The Artemis Project Support Fund was pitched as a student research grant—clean, civic, future-facing. In practice, it bankrolled enough breakthroughs in applied tech and battlefield systems to let Lockhart flatten an Ouroboros base in Asia. All without ever filing a military requisition.
The President signed it without a second glance—a leftover clause from the fund, buried in post-op paperwork. Then she was dead. Austin had connected the dots. Everyone had. Uroboros didn’t kill for symbols. They killed in cycles. They didn’t care who gave the order — only who made it possible. Case closed.
Except it wasn’t. Because something about it itched. That fund was too traceable. The logistics were too clean. The retaliation too quiet. Austin didn’t know what he was looking at. A missing actor? A deeper protocol? Something colder was coiled beneath the whole sequence, and it wasn’t Uroboros. He didn’t have a theory. Not even a name. Just the feeling that someone had left the doors unlocked on purpose.
By nine p.m. the office was half-empty. A stack of reports sat on his desk—Assessment Division’s latest projections. Their model ran across every registered Kamuy incident on record, cross-matched against the scene evidence. The conclusion: the suspect’s Kamuy was probably some form of energy detonation, possibly with a delayed trigger. Estimated window: five minutes. But the report was padded with caveats—effect could vary depending on the bearer, more data required, algorithm inconclusive. Austin didn’t pretend to follow the math, but the Assessment people were usually the least useless in the building.
He carried his empty cup into the elevator and punched the button for the dining floor. Every level had coffee machines, but by this hour his own floor’s pot was drained dry, filter clogged like a smoker’s lung. The elevator soptted on level ten—Logistics Division. Nobody waiting. He jabbed the close-door key before the thought of requisition forms could stain his mood. Logistics meant paperwork. Stacks of it.
The dining level still smelled of burnt grounds. Their urns were swapped out more often than anywhere else in the building, the only machines still coughing up coffee this late. He filled his cup and took a swallow. Bitter. Medicinal. He swore under his breath.
The floor was empty, save for the glass-wall labs across the atrium. Relics & Research Division. Their lights still burned. A cluster of researchers bent over some jagged piece of bone from some Drakespawn, magnifiers and tweezers in hand, like coroners dissecting God’s remains. Nervous wrecks, all of them.
Austin rode back up to Seventeen. Dropped into his chair. The monitor’s cold glow washed half his face. He didn’t know what he was looking for, only that something restless inside him kept digging. He leaned back, took a sip of the scorched coffee. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a Post-it in the frame of the monitor. Scribbled account. Password. He typed the sequence. Hit enter. The screen flickered twice, then unlocked: [Level Six Access Granted.]
The number system. The only thing the Bureau hadn’t managed to overcomplicate. An international outfit scattered across continents, drowning in languages, titles, and jurisdictions—but power was simple here. Just a number by your name. He only had Level Four.
Austin bit down on his cigarette, drummed a finger on the desk. Cross-tier access was banned outright. Not his first time. The account’s owner didn’t care anyway; in the smoking room the man would just grin and say, “* Don’t kill yourself over the job, Austin. There’ll always be more cases. More suspects. Go try golf sometime.” Austin would shrug, ash into the tray. More cases was fine by him. Stopping meant worse.
The file archive loaded line by line. First pages were meeting transcripts. Austin skimmed them with half-lidded eyes: supply-chain stabilization, cross-border coordination, ISSC partnerships, Stabilin shortages. Boilerplate. Same language as the press briefings. New bottles, old wine. One note even mentioned Lockhart Group assisting NATO last year, clearing three Tier-IV Drakespawn in the Mediterranean. Contracts dressed up as cooperation, but everyone knew who had swung the blade.
He scrolled. A flagged entry: Draconic Primary Entity. He felt his irritation rise. The Dragon that rewrote the world, and all he’d ever seen were a handful of blurred photos, watermarked, half redacted. The file still carried the same line as always: Immune to conventional assault.
Austin scrolled lower, the pages loading with the slowness of someone daring him to stop. More lines of clipped text. CIA insignia stamped in the margins. That operation six months ago—supposed to gut Ouroboros, burn their network down to coals. He remembered the briefing: “final phase,” “comprehensive dismantling.” But the CIA files disagreed. According to their informants, the group wasn’t dead at all. It had simply dissolved into something harder to kill. Non-structural action units deployed across multiple global zones.
He rubbed his temple. No command chains. No permanent bases. No names you could put on a warrant. Just fragments—cells designed to be thrown away. A contagion wearing human faces.
The report dug deeper. Ouroboros wasn’t just scattering units; they were running experiments on Kamuy-bearers. Pages of recovered files described tests that read more like butcher’s logs than science—forced activations, prolonged deprivation, subjects wired up until their nerves burned out. Turns out when you electrocute someone long enough, they die. Some revelation.
According to the assessment team, the purpose wasn’t random cruelty. Cross-referenced notes suggested they were trying to pin down the real cause behind why one bearer burned through Stabilin twice as fast as another. Consumption curves, dosage anomalies, outliers who collapsed early. It was all in there, written in a language stripped of humanity.
Austin sat back, cigarette hanging from his lip. He couldn’t remember the year the body count from Stabilin shortages passed cancer in the charts—just that it had been inevitable. There was never enough Stabilin. Maybe it was a good thing, in some twisted way, that Ouroboros wanted to know why one guy could harden his skin like steel and barely touch the stuff, while another’s Kamuy turned his bones to glass and drained vials by the week. Or maybe someone had already solved it, tucked the answer away in some file locked above him, somewhere past the Level Six inbox.
He drummed his fingers against the desk again, harder this time. That was the part he could never swallow, the way the upper floors kept their secrets like they were antique wine. He and the others were the ones out in the field, doing the footwork, mopping up the fallout. But upstairs? They’d sit on it. Let the Bureau chew through “unknown anomalies” while the suits compared notes in sealed rooms. Same cycle as always.
Austin ground the cigarette out in the tray, leaned forward. He ran a search on Stabilin Utilization Index and watched the loading bar crawl across the screen, patience draining with every pixel. His finger tapped twice against the desk before the thought slipped out, bitter as the coffee: “Bureaucratic as hell. Might as well be the ISSC.”*
He remembered his first Bureau briefing back at the old headquarters—an ISSC delegate droning about “shared responsibility”* while half the field agents dozed in corners the cameras didn’t cover. The ISSC—International Stabilin Supply Council. A name dressed up to sound like some august U.N. subcommittee. In reality, just a moral stage prop. Once a year they convened, lined up behind a podium, reciting the same script: stable supply, global cooperation, shared responsibility. Cameras clicked, declarations made. And then the moment the lights went off, every delegate went home and went right back to clawing Stabilin out of each other’s hands.
The Enforcement Bureau had started out as their enforcement arm, the “implementing branch” under ISSC’s umbrella, tasked with carrying out resolutions. In plain language: the council gave speeches, and the Bureau did the dirty work. But years of “dirty work” changed things. The Bureau had grown its own teeth—field units, rapid deployment squads, international warrants. They didn’t just enforce supply protocols anymore; they owned them. Stabilin trafficking, Kamuy regulation, black-market seizures—the Bureau reached into all of it.
Somewhere along the line, the balance flipped. People still paid lip service to the ISSC podiums. But in the field?Everyone knew the truth: the real thing to fear wasn’t a delegate in a suit. It was the Enforcement officer standing in your doorway with a warrant you couldn’t outrun.
Then something flashed past on the screen, loaded almost too quickly, as if it had been slid into the feed on purpose. Not a full report, just a clipped line from some top-classified meeting: Ouroboros experimentation indicates potential for uniform Stabilin requirement across all Kamuy-bearers.
The line hung on his screen like a nail in the glass. He stared at it until the words started to lose shape, until the coffee tasted even worse than it had five minutes ago. A voice in his head whispered: You shouldn't have seen that. But he had. The damage was done—not fear, exactly, but something colder. Like watching a house of cards realize it was about to fall.
He’d known it for years, but seeing it written there stripped away the last pretense: Kamuy was never merit-based. Never fair. From day one it had broken every rule capitalism was built on. No effort curve. No return on investment. No neat ladder where training or money could buy you a place. It just struck. Some lit up. Most didn’t.
He remembered a guy from Risk Analytics once dragging him over to a terminal, proud as hell about some model he’d cooked up. A modified Gini coefficient, mapped against Kamuy awakenings and global wealth. The graph had looked like a seismograph mid-quake—jagged, incoherent, one bad tremor away from snapping. Stabilin had been the patch, the illusion of order. It didn’t cure the chaos, but it gave markets something to price. Made power billable. Insurable. A product you could slice into derivatives and ship across borders.
And he’d swallowed it, same as everyone else. Figured he was just part of the baseline crowd, the statistical deadweight. But staring at this file now, Austin felt the floor tilt—like he wasn’t in some corner office anymore. He was sitting right on the fault line of a model that had already broken.
Stabilin alone had already overtaken the arms trade in annual turnover, and that didn’t even account for the grey-market aftershocks—entire economies gutted by subsidy denials, clinics priced out of supply, death curves rising in countries whose only crime was being poor when the Factor hit. He’d seen the numbers slide across his desk before, weeks in advance of the funerals they forecast. Mortality rates. Policy failures. A red spike no one upstairs ever rushed to flatten. In warzones and collapsed states, Stabilin wasn’t medicine. It was currency. Often more stable than the dollar.
Guns were insurance. Math was anesthesia. Kamuy was the nightmare. And Stabilin? Just a blanket draped over it, hoping no one noticed the shape underneath.
Now the files suggested Ouroboros was trying to strip the chaos out of it altogether. Make every Kamuy-bearer burn through Stabilin at the same rate. No more outliers. Austin could already picture the Risk Analytics floor lit up at three in the morning, junior analysts chain-drinking vending-machine coffee, plugging that line into their models like it was just another variable. Procurement graphs, stability curves, insurance indexes—all suddenly neat, smooth, predictable.
And that was the part that made his stomach turn. Not the cruelty of the experiments, but the simplicity of the outcome. If Ouroboros pulled it off, the entire world would run on a single number.
The simplicity stuck in his head, looping. One number to ration the world. And then another thought slipped in, jagged, unfinished: what if it didn’t stop with Kamuy-bearers… what if Ouroboros found a way to drag the rest of the population under the same leash… what if everyone had to dose just to keep standing…
Austin rubbed his temple, smoke stinging his eyes. Enough. He shut the monitor, grabbed his coat. He didn't feel panic. Didn't feel the urge to call anyone, file a report, sound the alarm. What was he supposed to do—march up to Level Twenty Seven and tell them their own classified files were terrifying? Write a memo about the end of the world?
The café across the street would still have that overcooked sandwich sweating under heat lamps. Better that than risking the dining hall this late, the food there turned into something you wouldn’t feed a dog.
Austin lit another cigarette in the elevator, watching the floor numbers tick down. Sixteen. Fifteen. Fourteen. Each floor full of people who probably slept better than he did. His temples throbbed, a low ache no coffee could touch. It would still be there in the morning.