Chapter 188: War on Two Fronts
The walls of the safe house felt like they were closing in. The scary truth of Silas’s creation, the process that had turned Jonah’s soul into a blueprint, filled the room, creating tension.
They had a new enemy. A global corporation hiding in plain sight.
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The emergency meeting with their superiors was not a debriefing. It was a council of war. The Headmaster and General Ironwood appeared on a large, secure glowing screen, their faces serious. The mood was no longer one of anger at a failed mission, but of a deep, cold dread.
Jonah and his team explained everything clearly. They talked about the gala, the appealing but heartless Julian Sterling, the proposal, and the reveal of Silas, the artificial Weaver.
As they spoke, General Ironwood’s face looked more and more angry.
When they finished, the room suddenly went silent.
It was the Headmaster who spoke first, his voice calm and reflective. "So. The Syndicate was never just the banker. They were a rival developer, running their own project in the shadows." He looked at Jonah through the screen, his eyes showing how fully he understood. "They did not copy your work, Jonah. They industrialized it."
"A war with the Sterling Syndicate," General Ironwood said, his voice a low, dangerous growl. "Is a war we cannot win. Not conventionally."
He looked at each member of the team, his stare as tough as an iron. "We can’t send an army to their headquarters. We can’t arrest a man as politically connected as Julian Sterling. He owns politicians. He has his own private military. Declaring war on him would be like declaring war on our own economy. It would be a civil war fought by lawyers and assassins, not soldiers."
The situation felt hopeless. They were facing an enemy they couldn’t fight, a ghost made of money and power.
"So what do we do?" Draven asked, his voice showing how frustrated he was. "We just let them get away with it? Let them build an army of those... things?"
"No," General Ironwood said, his face showing a hard determination. "We adapt. We fight a new kind of war. ASTF-Omega’s mission has just changed."
He held up his two fingers.
"One," he said, his voice sharp and clear. "You will find a weakness. Silas is their first success, but she is still a copy. A manufactured thing. Every machine has a flaw. You will find it, and you will find a way to break it."
He looked directly at Jonah and Vanessa. That was their mission. The creators versus the factory.
"Two," he continued, his voice dropping lower. "We fight them in the shadows. We need proof. Something certain that we can use to expose Sterling’s illegal activities to the whole world. We need to find a crack in his company’s protection and rip it wide open."
The mission was clear. They were a secret unit, told to fight two battles against an enemy that, officially, didn’t even exist.
Just as the Headmaster was about to add his own strategic advice, a soft ping came from the private terminal in the corner of the safe house. It was the one Jonah used for his personal, encrypted communications.
Everyone froze.
Jonah walked over to the terminal, feeling a strange sensation at the back of his neck. A single, untraceable message was waiting for him. It was a video file.
With the eyes of his entire team on him, he opened it.
The image that appeared on the screen made him feel scared.
It was a man whose face was covered in cuts and bruises, his eyes wide with fear. He was in a dark room, the type of forgotten place found in the deepest sections of the Undercroft. One of his arms was gone, replaced by a crude, bandaged stump.
It was Dr. Aris Thorne.
He looked broken. A weak version of the proud, arrogant creator who had lectured Jonah in the collapsing fortress. The hunter had become the hunted.
Thorne leaned close to the camera, his voice a desperate, rasping whisper.
"They took it," he said, his eyes looking around the dark room as if he expected Silas to step out of the shadows at any moment. "They took all of it. My research. My life’s work."
His face changed to show strong, angry hate. This hate was not for Jonah, but for the person he used to work with.
"Sterling," Thorne spat, the name sounding like a curse. "He doesn’t care about the art. The science. He changed it. He’s not creating soldiers. He’s creating slaves. Empty, programmable puppets with no soul, no will of their own."
He looked directly at the camera, and for the first time, Jonah saw a hint of something other than madness in the doctor’s eyes. He saw the desperate pride of a creator whose art had been stolen and changed for bad reasons by a man who only cared about profit.
"He’s a monster," Thorne said, his voice breaking. "And I helped create him."
He took a shaky breath. "I can help you stop him. I know his secrets. I know where the bodies are buried. I know everything."
He came closer to the camera, his face showing a desperate, wild look.
"Meet me," he pleaded. "Alone."
The video ended with a single, flashing image which showed a set of geographic coordinates.
The screen then went black.
Jonah just stood there, looking hard at his reflection in the dark screen. The safe house was completely silent.
Seraph, Draven, Vanessa, the Headmaster, and the General. They all stared at him, their faces holding feelings of shock, not trusting, and doubt.
The first villain. The madman they had been hunting for months, the man who had tried to kill them all, had just reappeared.
Not as an enemy.
But as a potential, and very desperate, ally. The devil himself was offering a deal. And Jonah was the only one who could decide whether or not to take it.