Navik descended swiftly through a spiraling elevator into the lower vaults deeper than any public had ever seen. The air grew colder, metal corridors darker, lined with pulsing conduit veins and bio sealed gates. Here, behind reinforced glass and shielded alloy, Dominion scientists worked under white lights and tightening nerves. They didn't look up when the door opened. They already knew who it was.
Navik stepped into the laboratory, eyes locked on the device that dominated the center chamber a massive ring of quantum filaments suspended in stasis, its coils humming with dormant energy. Around it, seven researchers adjusted dials, calibrated pulses, and whispered about containment fields. A central console projected a thin sliver of spatial flux, a shimmering haze that twitched in and out of sync with the lights above.
The lead scientist, pale and shaking, stepped forward. "Sir, the rift chamber is operational, but stabilization is… incomplete. We've run projections. Without a fixed anchor, the temporal aperture may "
" Hold," Navik interrupted, stepping closer. "You told me this machine would tear a hole through space. Open a corridor to the world they came from. Was that a lie?"
"No, sir, but the readings are inconsistent. It may not land us precisely in their origin point. It could tear open a dozen points or it could possibly pull the both worlds together so that both can collide and, this might end the world we know both could possibly merge leaving nothing behind. We need time. Hours at least."
Navik reached forward and clamped a gauntlet around the man's throat. The hum of the machine dimmed for a moment as the console flickered from the sudden field surge. The other scientists froze, silent. The lead gasped, fingers clawing at the pressure closing around his windpipe.
"You have until afternoon," Navik said, his voice sharp as steel. "Not a second more. I don't care if the corridor is stable. I only care that it opens. Do you understand?"
The man nodded, choking. Navik released him, letting him fall hard onto the cold tile. "Good," he said flatly. "Because if you fail, you won't live long enough to regret it."
Without another word, he turned and walked from the lab, boots clicking against the metal floor, cloak trailing like the shadow of death.
Far above, the city groaned. Shivam's team had entered the service corridor a narrow, smooth walled trench that stretched from a ruined underpass to the heart of the central district. It was too clean. Too quiet. No drones. No signal noise. No bodies.
Aman grunted, adjusting his stance as they moved through. "I don't like this. Feels like we're being herded."
"Because we are," Naina said, eyes scanning the curvature of the wall. "This path was never on the original Dominion schematics. Not even in the rebel archives."
Dikshant's clone scouted ahead and vanished down a turn. A second later, he winced. "Contact lost. It hit something."
"We back out?" Aanchal asked, already checking alternate routes through her Sight.
"No," Shivam said. His voice was calm. He didn't glow. He didn't burn. But every word he spoke carried weight.
"If Lavin wants us here, he'll be here too. This ends tonight." They pushed forward.
The corridor narrowed ahead, a ring of rusted machinery flickering dimly where power conduits ran along the ceiling. The further they went, the more Shivam could feel it an emptiness in the air. Not fear. Anticipation. The kind of silence a predator leaves behind when it's still watching.
The corridor opened into a wide octagonal chamber an abandoned Dominion transit hub buried beneath the palace's outer foundations. Fractured light fell from vents above, carving golden streaks across cracked black tile. In the silence between their footsteps, Shivam could hear the faint buzz of hidden circuitry active. Waiting.
At the far end stood Lavin.
He stepped from the shadow of a dead support beam, no helmet, no soldiers flanking him yet just the edge of his gauntlet glinting faintly with old power. His eyes caught the light, but not his expression. It was blank. Focused. His coat moved slightly in the draft, worn loose now, sleeves rolled back like a prizefighter warming up.
"Finally," Lavin said, voice quiet, carrying without force. "No masks. No myths. Just us again."
Shivam stepped forward; shoulders square. His team fanned out behind him in a practiced arc, scanning corners and side corridors for threats. But Shivam kept his gaze on Lavin.
"Let's finish what you started," he said.
They moved at the same time.
Lavin lunged with brutal precision, gauntlet sparking as it arced in for a wide feint. Shivam dropped his weight, pivoted under the strike, and landed a blow to Lavin's ribs clean, sharp, and deeper than expected. Lavin staggered half a step but recovered, his elbow catching Shivam's shoulder as he spun. They broke apart. Reset.
Aman growled as Dominion sentry drones activated across the ceiling, blinking red as shock rounds charged. "Dikshant!" he shouted.
"I'm on it!" Dikshant replied, already sending a clone vaulting up a pipe to land on the first turret. He hurled a charged knife straight into its center. It exploded in a burst of steam and fire, dropping inert metal to the ground.
Naina moved swiftly, eyes flicking bright silver. "There!" she called, loosing an arrow into a wall panel that had begun to hum. The shaft pierced a Dominion shock plate before it could trigger, shorting it out.
Aanchal flickered forward in a blur, sword drawing an arc through a sentry unit before it had time to track her. "Four more down this tunnel," she said. "Guard reinforcements inbound. Light infantry."
"Hold the room," Shivam said, ducking beneath Lavin's rising knee. He twisted inside the strike, caught Lavin's shoulder, and flipped him cleanly over onto the floor.
Lavin rolled with the momentum, flipping back to his feet with blood blooming at his lip. "You've changed," he said, wiping his mouth.
"So have you," Shivam replied.
Then they collided again.
No weapons. No flashy powers. Just raw, perfected form. Lavin struck with military precision kicks calibrated to disrupt balance, punches targeting pressure points. But Shivam had learned. He matched every move, deflecting with forearms wrapped in golden light, responding not with anger, but control. His fists were meteors. His strikes, mathematical.
He stepped into Lavin's guard and slammed an uppercut into his gut. Lavin wheezed, doubling over. Shivam didn't hesitate. He drove Lavin backward with a series of lightning fast jabs, hammering him into the wall until the man collapsed to one knee.
Outside, the rebellion had reached the civilian districts. The streets were a storm of fire and steel. Rebel fighters clashed with Dominion squads in the markets, ducking behind upturned carts and rail columns. Civilians, at first just watching shaking, unsure began to act.
One woman picked up a Dominion officer's discarded rifle. She fired it once, hands trembling, but the shot struck true.
A mechanic threw a crate at a Dominion shield drone, helping rebels flank a soldier.
Miners with their old tools. Mothers shielding the wounded. Teenagers pushing barricades.
The line had broken. And people were choosing.
A crackling voice blurted over a Dominion soldier's fractured radio, picked up by both sides: " Command alert. Troop division Sigma Red deploying from Palace Armory. Ground forces en route. Mayapuri Air Corps launching from sector ring at 0600. Estimated arrival: twenty minutes."
Aman cursed, flinging his shield outward to block a fresh volley of bullets. "We've got a timer now!" Dikshant grinned through the chaos. "Then we finish before they get here!"
Inside the chamber, Shivam and Lavin clashed again. Lavin's gauntlet flared, releasing a shockwave that blew Shivam back three feet. He skidded but didn't fall. He caught himself, eyes narrowing.
"Still think you're the storm?" Lavin growled.
"No," Shivam said. His aura flared, coiling around him like rising fire controlled, deliberate, unyielding. "I'm the one who holds it back."
He launched forward, faster this time, his body blurring with golden trails. Lavin tried to pivot, but Shivam was already there. A knee to the chest. A sweep kick. An elbow to the jaw. Lavin hit the ground hard, armor sparking, breath gone.
This wasn't a god fighting a soldier. This was a survivor fighting a tyrant. And outside, something even greater stirred.
In the Dominion command chamber, the air was thick with static and sweat. The officers gathered around the primary console stood rigid, their armored backs glinting under the pale red glow of overhead lights. Monitors pulsed like wounded hearts across the wall, displaying broken feeds from various sectors most flashing error warnings or blackout glyphs. The blackout had crippled their overwatch grid.
But then one stream stabilized. Sector Twelve.
The chamber lit up with sudden clarity. Footage poured in from a high altitude surveillance drone that had reconnected through a secondary node. The officers leaned in as the image sharpened revealing the eastern thoroughfare near the old rail yard, now a storm of shattered concrete, Dominion fire, and one small team carving a path through the chaos.
They weren't just surviving. They were dismantling.
Shivam's squad moved like a living pulse Aanchal a blur of silver cuts and flickering momentum, Dikshant's clones weaving a web of distractions and explosive traps, Naina's arrows curving around cover like sentient whispers, Aman smashing barriers with spear strikes and defensive surges. Their synergy was terrifying. Unstoppable. But it was the center that drew the silence. Shivam. The boy the Dominion once labeled a stray.
He moved with a calm so absolute it felt alien. No erratic bursts. No wasted strength. His fists moved with surgical violence each strike dismantling armor, each dodge angled with intention. His aura was no longer an uncontrolled blaze but a halo of discipline, burning with conviction. Dominion rifle fire bounced off the force ringing his body, crackling harmlessly against the golden shimmer surrounding him.
In the footage, he raised his hand and with a single, explosive push, flung back a half dozen Dominion soldiers who had tried to pin him from the side. The image trembled from the impact.
Someone in the chamber whispered, "It's not a myth." No one corrected them.
Navik stood alone at the edge of the command deck; arms folded behind his back. His eyes were locked on the screen, unblinking, his expression unreadable. There was no surprise. No rage. Just the faintest narrowing of his brow recognition. He was watching not a story unravel, but a threat evolves.
He had once called the boy a fluke. A product of anomaly. A passenger carried by Adhivita's recklessness. But now, that same boy was dismantling his elite squads in broad daylight, with power shaped like purpose. And the city the people had started to believe. The Spark was no longer a symbol whispered in underground broadcasts. It was visible. It was rising. And it was heading straight for him.
Navik's jaw clenched as the feed stabilized further, sharpening the golden flare of Shivam's aura on the screen. Officers in the room glanced at one another, unsure whether to speak, to move, or to brace for an explosion of fury. But it never came. Navik said nothing. He stood still, the silence around him stretching thin like glass over fire. Then, without a word, he turned from the projection and walked cloak trailing behind him like a living shadow, boots ringing out with slow, deliberate purpose.
He moved through the upper vault corridor, where portraits of past Dominion leaders stared down with cold eyes and eternal judgment. Their gold trimmed faces watched him pass, unmoved by the tremors building in the city below. He didn't pause. Down the spiral of the eastern key hall he descended, doors hissing open in deference to his command. One by one, layers of biometric security peeled away, accepting him without question. And then, deeper still, into the corridor where stone turned to steel, where walls bore no inscriptions, only scars of forced silence.
At the end stood a single chamber windowless, narrow, reinforced with an alloy even Dominion scientists rarely named aloud. Within it, beyond the sealed door and its flickering green control panel, sat Adhivita. The air around the door felt colder, denser, like the weight of history was pressing in from all sides.
Navik stood before it, his expression unreadable. He placed a gloved hand on the lock panel. It hissed in recognition, awaiting a second confirmation. But he didn't give it. Not yet. He remained there; eyes fixed on the metal as if trying to see through it. Inside, Adhivita sat beneath the dim light of her narrow cell, her gaze turned upward toward the sliver of sky barely visible through a cutout in the ceiling. He didn't raise a weapon. He didn't give a command.
Whatever had brought him here after rebellion's rise, after the people turned on him, after the first cracks in the Dominion's silence it was not vengeance. Not this time. When he finally stepped forward, it was not with a soldier's wrath. It was with something heavier. He had come to speak.