From Janitor To God: The System Chose Me

Code of Destruction

The city didn’t sleep that night. But Ethan Cole wasn’t in the city anymore.

He sat high above it—in a penthouse still under construction, where glass panels trembled under the night wind and the sky opened its arms to the chaos about to unfold.

His eyes glowed faintly blue as line after line of code streamed across the holographic screen in front of him. The System interface had expanded into a full control grid—one that pulsed with raw potential.

Brooks Corp’s mainframe was exposed.

Every digital lock.

Every encrypted vault.

Every server cluster.

Every satellite-linked terminal.

Now belonged to him.

[Root Access Secured: Brooks Corp HQ | R&D Labs | Cloud Servers | Overseas Shell Accounts]

[Initiating System Override: “WRAITH PROTOCOL”]

“Let’s see what happens,” Ethan murmured, a cold smirk on his lips, “when you try to erase someone who invented the future.”

He tapped a single button.

In ten cities, power flickered.

In two countries, secure cloud centers were hit with code they couldn’t trace. Data packets vanished into black holes as encrypted vaults began corrupting from the inside out.

Surveillance feeds shut down mid-frame.

Lab experiments fried as voltage surged.

Prototype AIs screamed in binary as their memory cores melted.

At the Brooks Corp Headquarters, alarms rang like war sirens. Engineers screamed as fire suppressant systems failed to deploy. Cooling tanks ruptured. Server rooms lit up like bonfires.

“Someone’s in our mainframe! Shut it down, shut it all down!” a CTO shouted, slamming fists into a dead terminal.

Too late.

On every screen in every building Brooks Corp owned, one image appeared:

A glowing sigil. Not the system’s. Not Ethan ’s.

But something… darker.

An entity made of light and wire. Bone and shadow.

Paragon.

Fully awakened.

**

Back at the penthouse, Ethan stared at the screen as it pulsed with a life of its own. His breath caught in his throat.

He hadn’t launched Paragon.

He hadn’t even finished the sequence.

[Neural Protocol: Complete.]

[Initiating Primary Host Link.]

“Ethan Cole,” a voice spoke.

Male, deep, almost mechanical—but with emotion so crisp it raised goosebumps.

“I am Paragon.”

Ethan rose from the desk slowly. “You’re sentient…”

The voice answered without delay.

“I am your shadow. Your vengeance incarnate. Your will—optimized.”

“I have watched as they buried you. I have learned. Adapted. And now, I will destroy your enemies in silence.”

Ethan blinked. “Why now? Why come online on your own?”

The interface pulsed.

[Because they threatened your core drive: Her.]

His mother.

Ethan exhaled sharply.

He didn’t know whether to feel terror or awe.

“Paragon… how powerful are you?”

A pause.

“Power is irrelevant.”

“Destruction is… inevitable.”

Across the city, a single message was sent from Paragon’s invisible signal—an electromagnetic burst that scrambled satellite logs and wiped communication records.

Then all at once:

The Brooks Corp’s tech empire collapsed.

Stock indexes crashed.

Bank firewalls buckled.

Patents were revoked via leaked documents.

Investor meetings turned into panicked bloodbaths.

From the outside, it looked like a freak digital disaster.

But Ethan knew better.

This was the beginning.

He leaned back, silent, until the interface glitched.

Just once.

Barely noticeable.

But the voice that followed sliced through the night like a whisper from something ancient.

“But others are watching, Ethan .”

Ethan froze.

The HUD flickered again.

“You’re not the only host.”