The afternoon sun was beginning to dip below the campus horizon, casting long, skeletal shadows across the courtyard as Clyde, Maddie, and Brianna walked toward the isolated edge of the university grounds. The friction from the Group 5 meeting still hung heavily in the air, a thick, invisible tension that made every step feel laborious.
Brianna adjusted her bag, her red-tipped nails brushing against the strap with a slow, rhythmic click. She glanced sideways at Maddie, her icy blue eyes carrying a sharp, evaluating glint.
"Maddie," Brianna started, her voice low, measured, and carefully casual. "Why are you so obsessed with stopping Clyde from investigating Obsidian? Back in the lecture hall, you looked like you were ready to tear his head off just for mentioning the name."
Maddie stopped in her tracks. She let out a long, ragged sigh, the tight, rigid posture she had maintained in front of CJ and the rest of Group 5 completely collapsing. She walked over to a nearby stone bench beneath a weeping willow and sat down, staring blankly at the concrete.
"It's not like that," Maddie murmured, her voice dropping to a smooth, quiet tone that carried a rare, unsettling trace of vulnerability. "It's just... I'm worried. I've seen firsthand what they can do, and I'm genuinely scared for Clyde. He thinks he's hunting a standard gang. He doesn't understand the depth of the dark water he's jumping into."
Clyde stopped a few feet away, slinging his bag over one shoulder. His deep blue eyes narrowed as he studied his childhood friend. "What do you mean you've seen what they can do, Maddie? We were nine years old when Auravale burned. We were just kids hiding in the reinforced bunker. How could you possibly have firsthand knowledge of their methods?"
Maddie looked up, her striking green almond eyes clouded with a dark, suffocating memory. The ambient noise of the campus—the distant laughter of students, the rustle of the wind—seemed to fade away, leaving only the sound of her steady, chilling voice.
"My father..." Maddie began, speaking slowly this time, making sure every word carried weight. "Before everything went down eleven years ago, he was a business tycoon with enemies lurking in every shadow. To protect his interests, he secretly financed and trained a private group of elite spies and black-ops operatives to handle his dirtiest corporate secrets. I managed to become close friends with one of those spies. His name was Sean."
She paused, swallowing hard, her gaze locking onto Clyde. "Sean was a prodigy. He was part of a highly classified, deniable faction known within the underground as the Blood Brigade. I'm sure you both have heard whispers of them over the years, right?"
Brianna nodded slowly, her expression was unreadable as she leaned against a stone pillar. "Well, they were legendary in certain circles. Vicious, precise, and completely untraceable. Actually, a rogue martial artist who used to contract for that exact unit was the one who taught me my early self-defense forms. If the Blood Brigade couldn't handle a target, nobody could."
"Anyway," Maddie continued, her hands clenching into tight fists in her lap, her knuckles turning white. "Eleven years ago, just weeks before the Auravale massacre, the Blood Brigade received a sealed, high-priority mission to investigate a rising entity known as 'Obsidian.' At that exact time, Obsidian was just a startup company—a small shadow group barely making a ripple on the radar. But they were monstrously vicious, despite their fresh debut. A few days after the brigade deployed into the lower sectors... Sean came back looking like a corpse."
Clyde's breath caught in his throat. He took a half-step forward, his heart beginning to hammer against his ribs. "A corpse? Did he survive the ambush?"
"Should I say... worse than a corpse," Maddie corrected herself, a chilling, clinical coldness creeping into her pitch. "He was half-dead, held together by nothing but sheer spite. Most of his physical body was entirely destroyed. His left leg was completely blown away—severed cleanly at the thigh by military-grade explosives—and his other limbs were entirely shattered and crippled. He had lost his right eye, leaving a hollow, bloody socket. His mouth was brutally torn open from the edge of his lips to his jawline, as if someone had intentionally carved a smile into his face."
Clyde felt a cold drop of sweat trace down his spine. The vivid imagery was suffocating, instantly triggering brief, flashing memories of his own family's mansion collapsing in flames."Yet, with whatever dying energy he had left in his lungs, Sean dragged his mutilated body across the border and crawled into our estate's main hall to inform my family of what had happened," Maddie whispered, her green eyes boring into Clyde's soul. "All of his colleagues—every single elite operative, tracker, and soldier in the Blood Brigade—had been slaughtered in the most gruesome ways imaginable. Sean managed to escape, but even the medical staff didn't understand how he was still breathing. Judging by the absolute horror of his physical condition, he was biologically supposed to have died days prior."
"A walking dead man," Brianna murmured, her voice carrying a dark, appreciative fascination."He had lost liters of blood," Maddie continued, her voice trembling. "He looked entirely pale, skeletal, and malnourished. Every single one of his fingers had been cleanly cut off, joint by joint. He had fractured ribs puncturing his organs, his kidneys were entirely ruptured, and his lungs and intestines were partially melted from some kind of experimental chemical trauma. Honestly, no one who saw him could comprehend how his consciousness was still intact. Maybe it was pure human will. Maybe it was a terrifying conviction to deliver the warning before his heart stopped. Either way, he announced the slaughter to my parents. The description was so graphic, so unholy, that my mother fainted on the spot. My father... he just stood there with a grim, expressionless look. He knew right then that the old world was over."
Maddie stood up from the bench, brushing her silky black hair out of her eyes. She looked completely sincere, her eyes glistening with what looked like genuine, deep-seated terror for her friend's safety. Her mask of the protective, worried childhood friend was entirely flawless."
So when I tell you to drop this case study in Group 5, Clyde, I am not trying to discourage you, I am saving you. If you pursue this case, you will be killed. If a highly trained, heavily armed black-ops spy network like the Blood Brigade could be slaughtered like cattle by a startup version of Obsidian... what do you honestly think they will do to a twenty-year-old undergraduate law student armed with nothing but a notebook and an obsession?"
Silence fell over the courtyard. The weight of the story hung over Clyde like a physical shroud.
Brianna stepped forward, her expression shifting back to her usual calm, supportive demeanor. "Maddie's right to be scared, Clyde. We survived that night by a miracle. We shouldn't poke a sleeping tiger unless we absolutely have to. Let's just focus on making Elaine proud."
Clyde looked at his two closest friends. Seeing the real fear in Maddie's face and the rational caution in Brianna's eyes, he slowly forced his posture to soften. He didn't want to fracture their bond. "I know. I'm sorry for snapping at the meeting. I don't want to put anyone in danger. Let's just focus on the project guidelines. We need to get a good grade."
Maddie let out a sigh of pure relief, stepping forward to squeeze his arm warmly. "Thank you, Clyde. Seriously. Let's just be normal students for once."
The next few days were an exhausting, mundane grind of pure academic research. Group 5 met every afternoon in the law section of the university library, surrounded by towers of textbooks, historical journals, and public trial transcripts. True to his word, Clyde kept his head down, focusing entirely on compiling standard corporate legal defense angles alongside Maddie. Their interactions were completely normal, peaceful, and cooperative.
But obtaining concrete data for a high-level university project quickly proved to be a nightmare for the entire team. Every single member of Group 5 was hitting a brick wall.
"This is ridiculous," Laura Heils groaned on Friday afternoon, tossing an empty manila folder onto the mahogany table. Her auburn curls bounced as she huffed, looking at Clyde for sympathy. "Every major organized crime trial from that decade is completely censored in the university's electronic library. How are we supposed to write a comprehensive analysis if the state won't even let us read the case outcomes?"
CJ rubbed his temples, staring at his laptop screen. "It's not just the school library. Even looking at the public police logs my dad authorized for undergraduate research, everything from eleven years ago is wiped entirely clean. It's like someone intentionally scrubbed the city's memory."
Renee Newton nodded in agreement, her mature face tight with frustration. "I tried pulling the basic municipal property registries from the old Auravale sectors for our background data. Half the documents are completely blacked out with federal redaction stamps. It makes no sense."
Victor smirked, spinning his pen. "Told you guys. The government likes its secrets. If we can't get the files, our presentation is going to be incredibly boring."
Bonnie Reil sat quietly next to Clyde, her almond eyes observing the mounting frustration around the table. She didn't speak, but she offered Clyde a quiet, grounding look that seemed to understand the silent tension brewing beneath his calm exterior.
Clyde looked down at his blank notebook page. He had promised Maddie he would stay inside the lines, but the sheer level of censorship they were encountering was proof enough that the ghost he was chasing was very much alive. The system itself was hiding something massive.
CJ finally shut his laptop with a heavy sigh. "Alright, Group 5. We're done for the weekend. We can't write a paper using black bars and missing timelines. Let's take a break and rethink our approach on Monday."
The students slowly packed their bags, leaving the library in a state of shared academic defeat. As they walked out into the cool evening air, Maddie and Brianna stepped seamlessly into position beside Clyde, chatting casually about their upcoming weekend study schedules.