2025-05-25 21:44:54
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CHAPTER 187: EMBERS IN THE BLOOD STREAM
The air reeked of cordite and char. Smoke clung to the underground walls, curling through the cracked cement like a living thing. Luka and Viktor moved like phantoms through the last of the skirmish. The corridor was littered with broken exosuits...Foundation troopers stripped of motion, their synthetic lungs hissing steam, their red visor lights fading one by one.But there was no time to celebrate survival.Calixa crouched near a torn console, her hands bloodied but still working. Sparks rained down from exposed cabling above her. “The fallback loop’s disabled. They severed the line.”“How long before they send reinforcements?” Viktor asked, voice hoarse, rifle hanging from his shoulder by a torn sling.Calixa didn’t look up. “Depends how many of their tracking satellites picked up the pulse. If Mirelle’s directing this personally, she’s already launched Phase Two.”Luka wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his glove, pacing. “What’s Phase Two?”Calixa stood slowly, eyes dark.
CHAPTER 186: THE BROADCAST WAR
The room buzzed with energy as Calixa’s fingers danced over a derelict terminal, long dormant but still laced with enough legacy code to act as a transmitter. Luka stood by her, pacing like a caged animal. His mind wasn’t just racing...it was splintering. Every second counted. Every moment they waited risked the Foundation tightening its noose.Viktor stood near the entrance with his rifle trained on the stairwell, peering into shadows like he expected the void itself to spit out an assassin.Alessia leaned against the rusted wall, reloading with methodical calm, though the tightness in her jaw betrayed the tension that rode her spine. “She was never going to let us walk out,” she said. “Mirelle wasn’t offering a seat...she was offering poison.”Luka nodded grimly. “She wanted to fracture us. Make us doubt. Delay us just long enough for their containment squads to mobilize.”“And they will,” Calixa muttered. “If I were them, I’d be running adaptive trace patterns across all known comm
CHAPTER 185: ASH AND ECHOES
The earth shook as the missile struck the surface...an impact like the wrath of gods. Concrete buckled, steel groaned, and fire swallowed the horizon. But deep beneath the ruin, through a forgotten subrail tunnel sealed with layers of lead-lined plating and electromagnetic shielding, Luka, Alessia, Viktor, and Calixa ran for their lives.Luka’s breath rasped in his throat as he clutched the data spike, its casing scorched and flickering. His limbs were still numb from the neural dive. The echo of Cain’s voice rang in his mind like a song with no end.“You all right?” Alessia asked, guiding him through the tunnel’s shadows.He nodded but didn’t speak.Behind them, Viktor stumbled. “We’ve got seismic degradation back there...half the ceiling's coming down. We need to pick up the pace.”Calixa turned briefly. “There's a junction point up ahead. Old service lift. Should link to the drain tunnels and into East Grid. I cached a fallback transport there months ago.”Alessia gave her a look.
CHAPTER 184: THE KILL ORDER
The safehouse was buried beneath a decommissioned rail yard on the city’s eastern edge...layers of rusted train cars, old freight containers, and rigged tunnels forming a tomb for outlaws and ghosts. Luka’s crew moved fast, hauling Calixa inside just before dawn painted the sky with ash.Steel doors slammed shut behind them. Alessia keyed in a rotating lock sequence. The heavy magnets hissed, sealing them in.“Status?” Luka asked.“Viktor’s back online,” Alessia replied. “Took shrapnel to the shoulder, but he’s walking. Vesper’s still off comms. She stayed behind to divert the drone heat. We’ve got five hours tops before they pinpoint the location of the counter-hack.”Calixa sat on a steel bench in the corner, stripped down to a tank top, fingers trembling as she plugged a neural interface into the reinforced mainframe at the center of the safehouse.“I’m going to need absolute silence,” she murmured.Viktor limped in, jacket torn, blood caked to his side. “She’s got a hell of a defi
CHAPTER 183: WHERE THE GHOSTS WAIT
The Fringe was a graveyard.Old infrastructure slouched like drunks in the dark, steel skeletons wrapped in vines and wire. Buildings half-swallowed by the earth leaned against each other like dying animals. Everything out here smelled of rust, ozone, and abandonment. No sirens. No signals. Just the hum of static in your ears...the kind that made your skull itch.They moved in silence, headlights off, under the cover of a fractured moon. Luka drove the lead vehicle, his fingers tight on the wheel. Alessia sat beside him, one hand near her holster, the other balancing a tablet that pulsed with faint tracking data. Viktor and Vesper followed in a second truck, armed to the teeth.“I don’t like this,” Alessia muttered.“You haven’t liked anything for days,” Luka replied.“That’s because we’ve been dodging black sites, defying a shadow state, and now we’re looking for a paranoid ex-Foundation hacker in what looks like the set of an apocalypse film.”Luka offered a weak smirk. “You forgot
CHAPTER 182: THE HOLLOW ACCORD
The tremors from Facility Nyx still echoed in Luka’s bones as they emerged through the old freight lift shaft into the upper ruins of District Seven. Dust coated their clothes. The skyline beyond was bleeding orange from a distant fire...one they hadn’t started.Or maybe they had.They stood in silence amid broken concrete and steel ribs of a long-collapsed tower, watching the city below tremble under its own weight. Somewhere far off, emergency sirens wailed like wounded animals. The Foundation would be cleaning up the mess for weeks. If it still could.Luka leaned against a rusted pillar, trying to slow his heartbeat. He felt Alessia’s eyes on him, saw Viktor pacing like a man itching for a war that hadn’t started yet. Vesper, as always, looked like she wanted more.“We didn’t kill her,” Vesper said flatly. “Mirelle. We let her walk.”“She made a choice,” Luka answered, voice rough. “And now she has to live with what’s coming.”Alessia stepped closer. “You think she’ll stand down?”
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