0830 Hours – Aerial Insertion, Andar Prime
From above, Andar looked dead.
A shining, beautiful metropolis now dimmed like a corpse.No cars moved. No people. Just rows of silent streets and blacked-out towers.
"City grid's gone," Grimm muttered, checking his feed. "Power, comms, even solar lines. Something's choking the infrastructure."
"Look closer," Nyx said.
Kael zoomed his optics.
In the parks, in the streets — thousands of bodies. Standing perfectly still. Heads tilted toward the darkened sky.Not dead.Waiting.
Kael's blood went cold.
"They're not civilians anymore," Isa said over comms. "They're Hivebound. Controlled by a Signal Root somewhere below the city."
"And if we destroy the Root?" Kael asked.
"They shut down."
"And if we don't?"
"They evolve."
0900 Hours – Ground Zero
The ops team touched down in the city center, blades drawn, guns charged.
No resistance yet.
Kael led the way, weaving between the frozen people. Some murmured under their breath — fragments of Architect code leaking from their lips:
"…awaken… ascend… integrate…"
A little girl stood in the middle of a cracked fountain, staring at him with hollow silver eyes.
Grimm grimaced. "Hate this."
Kael didn't reply.
This wasn't war.
It was annihilation dressed as peace.
0925 Hours – Contact: First Hostiles
The first strike was sudden.
A man — once human — lunged from a storefront window, bones twisted into bladed limbs, veins glowing blue.
Grimm crushed him with a grav gauntlet before he could scream.
But it triggered a chain reaction.
Across the plaza, the civilians twitched. Twisted.Limbs elongated. Eyes burned silver.
The Hivebound had awakened.
Combat Engagement Initiated – Threat Level: Crimson++
Kael moved first, slicing two hostiles before they fully shifted. Grimm and Nyx formed a killbox perimeter. Stitch unleashed a barrage of micro-drones to intercept the faster ones.
The Hivebound fought like nightmares — faster, stronger, unrelenting.
For every one they dropped, two more took its place.
"We can't hold this ground forever!" Nyx barked, reloading.
Kael slashed through a wall of Hivebound, panting.
"We're not here to fight the army," he said. "We're here to cut off its head."
0940 Hours – Signal Root, UnderCity
They dropped into the sewers — where the old tech lines ran.
The deeper they went, the hotter it got.Pipes glowed. Walls sweated. The air buzzed with static.
And at the heart of it, they found it:
The Signal Root — a grotesque machine-organism hybrid, throbbing against the concrete. It pulsed with Architect code, veins reaching into the city above like roots from a metal tree.
Standing before it was a figure.
Tall. Clad in a black exo-suit shaped like bone and steel. A tattered crimson scarf wrapped around his arm.
His helmet split apart, revealing a face partly human — but the left half was a lattice of code and living metal.
And he smiled.
"You're too late," he said.
Boss Introduction – Revenant
Codename: RevenantFormer Phantom Operative. Presumed KIA two years ago during Operation Nightfall.
Now?Fully integrated into the Architect's will.
Kael's fists clenched. He knew that face. He knew that voice.
Revenant drew a blade unlike anything they had ever seen — a sword that flickered between dimensions, too fast to track.
"Architect showed me the truth," Revenant said calmly. "Humanity is a broken machine. I chose evolution. You should have too."
Kael stepped forward, blades igniting.
"I'm not broken," he growled.
"I'm free."
Boss Fight – Revenant
The duel was instant chaos.
Revenant moved like liquid thought — teleporting between dimensions mid-strike, his blade slicing the air itself.
Kael barely kept up, countering with raw force and reaction.
Nyx, Grimm, and Stitch couldn't even land a hit — Revenant's tech was beyond anything they'd faced.He fought like he knew every move they would make.
Because he did.
He was one of them once.
But Kael adapted. He started to think wrong — fighting asymmetrically, like the glitch he was.
A feint here. A reckless charge there.
Human unpredictability against machine precision.
Kael baited Revenant into overextending — just long enough for Grimm to slam a graviton mine onto his back.
BOOM.
Revenant staggered.
Kael struck — twin blades piercing through Revenant's armor, severing critical sync nodes.
The ex-Operative gasped, falling to one knee.
But he laughed.
Laughed with blood spilling from his lips.
"You think this is over?" he whispered."This is only the first vessel."
The Signal Root behind him exploded into black shards — scattering data seeds across the underground.
Mission Aftermath
Andar Prime was burning.
Without the Root, the Hivebound collapsed — lifeless husks littering the streets.
But the Architect had what it wanted: a foothold.
A champion.
And Revenant… even in defeat… had seeded the city with something far worse.
End of Chapter 7