The tunnel was narrow, choked with dust, and laced with unstable wiring. Most would call it abandoned.
Matius Benedictus called it infrastructure.
Eline followed closely behind, coughing with every step. She didn't complain—perhaps out of fear, or perhaps because even she could feel it now: the gravity surrounding Matius. His silence wasn't emptiness. It was density. Like something larger than life hiding in a fragile frame.
As they moved deeper, the tunnel sloped down, shifting from concrete to metal. The walls began to hum faintly—old systems still alive with flickers of power. Matius traced his fingers along a specific cable as they walked, counting pulse intervals, measuring latency.
> "Still alive," he murmured.
> "What is?" Eline asked.
> "The Net."
---
At the far end of the passage, Matius halted. They stood before an old telecom junction—its original Empire seal long scratched away, replaced with graffiti that read DEAD ZONE. Most thought these terminals were obsolete relics.
But Matius had reactivated them, one by one, in secret over the last 3 years.
He knelt, opened the side panel, and connected his neural thread.
The pulse hit instantly.
A hundred feeds bloomed across his mind.
Satellite echo stations. Abandoned drone relays. Dead tech resurrected and stitched together in silent rebellion. All feeding into a single unseen web.
The Spider Network.
Not a tool. Not a surveillance system.
A mind.
An invisible brain built from junk and neglect—buried beneath the Empire's feet, watching, listening, predicting.
He was the only one who could access it.
Until now.
---
He reached into his satchel and pulled out a thin disc.
Inside it: Orthus Core v0.3 — an AI fragment designed to inhabit the Spider Network and control its spread. He hadn't intended to deploy it for another year.
But timelines had accelerated.
They always did.
> "You're seeding it now?" Eline asked, breathless.
He nodded.
"Why?" she pressed. "Won't they detect it?"
"They will," he answered.
He inserted the disc.
> "Eventually."
---
A tremor ran through the junction. Lights flickered. Deep in the subnets, routers decades old began to blink awake. Devices that hadn't seen power in fifty years began to ping.
And in his mind, Orthus awoke.
> "Spider Root Access Confirmed," the AI whispered.
"Spinning nodes… 1 of 500 connected… 3… 12… 36…"
It was working.
He watched in silence as the network unfurled like a digital organism. Branching. Learning. Mutating. Each node another eye. Another feeler.
> "They control the world from the top," Matius whispered.
"I'll take it from underneath."
---
He didn't need armies.
He didn't need weapons.
He needed information. Movement patterns. Resource shipments. Communication breakdowns. Political fractures.
Every empire was made of flaws.
All he had to do… was find them.
---
> "Enemy agent approaching outer perimeter," Orthus pulsed suddenly.
"ETA: 5 minutes. Unknown weapon signature. Cloaked."
Matius's eyes narrowed.
He stood, tapping into the camera feeds now connected. One by one they blinked in—a blurred shape moving down the tunnel behind them. Unnatural stillness in its body. No ID chip. No heat signature.
> "It's hunting," he muttered.
> "Hunting… you?" Eline whispered.
He didn't answer.
Instead, he walked to a steel door at the back of the chamber and entered a sequence of code: 19-∞-43-AZRAEL.
The door hissed open.
Behind it, a vertical shaft descended into darkness, too narrow for two people. Matius glanced once at Eline.
> "You go. Now."
"What about you?!"
"I'll mislead it."
"No!" she cried. "You're not—"
> "Now."
She flinched at his voice—sharper than before. Not loud, but absolute. She turned and vanished down the shaft. The door sealed shut behind her.
Matius turned to the terminal. Orthus was still seeding the network.
> "Node control: 162… 209… 248…"
> "Lock out sublayers," Matius ordered.
"If I'm compromised—erase all access keys and self-destruct."
> "Acknowledged. Countdown initiated."
---
Footsteps.
Now he could hear them.
Each step like a scalpel cutting into the silence.
Then… it came into view.
A man in pitch-black armor, face hidden behind a featureless mask. In his hand: a plasma blade that didn't hum—it whispered. Unlike any tech Matius had ever seen.
> "Target identified," the figure said. Voice deep. Artificial.
"Subject Omega-Zero. Containment protocol initiated."
Matius didn't move.
Didn't show fear.
Instead, he reached into his pocket… and flicked a tiny switch.
Boom.
The entire tunnel behind the agent collapsed—dropping steel beams and liquified concrete between them.
Matius didn't stay to see it fall.
He was already running.
---
Down hidden passages. Through vents. Behind collapsing ducts. Every turn memorised. Every step calculated.
And as he vanished into the dark, the whisper of Orthus still echoed in his mind:
> "Node 500 online. Spider Network fully active."
The web was cast.
And soon, the Empire would tremble—not from armies…
…but from a whisper in the dark they could never catch.
---