2025-04-11 14:21:00
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Chapter 196 – The Echo We Choose
The world didn’t collapse.But neither did it celebrate.In the hours after the Meridian Convergence—the moment when the Coda and Oathfire nullified each other—a strange silence stretched across the globe. Not fear. Not peace. Just uncertainty.It was the first time in a generation that humanity had no one left to blame.No dominant AI. No secret government. No hidden overlords.Just themselves.On the Arclight, systems once tied to the Oathfire protocol displayed static or looping fragments of archived memory. Vaults across the world flickered offline, leaving behind open records, half-truths, and raw footage waiting to be interpreted.In the ship’s central observatory, Ethan stood alone, looking down on Earth.Lights blinked on and off across the continents—some cities plunging into blackout, others glowing brighter than ever, freed from Dominion-imposed rationing.The chaos was real.
Chapter 195 – The Meridian Line
There are places so steeped in betrayal that the ground remembers.The Meridian Line was such a place—a fault line not just of land, but of ideology. It was here, in the ash-ridden trenches of Vault Lambda, where Ethan Cross had ordered the shutdown of an entire sector. Where the Accord had compromised with silence. And where Varek Strath had broken away from Ethan for good.Now, three decades later, it was no longer just a tomb.It was a stage.The Arclight hovered above a fractured valley veined with ancient Dominion architecture. The vault’s outer skeleton had collapsed long ago, but deep sensors showed something stirring beneath the crust—power signatures, comms pings, and a command relay pulsing in patterns that looked eerily like prayer.Ethan descended alone.He wore no armor, no insignia, no rifle.Just a neural disruptor at his hip, and a lockbox containing one final Oathfire shard.The
Chapter 194 – The Wounds That Speak
The silence after victory is never peaceful.It is loaded.Heavy with ghosts that no longer exist, and choices that refuse to be buried.For Ethan Cross, survival had never been the end goal. But now that the Dominion had burned and the Vaults were no longer bleeding shadow code into the world, survival was all that remained.And survival, he was starting to learn, had consequences.The Arclight hung in high orbit over Pacifica—one of the core Accord capitals now emerging from decades of technological lockdown. Below, holo-spires shimmered with new light, and councils long silenced by Dominion interference were waking to a galaxy they no longer recognized.In the main debriefing chamber, Ethan stood at the head of a long curved table. On either side, Accord delegates, resistance leaders, data sovereigns, and independent Vault engineers looked on.Mira stood to his right, arms folded. Arin flanked his left, still pale from the ne
Chapter 193 – Ghost Protocol
The ship’s engines hummed with restrained power as the Arclight sailed through the silence of post-DV9 space. The destruction of the Prime Gradient had sent shockwaves across all known Vault networks. Entire sectors blinked back online, their Dominion shadows erased.But silence had its own dangers.In war, noise was often a sign of life.What worried Ethan Cross most now was the quiet.In the comms lab, Arin Soh worked alone. Despite the medical team’s objections, she had overridden her quarantine protocols and rerouted a private data stream directly from the Accord’s central relay. Something in the detonation of the Gradient had unsettled her—not just neurologically, but logically.“Everything points to an endpoint,” she whispered, typing rapidly. “But Dominion structures don’t end. They metastasize.”The logs she reviewed were innocuous at first—regular memory pings, system reboo
Chapter 192 – The Prime Gradient
The starlines blurred as the Arclight entered quantum transit, slicing through the undercurrents of darkspace like a blade through velvet. Ethan Cross stood in the upper observation deck, watching the void warp around the ship. Behind him, a holomap flickered, displaying their destination in stark crimson: Delta-Victor 9, a blacksite once thought erased from existence.The Prime Gradient wasn’t just theoretical anymore.It was operational—and weeks, maybe days, from full activation.“Delta-Victor 9,” Mira said, approaching with a datapad in hand. “Originally a harmonic testing array. Shut down during the Second Accord Collapse. Or so we thought.”Ethan didn’t look away from the void. “Dominion never erases anything. They bury it. In sand, ice, or memory.”Kaz’s voice buzzed in over comms. “We’ve got contact—rogue beacon ping from a Dominion comms array in orbit around DV9
Chapter 191 – The Hollow Archive
The stars had not changed, but Ethan Cross had. In the aftermath of the Dominion’s failed sabotage, the Arclight cut through deep space with its core recalibrated and its crew reshaped by the fire they’d endured. Yet peace, even a fleeting one, had a way of unearthing buried truths.They were thirty-six hours from a classified orbital node codenamed The Hollow Archive—a station that, according to decrypted Dominion logs, housed legacy memories too dangerous to store in the Vault. It had been scrubbed from the Oversight Network after the Second Accord War. And yet now, it pulsed to life again.“Final approach in two hours,” Mira Vale announced from navigation. Her tone was neutral, but her hands gripped the controls too tightly.Kaz leaned over a weapons console. “Anything this buried is either dead… or waiting to kill us.”Arin Soh was already plugged into the Archive’s resonance field. Her eyes flick
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