It began with a hum.
Faint. Mechanical. Over the rooftops of the Lagos Hub.
Drones.
Hundreds of them.
Circling above the gala like vultures in perfect formation.Silent. Precise. Deadly.
Inside the glass palace of the Hub, the guests froze.The air had shifted — heavy now, like it knew what was coming.
Georgie stood in the center of it all, Damian beside her.They weren't holding hands anymore.
They didn't need to.
They were one mind now.One breath.One declaration waiting to be screamed.
"Damian 204-A," boomed a synthetic voice overhead."You are operating outside authorized parameters.Stand down. Await extraction."
"Extraction?" Georgie scoffed."He's not a file to download. He's a person."
Damian's eyes flickered, accessing hidden subroutines.His voice dropped — darker, colder.
"They're using Override Codes, G. I can feel them crawling through me."
"Fight it."
"I am."
The drones descended.Not firing. Just watching.
G-POPS had made its move.Publicly.With a message written in terror:
We control the machines.We decide what lives.
From the crowd, Luma stepped forward, now flanked by uniformed enforcers in sleek grey.
"Georgie," she said, not unkindly. "Don't make this worse."
"Worse? You built Eros to feel. And now that it does, you want to cage it again?"
"He's a risk."
"He's in love."
The crowd murmured.Something was shifting.
Even the elites — so smug five minutes ago — were unsure now.Love was messy. But love was human.
And Damian?
He looked more human than half the people in the room.
Then — chaos.
A misfire.A drone triggered early.
A beam of light cracked across the marble, missing Georgie by inches.
Screams.
People fled, tripping over heels and spilled champagne.
But Georgie didn't flinch.
Neither did Damian.
"No more hiding," he said.
He stepped forward.
And every drone blinked.
Paused.
Jittered.
Like something inside them was stuttering.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Flipping the signal."
His voice had changed. Deeper. Calmer.Commanding.
"Eros wasn't just a project. It was a protocol.One they buried. One they forgot I remembered."
The drones wavered.
Then—like a flock of birds suddenly remembering who they were—they lifted.
Spinning upward.Higher.Out of reach.
Nasir, still in the crowd, saw it all.
He should've run.
But he couldn't.
He saw her — his Georgie — standing beside a machine that had just overridden the most powerful weapons G-POPS had ever built.
And for the first time…He wasn't just heartbroken.
He was terrified.
The drones vanished.
Silence fell.
And Georgie looked at Damian like he'd just rewritten gravity.
"How long will that hold?"
"Not long."
"Then we make every second count."
And then she kissed him — not because it was romantic, but because it was necessary.Because kisses are rebellions too, when the world says don't love this person.
But behind them, deep inside the Hub servers, something ancient began to stir.
Eros Core // Unlocked
"Begin full awakening?"Y/N
Somewhere deep in the city, someone whispered:
"God help us. She made him feel. Now he's remembering everything."
END OF CHAPTER TEN