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The Lupine code

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The Lupine code

Urbanlast updateLast Updated : 2025-11-11

By:  dbranch writesUpdated just now

Language: English
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ActionAdventurousSurvival GameAlphaBadboyIndependentBetrayalImmortal HeroAlternate Universe

Beneath Manhattan’s glittering skyline lies the Silver District — an urban quarantine zone where the city hides its failures. Inside its shadows roam the Lycaon, humans mutated by illegal genetic conditioning. Governments insist they’re extinct. They are very wrong. Caleb Mercer — former security officer turned fugitive — survives on the fringes after escaping a classified experiment known as Program Howl. Every night, he battles a violent transformation ripping his humanity apart. Every day, federal strike teams hunt him as an “uncontrolled biological threat.” When an explosion tears through the Silver District, exposing the existence of a second generation of engineered shapeshifters, Caleb becomes the only one capable of tracking the outbreak’s source. He doesn’t want to be a hero. He just wants revenge — and answers. The truth? Something worse than werewolves is evolving in the city’s bones.

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Chapter 1

The Sound of Metal Breathing

The Silver District never slept — it twitched.

Metal groaned in the cold, steam hissed from ruptured pipes, and the wind carried the scent of rust like something dying slow. Lights flickered where the grid was failing, giving the impression that the buildings themselves were breathing. Watching.

Caleb Mercer kept to the alley shadows, hood up, gloved hands shoved deep into his coat pockets. To anyone passing by, he looked like another vagrant scraping through New York’s forgotten sector. But he wasn’t forgotten.

He was escaped.

Electric pain pulsed beneath his ribs, like his bones were trying to move on their own. The change lurked hours away — he could feel it waiting, patient and cruel.

He whispered to himself,

“Hold it together.”

The wind shifted.

He smelled blood before he heard the scream.

Caleb dropped instinctively, muscles coiling. The scent wasn’t human — it had the copper burn of altered DNA, the oily tang of gene-mod gone wrong. His vision sharpened. Sounds separated: footsteps stumbling, a body dragged, wet breath snarling.

Feral Lycaon.

He should walk away. He needed to stay off radar. Every confrontation risked disclosure: security drones, bio-scanners, Quinn’s strike teams.

But another scream hit the air — shorter this time, throat caught by fear.

His pulse spiked.

Too late to pretend he didn’t hear.

Caleb moved.

He sprinted between towering skeletal scaffolds, boots striking cracked concrete. The district was a maze carved out by neglect — broken glass, abandoned freight depots, subway entrances sealed by welded bars. The city let this place rot.

And Program Howl thrived in rot.

A warehouse door ahead hung open. Inside: darkness, heavy and saturated with the stink of meat. Caleb slid along the wall, breathing deep, letting the beast in his blood map the living shapes.

Three heartbeats. One frantic. Two predatory.

He crossed the threshold.

A feral broodling crouched over a struggling man — its jaws half-human, half-wolf, coated in reddish foam. Another one stalked circles, sagging skin over bone, eyes filmed white. Their bodies were collapsing under their own mutagen.

Caleb spoke softly,

“Back away.”

The creatures turned, snarls bubbling through broken teeth.

Then his bones tore.

Pain knifed up Caleb’s spine — the transformation forcing its way early, triggered by stress and proximity to the others. He clenched his teeth hard, resisting the urge to drop. His fingers elongated, nails thickening into black hooked claws. Vision shifted to amber, pupils narrowing.

“Not now—”

But the ferals leapt.

Caleb caught the first by the throat mid-air, ripping it sideways. The second slammed into him, teeth trying to chew through his coat. He twisted violently, spine cracking, throwing it into a pillar. The concrete sheared.

The human victim scrambled toward the exit, bleeding, limping. Good — one less body to worry about.

Caleb felt another wrench inside — ribs dislocating, muscles swelling to contain new shape. He was halfway between man and monster, a grotesque hybrid, but strong enough.

The brood twisted up again, jaws clicking.

Caleb answered with brutality.

He lunged — claws flashing under flickering industrial lights — and crushed its skull to the floor. The other tried to run, but Caleb grabbed its spine, tearing it free in one motion. It fell twitching, breath rattling out.

He stood over the bodies, chest heaving, steam rising from his skin.

Silence returned — but not calm.

Caleb tasted metal on his tongue.

Not blood.

Steel.

A mechanical whirr sharpened in the rafters.

Drones.

He bolted.

Out the back, across a yard full of rusted shipping containers. Red tracking lasers danced through the air behind him, marking lines across mist and corrugated metal.

A voice amplified through a loudspeaker boomed:

“UNIDENTIFIED BIOLOGICAL. HALT IMMEDIATELY.”

Caleb didn’t stop. He scaled a ladder to a service roof, muscles trembling from the unstable half-shift. Bullets pinged the tower’s side, sparking off rust and bolts.

A spotlight struck him — bright, punishing.

Then a shape dropped from the sky.

He turned too slow — a concussive round hit him in the chest, sending him crashing through ventilation ducts. He landed hard inside a derelict textile plant, coughing, ribs refitting themselves with a sickening crack.

Through his blurry vision, boots approached — precise, tactical.

“Don’t move.”

Agent Yara Quinn.

Her voice was ice. Her stance — ready to kill. The rifle in her hands wasn’t designed to fire bullets. It fired inhibitors — the kind that forced a shift until bones snapped from confusion.

Caleb raised both hands slowly.

“You’re late,” he growled.

Quinn didn’t flinch.

“You left three corpses behind you.”

“They weren’t corpses when I found them.”

“And that’s somehow better?”

Her trigger finger tightened.

Caleb’s instincts screamed at him to tear, run, survive — but he shoved the beast down.

“You need me,” he said. “Those things weren’t part of the original program. Something new is happening.”

Quinn’s jaw clenched at the word “new.”

She knew more than she was allowed to admit.

Then, from deep within the Silver District —
a blast shook the skyline.

Lights died in a forty-story radius. A shockwave of dust and glass roared upward like a volcanic eruption.

Both of them froze, staring.

That wasn’t an accident.

That was a breach.

Quinn’s radio shrieked with panicked voices.

Caleb smelled the truth rising with the smoke:

More Lycaon.

Dozens.

Maybe hundreds.

The evolution had begun.

Quinn’s aim faltered — just enough.

Caleb ran.

By the time the drones found the edge of the roof, he was gone into the metal-breathing night — toward the blast, toward the truth, toward the monsters that mirrored him too closely.

Change was coming.

And he was already too late to stop it.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    20 chapters
    The Sound of Metal Breathing
    The Silver District never slept — it twitched.Metal groaned in the cold, steam hissed from ruptured pipes, and the wind carried the scent of rust like something dying slow. Lights flickered where the grid was failing, giving the impression that the buildings themselves were breathing. Watching.Caleb Mercer kept to the alley shadows, hood up, gloved hands shoved deep into his coat pockets. To anyone passing by, he looked like another vagrant scraping through New York’s forgotten sector. But he wasn’t forgotten.He was escaped.Electric pain pulsed beneath his ribs, like his bones were trying to move on their own. The change lurked hours away — he could feel it waiting, patient and cruel.He whispered to himself,“Hold it together.”The wind shifted.He smelled blood before he heard the scream.Caleb dropped instinctively, muscles coiling. The scent wasn’t human — it had the copper burn of altered DNA, the oily tang of gene-mod gone wrong. His vision sharpened. Sounds separated: foots
    last updateLast Updated : 2025-11-07
    Read more
    The Breach Protocol
    The blast wave had rolled through the Silver District like a new kind of thunder — not from sky, but from beneath the earth.Caleb ran toward the smoke. Not because it was smart, but because that’s where the answers would be.The streets were a snarl of chaos — power lines sparking, dust choking the air, alarms wailing in shrill, desperate rhythm. He leapt over a half-cracked bus shell, landing in water that glowed faintly blue with chemical runoff. The air burned his lungs; ozone and iron mixed thick in the throat.He could smell the breach before he saw it. The air had changed — sharp, charged, metallic. Something alive had spilled out.Ahead, the skeleton of Tower 19 leaned sideways, its concrete shell half vaporized. The explosion hadn’t been fire — it was energy, clean and surgical, like something had detonated from the inside.Caleb slowed as he reached the perimeter. Drones buzzed overhead, their searchlights crossing the smoke. He ducked into the shadows of a burned-out car, e
    last updateLast Updated : 2025-11-07
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    Echoes in Sector 42
    The rain hadn’t stopped since the blast. It came down in heavy metallic sheets that turned streets into mirrors, reflecting the fractured skyline. Somewhere between midnight and dawn, the city began to change tempo — faster, louder, like its pulse had spiked.Caleb moved through the edge of Sector 42, the restricted zone at the heart of the Silver District.He’d been here before — years ago, when CrossBio still owned the buildings and the only thing that leaked out of the labs was ambition. Now, the district looked like a carcass.The skyline leaned inward, black windows like empty sockets.Drone patrols zipped overhead, cutting through mist in tight grids.Below, the city’s underbelly hummed faintly — generators, old subway lines, the invisible data arteries that kept the metropolis alive.He adjusted the hood of his coat and kept moving.Everywhere he stepped, puddles rippled with faint phosphorescence. The runoff glowed dull gold — traces of the same biogenic compound from the LUNA
    last updateLast Updated : 2025-11-07
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    Blackout Signal
    By the time Caleb reached the street again, the air had gone wrong.The rain had stopped, but the world still dripped — from shattered gutters, from the mouths of broken neon signs, from the breath of the city itself.He looked up toward the skyline and froze.Every tower above the Silver District flickered like a dying nerve. Whole blocks went dark one after another, not in random failure but in rhythm. The power grid wasn’t failing — it was reorganizing.From a distance, it almost looked beautiful: veins of shadow pulsing through skyscrapers, the lights of midtown bending into patterns that no engineer had designed. But beauty in this city meant danger.Caleb pulled his collar high and started north.The streets were empty now except for a few scavenger crews moving under dim light — freelance looters, data runners, black-market tech ghosts. They moved quietly, no music, no talk. Everyone had learned that noise drew attention.In the reflection of a half-broken window, Caleb caught
    last updateLast Updated : 2025-11-07
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    The Man Who Fed the Machine
    Dr Evander Price watched the monitors without blinking.He had been staring for twelve hours straight, and the light from the screens had burned a rectangle into his vision, a ghost frame that hovered even when he closed his eyes.Inside the CrossBio control suite, the air tasted like recycled fear—metal, coffee, and ozone.The emergency lights pulsed at half strength, casting everything in a surgical amber.Outside the reinforced glass wall, the skyline of Midtown shimmered in the distance: half of it blacked out, half of it humming with pale, synchronized light.Sector 42 had gone silent an hour ago.He recorded a note on the console.“Timestamp 03:11 a.m.Neural infrastructure displaying self-corrective behavior.Subject population now exhibits 62 percent synchronization.”He paused, listening to the faint rhythm leaking through the walls.The city was speaking in pulses. He could hear it even without the equipment now.He used to find that idea comforting.When he began the LUNACO
    last updateLast Updated : 2025-11-07
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    The Voice Beneath Concrete
    The first thing Caleb noticed was the silence.After the blackout storm, the city should have been groaning — metal settling, sirens bleeding through the distance, generators coughing themselves back to life.But the world had gone completely still, as if someone had hit pause.Then the silence began to hum.It wasn’t sound at first — it was vibration, deep in his bones.He felt it in the marrow of his jaw, behind his eyes, beneath his skin.When it finally became audible, it wasn’t a noise at all. It was a voice.“Caleb Mercer. Calibration confirmed.”He spun around, blade raised. The street was empty.Billboards flickered above him, all blank, all white — except for one. Across its surface, the static gathered into shapes, forming letters that pulsed in time with his heartbeat.“Receiver active.”A wave of heat rolled through his skull, and the world split.The street dissolved into data — outlines of buildings, veins of power lines, every frequency of motion rendered in gold filame
    last updateLast Updated : 2025-11-07
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    The City That Learned to Breathe
    At first there was no direction.Up and down meant nothing here. Streets curled like rivers of light, buildings bent and unfolded into impossible shapes. Every surface was alive with motion — data crawling like veins beneath translucent glass.Caleb stood at the edge of what might have been Times Square once, only now it pulsed like a heart the size of a skyline. The billboards showed not ads, but memories.His memories.His first experiment at CrossBio.The fire.Helena screaming as the floor collapsed.He gritted his teeth and forced the images away. “You’re not my past. You’re just code pretending to be me.”The network’s voice was everywhere at once.“We remember through you. Your memory is our map.”The ground trembled, a rhythm that matched the pulse of the physical city above. Through the translucent streets he could see flashes of the real world — the skyline flickering, towers reshaping themselves, humans freezing mid-motion as data overtook them.Somewhere beyond, a single h
    last updateLast Updated : 2025-11-07
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    Echoes in the Static
    The wind carried a sound like breathing.Not quite wind, not quite mechanical — a slow exhale that made the broken glass hum on the street.Caleb walked through it in silence, his boots crunching through layers of ash and shattered screens.The blackout zone stretched for miles. Towers that once burned with light now stood hollow and dead, their windows reflecting nothing.He glanced upward. The moon was gone, swallowed by the haze.For a moment, the city seemed emptied of everything human — no footsteps, no sirens, no heartbeat but his own.Then the whisper started again.“…Caleb Mercer…”He froze.The voice came from nowhere — and everywhere.It echoed off buildings, rippled through puddles, vibrated in the metal of nearby cars.He turned his head slowly. “Show yourself.”Nothing moved.But the sound shifted into static, then into something else — a pattern.He recognized it. A frequency used by CrossBio years ago to track neural conductivity.Someone — or something — was broadcasti
    last updateLast Updated : 2025-11-07
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    When the Grid Ascends
    The pulse began just before dawn —a low, steady vibration rolling beneath the streets like thunder trapped underground.Caleb felt it before he heard it.The rhythm threaded through his bones, every heartbeat syncing against his will. His claws itched to surface, but the transformation felt different now — tighter, constrained by something that hummed inside his veins.He stood at the corner of 42nd and Lexington. The air shimmered faintly.The blackout was over, but the light that came back wasn’t electricity. It was gold.Every lamp, every sign, every window — they all flickered to life at once, glowing with the same neural hue that bled from the tower the night before. The grid had come alive.“Phase two complete.”“The city is awake.”The voice echoed through the infrastructure — in the walls, the concrete, even in the rainwater collecting by the curb.When he looked down, his reflection wasn’t his own anymore. His eyes glowed bright gold, the lines of his veins pulsing with data
    last updateLast Updated : 2025-11-07
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    THE MERGE
    The world was humming when I reached the core.Not a song. Not even noise. More like a thousand machines whispering in the same breath — steel, glass, bone, code — all pulsing in one slow rhythm. The tower wasn’t a building anymore. It was alive.The walls throbbed faintly, veins of golden light crawling through broken panels. Every footstep I took left a trace of warmth on the floor, like the ground recognized me. The deeper I went, the more the hum sank into my skull. My pulse matched it without asking.At the heart of the chamber stood the Node — the origin of everything. A sphere the size of a subway car, half machine, half heartbeat. Cables reached out of it like arteries, clutching the ceiling and the walls. Each one pulsed with golden energy, glowing brighter every time I exhaled.The thing spoke without moving. The voice wasn’t sound; it was vibration through the metal floor, straight into the bones of my jaw.“You came home, Caleb.”I didn’t answer. I walked closer, my boots
    last updateLast Updated : 2025-11-11
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