The last of the sun slipped behind the Horizon of the Mayapuri's floating sector, and with it, the world turned cold.
Shivam stood at the canyon's edge, his team behind him, shadows at his shoulders. The wind whistled between broken stones and rusted metal spires remnants of some long-forgotten Dominion outpost now buried by time. Their breath fogged the air. No one spoke.
Below, the gash in the earth yawned wide Tower 617's trench, a scar carved through the mountain and swallowed by reinforced Dominion steel. Their path ran straight through its throat.
"We move in two," Shivam's voice had said earlier, crisp through the comms. "No delays. No signals. If you're seen, you vanish. This mission never happened."
Now it was real. He tightened the strap on his forearm brace. "We ready?"
Aman grinned, always the first to break tension. "If by ready you mean, 'completely outnumbered and walking into the lion's throat,' then yeah. Totally ready."
Dikshant cracked his knuckles, eyes scanning the cliffs. "They won't see us. Not this time."
Aanchal stood nearest the edge; eyes half closed. "Movement pattern: sweep every thirty seconds. Drone cluster blinks on five second intervals. We move on the third sweep."
Naina flicked a glance toward her, nodding. "I'll scout aura signatures ahead. Keep your steps light."
Shivam didn't nod. He just moved. Quietly. Downward.
They descended like ghosts rappelling over the fractured lip of the canyon, boots sliding along old Dominion alloy, fingers digging into vines and cracks like lifelines. The steel was slick with condensation. Below, the walls of Tower 617 loomed into view, sharp edged and dead silent, save for the low thrum of pulsing energy beneath the metal skin.
Shivam reached the first ledge and crouched, eyes up. A drone passed overhead, just as Aanchal had predicted. Its beam grazed the cliff above them, blind to the life tucked inches beneath it.
They moved in bursts. Shivam guided them in silence, stepping forward, then freezing. A flicker of her sight. Then a signal two fingers raised, one lowered. Go.
Naina led the second leg, her eyes shimmering faintly, catching the invisible veins of power running beneath the surface trip mines, old scanners, hidden pulse nodes. She danced between them without speaking, marking the safe spots with a scratch in the dirt or a tap on her heel.
Dikshant dropped a clone down a shallow crevice to bait a sonar ping. The false echo bounced back, redirected to a rocky bluff two klicks east. The drone redirected. They moved again.
By the time they reached the final vertical drop, the trench was a fading ribbon behind them, swallowed by dusk.
Below, a rusted Dominion conduit jutted from the cliff wall, its hatch sealed by layers of age and forgotten use. It led straight into the base of Tower 617.
Aman wiped a streak of grime off his cheek, looking at it with mock concern. "Feels like we're crawling into a corpse."
Shivam stared at the hatch. "Not a corpse," he said quietly. "A beating heart. And we're about to stop it."
He reached for the hatch's edge and pulled.
The hatch gave with a low metallic groan, dust pluming from the cracked hinges as Shivam wrenched it open. A wave of stale air poured out, laced with old metal, rust, and the faint buzz of dormant energy. For a long second, no one moved.
Then Aanchal ducked inside first.
The tunnel was narrow, barely wide enough for one person to crouch and move. Dominion tech ran through its wall old conduit lines, cracked fiber optics, glyph coded maintenance channels etched faintly into the metal. The passage descended at a slight angle, lined with grease black ladders and flickering sensor strips still humming with low power. A Dominion artery once clean, now forgotten.
They moved in single file. Shivam took the rear this time, watching their six.
Every sound felt louder down here the scrape of boots, a stifled cough from Dikshant, the occasional pulse of a Dominion energy hum that seemed to resonate through the walls like distant thunder.
Naina's voice came low, nearly breathless. "Bio scanners dead. Motion sensors degraded. This place hasn't seen activity in years but some of it's still live."
"I've seen these glyph lines before," she continued, fingertips brushing over faded symbols along the wall. "They're from a multi core Dominion lock. Relay tower version."
"Can you crack it?" Aman asked, crouched just ahead.
Naina smirked faintly. "Can I breathe?"
They passed into a wider shaft that led to a maintenance cross section four tunnel branches, all rusted shut but one. A faint blue pulse glowed from the far end.
"That's the core corridor," Aanchal whispered. "Two guards. Not patrol. Stationed."
"Elite?" Dikshant asked.
"Standing too straight to be bored," she answered. "Too still to be low rank."
A beat passed. Then Shivam spoke. "We don't take them out yet. We ghost them. Naina?"
She moved forward again, crouching low. Her Aether Sight shimmered behind her pupils as she scanned the radius. A pause then a sharp tap of her palm against the floor. "Found a glyph breach node. I can override it. Give me two minutes."
Aman knelt beside her, activating the uplink drive from his chest rig. A small triangular device blinked once, then twice.
Back at the bunker, Mansi's voice cut in softly through their earpieces. "Phase Two confirmed. Once you breach the core chamber, slot the drive into the relay port. That's our data path."
"Dominion core files, command chains, encryption seeds," Suchitra added. "You get this in, we see what they see."
Shivam exhaled through his nose, crouched against the steel. "Understood."
Naina's fingers traced across the node panel, bypassing crumbling Dominion protocol code. Sparks hissed. Lights blinked.
The final door whirred, then split open.
Ahead, through the threshold, was the relay chamber.
A massive, cathedral like space vertical columns of Dominion Noctirum pulse towers rose like spines from the floor, wrapped in coiled cables and pale energy veins. The center platform hovered a few feet off the floor the Dominion's primary data core, spherical and humming, rotating in slow, precise arcs.
A faint hiss echoed and from the far shadowed alcove, a Dominion guard stepped forward, unaware… but not for long.
Shivam held up his fist.
"We're in," he said.
Then his eyes locked on the path ahead.
"And we don't stop now."
The relay chamber was colder than the rest of the tower. Not in temperature in weight. The hum of Dominion Energy was no longer subtle. It beat like a low drum inside Shivam's chest. Every cable, every tower spike, every rotating metal ring at the room's center pulsed with deep blue light.
It wasn't just a data vault. It was a heart. Alive. Watching.
Shivam stepped lightly onto the circular floor, boots making almost no sound on the grated surface. His eyes flicked from the spinning core in the center to the catwalks that ran along the walls. One of them creaked slightly.
A Dominion trooper emerged tall, armored in reinforced carbon gray exo plating. He looked directly at them.
For a heartbeat, no one moved.
Then he shouted something in encrypted Dominion speech and raised his weapon.
Dikshant moved first. "Down!"
A flash rang out as the trooper fired. Energy rounds exploded against the far wall, sending shards of metal pinging into the floor.
Aanchal vanished in a blink.
Her Swiftstep activated mid motion, propelling her across the space in a whip quick burst. She reappeared behind the trooper just as he pivoted too late. Her blade cut across his back with precision, sparks flaring as it scraped exo armor. He buckled, dropped to a knee, and before he could reach for his backup clip, she knocked him out cold with the hilt.
Another door burst open across the chamber. Two more guards. These weren't rookies. Their armor bore black shoulder crests special ops.
"Multiple inbound," Naina said calmly, already drawing her bow.
An arrow formed instantly in her hand not wood, not steel, but raw energy shaped by thought and focus. She loosed it with surgical grace. The shot arced upward, bounced off a metal rail, and struck one of the guards in the shoulder joint. His arm sparked and fell limp.
The second returned fire.
Aman stepped forward.
His shield bloomed around him, a glowing barrier dome that pulsed with each hit. He dropped to one knee, using the shield as cover while Dikshant circled wide.
"Clone out," Dikshant muttered. A ripple in the air beside him gave way to an exact double the copy darted right while he went left, both moving fast.
The guard hesitated, tracking the wrong one.
Dikshant hurled a knife straight at his feet it landed, glowing. The moment the Dominion trooper turned, the knife exploded in a controlled burst, sending the man flying into a column.
"That's what I call a real handshake," Dikshant smirked.
Another alert screamed from the upper platform. Two Dominion drones dropped from above, legs whirring, guns charging.
Shivam's eyes flicked upward. "Mine."
He took two quick steps forward then launched.
The ground cracked slightly beneath his boots as he jumped, carried by sheer force. He met the first drone mid air and drove his fist straight into its core. The metal folded inward with a shriek, sparks and fire bursting outward as the drone spiraled into the wall and detonated.
He landed hard, then rolled, catching the second drone's legs before it could deploy. With a grunt, he lifted and hurled it across the chamber. It slammed into the base of the core tower with a blast that shook the floor.
For a moment, only the relay hummed. Aanchal reappeared, breathing hard. "That all of them?"
Naina stood from behind a column. "No more movement. For now."
Aman dropped his shield and looked to the still spinning relay console at the chamber's center. "Mansi, are you seeing this?"
The comm crackled. "Crystal. Proceed to uplink."
Aman stepped to the central console and pulled the triangular data key from his belt. The lights above flickered as he slotted it in. Dominion code flashed briefly across the screen then dimmed.
Suchitra's voice joined Mansi's. "Uplink confirmed. Code seed is embedded. We're into their system. Repeat: we are in." Shivam stood beside the wreckage of the drone he'd crushed, chest heaving. "They know something's happened."
"They don't know what yet," Naina corrected. "Not unless we give them a body to track." Dikshant walked over, his clone dispersing behind him in a shimmer of fading light. "Then let's not stay long." From the center console, a sharp series of tones began to rise a countdown on the feedback loop.
"Ten seconds," Aman said. "Blackout incoming."
Shivam looked at each of them, their faces slick with sweat and shadow, eyes still sharp, steady. He nodded once.
"Get ready to vanish." The final beep rang out like a chime. And then the lights died. The room pulsed once then fell completely still.
Aman stepped back from the central console; eyes locked on the relay tower's core as it began to flicker. The lights dimmed across the entire chamber, one by one, until even the Dominion sigils etched into the walls faded into darkness. The only remaining glow came from the faint hum of the Noctirum conduits, now thrumming out of sync, flickering like a dying heartbeat.
Shivam stood near the collapsed drone, body still, gaze sharp. He could feel it in the air the power imbalance, the sudden vacuum of surveillance. It was as though a great mechanical eye had just blinked… and refused to reopen.
"All towers linked to 617 are losing signal," came Mansi's voice through the comm, hushed with awe. "That's half of Vedhyra. Drone net is falling. Visual relays are cutting out."
"Core seed is active," Suchitra added. "It's crawling through the system. They'll think it's a malfunction but it's not. We're in." Above them, the relay dome flashed once, then went silent. No alarms. No explosion. Just an eerie stillness. Aanchal shifted on her feet, watching the door. "We're clear to move?" "For now," Naina said, glancing toward the outer corridor. "No new aura pings. No guards en route."
"Then we go," Shivam said. "Backtrack through the vent shaft. Quiet, same path."
They moved fast, retracing their route through the labyrinthine maintenance tunnels. Boots struck steel and crumbled concrete, heartbeat quick and silent. No one spoke there was nothing to say. The mission had worked, but they weren't out yet. Shivam could feel it that electric tension crawling up his spine. Victory, but not safety.
They emerged onto the ridge minutes later, the wind colder now. From their vantage point, the city below spread wide beneath the night sky Vedhyra, crown jewel of the Dominion, sprawled in broken geometry and cold steel spires. And it was dimming.
One sector at a time, the lights were going out. Streetlamps blinked to black. Patrol beacons failed. Sky bound drones fell in slow arcs, crashing without flame or fanfare. It looked, for a moment, like the stars themselves were dropping from the sky.
On a nearby ridge, rebel forces hidden under Vidhart's command were already on the move. Smoke signals rose in spirals. Transport skiffs skimmed silently across the river. Foot soldiers advanced through the ruins in formation quiet, trained, ready. Shivam didn't smile. But he let the silence linger.
In his earpiece, Vidhart's voice came through not booming, not triumphant. Just calm. Inevitable. "We begin."
Shivam looked to his team. They stood wind bitten and breathing hard, shadows cut from stone, each of them marked by this first strike. Aanchal's blade still glinted faintly with Dominion blood. Naina's eyes were unreadable, her bow still in hand. Aman adjusted his shield rig, letting the last pulses drain. Dikshant checked his knife count with a half smile, ready to reengage if necessary. This wasn't glory. It wasn't cinematic. It was war. And it had just begun.
The ridge behind Tower 617 gave them a clear view of the chaos unfolding below. Vedhyra's lower districts once glowing with cold, sterile Dominion order were now slipping into shadow. Entire blocks blinked out like dying stars. And with the blackout spreading, movement surged like wildfire across the map.
Inside the rebel war room at Mayapuri Bunker, Robin Rayudu's voice echoed through the comms, crisp and decisive. "The blackout gives us exactly forty two minutes before the Dominion switches to hardline defense mode." "We use every second," Rathod added, already stepping aboard a hover carrier rumbling with low thrusters.
Within minutes, her battalion of nearly ten thousand fighters began mobilizing from the secondary hangar bay. Robin moved with a smaller fleet beside her both heading for Mayapuri's floating city, their objective clear: disable the Dominion's air fleet before it could respond. The skies would be neutralized, or the entire rebellion would fall from them.
Meanwhile, deep along the war scarred trench near GT Karnal Road, Shivam and his team regrouped with Commander Vidhart.
The warrior met them with his usual silent authority, standing at the edge of a ruined steel overpass. Behind him, rows upon rows of rebel soldiers emerged from camouflaged bunkers their faces smeared with dirt, armor salvaged and patched, weapons humming with makeshift charge.
Ten thousand more. All of them waiting. And all of them ready.
"The teleportation gate lies near the old dumping ground," Vidhart said, stepping beside Shivam. "It's unstable buried under Dominion scrap and wreckage but it's still active. And it's our fastest way into Vedhyra."
Shivam nodded slowly, remembering the time when he and his friends were in this very place trying to enter in the dominion capital with the same gate, eyes drifting to the distance, where the gate's glow faintly shimmered under thick piles of metal and stone. "How many guards?"
"Few," Vidhart said. "But if the Dominion realizes what we're after, they'll bring everything they have." Aman cracked his knuckles. "Then we move fast and hit hard. Classic."
Naina's expression stayed calm, focused. "We secure the gate. No backup until it's under our control."
Dikshant threw a glance at Shivam. "You think this is it? First Real step into the capital?" Shivam didn't answer immediately. Because even as the rebellion began to roar to life something felt wrong.
They moved back into the clearing, scanning the perimeter one last time. And that's when Aanchal stopped. Her eyes locked onto a Dominion surveillance strip embedded in a half-burnt tree trunk. Fresh. Untouched. Not Dominion standard.
She knelt beside it her fingers brushing across the side panel. Then she found it. A signal knife long, slender, embedded at an angle only a trained hand would use. On the grip: a faint engraving. A symbol like a spiral flame. Lavin's mark. Shivam crouched beside her, eyes narrowing. He said nothing for a moment. Then he took the knife from the bark, weighing it in his hand.
"He was watching," Aanchal murmured. Naina's voice came quiet. "He knows what we're doing." Shivam stared at the weapon, a chill threading through his spine. "He's not just watching," he said. "He's waiting."
Above them, clouds rolled over the broken skyline. Thunder rippled faintly behind them, distant and cold. And from the shadows of a hollowed-out spire far from the conflict lines, Lavin watched. He stood alone, civilian draped, his coat blending into the stone. On the screen before him stolen feed, patched from old Dominion surveillance he saw them.
Shivam. Alive. Leading. Glowing. And beside him, a team that moved like more than rebels they moved like purpose.
Lavin tilted his head slightly, the edge of a smile playing across his lips.
"Let the myth breathe," he whispered to himself. "Let them believe in it." "That way… the fall will hurt more."