The body of Elric Voss still twitched in the chair as Adrian walked away. There was no rush of triumph, no wave of satisfaction. Just silence — the kind that filled a room after something final had happened.
The hallway ahead glowed with the dim red light of the alarm, painting the walls in a pulsing haze. He moved through it without hesitation, every step steady, controlled.
Backup would come soon. He knew their response times, their routes, their tactics. None of it mattered. There was no one left worth saving, and no one left to warn. He'd already uploaded everything — the complete archive of Project Aeon, dumped into the public networks, encrypted and mirrored across a hundred dark corners of the web.
The world would see what had been done here. Whether it cared or not wasn't his concern. Revenge had never been about justice. It had been personal. And now that it was done… what was left?
He climbed a maintenance ladder to the emergency shaft, the metal groaning beneath his weight. As he reached for the hatch, something sharp flickered in the corner of his eye — a thin red beam stretched across the ceiling. Tripwire.
He let go. Dropped. The hatch exploded above him a heartbeat later. Fire and shrapnel roared down the shaft, tearing through the air. The blast hit like a hammer. Adrian slammed against the rungs, pain flashing white through his chest. He gritted his teeth and pushed off, dropping to the lower platform as debris rained past.
Then came the hum. Low, mechanical, familiar. Drones. Three of them glided into view, sleek and black, their rotors whispering in the heat-hazed air. Targeting lasers found him instantly.
Adrian dove behind a support beam, pulling a small cylindrical grenade from his belt. His thumb flipped the pin, and with a flick of his wrist, he sent it rolling into the open. The device pulsed once — a high, sharp whine — before releasing a shockwave that crackled through the corridor.
The drones seized mid-flight, sparked violently, and crashed to the floor in showers of blue light. He didn't wait to confirm. He was already moving — every movement precise, economical, trained. His ribs ached, a hot sting spreading beneath the skin. He ignored it. Pain was just data.
He reached the secondary tunnel, only to find the blast door sealed. Its control panel flickered red. Manual override disabled. Full lockdown. They were closing the net.
A humorless smile touched his lips. "Took you long enough," he muttered. He tapped the comm bead in his ear. "Execute Protocol Echo."
Two kilometers away, a rooftop charge detonated. The shockwave rolled underground, shorting out the facility's comm grid. Power nodes blinked dead one by one. He had ninety seconds.
Adrian pressed a shaped charge against the wall beside the sealed door. The blast carved a narrow breach in the concrete. Smoke billowed, and he slipped through, coughing against the dust.
The emergency tunnel stretched ahead — a thin vein of flickering lights and half-broken pipes. He ran. Each step felt heavier than the last, his breath growing ragged. A glance down revealed the truth: blood trailing down his leg, dark and thick. Somewhere between the explosion and the drones, he'd been hit.
He dropped to one knee, using the wall for balance. The air smelled of smoke and ozone. Then — footsteps. Not boots. Polished leather. Measured. Calm.
He turned his head toward the sound. A man emerged from the haze, unhurried, dressed in a pristine white suit. His silver hair caught the dying light of the emergency bulbs. The face was familiar, a ghost dredged up from the project's archives. Director Halsten. Voss's right hand. Dead, or so Adrian had thought.
Halsten looked at him with detached curiosity. "You made quite a mess," he said, voice smooth, almost amused.
Adrian raised his pistol, but his hand trembled. The other man's gun was already leveled — sleek, black, silenced. A single click. A single thud. The round struck just above his heart. Adrian's world lurched sideways. The pistol slipped from his grasp, clattering to the floor. His body followed it a moment later, breath torn from his lungs.
Halsten stepped closer, crouching beside him, unhurried. "You were never meant to get this far," he said quietly. "Still… I'm impressed. You're what the project always wanted. Shame you never understood the bigger picture."
Adrian tried to speak, but blood filled his mouth. His vision dimmed, edges curling into black.
Halsten straightened, pocketed the pistol, and turned away. The heavy blast door slid shut behind him with a final hiss. Silence returned. Darkness followed. Not the kind that came with sleep — the kind that swallowed everything.
For a moment, Adrian thought that was it. That he'd finally reached the end.
But then something strange happened. He could still feel. Not his body — that was gone. Something deeper. Like floating inside a memory.
There was no light, no sound, only fragments drifting through the void. His mother's voice — faint, melodic, humming some tune he could never name. His father's proud, silent gaze as he repaired a toy at the workbench. The smell of old paper. The warmth of a life he'd never truly had the chance to live.
Then the images changed. A world of fire and ruin. Ash falling from a red sky. A man standing alone on cracked earth, his one arm missing, sword buried in the ground. Before him loomed something vast — a figure of darkness and heat, its shape shifting like smoke. Its presence pressed against Adrian's mind until his thoughts began to crack.
He gasped — or thought he did — as pain flared bright, raw, absolute. And then the darkness softened. The pain ebbed. His pulse slowed. He knew he should've been gone. Yet something was pulling him — faint, insistent. A call from somewhere else.
Adrian exhaled one last time, his mind sinking into stillness. And the world went quiet.