thanh.nguyenhoang.1403@gmail.com
Stories
168
Chapters
1,512
Words
3.2 M
Comments
0
Reading
11 d, 4 h
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MARA The flashes of a dozen press cameras feel like physical blows against my retinas. "Just one more, Mr. Cross! Look this way, Miss Venn!" a reporter shouts over the chaotic hum of the atrium. Lucian’s hand rests on the bare skin of my lower back, his fingers applying a precise, unyielding pressure. It is a possessive grip designed to look protective to the lenses, but to me, it is a steel vise. I force the corners of my mouth upward into a fragile, practiced smile, angling my face toward…-
15.3 K • Completed
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MARA The blinking cursor on the screen—ABORT OVERFLOW PROTOCOL Y/N?—is a guillotine hovering over my conscience. I stare at the flashing green light, my finger suspended above the keystroke that would save three million lives but instantly trigger Lucian’s security, stripping me of this terminal. My chest tightens, a frantic, suffocating rhythm taking over my lungs. I need the weapon first. I need the bullet that will put Lucian Cross in the ground before I can play savior to the city. With a…
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15.3 K • Completed
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MARA The prompt for GOLIATH-ZERO pulses on the screen, a radioactive green beacon demanding my biometric signature. I stare at it until the letters blur into meaningless shapes. Above us, the subterranean control room shudders violently as the first preliminary wave of the Category Five hurricane slams into the Seawall’s outer reinforcement buoys. The sound is apocalyptic—a deep, resonant boom that travels through the bedrock and reverberates in my teeth. On the holographic map, the entire coastline…
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15.3 K • Completed
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LUCIAN The euphoria of her surrender is violently severed by the shrill, mechanical shriek of the primary mainframe. I tear my mouth away from Mara’s neck, my lungs burning as the ambient lighting in the subterranean control room abruptly shifts from a stable blue to an aggressive, strobing amber. The heavy hum of the exhaust turbines drops an octave, groaning under a sudden, unauthorized data load. I pull back, my hands sliding from the bare skin of her thighs to grip the edge of the steel console…
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15.3 K • Completed
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MARA The subterranean control room is dying, and it sounds like a beast being crushed from the outside in. Overhead, the massive tungsten blast doors have sealed us in, their concussive thuds vibrating through the steel grating beneath my bare feet. The holographic projection map in the center of the chamber glitches violently, tearing into jagged pixels of apocalyptic red as the ocean pressure exceeds the facility’s maximum load. Water is already beginning to weep through the micro-fractures in the…
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15.3 K • Completed
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MARA The heavy steel axe strikes the reinforced glass with the force of a detonating mortar. A spiderweb of jagged white fractures explodes outward from the point of impact, but the pane holds. I pull the axe back, my muscles screaming in protest against the freezing, damp air of the stairwell, and swing again. The kinetic shock travels up the wooden handle, rattling my teeth in my skull. I am not an executioner anymore. I am a woman dismantling the very altar I built to my own grief. On the third…
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15.3 K • Completed
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The glowing pixels of my own digital signature burn into my retinas, brighter than the emergency strobes flashing across the control room. Authorization Confirmed. Signatory: Director of Emergency Operations, Lena Orr. The timestamp—02:14:33 AM—is the exact moment my brother-in-law called my sister to say he loved her, the exact moment Dax’s younger brother suffocated in the ash of Sector South. The absolute certainty I had carried for five years, the heavy armor of righteous grief, shatters into a…-
10.4 K • Completed
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The titanium blast door is an absolute barrier, a monument to industrial engineering designed to hold back the sea. Through the thick, reinforced viewport, the violent, swirling whiteout of the flooding turbine chamber obscures Dax entirely. The math of survival—the drilled, relentless logic I have lived by for five years—screams at me to turn around, run to the escape pod in Shaft A, and leave him to the grave he dug for himself. But the math is dead to me now. The ledger is broken. I drop the brass…
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10.4 K • Completed
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The echo of Sterling’s frantic, watery gasps fades behind the heavy magnetic door, but the confession remains, a toxic weight settling into the marrow of my bones. The zoning maps were fake. I stagger away from the glass cube, my boots sloshing through the calf-deep water flooding the primary corridor. For five years, I had built a fortress of agonizing certainty around the idea that I had simply made a horrific, necessary calculation to seal those doors. Now, the foundation is crumbling. It wasn't an…
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10.4 K • Completed
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The control room hums with a sterile, electric vibration that does nothing to mask the suffocating weight of the truth. I watch Lena’s reflection in the reinforced glass, her silhouette fractured by the telemetry data scrolling across the surface. She is staring at the encrypted tablet on the console, her breath coming in shallow, ragged bursts. The ghost of my brother, the forty-three body bags, the five years of her carrying a sin she didn't commit—it is all converging in this single, suspended…
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10.4 K • Completed
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