SUPREMACY- Clash Between Heroes and Villains Chapter 49: Galxenchi's Historical and Endless Death

 Suzutamashi Shockfront

Suzutamashi State woke to sirens and purple horizons.

On the eastern marches near Shiorikaze City, the dawn sky rippled and split. Death Regime portals irised open along the low hills, violet wounds in the air. Deathwing himself stood on a jagged basalt ridge behind them, boots sinking slightly into the soil of Galaxenchi as if he were pinning the continent in place.

Before him, Suzutamashi sprawled in tiers of light: Sorabiko and Yamashiromi glittering on the coastal shallows, Suzukaze and Hanatsumi wrapped around river bends, Kasairyoku's emerald wards guarding inland forests, and far beyond them all, the distant gleam of Tenkoshorai City—the capital—like a star caught in morning haze.

"Zweite Lektion," Deathwing said softly in German, words drifting over the mustering hordes. Second lesson. "Gallaxgonbei war nur die Hausaufgabe." Gallaxgonbei was only the homework.

He lifted his staff.

The ridge vomited undead.

Deathsoldiers in rusted plate staggered forward first, eyes empty, rifles welded to their bones. Deathmarines followed in closer order, breastplates etched with corrosion runes that shed gray mist as they marched. Deathzealots came last in each file, chanting in a dozen dead tongues, holding up standards fixed with skulls whose jaws clicked in time with the liturgy.

Behind them rolled armor: low, brutal tanks in steel gray-purple, glacis plates stamped with skull-and-crossbones, side armor stitched with hanging femurs like trophies. On their hulls, more grotesque silhouettes clung—human-mutant gunners fused into turrets, their spine-cables wired straight into the engines.

The horde poured down toward the Suzutamashi border, a slow-moving avalanche of iron and bone.

Above them, Galaxy gold flared.

Galaxadye's fleets slid out of folded space over Sorabiko Bay, prow lights cutting hard lines across the water. Galaxadale's armored columns fanned out from Kasairyoku's forest roads, treads biting into the soil. Galaxastream bent the Suzukaze River into humming, golden laminar sheets, turning it into a moving wall. Galaxastride drew teleport corridors between Hanatsumi, Shiorikaze, and Yamashiromi, cross-hatching the state with emergency lanes. Galaxastorm sank into the storm-fronts over Oborotaka and Seiryūgan, coaxing thunder into disciplined ranks. Far above, Galaxapuff eased Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary into position over Tenkyosei and Gekkoujou like a drifting second sun.

Each Supreme Commander carried a regiment hook in one hand and a superpower in the other.

"全軍、スズタマシ防衛線へ," Galaxadye's voice cracked across every Galaxy channel, Japanese clipped and precise. All forces, to the Suzutamashi defense line. "市民を後ろに、敵を前だけに残す。" Civilians behind us, enemies only in front.

Ground-level, Sorabiko's seawall lit up as Galax Soldiers and Galax Marines rushed to pre-marked positions, orange-trimmed armor reflecting the gold of their Supreme Commander's fleets overhead. Artillery platforms flexed on the bluffs. In Kasairyoku's outskirts, Galax Rangers sprinted through cedar groves, tagging coordinates for long-range teleport reinforcements.

Deathwing watched the gold patterns unfold and smiled.

"Invasion Suzutamashi beginnt," he announced. Invasion Suzutamashi begins.

He flicked his staff forward.

The first wave hit Shiorikaze like a tide.

At Sorabiko's coast, Galaxadye turned the sea into calculus.

His forward carriers—sleek hulls inscribed with astronomy sigils—formed a staggered line offshore, each ship a moving variable in an equation only he saw completely. Battery barrels ticked through angles, their movements so small and precise that from far away they looked almost bored.

"Gunnery rings to seventy percent," he ordered in Cantonese, voice thin over the rush of wind. "Health grids full. First contact, non-lethal on infrastructure; lethal on anything with a skull."

Deathsoldiers splashed into the shallows like rotten driftwood, rifles already blazing. Behind them, Deathmarines in heavier armor waded in, taking aim at the Sorabiko seawall.

Galaxadye's fingers snapped once.

Golden-yellow barrages lanced out in fan patterns timed to nanoseconds. Shells folded space in micro-arcs, skipping along the water's surface before erupting in precise, overlapping shockwaves that ripped the leading undead ranks apart while leaving piers and civilian platforms untouched.

"Adjusting fire," he murmured, eyes flicking along a string of invisible numbers. "Deathsoldier saturation over threshold. Shift two degrees starboard; bleed blasts into empty harbor quadrants."

From the ridge behind the undead, Deathendye answered in silence.

Charts of projected casualty ratios spun around him in ghostly columns, each skull-icon representing one of his own expendable units. He watched Galaxadye's firing matrix trace itself over Sorabiko Bay and nudged his own forces into compensation.

Deathmarines took the brunt, armor plates absorbing enough of the blasts to let Deathsoldiers behind them continue their trudge. The front line died exactly as predicted. The second line did not stop.

"Gegenartillerie," he said quietly. Counter-artillery.

Deathtanks in the second echelon angled their turrets skyward, belching volleys of bone-cored shells and necrotic smoke toward the Galaxy carriers. Missiles twisted in mid-air under Galaxadye's time-tilt, many tearing themselves apart, but enough reached his shields to hammer gold barriers into brief opacity. His health ring ticked down a notch as his fleets absorbed the splash.

"他真的在算我," he muttered under his breath, half-impressed. He's really calculating me. Aloud, he switched to Japanese. 「データは全部取った。次の一斉射で、彼の予想も壊してあげる。」 I've got all the data. Next volley, I'll break his predictions too.

His equation extended, wrapping Deathendye's emplacements into it.

For a moment, the bay became nothing but numbers and light.

Inland near Kasairyoku City, the war turned blunt.

Galaxadale's columns met Deathendale's spearheads in a storm of treads and armor.

Sunlight flashed off Galaxy tanks as they crested a low ridge, hulls gilded, muzzle brakes glowing gold from continuous fire. Deathendale's machines rolled up from the opposite slope—lower, heavier, plated in layered steel gray-purple, each glacis a wall of scratched skulls. Between them, the valley floor had already become a crush of wrecks and burning bone.

Galaxadale stood atop his command tank, coat snapping in the wind, one hand resting on the auto-loading cannon's housing. His other hand traced quick, invisible arcs in the air, marking where shells had to land to blow gaps in Death Regime formations without letting the hordes use wrecks as cover.

"Keep the forward two companies at seventy percent ring health," he ordered. "Anything below half, rotate back through the Kasairyoku repair loops. We're not feeding Deathendale easy targets."

On the far ridge, Deathendale watched his columns adapt.

"Sie lernt," he rumbled, approving despite himself. She learns. "Dann lernen wir mit." Then we learn as well.

He stepped forward, battered armor shrugging off a recent graze from a Galaxy rail-round. His own health ring hovered just under full, violet arc thick and steady. Around him, Deathtanks shifted into wedge formation, their necro-engraved tracks grinding furrows into the hillside.

"Panzerkeil," he commanded. Armored wedge. "Wir schneiden ihnen ihre hübschen Linien auf." We'll cut open their pretty lines.

The wedge drove.

Galaxian shells blasted chunks from the point tanks, but necrotic bone grew back over shattered steel almost as quickly as it flew off. When the lines met, it felt less like two armored columns colliding and more like tectonic plates grinding. Galaxadale's tank lurched as a Death Regime shell struck the lower glacis; his health ring dipped as shock rattled through the frame.

He planted his feet.

「まだ折れない。」 Still not breaking.

His answer was a point-blank shot that slammed into Deathendale's lead tank and flipped it onto its side. Deathendale emerged from the explosion wreathed in smoke, cloak burning, health ring shaved down to a third—but still walking, still swinging his staff to direct the pushing wedge.

Behind and around the two commanders, elites and infantry brawled in the dust: Galaxkiba's shinobi unit blinking through gaps to carve open Deathmarines' joints; Deathbash slamming shockwaves through Galax trench lines; Galaxysuzuhime hurling crescent moons of force into Deathsoldier packs; Deathgrimmar dragging a rusted greatsword through ruined forest, every swing leaving a trail of hungry shadows.

The valley refused to decide who owned it.

On Suzukaze's riverfront, the world folded into water.

Galaxastream stood on an invisible platform just above the current, robes already soaked, hair plastered to his forehead. The Suzukaze River around him was no longer really water; he had pulled its flow into spiraling, golden helices that laced through the air, each strand carrying entire companies of Galax Soldiers and armored vehicles like beads on a wire.

Outside those helices, Deathenstream tried to drown the state.

He twisted tributaries into violet torrents packed with bone fragments and zombie torsos, aiming them at Suzukaze's levees. Every time one floodwave neared a Galaxy wall, Galaxastream's hands moved, fingers describing tight curves; the wave hit an unseen angle and turned sideways, sluicing down harmless gullies or back into Death Regime formations.

"流量八割維持," Galaxastream reported calmly, Japanese steady even as the river bucked. Holding eighty percent flow. "Deathenstream の波形も読めてきた。" I'm starting to read Deathenstream's wave patterns.

Deathenstream heard the update through the shared Absolute band and bared his teeth, half amusement, half irritation.

"Dann mischen wir das Spektrum," he muttered. Then we mix the spectrum.

He injected sudden, jagged pulses into his own currents—bursts of compressed necrotic pressure that did not follow the smooth curves Galaxastream had already charted. The next violet wave hit a Galaxy deflection angle and broke, yes—but its core detonated, sending an unexpected side-surge over a previously safe floodplain.

Galax infantry scrambling there found themselves thigh-deep in corrosive, bone-laced water, shields flaring in emergency compensation. Health rings dipped across an entire battalion.

Galaxastream grimaced.

"ごめん," he whispered to them—sorry—and re-threaded three entire kilometers of river in one brutal twist, stealing momentum from downstream defenses to shore up Suzukaze's line.

The riverfront held, but only just.

Higher in the air, over Tenkyosei and Gekkoujou, two aerial doctrines collided.

Galaxapuff, human female, Supreme Commander and guardian of Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary, floated just below her fortress's golden underbelly, hair whipping in the wind, hands weaving sigils of air and light. Around her, bomber wings and fighter screens flew in tight, elegant patterns, each squadron a brushstroke in a larger painting.

Opposite her, Deathenpuff rode a necrotic sky-barge shaped like a broken cathedral, chem-cloud generators humming along its spine. Her bombers flew in dissonant swarms, each aircraft stitched with bone grafts and trailing violet contrails that left brief, toxic halos in their wake.

"Altitude grids stable at three layers," Galaxapuff reported. "Civilian airspace above Tenkoshorai remains clear. まだ落とさせない。」 I am still not letting anything fall.

"Wirkungsradius der Chemwolken erweitern," Deathenpuff replied coolly to her own staff. Increase the effective radius of the chem-clouds. "Wenn sie nichts fallen lassen will, zwingen wir sie nur dazu, höher zu fliegen." If she will not let anything fall, we will simply force her to fly higher.

Her squadrons began to drop violet bombs not directly onto Galaxy positions, but into empty strata of air, building stacked clouds of poisonous mist that narrowed Galaxapuff's maneuver space. Each time a Galax wing dipped too low, toxic particles scraped their shields, ticking health rings down and forcing them back up.

Galaxapuff's brow furrowed.

"Switch to pattern Kōrin," she ordered. "We trade some coverage for vertical safety. Tenkyosei stays gold, even if the clouds get ugly."

She compressed her formation, pulling bombers into tighter stacks that punched clean corridors through the chem-layers. It worked—but the more she focused on protecting the Tenkoshorai–Tenkyosei corridor, the more space she ceded on the Suzutamashi perimeter.

Deathenpuff's barge drifted inexorably closer to the state's inner ring, violet wake spreading like ink.

Across Suzutamashi the pattern repeated: paired Supreme Commanders clashing on shifting fronts, elites darting in and out of the gaps, hordes always pressing from below.

At Yamashiromi's outskirts, Galaxastorm and Deathenstorm hurled weather at each other, thunderheads cracking as gold lightning tangled with violet hail. Near Shiorikaze, Galaxastride tried to keep evacuation and reinforcement corridors open even as Deathenstride seeded teleport-denial mines in every shadow.

On the streets of Hanatsumi, Galaxrire and Galaxharp coordinated rooftop fire and sound-pulse bombardments against advancing Deathsoldier columns, while Deathbash and Deathfury slammed through buildings to break their lines of sight. In Kasairyoku's gardens, Galaxysuzuhime and Galaxmurasaki wove time-dilated floral spells around key chokepoints, forcing zombies to slog through seasons in seconds; Deathshade and Deathplague answered with blasts of biting darkness and fumes that turned flowers black where they stood.

Over all of it, Deathwing watched from his ridge, staff planted in the dirt like a surveyor's rod.

He did not wade in. Not yet.

Every time a health ring on either side shrank near sliver-status, he watched which direction the recall laws bent—and smiled a little more whenever a Galaxy Supreme Commander's aura flashed thin and flickered backward toward safer lines.

"Stress. Tempo. Risse," he murmured. Stress. Tempo. Cracks.

Suzutamashi shook under the combined weight.

By nightfall, the defense line had not broken—but neither had it held cleanly. The map glowed gold over most of the state, yes, but now a hooked smear of iron purple had bitten into the northern and central arcs, reaching nearly to the approaches of Kasairyoku and Suzukaze. Several outer farm belts lay under flashing "contested" overlays. Supply routes that had been straight now kinked around new purple wedges.

In the war-room aboard Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary, Galaxadye, Galaxadale, Galaxastream, Galaxastride, Galaxastorm, and Galaxapuff stood around a central projection, armor scorched, health rings resting in the orange bands.

"Held lines at Sorabiko, Suzukaze, and Oborotaka," Galaxastream summarized, voice flat with fatigue. "Lost ground north of Kasairyoku, east of Shiorikaze. Teleport grids in Suzutamashi outer ring down to sixty percent efficiency."

"Deathendale's wedge is too close," Galaxadale admitted, jaw tight. "If he pushes again before we reset, he'll be able to touch the Kasairyoku ward-wall."

"そして Deathenstride が、裏道を作ろうとしている," Galaxastride added, eyes tracking flickering purple pins. And Deathenstride is trying to build back doors.

Galaxastorm rolled his shoulders, thunder still whispering in his hair.

「まあ、テストって言ってたからね。」 Well, he did say this was a test. He looked up toward the projection of Galaxbeam's distant presence, a faint golden silhouette reviewing all angles. 「先生、これ以上やったら中間試験ですよ。」 Sensei, if we push beyond this, it becomes a midterm.

On Death Regime comms, Deathendye marked the same map with cold satisfaction.

"Mehrheit der Frontkommandanten gezwungen, sich neu zu formieren," he noted. Majority of front commanders forced to re-form their lines. "Momentum liegt bei uns. Abstand zu Tenkoshorai... um einen Ring verringert." Momentum lies with us. Distance to Tenkoshorai... reduced by one ring.

On his ridge, Deathwing closed his fingers slowly into a fist.

"Gut," he said again. Good.

The Suzutamashi front did not collapse. But for the first time since Gallaxgonbei's liberation, a Death Regime assault had shoved the golden line inward rather than being rolled fully back.

Far in the dark beyond Kasairyoku's forests, more portals glimmered, waiting to open.

The state's second day of invasion had not yet begun.

Dawn of the second day came in gray instead of gold. The clouds over Suzutamashi felt heavy, as if the state itself was holding its breath.

On the ruined outskirts of Hanatsumi, a single Galax Ranger flare arced up and burst into a stylized galaxy sigil.

"Signal from Third Ward," Galaxrire reported over comms, voice sharp but steady. "Death Regime vanguard regrouping in the gaps we left last night. Elites mixed in. This isn't just mop-up."

"当然だろ," Deathbash snorted from a half-collapsed overpass, hearing the same flare through Deathwing's shared sense-grid. Of course. "Heute machen wir ernst." Today we get serious.

He drove a fist into a toppled tramcar, shockwave rattling windows three streets away.

The answer arrived in streaks of light.

Galaxrire stepped off the edge of a tower and let gravity forget her for a moment. She inverted mid-fall, golden rifle already raised.

"「照準完了。」 Target acquired." Her Cantonese slipped out with the exhale. "數學テスト、始めようか。" Time for a math test.

Each pull of the trigger released braided constellations, bullets made of stars, that curved lazily and then snapped into lethal speed. They ricocheted off Galaxveronica's angled barrier panes, turning one straight shot into three plunging arcs. Deathsoldiers in the street below went down in neat, smoking rows—no gore, just armor cores cracking into recall light.

Deathbash laughed, slammed his palms together, and sent a rippling bonequake up the building's frame. The tower shuddered; Galaxrire's perch tried to come apart underneath her.

"構造、不合格。" Structural integrity: failing grade.

Galaxtempestress flicked a storm marble from an adjacent rooftop. It burst into compressed air that wrapped the tower in a swirling pressure brace. The collapse turned into a sway instead; Galaxrire rode it, still firing, cheeks flushed like a character drawn mid-battle in an opening animation.

"Thanks for the curve, Tempestress," she called.

"次は自分で受かってね," Galaxtempestress replied, smirking. Pass the next test on your own.

Down on street level, Deathravena stepped out of a crater surrounded by the charred silhouettes of Galax Soldiers. Her ritual circle still smoldered, runes of bone and inverted halos pulsing under her boots.

"Genug Spiele," she hissed, eyes burning violet. Enough games.

A ring of skeletal wings grew from the ritual lines, snapping upright and firing spears of black light toward the rooftops. Galaxrire twisted time by half a heartbeat, skating along the near-future path she had already computed. Spears sliced clean through where she had been.

One clipped Galaxtempestress' shoulder instead.

Her health ring shrank in a sudden jolt, gold arc dropping into the orange. She grunted, caught herself on a gust of her own conjured wind, and sent a retaliatory micro-typhoon spiraling down at Deathravena.

Deathravena walked straight through it, cloak shredding, skin knitting itself closed with threads of shadow.

"Siehst du?" she called, voice echoing. You see? "Wir haben auch Nachhilfe genommen." We had tutoring too.

Hanatsumi's skyline flickered gold and violet as the four elites traded blows, their attacks painting the air like dueling key frames.

Far to the north, in Kasairyoku's gardens, another group clashed under ruined maple trees.

Galaxysuzuhime leapt from branch to branch, kimono sleeves trailing streams of starlight. Every landing bloomed into circles of glowing petals that slowed time inside their radius. Zombies who stepped into them found their movements suddenly syrup-thick; what should have been a single stagger took whole subjective minutes.

"「花の速度、テスト範囲外。」 Flower-speed is outside the test scope," she teased, dropping another sigil.

Galaxmurasaki, ribbons of violet and gold swirling around her, flew a lazy figure-eight above the path. Her eyes tracked not the current position of Death Regime units, but where they would be five, ten, twenty seconds from now. Astral equations scrolled across her irises.

"調整完了," she murmured. Adjustments complete. "五秒後に左側、空けておいて。" Clear your left in five seconds.

Galaxysuzuhime stepped aside just as Deathgrimmar's greatsword scythed through the space she had occupied. The blade plowed into the earth instead, leaving a furrow that filled instantly with grasping skeletal arms.

"Fast," Deathgrimmar growled, voice like grinding stone. "Aber nicht schnell genug." But not fast enough.

Murasaki's answer was a downward sweep of her hand. The sky above Kasairyoku peeled back into a view of deep space for a moment—cold stars, slow galaxies. A focused beam of compressed starlight punched down along Deathgrimmar's sword, detonating in a burst that threw even his massive frame backward.

His health ring shrank to a thin violet crescent. A recall tug brushed his shoulders.

"Nein," he snarled at the unseen system. "Noch nicht." Not yet.

He hauled himself up anyway, only for a backline order to hit his comms: Deathendye's curt voice, demanding elite conservation.

Deathgrimmar glared up at the golden sky, then let the recall take him, dissolving into violet motes with a promise to come back heavier.

Galaxmurasaki exhaled, shoulders dropping.

"これで一問クリア," she said. One question solved.

"本番はこれから," Galaxysuzuhime replied. The real exam starts now.

Kasairyoku's ward-stones flared behind them as more zombies pressed in, pouring between shattered shrines.

Closer to Suzukaze's riverfront, Galaxyraijin and Galaxyqinglong turned the banks into an elemental concert.

Drums orbited Galaxyraijin in a slow cosmic rhythm, each strike sending timed lightning across the water. Galaxyqinglong's body traced the outline of a jade dragon; every punch extended into a serpentine arc that cracked bone and rusted steel.

"節拍合わせて," Qinglong called, ducking a hurled Deathtank shell. Match my tempo.

"もちろん," Raijin answered, grinning. Of course.

They moved like co-op protagonists, lightning strikes landing exactly where Qinglong's dragon coils had already twisted Deathsoldiers into tight clusters. Thunder rolled; violet health rings dropped; recall auras kept snatching Death elites off the board before anyone hit zero.

Above them all, the air shifted.

Golden chalk marks appeared in the clouds, writing themselves into existence.

Galaxbeam stepped fully into Suzutamashi.

He walked out of a vertical incision in the sky directly above Tenkoshorai's distant wards, coat fluttering in a gravity that now obeyed him first and physics second. His glasses caught reflections of every battlefield at once: Hanatsumi, Kasairyoku, Suzukaze, Sorabiko, Yamashiromi.

"中間試験だと聞いた," he said dryly, voice projected onto all Galaxy channels. I heard this turned into a midterm.

"教授," Galaxadye greeted, relief and worry mixed. "採点を手伝ってくれるなら助かる。" If you are here to help grade, we will take it.

On the basalt ridge, Deathwing lifted his head, eye sockets flaring with iron fire.

"So," he murmured. "Der Lehrer kommt selbst." The teacher comes in person.

He stepped off the rock.

The ground did not shake when Deathwing moved; instead, the color bled from everything nearby, as if the world were holding its palette back until it knew which Absolute would own this frame.

They met midway over Suzutamashi, just high enough that the shockwaves would only ruin some of the state instead of all of it.

"先生," Galaxbeam said in Japanese, tone light but eyes hard. "ここからは答案用紙を取り上げます。" I'm taking the answer sheets away from here.

"Zu spät," Deathwing replied. Too late. "Ich habe meine Notizen schon gemacht." I have already taken my notes.

They raised their implements in unison—chalk and staff.

Concepts shifted.

For four heartbeats, every elite, every commander, every soldier in Suzutamashi felt their health rings freeze. No damage in, no damage out. Bullets hung in the air; spells stalled mid-glyph. Time itself waited for the two Absolutes to finish a quick argument over the grading rubric.

Galaxbeam wrote a line of symbols that declared: "No civilian casualty can convert into strategic advantage this turn."

Deathwing crossed it out with a purple sigil that read: "All despair generated converts into fortification for my forces next turn."

Their metaphysical dice clattered in the unseen.

Galaxbeam's first d20 came up a respectable 15; Deathwing's counter rolled an 18. Violet despair-roots dug deeper into already-ruined districts.

"呵，" Galaxbeam exhaled, Cantonese wry. "運氣一般。" Average luck.

He changed tactics, writing smaller, finer theorems instead of sweeping ones: localized probability edits over Kasairyoku's ward-stones, micro-corrections to teleport drift around Hanatsumi, a sudden law that said "all Death Regime shells landing within three meters of a school simply forget how to explode."

His next d20 was a 19.

Deathwing rolled a 13 trying to counter in that narrower band, and for a full minute Galaxy lines brightened, health rings ticking up as near-miss attacks rewound into harmless sparks.

"Du zerfaserst es," Deathwing observed. You are fraying it. "Kleine, sichere Wunder." Small, safe miracles.

He answered by widening his own scope: a necrotic theorem that declared "any Galaxy retreat this turn deepens existing cracks in their morale wall." His d20 hit a clean 17 against Galaxbeam's 11 on the defense.

Across the state, whenever a Supreme Commander issued a pullback order to avoid catastrophic loss, their forces felt the strain double. Health rings did not just drop; the color of the rings dulled.

Galaxadale's armored wedge, already straining, buckled another few kilometers back from Kasairyoku. Galaxastride's teleport grids stuttered again, corridors narrowing. Galaxapuff had to lift Tenshinkō another layer higher to keep chem-clouds off the capital corridor, ceding still more perimeter.

"先生！" Galaxastorm grunted through clenched teeth, deflecting yet another poisoned hail front. "このままだと線が持たない。" At this rate the line will not hold.

"わかってる," Galaxbeam replied quietly. I know.

He looked down at Suzutamashi—all the tiny golden rings, all the violet wedges. The chalk in his hand felt heavier.

"でも、これは単位じゃない。" But this is not the final grade.

He snapped his fingers.

Gravity rotated ninety degrees over three contested farm belts, letting whole Galaxy battalions "fall" sideways into safer pre-mapped trenches instead of retreating in panic. Time thickened around one crucial teleport relay, giving Galaxastride the extra seconds needed to stabilize it. A limited law declared that, for the next ten minutes, no Deathtank shell could enter Tenkoshorai's airspace at all.

His last d20 of the exchange rolled a 14.

Deathwing's answer came up 16.

An invisible coin spun in the conceptual space between them, deciding whether either Absolute would escalate further—risking structural damage to Suzutamashi itself—or stand down at the edge of what the state could bear.

It landed tails for escalation.

Deathwing lowered his staff first.

"Genug," he said, voice carrying both into brains and over comms. Enough. "Sonst zerbricht das Klassenzimmer." Or the classroom breaks.

Galaxbeam let the chalk's light dim, shoulders slumping.

"同意," he replied. Agreed.

Normal physics rushed back in. Bullets resumed flight; spells finished their arcs; the world's BGM snapped on again.

Down in the streets, nobody had words for what had just happened. They only knew their ears rang and their health rings felt... tired.

The battle lurched forward into ordinary superhuman scale again—but the tilt was different now.

Death Regime formations in the Kasairyoku-Shiorikaze corridor had not been forced back. With every Galaxy pullback magnified by Deathwing's earlier theorem, the wedge pushed deeper.

By late evening of the second day, the map over Suzutamashi showed a clear picture.

Sorabiko and Yamashiromi remained gold, battered but held by Galaxadye's firing solutions and Galaxyraijin's percussion storms. Suzukaze and its river walls still shimmered under Galaxastream's careful flow edits. Oborotaka's heights crackled with Galaxastorm's balanced tempests.

But north of Kasairyoku and east of Hanatsumi, whole districts now glowed iron purple.

Deathendale's armor finally ground through the last of Galaxadale's prepared ridgelines and parked Deathtanks in smoking rows just outside Kasairyoku's inner ward-wall. Deathenstride's teleport snares flipped two outlying villages into permanent "contested" status, corridors in and out flickering unpredictably. Hanatsumi's outer ring of neighborhoods flickered from gold to violet as Deathbash, Deathravena, and Deathshade raised necro-bastions in the shells of apartment blocks that Galaxy elites had been forced to abandon.

Galaxbeam stood atop a damaged watchtower outside Tenkoshorai and watched the overlays settle.

"部分点," he said at last, half to himself. Partial credit.

Deathwing hovered at the edge of the purple zone, cloak dragging a slow storm behind him. His skull smile was small and satisfied.

"Erste Stadt, erster Schnitt," he mused. First city, first cut. "Wir sehen uns in der nächsten Stunde, Professor." We will see each other in the next period, Professor.

He turned away, staff drawing lines in the air that outlined the next wave of occupations.

The second day of Suzutamashi did not end in annihilation.

It ended with the Death Regime inside the state.

Galaxbeam was the first to vanish.

One moment he stood above Suzutamashi like a tired star, coat stirring in the warped air; the next, a vertical line of light closed around him and folded him out of the sky. The pressure on the state eased—not in danger, but in expectation, the way a classroom changes when the teacher steps out for a "moment."

On every Galaxy channel, his last order lingered.

「これ以上は無理をするな。」
Don't push any further.

Supreme Commanders acknowledged in terse bursts. One by one, their auras thinned and blinked away: Galaxapuff taking Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary to safer orbit, Galaxastorm and Galaxastream dropping out of the front line to re-thread weather and rivers from a distance, Galaxadye and Galaxadale pulling their command cores back behind Kasairyoku's ward-wall, Galaxastride abandoning fraying teleport corridors before they tore completely.

Elites followed—Galaxrire dragged off mid-curse by a sliver-thin recall ring, Galaxtempestress and Galaxyraijin yanked backwards in streaks of blue-white, Galaxysuzuhime and Galaxmurasaki dissolving into safe particles from the top of Kasairyoku's inner gate.

In their wake, the line looked suddenly very small.

Left behind were the people who bled in squads, not in headlines.

Galax Soldiers tightened grips on rifles whose recoil they could actually feel. Galax Marines checked mag-locks on armored plates. Galax Zealots whispered battlefield prayers into helmet mics, orange lenses bright. Galax Rangers re-scanned rooftops they knew would not really hold against Absolute-class pressure. Galax Marauders revved engine blocks on light armor. Galax Police and Galax Guards ushered the last civilian clusters into sub-basement shelters and then turned to face the streets with batons and riot shields upgraded into hard-light.

"前線残存部隊、聞こえるか？" A gruff voice cut across the cluttered net. Front-line remnants, do you copy?

"Hanatsumi outer ring, Galax Rangers and Galax Police ready," one squad leader answered, breath short. "No more elite cover."

"Sorobiko sea-wall, Galax Marines holding." Another. "Lord, there're a lot of skulls out there."

"Kasairyoku inner garden line—Galax Zealots and Galax Guards present," came a third. "We will delay them." The speaker's voice trembled only once.

There was no longer a professor to answer, only distant, clipped confirmations from rear echelons.

The Death Regime noticed the change in tone immediately.

At Shiorikaze City, the first flag went up.

Deathenstride watched the gold shimmer thin as Galaxastride's corridors snapped closed. Teleport-trap runes along the shadowed alleys pulsed a satisfied violet.

"Jetzt," he said softly. Now.

Deathsoldiers and Deathmarines surged forward, no longer tripping over spatial loops or being dumped into harmless cul-de-sacs. They came in three ranks deep, bolters spitting necrotic rounds, bayonets formed of compacted bone.

On the main boulevard, a line of Galax Soldiers braced with shields interlocked and rifles rested across the top. Behind them, Galax Police in orange-trimmed riot armor filled the gaps, batons reconfigured into short hard-light batons that could fracture skulls and, more importantly, buy seconds.

"Hold this intersection," their captain ordered. "Even ten seconds matters for the evac line."

They did.

Their fire cut zombies down in neat patterns—headshots that turned mindless charges into dissipating blue-white, where recall failsafes still worked, and into properly dead corpses where they did not. Galax Rangers on nearby roofs picked off Deathsoldiers, turning them into bursts of greasy purple smoke. For a brief, stubborn heartbeat, Shiorikaze looked winnable from street level.

Then Deathbash stepped around the corner.

One gauntleted hand came down. The street heaved.

Shockwaves punched through shield-lines like invisible fists. Galax Soldiers popped into recall light in batches, health-rings zeroed by an impact they could not even see. Those whose suits lacked failsafes went flying, armor snapping, bones breaking; Death Regime necro-technicians waiting behind the line politely tagged the first still bodies for "later use."

Galax Marauders swung a recon truck across the road, gunner blazing away, trying to slow the push.

Deathbash simply punched the vehicle into a neighboring storefront.

The captain's visor cracked.

"Fall back!" he shouted, voice cutting out as his ring collapsed and the recall caught him—one more orange spark leaving the city.

The intersection died with him.

Deathenstride stepped over the fading glyphs of Galaxy teleport sigils and planted the first flag of the campaign in the center of the crossroads: a steel pole ending in a ragged rectangle of iron-purple cloth, stamped with a grinning skull and crossed bones.

The effect was immediate.

The cloth snapped as if caught in a storm only it could feel. Violet light erupted from its seams, shooting straight up into the low clouds. The beam widened into a column, inside which shapes began to fall: more Deathsoldiers, more zombies, more necro-artillery pieces assembling themselves from ash and bone as they tumbled into existence.

"Verstärkungsbake steht," Deathenstride reported. Reinforcement beacon anchored. "Shiorikaze Knotenpunkt gesichert." Shiorikaze node secured.

Shiorikaze City, on the map, turned fully purple.

In Hanatsumi, it happened slower and uglier.

Galax Marines and Galax Guards fought block by block around the flower district, where yesterday Galaxrire and Galaxharp had turned rooftops into a duet of bullets and sound. Now the roofs belonged to Deathfury and Deathshade, their silhouettes cutting against a bruise-colored sky as they poured fire and gloom down into cramped streets.

"Zweite Straße verloren," a Galax Guard sergeant reported between bursts, armor scorched. Second street lost. "Third barricade still—"

His sentence ended in a scream as Deathfury's spear punched through the upper wall and detonated in a corridor of compressed bone. The barricade disintegrated. The sergeant's health ring slammed to zero; his body shattered into recall motes before it could be pinned and repurposed.

In a side alley, Galax Police tried to shepherd families toward a teleport pad that no longer lit.

"What do you mean it's offline?!" a constable shouted into static.

"Strider messed it up," another answered, bitter. "We're walking out of this one."

They didn't.

Deathravena glided down the street, robe dragging a carpet of whispering skulls. Her hands traced lazy circles in the air. Runes flared under the cobblestones, lines of bloodless crimson linking every spot a Galaxy ground unit had fallen in the last ten minutes.

"Hier," she murmured. Here.

The fallen rose again—skeletal and twitching, armor twisted into new, wrong angles. Former Galax Soldiers and Rangers turned their own rifles toward their retreating comrades, eyes empty and violet.

Galax Zealots stepped forward then, orange cloaks torn, voices hoarse as they chanted purification clauses they barely understood, trying to burn their own friends out of the necro-web.

Some succeeded, turning zombified comrades into ash instead of puppets.

Most did not.

The outer ring of Hanatsumi folded in on itself, street by street. By the time Deathravena reached the central plaza, her own robe was heavier with new faces stitched into the hem.

She planted the second flag on the broken fountain.

Purple light speared the sky; more portals flowered overhead.

Hanatsumi dimmed to violet on the map.

Kasairyoku had always been green on Galaxy projections—city of gardens, of forest wards and emerald defenses. Watching it turn a sickly, blackened shade of purple hurt in a different way.

Outside its inner wall, Galax Zealots and Galax Guards made their last stand beneath battered ward-stones. Kasairyoku City's kanji glowed weakly on cracked obelisks as Deathendale's tanks lined up in shell-spattered terraces.

"No more Supreme Commander signatures," one Galax Zealot whispered, looking up at the sky that had once burned with Galaxadale's firing arcs. "Just us."

"Then we do what we can," her captain said. "Every second we buy here is one the capital gets."

They threw everything into the first volley—rockets, time-delayed grenades, timed shield-pulses that rippled across the hillside like inverted waterfalls. Several Deathtanks exploded in gouts of violet fire, hulls flipping, crews reduced to screaming ash.

Deathendale walked through it.

Armor blackened, cloak in tatters, he still moved with the casual inevitability of a landslide. Shots that hit his chest plate gouged metal and bone, health ring ticking down in noticeable chunks—but it never dipped to sliver. He shrugged off explosions that would have erased whole buildings.

"Zurück," he told his own crews calmly when they tried to close up around him. Back. "Ich gehe voran." I go first.

He crossed the killing field, reached the base of Kasairyoku's inner wall, and drove the butt of his staff into the earth.

Cracks spidered up the ward-stones.

Galaxy sigils flickered, fought, and finally snapped.

Kasairyoku's inner gate failed.

The first wave of zombies—mindless, skeletal, grotesque—poured through, followed by Deathsoldiers using them as walking cover. Galax Guards inside the city center emptied magazines until their rifle barrels glowed, falling back step by step toward the central green.

When their last line broke, they triggered city-side recall failsafes they had been ordered never to use—mass evacuation beams that turned every surviving uniform into cold light and stored them deep in Galaxenchi's backup grids.

Only civilians and unarmored volunteers were left to be herded.

Deathendale did not bother with theatrics. He gestured once.

Death Regime banners unfurled from captured ward-stones, skull-and-crossbones icons snapping in a wind that smelled of rust and grave-dirt. Each banner became a beacon; columns of violet fell, delivering artillery, necro-priests, fresh elites.

Kasairyoku, emerald city, turned iron-purple.

The pattern repeated, sometimes fast, sometimes in slow, agonizing increments.

In Kikuyume, Galax Rangers and Galax Marauders traded alleys for hours before Deathgrimmar and Deathbash arrived and smashed through the last hardpoints.

In Qingrindo, forest shrines burned as Deathplague seeded chem-vats in ornamental ponds, turning them into bubbling vats that birthed new zombies every few minutes.

In Seiryūgan and Zenshourin, Galax Police held civic centers long enough to burn important archives and break key terminals, then went down under numbers they could not realistically count.

Each time a district fell, another purple flag rose—on a government rooftop, on a rail hub, on a hill shrine. Each time, the beam went up, and more Death Regime troops rained down, boots hitting streets already slick with battle remnants.

On the big map in Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary's war-room, the gold fragments of Suzutamashi shrank and huddled.

Sorabiko, Yamashiromi, Suzukaze City itself, Oborotaka's heights, a few stubborn pockets in Gekkoujou and Shengzenkai, and the glowing bastion of Tenkoshorai City remained bright. Everything between them—Shiorikaze, Hanatsumi, Kasairyoku, Kikuyume, outlying belts of Qingrindo and Hikuramei—had gone skull-purple.

From his distant vantage somewhere above Galaxenchi, Galaxbeam watched the colors settle, jaw tight, hands folded behind his back like a teacher in front of a very ugly report card.

On a different ridge, Deathwing surveyed the same map rendered in necrotic light, skull banners marking each new node.

"Langsam," he said, almost gently. Slowly. "Stadt für Stadt." City by city.

Behind him, more flags waited, furled and hungry, ready to be carried forward into the next state when Suzutamashi's lesson was fully, brutally complete.

Shiorikaze burned in silence long before anyone outside its wards realized it had fallen.

The sea wind had always smelled of salt and engine oil there, carrying the distant sound of Suzukaze City's river barges. Tonight it carried ash and the wet, metallic stink of necrotic chemistry. At the ruined intersection beneath Deathenstride's first banner, Galax Soldiers were still shooting—reflex, training, muscle memory—at shapes that no longer cared about ballistics.

Deathbash walked at the tip of the push, knuckles dragging sparks from the pavement. Every time a Galax Ranger's tracer line found his chest, purple bone flowed up to meet it, catching the shot and knitting shut around the glowing hole. He answered bullets with pressure: invisible fists that crumpled parked troop carriers and folded squad-lines into broken heaps.

Behind him, zombies came like a tide: flesh sloughing from cheekbones, vertebrae sticking through uniforms, jaws working soundlessly. Dark-gray-purple mist leaked from their mouths and eye sockets with every step, spreading across the asphalt in thin layers that stuck to boots and greaves. Galax Marines who advanced into that fog came out coughing, visor lights dimming as their health-rings bled away one percentage at a time.

A Deathtank ground forward over the median, skull-and-crossbones plate riveted onto its prow like a herald. The main gun shifted an inch and fired. A Galax armored car on the next block ceased to exist above the axle line, its turret tumbling end-over-end into the side of an office block.

The building sucked in the impact, windows whitening as necrotic growth bloomed up its spine. Within seconds, the whole tower became a hollow, purple-veined husk. Every living person inside—police, volunteers, nurses trying to hold an ad hoc clinic—fell silent. A moment later, the building convulsed and vomited them back out as a rain of bone fragments that crawled toward the nearest Death banner.

The flag drank them.

Shiorikaze's sky turned the color of a healing bruise as the reinforcement beam intensified. The last Galax Guard captain on the docks triggered his personal recall, trusting the automatic sweep to grab anyone within arm's reach.

The sweep grabbed only three more.

Shiorikaze was done.

—

South along the coast, Suzukaze City tried to live up to its name.

The wind there was a constant, river-bent force, channeling along water and concrete. Galaxastream had taught the local engineers to read it like a textbook, carving whole defense plans from the way trash blew in the rainy season.

Without him, the river fought alone.

Deathenstream stood knee-deep in Suzukaze River, cloak dragging greasy currents behind him. Around his boots, the water had turned almost black, silver bones tumbling in eddies like pale leaves. He lifted both arms.

The river rose.

It did not surge as a single wave, but as hundreds of twisting spines, each one a serpent of liquid shadow threaded with skulls. They slid over the embankments, seeking movement, warmth, fear.

On the upper promenade, Galax Marines and Galax Zealots fired down into the mess, orange muzzle flash reflected in the slick coils. A few skulls shattered, turning back into harmless water, but the bulk of the river simply flowed around the impacts.

"Back, back!" a sergeant shouted, shoving a young Galax Soldier away from the railing. "Fall to the second terrace, use the floodgates!"

They tried.

Floodgates slammed down across feeder canals, heavy rust-colored slabs warded in orange. For a heartbeat, the river strikes hit steel and concrete instead of people. Then Deathenstream spoke a single word in a language that existed mostly in autopsy reports.

The river remembered every corpse ever dumped into it.

It bled through the seams, through hairline cracks, through any section of gate that had once been touched by something dead. Gray-violet rivulets turned into hands, fingers, jaws. The second terrace flooded from the inside out.

Galax Marauders drove three armored trucks into the rising water, engines howling, chains trailing behind them. They tried to drag a temporary barrier into place, using the trucks as anchors.

Deathenstream twitched his wrist.

The current went sideways.

All three trucks slid into the river as if yanked by a god's fishing line. Doors slammed open under pressure; orange lights flashed once and went out as the cab compartments filled with a slurry of water and gnashing teeth.

By nightfall, Suzukaze's famous riverside neon shone only in reflections on black water. Deathsalts—alchemical crystals poured by Deathplague's assistants—glimmered in the gutters, sterilizing nothing, corrupting everything. When the first Death banner rose on the central bridge, its beam carved a perfect hole in the low clouds above the city, like a wound that refused to scab.

—

Kikuyume had always lived in the shadow of a story that its blossoms never quite matched.

Decades of Galaxy Regime horticulture grants had turned its hills into terraces of pale pink trees, but tonight they moved wrong. Petals fell upward. Roots pulsed like sleeping throats. The air stank of sweet rot.

Deathshade walked alone down the main shrine road, a smear of purple-black against lantern light. Each step left prints that grew molds no botanist had names for. Following in her wake, zombies treated the flowerbeds like doorways, hauling themselves out of soil that looked too shallow to bury anyone.

Galax Rangers in camouflage cloaks tried to pick her off from the hilltops, using targeting data cached before Galaxmurasaki's recall. The first volley hit her cape and hood, cloth blossoming with neat, burning holes.

She sighed and took the hood down.

The darkness underneath was not empty.

Something like a negative-space flame burned where her hair should have been, sucking color from nearby stone. The next volley never reached her. Bullets entered the aura, shuddered, and dropped at her feet as grainy gray powder.

"Not enough contrast," she said in soft, accentless Japanese, looking up toward the ridgeline. 「もっと濃い色で描いてあげる。」 I will repaint you in deeper colors.

She lifted both hands.

Shadows peeled off the bases of every lantern along the road, stretching across the stones like ink in water. They climbed the stairs, crawled over the ridgeline, and poured into the sniper nests as choking smoke. Silenced coughs cut off mid-sound; scopes glowed once and then cooled. A few recall flashes blinked out through the smoke; most did not.

Deathtanks rolled up behind her, grinding crushed petals into the stone. Their main guns tracked slowly, methodically. Each shot did not just demolish a house; a stitched glyph clung to the shell, blooming outward on impact like a bruise.

Where the glyphs landed, entire blocks faded to monochrome and then crumbled, buildings dissolving into a dust that the wind carried straight to the waiting Death banner on the hill.

By the time the last shrine bell cracked and fell, Kikuyume's terraces were barren scars, outlines of former streets etched in ash. The banner's beam turned the remaining clouds the color of dried blood.

—

In Qingrindo, the forest itself surrendered.

The city had been built into the slopes of a vast cedar reserve, houses and civic halls tucked between trunks and over mossy ravines. Galaxy urban design had woven walkways and rail lines through the canopy, careful not to disturb the wards carved into every living tree.

Deathplague saw only lungs.

He stood on a platform level with the mid-canopy, mask gleaming dull brass in the dim light. Around him, vats hummed—tall glass cylinders carried forward by gnarled constructs made from bolted-together deer skeletons and rusted farming machinery.

"Dosierung zwei," he murmured in German. Dosage two.

Assistants—half-human shapes in stained smocks—opened the first vat.

A column of viscous gray-green mist poured out. It did not dissipate. It flowed downward in patient waves, filling ravines, pooling in root basins. Leaves it touched did not wilt; they thickened, veins swelling until the foliage looked like sheets of raw, translucent meat.

Galax Guards in rebreather masks and street armor tried to hold the lower walkways, filters whining, visors filmed over with condensation and spores. Where they stood still and fired, they lasted a little while. Where they slipped, where the mist found even a pinhole gap in a seal, they stopped moving.

Fifteen minutes after the first vat opened, a Galax Police officer bracing against a cedar trunk felt his fingers go numb. He looked down. The glove had darkened where the mist clung. His health ring raced from green to orange to violet, then to nothing.

He did not recall.

Instead, something inside his chest turned around and looked back at him.

The next time he raised his gun, his visor was purple from the inside.

Deathplague walked past him without looking, directing his converted "patrol" deeper into the city. Behind them, moss turned into piles of soft, wet gray matter. The cedar trees' ward-sigils flickered and then inverted, now keeping fresh air out instead of holding corruption at bay.

When the Death banner rose in Qingrindo's central park, the trunks closest to it had already hollowed out. They leaned inward like worshippers.

—

Hikuramei and Fuyoshika went together, twin sparks snuffed on the same night.

Hikuramei—city of light, its kanji promising brilliance—died under a blackout.

Deathfury led that one personally, bone spear in one hand and a cluster of snarling skulls chained to his belt. Wherever he hurled the spear, streetlights exploded in fits of purple sparks. Emergency generators stuttered and failed. The proud holographic signs that had proclaimed GALAXENCHI'S RADIANT FUTURE now showed only static and, occasionally, a flicker of skull iconography forced into the buffer by Deathwing's image-breachers.

In the dark, Galax Rangers tried to use thermal. Deathfury's aura burned so hot in that spectrum that it turned every street into a blind smear of white. They shot shadows and sound, wasting magazines, until squads of Deathmarines walked right up on them, shotguns wheezing necrotic pellets that stuck to armor and chewed through from the outside in.

Every building that stayed lit became a target.

Fuyoshika, famous for its theater district and manicured lakes, watched fire blossom along its skyline like some grotesque festival. Deathgrimmar strode down the main promenade dragging his sword in the fountain water, turning spray into glassy fangs that shot outward in all directions.

A Galax Marauder crew made a desperate run across the Plaza of Mirrors, headlights off, engine whining. They tried to ram him.

He did not step aside.

The truck hit him and snapped in half, hull crumpling around his torso like foil. He wrenched himself free and, without breaking stride, smashed his blade upward. The shockwave ran up through the reinforced glass of Fuyoshika's tallest tower, blowing every pane outward in a storm of glittering shrapnel.

Inside, an entire Galax Police coordination center died as a glittering rain.

Twin beams rose over the bay, side by side, as both cities raised Death banners within the hour of each other. Their combined glow painted Tenkyosei's distant clouds.

—

Tenkyosei itself, city of heavenward light, did not fall quickly.

Galaxapuff had pulled Tenshinkō away, but not before she poured every spare drop of aerial warding she could into the city's upper atmosphere. Chem-clouds slid off invisible domes; necrotic spores burned up against unseen thresholds.

Deathenpuff responded like an alchemist at a lab bench.

Her sky-barge circled just outside the brightest sections of the dome, chem-vents adjusting angle a fraction of a degree at a time. She watched the way each drift of violet mist beaded and rolled, mapping the curvature she could not see directly.

"Da," she said at last to her bombardiers. There. "Auf Linie drei, vier, sieben. Wir reißen die Kuppel auf, wo sie am dünnsten ist." On lines three, four, seven. We tear the dome where it is thinnest.

Salvos arced up and then down in precise geometries, violet contrails crossing like stitches. Each cluster detonated just outside the ward-surface, not to break it by force but to load it with oscillating pressure at its natural resonance frequency.

To Tenkyosei's defenders, it sounded like the sky had developed a heartbeat.

Boom—pause—boom—boom.

Galax Guards in the upper towers went to their knees, hands over ears, as the vibrations crawled through their bones. Upstairs, the ward-maintenance crews tried to adjust runes that refused to settle. One by one, the anchor sigils along the perimeter walls flickered from gold to a queasy, dim orange.

Deathenpuff watched her instruments.

"Jetzt," she breathed. Now.

A final volley of condensed chem-bombs rose and then sank like a line of falling stars. The dome shuddered, turned visible for a single long second as a gold-blue shell, then fractured. Long, jagged cracks raced across its surface, and violet mist poured through them like oil spilled on glass.

Tenkyosei's lights went purple.

The ground battle began an hour later when the first wave of zombies dropped by grav-chute from the breached bands. By dawn, the once-bright city's famous halo had become a dull, iron ring on the horizon.

The banner planted on Tenkyosei's central spire burned a little brighter than the others. The reinforcement beam there did not falter once.

—

One by one, the remaining names on Suzutamashi's list turned from promise into damage reports.

Byakuyou's white bridges collapsed into the gorge under concentrated Deathtank fire, rail lines folding like paper ribbons. Shengzenkai's sports arenas became holding pens for the newly undead, their scoreboards displaying tallies no one wanted.

Oborotaka's mountain roads, once defended by Galaxastorm's carefully tuned landslide wards, slumped under Deathenstorm's targeted ice-bolts. Entire switchbacks vanished in avalanches of rock that buried platoons and opened new approaches for the violet tide.

Tsukikazehi's coastal towers flickered once and then dimmed under seaborne chem-shell barrages. Lianxiaoji's lakes turned from reflective blue to stagnant gray as Deathplague redirected contaminated water from Qingrindo's forests.

Seiryūgan's dragon statues cracked and bled shadow. Zenshourin's temples echoed with chants that were no longer in Galaxy liturgy.

Gekkoujou, once a jewel of night festivals, went silent after its last lantern ritual was hijacked. Deathravena wrote counter-sigils into the air above the square and, when the crowd's small, brave lights floated up, they turned mid-flight into screaming skulls that burst into corrosive rain.

Everywhere, the script was the same: Galaxy ground units fighting like people who knew they were already written into a losing answer, buying seconds and meters at the cost of lives; Death Regime elites and Supreme Commanders using biological horror and fantasy death-magic to write over city maps.

Each new skull banner stitched another segment of Suzutamashi into Deathwing's cloak.

—

Tenkoshorai was last.

The capital did not glitter. Its power had always been quieter than Tenkyosei's glow—broad avenues, layered administrative towers, the vast plaza before the {天光初来都} palace complex where Galaxbeam had once given lectures under open sky.

Now that sky was a deep, tired purple.

Deathwing did not rush this one.

He stood on a balcony of repurposed stone in the captured outskirts, staff resting lightly against his shoulder, and watched his armies ring the city. Deathtanks parked in careful arcs beyond the outer moat. Necro-artillery crews adjusted bony scaffolds, angles calculated not to strike the palace itself but the shield projectors coiled beneath.

Inside the walls, Galax Soldiers and Galax Guards manned barricades built from overturned transport buses and ceremonial parade floats. A cadre of Galax Zealots had planted orange banners along the main processional route, each one humming with the faintest echo of Absolute blessing—leftover radiation from all the times Galaxbeam had passed this way.

No Supreme Commander signatures burned over the city.

Only the lingering memory of their geometry.

Deathendye, Deathendale, Deathenstream, Deathenstride, Deathenstorm, and Deathenpuff took up positions along the siege ring like points on a ritual diagram. Between them moved elites: Deathbash cracking his knuckles in anticipation, Deathshade and Deathplague checking each other's sigils, Deathravena humming under her breath as she re-tied her robe of faces.

Deathwing lifted his staff.

"Letzte Lektion für heute," he said. Last lesson for today.

He brought the staff down.

Six assaults began at once.

Floodwaves of bone-choked water hammered the eastern walls as Deathenstream ripped feeder canals into weapons. Storm-lances—spears of frozen, violet lightning—slammed into western bastions under Deathenstorm's guidance. Chem-clouds drifted low over the northern approaches, forced down by Deathenpuff's precise pressure work.

In the south, Deathendale personally led a column of Deathtanks across the main bridge, each step forward accompanied by coordinated covering fire from Deathendye's mathematically perfect batteries. Deathenstride and Deathbash coordinated a teleport-ambush inside the outer barracks, dropping a zombie company directly onto a Galax Marine reserve that had believed itself safe.

Inside Tenkoshorai, the sound became one long, rolling impact.

Galax Guards on the bridge fired until their rifles locked open on empty. When they went to reload, necrotic shrapnel chewed through exposed seals. Zealots tried to raise new wards in the gaps left when older ones failed, burning through their own health-rings in desperate overcasting.

One stood atop the central gate, hands raised, chanting the longest invocation she knew from memory.

It bought them twenty seconds.

The gate blew inward anyway, doors ripping off hinges that had survived three previous civil-engineering overhauls. Deathtanks roared through the gap, main guns swivelling to target pre-logged clusters of resistance.

A Galax Guard lieutenant grabbed a fallen banner—orange field, stylized galaxy sigil—and planted it in the roadway in front of the lead tank.

The tank drove over it.

Tracks ground the cloth into the stones.

The lieutenant's health ring hit zero under a hail of secondary fire; his body fell backward, still clutching the splintered pole. Recall did not trigger.

Behind the advancing armor, zombies poured in an unbroken river, flowing around wreckage, over bodies, through smoke. Death Regime elites walked among them, directing, correcting, snuffing out pockets of resistance with flicks of their hands.

Deathshade collapsed whole side-streets into pits of slow, hungry shadow. Deathplague seeded alleys with crawling clouds that turned shouts into rattling coughs. Deathravena's rituals reached into the palace's own heroic statuary, cracking marble and bronze so that the figures could step down from their plinths as skeletal parodies of themselves.

The fight for the palace courtyard lasted longer than any outside observer would have given it credit for.

Galax Police units who had never expected to fire a weapon in anger dug in behind ornamental fountains. Palace clerks and junior strategists who had never been issued armor pulled on spare vests and passed ammo. A squad of Galax Rangers took up positions on the palace roof, sniping until Deathfury hurled his spear through the cupola and collapsed half the structure.

Even then, as the courtyard tiles shattered under tank shells and necrotic detonations, retreat recalls kept plucking a few defenders at a time out of the worst of it, sending them to safe deposit in distant Galaxenchi nodes. They would live. They simply would not live here.

When the last Galax Guard in visible orange armor fell without dissolving, Deathwing finally stepped through the palace gate.

He walked to the center of the courtyard, ignoring the way the stones still radiated the memory of Galaxy wards. Zombies parted around him like a tide around a rock. The complete ring of skull banners that now encircled Tenkoshorai dumped a steady rain of reinforcements into the outer districts, but here, for a moment, it was almost quiet.

He looked up at the main tower.

Once, Galaxbeam had stood there to accept delegations.

Now, a Deathtrooper detail climbed its inner stairs carrying a bundled length of iron-purple cloth.

Deathwing tilted his skull slightly, as if listening to a distant correction, then nodded once.

"Setzt es," he said. Raise it.

The Death Regime flag unfurled from the top of Tenkoshorai's highest spire, skull insignia stark against the darkening sky. For a heartbeat, its beam seemed to stab straight into the heart of Galaxenchi itself.

On every Death Regime map, Suzutamashi State turned fully, solidly purple.

On every Galaxy Regime map, it changed from "contested" to "occupied," annotated with cold notes about projected resistance cells and necessary evacuation corridors for any survivors.

Deathwing stood in the palace courtyard and let the silence stretch.

When he finally spoke, it was not to the dead at his feet.

"Gallaxgonbei, Suzutamashi," he counted softly in German, as if listing completed exercises. "Zwei Bundesländer." Two states.

His empty eyes turned northeast, toward the next cluster of city names on the Galaxenchi atlas—a new set of bright kanji waiting to be dimmed.

"Zeit für die nächste Hausaufgabe," he decided. Time for the next homework assignment.

Behind him, the skull banners snapped once in the stale wind, drinking in the last embers of Suzutamashi's resistance as Death Regime strategists began to draw new lines toward the next state slated for conquest.

Galaxwis did not look away from the screen when Suzutamashi went purple.

Lines of text streamed past faster than any human eye could track—casualty codes, recall pings, city-status flags flipping from GOLDEN to CONTESTED to OCCUPIED. Galaxwis sat in the half-dark of the Galaxenportal operations vault, hood up, fingers hovering over a console that mostly typed itself.

"鈴魂市、最終フラグ確認," he murmured, voice flat. Final flag confirmation for Suzutamashi. With a flick of his wrist he dropped a marker in the log: TENKOSHORAI FALL, DEATH BANNER VERIFIED.

He exhaled once, then opened a second pane.

On it, Gallaxgonbei's map trembled.

Tiny fluctuations blinked along the outer border near Rentianfue Pass and Maolongmai City, like pixels refusing to stay the same color. Galaxwis tapped one. It unfolded into a probability spiral—Deathwing's pathing signature, the same faint footprint he always left on reality when choosing his next target.

"教授," Galaxwis said quietly, switching to Cantonese as he opened a secure mental channel. "Deathwing 已經望返 Gallaxgonbei。座標同你之前預測嘅一樣。" Deathwing's eyes are back on Gallaxgonbei. Coordinates match your old prediction.

Light bent behind him.

Galaxbeam stepped out of a vertical slash of starlight, coat still carrying soot from the failed defense of Tenkoshorai. His glasses flashed once as he took in the screens.

"嗯，" he said softly. "他喜歡重考。" He likes re-sitting exams.

Galaxwis saved three copies of the Suzutamashi log, tagged them for later analysis, and stood.

"我要跟住你，" he said. I'm coming with you. "三十步之外。" Thirty steps back.

Galaxbeam nodded once.

"記錄員唔可以失踪。" Recorders can't go missing. He snapped his fingers. "走吧。"

Starlight folded up around them.

They reappeared in the thin air above Rentianfue Pass, where Gallaxgonbei's mountain wall met the open sky.

Below, the Supreme Commanders were already in motion.

Galaxadye's precision fleets stitched a golden curtain along the high valleys. Galaxadale's armored wedges blocked the switchback roads. Galaxastream threaded rivers into loops and counterflows that could be snapped into barriers at a gesture. Galaxastride laid down emergency teleport lanes along every ridge­line. Galaxastorm packed thunderheads tight above Maolongmai's approaches. Galaxapuff stationed Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary directly over the state line, its underside glowing like a drawn sword across the horizon.

On the far side of the pass, violet portals opened in a staggered arc.

Death Regime elites came first: Deathbash riding a wave of shattered rock; Deathshade pouring out of her own shadow like ink; Deathplague stepping from a portal with two new vats; Deathfury hurling his spear up into the air as if challenging the clouds; Deathravena already tracing a circle of bone-dust on the ground.

They hit the border like an opening salvo—and bounced.

Galaxastorm dropped a slab of timed lightning onto Deathbash's shockwave, flipping it back down the slope into the waiting ranks of zombies. Galaxadale's forward tanks picked Deathplague's vats off their carriers before they could uncork. Galaxastream split Deathfury's spear-flight into ten harmless arcs of rain. Galaxapuff sent a lattice of air-pressure blades through Deathravena's ritual, scattering her bone-dust before it could settle.

Within minutes, recall auras started grabbing violet silhouettes and yanking them backward. Deathplague vanished mid-curse. Deathbash disappeared halfway through a leap, expression furious and already plotting a rematch. Deathshade's form thinned into smoke and snapped away, health ring slivered out.

Galaxwis watched from behind a small, tight barrier of his own, logging each removal.

"Elites, early retreat," he noted in Mandarin, fingers flicking through holographic keys. "Supreme Commander 層級，準備登場。" Supreme Commander tier about to enter.

Right on cue, six heavier signatures stepped out behind the portals: Deathendye with charts already spinning around him; Deathendale in scarred armor, cloak in tatters from Suzutamashi but eyes still bright; Deathenstream dragging rivers behind his heels; Deathenstride tracing teleport circles the size of town squares; Deathenstorm wrapped in muttering stormfronts; Deathenpuff's chem-barge hovering low, vents already cycling.

The air thickened.

Galaxbeam floated a little higher, until he and Galaxwis could see almost the entire border arc. On the distant right flank, a new tear opened in the sky like a wound that had been waiting to be reopened.

Deathwing stepped through.

His cloak dragged a storm of ash. In his right hand, the staff he habitually used as a pointer. In his left, for once, a weapon: a massive reaping scythe, dark gray-purple from haft to blade, its curve echoing the skull-and-crossbones emblem snapping on the banners below.

Galaxbeam sighed.

"果然要動刀劍。" So we really are bringing out blades.

He opened his hand.

Golden light condensed there, zigzagging into the clean, straight geometry of a sword—no ornament, just a long, narrow blade with equations etched faintly along its surface. The air around it rang like a struck bell.

"Galaxwise," he said, switching to Japanese, eyes still on Deathwing. 「ここから先は、君の記録が試験範囲になる。」 From here on, your records will be on the exam.

Galaxwis swallowed, then nodded, already opening a fresh file.

"ログ開始," he whispered. Logging start.

The two Absolutes moved.

They met in the center of the sky above the pass, where Gallaxgonbei's gold and Death Regime's violet touched but did not quite overlap.

Deathwing swung first, scythe carving a wide arc that dragged a crescent of dead concepts behind it—every health bar in a hundred-kilometer radius dipped by one sickening notch. Galaxbeam stepped forward into the swing, sword tracing a thin, vertical stroke that rewrote the angle of the cut. The death-arc sheared harmlessly upward, slicing a chunk out of a cloud instead.

"同樣的招數，用第二次就會扣分。" Same move twice loses marks, he said mildly.

Deathwing smiled, sockets smoking.

"Dann musst du mich eben überraschen, Professor." Then you must surprise me, Professor.

Their duel fractured the air.

Below them, Supreme Commanders and their forces slammed together along the border line, each clash sending ripples up through the sky where Absolute power was already testing the ceiling of what the state could take.

Galaxwis stayed thirty steps back, as promised, one hand gripping the rail of his temporary platform, the other flickering through screen after screen, tracking every dip and spike in the health-halos below.

He did not fire a shot.

But he made sure every one counted.

Suzutamashi was still wrong in violet.

In the war-room beneath Galaxengongshi, the state hung as a three-dimensional hologram over the table—every city wrapped in the dull iron-purple of Death Regime occupation, skull-banners pulsing like infected nodes.

Shiorikaze City. Hanatsumi City. Suzukaze City. Kikuyume City. Sorabiko City. Yamashiromi City. Kasairyoku City. Oborotaka City. Tenkyosei City. Gekkoujou City. Tenkoshorai City, the capital.

All purple.

Galaxbeam stood with his hands behind his back, glasses reflecting that diseased light. Around him, the six Supreme Commanders formed a crescent—armor scorched from Gallaxgonbei's defense but health-rings hovering back in yellow and green bands after emergency resets.

Galaxwis stood at the console, fingers ready over the controls, eyes fixed on the map.

"再考試," Galaxbeam said quietly in Mandarin. Another exam. "呢次唔係 Gallaxgonbei，係 Suzutamashi。" This time it's not Gallaxgonbei, it's Suzutamashi.

Galaxadale folded her arms. "Syllabus says we do not leave students behind," she answered in crisp English.

Galaxadye looked up at the hanging map, jaw set. 「取り返す。」 We take it back.

Galaxapuff exhaled, letting the last grief for Tenkoshorai's first fall leave with her breath. "天空側は、もう準備できてるよ," she said. The sky side is ready.

Galaxbeam nodded once.

"Operation remedial," he said, switching to English for the record. "Objective: liberate Suzutamashi State. Rules: civilians first, syllabus second, Deathwing third."

He glanced at Galaxwis.

"記錄員," he added in Cantonese, "今次你唔好離得太遠。" Recorder, do not stay too far this time.

Galaxwis gave a small, tight smile. "我會喺你身後兩頁。" I'll be two pages behind you.

Starlight flared under their feet.

They arrived over the sea.

Dawn broke over Sorabiko Bay in bruised colors: violet chem-clouds smeared low, Death Regime banners rattling on the captured seawall, Deathtanks squatting where Galaxy artillery had once stood. Mindless zombies shuffled patrol routes along the broken piers; Deathmarines watched them from behind corroded parapets, rifles resting on rusted skull emblems.

The sky tore open.

Galaxadye's fleets slid out of folded space in three staggered lines, hulls burning gold-white against the violet horizon. Each carrier's underside lit up with targeting runes as they locked to pre-calculated coordinates.

On the command deck, Galaxadye stood braced against the wind, hair whipping, coat snapping.

「鈴魂湾、再テスト開始。」 Sorabiko Bay, re-test begins. She touched the comm stud. "Galax Soldiers, Galax Marines—line up your answers."

Below, golden teleport runes blossomed in the water.

Galax Soldiers and Galax Marines stepped out of them in disciplined ranks, boots splashing in the surf, shields already up. Behind them, Galax Rangers appeared on the shattered piers, long rifles shouldered, visors polarizing against chem-glare.

Deathsoldiers on the wall jolted.

"Kontakt an der See!" one necro-officer rasped in German. Contact at the sea!

Deathmarines swung their rifles down, opening up in ragged volleys. Violet tracers stabbed toward the beach.

Galaxadye snapped her fingers.

Time tilted.

The first Death salvos arrived late, sliding along angles that no longer led to living bodies. The Galaxy landing wave had already advanced two heartbeats forward in the timeline. To onlookers, it looked like the bullets simply forgot where the targets were.

"Return fire," Galaxadye ordered, voice cool. "Solve for x where x = skulls."

Golden artillery raked the seawall.

Concrete peeled away in blooming shockwaves, throwing Deathsoldiers backward. Chem-barrels ruptured, violet fluid vaporizing in the heat. The skull-banner over Sorabiko tore down, burning black before it hit the water.

Galaxrire hung in the air above the seawall, rifle tucked into her shoulder, ponytail streaming.

「一問一殺。」 One question, one kill. She squeezed the trigger in measured cadence. Each shot punched a line of star-braided light through a Deathmarine's breastplate, cutting them from their posts like punctuation marks.

Beside her, Galaxharp strummed the air, fingers moving across invisible strings. A low, resonant chord rippled over the wall; undead bodies toppled like knocked-over music stands, their rifles spinning away.

"落ち着け," she muttered in Japanese as a panicked Deathsergeant screamed orders. Calm down. 「合唱じゃない。」 This isn't a choir.

Sorabiko flipped on the map in Galaxwis's HUD from purple to blinking gold—CONTESTED, then SECURED.

"One," he whispered, already logging. "Sorabiko 市、再奪回。"

The liberation rolled inland.

At Suzukaze City, Galaxastream turned the river into a golden highway, carrying Galax tanks upstream on spinning current-plates while Deathenstream tried to hold the water hostage with bone-choked whirlpools.

"流れは貸し借りだよ," Galaxastream called over to him in Japanese, palms sweeping arcs in the air. Flow is about give and take. 「君は奪うだけ。」 You only take.

Deathenstream bared his teeth and hurled a violet surge that could have drowned half the district. Galaxastream nudged three critical angles; the wave crashed instead into a block of abandoned warehouses that Galaxwis had pre-tagged for demolition.

Suzukaze blinked from purple to gold on the map.

At Kikuyume City, Galaxkiba's shinobi company moved through the ruins like a negative space—appearing only when motions ended.

"Targets: Deathmarines squads beta through delta," Galaxkiba said, voice calm over the local channel. "Answer sheet: silent." He threw a fan of golden kunai down a side street; each blade carved a spinning equation in the air before embedding in a Deathsoldier's vertebrae. The victims froze, timelines sliced, and toppled as if someone had removed their frames.

Galaxssuki, perched on a half-collapsed billboard, watched through her scope, lips quirking.

「さすが忍び。」 As expected of a shinobi.

Kikuyume's skull-banner fell, the flagpole severed by a perfectly generic anonymous cut that nobody would ever trace.

Hanatsumi and Shiorikaze burned with firefights block by block, Galax Rangers trading shots with Death Guards in alleys that smelled of chem and shattered stone. Galaxnetta dove through windows trailing starglyph threads, tying Death squads into literal knots of probability; Galaxveronica layered barrier circles along evacuation routes, holding as long as she could before rotating back through recall to reset her ring.

City icons flipped on Galaxwis's hologram, one by one.

"Shiorikaze—secured. Hanatsumi—secured. Suzukaze—secured. Kikuyume—secured," he murmured, fingers flying. "Yamashiromi... still in contest."

Kasairyoku City, emerald girdle of Suzutamashi, fought harder.

The forests around it had been turned into necro-gardens: twisted trees bearing bone-fruit, roots drinking from bubbling chem pools. Deathshade lounged on a broken shrine roof, shadows coiling around her ankles like affectionate snakes; Deathravena's ritual circles burned in the clearings, skull-totems muttering.

"Na los, Galaxmädchen," Deathravena purred, voice smoke and German as she felt golden presences approaching. Come on, Galaxy girls. "Zeigt mir eure hübschen Lichter."

The lights obliged.

Galaxysuzuhime descended first, sleeves billowing, hair swaying as if underwater. She touched down on a branch that should not have been able to hold her. Cherry-blossom petals of raw time began to drift around her feet, each glowing faintly.

「ここ、花を返してもらう。」 We're taking the flowers back.

Behind her, Galaxmurasaki stepped from a fold in space, violet hair shimmering with its own inner galaxies, eyes calm.

"Target: Kasairyoku ward-core," she said, tone businesslike. "Objective: release the state's own defense formulas. Suzuhime, cover. 我負責開鎖。" I handle the locks.

Deathshade rolled her shoulders.

"Lichtshow," she sighed. Light show. She raised her hands; shadows around the shrine writhed up into spines and claws, lunging for the two elites.

Petals met darkness.

Galaxysuzuhime spun, arms tracing circles. Each petal of time sheered across a shadow construct's lifespan, compressing it into a single instant. Arms that should have raked across Galaxy armor instead crumbled halfway, aging into dust in mid-lunge.

Deathravena hissed and slammed her palm onto one of her ritual circles. Skeletal hands erupted from the ground, trying to grab Galaxmurasaki's ankles.

"唔好阻住我做功課," Galaxmurasaki said mildly in Cantonese. Don't interrupt me while I do homework. She kicked off the air itself, hanging upside-down as she wrote rapid golden characters across the sky. Each sigil mapped to an old Kasairyoku ward, hidden beneath Death Regime corruption.

One by one, the city's forgotten green barriers woke up.

Emerald light surged from the soil, punching through necro-gardens in spears. Bone-fruit exploded into dust. Chem pools boiled away. Deathshade's comfortable shadows found themselves outnumbered by returning ward-light; her health ring flickered into the red.

"Rückzug," she snapped, annoyed, as recall laws grabbed her ankles. Retreat.

Deathravena snarled, tried to hold her ground, and saw her own ring shrink to a sliver under the combined onslaught of petals and wards.

"Verdammt," she spat as she too was yanked backward. Damn it.

Kasairyoku City flashed from purple to violent, blinding green-gold on the hologram.

"Kasairyoku—liberated," Galaxwis breathed. "Forest ward-system restored."

The counteroffensive narrowed toward the heart.

Tenkyosei, Gekkoujou, and finally Tenkoshorai remained.

Tenkyosei's skies became a duel of flight paths—Galaxapuff's rebuilt squadrons spiraling through long golden loops while Deathenpuff's chem-bombers tried to claw their way back into dominance.

"高度三層目キープ," Galaxapuff barked. Hold the third altitude layer. "Tenkyosei の上には、一滴も落とさせない。" Nothing falls on Tenkyosei.

Chem bombs detonated in mid-air, violet blossoms stunting against fresh wards. Galaxy fighters wove through the debris, tags lighting on enemy hulls just long enough to trigger teleport-scraps that removed them from the sky.

Gekkoujou's cliff-side streets echoed with the crash of Galaxadale's treads against Deathendale's armored rearguard.

"Schon wieder, Kommandantin?" Deathendale called across the flaming avenue, laughter in his ruined voice. Again, Commander?

Galaxadale wiped soot from her cheek with the back of her gauntlet.

「そう。期末試験まで付き合って。」 That's right. Stay with me until finals. She pointed forward. Galaxy tanks surged. Deathtanks met them in a clanging, grinding impact that sent stone and bone both flying.

Neither of them gave an inch easily—but this time Galaxadale's flanking companies, working from newly liberated Kasairyoku, had angles Deathendale could not fully cover. When his health ring flirted with recall, he growled and signaled his units to fall back toward Tenkoshorai's last ring of purple light.

"Zu viele Variablen gegen uns heute," he told his crews. Too many variables against us today.

Gekkoujou's skull emblem toppled into the sea.

Above Tenkoshorai, the sky turned into an exam paper written in fire.

Deathwing waited over his occupied capital, scythe planted point-down into the purple dome of corruption that still wrapped the city. His cloak dragged a cloud of ash that circled like a miniature storm system.

When Galaxbeam and the Supreme Commanders stepped through from the Gallaxgonbei border, the dome's surface shivered.

"Nachsitzen schon vorbei?" Deathwing asked, skull-smile widening. Detention already over?

Galaxbeam regarded him over the rims of his glasses.

「補講じゃなくて、これが本番。」 This isn't remedial anymore; this is the real exam. He raised his hand; the golden sword re-formed there, equations etching themselves along the blade.

Below, Galaxy ground forces surged down Tenkoshorai's avenues—Galax Soldiers, Galax Marines, Galax Rangers, Galax Guards, Galax Zealots and Galax Marauders pouring through breach-points cut by the elites. Every squad moved under a Supreme Commander's aura, advancing behind overlapping shields and timed teleport failsafes.

Death Regime defenders fought like barbed wire: Deathsoldiers firing from windows marked with bleeding skulls, Deathmarines holding barricades built from destroyed Galaxy vehicles, zombies swarming over every misstep. Death Guards and Death Zealots shouted curses in German and dead languages alike, trying to hold the line.

At one intersection, Galaxrire dropped into cover beside a battered Galax Marine squad, rifle already humming.

「ここ、私が片付ける。」 I'll clean this part up.

"Jawohl, Scharfschützin," one of the Marines muttered in accented German, relief obvious even through his visor. Yes, ma'am sniper.

She leaned around the corner; three flashes later, the Deathtroopers pinning them down had new, precise holes in their helmets.

Half a kilometer away, Galaxharp, Galaxnetta, and Galaxtempestress combined their powers to peel a Deathtank column away from a hospital: soundwaves to stagger crews, illusion-threads to mislabel friendly paths as dead ends, and a descending micro-storm that flipped the lead tank onto its back.

Above all of it, Supreme Commanders clashed again with their Death counterparts—Galaxadye's barrages forcing Deathendye to reposition his guns away from the civilian districts, Galaxastream rerouting Deathenstream's last ditch floods into empty plazas, Galaxastride snipping holes in Deathenstride's escape grid, Galaxastorm boxing Deathenstorm's tempest into a shrinking, harmless knot.

And at the very center, sword met scythe.

Deathwing moved first.

He snapped his staff away, letting it vanish into the conceptual space where he kept half his plagues, and gripped the scythe in both hands. The blade cut an arc across the sky, dragging a trailing crescent of annihilation that erased the stars behind it for a heartbeat.

Galaxbeam stepped into the swing.

His sword traced a simple diagonal line, the sort he taught first-year students—clean, unadorned. Golden light met violet, and the race of their equations played out faster than human thought: Deathwing's cut tried to subtract "continued existence" from everything it touched; Galaxbeam's line added "exception" back in for every Galaxy soldier and city tied to his syllabus.

The conflicting symbols exploded into a ring of birds: black crows and golden sparrows spiraling out in a shrieking halo before dissolving.

"Deine Skripte werden immer dicker," Deathwing noted, amused. Your lecture notes get thicker every year.

"你啲實驗報告都越寫越長," Galaxbeam answered dryly in Cantonese. And your lab reports get longer and longer. "可惜都唔合格。" Pity they're all failing grades.

He flicked his sword, writing a quick function in the air. Every instance of "Death Regime fortification within Tenkoshorai" became a temporary variable subject to decay. On the ground, purple walls began to crumble faster, as if time itself had grown impatient with them.

Deathwing growled and answered with a spinning scythe-slash that pulled "hope of survival" out of a kilometer-wide radius. For a terrifying second, every Galaxy soldier in that circle felt their health rings slam down to a quarter.

Galaxbeam gritted his teeth, shoved his sword forward, and stapled a golden theorem over the wound: "temporary exam panic, not final grade." The rings snapped back upward, leaving only a ghost of the fear.

"先生！" Galaxadye's voice cut in over the Absolute band, strained. "作戦線、持ってます。だけど長くはない。" Sensei, we're holding the operational line. Not for long.

"時間伸ばす係係我," Galaxbeam replied. I'm the one who extends time. He raised his free hand, fingers spreading.

Golden grids unfurled over Suzutamashi again—this time not as planning diagrams, but as binding promises. Each city they had liberated flared on the map: Sorabiko, Suzukaze, Kikuyume, Shiorikaze, Hanatsumi, Yamashiromi, Kasairyoku, Oborotaka, Tenkyosei, Gekkoujou. Lines of light connected them in a net that wrapped tight around Tenkoshorai.

"Deathwing," he said in English, voice suddenly flat. "You're running out of partial credit."

Deathwing's sockets burned brighter.

"Dann sehen wir, wer die Prüfung zuerst abbricht," he replied softly. Then we will see who abandons the exam first.

They clashed again, sword and scythe sending ripples of rewritten physics through the city. Below, every elite duel, every tank skirmish, every zombie swarm shifted to reflect each new term added to the equation.

Galaxwis stood on a rooftop just outside the main blast radius, cloak snapping, console hovering at his side. He tracked every shift in health-rings, every forced recall, mapping it against the lives saved and the streets lost.

"先生、Deathwing 健康值四十以下," he reported suddenly, voice tight. Sensei, Deathwing's health value below forty. "如果再推多一步——" If we push one more step—

"我知。" I know.

Galaxbeam inhaled.

He stepped forward, sword low.

This cut was not about killing. Killing was off the table between Absolutes unless the author demanded a finale; both of them knew that. This cut was about jurisdiction.

He traced a looping symbol in the air that looked, to the untrained eye, like a stylized question mark. To Deathwing, it was a statement: "All territory bearing a Death banner inside this state is now outside the scope of your semester."

The scythe came down to block, but a fraction late.

The symbol sank into Tenkoshorai's dome.

Purple light shuddered, then cracked along a dozen fault lines. Skull-banners on the towers burst into ash. Chem-altars imploded. From the central plaza up through the palace district, violet sigils unknotted themselves into harmless gray dust.

Deathwing reeled, one hand clenching on the scythe haft.

Smoke poured from his eye sockets.

"Du... schreibst meine Arbeit um," he hissed. You rewrite my work.

Galaxbeam's sword tip rested against the empty air between them.

"註釋。" Annotations, he said.

For three seconds, the two Absolutes balanced in stillness, every system in Suzutamashi hanging on their decision.

Then Deathwing clicked his teeth once.

"Rückzug," he said over the Death Regime band, tone like a slammed book. Retreat. "Suzutamashi fällt aus der Studie... vorerst." Suzutamashi falls out of the study... for now.

Across the state, violet portals ripped open.

Death Regime Supreme Commanders, elites, and surviving armored formations vanished through them in disciplined explosiveness, dragging what forces they could. Zombies left behind collapsed into inert heaps of bone and rotted flesh, animation cut.

On Galaxwis's map, city icons flipped in a cascade—Tenkoshorai from purple to blinding gold, then the surrounding ring, then the corridors they had carved earlier.

The last skull flag over the capital tore free and turned to ash in the updraft.

Silence fell.

Galaxbeam lowered his sword.

「はい、Suzutamashi の追試、合格。」 And that's it—Suzutamashi's make-up exam: passed.

Galaxy soldiers on the streets below did not cheer at first. They were too tired. Instead, they simply... stopped, shoulders sagging, weapons lowering. A few seconds later, the first ragged shout went up from a plaza near Tenkyosei. Others followed, echoing off ruin and wardstone both, rolling through the wounded state like a slowly returning tide.

Galaxbeam let himself smile once, faintly.

"Galaxwis," he said.

"在," Galaxwis answered, eyes shining as he logged the final status line. Here.

"寫低。" Write it down.

"Suzutamashi State," Galaxwis typed, fingers steady at last. "Liberated. 傷痕累累, 但仍然屬於銀河。" Scarred, but still belonging to the Galaxy.

Kinchōhakkei State never got the chance to turn violet.

It woke to alarms instead.

Above the northern ridge-line beyond Galaxen-Shirayue City, the air rippled with portal scars—violet wounds forming, twisting, beginning to iris open into full Death Regime gates.

On the far side of reality, Deathwing stood inside a ring of his Supreme Commanders and elites, scythe butt resting on blackened stone.

"Dritte Lektion," he said quietly, watching Kinchōhakkei's map hover before him. Third lesson. "Kinchōhakkei. Achtundachtzig schöne Aussichtspunkte... und alle noch zu verderben." Eighty-eight beautiful scenic points—none ruined yet.

Deathendye's spectral charts already showed projected casualty cones sweeping across Galaxen-Hanlong City and Galaxen-Shirayue City. Deathenstream traced prospective plague currents down toward Galaxen-Tenshifu City's canals. Deathendale flexed gauntleted fingers, eager to test his tanks against Kinchōhakkei's roads.

"Portale auf Koryusei-Vektor," Deathwind ordered. Portals on the Koryusei vector. "Wir nehmen die Hauptstadt zuerst."

The portal ring brightened.

And then every violet circle froze, as if someone had hit "pause" on a movie.

A golden line crossed the battlefield without moving in space at all; it cut directly through the equations underlying the portals. One by one, the rings shattered into harmless, sparkling fragments of suspended time.

"考卷唔好偷看答案。" Do not peek at the answer sheet, Galaxbeam said, stepping out of folded starlight between Deathwing and the remaining intact gate. Dual one-handed swords hung at his sides, both sheathed in slow-burning gold.

Up above Kinchōhakkei's border, a Galaxy fleet phased in—Galaxapuff's fortress-shadow, Galaxastorm's storm shelves, and a forward spear of carriers under Galaxadye. On the ground near Galaxen-Shirayue and Galaxen-Hanlong, Galaxy teleport circles blossomed like lanterns: Galax Soldiers, Galax Marines, Galax Rangers, Galax Guards, Galax Zealots, Galax Marauders, and Galax Police taking positions on pre-marked ridges and streets.

"Sensei," Galaxadye's voice came over the Absolute band, crisp. 「キンチョウハッケイ防衛線、配置完了。」 Kinchōhakkei defense line in position.

Galaxbeam did not look back.

He tilted his head at Deathwing.

"試卷遲咗一日遞交," he said mildly. You're a day late turning in this exam.

Deathwing's fingers tightened around his scythe haft.

"Nachsitzen hat dir wohl geschmeckt," he replied. You must have enjoyed that extra tutoring. His sockets flared. "Gut. Dann korrigieren wir heute live."

He swung the scythe down.

Galaxbeam drew both swords.

The first clash broke the sky over Galaxen-Shirayue City.

Deathwing's scythe carved a crescent of null-light that tried to delete everything along the Kinchōhakkei border—trees, rock, shield grids, even the concept of "front line." Galaxbeam crossed his swords in an X, golden equations spinning off the blades. Where the attack passed his guard, reality simply... bent and slid around the state instead of through it.

Below them, commanders and elites surged into their own match-ups.

Galaxapuff took altitude over Galaxen-Koryusei City's distant skyline, squaring off not against Deathenpuff this time but against Deathenstorm, whose storm-ships rose on black cumulonimbus like funeral barges.

"風向き、全部うちの物にする," Galaxapuff said calmly. We'll make every wind our property. Her bomber wings fanned out in elegant arcs.

"Sturmfront konzentrieren," Deathenstorm countered. Concentrate the storm front. Violet lightning answered, hammering at Galaxy altitude grids.

Over Galaxen-Hanlong and Galaxen-Shirayue, Galaxastorm dove against Deathenpuff's chem-barges instead, ripping apart toxin clouds with precision thunderbolts.

「今回は空を譲らないよ。」 Not giving up the sky this time.

Deathenpuff snarled, chem-wings beating as she drove violet fog downward toward the border trenches.

On the ground near Galaxen-Longsakura City, Galaxadale's armored columns had rotated to face Deathenstream's plague-infused river armor, while Galaxastream instead took on Deathendale—turning streams into shifting embankments under Deathtank tracks, forcing the brutal machines to fight the terrain as much as his forward Galax Marines.

Further along the line, Galaxastride and Galaxadye combined against Deathenstride and Deathendye, teleport corridors and probability charts colliding in a sizzling lattice that filled the space between Galaxen-Tenshifu City and Galaxen-Yueshinden City with ghost paths and false solutions.

Between and around them, new elites stepped into the light.

Galaxcharm, sleeves fluttering, perched on a broken torii overlooking the border road, scattering talisman-cards that unfolded into miniature constellations and froze advancing Deathsoldier squads mid-stride.

「はい、ここから先はチャーム禁止。」 From here onward, charm is prohibited.

Galaxyxmoon floated beside her, hair and cloak moving as if in lunar currents, compressing gravity around Deathtanks until their treads sank deep into the roadbed.

On the Death side, Deathreaver—a gaunt elite cloaked in stitched-together pelts—whipped chains of vertebrae at the Galaxy line, each link carrying a curse of slow rot. Deathsanguis, eyes glowing red behind a plague mask, lobbed ampoules of clotted blood that burst into swarms of biting crimson bats.

"Zermalmt sie," Deathreaver hissed. Crush them.

Galaxterra dropped from above onto Deathreaver's chain-field, her boots ringing as she slammed both palms into the dirt.

「フィールド再構築。」 Reconstructing the field.

The ground cracked along clean geometric lines, swallowing the bone-chains and re-surfacing them in a neat pile that Galaxrire shredded with one contemptuous shot.

Elites screamed spells, guns barked, time bent and unbent. Kinchōhakkei's border glowed gold and violet by turns, the two colors wrestling for dominance.

And above it all, sword and scythe kept writing and erasing the rules of the fight.

Deathwing feinted high, then spun his scythe low, trying to catch Galaxbeam across the hip with a cut that removed "ever having stood here" from its victim. Galaxbeam back-stepped onto a moment one second earlier, letting the strike pass through the empty afterimage he'd left for it.

"Du weichst heute mehr aus als sonst," Deathwing observed. You dodge more than usual today.

"老師都有休息日," Galaxbeam replied. Even teachers get days off. He flicked one sword in a short, sharp arc; golden symbols scattered, latching onto distant Death portals and forcing them to half-form, stutter, and seal.

Below, that change rippled.

A wave of Death Regime reinforcements meant for the Galaxen-Ryumelin City flank failed to arrive. The Deathelites leading the existing assault—Deathbash, Deathravena, and Deathgrimmar—found themselves suddenly outnumbered as Galaxkiba's shinobi strike team and Galaxnetta's illusion-woven platoons hit their exposed sides.

"Wir sind abgeschnitten," Deathbash snarled over vox. We're cut off.

"Dann kämpfe mit, bis der Rückzug ruft," Deathgrimmar answered, dragging his rusted greatsword into guard. Then fight until recall calls.

They did, slamming shockwaves and necro-slashes into Galaxy lines, but every impact met layered barriers from Galaxveronica and counter-tempo sound waves from Galaxharp. Health rings on all six elites bled down into the orange; recall glows breathed at their feet.

Further west near Galaxen-Seihong City, Deathshade and Deathfury tried to push through a ravine guarded by Galaxssuki and Galaxytsukifenghuang. Moonlit sniper fire laced with starlight cut across Deathshade's smoke; phoenix fire boiled Deathfury's bone-spears into harmless steam.

"Verfluchte... Lichtershow," Deathshade spat as her ring ticked into red. Damned light show.

"次のシーズンでリベンジどうぞ," Galaxytsukifenghuang called after her as recall finally took hold. Try your revenge next season.

The border of Kinchōhakkei refused to turn violet.

Back in the story, that decision took the form of a single exhalation.

Deathwing's scythe caught both of Galaxbeam's swords in a grinding lock, violet sparks spitting.

"Du kannst nicht überall sein, Professor," he murmured. You cannot be everywhere. "Ein Staat nach dem anderen... irgendwann fällt einer." One state after another—eventually, one falls.

Galaxbeam's glasses glowed with reflected equations.

"你都唔可以無限期補考," he answered softly. You cannot take make-up exams forever either.

Below them, every Death portal in range flickered and collapsed. The few ground contingents that had managed to squeeze through early found themselves unsupported, surrounded by increasing rings of Galax Soldiers and Galax Marines whose teleport failsafes were still very much online.

Deathshade's voice snapped over the Death band, brittle.

"Vorhut wird eingekreist," she reported. Vanguard being encircled.

Deathendye's charts boiled red.

"Verlustkurve steigt zu schnell," he said tightly. Loss curve rising too fast. "Wenn wir jetzt durchziehen, verlieren wir mehr als die Studie wert ist." If we push now, we lose more than the experiment is worth.

Deathwing's sockets dimmed to a simmer.

"...Rückzug," he ordered at last, the word sour in his mouth. Retreat. "Kinchōhakkei bleibt... unangetastet. Vorerst." Kinchōhakkei remains... untouched. For now.

Violet runes wrapped around his elites and Supreme Commanders; one by one they tore sidewise out of the theater, leaving only inert zombie husks and fading embers of plague behind.

Galaxbeam held his stance for a heartbeat longer, swords still crossed, making sure the last portal signature dwindled to nothing.

Then he exhaled.

The gold along his blades cooled to a steady glow.

「はい。」 He nodded once. "Kinchōhakkei, 本日も平常授業。" Kinchōhakkei—regular classes for today.

On the border ridges, Galaxy troops slowly lowered their weapons. Over Galaxen-Koryusei City, Galaxapuff let Tenshinkō's shadow shift from combat configuration back toward peacetime patrol patterns. Storm grids eased; teleports untensed.

Galaxwis, half a continent away at his console, watched Kinchōhakkei's state field remain pure gold on his hologram.

He typed the new line into the log.

"Kinchōhakkei State: attempted Death Regime incursion intercepted at border. No cities occupied. 戰線保持，壓力仍在。" Frontline held, pressure ongoing.

Somewhere far beyond the map's edge, Deathwing began outlining his next "lesson."

But for one more day, Kinchōhakkei's skies stayed free of skull banners, and Galaxbeam sheathed his twin swords with the quiet, tired satisfaction of a teacher who had bought his students another week to study.

Galaxbeam's last golden equation faded from the air, sealing the very last Death portal on the Kinchōhakkei border. As Absolute pressure lifted, the sky felt lighter—still tense, but no longer on the verge of deletion.

"後は任せるよ、指揮官たち。" The rest is yours, commanders, Galaxbeam said over the Absolute band.

Galaxadye answered first.

「了解。前線、再配置開始。」 Copy. Forward line, beginning realignment.

His carrier flagship, the Galax Axis, slid along the upper atmosphere above Galaxen-Shirayue City, turning on a pivot of folded starlight. Around it, a staggered curtain of cruisers and destroyers adjusted by fractions of degrees, all obeying the tiny movements of his left hand.

Below, Kinchōhakkei's northern border seethed with the remnants of Deathwing's aborted push—stranded undead, scattered squads, a few stubborn pockets of elites who refused to accept that the lesson was over.

Galaxadye watched their positions update on his tactical holo and exhaled slowly.

"全艦、黄金照準モード。" All ships, golden aiming mode. His Cantonese followed, sharp and dry. "唔好浪費子彈喺啲行屍走肉度—target the ones who still think." Do not waste shells on walking corpses—target the ones who can still think.

The first scenario unfolded over the ruins of a forest hamlet north of Galaxen-Hanlong.

Three Deathelites had dug in among the shattered pines: Deathreaver with his bone-chains, Deathshade pooling darkness between the trunks, and Deathsanguis anchoring the triangle in a circle of blood-lit sigils. Their combined aura turned the clearing into a violet sore on Galaxadye's map—an infection point waiting to spread.

On the ground, a Galaxy platoon had already stalled. Galax Soldiers and Galax Rangers crouched behind collapsed logs and cracked boulders, shields blistered by constant curse-fire.

"Commander, their hex radius is chewing the shields," one lieutenant reported, voice tight. "We push, we lose half the company."

Galaxadye's answer was calm.

「いいから、十秒だけ我慢して。」 Just endure for ten more seconds.

He extended one hand over the holo; golden vectors unfolded from his fingers, snapping into a three-dimensional lattice around the clearing. Time stamps, angles, and distances floated in the air like textbook annotations.

"Carrier Three, fire pattern Sigma-9," he ordered. "弾速を九割まで落として。着弾までの一秒、私が預かる。" Drop shell velocity to ninety percent. I will handle the last second to impact.

High above, one of the carriers belched a single golden-yellow shell.

It descended in a lazy arc, far too slow, giving Deathshade more than enough time to see it coming.

"Amateur," Deathshade hissed, raising a curtain of oily night above the clearing. The shell entered the darkness and disappeared entirely.

"Fertig?" Deathreaver called. Finished?

"Natürlich," she began.

Galaxadye snapped his fingers.

For one second, only the shell existed in the forest's timeline.

It leaped from the position it would have reached at full velocity, skipping everything Deathshade had done in the interim, and reappeared point-blank over Deathsanguis' blood circle.

The explosion did not rip or burn; it rewound. All the blood-light he had painstakingly accumulated sprayed outward as clear rain. Deathsanguis staggered, sigils dying around his feet, health ring plunging straight into red. Recall runes flared under him, dragging him backwards into a waiting portal.

Deathreaver's chains lashed instinctively toward the point of origin, but Galaxadye had already pivoted the matrix. The returning shockwave twisted his curse-links into knots and pinned him to a tree. One precision shot from Galaxrire ended his attempt to escape and flicked his ring into forced retreat.

Deathshade tried to fade into the treeline.

"影に隠れるの、授業中は禁止だよ," Galaxadye said quietly—hiding in shadows is banned during class—and dropped a grid of faint golden numerals across the forest. Each number represented a possible place Deathshade might step in the next half-second.

His guns fired there, not where she was.

Impacts blossomed like punctuation, boxing the Death elite into a single, safe-looking pocket of darkness.

Galax Marines teleported into that exact pocket as the last shell hit. They yanked her down with stun-hooks before she could re-cast. Her health ring shattered into a recall flare and she vanished, curses trailing behind like smoke.

The Galaxy platoon stood amid dissolving necrotic haze, armor scraped but intact.

"前線、次。" Front line, next one, Galaxadye said, already turning to the next red blotch on his map.

Scenario two arrived without waiting.

An emergency ping pulsed from the Suzukaze–Yueshinden corridor: a fast-moving Death armored column had broken loose from retreat routes and was punching straight toward a vulnerable logistics hub near Galaxen-Yueshinden City.

Galaxadye pulled the feed into focus.

Deathravena led the spear, wings of shredded banners flaring behind her, chanting guttural rites that wrapped deathtanks in skeletal rib-cages of force. Beside the column, Deathfury and Deathgrimmar acted as flanking guards, hurling spears of fused bone and carving the road to rubble with each swing of that rusted greatsword.

The Galaxy defenders there were mostly Galax Guards and Galax Police—garrison troops, not front-line, holding a checkpoint that had suddenly become a bullseye.

"Command, this is Yueshinden Gate," the captain's voice came through, strained. "We can stall them for maybe thirty seconds. No more."

Galaxadye did not swear. He simply moved.

"全駆逐艦、座標 Y-17 にワープ。" All destroyers, warp to coordinate Y-17. "ヤマシロミ側の護衛は Galax Guards に任せる。" Yamashiromi side escort shifts to local Guards.

His staff on the bridge exchanged quick looks.

"Commander, that leaves a gap over Tenshifu's eastern arc," an officer warned.

「穴なら、あとで埋める。」 If there is a gap, we will fill it later.

The carriers flickered and vanished, reappearing low over the highway leading to Yueshinden.

The sudden arrival threw Deathravena's calculations off by just enough. The rib-cage shields around the deathtanks flexed but did not reorient in time.

"伏せろ!" Get down! the Galax Guards captain shouted, tackling his nearest trooper behind a concrete barrier.

Galaxadye opened both hands.

Golden sigils spun out from his fingertips and latched onto individual tanks, marking not their armor, but the specific micro-seconds in which their crew would blink, breathe, or flinch.

"All batteries: fire on rhythm, not position," he commanded. "一発ずつ、私のカウントで。" One shot at a time, on my count.

"—一。" One.

The first salvo hammered the left flank exactly as Deathfury inhaled to shout a warning. His ribs exploded with feedback from his own shield system; his health ring bled into orange.

"—二。" Two.

The next set of rounds skipped ahead a fraction of a second, hitting the right flank when Deathgrimmar's greatsword was mid-swing, casting a shadow that confused his depth perception. He misjudged and cleaved through one of his own tanks instead of the incoming shells. The resulting cascade threw him into the roadside embankment, ring jolting toward red.

Deathravena realized the pattern.

"Sie schießt auf unsere Fehler," she snarled. She's shooting at our mistakes.

She flung a death-crest sigil into the air, summoning a vortex of screaming skulls that should have swallowed the next volley whole.

Galaxadye did not care.

"—三。" Three.

The shells did not travel through the skull-vortex—they traveled through the half-finished instant before it fully formed, using Galaxadye's time-bending equations as rails. They emerged almost point-blank in front of Deathravena's position, detonation washing over her in a blossom of compressed starlight.

Her health ring snapped into the tiniest possible sliver.

Recall tried to grab her.

She staggered, wings flaring, trying to anchor herself to the column, to stay, to prove something to Deathwing watching from afar.

Galaxadye's voice reached her over the open band, quiet but firm.

「もう十分。」 That is enough.

One final precision round kissed the ground at Deathravena's feet—not lethal, just enough of a shock to tip her into the recall threshold. She vanished in a vertical streak of violet, pulled out of Kinchōhakkei whether she liked it or not.

The remaining deathtanks rolled on inertia for a few more meters before their bone wards collapsed and the Galaxy guns tore them apart.

Yueshinden Gate stayed gold.

The third scenario happened at knife-fighting range.

Later that same day, Deathplague and a cadre of plague-techs managed to slip a small force through a glitch in the collapsing portal lattice, emerging in the industrial outskirts between Galaxen-Tenshifu City and Galaxen-Rinkofu City. Their target: a series of chemical plants that fed into Kinchōhakkei's fuel and shield reagent lines.

By the time Galaxadye got the alert, plumes of sickly violet gas were already rising above the factories.

"地上部隊は間に合わない," an aide said grimly. Ground forces will not make it in time.

Galaxadye did not argue.

He left the bridge.

One step took him to the carrier's launch deck. The next, wrapped in a twist of gravity and light, dropped him straight into the fumes above the industrial blocks.

He landed hard enough on a rooftop that the building shuddered.

Deathplague looked up from the heart of his ritual circle—a ring of bubbling vats linked by pipes like veins.

"Ah," he rasped in thick-accented Mandarin. "指揮官が自ら来るのか。" The commander comes personally.

Galaxadye's health ring hovered near full, gold arc steady. His coat snapped in the toxic wind.

「現場を知らない指揮官は、ダメだからね。」 A commander who does not know the front is useless.

Deathplague flicked his fingers. Vats exploded, vomiting arcs of hyper-condensed disease toward him.

He moved.

In the time it took a normal person to blink, Galaxadye crossed half the rooftop, his body a stuttering blur of golden afterimages. Each step landed not where the eye thought it would, but where his future equation said it should for maximum survivability.

Bolts of plague energy passed through places he had already edited out of the current timeline.

He drove a luminous palm-strike into the roof, sending a geometric web of starlight across the factory complex.

"タイムスタンプ固定。" Time stamps locked.

The rising clouds froze mid-swirl, sliced into still layers. Below, Galax Soldiers and Galax Marines stormed the catwalks, picking off the immobile plague-techs like training targets.

Deathplague tried to retreat, dragging a ragged teleport circle into existence.

Galaxadye appeared beside him, wind from his movement still catching up.

"次の実験は、倫理審査を通してからにして。" File your next experiment with ethics review first.

He chopped the circle in half with a knife-hand blade of condensed light. Feedback ripped through his wards, slamming his health ring into red. Recall grabbed him and yanked him out of Kinchōhakkei in a shower of failing glyphs.

The frozen toxins shredded into harmless glitter as his web collapsed.

He stood among the dissolving particles, catching his breath, listening to the crackle of suit comms as his regiment finished cleaning up the remaining undead.

"Commander, the plants are secure," a Galax Marine sergeant reported. "Minimal contamination, no civilian casualties."

Galaxadye looked up at the thinning violet clouds and allowed himself the faintest smile.

「よし。じゃあ、次の『問題』を探そうか。」 Good. Then let us look for the next "problem."

His body blurred again, turning into a streak of yellow-white that shot skyward to rejoin the carriers.

Behind him, Kinchōhakkei's border map continued to update—patches of red shrinking, gold expanding—each adjustment annotated in Galaxwis's quiet logs:

"Galaxadye: multiple engagements. Enemy elites forced to retreat. Zombie and soldier hordes dispersed. Kinchōhakkei remains unbreached."

For now, every attempt Deathwing made to claw into the state ran up against the same wall: a Supreme Commander who treated war like an exam and refused to let a single question go unanswered.

Galaxadye's last engagement report ticked green on Galaxwis's console.

"敵性エリート、全部撤退確認。" All hostile elites confirmed in retreat, he said over the command net. "死者ゼロ。負傷多数、でも予定範囲内。" No dead, many wounded, all within projections.

「上出来だ、Galaxadye。」 Well done, Galaxadye, Galaxbeam replied, his voice a tired warmth on the Absolute band. 「ここからは、陸側の番だ。」 From here, the ground has the lead.

The holo-map zoomed out.

Gold washed across most of Kinchōhakkei's border sectors, but red bruises still pulsed along a few land corridors—pressure points where Deathwing's remnants had dug in rather than flee.

Those red scars lined up neatly with one name.

Galaxadale.

Galaxen-Hanlong City's western terrace thundered with treads.

From the vantage of his observation ridge, Galaxadale watched two colors of armor grind through the shattered suburbs below—Galaxy gold and Death Regime gray-purple, the clash traced as moving lines of light across his visor.

"Front Three, maintain wedge," he ordered, voice low but cutting clearly through the comms. "Front Two, refuse left flank by seventeen degrees. I want every Deathtank in that gutter in the next thirty seconds."

His flagship tank, the Galax Bulwark, sat half-buried in broken concrete, hull angled like a shield over a knot of Galax Soldiers crouched in its shadow. Scars ran along the golden plates, each one a frozen fragment of previously melted steel re-sculpted by his superpowers.

Below, Deathbash led a pack of deathtanks and bone-plated APCs through the ruins, hammering shockwaves into half-collapsed apartment blocks. Every impact sent clouds of dust and zombie fragments into the air; Deathsoldiers surged in behind the blasts, empty eyes glowing violet as they raised rifles fused to their own arms.

"Vorwärts! Alles, was noch zuckt, gehört uns!" Forward! Anything still twitching belongs to us! Deathbash roared, slamming his fist into the street again. A whole row of Galaxy barricades buckled.

The Galaxy line bent—but did not break.

Galaxadale raised one gauntleted hand.

Golden geometry rippled out from his position, tracing invisible rectangles over the streets like the outlines of a board game. Each rectangle snapped shut as his armored companies moved, tanks sliding into pre-marked kill boxes.

"Now," he said quietly.

Cannons spoke.

Shells struck pavement in a precise cross-fire that did not aim at the deathtanks themselves, but the space just in front of their tracks. Every impact dug a sudden trench, a slit in reality where gravity kinked sideways for a heartbeat.

The lead deathtanks hit those trenches and went light—treads spinning free as their weight shifted. Deathbash's advance wedge staggered, vehicles half-lifting, half-sliding into new pits that had not existed a second before.

"Was—?!" Deathbash snapped, grabbing for a building to steady himself.

Galaxadale's second volley landed on the rear edges of the trenches.

The shock collapsed the bent gravity fields inward. Deathtanks slammed down, noses-first, hulls angling helplessly. Their exposed underplates glowed bright purple as necrotic engines overcompensated.

"Front Two, take their bellies," Galaxadale said.

Golden lances fired from side streets, punching clean holes through armor that had been nearly invulnerable from the front. Half the wedge disintegrated in simultaneous detonations.

Deathbash's health ring plunged to orange, then to a hair above red as his own vehicle flipped on its side. He dragged himself out of the wreck, bone armor cracked, roaring in pure frustration.

"Rückzugslinie! Sofort!" Fall-back line, now!

He smashed the street one last time, sending a shockwave to cover the retreat—but the blow landed against golden bulwarks that had not been there a moment ago. Galaxadale stepped through the smoke, gauntlets braced, deflecting the force into the sky.

"You are done here," he said in level Japanese. 「この街は、授業範囲外だ。」 This city is outside the lesson plan.

Deathbash's recall sigils triggered, dragging him backwards into a violet slit in the air before he could answer.

Galax Soldiers cheered once, brief and sharp, before Galaxadale's voice cut back in.

"Celebrate when Hanlong's hospitals are quiet," he reminded them. "Not before."

The line rolled forward, grinding the last zombies under golden treads.

The battle shifted east.

Near Galaxen-Longsakura City, once-famous cherry constellations flickered low over burning avenues. Deathplague and Deathgrimmar had chosen this place for their stand, turning its ring of ornamental parks into a necrotic garden.

Hordes of flesh and bone heaved through the trees. Deathmarines marched between trunks dripping with blackened blossoms, firing bursts of curse-rounds that turned Galaxy cover into brittle glass. Deathtanks crushed playgrounds beneath their tracks, turrets swiveling toward the inner wards.

"Pretty," Deathplague crooned, spreading his hands. Violet toxins flowed between his fingers like ink. "腐った桜も、芸術だろう？" Rotten cherry blossoms are art too, are they not?

"Art critique later," Deathgrimmar growled, dragging his massive sword through a fountain that had once reflected the stars. "Feinde zuerst." Enemies first.

They did not wait long.

Galaxadale arrived at the head of a spearpoint of tanks and IFVs, gold light limning each vehicle's edges. His own machine plowed straight through a collapsed gate, shoving aside stone and twisted steel.

Longsakura's inner wards flashed on his HUD—cherished, vulnerable, emphatically off-limits to Deathwing.

"City defense grids on my mark," he said. 「長桜を、もう一度咲かせるぞ。」 Let us make Longsakura blossom again.

He drove his fist into the hull.

Golden sigils erupted from beneath the paving stones, unfurling like roots throughout the plaza. Every dormant ward-sensor, every old civic shield node lit up with borrowed starlight, lines connecting them into a single circuit.

Deathplague's first volley of toxic mist hit that circuit and froze, spread out across an invisible dome rather than drilling into the streets.

"反応速度、計算外......？" Reaction speed, outside my projections...? he muttered.

Galaxadale did not give him time to adjust.

"Armor Three, push straight through the plaza. Armor Two, pivot to the north grove. Infantry, follow in the wake—any zombie that stands up a second time, make sure it does not get a third."

Tanks roared forward.

Deathgrimmar leaped to meet them, greatsword trailing violet embers.

He brought the blade down in a roaring arc aimed directly at Galaxadale's command tank.

Galaxadale saw the arc, saw ten thousand futures where the sword carved his vehicle in half—and chose a different line.

Time bent around the Bulwark for exactly one heartbeat.

The tank existed half a meter to the left of where Deathgrimmar's trajectory said it should be. The sword slammed into stone instead of steel, gouging a canyon in the plaza.

Galaxadale's reply was a point-blank shot into Deathgrimmar's chest.

The shell did not explode; it unfolded into a lattice of solid light that wrapped around the Death elite like a cage, crushing in slow, irresistible increments. His health ring plunged from solid violet to a thin bruise of color.

"Grrrr—!" Deathgrimmar spat, shoving against the restraints. Bone plates cracked. One more squeeze and he would have snapped entirely.

Galaxadale opened his fist.

"退け。" Fall back.

The cage compacted just enough to trigger recall without finishing the kill. Deathgrimmar vanished backward in a storm of broken glyphs, torn from the field with a snarl that cut off mid-curse.

Deathplague stared, then looked up at the city shields flexing above him, at the golden tanks crushing his zombies like dry leaves.

"...やれやれ," he sighed in weary Mandarin. "今日の実験材料は、ここまでか。" So much for today's test samples.

He flung a handful of emergency sigils into the air. Recall circles snapped open at his and his surviving techs' feet, dragging them out just as Galaxadale's infantry broke into the grove.

Longsakura's map-square flipped from violet to contested, then to solid gold.

By night, the fighting had rolled south toward Galaxen-Seihong City and the industrial sprawl between Seihong and Galaxen-Kuromatsu.

Here, Deathcrush made his stand.

Deathtanks and necro-haulers clogged the freight roads, hurling shells into Galaxy fortifications. Zombie hordes poured out of seized warehouses, flesh and skeletal forms alike, overwhelming any isolated Galax squad that let itself be drawn too far from armored support.

"Wir brechen hier durch," Deathcrush growled over his vox. We break through here. "Wenn wir Kuromatsu haben, haben wir das Rückgrat." If we take Kuromatsu, we take their spine.

He stepped onto the hood of a wrecked Galaxy APC and slammed both fists down, sending a gray shockwave racing along the asphalt toward the main Galaxy barricade.

The barricade collapsed—because Galaxadale let it.

"Front One, fall back to line Gamma," he ordered calmly. "Do not contest the overpass. We want him to want it."

On cue, Galax Guards and Galax Marines peeled away from the ruined wall, firing methodical covering bursts as they withdrew into the shadow of a broad elevated roadway.

Deathcrush saw retreat and laughed.

"Feiglinge!" Cowards! He gestured his troops forward, surging into the new gap. Deathtanks rolled under the overpass, undead swarming around their hulls.

Up on the roadway, Galaxadale watched their heat signatures pass beneath him like ants in a glowing tunnel.

「引っかかった。」 Took the bait.

He raised both hands.

Golden sigils cascaded from the underside of the overpass, forming a dense, hanging script. Each symbol represented a force vector—weight, momentum, direction—rewritten to his liking.

"Evacuate the supports," he said. "All friendlies clear. Now."

The last Galaxy trooper dove off the embankment as Galaxadale clenched his fists.

Gravity flipped.

For three surreal seconds, the overpass fell upward, dragging everything beneath it with it. Deathtanks, zombies, scrap, even the shockwaves Deathcrush tried to throw down—all ripped skyward in a screaming column of debris.

Then Galaxadale let reality snap back.

Everything crashed down at once.

The impact shook half of Seihong's southern district. Dust geysered from the collapse. When it cleared, the road was gone, replaced by a glittering crater of cooling golden slag and shattered bone.

Deathcrush crawled from the pile, armor hanging in shards, one eye-socket empty. His health ring flickered on the edge of red.

"Du... wirst... dafür..." You... will... for this—

A single rail-round from a distant Galaxy sniper took the last sliver from his ring. Recall seized him mid-curse and dragged him back to Death Regime lines, leaving only cracked concrete where he had stood.

Galaxadale lowered his hands, shoulders tight, gaze sweeping the field.

"Seihong sector secure," he reported at last. "All remaining hostile elites forced to recall. Zombie presence reduced to clean-up levels."

On Galaxwis's map, one more red blotch dwindled and vanished.

By the time the twin moons of Galaxenchi rose, Kinchōhakkei's frontier had changed shape.

Where Deathwing's pressure had once bitten deep, now only narrow, violet scratches remained—isolated pockets behind the line, already being surrounded by Galax Soldiers and cleansed methodically.

From orbit, Galaxbeam studied the updated projections, fingers resting lightly on the rim of the holo.

"よくやったな、Galaxadye、Galaxadale。" You did well, Galaxadye, Galaxadale.

On his own command deck, Galaxadale leaned against the Bulwark's turret, helmet off, short hair damp with sweat, listening to the Absolute voice with quiet satisfaction.

「まだ終わりじゃない。」 It is not over yet, he answered. "But for tonight—"

He looked out toward the border, where Death Regime banners had once dared to flutter and now only smouldered fragments remained.

"—Deathwing stays on the far side of the line."

Far away in his necrotic fortress, Deathwing watched the same border redraw itself in faint gold, teeth clicking once in irritation.

"Gut," he whispered to the dark. Good.

Tests that did not break the subject only made the next experiment more interesting.

But for Kinchōhakkei, for now, the verdict was clear:

Death Regime elites had bled themselves to critical, forced to retreat under Galaxadale's layered counteroffensives. The hordes that followed them had been ground into dust and starlight. The state stood—scarred, smoking, but firmly under Galaxy banners—as the war shifted its gaze toward the next front.

Galaxadale's guns finally fell silent just long enough for the echoes to catch up.

The last deathtank in his sector went up not in fire, but in a ripple of collapsing geometry—a golden wedge of force biting straight through its rib-cage wards and punching the engine block out the far side. The wreck slid backward down the torn hillside, coming to rest amid a graveyard of its own kind. Around it, Deathsoldiers and Deathmarines tried one last ragged push, only to be cut down by converging arcs of rail-fire and the disciplined volleys of Galax Soldiers dug in along the terraces above Galaxen-Hanlong and Galaxen-Shirayue City. Every time a necrotic surge threatened to crest the berms, Galaxadale stepped in personally, coat flaring, one hand on his cannon, the other sketching brutal, short-form equations in the air that turned enemy momentum into recoil.

"敵戦車、残りゼロ。" Enemy armor, zero remaining, came the report over comms. "歩兵は散発的です。" Infantry resistance sporadic.

Galaxadale swept the valley with a last, measuring look. Violet plumes were gone, replaced by the faint shimmer of cooling golden wards. His own health ring hovered in the orange band, thick but scarred; the rings of the regiments under his command pulsed steady green and yellow along the ridgeline. Kinchōhakkei's northern wall held, and more importantly, it now bristled with fresh gun pits, mobile shields, and overlapping kill-zones he had carved out during the counteroffensive.

「ここは渡さない。」 We will not hand this over, he said quietly, more to the smoking landscape than to anyone else. Then, on the command net: 「前線、掃討と補給に切り替え。遊撃任務はエリートに回す。」 Front line, switch to mop-up and resupply. Harrier work goes to the elites.

He keyed a direct line up to the Absolute band. "Professor. Northern armored wedge neutralized. If Deathwing wants another test here, he'll have to start with new pieces."

Galaxbeam's acknowledgment came back as a warm, tired pulse of gold. "了解。じゃあ、細かいところは—" Understood. Then, for the finer details—

"—Galaxseiryu に任せようか。" —let us leave those to Galaxseiryu.

Galaxadale allowed himself the briefest of smiles as he turned back to his staff. Somewhere below his gunlines, the dragon would already be moving.

Galaxseiryu arrived in the ruins like a falling stroke of turquoise ink.

He dropped from a low-flying transport into the alleyways of outer Galaxen-Shirayue City, boots splashing through puddles lit by emergency beacon-light. Azure dragon sigils curled faintly along his arms and neck, their lines glowing whenever his heart kicked up. Above the rooftops, the distant rumble of Galaxadale's artillery was already fading, replaced by the closer, uglier sounds of zombie claws on pavement and Deathsoldier rifles barking in angry bursts.

"Galaxseiryu, this is Hanlong–Shirayue Joint Command," came the crisp voice of a staff officer in his earpiece. "Objective set: one, clear remaining Death Regime pockets inside the Shirayue logistics belt; two, secure evacuation corridors to the inner wards; three, tag any persistent elite signatures for Supreme Commander intervention."

「了解。龍、出ます。」 Copy. Dragon moving, he replied, voice calm.

He snapped his fingers.

A coil of spectral sea-blue water and starlight erupted from under his feet, forming a serpentine dragon that wound around his body and then launched itself down the street. Wherever its head passed, the air pressure dropped; the leading wave smashed a clump of Deathzombies into wet paste and tore the rifles from three astonished Deathsoldiers' hands, flinging them high into the walls. Galaxseiryu followed in its wake, sword flashing in short, economical cuts that severed spine-cables, pierced cursed hearts, and left dissolving violet ash where bodies had been.

A knot of Galax Rangers and Galax Guards emerged from behind an overturned transport as he approached, armor blackened, shields flickering.

"Seiryu-san!" their captain called, relief obvious even through the helmet filters. "We were about to fall back to the inner ring."

「まだ早い。」 Too early for that. He drew a quick sigil in the air; the dragon looped back and coiled protectively over the crossroads, its translucent body forming a makeshift barrier. "内側は守って。外側の掃除は、俺たちがやる。" You focus on holding the inner line. We will do the cleaning outside.

He flicked a series of coordinates to their visors—evac routes, fallback points, safe houses—then sent them moving with a jerk of his chin. They sprinted away under the cover of the dragon's sinuous bulk as another wave of undead rounded the corner, jaws snapping.

Galaxseiryu stepped forward to meet it.

"来いよ。" Come on.

The horde surged. He traced a vertical line with his blade; gravity along that line turned ninety degrees, and half the zombies suddenly "fell" sideways into a wall, pinned there as if glued by invisible force. He rode a burst of wind up the side of a ruined structure, kicked off broken concrete, and dove back down trailing a comet-tail of azure scales. Every impact was a small, precise catastrophe—deathtank hatches torn off, Deathmarines flung from their firing perches, Deathsoldiers knocked into angles of space they were never meant to occupy.

A panicked burst of violet sorcery scorched the street ahead: a minor Death Regime elite—Deathschläger, armored in overlapping bone plates, great maul crackling with corpse-light—stepped into view, roaring as he brought the weapon down in a blow meant to end any normal engagement.

Galaxseiryu tilted his head, eyes narrowing.

「タイミングが、雑。」 Your timing is sloppy.

The maul hit where he had been a full second ago. In the sliver of future he had already moved into, he appeared behind Deathschläger, dragon-aura flaring. A razor-sharp current of compressed water wrapped the elite's armor, slipping into every gap, every joint. He clenched his fist; the water expanded, shredding wards and cracking bone plating from the inside out.

Deathschläger dropped to one knee, health ring plunging into deep red.

"Rückzugskanal öffnen!" he snarled over the Death net. Open a retreat channel!

A recall sigil flickered under him, but Galaxseiryu had already stepped away, sheathing his blade in one smooth motion.

「宿題は、また今度。」 We can do your homework another time.

The elite vanished in a vertical smear of violet light, yanked out before Galaxseiryu chose to press the killing blow. The point was not annihilation; it was control.

He turned, pulling up his next orders.

New coordinates from Galaxwis and Galaxadye poured across his HUD: stray Death Regime squads trying to regroup near the rail spur, a pocket of zombies menacing a clinic on the Yunkagura road, a small but worrying spike of necrotic energy in a warehouse district between Galaxen-Longsakura City and Galaxen-Seihong City.

Galaxseiryu exhaled once, letting the dragon around him taste the air.

"次は...倉庫街か。" Next, the warehouses, he murmured.

The dragon nodded—or maybe that was just the wind—and uncoiled, launching itself toward the distant glow. Galaxseiryu sprinted after it, boots barely touching the shattered streets, an elite point of azure light weaving between gold and violet as he carried his superiors' orders into the thinnest cracks of the front, sealing each one before Deathwing's darkness could seep through.

Galaxseiryu's dragon left a trail of clean air behind it wherever it passed.

By the time dusk bled down over the Kinchōhakkei frontier, his objectives read like a checklist in Galaxwis's logs. Warehouse district between Galaxen-Longsakura and Galaxen-Seihong: cleared, with Death Regime ammo dumps converted into starlight and scrap. Yunkagura road clinic: all civilians evacuated, zombies pinned to the ceiling by inverted gravity and then neatly vaporized. Rail spur junction: Deathmarines' attempt at a last ambush broken by a single, coiling waterspout that peeled them from their cover and left them dangling in the air for Galax Rangers to tag with stun-bolts.

At one point, a minor Deathelite—Deathracker, armored in hooked bone and carrying a spine-linked carbine—tried to turn a side street into a killing lane. Galaxseiryu simply walked through his fire, dragon coiled tight as a shield, and cut the carbine in half along with three seconds of the elite's personal timeline. Deathracker's health ring plunged into red; recall seized him before he ever understood why his bullets had started flying backward.

When the last violet flare of forced retreat faded from the outskirts, Galaxseiryu stood on the roof of a half-shattered office block, dragon-ring looping lazily around him, watching the border lights stabilize into steady gold. His own health ring had dipped into yellow, maybe, but it pulsed steadily now, recovering as combat stress bled away.

"Hanlong–Shirayue urban belt, outer ring secure," he reported, voice even. "残存ゾンビは、掃除レベルだけ。" Remaining zombies are at broom-and-dustpan level only.

"記録完了," Galaxwis replied almost immediately—record complete. One more set of annotations appeared in the master campaign file: Galaxseiryu, multiple urban engagements, objectives achieved, no breakthroughs allowed.

On the Absolute band, Galaxbeam's presence flickered like a distant sun behind clouds. 「よくやった、青龍。」 Well done, Azure Dragon. 「次は...少し静かな戦場だ。」 Next is...a slightly quieter battlefield.

Far from the roaring tank lines and collapsed highways, another name lit up on his internal roster.

Galaxmizuki.

While Kinchōhakkei shook under artillery, the inner arcs of Galaxenchi's network survived on subtler work.

Galaxmizuki walked those quieter edges with the soft tread of someone used to being where she was not supposed to be.

She moved through the layered alleyways of Galaxen-Tenshifu City's lower decks, coat sleeves rolled just enough to keep the starlight sigils on her forearms mostly hidden. Overhead, emergency lantern-strips and jury-rigged shield emitters flickered between gold and dim orange as the power grid rerouted around damaged sectors. Below, in the tunnels and service conduits that threaded through the underbelly of the city, the war pressed in, muffled but constant.

"Galaxmizuki, we are uploading your task package now," came the soft, precise tone of a staff officer from Galaxwis's data cell. "Objective cluster Alpha: confirm integrity of civilian shelters in the Tenryokuchi and Hoshimori districts. Objective cluster Beta: locate and neutralize any Death Regime infiltration teams using zombie swarms as cover. Objective cluster Gamma: secure three key relay nodes for Galaxbeam's long-range theorem casting. Priority fluctuates as reports update."

「了解。」 Copy, she answered. "Send me everything. I will decide the order as I walk."

The data washed over her HUD in gentle cascades: red pins, gold pins, threads of probability. She blinked once, mentally stacking them into something that felt less like a list and more like a route.

Her first stop lay below Tenryokuchi.

She slipped into a maintenance shaft, boots barely whispering on the metal rungs, and dropped into a subterranean hub where three major shelter corridors intersected. Dozens of civilians huddled behind transparent barrier-walls, faces pale in the emergency glow. A handful of Galax Guards held the junction, rifles ready, eyes constantly flicking toward a sealed bulkhead door on the far side.

It boomed again as she arrived.

Something heavy pounded on the other side—then scraped, claws dragging across reinforced plating. Faint violet fumes seeped through microscopic seams, curling like fingers against the barrier-fields.

"Elite on site," one of the Guards snapped, straightening. "Reports suggested... some kind of tunneling Death units, but scanners are glitching."

Galaxmizuki stepped past him, placing her hand lightly on the bulkhead.

Cold.

Distantly, she heard the wet slosh and scrape of zombies packed shoulder to shoulder in a service tunnel, Death Regime sorcery keeping them just coordinated enough not to crush each other. Behind them, something heavier—incomplete words of a curse, bone graft grinding on stone.

"シェルターの出入りは禁止。" No one opens these shelter doors, she said quietly. Then she smiled, just a little, and tapped a faint sigil over the metal: a crescent moon of pale blue light, ringed with tiny stars.

"私は向こう側からノックするから。" I will knock from the other side.

A fold in space opened at her feet—small, precise, calculated by Galaxbeam's theorem-lattice but executed with her personal grace. She stepped through, and the tunnel swallowed her.

On the far side of the bulkhead, the world was teeth and rot.

Zombies jammed the corridor, wedged together so tightly that some had fused, arms and torsos blending into grotesque, multi-mouthed masses. Deep within the press shambled a Death Regime handler, Deathmolter, his torso encased in overlapping plates of bone and scrap, lower body a nest of rooted tendrils sunk into the floor. He pumped necrotic fluid into the horde with every sluggish pulse.

He did not have time to turn.

Galaxmizuki emerged ten meters behind him, eyes closed, palm brushing the damp tunnel wall.

"静かにして。" Be still.

Her sigils spilled outward in silence—no flash, no dramatic flare. The stars along her arms dimmed, then reappeared in miniature across the zombies' rotten skin, as though someone had splattered them with faint constellations.

One by one, the stars winked out.

Where they vanished, motion followed.

Zombies froze mid-snarl, mid-step, jammed fingers inches from tearing flesh. Necrotic currents slowed, then stopped, fixed at a single moment of their miserable existence. In seconds, the entire tunnel became a tableau: a wave of death arrested just at the point of impact.

Deathmolter felt it.

"Was—?" His voice strangled in his throat. "Welche—Zeit—Magie—?"

Galaxmizuki opened her eyes.

「ここは避難通路。」 This is an evacuation passage. 「あなたの実験場所じゃない。」 Not your testing ground.

She raised two fingers.

The stars she had left on Deathmolter's armor went from pale blue to blinding white. The light did not explode outward; it imploded, compressing his own temporal span into a single point. His health ring plunged straight into the recall threshold, shattering with a noise like cracking glass.

He vanished in a vertical smear of violet, ripped back to Death Regime lines. The frozen zombies around him twitched once as the control strands snapped.

Galaxmizuki released the field.

Time returned gently rather than violently. Rot that had been held in suspension fell apart as if embarrassed to have been seen. The horde collapsed in a chain reaction of quiet disintegration, bodies slumping into puddles of inert, gray muck that began to evaporate into harmless smoke.

She wiped one fleck of residue from her sleeve, then folded space again and stepped back into the junction hub on the Galaxy side.

"The tunnel is clear," she said simply. "No hostile elites, no moving undead."

Galax Guards exhaled as one.

A child behind the barrier made a small, awed noise. "星が落ちてきた..." The stars fell down...

Galaxmizuki offered them a brief, reassuring bow before turning away. Her HUD had already updated: Alpha cluster shelters secure. Beta cluster flag: new red pin—suspected infiltration near a relay tower above Hoshimori's older district.

She took the stairs two at a time.

Above Hoshimori, the rain had started.

It fell in thin, silvery sheets, catching on the edges of broadcast dishes and antenna spires. Somewhere among those towers, a Death Regime strike cell had slipped through—small, disciplined, masked by zombie distractions elsewhere—aiming to corrupt or destroy one of the relay nodes that let Galaxbeam project his equations across entire states.

Galaxmizuki moved along rooftop ledges as if born to them, coat whipping in the wind. Her eyes traced lines of potential between buildings, each drop of rain another datum in a constantly shifting map.

There—a stutter in the pattern.

On a gantry below the main relay dish, five Deathsoldiers in reinforced carapace-plate crouched around a humming violet device. Above them, a familiar silhouette—Deathshade, recalled earlier from another front and clearly angry about it—pooled darkness between the support struts, using the storm to blur her presence.

"Beeilt euch," Deathshade hissed. Hurry. "Bevor einer von diesen goldenen Musterschülern auftaucht."

Galaxmizuki stepped off the roof.

The wind caught her fall, slowed it, and wrapped it in threads of moonlit water. She landed on the gantry rail with barely a sound.

"もう遅い。" Too late.

Deathsoldiers jerked around. Deathshade whipped a bolt of condensed night at her, a spear of shadow meant to erase anything it touched.

Galaxmizuki flicked her wrist.

The bolt hit an invisible circle of stars and curved harmlessly into the sky, rejoining the rain as a faint, embarrassed drizzle.

Deathshade swore in three languages at once.

"Du schon wieder—!" You again—!

「授業、二時間目。」 Second period, Galaxmizuki replied, and snapped her fingers.

The rain around the gantry obeyed.

Every droplet twisted into a needle of light and velocity shifted to match her intent rather than gravity's. For the span of a breath, the gantry existed as a blurred cylinder of white-blue streaks. When the moment ended, the Deathsoldiers lay unconscious or blinking at recall threshold, armor pitted and cracked; their health rings flashed once and pulled them out in reluctant streaks of violet.

Deathshade tried to billow herself away.

Galaxmizuki drew a circle in the air with one finger.

Stars formed along its circumference, then collapsed inward. Space folded in a tight ring around Deathshade, corralling her shadow-pool into a narrow column.

"影遊びは、別の場所でね。" Play with shadows somewhere else.

She rotated the circle ninety degrees and let recall mechanics do the rest. Deathshade's health ring, already worn down from her earlier defeat at Galaxadye's hands, tipped into red under the strain. She vanished with a frustrated scream, and the gantry fell quiet except for the patter of ordinary rain.

Galaxmizuki knelt to examine the violet device.

A few quick sigils later, its necrotic circuits unraveled, turning into inert, glittering dust. She brushed it away from the relay casing, then pinged Galaxwis.

"Hoshimori relay node secure," she reported. "Infiltration team neutralized. Any Gamma objectives left in my radius?"

"Affirmative," came the reply. "One more node above the old starlight observatory, then your cluster is complete. After that, Galaxbeam may need you for theorem support over Kinchōhakkei."

Galaxmizuki rose, rain sliding off the invisible barrier that curled over her shoulders like a cloak.

「了解。じゃあ、星をもう一つ守ってくる。」 Copy. Then I will go protect one more star.

She stepped into the storm, letting it hide her as she moved toward the observatory—a quiet, precise counterpoint to the thunder of tanks and the blaze of Absolute duels, keeping the network intact so that when Galaxbeam and the Supreme Commanders reshaped the front, they could do it on a lattice of stars she had kept from going dark.

Galaxmizuki reached the old starlight observatory just as the last of the rain tapered off.

The dome above Hoshimori's hilltop still bore scars from an earlier campaign—ragged burns across its panels, one whole segment replaced with temporary field plating—but the relay node inside hummed a steady, reassuring gold. Her sigils moved across its casing like fireflies, checking every channel, every theorem anchor.

"No foreign glyphs. No necrotic residue. No temporal jitter," she murmured, mostly for Galaxwis's benefit. "観測所の星は、まだ生きてる。" The observatory's star is still alive.

"Gamma cluster complete," Galaxwis confirmed in her ear. "All three relay nodes secured. Logging you for optional redeploy on Professor's band, but for the moment—"

"—I keep walking," she finished softly.

She stepped out onto the observatory balcony. Below, Galaxen-Tenshifu and Hoshimori glowed in layered tiers: Galaxy barricades, field hospitals, armored convoys, all moving along lanes she had quietly kept lit. Above, the sky was clear enough that real stars showed through, faint but stubborn.

Galaxmizuki leaned on the railing for one breath.

「よし。」 Good.

Then she turned away from the view, coat fluttering, and walked back into the light—another quiet line of stability in a war that refused to stay still.

Far from the observatory, in a cathedral of bone and engine-noise, Deathwing redrew the night in his own colors.

He stood at the center of a vast tactical chamber carved into the ribcage of some dead, impossible beast. Maps of Suzutamashi, Kinchōhakkei, Gallaxgonbei, and their neighboring states hung in the air as overlapping veils of light—gold for Galaxy control, violet for Death occupation, iron-gray for contested zones that pulsed with slow, angry light.

Around him, his Supreme Commanders waited.

Deathendye with his scrolling casualty arrays, Deathenstorm wrapped in a cloak of crackling black cumulonimbus, Deathenstream smelling of river-mud and old blood, and Deathenpuff balancing on the edge of her necrotic sky-barge as if gravity had lost jurisdiction.

"Gallaxbeam hält seine hübschen Linien," Deathwing said, voice echoing through the hollow ribs. Gallaxbeam keeps his pretty lines. "Also reißen wir nicht nur Linien ein." So we do not just tear lines. He raised one clawed finger. "Wir reißen Menschen aus ihnen." We tear people out of them.

Violet light sharpened over Suzutamashi, Kinchōhakkei's edges, the coastal belts of Gallaxgonbei.

"Deathenpuff. Deathendye. Deathenstorm. Deathenstream." He pointed to each in turn. "Ziel: maximaler Schaden. Galax-eliten sind nur Bonuspunkte. Eure Prüfung ist, wie viel Gold ihr in Grau und Lila verwandelt." Objective: maximum damage. Galaxy elites are only extra credit. Your test is how much gold you can turn to gray and violet.

Deathenpuff's smile was small and terrible.

"Verstanden," she said. Understood.

Deathenpuff took the sky first.

Over occupied Suzutamashi, the clouds had already learned to fear her.

She rode her sky-barge above Tenkoshorai City's once-golden skyline, cathedral hull stitched with bone and rusted brass, chem-cloud generators along its spine humming with anticipation. Beneath her, the city lay under a permanent bruise of violet mist—Death Regime banners snapping from towers, deathtanks parked like guardian idols at every major intersection, zombie patrols shuffling along boulevards that used to blaze with festival lights.

"Bomberstaffeln eins bis vier: Staffelung über den alten Korridoren." Bomb wings one through four: stagger over the old corridors, she ordered. "Wir zeichnen die Linien neu, aber das Raster bleibt." We redraw the lines, but keep the grid.

Her bombers fanned out, trailing curtains of toxic contrails that layered Suzutamashi's airspace in lethal strata. Below, pockets of Galax Soldiers and Galax Rangers still fought on, trapped in insurgent cells that refused to surrender even under occupation.

Galaxy elites tried to break through.

Over the Tenkyosei–Gekkoujou corridor, Galaxyraijin punched up from the lower clouds, drums roaring, lightning boiling along his orbit. He hammered at her chem-layers with disciplined bolts, trying to tear a clean hole through which Galaxapuff's surviving wings could descend.

"Luftkanal 3-Alpha freiräumen!" Clear air channel 3-Alpha! someone cried on the Galaxy band.

Deathenpuff watched his charge with the dispassionate eye of a surgeon.

"Er ist müde." He is tired.

She flicked two fingers.

Chem generators along her barge shifted pitch. A ring of clouds around Galaxyraijin suddenly inverted—clean air turning poisonous, poison briefly clear—just as he committed to his downward strike.

His lightning hit a pocket of dead gas, failed to propagate, and died with a sickening sputter. The next instant, violet hail slammed into him from three directions at once, each pellet a seed of condensed plague.

His health ring plunged from mid-yellow to jagged red in one heartbeat.

"くそ...っ！" he hissed, staggering. Damn—!

Galaxapuff's panicked call came through faintly.「退いて、雷神！」 Fall back, Raijin!

Recall laws obeyed before pride could interfere. Galaxyraijin vanished in a smear of gold, dragged out with his wings half-charred.

Galaxharp and Galaxveronica tried in turn—sound barrages and barrier petals blooming against the chem-storm—but Deathenpuff treated them as little more than tests. Each new pattern earned a new counter. Each counter shaved their rings thinner until recall grabbed them too, yanking elite after elite off the board.

Only when the sky above Tenkoshorai and Tenkyosei was thoroughly hers did Deathenpuff give the real order.

"Jetzt." Now. "Tropfen öffnen."

Bomber bays yawned open.

They did not drop conventional ordnance—not at first. Instead, they shed clusters of heavy, pod-like shapes that tumbled through the chem-layers trailing hooks and chains.

At five hundred meters, the pods burst.

Zombie swarms, mutated for high-altitude insertion—limbs reinforced, skulls plated, eyes sewn shut against the drop—poured out in tight groups, their fall slowed by necrotic parachutes spun from congealed fog. They landed in plazas, on rooftops, on Galaxy bunker lids, smashing through whatever gold plating remained.

Galax Soldiers fired up at them, beams and bullets punching holes through falling bodies, but there were always more.

From her barge, Deathenpuff watched the golden map of Suzutamashi's resistance nodes flicker, then dim.

"Graxien, Galaxrangers, Galaxguardians..." she murmured, deliberately mangling the names. "So viele, die dachten, der Himmel gehöre ihnen." So many who thought the sky belonged to them.

She wrapped Suzutamashi's airspace in another layer of chem-cloud and turned her barge's nose toward the Kinchōhakkei border, trailing a violet wound behind her.

Deathendye turned numbers into slaughter.

On the Yueshinden–Kasairyoku axis in Kinchōhakkei, Galaxy convoys had gotten used to moving under Galaxadye's protective calculus—angles and timings tuned to minimize risk, convoys threading through windows of relative safety between Death artillery arcs.

Deathendye decided those windows no longer existed.

He stood on a mobile command dais behind a Deathtank battery, holo-arrays floating around him like stained glass. Every Galaxy movement pinged as a faint gold vector; every zombie horde and Death Regime gun line glowed in layered violet.

"Neue Zielpriorität," he said, adjusting his spectacles—plain glass over empty sockets. New target priority. "Nicht die Festungen. Die Adern." Not the fortresses. The veins.

He highlighted supply routes, medical runs, evac corridors—everything that kept the front from collapsing.

His gunners shifted aim.

The next volley of shells landed not on Galaxy front-line bunkers, but on a moving column of Galax Marines and Galax Guards escorting fuel trucks toward the Kasairyoku shield-wall.

Galaxmizuki had just tagged that route as "low-risk" based on older patterns.

Too late.

"INCOMING—!" someone yelled as the first shell tore the lead APC in half. Golden shields flared, tried to catch the rest, but Deathendye had timed the salvo to the exact moments when the convoy's shields had to cycle—micro-gaps in coverage that only someone as obsessive as he was would bother to exploit.

Explosions turned the road into a continuous chain of fire. Tanks flipped. Trucks detonated. Health rings up and down the column plunged into yellow, orange, red. Recall saved some; others simply... went flat.

Overhead, Galaxrire dove in, swearing in fast Cantonese, trying to knock out the spotter emplacements that guided Deathendye's barrage.

Deathendye was already accounting for him.

"Windkorrektur... hier." Wind correction... here.

He nudged one column of numbers.

The next counter-barrage burst not at Galaxrire's last position, but in a ring around where he would have moved to avoid a predictable shot. Blast-waves caught him in crossed vectors, tossing him into a spin that rattled his health halo straight to a sliver.

"嘩—唔係掛..." The hell—no way— he grunted, world turning upside down.

Recall circles flared under his boots, pulling him out of the sky before the follow-up could finish the job.

On the ground, Galax Marines fired smoke and emergency shields, dragging wounded into teleport-ready clusters as best they could. But Deathendye kept rewriting the map, treating every hesitation as another variable to exploit.

By the time Galaxadye managed to reassert her equation over that corridor, three more convoys and half a dozen armored platoons lay in burning ruin. The line still held—but its veins bled freely.

Deathendye logged the casualty ratios with clinical precision.

"Akzeptabel," he concluded. Acceptable.

Deathenstorm took what Deathendye did to numbers and applied it to weather.

He had always been at his most dangerous when given room to work, and Deathwing gave him an entire continental front.

Over the Oborotaka heights and the mountain borders between Suzutamashi, Kinchōhakkei, and Gallaxgonbei, clouds began to behave like a single, malevolent organism. Black thunderheads rolled in low, their bellies veined with purple lightning that forked in unnatural right angles. Hail the size of fists pelted ridgelines, each stone humming with curse-script.

Galaxastorm met him high above the peaks.

The Galaxy commander's aura crackled gold, his own stormfront pushing back against the violet tide. "ここは渡さないぞ, Deathenstorm!" You are not getting past here!

Deathenstorm's reply was a slow, grinding chuckle.

"Du bist müde, kleiner Donner." You are tired, little thunder.

He raised both arms.

An entire shelf of cloud rotated along a hidden axis, turning what had been a horizontal barrier into a vertical wall of pressure. Wind vectors inverted. Galaxastorm's own lightning, meant to lance forward, suddenly found itself trapped in a cage of spinning air.

He tried to redirect, sweat beading along his brow, but for every bolt he reclaimed, two others bent off course, searing the wrong clouds, collapsing his own formations.

Below, Deathenstorm's rain became a weapon. It hit Galax armor columns with such force that turrets dented inward. Hailstones shattered sensor arrays. Visibility dropped to nothing.

Zombie hordes and Deathsoldiers surged forward under that cover, silhouettes barely darker than the storm itself. They fell on isolated Galax outposts in the high passes, ripping through Guards and Rangers who could not tell friend from foe beyond ten meters.

On one ridge near the border between Gallaxgonbei and Kinchōhakkei, a company of Galax Soldiers held their ground as long as they could, shields sparking madly, tanks firing blind into the gray.

Then the sky itself came down.

Deathenstorm drove a single, needle-thin bolt straight through Galaxastorm's chest—carefully tuned to skirt the Absolute's invulnerability, instead tearing at the laws around his health ring. The golden halo shrank in one brutal jolt, dropping straight from mid-yellow to the edge of red.

Galaxastorm choked, forced to choose between stubbornness and survival.

「チッ...今回は引いてやるよ。」 Tch... I'll withdraw this time.

Recall ripped him out of the sky.

Without his opposing presence, the storm turned completely violet.

Deathenstorm spread his arms wider.

"Regnet," he whispered. Rain.

Entire cliff faces washed out. Galaxy bunkers vanished in mudslides, their occupants either teleported to safety by emergency failsafes or swallowed whole. For every soldier saved by recall, three more were simply... gone, leaving only snapped shields and empty craters.

Deathenstorm did not advance lines himself. That was not his task tonight.

His task was to make sure when Deathendye and Deathenstream pushed, they pushed into positions already softened by thunder.

Deathenstream turned those softened positions into rivers of death.

From the coastal estuaries of Gallaxgonbei to the inland rivers of Kinchōhakkei and the poisoned canals of occupied Suzutamashi, he stood at the junctions and pulled.

In Suzutamashi, he reversed gravity on entire harbors, sending seawater pouring uphill into inland districts where Galaxy holdouts clung to higher ground. In Kinchōhakkei, he found the precise point in the Suzukaze River where Galaxastream had re-threaded the current to protect levees—and snapped it.

The river bucked like a wounded serpent.

In one city along its banks, Galax Soldiers manning floodgates watched in horror as golden laminar sheets of water they had trusted all campaign suddenly shattered into jagged, bone-laced torrents. Necrotic silt boiled up from the depths, carrying zombie torsos and Deathmarines in rusted diving armor straight over broken walls.

"Zu den Brücken," Deathenstream instructed with quiet satisfaction. To the bridges.

His currents carried undead and deathtanks alike through channels that used to be safe zones, depositing them on streets never meant to see front-line combat.

Galaxestream dove in to oppose him, eyes hard, fingers carving counter-spirals in the air.

"流れは、こっちが決める," he hissed. I decide the flow.

Deathenstream tilted his head, amused.

"Dann schwimmen wir eben schneller." Then we simply swim faster.

He braided three tributaries together in a pattern that should have been impossible under normal hydrodynamics, creating a sudden vertical column of water that wrapped around Galaxestream like a reverse whirlpool. Pressure battered the Galaxy commander from all sides, hammering his health ring with every compressed heartbeat.

For a moment, the river duel became a contest of pure will—gold vs violet, laminar vs chaotic.

Gold wavered.

Galaxestream's ring dipped into orange, then into a ragged edge of red.

"撤退プロトコル起動！" Retreat protocol, now! came a distant order from Galaxbeam.

The water around him snapped into stasis as recall yanked him out, leaving a briefly dragon-shaped void in the churning flood.

Without him, Deathenstream's currents roared unchecked.

Entire defensive trenches vanished under black water. Galax Marines scrambled for high ground, some pulled away by failsafes, others dragged under by grasping hands from below. Tanks bogged to their turrets, then sank as necrotic silt ate at their hulls.

Deathenstream traced a lazy spiral over the map.

"Brücken... Häfen... Schleusen..." Bridges, harbors, sluices. Each word corresponded to a point where gold flickered and dimmed, replaced by muddy violet.

By the time Deathwing called a temporary halt, the board had changed.

Suzutamashi remained firmly under Death Regime occupation, its skies choked by Deathenpuff's chem-clouds, its streets crawling with fresh zombie drops. Kinchōhakkei still held—Galaxbeam and the Supreme Commanders had not let any state fall—but its veins ran thinner, its highways cratered by Deathendye's mathematics, its mountain passes chewed up by Deathenstorm's storms, its rivers scarred by Deathenstream's floods.

In Gallaxgonbei, coastal belts that had just begun to breathe after liberation now bore fresh bruises—raided ports, drowned villages, shattered bridges. Galaxy elites had fought hard wherever they could, but again and again, Supreme Commander pressure had simply been too much. Health rings hit slivers. Recall dragged them away before any could be truly broken.

On the casualty charts, one trend was clear:

Wherever Deathenpuff, Deathendye, Deathenstorm, and Deathenstream focused, Galaxy Regime ground forces paid the price—Galax Soldiers, Galax Marines, Galax Rangers, Galax Guards, and their armored columns taking the brunt of every equation, every storm, every flood.

In his bone cathedral, Deathwing considered the updated projections.

Golden regions were still larger than violet ones.

But the violet had deepened, grown teeth, carved hooks into the edges of every state it touched.

"Gut," he said finally, smoke curling from his sockets. Good. "Sie bluten. Noch stehen sie, aber sie bluten."

They bleed. They still stand, but they bleed.

He turned his gaze back toward the faint, distant glow that was Galaxbeam's presence on the other end of the board.

"Weiter, meine Sturmkommandanten," he murmured to his Supreme Commanders. Onward, my storm-commanders. "Wir sind noch lange nicht fertig." We are far from finished.

Galaxmizuki's last report slid into Galaxwis's logs like a quiet period at the end of a dense paragraph.

Shelters secure. Relays intact. Infiltration routes sealed.

Far away, in the hollow cathedral of ribs and engines, Deathwing closed his claws over empty air and felt the shape of all that intact gold—and all the places his own violet had already bitten into it.

"Genug," he murmured. Enough.

He turned away from the projection of Galaxbeam's lattice and faced the four figures standing just beyond the map's edge.

Deathenpuff. Deathendye. Deathenstorm. Deathenstream.

Each of them carried a front on their shoulders. Each of them, tonight, would be more than a name on his casualty reports.

"Geht," Deathwing said, iron-purple aura flaring. Go. "Zeigt ihm, dass seine Schüler auch sterben können." Show him his students can die too.

Deathenpuff took his command like she took her chem-clouds—quietly, and all at once.

Above occupied Suzutamashi, night had fallen into three distinct layers. At street level, violet lamps and burning wreckage painted everything in bruise colors. Higher up, a mesh of AA tracer and mortars stitched the air. Above that, an almost serene ceiling of chem-clouds glowed faintly toxic under a distant moon.

Deathenpuff's sky-barge cruised just beneath that upper layer, a silhouette of broken cathedral arches welded around engines that growled like an old organ.

"Berichte aus Tenkyosei?" she asked, hands resting lightly on the rail. Reports from Tenkyosei?

"Zombiedrops gesichert," an aide replied. Zombie drops secured. "Widerstandszellen in den inneren Ringen... noch aktiv." Resistance cells in the inner rings still active.

Deathenpuff tilted her head.

"Dann füttern wir sie." Then let us feed them.

She pointed with one bony finger.

Far below, a Galax Guards enclave in Tenkyosei's old university quarter had barricaded three blocks into a makeshift fortress—stacked shields, overlapping fields of fire, a handful of Galax Marines and Galax Rangers forming the hard core. They had cut kill-lanes through earlier zombie waves and now rested in exhausted, tight formation, trusting their overhead corridors to hold.

Deathenpuff rolled one shoulder.

"Bomberstaffel Zwei, Giftregenschirm über Sektor Sigma-Fünf." Bomber Wing Two, poison-rain umbrella over sector Sigma-Five.

Her aircraft banked, opening their bellies over a seemingly empty slice of sky.

They did not bomb the fortress.

Instead, they seeded a ring around it—chem droplets that hung in the air like a shimmering curtain. The ring descended slowly, blocking off exits one by one, draping alley mouths and cross-streets with thin, deadly mist.

Inside the shrinking circle, Galaxy comms crackled.

「外側の空気が変だ...」 The air outside feels wrong...

"Filters up! No one crosses that line without clearance!" a Galax Marine lieutenant barked.

They never saw the drop pods.

Deathenpuff's second gesture was almost lazy.

From the chem ceiling, pod-clusters fell in perfect silence, their fall hidden inside the glowing haze. They burst only at the last instant, spilling compact squads of airborne Deathzombies and Deathmarines into the choke points that the defensive lines had left open by necessity.

Screams and gunfire spiked through the band.

Galaxy elites moved to answer.

Galaxytsukifenghuang slashed down from the outer districts, wings a burning fan of gold and scarlet, carving corridors through chem and undead alike to reach the trapped pocket. Galaxtempestress rode a spinning node of compressed pressure beside her, storm marble blazing like a miniature star.

"Tenkyosei inner ring, hold!" Galaxytsukifenghuang shouted, Cantonese burning. "支援来た!" Support's here!

Deathenpuff watched them with clinical interest.

"Altbekannte Signaturen," she murmured. Familiar signatures.

She tapped a sigil on her console.

Chem generators on the sky-barge pulsed once, twice.

The clouds above the two Galaxy elites folded into a spiral—clear air at the center, toxic layers wrapped around it like shells. It looked, to an outside observer, like a tidy corridor through the storm.

Galaxtempestress grinned, storm marble flaring. 「道、開けてくれてありがとう。」 Thanks for opening a path.

They dove.

At the exact midpoint of the spiral, Deathenpuff twisted the shell.

The "clear" corridor slammed shut. Chem-density around them tripled in an instant; violet hail burst from nowhere, each pellet a micro-ritual tuned to their auras. Shields shrieked. Health rings plunged.

"くっ...！」 Galaxytsukifenghuang gasped as her phoenix fire guttered, halo shearing from high yellow to harsh red. "テンキーセイ...まだ守...らなきゃ—" Tenkyosei still has to—

Recall grabbed her mid-sentence, yanking her out in a streak of gold.

Galaxtempestress managed one ragged curse before her own ring hit the sliver and recall split her away too, storm marble falling from her fingers and dissolving before it could hit the ground.

On the plaza below, Galax Guards saw their saviors blink out and, for a heartbeat, faltered.

Deathenpuff's undead did not.

They surged through the gaps, Deathmarines using the barricades themselves as cover, Deathsoldiers firing at point-blank. Galax Soldiers poofed into recall-light, one after another, but sheer numbers filled every space recall opened.

Within minutes, Tenkyosei's university quarter fell silent save for the clatter of bone boots and the rasp of banners being raised.

Deathenpuff watched the gold on her map dim to violet.

"Ein Sektor weniger," she said, almost gently. One sector less.

Her barge's nose turned toward the next cluster of stubborn gold in Suzutamashi's map.

If Deathenpuff made occupation a science of the sky, Deathendye made attrition a science of everything else.

His command dais rode not atop a deathtank, but inside a half-buried bastion of welded steel and fossilized bone, dug into a hillside overlooking a vital Kinchōhakkei highway junction. Screens and translucent bone-slabs hovered around him, each etched with shifting tables, maps, rates.

Firelight from the burning wreck of a Galaxy convoy flickered through the slits.

"Konvoi X-17: neutralisiert." Convoy X-17: neutralized. "Verlustquote akzeptabel." Loss ratio acceptable.

A junior necro-analyst flinched.

"Äh... Herr Kommandant, das waren... zweihundert Galaxsoldiers und -marines." That was... two hundred Galax Soldiers and Marines.

Deathendye did not look up.

"And dreihundert unserer Zombies." And three hundred of our zombies. "Die Frage ist nicht, wer hinfällt. Die Frage ist, wer aufsteht." The question is not who falls. It is who stands afterwards.

He highlighted the junction ahead—three branching roads, all necessary for Galaxy resupply to reach a cluster of cities around Yueshinden and Hanlong.

"Gallaxgonbei hat ihn gelehrt, wie man gewinnt," he murmured, half to himself. Gallaxgonbei taught him how to win. "Kinchōhakkei lehrt, wie man verliert."

He began to write.

Lines of numbers and bone-glyphs filled the air. Every projected Galaxy sortie, every known teleport corridor, every storm pocket that Deathenstorm had seeded, every floodline Deathenstream could trigger—he stacked them into a lattice of probabilities.

Then he inverted it.

"Artillerie-Batterien Zwei und Fünf," he called. Artillery Batteries Two and Five. "Feuer nicht auf Ziele. Feuer auf ihre Entscheidungen."

It sounded mad until the guns fired.

Shells arced out, not toward visible bunkers or vehicles, but toward empty intersections, quiet culverts, stretches of road that did not yet hold anyone at all.

Minutes later, Galaxkiba's shinobi unit blinked into one of those intersections, cloaked in stealth, moving to set up a surprise anti-armor ambush.

"道路クリア," one of his scouts reported. Road is clear.

Galaxkiba's eyes narrowed behind his visor. 「匂いが違う。」 The scent is wrong.

He never got to finish the thought.

Deathendye's shells came down precisely on the coordinates that best fit a squad leader's "clear road" call, based on thousands of past engagements. The first blast shredded their chosen vantage points; the second and third bracketed their exfiltration paths.

Even with ninja arts and time-skip tricks, shrapnel and pressure struck home.

Galaxkiba's health ring plunged into jagged orange, then red as a stray necrotic fragment lodged in his side.

「クソ...指揮官の匂いか...」 Damn... that's the commander's scent... he hissed, recognizing Deathendye's pattern as recall ripped him away, leaving only fading afterimages where his unit had been.

On another axis, Galaxmurasaki dropped into a rail yard Deathendye had flagged as "likely reserve staging." She moved with all her usual precision, purple hair whipping as she carved through a first wave of zombies.

Then the numbers caught up.

A pre-plotted counter-barrage, timed to her known engagement tempo, turned the rail cars she was using as cover into shrapnel fountains. Shields flashed; sigils strained; her health ring lurched into red before she even saw the origin point. Galaxbeam himself snapped recall around her like a teacher yanking a student out of a collapsing experiment.

In his bastion, Deathendye logged both incidents in a neat hand.

"Elite-Beeinträchtigungen: Galaxkiba, Galaxmurasaki, status zurückgerufen." Elite disruptions: Galaxkiba, Galaxmurasaki, status recalled.

He highlighted the growing gaps those recalls left in the Galaxy line, then dragged fresh zombie and Deathtroop icons into them.

"Ziel erreicht," he said softly. Objective achieved.

The road network around the junction went from contested gray to a mottled violet.

If Deathendye cut veins and nerves, Deathenstorm crushed bones.

He strode along the edge of his storms as if they were solid.

High over the mountain pass between Gallaxgonbei and Kinchōhakkei, thunderheads rolled in ranks, purple lightning crawling through them like restless serpents. Hail already churned the valleys below into white noise; here and there, the silhouettes of half-buried Galax tanks and bunkers broke the surface like drowned beasts.

Deathenstorm stepped from one slab of frozen cloud to another, cloak snapping around him, eyes half-lidded in concentration.

"Mehr Druck hier," he muttered, gesturing. More pressure here.

Clouds clenched.

A whole ridge line where Galax Guards had dug fallback trenches shuddered as rain turned to a hammering sheet, each drop a tiny curse. Shields collapsed one by one; men and women screamed as their lines broke, many saved only because recall triggered faster than the mudslide that followed.

"Blitz hier." Lightning here.

He pointed toward a thin line of gold that appeared on his awareness—a hurried attempt by Galaxastorm, freshly returned from forced recall, to throw up a counter-front.

Galaxastorm's voice crackled angrily over the Absolute band. 「まだ終わってないぞ、Deathenstorm！」 I'm not done with you yet!

Deathenstorm's mouth twitched.

"Du atmest schwer, Donnerjunge." You breathe heavily, thunder boy.

He drew a sigil in the air. The next lightning bolt that Galaxastorm called down slit in two mid-fall, each half hooked by Deathenstorm's fingers and swung sideways.

The twin bolts speared two separate Galaxy flak towers instead, vaporizing them in twin blossoms of white-gold and then purple.

Shock slapped through Galaxastorm's aura. His health ring, still not fully recovered, jerked downward.

He gritted his teeth and tried again, pushing hard, sweat stinging his eyes.

Above him, Deathenstorm leaned into the wind.

"Der Unterschied zwischen uns," he said conversationally as he shaped the next pressure wall, "ist, dass du Stürme liebst." You love storms. "Ich... bin der Sturm." I am the storm.

He snapped his fingers.

The air over three separate passes imploded, then exploded outward. Wind sheared the tops off ridges. Avalanches ripped loose and thundered down onto Galaxy staging grounds, smashing tents, vehicles, half-erected shield pylons. Galax Marines and Galax Soldiers ran for their lives; recall circles yanked the unlucky away, leaving only empty craters and shattered equipment.

Galaxastorm's health ring dipped into raw red.

「...くそ。」 ...damn. He swallowed his pride and let recall take him a second time, his presence blinking off Deathenstorm's internal map.

With his opposite number gone again, Deathenstorm exhaled slowly, letting his storms settle into a steady, grinding rhythm.

He did not order an advance; that was not his remit. But the next time Deathendye or Deathenstream pushed troops through those passes, they would find Galaxy defenses half-buried and choking on purple rain.

Deathenstorm smiled up into his own lightning.

"Schön," he whispered. Beautiful.

If Deathenstorm broke the world from above, Deathenstream hollowed it out from below.

He stood ankle-deep in a flooded culvert just outside Galaxenportal City, water lapping at the edges of his tattered cloak. Around him, every canal, sewer, storm drain, and river branch glowed faint violet in his awareness, a pulse like a heartbeat echoing through the entire network.

"Gallaxgonbei," he said softly in German. "Du hast schön geblutet letztes Mal." You bled beautifully last time. "Lass uns sehen, wie viel du noch hast." Let us see how much you still have left.

He closed his eyes and pulled.

In the old harbor, water levels rose suddenly against the piers where Galax Soldiers had set up new defensive lines after liberation. Pumps whined as they tried to compensate. In the inland ditches around Wanshengtu Town and Meigue Province, drainage channels that had finally been cleared of Deathplague's toxins now gurgled with fresh, murky flows.

Galaxy engineers cursed and raced to open sluice gates before everything overflowed.

Galaxestream dove into the nearest river in a streak of gold, aura flaring.

"またお前か," he muttered as he felt Deathenstream's heavy hand on the currents. You again.

He swept his arms out, trying to restore laminar flow to the Suzukaze-Rentianfue axis, re-threading water into stable, golden sheets.

Deathenstream did not fight him head-on.

He sidestepped.

"Du hältst den großen Fluss," he said, amused. You hold the big river. "Dann nehme ich die kleinen." Then I take the small ones.

He yanked on feeder channels.

In alleyway gutters and side canals all over Gallaxgonbei's coastal cities, water suddenly surged backward. Manhole covers blew off in geysers; sewer tunnels vomited zombie-infested sludge straight into markets and streets that had begun to taste peace again.

Galax Rangers and Galax Guards scrambled to respond, boots splashing in filth as they formed firing lines.

Elites appeared—Galaxseiryu in a streak of blue, Galaxmizuki dropping from a rooftop, both trying to contain the unexpected floods.

"左側の支流を押さえる!" Cover the left branch! Galaxseiryu shouted, dragon-water already spinning.

"時間を遅くして、溺れる前に引き上げる." I will slow time and pull them out before they drown, Galaxmizuki answered, sigils blooming.

Deathenstream felt them like fingers pressing against his palms.

He smiled, thin and humorless.

"Zwei Steine, ein Fluss." Two stones, one river.

He twisted a single junction node where three minor channels met below Galaxenportal's old district.

Up above, what had been three manageable streams fused into a single, roaring column that punched through a lower ward. Golden sigils and azure dragon-scales collided with a volume of water they had not planned for. Pressure crushed shields, bent dragons out of shape, rattled elites' bones.

Galaxseiryu choked as his health ring snapped from mid-yellow into harsh red; recall seized him mid-stroke, dragon dissolving around him.

Galaxmizuki held just long enough to freeze a pocket of water around a trapped squad of Galax Soldiers, giving them room to breathe before her own halo shattered to sliver.

"ごめん," she whispered—sorry—vanishing in a vertical streak of gold.

Without them, Deathenstream's dark tide ran through Galaxenportal's lower streets unchecked. Zombies bobbed to the surface like obscene driftwood, clawing their way onto balconies and into homes. Galax Soldiers fought on stoops and rooftops, poofing away in recall-light one by one as they were overwhelmed.

Deathenstream raised a hand.

The water around him responded, carrying more Deathmarines forward in rusted amphibious armor, their rifles wrapped in waterproof bone wards.

"Vorwärts," he said simply. Forward.

The canals and culverts of Gallaxgonbei, once routes of trade and escape, became arteries for his invasion. For every Galaxy outpost that held, two more found themselves isolated, their access roads cut by sudden floods and undermined foundations.

By the time he eased his grip, the map over Gallaxgonbei's coast looked like it had been splattered with violet ink.

When the four of them returned—physically or only through their distant presence on the Absolute band—Deathwing did not greet them with applause.

He simply expanded the map again.

Suzutamashi: solid violet under Deathenpuff's chem-scarred sky.

Kinchōhakkei: still gold, but shot through with gray where Deathendye's math and Deathenstorm's weather had chewed highways and passes to pieces.

Gallaxgonbei: liberated in name, but its coasts and canals now bore fresh purple hooks where Deathenstream's waters had slipped in.

"Dies," Deathwing said, smoke curling from his sockets, "ist, was passiert, wenn ihr nicht nur auf ihre Helden zielt." This is what happens when you aim not at their heroes, but at everything around them.

He looked, one by one, at Deathenpuff, Deathendye, Deathenstorm, Deathenstream.

"Weiter," he said. Onward. "Solange noch Gold auf dieser Karte ist, habt ihr Arbeit."

As long as there is still gold on this map, you have work.

Out on the fractured fronts, Galaxy banners still flew.

But wherever those four Supreme Commanders walked—in the sky, in numbers, in storms, in rivers—the banners had to lean just a little harder into the wind to keep flying at all.

The four storm-commanders of the Death Regime did not vanish when Deathwing dismissed them.

They dispersed.

Deathenpuff's chem-clouds stayed threaded into Suzutamashi's sky, renewing themselves in slow, toxic breaths. Deathendye's equations continued to crawl across the road nets of Kinchōhakkei, marking junctions for future killing fields. Deathenstorm's weather-fronts ground along the mountain borders, rain and hail and purple lightning wearing down every bunker that dared stay golden. Deathenstream's currents kept tugging at coasts and culverts in Gallaxgonbei, turning waterways into ambush routes.

Their work did not end; it settled into a continuous pressure.

Under that pressure, the map of Galaxenchi bent.

And into the gaps their storms and numbers created, Deathwing sent the knife-points—his elites.

Galaxenwarpe City, Gallaxgonbei State, had once been called the Harbor of Thousand Lanterns.

Tonight it had only two colors: gold and violet.

Storms—Deathenstorm's storms—rolled low over the bay, clouds bruised with purple electricity. The river mouths feeding into the harbor still churned wrong, current-lines twisted by Deathenstream's hand. Galaxy barricades—freshly rebuilt after the last liberation—now sagged under the weight of constant shelling and surge-floods.

Along the drowned industrial belt on the eastern pier, Galax Soldiers and Galax Marines fought waist-deep in grimy water, shields flaring as they tried to keep a corridor open toward an evac square. Above them, one of the city's shrine-towers, a slender spire of gold and white, leaned at a dangerous angle.

Into that half-drowned district walked Deathgripress.

She did not splash.

Every step she took turned the fetid water around her boots the color of old bruises, then black. Where it touched, zombie torsos stiffened and rose, guided by strings of violet script that wound from her fingers into their ribcages.

"Zielsektor Galaxenwarpe Ostpier," came Deathendye's voice over the vox, flat, precise. Target sector: Galaxenwarpe east pier. "Galaxinfanterie-Fokus. Artillerie passt sich deinen Vektoren an." Focus on Galaxy infantry. Artillery will adjust to your vectors.

"Verstanden, Herr Kommandant," Deathgripress replied. Understood, Commander.

Her voice was surprisingly calm—young, almost bored.

She opened her hand.

Bands of dark-gray energy, edged in dirty violet, unspooled from her palm like ribbons in zero gravity. They drifted outward until they passed through the half-submerged alleys where Galax Soldiers had dug in. To the human eye, the bands were faint; to auras and shields, they were anchors.

"Grave lattice, online," she murmured.

A Galax Sergeant barked into his mic. "Move! Move! Get the wounded across before the next flood—"

His boot hit an invisible loop and froze mid-step.

"さっきまで、こんな感覚は—" This didn't feel like—

His own leg would not obey him. Neither would the soldier next to him; neither would the two Marines dragging a wounded comrade. The more they struggled, the tighter the unseen bands cinched around their armor, around their bones.

"Commander, something's locking us in place—!" another voice yelped.

Deathgripress exhaled through her nose, almost gently.

"Kein Rückzug mehr," she said. No more retreat.

Zombie hordes surged past her on either flank, wading forward with mindless enthusiasm. Normally they broke on Galaxy firing lines even faster than they could be recycled. Tonight, their opponents could not sidestep.

Galax rifles clocked and spat gold, each shot turning three, five, ten zombies into recall-smoke and necrotic slurry—but the line did not bend. There was nowhere for their wielder's feet to go.

"シールド限界までもう少し...!" Shields almost at limit...! a Galax Marine grunted as his barrier screamed under overlapping impacts.

Deathgripress closed her fist.

The bands snapped.

Not inward—downward.

For an instant, every immobilized Galaxy trooper felt as if a giant hand had grabbed their ankles and yanked. Armor sank into water, then into mud, then into something colder and more final. Shields, already stressed, tried to compensate and blew themselves out in a flare of blue-white.

From the surface, it looked as if an entire company simply dropped half a meter in unison and then could not climb back up.

"Feuerlinie eins bis drei: jetzt," Deathgripress said. Firing lines one to three: now.

Deathsoldiers and Deathmarines on the flanks opened up in overlapping volleys. Zombie bodies fell and rose again; Galaxy bodies flashed into recall-light or, when their health rings had already been shaved thin by earlier exchanges, went limp and stayed, dragged under by the lattice's grip.

Up on a half-collapsed warehouse roof, a Galax Ranger squad tried to counter.

A sniper—Galaxshiro, judging by the aura flicker—lined Deathgripress up in her scope.

"Target: elite, center of street," she whispered. "Wind correction... zero. Firing."

The shot never reached her.

The bullet entered the haze around Deathgripress and slowed to a crawl, caught in a sleeve of viscous, dark air. It hung there for a moment, spinning lazily, then dropped into her outstretched hand.

She regarded it with mild curiosity.

"Netter Versuch," she said—nice try—and flicked the slug aside.

It pinged off a lamppost and vanished into the water.

A moment later, Deathendye's pre-plotted counter-barrage, updated with her lattice data, came down on the warehouse rooftop. Galaxshiro's health ring snapped to a sliver; recall yanked her out just as the building folded.

Deathgripress did not watch her go.

Her eyes were on the shrine-tower now, where Galax Guards were still stubbornly holding a last choke point on the pier, buying time for evac transports that were never going to make it.

"Zombiewelle zwei, vor," she ordered. Zombie wave two, forward.

The water around her feet boiled as fresh undead—skeletal, bloated, some in torn Galax armor—climbed from submerged cracks and storm-drains, their joints creaking. Each had a faint, spectral loop around their neck, tied back to Deathgripress's fingers.

She raised both hands.

"Greift."

Invisible hands—dozens, then hundreds—closed around booted ankles on the shrine steps.

The last gold at Galaxenwarpe's east pier flickered, then went out.

On a parallel avenue closer to the city's old financial district, the slaughter felt different.

Here, high-rises shattered by earlier bombardments loomed over broad boulevards now choked with tank husks and overturned transports. The road signs still bore Galaxy calligraphy. Many still glowed gold.

They looked wrong under the light of Deathh.

Edelmar "Deathh" Grabenwurm walked down the centerline with the unhurried gait of a priest after a sermon.

He was tall even by Death Regime standards, zombie-human frame draped in robes that had once tried to resemble a healer's—white and brass and violet—but were now mottled with scorched handprints and old blood. His skin held that faint, lavender-gray pallor common to Death elites, but his eyes burned with a strangely gentle light, like candles left too long in a crypt.

Behind him, zombies marched in ranks far more disciplined than the average horde—Deathmarines with patched armor, Deathzealots bearing banners etched with skull-and-crossbones, Deathsoldiers in rusted plate with rifles at rest. They did not push past him. They walked in his wake, as if his footsteps defined the road.

Over the vox, Deathenpuff's voice drifted in from the upper air.

"Ziel: Galaxenwarpe Zentralbezirk." Objective: Galaxenwarpe central district. "Räum' die Straße. Flaggen hoch, Beacons setzen." Clear the street. Flags up, beacons set.

"Jawohl," Deathh replied softly.

Ahead, a Galax Marine platoon had welded wrecks into a makeshift wall across the avenue—tanks nose-to-tail, APCs on their sides, civilian buses jammed between them. Galaxpolice and Galaxguards manned firing slits, rifles and sidearms ready. The muzzle flashes were small, desperate stars against the encroaching purple.

"Hold this line and the evac train makes it!" a Galaxy lieutenant shouted. "We fall, the station falls!"

They opened fire as soon as Deathh came into view.

Beams and bullets converged on his chest and head in a storm.

For a second, the world in front of him was nothing but white-gold tracer.

Then the light blew past, fading into the storm-dark behind him.

Where he had walked, the air itself had thickened into a subtle, translucent veil—an aura that felt wrong to look at, like seeing stained glass from the wrong side. Impacts hit that veil and... bent. Some spun away. Some sank into it and vanished. A few made it through, punching small holes in his robes, tearing bits of flesh from his shoulders.

Every wound closed again before he took his next step.

"Er läuft... durch," someone stammered over Galaxy comms. He's just... walking through.

Deathh lifted one hand in a slow, almost consoling gesture.

A halo of pale, necrotic light flared behind him—blessed and blasphemous all at once.

"Ruht," he said in a soft, German-tinged voice. Rest.

The command was not for his own troops.

It rolled outward along the avenue like a pressure wave.

Galax Soldiers on the barricade felt their limbs go heavy, not with paralysis like Deathgripress's bands, but with a bone-deep exhaustion that had no logical cause. Hearts fluttered. Vision tunneled. Health rings—already chipped by earlier fighting—dipped as invisible hands pressed on them from above.

One Galax Guard, breath hitching, snarled through his teeth and fired anyway.

"まだ...終わってない...!" Not... done... yet...!

Deathh's eyes met his across the distance.

"Ich weiß," Deathh murmured. I know.

He closed his fingers.

The aura behind him pulsed.

Half the firing line's health halos plunged from yellow to raw orange in one instant. Two Marines whose rings had already been flirting with the red band tipped over the edge and flashed into recall-light, vanishing mid-shout.

"医療班—！...あっ..." Medics—!—ah— The channel cut to static as their IDs dropped off the local grid.

Deathh stopped a dozen meters from the barricade.

Around him, his zombies fanned out, leveling rifles and blades, waiting.

He bowed his head for a heartbeat.

"There is mercy in sleep," he said, switching seamlessly into accented English, more to himself than to them. "But war is... unkind curriculum."

He raised his arms.

Dark-golden sigils—death given the shape of theology—blossomed under the wrecks of tanks and buses. For a moment, every Galax trooper on the barricade saw those symbols under their boots, glowing through concrete and metal.

Then the street dropped.

Not physically—it was worse than that. For one impossible second, the "ground" beneath their concept of standing evaporated. Up and down lost meaning. Their health rings, already ringing with strain, tumbled as every stabilizing constant in their bodies screamed.

When the world snapped back into place, half the defenders were gone—yanked away by emergency recall, their rings too low to risk leaving them in that conceptual freefall. The rest slumped or staggered, guns shaking.

"Jetzt," Deathh said gently. Now.

Deathsoldiers and Deathmarines poured fire into the gaps. Zombies surged forward, climbing the wrecks, dragging remaining Galaxpolice down into the street. Those with enough ring left poofed away in last-second saves; those without simply went limp and slid into the gutter.

Within minutes, the barricade was Death Regime property.

Deathh stepped up onto the hull of a burned-out Galaxy tank and looked toward the rail station beyond—its roof caved in by earlier bombardment, its tracks twisted.

He made a small, almost apologetic sign in the air.

"Flagge hier," he said. Flag here.

Deathzealots rushed to obey, jamming a Death Regime standard into the tank's turret ring. As the iron-purple flag unfurled, the skull-and-crossbones emblem on it flared like a lit sigil.

Across the city, responders on Death Regime comms felt the beacon.

"Galaxenwarpe Zentralbezirk: gesichert," someone reported. Central district secured. "Beacon aktiv. Verstärkung kann ankoppeln." Beacon active. Reinforcements can latch on.

Purple portals began to wink open along adjacent streets, spilling fresh squads of Deathsoldiers and more specialized undead into the captured zone.

Deathh watched them come with a weary, almost priestlike expression.

"Geht," he told his zombies, switching back to German. Go. "Füllt die Lücken. Kein Galaxbanner mehr in dieser Straße." Fill the gaps. No Galaxy banner left on this street.

They shambled forward, obedient.

Behind him, far out over the bay, Deathenstorm's lightning flickered approval. In the harbor, Deathenstream's currents shifted again, aligning to new footholds. Above, Deathenpuff's chem-clouds thickened over the city center, sealing Galaxenwarpe under a darker dome.

On an upper frequency, Deathendye marked the capture with a neat glyph on his casualty projections.

Supreme Commanders drew the map.

Elites like Deathgripress and Deathh filled in the details—one pier, one avenue, one slaughtered company at a time.

And as Galaxenwarpe's last gold pockets blinked out and a solid block of violet grew on Deathwing's floating chart, the war for Galaxenchi's soul ground on, one city closer to the edge.

Deathgripress did not rest when the east pier fell.

By the time the Death Regime flag on the shrine-tower finished unfurling, she was already below the streets, boots echoing through Galaxenwarpe's drowned service tunnels. The air was thick with humidity and the stink of broken sewage—recent floods from Deathenstream's meddling had turned half the maintenance grid into a brown-green river.

It suited her.

"Zielwechsel," Deathendye's voice crackled in her ear. New objective. "Untergrundnetz sichern. Wir wollen keine Teleport-Korridore mehr hier." Secure the underground network. No more teleport corridors here.

"Also gut," Deathgripress answered, hopping lightly across a gap where the walkway had collapsed, landing on a reinforced pipe. "Dann halten wir sie fest, bevor sie überhaupt kommen." Then we hold them before they even arrive.

She reached a main junction—four tunnels opening like the petals of a rusted flower. The water here lapped at her shins. Even that small depth was enough.

She inhaled, slow, steady.

Exhaled.

Violet runes spilled from her mouth and fingers, thin as spider silk, threading into the water. They sank, spread, attached themselves to rusted ladders, broken valves, old Galaxy logos stamped into the concrete. Each anchor flared, then dimmed, leaving behind a faint, oily shimmer only auras would see.

"Griplattice Sigma," she murmured. "Kalibriert auf Galaxsignaturen." Grip lattice Sigma, calibrated to Galaxy signatures.

Far above, in an unremarkable alley three blocks from the central station, a flash of gold signaled an incoming teleport squad—Galax Rangers and Galaxkiba himself, using newly-rebuilt corridors to slip a strike team back into the "liberated" district and take out Death Regime command posts.

They dropped through the air like needles, cloaked in shadow, landing in an ankle-deep puddle.

Galaxkiba straightened, eyes narrowing behind his visor. 「入口、静かすぎるな。」 Too quiet for an entrance.

He gestured, sending two Rangers ahead to clear the alley mouth.

Their first step hit one of Deathgripress's invisible rings.

From her vantage point in the tunnel below, Deathgripress felt the faint tug—a new weight on her lattice, a new name in the net.

"Da seid ihr ja," she said softly. There you are.

Up in the alley, the lead Ranger froze mid-stride. The second slammed into his back, also snagging, both forced into a stiff, half-crouched posture. Before they could even swear, the puddle erupted into dark loops that snapped around their ankles.

"罠だ—!" It's a trap—!

Galaxkiba saw the shimmer at their feet and launched himself sideways, time-skip kicking in, trying to blink to a rooftop.

Deathgripress closed her fist.

The entire alley's standing water surged upward like a reversed waterfall, then dropped straight down. It carried the two trapped Rangers with it, dragging them waist-deep through solid stone as if the world had momentarily forgotten where the floor was. Gold shields flared, cracking; their health rings plunged into orange, then to red.

Recall grabbed them and wrenched them out of the city in twin streaks of light.

Galaxkiba almost made the roof.

At the last instant, his boot brushed a thin thread of Deathgripress's magic clinging to the brickwork. A loop snapped shut.

He hit the parapet, rolled, came up halfway through drawing his blade—and realized his lower leg would not move.

「っ...！」 He hissed through his teeth. Below the knee, his foot was anchored to something he could not see.

Zombie rifle-fire raked the alley as Deathsoldiers poured in from side streets, answering Deathgripress's ping. Bullets ricocheted off the wall near his head; one clipped his shoulder, shaving his ring.

"Du bist schnell," Deathgripress murmured, feeling his aura tug against her lattice. You are fast. "Aber nicht schneller als eine gute Vorbereitung." But not faster than good preparation.

She twisted her hand.

The rooftop stone turned briefly into sludge around his stuck foot, then back to solid. His ankle sank; ligaments screamed.

That was the moment Deathendye's pre-timed barrage hit the adjacent block, shockwaves hammering the building. The combined strain knocked Galaxkiba's ring into raw red.

Above, he snarled, kicked free by sheer force of will, and managed one last blink-jump to a safer roof—just in time for recall to seize him and drag him away.

The insertion failed. The teleport corridor Galaxkiba had used lit up on Galaxwis's board, flagged "compromised by Deathgripress."

Down in the tunnel, Deathgripress listened to the fading echoes of the Ranger's retreat and nodded to herself.

"Eins," she counted quietly. One.

There would be more.

She walked on, feeding more of her magic into the underground grid, turning Galaxenwarpe's veins and arteries into a permanent, unseen trap.

Deathh's next mission lay not in a fresh assault, but in what Deathwing called, with a touch of dry irony, "Seelsorge."

Pastoral care.

After the barricade fell, the avenue Deathh had cleared became a main artery for Death Regime occupation forces. Deathtanks rumbled through in steady lines, banners flapping, zombie patrols sweeping side streets. The captured rail station became an anchoring beacon—a constant purple flame on Deathwing's map, summoning new waves of troops for the inland push.

But not every pocket of resistance died cleanly.

In an underground parking structure beneath a collapsed office tower two blocks off the main route, a cluster of Galaxpolice and Galax Guards had sealed themselves in with civilian evacuees. The main exits were blocked by rubble; the side ramps were under constant sniper fire from Deathsoldiers on the street. The defenders rationed energy, food, and courage, waiting for a rescue that might not come.

Deathenpuff's chem-clouds could not reach them. Deathendye's shells would collapse the whole structure if he tried to "solve" the problem at range.

So Deathwing sent Deathh.

He entered through a service stairwell, steps echoing faintly, aura dimmed to avoid triggering emergency wards too early. Zombies followed, but at a respectful distance, rifles lowered.

At the bottom, a Galax Guard lieutenant sat against a concrete pillar, cradling a bleeding shoulder, pistol aimed shakily at the stairwell.

When Deathh's silhouette filled the doorway, she fired instinctively.

The bullet entered his veil, slowed, and sank.

He paused on the last step.

"You knew we would come," he said quietly in accented Japanese, acknowledging her discipline. 「それでも、ここに残った。」 And still, you stayed here.

"もちろんだ..." Of course... she managed, chest heaving. "市民...置いて行けないから..." We can't leave the civilians...

Behind her, evacuees—families, wounded, confused—huddled between parked vehicles. A few clutched Galaxy flags or faded shrine charms.

Deathh's gaze moved over them, expression unreadable.

"Weg da," he murmured to the zombies behind him. Stand back.

They obeyed.

He walked forward alone, hands open, empty.

The lieutenant emptied the rest of her magazine into his chest out of sheer refusal to surrender. By the fifth shot, her hand shook too badly to aim; by the last, her pistol only clicked.

The bullets left small bruises that faded even as she watched.

"Schlaf," he said gently. Sleep.

His halo pulsed—a soft, sickly gold-violet.

The lieutenant's health ring, already hanging in low orange, shivered and dropped straight into red. Recall flared, yanking her away before she could slide to the floor. Two Galax Guards behind her, both wounded, vanished the same way, their emergency bands triggering under the conceptual weight of his command.

Civilians, who had no rings, did not vanish.

They slumped where they sat, heads lolling, eyes closing under a pressure they could not resist. It was not death, not immediately; it was a forced coma, a suspension of will.

Deathh walked between them like a priest administering last rites, pressing one glowing hand briefly to each forehead. For those too injured to survive the process, their breathing simply stopped. For the rest, their bodies settled into an eerie, deep stillness.

"Wir nehmen euch mit," he promised softly. We will take you with us.

He raised his voice just enough for the zombies behind him to hear.

"Kein Schuss. Kein Gebiss." No shots. No bites.

They shuddered, disappointed but obedient.

When they carried the sleeping civilians up to the street, they were laid out under growing towers of skull-banners, faces peaceful. Some would wake, only to find themselves in a city where the flags had changed color. Others would not wake at all.

Information in Galaxwis's log would later mark the entire parking structure as "lost with unknown civilian status."

On Deathwing's map, a small gray knot turned decisively violet.

Deathh moved on to the next "flock."

Later, Deathwing paired them.

"Galaxencloude," came the order. "Südviertel." South district. "Griff und Hirte zusammen." Grip and Shepherd together.

Deathgripress met Deathh at an intersection where the rain had turned the asphalt into a mirror. Above them, Deathenstorm's clouds rippled; at street level, Deathenstream's floodwater receded just enough to leave glistening pools—perfect conduits for her magic, perfect mirrors for his aura.

"Kommandant will's sauber," Deathgripress remarked, eyes flicking along the ruined street. Commander wants this clean. "Keine Galax-Taschen mehr hier."

"Sauber ist relativ," Deathh replied, looking at the half-fallen Galaxencloude shrine ahead, its golden roof cracked, its courtyard still held by a skeleton crew of Galax Soldiers and Rangers. Clean is relative.

Galaxy had dug in hard here. The shrine's ward-stones still flickered with light; defensive sigils traced around the perimeter told anyone who could read them that a high-ranking elite had set these protections, even if they were gone now.

"Gründe sie," Deathh said, nodding toward the alleys. Ground them.

"Und du?" she asked.

"Zähle sie," he answered. Count them.

She smirked.

"Wie immer."

Deathgripress went first.

Her bands spread through the puddles and sewers like ink veins, lattices blooming under manholes, between broken tiles, across the slick shrine steps. This time, she tuned them to activate not when someone stepped, but when someone tried to run.

Inside the shrine courtyard, a Galax squad leader watched his health ring and his dwindling ammo and made the only call he thought would save his people.

"撤退準備！" Prepare to withdraw! "裏口から！南側の小路だ！" Through the back gate, south alley!

The first three Soldiers who turned and bolted toward the side exit made it three steps before the ground grabbed them. Ankles locked. Knees froze. One pitched forward, catching himself with both hands and finding his palms stuck fast to a puddle that felt like tar.

"Commander—! We're—"

Bands snapped around their waists and jerked.

They fell into the streetwater like stones into a lake, dragged sideways and down as if someone had opened a drain beneath reality. Health rings plummeted. Recall caught a few; the rest did not have enough left.

At the same moment, Deathh stepped out into the open.

He raised both hands, halo flaring.

"Genug gelaufen," he said, voice carrying over the rain. Enough running.

The aura that pulsed out from him did not freeze the remaining defenders—it simply made their bodies remember every wound, every hour of sleeplessness, every ounce of fear. Their shoulders sagged. Rifles dipped. A few leaned against pillars, suddenly too tired to stand.

"壊れてない奴は、伏せろ！" Those who aren't broken, get down! their squad leader shouted hoarsely.

They did—more out of habit than hope.

Deathh closed his eyes.

Around the courtyard, fallen Galax bodies he had already "touched" in previous engagements shivered, then rose. They did not look like their former selves anymore—not fully—but their armor still bore the orange-gold trim of the Galaxy Regime. Eyes now glowed the same candle-death hue as his.

"Aufstehen, meine Kinder," Deathh whispered. Get up, my children.

The reanimated Galax corps joined the assault on their former shrine, moving with unsettling coordination, forcing their still-living counterparts to face not only the Deathsoldiers outside, but echoes of their own.

Deathgripress's lattice made sure no one got far.

Within minutes, screams faded to choked silence. Recall flares shot up like a brief, desperate meteor shower—and then stopped, meaning the rings that hadn't already snapped had finally run dry.

Deathh walked through the courtyard, boots splashing in water that was more gray than red. He knelt briefly by a shattered ward-stone, fingers brushing its cracked surface.

"Schöner Ort," he murmured. Nice place.

He stood and nodded once to Deathgripress.

"Flagge," he said. Flag.

She flicked two fingers. A Deathzealot rushed forward from the street, jamming a skull-standard into the shrine's central plinth.

When the flag's beacon flared, Deathenstream's awareness slid along the newly-stable water grid, marking this district safe for further undead flows. Deathenpuff's clouds shifted, opening a clear eye directly above the captured shrine—an eerie "blessing" from the chem-tainted heavens.

Galaxencloude's south district turned violet on Deathwing's chart.

Later, as the night stretched into a grim dawn, Deathh found himself in a partially collapsed Galaxencloude hospital, standing in a ward where wounded Galaxy soldiers lay in makeshift cots. Deathgripress was not far, weaving smaller, tighter lattices around the building's foundations to prevent late reinforcements from blinking in.

A wounded Galax Marine sergeant, bandaged head and arm in a sling, glared up at him.

「これが...お前らの"救い"か。」 So this is your "salvation," huh.

Deathh looked down at him.

"Nein," he said simply. No.

He placed a hand over the sergeant's chest.

"This ist nur... Pause." This is just... a pause.

The Marine's health ring, already barely in yellow, wavered, then dropped into safe red. Recall flared, whisking him away from the occupied hospital. For Galaxwis, it would be another unexpected evacuation. For Deathh, it was one less voice he had to hear choking in the rubble later.

Deathgripress watched from the doorway, expression unreadable.

"Du lässt ihn gehen?" You let him go?

Deathh shrugged one shoulder, robe whispering.

"Was nützt mir ein gebrochener Geist, der nicht mehr kämpfen kann?" What use to me is a broken spirit that can no longer fight. "Sie sind nützlicher, wenn sie zurückkommen... und wieder fallen." They are more useful when they come back... and fall again.

Deathgripress laughed once, low and humorless.

"Grausamer als manche Kommandanten," she said. Crueler than some commanders.

"Nur... konsequenter," he replied. Only... more consistent.

They moved on together, deeper into the captured wards, one spreading invisible bonds through the bones of the city, the other weighing who would sleep, who would rise, and who would be allowed to leave so that the war could devour them properly later.

By the time they were done, Galaxenwarpe and Galaxencloude both showed solid violet blocks on Deathwing's floating map, beacon-sigils pulsing from shrines, stations, and hospitals alike.

In Galaxwis's logs, new names appeared in red: Deathgripress – "gravitic grave-lattice elite; urban teleport interdiction specialist." Deathh – "conceptual exhaustion aura; high-threat battlefield chaplain of the dead."

Under each, a growing list of engagements.

Under each, a note that felt less like data and more like a warning:

Where they go, ground holds. Where they pass, gold does not come back easily.

Deathgripress felt the turning of the tide before anyone said it out loud.

Her grave-lattice, spun through Galaxenwarpe's veins and Galaxencloude's foundations, hummed with new pressure—not the hesitant gold of scattered resistance squads, but dense, layered signatures. Supreme Commander weight. Multiple elites, moving in stacked formations.

"Verstärkung," she muttered, eyes narrowing as new auras punched through the fog. Reinforcements.

Above her, the sky changed color.

Golden streaks cut down through the lingering chem-clouds—Galaxharp riding on a ribbon of sound, Galaxrire's rifle already glowing with overcharged constellations, Galaxyraijin's thunder drums orbiting him like small moons. Elsewhere, Galaxysuzuhime and Galaxmurasaki descended on shimmering sigils, robes snapping, the air around them thick with floral time-wards.

"They're finally taking this district seriously," Deathgripress said, half to herself.

On the next block, one of her trap-rings flared as a squad of Galax Soldiers tried to push forward. Before she could tighten it, a sharp chord split the air; Galaxharp's music crashed through her lattice, rewriting the resonance. The ring shattered like glass under a soprano note. Freed Galaxy infantry surged over the broken sigils.

"Zeit zu gehen," Deathgripress decided. Time to go.

She did not simply run.

Every step of her withdrawal rewrote the field—unhooking critical anchors so her lattice would not implode on her own forces, leaving behind only scattered snares to slow pursuit. She reverse-bled her magic out of key junctions, turning hard choke points into mere inconveniences, just enough to keep Galax troops honest without tying down Death Regime retreats.

At the old tram exchange, a shell of compressed starlight detonated barely a meter from her, golden fragments carving furrows into her armor. Her health ring plunged into orange.

Deathrire's voice crackled over the net, taut with amusement. "Fast genug, Gräfin?" Fast enough, Countess?

Deathgripress bared her teeth in a grin he could not see.

"Reicht, um dich wiederzusehen," she shot back. Enough to see you again.

She dropped the last segment of her grid into free-fall—turning the flooded underpass behind her into a collapsing prison of stone and water that swallowed a pursuing Galax tank column whole, buying the retreat one more precious minute. Then she stepped sideways into a prepared recall circle and let the violet light take her, sensation smearing into the unfelt cold of the command nexus.

Deathh's exit was quieter, but no less deliberate.

In the captured hospital district, his work was almost done. Most of the living had been sorted—those allowed recall, those granted sleep, those taken by the gentlest version of his killing touch. The rest, the newly-risen "flock," were already forming defensive lines, eyes glowing with hushed devotion and necrotic fire.

Then the first golden meteor hit.

Galaxveronica's barrier sigils bloomed in mid-air like translucent lotus petals, catching an incoming chem-barrage and turning it into harmless light. Galaxytsukifenghuang streaked past overhead, wings a burning arc as she cut a channel of pure fire through a column of Deathsoldiers trying to reinforce the square. On a nearby rooftop, Galaxyqinglong carved jade-green spirals through the smog, severing corruption veins that fed the occupation wards.

"Gelehrte sind zurück," Deathh murmured. The scholars are back.

A squad of Galax Guards kicked in the remaining doors of the hospital lobby, shields up, ready to die hard for the reclaimed wards.

They stopped dead when they saw him standing in the middle of the waiting room—the tall, gray-lavender figure in a fraying robe, halo burning low, hands empty.

For a heartbeat, nobody moved.

Deathh tilted his head slightly, as if listening to something only he could hear: the distant rumble of Galaxadale's armor, the crack of Galaxrire's shots, the rising chant of Galaxyraijin's thunder.

"Die Stunde ist um," he said softly. The hour is up.

He did not try to break them.

He simply raised his hand and let his aura roll out one last time, not as a crushing command, but as a weight lifted. The exhaustion he had wrapped around this ward loosened. For the still-sleeping civilians, the spell shifted from binding to shelter; for his reanimated flock, it became a final benediction.

"Rückzug," he spoke into the Absolute band. Retreat.

The zombies around him stiffened, then turned as one and began to fall back, firing in disciplined bursts rather than charging. A few tried to linger, snarling defiance; he brushed their halos, and they crumbled into dust rather than be captured.

A Galax Guard sergeant stepped forward, rifle trained squarely on his chest.

「もう終わりか。」 Is it over already.

Deathh regarded him for a long moment.

"Für diesen Ort," he answered. For this place. "Nicht für euch." Not for you.

Golden targeting sigils began to crawl up the walls—Galaxwis's data-driven artillery cues marking the building as safely recapturable. That was Deathh's cue. He stepped backward into the shadow of a half-collapsed doorway and let it swallow him, recall tugging him out of the hospital just as the first Galaxy cleansing barrage hit the outer perimeter.

When the smoke cleared, the wards were gold again, the skull-flags gone. Only a lingering chill in the corners hinted that, for a time, death itself had walked the halls and taken notes.

From a high vantage in Death Regime space, Deathh watched the updated map—two hard-won violet blocks blinking back to contested, then to gold—and folded his hands inside his sleeves.

"Chaos genug," he decided without bitterness. Chaos enough.

There would be other cities.

The counteroffensives did not arrive as a single grand charge.

They came as a chain of lessons.

Galaxbeam led the first, floating high above the recovering districts in his coat of muted gold, chalk in one hand, sword at his hip. Kinchōhakkei, Suzutamashi's battered neighbor states, and the contested strips of Gallaxgonbei all hovered in front of him as layered projections—streets, rivers, shrine-lines, Death Regime beacons pulsing like infected nodes.

"Midterm exam," he said dryly over the theater-wide channel, switching to Japanese. 「範囲は、ここから海まで。」 The test covers everything from here to the sea.

Supreme Commanders answered one by one.

「了解。」 Understood, came Galaxadye, already rearranging carrier arcs above Galaxen-Shirayue.

「了解。」 Understood, from Galaxadale, armor treads grinding into newly drawn fire lanes.

「了解。」 from Galaxastream, hands already shaping river currents into pincer movements.

「了解。」 from Galaxastride, mapping teleport corridors like sutures along the wounds in the front.

「了解。」 from Galaxastorm, rolling storm-fronts into hammer-blow formations.

「了解。」 from Galaxapuff, tightening air patrols over every remaining violet coastal enclave.

Elites filled in the gaps—Galaxseiryu surging into low-altitude dogfights over captured industrial belts, Galaxmizuki and Galaxysuzuhime locking down evac routes with time-dilated wards, Galaxmurasaki and Galaxyqionglian weaving barrier gardens through key choke points.

The offensive unfolded city by city.

In Galaxenwarpe, where Deathgripress's lattices had once ruled the underground, Galaxastride and Galaxkiba turned her own logic against her. Teleport corridors were anchored not in clean plazas, but in the messy, partially cleared zones where her magic had weakened its grip. Strike squads blinked in and out between collapsed tram cars and flooded basements, dismantling residual traps one by one. When a dormant ring tried to snap closed on a retreating Galax platoon, Galaxseiryu dropped from the sky, dragon-green aura flaring, and punched a hole straight through the spell with a spiral of cutting wind.

"遅かったな," one Ranger panted gratefully. You were late, you know.

「ドラマチックな登場って、大事だから。」 Dramatic entrances are important, he replied, grinning.

By nightfall, Galaxenwarpe's shrine towers blazed gold again, their beacons overwriting the Death Regime signals that had drawn reinforcements before.

In Galaxencloude, where Deathh had turned a hospital ward into a quiet nightmare, Galaxveronica and Galaxharp led the reclamation. Shields layered like overlapping petals, absorbing lingering necrotic stains, while sound-bursts shattered subtle, sleep-sickness charms hiding in the walls.

Outside, Galax Soldiers and Galax Guards advanced in disciplined lines, their deaths no longer feeding Deathh's flock but triggering clean recall beams that whisked them back to safe med-loops.

"リズム、整った?" Is the rhythm set? Galaxharp asked over local comms.

"はい," Galaxveronica replied. Yes. "この街は、もう一回『やり直し』できる。" This city can redo the test one more time.

The Death banners fell there too, their beacons fizzling out as Galaxy codes overwrote them.

Along the rivers and rails, Galaxastream and Galaxadale orchestrated a slow strangulation.

Where Death Regime columns tried to pivot inland, river currents bucked, bridges rewrote their own lengths, and embankments turned into slick slopes guiding undead back toward low ground. Where deathtanks attempted to counter, Galaxadale's artillery clipped their flanks, not annihilating them outright but shearing off their options, forcing them to choose between bad terrain and worse lines of fire.

In the air, Galaxapuff kept a steel-delicate balance—never overextending, never giving Deathenpuff a stable chem-cloud platform long enough to rebuild deep inland cover. Every time a violet plume tried to form over a reclaimed city, bomber wings punched a hole through it and seeded gold in its place.

"海岸線まで後退させる," she said, voice calm but unyielding. Push them back to the coastline.

Deathwing felt the shift like a slow pressure against his ribs.

On his floating ridge above the front, staff planted in the dirt, he watched his hard-won violet wedges shrink, their inner edges eaten away by coordinated counterattacks. Every time Deathgripress tried to re-establish a firm grip on an urban network, Galaxastride scrubbed the anchor points. Every time Deathh stabilized a pocket of occupation, Galaxbeam's equations redirected Absolute attention there, forcing him to choose between preserving troops and preserving the "sermons" he had preached.

Deathendye's casualty charts lengthened. Deathenpuff's chem-cloud coverage maps thinned. Deathenstorm's storm-bands found themselves redirected into purely defensive bulwarks. Deathenstream reported that most favorable river geometries now led, inconveniently, straight back to the sea.

"Sie drängen uns in eine Ecke," Deathendye noted without emotion. They are pushing us into a corner.

"Eher... an den Rand," Deathwing corrected, gaze sliding toward the glittering line of distant water. More... to the edge.

He watched one more coastal city fall out of his grasp—its shrine beacon flipping from violet to gold as Galaxyraijin's lightning scoured the last Deathplague vats from the docks—and weighed his options.

To stand and escalate here, to force a true Absolute-level break, would mean turning half of Galaxenchi's coastline into a dead zone. It would also mean giving Galaxbeam exactly the classroom he wanted: a battlefield emptied of distractions, full focus, one problem set, one opponent.

Deathwing's fingers tightened briefly on his staff.

Then he exhaled.

"Rückzugslinien zur Küste verlagern," he ordered. Shift all retreat lines to the coast. "Stützpunkte nur dort halten, wo die Flotte sie direkt decken kann." Hold strongpoints only where the fleet can cover them directly.

There was no wail of protest over the Absolute band. His Supreme Commanders understood the calculus as well as he did. Deathenpuff began pulling her barges closer to shore. Deathenstream thickened fog over coastal evacuation corridors. Deathgripress and Deathh, newly recalled, redeployed their talents to shaping interim rearguards rather than fresh inland pushes.

From the Galaxy perspective, the change felt like a string snapping.

Resistance inland became scattered, brittle, more concerned with delaying pursuers than conquering new districts. Every city reclaimed added momentum to the golden wave. Maps aboard Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary and the Kinchōhakkei command centers showed the same evolving pattern: violet shrinking into a thin, hard band pinned between land and sea, studded with fortified blisters where Deathwing chose to keep his teeth in the shore.

In Galaxwis's logs, new entries stacked up in neat columns:

Galaxenwarpe: status changed to GOLD – major Death beacons neutralized.
Galaxencloude: status changed to GOLD – hospital and shrine sectors reclaimed.
River belts (Suzukaze axis): DEATH presence reduced to COASTAL STRIP.
Overall verdict: Death Regime forces cornered to coastline, interior states remain under Galaxy administration.

On the highest layer of the map, Galaxbeam drew a simple line with his chalk—one golden arc following the contour of the shore.

"ここまでで、一旦区切る。" We draw the line here, for now, he said.

Out over the dark water, Deathwing stood on the prow of a bone-armored capital ship, cloak dragging a blizzard of ash behind him. The land behind his fleet glowed largely gold again, bruised but not broken.

He tapped his staff once against the deck.

"Erstes Semester," he murmured. First term.

His sockets flared with cold light as he turned his gaze further along the coast, toward states and cities still untouched by this round of grading.

"Der Lehrplan ist noch lang." The syllabus is still long.

On land, Galaxy banners snapped in salt wind above reclaimed towers. Soldiers on both sides rearmed, re-sorted, and wrote their own quiet notes on what had been won and what had merely been postponed.

The war, pressed back to the water's edge, did not end.

It simply moved its starting line.

Galaxbeam's last command still hung in the Absolute band when the next wave hit.

The coastal front, already cracked and smoking, flared again as Deathwing threw fresh reserves straight into the gap between sea and suburbs. The violet crescent that clung to the coastline thickened, pushing inland like a bruise.

Galaxy elites rotated out—the ones with health rings shaved to slivers and mana halos guttering—and new lights dropped in to take their place.

Galaxyraijin came first, drums orbiting him like miniature moons, each surface etched with star-script and thunder kanji. Lightning coiled down his arms in bright, impatient braids.

Facing him over a stretch of shattered freight yard stood Deathhex, human-zombie male, his body strapped in layers of bone charms and hex-totems, eye sockets glowing with cursed equations.

"雷鼓か," Deathhex rasped, voice doubled by the spirits in his charms. Thunder drums, huh. "Kinder-Spielzeug."

Galaxyraijin grinned, hair whipped by a wind that answered only to him.

「じゃあ、大人の雷、見せてあげる。」 Then I will show you adult lightning.

He snapped both sticks down.

The drums boomed—not once, but in a stuttering rhythm that folded over itself. Bolts cascaded out in polyrhythms, some streaking through the visible sky, others sliding sideways through warped fractions of a second. Deathhex hurled counter-hexes, black sigils flaring like ink stains, but every time a curse tried to bite into a bolt, time bent and the lightning arrived a heartbeat earlier than the hex had expected.

"You're hitting my mistakes," Deathhex snarled, feeling his wards crack.

「授業中にミスしたら、減点でしょ。」 Make a mistake during class, you lose points, Galaxyraijin shot back.

The last stroke landed like a cymbal crash. Deathhex's health ring plunged into red, hex-charms exploding into dead dust. Recall glyphs seized him by ankles and wrists, yanking him backward in a stream of violet particles. He vanished mid-curse, leaving the freight yard charred but golden.

Further inland, the fight spilled across a canal district where Galaxyqinglong, human male, descended in a coil of jade-green starlight. His aura shaped itself into a luminous dragon that swam through the air, water and constellation fused.

Waiting for him on a cracked bridge was Deathseer, human-zombie male, blindfolded eyes covered in stitched leather, fingers twitching with psychic threads that connected to a half-dozen zombies staggering behind him.

"I have already seen your future," Deathseer intoned in German-accented English. "You drown."

Galaxyqinglong's reply was quiet, Cantonese soft and almost kind.

"未改功課之前，未算定局。" Before the homework is corrected, nothing is decided.

Deathseer hurled a wave of mental pressure at him, trying to jam timing and motor nerves at once. For a moment, the dragon's coil stuttered.

Galaxyqinglong rode the stutter.

He let the psychic shove tip him off his original course, then rotated that lost fraction of a second into a spiral, grabbing the canal's water and flinging it upward with him. A vertical river erupted, wrapping Deathseer's zombies in a spinning column. The dragon plunged through it, fangs first. Lightning crackled inside the water, turning the canal into a boiling helix.

Deathseer's health ring dropped into orange as his threads snapped one by one. He staggered, clutching his head, trying to anchor his visions to something solid.

Galaxyqinglong exhaled, and the water dragon's tail flicked him gently—but firmly—into recall threshold. He vanished in a spray of psychic static.

On another axis—streets already once-fought over in Suzutamashi, now contested again—Galaxmurasaki darted through ruined arcades, violet hair streaming behind her, gold-violet sigils fluttering off her sleeves. Each flick of her fingers laid down ribbons of slowed time: here, a bubble where bullets took the scenic route; there, a sheet where explosions stretched into quiet flower-bursts.

Charging her was Deathvalkyria, human-zombie female, armor a brutal mix of plate and bone, wings of spiked metal jutting from her back. A spear that looked grown from a graveyard spun in one hand, leaving arcs of dark-gray purple light wherever it moved.

"Schöne Farben," Deathvalkyria called, amused. Pretty colors. "Bluten die auch so schön?"

Galaxmurasaki pivoted midair, skirts flaring with their own gravity.

「血は、今日の授業範囲外。」 Blood is outside today's lesson plan.

Deathvalkyria lunged, spear thrust laced with a curse that tried to rot whatever it pierced. Galaxmurasaki twisted, not away from the spear, but away from the moment it occupied. The weapon passed through where she had been one frame earlier; her palm touched the shaft in the one frame Deathvalkyria momentarily loosened her grip.

She planted a glowing rune there.

The next time Deathvalkyria swung, the rune detonated in reverse, rewinding momentum. Her own swing snapped backward, torque wrenching her shoulder. Bone-plates cracked; her health ring dipped hard. A follow-up volley from Galaxy infantry, called in on Murasaki's mark, drove the Death elite into red.

"Rückzug," Deathvalkyria hissed through her teeth as recall light grabbed her. Retreat. "Noch ein Mal, Mädchen." Next time, girl.

Galaxmurasaki hung above the street, chest heaving, mana halo visibly thinner.

「はいはい。またテストで会おう。」 Yes, yes. We will meet again in the exam.

Not every elite duel went Galaxy's way.

In a warehouse district near a half-evacuated suburb, Galaxkiba led his shinobi unit in a blur of orange-black. His ninja arts turned alleys into traps: walls briefly intangible, shadows crystallized into blades, kunai skipping from second to second.

Opposite him, Deathkrieg, human-zombie male, moved like a tank on two legs, greatsword dragging sparks from the ground. His aura was pressure and artillery and the relentless advance of war.

"Come on then, kleiner Ninja," Deathkrieg growled, English rough, German vowels heavy. "Let's see if you cut through armor."

Galaxkiba vanished, stepping through a self-made seam in time, reappearing behind Deathkrieg with a palm strike full of compressed starlight.

The blow landed—but Deathkrieg's health ring barely twitched from green into high yellow. He planted a foot, letting the hit roll through him, then brought the greatsword around in an arc so wide it seemed to bend the street. Gravity warped. Debris and Galaxkiba together were hauled into the path.

Kiba sliced his own time thread, escaping with a teleport-flash—but not clean. The edge of the blow clipped him in the moment between disappearance and reappearance. Pain ripped through his ribs; his health ring plunged into red.

He landed on one knee behind Galaxy lines, vision swimming.

「......撤退だ。」 ...I'm pulling back.

Recall glyphs caught him before Deathkrieg could follow. The Death Supreme's elite guard roared forward, zombies and Deathsoldiers surging in his wake.

On a high rooftop, Galaxyakikaze, human female, watched that push with narrowed eyes. Wind tangled around her ankles, ready to spring.

"Think you're the only one who can bulldoze a street, ja?" came another voice over open comms.

Across from her, clinging to the side of a ruined tower like an insect, Deathraxxas, human-zombie male, flexed chain-blades that dripped necrotic oil, each link twitching like a hungry vertebra.

Galaxyakikaze smiled thinly.

「うるさい風から、静かな嵐まで。全部、私の担当。」 From noisy winds to quiet storms—they are all my department.

She jumped.

Air solidified under her feet, each step a platform of compressed pressure. She ran straight into Deathraxxas' field, arms carving arcs. Blades of vacuum sliced his chain-whips apart in mid-swing; wind bullets slammed into joints in his armor with surgical precision.

Deathraxxas howled, trying to use psychic body-manipulation to numb his own pain and force his limbs to keep moving. For a moment he managed it—chains regrowing in jerks, muscles spasming.

Then Galaxyakikaze reversed the pressure.

Every gust she had created switched direction at once, turning his own body-manipulation against him. Joints hyperextended; half-regrown chains tangled and snapped. His health ring plunged toward red, and his mana halo blew out entirely, all reserves spent just to stay upright.

"Genug," he hissed as recall took him. Enough.

Galaxyakikaze landed in a crouch, breathing hard, mana halo flickering dangerously low.

「次は、誰。」 Next.

Lightning, water, wind, and time carved signatures across the sky. Below them, fire and plague and psychic hooks answered.

In a ruined commercial belt near the coastal road, Galaxmizuki, human female, wove water and moonlight through broken glass. Illusion pools shimmered in every pothole, reflecting wrong angles, wrong numbers of enemies, wrong distances. Deathnurse, human-zombie female, moved through it with a tray of shining surgical tools and floating syringes, each filled with something unpleasant.

"身体の仕組みは、全部知ってるのよ," Deathnurse cooed in Japanese, voice sweet as poison. I know every structure of the body. "どこを刺せば一番きれいに壊れるかもね。" I also know where to stab to break you beautifully.

Galaxmizuki smiled without humor.

「じゃあ、その『教科書』ごと、流してあげる。」 Then I will wash that whole "textbook" away.

Water illusions snapped into reality, crashing over Deathnurse in overlapping waves. Each one carried a different vibration: one scrambled motor nerves, one dulled pain, one amplified every heartbeat into a thunderclap inside the skull. Deathnurse tried to counter with precise injections of body manipulation, but the pulses tangled her own control. Her hands shook; needles missed. Her health ring bled downward to a sliver.

She tried to cut her way out with a scalpel of sharpened bone.

Galaxmizuki froze just the reflection of that scalpel in a puddle, then shattered the water's surface. The weapon in Deathnurse's hand disintegrated into harmless droplets. The recoil finally tipped her into recall; violet light whisked her off the street.

Galaxmizuki sagged against a half-melted pillar, mana halo dim but still intact.

「これで、ここは守れた。」 This block is safe—for now.

All of this unfolded around the main storm: Galaxbeam vs Deathwing, and Supreme Commander lines buckling against one another.

Above the tangled fronts, the Absolutes clashed like overlapping theorems.

Galaxbeam descended with dual one-handed swords, both golden-yellow, their edges scribbled with living equations. Deathwing met him with his giant scythe, the blade a slab of dark-gray purple that mirrored the skull-and-crossbones of his banners, every swing leaving afterimages of ribcages and spinal cords.

They did not bother with words at first.

Galaxbeam carved arcs of pure space, lines where the universe briefly agreed to different rules. Deathwing's scythe hacked through them, spilling plumes of necrotic fog shaped like anatomical diagrams. When fog tried to infect Galaxbeam's lungs, time bent around his ribs, bypassing the moment the poison needed. When Galaxbeam's blades cut through Deathwing's cloak, they edited out the concept of "rot" for a heartbeat, forcing the Absolute of death to feel something like a clean wound.

"You bleed syllabus pages where others bleed," Deathwing said eventually, switching to smooth, bitter English. "Interessant."

Galaxbeam adjusted his glasses with the back of his wrist, swords still humming.

"Better than bleeding your field notes all over my students," he answered.

They swung.

The scythe came down in a vertical arc that should have split a city. Galaxbeam stepped sideways, into a line of hand-drawn math that existed only because he had written it a second earlier. The blade passed through a universe where he wasn't. His counter slash hit Deathwing's staff-hand, forcing the necromancer to shift his grip. Purple sparks flew; Deathwing's health ring dropped, but only modestly.

Deathwing responded with a wave of death-mana harvested from a thousand zombies dying below. It roared up like a tidal bore, full of screaming faces. Galaxbeam raised both swords and pushed time backward for that wave alone, forcing it to re-live its own formation process in reverse. The faces screamed themselves back into silence. Deathwing's mana halo flickered.

But each maneuver cost. Invisible counters ticked down over their heads, draining mana as surely as health.

By the fifth exchange, their duel had scorched the sky and left the fronts below a chaos of misaligned timelines and false shadows. Galaxbeam's health ring hovered in the low 70s but his mana halo burned thin, down to a hard 20. Deathwing's armor smoked, health in the high 70s, mana still a touch richer.

They broke apart by unspoken agreement, weapons still raised but spells held.

"Genug für diese Runde," Deathwing said finally. Enough for this round.

Galaxbeam's reply was dry.

「中間試験の前に、体力は残しておかないとね。」 We should save our stamina for the midterm.

Below them, Supreme Commanders carried the fate of the line.

Galaxadye's carrier grid out-calculated Deathendye's coastal artillery, knocking the death-logistician's health down into orange and burning his mana pool nearly dry. Deathendye faded from the front under recall, frustrated but alive.

Galaxadale hammered Deathendale on a landward flank, turning deathtanks into smoking craters until even the grave-armored juggernaut had to pull his wedge back with twenty percent health and zero mana, cloak and pride both singed.

But on the river axis, Deathenstream found a crack in Galaxastream's timing, sent a jagged, bone-laced floodwave straight through a half-completed spiral. Galaxy levees exploded. Galaxastream took the hit across his whole body; his health ring crashed into the twenties. Recall seized him and dragged him off the field gasping, coat dripping contaminated water.

In the high air currents, Deathenstorm pressed Galaxastorm into a stalemate that looked like a draw but wasn't: both health rings hovered in the 40s, but Galaxastorm's mana dropped down to a desperate flicker, while Deathenstorm held just enough in reserve to keep hurling nails of sleet where it hurt.

Elites on both sides bled mana and health into the dirt. Some—Galaxyraijin, Galaxyqinglong, Galaxmizuki, Galaxyakikaze—clearly won their lanes. Others—Galaxkiba, Galaxmurasaki on this rotation—were forced to blink out under recall, leaving zombies and Deathsoldiers roaring temporarily unchecked through their sectors until someone else could plug the gap.

By the time the last spells fizzled and the last artillery batteries cycled empty, both sides had paid.

The difference lay in where they stood when the smoke thinned.

Along one stretch of the front, Zombie hordes and Deathsoldiers still crashed helplessly against Galaxy lines, never making it past outer industrial belts. But along another—the axis where Galaxastream had fallen back and Galaxastorm's mana ran dry—Deathenstream and Deathenstorm combined their exhaustion into one last coordinated shove.

Violet wedges pushed inland, not far, but far enough that Death Regime ground banners now fluttered uncomfortably close to commuter ring roads and half-evacuated suburbs. Not in the cities yet—but within artillery range of their edges.

From his high vantage, Deathwing looked down at the updated map and curled his bony fingers into a slow, satisfied fist.

"Ein Ring näher," he murmured. One ring closer.

Galaxbeam, breathing hard, watched the same map from a Galaxy command stratum. Golden sectors still dominated, but here and there new purple teeth had bitten into the golden plate.

He shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them again, voice steady over the band.

「まだ終わってない。郊外で止める。ここが、次の授業範囲だ。」 This is not over. We stop them at the suburbs. That is the next lesson's scope.

The war did not end that day.

But the coastline was no longer the only Death line.

It had crawled, just a little, toward the hearts of the states.

Deathwing did not let the map cool.

The new purple wedges he had carved near the suburban ring of Kinchōhakkei pulsed like fresh bruises. He stood on a cliff of fused bone that had once been a tourist overlook above the coast, staff planted in the rock, cloak dragging a steady fall of ash behind him.

"Wir verschwenden den Druck nicht," he said, voice carrying over the crashing waves. We do not waste pressure. "Mehr Leichen. Mehr Stahl. Mehr Himmel."

Portals flared over the sea.

From the violet wounds, the largest horde yet spilled out—zombies tumbling like debris from a broken dam, Deathsoldiers and Deathmarines marching in layered ranks, Deathzealots chanting from the backs of armored carriers. Deathtanks rolled down invisible ramps straight onto the ocean, hulls supported by necro-buoyancy fields that turned the water beneath them into dark, sour gel.

Behind them came the navy proper: gray-purple dreadnoughts with ribbed hulls and skull-prow rams, guns like rows of jawbones. Chem-shells stacked on their decks glowed a sickly green.

Above, new aerial shapes swooped in—Death Regime bombers with bat-like wings grafted to their fuselages, fighter craft with ribcage cockpits and engines that screamed like they remembered dying.

The sea between Deathwing's cliff and Galaxenchi's coastline became a living conveyor belt of steel and bone, all aimed inland.

Far above it all, a golden geometry snapped into existence.

Galaxbeam stepped out of a vertical slit of starlight at the apex of a hovering grid, coat whipping in the high atmosphere wind. Golden lines radiated from his feet in every direction like a chalkboard exploded in three dimensions.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, exhausted, then glanced very slightly toward some invisible point above and outside the world.

"...作者，" he muttered in Mandarin, voice flat. "你係咪真係想靠寫字數嚇死敵人？" Author, are you seriously trying to kill the enemy with word count?

His glasses glinted; he sighed.

"好啦好啦，我知你仲喺度打字。" Fine, fine, I know you're still typing.

He flicked a hand, and the golden grids reoriented to face the oncoming tide.

"Operation syllabus, extra credit edition," he said on the open band, English dry. "Phase: 'Stop the author from making this arc three volumes long.' All units, report."

Supreme Commander voices flooded in, overlapping, then sorting themselves into ordered channels as the system recognized ranks.

「Galaxadye、前線艦隊、北湾配備完了。」 Northern bay fleet deployed, Galaxadye reported. "Naval firing arcs locked. Health rings in yellow, mana in safe band."

「Galaxadale、内陸防衛線を再構築中。」 Rebuilding inland defense line, Galaxadale added, armor still scorched. "Armor regiments consolidated into three main fists."

"Galaxastream, riverside grids at sixty percent," came the calm, slightly tired voice from the waterways. "Waterways still ours—for now."

「Galaxastorm、嵐の壁を引き直してるところだ。」 Redrawing the storm-wall, Galaxastorm rumbled, thunder muttering in his hair. "Mana low, but enough for one more 'big scene.'"

Above, Galaxapuff slid Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary into position like a golden lid over the coastline.

"Sky-layers ready," she reported. "Air corridors green for friendly, red for anything with skulls. Authors unwelcome."

A few chuckles answered that.

On the violet cliff, Deathwing tilted his head.

"Sie scherzen noch," he observed in German, amused. They still joke. "Dann haben wir Arbeit vor uns."

He raised his staff.

The largest bombardment of the campaign began.

Naval guns opened first.

From Deathwing's dreadnought line, chem-shells screamed toward the coast in staggered salvos, each round trailing tails of luminous gas. In response, Galaxadye's carrier wall blasted golden counter-barrages that met them over the surf, detonations blooming like torn suns.

"Second ring, fire on predictive vectors," Galaxadye snapped, fingers flicking across her holo. "Kill the shells that haven't been launched yet."

Her time-bent targeting turned the horizon into a sheet of algebra: guns aimed not where Death shells were, but where they must pass through in the tiny sliver of space-time between chamber and sky. Some Death guns exploded in their mounts as their own ammunition met future shrapnel.

It did not stop everything.

Chem clustered in low pockets over industrial ports. Shields flared as Galax Guards dragged civilians into underground shelters, coughs and shouted orders echoing through the smoke.

In the air above, Deathenpuff's bombers swooped in stacked waves, chem-bellies glowing. Galaxapuff answered with layered wings of fighters and barrier-casters, formations tightening and loosening like breathing.

「高度＋一〇〇。」 Altitude plus one hundred, she ordered. "Keep their clouds below our main wings. If the author wants a sky battle, we at least choose the camera angles."

Bombs fell; barriers met them in flashes of gold and violet. Dogfights threaded between the explosions, streaks of orange and purple light weaving desperate calligraphy across the clouds.

On the ground, the suburbs shook.

In the outer commuter belts of Kinchōhakkei, Death Regime ground columns finally pushed past the last isolated fields. Zombies spilled onto expressways like gray-black sludge, climbing over burnt-out cars, fingers scratching at armored hulls.

Galax Soldiers, Galax Marines, Galax Zealots, and Galax Police held intersections and overpasses, armor stained with ash and necrotic residue. Every time a line buckled, teleport glyphs flared as reserve companies blinked in, slotting into gaps like puzzle pieces.

Behind them, Galaxadale's consolidated armored fists moved.

Her main formation—three merged regiments of tanks and IFVs—ground forward through a retail district that no longer had walls, only jagged teeth of rebar. She stood in the open hatch of her command tank, coat torn, hair singed.

"Left block, pivot to face that deathtank cluster," she ordered, pointing with her whole arm. "Right block, crush those bone artillery nests."

A cluster of Death elites surged to meet her.

Deathgravemind, human-zombie male, skull half-exposed, rode a tank festooned with twitching brains in jars, each connected by wires to zombie platoons. Deathspine, all jagged armor and body-manipulation shackles, kept pace on foot, every step cracking the pavement. Overhead, Deathspitter hovered on a cloud of vomited insects, each one a flying toxin.

They hurled curses, chemical storms, and gravitational wrenching at Galaxadale's spearhead.

She responded with geometry.

Her tanks turned, not to meet shots, but to create exact, pre-calculated angles between them. Every incoming curse that tried to twist steel hit a point where three armor plates formed a stable triangle of reinforced space-time; the spells fractured instead of bending.

"See that?" she said over the local band, voice calm as if in a classroom. 「三角形は、強い。」 Triangles are strong.

Deathgravemind snarled, trying to seize the brains of wounded Galax Soldiers and flip them. Galaxadale simply cut their timelines short at the point of fatal hit and reattached them further along, into med-bays and regeneration pods. To him, his control lines kept hitting people—and then those people were simply gone.

"Fehler im System," he growled. Error in the system.

"Correct," she murmured. "Zero points."

Galaxadale's fist slammed into his weakened front, shells and point-blank time-blasts ripping through deathtank ribs. Deathgravemind's health ring plunged to red; recall tore him away in a convulsion of severed wires.

Deathspine tried to leap onto her command tank, body extending like a spear. She met him with a physical blow—no spell, just a gauntleted fist enhanced by a snap of localized gravity. The impact shattered his rib-cage armor; his health ring crashed into orange, then red, as follow-up fire from her escort vehicles riddled him. He vanished mid-scream, sent back to Death Regime lines.

"Forward three blocks," Galaxadale ordered, not slowing. "We hold them at the rail line."

Elsewhere, the Supreme Commanders switched in and out, combining their strengths like shifting panels in a strategy game.

On one axis, Galaxastream, still bandaged from earlier, rejoined the front alongside Galaxseiryu, who had just rotated in from quieter sectors. Streams and storm-drains became weapons: water leaping from gutters to slam into zombie columns, concrete turning slick under Deathmarauders' feet.

"Seiryu, tie their ankles," Galaxastream said, Japanese clipped.

「了解。」 Understood.

Galaxseiryu sliced with a gesture; water coiled around undead legs like serpent chains. Galaxastream twisted entire canals into vertical spirals, turning the bound hordes upside down and dumping them back into Death's own kill zones.

On another front, Galaxastorm and Galaxyraijin tag-teamed the sky.

Galaxastorm, mana scarce, focused on raw, heavy weather: sheets of rain thick enough to hide advances, gusts that slapped aerial chem back toward its launchers. Galaxyraijin, drums spinning, played lightning into the pattern, striking only where Galaxastorm's storm-wall made holes.

"You owe me a week of sleep after this," Galaxastorm muttered.

「じゃあ、テスト終わったら、一緒に昼寝しよう。」 Then let's nap together after the exam, Galaxyraijin laughed, before driving a bolt clean through a Deathelite trying to fly low under the main fight.

Above all of them, Galaxbeam fought and complained.

He and Deathwing clashed again and again in brief, brutal exchanges, never long enough for either to fully commit, always enough to re-shape the battlefield.

Deathwing swung his scythe in an arc that dragged the concept of "population density" with it; wherever the blade's shadow passed, zombies multiplied. Back alleys suddenly teemed with double the usual undead, hurling themselves at Galaxy fire.

Galaxbeam snarled, swords crossing.

"作者，呢啲效果你知唔知幾難寫清楚？" Author, do you have any idea how hard it is to explain these effects?

He slashed the air; golden equations etched themselves over the swollen undead clusters and rewrote their classification tags. Half the new "zombies" became inert props, objects instead of enemies. They froze, mid-lunge, suddenly just... corpses. Galaxy bullets passed through them seeking the still-animated ones behind.

Deathwing barked a laugh.

"Du schimpfst mit dem Autor mitten im Krieg," he observed. You scold the author in the middle of war. "Meta-Bewusstsein ist eine Krankheit, Professor."

"職業病。" Occupational hazard, Galaxbeam shot back, turning one sword to catch the scythe's handle. The clash sent ripples through the sky, knocking lesser spells offline for several seconds.

Below, those ripples forced elites to improvise.

On a ruined suburban street lined with half-collapsed convenience stores, Galaxkiba's ninja unit had run their mana nearly dry. His time-bend and teleport signatures sputtered; glowing sigils on his arms flickered.

"Commander, spells are barely sparking," one shinobi reported, kunai dripping necrotic ichor.

Galaxkiba exhaled, eyes narrowing.

「じゃあ...手でやるしかないな。」 Then we do it by hand.

He dropped from a rooftop into the midst of a Deathsoldier pack, body no longer phasing through time, just moving at the edge of what muscle and training could do. His orange-trimmed armor blurred; blades flashed, clean and controlled. Each cut severed tendons, ruined joints, toppled undead without wasting motion.

A Deathelite—Deathsaw, human-zombie male with serrated bone-blades for arms—charged him, expecting to overpower a "drained" opponent.

Their weapons met.

"Fehlt dir die Magie, hm?" Missing your magic, hm? Deathsaw sneered.

Kiba caught the bone-blade on a reinforced forearm guard and twisted, letting human leverage and timing do what time-bending would have made trivial. Deathsaw's own momentum threw him forward; a short, brutal elbow strike shattered his jaw. A follow-up palm heel, timed exactly for the frame his health ring dipped lowest, triggered recall.

「魔法がなくても、テストは受かるさ。」 You can still pass the test without magic, Kiba muttered, already spinning toward the next target.

At a different junction, Galaxyakikaze and Galaxmizuki took positions at opposite ends of the same boulevard, mana halos guttering. No more big storms, no more full-scale illusions—only precise, focused bursts.

"Right side," Galaxyakikaze called. "I will push them into your lane."

「了解。左をお願い。」 Then I will handle the left, Mizuki replied.

Akikaze unleashed a tight cone of pressure that slammed a zombie column sideways, hurling them into a shattered storefront. As they stumbled, Mizuki snapped her fingers; every remaining drop of water in that building surged out, forming high-density spikes that impaled three Deathmarines at once.

"次。" Next, she breathed.

Across from them, Deathgrimmar and Deathnurse, also mana-light, switched to brute violence. Grimmar's greatsword rose and fell with reaper rhythm, cleaving tanks like toys. Deathnurse waded through Galax Marines with scalpels and bone-needles, striking joints, arteries, even suit connectors, turning Galaxy tech against its wearers.

"Mach die Geräusche," she whispered as a Marine fell, voice almost tender. Make the sounds.

A wall of gold hit her from the side.

Galaxyqinglong, drenched and battered, had chosen to spend his last significant mana burst on that one move. A dragon made of pure canal-water smashed her into a billboard. Her health ring shattered to red; recall seized her, pulling her out mid-cackle.

Grimmar howled and swung for Qinglong, but his greatsword met only a faded afterimage—the last time-skew the elite could afford. Qinglong collapsed behind cover a heartbeat later, mana halo gone, unable to fight, but having removed a key butcher from the field.

Everywhere, similar choices played out.

Elites on both sides, magic dwindling, fell back on steel and fists and teeth. The soundscape shifted from spell detonations to gunfire, sword-clashes, and the close, wet sounds of melee.

In the midst of this chaos, the Supreme Commanders made one last rotation.

Galaxadye and Galaxadale combined their command nets, merging flotilla and armor readouts into a single, impossible tree of data—the kind of board that would make most officers' eyes cross.

「ダブルチェック、完了。」 Double-check complete, Galaxadye said. "We have enough health and mana between us for one more major push."

「じゃあ、線を引こう。」 Then we draw a line, Galaxadale answered.

Their consolidated forces slammed into the leading edge of Deathwing's inland wedge: tanks, deathtanks, zombies, Deathmarines, a screen of neck-deep undead.

On the opposite side of that wedge, Deathenstorm and Deathenstream, both worn but still functional, hurled everything they had left—poisonous rain, bone-laced torrents, wind that cut instead of carrying.

Between the two paired walls, the battlefield became a grinding corridor.

For a long, drawn-out stretch, it looked like no one would move.

Then Galaxbeam, still locked in glancing clashes with Deathwing, took a single second to write a new line of equation in the shared air: a narrow, golden arc across the front, labelled only with a single kanji—「境」, boundary.

Time kinked along that arc.

Every Galaxy weapon that crossed it hit with a tiny extra fraction of coherence; every Death spell that crossed it shed a tiny fraction of force. Individually, the difference was nothing. Across thousands of projectiles and impacts, it was a weight.

Deathenstream's floodwaves broke just short of critical rail hubs. Deathenstorm's sleet shattered on invisible ridges in the wind.

Galaxadale's tanks, battered but multiplicative, pushed the undead tide back one ruined block, then another.

Down on the line, a tired Galax Soldier dragged a wounded comrade behind a shattered bus and looked up at the sky, breathing hard.

"...we're... we're not losing ground?" he choked.

"Not today, kid," a Galax Ranger beside him grunted, reloading. "Today's lesson is '持久戦'—war of attrition."

On his cliff, Deathwing felt the subtle shift and hissed steam between his teeth.

"Genug," he decided at last. Enough.

He slammed his staff down.

Around him, recall glyphs flared for his exhausted Supreme Commanders and elites—Deathendye already gone, Deathendale limping, Deathenpuff pulled back toward rearming carriers, Deathenstream and Deathenstorm both hovering at the edge of collapse. One by one, their auras thinned and snapped out of the forward lines.

The zombies did not stop; they had no recall.

But without elite and commander guidance, their charge lost shape, turning from a spearpoint into a messy, shuffling tide. Galaxy artillery and infantry could handle that.

Deathwing looked up at Galaxbeam, scythe resting on his shoulder.

"Sie verteidigen gut," he admitted. You defend well. "Es ist... lästig." It is... troublesome.

Galaxbeam's swords hummed, tips still faintly glowing.

"你啲實驗仲未合格。" Your experiments are still failing the ethics exam, he said in Mandarin. "我唔介意你多做幾次，畢竟作者仲要寫幾章。" I don't mind you repeating the test a few more times, since the author clearly wants more chapters.

For the first time in hours, Deathwing actually laughed, deep and genuine.

"Dann sehen wir, wie viel der Autor aushält," he replied. Then we shall see how much the author can endure.

He stepped backward into a splitting portal, scythe tip carving a lazy arc that promised this was only an interval, not a conclusion.

The largest organized portion of his assault went with him—Supreme Commanders, elites, naval command nodes—ripping away like a tide drawn back.

On the ground, the Supreme Commanders of the Galaxy Regime stood among smoking suburbs and shattered industrial belts, health rings low, mana halos little more than tired halos of light.

Galaxadye checked the latest map projection, sweat stinging her eyes.

「前線...ギリギリ維持。」 Front line... barely maintained.

Galaxadale rolled her shoulders, armor cracking as it cooled.

「でも、これ以上は通さなかった。」 But we did not let them through.

Galaxbeam descended to their level, swords fading into harmless chalk sticks in his hands.

He looked at them, at the battered elites regrouping, at ground troops collapsing on sidewalks or leaning against still-standing walls.

"Good work," he said simply, in English this time.

Then he tilted his head again, addressing some unseen point just past the clouds.

"作者，" he said, Cantonese wry but gentle. "你都睇到啦，前線頂住咗。呢一章可以收工啦吓？" You see it too—the front held. Can we end this chapter here?

He turned back to his commanders before any cosmic answer could arrive.

「市民の確認を最優先。」 Civilians first. 「その次に防衛線の再構築。」 Then we rebuild the lines.

The map of Galaxenchi updated one more time.

Purple wedges still scarred the coastal states and outer rings. Zombies still scratched at the edges of light. Naval wrecks still smoked on the horizon.

But the golden line—thin, ragged, singed—had not broken.

For now, at least, the Death Regime's largest onslaught had been stopped short of the true hearts of Galaxenchi.

The second wave did not wait for dawn.

Explosions still crawled along the horizon like slow lightning when the Death Regime sigils flared again—thin violet scars reopening above the black water off Galaxenchi's coast.

Galaxbeam felt it before the alarms finished chiming.

"Round two already?" he murmured in Cantonese, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "作者真係好鍾意加長考卷。" The author really loves adding extra pages to the exam.

He straightened his coat and lifted his hand.

「銀河側、第二ラウンド開始。」 Galaxy side, round two begins. 「さあ、もう一回だけ踏ん張ろうか。」 Let us hold one more time.

Golden grids re-lit across the sky.

Violet portals unfolded lower this time, hugging the wave-crest and the broken shadow of distant Death Regime warships. Deathwing had learned from Suzutamashi and Kinchōhakkei; he did not fling everything in a single broad front. Instead, three stabbing thrusts shot forward at once.

On Galaxwis's tactical projection, they looked like claws.

"Marking vectors Alpha, Beta, Gamma," Galaxwis said quietly, fingers already racing over a console. "Alpha aimed at Galaxen-Shirayue, Beta toward Kinchōhakkei's river junctions, Gamma... trying to slip between our coastal cities entirely."

"好。" Good. Galaxbeam's eyes narrowed. "One claw at a time. Dismantle the hand."

Alpha vector – Galaxen-Shirayue corridor

Deathendye took the point.

His calculations flickered around him in stacked panes of ghostly numbers, each representing projected casualties, ammunition burn, and the probability that a particular Deathsoldier would still be shambling along in an hour. He had chosen his spear carefully: a column of reinforced deathtanks flanked by Deathmarines and Deathzealots, three elites pacing the sides like wolves—Deathgrimmar with his rusted greatsword, Deathshade in her tatters of shadow, Deathravena with a stained banner-wing unfurled behind her.

"Ziel: Durchbruch bis vor die Stadtmauer." Objective: breakthrough to the city wall, he said calmly. "Keine heroischen Alleingänge. Zahlen zuerst." No heroic solo plays. Numbers first.

Far above, Galaxadye was already waiting.

His carrier formation hung over the Galaxen-Shirayue approaches in a compressed arc, hulls scorched from the previous assault, shield auras thinner but still bright. Next to his health ring, a slim second halo flickered—mana tracking, still in the yellow band.

「アルファベクター、迎撃開始。」 Intercepting vector Alpha, he announced. "火力七割、マナは半分残して。」 Weapons output at seventy percent. Keep half your mana in reserve.

Below, the first Death shells reached for the city.

Golden-yellow fire answered.

Galaxadye did not try to erase the whole column in one spectacular strike. Instead, he broke the battle into problems: a deathtank about to crest a ridge at the wrong angle; a Deathzealot mid-syllable in a ritual; a Deathmarine squad stacked too close to its own artillery.

"Target their mistakes, not their armor," he reminded his gunnery crews. "佢哋每一次分心，就係你哋加分題。" Every time they lose focus, that's your bonus question.

Down below, Deathgrimmar snarled as a salvo landed exactly when he over-swung, the backlash from his own slash ripping his health halo down into orange. Deathshade tried to fade into a shadow gap, only to find Galaxkiba already there—blade flashing, time-bent kunai striking at the single instant her defenses reset. Deathravena threw a curse-banner high, summoning a spiral of screaming skulls, and watched it snap apart when Galaxadye tilted one second sideways.

"Er arbeitet mit Fehlern wie mit Kreide," Deathendye observed under his breath. He works with errors like chalk.

He adjusted his own models, feeding the new data back into the column. Counter-barrages thickened; two Galaxy cruisers lurched as necrotic shells punched into their shields. Galaxadye's health ring dipped, and his mana halo shrank as he spent more power to compensate.

For a moment, it looked like the spear might still punch through.

Then Galaxbeam's voice dropped onto the command band, calm and dry.

「答案、ここで修正。」 We correct the answer here.

The sky between the carriers and the deathtanks shimmered.

For three seconds, Galaxbeam lent Galaxadye a lattice of hard-coded geometry: a temporary golden theorem that no trajectory could cross except at certain fixed points. Galaxadye's guns did not need to aim anymore—they only had to fire when one of Deathendye's shells intersected a node.

Shells collided with shells in mid-air, detonations chaining in a clean, terrible pattern.

Deathendye watched his projections sag, casualty curves spiking in the wrong color.

"Rückzugslinie Gamma aktivieren," he said through his teeth. Activate fallback line Gamma.

Hovering near the front, Deathravena hissed, wanting to press, wanting to prove Suzutamashi had not been for nothing. But her health ring hovered at orange from the previous fights, her mana halo even lower. When Galaxharp's shockwave rolled down the valley, rattling bones and blowing holes in the Death infantry ranks, the recall laws finally grabbed her and yanked her out in a streak of violet.

The Alpha vector broke—tanks reversing, elites dragged back, zombie hordes left to shamble without proper direction as Galaxy artillery chewed them down.

Galaxadye exhaled, feeling his own mana halo drop into orange.

「アルファ、合格。」 Alpha passes, he said softly. "次。」 Next.

Beta vector – river and storm: Galaxastream & Galaxastorm vs Deathenstream & Deathenstorm

Beta came in like a weather pattern.

Deathenstream poured violet floods down every tributary he could reach, bone fragments and zombie torsos churning along in a necrotic slurry. Above, Deathenstorm lashed the clouds into blades—hailstones big as tanks, jagged lances of black lightning.

At the river junctions near Kinchōhakkei's inner ring, water and sky roared in tandem.

Galaxastream stood waist-deep in the current, eyes half-closed, hands moving through shapes only he and the river understood. Beside him, Galaxseiryu floated in a serpentine arc, body outlined in blue-white dragon fire, helping to anchor the flow.

"流量七割。護岸はまだ守れる," Galaxastream said, voice tight. Flow at seventy percent. Levees still holding.

High above, Galaxastorm braced his feet on a disk of condensed thundercloud, arms spread wide. Every breath drew lightning into his chest; every exhale pushed golden forks back into the stormfront, trying to blunt Deathenstorm's rage.

"雷雲の残量、もう三割だぞ," he grunted. I've only got thirty percent cloud left.

"Dann reicht das ja," Deathenstorm growled back over the storm band. Then that is enough.

He hurled a cluster of death-hail into a golden gap, hammering Galaxastorm's shield and shaving his health ring down into low yellow.

Galaxseiryu saw the line of impact coming and reacted without waiting for orders. He dove into the current, his aura unfurling into a long, coiling dragon of water and starlight that wrapped itself around the levees like living armor. Deathenstream's next surge smashed into that defense, frothing and screaming, but did not cross.

"すげえ..." Galax Guards on the embankment whispered, staring up at the serpentine halo.

Deathenstream clicked his tongue.

"Drachenspiel," he muttered. Dragon games.

He shifted tactics, pulling his floods back and sending them underground instead, trying to undermine the levees at their foundations.

Galaxwis pinged the change from his monitoring deck two cities away.

"地下流動パターン変化," he reported. Subsurface flow pattern change. "Stream さん、七秒後に右岸の下が抜ける。" Seven seconds until the right bank collapses.

Galaxastream did not argue with an analyst who lived thirty steps ahead.

"Galaxmizuki," he called. "右岸の根っこ、お願い。" Mizuki, get the roots on the right bank.

High up the stream, Galaxmizuki responded, glyph-circles already spinning under her feet. She flung handfuls of shimmering seeds into the air; they hit the wind, aged, sprouted, and grew in fast-forward, roots punching down through soil to weave a living mesh beneath the threatened embankment.

When Deathenstream's redirected surge hit, it met a wall of accelerated forest.

The levee shuddered—but held.

Overhead, Galaxastorm saw his chance.

「雷鳴、一気に絞る。」 Squeeze the thunder all at once.

He collapsed his entire remaining stormfront into a single spiraling column, golden lightning twisting around a core of raw pressure. Deathenstorm tried to intercept, but his mana halo had already dipped deep into orange; his counter-gust came a fraction of a second too late.

The column hammered into his anchor point in the clouds, spinning him out of position and driving his health ring sharply downward.

"Verdammt—!" he spat as recall laws surged up around him. Cursed—

He vanished in a violet snap, dragged back to a rearward rally point.

Without Deathenstorm to sync with, Deathenstream's floods grew sloppier. Galaxastream seized control of their edges, peeling necrotic water away from the levees and channeling it into shallow sacrificial basins, where Galaxmarines could safely evaporate it with focused fire.

By the time the storm quieted, both Galaxy Supreme Commanders' mana halos were hanging in red, but the river junctions still glowed gold.

Beta had been blunted.

Gamma vector – shadows and swords: Galaxbeam vs Deathwing, with new elites

Gamma did not come as a column.

It came as gaps.

Teleport glitches. Flickers in surveillance wards. A sudden dead spot in Galaxwis's map where there should have been chatter.

"Gamma is not a direction," Galaxwis said slowly, fingers halting over his keys. "It is... subtraction. 他喺度刪我哋啲線。" He is deleting our lines.

Galaxbeam's eyes sharpened.

"死翼親自出手。" Deathwing, personally then.

He stepped off the observation deck and let gravity forget him. One golden slash opened in front of him; he walked through.

He emerged on a quiet hillside overlooking the approaches to Kinchōhakkei's outer suburbs. It should have been unremarkable—just grass, a few half-broken walls, distant flashes from other fronts.

Instead, the colors felt wrong.

Purple soot drifted against the wind. In the middle distance, a tall, thin figure in torn iron robes leaned on a scythe taller than he was, its blade curved like a crescent of dried blood.

Deathwing did not turn at first.

"Runde zwei," he said to the empty air. Round two. "Zweiter Versuch, gleicher Lehrer." Second attempt, same teacher.

"學生交功課要準時," Galaxbeam replied, voice carrying easily despite the wind. Students should hand in on time.

He drew both swords.

They were not ornate—simply two slender one-hand blades, glowing with the same golden logic as his chalk. One in each hand, weight perfectly balanced.

"Shall we begin grading?"

Deathwing finally looked back, empty sockets burning.

"Du übertreibst mit der Metapher, Professor." You overdo the metaphor, Professor.

He hefted the scythe.

The world bent.

Their first clash did not look like weapon on weapon, not to anyone who might have been watching from the ground. From a distance, it looked like the hillside folded in half and tried to be somewhere else.

Galaxbeam's swords wrote lines through reality, carving out "safe" zones where Galaxy causality persisted. Deathwing's scythe swept across those same lines, rewriting anything it touched into disease, entropy, wasted potential.

Below them, new elites skirmished in the warping shadows.

On the Galaxy side, Galaxyraijin drummed thunder into coherent bolts, Galaxyqinglong spiraled through the air in jade-green arcs, and Galaxmurasaki streaked like a violet comet between collapsing buildings, her astronomy magic knitting fractured time back into usable lanes for retreating Galax Soldiers.

Opposing them, Deathnurse stitched wounded zombies into larger, stitched abominations; Deathsporeth let clouds of parasitic fog creep along alleys; Deathh and Deathgripress reappeared on the flanks, pushing hard with bone spears and psychically-guided bullet storms.

Lightning speared the ground; dragon coils smashed abominations into curdled sludge. Time loops snapped shut around flanking squads, forcing them to repeat the last two seconds of panic until a Galaxy marksman found the critical shot.

For every Death elite forced back into recall by redlined health and drained mana, another lunged forward to fill the gap. For every Galaxy elite who spent the last of their mana on one more spell and dropped into a forced teleport back to fortress-hospitals, another arrived, aura fresh and weapons bright.

Above them all, Galaxbeam and Deathwing traded blows in silence.

Swords met scythe, sparks blooming into equations and viruses.

At one point, Deathwing hooked both blades at once and dragged them downward in a coughing arc, nearly scything through Galaxbeam's chest. Galaxbeam twisted sideways, leaving behind a decoy line of himself that took the blow and dissolved into chalk dust. His health halo shivered down into yellow; his mana halo flared as he counter-cast.

He stepped inside Deathwing's guard, both swords tracing X-shaped lines across the Absolute's torso.

For a heartbeat, the cut nearly "took."

Deathwing's health halo flickered, flirting with orange.

Then the undead Absolute exhaled a cloud of grave-cold, converting the wound into something theoretical—pain without proper purchase.

"Du kannst mich nicht löschen," he hissed. You cannot delete me.

Galaxbeam's shoulders rose and fell once.

"你都刪唔到我。" And you cannot delete me.

He pushed.

The ground around them exploded into constellations as time and death smashed together.

At last, both of their mana halos dipped into red at the same moment. The laws of Titanumas itself intervened, firm and unmoving: Absolute Leaders do not die here. Not today.

Space thickened between them like cooling glass.

Deathwing narrowed his empty gaze.

"Genug für diese Runde," he said, raising the scythe in a brief salute. Enough for this round.

He stepped backward into a violet tear and vanished, taking Gamma's subtraction field with him.

Galaxbeam let both swords lower, their glow dimmer now.

He clicked his tongue.

"作者，你又懶得寫決勝局。" Author, you were too lazy to write a final round again, he muttered to the unseen sky.

Then he breathed out, letting his own mana halo start its slow crawl back toward yellow, and opened his senses to the rest of the fronts.

Alpha: retreating violet. Beta: quieting storms. Gamma: no longer eating lines out of his map.

For now, the coast held.

The third clash began under a sky lined with scars.

Over Kinchōhakkei State, clouds still carried the ghosts of earlier equations—faint golden grids, streaks of violet plague-smoke stretched thin by wind. Every city's horizon burned with some color: gold from Galaxy flares, iron-purple from Death Regime bombardments, white from evacuation corridor flashes.

Galaxbeam floated at the center of it all, coat singed, glasses cracked at one corner, golden chalk stick whittled down to half its original length.

"第三ラウンド。" Third round, he murmured, Japanese soft over the Absolute band. "テスト、まだ終わらないよ。" The test is still not over.

Far across the front, Deathwing heard the same sky-level channel. Standing atop a ribcage-spire of fused vertebrae, cloak dragging ash, he turned his skull-helmed gaze toward the interior of Galaxenchi.

"Dann korrigieren wir weiter." Then we continue marking, he replied in German, voice like ground glass. "Bis die ganze Karte lila ist." Until the whole map is violet.

He raised his staff.

The round resumed.

Sorabiko Bay – Numbers vs Shells

Over Sorabiko's glittering bay, Galaxadye stood in the command cradle of the Galax Axis, hands spread over a three-dimensional holo of the coastline. Each Death Regime barrage appeared as a jagged red curve; each return volley from her carriers as a smooth, gold arc.

"Deathendye is compensating faster," one gunnery officer reported, watching their hits land further and further from the deathtanks' densest knots.

「うん、でも彼も疲れてる。」 Yes, but he is tired too, Galaxadye answered. Her voice had the thin edge of someone working off the last third of their stamina bar.

"Adjust predictive loop... here."

She dragged two fingers across the holo. The golden arcs warped, now bending not to where the deathtanks were but to where their gunners would flinch next.

Beneath the clouds, in a fortified necro-bunker, Deathendye felt his calculations go sour.

"Was—?" He snapped his head toward a side-screen, watching several predicted safe-zones vanish under precise golden detonations. His own health ring flickered as sympathetic feedback bit into his spine.

He bit down a curse, fingers flying across corpse-keyboards, redistributing damage to reserve units.

"Sie verfolgt unsere Fehler, nicht unsere Positionen," he said tersely to his staff. She is following our mistakes, not our positions.

The next shell slammed into a battery three centimeters off his projection—exactly where a junior necro-officer had hesitated a heartbeat too long. Deathendye's health scraped down to the low twenties; Galaxadye's own dipped into the mid-twenties as she absorbed the counter-fire, but neither gave way.

On Sorabiko's seawall, Galax Soldiers watched wave after wave of Deathsoldiers and Deathmarines stagger, reset, and come again—only to be shredded in carefully tuned blasts that tore skulls from spines while leaving the concrete piers intact.

"Commander still has the rhythm," a Galax Marine sergeant said, half in awe, as another synchronized barrage erased a push before it reached the sand. "We're not losing Sorabiko today."

Up in the cradle, Galaxadye exhaled.

「ギリギリだけどね。」 Barely, she said, eyes on her diminishing mana string. Then she turned the map and shifted attention inland.

"Next axis."

Kasairyoku Valley – Hammer and Anvil

In the forested valley leading toward Kasairyoku City, the war was loud and close.

Galaxy tanks with gold-inlaid armor traded point-blank shots with deathtanks whose glacis plates crawled with bone-growth. The earth shook; trees went down like matchsticks.

On a ridge, Galaxadale stood in an open hatch, one boot braced, cloak torn and fire-scorched. Her main cannon roared beneath her, cycling through shells as fast as the auto-loader dared.

"Left wedge, seventeen degrees down, fire on my mark!" she shouted over local comms. "Right flank—hold until you can see Deathendale's command crest, then all at once."

Downhill, Deathendale waded through his own smoke, armor dented but unbroken, staff of black iron tapping the hull of a half-melted tank.

"Vorwärts," he growled to the crews. Forward. "Ihre Linie knackt. Noch ein Stoß." Their line is cracking. One more push.

The wedges of gray-purple armor ground forward, skull emblems grinning through fire.

Then Galaxadale's timing landed.

"Mark."

Her left wedge fired first, a curtain of golden blasts punching gaps in the deathtank formation—not enough to break it, but enough to stagger it, to make drivers jolt their steering controls for a fatal half-second. In that exact window, her right flank crested a secondary ridge and fired down into the exposed top armor.

Whole deathtanks flipped like coins. Necro-crews screamed; Deathendale's health ring lurched downward as the formation's collective resilience shattered.

He roared, trying to drag more bone up from the soil to reinforce his armor—but Galaxadale was already there, shells stitching around him in a patient, circular pattern. Each strike shaved another sliver from his health band, forcing his wedge back meter by grinding meter.

At last, Deathendale signaled a grudging fallback, smoke-screens igniting along the valley floor.

"Rückzugslinie drei," he ordered. Fall back to line three. His voice was flat, murderous. "Das hier ist nicht vorbei." This is not over.

On the Galaxy side, cheers went up as deathtanks burned and slid back. Galaxadale sank into the hatch for a moment, catching herself on the rim.

「まだ終わってないけど、これで一息。」 Not over yet—but we can breathe, she said, checking her own ring: still in the forties. Plenty of armor left. "Kasairyoku stays our side."

Rivers and Corridors – One Retreat, One Hold

On the Suzukaze River, the water glowed gold.

Galaxastream stood barefoot on a disc of hardened current, arms raised. Threads of the river coiled around him in tight, luminous helixes. Every time a Death-tainted torrent tried to smash into Galaxy levees, he touched one strand—and the incoming wave twisted aside, slamming into a dead zone or, worse for Deathenstream, back into undead ranks.

Across the spiritual current, Deathenstream snarled, fingers clawed into a violet whirlpool.

"You are stealing my rivers," he spat in harsh Mandarin.

"借的," Galaxastream replied mildly. Borrowing.

The next d10 exchange went Galaxy's way: his 7 against Deathenstream's 4, in the language of dice; in the language of the river, a sudden tightening of golden coils and a collapse of necrotic vortices.

Coughing water, Deathenstream felt his health plunge into the teens. Recall sigils flickered at his feet.

"Nein," he hissed, trying to anchor himself with more plague-ink.

The laws of the campaign disagreed. Violet light seized him, pulling him bodily back through his own currents and out of Suzukaze entirely.

"Stream's gone," Galaxwis logged quietly from a distant operations console. "River axis now firmly gold."

Not far away, however, the teleport corridors were a mess.

Galaxastride sprinted the length of an invisible bridge between Hanatsumi and a burning suburb, sigils flaring beneath his boots. Every step opened a rescue corridor; every third step, something tried to eat it.

"This timing is absurd," he growled, Japanese clipped. "If I ever meet the author, we're having a talk."

From a neighboring rooftop shadow, Deathenstride dropped a teleport-denial spike, grin thin and sharp.

"恨むなら、先生を恨め," he said in accented Japanese. If you must blame someone, blame your teacher. Then, in German, to himself: "Oder euren Würfelgott." Or your dice-god.

The second d10 in their duel belonged to him. Galaxastride's health crashed from the thirties toward the teens as one of his corridors collapsed mid-evacuation, forcing him to burn mana brutally to salvage civilians and avoid a massacre.

By the third exchange, he was moving on fumes, ring hovering around eighteen.

"Strider, you're in red," Galaxbeam warned over the band.

「わかってる。」 I know.

Recall runes snapped around his ankles like cuffs and yanked him off the bridge, out of the kill-zone, leaving a ragged gap in the teleport net that Deathenstride eagerly filled with his own denial fields.

Result on the ground: Galaxy holds the river, but the corridors between districts become hazardous, jagged, and unreliable.

Skies over Tenkyosei – One Guardian Falls Back

Far above Tenkyosei and Gekkoujou, the air tasted like metal.

Galaxapuff flew just under Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary's golden hull, hair matted with sweat, lungs burning. Each breath drew in a trace of violet chem that her shields had not quite managed to filter.

"Altitude band three is fouled," a flight officer coughed over comms. "We can't keep the escorts there much longer, Commander."

Below them, Deathenpuff's cathedral-barge drifted forward, chem generators humming. Her bombers stitched new clouds into the already-poisoned layers, constricting the sanctuary's maneuver space.

"Luft ist Statistik," Deathenpuff murmured in German. Air is statistics. "Wir verringern nur ihre Optionen." We simply reduce their options.

Galaxapuff saw the numbers the same way. Her d10s had opened strong but were now turning against her; every big push to clear airspace cost her health and mana she could not easily spare.

Her ring dipped toward the low teens.

"Tenshinkō must not fall," she whispered, Japanese thin. 「でも、落ちる前に退くのも指揮官の役目。」But it is also a commander's duty to retreat before she falls.

She keyed the Absolute band.

"Galaxbeam-sensei. I'm pulling the sanctuary back one ring. Tenkyosei stays covered; outer perimeter will have to manage without us."

"許可する," Galaxbeam replied immediately. Permission granted.

Golden light folded around Tenshinkō; the vast fortress drifted back, leaving a wake of thinning chem-clouds. Deathenpuff felt the change and pushed forward—but she had taken enough punishment that even her victory left her armor cracked and mana reserves heavily taxed.

The sky belonged to Death Regime a little more than before, but Tenkoshorai's direct air corridor stayed gold.

Absolutes – Concept vs Concept

While their lieutenants traded artillery and rivers and airspace, the two Abolutes crossed blades of idea and metal.

Above a shattered industrial belt between Kinchōhakkei and Galaxen-Shirayue, Galaxbeam and Deathwing clashed surrounded by a cyclone of symbols.

Galaxbeam's golden chalk etched equations in mid-air; Deathwing's scythe carved anatomy glyphs through them. With each pass, reality flexed.

The first d20 exchange was almost contemptuously small: 4 vs 2. On the ground, it looked like a brief, blinding flash—Galaxbeam rewriting a single second so that a massive death-wave arrived just after Galaxy shields finished cycling up instead of just before.

Deathwing's health dipped; his aura ruffled.

"You are still grading me while we bleed," he said, exasperation bleeding into his German. "Professor."

"習慣なのでね。" Force of habit, Galaxbeam replied, switching to Mandarin. "你寫出來的東西...實在太多錯字。" There are simply too many errors in what you write.

The second d20 hit like a falling star.

Galaxbeam saw an opening—a moment when Deathwing over-extended his scythe to sever three different Galaxy timelines at once. Instead of parrying, Galaxbeam wrote a new question on the sky:

If a scythe swings through three futures, which one bleeds?

He answered it for Deathwing.

Light snapped. The scythe's arc recoiled on its owner, clipping his own necrotic aura. Violet fire guttered; Deathwing's health plummeted from the forties into the low twenties in one brutal conceptual backlash. His mana bled away with it, dropping into single digits.

Galaxbeam staggered too; the backlash hit him as well, stripping health down to the high thirties and mana to ten. His hair frayed into a small corona of exhausted light.

"You are playing dangerously," Deathwing rasped.

"我只是跟緊課本。" I am merely following the textbook, Galaxbeam said, even as his hand trembled around the chalk.

A metaphorical coin flipped in that moment—whether Deathwing dug in further or cut his losses.

Pride landed on its edge and rolled the wrong way.

"Vorrücken," he commanded his network. Press forward.

His Supreme Commanders felt it—an order to keep attacking despite the damage. They complied where they could... and began to pay for it.

The Line Holds

As Round Three ground on, the new balance became visible on every map table and in every street.

At Sorabiko, Deathendye's barrages grew thinner; Galaxadye's calculus held the coastline.

In Kasairyoku Valley, Deathendale's wedge ceded ground under relentless tank fire, black smoke marking each meter lost.

Along Suzukaze, Deathenstream vanished into forced recall, his rivers collapsing into mundane water under Galaxastream's guidance.

Where Death still bit back—around broken corridors and poisoned skies—Galaxy commanders adjusted, tightened, and refused to let the gaps turn into true breaches.

On a rooftop in Kinchōhakkei, Galaxbeam floated alone for a moment, watching icons shift.

Red wedges shrank near Kasairyoku and Suzukaze. Purple smears around Sorabiko's docks retreated into more cautious arcs. The only bright violet remained clinging to the outer rings where Deathenstride's teleport mines and Deathenpuff's clouds still had bite.

"前線、全体報告。" Front-line, status report, he called gently.

One by one, tired voices answered: Galaxadye, Galaxadale, Galaxastream, Galaxastorm. Galaxastride and Galaxapuff chimed in from rear recovery positions, still alive, still sarcastic.

"先生、ギリギリ合格点ですか？" Sensei, did we scrape a passing grade? Galaxastorm asked, thunder rumbling faintly in his words.

Galaxbeam looked at the map. Deathwing's forces had not been annihilated, but they had been stopped. The push toward Kinchōhakkei's heart had stalled; several of Death Regime's hard-won wedges were now bent back toward the coast.

He exhaled once through his nose.

"今日のところはね。" For today, yes.

Far off, atop his vertebrae dais, Deathwing watched his health ring glow a stubborn, flickering 22. His mana guttered at 8, but his eyes still burned with iron purple.

"Sie haben uns zurückgedrängt," he admitted softly. They have pushed us back.

Then, colder: "Aber der Test ist noch nicht vorbei." But the test is not yet over.

He turned his gaze toward other states, other fault lines in Galaxenchi's defenses, mind already reaching for the next angle.

For now, though, Round Three belonged to the Galaxy Regime. The line around Kinchōhakkei held, bruised but unbroken, while above it all a tired professor and a furious reaper both prepared their next questions.

Deathwing's mistake was assuming the round was over.

The moment the last exchange with Galaxbeam subsided and the storm of symbols thinned, a new presence darkened the horizon—a silhouette so large it cut across multiple cities at once.

The Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz arrived.

It slid out of warped space above the far coast like a continent of iron and bone: a giga–titanic dreadnought carrier whose hull was a tapestry of skulls, crossbones, and rusted ribs. Violet engines burned along its flanks like ulcerated suns. Whole citadels and spires rose from its dorsal plates, each one a fortress, a lab, or a shrine to extinction.

Deathwing's voice went out over the Death Regime band, iron calm.

"Supreme Commanders. Rückzug." Supreme Commanders. Fall back. "Sammelt eure Eliten. Zurück auf die Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz." Gather your elites. Back to the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz.

On a dozen fronts, the order hit like a whip-crack.

Deathendye cut off his counter-battery math mid-adjustment, snapping recall runes around his feet. Deathendale punched a last Galaxy tank out of his way, armor smoking, then vanished in a column of violet. Deathenstream, still half coughing river water in some rear basin, disappeared in a swirl of tainted foam. Deathenstride and Deathenpuff triggered high-priority extraction sigils, their current battlefields folding out from under them.

Violet pillars speared upward from the front lines, each one a recall column carrying Supreme Commanders, elites, and whatever escort squads managed to keep pace.

On the Galaxy side, the effect was immediate.

"敵の指揮系統が消えた," Galaxastream reported, eyes wide. The enemy's command structure just vanished.

「じゃあ、掃除の時間。」 Then it is cleanup time, Galaxadale answered, baring her teeth.

Across Galaxenchi, the remaining Galaxy Supreme Commanders pressed forward.

Galaxadye's fleets dropped to lower firing bands, guns pivoting to pure extermination of anything marked with a skull rune. Galaxadale rolled her armored wall downhill, crushing disorganized pockets of Deathsoldiers. Galaxastream turned retreating necro-floods into golden whirlpools that sucked zombies into deep reservoirs and locked them there. Galaxastorm shifted from dueling clouds to precise lightning strikes, vaporizing clusters of deathtroopers and bone artillery.

Ground-level, Galax Soldiers, Galax Marines, Galax Rangers, Galax Zealots, Galax Marauders, Galax Police, and Galax Guards advanced in layered formations, shields flaring as they walked through streets glittering with recall sparks. Every time a Death elite failed to make recall in time, a coordinated set of stuns and blasts drove their health rings into red and forced a retreat anyway.

From above, Galaxbeam watched the pattern.

He saw Deathwing's recall vectors converge on the looming dreadnought. He saw the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz's primary spine start to glow, a massive lens of fused bone and metal beginning to iris open along its prow.

"もちろん," he sighed, in Japanese. Of course.

He touched the Absolute band.

「前線指揮官、継続掃討。」 Front-line commanders, continue your sweeps. 「ゾンビと地上兵だけを相手にして。上は、私が見る。」 Fight only zombies and ground troops. I will handle what is above.

"先生？" Galaxadye asked, tone sharpening.

"放心啦，" he answered in Cantonese, dry. Don't worry. "考卷最後一題，由老師親自批改。" The last question on the exam—I will grade it personally.

On the dorsal command deck of the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz, Deathwing planted his staff into the bone-metal plating and looked down at his gathered commanders.

Deathendye. Deathendale. Deathenstream. Deathenstorm. Deathenstride. Deathenpuff. Around them, elites in battered armor stood in ragged semi-circles, rings still in the orange and red, aura fumes seeping from cracked glyphs.

"The Professor drängt uns zurück," Deathwing said, voice carrying easily over the storm of engines. The Professor pushes us back. "Dann zeigen wir ihm die Endnote." Then we show him the final grade.

Behind him, a titanic skull-emblazoned aperture unfolded at the ship's prow. Internal conduits pulsed sickly violet as power rerouted from secondary and tertiary engines. Necro-reactors howled. Along the spine, entire decks went dark to feed the charging lens.

Deathendye adjusted his spectacles, unease threading his tone.

"Energieaufbau ist jenseits der üblichen Parameter," he warned. The energy buildup is beyond normal parameters. "Ein Schuss in dieser Stärke—" A shot of this magnitude—

"—reicht, um einen Kontinent zu löschen," Deathwing finished, smile thin. Is enough to erase a continent. "Ja. Genau darum geht es."

Deathenpuff's eyes narrowed.

"Wenn er das umlenkt—" If he reflects that—

Deathwing cut her off with a raised hand.

"Er ist müde. Seine Manakurve ist flach." He is tired. His mana curve is flat. "Wir setzen ihn unter Zwangsabschluss." We force him into final submission.

He turned away from them, cloak snapping in the charging wind.

"Supreme Commanders: Rückzug auf Innenpositionen." Fall back to internal positions. "Falls der Schuss... abprallt." In case the shot... glances oddly.

He did not say "fails." But Deathendye was already calculating fallback probabilities, and they were not pretty.

Above Kinchōhakkei's battered front, Galaxbeam floated alone.

The sky around him was churned milk—golden sigils from his own side, violet smoke from Deathwing's, and the distant glimmer of the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz's charging maw.

He took off his cracked glasses, cleaned them absently on a sleeve already ruined by soot, then put them back on.

"作者，" he said quietly, gaze tilted just off to the side as if addressing someone a little above and beyond the sky itself. Author. "你知唔知道，你寫到呢度，其實已經夠字數了。" Do you realize you already have enough word count by this point?

No answer, of course. Only the rising hum of a weapon meant to erase cities.

He sighed.

"好啦，最後一題。" Very well. Last question.

He raised his chalk.

Where earlier equations had been elegant, textbook material, this one looked almost lazy—just a single circle and a few looping symbols, drawn in the air right in front of him. But every stroke hooked into the deep laws of the local cosmos.

"局部空間曲率，考試範圍外。" Local space curvature—outside the usual syllabus.

The circle turned black.

Not "absence of light" black, but "absence of reference frame" black, a patch of sky where stars behind it did not distort so much as... forget to exist. The edges shimmered, swallowing stray particles, fragments of sound, and a single unfortunate necrotic shell that had drifted too far off-course.

On the dreadnought, Deathwing's staff slammed down.

"Deathenstrahl—FEUER!" Deathbeam—FIRE!

The prow lens flared.

A column of condensed annihilation spat from the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz, a beam of iron-purple so bright it cast hard shadows all the way to Galaxenchi's inland cities. Where it passed, clouds boiled away; air itself screamed.

It met the black circle head-on.

For an instant, nothing happened.

Then, very quietly, the universe around that point admitted it had made a mistake in allowing the beam to exist in the first place.

The deathbeam pinched, thinned, and fell inward. The black disk swallowed it like a drop of ink in an endless well. The shockwave that should have flattened cities simply never arrived; timelines leading to destruction snapped back like overextended rubber bands.

On the deck of the dreadnought, Deathendye's eyes went wide.

"Kein Einschlag?" No impact? "Unmöglich—"

"唔好咁小看黑洞啦。" Do not underestimate a black hole, Galaxbeam said mildly.

The circle quivered.

Galaxbeam rotated his wrist a quarter turn.

From the "back" side of the singularity, a new beam erupted—golden-white, threaded with diagrams and theorem marks, carrying the same magnitude of energy but rewritten in a different grammar. It shot back along the incoming vector, purified and inverted.

"What—" Deathwing began.

The reflected blast hit the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz dead on.

For a moment the giga-dreadnought was a silhouette inside a sun. Golden light punched through necro-armor, raced along spine-conduits, and detonated within magazine holds. Towers of bone and steel cracked in half. Chem-vats vaporized. Aerial docks along the dorsal plates erupted, flinging Death fighters and bombers away like burning leaves.

From below, Galaxy soldiers saw a second dawn bloom over the ocean.

"命中," Galaxadye whispered over comms, stunned. Direct hit.

On the deck, Deathwing staggered as the whole world beneath him lurched. His health ring slammed into the low teens; his mana, already frayed, guttered near empty.

"Alle nicht-essentiellen Sektionen: Flutungsprotokoll," Deathendye shouted into emergency channels. All non-essential sections: flooding protocol. "Hüllenbruch auf Deck fünf bis zwölf, wir—"

A slab of detonating hull cut his sentence off. He and the other Supreme Commanders threw up layered shields, violet spheres inside the golden inferno, barely holding.

Deathenpuff grabbed a railing as part of the deck peeled away into the sky. Her eyes met Deathwing's across the chaos.

"Exfiltration jetzt," she snapped. Exfiltration now.

For all his pride, Deathwing did not argue.

Violet sigils roared up around him, wrapping his skeletal form in a cocoon of raw recall. One by one, the Supreme Commanders triggered their own emergency jumps: Deathendale dragging an unconscious Deathenstream by the collar; Deathenstride blinking out with teleport runes already in his hands; Deathendye half-shouting coordinates as his body broke into glyphs of light.

They vanished in staccato bursts, abandoning the burning beast beneath their feet.

The Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz tried to flee.

Its remaining engines spat broken storms of violet fire, tearing a gouge in the clouds as it lurched into a crooked retreat vector. But the golden reflection had carved more than just surface scars; deep within its structure, entire decks were flooding with a mix of seawater and liquid death-energy.

Galaxbeam watched it stagger away.

"走得快喎，" he murmured. Leaving in quite a hurry.

He lifted his hand again—not with another singularity, just with a scatter of chalk sparks.

Thin golden beams lanced out from his fingertips, like a teacher flicking chalk at misbehaving students. Each ray speared a different part of the retreating dreadnought: a hangar bay, a side battery, one of the dorsal chem-towers. Explosions chased along its length like popping fuses.

By the time the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz tore a final, ragged portal open above the distant sea and slid into it, its prow was half-melted and its wake a trail of falling debris.

The naval bombardment died with it.

Death bombers that had not already been destroyed found their recall runes triggering automatically as their home anchor vanished behind them. Those that lacked such failsafes simply lost lift and spiraled into the ocean or empty countryside, breaking apart in harmless bursts of purple and rust.

Suddenly, the air over Galaxenchi was clear.

On the ground, Galaxy forces felt the shift like a pressure valve opening.

In Kasairyoku Valley, deathtanks that had been firing steadily all day suddenly stopped, their crews looking up at the sky as golden light washed over their hulls. A heartbeat later, Galaxadale's tanks came over the ridge in a roaring wave, crushing them flat.

On the rivers, necro-currents collapsed into ordinary water. Galaxastream exhaled, dropping to his knees on his little disc of current as the Suzukaze returned to a normal, exhausted flow.

In every contested district of Suzutamashi, Gallaxgonbei, Kinchōhakkei, and the neighboring states, zombie hordes began to flicker. Without the dreadnought's anchoring aura and Deathwing's Absolute pressure, many of the weaker necromantic bindings simply... gave out. Deathsoldiers stiffened mid-stride and fell into piles of bones. Mutant marines clutched at their chests and disintegrated into black dust.

Those that remained, still tethered to deeper, more stubborn rites, faced a reorganized storm.

"全軍、前進。" All forces, advance, Galaxadye ordered. "ゾンビの群れを囲んで消しなさい。" Encircle and erase the remaining hordes.

Across multiple states, Galax Soldiers, Marines, Rangers, Zealots, Marauders, Police, Guards tightened their rings. Guided by real-time data from Galaxwis and live vectors from the Supreme Commanders, they pushed in, sector by sector. Golden artillery cleared chokepoints; elites like Galaxkiba, Galaxseiryu, Galaxmizuki, Galaxmurasaki, Galaxharp, Galaxrire, Galaxytsukifenghuang, Galaxyraijin, Galaxyqinglong, and others dropped in to surgically remove remaining Death elites before they could reestablish a real front.

By the time the sun dipped toward the horizon, the Death Regime's presence on Galaxenchi had been reduced to scattered stains—a few corrupted craters here, a handful of stubborn undead pockets there—none of them with a solid command chain behind them.

Maps aboard Tenshinkō and the orbiting command carriers slowly shifted.

City by city, state by state, iron purple overlays faded back to gold.

Gallaxgonbei – liberated.
Suzutamashi – reclaimed after brutal contest, cities back under Galaxy control.
Kinchōhakkei – front lines secured, no Death foothold remaining.
Outlying belts – contested zones cleared or downgraded to "residual hazard."

At last, the master map above Galaxbeam's position—an enormous holographic projection of all Galaxenchi—glowed almost entirely gold.

He hung in the air, shoulders sagging for the first time, and let himself feel exactly one deep breath of relief.

"好。" Good.

He could have left it there.

He should have left it there.

Instead, Galaxbeam turned, again, to that slightly off-center point in the sky.

"作者，" he said in Cantonese, tone somewhere between fond and accusing. Author. "你睇吓你搞成點樣。" Look at what you have done. "成個 Galaxenchi 變咗戰場。城市爛晒，經濟會計部門肯定會嚟投訴。" You have turned all of Galaxenchi into a battlefield. The cities are ruined; the accounting department is definitely going to file a complaint.

He paused.

"再加上，" he added dryly, "你為咗字數，寫咁多爆炸同骰仔記錄。" And on top of that, you padded the word count with this many explosions and dice logs.

He flipped the chalk in his hand, caught it, and—for once—did not write an equation.

He snapped his fingers.

The sound was small.

The effect was not.

Time did not rewind completely; lives already lived through the terror kept their memories. But material history—stones, steel, glass, cracked streets, singed forests—shivered and flowed backward along their own timelines.

Collapsed buildings in Suzutamashi rose in reverse, dust racing back into bricks, shattered windows knitting themselves whole. Scarred highways in Kinchōhakkei smoothed, burn marks sliding away into nothing. Craters in Gallaxgonbei filled in as if grief itself healed, leaving only faint, luminous rings visible to Absolutes and Supreme Commanders.

Hospital beds emptied of critical injuries as shrapnel "decided" it had never entered flesh, leaving only exhaustion and psychosomatic aches in its place. Fallen Galaxy troopers reappeared in staging areas as blue recall particles finished resolving, having been "pulled" from slightly earlier save-points.

Most civilians only felt a dizzy lurch, as if reality had blinked.

On paper, in budget spreadsheets and reconstruction plans, the damage column shrank to something survivable.

"這次算你合格啦," Galaxbeam said to the unseen narrator. This time, I will mark you as "pass." "唔好慣性咁濫用，OK？" Do not make a habit of abusing this, all right?

He let his hand fall.

Galaxenchi hung beneath him, whole again, lights flickering on across cities now under golden skies.

That evening, in an auditorium in Galaxengongshi, Professor Galaxbeam walked into a lecture hall and set a piece of ordinary chalk onto an ordinary blackboard.

Supreme Commanders and elites sat scattered among rows of regular cadets. Galaxadye with a bandage along one temple, Galaxadale with her uniform jacket still smelling faintly of smoke, Galaxastream with damp hair, Galaxastorm with low thunder muttering under his collar, Galaxastride and Galaxapuff both in rear seats per their "mandatory rest" orders. Galaxkiba perched in the aisle like it was a rooftop. Galaxwis and Galaxytsukifenghuang shared a row near the back, quietly comparing notes.

On the board, Galaxbeam wrote:

「銀河戦術特講」
Galaxenchi Defense & Liberation – Review Session

He turned to face them.

"まずは一言。" First, a few words.

He looked over the room—all these beings who had just bled across maps, now sitting with notebooks open.

"よく頑張りました。" You did well.

A murmured wave of embarrassed coughs and half-smiles went through the room.

"In today's class," he continued in English, eyes glinting behind his glasses, "we will discuss three key topics. One: why you should never over-trust a single dreadnought, no matter how long its name is." A ripple of laughter at "Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz." "Two: how to anticipate an enemy who believes in deathbeams more than probability. And three..."

He shifted to Cantonese for that last part.

"點樣喺作者鍾意加戲嘅時候，自己識得搵落幕。" How to find your own curtain call when the author keeps adding scenes.

Somewhere far, far away in the dark beyond Galaxenchi's seas, the crippled Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz limped through void on emergency power, its interior flickering with violet repair rites. In one of its deep, half-lit chambers, Deathwing sat on a throne of re-growing vertebrae, staring down at a map of the world.

His health ring still glowed, dim but unbroken.

"Galaxenchi... befreit," he conceded, tracing a clawed finger over the continent. Galaxenchi... liberated. "Für jetzt." For now.

His eyes slid toward other continents. Other regimes. Other cracks in reality.

"Der Unterricht ist nicht vorbei, Professor." The lesson is not over, Professor.

Back in the lecture hall, Galaxbeam paused, looked up at the ceiling as if hearing an echo, and then smiled faintly.

"さて," he said, tapping the chalk against the board. Now then. "次は小テスト。" Next comes a quiz.

Outside, under a completely repaired sky, Galaxenchi celebrated—soldiers cheering in plazas, civilians lighting lanterns, carriers and Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary cruising in lazy, victorious arcs. For the first time in a long while, the night over the Galaxy Regime's homeland was entirely, defiantly gold.