Silence.
It had always been his strategy.
Not because he feared speaking—but because he understood the weight of sound. Every word spoken created a path. A record. A vulnerability. Silence, on the other hand, was untraceable. It was noise reduced to nothing, intent hidden in plain inaction.
In silence, you could become anything.
Or no one.
Matius Benedictus stood motionless in the chamber beneath the slums, one hand resting lightly on the schematic titled Nexus Seed. Eline slept fitfully in the corner, curled up beside a wall of broken drone parts. Her breathing was shallow. Her dreams disturbed.
He hadn't planned to keep her alive this long.
Statistically, she should have been discarded—left behind when the purge began. She was a distraction. A liability.
But her presence served one purpose now.
She proved he could still control outcomes without total isolation.
Even when emotional factors were introduced.
---
The neural thread in his brain buzzed softly. Orthus had returned from its silent infiltration.
> "Census Node 17-B partially breached," it said in pulse-code.
"98% of records corrupted. Found one fragment—classified under 'Protocol Heretic: Subject Omega-Zero.'"
Matius's eyes narrowed.
He focused, calling the file forward. A line of garbled text decrypted across the holoscreen:
> 'Born without designation. Experimental Subject. Cognitive Index: ∞'
Nothing more.
No birthplace. No parentage. No genetic origin.
He wasn't in the system. He was the system's flaw.
A ghost written into the Empire's bones.
He didn't flinch.
Instead, he reached for the core embedded in the data slate—a micro-reactor no larger than a coin, pulsing faint violet light. It was unstable. Illegally harvested. But paired with the Nexus Seed, it could simulate a confined mental field—a synthetic consciousness, small and fast enough to infect decision trees.
A virus that thought.
He connected the coil.
A soft hum filled the chamber, followed by whispering static.
Eline stirred. "What… what is that?"
Matius didn't look at her.
> "The beginning."
---
Outside, chaos still ruled the night.
The orphanage's west wing had collapsed. Drone patrols scoured the ruins, picking apart burned bodies and dragging survivors into mobile detention units. Above it all, the grey towers of the Virellian Capital loomed like watchful gods, windows glowing dimly through industrial smog.
But they weren't watching him.
They never did.
That was the mistake.
---
Matius accessed the spider-net—a mesh of salvaged surveillance taps he had planted throughout the slums over three years. The screens blinked to life one by one: street corners, guard stations, sewer nodes, abandoned elevators. He watched in silence, absorbing movement, mapping escape paths, tracking troop patterns.
Every feed. Every shadow.
He didn't breathe.
Then, he saw it.
A tall man in black military armor moving through the smog—not like a soldier. Too silent. Too deliberate. No insignias. Eyes glowing faint green.
> Not Virellian standard issue.
> Not from here.
A deep unease threaded into Matius's thoughts.
> "Orthus," he commanded. "Identify."
The AI hesitated.
> "Unregistered combatant. Movement patterns… predictive. Possibly enhanced. Not human baseline."
> "Estimated mission?"
> "Extraction. Or… termination."
Of who?
Matius calculated the odds.
Then he froze.
> Probability spike: Target – Subject Omega-Zero.
Him.
They were already coming.
---
He stood up slowly. His movements were calm, but inside his mind, calculations surged like lightning.
> They knew he existed.
They didn't know where.
But they were searching.
He turned to Eline. She looked up, her eyes dazed from interrupted sleep.
"We need to leave," he said.
"But… you said this place was hidden."
"It was."
He grabbed a slim case—folded blueprints, energy cells, three encoded cores—and slung it into a magnetic satchel. Then he approached the skeletal drone lying dormant near the back.
Its limbs were unfinished. Its AI barely coded.
But it would do.
He pressed a switch. It twitched. A single red eye blinked open.
> "Unit designation?" it asked in a rasp.
"Callsign: Specter-1."
"Objective?"
Matius's voice lowered.
> "Protect her. Delay them. Erase everything else."
The drone twitched again, then stood—unbalanced, limping slightly.
Eline gasped. "Is that—what is that?"
"Insurance," he said.
Then he turned to the tunnel—his exit route, pre-mapped long ago.
Not a single word of farewell.
Eline followed.
---
Behind them, the lab dimmed. One by one, terminals shut off. Lights dimmed. Files deleted. Sparks scattered from the drone's shoulders as it clamped itself into position beside the doorway, motionless like a statue.
And in the shadows of that underground crypt, Specter-1 waited for war.
---
Above ground, a storm was coming.
And far in the heart of the Empire, ministers and warlords would soon wake to the first whispers:
> "A ghost breached the system."
"A boy with no records."
"A machine that thinks."
"And a design that could end empires."
Matius Benedictus didn't smile.
He simply disappeared—into smoke, silence, and the gears of a plan far greater than any of them could imagine.
---