เข้าสู่ระบบThe "Abandoned Mine" turned out to be a rusting relic from the gold rush era, a cluster of corrugated iron sheds groaning under the weight of the Canadian winter. The wind chill was minus thirty.
Inside the only intact structure—a former foreman’s office—the team had set up a makeshift command center. A kerosene heater sputtered in the corner, providing barely enough warmth to keep their fingers nimble."We have a problem," Ben Carter announced. His face, usually flushed with the anxiety of managing billions, was now ghostly pale in the blue light of his laptop.Jack sat in a broken office chair, wrapped in three layers of wool blankets. His blackened right arm was immobilized in a splint. He looked like a king in exile—battered, but still commanding the room."Spit it out, Ben. Did the SEC finally catch up with us?""Worse," Ben said, turning the laptop around. "We’re broke."On the screen, the Sterling Industrial accountsThe Swiss Alps. Deep Underground.The world knew the Alps as a playground for the rich—ski resorts, chocolate, and neutral banking. They did not know that beneath the granite peaks of the Matterhorn, deep within a hollowed-out cavern accessible only by a hyper-loop train, sat the true seat of world power.Valhalla.The headquarters of the Fenrir Council was not a biological horror show like Cain’s pyramid. It was a masterpiece of brutalist architecture and cold luxury. The walls were hewn from the living rock. The furniture was minimalist. The air smelled of money and thin oxygen.In the center of the main chamber sat the Round Table.There were nine seats.Seat Number 4—marked with the rune of the serpent—was dark. The hologram that usually projected Cain’s face was extinguished.The other members were present, either in person or via high-fidelity holographic proxy. They were the invisible kings of the world—ar
The war did not end with a bang. It ended with a bell.New York City. 9:29 AM.The floor of the New York Stock Exchange was a cauldron of nervous energy. Rumors had been swirling since dawn. The unexplained atmospheric anomaly in the Arctic had triggered a cascade failure in global satellite communications. The "Aurora Network"—the high-frequency trading algorithm that had allowed Cain’s shell companies to dominate the market for months—had suddenly gone silent.High above the trading floor, in a glass-walled office that Sterling Industries had rented only hours ago, Ben Carter sat before a bank of six monitors. He looked like a man who hadn't slept in a week, because he hadn't."Jack," Ben spoke into his headset, his fingers hovering over the 'Execute' key. "The market opens in sixty seconds. Cain’s automated systems are trying to ping the server in the North Pole. They’re getting no response. The algorithm is blind.""Hit them," Jack’s voice came through, cold and steady. He was som
"BRACE FOR IMPACT!"Ben Carter’s voice cracked over the intercom, shrill with panic.The Osprey transport hit the turbulence layer like a stone skipping on water. Inside the cargo hold, gravity seemed to be a suggestion rather than a law.Jack was thrown against the bulkhead, his arms wrapped tightly around Olivia. Catherine tumbled past him, her magnetic boots sparking as they failed to grip the vibrating floor. Cain’s unconscious body slid across the deck like a sack of potatoes, slamming into a crate of munitions.CRASH.The Osprey landed—if "landing" could describe a controlled crash—on the ice shelf, two miles away from the pyramid. The landing gear sheared off with a screech of tearing metal, and the belly of the plane skidded across the glacier, carving a trench deep into the blue ice before finally grinding to a halt.Silence.Then, the groans started."Status," Jack barked, checking Olivia immediately. "Liv? Yo
The door sealed behind Robert Sterling with a hiss that sounded final.Inside the containment chamber, the silence was absolute, save for the blood rushing in his ears and the overwhelming, thrumming beat of the Progenitor Heart suspended in the abyss beyond the observation port.The air here didn't feel like air. It felt like soup—thick, metallic, and vibrating with an energy that made his teeth ache. Robert took a step, and his knees nearly buckled. The radiation warning on the wall wasn't just flashing red; it was burning a steady, unblinking crimson.So this is what a microwave dinner feels like, he thought, a grim smile touching his lips."Robert!" Elena’s voice came through the comms, distorted by the magnetic interference. She was pounding on the glass partition behind him, her face a mask of terror. "Robert, the sensors are maxed out! Your cellular degradation is accelerating! Get out of there!""I’m already cooking, Ellie," Robert
The universe, it turned out, did not care about money, or vengeance, or the petty squabbles of the Sterling family. The universe was hungry.High above the North Pole, the entity known in ancient texts as the "World Eater"—a biological scout for a high-dimensional civilization—began to feed.Cain was screaming now. It was a sound that defied human vocal cords, a high-pitched keen of absolute agony as his very essence was distilled and siphoned upward. His body withered rapidly, turning from a glowing god into a husk of grey, dried skin, yet the tendril kept him alive, refusing to let him die until every drop of energy was extracted."It’s eating the energy grid!" Jack roared, his voice barely audible over the sound of atmospheric tearing.The tendril that had impaled Cain split. Smaller, secondary tendrils lashed out, whipping across the top of the pyramid like searching tongues. One smashed into the communications tower, dissolving the steel in
The wind atop the Black Pyramid didn't howl; it screamed. It was a physical force, a wall of pressurized air generated by the swirling violet vortex directly above them. The Aurora Borealis, usually a curtain of ghostly green, had twisted into a bruising purple cyclone, its eye fixed directly on the altar where Cain held Olivia Sterling over the abyss.Jack froze. His boots were locked to the obsidian tiles, his black coat whipping violently around him. His right arm—the Obsidian Limb—pulsed with a dull, necrotic ache. It hungered to destroy, to rot, to end things, but Jack forced it down.He couldn't use Entropy on Cain. Not while Cain was holding his daughter. One slip, one stray tendril of that void energy, and Olivia wouldn't just die; she would cease to have ever existed, erased from the timeline like dust wiped from a table."You hesitate," Cain noted, his voice amplified by the electromagnetic field surrounding him. His jade-like skin glowed with an







