The night air wrapped around the East Tower like silk drawn too tight.
Enzo leaned against the stone railing, watching synthetic stars flicker across the Echelon dome. Below him, lights moved in quiet symmetry—drones patrolling, cadets passing in formation, the hum of order layered over something far more fragile: tension.
A sharp chime from his lens.
Encrypted.
He blinked twice, accepting.
Kael's voice cut through: "We need eyes, ears, hands. You've been greenlit to start formation."
Enzo responded silently.
"AGILA?"
"AGILA."
---
Forming a rebel unit within the most secure academy on Earth was as suicidal as it was necessary. But Enzo had always worked best under pressure. He spent the next cycle watching. Testing. Remembering.
Not everyone was fit to join.
Some were brilliant but lacked conviction. Others hated the regime but wouldn't bleed for freedom. He wasn't building an army—he was building a blade. Precise. Silent. Ruthless only when necessary.
The name AGILA wasn't just a call sign.
It was a promise: to soar above tyranny, to strike from the skies when no one saw it coming.
Enzo began his recruitment in silence.
---
Candidate One: Vega Sarrin.
A quiet engineer from the south arch wing. Brilliant with relic tech, rumored to be top of her class in adaptive systems. Enzo started sitting near her in mechanics class, offering soft challenges about her designs.
She responded with fire.
But she listened.
And when he left behind a broken drone core with a fragment of Cain's energy signature embedded in it—just faint enough not to flag the system—she returned it within a day.
"Interesting signature," she'd said, handing it back. "Where'd you find this?"
Enzo only smiled. "Hypothetically speaking, if it weren't legal… would you still study it?"
She didn't blink. "Hypothetically speaking, I already did."
She didn't need more convincing. Vega was in.
---
At night, Enzo mapped the Academy from memory and relay. Kael sent schematics from older Echelon blueprints, layered with surveillance blind spots.
There were rooms below the academy—chambers from older generations, now sealed off or forgotten. AGILA would need one. A nest beneath the marble.
He found one three floors down from the East Dormitory Wing. Locked behind a wall of old hydraulic systems, cloaked under the illusion of electrical panels. It had once served as a relic testing chamber—a forgotten scar of a forgotten era.
It smelled of rust and purpose.
He claimed it.
---
Candidate Two: Lyra Vale.
She had been watching him ever since the Delta simulation. She hadn't confronted him outright, not yet, but her silence weighed heavier with each passing day.
When she intercepted him outside the library under the red haze of artificial twilight, she didn't dance around it.
"Whatever you're doing, I want in."
Enzo raised an eyebrow. "You're assuming a lot."
"I'm not assuming anything," she replied. "I saw Cain. I saw what you did in the simulation. And I know you're not one of them."
He studied her. "You're looking for something dangerous."
"I'm looking for something that matters."
He looked away, then back. "It's dangerous."
"Good."
Lyra didn't press further. She didn't name names or accuse him of being Zero. She didn't need to.
She became the second recruit.
---
At midnight, AGILA was born.
Two shadows met in the old chamber beneath East Wing. They said nothing about loyalty, nothing about allegiance. Words were cheap. Only action mattered now.
Enzo spoke to them with no ceremony. "We retrieve truth. We sabotage control. We bring balance. We are not heroes. We are fracture."
There were no oaths. No ranks. Only call signs.
Kael's voice buzzed once more in Enzo's comm. "Intel suggests operatives from the Palace are already stationed within Echelon. Surveillance has doubled."
Enzo closed the signal and looked at his new recruits.
"We start small. Relay disruptions. Artifact retrieval. Evidence extraction."
They nodded.
He made one thing clear:
They were not soldiers.
They were a storm.
---
Others would follow—Drey and Vela, eventually. But not yet. They needed time to trust, to suffer, to choose. AGILA was not for the reckless. It was for the broken who still bled purpose.
And far from the depths of the chamber, in another wing of the academy, Tavien Rhys ran target drills with uncanny precision.
He hadn't forgotten what he saw in the simulation either.
And when he joined the Palace-aligned enforcement division, he swore one thing:
He would bring down Zero.
---
Later that night, as Enzo returned to his quarters, a message pulsed on his lens.
From Kael.
> "The Palace has received intel. They know Zero is at Echelon. You're not invisible anymore."
Enzo didn't flinch.
He pulled the cover off Cain, letting the saber hum faintly in the dark.
"Then let them come."
Above the city, dawn cracked through the dome.
And beneath it, wings were already rising.