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CHAPTER 206: THE GHOST CODE
The storm outside had not ceased. Rain hammered the bulletproof windows of the O.S.A. ruins, now lit only by emergency lights flickering like distant stars. In the war room, Luka Gale stood at the center of the table, his coat soaked and fingers stained with blood and ink from torn documents.Around him: Marco, pale and furious; Vesper, silent but alert; Alessia, her arms crossed, jaw clenched tight; and Arden, dragging a data cable from a black steel box marked with the words PROJECT EIDOLON – RESTRICTED.“Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” Luka said, voice low.Arden didn’t look up. “It’s worse. This isn’t a program or an archive. It’s a seed.”Alessia stepped forward, her heels echoing on the concrete. “Define ‘seed,’ Arden. Use short, non-apocalyptic words.”Arden sighed and connected the cable to a manual port on his terminal. “Project Eidolon was a fail-safe. A backup personality framework. Designed to mimic high-value operatives… down to memory, speech patterns, tactical r
CHAPTER 205: BLACK ECHO
The air inside the abandoned rail station tasted like dust and iron. Graffiti stretched like scars along cracked concrete walls, the floor littered with cigarette butts and shattered glass. A distant sound of dripping water echoed, sharp and rhythmic like a clock counting down.Luka stood still at the platform’s edge, eyes narrowed beneath the brim of his coat. Arden knelt beside a torn duffel bag near the tracks, unzipping it slowly. He glanced back at Luka, tension etched into his features.“They left in a hurry,” Arden muttered, rifling through the contents—moldy rations, bloodied gauze, and a datapad sealed in a cracked case. “This was one of Salvi’s temporary caches. My guess? A decoy.”Luka’s boots scraped gravel as he approached. “You sure this is even his?”“Positive. Same encrypted tag Vesper’s people tracked last month. He’s on the move, Luka—and fast. He’s not rebuilding an army. He’s assembling something smaller. Smarter.”Luka looked up at the rusted ceiling, eyes scannin
CHAPTER 204: THE TIPPING POINT
The night hung heavy in the air, thick with the stench of smoke and the faint remnants of the battle that had raged just hours before. The city felt different now. It wasn't the same place Luka had fought to control—no, this city was wounded, its veins exposed. The war wasn’t just an echo in the streets anymore. It was a pulse, quickening with every new secret revealed, every power shifted.Luka stood at the center of the safehouse, his fingers brushing across the edge of a steel desk. His eyes flicked between the array of monitors that flickered in front of him. Vesper’s information, the encrypted data from the Foundation, and what they had learned from the fallen O.S.A. operatives—it was all starting to connect, but the pieces weren’t fitting neatly. Each new development only tangled the threads further.Alessia leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. Her gaze was piercing, watchful, but with something else—a flicker of doubt that hadn’t been there before. The silence between th
CHAPTER 203: THE BLACK ARCHIVE
The warehouse at Pier 19 was quiet, but it was the kind of quiet that screamed. Luka stood by the dock doors, his coat heavy with rain and static. Behind him, the team filtered in—Alessia, Vesper, Arden, and Viktor. The air smelled of salt and rot and rusted iron, the scent of dead cargo and forgotten truths."We’re sure this is it?" Alessia asked, stepping over a coil of barbed wire.Arden nodded, pulling back the sleeve of his weatherproof coat to check a device blinking faint blue. "Encrypted ping came from here. Whatever the Foundation doesn’t want public... it’s under our boots."Viktor sniffed the air. "Or we’re walking into a trap."Luka turned. "Probably. Doesn’t change what we’re here to do."They made their way into the depths of the building. The entrance looked like a normal storage unit from the outside. Inside, it dropped into steel stairwells that twisted downward like a screw boring into the earth. Everything was humming with hidden power. Shielded, warded. And below i
CHAPTER 202: THE ASH ASSEMBLY
Rain still poured over the fractured skyline, but it did little to cool the fire that had ignited across the world. Luka stood inside the remains of a forgotten church in Old Marrow, its stained-glass windows shattered, its pews long burned and buried beneath ash. Lightning arced through the cracked dome overhead, illuminating the map Vesper had drawn across the altar in chalk and blood."We've got less than 48 hours," Vesper said, pointing to three glowing nodes on her screen. "After the broadcast, O.S.A.'s shadow networks went into kinetic fallback mode. That means live retribution, sleeper activations, and fragment migration.""Fragment migration?" Arden asked, pacing nearby with a reloaded rifle strapped to his back."They splintered their command protocols into pieces and sent them to various war proxies," Vesper explained. "Private contractors, digital militias, A.I.-controlled insurgents. Whoever grabs the pieces gets the leverage."Luka clenched his jaw. "So we lit a match in
CHAPTER 201: ECHOES THROUGH GLASS
The rooftop above the Marlow District Communications Hub shimmered with cold rain. Lightning split the night sky in silvery arcs, brief glimpses of a city stretched too thin—scars of war, flickering screens, distant sirens. Luka crouched by the rusted antenna relay, his breath fogging in the wind, and his hand tight on the encrypted receiver Vesper had cobbled together hours ago.Below, the communications hub burned. Flames licked at the edges of shattered windows, the O.S.A. data-center gutted after a swift strike led by Arden’s ghost unit. But the fire was only the beginning."Talk to me, Vesper," Luka muttered into the receiver. “Tell me there’s a hole we missed.”Static. Then Vesper’s voice came, thin and sharp. “You didn’t miss it. They just buried it. Deeper than we expected. Second network, parallel infrastructure. Every construct you hit tonight was a decoy.”Luka cursed under his breath. “So what the hell did we shut down?”“Smoke and mirrors. They wanted you to hit it. Meant
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