Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #0: Cassiel

At Red Gate, a tunnel mouth with a locked jaw, a Hypertech drone found her anyway. She shot it with a round she had no right to make and kept moving as sparks rained like domestic stars.

Graffiti followed her like road signs drawn in code: a three-pointed flame, a circle broken on one side, words half-scrubbed by time—We are the remainder, no one is coming, be the someone. She didn't know how to join a rumor. She kept walking toward one.

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Chapter 5 — The First Fire

The Resilience didn't interview. They bled in place and decided if you were friend by the way you moved when someone else screamed.

Cassiel found them at the end of a corridor of rust. Black Sigil had tracked a courier to a storage room and were turning the door into splinters. The Resilience inside—six fighters, none of them soldiers—braced for the moment when the math would end.

She stacked on the hinge. "On my shot," she said, and didn't wait for permission.

One round into an enforcer's visor. One into the next man's weapon hand. A third skipped off a knee and turned power into collapse. The door opened outward, because of course it did. The Resilience spilled like people learning to breathe with knives.

She moved them through the choke points she would have used to kill them, pivoted two to cover, shoved one boy's elbow down because he would have shot the ceiling and told the world where they were. Her voice kept them on a rail they didn't know they could stand on.

When it was done, the corridor smelled like burned wiring and new choices. An older woman stepped out of the half-light with a coat held together by thread and a stare held together by hate. "Mara Leto," she said, to save Cassiel the trouble of asking. "You just ruined someone's quarterly report."

Cassiel kept her rifle at low ready. "I'm out of work."

"Good," Mara said. "We don't pay."

"I know."

They looked at each other for a long moment that wasn't about money or mercy. "You're Hypertech," Mara said finally, not as an accusation, more like a diagnosis.

"I was."

"Why?"

"They told me to shoot a child."

Mara's mouth dipped and leveled. "That'll do it." She jerked her head toward the dark. "Walk."

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Chapter 6 — The Hinge

The tunnels the Grid forgot smelled like old smoke and stubbornness. The Resilience lit small fires and held their hands over them like they could warm the years. Cassiel folded herself into the circle without crouching, without apologizing.

"We're not a cause," Mara told her by the second night. "We're a habit. People like you break habits or get broken by them."

Cassiel didn't ask for a title. She asked for routes. Who smuggled water under the cameras? Which stairwells lost light at midnight? Which enforcer squads took bribes and which ones took trophies? She drew the city she knew on the concrete and let their versions argue with hers until a picture worth using emerged.

She trained. Not speeches; work. How to hold a rifle so it doesn't hold you back. How to enter a room that doesn't want you in it. How to leave one when it decides it does. She broke down a drone and taught them how to turn its eye to watch for someone else. She taught them how to run without looking like prey.

She built arteries: water caches, med kits taped under benches, ammo stocks in dead vending machines. She set trip-cameras that looked like rust and listened like saints. She taught them what to do with their hands when they were too scared to keep them still.

At night, when the others slept in piles that smelled like damp wool and fatigue, she lay awake and watched the dark bear weight. If Hypertech came for her, she would not let them take anyone else as change.

A week later, a courier brought news that moved like a rumor with boots on: a northern control tower had misread its own orders for an hour. Patrols went in circles and laughed about it later. Two nights after that, a southern hub hiccupped and lied to itself until morning. The Resilience looked at each other like a door had just opened in a wall everyone had agreed was load-bearing.

Mara poured a measure of contraband into two cups. "If this is a fluke, it's a generous one. If it's a someone, I want to meet their hands."

Cassiel didn't drink. She listened to the Grid's hum and found the hitch where a lie caught. "Someone's cutting," she said. "Not smashing. Not yet. They're making the city doubt itself."

"Name?"

"Doesn't matter," Cassiel said, and then, because names are navigation, "We'll call him Nocturnal until he gives us something else."

Mara grinned without humor. "Let's see if the night likes company."

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Chapter 7 — The Oath

Hypertech branded her rogue; the Black Sigil posted bounties that would pay for ten years of light. She started sleeping in two-hour shifts and taught the Resilience to do the same. When they raided a warehouse stamped with a white alloy half-skull over a black crow's wing, the crew found empty crates and one table with restraints still warm. Cassiel stood over it until the others stopped asking her why and started watching the door.

"Their labs are moving," she told Mara. "I can smell the solvent. I know that smell."

"We'll find them," Mara said. "We'll make them wish they hadn't needed a name."

Cassiel nodded and didn't trust herself to talk. Later, under a tram frame where rain always sounded like the same sentence, she said it into the dark because oaths sometimes need witnesses even if the witness is only the part of you that refuses to die: "I will not shoot for coin again. I will build. I will burn only what needs burning."

The tunnels listened. The city didn't notice. Not yet.

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. Chapter 8 — First Contact

Rumors turned into patterns. Patrols missed each other by inches that looked like intention. An eastern relay sang the wrong notes and nobody noticed until the wrong squads showed up in the right places to shoot at each other. The western hub went dark like a heart forgetting how to beat.

On a rain-drunk night, the Resilience ringed a small fire with hands and hunger. Cassiel leaned against a column and let her cobalt optics glow—sometimes a lighthouse, sometimes a warning.

Footsteps in the throat of the tunnel. Not marching—deciding. A figure separated from the dark like a sentence choosing to end. Cloak. Visor. A blade that knew its own weight. A small shape peered over his shoulder: a rat with metal in its bones, eyes bright as solder.

Around the fire, hands hovered near rifles. Mara Leto did not blink. Cassiel didn't raise her weapon.

The figure's voice was low, even, carrying clean through the damp:

"Orion's grip is breaking. The northern tower loops patrols into dead ends. The southern hub stutters. The Grid isn't what it was."

Cassiel studied him, optics a thin burn of blue. "You speak like someone who knows more than rumors."

His visor tilted a fraction.
"Rumors cut chains. That's all you need."

A boy near the fire blurted, hope and fear tangled: "If the Grid falters, do we strike? Do we rise?"

The figure didn't move for a long breath. Then:

"Not yet. Orion still breathes. You move now, you'll burn. Wait until he bleeds out. Then rise."

The fire popped. Cassiel let the silence run exactly long enough to become an answer. She nodded once.

"Then go. Cut deeper. When the time comes—we'll follow the shadows."

The rat's whiskers twitched. The cloak drank the light. And in the tunnels beneath a city that still wore Orion's name like a bruise, Nocturnal met the Rebellion for the first time.

Orion still ruled the sky.