NEON CITY, DISTRICT 9 – 02:46 AM
The heartbeat of the city was artificial: neon pulses, electric rain, distant sirens drowned by corrupted jazz. Below a flickering street sign, Club Vector towered like a glitch in the skyline—a stronghold of power, pleasure, and secrets owned by the cyber-mafia elite.
Inside, they laughed. They always laughed when they thought the past was buried.
"Bring up the Null footage," said Carlos "Scarface" Rossa, heir of the Rossa syndicate, sitting in a VIP booth surrounded by augmented dancers and chrome-plated bodyguards.
A hologram sparked to life: a younger man, eyes like ash, wiring exposed from his neck. Torture footage. Null's last known image—before the Family erased him from every database on Earth.
"Gone like a ghost," Carlos smirked. "Fucking traitor. Not even AI wants to remember him."
The crowd laughed with him. Bottles cracked. Music swelled.
Then.
Darkness.
A flicker. A sound like static crawling down a spine.
Screens across the club began to glitch.
One by one, the holograms distorted.
Then a single word appeared, blood-red and blinking:
NULL DETECTED
A silence heavier than death fell. The dancers froze mid-motion. The guards reached for weapons.
Carlos stood. "Who the fuck's running this stunt? Turn that shit off—"
NULL DETECTED
NULL DETECTED
The club's power grid collapsed. Doors locked. Windows sealed. Even their implants went offline—digital blindness. Panic.
And then… he walked in.
⸻
He wasn't supposed to exist.
But there he was—soaked from the rain, a trench coat torn at the sleeves, chest faintly glowing from beneath with veins of crimson code.
He stepped through the chaos like a shadow reborn. The floor rippled with every footstep, as if the building itself recognized its executioner.
No weapons.
Just him.
Niko Corvax.
The erased. The ghost. The blood code.
He looked up. No hatred in his eyes—just something colder. Beyond vengeance.
Design.
"Carlos Rossa," he said, voice smooth as data silk, "you uploaded my death certificate. Let me return the favor."
A scream. One of the guards fired.
Too late.
Null raised his hand—and his veins lit up.
A crimson pulse rippled from his fingers. The bullet froze midair. Shattered.
Then the guard's cybernetic eye exploded, and he dropped, twitching.
"Get him out of here!" Carlos barked, retreating toward the panic room. "Kill that fucking ghost!"
Three more guards charged.
Null didn't dodge.
He walked through them.
The first one's bionic legs jammed and twisted backward. The second dropped as his spinal chip fried and smoked. The third… had just enough time to whisper, "He's inside the network," before his skin turned black and cracked like burning silicone.
⸻
Carlos locked himself behind a biometric vault door.
He screamed orders into a broken comms unit. No response.
Then he turned.
The vault's screen lit up.
A video played. Security footage from earlier that night—him laughing, bragging, mocking.
On top of it, text appeared:
"You erased me from the system.
Now I'll erase you from memory."
Carlos shook. "Please… I'll pay you. You want the servers? I'll give them. Just let me live—"
The screen shut off.
Null's voice came through the speakers.
"Too late for money. This isn't a hack. It's a rewrite."
And then the door began to melt—digitally. The metal screamed as its code was dismantled line by line.
It opened.
⸻
Only one man walked out.
Smoke behind him. A red trail on the floor.
Club Vector was offline. Rossa's servers crashed. Dozens dead. And in the system logs of every black-market satellite in the hemisphere, two words echoed.
NULL DETECTED
03:04 AM – OUTSIDE CLUB VECTOR
The black rain kept falling. Neon signs short-circuited across the street. People fled in silence, shadows darting between alleyways. But the building behind them—Club Vector—was quiet now.
Too quiet.
Inside, flames sparked from broken servers. The dance floor was a graveyard of chrome limbs and twitching implants. Blood mixed with coolant, dripping into the cracks of a shattered reality.
And he stood in the center of it all.
Null.
His coat smoked at the edges. His breathing was slow, deep, machine-like. But his eyes—his eyes weren't artificial. They were human.
Too human.
He moved toward the bar.
Behind the counter, a trembling bartender—young, maybe 17—had survived. His chest heaved. He didn't move. Didn't blink.
Null saw him. Stopped.
The kid whispered, "Please… I wasn't with them. I just serve drinks. I never touched a gun."
Null didn't speak.
He leaned forward, reached into the bar's neural interface port—hacked it with a tap of his fingertip. Lights across the building flickered violently.
A few seconds later, the screen behind the bartender came to life.
Dozens of names. Faces. Passwords. Server locations. Safehouse coordinates.
Rossa's entire empire in digital form.
"You're right," Null said. "You didn't pull a trigger."
He paused.
"You'll pour drinks for me now."
The kid blinked. "W–what?"
"You work for me," Null said, cold. "Or you never exist again."
The bartender nodded fast, tears streaming. Null uploaded a dataworm into the kid's retinal implant—a silent contract. Non-negotiable.
⸻
03:11 AM – BACKSTREETS
Null exited the building.
Sirens hadn't come. No cops in this part of the city. Only paid silence.
But eyes were watching.
From above, three drones tracked his movement. Red target reticles blinked. A distant sniper AI tried to lock.
Null paused at an alleyway.
Then without turning his head, he whispered:
"Blackline: counter-surveillance protocol. Zone kill radius—30 meters."
His skin pulsed red again.
The alley lights bent. The drones shivered in the air—then exploded, all three at once, as if deleted from reality. The sniper AI returned a single result:
TARGET LOCATION: NULL
ERROR: LOCATION UNDEFINED
⸻
Elsewhere, deep underground…
The Rossa Central Data Bunker lit up like a Christmas tree. Dozens of analysts screamed across terminals.
"Who reactivated the Null protocol?!"
"We scrubbed him—there's no data!"
"He's back in the system. Somehow. He's not just hacking—he's rewriting the damn architecture!"
The don of the Rossa Family, Old Man Vittorio, rose from his throne—a chair fused with seven exoservers and an AI hive.
His voice came through with a cough of static and fury.
"He survived. That means we failed.
Put a global bounty on his head.
I want him deleted so hard even God won't find him."
⸻
03:25 AM – ABANDONED SUBWAY NODE
Null descended into the undercity—deeper than anyone legally goes.
He passed graffiti of extinct gangs. Bullet holes in support beams. The scent of rot and old fire.
He entered a chamber. Dark. Full of cables, disconnected nodes, server husks.
Waiting for him: a woman with silver eyes and no name.
Known only in whispers as "Patch"—the code surgeon. Former lover. Now… weapon supplier.
She didn't flinch when he arrived.
"You're early," she said, lighting a cigarette with a flame from her fingertip implant.
"Target eliminated," Null replied.
"You want your next injection?"
He nodded.
She approached with a black syringe filled with Bloodline v.98—unstable viral code turned liquid, stored in a cryo-pod. One wrong dose and his brain would melt. But this? This was evolution.
She plunged it into his neck.
His spine arched. Eyes rolled white. Code rushed through his veins—data screaming, memory rebuilding.
Then silence.
He breathed out.
"Now," he whispered, "we move on to the next Family."
⸻
Final Scene – 03:41 AM – UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Across the globe, dozens of high-ranking mafia bosses awoke to the same message burned into their private networks:
"NULL DETECTED"
"Rossa Down. You're Next."
—N.C.
Some called emergency meetings.
Others fled.
And in the depths of the Net, where ghosts traded death for power, a legend began to resurrect.