A flick of my wrist, a silent discharge from the micro-shock unit hidden in the cuff of my sleeve. No sound, no warning.
He drops like a sack of dead wire, twitching once before he crumples flat onto the cold floor.
I crouch over him.
No regret.
I reach into the jacket and pull the lining apart fully. The embed pocket’s woven tight into the fiber, probably shielded enough to throw off a basic scan. Clever. But not clever enough.
The crystal's already warm in my palm.
He never saw it coming.
I stand, place my back to one of the glass columns, and press the crystal against the interface port inside my wrist. The implant recognizes it instantly. There’s a brief sting—metalagainst nerve—then the flicker of light dances across my vision, overlay interfaces engaging one by one.
Accessing Obol Rootframe...
Override sequence: ACCEPTED.
Command Authority Verified: Tier Zeta-Null.
Ready to Transmit.
I draw in a breath. Hold it. Let the moment settle.
Then I trigger the pulse.
The upload moves fasterthan thought. A whisper of code unfurling like smoke across the station’s internal grid. The link’s clean. Silent. Nothing triggers alarms. It doesn’t scream—it slips, glides, dances along the data layers, rewriting as it goes.
One by one, lights across the memorial garden flicker.
A low hum stutters through the floor.
The air feels charged—static brushing across my skin like the taste of lightning. Somewhere in the far ceiling, the conduits groan, power struggling against the shift. The whole station holds its breath.
And then?—
Reset.
The lights flash white. The hum stops. For half a second, everything dies.
Dead silence.
Then the systems reboot with a low, steady pulse—different this time. Deeper. Slower. Like a heartbeat buried beneath the architecture.
I watch the shimmer of the override spread out across my neural HUD. Nodes lighting up. Data fragments collapsing and rebuilding. Obol’s lattice isn’t just cracking—it’s unraveling.
Every control script. Every overwrite anchor. Every identity suppressor node.
Gone.
Burned out from the root.
And I did it with a crystal no larger than a fingernail.
I lean back against the glass and close my eyes.
No speeches.
