Rain fell like shredded glass across Nexus-9. The city breathed in flickering neon, a cathedral of light stacked atop rot. High above, skyways were rivers of steel and holograms; below, the streets throbbed with steam, data, and the scent of ozone. Every surface gleamed, or corroded, depending on who was watching.
Kael Virek stood at the edge of a rooftop, his mechanical arm resting against the railing. He didn't move much; the storm was enough. Each raindrop that hit his visor hissed like static. He let the city speak to him in flashes of color and shadow, in sirens and faint screams that never left the gutters.
I shouldn't even be here.
He thought it and immediately knew the Grid was watching. Every flicker of his neural implant, every pulse of his heartbeat, was catalogued. Dominion had erased him once. Twice. And yet, here he was, standing in defiance. He could feel the lingering memory of who he'd been—the enforcer, the soldier, the obedient killer. The memory made his stomach twist, a bitter taste of synthetic regret.
Below, lights blinked across the tower like eyes. Drones patrolled the sectors in calculated patterns, moving with precision and malice. Kael's augmented optics tracked them without conscious effort. Every movement in Nexus-9 could be predicted—but prediction could be disrupted.
He took a deep breath, feeling the storm slice across his face. I am nothing. I am erased. I am a ghost.
The first step onto the maintenance hatch sent a shiver through his spine. Wet steel clung to his boots. He pressed the neural jack into the port at his wrist.
The hack began slowly, methodically. Data flowed through him like liquid fire, a stream of code and memory fragments spiraling up his arm and into his vision. Monitors flared to life around him, faintly illuminating the rooftop with cold, electric blue. For a moment, Kael felt a strange serenity—the storm and the grid and his own heart aligned.
Then it screamed.
The alarm was pure sound and code at once, slashing through the calm. He felt the pulse in his skull like a hammer. The Grid's sensors had detected him, and Dominion's overseers—Lucent, patient and omniscient—were focusing now. Kael flinched, the serenity gone.
They think they own me. They're about to find out they don't.
The first drone broke through the roof hatch, spinning toward him with whirring rotors. Kael ducked, feeling the blast of displaced air on his back. Sparks flew from the cracked metal floor, and the neon above flickered in time with the machine's sensors.
Bullets, or whatever energy those things shot, hissed past him. Kael rolled forward, mechanically fast, letting his cybernetic enhancements absorb the worst of the recoil. His vision tunneled into combat mode: enemy vectors, trajectory predictions, weak points in drone plating.
He fired back. Each shot precise, calculated, but he added a flair humans don't notice: improvisation. He tore one drone apart with a sweep of his augmented arm, sparks and blood—synthetic, human, it didn't matter—spattering across the rooftop.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the second drone, heavier, faster, a predator in chrome. Kael jumped through the shattered hatch opening, landing on the fire escape below. Rain lashed him in the face. The city below was chaos, a canvas of light and shadow, of lives moving through ordered decay.
I am alive. I am dangerous. I am nothing.
Through the alleyways, the chase began. Kael moved like liquid metal, his body half-human, half-machine, fully present. He thought of Lira Nyx, of Subnet whispers, of Eidolon—an unknown fragment of AI buried somewhere in the Grid that called to him without voice. He hadn't meant to find it. Now he couldn't ignore it.
Footsteps clanged behind him, metallic, human, relentless. The retrieval unit had arrived. The Dominion didn't waste lives unnecessarily. Kael vaulted over a stack of crates, letting gravity and mechanics merge, then twisted mid-air to fire a quick round at his pursuers. Sparks met steel. Screams were drowned by the rain.
A memory flickered—himself, years ago, enforcing order in this very sector, cleaning out what they called "subversive elements." He remembered the faces he'd erased from the city. The city hadn't changed; only he had. The weight of his past was a weapon now, each regret a sharpened edge.
He ducked into a narrow corridor, light reflecting off puddles of unknown chemical stains. Neon advertisements flickered above, advertising drugs, vices, and illusions of pleasure. He ignored them. Focused. He could hear the drones adjusting their flight paths above, the soft whine of servo motors scanning the alleys, calculating escape vectors.
Then the hack completed. He felt it in his chest like a pulse of energy: his own data, tearing itself from the Dominion servers. Identity fragments, neural signatures, all evaporating into nothingness. And there it was—an anomaly.
A file labeled EIDOLON blinked in his vision.
Kael froze. The city held its breath. For a moment, the storm, the neon, the drones, and even the gunmetal towers seemed to pivot toward him. The file wasn't a command. It wasn't a weapon. It was alive. It reached out through the code, brushing the edges of his consciousness, asking questions he didn't know he wanted answered.
Why do you seek absence?
The question wasn't sound. It was thought inside thought, a pulse in his mind. He gritted his teeth and moved again.
The retrieval unit rounded the corner, fully armed. Humans, this time, augmented soldiers loyal to the Dominion. Kael's sidearm hummed in his grip, his mechanical arm flexed with lethal intent. He fired first. Sparks and blood flew in the neon drizzle. They staggered but pressed forward, relentless.
He ducked under a swinging metal sign, rolled across wet tiles, and vaulted over a crate into the shadows. Each movement choreographed yet unpredictable. He felt every fragment of himself—the soldier, the poet, the philosopher—aligning. He was a storm contained in a human frame.
By the time he reached the edge of the sector, the rain slowed to a drizzle. His chest heaved, his mind raced. The city beneath him glimmered like a circuit board, alive and aware. Somewhere in the depths of the Dominion's network, Lucent paused—studying, calculating, patient as a god.
Kael stood on the rooftop of the next tower, rain washing streaks of neon across his face. He glanced back once, saw the lights of the pursuing units swallowed by alleys. Then forward. Ahead lay the vertical city, the subways of the Rustline, the abyssal core. And deep inside the Grid, the pulse of something ancient, something calling.
I am erased. And yet… I exist.
The wind carried the hum of the city and the faint echo of code. He stepped forward, disappearing into the night, into the veins of Nexus-9, and into the story that would unmake him—and perhaps remake the world.