KADUNA SECTOR – BLACK FOG BURIAL SITE
The Syndicate didn't bury its own in cemeteries. It carved graves beneath telecom hubs, bank
vaults, and police barracks. Places no one would look — or dare dig.
In Kaduna, the "grave" was hidden beneath an abandoned radio relay station that had been
non-functional since 2008. Ikenna keyed the retinal scanner, and the blast door rolled open with
a hiss.
They descended thirty meters down a spiral shaft and emerged into a concrete chamber lined
with sealed vaults. Each vault bore only a number. No names. No marks.
Ikenna walked straight to Vault 44.
Paused.
Briggs drew in a sharp breath.
The lock was melted.
The door — open.
Inside the vault: dust, cracked resin lining, empty memory sockets.
Nobody.
No card.
No record.
Ikenna scanned the wall.
Where the biometric plate should have been, there was only a scorched smear.
"What the hell…" Briggs stepped back.
Ikenna didn't speak.
He just looked down at the evidence card in his hand.
Then he pulled out the biometric scanner and tapped it against the evidence slot.Nothing.
"Card's been nullified," Briggs said.
Ikenna nodded. "More than that. Erased. It's like he was never entered into Syndicate death
logs."
Briggs hesitated. "So… is it him? Back from the dead?"
Ikenna looked up.
"No. Not yet."
Briggs raised an eyebrow. "Then what is this?"
"The Ghost Protocol," Ikenna said. "A contingency. He coded it into his file before the Massacre.
A way to reinsert himself into the system if anyone tampered with his grave."
Briggs exhaled slowly.
"So someone wanted this to trigger."
"Exactly."
"And now what? He's alive again? Active?"
"I don't think he was ever truly gone."
---
ELSEWHERE… LAGOS SLUM DISTRICT, 3:22 AM
The figure moved like smoke through the alleyways.
She wore a scarf that hid her jawline, a data rig slung across her back. Her eyes gleamed under
the sodium lamps.
Her name was Amira. She'd once been the Fog's best underground signal thief.
Until she disappeared.
Now, she was back — plugging cables into cracked panels, slicing into city gridlines, finding the
oldest Syndicate frequencies… and watching.Her rig chirped.
She paused.
The message wasn't encoded.
It wasn't encrypted.
It simply read:
"Protocol Awake. Fog Breakpoint. Command Line: /Return."
She stared.
Then slowly, without a word, she entered the command.
And the grid — Lagos, Port Harcourt, Jos, Makurdi — began to shift.
---
BACK AT KADUNA SITE
Ikenna turned from the desecrated grave.
"We have to assume all Ghost Protocol assets are in play."
Briggs flinched. "That includes the Reclaimer units."
"And the Shadow Logs. The Oba Recall. The Lazarus Cache."
"That's more firepower than any node has access to."
Ikenna closed the vault.
"It was built that way. Ghost didn't believe in central control. He believed in chaos that obeyed its
own logic."
"So what's next?"
Ikenna locked eyes with him.
"We find who triggered this."---
FOG SYNDICATE HQ – Emergency Ops Layer, Lagos
Nkiru was waiting when they returned.
So was Timi, head of the Syndicate's cryptology unit — and one of the few left alive who had
trained under Ghost.
He wore glasses, but didn't need them. It was a tic — a habit from an older life.
"Ikenna," he said, without looking up from the screen. "I decrypted the last known Ghostline log
before his death record was sealed."
Ikenna stepped forward.
Timi rotated the monitor.
On it: a list of codenames. All members of Division 33. All marked deceased.
Except one.
KREED.
Briggs leaned in. "That one survived?"
"Not just survived," Timi said. "He disappeared the night of the Massacre. Same hour the vaults
were sealed. Same hour Ghost was buried."
Ikenna spoke quietly.
"Kreed was Ghost's fallback."
"Then he's the key," Briggs said.
Timi hesitated. "There's more."
He opened a file.
A grainy still from security footage.A warehouse.
Kaduna.
Two hours ago.
A shadowy figure opening Vault 33.
Middle finger raised to the camera.
Not Ghost.
Not Kreed.
A third figure.
Taller. Broad. Left-handed.
And in the reflection of the vault door — barely visible — was a tattoo on the wrist.
The Fog Syndicate emblem.
Inverted.
---
BACK IN A SEALED ROOM BELOW HQ
Ikenna stood alone in the Observation Ring, watching surveillance feeds spiral across multiple
screens.
One of them showed the desecrated grave.
Another showed Amira, tapping at a control rig in a Lagos tunnel.
A third — static, shifting slowly — showed a man in a medical pod.
Eyes closed.
Lips twitching.
The final screen flickered.Then steadied.
A message:
"Phase 2 Begins."
---
The vault airlock hissed as it opened — not by command, but by override.
No one authorized it.
No one should have been able to.
Yet deep in the sub-basement of a disused Syndicate R&D complex in Enugu, Vault R-01 lit up
with soft red lights, and a synthesized female voice whispered from the intercom:
> "Directive: Reclaimer Protocol Engaged."
The silence that followed was cold.
Then came a mechanical whir.
Then steam.
Then movement.
Inside the vault, a humanoid shape uncurled itself from its cradle — seven feet of black alloy,
spine cables twitching, optic lens glowing like a coal pulled from a dying sun.
The Reclaimer had awakened.
And no one was ready.
---
Fog Syndicate HQ – Lagos
"Repeat that," Ikenna said.Timi didn't blink. "The Enugu node just reactivated itself. Vault R-01 is live."
"That's impossible," Briggs snapped. "That entire sector was quarantined five years ago after
the 'Nembe Implosion'. The whole lab was sealed, top-tier containment. Nothing goes in or out."
"Unless it was never fully shut down," Ikenna murmured. "And someone left a backdoor."
Timi tapped his console, bringing up archived feeds from the Enugu site.
No live video — only telemetry.
But the data was enough.
"Power surge at 03:14. Vault unsealed at 03:16. Vital patterns confirm synthetic neural
activation. R-01's status: operational. It's out."
Briggs's jaw tightened. "Out where?"
"Unknown," Timi said.
"That's not good enough."
"No, it's worse than that," Ikenna said. "The Reclaimer wasn't supposed to ever be deployed
again."
—
THE RECLAIMER
Originally developed to purge compromised Syndicate zones, the Reclaimer was part of Ghost's
Black Directive program — autonomous kill units with access to unrestricted methods, lethal
logic trees, and no human override.
After the Obalende Incident — where a
n early Reclaimer unit wiped out an entire Syndicate
faction and the host city's water grid — the program was scrapped.
Or so everyone believed.
—