Ashes of the Unbroken

Ashes of the Unbroken

The winter storm screamed through the ruins of Old Viren, a forgotten city where silence had made its home. Among the frostbitten skeletons of buildings, something stirred—a coughing breath, ragged and real.

She woke with a gasp. Cold concrete beneath her, blood-crusted fingers twitching. A name flickered across her mind like a dying lightbulb: **Kael**.

Dead.

She should be dead.

The last thing Kael remembered was the fall. A six-story drop, body broken, mission failed, and the enemy’s laughter echoing above as she vanished into the darkness. That had been two months ago. Or was it more? Time had no meaning in the void between life and whatever this was.

Her body was... different. Stiffer. Scarred in strange, symmetrical ways. She moved a finger, and metal clicked under her skin. Not just stitches—**augmentations**. Someone had found her. Someone had rebuilt her.

But who?

She pushed herself up, trembling. Snow crusted her eyelashes. A shard of mirror lay among rubble—jagged and streaked with ash. She looked.

Her reflection blinked back, and Kael nearly screamed.

Half her face was metal—sleek, gunmetal-gray with glowing veins of energy pulsing just beneath the skin. Her right eye, once stormy blue, was now a brilliant, inhuman silver. And on her neck, etched like a tattoo: **PROJECT NIX**.

"What the hell..."

She staggered out into the street. Not a soul. Just the wind and the wreckage of war. Drones circled high above, silent and scanning. Kael ducked beneath a rusted awning, instincts kicking in like an old muscle memory. Her mind raced.

Nix. That was the codename for a black-ops initiative—one that had been canceled, or so she thought. "Canceled" in military terms often meant buried. Deep. In labs. In blood.

Someone had pulled her from the brink, not to save her, but to **use** her.

Voices crackled in her head. A radio? A neural implant?

_"Nix Unit 7—status check. Respond. Do not deviate from assigned parameters."_

Kael didn't answer. Her pulse spiked. She wasn’t a machine. She was **Kael**—a rebel, a fighter, a survivor. They could wire her muscles, reprogram her brain, but they hadn’t erased her soul.

She ran.

Through alleys crusted with frost and forgotten propaganda. Through whispers of a city that had lost hope. With every step, her joints clicked smoother. Her body, once shattered, moved like a predator’s. The more she ran, the more she **remembered**.

The mission. The betrayal. Commander Arven—the man she trusted—turning her in for a bounty. Selling her out to the bio-surge syndicate that now controlled half the continent. They must’ve delivered her to the Nix program as payment. A living prototype.

Kael skidded to a stop at the edge of a crater where the rebel headquarters once stood. Gone. Vaporized. She dropped to her knees.

Her breath steamed in the cold. A flash drive on a chain around her neck burned hot against her skin. She yanked it free. It was encrypted, sealed with a genetic lock—hers.

Some part of her remembered planting this. A backup. A failsafe.

She jammed it into a crumbling terminal half-buried in ice. Lights flickered. A hologram blinked to life—her own voice, rougher, more human.

_"If you're watching this, you died. Or close enough. But they didn't win. They made a weapon. They forgot you were a woman first."__

The message detailed everything: locations of underground cells, names of remaining allies, backdoors into the Nix network. Plans. Hope.

A mechanical buzz made her whirl.

A scout drone hovered above, red eye scanning. She leapt, caught it mid-air, crushed it in her hand. Sparks fizzled. Too late. They knew.

They were coming.

Kael didn't run this time.

She strode into the open, toward the oncoming lights of Syndicate drop ships. A woman reborn—not just in flesh and metal, but in purpose. No longer broken. No longer prey.

The skies roared as the ships descended. She raised her hands—not to surrender, but to ignite. Energy surged from her palms, a gift—or curse—from the engineers who thought they owned her.

She smiled.

**Let them come.**

This was no longer about revenge.

It was a **reckoning**.