Nytherion never slept. It just blinked.
A pulse of blue neon flickered down alley walls, bouncing off puddles slick with chemical runoff. Above, the towers stretched like rusted spears into a haze-choked sky, their windows glowing with the soft, indifferent light of surveillance. Drones hummed like metal locusts, scanning faces, logging identities, whispering reports to the omnipresent god that ruled them all—the Wire.
Kael Virek moved like a shadow through the slums of Sector V-9, his coat stained with ash and oil, his hood pulled low. Under the cloth, his neural ports sparked faintly, reacting to the static in the air.
He wasn't supposed to exist anymore.
Not since the Execution Order.
Not since he went unwired.
He slipped between buildings, trailing faint digital distortion—like a broken signal. The city's security grid should have picked him up hours ago, but it couldn't see him. Not since he'd shattered his Code.
Everyone born after the Dominion Act was implanted with a NeuroCore at birth—a glowing black chip in the neck, the size of a coin. It fed into the Wire. Monitored every breath, every heartbeat. Assigned your fate. Gave you a purpose. Career, spouse, death—all preprogrammed, all calculated for efficiency. No choice. No chaos.
But Kael had been something different once.
A Codebreaker.
The elite.
The ones who could access the Wire directly.
But one day, he'd looked too deep into the system—and something had looked back.
A scream blared across the street—raw and human. Kael turned fast, slipping a hand beneath his coat. His fingers grazed the hilt of his quantum dagger, a flickerblade charged with anti-matter threads.
He saw them.
Two Enforcers in obsidian armor dragging a boy, maybe sixteen, by his collar. His NeuroCore was sparking violently—rejecting a fate implant.
Unstable Code.
That meant the boy still had a chance. A rare glitchborn. A possible rebel.
Kael's instincts screamed to walk away. Stay invisible. He had a bigger mission.
But then the boy met his eyes.
And Kael remembered.
He remembered what it felt like to be helpless. To scream inside while your body moved according to someone else's programming.
Screw the mission.
Kael stepped forward, letting the blur of his cloaking matrix fall. His body shimmered into visibility like a mirage turning solid.
The Enforcers froze.
Recognition lit up on their HUDs. One barked a code into his comm.
"Target Kael Virek identified. Level-Zero Fugitive. Kill-on-sight."
Kael's smirk was cold.
"Let's dance."
He moved.
Faster than human.
His dagger sang to life with a crackle of blacklight, slicing through the first Enforcer's helmet like paper. Sparks exploded. The body hit the ground twitching.
The second turned and fired—a railshot burst that seared the air. Kael slid beneath it, flipped up behind the soldier, and drove his blade into the neural port.
Silence.
Then the boy screamed again—more in fear than gratitude.
Kael dropped to one knee, facing him.
"What's your name?"
The boy shook. "J-Jax."
Kael tapped a wrist console, opening a fractured UI interface. Glyphs and command lines raced across his vision, encrypted code from a system he wasn't supposed to be able to access.
But he could.
Because Kael wasn't just unwired.
He was something worse.
Something newer.
"Jax. You're glitched. That means the Wire hasn't finished writing your fate yet. You've still got a choice."
"W-what choice?"
Kael's eyes glowed faintly with blue sigils.
"To stay asleep… or wake up."
Jax stared at the corpses. His hands trembled.
Then he nodded.
Kael uploaded a scramble protocol into the boy's NeuroCore, frying the connection to the Wire just long enough for the transformation to begin. The chip sparked, burned out, and went dark.
The boy gasped.
Then smiled.
And then the city howled.
Sirens. Drones. Hounds.
The Wire had found them.
"Run," Kael said, pulling Jax into the alley.
They bolted through flickering tunnels and dead zones, passing gangs of slum-borns who eyed them hungrily but didn't move. Everyone in Nytherion knew the Enforcers were more dangerous than rebels.
They reached a lift shaft—a broken freight elevator—rusted cables groaning in the darkness.
Kael slapped a palm against the panel. It hissed open.
Inside stood a woman in a crimson coat, her arms folded. Cybernetic tattoos shimmered across her face—data trails of a rogue AI whispering in code.
"Kael," she said flatly. "You're late."
Kael pushed Jax inside. "Got a stray."
The woman sighed. "You and your strays."
"His Core was unstable. He's like us."
Her gaze flicked to the boy. She saw it. The absence of fate. The raw, humming freedom.
"We'll see if he survives the rites."
Kael turned to Jax. "You're about to meet others like you. People who broke free. People who see through the illusion."
"The... illusion?"
Kael's voice was quiet. "Fate is a lie, Jax. The Wire doesn't predict the future. It writes it. We're going to take the pen back."
The lift dropped into the abyss of the city's underlayer—the place no Wire signal could reach. The dark web of reality.
The place where revolution was being born.