Date: October 2170
Location: ONI Bio-Test Complex Theta-9, Lunar Sublevel**
The laboratory was buried under kilometers of regolith, shielded by titanium composite and silence. Officially, it didn't exist. Internally, it was nicknamed The Hollow—a place where ONI's most forbidden projects took shape in echoing steel rooms that never saw daylight.
Inside Chamber V, Project NIGHTVEIL had advanced farther—and darker—than protocol allowed.
The vial from Kira Voss's encounter had yielded something. A biomechanical tissue mass that resisted decomposition. Self-repairing. Semi-sentient. Genetic markers matched nothing in the database—not Ceph, not human. The neural strands were thinking without a brain.
So ONI gave it one.
They grafted the biomass into Subject-27, a convicted insurgent from a failed colony uprising. He'd been scrubbed from all records, lobotomized, and plugged into a cradle of neural stimulators.
The fusion was not surgical—it was violent.
What came out wasn't Subject-27 anymore.
They called it Prototype Helix.
It didn't speak. It howled—a synthetic screech that shattered security glass and fried neural uplinks. It devoured simulation drones. Tore through alloy plating. Reflexes measured beyond Spartan-level response curves.
And worse—every hour, it evolved.
ONI researchers tried failsafes. Neural inhibitors. Biochemical cages.
None held.
During Containment Breach #5, Helix tore a test handler in half and began reconfiguring its own limbs into bladed masses. Cameras showed the creature forming new muscle types mid-motion—adaptation on the fly.
It took three plasma charges and a triple-radiation lock to kill it.
The remains continued twitching for 72 hours.
That was when Rear Director Sarai Tanaka signed the termination order for Phase 1.
No more hosts. No more fusions.
"We do not contain this tech," she wrote.
"We survive it."
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Weeks Later
ONI refocused Project NIGHTVEIL on countermeasures.
Weapon prototypes were developed based on their findings:
- Arclight Cannons calibrated to disrupt SynSuit phase shifts.
- Pulsewave Refractors tuned to destabilize the adaptive neuroweave.
- Cryo-Spike Rounds, freezing metabolic function faster than it could evolve.
ONI knew they couldn't predict where the next SynSuit would strike—or who might be building more.
—highlighting both a partial success and the human cost.
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Date: January 2171
Location: Enceladus Blacksite Gamma-3
ONI Recon-Team Glaive
The dropship coasted in low orbit, Enceladus' cracked, frozen surface sprawling below like shattered glass under moonlight. Inside, ONI Glaive Team performed final checks—each operative encased in matte-black counter-rigs laced with the newest NIGHTVEIL tech.
Lt. Reva Thorne, team lead, studied the mission brief. No public signal. No trace. A suspected SynSuit cache had been detected beneath a geothermal fissure network on Enceladus—likely a hidden radical vault seeded with Ceph-based weapon tech.
There would be no reinforcements.
Their job was containment.
And erasure.
They landed silently near the fissure complex. Drones swept the air with passive scans—no heat signatures. Nothing alive. The wind sounded wrong. Like it was watching.
Down the carved tunnel, contact happened fast.
The first SynSuit appeared from the wall.
Literally—from it.
Phase-shifted.
It lunged—faster than predicted.
Operative Mason died in seconds, neck crushed between two evolving blade-arms. Arclight counterfire lit the tunnel, strobing the walls in bursts of ionized white. The creature staggered as the directed energy collapsed its phase form.
It didn't scream.
It simply reformed.
Reva barked orders. They used Pulsewave Refractors, blasting it into destabilized fragments, then froze the remains with Cryo-Spike charges until it stopped twitching.
Then the second one arrived.
Operative Halverson was torn in half before her failsafe could detonate.
The remaining SynSuits didn't fight like soldiers—they fought like predators. One crawled on walls and ceilings, dodging shots by reshaping itself mid-run.
ONI's tech worked—but barely.
By the time the dust settled, only four of the eight Glaive operatives remained.
They destroyed the vault, left no trace, and returned with samples and combat telemetry.
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Back at ONI High Command
Rear Director Tanaka reviewed the feed personally. Grainy, blood-soaked, infrared static flickering over every kill.
"Effective... but not sustainable," she murmured.
ONI issued a closed directive:
NIGHTVEIL teams are now black ops only. Authorized for targeted elimination, recovery, and disavowal. Casualties acceptable. Awareness risk, unacceptable.
From now on, they wouldn't just wait for SynSuit incursions.
They would hunt them first.
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Date: March 2171
Location: Hargreave-Rasch Black Archive, Location Redacted**
The holoscreens displayed everything.
ONI's blacksite ops. The combat footage from Enceladus. The mutated SynSuit's erratic movements. Energy signatures. Pulse refractor weaponry. Operative biometrics—final vitals before death.
Jacob Hargreave sat in near silence, his breathing shallow, mind racing.
Across from him, Dr. Karl Rasch sifted through the decrypted telemetry.
"They learned faster than expected," Rasch muttered. "But they still don't understand it."
Hargreave turned away from the screen, eyes narrowed.
"Because they treat it as a threat to be destroyed. Not a language to be translated."
They had seen enough.
The SynSuit program—their earliest Ceph-influenced prototypes—had gone too far. Field-testing through colonial radicals had produced unpredictable, uncontrollable results. The suits had evolved beyond orders, beyond reason. Killing indiscriminately. Driven by neural instability and Ceph code degradation.
"We tried to force alien code into human chaos," Hargreave admitted quietly. "What we need now is synthesis. Not domination."
That's when they made the decision.
The SynSuit program would be shuttered. All remaining rogue prototypes would be purged or recovered.
And something new would be born from their ashes:
NANOSUIT 1.0
No raw Ceph code.
No uncontrolled mutations.
A tailored interface—human-focused, human-directed.
Designed with what they had learned from Grayson's neural rigs, Ceph adaptive matrices, and ONI's counter-data. Hardened against corruption, optimized for a single user.
An armor system that wouldn't mutate the soldier…
…but perfect them.
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The lab below the archive hummed to life.
Cryotanks opened. Robotics arms unfolded. Engineers, grown in secrecy, activated subsystems.
The first Nanosuit 1.0 Prototype was built in segments, like a puzzle of evolving machine muscle. Every inch a balance between biology and synthetic control. It wasn't a cage.
It was a promise.
"With this," Hargreave whispered, "we honor Grayson's dream. But we will not repeat his mistakes."
He looked to Rasch.
"No more gods. Just better men."
And the future—still secret, still dangerous—took another step forward in silence.