The data breach was hailed as a triumph across the resistance network. Social media feeds lit up with anonymized screenshots. Underground news outlets praised "The Ghost Surge," and civilians dared to hope.
But in the aftermath, the cost revealed itself.
Three resistance safehouses were compromised in retaliatory sweeps. Communications blacked out in Sector Nine. Nyx was found—alive, but barely—her system fried, her body trembling from neural backlash. She had overridden too many limits to keep the firewall distracted.
Kirion stood at her bedside in the dim-lit infirmary. Her breathing was shallow. "She bought us time," said the medic. "But her mind's scorched."
He felt the familiar weight return—the guilt that always followed a win. His daughter watched silently, fists clenched at her sides.
"We keep fighting, we lose pieces of ourselves," she murmured.
Kirion didn't correct her.
Elsewhere, Obel1sk vanished. No goodbye, no message. Just silence. Rumors spread—he had been captured, or worse, flipped.
The kill switch planted inside Aegis still pulsed, dormant but alive. A triumph. Yet the eyes that now followed them were sharper, angrier. The government had learned. Their retaliation would be colder, more precise.
And among the resistance, whispers began to stir.
Were the victories worth the bleeding?
Kirion didn't answer them. Instead, he knelt beside Nyx's cot and whispered:
"We don't win by surviving.
We win by making what we survived mean something."
In a hidden sector of the capital, a billboard flickered with a glitched message:
"Your firewall is burning.
We are already inside."
And somewhere, deep beneath concrete and wires, a spark flickered in the dark.