Location: Bastion Prime, Trinetra IslandTime: 02:47 Hours IST
The sea never slept around Trinetra Island.
It churned with the hum of tide and turbine, a dark pulsing thing that wrapped around the jagged coast like a hungry serpent. Above it stood Bastion Prime — the sprawling headquarters of Trinetra Command — a city-fortress carved into the rock and jungle, blending stealth and steel. It was not a structure. It was a symbol. It was power, made stone.
A glowing nerve center for an organization with no diplomatic footprint but infinite consequence.
It was here, in the black hours before dawn, that something came for them.
Inside Bastion – Command Dome "Agni Vedi"
A soft chime broke the stillness.
A radial interface lit up with blooming pulses — red arcs of motion data mapping invisible movement across Sector Nine. Deep infiltration.
The lights in the chamber remained dim, as if the base itself was watching with bated breath.
Agniveesh, commander of Trinetra and architect of its rise from ash, stood quietly in the center of the round platform. His eyes didn't blink. A still figure in obsidian black, tall, lean, his kurta folded neatly against his frame, barefoot on polished alloy tiles that fed him real-time seismic feedback from the ground below.
A voice crackled from the side console.
"Commander. There's movement. Non-civilian. Unauthorized. 600 meters from the Uraash Shaft."
"How many?" he asked softly.
The analyst hesitated. "Six signatures. Moving in diamond pattern."
Agniveesh exhaled. "Special forces. Not a probe. A kill strike."
He tapped the surface once. Lights dimmed further. Behind him, Aadesh, head of internal operations and Trinetra's second architect, emerged from a side corridor, still rolling his sleeves.
"What are we looking at?"
"ISC." Agniveesh didn't look away. "They've sent their hounds."
"Vajra Wing?"
"Most likely. They don't send amateurs to do this kind of work."
"Then let's give them a welcome they won't forget."
0300 Hours – Drop Zone Delta, Jungle Sector
The six ISC operatives moved like liquid death.
Each of them was a silent machine — bodies sheathed in temperature-dampening suits, exoskeletons allowing silent boosts, eyes scanning in multi-spectrum. They didn't speak. They didn't need to.
Their helmets fed them terrain data, satellite relays, pulse readings of wind and wildlife. Operation Ash Mantle was designed for surgical insertion — reach the Uraash Vault, extract isotope samples, and exfil in under twelve minutes.
The jungle had been mapped for months. Drones had flown decoy patterns for weeks.
They knew the Bastion's perimeter sensors, blind zones, heat dampeners. They had trained to fight elite forces.
But they hadn't trained for what Agniveesh had turned this island into.
0303 Hours – Trap One: Echo Bloom
As they passed through a narrow canyon overgrown with moss and vines, a faint vibration passed underfoot.
Then, a whisper.
A flash.
Suddenly, sound disappeared.
Literally — their aural channels went dead. Microphones cut. HUDs distorted.
"Jammer?" one of the operatives signed.
Then — a net.
Not rope — but liquid filament sprayed from bio-sensors, laced with metallic static, instantly fusing to their suits, feeding false vitals into their own HUDs. One by one, they turned on each other — temporarily blinded by systems hacked in microseconds.
A Rakshak unit watching from the treetops moved.
They dropped in unison — twelve of them. Shadow-skinned, hair tied, blades out, rifles suppressed. The jungle screamed without sound.
The fight was violent.
One ISC commando spun, kicked a soldier in the throat, twisted midair and shot another twice in the head — silent darts. Another jammed his wrist blade into a Rakshak's neck, only to be tackled and pummeled by two others.
Blood met moss. Blades met bone.
Agniveesh, watching from above through drone feeds, whispered:
"Every motion, every formation they learned — we studied it first."
0309 Hours – The Counter-Offensive
Aadesh now directed combat nodes like a chessmaster.
"Activate grid sector Gamma-12. Give them open ground. Make them greedy."
At his signal, the jungle parted — literally. Panels folded down, revealing a flat, glowing corridor of stone and light, leading to what looked like the entrance to the Vault.
One of the ISC operatives paused. "That's a decoy."
Too late. They entered it.
A magnetic sinkhole snapped open — not enough to kill, but to throw them off-balance. Gravity inverted for a split second. Adrenaline spiked.
Cameras inside recorded every expression. Every twitch. Every microsecond of fear.
Then came the sound cannons.
Invisible pulses shattered equilibrium. No hearing, no balance, no up or down. They stumbled, crawled, one vomiting into his mask.
Above them, a squad of Trinetra soldiers rappelled in upside-down, hanging like spiders, shooting plasma darts and tranquilizer microshards — non-lethal, but painful.
They wanted them awake when they ran.
0315 Hours – The Escape
The remaining ISC operatives finally deployed emergency flares.
Their evac pod had already entered lower stratosphere. They fired a signal burst — encoded and encrypted — and launched three decoy pings from their belts.
Trinetra interceptors fired EMPs at two. The third slipped through.
From above, a hypersonic pod dropped at terminal speed, opened wings at ten meters, and sucked the team in via vacuum harness.
They vanished into the sky, silent as they came.
Back on the ground, smoke lingered, blood steamed on moss, and a single helmet lay blinking.
0325 Hours – Aftermath in Bastion
The air in Agni Vedi was cooler now.
Agniveesh leaned over the command table, reviewing data. The screen split to show six faces of the ISC operatives. He tapped on one.
"This one. She hesitated. Her scan says she recognized our weapon signature."
Aadesh sipped black tea, bruises on his knuckles. "You want to track her?"
Agniveesh didn't respond. He simply stared at the map of Trinetra Island, now safe again, and said:
"They sent shadows. We showed them the dark."
0332 Hours – Closing the Vault
Down in the belly of Bastion, the Uraash Vault slowly resealed itself — steel sliding over steel, glowing with red authorization seals.
Inside it, the future of weapons shimmered — raw uranium, isotope cells, cold fission threads being weaved into test casings.
Only three people in the world knew what was stored here.
One of them, standing at the Vault gate, was Agniveesh.
He looked at the steel door and whispered to himself:
"Let the world believe we are a cartel. Let them think we are thieves."
"We are the only ones with the courage to build what no one dares: a sovereign war machine."