Chapter 3

Sasha had moved into Axel's villa and become the most envied woman in Base Seven.

I did not go looking for her right away. Rafe's death had sent shockwaves through the entire base. Axel was furious and ordered a full lockdown, which suited me fine. I used the time to keep building my strength.

I found the base morgue.

It was the single most resentment-saturated place in all of Base Seven. Every day, soldiers who had fallen to the hordes and civilians who had been weeded out by the base's brutal survival rules were wheeled in and left there. For someone like me, it was paradise.

I bound over a dozen warrior souls, men and women who had died ugly, violent deaths and carried enormous resentment because of it, then fused them all into a brand-new wraith.

[Wraith Fusion successful. C-class wraith acquired: Hundred-War Specter. Skills: Coordinated Combat, Weapon Mastery.]

This wraith was built from the combined souls of multiple fighters and could split into several units that worked in tandem. Its combat ability dwarfed Shade Child's by a wide margin.

Once that was done, I moved on to the second phase of my plan.

I created the identity of an anonymous information broker and reached out to Axel's biggest rival, the base's second-in-command, Vice Commander Weston Hale.

I told him I had proof that Axel had been colluding with the black market and skimming relief supplies, then set a meeting for midnight at the abandoned clock tower on the western edge of the base.

Weston took the bait.

At midnight, I stood on the top of the clock tower with the cold wind pulling at my clothes. In the distance, Weston's convoy was creeping toward the building with its lights off. However, he was never my real target.

"Master, she's here." Shade Child's voice echoed inside my mind.

I turned and saw a striking figure approaching the clock tower alone, slipping along a side path.

It was Sasha.

She had obviously eavesdropped on Axel's briefing and assumed she could dig up leverage on him here, something to trade for a better position. That was Sasha through and through, always clever, always looking out for herself and nobody else.

I jumped down from the top of the clock tower and landed behind her without a sound.

"Long time no see, Sasha."

Her whole body went rigid. She turned slowly, and the moment she saw my face, shock and a flicker of barely concealed panic spread across her features.

"Nico? You're... you're still alive?"

"Thanks to you, I'm doing great." I smiled at her, but there was nothing warm about it.

She pulled herself together fast, studying me with an unreadable look on her face. "What are you here for? Revenge? Going to kill me, and then go after Axel?"

"Kill you? No." I shook my head. "That would be letting you off too easily."

I stepped forward and caught her chin, tilting her face up so she had no choice but to look me in the eye.

"I'm going to make you watch while everything you cling to gets torn apart, piece by piece. Everything you have right now is going to disappear. And when it's all gone, you'll come crawling to me on your knees, begging me to take you in like a stray with nowhere left to go."

Humiliation and fury flashed through her eyes, but underneath both of those was fear.

She could see it. I was not the spineless boy she used to push around whenever she felt like it. The aura I exuded was cold and overwhelming, like something that had climbed out of the abyss itself.

"You're delusional," she hissed through her teeth.

"We'll see about that." I released her chin and turned to leave.

That was when a gunshot split the night sky.

Every alarm in my head went off at once and I activated Wraith Armor on instinct. A sniper round slammed into the center of my back and the black armor deflected it with a sharp crack.

Everything changed in an instant.

They were not Weston's men, and they were not Axel's either.

Over a dozen dark figures poured in from every direction. Their speed and raw power far surpassed any ordinary ability user, and every single one of them had eyes glowing unnaturally red.

My stomach dropped. They were Augments, the base's most closely guarded weapon, soldiers rebuilt with high-grade zombie crystal cores implanted in their bodies.

These soldiers were immensely powerful but dangerously unstable, and they answered to one person only, the supreme commander of the base, who happened to be Axel's father. Their target was both me and Sasha.