The purge began at 0400.
Caleb had the list ready by 0330. Three names. Three positions. Three threads in a web that ran deeper than anyone wanted to believe. He handed the tablet to Glen in the corridor outside the war room, and Glen read the names in the blue light of the screen and felt something cold settle in his chest.
"An engineer," Glen said.
"Worked on the shield conduits. Had access to the maintenance schedules. He’s the one who left the western conduit array uncalibrated before the Second Wave hit — we assumed it was battle damage. It wasn’t. He did it on purpose."
"A medic."
"Treated the wounded during the wave. Also had access to the medical bay’s secondary systems — including the personnel tracking database. He wasn’t just patching people up. He was logging who was injured, how badly, where they were stationed. Feeding that to the court."
"And a communications officer."
"Deployment schedules. Rotor patterns. Shield frequencies. Everything that moved through Eden’s comms grid passed through her station." Caleb’s voice was flat. Professional. The kind of flat that took effort. "The Lost knew exactly when and where to hit because she told them."
Glen stared at the names. He knew one of them — not well, not personally, but he’d seen the engineer in the corridors. Nodded at him once. The man had nodded back. A normal human interaction between two people who worked in the same compound. And the whole time, the engineer had been working for the things that wanted to eat them all.
"How long?" Glen asked.
"The engineer? Eight months. The medic? Four. The comms officer — we think since before the First Wave." Caleb pocketed his tablet. "She’s the most embedded. She’s been here longest."
Glen’s jaw worked. Eight months. The cultists had been inside Eden for eight months, minimum. Walking the halls. Eating in the mess. Standing beside Hunters who bled for this place. And every day, they’d been cutting threads from the rope.
"How did you find them?" Glen asked.
"Their mana." Caleb started walking. Glen fell into step. "During the Second Wave, I was running mana signature analysis on everyone in the compound — standard triage protocol, identifying the wounded by their mana output. Most signatures were clean. Normal. But three of them were... off. Not wrong in an obvious way. Just a harmonic I couldn’t place. Like a note in a chord that doesn’t belong."
"Anti-mana."
Caleb stopped. Looked at him. "How did you know?"
"The void recognizes it." Glen’s voice was quiet. "Anti-mana is what the Lost leave behind. Residue. The stuff that clings to anyone who’s had prolonged contact with them. It’s subtle — your scanners can’t pick it up because it reads as null, not as a positive signal. You can’t detect something by looking for it. You have to feel the absence."
"Your Domain."
"Yeah."
They walked in silence for a moment. The corridor was empty — 0400 was the dead hour, the time when even the most driven Hunters slept. The lights were on low power. The compound felt hollow.
"The cultists believe the System is a prison," Caleb said. "And the Lost are the liberators. They think they’re on the right side. They think they’re freeing humanity."
"I know what they think."
"I’m not sure you do. Not fully." Caleb’s voice was careful. "These aren’t mercenaries. They’re not paid. They’re not blackmailed. They’re believers. The engineer genuinely thinks the System is a cage and the court will set us free. The medic thinks the Lost are evolved — the next step, and the System is holding us back. The comms officer..." He paused. "She thinks the world deserves to end."
Glen didn’t respond to that. There was nothing to respond to. People believed what they believed. He’d stopped trying to argue with faith a long time ago.
"Can your Domain track them?" Caleb asked. "Not just the three you’ve identified. Anyone. Could you walk through Eden and feel who’s been touched?"
Glen considered it. The Predator Domain was an A-Rank skill — a radius of awareness that mapped mana signatures like a predator scenting prey. It didn’t just detect power. It detected quality. Texture. The shape of someone’s mana and the resonance it carried. Anti-mana residue would show up as a wrong note — a flat, dead patch in an otherwise living signature.
"Yeah," he said. "I can do it."
"Will you?"
Glen looked at him. "I was going to do it anyway."
He started at the eastern wing.
The Domain unfurled from him like a slow exhale. Not the combat version — that was a burst, a flare, a predator’s roar. This was the hunting version. Quiet. Patient. A net cast wide, drifting through the compound’s corridors and rooms, touching each mana signature it encountered like a hand brushing against fabric.
Most were clean. Hunters sleeping had low, steady signatures — the rhythm of recovery. Hunters on night shift had sharper ones, the tension of alertness. Engineers had technical signatures, precise and ordered. Support staff had softer patterns, less defined. Each one was a person. Each one was real.
Glen felt them all and moved on.
The eastern wing was clear. He moved to the central block — the mess hall, the medical bay, the comms center. The Domain expanded, covering more ground. He felt the medic’s station — empty now, the night shift medic was a clean signature, a young woman with a steady pulse and no residue. He felt the comms center — three operators on duty, all clean.
He kept moving.
The residential wing. Forty-seven sleeping signatures. He touched each one. Forty-four were clean. Three had the wrong note.
Not the same three Caleb had identified. Different ones.
Glen stopped in the corridor. His eyes narrowed. Three more. The web was bigger than Caleb’s data showed. The cultists weren’t just in the operational positions — they were in the residential wing too. Sleeping next to Hunters. Sharing bathrooms. Living lives.
He marked the signatures in his memory — the texture, the resonance, the exact quality of the anti-mana wrong note — and kept walking.
The maintenance wing. The engineer Caleb had identified was there — sleeping, his signature flat and dead in a way that made Glen’s teeth ache. Anti-mana clung to him like oil on water. Glen passed his door and didn’t stop.
Two more in maintenance. Clean.
The research wing. Caleb’s domain. Glen felt the signatures there — all clean, all sharp, all carrying the particular intensity of people who thought too much and slept too little. Caleb’s team was solid.
The training halls. Empty at this hour. Clean.
Glen completed the circuit in forty minutes. He’d touched every mana signature in Eden. Five hundred and twelve people. Nine had the wrong note.
Nine.
Caleb had found three. Glen had found nine. The difference wasn’t Caleb’s fault — his scanners couldn’t detect anti-mana. They detected what was there, not what was absent. Caleb had found the three who’d been careless enough to leave detectable traces. The other six had been more careful. Their anti-mana was deeper, older, more thoroughly integrated into their natural signatures.
But the Predator Domain wasn’t a scanner. It was an instinct. And the void inside Glen recognized anti-mana the way a wolf recognizes the scent of a rival pack.
He went back to Caleb.
"Nine," he said.
Caleb’s face didn’t change. But something behind his eyes did. "Three more than my list."
"Six more. Your three are included. There are nine total."
Caleb was quiet for a long moment. Then he pulled out his tablet and started working. "Names. Positions. Access levels. I need everything you can give me."
Glen gave it. The engineer. The medic. The comms officer. A logistics coordinator who handled supply shipments. A junior Hunter who’d been assigned to the southern patrol. A technician who maintained the ley-line sensors. A cook. A janitor. A records clerk.
The last three were the worst. A cook. A janitor. A clerk. People no one looked at. People who moved through the background, invisible by design, handling the infrastructure that kept Eden running. They had access to everything — not through passwords or clearances, but through proximity. A cook heard conversations. A janitor walked every corridor. A records clerk saw every file.
"They’re placed," Caleb said. "Strategically. Each one covers a different layer of the compound’s operation. Someone designed this."
"The court designed it."
"The court doesn’t recruit humans. It corrupts them."
"Same thing." Glen’s voice was hard. "Find a person who’s angry enough, lost enough, broken enough, and tell them the world deserves to end. They’ll believe you. The court doesn’t need to corrupt anyone — it just needs to find the ones who want to be corrupted."
Caleb looked at him. "You sound like you understand them."
"I understand how belief works. Doesn’t mean I agree with it."
Caleb cross-referenced the nine names against access logs, shift schedules, and incident reports from the last year. The pattern was damning. Every single cultist had been in a position to influence the Second Wave’s outcome. The engineer’s conduit miscalibration. The medic’s personnel tracking. The comms officer’s deployment leaks. The logistics coordinator had rerouted supply shipments away from the southern front two days before the attack — ammunition that arrived twelve hours late, too late for the garrison that needed it. The junior Hunter had fed patrol routes to a dead drop that the comms officer collected.
Each thread connected to another. Each cultist covered a different layer of the operation, and none of them knew the full picture. Classic cell structure. Compartmentalized. If one fell, the others could keep functioning. The court had learned from human intelligence networks — or maybe humans had learned from the court. Either way, the architecture was professional.
The removal team was Caleb’s. Six of his most trusted analysts, each one vetted, each one clean. They moved at 0430. Quiet. Efficient. No alarms. No announcements. The cultists were taken from their beds, their stations, their posts, and brought to a secured room in the sub-basement — a room that didn’t appear on any official map, because Caleb had built it for exactly this purpose.
Glen watched from the corridor. He didn’t go in. This was Caleb’s operation — clean, procedural, the kind of work that required precision rather than power. Glen’s job was done. He’d found them. Now Caleb’s team would question them, extract what they could, and determine the full scope of the damage.
The engineer went quietly. He looked resigned — a man who’d known this day would come and had decided not to fight it. The medic cried. The comms officer said nothing at all. Her silence was the loudest thing in the room.
The logistics coordinator tried to run. He made it three steps before Caleb’s team had him on the ground. He was fast for a non-combat role — fast enough that he’d clearly trained, fast enough that someone had taught him what to do if this moment ever came. It didn’t matter. Caleb’s people were faster. The junior Hunter — the one on the southern patrol — fought. He was C-Rank, strong for his age, and he fought with the desperate fury of someone who’d been found out. It took two of Caleb’s people to subdue him, and even then, he kept screaming about the System, about the prison, about the liberation that was coming.
They sedated him.
The technician, the cook, the janitor, the clerk — they went quietly. Each one looked different. The technician was pale. The cook was shaking. The janitor had the blank stare of someone who’d detached from reality years ago. The clerk was calm — too calm, the kind of calm that meant she’d been prepared for this moment and had already decided what she would and wouldn’t say.
Nine cultists. Removed from Eden in under an hour. No alarms raised. No one outside the operation team knew. Eden kept breathing — the lights stayed on, the night shift kept working, the wounded kept sleeping. The compound didn’t know it had just been cut.
Glen stood in the empty room after they were gone.
The room was bare. Four walls, a floor, a ceiling. Nothing special. But it felt different now. The air was stale. The silence was wrong. Nine people had been in this room minutes ago — nine people who’d been eating beside him, working beside him, walking the same corridors — and now they were gone, and the room was just a room, and Glen couldn’t shake the feeling that the walls were thinner than they’d been before.
Not literally. Figuratively. The walls of Eden had always been a line — us on this side, them on that side. The Lost were out there. The cultists were in here. But now the line had moved. It had moved inside the walls. The enemy wasn’t just at the gates. The enemy had been at the breakfast table.
Glen leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. The void hummed. Not with hunger. With something else. Awareness. The understanding that the ground he stood on wasn’t solid. That the people around him weren’t all what they seemed. That trust was a currency he’d been spending without checking the exchange rate.
He thought about the cook. The cook had made him dinner three nights ago. Stew. It had been good. Glen had eaten two bowls and thanked the man, and the man had smiled and said "anytime," and the whole time the cook had been feeding information to the things that wanted to end the world.
It would have been funny if it wasn’t real.
The cook hadn’t even been a good liar. That was the part that stuck. Glen had talked to him dozens of times — brief, mundane exchanges over a serving counter. "How’s the stew?" "Good tonight." "Thanks, man." Nothing. Not a flicker. Either the cook was a better actor than Glen had given him credit for, or belief made people invisible. Maybe both. Maybe the reason no one caught the cultists wasn’t that they were careful — it was that no one looked. Why would you? A cook is a cook. A janitor is a janitor. You don’t interrogate the man who mops your floor.
That was the insight that made Glen’s stomach turn. The cultists hadn’t hidden in the shadows. They’d hidden in plain sight, in the roles everyone ignored, and the court had counted on exactly that.
Glen opened his eyes. The room was still empty. The silence was still wrong. He pushed off the wall and walked out.
Caleb was in the corridor, tablet in hand. His face was drawn. The caffeine tremor had gotten worse.
"Well?" Glen asked.
"The comms officer broke first." Caleb’s voice was low. "She gave us the network. Not just Eden — every city. Every guild. The cultists aren’t a single cell. They’re a distributed network. Cells in every major population center, each one autonomous, each one connected through dead drops and encrypted channels. The court didn’t infiltrate Eden. The court infiltrated the entire hunter infrastructure."
Glen felt the cold again. Deeper this time.
"How many?"
"She doesn’t know the total. Her cell had contact with three others — Cape Town, Nairobi, Lagos. Each of those cells had contact with three more. It branches. Exponentially. We’re looking at hundreds. Maybe thousands."
"Thousands of cultists inside the hunter infrastructure."
"Inside the guilds. Inside the academies. Inside the support systems. Anywhere humans work alongside the System’s framework." Caleb met his eyes. "The purge can’t be limited to Eden."
Glen stood in the corridor and processed that. Not with panic. With the slow, grinding clarity of a man who’d just learned the floor was made of glass.
Eden wasn’t safe. Eden had never been safe. The nine cultists they’d removed were a fraction — a single cell in a network that spanned the continent. Every guild, every academy, every city. The court had been building this for years. Centuries, maybe. Slowly, patiently, placing believers in positions where they could do the most damage.
And the Second Wave had shown them how well it worked.
The deployment schedules leaked. The shield conduits sabotaged. The Tower anchor backup power disabled in Pretoria. The Lost hadn’t needed to breach the defenses from outside — the cultists had opened the doors from inside. The fleet had walked through gaps that humans had made.
Glen’s phone buzzed. A message from Isla: I’ve unlocked the first layer of the archive. Coming to the war room.
He typed back: Don’t. Stay where you are. I’ll come to you.
He pocketed the phone and looked at Caleb. "The purge goes continent-wide."
"I’ll need authorization."
"You have it."
"From who?"
"From me." Glen’s voice was flat. "And from the S-Ranks. Vera’s team is still in Pretoria — her people can handle the cleanup there. Seraphina has authority in the eastern guilds. Isla has the Sinclair network. We coordinate. We move simultaneously. We don’t give the cells time to warn each other."
Caleb nodded slowly. "The comms officer — she said the cells communicate on a delay. Dead drops. Physical messages. No electronic trails. If we move fast enough, the other cells won’t know we’re coming."
"Then we move fast."
"When?"
"Now." Glen started walking. "Wake your team. All of them. I want coordination packets for every guild leader we can reach. Vera, Seraphina, Isla — they get the full picture. Everyone else gets what they need to act. No leaks. No warnings. We hit every cell we can identify at the same time."
Caleb was already typing. "The Pretoria cell first?"
"The Pretoria cell, the Cape Town cell, the Nairobi cell, the Lagos cell. All of them. Tonight."
Glen reached the end of the corridor and stopped. He looked back at Caleb, who was still standing in front of the empty room, tablet glowing, fingers moving.
"Caleb."
"Yeah."
"The cook who made me dinner. Was he the one who poisoned the stew?"
Caleb looked up. "No. The stew was clean. He wasn’t trying to kill you. He was trying to be invisible. A cook who poisons the food gets noticed. A cook who makes good stew and listens to conversations gets trusted."
Glen stood there for a moment. Then he nodded once and kept walking.
The walls had eyes. And some of the eyes were the enemy’s. But now Glen knew, and knowing was the first step, and the first step was all he needed.
The purge was starting. And it wouldn’t stop at Eden’s walls.