The Malvador air was the smell of charred copper and shattered dreams. The city was an oven of ambition—steam billowing up from its giant metal girders, concrete spires hiding the horizon behind them. To the world outside, it was a progress kingdom. But to the five boys cramped in Bastion Hostel's east wing, it was a childhood graveyard.
The silence at the funeral had been louder than the gunfire that killed Dorik's uncle.
Rain drummed at the windows of the hostel. They said nothing. Not for hours. The five of them sat together in the common room with cracked walls, dripping wet shoes, and uniforms and eyes smeared. There had not been a need for comfort words, and no one was capable of pretense.
Dorik's hand shook, but he kept it hidden in the crease of his blazer. He hadn't cried. Not when the bullet hit his uncle in the neck. Not when the body fell to the ground. Not when the police questioned him. And not now.
Vinray sat next to him, spine straight, quiet. Not with platitudes. Just with presence.
"We're going to be like them," Nevan groaned. His voice creaked like withered wood. "We're going to die before we even live."
"No," Vinray said.
His voice froze the room. The word wasn't audible, but it was steel. And the way he spoke it, made them all look at him.
"No," he said. "We end the cycle. We don't turn into them. We create something different."
Kael laughed bitterly. "What? An empire from a hostel room?"
Vinray's eyes didn't waver. "Yes."
They looked at him like he'd lost his mind. But deep inside, something sparked in each of them. Not belief. Not yet. But curiosity.
"We make a pact," Vinray said. "Right now. We'll rise together. No matter what it takes."
Jinno, who had barely said a word since the funeral, looked up. "And if one of us loses his way?"
Vinray turned to him slowly. "Then the others drag him back. Or burn everything down trying."
It wasn't a plan. It was a declaration.
They stood in a circle. In the dimly lit room where walls peeled and floor creaked under their shoes. They cut their palms—Kael pausing for a moment, Nevan wincing. Blood mingled in the center of their clasped fists.
Dorik spoke first, in a whisper, "We live for each other."
Jinno continued, "We protect each other."
Kael nodded. "We rise together."
Nevan smiled weakly, "Or fall as one."
Vinray shut it. "We become more than what they made us."
The oath held them together stronger than any bloodline. At that moment, they weren't broken boys in a dying city. They were something else. The spark of a future that had no name yet—but it would.
The following year was living. School during the day, odd jobs at night. Vinray swept floors in a robotics company lab for ten credits per hour. Kael worked data entry and bill collectors. Jinno worked in a dying bookstore, soaking up information like a sponge. Dorik paid for their meals in underground fights. Nevan—Nevan scammed, flirted with anarchy, and returned hot electronics with a smile and a black eye.
They invested all their spare cash in one commodity: information. Textbooks, pirated lectures, black-market AI modules. They constructed an off-the-books network in the basement of the hostel, threading wires through cracked walls and recycled garbage. By seventeen, they were operating server farms on off-grid power. By eighteen, they had a functional prototype for a decentralized prediction engine.
They named it: "Specter."
Specter did not just predict patterns. It predicted movement. Markets. Trends. Reactions. Human intention.
Kael pitched it to a shell company he'd created under a false name. They had investors in two weeks. They were meeting in secret with corporate suits in crummy cafes within four weeks.
No one had any idea that five teens had created the most sophisticated behavior prediction system on the continent.
Vinray kept himself behind the scenes. He'd bring Kael up to speed, set strategy, rewrite code with Jinno at midnight and run tests against algorithms with Dorik under neural stress. But he never entered the limelight.
"You created it," Kael said to him one day. "Why not claim credit?"
"I don't need credit," Vinray replied. "I need control."
The first betrayal followed.
There was a man named Thur Askel, one of their original investors, who volunteered to go Specter international. He vowed infrastructure. Protection. Publicity. They signed on.
In months, he'd patented their code under a phony company and attempted to freeze them out.
Vinray did not yell. He did not freak out.
He just stated, "We cut his legs off."
Within thirty-six hours, they compromised every server Askel had. Nevan and Dorik plundered his off-site backups. Kael used skeletons in the man's mistress to make him resign from the board. Jinno re-coded Specter's heart code, closing Askel out of the one thing he imagined he owned.
When Askel pleaded to be allowed to bargain, Vinray sent him only one message: "You should've read the contract better."
After that, they trusted nobody outside the inner circle.
At age twenty, they established their first official company: Qezarp Labs. Publicly a data analytics company. Privately, a command center for their growing empire.
Each brother had a division:
Vinray: Core strategy, advanced manufacturing, and AI oversight.
Kael: Finance, investments, and global currency infiltration.
Jinno: Cybersecurity, machine learning, and behavioral mapping.
Dorik: Physical operations, enforcement, and acquisition logistics.
Nevan: Public relations, infiltration, and social influence.
Their approach was basic: penetrate each industry. Construct intangible scaffolds. Never reveal the whole image.
Vinray had a phrase: "Power is loudest when it's silent."
And they adhered to it tenaciously.
By the age of twenty-three, Qezarp Labs was merely the façade. Underneath, five separate conglomerates started emerging.
Dasa Holdings (Vinray) – The motor. Robotics, AI arms, cutting-edge manufacturing. At the close of the decade, it made 75% of the world's smart goods.
Ronex Global (Kael) – The vault. An untraceable web of investments manipulating commodities, digital currencies, and national debts.
Marquez Nexus (Jinno) – The code. Cybersecurity companies, AI research, deep-learning defense contracts.
Senn Corps (Dorik) – The shield. Industrial logistics, private security, resource extraction.
Korr Influence (Nevan) – The veil. Media networks, celebrity handlers, social engineering campaigns.
To the world, they were ambitious young billionaires.
To one another, they were still the boys from Bastion.
And to their enemies, they were specters. Invisible. Inaccessible.
But specters cast shadows.
At age twenty-four, their monitoring recorded a name that didn't belong. A rumor on the underweb. A code name.
Sarpanch.
A crew older than any corporation. Bigger than any nation. Fifty code-named individuals. No identifiable identity. No known organization. Only a single known objective: domination.
And they had taken notice.
The war hadn't begun yet. But its breezes were building.
In a hidden chamber beneath Vinray's primary factory—twenty meters underground, sealed in noise-nullifying alloy—the five met.
Vinray placed a photo on the table. A body. Tortured. Marked with the Sarpanch symbol.
Kael stared at it. "They're warning us."
Jinno shook his head. "They're provoking us."
Nevan exhaled. "They want to see how far we'll go."
Dorik cracked his knuckles. "Farther than they're ready for."
Vinray didn't speak for a while. Then he said:
"This doesn't change anything. We go on. We grow. But from here on—"
He regarded them all.
"No errors. No trust beyond us. And no compassion."
The boys' vow became the doctrine of war among kings.
Empires were arising. And the war that would not be seen had commenced.