Chapter 07

Chapter 07

Knight Protocol — Broken Steel

The Council struck back at dawn.

Not with soldiers.

With warrants.

By sunrise, Kofi’s face was everywhere—on screens in markets, at border posts, on the backs of newspapers still damp with ink. The charge was treason. The evidence was fabricated. The reward was obscene.

Knight Protocol demanded restraint.

But restraint was expensive.

Kofi moved through the city dressed as a dock worker, shoulders hunched, cap low. He felt the shift immediately—people were quieter around him now. Braver ones still nodded. Others looked away.

Fear had entered the room.

The Council had chosen law as its weapon. It was smarter than bullets.

Kofi slipped into an abandoned steel factory overlooking the port. Rusted machines loomed like skeletons. This was where the Council’s private security coordinated logistics—off the books, off the map.

He needed proof that would survive courts, borders, and denials.

Inside, the factory hummed with generators. Armed men patrolled catwalks above.

Kofi moved upward.

A guard spotted him at the stairs.

“Hey—”

Kofi fired first. The man went down, weapon clattering.

Alarms screamed.

No more restraint.

Kofi sprinted across the catwalk as gunfire tore through steel. Sparks rained down. He slid under a swinging crane hook, rolled, and crashed through a glass office window.

Inside, terminals glowed.

He yanked drives, ripped cables, downloaded everything he could in seconds.

Footsteps closed in.

Kofi vaulted out the back window, landing hard, pain flaring through his ribs. He ran anyway.

Outside, armoured vehicles blocked the exits.

No time.

Kofi climbed.

Up the skeletal frame of the factory, bullets snapping past him. He reached the top as helicopters swept in low.

Ethan Hunt would have jumped.

Kofi didn’t.

He threw a smoke charge and vanished back down the opposite side, crashing through tarps and into the harbour water below.

Cold swallowed him.

He surfaced minutes later beneath the dock, lungs burning, city sirens screaming overhead.

Knight Protocol was broken.

—This time, by necessity.

And as Kofi dragged himself into the shadows, he knew the final phase was coming.

The Council would stop pretending.

And so would he.