Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 853: Eclipse vs EDF 2

Sophie pulled a comm terminal closer, glancing at Sera and Brooks still hunched over the same wall of screens, and dialed.

It rang twice before Kelvin picked up, his face resolving on the small display, sun-kissed already, sunglasses pushed up into damp hair.

"Sophie!" He grinned wide. "Hey! How's it going, you good?"

"I'm good. How are you? How's—" Sophie hesitated half a beat. "How's Diana?"

"Oh, you mean my wife?" Kelvin said it slow, savoring every syllable, clearly delighted with the chance to say it out loud again.

Sophie rolled her eyes so hard Brooks actually glanced over.

"She's great," Kelvin continued, unbothered. "Swimming right now, actually, somewhere off the east beach. My dad bought me an island, Sophie. An actual island. As a wedding gift. I still don't fully believe that's a real sentence I get to say about my own life." He laughed, disbelieving all over again. "Anyway. What's up? Why're you calling?"

Sophie glanced at Sera and Brooks, both of them watching her carefully now, and took a slow breath.

"So," she said, choosing her words with obvious care. "I need a favor."

"Okay."

"A pretty big one."

"Okay," Kelvin said again, slower this time, sunglasses sliding back down over his eyes like he was bracing for something.

"I need you to hack into the Ark's systems."

Silence.

Sophie waited a beat. "Kelvin?"

Nothing.

"Kelvin, are you there?"

A pause, then his face reappeared, blinking like he'd just surfaced from somewhere deep. "Sorry, sorry, I think I'm having a network glitch. Can you repeat that?"

"I need you to hack into the..."

"Are you insane!!" Sophie didn't even get to finish her sentence before he cut her off entirely.

"No, genuinely, are you insane, Sophie, I thought maybe I misheard you the first time, I thought you'd hear yourself say that out loud and immediately walk it back, but no, you just said it again, with the same calm little voice like you're asking me to pick up milk." He threw both hands up on screen, sunglasses nearly flying off. "Did my absence somehow break your brain? Has hanging around Lila's chaotic energy this long finally started rubbing off on you?"

"Kelvin—"

"The Ark, Sophie. The Ark. Do you know what's on that station? Do you know who's on that station? That's not some backwater EDF supply depot, that's humanity's actual last-resort mobile fortress, staffed with some of the strongest, smartest, most dangerous people our entire species has managed to produce. You want me to just casually stroll into their systems from a beach chair on my honeymoon?"

"I—"

"And before you say it, yes, I know I'm good. I know I'm probably the best technopath currently breathing. But 'probably the best' doesn't mean 'immune to consequences,' it means 'the kind of target that gets noticed by other very good technopaths who work there full time and have institutional backing I don't have.'" He was fully worked up now, gesturing with both hands, voice climbing with each sentence. "The Ark isn't some empty building, Sophie, there are absolutely people stationed there whose entire job is catching exactly the kind of intrusion you're asking me to commit on my wedding trip."

Sophie let him finish, patient, arms crossed, waiting for the exact moment his momentum ran dry.

It came a beat later, Kelvin pausing to actually breathe.

"Are you saying," Sophie said, calm and deliberate, "that you can't do it? Because you're unable to beat a couple of glorified hackers?"

Kelvin's mouth opened, then closed.

"Didn't you just say you're probably the best technopath currently breathing?"

"That's not—that's a different—"

"I'm just at a hard place and I thought my genius of a friend could get me out of it. I'm sorry I called," Sophie said, voice softening into something almost sympathetic, almost. "I really am. This was clearly too much to ask of you. Enjoy the rest of your honeymoon, Kelvin. Tell Diana I said hi."

She reached for the disconnect.

"Done."

Sophie's hand stopped.

On the far side of the room, three separate terminals lit up in near-unison, data cascading down each screen in fast, clean streams, and Sera actually pushed back from her chair slightly, startled by how fast it had happened.

Kelvin's face on the small display looked deeply put out, sunglasses pulled off entirely now, glaring at her through the feed.

"For the record," he said, "I know exactly what you just did. You manipulated my gigantic ego into doing something reckless, on my honeymoon, using a technique so transparent a first-year could've seen through it." He shook his head slowly, equal parts offended and impressed. "For shame, Sophie. For shame."

"Thank you, Kelvin."

"I'm hanging up now. Diana's going to ask why I'm on my phone during our honeymoon and I refuse to tell her the actual answer, it's too embarrassing." He pointed at the screen, one last accusing finger. "This never happened."

The call cut.

Sophie exhaled, turning to face the wall of newly lit terminals, and found Brooks and Sera both already staring at the flood of information now populating across every screen.

"Well," Brooks said slowly. "That's certainly access."

---

The investigation took the better part of six hours.

Sera pulled personnel logs, cross-referencing duty rosters against Hendricks's own recorded schedule, looking for patterns in who he'd been paired with, worked alongside, reported to or from, across decades of entries that stretched back further than any of them had expected the Ark's digital archive to actually go.

Brooks worked a different angle entirely, pulling old commendation records, campaign citations, anything with Hendricks's name attached to a second signature, hunting for consistent co-authorship, joint operations, the kind of paperwork trail that suggested genuine working relationships rather than passing institutional overlap.

Sophie ran the social angle, digging through event attendance logs, gala guest lists, anything that placed Hendricks in a room with someone outside strictly professional contexts, the kind of record that might reveal who he actually trusted enough to spend unstructured time with.

"Okay," Sophie said, hours in, rubbing at tired eyes. "Commander Reyes. He's shown up on three separate joint operations with Hendricks over the last decade."

"Checked him already," Brooks said, not looking up. "Reyes retired eight years ago. Moved off-world entirely, runs a private security consultancy on one of the Sterling territories now. No active access to anything current."

"Fine. Cross him off." Sophie kept scrolling. "What about Lieutenant Colonel Aris?"

"Also checked," Sera said. "She and Hendricks served together during the Sirius campaign that first captured and turned the planet into a mine, decades back, but their service records diverge sharply after that. No sustained contact logged since. A dead end, most likely."

"Damn." Sophie leaned back, exhaling hard. "This is slower than I wanted."

"Institutional corruption doesn't announce itself conveniently," Brooks said. "We knew this would take time."

They kept at it. Names surfaced and fell away in slow succession, promising leads that thinned out under scrutiny, coincidental overlaps that explained themselves the moment someone actually checked the dates properly. A colonel who'd shared a training cohort decades ago but had no contact since. An officer whose name appeared alongside Hendricks's on a dozen documents but whose service record showed nothing but rigid, exemplary conduct with no red flags anywhere. A senator's aide who'd attended the same galas but whose entire relationship traced back to nothing more than mutual attendance at mandatory functions.

By the fifth hour, the pile of disqualified names had grown considerably longer than the pile of anything actually promising.

"I'm starting to think this is a dead end," Angel said, arms crossed, having rejoined them somewhere in the third hour after cleaning up from her own earlier fight.

"Maybe," Sophie said. "Or maybe he's just careful. Someone who's been hiding for this long doesn't leave an obvious trail of accomplices lying around for anyone to find."

"Wait." Sera's voice cut through, sharp, and everyone turned toward her screen.

"What've you got," Brooks said.

"Social attendance logs. Outside strictly professional settings." Sera scrolled slowly, highlighting a repeating name across a dozen separate entries spanning almost twenty years. "Commander Mei Lin. She appears alongside Hendricks at private functions, repeatedly, going back further than any other name we've found so far. Dinners. Private gatherings. Nothing officially logged as meetings, all personal social contexts."

"Are you sure?" Sophie backed up and asked almost immediately, shock written all over her face.

"Mei Lin," Angel repeated slowly. "She's Vanguard adjacent, isn't she? Command staff."

"Senior command," Brooks confirmed, frowning at her own screen now, pulling Mei Lin's file up alongside Sera's findings. "Highly decorated. We worked together and I know her well. Nobody's ever questioned her loyalty, not once, not even in passing."

"That's exactly the profile you'd want," Sophie said quietly. "Someone above suspicion. Someone whose name would never even make it onto a list like this if we weren't specifically looking for personal, informal contact patterns instead of professional overlap."

"There's more," Sera said, still scrolling. "A second name, appearing with similar frequency, similar informal context. Listed only as 'the First Lady' across several entries, no further identification attached."

The room went quiet.

"The First Lady," Brooks repeated slowly. "As in—"

"The General's wife," Sophie said, something cold settling into her voice.

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

"Wait." Angel leaned forward, staring hard at the screen like she could will more context out of it through sheer focus. "Are you telling me the two people Hendricks has spent the most personal, informal time with over the last two decades are a decorated Vanguard commander and the Supreme General's own wife?"

"That's what the records show," Sera said.

"That's—" Angel stopped, shaking her head slowly. "That's not a coincidence. That's not even close to a coincidence."

"It could still be nothing," Brooks said, though her voice carried none of the conviction the words were supposed to. "Social proximity isn't proof of complicity. People attend the same functions for a hundred reasons that have nothing to do with conspiracy."

"Sure," Sophie said. "Except we've spent six hours disqualifying every other name that came up for exactly that reason, and these two are the only ones that survived every single filter we ran."

Sophie stared at the two names sitting side by side on the screen, Mei Lin and First Lady, both linked to Hendricks across decades of careful, deliberate, personal contact that had never once been officially logged as anything worth noting.

"Okay," she said slowly, mostly to herself now. "Okay. So it's not just Hendricks."

"If this holds up," Brooks said quietly, "it's not just Hendricks, and it's not just the EDF command structure anymore either. That second name puts this somewhere a lot closer to the Ark's actual leadership than any of us wanted it to reach."

Angel let out a long, unsteady breath, sitting back hard in her chair.

"What the hell," she said, to nobody in particular, staring at the two names glowing steady on the screen. "What the actual hell."