This time, we didn't rush.
We planned.
Academy 4 was different from the others. No massive towers. No sealed underground labs. It spread outward—fields, controlled forests, long irrigation systems glowing faintly with energy. The children there weren't trained to fight.
They were trained to grow.
Kazim locked onto the academy's layout late one night, projecting it above the table. Green zones marked the farms. Yellow for staff areas. Red for security concentrations.
"Too many guards near the fields," he said. "If we engage there, the kids get caught in it."
"So we don't," Aira replied immediately.
The plan formed quickly after that.
We wouldn't enter near the greens.
We would pull the guards away from them.
Monisha opened the portal inside the staff sector—where instructors, administrators, and technicians worked. Unarmed. Overconfident. Safe.
The moment we stepped through, Aira moved.
Fire spread across storage units and control panels, controlled but aggressive. Alarms screamed to life. Smoke filled the halls. Staff scattered in panic, shouting, running.
And the guards followed.
Exactly as planned.
They flooded toward the staff zone, abandoning their posts around the farms.
That's when we moved.
Ren, Kazim, Aira, Monisha, and I formed a line at the main access route between security and the green sectors. Narrow ground. Limited angles. No room to flank easily.
"Nothing crosses," Kazim said quietly over the comms.
They came fast.
Too fast to count.
Aira stood forward, fire detonating in tight bursts—not wild flames, but focused strikes that knocked guards back and broke formation. Ren followed, vines tearing up from the ground, crushing legs, dragging armored bodies into the soil before they could recover.
Kazim moved like a machine—precise, efficient. His crystal-powered blades cut through joints and neck, killing them instantly.
I didn't think.
I didn't hesitate.
I moved.
The chained axe tore through shields, through bodies, through space itself when I forced more power into it. Guards fell in pieces, some not even realizing they were dead until they hit the ground.
Monisha didn't fight like us.
She opened portals.
Small ones. Precise.
Guards rushed forward and vanished—thrown into empty voids, unstable gravity zones, places no human body could survive for more than seconds. She closed each portal immediately, her face tight, focused, refusing to look away.
Behind us—
The rescue began.
Portals bloomed across the farm fields, one after another. Nature controllers—kids—hesitated only a moment before running through. Some cried. Some froze. Some looked back once.
Then they were gone.
Safe.
The guards kept coming.
We didn't give them time.
No speeches. No mercy. No pauses.
This wasn't a battle.
It was a barrier made of flesh, fire, steel, and resolve.
And it held.
When the last portal closed and Kazim confirmed evacuation complete, the ground around us was torn apart. Burned. Crushed. Silent.
We disengaged immediately.
No celebration.
No words.
As Monisha sealed the final exit and the academy alarms spiraled into chaos behind us, I looked once at the fields—empty now, finally free.
Academy 4 wasn't destroyed.
But it had been hollowed out.
And the academies would understand what that meant.
We weren't rescuing anymore. We were also taking the hard grown field with us.