One of the women whispered, voice trembling, "That one the tall one. He glowed. Did you see it?"
The old man nodded slowly. "The Spark."
It spread from there whispered down gutters, muttered through market slums, passed from lips to ears like a story half remembered but always longed for. Below their feet, the teleportation gate shuddered and then locked into full resonance. A pulse of blue fire burst upward, stretching skyward like a tower of light.
"Gate's active," Naina said, standing tall beside the humming circle.
Suchitra's voice came through. "Coordinates locked. Portal is holding steady." Shivam stepped onto the platform, turning to face his team. "Then let's go knock on their door."
The gate's pulse was steady now rising in rhythm, a heartbeat of energy rippling outward through the ash laced soil. From the cracked and broken rooftops of abandoned labor quarters, from gutted metro shells and half buried bunkers, the Grounds men were beginning to gather.
They didn't come out in droves not yet. Not bold. They watched in silence. In pairs. From shadows.
In the distance, blue light still curled up into the sky, and with it came something they hadn't felt in years: tension that didn't belong to fear but to something stirring. Something about to change.
In the center of the clearing, Shivam stood tall beside the humming teleportation ring, his silhouette etched in radiant lines from the Noctirum's resonance. Around him, his team took positions like pieces falling perfectly into place not just rebels now, but something closer to fables brought to life.
And then came the sound. A low, sharp hiss from above.
A single Dominion recon skiff descended from the clouds, sleek and black, its engine cutting a deep line across the sky. It moved fast and low a predator unaware that it was flying into a trap far bigger than it was built to survive.
"Movement confirmed," Naina said, her voice cool and clear over the comms. "Small detachment. No heavy support. Likely a scout ping responding to the energy flare."
Aman rolled his shoulders. "Poor bastards."
"Keep it clean," Shivam ordered. "We're not killing anyone who doesn't force our hand. We want them confused, not martyred."
The skiff touched down roughly a hundred meters out between two broken husk tanks and a collapsed radio tower. Four Dominion troopers disembarked quickly. Sleek body armor, high velocity rifles, full helmets. Professional. But not prepared.
Their scanning beams arced out in quick rotations. One of them was already barking over his suit comms. "Spike confirms Noctirum surge. Coordinates match Tower 617 could be rebel interference. Recommend priority escalation"
He didn't finish the sentence.
From the ridge, Dikshant's clone burst into view, drawing fire instantly. The troopers moved like clockwork, one pursuing, two holding formation, one raising a drone beacon.
That one was the first to fall.
Aanchal blinked behind him, appearing in a sharp blur just before the drone's launch. She snatched the device mid air and slammed it into his helmet, shorting his comm system. Her next strike brought him down with a clean sweep of her blade's hilt. He hit the dirt without a word.
The clone doubled back. The two chasing soldiers stopped, confused until Aman stepped forward, dropping from above like a crashing wall. His shield flared wide and trapped them both in a kinetic bubble, cutting their weapons offline instantly.
"Got 'em," he muttered, voice casual.
The final soldier turned just in time to see Naina's arrow already airborne. It didn't pierce it exploded into a flash charge of pure Aether, knocking the man backward and leaving him disarmed and stunned.
Seconds. It had taken seconds.
The Dominion squad lay unconscious or bound, their weapons deactivated and stacked at the base of a rusted pillar. No alarms, no wounds, no resistance. Just clinical takedown.
Vidhart stepped in slowly, his cloak brushing the dust. "This is what war looks like when you train for it. No fire. No blood. Just clarity."
Behind them, the Grounds men stared.
Some had climbed onto the tops of derelict skimmers, others stood hidden in broken arches and metro trenches. They'd seen flashes of rebellion before. Gunfire. Screams. Retreat.
But this was different. This was control.
A woman with oil-streaked hands gripped the shoulder of her younger sister, who trembled as the blue light of the gate rose behind Shivam like a divine halo.
"That's him," she whispered. "The one from the story. The God Sparked One."
"They said he tore through Dominion lines with his bare hands. That he carries fire without burning."
The whispers spread again, faster this time. Even in the bunker cities still too far to see the flare, the myth spread through intercepted comms, encoded rebel frequencies, word of mouth from scared but newly brave workers.
He walks the earth again.He stands at the Gate.The Spark is real.
Shivam looked up at the remaining troopers, all now bound and silent. He didn't gloat. Didn't speak. He just turned toward the swirling vortex of the gate, now nearing full sync. And behind him, for the first time, the people believed not because they were told to but because they saw it.
The gate pulsed like a heart awakened.
From the center of the Noctirum rings, a deep surge of light rippled outward, illuminating the ash strewn battlefield with hues of silver and blue. Static crackled in the air, lifting the hairs on every rebel's skin. The final glyph on the platform burned bright, then locked into place with a soft chime that belied the history it was about to tear open.
Shivam stepped forward, boots meeting the steel floor with solemn finality. He had walked through Vedhyra's backdoors before hidden, hunted, burdened by survival. But this was different. This time, he wasn't slipping past the cracks in the Dominion's walls.
This time, he was walking through the front.
Beside him, Aanchal twirled her blade and re sheathed it, her eyes scanning the portal's edge. Aman stood ready, spear glowing faintly against his palm, his stance relaxed but prepared. Naina, calm as the sky before a monsoon, tightened the grip on her bow. Dikshant exhaled slowly, a rare stillness settling over him before the motion that would surely follow.
Behind them, Vidhart raised his arm, his cloak catching the updraft of the energy pulse. The call needed no horn. The rebels had been waiting for this moment for far too long. With a single gesture, the army moved.
Thousands poured forward through the remains of the dumping ground and into the blazing core of the gate. Squad leaders called out formation updates. Mechanized packs followed behind, towing supplies and field emitters. The shimmering column of energy enveloped them one by one, a river of resistance flowing into the belly of the Dominion's pride.
The gate opened onto Vedhyra's undercity the industrial rings that formed the floating capital's foundation. Long catwalks stretched between vertical towers, their lights flickering weakly under the blackout. Steam rose from old heat vents, and the rhythm of Dominion machinery ticked on in forgotten corners, unaware that war had arrived beneath its polished spires.
Shivam and his team stepped through first. Their boots touched down onto the steel flooring with precision, not ceremony. No fanfare, no flags. But their presence carried the weight of prophecy myth made flesh, walking through the gates not as fugitives, but as the vanguard of a storm.
The undercity had never seen such movement. Rebel troops began spreading across the platforms in tight clusters, setting up signal dampeners and folding barricades. Engineering squads anchored teleportation nodes to maintain backflow connection with the ground side staging zone. The war effort bloomed like fire over frost.
And above, silently watching from grates, from lift shafts, from behind the cracks in ceiling tiles were the people.
The Grounds men of Vedhyra. The workers. The scavengers. The ones forgotten.
They had seen rebels before. Lone saboteurs. Runners in the night. Broken fighters carried away in chains. But they had never seen this.
They had never seen an army.
They had never seen The Noctirum infused Walk openly into the heart of power, head unbowed, cloak drifting behind them like thunder's echo.
A boy clinging to a maintenance cable gasped, his face pale from dust. "He's real," he whispered. "The one from the mine. From the transmission." His voice was barely audible, but the worker beside him heard.
"The God Sparked One," she said, eyes wide. "He's come back."
All across the lowest levels of Vedhyra, the words repeated passed from mouth to mouth faster than signal lines. In coded channels. In low hummed prayers.
"The Spark is here."
"They didn't sneak in this time."
"They walked through fire."
Within minutes, it was no longer a rumor it was a truth the people could see with their own eyes. Myth stepped off the page and walked into the capital's bones.
Shivam paused on a rise in the walkway, looking up through the vertical shaft that climbed dozens of floors to the elite towers of the Dominion's upper class. Above, the palace ring shimmered faintly beneath layers of reinforced shielding.
"This is where it starts," he murmured.
Aanchal moved beside him. "This time, we're not the ones running."
Naina scanned the upper corridors. "No alerts. No patrols yet. We've entered clean."
Vidhart appeared from behind a scaffold, nodding as he received comms from the rear forces. "The gate is stabilized. We hold the lower sector. The next wave will follow. Reinforcements in thirty."
Aman rolled his shoulder with a grin. "About time we had the home field advantage."
Dikshant cracked his knuckles. "Let them come."
Shivam looked once more to the people above, their faces peeking from shadow, hope beginning to push through fear.
"We're not ghosts anymore," he said quietly. "They'll see us. All of us."
And far above, behind blackened windows in the Dominion's throne halls, a red light flickered on a control console. Navik watched the sector map glitch. A hollow smile tugged at his lips. "They're inside."
The underbelly of Vedhyra pulsed with life it hadn't known in years.
Rebel boots thundered across the catwalks, weapons in hand, eyes wide with something between awe and purpose. For decades, Vedhyra had hung above the world like a throne made of glass and silence. Untouchable. Eternal. But now, its foundations trembled not from explosions, not from siege engines but from conviction.
Vidhart stood at the center of the makeshift command zone near the base of the teleportation gate, speaking swiftly into his comms as the last of the second wave reinforcements arrived. Shields were mounted along the steel ridges. A mobile uplink tower blinked to life beside a half-gutted elevator shaft. Drones buzzed out toward nearby lift points, scouting the higher levels of the capital.
"All positions holding," a rebel scout confirmed. "East corridor sealed. West stairwells rigged for fallback. We're clear up to the mid-tier conduits."
"Good," Vidhart muttered. "We take those nodes next. Then we're within striking distance of the Hall of Truth."
Above him, Shivam and his team had moved deeper into the underlayers. The corridor ahead stretched wide, designed for Dominion hover convoys, but now eerily still. Lights flickered overhead. Long forgotten banners crests of victories the Dominion had long since stopped earning hung crooked from iron pillars.
Aanchal moved with purpose, her eyes flashing faintly as she blinked ahead to scout the path. "Three hallways fork left no patrols yet. But I don't trust the silence."
"Trust your blade," Aman said, flexing the light across his spear as it responded to the electricity in the air. "That always worked for me."
Naina paused near a ventilation grate, closing her eyes. Her Sight rippled outward like radar, mapping outlines of movement two floors above some civilians, some guards, but none aware yet.
"We've bought time," she said. "Not peace."
Dikshant gave a low whistle as he turned back toward the city's rising spires through a grated window. "It's different seeing it like this. Knowing we're not guests or ghosts anymore."
Shivam remained quiet. His gaze traveled across the metal bones of the city, climbing upward where the throne platform glittered like a sunless jewel. Vedhyra had always been a city of illusion beauty for the few, built on the bones of the many.
Now the bones were moving.
He stepped forward, turning toward his team. "We split here. Two pairs scout the transit grid; the rest double back to secure the lift hubs."
Vidhart's voice crackled in his earpiece. "We're moving into the Old Armory district. Robin and Rathod are securing Mayapuri's sky ring. Air support is grounded, just as planned."
"Copy that," Shivam said. "We hold the undercity."
As the team moved, unseen eyes followed them from the darkness not all of them afraid.
Civilians peeked from hiding spots: former technicians, stolen youth workers, forgotten healers. And they saw not just soldiers. They saw figures glowing, figures that matched the whispers. Swift shadows that moved before bullets. Blades that flashed and vanished. Arrows that curved without wind. A boy whose hands carried thunder but eyes stayed kind. They saw the Spark. And the myth grew louder.
Above the city's mid-tier housing blocks, hidden behind a shattered school spire, a man in civilian clothing crouched silently in the shadows. His hair was dust slicked, his face clean shaven, his uniform discarded. But the glow in his eyes sharp, amber, predatory betrayed him.
Lavin watched. Not from a throne. Not from a podium. But from the streets. He had slipped into the civilian districts days ago, trading tactical control for proximity. He no longer trusted the Dominion's strategy of strength. That era had passed. The myth had outgrown their machines. So now he walked among the people. Heard their whispers. Measured their hope. Weighed it.
And he would kill it. Soon. Down below, Shivam felt something shift. Just a ripple. A pressure in the air. Faint. Like eyes behind glass.
"We're being watched," he said softly.
"Should we fall back?" Dikshant asked, already spinning a knife in his palm.
Shivam shook his head. "No. Let them look." He stepped forward, shoulders square, eyes on the rising core of the capital. "Let them see what's coming." The last of the rebel forces passed through the gate before it sealed in a low hum, its rings rotating once, then dimming into standby.
Now, there was no turning back. The city had been breached. The rebellion had arrived. And the hourglass had tipped