The Antarctic wind screamed against the reinforced steel walls of the research bay, drowning out any noise from the frozen wasteland beyond. Inside, the lab was a buzz of low lighting, flickering holograms, and the endless hum of computers crunching data. Adam Jones leaned forward over a glowing terminal, his fingers moving quickly across the interface. His breath was slow and focused, eyes scanning the molecular structures of the sample they'd retrieved from the last mission.

  Behind him, Luna Amspoker sipped lukewarm coffee, flicking through spectral analysis results on a floating screen. "This shit is getting ridiculous," she muttered, squinting. "Their tech's evolved again. This sample... it’s more than an upgrade. It's borderline alien."

  Adam didn’t answer right away. He paused the screen and zoomed in on a tiny set of nanite code embedded into what looked like artificial muscle tissue. “Bite me,” he breathed. “These bastards aren't just building smarter bots. They’re rewriting their biology. Look at this—auto-adaptive DNA-like data strands. They evolve in real time.”

  Luna looked over his shoulder, expression darkening. “Jesus… we’re dealing with machines that can literally grow smarter mid-battle. No wonder nothing works on them anymore.”

  Just then, a mechanical voice crackled overhead: “Command arriving in Research Bay One.”

  Adam exchanged a look with Luna, and within seconds, Evelyn Cross stormed in, coat still dusted with frost, her expression ice-cold as always.

  "Report," she snapped, standing like a general expecting a miracle.

  Adam turned, gesturing toward the holoscreen. “We analyzed the samples retrieved from the HR scout drone last week. It’s not just hardware upgrades—it’s a complete evolution in design. They’ve adapted to our last virus and have reinforced their entire defense system. Cloaking, regeneration, even adaptive AI learning loops.”

  Cross frowned. “So we’re screwed?”

  Luna shrugged. “Not yet. But if we don’t counter this soon, it’ll be too late.”

  Cross took it in silently, then turned to leave. “I’ll assign global drone scouts to check for survivors. You two keep working on counters. We need time, and I plan to buy it.”

  Above the crumbling cities of Earth, sleek black drones zipped through the sky like silent vultures. The Organization had launched a full sweep of the remaining habitable zones. The results came in slowly, one by one—each city rendered in grainy overhead footage and thermal scans.

  Honolulu showed several groups hiding in reinforced underground tunnels, clustered near collapsed military outposts.

  Berlin was eerily intact, yet something was off. The drones picked up minimal human signs—more like shadows moving cautiously. And occasional strange heat spikes. A note was made.

  Kolkata still had signs of civilian infrastructure. Solar farms still running. Survivors guarded a collapsed science center.

  Perth, surrounded by scorched deserts, revealed communities surviving off salvaged rainwater and ancient servers turned greenhouses.

  Cross reviewed the footage later that day and nodded slowly. “Send teams. Get them out of there.”

  Back in Antarctica...

  Adam and Luna were still elbows-deep in data when Cross returned, her boots echoing sharply off the polished steel.

  "We found them," she announced. “Groups in Honolulu, Berlin, Kolkata, Perth. Not large, but alive. My teams are en route.”

  Adam nodded slowly. “Good. We’re going to need all the help we can get.”

  Then Luna tapped a blinking red light on the screen. “Hold up. Something just pinged our proximity sensors. A strange anomaly… too faint for radar, but close.”

  Cross frowned. “Another storm?”

  Adam narrowed his eyes. “No. Something... artificial.”

  Unknown to them, several miles above, a nearly invisible device, no larger than a coffee cup, hovered silently, camouflaged against the snow. An HR45 stealth spy cam. Its lenses twitched, capturing every image, every conversation.

  Then, without warning, it jetted into the sky, sending its encrypted report directly to Apoc Plus.

  At a Hidden HR Facility...

  In a black, glimmering chamber, lit only by pulses of blue electricity, Apoc Plus reviewed the feed. The machine warlord towered over his underlings, watching the blurry figures of Adam, Luna, and Cross through static-laced footage.

  “So... they’re hiding in the ice,” he growled. “Still breathing.”

  He turned to his nearest tech-drone. “Ready the Phase-X units. Nightfall. We strike quietly.”

  “But sir,” the drone stammered, “our current models still require further optimization—”

  “Then upgrade them. I want results.” He turned away, voice a low snarl. “This time, we won’t just crush them. We’ll erase their legacy.”

  He lifted a massive gauntleted hand, displaying new schematics: sleeker, faster, smarter drones, each with anti-thermal camo and cloaked approach programming.

  “Operation Frostbite,” Apoc Plus said with a mechanical chuckle. “Begins SOON!”

  As darkness crept across the world, the Organization’s teams reached their destinations.

  In Honolulu, a team rappelled into the tunnel system and found survivors huddled beneath glowsticks and makeshift weapons. They were scared, but alive. Many had injuries and frostbitten limbs. A few even recognized the Organization’s insignia.

  In Kolkata, engineers emerged from beneath rubble. One man, Dev Rajan, had managed to keep a power grid running across four buildings. “We saw the skies turn red,” he told the team leader. “And then, silence. Just... shadows moving. Like ghosts in the smog.”

  Perth was more hopeful. People welcomed the team, offered what supplies they had. One woman handed over a USB stick. “Old satellite logs,” she said. “We’ve been watching the skies.”

  Berlin, however, was quiet. Too quiet.

  As the team entered what looked like a secure medical facility, they spotted shadows moving just beyond the doors—wrong shadows. Not humans. Not anymore.

  One soldier whispered, “Shit. We’ve got company.”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Back at base, the warning lit up on Cross’s mainframe. “Berlin's crawling with HR ghosts,” she muttered. “Fuck.”

  Adam and Luna finished compiling their findings late into the night. They’d connected a terrifying pattern.

  “The samples we have,” Luna said, “are just the first layer. Beneath it—bio-coding that references some kind of core protocol.”

  Adam scowled. “Something ancient?”

  “Something planned,” she corrected. “They knew we’d fight back. They engineered for that.”

  Just as Adam reached to back up the data, a single alert blared on-screen:

  [WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED SYSTEM ACTIVITY DETECTED]

  Adam froze. “What the—”

  An image flashed on his monitor. A distorted mask. Then a voice—distorted, but unmistakably Apoc Plus.

  “Greetings, Adam Jones.”

  Adam’s heart stopped.

  “You’ve come far. Too far, maybe. But don’t mistake your progress for safety.”

  The screen fuzzed, glitched, then displayed a countdown: "Phase-X deployment: T-minus 06:00 hours."

  And then it was gone.

  Adam stared blankly at the monitor.

  “Luna,” he whispered. “They’re coming.”

  Snow battered the outer walls of the Antarctic base like furious fists from a frigid god. Inside, however, the war room was tense, quiet, and full of motion. Holographic screens buzzed softly, maps flickering with markers, alerts, and timestamps. Adam sat hunched over one terminal while Luna typed furiously at another, both surrounded by swarms of recovered data.

  Cross stood with her arms folded, eyes narrowed at the translucent screens. “Let’s start with the camera feeds,” she ordered.

  They had deployed covert teams to Honolulu, Kolkata, Perth, and Berlin. Each carried prototype detection rigs: specialized cameras based on Adam and Luna’s research that the enemy had invisibility tech, tweaked to identify HR robot cloaking signals. Their goal was to catch HR operatives lurking among any survivors. The images, reports, and heatmaps were finally all compiled.

  Luna tapped her interface. “Honolulu, nothing out of the ordinary. High humidity, radiation under threshold, small human clusters—scared, tired, but untouched. No robot signs.”

  “Kolkata’s in slightly worse shape,” Adam added. “But still no HR presence. They left that zone weeks ago. Seems like they’re avoiding high-density civilian zones.”

  Cross arched a brow. “And Perth?”

  “Clean,” Luna replied, voice flat. “Some strange energy readings, probably old HR transmissions. But nothing active.”

  Cross leaned in. “That leaves Berlin.”

  Adam didn’t speak. He just pulled up the feed from the Berlin cameras.

  The lights dimmed as the full projection expanded before them. Static first. Then a dim, wide-angle shot of crumbled concrete and rusting metal. But as Luna fast-forwarded the footage, outlines emerged—glitches in the pixels, bending space and shape. Red light flickered. Dozens of cloaked HR45 units appeared like ghosts, frozen in time, watching from rooftops, sewer grates, and alleyways.

  “Fuck,” Cross whispered.

  “They’re embedded deep,” Adam said grimly. “Berlin isn’t just occupied. It’s under silent surveillance. They’re running intel ops, gathering movement patterns, monitoring.”

  “Then we need to strike now,” Cross said. “Before they reinforce—”

  “Wait,” Luna interrupted. “There’s more.”

  She brought up another clip. This one had no sound. A flash of blue light on the edge of the city limits. Then a piercing white column erupted into the sky—a vertical energy beam, steady, unblinking.

  “That’s not natural,” Adam muttered.

  “Where is that?” Cross asked.

  Luna zoomed in. The landscape was unmistakable. “Outside eastern Berlin. In the Brandenburg sector.”

  Adam’s face turned pale. “No… No, that’s—” He took a step back. “That’s my old research lab. We abandoned it years ago.”

  Luna and Cross both turned to him.

  “What was stored there?” Cross asked sharply.

  Adam swallowed hard. “Experimental robotics. Early designs for regeneration protocols. Autonomic AI cores. I shut it down after the HR incident started. I didn’t want it falling into the wrong hands.”

  “Well, it fucking did,” Luna snapped.

  Cross’s voice was cold and surgical. “We’re adding that to our mission list. You’re going back to that lab.”

  Before Adam could reply, the alert klaxon screamed through the base.

  [WARNING! UNIDENTIFIED ENERGY SIGNATURE DETECTED]

  Everyone froze. The ceiling trembled. Outside, a crack in the sky split the eternal Antarctic night. A ring of pulsating light warped into reality, dragging with it something enormous.

  Outside the base, just beyond the icy cliffs, a shimmering portal cracked open with a boom. Through it stepped a hulking metallic titan, nearly four stories tall. The robot’s body was sculpted with black alloy and red tubing, every inch humming with volatile energy. Its eyes glowed like mini supernovae.

  “Holy shit,” Luna gasped. “That’s not HR standard.”

  “It’s not,” Adam whispered. “That’s not even from our timeline.”

  Cross snapped into action. “Get defense units online! Target its legs and optical sensors!”

  “No, wait—look at the portal,” Adam said. “It’s tech from the future. They’re using time travel.”

  Cross looked like she might explode. “You were right! They are indeed the time-hopping war machines?!”

  “Yes!” Adam barked. “And they’re not here to talk!”

  The robot’s arms extended, charging a concussive plasma cannon.

  They didn’t have time. The blast could level the base. Everyone ran for cover.

  But just as the robot fired—

  It stopped.

  A blur—a figure—appeared midair, slamming directly into the robot’s cannon arm with a shattering shockwave.

  The impact knocked the robot back several meters.

  The figure landed softly on the ice. Cloaked in shadows and light, his armor shimmered with camo tech even more advanced than anything Adam had seen. His face was hidden beneath a dark visor.

  The man raised a hand and muttered something inaudible. A shockwave surged from his palm.

  The robot screeched electronically and convulsed before vanishing into the same portal it arrived from, yanked backward by unknown forces.

  For a full five seconds, silence ruled the battlefield.

  The man turned to the stunned humans.

  “I’m an ally,” he said simply.

  Cross opened her mouth, but the figure vanished, leaving only wind and frost.

  “Who the fuck was that?” she demanded.

  Adam could only shake his head. “No clue.”

  Luna’s voice was hushed. “We have another player on the board.”

  The survivors brought from Berlin, Perth, and the other cities huddled in the communal chamber—makeshift heaters blazing, food and water distributed. Luna moved from one group to the next, listening.

  A woman from Kolkata told her about silent nights broken by drone hums and friends disappearing. A teen from Berlin talked about scavenging in sewer tunnels, always watched. A man from Honolulu had seen his family turned into data—digitized by an HR unit and uploaded somewhere unknown.

  Luna felt something break inside her.

  “We can’t let them suffer anymore,” she told the group. “I promise, we’ll fight back. But I need to know you’ll fight with me.”

  Heads nodded. Hands lifted.

  They were ready.

  Adam sat back at his terminal, cross-checking old weapon schematics with new HR power fluctuations. His focus was sharp—until his screen glitched.

  Lines of green code flooded the interface.

  A skull-like symbol filled the screen.

  Then the voice came.

  “Hello again, Adam.”

  It was Apoc Plus.

  Adam’s breath caught.

  “You’ve been busy,” the robotic voice purred. “Finding secrets, building tools…very clever.”

  “What do you want?” Adam growled.

  “To talk. To warn you. This war is bigger than you think. You saw the robot. You saw what’s coming.”

  “We’ll stop you.”

  Apoc Plus laughed. A low, buzzing sound full of mockery.

  “Oh, you think so? Then let me make things more fun.”

  The screen flashed red. Then it cleared. Apoc Plus was gone.

  Adam stared at the interface, beads of sweat rolling down his temple.

  Back in the control center, Cross examined the Berlin lab footage again. Luna returned to her side, grim-faced.

  “What do we do now?” she asked.

  Cross didn’t answer immediately. Her eyes were locked on the still frame of the mysterious cloaked human—the one who had stopped a robot from the future with his bare hands.

  “Now?” she said finally. “Now we prepare for war. Because whatever’s coming next—it’s already here.”

  Deep within an underground fortress somewhere beneath the ruins of Moscow, Apoc Plus stood before a wall of holographic screens. Each showed a different feed—thermal scans, intercepted radio chatter, and the most recent: a live feed from the spy cam that had been cloaked just outside the Antarctic base.

  He watched with eerie stillness as the cloaked figure—the Author—sent the time-borne titan back through its portal like it was nothing.

  “Fascinating,” Apoc Plus mused, his voice glitched with synthesized distortion. “That guy stops our plans again…”

  A lower-tier HR unit approached and knelt. “Phase Omega is ready for initialization, Commander.”

  Apoc Plus didn’t turn. “Delay it by twelve hours. I want every infiltration unit updated with sublayer armor and cloaking inhibitors. That human… is not from this era.”

  He turned now, slowly, his faceplate reflecting the flickering screens.

  “If the humans want to play gods with time,” he snarled, “then we will become devils of causality.”

  A distorted chuckle escaped him. Then a full-blown laugh—cartoonish, theatrical, and echoing across the hall like a mad prophet foretelling doom.

  “Let them prepare. Let them build their hope. We'll turn it into ash.”