"Hey boo."

Angel stopped beside him on the street, her task force gear showing the last fifteen minutes on her the same way the road showed it everywhere else. A cut along her jaw that her biology was already handling. Her blood manipulation still active around her hands, the coating not yet stood down from combat ready.

She looked at the waste bin wedged into the transport gap. At the scorch marks on the road. At the Blood Fang bodies the task force units were already moving to contain.

"That was a show you put on," she said.

Noah looked at the street. "Your transport security needs work."

"That’s a conversation I’m going to be having with several people tomorrow morning." She glanced at him sideways. "You eaten?"

"Not since this morning."

"Dinner tonight," she said. "My place or somewhere out, doesn’t matter. I just." She stopped, started again. "Our schedules have been stupid since you got back. I want an actual evening."

Noah looked at her. She was looking back up at him with the directness she brought to everything, no performance in it, just Angel saying what she meant.

"I was going to call you about that," he said. "Was trying to figure out when you had a gap."

Something moved across her face that she didn’t fully manage to contain. Her chin lifted slightly. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

She held his gaze for a second longer than necessary, and whatever she was about to say next got interrupted by a stream drone hovering twenty feet away, its camera very deliberately pointed at the two of them standing close together in the middle of a destroyed street.

[Gambito307: WAIT IS THAT ANGEL WITH NOAH??]

[EclipseFanatic: bro who is the baddest girl Noah is with. Is it Sophie or blondebusty Lila]

[StreamGremlin: BLONDEBUSTY LILA I CANNOT]

[NightshadeX: it’s obviously the ethereal Sera, have you SEEN her]

[TacticalObserver: The Angel of Death is standing next to him right now so]

[GhostViewer44: all four of them are beautiful and all four of them would kill you without blinking. Mr Eclipse has a type]

[Gambito307: a man of culture is what he is. an absolute man of culture]

[StreamGremlin: the way Angel is looking at him though chat]

[EclipseFanatic: she’s looking UP at him, he got tall tall]

Angel glanced at the drone. Then back at Noah with a look that said she had clocked the chat and had decided it didn’t require a response.

"Tonight," she said.

"Tonight," he confirmed.

She turned back to her task force with the easy authority of someone returning to something that had been running fine without her and would continue to do so. Noah stayed long enough to help move two of the heavier Blood Fang bodies to containment, directed a structural assessment team toward the building column the transport had hit, and checked on the two civilians who had been drained. Both stable, task force medics had gotten to them fast enough.

Marcus appeared at his shoulder as he was finishing. Reyna on the other side.

"Good timing on the arrival," Marcus said.

"You called," Noah said.

"We call Lucas too and he takes seven minutes to get somewhere."

"I’ll tell him you said that."

"Please don’t."

They left the cleanup to Angel’s people and took the aerial route back to the harbor, the three of them in Marcus’s transport, Reyna already filing the incident report on her tablet before they had cleared the containment zone.

When they got back to base, Kelvin was waiting in the corridor outside Noah’s quarters.

Not pacing. Just standing there with his tablet and the expression of a man who had been thinking about something for long enough that it had become an emergency in his head even if it wasn’t one anywhere else.

"I need five minutes," Kelvin said.

Noah looked at him. "Is this about the facility wall?"

"No. Yes. Also no." Kelvin fell into step beside him as Noah pushed his door open. "Diana’s birthday is in three weeks."

Noah sat on the edge of his bed. "Okay."

"I want to do something for her. A party, a proper one, the whole thing. Decorations, people she loves, good food." He stopped. "She told me she doesn’t want a party."

"Then don’t throw her a party."

"But she deserves one."

"Kelvin."

"She spent months in a coma. She deserves a party."

"She also told you she doesn’t want one," Noah said. "Those two things can both be true."

Kelvin looked at his tablet like it might have an answer on it. "So what do I do."

"Ask Sophie," Noah said. "Or Lila. Or Sera. Any of the three of them will have a better read on this than me."

"I’m asking you."

"I know. I’m redirecting you. Because you and I are the wrong people for this specific problem." He looked at Kelvin. "Go ask Sophie. She’ll know exactly what Diana actually wants even if what Diana said was that she doesn’t want anything."

Kelvin considered this. "That’s actually good advice."

"I have my moments."

Kelvin left. Noah had exactly four minutes of quiet before his door opened again and Lucas came in without knocking, which was just how Lucas moved through spaces he considered his own.

"I want to duel," Lucas said.

Noah looked up at him.

"I’ve been thinking about it since you came back," Lucas continued. "The training post thing was information. The rhinosaur was information. But I want actual combat, actual conditions, see where we actually sit relative to each other." He crossed his arms. "You’ve been back for weeks and I’ve been patient."

"That’s true," Noah said. "You have."

"So."

"So yes," Noah said. "I’ve been expecting this since day three honestly."

Something shifted in Lucas’s expression that was as close to pleased as Lucas got. "Tomorrow morning. Lower training bay, before anyone else is using it."

"Works for me." Noah leaned back. "Though I should tell you the wall is still being repaired."

"I know. Kelvin cried about it in the group channel."

"He didn’t cry."

"He used four crying emojis. That’s crying."

Noah’s comm activated. Sam’s voice, steady and clear. "Noah, there’s an incoming transmission requesting your presence in the ops room. Message originated from Academy 12."

Noah sat up.

Lucas raised an eyebrow.

"Go," Lucas said. "Tomorrow morning. Don’t be late."

Noah blinked to the ops room before Lucas finished the sentence.

The ops room ran on a different energy from the rest of the facility. Quieter in a focused way, screens running continuously, the six technopaths Kelvin had personally recruited sitting at their stations with the particular stillness of people whose attention was somewhere else entirely, inside systems and networks that existed in dimensions adjacent to the physical room they were sitting in. Kelvin had spent three months finding each of them. He had described the process to Noah once as finding people who thought in frequencies rather than words.

Sam stood at the central console, three screens active in front of him.

"Academy 12," Noah said.

"Confirmed. Requested you specifically. Transmission is ready to connect on your go."

Noah nodded.

Sam opened the channel.

The screen resolved from static to a face Noah had not seen in years and had not realized until this exact moment how much he had missed.

Master Anng sat at a desk that Noah recognized, the same desk, the same wall behind it with the same faded Academy 12 insignia mounted slightly off-center, the same lamp in the corner that had always thrown too much light to the left. Everything exactly as it had been. The man himself was the same too, the compact frame, the close-cropped grey at his temples, the face that defaulted to an expression most people read as stern and that Noah had learned a long time ago was just what paying attention looked like on him.

For one second Anng was looking at the camera waiting for the connection to confirm.

Then his face did something it didn’t do in front of most people.

It broke into a grin.

"Master Anng," Noah said.

"Noah Eclipse," Anng said, and he said the name the way he had always said it, like it was both a greeting and an assessment. "You look different."

"I get that a lot lately."

"Taller."

"Little bit."

"Stronger." Anng leaned forward slightly, studying him through the screen with the same attention he had given every student he had ever trained. "Significantly stronger. Whatever you have been doing with yourself, it is working."

"How’s the academy?" Noah said.

"The academy is the academy." Anng sat back. "I have forty third-years who think they are ready for anything and will discover in approximately six weeks that they are ready for about forty percent of things. I have a second-year cohort that is more talented than any I have trained before which concerns me because talent without discipline is a liability." He paused. "And I have a first-year group that contains three individuals who remind me of people I used to teach and that concerns me for entirely different reasons."

Noah smiled. "Good concerns or bad concerns?"

"The interesting kind." Anng looked at him directly. "I want to see you face to face, Noah,"

"I can do that," Noah said. "When?"

"Today."

Noah blinked. "Today."

"You said you can do that."

"I did say that." He thought about Lucas waiting for a duel and mentally filed it under tomorrow. "Today works. It’s just that I thought I had something with Lucas but that was scheduled for tomorrow. Okay, give me an hour."

Anng nodded. "I will be here." Then, because Anng had always had a way of knowing things he shouldn’t have been able to know, he said, "The Grey boy. You two are going to fight."

"Tomorrow morning."

"Hm." Anng’s expression did something that in a less composed man would have been called excitement. "I always wondered, now that I am no longer responsible for either of you, who actually wins that."

Noah laughed. Genuinely, the kind that came up without asking permission. "I’ll let you know."

"See you in an hour," Anng said, and closed the channel.

---

He showered, changed into a black hoodie and sweatpants, pulled a baseball cap low, and took Seraleth’s car because his arrangement with Sophie’s old vehicle was a conversation he kept not having.

Academy 12 was eleven minutes by air from the harbor, the harbor was in the general direction of Sophie’s old house. He had made that flight in different directions on different days for some months and his hands still knew the route before his eyes caught the landmarks.

He set down in the visitor bay and got out.

A barracks was a barracks everywhere you went. Certain things didn’t change regardless of how advanced the world around them got. The layout, the particular quality of the air, the sound of training coming from multiple directions at once, the way people moved through shared spaces with the automatic awareness of individuals who had learned to operate in close proximity to others who were also dangerous.

He pulled the cap lower and walked.

’Don’t think about it,’ he told himself. ’Just walk.’

He thought about it anyway.

This was where Miss Harper had worked. Every morning for years, through these gates, down corridors he was currently walking through, cleaning and maintaining a place that trained the people she believed in even when those people didn’t believe in themselves yet. She had talked about the academy the way people talked about places that meant something to them, not always with warmth, sometimes with the fondness that came from knowing somewhere’s flaws completely and choosing to show up anyway.

He hadn’t been to her grave.

Nearly four weeks back and he hadn’t gone. He kept finding reasons and he knew they were reasons and not actual obstacles and he kept finding them anyway.

He kept walking.

Students moved around him, the usual flow of a training facility mid-morning, some in gear heading toward combat wings, some in academy uniforms moving between administrative buildings, a group running perimeter laps on the track visible through a gate to his left.

He kept his head down and his hands in his pockets and moved through it.

Someone stopped mid-conversation twenty feet to his right.

Then someone else.

’Here we go,’ he thought.

He could feel it, the attention arriving before any of them said anything, that particular shift in a space when something in it has been identified as significant. The aura wasn’t something he was projecting deliberately, it was just there, had been there since he came back, and in a place full of people conditioned from day one to read power differentials the way other people read weather, he might as well have been a lighthouse.

Whispers started behind him.

"...feel that?"

"...yeah what is that, who is..."

"...never seen someone built like that in the academy uniform..."

"...is he a student? He has to be an instructor at least..."

"...that aura though, that’s not instructor level, that’s..."

’They’re not wrong,’ he thought, and almost smiled. ’Power culture. You come up in these academies and the first thing you learn is what strength feels like when it’s near you. Because knowing that is survival. It tells you who to avoid and who to align with and where you sit in a room full of people who are all trying to become something dangerous.’

He had learned it the hard way. Showed up to Academy 12 as a first generation awakened, which in a building full of second and third gens was roughly equivalent to showing up to a footrace with one leg shorter than the other. Perfect Echo as his ability, a power that did nothing in any situation that mattered in a fight, which in an academy where fights were the primary curriculum was about as useful as knowing seventeen ways to make tea.

Then a school expedition. A beast hunt that went wrong in ways school beast hunts were not supposed to go wrong. A category three that should not have been in that zone. Him almost dying, and when he didn’t die, waking up with something in his head that hadn’t been there before and an egg in his inventory that he hadn’t put there.

’From that to this,’ he thought, walking through a corridor where every person he passed slowed down to figure out who he was. ’From nobody to whatever this is now. White hair and a class change and a system notification that says unknown projected outcome.’ He almost laughed out loud. ’Unknown projected outcome. That’s either the most terrifying thing anyone has ever told me or the most interesting. Some days it’s both.’

The whispers were getting more specific behind him.

"...wait, is that..."

"...no, can’t be, he wouldn’t just..."

"...look at the build though, and that hoodie, I think I saw this on stream last week..."

He turned a corner toward the martial arts wing.

Master Anng was already coming the other way, moving with the unhurried efficiency he moved everywhere, and he stopped when he saw Noah and looked at him the way he had always looked at students he was genuinely pleased to see, which he expressed the same way he expressed everything, with complete stillness and full attention.

"You’re early," Anng said.

"Habit."

Anng looked him over the way he had through the screen, properly this time, taking in the height and the frame and something else Noah wasn’t sure how to name.

"You have grown considerably," Anng said.

"Training," Noah said.

"More than training." Anng was quiet for a few steps. Then, "The reason I called you here."

Noah waited.

"I have students who are looking at what Eclipse Faction does and seeing a more attractive option than EDF service," Anng said. "Third years mostly. A few second years. They are making decisions I would like them to reconsider and I thought hearing from you directly might carry more weight than hearing it from me."

Noah looked at him. "You want me to talk them into staying in the military."

"I want you to tell them the truth of it," Anng said. "Whatever that truth is."

"Right," Noah said.

’So that’s why I’m here,’ he thought. ’Recruitment campaign. Unofficial, no insignia, just me showing up in a hoodie and a baseball cap to remind a room full of students that the EDF is worth their time.’ He almost laughed. ’Two days ago they sent a delegation to my house trying to get me back and now they’re working a different angle entirely. Through Anng.Through a man they know I’d walk across the city for without asking why.’

He looked at Anng walking beside him.

’Can’t even be annoyed about it,’ he thought. ’It’s genuinely smart.’

’Or maybe this is all his doing,’

"Assembled already?" Noah said.

"Have been for twenty minutes," Anng said, with the complete absence of apology that was one of his defining qualities.

Noah nodded. "Alright then."

The dojo was large, the same one Noah had trained in, the floor the same material, the same smell of sweat and effort that training spaces accumulated over time and never fully lost. Forty students sat in rows facing a cleared space at the front. They ranged from looking like they had been here long enough to be comfortable in the space to looking like people who knew they were here because someone important was coming and were trying to decide how to hold their faces about that.

They all looked at Noah when he came in.

He pulled the cap off.

The room reacted the way rooms reacted when they confirmed something they had been hoping was true. Someone in the second row said something to the person next to them in a voice that didn’t carry. Several people sat up straighter without deciding to.

Noah stood at the front of the room and looked at them.

’Forty people,’ he thought. ’Most of them are going to spend the next decade fighting things that are trying to kill them and everyone around them. Some of them are going to be very good at it. Some of them are going to die before they get the chance to be good at it. All of them are sitting here right now trying to figure out what their life is for.’

He knew that feeling from the inside.

"I’m sure most of you know me. But I’m just getting to meet you all for the first time so I’ll be straight with you. I heard some of you are thinking about going the faction route instead of EDF," he said. "Specifically looking at what Eclipse does and thinking that looks better."

Nobody said anything. Some of them looked at the floor.

"That’s a fair observation," he said. "So let me tell you how Eclipse actually works." He looked across the room. "We take contracts. That part is true. We also take eighty percent less commission than any other faction operating in the Eastern Cardinal. And the jobs we take without any commission at all, the calls that come in from settlements that can’t pay, from communities outside the city limits that the EDF response window doesn’t cover fast enough, those are the ones we answer first."

He let that sit.

"You leave the military and start a faction because you want freedom," he continued. "That part is also true. But freedom means the call comes in at three in the morning and there’s no commanding officer to decide whether Eclipse responds. There’s just you deciding. Every time. Without the structure telling you what the right answer is." He looked at a third-year in the front row who was watching him with the attention of someone filing everything away. "The EDF has a structure because structure is how you coordinate a response across four quadrants and multiple star systems against threats that don’t stop because you need sleep. That structure is not the enemy. It is genuinely necessary."

A hand went up in the third row. "Then why did you leave it?"

Noah looked at the student who had asked. Young, second year from the look of it, the kind of directness in the question that came from not having learned yet to soften things.

"Because the structure and I disagreed about some specific things," Noah said. "That’s a longer conversation. What I will tell you is that leaving didn’t mean the mission changed. Eclipse and the EDF are doing the same thing. We just do it from different positions."

The room was quiet for a moment.

Another hand. "Is it true you take any call? Even if there’s no payment?"

"Any call," Noah said. "If someone needs help and we can get there, we go."

The room shifted. Not dramatically, just the collective adjustment of people receiving information that reorganized something they thought they already understood.

He talked to them for forty minutes. Questions came from everywhere in the room, some of them sharp, some of them the kind that students asked when they were really asking something else underneath the surface question. He answered all of them the same way, directly and without making it more complicated than it needed to be.

When it was done Anng walked him out through the side entrance that opened onto the eastern grounds, the long stretch of training fields that ran along the academy’s outer wall. Afternoon light across it, a handful of students running drills at the far end.

They walked without particular direction, the way people walked when the walking was the point and not the destination.

"Kruel," Anng said.

"What about him."

"When he comes back." Anng kept his eyes on the grounds ahead. "And he will come back. I have seen enough to know that things like Kruel do not come once and then stop." He glanced at Noah. "Will you be ready?"

"Getting there," Noah said.

"And will I?" Anng said it without drama, just a question from one person to another. "I was not here for the first attack. There is an annual gathering, martial arts masters and instructors from across the Cardinal, has been running for longer than either of us has been alive. I have not missed it in twenty two years." He paused. "I came back to a city that looked like it had been through something I cannot fully imagine even having seen the aftermath."

Noah looked at him.

Anng at his age was still one of the most technically complete fighters Noah had ever trained under. The system had never classified him, Anng had no system, but if it had the number would have been something that made him uncomfortable.

"You’ll be there," Noah said. "I’m sure of it."

Anng nodded once, the way he accepted things that satisfied him, completely and without needing to say more about it.

They walked another twenty feet in comfortable quiet.

Then Anng said, "There is something strange about your energy today. I noticed it through the screen and I notice it more now standing next to you." He looked at Noah with the attention he had always given things he couldn’t immediately classify. "You were SSS ranked before you left for the vanguard program. That was already something I had no real explanation for." He paused. "Whatever you are now, I do not have an explanation for that either. And I have been doing this for thirty years."

Noah opened his mouth.

A voice came from behind him.

"Fancy having you back here."

Noah turned.

A young man stood maybe ten feet back, hands clasped behind him, the relaxed stance of someone who had been comfortable in his own body for a long time. Brown hair, around Noah’s age, maybe a year or two older. Tall, the kind of frame that said the training had been consistent and serious for years. A jaw that caught the afternoon light at an angle that suggested it had been cut from something that took its time. A name tag on the breast pocket of his shirt.

A smile on his face that knew something.

Noah looked at the name tag.

"Jayden Smoake," he said.