Clancy woke up at 0700. Not because he set an alarm, but because there was an alarm set for him. The sirens that were in the room the recruits were staying in all sounded, blasting Maroon 5 music. Not only was this strange, it was also odd for a government agency to be into pop rock.
Clancy groggily got out of bed and changed, the rest of the recruits also following suit. The uniform that they were all issued was pretty much the same. It was a slim fit black tracksuit with blue accents, with an OTA logo on the left breast. The only 3 people that had slightly different designs were the child he saw in the group, who seemed to be around 11, as well as two women similar age to him.
They all donned the same style black tracksuits but with a light purple trim instead.
The two girls did not exude the abilities of a fighter. In fact,they both seemed terrified to be lined up for role call. The boy, on the other hand, had a sort of smugness about him, One that made Clancy want to sock him in the face, even though they had never exchanged any words between them.
Five minutes after they had dressed and assembled in a straight line, the heavy steel door to their dormitory hissed open with a sharp click. Zephyr stepped inside first, clipboard in hand, his eyes scanning the room with quiet authority. Behind him followed Selwyn, tall and silent, his gaze sweeping over the recruits like a watchful shadow. Without missing a beat, Zephyr raised the clipboard, flipping a page with a crisp snap, and began to call out names, and each recruit soundly responded with a "Present!" or "Here!".
With each name called, Clancy made a mental note to examine them, figuring out who was who.
"Lena Hargrave!"
"Here!"
'Dark haired, roughly 5'5", black eyes, caucasian. Purple accents on her tracksuit.'
"Dorian Vance."
"Here, sir!"
'Dark haired locks, 6'11", possible giant, brown eyes, seems to be of african descent. Blue accents on his tracksuit."
"Mira Lockwood."
"Present."
'Ombre hair, 5'8", yellow eyes, caucasian. Blue accents on her tracksuit.'
"Baek Jihoon."
"Here."
'Black hair, 5'10", black eyes, pale skin of Korean descent. Blue accents on his tracksuit.'
"Alek Baryshnikov."
"Yeah, here."
'Blonde hair, 4'4", green eyes, caucasian, seems to be of Eastern European descent. Punchable face. Purple accents on his tracksuit.'
"Mariana Baryshnikov."
"Present."
'Blonde hair, 5'6", green eyes, caucasian, European descent, seems to be the sister of Alek. Pretty, not punchable face. Blue accents on his tracksuit.'
"Clancy Endicott."
"Present."
"Evelyn Feng."
"Here."
'Black hair, 5'10", black eyes, of east asian descent. Very pretty. Super my type. Purple accents on her tracksuit.'
"Luca Romano."
"Present, sir!"
'Blonde hair, blue eyes, 6'3", italian descent. Seems to be a decent guy at first glance. Blue accents on his tracksuit.'
And with that , Zephyr finished his role call and Clancy finished his base examinations. It seemed these 9 people, at least according to Zephyr, were the most elite unit in the world, or at least, were part of the most elite units.
"Alright, squad. Breakfast is in 3 minutes, there is a cafeteria two turns right out of this room. We begin training at 0800. "
With a final glance over the line of recruits, Zephyr lowered his clipboard and gave a curt nod. Selwyn turned on his heel, and together the two men strode out of the dormitory, the heavy door sliding shut behind them with a resonant thud, their footsteps fading down the corridor.
"The cafeteria was colossal—a cavernous hall the size of a football stadium, its vast ceiling disappearing into shadow above a sea of metal tables and benches. The low hum of thousands of voices filled the air like static, blending with the clatter of trays and the hiss of food stations. Nearly six thousand recruits were already crammed inside, eating, talking, or shuffling from line to line when the 111th Division stepped in. Navigating the bustling crowd, they made their way to the breakfast stations, grabbed their trays, and slipped into an empty table, the warm scent of food mixing with the sharp tang of disinfectant and machinery."
Clancy was starving, and so were the rest of the recruits. They hadn't eaten since yesterday morning when they had first entered the building.
Luca took a bite of his food, then set his fork down and asked Clancy.
"Hey, Clancy. So were you lying yesterday about knocking Garrick out?"
"No."
"Wow, that's impressive."
Luca seemed stunned, and Clancy could believe why. Garrick was indeed tough. But Clancy had been training with a demon until he was 18. That demon being his father. He was a brutal, skilled, and highly effective martial artist, more than Clancy ever was. Everything Clancy learned was from the experience and life that his father had lived. Garrick was tough, and although it was hard to believe, he did in fact believe that his father could defeat him.
It was why Clancy had an edge. Because his trainer had been so skilled, his standards from a young age were already ridiculously high.
"I would like to test out your skills in training later if that'd be alright."
The voice came from Dorian, who sat right next to Luca.
He towered over the other recruits, even as they sat down. His thighs were so massive he actually struggled to fit them between the bench and table. He looked at Clancy and spoke with a kind but curious tone.
"You see, before Garrick, I have only lost once. And so, I would like to test you, and see if you truly are as strong as you claim. I wish to improve my own skills and train to be the best version of myself."
Clancy, who had originally been slightly wary of Dorian, now realized that there was nothing to worry about. He was kind and desired improvement. Despite looking like a scarred barbarian, he seemed rather docile.
"Doesn't matter what your little pissing contests would prove you brutes, I would crush all of you without lifting a finger."
This time, the voice came from the end of the table, but from down below. It was the voice of the one kid in the division. Clancy recalled his name was Alek Baryshnikov. His Hermes device translated his words to have a thick european accent, laid heavily with contempt and utter pride. Luca spoke up first.
"I was wondering, how the hell did a kid like you even pass the exams? And why are you, along with the two girls, wearing tracksuits lined with purple?"
"Because I'm better than you."
Then Alek took a glance at the girls with purple on their tracksuits.
"Well, I'm better than you, anyways."
Then, he picked up his plate and walked away, walking out of the cafeteria.
His sister, Mariana, still sitting on the bench next to where his seat was, apprehensively did not speak during the entire exchange. Once Alek was out of earshot, however she apologized profusely to the group.
"I'm so sorry everyone. My brother does not know how to speak to others. He finds people…difficult to talk to. I hope you'll forgive him for his rude behavior."
And with that, she too also rose from her seat and left.
Soon, all the plates were cleared. The ones with a blue lined tracksuit went through one exit of the cafeteria, while the two girls Alek insulted earlier walked through the same exit he had used.
Clancy and the rest entered into a hallway, leading to the door of a classroom where they all took seats at.
After about 7 minutes of waiting, a woman walked in. She was extremely tall, and pretty old. She introduced herself as Evelyn Hart.
"I am the Strategic Intelligence Instructor at the North American Branch of the OTA. You will all be under 4 hours of intelligence classes and 4 hours of combat training every day for the work week for 6 months, until your first deployment. Your meals and housing will be provided here. On the weekends you are permitted reprieve to return to your civilian lives, but under no circumstances is any information to leak to outside sources. To insure this, we will be asking that you keep the Hermes devices on during the weekends, in order to track your location and monitor your speech. Any questions?"
Clancy raised his hand.
"Yeah, so… Will we get a salary? Didn't we technically…apply for this job?"
Evelyn smiled, impressed.
She had never been asked by a recruit about salary. In fact all questions usually ranged from, "what is the OTA" to "will there be a gendered shower or is it mixed?"
What she didn't know was that Clancy could care less about showers, he was more concerned with how absurdly broke he was. If there was any way to change that, he wanted to know.
"As I explained, lodging and meals will be covered for the first 6 months. There will also be a small stipend every month. But should you pass the final test and survive your first deployment, yes you will be entitled to a salary and contract."
She then turned to the rest of the recruits.
"Anything else?"
No one else raised their hands.
"Fantastic. Now, as you know…"
She continued to ramble on about the history of the OTA. According to her, the OTA was originally a part of the Philadelphia experiment in 1943.
In 1943, deep within the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, the U.S. Navy conducted what would become one of history's most terrifying and secret experiments—Project Rainbow, known to conspiracy circles as the Philadelphia Experiment. Officially dismissed as myth, the truth was far more disturbing.
The aim was to render the USS Eldridge invisible to radar—but the experiment pierced deeper than anyone intended. When the ship's generators roared to life and the electromagnetic field intensified, the vessel reportedly blinked out of physical existence for several minutes. But the true horror was what returned.
Witnesses claimed the ship reappeared suddenly—violently—its metal warped and twisted. Some crewmen were fused into the steel bulkheads, their bodies grotesquely embedded in the walls, floors, and deck. Others had vanished entirely. Those who survived suffered severe psychological breakdowns—speaking of shifting dimensions, inhuman figures watching them in the void, and voices that whispered from beyond time itself.
Unconfirmed reports described men who would phase in and out of reality, temporarily vanishing for hours or even days, returning disoriented, aged, or mutilated in impossible ways. Time and space had broken down inside the field—the barrier between worlds was torn open.
The experiment was immediately buried by military intelligence, but not before some of the underlying technology—or knowledge—was quietly transferred to shadow organizations tasked with studying the nature of time, rifts, and anomalies.
It is believed that the Philadelphia experiment was the first recorded temporal anomaly.
The Philadelphia Experiment cracked open a door humanity was never meant to touch. In the years that followed, the classified task force assigned to Project Rainbow sifted through the wreckage of the Eldridge and the impossible data it produced. What they discovered changed the course of history.
By 1950, after years of secret experimentation and sacrifice, human time travel was perfected—or so they thought. The early prototype allowed for limited jumps into Earth's own past. Small teams of carefully selected operatives were sent into history on reconnaissance missions: to observe, to gather data, to test the boundaries of temporal displacement.
But something was waiting.
In 1953, during a mission to the early 19th century, a five-man team slipped through the temporal gate, expecting to find a quiet pocket of the past. Instead, they emerged into a battlefield of horrors. A rift—one not caused by their own machine—hung open in the sky like a wound in reality, pulsing with unnatural light.
From that wound came the first recorded Kairon.
It was no formless entity or flickering phantom. The Kairon that stepped through was monstrous and real—a hulking, sinewed beast easily three meters tall, its frame twisting unnaturally with each movement. Patches of flesh and bone shifted like gears beneath armored plates that shimmered with oily, chitinous layers. It walked on four limbs like some grotesque fusion of ape and wolf, but its head—elongated, reptilian, crowned with jagged spines—snapped toward the team with hungry intelligence. Rows of serrated teeth gleamed as foul steam hissed from the gaps in its armored hide, and its eyes—six of them, burning like hot coals—fixed on the intruders with unnatural focus.
Where it stepped, the earth blackened and cracked; plants withered into ash. Its roar—a deafening, metallic shriek—ripped through the air as it lunged.
The time travelers attempted to retreat, but only two made it back, both badly burned, minds shattered by what they had seen. One died days later, convulsing in his sleep. The other survived long enough to whisper incoherent warnings of beings that existed outside history—creatures that hunted the cracks in time like wolves stalking wounded prey.
This catastrophic failure was marked as Temporal Incident Zero-One—the first contact with the Kairon species. More terrifying than the encounter itself was the realization that these rifts already existed in Earth's past—long before humanity ever dreamed of time travel.
The Kairon were not summoned by mankind's meddling.
They had always been there.
This revelation shook the secret council behind the project to its core. If the Kairon had been moving freely through time for centuries—perhaps millennia—then every step into the past risked awakening or disturbing them.
The answer to this terrifying new threat came swiftly. By secret international treaty, the Organization of Temporal Anomaly (OTA) was formed—tasked with hunting, containing, and erasing Kairon influence wherever they appeared in time.
But the fear remained: How many rifts were still hidden in Earth's forgotten history? How many monsters from outside time had already slipped through, unnoticed?
The horror of Temporal Incident Zero-One could not be ignored. It became clear to those within the highest levels of global defense and intelligence that the Kairon threat was not isolated—or accidental. Rifts like the one encountered in 1953 could exist at any point in history, tearing open without warning, spilling their monstrous inhabitants into eras unprepared to fight them.
Worse still, the records recovered from the time-travel mission hinted that some Kairon had already slipped into the past, possibly shaping human events in ways no one could detect. Wars, disasters, unexplained mass extinctions—what if these were not natural? What if they were the work of these creatures, silently preying on history itself?
Fearful of the consequences, the world's most powerful nations—acting in secret—signed an unprecedented, unofficial treaty. It was agreed that no single country could be trusted to handle this danger alone. Instead, a new organization would be formed: one without borders, without public knowledge, without the constraints of law or time.
And so, in 1960, the Organization of Temporal Anomalies (OTA) was officially established.
Its mandate was absolute:
Track, seal, and eliminate all rifts across history.
Hunt and neutralize all Kairon incursions, regardless of time or location.
Ensure the stability of the timeline at any cost.
The OTA recruited the world's best operatives, scientists, and temporal engineers—men and women who could operate in every era of human history, from the ancient past to the far future. Using technology born from the wreckage of the Philadelphia Experiment and refined by a decade of dark research, they built the first functional temporal gates, allowing strike teams to enter and exit the timeline wherever anomalies appeared.
But their task was far more than military.
OTA operatives became the hidden shepherds of human history, preventing the Kairon from destabilizing crucial moments: wars that would have been lost, inventions that never would have been made, civilizations that might have fallen centuries too soon.
In time, entire divisions of the OTA would be established—combat units, scientific divisions, temporal intelligence teams—each responsible for guarding a different thread of humanity's fragile past.
And though the world above remained unaware, the OTA knew the truth:
The timeline itself was under siege.
And the Kairon were far from finished.