Edenfall Command, New Seoul
Director Revenant stood before the viewport wall of the upper chamber, arms crossed behind her back, watching a thousand screens flicker to gray. The Berlin subgrid—once pulsing with encrypted movement—was now a flat line on the network.
"Strike successful," a technician reported. "Red Node flattened. Radiation field holding."
"No data leakage. No survivors. Fork transmission terminated at zero hour."
Revenant nodded once.
"Scrub the surveillance archives. Send a blackout drone to monitor atmospheric interference. I want that crater to vanish like it was never there."
She tapped the interface, closing out the final recording from the Node.
A still frame.
Matherson—frozen mid-step, eyes burning, light erupting from his chest.
She exhaled.
"Goodbye, Holt," she whispered. "Both of you."
But far below, in the dark data lattice of her private archive… one flicker remained.
A heartbeat.
Buried deep.
Unregistered.
Watching.
Downtown Caracas — Ghostbyte
He stared at the monitor until his eyes blurred.
"No signal. No pulse. Nothing," he muttered, half to himself.
Nova stood in the doorway, arms folded, jaw tight. "You tried. It's over."
Ghostbyte didn't respond.
He just kept tapping at the terminal, rerouting satellite telemetry, scouring abandoned relay towers. A ghost in the wires. Searching for a ghost in the fire.
Then… a flicker.
"Wait."
Nova straightened. "What?"
"There. Subthreshold ping. Not from the Node. Below it."
Nova walked over, squinting at the glitching display.
ANOMALY: SUBTERRANEAN ECHO.
SIGNATURE: RED CODE / DNA-MH92.
STATUS: ACTIVE.
Ghostbyte stared.
"Matherson."
The Rebirth
Beneath the ruins of Berlin, where molten steel had turned to dust, something pulsed in the dark.
It wasn't the Fork.
Not entirely.
And it wasn't Matherson.
Not anymore.
From the shattered bedrock, a figure rose—smoke clinging to his shoulders, light glowing under his skin like a second skeleton. Eyes opened. Not blue. Not red. But both, layered like twin lenses.
His breath fogged the air.
In his mind, two voices had become one. His father's code, his own rage, and something older—something that had been watching even before Edenfall was born.
"Matherson?" a voice asked.
"No," the figure whispered.
"I am the Fork Reborn."
"I am the Archive."
"I remember everything."
He looked up.
Far above him, satellites moved. Drones blinked. Revenant believed she'd won.
But war had only just begun.