Part 3: Ash Broadcast
Fear doesn't start with screams.
It starts with silence.
It starts in the moments after—when the body stops twitching, when the eyes freeze in place, the heart beats so loudly you can hear it in your ears and someone else walks into the room and sees what's left.
That's what happened in Paris.
It began in a penthouse above Rue de Lille, behind armored glass, a bullet proof door and two biometric locks, where a former data broker named Bastian Verleaux lived like the gods owed him rent.
He sold information.
Specifically: Paragon erasure protocols—location scrubs, ID shifts, neural signature shrouds. His clients were all ghosts, paid in hard crypto and weapons, grade silence.
His heart stopped at 03:21 am.
But he was still alive for another hour and thirteen minutes.
03:22 am– Rooftop breach.
No camera saw anything.
The hallway outside his unit remained perfectly untouched.
But inside, the body told the story.
Kairo didn't flay Bastian right away, that would've been merciful.
He emptied the man.
Removed his tongue.
Sutured his eyelids shut with synthetic wire pulled from his jacket.
Disconnected his thumbs and index fingers with surgical grace, laying them out like keys in front of a still running keyboard.
Then he jammed a pulse injector into Bastian's lower back—an old Paragon prototype. It hijacked the man's spinal cord, rewired his pain centers, turned his entire nervous system into a living transmitter.
Kairo opened a direct uplink to a defunct Paragon relay buried under the Louvre and pressed one bloody hand against the broker's chest.
The message didn't come through typed.
It came through tissue.
Through skin and smoke and the broadcast of his screams into the satellite grid.
And when the relay finally pinged alive, it didn't transmit code.
It transmitted an image.
Bastian, tied to a chair, his own severed fingers jammed in his ears, his eyes bleeding black. Carved across his chest in neat script, flayed into the skin:
YOU CANNOT HIDE
The next morning, nine high clearance spooks in Paris committed suicide within forty eight hours of viewing the file.
They didn't know what terrified them more, that Kairo was alive—or that he'd figured out how to broadcast.
Rio de Janeiro – 04:10 am BRT
Former handler João Mirallas was found inside a shipping container at the Port of Guanabara.
He'd vanished a month earlier. Changed his name, paid off two militias, hid inside an insulated cube of steel wrapped in thermal shielding.
It didn't matter.
Because Kairo found him anyway.
What they found inside was molten.
Mirallas had been strapped to a chair, naked, knees broken inward. Every inch of his skin was covered in chemical burns—from the inside. His veins had been pumped with liquified magnesium and set alight beneath the skin.
His ribcage was cracked open from the pressure.
And on the interior of the chest wall, burned into the bone with surgical precision.
TELL THE OTHERS
Whoever opened the container dropped their flashlight and ran five blocks before vomiting in the gutter and quitting his agency forever.
Kabul – 05:48 am AFT
Warlord Salid Karaj, former logistics operator for Paragon's Afghanistan ops, turned himself in.
He walked up to a NATO checkpoint alone. Hands raised. Begging. Crying.
He didn't ask for asylum.
He begged for a cell.
"I'll tell you where the caches are," he said. "Just put me underground. Put steel between me and him."
They didn't know what he was talking about.
Not yet.
Two hours later, after processing, the surveillance footage of his cell shorted out for eight seconds.
When power returned, the guards found Karaj's body flattened against the wall—compressed to two inches thick, like a fly under glass. The entire room smelled of burning quartz.
His final words were scrawled in urine and blood across the wall, written by his own finger:
HE'S NOT A MAN. HE'S A WEAPON.
The Broadcast
It began that night.
A ripple across darknet forums, military threat exchanges, closed loop mercenary threads, whisper chains from Panama to Prague.
At first, it was just a clip.
Eight seconds.
Low resolution.
No audio.
Grainy footage of a hallway, somewhere in Eastern Europe.
Fluorescent lights flicker. A body slumps against the wall, spine twisted like a helix.
Then.
Kairo.
Emerging from the shadow.
Face half-lit. Coated in blood.
No mask. No armor.
Just eyes glowing faint blue.
He looks at the camera. Doesn't speak.
The screen goes black.
That was all.
But it was enough.
Across the world, reaction protocols triggered in thirteen classified defense systems. Five black-ops agents disappeared into bunkers, three resigned. Two turned on their own teams and fled.
And one simply walked into a lake wearing full gear and never came up.
The footage had a filename. Not given by Kairo, but by the people trying to forget him:
ASH_BROADCAST_01.avi
It spread like mold.
Not on networks.
On minds.
Kairo didn't need armies.
He didn't need war.
He needed a name.
And now he had one.