Semua Bab Bound by Vows and Vendetta: Bab 71 - Bab 80

Chapter 70 — The Eye of the Code~LORENZO~NAPLES — 3:11 A.M.The compound was too quiet.Not the kind of quiet that comforted. The kind that waited. Like the walls were holding their breath, like the floorboards knew something they weren’t ready to speak aloud.Lorenzo stood in the lower crypt, alone.Project EYE wasn’t supposed to be touched. Not unless there was no other choice.The biometric scanner read his fingerprints, iris, voiceprint, and a twelve-year-old cipher code that hadn’t been spoken since Don Emilio’s reign."Legacy nullius. Corpus ex machina."Green light. Access granted.The vault opened.Cold air. Dry. Electric.Inside, an obsidian room lined with data cables that pulsed like veins. At the far end: a sarcophagus-shaped mainframe humming with sentience.Project EYE.The Artificial Intelligence built from the first Umbra neural prototypes. Disbanded. Sealed. Buried.Until now.Lorenzo stepped forward. "Run base protocols. Identity: Lorenzo De Rossi Clearance: Black R

Chapter 72 — Elias, Son of Smoke~ARIA~TOKYO — 3:47 A.M.The city never slept, but this part of it pretended to. The ward was industrial. Glass and silence. Neon flickering just enough to fool a camera. Below the Shibuya transit tunnels, below the maintenance shafts no longer in municipal maps, something buzzed like a half-buried god.And Aria stood at the edge of it.She wore a coat woven with anti-surveillance thread. One Ash Blade at her back. Maria to her right. The hatch before them opened with a hiss, revealing the old Umbra lock chamber beneath the city."Tokyo was meant to be clean," Maria muttered."No city built on tech ever is," Aria replied.She stepped inside.~~~~~~~~~~THE UMBRA REMNANT VAULTThe air was stale. Cold. The lighting overhead flickered in pulses that synced with an old Umbra rhythm: three long, one short. Legacy coding for internal sync. Aria read it like a heartbeat.The console ahead of them looked dormant. But Aria saw through that, too. She placed her

Chapter 74 — The Hive ~LORENZO~HONG KONG — 2:45 A.M.There was a certain kind of rot that only grew beneath skyscrapers—the kind of stink that no money could bleach. Lorenzo knew it well. The lower levels of Hong Kong's Wan Chai district were the perfect camouflage for the things the underworld didn’t want seen. Illegal server farms. Rogue data centers. Blacksite vaults built like tombs.And tonight, he was inside one.No Ash Blades. No Matteo. No Maria. Just him.Like old times.The hallway stank of rust, sweat, and recycled air. His boots echoed against wet concrete as he descended deeper into the vault marked on Elias's corrupted broadcast.Project Typhon was a bluff.But the real prize was this:NOS.Network of Sovereigns.And what Lorenzo found tonight would either cripple Elias permanently...Or light Europe on fire.~~~~~~~~~~THE HIVEThe door to the vault was protected by a biometric cipher.He didn’t try to hack it. He blew it.A small charge. Controlled. Clean. Just enoug

Chapter 76 — Mother, Sister, Fire~ARIA~LIJIANG, CHINA — 4:15 A.M.Rain slicked the rooftops like oil on porcelain. Old stone bled beneath her feet as Aria moved through the narrow alleyways of Lijiang. She had changed her name, her walk, even her breath to get here. Her ID read Hana Song, but every cell in her body still screamed Moretti.Sky trailed just behind her, quiet as a whisper, eyes scanning for data signals even as the wind howled through the cracks in ancient timber. Two Ash Blades flanked them in silence—a woman named Inez with half her face scarred from a Yakuza firebomb, and a mute named Roji who hadn’t spoken in five years but could kill with a thread.Aria gripped the iron pendant beneath her cloak—an old Benedetti coin, her mother’s. Cold. Solid. Real. She needed that tonight.The inn Renata had called from was empty. But not untouched.Aria stepped inside slowly. The room smelled like sandalwood and copper. The window had been shattered inward. Someone left fast, o

Chapter 78 — The Extraction ~ARIA~LIJIANG, CHINA — 3:27 A.M.The monastery was burning behind them.Ash floated like dead snow. Aria moved through the smoke with blood on her hands and fire in her lungs. Sky was ahead, guiding Renata down the old quarry path that snaked behind the mountain. The Wraiths flanked them in brutal silence, blades drawn, bodies painted in the red of war.Lorenzo was last.He had taken a blade through the side during the breach—a serrated edge meant to gut, not pierce. But he kept moving like it hadn't happened. Blood soaked through his coat. His jaw was set. His gun hand never shook.Aria looked back once.He stumbled.She ran.~~~~~~~~~~THE CATACOMBSThey reached the collapsed shelter carved beneath the cliffs. The air was colder there, still and dry, like a tomb waiting to be named.Renata collapsed on the stone floor. Sky slid beside her, whispering a diagnostic code under her breath as she scanned vitals through a retinal lens. One of the Wraiths, Roj