The night the Caelum struck, the Golden Triangle's turf smelled of rain and old diesel. Moonlight slid across corrugated roofs and pooled in the gutters like black mercury. Lanterns in crooked alleys blinked with the tired pulse of illicit commerce; men with hard eyes paced the streets in bored loops, believing their shadows long-established. They had not seen anything yet.
From the ridge two kilometers beyond the compound, Marco's recon team watched smoke curl from the nearest warehouse. EIDEN's voice moved through Novaeus's earpiece like a precise, clinical relay—no affect, only the arithmetic of danger.
"Sector heat map confirmed," EIDEN reported. "Targets: warehouse cluster alpha, command house beta, armory gamma. Personnel estimate: 143 armed. High-value target located: V. Sorn, faction lieutenant, probable command node inside compound B. Weather: calm. Civilians: sparse. Ingress points: three vehicular, four pedestrian. Suggested vectors: two assault teams daybreak, one overwatch insertion from the north ridge. Time to impact: immediate."
Novaeus did not speak. He had not needed to leave the city to issue the order; the design had been laid weeks earlier in a geometry of maps, money, and micro-insertions. But the execution—the clean, cold business of bodies in motion—was a thing to watch. He watched via feeds: the silhouette of Marco's van sliding into the shadow of the ridge, the careful lowering of black-clad operatives into the night.
They moved like a single, disciplined organism. The enhanced units—men and women who had taken Novaeus's serum—slid down the wire like dark petals. Their training was a sequence of practiced arithmetic: breath, foot, hand; every movement minimized exposure, maximized effect. They were quiet enough that the rats in the warehouses did not stir.
At 02:13, the first pulse pierced the air: a single, surgically precise explosion that removed the outer security post without collapsing the whole structure. The charge was a whisper compared to a bomb, a removal of a hinge, a seam undone. Men on the wall tumbled like ragdolls, snagged by grapples. Within seconds, the assault teams were inside—two dozen shadows uncoiling into motion.
EIDEN narrated through the comms with the compassion of a scalpel.
"Team Alpha: breach executed. Interior sweep in progress. Minimal external alarms. Team Bravo: perimeter locked. Overwatch: dispersal of electronic countermeasures complete. Armory gamma: active resistance detected—two-to-four heavy gunners with improvised automatic platforms. Recommend suppression fire from Bravo."
The firefight was not cinematic. It was close, ragged, efficient. The Triangle's men were surprised and barbarically brave—men who had gambled everything on speed and greed, not on the careful patience of a syndicate that had learned the arithmetic of power. The first exchange was a staccato of shots, a stench of hot metal and the boxy roar of automatic weapons. Light flared as muzzle flash licked the inside of the corrugated walls.
Marco's men adjusted. Small, hard-shouldered burly figures moved with the animal economy of trained killers. They did not halloo or cry for vengeance; they flowed. Precision suppressive fire pinned the heavy gunners while a growing black silhouette—Team Charlie—moved in to sever the weapon platforms' feed and jam the ammunition belts.
Blood came quickly. It always did when steel met skin. A gunner, a broad man with a tattooed throat, took a round to the shoulder and folded against a crate of nitro canisters; the scent of frying protein and copper filled the air. Another man took a slug in the thigh and sank to his knees, both hands mashing at the wound until his grip gave way. The sound of inhalation changed then, from steady to ragged; it became a time-marker. Marco's men finished what they needed with clinical speed—one neck-stab, a short burst at an exposed temple when hesitation might allow an enemy to cry out.
Novaeus regarded the live feeds. His face, already carved by sleep, was the blank of a stone. EIDEN annotated the scene with numbers, with small adjustments.
"Clear routes C and D. Hostile neutralized at armory gamma. Casualty report: hostile KIA five, WIA three. Friendly status: one minor concussive trauma, one bruised rib. No operatives compromised. Extraction ETA twenty minutes."
The clearing of the armory was the point of the operation. Guns, boxes of ammunition, and improvised explosive materials were removed, cataloged, and either detonated in place with controlled charges or crated for transport. The Triangle had thought its weapons stock would make them untouchable; it had miscalculated where the true weaponry came from.
There was gore enough to make quieter men flinch. A young trafficker, his face still soft with boyish fat, tried to run and was clipped across the throat; the artery spurted in a red arc. Another man's lower leg was blown away by a fragmentation charge meant for a vehicle; he screamed until sedated under an operant's gloved hand. Teams moved through the warehouse with the mechanical detachment of surgeons excising infection. Blood pooled in oily rills beneath pallets; Conrad, a veteran operative with bristled hair, flicked it away with the stoicism of someone accustomed to the sight. Nothing poetic in it—only utility.
At the command house, it was different. The lieutenant they sought was not a fool. V. Sorn had stacked his rooms with the soft comforts of a man who believed in safety: false floors, a cellar with ironbolts, a phone switchboard of copper wires and burner cells. He had a small cadre of fighters loyal for pay, not for cause. Yet loyalty had its limits; loyalty to money bleeds quickly when the ledger flips.
Team Delta struck the command house at the western flank. They unbolted a window and eased in like wet ink into paper. One operative—Zara—moved through the inner corridor and found the lieutenant in a room maze, holding a pistol and a narrow, jagged rage. He fired without aim and missed. She returned fire. The two men, or rather the man and the operative, were both breathing heavily as the second one fell. The feed cut to grey for a heartbeat as a camera shifted.
"He's down," EIDEN reported. "V. Sorn confirmed KIA. Command node destabilized. Secondary leadership fracturing. Intercepted comms show confusion at 02:19. Recommend immediate extraction of intelligence and assets before counterforce organizes."
Marco's men requisitioned the lieutenant's comms, his notes. There were lists—routes, contacts, bank boxes, names. They photographed the ledger, ripped out SIM cards, smeared them in solvent. Nothing was spared. The ledger would be sent to Novaeus; the names would be categorized, monetized, neutralized if necessary.
Outside, chaos caught at the edges. The Triangle's remnant fighters attempted to muster in alleys, wielding machetes and shotguns that coughed with the tremor of inexperience. They ran into ambushes. One band, moving toward the docks to escape by boat, fell under a fusillade of dark shapes—snipers who had already taken the heights. The shots were surgical, a math of wind and distance calculated by EIDEN's algorithms and implemented by Marco's marksmen. Bodies hit the asphalt like dropped sacks. Blood flowed outward like leaking ink, black streaks on tar.
Among the departed, one attempted to shout a rally-cry, a meaningless howl for men who had never been more than cogs. His head opened like a rotten fruit under a single, obscene shot; the slurry of red and bone was the kind of image the new recruits would sleep with for nights and learn to unsee.
EIDEN's voice was a constant through it: observational, precise. "Secondary units neutralized in sector three. Five hostile groups attempted egress. Two boats disabled at dock. No civilian casualties reported. Recommend controlled demobilization sequence to prevent regional spillover."
They found children in one collapsed building—two small figures huddled with eyes too old for their faces. Marco paused, and someone swore at him through the comm before the operative with a medical kit scooped them up, warm hands under tiny shoulder blades. EIDEN queued a local ambulance route and masked the movement beneath unrelated municipal traffic using falsified reports. For Novaeus, this was not charity; it was calculation. A child resuscitated now was a quiet ledger item later—a way to buy silence or gratitude if needed. But Marco's face hardened as he watched the child coughing up dust. He handed them to an operative with a small stuffed animal from his own pack. There were things systems could not measure: pity, optics, the currency of rumor.
By 03:12, the main objectives were achieved. Armory gamma was empty of usable stock; the command house was gutted of leadership and the ledger secured; several docks were disabled. The Triangle was in disarray. Small fires consumed stacks of contraband; the warehouse roofs reflected flames like bruises in a dark mirror.
They burned what they could not take. Frankly, they incinerated the rest. The air thickened, bringing a tart hardness to the nightside breath of the compound. A black cloud from the largest warehouse rolled low, carrying the scent of burning polymers and oil. It would feed rumor for days.
EIDEN's after-action tally came in with detached efficiency.
"Operation status: phase one complete," EIDEN said as the teams began extraction. "Confirmed hostile KIA: twenty-three. WIA: seventeen. Friendly KIA: zero. Friendly WIA: three—two stabilized and extracted, one moderate, transport en route. Collateral civilian casualty: none. Material assets destroyed: armory gamma—full detonation sequences executed on-site for volatile munitions. Property damage: warehouse cluster alpha—estimated eighty percent destruction. Docks: two disabled, minor environmental impact flagged; cleanup operations will be scheduled to mitigate. Intelligence yield: significant—pilot code, manifest copies, contact ledger, procurement channels. Immediate tactical result: command hierarchy decapitated, expected local destabilization. Probable regional reaction: short-term retaliatory strikes from displaced elements, long-term erosion of Golden Triangle control in targeted sectors. Recommend: maintain pressure, establish local puppet cell, begin systemic absorption of remaining operatives via negotiated surrender with enforcement conditions. Extraction complete in T plus zero point nine hours."
When Marco's team came up the ridge again, Novaeus watched them on-screen—black, blood-streaked faces, gloved hands wiping the sweat and red from their forearms. They had a crate: the lieutenant's ledger and a small chest of cash. They had two boys rescued from a collapsing partition and one operative with a stitched rib.
Marco's voice in Novaeus's ear was flat. "It's done. The ledger's clean. We got manifests and procurement lines. We burned everything else. We took two boats—one primary, one runabout. Bodies are being catalogued. The alley kids will get medical. No friendly losses, sir."
"Good," Novaeus said. He allowed himself the smallest of smiles. Success had a way of tasting like that—a clean, metallic tang. He did not celebrate. He did not call for triumph. He issued a handful of cold instructions with his usual economy.