The ghostly image of the mutilated rabbit burned on the back of Arjun's eyelids. The scientist's panicked voice echoed in the enhanced chambers of his mind. Uncontrolled cellular mitosis. Consuming itself. OmniCorp wasn't just a competitor; it was a pack of rabid dogs playing with plutonium. And they had just caught the scent of his energy signature.
Fear, cold and sharp, coiled in his gut. But it was met and matched by a new, ferocious instinct—the will to survive, amplified by his upgraded body and mind. Panic was a luxury he could not afford. Data was his weapon.
"Gyan," he said, his voice low and steady, a stark contrast to the storm inside him. "Priority one: operational security. Analyze everything we've done. The hammer, the knife, the bank account, the data probe. Could any of it lead them here?"
The holographic display shimmered, streams of data flowing like digital water.
"Analysis running. The financial transactions are secure, routed through multiple anonymous layers. The product sales are anomalous but small-scale, likely beneath their current threshold of interest unless cross-referenced with other data. The data probe into Project Prometheus, however, was a significant risk. While the origin was successfully spoofed to Antarctica, the act itself was a high-energy event on their network. It will have alerted them that someone of considerable capability is aware of the project. It does not lead them here directly, but it narrows their field of search to entities capable of such a breach."
"So, they know they're not alone," Arjun murmured, pacing on silent feet. The new muscles in his legs moved with a predator's grace. "They'll be paranoid. They'll be looking for ghosts. We need to become one."
The concept formed in his mind, crystal clear. He needed to vanish. Not from the city, but from their sensors, their cameras, their digital dragnets. He needed a cloak.
He focused inward, pulling up the system's most powerful and least understood feature: Function Creation.
The interface was dauntingly blank, a canvas of pure potential. A prompt appeared.
["Define desired function parameters."]
How did one ask a god-machine for invisibility? He thought in terms a programmer would understand. Input. Output. Process.
I need a function, he thought, shaping the desire with his will. A personal stealth field. It must bend light around me, absorb sound I generate, mask my thermal signature, and disrupt any form of electromagnetic scanning—radio, microwave, everything. It must be toggleable and have a minimal energy cost when active.
The system processed the request. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, text scrolled across his vision.
["Function Creation Request: Multi-Spectrum Cloaking Field. Calculating resource cost..."]
A progress bar appeared, filling slowly. The cost was immense. It wasn't just SP; it was a fundamental tax on his newly enhanced system.
["Cost: 250 SP. 50% of current maximum Stamina for one (1) hour post-creation. Proceed? Y/N"]
Arjun sucked in a breath. Two hundred and fifty points. That was over ten days of passive regeneration. And a fifty percent Stamina drain? In his newly powerful state, that would feel like being hit by a truck. It was a brutal cost.
But the image of the rabbit, frenzied and broken, flashed before him. The cost of being found was infinitely higher.
Y.
The moment he confirmed, it felt like a vacuum hose had been attached to his soul.
His vision swam, the room tilting violently. A wave of nauseating weakness crashed over him, so profound it drove him to his knees. He gasped, his upgraded lungs struggling to draw breath. It was as if the very energy that powered his new muscles and sharpened his mind was being violently siphoned away, funneled into the creation of this new law of physics. His Stamina, which had felt limitless moments ago, evaporated, leaving behind a deep, hollow ache in every fiber of his being. He slumped against the wall, sweat beading on his forehead despite the coolness of his shirt.
["Function Creation: 50%... 75%... 100%. Complete. New Function added: [Cloak]. SP: 0/250. Stamina temporarily reduced by 50%."]
The draining sensation stopped, leaving him feeling frail and utterly drained. He looked at his hands; they were trembling. But in his mind's eye, next to Status and Upgrade, a new option now glowed: [Cloak].
It was done. He had his ghost suit. Now he needed to know where the enemy was.
"Gyan," he breathed, his voice raspy with fatigue. "The OmniCorp facility in Lucknow. The one from the blueprints. I need a live satellite feed. Thermal, EM, the works. I want to see it right now."
"Accessing GeoSat-7. Reprogramming optics for real-time surveillance. Feed is live."
The hologram changed, showing a crisp, bird's-eye view of an industrial park on the outskirts of the city. It was a bland, forgettable complex of warehouses and office buildings. But Gyan overlaid the stolen blueprints, revealing the truth: the real facility was a massive, ten-story inverted pyramid buried deep beneath the largest warehouse.
Thermal imaging showed a handful of security guards making lazy rounds on the surface. But underground, it was a hive of activity—dozens of hot, human-shaped blobs moving through the labs and corridors.
"I am detecting periodic, low-power EM pulses emanating from the facility," Gyan reported. "The pattern is consistent with a localized LIDAR scanner. They are sweep-scanning the entire five-square-kilometer area of interest, likely looking for energy residue matching the lightning strike."
The pieces clicked into place. They weren't just sitting in their base. They were actively sweeping for him. Right now. It was only a matter of time before their net closed.
Just then, a new alert flashed on the edge of the hologram. It wasn't from the satellite.
["Proximity Alert: Motion sensor triggered at the perimeter of the property. West side. One individual. Approaching the main door."]
Arjun's blood ran cold. They were here. Already.
"Who is it? Show me!" he hissed, pushing himself upright, forcing his weakened body to obey.
The hologram switched to a grainy, real-time feed from a hidden camera near the front door—a relic of the previous owners he'd never had the heart to remove. A man stood there. He wasn't in a tactical uniform. He wore the dusty, off-white clothes of a municipal water board employee, complete with a faded ID card clipped to his chest and a battered clipboard. He looked bored, impatient.
"Facial recognition running… No match in any public or private database I have access to. The identity he is presenting is a deep cover alias. His gait and posture suggest advanced military or paramilitary training. Heart rate is steady at 55 BPM. He is not anxious. He is professional."
A scout. They were sending a scout to case the house, to see who—or what—lived here. The man raised a hand and knocked on the door, the sound echoing through the empty house like a gunshot.
Arjun's mind, slowed by the Stamina drain, raced through options.
· Ignore him? He might go away. Or he might come back later with a full team.
· Answer the door? In his current weakened state, facing a trained operative? Suicide.
· Run? Where? They'd just track him.
No. This ended now. This was his home.
"Gyan, the [Cloak] function. Activate it."
["Initiating Multi-Spectrum Cloaking Field."]
There was no sound. No dramatic shimmer. But the air around Arjun bent. He looked down at his own hands and saw the dusty floorboards right through them. He was a ghost, a heat haze, a mirage. The effort of maintaining the field was a constant, dull drain on his already depleted stamina, like holding a heavy weight above his head. He wouldn't be able to hold it for long.
He moved silently, his new agility allowing him to glide across the floor without a sound. He reached the front door just as the man outside knocked again, harder this time.
Arjun took a deep, steadying breath. This was the moment. The transition from hiding to hunting.
He unlocked the door and pulled it open.
The man on the porch looked up from his clipboard, his eyes already crafting a lie about a water main inspection. His eyes swept past the doorway. He saw nothing. No one. The door had simply opened on its own.
His professional calm fractured for a microsecond. His eyes narrowed, scanning the empty darkness of the hallway beyond. His hand twitched, instinctively moving towards his back where a weapon was likely concealed.
That was all the confirmation Arjun needed.
In that moment of the man's confusion, Arjun struck. He didn't throw a punch. He simply reached out with his cloaked hand and grabbed the man's wrist, the one moving towards the weapon.
The man's reaction was lightning-fast. He jerked back, his other hand coming up in a brutal knife-hand strike towards where Arjun's head should be.
But Arjun was already moving. His upgraded Agility, even sapped by half, was beyond human. He flowed with the motion, using the man's own momentum against him. He twisted the captured wrist, applying precise, brutal pressure to a nerve cluster.
The man grunted in pain and surprise, his strike going wild. He couldn't see his attacker. He was fighting a ghost.
Arjun pivoted, yanking the man off balance and pulling him forward, through the doorway and into the dark house. He kicked the door shut with his foot.
The operative stumbled into the darkness, disoriented and blind. He reached for his weapon, a compact pistol, but a cloaked foot kicked his hand, sending the skittering across the floor.
"Lights, Gyan," Arjun whispered.
The hallway was suddenly bathed in a soft, ambient light from no visible source.
The man froze, his eyes wide, frantically trying to find his invisible assailant. He was breathing heavily now, his professional composure completely shattered. He was trapped in a closed space with something he couldn't see, couldn't understand.
Arjun released the [Cloak] function. The strain vanished from his muscles, but the Stamina drain left him feeling hollow. He materialized out of thin air, right in front of the man.
The operative stared, his jaw slack with utter disbelief. He saw a young man in a dark shirt, breathing heavily, looking pale and tired. He didn't look like a super-soldier. He looked like a programmer who had just run a marathon. But he had just moved like a demon and appeared from nowhere.
"Who are you?" the man gasped, cradling his injured wrist.
Arjun didn't answer. He simply looked at the man, his new, piercing perception taking in every detail—the fake ID, the cheap clothes that couldn't hide a trained physique, the fear in his eyes.
"Gyan," Arjun said, his voice cold and flat. "Scan him. Everything. Biometrics, neural patterns, subcutaneous implants. I want to know who he is, who he works for, and what he knows."
A faint beam of light emerged from the obsidian slate on the table, sweeping over the stunned operative.
"Scanning. Identity confirmed: Captain Rakesh 'Rook' Verma, formerly of the 21st Parachute Regiment. Current employment: OmniCorp International, Black Sky Division. He is equipped with a subdermal comms implant and a GPS tracker."
Rook's eyes widened further. His cover wasn't just blown; it had been atomized.
"Disable the tracker. Jam his comms," Arjun commanded.
"Jamming active. Tracker disabled."
Arjun took a step closer. He was still weak, but he stood with an authority that didn't come from muscle. It came from absolute, terrifying power.
"You came to my house," Arjun said, his voice barely a whisper. "You don't get to leave until I say so. Now. We're going to talk about OmniCorp. We're going to talk about Project Prometheus. And you're going to tell me everything."
For the first time, Arjun saw true fear in the operative's eyes. Not the fear of a fight, but the fear of the unknown. The fear of a man who had just realized the world was far stranger, and far more dangerous, than he had ever been trained to handle.
The hunter had become the prey. And the ghost in the machine had just taken its first prisoner.