Reflexions Thanos Kalamidas T h e O f f - V i g i l a n T e g r O u p The Obsidian ReapeR Reflexions Thanos Kalamidas Ovi ebooks are available in Ovi/Ovi eBookshelves pages and they are for free. If somebody tries to sell you an Ovi book please contact us immediately. For details, contact: ovimagazine@yahoo.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writer or the above publisher of this book An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C Reflexions Reflexions Thanos Kalamidas The Obsidian Reaper Thanos Kalamidas An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C Reflexions T he night had a texture , wet like circuitry bleeding static, sharp like ozone before a pow- er surge. The rain came down in rhythmic pulses, not natural, but timed by the municipal water management AI, which didn’t care if you drowned so long as you paid your rain tax. Ray Vance, now more myth than man, watched from the edge of a forgotten skywalk, twenty stories up in a zone that hadn’t seen maintenance since the Biocon Wars. Neon advertisements crawled across the decaying skyline, promising “Hope 3.1” and “Synthetic Redemption, Now With Emotion Emula- tors.” Lies, all of them. In this city, redemption was a service plan you couldn’t afford. Thanos Kalamidas His mask glinted under fractured light, shattered mirror fragments embedded in matte-black polyflex. It wasn’t meant to hide his face. It was meant to reflect theirs . The mask cut identities into splinters. When they looked into it, they saw the pieces of themselves they buried. He moved like a glitched line of code. Graceful. Si- lent. Angry. Tonight’s target was Harmon. Detective Lennox Harmon, badge number burned out of the system, pension bloated by falsified kills, now rotting his days away in a drifting bio-barge known as the Algalene . A floating garden of narcotic fauna and synthetic eco-luxury moored on the west- ern sloughs, outside the jurisdiction of any morally intact governing body. Ray, The Obsidian Reaper, slid down a rusted teth- er cable, his boots hitting the edge of the barge with a muted crunch. From his belt, he pulled out a nar- row rod, thumbed the end, and watched it snap into a humming obsidian spike. Dense, monomolecular, beautiful in its simplicity. Like grief, refined. Reflexions Inside, the air was warm and wet, thick with engi- neered humidity. Plants twitched unnaturally as he passed, gene-hacked flora with anti-surveillance in- stincts, their petals trained to follow heat signatures like lazy dogs. He stepped over coiled feeder vines and bypassed the biosensor doors with a stolen code-pulse har- vested from Harmon’s burner account two nights prior. Entry was fluid, seamless, like slipping into the memory of a place you tried to forget. The room was low-lit, dominated by a nutrient tub cradling Harmon’s corpulent body. Tubes laced into his skull fed him a neuroloop simulating a beach- front hallucination, sunset cocktails, synthetic jazz, skin tones that glowed under dream-suns. The bas- tard was laughing in his sleep. Ray stared at him. He reached for Harmon’s drip line, flicked it once to check dosage. Then he pulled a small syringe from his coat, truth spike , a cortical stimulant synthesized to bypass willpower and inject raw memory into con- scious thought. It was illegal in nineteen city-states. Ray had enough for an army. Thanos Kalamidas He plunged it into Harmon’s neck. The man jerked, eyes flying open, a scream caught behind a paralyzed jaw. “Do you remember the black box logs?” Ray’s voice was low, modulated by the mask’s subharmonic layer. “Do you remember what you deleted?” Harmon’s mouth frothed, eyes darting, limbs fail- ing to obey. “You watched them die. You let them.” A datafeed behind Ray pinged, security AI booting from a tripwire script embedded in the neural loop. Time was bleeding. Ray didn’t blink. He reached forward, grabbed Harmon’s jaw, and forced the man to stare into the mask, into his own fractured face. “This is who you are.” He drove the obsidian spike in, fast, efficient, through the throat and into the base of the brain- stem. Harmon convulsed once, then sagged like meat with nowhere to go. Reflexions Ray pulled the spike out slowly. The room was qui- et again, save for the low growl of the barge engine and a looping synth riff that played from Harmon’s forgotten dreamscape. He walked to the terminal. Plugged in. Found the backup. It wasn’t much—just time-stamped footage, heav- ily corrupted, but within it: flashes of light, a child’s voice, a woman screaming. Enough to confirm what Ray already knew: the deletion was ordered, execut- ed, and enjoyed by those with polished boots and clean hands. He copied it. Encrypted. Fragmented. Then he left a single obsidian shard on Harmon’s half-open eye- lid, the sharp edge pointed inward. Ray slipped into the night again, disappearing into the rainfall like a whisper someone tried to remem- ber but couldn’t quite place. Above the city, the sky blinked red. * * * * * * * * * * Thanos Kalamidas The city was a dark hive pulsing with neon and decay. Every surface shimmered with a wet chrome sheen, reflections breaking into fractals under flick- ering holo-ads. Somewhere deep inside this monolith of glass and rust lived Eliah Drumm, the architect of silence, the man who built walls of data so thick they choked justice itself. The Obsidian Reaper didn’t knock. He slipped past biometric sensors with a ghost virus riding stolen credentials, a pulse of code that erased his presence from the subgrid like a wraith deleting footprints in wet sand. Drumm’s penthouse was a fortress stacked with black glass and smart steel, wrapped in layers of se- curity designed to outthink any intruder and the city’s best security systems were nervous tonight. The elevator hummed as the Reaper triggered a reroute, sending the lift to the emergency basement level while he scaled the service shafts, fast, prac- ticed, predatory. The sound of servos echoed in tight spaces, mingling with distant city sirens that never stopped, never meant peace. At the vault-room door, a weave of laser tripwires sliced the air like a digital spiderweb. The Reaper’s Reflexions fingers danced across a compact terminal hacked from GenSentry’s darknet feed, code melted the safe- ty protocols in real-time. A slight flicker in the aug- mented reality overlay, and the lasers winked off. He slid inside. The vault smelled like cold iron and corrupt- ed memories. Walls lined with drives blinked soft- ly, each a capsule of stolen lives. The Reaper’s mask shimmered in the pale light, mirror shards catching the glow, throwing fractured shadows across the floor. There. VanceFamily.dat, the file that was never meant to see daylight. But he found it, tucked behind layers of encrypted ICE thicker than a city’s firewall. He paused. Every second ticked with danger. Security drones were programmed to converge here in less than sixty. He pulled out a monofilament blade, humming ob- sidian thinness, and began carving away the ICE de- fenses. Code bled in cascading streams on his HUD, lines of fire in the digital underworld. An alarm cut through the silence. Thanos Kalamidas Turrets unfolded from ceiling vents, their barrels glinting, aiming. The Reaper rolled, shards of reflected light dancing off his mask, slicing the air as he dodged explosive rounds. His movements were a glitch in the system, fluid, unexpected, deadly. He threw a pulse grenade. The room flooded with electromagnetic interference. The turrets spasmed and went dark. But the reprieve was short. Heavy footsteps pounded the hall. GenSentry’s black ops, clad in reactive armor, poured in—steel and intent. The Reaper’s fight was brutal, a blur of obsidian and raw rage. His blade met armor with sparks, slashing servos, tearing tendons beneath synthetic skin. A hit to the neck, a flash of crimson, his attacker dropped like broken code. Blood mixed with oil on the polished floor. The Reaper was bleeding too, thin lines slicing through his kevlar. But he was fuelled by more than pain, by loss, by fire forged in grief. Reflexions He reached the core console. His fingers typed a rapid staccato, sending the stolen files into the city’s underground mesh, a viral confession set to detonate in every system GenSentry tried to control. Captain Drumm emerged, gun raised, face twist- ed in corporate contempt. “You think this ends with you?” The Reaper’s voice was a rasp behind the mask. “Justice isn’t blind. It sees in shards.” A lightning-fast exchange, obsidian blade against plasma rounds. The Reaper dove, cutting the gun hand off in a shower of sparks. He was on Drumm, driving the obsidian spike deep into the captain’s chest, through reinforced armor, into heart and bone. Drumm gasped, clutching the shard, eyes wide with the horror of truth. The Reaper knelt beside him, placing the shattered mirror mask over the dying man’s face. “See yourself.” Drumm’s blood pooled, dark and glossy. Sirens closed in. Thanos Kalamidas The Reaper melted away, shadows swallowing him whole. * * * * * * * * * * The city buzzed with a new kind of static. Screens everywhere flickered with leaked evidence, the truth unspooled in pulses and bursts, shredding decades of lies. But the Reaper did not rest. In a forgotten alley beneath a flickering holo-ad, a courier picked up a tiny obsidian shard—a calling card, a promise. Somewhere, someone was watching. Because even shattered mirrors can reflect shad- ows no one expects. * * * * * * * * * * Reflexions Reflexions The Obsidian Reaper Thanos Kalamidas Ovi eBook Publishing 2025 Ovi magazine Design: Thanos Ovi ebooks are available in Ovi/Ovi eBookshelves pages and they are for free. If somebody tries to sell you an Ovi book please contact us immediately. For details, contact: ovimagazine@yahoo.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writer or the above publisher of this book An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C Thanos Kalamidas Thanos Kalamidas T h e O f f - V i g i l a n T e g r O u p The Obsidian ReapeR Reflexions Thanos Kalamidas , a multipublished writer, cartoonist and illustrator; born and grew up in a picturesque neighbourhood on the moun- tainside of Hymettus in Athens, Greece. Then his life took him to Berlin, Germany and to London, UK for studies. After a brief stay in Yorkshire he moved his life to Paris, France while working in Tokyo, Japan and in Cape Town, South Africa. In the last 25 years he became a permanent Scandinavian resident and recently, in his glorious sixth de- cade, he moved to a scenic village in the Växjö area.