Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #1: Nocturnal

Year 2136

Chapter 1 – Opening Moves

The city was a cathedral of compliance. Towers blinked with patient light. Drones drifted like steel starlings. Every alley had a camera; every camera had a command. Orion's Grid hummed as if the sky itself had a pulse.

On a forgotten rooftop, a figure waited with the rain braided into his cloak. Nocturnal—glasses and lectures by day, a hood and steel by night. The exo fused to his spine thrummed through the bones of his back like a second heart. At his side, a titanium blade; at his hips, two pistols that drank air and spat silent rounds. In his hood, a warm weight—Pancho, whiskers like antennae, mind braided to his own through a micro exo.

The northern control tower hummed blue below him. Nocturnal watched, counted, learned: enforcer pacing, drone orbits, scan cones that barely overlapped when weather fouled their lenses. When the timing clicked, he went over the edge like a thought dropping into a throat.

Inside was cold light and the buzz of systems that never slept. Three core guards pivoted in a triangle around a server column. The first died before his optics could flare. The second felt a shock-lance bite his own chest. The third reached for the uplink and found a rat with knife-bright tools tearing the plug free.

Nocturnal didn't erase the tower; he bent it. Code spooled under his fingertips, re-threaded into a quiet parasite: patrols would loop wrong, drones would double-scan empty alleys, response priorities would misfire—for hours, not seconds. When he climbed back into the night, the city still looked the same but walked with an uneven gait, like a predator with a stone in its paw.

The rain swallowed him. The first seam had been cut.

⸻

Chapter 2 – Southern Fire

The southern hub squatted over the slums with a bunker's logic: layered shields, turrets in patient arcs, a gate that smiled only to bite.

Pancho slipped into a generator yard like fog. A moment later, power hiccupped. Lights dropped in a sigh. Turrets blinked and forgot what they'd been told to hate. Nocturnal crossed the yard in one breath: a throat cut clean, a visor cracked with an air slug, a door wedged wide by a rat's gnaw.

Within, servers glowed with a language his visor struggled to name—glyphs too exact, too elegant. He laid his palm to the console and felt the exo inside him answer, as if the building recognized a cousin in his bones.

Words like a blade without steel slid across his HUD:

I SEE YOU.

He planted a different kind of weapon: not a blast but a lie. A viral thread that wouldn't topple the hub, only misguide it, so the Grid sang to itself and believed every wrong note. The lights came back. The hum smoothed. But the cadence ran crooked.

Something far above code had turned its head. Nocturnal left before it hunted the scent back to his blood.

⸻

Chapter 3 – Firelight and Contracts

The old metro veins coughed up steam and rumor. In the dark, the Resilience kept their fires small and their hope smaller. When Nocturnal stepped into the circle of light, a dozen hands found hidden knives, then stalled, then lowered.

She arrived like punctuation: a long coat, scarred armor, cobalt optics that drank flame and gave nothing back. Cassiel. Bounty hunter by resume, survivor by practice. In these tunnels she was a hired edge; to Orion's men she was a problem too expensive to solve.

"You cut the Grid," she said, weighing him. "Good. Keep cutting. But don't mistake a limp for a broken leg."

He gave them only what they could carry: patrols looping themselves stupid in the north, a southern core that had learned to lie. Nothing about the voice that had watched him through a pane of light. That burden was his.