Voss's voice grew softer, haunted by memories. "After the Purge… the world began to fall apart. Not overnight, not suddenly. But like a wound left to fester, everything rotted from within."
24's gaze drifted to the shadows of the Undercity chamber, but his mind was already far away, back in the ruins of the city he had fled.
⸻
The first signs had been small. Corporate enclaves collapsing, trade routes cut by rebel factions, minor skirmishes in the streets. Food shortages. Civil unrest. By the time 24 had realized the Purge had left him alone, the world above was already unraveling.
The corporations — those giant, faceless Elite Government Intelligence puppet-masters — struggled to maintain control. Their security forces turned on each other, their databanks hacked, their vaults raided. Cities burned quietly at first, then erupted in chaotic flames.
Elias wandered through it all. He was sixteen when the Purge began. Seventeen when he became 24. Now, eighteen, nineteen… he moved through a city no one ruled, a world no one maintained.
Buildings were skeletal. Concrete towers cracked and blackened from fire. Smoke hung low in the streets, smelling of metal, ozone, and decay. The smell clung to his clothes, to his hair, to his skin. Every step echoed on empty streets. Every shadow could hide death.
⸻
The Loneliness of Survival
24 moved like a ghost through the ruins, teleporting short distances to avoid the remnants of warbands and drones. Each jump burned his body, each landing left echoes in his mind — the voices of the dead, the fragments of the children he had lost.
He scavenged, learned to fight alone, and built his reputation as a shadow in the apocalypse. Humans whispered about a figure who appeared and vanished without warning — blades gleaming, no one left alive to tell the story.
And he remembered Moth. Every night. Her laughter, her teasing, her spark of humanity in a world that had none. It was the only tether that kept him sane, even as the world itself went mad.
⸻
The World Falls
By the twenty-first year of the century, global systems had failed. Power grids collapsed. Satellites burned out. The oceans rose in some regions, while elsewhere, storms scoured entire cities. Mega-corporations fought over scraps of infrastructure. Governments fell like sandcastles.
EGI, the organization that had created the Black Division, survived. But it adapted. Instead of controlling nations, they controlled fragments — city-states, corporate sectors, and wastelands. They hired mercenaries, assassins, and spies. And they hunted him — 24 — not just as a survivor, but as a threat to their new order.
⸻
The Hunter Emerges
Voss looked at Mara and Kira, her voice trembling with a mix of fear and awe. "During these years, 24 became more than a boy, more than a soldier. He became a ghost. A hunter. And the EGI… they didn't forget him. They were rebuilding their forces, sending others like Specter into the new world. And when they did, 24 would be ready. Not for survival… for vengeance."
24's gray eyes hardened. The ruins, the collapse, the endless deaths he had witnessed — all of it shaped him. The fire of the apocalypse reflected in his soul, and it was cold, relentless, and sharp as the blades he carried.
Voss's final words hung in the air: "He is the last of the Black Division… and the first of something else entirely."
⸻
The chamber fell silent. Mara and Kira could feel it — the weight of the apocalypse, the ghosts of children turned soldiers, and the shadow that 24 had become.
Outside, the Undercity hummed, but in 24's mind, the world above was still burning, still collapsing, still waiting for him to return.