You call yourself Nero now.

The Cyberhound. The Red Reboot. Like you hit a button one day and erased the man you used to be.

But it doesn’t work like that.

I know the story you’re trying to sell: screen goes black, the hum fades, a loading bar crawls across, and when it’s done, you’re brand new.

Clean. Untouched.

That’s a fairy tale for machines.

And you’re not a machine. You’re human. Humans don’t get clean slates. We carry every ugly thing we’ve done, whether we want to or not.

Trust me.

You can overwrite it, hide it under a shiny new interface… but the original files are still there.

Every mistake. Every betrayal. Every moment you wish you could delete.

Ghost data. Buried, but never gone.

And you’ve been dragging that ghost for a long time.

Before the reboot, before the mask, you were Lucien.

Lucien, who walked away from his family without a backward glance.

Lucien, who bent the knee to Ezekiel Graves and called it faith.

Lucien, who let another man’s voice overwrite his own until there was nothing left but obedience.

You didn’t lose your identity; you handed it over. Then tried to pretend the trade never happened.

You didn’t erase Lucien. You just shoved him into a locked folder in your head.

But that folder’s been open for a while now, hasn’t it? Redgrave’s been crawling through it, pulling out the pieces you hoped would rot in the dark.

And everyone sees it now: Lucien never escaped servitude.

That’s what the reboot was about, wasn’t it?

Not reinvention.

Escape.

You didn’t build Nero to be stronger. You built him to hide Lucien.

To bury every coward’s choice you made, every time you followed instead of led, every moment you proved you were more comfortable taking orders than taking risks.

And now Redgrave owns the old files. He’s bending you, twisting you, and you’re too afraid to admit you still answer to a master.

I’m not fighting a cyberhound. I’m not fighting a reboot.

I’m fighting the ghost you’ve been carrying.

I’m going to strip away the interface you’ve built until there’s nothing left but corrupted memory.

Every layer I peel back will pull Lucien closer to the surface.

Every truth you’ve hidden will take shape again, until there’s no separation between the man you were and the mask you wear.

You’ve lived this long pretending the two are different, that Nero is clean, that Lucien is gone.

But they’ve always been the same file, one written over the other, both rotting in the same place.

I’m going to leave you with a system that can’t even pretend to function, where the mask doesn’t fit, the name doesn’t work, and the only thing you can hear is the hum of everything you’ve lost.

When Lucien is all that’s left, there will be no reboot.

No clean slate. No new name to hide behind.

Only the truth.

Because I won’t just break Nero.

I’ll leave Lucien running.

And he’s the part of you you’ve never survived.