The heavy marble echo of the mansion hallway seemed to swallow the silence left behind by the cut-to-black. Damian stood frozen, his eyes locked onto the two security guards stationed near the grand double doors. One of them—Miller, a veteran head of internal security who had served the family for over a decade—was subtly shifting his weight backward, his hand hovering fractions of an inch away from his holster.

The screen flickered, and Elena’s face appeared. She looked tired, dark circles under her eyes, recording from this very bunker.

“Damian, if you’re watching this, it means I didn't make it back from the mansion, and you’ve uncovered the collar. Aegis isn’t a tech firm. It’s a global depopulation and behavioral control grid. Your father didn't die of a heart attack—he tried to shut the network down when he realized what it was becoming. The board poisoned him. And they’re planning to use Lily’s neural markers to execute a global firmware update that will permanently suppress human free will across eight billion people.”

The video paused automatically. A secondary prompt flashed on the screen:

EXECUTE COUNTER-PROTOCOL OMEGA? [Y/N]

Damian stared at the blinking cursor. Protocol Omega. A complete, unrecoverable system wipe that would destroy Aegis Global’s servers worldwide, but would also instantly fry every smart device, medical pacemaker, power grid, and communication network on Earth, plunging civilization back into the stone age overnight.

"Erase the tyrants, or save the world as we know it?" Damian whispered to the empty room.

Before his finger could press the 'Y' key, a sharp, metallic screech echoed down the concrete tunnel outside.