Chapter 134| The Flag

Chapter 134: Chapter 134| The Flag

Results were posted at 2:00 PM.

Not on a board. On the academy communicator — individual notifications, one per student, classification update filed directly from the NSA database to their registered profile. The kind of delivery that said this was official and permanent.

Zane was in the dormitory corridor when his communicator buzzed.

He checked it.

[NSA CLASSIFICATION — OFFICIAL UPDATE]

Student: Calloway, Zane

Previous classification: Sigilless — Unregistered

Updated classification: B-Rank

Ability type: Physical Enhancement / Contact Force

Status: Active

He stared at it for a moment.

’B-rank,’ he thought. ’Official.’

『 The system notes this is the first time the host’s NSA file has contained a rank above Sigilless. The system considers this a significant development. 』

’It is,’ he thought.

He pocketed the communicator and kept walking.

_ _

The class had the specific energy by evening that it always did when something had shifted and everyone was still deciding what to do with it. Not loud. Just the atmospheric change of a room that had received new information and was running it through existing models to see what fit and what didn’t.

Theo came back A-rank. Expected. Ryan B-rank, top of the bracket. Also expected. Maren C-rank on paper — her Overdrive was registered to her, and what she produced at C-rank ceiling was exactly what the machine logged.

Zane’s result had moved through the group quietly. Not with noise or confrontation. Just moved. The Sigilless student from the Second Generation Initiative now sitting in the B-rank column with a contact force classification. Six weeks ago he’d walked into this building with nothing on file. Today the NSA had given him a bracket.

Nobody said anything directly to him about it.

A few people looked.

He didn’t acknowledge the looks.

Cole Brennan glanced his way once across the common area with the expression of someone revising an assumption they hadn’t realised they’d made. Trace Carter said something low to Dario beside him that Zane didn’t catch and didn’t try to. Theo looked up from his communicator, found Zane’s face across the room, held the look for exactly two seconds, then went back to his screen.

Zane got a coffee from the common room dispenser and sat in the corner and let the room process whatever it needed to process.

_ _

Maren found him after the evening theory block.

Not in the corridor itself. Outside it, positioned with the specific patience of someone who had waited for the foot traffic to thin before choosing the moment.

She fell into step beside him without preamble.

"B-rank," she said, not quite in disbelief. Somewhere just short of it.

"Apparently," Zane said.

She was quiet for a moment. Walking beside him with the assessment expression running at low idle, the version she used when she was gathering rather than responding.

"The panel reading during your test," she said. "It didn’t look like a single output. You did two tests."

He kept his eyes on the corridor ahead. ’Come on Maren, you can’t say you noticed just now.’

"Seems my Sigil can do both things," he said. "Still figuring it out."

She was quiet for a moment.

"Wow." She smirked and hit him lightly on the shoulder. "Maybe you’re going to become a prodigy. Like your dad."

"I hope so," Zane said.

She glanced at him sideways.

One second of the look that had been doing quiet calculation behind a very still face since week one of the training grounds.

"I knew I had my eyes on someone special," she said.

’Special huh.’ Zane kept walking. ’Don’t know what to say about that. Got this far because of the system, which had a one-in-a-million chance of even manifesting. Still luck, I guess.’

"Thanks for the nice words maren". Zane said, throwing a short smirk.

She didn’t push it. Just threw a smirk in sync with Zane’s.

They reached the junction where their routes split. Her block left. His right.

She stopped.

"Zane."

He looked at her.

"Whatever that was today." She held his gaze steady. "Be careful with it."

Not a question. Not pressure. Just said the way she said things that were true and didn’t require decoration to land.

He held her gaze for a moment.

"Yeah," he said." I’ll remember this".

She stared at him for a moment. "Okay then got somewhere to be". Waved briefly and turned left.

"Yeah". Zane waved in sync and turned right.

On his way back to the dormitory he remembered the daily quest. He started activating Overdrive in short bursts — small, invisible pulses, bleeding off just enough to count. Each window opened and closed in under a second. By the time the dormitory block came into view he’d run through all six reps.

『 Daily Quest: Overdrive Activation Window Reduction — 2/6 | Activation Window: 0.633s 』

『 Milestone Reward at 6/6: Activation Window locked at 0.50s 』

He rolled his shoulder once and kept walking.

_ _

Zane arrived at Room 714 at exactly 9:15 PM.

Dex was asleep already — face down, one arm hanging off the mattress edge, the specific posture of someone who had decided the day was complete and executed on that decision without ceremony. Gerald wheezed from the corner vent. The lamp on Zane’s side of the room threw a small circle of light across the desk.

He sat down.

Reached into his bag.

Pulled out Kael’s folder.

Standard manila envelope. Sealed with a strip of tape that had Kael’s handwriting across it — a single line written over the seal that would show clearly if it had been opened. It hadn’t. Zane had been carrying it since yesterday without breaking it.

He broke it now.

Inside — eight printed pages. Physical copies, not digital. The kind that left no network trace and couldn’t be pulled from a system log. Some sections highlighted in yellow. One page with a hand-drawn facility diagram in the margin.

He read the first page.

Then the second.

By the fourth he had stopped moving entirely.

The Harbor Collapse official report cited structural failure and delayed response time. He’d known that. Sera had mentioned the incomplete intelligence detail weeks ago and he’d filed it and left it alone because it wasn’t his to carry.

What Kael’s folder had was different.

Internal NSA communications. Dates. Names with department codes beside them. A chain of memos beginning six weeks before the Harbor Collapse showing that the intelligence discrepancy on the building layout had not been an oversight. Three separate analysts had flagged it. Two had their concerns logged and marked resolved without explanation. The third had submitted a formal report that had been redirected entirely out of the standard review chain.

Garrett Calloway had gone in with three heroes.

Someone inside the NSA had known it was a Category S operation before he walked through that door.

Someone had sent three heroes anyway.

Zane set the fourth page down.

Looked at the lamp.

’Deliberate,’ he thought. Not negligence. Not a systems failure. Not the kind of mistake that happened when an organisation moved too fast and checked too little. Deliberate. Someone had made a specific choice and then spent fifteen years letting the story be about his father’s failure instead.

He sat with that for a long moment.

Dex shifted in his sleep across the room. Gerald wheezed on schedule.

Zane picked up the fifth page.

The diagram was on the sixth page. A facility floor plan — no label, no official header. Just coordinates written in the margin in the same handwriting as the seal.

He didn’t recognise the location. Not yet.

His father had been sent into the Harbor Collapse deliberately short-handed.

He read the last two pages slowly. Set them down in order. Slid everything back into the folder and placed it on the desk beside the lamp.

Looked at it.

『 System Note: The host has read the folder. The system has no comment on the contents. The system notes the host’s heart rate has been elevated for fourteen minutes. 』

’I know,’ Zane thought.

He turned off the lamp.

Lay back on the bed in the dark with his hands folded across his chest and Dex wheezing his twenty-minute rhythm into the silence.

He stared at the ceiling.

Thought about a chain of memos. Three heroes. A facility with no name and coordinates written in a dead man’s handwriting.

’Why am I even stressed about this,’ he thought. ’Not like he was my original dad.’

But something kept pulling. Some residue he couldn’t fully account for. The original Zane’s emotions, maybe — still running somewhere underneath, driving him toward something he hadn’t chosen to care about.

He didn’t have an answer for that.

A long time passed before he slept.