In Tokyo's Shibuya district, the daytime crowds had morphed into a neon night. Just behind the famous scramble crossing, where a river of people flowed, a narrow street led to a third-floor studio apartment in a silent building. This was Kai's prison and his temple.

The thirty-four-year-old artist stood barefoot on the concrete floor before his canvas, staring into the void. His hands trembled; not with the tremor of creativity, but with a deep, bone-deep tremor of lack. The walls were silent witnesses to past successes: abstract expressionist pieces, explosions of color, visual equivalents of emotional storms. But now... nothing for three years. His mind was just an echoing emptiness in the bottomless pit of creativity.

For three years, he hadn't been able to make a single meaningful touch to his canvas. The gallery owner had issued his final warning: "New work, Kai-kun, or the contract." To be at the end of his money was one thing, but to be at the end of his art... that could kill him.

He pulled at his hair and leaned back, closing his eyes. Nothing was working. It was as if the connection between his brain and his hand had been severed. Or worse: his brain itself had fallen silent. "Try again," he said to himself. Breathing exercises. Meditation...

03:17:01

He felt something... And suddenly, everything changed. First, a pressure. Right in the middle of his forehead, an unbearable pressure, as if an invisible hand was trying to split him in two. Then a sound; but not one he heard with his ears, but one he felt with his bones, with the roots of his teeth, a low-frequency hum. A momentary mis-tuning of the universe's fundamental note.

Kai knelt. He wanted to shout, but no sound came out. His eyes rolled back, his consciousness blurred. And then... a flood.

These were not images. They were pure information. Geometric shapes, mathematical ratios, symbols of an ancient and foreign language. They flowed through his mind like a river, pushing aside his thought processes, his logic, even his personality. He was a channel, an antenna, a blank page now.

His eyes opened unconsciously. But he wasn't seeing; at least, not the outside. He was seeing the inside, the storm in his mind. His hands began to move. First on the floor, on the concrete. His fingers reached for the black ink bottle beside him, removed the cap, and began to draw on his canvas, not by pouring, but directly with the mouth of the bottle.

Line. Circle. Triangle. Interlocking spirals.

Ink dripped from the canvas onto the concrete, spreading like a dark stain. Kai didn't stop. He stood up, staggered, knocked something over as he grabbed another canvas. He made his painting and then another. He took a canvas, drew complex, repeating patterns, threw the canvas aside, and took a new one. Some resembled Egyptian hieroglyphs, others looked like circuit diagrams. When the canvases ran out, he turned to the walls. He continued to paint. Each symbol, each picture, was more complex than the last. But in reality, they were all in deep harmony.

"Urasai! Stop making noise!" A voice from the neighbor filtered through the wall. But Kai didn't hear. His world was now made up of these symbols.

For an hour, in a trance, he covered the floor of his studio with canvases. Ink got on the floor, on his t-shirt, on his pants, on his face. Breathless, sweaty, but in a kind of ecstasy. As if everything that had been building up inside him for years, unable to find expression, was gushing out of this channel.

Then, suddenly, it was over.

The pressure disappeared. Kai collapsed where he was, on the ink-stained concrete. His chest rose and fell like he had run a marathon. He slowly opened his eyes. At first, he saw only blurry shapes. Then, he began to perceive the state of the room.

And his breath caught.

The chaos surrounding him was not artistic chaos. It was a language. The symbols, lined up side by side, seemed to mean something. A message. A map. Or a... warning.

He stood up, trembling. He could barely stand. He came to a wall, reached out his finger to the ink lines that had not yet dried. As he touched it, he felt a slight electric shock; he wasn't sure if it was a figment of his imagination or real.

"What... what is this?" he whispered to himself, his voice dry and cracked.

He looked for his phone. The screen was shattered; probably when he dropped it. But it was working. He looked at the time: 04:23. He opened the camera and started taking pictures. He documented every canvas, every detail. He took hundreds of photos.

Then, fatigue brought him back to the ground. He leaned his back against the wall. He closed his eyes, but the symbols continued to dance in his mind. A melody... yes, he heard a melody. It wasn't the sound of the violin from the neighbor. It was something playing inside his mind, like the sound expression of the symbols.

Tick.

A small, metallic sound. Kai opened his eyes. On the easel, in the canvas, one of the most complex symbols he had drawn in ink; a pattern of three interlocking circles; the ink drop in the very center had exploded, creating a small, black crater. As if a pressure from within had burst it.

Kai froze. Could this be just a coincidence? Do such things happen when ink dries?

Tick. Tick. TICK.

Other symbols began to explode. Small black craters, appearing like a star map on each canvas. Each explosion brought a slight smell of ozone. Static electricity.

Kai jumped to his feet in panic. This was real. He was facing not just an artistic expression, but a physical phenomenon. His hands trembling, he began to gather the scattered paper canvases on the floor. The symbols on some of the canvases looked similar. They were even like a continuation of each other. Now he was trying to put them together to form a whole. With a pen in his hand, he tried to combine the ink stains, to complete the missing pieces.

But there were too many missing pieces.

When the canvases he arranged were combined with the large drawings on the wall, a large picture emerged. This was not a picture, it was a map. Not a world map. A time-space map. Layers, transitions, points marked "NEXUS". And on one of these points, in handwriting; in his own handwriting, in a way he didn't remember: Istanbul. CERN. 03:17.

He knew CERN. The Large Hadron Collider. But why had it appeared in his mind, among these symbols?

A soft knock came at his door. Kai flinched. "Kai-kun? Daijoubu desu ka?" It was his neighbor Hana's voice, anxious and soft. "There was a lot of noise... and now you're silent. Are you okay?"

Kai looked around. In the midst of this chaos in ink, he couldn't open the door to anyone. "H-Hai!" he called out, trying to make his voice as normal as possible. "Daijoubu! I'm just... working on a new project. I'm so sorry for the noise."

"Project?" Hana's voice carried a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. "While I was playing my violin... I felt a strange thing. My violin... It resonated with a vibration coming from your room. A weird melody."

Kai's heart raced. Hana was a talented but modest violinist who played in small bars in Shibuya. That she had felt something too...

"Melody?" Kai asked, approaching the door. He remembered the melody he had heard at the end of his trance.

"Yes. Something I've never heard before, but at the same time... familiar." She paused. "I played the melody I heard on my violin. It didn't seem to be from this world. An epic melody..."

Kai unlocked the door, but left the chain on. Through a narrow gap, he saw Hana's worried face. "Actually... maybe," he mumbled. "I want to show you something. But... be prepared."

He removed the chain and opened the door. As soon as Hana stepped inside, her hand went to her mouth. Her eyes scanned the walls, the floor, everywhere, covering the symbols. An expression of shock and curiosity appeared on her face.

"Kai-kun... what are these? Did you draw all of these?"

"Yes. But... I don't remember how I drew them." Kai showed a trembling hand. "Something happened, Hana. At 3 o'clock. A pressure, a sound... and then these."

Hana slowly entered, closed the door. She went to a wall, ran her finger in the air over the symbols, her lips moving slightly. As if she were reading notes.

"This..." she whispered. "This is incredible."

"What?" Kai asked, approaching her.

"These notes..." she pointed to a group of notes drawn among the symbols "They are compatible with my composition. Look." Hana took a small notebook out of her bag and opened a page. On it were musical notes written in handwriting. "Tonight, just now, I composed this. Just like you, as if someone was guiding my hand."

Kai looked at the notes. He wasn't very good at music theory, but he could compare the notes. And she was right.

"My God," Kai mumbled. "This is not a coincidence. We both... felt the same thing. From the same source."

Hana closed the notebook, fixed her eyes on Kai. "What is this source, Kai? Where is it coming from?"

Kai shook his head. "I don't know. But..." He pointed to the wall. "This is a map. And it shows us a place. CERN. And a time: 03:17. The moment we felt."

Hana held her breath. "What about others? If we both felt it, could others have felt it too?"

At that moment, Kai's phone vibrated. It was a message from an unknown number. Just a link and a sentence:

Please respond. Important.

Below the message was a photo taken by someone named Derya: in the ground, in an old excavation site, the same symbols that Kai had drawn on his wall were engraved.

Kai handed the phone to Hana. They both froze. The symbols were not only in their minds. They were in the past too. Hundreds of years ago.

"This... this is impossible," Hana whispered.

Kai looked at the map on the wall, then at the photo on his phone, then at Hana's notebook. The pieces were coming together. But the picture they were forming was something beyond art. This was a call to discovery. Or a warning of danger.

"Maybe it's not impossible," Kai said, his voice no longer trembling, carrying a new determination. "Maybe it's just... bigger than we expected."

The neon lights of Shibuya seeped through the studio window, illuminating the ink symbols in shades of blue, green, and red. In the heart of Tokyo, two lonely souls had met on the threshold of an ancient mystery. And this mystery connected them to strangers on the other side of the world, to other "triggered" ones who had felt the same pain that night.

The artist was no longer just an observer. He was a part. And the puzzle to which this piece belonged extended beyond time and space.

The third floor of an old industrial warehouse in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood was both sanctuary and prison for Marcus. The vast, raw concrete space, measuring four hundred square meters, housed the ghosts he'd brought back from Fallujah, Iraq. On the walls, memories of military service? No, emptiness. On the floor, nothing but a bed, a chair, a table, and a worn rug. Not minimalism, but a manifesto of annihilation.

Marcus was forty-four, but his eyes carried the weariness of sixty. His face was etched with deep lines carved by the desert sun and the terrors of the night. Now, at 3:15 AM, he sat in his chair, feeling the cold metal of the Colt M1911 pressed against his temple. The gun had been smuggled out of Iraq – a war trophy, a souvenir, and now, a potential escape.

During the day, he could occupy his mind while his body was awake: a security job at a friend's construction company, hours of walking on the Brooklyn Bridge, attempts to exhaust himself at the gym. But the nights... the ghosts were set free during the night hours.

Especially the ghost of Ahmed.

At night, it felt like a desert heat in the room. Sweat trickled down Marcus's back, but the window was open, and the November cold of New York was pouring in. Paranoia... a classic symptom of PTSD. But this time, it was different. This wasn't just a memory; it was a physical presence.

Ahmed was a fourteen-year-old boy, marked as "suspicious" by Marcus's team during an operation in Fallujah. His hands were empty. His eyes were filled not with fear, but with deep sorrow. Marcus had questioned the orders, hesitant to fire. But the others... the others hadn't hesitated. And now, Ahmed's ghost stood before Marcus every night, silently watching him, his eyes carrying not accusation, but only deep grief.

"I can't take it anymore," Marcus mumbled, his voice echoing in the emptiness of the room. His fingers danced on the trigger. A simple movement: pull the trigger. A burst of sound. Then silence... a permanent, final silence.

He increased the pressure on the trigger. His muscles tensed. His heart was like a bird beating in his chest. He closed his eyes. He saw Ahmed. Then his wife, Chloe...

His wife? No, she wasn't his wife. His wife, Clara, had left years ago. Chloe was a doctor. A soft-spoken, patient woman who tried to help him. She would be disappointed.

"I'm sorry, Chloe," he whispered.

The trigger reached its final point. A fraction of a second more pressure, and everything would end.

03:17:01

And at that moment, the world held its breath.

This wasn't a metaphor. It was a physical sensation. There was a sudden drop in pressure in Marcus's ears, as if he were going up in an elevator very quickly. Then, vibration. The entire building seemed to vibrate at an atomic level. The glass of the window vibrated slightly. The empty beer bottle on the table shifted a centimeter to the right.

Marcus pulled the trigger.

Click... It didn't fire.

Marcus opened his eyes. Swearing, he angrily aimed the gun at the brick wall at the other end of the room and fired. This time, the gun fired. Instinctively, he lowered the gun, scanning the surroundings. His military training was stronger than his ghosts. Danger. Physical danger.

But there was no one in the room. Only the pale ghost of Ahmed, now even paler. He seemed surprised. Really? He looked surprised.

His eyes fell on the empty shell casing on the floor. He reached out his hand. Then... the casing obeyed him and returned to his hand.

Then, heat...

In his palm, the red-hot casing of the gun...

Pain... White, burning, unbearable pain. Marcus instinctively screamed, throwing the gun into the air. The gun fell to the concrete floor, but it didn't explode. But the pain in his palm continued.

The casing seemed to be stuck to his palm, burning and melting his flesh. Marcus struck the casing with his other hand to drop it, but when he touched it, that hand also burned. Double pain... The scream was knotted in his throat, only a muffled groan came out.

"What... what happened?" he stammered, his voice filled with fear and surprise.

He looked at the gun on the floor... and at the casing. The casing... It was a cold, brass casing. It wasn't burned or melted. Had he dreamed? Or hallucinated... He wouldn't be surprised... He had lost his sense of reality for a while. But... the pain in his palm, the pain was real. And that orange mark...

Marcus got up, staggering towards the sink. He turned on the cold water, holding his palms under the water. The pain subsided a little, but that strange, deep ache continued. He looked in the mirror. In his eyes, there was something foreign, besides his own fear. An energy. A... power.

His instinct screamed at him: This was not a dream, a hallucination, or a delusion. Somehow... it was real.

The room still seemed to be vibrating, but it was an internal vibration. In the air, there was static electricity; an electrical charge that made his hair stand on end. He looked out the window. The streetlights were burning normally. Below, a few night owls were walking, unaware of anything.

But something had happened. And it wasn't just limited to him.

Ahmed's ghost was still there, but now he looked different. Clearer, more real. And he raised his index finger, pointing at Marcus's burning palm. As if saying, "Look," he said. "Look what happened."

Marcus took a step towards the ghost. "What? What happened? Tell me!"

But the ghost was silent, as always. He just kept pointing with his finger.

Marcus looked at his palm. That orange mark was now more defined. A triangle within a circle... An ancient symbol? He remembered seeing something similar during a protection mission in one of the archaeological sites in Iraq during his military days.

And then, the urge.

An uncontrollable urge from within. He wanted to move something. Not just want, he could.

His eyes fell on the empty beer bottle on the table. He focused. He thought of the bottle. Lifting it, holding it in the air...

The bottle trembled.

Marcus's breath caught. No. This couldn't be. It was just a tremor, a vibration.

He focused more. Rise.

The bottle rose a centimeter from the surface of the table, hovered in the air, and flew directly towards his hand, obeying Marcus...

Marcus screamed, this time filled with shock and fear. His concentration was broken. The bottle fell halfway to the floor, onto the rug, didn't break at first, but after bouncing off the rug, it hit the concrete floor and shattered.

His heart was pounding as if it would jump out of his chest. His hands were shaking - this time from fear. He was having trouble breathing. What was this? Was it madness? A new, terrifying manifestation of PTSD?

But that orange mark on his palm was still there, throbbing slightly. And inside, he felt a strange power. Just like feeling his muscles, but this had nothing to do with muscle. A mental muscle, perhaps... a psychic limb.

"No," he moaned, shaking his head. "This isn't real. This can't be real."

At that moment, his cell phone rang. An unknown number. Marcus, with his trembling hand, answered the phone, brought it to his ear. A cold, professional voice was heard from the other end:

"Mr. Marcus? I hope I'm not disturbing you at this hour. My name is Anton. I want to talk to you about your... new... abilities."

Marcus's blood froze. With a sudden reflex, he took the gun in his hand. "What? What abilities? Who are you? Where did you get my number?"

"First... Please put down your gun. I want to help you. To guide your power..." Anton's voice was oily, persuasive. "Let's just talk. Tomorrow, in Central Park. At 10 AM. Come alone."

The phone hung up.

Marcus dropped the phone. His breath was steaming in the cold air of the room. This had to be a dream. A nightmare. But the pain in his palm, the broken bottle on the floor, and now this phone call... it was all real.

He looked at the ghost. Ahmed was no longer looking at him. His eyes were fixed on the window, on the night sky of New York. As if pointing to something bigger.

Marcus slowly sat on the edge of the bed. He examined his hands. They looked normal. But as if, inside, there was a sleeping volcano. And someone - this Anton - knew of its existence.

He had been trained as a soldier. He knew the threats. Anton... was definitely a threat. A physical, psychological, and now... a paranormal threat.

His eyes drifted to the gun in his hand. A few minutes ago, he was about to end his life with it. Now, his life had suddenly become terrifyingly and fascinatingly complicated. He hadn't been able to end his life for a reason, and now... There was a mission on the horizon. He had been a soldier long enough to know that.

He clenched his non-gun hand. That orange mark throbbed between his fingers. He had to make a decision. Either he would accept this power - this madness, whatever it was - and face Anton. Or he would run, hide, and maybe return to the gun, to the unfinished business.

But now the gun didn't seem like a solution to him. Because in his hand, he literally had a new power. And power always brings a choice: to control it or to be controlled by it.

Outside, a siren sounded in Brooklyn, fading away. Marcus got up, walked to the window. The lights of the city now had a different meaning for him. How many more people were experiencing the same thing among these lights? How many people felt a mysterious burn in their palms at 3:17 AM tonight? How many people received a phone call from someone named Anton?

Central Park. 10 AM.

Marcus opened his eyes, got out of bed. He opened his palm, closed it. The power was still there. It was frightening. But at the same time... it seemed to have a purpose again. Purpose... Something he hadn't felt in months.

"Okay," he mumbled into the darkness. "Let's talk then."

His fiery fate had begun to cool. And in its place, a new fire was burning, dangerous, uncertain, but proving that he was alive. Marcus was no longer just a ghost hunter.

He himself had become, inexplicably, the target of a ghost hunter.

In Berlin-Kreuzberg, nestled on the banks of the Spree River, a high-ceilinged artist's studio served as both home and war room for Sofia Reinhardt. The thirty-year-old data analyst and former hacker had transformed this expansive, industrial space into a digital cathedral. One wall was dominated by a massive setup of three main monitors, each displaying 8K resolution, surrounded by a dozen smaller auxiliary screens. Across the room, a giant whiteboard displayed complex data streams and network topologies, hand-drawn – an analog map of the digital world.

It was 03:00. Sofia, clad in dark jeans and a grey t-shirt emblazoned with "I ♡ DATA," was hunched in her ergonomic office chair, her eyes flitting across the screens. Minimal rhythms of experimental electronic music flowed through her headphones – a sound wall she'd chosen to synchronize with her brain's alpha waves. Her hands danced across two separate keyboards simultaneously, one in the English QWERTY layout, the other in the German QWERTZ layout.

The subject of her current scrutiny was data packets residing on a secure server, "Kronos-Vault," deep within the dark web. Normally, she pursued financial fraud or state secrets. But tonight, she was following a different scent: quantum anomaly data.

A week prior, she'd received a tip from a contact at CERN – someone whose name she would never reveal: "We suspect some ATLAS data has been leaked through unofficial channels. Could you take a look?" Sofia couldn't refuse the offer. The free flow of information was a principle for her; but this was theft, and Sofia couldn't let it go.

03:17:01

The screens suddenly went haywire. First, the traffic monitoring software on the main monitor registered an anomalous data tsunami. Encrypted data packets were erupting from fourteen different root servers worldwide within milliseconds. The packets, unusually, carried the same cryptographic signature: 0xN3Xu5_Δ.

A Nexus symbol.

"Was zum Teufel..." Sofia muttered, halting her hand on the English keyboard. She narrowed her eyes, zooming in on the data stream. The source IPs of the packets belonged to various universities, research institutes, and – interestingly – some private hospitals. But the destination addresses were hidden behind a complex proxy chain.

Sofia's fingers began to storm across the keyboard. On one hand, she was trying to capture and isolate the packets in a virtual environment, while on the other, she was mapping their sources in real-time. Her hand on the German keyboard controlled the data visualization software, pouring the streams onto a world map with colored lines and dots.

And then she saw the pattern.

The data bursts were not random across the globe. They were concentrated at specific coordinates: Istanbul. CERN. Tokyo. New York. Shanghai. London. Los Angeles. Rome. Berlin. And a few more. All within the same millisecond.

"Das ist kein Zufall," she whispered, "This is no coincidence."

Immediately, she activated a custom-built AI tool: "Nexus-Parser."

The tool began to analyze the metadata of the captured encrypted packets, looking for patterns independent of the content.

And it found them.

The timestamps of the packets were identical: 03:17:01.234 UTC. The location of the highest packet density. CERN. She quickly infiltrated CERN's cameras with her custom-built AI tool. She had provided assistance once last year in an unrelated external volume case. She noticed a difference in Elena's movements when she went back a few minutes in the records. And she listened to her conversations with Leo. Millisecond Quantum Field Instability: A Possible Macroscopic Effect Theory...

Sofia held her breath. She didn't know Elena and Leo personally. Only from last year's event... a digital acquaintance... This woman was aware of something. And now, this experiment... her theoretical anomaly time coincided with the stolen data packets flowing on the dark web. Something was wrong. Or too right...

But the real shock came in the next step.

As Sofia attempted to infiltrate the "Kronos-Vault" server – a task she'd been working on for hours – she realized that the server had momentarily shut down and erased all traces. A professional, clean job. But before escaping, the server had leaked some of its logs. Sofia captured these fragments. The data was related to CERN.

She quickly decided to contact Elena Volkov. But not directly. She had to use an anonymous, secure channel. She prepared a message with "Quantum-Pigeon," a custom encryption protocol that mimicked quantum key distribution (but was much simpler):

>> DATA STOLEN

While informing Elena, she was also trying to decrypt the data she had ripped from the server.

There were strange lines in the logs:

[03:17:05] SUBJECT: #1076 (Istanbul) - Neural activity peak. Classification: VISION.

[03:17:05] SUBJECT: #2281 (Tokyo) - Psychomotor episode. Classification: SEMIOLOGY.

[03:17:05] SUBJECT: #5543 (New York) - Psychokinetic phenomenon. Classification: TELEKINESIS.

[03:17:06] RECIPIENT: 'KRONOS' - All subject data transmitted. Payment confirmed.

Sofia's blood ran cold. This was more than data theft. This was a surveillance operation. Someone was monitoring people around the world – "subjects" – tracking their "neural activity" and selling this data to a recipient called "Kronos." And all of this had happened during Elena Volkov's quantum anomaly.

"Mein Gott," she murmured. Her hands began to tremble. This was a major ethical violation. An attack on human rights, privacy, and scientific ethics. But it also seemed to be part of something much bigger.

>> ANOMALY RAW DATA PACKETS. NOT JUST CERN. DATA FROM RESEARCH CENTERS AROUND THE WORLD. ON THE DARK WEB IN A CLOSED AUCTION. RECIPIENT: AN OFFSHORE COMPANY NAMED 'KRONOS'. AND ELENA... I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE ANOMALY, BUT I SUSPECT IT'S MUCH MORE THAN YOU THINK. THERE ARE 'TRIGGERS'.

She sent the message. Without waiting for a reply, she turned to another interesting data stream. After the anomaly, there was an abnormal increase in "strange experiences" on social media and news sites. On Reddit's r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix, on 4chan's /x/ board, and even on some small local news sites... People were reporting snapshots, uncontrolled abilities, strange dreams. All with timestamps of approximately the same time: around 03:17.

Sofia ran another software to collect these reports. The report map perfectly overlapped with the source points of the data packets.

She understood: The anomaly was not just a physical event. It had a biological, neurological effect. It had "triggered" some people. And someone – Kronos – was monitoring these triggered people, collecting data about them. Why? For research? To exploit? Or... to control?

Sofia took a screenshot – an image showing the metadata of the encrypted data packets and the decrypted parts of the "Kronos-Vault" logs, with personal information censored. She sent it with "Quantum-Pigeon."

>> NEW INFORMATION. VISIONS. TELEKINESIS. ANOMALOUS PERCEPTION. YOUR ANOMALY USED THEM LIKE AN ANTENNA. OR THEY USED YOU. THEY ARE BEING WATCHED ON THE DARK WEB. THEY ARE IN DANGER!

>> WHO ARE THE 'TRIGGERS'? WHERE?

>> A NEUROSCIENTIST IN ISTANBUL, AN ARTIST IN TOKYO, A SOLDIER IN NEW YORK... THEY ARE ALL CONNECTED. INFORMATION CONTINUES TO FLOW ON THE DARK WEB. I AM INVESTIGATING TO THE DEEPEST LEVEL. WE MUST FIND THEM. BEFORE SOMEONE ELSE...

After sending the message, Sofia leaned back. Her eyes fixed on the empty space on the whiteboard. She slowly got up, took a felt-tip pen, and wrote in large letters in the center of the board:

NEXUS - 03:17:01

Then, she began to draw a world map. Istanbul, CERN, Tokyo, New York... She marked each point, drawing lines between them. A network was forming. And at the center of this network was a cloud that read "KRONOS."

Sofia put down the pen. In the silence of the Berlin night, only the sound of the computers' fans and the distant hum of the river could be heard. But in her ears, the screams of the data echoed. The screams of stolen data, of monitored people, of violated privacy.

She was no longer just a data hunter. She was a protector. A soldier on the digital front of an invisible war. And the first bullets of this war had been fired at 03:17:01.

She returned to her computer. She opened a new window. Title: "Nexus Triggers - Potential List." She began to write city names and ability classifications below each other. Each line meant a person, a life, a mystery.

Outside, Berlin was sleeping – or pretending to. But Sofia Reinhardt was awake. The oracle of data had now read her prophecy. And this prophecy said that strangers from all over the world were connected by the same invisible wound. She would find them. Before Kronos.

Because data was not just power. It was responsibility. And Sofia, tonight, had taken on that responsibility.