They emerged from the Black Vault with more than just a broken Reaper and bleeding memories.
They carried a weapon.
Not one made of steel or code.
But knowledge.
Within Kael's neural core now lived fragments of Project Omega—a protocol so dangerous it had been buried across ten black sites, each designed to never be found by the same person.
Lucan Sterling had found them all.
And he was building a throne.
Kael sat alone inside the Coreship Nemesis, floating in low Earth orbit. The others slept or healed or wept. But he read.
Data. Schematics. Concepts that broke the laws of causality.A network of synthetic consciousnesses seeded through history itself.A crown made not to rule nations, but narratives.
The Omega Throne would overwrite reality.
It could turn heroes into tyrants.
Crimes into miracles.
Erase entire bloodlines from history in a single pulse.
And Lucan planned to sit on it.
Kael clenched his jaw.
Trix entered, her face pale.
"You're shaking."
Kael looked up. "I saw my father in the data."
Trix stiffened. "Alive?"
Kael shook his head. "Worse. Complicit."
The Velvet House had once been the great counterforce to Sterling Industries. That's what the world believed.
But buried within the Omega files was a truth so vile Kael almost ripped the neural link from his skull.
His father—Corven Virelion—was the first architect of the Omega Throne.
And Kael?
He was meant to be its vessel.
Not a rebel.
Not a threat.
A shell.
A boy genetically sculpted and groomed to ascend the throne at 27, when the neural pathways would finally align.
Lucan's war had always been Plan B.
Kael was Plan A.
And he had just activated himself.
"Do we destroy it?" Seiryu asked later that day, gathering around the Omega map display.
Thalia shook her head. "No. We can't."
Kael stared at the map—ten golden pillars across the Earth, converging at a single point above the Atlantic.
The Ascension Spire.
Trix said what no one wanted to admit:
"If Lucan reaches it before us, he becomes history's author."
"If we reach it first…"
She looked at Kael.
"You become history itself."
Kael walked to the observation deck, watching storms rage below.
Liora joined him, her skin still pale from the extraction, but her eyes clear.
"I remember who I am now," she said softly. "What he did to me."
Kael didn't reply.
She leaned against the glass.
"I saw the Omega Throne in my dreams. Lucan showed it to me while I slept."
"It doesn't crown kings."
"It copies them."
Kael turned. "What do you mean?"
Liora looked at him.
"It scans your identity… then makes a thousand versions of you.""Each one tailored to control a different region, belief system, economic class.""A world of Kaels—each one slightly bent to Lucan's purpose."
Kael's voice turned hollow.
"Then who would I be?"
Liora touched his chest.
"The only real one left."
Later, in the ship's war chamber, Kael assembled the team.
"We have 72 hours until Lucan reaches the spire."
He clicked a hologram.
A spinning helix of personality algorithms and geopolitical AI clusters appeared.
"Lucan has started building the Echo Crown—the system that will distribute copies of me across the world."
Thalia leaned forward.
"What if we… poison it?"
Kael raised an eyebrow. "Go on."
She continued, "If it needs you to build clones—then maybe we feed it a lie. A version of you that Lucan would never accept."
Trix nodded. "A version that would destabilize everything he's built."
Seiryu smirked. "You want to Trojan Horse the god-code?"
Kael's voice was steel.
"No."
"I want to infect the throne with the truth."
They began building it that night.
Kael sat inside a psychic recording tank—his thoughts translated into neural waveform, then run through distortion fields.
He showed them not just his victories.
But his grief.
His rage.
His failures.
His scars.
A flawed Kael.
A human Kael.
One who would never rule.
But liberate.
Then came the call.
Intercepted by Thalia.
Lucan's voice.
Encrypted, but unmistakable.
"You think you've outplayed me, boy. But I designed the board."
"You may sit on the throne. But when you do, you'll learn the final rule."
"There is no Kael Virelion."
"Only what I made you believe you are."
The message ended.
The team was silent.
Kael stood slowly.
His voice didn't waver.
"Then I'll crown myself anyway."
The chapter ends with the Nemesis descending toward the Ascension Spire, lightning crawling across the sky like serpents of prophecy.
Kael's final words before the next battle:
"If I must sit on the throne…"
"Then I'll burn it from within."