SSS-Rank Corporate Predator System

Julian Cross stumbled through the ridiculously oversized, electronically controlled front doors of his family's estate.

He was a ghost.

A pale, trembling ghost haunting his own pristine, marble-floored home.

He moved like a sleepwalker, his mind a screaming vortex of shattered images.

A boy with glowing eyes.

A lobby exploding into a storm of silver and black lightning.

A quiet girl who had calmed a monster with a touch.

He was a prince who had just seen the dragon, and the dragon was real, and the princess wasn't afraid of it.

His world was broken.

He found his father in the study.

Silas Cross was sitting in a high-backed leather chair, a single lamp casting his face in sharp, predatory shadows.

He was looking at a data tablet, his expression as calm and unreadable as a slab of granite.

He didn't look up when Julian entered.

"You're late," Silas said, his voice flat, devoid of any emotion.

"Your little 'trap' was an unmitigated failure."

"I have already received the preliminary reports."

"Seventeen thousand dollars in property damage to a minor corporate asset."

"Two hospitalized security personnel who will be on medical leave for six months."

"And the target, the girl, was left completely unharmed."

He finally looked up, his cold, gray eyes pinning his son to the spot.

"Explain to me, Julian," he said, his voice dropping to a dangerously quiet level.

"How you managed to fail so completely."

"So spectacularly."

Julian just stood there, shaking, his mouth opening and closing but no sound coming out.

He was trying to form the words, but his mind was still back in that ruined lobby, staring into the face of a god.

"I gave you a simple task," Silas continued, his voice like the slow, grinding of stones.

"Create a distraction."

"Lure the ghost."

"Instead, you indulged in your pathetic, hormonal obsession and turned a simple intelligence operation into a public relations nightmare."

Silas stood up, walking slowly around his massive, mahogany desk.

He stopped in front of his son.

He was a full head taller, a towering, imposing figure of controlled, corporate fury.

"You are a liability, Julian," Silas said, each word a chip of ice.

"You are an emotional, impulsive, and deeply disappointing variable in an equation that requires precision."

"You are my son."

"And right now, that is the only reason you are still breathing."

The threat was not a shout.

It was a simple, cold statement of fact.

A business transaction.

And that, finally, was what broke Julian.

The fear, the humiliation, the terror… it all came pouring out of him in a torrent of panicked, blubbering confession.

"It was him!" Julian cried, the words tumbling out of him, his voice a high-pitched, childish whine.

"It was the ghost!"

"He was there!"

Silas raised a single, dismissive eyebrow.

"We are aware the ghost was present," he said, his voice laced with contempt.

"That was, after all, the entire point of your little theatrical production."

"No!" Julian shrieked, taking a stumbling step backward.

"You don't understand!"

"I saw him!"

"I know who he is!"

That got Silas's attention.

A flicker of genuine interest, cold and sharp, appeared in his gray eyes.

He stopped his slow, predatory circling.

He just stood there, waiting.

"It's Vane," Julian sobbed, the name tasting like ash in his mouth.

"Miles Vane."

"The kid from my school."

"The freak who beat me in the decathlon."

"He's the ghost."

Silas's face remained a perfect, unreadable mask, but his mind was racing, connecting the dots with the speed of a supercomputer.

The decathlon.

The shimmering, impossible step.

The sudden appearance of a new, highly skilled player on the board.

It was a wild, almost unbelievable coincidence.

But Silas Cross had built an empire on the belief that there was no such thing as coincidence.

There was only cause and effect.

"His power," Julian continued, his voice now dropping to a terrified whisper, his eyes wide with the memory.

"Father, you didn't see it."

"It was… it wasn't normal."

"He lost control."

"The whole building… it was coming apart."

"There was lightning."

"He wasn't just a system user."

"He was… something else."

Silas's expression didn't change, but a new, cold light was dawning in his eyes.

An unstable system.

Raw, untamed power.

He had seen something like that once before.

A long, long time ago.

In a laboratory that was no longer on any map.

"And the girl," Julian stammered, his mind replaying the most impossible part of the whole nightmare.

"She just… walked up to him."

"She talked to him."

"And it stopped."

"He just… stopped."

"Like she was his off-switch."

Silas was no longer listening to his son's panicked rambling.

He was lost in his own memories, his mind digging through archives of data he had thought were buried forever.

The Vane project.

Project Revenant.

The SSS-Rank Echo Protocol.

The most powerful, most stable, most revolutionary piece of technology he had ever seen.

A system that could adapt, evolve, and absorb the abilities of others.

A system he had murdered two people to possess.

A system that had been lost in the fire, in the explosion, all those years ago.

"His name," Silas said, his voice a low, intense whisper that cut through Julian's sobs.

"You said his name was Vane."

Julian nodded frantically, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his thousand-dollar jacket.

"Miles Vane," he repeated.

Silas Cross was a man who prided himself on his absolute control, on his complete lack of emotional response.

But in that moment, as the final piece of the puzzle slammed into place, the world saw something that no one had ever seen before.

Silas Cross was stunned.

His face, for a single, fleeting second, was a mask of pure, unadulterated shock.

The boy.

The six-year-old boy from the lab.

The child he had thought was just another piece of collateral damage, another loose end burned away in the fire.

He hadn't died.

He had survived.

And the Vanes, those brilliant, defiant fools, had succeeded.

They had injected their own son with their masterpiece.

The SSS-Rank Echo Protocol he had been searching for, the one he had spent millions trying to replicate, the key to absolute power… it wasn't lost.

It had been incubating.

Growing.

Evolving.

Inside a child.

The shock on Silas's face faded, replaced by something far, far more terrifying.

A chilling mixture of pure, incandescent fury.

And immense, all-consuming greed.

The ghost that had been haunting his operations, the variable that had been dismantling his empire from the inside out… it wasn't a rival.

It was the living legacy of his greatest victims.

It was a treasure, a priceless, one-of-a-kind asset, walking around in the body of a teenage boy.

His objective, his entire mission, shifted in that instant.

He was no longer hunting a ghost to eliminate a threat.

He was hunting a unicorn to claim his prize.

He looked at his sniveling, pathetic, terrified son.

Julian was no longer a liability.

He was a tool.

A key.

"Forget the girl," Silas said, his voice a low, predatory purr, a terrifying calm descending over him.

"She is a means to an end."

"But the boy…"

He walked over to his desk and placed his hands on its polished surface, leaning forward, his eyes gleaming with a cold, terrifying light.

"We need to get that boy, Julian."

"We need to bring him here."

"We need to put him on a table."

He looked at his son, and a slow, cruel smile spread across his face, a smile that promised nothing but pain and cold, sterile, scientific curiosity.

"We need to dissect him," Silas Cross said, his voice filled with the chilling excitement of a collector who has just found his rarest specimen.

"And take back what is rightfully ours."