Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #4: In The Shadows

Hours passed. Then the shadows moved wrong.

Claws ripped through the roof beams. A crow detonated in a flash, shredding half the drones. A decoy collapsed before it even finished walking.

Cassiel fired at the shape that darted between columns—faster than her optics could lock. Her rounds cracked concrete. Nothing else.

When it ended, all that remained was the insignia carved deep into a support pillar, as if etched there by laughter.

The stronghold buried its dead the next day.

⸻

Chapter 10 — Into the Grid

Nocturnal finally pulled the fragments together. The code the crows left behind wasn't random. It was a path—coordinates not of the waking city but of somewhere deeper.

"The Grid," he said, voice low. "He's luring us inside."

Cassiel folded her arms, cobalt optics glowing like storms. "And if we walk in, we won't come back the same."

Pancho's voice rasped through Nocturnal's skull: "That's the point. He wants us in his hunting ground. He wants us where the walls don't obey physics."

Cassiel leaned forward over the table, scarred hands flat against the steel. "Then we don't walk blind. We fortify here. We plan routes in. And when we step onto that black floor—we go with one purpose: we name him, and we end this hunt."

Outside, on the tram frame, the crows gathered in silence. Their eyes glowed faintly, like they were staring into another world entirely.

And in that other world—the Grid, the endless plain of black metal and white sky—Remnant crouched in the wires, watching the Architect's shadow move across the horizon. His alloy jaw clicked once, a predator's grin.

"First the man," he whispered to himself. "Then the god."

———

Chapter 11 — Whispers in the Stronghold

The Outer Markets no longer felt like victory.

Children who once shouted in the alleys walked quiet now, eyes always tilted skyward. Traders who used to haggle started handing over goods without argument, as if saving their voices.

Every night, the Resilience buried another fighter. Not from open battles, but from accidents: patrols gone missing, food crates poisoned with industrial solvent, sentries found strangled with black feathers stuffed in their mouths.

Cassiel called the militia together beneath a broken tram frame. "This isn't sabotage," she told them. "This is theater. He wants us afraid enough to break ourselves."

Her cobalt optics swept the crowd, bright as a welder's flame. "Don't give him the play he wants."

But when the fire died down and the civilians drifted off, Cassiel let her shoulders slump. "He's inside their heads," she muttered to Nocturnal.

Nocturnal said nothing. His visor tracked a single crow perched on the tram above them, watching.

⸻

Chapter 12 — The Doubters

It spread slow at first, then fast: distrust.

Some fighters whispered that Nocturnal's presence was what drew the hunter. Others claimed Cassiel was Hypertech's spy—how else would she know so much about their labs?

Two factions almost came to blows before Cassiel fired her rifle into the ceiling and reminded them that their real enemy wore claws, not cobalt eyes.

Still, the damage was done. Doubt walked the stronghold like smoke.