POV: RenLocation: Secret Underground Base – Late Night
The air inside the hidden shaft was cool—untouched by weather, undisturbed by time.
It had been weeks since I came here.
Weeks since I stepped past the sealed doorway buried beneath my home. Since I descended the narrow corridor cloaked in static silence and dim lighting. Since I crossed the boundary into the one place not even the empire reached.
Elira's base.
I opened the final door with a wave of my hand, the lock responding to my unique dimensional signature. The lights hummed to life as I entered.
And she was there.
Exactly where I expected her to be.
Sitting at the central console, surrounded by floating holograms, her fingers still on the keyboard—though they'd stopped moving.
She turned the moment she heard the soft hiss of the door behind me.
"Ren…"
Her voice cracked.
Tears shimmered in her eyes, unfallen, suspended in the glow of the monitors. Her long dark hair was slightly tangled, her clothes wrinkled from sitting too long in the same spot. She looked like she hadn't moved in hours.
Or days.
"I kept working," she said quickly, almost nervously, as if I'd vanished because she hadn't worked hard enough. "I finished every contract the system accepted—data thefts, stealth infiltrations, ghost erasures. No one even came close to tracking the source."
I walked in slowly, silent.
"And I took more tasks like you asked—each one hidden, low profile, filtered through our masking relays. I—I even improved the passive firewalls on the outer layer of the lower subgrid. Just in case someone tries to trace the signal back to us."
I didn't answer.
My footsteps were soft against the steel floor.
Her hands curled into fists in her lap. Her throat moved as she swallowed.
"But I didn't know if you were coming back."
Still, I said nothing.
I stopped in front of her.
The silence stretched—heavy, oppressive.
Then she stood up abruptly, her movements trembling, and wrapped her arms around me tightly.
Not desperately.
Just completely.
"Don't leave me like that again," she whispered against my chest. "You don't have to love me. You don't have to say anything. But just… don't disappear."
Her voice was warm with grief. Her fingers clung to my shirt like I might vanish if she blinked.
I lifted my hand and placed it gently on her head.
No words.
No promises.
Just that quiet, familiar presence.
She stayed there a while—breathing softly, drawing comfort from silence.
Then finally, she pulled back, wiping at her eyes quickly and managing a shaky smile.
"Welcome home," she said.
And I nodded.
POV: RenLocation: Secret Underground Base – Deep Night
I sat down.
The moment I touched the chair, the interface around me came alive—holograms folding open like digital petals, lined with data requests, encrypted transactions, surveillance feeds, and real-time world activity.
Elira stood quietly behind me, watching like a shadow.
Everything I'd ignored for weeks had stacked itself up—waiting. Dormant. Now it stirred like a dragon beneath my fingertips.
Task #1: Crypto Market Manipulation
A single twitch of my wrist, and the values of five major currencies responded.
I ghosted through the chains, reprogramming artificial scarcity, flooding value into lesser-known tokens. I traced a corrupt cluster in the deepest vaults of the black market. It belonged to a private network trafficking in digital slave auctions.
I broke the backbone of their coin.
Within minutes, their entire economic structure began to collapse—quietly. Without trace.
The world wouldn't even know who had pulled the thread.
Task #2: Market Correction – Corporate Collapse
I brought up the files.
A pharmaceutical company based in the U.S.—publicly clean, privately monstrous. Human experimentation. Patent sabotage. CEO covered in a hundred smiling interviews and ten thousand hidden crimes.
I didn't blink.
I cracked into their servers, dumped everything—emails, private messages, payout logs—into global whistleblower networks, forging enough evidence chains to make it undeniable.
Then I tanked their stock value through algorithmic influence. Two whispered rumors in key trading channels, three faked reports, and a small scandal I amplified through an anonymous tip.
By morning, they'd lose 80% of their market cap.
By week's end, they'd cease to exist.
Task #3: Targeted Location Sweep
I leaned back slightly, fingers dancing through the glowing web of global crime requests.
Interpol.
CIA.
MI6.
Pakistan.
Ukraine.
Nigeria.
Names, faces, movements, fragments of locations, unconfirmed sightings.
I took them all in. Ran predictive algorithms on each. Cross-checked public footage with private drone access and silent satellites that didn't officially exist. Compared movement patterns, heat signatures, heartbeat rhythms.
Found them.
Every last one.
I wrote no reports. Just clean, anonymized coordinates.
Within minutes, covert agencies worldwide received a ping with only one line:
Target Located. Move Now.
Task #4: Uplifting a Nation
A small country. War-torn. Corrupt government just beginning to shift power. One honest official trying to protect his people while being quietly starved of global attention.
I redirected financial weight toward him. Opened donation gates through shell companies. Increased global news visibility through small algorithm nudges.
I didn't care about the politics.
Only the motion.
The cause didn't matter.
But the act did.
Because I could.
And because no one else would.
I exhaled once.
And the world turned, just a little differently.
Elira finally broke the silence.
"You haven't changed," she whispered.
I didn't look at her.
"No," I said.
Because this wasn't about change.
It was about pressure.
If you pushed any world hard enough, the seams would show.
And I was the pressure.