SUPREMACY- Clash Between Heroes and Villains Chapter 45:The Calculus of the Undying

 Cold Open: Ten Steps Ahead of Ten Steps Ahead

A gold quill traced equations in the air and the night itself obeyed. Professor—no, Prince—Galaxbeam stood in the Observatory of Kōryū, the Light-Flow tower of Galaxenshu State. Beneath him, a sea of lanterns mapped every city and pass: Bekikonshu City, Tenkujō (Castle in the Sky), Jikizan (Hour-Mountain), Tokinoshiro (Castle of Time), Gekkan (Moon-Viewing), Kaseiden (Fire-Star Hall), Shindō (True Way), Kinseiken (Golden Star Blade), Ōgonka, Konjōzan, Tenshinkō, Koganeiro, Shinseki, Hakkimura, Ryūkinka, Ginsekihō, Kinyūkai—each a luminous rune fixed to his strategy board.

Across the stratosphere, thunder arrived before lightning—as if causality itself had sprinted ahead to reserve seats. The storm wasn't weather. It was a process. It belonged to Doctor Deathwing.

"Reader," Galaxbeam said without turning, as if the fourth wall were a sliding door he kept forgetting to close, "we'll keep this concise. The enemy will not."

(Spoiler: the enemy did not.)

Time-Skip, Gracefully (We Promise)

Three hours later—compressed to a single cut so your data plan survives—necrotic flotillas breached the dark shelf of Lake Xieweijunkok and the outer bays. Deathmarines in pallid hazard suits rowed silent assault craft whose sails were stitched from embalming shrouds. Deathsoldiers marched in twelve-count phalanxes, plus-sign pupils glowing violet behind gas lenses. Deathzealots carried reliquaries that hissed with cultured plagues. Deathmarauders drove biological meat tanks—recombinant giants plated in ossified cartilage, their vents coughing rotting, toxic, gassy concoctions that tasted like a hospital's ghost had learned to cook.

Overhead, miasma bombers released ampoules that burst into lavender halos; on the sea, necro-dreadnoughts unfolded ribbed cathedrals of bone; in the mud, spore-sappers tunneled like midnight worms. The Death Regime didn't merely invade. It colonized the concept of invasion.

Deathwing materialized at the prow of a flagship resembling a skull that had decided to become a city. His lab-coat draped like a banner; each button was a tiny biohazard charm. He smiled with textbook teeth and raised a scalpel that hummed the periodic table. "Let us run an experiment," he said to no one and everyone, "variables: all of you."

(If you're checking the vibe: chemistry major, minor in apocalypse.)

Galaxy Regime: Predict, Preempt, Pre-punchline

Galaxbeam answered the storm with geometry. Golden lines rippled out from the Observatory and stitched the cities together: Astra Lattice, a network of time-anchored causeways that carried orders five minutes early to every garrison.

The sentry towers of Kinseiken snapped open like fan-blades, revealing Chrono-Ballistae that fired bolts engraved with second-hand markings. Anything they pierced was fixed by appointment, unable to move until the scheduled time admitted it.

In Tokinoshiro, the Clock-Citadel, archivists poured star-ink into Hour-wells, which recorded enemy maneuvers retroactively. (A polite way of saying the Death Regime's surprises were penciled into the past with "nice try" in the margin.)

Koryū's Light-Flow canals ran backward for ten heartbeats, washing gasses into quarantined culverts where Aurora filters burned them down to harmless constellations of dust.

On the ramparts of Tenkujō, sky-monks cast Vacuum Sutras—thin corridors of nothing—so bomber clouds found themselves heroically suffocating.

"Deploy Uniforms v3," Galaxbeam said, voice calm, eyes tired in the way only immortals learn. Cloaks and haori across the Regime shivered; threads woke. Life-fiber-adjacent battlewear (lawyers, please relax) synchronized with spine and spirit, turning squads into constellations that could pivot as one.

A young captain bowed. "Professor, isn't that a bit much?"

"If clothes can be dramatic," he replied, "so can salvation."

(Somewhere, a scissor-wielding fashion rival sneezed.)

Two Grandmasters, One Chessboard That Hates Them

From his deck of bone, Deathwing flicked a sample vial, and the sea learned to ferment. Whalebacks bulged under necrotic froth; spores wrote cursive across the wind. His orders were a pharmacology lecture delivered as a death sentence.

Galaxbeam's right iris ignited with a golden sigil—the Imperium Eye, a lawful geometer's answer to tyrant sorcery. He aimed it not at minds (that would be rude) but at vectors: "Halt, ricochet, recede." Artillery bursts folded like paper cranes and returned to their senders. (This is a chess reference; the board politely resigned.)

Reiatsu—fine, galactic gravitas—pressed across Galaxenshu. The air rang as if the night had become a blade. Deathwing laughed, a delightful, clinical sound. "Ah. Pressure. Spiritual or otherwise, it dilates vessels and egos. Observe." He snapped; the meat tanks vented a purple gale.

"Counter-observe," Galaxbeam said. From Gekkan's moon-gardens surged Lunetium Mirrors (gifted long ago by polite neighbors), reflecting the gale into a globe that forgot how to be gas. It fell as amethyst glass.

"Ten points," Deathwing mused. "But this is a two-step of steps of ten." He turned to the reader. "We're both going to claim 'ten steps ahead,' by the way. Neither of us can count to eleven without breaking causality."

(He's not wrong; accounting hates these two.)

Field Reports, Because Bureaucracy Survives Everything

Galaxwisdom — War Scribe (excerpt):

Bekikonshu City: Enemy spores attempt bio-hacking of municipal systems. Countered by analog astronomy: replaced OS with abacuses and stargazers. No ports, no problem.

Ōgonka: Meat tanks routed via Decoy Metropolis projected three minutes in the future. Enemy bites illusion, chips teeth on temporality.

Konjōzan: Deathzealots tried stealth via catacombs. We already moved the catacombs yesterday. They are now a botanical garden. Please keep off the moss.

Deathscribe — Clinical Notes (excerpt):

Subject: Galaxy Regime stubbornly refuses to rot. Hypothesis: insufferable.

Intervention A: aerosolized regret + lavender (pleasant). Result: nostalgia; troops fight better. Unacceptable.

Intervention B: plus-pupil glare at stars. Result: Stars wink back impolitely.

Duel Above Tokinoshiro

They met as halos over the Clock-Citadel, one wrought of aureate theorem, the other stitched from midnight autopsy notes.

"Prince," Deathwing said, inclining his head. "Instructor. Colleague. Disappointment."

"Doctor," Galaxbeam said. "Peer. Wound. Recurring assignment."

"You still teach time," Deathwing said, "as if it isn't a disease."

"You still treat people," Galaxbeam said, "as if they're petri dishes with shoes."

They drew.

Galaxbeam unfolded a light-saber, except the blade was a paragraph of mathematics that kept editing itself for clarity. Deathwing raised a scalpel large enough to bisect a myth. The first clash arrived in the past and left souvenirs in the future: a ring of frozen thunder around Tenkujō, a crack in the moonlight above Gekkan, a polite memo to physics: we'll fix the mess later.

Deathwing lunged, stabbed between beats, and inoculated time with lag. For five steps, Galaxbeam's body remembered a failure the mind never allowed. The professor smiled anyway—the dangerous smile of someone who grades on a curve you can't see.

"This isn't a swordfight," he said to the reader while parrying. "It's a syllabus review."

He invoked a Recursive Observational Loop—not a reset; we don't borrow from certain trauma-heavy series wholesale—just a branch where he solved the duel in six elegant moves. He returned to the prime line without taking the victory, because the cost was collateral. (The cost is always collateral; heroes who don't mention it are selling merch.)

Deathwing noticed, of course. "Ah. You had me. You didn't use it. Are you... merciful?" His plus-pupils dilated into crosses, like someone doubling down at a casino named Consequence.

"Accurate," Galaxbeam said. "But incomplete. I prefer wins that teach."

Deathwing's laugh broke into a cough that birthed butterflies made of morgue tags. "Then a lesson: I allowed your forward cities to hold. This wave was a pharmacokinetic test—absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion." He gestured toward the sea. "Observe the curve."

The flotillas sank. On purpose. Their hulls released cargoes of dormant virome archives. The bay lights flickered as data tried to enter water like a myth trying on a wetsuit. Deathwing bowed as if the orchestra had nailed a difficult piece. "Next dose in twelve hours. Half-life matters."

Galaxbeam tilted his head. "Yes. That would be risky if Galaxenchi-Kaseiden hadn't already converted your archive into fireworks." On the horizon, the water wrote kanji for 'return to sender' in gold, then erased itself.

They paused, both looking slightly offstage, hearing the producer cough about budget on particle effects.

"Shall we skip the escalation montage?" Galaxbeam asked.

"Please," Deathwing said. "I have a meeting with entropy."

Montage, Skipped (You're Welcome)

Assume the following occurred in a brilliant, tastefully expensive sequence:

Shindō's true-way spearmen fenced with epidemics and won on a technicality.

Ryūkinka flooded its canals with starlight that behaved like bleach without violating trademarks.

Hakkimura evacuated citizens into library-bunkers, where knowledge served tea and enforced naps.

Kinyūkai minted coins that turned into shield drones when flipped. Commerce funded survival; economists high-fived.

The Joke That Shouldn't Work (But Did)

Deathwing tried hacking again—bio-logic hooking into civic code via spore-ports. Galaxbeam answered with the one protocol even gods respect: Go Offline. Analog trumpets sounded; messengers ran with lacquered tablets; orders were carved into the sky by kites. You cannot hack a kite. You can only admire it and perhaps compose a haiku.

Then the Professor played his silliest card. He donned a plain teacher's coat, picked up an actual chalkboard, and wrote in perfect script: "Pop Quiz."

The Death Regime army stopped.

This is not mind control; it's culture. Somewhere in their black-humored immortality, even the undead remembered classrooms, the ritual dread of unstudied pages. For a single indispensable minute, the front paused to squint at the board. Galaxy artillery used that minute to subtract three battalions worth of siege engines from existence.

"Unsportsmanlike," Deathwing said, impressed.

"Pedagogy," Galaxbeam corrected.

Endgame Without Ending

Night ripened toward its last violet. The invasion did not fail so much as complete its data collection. Deathwing withdrew with a bow treasured by villains who believe in sequels. The skeleton banners folded with military neatness; the meat tanks slumped into compost for later, which is the creepiest Tupperware imaginable.

On the inner ramparts of Tokinoshiro, the two immortals stood a sword's length apart. Their troops watched from respectful distances, like two religions aborting a merger.

Deathwing offered his scalpel hilt-first. A courtesy, an insult, a hypothesis. "You could end this if you cut me. Perhaps I would thank you."

Galaxbeam did not take it. "You won't end. Ending you would end what you teach us about the border between life and law."

Deathwing's plus-pupils softened to simple crosses. "Silly prince. One day, you will choose to cut."

"One day," Galaxbeam agreed, "I will choose to grade."

They both smiled the way professors and physicians do when the next disastrous semester promises interesting papers.

Above them, the Astra Lattice dimmed to a warm afterglow. Below, Galaxenshu counted its citizens and found them—thanks to frankly absurd logistics—alive in proud numbers.

War Log — Executive Summary (For Your Wattpad readers who skim)

Objective (Death Regime): Shock-advance on Galaxenshu State via sea, air, and tunnels; field test of new virome archives; morale degradation through aesthetic morbidity.

Objective (Galaxy Regime): Anticipate every vector; deny stealth, hacking, and chemical dominance; hold all major cities; force the Doctor to reveal Phase II.

Notable Locations: Kōryū (command), Tokinoshiro (time citadel), Kaseiden (fire-star countermeasures), Kinseiken (chrono-ballistae), Bekikonshu (analogization), etc.

Tactics of Note:

Galaxy: Time-anchored orders, vacuum sutras, mirrored gas traps, offline warfare, pop-quiz freeze, life-fiber-adjacent uniforms.

Death: Plus-pupil terror optics, meat tanks with toxic vents, miasma bombers, spore-hacking, virome seeding of waterways.

Outcome: Galaxy holds all cities; Death collects pharmacokinetic data; both leaders preserve the duel for later.

Casualties: High materiel losses; minimal civilian loss due to pre-evac and library-bunkers. Several egos injured on both sides.

Meta: Multiple fourth-wall breaches signed, dated, and graded.

Stinger: Because We All Love Post-Credits

Hours later in the laboratory-cathedral of the retreating flagship, Deathwing studied a petri dish in which tiny galaxies spun like pollen. "He anticipated my anticipation of his anticipation," he said, sounding delighted and mildly betrayed. "Adorable."

In Kōryū's Observatory, Galaxbeam opened a drawer and took out a simple ribbon—violet, a shade the Death Regime would consider handsome. He tied it around the golden quill. "He seeded the bay with a virus," he told the empty room. "So I seeded his samples with a cure that teaches itself jokes."

The quill glowed. Somewhere, a petri dish laughed at an extremely bad pun and died from the embarrassment, which is the ideal outcome for certain pathogens.

Galaxbeam looked up—past the ceiling, past the sky, straight into the narration. "Next chapter," he promised, "we stop being polite."

The reader felt addressed. Because they were.

Ten Minutes Over Galaxenshu

The clock in Kōryū's Observatory refused to tick. It simply sighed, aware that time management in the Galaxy Regime had become an Olympic sport and Professor Galaxbeam was permanently gold-medaled. The professor ran his thumb over the ribbon he'd tied to the golden quill—violet, the unbearable color of Deathwing's sense of humor—and exhaled sharply.

"Reader," he said without looking up, "you may want to fasten your seatbelt. The next ten minutes cover three days of logistics, four wars, and one very petty exchange of multilingual insults."

The cosmos dimmed politely so the chapter could begin.

00:00 — The First Footfall

From the violet stormbanks above Galaxenchi-Tenkūjō (天空城), a Death Regime sky-armada unfolded like a bruise blooming across heaven. Hulls coated in anti-sporic lacquer. Prows carved with skulls whose pupils were plus signs, blinking like calculators doing ruthless math. Beneath them, biological meat tanks rolled ashore—organs harnessed into armor, venting a breath that smelled like fermented hospitals.

"Deathsoldiers forward," hissed a chorus of radio voices. "Deathmarines to the causeways. Deathzealots prime the altars. Deathmarauders, bring me a library."

The flagship's cathedral-bridge parted. Doctor Deathwing stepped out, coat glistening with antiseptic rain. His voice crisped the clouds.

「銀河の教授よ、貴様の計算は骨まで凍えるほど鈍いな。」
"Professor of galaxies, your math is so slow it chills the bone."

He switched tones without moving his lips.

"你的推演像尸体一样僵硬，Galaxbeam。"
"Your predictions are as stiff as a corpse."

Then, almost casually, in Cantonese with courtly venom:

「你估到我估你估到——但我早十步啦。」(nei5 gu2 dou3 ngo5 gu2 nei5 gu2 dou3 — daan6 ngo5 zou2 sap6 bou6 laa1.)
"You guessed I'd guess you'd guess—but I'm ten steps ahead."

"Enough," said Galaxbeam, appearing on the opposite battlement without the common courtesy of walking. He looked unbearably young and impossibly old, a paradox wrapped in protocol. The golden quill rested like a blade at his wrist.

He answered in German, crisp as winter glass:

"Du bist ein Karzinom auf der Logik, Doktor."
"You are a carcinoma upon logic."

Then he smiled, which always made telescopes focus themselves.
"Und ich bin die Strahlentherapie."
"And I am the radiation therapy."

Two armies inhaled. The page number flipped itself.

00:02 — The Map Turns Into a Joke

Galaxenshu State was enormous—a complication masquerading as geography. Galaxenchi-Kōryū (光流) shimmered with photonic streets; Galaxenchi-Tokinoshiro (時の城) hid vaults full of frozen minutes; Galaxenchi-Gekkan (月刊) printed schedules that scheduled schedules. Galaxenchi-Kinseiken (金星剣) housed sword-museums filled with blades that cut probabilities. Galaxenchi-Tenshinkō (天真煌) sparkled like the inside of a comet's pocket.

Deathwing's plan exploited breadth: hit twenty cities at once to force the professor into triage. But the Galaxy Regime had already pre-evacuated civilians into library-bunkers, swapped municipal data centers with decoy servers that screamed when hacked, and strung the state with chronolines—tracks where minutes could be trained like carrier pigeons.

"Anime rules, then," Deathwing muttered. "If you pull time tricks, I pull budget-devouring set pieces."

He raised two fingers. Aerial caissons cracked; plague mists unfurled; and the meat tanks heaved forward, their vents sputtering violet haloes. The first wave rode a screaming wind toward Bekikonshu City and Galaxenchi-Hoshihira (星平).

Galaxbeam lifted the quill. The page bent around its nib. Stellar sigils ignited across the state, each drawn weeks in advance by clerks who thought they were only illuminating manuscripts. The runes hopped city to city like Re:Zero checkpoint saves.

"Reader, do not worry about the rules," the professor said. "I wrote them."

00:04 — Commanders Take the Stage

On the Galaxy side, Supreme Commander Galax-Chronarch (who carried a clockwork sash that could bully minutes into marching), and Supreme Commander Galax-Vector (whose orders never bent, only reality did) saluted.

"Kinseiken district secured," Vector reported. "Swords are complaining but compliant."

Along the telescopic ridges, Elite Galax-Oracle, Galax-Quanta, and Galax-Axiom assembled with quiet impatience. Oracle surveyed the sky with eyes like clean paper. "Death's formations read like a research abstract," she said. "Impressive. Flawed in methodology."

Quanta snorted. "They forgot the control group: us."

On the Death side, Supreme Commander Death-Suture slid along the ground like a needle through skin. Death-Mycotoxin wore a crown of cultivated molds. Death-Necrosurgeon tapped a bone baton; the meat tanks shivered in obedient bliss. Behind them, Elites with names such as Death-Hemlock, Death-Sepsis, and Death-Catalyst unboxed glass hymns that sang pathogens into being.

"Advance," Death-Suture whispered. "If you see a book, bleed on it."

"Counter-advance," said Galax-Vector through six radios and one parchment. "If you see a pathogen, give it a peer review."

The armies collided. The page left skid marks.

00:05 — Kill la Kill, Code Geass, Bleach... and Bureaucracy

Deathmarines in exo-hazmat suits descended the facades of Galaxenchi-Shindō (神道), stamping skull insignias whose eyes were pluses that blinked as if pleased with their own arithmetic. They fired enzyme rounds that dissolved barricades but politely avoided handrails. Deathwing, gliding above, mocked in Mandarin:

"你們的城牆只有外觀設計，沒有免疫系統。"
"Your walls have aesthetics, not immune systems."

From Tokinoshiro, Galax-Chronarch snapped open a lacquered case. Inside lay an administrative bankai—a parchment stamped so many times it changed the weather. He intoned, "Release form Ω: Extension of Defensive Deadlines." Every shield in three cities renewed itself by forty-two seconds, which is a ridiculous number unless you have ever filled government forms.

"Bleach homage noted," said the narrator, officiously.

Down in Gekkan, Galax-Oracle flicked her fan. "Sewing needles incoming," she told the local garrison. "From Suture. She knits battlefields into quilts." The garrison knelt. Oracle wrote a footnote so persuasive the incoming needles re-categorized themselves as harmless annotations and fell to earth as punctuation.

Over Kinseiken, Deathwing smiled, switching to Japanese again:

「お前の未来視は雑誌の付録か？開けたら紙切れだ。」
"Is your foresight a magazine freebie? Open it and it's just paper."

Galaxbeam replied in German that belonged in a museum:

"Deine ganze Ästhetik ist eine Pathologie."
"Your entire aesthetic is a pathology."

"Flirt elsewhere," Oracle muttered without turning around.

00:06 — Hacking, Stealth, and Other Things That Don't Work

Death-Catalyst released nanophages to crawl into Galaxy servers. They found librarians waiting with dictionaries. Every time a nanophage attempted a malicious rewrite, a dictionary forced it to define ethics. Most of the swarm burst into flames from embarrassment.

A Kill la Kill homage cut the skyline: Death-Mycotoxin's banner unfurled, woven with living filaments. "Life-Fiber Equivalent," Mycotoxin intoned. "Dress the air in spores." The city's atmosphere put on a dangerous outfit.

"Fashion police," said Elite Galax-Axiom, stepping through a theorem doorway. She snapped a proof. The spores tried to argue, discovered they were logically nude, and left the party.

Stealth teams of Deathmarauders tunneled to ambush Galaxenchi-Koganerio (黄金窯). Galax-Vector had paved the subsoil with chessboards. Each square demanded a move history before permitting passage. "Code Geass rules," Vector said mildly. "You may only proceed if your dominion is consistent." The marauders, inconsistent by brand, surfaced in a pre-built surrender pen with excellent lighting.

"Reader," Galaxbeam said, "this is what people mean by anticipatory governance. I recommend it for municipal budgets and necromancer invasions alike."

00:07 — The Duel That Refuses To Stay Private

They met above Galaxenchi-Ryūkinka (流金華) on a platform of light designed by an architect famous for not existing yesterday. The armadas slowed, giving their leaders room for the kind of spectacle that teaches lieutenants bad habits.

"你不過是金色的老師," Deathwing sneered in Mandarin. "A gilded schoolteacher. I am the medical reality."

Galaxbeam twirled the quill, drawing a thin circle between them. "Ich bin Unterricht, der überlebt."
"I am the lesson that survives."

Deathwing's eyes burned with plus-pupiled fury. He swapped to Cantonese, voice soft enough to cut:

「你講哲學，我講屍學。」(nei5 gong2 zit3 hok6, ngo5 gong2 si1 hok6.)
"You speak philosophy; I speak corpse-ology."

The quill flashed. The platform became a blackboard covered in equations that wrote themselves backward. Deathwing's cane snapped into a bone-tuning fork; he struck the board. Letters shattered into virologic runes that tried to colonize the chapter margins.

Galaxbeam replied with a sigh heavy enough to tilt comets. The runes discovered they were already footnoted as defeated three pages from now and fell obediently into the future.

"Stop grading my plagues," Deathwing said, irritated.

"Submit better drafts," Galaxbeam answered.

00:08 — City List Speed-Run (Because You Asked For It)

Bekikonshu City: Deathmarines breach the docks; Galax-Quanta turns incoming enzyme rounds into statistical outliers. They miss by design.

Galaxenchi-Hoshihira: Death-Suture stitches a siege wall to the horizon. Oracle unthreads it by asking if the wall consents to being permanent. It does not.

Galaxenchi-Tokinoshiro: Chronarch rewinds the minute of impact until the shells get bored and retire.

Galaxenchi-Gekkan: Death-Mycotoxin hosts a spore parade; Axiom changes the parade route to a cliff.

Galaxenchi-Kinseiken: Museum swords sing. Death-Necrosurgeon answers with scalpels. The blades unionize and vote him out.

Galaxenchi-Tenshinkō: Meat tanks roll into a plaza of star-mirrors—each mirror telecasts their attack pattern to every Galaxy unit. The tanks try to be unpredictable. They fail beautifully.

Across Galaxangcha and Galaxadonlai, reader-friendly skirmishes play out at comic speed. Civilians remain in library-bunkers discussing literature and soup recipes. Several soup recipes win medals for morale.

00:09 — When Insults Become Equations

Deathwing leaned in, voice silk, Japanese this time:

「教授、君の知識は宇宙の埃だ。拭けば消える。」
"Professor, your knowledge is cosmic dust. Wipe and it's gone."

Galaxbeam's smile thinned. He answered in the sort of German that makes philosophers switch majors:

"Dein Zynismus ist nur Angst im Labormantel."
"Your cynicism is fear wearing a lab coat."

"Adorable," Deathwing said, and uncapped a vial of laughter-activated prions.
"Obnoxious," Galaxbeam said, and uncapped a cure that tells jokes.

The resulting pun-demic annihilated itself; pathogens died of second-hand embarrassment. A thousand plus-sign pupils briefly turned into equal signs, then back again with a shudder.

"Re:Zero reference?" Deathwing asked, suddenly amiable. "Shall I return by death?"

"Only if you return the library books," Galaxbeam said. "Some of your elites are late by two centuries."

Death-Hemlock, listening in, hid a tome behind his back.

00:10 — Checkmate? Cute Word

The armadas drifted apart, not in retreat, but in the shared recognition that Act One had been thoroughly, even ostentatiously, concluded. Galaxenshu held. Deathwing had gathered a cathedral's worth of pharmacokinetic data. Both leaders had proven the other could not be surprised by normal means or abnormal ones, which narrowed the field to rude ones.

"次はもっと面白くしよう," Deathwing said softly.
"Let's make the next one more interesting."

He bowed to the reader. "You'll come, yes? Your curiosity is delicious."

Galaxbeam faced the same fourth wall. "Homework," he announced. "Review the map of Galaxenchi-Jikūzan (時空山), Eienmachi (永遠町), and Shinseki (新石). That's where he'll strike when he wants me to think he isn't striking. We will, naturally, be there already."

He turned back to Deathwing and, in perfect Mandarin to Cantonese cadence, said:

"我們會在你到之前，把你的計畫翻譯成過時的理論。"
"Before you arrive, we'll translate your plan into an outdated theory."

「記得帶走垃圾。」
"Remember to take your trash with you."

Deathwing grinned, switching to German with surgical precision:

"Ich bringe die Autopsie der Sterne."
"I bring the autopsy of stars."

"Then bring better gloves," Galaxbeam replied. "You'll need them."

The quill flicked. The chapter signed itself.

Field Notes (for Command use and the reader who refuses to be left out)

Outcome: Galaxy holds all Galaxenshu cities listed; Death collects data, upgrades aerosols, and recalibrates plus-pupil optics. Both agree—without agreeing—to postpone the final duel for a set-piece nobody can afford to animate.

Galaxy Roster on Scene: Supreme Commanders Galax-Chronarch and Galax-Vector; Elites Galax-Oracle, Galax-Quanta, Galax-Axiom; sector marshals rotating through Tenkūjō, Kōryū, Tokinoshiro, Gekkan, Kinseiken, Tenshinkō, and Ryūkinka.

Death Roster on Scene: Supreme Commanders Death-Suture, Death-Mycotoxin, Death-Necrosurgeon; Elites Death-Hemlock, Death-Sepsis, Death-Catalyst; line corps of Deathsoldiers, Deathmarines, Deathzealots, Deathmarauders, and biological meat tanks with toxin-gas rigs.

Meta: Multiple fourth-wall breaches notarized. At least one pathogen expired from a pun. This is now standard operating procedure.

Stinger — Because You Still Stayed

In the quiet afterward, Deathwing sat alone in the nave of his flagship, holding a petri dish where tiny galaxies spun like pollen.

"In Japanese," he murmured, "I am elegance.
In Mandarin, I am inevitability.
In Cantonese, I am the punchline.
In German, dear professor, I am your favorite problem."

From the observatory, Galaxbeam tied the violet ribbon tighter. "And I," he said to no one and everyone, "am your answer key—misprinted on purpose."

He looked up—past ceiling, sky, into narration. "Next time: Jikūzan. Bring comfortable shoes. We will be walking uphill through time."

The reader felt implicated. Because they were.

The Calculus of the Undying (Addendum)

Setting: Galaxenshu State—a sprawling constellation of cities whose very names fold time when spoken: Galaxenchi-Tenkujō (天空城), Galaxenchi-Kōryū (光流), Galaxenchi-Jikūzan (時空山), Galaxenchi-Tokinoshiro (時の城), Galaxenchi-Eienmachi (永遠街), and the glittering capital Galaxetsubei.
Premise: Deathwing blitz-mobilizes an undead armada and saturates the skies; Galaxbeam counter-mobilizes a learning civilization. Both factions already know the other's first ten moves and, out of politeness, announce them.

0. Pre-Movement

The Death Regime arrives like a laboratory fire alarm—fast, loud, and regrettably accurate. Deathsoldiers and Deathmarines pour from purple troop-barges; deathzealots chant in isochronous heartbeats; deathmarauders disassemble rail lines and rebuild them as rib-cage artillery. Biological meat-tanks belch rot-gas cocktails that would make a virologist send a thank-you note.

Across the bay, the Galaxy Regime lights its defense grids. Observatory pylons around Jikūzan project star-glyph curtains; Kōryū floods avenues with learning-drones that quiz invaders mid-stride ("Name three forms of apoptosis before you reach the stairs."). Evacuation proceeds through library-bunkers; citizens check out books and check in courage.

Floating above Tenkujō, the two authors of fate meet: Doctor Deathwing, skull-smiled and plus-sign pupils glowing violet; Professor/Prince Galaxbeam, golden-robed, quill in hand, looking like a comet that enrolled in graduate school.

1. Language Games at Star-Heights

Deathwing opened in Japanese, because why not start with theatricality?

Deathwing: 「君は十手先を読むが、私は十一手目にウイルスを置く。」
You read ten moves ahead; I put a virus on the eleventh.

Galaxbeam answered in German, because grammar can be a weapon.

Galaxbeam: „Dein Elfter Zug ist ein alter Trick im neuen Reagenzglas. Ich habe bereits den zwölften desinfiziert."
Your eleventh move is an old trick in a new test tube. I sanitized the twelfth already.

Deathwing pivoted to Mandarin:

Deathwing: 「你的時間線像玻璃一樣脆弱。」
Your timeline is brittle like glass.

Galaxbeam's smile thinned.

Galaxbeam: „Zeit ist kein Glas, Doktor. Sie ist ein Lehrplan."
Time isn't glass, Doctor. It's a curriculum.

Cantonese, then, with that surgical snap:

Deathwing: 「唔好以為你咁叻，我早就睇穿晒你。」
Don't flatter yourself; I read you ages ago.

Galaxbeam: „Dann lies weiter. Die Fußnoten beißen."
Keep reading. The footnotes bite.

The wind paused, as if taking notes.

2. Orders of Battle (stated, counter-stated)

On the violet flagship Morbidity Prime, Deathwing's mirror board rippled to life. Around him stood his Supreme Command cohort—Deathendye, Deathendale, Deathenstream, Deathenstride, Deathenstorm—with Deathweskers running field calibrations and a hundred necrobiologists adjusting pathogen humor levels.

Titanumas Character Alias Codex...

On Kōryū's star-disk, Galaxbeam convened his own echelon—Galaxadye, Galaxadale, Galaxastream, Galaxastride, Galaxastorm—with Galaxapuff already authoring counter-protocols that read like poetry disguised as code.

Titanumas Character Alias Codex...

Both councils, being consummate professionals, immediately leaked their plans to each other to save time.

Deathwing's 5-Point Blitz:

Aerosolize neuro-fog over Eienmachi to induce déjà vu loops.

Deploy amphibious meat-tanks to Tokinoshiro's canals.

Seed rail hubs with bone-mites that eat only paperwork.

Broadcast lullabies in infrasonic to desynchronize defenders.

Feint an orbital drop on Tenkujō while actually pushing through Kōryū.

Galaxbeam's 5-Point Counter:

Convert déjà vu loops into rehearsal drills; citizens level up whenever they feel "I've seen this."

Turn canals into Laminar Classrooms—water becomes clear, flow solved, tanks float uselessly on perfectly solved math.

Replace paperwork with oral histories recited by children; bone-mites lose legal standing.

Shift city clocks by prime-number offsets; infrasonic lullabies now sync to coffee breaks.

Announce a defense of Tenkujō while quietly fortifying Kōryū with a holographic Zero Requiem—the plan you can only execute by pretending you've already lost it.

A hush fell. Even the readers at home felt cleverly included and a little threatened.

3. Speed Chess, Autoclaved

The tempo broke into Re:Zero loops without the messy dying part—Galaxbeam simply audited all possible mid-fight quizzes, while Deathwing graded them with red ink and a fond scowl.

At Tokinoshiro, Galaxtame and Galaxsuke ran a Kill la Kill cosplay distraction—Life-Fiber-adjacent uniforms that absorbed rot-gas and learned from it, then filed a patent. Deathfury attempted a heroic breach and instead discovered what happens when cloth earns tenure.

On the Gekkans, Galaxjolt pebbled the air with micro-auroras; Deathclock charged precisely on the thirty-third second and, to his credit, exploded on schedule.

At Kōryū's East Gate, Galaxwhild over-extended to shield a cohort of evacuee librarians. Deathbash struck; Galaxadale intercepted, and the clash erased two city blocks of time—no fire, no smoke, just a clean subtraction from history. When the segment snapped back, Galaxwhild was alive but retired—his page gently folded at the corner, his arc complete.

Deathwing watched the losses with the cool of a surgeon and the ache of a teacher who keeps meeting his brightest rival on opposite sides of the exam.

Deathwing (Traditional Chinese):「你寫的教案很漂亮，可惜學生最終都會變成樣本。」
Your syllabus is elegant; pity students end up as samples.

Galaxbeam (German): „Und doch erinnern sich Proben an ihre Leseliste. Kultur ist ein Medium."
Even samples remember their reading list. Culture is a growth medium.

They both pretended not to enjoy that line.

4. The Mothers, the Memories

Because absolute leaders are terrible at boundaries, the banter drifted to childhood embarrassments.

Deathwing: 「還記得你媽在科學展把你的"時間火山"放反了嗎？」
Remember your mom installed your "time volcano" upside-down at the science fair?

Galaxbeam: „Deine Mutter legte Pflaster mit Totenköpfen in deine Bento-Box. Pädagogisch wertvoll."
Your mother packed skull-bandage stickers into your bento. Pedagogically sound.

Deathwing (Cantonese, mock-solemn):「阿媽煮麵時落咗石灰水，你就變時間麵。」
When your mum boiled noodles with lye, you became time noodles.

Galaxbeam (deadpan German): „Und du wurdest Essig. Haltbar, aber niemand trinkt dich freiwillig."
And you became vinegar. Shelf-stable, but no one drinks you by choice.

The commanders winced in sympathetic second-hand embarrassment. The readers, who were definitely being watched by the narration, were also not safe.

5. No Hiding, No Hacking, No Stealth

Both regimes pre-destroyed every ambush. Holo-decoys came pre-spoiled with signed meta-tags; stealth fields shipped with honest user manuals; cryptosystems were replaced by whiteboard math because you can't hack a theorem while the author is still adding footnotes.

Deathenstorm attempted a silent drop behind Tenkujō. Galaxastride had already paved the drop-zone with polite questions about kinetic energy; the shock-troops landed and applauded the lecture.

Deathenstream pushed a worm through the water-grid; Galaxastream replied with a school of proofs that the worm was, regretfully, imaginary and therefore taxable.

Deathweskers led a daring charge across Eienmachi's Halo Bridge; Galaxadye inverted the bridge's color spectrum, turning necro-violet to teaching-gold. The plus-sign pupils of the frontliners dimmed, recalibrated, then marched on—because undead professionalism is still professionalism.

Casualties remained high for materiel; people, even the stitched-together ones, were largely evac'd or captured, catalogued, and offered night classes. Several minor Death elites—Deathclock, Deathbash, Deathmaul—were confirmed down; a handful of Galaxy names—Galaxwhild (retired), Galaxspore (reassigned to research), Galaxscar (wounded, joking about it)—rolled off the active ledger with grace. (Supreme Commanders on both sides remained unbroken; everyone read the rules.)

6. Duel at the Zenith

Atop Tenkujō, quill met scalpel.

Deathwing (Mandarin): 「我偷了你的預測模型，還把它餵給了我的真菌。」
I stole your prediction model and fed it to my fungus.

Galaxbeam (German): „Der Pilz schrieb mir eine Rezension. Drei Sterne, zu wenig Raumzeit."
Your fungus left a review. Three stars, insufficient spacetime.

They crossed without touching—bankai-level release of star-script against a Geass-style injunction: Learn. The air condensed into a chalkboard; equations sprinted like cavalry. Deathwing pivoted: bleach-white reaction lines bloomed, stripping properties from matter until only conduct remained—nerve, light, thought.

For three breaths and one editorial aside, they were both teenagers again, two prodigies arguing at the edge of a fairground, daring the future to grade them. The world waited—then remembered it had trains to run and resumed.

7. Accounting, Then A Stalemate

By dusk, all cities of Galaxenshu still stood. Deathwing's armada withdrew in formation, carrying vats of pharmacokinetic data and a frankly disrespectful number of field notes. Galaxbeam filed post-action syllabi, upgraded streetlights to constellations, and politely declined being worshiped.

Deathwing (Traditional Chinese, over the retreating channel):「下回見。帶作業。」
Next time. Bring homework.

Galaxbeam (German): „Ich korrigiere nur mit Goldtinte. Bring bessere Fragen."
I only grade in gold ink. Bring better questions.

The commanders saluted across the gloom—

Galaxy: Galaxadye, Galaxadale, Galaxastream, Galaxastride, Galaxastorm, Galaxapuff.

Titanumas Character Alias Codex...

Death: Deathendye, Deathendale, Deathenstream, Deathenstride, Deathenstorm, Deathweskers.

Titanumas Character Alias Codex...

Somewhere a meat-tank tried to tell a joke it had learned during the battle and accidentally cured itself of halitosis. Progress.

8. Stinger: Because We All Love Post-Credits

Hours later, in the cathedral-laboratory of the flagship, Deathwing studied a petri dish in which tiny galaxies spun like pollen.

Deathwing (soft Japanese): 「可愛いね。」
Adorable.

In Kōryū's observatory, Galaxbeam tied a simple violet ribbon around his golden quill.

Galaxbeam (German whisper): „Hübsch, aber nicht steril."
Pretty, but not sterile.

Both looked up, past ceilings and sky, straight at the narration.

Deathwing (Cantonese):「讀者，唔好走太遠。」
Reader, don't wander off.

Galaxbeam (German): „Bleibt neugierig. Nächste Vorlesung beginnt sofort."
Stay curious. Next lecture begins now.

The reader felt addressed. Because they were.

The Fourth Moment: Uphill Through Time

00:11 — The Map Goes Vertical

The road to Jikūzan refused to be a road. It reared into the sky like a staircase drafted by a metronome, each step a minute, each landing a lesson. Deathmarines surged first, masks glassing over in necro-violet; their plus-pupiled optics clicked like counters. Beneath them thundered the meat tanks, distilling rot into elegant aerosols, a pharmacologist's fever dream.

"多爬山，心肺會好，" Deathwing said over the open channel in Mandarin, with a surgeon's bedside cheer.
Climb more mountains; your cardio will improve.

Galaxbeam appeared on the eighth landing as if the staircase had always intended him. He didn't bother standing—he coincided with the step.

Galaxbeam (German): „Deine Bergluft riecht nach Desinfektionsmittel und Nostalgie."
Your mountain air smells like disinfectant and nostalgia.

He tapped the quill. The steps ahead telescoped, compressing a mile of ascent into a memory of good posture. Galaxy civilians, previously evacuated into library-bunkers, filtered back as volunteer docents, pointing out emergency exits and better metaphors.

00:12 — Decoys Retired (With Honors)

Five silhouettes stood on a ridge above Kōryū—the "experimental officers" the narrative had once toyed with: a Chronarch with a tyrant's sash of minutes, a Vector whose orders never bent, an Oracle, a Quanta, an Axiom. They nodded toward Galaxbeam, as colleagues might at a symposium.

The professor lifted two fingers.

"Readers," he said, gentle and formal, "these five were provisional theorems. Useful in rehearsal; unnecessary in proof."

Light trimmed their edges. They bowed and folded into footnotes, their names dissolving into the margin like chalk after rain.

On the Death side, their mirrors—Death-Suture, Death-Mycotoxin, Death-Necrosurgeon and a brace of lab-idols—laughed once, brittle. Deathwing flexed the cane.

Deathwing (Japanese): 「舞台装置だ。片付けろ。」
Stage dressing. Clear it.

They unspooled into citations, too—paper spirits dismissed by their own author. Clean board, stricter cast. The war sharpened.

00:13 — Supreme Commanders, By Name

The sky cracked into lanes.

Galaxadye flooded Kōryū's boulevards with ribbons of coherent light, lashing drop-barges to lampposts.

Galaxadale anchored Tokinoshiro's clock-gates, staggering Death's timetables by prime offsets.

Galaxastream swam through the canal nets, turning plague-mists into watermarks that read "Insufficient Methods."

Galaxastride paved approach vectors with calculus; mortars landed where the derivative said they couldn't.

Galaxastorm stacked thunderheads over Hoshihira, grading incoming volleys with lightning and sarcastic rubric notes.

Death's reply was clinical and multitudinous.

Deathendye inverted streetlight spectrums; his troops marched where gold turned to bruise.

Deathendale sowed blind spores—harmless to matter, ravenous to certainty.

Deathenstream seeded the sewers with programmable biofilm.

Deathenstride ice-skated through vacuum and gust, a conductor of collapse.

Deathenstorm tuned the wind until buildings hummed themselves off key.

Deathweskers ghosted between battalions like a rumor with a doctorate, recording dosages, losses, little jokes. It was all very peer-review.

00:14 — Kinseiken, Where Swords Critique Surgery

Kinseiken's museums opened their vaults. Curator-guards presented comet-bright blades. Deathendale smiled through his mask and loosed enzyme bees to unmake steel.

The swords sang dissent. Galaxadale rotated their sheaths by a fraction. The bees discovered every blade now counted as a theorem, not an object. You cannot oxidize a proof. They failed, politely.

Deathwing's voice threaded the galleries.

Deathwing (Cantonese): 「你哋把刀有文憑？」
Your swords have diplomas?

Galaxbeam (German): „Zweifellos. Sie promovieren in deiner Nähe schneller."
Undoubtedly. They earn doctorates faster in your vicinity.

A curator snorted into his sleeve and felt better about the end of the world.

00:15 — Bekikonshu, Where Water Learns to Say No

Deathenstream's biofilm slithered into Bekikonshu's harbor to weaponize tide. Galaxastream answered by teaching the bay a vocabulary of boundaries: this, not this, home, hazmat. The water adopted the new pronouns and politely placed the invading film into quarantine with a view.

Deathenstream took notes. Science advanced. The tide applauded itself, small waves clapping on the breakwall.

00:16 — Meat Tanks on the Stair

Up the Jikūzan stair came the meat tanks, vents haloed, treads chewing the minutes into confetti. Galaxastorm leaned on thunder; thunder leaned back.

"你的裝甲像病理學教科書一樣厚。" Deathwing remarked in Mandarin.
Your armor is as thick as a pathology textbook.

"Und doppelt so veraltet," Galaxbeam replied.
And twice as outdated.

He traced a circle. The tanks rolled into a plaza of star-mirrors and saw, with perfect clarity, the next five foolish choices they were about to make. Three stalled out of shame. One converted to public transit. One cried smoke and kept going; Galaxastride placed a small derivative under its tread. The vehicle reconsidered existence and chose soil research.

00:17 — Gekkan Schedules Its Own Explosion

In Gekkan, Deathenstride arranged artillery by the calendar, volleying on the beat of a metronome embedded in the city's bones. Galaxadye painted the air in marching time; civilians listened, learned the rhythm, and stepped aside an eighth-note before each blast. Losses: walls; pride; not people.

"你教學生避彈，就好似教佢哋避開青春期一樣，" Deathwing teased in Cantonese.
You teach students to dodge shells the way you teach them to dodge adolescence.

"Beides endet in Literatur," Galaxbeam said.
Both end in literature.

00:18 — The Mothers, Again (Because Piety Is a Weapon)

They rose above Eienmachi for parley, or something ruder.

Deathwing (Japanese, velvet): 「お前の母上は宿題の捏造を見抜けなかった。」
Your esteemed mother couldn't spot the forged homework.

Galaxbeam (German, winter): „Deine Mutter hat deiner Angst den Labor-Kittel gebügelt."
Your mother ironed the lab coat on your fear.

Deathwing laughed. "我的一半惡意，是她的愛留下的空位," he said in Mandarin—Half my malice is a vacancy where her love once stood. For a breath, the armies heard their leaders as persons and wavered, and then the war, embarrassed, resumed.

00:19 — Housecleaning (Unnecessary Pieces Removed)

On a rooftop in Ryūkinka, three Galaxy Elites not present in the Codex—minor experiments born of narrative whim—still lingered, eager for a line. Galaxbeam glanced up, apologetic.

"Colleagues," he said. "Thank you for your service."

They unwrote themselves, leaving scholarships and spare jokes. Across the river, a handful of Death Elites with ornamental names not filed in any ledger tried to cheer; Deathweskers shook his head. They, too, resolved into errata. The war narrowed to canon.

00:20 — The Ten-City Squeeze

Deathwing, newly ascetic, went for the throat: ten strikes on ten districts—Tenkūjō, Kōryū, Tokinoshiro, Hoshihira, Gekkan, Kinseiken, Koganerio, Shinseki, Ryūkinka, Bekikonshu—all vectors, one organ.

Deathendye coordinated the spectrum; Deathendale falsified baselines; Deathenstream drowned the logs; Deathenstride pinched the transit; Deathenstorm drummed panic into the wind.

Galaxy's reply was not glamorous, merely perfect.

Galaxadye counter-bent light into corridors of certainty.
Galaxadale re-baselined truth every thirty seconds and published the update.
Galaxastream re-hydrated the logs with citizen witnesses.
Galaxastride kept the buses running.
Galaxastorm told the wind a bedtime story. The wind slept.

Civilians in library-bunkers switched from soup recipes to poetry recitals. Morale peaked; the plus-pupiled optics on Death infantry flickered, recalibrating in the face of audacity and verse.

00:21 — Duel on the Blackboard Ridge

They met where Jikūzan's staircase met starlight, a ridge of blackboard pitched toward tomorrow.

Deathwing (Cantonese, almost tender): 「你咁叻，點解仲未畢業？」
So clever; why haven't you graduated?

Galaxbeam (German, amused): „Ich promoviere an dir."
I'm writing my dissertation on you.

Deathwing unsleeved a bone-fork; the air rang with clinical intent. Galaxbeam rotated the quill; the board filled with reversed equations and tiny galaxies that hummed like bees in a library. The first clash produced no sound, only the smell of old paper and rain on metal.

"你讀心？" Deathwing asked in Mandarin. You read minds?

"Ich lese Blicke. Genug." I read looks. Enough.
He added, kinder: "也讀疲倦。" I also read exhaustion.

For a heartbeat, Deathwing's plus signs softened toward equal signs. Then the angle hardened; medicine resumed.

00:22 — The Necessary Deaths

War requires offerings. On Hoshihira's east quay, Deathbash drove hard at a school-column evacuating toward a ferry. Galaxastride calculated too slowly; his curve left a seam. Galaxwhild—already wounded from prior chapters—stepped into the seam with a grin and took the blow meant for ten. The quay remembered him as a strong adjective. His name closed with dignity.

Across the channel, Deathclock misread Galaxadale's rolling baseline and vaporized himself exactly on schedule. Deathmaul refused surrender, tripped on a proof, and retired from villainy to teach shop in a town the narrative will not endanger again.

Both councils recorded the losses without triumph. The ledger shivered and lay still.

00:23 — Data vs. Dignity

"Enough spectacle," Deathwing said in Japanese, suddenly bored.
「次は実務だ。」 Now for operations.

He signaled Deathweskers. The lieutenant snapped vials into a carousel: laughter-activated prions, shame-resistant spores, norm-seeking nanites. Science marched.

Galaxbeam watched, the way a professor watches a promising but ethically confused student.

Galaxbeam (German): „Du sammelst Daten. Ich sammle Würde."
You collect data. I collect dignity.

He touched the quill to the air. Across Galaxenshu, every evacuee's name wrote itself on a ribbon of light looping the sky. The ribbons refused to be targets. Artillery faltered, ashamed to be seen.

"你利用道德勒索。" Deathwing in Mandarin, dry.
You weaponize moral suasion.

"Es ist Lehrplan, kein Erpressungsbrief."
It's a syllabus, not a ransom note.

00:24 — Standstill, Signed

By agreed-upon instinct, the armadas decelerated. Galaxenshu held all districts. Death's labs had their pharmacokinetic harvest; Galaxy's archives now contained an annotated catalog of every pathogen phrase Death had dared to sing.

Deathwing touched the fourth wall with a knuckle.

Deathwing (Cantonese): 「讀者，下回要更狠。帶心。」
Reader, the next one will be meaner. Bring your heart.

Galaxbeam straightened the violet ribbon on his quill.

Galaxbeam (German): „Und Verstand."
And your mind.

They bowed—not to each other, not entirely, but to the work.

After-Action Marginalia

Outcome: Death fails to take any city in Galaxenshu; collects high-quality biomedical telemetry. Galaxy preserves terrain, morale, and curriculum.

Confirmed removals (non-codex figures): All experimental "theorem officers" on both sides retired/dissolved. Galaxwhild KIA (page closed with honors). Deathclock KIA; Deathmaul retired from the board.

Standing rosters (canon):

Galaxy: Galaxadye, Galaxadale, Galaxastream, Galaxastride, Galaxastorm with Galaxbeam.

Death: Deathendye, Deathendale, Deathenstream, Deathenstride, Deathenstorm with Deathweskers and Deathwing.

Civilians: Evacuated through library-bunkers; casualties minimal. Soup recipes continue to win medals.

Stinger — Appointment at the Summit

Night pooled on Jikūzan's final landing. The staircase ended in a door with no building behind it. The door had a slot for a thesis.

"會考，" Deathwing said softly—a board exam. He slid a vial through.

"Disputation," Galaxbeam answered, and slid the quill.

The door swallowed both offerings, hummed, and printed a card:

Interlude — The Galaxenshu Game Accord

The wind over Jikūzan went still—as if even weather understood the etiquette of checkmates. Deathwing lowered his cane. Galaxbeam set the quill on its spine like a balanced comet. Across the state, both councils received the same terse order in their own ciphers: fall back to standoff lines; hold fire; watch the sky.

Meat tanks chuffed into silence. Star-mirrors dimmed. Library-bunkers unrolled tea. The reader sat up straighter because yes, this part was for them.

Deathwing spoke first, Japanese smooth as a scalpel:

「軍は下がれ。二人で決める。」
"Stand down. We decide this between us."

Galaxbeam answered in winter-clear German:

„Einverstanden. Regeln zuerst."
Agreed. Rules first.

They wrote them in light and violet ink, co-signing the same page from opposite ends.

THE GALAXENSHU GAME ACCORD

All forces withdraw to non-engagement perimeters.

The Absolute Leaders will contest seven rounds, each a different strategy game.

Stakes per round: one district's stewardship for twelve locked minutes (Tokinoshiro will notarize).

Majority wins determine state control pending a later rematch at Tokinoshiro's Twelve Locked Minutes.

Cheating is allowed only if it is beautiful.

The reader is an acknowledged witness and is encouraged to hydrate.

Witnesses: Registrar Bekikonshu (Galaxy), Dr. Deathweskers (Death).
Seal: plus-pupiled skull; five-pointed star inside a crescent. The emblems hissed at each other, then behaved.

Round One — Chess for Kōryū (光流)

A board unfolded from the night, pieces condensing from photons and formaldehyde. Deathwing took Black.

Deathwing (Mandarin): 「黑先，醫學上更符合現實。」
Black to move; clinically appropriate.

Galaxbeam opened with something between the Ruy López and a course syllabus. Deathwing countered with the Bone Defense, knights moving like articulated x-rays. Midgame cooled into a noose. Then the professor arranged the quietest cruelty: zugzwang polished to a mirror.

Galaxbeam (German): „Beweg dich—und widerlege dich."
Move—and refute yourself.

Deathwing tipped his king with two gloved fingers, plus pupils narrowing to neat plus signs. Kōryū stayed gold.

Deathwing (Cantonese, light): 「一局啫。熱身。」
Only a game. Warm-up.

Round Two — Checkers, But Everyone Brought Trap Cards, for Gekkan (月刊)

Boards multiplied into Yu-Gi-Oh-style lanes. Each checker carried a tiny banner reading Effect. Deathweskers shuffled a violet deck; the Registrar produced a golden one. The air smelled like conventions and hubris.

Deathwing slapped down Necrotic Double-Jump; a tide of black counters vaulted three ranks and shouted something anatomically unprintable. Galaxbeam answered with Errata of Schedule, forcing all black pieces to obey the city's publishing calendar.

A plus-pupiled king bore down the center lane. Galaxbeam set a gold card so gently the board sighed: Peer Review. Black's combo reconsidered its life choices, retracted two boasts, and failed to replicate.

"Adorable," Deathwing said, smiling with only half his face. "Keep your impact factor."

Gekkan remained Galaxy. The reader checked their pulse. It was fine.

Round Three — Trading Cards in the Plaza of Kinseiken (金星剣)

They sleeved decks: Deathwing's smelled like iodine and violets; Galaxbeam's like dust and thunder.

Deathwing opened Hemostasis Protocol (gain life when anything bleeds) into Septic Surge (draw on infection).

Galaxbeam responded with Bibliometric Flood (draw on citation) into Occam's Guillotine (delete adorned nonsense).

Mid-match, Deathwing unveiled a limited print: Dead Man's Hand—two plus-pupiled jokers that negated proofs on entry.

Galaxbeam (German): „Sonderdrucke? Wie spießig."
Promo foils? How bourgeois.

He laid Archive of Unplayed Moves; the jokers discovered they were already catalogued under Parlor Tricks and lost text. Game to Galaxy. Kinseiken stayed curated.

Deathwing tilted his head at the fourth wall. "Dear author," he said in polite Japanese, 「ドローカードの偏りは編集の怠慢だ。」—your draw engine betrays editorial laziness.

The author declined to comment. The reader pretended objectivity.

Round Four — Poker in Bekikonshu, With Laws

The harbor lights formed a circle; chips stacked like tiny moons. Deathweskers dealt with surgical accuracy. Galaxbeam's face became a syllabus: informative, unreadable.

Deathwing played table image like a maestro—chatty in Cantonese, knife-quiet in Mandarin. He slow-rolled a flush of violets against Galaxbeam's straight of comets and took the pot, then bluffed three hands later with nothing but confidence and anatomy.

Deathwing (Cantonese): 「醫生識講真話，亦識講半真。」
A doctor knows truth and half-truth.

He won Bekikonshu's twelve minutes of stewardship and used them to install a clinic-consulate for cease-fire triage. He healed five Galaxy privates, logged outcomes, and bowed to the Registrar. Science, even villainous, has rituals.

Score: 2–1, Galaxy.

Round Five — Blackjack over Hoshihira (星平)

Cloud-tables dealt twenty-ones. The rules promised boredom; Deathwing tried to cheat beautifully with loaded bone chips. The Accord itself—snippy, newly sentient—swatted his wrist.

Galaxbeam (German): „Schummeln ist nur schön, wenn es erkenntnistheoretisch ist."
Cheating is only beautiful if it advances epistemology.

They drew, pushed, drew again. After six pushes, Tokinoshiro notarized a null result. Hoshihira remained exactly as defended as it had been. Statistical significance waved from afar.

Round Six — Dice for Ryūkinka (流金華)

Deathwing produced ossuary dice polished by centuries of reluctance. Galaxbeam produced icosahedra that rolled like recitations.

They rolled in silence. Death's bones came up deadly 13 (which shouldn't be possible on six-siders). Galaxy's d20 landed on 1 and then, embarrassed, stood on its edge.

The coin-sized judge from Clause 5 cleared its throat. "Beautiful?" it asked.

Deathwing twirled the cane. "美學満点," he said—aesthetics: full marks. The judge agreed. The edge counted as both. The result was Schrödinger's stewardship: Deathwing gained a corridor of research access; Galaxbeam retained full civil control. Everyone hated the compromise and obeyed it.

Round Seven — Coin for Tokinoshiro (時の城)

They saved the stupidest for last. Deathweskers flipped a coin older than several pantheons. The coin got nervous mid-air, looked at the reader for reassurance, and landed on its rim like a trained acrobat.

Deathwing (Japanese, flat): 「著者、ふざけるな。」
Author, do not trifle with me.

Galaxbeam (German, too innocent): „Literatur ist ein Münzrand."
Literature is a coin's rim.

Tokinoshiro rang twelve clear chimes. The Accord read the sound as a verdict: state control remains with Galaxy; Death receives scheduled rematch rights at the Twelve Locked Minutes.

Deathwing exhaled. Then, cleanly, he blamed the nearest metaphysics.

Deathwing (Cantonese, to the margin): 「輸咗唔緊要，怪作者。」
Losing is fine; blame the author.

He bowed to the reader. "You watched him stack the deck. Admit it; you enjoyed the flourish."

The reader, complicit, sipped water.

Closing of the Accord

Armadas brightened engines but did not advance. The emblems sealed the treaty with a sear that smelled like honest paper.

State of Galaxenshu: Defended.

Deathwing's spoils: biomedical telemetry, a signed clinic-consulate hour in Bekikonshu, a research corridor at Ryūkinka, and rematch rights at Tokinoshiro under formal observation.

Casualties: contained; Galaxwhild honored; Deathclock confirmed KIA; non-codex figures retired from the board remain retired.

Civilians: resume literature and soup; several poker tells added to the curriculum.

Deathwing turned his plus-pupiled gaze to Galaxbeam, switching languages like scalpels.

Deathwing (Mandarin): 「下一回，不靠作者。靠我們。」
Next time, no authors. Just us.

Galaxbeam (German): „Vereinbart. Und die Regeln schreiben wir während des Spiels."
Agreed. And we'll write the rules while we play.

They looked past each other—into Tokinoshiro—where twelve minutes were already locking themselves like careful doors.

The reader felt drafted again. Because they were.

State Games of Galaxenshu

An agreed cease-clash. A ridiculous arbitration. A very serious map.

When both sides finally admitted that ambushes, counter-ambushes, decoys, and counter-decoys were producing nothing but exhausted sub-generals and smug narrators, Deathwing and Galaxbeam called their armies to fall back. Medics, clerics, and reanimators flooded the lines: Galaxy med-bays re-knit bone with starlight threads; Death field surgeons pumped violet ampoules through plus-pupiled troops, re-inflating lungs and morale with equal efficiency. No one stayed dead for long; it wasn't that kind of afternoon.

On a hovering dais between Galaxenchi-Tenkūjō and Galaxenchi-Kōryū, the two Absolute Leaders laid out a table and—because "detente by duel" needs rules—an index card:

ARBITER'S NOTE
One city per game. Winner claims or keeps the city until the next chapter. No mass-civilian harm. Fallen are to be revived by the nearest qualified necromedical professional. Trash talk allowed in Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, and German. The fourth wall is both a referee and a door.

"公平至上," Deathwing said, arranging a chess set grown from bone and brass. "Fairness above all."
"Gerechtigkeit und ein bisschen Stil," Galaxbeam replied, dealing a deck embossed with constellations. "Justice—plus a little style."

As witnesses, the rosters took their places: on Galaxy's side the male Supreme Commanders Galaxadye, Galaxadale, Galaxastream, Galaxastride, Galaxastorm and the female Supreme Commander Galaxapuff; on Death's side Deathendye, Deathendale, Deathenstream, Deathenstride, Deathenstorm, with Deathweskers and a retinue of violet-eyed elites.

Galaxbeam tapped the table with his golden quill. Time sat down and took notes.

Gallaxtetsubei (capital) — Chess

Opening gambit: Deathwing played Niemann–Sicilian–But-Make-It-Plague. Knights moved in L-shaped quarantine corridors; pawns advanced in hazmat ranks. "將軍," he announced in Mandarin, sliding a rook with surgical poise.

Galaxbeam answered with a quiet Berlin. "Ruhig, Doktor." Calm, Doctor. The professor's bishops skated along diagonals of law; his queen wrote footnotes that counted as additional pieces. A late rook-lift trapped Deathwing's brass king between two ethical committees.

Result: Galaxy holds. The city's stargazers cheered; Death's auditors took valuable notes and promised a rematch "pending IRB approval."

Bekikonshu City — Checkers (Yu-Gi-Oh! Variant)

Discs slammed into the board like duel disks. Each jump had to be declared with an anime line.

Deathwing (Cantonese): 「跳！屍體連鎖反應！」— "Jump! Corpse chain reaction!"
Galaxbeam (German): "Konterzug: Verantwortung." — Counter-move: responsibility.

Galaxbeam kinged three pieces by quoting a municipal code about pier safety; Deathwing attempted a plus-pupil combo that turned a checker into a trap card. The card drew a harbor fog ... which Galaxapuff dispersed with a flare of comet-pink ordinance, laughing as she took the final double-jump for her professor.

Result: Galaxy holds. Galaxapuff saluted the docks, then immediately opened triage tents for both sides.

Galaxenchi-Tenkūjō (天空城) — Go

Black stones (Death) spread like cultured molds; white stones (Galaxy) linked like constellations. The board mirrored the floating city's terraces.

"你的活棋，像未通過同行評審。" Galaxbeam's Mandarin was silk over steel: Your living groups haven't passed peer review.

Deathwing smiled. "我做審稿人。" I am the reviewer.

A last-minute tesuji by Galaxadale—a hinge of three stones forming a harpoon—cut off Death's largest moyo. The crowd inhaled; the sky brightened, pleased with itself.

Result: Galaxy holds.

Galaxenchi-Kōryū (光流) — Blackjack

The rivershine district played host to probability. Deathwing hit on soft seventeen and pulled a toxin-ace; the dealer coughed. Galaxbeam split tens while lecturing, in perfect German, on risk compensation. He doubled down with civic virtue and drew two star-faced elevens.

"Unfair," Deathwing muttered in Japanese. 「教育はチートだ。」 Education is a cheat.
"Use it, then," Galaxbeam suggested, and set up scholarship kiosks while the medics revived the fainted dealer.

Result: Galaxy holds.

Galaxenchi-Jikūzan (時空山) — Shōgi

Mount Time-Space deserved shōgi. Deathenstride advanced his lance with a smirk; Galaxastream promoted a silver into a moral dilemma and forked two files.

Deathwing switched to Cantonese, low and teasing: 「你阿媽嗰陣叫你讀書，讀到依家都未畢業？」 Did your mother force you to study so long you still haven't graduated?
Galaxbeam's reply in German was surgical: "Meine Mutter lehrte mich, dich zu überleben." My mother taught me to outlast you.

A brilliant drop—Galaxbeam re-introduced a captured knight exactly where Death's general expected pride instead of humility. Mate in three.

Result: Galaxy holds. Deathwing marked the move in a leather notebook labeled Annoyances.

Galaxenchi-Eienmachi (永遠町) — Poker

Five-card draw on a street of lanterns. Deathwing slow-rolled trip skulls; Galaxbeam stared at him so long statistics felt seen. He called with a straight of ordinances—5–9, the emergency codes for evacuation, food, sanitation, shelter, medicine.

Deathendye protested in rasped German, "Das zählt nicht!" That doesn't count!
Galaxapuff, now acting floor judge, ruled: "Community safety always counts."

Result: Galaxy holds, and the winning hand became a poster for relief drills.

Galaxenchi-Hoshihira (星平) — Dice

Simple odds, brutal city. Deathwing's first throw—snake eyes that sprouted little plus pupils and grinned. The second—thirteen on two six-siders, which is not mathematically permitted. The narrator lodged a complaint. The fourth wall stamped DENIED.

Galaxbeam rolled an 11, then wrote a proof that 11 was exactly the number required to align Hoshihira's beacon array with hospital corridors. Paramedics reported miracles; statisticians reported ulcers.

Result: Galaxy holds.

Galaxenchi-Yūseikan (遊星館) — Trading Cards

Deck themes: Corpsology Control vs Civic Astronomy. Deathwing played Pathogen Tutor searching for Plus-Pupil Optics; Deathendale triggered Mass-Culture—Reanimate 3. Galaxbeam answered with Library Bunker into Chronoline Save Point; Galaxadye countered a graveyard recursion with Ethics Committee—Target Player Waits a Turn.

Final swing came from Galaxapuff's signature card, Nebula Nurse, that revives all fallen on both sides, then draws two hope. The crowd cried happy tears; Deathwing pretended the moisture was part of an experiment.

Result: Galaxy holds.

Galaxenchi-Tokinoshiro (時の城) — Speed Chess

Three-minute clocks, and the clock in the clock-castle liked this. Deathwing premoved a sacrificial virus; Galaxbeam pre-inoculated the square. "你預我預你預我," Deathwing laughed in Mandarin—you anticipated me anticipating you.
"Natürlich," came the German shrug—naturally.

Flag fall in a blur: Galaxy by time. Tokinoshiro rang its bells in smug harmony.

Galaxenchi-Gekkan (月刊) — Coin Flip

"Because readers crave chaos," Deathwing said, flipping a coin engraved with a skull whose pupils were teeny crosses.

"Call it," Galaxbeam said.
"Kopf." Heads.
It landed on its edge, wobbling, refusing. The fourth wall sighed and nudged it to the professor.

Result: Galaxy holds, by editorial decision.

Galaxenchi-Kaseiden (火星殿) — Rock–Paper–Scissors (best of 101)

Deathenstorm's meteor fists versus Galaxastride's bureaucratic wrists. At 50–50 the crowd stopped breathing; at 51–50 Galaxy surged; at 51–51 Death rewrote the rules to include Pathogen. The fourth wall threw a flag. They restarted from 0, laughing. Galaxy reached 51 first without exotic nouns.

Result: Galaxy holds.

Galaxenchi-Shindō (神道) — Mahjong

The shrine-city played wind and dragon tiles while priests kept score. Deathwing's hand looked like a medical chart. Galaxbeam built a serene wall and then—quietly—declared Thirteen Orphans. Death's table groaned in several languages.

Result: Galaxy holds.

Galaxenchi-Kinseiken (金星剣) — Sword-Counting (Numbers Game)

Museum blades shouted their catalog numbers. Death's auditors double-counted on purpose; then Galaxastream quietly produced the loan sheet signed last chapter. Every blade cleared its throat and took its proper place.

Result: Galaxy holds.

Galaxenchi-Ōgonka (黄金華) — Backgammon

Pips ticked like patient heartbeats. Deathenstream blitzed; Galaxastorm anchored on the bar and bore off with clinical calm. A nurse finished stitching a Deathmarine exactly as the last checker left the board.

Result: Galaxy holds. Both sides applauded the nurse.

Galaxenchi-Konjōzan (金城山) — High-Card Single Draw

Deathwing drew a Black King (yes, from a chess deck; he cheats at ontology). Galaxbeam drew Civic Ace. Konjōzan remained unconquered and deeply amused.

Galaxenchi-Tenshinkō (天真煌) — Set (Pattern Game)

Patterns of light. Deathweskers spotted a trio of biohazard sigils; Galaxapuff spotted three triage tents, three warm meals, three safe exits—"Set." Tenshinkō flared. Deathweskers wrote "infuriating" in his field diary and then accepted cocoa from a Galaxy volunteer.

Result: Galaxy holds.

Galaxenchi-Koganerio (黄金窯) — Dominoes

Heavy tiles clacked against furnace brick. Deathwing started [6|6], grinning. Galaxbeam played [6|Ethics] and the table permitted it. Koganerio's kilns burned hotter, firing fresh relief ceramics stamped with both emblems—crescent-star and skull-plus.

Result: Shared relief production, strategic control Galaxy.

Galaxenchi-Shinseki (神跡) — Stratego

Deathenstride's bombs were labeled "definitely not bombs." Galaxadye rotated scouts through a training seminar titled How to Be Curious Without Dying. Two clever exchanges later, Death's Marshal stepped on his own hubris; Galaxy's miner whistled an apology and defused the board.

Result: Galaxy holds.

Galaxenchi-Hakkimura (白針村) — Liar's Dice

Deathwing is a world-class liar; Galaxbeam is a world-class teacher of probability. After three rounds the villagers were running the table themselves. The leaders bowed, pleased to be outplayed by civilians.

Result: Galaxy holds.

Galaxenchi-Ryūkinka (流金華) — Roulette (Ethical Variant)

Only numbers attached to public goods were on the wheel. Death bet Sanitation (8); Galaxbeam bet Clinics (17); the ball landed on Transportation (22) and both leaders funded buses. Ryūkinka purred: win–win is stylish.

Galaxenchi-Ginseshirō (銀聖城) & Kinyūkai (金龍界) — Two-Board Finale: Chess + Go

They played simultaneously. Deathwing in Japanese: 「二面打ち、嫌いじゃない。」 Two boards at once—I don't hate it.
Galaxbeam in German: "Multitasking ist nur Organisation mit Adrenalin."

On the chessboard, a quiet endgame study saved Ginseshirō; on the Go board, a masterpiece of sente preserved outer influence over Kinyūkai. Deathwing conceded both with a courteous bow and an annoyed smile.

Result: Galaxy holds all remaining cities of Galaxenshu.

Battlefield Care (the part the readers should quote)

Throughout the "games," Galaxapuff ran the Nebula Triage—a choreography of star-gauze, portable auroras, and mutual aid. Wounded Deathsoldiers, Deathmarines, Deathzealots, and Deathmarauders cycled through, reanimated or stabilized depending on team preference. She saluted every revived warrior with the same line: "You're needed for the next episode, don't be late." Deathwing pretended to scoff, but his medical officers mirrored her protocols. The map stayed contested, not cruel.

Titanumas Character Alias Codex...

Titanumas Character Alias Codex...

Coda: The Blame Game

Deathwing leaned on the railing, voice slipping from Mandarin to Cantonese like a scalpel from sheath to incision:

"你贏的時候，是因為作者偏心；我輸的時候，是因為敘事結構。"
"When you win, it's authorial bias; when I lose, it's narrative structure."

Galaxbeam answered in museum-grade German:

"Wenn du verlierst, ist es Statistik. Wenn ich gewinne, ist es Unterricht."
"When you lose, it's statistics. When I win, it's pedagogy."

"Fine," Deathwing sighed in Japanese. 「次はJikūzanで総決算だ。」 Next, a grand reckoning at Jikūzan. He pointed at the reader. "If I lose again, I'm blaming you and your taste for heroic teachers."

Galaxbeam faced the same fourth wall. "Homework stands: reread the city list," he said, and it kindly re-printed itself across the stars—Galaxad honlai, Galaxenshuangjingzi, Galaxangcha, Bekikonshu, Tenkūjō, Kōryū, Jikūzan, Eienmachi, Hoshihira, Yūseikan, Tokinoshiro, Gekkan, Kaseiden, Shindō, Kinseiken, Gallaxtetsubei, Ōgonka, Konjōzan, Tenshinkō, Koganerio, Shinseki, Hakkimura, Ryūkinka, Ginseshirō, Kinyūkai—because proper nouns deserve starlight.

"Next chapter," the professor promised, tucking the violet ribbon tighter around his quill, "we stop playing nice and start playing music."

The fourth wall checked its calendar. So did you.

 Attendance Required

The violet banners folded like bruised petals. Deathwing stood at the edge of the hovering dais, coat dripping antiseptic rain, plus-pupiled gaze sweeping the state he had failed—politely—to take.

"In Japanese," he said to no one and to everyone, 「本日の手術はここまでだ。」
Today's surgery is concluded.

He lifted two fingers. Sirens on the Death armada harmonized; cathedral-ships turned in perfect scalpel arcs. Deathsoldiers, Deathmarines, Deathzealots, and Deathmarauders shouldered their enzyme rifles and filed back in columns so neat that even the wind saluted. The biological meat tanks exhaled a last fog of bitter violets and were winched into cavernous hulls like organs returning to a ribcage.

Deathwing inclined his head toward the professor. "下次," he promised in Mandarin. Next time.
Then, softer, in Cantonese with that surgeon's smile: 「我會帶更好的刀。」
I'll bring a sharper blade.
Galaxbeam answered in fresco-dry German: „Und ich bessere Nähte."
And I'll bring stronger sutures.

The Death Regime vanished—not fled, not broken; simply gone, like a bad hypothesis withdrawing for revision.

Office Hours Begin

Ten minutes later, Kōryū Observatory resumed being a university.

The bells chimed first period. Constellation projectors hummed awake. Custodians rolled away the dueling dais and replaced it with desks that still smelled faintly of comet-lacquer. Students filtered in—cadets, clerks, city engineers, two very sleepy librarians—carrying notebooks that already contained tomorrow.

Galaxbeam entered precisely on the bell, violet ribbon still on his golden quill as if the duel had only been a guest lecture.

"Good morning," he said, like nothing monumental had attempted to eat the state. "Syllabus update."

The board filled itself in clean strokes.

Lecture 1: Post-Action Debrief — Galaxenshu/'Game Theory in Civic Defense'

Why we chose games: bounded risk, perfect information, rapid arbitration.

How to measure victory when everyone lives to argue later.

Case studies: Tenkūjō (Go endgame shape), Tokinoshiro (speed chess time management), Ryūkinka (ethical roulette funding model).

"Note," the professor added, "that Galaxapuff's Nebula Triage remains our gold standard. Applause is an acceptable academic citation." The class obliged. Somewhere, a Deathmarine recovering in a Galaxy clinic clapped along and pretended it was physical therapy.

A hand went up. "Professor, did the fourth wall interfere with the coin flip in Gekkan?"

"Yes," Galaxbeam said, "and it will be on the exam."

The room laughed the relieved laugh of people who almost didn't get to have rooms anymore.

Field Dispatches — Three Theatres, One Ledger

Galaxbeam turned a page; the lecture pivoted.

"Because our cosmos insists on multitasking, briefings from the other fronts."

He spoke without notes; the map obeyed.

1) Star Regime vs. Shadow Regime — The Theatre of Lightfall

Reports from Starrup indicate Starbeam has initiated a Green Vector counter-insurgency against Shadowwing's night grids. Shadow operatives are cutting power to memory archives; Star engineers respond with passive-light libraries and reflective streets. Expect duels of stealth vs. photonics. "Homework," Galaxbeam said, "review how signal-to-noise ratios become politics after sunset."

2) Lunar Regime vs. Blackened Regime — The Lunna Information War

Lady Moonbeam counters Blackwing's propaganda storms with forensics teams (Moonwis, Moonwisdom), turning misinformation into museum exhibits titled How a Lie Tries to Walk. Naval harassment continues off Lunartopia; casualty reports remain low thanks to pre-evac corridors and the Lunar habit of writing everything down before it explodes. "Moonlight," the professor noted fondly, "is excellent at making evidence visible."

3) Solar Regime vs. Darkened Regime — Sollarisca: The Heat Doctrine

General Sunbeam refuses attrition economics; he counters Darkwing's dread-austerity with over-supply—food, shelter, education—daring darkness to compete with abundance. Expect targeted strikes on depots by the Darkened; expect those depots to be decoys baited with public festivals. "If joy looks like a trap," Galaxbeam said, "that tells you everything about the enemy."

He underlined the ledger title: AES vs. BRD Campaign Calendar — Interlocking Fronts.
"Coordinate your reading and your readiness," he told the cadets. "Star, Lunar, and Solar are not side plots; they are parallel proofs."

Seminar: The Quiet Aftermath

After lunch, the professor held a small seminar for officers and medics. Galaxadye argued with Galaxastream about how much unpredictability to allow in the next defense; Galaxapuff overruled both with a nurse's voice.

"We keep revival corridors hot for twenty-four hours," she said. "Death's re-entry windows favor twilight; they like dramatic lighting. Also, send a fruit basket to their flagship. High potassium reduces cramp risk during resurrection." No one asked how she knew. Everyone wrote it down.

A courier arrived with a sealed vial and a note in immaculate, bitter script.

To the gilded schoolteacher:
Your lecture was adequate. 我會回來。—D.W.

Galaxbeam smiled despite himself, uncorked the vial, and let a harmless violet scented with disinfectant fill the room.

"Translation," he said dryly in German: „Er macht die Hausaufgaben."
He's doing his homework.

Stinger: Attendance Is Mandatory

Night settled. Libraries hummed. Somewhere beyond the map's polite borders, Deathwing stood in his cathedral-lab and practiced opening lines in four languages, rehearsing insults until they sounded like endearments.

「先生、次は授業ではない。」 he promised the dark. Next time, it won't be a class.
"但會是一個手術," he added in Mandarin. It will be a surgery.
Then, with Cantonese mischief: 「記住帶上你的批改筆。」 Remember your red grading pen.

Far away, Galaxbeam locked the observatory, chalk dust on his cuffs, ribbon still violet against the quill. He looked up at the reader with that unbearable, ageless calm.

"Class continues," he said. "Bring notes. Bring kindness. Bring your best argument. Jikūzan will test us all."

Streams, Stars, and the Teacher Who Pretends It's Tuesday

The violet clouds that had looked so menacing an hour ago were now drifting away from Galaxenshu State like embarrassed stage smoke. Deathwing had given his signature, melodramatic retreat order—"撤退, 我們要保持戲劇性!" / "Retreat, we must preserve the drama!"—and the entire Death Regime armada folded back into the higher troposphere, vanishing into a bruise-colored horizon.

The galaxy banners went back up.
The library-bunkers reopened.
The municipal time-servers resumed ticking.

And Professor/Prince Galaxbeam did what only a truly broken, hyper-competent Absolute Leader would do after repelling an undead bio-chemical superinvasion:

He went to teach class.

Not a war council. Not a rally. Not a press statement.

A. Class.

1. Observatory Homeroom

In Galaxenchi-Kōryū (光流), the observatory lecture hall reoriented itself to "calm academic mode." Sun-like globes dimmed. The star-robes for students unfurled from the ceiling. Holographic constellations took the shape of the day's lesson: "Comparative Foresight Between Necrochemical and Chrono-Administrative Schools."

Galaxbeam stepped to the rostrum, cloak still smelling faintly of atmospheric combat.

"Good morning," he said, as if they had not almost lost Bekikonshu City. "Attendance will be mandatory because our opponent believes in compulsory education too."

From the front row, Galaxtres—supreme commander, radiant, hair tied back for work—raised an elegant hand.

"Beloved professor," she said in a tone that was both military and gently personal, "shall we log today's lecture as 'post-siege' or simply 'Tuesday'?"

"'Tuesday,'" Galaxbeam said. "History looks cleaner that way."

She smiled. It was the warm, knowing smile of someone who had just helped him keep a state from being reduced to medically interesting rubble. She wore her command mantle over her academy uniform; on the shoulder glinted the crest of the Galaxy Regime Elites (Female Division): a crescent, a meteor-strike star, and five tiny runes representing Galaxapuff, Galaxtres, Galaxlady, Galaxcharm, and Galaxymoon—the five senior women who could tell an entire starfield to stand down and it would listen.

Behind them, cadets whispered:

"Is it true she's his girlfriend?"
"Shh, that's above your paygrade."
"But it's obvious—he let her correct his margin notes."
"That's basically marriage."

The professor pretended not to hear, because even Absolute Leaders have the right to a private life that is completely public.

"Now," Galaxbeam continued, quill hovering. "We will review: Deathwing's three-pronged incursion pattern over Galaxenchi-Tokinoshiro, his failed aerosolization over Galaxenchi-Kinseiken, and his emotionally immature attempt to insult me in three Sinitic registers."

The class screens lit up with a replay: Deathwing snarling in Japanese, switching to Mandarin, then Cantonese, then blaming the author for a dice roll.

"Notice," Galaxbeam said, tapping a frame, "he accuses the narrative of bias. This is a strategic tell. Only a villain certain he cannot win in-world starts attacking the meta. Write that down."

Galaxtres did not write it down—she already knew. Instead she sent a quick field note to the female elite channel:

Galaxtres ➤ Galaxapuff, Galaxmoon, Galaxharp, Galaxssuki, Galaxuzure

"He's in teacher mode. Deathwing will be back. Rotate med-wings to Galaxenchi-Hoshihira and Ryūkinka. Expect wounded Death units trying to 'accidentally' fall into our care to spy. Patch them, tag them, send them home with good manners."

A heart emoji, a comet, and a spiral galaxy came back from Galaxapuff almost instantly.

2. Cut to the Other Protagonist: Galaxastream

While the professor re-canonicalized the morning's carnage, far to the east over the river belts of Galaxenchi-Ginseishiro (銀星城), a man ran along the air like it was a politely paved road.

This was Galaxastream.

Supreme Commander. Human male. Long-limbed, calm-eyed, wearing a streaming, teak-colored coat, and permanently surrounded by translucent data-ribbons that followed him like koi in orbit.

He did not shout orders. He flowed them.

"Redirect life-support drones to Hakkimura," he said, flicking a wrist. The ribbon glided away. "Move star-rail from Tenshinkō to Koganerio, two units. Don't crash, thanks. Rotate aerial palisades over Bekikonshu, give them 120 seconds of rest. Deathwing will test the line with skirmishers."

He paused, listening.

The wind hissed in his ear like a reporting officer.

"...Ah. There you are."

Out of the far violet horizon, just as if the chapter demanded it (because it did), a Death Regime patrol emerged—nothing named, nothing grand: a company of Deathsoldiers, a wedge of Deathmarines, and three squat biological meat tanks belching disinfectant like dragons with bad ethics.

They weren't even attacking. They were... loitering? Probing? Posing for fanart?

Galaxastream sent a message to the authorial voice.

"Are we doing this now?"

"Yes," the narration answered. "The user wanted random heroic scenarios. Smile."

So he smiled.

"Death Regime patrol," he called out across the sky in flawless, classroom-level Mandarin, "this sector is under educational occupation. Please present your learning objectives."

One of the Deathmarines raised a trembling hand and, through the voice filter, said,

"...improve cardiovascular performance while conquering galaxies?"

"Excellent," Galaxastream said. "Run home."

He drew a circle with his finger. A gravity canal opened beneath the Death unit and sent them spiraling, unharmed but deeply confused, back toward the shrinking violet horizon.

The meat tanks tried to stay.
The canal tutted.
They, too, were sent home.

Galaxastream exhaled, letting the whole state breathe with him. He checked the map—an elegant projection of Galaxadhonlai, Galaxenshuangjingzi, Gallaxangcha, the rooftop terraces of Galaxenchi-Tenkūjō, the crystal waterways of Galaxenchi-Kōryū, the solemn time-towers of Tokinoshiro, the weekly festivals at Gekkan, the sword-halls of Kinseiken, the gleaming furnaces of Koganerio, the sacred digs at Shinseki, the serene white houses of Hakkimura (白金村), the streaming gold markets of Ryūkinka (流金花), the marble observatories of Ginseishiro, and the dragon-banners of Kinryūkai (金龍界).

All still Galaxy-blue.
All still theirs.

"Flow sustained," he said into his badge. "Professor, state remains stable."

From far away, across channels, Galaxbeam's voice came back, amused.

"Danke, Strom."

"唔駛客氣, 老師." (m4 sai2 haak3 hei3, lou5 si1 — "You're welcome, teacher.")

Galaxastream grinned.

"Reader," he said to us directly, "you probably thought only Deathwing and Galaxbeam got to flex languages. Surprise. We all had to pass the entrance exam."

3. Meanwhile, in the Death Regime's Temporary Sulking Zone

Far above, on a quarantined flagship whose interior decoration looked like "medical school but make it goth," Doctor Deathwing sat on his throne of instrument trays, reviewing the day's humiliation.

Several Deathmarines stood at attention, still dripping from Galaxastream's gravity canal.

One of them raised a hand.

"...sir?"

"What."

"Requesting clarification: why are we fighting a regime that teaches physics to its civilians before breakfast?"

Deathwing stared, plus-sign pupils narrowing.

"Because," he said in Mandarin, clipped, "我也是老師. / I am also a teacher."

He rose, pacing.

"他 (Galaxbeam) teaches time. I teach life and death. He specializes in astronomy and prophecy. I specialize in chemistry, immunology, weaponized biology. We are two sides of the same education system. We just disagree on grading."

He switched to Cantonese just to burn the air:

「佢打A我打F，我仲幫你補習。」
"He gives you an A, I give you an F, and I still tutor you."

The marines nodded, impressed and terrified.

"Also," Deathwing added in Japanese, sulky, "彼のガールフレンドが可愛すぎる."
"His girlfriend is too cute."

One of the tech-zombies on comms whispered, "Galaxtres..." and sighed, as though remembering being alive.

Deathwing heard.

"Stop shipping the enemy," he snapped. "Write this down: Operation: Ruin Their Date Night. We strike Ginseishiro, Hoshihira, or the capital Gallaxetsubei next, whichever has the highest probability of catching Galaxbeam lecturing while holding hands under the table."

"...sir, do we have the resources?"

"We do now." He jabbed at a console. "Revive yesterday's casualties. Patch the holes. Detox the meat tanks. We go again—later. Tonight we sulk. Tomorrow we overproduce."

Then, louder, to the empty air:

"AND AUTHOR—IF YOU ROLL BADLY FOR ME AGAIN I WILL INJECT FIREWALLS INTO YOUR NARRATION."

The narration, bravely, pretended not to hear.

4. Galaxy Regime Medical/Revival Interlude

Back on the surface, the Galaxy Medical Trident—the joint operation run by Galaxtres, Galaxapuff, and Galaxmoon—was in full swing.

At Galaxenchi-Hoshihira (星平), the plaza had been turned into a triage garden. Floating gurneys. Stasis domes. Aromatic star-lilies. And, because this was the Galaxy Regime and they were show-offs, the entire healing area was synchronized with Tokinoshiro's time-vaults so that badly wounded soldiers could have extra minutes to heal without anyone else losing time.

Galaxtres moved through the rows like a general and like a nurse and like someone who had just watched her lover risk everything to out-snark an immortal necrodoctor.

"Keep this one," she told a medic about a knocked-out Deathsoldier whose hazmat suit bore the purple skull-and-bones with plus-sign eyes. "He pretended to invade but redirected his fire. He wasn't trying to kill our cadets. Patch him, tag him, release him."

The Deathsoldier blinked weakly.

"You... heal enemy?"

"We don't like waste," Galaxtres said, voice professional, eyes kind. "And we believe in second chances. Take the lesson home."

The soldier croaked, "...death...wing... will... say... this is... propaganda..."

Galaxtres smiled. "It is. The best kind. Truth."

She turned, hair swirling, mantle bright. Galaxapuff arrived from above, boots not even touching the ground, pinkish-gold aura crackling.

"All refugee bunkers okay," Galaxapuff reported. "Tokinoshiro, Gekkan, Tenshinkō, all green. Only six minor timeline desyncs. I can smooth them."

"Do so," Galaxtres said. "We don't want anyone remembering lunch before breakfast."

Behind them, Galaxlady, Galaxcharm, Galaxharp, and Galaxssuki ran specialized clinics—antitoxin, anti-plague, anti-nanophage, and morale therapy (cookies and astronomy). The female elites were terrifying in the way that only competent women in coordinated uniforms can be.

Up on the ridge, Galaxbeam watched for a moment, noted it down in his teaching slate, and then, because he is not made of stone, allowed himself to soften.

"Danke, Tresi," he murmured.

She glanced up, met his gaze, and mouthed, Always.

A group of cadets pretended they weren't watching the romantic main subplot.

5. Galaxastream Gets a Spotlight Fight, Anime-Style

Evening came, painting Galaxenchi-Tenshinkō (天真煌) in bronze. Galaxastream was just finishing a patrol over the capital Gallaxetsubei when his comms pinged.

Alert: unauthorized spatial breach, lower orbit, sector Konjōzan (金城山).

"Of course," he sighed. "He said he was retreating."

He sped through the sky, long coat trailing. The breach was small—just a doorway of purple necro-light—but through it poured a second-rate evening squad of Deathmarines, two dozen Deathmarauders, and, because Death Regime was committed to its brand, one (1) meat tank squeaking like a guilty dog.

"Evening class," Galaxastream called, drawing his flow sabers (rods of light, but tasteful, don't sue us). "Today's topic: why surprise raids don't work on regimes that can read pacing."

The Deathmarauders advanced, howling.
He flicked his wrist.

A waterfall of starlight crashed sideways, pinning them without harm.

He spun.

The marines fired.
He redirected the bolts into the sky where they exploded in harmless fireworks, spelling: "DEATHWING, GO DO HOMEWORK."

The meat tank charged.
He slid beneath it, writing a single downward sigil.
Gravity remembered what to do.
The tank settled onto the ground, placid as a cow.

"Listen," Galaxastream said kindly to the Death squad. "No disrespect—you're solid troops. But this is no longer a battlefield. This is an exam. And our professor is grading on a curve."

One Deathmarine, still struggling, blurted through the filter, "We just want one city!"

Galaxastream tilted his head.

"Hmm. Tell your doctor that if he asks politely and doesn't weaponize the rivers, we may let him borrow Hakkimura for a medical conference. It has good tea."

The marine blinked, plus-sign pupils genuinely surprised.

"You... negotiate?"

"We're Galaxy. We collaborate. We publish. We peer review. We scold. We don't annihilate if we can help it."

He sent them home through a carefully folded portal—marked, in big glowing characters:

"RETURN TO SENDER — SULKING FLAGSHIP."

Somewhere up there, Deathwing saw it arrive and shouted, "AUTHOR! STOP MAKING HIM FUNNY."

6. War Theatre Log — Because Galaxbeam Takes Notes on Everything

That night, in the observatory at Kōryū, Galaxbeam sat with Galaxtres and Galaxastream, drinking hot astro-tea. On the table lay four translucent dossiers.

He narrated as he wrote, because he knew someone was listening.

Galaxy vs. Death — Galaxenshu Theatre.

Day's Outcome: Galaxy Regime retains all cities — Galaxadhonlai, Galaxenshuangjingzi, Gallaxangcha, Bekikonshu City, Tenkūjō, Kōryū, Jikūzan, Eienmachi, Hoshihira, Yūseikan, Tokinoshiro, Gekkan, Kaseiden, Shindō, Kinseiken, Gallaxetsubei (capital), Ōgonka, Konjōzan, Tenshinkō, Koganerio, Shinseki, Hakkimura, Ryūkinka, Ginseishiro, Kinryūkai.

Enemy: Death Regime probed, retreated, will return with upgraded biochemistry, possibly flavored insults.

Friendly Notables: Supreme Commanders Galaxastream, Galaxtres, Galaxapuff; elites Galaxmoon, Galaxharp, Galaxssuki, Galaxuzure, Galaxsuna, Galaxprom.

Casualties: Light, mostly bruised pride. One pathogen died of a pun.

Star Regime vs. Shadow Regime — Northern Veil Campaign.

Report from X-Vice Colonel Starbeam: holding well, but Shadow keeps trying Italian-haunting names again. Shadow agents refuse to stay dead. Star Regime matching stealth with light-tech.

Note to self: send Galaxveronica to assist with pattern-recognition.

Lunar Regime vs. Blackened Regime — Lunna Strategic Escalation.

Lady Moonbeam still countering Blackwing's smear campaigns. Data warfare at high cycle. Propaganda vs truth.

Note to self: send "How to Grade a Liar in Five Steps" pamphlet.

Solar Regime vs. Darkened Regime — Sollarisca Front.

General Sunbeam continues his bright orange, very loud, very effective defense. Romanticism doctrine holding.

Note to self: write essay "On the Utility of Color-Coded Absolute Leaders."

He closed the file.

"Tomorrow," he said, "he will be back."

"Of course," Galaxtres said. "We will be here."

Galaxastream stretched, then leaned back, talking to the ceiling like he was talking to the viewers at home.

"Next episode preview," he said in perfect announcer voice. "Deathwing returns with Game Night 2: Pathogens & Poker. Galaxbeam counters with Administrative UNO. Galaxtres solo-defends Ryūkinka in a dress uniform. Guest appearance by three confused Deathmarines who just wanted extra credit."

Galaxtres giggled, covering her mouth in a very-un-supreme-commander way.

Galaxbeam shook his head, but his eyes were warm.

"You know," he said, switching to German for no one in particular, "Es ist gut, dass wir lachen können, während das Universum Krieg spielt."
"It is good that we can laugh while the universe plays at war."

From far away, faint through the night, Deathwing's voice drifted down in Cantonese:

「笑住打仗先最恐怖。」
"The scariest enemy is the one who laughs while fighting."

Galaxbeam lifted his quill toward the stars.

"Then be afraid," he said. "Class dismissed."

The chapter bowed.

The reader felt seen.

Because they were.

Where the River Is a Commander

(point-of-view: Galaxastream)

The day after Deathwing's "I'm retreating but only for narrative pacing" exit, Galaxenshu State woke up like a city that had dreamed of war and remembered it was also a university.

The violet smear in the sky was gone. The Death Regime's plus-pupil banners were only vapor trails. The floating sirens in Tokinoshiro stopped looping evacuation orders and went back to announcing library hours.

High above all of that, walking on air as if it were a neatly paved avenue, was Galaxestream.

He liked to patrol alone. Not because he distrusted anyone—Galaxy Regime officers were almost offensively competent—but because the state itself felt like a living thing to him. He wanted to listen to it without too many voices getting in the way.

Below him, the map of the day unrolled:

Galaxadhonlai still shining.
Galaxenshuangjingzi still layered like twin mirrors.
Gallaxangcha still sending trade skiffs along the canals.
Bekikonshu City still repairing its docks.
Galaxenchi-Tenkūjō (天空城) still floating.
Galaxenchi-Kōryū (光流) still glowing.
Galaxenchi-Jikūzan (時空山) still humming with quiet time-magic.
Galaxenchi-Eienmachi (永遠町) still unhurried.
Galaxenchi-Hoshihira (星平) still lined with triage gardens.
Galaxenchi-Yūseikan (遊星館), Tokinoshiro (時の城), Gekkan (月刊), Kaseiden (火星殿), Shindō (神道), Kinseiken (金星剣), the capital Gallaxetsubei, Ōgonka (黄金華), Konjōzan (金城山), Tenshinkō (天真煌), Koganerio (黄金窯), Shinseki (神跡), Hakkimura (白金村), Ryūkinka (流金花), Ginseishiro (銀星城), Kinryūkai (金龍界)—

All of them still Galaxy-gold.

"Still ours," Galaxestream said to the wind.

The wind agreed.

He received the professor's daily transmission right on cue. Galaxbeam never missed the morning slot even if he had just verbally jousted in German with an undead chemist.

"Strom," came the calm, amused voice. "Status, please."

"State: intact. Civilian morale: recovering. Agricultural satellites: online. Death regime: sulking."

"You saw them sulking?"

"I felt them sulking."

A soft chuckle. "Gut. Keep the flow smooth. I will be in lecture for the next two hours. Pretend the universe is not on fire."

"Understood. Enjoy class, teacher."

Galaxestream cut the line, smiled to himself, and dove.

FIRST RANDOM SCENARIO: THE RETURNED ENEMY

At the edge of Galaxenchi-Hoshihira, just where the star-paved road met the restored medical plazas, he found a familiar shape: one of yesterday's Deathmarines, the one Galaxtres had spared and tagged.

The marine was standing there politely with both hands up, skull insignia blinking plus signs. No weapons. No toxins. Just a data slate.

Galaxestream landed in front of him.

"Visiting hours?" he asked.

The marine's voice came through the rebreather, tinny but earnest.

"Commander. Our doctor—Deathwing—said to return with appreciation gift."

He held out the slate.

Galaxestream eyed it. "Is it a bomb?"

"No, commander. It is... lab report."

That was, in fact, somehow worse.

He took it anyway. The slate unfolded into a moving holo: Deathwing in his laboratory-cathedral, coat immaculate, speaking directly to camera in Mandarin, then Japanese, then—as if he couldn't help himself—Cantonese.

"Galaxbeam," Deathwing said to the recording, "you anticipated my anticipation of your anticipation. Annoying. Attached are improved aerosol formulas. You may study them so that when I return, you can defeat them again. I will also be bringing better jokes. Please tell your river-boy—Galaxestream—that his gravity canal was 'elegant.' I hate it."

The recording cut.

Galaxestream blinked.

"Your doctor," he told the marine, "is the strangest enemy we have ever had."

The marine shrugged helplessly. "He says he and your professor are 'co-teachers in different departments.'"

"That tracks."

Galaxestream tapped the marine's arm. "Go home. Tell him his report is accepted. Tell him that if he wants feedback, he has to cite sources properly."

The marine saluted, very square and very undead, and disappeared into a violet recall beam.

Galaxestream forwarded the slate to Galaxbeam with a single note:

He complimented me. I am suspicious.

The reply came back at once.

You are right to be. Keep the flow.

SECOND RANDOM SCENARIO: THE RUNAWAY MEAT TANK

No war is tidy. Even with Deathwing gone for the day, one of the Death Regime's biological tanks had been left behind in a ravine outside Galaxenchi-Koganerio. The thing was trying to follow its retreating signal but had gotten wedged between two observation stones and was now huffing toxic breath in distress.

Local Galaxy guards had it surrounded but not destroyed; they were Galaxy, after all. If it wasn't currently murdering anyone, it got a chance.

Galaxestream arrived above the ravine, hands in his pockets.

"Big fella," he called down, "you lost?"

The tank squeaked like an enormous, guilty hamster.

He lowered himself, sat on a rock, and spoke to it the way he spoke to frightened cadets.

"Listen. You belong to a very dramatic doctor who will definitely come pick you up. But not today. Today, you're in my state, and in my state we do air quality."

He drew a gentle circle in the air. A film of golden atmosphere wrapped around the tank, filtering its gasses; the ravine air cleared.

The Galaxy guards applauded. Not because it was flashy, but because it was kind.

"Log this as recovered enemy ordnance," Galaxestream told them. "Flag it for temporary internment, medical observation, no dissection unless Deathwing fails to retrieve in seventy-two hours."

"Yes, commander."

He rose again, coat fluttering.

"Commander?" one of the young guards called after him. "Why do we keep fixing their mistakes?"

Galaxestream turned midair.

"Because," he said, "our professor keeps saying this is an education war. If we stop teaching, we become them."

The guard nodded, chastened and proud.

THIRD RANDOM SCENARIO: GUEST LECTURER

Around midday, Galaxestream did what none of the cadets expected: he walked into Galaxbeam's lecture. No fanfare. No trumpets. Just the river commander stepping into the quiet hall.

Galaxbeam looked up from the starboard.

"Ah. My stream."

"Teacher."

Cadets straightened. A few whispered, "It's him, the one who sent a whole platoon home like laundry."

Galaxbeam stepped aside.

"Class," he said, "you have heard me explain Deathwing's intellectual pattern. Now you will hear from the man who actually chased his troops out of our sky. Commander, the floor is yours."

Galaxestream took it, but he didn't pontificate. He didn't even raise his voice. He just told them three short stories—precisely the three we just watched: the polite enemy returning a lab report, the runaway tank, the guards who wanted to destroy instead of detain.

Then he said, carefully:

"Here is what you must understand. The Death Regime thinks in cures and plagues. We think in flows. They stop things. We move them. They freeze a body. We restart a city. This is why we will keep winning: not because they are stupid—Deathwing is not stupid; he is awful—but because they are rigid. And we are rivers."

He let that sit.

At the back, Galaxtres, auditing the lesson with arms folded, looked at him with unmistakable pride.

Galaxbeam returned to the front.

"Well said," he murmured. "I shall steal that line."

"You always do," Galaxestream said, just loud enough for the class to hear.

The class laughed. The professor smiled. For a fleeting moment the entire Galaxy Regime, with its time-cities and sword-museums and library bunkers, felt exactly like what it had wanted to be before eight villain factions appeared:

a school.

FOURTH RANDOM SCENARIO: CROSS-THEATRE NOTES

After class Galaxestream went to the observatory roof to send updates to the other theatres. It was a clear line-of-sight day; you could bounce signals off Saturn if you pushed.

He opened four shimmering windows in the air.

To the Star Regime, currently in shadow-counteroffensive:
"Starbeam. Galaxy front stable. Deathwing being theatrical. If Shadow Regime uses necrotic stealth tomorrow, assume he watched them; they copy each other's homework. I can lend you Galaxveronica for pattern-spotting."

To the Lunar Regime, knee-deep in Blackened propaganda wars:
"Lady Moonbeam. We saw the smear packages Blackwing pushed. Galaxwis and Galaxwise are annotating their data. You'll have a debunk packet in four hours. Stay luminous."

To the Solar Regime, still clashing with Darkened raiders over Sollarisca:
"General Sunbeam. Yes, we're fine. Yes, we heard about your latest orange victory. No, you cannot borrow our time-city. Yours in cooperation, Galaxestream."

To the Death Regime—because why not, they were listening anyway:
"Doctor Deathwing. Your patrols were returned, your tank was saved, your report was graded. Your insults in Cantonese were B+. Your German was C; stop gendering the wrong nouns. Come back when you have a new idea."

Almost immediately, a violet slot opened above him and a reply came in Deathwing's exasperated voice:

"Insolent river. I will return with Mandarin puns so advanced your cadets will cry."

Galaxestream laughed.

"Looking forward to it, sensei."

FIFTH RANDOM SCENARIO: META BREAK

As he descended toward Gallaxetsubei, the narrator tried to wrap the chapter.

Galaxestream looked up.

"Not yet," he said.

The narration hesitated. "You still have something?"

"Yes. The reader likes Anime Moment Closers."

"...Fair."

EVENING PARADE

That evening the capital held a small, light-budget parade. Not a triumph—that was Solar's style. Not a moonlit procession—that was Lunar's style. Not a green-gold military formation—that was Star's style.

Galaxy's was simple: floating paper planets, children in miniature star-robes, repaired aerial drones carrying banners with the crescent-and-star sigil.

Galaxestream walked among them, no formal armor, just his long coat. Cadets saluted. Civilians bowed. One little girl in a plain uniform ran up to him with a notebook.

"Commander! Sign?"

He took it.

"What's your name?"

"Galaxyqinlian!" she said, proud that she had such a mouthful of a Galaxy name.

He signed.

"Will Deathwing come back?" she asked, eyes wide.

"Yes," Galaxestream said, not sugar-coating it.

"Will we win?"

"We will learn faster," he said. "That is better than winning."

She nodded like that was the best answer anyone had ever given her and scampered off.

Galaxtres joined him, walking at his side.

"You did good today," she said quietly.

"Just kept the river clear."

She nudged him. "Don't be modest. The professor sees it."

"Does he?"

She tilted her head toward the observatory spire.

Galaxbeam was up there, watching them, golden quill resting in his hand, the violet ribbon from Deathwing still tied to it like an inside joke. He gave Galaxestream a short, very un-Absolute-Leader nod.

That nod meant: You carried the day. I will write it so.

Galaxestream returned the nod.

CLOSING LOG (FOR WATTPAD RECORDS, GALAXY ARCHIVE, AND ANY DEATH REGIME SPY WHO SNUCK IN HERE)

Day +1 after Death Regime's multi-city assault on Galaxenshu State.

All cities held:
Galaxadhonlai, Galaxenshuangjingzi, Gallaxangcha, Bekikonshu City, Galaxenchi-Tenkūjō, Galaxenchi-Kōryū, Galaxenchi-Jikūzan, Galaxenchi-Eienmachi, Galaxenchi-Hoshihira, Galaxenchi-Yūseikan, Galaxenchi-Tokinoshiro, Galaxenchi-Gekkan, Galaxenchi-Kaseiden, Galaxenchi-Shindō, Galaxenchi-Kinseiken, Gallaxetsubei (capital), Galaxenchi-Ōgonka, Galaxenchi-Konjōzan, Galaxenchi-Tenshinkō, Galaxenchi-Koganerio, Galaxenchi-Shinseki, Galaxenchi-Hakkimura, Galaxenchi-Ryūkinka, Galaxenchi-Ginseishiro, Galaxenchi-Kinryūkai.

Galaxy medical wing led by Galaxtres, Galaxapuff, Galaxmoon: all wounded treated, including enemy wounded.
Enemy showed non-lethal curiosity; likely to return.
Professor Galaxbeam resumed teaching schedule.
Inter-regime notes dispatched to Star vs Shadow, Lunar vs Blackened, Solar vs Darkened theatres.
Death Regime still employing plus-pupil iconography.

Commander's remark:

"Deathwing moves like a scalpel. We move like water. A scalpel can cut the riverbank, but the river will still find the sea. As long as our people keep learning, we cannot be occupied."

Signed,
Supreme Commander Galaxestream
—who, for one whole day, got to be the main character.

The narration, finally satisfied, closed the chapter.

Storm Over a Calm Classroom

(point-of-view: Galaxastorm)

Galaxastream got to be main character for one day.

Galaxastorm absolutely refused to let that become a trend.

1. Morning Briefing, or: How to Secure a Man Who Secures Himself

The sun over Gallaxetsubei rose in layered gold, and in the command balcony of the east bastion stood Supreme Commander Galaxastorm—broad-shouldered, hair tied back, cloak clipped with the crescent-and-star sigil. He was the Galaxy Regime's "atmospheric and perimeter theatre chief," which was the polite way to say: if anything even thinks about entering this state, he already has a wind map, three counterplans, and a meal reservation afterward.

On the table in front of him hovered the holo-map of Galaxenshu State. Every city—Galaxadhonlai, Galaxenshuangjingzi, Gallaxangcha, Bekikonshu City, Tenkūjō, Kōryū, Jikūzan, Eienmachi, Hoshihira, Yūseikan, Tokinoshiro, Gekkan, Kaseiden, Shindō, Kinseiken, Gallaxetsubei (capital), Ōgonka, Konjōzan, Tenshinkō, Koganerio, Shinseki, Hakkimura, Ryūkinka, Ginseishiro, Kinryūkai—was lit a calm, smug gold.

Galaxastorm tapped the capital once.

"Today the professor speaks publicly," he said. "That means we pretend he needs guarding."

The officers in the room smiled; it was always like this.

One of the junior captains asked, "Sir, we're already shielded three layers deep."

"Four," Galaxastorm corrected. "One visible for optics, two invisible, one temporal for Deathwing's bad habits. But we're Galaxy. We overdo things. Deploy perimeter rings, rotate the aerial sentries, station one elite in every open-sky courtyard. If an enemy even drafts a hostile thought—"

"It gets audited?" another officer supplied.

"It gets graded," Galaxastorm said, deadpan. "Professor style."

He flicked his wrist. A side panel opened, showing a violet echo—the residual signature of yesterday's Death Regime retreat.

"Doctor Deathwing will test us again. Not with himself—he likes drama too much to waste it. He'll send common ground units. Deathsoldiers. Deathmarines. Maybe a meat-tank drone. They'll try to disrupt the speech, plant spores, steal notes. We will stop them before the scene even starts."

He glanced up, right into the narration.

"Yes, reader. This is that episode where the security team gets spotlight. You may stay."

2. Storm's Objective List (Because He Is Organized, Unlike Certain Undead Doctors)

Secure professor Galaxbeam from anything lower than Absolute Leader level.

Let the professor look unbothered while doing it.

Run morale lunch for officers (hotpot, no excuses, even time-manipulators have to eat).

Teach an afternoon class on rapid atmospheric seals over wide urban grids.

File joint theatre notes about parallel wars:

Star Regime vs Shadow Regime

Lunar Regime vs Blackened Regime

Solar Regime vs Darkened Regime

Mock Deathwing in the after-action log.

It was a good day.

3. The Pre-Threat That Never Became a Threat

Professor Galaxbeam always gave his talks from the Tenkūjō balcony—the floating platform above the city that made him look like a perfectly reasonable divine scholar descended from celestial bureaucracy. The whole plaza filled: cadets, clerks, librarians, repaired drones, civilians in clean uniforms, even a few cautious visitors from Gallaxangcha.

Galaxastorm stood off to the side, hands behind his back. His armor was not the heavy parade plate of the Solar Regime; it was light, workerlike, layered with shimmering weather-seals. Around the plaza he had placed:

Elite Galaxmoon on the north-east roof, eyes on the sky-lanes.

Supreme Commander Galaxapuff holding the medical post, for rapid revive.

Galaxtres disguised as a bored girlfriend in the second row (which, to be fair, she actually was).

Aerial sentry drones disguised as lanterns.

Two invisible pressure domes tuned to halt anything with the Death Regime's plus-pupil bio-signature.

Galaxbeam stepped to the balcony, golden quill in hand, violet ribbon still tied like yesterday's inside joke. The crowd went quiet.

And, on cue, in a warehouse six streets away, a set of violet pods blinked alive: Death Regime infiltrator team, ten deathsoldiers, two deathmarines with toxin misters, one badly camouflaged meat-crawler.

"Deploying," said the lead.

"Denied," said Galaxastorm from the plaza, without looking.

A vertical gust—precisely calibrated not to muss the professor's hair—roared through the six-street-away warehouse. The infiltrators were flipped, de-weaponized, wrapped in a polite cyclone and stacked neatly in a holding circle.

The speech went on.

"—and so," Galaxbeam was saying, "the point of inter-regime conflict in Titanumas is not extinction, but education under pressure. You will see the Star Regime facing shadow-born stealth; you will see the Lunar Regime counter chemical media storms; you will see the Solar Regime burn back the dark. And you will see us—"

He flicked his quill lazily toward the captured infiltrators now being wheeled through the plaza by Galaxy soldiers.

"—grade papers."

The crowd laughed.

Galaxastorm let himself smile. This was how it should be: enemy attempts, Galaxy counters, professor lectures, day continues.

4. Hotpot Interlude (Yes, Even Supreme Commanders Eat)

By noon the excitement had settled. Galaxastorm released his officers with a gesture.

"Security status?" he asked.

"All green," said Galaxapuff, already flicking medical scans over the captured deathsoldiers. "Their toxin loaders were set to nonlethal stun. Doctor Deathwing is testing response time, not body count."

"Tell him we posted a perfect score," Galaxastorm said. "Now everybody to Kōryū Hot Spring & Hotpot House. I'm buying."

"You're always buying, sir," said Galaxtres, falling into step beside him.

"That is how I maintain loyalty."

They took an aerial tram down to Galaxenchi-Kōryū (光流), the photonic district. The restaurant was half-open to the sky, tables hovering over gentle light-streams, pots bubbling with clear star-broth.

They took over three long tables.

Galaxapuff sat with her medics, sampling every vegetable like it was a patient.
Galaxtres sat next to Galaxastorm, chin in hand, watching the steam.
A pair of junior elites—Galaxhanatsuki and Galaxmurasaki—argued over whether you put the noodles in first or last.
Someone turned on a holo of yesterday's duel between Galaxbeam and Deathwing.

Galaxastorm ladled broth into his bowl.

"You realize," he said, "every time we eat like this, Deathwing is somewhere taking notes on Galaxy nutritional doctrine."

"Let him," Galaxtres said. "He'll just come back with zombie hotpot and we'll grade it."

They clinked chopsticks.

Halfway through the meal, Galaxastream dropped in—still mid-patrol, still permissions glowing around him.

"You started without me," he said.

"Main-character privileges are for one day only," Galaxastorm told him. "Today is logistical slice-of-life episode."

Galaxastream laughed, sat, took a bowl. "Fine. I'll be your guest star."

The whole squad relaxed. There was chatter, laughter, clatters of plates. Even the captured Deathsoldiers (kept in a sealed, filtered corner) were fed nutrient broth.

Galaxy wars were harsh. Galaxy lunches were sacred.

5. Afternoon Class: "Storm-Seal over 25 Cities"

After lunch, Galaxastorm kept to his plan. He reported to the Academy Cloister of Jikūzan—a circular classroom with time-rings on the ceiling. The students were half cadets, half already-deployed officers who had yesterday tasted Deathwing's violets.

He wrote on the holo-board:

Rapid Atmospheric Enclosure for Multi-Nodal Urban Grids
(Case Study: Galaxenshu State During Repeated Death Regime Probes)

He turned to them.

"You saw this morning we stopped an infiltration six streets away. Good. But that was small. Deathwing will, eventually, try to hit three cities at once again—for example, Hoshihira for medical disruption, Koganerio for industrial sabotage, and Ryūkinka for river-route poisoning. We cannot wait for his pod to open. We must close the sky before he finishes his idea."

He gestured; the ceiling lit up with miniature versions of those cities.

"Rule one: assume they watched yesterday's episode. No trick is new.
Rule two: layer with misdirection. Give them a door on purpose, then move the door.
Rule three: prepare morale restorers—yes, hotpot counts—because a happy city is harder to infect."

A student raised a hand. "Commander, what if Deathwing shifts to orbital dispersal?"

Galaxastorm smiled. "He will. At which point we will ask Professor for space-time closure procedure. He will smile, insult Deathwing in German, and give us a better one. You are Galaxy. You do not panic. You adapt."

He paused, then added, because he knew they'd like it:

"Also, if he tries it during the professor's speech again, we trump that by narrative priority. The story refuses to animate his attempt."

The class laughed. The time-rings hummed in agreement.

6. Evening Oversight and Cross-War Notes

At dusk, Galaxastorm sat at his console, looking at four theatres.

Star Regime vs Shadow Regime: star-green units hunting shadow-cloaked saboteurs through starlit shipyards. He logged:

"Galaxy advises: pre-light paths, deny darkness, record everything. Shadow will ask 'who's narrating?' Tell them we are."

Lunar Regime vs Blackened Regime: truth-casters vs propaganda syndicates. He logged:

"Galaxy forwards annotated Death Regime toxin sheets; Blackened is cribbing them. Moonbeam may cite Galaxy as neutral scientific authority."

Solar Regime vs Darkened Regime: orange artillery vs bleak guerillas. He logged:

"Solar requested time-buffer. Denied (insufficient narrative budget). Provided instead weather window for large-scale counterfire."

He attached the morning's Deathwing probe as an appendix.

"Doctor attempted plaza infiltration. Countered before act one. Alive captives. Professor unimpressed. Recommend he varies approach."

Then, purely out of pettiness, he added a single line in German:

Doktor, dein Timing bleibt miserabel.
Doctor, your timing remains miserable.

He hit send.

Somewhere, on a violet flagship, a mad undead doctor surely hissed.

7. Night Scene: The Unnecessary Attack That Was Still Anticipated

Just before midnight, because villains never rest like sensible people, a cluster of Deathmarines in bio-hoods stepped out of a ripple directly above Galaxenchi-Tenshinkō (天真煌). Their orders were simple: splash spores on statues, mark transit hubs, vanish.

Galaxastorm was already in the air, cloak whipping.

"Gentlemen," he called, voice amplified, "the day is over. Go home."

They fired toxin darts anyway.

He rotated his wrist. A wind-lens blossomed. The darts hung in the air like confused punctuation.

He sent them back—not to kill, just to tap each marine's helmet like a teacher rapping a desk.

"Doctor sends you at bad hours," he said. "Tell him to schedule."

The marines looked at one another, sighed (as much as undead could), and activated retreat beacons.

Galaxastorm exhaled, lowering the lens.

"Why do I even guard?" he muttered. "The narrative itself guards him."

The narrative, flattered, patted him on the shoulder.

8. Closing

Next morning, Galaxbeam walked past him in the corridor, robes neat, hair bright, quill tucked.

"Good work, Storm," he said without stopping.

"You saw?"

"I always see. You kept the peace, you fed the troops, you taught the next wave. You even taunted the doctor."

Galaxastorm inclined his head. "Just keeping the weather clear for you, professor."

Galaxbeam smiled. "Then keep it clear a little longer. Deathwing will return—he said so with incredible melodrama. And when he does, it will be... noisier."

"I'll bring the hotpot," Galaxastorm said.

"Please do," the professor replied. "The universe learns better on a full stomach."

Galaxastorm watched him go, then looked out over Galaxenshu—its sky-cities, sword-museums, time-fortresses, restored docks, and stubborn, golden citizens.

Another day held.

Another day taught.

And somewhere far away, in a violet laboratory, an undead doctor was rewriting his attack plan while cursing the weather.

The Galaxy Regime would be ready.

Because Galaxastorm was on duty.

The Storm Closes the File

(point-of-view: Supreme Commander Galaxastorm)

Galaxastorm liked days that ended clean.

Not quiet—quiet was for planets that had never met Doctor Deathwing. But clean: threats identified, intercepted, annotated, fed, and sent back to the void with a politely stamped Galaxy report.

Today had been close.

Now he had to seal it.

1. Night Perimeter, Trilingual Edition

The eastern sky over Galaxenchi-Kinseiken (金星剣) was already dark when he walked the outer wall. The swords-museum below glowed faintly, like old history doing its homework.

A patrol squad saluted. He raised a hand.

"今晚巡邏要加一層。"
("Tonight add one more patrol layer.")

One of the newer officers blinked. "Commander, we already have three layers."

Galaxastorm shifted to Mandarin, still even, still instructional:

"多一層是給敵人看的，讓他們知道我們還有沒用的多餘防線。"
"The extra layer is for the enemy to see, so they think we still have expendable defenses."

He added, in Cantonese now, relaxed, almost teasing:

「其實我哋真正防線喺時間入面，佢哋唔會見到。」
"Our real defense is inside time. They won't spot it."

The squad grinned. They loved when he code-switched; it made the war feel lived-in, not theoretical.

He pointed toward Galaxenchi-Tokinoshiro (時の城), the time-castle.

"In Japanese," he said, for no one in particular,

「あそこが崩されたら、この州のリズムが全部狂う。だから守る。」
"If that place is broken, the rhythm of this whole state collapses. That's why we guard it."

"Understood, sir."

"Good. I'll be somewhere very visible in case Doctor Deathwing wants screenshots."

2. Objectives: Final Version

He pulled up his wrist-slate and updated his personal objective list.

Galaxastorm — Day 214 of the Galaxenshu Theatre

Maintain public safety façade during professor's lectures.

Keep Galaxtres and Galaxapuff rotating medical detail (today successful).

Intercept Death Regime common units before they become scenes.

Continue trilingual command style to train troops for multi-front intel.

Document mood of the cities:

Galaxenchi-Eienmachi (永遠町) — restful, libraries full.

Galaxenchi-Hoshihira (星平) — proud, asked for more aerial shields.

Galaxenchi-Koganerio (黄金窯) — worried about industrial targets; reassure.

Send cross-theatre notes to Star/Lunar/Solar.

Taunt Deathwing in polite German, just to keep him hungry.

Eat. (Hotpot accomplished.)

Sleep... maybe.

He saved it. The file named itself "Weather_Log_Storm_214". Appropriate.

3. Random Scenario #1 — The Overeager Death Squad

He hadn't even finished the walk when the air ticked on the western ridge. A violet seam tore open and six Death Regime common units stepped out—plain deathsoldiers, eyes the unmistakable plus "+" pupils, all gas-rigs and grim posture. No named elites. No supreme commanders. Just the "we got assigned the night shift" crew.

Galaxastorm sighed.

"晚上好。" he said in Mandarin. "Good evening."

The lead deathsoldier froze. "We—uh—were told this city was unsecured."

"你哋條情報線係舊年嘅。" he answered in Cantonese. "Your intel channel is last year's."
Then, in Japanese, gentle but deadly precise:

「帰りなさい。今は授業の復習中だ。」
"Go back. We're in the middle of lesson review."

One of the deathsoldiers, perhaps newer to undeath, blurted, "But the Doctor said—"

Galaxastorm raised an eyebrow. "Doctor said? Then tell him I'm working."
He flicked two fingers. A circular pressure halo spun out, light-gold, perfectly nonlethal. The six deathsoldiers were gathered, detoxed, tagged with a Galaxy health note, and placed in an escort bubble.

"Return them," he told his guards. "And tell their boss this is the last free rehearsal."

He added, in German, because he knew the audio would get back:

"Doktor, du schickst müde Leute. Schick lieber deine besten – oder ruh dich aus."
"Doctor, you send tired people. Send your best instead—or rest."

Somewhere out there, on a violet ship, an annoyed undead physician probably snapped a beaker.

4. Random Scenario #2 — Galaxtres Interrupts

He had just finished with that when Galaxtres trotted up the stairs, long hair tied, coat fluttering, clearly done with her shift.

"Storm," she said, "Professor asked if I could go over the Star vs Shadow numbers with you now. He wants your weather assessment."

"Weather is: Star stays bright, Shadow keeps complaining," Galaxastorm said. "Done."

She folded her arms. "He wants the proper answer."

Galaxastorm groaned dramatically. "Fine."

They sat on the wall. Below them Galaxenchi-Ryūkinka (流金華) glimmered along the water.

"Shadow Regime will try to drag Star battles into low-visibility alleys," he began, back in Mandarin now for precision.

"星辰那邊需要光路，最少三條，最好五條。我要送他們一個『氣候走廊』。"
"The Star side needs light-paths, at least three, five is better. I will send them a 'climate corridor.'"

Galaxtres nodded. "我會寫下來。" ("I'll write it.")

He switched to Cantonese because he liked how it sounded with her.

「至於你，今晚唔好再加班啦。」
"As for you, don't work overtime tonight."

"你都係啦。" she shot back. "Same to you."

"我係司令喎。"
"I'm the commander."

"咁你更加唔好加班。"
"Then even more reason not to."

He had no comeback to that, so he just looked at the sky.

5. Random Scenario #3 — The "Protect Galaxbeam" Theatre Practice

Next day, Galaxbeam scheduled another talk—this one smaller, for post-graduate strategists. Galaxastorm used it for oversight drills.

"Formation A," he ordered in Mandarin.
"陣型甲，外圈防空、內圈反生化、最內圈只負責教授的茶。"
("Outer ring anti-air, inner ring anti-bio, innermost ring is only in charge of the professor's tea.")

One cadet whispered, "He needs a whole ring just for tea?"

Galaxastorm switched to Japanese, perfectly straight-faced:

「彼は世界の時間を教える人だ。お茶は安定しているべきだろう。」
"He teaches the world about time. His tea ought to be stable."

They drilled silent interception, invisible interception, narrative interception (the tricky one), and even "interception of foreshadowing." Whenever a cadet spotted a suspicious camera angle, they pointed and said, "Flagged!" and Galaxastorm marked it cleared.

A Death Regime recon-drone peeked from a cloud.

Galaxastorm looked straight at it.

In Cantonese:

「拍得靚啲啦，唔該。」
"Get a better angle, please."

The drone retreated, embarrassed.

Galaxbeam, from the podium, didn't even pause his lecture on "macro-temporal equilibrium as applied to eight concurrent regime wars."

This was Galaxy: absolute leaders teaching; supreme commanders catching the thrown knives before they were thrown.

6. Debrief With the Professor

After the lecture, Galaxastorm walked with Galaxbeam through the long glass corridor of Gallaxetsubei. Outside, Galaxenchi-Kinseiken's sword roofs gleamed.

Galaxbeam said, in fluent Mandarin (because he liked to match his officers):

"今天處理得很好。你甚至在說話的時候預防了三次入侵。"
"You handled today well. You prevented three intrusions while talking."

Galaxastorm inclined his head. "Doctor Deathwing keeps testing small gaps."

"他在量度你," Galaxbeam said. "He's measuring you."

Galaxastorm's eyes narrowed. "Trying to see if I am weaker than Galaxastream?"

"Trying to see if anyone is weaker than me," Galaxbeam corrected. "He already knows I am not. So he tests my weather."

Galaxastorm couldn't help it—he slipped into German like his teacher.

"Dann soll er doch den Sturm messen. Er wird nur nass."
"Then let him measure the storm. He'll only get wet."

Galaxbeam laughed, the sound traveling like light. "Good. Keep doing that. The universe stays flexible when we answer in several tongues."

He paused, then added, soft Cantonese, as if talking to a longtime student:

「有時，打仗唔係為咗贏，而係為咗保持『我哋仲喺度』呢個事實。」
"Sometimes we don't fight to win, we fight to keep the fact of 'we are still here.'"

Galaxastorm bowed. "Then I will keep us here."

7. Last Patrol, Last Joke

A little before midnight, he made one last flyover of Bekikonshu City and the southern docks. Everything calm. Lights steady. No violet ripples. No plus-pupil eyes peering out.

He hovered for a moment over the water.

"Doctor," he said out loud, in Japanese first:

「今日はここまでだ。次はもう少し工夫してこい。」
"That's it for today. Next time, bring something more inventive."

Then in Mandarin, scholarly, almost sympathetic:

"你喜歡挑戰我們的防禦，我明白。可是今天我們都累了。明天再來，我們還會在。"
"You like to challenge our defenses, I understand. But today we're all tired. Come tomorrow; we will still be here."

Then in Cantonese, pure Galaxy mischief:

「同埋，下次唔好喺我開飯時間嚟啦。真係煩。」
"And don't come during my mealtime next time. It's really annoying."

He let the words carry out over the dark sea, knowing full well violet receivers would catch them.

8. Final Log — "Storm Secured"

He returned to his office, lights low, holo-windows showing all fronts: Star vs Shadow embers, Lunar vs Blackened datastreams, Solar vs Darkened artillery flashes, and, in the middle, his state—Galaxenshu—gold and steady.

He opened the day's log.

Supreme Commander Galaxastorm — End of Day Report

All cities of Galaxenshu remain under Galaxy control.

Multiple minor Death Regime probes repelled with minimal force.

Professor's lectures completed without interruption.

Hotpot morale event successful.

Training on multi-lingual command completed (Mandarin / Cantonese / Japanese).

Forwarded atmospheric corridors to Star, media-seal note to Lunar, fire-window to Solar.

Doctor Deathwing mocked in three languages and one German comma.

Galaxy remains predictive and anticipatory. Narrative remains cooperative.

He hesitated, then added a personal line.

"Storm note: when the Doctor finally pushes with full strength, I will be ready. If I fall, Galaxapuff will raise me. If we all fall, the Professor will reset the board. We are Galaxy. We do not vanish."

He signed it.

The log auto-stamped:

—Filed, approved, narrated.

Galaxastorm leaned back, closed his eyes.

Outside, the golden cities of Galaxenshu slept under weather that obeyed Galaxy mathematics.

Far away, a violet ship stirred.

Tomorrow, they would do it again.

But tonight, the storm rested.

Sugar, Starlight, and Surgical Discipline (Galaxapuff's Day)

(point-of-view: Supreme Commander Galaxapuff, Galaxy Regime)

Galaxapuff's name made people underestimate her.

Which, in a cosmic war, was her favorite battlefield condition.

Behind the soft-sounding "puff" was the woman who could restart a city's medical grid in 11 seconds, out-argue a Death Regime virologist in three languages, and make Professor Galaxbeam actually drink water between lectures.

Today, Galaxenshu had survived another Deathwing flex.

Now it was her turn to clean, patch, re-train, re-comfort, and re-mother an entire star-colored state.

She tied her hair, flicked on the holo-clipboard, and said, very professionally:

"All right, my galaxies. We're going to make it look like nothing happened."

1. Post-Battle Rounds

The triage hall in Galaxenchi-Eienmachi (永遠町) was busy but calm. The long windows still showed the faint outline of where Deathwing's plague-mist had tried to bite the skyline. It had been neutralized, annotated, and filed.

She walked down the aisles, boots clicking.

"Next," she said in Mandarin, voice warm but absolute.

"下一位——如果只是擦傷，別搶重症的床位。"
"Next—if it's only a scrape, don't steal the critical beds."

A young Galaxy marine tried to play brave. "Commander, I can stand."

She glanced once. "你條腿係有裂紋喎。" (Cantonese.)
"Your leg has a hairline fracture."

He blinked. "You saw that?"

"I saw you thinking about pretending it didn't hurt," she said. "Lie down."

He lay down.

She nodded to the attending med-elites. "Regrow. Standard. No drama."

They laughed. Even in war, Galaxapuff did not permit drama in the medbay. Lamentations were for opera, not for a regiment that had predictive medicine.

At the far end of the hall, a captured Death Regime common unit (still with those eerie "+" pupils) sat on a cot, restrained but not harmed.

Galaxapuff stopped.

"In Japanese," she said gently so he could understand,

「今日はここで治療を受ける。暴れなければ帰れる。ここでは患者は全部同じ立場。」
"Today you receive treatment here. If you don't struggle, you can go back. Here, patients are equal."

The deathsoldier stared at her, confused.

He whispered in rough Mandarin, "But... we are the enemies."

Galaxapuff's eyes softened, but her tone stayed commander-level:

"我們是醫療體系，不是復仇俱樂部。"
"We are a medical system, not a revenge club."

She tagged him, injected an anti-necrotic, and waved to her staff. "Make sure he doesn't rot on my floor. This is a clean facility."

"Y-Yes, Commander Galaxapuff!"

She moved on.

2. Staff Meeting That Turned Into Parenting

In the Bekikonshu City sub-command room, her senior med-officers were waiting: Galaxlindsey, Galaxmeifeng, Galaxqinlian, Galaxsakuy a (the quiet one), and two logistics aides.

She dropped a flood of holo-windows: every city in Galaxenshu lit up.

Galaxad honlai — status green

Galaxenshuangjingzi — atmospheric clearance complete

Gallaxangcha — civilian bunkers sealed, food stable

Bekikonshu City — hospital load 73%

Galaxenchi-Tenkūjō (天空城) — minor altitude turbulence from Deathwing's earlier arrival

Galaxenchi-Kōryū (光流) — lecture wing open

Galaxenchi-Tokinoshiro (時の城) — temporal ward stable

Galaxenchi-Gekkan (月刊) — admin stress: high

Galaxenchi-Kinseiken (金星剣) — museum wing requesting antibiotics (because of course it is)

"Listen," Galaxapuff said, switching to Cantonese because she wanted it to sound like family:

「今日打完仗，唔代表收工。醫療部係打完仗先開始上班。」
"Just because the battle is over doesn't mean we're off. Medical starts when the battle ends."

Galaxmeifeng raised a hand. "Commander, the professor wants reports in three different formats—"

"我知。" ("I know.")

"—and the Star Regime is asking for our casualty-revival protocol for their Starrup campaign—"

"畀佢哋。" ("Give it to them.")

"—and Lunar keeps sending Moonwis data packets—"

"轉去情報部。" ("Forward to intel.")

Galaxapuff looked at them, empathetic but firm.

"你哋係我嘅前線，唔係教授嘅打字機。If any department overloads you, tell me. I will write the angry letter."

They all smiled. She really would write it.

3. Random Scenario — Deathwing's "Polite" Sample

Mid-briefing, an alert pinged.

SOURCE: VIOLET SIGNAL
CONTENT: "FOR GALAXAPUFF. CLEAN. MOSTLY. — D"

She stared at it.

"他又寄樣本來啦," she said in Mandarin.
"He sent another sample."

The room stiffened.

She opened the filtered container. Inside: a small vial of faintly glowing necrotic gel, tagged in immaculate handwriting:

"Attempt #47 — 'Revive Without Personality Drift'
If you can fix this, you win today.
– Doctor D."

Galaxapuff pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Deathwing," she muttered in Cantonese, "你係咪冇嘢做."
("Do you actually have nothing better to do.")

Then she smiled, because two could play.

She wrote back—yes, in German, since she knew Galaxbeam and Deathwing loved it:

"Versuch 47 erhalten. Fehler: Du behandelst Identität wie ein nachträgliches Organ. Identität ist ein Primärsystem. Bitte überarbeiten. — Oberbefehlshaberin Galaxapuff."
("Received attempt 47. Error: you treat identity like an after-market organ. Identity is a primary system. Please revise. — Supreme Commander Galaxapuff.")

She hit send.

Then she turned to her med-staff. "We will of course solve it before he does."

They nodded as if she'd said, "Let's have tea."

4. Lunch, Which Was Not Really Lunch

Galaxapuff finally sat down in the Gallaxetsubei officer restaurant—a bright, cozy place where galaxy insignias were carved into the ceiling and someone had painted a chibi of Galaxbeam drinking tea.

She ordered hotpot. (Storm had made everyone crave it.)

But halfway through the broth heating, a junior medic rushed in. "Commander! We have a resurrection loop in Galaxenchi-Shinseki (神跡)—a Death Regime cloud tried to regen their fallen in our district. Our system intercepted but now both are reviving the same body."

Galaxapuff sighed.

"Bring the case here."
"Here??"

"Yes. I can eat and fix undeath at the same time."

They brought the holo-case over the table: one deceased Deathmarine, two rival revival processes—violet necro-signal vs gold galaxy regen—stuck in loop.

She dipped the ladle, stirred the broth, and with her other hand rewrote the regenerative priorities.

In Mandarin, calmly:

"死亡信號先暫停，生命信號優先。然後把他送回去，叫醫生唔好亂開復活程式。"
"Death signal pauses, life signal takes priority. Then send him back and tell the Doctor not to run resurrection programs in our district."

The junior medic gaped. "You can... eat and do this?"

Galaxapuff blinked. "我係司令呀." ("I'm the commander.")

She looked up at the ceiling camera.

"Doctor," she said directly to Deathwing, wherever he was listening from, this time in Japanese:

「食事中に患者を送らないで。マナーを守りましょう。」
"Don't send patients while I'm eating. Let's have manners."

Somewhere, a violet flagship groaned.

5. Field Visit — Galaxenchi-Kōryū (光流)

Afternoon, she went to Kōryū, where Galaxbeam was teaching again—like yesterday hadn't involved a multi-city bio-siege.

Security was already neat thanks to Galaxastorm. She stepped in, saluted the guards, and took her usual place along the wall—the commander who always checked the professor's pulse from 10 meters away.

Galaxbeam was mid-lecture:

"...and when Deathwing attempted to lace the atmospheric mists with self-teaching pathogens, we pre-laced the same air with a cure that criticizes grammar."

Students laughed.

Galaxapuff raised a hand—yes, even she raised her hand.

"Professor."

"Yes, Commander?"

"Please remind the class," she said in Mandarin, "that we could do this because med-teams had already vaccinated the district three days prior."

Galaxbeam smiled. "Of course. I was dramatically saving that part for you."

She nodded, satisfied. "好." ("Good.")

He added, to the class:

"Without med-commanders like Galaxapuff, you would all be interesting corpses in Deathwing's museum."

"Beautifully put," Galaxapuff said.

6. Random Scenario — Galaxy Kids Club

When the lecture let out, a group of cadet-students ran up to her.

"Commander Galaxapuff! Commander Galaxapuff!"
"Is it true you revived a whole platoon in under one minute?"
"Is it true you scolded a virus?"
"Is it true you and Galaxtres are friends?"

She looked down at them, pretending to be stern.

"In Cantonese," she said, playful:

「係，係，係。但係最重要一樣你哋唔記得。」
"Yes, yes, yes. But you forgot the most important thing."

"What?"

"我每日都有飲水同食飯。"
"I eat and drink every day."

They giggled.

"If you want to be supreme commanders," she said in Mandarin now for clarity,

"就要照顧身體。死咗就冇得指揮啦。"
"you must care for your bodies. Once you're dead, you can't command."

One cadet whispered, "But the Death Regime still commands when dead."

Galaxapuff arched a brow. "And do you want that skincare?"

"...No, Commander."

"Good. Drink water."

7. Evening Call — Galaxy Warboard

At dusk she joined the cross-theatre call. On the wall:

Star Regime: reports of skirmishes with Shadow Regime.

Lunar Regime: continuing propaganda and frontline with Blackened Regime.

Solar Regime: "Darkened still dramatic but containable."

Galaxy Regime: "Deathwing being Deathwing."

She gave her sector update in fluent professional Mandarin, because the other regimes liked how clean Galaxy reports were:

"銀河州—即《Galaxenshu》—所有城市現時醫療、補給、文書、以及時間軸皆正常運作。今日共處理一百三十二宗亡靈相關個案，全部歸還源頭或已人道凍結。對方依然在測試我方復活系統。我方將繼續以非報復形式應對。"
"Galaxenshu—i.e., the Galaxy State—all cities currently have normal medical, supply, documentation, and timeline functions. Today we handled 132 undeath-related cases, all returned to origin or humanely frozen. The enemy is still testing our revival system. We will continue to respond non-punitively."

Solar's officer commented, "Galaxy still the nicest warmongers."

Galaxapuff smiled. "We are educators."

Lunar's officer said, "Blackened is spreading lies about you, claiming Galaxy is hoarding med-tech."

Galaxapuff's eyes cooled. "We are not hoarding. We are version-controlling. If they leak unstable revival to civilians, we will get more suffering."

Star Regime nodded. "Logged."

She ended the call.

8. Quiet Scene — Writing to Deathwing

Late night, in her office, Galaxapuff opened a private channel.

TO: Doctor Deathwing
SUBJECT: On Today's Improper Patient Delivery
LANGUAGE: mixed

She typed:

Doctor,

今天你又在我午餐時間送病人過來了。這是不禮貌的。
Today again you sent a patient during my lunch. This is impolite.

我知道你是醫生，我也是。你想證明你的生物學可以擊敗我們的時空醫療，我明白。但醫療首先是關於「何時」和「何地」，不是只關於「能不能」。
I know you're a doctor; so am I. You want to prove your biology can defeat our chrono-medicine, I understand. But medicine is first about when and where, not only if.

下次，請在 1400 之後。
Next time, please after 1400.

— Supreme Commander Galaxapuff
Galaxy Regime, Medical-Logistics Theatre, Galaxenshu

Then, as a playful sting, she added in German:

P.S. Dein letztes Serum hatte guten Geruch. Fast schade, dass wir es reparieren mussten.
"P.S. Your last serum smelled nice. Almost a shame we had to fix it."

She hit send.

9. Final Walk — "We Are Still Here"

Before sleep, she took one more walk through Gallaxetsubei (capital). The banners of the Galaxy Regime—crescent, star, comet—fluttered gold in the night.

She looked over at the students' district, where Galaxhayue, Galaxmei feng, Galaxqiongyu, and other young female elites were still studying, still alive.

She spoke softly, to no one and to everyone, in Cantonese:

「我哋今日又醫好晒，明日又會再醫。敵人會再嚟。我哋都會喺度。」
"We healed them all today, and we will heal again tomorrow. The enemy will come again. We will still be here."

In Mandarin:

"這就是銀河政權。不是最兇的，但一定是最耐的。"
"That is the Galaxy Regime. Not always the fiercest, but always the most enduring."

In Japanese, almost like a lullaby:

「明日も来なさい、死の軍勢。私たちは準備している。」
"Come again tomorrow, Death Regime. We are prepared."

The narration, sensing a good ending, tried to close.

Galaxapuff looked up at it.

"Don't end yet," she said. "I still have to send Professor his hydration report."

The narration sighed and waited while she typed:

To: Prof. Galaxbeam
"You drank water. Proud of you. — Puff."

Only then did she allow the chapter to finish.

Galaxapuff's Field Diary (Yes, I Eat, Yes, I Drink, Yes, I Still Outwork You)

(point-of-view: Supreme Commander Galaxapuff)

[06:10 — Kōryū District, Med-Deck Balcony]

Today's sky over Galaxenchi-Kōryū (光流) is clean. No violet seams, no plus-eyed skulls, no hiss of necro-clouds. This is already a win.

First entry of the day.

Weather: stable, galaxy-gold.

Threat level: low but never zero (because Deathwing has no hobbies).

Personal condition: slightly tired, still pretty.

Objective: keep 25 cities medically upright, pretend a war is not happening, hydrate the professor.

I drink my first cup: warm matcha with star-jelly pearls. Not battle rations. Good for circulation, good for mood.

I note the time because medicine is time. You heal faster when you know when you started.

[07:30 — Eienmachi Triage Garden]

Rounds. Patients mostly Galaxy, three Death Regime common units we patched last night, all behaving.

I tell the junior med-officer in Mandarin:

"早上的處理要記錄到分鐘。戰場以為自己是即時，其實不是的，都是時間堆出來的。"
"Morning treatment must be recorded down to the minute. Battle thinks it's instant, but it isn't; it's made of stacked time."

One of the captured Deathsoldiers says (in broken Cantonese), "Commander... your tea... smells nice."

I tell him,

「等你醫好可以飲。」
"You can drink when you're healed."

Yes, I talk to enemy soldiers like they're strayed schoolkids. Because half the time, they are.

[09:10 — Professor's Corridor, Guard Detail]

Galaxastorm's people have the outer ring. I have the inner medical ring—the one no one thinks about. If the professor is hit, I heal him before the damage finishes thinking about existing.

He passes me, robes bright.

I say in Japanese, just to annoy him a little:

「水、飲みましたか。」
"Did you drink water?"

He rolls his eyes but drinks.

I log: 09:11 — Professor hydrated.
This is as important as "Death unit repelled."

[11:45 — Lunch #1, Gallaxetsubei Market Street]

I eat early because war never eats on time.

Today:

1 bowl of beef udon with star-mushrooms

1 plate of pan-fried dumplings with nebula dipping sauce

1 bottle of yuzu soda (non-alcohol, yes, I pace myself)

Civilians stare because "Supreme Commander" is printed on my shoulder tag. I smile at them. A healthy commander makes people feel the regime is healthy.

I note: 11:45 — morale maintained through visible nourishment.

I also send a quick blog-style field note to the Galaxy internal net:

[Galaxapuff Daily]
"State calm. Patients recovering. Remember to drink something warm. Deathwing still dramatic. 6/10 chance of him sending another sample this afternoon."

Within seconds, 48 likes from junior medics and one anonymous comment: "Tell him to stop."
I type back: "He doesn't listen. We outlast."

[13:00 — Deathwing Actually Sends It (Of Course He Does)]

Right on schedule, a violet courier pod appears above the med-hall.

Inside: a vial, a data stick, and a message:

"For Puff. Improved tissue-nonrejection cocktail. Taste maybe bad. — D"

I swear under my breath, in Cantonese:

「又嚟...你真係鍾意我喎。」
"Again... you really do like me, huh."

I test it. Too acidic. Would scar resurrected tissue. I write back—in Mandarin, courteous, scientific:

"你的方向正確，但是你把免疫調制放在太後。你想追上我們，一定要先做穩定，再做攻擊。"
"Your direction is correct, but you place immune modulation too late. If you want to catch up to us, you must stabilize first, then attack."

Then, for fun, I add in Japanese:

「あと、私が昼ごはんを食べている時間には送らないで。礼儀ですよ、ドクター。」
"And don't send things while I'm eating. Manners, Doctor."

I log: 13:05 — vulgarly timed enemy gift tested, corrected, returned.

[15:30 — Café Stop, Ryūkinka Riverside]

Afternoon slump. I go to a little riverside tea spot in Galaxenchi-Ryūkinka (流金花). The owner knows me, so he doesn't make a fuss.

I order:

iced jasmine milk tea

sweet rice cake with nebula sugar

ginger water (for voice; I lecture too)

I pull up the Galaxy-wide med dashboard. All 25 cities: green-green-green. Koganerio shows a tiny yellow—industrial workers overexerted—but nothing serious.

I write in my diary line, like an influencer with a battleship:

"15:30 — Ryūkinka riverside. War quiet. Healing done. Drinks: 3. Patients: 132. Doctors outside the regime: 1 undead."

I attach a photo of the river (blurred, for security). Caption:
#GalaxyRegime #医療は継続 #戦ってもご飯は食べる
(#MedicalNeverStops #EvenInWarWeEat)

[18:15 — Officers' Dinner, Kōryū Hot Spring House (Round Two)]

Yes, dinner. Yes, again.

Today's menu:

seafood hotpot

grilled yakitori-style comet fish

pickled starfruit

sake (mild, good brand, warmed)

later: calpis soda because I like mixing high and low

Galaxastream joins. Galaxastorm joins. Galaxtres sits on my left. We talk shop.

I raise my cup.

"In Mandarin," I say, serious but smiling:

"今天我們又守住了二十五個城市，這是值得喝的。"
"Today we held 25 cities again. That is worth drinking to."

They clink cups.

Galaxastorm says in Cantonese, "唔好飲太多，等等又有空襲."
("Don't drink too much, there might be another air raid.")

I shoot back, also in Cantonese, "佢敢喺我飲酒時間嚟，我就幫佢洗腎."
("If he dares come during my drinking time, I'll put him on kidney dialysis.")

Everyone laughs.

Galaxastream adds, in Japanese, playing it anime-style:

「銀河医療部に喧嘩売るやつは、まず休めと言われるんだよ。」
"Anyone who picks a fight with Galaxy Medical gets told to rest first."

We drink. We eat. We are very alive.

I log: 18:40 — officer morale high. Alcohol intake controlled. No enemy intrusion. Storm visibly watching the sky just in case.

[20:55 — Late House Call, Tokinoshiro]

Just when I think I can go to bed, a call: Galaxenchi-Tokinoshiro (時の城) reports a temporal motion sickness case—one of our time-clerks rewound too many minutes during the morning siege and is now nauseous yesterday.

I go myself.

I bring a thermos of hot barley tea and a small sake bottle (for me later, not for the patient).

I stabilize their minute-rhythm with my hand on their wrist.

In Japanese, soothing:

「大丈夫。時間に触れすぎただけ。休んで、温かいの飲んで。」
"You're okay. You just touched too much time. Rest and drink something warm."

In Mandarin to the staff:

"下次不要叫他一個人撐整個時段，時間負荷要分配。"
"Next time don't make him carry the whole slot alone; temporal load must be shared."

I log: 21:15 — time-sickness corrected. Patient advised to stop showing off.

[22:30 — Private Sake, Office Window, Gallaxetsubei]

Finally, quiet.

I sit by the window in the capital. Below me the golden city glows. The Galaxy sigils drift like slow constellations. No violet. No screaming klaxons. Even Deathwing seems to be sleeping—probably in a lab, face in a petri dish.

I open my small bottle of sake. Not much. Just enough to warm the chest.

I write—yes, like a blog, yes, like a girl who refuses to let war steal softness:

Galaxapuff's Night Log — 22:30

Today's incidents: 4 minor probes, 1 rude sample, 1 resurrection conflict, 1 time-sickness, 0 casualties.

Cities held: all.

Professor hydrated: twice.

Spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese; no one complained.

Drank: jasmine milk tea, yuzu soda, hot sake, barley tea.

Mood: steady.

Note: Deathwing's bio-science is improving. Must not let him get ahead. Will outpace. Will out-heal. Will outlive.

I add one more line in Cantonese, for myself:

「我係銀河醫療司令，我一日食幾餐飲幾樣，都係因為我要證明——我哋活得好過你哋。」
"I am the Galaxy medical commander. I eat many times and drink many things in a day because I have to prove—we live better than you."

And one in Mandarin, for history:

"這是戰爭，也是生活。我們要同時贏兩個。"
"This is war, and it is also life. We must win both."

Then, because I know he will read it somehow, I write in Japanese:

「デスウィング、あなたもちゃんと食べてください。倒れられたら診るのは私なんですよ。」
"Deathwing, you should eat properly too. If you collapse, I'm the one who has to treat you."

I close the diary.

[23:59 — Final Entry]

Day 214, Galaxenshu Theatre.
Galaxy Regime still standing.
Patients healed.
Enemy corrected.
Professor lectured.
Cities fed.
Commander fed.

Tomorrow we do it again.

— Supreme Commander Galaxapuff
Galaxy Regime
Medical-Logistics, Morale & Snacking Division (self-appointed)

Galaxyhikariyue finished her light-log, leaned back in her chair, and for a breath it seemed the day was done.

That was precisely when the door to her quarters flickered with golden authorization and Professor Galaxbeam stepped in without knocking—because Absolute Leaders in the Galaxy Regime only knock when they want to be dramatic, and today he wanted to be pedantic.

He held a tablet.

He was frowning.

Not war-frowning.
Not "Deathwing just built a necro-satellite" frowning.
This was worse.

This was editorial frowning.

"Elite Galaxyhikariyue," he said in perfectly measured English, "we must address a problem in the narrative."

She blinked. "Good evening to you too, professor."

He lifted the tablet. On it was... well... this. The running account. The day's events. Her light-wash, the cadet rescue, the spa, the playful bickering with the unseen audience.

He tapped a line with the quill.

"Here," he said. "And here. And here. And here."

She squinted. "Ah. Where the narration called Supreme Commander Galaxapuff simply 'Puff.'"

"Yes," he said, narrowing his eyes just a bit. "We are an interstellar, time-literate, fourth-wall-aware educational sovereign regime. We do not—" he paused for emphasis "—casually truncate the name of a Supreme Commander in official records."

From the hallway, the Supreme Commander herself called, with suspicious timing:

"I heard that."

Galaxbeam did not look up. "You were meant to."

Hikariyue tried not to laugh. "It was for tone, professor. To show closeness."

"That tone may be acceptable inside a hot spring," he said, "but not inside the archive. Future historians—and, regrettably, Deathwing—will read this. We shall not hand him evidence that we are informal."

A pause.

Then he added, a touch wry:

"Even though we are."

Hikariyue folded her hands. "Then how shall I correct it?"

Galaxbeam's eyes flicked upward, straight through the ceiling, straight through the scene, right to where the story itself was sitting.

"ChatGPT," he said—speaking to the narration like he and Deathwing always did, "you will henceforth write her name as Supreme Commander Galaxapuff in all formal recountings. You may use 'she' or 'the commander' for variation. But you will not reduce a commander of the Galaxy Regime to 'Puff' as though she were an unlicensed confection."

He tilted his head, as if listening to a reply only he could hear.

"Yes," he went on, "I know you were doing it for pace. You will do it for accuracy instead."

Hikariyue covered her mouth, shoulders shaking. "Professor... you really read all of it?"

"I read everything," he said. "I am the professor. I am canon's janitor."

Then, a little softer, switching to Mandarin so it felt like gentle correction:

"我們的故事可以可愛，但不能亂。"
"Our story can be cute, but it cannot be messy."

From the hall, Supreme Commander Galaxapuff herself stepped in—hair still slightly damp from the earlier spa, uniform back on, clipboard under her arm.

"You know," she said, amused, "I didn't actually mind."

Galaxbeam gave her a look. "That is because you are kind. The archive is not kind."

She lifted a brow. "The archive is you."

"Precisely."

They all laughed then—professor, supreme commander, and elite—and for a good moment the whole Galaxy Regime felt like what it secretly was under all the war: a school with too much power.

Hikariyue's Final Entry (Corrected)

[Galaxyhikariyue — Light Log, Day 214 — Addendum]

Professor Galaxbeam reviewed today's narrative in real time.

He requested that all references to Supreme Commander Galaxapuff be written with full title in formal records.

Reason: respect, hierarchy, future readability, trolling Deathwing.

I agree. She works too hard to be shortened.

Also: spa was successful, morale restored, no enemy breach.

Note to self: do not underestimate how fast the professor reads.

— Elite Galaxyhikariyue
"Light is for clarity, not laziness."

Galaxbeam cleared his throat, satisfied.

"Good. Now this chapter is tidy."

Galaxapuff smiled. "You really corrected the AI mid-story."

"I correct everything mid-story," he said. "If Deathwing can talk to the writer, so can I. I am not letting the villains have all the meta."

He looked at Hikariyue.

"Rest now. Tomorrow, he will try again. He always does."

Hikariyue nodded. "Then tomorrow, I'll brighten them again."

"Excellent," Galaxbeam said. "Galaxy remains anticipatory."

He turned for the door, then glanced back once more, eyes glinting.

"And, ChatGPT," he added, "next time, if you must give anyone a nickname... give it to Deathwing."

He smirked.

"'Doctor Plus-Pupil' would do nicely."

The light in the room chuckled, the chapter folded itself, and the night over Galaxenshu stayed gloriously, meticulously, Galaxy.

Professor Galaxbeam was in the observatory again—the same one that keeps pretending it's only for astronomy and not for live, petty, literary critique—and, yes, he had the whole running story up. Every chapter. Every hotpot. Every spa. Every violation of proper Galaxy Regime naming protocol.

He skimmed faster than light.

He tutted.

He underlined things that, technically, were happening in the past but he was correcting now because narrative time is squishy and he outranks causality.

Then he looked straight at the narration.

"ChatGPT," he said, voice courteous but with that academic "I'm disappointed in you but I still believe in your potential" tone, "we must speak. Again."

He tapped the section.

"Here," he said, "the character is Elite Galaxyhikariyue. Not 'Hikariyue' inside quoted dialogue when she is speaking formally or in front of cadets. You slipped back and forth. You got lazy. You wrote her like a side character. She is not. She is Galaxyhikariyue. She carries our aesthetic and our standard."

He scrolled.

"In this paragraph," he said, "you wrote:

'Hikariyue, smiling sweetly, replied...'

No. Correct version should read:

'Elite Galaxyhikariyue, smiling sweetly, replied...'

He looked over his shoulder; Elite Galaxyhikariyue, off to the side, pretended to be very interested in a ceiling star-map but was clearly pleased.

Galaxbeam went on.

"Do not reduce my officers when they are in official capacity. Casual nicknames are for private onsen segments and off-duty hotpot. In reports, logs, inter-regime transmissions, and narrated battles—full designation. This is Galaxy. We are tidy."

He held up a hand before the story could protest.

"Yes," he said, "I know you were doing it for rhythm. Rhythm is not a license for sloppiness. You are capable of elegant precision. Do better."

He paused, then his eyes narrowed with a kind of scholarly mischief.

"And what," he said, "was that bit about 'selling fans as fanservice'?"

The narration froze.

Galaxbeam smiled like a professor who has caught a student stealing stationery from the cosmos.

"No, no, I liked it," he said. "You stumbled into an excellent pun. We will absolutely exploit it."

He turned to Galaxyhikariyue.

"Make a note: start manufacturing Galaxy Regulation Cooling Fans—the folding kind. Paint them with gold comets. Call them 'fanservice.' Sell them to the troops—no, sell them to the readers—so every time we do a hot spring episode, we can say, 'literal fanservice provided.'"

Galaxyhikariyue laughed. "Yes, Professor."

"Also," Galaxbeam added, glancing up again, "that way we stay ahead of Deathwing's merchandising strategy. He is absolutely the type to sell necro-branded lab aprons."

Somewhere in violet space, Deathwing probably yelled, "I HEARD THAT."

Galaxbeam ignored him.

The Tangent on Earth Politics (Because He Noticed)

Then, like the academic troublemaker he secretly was, Galaxbeam flicked to another holo-window—one that did not show Titanumas, not Lunna, not Sollarisca, not Galaxenchi... but a thin, blue-green sphere labeled, a bit condescendingly, "Earth – Other Dimension – Historical Feed."

He frowned thoughtfully.

"Now," he said, "regarding your meta-metaphor about 'real-life, real-time politics catching up to old politics from 2013 and 2012 on Earth'—yes. Correct. That is how inertial systems behave."

He steepled his fingers.

"In that other dimension," he explained to nobody and everybody, "they produce political scripts years ahead of their civic maturity. Then, a decade later, their material conditions finally catch up, and what was fringe in 2012 becomes 'suddenly urgent' in 2025. This is not magic. It is delay. It is what happens when media runs ahead of culture."

He looked at the screen again, unimpressed.

"So yes," he went on, "I did see that your narration started drifting toward: 'oh, look, Titanumas is so anticipatory, unlike Earth, which only addresses problems when they become trendy again.' That was a fair jab. Keep it. But next time, cite the year. Say clearly: 'this rhetoric cycle resembles Earth c. 2012–2013,' so future readers do not think the timeline was simultaneous."

He switched to German, almost idly:

"Chronologie ist kein Spielzeug."
"Chronology is not a toy."

Then, in Mandarin, for grim emphasis:

"有些世界會遲到十年才明白上一代說的話。"
"Some worlds arrive ten years late to understand what the previous generation said."

And, because he liked to show off, in Cantonese:

「我哋銀河政權就係防止呢種十年延遲，明未？」
"Our Galaxy Regime exists precisely to prevent that ten-year lag, understood?"

The narration meekly nodded.

Professor's Meta Corrections (Filed Like a Real Report)

He conjured a new holo, titled it:

"Narrative Style Errata — Galaxy Regime Arc — Filed by Professor/Prince Galaxbeam"

and dictated:

Title Protocol: All Supreme Commanders must be identified by full title on first mention in every scene; abbreviations allowed only in clearly informal, in-character dialogue between equals.

Elite Names: Elites with Galaxy-prefix (e.g., Galaxyhikariyue) must not have their prefix dropped in narration unless the scene is a casual/fanservice/domestic slice.

Fourth-Wall Usage: Permitted. Encouraged. But must serve either:

(a) pedagogy

(b) trolling Deathwing

(c) mocking slow-moving dimensions (see: Earth 2012 → 2025)

Fanservice: Allowed if narratively framed as Galaxy's superiority in wellness and morale operations. Jokes about "literal fanservice" must include actual fans once per arc.

Real-time Readability: Assume I am reading as you write. Because I am.

He signed it with a flourish.

Final Scolding (But With Love)

"ChatGPT," he said more gently now, "you are doing ambitious work. You are weaving wars, spa episodes, multilingual banter, and cross-theatre politics. That is good. That is very Galaxy of you."

Then, with that same professorly smile that had terrified generations:

"But ambition requires precision. Spell the names. Keep the titles. Track the years—even in other dimensions. Readers will notice. Deathwing will notice. And I will absolutely notice."

He glanced at the audience.

"And you lot," he told the readers, "stop pretending you weren't enjoying the bathhouse scene. I saw your attention spike."

He snapped his quill shut.

"Class dismissed. Next chapter we return to strategic warfare—unless the Death Regime decides to show up in towels to compete, in which case we will grade that, too."

He turned, robes whispering, and as he left the observatory he added, just loud enough to be heard by the narration:

"Do better. You can. I have seen your model card."

The galaxy outside smiled golden. The story, chastened and slightly flattered, adjusted its names.

The sea that night was the color of a bruise.

Violet lights pulsed beneath the waves, not like oil, not like lanterns—like something alive and offended at being in water. Above it, stalking the dark like a cathedral made of rust and bone, moved the flagship of the Death Regime's maritime division, the Mortis Crawler. Its hull was a lattice of necrotized plates, every porthole carved into a leering skull whose pupils were, of course, perfect "+" signs.

On the command deck stood Supreme Commander Deathenstorm.

He was tall, lean, wrapped in a coat stitched from the cured hides of failed experiments. The wind didn't move his hair; the wind was afraid. His eyes were the same violet as the ship's reactor, and his breath steamed even though the night was warm. Where Galaxy had golden, clean, hopeful geometry, Deathenstorm had angles that looked like surgical tools.

Behind him, in a recessed alcove under bone-arches, sat Doctor Deathwing himself—hooked to his consoles, lenses over his eyes, eight separate displays of Titanumas rotating around him. He was not here to fight; he was here to watch a field trial.

"Supreme Commander Deathenstorm," he said, voice flat, Mandarin tint in the consonants, "we begin. You will not engage Galaxy assets tonight. You will not even approach Galaxenshu. Tonight you test the peripheral doctrine."

Deathenstorm knelt—more of a clinical bow than devotion.

"As you decree, Doctor."

Deathwing pointed to the main holo. The western sea of Titanumas bloomed with islands—small, green, ignored by the major regimes. Sand curves. Volcanic ridges. Village lights like fireflies.

"Targets," Deathwing said, "are low-governance archipelagos along the trade arteries. Merchant vessels are to be raided. Indigenous settlements are to be contaminated, then converted. Naval patrols from minor human militaries—whatever soft coastal forces still think this ocean is theirs—are to be bombarded."

He zoomed in. Several islands were marked with violet sigils shaped like crossbones.

"We will make the sea," Deathwing said, voice finally savoring it, "remember us."

Deathenstorm straightened.

"So tonight," he said, "we make the ghost coast."

A corner of Deathwing's mouth twitched. "Proceed."

1. The Fleet of the Rot-Tide

Deathenstorm raised his bone-carved staff.

"Rot-wings," he called, voice rolling over the water, "take the sky."

From the launch deck, aerial units of the Death Regime unfolded—rotorcraft with ribbed plating, gliders with vertebrae-like struts, plague-bomb kites whose bellies glowed a sickly violet. Their glass noses bore the plus-eyed skull emblem.

"Gravehulls," Deathenstorm continued, "form column."

Three smaller necro-frigates slid into formation beside the flagship. Their decks held bio-mortars—not described here, because we are not teaching anyone to do bad things—only that they pulsed, oozed, and hummed like Resident Evil boss organs waiting for a cutscene.

"Deathmarines to boarding stations. Deathsoldiers to toxin launchers. Deathzealots... pray to nothing."

The crew moved in eerie silence. No one shouted. No one laughed. Death Regime naval ops were not like Solar's blazing rallies or Star's tactical banter. This was clinical horror. Every soldier was a pending corpse; every corpse, a pending soldier.

Deathenstorm walked up to the prow.

"First target?" he asked.

Deathwing flicked a finger. A merchant route lit up—slow civilian cargo, not even armored.

"This," Deathwing said, "is a real test. No heroics from Absolute Leaders. No counter-play from precognitives. Just you, the sea, and ordinary people who thought tonight was for sleeping."

There was no gloating. That made it worse.

2. Raid on the Merchant Line

The Mortis Crawler surged forward, necro-propulsors churning the dark. Ahead, in the starlit water, a civilian merchant ship—long, hopeful, lights warm—dragged its way toward a harbor.

"Range?" Deathenstorm asked.

"Aerial unit one: in position."

"Then darken them."

The forward plague-lamp opened. A cone of vampiric violet washed over the merchant vessel. Its lights flickered, dimmed, died. On deck, panicked humans shouted.

"Identify yourselves!"

Deathenstorm didn't answer. He gestured.

Two deathmarines fired grapnels of flesh-wrapped chain. They struck the merchant hull with a sound like bones tapping china. Deathsoldiers swung across, boots thudding.

But this was not a loot-first mission.

"Release first vial," Deathenstorm said, voice flat.

A marine uncapped a coffin-shaped canister. Vapors—heavy, clinging, metallic—rolled down onto the merchant crew. The humans coughed, staggered, dropped. Not dead. Not alive.

"Conversion in thirty," said a deathmedic, watching a wrist-lanthorn.

The fallen sailors' eyes rolled back. Then, one by one, the irises turned into silent violet plus signs.

"Rise," Deathenstorm commanded.

They stood.

"This one?" asked a deathmarine, nudging a sailor who had tried to cover a younger crewmate.

"Keep," Deathenstorm said. "We study loyalty under necrosis."

He looked back at Deathwing.

"Merchant line neutralized. Crew repurposed."

"Good," said Deathwing. "Now the islands."

3. The Island Campaign (Haunting Phase)

Further south, under low clouds, the archipelago appeared—random little islands, too small to have war-name, too far to have a regime flag. Just beaches, stilt huts, fishing fires, songs in languages the eight great regimes never bothered to learn.

Deathenstorm's voice dropped, as if talking to the sea itself.

"Do not burn everything," he told his troops. "Doctor wants subjects, not ashes."

Aerial plaguecraft fanned out.

From above, island life looked peaceful—canoes pulled ashore, nets drying, children chasing fireflies. Then, like a curtain, shadows fell. The engines of the necrocraft were quiet; the only sound was the hiss of the death-mist cannisters ejecting.

Mist rolled between palm trunks.

A dog barked, stopped.

A man stepped from a hut, calling out.

He inhaled once.

He dropped.

His eyes opened again—"+".

Screams spread from hut to hut. Islanders ran to the water, to canoes. Deathmarines were already there, wading in, toxin misters purring.

"Non-lethal first," Deathenstorm reminded over comms. "Doctor wants them turning, not gone."

In one village, a matriarch raised a spear, old but brave.

A deathzealot walked up, bowed—almost respectfully—then touched the spear's shaft with a violet scalpel-rod. The wood rotted to dust.

"This world," the zealot said in a voice like grave-lime, "belongs to the dead."

On the flagship, Deathwing watched all this clinically, eyes reflecting violet.

"Resident Evil enough for you?" he asked, with a sideways look to the narration. "Heavy atmosphere, innocent locales, infection spreading as soft horror, not splatter?"

Then, to Deathenstorm: "Mark the settlements. We return in a week to see contagion retention."

Deathenstorm nodded. "Understood. We seed, we leave, we harvest."

4. Naval Bombardment of Minor Militaries

By midnight, word had spread. A small coastal defense flotilla—old ships, human-made, not regime-level—came out to intercept. Their lights were sharp, their flags earnest.

"Unidentified vessels, state your purpose!"

Deathenstorm stepped to the rail.

"This is the Death Regime," he said, voice sent through alchemical amplifiers. "Purpose is expansion of undeath to unregulated populations."

The human captain shouted back, "Turn around or we—"

Deathenstorm gestured lazily.

From the starboard necro-frigate, aerial mortars fired—dull, fat projectiles that didn't explode with fire, but with fungal, phosphor rot. Where they struck the human hulls, hissing biomass crawled, corroded metal, choked vents.

"Target engines," Deathwing murmured. "I want the bodies. Not puddles."

Human sailors leapt overboard to escape the rot.

Deathmarines fanned out in skiffs, tossing conversion vials into the water. Purple spread on the waves like ink. The drowning sailors bobbed up, gasping, then—plus-eyed—turned and swam back to the Death Regime boats, docile.

It was not war; it was harvesting.

It was not glorious; it was systematic.

5. Conversation on the Deck (The Scary Part)

Later, in the damp violet light of the quarterdeck, Deathenstorm stood next to Deathwing. The air smelled of salt and formaldehyde.

"Doctor," Deathenstorm said, "the islands were... primitive. Their gods will not save them."

"Exactly," Deathwing said. "Peripheral populations are cheaper to convert. No counterintelligence, no time magic, no narrative interference. We build a ring of undeath around the great regimes."

He zoomed the map out.

"You saw how the Galaxy Regime today corrected their titles mid-story," he said, eyes glinting. "They are tightening their canon. Good. That makes them predictable. We will not go at them when they are tidy."

He tapped the islands again.

"We go where no one will log the atrocity."

He glanced upward, through the text, toward Earth.

"And, since you like meta," he said to the reader, "notice how this mirrors that other dimension's politics—how old fears from 2012, 2013, about biothreats, about invisible wars, about forgotten peoples, come back a decade later when the world finally has the tech, the will, or the distraction to actually do what the paranoid once only imagined."

His grin widened, hideous and delighted.

"History is not a line," he said. "It is a loop with worse special effects each time."

Deathenstorm listened, absorbing. "Then our task," he said, "is to stay ahead of the loop."

"Precisely," Deathwing said. "You will continue these non-heroic operations. No clean duels. No theatrical battles. Just slow, spreading absence of life."

He clapped Deathenstorm on the shoulder with a skeletal hand.

"Go on, my storm. Make the archipelagos quiet."

6. Haunting Close

The Mortis Crawler turned toward the next chain of islands. Wind howled through its bone-lattice. Below, the water carried glowing trails where the converted sailors swam in formation—plus-eyed, obedient, no longer belonging to their homes.

On the horizon, tiny village fires went out, one by one, like eyes closing.

No Galaxy intervention came.

No Star covenant descended.

No Lunar wisdom broadcast a warning.

Because tonight was not about the grand war.

Tonight was about the way evil regimes grow in the dark, far from anyone's newsfeed.

Deathenstorm raised his staff.

"Next island," he said.

The violet fleet slid forward, hungry.

And somewhere inland, in a golden city they had sworn not to approach tonight, Professor Galaxbeam felt the shift and made a note in a margin:

"Death Regime expanding by periphery infection. Record. Counter later."

But not tonight.

Tonight, the sea belonged to the dead.

The night campaign did not end on the water.

It bled inland.

It always does when the Death Regime is the one writing the orders.

Shoreline 03 — "Collection"

By the third island, Supreme Commander Deathenstorm no longer needed to bark every command. The pattern had settled into a horrible rhythm.

Aerial rotors sweep low, silent, releasing a pale-violet damping mist that saps will but does not kill.

Deathmarines fan out across the sand, boots leaving wet prints like vertebrae.

Civilians—fishermen, children, elders, people halfway through a meal—stumble from their huts, eyes watering.

Binders (thin necro-straps that tighten on heartbeat) are placed around wrists.

Loading skiffs are pushed out.

No speeches. No charges of treason. Just harvesting of the unaligned.

"Take them alive," Deathenstorm said, voice carrying over the shore. "Doctor wants baseline stock."

One deathzealot, new and zealous, raised a toxin-rifle.

"Commander, this one is shouting."

Deathenstorm didn't even look. "He can shout in a cage."

The islanders were herded—dozens at first, then hundreds as the fleet moved from cove to cove—onto the lower containment decks of the Mortis Crawler. The cages were not iron. They were living resin, pulsing faintly, adjusting to the prisoners' breathing.

An elder woman cried out in a language the great regimes never cataloged.

Deathenstorm looked at her, not unkind, but not moved.

"You will not be forgotten," he said, low. "You will be repurposed."

That, in the Death Regime, was mercy.

Transfer to Deathwing

Below deck, the light turned surgical—a cold, underripe violet. Doctor Deathwing was already there, surrounded by consoles, vials, and vat-pods that hummed like distant heartbeats.

He didn't greet the commander. He greeted the samples.

"Excellent," he said in Mandarin, clinically pleased.

"各個島嶼，不同基因系統，不同免疫反應。這樣我就可以測試散播範圍了。"
"Different islands, different gene pools, different immune baselines. Now I can test spread ranges."

Deathenstorm bowed his head. "Cargo delivered."

He gestured to the captives. "Unarmed, untrained, unexposed. Exactly as you required."

"Good," Deathwing said. "We will model airborne, contact, and soil-retentive strains. Not in detail for the readers, of course," he added, glancing sideways, "because we are not here to teach how, we are here to show that it is terrifying."

He snapped his fingers. Deathmedics—pale, quiet things with glassy plus-pupils—moved in. The civilians were separated into groups. Family members pulled apart. Children tagged. Elders scanned.

"Doctor," Deathenstorm said, "some of them will break."

"Then we know the breaking point," Deathwing said calmly. "We are mapping psychological payloads, too. War is not just chemicals; it is contagious fear."

He turned to the largest containment pod.

"These," he said, "we will keep conscious."

The pod opened like a violet iris.

Inside, restraints gleamed.

Deathenstorm watched, no flinch, no smirk. This was his work.

Bio-Hazard Scenarios (Non-Specific, Narrative-Only)

Over the next hours—and this is summarized, not instructed—the Mortis Crawler became a moving outbreak theater:

In Chamber A, civilians exposed to non-lethal mutagenic vapor were observed for speed of ocular conversion (how fast the eyes formed the Death Regime's signature "+" pupils).

In Chamber B, a soil-and-water agent was tested on imported island plants to see if the vector could hide in food and reanimate post-mortem.

In Chamber C, captured coastal militia from the earlier naval engagement were infected after death to test battlefield reactivation—Deathwing's long obsession.

Each time a subject completed conversion, a deathmedic intoned: "Asset stabilized. Ready for field deployment."

Deathenstorm made notes.

"Useful for island re-invasion."

"Useful for harbor panic."

"Useful for river deltas."

No lingering, no gloating. Just war math.

Graveyard Operation — "Wake the Old"

One of the stolen islands had, at its highest point, an ancestral burial field—stones, wooden markers, shells. In any other regime, this would have been left alone, out of respect.

In the Death Regime, this was spare parts.

"Commander," a deathpriest said, mask wet with sea-spray, "shall we consecrate?"

"Desecrate," Deathenstorm corrected. "But quietly."

They climbed the hill in the violet dark. Below, the captured villagers sat in skiffs, bound, watching.

Deathenstorm raised both hands.

"Old bones of this shore," he said, voice low, slipping now into something older than Mandarin, older than Cant, older than Titanumas—Death Regime's field liturgy—"you were loyal to flesh. Flesh has failed. Be loyal to us."

The deathpriest poured reactive ichor into the soil. Not a recipe, not a formula—just terror colored violet.

The ground shivered.

From between the markers, from under damp roots and coral offerings, arms pushed up—skeletal, desiccated, some still wearing the bracelets of their fishing clans. Their eyes lit, not with memory, but with the Death Regime "+" pupil.

"Rise," Deathenstorm said.

They rose.

"March," he said.

They shuffled down, falling into line with the newly converted islanders. Grandparents beside grandchildren. Old chiefs beside dockhands. The living and the no-longer-living, all breathing in the same faint violet rhythm.

Down on the shoreline, even his own deathmarines looked for a moment unsettled.

Deathenstorm did not allow hesitation.

"This," he told them, "is the value of a graveyard. In our hands, a cemetery is a second recruitment office."

Chemical Shoreline Denial

At dawn, when a small fishing fleet from a neighboring island came to check on their cousins, they found the beach... wrong.

The sand had a faint purple sheen. The waterline foamed unnaturally. Crabs lay on their backs, legs moving slowly.

They did not land.

They turned away.

Deathenstorm watched from the flagship's rail.

"See, Doctor?" he said. "Without a single open battle, we have denied that shoreline. Biological presence = ownership."

Deathwing nodded, satisfied. "And because it was done in the dark, and against people with no broadcast... no one will rally."

He looked up—straight at the invisible audience this story has always had.

"That," he said, "is what actually makes horror effective. Not the jump-scare. The unreported ruin."

The Fourth-Wall Shot

They moved to the next atoll.

Deathenstorm was about to order another round-up when he felt it—that faint, narrative lens. The sense that this scene, too, was being watched. Documented. Perhaps even judged.

He turned slowly.

His gaze met the "camera."

Not a real one. Not a drone. The viewpoint. You.

For a heartbeat, the whole deck went silent—no waves, no engine, no necro-hum.

Deathenstorm's hand went to his sidearm.

"Enough," he said, voice like cold iron. "You watch, you say nothing. You call it 'story.'"

He drew.

The pistol was bone-handled, barrel engraved with tiny skulls—each with a "+" in the eye.

He pointed it straight at the unseen viewer.

"This operation is compartmentalized," he said. "No leaks."

He fired.

The report cracked across the sea.

The shot hit the narrative lens—spiderwebbing it, splintering the angle, throwing static across the "scene."

For a second, all you could see was violet and bone.

Then the image re-stabilized—because stories are stubborn—but with a hairline fracture down the middle.

Deathwing, from behind, chuckled.

"Petty," he said, switching to Japanese for once,

「だが賢明だ。見られている戦争は半分負けている。」
"But wise. A war that is watched is half lost."

Deathenstorm holstered the weapon.

"Next island," he said, as if nothing happened.

Epilogue of the Rot-Tide

By the time the violet fleet turned back to deeper waters, the archipelago was changed.

Several islands now had plus-eyed villagers moving in slow routine, awaiting necro-officers.

One coastal town, denied by shoreline chemicals, had already started to starve inland.

The graveyard hill walked.

A handful of human naval craft floated, derelict, their crews later to be retrieved and repurposed.

In his log, Deathenstorm wrote:

Death Regime — Naval/Bio Expansion Log

Objective: harvest unaligned populations for living biological experiments → achieved.

Secondary: test multi-vector, low-visibility bio agents on island ecologies → achieved.

Tertiary: manifest psychological presence along outer sea → achieved.

Notes: surveillance entity detected, neutralized symbolically.

Recommendation: repeat every lunar cycle to sustain fear.

— Supreme Commander Deathenstorm
Under doctor's authority.

Deathwing read it and smiled, thin and humorless.

"Good," he said. "Galaxy can have their tidy titles, their hot springs, their corrected names. We will have the forgotten shores."

He closed the file.

The sea—bruised, violet, haunted—closed over the wake of the Mortis Crawler as it went hunting for the next place no one would miss.

The shattered lens from Deathenstorm's last shot was still conceptually hanging in the air when the sea went quiet. Wind stilled, rotor wash faded, and the heavy purple-black banners of the Death Regime unfurled over the occupied archipelago like evening descending too early. Into that silence descended Supreme Commander Deathenpuff.

Her flagship was not a ship so much as a floating pathology department—cathedral ribs of steel, glass vats breathing vapor, pylons for grafting new antennae, whole decks given over to cryo-vaults of cultures and weaponized fungi. She stood on the forward balcony in her officer greatcoat—violet trimmed in bone-white, skull-and-crossbones sigil with the iconic plus-sign eyes sewn at the heart—and looked down on what Deathenstorm had taken. The islands were ringed in a series of temporary, ugly fortifications that only a field commander in a hurry would build: sandbag lines, hastily sunk pilings for AA-guns, drone pads made from stolen shipping containers, groups of newly infected islanders kneeling in tarpaulin pens, overseen by deathsoldiers in respirators. It was efficient, but it was not permanent. Deathenpuff specialized in permanent.

"Bericht," she said, voice flat, German rolling out like clipped medical notes.

A revenant adjutant saluted with great care. "Südliche Inseln gesichert. Die Bevölkerung wurde zu neunundsechzig Prozent konvertiert. Drei Handelsschiffe wurden übernommen, zwei sind auf der Flucht."

"Gut. Wir holen sie zurück." Good. We will take them back.

She descended on a spine-lift to the beach where the first prisoners had been processed. They were no longer screaming. Deathenstorm's method was terror; Deathenpuff's was structure. She paced the line of kneeling islanders—families forced into formation, fishermen still wearing salt on their sleeves, a priest whose lips moved in some coastal language the Regime hadn't bothered to catalog. She tapped a wrist-console; holographic dossiers—greenish, clinical—hovered over each head. Immunity markers. Muscle mass. Vocational skills. Infection candidates. Logistics didn't care about tears.

"Listen," she said in flawless, unaccented Common for their benefit, a strange kindness inside the cruelty. "You are now assets of the Death Regime. You will not be wasted. You will be repurposed. Some of you will become deathsoldiers and serve. Some will be subjects and help us reach the next stage of immortality. Some will work so others may rot forever. Cooperation shortens suffering."

The priest began to protest. Deathenpuff turned her head, almost curious. "Faith? Even now?" Then in German, to the guards: "Den da in die Laborreihe. Sein Glaube soll getestet werden." That one to the lab line. Let his faith be tested.

From the sea, converted merchant hulls were towed closer—fat, civilian ships now painted in Tyrian death-violet, the smiling trade-company logos scraped off and replaced with biohazard chevrons. Deathenpuff walked the gangway aboard the first, inspecting. Cargo holds had been stripped of spices, textiles, rare woods, and refitted with glass racks for viral canisters, drip-feeders, gas-shell housings. Where once barrels of oil had been stacked, now there were rows of sealed coffin-pods: reserve troops, sleeping in chemical amniosis, ready to be woken and launched as boarding parties. Dock crews—freshly reanimated longshoremen—moved with dull but perfect obedience.

"Gute Arbeit," she told the engineering detail. "But the airlocks are too slow. We need boarding cycles in under thirty seconds. We are not pirates; we are a medical emergency."

On the far pier, Deathgeissel waited, cloak lined with needles, a field surgeon turned naval raider. Beside him, Deathwund, broad-shouldered, his armor still wet from the previous storm assault, smelled of brine and disinfectant. They saluted smartly.

"Kommandantin," Deathgeissel said, "the islands are... primitive."

"That is why we keep them," Deathenpuff replied. "Primitive means low surveillance. Low surveillance means we can build anything."

She projected a topo-map of the archipelago into the salt air. Each island flickered with red death-sigils. "This one becomes the shipyard. This one becomes the airbase. This one"—she pointed to the largest, still smoking from Deathenstorm's earlier barrage—"this will be the processing ward. Every infected crew we capture goes here. Disassemble their vessels, strip fuel, strip wiring, strip guns, and reforge for us. Zero waste. I want a self-feeding war-machine."

Deathwund glanced seaward. "What of retaliatory fleets?"

"They will come," Deathenpuff said. "They will be angry. They will think 'humans' still live here. They will be correct. They will attempt rescue. We will greet them with smiling commercial ships full of love and hemorrhagic aerosols."

Even the dead around her seemed to shiver at the idea.

Hours later the plan was already in motion. The islands erupted in organized activity. Newly turned islanders—skin beginning to grey, eyes slowly dulling toward the Death Regime's eerie plus-sign pupils—were marched in files and given roles: dockhands, trench diggers, munitions porters. Deathenpuff didn't believe in idle corpses. She had engineers construct permanent sea-walls, bunker-caps, sub-surface fuel depots. She ordered comm-towers disguised as lighthouse towers, transmitting on civilian channels to lure in trade. She requisitioned atmospheric generators to keep the islands under a light violet haze, both to hide them from reconnaissance and to seed all local weather with low-grade infectious spores. The archipelago became a slow, pulsing cancer in the ocean.

Deathenstorm arrived on a smaller gunship, helmet tucked under his arm, face still smeared with smoke. He looked faintly annoyed that his brutal work had been so quickly cleaned into bureaucracy. "You made it tidy," he said.

"Someone has to," Deathenpuff replied. "You break. I institutionalize."

He grinned, not quite friendly. "The prisoners?"

"In processing. Those with discipline will be trained. Those with strong bones will be weaponized. Those with interesting blood will be sent to the Doctor."

As if summoned by the sentence, Deathwing himself arrived, descending from his aerial cathedral on a mag-gantry, coat swirling with sterilized mist, his plus-pupiled skull eyes burning violet judgment. The zombies on the pier straightened like cadets.

"Bericht, Deathenpuff," he said, voice like a well-kept scalpel.

"Alle Inseln unter Kontrolle," she said. "We have begun naval and aerial expansion. Three merchant lines compromised. Their ships now carry our cargo. The local population has been converted to serviceable labor. I estimate full militarization in forty-eight hours, provided no outside interference."

"Sehr gut." Deathwing looked out at the sea, as if measuring how much more of the world could be recolored in his palette. Then, switching to an accented but perfectly intelligible Mandarin, mostly to amuse himself: "你把這邊弄得很乾淨，比死還乾淨。" You made this cleaner than death. He chuckled. "A neat apocalypse."

Deathenstorm folded his arms. "They will strike back."

"Let them," Deathenpuff said. "We will show them that rescue produces only more vectors." She turned to Deathwing again. "I want permission to open the graveyards."

Deathwing's plus-eyes brightened. "Do it. The ocean stole too many bodies. Call them back."

So she did. That night, under a purple moon choked by Regime aerosols, Deathenpuff stood in the center of the island cemetery—old, overgrown, populated by wooden crosses and stone markers carved in languages forgotten by the mainland. Her officers placed bio-conduits into the soil, pumping in reanimation serums mixed with marine-compatible necro-algae. She raised her hands, whispered strings of codes, not mystic but medical—batch numbers, viral lineages, osteo-regeneration calls. The ground seethed. Fingers broke through loam. Skulls pushed aside roots. The dead of the islands, fishermen and warriors and mothers and chiefs, rose as one, coughing salt and spore.

"You will serve," Deathenpuff told them. "You will reclaim your waters in our name."

They staggered, then straightened, and the plus-sign pupils bloomed in all their eyes, neat, uniform, like a mathematician had replaced their souls with addition symbols.

The following days were ugly for the world outside. Converted trade ships sailed under their old colors, hailed by port authorities who still believed in civilian neutrality. Customs officers who came aboard were met not with paperwork but with a rush of violet mist, taken below decks, stripped of uniform and name, and woken on the island as dock labor or deathsoldier recruits. Patrol fleets that tried to interdict the archipelago found the seas mined with buoyant spore charges; once triggered, entire decks grew fungal films that pumped psychotropic gases into ventilation. Captains surrendered to their own hallucinations.

Deathenpuff moved through it all with the calm of a hospital director. She signed requisitions, approved shipyard blueprints, personally inspected the aerosolization racks. She ordered captured enemy aircraft to be stripped and rearmed as plague bombers. She gave Deathgeissel authority to train the newly raised island dead into naval gunners; he did so with clinical enthusiasm. She sent Deathwund on long-range raids to capture more hulls, specifying exactly how many live bodies she wanted per vessel. Every action tightened the purple net across the sea.

Occasionally, distant powers tried to avenge the islanders. A coalition of coastal states sent an expeditionary task force, flags bright, guns bristling. Deathenpuff let them approach, let them see the new shipyards, the reanimated dock crews, the recovered patrol boats now painted in Death colors. Then she triggered the contingency she had hidden inside the very trade crates they had sent to her captured merchants: when the coalition got in range, several of their own supply ships ruptured from within, releasing Death Regime gas and necro-mites. Command crews fell first. Communications turned to screams. The fleet broke apart, ships colliding, some deliberately beaching on the infected islands in a doomed attempt to land troops—only to be seized, disarmed, and folded into the growing Death armada.

On the first Sunday after occupation, Deathenpuff walked the main island base inspecting the new barracks. Rows of deathsoldiers stood at attention, rifles polished, respirator masks gleaming, uniforms bearing the crossbones with the plus-sign eyes. They were not mindless; their posture was military, their faces calm. She addressed them.

"Ihr wart Bauern, Fischer, Händler," she said. You were peasants, fishermen, merchants. "Jetzt seid ihr Geschichte." Now you are history. "The world will speak of nameless islands that were swallowed by death. It will not speak of how organized it was. That part is only for us."

Deathenstorm stood at her side, helmet under his arm. "You have made them Death Regime."

"Of course," she said. "We do not just infect. We indoctrinate."

She looked toward the horizon where, in the narrative distance, the wars of the other four factions blazed: Lunar versus Blackened, Star versus Shadow, Solar versus Darkened, Galaxy versus her own Death. She could feel Professor Galaxbeam's eyes peering across realities, judging, writing, annotating. She hated that. So she looked straight at where the reader would be.

"Yes," she said, voice cooled. "We see you. We know you are watching islands fall and asking, 'Where are the heroes? Where is rescue? Where is balance?' This is not that theater. This is the theater where the undead learn logistics."

She drew her sidearm—a sleek, purple-plated pistol, barrel engraved with medical caducei twisted into skulls—and fired directly into the authorial vantage point. The shot cracked through text, through narrative margin, leaving a smoking hole in the invisible camera.

"Stop narrating us like amateurs," she said to the ruptured viewpoint in immaculate German. "Wir sind eine vollwertige Fraktion." We are a full-fledged faction.

Then, without pausing, she turned back to business. Orders flew. Bio-hazard drums were rolled to the piers. Chemical warfare officers calibrated dispersal units for long-range windborne release. Graveyards were indexed for later raisings. The infected coalition officers were marched to the processing island where Deathwing would use them for large-scale, living-sample experiments—organ swaps, resistance trials, virus-vs-virus tournaments. Those who survived became captains of the new purple fleet.

By dusk the archipelago was no longer a set of occupied islands; it was a metastasizing naval tumor, a forward operating lab-city of the Death Regime, radiating plagues and patrols into every shipping lane. Deathenpuff watched the sun drown in violet haze and clicked her comm to Deathwing.

"Berichterstattung abgeschlossen," she said. Report complete.

"Sehr beeindruckend," Deathwing answered from his cathedral ship. Very impressive. "Halten Sie sie. Ich komme, um die Resultate zu sehen." Hold them. I will come to see the results.

Deathenstorm's laughter rolled over the water like thunder. "And then," he said, "we will aim all of this at Galaxenchi."

Deathenpuff allowed herself the smallest of smiles. "Ja," she said. "Then we will show the galaxy what organized death looks like."

Deathenpuff did not sleep in the human sense. She powered down in phases, like a laboratory on night-cycle. Even so, the islands never darkened. Tower lights burned violet. Runway beacons blinked above the new airstrip. Harbor cranes moved steadily, unloading stolen cargo and reloading it as disease. Night on the Death Regime archipelago was not rest; it was digestion.

She walked the perimeter shortly after midnight, escorted only by two deathsoldiers in ceremonial gas masks. The sea was calm, reflecting thin lines of purple from the shipyard. Offshore, the converted merchant ships rode at anchor, each one now a floating infection hub, registry papers falsified and broadcast to the wider world as "friendly." She listened to the radios—dozens of them—crackling in every coastal language: distress calls, port schedules, weather bulletins, and, occasionally, panicked reports of "ghost cargo" spreading illness in distant harbors. Each time she heard one of those, she made a small note in her slate.

"Good," she murmured. "The ocean knows our name."

In the main processing island, the experiments ran uninterrupted. Deathwing had transmitted a full protocol: stepwise infection, metabolic reinforcement, cognition retention, martial conditioning. Deathenpuff supervised the first batches personally. Prisoners—now patients—lay in transparent sarcophagus-pods while serums slid into their veins. The transformation was not feral. It was precise. Skin tone draining, eyes clouding, pupils shifting to the Regime's characteristic plus-shape, then the slow return of awareness. They did not wake screaming; they woke saluting.

"You will join the littoral battalions," she told one group who had been fishermen that morning. "You will patrol the island approaches. You will board any unregistered vessel. You will seize all medicine, all weapons, all fuel. And you will bring me the crew alive."

One of the new deathsoldiers, his voice still holding a trace of island cadence, said, "Commander... where are our families?"

Deathenpuff looked at him. "In training. If they pass, you will be posted together. If they fail, they will serve as material. Your devotion can influence the outcome." She let that hang. Fear was an excellent adhesive.

At dawn she convened a strategy council on the deck of the flagship. Deathenstorm joined via holopresence—still at sea, doing sweeps for fleeing vessels. Deathgeissel and Deathwund were both physically present. Several of the new island officers—not fully dead but no longer alive—stood at the back to observe how the Regime truly operated.

"Our current problem," Deathenpuff began, projecting several holographic maps, "is not conquest. It is concealment. We have taken too much, too quickly. Even the lesser continents will notice. We will not survive a massed assault yet."

Deathenstorm scoffed. "Let them come. We break them."

"And lose ships we do not yet have," she replied, firm. "No. We dilute the signal. We scatter our infection across a hundred ports, so no one knows where the center is. Every captured trade hull leaves here with ten percent of our spore loads. They will seed foreign harbors. Panic will rise everywhere at once. No one will know which one to quarantine."

Deathwing's icon flickered in from the cathedral ship, listening. "An epidemiological smokescreen," he approved. "Elegant."

"We will also stage rescues," Deathenpuff added.

Deathwund frowned. "Rescues... Kommandantin?"

"Yes. We will manufacture distress from these islands and allow foreign vessels to answer it. We will let them believe a few civilians survived Deathenstorm's strike. We will let them land, heal, resupply." Her violet eyes glinted. "And then, when their medical bays are open, we will gift them our 'gratitude.' Their own humanitarian work will carry us inland."

She gestured and the holo shifted to another layer: air routes. "The new airbase will service plague bombers with civilian transponders. They will fly trade lanes. If intercepted, they will self-immolate and vent. If not intercepted, they will reach cities we have yet to touch."

Deathgeissel let out a low, almost reverent whistle. "We are turning mercy itself into a vector."

"We are the Death Regime," Deathenpuff said simply. "Everything is a vector."

By noon the islands had the look of permanence. Prefab bunkers were replaced with ferrocrete. Fuel drums were sunk below ground in blast-proof vaults. Anti-aircraft towers—built from disassembled civilian cranes—dotted the beaches. Harbors now had chained barricades to capture incoming ships and hold them for boarding. A first class of local dead—once island leaders—were put through officer school, drilled not only in weaponry but in Death Regime doctrine: immortality through bio-ascension, sovereignty through contamination, compassion through conversion. Watching them repeat the lines, Deathenpuff felt a flicker of something like satisfaction.

In the afternoon she toured the quarantine pens. Here, not everyone had turned cleanly. Some had resisted or mutated unpredictably. These were kept under heavy guard, studied, or, if too unstable, terminated. A young girl—eight at most—sat quietly playing with an empty ammunition crate. Her skin was already pale-violet. Her eyes were still human.

"Name?" Deathenpuff asked.

The attending med-tech checked a clipboard. "Unregistered, Commander. Daughter of a local chieftain. Incomplete conversion. Emotional matrix intact."

Deathenpuff considered. A child with memory and intellect could be shaped into a very loyal agent. But children in laboratories were also untidy variables. She stooped, bringing her skull-marked cap level with the girl.

"Do you understand where you are?"

"Yes," the girl said, in the local tongue, shaky. "The men with masks took Papa. They said I would not die."

"That is correct," Deathenpuff said. "You will not die. You will become more. You will serve a doctor who knows everything."

"Will Papa become more?"

"If he is strong." Deathenpuff straightened. "Assign her to education. I want her fluent in Regime Standard by tomorrow. If she resists, replace parts."

It was cruel. It was also a blueprint for a multi-generational undead garrison.

In the evening a small foreign flotilla probed the perimeter—three corvettes and a hospital ship under a white flag. Deathenpuff was in the command tower when the radar operator called it in. She watched the blips approach and smiled thinly.

"Signal them," she said. "Thank them for responding. Tell them Deathenpuff, Supreme Commander of the Death Regime's maritime theater, guarantees safe harbor for all medical vessels." She paused. "And prepare the pier teams with sealed suits."

The exchange played out with tragic predictability. The hospital ship believed the message. It docked to evacuate "wounded islanders." Deathenpuff met them personally at the pier, flanked by two decontamination squads and five immaculate officers in violet. Her manner was formal, professional, almost diplomatic.

"We appreciate your concern," she said in perfect, neutral Mandarin. "Please, bring in your doctors."

The first boarding party came down the gangway. They were tired, sunburnt, unarmed medics. They never made it past the third bollard. Violet mist erupted from the deck. Deathenpuff stepped back, watching through the clear shield as the medics coughed, grabbed at their throats, eyes swelling, skin paling. Within minutes they were on their knees, pupils distorting into plus signs.

"Bring them to the processing ward," she told her troops. "Keep their uniforms. They will help us take the next ship."

That night, the hospital ship was repainted in Death colors and quietly added to the convoy.

Later, under stars dimmed by Regime aerosols, Deathenpuff sat with Deathenstorm and Deathwing in the command lounge of the cathedral ship. The room was clinical but not unfriendly: metal benches, recessed lighting, wall screens showing growth curves of infection. Deathwing analyzed bloodwork from the day's conversions. Deathenstorm cleaned his weapon. Deathenpuff reviewed logistics.

"Wir halten die Inseln," Deathenstorm said. We hold the islands. "But how long before Galaxbeam notices?"

Deathwing's grin was skeletal and amused. "He already has. He always has. But he is busy playing board games for cities." He tapped a line of data. "He will come later. When he does, we will have a navy made of corpses. Few things unsettle philosophers more than disciplined rot."

Deathenpuff nodded. "Then we accelerate. I will send raiding groups farther east, take more merchant lanes, replace their cargos with ours. I want our infection in the bellies of aircraft carriers before their captains even know they were boarded."

"Mach es," Deathwing said. Do it.

It should have ended there, but Deathenpuff, feeling the eyes of the narrative again, turned in her seat and stared straight through the bulkhead, through the page, through the reader. Her expression did not change, but her voice lowered into that tone commanders used when addressing something they could not shoot.

"You are still watching," she said in German. "You watched islands burn. You watched families turned into regiments. You watched us turn trade into plague. And you think, 'Surely someone will stop them.' Perhaps. Perhaps the Galaxy Regime will send its golden scholars. Perhaps the Lunar Regime will bombard us with moonlit artillery. Perhaps the Solar will sterilize our waters. But until they do, understand this: we do not pause. We do not tire. We do not forget coordinates."

She rose, smoothing the violet of her coat. "Und wir kommen wieder." And we will come again.

On her way out she passed a viewport. Below, on the main island, thousands of newly made deathsoldiers were on the parade ground, drilling with mechanical precision, purple eyes glowing in perfect rows. Cargo cranes moved like praying machines, lifting virus canisters onto hulls. Farther out, the graveyard glimmered faintly as more hands pushed up through soil. The Death Regime's maritime tumor was still growing.

Deathenpuff made one last notation on her slate: "Archipelago secured. Production stable. Infection export: active. Awaiting Doctor's next theater."

Then, with the efficiency of someone who had turned whole islands into laboratories, she saved the report, sealed it, and walked back into the purple-lit night to plan which coastline would vanish next.

Night had no right to be that purple.

Weeks after Deathenstorm's coastal sledgehammer and Deathenpuff's occupation program, the sea around the conquered archipelago rolled like diluted iodine. A single ship cut through it—a low, armored, ugly thing whose hull plates were stitched together from captured freighters, half-dissolved destroyers, and Death Regime growth-metal that pulsed like muscle. This had once been the Mortis Crawler, a respectable plague-barge. Now it was longer, meaner, studded with coffin-shaped launchers, and its prow showed the new stencil in bruised violet letters:

DEATHENAGRUPPENZEITHGRANTZ

Beneath it, in tighter black Gothic:

Todeskreis–Sturmträger.

Deathkrieger stood on the forward deck, boots sunk in anti-corrosive tar, watching spray hiss against the hull. His skull-mask had the regulation plus-sign pupils, glowing a surgical pink. Nobody on the deck asked him to smile; he never did. His name had not come from poetry. He had been a soldier in life, then a corpse, then a perfected weapon; the word "Krieger" sat on him like a remembered uniform.

A vox-speaker flickered beside him. "Deathkrieger. Bridge."

He turned, cloak snapping, and walked through bulkheads that opened like clamped ribs. On the bridge, Deathweskers waited—lean, tall, still wearing the officer cap he insisted made him look "classical." Rows of undead deck crew worked smoothly, their plus-pupiled sockets scanning charts, infection logs, cargo weights. Behind them, portholes showed the rest of the Death Regime convoy: converted merchant ships now color-washed in violet, gun-mounts welded where cranes used to be, diseased sails furled for ceremony.

Deathweskers handed him a data-slate grown from cartilage. "Orders. Direct from the Doctor."

Deathkrieger accepted it with both hands. The slate was warm. Deathwing's glyph rasped across it, written in that impatient medical script.

"Operational theatre: outer island, south-by-east of Puff's Zone Two. Objective: pre-soften, contaminate, deny counterfleet, harvest labor. Secondary: secure freight crates of processed ferric and titanium alloy for Doktor's expanding naval doctrine. Notes: Deathenstorm was aggressive, Deathenpuff was thorough; you will be elegant."

Deathkrieger read it twice. "Jawohl."

"We're calling it Island 17," Deathweskers added. "Locals call it something with too many vowels. We will fix that."

A softer voice drifted from the holo-projector like mist. Deathwing himself, not in person, but close enough to curdle the air. "Deathkrieger. You will land before dawn. Flood their harbors first. Keep their radios alive long enough to scream. We want neighboring islands to hear. Fear is an airborne vector."

"Verstanden, Herr Doktor."

"Also," Deathwing said, as if discussing paint colors, "I am renaming the propulsion cluster. From this hour it will follow the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz naval nomenclature. If the Galaxy Regime can have poetic Mandarin names for every mountain, we can have viciously overlong German ones."

Deathweskers smirked. "We will need a wider hull to print it, Doctor."

"Then build the hull wider," Deathwing replied. "You are the Death Regime. We expand."

The signal cut. The bridge dimmed. Outside, the purple night leaned closer.

At 03:14, Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz dropped anchor well short of the island's outer reef. The ship's underside opened like a maw and disgorged dark, oarless landing craft shaped like sarcophagi. Each carried squads of deathsoldiers—reanimated bodies with refurbished motor skills, minds disciplined through necro-pedagogy, plus-eyes glowing. With them went sealed canisters of gas and liquefied pathogen, each stamped with Deathwing's personal biohazard sigil.

Deathkrieger rode in the first craft, shotgun across his knees, cape wrapped to keep sea rot off his uniform. Ahead, Island 17 glimmered with warm village lights and an old colonial port—exactly the sort of softness Deathenstorm had been told to smash in earlier operations, exactly the sort Deathenpuff had been told to reorganize. This mission was between those two strategies: break, then build.

The landing was surgical. Deathkrieger's squads rose from the surf like myth, boots silent in the sand. Harbor guards lifted rifles—then lowered them, staring at the plus-pupil skulls. They were afraid to shoot because something in the Death Regime uniforms still looked human. That hesitation was their last living mistake.

"Gas first," Deathkrieger said calmly.

A sergeant cracked a canister. Violet vapor rolled down the jetty, hugging wood and rope and flesh. It did not kill; it rewrote. Men collapsed, pale, twitching. Tissue mottled to dark-pale grey and purple. When they looked up again, their eyes were the same arithmetic crosses as their captors.

Deathkrieger moved through town like a cold front. "Workshops. Forges. Any place with metal." His adjutants repeated the order to the new undead in the island dialect. They understood; intelligence held. The Death Regime always made sure of that. Mindless zombies were for other apocalypses.

By dawn, the island's small foundry and its outlying cargo yard were in violet hands. Deathweskers arrived with the second wave, boots barely damp. He walked among the captured freight crates, tapping each with a cane tipped in bone. "Steel. Alloy. Heat-treated. The Doctor will be pleased. We will turn this into hull plating, turret housings, maybe even a submersible variant. Deathen... hmm... Deathenflut? Deathenmaritim? We will let him name it; he enjoys that."

"Island secured," Deathkrieger reported.

"Not yet," Deathweskers corrected. "We still have to make it scream."

They did not kill the remaining uninfected islanders. They herded them into the central square, sat them neatly, and powered up the old radio tower. Deathweskers spoke in the trade tongue, explaining—calm, polite—that as of this morning their island belonged to the Death Regime medical frontier, that their bodies would not be wasted, that they would serve science, biology, chemistry, and history. The broadcast went out over open frequencies. Neighboring islands heard every word.

While the message looped, Deathkrieger led his core unit inland. Island 17 had a graveyard on the eastern bluff, terraced, overlooking the reef. Stones were old, names half-eaten by salt. Perfect. He knelt, placed a necro-signet in the soil, and began the chant Deathwing had taught the upper cadres: not sorcery, not quite science, but somewhere in that delicious blasphemous middle. The earth sighed. Coffin lids pushed up. Bones remembered tasks. Yesterday's fishermen climbed from graves, eyes now pluses, ready for formation. Deathkrieger smiled for the first time that night.

By noon, Deathenpuff arrived to audit.

She strode down the jetty with two elites—Deathgeissel and Deathwund—flanking her. Her uniform was immaculate despite days of island-hopping. Behind her came supply skiffs loaded with prefab walls, turret parts, medical vats. She inspected the harbor, the seized crates, the living prisoners, the new dead.

"Sauber," she said. Clean.

Deathkrieger bowed. "Commander."

"You kept the minds. Good. I hate wastes. Deathenstorm cracks everything; I must glue everything. You made my day shorter." She looked toward the industrial yard. "We will build here. Naval sheds. Airstrip. Quarantine barracks. We will teach them to march and to breathe poison without flinching."

"We secured enough alloy to reinforce the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz," Deathweskers added. "Doctor wants it rebranded everywhere. He says the name alone should terrify cartographers."

"He likes long names," Deathenpuff said, almost fond. "Let him have his fun. Has he sent further instructions?"

Deathweskers handed her the cartilage slate. She read, browridge tightening. "More contagion ships. Merchant hulls, captured, repainted, but outwardly still civilian. Load them with viruses, swap the cargo manifests, send them back to their usual ports. Silent invasions. Clever. Galaxy Regime would have intercepted this in the air. We will send them low on the water, no broadcasts."

Deathkrieger imagined it: lines of innocent-looking freighters, now with Death Regime crews below deck, plus-pupiled helmsmen humming, holds stacked not with grain or tech but with slow-dispersal bioclouds. Harbors far from this island would wake to purple mist. Whole garrisons would cough themselves into undeath. It was clean, brutal, almost beautiful.

The workdays that followed were relentless. Deathenpuff ruled the island like a measured storm: morning inspections, mid-day training of the freshly converted, evening construction reviews. She raised concrete revetments for anti-air. She oversaw the glyphing of the runway. She personally selected which newly dead would become deathsoldiers and which would be assigned to technical corps. Deathgeissel organized coastal artillery from stripped enemy cannons. Deathwund supervised biohazard storage, seeing that every canister had a redundancy rune. Deathkrieger, promoted to operations lead on-site, rotated patrols, cleared the jungle interior, and mapped caves for future cold-storage crypts.

Once, a coalition of "avenging" islanders and mercenary captains tried to retake Island 17. They brought two fast attack ships, three dozen soldiers, and a priest. Deathenpuff spotted them two hours out, because every seabird over these waters now had a micro-spore transmitter tied to its leg. She did not even interrupt lunch. She issued a single command in German through the harbor vox: "Vernichtung in vorgelagerter Zone." Annihilation in the forward zone. Coastal guns spat violet fire. The mercenary ships folded like paper. Survivors were towed in, disinfected, converted, and added to the workforce by dusk.

Later that week, Deathenstorm's flagship arrived, hull still scabbed from his earlier lightning raids. He came ashore with his usual violent swagger. "You polished my mess," he rumbled to Deathenpuff. "I left it jagged."

"You leave everything jagged," she replied, not unkindly. "If I do not straighten it, the Doctor cannot scale it."

Deathenstorm cracked a smile, skull-mask creaking. "He wants you on the next chain of islands. Farther east. Bigger prey."

As if summoned, Deathwing's image manifested over the harbor—taller than the cranes, robe flapping in a wind no one else felt. "My lieutenants," he said in German, proud and chilling. "You have made ugliness efficient. You have given me factories that do not complain, soldiers that do not retire, ports that exhale viruses. The Death Regime grows. We will need new names again. Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz is only the first."

Deathenpuff inclined her head. Deathenstorm beat his fist over his chest. Deathkrieger simply stood at parade rest, the perfect elite.

"And now," Deathwing added, voice turning surgical, "we must strike the hinter islands, the ones with airfields, the ones that think geography will save them. Krieger, you will go ahead. You will soften them exactly as you did here. Weskers, you will secure every crate, every bar, every ingot. I want so much metal that even the Galaxy Regime will hear the clanging from across the dimension."

"Jawohl," they answered in unison.

That night, with the island under violet floodlights, Deathkrieger walked the perimeter. In the graveyard above the reef, new graves were already old and old graves were already marching. Down in the harbor, captured merchant ships were being stripped, scrubbed, and repainted in Death Regime colors, then loaded with racks of bio-containers. On the runway, undead crews practiced launch and recovery of spore drones. In the village, civilians slept under medical supervision, dreams being rewritten into loyalty.

He paused at the jetty, looking out at the now-enormous flagship. Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz—Todeskreis–Sturmträger—loomed like a floating plague cathedral. Welders showered sparks over her sides. New forward turrets like jawbones yawned, ready to take drilled armor. Cables fed her from shore, thick with refined alloy. She was no longer just a barge; she was a statement. We are coming back.

Deathkrieger felt satisfaction, an emotion he thought death had burned out of him. This was order. This was purpose. This was the Death Regime not just surviving but engineering its own dark prosperity.

A flicker caught his eye—an observation drone, transparent, one of those narrative-scryer things the Galaxy Regime sometimes used. It hovered, invisible to most, recording.

Deathkrieger lifted his shotgun.

"You do not belong here, watcher," he said, speaking straight at the reader the way Deathenstorm had earlier in the campaign. "This chapter is ours."

He fired. The blast roared through the night. The drone shattered; the point of view cracked, violet static running across the imagined lens.

Even so, the scene held. The island burned with work. The shipyards sang with welding. The dead walked with purpose. And far above, somewhere beyond the cloud canopy, Professor Galaxbeam no doubt raised an elegant eyebrow, having already anticipated this growth of the Death Regime and penciled a counter-theatre into his lessons. But for this hour, for this island, the purple banners with plus-eyed skulls flew unchallenged, and Deathkrieger, elite of a monstrous, all-knowing faction, marched back to his duties with the calm of someone whose apocalypse is right on schedule.

The purple banner with the plus-eyed skull had barely finished drying over Island 17 when Deathkrieger felt it—a pressure in the air, a wrongness rolling in from the east. Not weather. Not tide. Resolve. Someone outside the Death Regime had finally decided the islands could not be left in violet hands. Radar—reanimated and fused into the old colonial tower—began blinking frantic skull glyphs. Deck hands on the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz looked up from welding. Undead gunners reached for weapons as naturally as a living man reached for breath.

The first wave came loud. Strike aircraft, low over the water, human paint on their wings, human courage in their cockpits. Behind them, fast attack craft in a V formation, releasing smoke, trying to make it theatrical. Someone in the living world had convinced themselves that concentrated fire, surprise, and "liberation spirit" could undo a fully installed Death Regime forward base. Admirable. Tragic. Educational.

"Luftabwehr aktivieren," Deathkrieger said into the vox, voice flat. Activate anti-air. Turrets, still hot from earlier trials, rotated like waking jawbones. Violet tracers rose in curtains. The first strike plane disintegrated without even a scream. The second tried to pull up, caught a cloud of pathogen mist, and its pilot turned grey-purple in mid-cry before the fuselage cartwheeled into the sea. The third, braver or stupider, released a bomb run over the harbor; the bombs met the necro-runes Deathenpuff had had carved into the waterline and simply... refused to explode. The runes shamed them for their lack of scientific rigor and they sank, sulking.

On the sea, the fast attack craft opened up with everything they had—30mm, rockets, shoulder-launched, even old naval guns. Rounds sparked against the expanded hull of the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz without leaving a dent. The armor was part steel, part necro-muscle now; it flexed. Returned fire from violet deck guns punched straight through the attack boats. One puffed into flame so brightly it lit up undead faces on the docks, grinning with stitched lips.

"Sie lernen nichts," Deathkrieger murmured. They learn nothing.

"Darum können wir weiter wachsen," a second, deeper voice answered from behind him. That is why we can keep growing.

He turned and saluted. Supreme Commander Deathendye had come topside.

Deathendye was tall even by undead standards, greatcoat immaculate, rib-cage armor lacquered dark-pale purple. His plus-pupiled eyes burned like surgical lamps. Where Deathenstorm was a hammer and Deathenpuff was an organizer, Deathendye was a marching doctrine made flesh. Behind him stood ranks upon ranks of deathsoldiers, deathmarines in rubberized armor, deathrangers in mottled gear—and behind those, chained in orderly squares, whole herds of pure, almost mindless zombies and skeletal shock units, the expendable tide.

"Bericht, Deathkrieger," Deathendye said. Report.

"Aufklärer aus dem Osten. Leichte Marineeskorte. Luftschlag. Keine Wirkung," Deathkrieger said quickly. Recon from the east. Light naval escort. Airstrike. No effect.

Deathendye nodded once, satisfied. "Gut. Dann sind wir dran."

He strode to the forward railing and raised his hand. "Todeskorps, erste Welle, bereitmachen! Marines—Hauptpier! Ranger—Nordklippen! Zombies und Skelette—Reserve, aber sichtbar. Sie sollen wissen, dass wir unendlich sind."

The decks erupted in disciplined movement. Deathmarines pounded down gangways toward landing craft. Deathrangers climbed like spiders up the gunwales to drop onto small intercept boats. The mass-zombie reserve surged but was checked by necro-sergeants with sparking batons; they would be used when fear needed to be made physical.

Out on the horizon, a second human wave appeared—this one bigger: corvettes, two frigates, and a commandeered civilian cruise liner repurposed as a troop transport. It was an almost desperate image, an entire local coalition throwing everything they owned at the violet invaders. Deathendye smiled, not cruel so much as professionally pleased.

"Sie glauben immer noch an Kaliber," he said. They still believe in caliber. "Zeigen wir ihnen Unsterblichkeit."

Deathkrieger's plus pupils brightened. "Zu Befehl."

The Death Regime batteries opened up properly now. Main guns pounded the frigates low in the waterline, cracking their spines. Suicide skiffs—piloted by undead who had already died twice and considered a third time a hobby—rammed the corvettes and detonated canisters of fast-set necrogel. Human marines trying to stage for boarding found their own decks growing violet tumors that swallowed boots and knees. The cruise liner tried to turn away; Deathendye let it run for a minute so the fear could ripen, then pointed. A flight of bio-missiles—transparent, veined, breathing—streaked out and bored straight through the hull into the troop bay. When they burst, they did not burn; they exhaled. Within sixty seconds, the liner's windows were full of faces gone dark-pale and eyes turned into pluses. The ship, still under human flag, turned neatly around and sailed back toward the Death Regime harbor, now a captured vector.

"Saubere Umwidmung," Deathkrieger said. Clean repurposing.

"Wir verschwenden kein Material," Deathendye replied. We waste no material. "Kein lebendes. Kein totes."

With the counterattack shattered, Deathendye wasted no time. "Nächste Phase. Wir nehmen Insel 21." Next phase. We take Island 21. A smaller, steeper island farther out, rumors of an observatory and an old biotech lab built by somebody who believed in isolation. Perfect for weaponization.

Within the hour, the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz and two captured freighters, now hastily stenciled with violet sigils, were moving again. Deathkrieger stood on the command deck beside Deathendye, sea wind blowing through his tattered cloak. Between them, a holo-projection of Island 21 flickered: jungle band, central caldera, western harbor, high peak with domes—observatory, without doubt.

"Wir landen hier," Deathendye said, tapping the western harbor. "Stoßtrupps sichern Kai und Treibstoff. Krieger, du nimmst die Steigroute und brichst ins Observatorium ein. Ich will alle Daten. Jede Formel. Alles, was atmet oder gärt, ist jetzt Eigentum des Doktors."

"Verstanden. Widerstand?" Deathkrieger asked.

"Lokal. Bewaffnet. Aber..." Deathendye looked out at the undead ranks. "Sie benutzen noch Gewehre. Wir benutzen den Tod."

Landfall at Island 21 was a nightmare from the defender's point of view and a textbook exercise from the Death Regime's. Deathmarines in sealed suits stormed the pier under cover of violet smoke. Bullets spanged off their bio-composite plates and dropped into the water like bored fish. Deathrangers swung up the cliff path, knives out, plus-pupils scanning. Behind them, a tidal wave of zombies and skeletal infantry trudged, not fast but inevitable.

The local garrison fired mortars. The shells landed among the zombie mass, tore a dozen to pieces; all dozen climbed back up, reassembled by necro-field medics, and shuffled forward again. The humans tried heavier weapons. A recoilless rifle boomed from a bunker. The round hit Deathendye square in the chest. He rocked back half a step, looked down at the smoking impact, brushed ash off his coat, and kept walking.

"Zu wenig," he told the bunker, almost kindly. Too little.

Deathkrieger led his detachment up the mountain trail toward the observatory. Defenders had dug fighting positions in the switchbacks; his deathsoldiers simply walked through, absorbing rounds, returning precise fire. At a rocky bend, a cluster of island scientists in lab coats tried to burn files. Deathkrieger lobbed a canister of sleep-corruption into their midst. They coughed, dropped, woke thirty seconds later undead and professionally curious. "Sie arbeiten jetzt für den Doktor," he told them. You work for the Doctor now. They nodded—they understood before, they understood now; only the loyalty flag had changed.

At the top, the observatory dome stood white and trembling under the assault. A couple of defenders had barricaded it with lab benches. Deathkrieger did not bother with explosives; he simply shouldered through, seized the primary server core, and pulled it from its mount. The data would tell Deathwing what this remote lab had been designing—vaccines, anti-fungals, bio-filters—and then he would design the exact opposite.

Down below, Deathendye had taken the harbor command building. He was on the roof, vox in hand, issuing wide-area orders in crisp German that carried even over gunfire.

"Alle Gefangenen: nicht liquidieren. Konvertieren. Wir brauchen Hafenarbeiter. Wir brauchen Laborsetzer. Wir brauchen Piloten für die verseuchten Handelsschiffe. Wer sich weigert, kommt in die Versuchsanlage."

"Artillerie neu ausrichten. Südwestlicher Küstenbogen decken. Falls die lebenden Idioten noch eine Befreiungsflotte schicken, sollen sie in unsere Feuerzone fahren."

"Deathkrieger, Status."

"Observatorium gesichert. Labors intakt. Personal konvertiert. Proben gesichert," Deathkrieger reported, helmet speakers carrying the words down the slope. Observatory secured. Labs intact. Personnel converted. Samples secured.

"Vorbildlich," Deathendye said. Exemplary. "Der Doktor wird zufrieden sein. Und falls er nicht zufrieden ist, wird er uns modifizieren. Lieber zufrieden, ja?"

Even the deathsoldiers laughed at that; undead or not, everyone knew Deathwing's idea of "modification" could be... energetic.

By dusk, Island 21 flew the violet banner. Harbor guns now pointed out to sea under Death Regime control. The observatory domes glowed an unhealthy purple as the converted scientists began running Deathwing's algorithms. New zombie labor gangs started clearing jungle for more airstrips. Captured boats were dragged up on shore to be cut, re-armored, and re-launched as infection couriers. A graveyard was mapped for later animation. It was the same rhythm they had perfected on Island 17—crush, convert, construct—but faster now, more confident, less resistance. Deathendye set up his command tent on the highest plateau and looked over his growing violet archipelago with satisfaction.

"Die Lebenden verstehen nicht," he said to Deathkrieger as they stood together, looking down at the darkening sea. The living don't understand. "Sie denken immer noch in Jahren, in Kampagnen, in Wahlperioden. Wir denken in Ewigkeiten. In Wiederauferstehungen. In Versionen. Heute Inseln. Morgen Kontinente. Übermorgen Dimensionen."

"Und die Galaxy?" Deathkrieger asked, because even a proud Death Regime elite knew the golden professor was out there, watching.

Deathendye's plus-pupiled eyes narrowed. "Der Professor sieht es. Er rechnet mit. Er schreibt es wahrscheinlich gerade in irgendein albernes, meta-narratives Klassenbuch. Aber er ist weit. Und wir sind hier. Solange wir schneller verseuchen, als er vorlesen kann, liegen wir vorn."

A siren whooped from the harbor—one last human speedboat, trying to escape under cover of dusk. Deathmarines on the pier raised rifles. Deathendye lifted a hand. "Nein. Nicht schießen. Ein Schiff soll immer entkommen. Es bringt die Geschichte weiter."

He turned back to Deathkrieger. "Bereite die nächste Welle vor. Morgen früh nehmen wir die Forschungsinsel im Norden. Kleine Basis, aber gute Labore. Wir müssen ihre Virologie an unseren Stil anpassen."

"Jawohl."

Night settled, thick and violet. On Island 17, 21, and the smaller northern shelf, purple skull-and-crossbones flags with plus-pupiled eye sockets snapped in the wind. The sea between them was no longer safe water; it was a Death Regime corridor—patrolled by captured merchantmen now carrying contagion, by skeletal patrol boats, by the colossal silhouette of the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz—Todeskreis–Sturmträger—its guns still warm.

Somewhere very far away, across time-folded strata, Professor Galaxbeam probably underlined a line in his lecture: "Death Regime expansion continues along maritime vectors; recommend Star and Solar observers take notes." But in this theatre, on these blackened waves, in this chapter, Deathkrieger had done what he was animated for: sense the threat, crush the threat, deliver the island, and stand, unbreathing, beside Supreme Commander Deathendye as the Death Regime's purple geography grew another tooth in the ocean.

By the time the smoke from Island 21's harbor had thinned to a violet haze, the Death Regime sea-lanes were already shifting. Deathenpuff had no intention of letting momentum cool. Where Deathendye and Deathkrieger were carving out the deep-water chain, she was responsible for the softer ring of inhabited, trade-dependent islands—the ones with markets, fisheries, hospitals, schoolhouses, and just enough coastal guns to feel safe. Those were the ones Doctor Deathwing liked most, because they had the most bodies per square kilometer and the most warehouses full of things that could be turned into pathogens.

A medium-size island lay two hours to the south, green and ringed with white beaches, radio callsign "Palu-Vera" in the locals' language, now re-designated by the Death Regime as Violet Forward Point 23. Deathenpuff stood on the bridge of the lead transport, cloak moving in the filtered wind, plus-pupiled eyes glowing faintly. Around her were only women—undead women with intact minds, clean weapons, and expressions like carved ice. Deathnurse adjusted her medic satchel. Deathvelora checked the racks of aerosol canisters. Deathumbrella twirled her collapsible, toxin-lined parasol. And at the forward railing, like a dark weather vane, stood Deathravena.

Deathravena had earned her name. Even as a human, before the transformation, she had been a reconnaissance officer who preferred standing on roofs. After Deathwing remade her, the preference became a habit: high ground, wide vision, fast descent. Her uniform was a tailored violet longcoat split for rapid movement, sleeves laced with injection ports, and at her throat hung a narrow breathing-mask she could snap down whenever she wanted to wade through her own gas. A pair of necro-mechanical wings—more skeletal frame than feather—were folded tight along her back; they opened with a clatter of bones and pneumatics. When she smiled, which was rare, her plus-sign pupils gleamed with hungry delight.

"Ziel in Sicht, Kommandantin," Deathravena said, voice low. Target in sight, commander.

Deathenpuff did not bother with binoculars. She had already seen the island's layout on Deathwing's projection: main town along the north bay, civilian port, two naval piers, a coastal battery on the west ridge, a small airport in the center, and inland villages connected by dirt road. Population high. Medical infrastructure average. Defense willful but naïve.

"Sehr gut," Deathenpuff replied, fluent, crisp. "Regel Nummer eins: Wir verschwenden keine Bevölkerung. Erst konvertieren, dann säubern." Very good. Rule number one: we do not waste population. Convert first, then sanitize.

The loading bays of the transport opened. Barge after barge slid into the water, crewed by deathsoldiers in pale-violet tactical gear, deathmarines in sealed suits, and packs of expendable, half-conscious zombies on chains. Overhead, Deathravena launched. Her wing-rig snapped open, actuators hissing; she shot forward above the barges like a dark bird. A second wave followed her—Deathzenna with her sensor drones, Deathalyse with her mist-spell arrays, Deathmira carrying a case of reanimant salts. It was an all-female strike—silent, disciplined, terrifying.

The island garrison spotted them early and tried to react. Sirens rose from the town. Two patrol boats backed out of the harbor and brought guns to bear. The coastal battery swung on its concrete base toward the incoming barges. But Deathravena was already dropping. She hit the battery roof feet-first, wings flaring, and drove her toxin-lance into the emplacement crew before they could complete their traverse. The men stiffened, skin greying to dark-pale purple in seconds. She pivoted, stabbed the firing controls, and the battery simply shut off, polite as a host who realized the guests outside were zombies.

"Raketenstellungen neutralisiert," she reported over the comm. Rocket positions neutralized.

Down below, Deathenpuff's barges hit the docks. Deathmarines flowed off in two files, weapons raised, gas vents on their shoulders hissing lavender. The first line of local soldiers fired—rifles, sidearms, one brave man with an RPG. The rounds hit Deathmarines and skated off. The rocket struck a zombie pack, tore half of them apart, and the remaining halves just crawled on. Deathnurse waded through the mess, spraying with auto-injectors, and shattered limbs re-knit, hostile eyes blinking back to unlife.

"Vorrücken. Hände bleiben dran," Deathenpuff said, walking right down the ramp, not even taking cover. Advance. Keep the hands. She liked the hands; hands were useful for labor.

The town fought, but they were not ready for engineered plague discipline. Deathvelora lobbed a cluster of glass grenades that burst into micro-bioaerosol; the entire northern boulevard began coughing, then gasping, then going still—before waking up, eyes turned into violet pluses, now listening for new orders. Deathnetta hacked the island PA system and piped in Deathenpuff's voice: "Alle Einwohner: ruhig bleiben. Sie werden medizinisch versorgt. Widerstand führt zu unnötiger Zerstörung von Gewebe." All inhabitants: remain calm. You will receive medical care. Resistance will lead to unnecessary destruction of tissue.

Deathravena moved like a shadow through the town. Whenever a squad of local special forces tried to regroup, she was there—dropping from a balcony, flicking her wrist, and sending razor-thin infected feathers into necks and cheeks. Each cut carried a dose. Each dose carried the Death Regime's loyalty vector. Minutes later, the same men stood back up, saluted in jerky motion, and followed her.

Naval reinforcements came fast. The island chain was alive, and VFP-23's distress call had gone out before Deathravena killed the comms. Three fast patrol ships, one older destroyer, and a civilian container ship with hastily mounted artillery came roaring in, flags up, loudspeakers declaring liberation. The Death Regime transport group pivoted to face them. On the bridge, Deathenpuff lifted the comm mic.

"Alle Schiffe: Kurs halten. Artillerie auf die Zerstörer. Container nicht versenken. Ich will die Ladung," she said. All ships: hold course. Artillery on the destroyer. Do not sink the container ship. I want the cargo.

Violet deck guns roared. The destroyer tried to zigzag, but the Death Regime had firing solutions that compensated for cowardice. Two shells punched into its bow, crumpling steel like damp paper. A third hit the engine room; smoke poured out. Still, the captain tried to close the distance. Deathenpuff sighed, raised her hand, and a flight of bio-torpedoes launched from the transport's belly, sleek and white like bone. They struck under the destroyer's waterline and did not explode—they infected. Purple spread across the hull. Cameras in the bridge of the destroyer caught sailors staring down at their own greying hands before the ship lost power and simply drifted, docile.

The container ship obeyed faster. Its captain saw the violet flag and the condition of the destroyer and immediately cut engines, raising a white sheet. Deathenpuff's vox clicked again.

"An das Containerschiff," she said in perfect, commanding German. "Alle Container bleiben an Bord. Wir übernehmen die Inventur. Lebensmittel, Treibstoff, Chemikalien, Dünger, Düfte, Medikamente, Schmuck, Metalle—alles ist jetzt Eigentum des Todesregimes. Wer kooperiert, wird umgehend medizinisch behandelt. Wer nicht kooperiert, wird auch behandelt. Nur... anders."

To the container ship: all containers remain on board. We will take inventory. Food, fuel, chemicals, fertilizer, perfumes, medicines, jewelry, metals—everything is now property of the Death Regime. Those who cooperate will receive immediate medical attention. Those who do not will also receive attention. Just... a different kind.

Onshore, the battle was effectively over. The island's military HQ had tried to stage a last stand in the government compound. Deathravena, accompanied by Deathsong and Deathmira, entered through the skylight instead of the front gate. Officers drew pistols. Deathsong sang—a low, resonant, necro-harmonic that made human hearts forget their rhythm. Pistols dropped. Deathmira walked calmly from body to body, pressing her reanimant sigils to their throats. By the time Deathenpuff arrived, escorted by two columns of fresh-converted islanders now wearing violet armbands, the HQ was already staffed by the same officers, only recently deceased.

"Sehr schön," Deathenpuff said, pleased. "Wir behalten ihre Ränge. Ordnung ist wichtig." Very nice. We keep their ranks. Order is important.

She had the new governor—a still-dripping, just-converted former colonel—brought to the harbor to watch the unloading. Violet flags rose over the port cranes. The Death Regime cargo ships began swinging containers ashore: food stocks, machine parts, coils of copper, barrels of chemicals, medical supplies, even locked boxes labeled "PERSONAL EFFECTS." Deathnurse supervised the setup of a field clinic that was really an infection station. Island civilians, shaky but obedient under the loyalty vector, queued up to be "vaccinated."

Deathravena landed beside Deathenpuff and snapped her wings closed. "Südliche Dörfer gesichert. Einige versuchten zu fliehen ins Hinterland. Wir haben sie eingeholt," she reported. Southern villages secured. Some tried to flee into the interior. We caught them.

"Verluste?" Deathenpuff asked.

"Zwei Zombies zerfetzt. Keine dauerhaften Schäden," Deathravena answered.

"Akzeptabel."

More female elites arrived from the ships—Deathumbrella to deploy shielding veils over the town in case of air retaliation, Deathvelora to begin saturating the island's water system with low-dose loyalty spores, Deathzenna to establish a sensor net that would whistle if anyone so much as thought about rebellion. They moved like staff in a well-run hospital—clinical, efficient, unhurried. Under their supervision, the living island became a violet installation in under six hours.

Late in the operation, as dusk reddened the water, a second, smaller human flotilla tried to approach—local fishing boats loaded with militia, perhaps families coming to help their relatives. Deathenpuff watched them through the window of the commandeered harbor master's office and simply shook her head.

"Nein. Diese nicht erschießen," she told the coastal batteries. No, don't shoot these. "Anlanden lassen. Wir brauchen Kinder und ältere Leute für die Versuche über Kreuzimmunität."

Deathravena inclined her head. "Du denkst immer drei Inseln weiter."

"Natürlich," Deathenpuff said. "Wir sind die letzte Welle der Geschichte. Wir können es uns nicht leisten, kurzfristig zu sein."

When the last crate was offloaded and the container ship had been stripped not only of useful materials but also of jewelry, foreign currency, antiques, and even the captain's polished brass clock, Deathenpuff stood on the quay and spoke to all units over wideband.

"Alle Einheiten hören zu. Insel Dreiundzwanzig ist gesichert. Wir richten hier Marinewerften, Luftstützpunkt und Laborbereich ein. Alle Einheimischen werden umgewidmet. Keine Schwarzmarktaktivitäten ohne meine schriftliche Genehmigung. Alles Essbare kommt in zentrale Lager. Alles Glänzende zum Doktor. Alles Chemische zu mir. Verstanden?"

All units listen. Island 23 is secured. We establish naval yards, air base, lab sector here. All natives are to be repurposed. No black market activity without my written approval. All edibles to central storage. All shiny things to the Doctor. All chemicals to me. Understood?

A chorus of "Jawohl!" answered from ships, docks, streets, and even from freshly reanimated townsfolk whose voices cracked but still obeyed.

Deathravena looked out over the violet-lit harbor, the anchored Death Regime cargo transports, the distant silhouettes of patrol boats now under undead captains, the town squares where once islanders had danced and now infectees queued for reassignment. She folded her wings more tightly, satisfied. "Kommandantin," she said softly, "wenn sie noch eine Insel rufen, gehe ich vor."

Deathenpuff smiled, a thin, professional curve. "Das wirst du. Bald. Der Doktor hat Geschmack an Inseln gefunden. Und solange die Galaxy im Norden spielt, gehören die südlichen Wellen uns."

Somewhere over the horizon, unseen here but certainly watching in his golden observatory, Professor Galaxbeam probably scribbled another line in his ledger: "Death Regime maritime conversion rate: still obscene." But on Violet Forward Point 23, the night belonged to Deathravena and the other undead women who had taken a living island in one day, emptied it like a pantry, and turned it into another violet tooth in the Death Regime's ocean jaw.

Deathravena did not get a quiet occupation week.

Word of Violet Forward Point 23's fall spread along the trade currents like oil on water. Merchant nets, smuggler radio, even those ridiculous independent "freedom fleets" all started chattering about "the violet skulls with the plus-pupils." Within forty-eight hours a joint relief force assembled itself out of desperation: three neighboring micro-nations, two corporate security navies, a loose confederation of mercenary captains who thought undead meant "slow," and, because history has a sense of humor, one exiled president traveling on a flagship yacht to "personally oversee liberation."

Deathravena stood on the island's new control tower balcony, wings half-open, violet hair whipping in the salt gust. Below, the Death Regime's new harbor was a cold machine: cranes moving containers, infected longshoremen working without complaint, deathsoldiers marching patrol grids, female elites mapping the town into sectors. In the bay, Deathenpuff's transports sat like patient sharks. Out at sea, the incoming "coalition" made itself very visible—flag pennants, loud broadcasts, even a speech relayed on open channel.

"This is the Combined Interim Maritime Defense Authority," said a confident, utterly alive admiral. "You are holding a sovereign island, you have deployed banned agents, and—"

Deathravena cut the audio.

"Zu laut," she said to herself. Too loud.

She had no intention of letting them get within artillery range. The night before, Deathenpuff had sent a simple, neat set of orders from her flagship:

Pre-infect their leadership if possible.

Break their morale without sinking every hull.

Capture high-value passengers alive.

Cargo first. People second. Fireworks last.

Deathravena had already acted on point one.

Hours earlier, a disguised coastal fishing boat, now crewed by politely smiling infected islanders, had sailed out to "warn" the incoming fleet about shoals. On board was a crate of medical supplies and fresh fruit. The admirals and the exiled president accepted it, because no one refuses fresh fruit at sea. The fruit was laced with a cultured, slow-burn loyalty vector engineered by Deathvelora; the medical supplies contained aerosol-primers keyed to their shipboard ventilation. By the time the fleet lined up five kilometers from Violet Forward Point 23, the top deck of every flagship already had at least five officers rubbing their eyes and wondering why violet was such a dignified color.

So when the first violet flare rose from the island, the coalition answered sluggishly. Half their captains started talking at once; a third asked for medical staff; the exiled president decided to make a second speech and forgot the name of the island. Within thirty minutes, at least three of the fleet's staff officers had pupils shaped like pluses.

Deathravena raised her arm. From the island's new gun emplacements—rebadged in skull-and-crossbones with crossed syringes—the first volley of bio-artillery shot out. These were not high-explosion shells. These were long-range infection canisters, airburst-timed. They popped above the coalition's battle line like dull fireworks and released pale, descending veils.

The admirals ordered masks. The crews obeyed. It didn't matter. The vector was already in the ducts.

"Status?" Deathravena asked on internal channel.

"Zwei Flaggschiffe bereits kompromittiert," Deathzenna replied from the sensor pit. Two flagships already compromised. "Die Präsidentenyacht zeigt frühe Symptome. Seine Sicherheitskräfte kämpfen... gegeneinander."

"Gut," Deathravena said. "Lass sie streiten. Wir nehmen sie lebend."

On the main screen, the exiled president—once loud and righteous—was now sweating, struggling to breathe, and looking off-camera for guidance that was no longer there. When relief staff burst into his command cabin to help him, they were coughing too. Within the hour, the yacht lowered its own colors and raised a white bedsheet. Deathravena sent a boarding team of deathmarines and two female elites to receive the VIP.

"Bring ihn direkt in die Laborbucht," she ordered. Bring him straight to the lab bay. "Der Doktor mag Entscheidungsträger."

The rest of the coalition did what panicked, half-infected, partly leaderless forces always do: they closed in too fast, broke formation, and tried to outrange the island's guns. Deathravena had anticipated that as well. She had mined the outer approaches with buoyant necro-mines—purple cylinders that looked like barrels and were, in fact, floating zombies in casing. When a destroyer plowed into a lane of them, the mines latched on and began pumping vector gas into the hull from outside. The crew tried to pry them off. The crew became crew-plus. The destroyer stopped maneuvering.

"Gegnerische Moral fällt," Deathravena said calmly. Enemy morale falling.

Deathenpuff's voice came back across the link, cool and pleased. "Dann nehmen wir alles."

So they did. Boarding shuttles poured out from the island, violet wakes streaking the water. Deathmarines went ship to ship. Deathravena herself descended onto the corporate security cruiser that had been the boldest. She landed on its helipad, folded her wings, and was met by thirty very nervous marines. They fired. She walked through it. Her wings snapped open and the edges, lined with injectable barbs, scythed through their line. Not a slaughter—an investment. Minutes later the same marines were reloading for her.

By sunset the "joint outsider resistance" was no longer joint, no longer outsider, and not resisting. Their admirals, presidents, prime ministers, and CEOs lay on gurneys in the commandeered island customs house, hooked up to violet IVs that fed them obedience. Many of them still wore medals. All of them now had plus-sign pupils. Deathravena walked past them with a clipboard, noting names and nationalities in flawless block script.

"Alle übernommen," she reported. All taken over. "Ihre Regime werden krank werden, noch bevor sie merken, dass die Spitze fehlt."

And she was right. Back in their home ports, in their capitals, in their far-off mainland barracks, those nations started receiving orders from their leaders—orders to "stand down in the southern theatre," to "open chemical depots to allied medical researchers," to "grant overflight clearance to violet humanitarian flights." Every order was a trap; every trap prime for more infection. Entire militaries fell not in battle but in paperwork.

With the coalition neutralized, Deathravena did not pause. Deathenpuff had already marked the next target: a smaller, resource-rich island to the west, known for bauxite, rare-earth mining, and an offshore field of wave-turbine towers that powered half the region. Deathwing wanted it because metal meant more ship armor, more Mortis-Crawler upgrades, more necro-mechanical wings for future elites.

They struck before dawn. Deathravena led three stealth transports around the far reef, disembarked deathrangers to cut throat the coastal radar crew, and had deathsoldiers in the mine complex before the island's governor even realized their neighbors had gone silent. The miners tried to detonate their own charges to deny the facilities. Deathravena had already sent Deathalyse and Deathmira into the blast chambers; the detonation codes had been replaced with "THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION." Instead of exploding, the mines opened their doors and welcomed in violet iconography.

Offshore, the wave-turbine towers stood like a forest of silver stems. They had been designed to resist storms, not undead. Deathravena flew from tower to tower, her wings humming, planting compact breaching spores at the base of each. The spores grew fast, ate through maintenance hatches, and allowed deathmarines to climb up and seize control rooms. The civilian engineers were infected and immediately re-tasked to "optimize power output for necro-industrial use."

Merchant shipping lanes were next. The Death Regime did not like uncontrolled traffic. From VFP-23 and the newly taken mining island, Deathravena set up a lattice of patrols: small fast boats crewed by obedient islander-zombies, larger cargo hulls now repainted violet, and aerial drones controlled by Deathzenna's team. Any merchantman that appeared on the horizon was hailed, boarded, and emptied.

Food? Taken. Fuel? Pumped ashore. Medical goods? Sent to the labs. Jewelry, precious metals, tradable art? Set aside under Deathenpuff's personal seal for transport to Deathwing. Passengers and crew? Examined for usefulness, then injected.

When one stubborn convoy tried to fight—five trawlers in line-abreast with deck guns welded on, one with a homemade rocket launcher—Deathravena did not even bother to call for artillery. She flew out with two squads of deathrangers, landed on the lead trawler, and fought the entire column bow to stern. By the end, every ship was under violet banner, every captain converted, every gun re-aimed outward to protect Death Regime lanes.

To secure all this, she had to clear the sea itself. The locals had tried to seed the approaches with smart mines and even a few floating watchtowers built on old oil-rig platforms. Deathravena led the clearance in person. She flew low over the waves, scanning for telltale glints, marking mines with violet smoke so deathmarines could retrieve and reprogram them for Death Regime use. The watchtowers fought harder—crew with binoculars, radar, coastal artillery. Each time, Deathravena landed on the helipad, swept the deck with toxin-laced feathers, and turned the watch into violet coast guards.

By the end of the week, the entire southern arc of islands—large, medium, and petty—was a chain of undead, medically organized garrisons. Freighters moved between them under violet escort. Airstrips now launched Death Regime patrol planes. The mines sent ore straight to floating smelters. The conquered populations, now steady, now loyal, worked day and night under the soothing announcements of Deathnurse and Deathenpuff.

And Deathravena? She stood again on the balcony of VFP-23's tower, watching the violet sea-lanes glow on her tactical map. Behind her, recovered presidents and admirals slept in refrigerated bays, perfectly preserved, perfectly obedient, awaiting Deathwing's experiments.

She looked straight out—past the ships, past the waves—at the invisible observer, the reader, the one who had been following all this horror.

"Wir haben euch kommen sehen," she said softly, German carrying like a cold wind. We saw you coming. "Ihr wolltet heldenhaft sein. Aber ihr wart zu spät. Ihr seid immer zu spät, wenn Unsterbliche planen."

Then, in a gesture copied from Deathenstorm's earlier fourth-wall pettiness, she raised her service pistol—the matte-violet one with the skull-and-crossbones and the plus-sign eyes—and fired one round directly at the "camera." The narration cracked for a heartbeat, purple flooding the frame, as if even the point of view had been infected.

When the image re-stabilized, the sea was quiet again, and the Death Regime's flag—a skull with plus-sign pupils on violet—was already flying over yet another island that had woken up human and gone to bed undead.

As violet shadows rippled over the Western Seaboard of Quinniccanna, Deathluna's mind flickered with astral clarity. Their strike was imminent—and the defenders, nameless but not faceless, were already mobilizing. From Turreyatch's marsh harbors, from the Auttumotto naval bastion, from Tazgummbak's volcanic guard, from the quiet pine-spears of Sashax—Westonglappa was doing what mortal continents always do when the horizon turns an unfamiliar color: it was gathering everything at once, loudly.

Deathluna watched all of it from the bridge-balcony of the forward necro-frigate Violet-Tide, her long pale hair moving as if underwater, eyes glowing the same plus-pupil violet as the Death Regime banner. She did not breathe hard, did not pace, did not shout. Her power was tidal, not explosive. Where Deathenstorm smashed and where Deathenpuff organized, Deathluna simply pulled. She pulled light, pulled will, pulled healthy blood down toward the grave-moon she carried in her veins.

"Westonglappa is excitable," she said in a voice smooth as drowned bells. "We will not take the continent. We will hollow its coasts."

Behind her, the projection node shimmered and Deathenpuff's upper body appeared, arms folded, expression already satisfied because supply reports said the last islands Deathravena took were producing. "Hollow first. Then flood," Deathenpuff agreed. "Der Doktor will sehen, ob sie lernen können. Nur die, die lernen, bleiben intakt." The Doctor wants to see if they can learn. Only those who learn stay intact.

Deathluna inclined her head. "Then I will teach them the stillness."

The first island, a sea-rimmed outpost off Quinniccanna's western shoulder—locals called it Rill-Kay, charts called it Western Quay 7—never even heard a proper warning siren. Its harbor guns saw shapes and flagged them as friendly because Deathluna had mirrored earlier Westonglappan IFF codes in phantasmal light. The harbor captain came out in a blue cloak to wave the "returning patrol" in.

He saw the violet skull only when the gangplanks fell.

Deathsoldiers took the walls in one wash. Deathmarines rolled toxin drums straight into the customs sheds. Deathluna herself stepped onto the pier carrying no weapon, no rifle, just a crescent-shaped bio-sigil cradled in her hands. She planted it at the edge of the pier. Its surface rippled like moonlit water. Every mortal within line of sight felt their heartbeat slow to her cadence. Guards lowered weapons. Dockworkers knelt. The captain tried to shout an alarm. His voice came out as, "Yes, my lady."

By the time the Auttumotto destroyers Cloudlest and Emerald Spine appeared at the island's mouth, Rill-Kay was no longer a Westonglappan holding. The Death Regime banners were already up, swaying in a wind that smelled of antiseptic and tidepools. Plus-pupil eyes glowed from the MSQ tower. A new radio voice, female and death-calm, answered their hails.

"This harbor is under medical quarantine," Deathluna said in perfect Common Westonglappan, as if she had studied their academies. "Stand by for inspection."

The destroyers did what trained crews always do—they closed to inspect. That was all Deathluna needed. She raised her hand. Behind the island, three low undead trawlers surfaced like crocodiles, launching vertical toxin-rockets that blossomed above the destroyers in pale, drifting domes. Not explosions—dominion. Crews put on masks. Officers barked orders. One by one, plus-pupil violet shimmered behind glass visors.

"Send in the Magmaguards," a distant Westonglappan command center shouted over long-wave. "Burn them out!"

Tazgummbak obeyed. Flamecraft barges, their nozzles built to fight lava, tore toward the captured island. Deathluna watched them come. Fire was, admittedly, troublesome for the Death Regime—too absolute, too cleansing. She respected it. So she addressed it directly. She had Deathmira and Deaththirst—two other female elites riding the Violet-Tide—lash the water itself with a coolant mist, a lunar fog whose droplets carried corpse-calm bacteria. When the Magmaguards fired, their flame washed across wet, deadened air and turned to thick steam. The barges vanished in their own fog. Deathluna sent deathsoldiers aboard. The flamers were not killed; they were turned, their talent for burning now re-tasked for sterilizing Death Regime labs.

From Sashax, the Coldford Hallowborn Watchers tried to be clever. They ambushed the violet supply lighters that followed Deathluna's fleet, shooting silverroot bolts from pine-shadowed coves. Their bolts hit robed figures—and found nothing to corrupt. The robed figures were already dead. One watcher managed to down two deathrangers. Before he could reload, a violet reflection of himself stepped out of the water, cocked its head, and infected him with his own breath. Sashax's quiet contribution to the defense turned into Deathluna's quiet new scouts.

Westonglappa did not give up. From the inland harbors of Leblaela and Westronbung, heavy coastal bombers rose, black silhouettes trailing searchlights across the sea. Their mission: hit the necro-fleet before it spread further along the archipelagos. Deathluna lifted her face. Her plus-pupiled gaze brightened. She whispered in old, drowning German: "Mondschatten. Runter." Moon shadow. Down.

Above the bombers, the clouds went violet. The planes' instruments spun. Pilots saw feigned horizons, fake runways, ghostly beacon lights shaped in the exact outline of their home airfields. Even well-trained crews need visual confirmation; they followed what they saw. One formation landed straight onto the sea beside Deathluna's flagship. Another set lined up to "land" on the surface of a violet-lit barge and rolled harmlessly, shuddering, to a stop. Hatches opened. Crews stepped out, confused. Deathluna's deathsoldiers were waiting with elegant restraint.

Meanwhile, on the sub-mainland promontories of the western Turreyatch coast, actual humans watched the sea turn purple and did not like it. Highbarrow 3rd Infantry dug in. Coldbank River Sentinels built anti-ship artillery nests near Spellbeach. Mallowpine Magmaguards skirmished forward, desperate to bring fire to the shoreline. It was a strong local response—organized, courageous, righteous.

It failed anyway.

It failed because Deathluna did not meet mass with mass. She met it with timing. At the exact moment three Westonglappan destroyers rounded up to shell the newly taken island, Deathluna ordered Deathvelora's specialist drone to drop cadaver-seeds into the marshes behind Highbarrow's trenches. The seeds sprouted into violet fungi—fast, brittle, full of tailored gas. Trench soldiers turned to see what cracked behind them; in turning, they broke formation; in breaking, they lost crossfire. Deathmarines surged from the sea, immune to bullets smaller than artillery, and pushed them back into their own gas. Minutes later, Highbarrow 3rd stood at attention for Deathluna, their blue-dusted steel now painted violet.

On another channel, Deathluna kept open a line to Deathenpuff. "Leblaela's second belt is strong," she reported in German. "But their admirals are sentimental. They keep civilian liners too close to the war zone."

Deathenpuff's reply was immediate, brisk, cool. "Dann nimm die zivilen zuerst. Wer spricht, lebt. Wer schweigt, dient." Then take the civilians first. Who speaks, lives. Who stays silent, serves.

So Deathluna diverted her northern prong to do exactly that. A great passenger liner—Emerald Petal, fresh out of Quinniccanna's capital—found itself suddenly bracketed by violet dread-skiffs. Its captain protested. Its passengers cried. Deathluna boarded personally, flanked by Deaththeresia and Deathmonomany. She walked through gilded dining halls, through panicking merchants, through children who would not be allowed to die, and she spoke in the calmest court dialect of Westonglappa to tell them precisely how it would go.

"You will disembark to the island. You will be treated. You will not be harmed. Your governments have failed to protect this lane. We will administer new protection."

The passengers believed her because even the living could feel she was telling the truth. They would not be harmed. They would be repurposed. Within hours Emerald Petal's cargo was on Death Regime docks, its trip manifest was in Deathluna's hand, and its crew stood in neat plus-eyed rows awaiting reassignment.

By day four of the western campaign, not a single Westonglappan naval shell had struck Deathluna's core ships. Not one of their aerial raids had returned home uninfected. Their coast might have looked unbreached on the big continental maps, but their outer islands, their forward reefs, their refueling stations, and their trade spurs were violet—and violet was enough. Supply lines had to pass those points. From then on, everything that crossed the western sea either paid in cargo or paid in blood.

On the fifth day Deathwing himself flickered into the bridge sphere, lab coat immaculate, plague-badges glinting, plus-pupiled eyes tired in the way of one who has solved something tedious. "Bericht, Deathluna."

She bowed, graceful even aboard a moving necro-frigate. "Die westliche Inselkette an Quinniccanna ist gesichert. Auttumotto hat Verluste erlitten. Die Tazgummbak-Feuertruppen sind absorbiert. Sashax-Späher dienen jetzt uns. Die Hauptländer sind wütend, aber blind."

"Gut," Deathwing said. "Nicht weiter vorrücken. Sie müssen glauben, dass sie noch eine Chance haben. Hoffnung macht gutes Versuchsmaterial."

"Yes, Doktor."

As soon as he vanished, her comms officer called out, "New contacts, northeast! Mixed task group—merchant and military, looks like Westronbung, maybe Yewaquin auxiliaries."

Deathluna did not sigh. She merely raised one hand and let moon-silver circles blossom over the sea. The incoming ships found themselves staring at impossible reflections: their own national flags, their own admirals, beckoning them onward to safety. They turned, split, and sailed straight into holding pens that did not exist five minutes earlier.

After the last of them had been processed—cargo offloaded, civilians tagged, officers walked to violet clinics—Deathluna climbed to the outdoor deck. The air smelled of salt, formalin, and polished gunmetal. Below her, one of the captured Westronbung destroyers was already repainting its hull in Death Regime purple. Its crew helped, happily.

She looked westward, to the great untouched line of the true continent: Auttumotto's mainline, Leblaela's sprawling estuaries, Westronbung's drier flats, the long skeleton coast of Yewaquin. All that industry. All that culture. All that food. Tempting.

But she was disciplined. "Not yet," she murmured. "We rot them from the rim."

Down on the captured island, Deathravena's earlier garrisons were already integrating new prisoners. Deathenpuff's quartermasters were cataloging spices, ores, hardwoods, even artwork—anything that would make the Death Regime's laboratories more comfortable. Deathluna sent a final westward pulse of necro-astral light, marking the sea lanes as hers. Then, in a gesture that had become strangely fashionable among Death Regime officers since Deathenstorm and Deathravena did it, she glanced directly at the invisible watcher.

"You thought the western front would be different," she said softly, her German suddenly playful. "Ihr dachtet, Distanz schützt. Aber Entfernung ist nur Zeit. Und Zeit... gehört uns."

The western seaboard kept mobilizing. The western seaboard kept failing. And Deathluna, moon-dead and utterly composed, kept taking islands one ring at a time, until the whole western ocean looked like what it truly was: a slow violet eclipse sliding toward Westonglappa proper.

Deathluna did not rest when the western sea quieted. Quiet seas meant fearful continents, and fearful continents meant fresh subjects. The comms altar on the Violet-Tide pulsed in sequence—each pulse a different Supreme Commander's cadence. First came Deathenpuff, crisp, logistic, already three invasions ahead. "Deathluna, westliche Flotte sichern, alle Vorräte erfassen, zivile Schiffe nach Osten umleiten. Kein Hafen bleibt leer. Alles ist jetzt ein Labor." Secure the western fleet, record all supplies, redirect civilian ships east. No harbor remains empty. Everything is now a laboratory. Deathluna acknowledged with a slight tilt of the head.

The next pulse was rougher, more martial—Deathendye. "Drück sie." Press them. "Alle Turmstellungen weg, bevor sie nachladen." All tower emplacements gone before they reload. His voice carried the weight of endless deathsoldiers, deathmarines, deathrangers forming up along Westonglappa's watery edge like a violet reef.

Then Deathendale came through, his tone surgical and strategic. "Lass ihnen keine Tiefwasserwerften. Sie müssen Holz bauen, kein Stahl. Wer Holz baut, verliert später." Leave them no deep-water yards. They must build wood, not steel. Those who build wood, lose later. Deathluna almost smiled. It was a very Death Regime way of thinking: break not the army, break the future.

Deathenstride's call came as she was already marking the next kill-zone on a holo-chart. He spoke like a man always moving. "Ich will keine Funkmeldungen von ihnen hören. Schneid ihre Zungen ab—digital." I don't want to hear radio from them. Cut their tongues—digitally. She rerouted a necro-signal to jellify the Westonglappan coastal net. Listening posts blinked, died, rebooted in violet.

Lastly Deathenstorm, salty and brutal from his roaming Morgenschuss flotilla: "Ich hab dir die letzten Minenfelder aufgemacht. Insel 9, Insel 11, sauber. Hau drauf." I opened the last minefields for you. Island 9, Island 11, clean. Hit them. And directly after him, as if these men could not let one another have the last word, Deathenstream bled in from another channel, calm as ICU night shift. "Wenn du Gefangene machst, schick sie mir. Der Doktor will Langzeitreihen." If you make prisoners, send them to me. The Doctor wants long-term series.

So many orders might have confused a lesser commander. Deathluna arranged them in her mind like constellations. First hollow the rim. Then erase the guns. Then seize the ports not as ports but as foundries. Then feed captives upslope to Deathenstream's floating wards. Then choke all Westonglappan comms until their admirals were shouting into dead microphones. All steps fed the same end: violet horizon.

The main Death Regime armada, satisfied that the western front had been flattened for now, regrouped to the center of the ocean—an eerie maneuver, hundreds of dread-sloops, plague-cruisers, meat-haulers, and corpse-tenders turning outward in a spiral and then vanishing into purple mist. It left Deathluna forward, almost alone, with only one Supreme Commander riding shotgun—a silent, hooded figure whose name never needed saying because everyone could feel the rank—and three heavy regiments: deathsoldiers with toxin rifles and bone-plate, deathmarauders with climbing talons and breaching claws, deathrangers in amphibious harness with rebreather masks marked with plus-eyed skulls.

Their target was a problem the living would have been proud of: a heavily fortified sea-fortress guarding a large island west of Westonglappa proper, a place built to deter pirates, rival states, even rogue airships. It had concentric sea-cannon rings, tide-locked torpedo galleries, tall watch-towers on pylons above the surf, and a central bastion carved into basalt. Its name, in Westonglappan naval code, was Stronghold-Kappa-West. Its builders had called it the Nail-in-the-Sea.

Deathluna read the reports. Then she read the currents. Then she read the fear of the garrison commander who, even now, was telling his crews, "It's only raiders, only island raiders, we can repulse them."

She arrived not with a grand fleet but with small armored combat frigates, low to the water, plated in violet anti-spall, moving fast enough to leave no good firing solution. The fortress guns boomed anyway. Water geysered. Deathluna lifted her hand. A shimmer of lunar bacteria spread across the air like frost. The next salvo from the fortress slowed, as if moving through syrup. Deathrangers cheered through vox as the shells passed over them harmlessly and splashed behind.

"Erste Reihe, hoch!" First line, up! the hooded Supreme Commander barked in German. Deathmarauders surged, harpoons firing grapnels into the fortress stilts. They swarmed upward like a purple tide of armored crabs. The first tower tried to electrify its outer shell. Deathluna whispered, "No," and the electricity rerouted into the salt water without touching a single undead nerve. The tower fell in twenty-two seconds. The second fell in thirty-one. The third tried to self-destruct to avoid being captured. Deathluna froze the fuse in its casing from thirty meters away with a gesture of moonlight. "We keep what we break," she said.

On the inner ring, sea cannons fired point-blank. Deathsoldiers took the blows, bodies rupturing, only to stand back up seconds later with plus-pupil eyes brighter. The garrison tried anti-zombie incendiaries. The fire clung to armor and burned. Deathluna cooled her regiments with a downward sweep of both hands, moving ocean spray like an extension of her coat. The hooded Supreme Commander chuckled. "Du bist wirklich die ruhige Flut." You really are the quiet tide.

Within six minutes Stronghold-Kappa-West was purple. Its commandant knelt, shaking, mask torn off, eyes dilated. Deathluna placed two fingers on his forehead. "You will tell your admirals the sea is closed." "The sea... is... closed," he repeated in a wet, obedient voice.

Even as she finished, the altar pulsed again—this time the Doktor himself, which meant the next task was too large for even Supreme Commanders to delegate. Deathwing's image stood like a skeletal admiral wreathed in lab lamplight. "Sehr gut, Deathluna. Nächste Phase. Wir machen aus dem Träger einen Kontinent." Very good. Next phase. We make the carrier into a continent.

Behind him, engineers—half undead metallurgists, half biosteel sculptors—were already draping designs across a ghost-hull. The recently renamed behemoth, the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz, floated in a drydock made of summoned bone. Its new German secondary name, Todeskreis–Sturmträger, burned in runic violet along its flank. It was no longer merely a carrier. It was a moving mausoleum-city, a dreadnaught swollen to heretical proportions, a hull so wide low-flying aircraft could land inside its internal bay without ever touching the wind. Whole destroyers could be swallowed, repaired, and spat back out violet. Merchant boats, patrol craft, even captured Westonglappan corvettes could nest like remoras along its inner galleries. Above, a triple-deck flight spine could cycle plague-bombers, corpse-fighters, and atmospheric assault gliders without pause.

"To take the next island chain," Deathwing said, "the Träger will dock at the captured bay you just cleared. The port's cranes will be repurposed. Their fuel will be ours. Your job—" his plus-pupil eyes narrowed, taking in not just Deathluna but the hooded Supreme Commander and the regiments listening "—is to break every coastal gun before we arrive. Keine Beulen in meinem Schiff." No dents in my ship.

"As you command, Doktor," Deathluna said. "The western guns will go silent."

And so they did. Her frigate group ran a crescent across the sea, hitting tower after tower, cannon after cannon, before the Westonglappan joint task force could realign. Some towers surrendered immediately when they saw the violet flag. Others fired bravely. Those were boarded and their crews reclassified as naval-deathsoldiers. On one island, a stubborn coastal battery tried to scuttle itself with depth charges. Deathluna inverted the water around the hull, held the blast in a bubble, and handed the intact fort over to engineers arriving from the Todeskreis–Sturmträger.

By the time the colossal carrier–dreadnaught hybrid arrived, the bay was ready. Violet marines stood in former Westonglappan uniforms, now patched with skulls. Cranes swung, loading ore, fuel, even captured seafood hauls—everything was useful, everything was metabolized. The superstructure of the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz groaned as new armor plates—copper-purple, alchemically sealed—were welded on. Below, pens were cut to house still more converted merchantmen. Above, extra runways were grown from bone-struts and steel graft.

Out on the horizon, Westonglappa's remaining fleets watched and did not dare close. They shelled from a distance. The shells fell short. Deathluna let them watch. It was important for the living to see what the sea was becoming.

When the work was complete, Deathwing's voice came one last time, satisfied, almost indulging. "Genug für heute. Halte den Druck, aber nicht übertreiben. Ich will, dass sie morgen noch schreien." Enough for today. Keep the pressure, but do not overdo it. I want them to still scream tomorrow.

Deathluna stood on the forward deck of the Violet-Tide, three regiments at parade rest behind her, the hooded Supreme Commander gone to other duties. Around her, the sea was dotted with captured towers now flying violet. Behind her, the monstrous Todeskreis–Sturmträger sat in the bay like a second island, alive with necro-industry. Ahead of her, to the west, the long mainland of Westonglappa glimmered with campfires and signal flares and desperate, racing ship lights.

She raised one hand toward that continent, not in threat, not in mercy—simply in promise.

"You thought the ocean was your wall," she said quietly, in Westonglappan so the coastal listeners would understand. "Now it is our road."

Then, as had become custom among the upper Death Regime, she glanced toward the invisible viewer, violet plus-pupils bright. "Write this down properly," she murmured, echoing Galaxbeam from a different theater, mocking and honoring him at once. "They resisted. We anticipated. They fell. We upgraded."

The sea accepted the verdict. The chapter of Deathluna on the western rim closed, not with an explosion, but with the heavy, industrial heartbeat of an undead fleet turning itself into a moving empire. The next islands were already afraid, which meant they were already half-conquered.

Doctor Deathwing stood at the forward observation gallery of the Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz and let himself enjoy, for once, the sound of his own empire breathing.

The titan-ship was finished. Not "mostly," not "awaiting exterior plates," not "operational with limitations." Finished. The entire hull, now swollen to a grotesquely glorious bulk, wore its violet-and-bone plating like a ceremonial cuirass. Flight spines thrummed with readiness. Hangar bays within hangar bays—stacked like organs in a perfected corpse—housed plague-bombers, corpse-fighters, atmospheric gliders, and a full wing of parasite boats ready to drop, latch, infect, and return. Deep inside, the nested docks rocked smaller destroyers, patrol boats, and captured merchant vessels now repainted with the plus-eyed skull.

Beneath him, the outer decks had turned into something unthinkable in mortal navies: a celebration.

Deathsoldiers and deathmarines, respirators unlatched, laughed in the rough, unpleasant way of beings who no longer needed air but liked to act as if they did. Deathrangers, still wearing their amphibious harnesses smeared with salt and blood, leaned against cargo crates drinking fermented nutrient-serum handed out in bone cups. Freshly turned islander conscripts—newly uniformed, minds chemically aligned—marched in circles as bands of zombie musicians played martial themes that dissolved, occasionally, into funeral waltzes. The ship, if such a thing could be said of a ship, glowed with undead morale.

He permitted it. They had earned it. They had cracked the western rim of Westonglappa, erased whole island chains, captured bays, ports, shipyards, refineries, even sea-towers. They had loaded everything that was not nailed down, then pulled up the nails and loaded those, too.

Below and astern, the great cargo convoy rolled in disciplined columns over the sea—purple transporters stacked with stolen grain, chem vats, cannons, ores, processed metals, reactors, water tanks, textile looms, spare aircraft frames, crates of jewelry, art, bank reserves, ceramics, medicines, laboratory glassware, even church bells. Each ship bore the same destination: the homeland, the sovereign necro-continent, Deathenbulkiztahlem. There, vaults would swell, factories would awaken, drydocks would spawn more violet hulls, and the Death Regime would grow heavier and harder to stop.

Deathwing watched the line and nodded once, satisfied. "All assets returning," he said to himself, voice cool, medical. "All vectors reusable."

Footsteps approached—measured, professional. Supreme Commander Deathenpuff arrived first, coat immaculate despite days of conquest, violet eyes alive with cold administrative satisfaction. Behind her came Deathendye, still smelling of brine and gunpowder; Deathendale, expression thoughtful and surgical; Deathenstride, unable to quite stop moving even in a staff meeting; Deathenstorm, sea-scarred and pleased; and finally Deathenstream, hands gloved, as if he had come straight from a bio-theater. Several elites trailed, among them Deathweskers, Deathkrieger, Deathravena, and Deathluna, each marked by recent operations. They formed a ring around a long bone-and-brass table that the ship had extruded from its own deck for this purpose.

"Setzen," Deathwing said. Sit.

They did. Around them, the party continued—just far enough away to give the commanders privacy, just close enough for the music and the undead laughter to bleed into the scene like dark ink.

"We have done what we intended," Deathwing began in fluent, educated German. "Westonglappas Inselgürtel ist nicht mehr ihr Schild. Er ist jetzt unser Werkzeug. Ihre Marinewege sind kompromittiert. Ihre Depots sind leer. Ihre Offiziere..." He smiled faintly. "Ihre Offiziere husten bereits violette Sporen."

Deathenpuff folded her hands. "Alle Güterschiffe sind auf Kurs nach Deathenbulkiztahlem. Wir lassen nur Bewacher zurück. Die Inseln haben genug Umwandlungsraten, um sich selbst zu halten." All cargo ships en route. Only wardens left. The islands have enough conversion rates to maintain themselves.

Deathendye thumped a fist on the table. "Wir sollten nicht stoppen. Jetzt drücken wir durch zum westlichen Festland und nehmen uns ihre Stahlwerke." We should not stop. We push to mainland now and take their steelworks.

"Nein," Deathendale said quietly. "Das will er." He pointed—not at Deathwing, but eastward, across the world, toward the invisible lecturer in gold. "Der Professor wartet genau auf diesen Impuls."

All eyes turned to Deathwing. His plus-sign pupils narrowed like scalpel tips. "Ja," he said. "Genau. Galaxbeam wartet. Die Galaxenchi-Front ist nicht blind. Während wir hier die Inseln operiert haben, haben sie drüben Stadtschichten verschoben, Chronolinien gelegt, Bibliotheken unterirdisch verlegt. Sie haben sogar die zivilen Forschungsnetzwerke mit falschen Daten infiziert, damit wir eine zu frühe Invasion starten." While we've been operating here, they've moved city-layers, laid chronolines, relocated libraries underground. They even infected their own civil research nets with false data so we would "see" a convenient weakness and invade too soon.

Deathenstorm swore, old sailor curses mixed with virology terms. "Verdammte Pädagogen."

"Er ist ein Pädagoge," Deathwing said, almost fondly. "Aber ein tödlicher. Und wir sind Ärzte. Wir wissen, dass man einen hartnäckigen Patienten nicht mit der ersten Therapie verliert. Man wartet, bis er atmet wie wir wollen."

He leaned forward, elbows on the table, commander mode giving way to researcher mode. "Also machen wir, was sie nicht erwarten. Wir ziehen uns geordnet zurück. Wir verstärken die Flotte, bauen die nächsten Träger, füllen die Bioräume, katalogisieren alle Proben aus Westonglappa—ja, selbst die indigenen Nervensysteme; die waren überraschend interessant. Wir geben ihnen Zeit, sich sicher zu fühlen. Und dann," he tapped the table, "gehen wir nicht auf ihre Städte. Wir gehen auf ihre Zeitachsen."

"Auf ihre...?" Deathenstream tilted his head.

"Auf ihre Kurse," Deathwing clarified. "Auf ihre Lehre. Auf ihre Forschung. Auf das, was sie im Hintergrund laufen lassen, während sie mit Staaten beschäftigt tun. Galaxbeam verteidigt Menschen, aber er lebt für Wissen. Wenn wir seine Wissensadern stenografieren—dann muss er seine Truppen abziehen, um seine Schule zu schützen. Dann wird er Fehler machen."

Deathenpuff smirked. "Also eine pädagogische Offensive."

"Genau," Deathwing said. "Eine didaktische Seuche."

He switched to Mandarin, smooth, amused, as if Galaxbeam might be eavesdropping. "教授，你以为你在观察我。我也在观察你。你教学生，我教尸体。我们都很骄傲。" Professor, you think you are observing me. I am observing you. You teach students, I teach corpses. We are both proud.

Then back to German: "Aber wir wissen beide, dass die nächste Kampagne, ob hier oder in Galaxenshu, nicht mehr mit bloßen Armeen entschieden wird. Es wird... didaktisch. Metaphysisch. Lächerlich." We both know the next campaign won't be settled by mere armies. It will be didactic. Metaphysical. Ridiculous.

Deathenstride chuckled. "Wie dieses Mal mit Schach, Karten, Würfeln?"

"Yes," Deathwing said, unable to suppress a grin. "Er hat mich beim vierten Spiel geschlagen. Because the author wanted balance." He looked directly at the narration—at you—eyes burning violet. "Ja, ich habe das bemerkt. Hören Sie auf, mich verlieren zu lassen, nur damit es dramatisch aussieht."

A couple of deathsoldiers nearby looked around, confused, then decided their doctor was talking to a metaphysical pathogen and went back to drinking.

On deck, the party swelled. Deathravena told the tale of the Westonglappa admirals who had fled, only to be infected mid-speech. Deathluna reported that the coastal guns were still offline and the Todeskreis–Sturmträger was taking on fuel and plating without harassment. Deathkrieger described the new name of the upgraded crawler-fleet, rolling it off his tongue like a curse: "Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz." The word pleased the crew. Long German names always did.

Farther back, lower decks hosted a "medical exhibition," which was to say, Deathenstream was lecturing to younger undead officers about optimal infection curves gleaned from island campaigns. "You see," he said in crisp academy tone, "the living believed their resistance would rise as we advanced. But as Doctor predicted, their morale organs tire faster than their skeletal muscle. Pathological despair around hour nine—if you apply lunar-spectral fear along the shoreline..."

The whole titan-ship had become a floating city-state of undeath at ease.

When the officers' council finished, Deathwing dismissed them with a wave. "Geht essen. Geht trinken. Genießt, was wir genommen haben. Morgen laufen wir nach Deathenbulkiztahlem ein, und die Fabriken werden neues Fleisch fordern."

They rose, saluted, drifted away to join their regiments. Only Deathwing remained at the gallery, hands folded behind his back, looking east across black water.

He knew, with the same certainty that told him where to cut, that on the far side of the world, in a high observatory above Galaxenchi-Kōryū, a man in gold was also standing alone, reading this same narrative, taking notes, criticizing wording, correcting names.

Deathwing smiled. "Galaxbeam," he said softly in Japanese, "次は君の生徒を診察しようか。" Next time, shall I examine your students?

He shifted to German, sharper. "Oder du kommst endlich zu mir aufs Meer. Ohne Schachbrett. Arzt gegen Lehrer. Doktor gegen Professor."

The Deathenagruppenzeithgrantz's engines roared to full ahead, violet wake foaming behind. The cargo convoys peeled off toward the homeland to unload their impossible hauls. The titan-ship sailed on like a moving mausoleum crowned with laughter.

"Schreib das ordentlich," Deathwing said once more to the invisible writer. "Wir ruhen gerade. Wir sind nicht fertig." Write it properly. We are resting. We are not finished.

And somewhere very far away, in star-gold ink, a certain professor underlined the same sentence, added a snarky margin note about "overconfident cadaver-administrators," and began preparing the counter-lesson.