Smoke curled through the tunnels like memory.
Matt moved like breath through lungs of steel and ash—wire in one hand, detonator in the other. No fear. No hesitation.
Not anymore.
The gas Bishop pumped into the control room? Not poison.
Neurotoxin suppressant. Enough to keep him lucid.
He'd need his mind to watch it happen.
Matt moved past the server vaults, past biometric locks he'd bypassed days ago, before he'd let himself get caught.
Because this wasn't revenge.
It was an erasure.
Bishop's legacy was built on recordings. Surveillance. Leverage. Pain on film, trauma in files.
And Matt had found them all.
Every confession. Every scream. Every secret.
> Aaron's worst night in the pit. Leon's betrayal. His own daughter's disappearance.
All of it, archived.
Categorized.
Weaponized.
Matt opened the final chamber.
Rows of drives. Towering servers.
The spine of Bishop's kingdom.
And at the center: a black terminal.
He slid in the device.
A virus he built in silence. With purpose.
It didn't just wipe.
It rewrote.
Footage became static.
Files became noise.
Faces blurred. Voices twisted.
Within minutes, Bishop's empire—his leverage, his control—wasn't just deleted.
It never existed.
And as the drives sparked and smoked, Matt stared into the chaos and whispered:
> "Now you're just a man."
---
Back in the control room—
Bishop fell to his knees.
Monitors flickered into oblivion.
His empire—the fear, the grip, the data—gone.
Aaron stepped forward, gun aimed at Bishop's head.
Leon beside him, jaw tight.
"What now?" Leon asked.
Aaron didn't speak.
They both looked at Bishop.
Tears ran down his face.
Not from grief.
From disbelief.
Aaron holstered the weapon.
"Leave him," he said.
Leon blinked. "What?"
Aaron's eyes stayed locked on Bishop's hollowed-out expression.
"He's not a god anymore."
And in the distance, a final charge blew.
The servers. The evidence. The backbone of control—
dust.