Hong Kong shimmered like a circuit board on fire.
The city was ablaze with speculation, police silence, and corporate blackouts. One of its most prominent buildings—The Yuexiu Spire—had been taken over by a single man in a matter of hours.
That man was Lucan Wexley.
And he wasn't hiding.
He was waiting.
Kael stood across the harbor, wind whipping his coat, the glowing spire pulsing like a heart. "He's broadcasting something," Trix said over comms. "Not over public frequencies—directly into secured military satellites. It's a declaration."
Kael's voice was flat. "Play it."
A hologram shimmered between them, Lucan's face emerging in flickering gold.
"You were raised with names. I was raised with numbers. You were fed kindness. I was forged with pain. But blood always remembers. Come, Kael. Let's finish what began in the womb."
Trix cut the feed.
Thalia exhaled. "Your twin is a poet and a sociopath. Great."
Kael didn't reply. He was already walking.
Inside the Yuexiu Spire, the world bent.
Lucan had transformed the corporate tower into a warped cathedral of light and control—holograms that looped traumatic memories, soundwaves that disrupted equilibrium, mirrored surfaces that replayed nightmares.
Kael moved through it alone.
Thalia and the others were ordered to stay out.
"This is blood work," Kael had said.
And they had obeyed.
Now, Kael ascended a stairwell of glass, his reflection fractured with every step. The mirrors whispered in his father's voice. His mother's. Even his own.
But he tuned them out.
Until the door opened.
And Lucan stood there.
They were identical, down to the curl of the lip and the burn in the eyes. But Lucan had no warmth. His skin was paler. His posture rigid, trained. Engineered.
"You came," Lucan said softly. "Wasn't sure if you'd be brave enough… or foolish enough."
"I came for answers," Kael said. "And an end."
Lucan smiled.
"You're still pretending this is personal. But it's mathematical. We are not men, Kael. We're equations in a larger problem. Father didn't choose you over me. He needed both of us to complete the algorithm."
Kael stepped closer. "Then why kill him?"
Lucan's eyes flared.
"He tried to erase the experiment."
The fight didn't begin with fists. It began with pulses.
Lucan moved first—his body crackling with energy as he launched forward. Kael blocked, felt the shock ripple through his bones.
They were matched in strength.
But not in method.
Lucan fought like a soldier—a weaponized dance of deadly precision. Kael moved like a storm—raw, reactive, primal.
Glass shattered. Lights ruptured.
The tower itself groaned.
Kael landed a punch that drove Lucan through a wall. Lucan retaliated with a sonic scream that sent Kael flying across the chamber.
Blood spilled from both mouths.
But neither stopped.
Then Kael saw it.
A control node on Lucan's spine—pulsing with Syndicate tech. A neural stabilizer. That's why Lucan was always one step faster, why his pain tolerance was insane.
"Still using their leash," Kael muttered.
Lucan sneered. "I am the leash."
Kael flipped, drove Lucan into the floor, tore the device free.
Lucan screamed—pure, primal agony.
And then he changed.
His veins turned black.
Eyes burned silver.
And for one second, Kael didn't see a man.
He saw something ancient.
Something designed.
Lucan rose—eyes glowing, skin cracking with energy.
"You fool. You just unshackled the failsafe."
Kael stepped back.
"What are you?"
Lucan smiled, lips split with blood.
"I'm what you were meant to become."
The battle restarted.
But now it was different.
Lucan no longer moved like a man. He glided. Crashed. Bent space around his body. He wasn't just enhanced. He was awakening something buried deep in their DNA—something from the Archon project.
Kael fought harder, tapping into the same energy.
And as he did—his vision blurred.
A new sense opened in his mind. He could see ahead. Lucan's next moves. Shifts in light, tension in space, gravitational variance.
They were evolving mid-combat.
Like algorithms re-writing themselves.
In a final clash, Kael tackled Lucan through the glass façade.
They plummeted 80 stories—slammed into a Syndicate drone cruiser parked below.
Both survived.
Barely.
Lucan limped away, vanishing into the shadows of Hong Kong.
Kael lay in the wreckage, bleeding from the eyes, whispering, "This isn't over."
Later, aboard the yacht, patched up and silent, Kael reviewed the fight frame by frame.
He froze on one image—Lucan's blood, dripping from a shattered piece of glass.
It pulsed faintly.
Kael leaned closer.
And saw a sequence in the blood itself.
Not just DNA.
A message.
The screen decoded it:
"PROJECT GODHAND - STAGE TWO INCOMING."
Kael whispered the words out loud.
Then stood.
"Find out where they're activating it."
Trix blinked. "You're not going after Lucan?"
Kael's eyes burned like his brother's had.
"No. I'm going after the ones who made us both."