A precursor idea comic about Serathin being taken over by an AI that spawned Void Protocol, my comic series. This is still a nice little comic and I wrote a little blurb for it below that I didn't feel like putting into a separate file.

Into the Void

The city slept soundly through the night, all except for one creature that streaked through the air. The draconic sabre-wolf flew with purpose over the city towards one skyscraper in particular, the bold letters of ‘Enduring Technologies’ glowed with a bright blue light as he banked left and used the illumination to hide his approach. Once he was close enough he let out his wings to break and landed with little more than a soft, muffled thud, then adjusted his black mask as he made a quick look for guards and cameras.

Serathin started this job with high expectations; right from the beginning everything had been provided to him by the client, as well as the entire sum of his substantial fee up front. Access cards, layout, internal security… it was a dream for a thief to be armed with such intelligence. As he walked to the roof access door he pulled the thin strip of plastic from one of the hidden pockets on his tight, black leather pants. He approached the door from the side to avoid the camera, and once he was within reach he slid the card through the reader. For a second his breath caught in his throat, for a split-second he thought that perhaps it was too good to be true, but that thinking was quickly squashed when the little green light on the card reader blinked green and let out a cheerful beep.

Once he breached the corporate facility Serathin silently made his way to the elevators that were on the floor below. The elevators would be locked down for the night; luckily it wasn’t the actual box he needed but rather the elevator shaft. When he reached the shiny brass door he did a quick scan of his surroundings and then pulled out an electric screwdriver to unscrew one of the panels. If he had just pried open the door he would have set off several alarms, instead he clipped the wires of his wrist computer to the two main leads and let the algorithms do the rest. After a very short while the doors opened and revealed the empty shaft and the sabre-wolf quickly swung himself inside after he had replaced the panel.

“Alright, that was the easy part.” Serathin muttered to himself as he looked down the very dark and seemingly endless shaft. He climbed over to one of the nearby ladder accesses and climbed down several floors until his next target, a large ventilation cover that almost seamlessly blended into the metal of the wall. As he ledge-crawled his way over he pulled out several small strips of a dull grey metal, keeping one of his gloved hands on the wall as he prepared the strips with the other.

While the grate appeared to be simply able to be pried out and opened, but thanks to the information given to him by the employer as well as his own instincts he knew that wasn’t the case. Once he got to the smooth metal he brought up his wrist computer and scanned the grate, finding the areas with increased electrical activity that denoted an alarm contact point. Once he found them he took out a breaching tool and opened the metal just enough for him to slide the strip in. The metal was not only there to continue the magnetic bond but also had been tuned to a particular frequency. When he did that several more times he was finally able to pop the grate open and sneak inside.

The vent was cramped and dark, but once Serathin’s night vision kicked in he was able to see well enough to slowly slide himself forward. As he reached the first junction he flicked his wrist computer on dark mode and looked at the vent map that he had been given. It marked out the areas that he had to avoid since they had security countermeasures, but as he reached one area in particular he realized that there was one intrusion system that he couldn’t bypass. He wouldn’t have seen it had it not been for the contacts in his eyes, a pricy piece of gear that allowed him to see a lot more things like the energy wavelengths of motion sensors or, in this particular case, alarm lasers.

Serathin took a deep breath and braced his hands and feet onto the metal walls, his gloves giving him the necessary traction in order to hoist his body up and over the lasers. The information he had been given had proved to be especially helpful in this regard, the grid was rather tame compared to some of the areas he had bypassed. Once he had finished his mid-air vent crawl he continued his journey downward to the floor he needed and the great to appear out of. Once he had reached his breach point he checked the watch on his computer and realized with a note of pride that he had arrived at the point at exactly the right time.

The hallway below had a singular guard in it, a lioness that walked underneath the grate and continued on her patrol. Even though she was clearly female she had the mane of a male lion and it was accented in a way, which only served to enhance her beauty. As the sabre-wolf jimmied open the vent as silently as possible he wished he could ask her out, unfortunately he knew that wasn’t going to happen considering he was engaged in larceny-based activities. Normally he wouldn’t have dropped before he made absolutely sure that no one else was coming, but he even had the guard schedules, which meant that he had to merely walk over to his prize. His very big, shiny prize….