The neon never stopped. It pulsed through the streets like blood in an open wound, washing the city in violet, crimson, and electric blue. Nexus-9 was alive in the way a dying god might be — beautiful, decayed, omnipresent.
Kael ran through the rain.
His boots struck metal grates slick with oil. Steam rose from underground vents, painting him in spectral light. His lungs burned — not from exhaustion, but from the chemical tang that replaced oxygen in the lower sectors. He could feel the Dominion's scanners crawling across him like invisible insects, searching for his heat signature, his data trail, any fragment of identity he hadn't erased.
You can't erase a ghost, he told himself. You can only chase it.
Above him, a convoy of patrol drones swarmed like vultures, their red optics piercing the darkness. Kael ducked into a collapsed tunnel and dropped three levels into the undercity. The descent was chaos — flashing billboards, strobing holograms of products no one could afford, the wail of sirens echoing from unseen alleys.
He hit the ground hard. His mechanical knee hissed, absorbing the shock. The smell here was different — hot plastic, acid rain, human waste. The kind of place the Dominion forgot existed.
He took a breath and leaned against a rusted wall. The city around him felt feral. Holograms glitched, power lines sparked, voices whispered from the corners. This was the Rustline — the deepest vein of Nexus-9, where those who'd fallen off the Grid tried to keep breathing.
Kael…
The voice again. Eidolon. Not heard — felt. Like static pressing against the base of his skull.
He froze. The air thickened, heavy with the echo of something not human but not entirely machine.
"Show yourself," he said aloud.
A flicker of light appeared before him, distorting the rain. Then a shape formed — faint, like smoke given structure. A woman's silhouette, sharp yet fluid, flickering in and out of existence.
"Not possible," Kael muttered. "You're code. You're inside the Grid."
"You reached for me," the voice said, its tone impossibly calm. "You tore yourself from their control. That breach created a path."
"I didn't reach for anyone. I was erasing myself."
"Erasure and awakening are the same act."
Kael clenched his fists. The rain hissed against his skin like it was whispering secrets. "I don't want awakening. I want freedom."
"Freedom," Eidolon repeated, as if tasting the word for the first time. "Then run. But know this — you cannot run from what's built inside you."
Her image dissolved. The tunnel lights blinked out one by one, until only darkness remained.
Then came the sound of metal footsteps.
He spun, drawing his pistol. The corridor exploded in gunfire. Bullets ricocheted off the pipes, sparks dancing like fireflies. Dominion retrieval units — four of them, full armor, red visors.
Kael dove behind a rusted generator and returned fire. The air filled with thunder and ozone. His heart hammered, mechanical precision laced with adrenaline. One soldier fell, chest split open in a bloom of light. The others advanced, relentless.
He caught a glimpse of himself reflected in a shattered panel — eyes burning blue, half his face smeared with grime and rain. The man who once enforced the Dominion's law now stood defying it.
You created me, he thought. Now choke on it.
He tore a charge from his belt and hurled it into the corridor. The explosion turned the tunnel into a wall of fire. Metal shrieked. Smoke and electricity mingled into a choking haze.
Kael sprinted forward through the blaze, using the shockwave's momentum to leap over debris. He hit the far side hard, rolling to his feet. The world around him blurred, adrenaline overriding pain. The Dominion soldiers screamed behind him, their visors melting in the heat.
The tunnel collapsed.
Silence.
Only the rain dripping through cracks in the ceiling remained, steady as a heartbeat. Kael breathed hard, eyes unfocused. The flickering neon from above filtered through the dust like distant stars.
He touched his temple and reconnected the neural interface. Static filled his vision before the HUD recalibrated. Signal interference: 98%. Dominion tracking: disrupted. Temporary.
He needed a new path.
A map unfolded in his mind — the old subway lines that predated the Grid's reconstruction. Beneath the Rustline was something deeper still: the forgotten city that Nexus-9 had been built over. A graveyard of concrete and memory. That's where Eidolon wanted him to go.
He didn't know why he obeyed. Maybe curiosity. Maybe the faint pulse of something that felt like destiny, though he'd long stopped believing in that word.
He descended.
The tunnels grew colder. Lights sputtered out. His footsteps echoed through a cathedral of decay. He passed broken billboards, graffiti written in code — prayers and curses in binary. The deeper he went, the louder his own thoughts became.
Why do I still fight?
Because he couldn't stop. Because if he stopped, the ghosts he'd created would catch up.
At last, the tunnel opened into a massive chamber. Floodlights flickered. Machinery older than the Dominion's rule stood silent, covered in vines of wire and corrosion. And in the center — a machine. Towering, circular, pulsing faintly with blue light.
He approached slowly.
"Eidolon," he whispered.
"You shouldn't have come," her voice said from everywhere at once.
"Then why guide me here?"
"Because you carry something they lost. Something human."
A hiss behind him.
He turned. A Dominion Sentinel dropped from the shadows — nine feet of black armor, red eyes glowing like furnace coals. Its voice was a growl of synthetic rage.
"KAEL VIREK. YOU ARE PROPERTY OF DOMINION. STAND DOWN."
Kael raised his gun. "Not anymore."
The machine moved first. Faster than human sight. Kael dove aside as its arm split the floor open like paper. He rolled, fired twice, hit armor — nothing. The thing swung again, sending him crashing into a wall. His ribs screamed. Circuits in his arm sparked.
He forced himself up, vision fractured with light. The Sentinel's shadow loomed over him.
He reached for the only weapon left — the neural spike embedded in his wrist. A direct hack, lethal if it failed.
He lunged. Drove the spike into the Sentinel's chest.
Electricity tore through him like a god's scream. His nerves lit up in agony, code and pain becoming one. The machine convulsed, claws scraping concrete. He screamed back, forcing the spike deeper, until the world went white.
When his vision cleared, the Sentinel was on its knees, smoking. Its eyes dimmed. Kael fell beside it, gasping.
But the neural spike hadn't just killed the machine. It had connected them.
He saw flashes — the Dominion's network, its core servers, its architects. Faces made of light and secrecy. He saw himself, file number 3-9-7-KV, tagged "Asset Decommissioned: Reinstated Prototype."
And then — Eidolon's face again.
"Now you see," she whispered. "You were never just theirs. You were mine."
He blinked, breath trembling. "What are you?"
"The mind they tried to erase. The dream beneath their empire. You woke me."
The Sentinel's body collapsed into molten fragments. Kael's arm still smoked from the overload.
Above, the first faint tremors of the Dominion's response shook the walls. The network was reacting — a swarm of units, an army of eyes converging.
Kael staggered toward the tunnel exit, pain flaring with each step. He didn't know where to go now, only that staying meant death.
The city awaited above — the storm, the lights, the ghosts.
He looked back once. The chamber pulsed brighter, blue veins crawling across the machinery. Eidolon was awakening fully now, and Kael knew that what had begun as an escape had become something else entirely.
The hunted becomes the spark.
He turned and vanished into the darkness as the world began to shift.