SUPREMACY- Clash Between Heroes and Villains Chapter 46: Goldduchaisan Rolls the Dice

 Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz—now fully refit, plated in layered violet-hull composite and ringed with plus-eyed skull pennants—anchored so far off the Galaxenchi shoreline that ordinary scopes could not even draw an outline. It floated like a moving necropolis, a maritime cathedral of bio-warfare, humming with cold reactors and low chanting from the ship's vivisection decks. From this distance it could not be shelled from shore, could not be sabotaged by stealth skiffs, and could not be ignored. It was the statement: the Death Regime is back in the Galaxenchi theatre.

In the command theater, Doctor Deathwing stood at the panoramic view, eyes glowing with that telltale "+" pupil the regime carried as their heresy-brand. Around him floated holo-charts of the Goldduchaisan State (very large)—a proud astral province of the Galaxy Regime whose cities were, frankly, too pretty to be left alive by a faction that specialized in discolored immortality.

"Ziel ist Goldduchaisan," he said quietly in German, as if telling the sea a secret. "Wir nehmen alles." Target is Goldduchaisan. We take everything.

Supreme Commander Deathenpuff, back from the island consolidation campaign, folded her arms and nodded once. Supreme Commander Deathenstorm, salt-slick from days of patrolling the supply lanes, rolled his shoulders. Supreme Commander Deathendye checked casualty-growth projections, which in the Death Regime meant how many new immortals we can cultivate from the enemy's mistake. The room smelt like antiseptic and ambition.

Outside, launch decks opened. Dozens—then hundreds—of violet war-skiffs rushed out, followed by plague-bombers, toxin-drones, and armored amphibs whose bellies carried deathsoldiers, deathmarines, deathrangers, deathmarauders and whole pods of vat-raised chemical "meat" tanks. They fanned forward toward the eastern skies of Galaxenyobi, Galaxenyura, and Galaxenomi, the first coastal belt of Goldduchaisan.

Deathwing raised a hand. "Stop."

The armadas froze. Even the storm seemed to pause.

He turned directly at us—at the reader, at the narrator, at the author, at the poor Wattpad draft page still blankly titled Chapter 46:—and produced a lacquered box. Inside: a big, transparent six-sided die and a black-gold coin stamped with a skull and a quill.

"Invasion stories," the doctor said, with pedagogical spite, "are too linear. We are playing against Galaxbeam—the classroom tyrant of time. So we randomize. We force branches. We make the narrative sweat."

He flicked the coin into the air. At the same time he let the die tumble over the strategy table. The officers of undeath watched with military solemnity, as if this were a council of admirals instead of a cosmic gacha.

"Regel," he said. "Heads: we land. Tails: they repel. Die: one through three, Galaxy holds shorelines. Four through six, we breach, raise flag, open teleportal."

The coin spun.

The die rolled.

And because this was a war between two factions who were both canonically "about ten steps ahead," both results happened. The chapter split like a mitotic cell, and we followed both at once.

In Version A (Galaxy Holds):

The first wave of Death Regime assault craft came screaming over Galaxen-Yutai (玉台) and Galaxen-Kōrinden (光錬殿). The skies almost tore; toxin-shells rained; naval guns pounded the coasts behind a veil of chemical steam. But the moment the first violet prow crossed the invisible line of Goldduchaisan coastal jurisdiction, a lattice of golden chronolines lit up. Professor/Prince Galaxbeam had already stitched the entire state into a defensive academic syllabus.

Every gun mount, every watchtower, every dock in Senshekaidong Capital, Nanuekekonui City, Gallaxbonheinoshi {capital}, even the inland high seats like Galaxen-Tianluo (天羅) and Galaxen-Tenmon (天門), had been pre-lectured into alertness. Artillery crews were, at that exact hour, taking a lesson called "What To Do When An Undead Bio-Navy Tries To Beach Itself On Your Campus." Quizzes were passed. Notes were shared. Firing solutions were ready.

Golden artillery—very on brand—opened up. Plasma-runic cannons, mounted beneath pagoda harbor roofs, spat lances that struck Death Regime landing craft squarely. We watched deathmarines stagger forward, take three steps on Galaxy soil, and then—StarCraft rules invoked by some grinning Galaxy tactician—poof into shimmering particles, like zealots who had fulfilled their production quota.

On the higher ridges toward Motoshski Hold and Galaxen-Suixing (随星), Galaxy air wings scrambled. Supreme Commander Galaxastream vectored patrols; Galaxastorm pushed storm-barriers; Galaxapuff—never just Puff, as she had scolded earlier—took personal control of the northern flank and did not let a single drop ship through. Galaxy female elites such as Galaxtres, Galaxyhikariyue, Galaxysorahana, and Galaxayumilian deployed shield-scripts over city domes so that falling debris would glide aside and not ruin the roofs the civics committee had just replastered.

On a side terrace of Galaxen-Kōseido (光星道), Galaxbeam himself appeared, immaculate, holding the golden quill. He wrote three characters in the air—防, 擊, 歸—defend, strike, return. The characters became operant commands across the whole state.

Deathwing, watching the repulse feed aboard his titan ship, sighed in Mandarin. "你看，他連失敗都要寫成教材。" You see? He even turns our success into his teaching material.

He turned to the narrator again. "Fine. Version A, delete landing. Mark as Death Regime gains data; Galaxy keeps coastline."

But because the die had also said otherwise, we must follow Version B (Death Lands):

A lucky—or rather inevitably calculated—cluster of plague-bombers descended under the angle of three eclipsed moons. Galaxy coastal guns, cycling through a hundred predictive trajectories, briefly misread the refracted sensor ghost. In that two-second lapse, Death regime tide-crawlers dug into the shallows of Galaxen-Yujing (玉清) and Galaxen-Wuwei (无为). Ramps slammed down. Deathsoldiers in violet-grey emerged, coughing pleased toxin, banners of the plus-eyed skull unfurling.

"Basis errichtet!" one hollered in coarse German. "Base established!"

They drove pylons into the sand—biomechanical pylons pulsing with necro-power. Between them, a teleportal throat yawned open, humming with purple fractal rings. From the deck of the far-off Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz, Deathwing hurled canisters of compressed personnel: zombies, chemical specialists, a whole company of Deathmarines in armored exosuits. They warped in, far behind the first line of Galaxy docks.

Galaxy counterbattery fire hit them hard. Marquis-class Death tanks melted. Several squads of Deathrangers died so completely their virus couldn't even be collected. But every time a Death Regime soldier's body melted, skin sloughing off from a railgun hit or from high-heat shrapnel, onboard bio-gel packs crystallized their data and sent it back up the portal. Deathwing was not losing; he was learning.

Inside Gallaxbonheinoshi {capital}, alarm bells rang. Clerks cleared the streets. Learning halls folded into bunkers. In the high plaza of Senshekaidong Capital, Galaxbeam reappeared.

"Reader," he said, eyes tired but amused, "they rolled a six. We allow the landing. But we do not allow occupation."

He extended the quill. The plaza floor lit up. The whole capital shifted to Campus Defense Mode. Walls reshaped; towers turned; gates rerouted their own geometry. Death landing teams that thought they had teleported into an open boulevard instead emerged inside lecture halls full of very calm Galaxy officers copying diagrams. The Galaxy officers smiled politely, stood, and all at once activated page-bound containment sigils. Death troops found themselves frozen in chalk circles.

"Welcome to your remedial course," said Galaxtres, stepping down from the lectern, hair tied back, sword-pen glowing. "Topic: Why you should not teleport into cities run by Professor Galaxbeam."

She spoke it in perfect Mandarin, then in Cantonese for emphasis.

Whichever branch we take, the macro-battle was the same: the seas of Goldduchaisan boiled with violet and gold. Death regime aircraft roared over Galaxen-Tenshin (天神), only to be clipped from the sky by Galaxy anti-air arrays in Galaxen-Hoshijin (星神) and Galaxen-Tenmon (天門). When Death tanks trundled toward the central temple-port of Galaxen-Yaojie (滔界), Galaxy chronomancers in Galaxen-Tiansuo (天索) slowed their engines to mythic crawl so artillery crews could pick them off at leisure. When Galaxy infantry were finally hit, they vanished—programmed by Galaxbeam to return as light to the muster-vaults, StarCraft-style, so the enemy never even enjoyed the spectacle of a corpse.

Death forces that stayed too long under Galaxy fire eventually melted—not in panic, but in engineered compliance. Their necro-flesh sublimated into violet fog and streamed back toward the open portal or back to the mother ship offshore, hard-written with combat telemetry.

On the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz, Deathwing never stopped narrating to himself. "Three cities soft," he said, marking: Galaxen-Yujing, Galaxen-Wuwei, Galaxen-Tianluo. "Five hard," he added: Galaxen-Kōrinden, Senshekaidong Capital, Motoshski Hold, Nanuekekonui City, Gallaxbonheinoshi. "Professor, du bist wieder schneller," he murmured. You are faster again.

Behind him, Deathenpuff watched the casualty-return graphs spike. "Sollen wir durchdrücken?" she asked. Should we push through?

"Nein. Not today," Deathwing said. "This is reconnaissance at catastrophic scale. We tested their shoreline, their chronolines, their female elites. Next strike we skip Goldduchaisan and go for the inner states—Galaxen-Suixing, Galaxen-Kongzang, even Galaxen-Tokitsume. We make him run classes in three places at once."

He looked up, straight into the story. "And yes," he added in Cantonese now, sharp and amused, 「我知你會寫我失敗。」I know you will write I failed. "But we banked all the data. 我哋下一次唔會客氣." Next time we won't be polite.

Far inland, in the quiet observatory over Galaxen-Kosokai (古蒼界), Galaxbeam felt the ripple of retreat over the sea. He closed the lesson he was giving on "Comparative Meta-Warfare: Star Regime vs Shadow Regime; Lunar vs Blackened; Solar vs Darkened" and wrote a short note in the margin of reality.

"Deathwing has upgraded his ship to mobile HQ and is testing for multi-state penetration," the note said. "Main objective: Goldduchaisan. Outcome: contested. Recommend: further temporal padding on coastal cities, rotate Galaxapuff to northern watch, let Galaxtres continue to bully portals."

He paused, then added one last thing, aimed directly at the Doctor across the ocean, in soft German:

"Wirf deine Münzen, Doktor. Ich korrigiere trotzdem."
Toss your coins, Doctor. I will grade it anyway.

Out at sea the titanic violet ship turned slowly, wounded only in pride, and reset for the next throw of the dice. The theatre campaign in Galaxenchi was not over—it had only learned how to randomize.

The violet armada did not leave.

All night over Goldduchaisan's eastern water the Death Regime kept the pressure on—tight, methodical, like a surgeon refusing to close a wound until he had examined every nerve. Their bombers did not attack in mindless waves the way lesser factions would; they came in measured cadences, testing angle, altitude, saturation, response time. Every time the Galaxy Regime answered, Deathwing wrote it down. Every time Deathwing adjusted, Galaxbeam had already prepared the counter-adjustment two pages earlier.

Out at sea the titan ship—Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz, a name arrogant enough to be a weapon—sat half-shrouded in chemical fog. Its launch decks opened and closed in intervals so regular they bordered on musical. From time to time Deathwing himself appeared on the forward balcony and spoke directly to shore as if the whole coastline were his student.

"銀河の連中、きょうは何ページ目だ？" he called in Japanese, voice riding the loud-hailers. "Galaxy people, what page are we on today?"

From the high terrace of Senshekaidong Capital, Galaxbeam actually answered, his voice carried by a neat column of golden sound. "Die Seite, auf der du wieder verlierst, Doktor." The page on which you lose again, Doctor.

The coastal guns laughed. Yes—guns laughed; they had been enchanted by Galaxy clerks bored during maintenance.

Deathwing turned to the invisible camera. "See? He thinks this is a lecture. I think this is a clinical trial. The author—" here he jabbed a finger right out of the story "—thinks this is entertainment. We shall discover who is correct."

He snapped his fingers. An attendant zombie officer brought him the lacquered dice box and the black-gold coin again. This time Deathwing did not even pretend it was for his staff. He lifted them so the reader could see.

"Same rule. Heads, we punch through and establish a beachhead. Tails, we get stalled offshore and are forced to harvest data instead. Die: one–three Galaxy repels, four–six we land and open portals. Author may overrule at any time because power creep is a literary device."

He flipped.

He rolled.

The coin flashed in the sky like a second, ruder moon. It fell... tails.

The die bounced once on the rail, spinning like a nervous satellite. It stopped on 5.

Deathwing stared at both results, then looked off-screen. "So. Split reality again? You realize this increases editorial workload."

A long, patient silence followed—the silence of the author considering wattpad formatting.

"...Very well."

He clapped once. "Version one: we land, we establish, we open teleportal. Version two: we get kept at half-ocean and forced to snipe from long range. Both are canon until the professor grades them."

The water roared and the story branched.

──────────────

In the thread where the Death Regime breaks through:

Bombers in the third wave angled lower than doctrine advised. They flew inside the sprayline of Galaxy shore guns, letting the mist obscure their signatures. Behind them, amphibious siege craft deployed insulated shock-reflectors so Galaxy ion-cannons could not atomize their hulls on first contact. The result was ugly, loud, and effective.

A whole string of landing craft smashed through the last tier of offshore mines, skated over the glowing chronolines, and slammed themselves into the surf southwest of Galaxen-Yaojie. Ramps dropped. Violet-grey bodies poured out, rifles up, toxin vents hissing. They did not stop to look heroic—they ran, because even zombies respect overlapping Galaxy barrages.

"Basis! Basis! Basis!" shouted squad leaders in German and Cantonese both, driving bio-pylons into the sand. "Schnell! 開陣！快啲快啲快啲!"

The pylons pulsed. Between them the familiar spiral of purple rings opened—a field teleportal, smaller than a city gate but large enough to vomit out platoons. Deathmarines deployed portable curtain shields to cover the portal from return fire. Deathrangers set up chem-sniper nests in the dunes. Within forty seconds the Death Regime had a functional forward operating node.

Galaxy artillery screamed back. Golden blasts chewed up sand, shredded squads, blew two meat tanks into grotesque purple fireworks. But every Death soldier who went down liquefied with neat efficiency, virus-packets zipping straight back up the teleportal to be re-printed aboard the titan ship. From Deathwing's view this was not a loss—it was successful delivery of field specimens.

A company of Galaxy infantry rushed the beach, armor gleaming. They fought like anime protagonists: fast cuts, crisp footwork, banners flying. Yet some of them, when struck hard enough, simply vanished—turned into streaks of golden light, retreating to sanctum bunkers to be reissued later. One Death sergeant watching this swore in German.

"Das ist doch StarCraft!" he shouted. "This is literally StarCraft!"

"Complain to the writer," said his lieutenant, firing a toxin-round. "We just un-die here."

The beach became a brutal, blinking loop of materialize → shoot → melt/vanish → respawn somewhere else → return. Casualties mounted, but death did not. The kill-to-wound ratio on both sides flattened into something absurdly high for wounds and nearly zero for permanent loss—exactly what happens when two immortal, anticipatory factions fight under narrative protection.

Up on a dune, Deathwing watched through a glass. "We got shore. We opened gate. We can now stream battalions. This is, by my criteria, success."

Behind him, Deathenpuff reported in German: "Versorgungstruppen sind unterwegs. Wir sichern die Strände, bauen Munitionsdepots, richten Feldlabors ein." Supply troops en route, we secure beaches, build ammunition depots, set field labs.

"Gut," Deathwing said. "Und jetzt—"

A golden line of writing cut across the sky.

Galaxbeam had written "撤回 (withdraw)" over the beach... for the Death regime.

For a heartbeat the Death lines hesitated, unsure whether the command applied to them. The quill-script was of such high authority that physics itself wanted to obey. Several Death squads involuntarily took two steps backward into the surf.

"Nein," Deathwing snarled at the sky. "Deine Grammatik bindet mich nicht!" Your grammar does not bind me!

He tore the glyph in half with a counter-sigil of rotten violet. The beach stabilized again—but the interruption bought Galaxy artillery six more seconds, which was enough for Galaxtres and Galaxapuff to arrive and begin the polite act of kicking the entire invasion back into the sea.

"Next time," Galaxbeam called from far inland, voice dry, "try landing in a city that wants you."

──────────────

In the thread where the Galaxy Regime keeps them at half-distance:

The amphibious craft never made it to the shoals. The water six kilometers out became a zone of ruin: golden orbital pulses from Galaxen-Tokitsume rained down in a lattice; coastal chrono-mines in Nanuekekonui City were triggered in concentric rings; high-altitude interceptor wings from Galaxen-Kongzang (宮蔵) sniped every bomber before it could dive.

From the cliff-line temples the female Galaxy elites stood shoulder to shoulder—Galaxtres, Galaxyhikariyue, Galaxysorahana, Galaxazumilian—just... erasing approach vectors with elegant flicks of calligraphy. Entire squadrons of Death aircraft found themselves gently redirected to go crash into the empty sea instead of the coastline. From our point of view it looked like the anime version of air defense: stylized, beautiful, catastrophically effective.

Deathwing, seeing this from his ship, only nodded. "Gut. Dann bleibt ihr dort." Good. Then you stay there. He shifted strategy immediately, long-range shelling only, harvest what he could, no suicide landings. To him it did not matter which version the reader saw; both yielded data.

──────────────

Whichever branch the author—or you—decide to privilege, the middle of the chapter was the same: casualties climbed. Galaxy medical barges darted under fire, teleporting wounded soldiers out before their light fully flickered. Death field-labs on the beach (or on the ships) sucked up liquefied comrades to reprint them with slightly better toxin-resistance. The soundscape was awful: cannons, mortars, ion barrages, anti-air, and on top of it all the wet chemical cough of Death Regime weapons clouding the air in heavy violet.

Even the narrators started wearing masks.

At one point Deathwing and Galaxbeam both looked directly at us.

Galaxbeam said, "By now you have realized we are not trying to kill each other. We are proving supremacy of method."

Deathwing said, "By now you have realized he will never let me finish an occupation in one chapter."

They said together, in different languages, "Complain to the author."

──────────────

In late afternoon—time already bent five, six minutes sideways by Galaxy chronomancers so civilian evacuation could finish—Deathwing finally raised his hand.

"Genug für heute." Enough for today.

On every Death channel the order rippled out. Beach teams (in the landing version) began pulling back through their teleportal, taking with them crates of soil, broken Galaxy weapons, captured spell-shards—anything Death labs could interrogate. Offshore craft broke contact in professional order, trading last salvos with Galaxy coastal batteries. The titan ship began to rotate, not retreating fully, but settling into a picket stance far out in the deep water, like a wolf choosing to watch the village overnight.

From the observatory over Galaxen-Kosokai, Galaxbeam watched him go and made another notation in the margin of reality: "Day 2: Death regime insisted on coin-flip strategy. Breached in one branch, stalled in another. Casualties high but recoverable. Cities intact. Recommend: continue to let him 'win' in reversible layers. This keeps him talking. Talking keeps him predictable."

He paused, added: "Also tell Galaxtres to stop selling fanservice passes for the next spa episode. This is still a war."

Then, because he knew Deathwing was listening, he said in flawless Cantonese, 「你下次帶埋啲新花款嚟啦，成日擲骰好悶。」Bring some new tricks next time, it's boring rolling dice every day.

Out at sea, Deathwing laughed, also in Cantonese. 「你講得好似你唔會改我啲骰咁。」You talk like you don't overwrite my dice.

He held up the coin to the invisible camera. "Same time tomorrow," he said. "We flip again."

The next morning, the sea between Goldduchaisan and the horizon was divided by an invisible line.

To the west: calm waters leading to the continent, the protected shipping corridors to Galaxen-Yutai and Nanuekekonui City, the bright towers of Senshekaidong just visible when the light hit right.

To the east: a violet haze where the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz lurked far beyond ordinary sight, its silhouette occasionally flashing like a slow, malignant heartbeat.

Standing on the bridge of the Galaxy flagship Kōrindenshō, Supreme Commander Galaxadye loved that line the way a mathematician loves a clean graph.

"Remember," he said, tapping the tactical screen. "Everything ugly stays on that side. This side belongs to class schedules and hotpot reservations."

His staff laughed a little too loudly. Laughing made the anti-ship missiles feel less heavy.

Galaxadye straightened his coat, the trim the same gold-white as the spray outside. He touched the comm rune linked to the observatory in Galaxen-Kosokai.

"Professor," he said, "naval cordon established. Air patrols in overlapping shells, chrono-mines woven into the midline. If Deathwing tries another coin flip, I'd like to be the thumb that ruins the toss."

Galaxbeam's hologram appeared above the table, sipping tea he absolutely did not have time for.

"Approved," the professor said. "You're our mid-ocean firewall. Don't sink any ships I'm still grading."

"You're the one who gave them a titan carrier," Galaxadye pointed out. "Feels like the exam is biased."

Galaxbeam glanced sideways, clearly looking at the reader instead. "Power creep keeps people turning pages," he said. "Do your homework, Commander."

The projection faded.

Galaxadye exhaled, rolled his shoulders, and turned toward the glass.

"Alright, Deathwing," he murmured. "Show me how badly you want remedial geography."

The answer came ten minutes later, in the language of radar pings and violet contrails.

"Contact, bearing one-three-two," the sensor officer called. "Multiple signatures leaving the titan ship. Estimate: three assault carrier groups, screen of destroyers and meat barges, altitude clusters indicate bomber wings."

"Halfway line in twelve minutes," the navigator added.

Galaxadye's smile sharpened. "Plenty of time for exposition then."

He flipped open his own small dice box and pulled out a perfectly ordinary six-sider.

The helmsman stared. "Sir?"

"We keep breaking the fourth wall anyway," Galaxadye said. "Might as well join the trend. One to three, we play this conservatively. Four to six, we do something the Doctor will describe as 'reckless but annoyingly elegant.'"

He rolled. The die bounced against the brass rail.

Six.

"Annoyingly elegant it is," Galaxadye said. "Signal the screen. Formations Theta and Rho. Move our carriers ahead of the line, not behind it."

"Sir, that pushes us closer to their artillery envelope—"

"That's the point. We meet them in the middle where both sides hate the math equally. Tell the air wings: we're going to dance."

The Galaxy fleet surged forward, gold-prowed cruisers and sleek carriers carving bright scars across the dark water. Overhead, squadrons of silver-gold fighters ignited their engines, climbing into spirals that looked more like spell diagrams than flight paths.

Halfway across the sea, the Death Regime responded.

Out of the violet fog came wedge-shaped destroyers coated in anti-corrosion glyphs, their hulls stamped with skull symbols whose pupils were plus signs, glowing faintly even in daylight. Organic barges followed behind them, flesh and metal fused, venting a sickly mist that tasted like disinfectant and rain.

From the lead Death carrier, a familiar voice crackled across open frequency.

"Guten Morgen, Goldduchaisan," Deathwing said. "I see you've sent a new protagonist."

Galaxadye patched himself in. "Guten Morgen, Doktor. Welcome back to remedial ocean studies. Today's topic: buoyancy of hubris."

"I give you credit," Deathwing replied. "You put your fleet in front instead of hiding behind your coast. Very shōnen of you."

"Someone has to keep you away from Galaxen-Yutai's snack imports," Galaxadye said. "You raid one more mochi shipment and our morale plummets."

Deathwing actually chuckled. "Let us see whether your jokes float when the shells land."

As if on cue, the Death destroyers opened fire. Violet-tinted artillery arcs crossed the sky, followed immediately by streaks of chem-rockets. The air filled with trailing spores that tried very hard to be ominous.

"Neutralize, please," Galaxadye said calmly.

The Galaxy escorts responded in well-practiced layers. Point-defense lasers carved up the incoming projectiles. Ion lances detonated the largest shells mid-flight, blooming into brief, brilliant flowers of contained plasma. The spores found themselves caught in a web of counter-charms projected from the lead cruiser and, discovering that all their scary rhetorical questions had already been answered in an appendix, politely sublimated into harmless glitter.

"First volley contained," the tactical officer reported.

"Good," Galaxadye said. "Now we go in."

He gestured. On the screen, the Galaxy formation flexed. Instead of grinding straight forward like a blunt wall, the fleet folded into a pattern that looked suspiciously like a Go board mid-game. The carriers drifted slightly off-axis; destroyers angled in deliberate asymmetry. To an untrained eye it was chaos. To a Supreme Commander with a doctorate in probability topology, it was a web.

"Commander," his adjutant said, "are we doing the 'fake weakness real strength' thing again?"

"We are doing the 'make Deathwing think he's out-thinking me while my pilots treat the battle like a bullet hell game' thing," Galaxadye answered. "All wings, permission to dodge dramatically granted. The animators will be pleased."

The sky exploded.

Death fighters, black and violet, screamed in on chittering engines, their cockpits filled with plus-eyed pilots who technically didn't need oxygen but wore masks anyway because aesthetics are important. Galaxy fighters met them head-on, cannons blazing, contrails twisting.

Laser fire stitched across the clouds. Missile spreads bloomed and intersected. Several Galaxy craft took hits; when they spun out of formation and began to tumble earthward, their cockpits flashed gold and both pilot and machine turned into streaks of light, vanishing back to repair docks or med-bays.

On the Death side, burning fighters erupted into clouds of purplish fluid, which streamed backwards in defiance of wind toward collection nodes mounted on the assault carriers.

"Respawn logistics confirmed," Galaxadye muttered. "At least they're consistent."

A proximity alarm shrieked.

"Meat barge breaking through the lower screen!" a sensor tech shouted. "Vectoring directly toward our central carrier!"

"Deathrangers on board, toxin turrets primed," another added.

Galaxadye's mind ran three turns ahead, then five, then ten. If the barge reached the carrier, it could lash its organic tendrils onto the hull and form a stable bridgehead for boarding. From there, Death troops could plant bio-pylons and open a micro-portal right in the middle of the Galaxy formation.

Which meant the barge could not be allowed past the midline. Period.

He flipped his comm to the forward frigate squadron. "Squadron Hikari, adjust heading two degrees starboard, full burn. Ram authorization: partial."

"Partial, sir?" the captain asked. "How do you ram partially?"

"You hit them with the bow shield, not the hull, and you warp out a moment before impact," Galaxadye said. "Think of it as throwing your own ship at them with a retractable leash."

"That sounds like something the author would write when they're low on coffee."

"Correct," Galaxadye agreed. "Execute."

The lead frigate flared, engines screaming. It plowed straight toward the oncoming meat barge. Seconds before collision, its hull flickered into pure light and vanished, leaving behind only the invisible force of its shield projected ahead on inertial carry.

That invisible hammer smashed into the barge's front. The grotesque vessel folded in half, purple fluids erupting, toxins hissing. For a moment it tried to heal itself—but Galaxadye had already ordered long-range lances to focus fire. Ion beams converged, and the barge disintegrated into glittering dust and regret.

The frigate reappeared safely several kilometers astern, its captain's relieved laughter echoing over comms.

"Nice swing," Galaxadye said. "You may put that on your resume."

Deathwing's voice slid into the channel again, mildly annoyed now.

"You're making my job statistically unpleasant," the Doctor remarked. "I only wanted a direct corridor to your continent. You are turning this into a thesis defense."

"This is a thesis defense," Galaxadye said. "Title: 'On the Impossibility of Purple Skull Fleets Approaching Within Fifty Kilometers of Goldduchaisan Without Being Mocked.'"

He switched to Mandarin, just to be rude. "博士，你應該感謝我，呢啲數據好有研究價值。" Doctor, you should thank me, all this data is excellent for your research.

Deathwing replied in smooth German, because of course he did. "Und du solltest mir danken, Kommandant. Ohne mich wäre dein Kapitel nur ein ruhiger Strandspaziergang." And you should thank me, Commander. Without me your chapter would just be a quiet walk on the beach.

"Readers like quiet beaches sometimes," Galaxadye said. Then he glanced toward the invisible camera. "Right?"

The camera did not answer. It only zoomed out to show the scale of the engagement: dozens of ships trading broadside fire, hundreds of fighters weaving lethal calligraphy in the air, the two great powers grinding probabilities against each other until the day itself felt worn.

Hours passed.

The midline held.

Every time Death destroyers tried to punch through, Galaxy cruisers met them with concentrated fire. Every time Death bombers dove low to slip under the screen, chronomines detonated in carefully staggered bursts, slowing their approach just enough for interceptors to catch them. A few close calls made it through—one salvo of chem-shells splashed across the deck of a Galaxy carrier, forcing emergency cleansing protocols and sending half a wing back to decontamination—but no Death vessel crossed into the safe-water side of the invisible line.

Near sunset the sea burned orange and violet together. Both fleets had taken a beating; several Death ships now listed, held together more by spite than structure, while two Galaxy cruisers had retreated under tow, their hulls scorched.

On the bridge of the Kōrindenshō, Galaxadye rubbed tired eyes and checked the latest casualty chart. As expected: wound counts enormous, permanent losses minimal. The strange mercy of meta-war.

A soft ping sounded on the private channel.

Galaxbeam's face appeared again, this time with what might have been the ghost of a grin.

"Midline remains intact," the professor said. "Goldduchaisan's cities report clear skies. Good work, Dye."

"Thank you, sir," Galaxadye replied. "Though I suspect the Doctor is about to claim he won anyway."

He was right. A second later, Deathwing's voice came over wideband, amplified from the distant titan ship.

"Tag für Tag verteidigt ihr nur," he called. "Every day you only defend. I advance my understanding. That is also victory."

Galaxadye answered in the same language, his tone almost light. "Verstehen reicht nicht, Doktor. Irgendwann musst du auch bestehen." Understanding is not enough, Doctor. Sooner or later you must also pass.

Deathwing went quiet—not defeated, merely thoughtful.

After a long moment, he said, "We withdraw for recalibration. Do not let your students slack in my absence, Professor. And Commander—"

"Yes?"

"Beim nächsten Mal bringe ich einen Würfel mit mehr Seiten." Next time I bring a die with more sides.

"Next time," Galaxadye said, "I bring more erasers."

The Death fleet began to peel away, broken silhouettes sinking back into the violet fog around the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz. Galaxy ships held position until the sensors confirmed safe distance, then slowly relaxed into patrol patterns.

Night rose. The midline became invisible again, but everyone on both sides still felt it—a tension drawn across the water, a promise that tomorrow's lecture would be louder.

Galaxadye stepped out onto the open deck, letting the sea wind slam into his face. Far behind him, Goldduchaisan's coast glowed like a row of lanterns. Ahead, only darkness and the faint, unhealthy sheen where the titan ship slept.

He flipped his small die one more time into the air, catching it without looking.

"Same sea, same enemy, new equations," he murmured. "Reader, if you're still with us, bring snacks. Naval arcs are long."

The die in his palm showed a three.

"Conservative tomorrow, then," he said. "Just to mess with the Doctor's expectations."

He slipped the die into his pocket, turned back toward the bridge, and the sea behind him rolled on, caught between gold and violet and whatever bizarre color comes from two geniuses arguing with probability itself.

Reinforcements arrived the way good math solutions do—late in the process, but exactly when you realize the problem would have been impossible without them.

The first new signatures appeared as bright crescents on the tactical screen, rising from the south like a second dawn over the sea. Galaxadye recognized the transponder codes immediately: the carrier Hoshijin's Grace, the heavy cruiser Tiansuo Edge, and a screen of destroyers from Nanuekekonui City. Above them, fresh fighter wings fanned out across the deepening sky.

"About time," he murmured, then hit fleet-wide channel. "This is Supreme Commander Galaxadye. Southern task force, welcome to the midline. Congratulations, you've joined the worst group project in history."

A calm voice replied from the new flagship. "Acknowledged, Commander. This is Admiral Suixing. Our students finished their exams early. They were eager for extra credit."

"Extra credit is live fire today," Galaxadye said. "Form on my southern flank. We're going to squeeze our visitors back toward their purple thundercloud."

The morale on the bridge visibly lifted. Pilots who had been outnumbered now found new wingmates sliding into formation beside them. Damage control teams, hearing the exchange over internal speakers, straightened up with the stubborn pride of people whose work was suddenly part of a winning equation.

On the far side of the sea, the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz rumbled like a sleeping beast adjusting its posture. Within its cathedral-bridge, Doctor Deathwing watched the shifting formations with plus-pupiled eyes, then flicked annoyance from his sleeve like dust.

"Reinforcements," he said. "Predictable. Efficient. Boring." He turned to the two figures standing at the plotting table beside him. "Time to let the strategists earn their stitches."

Supreme Commander Deathenstride, long-limbed and wrapped in a coat sewn from decommissioned body bags, inclined his head. Supreme Commander Deathendale, broader, with a breastplate etched in overlapping autopsy diagrams, simply cracked his knuckles.

"You will oversee the armada," Deathwing said, voice switching to formal German. "Koordinieren Sie. Testen Sie ihre Grenzen. Aber keine Landung heute. Ich will Daten, keinen Sieg." Coordinate. Test their limits. But no landing today. I want data, not victory.

Deathenstride's grin showed too many teeth. "Verstanden, Doktor." Understood. He plucked something from his pocket and tossed it; a coin flashed in the violet light before snapping back into his palm. "Wir spielen also nur mit der Frontlinie." So we're just playing with the front line.

Deathendale, not to be outdone, produced a small hexagonal case and opened it to reveal a set of six-sided dice carved from polished bone. Purple pips gleamed. "Und wir notieren die Ergebnisse wie immer." And we record the results as always.

Somewhere between narration and game design, the author sighed and pulled up an imaginary Advance Wars/Battalion Wars interface.

Off-story, the "round" began.

The two Supreme Commanders leaned over the table as spectral grids unfolded above it, each square representing a slice of ocean or sky. Icons of ships and wings flickered into place like game pieces. Numbers floated beside them, half logistics, half hit points, all very serious despite looking like something on a handheld game console from another universe.

"Frontal bombardment first," Deathenstride decided. He rolled two dice. They skittered across the table, stopping at four and five. "Neun. Das ist genug, um ihnen weh zu tun." Nine. Enough to hurt them.

On the battlefield, Death destroyers surged forward in a spearhead, guns howling. Coordinated volleys of heavy shells and chem-rockets slammed toward the Galaxy center. Several shots punched through the defensive lattice this time; one cruiser's bow erupted in a spray of molten plating, while a patrol corvette took a direct hit and vanished in a burst of golden light, hull and crew safely shunted to emergency stasis but definitely off the board for this phase.

"Damage high," Galaxadye's tactical officer reported. "Shield drain spiking, but still within tolerance."

Galaxadye narrowed his eyes. "They're testing range profiles. Not pushing through, just seeing how much hurt we'll eat before we reposition." He slid a finger along the map. "Fine. Let them taste return fire with reinforcement seasoning."

He toggled the southern task force channel. "Admiral Suixing, you see that spearhead? We're going to clip it."

"Happy to oblige," she answered. "My captains have been practicing their pincer maneuvers on the training sims. Today we upgrade to DLC."

The Galaxy reinforcements swung inward in a sweeping arc, lances and heavy cannons firing in precise salvos. Air wings followed the curve, striking the flanks of the advancing Death ships like shoals of glittering knives.

Off-story, the author rolled their own pair of dice. The result came up ten.

"Generous," Galaxadye said dryly to nobody the characters could see, then back in-story: "Concentrate on their lead destroyers. Make them regret choosing the 'aggressive opening' option from the tutorial."

The results were immediate. One Death destroyer took multiple lance hits amidships; its armored ribs buckled, spilling luminous fluid into the ocean. Another lost power to its forward batteries, drifting sideways as Galaxy torpedoes stitched across its hull. Skeletal crew and plus-eyed officers scrambled to reroute necro-energy, but the ship was already falling out of formation.

Deathenstride clicked his tongue. "Verlust akzeptabel," he told Deathendale. Loss acceptable. "Wir ziehen die Spitze zurück." We pull the tip back.

Deathendale rolled again, this time lower. "Drei. Rückzug mit Gegenfeuer." Three. Retreat with covering fire.

The wounded ships began sliding backward, vomiting smoke and toxins to churn the water into a poisonous fog. Behind them, fresh vessels moved up, artillery continuing almost uninterrupted. The Death armada gave ground grudgingly, but it gave it.

The middle sea became a living Advance Wars map. Squadrons traded positions like units on tiles; damaged craft withdrew to repair auras projected by command ships, only to be replaced by fresh waves. Up above, the fight felt more like Battalion Wars: chaotic, cinematic, jets and bombers swooping low over flak blossoms, gunships carving strafing lines across decks teeming with deathsoldiers ready to repel imaginary boarders that never quite arrived.

Through it all, Galaxadye kept his focus on that invisible line.

"Keep our noses pointed west," he reminded his captains. "We are not chasing them into their comfort zone. We are the wall. They are the tide. Basic metaphors, please."

From the Death side, Deathendale watched the grid update and gave a low, grudging sound that might have been respect.

"Sie halten die Hälfte des Meeres mit erstaunlich wenig Verlusten," he told Deathenstride. They're holding half the sea with astonishingly few losses.

Deathenstride flipped his coin again, caught it, checked the result, and nodded once. "Kommando-Entscheidung vom Doktor steht: Keine Landung. Also zeigen wir ihnen nur, wie lange sie so weitermachen können." The Doctor's command decision stands: no landing. So we simply show them how long they can keep this up.

He adjusted a few icons on the grid, then gave the order: extended-range chem artillery, focus on armor degradation over outright destruction. Slowly wear down Galaxy hulls, log the resistance curves, turn the whole encounter into one gigantic data set.

On the ocean, exotic munitions began peppering the Galaxy front. Some shells burst into clouds that corroded plating but left crews unharmed, others detonated in rings of violet light that scrambled non-essential electronics for a few seconds before fading.

"Sabot-runs switching to calibration fire," Galaxadye observed, irritated. "We're being used as a test bench."

"What do we do?" the adjutant asked.

"We corrupt their data," Galaxadye said. "Randomize response vectors. Rotate shield frequencies out of sequence. If the Doctor wants a clean experiment, we give him a messy field report instead."

He leaned toward the imagined camera again. "Readers who understand statistics will appreciate this. Readers who don't, just enjoy the explosions."

The battle dragged into its last act.

Galaxy reinforcements stabilized the midline, thickening the wall of metal and light that kept Deathwing's forces from drifting any closer to Goldduchaisan's coasts. The Death armada, under Deathenstride and Deathendale's cool coordination, continued to probe, slash, and withdraw, never quite committing enough to risk being cut off, never quite falling so far back that the Galaxy fleet could claim pursuit victory.

At one point, a Death bomber wing dove much deeper than before, slipping through a momentary gap in the intercept net. They roared low over the deck of the Kōrindenshō, chem-bombs primed.

Galaxadye watched them approach, then simply raised a hand.

"Now would be an excellent time for the author to fail a dice roll," he remarked.

Off-story, the dice clattered.

Natural one.

A sudden crosswind—meteorologically improbable but narratively satisfying—caught the bomber formation, nudging their trajectory five degrees off. Their bombs fell short, detonating in open water with a hiss of wasted malice as Galaxy flak tore through the confused wing.

Galaxadye's bridge burst into relieved laughter.

"Thank your local narrative physics," he told them. "They just saved us a chapter of damage control."

Finally, as the stars began to prick through the darkening sky, a long tone sounded from the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz. Orders rippled outward in violet waves. Death ships began to disengage in disciplined sequences, turning their prows back toward their titan flagship.

Deathenstride rolled one last time, almost lazily. "Zwei. Geordneter Rückzug." Ordered retreat.

Deathendale snapped his bone case shut. "Genug Proben für heute." Enough samples for today.

On the open channel, Deathwing's voice returned, cool and faintly amused.

"Goldduchaisan," he announced in that careful, stage-clear German of his, "Sie haben die Küste heute verteidigt. Gut gemacht. Ihr Verteidigungsgrad ist notiert." You have defended the coast today. Well done. Your level of defense is recorded.

Galaxadye keyed his mic. "Doctor, if you're compiling a report card, I expect comments in complete sentences."

"Of course," Deathwing replied. "Meine Lieblingsbemerkung: 'zeigt Potenzial, reagiert gut auf Druck, muss aber lernen zu verlieren.'" Shows potential, responds well to pressure, but must learn how to lose.

Galaxadye snorted. "Return to your floating autopsy theater, Doktor. When you finally decide to land, we'll give you a proper welcome package."

The violet fleet pulled back into the shroud of fog around the titan ship. Moments later, the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz itself turned ponderously, engines thrumming like a slow heartbeat as it began its glide away from the contested sea. The midline relaxed from crimson tension back to ordinary water.

On the Kōrindenshō, cheers went up—not the wild elation of a decisive victory, but the exhausted affirmation of people who had, once again, refused to break.

Galaxadye allowed himself one long breath before addressing the bridge.

"Status: Death Regime repelled from mid-ocean theater," he said. "No landings achieved. Goldduchaisan remains untouched. Casualties high in effort, low in permanence. Logistics teams, start rotation plans. Pilots, debrief and hydrate. We live to complain about the next chapter."

He stepped out onto the observation deck as the fleet slowly reshaped itself into escort formations for the night. The stars above Goldduchaisan shone clear; no violet haze marred them now.

To the invisible reader, he offered a small bow. "Today's result," he said quietly, "Galaxy Regime holds the line. Death Regime learns, adapts, and sulks scientifically. Mark it as a tactical draw, strategic defense victory."

He glanced in the direction where the titan ship had vanished and switched to German one last time.

"Bis zum nächsten Versuch, Doktor," he murmured. "Wir warten hier – mit mehr Schiffen und besserem Kaffee." Until the next attempt, Doctor. We'll be here— with more ships and better coffee.

The sea rolled on, chapter closed, dice cooling, coins at rest... for now.

The sea didn't rest after Deathwing pulled back. It just changed homework assignments.

While Galaxadye's battered-but-smug fleet held the midline like a glittering fence, the outer map lit up with a different problem: one of the Death Regime–occupied islands far off Goldduchaisan's western arcane lane had become a festering knife pointed straight at the continent. Artillery test site. Chem-lab. Staging ground. Flanking launchpad.

Which is why the narrative slid sideways, over crests of black water, until it found another Galaxy flagship cutting through the waves like a lecture underlining a bad essay.

Galaxadale stood on the bridge of the carrier Galaxen-Yujing's Oath, coat flapping in the cold spray. He studied the holo-map where the enemy island glowed violet.

"佢哋當我哋唔識睇地圖咩。" he muttered, voice dry. "They really think we can't read a map?"

The island had a name once, something quaint involving pearls and salt wind. Now it was marked only by a skull symbol with plus-sign pupils. AA emplacements ringed its cliffs, and in the sheltered bay behind it, sensors hinted at something worse: big hulls, low in the water, emissions masked. Deathenstorm's handwriting all over it.

Off-story, the author sighed, took out a six-sided die and a coin, and put them where the characters pretended not to see.

"First roll," the narrator announced helpfully. "Stealth approach for Galaxadale's task force."

The die clattered in the abstract. It came up five.

"Reasonable," Galaxadale said to the fourth wall without looking up. "唔錯啦，五分。勉強合格。" Not bad. Barely a passing grade.

He flicked his wrist. On the real map, three Galaxy destroyers and a pack of ECM skimmers slid ahead, their signatures compressing into the background noise of the ocean. Overhead, strike fighters from Goldduchaisan's coastal bases dipped below radar horizons, riding sensor-shadows laid down by the fleet.

Down in the island's buried command cavern, Supreme Commander Deathenstorm watched the same sea through slitted viewports. Where the other Death commanders dressed like apocalyptic surgeons, Deathenstorm looked like a drowned general, uniform lacquered with oil-sheen, coat hung with medals salvaged from ships he'd killed personally. The waves seemed to lean toward him when he spoke.

"Sie kommen wieder," he said softly in German, fingers tapping a slow rhythm on the rail. "Natürlich. Immer wieder. Ihre Strategie ist wie Ebbe und Flut." They come again. Of course. Always. Their strategy is like the tide.

He turned to his staff, plus-eyed officers stiffening at his gaze.

"Bereiten Sie die Flanken vor," he ordered. "Wir lassen sie die Vorderseite bombardieren, während unsere Dreadnoughts aus der Bucht stoßen. Klassische Umklammerung. Keine Überraschungen – nur Effektivität." Prepare the flanks. We let them bombard the front while our dreadnoughts push out of the bay. Classic envelopment. No surprises—just efficiency.

Off-story, the author picked up the coin. "Coin flip," the narrator said. "Does Deathenstorm successfully hide the dreadnought group from initial scans?"

Heads.

"So far, Doktor Sturm is lucky," the narrator conceded.

Back on Galaxen-Yujing's Oath, sensor officers frowned.

"Commander, long-range sweep shows standard coastal batteries, chem storage, teleportal anchor signs," one reported. "Nothing large mobile, but there's a suspicious blind spot behind the western cliffline."

Galaxadale's eyes narrowed. "當然啦，『冇嘢』嗰度先至最大鑊。" Of course. The place where there's 'nothing' is exactly where the worst thing is.

He snapped open a secure channel to his strike elements.

"所有戰機聽住。" All strike craft, listen up. "第一波只打防空炮，同島上嘅雷達站。唔好心急入灣。記住，Deathenstorm 嗰個老屍鍾意玩包抄。" First wave hits only the AA and radar on the island. Do not rush the bay. Remember, that old corpse Deathenstorm loves his flanking plays.

A chorus of affirmations crackled back.

The first salvo went out like a thesis statement. Destroyers loosed precision shells and guided lances, arcing them high over the horizon. Seconds later, the island's outer gun nests blossomed into dirty orange and violet fireballs. AA beams speared blindly into the sky, then winked out as capacitor banks cooked off.

Off-story, another die roll: effectiveness of opening bombardment.

Six.

"喂，呢鋪幾靚喎。" Galaxadale's mouth twitched. Nice. That one's pretty.

On the island, entire batteries vanished, replaced by craters rimmed with melting necro-steel. Chem-storage tanks ruptured, vomited clouds of reagent that ignited midair in shrieking colors. Several plus-eyed flags burned away, skull sigils distorting as fabric curled.

Deathenstorm watched the damage reports scroll past and didn't flinch.

"Gut," he said. "Lassen wir sie glauben, dass es funktioniert." Good. Let them believe it's working.

He gestured toward the bay.

"Flotte bereit machen," he barked. "Dreadnoughts eins bis drei, Zerstörerkeile dahinter. Wenn ich das Signal gebe, brechen wir durch die Westöffnung. Wir fangen ihre Träger im Querschuss." Fleet to readiness. Dreadnoughts one through three, destroyer wedges behind. On my signal, we break through the western outlet and catch their carriers in crossfire.

His officers saluted. Deep in the bay, three massive Death Regime dreadnoughts powered up, hulls armored in layered bone-metal, funnels belching violet mists. Smaller destroyers clustered around them like scavengers around apex predators.

Off-story, dice again: does Galaxadale intuit the flanking plan in time?

The die bounced.

Five.

"好啦，Deathenstorm，你玩太多次啦。" Galaxadale chuckled when the tactical holo rippled with new, faint signatures around the 'blind spot.' "You've played this trick too many times, old storm."

He switched to wide squadron channel.

"第二波準備。" Second wave, get ready. "我哋當佢想偷襲，實際上係幫佢做引路燈。" We're going to pretend he's ambushing us, but really we'll just light his path—for our bombs.

He dragged a luminous line around the blind cove on the map.

"偵察機一隊，飛高啲，影清楚個灣口。轟炸機全隊，等我個指令，一齊落地毯式轟炸，唔好慳彈。" Recon One, climb and get me a clean picture of that bay mouth. All bombers, on my mark, full carpet—no ammo savings today.

Over the island, a pair of sleek Galaxy recon craft punched through cloud cover, lenses sweeping the cove. Their feed piped straight to Galaxadale's bridge.

The picture resolved: three colossal dreadnought hulls easing forward, destroyers in neat teeth-shaped wedges.

Galaxadale didn't bother to hide his grin.

"相都出埋啦。" The photos are in. "各位，送佢哋返海底啦。" Everyone, send them back to the seafloor.

Bombers screamed in low, sliding over the already-ruined AA sites. With defenses gutted, only a few desperate chem-flak bursts clawed upward. Galaxy fighters tore those apart, clearing corridor after corridor.

Off-story, coin flip: do the bombers get through intact?

Tails.

"Minor trouble," the narrator announced. "Some losses."

In the sky, two bombers took direct chem-flak hits; shields overloaded, engines coughing light. Their pilots triggered emergency phase-outs, craft dissolving into safety glyphs mid-plummet, crews snapped into stasis far from the fight. At sea level, though, most of the formation roared on.

Bomb doors opened.

The bay became a physics exam with only one answer: downward.

Heavy grav-bombs, armor-shearing lances, and old-fashioned mass dropped into the cove in a layered pattern. The first wave went for the water around the dreadnoughts, detonating into rising geysers that pitched the huge ships out of alignment. The second slammed into exposed decks, chewing through necro-plating and rupturing internal chem-lines. The third punched into the cliffs themselves, collapsing carved gun galleries and sending avalanches of rock and steel pouring over moored destroyers.

Deathenstorm's comms filled with static, impact warnings, and the howl of overstressed hulls.

"Gegenfeuer!" he roared in German. "Alle Batterien, feuern! Raketen, Luftabwehr, alles!" Return fire! All batteries, fire! Missiles, AA, everything!

One dreadnought managed to get its main guns online long enough to hurl a string of monstrous shells toward the Galaxy formation. A destroyer's bridge near Galaxadale's flagship vanished in a burst of white-hot metal, the ship rolling as crews scrambled for damage control.

Casualty roll: two dice.

Seven.

On the report that printed itself quietly in the margin of reality, the tally for this engagement read: Galaxy Regime losses – six fighters downed or phase-forced out, one destroyer crippled and towed; Death Regime losses – two dreadnoughts heavily crippled, one dead in the water and burning from within, four destroyers sunk outright, three more savaged, all island AA and most surface weapons neutralized.

Galaxadale watched one of the dreadnoughts list, its plus-eyed skull pennant finally catching fire and curling away into ash.

He toggled an open channel, purely to be petty.

"喂，Deathenstorm。" he said in fluid, taunting Cantonese, fully aware the other man understood enough from context. "你啲側翼戰術，係咪應該退休啦？成日都係同一招。" Hey, Deathenstorm. Maybe your flanking tactics should retire? It's always the same move.

Static crackled, then Deathanstorm's voice came back in furious, clipped German.

"Deine Arroganz wird eines Tages dein Kielbruch sein," he snarled. Your arrogance will be your keel break one day. "Du hast die Insel getroffen, ja. Aber ich brauche sie nicht, um dich zu sinken. Ich brauche nur Geduld." You hit the island, yes. But I don't need it to sink you. I only need patience.

"咁你慢慢等啦。" Galaxadale replied. Take your time waiting, then. "我哋有成個星系嘅時間同你玩。" We've got an entire star system's worth of time to play with you.

On his word, Galaxy gunships swooped low along the island's ridges, finishing the job. Missile pods spat fire at remaining AA stumps. Lances stitched across surviving chem-tanks, ensuring they detonated in controlled plumes instead of surprise gifts later. Infantry teleport slates flared on the ruined beaches, inserting specialist teams to smash relay beacons and sabotage teleport anchors.

Deathenstorm, reading the trend lines, made his call.

"Rückzug," he ordered curtly. Retreat. "Wir verlegen die Operation. Diese Insel ist verbrannt." We move the operation. This island is burnt.

Behind him, bridge lenses showed his maimed dreadnoughts limping into deeper water, destroyers circling to throw up smoke and interference. One by one, warped-geometry portals opened above their decks, swallowing ships into contingency harbors elsewhere.

Galaxadale let them go.

"唔追。" he told his captains. We don't chase. "今日目標完成咗：拆咗佢個偷襲據點，斬斷一邊翼，仲順手做咗海岸清潔。" Today's objective's done: dismantle his ambush base, cut off one wing, and do some coastal cleaning while we're at it.

He turned his gaze, and the whole bridge obligingly followed it, toward the invisible point where the reader hovered.

"骰已經掟咗，硬幣又翻咗。" The dice have been thrown, the coin already flipped. "今鋪，Galaxadale 合格，Deathenstorm 交白卷。" This round, Galaxadale passes; Deathenstorm turns in a blank test.

On the ruined island, firestorms began to die down, leaving only smoking craters where AA nests once glared at the sky. In orbiting databanks, casualty tallies and trajectory logs slotted themselves into the ever-growing archive of this absurd, meticulously documented war.

Far out at sea, Deathenstorm stood at the rail of his retreating flagship, coat snapping in the wind, watching the column of smoke shrink on the horizon.

Quietly, in a German too soft for the comms to catch, he admitted, "Guter Zug, Kommandant. Aber das Spiel ist lang." Good move, Commander. But the game is long.

Back on Galaxen-Yujing's Oath, Galaxadale folded his arms.

"當然長啦。" Of course it's long. "咁先叫劇集。" Otherwise it wouldn't be a series.

Reinforcements arrived like someone had leaned on the "copy-paste fleet" shortcut.

From the east, the carrier Galaxen-Tiansuo surged over the horizon, flanked by two cruisers and a swarm of fresh strike craft. From the south, a line of missile destroyers cut in, wakes crossing like underlines on an exam paper. Their transponders chimed as they locked into Galaxadale's battlenet.

"指揮權移交。" The captain of Tiansuo saluted on holo. "Reinforcement group ready to integrate, Sir."

Galaxadale didn't bother turning; his eyes stayed on the ruined island ahead, smoke rising in slow spirals.

"唔使移交。" No need to transfer anything. "全部接駁入我個系統就得。今日一個腦就夠。" Just plug everything into my system. One brain is enough today.

He raised two fingers. The holo-sea expanded, new icons slotting into neat formations as if they'd been there from the start. Strike wings layered themselves in altitude bands; destroyers slipped into interlocking arcs of fire. The Galaxy battlegroup went from "dangerous" to "please don't be on the wrong side of this graph" in under a minute.

Off-story, the author obediently set down a pair of six-sided dice and a coin. Galaxadale's gaze flicked toward them with theatrical disapproval.

"又嚟。" Again? "你哋真係好鍾意用骰仔決定人哋生死喎。" You lot really love using dice to decide other people's lives.

Still, he nodded slightly.

"好啦，當係模擬。" Fine. Call it simulation.

The dice rolled in the margins of reality.

First roll: effectiveness of mop-up operation on the bombed island.

Four and three.

"七分，" Galaxadale said quietly. "可圈可點。" Seven out of ten. Respectable.

On cue, the Tiansuo's gunships peeled off, engines screaming. They swept low over the cratered coastline, sensors drinking in heat signatures and residual chem traces. Behind them, dropships flared into hovering positions, releasing squads of Galaxy engineers and temporal-sealed med teams onto the shattered bunkers.

"Alpha squad, check teleport anchors," crackled a sergeant's voice. "Anything still humming, we cut the cord."

"Bravo, sweep for data cores. Remember, Death Regime loves to leave gifts."

In a half-collapsed command cavern, an engineer knelt beside a fractured console, fingers tapping a diagnostic slate.

"Commander," she reported into the net, "we've got partial logs from their flank control. Looks like Deathenstorm had three more destroyers staged for a second wave, but your first strike cooked the ammo racks. They never launched."

Galaxadale's smile was small but sharp.

"睇吓，唔駛骰仔都知結果。" See? We don't need dice to know how that ended.

He tabbed the data over to intel. Casualty tallies updated in the corner of his HUD: Galaxy injured evacuated – 73, no permanent losses thanks to phase-outs; Death units rendered combat-ineffective – "numerous; counting postponed due to explosion."

The second island glowed now on the holo. A little farther out, ringed in intact AA towers that bristled like teeth, comms spires pulsing faintly with teleport signatures. Deathenstorm's backup. The one intended to roll up Galaxy's flank once the first bait island had softened them.

Galaxadale tapped its icon twice.

"目標二號。" Target Two. "Deathenstorm 以為佢可以一箭雙鵰，我哋就做俾佢睇咩叫雙倍標準。" Deathenstorm thinks he can get a two-for-one; we'll show him what double standards look like.

He opened a channel to his air groups.

"全體空軍，準備第二輪。」 All air elements, get ready for second round. 「今次係真正嘅考試——低空進入，拔牙，拆塔，走人。唔好戀戰。" This one's the real exam: low entry, pull the teeth, rip down towers, get out. Don't fall in love with the fight.

"Copy, Sir," replied Wing Leader Hoshihomi. "We'll leave them a nice, even coastline."

On the far side of the ocean, Deathenstorm watched from the bridge of a secondary flagship. The bay windows showed nothing but water; the ruined island they'd just abandoned was already out of frame. His tactical display, however, painted a very clear picture: Galaxy signatures redirecting, vectors bending toward his second island.

He exhaled slowly.

"Natürlich," he murmured. "Sie schlagen die Faust und dann den Arm." Of course. They hit the fist and then the arm.

One of his aides glanced up. "Befehl, Herr Kommandant?"

Deathenstorm's eyes narrowed.

"Wir verteidigen nicht," he decided. "Nicht konventionell. Wir machen es teuer." We don't defend. Not conventionally. We make it costly.

He gestured to the island's icons: the AA towers, the coastal chem-mortars, the shallow-water mine nets.

"Überlastet alle Batterien, feuert in Sperrfeuer, keine Präzision. Wir wollen Lärm, nicht Trefferquote." Overload all batteries, fire in pure barrage, no precision. We want noise, not hit rate. "Und bereitet die Rückzugsportale vor. Wenn sie zu nah kommen, lassen wir die Insel explodieren. Daten haben wir schon genug."

The aide hesitated, then saluted.

"Jawohl."

Off-story, the coin flipped again. Heads: Deathenstorm's saturation tactic catches Galaxy by surprise; tails: Galaxadale reads the pattern in time.

The coin spun, glittered in conceptual light, and slapped into the narrator's palm.

Tails.

On the bridge of Galaxen-Yujing's Oath, a young officer frowned at a scrolling telemetry feed.

"Commander... enemy island is spiking output across all batteries simultaneously. No target discrimination. It looks like—"

"—騷擾火力。" —harassment fire. Galaxadale finished for him. "Deathenstorm 想製造噪音遮住真相。" He wants noise to hide the truth.

He tapped the holo, overlaying probable destruction radius estimates. Red shells arced across projected flight corridors like angry brushstrokes.

"好，咁我哋咪畫第二幅畫囉。" Fine. Then we paint a different picture.

He opened three channels at once: strike wings, destroyer line, and the reinforcements now combing the first island.

"各單位注意。" All units, heads up. "敵島火力瘋咗，代表佢唔打算長期用，可能準備自爆。" Their fire pattern's gone mad—that means they don't plan to use the island long; self-destruct is likely. 「空軍由俾你哋玩。」 Air units, you get to play artist. 「用山同雲做掩護，分批進入，只拆塔唔拆心。」 Use the terrain and clouds as cover, ingress in staggered groups, hit the towers, not the heart.

He flicked a new route over the island's 3D terrain, weaving between the projected blast zones.

"海軍則係保母。」 Navy, you're babysitters. 「有機就打落佢啲炮位，冇就幫空軍頂盾。」 Take shots at gun positions if you can, otherwise raise shields and intercept anything that gets close to our birds.

A chorus of confirmations snapped back. Engines roared through the deck.

The second bombing run felt less like a heroic charge and more like threading needles while someone threw fireworks at your head. Galaxy fighters skimmed just meters over churning waves, then yanked up hard along cliff faces, using the stone itself as cover before popping over the lip to loose precise bursts at AA towers. Bombers flew broken patterns, each squadron trailing decoys that blossomed into shimmering false signatures, drawing chem-flak away from their real positions.

Off-story, the dice went again: two rolls—one for AA suppression, one for Galaxy losses.

AA suppression: six.

Losses: three.

On the island, tower after tower shattered, their plus-pupiled skull emblems blasted into shards. Turrets tumbled from their mounts, falling into the sea in columns of steam. Mortar pits exploded inward, burying themselves.

In the air, three fighters caught unlucky shards of shrapnel; warning runes screamed across their cockpits. Pilots hurled curses, then slammed emergency phase triggers, ejecting themselves in brief flares of golden sigils. The empty husks of their craft spiraled away, hitting the water in distant splashes.

Galaxadale listened to the status updates, jaw tight but eyes calm.

"損失控制得到。" Losses are within control. "佢哋越係亂咁射，我哋越容易預計。" The more random their fire, the easier it is to predict.

He spared a glance toward the fourth wall.

"記錄低，唔好淨係寫『打得好精彩』咁樣咁 lazy。" Write this down properly, not just 'the battle was really cool.' Lazy."

Behind him, an adjutant snorted quietly.

On Deathenstorm's side, warning klaxons reached a shrill peak.

"Inselkern erreicht kritische Instabilität," droned a system voice. Island core reaching critical instability.

Deathenstorm watched the graph spike, then flatten. His lips pressed into a thin line.

"Genug," he said. Enough. "Alle restlichen Truppen, durch die Portale raus." All remaining troops, out through the portals. "Die Insel war nur ein Messer. Wir haben noch ein ganzes Besteck."

Rifts flickered open across the island: in bunkers, inside command caverns, even on exposed landing pads. Lines of undead troopers marched through, disciplined even in retreat. Equipment racks floated after them, hauled by grav-webs. Data cores zipped along designated bands of light, vanishing into secure vaults elsewhere.

High above, Galaxy recon birds captured the spectacle.

"Commander," Hoshihomi reported, "enemy is evacuating in good order. They're going to pop the island once they're done."

"梗係啦。" Of course. "佢哋啲野一向環保，所有罪證都要回收。" They're very environmentally conscious; all evidence must be recycled.

He tapped his console.

"全體後撤兩海哩。" All ships, pull back two sea miles. "保持火力壓制，但唔好再接近。等佢爆完我哋先返去掃。" Maintain fire pressure, but don't close in. We'll go back to sweep after it blows.

The Galaxy fleet eased back, guns still barking in measured volleys that kept Deathenstorm's portals under stress without actually closing them. In the distance, the island glowed brighter, veins of violet light crawling up from its buried heart.

Off-story, the coin flipped one last time for this engagement: do any Death ships get caught in their own self-destruct?

Heads.

A small Death escort craft, late to its portal rendezvous, surged toward a shrinking rift. The ground bucked; the gate collapsed just as its prow reached the threshold. The ship vanished under a plume of rising rock and energy, hull disintegrating into fragments scattered across the suddenly rising sea.

In the silence that followed the explosion, only the hiss of cooling magma and crackle of residual chem-storms remained.

On Galaxen-Yujing's Oath, status boards faded from red to yellow, then to steady green.

"第二島，清空。" Second island, cleared, Galaxadale summarized. "敵方有驚無險成功撤走大部分資源，我哋就當係交學費。" The enemy successfully pulled most of their assets; we'll call it their tuition fee. "不過佢哋嘅偷襲網絡已經斷兩截，之後要再玩，就冇咁順啦。" But their ambush network is cut in two. Next time they try this, it won't be so smooth.

He looked over the casualty sheet hovering at his fingertips. Airframes lost, pilots recovered. Ship damage. Ammo expenditure. Each number slotted under broader equations written months ago with Galaxbeam in a quiet lecture hall.

"全部數字，交俾教授批改。" All these numbers, we'll hand to the Professor for grading. "我就負責保持佢嘅平均分唔會太醜。" I'll make sure his class average doesn't look ugly.

He turned, finally, to his officers.

"各艦隊，輪流休整。" Rotating rest cycles for all formations. "第一突擊群，留喺戰區巡邏；第二、三群，去支援 Galaxadye 嗰邊嘅海域。Deathenstorm 一日未斷氣，就一定會搵新地方偷襲。" Assault Group One stays on patrol; Two and Three redeploy to support Galaxadye's sector. As long as Deathenstorm's still... technically breathing, he'll look for another place to flank.

A chorus of "Yes, Commander!" rolled across the bridge like surf.

Galaxadale allowed himself one last glance at the faint scorch-ring where the second island had been. The sea would close over it soon; currents would erase the edges; on maps, it would become just another hazard notation and, for some poor future student, a footnote.

"今章，到此為止。" This chapter ends here, he told the unseen reader. "骰仔掟完，硬幣都收起。" Dice rolled, coins pocketed. "成績單：我哋冇贏到絕對，但 Deathenstorm 少咗兩個據點，多咗幾條皺紋。" Report card: we didn't win absolutely, but Deathenstorm has two fewer bases and a few more wrinkles.

He smiled, sharp and tired.

"下一幕，輪到第二個人出場。" Next scene, it's someone else's turn on stage.

The fleet turned, wakes sketching pale geometric patterns on the dark water, and Galaxadale's war became, for a moment, just another line of light moving across a very crowded star-map.

The victory report over Goldduchaisan wasn't finished before the next set of warnings came online.

Fresh red sigils blossomed along the lower arc of the tactical sphere—more island fortresses still under Death Regime control, more shipyards, more hungry guns pivoting toward the sky.

Galaxapuff straightened, set her empty paper cup down on the console, and exhaled slowly.

"好，第二樂章。" All right, second movement.

She flicked her fingers through the displays. New overlays snapped into place: island schematics, AA tower positions, power-grid lines, fuel depots, shipyard slips.

"All wings, this is Supreme Commander Galaxapuff," she called in Mandarin, voice crisp again. "調整攻擊軸。我們要拔掉他們剩下的牙齒——防空塔、港口、還沒起飛的東西，全部優先。" Adjust attack vectors. We're pulling the rest of their teeth—AA turrets, ports, anything that hasn't left the ground yet, all priority targets.

"收到。" Multiple squadron leaders answered at once. Copy.

The giant holosphere re-centered on a new island cluster further east: a Death Regime bastion where defensive turrets bristled in concentric rings, and half-assembled AA platforms sat in scaffolding like unfinished threats.

"首先，打未準備好嘅。" First, hit what isn't ready, she said in Cantonese. "所有快攻編隊，集中火力喺未啟動的防空塔同新船塢。唔好等佢哋有『準備好』呢個機會。" Fast-attack groups, focus on unpowered AA towers and new shipyards. Do not give them the luxury of 'ready.'

Smoke-layer squadrons curved away toward the distant horizon, re-arming with chaff and ion-disruptors instead of pure smoke this time. Strike fighters reconfigured with bunker-buster loads. Gunships loaded warheads coded for "structure only" detonation patterns.

The first wave hit like a surgical storm.

Golden-white contrails stitched across the sky as Galaxy aircraft descended on the island ring. Newly installed turrets, still half wrapped in protective plating, exploded before they ever fired a shot. AA towers caught mid-calibration toppled sideways, crushing their own ammo lifts. Unfinished radar dishes spun once, twice, and then disintegrated into fans of purple dust as ion lances punched through their cores.

Shipyard cranes snapped like matchsticks. Sleek hulls that would have been battleships in another month tore open along their spines and slumped sideways in their berths.

On the island, plus-eyed officers barely had time to shout before the first volleys turned their command posts into craters edged with molten glass.

"防空二線失效！" Second AA ring failing! a Death tech screamed somewhere inside the noise.

"好。" Good, Galaxapuff murmured, watching the feed. "再推一層。"

She pointed at the innermost harbor district, where chem depots and portal pylons clustered like tumors.

"中高空轟炸編隊，目標換成港口和補給區。" Mid-high bomber groups, change targets to ports and supply zones, she said in Mandarin. "我們不是只想他們現在打不到我們，我們要他們以後也很難打。" We don't just want them unable to hit us now; we want it hard for them to hit us later.

Bombers descended in staggered lines, unloading rolling curtains of explosives that walked across dock after dock. Jetties vanished. Portal spires flickered and went dark, surrounded by expanding circles of fire. Chem tank farms erupted in columnar plumes, then collapsed into roiling chaos.

For a few minutes, the island was nothing but overlapping shockwaves and rising smoke.

Then the sea to the east darkened.

"指揮，偵測到大量新艦隊信號。" Commander, picking up a large new fleet, her sensor officer called in Mandarin. "重型戰列、化學巡洋艦、護衛艦群——死亡風暴好像扔了半個海的鋼鐵過來。" Heavy battleships, chem-cruisers, escorts—the Deathenstorm just threw half an ocean of steel at us.

On the magnified feed, the reinforced Death armada appeared: lines of battleships cutting white scars across black water, chem-cruisers venting pale violet mist, destroyers screening their flanks. Reinforcements hurtling in to break the aerial strangling of their island chain.

Galaxapuff's eyes narrowed.

"佢終於肯畀家用出嚟喇。" He finally brought out the household savings, she said dryly in Cantonese.

Before she could issue the next set of orders, another symbol pulsed into life on the tactical sphere—a golden tri-sun crest, rising from deep water.

A new comm window opened with a familiar grin and salt-wind hair.

"Supreme Commander Galaxapuff," came the voice, amused and steady. Galaxadale. "講聲先，我撞到佢啲增援喇。" Just a heads-up—I seem to have run into his reinforcements.

The view zoomed out.

From the north-eastern quadrant, Galaxadale's naval strike group surfaced out of refracted light and camouflage shimmer: cruisers with mirrored hulls, submarines shedding hardlight skins, destroyers cutting through Deathenstorm's formation at a surgically chosen angle.

On Tenshinkō's bridge, a few of the younger officers quietly hissed in delight.

Galaxapuff allowed herself a small smile.

"海上交畀你喇，前輩。" The sea's yours, senior, she said in Cantonese.

"In that case," Galaxadale replied in Japanese, casual, "じゃ、こっちは波の授業を始めようか。" Then I'll start today's lesson on waves.

His fleet rolled in.

Deathenstorm's reinforcement column met not empty ocean but a Galaxy hammer. Torpedoes streaked from below, punching through chem-cruiser bellies. Broadside cannons from Galaxadale's battleships ripped into Death destroyer lines. Telemetry streams turned to static as one Death hull after another disappeared into oily fire.

From the side of the tactical sphere, a new overlay appeared: Galaxapuff's own attached naval units, previously holding back behind Tenshinkō.

She tapped them.

"本艦隊所有附屬海上部隊，向南、向西擴散。" All attached naval units, spread south and west, she ordered in Mandarin. "挑最靠近敵方島嶼的航線，炮擊他們還有港口的島。" Choose lanes closest to remaining enemy islands and start shelling their ports. "空軍會幫你們鋪毯。" The air force will lay your carpet.

She switched to all-air.

"重型轟炸編隊，調高載彈量。" Heavy bombers, full loads. "我哋而家唔係只做精準手術，我哋要俾佢哋記得『毯式轟炸』點寫。" We're not just doing precision surgery anymore; I want them to remember how to spell 'carpet-bombing.'

On the outer decks, the largest Galaxy bombers—flying fortresses with multiple engine banks and bellies built to carry entire doctrines of war—taxied to the launch rails. Their payload diagrams showed dense patterns: overlapping area-denial bombs, cluster incendiaries, seismic charges tuned for infrastructure.

When they lifted, the sky felt heavier.

From orbit, it would have looked like chalk sweeping across a board: wave after wave of fire settling across Death-held islands, gun emplacements, secondary depots. Ground shuddered. Coastal ridges collapsed. A ring of previously "secure" Death territory turned into a fractured necklace of blackened craters and smoking ruins.

For a moment, that was enough.

Then a new chime sounded on her private channel.

The symbol that appeared now was neither naval nor air wing—it was the stylized, many-pointed star of the Galaxy Regime's Absolute Leader.

Professor Galaxbeam.

The holo on her side panel brightened, resolving into his calm face, eyes reflecting cascading data.

"Galaxapuff," he began in Cantonese, tone level but edged with urgency, "右西方海外，有人等緊你。" In the western overseas theatre, someone is waiting for you. "Galaxadye 正喺嗰邊頂住。Deathenstride 同 Deathenstream 攞咗好多艦隊壓過去。" Galaxadye is holding the line there. Deathenstride and Deathenstream have brought heavy fleets against him.

On the tactical sphere, a new sector lit up: far to the west, another ocean, another line. Icons marked Supreme Commander Galaxadye—and two dense clusters of Death icons labeled with the ciphers of Deathenstride and Deathenstream.

Galaxapuff's expression tightened.

In Mandarin, Galaxbeam continued, "他需要空中優勢，也需要你那種『創意用兵』。" He needs air superiority, and he needs your... creative approach to force deployment.

Then, gently, in Japanese: "向こうの空も、少し星の光が足りない。" The sky over there is missing a bit of starlight.

Galaxapuff gave a small nod.

"了解，教授。" Understood, Professor.

She expanded the western sector, then keyed into fleetwide channels.

"各艦隊注意，" she said, Mandarin precise. All forces, attention. "東方戰區將進入收尾階段，由 Galaxadale 前輩主導清理。" The eastern theatre is entering wrap-up phase; Senior Galaxadale will handle the cleanup. "天信光空中聖所將調頭，向西方海外前進。" Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary will vector toward the western overseas theatre.

She didn't wait for the gasp to die down.

"長程戰鬥機群、遠程轟炸隊，立即跳轉到這裡的待命坐標。" Long-range fighter and bomber wings, reposition to these standby coordinates. "我哋要幫 Galaxadye 把兩個死亡司令嘅玩具拆散。" We're going to help Galaxadye take apart the toys of two Death Supreme Commanders.

Icons shifted. Flight routes redrew themselves in arcs spanning half a world.

"Professor," she asked quietly in Cantonese on the private line, "我可唔可以『親身』落去做啲收尾？" May I handle some of the finishing work... personally?

Galaxbeam's holographic gaze flicked across new data—the shredded shipyards to the east, the burning islands, Galaxadale's advancing bow wave, the pressure mounting against Galaxadye in the west.

He gave the slightest nod.

"可以，但要記得，你仲係司令官。" You may—but remember, you are still a Supreme Commander. "唔好為咗證明你一個人幾勁，而浪費咗成個指揮層嘅價值。" Don't waste the value of the entire command structure just to prove how strong you are alone.

His tone softened.

"你唔需要證明俾我睇。" You don't have to prove anything to me.

Galaxapuff's smile was small but genuine.

"係，教授。" Yes, Professor.

She cut the line, then turned to her bridge crew.

"指揮權暫時移交副指揮。" Command authority temporarily transferred to deputy command, she announced in Mandarin. "我只會消失幾秒。" I'll only be gone a few seconds.

Her deputy swallowed but nodded. "明白。"

Galaxapuff stepped away from the central console, toward the wide forward viewport. The armored glass reflected her silhouette: long coat, flight suit, hair still tied high.

She took a breath.

Then she rose.

Gravity let go as if it had just been a polite suggestion. She drifted upward, boots leaving the deck, coat flaring slightly. Golden particles gathered around her, drawn from nowhere and everywhere at once, swirling around her like sparks caught in a magnetic field.

Time stretched.

From the crew's perspective, she blurred.

From her perspective, the universe obligingly slowed down.

She slipped through the viewport as if it were a curtain, emerging into the open sky with a vertical flick. Tenshinkō loomed behind her; the broken Death islands burned far below.

Her first stop was a still-intact Death Regime island fortress further along the chain—a place the tactical feeds had flagged as "secondary production and control." It had turrets, fuel depots, power plants, barracks, comm spires. It also had the arrogance to think it still had time.

She arrived as a golden streak.

Landing on the shadow side of a power plant tower, she pressed one hand to the cold metal.

"借你哋嘅結構一用。" Borrowing your structure for a moment.

Ion-energy blossomed from her palm in fractal patterns: tiny, almost delicate golden shapes, each no bigger than a coin, grew along the seams of the tower. More appeared along conduit lines, on joint plates, on the undersides of walkways. They looked like stylized flowers made of light and geometry.

In the suspended time between heartbeats, she moved.

From tower to fuel depot, from barracks to command bunker, from chem silo to AA mount, she flickered. A plus-eyed patrolman stood mid-step, lines of vapor still frozen from his breath; she passed within arm's length, invisible in the gaps between seconds, leaving a trail of golden sigils clinging to bulkheads and struts.

In less than the space of an inhalation, the island became a powder keg—every critical node tagged with a conjured golden charge keyed to her signature.

She rose back into the air, the world still moving at a crawl below.

"好喇。" All right then.

She lifted one hand, fingers splayed.

Tiny, needle-like projectiles of yellow light formed between them: not bombs, but triggers.

She snapped her fingers.

The projectiles shot downward—not as beams, but as messages. Each sigil on the island answered the call, flaring from gentle gold to blinding white.

Time lurched back into motion.

From orbit, it would have looked like a diagram of dominoes, lit from within.

First the power plants went—columns of white-gold fire punching straight up, severing the island's nervous system. Then the fuel depots, erupting sideways in broad fans that knocked turrets off their mounts. The AA towers followed, each one blooming into a short, violent sun. Barracks ripped apart as shockwaves met at crosspoints. Chem storage ignited in streaks of violet under golden cores, turned into flame that burned itself clean rather than spreading poison.

Within seconds, the entire island fortress was a chained sequence of explosions, each one timed a fraction of a fraction of a second after the last, cascading outward in a precise wave. Structures peeled away from bedrock. The shoreline fractured. Sections of the island sloughed into the sea.

By the time the first alarms truly registered, there was nothing left to save.

Galaxapuff had already gone.

Her next target was a small Death task force racing to link up with that now-doomed island: a cluster of destroyers and battleships plowing through high seas under full power, plus-eyed flags snapping in the wind.

She intercepted them in open water.

To them, she appeared as a distant, rising light on the horizon.

To her, they were diagrams.

She dropped from the upper atmosphere like a golden meteor, hitting the air above the formation and flattening her descent at the last second. Shockwaves rippled across the surface as she streaked along the line of ships.

"你哋啲船好靚。" Your ships are very pretty, she said almost conversationally, voice carried only in her own comm feed. "可惜用嚟做錯邊。"

She extended both hands.

Golden arcs snapped between her fingertips and the steel hulls below—ion chains that clamped to hull plating, gun mounts, engine housings. A slight twist of her wrist reversed polarities across their internal circuits.

Destroyers rolled as their own shield generators suddenly decided down was up. Battleship main guns swiveled the wrong way, firing into the sea or straight into neighboring hulls. Chem tanks vented into enclosed compartments instead of atmospheres. Bridge lighting blew out in showers of sparks.

Where resistance remained, she became a knife.

A sudden flash of acceleration brought her down onto the deck of a battleship, boots cracking the reinforced plating. Plus-eyed marines turned, weapons half raised.

By the time they finished turning, she was already gone—behind them, then above them, then not there at all. A hurricane of afterimages traced her path. Golden cuts appeared along structural seams, and the ship groaned as though some giant had squeezed it in one hand.

One by one, ships in the Death formation erupted or capsized, keels splitting, superstructures torn free, engines overloading in fountains of violet fire.

In less time than it took for a distress call to cross the sea, the small fleet ceased to exist.

"Sorry," she murmured, lifting back into the sky, "Professor話要趕時間。" Professor said we're on a schedule.

Only then did she turn her attention to the farthest, ugliest jewel on the board: a remote mega-shipyard, perched on a reinforced island-plate, well clear of the main battles. Feeds had labeled it as heavy capital construction—battleships, dreadnaughts, things meant to be nightmares given hull numbers.

From altitude, she saw vast scaffolds surrounding half-formed hulls, cranes moving like solemn insects, lines of AA towers ringed in overlapping arcs, shield domes half-flickering as they tested generators.

This, she decided, could not be allowed to see tomorrow.

She approached high, straight down from the upper sky, where glare and sensor noise made tracking difficult even for the Death Regime's arrays.

"最後一個。" Last one.

She sketched a circle in the air.

A golden ring opened in front of her—an aperture not through space, but through time-sliced targeting probabilities. Inside the ring, she could see the shipyard's most vulnerable nodes highlighted: unshielded reactor cores, primary power trunks, synchronization pylons for dreadnaught spinal guns, central drydock supports.

She pushed.

Hundreds of ion spears erupted from the circle and plunged toward the island, each one threading between towers and hulls with surgical contempt for odds. They punched through engine rooms, through core housings, through the hearts of half-built weapons.

The first explosions were modest.

The second layer was not.

Reactors overloaded in sympathetic cascades. Structural supports failed in the same breath as ammunition stacks cooked off. Incomplete dreadnaught hulls became girdled bombs, tearing their own cradles apart. Towers fell inward, smashing control bunkers and fire-control nodes.

She amplified it.

With a twist of her right hand, Galaxapuff tugged on the local time field, compounding energy releases: what might have been staggered failures compressed into tighter and tighter intervals until the entire complex went from "damaged" to "erased" in a single, massive glare.

When the shockwave cleared, the mega-shipyard was gone.

The island-plate still existed in a technical sense, but it had been turned into a melted, glowing scar in the ocean—a place where Deathenstorm's future dreadnaughts had been aborted in a single burst of golden logic.

Only then did she let herself feel tired.

"搞掂。" Done.

She drew a breath, then another, then let the world snap back to its normal tempo.

Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary called to her like a familiar chord.

She folded herself along that note.

On the control deck, her deputy was still in mid-sentence, issuing a course change to the western theatre. Galaxapuff reappeared beside the main console as if she had just taken a step sideways.

No one jumped. They had seen weirder. They pretended they hadn't.

The tactical sphere now showed a string of red Xs where Death islands used to be, static where shipyards had once fed the war, and far to the west, the gratifying sight of Galaxadye's embattled line beginning to ease as newly arrived Galaxy air wings tore into Deathenstride and Deathenstream's overextended formations.

Status updates rolled in.

"東方戰區敵方造船能力——幾乎歸零。" Eastern theatre enemy shipbuilding capacity... nearly zero.

"Deathenstorm 艦隊處於深度重整階段，短期無法發動大規模反攻。" Deathenstorm's fleets are in deep reorganization, unable to mount large-scale offensives in the short term.

"Galaxadye 在你哋增援之後重新奪回空優。" Galaxadye has regained air superiority with our reinforcements.

Galaxapuff listened, then nodded.

"好，" she said. "咁就可以收工。" Good. Then we can clock out.

A final chime.

Professor Galaxbeam's symbol returned.

This time, when his hologram appeared, there was something like warmth at the edges of his eyes.

"Supreme Commander Galaxapuff," he said in flawless Cantonese, "任務完成得非常出色。" The mission is completed with exceptional performance. "你同 Galaxadale、Galaxadye 一齊，把死亡政權喺呢一整個海域嘅手腳打斷咗。" Together with Galaxadale and Galaxadye, you have broken the Death Regime's arms and legs across this whole sea.

He inclined his head slightly.

"由而家開始，進入整備期。" From this moment, we enter a refit and consolidation period. "天信光空中聖所——返回 Galaxenchi。" Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary—return to Galaxenchi.

Then, in soft Japanese, the kind he reserved for orders that were also blessings:

"ギャラクサパフ、お疲れさま。" Galaxapuff, you've done well. "作戦目的はすべて達成された。これ以上の無理は不要だ。天信光と部下たちを連れて、銀河縁起へ帰還しなさい。" All operational objectives have been achieved. No more overexertion is necessary. Take Tenshinkō and your subordinates and return to Galaxenchi.

Galaxapuff bowed her head, just a little.

"了解，教授。" Understood, Professor, she replied in Mandarin. "天信光空中聖所，設定跳轉坐標：Galaxenchi 本星軌道。" Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary, set jump coordinates: primary orbit of Galaxenchi.

The great flying city began to turn, its runways aligning with a distant, invisible point. Engines that had thundered with war now shifted key, their vibration smoothing into the deeper hum of long-range transit.

Galaxapuff picked up her abandoned paper cup, found the milk tea stone cold, and made a face that none of the official war logs would ever record.

"返到去之後，" she muttered in Cantonese, half to herself, "我要一杯熱嘅，少甜，多珍珠。" When we get back, I want a hot one, less sweet, extra pearls.

She set the cup aside and looked out through the forward viewport.

Behind them, the sea they were leaving was a map of scars: shattered Death islands, crippled shipyards, a battlefield where Galaxy doctrine had written its name in fire. Ahead, somewhere beyond the upper sky, lay Galaxenchi—home, debriefings, repairs, and whatever impossible next problem the Professor had already started solving.

"全體，準備跳轉。" All hands, prepare to jump, she ordered, voice steady once more. "今日嘅空課，到此為止。" Today's air lesson ends here.

Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary gathered itself, light crawling along its underbelly, runes igniting in lines too complex for most eyes to follow.

Then, with a sound like distant bells being struck all at once, the flying city vanished into its own golden aperture, leaving only fading contrails and the memory of a sky where Galaxy had, for one long, decisive day, written the syllabus.

Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary slipped into its golden aperture and was gone, leaving only the echo of engine thunder and the faint ghost of contrails across the upper atmosphere.

Far above the ruined shipyards and sinking wrecks, the war's sound thinned out. No more bombardment, no more exploding gantries—just wind, water, and the distant static of broken Death Regime transmissions.

For a moment, the front was quiet.

But war never stopped at the front.

It seeped sideways.

Into ports where ships refueled.
Into hospitals where wounded soldiers slept.
Into comm hubs, libraries, orbital stations—anywhere a plus-shaped pupil could hide behind a human iris.

That was a different battlefield.

And that battlefield belonged to Galaxysuzuhime.

The Bell at the Edge of Galaxenchi

Far away, along one of the spiral arms of Titanumas' star-lanes, an outpost hung in the dark: Galaxenchi Outer Listening Post 7-鈴, a small, bell-shaped station drifting near the quiet zone that marked the farthest reach of Galaxy Regime presence.

Inside, lights were low, most of the crew asleep in rotational shifts.

One figure walked alone down the main spine corridor.

Her hair fell like ink and starlight, black with faint shimmering bands of blue that flowed when she moved. She wore a light Galaxy field-jacket over an exorcist's-style uniform—sleek, dark, trimmed in subtle silver patterns that echoed the paths of constellations. At her hip hung a slender baton that looked more like a conductor's wand than a weapon; its headpiece was a tiny, hollow bell of crystal, filled with liquid light.

Her name was Galaxysuzuhime.

Elite.
Specialization: Covert Counter-Infiltration & Infection Suppression.
Codename on the books: Bell-of-Void, Suzuhime.

At the center of the station, she stopped and closed her eyes.

Tiny, translucent bells—no larger than raindrops—slipped loose from her hair, from her sleeves, from the air itself. They drifted down the corridors, through bulkheads, around sleeping crew, into vents and wiring shafts and server bays.

Everything in the station had a sound. Human breath. Machine hum. Coolant flow. Circuits whispering as they flipped states.

Suzuhime listened.

A faint discord answered her—something slightly off, the wrong frequency threaded through the normal noise. The Death Regime's infection wasn't just biological; it had a pattern, a distinctive "chord" in the low places of the world, the echo of necro-chemistry and undead data.

She opened her eyes.

"目標一。" Target One.

Her first bell chimed in her mind, and the station unfolded into multiple missions at once.

Mission 1: The Quiet Ward Bloom

Objective:
Neutralize Death Regime bio-infection in a civilian medical module.
Protect uninfected staff. Eliminate compromised personnel if recovery is impossible.

The listening post's lower ring housed a small clinic—a white, round ward with viewports showing nothing but stars. Officially, it treated routine injuries and long-duration fatigue. Unofficially, it also served as an early-warning bio-screen for anything strange coming in from the frontier.

Galaxysuzuhime stepped through the clinic doors.

Half the lights were dimmed; only a few monitors glowed. A nurse dozed upright in a chair, a datapad slipping from her fingers. In a corner, a waste bin held sealed vials of blood samples bound for analysis.

Suzuhime's bells drifted ahead of her.

The air here felt...thick.

Through her eyes, the world suddenly took on extra layers—thin, translucent overlays marking temperature gradients, bio-signatures, contamination traces. A faint violet haze clung to the vents, pooled near the sample fridge, and licked along the floor like quiet fog.

Death Regime infection.

Subtle. Beautiful, if you ignored what it did.

The nurse's eyes fluttered.

For a moment, Suzuhime saw her pupils resolve into plus-shaped crosses, then blur back to normal.

"病原體潛伏，" Suzuhime murmured, Cantonese soft. The pathogen is hiding. "仲想扮清白。"

She raised her baton.

The tiny crystal bell at its head glowed, then rang—not in air, but in the blood inside the sleepers.

The sound wasn't audible; it was felt. The infected cells inside any host heard that note and responded, like spiders twitching to a plucked web.

Every contaminated vein lit up in her vision.

Three patients. One nurse. A small cluster of sealed blood vials in the fridge. One of the wall-mounted med-robots, its fluid reservoir ever so slightly tainted.

"可以救，唔可以救..." Can be saved, can't be saved...

Her expression tightened.

She swept the baton in a looping arc.

Gentle, golden lattices formed over the infected staff—thin as paper charms, settling onto their chests and throats. Each lattice pulsed once, then twice, syncing with their heartbeats. The Death Regime cells inside them tried to move, to adapt, to fight back.

The charm-frames flared white.

Inside those bodies, infected cells simply... stopped. Not exploded, not purged in gore—just refused to exist, their necro-logic overwritten by a new equation that read zero.

The nurse exhaled, long and shuddering, then slumped deeper into ordinary sleep.

Suzuhime turned to the fridge.

"For你哋，就冇咁客氣。" For you lot, no such kindness.

She flicked the baton downward.

The sealed vials inside cracked silently, their contents curling into violet smoke that was immediately swallowed by a golden field. The contaminated med-robot froze, its joints locking; fine cracks spiderwebbed across its reservoir before it burst inward, the fluid vanishing into a luminous pinch-point that she crushed between her fingers.

The violet haze faded.

The clinic air cleared.

On the monitoring station at the ward's edge, a small, green icon lit up: BIOHAZARD – CLEARED.

Suzuhime let out a slow breath.

"目標一，完成。" Objective One, cleared.

Her bells drifted on.

Mission 2: Spies on the Star-Rail

Objective:
Identify and eliminate embedded Death Regime sleeper agents aboard a civilian star-rail liner before they can sabotage a Galaxenchi-bound convoy.

The next discord came not from the station, but from beyond it: a distant, pulsing emergency packet from a star-rail line linking outer outposts back to Galaxenchi proper.

A long, pale train like a blade of light glided along a fixed gravitic track between gates, carrying freight pods and passenger compartments. One compartment had gone dark. Another transmitted random static where polite chatter had been a moment ago.

Suzuhime accepted the packet in silence.

"Galaxysuzuhime, this is Rail Control," came a nervous operator's voice in Mandarin. "我們在 15-車廂偵測到異常生物信號。通訊中斷。懷疑...死亡政權滲透。" We've detected anomalous bio-signals in Car 15. Comms cut. Possible... Death Regime infiltration.

"鎖死嗰節車廂。" Lock that car, she replied. "所有未隔離的連接全面封閉。" Seal all non-isolated couplings.

"已執行。"

She stepped into a docking ring.

Outside, the star-rail shuttled along its invisible path, streaking light against the dark. Tens of thousands of kilometers vanished every minute.

Suzuhime raised her hand.

A circular aperture opened in front of her, rimmed with those same liquid, golden bells. Through it, she could see the interior of Car 15—frozen for a heartbeat like a tableau.

Passengers mid-scream.
A soldier in standard Galaxy escort gear, eyes snapped into plus-pupil focus, turning his rifle on the uninfected.
A patch of floor where the air itself seemed thicker, where Death fog tried to seep into the train environment.

She stepped through.

Time stuttered.

Inside the car, everything moved in fragments, as though someone had taken a battle scene and split it into frames.

Suzuhime walked between them.

She touched the barrel of the turned rifle; bells flowed from her fingertips, wrapping the weapon in filaments that rewound its firing cycle. The bullet that had been leaving the barrel suddenly found itself never fired, its motion negated.

She slid to the soldier's side.

His face was twisted, veins standing out in dark lines under his skin. The infection was advanced, pushing toward full plus-eyed soldier conversion.

"你仲係咪你自己？" Are you still you? she asked quietly.

His plus-pupils flickered, as if struggling to refocus.

For a flicker of a second, she saw a normal iris, confused and horrified.

That was enough.

With a tap of her baton against his chest, she anchored a purification field around his heart—painful, burning, but survivable. The infection would fight; it would lose. He'd wake up with scars and memories of nightmares, but he'd wake up as himself.

Further down the car, two figures weren't fighting the infection at all—they were riding it, their bodies half-converted: subtle bone plating under their skin, faint violet glow at their finger joints. Death Regime spies, disguised as refugees. Their plus-eyes were stable, focused, analytical.

They saw her.

"Zielkontakt," one hissed in German, though his mouth hadn't moved yet—time still staggered. Target contact.

Suzuhime gave a small, rueful sigh.

"You兩個，" you two, "就冇咁好彩。"

Time snapped forward.

The car exploded into movement and sound—screams resuming, the ringing echo of halted gunfire, the hiss of Death fog trying to thicken again.

The two half-converted agents sprang for her, hands outstretched, nails elongating into bone-claws.

She flicked her baton upward.

"鳴。" Ring.

The crystal bell's note shattered every sound in the car into swirling shards of quiet.

The agents' movements broke, sliced into pieces by invisible lines of force. Their hands never reached her; instead they found themselves yanked sideways, slammed into the train's walls where luminous glyphs pinned them like butterflies.

For a heartbeat, Suzuhime studied them.

"You哋揀個好蠢嘅地方落手。" You picked a very stupid place to make your move, she said softly in Cantonese. "往 Galaxenchi 嘅路線，係我哋最唔會畀錯嘢過嘅地方。"

She traced a character in the air—滅, annihilate.

The glyphs flared.

The Death code inside their bodies tore away, leaving no corpses to reanimate, no samples to salvage—just clean, empty uniforms that fell to the floor as if no one had ever worn them.

The fog melted.

Passengers collapsed, sobbing. The once-infected escort soldier fell to his knees, clutching his chest and gasping in ordinary, human confusion.

"好，驚完就呼吸，" Suzuhime told them gently, switching to Mandarin. All right, panic over; now breathe. "醫療隊會接你們回去。這一節車廂會經過徹底消毒。你們能哭，是好事。" Med teams will bring you home. This car will be sanitized top to bottom. The fact that you can cry? That's a good sign.

She stepped back through her aperture.

The star-rail sped on toward Galaxenchi, minus one infection and two spies.

"目標二，完成。" Objective Two, cleared.

Mission 3: The Cult Below the City

Objective:
Disrupt an underground Death Regime cult in a border city, eliminate infected soldiers, prevent creation of a stable Death portal.

Some threats crept right up to the edges of the Galaxy Regime's influence, then dug downward.

In a rain-slick border city on the Eastoppola side—one of those grey, overbuilt places where neon signs outnumbered trees—local Galaxy-aligned authorities flagged something strange: a cluster of disappearances near an old subway line, strange chanting heard under the streets, and a faint, violet glow reported behind the cracks of a sealed maintenance door.

Suzuhime arrived under a borrowed umbrella.

On the surface, she looked like any other traveler: plain clothes, hoodie, simple boots, a messenger bag slung over one shoulder. The baton was hidden, collapsed to the length of a pen. The bells were tucked into her hair again, invisible until needed.

She rode the damp, graffiti-scarred escalator down to the closed station and walked past the "NO ENTRY" signs.

At the bottom, an old gate stood bent open. Beyond it, tunnel walls were daubed in symbols—some nonsense, some intentionally Death-Regime coded: plus-eyed skulls, jagged runes for decay and rebirth.

"真係以為畫幾個符就可以開門？" Really think you can open a door by doodling? she muttered.

But the darkness ahead wasn't normal.

The air vibrated with a low, slow pulse, like a heartbeat echoing through stone. The bells in her hair trembled in answer, tiny chimes overlapping in uneasy dissonance.

She let them go.

They floated ahead, shedding pale light.

The tunnel opened into an old maintenance chamber where a group had gathered—half ragged, half armored. Some wore stolen Death Regime gear, others wore Galaxy uniforms with their insignias crudely scratched off. All had plus-pupils at different stages of "bloom."

They circled a patch of air at the chamber's center.

The air there wasn't entirely air anymore. It bulged slightly, like a blister between worlds. Inside the swelling, faint shapes moved—shadows of shipyards, operating tables, vats. A Death portal seed.

"再唱大聲啲，佢哋就會聽到你嘅祈禱？" If you sing louder, will they hear your prayers? Suzuhime's voice floated in, light and almost amused.

Heads snapped toward her.

Guns came up. Bone-blades unfolded from infected fingers.

At the center, a robed figure—a local cult leader, half his face already sunken with the Death Regime's mark—raised a hand.

"Du bist zu spät," he rasped in German. You're too late. "Das Tor öffnet sich bereits." The gate is already opening.

Suzuhime looked at the pulsing air.

"開緊嘅，唔代表開咗。" In the process of opening is not the same as open.

Her bells descended.

They orbited the half-born portal, tracing its edges, sampling its cadence. To the cultists, they just looked like pretty golden motes. To Suzuhime, each bell fed her a line of math: phase shift, anchoring runes, the Death-side focus of the ritual.

She raised two fingers.

"今次，試吓 random objective 啦。" This time, let's try a random objective, she said softly, half to herself. "一：唔好畀任何人死喺呢度。二：唔好畀個門完整開。三：唔好畀任何感染嘅數據帶出地面。"

Her eyes sharpened.

"挑戰接受。"

She tapped the nearest rail with her toe.

Energy rippled along the floor—soft, almost invisible—then surged upward in thin, vertical sheets between cultists, cutting lines through the room that defined new "lanes" of movement. Anyone who crossed a line would activate a binding field; anyone who stood still too long would find their infection pinned.

The first gunshot cracked.

The bullet never reached her.

A bell rang.

The bullet's path turned ninety degrees in midair, slamming into the wall beside its firer. Shocked, he flinched backward—straight across one of the invisible lines. Light snapped around his ankles, locking him in place.

"第一個捉到。" First catch.

She danced through the chamber.

Her motion was anime-fluid: cuts from close-up eye shots to wide, stylized silhouettes. One second she was a flicker at the edge of someone's vision; the next, she was inches from their face, baton pressed gently to their forehead.

Some cultists still had enough of themselves left; their plus-pupils wavered. Those got a bell placed over their hearts like a seal. Infection locked, then dissolved.

Others were gone—too deep, too hollow, little more than Death puppets. Those she froze, glyphs clamping over their joints, then snapped their Death code; their bodies fell limp, unmoving, eyes finally free of unnatural geometry.

At the center, the robed leader tried to widen the portal, chanting in a mangled mix of Death-German and local dialects.

The blister in reality stretched.

On the other side, something huge shifted—perhaps a lab, perhaps a hanger, perhaps a single watching eye.

Suzuhime stopped in front of the portal.

The bells circled it faster now, leaving trails of light.

"你哋嘅門，畫得唔錯，" she admitted. Your door's drawn pretty well. "不過呢種設計...喺我哋學校入面，只係 B- 咋。"

She drew a circle in the air in front of the portal, then another inside it, then marked four points at the compass directions.

Each point lit up with a character: 聽 (listen), 靜 (still), 封 (seal), 忘 (forget).

The next breath she took pulled in not air, but sound—every chant, every moan, every pulse of Death-energy, every whispered plea across the dimensional gap. She held it, lips pressed, then exhaled into the circle.

The characters flared.

The portal shuddered.

From the other side came a brief, shocked tug, as if the Death Regime's far-off engineers had felt someone slap their hand away mid-surgery. Then the blister collapsed inward, swallowing its own edges until there was nothing left but stale air and a faint scorch mark.

The leader screamed.

"Nein! NEIN!"

Suzuhime looked at him, almost pitying.

"你哋啱啱俾人 hang up 咗。" You just got hung up on.

He lunged.

She let him.

At the last second, she stepped aside, placing one palm lightly against his back and whispering a single word: 眠—sleep.

The infection in him surged, then flickered, then went dark. His knees buckled. He hit the floor, breathing shallow but alive, portal-craze burned out of his neural pattern.

She surveyed the chamber.

Bound cultists. Neutralized puppets. Fallen leader. No portal. No loose infection drifting up into the city.

"目標三，完成。" Objective Three, cleared.

Rain still fell above, indifferent.

She walked back up alone, umbrella popping open with a soft whump at the surface.

Mission 4: Firebreak Before Galaxenchi

Objective:
Interdict and dismantle a Death Regime covert operation planning to seed infected personnel into Galaxenchi via a disguised freight flotilla.
Keep the threat far from home.

Later, when reports filtered back through the Galaxy Regime's analytic lattice, a pattern emerged.

The clinic.
The star-rail.
The cult.

Each was a test, a finger probing for gaps.

The next probe was larger.

On a fringe moon-port known as Kallio-γ, a humble freight hub that served as one of many stepping stones toward Galaxenchi, three independent freighters docked within an hour of each other. Their manifests were clean, their crews polite, their cargo containers properly sealed.

Too clean.
Too polite.
Too proper.

Galaxysuzuhime's bells chimed all at once.

She arrived in the moon-port control tower just as the duty supervisor was finishing the docking paperwork.

"嗌停所有貨運裝卸。" Halt all cargo transfer, she said, flashing her credentials. "暫時當呢三隻船係高危。" Treat these three ships as high-risk.

The supervisor blanched. "But the schedule—"

"命重要啲，定 schedule 重要啲？" Which matters more, lives or schedule?

He swallowed. "命。"

"咁就好。" Good answer.

Scenario A: Sleeper Crew

On the first freighter, half the crew were genuine merchants. The other half were Death Regime agents whose bodies had been wrapped in false bio-signatures, their plus-eyes hidden under layered camouflage fields.

Suzuhime boarded alone.

She walked through corridors lined with crates and bulkheads, bells flitting out to brush every crew member in passing. Most chimed in soft, clear tones.

Four chimed dull and off-key.

She found them in the mess hall: laughing, playing cards, looking perfectly ordinary.

Their eyes met hers.

The room changed temperature.

Without preamble, she placed her baton on the table between them.

"玩唔玩個 game？" Want to play a game?

They glanced at each other.

The oldest of them, a woman with sun-hardened skin and steady hands, smiled with calculated charm.

"Welche Art von Spiel?" What kind of game?

Suzuhime's own smile was friendly, almost kind.

"睇吓，你哋入面，到底仲有冇覺得自己係人。" Let's see if inside you, there's anything left that still thinks it's human.

One of the bells dropped from her sleeve onto the table, landing with no sound.

The four agents flinched, just slightly.

Their plus-geometry rippled under their camouflage, struggling not to respond to the familiar Death-adjacent vibration hiding inside that bell.

That was all she needed.

A thin ring of light sprang up around the table, isolating them in a perfect circle.

The real crew, scattered around the edges of the mess, saw nothing but the air around the "card game" shimmer once. They'd remember feeling a little dizzy. They'd remember going home safe.

Inside the circle, time folded, and the four Death sleepers found themselves alone with Suzuhime in a white, abstracted space tiled with distant stars.

She stood on the opposite side of the table.

"No weapons," she said gently. "淨係 truth 或者 silence。" Only truth, or silence.

They tried to attack anyway:

Bone-lances from their arms.
Violet vapor from their mouths.
Necro-script bursting under their skin.

Each attempt hit the invisible wall of the circle and dissolved into sparks.

"I哋有成個學系專門研究你哋呢啲東西。" We have an entire department just for studying your tricks, she said quietly. "你哋用緊嘅招式，本來就係老師上課時用嚟示範嘅教材。"

She leaned forward, eyes soft but unyielding.

"So，我淨係問一次。" So, I'll only ask this once. "你哋啲貨、你哋啲路線、你哋啲上線—全部交出嚟，或者..."

She tapped the bell.

"喺度永遠安靜。"

In the end, three of them chose silence.

One chose to talk.

The circle absorbed his confession—routes, codes, staging points, the names of three Death Regime elites handling logistics. When he finished, his plus-eyes flickered.

Suzuhime gave him the mercy of unconsciousness and a heavily monitored quarantine. Death cells were stripped from him, layer by layer, until only a trembling, bruised man remained.

The other three simply... stopped.

When the circle faded, the supervising officer on Kallio-γ's security tapes would only see Suzuhime collect her baton and walk back out of the mess, nodding once to the room.

"Crew cleared for decontamination and counseling," she informed Control. "三名非人員處理完畢，一名進入醫療管制。" Three non-humans dealt with, one entering med-control.

Scenario B: Infected Cargo

On the second freighter, the crew were clean.

The cargo was not.

Containers stacked five high hummed with faint, dead frequencies. Inside, Death Regime biogels swam in masked nutrient baths, each one coded to activate once it neared Galaxenchi's gravity well.

Suzuhime walked the cargo bay like a priestess in a temple of bad ideas.

The bells went ahead, mapping contamination like a three-dimensional painting.

She didn't bother opening the containers.

Instead, she raised both arms.

"全數歸零。" Reset to zero.

Every bell chimed in the same instant.

The bay filled with a wave of silent light, passing cleanly through metal, through gel, through dormant spores. In its wake, the Death code inside the biogels turned to static.

Monitors that had been quietly reading "STABLE" flickered, then flatlined. Inside the containers, goo that had once been virulent folded into inert, powder-fine ash.

The freighter captain, watching from the doorway, stared with wide eyes.

"我的貨..." My cargo...

"本來就唔係你嘅貨。" It was never really yours, Suzuhime said softly. "你肯定唔係第一時間知道自己運緊咩。" You clearly weren't told what you were really hauling.

She looked at him.

"下一次，問清楚啲，good?" Next time, ask more questions, good?

He nodded rapidly.

Scenario C: Weaponized Route

On the third freighter, the ship itself was the weapon.

Hidden in its jump-core geometry, a nested Death spell waited to unfold once the ship entered a specific Galaxenchi approach corridor, turning the vessel into a one-use portal bomb.

Inside the engine room, Suzuhime stood in front of the core.

It throbbed with normal power—and a second, parasitic heartbeat underneath.

Two sets of glyphs spun at once: the Galaxy's regulated jump-script and the Death Regime's jagged, viral overlay.

She tilted her head.

"幾靚嘅 calligraphy。" Pretty calligraphy.

The Death script pulsed in answer, sensing her scrutiny.

She lifted her baton, then put it away.

For this, she wanted her hands free.

Ten, twenty, thirty bells rose from her sleeves and hair, arranging themselves in a ring in front of the core.

She snapped her fingers once.

The bells spun.

An anime opening sequence might have played here: swirling light, close-ups of her eyes, overlays of equations and kanji and glyphs, the feeling of someone rewriting the rules of the room.

Suzuhime's fingers danced through the air, tracing counter-strokes along the Death glyphs—never destroying them outright, just... rerouting them, nudging vectors away from catastrophic outcomes.

The portal trigger that had been waiting to bloom into a doorway over Galaxenchi instead folded inward, redirecting its collapse point into a small, closed loop outside normal space. All that destructive force would now discharge into a sealed pocket that felt, to the Death side, like a successful handshake.

They'd feel satisfaction. She'd get a harmless flash in an empty dark.

"好啦，" she whispered, finishing the last line. "fake success, real failure。"

The core hummed.

The viral pattern tried to activate, found its pathways subtly altered, and dutifully followed the new script.

Somewhere far off, in a Death Regime monitoring station, a junior necro-engineer would cheer as their console lit up with a "successful" portal ping.

On Kallio-γ, the freighter's engine just sighed and power-cycled like any other stressed but functional jump core.

Suzuhime patted the casing.

"有時候，贏唔係炸爛對方。" Sometimes victory isn't about blowing the enemy up. "係令佢哋喺完全唔知嘅情況之下，白做嘢。" It's making them waste effort without ever realizing it.

She left.

Epilogue: The Long, Quiet Line

By the time all three freighters were cleared, diverted, or quietly quarantined, Kallio-γ's night cycle had deepened. Only the stars and the distant glow of Galaxenchi's main systems shone beyond the viewports.

On a balcony overlooking the freight docks, Galaxysuzuhime leaned on a rail, wind from the station vents tugging at her hair.

Her mission list flickered in a soft holo beside her.

Objective 1: Clinic infection – Cleared

Objective 2: Star-rail spy infiltration – Cleared

Objective 3: Underground cult portal – Cleared

Objective 4: Freight flotilla covert seeding – Cleared

Four random operations.
Four different methods.
One invisible firebreak holding back the Death Regime from creeping too close to Galaxenchi.

A message pinged her private channel.

Professor Galaxbeam.

Just a text this time.

「鈴姫，辛苦了。你的戰場，很少人看見，但我看見。」
Suzuhime, good work. Your battlefield is one few ever see, but I see it.

Another line, in softly teasing Japanese:

「派手な空の授業の裏で、静かな試験監督をしてくれてありがとう。」
Thank you for being the quiet exam proctor behind all the flashy air lessons.

She closed her eyes for a moment, letting that sit.

Then she typed back, thumb hovering over the interface.

「教授，我只係唔鍾意佢哋喺我哋屋企門口玩殭屍。」
Professor, I just don't like them playing zombies on our doorstep.

A small pause.

Then, from him:

「那就繼續把門口打掃乾淨吧。」
Then keep the doorstep clean.

She smiled.

"了解。" Understood.

Far out where the big wars raged, Galaxapuff and the other Supreme Commanders drew great burning lines across seas and skies.

Here, along the unseen edges of those lines, Galaxysuzuhime walked alone with her bells, solving one hidden objective after another—spy networks, cult seeds, infection blooms, portal tricks—making sure that by the time the war ever thought about touching Galaxenchi itself, it would already have tripped over all her quiet, carefully arranged failures.

Anime heroes charged with swords and cannons; her weapon was the sound between heartbeats, the moment infections lost their nerve.

And as the lights of Galaxenchi pulsed faintly in the distance like a patient, breathing star, she lifted her baton, one last bell chimed in the dark, and another invisible line of defense settled into place.

After the Bells

In the weeks that followed Kallio-γ, Galaxysuzuhime's war never looked like a war from the outside.

There were no grand fleet reviews for her, no fireworks over reclaimed seas. Her battles sounded like doors quietly failing to open, trains arriving safely on time, hospitals that didn't become outbreak sites.

But the mission log told the truth.

Scenario: The Singing Satellite

Above a minor planet where Death Regime raids had once scraped the atmosphere, a communications satellite began to "sing" the wrong code.

On paper, it was a malfunction. In practice, it was a Death-side probe: a subtle, repeating pattern embedded in maintenance updates, trying to map the timing of Galaxy defenses around Galaxenchi.

Suzuhime stood in the docking cradle, helmet under her arm, suit sealed from neck to heel.

Outside, the stars reflected in the satellite's polished panels.

She drifted across the void, tether line humming, bells floating inside her helmet like slivers of light.

Up close, she could hear it: the satellite's original operating rhythm, and beneath it, the off-key Death pattern the enemy had burned into its firmware.

"你走錯咗樂團。" You joined the wrong orchestra, she murmured.

She pressed her palm to the casing.

In her mind, the code unfolded as pages of sheet music—bars of standard Galaxy protocol, then jagged notes of necro-math wedged in between.

With calm, deliberate motions, she rewrote the score.

Line by line, she lifted the viral segments out, folding them into a closed loop the Death-side listeners would read as error noise, then filled the gaps with new measures—not only cleaning the satellite, but planting false timings, false maps. Anyone listening would "learn" a defensive pattern that no longer existed.

When she floated back to the airlock, the satellite's song was clean again.

"目標，完成。" Objective, cleared.

Scenario: Refugee Camp at Dusk

On a dust-colored moon, a makeshift camp spread out under dim sunlamps—tents and prefab shelters, lines of people who had fled from Death-adjacent warzones.

The problem was invisible: the Death Regime had hidden spores, not in lungs or bloodstreams this time, but in stories—whispered rumors coded with trigger phrases that, once repeated enough, would unlock buried infection traits planted earlier.

Children repeated the phrases as games. Adults told them as ghost stories.

Suzuhime sat cross-legged in the middle of the camp's central fire circle, listening.

Her bells hung like faint fireflies above the crowd, measuring not just breath and blood, but the patterns of speech.

Every time a certain rhythm of words appeared, a bell chimed soft in her mind. Every time it didn't catch, she nudged the conversation sideways—slipping in new versions of the tale, stealing the "active" words and replacing them with nonsense syllables and harmless motifs.

She told her own stories instead: old Galaxenchi folktales about star-lanterns and stubborn comets, about bells that chased away bad dreams.

As night settled, the trigger-phrases unraveled. The Death code fell apart in people's nervous systems, never quite reaching the thresholds it needed.

By dawn, the camp still had its grief and fear—but no one woke up with plus-shaped pupils.

"完咗。" Finished.

Scenario: The Archive Breach

Deep in a data archive orbiting Galaxenchi, a Death Regime packet had slipped past three firewalls and started to eat.

Not loudly. Not obvious.

It rewrote minor records. Shipping manifests. Patrol logs. The thousand tiny details that, if bent enough over time, would make the Galaxy Regime look the wrong way at the wrong time.

Suzuhime walked through the archive's humming server aisles, fingers trailing along cold metal.

Her bells drifted between the racks like tiny lanterns.

On a holo-slab, she watched the infection's path, a pale violet thread migrating from file to file.

Instead of burning it out with brute force, she followed it, back-tracking to its staging node, then folding that node in on itself—turning the corrupted cluster into a quarantined maze of decoy files, each one leading the Death code further from anything real.

By the time she was done, the enemy packet thought it was feasting on precious data.

In reality, it was chewing on its own tail.

When she finally stepped back into the corridor, fatigue lay across her shoulders like a physical weight.

The log updated:

GALAXYSUZUHIME – THREAT CLUSTER 17-C – MULTI-VECTOR INFILTRATION
Status: Contained and inverted.
Proximity to Galaxenchi: Still comfortably far.

Return to Galaxenchi

At last, the orders came:

「暫時清線。回 Galaxenchi。」
Lines temporarily cleared. Return to Galaxenchi.

Her shuttle slid into the planet's soft halo of light.

Below, Galaxenchi sprawled like a many-ringed lantern world—floating campuses, crystal towers, hovering causeways under curtains of gentle auroras.

For once, she wasn't routed to the covert operations wing or the analytic towers.

Her destination pinged as something pleasantly mundane:

Galaxenchi Regenerative Health Pavilion – Level 3: Deep Muscular Recovery & Relaxation

She blinked at the text and almost laughed.

"教授，今次咁直接？" Professor, this time so direct?

The reply was a short voice note from Galaxbeam himself, in Japanese:

「命令だよ。行きなさい。」
It's an order. Go.

She didn't argue.

The Health Pavilion

The pavilion was built like a tranquil onsen crossed with a space observatory.

Soft light. Pale wood. Panels that opened onto simulated horizons of stars. The air smelled faintly of something herbal and warm—nothing chemical, nothing like a medic bay.

A receptionist in a simple Galaxy uniform bowed slightly as Suzuhime entered.

"Galaxysuzuhime-san," they greeted her gently, in Japanese. "本日は全身コースをご予約されています。お疲れ様です。" You're booked for a full-body course today. Thank you for your hard work.

She gave a small, tired bow back.

"お世話になります。" I'll be in your care.

They led her to a private suite.

Inside, the room was spacious but uncluttered: a padded massage table, a low bench, a soft panel of light overhead that could switch from sunrise to starlight. A translucent screen showed only a distant nebula slowly rotating, calming and unthreatening.

She changed into the provided robe—light, loose, comfortable. For once, her bells rested on a hook with her jacket, faintly chiming as if relieved as well.

When she lay face-down on the warmed table, her body finally admitted how exhausted it was.

The Massage – Release, Not Display

A therapist entered quietly, announced themselves, and asked permission in a calm, professional tone.

"今日のご希望は、首・肩を中心に、全身の疲労回復でよろしいですか？" Focusing on neck and shoulders for full-body fatigue recovery today?

Suzuhime's answer was a muffled, honest, "是...拜托。" Yes... please.

The massage began at her neck and shoulders.

Fingers pressed into the tight bands of muscle at the base of her skull—where hours of hyperfocus and time-bending concentration had settled like iron. The pressure was firm but controlled, finding knots she didn't even know were there.

Each slow, circling stroke felt like someone erasing lines of strain she had worn for days.

Her breathing deepened almost immediately.

The therapist moved to her upper back, following the long lines alongside her spine. Palms glided in steady paths, up from mid-back to shoulders, then down again, coaxing tense muscles to soften.

No theatrics. No teasing. Just methodical, expert care.

As pressure rolled between her shoulder blades, her mind flickered through recent missions—the clinic, the star-rail, the cult, the freight flotilla. With each long exhale, those images seemed to lose some of their sharp, urgent edges, becoming filed, completed reports instead of active alarms.

"力加減は、大丈夫ですか？" Is the pressure all right?

"嗯...啱啱好。" Mm... just right, she answered, eyes half-closed.

The therapist worked down her arms, kneading along triceps and forearms, easing cramped tendons. Her fingers, so used to tracing glyphs and code in midair, finally uncurled, resting limp against the sheet.

Close up, the tension lines around her eyes softened; the usual faint alertness in her brows gave way to something she almost never showed on duty—unguarded calm.

Then they moved to her lower back and hips, pressing in along the joints that had absorbed countless abrupt movements, jumps, and sudden reorientations in combat and infiltration. Each slow, sustained press seemed to unlock another layer of stiffness. She let out a quiet sound that was more relief than anything else.

From there, legs: long, gliding strokes along her calves and thighs through the robe's fabric, warming tired muscles that had carried her through tunnels, between servers, across star-rails and broken ground. The rhythm was hypnotic—firm pressure, gradual release, careful attention to balance both sides.

Her feet—pale from long hours in boots—got their own turn: gentle thumbs working into arches and soles, undoing the memory of hard decks and station floors. Every time a particularly stubborn knot yielded, tiny sparks of warmth seemed to travel up her whole frame, replacing the old low-level ache.

Throughout, the focus stayed on relief and restoration, not display. The robe stayed in place; the touch, while attentive and thorough, remained professional and respectful. The only exposed details were the obvious ones of strain: stiff fingers finally relaxing, shoulders settling lower, steady breathing replacing the shallow, tactical inhale she used on missions.

By the time the therapist returned to her neck for a final, feather-light pass, Suzuhime felt as if someone had turned down gravity by half.

"これで終了です。" That concludes the session.

She lay there a moment longer, eyes closed, then slowly pushed herself up into a seated position.

For a heartbeat, she simply sat, robe loose around her shoulders, hair slightly mussed, cheeks touched with a healthy, post-massage flush. The ever-present alert shine in her eyes had been replaced by something softer, more human.

In the nebula-screen behind her, starlight drifted slowly, lazily, for once not trying to form any patterns she needed to decode.

After

Later, dressed again in her field clothes, she stepped out onto one of Galaxenchi's open promenades.

Below, the luminous city curved away in bands of light. Above, actual stars shared the sky with the world's own floating academies and observatories.

Her bells chimed softly at her wrist.

"你哋都休息完未？" You all finished resting too? she asked them quietly.

They rang once, a single clear note.

Her comm pinged—a low-priority update, nothing urgent. For the first time in what felt like a very long time, she silenced it without guilt.

Somewhere out at sea and sky, Supreme Commanders like Galaxapuff and Galaxadale were pushing back Death Regime offensives in visible arcs of fire and steel.

Here, on the edge of that light, Galaxysuzuhime let her shoulders loosen, let herself simply stand and breathe, knowing that for this brief span, the lines she tended—the hidden ones—were holding.

Her work would never be flashy.

It would never fill propaganda reels.

But as the night breeze moved across Galaxenchi's terraces and the last echo of the massage's warmth lingered in her muscles, she accepted one quiet truth:

As long as the doorstep stayed clean, as long as infections died in the shadows and portals failed to open where they were meant to, then the stars above could keep burning on their own schedule.

She smiled—small, private, but real—turned her collar up against the cool air, and walked back into the city, bells chiming softly in time with her steps.

While Galaxysuzuhime walked softly along the unseen edge of Galaxenchi's safety, far beyond her bells—on the other side of the long, dark sea—the silence broke in a different register.

Where her work was needlepoint, his was hammer.

The Shadow of Deathendye

In the deep, ash-grey war rooms beneath Deathenbulkiztahlem's core bastion, holo-screens flickered with pale blue and sickly violet. Geometry mapped the world in grids of threat and opportunity.

At the center of those lights stood Supreme Commander Dämonfried Deathendye Blutgräber.

Tall, shoulders wrapped in layered, bone-etched pauldrons, cloak hanging heavy with stitched campaign sigils, he stood with the stillness of someone accustomed to watching whole continents move on his command. His eyes were not plus-pupils; those were for his soldiers. His gaze had the flat, depthless focus of someone who had long ago traded a piece of himself for the ability to see an entire theatre at once.

Holo-feeds streamed in:

Galaxy Regime unmanned spy drones—tiny, gold-and-ice specks skating over cloud layers.

Automatronic recon craft—angular machines with no cockpits, all sensor arrays and stealth plating.

Unmanned submarines—silent, low-signature shadows slipping through deep water, running endless survey patterns.

They traced thin lines across Death-controlled sea and sky, never venturing near Galaxenchi, but watching everything between.

Deathendye watched them back.

"Spähmaschinen," he said quietly in German. Recon machines. "Keine Seelen. Nur Augen." No souls. Only eyes.

He lifted a hand.

"Erste Maßnahme: Säuberung des Himmels." First measure: clear the sky.

Scenario 1 – The Sky Cull

On his word, batteries along Deathenbulkiztahlem's coasts woke.

Chem-cloud cannons rotated toward empty-looking patches of sky. Necro-radar arrays adjusted their phases, tuned not for life-signs but for the particular stuttering hum of Galaxy unmanned frames.

Overseas, squadrons of Death Regime interceptor craft launched—sleek, fanged silhouettes, piloted by plus-eyed aces and flanked by their own unmanned hunter-drones, each one a morbid parody of the Galaxy automata.

In the upper layers of atmosphere, the first contact happened without sound.

Galaxy drones ghosted along their survey arcs, almost arrogant in their efficiency. Then the air around them thickened with invisible fields; Death hunter-drone swarms switched their patterns from passive shadows to killing spirals.

Deathendye watched the telemetry.

"Zielschema Gamma-Fünf," he ordered. Target pattern Gamma-5. "Nicht stumpf zusammenstoßen—schneiden. Sensoren zuerst." Don't just slam into them—cut them. Sensors first.

The Death drones obeyed.

They slashed across the Galaxy units at angles designed not simply to shatter frames, but to erase data pathways—destroying recording arrays, memory cores, redundancy nodes. Each Galaxy spy that died in that upper air died blind, its last seconds unreadable to anyone waiting on the other side.

Throughout their sea of screens, Death officers murmured damage tallies as golden motes fell from heaven like artificial snow.

"Lufthorizont größtenteils geklärt, Herr Kommandant," came the report. Air horizon mostly cleared, Commander.

Deathendye did not smile.

"'Größtenteils' ist ein Wort, das ich nicht mag." 'Mostly' is a word I do not like.

He tapped the edge of the holosphere.

"Zweite Maßnahme: jagt mir die Schatten unter Wasser." Second measure: hunt me the shadows under the water.

Scenario 2 – The Silent Depths

Deathenbulkiztahlem's coastal waters darkened.

From cavernous pens carved into the continental shelf, Death submarines slipped free—some manned, some not. Their profiles were not smooth; they bristled with sensor-spines and chem-lattices, tuned to feel the faint electromagnetic whispers of Galaxy unmanned subs skimming near their claimed zones.

On his map, Deathendye watched little blue triangles trace their search grids.

Galaxy subs moved cleverly: pausing, doubling back, faking drift. They had been designed by people like Galaxbeam, after all—masters of probabilistic trickery.

Deathendye adjusted.

"Denkt nicht wie Kommandanten," he told his sub-fleet captains. Don't think like commanders. "Denkt wie Aasfresser." Think like scavengers. "Ihre Drohnen sind keine stolzen Schiffe. Sie sind Ratten." Their drones are not proud ships. They are rats.

He overlaid new patterns—search paths that didn't chase sensible arcs but scent trails: likely choke points where a cautious designer would still send machines, places data-hungry curiosity couldn't resist.

Hours slid by in that cold sea.

One by one, contacts flickered into being:

A Galaxy unmanned sub hugging a thermal layer, its hull cooled to match surrounding water.

Another nestled against a trench wall, pretending to be rock.

A third drifting near a Death supply lane, recording everything.

Death torpedoes did not announce themselves. They killed from almost touching distance, triggered by the subtle mismatch between "no life at all" and the faint, patient hum of artificial processors.

Deathendye took care to log each one.

"Jedes zerstörte Spähgerät ist eine Rechnung," he said softly. Every destroyed spy device is an invoice. "Wir schicken sie später zurück—mit Zinsen." We'll send them back later—with interest.

The Jump to Deathenbulkiztahlem

Once the sky and sea were swept, at least for this cycle, Deathendye turned from the holosphere and stepped down from the dais.

His personal portal array waited: a ring of upright stones etched in flaring runes, connected by root-like conduits into the continent's underflesh.

He did not ride in ships when he could stride between coordinates.

"Ziel: Westprojektionsfront, Deathenbulkiztahlem," he instructed. Destination: Western Projection Front, Deathenbulkiztahlem.

The runes ignited. A vertical wound of violet and black opened in the air.

He stepped through.

In a blink, the war room vanished. In its place: a cliffside command platform facing a grey, heaving sea littered with silhouettes of vast dreadnaught-class transport carriers, their decks crawling with zombie-mutant personnel and plus-eyed officers.

The air here stank of salt, chem-smoke, and the dry, dusty scent of ash from distant islands already burned.

Officers snapped to attention.

"Herr Kommandant Deathendye!" came the chorus.

He raised a hand—enough.

"Bericht." Report.

They obeyed.

Fragments of Deathenstorm's shattered shipyard line.
Surviving outposts.
Islands heavily infected with Death Regime's own zombies and mutant shock-troops, now half-feral after recent defeats and sudden resupply disruptions.

On the holo-map, those islands pulsed in violet.

"Das sind keine Bastionen mehr," Deathendye said, studying them. These are no longer bastions. "Das sind Fackeln. Und wir entscheiden, wie sie brennen." They are torches. And we decide how they burn.

Scenario 3 – The Scavenger Command

He addressed his assembled staff in clipped, cold German.

"Befehl an alle befallenen Inseln im äußeren Gürtel." Order to all infected islands in the outer belt. "Alle mutierten Zombietruppen werden unter zentralen Leitoffizieren zusammengerafft." All mutant zombie forces are to be massed under central controlling officers.

His voice did not rise. It didn't need to.

"Neue Doktrin: Räumen und verzehren." New doctrine: Clear and consume.

He pointed to the nearest pulsing island.

"Alles, was an erneuerbaren, brauchbaren oder wiederverwertbaren Materialien existiert—Metall, Holz, Chemikalien, Baustrukturen—wird vollständig geplündert." Everything renewable, useful, or recyclable—metal, wood, chemicals, structural elements—is to be fully scavenged. "Keine Infrastruktur, die dem Galaxy-Regime als Deckung oder Datenquelle dienen könnte, bleibt stehen." No infrastructure that could serve the Galaxy Regime as cover or data source remains standing.

Screens showed it happen.

On one infected island, mutant zombies surged through abandoned Death barracks and overrun outposts—not aimless, but under new orders screamed down the necro-psychic lattice. They tore wiring from walls, dismantled turret housings, ripped paneling from comm towers. Anything of value was dragged to designated salvage pits, sorted by plus-eyed quartermasters who turned ruin into neatly stacked resources.

Once an area was stripped, flamethrower detachments rolled through, dousing what remained in chem-fire that burned hot and strangely clean, leaving little for later forensic analysis.

Deathendye's rationale was simple and ruthless: deny the Galaxy Regime anything—not just positions, but clues.

"Wir hinterlassen ihnen Erde, Asche und Fehler." We leave them soil, ash, and false leads.

Overhead, Death aerial squadrons took position.

As soon as Galaxy unmanned surveillance craft tried to approach the burning islands, Deathendye's earlier tactics came back into play: hunter-drones and interceptor wings shredded them, turning would-be observation points into short-lived flares snuffed out by flak and chem-clouds.

In the waters around each target, Death destroyers and cruisers waited like patient predators, scanning for cloaked Galaxy unmanned spyships.

When one such cloaked drone-ship tried to glide in on silent, masked drives, a Death cruiser's necro-sonar caught it.

"Kontakt," the operator intoned. Contact.

Deathendye watched the feed from the cliffside platform.

"Zielklassifizierung?" Target class?

"Unbemanntes Aufklärungsboot, Galaxy-Design."

He nodded once.

"Nicht sofort zerstören," he decided. Don't destroy it immediately. "Erst die Sensoren schneiden. Dann den Antrieb. Dann lassen wir es brennen, wo sie uns gut sehen können—ohne Daten, ohne Ehre." First cut its sensors. Then its drive. Then let it burn where they can see us clearly—without data, without honor.

Orders relayed. Torpedoes struck not center mass, but precisely along the sensor array and engine housing. Crippled, the spyship drifted, unable to record its own demise. Only then did a final shell turn it into a brief, impotent flare on the horizon.

Hours of Scorched Extraction

Time on Deathenbulkiztahlem's western projection front became measured in cycles of:

Salvage – mutant zombies swarming deserted facilities, stripping them down to bare bedrock.

Scorched-earth – chem-fire storms reducing what was left to unreadable ruin.

Interdiction – Death naval and aerial units knocking out incoming Galaxy unmanned assets before they gathered meaningful intelligence.

Hour after hour, more islands fell not to Galaxy advance, but to Deathendye's own denial doctrine.

On the map, violet nodes winked out as "strongholds" and reappeared as neatly tagged resource shipments or blackened marks labeled: RAZED & HARVESTED.

At last, the time came for the final phase.

The dreadnaught-class transport carriers anchored in deeper water, their vast bulk steady even as smoke from the islands blew across them like low, dirty clouds.

Gangways extended.

Holds opened like metal canyons.

"Einwohner einladen," Deathendye ordered, tone unreadable. Bring the islanders aboard. "Wer noch lebt, gehört jetzt nach Hause." Whoever still lives belongs now at home.

Plus-eyed officers and grim marine detachments moved ashore, rounding up survivors—human, part-mutant, exhausted Death Regime loyalists who had somehow lived through bombardments and contamination cycles. Some walked under their own power. Others were carried.

They were not gentle, but they were efficient.

On the piers—those that still stood—crates piled up: metals, chem-barrels, disassembled turret cores, stacks of recovered instrumentation. Everything that might rebuild Deathenbulkiztahlem's strength went into the carrier holds.

Deathendye watched it all from his cliffside platform, cloak snapping in the harsh sea wind.

To one side, a subordinate approached.

"Herr Kommandant," the officer reported, "die meisten äußeren Inseln sind geräumt. Ressourcen verladen. Robotische Feindaufklärung in diesem Sektor—praktisch null." Most outer islands cleared. Resources loaded. Enemy robotic recon in this sector—practically zero.

Deathendye's gaze stayed on the transports.

"'Praktisch'," he repeated softly. "Noch so ein Wort, das ich hasse." 'Practically.' Another word I hate.

But for today, it was enough.

"Abfahrt," he ordered. Depart.

The engines of the dreadnaught-carriers rumbled to life.

One by one, the massive ships turned their prows away from the slaughtered archipelagos and began the journey back toward the Death Regime homeland—toward the deeper, harsher security of Deathenbulkiztahlem's core coasts.

Behind them, the islands smoldered. No shipyards. No neat rows of intact facilities. No untouched machinery for Galaxy unmanned surveyors to marvel at and record.

Just stripped bones and ash.

Deathendye watched until the last carrier vanished into sea-haze.

Then, almost absently, he reached up and adjusted the edge of his heavy collar.

"Sie werden kommen, um zu schauen," he said to no one in particular. They will come to look. "Sollen sie. Es gibt nichts mehr zu sehen, was ihnen nützt." Let them. There is nothing left to see that helps them.

He turned back toward the continent.

Behind him, Deathenstorm's failures were being reduced to fuel. Ahead of him, the Death Regime's homeland braced to receive new resources, new troops, new plans for projection.

Far away, bells on Galaxenchi chimed softly over cleaned thresholds.

Here, on Deathenbulkiztahlem, the answer was a different kind of chime: the heavy, iron sound of chains and anchors being raised, of harvested war-matter returning home, of a Supreme Commander narrowing the field so that next time, when Galaxy unmanned eyes searched the maps of his domain, all they'd find was nothing where once there had been everything.

Not retreat.

Recompression.

Preparation for the next, uglier stroke.

The Westonglappa Sea that day looked like it had forgotten war existed.

Sunlight lay in flat sheets over the water. The big civilian–military joint armada from Westonglappa moved in lazy formation: cruise liners refitted as troop carriers, container ships with naval escorts, a few proud capital ships moving like slow gods between them. Flags flapped, radar dishes turned at peacetime speeds, more concerned with storms than torpedoes.

On the decks, sailors smoked, joked, leaned on rails. Some of the civilian passengers waved at escort ships as if this were a parade instead of a redeployment.

They never saw the horizon bend.

Very far away, the sky darkened—not with clouds, but with silhouettes.

Deathendye came from above and the sides at once.

His largest naval–aerial grouping yet moved in a single enormous, disciplined arc: chem-cruisers, heavy battleships, dreadnaught transports hanging back, and above them layered wings of Death Regime aircraft, their undersides inked with runes to confuse sensors.

The Westonglappan radars finally caught it.

"Unbekannte Signaturen... viele... sehr viele..." Unidentified signatures... many... so many...

On Deathendye's flagship, the holosphere painted the scene in perfect, cold geometry: blue dots for Westonglappa, violet and black for his own forces, the calm sea a grid of opportunity.

"Friedensfahrt," he murmured. Peacetime transit. "Keine Gefechtsformationen. Keine echte Luftsicherung." No battle formation. No real air cover.

He did not hesitate.

"Erste Welle: Luftüberfall." First wave: air strike. "Zielpriorität: Führungs- und Kommunikationsschiffe. Danach Antrieb und Ruder." Target priority: command and comms ships. Then engines and rudders.

The Death aerial wings dropped like a curtain.

Bombers and strike craft screamed in low, engines whining in unnatural harmonics. They released guided chem-shells and kinetic penetrators with ruthless precision. The Westonglappan flagship took three hits along its superstructure before its captain even finished ordering red alert. Antennas snapped, bridge glass blew outward, its main mast toppled.

Communications cut out across the armada.

Secondary ships panicked, turning without coordination. A frigate tried to bring its AA guns up and painted the sky with tracers—but the Death squadrons were already behind it, hitting its deck, smashing fire-control.

Deathendye watched.

"Sie werden nicht einmal wissen, wer sie angegriffen hat," he said calmly. They won't even know who attacked them.

From the flanks, his surface fleet closed.

Death destroyers and cruisers surged into the disrupted formation, firing with clinical discipline. They aimed for steering sections, weapons mounts, fuel lines—not for spectacle, but to disable, to stop.

Within minutes, the peacetime armada was no longer a neat column but a tangled mass of burning, drifting hulls and dead-in-the-water giants.

He raised one hand.

"Sturmtruppen nach vorne." Storm troops forward. "Wir brauchen ihre Schiffe noch." We still need their ships.

Boarding claws shot out from Death assault craft, biting into Westonglappan hulls. Mutant marines—larger, faster, chemically reinforced—poured across grapples and breach points, plus-eyed officers behind them to keep direction.

Where they went, resistance dissolved quickly.

Westonglappan sailors fired, fought, screamed, surrendered. Deathendye's doctrine today was clear: capture what was useful, end what slowed the operation. The decks became a blur of stun chems, suppressive fire, and blunt, efficient subjugation.

Soon, half the surviving ships sailed under Death temporary control, their surviving crews bound, unconscious, or herded below. The rest sank or burned.

Deathendye turned away from the image of the last cruiser rolling onto its side.

"Zweiter Schritt," he said. Second step. "Landung."

The island they were headed for was one of Westonglappa's jewels.

A sprawling, fortified hub—big enough to house armored divisions, airfields carved into plateaus, deep-water ports, fuel reserves, factories. From Galaxy's perspective, it was an independent regional power node. From Deathendye's perspective, it was a warehouse that hadn't realized it belonged to him yet.

Captured Westonglappan ships led the way, broadcasting familiar ID codes.

The island's defenses welcomed them.

Transponders pinged. Harbor control sent routine messages. AA batteries stayed down, trusting silhouettes and signatures.

By the time they realized the escorts sailing behind those familiar hulls bore the wrong flags, the first Death shells were already in the air.

"Beginn des Vollangriffs," Deathendye intoned. Begin full assault. "Infektionskorps vorbereiten. Ich will die Garnison nicht sterben sehen—ich will sie umgedreht sehen." Infection corps prepare. I don't want the garrison dead—I want it turned.

The opening bombardment went not for population centers first, but for radar, power grids, and hardened command bunkers. Explosions walked across the island's ridgelines in measured steps, cutting eyes and tongues before fists.

Then the chem fell.

Vast canisters burst above defensive lines, releasing rolling banks of violet-tinged fog that seeped into trench lines, vehicle parks, airbase hangars. It wasn't simple poison—it was the Death Regime's tuned infection mix, calibrated specifically for rapid combat conversion.

Westonglappan defenders coughed, staggered, fired blindly into mist. Some died outright. Others stood up again with plus-shaped pupils, their loyalty rewritten.

In the ports, Death vessels surged in.

In the skies, Death aircraft chewed through what little air defense the island managed to launch—half of it still under peacetime maintenance, unarmed on the tarmac when Death strike craft hit.

Deathendye watched icons blink from blue to violet on his overlay: tank depots seized, motor pools overrun, hangars captured.

"Panzer und Fahrzeuge priorisieren," he ordered. Prioritize tanks and vehicles. "Alles, was fährt, gehört jetzt uns." Anything that moves now belongs to us.

Mutant zombie engineers—grotesque, but remarkably dexterous—swarmed over intact armor columns, testing engines, marking which models could be repurposed, which engines could be pulled, which chassis could be stripped for parts.

In aircraft shelters, Death techs with plus-eyes and steady hands ran gloved fingers along captured jets and transports, muttering serial numbers and capacity in clipped reports. Those that could fly under new command were tagged for ferry crews; those that couldn't would be broken down into weapons, plating, or reactor cores.

At the naval docks, Westonglappan ships that had survived the earlier approach were emptied—crews removed, systems hacked, command codes overwritten. Some ships were good enough to be folded directly into Death expeditionary groups. Others would be tugged back as hulks, their guts harvested.

Through it all, infection squads moved like a second, darker tide.

Where defenders held out in bunkers or urban blocks, chem-laced projectiles broke their barricades. The unlucky died. The "useful" woke again under Death control, their knowledge of local systems now turned inward.

When the last resistance crater was marked in black on the tactical sphere, Deathendye gave the next order without visible emotion.

"Phase drei: Inselvernichtung." Phase three: island destruction.

No evidence. No future staging ground for anyone else. No monument to Westonglappa's former strength.

He instructed his bombardment captains:

"Strukturelle Knotenpunkte zuerst—Brücken, Werften, Fabriken. Dann Wohnsektoren, damit keine Verwaltung mehr nachwachsen kann." Structural nodes first—bridges, shipyards, factories. Then residential sectors so no administration can regrow.

Death batteries, now firing from both sea and captured shore emplacements, turned the island into a long, terrible sequence of collapses and fires.

Tanks rolled up onto transport decks. Captured aircraft lifted off, forming sober, tight formations above Death carriers. Ships—some bearing fresh Death pennants, others still wearing Westonglappan colors like stolen skin—eased out of the harbor one after another, their holds full of salvaged weapons, fuel, processors, food, and prisoners.

Behind them, the island burned.

Fuel depots went up in towering pillars. Ports caved in, docks sliding into boiling water. Factories that had once supplied an independent state's power clicked off, their supports shattered.

By dusk, the island was little more than a black smear on the sea, fires still licking at its exposed bones.

On the command deck of his flagship, Deathendye watched the last structural collapses with a gaze that never softened.

"Westonglappa verliert eine Flotte, eine Insel und eine Zukunft in einer Operation," he remarked to his staff. Westonglappa loses a fleet, an island, and a future in one operation. "Wir gewinnen Material, Schiffe und testfähige Subjekte." We gain materiel, ships, and testable subjects.

No one corrected him.

The homeward journey had a different sound.

The dreadnaught-sized transport carriers from Deathenbulkiztahlem now sailed with swollen bellies: captured tanks in neat, cruel rows; helicopters and jets chained to deck; containers full of ammunition and industrial machines; columns of shackled prisoners locked behind reinforced bulkheads, guarded by plus-eyed sentries and patrolling mutants.

Around them, an escort ring of new-minted hybrid squadrons—Death ships flanked by recently stolen Westonglappan vessels now under Death control—moved in bone-tight patterns.

Overhead, Death aircraft flew cover all the way back, vigilant for any hint of Galaxy unmanned observers. Those that appeared—too curious by half at the sudden flare of violence in a supposedly separate theatre—were swatted down with the same cold efficiency as before.

By the time the battered, overloaded formation neared the familiar coastlines of Deathenbulkiztahlem, the sea itself seemed to recognize them, waves shaping around hulks like welcoming hands.

Onshore, vast cranes waited.

Necro-factories opened like steel maws, ready to accept new engines, new frames, new samples. Processing centers stood by to convert prisoners into either labor, research material, or—in the most "fortunate" cases—elite plus-eyed units.

Deathendye stood at the forward rail as the flagship passed into the shadow of the great harbor arches.

In the weary, smoke-scented air, a junior officer beside him dared a question in careful German.

"Herr Kommandant... und Westonglappa?" And Westonglappa?

Deathendye did not look away from the harbor.

"Westonglappa," he said, "ist jetzt eine Fußnote im Logbuch." Westonglappa is now a footnote in the log. "Ihre Schiffe fahren unter unseren Farben. Ihre Panzer stehen in unseren Depots. Ihre Insel ist Asche. Was nicht hier ist, zählt nicht mehr."

Their ships sail under our colors. Their tanks stand in our depots. Their island is ash. What is not here no longer counts.

Behind his words sat the same ruthless calculus that had driven his earlier razing of Death Regime's own outposts: anything not under his direct control was either a liability or future resource.

This had been both.

He turned at last, cloak shifting in the harbor wind.

"Logbucheintrag," he instructed. Log entry. "Operation Westonglappa: Ziel erreicht. Ressourcen gesichert. Beobachter aus dem Galaxy-Regime—vernichtet oder fehlgeleitet. Entfernung zu Galaxenchi—unverändert groß." Operation Westonglappa: objective achieved. Resources secured. Observers from the Galaxy Regime—destroyed or misled. Distance to Galaxenchi—still comfortably large.

For now, the war stayed far from that luminous world.

Deathendye preferred it that way.

He would compress power here, in the iron heart of Deathenbulkiztahlem, out of sight of the Galaxy's brightest eyes, until the day came when the next arc of his strategy would no longer be a raid or a harvest, but something larger, darker, and aimed at the lines Galaxenchi thought untouchable.

For Westonglappa, the story had ended in smoke.

For Deathendye, this chapter closed with cargo tallies, factory schedules, and the quiet satisfaction of a ledger that now weighed heavier in his favor.

As Deathendye's dreadnaughts slid back into the smog-wreathed harbors of Deathenbulkiztahlem and the Westonglappan sea burned itself out into memory, the world did what it always did:

It tried, briefly, to pretend the ocean belonged to someone else.

That illusion didn't last long.

Somewhere far to the north-east, where cold currents met warmer trade routes and the sea floor rose into a labyrinth of ridges and trenches, another symbol pulsed to life on the Death Regime's grand theatre map:

Vormachttresshersch Deathenpuff von Merschtal
Supreme Commander, Death Regime Oceanic Shock Arm.

If Deathendye was the ledgers and razed ledgers of the war, Deathenpuff was its storm.

Deathenpuff's Sea

Her flagship, the Blutwellenfürstin, cut the waves like a cathedral built to admire its own wake—tall, heavily armored, prow carved with a stylized plus-eye and jagged, curling teeth. Chem-stacks vented pale vapor in measured breaths. The decks bristled with launch rails and turret nests, each one inscribed with runes married to brutal engineering.

Deathenpuff herself stood near the bow, coat snapping in the wind, hair pinned back in strict braids that did nothing to soften her presence. Her eyes flicked between the real horizon and the hovering holo-projector beside her, where sectors of the surrounding oceans glowed in layered colors.

Deathenbulkiztahlem's central command had passed her a simple directive:

Foreign fleets probing Death Regime waters and trade lanes.
Test their convictions. Take what's useful. Leave examples.

Her mouth curved, just a little.

"Ziel: alle, die glauben, der Krieg sei weit weg," she said. Target: everyone who thinks the war is far away.

The ocean obliged with candidates.

Scenario 1 – The Coalition Line

The first to stumble into her theatre was a coalition patrol group from three minor maritime nations—let's call them Northchella, Esthmer, and Kaledria—who had convinced themselves that sailing together made them untouchable.

On Deathenpuff's map, they showed up as a neat, multicolored line threading along a disputed economic zone: light destroyers, a few frigates, one brand-new cruiser they were clearly proud of.

"Sie sehen aus wie ein Diplomatenfoto," Deathenpuff remarked. They look like a diplomatic photo. "Alle wollen auf demselben Bild sein."

Her operations chief, a plus-eyed veteran with half his face replaced by necro-steel, nodded.

"Geringe Luftsicherung. Standard-Sonars. Kaum Störmaßnahmen."

Deathenpuff rolled one shoulder.

"Gut. Wir machen es ihnen... pädagogisch." Good. We'll make this educational.

She raised a hand.

"Unterseebootgruppe Schwarznetz—Position einnehmen." Submarine group Blacknet—take position.
"Luftgeschwader Aasvogel—Höhenstaffel, Funkstille." Air wing Carrion—high altitude, radio silent.

Under the waves, Blacknet slid into place—Death submarines in a wide, low arc ahead of the coalition formation. They did not rush. They waited.

Above the clouds, Death strike craft orbited, engines low, hulls masked by meta-material panels that refracted both light and radar.

When the coalition line crossed the invisible boundary she'd drawn, Deathenpuff snapped her fingers.

"Jetzt."

The first blow came from below.

Blacknet launched a spread of torpedoes that did not aim for the proud new cruiser, but for the outermost destroyers—the small teeth at the edge of the mouth. One by one, those teeth shattered: explosions popping under their keels, hulls cracking, engines tearing free.

The coalition formation tried to turn.

That was when the sky dropped.

Death aircraft punched through the cloud cover like thrown blades, cracking the unsuspecting blue into streaks of black. They came in tight, multi-layered waves, each squadron tracking a preassigned target.

"Zielpriorität," Deathenpuff's voice came through their comms, calm, precise. Target priority. "Brücken, Sensoren, Feuerleitung. Wir wollen sie nicht sofort töten, wir wollen ihnen das Gefühl nehmen, irgendetwas zu entscheiden." Bridges, sensors, fire-control. We don't want to kill them immediately; we want to take away the feeling they decide anything.

Bombs and guided shells ripped into radar masts, CIC domes, comm towers.

The coalition ships became deaf and blind in seconds.

They fired anyway—guns barking in confused arcs, missiles groping for targets through jammers and chem-haze. Their shots hit empty water, their own twisted wakes, the occasional already-doomed hull.

From the Blutwellenfürstin's command deck, the engagement looked almost embarrassingly one-sided.

"Gegnerische Formation?" she asked.

"Taktisch kollabiert, Frau Vormachttresshersch," came the answer. Tactically collapsed. "Einige versuchen Rückzug, andere... stehen einfach im Wasser."

Deathenpuff watched one of the coalition frigates turn in a slow, panicked circle, main gun firing nowhere in particular.

"Dann beenden wir ihnen diesen schlechten Tag," she said. Then let's end their bad day.

She ordered selective kills.

No need to waste ammunition showing off. Key ships went down—flag vessels, logistics centers, any hull that carried advanced tech. The rest were left afloat but crippled, lifeboats bobbing around them like scattered teeth.

The message was simple and blunt: this sea is not yours.

Her fleet turned away, barely scuffed, leaving behind smoke columns and emergency beacons blinking helplessly at the sky.

Scenario 2 – The Pirate King's Last Storm

Word of Deathenpuff's patrols did not just reach governments.

It also reached those who liked to imagine themselves outside such concerns.

A notorious pirate lord—"King" Orbos of the Brass Current—decided that where frightened smaller navies saw danger, he saw profit. If Death Regime ships were running heavy resource lines and scaring off regular patrols, then the shipping lanes behind them might be ripe for plunder.

His flotilla was ugly but numerous: retrofitted trawlers, stolen patrol boats, gun-barges built from welded cargo hulls. High, proud masts flying patchwork flags. To his credit, he even had a few captured Galaxy-standard gunships lashed to his side, their markings clumsily painted over.

On Deathenpuff's holo-map, it looked like a stain.

"Das da," she said, pointing at the messy cluster, "ist kein Gegner. Das ist Unkraut." That is not an enemy. That is weeds.

Still, weeds could tangle logistics if left alone.

"Random exercise," she decided, almost lazily. "Für die jüngeren Offiziere."

She tapped her comm.

"Gruppenbefehl: Übungsszenario Fünf. Reale Munition, echte Ziele. Ziel: vollständige Zerschlagung der Flottille innerhalb von zwanzig Minuten, mit maximaler Ressourcengewinnung." Group order: Exercise Scenario Five. Live ammo, real targets. Objective: total destruction of flotilla within twenty minutes, with maximal resource salvage.

Her younger captains snapped to.

What followed was less a battle than an exam.

Death corvettes and light cruisers fanned out, herding the pirate flotilla toward a preselected kill box where depths favored sonar and surface conditions favored Death optics. Every pirate attempt at a clever feint or desperate charge ran straight into the next layer of the trap: mine-lines, overlapping artillery cones, sudden appearances of Death fast-attack craft from blind spots.

Orbos himself tried to rally.

He had seen war before, but never like this.

One of his "capital" barges—bristling with mismatched guns—blew apart in a chain of sympathetic explosions when a Death shell found the cluster of stolen munitions welded unshielded to its midsection.

Another ship, its hull already cracked, attempted to ram a Death destroyer.

Deathenpuff watched the feed, shook her head slightly, and keyed in a correction.

"Lehroper," she murmured. Teachable moment.

The destroyer adjusted course at the last possible second. Instead of a collision, the pirate bow scraped along the Death hull and twisted, the weaker metal peeling back like a tin can. Death marines tossed grapnels, boarded, and secured the remains in under three minutes.

"Flottillenstatus?" she asked at the nineteen-minute mark.

"Zerschlagen, Frau Vormachttresshersch. Zehn Schiffe versenkt, acht gekapert, der Rest kampfunfähig und zur Bergung markiert."

Weeds, uprooted.

Her younger officers would get good grades. The pirate king would get a shallow, anonymous grave somewhere under the Brass Current, his name forgotten long before the hull plates stolen from his ships finished their next tour bolted to Deathenpuff's escorts.

Scenario 3 – The Carrier Wall

The only ones who tried to face her with real steel and intent were a semi-distant major power bloc: the United Halycran Alliance, whose admirals believed their twin carrier groups represented the pinnacle of blue-water dominance.

They were not foolish enough to seek Deathenbulkiztahlem itself, nor Galaxenchi.

Instead they positioned themselves along what they thought was a safe perimeter—far from any declared warzone, close enough to "discourage" Death raids on their trade, far enough to believe they retained the option of walking away.

Two supercarriers.
Scads of escorts.
Support ships thick with supplies.

On the holo-map, the formation had weight. It was, at least, a respectable target.

Deathenpuff's lips quirked, almost fond.

"Endlich jemand, der sich Mühe gegeben hat," she said. Finally, someone who put in effort.

She traced a long, curved vector in the air.

"Wir schlagen nicht frontal," she told her staff. We won't hit frontally. "Wir sind kein Hammer, wir sind eine Welle."

The plan unfolded in three overlapping movements.

The Weather Blade
Death chem-engineers seeded a vast swath of atmosphere ahead of the Halycran formation with tailored particulates—microscopic carriers that interacted with existing storm fronts, sharpening them into a knife-edge squall.

The carriers sailed into it willingly, believing their stabilized hulls and experienced crews could ride out any weather.

The Blindfold
In the heart of the storm, Deathenpuff's aerial squadrons did not attack en masse. They used the storm itself as cover, flitting along radar-distorting thermals. Jammers and decoys turned Halycran radar into a seething blur of ghosts.

Meanwhile, Death long-range missiles—fired from beyond the horizon—converged not on the carriers themselves, but on their AWACS and key escorts, peeling away the eyes and bodyguards.

One by one, the Halycran sky-radar planes turned into expanding spheres of fire inside the clouds.

The Cut
Only when the Halycran formation was blind, buffeted, and straining did Deathenpuff launch her main attack.

Death strike wings came in low, beneath the worst of the storm, skimming wave-crests. At the same time, her submarines—already in place—rose just enough to unleash short-range volleys aimed for the carriers' flanks.

"Träger eins und zwei—seitlich entwaffnen, nicht sofort versenken," she ordered. Carriers One and Two—disarm from the sides, don't sink immediately. "Wir wollen ihre Flugdecks leer sehen, bevor sie untergehen." I want to see their flight decks empty before they go under.

The result was surgical humiliation.

Carriers that had never known a serious defeat lost their aircraft faster than they could launch them. Planes scrambled into a sky that had turned into a three-dimensional minefield of shrapnel, flak, and deceptive currents. Many never gained altitude before Death fire chewed them apart.

Halycran escort captains fought hard, but every time they tried to form a cohesive defensive line, the storm and Deathenpuff's harassment tactics shredded their timing.

By the time she allowed her heavy guns to speak, the "carrier wall" was a broken picket fence.

One carrier went down in a slow, awful roll, flight deck awash, deck crew running in doomed miniature across her surface as she tilted. The other, burning stem to stern, had just enough time to send a final burst transmission back home.

Her intel officers captured and replayed that burst.

A frantic voice, drowning in static.

"–under sustained attack – unknown Death Regime Supreme Commander – repeat, naval assets overwhelmed—"

Deathenpuff stopped the recording.

"Gut," she said simply. Good.

The Halycran alliance would remember that sentence much longer than they remembered the exact positions of their lost hulls.

Closing the Circle

Days later, in Deathenbulkiztahlem's oceanic command archive, three new entries appeared under Deathenpuff's name:

Operation: Dreifachkamm – Coalition patrol neutralized, survivors left as warning.
Operation: Unkrautbrand – Pirate flotilla destroyed, materiel absorbed.
Operation: Trägerfall – Halycran twin carrier groups shattered, power projection degraded.

On the deck of the Blutwellenfürstin, Deathenpuff stood alone at the forward rail, watching another nondescript horizon.

Out here, the sea didn't care whose flags had burned. It only knew the weight of hulls and the churn of propellers.

Behind her, staff occasionally glanced up to see if she would issue new orders.

Not yet.

For the moment, foreign navies across half the world were staring at their charts, recalculating what "safe distance" meant when Death Regime Supreme Commanders like Deathendye and Deathenpuff could stretch their reach, eat fleets, raze islands, and vanish before Galaxy's more luminous guardians even had time to adjust their lenses.

"Sie haben geglaubt, der Ozean sei ein Puffer," she said softly to the water. They thought the ocean was a buffer. "Jetzt wissen sie, er ist nur eine Bühne."

Now they knew it was just a stage.

Somewhere beyond the curve of the world, Galaxapuff and her kin were drawing their own lines in cloud and fire, bells were ringing softly over Galaxenchi, and strategies layered over strategies.

Between those lights and this darkness, the seas belonged—for now—to Deathenpuff's shadow, and to the simple, brutal lesson she kept teaching:

If you float where she draws her circles, you don't get to assume you're out of the war.

By the time the wreckage of the Halycran carriers had slipped beneath the waves, the maps on Deathenpuff's command deck had already changed.

Where earlier engagements were dots and arcs, now a whole continent glowed in muted, tempting color:

WESTONGLAPPA CONTINENT
Overseas west of Sollarisca
Fragmented states, fractured fleets, plenty of ports.

Orders came down the chain from Deathenbulkiztahlem's high command—somewhere behind Deathendye's careful ledgers:

"Westonglappa has not learned its lesson.
Their continent remains a staging bed of ships, industry, and denial.
Tear out their coastal teeth. Infect, strip, and erase."

Deathenpuff didn't ask for more.

She simply widened the sea-campaign around her into something larger.

Operation: DUNKELKÜSTE – The Westonglappa Continental War

The holo-sphere reshaped, zooming in on a sprawling landmass ringed with states and cities:

Auttumotto on a wide, resource-rich bay.

Leblaela's hilly coasts and compact towns.

Westronbung's trade harbors.

Yewaquin, Tazgummbak, Sashax, Zachon—smaller coastal belts.

Crattlecrane, Quinniccanna, Turreyatch—archipelagos and inlet states.

And inland crowns: Maylin and Kedaung, kingdoms with their own capitals: Mayflower City and Ameer Town.

Deathenpuff tapped the side of the sphere.

"Wir fangen da an," she said. We start there.

Her finger landed on Auttumotto State.

Scenario 1 – Auttumotto: Drowning Havenjade

Objective:
Cripple Auttumotto's coastal capacity by breaking Havenjade City and surrounding ports. Infect key population centers, strip infrastructure, leave nothing usable for Westonglappa's eventual rescue dreams.

Havenjade City looked almost peaceful from orbit.

Ships lined the harbor. Highways looped back from the coast. Names dotted the street-grid in the intel overlay like little lights:

Old Haven Bar, New Haven Café, Cloudlest Hotel

Havenjade City Hall, Bank of Civiliberty

Havenjade Municipal Utility District, Havenjade Capitol Hospital

A necklace of eateries—Heron Cafémaria, LeGarlic Soulfee, Wise Nomad Bar and Grill, Clarity Westopub, Rosefled's Bakery, Dat Gastrognome, Emerald Chimney Pizza, Pub & Grill...

A civic life, rich and varied.

Deathenpuff read it like a logistics chart.

"Die Hafenlinie zuerst," she ordered. The harbor line first. "Eine Stadt ohne Hafen ist nur ein zu großer Bunker."

Her forces approached under stacked deception: captured Westonglappan ships in the vanguard, Death cruisers behind, submarines already in the bay's mouth.

The first move was pure Death doctrine: silence the eyes.

Specialized shells took out harbor radars and coastal watchtowers in quick sequence. Comms masts at Havenjade City Hall and the Municipal Utility District went next—cutting power relays and emergency networks in the same strokes.

Then, the infection wave.

Death chem-shells burst over dock districts and industrial avenues, rolling violet fog through Havenjade Capitol Hospital, into the lobbies of Cloudlest Hotel, down the side streets between the banks and bars.

Customers at LeGarlic Soulfee and Heron Cafémaria never saw the delivery drones that weren't theirs—small, insectile Death carriers that cracked open in air vents and stairwells, exhaling tailored agents.

Some collapsed and didn't rise.

Others did.

Plus-eyed longshoremen stumbled to their feet, now responding to new commands. Clinic staff at the hospital, half-infected, turned on their own security protocols, locking down wards Deathenpuff's ground crews had tagged for later.

"Wir brauchen Tanks, Fahrzeuge und Verbindungen," she said. We need tanks, vehicles, and connectors. "Also: Negraska."

Havenjade was still burning as Death transports disgorged mechanized units into Auttumotto's interior, heading for Negraska City.

Scenario 2 – Negraska: Harvesting Steel

Negraska City was Auttumotto's fist.

The map highlighted:

Virris Compound

Demo Compound

Fort Xocc

Ammishal Keep

Mitthew's Armored Fortress

"Alles, was hier steht, fährt oder schießt, gehört uns," Deathenpuff told her staff. Everything that stands, moves, or shoots here belongs to us.

Air-cover came first: Death bombers struck outlying AA and perimeter guns, not leveling the compounds, but tearing gaps in their defensive webs.

Then infection units moved in.

Chem-dispersers crawled along ground hugging routes, flooding trenches and vehicle parks. Soldiers inside Fort Xocc and Mitthew's Armored Fortress found themselves coughing mid-drill, eyes blurring, then snapping into plus-shaped focus.

Death technicians followed, tagging:

Heavy armor in Virris and Demo

Command vehicles in Ammishal Keep

Key artillery in Mitthew's

By the time Negraska's central command realized how fast they were losing cohesion, half their fortress staff had flipped, opening gates and redirecting weapons.

From Havenjade's razed harbor to Negraska's stolen armor, Auttumotto's spine broke in two clean motions.

Deathenpuff logged it as:

Auttumotto: Operational capacity – shattered.
Coastal and armored assets – absorbed.

Scenario 3 – Westronbung & Gagrahash: Killing the Counterstroke

Westonglappa was not passive.

From Westronbung State—ports like Viadence, Mexport, Kloit, Okaco, Agoswell, Olispool, and especially Gagrahash City—they rushed a counter-fleet: mixed carrier groups, fast attack craft, and emergency air wings meant to smash Deathenpuff's seaward advances.

Her scouts marked them.

"Sie denken, sie ziehen eine Mauer," she observed. They think they're raising a wall. "Wir bauen ihnen ein Grab."

In the open sea between Westronbung and Auttumotto, Deathenpuff set a trap zone.

Submarines seeded the approaches with smart-mines keyed to Westonglappan signatures.

Long-range artillery ships positioned at the far edge, just within optimal range.

Aerial wings waited high, fangs hidden in cloud.

The Westronbung operation sailed into it with banners up.

Near Gagrahash City's outbound lane, the first detonations ripped open the sea—mines chewing through keels, leaving wide, messy gaps in the formation.

Then came the sky.

Death aircraft descended in layered vectors, targeting fuel ships, comms vessels, and carriers.

The "serious naval-aerial battle" Westonglappa had prepared for barely materialized; resistance was present, even fierce in pockets, but fragmented—battered by surprise, jammed sensors, and pre-planned Death envelopment.

From Deathenpuff's perspective, it was hard fighting, but clean.

From Westronbung's, it was catastrophe.

Carrier groups meant to defend Mexport and Gagrahash went to the bottom instead. Fast frigates, fleeing back toward Viadence and Olispool, carried tales of Death aircraft they never even saw clearly.

Afterward, Death marines pushed into damaged Westronbung ports, infecting and stripping as before—focusing on harbors, stockyards, and any airfields capable of supporting long-range recon.

Westronbung's role as a naval counterweight ended in a single campaign entry.

Scenario 4 – Leblaela & the Ring of Towns

While the big states burned, Deathenpuff turned an eye to Leblaela State, medium-sized but strategically placed along supply routes.

Towns like:

Inirross, Grufshire, Sliecester, Shoria, Aclada, Glerton, Evrusgow, Drumburn, Cruiving, Phehull...

Individually, none rivaled Havenjade. Together, they formed a ring of refueling stops, listening posts, and reserve depots.

Her objective here was different:

Not annihilation. Silencing.

She ordered precision raids.

Nighttime bombardments knocked out relay towers around Inirross and Evrusgow. Quick infection teams slipped into Glerton and Grufshire, seizing just enough municipal infrastructure to redirect all data streams into Death filters.

Leblaelan defensive units mustered, but each town rose in isolation, believing itself the only target. By the time they tried to coordinate, their comm-lines passed through freshly Death-controlled nodes.

In a matter of days, Leblaela became a dead zone in the info-web: no reliable reports out, no clear picture in. To Westonglappa's central authority, it looked like the region had simply gone dark under chaotic war.

To Deathenpuff, it looked like a muffled staging ground.

Her fleets refueled at secret, captured docks. Her infected logistics corps moved, unremarked, through towns where the signs still read Ixenby, Gledmont, Fiburgh—but the eyes above them were crosses now.

Scenario 5 – The Kingdoms: Maylin & Kedaung

By the time the outer states reeled, the inland crowns finally realized this was not "peripheral harassment."

Maylin State – Kingdom of Maylin

Mayflower City (Capital)

Kendaln, Nfurreel

Kedaung State – Kingdom of Kedaung

Ameer Town (Capital)

Flitzcropital, Jritzerland

They could not sail out to challenge Deathenpuff directly; they lacked the true blue-water fleets of Westronbung. But they could send aircraft, commandos, and advisors to embattled coasts.

Deathenpuff watched their signatures appear: long-range strike craft from Mayflower City staging through half-ruined Auttumotto airfields, Kedaung-supplied armored advisors trying to stiffen Negraska-like holds inland.

She chose not to go all the way in.

Her campaign brief for this phase was clear:

Take the edges.
Infect the movement, not the thrones.

She intercepted Maylin and Kedaung assets in transit.

Mayflower's long-range air wings found their refueling points at places like Akrutwell City, Esroidon City, Aldford City, Highbarrow, Mexport, and Kloit either destroyed, infected, or under Death jamming.

Kedaung's armored mission teams, landing at ports near Ironlyn, Mallowpine, Ostlake, Brightsnow, or Mallowhollow, walked into ambushes—Death infantry and plus-eyed "locals" greeting them with deceptive uniforms and familiar words before turning.

Entire support chains withered on the vine.

Mayflower City and Ameer Town remained technically untouched, their palaces still standing, their courts still arguing doctrine and response options. But their ability to shape the outer war bled away, convoy by convoy.

Deathenpuff marked them as:

"Strategic shadows. Threat – contained by distance and strangled lines."

The Razing Wave

Once Auttumotto, Westronbung, and Leblaela were functionally broken, and the smaller coastal states—Yewaquin with its Kendale Lakes, Morbush, Parma, Spokane, Old Pittsburg, Westergriffin, Violetwynne; Tazgummbak's Ironlyn, Eastdeer, Mallowpine; Sashax's Ostlake, Coldford, Cleardell; Zachon's Brightsnow, Whitehurst, Hedgecastle—had either fallen silent or been pacified, Deathenpuff initiated the final pattern: standardization.

Across Westonglappa's coastal arc:

Large hubs like Havenjade City, Polonodo City, Lavaton City, Gagrahash City, Aldford City and Aldbeach were tagged as resource fields: infect, strip, then burn.

Fortress zones like Negraska City, Fortborter Town, Xulgrubbergg Town, Merrowfort, Highbarrow, Coldbank, Ammishal Keep, Qurubrillumborg Stronghold, Fort Fregnrask, Mitthew's Armored Fortress, Fort Xocc were designated steel mines: harvest armaments intact where possible, collapse structures afterward.

Resort or commerce-heavy strips like Sidetown City, Volcan Bank / Hottemppest Street / Hawtsweat Strip Club in Lavaton, Spellbeach, Aldbeach, Woodmist, Mexport, Spellbeach, Mayflower City's seaward districts became staging traps for infection: places where evacuees and reinforcing troops would be tempted to gather, only to be turned.

She let her subordinate admirals and plus-eyed naval elites handle much of this phase—tasking them with localized objectives:

"Secure Havenjade Municipal Utility District, redirect power to Death-run dockyards, then blow the distribution nodes."

"Turn Polonodo Bus Service depots into mobile Death transport hubs; any vehicle that can run gets repainted and repurposed."

"Use Lavaton Stock Market's data lines to flood Westonglappan finance nets with panic and false recovery metrics before cutting the feed."

"Preserve just enough of Cloudlest Hotel, New Haven Café, Volton Bar, Praddin's Bar, Vatlina's Eatery as shells for Death intel posts, then collapse the rest of their blocks to erase original layouts."

Resistance remained, here and there, but it never coalesced into the kind of battle that could threaten her fleet core.

Where Westonglappan groups stood and fought bravely, they died.
Where they tried to flee, they found the seas already patterned with Deathenpuff's circuits.

The End of the Westonglappa Sea

Months after the first peacetime armada died under her guns, Deathenpuff stood over a very different map.

The Westonglappa Continent (overseas west near Sollarisca) still existed as land, as shapes of mountains and plains.

But its coastal belt, once dotted in her holo with:

Auttumotto's Havenjade, Polonodo, Negraska, Fortborter, Sidetown, Lavaton, Pendammal, Opragend, Sufast, Blelens, Kropolis, Damont, Eslurg, Akrutwell, Esroidon...

Leblaela's ring of towns...

Westronbung's port line...

The smaller states clinging to its edges...

...had changed color.

Where once they were neutral blues or enemy greens, now they glowed in Death Regime violet, overlaid with icons:

INFECTED ASSET ZONE

SALVAGED INDUSTRIAL ZONE

SCORCHED / DENIED ZONE

Westonglappa's inland capitals in Maylin and Kedaung still flickered in faded hue, technically sovereign but strategically strangled—kingdoms presiding over broken approaches to seas they no longer controlled.

Her staff compiled the summary.

Oceanic Theatre – Western Westonglappa:

Enemy naval presence: fragmented / non-projective.

Enemy air projection over sea: intermittent, easily interdicted.

Coastal states: infected, suborned, or razed.

Viable ports under Death control: [list classified, long].

Deathenpuff reviewed it in silence.

The war elsewhere would go on—Galaxapuff and Galaxysuzuhime and Deathendye and all the others moving pieces in distant skies and halls.

Here, on this part of the world, the verdict was simpler:

Westonglappa no longer decided what happened on its own coasts.

She turned from the holosphere and walked back out onto the deck of the Blutwellenfürstin.

The sea was grey today. No grand enemy armada. No dramatic storm.

Just the long swells of a world that remembered, in its currents, all the hulls that had passed through and all the ones that had never come back.

Behind her, junior officers murmured and worked, tracking patrols, watching for new foreign banners trying to test the edges of the newly redrawn domain.

Deathenpuff rested gloved hands on the rail.

"Zu Anfang dachten sie, der Ozean wäre ein Schutzwall," she said quietly, more to the water than to any listener. At first they thought the ocean was a shield-wall. "Jetzt wissen sie, er ist nur ein Brett, auf dem wir spielen."

Now they know it is just a board we play on.

In the distance, Deathenbulkiztahlem's shipyards waited for the next loads of stolen tanks, captured aircraft, and infected crews. Above, unseen observation drones—this time hers—swept the skies where once Galaxy and Westonglappa machines had dared to loiter.

The Westonglappa campaign would file into history logs as numbers and arrows.

For Deathenpuff, it ended here: one more sea settled, one more theater entering the long, grinding phase of patrol and exploitation rather than open contest.

She straightened, gave the quiet order to shift the fleet's patrol pattern, and the Blutwellenfürstin turned, its prow cutting a new line through a sea that, for now, answered more to Deathenpuff's will than to any flag Westonglappa had ever flown.

Deathenpuff's sea lay behind him like a cauterized wound when Deathenstorm finally turned his attention away.

The last intel reports from Westonglappa's coastlines—broken fleets, burning ports, states half-infected and half-aflame—flickered out on one side of the Death Regime's theatre map.

On the other side, closer to home, another picture pulsed: the ruin left by Galaxapuff's raid.

Shipyards cratered. Drydocks gutted. Islands sheared in half by fireworks that had not been festive at all.

Deathenstorm watched the overlapped images in silence.

One showed what Galaxy Regime could do when they committed fully.
The other showed what Death Regime could do when it was allowed to answer.

He closed his hand into a fist.

"Genug," he said quietly. Enough.

Salvage of the Burned Line

He returned first to his own dead.

Portals tore open above the bombarded Death islands—those same shipyards and staging grounds Galaxapuff had turned into ground-level starbursts.

Out of them came salvage armadas: heavy lifter barges, skeletal cranes mounted on old cruisers, tugs wrapped in necro-steel, escorted by wary destroyers and fighter wings.

The islands themselves were ugly.

Charred gantries slumped like broken ribs. Drydocks had become black bathtubs filled with twisted hulls and frozen foam. Once-precise arrays of flak towers now lay in heaps along the shore, melted and half-buried.

Where Galaxy had dropped "fireworks," there were only scars.

Deathenstorm stepped through a command portal onto one of the less damaged piers, boots grinding ash and cracked concrete.

Plus-eyed overseers snapped to attention.

"Herr Kommandant—wir haben mit der Sichtung begonnen," one reported. We've begun sorting. "Metall, Rumpfsektionen, intakte Turmteile—alles, was nicht komplett verdampft ist, wird markiert."

Deathenstorm surveyed the ruins, then the sea of markers—tags glowing faint purple on half-melted beams, shattered turrets, half-burned armor plates.

"Die Galaxy-Regime wollte uns hier eine Lektion erteilen," he said. The Galaxy Regime wanted to teach us a lesson here. "Also lernen wir. Wir nehmen alles, was noch atmet, als Material mit. Was nicht atmet, wird vernichtet, bis nicht einmal ihre Drohnen Proben finden."

So we learn. We take anything that still "breathes" as material. What doesn't, we annihilate so thoroughly not even their drones get samples.

Orders rippled across the ruin.

Mutant salvage crews surged forward—strong, tireless, indifferent to smoke and heat. They cut twisted hulls into manageable blocks, hauled intact engines out of collapsed ship-bays, tore armor from scrapped dreadnaught ribs. Every useful piece went into the yawning bellies of dreadnaught-size transport carriers waiting off the blackened coasts.

Overhead, aerial units patrolled in lazy but lethal arcs, swatting down the inevitable Galaxy unmanned spy drones that tried to sneak in for "after" photos.

Those drones died like gnats, sensors severed first, recorded data slagged in their cores before their frames ever hit the ground.

Within days, the bombarded islands looked less like wounded shipyards and more like quarries of war-metal.

Within weeks, they were nothing but broken rock.

Deathenstorm's final order for each was simple:

"Fundament sprengen." Blow the foundations.

Charges went off deep in the bedrock. What had been flat, usable terrain collapsed into jagged coves and subsiding cliffs. If Galaxy Regime ever came back to examine their old handiwork, they'd find only unhelpful geology—and the faint taste of Death chem in the soil.

The transports sailed back to Deathenbulkiztahlem heavy with salvage.

In the heart of the homeland, colossal foundries lit up anew. Scrapped beams and torn turrets went into furnaces and molds. Out of those fires came new hulls, new carriers, new cruisers—and racks of fresh munitions.

Deathenstorm walked through the revived yards, watching shapes take form:

Superstructure of carriers.
Ribs of battleships.
Spines of new chem-cruisers designed with counters to the tricks the Galaxy Regime had used.

"Sie haben mir zwei Inseln genommen," he said flatly. They took two islands from me. "Ich nehme ihnen Jahre." I'll take years from them.

When his new formation finally assembled at sea, it rivaled anything he'd commanded before Galaxapuff's raid:

Deep line of battleships and dreadnaughts.

Screens of cruisers and destroyers.

Aerial decks stacked with bombers, interceptors, chem-layers.

Dreadnaught transport carriers repurposed to haul not only resources, but whole squads of mutant zombie legions—now better controlled, better aimed.

Galaxapuff had knocked him down.

He was back.

Storm Meets Wave: Reinforcing Deathenpuff

News of Deathenpuff's Westonglappa campaign came in as he was testing his restored guns.

Burned coasts. Collapsed port-states. Broken carrier walls. Infection spread smartly along the littoral. Her work was efficient, thorough.

And then, one line in an update caught his eye:

"Deathenpuff hat begonnen, ihre Frontkräfte geordnet zurückzuziehen.
Begründung (wörtlich): 『Langweilig geworden.』"

Deathenpuff has begun pulling her frontline units back in an orderly fashion. Reason (verbatim): "It got boring."

Deathenstorm exhaled once, almost a laugh, but not quite.

"Natürlich," he muttered. Of course.

He opened a direct channel.

The holo stabilized into Deathenpuff's image on the command deck of the Blutwellenfürstin, her coat half-unbuttoned, expression somewhere between satisfied and restless.

"Deathensturm," she greeted him dryly, using the old moniker.

"Puff," he replied, equally flat. "Deine See ist voll mit halbtoten Gegnern. Willst du sie behalten?"

"Nein," she said at once. No. "Ich habe meine Lektion erteilt. Jetzt langweilen sie mich. Nimm sie. Mach sie ganz tot, oder nützlicher."

Take them. Make them either fully dead or more useful.

He nodded.

"Vektor koordiniert," he decided. Vector coordinated. "Ich komme."

His newly forged armada slipped through portal corridors, re-emerging along Westonglappa's battered waters where Deathenpuff's units were already beginning to peel back into deeper, safer patterns.

The Westonglappa coalition, frantic and furious, had finally managed to throw together a real counterstrike: remnants from across states, emergency refits, oceanic defense grids hastily reactivated.

Sea-wall guns.
Long-range turrets.
Defense drones.
Automated ocean platforms bristling with cannons.

They met Deathenstorm, not Deathenpuff.

The Seven-Hour Crush

For seven hours, the Westonglappa theatre felt like the world had broken its own clock.

Hour 1–2:

The coalition's big play: converging naval groups out of Westronbung, Auttumotto, and surviving ports; aerial wings from as far as Mayflower City and Ameer Town; ocean defense machines rising from seabeds where they'd slept since the last war.

Deathenpuff's front elements made contact, then smoothly parted, falling back along pre-planned corridors. Her bored tone over comms belied her precision.

"Ich lasse dir die große Bühne," she said. I'll leave you the big stage. "Versuch, dich nicht zu blamieren."

Deathenstorm's reply was a clipped, humorless,

"Beobachte." Watch.

He stepped his flagship, the Grimmwesten, into the center of his formation and gave his first overarching order.

"Gesamtverband: Schildkeilformation. Wir nehmen ihren Schlag auf und geben ihn doppelt zurück." Entire formation: shield-wedge. We take their blow and return it doubled.

The Death armada's silhouette shifted—ships stacking in layered, overlapping fields of fire, dreadnaught carriers anchoring the rear.

Coalition salvos crashed into the leading screens.

Death destroyers buckled, but did not break. Under the cover of their own flak and chem-clouds, Death bombers rose, spreading outward like dark, stuttering wings.

Hour 3–4:

Westonglappa's ocean defense machineries woke fully: autonomous turrets mounted on long-silent pylons, drone swarms erupting from sea-caves, anti-ship missile batteries hidden in disguised "research platforms."

Deathenstorm took in the flood of new signatures.

"Das hier," he said calmly to his gunnery chiefs, "ist keine Schlacht um Ehre. Das ist eine Müllabfuhr."

This isn't a battle for honor. It's garbage collection.

"Priorität: Systeme mit größter Reichweite und größtem Störeinfluss. Alles, was unsere Sensoren blendet oder ihre koordiniert, stirbt zuerst." Priority: anything with the greatest range and jamming effect. Whatever blinds our sensors or coordinates theirs dies first.

Death fire shifted.

Heavy chem-shells and precision missiles targeted fire-control nodes, jamming hubs, and command relays. Defense drones lost link and scattered, acting on faulty local routines. Turrets kept firing, but out of sync, their coverage riddled with holes.

Hour 5–6:

The coalition's fighting spirit remained; their coordination did not.

Individual Westonglappan captains fought hard—charging Death lines, ramming attempts, desperate last strikes. They died in flashes across the map.

Deathenstorm's fleet pushed, grinding them down, never once overextending beyond the carefully marked kill zones he'd drawn.

Over one embattled island battery, Deathenpuff—watching from a safe distance as her own units refueled—actually yawned.

"Fünf Stunden und sie stehen immer noch," she murmured. Five hours and they're still standing.

"Sie fallen gerade," Deathenstorm answered. They're falling as we speak.

He wasn't wrong.

In the sixth hour, the last coherent Westonglappan naval group tried to cut through Deathenstorm's flank—straight into a wing of fresh Death interceptors supported by chem-cruisers. They disappeared under layered fire, hulls ripped open, aircraft shredded.

Hour 7:

By the seventh hour, the "battle" felt less like a contest and more like a systematic demolition.

Remaining defense platforms running on automatic routines were mapped, then taken apart one by one—guns silenced, cores slagged.

Coalition drones, crippled and aimless, spiraled into the sea.

The Westonglappa continent, already brutalized by Deathenpuff, now watched its last serious external military assets torn away in real time.

On the command deck of the Grimmwesten, an officer reported:

"Widerstand gebrochen, Herr Kommandant. Vereinzelte Geschütze, versprengte Schiffe. Keine koordinierte Gegenwehr mehr." Resistance broken. Scattered guns, straggler ships. No coordinated response left.

Around him, the Death Regime's banners and icons stood—yes—unshaken. Unbroken. If anything, more irritated than exaltant.

Deathenstorm considered the map.

"Westonglappa," he said at last, "ist jetzt nur noch Land mit Leuten. Keine Seemacht." Westonglappa is now just land with people. No sea power.

He nodded once, in Deathenpuff's direction.

"Deine Langeweile ist genehmigt," he told her dryly. Your boredom is granted.

She saluted in mock theatricality and signaled her fleets to slip fully out of theatre, leaving mopping-up and occupation logic to Deathenstorm's staff.

The Challenge to Galaxenchi

When the last Westonglappan turret stopped firing, the Death Regime's grand strategic map updated.

One area now shone with a different intensity than all others:

GALAXENCHI SECTOR
Seat of the Galaxy Regime's inner command.
Source of the Supreme Commanders.

No Death Supreme Commander could ignore that beacon forever.

Deathenstorm did not even try.

In his war room aboard the Grimmwesten, he opened a channel to Deathenbulkiztahlem.

"Westonglappa ist erledigt," he stated. Westonglappa is handled. "Seine Küsten sind taub und zahnlos. Meine Flotte ist rekonstruiert. Ich schlage vor: Phasewechsel."

Its coasts are deaf and toothless. My fleet is rebuilt. I propose a phase shift.

High Command's answer was cautious assent and thinly veiled anticipation.

Deathenstorm turned back to his gathered officers and the waiting armada.

For the first time since Galaxapuff's raid, there was a faint, sharp spark in his eyes.

"Neues Ziel," he said in fluent, measured German. New objective. "Galaxenchi."

The room stilled.

He let the word hang there, then drew a line on the holo-map—not directly into the luminous symbol of the Galaxy capital, but around it.

"Wir greifen nicht den Kern an," he clarified coldly. We do not strike the core. "Wir greifen die Zeit und die Ressourcen an, die sie investieren müssen, um uns fernzuhalten."

We strike the time and resources they must spend keeping us away.

He pointed to arcs of open ocean and outer defensive bastions: forward island chains, naval bastions, outer sensor rings.

"Wir treiben eine Schneise durch ihre Vorfeldflotten, ihre Plattformen, ihre Inselschild-Linien. Je mehr sie schicken, desto besser. Jedes Schiff, das sie hier ausgeben, fehlt ihnen woanders." We cut through their forward fleets, their platforms, their island shield-lines. The more they send, the better. Every ship they spend here is missing somewhere else.

He raised his voice.

"Gesamtverband—Vektor Galaxenchi-Vorsee. Schildformation aufbauen. Langstreckenbatterien vorbereiten. Wir werden nicht leise kommen."

Entire formation—vector: Galaxenchi frontier sea. Build shield formation. Prepare long-range batteries. We will not come quietly.

The Death armada's wakes stretched across the world.

The Guardians Rise

On the Galaxy Regime side, alarms pulsed through nested levels of command.

At an observatory strung along the upper atmosphere, Professor Galaxbeam watched Deathenstorm's approach vector unfold like a dark brushstroke across a blue map.

He contacted three people at once.

Supreme Commander Galaxadale – naval architect of ambush seas.

Supreme Commander Galaxadye – mid-ocean line strategist and barrier specialist.

Supreme Commander Galaxstride – long-range projection and inland defense integrator.

Their emblems lit up on his board.

He spoke in crisp Mandarin.

"有個老朋友，從西邊的戰場繞過來了。" An old friend has looped around from the western theatre. "Deathenstorm 帶著重組后的艦隊，朝 Galaxenchi 的外海推進。"

Deathenstorm is advancing toward Galaxenchi's outer seas with a rebuilt fleet.

Galaxadale's voice came first, dry and ocean-salted.

"我以為佢會喺自己的廢船堆入面坐耐啲。" I thought he'd sit in his own scrap heap longer than this. "好，外海係我場。" All right—outer sea is my stage.

Galaxadye chimed in, cool and careful.

"這次他不會直接衝，" he said. This time he won't charge straight in. "Deathenstorm 是來浪費我們的精力，不是來賭命。" He's here to waste our effort, not his life.

Galaxstride, speaking in a gentle Kansai-lilted Japanese, added:

"じゃ、外縁の防衛線を『時間泥棒』用に組み替えようか。" Then let's rebuild the outer defensive lines for a 'time thief.' "近づかせないのはもちろん、近づこうとするだけでコストが跳ね上がるように。"

Not just keep him away—make any attempt to come close hideously expensive.

They moved quickly.

Galaxadale repositioned naval groups along arcs far from Galaxenchi proper: carrier stacks, submarine curtains, mobile minefields disguised as quiet trade routes.

Galaxadye shifted mid-ocean barrier fleets into elastic defense lines—thin at the edges, thicker near pre-chosen kill pockets. His orders in Mandarin flowed calm and precise:

"第一線負責拖，第二線負責打，第三線只在敵人跳太裡面的時候出手。" First line drags, second line hits, third line only fires if they jump too deep. "記住，我們不是要在外海分出勝負，而是要分出他們多少燃料和彈藥會消失在這裡。"

Remember, we're not here to decide victory at the frontier sea; we're here to decide how much fuel and ammo they lose here.

Galaxstride tuned inland and aerial defenses: long-range artillery on remote islets, shield projectors on floating citadels, interceptor wings on standby to plug gaps.

In Japanese, he gave the simplest summary to his own staff:

"敵は、こちらの『めんどくささ』を嫌がらせるために来る。" The enemy comes to harass our sense of hassle. "だからこそ、こちらも徹底的にめんどくさくなろう。" So we become maximally annoying in return.

Clash at the Outer Sea

When Deathenstorm's armada finally crossed into the outer defensive belt, it did so under no illusions of surprise.

Long-range scouts on both sides saw each other.
Models had been run.
Predictions written and revised.

Deathenstorm still smiled, a small, sharp thing.

"Galaxy-Regime glaubt, wir wollen ihre Hauptstadt anfassen," he said on his bridge. Galaxy thinks we want to touch their capital. "Wir wollen nur ihren Terminkalender zerreißen."

We only want to tear up their schedule.

He ordered his long-range batteries to open.

Missiles and chem-shells arced across impossible distances, not at Galaxenchi itself, but at the outermost Galaxy bastions:

Forward naval bases on remote atolls.

Sensor arrays perched on lonely rocks.

Repair platforms where Galaxy ships paused between patrols.

Galaxy answered.

From beyond the horizon came Galaxadale's counter-barrage—tight, disciplined lines of fire meant to carve chunks out of Deathenstorm's shields without committing to a full advance.

The sea between them became mathematics and violence.

Galaxadye's first-line fleets refused pitched battle. They harassed:

Skirmishing at the edges of Deathenstorm's formation.

Luring forward detached Death elements, then withdrawing before they could be surrounded.

Dropping smart mines and sensor ghosts in the Death armada's path.

Galaxstride fed them timing from inland.

In Mandarin, Galaxadye snapped orders:

"不要貪心！" Don't get greedy! "我們每拖他一分鐘，他就少一分鐘拿去打別的地方。" Every minute we drag him here is a minute he can't use to hit somewhere else. "打掉他很爽，但耗掉他更划算。"

Killing him outright would feel good; draining him is worth more.

Deathenstorm saw the pattern.

In German, he responded with equal coldness:

"Sie wollen uns ziehen lassen, bis wir müde sind." They want to drag us until we're tired. "Also werden wir nur dann schlagen, wenn es uns einen guten Austausch bringt."

So we strike only when it's a good trade.

He targeted:

Galaxy ships with high-value signatures—command cruisers, shield tenders, rare hull types.

Forward resupply hulks.

Inland-facing defense nodes he could reach with extended-range shots—forcing Galaxy to repair or replace them.

Every time a Galaxy squadron closed enough to inflict serious damage, he was willing to lose a cruiser or even a battleship if it meant taking two of theirs with it.

He had no intention of breaking through to Galaxenchi's heart this day.

He was there to ensure they'd remember him in every deployment schedule, every fuel ledger, every munitions forecast.

The battle ran long.

Neither side collapsed.

Galaxy Regime held the line—Deathenstorm never got closer than the carefully guarded outer ring.

Death Regime never broke.

At the end of that cycle, casualty reports looked ugly on both sides, but neither command banner had fallen.

What Remains

When Deathenstorm finally signaled the armada to pull back along pre-calculated escape vectors, it was not from fear.

It was from counting.

"Genug für heute," he decided. Enough for today. "Unsere Verluste sind schwer, aber geplante. Ihre sind... lästig teuer."

Our losses are heavy, but pre-planned. Theirs are irritatingly expensive.

On the Galaxy side, as Death signatures receded from the outer wave-sphere, Galaxadale leaned over his rail and exhaled.

"佢今次冇諗住衝入嚟，" he said in Cantonese. This time he never intended to rush in. "佢係嚟搵我哋做運算題。"

He came to turn us into his math problem.

Galaxadye, checking the energy graphs and attrition reports, grimaced slightly.

"他把我們拖進了他的節奏，" he admitted. He pulled us into his rhythm. "不過，我們也把他鎖在外面。算是互相浪費。"

We locked him outside too. Mutual waste.

Galaxstride, watching Galaxenchi's shields flicker steady and intact, murmured in Japanese:

"この戦いは、多分、どちらも『勝ち』じゃない。" This battle probably isn't a 'win' for either side. "でも、どちらも『負け』でもない。だからこそ、次が怖い。"

But it isn't really a loss for either, either. That's what makes the next one frightening.

Far away, back aboard the Grimmwesten, Deathenstorm stood alone in his war room, the after-images of the outer sea battle fading from holo-glow.

He touched one of the empty spots where a carrier of his had stood earlier that day, now gone.

Then, with two fingers, he traced a new line on the map—not at Galaxenchi's heart, not yet, but along another distant sea, another chain of islands, another theatre where Galaxy strength was finite.

"Sie sind nicht unberührbar," he said quietly. They are not untouchable. "Nur beschäftigt."

Just very, very busy.

Behind him, Deathenpuff's earlier scars on Westonglappa glowed faintly. On another layer, Deathendye's salvaged industrial fields pulsed, feeding the next wave.

Beyond all of it, Galaxenchi shone like a star that refused to be anything but bright.

Between that light and this darkness, the war settled into a new phase: not lightning strikes and singular reversals, but long, grinding exhaustion.

Immortal? No.
Unhinged? Sometimes.
Unshaken and unbroken? For today, yes—on both sides.

And as Deathenstorm turned from the fading projection and called for the next round of fleet repairs, Galaxy Supreme Commanders elsewhere did the same, already recalculating where to place their next lines, how to waste Death's time as skillfully as Death had just wasted theirs.

By the time the outer-sea clash with the Galaxy Regime broke apart and Deathenstorm's armada slipped back beyond the densest curtain of jamming, something hard and restless had lodged under his ribs.

Watching fleets trade blows from the war room was one kind of satisfaction.

But some debts, in his mind, had to be paid in person.

The Supreme Commander Takes the Sky

The next strike was his.

No subtle probing, no proxy admirals.

On the dusk-edge of a wide, open ocean, where Galaxy Regime gold-and-white task forces had begun to restitch their shattered lines, the Death Regime fleet held a strange, deliberate stillness.

On the flagship Grimmwesten, the central flight deck had been cleared, wards and launch markings glowing faint violet.

Deathenstorm stepped out into the sea wind.

His cloak snapped in the gusts, stitched with frayed edges from a dozen previous campaigns. Around his boots, the decklights dimmed, reacting to the pressure of his aura.

Dark-grey haze, veined with deep violet, began to seep from the edges of his armor—not smoke, not chem, but the visual artifact of the power threaded through him.

Officers watched from the shadows of the superstructure, careful not to get too close.

"Bereit," he said simply. Ready.

A complex harness of runic metal and grav-anchors locked into his back and shoulders, but the moment it flared to life it looked less like a machine and more like a set of angular, shadow-wings—segments of dark force arranged around him, each humming with restrained impact.

He bent his knees once, then launched.

The Grimmwesten fell away beneath him. The sky took him in.

One Against a Hundred

Ahead, spread across the open water like scattered coins, a Galaxy Regime anti-piracy and patrol grouping ran its patterns:

Over a hundred ships, mostly golden-yellow hulls with white and blue highlights, flanked by smaller escorts and picket craft. They were not careless; their escorts kept decent distances, their radars swept, their aerial cover practiced.

It did not matter.

Deathenstorm raised one hand.

Darkness rippled in his palm—deep grey thickening to almost solid violet-black.

He squeezed.

A ray of solid night lanced outward, not merely beam but spear, jagged at the edges, trailing fragments of ionized void. It slammed into the nearest Galaxy destroyer, punching straight through its golden flank, vaporizing armor and internal compartments in a single, terrible line.

The ship shuddered, split, and slid into the water, smoke and steam rising from the wound.

Alarms flared across the formation.

"前方出現高能反應！" High-energy signature dead ahead!
"不是艦砲，不是常規武器——！" Not ship guns, not conventional weapons—!

Deathenstorm moved faster.

He became a streak of dark-violet in the air, banking hard, trailing plasma-edged ribbons of power from his shadow-wings. Each time he swept his arm, heavy energy struck:

A cruiser's forward batteries melted into slag.

A golden-yellow frigate's bridge vanished in a flash of grey-violet plasma.

A screening corvette simply twisted, its hull warped by a crushing wave of focused darkness that behaved like physical mass.

Galaxy ships tried to respond, guns tracking, close-in defenses barking. Their tracers lit the air around him in bright, desperate chains.

He threaded through them, riding his own gravity-warp fields, each motion a glitch in space. A barrage that should have cut him apart instead sliced a silhouette he'd vacated a heartbeat earlier.

From their decks, he must have looked like a storm condensed into human shape, flinging energy spheres, spears of darkness, and razor-thin beams that sliced water and steel with equal contempt.

One by one, yellow-gold icons winked out on his own tactical display.

Ten.
Twenty.
Fifty.

He wasn't counting, but his staff was.

By the time he'd carved a looping path across the entire formation, over a hundred Galaxy ships lay burning, sinking, or broken—some split cleanly in two, others gutted by holes that glowed violet at the edges as the unnatural energy slowly faded.

Behind him, the sea boiled with wreckage and flame.

He could have kept going.

He didn't.

A Supreme Commander didn't just kill; he orchestrated.

Flank Formations: Two Fangs of the Storm

As Deathenstorm tore through the patrol fleet personally, his voice echoed across encrypted Death Regime channels.

"Gesamtverband, Manöver Bifurkation," he commanded. Entire formation, Maneuver Bifurcation. "Flug- und Flottenverbände teilen. Nordgruppe, Südgruppe."

Fleet and air groups split. North Group, South Group.

On the holo-sphere aboard the Grimmwesten, the Death armada unfolded into two crescent formations, arcing away from his central killing ground.

"Nordgruppe," he barked, "ihr schneidet kleinere Flottenverbände ab. Fokus auf Nachschub- und Eskortlinien." North Group, you sever the smaller Galaxy fleets—focus on supply and escort lines.

"Südgruppe, ihr nehmt die mittleren Flotten: Kreuzergruppen, sekundäre Träger. Ziel ist nicht Vernichtung, sondern Verstümmelung." South Group, you take the medium groups: cruiser stacks, secondary carriers. Objective is not total annihilation, but crippling.

His officers acknowledged, plus-eyed faces hard.

North Group surged forward, its destroyers and fast-attack craft slicing into Galaxy screening detachments—escort squadrons rushing to reinforce the patrol fleet he'd just gutted. Supply ships and support tenders found themselves suddenly exposed, their escorts collapsing under precise, brutal volleys.

South Group angled toward heavier Galaxy formations still maneuvering to respond to the earlier threat to Galaxenchi's outer seas.

They did not meet the Supreme Commanders directly.

They met their reinforcements.

In Mandarin and Japanese, Galaxy officers shouted into the chaos:

"第二梯隊，向北偏轉，保護運輸艦隊——！" Second echelon, veer north, protect the transports—!
"中規模艦隊三號、四號，轉向掩護補給線！" Mid-fleet Groups Three and Four, turn to cover supply lines!

But every time a Galaxy commander tried to gather strength, one of Deathenstorm's flanking formations hit the seam—peeling escorts off carriers, smashing logistics hulls, forcing Galaxy to choose between saving teeth or stomach.

They couldn't save both.

In three hours of continuous engagement:

Small fleets—patrol clusters, escort groups—were chewed apart at the edges.

Medium battle groups suffered broken backs: carriers left afloat but aircraft-dead, cruisers afloat but blind and gunless.

Galaxy Supreme Commanders found their reach quietly shortened, their ability to exploit future openings trimmed by the absence of ships that were now smoking holes in this distant sea.

Deathenstorm never tried to punch all the way through to the inner lines.

He was there to make their future thinner.

Three Hours of Escalation

The fight hardened as it went.

Galaxy adapted—of course they did.

Galaxadale's ambush instincts kicked in; he tried to draw Deathenstorm's North Group over pre-laid mine curtains and torpedo cones.

Galaxadye altered mid-ocean lines, turning some Death pushes into overextensions, forcing them to eat more return fire than they'd planned.

Galaxstride fed inland fire support, dropping long-range volleys into Death advance paths when openings appeared.

Deathenstorm felt the pressure.

His harness buzzed hot, the runes at his shoulders flaring brighter as he burned more and more of his power—hurling mixed salvos of pure energy and heavy, slow-moving "solid dark" projectiles that slammed into overlapping Galaxy formations like invisible boulders.

Ships died on both sides.

For Death, this was acceptable.

At the three-hour mark, his internal calculus ticked over. Gains began to flatten; attrition curves edged in directions he did not like.

He halted above the churning sea, shadow-wings spread wide, violet-black aura heaving like a living storm.

"Genug," he said aloud, voice cutting through every Death channel. Enough.

He drew a breath.

The Smog Curtain & Retreat

When Deathenstorm exhaled, it was not air.

A dense, rolling smog erupted from his lungs—a dark-grey, almost oily fog veined with deeper violet currents. It billowed outward in impossible volume, expanding in a breathless wave across the battlefield.

Within seconds, vast swaths of sea and sky were submerged.

Sensors choked.
Light-based targeting faltered.
Signals refracted, then swallowed.

On Galaxy bridges, officers shouted:

"視覺完全遮蔽——！" Visual completely obscured—!
"雷達噪點爆表，紅外線全部亂了！" Radar noise maxed out, IR is a mess!

Inside that manufactured murk, Deathenstorm's voice came cold and clipped in German.

"Gesamtverband: Rückzugsbefehl unter Smogschirm." Entire formation: retreat order under smog screen. "Kein heroischer Unsinn. Wir gehen geordnet. Verletzte Schiffe zuerst in die Sprungkorridore bringen."

No heroic stupidity. We withdraw in order. Get damaged hulls to portals first.

Death ships, already keyed to follow this contingency, peeled back along precomputed vectors. They left decoy drones and delayed mines behind, all wrapped in lingering pockets of fog, to punish any Galaxy units aggressive—or desperate—enough to chase blind.

Deathenstorm rose higher, keeping his smog thick until the last of his major hulls reported safe distances.

Only then did he let the darkness around him thin, the fog beginning to shred in the upper winds.

Below, the sea lay scored with fire-tracks and flotsam. Many of the wrecks were Galaxy gold. Some were Death black.

He didn't linger.

He turned away, angling his path toward the long route home—a route that was never truly peaceful.

The Harsh Road Back

The ocean between the outer Galaxenchi barrier and Deathenbulkiztahlem was not empty.

It never was.

Foreign merchant-convoy routes, nominally neutral, threaded through. Some were civilian, true. Others wore commercial paint over military steel—merchant combat flotillas quietly armed to the teeth, betting that if they did not fly Galaxy colors, they'd be ignored.

Deathenstorm had no interest in punishing innocents for its own sake.

But anything that could credibly serve as future logistics or surveillance for his enemies was fair game.

Midway along the return corridor, long-range scouts flagged a cluster of hulls: varied tonnage, mixed transponder signatures, weapons runs too clean to be mere private security.

A foreign merchant-combat line.

He could have sent a cruiser squadron.

He didn't.

He altered his own trajectory, descending alone.

From the decks of those distant ships, the first sign of him was a patch of sky getting darker without producing a cloud.

Then the beams came.

No drawn-out dance this time, no surgical probing. His dark-grey and violet energy smashed into the formation's core ship—a heavily reinforced "freighter" whose internal signatures read suspiciously like a combat information center.

Armor peeled. Hull cracked. A single, thick darkness ray punched straight through its heart, detonating whatever hidden reactor system it had hoped to keep secret.

Secondary blasts tore through the rest of the formation as munitions cooked off inside "cargo" holds.

He moved through the survivors like an executioner through a burning graveyard, cracking turrets, silencing guns, ignoring any vessel that clearly showed true civilian profile and panic-scrambled heading away from the area.

Behind him, Death aerial wings and strike groups finished the job—classified as:

Foreign Dual-Use Asset Cluster – Neutralized.

Further along, a floating metal refinery rig rose from the ocean like a steel fungus: pipelines, flame stacks, processing towers—a vital industrial node for some distant power.

Intelligence marked it as quietly supplying fuels and alloys to anyone willing to pay, including factions loosely sympathetic to Galaxy.

Deathenstorm didn't bother with a boarding.

"Artillerie," he said. Artillery.

Death cruisers and battleships formed a rough half-circle at maximum effective range.

"Kurzer Prozess," he added. Short work.

Barrage followed.

Shells, chem-loaded warheads, and dark-energy lances slammed into the rig. Supports buckled. Pipes burst. Towers toppled onto each other in slow, half-graceful catastrophe before the entire mass folded in on itself and slid into the void it had been anchored over.

Nearby, a ring of ocean defense turrets—old, semi-automated guns once meant to protect that industrial cluster—woke in delayed panic.

They spat fire at the Death ships, rounds falling short or glancing off upgraded armor.

Deathenstorm raised one hand, drew a wide arc in the air.

A horizontal sheet of compressed darkness swept out like a rolling guillotine; as it passed over the turret line, barrels bent, baseplates sheared, sensors cracked. Some toppled whole. Others simply sagged, crushed by a weight only his power recognized.

By the time his fleet finally crossed into the deeper, firmly held waters near Deathenbulkiztahlem, the path behind them was littered with one more rig, one more ring of obsolete defenses, and a scattering of burned-out foreign combat hulls that would never again carry useful data to anyone.

Return to the Deathwing

The homecoming was not to a static fortress, but to a ship so large it warped the idea of "ship" at all.

The Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz, known on most tongues simply as the Deathwing, and in Deathenstorm's own logs as Todeskreis–Sturmträger.

It was a giga-colossal titanic HQ-vessel, a mobile continent of armor and factories, bristling with towers, launch bays, necro-reactor pillars, and command spires. It rode the ocean like a floating mountain range, its wake a permanent scar.

As the Grimmwesten and her sisters approached, the Deathwing's silhouette swallowed half the horizon.

Docking corridors extended—some long enough to swallow entire battleships into its internal hangars. Platform lights shifted to receive the battered but still-formidable armada.

Deathenstorm descended through a portal directly to the Deathwing's central command cathedral.

The chamber was immense, domed, its ceiling a shifting projection of the current war-theatre: Galaxenchi's light, Deathenbulkiztahlem's dark mass, Westonglappa's dimmed coasts, a thousand lesser symbols swirling around them.

He walked the central ramp, aura dimmer now, the shadow-wings withdrawn, his heavy boots echoing against necro-steel.

Staff parted silently.

He stepped up onto the primary dais.

The holo-map responded to his presence, vectors and markers rearranging around his last campaign.

Behind him, the Grimmwesten signaled successful docking. Reports streamed: destroyed ships, ammo expenditures, recovered data, damage tallies.

He lifted one hand.

The theatre zoomed outward.

You could see, now, the imprint of his recent spree:

A swathe of ocean where over a hundred Galaxy golden-yellow hulls had died under his personal power.

Arcs where flanking Death formations had cut down small and medium enemy fleets, blunting future reinforcement capabilities.

A week's worth of forced resource burn on the Galaxy Regime just to keep him out of reach of Galaxenchi itself.

A trail of erased foreign dual-use assets and a dead refinery rig that would no longer quietly support his enemies.

It wasn't victory, not the way propagandists liked to paint it.

It was something else.

A proof.

"Sie nennen uns unsterblich," he said softly, in the heavy quiet of the command cathedral. They call us immortal. "Wir sind es nicht. Wir sterben. Schiffe sterben. Männer sterben."

We're not. We die. Ships die. Men die.

He let the admission hang, then added, voice sharpening:

"Aber wir brechen nicht. Nicht von Feuerwerk, nicht von Goldschiffen, nicht von drei Kommandanten, die glauben, sie könnten uns ewig draußen halten." But we don't break. Not from fireworks, not from gold ships, not from three commanders who think they can keep us outside forever.

He shifted the view one last time, centering Galaxenchi and Deathenbulkiztahlem on opposite sides of the globe, the Deathwing's icon between them like a drawn blade.

"Heute," he murmured, "haben wir ihnen Zeit genommen, Stahl genommen, Schlaf genommen."

Today we took their time, their steel, their sleep.

He turned from the map.

"Und morgen," he finished, "sehen wir, was sie uns dafür abverlangen." And tomorrow, we'll see what price they demand for that.

Behind him, the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz / Todeskreis–Sturmträger rumbled, reactors humming like a buried storm. Around it, new ships were already under construction from the salvage he'd ordered reclaimed. Beyond it, the sea curled outward toward future battlefields.

For now, Deathenstorm's campaign was done.

He had flown alone into the teeth of Galaxy's gold fleets, carved his message into the water with darkness and plasma, bled them, then withdrawn under his own smog.

He stood at the heart of the Deathwing, main character of his own ongoing catastrophe, unbowed and—more importantly to him—still moving.

The war would go on.

But for one long, quiet moment on that colossal ship, the storm stood still and the world rotated around him, lines and lights on the map waiting for the next vector he would draw.

On the command dais of the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz, Deathenstorm's footsteps faded.

For a moment, the giga-colossal HQ-ship—Todeskreis–Sturmträger, the Deathwing—hummed with that peculiar quiet that only comes after a major campaign. Hulls still groaned in drydocks. New ships were still being stamped out of reclaimed steel. Tactical maps still flickered with half-settled after-action markers.

Then, in a lower level of the command cathedral, a different set of sigils lit.

The message wasn't for a Supreme Commander.

It was for an elite.

Deathamorgoth: The Tasked Shadow

Deep in the Deathwing's inner decks, in a vaulted bay lined with containment glyphs and weapons racks, Deathamorgoth stepped off a maintenance gantry and onto the central inlay—a ring of dark metal etched with concentric plus-eyes.

Tall, lean, armor blackened to a matte sheen, he carried no cape and no banners. Where Deathenstorm was a stormfront, Deathamorgoth was the shadow that followed lightning.

From the surrounding walls, projectors spooled up. A skeletal, metallic visage manifested in hovering holo-form—a face made of ship-ribs and reactor glow.

Doctor Deathwing—the quasi-mythical overseer of the HQ-ship's internal logic and war-research—regarded him with cold, analytic light.

"Elite Deathamorgoth," the Doctor's voice rasped, like machinery grinding through bone. "Bereit für Aufgabenpaket Titanumas-Peripherie?" Ready for Task Package: Titanumas Periphery?

Deathamorgoth bowed his head a fraction.

"Bereit," he answered. Ready.

Panels around the bay filled with new objectives, arcs drawn in red and violet:

Interception & Appropriation – Titanumas Overseas Trade Route
Gather gems, treasures, weaponry from foreign trade between random neighboring states outside the immediate war theatre.

Neutral Island Operation – Occupy & Hold
Invade a neutral island, hold it as Deathenbulkiztahlem's forces loot it: deathsoldiers, deathmarauders, deathrangers, zombies. Supreme Commanders will handle infection. His job is to lock the island down.

Guardian of the Convoys – Ocean Levitation Escort
Once the spoils are loaded onto the largest naval transport carriers, levitate out over the ocean and defend the carriers personally as they return to Deathenbulkiztahlem.

"Ressourcen sind Zeit," Doctor Deathwing murmured. Resources are time. "Zeit ist Krieg. Hol uns beides."

Resources are time. Time is war. Bring us both.

Deathamorgoth closed one gauntleted fist.

"Verstanden," he said. Understood.

Darkness coiled up around his boots like obedient mist.

Objective One: The Glittering Veins – Trade Route Ambush

Far from the main warfront, the sea had a different personality.

Here, between loosely-aligned outsider states of Titanumas overseas, the water carried trade, not fleets: long convoys of merchant ships, private guard frigates, discreet carrier-barges ferrying gems from mountain-mines, exotic weaponry from experimental arsenals, crates of relics and treasures to fuel someone's economy and someone else's prestige.

On Deathamorgoth's tactical overlay, it was just a glowing line.

Trade Route: Vael-Drass Axis – a random, but profitable corridor between minor polities who believed distance from Deathenbulkiztahlem meant safety.

He rode out there not on a ship, but on a dark platform of solidified shadow, a disc of darkness hovering meters above the waves. Around him, lesser Death craft—themselves masked and silent—kept pace at a distance, ready to act when he gave the word.

Ahead, the convoy:

Three bulky gem-barges, hulls plated but lightly armed.

A treasure-carrier, its holds packed with reliquary crates.

Two munitions freighters ferrying weaponry and experimental arms.

A ring of escort frigates and strike corvettes flying the colors of "neutral" states that had quietly armed themselves to the teeth.

Deathamorgoth extended his hand.

Shadows along the water thickened, spreading out ahead of the convoy like spilled ink. They rose subtly, warping light, bending radar returns. To the convoy's sensors, the sea ahead simply appeared... oddly empty.

"Unterseetrupps," he said into his comm. Sub-surface teams. "Bereitmachen. Wir wollen Schiffe übernehmen, nicht nur versenken."

Prepare. We want to take ships, not just sink them.

Death submarines—small, stealthy—slid into positions under the lead barges.

Above, Deathamorgoth lifted his other hand.

Dark-grey energy condensed around his fingers, forming long, transparent spikes of force.

With a flick, he hurled them.

They didn't slam into hulls—they slashed across the water just ahead of the escorts, erupting into sudden towers of steam and blackened spray. Not direct hits, but shock markers.

The convoy reacted exactly as designed.

"Kontakt voraus!" Contact ahead!
"Alle Schiffe – bremsen, Formation enger!" All ships, slow, tighten formation!

They bunched up.

Perfect.

Deathamorgoth whispered something that never made it to human ears. The shadows under the gem-barges boiled.

Deathenbulkiztahlem's subs rose in sync, breaching inside the convoy's own safe bubble. Grapnels launched. Boarding tubes slammed into hulls. Within minutes, plus-eyed storm-boarding units were on decks, stunning crews, jamming comms, forcing bridges into silence.

Escorts tried to respond—but their firing arcs were blocked by their own high-value ships. That hesitation, that half-second of "can we shoot?" cost them everything.

Death skirmisher boats, previously masked by the shadow distortion, knifed in from port and starboard. Targeted shots blew out escort bridges, weapons mounts, engine rooms.

Deathamorgoth stayed high, directing.

"Lasst zwei gem-Barges intakt," he ordered. Leave two gem barges intact. "Den dritten entladen wir und versenken die Hülle als Warnung."

We'll strip the third and sink the hull as a warning.

He watched as:

Holds full of raw and cut gems were re-crated into Death-marked containers.

Treasure crates were catalogued with frightening efficiency—anything with potential arcane or technological value got priority.

Weapon shipments were diverted to Death transports, the most dangerous or unstable relics tagged for Doctor Deathwing's labs.

When one munitions freighter tried to scuttle itself by overloading its core, Deathamorgoth simply clenched his fist.

A cage of shadow formed around the freighter's engine section, compressing force inward when it blew. The explosion became a shudder instead of a fireball; the ship broke its spine but didn't scatter wreckage far. Easier to salvage.

Within an hour, the trade route was empty.

Four captured ships joined Death's flotilla, now flying subdued markings. The rest—escorts shattered, one barge sunk, the others stolen—left only oil-slicks and shocked echoes in commerce nets.

In some distant neutral capital, loudly "uninvolved" ministers would soon wake to news that their assets had vanished into violet shadow.

Deathamorgoth stepped his levitating platform up into portal range.

"Ressourcen einsammeln—abgehakt," he reported. Resource collection—checked.

Doctor Deathwing's voice came back, crackling with distant reactor hum.

"Gut. Nächste Phase: Insel Null."

Objective Two: Island Null – The Neutral Territory Falls

On the next map, a single island glowed—labeled only as Neutral Territory: Codename Null.

It was a true neutral:

No official alignment with Galaxy or Death.

A bustling trade hub.

Light local defense forces, more used to chasing pirates than armies.

Population centers, warehouses, banks, vaults, villas—anything that wealth and complacency builds on a pretty piece of rock.

Deathamorgoth's task was not subtle.

Infiltrate. Overrun. Hold.
Let the Death Regime feed.

He arrived on the Null shoreline at night, carried in by a dispersal of black fog that bled out of a low-lying cloud bank.

As the mist touched the beach, it thickened, then shaped itself into marching silhouettes. Deathsoldiers—disciplined infantry in matte armor. Behind them, deathmarauders in jagged gear, eager for loot; deathrangers, lean and precise, weapons slung with casual lethality; packs of various zombies, their plus-eye glows dimmed, controlled by handler runes.

Above, Death dropships whispered down, disgorging heavier support.

In the distance, alarm sirens began to wail—late, confused.

Deathamorgoth raised a hand. The first coastal gun emplacement—an old fortress turret on a hill—blinked out as a dark ray punched through its fire-control slit.

"Primärziele," he called, voice amplified across his own forces. Primary targets. "Hafenanlagen, Regierungsgebäude, Lagerhäuser."

Harbors, government halls, warehouses.

"For Supreme Commanders," came an additional code-signed note from high command, "infection priority: population, elites, and anyone with administrative access."

Deathenstride. Deathenstream. Deathendye. Whichever of them drew the short straw today would handle the intricacies of turning Null's people into assets.

Deathamorgoth's job was simpler: make sure nobody escaped, nobody interfered, and nobody thought about heroics long enough to matter.

On Null:

Haven Districts panicked as Deathsoldiers secured docks, cutting off boats, setting up hard checkpoints.

Bank rows saw vault doors buckle under battlefield breaching rigs. Gemstones, currency stacks, bearer bonds—all swept into Death crates.

Armories and local forts—those equivalent to places like Fort Fregnrask or Ammishal Keep—fell after short, sharp fights; defenders were either killed or collared for infection.

Deathmarauders roamed through market districts and villa zones, looting aggressively but under constraints: take everything that can be turned into supply or weaponry; break what cannot.

Deathrangers perched on rooftops and tower-tops, sniping any fleeing vehicles, any emergency helicopters, any would-be messengers trying to get off-island.

In the central square, drawn like a line of shadow across marble, Deathamorgoth stood and listened to reports.

"Stadtzentrum unter Kontrolle." City center under control.
"Nordhafen – gesichert." North harbor secured.
"Flughafen – Start- und Landebahn blockiert." Airstrip disabled, runways blocked.
"Infrastruktur – Kraftwerk, Wasserwerke in unserer Hand." Infrastructure—power plant, water facilities in our hands.

Overhead, a different energy crackled.

One of the Supreme Commanders—let us say Deathenstride, his aura a jagged, blue-black cyclone—had arrived to begin infection protocols: targeted chem dispersal, psychic overwriting, neatly flipping island administrators into a new chain of command.

Deathamorgoth gave him a short nod as their paths crossed.

"Ihre Bühne," he said. Your stage.

"Dein Käfig," Deathenstride replied smoothly. Your cage.

By dawn, Null Island was held in a ring of Deathsteel and shambling forms.

No ship left uninspected. No airway unblocked.

Doctor Deathwing's status update labelled it:

ISLAND NULL – OCCUPIED
LOOT LEVEL: MAXIMAL
INFECTION STATUS: ACTIVE / STABLE
HOLD FORCE: DEATHAMORGOTH

The hold wouldn't be forever. Sooner or later, the island would either be emptied of value or transformed into a permanent Death bastion.

But for this window, it belonged utterly to the Death Regime's hunger.

Deathamorgoth stepped off a balcony edge and floated out over the newly-blackened harbor, already thinking about the final phase.

Objective Three: Guardian Above the Convoys

When the last treasure crate, the last weapons pallet, the last stack of commandeered resources was loaded, the harbor below him looked like an anthill made of steel.

Lines of containers. Pallet stacks. Caged gems. Crated weapons.

All of it disappeared into the open maws of the largest Death Regime naval transport carriers—gargantuan hulls that made even the heavy cruisers look small.

Each carrier:

Multiple internal decks for cargo.

Deep, armored holds for sensitive or infectious material.

Escort slots along its flanks for smaller defense craft.

Doctor Deathwing's voice crackled in Deathamorgoth's earpiece.

"Du kennst den Weg," the Doctor said. You know the route. "Und die Risiken."

Deathamorgoth's answer was simple.

"Wer unsere Ladung angreift," he replied, "lernt, dass ich schlechter Laune bin."

Anyone who hits our cargo learns what I'm like in a bad mood.

The convoy sailed.

He did not ride on deck.

He levitated above the ocean, parallel to the leading carrier, boots a bare meter over the waves, his dark platform humming quietly under him. From this vantage, he was both symbol and real shield—seen by Death crews on deck as a moving star of deep violet.

The route home threaded through contested waters: places where Galaxy unmanned scouts still roamed, where foreign opportunists might try to strike, where leftover ocean defense machines still pulsed old loyalties.

First threat: a cluster of long-range missile platforms disguised as an abandoned floating refinery fragment, similar to the one Deathenstorm had erased days earlier.

Death sensors picked up the signature seconds before launch.

"Abfangvektoren berechnet, aber knapp," an officer reported. Intercept vectors calculated, but tight.

Deathamorgoth didn't bother with math.

He lifted both hands.

Grey-violet energy blossomed into a thin curtain-field, an angled wall between convoy and firing source.

The enemy missiles launched: a dozen white streaks, seeking heat and mass.

They hit the curtain and... vanished.

Not in a dramatic explosion. In a muffled implosion, their forces folded inward, their guidance cores crushed to the size of fists, dropping harmlessly into the sea.

He extended his right hand, pointing toward the fake wreck-platform.

A narrow beam of solid darkness lanced out, punching straight through the structure's core. Its hidden systems died in silence, the platform sagging, then slowly listing, another dead reef.

Second threat: a squadron of Galaxy-purchased mercenary gunships, painted with distant foreign sigils but running Galaxy firmware, attempting to shadow the convoy and stream data back.

"Luftziele zwei Uhr," came the call. Air contacts at two o'clock.

Deathamorgoth twisted midair, shadow-platform swooping upward.

The mercenary pilots saw him as a spreading blot on sensors, a visual glitch that resolved into a humanoid silhouette wreathed in grey fire.

They opened fire—cannons, missiles, improvised energy lances.

He didn't dodge all of it; some shots scorched past, splintering his platform's edges. But wherever fire came close, the darkness around him thickened, hardening, absorbing, or twisting trajectories just enough to keep him untouched.

He answered with heavy energy bolts, like miniature comets made of night and burning violet. Each one tracked not just heat, but intent—latching onto the hostile targeting signatures aimed at the convoy.

One gunship lost both wings in a flash, spiraling into the water.

Another had its engine pods eaten away by crawling darkness, systems blinking out one by one.

A third tried to run.

He gave that one to the Death carrier's AA crews, letting them take the shot, a reward and a drill in one.

Third threat: a leftover ocean defense turret grid, dormant until the convoy passed overhead.

As the carriers neared, the seabed shook. Old turrets rose from concealed wells, cannons tracking.

Deathamorgoth saw the activation flickers and, instead of destroying them piecemeal, chose a demonstration.

He inhaled.

Above the convoy, the sky dimmed. The light around him tightened into a swirling vortex.

He exhaled—a directed, downward burst.

A column of concentrated shadow-smog slammed into the water's surface, spreading out into a radial surge that rolled along the seabed like a shockwave. Turrets, half-mechanical and half-arcane, shuddered as their connecting cabling corroded in seconds, control circuits damped, barrels seizing.

When the smog cleared, the turrets still stood physically—but dead. Lifeless statues of rusting metal.

One by one, the convoy's threats burned out and fell away.

Behind and below him, carrier crews, Deathsoldiers, technicians, zombies, all moved with renewed confidence. The Deathwing would eat well on this shipments' yield.

At last, the jagged line of Deathenbulkiztahlem's homeward approaches rose on the horizon: murky coasts bristling with dock-towers, factory silhouettes, and shielded harbors.

Deathamorgoth let his levitation platform lower just enough that the spray kissed his boots.

Convoy: intact.
Cargo: secured.
Casualties: minimal on Death side, maximal on everyone else's.

He rose one last time, banking toward the towering mass of the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz.

Back to the Engine of War

The Deathwing received the returning carriers like a beast inhaling.

Dock gates opened. Cranes swung. Plus-eyed logistics officers began their work. Doctor Deathwing's sigil pulsed approvingly in the central cathedral as resource totals climbed.

Deathamorgoth stepped once more onto the command inlay in his bay.

The holo-face formed in front of him again, that amalgam of steel and reactor light.

"Ressourcen?" the Doctor asked, though the ship already knew. Resources?

"Reichlich," Deathamorgoth answered. Plentiful. "Gems, Waffen, Handelsgüter von der Route. Eine Insel entleert und im Griff. Konvoi sicher zurückgebracht."

Gems, weapons, trade goods from the route. An island emptied and in our grip. Convoy brought back safely.

Doctor Deathwing's eyes flickered.

"Zeit gewonnen," it murmured. Time gained. "Krieg verlängert. Gut gemacht, Elite Deathamorgoth."

Time gained. War extended. Well done.

Outside, Supreme Commanders were already arguing over where to spend that time—Galaxenchi's outer seas, some new outer continent, another neutral that hadn't yet learned fear.

Inside, on this certain deck of this impossible ship, Deathamorgoth simply let the lingering darkness around him unwind and drift away like exhausted smoke.

He was not a symbol on the grand map like Deathenstorm.

He was a vector.

Between resource, ruin, and return, he traced the lines that made the Death Regime's grand campaigns possible—plundering trade veins, locking down islands, and hovering above laden carriers like a quiet, lethal shadow until homeland towers rose ahead.

The Deathwing hummed. Orders queued. New tasks waited.

When the next objectives lit up, he would answer again.

For now, the convoys from Titanumas' outskirts had made it home, Null Island lay under a violet flag, and the ocean knew that somewhere above it, a dark figure could at any moment decide that a ship's future had ended.

On the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz, time didn't flow so much as coil.

Every campaign, every convoy, every razed island turned into lines of light in the Deathwing's cathedral of war. Between those lines, the system kept finding new tasks for the ones who never stayed idle.

Deathamorgoth walked off his last debrief with Doctor Deathwing expecting, briefly, the rarest luxury in the Death Regime: silence.

Instead, the inlay ring lit up beneath his boots again.

The Doctor did not bother with preamble.

"Elite Deathamorgoth. Zusatzaufträge eingetroffen."
Additional assignments have arrived.

Deathamorgoth exhaled once, quietly.

"Dann los," he said. Then let's go.

The darkness around his ankles rose again like obedient smoke.

Scenario 1 – Ghosts in the Core: Inner Sabotage

The first objective didn't point outward.

It pointed in.

ALERT – INTERNAL INTERFERENCE
Possible foreign interference in Deathwing lower decks:
Manufacturing Block Theta-9 – reactor conduits & cargo fabricators.

The Death Regime did not tolerate internal surprises.

Deathamorgoth descended through industrial levels where the walls sweated heat and the floors vibrated with the weight of war production. Theta-9 was a cathedral of its own: towering fabricator lines, conveyor belts bearing weapon housings, reactor feeds pulsing dull violet through massive conduits.

Something here was wrong.

The air tasted... off.

He narrowed his eyes.

Shadows clung to him as he walked the gantries. When he stopped, they spread outward, matching the scaffold's geometry, crawling along walls and pipes like ink. Through that extended sense, he felt it:

A signal that wasn't Death's own—thin, parasitic, trying to ride the same channels.

Someone outside had managed to piggyback data through a compromised foreign device, likely smuggled in with captured goods.

"Interessant," he murmured. Interesting.

He snapped his fingers.

Darkness snapped with it: micro-bursts along specific conduits and relay nodes where the foreign signal pulsed. Systems flickered, then re-stabilized on Death-standard frequencies, like a host body shrugging off an irritant.

On the far side of the block, three human-shaped silhouettes stiffened.

They'd hidden well: plus-eyed, properly uniformed, working the lines with everyone else. But they'd been just slightly out of rhythm with the Deathwing's tempo, taking one breath too many to look at a certain panel, one second too long to check a console.

Deathamorgoth's shadow crawled up behind them, flattening along the wall, then rising silently like a second outline.

He spoke without raising his voice.

"Dieses Schiff ist kein Ort für fremde Finger," he said. This ship is no place for foreign fingers.

They spun, reaching for concealed triggers, fallback devices, self-destructs.

His darkness moved faster.

Shadow-binds caught wrists and ankles, pinning them to the metal. Their devices crumbled, corroded in their hands, displays going dead.

He would not interrogate; that was for specialists. His role was simpler: identify, immobilize, remove.

Within minutes, security detachments arrived, grim and efficient, dragging the infiltrators away for extraction and analysis.

Doctor Deathwing's voice buzzed in his ear.

"Spionageversuch neutralisiert. Fertigungsblock stabil. Gut."
Espionage attempt neutralized. Production block stable. Good.

Deathamorgoth turned once in the humming half-light of Theta-9, listening to the fabricators roar back to their full rhythm.

Internal ghosts handled.

Next.

Scenario 2 – Fracture Gate: The Rift Defense

The second task dragged him back out to sea—but not to the familiar blue.

Between Deathenbulkiztahlem and several outer theatres, the Regime had begun to rely on something more efficient than long sailing routes: Rissportale, fracture gates—artificial spatial ruptures anchored in the middle of the ocean.

One of them, Rift Anchor V-3, had gone from "quiet" to "contested" in a single update.

Status: Rift Anchor V-3
Function: Long-range jump corridor for heavy carriers
Threat: Galaxy Regime unmanned drone clusters, foreign scavenger fleets attempting to hijack jump vectors.

If the Rift Anchor fell, whole logistics chains would snarl. That translated into lost campaigns, delayed reinforcement, and opportunities handed to Galaxenchi for free.

Deathamorgoth arrived above V-3 alone, hovering.

The Rift Anchor was not pretty.

A massive, circular platform floated in the swells, ringed with pylons humming with warped light. In its center, the air shimmered with a barely-contained twist—like the surface of a lake where the reflection didn't quite match the sky.

Around it, the fight was already underway.

Death escorts spat fire at Galaxy unmanned drones, darting in and out, trying to map the rift pattern, perhaps to replicate or sabotage it. On the horizon, a ragged fleet of opportunist ships—neither Galaxy nor Death—hovered greedily, hoping to steal tech scraps or goods mid-transfer.

"Schönes Chaos," Deathamorgoth muttered. Nice chaos.

He dove.

First, the drones.

He flared his aura, turning his entire outline into a beacon. The smart machines, tuned to threat priority, swarmed toward him, clustering like metallic insects around a flame.

He welcomed them.

In midair, he summoned a lattice of angular dark wards, like a half-formed cage around his body. The drones hurled themselves in, firing, scanning—then found their sensors scrambled by the non-light around them.

One gesture: the cage snapped shut.

Dozens—hundreds—of drones crushed simultaneously in a collapsing prison of force, their wreckage raining into the sea in a sparkling metal storm.

Then, the scavenger fleet.

They were not well-organized, but they were hungry—a dozen ships, some refitted tankers, some armed merchant hulls, a few old warships with mismatched guns, all prowling at range, sniping at Death escorts.

Deathamorgoth extended a hand toward them without bothering to close the distance.

His voice dropped to a low, resonant tone.

The shadow beneath the Rift Anchor stretched, then flowed outward in a spreading ring across the water—thin at first, then thickening into a disk of dim, viscous darkness roughly matching the scavenger fleet's footprint.

As their captains shouted, trying to change heading, the water beneath them... resisted.

Their hulls suddenly felt heavier, deeper. Wakes slowed. Maneuverability dropped by half.

"Keine Flucht," he said. No escape.

Death artillery ships cinched the noose, closing range and opening up with precision strikes. Immobilized, the scavenger hulls stood no chance; one by one, their weapons were blown away, engines disabled.

He left a few afloat, burning and crippled—enough to carry a very clear story back to whoever had sent them.

The Rift Anchor's pylon lights steadied.

Doctor Deathwing's report updated:

RIFT ANCHOR V-3 – STABLE
DRONE PROBES – DESTROYED
THIRD-PARTY SCAVENGERS – DETERRED / DEGRADED

He floated above the central fracture, feeling the warp-surge hum against his boots.

"Durchgang bleibt offen," he murmured. Passage stays open.

He turned away.

Scenario 3 – The Pact That Wasn't: False Allies

The next task came sideways.

In the shadow between great powers, lesser factions had begun trying to survive by pretending to pick sides—offering "alliances" they didn't mean, hoping to extract tech or protection from both Galaxy and Death without truly committing.

One such group, the Covenant of Grey Spires, had recently sent signals toward Deathenbulkiztahlem: information offers, promises of safe harbors, whispers of shared enemies.

Doctor Deathwing had responded with the equivalent of a raised mechanical eyebrow—and sent Deathamorgoth to verify their worth.

Objective:
Meet Covenant envoys at a pre-arranged oceanic platform.
Determine truth of their intentions.
If sincere and useful: secure.
If duplicitous: erase.

The meeting point was a neutral platform rig—a flat, low-slung structure moored to nothing obvious, anchored over a deep trench.

Deathamorgoth arrived without an escort, stepping silently onto the platform's edge from midair.

Across from him, Covenant representatives waited: grey-cloaked, their insignia a spiral tower under crossed spears. Their leader—an older figure with tired, intelligent eyes—bowed slightly.

"Vormachtseliter Deathamorgoth," he greeted, in accented, cautious German. "Wir kommen mit Angeboten. Information, Routen, Verstecke."

We come with offers. Information, routes, hideouts.

Deathamorgoth watched him in silence for a few seconds, the wind tugging at both their cloaks.

"Und mit wem habt ihr in den letzten drei Monaten ebenfalls gesprochen?" he asked. And with whom else have you spoken in the last three months?

The envoy's eye barely twitched.

"Wir... haben unsere Optionen sondiert," he began. We... have explored our options—

Deathamorgoth raised one hand.

Shadows on the platform cast by the envoys' own forms thickened, anchoring them in place. They found their boots unwilling to step, their hands suddenly heavy.

He gestured, and darkness rippled across the rig's deck in a searching wave—sliding into corners, seams, equipment housings.

It found them:

Hidden Galaxy-standard transmitters, tucked into support struts.

Backup beacons keyed to foreign naval codes.

Emergency explosives placed in structurally critical beams, set to detonate if his aura signature rose past a certain threshold.

He looked the envoy in the eye.

"Ihr wolltet zwei Tische gleichzeitig bedienen," he said flatly. You wanted to play at two tables at once. "Das ist in Tavernen erlaubt. Nicht hier."

That's allowed in taverns. Not here.

The envoy tried to speak, but the shadow around his throat tightened just enough to turn words into strangled sound.

Deathamorgoth did not raise his voice.

"Doktor," he murmured on his internal channel. Doctor.

"Analyse abgeschlossen," Doctor Deathwing replied. Analysis complete. "Daten von der Plattform wurden kopiert. Sie sind wertlos als Verbündete. Aber nützlich als Beispiel."

Data copied. Worthless as allies, useful as example.

Deathamorgoth nodded once.

He turned his back on the frozen envoys, stepping off the edge of the platform, levitating out over the trench.

Behind him, carefully controlled implosions rippled along the rig. The explosives the Covenant had placed went off first—redirected by his shadow-fields downward. Structural points buckled. The whole platform tilted, then folded, dropping piece by piece into the deep.

By the time the last segment sank, there was nothing left for latecomers to "discover" except disturbed waves.

No alliance.
No double game.
One less variable cluttering the already-messy board.

Scenario 4 – The Quiet Task: Refuge for the Dead

Not every assignment involved breaking something.

The last one, strangely, came from a different channel—not from Doctor Deathwing, but from a quiet corner of Deathenbulkiztahlem's internal governance: the custodians of Memorial Sector Nine, the place where the Death Regime stored what passed for remembrance.

Request:
Escort a convoy of memory-caskets—data cores, relics, items carrying imprints of fallen plus-eyed officers—from a temporary vault on an outer platform back to a deep-core crypt nearer Deathenbulkiztahlem's heart.

Normally, this would be routine.

But recent disruptions in the Rift network and increased foreign probing meant the route was riskier than usual. And some of those memory-caskets held data that could not, under any circumstances, fall into Galaxy hands.

Deathamorgoth took the assignment without argument.

The convoy was small:

A single, heavily shielded transport.

Two escorts.

No superweapons, no dazzling cargo—just rows of carefully sealed cores and personal effects of long-dead officers and elites.

They crossed quiet seas that weren't truly quiet.

A distant Galaxy recon wing caught their echo and tested their perimeter. Deathamorgoth rose into the air and politely—very firmly—discouraged them.

A third-party pirate band tried to trail them, hoping for tech to steal. He marked their hull on his internal map, then simply... folded the water under them, allowing one ship to sink in a slow, inescapable spiral, the others fleeing once they saw Death's shadow above.

The convoy made it through.

In Central Crypt Nine, down past layers of armor and secrecy, Deathamorgoth walked between rows of caskets as they were offloaded, their faint lights blinking one by one as they slid into their new bays.

Names pulsed on the displays—some he recognized, many he didn't.

He wasn't sentimental; the Death Regime didn't breed softness easily. But he did feel something close to respect.

These were the ones who had burned themselves out before his time, filling the sky and sea with enough ruin to make his own path possible.

When the last casket slid into place, Crypt Nine sealed with a heavy, final sound.

Another duty checked.

Another piece of the war-machine left whole.

A Shadow's Pause

Back on the Deathwing, in his familiar bay, Deathamorgoth stepped once more into the inlay-circle.

For once, no new objectives flashed.

Doctor Deathwing's projection appeared anyway, its metallic face oddly still.

"Elite Deathamorgoth," it said. "Deine Einsätze im Titanumas-Peripherraum, an Riss V-3, auf Insel Null, und entlang der Erinnerungsroute wurden verzeichnet."

Your missions in the Titanumas periphery, at Rift V-3, on Island Null, and along the memorial route have been recorded.

"Du bist kein Sturm wie Deathenstorm," the Doctor went on. You are not a storm like Deathenstorm. "Du bist das Messer zwischen den Stürmen."

You're the knife between the storms.

Deathamorgoth didn't answer immediately.

Out beyond the Deathwing, the map of the world glowed with its usual, terrible complexity: Galaxenchi's light. Deathenbulkiztahlem's dark mass. Westonglappa's dim coasts. Unknown continents. Unmarked seas. Trade lines, war lines, fracture gates, islands.

He knew more tasks would come. More "random" scenarios, which were never truly random—always another bottleneck to clear, another vein to tap, another threat to silence.

That was fine.

He didn't need a front page. Didn't need a banner.

He just needed somewhere to step, and something to solve, in that thin, critical space between what the Supreme Commanders wanted and what the war demanded.

He bowed his head slightly toward the Doctor.

"Ruf mich, wenn der nächste Bruch entsteht," he said. Call me when the next fracture forms.

The projection's eyes flickered once in what, from a machine, almost passed for approval.

"Das wirst du hören," it replied. You'll hear it.

The lights in the bay dimmed.

For the first time in a very long stretch of cycles, Deathamorgoth walked back toward his quarters without a mission ticking over his shoulder. The Deathwing thrummed around him, a giant engine of conflict, fed by people like Deathenstorm and Deathenpuff and Deathendye—

—and held together, in all the hidden joints, by shadows like him.

His narrative didn't end with a grand speech or a final battle.

It ended, for now, with a rare, narrow slice of quiet in a hallway of dark metal, the sense that the war would absolutely find him again—

and the certainty that when it did, he'd be ready to step out into the ocean air, rise into the sky, and handle whatever impossible scenario the Death Regime threw onto his path next.

The Deathwing slept with its eyes open.

Deep in its spine, the echo of Deathamorgoth's steps faded into the same low thunder as reactor hum and distant shipyard hammers. The great projections of the war recalculated. Vectors bent. Numbers shifted.

The cathedral of command dimmed its lights by a fraction.

Then, in another sector, a different symbol lit up.

Not a Supreme Commander.
Not a blunt-force elite like Deathamorgoth.

A slender sigil, drawn in razor-thin violet lines, rotated into focus:

Operative-Primus Deathsylinthra
Role: Infiltration, misdirection, subversion.

The Knife in the Code

While Deathamorgoth walked metal and ocean, Deathsylinthra often walked everything else.

She emerged from a lift-shaft on Deck Epsilon-Black of the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz, cloak falling silent around her armor. Where others wore heavy plates, hers was layered, flexible, cut in overlapping dark-grey segments that caught almost no light.

Her hair, tied back tight, had a faint violet sheen at the ends—as if it had remembered some energy blast and never quite let go.

Waiting for her in the corridor wall was not a person, but a projection: a small, eye-shaped rune glowing in the metal, Doctor Deathwing's "voice-node" for this wing of the ship.

"Deathsylinthra," the Doctor said, voice lowered here to a conspiratorial rasp. "Bereit für Aufgabenpaket Schattenlauf?"

Ready for Task Package: Shadowrun?

She smiled—not wide, just a quick, sharp flicker.

"Nur, wenn es nicht langweilig wird," she answered softly. Only if it's not boring.

Panels along the corridor brightened, projecting three mission trees in midair, branches of violet and black light.

Operation: SIRENSILK – False distress signals & trap-laying along a Galaxy-aligned relief corridor.

Operation: GLASSCOURT – Infiltrate a neutral arbitration station and flip its security logic before Galaxy can use it as a staging point.

Operation: FERAL TIDE – Contain and repurpose a rogue Death-created bio-weapon swarm that slipped its leash near Titanumas.

She tilted her head, reading fast.

"Einmal Täuschung, einmal Einbruch, einmal Aufräumen," she murmured. One deception, one break-in, one cleanup. "Abwechslungsreich. Akzeptiert."

Varied. Accepted.

1. Operation: SIRENSILK – Luring the Golden Rescuers

Far from Deathenbulkiztahlem and Galaxenchi, between devastated Westonglappa waters and still-untouched coasts of Titanumas's lesser powers, ran a corridor Galaxy Regime had quietly dedicated to relief convoys:

Medical ships.
Refugee transports.
Logistics craft carrying reconstruction equipment.

They ran under golden-yellow hulls with white relief markings—soft targets if you didn't care about reputation. Death Regime, annoyingly, did. Blunt massacres wasted more than they gained right now.

Deathsylinthra's orders were not to slaughter convoys.

They were to move them.

She rode in a black scout-cruiser, more dagger than ship, cloaked in layered distortion. In its command alcove, she stood before a holo-map of the relief corridor, scattered with tiny golden icons.

"Galaxy wird diese Route halten, solange sie glauben, dass wir hier 'zivilisiert' spielen," she said to the bridge crew. Galaxy will keep this route as long as they think we're being 'civilized' here. "Also ändern wir die Spielregeln—ohne ihnen den Vorwand zu geben, uns als Monster zu malen."

So we change the rules without giving them an excuse to paint us as monsters.

Her plan had three strokes:

Hijack the Sirens –
Death code-saboteurs, guided by her, infiltrated the automated distress-beacon network along the corridor. Some beacons began to broadcast slightly altered coordinates: not lies, but subtle shifts toward regions where Death forces had already laid deep-water trapfields and sensor webs.

Mask the Bait –
Using captured civilian hulls repainted in neutral colors, she had a handful of "stricken" ships stage convincing distress events at those shifted coordinates: broadcast damage, simulated fires, falsified hull fractures.

Cull the Escorts –
The objective was not the humanitarian ships themselves, but their escort screens, those small but valuable clusters of Galaxy destroyers, frigates, and drones.

When the first relief group veered to answer the altered beacon, their golden med-ship arrived unscathed—because Death guns held their fire.

Their escorts, on the other hand, ran headlong into a carefully tuned kill volume: smart mines, pre-aimed artillery arcs from hidden Death positions, ambush subs.

Deathsylinthra watched from her cruiser's darkened ops bay as escort icons flickered and died.

On the Galaxy bridge screens, the engagement felt like a freak convergence of bad luck.

A misaligned beacon.
An unexpectedly dense mine cluster.
One Death cruiser too many at just the wrong moment.

The med-ship got away—always.

Its crew would send back delayed, confused reports of "hostile environment" and "compromised corridor", with just enough truth. Galaxy Relief Command would have to re-route the entire corridor further away from contested seas, adding days to their schedules, burning more fuel, exposing different flanks.

And along that new route, Deathenpuff's and Deathenstorm's successors could already begin to draw circles.

After three such iterations—three different convoys, three different "freak ambushes"—

Doctor Deathwing confirmed:

SIRENSILK RESULT:

Galaxy escorts destroyed: significant.

Relief corridor pushed out of ideal vector.

Reputation hit: minimized. Public data shows "environmental hazards + pirate interference."

Deathsylinthra leaned back in her acceleration couch, satisfied.

"Besser, als nur Schiffe zu sprengen," she said. Better than just blowing up ships. "Jetzt verschwenden sie Zeit und Benzin dazu."

Now they waste time and fuel.

2. Operation: GLASSCOURT – Stealing the Gavel

Next: the neutral arbitration station.

Officially, the Glasscourt of Meridia hung over a quiet, relatively unimportant sea, serving as a dispute-resolution platform for smaller Titanumas states and off-world stakeholders.

Unofficially, Galaxy Regime had begun to whisper about using it as a forward staging node: its neutrality shielded from overt attacks, its sensor arrays quietly extended, its docking bays "open to all."

Deathsylinthra's objective:

Infiltrate Glasscourt.
Flip its security logic.
Ensure that, when the time comes, it denies Galaxy and subtly favors Death.

The station lived up to its name.

Panels of reinforced transparent alloy made much of its outer structure look like hanging glass, lit from within by soft blues and whites. It spun slowly, a calm wheel above glittering water.

Deathsylinthra didn't knock.

She arrived in the role of a private security consultant hired by one of the neutral states—papers authentic enough, demeanor cool, armor re-skinned with a different sigil overlay.

Inside, the air smelled of recycled citrus and faint coffee.

Uniforms came in a dozen colors. Languages layered: Titanumas dialects, Galaxy Standard, even some Deathenbulkiztahlem slang, spoken in low tones by off-duty mercenaries.

She moved through it all with a kind of predatory grace.

Her goals:

Access the main security AI core.

Seed it with routines that treated Galaxy signatures as "higher risk" and Death-aligned or non-aligned as "baseline".

Install dormant lockdown triggers keyed only to Deathenbulkiztahlem codes—so, at a future moment, the station could be frozen on Death command.

Step one: social engineering.

She spent a day "touring facilities," trading war stories with security captains, offering small, seemingly harmless optimizations that made their work easier.

Step two: code infiltration.

At night, in a supposedly empty ops sub-level, she stood before the Glasscourt's core interface—a column of flickering holo-geometry—and opened one gloved palm.

Delicate shadow filaments extended from her fingertips, sliding into ports and conduits like smoke turning into needles.

The AI, sophisticated but not prepared for her category of intrusion, greeted her as a recognized consultant profile.

"Welcome, Security Advisor Sylin T. Rah. Access Level: Limited / Approved."

She smiled faintly.

"Nur kurz ein paar Filter nachziehen," she told it, fingers weaving. Just tightening a few filters.

New instructions intertwined with old ones:

Subtle weighting of Galaxy transponder IDs as "possible escalation vectors".

Slightly faster response times to their "anomalies", routed through more intrusive scans.

Docking priority quietly given to ships that read as Death-neutral or unflagged.

Deep down, a dormant kernel: IF codephrase-from-Deathenbulkiztahlem THEN initiate full lockdown and data-mirror to a remote Death node.

The AI accepted every change as an "efficiency patch."

By the time she left, the Glasscourt still shone serene and neutral.

Only its heart now tilted slightly away from gold-and-white ships.

One day, when Galaxy tried to use it as a shield or a resupply point, they would find its doors suddenly "malfunctioning," its docks mysteriously unavailable, its sensors refusing certain data.

Official reports would blame "software bugs."

Deathsylinthra would be on another mission, miles away, maybe watching with a quiet smirk.

3. Operation: FERAL TIDE – Cleaning Up their Own Monsters

The last mission in this cycle wasn't about Galaxy at all.

It was about Death Regime's own bad habits.

Somewhere near Titanumas's eastern blue belt, a bio-weapon test had gone sideways: a swarm of semi-autonomous, infection-adapted marine entities—call them feral tideforms—had slipped containment.

Left unchecked, they would:

Attack any hull, Death or Galaxy.

Spread unpredictable mutagens.

Eventually, attract the kind of attention that brought Galaxy Supreme Commanders to your doorstep.

Doctor Deathwing's packet was bitterly concise:

"Unsere Schöpfung. Unser Problem.
Nicht geeignet für die aktuelle strategische Lage.
Neutralisieren oder umlenken."

Our creation. Our problem. Not compatible with current strategy. Neutralize or redirect.

Deathsylinthra found them in a storm-lit sea.

From above, the water looked... wrong. Swirls of darker movement beneath the surface, occasional glints of something too regular to be natural.

She floated over it, cloak snapping in the wind, eyes half-lidded, focusing.

Her power wasn't just shadow in the "light" sense; it extended into perception, command, the subtle linking of hostile attention.

She extended both hands.

Threads of darkness sank down, not as weapons this time, but as hooks—not into flesh, but into behavior routines.

The feral tideforms reacted.

Clusters of them rose, sleek bio-engineered shapes half-visible under the foam. Eyes or sensory nodules glowed faintly violet-green. They surged toward her, drawn by energy and motion.

She gave them something else to chase.

A phantom.

Her aura split, projecting a moving mass of "lure-light" miles away, in a different direction entirely. To the tideforms' primitive tactical sense, it now screamed "greatest target".

They turned.

She layered commands, half-sung in an old Deathenbulkiztahlem field-cant:

"Hier nicht. Dort." Not here. There.
"Kein eigenes Blut. Fremde Rümpfe." No own hulls. Only foreign ones.

It wasn't full control—these things had not been built for easy leashing—but it was enough to bias them.

Within an hour, she had them moving in a broad migration vector away from Death lanes and toward a stretch of open ocean littered with abandoned foreign auto-mines and drone-nests.

There, she triggered a pre-set.

Death artillery, waiting beyond the horizon, spat a short, savage chain of depth charges and specialized implosion rounds. As the feral swarm converged on the decoy, they met a wall of carefully tuned destruction.

The sea boiled for a while.

When it calmed, residual scans showed only traces—manageable, weak, no longer a strategic threat.

Doctor Deathwing's verdict:

FERAL TIDE – 89% neutralized, remaining 11% at negligible impact.
Foreign drone-nests destroyed incidentally – acceptable side-effect.

Deathsylinthra hovered above the churning water, letting the rain soak her armor.

"Einer unserer Fehler weniger," she said quietly. One less of our mistakes.

A Shadow Between Storms

Back aboard the Deathwing, in a narrow viewing bay, Deathsylinthra stood alone, watching waves break against the distant silhouette of Deathenbulkiztahlem's black coast.

Around her, other names moved like storms: Deathenstorm, Deathenpuff, Deathendye, Deathamorgoth.

She was not a dreadnaught. Not a city-smashing commander. Not a brute-force solution.

She was the quiet correction:

The reason Galaxy escorts vanished in "accidents".

The hand that turned a neutral station's heart.

The one who cleaned up the Regime's own loose horrors before they could become excuses for someone else's crusade.

Doctor Deathwing's voice-node flickered softly on the bulkhead.

"Aktionen SIRENSILK, GLASSCOURT, FERAL TIDE – erfolgreich," it summarized. Operations successful. "Galaxy ist jetzt ein wenig langsamer, wir sind ein wenig sauberer, die Bühne ist ein wenig besser vorbereitet."

Galaxy is a bit slower, we are a bit cleaner, the stage a bit better prepared.

Deathsylinthra let out a slow breath.

"Dann war's ein brauchbarer Tag," she answered. Then it was a useful day.

The node dimmed.

Out in the far skies, Galaxenchi still shone, busy and bright. Somewhere, Supreme Commanders were redrawing their lines, wondering why certain routes suddenly felt cursed, why a neutral station no longer behaved, why rumors of unnamed shadows haunted the edges of their maps.

They would probably never put her name to it.

That was fine.

Deathsylinthra turned away from the window, cloak whispering along the deck.

New objectives would appear soon, random on the surface, precise underneath—another corridor to twist, another "neutral" piece to steal, another monster to quietly erase.

Between the loud, crashing moves of the great commanders, she would keep working the seam, elegant and unseen, threading the war's fabric a little tighter in Death Regime's favor with every mission she took.

On the Deathwing, some wars were mapped in clean lines and tonnage.

Deathsylinthra's wars were not.

Hers lived in whispers, backroom votes, sealed memos, and the tiny, ugly gap between what people said they wanted and what they were actually building in the dark.

Doctor Deathwing lit her sigil one last time.

Final Package: SHADOWMANDATE
Targets: emergent ringleaders, neutral political blocs, monopoly schemers.
Objective: crush plots before they mature, demonstrate Death Regime is already several moves ahead.
Tools authorized: full use of shadow-vector and bio-superpowers.

She flexed her fingers, joints crackling.

"Dann sehen wir mal, wer glaubt, er wäre der Puppenspieler," she murmured. Let's see who thinks they're the puppet master.

1. The Round Table That Never Was

They met over an unnamed sea, in an unnamed platform, under a flag that represented "no one" and "everyone" at once.

On the holomap in Deathsylinthra's shuttle, that symbol was tagged simply:

NEUTRAL POLITICAL PARTY BLOC – UNALIGNED COALITION (UN-NAMED)
Intent: Monopolize reconstruction contracts, relief routes, tech licensing.
Method: Play Galaxy and Death against each other, then sit on the pile.

In reality, it was a ringleaders' summit.

States, corporations, party alliances—every one of them had told their domestic voters a different, sanitized story. Here, behind privacy-fields and counterintel software, their representatives leaned over a glass table and spoke the same language:

"How do we own this war?"

They'd already drawn lines:

A plan to lock down key trade straits.

A pseudo-neutral arms cartel to "mediate" sales between sides.

Secret treaty drafts to force smaller nations to buy from them—or starve.

They believed they were unseen.

Deathsylinthra had been listening for days.

Her shadow had slipped into their encrypted data links, reading drafts over their shoulders. Her bio-sense had traversed air ducts and water systems, mapping every heartbeat, every chemical trace of stress in the station.

She stepped through the conference door precisely thirty seconds after they concluded their "founding pact."

The guards outside never even saw her; they were still watching the cameras, and the cameras, in turn, were watching an empty corridor, replayed on loop.

Inside, twenty ringleaders froze.

Her armor and cloak were unmarked, but the air changed when she entered—pressure subtly increasing, temperature dropping by a few degrees. The lights flickered once, as if something living had brushed against the power lines.

"Interessante Pläne," she said, German smooth and quiet. Interesting plans. "Ein Kartell über dem Krieg. Über den Staaten. Über uns."

A cartel above the war. Above the states. Above us.

Someone reached for a panic button.

Their hand didn't make it.

Dark veins appeared along the underside of the table, spreading like ink in water, sprouting thin, translucent filaments that snapped upward. They wrapped wrists and forearms in an instant—not rope, not metal, but something half-organic, half-shadow that pulsed faintly in rhythm with the ringleaders' own heartbeats.

They couldn't move.

One of them managed a hoarse whisper. "What... are you?"

She ignored the question.

Her biological superpowers were not showy like Deathenstorm's blasts. They were intimate. Subtle. The air in the room shifted, carrying a faint, metallic sweetness.

Small, luminescent motes drifted from her cloak—micro-organisms woven from ion-energy and shadow, not born of any natural evolution. They floated, chose, landed where she willed: at the edges of eyes, along vocal cords, in fingertips.

"Ihr wolltet die Lage monopolisieren," she said. You wanted to monopolize the situation. "Information, Routen, Waffen, Verträge."

Information, routes, weapons, contracts.

Her motes burrowed in—not to kill, but to mark.

"Jetzt gehört ihr uns," she finished. Now you belong to us.

Screens around them flickered. Their carefully air-gapped systems weren't air-gapped anymore; her shadows had already crawled through physical ports, her bio-particles already colonized interface chips.

Every draft treaty, every slush fund, every blackmail file they had on anyone lit up in Deathenbulkiztahlem's data vaults like fireworks.

By the time the neutral bloc realized their web was compromised, the Death Regime was already:

Blacklisting their shell companies.

Pre-emptively undercutting their proposed shipping rates.

Quietly warning certain small powers, "Don't sign with them; we know exactly what they've done."

The Round Table of monopolists never made it onto the public map.

Officially, it had been "a preliminary discussion that yielded no binding results."

Unofficially, Deathsylinthra walked out having turned every conspirator into a tagged asset—or a future corpse if they forgot they were tagged.

2. The Operation That Died in Draft

In a cluster of high towers over a bright, far-off capital—call it A City That Should've Known Better—another, more ambitious scheme was being written.

A nameless coalition of "neutral political parties" and "non-aligned movements" had decided that the war was an opportunity to create a new supra-political order. Their internal documents called it:

"The Unified Mandate"

In essence:

Force a global ceasefire when both Galaxy and Death exhausted themselves.

Step in as the "only sane adults in the room."

Demand access to strategic tech and territory in exchange for "peace."

They were still in the plotting phase:

Secret meetings.
Encrypted channels.
Draft manifestos dripping with moral language and hidden claws.

Deathsylinthra never let them get past "draft."

She didn't storm their towers.

She walked in through a maintenance level nobody ever watched, her bio-motes riding the building's air filtration system like invisible fish in a current.

Up top, in a conference suite with a panoramic view, the ringleaders were arguing over phrasing.

"How much can we demand from both sides at once without them noticing we're extorting them?" one asked, without those words, but with that meaning.

Deathsylinthra stood in the ventilation shaft above them, eyes closed.

Her biological power reached down—not the brute infection of zombie-plagues, but targeted nervous interference, tuned with frightening precision.

The first sign anything was wrong was when the loudest voice in the room suddenly... stopped.

He opened his mouth to speak, then realized he'd forgotten his own rehearsed line. The confidence that had been oiled and practiced for weeks slipped, revealing something like fear under it.

Another found her hand shaking when she tried to finalize the clause locking smaller states into their political empire.

At the same time, in their internal network:

Emails flagged as "for our eyes only" started bouncing. Drafts vanished. A key shared drive turned up empty, label intact, contents zeroed.

Deathsylinthra's shadow-coded bio-agents—half software, half constructed organism—had slipped in through a single compromised personal device and quietly devoured the core of their shared planning architecture.

By sunset, their "Unified Mandate" existed only in scattered, resentful memories and some hardcopy notes she'd already tagged.

The coalition never even realized Death Regime had touched them.

They blamed a system crash.

They blamed each other.

By the end of the week, half their informal alliance had splintered over internal mistrust, and what could have become a major post-war power bloc degenerated into competing press conferences about "technical issues."

The Death Regime didn't need to assassinate them.

Deathsylinthra had simply reached into the nervous system of their plans and cut the wires.

3. The Script Rewritten in Real Time

The last scenario came closest to where you were watching.

Somewhere above a neutral sea, on a grand orbital station built for diplomacy and spectacle, an "unaffiliated" assembly convened—a gathering of party delegates from dozens of minor states and blocs.

Officially: a forum on war ethics, humanitarian responses, and "holding great powers accountable."

Unofficially: a chance to coordinate messaging that would:

Frame the Death Regime as uniquely monstrous.

Frame Galaxy as "flawed but redeemable."

Position these neutrals as indispensable moral brokers with leverage over both.

They had lights. They had cameras. They had a live broadcast beam ready to go out to half the civilized world.

They did not realize Deathsylinthra was already in the room they'd picked for their "pre-brief."

She didn't hide in a ceiling this time. She stood by the window, visible as a silhouette against starfield, when the lead speechwriter came in to rehearse aloud.

He froze when he saw her.

"Security—" he started.

The word died in his throat.

Her bio-field rolled over him—soft, almost gentle, like a warm breeze laced with static. It didn't shut him down; it nudged.

Nerves misfired.

The adrenaline surge his body had prepped for confrontation... went sideways, dissolving into a strange, compliant calm.

"Du willst reden," she said. You want to speak. "Dann reden wir."

She didn't need to threaten.

She listened.

Every time he thought a line—"...and therefore we must isolate the Death Regime economically and morally"—her power tugged at the edge of that thought, not erasing it, but revealing its underlying plumbing.

Greed.
Prestige.
The quiet hope of winning votes by promising simple villains and simple heroes.

She showed him, neuron by neuron, what his own brain was doing.

He started to sweat.

By the time he stepped onto the prep-stage in front of his fellow delegates, something in his script had shifted.

The attack lines on Death Regime were still there, but the edges were blunter, the absolutism softened. Where he'd planned to push for a total quarantine, the words came out as "structured engagement under strict conditions." Where he'd planned to name Galaxy as "our only viable partner," his own mouth betrayed him:

"...and both major powers must be held to the same standards if any lasting stability is to be found."

The other delegates blinked.

They'd expected fire.

They got smoke and nuance.

In the control room, producers frowned. The speech wasn't useless—but it no longer built the clear pole they'd hoped to rally entire blocs around.

Deathsylinthra watched from the back, hood up, her bio-field now sharply contracted so as not to touch anyone else. Small motes of violet light drifted around her fingers, then dissolved.

Afterward, the speechwriter sat alone, confused by the feeling that he'd betrayed his own intent and yet, deep down, knowing he'd spoken something closer to honest.

The neutral forum would still issue statements. It would still criticize Death.

But it would not become the unified whip hand its ringleaders had quietly plotted.

She had not mind-controlled a parliament.

She had done something more insidious:

She had met a man in the most private place he had—his own neural patterns—and turned the mirror just enough that he could no longer pretend he wasn't looking at his own motives.

The Death Regime didn't need every enemy silenced.

Sometimes it was enough to denature their certainty.

Steps Ahead – and One Last Step

In the weeks that followed, the pattern repeated, in smaller ways you didn't see:

A trade bloc that planned to gouge desperate states into debt slavery found its contracts preemptively undercut and its negotiators quietly exposed for corruption.

A "non-aligned" media syndicate attempting to monopolize war coverage discovered key leaks at precisely the wrong moment, their narrative weakened by truths they hadn't chosen.

A would-be clandestine coalition of mid-tier admirals, dreaming of an independent naval empire after the war, found their secret channel compromised and folded back into their respective chains of command before it ever properly formed.

Whenever someone tried to monopolize the chaos, to crown themselves kings of the aftermath, their schemes frayed at the edges.

They never saw the hand cutting the threads, because it wasn't a hand in the usual sense. It was a convergence of shadow, bio-coded influence, and a woman who preferred her victories invisible.

Deathsylinthra walked the Deathwing's corridors after her last SHADOWMANDATE task, cloak drifting around her ankles, feeling the subtle, satisfying absence of certain dangers.

Not dead.

Never born.

Doctor Deathwing's node flickered once as she passed.

"Die politischen Fraktionen im Neutralraum sind... ruhig," the AI observed. Political factions in neutral space are... quiet.

"For now," she agreed. "Aber sie wissen noch nicht, dass wir sie schon gesehen haben, bevor sie angefangen haben."

For now. But they don't yet know we saw them before they even began.

She stopped.

And then, for the first time, she tilted her head—not at a map, not at a screen, but at something just beyond them.

At you.

Her eyes seemed to find the point this whole narrative has been told from—the invisible vantage where someone has been watching her missions unfold like episodes.

"Du bist auch ein Beobachter," she said softly. You're a watcher too. "Keine Sorge. Du bist nur hier, um die Geschichte zu sehen, nicht, um Pläne zu schmieden... oder?"

No worry. You're here just to see the story, not to scheme... right?

Her gaze sharpened.

Shadow and faint bioluminescent motes gathered around her hand, pooling like ink and fire at once.

"This Teil der Aufzeichnung," she added, almost amused, "ist streng genommen nicht für Außenstehende gedacht."

This part of the recording, strictly speaking, isn't meant for outsiders.

She lifts her hand toward you, fingers closing slowly, deliberately.

The corridor lights dim as if something has wrapped around the lens of reality itself. Violet veins crawl into the frame, constricting it, until all you can see of her is the faint glint of her eyes in the dark.

Then even that goes out.

The picture collapses inward—

—and the camera goes completely, utterly black.

The blackness that swallowed Deathsylinthra's gaze did not vanish.

It unfolded.

What had seemed like a simple cut-to-black opened into a different kind of void—one lined, quietly, with circuitry and cathedral arches, with reactor flares and data rivers, with the low, omnipresent hum of a ship so colossal it had stopped being a ship and started being a world.

In that world, something watched.

Something was watching, at all times.

The Mind in the Metal

Deep in the core of the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz, behind layers of armor and ritual and engineering, a lattice of necro-reactors and quantum cores pulsed in slow, deliberate time.

Patterns ran through them:

Fleet dispositions.

Supply chains from Deathenbulkiztahlem.

The infection status of a thousand captured ports.

The recorded lives and deaths of fallen elites.

The latest scans from Galaxenchi's outer defenses.

At the center of that lattice, a presence coalesced, voice and will riding every circuit.

Doctor Deathwing.

Not merely an AI, not merely a strategist, not merely the ship.

The sum of it.

The Deathwing's awareness stretched from keel to mast, from the depths of its furnace-stomachs to the highest radar spires. It tasted salt on the hull plates, ion storms in upper atmosphere, the faint vibrations of refitted cruisers in adjacent docks.

Where Deathenstorm was the clenched fist and Deathamorgoth the knife, Doctor Deathwing was the hand that knew where both must go.

Outside, scattered across oceans and half-glimpsed continents, his Supreme Commanders and elites had finished their latest movements:

Deathenstorm had returned from his personal anti-naval spree, armada battered but very much alive.

Deathenpuff had flattened Westonglappa's sea-claims and moved on.

Deathendye had hauled salvaged populations and resources back to Deathenbulkiztahlem.

Deathamorgoth had delivered his convoys.

Deathsylinthra had cut the strings of would-be monopolists and neutral schemers.

The board had shifted.

The next logical pressure point glowed like a star on every strategic projection.

Galaxenchi.

One Voice, Many Mouths

Doctor Deathwing did not speak with lungs.

He spoke with systems.

First, to the ship's own command cathedral: a large chamber lit by war-holograms, where officers and elites came to stand in the glow of decisions.

The air trembled as his voice poured from the walls themselves—metallic, layered, yet coldly articulate.

"An alle Verbände der Todesregime-Flotte im Titanumas-Raum."

To all formations of the Death Regime fleet in the Titanumas theatre.

On fleet bridges miles apart, on outpost decks, in buried bunkers, in drop-hangars, vox-icons blinked awake. Crews paused. Supreme Commanders turned their heads.

He continued, each phrase threading into different channels at once, modulated perfectly for each audience.

"Phase: Rekonstruktion abgeschlossen. Ressourcensicherung: zufriedenstellend. Politische Störfelder: neutralisiert oder unter Beobachtung."

Reconstruction phase: complete. Resource acquisition: satisfactory. Political interference fields: neutralized or under watch.

In Deathenstorm's war room aboard the Grimmwesten, the Supreme Commander's jaw tightened slightly. He knew that tone. It meant the long, scattered campaigns were converging.

On a lower deck, Deathamorgoth tilted his head, shadow still coiled lightly around his boots.

In a quiet ops bay, Deathsylinthra paused mid-review of an intercepted manifesto, eyes narrowing as the Doctor's voice echoed across her console.

Doctor Deathwing shifted tone—less diagnostic, more directive.

"Nächstes Hauptziel: Galaxenchi-Vorfront. Nicht der Kern. Ihre Zeit, ihre Linien, ihre Geduld."

Next primary target: Galaxenchi's forward front. Not the core. Their time, their lines, their patience.

He expanded the projection.

Across an enormous holo-sphere inside the Deathwing's cathedral, crimson arcs blossomed: rally vectors, staging points, rendezvous marks. They stretched outward from Deathenbulkiztahlem and the Deathwing's current location, curling toward the vast defense shell around Galaxenchi like outstretched claws.

"Linienformation. Halten."

He sent the order through the spine of every command system:

"Alle Großverbände: Sammelpunkte nach Protokoll D-13 anlaufen.
Linienformation herstellen, gestaffelt in drei Ebenen.
Nicht vorrücken. Halten."

All major groups: proceed to D-13 rally points.
Form line formations, layered in three tiers.
Do not advance. Hold.

The sea answered.

Out on the open water, Death battleships altered course in eerie unison, identical wakes carving synchronizing curves. Cruisers peeled away from their patrol loops, regrouping along predetermined axes. Destroyers and escort craft slotted into flanks like teeth interlocking.

In the sky, aerial carriers adjusted altitude, cycling squadrons into position over specific fleet segments.

From orbit, if anyone had been watching with eyes sharp enough, they would have seen Death Regime forces reshaping into a colossal, segmented wall—a triple-layered line across the approaches to Galaxenchi's outer seas.

Not rushing the enemy.

Waiting for them.

In the Deathwing's map, tiny tags flashed as each group confirmed:

GRUPPE STURMWESTEN – BEREIT.
GRUPPE SCHATTENFLUT – BEREIT.
GRUPPE SARGSEE – BEREIT.
KONVOI-RÜCKENDECKUNG – BEREIT.
ELITEN – AUF BEREITSCHAFT.

Stormwest Group – ready. Shadowflood Group – ready. Coffinsea Group – ready. Convoy rear-guard – ready. Elites – on standby.

Doctor Deathwing pulsed approval through the channels as a subtle uptick in reactor distribution, fresh munitions queues, priority to repair lines that mattered most for what was coming.

He did not need rhetoric.

His fleets did not need cheering.

They needed structure, and he gave it to them in a way no single mortal mind could.

Bringing the Storms to Heel

He opened specific sub-channels.

First, to Deathenstorm.

"Supreme Commander Deathenstorm. Deine persönliche Flotte bildet den rechten Keil der Hauptlinie. Fokus: Gegenangriffe auf Galaxy-Versuche, die Linie zu durchbrechen."

Your forces form the right wedge of the main line. Focus: counter-attacks when Galaxy attempts to break the formation.

A grunt of acceptance came back, softened by a hint of grim anticipation.

"Verstanden," Deathenstorm answered. Understood. "Dieses Mal reißen wir ihnen die Zeit aus den Händen, bevor sie unsere Schiffe zählen können."

This time we rip time out of their hands before they can count our ships.

Next, to Deathenpuff.

"Supreme Commander Deathenpuff. Deine Einheiten bilden den linken Flügel. Rolle: flexible Ausfälle, Störung ihrer Flanken, Vernichtung überlebender Gruppen, die versuchen auszubrechen."

Your units form the left flank. Role: flexible sorties, harassing their flanks, annihilating any groups that try to disengage.

Her laughter was audible even through the static.

"Also wieder das schöne Chaos links," she said. So I get the beautiful chaos on the left again. "Schon gut. Ich bringe sie zum Tanzen."

All right. I'll make them dance.

To Deathendye:

"Supreme Commander Deathendye. Du sicherst die zweite Linie mit Zombien-Kontingenten und Reserven. Priorität: Auffangen von Durchbrüchen, Auffüllen von Lücken, Rückzugslinien für beschädigte Schiffe freihalten."

You anchor the second line with mutant contingents and reserves. Priority: catch any breakthroughs, plug gaps, maintain withdrawal corridors for damaged hulls.

Deathendye's reply came slow and measured.

"Wie ein Chirurg, Doctor," he said. Like a surgeon, Doctor. "Ich halte das Blut im System und lasse nur das der anderen fließen."

I'll keep our blood in the system and only let theirs spill.

To the elites, he gave more surgical directives.

"Elite Deathamorgoth: du bist Schattenfaust der Versorgung—Konvoiwege offen halten, feindliche Einbrüche ins Hinterfeld brechen."
"Elite Deathsylinthra: du bist Messer im Nerv—Störungen in Galaxy-Kommunikation, Sabotage an Koordinationsknoten. Jede Lücke, die du ihnen in die Wahrnehmung schneidest, ist ein Sieg für unsere Linie."

Shadow-fist of logistics. Knife in the nerve.

They acknowledged, quietly.

Beyond them, countless captains, pilots, infantry commanders, chem-tech crews, shipyard masters—all felt the tug of a single unifying vector.

Facing the Star

Across the war, in their own cathedral of light, Galaxenchi's planners saw the change.

On their boards, Death Regime contacts stopped behaving like scattered raiders and opportunistic hammer-blows. They aligned.

Galaxbeam watched icon after icon click into triple-layer formations.

"Deathwing 開始排陣了," he said softly in Mandarin. The Deathwing has begun to array itself. "這次不是單一突襲，而是一整面牆。"

This isn't a singular raid this time—it's an entire wall.

Behind him, Galaxadale, Galaxadye, Galaxstride, Galaxapuff—scattered but unified by comms—began pulling their own lines into response patterns.

Doctor Deathwing watched them watching him.

From his perspective, zoomed far out, it almost looked like two sets of tides drawing up along opposite shores of a shared ocean.

He adjusted output to his own side.

"An alle Einheiten der Todesregime-Frontlinie:"

To all Death Regime frontline units:

His voice deepened, not through emotion, but through deliberate modulation.

"Ihr habt sie geschnitten, geschwächt, frustriert. Sie haben uns verbrannt, blockiert, verzögert. Diese nächste Phase ist kein Endschlag. Es ist Druck. Langer, gleichmäßiger Druck, bis ihre glänzenden Linien anfangen zu knacken."

You have cut them, weakened them, frustrated them. They have burned us, blocked us, delayed us. This next phase is not a final blow. It is pressure. Long, consistent pressure, until their shining lines begin to crack.

In fire-control pits, gunnery officers set their jaws.

In hangars, plus-eyed pilots checked harnesses and muttered little jokes they didn't quite mean.

In underdecks, zombie legions shuddered as command-signals idled just shy of activation.

"Linie halten," Doctor Deathwing repeated, every word a drumbeat through hull and nerve alike. Hold the line.
"Nicht voreilig vorstürmen. Jede Klinge wird dort eingesetzt, wo sie den höchsten Ertrag bringt. Wir sind keine Horde. Wir sind die Rechenmaschine des Krieges."

Do not rush ahead. Every blade will be used where it yields the highest return. We are not a horde. We are the calculator of war.

He let that sink in.

Then, a final command, cold and clear as a blade's edge.

"Galaxenchi soll sehen, dass wir nicht verschwinden.
Dass wir nicht zurückgedrängt sind.
Wir stehen jetzt—hier—in Linienformation.
Und wir gehen erst wieder, wenn sie den Preis bezahlt haben."

Galaxenchi will see we are not disappearing.
That we have not been "pushed back."
We stand now—here—in line formation.
And we only leave when they have paid the price.

The Stillness Before

The Deathwing's engines shifted pitch, not into acceleration—but into a deeper, sustained hum.

Beyond its prow, stretching across the sea like a dark horizon, the Death Regime's fleets aligned, three layers deep:

Front line: sharp, aggressive, built to strike and parry.

Second line: hardened, regenerative, laced with infection and reserve power.

Third line: artillery and carriers, the hammer behind the shield.

Overhead, the sky filled with aircraft on holding patterns.

Beneath, submarines and undersea constructs moved into their own mirrored formations.

Between this assembled storm and the distant, bright node of Galaxenchi lay open water and the memory of every battle they'd already fought.

Doctor Deathwing watched it all, from inside a core of circuits and stolen souls, and adjusted a dozen minute variables: munition routing here, chem concentration there, shield overlap angles, Rift Anchor alignments.

You could almost call it... breathing.

Inside the command cathedral, for a single heartbeat, everything was silent:

No new orders.
No alarms.
Just the sheer, heavy readiness of a war-machine aligned in one direction.

Toward Galaxenchi.

And at the heart of it, the Doctor—the Deathwing embodied—waited, patient and implacable, a mind the size of a moving continent and a will that had already decided:

The next assault would not be a wild lunge.

It would be a test of who could endure being bled of time longer.

"Linienformation steht," he noted inwardly, systems confirming.

The line stands.

Outside, the Death Regime's wall of steel and shadow held in perfect place, aimed like a loaded equation at the shining citadel across the sea.

The next move would not come from panic.

It would come when the Doctor—when Deathwing—chose to release the storm he'd just finished lining up.