Prologue: Residual

Prologue: Residual

In the final days of humanity's golden era, science was more than ambition—it was godhood. The year was 2039, and after decades of wars, pandemics, climate upheaval, and economic collapse, mankind found itself cornered. Death and suffering became more than inevitabilities; they were accepted constants. Governments crumbled, borders dissolved, and corporate giants ascended to power. Among them, one name rose higher and darker than the rest: Eidolon Pharmaceuticals.

From their sterile glass towers, Eidolon offered humanity something irresistible—a miracle. The drug was called REX-9, a genetic marvel that promised salvation: it could repair any illness, cure terminal conditions, regenerate organs, and reverse chronic pain. It was biological alchemy, humanity's greatest hope distilled into a vial. Desperation gave the people no reason to refuse, and in months, hundreds of millions willingly placed their lives in Eidolon's hands.

But every miracle has a price, and every god has a shadow.

Within weeks, strange reports began to surface. Patients whose tumors vanished overnight woke up with eyes glowing like molten gold. Children, once crippled and bed-bound, found themselves strong enough to bend steel or run faster than cars. Soldiers given experimental battlefield doses stopped bullets with their minds or melted enemy tanks with bare hands. People changed—not just healed, but altered, elevated, remade.

They became known as Residuals.

Initially celebrated as the next step in human evolution, Residuals quickly became a threat. The mutations were unpredictable and devastatingly powerful. Powers manifested chaotically, sometimes violently. Some Residuals combusted spontaneously; others collapsed buildings by accident, their bodies unable to control the immense biological energy surging through their cells. It wasn't evolution; it was an epidemic of unstable superhumanity.

Panic erupted. Eidolon Pharmaceuticals, their profits already secured, publicly expressed shock and withdrew REX-9 from global markets, blaming sabotage and terrorism. Privately, they'd known the consequences from the start. Residuals were an expected byproduct—experimental data points to refine their biological research. Human lives were just statistics in the dark calculus of progress.

Governments fractured, and what remained of civilization fragmented into sectors controlled by corporations, private militias, or militant factions. Cities transformed into tiered fortresses—glittering, luxurious spires built atop brutal slums. Above, the wealthy survived in comfort and denial, protected by advanced technology and private armies. Below, millions struggled to survive in labyrinthine slums where hunger, crime, and desperation ruled.

Years passed. The Residual crisis deepened, and Eidolon Pharmaceuticals evolved. No longer content as mere pharmaceutical providers, they now held dominion over society itself, manufacturing private armies, overseeing entire city sectors, and conducting secretive, unethical research to harness Residual abilities. To Eidolon, humanity had become livestock—raw genetic material for their dark experiments.

Residuals were hunted, rounded up by special units known as the Null Division, a brutal paramilitary force of biologically augmented soldiers whose sole purpose was containment and extermination. Residuals who survived hid deep in shadowed alleys, black markets, abandoned underground railways, and gutted skyscrapers—fugitives in their own cities.

But hope refused to die. Within the darkness, sparks ignited. Resistance formed quietly, slowly, among those betrayed, forgotten, and discarded by Eidolon. They sought justice and vengeance, but more importantly, they sought freedom—freedom from experimentation, from oppression, from the corrupted world built on their suffering.

This was the world humanity had created from desperation and hubris—a world of miracles and monstrosities, of shadowed alleys and neon-lit towers, of science pushed too far and gods brought too low. This was the legacy of REX-9, the Residual Effect: a new kind of humanity, reshaped, dangerous, volatile, and hunted.

And amidst this chaos, beneath the shattered dome of a broken sky, the fates of those who survived were about to intertwine, bound by blood, betrayal, and rebellion.

This was their story—the survivors, the discarded, the Residual.

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Chapter 1: Ashes in the Veins

It smelled like burning metal and wet asphalt—an aroma Kai Mercer had come to associate with the underbelly of District 8, the corpse of what once was the southern half of New Chicago. The sky overhead wasn't a sky anymore, just a cracked dome of static-light gray, flickering with occasional pulses of red from the surveillance drones hovering far above. You couldn't see stars here. You couldn't see the moon. You couldn't even see tomorrow.

He moved silently through a narrow alley between two skeletal towers, concrete and steel peeled apart like rotting skin. Trash fires flickered behind rusted scaffolding, illuminating the vacant stares of the squatters curled beneath thermal blankets like bundled corpses. Old signs clung to fractured walls—HORIZON TOWER in chipped gold letters, and beneath it, CONDEMNED - BIOHAZARD ZONE. No one cared. No one ever did.

The city was a carcass—and they were all just rats feeding off its bones.

Kai adjusted the strap of his duffel bag and stepped over a mangled drone carcass still twitching in its death throes, sparks dancing across its broken shell. He paused briefly, just enough to press the toe of his boot against its cracked ocular lens. The light went out.

Noise filled the night—not the clean, sharp noise of the upper levels, where drones hummed smoothly and plasma rail lines clicked in rhythm. Down here, sound was a messy blend of leaking steam, coughing reactors, echoing footsteps, and the occasional human scream. Sirens wailed in the distance. They never got closer.

He checked the clock embedded in the corner of his left eye—digital, dim blue.

00:41:33

He was late.

The clinic was three blocks ahead, tucked behind a façade of a burnt-out noodle bar. He'd been there before—twice, maybe three times. They changed ownership often. You didn't live long when you dealt in black-tier pharmacogenetics. But the job paid, and Kai needed the serum.

He reached the intersection and stopped.

The entire block looked like it had been hit by a microwave bomb. Glass melted into puddles along the curb. Vehicles were overturned and gutted, their frames scorched from within. A giant mural covered the northern wall of a collapsed building—a massive face, half-human, half-veined with circuitry. Its mouth was stitched shut. Across its forehead, graffiti in blood-red paint read:

NO GODS IN LABCOATS

Kai stared at it for a long second, jaw clenched. Then he walked on.

The storefront had once been called Yuki's Noodles—he could still make out the faded kanji behind the soot. He scanned the area. No cameras. No guards. Just a half-open metal shutter and a scent of iodine and ethanol bleeding into the damp air.

He ducked under the shutter, slipped into the shadows, and closed the world behind him.

The interior had been gutted. The dining area was now lined with surgical partitions and flickering UV lamps. Medical equipment hummed quietly in the corners—some black market, some military surplus. At the far end, a woman in a bloodstained apron tapped away at a datapad, one cybernetic arm twitching with each keystroke.

She didn't look up.

"You Mercer?"

"Yeah."

"You late."

"Clock disagrees."

"Clock don't run this place."

He dropped the duffel on a cracked table. It thudded, heavy. Inside: two sealed vials of REX-X3, a sample of live stem culture from a Residual corpse, and a datapack of encrypted black-lab logs pulled from a facility east of Sector 3. All of it stolen. All of it dangerous.

The woman approached and scanned the vials with a worn-out hololens that whirred like a dying fan.

"Batch codes check out," she muttered. "You want cash or serum?"

"Serum," Kai said.

"Risky."

"Just give it to me."

She hesitated, studied his face like she was trying to guess what version of hell he'd crawled out of. Then she reached beneath the counter, pulled out a steel case, and slid it across to him.

He opened it slowly.

Inside were six doses of REX-N, a stabilized nanocarrier version of the old REX-9 strain. Each one glittered in a cylindrical injector like a vial of frozen lightning.

He picked up the first one and held it to the light. The fluid shimmered—not liquid, but not quite gas either. It was alive. Each molecule was a hungry machine, built to overwrite genes with surgical precision. It didn't just mutate you. It rewrote you.

"You still using these?" the woman asked, voice lower now. "I heard you burned out two spinal stabilizers already."

"I'm careful now."

"Sure," she said, tone unreadable. "They all say that."

Kai injected it into the base of his neck.

The cold came first. Then the static.

His vision blurred as his cybernetic eye tried to recalibrate, shifting through filters—thermal, night, motion vectors. The world pulsed. His fingers twitched involuntarily. The hairs on his arms stood straight.

A deep vibration rolled through his skull like a growl beneath the earth. Then, slowly, it passed.

The woman didn't speak. She just watched.

Kai stood still for a moment longer, breathing through his teeth. Then he closed the case, slid it back across the table.

"That's one," he said. "I'll be back for the rest."

"If you survive the week."

"Always do."

He turned, pushed back through the curtain of plastic sheeting, and left the way he came.

Back into the wet dark.

Back into the world that forgot how to sleep.

Back into a city where gods were made in basements and burned in alleys, their veins full of lightning and regret.

There were no heroes here. Only survivors. And their time was running out.