Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #1: Nocturnal

A boy with a solder-scarred jaw blurted, "Then we rise?"

"Not yet," Nocturnal said. "When it hurts to stand, you kick."

The fire hissed in the damp. Somewhere above, the Grid tripped over its own feet, and a rumor of future lifted its head.

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Chapter 4 – Rain on Steel

The Crimson Pack came to the rail-yard with plasma in their hands and detachment in their voices. Two civilians knelt by a loader track, rain making their faces shine. "Relocation," an enforcer said to no one. The blade warmed like a tongue of red glass.

Nocturnal broke the night into quiet pieces. One body eased down into shadow; another visor cracked with a puff of air; the last two tried to rotate toward a threat that refused to be where they looked. When silence returned, the rescued didn't cheer. They stared at the space he'd left, at the idea of him, and learned how a myth begins.

He climbed into the rain again. The city's spine, the eastern relay, raked the clouds with antennae. Ground was hot with patrols; the sky was arrogant. He chose arrogance.

The tower's lattice accepted him like a ladder. Rain pinned his cloak to his back. He flattened against struts as a drone swept an inch too low. At the uplink, glyph-light crawled like frost. He slid his gauntlet in and retuned the song. Orders stayed crisp; they just led to wrong doors.

The wind carried a voice colder than storm:

Clever shadow. Long shadow. Long shadows cannot hide.

He went down the way he'd come up, leaving the city to argue with itself.

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Chapter 5 – The Subterranean Heart

Under a dead stadium, a data-fortress beat a low drum. Nocturnal let a Black Sigil squad trip the guns; turrets woke and forgot friend from foe. While they cursed their comms, he slid into a side rib where glyphs had been soldered into the metal like scars.

At the core he stopped cutting around the edges and severed the artery. One conduit screamed molten. Another spit sparks like rain. The fortress shuddered and went blind; half a district staggered.

The voice didn't boom—it pressed, as if the air itself had a hand.

You will come to me, shadow. In triumph or in ruin.

He left with the feeling of a horizon moving closer.

⸻

Chapter 6 – The Spire's Teeth

Orion's spire rose like a verdict, ribs of glass and steel braided with light. Cassiel climbed a broken billboard and made the sky's eyes go blind one by one. Through her scope, a hangar irised open: war titans on chains, plates inked with coiling glyphs.

"Not squads," she said. "Sermons."

Nocturnal bit down on the urge to turn the bay into sunlight and rubble. Fire at the wrong hour was a kind of surrender. He slipped inside instead.

On the gantries, he and Pancho wove a silent death. A needle into a seam, a virus into a core; diagnostics smiled and lied while their hearts were emptied. By the time he finished, the giants looked hale and hollow at once. When Orion called them, they would pretend to wake and then refuse.

Deeper, the glyph column spiraled like a spine made of song. Nocturnal pressed his palm into the light and salted it with discord. Voices came apart. Screens shattered. Orders garbled. The spire trembled.

...you... cannot... silence... the god in the wire hissed, not quite a god, not quite a wire.

"Good," Nocturnal whispered. "Then you can hear me."