Atlas didn't sleep.
He sat alone in the vault's engine chamber, the core's silent pulses casting shifting shadows across his face. The warning played over and over in his mind—his own voice, older and broken, telling him to kill the only blood he had left.
He didn't trust it. But he couldn't ignore it either.
Not when the system confirmed the voiceprint. Not when Nyra ran the analysis five times.
The deeper he went into the vault's systems, the more encrypted files he unearthed—black files labeled with strange codes, void tags, and Omega-class seals. All locked. All waiting for a master key that didn't yet exist.
His instincts screamed at him: this wasn't just a reunion.
It was a setup.
"Nyra," he said, rubbing his temples. "Give me a full analysis of those Mars coordinates. Terrain, possible structures, Vorr movement if any."
"Already scanning. Warning—current orbital scans of Mars show irregular energy signatures. Atmospheric composition is unstable. Radiation zones have spiked beyond expected decay rates."
"Someone's tampering with the atmosphere?"
"Or shielding something beneath it."
He stood.
"Prep the Skyrend. We're going to Mars."
"Should I alert the Phoenix remnants?"
"No. Not until I know what I'm dealing with."
She hesitated. "You shouldn't go alone."
"I'm not."
He reached behind the cryo console and pulled a plasma rifle from a magnetic locker. Its surface was scorched, the signature mark of the final resistance etched into its side—a phoenix with wings outstretched, burning in silence.
"I've got ghosts riding with me," he muttered.
Hours later, the Skyrend broke through the vault's ceiling dock, its fusion engines flaring to life as it carved a path through the debris field.
Mars appeared in the distance like a bleeding wound.
The red planet hadn't looked red in centuries. Not since the Vorr turned its skies into black storms and melted its cities into glass. Still, there was something unnatural in the way the clouds shifted above Olympus Mons. Like the planet itself was breathing.
Atlas locked in coordinates.
As he descended into the atmosphere, static slammed into the cockpit. Warning lights flared, and Nyra's voice snapped to alert mode.
"We're being scanned."
"By what?"
"Unclear. But the source is not Vorr."
The Skyrend lurched. Instruments blinked erratically.
Atlas gritted his teeth. "Activate stealth mode. Engage auto-correction thrusters."
"Working. But if this continues, we'll be forced to land manually."
"Then prep for crash sequence."
He braced himself.
The ship buckled as magnetic interference crashed over it like waves. Systems flickered. Heat surged through the hull.
Then silence.
The storm vanished. The turbulence stopped.
They broke through the clouds and saw it.
A city.
Hidden beneath the ash storms and rubble.
Still intact.
The skyscrapers were worn but standing. Bio-domes flickered faintly across rooftops. Defense grids long thought destroyed were glowing—active.
Atlas didn't speak. He just stared.
This place wasn't ruins.
It was alive.
The Skyrend coasted down toward the outer rings of the city, settling between what looked like a collapsed magrail system and the skeletal remains of a battle cruiser.
Atlas stepped out into Martian air filtered through his helmet. Dust swirled in slow spirals. And ahead of him, beyond a broken wall, figures moved in the shadows.
Not Vorr.
Not human either.
"Contact," Nyra whispered through the comms.
He raised his rifle, moved low, fast—cover to cover. The city was eerily silent except for the rhythmic hum of buried machinery.
Then a voice echoed through the comm.
"Atlas Thorne. You made it."
He froze.
The voice wasn't his sister's.
It was male.
Cold. Familiar.
"Who is this?" Atlas barked.
A figure stepped out from the broken archway.
He was tall, armor-clad in black with veins of pulsing red tech laced through his limbs. His eyes glowed beneath a Vorr helmet—but there was no mistaking the human shape beneath.
"You don't remember me," the man said, pulling off the helmet.
Atlas's blood went cold.
"You died on Titan."
The man smiled, jaw twitching with a hybrid's muscle tension. "That's what you were meant to believe."
"Commander Rellon," Atlas spat.
Rellon. One of the elite generals from the final resistance. A man thought to have sacrificed himself in a last stand to destroy Vorr research facilities.
Except here he was—alive, enhanced, and clearly altered.
"What the hell are you?" Atlas growled.
"A bridge," Rellon replied. "Between what we were and what we must become."
"Don't give me riddles. Where's my sister?"
"She brought you here. As planned."
He raised a hand, and instantly Atlas's HUD glitched. A virus embedded in the frequency hijacked Nyra's interface. Static burst through his earpiece.
"Don't fight it," Rellon said. "You'll understand soon."
Atlas fired.
Three shots. Clean, center-mass.
Rellon didn't flinch. The rounds struck a kinetic barrier and dispersed like water.
"Still quick to pull the trigger," he said. "That's going to be a problem."
Behind him, more shapes emerged—some human, some augmented, some... neither. One of them wore a hood, face obscured. Her body shimmered with cloaking distortion.
"Come out," Atlas growled.
The figure stepped forward, lowering her hood.
It wasn't his sister.
But she looked exactly like her.
Almost.
The features were off—like a painting drawn from memory and distorted slightly in shadow. Her eyes were glassy. Artificial.
And she was wearing his mother's locket.
His stomach dropped.
"What is this?"
"She's the prototype," Rellon said calmly. "The first of the Reconstructed."
Atlas stepped back, rifle trembling.
"No. No, that tech was banned. The consciousness clone program—"
"Was never destroyed," Rellon interrupted. "Just buried. Like us."
"She's not real."
"She's more real than you," the girl said. Her voice matched his sister's. Perfectly. "And soon, you will be too."
Something hit him in the chest.
Hard.
Atlas looked down—his armor cracking, light bursting from the seams.
Nanites.
Injected.
Rellon's voice echoed inside his head.
"You were never meant to stay human, Atlas. The Last Human must become the First God."
Atlas fell to his knees, his vision flickering red.
Inside his neural interface, new words