Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #1: Nocturnal

He opened the comms to the tunnels. "Now."

⸻

Chapter 7 – Siege Doctrine

The Resilience didn't march—they erupted. Gates exploded in puffs of red and white. Drone relays smoked. Cassiel pivoted the assault up and sideways, slamming into mid-level hangars where Orion kept his second breath.

Inside, Nocturnal met six of Orion's answers to the word elite. Black Sigil Elites—armor veined with red light, weapons humming with a borrowed hymn. He cut the formation before it could finish the thought of surrounding him. Three dropped like punctuation; the last three learned how momentum kills the obedient.

"Path holds," Cassiel snapped through gunfire. "You climb."

He climbed.

The command hall was a theater of steel, screens coughing static, pillars tattooed with glyphs. Orion stood from a throne braided to the spire's veins, conduits feeding his armor like umbilicals. When he flexed, the air bent around his gauntlets. His mask reflected stormlight and a man who had made himself into a pronoun.

"You gnaw the bones of gods," Orion said. "Parasites don't wear crowns."

Nocturnal answered with knifework on hoses. A hip conduit parted; the light in Orion's stride limped. A spine line spat sparks; the Architect's whisper leaked like broken radio. Orion hit hard enough to fold steel; Nocturnal declined to be where the floor died.

He never fought the man. He fought the supply that made the man monstrous. When only two conduits remained—neck and lower spine—he took them in one breath: a feint low, a leap, a slice at the throat, a boot to the mask, a downward arc that split the back.

Power bled out like a confession.

Orion lunged with a last, ugly grace. Nocturnal held the blade at his throat and did not take the head.

"You lived long enough to fall," he said, and stepped aside to let the armor die.

Outside, the spire listened to a new sound: a city that had learned to shout.

⸻

Chapter 8 – The Shadow's Answer

"Orion has fallen."

Silence took a breath and then the districts screamed. Cassiel brought the Resilience into the throne room to see the corpse of a rumor. Some cried, some laughed like they'd forgotten how, some stared at the blade and learned faith. Pancho's tail thumped his pauldron, a pulse of pride and warning.

They tried to make Nocturnal a throne; he refused with the only speech he gave that night. "I am not your crown. I am your knife. Keep your own heads."

Cassiel's optics narrowed in a smile. "Smart. Symbols are crowns anyway."

So he did what symbols can do and tyrants never will: he helped them build.

Rails twisted into barricades, stations into clinics, the old Outer Markets into a fortress stitched from vendor stalls and welded scrap. Children too small to lift rifles ferried augments to med bays. Drone husks became sentries that watched for different wolves.

They found the wolves sooner than they hoped. In the markets' back lanes, brands had been stapled to the living and sewn into clothes by hands that measured people by parts. Not Orion's sigil. Not any gang's mark. Clean, clinical, expensive: the white alloy half-skull over a black crow's wing.

Cassiel's mouth went hard. "Not the spire. A lab. Someone's contractor. They'll come to collect what we just stole."

Pancho's mind-voice rasped: And when they do, they won't be wearing Orion's colors.

By dusk the markets were theirs—watchfires on the roofs, sentries on the tram frame, a chant in the alleys that managed to say gratitude without surrender. The Grid still twitched in the corners of the sky, and from somewhere quiet and patient a voice bled back into the neon:

Build. Burn. Repeat.
Come to me, little shadow.

Nocturnal watched the stronghold breathe and let the rain rinse Orion's ash from his cloak. The god in the wires had promised a meeting. Fine. But the city would be there to hear the terms.

And far from the fires, under clinical lights and a lens that recorded without blinking, a hand stamped that half-skull over crow's wing onto fresh canvas and decided a name that fit the night better than the old one.

Remnant would come. After the serpent. After the city learned to stand. After the god spoke again.

For now, the city held its breath—and the blade did not lower.