FLASHBACK — THREE MONTHS AGO AFTER THE SCOTTO FIGHT — COVENANT BASE
The common room was warm with laughter. Balloons in green and gold floated near the ceiling. A cake sat on the table, half-eaten, icing smeared on paper plates. Amaka leaned back in her chair, a Kobe orb balanced on her palm, green light casting soft shadows across her face.
"Twenty-nine," Patrick said, raising a bottle. "Old woman."
"Abeg Shut up." Amaka replied laughing.
"Hahaha," Agnes added, smiling. "Happy birthday, Amaka."
They drank. They ate. They talked about missions finished and enemies exorcised. The easy rhythm of people who had fought together for years.
Then Patrick set down his bottle.
"We've been talking," he said. "Agnes and me."
Amaka's orb dimmed.
"The Scotto fight... it showed us something."
"Showed us we're not strong enough," Agnes said quietly. "We've been talking about... stepping back. Leaving the Covenant."
The room went still.
"Why?" Amaka asked. "We can do anything together. Anything that doesn't kill us makes us stronger. We've been together for years. We can conquer." They both looked at her confused and disappointed.
"Objectively," Patrick said, "we can't."
Agnes nodded.
"We can't."
Amaka looked at them. Her oldest friends. Her partners.
"Factually," she said, "I could."
Patrick laughed. Agnes laughed. They stood, pushed in their chairs, and walked toward the door.
"You're way past being a youngster," Patrick said. "Or a dreamer."
They left.
Amaka sat alone with the half-eaten cake and the deflating balloons. Her orb glowed steadily in her palm.
She didn't stop believing. She just stopped saying it out loud.
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PRESENT — COVENANT BASE—
The corridors were a graveyard of shifting stone and drifting dust. Amaka moved through them, her green orbs orbiting her shoulders like moons. Her body was leaner now—three months of training had carved away hesitation, replaced it with muscle memory and instinct. She was tired. Everyone was tired. But hunger kept her moving.
She turned a corner.
Scotto stood at the end of the hallway.
Four months old. Darkness wrapped around him like a second skin. His third eye was half-lidded, patient. The red slice marks of his sashes drifted in an unfelt wind.
"Do you know where David is?" he asked.
Amaka stopped.
"Is that really the first thing you ask me?"
Scotto tilted his head.
"I'm not interested in you, Amaka. Keep moving."
She didn't move.
The first Kobe was already in her hand.
"Too bad."
She threw.
As the area shifted to the warehouse.
The dark did not fall. It was already there, waiting, a patient ink that had seeped into every corner of the ruined loading bay long before Amaka's green-glowing orbs pushed against it. She stood in the centre of the ruined warehouse, a Kobe already palmed in each hand, their emerald radiance painting her sweat-sheened face. Her breath came steady. Her wrists were loose. Every sport she had ever played sang in her muscle memory, ready.
Scotto was four months old. The dark loved him like a son.
He didn't step from a shadow—he was the shadow, emerging from a pool of black beneath a collapsed shelving unit, his small body a silhouette cut from the fabric of night itself. His eyes were closed, but the Third Eye saw her Faith signature like a bonfire on a moonless plain. He saw the micro-fluctuations, the tiny tremors of adrenaline, the way her courage flickered at the edges. Not doubt. Just humanity.
"Amaka," Scotto said, and his voice was the rustle of dead leaves. "You seem to have improved."
"Well thank you," Amaka answered, and threw.
The first Kobe was a fastball, baseball-wrist snapping through release, humming green and dense with poured Faith. It crossed the distance in a heartbeat. Scotto didn't move—Dark Mass answered, a wall of solid black erupting between them. The orb struck it and didn't explode; Amaka was too smart to waste a detonation on a shield. Instead, it ricocheted, a squash-rebound calculated in the instant of release, banking off a steel pillar and screaming back toward Scotto's left flank.
Scotto's Third Eye had seen the angle before she threw it. A second tendril of Dark Mass curled outward, a serpent of living shadow, and caught the orb mid-flight, smothering its green glow in a cocoon of black. Light Devourment, evolved past what Ekpoma had seen, drank the orb's Faith in heartbeats. The Kobe dimmed, cracked, and crumbled to inert dust.
Amaka was already throwing again. Two orbs this time, a handball quick-release and a volleyball overhand spike simultaneously—one low, skimming the ground with bowling-spin, the other arcing high. Scotto's darkness split, a tendril for each. But the low orb wasn't an orb.
It was a feint. Amaka had dropped to one knee, snatching a returning Kobe from the air—Loyalty bringing it home—and the low throw was a shot-put shove that became a curveball, bending around a concrete pillar on a trajectory no geometry should allow. It struck Scotto in the shoulder.
The impact was concussive, a kinetic hammer that spun his body sideways. The dark around him shivered, offended. He caught himself on a platform of solid shadow, rising rather than falling, and for a moment, something like respect crossed his closed-eyed face.
"Interesting," he said, and sounded almost proud.
"I'll do it again."
She meant it. Her palms were already open, summoning. Four orbs spiralled home, green comets stitching through the darkness. She caught them in rhythm—table-tennis speed, juggling mass between her hands, feeding each one heavier than the last. The air around her hummed with accumulated Faith, a pressure building.
Scotto vanished. Shadow Step, not Speed of Dark—quieter, a hunting reposition. He emerged from the darkness beneath a catwalk, thirty feet above and behind her.
"Here," he whispered.
A lance of Dark Mass, compressed to a spear-point, drove downward. Amaka didn't turn—she read the shift in shadow, felt the pressure change, and dove sideways, a goalkeeper's save with her body parallel to the ground. The dark spear cratered the concrete where her chest had been. She rolled, caught a returning orb mid-dive, and hurled it backhand without looking.
Scotto caught it with a barrier. But the barrier cracked. She was feeding them too much mass now, pushing past what his absorption could handle in a heartbeat. The Third Eye registered the shift: her Faith was increasing, not flagging. She was digging deeper, finding reserves beyond what he had calculated.
A Vanguard to her core. The words he'd heard returned to him. He understood them now. A vanguard does not stop. A vanguard breaks themselves against the dark so that someone else can bring the light.
He decided to break her.
"Speed of Dark," he said, and the words were a door opening.
He didn't move. He arrived. In her guard, inside the radius of her throw, where orbs were useless. His hand pressed against her sternum, and Dark Mass exploded from his palm—not a projectile, but a point-blank wave of solidified night. Amaka flew backward, crashing through a stack of pallets. Wood splintered. Her green aura flickered.
A single orb rolled from her hand, bouncing weakly across the concrete. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Scotto walked toward her. Not strode. Walked. The dark moved with him, a royal cloak. His Third Eye scanned her Faith signature—depleted, fluttering, but not extinguished. Not yet.
"Yield," he said. "You've proven enough."
Amaka pushed herself onto her elbows. Blood traced a line from her hairline. Her eyes found his, and in them was something Scotto's Third Eye had never seen in any signature: absolute refusal.
"I'm not proving anything," she said. "I'm buying time."
She raised her hand. The scattered Kobe—the one that had rolled away—lifted from the ground. Loyalty. It shot toward her palm. But she didn't catch it.
She spiked it. Volleyball leap from her knees, a full-body torsion that should have been impossible, and the orb screamed toward Scotto with everything she had left. He raised a barrier—but she wasn't aiming at him.
The Kobe struck the catwalk above him. The detonation, Explosive Force on delay, triggered on impact. Steel screamed. The entire structure sheared from its mounts and came down.
Scotto's Speed of Dark activated reflexively, carrying him clear of the collapse. He emerged from a shadow at the far end of the warehouse, untouched but separated. Amaka lay in the rubble, one arm pinned, her remaining orbs scattered and dim. Her aura was a candle in a windstorm. She couldn't rise. She didn't try.
Scotto tilted his head.
"For what? What were you buying time for?"
The door exploded inward.
Not a charge. Not a breach. David stepping through, and the door simply chose not to exist in his way.
One arm. Hearth drawn in his other hand. The green headband pushed back coiled black hair. His eyes found Scotto.
"David," Scotto said, and for the first time, his voice held something other than quiet dominion. Recognition. Perhaps warning.
David walked past the rubble. He knelt beside Amaka, lifted the beam pinning her arm with one hand, and set it aside. He looked at her face, at the blood and the dust and the eyes that still burned.
"Hey, B," he said.
"Wassup dear," Amaka said, and coughed. "What happenedto your arm?"
"Oh yeah I was involved in a fight in Porthartcourt."
"Sorry dear."
"Thanks B."
"Remember scotto?"
"Is that one a question? Water is wet." He responded giggling.
David helped her sit up against a broken pallet. Then he turned to face Scotto. The distance between them was thirty feet of ruined warehouse, dust still settling, shadows still coiling around the boy of dark.
"Thanks for waiting," David said.
Scotto's shadows paused. The Third Eye fixed on David's signature, searching for a fluctuation, a tremor, any evidence of lie. It found only steady, implacable green light.
"You're welcome," Scotto said. "Let loose. This will be the final time we learn from each other."
"I learned earlier in Porthartcourt," David said, and stepped forward into the dark.
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End of Chapter 65