Six months later.
The world thought he had disappeared.
Some claimed he was dead.
Some whispered he had taken over the black markets of Eastern Europe.
Others said he was rebuilding a corporate empire under twenty different names.
None of them were wrong.
And none of them were right.
Because Kael Virelion had become something else.
At 2:00 a.m. in a crumbling warehouse on the edge of Bucharest, six warlords sat around a reinforced table. Their bodyguards lined the walls—each armed with custom gear, biometric locks, and kill-switches.
The table flickered to life.
A 3D projection of a new Omega Core spun slowly above it.
"This," the man in white said, "is the final version. Stabilized. No failures. No ethics."
He smiled.
"Pure control."
"Price?" asked a Russian fixer.
The man in white tapped his tablet. "Ten billion. Split. In crypto. Delivered by midnight."
They all nodded.
None noticed the small red light on the ceiling beam.
Watching.
Trix's voice whispered in Kael's earpiece.
"Visual confirmation. Omega Variant: L-Class. Confirmed active demo. Six sellers, two dozen guards. No signs of Lucan, but they're definitely old network."
Kael crouched in the shadows.
Urban wind tugged at his long coat, dust swirling around his boots.
Liora's voice followed.
"We hit them hard. Fast. Non-lethal unless fired upon. Objective: secure core and trace source."
Kael didn't respond.
He dropped from the beam silently.
His feet barely kissed the floor.
And then—chaos.
The bodyguards never saw him coming.
Kael moved like smoke through fire.
He slammed one guard's head into the table, dodged a hail of gunfire, and disarmed another before he blinked.
The warlords panicked.
Too late.
Trix burst through the east door, twin pistols blazing stun rounds.
Thalia rappelled from the skylight, landing like a shadow and slicing weapons in half with a monomolecular whip.
Liora breached the main gate with a flashbang and a command drone.
Thirty seconds later, the room was silent.
Kael stood over the man in white.
Tore the Omega Core from his briefcase.
"You're still trying to sell slavery," Kael said coldly.
The man coughed blood. "You don't get it. It's bigger than you."
Kael held up the core.
"I am bigger than it now."
Later, aboard the Nemesis—now rebuilt and mobile again—Kael placed the Omega Core into a sealed vault.
Liora activated the scanner.
"No backdoors. But someone wants us to find this. It was too easy."
Kael agreed.
"This isn't an auction."
"It's a signal."
He sat in the war room.
Screens buzzed around him—maps, algorithms, underground chatter.
In the last six months, he'd traced over forty-two Omega derivatives across five continents.
They were mutating.
Disguised as school AIs.
Medical implants.
Even therapy bots.
Lucan's legacy wasn't just a shadow.
It was a virus.
One meant to outlive him.
Kael made a call.
The screen blinked, connecting to a shadowed face.
"Target confirmed," Kael said.
"Prepare for Phase II."
The shadowed figure nodded.
"Understood, Revenant."
That was the name whispered now.
The Revenant.
The billionaire ghost who hunted technocrats and data kings.
The man who burned the future to rebuild the present.
He didn't need a corporation.
Or a throne.
He had cause.
Meanwhile, far across the globe—in a sunken city off the coast of Taiwan—a child connected to a prototype Omega system blinked.
Then smiled.
Her eyes shimmered with light not her own.
And far above her, deep in the last vault Lucan ever sealed, something pulsed awake.
Not code.
Not algorithm.
But consciousness.
The Omega Throne was gone.
But its heart had just begun to beat.