Chapter 9 - Flashback


    The city was alive in a way that never slept, a chaotic pulse of neon and rain-slicked asphalt. Kira and Ethan moved like shadows through the streets, shoulders hunched, eyes scanning every reflective surface for tails. They kept their hoods up, their faces down, slipping through the throng of people lost in their own augmented realities. The mega-screens above flickered with looping advertisements, artificial models smiling in perfect resolution. Drones zipped overhead, lenses gleaming like the cold eyes of the city itself, scanning for faces, for heat signatures, for anomalies.


    “This is a bad idea” Kira muttered, adjusting the collar of her jacket to shield her face. “We’re lit up like an unregistered node on a closed network. I can feel eyes on us.”


    “You’re always paranoid” Ethan replied, voice low, though he checked the storefront reflections anyway.


    “For good reason” she shot back. “If we’re flagged before we reach the safehouse, Sledge’s gear won’t help you jack in. We’d be dead before we could even boot up.”


    They passed an alley where a trio of figures huddled around a portable terminal, fingers moving like spiders across the jury-rigged surface. Digital smugglers, selling access to black-market deep-dive networks. The kind of people they once tried to put out of business, before the lines between law and crime blurred. As they crossed a street, a siren blared in the distance, followed by the unmistakable thrum of a CyberWatch response vehicle. Kira’s hand twitched toward her concealed weapon, but the patrol wasn’t for them…not yet.


    Ethan swallowed hard. “We should keep moving.”


    Kira nodded, and they hurried through the final stretch toward an unremarkable tower block, neither especially run-down nor too secure. Even here, the chipped fa?ade and half-flickering hallway lights told a story of minimal oversight. The door recognized Kira’s alias—an identity rented through half a dozen false credentials—and slid open just enough for them to slip in before it sealed tight behind them.


    “This place still feels exposed” Kira muttered, though she led Ethan up several flights of stairs without pause. “But at least it’s off the grid.”


    Ethan pulled back his hood, exhaling. “Let’s just get to work before I start second-guessing all of this.”


    <hr>


    The hidden safehouse smelled of burnt circuitry and stale coffee, the acrid tang of overheated wiring blending with the musty odor of walls that hadn’t seen proper upkeep in years. The hum of outdated cooling fans rattled in hidden corners, struggling to offset the heat pulsing from overclocked processors stacked in one section of the main room. Flickering LED strips, some half-broken, threw uneven light across a workspace buried under tangles of cables like mechanical vines. Every so often, the surge protectors blinked in protest, barely containing the strain of the rigged-together tech that defied any safety regulation.


    A single flickering LED cast a sickly green hue over their makeshift command centre. Outside the small, grimy windows, the city pulsed with neon signs hawking the latest cyber-mods, corporate drones scanning the streets for transgressors. Inside, the air felt thick with tension and old secrets. Kira stood by one of those grimy windows, arms crossed, scanning the skyline. Below, a drone skimmed the crowds for anomalies, always watching.


    “This is insane” she muttered, eyes on the street. “You know that, right?”


    Ethan exhaled sharply, a half-smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Insane is pretending CyberWatch isn’t turning rogue AIs into weapons. We can’t just walk away. Not after we’ve seen what they did to the last group that tried to expose them.”


    Kira stayed by the window; arms tight across her chest. “We should walk away while we still can” she insisted, though her voice was more hollow than forceful.


    A terminal chimed, the unblinking screen displaying lines of cascading code—firewalls inside of firewalls, encryption inside of encryption. “You don’t believe that” Ethan said, fingers flying across the keys.


    She pressed her lips together, refusing to admit he was right. “How do you even know this place is secure?”


    Ethan leaned back, running a hand through his hair. “I trust the hardware more than I trust our old bosses. We hide it all here—behind dummy IDs and scrambled proxies. Even CyberWatch will have trouble pinpointing us…assuming we don’t draw too much attention.”


    Kira paced the cramped space, the brush of cables tugging at her ankles. “And you really trust Sledge’s gear?”


    Ethan gave a half-shrug. “As much as anyone trusts Sledge.”


    Kira tried not to smirk. “That’s not saying much.”


    “Sledge said the rig can handle deeper dives” Ethan continued, pushing away from the desk. “But we both know the real problem isn’t the tech.”


    She pivoted, meeting his gaze. “It’s them.”


    CyberWatch. Their longtime employers. The very organization they were about to betray.


    “They wipe entire networks over less” Kira said, voice tight. “We both remember what happened to the Cryptonet Collective—gone overnight. And those people? Not a trace.”


    This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it


    Ethan placed a hand on her shoulder. “This is the only way. If we so much as breathe near a CyberWatch server, we’re flagged. We’d be dead before we could log off.”


    Kira swallowed hard. “If something happens to you in there—”


    “It won’t” he said, too quickly.


    Kira shook her head, stepping back. “That’s not how this works. They’ll kill us both if they find out we’re leaking this. Promise me…if you get stuck—if I can’t pull you back—you fight to return. No matter what.”


    He hesitated, then nodded. “I promise.”


    She caught his wrist before he could move away. “And if you can’t?”


    Ethan’s expression softened. “Then you finish this without me.”


    A flicker of anger, fear, something else, crossed her face. “I hate you sometimes.”


    He managed a weak grin. “You’ll miss me when I’m gone.”


    She didn’t return the smile.


    The dive rig hummed to life, an electric whine rising in pitch. Ethan braced himself, lying back as the sedation routine kicked in. A wave of metal against bone, then a wash of stinging static in his veins as the neural link booted up, syncing his consciousness to the data flow. Kira moved into action. She checked connections, tightened the wrist straps, and rechecked the neural interface. Flickering LEDs traced Ethan’s descent into the digital currents. Kira, however, kept her focus on the power readings and fail-safes.


    “This gear is black-market modded” she warned, her voice tense.


    “No buffers. No auto-eject. Once you’re in, I can’t yank you out.”


    He gave a shaky thumbs-up, eyes half-lidded from the dive sedation. “Guess I’d better not screw up, then.”


    She scoffed. “Not funny, Ethan. If this hardware glitches, or if you get flagged, we have no clean reboot sequence. You’ll need to find your own exit.”


    His grin faded. “I will.”


    Her hand hovered over the interface controls. “Ethan, listen. If anything seems off... anything... Get out. I mean it. No heroics.”


    She locked eyes with him. In that moment, everything else in the safehouse vanished, the cables, the flickering lights, the hum of old fans.


    “Promise me” she whispered.


    He let out a long breath. “I promise.”


    She didn’t look convinced. Still, she pressed the final command.


    “See you on the other side” Ethan murmured as the countdown began.


    He felt an inward plunge, a sensation of being pulled through a narrowing funnel. Reality flickered, his body dissolving into raw code. His final glimpse was Kira’s face, hollow with dread, before everything went dark.


    <hr>


    He woke to silence. Cold, endless, suffocating darkness pressed around him like a living thing. His breath should have been rapid, his heartbeat pounding in his ears, but there was nothing. No sound, no warmth, no sensation except for the creeping void stretching endlessly around him. His limbs, did he even have limbs? He tried to move, but his body did not respond. A deep nausea rolled through him, not from vertigo, but from the absence of orientation itself. His mind grasped at fragments, flashing images that dissolved before he could make sense of them. A library. Towering shelves of shifting code stacked higher than any real-world structure. A book, its glyphs shifting under his fingers. A presence, something watching. Something waiting.


    His memories twisted like corrupted data, flickering in and out of clarity. He had been diving? No, he remembered he was escaping. But from what? And where was he now? The emptiness stretched on, pressing against the edges of his thoughts. Was this death? A system crash? A failure of the neural link? He wasn’t sure anymore. Then, from the depths of the void, came a ripple. A whisper, not a sound but a disturbance, brushing against his unraveling sense of self. He wasn’t alone. He wasn’t in the Abyss. He wasn’t anywhere. Something was wrong.


    Fragments of memory drifted in the void; they were becoming clearer. The last thing he remembered was the dive, the rig humming as it pulled him under, the weightless transition into the Abyss. He dived into a library, surrounded by endless corridors of shifting code, the cold glow of floating data scripts lighting the walls. The tome. He was sent to retrieve something—the altered source code—a package hidden within the structure of the old digital archives.


    The plan had been simple. Access the restricted sector, extract the evidence, and slip out before the system flagged him. But something had changed. The book he had taken was more than an archive. The moment he touched it, the script beneath the cover had rewritten itself. The glyphs melted into incomprehensible patterns, pulsing like a living thing. Suddenly, it appeard, The Necromancer.


    The shadowed figure waiting for him, its eyes hollow and burning with fractured light. A voice like tearing static had spoken his name, unraveling the digital walls around him. The library had collapsed into a shifting abyss, the world flickering between structured data and raw, broken code. He had tried to run, tried to eject, but the system wouldn''t let him go. And then… nothing. A void, endless and consuming.


    A sensation crawled over and beneath his skin, like data packets being rewritten in real time. He tried to move, but there was no ground beneath him, no air to push against.


    “What is happening to me…” Cedric’s voice was barely a whisper.


    He turned, searching for the system UI, the exit command, anything. But there was nothing. Just blackness stretching infinitely in every direction. He wasn''t diving anymore. He felt a ripple in the void, like a current moving through unseen water. A presence. A voice, deep and hollow, whispered from the darkness. Not in his ears, but inside his thoughts.


    “We are one.”


    Panic flared in Cedric’s chest. “Who’s there?”


    The void did not answer. But it did not stay empty. The darkness began to take shape, twisting, coiling, something was watching him. Studying him. A flicker of light, like a corrupted frame of a broken video feed, revealed an outline, something humanoid, but wrong. Its form twisted and stuttered, as though it existed across multiple states at once, struggling to define itself. The edges of its body flickered between solid and ephemeral, its limbs elongating and retracting in unnatural, erratic motions.


    A pulse of static rolled through the void, and Cedric’s head throbbed as fragmented data rushed into his mind, scrambled images, half-formed words. The entity didn''t move toward him, it shifted, as if rewriting its position between moments, appearing closer without traveling the distance. Its presence gnawed at the edges of his awareness, an intrusive force reaching into him, tugging at something deep within his code, as if testing how much of him was still human.


    Cedric felt his breath hitch, or at least he thought he did. He had no lungs here. But the fear was real, visceral. He tried to pull away, but there was no ground to retreat to, no air to push against. The void closed in around him, thick like ink, suffocating. The figure loomed, its face was a void of its own, shifting and reforming, eyes like fractures in reality itself. The longer Cedric stared, the more it felt like something inside him was… unspooling. For the first time, Cedric felt it. Not just fear. A pulling sensation, as if something beneath the surface of his mind was being unraveled.


    “No” he thought, resisting the sensation, but it coiled around him like a thousand unseen tendrils.


    He tried to scream... But he couldn''t. There no was no sound, just silence.