Insomniac Player

Two days later, the Nova Corps stepped into a room that officially didn’t exist.

The lift beneath the Viremont Secretariat ignored forty visible floors and kept descending for nearly a full minute. No level numbers appeared anywhere on the panel. Damien felt three separate barriers scan his body, his inventory, and his system identity before the doors finally opened.

Sir Martin waited on the other side.

"No recording. No external messages. No summoned entities."

Hamari glanced at Damien. "Your new twin’s been specifically uninvited."

"He wasn’t planning to show up."

"That’s exactly what a secret twin would want us to believe."

The underground chamber held a long black table and a curved wall built entirely from inactive display panels. No guards stood inside. Only one other person waited, someone who looked barely past thirty.

Damien recognized him instantly. This was the same man who’d been in the room when John tore through the government interrogation hall, the one who’d bowed to Damien, apologized, and slapped a regional president in front of half the administration. Today he wore a plain charcoal suit, no medals, no visible weapon.

The system filled in his name now that the room’s privacy field allowed it.

➤[Elias Rowe]

➤[Prime Minister, Earth-69 Central Government]

➤[Further information restricted.]

Elias stood as they entered. "Thank you for coming."

Naked Nun looked around the windowless room. "If this turns into an assassination, I’d like it on record that the location has no atmosphere whatsoever."

"This will not become an assassination," Martin said.

"Then I suppose the atmosphere matters less."

Daria picked a seat. "Ignore her."

"People keep trying," Naked Nun said. "My persistence should really be admired at this point."

John stayed standing behind Damien’s chair. Plenty of empty seats sat around the table, including one clearly built for someone his size, but he crossed his arms and watched Elias instead. The Prime Minister noticed and said nothing about it.

Once everyone settled, Elias touched the table, and the curved wall came alive.

A map of Earth-69 unfolded across it, split into two hundred nine regions, hundreds of red points scattered over the surface. Damien assumed gates at first.

Then the images started.

A warehouse full of wrapped narcotics stacked beside crates of healing potions. A destroyed passenger train. A residential room fitted with chains, suppression collars, and twelve narrow beds. An inventory seizure list carrying the names of missing children. A masked execution, recorded from three separate angles.

Doctor Smoke’s cigarette stayed unlit between her fingers the whole time. For the first time since Damien had known her, she didn’t even try to light it.

Elias let the images sit there.

"The system brought miracles. It cured diseases that used to tear families apart. It gave us food production, real healing, new materials, access to other worlds entirely." The map rotated slowly under his words. "It also gave criminals inventories nobody can search without proper authority. Movement skills that cross borders without stopping. Classes built for disguise, coercion, poison, information theft. The old criminal networks adapted to all of it faster than most governments managed to."

Several red points merged into seven larger symbols.

"Five years ago, they started merging together."

Words bloomed above the map.

NEVA ORDER

Hamari’s smile dropped away. "Nova Corps and Neva Order."

"The similarity’s coincidental," Martin said.

"It’s going to ruin every search result we ever run."

"Hamari," Daria said quietly.

She nodded and went still.

Elias changed the display. A structure appeared, most of it made of question marks. Thousands of street-level groups fed money upward through transport circles, regional brokers, unidentified commanders. Twelve blank silhouettes stood above all of it, and one final space waited empty at the very top.

"The Neva Order didn’t just ally with existing criminal groups. It absorbed them. Drug networks, assassination guilds, traffickers, kidnappers, terrorist cells, illegal class laboratories, black-market gate teams, all of it now moves resources through one shared structure."

Doctor Smoke leaned in. "How much of that’s actually confirmed?"

"Enough to bury a city."

"That wasn’t my question."

Martin answered instead. "Arrests, financial transfers, or captured communications support thirty-two percent of what you’re seeing. Another twenty-one percent carries high confidence. The rest is pattern analysis."

"Better answer," Doctor Smoke said.

Damien studied the map. The red points didn’t follow regional borders at all. They followed rail lines, sanctuary routes, farming centers, cities where gate materials changed hands. Some regions carried almost no marks. Others looked less like a map and more like an open wound.

"Why announce the name at all?"

Elias looked at him directly. "We didn’t."

"They did, then. An organization hidden this well doesn’t need a shared name unless it wants the smaller groups to know they belong to something bigger."

Something sharpened behind Martin’s expression.

Elias nodded slowly. "Fear’s part of the structure itself. A local gang can threaten one neighborhood. A branch of the Neva Order can imply retaliation from anywhere on the planet."

"Or the name’s a product," Daria said. "They sell protection and reputation to whoever joins."

"That’s our working theory too."

Naked Nun looked at the twelve silhouettes. "Levels?"

"Unknown."

"Classes?"

"Unknown."

"Can they fight?"

"Yes."

She smiled again. "Finally, something useful."

Doctor Smoke tucked the unlit cigarette behind her ear. "You’ve got armies, intelligence divisions, guild agreements, and men like Martin standing around. Why are five freelancers sitting in this room?"

Elias replaced the map with photographs of government officials. Red crosses marked some of the faces. Others carried vanished dates instead. Three wore prison intake numbers.

"Because every large operation eventually reaches someone they already own. Raid orders leak. Witnesses vanish. Evidence gets swapped out before it reaches a courtroom. When we move soldiers, the target already knows before the transports even leave the ground."

Imran wasn’t in the room, but Damien could already picture the general’s exact response. Compartmentalize the information. Cut the number of people who know. Use people who fall outside the predictable command structure.

"You want a small team," Damien said.

"A new one," Elias corrected. "Doctor Smoke has a service record, but no active unit right now. Madam Marvel’s family makes her too visible, but they have no connection to this investigation at all. Naked Nun and DeluluGirl have never worked under military intelligence in their lives. And you came back to this world recently enough that the Neva Order has no established read on you whatsoever."

"And John?"

Elias glanced past Damien at the giant standing behind him.

"Sir John was invited because any plan built around you without his knowledge would survive right up until the moment he found out about it."

John’s mustache shifted. "Correct."

"He’s also one of the very few people whose strength makes direct coercion unlikely."

"Less correct." John’s voice went flat. "Direct coercion is possible exactly once."

Nobody asked what happened after that once.

Elias moved to the next image. A boy, maybe fourteen, wearing an awakening restraint around his neck. A number sat written across the photograph where a name should have been.

"The Order has started kidnapping young people shortly before their expected awakening. They try to shape the class conditions in advance, force contracts the moment the awakening actually happens, then sell off whoever comes out useful. The ones who awaken into weak classes simply disappear."

The room went colder without a single spell being cast.

Saint Mary’s, Damien thought immediately. Kids from families with no influence made easy targets. People could go missing for days without anyone noticing. Sometimes longer.

Sister Agnes would notice. Noticing and actually stopping something, though, had never been the same thing.

"How many?"

"Confirmed, four hundred seventeen in the last year alone. Estimated, over two thousand."

John’s fingers closed around the back of Damien’s chair. Metal bent audibly under his grip.

Elias watched it happen without flinching.

"This isn’t a gate. There’s no clearing condition. No boss waiting at the end of it. No system announcement telling us the moment we’ve actually won." The unknown silhouettes returned to the wall. "It’s made of people instead. That makes it more patient. More adaptable. In some ways, considerably more dangerous than anything we’ve fought so far."

Damien looked at the map again, at every red mark bleeding across it.

I spent years afraid of monsters, because monsters were at least honest about wanting me dead.

People smile first.

"What do you actually want from the Nova Corps?"

Elias closed the images of the missing children.

"Help us take it apart from the bottom up."

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