Lucas didn't sleep that night. The ring sat on the table beside him, its polished silver surface gleaming faintly under the dorm room lights. The black chess knight etched into it seemed to stare at him, judging him. He kept hearing Voss's voice in his head: "A better world."
But what did that mean? And who decided what "better" looked like?
In the morning, he slipped the ring onto his finger.
The moment it touched his skin, a faint pulse ran through his body—like static electricity, but colder. A second later, his watch vibrated. A new encrypted file had arrived.
No message. No sender. Just a blinking icon: Mission: Entry Protocol.
Lucas swallowed hard. He grabbed his gear and left for his first Cipher mission.
Voss was waiting for him by the academy's underground garage, where a sleek black car idled. Without a word, the headmaster handed him a tablet.
"Your first task," he said, "is simple. Prove your loyalty. There's a facility on the edge of East Nova City. It's guarded by MAYHEM operatives. Inside is a classified memory core once owned by Agent Zero. You'll retrieve it."
Lucas frowned. "Why would Cipher want Zero's files if he already destroyed him?"
Voss looked at him with faint amusement. "Because even in death, Agent Zero is a threat. The data he left behind could undo years of our progress. We're tying up loose ends. You're the knife."
Lucas climbed into the car without another word. His hands gripped the wheel tighter than necessary as he drove, Ava's words echoing in his mind: They'll be watching. One wrong move…
The facility was quiet—too quiet. It sat like a forgotten bunker beneath an abandoned warehouse, surrounded by rusted fences and broken drones. Lucas parked and scanned the perimeter.
His earpiece clicked.
"Agent Glitch," Kai's voice came through. He was hidden somewhere nearby. "I'm in position. No visible Cipher agents yet. You're solo."
"Good," Lucas whispered. "Let's make this look convincing."
He approached the entrance. A retinal scanner flashed red, then blue. The ring on his finger pulsed again, and the doors slid open. Cipher tech. They were expecting him.
Inside, the hallway stretched out like a surgical tube—bright, sterile, humming. Lucas kept his movements controlled, deliberate, just like Ava had taught him. He passed cameras, disabled drones, and finally reached the vault.
The memory core was a small, black cube, much like the Echo Cube—but this one pulsed with green light. It sat on a pedestal beneath layers of motion sensors.
Lucas hesitated. Taking it would mean giving Cipher what they wanted. But not taking it would blow his cover.
He pulled out a scanner from his bag and connected it to the cube. While he extracted the data, a copy silently uploaded to a hidden drive in his jacket—one Ava had built herself. MAYHEM would get the info too.
As he turned to leave, something shifted.
The lights flickered.
And suddenly, the air around him filled with faint whispers.
Lucas spun, drawing his stun gun. No one was there. But the whispers got louder—like radio static tangled with ghost voices.
A shadow moved at the edge of his vision. He fired, but the dart passed through nothing.
Then a figure emerged—tall, wrapped in a black coat, with a face covered in a smooth, featureless mask.
"I was wondering when Cipher would send someone," the figure said.
Lucas took a step back. "Who are you?"
"I'm what you'll become," the figure replied. "If you stay in the dark long enough."
They moved with speed that didn't feel human. Lucas ducked the first strike and rolled behind a crate. He pressed his earpiece.
"Uh, Kai? Bit of a problem. I'm being chased by a ninja made of nightmares."
"On my way," Kai responded.
Lucas dodged, leaped over a table, and slammed the emergency lockdown button. The door started closing—but the masked figure slipped through just in time.
The room plunged into chaos.
Lucas used everything he had—stun grenades, shock gloves, even an anti-gravity mine Ava gave him "just in case things got spicy." Nothing slowed the attacker down.
Until Kai burst in from the side and slammed the masked figure into a wall with a kinetic blast from a stolen MAYHEM gauntlet.
The figure let out a low, distorted laugh and vanished into smoke.
Lucas coughed and fell to the ground. "Okay. So THAT just happened."
Kai helped him up. "We've got the core?"
Lucas nodded, holding up the cube. "Yeah. And maybe a few new nightmares."
They escaped before Cipher backup arrived. Back at their hideout—a forgotten subway station below Blackridge—Ava was waiting.
She studied the copied files as Lucas caught his breath.
"This isn't just Zero's data," she said, eyes wide. "It's his final project. A map."
Lucas frowned. "A map of what?"
Ava turned the tablet so they could both see.
It displayed an enormous network of red dots—connected by glowing threads of data.
"It's Cipher's network," she whispered. "All of it. Every base. Every operative. Every plan."
Lucas's heart pounded. "Zero wasn't just fighting Cipher. He was tracking him."
Ava nodded slowly. "He built this before he disappeared. Maybe he knew we'd need it."
Lucas looked down at the ring still on his finger. "Then let's use it."
They were inside now. Behind enemy lines. And for the first time, they had a weapon that might actually turn the tide.
But the deeper they went, the more Lucas wondered: how far could he go before he lost himself completely?