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/-\
The warning came in pulses.
Three red lights blinked in succession along the north end of the grid schematic low-frequency alerts, not loud enough to trip the city-wide systems, but sharp enough to trigger Kiera's private failsafes. She was already on her feet before the second blink faded, hand hovering over her wristpad as lines of unreadable data streamed across the glass.
"Motion breach," she said, voice flat but sharp. "Sector E2. Access tunnel. Not city-authorized."
Luro stood across the room, half-in the frame of a decaying support beam, the wall behind him crowded with vintage comm arrays. "Impossible. That grid's sealed. Even backchannel feeds don't ping it anymore."
"It's not feeding a ping," Kiera muttered, fingers moving fast. "It's bypassing the sensors entirely riding some kind of masking signal. Whatever this is, it isn't using brute force. It's… elegant."
"Elegant's not a word I like when we're talking about breaches."
Aiden entered from the side passage, eyes narrowing at the buzz of tension in the room. He hadn't said much in the last two days not since the vault had stirred but now, he looked ready. A blade waiting for the hand that knew how to wield it.
Kiera gestured toward the central holotable. A grainy image snapped into place partial lidar scans of an underground tunnel. Dust. Heat signatures.
Just one.
No ID tag. No timestamp match.
"Who's down there?" Aiden asked.
Kiera shook her head. "No face. Whoever it is, they're using an echo-displacement cloak. No footprint, no thermal. Just residual shimmer trails in the pathing data."
Luro squinted. "That's… ARASHI-grade stealth."
A beat passed.
None of them said it out loud.
But they were all thinking the same thing: only one active unit had ever used ARASHI-grade stealth protocols. And that unit was supposed to be offline.
"Echo," Aiden said.
Kiera swallowed. "Or someone using his tech."
Either way, they couldn't ignore it.
Twenty meters below the city's surface, the service tunnels hadn't seen legitimate use in over a decade. Most had been flooded, collapsed, or sealed during the restructuring after the Kyoto Burn. But this one had somehow stayed intact unremarkable enough to avoid reconstruction, yet stable enough to persist.
The intruder's steps left no sound.
No scuff. No friction drag. Not even dust displacement on the microlevel.
A second shimmer pulsed briefly against the metal wall like heat distortion in reverse. Then nothing.
Further up the tunnel, a rusted terminal powered up for the first time in fifteen years. The glow was dim, flickering. Its interface defaulted to a language template long since deprecated.
Lines of archaic code scrolled across the screen.
:: VERIFICATION KEY ACCEPTED ::
:: SUBLEVEL 3 ACCESS GRANTED ::
Then, slowly, a segment of the wall retracted.
Back in the workshop, Drey slammed a crate shut and started packing thermal gear.
"You're telling me a ghost just broke into a section of the grid we didn't even think existed anymore," he said, face tight.
"No," Kiera said. "I'm telling you something that shouldn't be active just reactivated something older than we are."
She keyed in a sequence on the holotable. The blueprints shifted peeling back layers of false infrastructure, revealing a sub-chamber beneath the registered city levels. Hidden nodes. A compartment sealed in at least three digital layers.
Luro stared. "I thought that was urban myth."
"Everything's an urban myth until it tries to kill you," Drey muttered.
Aiden studied the layout.
He recognized the shape of it.
Not the city's shape.
The pattern was older. Familiar.
It mirrored a seal he had seen once. In another life. A memory not his, but carried in his blood.
He exhaled. "This wasn't built by city tech."
Kiera nodded. "No. It predates the grid entirely. I think the city was built around it."
That idea sat in the air like lead.
In the tunnel, the intruder stepped through the unlocked hatch.
Inside, the space didn't look like the rest of the tunnel no rust, no debris. It was cleaner. Cold. Covered in a fine, shimmering dust like static sand.
A massive conduit ran along the spine of the chamber, glowing faintly from within. Arcane symbols burned along its frame not digital, not mechanical. Chakra-script.
And there, at the far end, mounted in a transparent shell of energy, was a single module.
Pale. Square. Pulsing.
It whispered a name into the intruder's mind.
:: Dusk Protocol ::
By the time the team reached the upper hatch, Aiden's instincts were already flaring. The air near the access point smelled… different. Sharp. Like ozone before a lightning strike.
"Whatever happened here, it was recent," he said.
Luro placed a diagnostic probe against the entry seam. "Power levels are residual. Something passed through here less than an hour ago."
Kiera adjusted her glasses. "And left no trace on any of the grid logs."
The hatch groaned open.
Inside, they found the chamber. Empty.
Mostly.
A strange humming lingered in the air, faint but rising.
Then Drey spotted it. A corner module, still powered, with a diagnostic screen blinking slowly.
They approached it.
Lines of command code were being auto-executed. Kiera hissed under her breath.
"It's a loop," she said. "Something triggered the boot cycle for a secondary protocol."
Aiden stepped forward.
And froze.
A single phrase was blinking in the corner of the screen, pulsing red:
:: UCHIHA ACCESS GRANTED ::
Kiera stared. "Aiden what the hell did you unlock?"
They didn't see the second access point power up behind them.
Didn't hear the hiss of air decompressing.
Didn't notice the shadow detach from the wall until it was already moving.
In the flickering dark of the hidden vault, the intruder paused.
Something behind him had changed.
A second sequence had begun. Parallel access. Unregistered.
He tilted his head.
And smiled.
A flick of the wrist activated a silent transponder.
On the other side of the city, buried within a long-dead node in District One, a sleeper agent received the pulse.
The agent's eyes opened.
They belonged to someone Kiera knew.
/-\
If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my Patreon at
" https://www.patreon.com/Its_Zack/ "
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want.