Location: Melbourne, Australia
The storm didn't ask permission.
It came at 3:46 a.m. like a drunk with unfinished business—howling down the Yarra River, toppling street signs, and rattling the bones of a city that hadn't truly slept in decades. But Melbourne had a talent for pretending everything was under control. The bars in Fitzroy stayed open. The alleyways of Collingwood whispered deals in code. And in the corporate towers of the CBD, men in designer suits washed their sins with whiskey and board meetings.
No one heard the sound beneath the city.
Except her.
---
The security guard on duty at Parliament Station had been half-asleep when the tremor hit. A low-frequency vibration. Like a subway car passing through a tunnel that had long been abandoned. He glanced at the monitors. All clear.
But underground, deep beneath the city's mapped-out skeleton, something stirred.
A heavy iron gate—one that hadn't been unlocked in nearly twenty-five years—creaked open with a metallic groan.
Footsteps followed.
Two pairs. Precise. Measured. Military.
And then came the silence.
---
Docklands, 4:12 a.m.
Rain hit the glass like nails. A private elevator glided up to the 47th floor of an unfinished skyscraper. Inside, a woman stood in silence, one hand resting on a metal briefcase. Her name was Kael Winter. Age 32. No social media. No paper trail. No allegiance.
Dressed in black, hair tied up, eyes sharpened by something colder than ambition, Kael was not someone you met by accident. She was the kind of professional that showed up only when secrets began to stink.
The elevator doors opened with a soft ding.
A man stood waiting. Older. Grey suit. Leather gloves. His smile didn't reach his eyes.
"You're late," he said.
Kael stepped out, unbothered. "The city was screaming. I stopped to listen."
He offered her a glass of wine. She declined.
"Where's the target?" she asked.
The man handed her a red file. Inside was a grainy surveillance image of a man stepping off a tram near Richmond Station.
"Name?" she asked.
"They call him Ronan Vale. Former military. Disappeared in 2005 after a classified op in Kandahar went south. Presumed dead. Until last week."
"What happened last week?"
"Someone breached a vault beneath Parliament Station. Not just any vault. That vault. The one nobody talks about."
Kael frowned. "The one that doesn't exist on any map?"
He nodded.
"Let me guess," she said. "He walked out of it."
---Elsewhere in Melbourne...
A body floated in the Maribyrnong River.
Not the first. Not the last. But this one had something unusual.
Burn marks.
On the inside of the skull.
Detective Marcus Vey, two years shy of retirement and already half-detached from the world he used to believe in, stood by the bank. His cigarette was wet. His patience worse.
"Who found him?" he asked.
"Cyclist," the constable replied. "Coming off the bridge. Thought it was a dog."
"It's never a dog," Marcus muttered.
The forensic pathologist was pale. Not because of the corpse. But because of the scorch pattern in the brain cavity.
"What the hell kind of weapon does this?" Marcus asked.
"None that we've ever seen."
---
Inside a warehouse in Footscray
Ronan Vale pulled the tarp off an old 1978 Ford Falcon. The car looked like it had died in the '90s and stayed dead. But underneath the dust, it was armored. Reinforced. Modified for war.
He opened the glovebox.
Inside was a faded photograph: five men in military fatigues. All smiling. All now dead.
He stared at it for a long moment, then folded it and slid it into his coat.
He had returned to Melbourne for one reason.
To finish the war that never officially started.
---
6:00 a.m. – Federation Square
A screen lit up on the plaza, playing a routine public service broadcast.
But for 2.7 seconds, the feed glitched.
A symbol appeared.
A red circle with a vertical line running through its center. Ancient. Obscure. Forgotten.
But not by everyone.
Far away, in a basement beneath a luxury hotel, a group of men in suits stared at a terminal.
"He's awake," one of them whispered.
"What do we do?"
The oldest man stood. His face was covered in ritual scars. His eyes didn't blink.
"We wait."
---
The war Melbourne never knew it fought was starting again. And the only man who could stop it was the one they buried in the dark twenty years ago.
But Ronan Vale had not died.
He had been learning.
Now, he was back.
And he wasn't alone.