Aiden sat on the living room floor, knees pulled tightly to his chest, feet resting flat on the edge of a glass table three times his size. His head hung low, the lenses of his glasses catching the flicker of the television’s dying light. One hand rose to adjust them—not because they’d slipped, but because the motion helped him think. A cup of tea, long gone cold, rested near his toes, untouched.
Newspapers littered the space like autumn leaves in a storm—some torn, some yellowing. A few were precisely folded and annotated, others crumpled in frustration. Red circles marked headlines, cryptic symbols filled margins—notations only he could decipher.
The television’s signal warped again. Static bled in and out. The anchor’s voice was a garbled echo, like someone speaking from underwater. But for one perfect second, the lower third stabilized, and a name glowed on-screen—circled in red marker:
He clasped both hands in front of his lips, thumbs pressed to his chin. Then, slowly, he rubbed them together in rhythm—as if warming an invisible thought. His eyes, wide behind round lenses, did not blink.
“The entity spotted in the Seventh Country, Kenya, has been eliminated. Official sources confirm extensive casualties. Initial reports identified the creature as an experimental-class threat. Suspended has labeled it: VIRULENT 09-A. A crude entrance into the Expanse was discovered shortly after. Speculative links to old Solfare drain nodes have been dismissed.”
He clicked his tongue. Once. Twice. Then scoffed.
“No–no, that’s not right.”
Fools.
To think this was Virulent 09-A?
The council was masking the truth. Classic misdirection. The real creature was still out there—still working. He could feel it. From the very first massacre—the B-Class Rising Stars, ripped apart like demonstration dummies—he knew it wasn’t random. It was theatrical. Studied. A kill with rhythm. That thing hadn’t been released.
It had escaped.
He didn’t like hunches. Too many variables. But this one lingered.
That’s why he kept watching.
He suspected the entity’s causality allowed it to steal something. A trait. An ability. A life. Ninety percent certainty.
Seven years ago, the Rising Stars were annihilated on a live broadcast. Each death cut mid-transmission. It hadn’t just shocked the Adventurers’ Guild—it rewrote their protocol. How they trained. How they ranked. How they died.
He’d replayed the footage too many times to forget. 15,752 views. He stopped counting after that.
The way it moved—fluid, deliberate. Each strike wasn’t violence. It was architecture. A choreographed method. Not a rampage. A ritual.
Now crouched like a gargoyle on the table’s edge, he leaned forward. One hand sifted through notes—tight handwriting, diagrams, clipped photos, chemical data.
He picked up one file between two fingers, like it was diseased.
A robbery. Floating storage node. An entire stockpile of XX2: vanished. Dated five years ago.
XX2.
A restricted compound, used primarily in surgical procedures for enhanced individuals—especially those with healing factors too aggressive for standard operations. Hospitals could requisition it, but never over the counter.
He’d studied it. Understood how, in precise doses, it could dampen causality. Slow down augmented feedback loops. Nullify certain mutations. But it required a delicate chemical balance—and a mind sharp enough to calculate the edge.
He underlined the name with a pinky.
Another sheet.
A bank robbery.
NextBank. His former branch.
The theft happened the same day he was reassigned. That same night, he had his first sleep lapse. That same night, he first saw the figure.
Not imagined. Not hallucinated.
Proof that the figure had associates.
He slid the reports into a rough timeline, arranging them with quiet focus. Each event clicked into place—not by force, but by gravity.
“There it is,” he murmured.
He stood slowly, still hunched, his weight forward as if his thoughts moved faster than his body could follow. A photo pinned to the table caught his eye—a white-haired figure walking away from a teleportation rig crime scene. The image was blurry. Deliberately so.
“Can’t confirm the face. But the hair—that length, that shade."
The woman who took it had worked that rig.
She was supposed to be anonymous.
“But money makes memory soft,” he said. “And silence even softer.”
He’d paid her. Enough to buy six years off her body with age suppressors. She talked. Then she forgot.
The money came from a NextBank sub-branch—his own. Transferred just months ago. Small amounts were moved in recursive patterns. Untraceable. Unless you already knew where to look.
But no one ever looked.
“Is this on purpose, Virulent 09-A?” he asked, rocking slightly.
“You’re too precise for this. So why leave a trail?”
He compared the deaths—everyone.
A clean punch through the torso. Always the same angle. Same wound radius. Same causality residue in the air. Like fingerprints, if you knew how to read them.
The Guild brought in a Detailer—an Effector trained to read the specific causality of Coz. Even they couldn’t explain it. The trail didn’t match any known synthetic augmentation. But one element repeated:
Blood.
That was the giveaway.
You couldn’t build a beast with that kind of cleanly refined causality—at least not without breaking several known laws. And a few unknown ones.
Suspended had been accused before, and most were speculations
But he had proof.
Archives, scrubbed clean, but not deep enough. Back when he hacked Orbit, he’d pulled what was buried. Files, coordinates, fragments of causality logs.
The beast wasn’t acting alone.
That white-haired figure? He wore a spatial ring—a rare artifact. Folded space. A gear vault, weapon holster, and storage device all in one.
93 percent.
That was how certain he had found his match.
He stood suddenly. Knees cracked. His shirt collar sagged, belt missing again. He walked to the TV and tapped its glass.
“Where do you stay, Molly?”
Not to track her. She wasn’t the target.
But he needed to know if she lived alone.
Who was she sleeping next to when the city went quiet?
He tilted his head back. The lenses of his glasses slipped slightly down his nose. With one practiced motion, he reached behind the screen and clicked off the illusion gear inside.
The glow vanished.
His phone buzzed.
Natasha:
“Where are you? Are we going or not??”
He stared at the message. Then crouched again—not quite sitting, not quite standing—and muttered:
God, I don't really want to go,” he sighed.
He didn’t answer. Just bent down, picked up a paperclip from the floor, unwound it, and placed it on top of the red circle drawn around Molly’s name.
***
The ground shook when it hit.
The creature moved faster than it had any right to.
Aiden barely managed to duck—its claws missed his neck by centimeters, carving sparks from the steel wall behind him.
His ribs screamed. He rolled, coughing blood, shoulder crunching into the wet earth. His hand slipped—then slapped down into a shallow puddle of his own blood still spreading.
He’d been fighting too long.
His coat was torn to shreds. One of his lenses had cracked. A claw mark ran from collarbone to hip, still leaking red.
The monster skittered sideways on six barbed limbs—a warped hybrid of insect and machine. Its chitinous body pulsed with red light beneath its shell. Its mouth split in three directions. Bone hooks clicked. Acid hissed from between its mandibles.
[Base: Activating]
[Status: Incomplete Build ??]
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
? Physical Body: Present Timeline
? ERROR: Neurochannel Flood
? Sync Failed. Rebooting...
Aiden’s vision jittered. His eyes snapped wide.
The monster lunged.
He tried to dodge—too slow.
A clawed backhand slammed into his thigh. He flew sideways, crashing into a broken rail. His vision blurred.
“Look at your system, for Christ’s sake,” said the voice from above.
He groaned, rolled onto his back, blinking past the blood.
A woman sat cross-legged in the canopy of a crooked tree. Her black agbádá rippled in the wind. A wide abèké straw hat cast her face in shadow, but her voice cut through the chaos with razor clarity.
“Flooded neural channel. You let your mind spike. Now you’re just a boy bleeding on the floor.”
The creature shrieked and charged again, skidding through mud and metal.
“Effectors like you—glass cannons. You break easily. Power isn’t your ally. Distance is.”
[System Advisory]
Cognitive stress exceeds 87%.
Initiating breathing recalibration in 3… 2…
Aiden exhaled shakily. His heartbeat thundered in his ears.
“Effectors are programmers, Aiden,” she continued. “You don’t punch reality—you write elegant scripts into the world.”
He spat blood and pushed off the ground.
“This isn’t coding,” he muttered. “It’s dying.”
“Wrong,” she said simply. “It’s debugging.”
The monster shrieked and lunged again.
Aiden reached toward the side of his watch—a Rolex Oyster Perpetual, once pristine, now dulled with age.
The second hand twitched forward—each movement precise and mechanical.. Time, measured in sharp little stabs.
[Base: Rewind Available]
[Status: Incomplete Build ??]
? Sync Duration: 6.1 seconds
The world blurred—colors smeared and bled.
He saw the mistake. The flinch. The impact.
Then he chose differently.
This time, he rolled forward. The monster missed by inches. He slung his blade—silver flashed through the air and bit under its shell. Not deep enough to kill, but it staggered. Acid hissed where the cut landed.
From the tree, she nodded once. “Better.”
The creature reeled, twitching erratically.
Aiden circled it, breath ragged.
“If you would come down and help me,” he said between gasps.
“Nope. Not a chance.”
[System Status Report]
Blunt Fracture: Left Femur
Cognitive Strain: High
Emotional Interference: Active
Base Cooldown: 19s
He winced. Pain flared with each breath. His body was breaking down.
“I can’t win like this.”
“You’re not here to win. You’re here to survive.
Winning comes after.”
The monster crouched low.
Its gaze flicked—not at him, but at the scorched pipe he’d used earlier.
He inhaled. Slower this time. Don’t panic. Think.
“Programming, right?” he muttered.
He didn’t run. Just shifted—enough to catch the edge of the moment, enough to pull light from the air.
A filament of light stitched into shape—thin as wire, bright as plasma, humming with stored intent. It stabbed into another leaking pipe as the creature lunged. Sparks. Fire.
The monster screamed, flames licking across its wet shell. It thrashed blindly.
Aiden limped back and dropped to one knee.
[Base Cooldown: 3s]
[Status: Incomplete Build ?? – Rebuilding: 2%...]
Next Use Sync Quality: 86%
The woman whistled—short, sharp, impressed.
She swung her legs a little, casual, like they weren’t surrounded by acid-spitting nightmares.
“You finally stopped flailing.”
Aiden coughed blood.
“Thanks for the encouragement,”he wiped his mouth with a bloodied glove.
“Effectors don’t get stronger by training their bodies. They refine their minds.
Learn to process your code faster. Cleaner. That’s how you survive.
That’s how you live long enough to matter.”
Aiden panted, hands trembling.
“How’s Bola’s trip going? Is he in the Expanse yet?”
“Not yet. We burned a million naira getting him there—he better be worth it.”
Natasha was a breacherwas one, technically—but her style was different. Instead of writing clean spell code, she hacked
She wrote viruses faster than most people blinked.
A spell didn’t fail because she blocked it—it failed because she infected
Her power was obscure, almost surgical—but it was deadly useful.
She’d modeled 67 percent of the crime scenes in the Virulent 09-A case, reconstructing them in layered holograms so Aiden could walk through them like interactive crime novels.
She rebuilt broken bones. Reassembled burnt corpses. Estimated age, sex, ancestry, and stature with near-academic precision.
It was her recon that let him find the pattern
***
A halfhearted drizzle.
The rain hadn’t stopped since morning, like someone’s mind stuck in replay.
He sat alone at the end of the counter in , a crusty little pub. The light above the bar flickered a beat slower than the music.
Dust clung to the neon over the liquor shelf like it was afraid of being forgotten.
He sipped from a teacup—index and thumb pinching the handle delicately, pinky raised—never breaking eye contact with the shelf.
There were three options.
The bartender—if she could be called that—moved with uncanny grace. Her left arm was a grafted wood-metal hybrid, engraved with glowing spirals, gears clicking softly as she reached for another bottle to mix into his tea.
She didn’t ask questions. Not when she dropped off the envelope. Not when she poured the first drink. Not when she noticed he hadn’t blinked in the last thirty seconds.
Only the beads on her waist chain responded, rattling softly like a clock counting down.
He peeled open the envelope.
Didn’t flinch. Just stared at it.
Plain envelope. Cream-colored. Tucked slightly off-center on the bar, like someone had placed it there with a whisper instead of a hand.
Stamped: INTERNAL – EYES ONLY.
He didn’t open it right away.
Instead, he ran his fingers through his hair—once, twice. Then again, harder this time, as if he could dig his way into thought.
His right leg twitched under the bar. The tip of his shoe tapped the wood, once every few seconds.
He clicked his tongue. Turned the teacup in his hand clockwise twice. Then raised it.
Empty.
“Another,” he muttered, eyes still on the envelope.
She nodded and poured without speaking, while he picked up a sugar cube and balanced it on his tongue like communion.
He took the second glass like he was bracing for recoil.
Sipped slowly.
The liquid shimmered faint green—distilled from synthetic baobab roots. Illegal in some zones.
Then he opened the letter.
His pupils narrowed.
One page. Clean font. Government watermark.
Division:Department:Subject:
And in bold, all-caps beneath it:
YOU HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED FOR FORMAL INQUIRY ALONGSIDE SIX OTHER EMPLOYEES. PLEASE PREPARE NECESSARY STATEMENTS AND EXPECT CONTACT FROM INTERNAL AFFAIRS.
No signature. Just a blade in paper form.
He pushed his glasses up again.
They slid right back down.
Then he folded the letter neatly, tucked it into his coat pocket like it was nothing more than a dinner receipt.
He didn’t speak.
The mustache above his lip twitched—dense, bushy, unkempt like his hair.
He hissed again—quieter this time. Slouched forward. Tapped his thumb against the rim of his glass.
Somewhere behind him, a pool cue cracked, followed by laughter.
The world kept spinning like it didn’t care a guillotine had just been quietly lowered over his neck.
He whispered to no one in particular:
“He should’ve burned the damn logs…”
Another sip. Another drag of his hand through his hair.
Then silence.
“Option one was to confess. But I’m not the suicidal type.”
“Option two was to do nothing and pray Lucas’s guilt would create a smokescreen thick enough for me to walk away untouched. Tempting.”
He tilted his head slightly—a gesture that felt both childlike and unnerving.
Just the sound of rain tapping on the windows like the ghosts of every bad decision he’d made, asking to come inside.
“Except Lucas had started talking. Or would. It’s inevitable. Good people—”
Aiden’s lips curled into a faint smirk,
“—tend to mistake dying for some kind of moral performance. Theatrics. And the moment he opened his mouth, it would’ve only been a matter of time before someone traced the burnedNaira back to my projects.”
Lucas Manning was Aiden’s immediate superior.
He was everything Aiden seemed not to be—calm, measured, and once, morally sound.
For years, Lucas and Aiden siphoned money through strategic gaps in the bank’s multinational shell system. They were both independent thieves who stole without limit.
Well—Aiden had always known about Lucas. Lucas never realized Aiden knew all along.
It was an elegant theft, veiled under layers of corporate jargon and internal blindness.
But Lucas cracked.
was the washing machine for kings and warlords. Flood lords. Spell-tech smugglers. Even high-odds gamblers for the Dice Festival
Now, with the Dice Festival being hosted in Nigeria, no one was taking chances. Not with or . Any excuse to tilt a win was cause for state-level surveillance.
One audit.
One whisper from upstairs.
And the man began fidgeting—stealing more
He left a trail
And worse—he started talking
Anything Lucas said could eventually pull Aiden into the mess. And if research was done...
Well, Aiden wasn’t exactly using the money to fund a charity.
No—he was using it to hijack industrial-grade electricity. Illegal. Banned everywhere.
But he needed it to build a system that could simulate gryphon flight paths
At the same time, the bank’s Board—who had been using the company as a laundering funnel for government-level embezzlement—needed scapegoats
The Blackflow Division was chosen. Not for guilt. For convenience
Everyone in that unit had just enough dirt to make them burnable.
Lucas included.
Aiden especially.
“Lucas is almost dead, so I’ll become the only node of knowledge left with a full picture of the embezzlement routes. And if I have the full picture, I become useful. Too useful to discard. At least for now.”
“Information asymmetry is the real currency here.
Morality is just the tax.”
He pushed up his glasses again—this time using his thumb.
A glint hit the lens.
He walked toward the exit, pausing only to run his hand through his short, disheveled hair—once, twice, then again with his knuckles, like he was trying to press a thought deeper into his scalp.
The rain still hadn’t let up. Not harder. Just enough to remind him the world didn’t care what bled inside.
Aiden walked fast, head low. City lights flickered across puddles, reflecting the dying sparks of lanterns and gas-fed burners. In the Expanse, there was no electricity. Not reliably. Everything ran on .
He reached the edge of the lot and raised his hand to flag down a passing chariot. Not the ceremonial kind. This was a —rust-colored steel plated with bronze rings, pulled by two tire-legged brutes known as , their limbs powered by internal coil-pistons and rhythmic heart-gauges. Smoke hissed from their backs.
“Zuma Prime Memorial,” Aiden said, hopping up onto the open cab, gripping the curved iron bar beside the seat.
The chariot master—an old woman with a cybernetic eye and fingers stained from engine oil—grunted and pulled a lever. The beasts whirred to life, gears clicking in a harsh syncopation as they bolted forward, hooves striking stone with a sound like hammer on bone.
The streets were narrow and soaked. Vendors shouted under hanging woven tarps. Windchimes made of clattered with every gust. Signs were carved in Yoruba and Amharic, backlit with faint fire-dyes and resin glowcaps.
Every so often, a church bell rang in place of a traffic signal.
Aiden watched the world blur past—a future rebuilt by hand.
At Zuma Prime Memorial, there were no drones or gates. Just a boy with a wooden crutch and a bundle of hand-stitched visitor passes. Aiden flipped him a battered coin. The boy bowed low.
Inside, the hospital glowed warm, not from tech, but from laced into the walls. Murals of ancestors and winged spirits moved gently, warding sickness with symbols passed down through . The floor clicked faintly with each step—a constant tick of the mechanical circulator beneath.
Room B7.
Lucas lay under a taut , its mesh laced with soft threads of -woven biofibers. The net pulsed a slow rhythm, matching the failing beat of the man beneath it.
He looked carved thinner. His skin was gray and sagging, his lips cracked, chest rising unevenly. A pulsed near his collarbone, breathing for him.
Two others sat nearby. One woman held a folded prayer cloth embroidered with coded symbols. Another man—maybe a cousin—wore ceramic beads inscribed with family names. They watched him like he was already half-gone.
Lucas coughed.
Hard. Bloody.
It sprayed the inside of the mesh. The woman flinched, holding the cloth tighter.
One eye opened.
“Don’t all look like that. Come on. Not even you too, Aiden?”
A cracked grin. “I thought you hated me.”
Aiden stepped closer. His face was stone.
“Really, Lucas? You have time to make jokes?”
He bit his bottom lip. Hard. A thin line of red welled at the edge.
Lucas groaned, still smiling.
“Chill, man. It’s not like I’m dying.”
Aiden adjusted his glasses with a slow, deliberate push.
The lenses caught the lantern light.
His eyes vanished behind the gleam.
Lucas tried to laugh again, but it came out more like a gasp.
“Can we have some alone time?”
The two companions stood reluctantly. The woman hesitated, then kissed Lucas’s forehead. They left.
Aiden walked to the door. Closed it.
Bolted it.
The sound echoed like a blade drawn across stone.
He smiled.
Then he smiled more.
Tried to stop.
Couldn’t.
The smile just stretched—like something inside was growing teeth.
Still facing the door, his voice came out quiet. Controlled. Clinical.
“Your liver.
Left lung.
Lower intestine.
Microfractures in the spine.
Stomach lining? Gone.
That hack-grade potion you took did a number on you, Lucas.”
He turned.
Lucas had gone still. His eyes searched Aiden’s face.
“How far is the 23 millionNaira you transferred to your father last week?”
“They’ve found it.”
Lucas jerked under the net. His arms twitched. The net strained.
He trembled—mouth open like he wanted to scream.
Aiden raised a hand.
Snapped.
[Form: Time stop ]
[Status: Incomplete Build ??]
Fuel: Mental fortitude.
Lucas froze.
But his eyes kept moving—wild, desperate.
Veins blooming red-black across the whites, pupils locked onto Aiden like a weapon, afraid to fire.
Aiden stepped closer.
A single tear traced down his cheek.
He didn’t wipe it.
He didn’t flinch.
“All from a drop of coffee.”
