(24's Perspective)
When Voss stopped speaking, I could tell she was finished. She didn't know what came next — no one did.
That part belonged to me.
The night I left the EGI facility, the city was already falling apart. Power grids flickered like dying stars, and the air smelled of burning plastic and rain. I remember walking until the smoke turned the sky gray and the screams faded into static.
That was the beginning of the end — for the world, and for me.
⸻
The First Night
I made it to the rooftops before dawn. The city below looked like a broken circuit board, pieces of light still sparking across the ruins. Somewhere out there, the Elite Corporations were still fighting over scraps of data, old weapons, and territory. But all I saw was fire.
I slept for the first time in days beneath a rusted comm tower. My body shook every time I closed my eyes — jump fatigue. Every teleport leaves a scar somewhere inside you. Neural backlash, they called it. Like burning wires in your veins.
But pain means you're still alive.
⸻
The Fall
The following weeks were chaos. Cities went dark, comms died, trade convoys were hijacked or wiped out. I moved through it all like a ghost.
The survivors I found weren't civilians anymore — just scavengers with knives and hunger in their eyes. Some begged for help. Some tried to kill me. I didn't blame either kind.
I learned to stay silent, to move fast, to only kill when I had to. My blades — the long and the short — became extensions of my breath. Quick, efficient, silent.
Teleport. Slash. Vanish.
Sometimes I could still feel the rhythm of Moth's laughter in my movements — quick and unpredictable. I tried not to think about it too long. It hurt too much.
⸻
The Ruins of the World
The collapse didn't happen in one explosion. It came like rot.
The Elite Government Intelligence fractured. Their data wars unleashed things they couldn't contain — biological, mechanical, and worse. They lost control of their own machines. Autonomous war drones wiped out entire sectors before they were shut down.
Weather systems went rogue. Cities drowned. Whole regions became deserts overnight.
I watched the sky turn red one morning — clouds shaped like burning wings. That's when I realized the world wasn't ending. It had already ended. We were just living in the ash.
⸻
The First Kill
Three months after the Purge, a scavenger gang found me on the edge of the dead zone near what used to be Denver. I was outnumbered — ten of them, armed, hungry.
They thought I was just another drifter.
Teleport.
Blade.
Blood.
They didn't understand what they were fighting. They called me a ghost before they died.
I didn't feel proud. I didn't feel anything. I left their bodies where they fell. Their blood pooled in the cracks of the road and mixed with the rain until it looked black.
That's when I stopped being Elias Ward.
That's when I became 24.
⸻
Surviving the Silence
Years passed like hours. Seasons blurred together. I learned to hide from drones, to harvest water from the wreckage, to track patrols and corporate convoys.
Every so often, I'd hear whispers — rumors about someone else who had survived the Black Division. A phantom. A killer. A name that shouldn't exist anymore.
Specter.
He'd climbed the ranks of EGI's new hierarchy, they said. Controlled the security forces that patrolled the ruins. Turned their chaos into empire.
I didn't want to believe it. But deep down, I knew it was true.
Specter had lived.
And he was coming.
⸻
The Oath
I made my oath on a night when the sky was burning again — this time from orbital debris. A line of falling stars lit the horizon while I sat on the remains of a highway overpass, my blades across my knees.
"You took everything from me," I said to the empty world.
"You turned us into ghosts. Now I'll haunt you back."
The wind howled through the cracks of the concrete. For a long time, I thought I heard Moth's voice in it — soft, teasing, the same way she used to call me pretty boy just to make me blush.
I opened my eyes. The wind was silent again.
The world didn't care.
But I did.
And that was enough.
⸻
That's when the legend of 24 began — a shadow that walked through apocalypse, hunting the people who had built it.