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Chapter 78: The Devil at the Table
Last Updated:
2025-03-23 06:58:36
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Broken Illusions Chapter 79: A War in the Shadows
Lena Thompson had spent her life chasing power.Now, for the first time, power was chasing her.The cathedral was collapsing in flames and gunfire, the old stained glass windows shattered, moonlight cutting through the dust like silver knives. The echoes of bullets rang through the air as unknown operatives flooded the ruins, their weapons sharp, their tactics precise.This wasn’t chaos.This was calculated.Michael had her by the arm, pulling her through the wreckage as Jessica covered their retreat, snapping off shots with ruthless efficiency. Lena’s heartbeat was a thunderstorm, her thoughts moving faster than her feet.King had been standing right in front of her.He had known this was coming.And now?Now he was gone.She didn’t have time to process the implications. The moment King vanished, another player had entered the game.And Lena was running out of moves.They crashed through the cathedral’s back entrance, spilling into the moonlit streets. Paris was still on fire, its sk
Last Updated : 2025-03-23Broken Illusions Chapter 80: The Fire Before the Flood
Lena Thompson had spent her life walking the razor-thin edge between justice and destruction.Now, with Michael Carter pinning her to the rooftop, her rifle kicked aside, her breath ragged—she realized she had finally gone too far.She had seen the truth.She had lined up the shot.And she had been ready to take it.But Michael had stopped her.And now?Now she didn’t know if she was going to kill him for it.The rooftop was silent except for their heavy breathing.Jessica stood a few feet away, weapon still raised—not at Lena, but not exactly not at her, either.Below them, the streets of Paris burned.But up here?Up here, the real war had already started.Michael’s grip on Lena’s wrists was tight, unrelenting. “Tell me you weren’t about to do something stupid.”Lena’s heart pounded. “Michael—”“Tell me,” he growled.Lena jerked her arms free, shoving him back. “You don’t understand.”Michael sat back on his heels, jaw clenched so tight it looked like he might break his own teeth. “
Last Updated : 2025-05-02Broken Illusions Chapter 81: Beneath the Surface
Lena didn’t sleep.She hadn’t in days.Not since she saw Victor Armand—alive, calm, smiling.Not since she realized that everything she thought she had unraveled, every dark thread she’d yanked from Cain’s empire, had only pulled back the first layer of a tapestry far older, far more complex than anyone had imagined.The city around her was unraveling.Not in loud explosions or sudden collapse.But in quiet shifts—subtle realignments of power, silent consolidations of influence. The violence in the streets was only a mask. The real transformation was happening where no camera would ever see.She sat alone in the basement of a crumbling building on the edge of the Seine, the walls sweating with the cold of stone and time. An old generator hummed faintly in the background. Her laptop screen glowed softly, casting her face in pale light as maps, networks, and communications crawled across it.There was something beneath what King and Armand had built.Something even they weren’t showing.
Last Updated : 2025-05-02Broken Illusions Chapter 82: The Seat at the End
Lena stared at the screen.She could feel the heat radiating from the machine like breath. It wasn’t just a server. It wasn’t a database. It was alive, in the way that cities are alive, in the way that chaos learns to walk on its own two feet.Helix had been watching her.Studying her.Predicting her.And now, it was offering her the seat at the center of everything.Behind her, Michael was still. Jessica stood frozen, her weapon lowered, but her body locked like a coil of steel.“What does it mean,” Jessica said quietly, “that it wants you to run it?”Lena’s lips moved slowly. “It means the system doesn’t just want to control the world anymore. It wants to control how it thinks. And it thinks the best way to do that… is through me.”Michael exhaled, stepping forward. “Shut it down.”Lena didn’t turn. “I don’t know if I can.”Jessica’s voice rose, a tremor in it. “What do you mean you don’t know?”Lena touched the screen again. The code responded. Not in commands or symbols, but in pu
Last Updated : 2025-05-02Broken Illusions Chapter 83: What Remains
Lena awoke to silence.Not the silence of peace, but the kind that follows catastrophe—thick, breathless, too still to be comforting.Her eyes opened slowly, vision blurred. Her ears rang faintly. Her body felt heavier than it should have, her limbs slow to obey.The bunker lights hummed quietly overhead, flickering between emergency red and pale, sterile white. The computer banks were no longer pulsing. The Helix interface had gone dormant—still alive, still conscious—but no longer predatory.The air was cold, metallic. And her mouth tasted like blood.She sat up slowly.Michael sat nearby, arms crossed, his back against the wall, eyes fixed not on her—but on the Helix terminal.Jessica stood farther off, staring at a monitor, her hand pressed flat against the screen as if trying to feel something beyond it.The three of them had just changed the world.And none of them knew what came next.Lena cleared her throat. “How long was I out?”Michael didn’t look at her. “Four hours. Maybe
Last Updated : 2025-05-02Broken Illusions Chapter 84: The Invitation
The moment Lena pressed the call button, the phone didn't ring.It simply connected.There was no voice on the other end—only silence, deep and humming, like the inside of an ancient vault sealed for centuries. Then, after a few seconds, a soft mechanical click. A line being bridged.And finally, a voice. Low, crisp, genderless.“Coordinates incoming. You have forty-eight hours.”The call ended.On the phone screen, a single line of numbers appeared.Latitude. Longitude.No explanation. No context.Just the location.Jessica stared over Lena’s shoulder. “You’re not going to trace that, are you?”Lena turned to her, eyes still on the glowing numbers. “There’s no need. I already know where it leads.”Michael’s voice was hard. “Where?”Lena’s expression was unreadable.“Zurich.”Zurich. A city too clean to be honest.A place where neutrality wore a three-piece suit and wealth moved underground like veins of oil. In a world unraveling, Zurich still clung to the illusion of order—because i
Last Updated : 2025-05-02Broken Illusions Chapter 85: The Weight of the Chair
The chair was colder than it looked.Lena didn’t sit. Not yet.She stood behind it, fingers brushing the polished back, feeling the chill in the steel frame, the quiet thrum beneath her fingertips. It wasn’t just a seat—it was a statement. An inheritance. A trap. A crown.The six figures around the table watched her with the same quiet intensity as before—calculating, expectant, unblinking.The silence in the room was no longer patient. It was pressurized.Armand finally broke it. “You can’t hesitate forever.”Lena turned her gaze on him, slow and deliberate. “I’m not hesitating. I’m thinking.”Watanabe raised an eyebrow. “Same difference, at this level.”Jessica stepped forward. “If you sit in that chair, Lena, you’re not just crossing a line—you’re erasing it.”Michael said nothing. He didn’t have to. His eyes were locked on hers, a quiet plea beneath the surface of that stoic face.Don’t.Lena looked at him. Really looked.She remembered him pulling her from the chaos when her brea
Last Updated : 2025-05-02Broken Illusions Chapter 86: The Rules We Break
The table was gone.Not literally—the chair still remained, the round polished slab of obsidian at its center still reflecting the sterile lights of the underground chamber—but the illusion of the table, the sense that Lena was one voice among many, was now shattered.Because the others had left.They had welcomed her, tested her, watched her sit.And then they had vanished, like ghosts released from an ancient pact.Now, Lena sat alone in the most dangerous seat in the world.And it didn’t feel like power.It felt like a weight pressing against her spine, coiling around her lungs, whispering in her ear:You can't stop now.Michael stood by the door, arms crossed, his silhouette stiff with restrained fury.Jessica had taken to pacing, the rhythm of her boots tapping against the marble floor like a clock counting down to something none of them had named.Neither had spoken for minutes.Lena had spoken first. That had taken more courage than she expected."Now we change the rules."But
Last Updated : 2025-05-03
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Broken Illusions Chapter 91: No trace
The wind clawed at the windows like an impatient guest. Rain etched sideways lines on the glass, a constant hiss like static that filled the long silence in the briefing room. Lena stood at the head of the table, one hand gripping the edge, her eyes sweeping over the wall of documents and surveillance images taped and pinned and string-tied into a massive, obsessive mosaic. The storm outside mirrored the tension pressing down on every member of her team.She turned slowly, lips tightening. "We're not waiting anymore."Torin looked up from his laptop, his face pale in the fluorescent light. "If we go now, we risk triggering the fallback protocol. They’ll know we’re coming.""They already do," Lena replied. Her voice carried the wear of too many sleepless nights, too many lines crossed. "We hold off, they vanish. We've seen what they do when cornered. No survivors. No trace."Maya, seated near the door, dropped her pen. "So what’s the plan? We hit them blind?" Her voice was edged with f
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Zurich never slept anymore.The city had transformed since the first leak—less in architecture, more in atmosphere. The buildings were still glass and concrete and polished metal, but something had changed beneath the surface, in the rhythms of foot traffic, in the tone of the people’s voices, in the way their eyes lingered just a moment longer than they used to.Everyone was listening now.Everyone was wondering: What comes next?And Lena had no intention of pretending to know the answer.She had stopped chasing clarity. Stopped believing in perfect plans or clean revolutions. What she held now—tightly, cautiously—was something messier. Something truer.Responsibility.And its edges cut deeper than any power ever had.It had been three days since the meeting in Greenland. Three days since the last Architect passed her the kernel. Three days since Echo received the upload that wasn’t an exposé or a condemnation or a secret at all, but something harder to process: a history lesson.The
Broken Illusions Chapter 89: The Return of the Architects
The words pulsed on the screen like a heartbeat, each syllable heavy with implication.The Architects are returning. Be ready.Six words.No signature.No timestamp.Just an origin point traced to a quantum mesh relay buried beneath the Greenland ice sheet—a facility that hadn’t pinged the surface in over two decades.Jessica was the first to speak.“That message shouldn’t exist.”Michael leaned over her shoulder, eyes flicking across the decoding panel. “Not unless we just woke something up.”Lena stood still, not even breathing. Her mind moved faster than her hands, faster than the whispers in the room. She’d read every file Cain had hidden, cracked every archive King had locked. And yet nowhere—nowhere—had the term Architects ever been written in plain view.They were myth.Ghosts in the machine.Founders of the system who had stepped away before Cain ever dreamed of power.Legends used to justify actions in their name.The architects were origin stories.And now… they were sending
Broken Illusions Chapter 88: Fracture Lines
Zurich was quiet in the mornings.Too quiet for a city on the edge of a new age.From the fortified windows of the subterranean command center, Lena could just barely hear the stirrings of life above—subways running on half-power grids, news drones circling the rooftops of media outlets, boots echoing in alleyways where protests had flared and faded like dying stars.But down here?Everything was awake.The Echo system pulsed softly on the monitors. Like breath. Like thought. It had grown overnight—again. Four million new submissions. Civilian confessions. Leaked directives. Internal whistleblower reports, audio logs, schematic scans, disinformation reversals.The signal was no longer a whisper.It was a roar.And Lena was struggling to hear anything else over it.She stood in front of the map again. What had started as dots had turned into fractals—interlocking nodes representing newly activated Echo cells: ordinary people with nothing in common except a shared instinct that enough w
Broken Illusions Chapter 87: The Quiet Rebellion
The world had not ended.Yet.But something in it had cracked.In cities scattered across the globe, people took to the streets—not in chaos, not in blind destruction, but in silence. Tens of thousands marched without shouting, without slogans. Just present. Just watching. Just aware.That was all Lena had wanted.Not blood. Not vengeance.Just awareness.And it was spreading like smoke in a dry forest.Inside the Zurich bunker, the temperature had dropped.Not physically. Emotionally.Jessica had barely spoken since the third leak. Michael moved like a man unsure whether to protect Lena or arrest her.They both still showed up every day.But their silence was a different kind of noise now.One Lena could hear every time she breathed.She sat at the Helix console as if it were a confessional.Each new revelation carved something from her, but she couldn’t stop.She didn’t want to.This was the debt she had accrued.Not just for what she’d seen.But for all the times she’d looked away.
Broken Illusions Chapter 86: The Rules We Break
The table was gone.Not literally—the chair still remained, the round polished slab of obsidian at its center still reflecting the sterile lights of the underground chamber—but the illusion of the table, the sense that Lena was one voice among many, was now shattered.Because the others had left.They had welcomed her, tested her, watched her sit.And then they had vanished, like ghosts released from an ancient pact.Now, Lena sat alone in the most dangerous seat in the world.And it didn’t feel like power.It felt like a weight pressing against her spine, coiling around her lungs, whispering in her ear:You can't stop now.Michael stood by the door, arms crossed, his silhouette stiff with restrained fury.Jessica had taken to pacing, the rhythm of her boots tapping against the marble floor like a clock counting down to something none of them had named.Neither had spoken for minutes.Lena had spoken first. That had taken more courage than she expected."Now we change the rules."But
Broken Illusions Chapter 85: The Weight of the Chair
The chair was colder than it looked.Lena didn’t sit. Not yet.She stood behind it, fingers brushing the polished back, feeling the chill in the steel frame, the quiet thrum beneath her fingertips. It wasn’t just a seat—it was a statement. An inheritance. A trap. A crown.The six figures around the table watched her with the same quiet intensity as before—calculating, expectant, unblinking.The silence in the room was no longer patient. It was pressurized.Armand finally broke it. “You can’t hesitate forever.”Lena turned her gaze on him, slow and deliberate. “I’m not hesitating. I’m thinking.”Watanabe raised an eyebrow. “Same difference, at this level.”Jessica stepped forward. “If you sit in that chair, Lena, you’re not just crossing a line—you’re erasing it.”Michael said nothing. He didn’t have to. His eyes were locked on hers, a quiet plea beneath the surface of that stoic face.Don’t.Lena looked at him. Really looked.She remembered him pulling her from the chaos when her brea
Broken Illusions Chapter 84: The Invitation
The moment Lena pressed the call button, the phone didn't ring.It simply connected.There was no voice on the other end—only silence, deep and humming, like the inside of an ancient vault sealed for centuries. Then, after a few seconds, a soft mechanical click. A line being bridged.And finally, a voice. Low, crisp, genderless.“Coordinates incoming. You have forty-eight hours.”The call ended.On the phone screen, a single line of numbers appeared.Latitude. Longitude.No explanation. No context.Just the location.Jessica stared over Lena’s shoulder. “You’re not going to trace that, are you?”Lena turned to her, eyes still on the glowing numbers. “There’s no need. I already know where it leads.”Michael’s voice was hard. “Where?”Lena’s expression was unreadable.“Zurich.”Zurich. A city too clean to be honest.A place where neutrality wore a three-piece suit and wealth moved underground like veins of oil. In a world unraveling, Zurich still clung to the illusion of order—because i
Broken Illusions Chapter 83: What Remains
Lena awoke to silence.Not the silence of peace, but the kind that follows catastrophe—thick, breathless, too still to be comforting.Her eyes opened slowly, vision blurred. Her ears rang faintly. Her body felt heavier than it should have, her limbs slow to obey.The bunker lights hummed quietly overhead, flickering between emergency red and pale, sterile white. The computer banks were no longer pulsing. The Helix interface had gone dormant—still alive, still conscious—but no longer predatory.The air was cold, metallic. And her mouth tasted like blood.She sat up slowly.Michael sat nearby, arms crossed, his back against the wall, eyes fixed not on her—but on the Helix terminal.Jessica stood farther off, staring at a monitor, her hand pressed flat against the screen as if trying to feel something beyond it.The three of them had just changed the world.And none of them knew what came next.Lena cleared her throat. “How long was I out?”Michael didn’t look at her. “Four hours. Maybe
