The room pulsed with static.
Somewhere in the depths of Prague's forgotten subway system, beneath layers of concrete and wire, Ghostbyte sat motionless before his rig—six custom towers humming like hounds in heat, the monitors bleeding green code into the darkness.
Alarms flickered, whispering lies he didn't believe.
He'd already shut them down.
This wasn't a false ping.
This was a breach.
A quiet one.
The kind you don't detect until it's already too late.
He wiped the sweat from his brow, fingers dancing across a makeshift keyboard composed of scavenged parts and prototype silicon. He moved like a pianist who had once played softer, slower music—before the world had bled too much.
Then he paused.
There it was again.
A signature.
Faint. Almost harmless. Like a memory of a memory.
A recursive loop inside his relay stream. It mirrored his code, mimicked his rhythm, and—most dangerously—it had rewritten three lines of his emergency port protocol.
It didn't want to break in.
It wanted to leave a door open.
"Son of a bitch," he whispered, heart pounding.
Whoever this was... they knew him. Knew his code. Knew his habits.
Not Edenfall.
Not some machine.
Someone human. Someone personal.
He ran a trace—not to find the source, but to find the echo. His own code had been echoed. Reflected through an older framework. One he'd only seen used once.
Back when he wasn't Ghostbyte.
Back when he was just Cal.
Back before the raid in Kyoto.
Before he let them all die.
His hand froze over the keyboard as the trace completed.
[CONNECTION ESTABLISHED: USERNAME//Specter02]
He stared.
Then whispered:
"No. You're dead. I watched you burn."
Flashback — Kyoto Safehouse, Seven Years Earlier
Rain on glass. Static on old radios.
A narrow room, lit only by a flickering oil lamp. Cal—leaner, younger, and still carrying hope like a broken compass—stood beside a taller woman, cloaked in signal-resistant armor. Her name was Nova, but in the network they called her Specter.
She had been faster than him. Smarter. Colder. But she'd believed in the same truth:
"Edenfall controls too much," she had told him once. "If we don't pull their teeth, they'll rewrite the whole damn species."
Then came the breach.
The trap.
The fire.
Nova had gone back in to retrieve the core server. Cal had waited. And waited.
Until the building exploded.
Until the sky turned orange.
He never saw her again.
Never heard her voice.
Until now.
Back to Present — Prague
The screen buzzed.
Then, without authorization, it blinked open.
A video feed.
A woman. Cloaked in darkness. Eyes sharp. Scar across her left cheek.
"Hello, Cal."
His jaw clenched.
"You're supposed to be dead."
Nova—Specter02—tilted her head.
"A lot of us are supposed to be dead. And yet here we are, playing games on opposite sides of a glass wall."
He narrowed his eyes. "You're working with them."
She didn't flinch.
"Working through them."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"It means you're chasing revenge like a boy with a wooden sword. Matherson? He's the fuse. But he's not the fire. Edenfall's about to burn itself alive, and you're too busy playing guardian to see it."
Ghostbyte took a slow breath. "Then why breach my rig?"
"To warn you," she said, voice lowering. "They've activated Kestrel."
That name.
A cipher. A myth.
A ghost unit no one ever proved existed.
She continued. "It's not just Matherson they're hunting. It's everyone connected to the ledger. You think Edenfall doesn't know how deep your signal goes?"
Ghostbyte stared at the feed.
Nova leaned in.
"You have three days. Then the kill grid activates."
CONNECTION TERMINATED
Static.
Silence.
Ghostbyte sat back, the weight of the years pressing down like iron.
Matherson was still running through the tunnels.
But he wasn't just running from Edenfall anymore.
He was running into a war.
And the ghosts?
They were all waking up.