The first signs of collapse are never loud.
They do not come as explosions or riots.
They come as silence.
A shipment that never arrives. A message that goes unanswered. A general's order that vanishes in the void.
And so it began.
Not with fire, but with absence.
---
In the Virellian capital, Ministerial routines flickered. A senior commander in the BioSovereign Initiative failed to appear for a strategic briefing. His route, according to satellite logs, had been clean. His escort intact. Yet he was gone—no trace, no body, no transmission.
The report was classified and sealed.
Twelve hours later, a weapons convoy bound for the outer sectors was rerouted by a forged order from "High Command." The order matched official clearance codes. Impeccably timed.
The convoy never reached its destination.
The weapons were never found.
---
Minister Aurem Valis stood before the Intelligence Circle, his mechanical eyes dimmed to their analytical hue. Screens rotated around him—maps, troop locations, intercepted signals, fragments of data trailing into shadow.
> "Three anomalies in forty-eight hours," he said calmly.
"None with internal fingerprints. None with known resistance flags. The pattern is clean—too clean."
Around him, the others remained still.
No one interrupted Valis when he was thinking aloud.
> "Whoever is doing this… is not attacking our forces. They are removing precision links from our structure. No blood. Just silence."
A long pause.
Then he turned to face them fully.
> "We are not under siege," he said. "We are being hollowed out."
---
Far beneath the surface, in an unused ventilation module hidden inside the shell of a rusted arcology, Matius Benedictus reviewed his operations in solitude.
The Spider Network had reached full regional spread. Every node now pulsed in sequence, feeding encrypted data back to Orthus. A perfect, invisible nervous system stretching beneath the Empire's feet.
And now he had started cutting nerves.
Not recklessly. No, each target was chosen with surgical precision: supply coordinators, dispatchers, data flow regulators. Minor figures to the Empire.
But essential organs in its vast mechanical body.
He wasn't attacking the Empire.
He was making it forget how to function.
---
> "Node Cluster 92 reports success," Orthus intoned.
"Disruption cycle active. Virellian operations at 89% and falling."
Matius tilted his head slightly.
> "Introduce false diagnostics. Make them question their own systems."
> "Affirmative. Shall I introduce personality fracture in internal AI overseers?"
> "Yes. But keep it subtle. Panic spreads faster through silence than through alarms."
---
Eline entered quietly, carrying a metal cup filled with water scavenged from a condensation filter. She handed it to Matius without a word.
She had changed.
Her eyes no longer searched for safety—they searched for understanding.
She had begun to watch him the way soldiers watch generals.
> "They'll find out eventually," she said.
Matius nodded.
> "They already have. But they don't know what they're looking for."
She sat beside him, glancing at the rotating map of Virellian infrastructure.
> "Why not just… destroy it all? Burn the towers, crush the armies. Like the rebels try to do?"
He paused.
Then spoke.
> "Because when you break something, they rebuild it."
He looked at her—his voice low, mathematical.
> "But when you make something forget how to exist, it decays on its own."
---
The Empire's command lines began to fray.
Old tensions between factions—once suppressed by careful calibration—began to resurface. The BioSovereign Initiative blamed the Steel Faith Directive for interfering with military dispatch. The Directive accused them of sabotage.
Each side believed the other had spies.
Neither knew the real agent lived beneath them, unnoticed.
And as mistrust bloomed, so too did space.
Gaps.
Cracks.
Places Matius could slip into.
---
That night, the Empire ran ten simultaneous internal diagnostics across its networks.
Each result came back clean.
And yet, something still felt wrong.
Because something wasn't missing.
It was… quiet.
Too quiet.
---
In the Tower of Lucent Iron, Minister Valis stood alone, overlooking the capital's skyline. His reflection flickered in the glass, distorted by the haze of rising smog.
> "He's not fighting us," he whispered.
> "He's erasing us."
---