Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #6: Crossfire

Chapter 1 — The Watcher and the Infiltrator

SCS lived in bureaucratic daylight and hunted in corporate night. Their badge opened doors when it could and vaults when it had to, and the difference was mostly paper cuts.

A preferred roofs to desks. He shadowed Maku for nine nights, learned the cadence of his headaches, the way streetlamps guttered when grief hit like weather. He mapped anchor habits—how Maku touched a wedding photo before leaving, turned the cracked radio off/on twice, pressed his thumb to the orange peel he refused to throw away.

He cataloged power sags against Maku's steps, boxed them in red on a district map that looked more like a cardiogram than a city. He wrote in a hand so small it became its own encryption:
• Stutter precedes nausea by ~17s; follows micro-glyph bloom on interior surfaces.
• Subject can "push" residue off partner (Hana). Three-breath window. Cost evident: epistaxis, tremor.
• Grid proximity? He looks at empty air like it's listening.

A didn't intervene. He practiced the SCS virtue: patience weaponized. If Maku was a fuse, A needed to know the shape of the bomb.

Across the river of towers, J wore a borrowed suit and Hypertech's smile. The arcology recognized the smile and let him pass. He rode lifts that talked in hush tones and walked corridors whose silence had a scent: solvent, ozone, money.

The paper trail led to a drawer that didn't exist and a project that changed names like a fugitive: Project Obelisk → Fly MK.2 → CrowNet Pilot → "continuity asset." He built the ghost back out of crumbs: requisitions for alloy mandibular frames, multi-weapon armatures, secondary-code arrays for avian neural grafts. A single phrase bled through redactions again and again: "triplicate self architecture."

Night after night, he sat in a cold archive room and taught the building to forget him. He copied boot logs that insisted nothing booted. In a janitor's closet he found an unlabeled crate lid embossed faintly with a half-skull over a crow's wing. He photographed it twice and didn't sleep afterward.

On the tenth night the corridor lights stuttered. J paused, hand on an unmarked door, and whispered to the hush, "Who made you?" The building didn't answer, but somewhere a crow shifted.

Chapter 2 — Rebirth and Reconvergence

The city kept a damp corner for miracles and monsters. That's where the glyphs pooled after rain—black filaments making a lace on busted neon, crawling in loops through puddles, gathering mass the way rot spreads.

They knitted a man.

They started with the spine, spun vertebrae from symbols, sheathed them in alloy. They hung arms like weapons and hands like verdicts. They painted muscle with code and stitched it into the Project Fly frame. The jaw came last—white and smiling and wrong.

Remnant inhaled the world like a debt collected.

Memory returned as violence played backward—a blade inside him, a rat screeching on a wire, a white sky saying BUILD. BURN. REPEAT. A death that didn't take because there were two more to spend. He flexed; crows fell out of the eaves, landed, and stared like disciples.

They sang him the city in clicks and code: the hooded shadow moving between watchfires; Hypertech officials scrubbing servers with the industry's finest bleach and guilt; and the SCS pair—one inside the arcology (J), one outside scribbling on paper (A).

Remnant turned toward the towers where Hypertech slept on its teeth and decided to let the father worry. The shadow would keep. The rebellion would keep. But a watcher who thought ink outran claws?

He lifted his face to the neon weather and let the crows trace a path through it. "Start with the one who writes."

Chapter 3 — The Watcher Hunted