Stuck in an Island with Twelve Beautiful Women
Chapter 857 - 859

Chapter 857: Chapter 859

"He’s not gone," she gasped, bleeding from a cut on her cheek. "Just stalled."

They ran.

Up above, the facility began to collapse. The diversion team had planted explosives in the structural supports. Tamir’s voice crackled over the radio.

"Extraction point’s hot. Meet at fallback route."

Jude and Rhea made it, barely. They emerged into the chaos, flames, gunfire, shadows moving between the trees. But the data was secured. The facility was gone. And the world was about to change.

That night, Jude sat with Rhea and Tamir on a hill overlooking the smoking ruins. They didn’t speak. There was nothing left to say. They had survived.

But they all knew it wasn’t the end.

Ascendia would rebuild.

The boy would return.

And when he did, Jude would be ready.

The wind howled through the ravaged plains where once a forest had stood. Blackened stumps and ashes remained, a landscape carved by the chaos of the last raid. The smell of burned metal and ozone clung to the air. Jude walked ahead of the caravan, his eyes scanning the horizon for signs of movement, but all he could see were the echoes of destruction. Behind him, the group moved slowly, wounded, weary, carrying the weight of victory that felt far from triumphant. The Aeon Facility was gone, its foundations buried beneath rubble, but the boy who had stepped out of that glass chamber lingered in every thought, every heartbeat. Jude couldn’t forget his eyes, unfeeling, focused, cold. The mission had succeeded in the eyes of the resistance. Data had been leaked. The world had seen glimpses of the truth. Outrage had sparked in some corners, denial in others, but most importantly, the silence had been broken. They were no longer ghosts in the machine. They were a threat, and Ascendia knew it.

But exposure had its cost. Safe houses had been raided. Allies disappeared. The resistance network had fractured under pressure, with some units going dark, others turning rogue. Communications were spotty. Supply lines collapsed. Jude’s team, what remained of it, became wanderers. They found temporary shelter in the outskirts of Elandar, an abandoned mining complex carved into the cliffs. Rhea commandeered the lower tunnels, transforming them into medical bays and storage vaults. Tamir trained the remaining fighters in the upper caverns, keeping them sharp, focused. Jude didn’t rest. He couldn’t. The boy, code name Lucien, according to decrypted files, had not only survived but was being sent after them. Target: Jude. Objective: eliminate the anomaly. The idea that Ascendia saw him as more than a nuisance now, perhaps even a threat to their control systems, gnawed at him.

He spent long hours pouring through the data they had retrieved. Each page brought another piece of the nightmare to light. Lucien wasn’t the only one. There were others, some older, some younger. All enhanced, all rewritten, and each programmed with failsafes that ensured loyalty beyond any human limitation. And then there were the Overseers, Ascendia’s hidden elite, names never spoken aloud, faces absent from any database. They were the architects of the program, the ones who gave the orders behind closed doors. Jude became obsessed with them. Finding them. Exposing them. Stopping them. Rhea noticed the shift. She said little, but her presence remained constant. She brought food he often ignored, reminded him to sleep, to breathe. She never tried to stop him, only stayed near enough to catch him if he fell.

Three weeks passed. Then the message came. Not through radio or digital relay. A child arrived at the mouth of the cave, no older than ten, carrying a handwritten note sealed in wax. No crest, no signature. Just one line: "You left a piece of yourself behind. Come alone." Coordinates followed. Jude studied the paper for a long time, then burned it. He didn’t tell Rhea. She would stop him, or worse, try to come with him. This was something he had to face alone.

He left before sunrise, a satchel across his back and a pistol tucked against his ribs. The coordinates led him northeast, toward a ruin that once belonged to the old government, a training facility for elite peacekeepers, long since abandoned. Or so everyone believed. As Jude approached the site, he saw signs of life. Fresh tracks. Heat residue on the walls. And a single sentry standing atop the gate, still as stone, eyes hidden behind a visor. He raised no alarm. Simply nodded and stepped aside.

Inside, the facility was quiet. Clean. Operational. Light flickered across walls covered in digital screens showing movement across cities Jude hadn’t seen in years. Then a voice called from the end of the corridor. "You came faster than expected." A woman stepped into view. Older, her dark hair streaked with silver, her eyes sharp and calculating. She wore no uniform, no badge, only a plain black coat. "My name is Celeste. I used to be one of the Overseers. Now I’m just a woman looking to balance a scale that tipped too far."

Jude said nothing. She gestured for him to follow. They walked in silence through halls that smelled of sterilization and regret. Finally, she stopped before a thick metal door. "You deserve to see him again," she said. "He’s not what he was. But maybe you’ll find something human left in him." The door opened.

Lucien sat in the center of the room, unbound. He looked up slowly, his face unchanged. Those same eyes met Jude’s, calm and unreadable. "They said you were my father," he said. "I don’t remember you."

Jude stepped inside, the door closing behind him. "I didn’t know about you. Not until it was too late."

"They showed me pictures," Lucien continued. "Your face. Your files. Your history. I read it all. But it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel like mine."

Jude sat across from him. "Because it’s not. They took it from you."

Lucien tilted his head. "Why would they lie? They gave me purpose. Direction. You abandoned me."