جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 110

Night came down in pieces, not all at once. Clouds thickened over Garden City, blurring the moon into a smear of silver. In the dim light, the narrow streets seemed longer, the alleys deeper, the rooftops higher. A perfect hunting ground for the kind of operatives Dominion had sent.The Whisper Teams fanned out across the districts with absolute precision. They did not speak. They did not gesture. They moved with the quiet intent of surgeons preparing an incision. Each of them carried a neural patch on their wrist—coded instructions pulsing faintly against the skin. A selection of targeted stress points. A list of pre-identified community nodes. The names of people whose influence outweighed their titles.Phase Two had one objective: destabilize Garden City’s support structure so thoroughly that unity became impossible.The first team slipped into the Old Quarter, where the cobblestones curved like ribs and every house had windows like old eyes. They watched the night-shift bakers unl

Ethan had always believed cities breathed. Not through chimneys or furnaces or vents, but through people — through the space between them, the glances, the greetings, the exchanges of trust so small you almost never noticed they existed. Today, Garden City’s breath felt ragged. Not dying. Not broken. But winded. As if a hand was pressing lightly — very lightly — against its ribs.As if someone unseen was testing how strong those ribs were.The sky overhead was a bright gray, the kind that made shadows soft and uncertainty harder to see. Children played in the plaza like nothing was wrong, but their parents watched them too closely. Vendors opened their stalls, but their smiles were measured. The Reader’s Board had three new anonymous notes posted by dawn, all cryptic, all hinting at secrets the council was supposedly keeping.Ethan studied each one carefully. The handwriting matched none of the known community scribes. The ink strokes were confident, the spacing too neat. Whisper Tea

The wind that crawled across the northern ridge that night was colder than winter deserved. It carried with it a low, rhythmic hum — steady, unnatural — the signature of machines built to stalk men. Ethan heard it long before the others did. He stopped mid-stride, raising a hand for silence. Behind him, Mira froze instantly, her grip tightening around the compact rifle slung beneath her coat. Alexander paused with a coil of wire halfway into his satchel. Jun, who had been scouting ahead, returned with a grim look already carved across his face.“They’re here,” Jun whispered.No one asked who. There was only one group whose presence made the air itself hold its breath.Whisper Team.Dominion’s most elite hunters. A squad that moved through shadows with machine precision and human cruelty. They didn’t march. They didn’t track footprints. They hunted through sound, through signal, through the faint electric static a body carried when adrenaline lit the nerves.Mira scanned the treeline.

The warning came not by radio, not by signal, not by any of the channels Ethan and the council had rebuilt after the Dominion core fell. It came in the form of silence — a sudden, unnatural stillness that pressed against the night like a hand closing around a throat.Alexander noticed it first. He froze mid-stride along the northern parapet, eyes narrowing, breath stilling. The air tasted wrong — metallic, sharp, charged. Garden City’s wind always carried noise: distant generators, the chatter of late workers, the hum of lamps. But now, nothing.“Jun,” he called quietly. “You hear that?”Jun didn’t have to ask what. He heard it too. Or rather, he heard what was missing.“Whisper Team,” Jun muttered. “It has to be. Nobody else can kill sound across a whole district.”Whisper Team — Dominion’s invisible vanguard, the ghost-unit known for two things: undetectable entry and leaving no survivors. Their operations always began the same way: First, silence. Then, darkness. Then, bodies.E

The masked stranger vanished into the city’s skyline as if the rooftops themselves had swallowed them whole. No footstep echoes. No flutter of fabric. No trail. Only the faintest tremor of a loose sheet of metal still vibrating where they had last touched down.Ethan stood at the rooftop’s edge, staring into the direction the stranger had gone, his breath still uneven from the fight with Whisper Team. Jun paced behind him, muttering curses under his breath as he checked the magazine of his rifle. Mira kept her blade drawn, eyes narrowed in suspicion. Alexander’s portable jammer still hissed and sparked at his feet.Only Lorren, bruised and staring at nothing, seemed unable to accept what had just unfolded.“Whisper Team doesn’t retreat,” he whispered to himself. “They don’t pull back. Not unless—”“Outmatched?” Jun snapped. “Looks like somebody just spooked the empire’s favorite boogeymen.”Lorren shook his head sharply. “No. Outmatched is one thing. But Whisper Team is doctrinally in