I leaned my back against the cold blast door, my heart hammering wildly in my chest like an engine on the verge of overloading. Outside, the sound of that woman Ilana's pounding and cursing was rapidly fading; it sounded like she had gone to get backup.
Good.
This damn fleeting moment of peace, bought with violence, was exactly what I needed.
I turned around to face the bottomless, pitch-black corridor ahead. The ancient scent of dust, ozone, and old paper hung heavy in the air, thick enough to choke on. Yet beneath that stench of decay, the familiar "Ghost Echo" was as clear as a whisper in my ear, tugging at my every nerve.
I was home.
Without a second thought, I stepped into the darkness.
The place was far more massive than I'd imagined, like a steel graveyard utterly forgotten by time. Rows of towering metal archive racks stood like silent steel giants, stretching into the distance until they vanished from sight. The faint glow from my personal terminal was the only light in the dead silence. Wherever the light touched, I could see the racks covered in a nauseatingly thick layer of dust, with grimy cobwebs clinging to the corners.
Following the index number provided by that anonymous bastard—YF009—I began to weave through the labyrinth of shelves.
*Whirrr—*
A nearly imperceptible, low-frequency electronic hum drifted from the distance.
My body moved faster than my brain. In an instant, I slipped into the shadows of an archive rack like a ghost, holding my breath. A disc-shaped security drone, its ominous red scanning beam flickering, glided silently past the end of the aisle. Its scanning beam swept inch by inch across the rack where I was hiding, the cold red light almost searing my skin.
I didn't dare emerge from the shadows until that damned humming had completely faded into the depths of the corridor. The security here was a hundred times tighter than outside. My "Engineer's Eye" allowed me to predict the patrol routes of these cold machines, but there were too many of them. I had to scurry through the cracks in the darkness like a real gutter rat.Time was ticking away, and my heart hammered with mounting panic. Damn it, that woman could burst in with a pack of Academy lapdogs at any moment; I didn't have time to play hide-and-seek!
"YF-007... YF-008..." I repeated the numbers on the labels in my head, gliding through the archive racks like a ghost, my boots making no sound as they hit the floor.
Finally, in the most remote and shadowed corner, I stopped dead.
Before me stood a shelf unlike any of the others, enclosed in its own rusted metal cage. A faded yet still stark red warning sign hung from it.
"SEALED - TOP SECRET"
My heart gave a violent lurch, nearly jumping out of my chest!
I aimed the dim light of my terminal at a physical file box on the shelf. It was a dark gray metal box, coated in a layer of dust so thick it looked as if it hadn't been touched in decades—utterly forgotten by the world.
On the side of the box, a stenciled white label glared back at me in the faint light.
"G.E. Project"
This was it!
The Ghost Engine Project!
A wave of intense dizziness washed over me. I felt the blood rush to my head, and my ears began to ring.
I'm here, Father. I've come to take back what belongs to us.
I took a sharp breath, using every ounce of willpower to steady my trembling body. Reaching out, I used my sleeve to roughly wipe away the dust, revealing the latch.
Another damn mechanical lock, though far simpler than the stupid gate outside. For me, this was as easy as breathing. I pulled a probe from my pocket and slid it in effortlessly. Feeling the mechanical feedback through my fingertips, I worked the pins by instinct.
*Click.*
A faint but crisp click, and the lock gave way.
My hands shook uncontrollably as I slowly, with an almost religious reverence, lifted the lid of the metal box.
An even heavier scent of decay—a mix of old paper and dust—hit me, as if I were opening a tomb that had been sealed for twenty years.It was filled with a thick stack of yellowed paper blueprints and several data chips so old they looked like antiques.
I picked up the top blueprint. It depicted incredibly complex energy circuits unlike anything I'd ever seen, flanked by dense clusters of formulas and parameters that I couldn't yet fully grasp. But with just a single glance, I could feel the power contained within—power enough to upend the entire universe. It was a kind of beauty: a pure, lethal beauty belonging to machinery and energy.
But that didn't matter.
I tore through the documents like a starving beast ripping apart its prey. My goal wasn't technical details; it was the people. Who had created all this?
Finally, buried in the middle of the stack, I found a printed list of project members.
My breath hitched, then stopped completely.
At the very top of the list were two names printed in bold, followed by their titles, like sacred names etched into a historical monument.
Chief Engineer: Ethan Ackerman.
Core Data Analyst: Lena Ackerman.
Ethan... Lena...
Ackerman!
My parents. They weren't fucking miners. They were geniuses, the architects of legends! And the Empire—this godforsaken, decaying Empire—had buried their names under endless dust, leaving them to be forgotten like trash.
A surge of emotion—a cocktail of ecstasy, pride, and gut-wrenching agony—erupted inside me like a nuclear blast, drowning me completely. I'd found it. I'd finally found the ironclad proof of who they really were.
But my shock was far from over.
My gaze swept down the list like a scalpel, cutting precisely through every name until it finally landed on the very last entry: "Project Lead."
When I saw the name, I felt as if I'd been stabbed in the back, the blade twisted and churned deep inside me. My blood turned to ice.
Project Lead: Hawk Anderson.
Hawk Anderson.
The name was a poisoned dagger, piercing my heart and twisting with a vengeance. The man who had hunted me like a bloodhound, scrutinizing me with those eagle eyes... the Chief Investigator who had stared me down during the league matches as if trying to peer into my very soul...He wasn't investigating the truth.
He was guarding his own grave! He was making sure my parents' ghosts would never crawl out from this moldy, rotting pile of old papers!
I felt no anger, only a cold, absolute murderous intent festering in my very marrow. I wanted to see him on his knees before me, to hear the sound of his bones snapping, to break his neck with my own two hands.
I forced myself to stay calm, my mind reeling from the massive shock of this information. *Calm down, Vex. Calm down.* Anger is a luxury for the weak; what I need is vengeance.
I kept digging and, at the very bottom of the dossier, found a thin, stapled document that looked like a pre-written epitaph.
The title read: "G.E. Project Accident Report."
I read it word by word, each one like a poisoned needle piercing my eyes.
The report stated that during a critical experiment, an "uncontrollable energy resonance" occurred, causing the core laboratory to be instantly consumed by high-dimensional energy.
The core members, including Ethan and Lena Ackerman, were killed instantly, their bodies vaporized.
The project was subsequently deemed extremely hazardous and ordered by the Emperor to be permanently sealed.
At the end of the report was Hawk Anderson's signature—a flamboyant scrawl that reeked of arrogance and the absolute power to end it all.
"Accident"? "Vaporized"?
"Uncontrollable energy resonance"?
As I looked at the technical description of that "energy resonance," the corners of my mouth curled into a cold, destructive smile. Those desk-jockey idiots hadn't even bothered to craft a decent lie. The energy model they described was like asking a cook to design a nuclear reactor—it was laughably riddled with holes.
This wasn't some damn "accident."
It was an execution.
A precision murder, carried out using the very weapon my parents had spent their lives building!
Just then!
"She's inside! Seal all exits! Activate maximum-level internal security protocols!"
From outside the restricted zone, Ilana's sharp, frantic voice barked out orders.Immediately after, a flurry of hurried, chaotic footsteps came rushing toward my position! They were even wearing heavy power boots; the heavy metallic thuds hammered against the floor—and against my heart.
They were here!
Without a moment's hesitation, I whipped out my personal data pad and snapped photos of the project member list, the accident report, and several key technical schematics that laid bare their lies.
I couldn't take the physical file; that would immediately tip them off that I knew their core secret. I had to leave it here, letting them believe their fortress was still impregnable and that I was nothing more than a stray rat who had broken in and found nothing.
After the final shot, I quickly stacked the documents back in their original order, placed them back in the metal box, snapped the lid shut, and slid it back into its place on the shelf. I even grabbed a handful of dust from the floor and carefully sprinkled it over the box, smudging it with my fingertips to erase any sign of my presence, making it look exactly as it had for the last few decades.
With that done, and the footsteps drawing closer, I took a deep breath and turned, vanishing into the deeper shadows of the archives like a drop of ink dissolving into the night.
Hawk Anderson... I won't forget that name. From this day forward, what lies between us is no longer as simple as investigator and suspect.
This is a blood debt.
And I, Vex Ackerman, will make sure you pay it back in full.
I pressed myself against the side of a shelf like a gecko. The moment I merged with the darkness, a piercing alarm shrieked behind me. Blood-red emergency lights flooded the restricted zone, casting twisted, monstrous shadows from the rows of shelves.
A cold, synthesized mechanical voice echoed through the space, every word dripping with an ominous threat:
"Warning: Unauthorized genetic sequence detected. Target locked. Initiating... Purge Protocol."
I heard the rhythmic *clack-clack* of countless mechanical joints unfolding, the sound surging toward me from all directions—from the ceiling, and from the darkest depths of the archives.