All Chapters of the obsidian proxy: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

My secure base of operations—a sterile, unmarked penthouse overlooking the harbor—was designed for exactly this: metamorphosis. The moment I locked the door behind me, the weapon known by no name shed its skin and began the exhaustive, demanding process of becoming Elias Vance.I laid the Thorne Corp file open on the minimalist steel table. My own data, the digital life I was about to inhabit, was projected onto the wall. Every detail, every inconsistency, had to be ironed out until the fabricated history was more solid than reality. The Syndicate’s process was ruthless and flawless. Elias Vance wasn't just a fake name; he was a meticulously engineered ghost with a seven-year professional trajectory.Birthplace: Seattle.Education: Unnamed, but prestigious, degrees in Cybersecurity and Global Corporate Governance.Career: A string of high-profile, successful, short-term contracts. The pattern established: He cleans up messes nobody else can, demands a king's ransom, and disappears. El

The door hissed open, and the temperature in the room plummeted—at least, the atmospheric temperature did. Julian Thorne didn't simply walk into a room; he commanded it. He was taller than I expected, framed perfectly in the doorway against the backdrop of the expensive, dark wood paneling. The headshot in the file hadn't done justice to the raw, almost abrasive intensity of his presence.He looked tired, the shadows under his clear grey eyes deepening the sense of perpetual crisis I had noted in his photograph. But that exhaustion was masked by an unbreakable composure. He carried the weight of a billion-dollar empire with a stoicism that was deeply unsettling. He was a glacier—beautiful, vast, and deadly to anything that sailed too close.“Mr. Vance,” he said, his voice low and precise, devoid of warmth. It was a voice that expected instant obedience, not conversation. “Dr. Sharma tells me you’ve agreed to the terms. Specifically, the terms of your preposterous fee.”I stood immedia

Julian Thorne was a man of ritual, and within forty-eight hours of my official retainer beginning, I had mapped his routine with the same precision I applied to his company's firewalls. He was in the office by 7:00 AM, always after a run (the residual tension in his shoulders gave that away). He ate the same lunch—a tasteless, nutritionally dense shake—at his desk. He left the office between 11:00 PM and midnight, usually alone. He was guarded, predictable, and profoundly lonely. My role as Chief Security Consultant granted me unfettered access, ostensibly to assess and patch vulnerabilities across all departments. In reality, I was a ghost. I audited firewalls, interviewed department heads, and implemented my own security hardening protocols, all while the silent rootkit I'd deployed lately is efficiently siphoned terabytes of data back to The Syndicate. But the closer I got to the heart of Thorne Corp, the more complex the picture became. The Director had painted Julian as a cold,

Back in my penthouse, the next seventy-two hours blurred into a siege of technical planning. My task was to design a robust, auditable security solution for the Echo power core while secretly inserting the remote shutdown feature—a malicious payload hidden beneath layers of clean code.Julian, meanwhile, was not making it easy. He demanded I work directly under him, not Anya Sharma. This meant daily, late-night reviews in his private office on the sixty-third floor.His office was vast, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the entire city. It was impeccably clean, bordering on austere, yet somehow, incredibly isolating. There were no personal touches—no photographs, no sentimental clutter. Just a massive glass desk and the silent weight of responsibility.Tonight, I presented the initial draft of the power core defense architecture.“It’s effective,” Julian conceded, leaning back in his chair, his fingers steepled under his chin as he read the printout. “But why the redundancy in

The incident in the break room had fundamentally shifted the dynamic. Julian, now aware of my intense working hours, began imposing small, professional boundaries to force me to slow down. He’d cancel our late-night review and insist on finishing the next morning. He’d send a brief email: “Go home, Vance. My systems can wait.”I found this entirely unacceptable. It was hindering my mission access, but worse, it was a constant, small reminder of his unexpected care.I began to work around it. I started observing him from a distance, using the sophisticated internal camera feeds I had full access to (ostensibly for security monitoring). I watched him on the sixty-third floor, silent and solitary in his glass-walled office. I watched him work until the city lights were the only illumination.This wasn't intelligence gathering; it was a terrifying fixation. I found myself anticipating his movements, memorizing the subtle ways he ran his hand through his hair when he was frustrated, the wa