2025-04-11 20:53:06Subject Omega
It was the first time in years that Caden Black felt the kind of fear he couldn't flee from, the kind of fear that froze a soldier to the spot, not because he was weak, but because his heart was breaking. The woman in front of him had Sophia's face, her voice, her scent. but the burning spark in her eyes was smothered. All that was left was the cold glint of neural override, artificial intelligence coupled with human reflexes. "Stand down," Elara ordered calmly, stepping into the ruined tower chamber. Her heels rang on the scorched metal floor like commas to a spontaneous death oration. "Or I'll let her tear you apart." Caden's brain revolted. He stood his ground, still holding his weapon trained on the new clone standing next to Sophia, some new version of the Revenant model. Faster. Sleeker. More realistic to the point of appearing human, but more robotic in intent. His eyes darted to Sophia's no, Subject Omega's again. No recognition. No spark of emotion. Just programming. "Where is Sophia?" he snarled, voice rough. "What did you do to her?" Elara smiled slowly, venomously. "I ran her full sequence. You always knew she was different, didn't you? Smarter. Stronger. Faster. She was the prototype. The original mold." Caden gritted his jaw. "She was human." "She was evolution," Elara snapped back. "And now? Now she's perfected." Sophia or the shell wearing her face stepped forward. “Subject Omega recognizes previous field partner. Scanning… threat level: unstable. Authorization to engage?” Caden’s heart cracked. She didn’t remember him. Or if she did… it was buried deep, buried beneath layers of synthetic commands and false memory loops. “You’re not her,” he whispered. “You’re a lie in her skin.” But deep down, he prayed she was still in there somewhere. Fighting. He dove to the left as Omega shot, crashing into the metal wall with sickening force where he had been standing seconds before. She moved with the speed of lightning no hesitation, no excess motion. Caden rolled and fired three shots, shooting low to cripple, not kill. She dodged bullets in flight. Damn it, he thought. She wasn't just faster, she was anticipating his move. They clashed near the stairwell. Her strikes were surgical, precise. Caden blocked, dodged, countered. But he was getting slower, tired from the fight, from the emotional toll of seeing her like this. One punch connected, throwing him against the wall. Stars exploded in his vision. He tasted blood. “Caden Black,” she said mechanically. “Terminate or capture protocol initiated.” “Don’t do this,” he rasped. “I know you’re in there, Sophia.” For an instant, a fraction of a second, her hand trembled. Her eyes blazed. Break in the code? Recognition? But Elara stepped on, voice slicing. "Override. Sequence 79-A. Suppress emotional response." The flicker of light in Omega's eyes died and returned, colder than before. Caden cursed under his breath. He had to get out. Not out of fear but strategy. He couldn't afford to lose her and the war tonight. He pulled a smoke pellet from his vest and tossed it onto the ground. The room was filled with thick clouds. Gunfire echoed. He sprinted, ducking beneath Omega's follow-up strike, making a frantic leap through the ruined tower window. He smashed down on the gravel below, rolled, and limped into the tree shadows before more Revenants showed up. Elara's voice came behind him over the radio frequencies. Let him run. Subject Omega will track him. And when she arrests him" Caden gritted his teeth, blood trickling from his lip. "She'll forget what it means to love." Elsewhere, Secret Underground Lab (24 Hours Earlier) Ethan Drake's fingers flew over the control panel, his gaze reading data streams. He had caught something… a neural echo from Subject 003. He didn't know how, but Sophia had left a pulse, a signal before she was taken. She knew she could be compromised. She left a back door. Clever girl, Ethan snarled, entering the code into the dormant system he'd created in secret: the Failsafe Protocol, a neural-kill virus that could bring back infected Revenants if injected directly into their central cortex. But never tested in the field. He met the woman in front of him Lyra Kane, ex-Revenant agent, current friend. Mauled, immobile, deadly. "She left us with a shot," Ethan said. "But someone's got to get close enough to hook this up to her spinal port." Lyra's face went dark. "That's suicidal." "Then fortunate for us I have a contact in mind who earns his living from impossible tasks." In the Present – Forest Edge Darkness enveloped Caden as he ran. Rain poured down once more, wetting his blood-soaked shirt, running down his hair. His lungs were burned. His side ached. But he didn't. He couldn't. She survived. Not just physically, but deep inside that robotic shell, Sophia's soul was screaming. And he was going to save her… no matter how many Revenants he tore his way through with his bare hands and how many bits he broke Elara into. A dart whizzed past his head and stuck itself in a tree. Tranquilizer. He ducked, rolled, and turned his weapon but a figure stepped from the shadows behind him and jammed a knee into his back. Caden hit the ground, hard. As his vision blurred, he heard a familiar voice murmur: “Don’t worry, soldier. You’re not dying today.” Ethan. He blacked out. Sometime Later – Safe house Caden woke to the smell of antiseptic and the flicker of light overhead. His ribs were bandaged. Someone had removed his shirt and stitched his wounds. He sat up too fast. Pain shot through his chest. Ethan leaned against the wall, arms crossed. "Told you'd require backup." "Where is she?" Caden rasped. Ethan tossed it to him. It pulsed with soft blue light. "A failsafe. Her code's not completely overwritten. We only get one shot at rebooting her neural net." Caden looked at it. "And if it doesn't work?" "Then she kills you." There was a pause. Then Caden looked him straight in the eyes, eyes burning with determination. "Then I'll die reminding her who she is." Before Ethan could respond, Lyra burst into the room. "They've found us. Coming in." Caden strapped on his gear, adrenaline already coursing. "Then we bring the storm." Meanwhile – Elara's Private Chamber Sophia stood before the mirror, fingers trembling with old memories flashing in pieces. Her laugh. Caden's smile. A kiss with snow falling around them. She didn't understand. She wasn't meant to understand. Elara looked at her from behind like a pleased artist holding a broken masterpiece. "You're not her anymore," Elara said. "You're better." But as she left the room, Sophia glanced back at the mirror and for a brief moment, there was a tear on her cheek. Unprogrammed. Uncontrolled. Real.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter Sixty Three - The Echo Code
A low thrum resonated through the corridors of the ancient sublayer beneath the ruined Neo-Citadel, an echo not of sound, but of mind. The vaults here antedated the concept of human memory ever being downloaded into silicon. This place was in no database. It was on no map. It existed only in the collective unconscious of Revenant's oldest roots until now.Caden stepped through the entrance, the sliding metal plates of the subterranean gate shutting behind him with a whoosh. Light played along the curve of the room, scanning his biometric signature, but hesitating, halting in a stutter of uncertainty as if the system itself wasn't sure he was still alive.He was followed closely by Kael Voss, bruised and limping but awake, one eye constantly on the fluctuating energy levels on his gauntlet. Two of the hybrid strike team members brought up the rear behind Lorren, the telemetric killer, and Janae, the biomech tactician with nerves wired to a predictive battle matrix.Above them, well bey
Chapter Sixty Two - Through the Eye of the Spiral
The world was not finished.As the aftermath of the paradox storm faded into a spiraling void over the shattered landscape, there was silence, not the quiet kind, but the tense, holding-breath silence of something unfinished. Something waiting.Sophia drifted inches above the floor, free from the shackles of gravity, her code-instructed body vibrating between organic memory and after-organic consciousness. The tear behind her swirled like a monstrous eye, a throbbing mass of multidimensional strata, opening up to alternate streams of the same moment in time. Every echo vibrated with its own tragic culmination.And all of them centered on her and Caden.Standing frozen in the ruined field, Caden wore a streak of blood on his cheek, armor charred from the last encounter of anti-temporal feedback. Lost his crew. Lost his sense of direction. Lost the clear lines between good and evil. The one that did not change was the crack inside him, a fear he could no longer explain.The other Caden,
Chapter Sixty One - Children of the Loop
Falling was like being called back by the universe.Caden fell through a dizziness of color‑muddled horizons, each one a half‑half world, a recollection, a possibility. Cities rose up and toppled in the space of heartbeats, oceans turned into deserts in bursts; constellations rearranged like fretful gods, then extinguished themselves. A noise half wind, half shattering data clogged his head until thought itself dissolved.And then it all stopped.He came down gently, impossibility onto something solid and liquid but not solid or liquid, memory taken shape. Pale light stretched in every direction with massive forms floating in the light, arches of frozen code, pillars cut out of crystallized timelines, mosaics depicting civilizations no book had ever mentioned.In front of him, a see-through walkway unrolled step by step beneath his feet, guiding him towards a colossal gate of meshing glyphs. The gate pulsed once, and an aperture irised open.Inside lay the Architect.The Hall of Origi
Chapter Sixty - The Broken Veil
Ashfall came in whirls, grey and dusty and studded with impossibly thin filaments of manmade carbon. It dusted broken spires of the southern citadel, the fallen Revenant sentries, and shattered mech armor equally. The horizon trembled under the dying cadence of the paradox beacon, its light waning with the uneven pulse of a collapsing timeline.Kael Voss crouched beside a collapsed building, his neural visor spewing static as it struggled to map the turbulent layers of reality that surrounded him. His bracer's diagnostic streamed red, temporal drift increasing, oxygen saturation decreasing, and interdimensional convergence approaching critical mass. Simple as it was, time was cracking, space was splitting, and their group was short on both.He looked up at Caden, motionless atop a peak of alloyed debris, his eyes fixed upon the gaping tear in the sky above. The swirling vortex had grown, colors no longer limited to visible light in the spectrum. now it seeped into the human eye colors
Chapter Fifty Nine - Ashes of the Architects
The world no longer made sense.It fell apart in layers, moments stitched together like broken reflections in a shattered mirror, time bleeding into itself, logic unraveling at the seams.Caden stood at the edge of the paradox rift, space and time itself warping around him. His meeting with his future self Triarch Caden still echoed through his synapses. The man's cold eyes, his presence haloed in entropy and silence, stayed with him.But that version of himself had been lost when the rift destabilized, pulled back into a temporal fold by a power too vast to comprehend. And in his place, silence.But silence, Caden had learned, was never peace.He turned slowly, the fractured sky above casting jagged reflections across the fractured ground. To his rear, Kael Voss knelt beside the ruins of their forward command module, trying to reboot the neural sync array with shaking hands. Most of the team was gone, scattered, incinerated, or phased out of reality in the last temporal surge. Only a
Chapter Fifty Eight - The Unwritten Seed
As the tear sealed, the ground seemed to exhale a shiver of still undulating over the empty battlefield like the last wheeze of something very old. Sighing wisps of smoke curled into the air from shattered machines and burnt soil, a thousand sighing sighs dissolving to ash. Time was not linear anymore after the fall of the paradox. It rested heavy and unreal, like a forgotten promise to be remembered.Caden was buried half up to his waist in rubble at the shattered base of the obelisk, his armor torn and blood running down a cut over his eye. But he was not unconscious. He was listening.Listening to the silence.A silence that was not empty but full of meaning. The kind of quiet that followed revelation. Or birth.Or both.He heaved himself upwards with a grunt, looking over the wreckage. The Revenant Sentinels were nowhere, dissolved, fled, and wiped away, he couldn't claim. His crew was dispersed. Kael Voss was slumped against a piece of twisted metal, his bracer sparking, one lens
You may also like
BLOODLINE CHRONICLE: A MAFIA FATHER'S JOURNEY
King Cleo390 viewsCold-Blooded Barista
Abu Ulfah1.1K viewsSavage Honor: Blood Oath
Flow112 viewsCriminal Judge
Eric471 viewsBlack Hand Over the Sky
shuo328 viewsGhost Directive
Wonderful65128 viewsNameless District
Nameless Swordman1.2K viewsBurn Loot
Onomzki 306 views