The room hummed like a refrigerated coffin.

Ying stood in the centre of the Enforcer command hub, flanked by floor-to-ceiling walls of surveillance feeds. Hundreds of screens glowed cold in the dark—black-and-white city views, aura-sigils, infrared overlays, heartbeat graphs. Each screen showed a different corner of Prague. Each one showed him.

King Tomas.

In cafes. On church steps. In children's classrooms. Smiling. Waving. Walking.

Then— One by one— They twitched.

Ying didn't move.

The first Tomas convulsed in a bakery queue. His eyes rolled back, limbs stiffening like a glitching doll. Another, in a tram station, dropped to his knees, frothing black. A third, mid-speech outside the Cathedral, jerked sideways and collapsed. Then more.

On every feed, across every sector – the same failure.

Limbs seizing. Faces drooping. Flesh sliding off bone like spoiled wax. Some screamed. Others just melted. All of them – dying.

No cause. No alert. No visible trigger.

Ying's eyes narrowed.

Only one eyebrow rose – a fractional tick. Not surprise. Calibration.

Chloe? She'd seen her work before – ghostwalks, spirit ruptures, echo-kills. If this was Chloe, it meant she'd found a way to fracture the puppet souls from their anchors. Not impossible. The aura feeds had been twitching with static echoes for twenty-three minutes – precise to the second. That aligned with ghost disruption on a mass scale. Bleed-over from residual trauma. Chloe could do that. If she was angry enough.

Liz? Ying considered it for exactly three seconds. A psychic surge on this level would require enormous bandwidth – direct mind-to-mind overload across dozens of zones. Liz had the raw potential. But she'd never seen Liz sustain anything like this, not without burning herself out. Unless— Unless she cracked the root. If Liz had found the central control thread… if she'd found the original Tomas…

No, Ying thought. Too early. Too dangerous. Liz wouldn't risk it yet.

Victor? Now that tracked.

Every collapsed Tomas had gone down the same way – hard, messy, organ-first. No soulshock. No traditional rupture. Just biological failure. Muscles tearing, joints dislocating, tissue melting into meat-jelly. Victor's style was never surgical. He hit the system like a virus made of claws.

Ying rewound one of the clips silently, watching a Tomas seize, twitch, then drop in a lurch of melting ribs.

Centralised rupture, she concluded. Not decay. Interference. Brute disruption of a shared nervous system.

She logged the scenario into memory. Chloe – 30%. Liz – 15%. Victor – 45%. Other/Unknown – 10%. Low error margin. Acceptable.

She tapped her thumb once against her thigh.

I'll ask them later.

The feeds showed chaos. Enforcers retreating. Civilians running. Cameras glitching.

Tomas was collapsing everywhere. Simultaneously. System-wide.

Ying exhaled, slow. No smile. Just purpose sharpening into clarity.

"Planned or not," she murmured, "that was our signal."

She turned her head slightly – just enough to catch the profile of the nearest guard standing three metres to her right.

He didn't know yet that he was a target.

Ying did.

She stepped forward, shoulders level, footsteps quiet, almost polite.

But her intent walked ahead of her like a blade unsheathed.

Time to begin. Time to burn it all down. Find Max, and get the Hell out of here.

…………………

The halls were quiet. No alarms. No announcements. Just the muffled hiss of fluorescent lights, and the low, continuous hum of power flowing through the reinforced walls.

Ying moved like a shadow through the upper corridors – barefoot, coat unmarked, not a thread out of place. Her hair was tied, her breath measured. No footsteps. No heart-rate spike.

She paused at a maintenance alcove and slid the false panel open with two fingers.

Inside – her datapad. A black slab, matte screen. Unconnected. Undetectable.

She tapped once.

The list lit up – names, faces, timestamps.

Enforcer GARDNER – Oversaw four Selection rounds. Ordered the kneecapping of a suspect during interrogation. Laughed while doing it. Lieutenant HRUBY – Logged 19 disappearances. One survivor said he brought children to Tomas. TAMARA ZOULEK – Barracks sergeant. Shot a prisoner in the back for "slandering His Majesty."

Confirmed. Confirmed. Confirmed.

Every face glowed red.

Ying moved.

First target – the Planning Wing.

Gardner sat behind a curved table, muttering to himself, revising schedules for the next Selection. His fingers hovered over civic files.

He didn't hear her. Didn't see the blade until it was embedded in his eye, the hilt flush with bone.

He didn't make a sound.

She caught his body before it hit the floor. Dragged it gently beneath the console. Logged off the console without leaving a trace. Moved on.

Second target – the Barracks Row.

Tamara was just returning from her patrol sweep. She pushed the door open, still talking into her comms. "Yeah, he squealed. But I told him—"

CRACK.

Ying dislocated both her hands in one swift motion. Then pivoted. Drove her heel into the woman's temple.

Tamara dropped like butchered meat. Not dead yet.

Ying knelt beside her.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"You signed off on the boy from the textile sector," she said quietly.

Tamara's eyes fluttered. Her mouth opened.

Ying crushed her throat with one hand. Clean. Instant death.

Third target – the Sub-offices.

Lt. Hruby sat at his desk, half-asleep, screen open to citizen logs. He saw her too late. His gun was halfway out of the drawer when her baton drove through his wrist.

She flipped it, caught the weapon mid-air, and shot him once in the neck. The silencer hissed.

No mess.

Three kills. No errors. No emotion.

Only verification.

Ying leaned against the wall outside his office. Let the silence settle again.

Then she felt it. The tremor.

Not seismic. Not electrical. A soulfield fluctuation – sharp, then spreading. Like pressure releasing. Like a weight lifted from the city's lungs.

A second pulse followed. Softer. Not a collapse. A crack.

She understood instantly.

These weren't just executions. Each target was an anchor. A thread in the net that held Prague together.

The surveillance system. The Selection routes. The behavioural prediction map. It all ran through blood. Through Contracts. Through sacrifice. All about control.

And now – one by one – the knots were coming undone.

She closed her eyes.

Good.

Then opened them. Three more names pulsed red on the datapad.

She moved again.

…………………

The doors hissed open.

Ying stepped inside.

The room was dark. Not with shadow but with light. Dozens of screens hovered mid-air in silent formation, glowing in the stale air like rectangular ghosts. City feeds. Aura sweeps. Contract tracking overlays. Each one pulsed with warnings. Glitches. Distortions.

Something was breaking. And the room knew it.

So did the four Enforcers inside.

Captains. Each one marked by rank and power – halos burning behind their heads. Contractors, all of them. Upgraded. Dangerous.

They turned when she entered.

Captain Rybak – tall, square-jawed, eyes too still – stepped forward first. "Ying," he said. "You're not authorised to be here."

Captain Markova reached for her back. Her Contract tattoos glowed, lines of gold tracing her neck like circuitry.

Ying raised one hand. No weapon. Just stillness.

"You've seen the feeds," she said. "Tomas is down. The puppets are failing. This is over."

Rybak's jaw ticked. "You don't know what you're doing."

"I do," Ying replied. "I watched you order the last ten Selection rounds. I watched you black-bag teachers. Children. You took my neighbour's son."

Captain Dorn – older, greyer, stayed silent. His hand hovered near his belt. Contract glyphs flickered on his wrists. Not active yet. Just twitching.

"You're here to kill us," Markova hissed.

Ying's eyes didn't blink. "Only if you make me."

For a second, nothing moved.

Then Captain Sven dropped his sidearm. Just let it fall.

"I'm done," he said. His voice was flat. Broken. "Whatever this is… it's bigger than us."

Markova spun.

"Coward—"

She didn't finish.

Ying was already there.

Her boot slammed into Markova's chest, sending her crashing backward into a console. The woman lit her Contract mid-fall – blue-white arcs snapped across her arms – but Ying moved faster.

She closed the gap in half a breath and drove her baton into the side of Markova's neck. The glyphs sparked once – then died. Her body went limp.

Two left.

Rybak raised his hand – powers fully charged now, halo surging. The air around him bending with kinetic pressure.

Ying ducked low.

The first blast missed, cracking a monitor into fragments. Ying surged forward, sweeping his legs out from under him. Rybak hit the floor hard, exhaling blood.

Dorn moved to flank. Slow. Calculating.

He didn't get halfway.

Ying grabbed a shard of shattered screen and drove it into his eye.

Then silence.

Three bodies. One survivor.

She turned to Sven, who hadn't moved. His hands were up, face pale.

"I won't fight you," he said. "I just… want to see how it ends."

Ying nodded once.

She dragged a chair from the wall, forced him into it, and tied his wrists with a power cord ripped from the nearest terminal.

Then she walked to the centre of the room.

At the base of the far wall, nestled between the data towers and hum-crates, was the core spine – a crystal lattice that pulsed with sickly white light. The soulfield uplink. The node that connected Enforcer command to the palace grid, the prison systems, the surveillance eyes that watched everything.

Ying reached into her coat and withdrew a thin, black knife. Matte. No gleam.

She drove it into the node.

Cracks spidered instantly – light spilling out in jagged pulses. The crystal convulsed, then shattered inward with a sound like glass choking on air.

Around the room, every screen blinked once. Then twice.

Then failed.

Across the city, aura surveillance grids buckled. Locks disengaged. One prison wing shorted open. The alarm system stuttered – then went silent.

A fail-safe had tripped.

One small act, but it spread. Like a virus. Like fire.

Ying stepped back.

Her pulse was steady. But her breath caught. Not from exertion. From what this meant.

The crack had started. And now it would spread.

…………………

Ying moved like smoke.

The corridors behind her still reeked of scorched circuits and bleeding glyphs. Somewhere deep in the building, systems died in sequence – lights flickering out, lockdowns shorting open. But ahead, the air changed. The sterile cold of control gave way to the stale, frightened heat of the city.

She crossed the final security gate – half-open now, its locking pistons frozen mid-cycle. And there, at the mouth of the exit hall, slumped against the wall beneath a flickering emergency panel—

Captain Mirka.

One arm cradled against her ribs. Blood on her sleeve. Her face was pale. But not broken.

Her eyes met Ying's.

There was no defiance. Only recognition. And guilt.

She raised her sidearm anyway.

It shook in her grip.

"You shouldn't be here," Mirka said. Her voice was low. Rough. "You don't understand what you're risking."

Ying didn't reach for her own weapon. She didn't need to. She took two steps forward.

Mirka flinched.

"Don't," Ying said.

"I can't let you—"

"You already have."

Ying's hand blurred – faster than fear. She closed the space between them in a blink, fingers snapping the weapon from Mirka's grip before it finished rising. It clattered to the floor.

Mirka's breath caught.

Ying didn't strike. Didn't scold. Just studied her – eyes sharp, unreadable.

"You knew it was wrong," she said softly. "Every order. Every child taken. Every Contract forced. You knew."

Mirka's lip trembled. Her mouth opened – then shut again.

Ying waited.

"I…" Mirka's eyes watered, not from pain. "There are commands. Soul deep. Contract triggers. We couldn't disobey…"

"You're disobeying now."

Mirka looked down. Her hand was still half-raised in a fist. But it didn't close.

"I wanted to help them," she whispered. "I thought I could from the inside. Thought... maybe it was better than nothing."

"It wasn't," Ying said. "But you can still help. Help undo it."

Mirka met her gaze. No lies there. Only despair. And under it – something else. The ghost of resistance.

Ying moved quickly – two fingers against Mirka's neck, striking a precise point beneath the ear. Mirka gasped once. Then folded, eyes rolling back.

Ying caught her before she hit the ground.

The door to the city yawned ahead.

Ying dragged her carefully – out past the red line etched into the floor, past the last control sensor, past the reach of cameras. The air beyond was heavier, warmer, smelling of ash and boiling water. The outer zone.

She found a slumped awning across the way – a collapsed street-side info booth long since abandoned. The fabric was torn, but it shaded the wall.

Ying laid Mirka there.

Not like a prisoner. Like a person.

She adjusted the coat to hide the badge. Wiped some of the blood from her cheek. Then stood.

She didn't look back.

…………………

The smoke was thinner here.

Not gone but it swirled different. Less controlled burn, more wreckage. Ying stepped through it without sound, her boots silent against the cracked tiles of a service alley just beyond the command wing's outer perimeter.

And the world watched her.

They didn't call out. Didn't move. But she felt them.

Eyes.

Above, behind, beside. Reflected in shattered windowpanes, behind iron-latticed fences, tucked into the broken teeth of shopfronts. Civilians. Dozens. More. Hunched low, breathing shallow, half-hidden in the soot-stained skeletons of a city that had learned to disappear.

One woman – eyes hollow, baby pressed to her chest – gasped when she saw Ying. Not in recognition.

In realisation.

Another, older, stepped back and gripped a rusted pipe like it might protect her. She didn't raise it.

No one screamed.

Ying didn't stop. She didn't speak. But she saw them all. And let them see her.

Her coat was black. Red-streaked. The blood hadn't dried. Her blade hung low at her side, loose, relaxed, unafraid. Her halo shimmered faintly behind her – dull, low-frequency light, more pressure than glow.

And the blood on her boots? Fresh.

She turned one last corner. The air behind her shifted.

"Is that... her?" someone whispered.

"She just came out of the tower."

"She's not with them."

"She killed them."

A pause.

Then— so quiet Ying almost didn't hear it—

"She's fighting for us."

A child's voice. Half-dreamed. Hopeful.

Ying didn't turn around.

But she heard movement.

Behind her, in the dusted hush, a woman crawled from beneath a kiosk roof and reached for the unconscious figure Ying had left under the awning. Cpt. Mirka. Her hand was bleeding. But steady. She gripped the collar, pulled the limp form into the shadows.

Another man began unlocking a rusted basement gate. His hands shook. But he did it anyway.

Ying kept walking. No speeches. No victory. Just a message, left behind in breath and silence.

Enforcers can fall.

Tomas is not untouchable.

Someone is striking back.

The smoke thickened again.

Ying disappeared into it.

But the street didn't forget.

A window cracked open.

A bolt slid free.

A child whispered again.

Ying's jaw tightened – not from rage. From purpose.

One spark, she thought. That's all it takes.

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