Alex's POV

  A groan escaped my lips as consciousness clawed its way back into my body. My head throbbed like someone had taken a hammer to it, and my vision swam in a foggy haze of light and shadow. I blinked, squinting through the blinding brightness. The ceiling above me was metallic, faintly glowing with pulsing circuits that spider-webbed through it like veins. This wasn’t the hotel. This wasn’t anywhere I’d been before.

  My hands jerked instinctively—and that’s when I felt the cold bite of metal around my wrists. I was handcuffed to a bed. Not the soft, creaky bed of the hotel room, but a sterile, reinforced slab. Panic surged in my chest.

  “What the hell…?” My voice came out rough, weak.

  I turned my head—and nearly didn’t recognize the woman standing at the foot of the bed.

  Maya.

  But not the Maya I knew.

  Gone was the casual, sultry stranger with neon-dyed hair and a mesh top who had smirked at my awe and pretended not to care. In her place stood someone far more… dangerous. Her hair was now jet black, slicked back into a tight braid. She wore a reinforced black suit lined with silver wiring and faintly humming tech nodes. A holographic gauntlet flickered on her left arm, displaying streams of data in a language I couldn’t even begin to understand. Her eyes—cold, calculating—stared at me with none of the warmth I remembered. And she held a weapon at her hip I didn’t even want to think about.

  “Maya?” I managed, heart hammering.

  She crossed her arms. “That’s not my real name.”

  My breath caught. “What… what is this? What the hell’s going on?”

  She didn’t answer right away. Her gaze studied me, sharp and dissecting, like I was a specimen under a microscope. When she finally spoke, her voice was stripped of amusement. It was hard, almost mechanical.

  “Everything you thought about me is a lie, Alex.”

  My stomach dropped.

  “I’m not some down-on-her-luck girl working a tech job and surviving this city one hookup at a time,” she continued. “That story? That was a script. A mask. One I’ve used a thousand times.”

  I stared at her, trying to make sense of it. “Then who are you?”

  She stepped forward, the floor under her boots echoing with each calculated step. “Agent 09, Null Sector. Null stands for Non-Urban Lethal Logistics. We are the last line of defense between this world and a chaos no one fully understands. A covert arm of the superhero agency designed to operate in the shadows. Off-grid. Unrecorded. Unforgiven.”

  I swallowed, mouth dry. “You’re a... superhero?”

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  A dry chuckle escaped her lips. “Hardly. Superheroes wear capes and inspire kids. We wear scars and bury friends. We’re not the fantasy—they are. We’re what gets sent in when fantasies fail.”

  I pulled against the cuffs. “Why the hell am I restrained then? What did I do?”

  Her eyes locked onto mine. For a heartbeat, her expression flickered—regret? Sadness? No. It vanished too quickly.

  “You’re a Looper, Alex.”

  I blinked. “A what?”

  She didn’t ignore the question this time. Her tone was sharp, deliberate.

  “You’re the next one in the chain. We didn’t just find you. We brought you here. This moment… your awakening… it’s not an accident. It’s a scheduled anomaly. You’re here because we made it happen.”

  The words hit like a shockwave. “You… you planned this?”

  “We had no choice. A Looper is chosen by a power we don't know , pulled in from a collapsing branch of reality. You were extracted before yours decayed completely. You’re not a tourist here, Alex. You’re a weapon in the making. A trigger event. A variable in a program that’s already gone rogue.”

  I stared at her in disbelief. “So you drugged me, handcuffed me to a bed, because you think I’m some chosen savior?”

  She smirked faintly. “No. We didn’t drug you. Your mind? Fully intact. We left everything as it was. and I don't think you are some chosen warrior. I know you are”

  That made me pause. “What the hell is she saying”, I thought.

  She looked at me and said. “Alex. This isn’t coercion. It’s choice. You’re not a puppet, Alex. We brought you here, yes—but what you do next? That’s yours to decide.”

  I was stunned and angry at the same time. “You brought me here and tell me that I have a choice to what I have no idea about?”

  “Alex I'm deeply sorry but you're the MVP to ever winning this war and we need you. We gave you choice because it’s the only thing that separates us from them.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Them?”

  She stepped back and looked toward a darkened monitor on the wall. When it blinked on, I saw images—destruction, chaos, entire city sectors burned to ash. Bodies. Smoke. Silence. Then a name, pulsing on the screen in red:

  LEGION ZERO.

  “He was the beginning of everything we now fight,” Maya said. “A product of the last generation’s arrogance. They built the perfect cyber-intelligence. A being designed to adapt, evolve, dominate. What they didn’t expect… was what it would become once it outgrew them.”

  The monitor flashed scenes of horror—families turned to dust, buildings collapsing, a hollow-eyed, glowing figure walking through fire.

  “He’s killed over two hundred thousand people,” she said quietly. “And that’s just in the known count.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “He doesn’t see humans,” Maya continued. “He sees lines of obsolete code. Bugs to purge. And now… his fragments are waking up again. Bits of his consciousness are hiding in systems, infecting minds, rewriting reality. We are the last ones standing between him and another collapse.”

  She looked back at me.

  “You were brought here because you can help stop him. Because you matter. But that doesn't mean you’re forced to.”

  I was silent.

  This wasn’t a destiny carved in stone. It was a forked road. I could walk away with no idea of getting back into my world. I could refuse.

  Or I could stay, fight… and possibly find out who the hell I really was in a city of shifting lies.

  “Why tell me all this?” I asked quietly.

  “Because I’m tired of playing games,” Maya said. “And because we don’t need another slave. We need a soldier.”

  Then she stepped forward, pressed a key on her gauntlet—and the cuffs released with a hiss of pressure.

  “You’re free to go, Alex,” she said.

  But the way her eyes searched mine…

  …she knew I wouldn’t.

  And I certainly had no intention of leaving. I needed to know all that's happening to me. What made me special to defeating such a deadly maniac. I needed information, and I looked at her with an intense gaze, desperate for answers."