Red Zone — Berlin Crater, Inner Shell
Alarms began to scream across Ghostbyte's HUD.
Multiple targets inbound. Triangulating Edenfall. Fast. Armed. Hostile.
Drones streaked overhead like burning comets, their thrusters cutting through the radioactive mist. Ghostbyte grabbed Nova's arm, yanking her back into cover.
"They're here!"
Matherson turned, slowly, calmly as if the incoming death didn't concern him at all. His skin glowed faintly beneath his torn shirt, veins illuminated with red-blue flickers like power surging through fiber-optic nerves.
Nova aimed her pistol again. "Matherson can you move?"
His head tilted slightly. "Move?"
The ground beneath their feet began to hum.
"I am movement now."
Ghostbyte's jaw clenched. "We don't need philosophy we need a way out."
Matherson blinked. Then, in one smooth motion, he knelt to the earth and placed a hand on the cracked stone.
There was a sound low, ancient, metallic and biological at once. A harmonic ripple echoed outward in a perfect circle. Beneath them, the ground shifted. Not violently. But as though it recognized him.
A shaft opened machinery long dormant roaring to life.
"Underground transit," he said. "Legacy tech. Buried with the first resistance network."
Ghostbyte stared. "How do you know that?"
Matherson looked up.
"I remember things I never lived."
"I'm becoming what they feared."
Pursuit
Behind them, the first wave of Edenfall soldiers dropped from skimmer pods, rifles raised. Red lasers cut through the rising dust.
"Go!" Nova shouted, shoving Matherson toward the opening.
He hesitated, eyes locked with hers. "You still don't trust me."
Nova's jaw clenched. "Trust is earned."
"Then let me earn it."
He extended a hand not to her, but to the soldiers behind.
And reality fractured.
A pulse burst outward, silent and invisible to the human eye but catastrophic to anything digital. The Edenfall soldiers staggered. Comms shorted. Rifles glitched. One drone spiraled and crashed into the dust.
"EMP?" Ghostbyte said.
Matherson shook his head. "No."
"Command override."
Descent
They dropped into the shaft just as Edenfall regained control. A bullet grazed Nova's shoulder. She hissed, gripping the wound as the platform below began to descend, fast.
"Are we safe?" she asked.
Ghostbyte checked his wrist. "We bought maybe ninety seconds."
The tunnel lit up with old lights flickering to life. Forgotten systems recognizing something ancient in Matherson's presence. Something buried in the code of the rebellion. Or older.
Nova staggered back. "What the hell are you?"
Matherson turned to her.
His eyes no longer glowed.
Now… they shimmered.
"I don't know yet," he said quietly.
"But Edenfall will learn to fear it."