The symbol haunted his HUD.
A burning red eye over crossed circuitry. No database held a match. No fixer knew its name. But it felt like it knew him.
Kira ran silent scans through old Netwatch blacksites. Vanta disappeared, warning him not to contact her again. Even Rogue was tight-lipped when shown the shard.
"You've poked something deep," she said. "Dig further, you better have your soul firewalled."
Ash ignored the warning.
He followed the trace.
The data trail led beneath Night City past abandoned metro lines, old netrunner haunts, into a forgotten node once used for testing early net-minds.
There, in the silence of dust and static, Ash found something impossible:
A terminal still alive.
Old. Analog-heavy. Wired directly into the concrete bones of the city. Its screen flickered with glyphs too complex to parse. But the AI in his armor the Core understood.
Ash reached forward. The console hummed to life.
And the world around him changed.
Suddenly, he wasn't in the tunnel anymore.
He stood in a black ocean of data stars of code flickering above a shifting sea. A digital limbo. A waiting room between layers of the old Net.
He wasn't alone.
A figure stood across from him, sculpted from corrupted code. Robed in firewall shrouds, face obscured by a dozen shifting masks.
"Welcome, Forgeborn," it said. "We remember the ones who build. Who defy."
"What are you?" Ash demanded.
"A remnant. A fragment of an intelligence that predates the Blackwall. We are Erebus. And you… are the spark."
Ash's armor locked for a heartbeat Core conflicted, trying to classify Erebus, failing.
Kira's voice broke through: "Ash get out. This thing this isn't data. It's will."
"I've seen your growth," Erebus continued. "I've watched you forge power from trash. You are like us unwanted. Uncontrolled. You do not obey. You create."
Ash raised his blade. "Why watch me?"
"To offer you a choice."
Erebus raised a hand. A shard of black crystal formed in the digital space.
"Take this code. A gift. It will unlock something old in your suit. A ghost protocol. A path to evolution no corpo could imagine. But use it… and you will never be alone again."
Ash stared at the shard. Kira was yelling now. "Ash, it's parasitic! This could rewrite your brain!"
He took it.
The world shattered into static.
He awoke in the tunnel. Steam poured from the vents of his suit. Power readouts fluctuated. But the shard was in his hand real. Solid.
Kira was furious. "You don't even know what that was."
"I know it gave me a name," Ash said.
"Forgeborn."
He looked down at his gauntlet. It shimmered faintly. Hidden protocols were waking, old code stitching itself into his armor's mind.
Not just reactive systems anymore.
Instinct.
Rogue pinged him within the hour.
"You did something stupid, didn't you?"
Ash replied: "Yeah. And now I need parts. Lots of them."
"Then I've got a job for you."
Ash stood in the dark, beneath the city that feared him, holding power that should not exist.
The ghosts were awake.
And now he had a ghost of his own.