Full Sweep

The order left Sofie's lips like a quiet storm. No raised voice, no dramatic pause. Just four words, spoken with the weight of queens long buried and wars long forgotten.

"Full sweep. Cut every branch."

And that was all it took.

There were no drums. No marching anthems. No grand declarations to the world. The Black Knights didn't need fanfare, they were the fanfare, the silent kind, the kind that appeared without warning and left nothing behind but ruin and rumors.

They vanished from the Sky Fortress like smoke on a cold wind.

In the dead of night over Brazil, the jungle swayed with its usual symphony, until it didn't. Birds scattered, silence fell. Deep within the canopy, cloaked figures moved without light. A hidden lab, buried beneath vines and illusion, blinked on security feeds, then blinked off. When Volton's retrieval squad arrived twelve hours later, all they found were hollowed-out corridors, scorched tech, and a single insignia carved into a concrete wall: the Demonfire flame crossed by twin blades. No blood. No noise. No trace.

In Siberia, the snow never even melted. The sky barely shifted from grey, the cold too thick to breathe through without burning. A Reaper safehouse sat beneath layers of ice, protected by sonar fields and geothermal traps. None of it mattered. A Knight captain stepped out of the storm, clad in armor older than the very bunker's foundation, and moved through the complex like a wraith. The soldiers never screamed. The command core was frozen solid. Outside, the only sign anything had happened was a circle traced in ash, an ancient seal marking the ground where the heart of the base used to be.

Across the globe it played out again and again, like orchestrated whispers of vengeance.

In Morocco, a caravan outpost transporting volatile data cores vanished from the grid mid-transmission. All that remained was one final packet of corrupted code sent seconds before black-out: a single frame of a shadowed figure standing amidst flames, eyes glowing white.

In the Australian outback, a Reaper breeding pit disguised beneath an abandoned mining facility was purged in less than an hour. Surveillance drones recorded movement, then static, then silence. A later inspection team discovered every entrance sealed from within, the Reapers gone, the stench of holy fire thick in the air.

They struck in silence, in shadow, in sequence.

The Black Knights didn't fight battles. They ended them.

By the third day, Volton's data branches began to desynchronize. Supply lines went dead. Sleeper agents failed to check in. Armored transports were found overturned or gutted, left to rot under the sun like carcasses marked by an unseen predator.

To the outside world, it looked like chaos.

But to those watching from above, from the glowing war table inside the Sky Fortress command deck, this was surgical. Every mark, every sweep, every fallen node was exactly where Slacovich had calculated it would fall.

A constellation of Volton's empire, now methodically snuffed out.

And as the final branch in East Africa fell in a blaze of blue fire, a quiet ripple echoed across the resistance map.

The main root had been exposed.

Volton's empire was no longer unreachable.

It was cornered.

And the Black Knights?

They were just getting started.

---

High above it all, the Sky Fortress hummed like a beast caught between breath and battle. The kind of hum that lived in the walls, pulsed through the lights, and settled in the bones of everyone inside. A storm was coming, one not written in weather, but in blood and retaliation.

At its core stood Slacovich.

He didn't leave the war-room dais anymore. Hadn't in days. Maybe longer. No one dared to ask. He was always there, boots planted firm against the polished steel deck, spine straight, shoulders tight, as if holding the whole sky above him with willpower alone.

The map floated before him, a living battlefield of light and shadows. Red points pulsed like infected wounds, Reaper dens, supply routes, hidden caches, names tied to atrocities. Every time one winked out, replaced by green or blue, he didn't celebrate. He didn't speak. His fingers simply moved. Swift. Certain. Recalculating the assault lattice before anyone even breathed in.

There were no hesitations now. No delays. This was the mind of a war general honed to the edge.

The air around him felt different, like gravity pressed harder within his reach.

Beside him stood Tyler.

Silent. Present. Unshaken.

He didn't speak unless Slacovich did first. But his presence was weight enough. Tyler scanned every wave of new data the moment it hit the map, logging movements, cross-referencing terrain, tracking withdrawal patterns with a soldier's gaze and a mourner's precision.

He never asked for breaks. Never complained about the ache in his back or the fact he hadn't seen daylight in three days.

He just worked.

They didn't need to speak much.

One would move a piece, the other would tilt the grid. One would find a gap, the other would close it. Two wolves pacing the same cage, burned, bloodied, but not broken.

They'd seen what Volton had taken. They'd watched what he made out of someone they loved. And now?

Now they were going to burn him out of existence.

The lights of the command deck dimmed every few minutes as system pulses cycled, but even in the dark, the two of them stood steady. Glowing eyes. Restless hands. And that cold, silent understanding that neither of them would rest until the last red mark was gone.

Until nothing remained of Volton Hellgazer but a memory sharpened into ash.

---

Below, Sun University pulsed like a hidden heart, veiled in steel, locked beneath layers of reinforced security, and alive with desperate purpose. The once-prestigious hunter school now housed something far more vital than knowledge: survival.

Harry moved like a man possessed. His lab coat flared with every pivot, half-buttoned and smeared with chemical stains. He muttered to himself as he adjusted flow valves and peered through glowing glass coils, where the serum hissed and danced like serpents ready to strike.

Caroline trailed just behind him, focused and sharp, her hands never still. Every percentage mattered. Every refinement shaved death off the edge of their odds. She barked out orders with a tone that made techs straighten mid-breath, treating each vial like it held salvation, and maybe it did.

The scent of ethanol, silver dust, and scorched wiring hung thick in the air. A pressure. A promise. One wrong step could ruin everything, but no one flinched. Not here. Not now.

This wasn't just a lab anymore.

It was the last line between extinction and vengeance.

And under Harry and Caroline's leadership… it wasn't going to break.

---

Nicholson's hunters moved like clockwork, precise, relentless, eyes never still. Their boots crunched against the gravel paths of Sun University's grounds, radios whispering updates in tight loops. Patrols overlapped by design, forming an unbroken circle of vigilance that stretched one full kilometer in every direction.

No blind spots.

No breaks.

No forgiveness.

Every rooftop was scanned. Every sewer grate logged. Every shadow eyed like it might bite. They weren't just guarding a campus anymore, they were protecting the core of resistance, the serum, the future.

Nicholson watched it all from the command deck above, arms folded, gaze sharp. His presence alone kept the nerves taut and the lines tight. Nothing moved without permission.

Even the wind, it seemed, needed clearance to pass.