Chapter 4 Recruitment

• Kael sat slumped against the alley wall, panting like an animal dragged back from death. His body trembled as the burning subsided beneath his skin. Rain washed blood and filth from his face.
• He was breathing again.
• Alive. “This… isn’t possible.” He said in a broken voice.
• He looked down at his arm — the glowing ring had faded now, but the faint scorch of its pattern was still etched into his skin like a brand.
• Then came the voice again.
• [SOVEREIGN SYSTEM STABILIZED]
• [INITIATING INVITATION TO EXTERNAL ENTITY: SOVEREIGN PROGRAM]
• Kael blinked hard, trying to focus.
• “What… Sovereign Program? You....you’re Sovereign, aren’t you? The system?”
• Kael stared at the digital message floating in his vision — sharp gold lettering that faded as quickly as it appeared.
• He understood just enough to feel unsettled.
• This… thing, this system, whatever it was — it wasn’t military, wasn’t manmade. But it had enough influence to bend the world around him. To steer people. Events. Possibly even fate.
• And now it had delivered him into someone else's hands.
• Hands that wouldn’t even know he was placed there.
• The Sovereign System was not part of the Sovereign Program.
• The Program was a human invention — a covert initiative born from warzones, funded by black-budget nations, operating in shadows with full deniability.
• The System, however, was something older. Unknown. A self-propagating intelligence buried beneath the layers of modern civilization, choosing hosts not by merit, but collapse.
• It did not speak to the Program. It simply nudged the world until they found him. A brief gap in a database...A flagged biometric file....A rogue recruiter told to “check out a strange case” near Dock 11.
• By the time Kael Darion woke up, the pieces had already been placed. The Sovereign Program believed they were rescuing a candidate.
• They had no idea they were following a script written by something far more powerful. Back in the alley, Kael shivered, Then the prompt appeared.
• [FREEDOM CAN ONLY BE EARNED THROUGH ASCENT]
• [ACCEPT ENLISTMENT?]
• [Y / N]
• Kael stared at it. “You brought me back… just to hand me off to someone else?” There was no response, it was just the blinking Y/N.
• A timer ticked down silently — two minutes remaining.
• His hands curled slowly into fists. Pain still swam in his bones.
• "Freedom must be earned..."
• “Then fine,” he whispered.
• “Yes.”
• [ENLISTMENT ACCEPTED]
• [EXTRACTION TEAM INBOUND | Duration: 00:03:27]
• Kael blinked. The words seared across his mind like branded code, but no pain followed. Just… heat. Centered in his spine. His fingers stopped shaking. His pulse steadied slightly.
• Kael staggered upright. The countdown in his vision reached its final seconds.
• [Duration: 00:00:06… 5… 4… 3…]
• Two white headlights broke through the mist at the end of the alley. A black SUV rolled to a slow, deliberate stop. Engine quiet. Windows tinted so deep they looked like mirrors. It had no markings and no license plate.
• The rear passenger door opened with a hiss.
• Inside, two men in matte black fatigues, and a woman with a tablet across her knees. Her expression didn’t change when she saw him.
• “Kael Darion,” she said. “Confirm.”
• He limped forward, ribs still flaring with every breath. Water dripped from his hair. His fingers curled around the doorframe.
• “...Confirmed.”
• She tapped the tablet once.
• [SOVEREIGN PROGRAM: RECRUITMENT CHANNEL OPENED]
• [CANDIDATE: DARION, KAEL]
• “Get in,” she said. Kael climbed into the leather seat. The door shut behind him.
• The SUV pulled away in silence, disappearing into the storm.
• Three thousand miles away, a red indicator flashed on a holoscreen in the recruitment operations control room.
• “A new file just came through,” a tech muttered.
• “We’re not due for intake this quarter.”
• “Yeah, well… this one's not on the board.”
• A digital dossier expanded:
• Name: Kael Darion
• Age: 27
• Origin: New Delton, U.S. Sector
• The senior officer leaned in. “Who flagged him?”
• “No one. There’s no uplink trail. No recommender. The request felt like it just… wrote itself in.”
• He scrolled through the notes. Vital signs. Surveillance threads. A data packet labeled “Recovered from near-mortality threshold.”
• "Okay...forget about it...it might be the upper heirachy doings"
• Hours passed, Kael didn’t sleep and didn’t speak.
• The SUV took him through multiple airlifts, motorcades, checkpoints. Eventually, a cargo elevator hissed open beneath a long-abandoned NATO installation covered in moss and concrete erosion.
• The descent was endless. When the elevator doors opened, Kael stepped out into a blast-chilled metal hangar, the size of a football field, lined with drones, weapons racks, and uniformed personnel in black with no name tags.
• They barely looked at him. No one asked questions, they just moved like they’d done this a thousand times.
• The woman with the tablet finally broke her silence.
• “You’ve been selected for Sovereign Base 7. Program track: Tier 0 Combat Utility.”
• “Orientation begins now. Medical intake in fifteen seconds. Strip in the next room. You’ll be issued new gear.”
• “What happens if I say no?” Kael muttered.
• She didn’t even glance up.“You’re already registered. Welcome to your new job.”
• She turned and walked away. Kael stared at the matte grey walls. Lights buzzed overhead. The air smelled like gun oil and antiseptic.
• He moved to where they told him, thinking, "If not for the fact that I don't have anything to lose, I certainly would not be here."
• The Sovereign Program wasn’t listed on any official document. It didn’t belong to a country. No flag. No emblem. Just a budget line hidden beneath a NATO weapons logistics account that no one ever reviewed.
• It was founded after the collapse of Operation Cairnfall, when fifteen billion dollars’ worth of wet work and black-budget assets went dark. Intelligence analysts realized something: wars weren’t failing because they lacked soldiers, they were failing because they used the wrong ones.
• So they changed the recruitment model. They stopped pulling from academies and military elites.
• Instead, they started fishing at the bottom.Debtors. Convicts. War orphans. Addicts. Fugitives. Disavowed agents. Failed assassins.
• People no one would miss. They were called “Bases." They were stripped of identity, trained in systems denied by every major government, and given one directive:
• "Survive your contracts. Then disappear. Everything else is noise."
• The Sovereign Program wasn’t about patriotism. It was about containment.
• Kill the untraceable. Deploy the erased. Control the chaos by using those already consumed by it. And if the weapons walked away afterward? They’d earned it.
• ********
• Kael changed into the issued uniform — grey-black fatigues, no insignia. He stood in line with ten others. Every face around him was a different story of loss:
• One had prison tattoos from neck to wrist.
• One was missing fingers.
• One didn’t stop shaking.
• None of them spoke as an automated scanner swept across them — full-body scan, vitals, DNA match, psych stress readouts.
• Kael’s result beeped:
• “Adrenal integrity… dangerously high. Cortisol saturation… unstable. Pain threshold: abnormal.”
• Colonel Drekkar stepped out onto the overlook. Steel boots. Cold eyes. Back straight like a razor. Forty new recruits stood in formation below. Most swayed from fatigue. Some twitched. No one spoke.
• “You were rats,” Drekkar said, voice thunderous.
• “Now you’re blades.”
• “You were pulled from your filth because you’re useful. That’s it.”
• “The Sovereign Program doesn’t save people. It converts them.”
• “You want a second chance? Earn it. You want revenge? Live long enough to take it. You want freedom?"
• He smiled, the kind that meant nothing good.
• “Survive.”