LOGIN**[ 09:23:34 ]**The red numbers of the countdown hung, throwing a dull red glow over the cracked dashboard of the jeep. Every second that ticked past felt like it cost something.Ronan gripped the wheel hard enough that his knuckles had gone white, jaw set, brows pulled down into a scowl. “You sure you pulled the right coordinates, Silas? Or are we just driving toward the edge of nowhere?” he asked, voice rough over the sound of tires on uneven ground.He kept the jeep moving down a rough coastal road on the far edge of Telenburgh, pavement long gone to gravel and sand and weeds, cliffs on one side, gray ocean stretching out on the other under a sky.They’d been driving over two hours now and still hadn’t reached wherever Ryan and Elena were supposedly holed up. Silas’s tracker kept pointing them to this stretch of coast. Nobody could figure out why. Why would two of NexMind’s best hunters be sitting out here, in the middle of nowhere, less than twenty hours before the world was su
Back at the hideout, the air still smelled like sewer water, copper, and wet concrete. Silas groaned as Ara straightened his arm out, trying to work the spasm out of his shoulder. She rinsed a towel in a basin of lukewarm water, wrung it out, and pressed it against the bruise on his bicep. He flinched hard, jaw tight, biting down whatever sound wanted to come out of him.“Sorry,” she muttered, easing off the pressure a little.“It’s fine,” he said, though his voice said otherwise. “Keep going.”Daniel pulled up a crate and sat across from them, his face grim in the low light. “What else did you get out of those players, Silas? Did they know who put them there?”“They didn’t even know each other at first,” Silas said, wincing as she adjusted her grip. “Except a few—some cousins, a couple of brothers. NexMind grabbed them off the street, out of their apartments, off their jobs, wherever, and none of them knew why at the time. It wasn’t until they were all stuck in the same block toget
Ronan stood in the corner of the strategy bay, arms crossed, a deep frown on his face. Next to him, Daniel sat beside Ara, who was typing furiously on Silas’s damaged computer, trying to stabilize what was left of the connection. Behind them, the twins argued about what Silas’s message actually meant—Maksim was sure it meant slaughter was coming, Milana thought it was a coded warning about their next move.Ara ignored them, eyes locked on the glowing terminal. She was trying to trace where the message had come from, pulling a location out of the corrupted data, but it wasn’t cooperating. The signal kept bouncing across dozens of proxy servers and encryption loops.Daniel leaned in. “He could be in an active holding facility right now,” he said, low and urgent. “If they made him send that message, they might already be moving him. We need to act fast, before they wipe the trace.”Ara gritted her teeth and pulled up her interface, searching for a stronger intrusion skill. The firewall
Patrick let out a long, heavy sigh, stepping between the barrel of the gun and his unexpected guests. He held up a hand, looking at the young man in tactical gear with a calm, tired authority.“Stand down, Leo,” Patrick instructed softly. “Lower the weapon. They aren’t corporate hitmen.”The young man hesitated for a second, his eyes narrowing as he scanned Ronan’s intimidating frame and Ara’s lingering aura, before slowly lowering his handgun and placing it back into its holster.Dain stared at the young man, a wave of profound envy and bittersweet sadness washing over his weathered features.“You have a son, Patrick,” Dain murmured, his raspy voice trembling slightly as he expressed his genuine gladness that Patrick had managed to keep his family intact and live with his son in quiet seclusion.The old scientist looked down at his own trembling hands, deeply lamenting how much he had missed his own son over the decades of his imprisonment and failed timeline jumps. He spoke with a q
It took a full day to track down the engineer Dain had mentioned. The wait was brutal, as every tick of the clock felt like a hammer strike. Out in the city, small things kept shifting: security protocols changing, strange power grid flickers, all of it pointing to a system closing in on its final phase.Ara, Ronan, and Dain left for the outskirts early that morning in an unmarked car, trying to stay off the surveillance grid. Daniel and the twins stayed behind, still working every angle they had to get a signal off Silas’s wristband or catch anything coming down from the ship.Back at the safehouse, tension was fraying fast. Maksim leaned against the table, arms crossed, staring at the countdown on the wall display.“Three days,” he said, voice flat and bitter. “Less than two day until day eight, and we don’t even have a confirmed lead. We’re out of time.”Milana looked up from her console. “A little hope wouldn’t kill you, Maksim. Ara and Ronan have something solid. If Ramsdale’s ol
They got back to the hideout at four in the morning. The city outside had gone quiet. Inside the vehicle the silence pressed against Ara’s ribs until every breath felt deliberate.After the beam tube blew, they had searched for another way to Silas—maintenance shafts, backup lines, anything. Before they found a blueprint, NexMind guards flooded the corridor below and opened fire. With Ramsdale to protect they ran, leaving Silas behind in the ship.When they pulled into the garage under the safehouse, Ronan turned and took Ara’s hand. He didn’t speak. Something solid held between them while the rest of the night came apart.Still holding hands, guiding Ramsdale between them, they moved toward the entrance. Guns came up out of the dark. Safeties clicked off.“Stand down! Identify yourselves!”A flashlight snapped on. Daniel’s face appeared behind it, eyes wide, then he lowered the weapon. Milana and Maksim lowered theirs too, breath leaving them in the same moment.They checked her over
Ara Pov: “Run faster, they're getting close” A voice called out in front of Ara, as she jumped over the huge crack on the ground, her knee almost giving out, but she kept her stance. Her foot caught the edge of the concrete crack and she stumbled, her body lurching forward. The ground came up at he
Ara POV: The hideout had become a warzone in under two minutes. Three of Elena's players had made it through the lower entrance before Ronan managed to collapse the stairwell, and the fight that followed was loud and ugly and nothing like the clean action sequences she had seen in movies before th
Ara POV: The hideout was not what she expected. She had pictured something grim. Bare concrete, a single flickering light, maybe a bucket in the corner. What she got instead was a gutted storage room three floors underground with actual furniture, a generator humming in the back, and the smell of
Ara POV: "Do you accept your first mission?" "Absolutely not," Ara said out loud, to empty the air, in an empty lot, like a completely sane person. "No. Who even are you? Get out of my head." The voice said nothing for a moment. Then it said, pleasantly and mechanically and with absolutely no re







