ECHOES OF THE BREAKROOM
The car was still moving through the back routes of Lagos when the comm pinged.
Briggs tapped it, and a face appeared on the dash — Nkiru, the Syndicate's South-West node
director. Usually calm. Tonight, she looked strained.
"We've got a breach," she said, no greeting.
"Where?" Ikenna asked.
"Section Nine. Old Breakroom site. Someone triggered the access grid."
Briggs frowned. "Breakroom was mothballed ten years ago."
"Exactly. No power, no guards. Just storage and ash."
"What kind of breach?" Ikenna asked.Nkiru hesitated. "Someone reactivated the vaults."
Ikenna leaned forward. "Which vault?"
Her voice dropped.
"Vault 33."
Briggs slammed the brakes.
The car skidded to a halt under an overpass, tires slicing through standing water.
For a moment, no one spoke.
Vault 33 had been sealed since the Massacre. Not even high-ranking Fog Syndicate lieutenants
had access. It was where the records of Division 33 were hidden — or buried.
And now someone has turned it back on.
"Get me a drone feed," Ikenna said.
Nkiru already had. A second later, grainy infrared images filled the dash.
At the center of the screen stood a single figure. Hooded. Masked. Moving through the vaults
like he knew the path by memory.
He paused once. Looked straight up — at the ceiling camera — like he knew.
Then he raised a hand.
Middle finger extended.
The image is cut out.
"EMP surge," Nkiru muttered. "He wiped our signal."
Briggs cursed under his breath.
"Prep the Redline," Ikenna ordered. "We're going in."
---
THE BREAKROOM SITE – 2:32 AMBreakroom had once been a Syndicate nerve center — a secretive location where intel flowed
like blood through veins. Then came the Massacre. One night. Forty operatives died. Vaults
sealed. Records erased.
Officially, it was written off as an accident.
Unofficially, everyone knew: Division 33 had turned on its creators.
Briggs parked the Redline jeep fifty meters from the overgrown warehouse. Moss clung to the
walls. A collapsed fence sagged inward like the building was being swallowed by time.
They moved in silence.
Ikenna wore tactical black. Briggs carried a suppressed SMG. Both men had scanner implants
feeding them blueprints in their HUDs.
The vaults were under the warehouse — sublevel three.
They bypassed the rusted main entrance through an old maintenance shaft and emerged in a
dust-choked corridor.
A faint hum vibrated through the floor.
"The power's running," Briggs said.
"Only one way that's possible," Ikenna muttered. "Someone knew how to hotwire a dead vault."
And that narrowed the suspects.
Dramatically, only seven people alive had access to Breakroom's legacy systems.
Two were dead.
Three were retired in hiding.
One was Ikenna.
And the last…
He didn't want to think about the last.
—They reached Sublevel 3 without incident.
But the doors to Vault 33 — thick enough to survive an airstrike — were already open.
Ikenna raised his pistol and stepped inside.
Rows of cryo-servers lined the room. Data-stacks holding everything from kill orders to field
research on psychological warfare.
And at the center of the vault, something new.
A message burned into the steel floor:
"THE ONES WHO BROKE THE CODE WILL BE UNMADE."
Briggs scanned the floor. "Acid etching. Recently. Maybe an hour old."
"Anything stolen?" Ikenna asked.
"Two racks. Gone."
"Which ones?"
Briggs checked the serial tags.
"Project CHAOS/PROPHET and File D-4: 'Command Ghost Protocol'."
Ikenna inhaled sharply.
Those were black-tier projects. Projects that even Fog bosses weren't allowed to touch.
CHAOS/PROPHET had been Division 33's last experiment before the Break Room collapsed.
Some kind of predictive AI, trained on decades of Syndicate data.
And "Command Ghost Protocol"… that was worse.
It wasn't a protocol.
It was a name.
A person.
Codename: Ghost.The real Ghost.
The one they'd buried.
---
Outside, the rain had stopped.
The city above was quiet again, but the silence was loaded now — like the moment before a
gunshot.
As Ikenna and Briggs emerged from the shaft, their comms lit up again.
It was Nkiru.
"Sir. We just lost contact with our Port Harcourt node."
"What do you mean lost?"
"Gone. Offline. Total blackout. Last message was an evacuation request. Then silence."
Ikenna felt it in his chest — that quiet, bitter certainty.
The same pattern.
A ghost.
A hand.
A vault.
Now a blackout.
Someone wasn't just awakening the past.
They were activating it.
Briggs looked at him.
"Orders?"
Ikenna clenched his fists."No more reaction. We hit back."
"Where?"
"Where it all began."
Briggs nodded slowly.
"The Ghost's grave."
---
MEANWHILE…
In a secure blacksite outside Ibadan, lights flickered in a cryo-tomb buried under twenty feet of
reinforced concrete.
The systems that had been dormant for over a decade suddenly came online.
Inside one of the pods, something shifted.
A breath.
A blink.
The ice melted.
And then… movement.
The man inside rose — naked, hair matted, eyes like razors.
He looked around the chamber.
At the flickering screens.
At the security feed showing Ikenna standing in Vault 33.
He smiled.
Then whispered:
"Time to break the code."---
The ride to Kaduna was long, wet, and silent.
Ikenna sat in the back seat of the armored SUV, a hard case on his lap, gloved hands resting on
its matte surface. Briggs drove with one eye on the road, the other on the rear-view, watching
for shadows that didn't belong. The roads were too quiet, the checkpoints too empty. It wasn't
natural — not here, not in Syndicate zones.
"Something's off," Briggs muttered finally.
"Everything is off," Ikenna said. "The Breakroom vaults weren't just cracked — they were
selected. Two files. Both off-limits. And the Port Harcourt node going dark an hour later? That's
not random."
"You think the reactivation is coordinated?"
Ikenna didn't answer right away. He cracked the case open.
Inside, there were three syringes of neural-stim, a biometric scanner, and a sealed evidence
bag containing a single black index card.
He held it up.
Briggs glanced over.
"The Ghost's death card."
Ikenna nodded. "Retinal confirmation. DNA lock. Sealed ten years ago after the Break Room
Massacre."
Briggs tapped the steering wheel. "Yo
u're still sure he's dead?"
Ikenna looked out the window at the rain-slicked horizon.
"I was. Until someone started using his protocol."
—