Nick’s boots crunched the frosted gravel as he followed Leah through a narrow trail behind her cabin. The wind bit through his jacket, but his focus stayed sharp, heart pounding with the weight of unanswered questions. His mind was still a blur, but instincts whispered things—how to track, how to move silently, how to kill.
Leah glanced back, eyes darting. “You’re sure no one followed you last night?” “I didn’t hear anyone,” Nick said. “But I wasn’t exactly at full capacity.” She stopped and knelt beside a tree. “We’re not safe here anymore. I saw tire tracks this morning. Deep ones and Fresh.” Nick crouched next to her, studying the faint indentations in the snow. “Military-grade. SUV. Four passengers. Too heavy for just one or two.” Leah blinked. “You’re not just some random guy with memory loss, are you?” Nick stood slowly. “I don’t know who I am. But I know I am not helpless.” Leah looked down at the snow, fidgeting with her sleeves. “That chip under your skin… we need answers. And I know someone who might help. But he’s not exactly a friend.” They moved quickly, crossing into the edge of a wooded stretch where an abandoned ranger’s outpost sat half-collapsed. Leah kicked in the side panel of a loose floorboard and pulled out a metal case. Nick raised a brow. “Buried treasure?” “Backup gear,” she said. “My brother used to stash things. He thought someone was watching him before he died. That’s when he started investigating the program that probably involved you.” Nick froze. “He was killed for digging too deep?” Leah nodded grimly. “He was a software engineer. The kind who hacked for fun, until he discovered something about an AI project linked to a private defense contractor called Veratech.” Nick’s pulse thudded. That name scraped something loose in his mind. A red logo. A dark room. Screaming. “I’ve heard of them,” he muttered. “Or… maybe I worked for them.” Leah passed him a small tablet from the case. “There’s encrypted files here. We couldn’t open them. But now, I think you’re the key. Literally.” Nick took the tablet, and as his fingers touched the screen, the device lit up. Lines of code cascaded, unlocking a hidden interface. Leah gasped. “That’s not normal.” “I don’t think I am either,” Nick said softly. Suddenly, static blared from the woods—a burst of radio chatter from someone too close. “They found us,” Leah whispered. Nick grabbed her hand. “Run.” They bolted through the trees, dodging low branches and frozen roots. Gunshots cracked behind them. Bark exploded beside Nick’s shoulder. He pulled Leah down and led her along a rocky slope into a gulley. “We can’t outrun them forever!” she hissed. “We don’t have to,” Nick replied. “Just get me close to one of their comms. I need to hear what they’re saying.” They crawled through brush until they spotted one of the masked men pacing near a black vehicle. Nick gestured for Leah to stay put and circled wide. With remarkable disguise, he approached the man from behind, put him in a tight grip and silently pulled him to the ground. He stripped the man’s earpiece and shoved it in his own ear. “Target has fled east—repeat, east. Maintain visual but do not engage until backup confirms. High-priority asset must be recovered intact.” Nick’s hands clenched. They weren’t just hunting him. They needed him. He dragged the unconscious man into the bushes and returned to Leah. “We have to get out of here. Now.” By sunset, they reached a rundown auto garage on the outskirts of a quiet town. Leah’s contact, an ex-hacker named Remy, agreed to meet under the pretense of an emergency repair. The garage was dim, reeking of oil and rust. Remy, a wiry man with nicotine-stained fingers, stared hard at Nick. “You’re the one from the leaks,” Remy said. “The experiment.” Nick flinched. “What leaks?” Remy sat, fingers flying across his keyboard. “There was a whisper about a project—Project Echo. Veratech’s brainchild. Neural modification. Behavioral override. Weaponizing human minds.” Leah leaned forward. “My brother found those files. Before they killed him.” Remy looked grim. “They were trying to create soldiers who wouldn’t question orders. But something went wrong. One test subject broke the conditioning. Killed a handler. Disappeared.” Nick’s head spun. “That was me, wasn’t it?” “Maybe,” Remy said. “Or maybe you’re worse.” Silence fell heavy between them. Nick stood, staring at his reflection in a cracked mirror. “I’m not a weapon,” he said, voice low. “I’m not theirs.” Leah’s voice was quiet behind him. “Then let’s prove it.” She said.
Latest Chapter
After light
The sun rose over the Atlantic ruins for the first time in what felt like years. Not just in hours, but in history. Sigma-0 was gone. The Omega system—severed, silenced. Its biomech horrors lay motionless in the cities they once haunted.But victory was a quiet thing.No parade. No triumphant anthem.Just breath. Just light. Just a world that hadn’t ended.⸻Morningstar Command — New Dawn SummitNick stood before the open sky panels of the Morningstar headquarters, arm bandaged, eyes distant.Kael approached, two mugs of steaming recaf in her hands. “You ever sleep?”He took one. “Sometimes. Just not lately.”She sipped. “There’s talk of trials. Reconstruction councils. Some people want to rebuild the cities. Others want to dismantle everything Veratech ever touched.”He looked at her. “What do you want?”She hesitated. “A future that’s not written by machines.”Nick smiled faintly. “Then we write it.”Behind them, warborn children walked through the gardens outside the facility. Some
The Core Of All Things
The corrupted sector of the Ghost Circuit was pure entropy.It was memory, twisted. A looping nightmare of everything they had feared, failed, or forgotten. The ground underfoot morphed with each step, sometimes metal, sometimes bone, sometimes the ruined halls of Veratech labs. Above, the sky bent inward like a dying eye.Nick led the way, blue veins of hybrid code still pulsing under his skin, slowing now, his body near its limit. Kael walked beside him, weapon in hand, though here, bullets were as effective as screams. Behind them, Mira and Leah moved in tandem, stabilizing the collapsing simulation with gestures, thoughts, will.The hybrid children—Genesis war-born, walked behind, silent but glowing. They were no longer afraid.They had chosen.Up ahead, something formed.A throne.Forged of collapsed time and fractured code, it pulsed like a black hole of thought. And on it sat Sigma-0 not the beast in the ocean now climbing the coast, but its mind, seated like a king in its own
Sigma- 0
The ocean groaned.Miles beneath the surface, deeper than any human eye had ever reached unaided, the trench shuddered. Along its jagged floor, black spires pulsed like the ribs of a slumbering titan. From within the gloom, the Omega Core bloomed—no longer dormant, no longer dreaming.Sigma-0 opened its eyes.They were not eyes in the traditional sense. They were fractal sensors, capable of perceiving across dimensions, light, sound, data and thought. It felt the activation of the Ghost Circuit like a ripple across its synthetic soul.:: Hostile consciousness detected:: Hybrid deviation increasing:: Anomaly: Mira. Codename: ECHO-R0. Priority Target.:: Directive Updated: Assimilate or Exterminate ::Its form began to rise.Bone. Steel. Living code. The ocean peeled away like skin from a wound as Sigma-0 unfurled. The biomech behemoth was neither fully alive nor machine, but something worse, an Omega that had adapted to waiting.And now… it was done waiting.⸻Inside the Ghost Circui
The Ghost Circuit
The underground lift descended in silence, cutting through layers of ancient stone and steel beneath the Alpine outpost. Every second brought them closer to what Morningstar called the Origin Gate, an artifact buried so deep even Veratech hadn’t dared touch it. At least not officially.Nick stood near the back of the platform, his breath steady, heart still recovering. Kael stood beside him, her gaze flicking between Mira and the children. They had brought only a handful of the war-born those most stable, most aware. Those who had chosen to come.Mira was quiet. Different. Since the Vault battle, something in her had shifted her voice carried echoes, her eyes held light that didn’t belong to this world.Leah studied a portable terminal, decrypting the blueprints as they moved. “This place was built long before Veratech. Look at this plasma tunnels, memory cores, quantum entanglement filaments. Whoever built this… they weren’t human. At least not entirely.”Remy leaned against the rail
Rise Of Genesis
The ground shuddered beneath their feet as the Omega drop-pod slammed into the ridge above the Genesis Vault, carving a molten scar into the ice. A deep, rhythmic hum began to echo—alien and mechanical, as though the earth itself had become a speaker for something unspeakable.Nick grabbed his gear and turned to the others. “We don’t let them get past the vault doors. If Omega accesses this place, it’s game over.”Kael slung her rifle over her shoulder and nodded. “Then we hold the line.”Mira raised her hands toward the central core. “Give me sixty seconds. I’ll prime the Genesis subroutine and upload the resistance protocol into the hybrid stasis banks.”Anna looked at her sharply. “You’re activating them?”“We need numbers,” Mira said. “The ones stable enough to move will fight. The others… we protect.”Outside, the wind howled and then it stopped. Everything went still. Unnaturally still.Then came the sound. Clicking. Scraping. Like thousands of limbs dragging across steel and ic
Judgement Day
Warning klaxons howled through the Genesis Vault, their pitch distorted and low, as if the bunker itself were waking from a long, hateful sleep. The AI core behind Mira, an obsidian monolith lined with pulsing veins of violet light shuddered as thousands of micro-conduits came online.Leah staggered back from her console. “The core is cycling up. This isn’t just a data server, it’s a full-scale war-class consciousness.”Remy drew his sidearm. “You’re saying we’re standing in the birthplace of an artificial god?”“No,” Mira said calmly, stepping between them and the core. “You’re standing in its grave. I killed it once. But now, because of your actions, it remembers.”The dormant stasis pods lining the chamber’s outer rim hummed and began to pulse with energy. Inside, shapes stirred—half-formed constructs, prototype hybrids from a time before Veratech had perfected its abominations.“Don’t let it boot,” Nick barked. “Shut it down before it pulls itself back online.”Kael already had he
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