The comms were silent. The kind of silence that came when protocol failed to account for reality.

Someone had flushed the ballroom. No casualties. No signal.
And now she was speaking on their frequency like it was hers.

She broke the tension with a soft sigh.

“…Sorry, darling. Keep forgetting what they call you here.”

No callsign. No rank.
Just familiarity and a level of calm that didn’t belong in the middle of a high-risk op.

Arthur’s eyes narrowed.

Then Merlin, composed as ever, exhaled. Just once. “Agent Merlin.”

Her voice came back, light.

“Noted, Agent Merlin.”

Then the ping.
A file dropped into the system. External. Secure. Seamless.

Merlin passed it along without pause.

Arthur watched it open across the network.

The air changed.

No one spoke right away. But he could feel it.

Bedivere was the first to break the silence.
“…This isn’t from our recon.”

Gawain leaned forward.
“This is weeks ahead of our recon.”

The pictures were detailed. Schematics. Patrol paths. VIP logs. Guard rotations.
Hand-drawn. Time-stamped. Precise.
Not adapted from Kingsman files. Written and drawn from scratch.

Arthur didn’t need to be told.
It wasn’t just better. It was corrective.
He was already adjusting the op in his head.

And still, Merlin said, evenly,
“Now you’re just showing off, Wyvern.”

The name landed like a trigger pull.

Arthur glanced at the feed.
He didn’t flinch. But the name came with weight.

Wyvern Grayson.

A name the Round Table had read in redacted logs.
The reason half the treaties in Eastern Europe held.
The reason the other half didn’t.

Gawain’s voice was quiet, realizing who’s standing next to him. “She wasn’t supposed to be here.”

She came back on the comms, as if she’d always been in the game.
“Not here to steal your thunder, Commander. I believe the phrase is: back up, as promised.”

Arthur’s jaw tightened.

She had shifted the battlefield in under three minutes.
Didn’t ask. Didn’t brief.
Just corrected course.

He’d be lying if he said he couldn’t see the angles. Where her intel and version streamlined theirs. Where her calculations shaved off risk.

What mattered was that she was right.

“What’s your position?”

“Where I need to be.”

He didn’t like the disruption. But she wasn’t wrong.
Her intel was cleaner. Her timing precise.
And Merlin?
Not even remotely surprised.

Arthur gave a clipped nod, more to himself than the team.

“Fine. Let’s shut this down.”

The mission kicked forward like a snapped wire.

Gawain adjusted his cuffs, already moving. “I’ll sweep the West wing.”

“East, hotshot.” Crown said, smoothly. “Unless you want to miss all the fun.”

He paused. Just long enough to register it.

“…East it is,” he said, a grin tugging at the edge of his voice as he turned on his heel.

In the security booth, Bedivere’s fingers danced across the tablet.

“Redirecting cameras. Looping patrol footage. Unlocking floor access now.”

Arthur nodded once. “Percival. Lancelot. Move.”

Lancelot moved like a blade drawn mid-swing.

He surged down the north hallway. A guard stepped into his path.
One twist. Drop.

Another raised a rifle.
Lancelot swept low, cracked ribs with a knee, and pivoted out—
his knife slipping from his fingers mid-motion.

He didn’t pause.

“Hallway secure,” he said into comms. “Two hostiles down.”

A blur passed him.

Crown.

She caught the falling blade one-handed without breaking stride.
Turned. Threw.

The knife sank clean into the chest of a third man, rifle raised and aimed squarely at Lancelot’s back.

She kept walking.

“Make that three,” she said, not even looking back.

At the corridor’s end, she glanced over her shoulder.
A half-smile.
Then gone.

Bedivere’s workspace was glowing like a bomb was about to go off.

Six camera feeds open. Three more in debug. One ear filtering team comms, the other feeding Arthur filtered alerts.

He dragged a split-screen thermal map over two static hallways and a flickering signal in the northwest stairwell.

“South junction’s flagged. North wing too stable. Could be clean or fake—we’ve got a ten-frame delay but no source corruption.”

He pinged it. Logged it. Kept moving.

Arthur’s voice came over the line. Controlled. Irritated.

“You’re still showing no movement at junction six. Tristan’s got a lock—why hasn’t it triggered?”

Bedivere’s fingers flew.

“I’m seeing zero on motion. Static audio pattern. Timestamp holding... no drift.” He frowned. “Looks real.”

In his earpiece: Lancelot grunting through a fight. Galahad dryly announcing a takedown. Gawain half-laughing mid-mission.

Then—

A new visual ticked live.

Crown.

Not in the hallway.

Above it.

She swung down into frame from the ledge, heels scraping glass like she wasn’t mid-op but mid-performance.

Evening dress. Lipstick in hand.

She looked up into the camera. Right at it.

Then started writing across the lens.

Large, looping strokes. Red on grey feed.

For a moment, nothing changed.

Then the hallway glitched.

The footage stuttered—jumped half a frame behind.

Then again.

Bedivere’s blood chilled. “No—”

He scanned it. Timestamp off. Lighting pattern caught on loop.

The hallway wasn’t quiet. It was too perfect.

“Visual loop confirmed. Feed’s poisoned. They buried movement behind a burn-in,” he said, fast now. “Shutting it down—cross-checking adjacent junctions—”

Four more collapsed under the same test.

Every one of them flagged clean. Every one of them false.

He toggled backups.

Real footage slammed into the interface like cold water.
Guards running. One agent being flanked. Another hallway where nothing was supposed to be happening—was.

Bedivere rerouted the tactical layout with one flick and tossed a full update to Arthur’s board.

“Looped feeds terminated. Five total. I’ve restored real-time visuals and rerouted tracking.”

Arthur watched as half the board corrected.

Routes redrew. Markers snapped back. The noise started to make sense again.

He stared at the hallway Crown had appeared in. The one that had read “clean” for ten full minutes.

The lipstick still smeared across the lens before it cut.

Not vandalism.

A flare.

He stepped back. Processing.

She hadn’t destabilized the mission.

She’d exposed the illusion that it was stable in the first place.

Arthur’s jaw set. He didn’t say a word.

But something in his expression cracked.

Because in the middle of chaos, she hadn’t reacted to it.

She had peeled it back.

And everyone else was just catching up.

Percival sprints down the hall, his boots pounding tile. “Commander, approaching the service corridor. Should save ten seconds to target.”

“That route was sealed during prep,” Arthur replied. Calm. Sharp. “Adjust to secondary.”

“Shit. Right. Copy.” He slowed, preparing to pivot.

Footsteps soft and quick cut across his path.

Then she passed him.

White hair loose to her waist, steady stride, dressed for the event but built for the field. Cool gaze, unreadable. No insignia. No rush.

She didn’t look surprised to see him.

“Finally,” she said, tone smooth, “Someone running in the right direction.”

He turned, thrown for half a second. “Wait, you’re—”

She smiled like it wasn’t a secret and kept moving.

He blinked, then clicked comms.

“Sir. I think I just saw Crown.”

A beat of silence.

Arthur’s reply came flat. “Did she speak to you?”

“Said I was heading the right way.”

Another beat.

“Then stay your course,” Arthur said. “Take the corridor.”

Percival pivoted back and picked up speed.

The door ahead stood slightly ajar. He slowed just enough to clock the scene.

A gold pin glinted in the lock—curved, delicate, nothing Kingsman-issued. A fingerprint left with intent.

Inside, three targets.

His mark stood mid-room, facing a cabinet. A guard to his left leaned against the wall, scrolling a tablet. Another crouched by an equipment crate, head down.

Percival moved.

He charged through the threshold in one clean motion. The standing guard turned just as Percival hit him like a truck—shoulder to chest, full force. The man’s body cracked against the wall and dropped.

The crouched guard reached for a weapon.
Percival lunged, grabbed his arm mid-draw, and slammed it down hard against the crate edge. Bone gave. The man screamed. Percival drove a knee into his ribs and let him fall.

The mark took off.

Percival ran.

Closed the distance in five steps, wrapped a hand around the man’s collar, and yanked.
The mark stumbled, caught air, then hit the ground hard. Percival dropped on top of him, wrenched his arms back, zip-tied his wrists tight and high.

He stood, yanked the man upright like dead weight, and clicked comms.

“Mark secured,” Percival said, breath steady but hot. “Three down. South corridor clear.”

He turned once, halfway out the door. The gold pin still sat in the lock, catching the low light.

Same glint he’d seen in her purse when she passed him.

He didn’t say a word.

But something in him shifted.

Then he kept moving.

Galahad moved through the west wing like he was making an entrance.

Crisp lines. Polished stride. One hand adjusting the cuff of his jacket like a ritual.

Two targets ahead.

The woman stood near a partition wall, pretending to take a call. The man loitered by the stairwell, trying too hard to look bored.

He set his rhythm, slow and centered. A performance.

Then Crown passed him.

White hair. Unreadable eyes. No sound but the hush of her steps across marble.

No warning.

Something touched his hip.

A second later, he felt it—the weight of a pistol settle cleanly into his holster.

He blinked once.

Oh?

A gun.

He hadn’t brought one.

He didn’t react. He never missed a cue. But his mouth pressed into a sharper line.

The catering cart rolled between him and the woman. Too smooth to be coincidence.

It clipped her hip. She shifted two steps left. Irritated.
Now framed in the glass. Like a gift.

He moved.

One smooth pivot. Taser drawn from under the napkin tray.
Pressed to her spine, down she went.

No noise.

He turned on the second mark. The man reached into his jacket, confident.

“You’re underdressed,” Galahad said, already raising the pistol surreptitiously gifted.

The man’s fingers came up empty.

Real panic this time.

Galahad moved faster than he looked capable of.

A full pivot. Grabbed the man’s wrist mid-motion.
Twisted. Drove a knee into his gut, flipped him onto the floor, and put him down hard.

He straightened. Ran a hand down his jacket. Breathed out slowly.

Tapped comms.

“Two down. West wing clear. And someone’s been cheating.”

He looked at the pistol Crown had gifted him. Then at the unconscious man, whose holster was sewn clean but empty.

She hadn’t interfered.

She’d rewritten the ending of the scene.

He ran a hand down his lapel, exhaled sharply, and said, under his breath,

“Well, that was nearly tragic.”

Then, quieter still:

“No wonder Arthur’s twitching.”

Then—
A soft breath. A flick of his coat.

And scene.