2025-02-24 20:22:12The Attack
The first bullet zips past my ear, so close that I swear I feel the heat of its friction as it slices through the air. My breath catches. My pulse spikes. And then—everything slows. The world stretches into unbearable clarity as my enhanced reflexes take over, a gift I never asked for and a curse I can never escape. The system inside me does what it always does: it calculates. Within the span of a blink, a dozen potential escape routes manifest before my eyes. But before I can even act on them, something fractures in my vision—two versions of the same moment unfolding in tandem. One reality: I move too slow. The bullet finds its mark, ripping through my skull. The other: I roll left, just in time, just barely scraping by with my life intact. I don’t get to choose. The system does. I feel my body react before my mind even processes the decision. The muscles in my torso tighten, and I throw myself to the left, hitting the ground with a force that rattles my bones. The impact knocks the air from my lungs, but I push through, twisting behind a toppled metal crate. My chest heaves, burning from the sudden exertion. Gunfire erupts. A relentless monsoon of bullets tears into my cover, the sharp clang of ricocheting metal echoing in my ears. Sparks fly, flashing like miniature bursts of lightning in the chaos. My hands clench into fists as I shove down the rising terror clawing its way up my throat. There’s no room for fear. No room for doubt. Fear is hesitation. And hesitation is death. Somewhere beyond the relentless gunfire, a voice bellows through the din—gruff, authoritative, the kind that belongs to someone who commands without question. “Flank left! Don’t let him breathe!” Not just any strike team. Professionals. Well-trained. Well-equipped. And, most importantly, well-informed. I glance at my HUD, my augmented vision feeding me tactical data at an inhuman speed. Six hostiles. Three advancing fast, two covering from higher ground, one hanging back—observing, analyzing. Squad leader. No exits. I’ll have to make one. My muscles coil in preparation, and before my enemies can react, I vault over the crate, landing in a crouch. The first man doesn’t even register my movement in time. A swift, brutal strike to his throat drops him before he can squeeze the trigger. The second swings his rifle toward me. Too slow. I twist, sidestepping the burst of fire, my body flowing in perfect harmony with the system’s calculations. My knife finds his ribs, sharp and unrelenting. He collapses with a gurgled gasp. Then, it happens again. The skip. Two possible futures flash before me. One where I fail to see the sniper lining up his shot. The other where I do. Before I can react, the system wrenches me toward the second outcome. My vision snaps to the high ground, my body moving against my will. I drop flat just as the bullet meant for my skull whizzes overhead. I should feel relieved. Instead, I feel rage. They knew. They knew what I was. They came prepared. A sharp metallic clang echoes behind me. I turn just in time to see a concussion grenade rolling to a stop a few feet away. Every instinct I have screams at me to run. But the system ignores my instincts. The world slows once more, giving me just enough time to lash out with my boot, sending the grenade skidding back toward the advancing operatives. Whump. The air trembles. The shockwave rips through the room, sending them sprawling. I don’t waste a second. I sprint. My lungs burn with each desperate inhale as I push toward the emergency exit. Then—a shadow. A silhouette blocking my path. Larger frame. Broader shoulders. The squad leader. His weapon is already raised. But unlike the others, he doesn’t shoot. He studies me. Then, slowly, deliberately, he smirks. “You’re fast.” His voice is calm, almost amused. “But you already know that, don’t you?” A chill snakes down my spine. There’s no urgency in his stance. No fear. No panic. He expected this. He wanted this. My grip tightens around my blade. “Who sent you?” I demand, keeping my voice steady despite the adrenaline surging through my veins. His smirk deepens. “You already know the answer.” A trap. A test. A goddamn game. Then—another skip. Two outcomes unfold before me. One: I lunge, and his gun is already raised. A bullet tears through my gut. The other: I feint right, grab the barrel, disarm him. I don’t get to decide. The system does. I move, not of my own accord, but with an eerie, unnatural precision. The rifle slips from his grasp before he can fire. I bring the butt of it down against his temple. He stumbles, dazed—but still smiling. “They’ll never stop coming,” he mutters before collapsing into unconsciousness. My breath is ragged. My hands tremble. The system hums in my head, cold and unfeeling. It doesn’t care about exhaustion. It doesn’t care about fear. It doesn’t care that the horror curling in my stomach is becoming unbearable. I used to be in control. I used to have a choice. Now? Now the system decides who lives and who dies. I yank a smoke grenade from my belt, pull the pin, and throw it. Thick gray fog billows outward, swallowing the room in chaos. In the cover of darkness, I sprint toward the maintenance shaft, forcing my aching limbs to move. Gunfire erupts below as I haul myself up into the ventilation system, muscles screaming in protest. My pulse pounds like war drums in my ears. Another step ahead. Another forced escape. Another reminder that I am not truly free. And then— As if to mock me, the system whispers in the back of my mind: They will find you again. I exhale sharply, jaw tightening. “Let them try.” I crawl through the narrow shaft, my breathing ragged, my mind racing. Then, suddenly— My HUD flickers. A sharp red warning blares across my vision. SYSTEM OVERRIDE DETECTED. Panic surges through me. Before I can react, my limbs seize. My body locks up mid-crawl, frozen in place. A crackle of static. Then, a voice. Smooth. Taunting. Familiar. “You didn’t think you were the only one, did you?”
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CHAPTER 40
The Overseers’ OfferThe world dissolved around me.One second, I was reaching for Kane, begging her to remember. The next, I was nowhere.Not darkness. Not light. Not even the static void I had grown used to when the system reset itself. This was something else. Deeper. A place between places, where time didn’t flow and space didn’t hold shape.The air was thick, heavy, pressing against my skin like unseen hands trying to crush me into nothing.Then, I saw them.The Overseers.They stood in a line, stretching into infinity, figures draped in shifting code, their bodies flickering between forms—human, machine, something beyond either. Their faces were featureless, but I could feel their eyes on me, studying, measuring.And then I saw them.The frozen figures standing behind them, trapped mid-motion, their bodies flickering with incomplete memories. My heart slammed against my ribs.They were all me.Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Versions of myself, erased, rewritten, trapped in a moment
CHAPTER 39
Kane’s ChoiceThe world was unraveling.It wasn’t just the usual flickers at the edges of my vision, the skips in time that made me question whether I had just blinked or lost an entire second of my life. No—this was different. Bigger. The walls around us pulsed, shifting like waves of data crashing against the fragile shore of reality. The system was reacting, rewriting, adapting.Zero wasn’t moving. Not yet. He stood at the center of it all, watching, waiting. His face was unreadable, but his stance said everything. If I made the wrong move, if I hesitated for even a second, he would end this.I wasn’t sure if I was ready for what that meant.Kane didn’t hesitate. She never did.“Elias,” she snapped, her voice sharp, urgent. “Failsafe. Now.”Elias looked at her, his fingers hovering over the tablet. “Are you insane?”“Do it.”He hesitated, just for a second, just long enough for the weight of what she was asking to sink in. I didn’t know what the failsafe would do, but the look in E
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Zero’s BetrayalThe air around us shifted, carrying the faint hum of something unnatural. A disturbance, subtle but undeniable. It crawled beneath my skin, setting every nerve on edge.Kane, ever perceptive, caught it too. Her hand hovered near her weapon, muscles coiled, ready. Elias was already scanning the hallway ahead, fingers twitching against his tablet.Something was waiting for us.Then, the shadows twisted.A ripple ran through the air, distorting the space in front of us like heat bending over asphalt. And from that shifting darkness, he stepped forward.Zero.For a moment, the sight of him made something in my chest tighten—an old reflex, an instinct carved from trust. He looked exactly as I remembered. Same sharp eyes, same knowing smirk, the same way he carried himself like he was always one step ahead.But something was wrong.His movements were too precise. His presence, too still. The flicker of life in his expression was nothing more than a well-crafted illusion.I r
CHAPTER 37
A Code Written in BloodThe vault smelled like cold metal and something else—something rotten, like data that had spoiled. The walls pulsed with dim red lights, stretching into endless rows of glass cases. At first glance, they looked empty.They weren’t.I stepped forward, breath fogging against the glass as I peered inside. A face stared back at me. Eyes wide. Mouth slightly open, like he’d been caught mid-sentence. A man frozen in time.Not dead. Not alive.Just gone.Kane moved beside me, her fingers hovering inches from the glass. “What the hell is this?”Elias was already moving, his bag slung over his shoulder as he pulled out a tablet. “A graveyard,” he muttered, running his fingers over the control panel. “Or a prison, depending on how you look at it.”My stomach twisted. “They’re trapped?”“They’re rewritten.” His voice was grim. “The system didn’t just erase them. It repurposed them.”I forced myself to look again. The man in the glass had no scars, no wrinkles, nothing tha
CHAPTER 36
The Fractured SelfThe road ahead stretched endlessly, a ghost of a world flickering in and out like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to exist. My boots kicked up dust, but even that felt artificial, like it was programmed to react the way I expected. Kane walked beside me, silent, her sharp eyes scanning the ruins ahead. Elias trailed behind, muttering calculations under his breath.I knew where we were going. The Overseers’ domain. A place where reality wasn’t a certainty, where time looped back on itself and people became echoes.But for some reason, I couldn’t remember why we were going there.I frowned, shaking my head. Something was missing—like a word on the tip of my tongue, slipping further away the harder I tried to catch it.Kane noticed. She always did. “What’s wrong?”“I…” I opened my mouth, but hesitation stopped me cold. What was wrong? I couldn’t explain it, but I felt lighter, like pieces of me were missing.“Tony,” she pressed, voice firm but not unkind. “Talk to me.”
CHAPTER 35
A World Outside the SystemThe world around us wasn’t fully formed. Buildings stood half-finished, their structures dissolving into static at the edges. The sky above flickered between shades of gray and deep violet, glitching in and out like a bad signal. It was a place that wasn’t supposed to exist—an abandoned zone, untouched by The Overseers.Kane and I stood in the middle of the street, our breaths visible in the eerie cold air. She kept a tight grip on the device we’d stolen, her knuckles white from the pressure.“This place feels wrong,” she murmured. “Like it’s waiting to disappear.”I agreed. The world here wasn’t stable. It was like standing on the edge of a dream, just before waking up.Then, a figure emerged from the shadows. A man, dressed in a dark, tattered coat, his face partially hidden beneath the hood. He stepped forward with a calculated slowness, his hands raised in a gesture of peace.“I was wondering when you’d find your way here,” he said.Kane tensed beside me
CHAPTER 34
The Core’s CoordinatesThe screen flickered, casting a cold blue glow over Kane’s tense face. Lines of encrypted data scrolled rapidly, filling the air with the soft hum of technology at work. My fingers danced across the keyboard, heart pounding as I decrypted the last layer. Then—Coordinates. A list of possible locations. The Core.Kane exhaled sharply beside me. "This is it." Her voice was quiet, but beneath it, a current of urgency rippled through.I swallowed. "We finally have something real."But before the words could settle, a chill ran through the room. The lights dimmed, not flickering—shifting, like the walls themselves were second-guessing their existence. Kane and I locked eyes. Outside the window, the city moved in ways it shouldn’t. A building that had been across the street was now beside us. People walked in slow, deliberate steps, their faces expressionless, heads subtly tilting in unison."The Overseers," Kane murmured, reaching instinctively for the knife at her b
CHAPTER 33
The Price of RebellionThe air here was heavy, thick with the weight of things that didn’t belong.I could feel it pressing down on my skin, humming through my bones—a silent scream buried in the fabric of reality. Kane and I moved cautiously through the remnants of what had once been someone’s last stand. The place had the same eerie stillness as the hideout before, but worse. This wasn’t just abandoned.It was frozen.A street half-formed, cutting off into an expanse of nothing. A doorway leading to nowhere, hanging in the air like it had been sliced from existence mid-thought. Cars, chairs, even the dust in the air—stuck in a single moment, refusing to move.Like time had decided to give up.Kane ran a hand over a rusted terminal embedded in the wall, her fingers pressing against dead keys. "Whoever they were… they didn’t get far."I crouched near a stack of papers scattered across the cracked pavement. Words scrawled in desperate handwriting, some neat, others jagged and frantic.
CHAPTER 32
The First RemnantI woke to the taste of blood in my mouth.For a second, everything was wrong—blurry, twisted. The world flickered like a broken screen, and shadows stretched in directions they shouldn’t. My heartbeat was loud, too loud, like it was trying to hammer its way out of my chest. Then, just as quickly as it started, the distortion snapped back into place, leaving me gasping on a cold, cracked floor.Kane's voice cut through the haze. "Tony."She was crouched beside me, eyes sharp, body tense. There was dust in her dark hair, and a thin cut ran along her jaw, but she looked intact. Alive."You're okay," she said, like she was trying to convince herself. "I caught you before you hit the ground. Mostly."My head throbbed. I forced myself upright, biting back a groan. "Define 'mostly'?""You didn’t die. You’re welcome."I let out a weak, breathy laugh. "Guess I owe you one."She stood, scanning the room we’d landed in. It was some kind of hideout—low ceilings, metal walls, the
