"She swore vengeance on all men with dark hearts." - Lisa Papademetriou (Siren's Storm)

* * * *

A day later, Lucas Alescio found himself nursing a worsening headache as he leaned over the polished surface of the strategy room table, fingers pressed to his temples, the lights too bright, and the silence too suffocating.

The autopsy report had finally come in—and with it, the confirmed identity of the mutilated corpse found in the forest clearing. The name alone had ignited a powder keg among Team Alpha.

"Run his identity by me again," Leonid demanded from across the table, disbelief written deep in the furrows of his brow.

Allen groaned in a long, theatrical exhale, his ruby-red eyes narrowing in exasperation as he exchanged a weary look with Jonan, who merely offered a dry shrug. "You asking me ten or twenty times won't change the name printed on the damn report, Leo," Allen muttered, tapping one pale finger against the manila folder in front of him. His tone was flat, but beneath it simmered the same horror they all felt. "Guy's name is Walden. No last name recorded. But the underground knows him. The Gifted knows him. Everyone who walks the fringes of Eldario whispers the same name. The Butcher. And there's no reward for guessing how he earned that title."

No one in Team Alpha asked for further clarification. The name was grotesquely self-explanatory—one of those rare cases where the urban legends turned out to be tame compared to the reality.

"No wonder someone finally put him down," Leonid murmured darkly, folding his arms across his chest. "Could be Aegis, too. Whenever it involves a hunter, especially a notorious one, it's usually them. Either way, the underground doesn't forget. And they sure as hell don't forgive."

"Except Aegis has been quiet," Lucas interjected, his voice low, analytical. "Apart from the occasional whisper, they've been shadows these last two years. This… This feels like them finally stepping out again."

Taylor sat quietly for a moment, then tilted her head in thought, biting her lip. "It's rare for a hunter to be discharged," she said softly, her voice touched with unease. "Even rarer for one to live after leaving."

Like the ESA, the hunters did not grant honourable discharges. Retirement only came in a casket.

"Well, officially, he's no longer one," Allen added pointedly, and that cryptic edge in his voice made the air in the room go still. His eyes flickered to the surveillance camera perched discreetly in the corner. "But we all know the truth, don't we? Hunters don't leave. Not really. And Walden… He had a preference for children. Gifted children. Or the children of Gifted. Doesn't matter. So long as they screamed."

A silence followed that felt more like mourning than shock.

Elijah's expression darkened, his cat-slit pupils narrowing. "Goddess…" he murmured, his voice more breath than sound.

Lucas turned to the Rosales twins, eyes unreadable. "You both searched that cabin. His home. What did you find?"

Elijah hesitated, exchanging a glance with Taylor. There was a depth to the look—a twin's silent code, forged through years of unspoken understanding.

"I wish I hadn't," Elijah replied at last.

Taylor groaned, pressing her hands to her face and muttering something under her breath before looking up, her eyes hollowed by what she had seen. "He made serial killers look like children playing house. I swear, if this is the kind of monster the ESA ever protected—" She stopped herself short, but the implication lingered like rot.

Lucas's voice cut through the air like a blade. "Quiet."

Everyone jolted.

Lucas's hands were braced on the desk, knuckles white. His eyes flickered toward the corner again—toward that silent, watching eye of ESA surveillance, before he marched to the door, opened it, checked the hall, then shut and locked it with a decisive click.

He turned back to them, face carved from stone. "You know better than that. Especially in here. The walls have ears."

Taylor nodded slowly. "…Yeah. You're right."

Lucas let the tension bleed out of his stance and returned to his seat. "Tell me what you found."

Taylor reached forward and pushed a folder across the table toward him. Her face was pale and composed, but the grimness in her eyes said everything. "Hope you didn't just eat," she muttered. "You'll regret it if you did."

Lucas hesitated. The look on Taylor's face unnerved him. Not many things did. She and Elijah were among the most unflinching in Team Alpha—calm, composed, and surgical when necessary. If even they were disturbed…

Still, he opened the folder, and Leonid, Jonan, and Allen leaned in behind him.

The first image turned his stomach.

Rows of skulls, neatly arranged on crude wooden shelves. Small skulls. Too small.

One photo showed eyeballs suspended in glass jars, pupils staring blankly out from viscous liquid. Another revealed a child-sized skeleton strapped to a rusted metal chair, wires protruding from sockets in the wall.

Allen turned green, a hand clamped over his mouth. "The Goddess be with us," he whispered.

Lucas slammed the folder shut with finality, as if that alone could trap the horror back inside.

Elijah leaned back, his expression unreadable, his fingers curled together. "Forensics was still working when we left," he said. "One of the techs told me they suspect the sofa coverings are made of human skin. From the age and size of the remains…" He trailed off. "They were children. Almost certainly Gifted. We can probably close a lot of the missing children's cases over the last few years, if so."

Leonid went sheet-white, burying his face in his hands. "Dear Goddess. I'm going to be sick."

"There's more," Elijah said quietly.

Jonan looked scandalised. "More? There's more?!"

Elijah shot him a flat look before continuing. "There's a basement. Hidden. We wouldn't have found it without Remi."

Lucas's brows rose. "Remington Wayne?"

Elijah nodded. "Yeah. He and Coleen joined us to assist. You know Remi—non-Gifted, but senses sharp enough to rival a hunter. He found a false panel in the floor."

Lucas nodded again. Remi was a rarity—one of those without Gifts, but blessed with instincts and perception that defied ordinary logic.

Leonid groaned from behind his hands. "Do I even want to know what was down there?"

"Not what we found," Taylor said bitterly. "What we didn't."

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The team stared at her. Taylor flipped open a photo page, showing blood-slick stone, chains bolted to walls, and a rusted drain in the center of the floor.

"From the blood splatter patterns, the chains, and the marks…" Elijah leaned forward. "Children were chained there. Tortured. Some of the blood was fresh. Days old, not weeks, or months."

Silence.

It felt like something unspoken had settled over the room—rage, grief, and a gnawing sense of helplessness.

Lucas is certain he is going to have nightmares for weeks after this. Who needs to watch a horror movie when working as an ESA agent in Special Operations can subject one to all kinds of horror?

Allen finally exhaled. "…Then maybe it's a good thing Aegis got to him before we did," he said. Startled looks turned toward him, but he held his ground. "What? I'm saying what we're all thinking. If we'd caught him and filed charges, they'd be dismissed. Always are when it involves a hunter. Especially when the victims are Gifted. You know I'm right."

No one spoke.

Not because they disagreed, but because it was the truth. And the truth, in Eldario, had never been more poisonous.

Lucas winced slightly, rubbing his temples as his mind slipped back to a conversation he'd had not long ago with Timo, and later with Sera.

How long ago was that now? Days? Weeks? Months? It felt like a lifetime. Everything was beginning to blur together, swallowed by the ever-thickening tension that had overtaken Eldario.

"W-Well…"

"If Walden's murder was Aegis's doing," Leonid said, his voice low and steady, "then it means they've resurfaced at last." His words landed with the weight of confirmation rather than theory, drawing a round of somber nods from the room.

He sighed then, exchanging a look with Lucas—a silent, unspoken understanding between two men who had fought through too many battles to be caught off guard by the next one.

Lucas gave a slow, grim nod.

"I hope none of you have filed vacation requests," Leonid added, his tone wry beneath the gravity. "We're going to be knee-deep in this for the next few months, I'll bet."

"It's been two years, hasn't it?" Jonan swivelled in his chair, the worn wheels creaking faintly as he turned to face the sprawling corkboard that covered nearly half the strategy room wall. It was a chaotic mosaic of notes, photographs, pins, string, and handwritten observations—two years' worth of pieced-together whispers and sightings, all tied to the elusive group known as Aegis. "We've been chasing ghosts," he muttered. "Do we even know anything about them?"

And truly, how did you find someone, or several someones, when you didn't even know what name to call them?

Even the so-called clients of Aegis, the ones Team Alpha had managed to track down, remained frustratingly silent. Unshakable loyalty, or perhaps terror. Or both. Whatever the reason, none had confessed to direct contact, and even fewer dared utter a name. The loyalty Aegis inspired was unnerving in its intensity, and that silence only fed the enigma.

And if Aegis's clients had been tight-lipped, then the underground was practically hermetically sealed.

Not even Elijah's most trusted contacts would speak when the word "Aegis" surfaced, choosing instead to vanish behind thinly veiled excuses and blank stares. Aegis might as well have been a myth for all the information they could scrape together.

"The only real contact we've had with them was that raid on headquarters," Lucas remarked, rising from his seat with a fluid grace and crossing to the metal file cabinet in the corner. He tugged open the top drawer and pulled out a remarkably thin folder—an ironic testament to just how little they knew after so long. "That had to be about a year and a half ago now. Maybe longer."

"Oh, that incident?" Allen snorted, propping one boot on the nearby console. "When they blew out half the west wing and put two full squads of ESA agents in the burn ward? Yeah, hard to forget. But hey," He added with a faint smirk, glancing sidelong at Elijah, "we got a whole new security system out of it."

Elijah gave a dry, ghost of a smile, the hood of his jacket still drawn loosely over his head. "Silver linings, I guess."

It was grim humour, but that was how they survived—these unrelenting days, these morally grey nights. With jokes that only people who had seen death too many times could make.

The truth was, that attack had changed more than just their architecture. It had been a brutal wake-up call.

Tiara, their director, had been lobbying for years to modernise the ESA's outdated digital infrastructure. The systems in place had been relics—patchwork tech from another decade, hollowed out by budget cuts and bureaucracy. Technology had progressed far beyond what it had been when Tiara was a new agent herself.

But the attack had finally given her the leverage to initiate a full overhaul. A necessary evolution spurred by destruction.

"Anything we've actually deduced about Aegis?" Lucas asked, settling back into his seat with the file in hand. His tone was brisk but layered with a quiet tension. For all their cases, Aegis had always lingered in the background like a spectre—unresolved, untouchable, and dangerously unpredictable.

Leonid shook his head. "Nothing solid. But there are patterns." He tapped a finger against his temple, blue eyes sharp with thought. "We know at least half their group is likely Gifted. Most incidents they're involved in center around Gifted victims or Gifted targets. They strike fast, clean, and without warning. Always protecting someone. Never leaving a trace." He hesitated, his jaw tightening. "They do what we can't. They protect the Gifted in ways that the law doesn't. Or won't."

There was silence at that.

No one needed to say it aloud: in Eldario, being a Gifted was a curse. Registration was mandatory. Surveillance was constant. One wrong move, one whispered accusation, and you could vanish into the cold hands of the hunters or worse, the Council's hidden chambers.

"They're probably unregistered," Jonan said, sighing as he slumped deeper into his chair. "Makes sense. The smart ones stay out of the system. They know it only ends one way."

His voice was tinged with frustration, but not judgment. Jonan, for all his sharp wit and bombastic energy, understood injustice better than most. He'd seen what the system did to those it was meant to protect. That's why he fought.

"Everything we know about Aegis is rumour and shadow," Elijah offered, resting his chin on one hand. "I even asked Louis from Team Delta—ESA's top hacker. Best in the agency." He gave a half-laugh, more rueful than amused. "He couldn't even access the site Aegis supposedly uses to receive requests. Said it was like trying to break into a ghost server. Untraceable. Undetectable."

"Dethroned, just like that," Allen quipped, grinning at the mental image. "Poor Louis. But seriously," He added, his expression sobering, "my contacts in the underground? Frosty as hell. More than usual. There's something going on, something they're not saying. I think it has to do with the hunters. Some incident, maybe. But no one will talk. It's like someone locked the whole city's mouth shut."

Lucas thumbed through the slim file again, his eyes narrowing. "We do know one name: Zero. Leader of Aegis. Probably an alias. Beyond that? Just whispers. They've been active for at least two years, maybe longer. But they're precise. Strategic. Not one trace left behind unless they want it found."

"They've never been this…ruthless before. It's not their usual MO," Leonid murmured, still spinning a pen idly between his fingers. "If Walden's death was their doing, it's the first sign we've seen of real bloodshed. Not sabotage. Not extraction. Execution. But if children were involved…" His voice faltered for a moment. "Honestly, I wouldn't blame them."

A heavy silence fell over the room once more. They were all thinking the same thing.

If Aegis had killed Walden, then maybe, for once, the monsters had turned on each other.

Elijah exhaled, long and slow, the sound cutting through the stillness like a sigh of mourning. He leaned back in his chair, crimson hair slipping over his eyes as he looked around the room at his comrades—his family in everything but blood.

"In the end…" he began softly, "how do we even know who's right anymore? We call Aegis the enemy because we're told they're the enemy. Because we're the ones chasing them." He traced quotation marks in the air with his pen. "But maybe, to them? To the Gifted they protect? We're the villains."

There was no rebuttal. Not from Lucas, not from Leonid, not even from Taylor.

And that, more than anything, was the answer they weren't ready to face.

"Though if it's true there were Gifted children imprisoned in Walden's basement, and Aegis was the one who freed them…" Lucas's voice trailed off, low and tense as he folded his arms across his chest, bringing the subject back on track. His sharp onyx eyes flicked to the bulletin board behind them, its collage of photos, maps, and a string connecting leads that went nowhere. "Then someone out there must know something. Someone has to."

He leaned back against the edge of the table, his tall frame stiff with unease, the worn leather of his black jacket creaking softly. "I can't see Aegis keeping injured and traumatised kids with them. Not while they're trying to stay off every radar in Eldario. It's too risky. Too loud."

"They would've taken them to the underground," Taylor said simply, her arms folded and brows furrowed. Her tone was even, but there was something brittle beneath it—some deeper anger only just contained. "They don't trust the ESA. And they definitely wouldn't trust any state-run orphanage. Those kids would vanish below the streets, into the folds of whatever fractured sanctuary the underground still has."

Lucas nodded grimly, thoughtful. His gaze swept over the team, lingering on one particular face. "Elijah," he said, "you've still got contacts down there, right?"

Elijah didn't immediately answer. His crimson hair hung over one eye as he sat half-slouched in his chair, twirling a pen between his long fingers. The feline slits of his blue pupils narrowed slightly as he caught the look on Lucas's face—sharp, persistent, and quietly dangerous.

"I don't like where this is going," he muttered, his tone dry as sand. "And I really don't like that look, Lucas."

Lucas raised an eyebrow. "Can you recommend someone who might know something?"

Elijah didn't groan, not quite, but the sound he made was close. "I've told you before. The underground doesn't turn on its own. Not for us. Not for anyone." He ran a hand through his crimson hair and sighed in frustration. "And Ethan… Ethan's especially bad. Trying to get information from him when he's already said no is like trying to pull teeth with a spoon."

When Lucas didn't waver, Elijah groaned aloud this time and flung his pen down onto the desk. "Fine. Just don't say I didn't warn you when this turns into a total disaster." He ignored the quiet chuckles that passed around the room—Jonan smirking into his palm, Allen exchanging an amused look with Taylor.

Elijah jabbed a finger in Lucas's direction. "But listen to me, because this part matters: you can't go alone. They'll chew you up and spit you out, badge and all."

"Leonid," Lucas said, already turning.

The well-built water-user gave a short nod, the soft material of his scarf shifting as he moved. His dark blue eyes were already narrowing. He pushed away from the wall where he'd been leaning and folded his arms. "Where do we find your informant?"

Leonid said it calmly, but his mind had already gone into mission mode—assessing loadout, potential weapons, and routes in and out.

Leonid was the team's shield, the one whose presence always brought a sense of security. Where Lucas brought strategy and precision, Leonid brought grounded strength. And when the two of them moved together, it was with the easy, fluid precision of veterans who trusted each other with their lives.

Elijah exhaled and shook his head, muttering under his breath. "For the love of the Goddess, just don't piss Ethan off. He's not someone we can afford to lose. He's the underground's best informant. The man's practically a ghost even to the underground, and it took me years—years, to earn the tiniest sliver of trust." His voice grew more serious, more worn. "He doesn't work with the ESA, not unless I personally vouch for it. And even then, he picks and chooses what to share."

Lucas gave a small nod. "We'll be careful. No pressure, no threats. Just conversation."

Elijah shot him a flat look. "I don't believe you, but fine."

He tore a page from the small notebook he kept tucked in his coat, scrawling something onto it with quick, precise strokes. He handed it over, meeting Lucas's eyes.

Lucas read the address. And paled.

Elijah only nodded, solemn and serious now. "Be careful. And don't go unarmed. Not there."

Lucas glanced again at the address, his fingers tightening around the paper. He met Leonid's eyes, and in that wordless moment, both men understood exactly what kind of place they were walking into.

"…Zalfari," Lucas said quietly.

The word hung in the air like a drop of cold water on burning skin. None of them spoke, but every member of Team Alpha felt the same chill run down their spine.

Zalfari wasn't a place for the faint of heart. Not even for the trained.

But this was Team Alpha—each of them lethal in their own right, yet stronger when together. In two years of chasing Aegis, they had built a bond shaped by fire and forged in trust. They were a team not because the ESA had assembled them, but because they had chosen each other, again and again, in the heat of battle and the silence of aftermath.

Jonan, the demolition expert with a mischievous grin and nerves of steel, stood and stretched, cracking his knuckles. "Well, if we're going to hell, might as well bring fireworks," he muttered.

Allen grinned at his best friend, already grabbing a toolkit from the shelf. "Just don't blow up the contact, yeah?"

Taylor let out a sigh and tucked her dark ponytail over her shoulder. "Please don't make me have to draw up a condolence letter to the informant's family."

Even Elijah cracked a reluctant smile.

They were going into Zalfari. They were going in together.

And whatever came next, whatever Aegis had stirred up, whatever truths waited in the shadows, Team Alpha would face it as one.

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