The seaplane skimmed across the black water, silent but for the whisper of turbulence under its wings. Elijah sat in the rear seat, hood up, fingers gloved in carbon mesh. The window beside him was dark, distorted by salt and shadow. A faint blue glow blinked from the holo-console on his wrist.
**MISSION: SHADOW ENTRY – SL009-OMEGA**
**LOCATION: MURDINE ISLAND PRIVATE FACILITY (Slade-Tech Shell Lab)**
**OBJECTIVE: Infiltrate and extract internal personnel files from Project Nyx.**
**Secondary Objective: Leave no trace. Maintain death status.**
**Alias Activated: Ezra Vale**
"You nervous?" asked the pilot in a clipped voice, never turning from the controls.
Elijah didn't answer.
He wasn't nervous.
He was focused.
Tonight, the man known as Elijah Blackwood didn't exist.
---
Murdine Island was little more than rock and fog. A forgotten military outpost turned corporate shadow project — owned by a Slade-controlled shell company but never listed on public ledgers. The Fold had traced unusual data movement there: files tagged "Project Nyx" routed off-grid, encrypted, then erased.
Secrets worth digging for.
The facility itself was buried into the rock. A slab of concrete and dark glass, partially submerged, accessed only by coded water entry and magnetic elevator shafts. Surveillance was minimal. Too minimal. Almost like they didn't expect anyone to know it existed.
Perfect.
Elijah slipped into the dive suit, checked his oxygen readings, and slid backward into the freezing sea. The cold bit into his skin through the layers. He sank like stone, body silent, movement calculated.
Inside his ear, The Fold's neural relay pulsed.
**Aleksei:** "You have twelve minutes to breach the sub-level and pull the files. After that, scheduled power cycling could fry the grid."
**Elijah:** "Copy."
**Aleksei:** "And Ghost?"
He paused.
"I'm not here."
---
The water intake shaft had been mapped already. Elijah approached the steel grate, triggered the pulse disruptor from his belt, and watched as the magnetic seal disengaged with a soft *clunk*.
He slipped through.
The shaft narrowed, dark and humming with water pressure. At the end, an angled maintenance port. He activated his wrist chip. A soft light blinked—signal handshake successful.
**Welcome, Ezra Vale.**
Inside, the lab was cold steel and cobalt lighting. White panels. Black flooring. Silent hallways. No guards. No cameras. But Elijah's instincts screamed otherwise.
He moved quickly.
His biometric camo adjusted every time he stepped under motion sensors — reflecting back low-res, looped imagery of an empty hallway.
Down three corridors. Past a genetics archive. Through an unmarked side chamber that smelled faintly of formaldehyde.
Then—
**CORE ROOM – RESTRICTED**
He tapped into the panel. His chip blinked once.
**Access Granted.**
Inside: Servers stacked like altars. One central terminal sat under a beam of cold light.
He plugged in a shard drive and began the pull.
**TRANSFERRING: PERSONNEL FILES – PROJECT NYX**
Lines of text scrolled.
Experimental neuro-mapping.
Cognitive interface syncing.
Artificial emotional suppression.
He paused.
**Blackwood, E. – Subject E07 \[REDACTED]**
His own name.
He started to dig, but the timer on his wrist blinked.
**3:21**
"Dammit."
He copied what he could and yanked the shard drive free.
---
The exit route ran through a lower substation. But as he turned the corner—
Movement.
Two men in white lab gear. Talking. One scanned a retinal panel while the other pushed a containment crate.
Elijah slid into the shadows.
He wasn't here for a fight. But he couldn't risk exposure.
The moment the second man turned, Elijah was on him — a whisper of movement, one palm over the mouth, the other driving the nerve blade into the soft base of the neck.
He caught the body before it fell.
The second man never even saw him.
The kill was clean. Quick. Untraceable.
**No one saw the ghost.**
He exited through the emergency drainage tunnel and emerged behind the west bay reef. A Fold retrieval drone blinked in the water nearby.
He climbed in.
---
Back at the Fold compound, Elijah sat in the debriefing chamber — a circular room of polished obsidian, with screens lining the wall.
Aleksei studied the shard Elijah had retrieved.
"Project Nyx is bigger than we thought," he said. "They were testing live neural reprogramming through emotion triggers. Subject data confirms synthetic grief cycles. You were one of them."
Elijah's voice was quiet. "What are the odds they still think I'm dead?"
"High," Aleksei replied. "News still holds. Jeremy's feeding the press small distractions. You're invisible. But the Slades are getting sloppy."
Elijah's hands curled into fists.
"They made me think I was broken. They designed it."
"They did," Aleksei said. "But now you're the only man who's ever walked out of Nyx alive."
Elijah stood.
"This isn't revenge anymore," he said. "It's reckoning."
He turned to leave.
But before he reached the door, a quiet beep echoed.
A screen flickered on.
A masked face. Not Aleksei's.
Someone higher.
Fold Command.
"Elijah Blackwood," the voice said. "Your training period is complete. The data retrieved confirmed your viability. But there is one last measure before we grant access to Tier One intel."
Elijah met the gaze through the screen.
"I'm ready."
"Good. Report to Chamber 9. You will be entering the trial zone within the hour."
"What kind of trial?"
Silence.
Then:
"The kind that breaks most men. If you survive, we rebuild you completely."
---
Elijah exited the chamber, the weight of the ghost suit still clinging to his back, the edges of the shard drive biting into his palm.
Behind him, the remnants of Project Nyx flickered across the dark screens.
In front of him — Chamber 9.
And a chance to finally confront the storm inside.
---
Chamber 9 was silent.
Cold air hissed from vents above, stirring the mist that clung to the steel floor. The room was circular — no doors, no windows — just curved, silver walls and a chair at its center.
Elijah stood barefoot in the middle, stripped of gear, of weapons, of everything but his name… or what was left of it.
The overhead lights dimmed. Then the voice came, smooth and neutral.
**"Psychogenic Trial commencing."**
**"Subject: Ghost – E07."**
**"Objective: Full internal coherence recovery. All memory contamination will be confronted. Outcome: Total integration or permanent mental collapse."**
Elijah clenched his jaw. He didn't ask questions.
He sat.
The moment he did, a band of light circled his head. A micro-needle tapped behind his ear — injecting directly into his synaptic bridge. Reality cracked.
---
**The Simulation**
He was back in the Slade mansion.
Empty. Candlelit. But *real*. The smell of fresh orchids. The click of heels against the marble.
"Elijah," came her voice.
He turned.
Lilian stood in the hall, hair loose, barefoot, wearing that silk robe — the one from their lake house nights. Her face was soft again. Familiar. Not cold and sculpted. Not the stranger who sold him out.
"You were right," she whispered, tears in her eyes. "They used me. I didn't know what they were doing to you."
He backed up slowly.
"This isn't real."
She came closer. "But does that matter?"
Behind her, the house flickered. A glitch. A bleed-through. Jeremy stepped into the hall, hand on her shoulder, smiling.
"Forgive us, brother," he said. "It wasn't personal."
Then the walls began to collapse.
Elijah was drowning in memories — the slap, the setup, the cameras, the voices, the blood in the gravel. But also—
The laughter.
The promises.
The night Lilian first said *I love you* in a voice so shaky he'd believed it.
"Wake up, Elijah," someone said. A third voice. Deeper. Not part of the memory.
"Don't trust what you feel. It's not all yours."
---
**Reality Pulse Detected.**
Elijah's hands gripped the arms of the chair.
Sweat streamed down his face. His body shook. Still breathing.
"Status?" came Aleksei's voice in the control booth.
"He's pushing through," someone replied. "95% integrity. No breaks."
Inside, Elijah stood again — in the simulation, in his mind — as the fake Lilian faded into static. Her eyes lingered longest. Almost like she didn't want to go.
But he was ready now.
She was a ghost.
He was not.
---
The simulation changed.
He was in a dark room. One chair. One light.
Across from him sat… himself.
Or rather, the man he used to be.
Younger. Clean-shaven. Dressed in a crisp Slade-Tech uniform.
"You lost everything," the old Elijah said. "And for what?"
"I gained clarity."
"They broke you."
"No," Elijah said. "They exposed me. And now I know what I am."
"What are you?"
He looked himself in the eyes.
"An evolution."
The younger version vanished. The walls dissolved.
His heart slowed.
Breathing leveled.
The chair released him.
---
**Trial Complete.**
He stood, covered in sweat, blinking into the real chamber. The lights rose.
Aleksei entered, flanked by a masked figure — someone new.
"Not many pass Trial 9," Aleksei said. "Most get eaten alive by their guilt."
"I buried mine," Elijah replied.
The masked man stepped forward and handed him a case. Inside — new credentials. A black card. Red digital etching.
**LEVEL ONE: FULL OPERATIVE STATUS GRANTED**
**ACCESS TO DEEP NETWORK OPENED**
Elijah closed the case.
"What's next?" he asked.
Aleksei smiled. "Now you become a legend"