Silas stood before the full-length mirror in Arthur's old office. The biometric locks recognized him as the owner now. He watched his reflection fray at the edges. A render error in the smart-glass. The room was a cold temple of black chrome and polarized windows on the seventy-seventh floor of Nexus Tower.

  Outside the city sprawled like a corrupted motherboard. Neon arteries pulsed through the permanent smog layer. Up here you were severed from the street. You floated above the grime and the desperate scramble for the next upgrade. He pressed his hand against the glass. When he pulled away there was no smudge. The surface nanites at this altitude didn't leave evidence.

  He scoffed internally. Up here, a Sequence Four with a bad portfolio was worth less than a Sequence Six who knew which executive's secrets to leverage. Power wasn't about strength anymore. It was about information, leverage, and knowing when to strike.

  His promotion had come through the moment Doctor Parker had cleared him for active duty. The memo had been brief: "Congratulations on your new position, Mr. Creed. Your predecessor's assets have been transferred to your control."

  Arthur's old office, his title, his security clearance, even his parking spot with the charging station for luxury vehicles. All his now.

  More importantly, he was free of the obligation to spy on Cole Walker. That particular task had been relegated to junior operatives, beneath his new station. Let someone else track his day to day. Silas had bigger prey now.

  Marcus had been true to his word. But the "little extra," the biomod, had changed everything. His core purification was at 98%. He could feel Sequence Five clawing just beneath his skin, a door waiting for him to kick it open. The sensation was maddening, like an itch in his bones, a hunger that food couldn't satisfy. He was stronger, faster, his mind a quantum processor that saw the world in probabilities.

  And he was hungry.

  He looked down at his hand, the edges of it having a slight shatter to it. Like looking through broken glass, his fingers seemed to exist in multiple states at once, solid, then fractured, then reformed in rapid succession, as if reality couldn't decide which version was real.

  The biochip Marcus had installed was still integrating, Parker had said. Three weeks until full neural synthesis. Side effects were expected, though Parker had been vague about what those might entail.

  "Some visual distortions," she'd said, not meeting his eyes. "Temporary dissociation. Nothing permanent."

  But she'd been lying. He could tell by the way her pulse had quickened, visible through the thin skin of her throat.

  Is this one real? Fake? he thought to himself.

  The fragmenting wasn't constant; it came in waves, tied to his emotional state. Usually when his adrenaline spiked or when he pushed his enhanced processing too hard. Yesterday, he'd seen his reflection split into three versions during a board meeting. One had been signing documents, one had been strangling the CFO, and one had been sitting perfectly still, dead behind the eyes. Only iron discipline had kept him from reacting.

  He closed his eyes tight, taking a deep breath, looking back down again. The cracks had disappeared, but he could still feel them, like fractures in reality itself waiting to spread.

  "Get it together," he muttered to his reflection. "You're better than this."

  His reflection smiled back, and for a moment, he wasn't sure if he'd made it do that.

  His desk chimed. A priority message from Marcus, encrypted with corporate-grade quantum locks.

  He sat down, pulling up a data pad, the screen adjusting automatically to his retinal pattern. His new assignment from Marcus was elegant in its brutality: a high-level executive at Aetheris Systems had developed a new, stable method for energy transfer that could make Nexus's entire power division obsolete.

  Project Starlight, a name that sounded hopeful, optimistic. The irony wasn't lost on Silas. The mission was simple. Infiltrate the executive's penthouse during a private party, extract the data, and eliminate the executive. Make it look like a tragic accident.

  "Julian Kingsley," Silas read aloud, studying the target's profile. The man's face was handsome in that generic executive way, all straight teeth and confident eyes. "Forty-seven, divorced, no children. Sequence Six Storm Domain, but hasn't seen real combat in a decade. Last field operation was a hostile takeover. He'd wet himself when the shooting started. Soft. Complacent. Perfect."

  Silas pulled up Kingsley's social media, scrolling through images of yacht parties and charity galas. The man posted his entire life online, including his routines. Every Thursday, gym at 5 AM. Every Friday, drinks at the Celestial Lounge. Every Saturday, a party at his penthouse.

  "You're already dead," Silas told the image. "You just don't know it yet."

  He closed the file, and the smiling face disappeared.

  For a job this delicate, he needed a team. But he wasn't just choosing a team for the mission. He was choosing a team for his own future. Marcus might think he was creating a loyal attack dog, but Silas had bigger ambitions. Every asset he acquired now was an investment in his eventual coup.

  Silas keyed the next file. Cassius Vale. Sequence Five Colony Walker. Hive Domain. The dossier was heavy. It carried a long list of closed contracts and a failure rate of absolute zero. His kit was optimized for remote data extraction and surveillance without a physical footprint.

  He triggered the tactical playback. The feed came from a black site deep in the industrial sector. Timestamp was ninety days old and the authorization key had been scrubbed by someone with orbit-level clearance. The resolution was garbage but the lethality was clear. Vale wasn't a singular entity. He was a distributed system.

  His primary body exploded. A cloud of chrome arachnids and razor-winged drones filled the corridor. Every unit ran on a synchronized kill-loop. The security grid caught the carnage from multiple angles. Feed A showed a guard getting dismantled by the metal swarm. The audio cut out when the drones breached his airway to silence the screaming. Feed B showed the aerial units coalescing into a humanoid shape. They held the form just long enough to punch a clearance code into the keypad before dissolving back into the air.

  The security team had lasted forty-nine seconds. The screaming had lasted longer. Cassius could infiltrate any structure, overwhelm any defense through sheer numbers and perfect coordination. For an infiltration and data extraction mission, he was exactly what Silas needed.

  The psychological profile was straightforward. "Subject shows no signs of personality fragmentation. Maintains full individual consciousness and control over swarm manifestations. Notable tactical thinking and strategic planning capabilities. Recommended for infiltration and reconnaissance operations."

  But Silas noticed what wasn't in the file. No mention of family. No personal connections. No weaknesses except a single note: "Subject displays unusual attachment to maintaining human form during downtime. Possible identity anxiety."

  Interesting.

  He queued up the next file. Livia Ester. Sequence Five Null Prophet of the Silence Domain. Her psych profile was a parade of red flags indicating high-functioning sociopathy. Empathy baseline was basically nonexistent. She was a specialist in deletion and site sanitation.

  The ID shot showed a woman with flat, grey eyes and a face so generic it refused to stick. Silas studied the pixels for forty seconds. The moment he looked away the details evaporated. He couldn't reconstruct her features if his life depended on it. Her biometrics were just as slippery. Median height. Median weight. Distinguishing marks: null. She was a void in the database.

  Her combat logs were a series of redacted reports and silent, stabilized drone footage. One clip showed her walking through a firefight, bullets and plasma bolts simply ceasing to exist as they entered her null-field. The video had no audio track. Not muted, but absent, as if the file itself rejected the concept of sound. She reached her target, placed a hand on his shoulder, and the man just… deflated, all the sound and life in his body deleted in an instant.

  The timestamp showed the execution had taken three seconds. The target hadn't even had time to scream.

  For a quiet, surgical assassination, she was the perfect instrument.

  And another threat, Silas thought, his phantom-futures showing him a timeline where his own name ended up on her list of "problems to be solved." He saw himself in his office, Livia standing behind him, her hand reaching for his shoulder. He saw himself trying to scream as her knife slit his throat.

  A Silence Domain is the perfect assassin, but everyone's loyalty, even my subordinates', can be turned.

  Like I did with Arthur. Like Marcus would do to me if given the chance.

  They were perfect for the job. And perfect for what came after.

  He sent the summons.

  The message was brief: "Conference Room B-7. Twenty-five minutes. Come alone."

  They met in a sound-proofed briefing room in the sub-levels. The room had no windows, no reflections, just matte black walls. A space designed for secrets.

  Silas clocked in early to prep the area. He put his back to the wall with clear sightlines on the entrance. Then he set water bottles at every seat. Basic psy-ops. You accept a drink, you accept a subconscious debt. It disarms people.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Cassius arrived first. He looked the part of a high-end corporate asset. Tactical weave, close crop, posture tight. But the eyes were the tell. Honey-gold honeycombs that barely passed for human. When he blinked, the shutters didn't close all at once. It was a ripple effect. He scanned the room for threats, sat down, and ignored the water.

  "Silas," Cassius gave a nod. "Or is it Director Creed now? Nice bump in pay grade."

  "News travels."

  "Everything travels fast when you have eyes everywhere." Cassius smiled, and for a moment, Silas could have sworn he saw something moving under the man's skin.

  "Interesting team composition. I've read Livia's file. Never worked with a Silence Domain before."

  "Any concerns?" Silas asked.

  "Concerns? No. Curiosity? Yes. Her kill rates are impressive. Her psych eval... less so. Glad she's pointed at the enemy."

  "For now."

  Cassius's compound eyes focused on him. "Cynical outlook for a team leader."

  "I prefer honesty to comfortable lies. We're all here because we're useful to each other. When that stops being true, we'll go our separate ways. Or one of us will go in a body bag."

  Cassius laughed. "Refreshingly bleak. Most suits talk about 'family' right before they stick a shiv in your kidneys."

  Livia arrived a moment later. The door slid open and she just edited herself into the room. One second it was just Silas and Cassius, next second she was there. She wore standard grey tactical. She didn't speak, but the room changed, her presence a hole in the room's ambient noise. Silas's augmentations, always quietly whirring, went silent. Even his pulse felt dampened.

  Cassius twitched. His hand drifted toward his holster before he caught himself. "Hell. That's... disconcerting."

  Livia's colorless gaze shifted to him, and when she spoke, her voice was perfectly flat. "You'll adjust."

  "Right. Love the supernatural mute button," Cassius said, his tone dark. "Really sets the mood."

  Livia tilted her head slightly, studying him like an insect under glass. "Sarcasm. Humor as a defense mechanism. Predictable."

  "And what's your defense mechanism?" Cassius shot back.

  "I don't require one." She sat down with mechanical precision, her movements too smooth to be entirely natural. “I am the threat profile."

  Silas watched the interplay with interest. Good. Let them establish their dynamic now, rather than in the field.

  "Our target is Julian Kingsley, Head of R&D at Aetheris Systems," Silas began, cutting through their tension. He triggered the display. A holo-schematic of a luxury penthouse bloomed on the table. A glass needle piercing the smog layer, reserved for the tax bracket that didn't have to breathe the same air as the street. The projection streamed live telemetry. Wind shear. Patrol loops. The thermal signatures of the people inside.

  "Tonight, he is hosting a private celebration. His department just closed a deal worth thirty billion credits. He'll be drunk on success and alcohol. His guard will be down, but we can expect high security. Our objective is twofold."

  He looked at Cassius. "Your primary task is data extraction. Kingsley has the prototype data for 'Project Starlight' stored on a privately shielded server in his study. The server is air-gapped, no wireless access. You'll need to physically interface with it. You will infiltrate the building's network, bypass his security, and acquire the file. You will do this silently. You will not be detected."

  Cassius studied the building schematics, his expression focused. His eyes tracked patterns invisible to normal humans, probably calculating airflow and vent dimensions. "Ventilation system's the obvious entry point. I can disperse, scout the entire building layout, then partially reform in the server room for the physical download. The vents are wide enough for my larger forms, narrow enough that security won't have bothered with sensors. Ten minutes max if the encryption's standard. Fifteen if they've got quantum locks."

  "They have quantum locks," Silas said. "Kingsley's paranoid about industrial espionage."

  Silas then turned to Livia. "Your task is simpler. Once Cassius has the data, you will eliminate Julian Kingsley. His death must look like an accident. A fall from his balcony is the preferred outcome. No witnesses and no evidence."

  Livia's eyes flickered, the only sign she had heard him. "The balcony is on the 47th floor. The fall will take approximately 4.3 seconds. I'll null any sound he makes." She gave a single, almost imperceptible nod.

  "You've calculated this before," Silas observed.

  "I calculate every possible death for every person I meet," Livia replied.

  Cassius shifted uncomfortably. "That's... reassuring."

  "His security detail," Cassius cut in. He keyed additional data onto his slate. The screen jittered with static bleeding off his hardware. "Red Sand mercs. Mil-spec chrome. Thermals. Motion trackers. They'll be a problem."

  “Not at all,” Livia said. “I'll create perception dead zones. They won't register anything unusual.”

  “Must be nice,” Cassius muttered, “being able to just delete problems from existence.”

  “It's optimal,” Livia replied. Flatline tone.

  "Everything's about optimization with you, isn't it?" Cassius leaned back. "Do you ever do anything just for fun?"

  Livia was silent for six seconds. Then: "I once deleted all the sound from a concert. Four thousand people, suddenly experiencing perfect silence. The panic was... interesting."

  "That's your idea of fun?"

  "Yes."

  Cassius looked at Silas. "We're working with a psychopath."

  "We're all psychopaths," Silas corrected. "She's just playing in the open."

  "My role," Silas continued, a cold smile touching his lips, "is oversight. I will be your eye in the sky, coordinating from a distance."

  It was a lie, of course. He would be there, watching, waiting for the perfect moment to edit the mission's outcome. If either of them proved more useful dead than alive, well, accidents happened in the field.

  The lights flickered. For a split second, Silas saw Cassius dissolving into insects mid-sentence, the swarm crawling across the table toward him. His pupils dilated, vision stuttering between real and unreal. Pain spiked behind Silas's eyes as the biochip activated. He blinked hard, forcing his vision to stabilize. Then Cassius was whole once again, staring at him with those compound eyes.

  “You alright?” Cassius asked.

  “Fine,” Silas said smoothly. “Just calculating probabilities. It’s a Lucent thing.”

  "Funny," Cassius said. "I've worked with Lucent’s before. Their eyes don't do that."

  "Everyone's augmentations manifest differently."

  “Right,” Cassius said, clearly filing that information away for later.

  "One more thing," Silas added, pulling up a secondary display. The screen showed facial recognition data for all expected guests. "Kingsley's party will have approximately sixty guests. Tech executives, minor politicians, high-end escorts. There's also a weapons dealer named Krueger who might be carrying military-grade hardware. Avoid him if possible. Collateral damage is acceptable but not preferred. Dead bodies raise questions. Questions lead to investigations."

  “I don't do messy,” Cassius said. “Clean infiltration, clean extraction. That's my reputation.”

  “I eliminate targets. Nothing more, nothing less,” Livia stated.

  "What about extraction?" Cassius asked. "Once the job's done, how do we get out?"

  "Three routes," Silas pulled up another display. "Primary: the service elevator to the parking garage. Secondary: the external maintenance platforms, rappel down to the 30th floor where we'll have a vehicle waiting. Tertiary: base jump from the balcony with glide suits."

  "The same balcony Kingsley's falling from?"

  "Different balcony. The penthouse has four."

  "Rich people," Cassius shook his head. "More balconies than sense."

  "Then we understand each other." Silas stood, his hand moving to the weapon at his hip, a gesture both of them noticed. "We deploy at 2100 hours. The party peaks at midnight. Kingsley dies at 12:17, after his usual balcony cigarette. Make it clean."

  He looked at the two of them, his new pawns. The perfect tools to secure his own ascension. In his peripheral vision, the biochip created more shadows of futures that might be, or it might just be his neural pathways misfiring. Hard to tell anymore.

  "Nexus has invested a great deal in our success," Silas said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Let's not disappoint them."

  "And if something goes wrong?" Cassius asked.

  "Then we adapt. Improvise."

  "That's not much of a plan."

  "Plans are just suggestions once the shooting starts," Silas replied as he exited the room. "What matters is that we complete the objective. Kingsley dies, the data is retrieved, and we all walk away with a nice bonus."

  Despite the briefing ending, neither operative moved.

  “He’s got an agenda,” Livia said simply once Silas left.

  "Him and everyone else at Nexus," Cassius replied, checking his weapon. The pistol was a custom model, its grip designed for hands that might not always be entirely solid. "The question is whether his agenda gets us killed."

  “If it does, I’ll kill him first,” Livia said.

  "Comforting thought." Cassius stood, stretching. His joints made sounds like clicking insects. "For what it's worth, I think our boy Silas is seeing things. Literally. Watch his eyes next time, he tracks movement that isn't there. And did you see his hand? It was flickering at the edges."

  “Biomod complications?”

  "Or Lucent madness. Or both." Cassius headed for the door. "I once knew a Lucent who pushed too hard, too fast. By the end, he couldn't tell the difference between light and reality. Thought he could walk through walls because 'everything is just photons.' They found him halfway through a reinforced concrete barrier, merged at the molecular level."

  "How did he die?"

  "He didn't. He's still there. The building's condemned now. Sometimes at night, you can see lights flickering in the walls where he's trapped."

  Livia considered this. "Fascinating. I should visit."

  "You would find that fascinating."

  "Either way, we do the job, get paid, and get out. Whatever corporate ladder he's trying to climb, that's his problem."

  "Agreed," Livia said, already fading toward the exit.

  Alone for a moment, Cassius concentrated, sending out a few reconnaissance wasps through the ventilation. Old habit, always know your exits. As they dispersed through the building, mapping the layout and identifying security cameras, he contemplated their new commander. Young, ambitious, and possibly hallucinating. In Nexus, that combination usually led to either rapid promotion or immediate termination.

  One of his wasps found a hidden camera in the briefing room, not connected to Nexus security.

  Cassius smirked. This job was going to be more interesting than he'd thought.

  Above them, seventy-seven floors up, Silas watched the briefing room's footage, or tried to. Livia's presence created dead zones in the recording, and Cassius's swarm caused electromagnetic interference. But he'd expected that.

  He rewound the footage, watching their micro-expressions, their tells. Cassius was suspicious but professional. He'd do the job, but he'd have contingencies. Livia was harder to read, her face a blank mask that gave away nothing. But the fact that she'd mentioned killing him was actually reassuring. It meant she was thinking tactically, not personally.

  In the mirror, his reflection looked back, and for a split second, the biochip made it fracture into multiple versions. One was covered in blood. One wore Marcus's face. One was missing its eyes.

  The bloody one spoke: "They'll betray you."

  The one with Marcus's face laughed: "Of course they will. It's what you'd do."

  The eyeless one whispered: "But not before they're useful."

  He blinked, forcing the image to stabilize. The reflections merged back into one, but he could still hear them whispering at the edges of his consciousness.

  Parker had said a few weeks until full integration. The question was whether the hallucinations were a bug or a feature.

  Aetherios System: Dawnlight [LitRPG Adventure]

  POSTING DAILY ? FIRST TWO BOOKS WRITTEN

  Welcome to the Aetherios System, where quests are mandatory and failure results in deletion!

  Problems like:

  - Forest badgers with bodybuilding addictions and very personal grudges

  - A kobold village too dumb for diplomacy

  - One cantankerous apothecary witch

  - Smug elves

  - An undead dungeon that didn’t get the memo about staying dead

  Prove yourself or be erased. No pressure.

  ?? Read Now on Royal Road