Two weeks since the incident at the ridge dome, and Leon Caelum Rivera had begun to find his rhythm…
"Again!" Aros barked from across the training hall.
Leon's blade, a sleek carbon-tempered shortblade built by Cael, clashed against a drone's exoshell. Sparks erupted as the feedback pulse rippled through his gloves. He pivoted with instinct, ducked a counterstrike, then surged forward with a fluid upward slash. The drone clattered to the floor in two clean halves.
"Better," Aros said with a grunt. "But you're still hesitating before the finishing blow. No second thoughts next time."
Leon panted, wiping sweat from his brow. "I'm not a killer."
"You are now," Aros said simply. "Or you're dead."
Leon's breath caught not from exhaustion, but the truth of it.
Behind him, Echo watched from the shadows above the ring, arms crossed. She said nothing….Not yet.
Later, in the Field Chamber, Cael adjusted the sync core on Leon's backplate.
"Your Aether thread is stabilizing faster than I thought," he muttered. "Usually takes months to attune this well."
Leon raised an eyebrow. "And me?"
"You're a freak," Cael said with a grin. "In the best way. It's like your body's already familiar with the flow."
Leon watched as the sync display hovered beside them, pulses of blue-white light streaming in circuits from his spine through the simulated nervous system. "So what does that mean?"
"It means," Echo said, now entering the room, "you're ready for field deployment."
The holo-table buzzed with distorted static before stabilizing into a schematic of a shattered landscape, black rock, twisting metallic structures, and pulsing veins of red energy threading through the ground like infected roots.
"Delta-11 was a pre-Ascension research site," Echo said. "It was abandoned after initial experiments with breach mimicry went… badly."
"Meaning what?" Vex asked.
"No survivors," Echo said. "And now, someone…something…is reactivating the systems."
Aros leaned forward. "Signals?"
"Unusual frequency pulses. Not quite breach. Not quite human."
Leon frowned. "So… hybrid?"
Cael nodded grimly. "Maybe synthetic anomaly. Which would be bad." Echo looked around the table. "This is a recon and containment op. Valiant only. We drop at 0300." Leon swallowed. His first real mission..not training, not simulation.This was real.
0300 Hours – Blacksite Delta-11
The sky above the site churned with unnatural clouds, their undersides flickering like film caught in an old reel. The shuttle set down with a hiss, and Unit Valiant deployed in a fan pattern across the blackened terrain.
Leon stepped onto the ground and immediately felt it, like the hum of tension in his bones, the taste of static on his tongue.
"You feel it too?" Kestra asked quietly.
"Yeah," he replied.
"Good. Trust that."
They advanced through the remnants of an old facility, half-melted consoles, walls twisted into spirals, gravity distortions that made the air vibrate like a plucked string.
Then the wave hit. A burst of red light surged outward from a crater near the center of the facility. It rippled through the environment, and through them.
Leon gasped, dropping to a knee as pain lanced through his chest. His sync module flared with wild energy.
"What the hell…" Aros grunted, bracing himself.
Cael's voice screamed in their comms. "Something's hacking the Aether threads!"
The crater exploded upward, from its depths rose a thing not quite alive…half-machine, half-tendril, bound in twisted metal. It floated above the earth, its shape shifting between humanoid and insectoid with each flicker of its phase.
"Contact confirmed," Echo snapped. "Form defensive crescent!"
Leon moved like he'd trained, syncing like he'd practiced. Aether flowed through his limbs like fire and water at once. He slid under a tendril strike, activated a pulse shield from his left gauntlet, then retaliated with a burst of kinetic energy.
Aros roared forward, hammering the beast with raw momentum. It caught his punch, then broke off one of its own limbs to stab back.
Kestra's rifle sang with precision. "Targeting its flux nodules!"
The creature howled as one of the nodules burst, releasing a spray of corrosive mist. Ryn dove in, shielding Vex from exposure with a surge of green barrier light.
Leon pushed forward.
His blade hit its mark, carving across one of the beast's armored seams. Energy spat out. It screamed, then focused on him.
He didn't back down.
Instead, he called out the flow he'd felt since arriving, the cadence of the system.
With a focused breath, he extended his hand.
And for a moment, Aether answered.
A shockwave erupted from his palm, disrupting the creature's form.
"Now!" Echo shouted.
Vex loosed a perfectly timed shot. It tore through the core, destabilizing the anomaly's shape.
The creature screeched one final time, then imploded in a burst of red-black light.
The team gathered near the crater.
"It wasn't just an anomaly," Echo said, kneeling. "This was created. Built."
Cael scanned the wreckage. "This signal signature, it matches the tech from the dome breach two weeks ago."
Aros grunted. "So someone's engineering these things?"
Echo nodded grimly. "And they're getting better at it."
Leon looked at the remnants, heart still racing. "Someone knew we'd come."
Back at Fort Veridion, Leon stood before the viewport overlooking the artificial ocean near the fort.
Echo approached quietly. "You did well."
"I hesitated."
"You recovered," she said. "That's what matters."
He turned to her. "How do we stop something we don't understand?"
"We start by learning," she said. "And by standing together."
That Night,In the Shadows,Deep in a chamber far beneath the Division network, an encrypted message came through .
"Test successful," the message read.
"Valiant engaged. Sync signature confirmed."
A second signal blinked beneath it, an encrypted symbol resembling the glyphs found on the anomaly's body.
A third message followed. This one untraceable.
"Initiate next phase. Subject Caelum is adapting too quickly."
And in the background, a shadowed figure stood before a wall of screens, each one showing feeds of Leon, the Division, and breach patterns across Orion.
A single hand reached forward, tracing the screen.
"All according to design."