Grid Runner

Before the Dominion, before the corporations owned the stars, there was a man who could see it coming.

He was an engineer. The designer of quantum power grids woven through space-time. His work kept planets running and ensured cities never went dark.

Laying the foundations for NeuroNet, which one day would span civilizations, should have been enough. But for them, it never was...

More power. More bandwidth. More conductivity.

The corporations pushed too hard. What should have been a long-celebrated breakthrough became a disaster...

The grid surged. A cascade of raw energy overloaded the system, igniting entire districts, melting through infrastructure, and plunging entire sectors into chaos. The megacities flickered — streets bathed in darkness illuminated only by the aurora of burning steel.

Thousands were caught in the aftermath, swallowed by fire under collapsing structures. Those lucky enough to crawl from under the ball of flames and debris had their bodies changed forever.

Grid Runner was one of them.

His body bore the scars of the catastrophe, and his mind had changed in ways he could not explain. The grid was no longer just a system of wires, data streams, and power relays. It was a shifting equation, a lattice of energy waiting to be solved. His goggles now exposed the invisible, peeling back the city's layers, revealing the energy flows hidden beneath.

Yet the thrill of revelation was drowned by the weight of guilt. He would not return to rebuild what they had broken. Standing by while the corporations expanded recklessly was also no longer an option. The bodies buried under steel and fire whispered the truth. Too many had suffered.

The corporations never knew when to stop.

So he will.

Silent. Precise. Relentless. He strikes without warning or hesitation. Sabotaging systems and disrupting the networks.

Like an electron slipping between states, he moves unseen, untouchable.

He might not win this war. But he won't let them win either...