The city of Orpheon never slept, its skyline glowed with towers of steel, screens, and secrets. Buried beneath that neon glare was a man who should have been dead.
Elias Kael.
Former intelligence operative. Declared killed in action. Except death had been a cover, crafted by the same shadow syndicate that betrayed him.
He awoke in a cryo-chamber two years after the ambush, lungs filling with air that felt both foreign and burning with life. His last memory had been a bullet tearing through his chest and the cold embrace of blackness. Now, instead of a coffin, he found himself reborn in a sterile underground facility, with a message pulsing across a cracked screen:
“You were chosen for the Phoenix Protocol. Rise. A new world awaits.”
But Orpheon wasn’t the city he remembered. A corporation known only as The Dominion had taken over, its surveillance drones watching every corner, its agents rooting out dissent. People lived not by freedom, but by the permissions their digital profiles granted them. Those who resisted simply vanished.
Elias was no longer just a man; his body bore scars of cybernetic augmentation, enhancements he hadn’t asked for. Faster reflexes. Accelerated healing. A heart that no longer beat with natural rhythm, but with the hum of engineered precision. He had been resurrected not as himself, but as a weapon.
Yet along with his rebirth came visions, fragments of memories that weren’t entirely his. A woman’s voice whispering his name. Flames consuming the city. A child’s cry echoing in the dark.
He was hunted now. The Dominion branded him a ghost, an error that should not exist. Their agents pursued him through the underworld of Orpheon: forgotten subway tunnels crawling with gangs, data-markets where stolen identities were traded like currency, sanctuaries run by monks who encrypted prayers into code.
And with every chase, Elias grew closer to unraveling the truth: The Phoenix Protocol wasn’t designed to save him. It was designed to control him. To overwrite who he was. To turn him into the prototype of a new breed of enforcers.
But Elias had something they hadn’t anticipated. The very process that resurrected him had fractured their programming, leaving cracks where his will could bleed through. For the first time, a weapon was thinking for itself.
And so the thriller began: a man reborn, hunted by the architects of his resurrection, torn between the fragments of who he was and the terrifying potential of what he had become.
The final question burned brighter than the neon towers of Orpheon
Would Elias Kael remain a pawn of The Dominion, or would he rise, like the phoenix, to burn their empire to ash?
