The fire had faded, but the sky still bled light.
Korr sat on the edge of the ruined rooftop, breathing in smoke and cold metal. The shattered spire of the Vetrax Nexus lay in a heap of twisted steel below, cables sparking like dying nerves. Across the street, the Legionnaire's body smoldered. Its charred armor clung to bone-white plating that defied nature and design alike.
But it hadn't moved again.
It hadn't needed to.
Its words still echoed in Korr's mind—You delay the inevitable.
He didn't understand how it had spoken directly into his thoughts. No transmission. No sound. Just presence. Like the Architect's Legion wasn't built to communicate through machines, but through something deeper.
Something alive.
Forty-eight minutes later, Korr and his team regrouped inside the old metro tunnels beneath Sector D.
The tunnels were humid, crumbling, lit only by red emergency lamps and strips of bioluminescent fungi growing through cracked pipes. Vetrax's underground had become more than an escape route—it was a new capital for the displaced.
Korr's squad assembled in a hollowed station where old vending machines had been reprogrammed to dispense water filters and fusion cell chargers. Kids huddled near broken holo-panels. Civilians who refused to flee. Engineers turned fighters. Hackers turned medics. Refugees turned soldiers.
And they all looked to him.
Mara, bruised and smeared with dust, stepped up beside him. She handed him a data slate.
"Intel from the relay towers before the blast. Pulled everything the Legion had queued."
Korr scanned the data. Dozens of encrypted commands, but one stood out—a repeating signal buried in the lowest frequency band, hidden like a parasite.
He tapped the code.
The screen flickered and a schematic unfurled—an image of the Earth's mantle layers, marked with heat spikes and signal anomalies near the planet's fault lines.
"What the hell is this?" Korr asked.
Mara's voice dropped to a whisper. "They're tunneling."
He looked at her sharply.
"Through the Earth?" he said. "Why?"
"I don't know," she said, "but it's not mining. These aren't resources. They're building something."
Korr's gut twisted.
"Where's their deepest node?"
Mara pointed at the screen.
It blinked red beneath the Himalayas.
Twelve hours later, Korr stood inside the mobile command rig Ash Protocol, a mobile stealth operations bunker once used by Coalition special forces. The rig—twelve tons of cloaked plating, signal baffles, and AI-locked navigation—was one of only three left. And it was the last still operational.
"Set a course," Korr said. "Target zone: Site Theta, coordinates buried beneath Nepal Ridge."
The pilot, a woman with a shaved head and neck tattoos of old solar constellations, raised an eyebrow. "You're heading straight into Legion territory. That's suicide."
"No," Korr said. "It's worse. But we don't have a choice."
As Ash Protocol roared underground on magnetic treads, Korr reviewed the mission logs.
There was a time—five years ago—when war made sense. Soldiers had faces. Objectives were simple. Win territory. Disable infrastructure. Save civilians.
Now? The Legion didn't take land. They ignored it. They were after something bigger. Something beneath the world.
And somehow, Elias Korr—an old war commander clinging to ancient tactics—was expected to stop it.
His fingers hovered over the encrypted message Mara had found in the Nexus data core. Not just coordinates. It contained a phrase, repeated over and over:
AWAKEN THE SEED
He'd seen it before.
Buried in war records erased by the Coalition.
Attached to a forgotten classified program: Project Origin.
And suddenly, the pieces began to fall into place.
The Legion wasn't conquering.
They were unearthing something.
Or someone.
Ash Protocol reached a mountain hollow just before dawn. Hidden beneath rock and camouflage netting was a sealed bunker with the Coalition's oldest logo: a five-pointed star made of circuitry and bone.
Korr approached the heavy door. It scanned his retina. Access denied.
He keyed in a code he hadn't used in years.
"ASHTRAY-12-VERTEX-ZENITH."
The door hissed open.
Inside: darkness, frost, and silence. But as lights flickered on, the truth emerged.
Rows of cryo-pods.
Not machines.
People!!.
Humans—connected to servers and deep-brain interfaces. Some as young as sixteen. Others too altered to be recognizable. One had no eyes—just glass domes where a neural matrix shimmered with data pulses.
This was Project Origin.
And suddenly, the Legion's interest in these coordinates made sense.
They weren't the first to create soldiers merged with machines.
We were, from behind him, mara's voice came through the comments.
Korr… there's something wrong."
He turned.
And then—before he could ask what she meant—the cryo-chambers woke up.
Warning lights flashed red.
The sealed minds opened.
And every sleeper in that room began to speak in unison—a voice layered in a thousand echoes, reaching directly into Korr's mind:
"You tried to bury what we were. You will not bury what we've become."