The first explosion did not hit the estate.
It hit the grid.
Power across three districts faltered, not blacked out entirely, but destabilized in a way that sent systems scrambling to reroute, recalibrate, and compensate. Transportation nodes froze mid-sequence. Surveillance feeds flickered, looped, then went dark.
Cassian wasn't attacking infrastructure.
He was attacking trust.
Inside the estate, the shift was immediate. What had once been a controlled environment turned volatile, security teams snapping into motion, analysts shouting over one another, alerts cascading faster than they could be processed.
Dante stood at the center of it, immovable.
"Status," he said.
"Grid interference confirmed," a technician reported. "Not brute force. He's injecting false stability metrics. Systems think they're fine until they collapse."
Aria stepped beside Dante, already stripping layers off the data.
