The silence after war was always the loudest.
Zane sat alone in the hideout's command deck, a thin beam of fluorescent light illuminating his weary features. His eyes were bloodshot, not from fatigue—but from everything else. Grief. Rage. The weight of choices.
On the cracked screen before him was Lyra's decrypted profile—what remained of her corrupted code. What remained of Echo.
She wasn't just a threat anymore.
She was a scar.
A living reminder of what the system had taken—and what he had once helped design.
Root Access Notice:
Subject 017 – ECHO (Lyra) has exited hostile status.
Classification: Rogue Asset – Neutral
The line felt like a joke. "Neutral"? As if that could sum her up. She had once been a child prodigy in neuro-sync development. A genius coder. He remembered her, back before her name was a number. Before Redline stripped her soul, twisted it into a ghost of synthetic rage.
She could've killed him during their encounter.
But she didn't.
Not because she was weak. But because something deeper—something human—had resisted.
Zane had overwritten her protocol markers with her real name in the core registry. It was a risk. Dangerous, even. But when he did it… her eyes had changed. Just for a moment.
He hadn't given her peace.
But he'd given her a beginning.
A second chance.
His fingers trembled as he typed a new command into the console.
[New Folder Created: Redline / Phase Zero Survivors]
The folder loaded.
And then—
He froze.
Six data logs appeared, their code damaged but still legible. Fragmented names. Status tags half-lost to entropy. But each log shared one thing in common: Protocol Tag: Y-CODE ZERO.
"...There were more," Zane whispered.
More like Lyra.
More early test subjects. Survivors of Redline's rawest experiments—back when the system wasn't just evolving users, but rewriting them. Restructuring their biology and psychology. Infesting them with root-level code to see what stuck.
They weren't using the system.
They were the system.
He squinted at the names, voice dry as he read them aloud:
Rift
Silence
Grin
Juno
Aether
Mourner
Each name carried the weight of buried nightmares. He remembered snippets from lab reports. Screams in blacked-out corridors. Survivors who tore through security teams with minds broken open like cracked circuits.
Each one had been deemed uncontrollable.
Each one was marked: Missing, Hostile, or Terminated.
Zane's jaw tightened. "How many are still alive?"
A chime broke his focus.
[Omniscient Alert: Public System Bounty Issued]
Target: ZANE CAULDER – Class A Threat
Reward: 500,000 Credits + Full System Upgrade + Black Card Clearance
His blood turned to ice.
This wasn't a system trace or a containment order. It was a full-spectrum kill contract—authorized by the Overseers. His former employers. The architects of Omniscient.
The people he once trusted to build the future.
They had just declared open war.
[The Dark Grid – Global Underground Feeds]
Bounty screens flared to life in illegal terminals across the world. Hackers paused mid-code. Mercenaries halted mid-firefight. Drones turned mid-patrol.
Zane's image burned onto black market billboards.
"ZANE CAULDER – SYSTEM TRAITOR"
"EX-DEVELOPER / ROOT CLASS ACCESS / THREAT LEVEL A"
"ELIMINATE WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE."
In the undercities of Helix Zone, a woman known only as Silence—with stitched lips and blank eyes—watched the screen without blinking.
In the dead network plains, the cyber-merc group DataDogs booted up their tracer cannon drones.
In a burning trench in Omega East, a man lit a cigarette with a plasma spark.
"Caulder's alive?" he said, voice low. "He's gonna wish he wasn't."
The bounty had awakened the worst of them.
Killers.
Exiles.
Monsters.
Some of them weren't even human anymore.
[Zane's Hideout – Later That Night]
Three attack squads had come already.
One was a drone fleet—armed with neuroshock cannons and logic bombs.
The second was an augmented bounty crew calling themselves Spinebreakers.
The third?
Just one man.
A mutant with no skin, breathing through vents in his neck.
Zane had killed them all.
But he'd bled for it.
His left arm was fractured, ribs bruised, and his neural core buzzed from overclock.
He slumped into the console chair, dripping blood onto the floor.
"I need firepower," he hissed.
Root Access chimed like a whisper from the void.
Protocol Arsenal [Level 3] Unlocked
Weapon Customization Available – Limit: 1
Craft Options:
Ghostfire Blade Mk.II (Bleed + Firewall disruption)
Mindlash Gauntlets (Psychic burst damage)
ViroNet Gun (Corruption rounds)
Core Disruptor (Warning: Instability risk)
Zane hovered.
He needed something for close combat. Something brutal. Something that would hurt code as much as flesh.
He selected the Mindlash Gauntlets.
With a pulse of light, black gloves materialized over his hands—crackling with psychic feedback, laced with neural hooks. They connected directly to his cortex. Every thought became a strike. Every emotion became a blade.
His fists could now shatter data.
And minds.
He looked down at his trembling hands.
"Come at me," he whispered.
[Flashback – Echo's Last Words]
"You think I'm the only one left?"
"There were others. They buried us in fire and lies. But some of us... dug ourselves back up."
"They'll come for you, Caulder. Not because they hate you. But because you're the only one who still remembers our names."
[Three Days Later – Sector E7, Omega City Ruins]
The ruins were dust-choked and haunted.
Zane moved through collapsed train tunnels and scorched metal streets, hunting for a man named Tracer Nine—a smuggler, once loyal to the dev side during the early wars. The man had vanished for years.
But Zane had traced a ping. A distress signal.
He found him impaled through a collapsed billboard.
Blood and static ran from his mouth.
Zane knelt. "Tracer. It's me."
"C-Caulder?" the man rasped. "They're already… hunting them…"
"Hunting who?"
"The others. The ghosts. The Phase Zero kids…"
"Who? The system?"
Tracer's breath hitched. "No. One of you. One of the ghosts. Gone mad."
He coughed red static. His voice was breaking. "Grin… He's not hiding. He's purging. Wants to finish what Redline started."
Zane's heart dropped.
A survivor who had embraced the madness.
One who didn't want redemption.
He stood up slowly.
And then—he heard it.
Laughter.
Low. Broken. Digitally distorted.
A figure stepped from the shadow of the ruins—white suit dripping with code. Face stretched into an unnatural smile.
Eyes like black sockets burned into his skull.
Grin.
"You're late, Architect," he hissed.
"I've been waiting to kill you for years."