Night fell over Colombia like a sheet of blood-stained velvet. Vekom stood alone on a villa balcony once owned by one of Escobar's assassins. The city lights below flickered through the haze of tear gas and distant gunfire. Since Pablo's death, the vacuum had birthed chaos, and into that chaos, Vekom had poured weapons.
His clones had returned from Medellín with intelligence — full maps of Pablo's vaults, now largely abandoned or swallowed in faction wars. The Lord of Arms System quietly absorbed Pablo Escobar's wealth as his empire splintered. The total haul: $29.6 billion USD, in laundered accounts, physical reserves, and black gold caches.
System Update:Vault Resources Secured.Total System Capital: $32,418,331,947.91Cloning Capacity Expanded. New Limit: 40 Units.Research Tree: Tier 3 Unlocked.
But power invited retaliation.
It began in Vienna.
A Russian contact, supposedly neutral, set up a meeting with one of Vekom's European clones. But when the clone arrived, it wasn't arms being offered — it was a trap. A car bomb meant to vaporize him.
The clone survived. Barely. He crawled away from the flaming wreckage missing an arm, dragging himself into a canal before local agents could recover him.
Vekom watched the entire scene through the feed, his expression carved from granite.
They knew now. Not just that he was selling. But that he was everywhere.
And that made him a threat.
New Directive:Engage Counter-Insurgency Protocol. Target: European Syndicates.
He issued it without hesitation.
Across Europe, chaos began to spread.
A French arms depot in Marseille exploded in the night — a single anti-tank round fired from a rooftop 400 meters away. No witnesses. No cameras. Gone in seconds.
In Antwerp, a luxury yacht known to host illegal trades caught fire. Engine failure, they said. But there was no engine left to investigate.
In Kyiv, a rival dealer was found executed with surgical precision — two in the chest, one in the head. The shell casings didn't match any known caliber. They weren't supposed to exist.
They were custom.
Back in Baghdad, Al-Rashid contacted Vekom's clone again.
He no longer wore suits. He wore a military uniform now — one stitched with the insignia of a man rising too fast.
"We want tanks," he said. "And drones that cannot be seen. You've proven your power. Now we want your loyalty."
The clone said nothing.
Al-Rashid leaned in. "You've built a network. A ghost empire. But ghosts vanish when the world looks at them. You need allies, friend. You need a country. A base."
He was wrong. Vekom didn't need a base.
He needed a battlefield.
System Alert:U.S. Intelligence Intercept Detected.DEA Source Eliminated.Contingency Mode: Colombia.
The DEA task force assigned to Colombia had vanished. Officially, they were "missing in action." Unofficially, Vekom's clones had wiped them out after they stumbled too close to one of his underground testing sites.
The Americans were furious. Accusations flew. Satellite coverage over Colombia intensified. The U.S. President issued a public condemnation, blaming residual cartel activity — unaware he was years too late.
Vekom used the distraction.
He activated a new system feature.
Feature Unlocked:"Space Transport – Suborbital Delivery Mode."Capable of deploying clones globally in 3 hours or less.
He deployed four new clones to America — each embedded with separate roles: a border tech contractor, a defense lobbyist's aide, a DARPA janitor, and a Florida boat mechanic.
Let them look at Colombia.
Let them miss what was happening in their own backyard.
Meanwhile, the Vienna trap had consequences.
The surviving clone sent fragments of voice logs and footage. One name repeated in the scrambled data: Anton Bekrov.
An old Soviet arms dealer turned freelancer. He was once rumored to have sold tanks to terrorists during the Chechen War. Now, he was calling in favors.
Anton had wealth. Reach. He owned airstrips, ships, and half a dozen intelligence assets. He'd been untouchable.
Until now.
System Command:Authorization: Tier 3 Weapon Release.Target: Anton Bekrov's convoy, Route D9, Romania.
The drone that killed him was invisible to radar.
It dropped from suborbital space, painted black and armed with twin-missile pods.
The explosion left a crater 30 feet wide.
No survivors.
By now, the world was noticing.
But they had no name.
Just rumors of a seller who moved like a ghost, whose weapons showed up anywhere, whose clients spanned cartels, armies, and countries without flags.
And they were desperate to find him.