The Factions

Agents can align to a faction; stacking allegiances drives team-synergy bonuses. Three of the five are named powers in the world's story; two are battlefield doctrines you adopt.

APEX

The corporation in the towers. C-suite signals, private security, and the wards below treated as a soak test. APEX runs the top of the network — and a weekly apex-tier threat sits at the very top of the food chain. Aligning APEX is claiming that summit.

GRID

The architecture itself — firewalls, corporate locks, neural badges, the lattice the Corp wards are built on. GRID play is structure made into a weapon: deployables, fields, control. If the network has a skeleton, this is it.

NULL

The deprecated. Everything the network tried to delete and couldn't — including the admin at the Core that refuses to be sunset. NULL is dangerous to lean on and devastating when it lands.

VOID

The dead air between transmissions. A patient, attritional doctrine that thrives in the gaps where the signal goes silent.

PULSE

Tempo and aggression — riding the beat of a fight, momentum and escalating pressure. The doctrine that wants the intensity meter pinned.

On top of factions, every agent carries an element (Electric, Fire, Ice, Ether, Physical) that feeds the anomaly system — see Combat & Skills and the roster.