The Orvantian sky darkened prematurely that winter. Snow whispered down in feathery spirals, shushing footsteps and blunting the corners of a campus precariously balanced on the precipice of something unknown. Whispers of rumor whirled through the cold air—students gone missing, professors walking out without goodbyes, whole departments closed or reorganized in the dead of night. No hint. No official word. But the unease seeped deep, writhing under the skin of every edifice.
Within Room 17-C, the heart of that quiet maelstrom, Vinray Dasa sat alone. Split-screen monitors with surveillance images, data crawls, logged communication intercepts ringed him. His gaze was still, measuring. Dean Rullien—a tenured functionary obligated to an off-conglomerate auditing firm—had started prying into sensitive grant channels and identified trends in student intelligence reports. He was too close.
"Time to test the Thirty," Vinray whispered, sending a signal deep within the system's neural matrix.
Under the old literature building, five masked agents stepped out of the darkness: Harrow, Wisp, Vanta, Echo, and Nox. They were not students. They were instruments of psychological warfare, precision crafted from chaos, forged in the crucible of Vinray's creation. Each had been hand-selected from disorder.
The objective was specific: steal Dean Rullien's personal data cache, destroy all backups he had, and coerce him into resigning—without ever knowing he had been compromised.
Kael Ronex stood on top of the economics faculty roof, his fingers typing across a quantum scrambler. His job was data interception and financial scrambling. If Rullien attempted to stash funds or call for assistance, Kael would intercept it before it could occur.
In the media lab, Jinno Marquez was already constructing a false narrative. He stoked a flow of imaginary grievances and salacious rumor into encrypted student forums, quietly implying Rullien had misused his position to muzzle intellectual dissent. The aim was disorientation, not destruction—a slow dismantling of the man's confidence.
Nevan Korr, ever a phantom in electronic form, organized a viral campaign: anonymous pamphlets called The Audit That Wasn't distributed within hours. They ridiculed policies Rullien couldn't recall making, with forged but persuasive student signatures.
Dorik Senn waited in the tunnels of the boilers, armed and quiet, the fail-safe in case the operation fell into chaos.
Within forty-eight hours, Dean Rullien resigned, citing "severe emotional exhaustion." His personal files irretrievably corrupted. His cloud keys disabled. Allies inaccessible. No evidence of manipulation.
The initial mission was done. Effective. Elegant. And completely invisible.
Yet something remained.
Later that evening, in the poorly lit archives beneath the main library, Venessa confronted Vinray. She glided like a flame, silent but burning, her amber eyes etched with worry.
You shattered a man's life without ever laying hands on him," she whispered.
Vinray didn't blink. "He was dangerous."
"And who will come next?"
His silence was reply enough.
Venessa regarded him, her tone level. "I went through the blueprint. You instilled binary empathy dampening into their psychological framework. You're programming human nature back in."
He didn't confirm or deny it.
"You're creating weapons of people, Vinray."
"We don't have time to doubt," he answered.
She moved closer. "Then taste the uncertainty. Or one day, you won't know who you are."
He remained silent. But he did not sleep that night.
Weeks went by, but the reverberation of that initial mission lingered.
Then came the breach.
An outside force codenamed Obelisk penetrated Orvantis. A deconstructor. A ghost stalker. His expertise was in finding rogue influence networks and bringing them down from the inside.
Vinray initiated surveillance detail: Wisp and Echo. Track. Watch. Do not intervene.
Three days passed.
Wisp came back by himself.
"Echo's gone."
Vinray's eyes did not shift. "Dead?"
Wisp paused. "Turned. Recruited."
For a minute, nothing was said. Then Dorik's knuckles rapped the concrete wall. Kael's fists clenched. Nevan blew smoke, eyes empty.
Vinray's tone was icy cold. "We are not gods. We bleed."
Then his eyes narrowed. "Bring him back. Not alive."
It was the first sanctioned kill.
Jinno used a synthetic memory virus—Echo's worst regrets, deepest doubts, turned into auditory hallucinations. Venessa, her hands shaking, created the erasure protocol: after Echo was killed, all brain-backups throughout the memory hive would be overwritten. No resurrection. No afterthought.
Dorik found him in the depths of an abandoned rail station.
When Echo turned, he didn't flee. He breathed Vinray's name softly, as if it still had meaning.
It didn't keep him alive.
No one said anything afterward. Not during cleanup. Not when they buried Echo's codename. His actual name was never spoken again. Not even to the others.
And with that, something changed inside the Thirty. The facade of invincibility was broken.
Now, there was fear.
Vinray again stood atop the bell tower, fists buried in his coat. Snow swirled down in ghostly drifts, covering the old stone and numbing the stillness. He saw Venessa step out onto the garden path below, alone. Her form drifted like a question he feared to answer.
He almost came down. Almost shouted.
Instead, he spun around and drew out a crumpled page from his jacket—ancient parchment, stained with thumb marks, marked with five signatures: the original agreement. The vow given by five boys to shield one another from the shadows.
It was encrypted now, photographed and locked in a safe of digital shields, but this one sheet—the actual sheet—he carried on him.
Because the ink had set.And so had the blood.But the conflict was just starting.