Location: Somewhere inside a frozen Soviet waste server hub, under Novosibirsk
It was minus forty outside.But inside the base, it was colder — not in temperature, in purpose.
Rows of blinking towers hummed with data. War maps. Defense codes. Drone flight paths. Nuclear key patterns.The brain of the Federation's military — buried beneath ice, wrapped in silence.
They thought no one could reach it.
They forgot Shoonya didn't care what was possible.
Four Hours Earlier – Indian border side, Outpost Null
A steel table. One broken radio. One dead Soviet soldier lying on the floor. His neural jack still warm.
Shoonya didn't ask for permission. He ripped it out, plugged the wire into a pulse adapter, and connected it to his own temple.
The squad stared.
"You're gonna hack a live brain system?" one whispered.
Shoonya lit a smoke. "No. I'm gonna become it."
Present – Inside the Soviet grid
He wasn't just seeing screens. He was the screen.
He moved through firewalls like a ghost slipping through cracks. Every second, alarms flared — and he rewired them before they could speak.
The Federation had layered encryption.Shoonya had rage.
One after the other, he stabbed through:
Defense Grid East – Down.
Drone Airfield #44 – Hijacked.
Blackout Protocol Vault – Wiped.
Moscow Proxy Layer – Looped.
He sent back decoy footage to Russian generals: Indian units retreating, bases "abandoned", Shoonya's own kill status as "deceased."
He needed thirty more seconds.
Then came the countertrace — a Soviet neural AI. Voice like glass shards, speaking in perfect Hindi.
"Unauthorized user. Identity flagged. Locking bio-pattern."
Shoonya grinned. "Too late."
He unleashed Needlefall.
A worm virus of his own making. Built in 18 hours. Designed to do one thing:
Make the Soviet war grid go blind.
Missile systems shut down.
Drone feeds showed fake landscapes.
Supply lines rerouted into enemy zones.
Soldiers started firing on shadows, thinking they were enemies.
One general in Omsk shot himself — thought a wall panel was a drone camera.
Shoonya sat back, jack unplugged, bleeding from the nose.
His comm crackled. His old captain's voice:
"What did you do?"
He exhaled. "Just gave 'em a taste of their own surveillance."
He stood. "Tell command — if it still exists — that Needlefall is live."
24 hours later…
Soviet bases stopped moving.
India's backup servers rerouted control of 40% of Eurasian sky drones.
For the first time since betrayal, Akhand Bharat hit back — without firing a bullet.
And Shoonya?
He didn't smile.
He just carved one more line into his combat knife:
"Control is power. But lies are control."