by Dee Watts
Ashbourne is a city built on movement. Freight trucks roll through its industrial corridors at all hours of the night. Corporations expand behind mirrored glass towers. Powerful people operate in silence while the rest of the city keeps its head down and moves on. Private investigator Myra Jones has spent years digging through the city’s lies for a living. Most cases involve cheating spouses, insurance fraud, or missing persons. Then Melissa Shields walks into her office looking for her missing brother. James Shields was a commercial courier who disappeared after discovering something suspicious during a transport route tied to Ashbourne Research and Defense, one of the city’s most powerful defense contractors. The deeper Myra digs into his disappearance, the more dangerous the case becomes. Surveillance follows her. Armed men begin appearing where they should not. Someone inside ARD is desperate to keep James silent. Everything changes after a violent robbery attempt erupts into a high-speed chase through Ashbourne’s industrial district. The collision that follows ruptures a classified biological container and exposes Myra to an experimental compound that should never have existed. She survives. But survival comes with a price. The substance bonds to her body and transforms the black leather jacket she wore that night into something alive. A living armor system forms around her during moments of danger, enhancing her strength, reflexes, and senses beyond human limits. As whispers spread across the city about a black-cloaked figure moving through the rooftops at night, Myra finds herself caught between corporate conspiracies, private security forces, investigative journalists, and a growing criminal underworld trying to profit from the chaos. Meanwhile, ARD scrambles to contain the fallout before the truth about Project Phoenix reaches the public. Ashbourne is changing. Something powerful was born on Route 9.And the city is about to learn its name. Dark Strike. Cover Art by Zal Art New chapters will be published three times per week. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Advanced chapters and new Dark Strike storylines can be seen on the Strike 7 Network Patreon page.
