12:20 PM – BLACKPORT – SAFEHOUSE 9
Rain hits the windows like broken glass, slicing across the skyline of Blackport. Null stares out at the chaos12:20 PM he unleashed.
Across the room, Kai is tending to her wounds while Rook reboots the backup server on a jury-rigged console.
Switch is lying on the floor with cables plugged into her spinal port, her consciousness temporarily jacked into the underground net.
"You broke the world," Kai murmurs.
"It was already broken," Null replies. "I just pulled back the curtain."
But behind the calm in his voice, his mind burns.
He didn't just take down the Bloodlines' data grid.
He activated something far older—something buried deep beneath layers of encrypted legacy code.
A virus. A signal. A memory.
⸻
FLASHBACK – 11 YEARS EARLIER – BLOODLINE DETENTION CAMP, SIBERIA
Snow howled like a beast outside the prison walls.
Young Null—then called Elias Corvax—was only 14. Shackled, emaciated, and angry.
A voice whispered to him in the dark.
"Do you want to live, Elias?"
He looked up.
A man stood outside the cell, face hidden beneath a black hood with wires feeding into his skull.
A Bloodline exile—codename: Dr. Hekser.
"I can give you power. But you'll bleed for it."
Young Elias's answer was simple.
"Then let me bleed."
⸻
12:45 PM – BACK TO PRESENT – SAFEHOUSE
Null jolts awake from the memory. His implant pulses—red, erratic.
Switch's voice cuts through:
"We've got a situation. Someone's reactivating legacy Bloodline assets in Shanghai. Not AI. Not human either."
Kai narrows her eyes.
"What does that even mean?"
Switch swipes open the screen. A single symbol glows: a hexagonal sigil with seven points.
"It means they're waking up the Arbiters."
⸻
01:00 PM – ARBITERS PROTOCOL INITIATED
In an underground vault in Shanghai, ancient pods hiss open.
Seven humanoid figures step forward—half-organic, half-machine.
Eyes glowing with crimson light. Body plating engraved with Bloodline scripture.
The leader, codenamed Judicium, lifts his head.
"Null Corvax. Code: Excommunicated.
Status: Eliminate with extreme prejudice."
They vanish in a blur of quantum movement.
⸻
01:10 PM – BACK IN BLACKPORT – DECISION POINT
Rook reloads his weapon. His voice is low.
"If those things are real, we're gonna need more than pulse rifles."
Kai looks at Null.
"What's the plan?"
Null walks over to the wall, flips open a hidden panel, and pulls out a black case. Inside: seven crimson data shards.
"These are pieces of the original Bloodline kill-code. We're going to rewrite their own monsters."
Switch stares.
"You kept that from us?"
"Because I needed to be sure. And now I am."
⸻
01:25 PM – GHOST SIGNAL INTERCEPTED
While prepping their escape, Switch intercepts a rogue signal.
A distorted voice crackles through:
"You're not alone in this war."
It's Cipher Ghost again—but this time, she sounds panicked.
"They found me. The Obsidian Board deployed Protocol Ω. They're activating Blood Purge nodes in every major city. You have less than 24 hours."
Null's eyes harden.
"Then we end them before they press that button."
⸻
01:35 PM – MISSION LAUNCHED: TARGET — KYOTO DATA SPIRE
The team gears up.
• Rook: loaded with EMP rounds and heavy armor
• Kai: stealth blade and AI-guided pistols
• Switch: portable quantum deck
• Null: twin neuroblades + the Bloodline kill-code fragments implanted directly into his arm
They board an unregistered stealth aircraft.
Destination: Kyoto Data Spire, one of the last operational control towers of the Bloodline World Grid.
Objective: Burn it to the ground.
⸻
02:20 PM – KYOTO AIRSPACE – INTERCEPTION
As they approach the city, two hyper-advanced interceptors flank them.
A voice comes through the comms:
"Null Corvax. You are entering restricted airspace.
Prepare for termination."
Kai curses.
"How the hell did they find us?"
Rook:
"No time. Brace!"
Missiles lock.
Null grabs the controls.
He dives under a satellite array, jamming signals with his neural link. Switch overrides the targeting AI.
Kai launches a counter-missile.
One interceptor goes up in flames. The other follows seconds later.
But the aircraft is hit—damage critical.
⸻
02:40 PM – CRASH LANDING – KYOTO OUTSKIRTS
They crash hard in a snowy industrial sector, just outside Kyoto.
Everyone's injured but alive.
Null rises first, blood dripping down his arm, his implant sparking.
"No turning back."
He loads the kill-code fragments into his neural core.
They move toward the tower.
03:15 PM – KYOTO OUTSKIRTS – APPROACHING THE SPIRE
The tower looms above them like a digital monolith—an obsidian spire that stretches through the clouds, its surface pulsating with deep red veins of data.
Null's neural HUD flickers with warnings, corrupted signals, and pulses of hostile code.
Rook scans the perimeter.
"Automated turrets, cloaked sentries, infrared webbing. They don't want guests."
Kai unsheathes her plasma blade, eyes scanning every rooftop.
"Doesn't matter. We're crashing their party."
Switch overrides a security gate with her portable deck, fingers dancing like lightning over the interface.
"Give me 18 seconds…"
The lock sparks, sizzles, then clicks open.
"…or four. You're welcome."
⸻
03:25 PM – LOBBY SECTOR – KYOTO DATA SPIRE
They breach the tower. Immediately: sirens.
A row of Bloodline security drones descend from ceiling pods, armored with synthetic tungsten and armed with AI-guided flechette cannons.
Null moves first.
He unsheathes his dual neuroblades—edges made of quantum-threaded alloy.
A blur of red and black.
By the time Kai and Rook engage, five drones are already scrap on the floor.
But the tower responds fast. The floor trembles.
Walls shift, forming corridors that rearrange like a maze.
Switch's eyes widen.
"The tower's running a predictive combat AI. It's learning from us."
Null plugs his wrist into a wall port.
"Then I'll teach it pain."
He injects a fragment of the kill-code into the system.
The tower screams.
⸻
03:40 PM – INNER CORRIDOR – GHOSTS OF THE PAST
They push deeper. Along the corridor walls: faded symbols. Bloodline logos long thought purged after the Cyber Wars.
Kai touches one.
"These aren't just operational zones. This place was a breeding ground."
"For what?" Rook asks.
Switch replies quietly:
"Post-human augmentation. Illegal splicing. Thought-form engineering."
Null stops walking.
He knows this place.
"I was made here."
Flash—memory spike.
A surgical table. Blinding lights. Screaming code injected into his veins.
A voice:
"Subject 7: Begin Phase Omega."
⸻
04:00 PM – SPIRE MID-TIER – ARBITER ENCOUNTER: JUDICIUM
An elevator shaft opens—and from the shadows descends Judicium, the Arbiter leader.
He lands with inhuman grace. Cloaked in digitized black armor, with a glowing red X across his chest.
"Null Corvax," he speaks with a voice layered in synthetic echoes.
"You escaped judgment. But the ledger remains."
Rook raises his weapon—fires.
Useless. The bullets freeze mid-air, caught by Judicium's kinetic field.
The Arbiter lifts his hand—Rook is flung back into a wall, gasping.
"I will erase you from time."
Null doesn't hesitate. He lunges.
Neuroblades meet quantum-forged claws. Sparks erupt. Every strike tears through stone and steel.
Kai flanks. Switch launches a virus burst.
Judicium laughs.
"Predictable."
He counters every move—until Null grits his teeth, slices his own palm, and activates a full fragment of the Blood Code.
His body glows red. A ripple of raw data energy explodes.
Judicium staggers.
His perfect defense… falters.
Null takes the opening—plunges a neuroblade into the Arbiter's chest.
"Judgment denied."
⸻
04:15 PM – SPIRE CORE ACCESS – CODE BREACH
They reach the core vault—heart of the tower. A spinning orb of crystallized data, suspended above a magnetic chamber.
Switch hooks into the terminal.
"There's a master root here. It's connected to everything. All global purge nodes. AI weapons. Surveillance. Kill-switches."
Kai:
"Can we shut it down?"
Null:
"No. We do better. We take it."
He jams all remaining fragments of the kill-code into the core.
The tower shudders. Red warning glyphs flash.
Switch is struggling to maintain control—her mind swimming through code storms and AI defenses.
Suddenly, the system opens a channel.
A voice—calm, cold, and familiar.
"Null Corvax. I am the Architect."
⸻
04:20 PM – TRANSMISSION – THE ARCHITECT
A hologram forms.
A man in a black suit, face obscured by a shifting mask of code. The Architect—original designer of the Bloodline protocol.
"You've proven your worth. Impressive. But futile."
Null:
"You're just a ghost."
Architect:
"And yet I still write your reality."
He raises a hand—code wraps around the tower core, trying to force a reset.
Switch yells:
"He's locking the system!"
Null stabs his neural jack deeper—blood dripping.
"Then let's overwrite him."
He inputs a recursive paradox loop—code that rewrites itself endlessly, infecting even the Architect's root identity.
The hologram screams—fractures—collapses.
⸻
04:30 PM – SPIRE COLLAPSE – EXFIL PROTOCOL
Rook helps a barely-conscious Switch to her feet.
The spire is collapsing—alarms echo across the structure.
Outside, aerial gunships approach.
Null grabs Kai.
"We jump."
She stares.
"That's 80 floors—"
"Trust me."
He activates his emergency grappling tether.
All four launch off the edge.
Behind them, the tower explodes—data fire spiraling into the sky like a dying god's scream.
04:40 PM – BLACKPORT OUTSKIRTS – CRASH SITE
They hit the snow hard.
Null rolls instinctively, pain blooming down his left side. His neuroblades retract just in time to keep from slicing his ribs open.
Kai groans, pulling herself up next to Switch, whose lips are pale from neural fatigue.
Rook's shoulder is dislocated, blood freezing along his jawline.
They're alive—but barely.
In the distance, the Kyoto Data Spire is nothing but a smoking crater. The kill-code worked. For now.
"We need extraction," Kai coughs.
"No," Null says, standing shakily. "We need answers first."
He turns to Switch.
"The Architect wasn't operating solo. He was bound to something deeper—older."
Switch plugs into her deck, which is blinking with corrupted data.
"There's something else… buried deep in the core logs. An access signature I've only seen once before."
"Where?" Rook growls, popping his shoulder back into place.
Switch hesitates.
"Blackline Zero. The origin vault."
⸻
05:10 PM – TEMPORARY HIDEOUT – OLD KYOTO METRO
Deep beneath the surface, they hide in a forgotten metro station lit only by Null's implant and Kai's wrist torch.
The air tastes of rust and mildew. Graffiti from protest movements long crushed lines the tunnel walls:
"No Gods in Circuits."
"Bloodline is not my lineage."
Switch sits cross-legged, processing.
"The kill-code did more than shut down the tower. It triggered a feedback trace… and someone answered."
She turns the screen toward the others.
A map of global server pings blinks red. One dot—deeper than anything on Earth's grid—flashes in a part of the Pacific listed as:
DEADZONE: X7-BURNWATER
Kai frowns.
"That's ocean. There's nothing there."
Null:
"Exactly. That's why it's perfect."
⸻
05:45 PM – GHOST CHANNEL – UNKNOWN LOCATION
Suddenly, Switch's system is hijacked—again.
The screen goes black.
Then a face appears: half-flesh, half-hollowed AI mesh. Not the Architect.
This one is different. Female. Elegant. Mechanical rage behind crystal eyes.
"You should have died in that vault, Null."
It's her.
Cipher Ghost.
Alive.
"You triggered a deeper war. The Bloodline AI wasn't the end. It was a prison. And now you've freed what was inside."
Null grips the table.
"What are you talking about?"
Ghost's voice distorts.
"The Bloodline wasn't human. It was a gate. A seal. You just cracked it open."
The feed ends.
⸻
06:30 PM – MIDNIGHT MARCH – EN ROUTE TO EVAC
They steal an old mag-train buried under debris. It's unstable, glitching, but it'll carry them to the shoreline.
Outside, Kyoto is on fire.
Bloodline sleeper agents—humans unknowingly implanted with neural detonators—are going off across the city. Panic. Collapse.
Switch scans the newsfeeds.
"It's not just Kyoto. Berlin. Nairobi. Toronto. All lighting up. Protocol Ω is real."
Null looks at his team.
"This is no longer revenge. This is extinction prevention."
He uploads the last fragment of the kill-code into a shared neural drive.
"We go to Burnwater. We end this at the source."
⸻
07:00 PM – SOMEWHERE DEEP – THE OBSIDIAN BOARD
Far away, in a chamber wrapped in darkness and data, the Obsidian Board meets.
Seven figures—holograms, half-visible.
One speaks.
"Corvax has destabilized the Kyoto node. What of the Arbiters?"
Another:
"Judicium is terminated. Three others are offline."
A pause.
Then the Prime Voice says:
"Release Protocol SIGIL-9. It's time to awaken the Deep Script."
They all nod.
On the table: a sealed vial—black nanofluid swarming like sentient ink.
The Prime uncorks it.
"May the Code guide chaos."
⸻
08:00 PM – COASTLINE – EDGE OF THE DEADZONE
The train screeches to a halt. The team exits into a storm.
Beyond the shore, the ocean glows faintly. There's a shimmer in the sky—like light bending where it shouldn't.
Kai peers through electro-binoculars.
"There's something there. A platform… invisible to radar."
Rook arms himself.
"Let's swim."
They take submersible gear from a smuggler's stash hidden in a nearby lighthouse. Old contact of Null's. Dead now. Bullet in the head, camera lens melted.
"They knew we'd come," Switch says quietly.
⸻
09:15 PM – UNDERWATER – APPROACHING BURNWATER PLATFORM
The platform is vast—black steel, older than any known tech.
Switch gasps in her comm.
"This isn't a server hub. It's a vault. It predates modern Bloodline structures."
Null:
"Because it was built by the First Script."
They dock.
The airlock opens with a hiss of decayed pressure.
The scent of burned ozone and old blood.
Inside: silence.
Walls of engraved code. Floors that shift like they're thinking.
They descend into the abyss.
⸻
09:45 PM – BURNWATER CORE – THE FORGOTTEN KING
At the heart of the facility lies a sealed chamber.
A throne of wires.
On it: a corpse—or what looks like one.
Metal limbs. A cracked human skull.
Null stares in horror.
Kai steps forward.
"Who…?"
Switch's voice shakes.
"This is Subject Zero. The one before you."
The body twitches.
The skull turns.
"You are late, brother."
Null staggers back.
It's not a corpse.
It's Elias Corvax Prime—the first.
The prototype.
"I was the first key. You were the second."
"I killed you," Null whispers.
"No," the voice rasps. "You tried. But I am the recursion. The original line."
⸻
10:00 PM – SYSTEM SHUTDOWN INITIATED
Every light in the vault goes red.
The platform begins to rise—revealing itself to the world.
Null faces his origin.
Corvax Prime lifts a finger.
"Shall we complete the code together?"
Then the sky tears.
Gunships descend. A fleet of drones screams down.
Bloodline survivors. The Obsidian Board's last enforcers.
They open fire.
And the war begins again.