HOW DID OPERATIONS TEAM Z7 COME TO BE?
Table of Contents
Operations Team Z7 is the Arknights Endfield squad that Endfield’s own HR department doubted: captain Akekuri, a valedictorian who could have worked anywhere, and four recruits nobody else wanted, Antal, Catcher, Fluorite and Estella.
Fluorite’s silence usually means a prank is coming. Estella falls asleep to a record that causes dizziness and nausea. The only time she has seen Catcher frown, she had just thrown a week-old cream cake onto his greatsword. And according to Estella, Antal’s jokes always make her and Fluorite laugh. Their captain could have worked anywhere on the planet, so why did she pick these four? This post follows our long-form video section by section, with the game’s own words.
How we checked this: every quote comes from the Arknights Endfield game text (operator files, voice lines, text chats, Dijiang chatter, weapon archive stories, tags and the 1.6 Si’s painting dialogue), checked against the current game data. Where we connect facts the game doesn’t connect, we say it is our reading. Images are frames from our video; the art and footage in them belong to Hypergryph, Yostar and Gryphline, and the Si’s painting clips are from pxldawn (CC BY). Endfield Hub is a fan site, not affiliated with Hypergryph, Yostar or Gryphline.
TL;DR
- Akekuri asked for an empty squad: a business-school valedictorian, she joined Endfield instead of the family company and asked Supervisor Perlica for the inactive Z7.
- Her recruits worried HR: they got in “on Perlica’s personal guarantee”, as a trial run.
- Each recruit had nowhere else: Antal the Savra genius who flipped off his professors, Catcher the sick kid from a soldier family, Fluorite the wanted gunslinger, and Estella, taken from a Landbreaker camp.
- They look after each other in odd ways: a living GPS, a cupcake secret, a 1-millimeter smile, and a captain who quietly rewrites the schedule of anyone who overworks.
- The families never left: parcels of weapons, a grandmother’s care packages, a donation to a frontier town, and a mother who fell ill from overwork.
- Why Z7: a girl who played “Fight the Aggelos” on her father’s shoulders and wants her family to sit down together again.
Who Is Akekuri, Z7’s Captain?
As a little girl, Akekuri rode on the shoulders of her dad and her uncle, playing the commander while they charged imaginary Aggeloi. Ten years ago, her uncle was called up to the north and never came back. Her parents stopped speaking. Her dad went back to the war, and her mom kept running the family company.
Her mother raised her to take over that company, and she graduated top of her business school. Then she joined Endfield instead, and asked her supervisor Perlica for an inactive team called Z7, promising to rebuild it as a small support team that wouldn’t drain anyone else’s resources.
When the Endmin asks why a valedictorian chose Endfield, she says: “Truth is, I’m the one who’s grateful they chose me.” She gave up fashion and art to train.
How did Akekuri prepare to lead Z7?
She prepared the way she knew how. She pestered Krad, Endfield’s ballistics expert, for a whole month about every role in a squad. She asked both Chen and Ember to train her recruits, and neither knew she had asked the other.
HR’s verdict on her recruits was that a few of them “made HR raise their eyebrows”. They got in on Perlica’s personal guarantee, as a trial run. Akekuri carries a flare gun and admits she isn’t the strongest fighter, so trust and teamwork are the team’s best defense. In her words: “A strong team is one without any weak links.”
Who Are the Z7 Recruits?
Antal: the Savra genius with a robot arm
The first raised eyebrow was Antal. He’s a Savra, a scaled race the game describes as long-lived, with long tails and skin rougher and tougher than their cousins the Phidians. Arknights players have met Savra before: Asbestos and Blacknight are Savra too.
He grew up in his grandmother’s repair shop in New Wrankwood, a movie city that, as one weapon story grumbles, just took its name from Wrankwood, Columbia’s movie-star city in the first Arknights. He graduated top of a strict academy, and used a robot arm to give his professors the finger at the ceremony. Nobody there would write him a recommendation.
Endfield took him anyway. He wanted the research center, but his interviewer was Akekuri, and she told him modified Originium devices belong in real fights, not the lab, because that’s where their problems show up. He agreed, and joined her team instead. He also has a life goal. In school, people said he had no sense of humor. He agreed: “My defect must be corrected.” So he trains bad jokes, five times a week.
What he doesn’t advertise is his talent. One weapon archive story is the confession of a man who was the top Arts caster in every class he ever took. Endfield rated his Arts “Standard”, so he stormed into HR and demanded a retest. HR set one up with two other operators as controls. He carefully cut one perfect square out of a metal slab. At the next station, a Savra looked at him and asked: “Is this the way to do it? I thought I had to cut 16 squares with a single move!” There were sixteen perfect squares on the floor, and the clock said one minute and one second.
The genius gave up on the Specialist Tech Division and went to work in the Arsenal. The story never names the Savra. Antal’s own file rates his Arts “Outstanding”. More in Antal’s full backstory.
Catcher: the least talented soldier in a family of soldiers
Catcher has the opposite problem. His parents were soldiers, his brother is a military instructor, and his sister is a famous bodyguard. He’s the youngest, and he calls himself the least talented soldier in the family. He caught Oripathy at four and spent his early childhood in bed. He says he couldn’t even lift a water canteen, and he still hates the smell of iodine. He remembers his first walk in broad daylight as being brought back to life.
So he trained, two hours earlier than his brother and three times as hard as his sister. One of his tags says he started with thirty squats a day at boot camp, and kept it up for 1,946 days.
The private military companies he worked for wanted him to stop asking questions. He couldn’t. His Endfield employment contract quotes an operator who hears he’s on the mission: “Woot! Awesome! Now I can breathe easy.” More in Catcher’s full backstory.
Fluorite: the wanted gunslinger
Then came Fluorite. She’s a Phidia, which the game describes as a tall, slender race with long tails and pointed ears, rare on Terra and even rarer on Talos-II. Arknights players know Phidia like Eunectes and Indigo.
Her real name is Verana. As a kid, she ran from town to town with her mother and a crowd she calls family: six uncles, eight aunts and twenty-two siblings, none related by blood. They slept on pack animals all day, sunbathing so they wouldn’t feel hungry. She says nowhere was really home.
Her bounty poster is the short version of what came next: gang muscle, gunslinger, then top shooter for a crime boss in a frontier town, until she turned on him, wrecked his business, and kicked a corrupt politician in public. The poster even accepts body parts as partial delivery: thirty percent for hands and feet, fifty for the tongue.
She tells the Endmin how she met Akekuri: Z7 was driving Landbreakers out of a town, the locals were eyeing Endfield’s supplies like vultures, and Akekuri bailed her out of trouble. Perlica named her Fluorite, after a mineral that is “naturally toxic, yet perfect for creating all kinds of industrial products”. Her verdict: “Kind of a cheeky choice.” More in Fluorite’s full backstory.
Estella: the recruit from a Landbreaker camp
The last recruit Z7 found in a Landbreaker camp. Estella’s family lost their savings to a fraudster named Bernard MacDoff (our reading: the game’s version of Bernie Madoff), then lost their mine to a collapse and a raid on the same night. The raiders took Estella and put her to work.
In her version, she was at rock bottom and very hungry when Akekuri and Fluorite took her in with the people they’d rescued. Then she started describing the Landbreakers’ organization and their patrol shifts. Fluorite was so amazed she asked how she knew, and Estella still remembers the look on her face. Akekuri was impressed, and invited her to join Endfield.
Estella said yes because she wanted somewhere safe to live. Her first words to the Endmin explain the rest: “Please don’t give me physically-intensive assignments. Thank you.” Her contract says: “You can trust Estella on anything EXCEPT life.” More in Estella’s full backstory.
How Do the Z7 Members See Each Other?
Catcher admits Z7 doesn’t look impressive. In his words, the captain is a little too young, Fluorite’s bite is a little too nasty, and Estella and Antal both need a little more common sense. Then he says he wouldn’t mind being a permanent member.
When the Endmin needs to find everyone, Akekuri sends Catcher, the team’s living GPS. Akekuri is in the mess hall, because they’re serving pastries from Higashi, the Japan-like country that Arknights’ Mizuki and Saga come from. Fluorite has booked the training room all day to fix her last mistake, though she’d never admit it. Antal is in the archives. Estella is probably at the Slug farm, asking where to find slug-brewed liquor.
Estella’s taste, plan and secrets
That’s her taste. Her photo snapshot offers you a nutritious drink of bugs and plant extracts. She once gave Akekuri, who loves long-ears, a stack of long-ear recipes. Akekuri didn’t speak to her for a week, and Estella still thinks that was weird. She also asks the Endmin for a way to get fit without sweating. Her training plan turns out to be one fifth of the normal load. She had assumed it was double. “Endmin, am I totally doomed?”
Estella collects secrets but never uses them, because that’s too much work. She has nothing on Catcher, who, she says, lays everything bare in his performance reports. She has never met a weirdo like him. On Akekuri, she does have something: if the captain gives her an unfair assignment, everyone learns about Akekuri’s cupcake secret. The game never says what the secret is. Estella is still keeping it.
Antal’s lectures and jokes
Antal gives lectures. When Estella asked why long-ears have long ears, he lectured on ecology for the rest of the day, then said he had skipped seventy percent of the material. And his jokes have a timing problem. In one Landbreaker ambush, while Catcher held the line, Antal delivered a punchline and explained the pun. He says it was on purpose, because Catcher was stressed, and afterward the corner of Catcher’s mouth moved about one millimeter.
He worries about Estella in battle, because they both have shiny, easy-to-spot skin. He finds Fluorite’s tail impressive, but she has banned “tactile assessments”. And when it rains, he says, Catcher stops talking, though he never minds Antal sitting next to him. Antal finds this perplexing, and the game never explains it.
Fluorite’s version of Antal: “That big lizard’s cool as ice, even in the heat of battle. Probably doesn’t even realize he’s in danger.” It drives the captain up the wall. Once, Antal turned down dinner with the Endmin because he had hunted down an Aggelos on his own without reporting it, and Akekuri punished him by taking away his night-time canteen privileges.
Fluorite reads people
Fluorite’s Arts only make sticky fluids, but she reads people so well that some operators think she has secret divination powers. One Z7 member nearly flunked PE and got an earful from the instructor. On the walk back to the dorms, Fluorite passed them and said: “I guess it can’t be helped. Midnight sandwiches are just so divine.” She had worked out that they’d been snacking at night, and said it out loud. When they complained to the rest of the team, they got knowing looks instead of sympathy.
She explains it to the Endmin: playing along with people’s schemes is too much work, so she answers what’s on their minds. If they meant no harm, she gets dirty looks. If they did, it’s safer to make them show their fists early. She also brings the Endmin a wildflower from Terra that only grows where people have been, this one from the very edge of the Blight. She calls it poetic, then adds: “Though I just killed it.”
She taught Antal a card game where the loser does whatever the winner says. He won five games, so she owes him five lessons on being fun to talk to.
Catcher, the cook who brings everything
Fluorite says the super-prepared ones like Catcher are the most afraid of messing up, but he always pushes through. His idea of preparing is asking the Endmin whether to bring a welder, an antigravity module or a dust mask, and then bringing everything.
He’s also the cook. On his first day in Z7 he tried his teammates’ food. On his second day he asked the combat instructor, Lil’ Dodge, for survival training. He keeps a handwritten menu of everyone’s likes and hard nos.
Akekuri’s meetings are tea parties, because tea makes people calm enough to speak up. For two months she served Catcher coffee, and he drank it every time without a word. He’s allergic. She switched him to hot cocoa. Catcher, in turn, makes the Higashi snacks she won’t admit she loves, and calls it a coincidence.
Catcher trusts the team completely on missions, and not at all to rest afterward, so he walks the library all-nighter and the game-room prankster back to their cabins himself. Akekuri watches Catcher. Whenever he takes on work nobody gave him, she quietly changes his next assignments.
Estella’s near-death
Estella worries them in the field. She tells the Endmin she works alone because her bad luck sometimes takes others down with her. Fluorite’s advice: don’t touch Estella’s playlist, and don’t let her chase danger for real. One of Estella’s potentials is called “Life Over Mission”.
Once, on recon five kilometers away, she learned teammates were trapped. She changed the plan on her own, ran into the crossfire to cover their retreat, and was blown off her feet. Her chance of surviving the next twenty-four hours was eighty-five percent. Her visitor list names four people: Akekuri, Fluorite, Catcher and Antal. The file is labelled “a medical record often reviewed by Akekuri”.
Others noticed. Pogranichnik, the old soldier, says Z7’s youngsters only had basic training but fight with real soldiers’ awareness. And one weapon story is a drill instructor, Sato Kogo, yelling at a recruit whose team lost to Z7 and who blames it on not going to military school. Sato, a former debt collector, tells him to drop the excuses, then asks for his plan to beat Z7 next time.
What Happened at Z7’s First Anniversary?
The team’s first anniversary is the one day everyone in Z7 calls unforgettable. Only Estella has good memories of it, and she was unconscious for most of it.
It was a riverside picnic. Estella’s wild mushrooms were only mildly toxic but incredibly spicy, and while the team washed the burn out in the river, the dam upstream started a scheduled release. Akekuri had forgotten the notice; it was the reason they had the day off. Estella rode the flood on the team’s cooking pot, imagining a rock concert. The others walked all night, found her asleep at a nomad campfire, and carried her back in turns. On Akekuri’s back, she mumbled things about home.
What Did Z7 Achieve in One Year?
After a year, Akekuri reported to Perlica: forty missions, ninety-five percent success, zero casualties, and a combat rating that was still only average. In support, command and management, they ranked near the top.
Her private notes are about people. She worries Catcher is overextending himself. She knows Estella isn’t lazy, but healing a fragile body. She wonders if she’s patient enough for Fluorite to feel safe with her, and sees how hard Antal works to keep up.
Antal has noticed her too. He tells the Endmin the captain often loses sleep and paces around at night, and won’t say why. He asks the Endmin to find out. The report asks to serve under the Endmin, who was about to wake up. When they meet, she says: “We may be newly reformed and flying under the radar for now, but I promise, we’re going to make our mark.”
Where Do the Z7 Members Come From?
Catcher’s family still treats him as the sick kid. They send him rucksacks of food, an exoskeleton, and once a bomber drone that nearly got him blacklisted by the arsenal. He tells the Endmin they still think he’s the kid who couldn’t sit up without help. The Endmin points out that Z7 does the same: Akekuri rearranged her schedule to stop him overworking, and Antal has asked twice for tutorials on how to make Catcher laugh. He takes leave to thank his childhood doctor before the man retires, to show him he’s no longer the kid who could barely get out of bed. He wants to hold the line the way that doctor did.
Antal’s grandmother built him a staff when he was small, to make up for his weak Arts, and told him his talent lay elsewhere. He believes her completely. She told him: “It shall accompany you as you modify this world.” In school, she mailed him movie plushies to hand out so he could make friends. His classmates kept the gifts and ignored him. After Z7, he tells the Endmin, he began “to tentatively accept the existence of unconditional social bonds”. She sends care packages for the whole team, labelled “gratitude for tolerating me”, and would love to have tea with the Endmin and explain how she raised “that little scaley kid”.
Estella’s parents still say it was bad luck that their lives kept getting worse. Estella says luck balances out, and that meeting Z7, joining Endfield and meeting the Endmin is her proof: “It’s okay if I’m not that lucky. Because I’ve already gotten the greatest luck long ago.”
Fluorite learns her teammates secretly donated money to rebuild Oriron Screw, the frontier town she only calls her “hometown”. She buys them gifts back: extra-spicy jelly beans and, for Antal, a book called Common Guide to Daily Life. The Endmin has to deliver them, because the team runs when she walks up with her hands behind her back. She also hands the Endmin a letter, to be burned in the wilderness if she doesn’t come back. The person it was meant for is gone. Her last file ends: “Verana, you can also call me ‘Fluorite’ now. I’ve reached the skies.”
Then Akekuri gets news that her mother has fallen ill from overwork. She tells the Endmin she feels guilty for choosing Endfield over the family business, and she’s scared to go home. Asked who she’d be if she had stayed, she says she’d work just as hard, in business suits. But she’d never have met Z7, or the Endmin. She decides to tell her mother this is the path she truly wants.
Her wish, she says, is simple. She hopes her mom and dad can make peace. If they both worked at Endfield, maybe they wouldn’t have to choose between duty and family.
Where Are the Z7 Members in Si’s Painting?
In version 1.6, Z7 turns up inside Si’s magical painting. Akekuri tells a crowd: “A brush work divine… It resonates with true might…” They wait for a five-seven syllable poem, until one onlooker points out she’s just talking normally. Nearby, Fluorite makes a coin vanish for some kids: “Watch closely, this coin is about to disappear… Heh, off it goes.”
All five are in there if you go looking:
| Member | Where in Si’s painting |
|---|---|
| Fluorite | By the stone lions outside Yuanyuan Manor |
| Akekuri | Yuanyuan Manor, second floor |
| Estella | Sitting on the maple terrace |
| Catcher | Under an old tree on the trail past the bridge |
| Antal | Up at the Pavilion of Parting |
Why Did Akekuri Build Z7?
So why did the girl who could have had any job on Talos-II rebuild an empty squad out of people nobody wanted? Because she grew up playing “Fight the Aggelos” on her father’s shoulders, and watched the real war take her uncle and split her family. She wanted to use what little she had to help as many people as possible, and maybe make the world calm enough that her family could sit down together again. And she found four people who didn’t fit anywhere else.
In her words: “After applying to reestablish Z7, I went through over a year of intense training and trials. But what truly mattered was meeting Catcher, Fluorite, Estella, and Antal. They’re the heart of our team and the reason Z7 has a future.”
And if you want to join them, one of her idle lines has an invitation: “Have you ever had nama yatsuhashi? It’s a traditional Higashi sweet with red beans, matcha, and roasted chestnut flavor. If you’re up for it, come along to the next Z7 team meeting.”
What the game doesn’t say: what Akekuri’s cupcake secret is, why Catcher goes quiet in the rain, who the Savra in the Arts retest was, and whether Akekuri’s parents ever made peace.
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