The safe house was hidden deep beneath the city. It was supposed to feel secure, but the air inside was filled with tension. The team sat around a table. The only sound that broke the silence was the quiet buzz of the air recyclers.
Draven hit is fist on the table, making the others jump. BANG!
"How?" he growled. "Just... how? We spent months thinking Jonah was one of a kind. A miracle. And that man just snaps his fingers and has one of his own? How do you make a Weaver?"
"She wasn’t made like Thorne’s creatures," Seraph said, her voice low. She was staring at the table, replaying the fight in her mind. "There was nothing wild about her. She was clean. It felt... engineered."
Jonah said nothing. He was staring at his own hands, at his God Mark that glowed faintly under his skin. He rembered the feel of Silas’s power,a perfect mirror of his own. He rembered her God Mark, the logo of the Syndicate.
The feeling of it made him deeply uncomfortable.
"I don’t get it," Draven continued, his frustration growing. "Thorne needed Jonah’s blood. How could Sterling do it without that?"
"He didn’t need it," Vanessa whispered.
Everyone turned to look at her. She was looking at her datapad, her face pale under the light coming from it.
"The source code," she said, her voice trembling. "Oh, gods. The source code."
She turned the datapad to show them. On the screen was the data she had copied from the Bureau’s servers months ago. The digital blueprint of Jonah’s power. His soul, translated into a language of pure information.
"Sterling said he acquired Thorne’s assets," Vanessa explained. "We thought he ant labs and research notes. But he ant the data. The data Thorne collected on you in the fortress. The data from our fight with the Gemini."
"He didn’t need your blood, Jonah," she said, her voice filled with a bad, sure feeling. "He had sothing better. He had the recipe."
As she spoke, everything around Jonah seed to disappear. The walls of the safe house vanished , replaced by a vision, a mory of a story he hadn’t witnessed but now understood clearly
———————————————————————
Weeks Ago. One of the Syndicate Laboratory.
Dr. Aris Thorne stood in front of Julian Sterling, proudly presenting the data from his fight with Jonah. "As you can see," Thorne said, his voice full of pride, "the subject depends too much on ’emotions,’ which is interesting but not a good way to fight. It’s a fault we can easily fix with our programs"
Julian Sterling leaned back in his expensive chair. He looked... bored.
"Inefficient is the correct word, Doctor," Sterling said, his voice calm and cold. "Your Gemini were impressive for a first try. But they were unstable. Your thods are still too reliant on basic, biological fusion. You were working with simple tools, Doctor, while we were creating sothing far more advanced and impactful."
Thorne’s proud expression changed. "But the data..."
"The data is useful," Sterling agreed. "But it is only one piece of a much larger puzzle." He pointed to a scientist standing silently in the corner. "You see, Doctor, while you were busy playing in your mountain, the Syndicate was working on a project. A more... permanent solution."
He smiled, a dangerous look on his face. "You took all that effort to steal the subject’s blood. We found it was much easier to simply steal his soul."
The scientist moved forward and activated a terminal. A glowing image appeared. It was Jonah’s source code, the data Vanessa had stolen from the Bureau.
Thorne stared at it, his eyes growing wide as he suddenly understood.
"We didn’t need to build a hybrid from broken parts," Sterling explained, standing up and walking towards a large door. "We decided to build from a clean slate. All we needed was the right raw material."
The door hissed open. Inside, a woman in a gray jumpsuit was sitting on a tal chair. Her face was hard and emotionless. She was a soldier, one of the Syndicate’s most ruthless and loyal rcenaries. Her file said she had zero magical potential.
Perfect.
"We didn’t need to steal the subject’s power," Sterling said, a note of triumph in his voice. "We only needed to understand the chanics of how it works."
He nodded to the scientists.
The scene shifted. The woman, Silas, was now strapped into a chair in the center of the lab. A helt-like device covered in glowing runes was lowered onto her head. It was a piece of forbidden Artificer technology, reverse-engineered and perfected by the Syndicate.
Jonah’s source code was projected all around her.
"We used your data to build the machine," Sterling’s voice echoed in the vision. "And we used the machine to imprint the design."
The machine began to work. A blinding, blue-white light filled the lab. Silas’s body shook tightly in the chair. She was not being fused with a beast. She was being rewritten. Her soul was being reprogramd.
The light faded. The machine powered down.
The final scene of the vision showed Silas, now dressed in her black uniform, standing at attention in front of Sterling.
She raised her right hand.
And the God Mark of the Syndicate glowed on her skin.
She opened her eyes. Her Awakening was stable and controlled.
The Syndicate hadn’t just copied Jonah. They had industrialized the process of creating Weavers.
———————————————————————
The vision disappeared. Jonah was back in the safe house. Vanessa was watching him, her face showing they both felt the sa terrible fear.
He finally understood. He saw the whole, terrifying picture.
The war was never about stopping Thorne from making more monsters. Thorne was just the beginning. The real threat was a company that had turned his soul into a blueprint.
He was no longer the only one of his kind. He was just the original model.
And the company that had stolen his design was about to launch its new product line.
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