Chapter 82
No survivors.
The room was cold. Sterile. Bathed in the soft blue light of dozens of monitors that blinked and flickered with endless streams of data. Thin lines of code rolled endlessly across several massive displays, each monitored by analysts stationed in rows—fifty of them at least. All dressed in uniform grey, all silently focused on the real-time information flowing in from every corner of the region.
It was quiet despite being filled with over fifty people. Their fingers clicked and tapped across keyboards. Eyes flickered across holographic screens, walls lined with monitors, data streams cascading vertically and horizontally, numbers updating every few seconds.
The constant hum of machines instead filled the silence, an orchestra of efficiency and tension.
At the far end of the room stood a massive central display—five meters wide—split into quadrants. It projected an overhead schematic of the Hold and the surrounding regions. Tiny green lights marked active trackers, each one representing a life. Supervisors walked between desks, arms crossed, posture stiff.
A woman stood at the center console, her arms folded, eyes darting between numbers and graphs. Her posture was tense but calm, like a soldier trained to function in chaos. Her job was not to panic. It was to respond.
On the central screen before her, a clean grid displayed the life signs of thousands of personnel deployed in and around the Hold. Masters, Experienced, Novices—each with trackers embedded in their uniforms, each accounted for.
Then—something changed.
A sharp ping cut through the low hum of ambient sound.
One of the green dots turned red.
The woman frowned slightly.
"Death logged," she murmured, tapping the icon. "...Rank: Master?"
Her frown deepened.
Masters didn't just die. Not within the Hold. Not where it was supposed to be safe. Especially not without any warning.
A top-tier ascended... She blinked and glanced at the biometric logs again to be sure.
She flagged the anomaly and opened the log history, preparing a report—when another ping rang out.
Another dot turned red.
Then another.
Her breath caught.
"Two masters... in quick succession? Inside the Hold?"
Her eyes darted across the grid, now suspicious. But she barely had time to make sense of it before—
Ping. Ping. Ping.
The data screamed. The schematic was turning red. Tracker after tracker blinked out of existence—suddenly, violently, without warning.
The red dots multiplied—first slowly, then rapidly. She froze in place, watching in disbelief as entire clusters of green began to blink out.
One of the technicians looked up, alarmed.
"Ma'am, are we under attack? This—this is the Hold…"
A long, mechanical screech echoed across the control room.
It wasn't just a few deaths anymore.
It was dozens.
Then hundreds.
The lights above flickered for a moment as an automated alarm began to sound. An angry red hue filled the room as warning panels ignited all over the wall.
More and more pings sounded. Each one announcing another fallen life.
The woman didn't speak—her mouth was slightly agape, her fingers trembling just above the touchpad. On the main screen, rows of dots turned red with horrifying speed.
A full unit. Gone.
Then another.
And then… the screen stopped updating.
"Something's wrong," she said, almost breathless. "Something's very wrong in the Hold."
Alarms wailed less than a minute later.
The control room was in chaos.
Red lights pulsed across every screen. The system registered mass casualties. One after another, names vanished from the personnel list. Master-level, experienced, novice—hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. The Hold wasn't losing a battle. It was being extinguished.
She turned and sprinted.
Down the stairs, across the platform, directly to the floor above where her superiors were stationed.
Within minutes, the entire floor was on high alert.
Chairs scraped back. Commanders rushed into the surveillance room. Orders were shouted, files pulled up, command trucks dispatched.
An operation chief slammed his palm against a screen, bringing up an emergency deployment protocol.
"Mobilize all recon trucks. Now! Full dispatch. Send them in from every sector!"
The order was immediate. Executed with practiced urgency.
Because what was happening wasn't just a breach.
It was a massacre.
A genocide in real-time.
More than a million lives—evaporating.
The woman stared in horror. She had never seen anything like this.
"All those people…" someone whispered behind he r.
One of the senior commanders, tall and broad-shouldered with a thick scar down his jaw, stepped beside the woman and stared hard at the display.
"How many left?" he asked, voice like iron.
The woman, pale now, tapped into the master database.
"All trackers have gone silent," she said slowly. "Except... one."
She zoomed in.
A single light remained.
One tracker still alive. Just one.
They isolated the ID. Pulled the file immediately.
Name: IAM
Rank: Novice
Path: Cursed & Blessed Speech
Weapon: Modified Firearm
Formation Time: One Month and Two Weeks
The supervisor exhaled sharply. "A novice…?"
Another officer leaned in, perplexed. "How the hell did a novice outlive everyone in the Hold? There were Ascenders. Masters. Veterans…"
He didn't finish the sentence.
A sudden beep made every eye snap to the center screen.
The last light—the one marked IAM—began to blink.
Weakly.
Once…
Twice…
Then it stopped blinking altogether.
A long, droning tone filled the room, marking final confirmation.
IAM had died.
The last survivor… was gone.
No response.
Just a ghost signal… then nothing.
For twenty agonizing minutes, IAM had been the last flicker of life on that screen.
Now… there were none.
No survivors.
The room stood in silence, everyone watching the dead display.
Only the soft hum of the systems remained.
.....
The grey military truck rumbled across the desert, its tires cutting long tracks into the dry brown sand. Dust whipped up behind it in thin, howling streams. The sky above was a dark grey , blanketed in a sheet of shifting fog that loomed across the wasteland like a corpse's breath.
And out in the distance, barely visible beyond the glass of the passenger window, the strange shapes moved.
Ever-shifting.
They loomed and twisted, morphing without rhythm or purpose, like fragments of forgotten thing lost in mist. They did not approach. They did not retreat. They simply existed—moving in ways that made no sense.
Eight soldiers rode in the truck—silent, focused. The air inside was heavy, thick with tension.
This was just one of many trucks being dispatched. A fleet of them, speeding across the wastelands toward the Hold.
And in this one, at the front passenger seat, sat a man staring out the reinforced window. His gaze didn't move. His posture was straight. His face unreadable.
His hair was short and blond, the sides trimmed close. He looked lean but tall—standing easily over 6 feet. His eyes were brown, but not soft. They were cloudy.
Distant. As if somewhere far behind those eyes, a storm was brewing.
He had seen many battles.
But something about this felt different.
He hadn't spoken for over an hour, but his fingers were drumming against his thigh unconsciously.
He had heard the transmission.
He had seen the data.
More than a million dead.
Gone.
And that final name still echoed in his head.
IAM.
A name he didn't recognize.
A novice.
The last one standing.
And now gone.
He didn't know what they were going to find when they arrived.
But he going to find out... Whether he liked it or not.