The Councillor's Office was quiet yet again. The greying storm outside pressed rain against the glass façade of the spire, yet no sound vibrates through. Within that silence, Director Samir stood before the Councillor's desk, his reflection fractured across the polished alloy floor.
"Progress?" she asked without looking up, stylus poised above the briefing tablet.
"Reactivation is complete," he answered.
"We have restored ninety-two percent of the Division's functional capabilities. Many of which were still functional post the purge. Field agents have returned, three of which are elite veterans who have successfully reinstated the other veterans."
"The Councillor's stylus halted mid-air. "And the signal?"
Samir hesitated a bit too long. "Origin still uncertain. It wasn't an echo, ma'am. The voice modulation matches Babel-ere transmissions within our restored archives. Whoever had sent it, used the exact frequency we know."
The Councillor leaned back, the faint hum of her desk lamp filling the pause. "So the rumour persists."
"Yes," Samir admitted. "And the Division believes it could be authentic."
"Belief," she echoed softly, "is dangerous Director. We don't fund belief; we fund certainty."
He met her gaze with dying eyes. "Certainty died with Babel."
The line hung heavy between them until she sighed and signed the report. "Keep your people contained. I know where you stand, Director. But I want to know of updates on every transmission she intercepts. Heleran Dominion has already asked questions, and the Iron Accord has begun reconnaissance near Ganzir's perimeter. If an Architect truly survived..." Her words faded, replaced by the hum of the lamp once more. "No, never mind that. You're dismissed."
Samir inclined his head. "Understood Councillor."
She kept her dead down to the datapad as he turned to depart from her presence. "And Director, don't stand where you may fall."
"Yes, ma'am."
The door closed behind him with a fluid motion. Outside the office, the hum of activity returned, footsteps, murmurs, speech. Samir paused by the panoramic window that overlooked the city's lights. Far beyond, from what he can see, lightning crawled through the horizon over Ganzir's dead plains.
—————
The corridors of the Council Spire were already bustling by the time Samir returned to the Division's floors. Through the glass walls, the morning shift of personnel flowed like a silent tide; clerks, officers, couriers, all unaware of the Division acting quietly around them.
When the lit doors sealed him in, the noise of bureau activity disappeared. The traversal carried him back into the dim hum of the Observation Division, a place the sun can't warm.
"Good morning, Director," Seraphine's voice was the first to greet him before the doors opened. Calm, practiced, slightly pleased, all while threaded with her signature faint, electronic distortion, like a human breath caught in static.
"Morning, Administrator." Samir replied as he stepped into the operations chamber. The central console were already awake. Half the active monitors around it were showing survey grids of the Eastern Continent, others displayed blurred aerial feeds from satellites still half-dormant since the war.
Around the outer tiers, a handful of operators moved between stations, most of them were new. The veterans, Elias, Haru and Voss, stood apart; observing rather than interfering with the rookies.
"Status report," Samir called, unbuttoning his coat as he approached the central dias.
Seraphine's projection materialised above it, her form clearer than yesterday, the edges were more refined; though her face still refused to settle into a single shape.
"Observation grid is online across eighty-four percent of the Coalition's territory. Remaining sectors are currently suffering from interference due to Wanderfield distortions. We have compensated by splicing feeds from Babelian satellites that we have access to. Overall efficiency has upped by twelve percent since midnight."
Samir nodded once, scanning a holographic readout that floated beside her. "And the recruits?"
"Under evaluation. Psycholoigcal stability is acceptable within parameters. Two have shown latent Esper potential, while suppressed, it is measurable. I recommend further monitoring."
He raised an eyebrow. "Monitor quietly, Administrator. I don't want them spooked this early into their new career."
"Of course," she aid, the tone carrying the faintest trace of amusement. "Would you like the briefing?"
"Proceed."
Seraphine dimmed the chamber lights around the central dias. Her form disappeared as the projectors were used to display other holograms, spiralling upwards. Maps, data strings, energy readings, all weaved together as veins of light in the air.
"Overnight analysis of the Babelian archives yielded incomplete recovery across one hundred and twenty-three data files. Thirty-seven were corrupted beyond repair. The remaining eighty-six were partially reconstructable."
Samir looked up from the console. "Define partially."
Her holograms flickered, then resolved to focus on a single display. Lines of text suspended in the air, incomplete fragments. Their Babelian script spliced with machine code.
"Even with my pre-purge partition," she began with a tone of mild annoyance, "some subdirectories were degraded irreversibly. These were the deepest layers of their research, an encryption beyond pre-war standards. I have attempted sequential restoration through adaptive heuristics. The result produced linguistic overlap inconsistent with Babel's known lexicon."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning," she said quietly, "the data was written by something else."
Samir straightened. Around them, the operators continued their work, oblivious. "A foreign system?"
"Not foreign," Seraphine corrected. "Parallel. The same data signatures appear in certain defence protocols I found buried in my own code; protocols I do not recall authorising."
Samir's brow furrowed. "You're saying someone used your framework as a bridge?"
Her eyes flickered into a different shape, a rare visual cue of discomfort that this Proto-AI can feel. "I am saying that the purge did not erase everything. Something was already hiding beneath the archives, nested within recovery sectors that even I could not fully access. When Babel fell, it buried its secrets with precision."
"Can.. you isolate it?"
"I can try, Director, but..." Her volume lowered, a soft modulation between machine and human.
"Whatever it is, it is not idle. While restoring the data, it recompiled part of my subroutines, as if it was listening."
The lights around the dias returned to normal, yet the room felt darker.
Samir rested his hands on the console, leaning forward. "Keep it contained Seraphine. If it's another layer of Babel's defensive architecture, we'll deal with it ourselves before the Councillor even breathes a word."
"As you wish," she said, almost tenderly. "But if it continues to move through the archives, Director, we may already be too late to contain it."
For a moment, the hum of the Division filled the silence again. Footsteps reverberated. Operators went about their duties. Above them, the returned holographic shape of Seraphine tilted her head slightly, as if listening to something only she could hear.
"Morning briefing concluded," she murmured, her machine heart returning to her duties. "Shall I prepare the field summary for the Ophanim project?"
"Yes. It's time we start moving again."
And as the room came alive with data streams and directives, one faint, unregistered process continued to pulse inside the archive network; small, recursive, and possibly ancient.
Somewhere in that code, a single line repeated without prompt:
LEGION—LINK—REQUESTING——AUTHORITY
——————
From the lower tiers of the operations chamber, Elias watched the silhouettes above. Director Samir standing beneath Seraphine's descending light, the two of them speaking in measured tones and their words lost beneath the noise of firing drills, yet their posture said enough; discussion, secrecy and tension.
He chose not to listen.
Instead, Elias turned his attention back to the rows of new recruits spread along the training hall, separated from the his position by only a layer of bulletproof glass. Through it, the Division's inner light made everything look colder, cleaner and more unreal than it was.
"Keep your arms straight," he muttered, moving from his position to walk between them. "Don't fight the recoil, control it. The weapon will be more accurate if you do that."
Most of them nodded, pretending to understand. A few were still tired from the other day; the sleepless train ride. One ejected his magazine, failing to catch it as it clattered loudly against the floor.
Elias's gaze cut towards him, causing him to freeze and murmur an apology.
Behind him, the faint resonance of Seraphine's voice filtered through the glass from the speakers back in the chamber. He ignored it again. Whatever passed between her and Samir was above his clearance; it always has been.
He learned a long ago that the Division's truth didn't like being seen.
He continued down the line. The recruits' weapons were unloaded, standard as per the drill, but each bore the faint blue insignia of the Coalition. He remembered when those emblems still meant something; before Ganzir, before Babel burned itself off the map.
One of the veterans, Voss, leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching with a faint smirk.
"Some of them still lean back as if the gun bites." He said.
"They'll learn," Elias replied, not turning to face him.
"They'll need to. If the Division is ever sent back in the field, then something is wrong."
Elias gave a faint, humourless smile. "When has it ever been right?"
Voss's smirk faded. "Fair."
They fell into silence for a while, the kind filled only by the sound of metal against metal and the occasional muffled yelps by a person getting their thumb caught against the slider.
Through the glass, Seraphine's form shifted again. Even from here, Elias could tell she was more stable today; sharper, smoother. He wondered what she was discussing with Samir that warranted such processing concentration. He wondered, too, if she could still hear when he thought about her.
"She's different," Voss murmured, following his gaze. "Shaper. Too sharp even."
"She's been gone a whole year," Elias said. "Maybe she learned a few new tricks in the dark."
Haru entered then, her coat folded over her arm, still slightly damp from the surface's rain.
"Director wants us three upstairs in five."
Elias arched an eyebrow. Voss just said "Huh?"
"Now, let's go, come on." she clapped her hands. "Apparently we're meant to go on a field mission. Seraphine says it's preliminary."
Voss exhaled through his nose. "Field work already? We're never truly in the right are we...?"
"The Division never wastes time, at least not since Samir took charge." Elias muttered. He turned to the recruits, clapping his hands once, a sharp sound that made them straighten instantly; a reaction he made sure to drill into them. "Break for fifteen. Hydrate and keep your neural bands active. If I find anyone with their implants idled, I'll have you re-run the calibration tests myself."
A murmur of acknowledgement followed. He handed his training pad to the nearest technician and started towards the door. "Make sure they finish the rest of the training..."
As the three of them ascended the stairway to the Operation Chamber then towards the Central Dias, Elias caught a final glimpse of Seraphine above the console, her head tilted slightly as if listening to something they can't pick up on, before disappearing. Samir stood facing them, arms folded behind him, watching them approach.
The sight tightened something in Elias's chest, not fear, not trust, just a quiet understanding that the Division was once again standing on the edge of something the world couldn't yet see.
Haru spoke softly as they stopped before him. "What's the brief, Director?"
The overhead lights dimmed to a steady pulse as Samir practiced his lines in his head a final time. Rows of terminals along the terraces had been filled; technicians murmured in half-whispers as their screens displayed their menial tasks. The Observation Division was deploying for the first time in a year.
Seraphine's voice broke the ambience like a cathedral bell. "Attention all field personnel. Division briefing is commencing at the Central Dias underneath Director Samir. All Holo-wall screens at his proximity will be synchronised to his datapad.
"Director, you have the room."
"Observation Division," Samir began, his voice calm but resonant enough to silence the distant murmurs in the room. "You're all familiar as to why we've been brought back. You all know what the Councillor wants from us. Now you'll hear mine."
Everyone fell entirely silent.
"During the Fifth Year of the Decade war, Varkos forces penetrated two Kilometres into Ganzir's north-western outer-rim sector. Inside, they found a relic; Ophanim. A mobile command locomotive built by Babel's engineers to survive and observe within the worst environmental distortions known to us. She was recovered, retrofitted and became the Division's forward platform for deep-field operations."
Samir paused, eyes sweeping across the crowd. Veterans attentive, recruits partially in awe.
"For years since then, up to our disbandment, she served as the Division's backbone. Then, when Babel fell, and the Division was shuttered, Ophanim was sealed in Storage Chamber 04-S, beneath Narene's southern docks. No personnel has entered the site since the Purge. Her shielding has likely decayed and her neural core is cold."
He turned slightly towards the central console which begins projecting a schematic of the colossal machine, angular, segmented, armoured, with multiple carriages. The hologram rotated slowly above the dais, its light glancing off Samir's uniform.
"Your objective," he continued, "is to reawaken her."
He pointed towards the projection. "Ophanim remains intact. But during archive restoration, the Administrator detected an anomaly, a dormant subroutine still embedded in her pre-war code. Babelian in design, Architect-grade encryption. Whatever remains of her original directive has never been fully overwritten."
He let the statement linger, heavy as tungsten.
"So this will not be just a recovery mission, but rather a reactivation. Keep it controlled, cautious and silent. No outside interference, no Council technicians and especially no military oversight. This operation remains under Observation authority only."
The projection flickered, layering operational maps just above the holo-walls before properly integrating into the 2D displays. Shown by it, was an undercity schematic, storage tunnels and geothermal lines used to power the nation.
Samir continued on, "Elias will form up as the Field-Team's leader. He along with his men will descend to the chamber and oversee manual startup."
Voss gives Elias a light bump on the shoulder.
"Seraphine will be watching through the nation's network, as will we. However, you," He turns to face Elias directly, "are to ensure the Ophanim is segregated from any network until stability of whatever lays dormant inside it is confirmed."
Elias shifted slightly under his scrutinising gaze, "What if the original Babel protocol reawakens with her?"
"She's with us now." Samir answers quickly, "Now, the Ophanim is not just a train. She's a piece of Babel's mind. Unlike the Division which is half-Babel and half-Varkos, her network architecture is mainly comprised of Babel, not Varkos. Once we reactivate her, we'll gain the only sensor array capable of penetrating deep into sensor jamming zones, such as the ones the Iron Accord set up around Ganzir's perimeter."
He took a step forward, his voice cutting cleaner now through the air.
"You all know the necessity of having her back in our service. The Dominion and the Accord would burn through a thousand men for this kind of technology. We'll do it with twenty, and twenty will return."
He gestured to the upper tier displays on the angled ceiling surrounding the central dais, where schedules and team assignments materialised. "Gear up begins immediately. Departure within the hour. Seraphine will handle your neural-link calibration while you prepare. Once Ophanim's field core reinitialises, we'll move her back under Division command."
A pause, then he added almost under his breath, "And remember, tensions are still tough around the edges with the other nations. The alliance was only made for the war. Satellites are sure to be placed on us once more. If someone, specifically the Iron Accord, finds out we're toying with Babel tech, there may be violent backlash."
The room was silent long after he finished.
Then Seraphine's voice, now softer, smoother and oddly more gently this time, spoke through the speakers. "Mission parameters acknowledged. Initial diagnostics on the chamber are complete. The facility remains sealed with minimal power storage and manpower."
Samir nodded once, then looked over the gathered faces. "You have your orders. Disperse."
As the operators began dispersing, Seraphine dimmed al projectors back to idle.
"I'm still not fully trusted." she said, her tone a projection showcasing her hurt.
"The war has affected everyone in many ways, some are still holding guns to their own hearts, don't take it personally. Elias does trust you, he's just weary."
For a moment, neither spoke. Seraphine's projection idled blankly, Samir just stood and watched as his operators walk to gather their gear.
"Director." Seraphine spoke quietly. "I've found something in the Archives."
——————
The prep-room smelled faintly of gun oil and sweaty air. Rows of lockers hummed with low, electromagnetic charge, readying each unit's gear for neural synchronisation. Cool, white lighting spilled across the floor, occasionally shadowed by the form of an operator putting on field-gear.
Elias stood by his locker, the faint click of the magnetic seals are the only sounds he made. The walls around him carried the rhythm of a place half-awake: the shufflying of recruits checking their harnesses, the muted chatter of technicians running last-minute diagnostics on exosuits and the distant, constant hum of the Division's superchargers built into the room for the equipment stored within it.
"It feels strange," Haru murmured as she secured the seal on her gauntlet. "Getting back into field rig after a year off. Like my body forgot the weight."
"I also dislike how much this gear makes us stand out. It's designed for when the Division has to send people to a battlefield, not an urban undercover mission.." Voss added.
"It's why we're going underground, deep below the city." Elias said absently, "Did you not pay attention to what Seraphine was showing us?"
"Eh-" Voss couldn't answer. Instead he tried to act busy, calibrating his optical implant with a handheld device, the mechanical lens in his left eye flickering as readouts scrolled across the surface. "It's still giving out some static," he muttered. "Can't tell if it's the implant or Seraphine's connection."
"It's both," Seraphine's voice drifted gently through his earpiece. "The implant's frequency receptor is outdated by two firmware cycles, it hasn't gotten any updates since the disbandment of the Division. I've adjusted your neural band accordingly."
Voss tilted his head, letting out a dry chuckle. "You're watching again."
"I'm always watching.," Seraphine replied, faint amusement hiding behind her tone. "It's what they built me for."
Haru rolled her eyes and muttered a Aquilian curse, too quiet for the younger recruits to hear.
Across the room, the rookies were busy fumbling with their mechanical gear, whispering to one another while trying to appear composed. Elias watched them for a moment, the uncertainty in their hands, they way they double checked their sidearm's safety and position.
He remembered being that young once, though he couldn't quite remember when.
"Attention Operators," Seraphine's voice returned, clearer now. "This is a reminder that Operation command within the field is defaulted to Lieutenant Elias under orders by Division Director Samir."
A chorus of muted acknowledgements followed.
"Mission objective," she continued, "is to reactive and stabilise the Ophanim's main core. Observation operators have reported a wanderfield storm near the southern port. While the Ophanim is stored underground, you should expect atmospheric degradation and magnetic interference. Wanderfield residuals are commonly minimal at this depth but may fluctuate during the reactivation phase. Standard-Issue respirators are mandatory for this deployment."
Voss finished his half-assed calibration and snapped the device shut. "Always loved her optimism."
"I'm simply thorough," Seraphine replied cooly. "Field-Team's departure will commence in five minutes. Elevator A-3 has been cleared from the entire building. It will take you all to a descent down to Dock Sublevel Four. The same sub-terrain level the Ophanim was stored in. Convoy drones are active in these tunnels and are under my navigation. Once the chamber doors are opened, manual override must be performed locally. I cannot interact with the Ophanim directly until internal synchronisation begins."
"Does she know she already said that earlier..?" Elias hears one of the rookies ask another.
"She's making sure you newbies know what to do. Consider it a nicer form of drilling."
"Thank you." Seraphine whispers in his earpiece; human.
Elias said nothing in return, he didn't need to. Pulling on his coat, the same dark-grey field from years ago, he looked up at the overhead speaker. "We'll be going now Seraphine. keep an eye on us."
"Understood Lieutenant."
Haru approached, locking a power pack into her rifle. "You think she'll ever wake up?"
"She will," Elias said, almost instinctively.
Voss smiled, slinging his weapon over his shoulder. "You sound sure."
"I'm not," Elias replied quietly. "It was a bitch to get her to start when we first got her. But, it's better than sounding afraid in front of the rookies."
He checks his watch, observing how the seconds tick down.
A low chime echoed through the chamber, Seraphine's signal for departure. The recruits stood up and lined up automatically, each in their sealed suits, faces behind visors. The veterans took their places at the front.
"Alright," Elias said, his voice steady. "This is just a simple deployment. Travel through Varkos owned territory, avoid sunlight, retrieve a vehicle owned by us. Let's go."
The far wall split open with a hydraulic hiss, revealing the elevator platform behind it, a wide, spacious lift filled with white corporate lights. As the operators stepped onto the platform, Elias took one last glance back at the prep room, the empty benches, the silent lockers, the faint blue glow of the Division's emblem on the wall. Then he faced forward. Then the lift traversed, first sideways, then downwards. They were swallowed into the deep.