The city had changed—but so had Kirion.
Gone were the skyscrapers gleaming with sterile pride. Now they loomed cracked and dark, their windows like dead eyes. Military drones buzzed overhead, their surveillance routes more frequent. Curfews had become doctrine, and whispers of rebellion stitched the alleys like smoke.
But Kirion walked through it all unseen.
He no longer moved like a man burdened by survival.
He moved like a ghost who had returned for unfinished business.
Sera was at his side, cloaked in secondhand threads and quiet confidence. Her hair was wrapped tight beneath a data-woven scarf, one she had programmed herself to jam low-level sensors. Her eyes scanned everything—doors, drones, reflections.
No longer just a daughter.
Now, his shadow.
His equal.
They made contact with the signal source in a half-collapsed library beneath the old tech district. Dust clung to every surface, but the underground was alive: silent terminals, coded murals, the faint hum of quantum drives older than most buildings still standing.
A woman greeted them with an augmented eye and a voice like static steel.
"You're late," she said.
Kirion didn't flinch. "We waited until you were real."
She smirked. "Welcome to the Arc Echelon."
The Arc wasn't resistance. It wasn't rebellion.
It was reconstruction in exile.
Coders, doctors, scientists, rogue scholars, disillusioned military—an entire hidden society bound by a single goal: rebuild the country from its bones out.
They didn't just fight the regime.
They built what would replace it.
Kirion listened, questioned, dissected.
He watched how they operated—efficient, tight, but missing something.
Heart.
Conviction forged in fire.
They had data. He had scars.
They had plans. He had will.
He didn't ask to lead.
But leadership wrapped itself around him like a glove finding its rightful hand.
By the second week, they were consulting him on urban med response systems, disguise networks, and counter-surveillance.
By the third, he was redesigning escape routes, ghost tunnels, and triage code.
Sera worked beside him, charming old bots back to life, creating logic loops to confuse government watchdogs. They called her "Wireling." She liked it.
And then came the first mission.
A convoy—moving political prisoners east, under high clearance. The Arc wanted to monitor.
Kirion wanted to liberate.
"They'll expect resistance," the Arc lead warned.
Kirion nodded. "Then let's give them something unexpected."
He stepped back into the fire, not as the hunted, but as the storm.
No mask. No hesitation.
Just the man the regime had forgotten.
And the daughter it had never seen coming.