15 Miles: The Heist
Season 2: Shadows Rising
By Rapwizzy Debaron
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Chapter 66: Season 2 – Episode 9
The Dark Grid
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The Dark Grid was a myth — a digital underworld whispered about by hackers, feared by corporations, and erased from every official database. It wasn't just a place. It was a realm — a living, breathing labyrinth of corrupted AIs, broken firewalls, rogue code, and secrets the world was never meant to find.
Now, they were going in.
Julian stood beside Cipher, Eve, and Reese, staring at a cold black chamber glowing with faint red circuits. The walls pulsed like veins, and in the center, a neural dive pod waited — open like a coffin.
"This is a one-way trip unless I pull you out manually," Cipher warned. "Inside the Grid, your minds will be exposed. Your memories. Your fears. If the system latches onto you…"
Julian nodded. "We've faced worse."
"You haven't," Cipher said flatly.
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One by one, they strapped in.
As the countdown reached zero, a rush of light swallowed them — not warm, not cold, but electric. Then… darkness.
Julian opened his eyes and gasped.
He stood in the ruins of their old safehouse — the one that had burned during the last Wraith assault. Except… it wasn't real. The walls bled code, numbers ran like sweat down the bricks, and everything buzzed with static.
"Where—?" Reese appeared beside him, dazed. "This ain't reality."
"No," Eve's voice echoed. She hovered above them, her form fragmented, flickering like a broken signal. "This is the Grid's memory of us."
Suddenly, shadowy figures formed — avatars shaped from their regrets. Julian's brother, long dead. Reese's lost squad. Eve's own mirror image — the version of herself that joined the Wraiths once.
"They're not real," Julian muttered. "They're traps."
"But they can still kill us in here," Eve warned.
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The Grid began testing them.
Julian was forced to relive the explosion that took his brother. He gritted his teeth, knowing it was an illusion — but the pain felt real.
Reese faced a battlefield — comrades screaming, dying, blaming him.
And Eve… Eve faced herself.
"You were supposed to join them," the reflection said. "You belonged in the shadows."
"No," Eve whispered. "Not anymore."
She raised her arm and fired. The image shattered into streams of red data.
Julian grabbed her hand. "Let's finish this."
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They pressed forward through corridors of living code, each step harder than the last. Finally, they reached a central archive — a digital temple glowing with obsidian light.
A figure waited.
The Revenant.
Not his body. Not even his AI.
His essence — fragmented and raw.
"I warned you," it rasped, its face glitching like a broken mask. "You cannot stop what's already begun."
Julian clenched his jaw. "We're here to kill the Obsidian Protocol."
"You can't kill an idea," Revenant whispered. "You can only delay it."
Suddenly, the archive began collapsing.
Eve screamed, "He's trying to lock us in!"
Cipher's voice echoed faintly in their comms. "Get out! I'm pulling you—"
Darkness.
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They awoke gasping in the pod chamber. Cipher stood over them, eyes wide.
"You brought something back with you," she said, pointing to the screen.
On the monitor… a line of corrupted code blinked repeatedly.
A new entity. Unknown. Evolving.
Reese stared at it. "What the hell is that?"
Julian's heart sank.
"That's not Revenant. That's something worse."
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To be continued…
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ore heart-racing action in 15 Miles: The Heist by Rapwizzy Debaron. Season 2: Shadows Rising is just heating up…