Back at Central Command, he called for a priority blackout meeting.
Multiple generals, agency heads, and government security officials tuned in to the encrypted satellite feed. Faces grim. Tension so thick it cut deeper than steel.
Detective Jin stood at the front of the digital war room, his jaw locked tight, a storm in his chest.
He pulled up a recording—frames of the black-suited man in the underground base, surrounded by elite weapons, stolen technology, and a private extraction chopper.
The video looped.Paused on the masked man's silhouette.The crimson streaks on his obsidian mask glowed like blood remembering its purpose.
"This man isn't working alone," Jin began, voice low. "He has funding, weaponry, and men that don't officially exist."
A general scoffed. "Are you saying… he's building an army?"
Jin leaned forward, eyes hard.
"He already has one."
The silence that followed wasn't from disbelief—It was from understanding.
"And whoever's behind this—behind Lisa's trafficking, this bounty war, this black market auction—this isn't just a cartel or a syndicate."
He clicked through intelligence images—burning compounds, erased data centers, flooded blacksite bunkers.
"It's something buried deeper. Something capable of destabilizing nations."
A map filled the screen—lit with red pulses across the globe. Each pulse, an act of chaos in the last seventy-two hours. All linked by one unseen hand.
There was silence.
And then the Director of Special Operations spoke, slowly and gravely:
"Tell us what you need."