The room was silent.
Too silent.
The screens still displayed the Tower's standard feeds, but one of them flickered. A tiny anomaly. Almost elegant. The kind of error no one dared to report without absolute certainty.
Seren Vale did not need an explanation.
She stepped closer, hands clasped behind her back. Her reflection overlapped with the lines of code, perfectly aligned. She tilted her head slightly.
"Replay the sequence."
The feeds shifted.
Fragmented images.
Broken angles.
Internal cameras.
Silhouettes fell before the alarms could even activate.
Precise shots.
Movements without hesitation.
Clean neutralizations. Final.
Seren watched without blinking.
She was not analyzing the violence.
She was recognizing a method.
A guard collapsed before finishing his turn.
Another was disarmed, broken, eliminated in a single second.
Seren tilted her head slightly.
"Elias Calder."
The name carried neither anger nor surprise.
Only an old certainty.
The images continued.
The transfer interrupted.
The terminal destroyed.
Then… nothing.
ASTREA: OFFLINE.
Her breathing remained steady. Her expression did not change.
But something, deeply buried, tightened.
"Where is she?" she asked calmly.
No one answered.
So Seren raised her hand.
A simple gesture.
Secondary alarms activated throughout the Tower. Protocols only she could trigger. Names appeared on the screens: sleeper agents, special units, retrieval hunters.
"Deploy them," she said. "All of them."
An officer dared to speak.
"Director… if ASTREA has been embodied—"
Seren turned toward him.
Her gaze was precise.
Devoid of anger.
Devoid of mercy.
"ASTREA is not a person," she said.
"It is an error."
She moved toward the window overlooking the city.
"And errors are corrected."
Her fingers tightened almost imperceptibly.
"Bring her back to me.
Destroy the body.
And if Elias Calder is still alive…"
She let the sentence hang.
There was no need to finish it.
In the lower levels of the city, men began to move.
Weapons were pulled from their sleep.
Contracts were activated.
The hunt had begun.