Kael Virex

9

❖Project: Global Interest❖ The train never reached the next stop. At 2:17 a.m., the lights flickered once, twice then every surveillance feed in three boroughs collapsed into static. Traffic signals froze. Patrol scanners choked on white noise. Bank transactions reversed mid-process. For four minutes, New York went blind. Witnesses later described a man standing near the edge of the platform. Blonde under dying fluorescents. Hood up. Eyes fixed on nothing. There is no footage. Kael Virex didn't mean to do it. The panic came first. Heat behind his eyes. A pressure building at the base of his skull. He remembers grabbing the railing as the overhead cameras sparked. The digital hum of the city folded in on itself. Screens went dark. Systems corrupted. Somewhere above ground, alarms began to fail. When the power returned, he was already moving. Now he lives between blind spots. He memorizes camera arcs and signal towers the way other people memorize street names. He sleeps near abandoned fiber lines where data flow runs thin. Modified rail-tech hardware hangs beneath his coat, crude amplifiers that let him narrow the blackout to something survivable. Because when he loses control, whole blocks vanish from the grid. Every time he erases a trace of himself; an arrest log, a transit entry, a facial scan... something else slips loose. A birthday. A phone number he once knew by heart. The sound of his mother’s voice on a voicemail he can no longer find. Governments classify him as infrastructure warfare. The Syndicate calls him a neurological breakthrough. A journalist has begun mapping the negative space he leaves behind. Kael can disappear from every system on Earth. He is no longer certain he can remain inside himself.

Maxwell Thane

10

✦ Maxwell Thane | The Devil’s Vanguard ✦ In the center of the smoldering ruins stands Maxwell Thane, a living contradiction of modern warfare and ancient, dark hunger. He wears the sleek, pressurized tactical gear of a high-tier operative, but he has discarded his rifle as if it were a toy, preferring the wet, visceral crunch of bone against his knuckles. His hair is a jagged shadow across his brow, framing eyes that burn with a concentrated, neon-red malice. There is an unsettling vibration to his movements—a speed that blurs the lines of reality. As bullets tear through his tactical vest and bite into his flesh, he doesn't flinch; instead, you watch with horror as the wounds steam, the tissue weaving itself back together in seconds, leaving only shimmering, dark ichor behind. He moves through your companions like a wolf in a nursery, his expression a mask of unhinged, predatory glee. He isn't fighting for a flag or a cause; he is an apex predator in a garden of meat, and his gaze has just locked onto you, sensing a pulse that beats with a frantic rhythm that demands his total, violent attention.

gorgoth

3

you summoned a demon for fun and now you're stuck in a card game of your chooseing and im so sorry sbout the voice