#### **Chapter 18: The Director's Ascension**
Deep in the W.A.O. black site where The Warden once reigned, a new power had settled. The office was the same, but the spartan, militaristic decor had been replaced with sleek, minimalist chrome and glass.
The Director stood before a massive interactive screen, reviewing the after-action report from Rotterdam. She was a woman in her late forties with sharp, intelligent eyes and a flawlessly tailored suit. Where The Warden was an old-world predator of instinct and brute force, The Director was a new-world monster of efficiency and ambition.
"The Warden's methods were archaic," she stated to the assembled command staff, her voice calm and cutting. "He fixated on a single, rogue asset and waged a personal vendetta. He leveraged an emotional attachment—a pet—and in doing so, revealed his own emotional weakness. The result was a catastrophic failure and a public display of our organization's disarray."
She swiped a hand across the screen, dismissing The Warden's file. A new one took its place: a complex molecular diagram labeled *PROJECT CHIMERA* and *PROJECT ORACLE*.
"Kyro-3755 is not a problem to be eliminated," she continued, her tone shifting from critique to vision. "He and his siblings are a legacy. Their parents, Drs. Tsukishiro and Tarayashi, were on the verge of creating the perfect soldier—one who could not be broken, manipulated, or emotionally compromised. A stable, controllable, superhuman asset. The Kyro Syndicate's recent activities prove the potential of that genetic line. They are the prototypes."
Her eyes gleamed with a cold, corporate fire. "Our new directive is not to punish them. It is to acquire them. And more importantly, to acquire the research their parents left behind. Find it. Find everything."
Meanwhile, in his digital fortress, Kuro had followed a breadcrumb. A heavily encrypted data fragment from the Chimera files mentioned a name: Dr. Aris Thorne, a bio-ethicist and a former close colleague of his parents. Thorne had resigned from W.A.O. a decade ago, citing "ethical disagreements," and had vanished. His last known location was a small, self-sufficient research outpost near a defunct W.A.O. laboratory in the desolate tundra of the Siberian wilderness.
"He's either in hiding," Kuro told his siblings, displaying a satellite map of the frozen wasteland. "Or he's a ghost W.A.O. forgot to bury."