The Vankos were talented and capable, but they couldn't serve as the Brotherhood's foundation. When it truly mattered, they needed people they could actually trust.
Bella wanted to develop the Brotherhood's own homegrown talent—but something was off with all of them, emotionally.
Rebecca the hacker was the clearest example.
She was a textbook Brotherhood Assassin: idealistic, big-picture thinking, always looking at the horizon. Her anxiety wasn't about the Brotherhood's future—it was about humanity's. According to Rebecca, human scientific progress had effectively stalled back in the twenties and thirties of the last century.
Everything that came after—nuclear weapons, particle colliders, the internet, smartphones—had all been built on theories developed in that earlier era. Humanity had hit a wall. The path forward had run out. Even the fusion reactor that Anton Vanko treated like his most prized possession was based on theoretical groundwork from that same period.
Rebecca was deeply pessimistic. She didn't believe in humanity's technological future.
She gripped the railing and leaned back.
"Honestly, if you strip away the hatred and the ideological conflict, the Templar Order has always been trying to replicate Isu technology—looking for a completely new path forward, a way to push human science forward again. I think they've done more to actually advance human technology than we ever have."
Bella thought it over. She didn't know much about science, and she had no interest in debating ideologies.
"I don't agree with you," she said. Then she turned the question around: "Rebecca—do you like mountain climbing?"
The hacker shook her head with a faint laugh, as though she'd heard something absurd. "I used to be an extreme sports junkie. What do you think?"
Bella didn't laugh. She laid out her thinking in a calm, even voice:
"When you're standing at the base of a mountain, you can see villages, rivers, trees, and the peak—but only that one mountain. Everything beyond it is invisible. You have to climb to the summit before you can see how much world is out there. We're in the climbing phase right now. We'll find the next peak once we've reached the top. That's how progress works—there's no reason to panic about it."
"And as for Isu technology—we can use that too. I think of the Isu as another mountain. There's no reason to reject it, no reason to treat it as an enemy. Knowledge doesn't belong to any one species. If someone handed you alien technology right now, could you actually stop yourself from studying it?"
...
Bella was incredibly busy.
The Mentor role had somehow merged the duties of chief of staff, operations manager, CFO, head of HR, head of security, and a dozen other positions into a single job—with the occasional sideline as a big sister and a hired fist.
There were a thousand threads to manage at once. She'd barely gotten the research side organized and hadn't even left Osaka when her deputy came looking for her.
"Mentor, I've recruited a hundred and fifty soldiers. We can work around the equipment, but training is a much harder problem."
Gavin Banks was already stretched thin, running the candy business on Bella's behalf while secretly recruiting fighters, overseeing the Brotherhood's weapons manufacturing, and managing ammunition production. He had no room left to breathe.
The Brotherhood had previously maintained a dedicated training corps—experienced instructors, and quite a few of them.
The problem was that those instructors had been well-known within the Brotherhood precisely because they'd trained so many members. During the first wave of the Great Purge, captured members had cracked under interrogation and given up their real identities. The Templars hunted them down one by one. Not a single one survived.
The Brotherhood as it stood today had very few people who could actually fight.
Galina was skilled—but her abilities had been extracted through the Animus, genetic memories from her ancestors copied directly into her muscle memory. In other words, she knew the techniques herself but had no idea how to teach them to anyone else.
Being a talented student doesn't make you a good teacher. A star player doesn't automatically make a great coach.
Doing something and teaching someone else to do it are two entirely different skills.
Galina had tried several times. The results confirmed it—she was not a capable instructor.
William Miles and Gavin Banks were both administrative talent. Their combat ability was, to be charitable about it, not worth discussing. Putting them in charge of training was asking for the impossible.
Bella herself didn't have the time. And besides—since when did a Mentor personally run drills? Did Marx ever show Communist fighters how to operate a rifle? Not a chance.
She'd been turning the problem over for a while. Her original plan had been to bring in Taskmaster from New York—but that man's principles were practically nonexistent. Even setting aside the character issue, he was a mercenary who simply stayed neutral. Long-term cooperation offered the Brotherhood nothing. The Brotherhood could hire him—but so could the Templar Order.
"Here's what we'll do, Mr. Banks," she said. "Send someone to East Slavic. Make discreet contact with the leader of the reform faction."
...
The East Slavic Republic was a country that hadn't existed in Bella's previous life. It sat at the junction of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, with most of its territory spread across the Ukrainian flatlands—a classic agrarian state, landlocked and entirely surrounded by those three neighbors.
Being pressed up against Russia, a colossal power, made East Slavic inherently precarious.
A precarious environment meant no investment.
No industrial base meant no manufactured exports. Selling agricultural goods alone barely covered basic needs, and even there they couldn't compete with Ukraine's farm output, let alone Russia's.
The only reason the country still existed was that the Western world wanted it to exist.
East Slavic's domestic economy was a disaster. The conflict between the reformists and the conservatives was growing sharper by the day.
The reformists wanted to pivot fully toward the West. The conservatives wanted to realign with Russia.
Both sides had long since moved past arguments—rockets, rifles, and bombs were now their preferred tools of persuasion.
Svetlana Belikova had risen to lead the reformist faction in exactly this kind of environment.
She was middle-aged, but she'd once been the chief special forces instructor for the entire Soviet Union. Despite being a woman in that era, her personal combat skills, marksmanship, and vehicle operation skills were all ranked first across the entire USSR.
Matching her exceptional ability was exceptional ambition. She had no interest in being an anonymous instructor who trained others to receive the glory. She wanted to step into the spotlight herself—to hear the applause, to feel the crowd at her back.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, she returned to her homeland in East Slavic. Over the span of a decade, as a woman in a world that doubted her, she had clawed her way to the top of the reformist movement.
The days of serving as the Soviet Union's chief special forces instructor felt like another lifetime now. These days she wore tailored suits and heels instead of a uniform, replaced iron discipline with a politician's practiced smile, and faced her supporters and constituents with carefully curated warmth.
Svetlana Belikova had come to power during one of the country's sharpest internal crises. Her personal reputation was formidable—but she was a political newcomer, and the public didn't fully trust her yet. She needed more supporters.