The stadium lights were blinding, a hundred thousand lumens designed to eliminate shadow and expose every flaw. Gael "Zeke" Matthews stood at the baseline, the spotlight of a thousand cameras fixed on his back, a hollow target framed by the roar of thirty thousand spectators.​This wasn't college anymore. This was the pinnacle: the quarter-finals of the Paris Open, a dream tournament for any professional athlete. For Zeke, it was simply proof that he had failed to escape.​At twenty-five, he was the youngest player in the modern era to achieve such consistent dominance, a mechanical wonder whose effortless talent translated into millions of dollars in prize money—money he couldn't touch, money managed by the various entities ensuring his "career freedom." His mother watched from home, her pride a heavy, silent chain around his neck.​The match was over. He had won three straight sets against a former world number one. The final point was, as always, Zeke's signature: a flat, blinding ace hit with the dispassionate inevitability of a bullet.​He didn't pump his fist. He didn't even breathe heavily. He walked to the net, shook his opponent's hand, and felt nothing but the dull, grinding fatigue of a prison sentence extended.​He looked up at the corporate boxes—the modern-day version of the suits in the college bleachers. They were smiling. They were counting. They were satisfied.​Brilliant, the commentators would call him. A man born to this court.​But deep within the locker room, away from the applause, Zeke stood before the sink, his hands gripping the porcelain edge. He saw not a champion, but a highly valuable, well-maintained tool. All his victories were just payments on a debt he never asked for. All his strength was a gilded cage.​He reached into his duffel bag and pulled out the single item he kept from his college days: a tennis racket with a neatly repaired, but still visible, crack running through the carbon fiber handle. The memory of the girl who had picked it up—the clumsy, focused, sweet freshman who saw his pain and somehow translated it into a reason to fight—was the only soft spot left in his hardened heart.​He had pushed her away years ago, shattering her naive admiration with the brutal truth of his contempt for the wealthy class she represented, and then his own clumsy, devastating declaration that had been so easily dismissed.​He put the racket back. The decision had been made weeks ago. His graduation was paid for, his mother's position secured. His obligation was, technically, over.​He pulled his phone from his pocket. The screen was cracked, a remnant of a moment he had wanted to break himself. He opened the notes app where, tucked beneath pages of physics equations for the Civil Engineering doctorate he was quietly pursuing, was the draft of his resignation.​He was going to do it. He was going to walk away from the fame, the money, the duty, the game that had stolen his life. He was finally going to go astray.​He tapped the button to send the email to his agency, his hand shaking for the first time all day. The notification of transmission popped up instantly.​But right below it, an incoming message flashed across the screen, a notification from a secure, encrypted account he hadn't seen active in three years, and one that contained a name that hit him like a physical blow:​From: AKIM​Subject: Don't you dare quit.

They call me the sunbeam, the group’s bubbly, chaotic muse. And honestly, it’s the easiest composition I’ve ever created. My life in the Fine Arts studio is all light and color—a sharp, deliberate contrast to the muted, grey world that constantly bleeds into my periphery. It’s funny; I spend my days learning to layer paint, yet the heaviest layer is the forced normality I wear like a thick, cheerful varnish.​The truth is, my eyes are permanently open to the final act of everyone’s story. In the bustling cafeteria, while my friends discuss critiques and deadlines, I’m watching the quiet, translucent woman sitting beside the exit sign, waiting for the young delivery driver to finish his meal. She’ll follow him home tonight. And the future? It arrives in fragments, sharp as broken glass, in my dreams. Since I nearly drowned at nine, shortly after my mother passed—a memory I keep locked away like toxic paint—this duality has been my prison. It’s why I couldn't move in with my father when he finally acknowledged my existence; how can you share a home with someone when you’ve already dreamt of his funeral? It is safer to live alone, meeting him once a month, keeping the polite, strained distance that defines our relationship.​I’m the ultimate audience member, never the star. I watch the tragedy, I foresee the climax, and then I return to the present to watch it unfold, helpless. This is the routine that dictates my twenty-one years.​But last night, the canvas shifted. Last night, the protagonist in the prophetic dream wasn't a classmate, or a stranger, or my distant father. It was me. I saw myself, completely and vividly, standing beside a man whose face was still blurred by the dream's dissolving edges. Yet the feeling was palpable: a sense of belonging, a raw, terrifying intimacy I’ve never known. It sent a chill deeper than any ghost’s touch, because the moment I become the subject of the vision, the moment I step from the shadows of observation into the bright, fatal focus of the future, the stakes are unbearable.​Every dream before this has brought closure for someone else. Does this dream signify my own? Or, in a cruel twist of fate, is this the first time the future isn’t a warning, but a doorway? I only know that the sight of my own life, held captive in the frame of prophecy, is the most beautiful, and most terrifying, piece of art I have ever witnessed.

When a hacker meets a hacker, what would happen?Herra Wren Philips was a leader of the team of Ethical Hackers, paid by owners of business owners to test the quality of their system firewall. Her meticulous operation was known to industry and corporates line up to acquire their service but in secrecy. Until, Sawyer Ahn. With one operation gone south, it becomes a reason for their unexpected interaction that not only violates the rule of Herra's operation but sparks the curiosity of Sawyer.One interaction becomes two more, then much more frequently.Sawyer not only tried to sabotage their operation but also tried to crack Herra's team codes.But with this chaotic dynamic was it really coincidence or was it planned by Sawyer? or Herra?The repeated mistake was not on Herra's vocabulary, so why does the trouble of keeping Sawyer get in her way?