Apocalypse Trade Monopoly
Chapter 161: : Silent Codes

Chapter 161: : Silent Codes

The door sealed behind her.

And the voice that followed was not recorded.

It was real.

"I’ve been waiting, Architect Zhang."

Ava stood rigid.

She didn’t know this woman.

But she knew what she was.

High command. The kind of operative that didn’t exist on paper. The kind who didn’t sit in war rooms—they built them.

"You’re not with Zhao’s command," Ava said slowly.

The woman gave a faint smile.

"I outrank Zhao."

Her voice was even. Elegant. Like a blade being drawn from a velvet sheath.

"You can call me General Rei."

Ava’s eyes narrowed. "Angle worked for you."

"She served a purpose. Briefly."

General Rei steepled her fingers on the table.

"I admit, I thought she might beat you. She was...persistent. I admire persistence, even in the mad."

"She was a copy of a soul shoved into broken code."

Rei nodded. "And you? You’re the original. The final backup. The last viable architect with an active node."

Her voice sharpened just slightly.

"You’re mine, now."

Ava didn’t answer.

Rei rose from her chair.

Not tall. But not small either. The kind of presence that didn’t need height to dominate a room.

"I assume Lucas Bai is still active in the Mindspace?"

Ava didn’t flinch.

Rei tilted her head.

"I could break you. I could find him. But I’d rather offer you an exchange."

"No."

Rei didn’t react. "You haven’t heard the terms."

"I don’t need to," Ava snapped. "If Angle was your idea of strategy, I’ve seen how your games end."

Rei’s smile returned, but this time it was sharp.

"Oh, child. That wasn’t strategy. That was scouting."

A beat of silence.

And then she turned her back.

"You’ll come around," she said. "You’re intelligent. You’re alone. And you’re bleeding power you don’t even understand yet."

The door opened behind her—flanked by guards, clean-cut, no insignias.

Rei didn’t need to threaten her.

She just walked away.

"I’ll see you soon, Architect."

The door hissed closed behind her, locking Ava back in with silence and cold light.

Ava stared at the empty table.

And for the first time in hours—

She felt trapped.

Not in the way she had when she’d first arrived at the bunkers after the Collapse. Not like a scavenger shoved to the bottom rung of a rigged hierarchy.

This was different.

Strategic.

The kind of trap that studied you first, then moved the walls after you thought you were safe.

Ava paced the perimeter of the room, counting her steps, mentally logging the placement of vents, the vibration in the floor panels, the tempo of the lights. Every detail. Every variable.

General Rei knows my system.

She stopped, staring at the metal wall where Rei had been just moments ago. Cold. Seamless.

Worse. She’s studied it.

That meant every sensor in this cell was likely tuned to her biological spikes, any pattern recognition her mindspace syncs triggered. Her blueprint system wasn’t just muted—it was leashed. A clever suppression field. She could feel it humming under her skin.

But buried beneath that—

A pulse.

Soft.

Small.

Familiar.

It took her five seconds to locate it.

Under the cot’s corner: a scratched data node no bigger than a coin, stuck between two bolts like forgotten trash.

Ava crouched, slipped her nail into the edge, and popped it free.

As soon as it touched her palm—

Everything stilled.

Not the world.

Her.

The buzzing in her nerves slowed. The noise of the room faded. And then—

[BOOTING: SUBROUTINE 22C]

[SYSTEM: BLUEPRINT (SHADOW THREAD)]

[SIGNATURE: PASSIVE WAKE – INSTALLED BY: A.]

Ava stared.

The blinking line of code shouldn’t have meant anything. The system tag was vague—just a single letter, A—a placeholder.

But she knew.

Somewhere deeper than her memory, buried under layers of forced forgetfulness and overwritten history, the recognition flared like a match in a cave.

She whispered the name aloud:

"Anika."

A pause.

It hurt to say it. Like her throat remembered the pain her mind had tried to forget.

Anika Lee. Her best friend. Classmate. Dorm mate. The one who could code faster than anyone else at the academy, but still asked Ava to proofread her logic trees like it was ritual. They’d passed notes across the lab benches, stayed up all night running error loops together, joked about being "co-architects of the apocalypse" if the simulation systems ever actually launched.

Anika was one of the sixteen backups.

One of them.

One of us.

And now?

She was just a flicker of dead code inside a scavenged node.

A failsafe meant to wake Ava up if something went wrong.

"Too bad," Ava whispered, clutching the coin-sized node tighter in her fist. "You were always smarter than me. You should’ve been the last one standing."

The message hadn’t ended.

A new line appeared. It wasn’t automated. It was a time-locked voice log.

Ava hesitated.

Then she played it.

Anika’s voice crackled out—low, hurried, tired.

"If you’re hearing this... it means you made it and I didn’t. Or I’m compromised. Either way, you’re the only one left with full root."

"They’re lying, Ava. The bunkers, the purge, the Rewrites... It wasn’t a system update."

"It was a reset."

"They didn’t fail to activate the Architect Project. They used it. The Architect nodes? The blueprints? We were the framework. The scaffolding for a new control protocol. You... you were supposed to be the center."

"And if Rei finds you first—run."

"Or burn everything."

The log ended with a sharp glitch.

Ava didn’t move for a long time.

The node in her palm pulsed softly once. Like a heartbeat. Or maybe a goodbye.

She stood slowly.

Shoulders squared. Grief buried under fire. The data node still warm in her hand, pulsing gently like the echo of a friend long gone.

Then—The light shifted.

Not the cold fluorescents overhead.

The room itself.

A subtle flicker, like reality held its breath—and Ava felt it. That hum. Like static in her molars, vibrating under her skin.

Her blueprint system wasn’t active.

But his signature always cut through the noise.

She turned, eyes narrowing just as the wall behind the cot rippled—a horizontal slash of shimmering code tearing through the reinforced concrete like it was silk.

"Move."The voice came through first.Rough. Dry. Familiar.

Lucas.

Ava didn’t question it.

She sprinted across the room just as the wall folded open, revealing a tunnel of pulsing light—hacked data compressed into a moving construct. A bridge through synced systems—her system.

No, Anika’s.

Lucas had used the dead girl’s node like a key.

He reached a hand through the rift, coat flared, eyes sharp with focus.

"You’re late," Ava snapped as she took it.

Lucas yanked her through the breach.

Behind her, alarms blared—too late. The room dissolved into a cascade of broken geometry as the tunnel collapsed behind them.

—

They landed hard.

Metal underfoot. Neon glow. A supply corridor Ava didn’t recognize.

Lucas didn’t wait. He shoved a data drive into a reader on the wall and triggered a door sequence—two seconds of mechanical groaning, then—

Silence.

They were in a sealed maintenance tunnel, far beneath the central AI core of the bunker. Unmonitored. Forgotten.

Lucas exhaled once, then turned to her.

"You alright?"

"I’ve been better."

"You were unconscious for twelve minutes," he said. "That room was vacuum-sealed. Rei had protocols in place. We’re lucky I cracked the override before it hard-locked."

Ava raised a brow. "Lucky? You planned this."

Lucas smirked.

"I always plan. The hard part was faking your biosignature drop long enough to trigger an auto-transfer without them noticing I was already jacked into the node."

"Translation?"

"I made them think you flatlined. Then I stole their map."

Ava’s smile was crooked, breathless. "You really are the devil."

"An efficient one."

He tossed her a small drive—etched with her old system glyph.

"Here. It’s your backup. Anika’s thread didn’t just ping me—it handed over a ghost copy of your Architect root protocols."

Ava caught it, fingers curling around the metal.

"Wait—how?"

Lucas’s voice dipped, serious now. "Because someone left you a gate that opens from both sides."

He glanced at the ceiling.

"And Rei just realized she lost control of the entire southern bunker firewall."

Ava stared at him.

Then—slowly—she grinned.

"Well," she said. "Let’s make her regret that."

Lucas gave her that sharp-edged grin—the one that always meant something was about to explode.

"Then we don’t walk," he said. "We detonate."

He stepped forward, slammed a panel on the side of the corridor, and ripped the casing clean off. Behind it, rows of flickering cables and old relay cores blinked like forgotten arteries. He jammed in a cartridge—the same drive he’d tossed her. Sparks danced.

"Wait," Ava said, "is that going to—"

Boom.

The lights above them blew out. The floor trembled. A deep ka-thunk echoed down the corridor like the bunker itself had hiccupped.

Lucas turned with unbothered calm. "Access granted."

Central alarms screamed.

A red hue slammed across the corridor. Sirens began to wail in descending bursts. From behind them, security doors hissed open—then slammed back down.

"Response units will be here in three minutes," Lucas said, already pulling a compact sync-blade from his coat. "Two if Rei doesn’t sleep."

"I don’t plan on talking."

Ava slammed the backup glyph into her bracer, and her system responded like it had been waiting the whole time.

[BLUEPRINT SYSTEM — PARTIAL SYNC RESTORED][MATERIAL FABRICATION: ENABLED]

Ava raised her wrist.

The air shimmered.

Armor grew across her forearms in a second-flat reaction. Lightweight plating spun into being down her spine and thighs, linking together with glowing seams of reactive thread. Her fingers snapped closed around a fabricated baton—light-forged, thrumming with density.

She looked at Lucas.

"Let’s wreck this place."

Bunker Command Hall – Five Levels Up

The elevator didn’t make it to the top floor.

Lucas blew the roof off it.

He planted a spike charge in the lift’s access panel, kicked open the hatch, grabbed Ava’s hand, and yelled, "Up!" just as the detonation punched them skyward on a shockwave of compressed force.

They crashed through the roof like debris on fire.

Four stunned guards didn’t even raise their rifles in time before Ava was already moving—her baton struck the first across the helmet, denting it inward, then cracked a second across the solar plexus. Lucas flipped the nearest into a server pillar, then shoved a magnetic override onto the central command console.

Lockdown disabled.

Containment breached.

Doors opened everywhere.

"Back route?" Ava shouted.

"Improvised."

He grabbed a riot shield off a fallen guard and kicked it across the floor like a sled. Ava leapt onto it, crouched like a boarding thief, and slid through the corridor, baton spinning. Lucas followed, hot on her trail, deflecting stun rounds with the remaining magnetic barrier on his left arm.

They tore through the lower wing like chaos incarnate.

Security bots dropped from the ceiling.

Ava lobbed a grenade of her own design—plasma-cored and stitched with glitch-pulse.

Boom.

Welded steel peeled back like tinfoil. Bots fried mid-air, twitching and jerking.

They hit the core vault next.

A circular chamber. High security. Reactor-fed.

Lucas looked at Ava.

"You ready to shut it down?"

She grinned through blood and grit.

"No."

She raised both hands and called her system again.

"I’m ready to rewrite it."

A glyph split in her palm.

[NODE OVERRIDE: INITIATED]

All across the southern wing, control lines fried. Terminals surged with blue fire. Rei’s face blinked onto a nearby screen for half a second—

Then vanished under the crash of collapsing code.

Lucas dropped the last sync charge into the reactor plate. "Say the word."

Ava didn’t hesitate.

She stepped forward, eyes locked on the glowing containment coil thrumming at the heart of the southern core. Beneath the pulsing blue dome, raw energy rippled like a storm begging to be unleashed.

All around them, sirens howled. Steel cracked under pressure. Doors blew open and slammed shut in wild sequence—emergency overrides battling with collapsing subsystems. Somewhere above, another floor gave way, raining sparks.

And still—Ava smiled.

"Light it up."

Lucas hit the trigger.

The sync charge didn’t just detonate.

It sang.

A vibration tore through the plate, too high-pitched for the ear—only felt, like being slammed in the chest by a god’s whisper. The floor split under them, white light pouring from the crack like lava made of data.

Ava grabbed Lucas’s arm as the vault went nova.

They dove—not away, but through.

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