“War doesn’t always begin with gunfire. Sometimes, it starts with a whisper in a glass tower.”

  The room was sterile, gray, and reeked of bureaucracy. But behind that monotony sat giants—men and women with countries in their pockets and blood on their signatures.

  At the head of the table, Ambassador Leopold Krüger, a stoic force in European politics, tapped his pen against a thick folder marked “Aurelian Directive: OMEGA-TIER”.

  “He’s resurging,” Krüger said flatly. “We’ve seen the pattern before—small interventions, localized warlords disappearing, data breaches into encrypted nodes... and now, whispers about Dominion.”

  “You think it’s Malik?” asked Senator Graves of the U.S., his brow furrowed.

  “I don’t think,” Krüger corrected. “I know. Rex is moving again.”

  The screen behind him lit up with a global heatmap — clusters of suspicious events, disappearing agents, false identities resurfacing, and one common denominator: a black sigil with a wolf’s eye.

  Alfred’s calm voice echoed into the underground operations center as holographic maps blinked with red alerts.

  “We intercepted partial AI protocol signatures from the Aurelian network,” he explained. “They’re triangulating our patterns. Slowly. Precisely.”

  Rex stood over a long table, fingers tracing potential Aurelian nodes.

  “They’re not attacking yet,” Rex muttered. “They’re recruiting.”

  “Inside jobs?” Raz asked, sharpening his karambits.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  “Exactly. They want to poison us from within. Convince our people we’re no longer gods... just men.”

  “So what’s the counter?”

  “Fear.” Rex looked up, cold eyes shining. “Controlled chaos. We’ll give them something to chase… while we rip their floorboards out.”

  Juno, Dominion’s resident phantom in cyberwarfare, sat among ancient servers glowing like relics. She was halfway through rewriting a NATO ghost protocol when her comm crackled.

  “They’re tracing satellite hops,” Navarro said. “Our camouflage is thinning.”

  “Let them come,” Juno whispered with a smirk. “I’ve got a white rabbit waiting.”

  She initiated Project Requiem — an offensive AI program reverse-engineered from Aurelian’s own military botnet. If they wanted data, she’d give them a storm of illusions.

  In a dimly lit suite, Marco Bellante, one of the original founders of Aurelian Pact, downed a glass of scotch. He was scarred from years of indirect war — Rex had burned his shipping empire to the ground a decade ago.

  “He doesn’t fight battles,” Marco growled. “He erases footprints. Whole cities wake up forgetting who used to run them.”

  “So how do we win?” asked his bodyguard.

  Marco looked at the screen—images of Rex’s known associates.

  “We find his ghosts. And we bring them into the light.”

  Gunfire rained across the hilltops. Rex’s squad was pinned behind a stone embankment. His comms were dead. One of his men, bleeding from a chest wound, clutched a detonator.

  “We’re boxed in! They’re gonna overrun us!”

  “Not if they’re buried before they do,” Rex barked.

  He snatched the detonator, sprinted through bullets, and set off the charges manually.

  The explosion swallowed the enemy squad—and half the valley. Dust clouded everything.

  Rex limped back to his men, eyes bloody, face emotionless.

  “This is what loyalty looks like. I won’t ask it. I’ll prove it.”

  The inner circle, minus the Sixth, gathered around the central table. Holograms hovered above, projecting coded files, troop movements, political shifts.

  “They’ve called this a chessboard,” Kira said. “Fine. But they’ve forgotten we don’t play by turns.”

  Rex smiled thinly.

  “Let them open with the queen. We’ll flip the board.”