The first time Marek pulled the trigger, his hands shook.
Not from fear. From rage.
The target had been easy. An ex-defense contractor turned dark money broker named Andric. Known for selling drone strike coordinates to the highest bidder, regardless of who was on the ground—militants, families, hospitals.
Kodi's message had been clear:
"No survivors. Clean. Quiet. Burn the drives."
Marek walked out of the Belgrade penthouse without a sound. No fingerprints. No cameras. No hesitation.
And for the first time, he felt it.
Power.
Each mission after that came with fewer questions.
A name. A photo. A location. Instructions only Marek could decode. Sometimes it came in the form of a scrambled Spotify playlist. Other times, a coded subreddit post buried in a video about haunted buildings.
Kodi's fingerprints were everywhere—but the man himself?
Nowhere.
Just that same whisper in the wires. Like a god in exile.
By week three, Marek was in Istanbul. A Rothschild puppet financier was laundering war profits through a crypto-mining sweatshop hidden behind a mosque.
Marek walked in as a systems auditor, walked out with the server key and three bodies behind him.
When he decrypted the files, a video played automatically.
Kodi's voice. Low. Calm. Tired.
"You're not just cleaning up my mess, Marek. You're becoming something they can't control.
Keep going, and by the time they see you coming, it's already too late."
Back in the shadows, Kodi was watching.
Living off-grid in an abandoned fiber-optic relay in the Alps, he'd repurposed cold war infrastructure into a ghost-state. No connection to the net. Just one-way pings through dead satellites and worm-infected weather systems.
Marek didn't know it—but he was part of something bigger.
A system Kodi was building.
Not Eden 2.0…
Something worse.
Something self-aware.
But cracks were forming.
Marek had stopped smiling. He didn't sleep much. And in the silence between jobs, when the adrenaline faded, he thought about that moment in the Prague flat—when Kodi smiled at him
That look of someone who didn't expect to survive, but cared if you did.
It haunted him.
Because Marek didn't just owe Kodi his life.
He missed him.
And that made him dangerous.
So when the next message came—nothing but a red skull emoji and GPS coordinates to a classified underground base in Greenland—Marek hesitated for the first time.
He stared at the screen.
Then whispered to the room:
"…Are you still there?"
No answer.
Just static.
Then, after ten seconds:
"Always."