The Coil was never meant to be a fortress.
It was a repurposed cistern — half-forgotten, half-broken — wired together with stolen tech, buried blueprints, and too much hope.
But that night, it became a battleground.
The Order came with no warning.
No alarms.
No subtlety.
Just silence. And then— floodlight.
From every tunnel mouth, they poured in:
Elite Helix agents — clad in bone-white armor, faces masked with memory filters.
Cloaked initiates with eyes blank from years of loyalty conditioning.
Experimental units known only by code: Specter Protocol — combat ghosts pulled from neural scrap, walking echoes trained to kill.
Kabir was the first to see them.
"Contact!" he shouted, eyes wide.
The room flared red.
"They found us."
Sila grabbed the main relay cables and yanked.
The data spike began transferring everything to off-grid nodes — memory files, survivor lists, and most importantly:
The names of the forgotten children.
The ledger.
The truth.
The first blast blew out the western wall.
Stone cracked. Water from an old pipe sprayed across the server banks.
And then chaos opened its jaws.
Kabir led the defense — wielding a modified arc-spear cobbled together from shattered memory-drives and power regulators.
"We don't hold forever," he shouted. "Just long enough to send the spark."
"Spark is lit," Sila replied. "Buy me 60 seconds."
They dug in.
And it wasn't enough.
The Order moved like a machine — coordinated, brutal, precise.
One by one, Fragments fell.
Not all killed.
Some simply froze when their old training reactivated under pressure.
Some whispered the spiral's prayer before collapsing.
"Through obedience, clarity. Through clarity, power."
The conditioning ran deep.
Kabir made it to the center relay.
His shoulder burned — a graze from a flash-slice. Blood smeared the controls.
He didn't care.
He slammed the data core into the outbound slot.
"For Aarav," he whispered.
"For the ones they erased."
And hit send.
Outside the Coil, in a forgotten relay node built into the shell of a ruined chapel—
A screen blinked to life.
The data pulsed.
And somewhere far beyond the city, another Fragment cell opened their eyes.
Back in the Coil, Kabir turned to face the last wave.
Sila beside him. The few who still stood behind them.
They weren't soldiers.
They were stories the Order tried to erase.
And tonight, those stories chose to fight back.
Transmission complete.
Coil compromised.
But the spark?
The spark escaped.