2025-08-15 10:46:23Lukas nodded, his voice low but certain. “I could’ve. The needles were slowing the toxin’s spread. I needed more time.”
Voss overheard, his face twisting with rage. “Enough! You’re done here, Brandt. Security!” He gestured to the door, but Sofia’s hand shot up, her presence commanding silence.
“You idiot!” Sofia roared. “You pulled his needles! You’ve killed him!” Her hands gripped Voss’s white coat, her knuckles white.
Voss shoved her back, his face turning red with anger. “How dare you!” he spat. “This fake doctor’s nonsense put my patient in danger! Acupuncture? In a hospital? You’re as delusional as he is!”
“Touch him, and you answer to me,” she said, her voice like steel. The security guards hesitated, caught between Voss’s authority and Sofia’s influence. She turned to Amelie. “Your father’s not gone yet. Let Lukas try again.”
Lukas strode back into the ward, he ignored the security guards hovering at the door, clearly feeling nervous after Sofia’s earlier warning. “You ignored my instructions,” he said to Voss, his voice low. “I told you the needles were countering the toxin. You didn’t listen, and now he’s dying.”
Voss scoffed,“Your parlor tricks caused this crisis, Brandt. Don’t shift the blame. You’re no doctor, you’re a fraud.”
Amelie Dubois, tears running down her face, held her father’s hand tightly and spoke with a shaky voice. “Stop fighting! Do something!” Her blue eyes darted between Voss and Lukas, her trust in the hospital’s star physician breaking as her father's condition got worse.
Sofia turned to Lukas, her anger fading into a desperate request. “Lukas, please,” she said, her voice softer now. “Pieter’s my partner—Viktor’s partner. We need him. Save him, and I’ll give you unrestricted access to my family’s botanical archives, centuries of rare plant knowledge, it'll be yours.”
Lukas’s gaze returned to Pieter, whose convulsions had slowed but whose vitals remained critical, the monitors flashing red. The offer was tempting: Sofia’s offer was tempting—her archives held cures he had only heard about, a goldmine for an herbal doctor like him. But it was very risky. The poison, made from a mix of plants, got worse when Voss took out the needles, almost killing Pieter. Lukas hesitated for a moment, then nodded with determination. “I’ll try,” he said. “But I need something specific.”
“What?” Sofia asked, her eyes locked on his.
“Crushed dried tulip bulbs,” Lukas said, his voice steady. “A rare Dutch antidote, used for centuries against plant-based toxins. It’ll complement the acupuncture. Get it fast.”
Sofia didn’t hesitate. She pulled out her phone, barking orders to an assistant in rapid French. “Find it now!, I don’t care what it costs.” She turned back to Lukas. “You’ll have it in twenty minutes.”
The medical team exchanged skeptical glances, a nurse muttering under her breath about “folklore nonsense.” Voss folded his arms, with a sneer. “Tulip bulbs? You’re wasting time. He needs real medicine, not your fairy tales.”
Lukas ignored him, turning to the nurse who had brought the needles earlier. “Get me eighteen fine silver needles again. Sterile,hurry!” She nodded and hurried away.
Amelie stepped closer, her voice trembling. “Can you really save him? After… this?”
Lukas met her gaze,. “I can try, the toxin’s aggressive, but I know its patterns. Trust me.” His words carried the weight of his grandfather’s teachings, the years spent studying plants and pulses, the quiet brilliance that had once earned Elise’s admiration.
The needles arrived. Lukas took a deep breath, his focus on Pieter’s body. He closed his eyes briefly, visualizing the meridians, the energy pathways disrupted by the toxin’s chaos. This wasn’t just acupuncture, it was the Flora Pulse, a revered herbalist technique his grandfather had taught him, blending needlework with plant-based remedies to draw out toxins. The medical team’s mocking whispers about “voodoo” and “fake medicine” quieted down as he started.
He carefully put the first needle on the side of Pieter’s head, then he placed another at the bottom of Pieter’s neck, and a third one on his chest. One by one, eighteen needles were carefully placed in the right spots. The monitors beeped unevenly, but Pieter’s shaking slowed, and his breathing got a little steadier.
Sofia’s assistant rushed in, holding a small glass bottle with a fine amber powder inside, a crushed dried tulip bulbs from a private collector in Utrecht. Lukas took it, unscrewing the cap and placing it near Pieter’s arm, where the toxin’s effects were most pronounced. “This will draw it out,” he said, his voice low but certain.
The room held its breath as Lukas adjusted the final needle, his fingers gently touching Pieter’s skin. A soft sound seemed to come from the needles, but it might have been the monitors or just the tense atmosphere. Then, something moved under Pieter’s skin—a dark shape twisting beneath the surface. Amelie gasped as a small black beetle with shiny shell came out from where a needle pierced Pieter’s arm.
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Chapter Two Hundred and Twenty-One
The room was quiet in the way that came after storms, when even the air seemed to be listening for what would break next.Lukas stood by the window, his phone resting loosely in his hand, the screen dark. Below him, the city moved on, unaware and uncaring, cars threading through the streets like nothing in the world was wrong. He watched them for a long moment, grounding himself in the ordinary rhythm of it all, before he finally turned away.Elise sat on the edge of the couch, her posture straight, hands folded together in her lap. She had changed since the last time he had seen her, and not just in the obvious ways. There was a sharpness to her now, a restraint that had been forged under pressure. She looked like someone who had learned the hard way that hesitation could cost everything.“You shouldn’t have come alone,” Lukas said at last.Elise lifted her head. “Neither should you.”A corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “Fair.”Silence settled again, heavier this time.
Chapter Two Hundred and Twenty
The first consequence arrived quietly.Lukas noticed it not through alerts or urgent messages, but through absence. No calls asking for concessions. No late-night intermediaries offering compromise dressed as cooperation. For nearly forty-eight hours after the framework announcement, the channels that had once been crowded went unnervingly still.That silence told him more than outrage ever could.He stood in the strategy room with his jacket draped over the back of a chair, sleeves rolled up, reviewing a live feed of implementation metrics. Regions were responding faster than projected. Compliance audits were activating without friction. Systems that had been resisted for years were suddenly being adopted with minimal protest.Too smooth.Margot leaned over the table, fingers braced against the glass. “They’re not pushing back because they’re recalculating,” she said. “They’re deciding where to hit instead.”Elise sat across from them, posture composed, eyes sharp. “If they can’t slo
Chapter Two Hundred and Nineteen
Lukas slept for less than three hours, and when he woke, it wasn’t to an alarm but to the familiar sense that something had shifted while he wasn’t looking.The city beyond the windows was already alive, pale morning light spreading across glass and steel. For a long moment, he stayed still, listening to the rhythm of the building, the distant hum of systems coming online. It reminded him uncomfortably of how things used to feel before Berg’s influence had been obvious—quiet, efficient, deceptively calm.He swung his legs off the bed and dressed without ceremony. There was no time for indulgence today. Momentum had its own appetite.By the time he reached the main operations floor, teams were already assembled in clusters, voices low but purposeful. No panic. No scrambling. That alone told him how much had changed. Fear had been replaced by something closer to discipline.Margot noticed him immediately and peeled away from a discussion near the central console. “You’re early.”“I didn
Chapter Four Hundred and One
The early morning fog settled low over the city, dampening sounds and muting colors, creating a temporary suspension of the familiar urban rhythm. Elias moved through the streets with a sense of measured urgency, observing the slow stirrings of life awakening beneath the haze. His thoughts were tangled with the events of the past weeks: coordinated disruptions, the pressure of upcoming council votes, and the delicate balance of distributed authority that remained untested in high-stakes real-world scenarios. Today, he knew, would demand more than data analysis; it would require intuition, ethical judgment, and direct engagement with those on the ground.He arrived at the operations hub before most of the team had logged in. Lana was already monitoring multiple feeds, her attention sharp as she tracked subtle deviations in traffic flows and energy distribution. “Something unusual in district nine,” she noted immediately, her voice low but tense. “Energy spikes coincide with minor crowd
Chapter Two Hundred and Seventeen
The first thing Lukas noticed was the silence.Not the good kind. Not the earned calm that followed a battle won. This silence was taut, stretched thin across the operations floor like wire pulled too tight. Every screen glowed. Every system breathed. But no alarms sounded, and that absence felt deliberate.He stood where Margot had left him, eyes fixed on the cascading code she’d flagged before stepping away. The contingency wasn’t loud. It wasn’t aggressive. It was elegant in the way only something designed by a patient mind could be.Berg had built decay.“Show me the trigger path again,” Lukas said.Margot reappeared at his side, shoulders hunched forward as if bracing against something unseen. With a few precise gestures, she isolated the sequence. The display shifted, lines thinning, nodes dimming until only a narrow thread remained.“It activates through advisory overlap,” she explained. “No single action looks suspicious. Each step is defensible on its own. But together, they
Chapter Two Hundred and Sixteen
The room felt different after Berg was secured.Not quieter. Not calmer. Just… heavier.Lukas stood at the center of the main operations floor, hands resting on the back of a chair he hadn’t realized he’d pulled out. Around him, systems continued to run, lights blinking in steady rhythms, data streams flowing like nothing monumental had just happened. That normalcy unsettled him more than chaos ever did.Containment was supposed to feel like victory.Instead, it felt like the pause between breaths before something broke.“Status,” he said, his voice cutting cleanly through the low hum of activity.Margot looked up from her console. Dark circles had formed beneath her eyes, the kind that came from adrenaline wearing off too fast. “Primary networks are collapsing faster than expected. Financial shells are frozen. Three proxy boards resigned within the hour once the legal notices landed.”“And the rest?”She hesitated just a fraction of a second. Lukas noticed.“They’re quiet,” Margot sa
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