Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #2: Remnant

Remnant admired that.

He wanted it.

He also wanted what the shadow wore under his cloak—the spinal exo, the chemistry in his blood, the neural tricks that let him move like a rumor. A man could build a ladder with that if he wasn't afraid of heights.

The crows tapped the glass. He tapped back. The pattern meant nothing to anyone who hadn't had a fragment of code nestled against their brainstem.

You're hungry, they said. We are, too.

⸻

Chapter 4 – The Break

Escapes don't have to be clever. They have to be inevitable.

Hypertech scheduled a transport. Too many signatures were converging: military auditors sniffing contracts; a Resilience probe in the outer wards; a whisper that a bounty hunter with cobalt optics had stopped shooting people for money and started shooting for a reason.

They put Remnant in a box that could have endured a crash from orbit. They didn't consider a crash from inside.

He sat still until the CrowNet pulsed the right note. Then he stood.

The alloy jaw unlatched; the arms unfolded; the box became a memory of a box. Remnant walked out of a truck that had been told not to exist. He walked through a corridor that hadn't been built to hold the weight of a man-shaped catastrophe.

The lights dimmed. The shadow accepted him like a returned son. He slipped, stepped, and reappeared at a wall that had never been told no. He told it no.

By the time the slate-suit reached a safe room that had been advertised as unkillable, Remnant was already outside, the bomber jacket wet with ordinary rain, the half-skull bright against it, the boots leaving prints so ordinary they were invisible.

A crow landed on his shoulder. The mark glinted on its neck.

In the city, the Markets still burned watchfires. In the tunnels, chants still vibrated air. In the Grid, ghosts still ran perfect patrols toward empty corners. In the spire's wreck, fresh salvagers debated whether the mask on the floor would fetch more than the conduits bolted to it.

Remnant looked at the skyline and felt a word form on his alloy tongue that had nothing to do with gods or men:

Hunt.

⸻

Chapter 5 – Crow Gospel

You learn a city by listening to what it says when it thinks it's alone.

Remnant moved at street-level speed—civilian—and at something else the records didn't have a field for. He crossed five districts in the time it takes a kettle to boil. He sat. He watched. He counted the seconds it took for Resilience patrols to get comfortable and for Black Sigil stragglers to choose a new tattoo.

He didn't touch civilians. He slit networks.

Crows settled along a tram frame in the Outer Markets and recorded. A toddler pointed and laughed because to children, crows and angels occupy the same shelf.

Remnant stood beneath a watchfire and waited for the smoke to write a hole in the air where a shadow would eventually stand. He left nothing that could be called evidence. He left hints.

A camera, hacked, that would only show a half-skull over a crow's wing at 03:33 each night, then reset itself and tell the truth until tomorrow.
An enforcer pauldron crushed by an impossible closing force and set—gently—on a Resilience barricade, because sometimes love letters are written in the alphabet of threat.
A string of false patrols injected into the edges of the Grid—not to help Orion (there was no Orion), not to help the Resilience (they didn't need help), but to mirror Nocturnal's work back at him, a signature recognizing a signature: I see your hand. Here is mine.

He watched Cassiel teach a girl how to take a rifle apart and put it back together with a bandaged hand. He measured the time between the moment the girl first flinched at the sound of gunfire and the moment she stopped. He watched Nocturnal refuse a crown and then build a wall anyway.

At night, he entered shadow and practiced being gone.

The Project Fly chassis taught him how to climb a building from the inside. The secondary code hummed in his skull when he looked at a camera and it blinked because it thought it had blinked. The three lives sat like promises in his chest.

He didn't say he would ascend.

He assumed it.

⸻

Chapter 6 – The First Message

End of Act I, elsewhere: the Outer Markets kept their watch. The fires burned. Children ferried augments. Cassiel walked the line with her rifle down and her eyes up. Nocturnal stood on the tram frame and watched the city choose itself.

Remnant chose his moment the way you choose a door in a hallway that's all doors: whichever one the house doesn't want you to open yet.

He stepped into the low-light behind a sentry who was too tired to be scared and too scared to admit he was tired. He didn't touch him.

He touched the steel of the frame above the plaza and scratched a symbol just deep enough to outlive a fresh coat of paint.

White half-skull over a black crow's wing.

He tilted it one degree, the way you tilt a picture to make an obsessive come fix it. He wedged a pauldron there, the metal bruised in a way that suggested a jaw with the wrong kind of bite. He perched a crow above it that didn't blink when dawn came on.

He stood in the middle of the market at 03:33, and every camera that should have recorded him did—but those frames were overwritten by an empty shot with a timestamp that flickered half a second longer than it should have. Anyone who had ever retuned an uplink would see it the way a pianist hears a wrong chord in a crowded room.

He took a last look at the watchfire and understood the shape of the man he wanted to steal parts from, not because Nocturnal was weak, but because strength is a resource, and he was done being the thing resources were pointed at.

He said nothing.

The crows said it for him, in a cadence stitched to a fragment of the Architect's broken hum, a song tuned to wake only one listener:

I hunt what hunts.
I rise where you cut.
I want what you are.

Remnant stepped backward into shadow and was not there anymore.

On the tram frame, the mark glowed very faintly when the watchfires guttered. Pancho's whiskers twitched. Cassiel's optics narrowed. Nocturnal's visor tracked the 0.5-second stutter in a camera that had been otherwise perfect for three nights, and understood that Act I had never been the end of anything.

It had been the start gun.