Chapter 81: The Whisper Campaign
The DGC temporary command center felt like a tomb.
Captain Helena Valerius stood in the sterile, humming silence, a cup of lukewarm, bitter coffee in her hand.
The air was thick with the ghosts of her own failures.
The Chimera leak had shattered the public’s trust in the DGC.
General Gideon, protected by a wall of high-priced lawyers and political maneuvering, had been placed on "administrative leave," a polite term for a paid vacation.
Commander Kael was now the de facto head of Special Operations, his power growing daily, his arrogance a palpable, suffocating presence in every briefing.
And Thanatos, the ghost that had started it all, had vanished without a trace.
Valerius felt like she was the only sane person left in an asylum that was burning down around her.
"Anything?" she asked, her voice a flat, weary sound.
The young analyst at the main console, a kid named Ensign Miller, shook his head, his face pale under the harsh fluorescent lights.
"Nothing, Captain," he said. "It’s like they fell off the face of the earth. No energy signatures. No comms chatter. Nothing."
He hesitated.
"We are, however, getting a series of... anomalous incident reports from the Undercroft."
Valerius’s eyes narrowed. "Anomalous how?"
"A series of deaths," Miller explained, pulling up a file. "Low-level DGC informants. A couple of journalists who were digging into the Chimera story. All found in locked rooms. No signs of forced entry."
He brought up a series of grisly crime scene photos.
"The official cause of death is being listed as ’spontaneous organ failure’," he said, his voice dropping. "But the coroner’s private notes, which I may or may not have legally acquired, mention something else."
He zoomed in on one of the photos. A close-up of a victim’s face.
The eyes were wide with a terror so profound it seemed to be frozen in the very cells of the body.
"Every victim has the same look on their face," Miller whispered. "They died of fright."
"And there’s this," he added, pulling up a final, grainy security feed from an alleyway.
It showed a DGC patrol, torn to shreds.
Their armor was ripped open, not by claws, but with a terrifying, surgical precision.
"This is Gideon," Valerius said, her voice a low, cold growl. "It has to be."
"He’s cleaning house. Silencing anyone who could testify against him."
"But how?" Miller asked. "He’s under house arrest. His assets are frozen."
Valerius stared at the image on the screen, at the clean, perfect, and utterly inhuman carnage.
She knew.
"He’s not using his assets," she said, her voice a grim, final whisper.
"He’s using his pets."
Back at the Thanatos warehouse, life had found a new, strange, and deeply chaotic rhythm.
The place was no longer just a shell.
It was starting to feel like a home.
A very weird, very dangerous home, full of broken people and a six-legged rat-spider named Steve, but a home nonetheless.
Luna, their new Seer, was slowly, cautiously, beginning to find her place.
She was a bundle of nervous energy, a frightened bird in a nest of predators.
Jax had immediately taken her under his wing, declaring her his official "Apprentice of Awesome."
He was currently trying, and failing, to teach her the delicate art of calibrating a plasma coil.
"See?" he said, his voice full of an infectious enthusiasm. "You just have to feel the energy. You have to become one with the potential for a glorious, unregulated explosion."
Luna just stared at the sparking, humming device, her eyes wide with a terror that was not entirely related to its explosive potential.
Jinx watched them from a distance, her usual cynical scowl softened by a rare, almost maternal fondness.
She had taken it upon herself to be Luna’s unofficial bodyguard, a grumpy, pink-haired guardian angel who communicated primarily through grunts and the occasional, well-aimed glare at anyone who looked at their new rookie funny.
Michael was training with Chloe.
His control was better. The whispers were still there, a constant, low hum of monstrous static, but the walls he had built were holding.
For now.
"Again," Chloe commanded, her voice a crisp, clean line of pure, professional focus.
He was in the VR simulation, trying to construct a complex, shimmering lattice of pure Void energy.
He was actually doing it. The structure was stable, the lines clean.
He was so focused that he didn’t notice the change until it was too late.
Luna, who had been watching them from a safe distance, suddenly let out a small, sharp gasp.
Her hands flew to her temples, her face going pale.
"It’s... it’s happening again," she whispered, her voice trembling.
The VR simulation in Michael’s head dissolved into a blizzard of white static.
He was back in the training room, his own senses screaming a frantic, desperate alarm.
His [Void Sense] was on fire.
A new presence had just appeared on his internal radar.
It was cold.
It was sharp.
It was predatory.
And it was moving through the city with a silent, terrifying speed.
He stumbled out of the diagnostic chair, his eyes locking with Chloe’s.
She was already at her console, her fingers a blur across the keyboard.
"I’m getting a report from one of my Undercroft contacts," she said, her voice tight with a new, sharp urgency. "Another one of Gideon’s potential witnesses is on the move. A DGC data analyst. He was scheduled to meet with an Ironhearts informant."
She pulled up a live traffic camera feed.
It showed a dark, rain-slicked street in the meatpacking district.
A lone figure in a trench coat was walking quickly, his head down, his shoulders hunched.
And from the shadows of an alleyway behind him, another figure emerged.
It was humanoid, but its form was unstable, glitching, its limbs unnaturally long and thin.
It moved with a silent, boneless grace, a predator stalking its prey.
A Stalker Chimera.
It was happening. Right now.
"They’re going to kill him," Michael said, his voice a low, grim statement of fact.
"Jax!" Chloe’s voice was a whip-crack, cutting through the sudden, tense silence. "How long until the van is operational?"
Jax, his manic energy instantly replaced by a sharp, focused professionalism, gave her a grim smile.
"Give me five minutes," he said. "And a very large wrench."
Luna, who was still trembling, her eyes wide with the aftershocks of her vision, looked at them, her face a mask of fear and a new, dawning resolve.
"It’s not just the analyst," she whispered, her voice a ghost of a sound.
She looked at Michael, her Seer’s eyes seeing something that no one else could.
A new, cold, and terrifying thread in the tapestry of their fate.
"It knows you’re watching," she said, her voice dropping, a chill in her words that had nothing to do with the temperature.
"It’s not just hunting him."
She took a shaky, terrified breath.
"It’s hunting you, too."