SUPREMACY- Clash Between Heroes and Villains Chapter 48:Deathwing's Research, Galaxbeam's Grade

 Dawn had barely cooled the gunmetal haze over Gallaxgonbei when Doctor Deathwing stepped onto the forward deck and raised his hand. The armada quieted—not in sound, but in intent. Orders rippled out in clipped German and the fleet reformed from raiding spread to spearhead. The Death Regime's six Supreme Commanders—Deathendye, Deathendale, Deathenstream, Deathenstride, Deathenstorm, and Deathenpuff—rallied to his vector; the Absolute Leader would drive inland while salvage columns and zombified labor trains cleaned the rear. Across the straits, Galaxy lights kindled along the cliffs of Goldduchaisan; answering that glow, six defenders took their marks—Galaxadye, Galaxadale, Galaxastream, Galaxastride, Galaxastorm, and Galaxapuff.

The approach to Goldduchaisan

The first mile was deception. Galaxapuff's smokescreen corridors braided with Galaxastorm's wind shears, so Deathenstorm's forward carriers found clear lanes that ended in sun-kite mines—golden sails that looked like drifting festival art until they bloomed into hard light and cratered a destroyer's prow. Deathenstream adjusted the tide math, flattening chop for gunship ingress; Galaxastream pinched seconds out of the clock and slid the ambush two breaths earlier, leaving Death Ranger boats to arrive into their own shadows. From the cliffline, Galaxadye's voice carried over wideband Mandarin: a calm cadence of headings and "hold your fire... now fire," while Galaxadale's hidden littorals came alive—autonomous rock batteries, time-linked to crack only when Deathenstride's vanguard stepped between cover and cover. 

Deathwing did not brake. He split the mass: two heavy columns with a shadow column of chem-cruisers masked in violet. "Vektor drei-zwei-null, volle Streuung," he ordered—vector 320, full dispersion—then lifted his right hand. Gray-violet lances knurled from his palm and planed a golden berm off the cliff, opening a literal bite-mark for Death troops to pour through. The ground answered with Galaxy traps: thermite lilies in the culverts, gravitic snares on the switchbacks, and a ring of false beacons that lured drones into neat kill-circles.

Where elites cut the path

Street by street the fight went personal. Deathbash and Deathcrush drove the boulevard with wrecking-crew simplicity—curbstone to curbstone, shields up, battering cannon nests. Galaxprom met them with lensing spirals, turning corners into astronomy; Galaxrire's filament blade ricocheted sparks off ossuary chains and iron jawplates. Deathfelix ghosted rooftops; Galaxstar answered with starboard arcs and time-bursts that skipped him half a terrace at a time. In the flood channels, Deaththrend crouched for the pounce; Galaxymoon thinned mist and made the ambush look foolish without ever drawing blood. For every brute shove, a golden countersign. For every clever trick, a viper's hiss from the violet fog behind it.

Where commanders test the line

The six-on-six ballet broke into paired gravities:

Deathendye vs Galaxadye: precision vs precision, both carving the sky into rulebooks.

Deathendale vs Galaxadale: gridmaker vs coast-shaper, artillery graphs arguing with reefs that refused to be where they were drawn.

Deathenstream vs Galaxastream: laminar tide against time-slice, each stealing minutes from the other until both laughed once on open channel and then tried harder.

Deathenstride vs Galaxastride: maneuver artists bending regiments around invisible corners.

Deathenstorm vs Galaxastorm: raw pressure, AA curtains vs knife-edged airflow.

Deathenpuff vs Galaxapuff: the showrunners—smoke, decoy, reveal, reversal—two directors cutting the same reel in opposite moods.

Deathwing walked forward through all of it, a moving storm-center. Where a trap flowered, he scissored it with dark-gray rays and exhaled a smog that taught sensors to see winter. Where a cliff battery flared, he pointed, and a dreadnought sang back with enough weight to move the cliff's opinion.

The pivot

Goldduchaisan refused to be rushed. Galaxadale's coastal batteries "blinked" between rock and mirage; Galaxastorm wrote bad weather only Deathenstorm could see; Galaxapuff pretended to give ground, then revealed side-aimed AA fans that shredded chem-curtains from below. Twice Deathwing carved a doorway through a cathedral shield harmonic; twice Galaxadye sealed it with a sentence of numbers spoken like prayer. Deathendale and Deathenstream kept losses acceptable—salvageable ships taken under tow, ground columns turning side streets into supply lanes even as Galaxy elites siphoned minutes off their schedule.

By late afternoon, Deathwing had teeth in the first terrace but not the second. He breathed out a dense fog, called for a two-arc flank, and signaled Deathenpuff to swing wide for a portside cut. Galaxapuff anticipated, counter-curtained, and fed the ambush a decoy column of drones wearing honest hull-signatures. Deathenpuff burned the fakes, and in that heartbeat, the cliffline lit in true colors and pushed.

After-action sense

Both sides kept their Absolutes in reserve; both sides retained four Supreme Commanders above half strength; both elite cadres cycled out before critical loss. But the defenders owned the terrain and the traps were prepaid. Deathwing's spearhead could bruise the first terrace; it could not keep it without trading the afternoon for the evening and inviting Absolute intervention.

Liberation Roll of Gallaxgonbei

Gallaxgonbei State looked wrong in violet.

From the high clouds above Galaxenportal City, Professor Galaxbeam watched the stain spread across the map hovering in front of him—Death Regime control-runes pulsing like a sickness over each city name.

Galaxenportal City. Gallenkodai Town. Jakchi City. Galaxenhuo. Galaxenyanbaohu. Galaxenbonbao. Gallaxendeichi. Gallaxyukai.
Galaxenwarpe City. Galaxencloude. Galaxenhueko. Gallaxreixuanbeodong. Galaxengongshi, the capital. Galaxenzuochen.
Wanshengtu Town, Meigue Province, Watabomei Town, Folenggao Reach, Keikon Town, Haylao City, Xinglat Province, Maolongmai City, Rentianfue Pass, and Xiewejunkok.

Every sigil burned in Deathwing's dull iron purple.

Galaxbeam exhaled once through his nose, glasses catching the reflection of that corrupted map.

"好了，" he murmured in Mandarin, voice low. "Gallaxgonbei，考卷重做一次。" Very well. Gallaxgonbei—redo the test.

Below him, Galaxy Regime task forces slid into position: gold-trimmed carriers in the off-shore fog banks, aerial fortresses holding above the cloud line, ground columns hidden in folded pockets of warped space. Supreme Commanders fanned out across the state like brushstrokes.

Galaxadye took the northern sea lane with his precision fleets.
Galaxadale prowled the coastal shelf, guns quiet, shields hungry.
Galaxastream skimmed low over river lines, weaving a net of currents.
Galaxastride anchored the landward wall, boots already on the soil Deathwing thought he owned.
Galaxastorm sat inside the thunderheads, listening to electricity gossip.
Galaxapuff parked Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary so high above the state it looked like a second moon.

At his side, a handful of elites floated in relaxed formation, soldiers' bodies riding magicians' posture. Galaxrire spun a golden rifle like a baton, scope already filled with possible targets. Galaxharp stretched her fingers, strings of light humming between them. Galaxveronica drew circles in the air, layering translucent barrier sigils like petals. Galaxtempestress rolled a tiny, storm-filled marble between her fingers. Galaxytsukifenghuang, feathered mantle folded, burned with slow phoenix fire.

"教授。" Galaxrire half-smiled, Cantonese lilting. "Ready when you stop monologuing into the upper atmosphere."

Galaxbeam blinked, realized he had been staring straight up at the sky, and coughed.

"...習慣咗比作者監視。" I'm used to being watched by the author, he said dryly in Cantonese. "無辦法啦。" Nothing to be done.

He snapped his fingers.

Golden grids unfolded across the sky.

"Operation syllabus," he said in English now, broadcasting to the whole theater. "Phase One: cut the coastal chains. Phase Two: snap the inland spine. Phase Three..." His eyes hardened. "...grade Deathwing's homework."

He switched to Japanese for the launch call, tone bright enough to be an anime episode title.

「じゃ、行こうか。銀河側の反撃授業—Gallaxgonbei 解放編！」
Then—shall we? Galaxy's counter-lesson: Gallaxgonbei Liberation Arc!

The sky answered.

The attack began where the occupation had first come ashore—Galaxenportal City.

Death Regime dreadnoughts squatted in the harbor like rusted teeth, portals yawning open above them. Violet AA tracers clawed at the clouds. Zombified dockworkers shuffled between improvised chem-refineries, loading greenish fuel into gun batteries fused straight into the city's bones.

Deathwing's Supreme Commanders had left guardians: Deathenstorm's storm-scarred carriers, Deathenpuff's bomber roosts, Deathendale's fortress barges. Around them, elites like Deathbash, Deathcrush, Deathplague, Deathfury, and Deathshade stalked the streets, leading columns of Deathsoldiers and Deathmarauders through neighborhoods that used to glow gold at night.

"Feindkontakte im Westhafen," one necro-officer rasped over vox. Enemy contacts in the west harbor.

Deathcrush leaned on a railing, armor dripping necrotic fluid, eyes reflecting the sea.

"Lass sie kommen," he said, bored. Let them come. "Wir haben ein ganzes Bundesland voll Leichen als Munition."

The sea flickered.

A thin gold line appeared on the horizon, too straight to be natural.

Then the line unfolded—Galaxadale's forward carrier wall sliding out of folded space. Their hulls shone in layered astronomy sigils. Turrets rotated once, as if cracking their necks after a long nap.

From high overhead, Galaxapuff's voice dropped in Cantonese.

"海岸目標，照舊。" Coastal targets, same as always. "煙幕先，火花之後。"

Bombers punched down through the clouds, laying curtains of shimmering golden smog over the harbor. Death AA lit the air with violet needles; Galaxveronica's barriers curved like petals, catching the worst of it and diffusing the rest into harmless starlight.

Galaxtempestress flicked her storm marble toward the city; it burst into a descending halo of pressure fronts. Shells curved off-course, detonating in empty air. Galaxytsukifenghuang folded and refolded her phoenix wings, sending slashes of golden-scarlet fire across the chem-refineries; vats of fuel boiled over, fountains of corrupted energy vaporizing into harmless light.

Deathbash slammed a fist into the street, sending a shockwave of gray bone-spikes up through the pavement. Galaxy infantry—Galax Soldiers, Galax Rangers—used pre-plotted time-steps from Galaxstar's earlier calculations, already one heartbeat out of the impact zone. To spectators it looked like they simply weren't there when death arrived.

"你哋啲時間線，" Galaxrire murmured as he hung in the air, picking targets, "畀教授改到好似考試作弊咁。" Your timelines are hacked like exam cheats, he said in Cantonese, amused.

He pulled the trigger.

Each shot left his rifle as a streak of compressed constellations, stars braided into a bullet. Deathbash's shoulder guard exploded into shards; Deathcrush's breastplate cratered; Deathplague's chem-tank cracked open, leaking luminous smoke.

"Wer—?!" Deathplague snarled, spinning, German rising with his anger. "Scharfschütze oben rechts—!"

Before he finished the sentence, Galaxharp strummed invisible strings. Sound turned into force, a harmonic shockwave flattening the rooftop he stood on and hurling him into a shipping container. The container crumpled around him like an aluminum can.

"Tempo 4/4," she said in Japanese, brushing hair from her face. 「落ち着け、カラオケじゃないから。」 Calm down; this isn't karaoke.

Beneath their duel, Galaxadye's assault columns hit the docks with choreographed violence. Golden shields flared as Deathsoldiers opened fire; Galaxy melee elites carved through the first ranks in streaks of light, their blows leaving behind geometry rather than gore. Every Death body that fell liquefied and sank into the street; every Galaxy trooper that died shattered into blue-white particles, teleport-failsafes yanking them out for respawn.

The liberation of Gallenkodai Town followed like the next bar in a song. Jakchi City, tucked just inland, woke to the sight of Galaxastride walking straight down its main highway, each footstep rewinding cracked asphalt under his boots. Deathmarauders rushed him; his hand traced an orbit in the air, and suddenly their charge took days instead of seconds. By the time they reached him, exhausted and moving like slow-motion, the Galaxy infantry behind him had already walked around, tagged their armor cores, and sent them vanishing in neat bursts of recall light.

"ごめんね," Galaxastride told them quietly as they dissolved. Sorry. 「時間割はこっちの都合で決める。」 The timetable is ours to set.

Farther inland, the fight turned intricate.

Galaxenhuo's industrial yards had become a nest of Deathplague labs, pipes pumping shimmering toxins toward Galaxenyanbaohu's residential blocks. Galaxenbonbao's markets groaned under makeshift AA towers and necro-altars. Gallaxendeichi, once famous for its night festivals, burned with violet lanterns filled with trapped souls.

Here, new elites stepped into the frame.

Galaxyraijin descended over Galaxenhuo wrapped in a cloak of thunder, golden drums orbiting him like satellites. Each strike of his sticks sent sheets of timed lightning arcing along Death pipelines, vaporizing toxins before they reached the neighborhoods. Galaxyqinglong, his body traced in jade-green constellations of a dragon, dove beneath the streets, snapping apart corruption nodes with precise, spiraling strikes.

Deathfury and Deathwrath met them head-on, bodies armoured in overlapping grave-plates, eyes blazing with necrotic fire. Deathfury hurled spears of compressed bone; Deathwrath swung a chain-scythe that shed screaming skulls.

"再多雷也会熄灭，" Deathfury spat in harsh Mandarin. Even lightning burns out.

"唔好意思，" Galaxyraijin replied, Cantonese easy, grin sharp. "我哋用嘅係充電電池。" Sorry. We run on rechargeables.

The air became a strobe of clashing elements: purple smoke vs golden rain, green dragon coils vs black bone chains. Health-rings—thin, luminous halos only Absolutes and Supreme Commanders could see—tightened around each elite as blows landed. At half-ring, retreat protocols flashed; by mutual unspoken agreement, nobody pushed a duel to zero. They were here to win territory, not erase pieces from the board.

While elites brawled, Galaxengongshi, the capital, became the real hinge.

Deathwing himself hung above the city on a throne of vertebrae welded into a floating dais, cloak dragging a storm of ash behind him. Around him, his Supreme Commanders closed ranks: Deathendye, Deathendale, Deathenstream, Deathenstride, Deathenstorm, Deathenpuff. Their combined aura pressed down on the state like the promise of a mass extinction.

"Sie kommen sich wirklich holen, was?" Deathwing mused, voice echoing across the city in perfect German. They really came to take it back. "Wie mutig. Wie... pädagogisch."

Golden light answered.

Galaxbeam stepped out of a vertical slash of starlight above Galaxengongshi's central plaza, coat rippling in a phantom solar wind. Behind him, the six Galaxy Supreme Commanders formed a mirrored crescent around their Death counterparts.

Galaxbeam adjusted his glasses.

"Deathwing," he greeted in English, crisp. "You have something that belongs on my syllabus."

Deathwing tilted his head.

"Professor," he replied, equally polite. "Sie würden gute Noten in Zerstörung bekommen." You would get high marks in destruction. "Aber dies—" he gestured with a clawed hand at the occupied city "—ist meine Forschung."

Galaxbeam's eyes softened for a heartbeat as he glanced down at the choked streets of Galaxengongshi—at the golden shrine towers, defaced with violet sigils, at the schools turned into barracks.

Then they hardened again.

"研究有倫理界線。" Research has ethical boundaries, he said in Mandarin, voice low. "你越界太多次了。" You've crossed the line too many times.

Deathwing smiled, slow and sharp.

"Dann benoten wir einander heute." Then let us grade each other today.

He raised his staff.

The sky tore.

The duel between Absolutes unfolded across all of Gallaxgonbei at once.

When Deathwing swung his staff, the air over Galaxenwarpe City curdled into a tsunami of liquid shadow, vomiting skeletal serpents that dove for the streets. Galaxbeam flicked his chalk—an ordinary-looking stick that wrote equations in the air—and every serpent found itself caught in a looped timeline, biting its own tail in an endless circle.

Above Galaxencloude, Deathwing exhaled a cloud of spore-words; each syllable bloomed into an infection glyph that sought lungs and bloodstreams. Galaxbeam snapped his fingers, and all air within the city briefly turned into the vacuum between galaxies. The spores tore themselves to pieces, unanchored.

"先生！" Galaxastorm grunted over comms in Japanese as he wrestled a meteor of poisoned ice away from Gallaxreixuanbeodong's suburbs. "少しは手加減してくれませんか？" Sensei, could you hold back a little?

"宿題やってきたでしょう？" Galaxbeam answered mildly. You did your homework, didn't you? He switched to Cantonese, warmth threading through the fatigue. "頂多只係加幾條加分題。" At worst I'm adding a few bonus questions.

Across the state, Supreme Commander duels flared and folded.

Galaxastream and Deathenstream twisted the rivers between Galaxenzuochen and Wanshengtu Town into dueling currents, one golden and laminar, the other violet and choked with bones. Every time Deathenstream tried to flood Galaxy positions, Galaxastream re-threaded the water into spiral staircases, lifting his troops to higher ground while gunships strafed from the sides.

Galaxadye's precision artillery danced with Deathendye's calculated massacres along the edges of Meigue Province and Watabomei Town. One mis-timed volley from either could have glassed whole districts; instead, their shells collided mid-air in blooming, carefully controlled annihilations, shockwaves sculpted to pass over civilian shelters.

Galaxastride and Deathenstride played lethal tag across Folenggao Reach and Keikon Town, teleportation and teleport-denial runes snapping on and off like camera shutters.

"またお前か," Deathenstride growled in Japanese as his ambush circle mis-fired for the third time, depositing him inside a harmless loop of his own footsteps. You again.

「先生に言われてね。」 Galaxastride replied, shrugging. Sensei told me to. 「君の足跡、全部覚えたよ。」 I've memorized all your steps.

In Haylao City and Xinglat Province, Galaxapuff and Deathenpuff turned the sky into a storyboard of competing air campaigns, their bomber groups trading smokes, flares, chem-clouds, and counter-storms, squadrons weaving through one another like clashing brushstrokes.

On the ground in Maolongmai City and along Rentianfue Pass, elites from both sides slammed into each other again and again.

Galaxrire vs Deathcrush in an alley where gravity forgot which way was down.
Galaxharp vs Deathbash on a collapsing overpass, sound vs shockwaves.
Galaxtempestress and Galaxytsukifenghuang vs Deathplague and Deathgrimmar over a poisoned reservoir, phoenix fire boiling disease into harmless steam.
Galaxveronica shielding evacuation routes in Xiewejunkok while Deathshade burned purple trenches through abandoned warehouses.

Each clash left both sides' health-halos thinner, dimmer. When the rings narrowed to a sliver, the battlefield itself pushed them away—time bending around them, space refusing to support any more damage. Forced retreats felt like invisible hands grabbing the backs of their coats and hauling them offscreen.

"退くぞ," Galaxrire hissed, tearing his rifle free from a wall as the recall effect grabbed him. We're pulling out. In Cantonese, he added for Deathcrush's benefit: "下次再玩。" We'll play again next time.

Deathcrush snarled as a similar aura wrapped his limbs, dragging him back toward a med-portal.

"Wir sind noch nicht fertig!" We're not finished!

"Natürlich nicht," Deathwing muttered, hearing the distant protests of his elites even as he locked beams with Galaxbeam above Galaxengongshi. Of course not.

At the climax, Gallaxgonbei became a single diagram.

From Galaxenportal City to Xiewejunkok, golden and violet vectors intersected in the air, tracing lines of force, paths of artillery, cones of probability. To normal eyes it looked like a storm of light and darkness; to Absolutes it was a chalkboard full of symbols.

Galaxbeam wrote.

Every stroke of his chalk altered a law: gravity rotated ninety degrees in one district, letting falling rubble slide harmlessly into the ocean; time thickened around a hospital in Watabomei Town, so explosions outside played as if underwater; the concept of "contagion" itself took a five-minute coffee break around Rentianfue Pass.

Deathwing rewrote.

With a sweep of his staff, he turned civilian fear into kinetic shields, despair into corrosive winds that ate at Galaxy armor. He pulled the statistical certainty of death from a thousand tiny skirmishes and braided it into a single, scything wave aimed straight at Galaxbeam's heart.

"教授！" several Supreme Commanders shouted at once.

Galaxbeam caught the wave on the tip of his chalk.

For a heartbeat the whole world went silent as their powers met—golden theorem vs violet plague, astronomy vs anatomy, pedagogue vs pathologist.

Then the sound came back like a dropped BGM track.

The death wave shattered into glittering symbols. Each symbol turned into a tiny golden bird and flew outward, perching atop Galaxy soldiers' shoulders, singing a frequency that made Death Regime rifles misfire.

Deathwing hissed, smoke pouring from his eye sockets.

"Du spielst mit Konzepten, Professor." You play with concepts. "Gefährliche Angewohnheit."

Galaxbeam's expression was tired, edges of his hair haloed in light.

"你都一樣。" You're the same, he answered in Mandarin. "分別只係你玩死人，我玩死線。" The only difference is—you play with dead people; I play with dead lines on a board.

He pointed downward.

Every golden line he had drawn snapped tight.

In that instant, all across Gallaxgonbei, Galaxy Regime forces surged in perfect synchrony: shield walls advanced exactly as Death artillery barrels hit cooldown; assault squads blink-stepped through gaps that existed for less than a second; evac columns crossed kill-zones at the only safe micro-moment of the entire battle.

Deathwing felt control slipping—not through raw power, but through tempo. The state was becoming Galaxbeam's classroom again.

"Rückzugslinien vorbereiten," he said at last, voice cold. Prepare fallback lines. "Wir geben ihnen dieses Bundesland zurück... vorerst." We give them this state back... for now.

Deathendye and Deathendale grimaced but obeyed, calling portals into being along the retreat vectors. Deathenstream drowned whole districts in fog to cover the withdrawal. Deathenstorm hurled a last storm-lance at Galaxastorm, more out of habit than hope; Galaxastorm caught it, spun it, and let it dissipate into harmless rain over Maolongmai City.

One by one, Death Regime capital ships broke off and slid into violet wounds in the air. Ground units that couldn't reach the portals in time melted into necrotic dust, leaving only scorch-marks and rusted equipment behind.

Galaxbeam did not chase.

He lowered his hand, letting the golden grids dissolve, and looked down over Gallaxgonbei—scarred, blackened in patches, but undeniably theirs again. Galaxy banners flickered back to life on civic towers. In Galaxengongshi's plaza, civilians who had spent the whole battle hiding in reinforced basements stepped out and squinted up at the sky.

He switched to Japanese for his closing order, voice broadcast on every Galaxy channel.

「はい、今日の授業はここまで。」 That's it for today's lesson. 「撤収準備。まず市民の確認、次に防衛線の再構築。」 Prepare to withdraw and reset. Check on the civilians first, rebuild the lines second.

Then, softer, in Cantonese, mostly to himself and the unseen reader.

"作者，如果你仲喺度睇，記低：Gallaxgonbei，暫時及格。" Author, if you're still watching, write this down: Gallaxgonbei—provisionally passed.

He turned away from the sky and started giving practical instructions.

The dead did not get the memo that the lesson was over.

Even as the last Death Regime capital ships tore their portals open and slipped into violet wounds in the air, the ground of Gallaxgonbei kept disgorging bodies. Necro-factories buried under Galaxenportal's piers and Galaxenhuo's industrial blocks spat out wave after wave of shambling silhouettes—first plain zombies, then zombie-human mutant cadres, stitched in the armor plates of Deathsoldiers, Deathmarines, and Deathmarauders. Behind them rattled columns of armor: steel gray-purple tanks with ribbed plating and great skull-and-crossbones sigils of the Death Regime stenciled across their turrets.

They came on in moaning, clattering tides, spilling through the streets of Galaxenportal City and Gallenkodai Town, flooding the boulevards of Jakchi City and the factory rows of Galaxenhuo, slopping like diseased surf against the inland walls of Galaxenyanbaohu, Galaxenbonbao, and Gallaxendeichi.

To civilians, it looked like the end of the world had decided to hold an encore.

To the Galaxy Regime elites and Supreme Commanders, it was...more like overtime.

On the waterfront terraces below Galaxenportal's reclaimed harbor, Galaxadale stood on the prow of a hovering gun-barge, coat flapping in the thermal wash of his own guns. The first tail of zombies hit the invisible line where his forward shields began and simply vaporized, boiling away into greasy mist that the wind peeled back out to sea. Behind them, the mutant Deathsoldiers raised rifles and bone-bayonets, firing volleys that splashed harmlessly across his armor.

"Armor penetration: zero," his gunnery AIs reported in calm, polyglot system voices.

"Of course it's zero," Galaxadale muttered in Japanese, fatigue sharpening his consonants. 「絶対指揮官を撃てる地上兵なんて、設定から存在しない。」 Ground troops that can hurt a Supreme Commander aren't in the settings.

He raised a hand. Batteries all along the sea wall followed the gesture like a conductor's baton.

"Fire line, breathe in."

Golden lances stitched the avenue, tanks bursting open like rotten fruit. Mutant marines who tried to climb over the wrecks found their arms and legs rewriting themselves into harmless particles as Galaxadye's distant correction grids updated the local physics constant for "rotting meat."

In Galaxenhuo, the fight stacked vertically.

The streets were a carpet of corpses. Above them, a second layer of undead clung to the sides of buildings, crawling like gray-purple ants, their fingers melted into the concrete. Above them, on hovering causeways of compressed starlight, moved the Galaxy elites and their escort squads.

Galaxyqinglong spear-tackled a wedge of Deathmarauders trying to push a portable chem-cauldron down an alley. His dragon-etched body shimmered; he spun once, and the whole knot of enemies stretched into a shining spiral, uncoiling into neat lines of neutralized corpses along the roadside.

"Still can't touch us," he noted in Mandarin, breathing hard. "But they can waste our time."

"時間都係資源啦。" Time is also a resource, Galaxyraijin answered over comms in Cantonese, voice crackling under thunder.

He slammed both drumsticks down. A ring of lightning exploded outward, stripping a city block's worth of zombies down to smoking outlines. The shockwave rippled over the hulks of gray-purple tanks; their guns collapsed into useless slag.

For every thousand they erased, another thousand crawled, limped, or rolled out of subway mouths and sewer grates.

By mid-afternoon, even invulnerable demigods looked tired.

Health rings around the elites and Supreme Commanders were still full and bright—no real damage, no risk of death—but the light inside them had thinned, flickering slightly with each new exertion. Cosmic stamina, not mortal flesh, was what flagged now.

Deathwing noticed.

From his retreating vantage point near the upper atmosphere, he watched the onslaught feed endless bodies into a grinder that could not be jammed. The grinder grew hotter, though. Sparks jumped. The tempo of the Galaxy counter-offensive stuttered in places where even Galaxbeam's planning could not fully erase fatigue.

"Schickt die Nächsthöheren," he ordered on a low band. Send in the next tier up.

Deathgrimmar, Deathshade, Deathwrath, Deathfury, Deathbash, Deathcrush—elite silhouettes peeled away from the general retreat and plunged back down toward the ruined state like purple comets.

They landed in the thickest knots of undead and began to organize the chaos.

Deathshade carved lanes of disciplined fire through the horde, using zombies as ablative armor while he aimed concentrated barrages at Galaxengongshi's forward bastions. Deathfury hurled spears of bone through the air, the projectiles sprouting screaming skulls that detonated on impact. Deathgrimmar's presence alone made nearby corpses stand taller, surge faster, their empty eyes briefly aware.

To the Galaxy ground forces, it felt like the difficulty slider finally clicked up one notch.

To the Galaxy Supreme Commanders, it still felt like tutorial mode.

Over Maolongmai City's outskirts, Galaxastorm caught a bone spear in one hand and lazily twisted it into harmless dust. He followed the trajectory back with his eyes and spotted Deathfury crouched atop a half-collapsed apartment block, arm cocked for another throw.

"ねえ。" Hey.

He snapped his fingers.

Every thundercloud in a fifty-kilometer radius turned its attention to that rooftop. A single, impossibly bright bolt hammered down. When the afterimage cleared, Deathfury was still alive—he had to be; the rules of the setting forbade otherwise—but his health ring had shrunk to a slender red crescent, and a recall aura was already dragging him backward, off the field.

On another front, Galaxastream met Deathenstream's lesser lieutenants in the river canyons feeding Wanshengtu Town and Meigue Province. With each sweep of his hands, entire platoons of Deathmarines found the water under them abruptly flowing sideways, dumping them into temporary eddies where Galax Soldiers with shock-batons tagged them for respawn or banishment.

In Rentianfue Pass, Deathgrimmar personally led a column of mutant Deathmarauders through a defile, confident that sheer numbers would bog the defenders.

Galaxastride stepped out of thin air in front of them, expression apologetic.

「ここから先は、徒歩で一万年かかるよ。」 From here, it's ten thousand years on foot.

He drew a lazy circle in the dust with his boot. Time snapped. To the mutants, each step forward suddenly required a month; each breath, a year. By the time their slowed perception realized what had happened, Galaxy Rangers had already vaulted over them, tagged them, and moved on.

Deathgrimmar swung once in fury, trying to cleave Galaxastride in half. The blade passed through him like a hand through a hologram. The rules themselves denied the hit.

His own health ring shrank as Galaxastream's distant artillery, carefully threaded through timelines, pelted him with non-lethal conceptual strikes: detention, demotion, probation.

"Zurück," Deathgrimmar snarled as his recall aura finally grabbed him. Back. "Das hier ist eine Farce." This is a farce.

He vanished in a burst of violet system-light.

Deathwing's eyes narrowed.

Elites clearly would not turn Gallaxgonbei back. They barely dented the tempo.

"Dann die Kommandanten." Then the Commanders.

Across the broken sky, Deathendye, Deathendale, Deathenstream, Deathenstride, Deathenstorm, and Deathenpuff all received the same terse pulse of command and the same coordinates. They had already been withdrawing in good order, preserving the strategic layer. Now they pivoted as one, carving brutal arcs back toward the state.

It was meant to be a decapitation strike: six Supreme Commanders diving in a converging pattern toward Galaxengongshi's central plaza, aiming to punch straight through the exhausted Galaxy lines, smash the local command lattice, and snatch a piece of the syllabus back by force.

Galaxbeam had been waiting for exactly that.

Titanumas Character Alias Codex...

He stood alone at the plaza's center, chalk in one hand, the other in his pocket. Around him, Galaxy Supreme Commanders held the perimeter or were elsewhere along the front; this moment was his.

"Right on schedule," he murmured in English, glasses reflecting six violet contrails.

He drew a hexagon in the air.

Each line of the shape corresponded to one Death Supreme Commander: artillery math for Deathendye, vector calculus for Deathendale's maneuvers, fluid dynamics for Deathenstream's rivers, teleportation logic for Deathenstride, storm equations for Deathenstorm, aerodynamics and payload trees for Deathenpuff. As they screamed toward him, the hexagon spun, equations spilling outward like chains.

The first to hit the perimeter was Deathenstride. His teleport signature sparked once, twice, then—slid sideways, dropping him not at Galaxbeam's back as planned, but into a closed loop that began with his own entry rune and ended with his previous position.

He reappeared exactly where he had started his sprint, health ring mysteriously shaved to three-quarters.

"Was—?!"

"重做一次，" Galaxbeam said mildly, voice carrying to him in perfect Mandarin. Try again.

Deathenstorm hurled a continental storm-lance down at the plaza, intending to pin Galaxbeam before impact. The lance elongated, refracted, and reappeared as a tight spiraling cage—around Deathenstorm himself, high above the battlefield. Lightning chewed his armor instead of the professor's; his health ring plunged to half, and the recall aura flared warning crimson.

Deathendye and Deathendale tried the obvious ploy: cross-cut barrage, one saturating the plaza with precision strikes, the other driving a spearhead of spectral armor toward the weakest predicted angle of defense.

Galaxbeam flicked his chalk, and the plaza's coordinate system rotated ninety degrees.

Every "down" shell now fell harmlessly sideways. Deathendale's spearhead, trusting its maps, slammed into a region of space where distance had been quietly stretched; each meter became a kilometer. By the time they realized how far they still were from their target, Galaxadale's long-range batteries had bracketed them with non-lethal but humiliating starlight blasts, bouncing them across the sky like misbehaving chess pieces.

Deathenstream arrived last, rivers roaring upward in defiance of gravity as he tried to drown the entire plaza in a vertical ocean.

Galaxbeam wrote one word in the air:

PAUSE.

Every droplet froze. Deathenstream's own current lines wrapped around him like a net, tightening. His health ring snapped to a razor-thin margin; recall protocols screamed.

"Genug," Deathwing's voice cut across their private channel, unexpectedly sharp. Enough. "Rückzug."

Reluctantly, each Supreme Commander allowed the recall auras to have them. Their bodies blurred, then zipped along pre-drawn retreat vectors Galaxbeam had already accounted for.

Only once they were gone did he erase the hexagon and let the plaza's physics settle back into something locals would recognize.

He exhaled, the first honestly tired breath he had let himself show all day.

「生徒の答案、全部添削済み。」 All the students' papers have been corrected, he muttered in Japanese, half to himself.

Down on the streets, nothing that grand was visible—just the slog.

In Xinglat Province, Galaxy infantry formed rotating phalanxes, shield walls advancing while heavy weapons teams chewed up endless zombies that staggered out of former Death strongpoints. In Haylao City, Galaxapuff kept a lazy air patrol going, dropping pinpoint micro-bombs on any cluster of gray-purple armor big enough to inconvenience a regular squad.

Near Xiewejunkok, Galaxveronica and Galaxtempestress worked side by side over a rail junction that had seen some of the worst fighting.

"屏障層，還有多少？" How many barrier layers left? Galaxtempestress asked, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand.

Galaxveronica's fingers traced one more glowing circle in the air, then sagged.

"Enough to walk the civilians home," she answered in Cantonese. "Not enough to waste on Deathwing's leftovers."

Below them, Galax Soldiers and Galax Rangers were already proving she did not need to. Having watched their Absolutes and Commanders all day, they had learned the rhythm of Gallaxgonbei's new syllabus. They fought in teams of three, trading positions, using the local terrain as if Galaxbeam himself had designed every street corner for cover drills.

Zombies lunged; they were met, parried, and erased.

Mutant Deathsoldiers emptied entire magazines into orange-gold shields that did not so much as flicker.

Tanks fired, their shells arcing majestically toward targets that had already moved one planned heartbeat earlier.

City by city, suburb by suburb, terrace by terrace, the swarm thinned.

By evening, the only undead still staggering around Gallaxgonbei were isolated pockets—glitches in Deathwing's retreat scripts. Galaxy mop-up teams flagged them for teleport scrubbing or simply penned them into quarantined sectors, there to be studied, cured, or quietly deleted.

High above, Deathwing's presence receded entirely, his attention turning to other states, other experiments. Gallaxgonbei was no longer worth the energy.

For the Galaxy Regime, that was the point.

They were bone-deep tired. Their cosmic power reserves needed a reset, their nerves needed quiet. But as the first true night in months fell over Galaxenportal City, the stars above it looked gold again, not dull violet.

The dead could keep shuffling in their little leftover loops. The lesson of the day stood.

Gallaxgonbei belonged to the syllabus once more.

For most of Gallaxgonbei, the battle was tapering into mop-up.
For Galaxadye, it was finally reaching his preferred difficulty curve.

He stood at the edge of his flagship's observation deck, a thin figure framed in gold glass and war-fog. Below, the northern districts of Gallenkodai and the outskirts of Jakchi and Galaxenhuo had merged into one seething belt of motion—zombies in the tens of thousands, packed shoulder to shoulder, backed by ranks of armed Deathsoldiers, Deathmarines, and Deathmarauders marching in crude formation around steel gray-purple tanks.

From this height, the tanks looked like beetles: armored backs, skull-and-crossbones sigils gleaming dully on their turrets. The undead around them were a crawling bruise.

Galaxadye's eyes glowed a steady golden-yellow, the same color as the targeting sigils floating in layers in front of him. Thin lines of light threaded between his fingers, connecting him to each carrier, each gun, each missile drone in his precision fleet.

"Surface density: ninety-two percent in primary kill-zone. Incoming vectors at... too many." His voice was dry. "System, give me a number that fits on the page."

"Approximation: 1.7 million hostile ground signatures within operational theater," the fleet core replied in star-bright English. "Threat rating versus Supreme Commander: negligible. Threat rating versus civilian and lower-tier units: severe."

"就係咁啦。" Figures, he murmured in Cantonese. "They can't hurt me, but they can still fail the exam for everybody else."

He lifted his hand.

Golden lines snapped into being over the entire northern front—like someone had laid a transparent, glowing graph paper over the landscape. Each intersection point marked a tank, a cluster of Deathmarines, a knot where the zombie tide grew too thick.

"Artillery syllabus, page one," he said calmly, switching to Japanese. 「標的配点、ここからここまで。」 Target weighting, from here to here.

He wrote in the air.

Every stroke of his finger became an equation: angle, velocity, impact time, collateral risk, timing against Galaxbeam's larger state-grid. Solutions flickered along the lines, cascading down toward the batteries waiting in the off-shore fog.

A heartbeat later, the carriers answered.

Galaxadale liked big theatrical volleys. Galaxadye preferred clean ones.

From the fleet came not a noise, but a feeling—like the world inhaling. Thin spears of golden-white light punched down in perfect, staccato sequence, each blast no bigger than a single tank, a single alley, a single bridge choked with Deathsoldiers. No wasted energy, no stray shockwaves.

From above, the swarm began to pixelate.

Every skull-marked tank in the front rank simply ceased to be—reduced to glowing dust that rained down over confused zombies. Deathmarines crouched behind cover found that cover evaporating; before they could react, the next line of micro-strikes removed their weapons, their legs, their sense of coordination, leaving them stumbling targets for Galaxy infantry below.

"First layer peeled," the fleet core reported. "Reload cycles within textbook parameters."

Galaxadye rolled his shoulders. A faint crackle of electricity skated down his arms.

"Good. Turn the page."

The undead did not stop.

With every wave he erased, more clawed their way out of underground depots and necro-silos. Fresh columns of Deathsoldiers jogged in from the ruins of Deathwing's abandoned FOBs, rifles barking purple muzzle-flash, bullets stitching uselessly across Galaxadye's forward shields and the orange-gold barriers his elites had left behind.

A stray volley tracked up, every round aimed directly at the Supreme Commander's chest.

From Galaxadye's perspective, they might as well have been raindrops.

He watched them rise through the air in slow motion, each bullet a little knot of probability and bad intent. Tiny numbers appeared beside each one in his vision: damage potential vs Supreme Commander: 0.00. The setting would not allow them to do anything more than annoy him.

He sighed, snapped his fingers.

Time around the bullets thickened into honey. They drifted, hanging a few meters from his face, then melted into golden motes and joined the rest of the targeting lattice.

"Nice try," he said politely in German, knowing some necro-officer might be listening. "Falsches Fach." Wrong subject.

The necro-officer below never heard him. Galaxadye's next barrage had already taken the man's command bunker off the map.

The swarm pressed harder.

Where artillery should have stalled it, zombies simply clambered over the bodies of their fellows. Deathmarauders shoved portable chem-mortars through gaps in the bombardment, lobbing globs of violet sludge at Galaxy forward positions. Still more tanks rolled up from the rear, their turrets muttering out crude shells enchanted to spread despair and paralysis.

Even with Supreme Commander immunity, the scale threatened to bury the state's lower-tier defenders in noise.

Galaxadye's jaw tightened.

"System," he said in Mandarin now, slipping into the clipped tones of someone doing mental arithmetic too fast to bother with full grammar. "Open the time register. Localized."

"Time register unlocked," the core replied. "Warning: extended manipulation may induce operational fatigue."

"加班費之後再講。" We'll talk overtime pay later.

He stepped off the deck.

For an outside observer, he vanished in a flash of golden lightning.

For Galaxadye, the world simply...slowed.

He dropped through cloud layers as if they were pages in a book, each one peeling back to reveal the next stratum of the battle. In the time it took a single shell to travel from one tank to another, he had already sorted the entire northern front into categories: critical, caution, trivial. Every zombie horde, every Deathsoldier cluster, every armored column got a tiny symbol above its head.

He hit the ground outside Jakchi in a crack of displaced air, boots gouging a crater in the already shattered pavement.

Hundreds of Deathsoldiers and mutant Deathmarines turned as one, raising rifles, shouting in German and guttural dead tongues.

From his perspective inside the time-stretch, they were statues.

"Close-combat section," he announced quietly to nobody, raising both hands. 「試験範囲：ナノ秒。」 Exam scope: nanoseconds.

The air around him filled with constellations.

Each star was a potential strike point, hanging in a sphere around his body. He moved once—just once, from his viewpoint—but the movement propagated along all the plotted vectors. Golden afterimages of Galaxadye erupted in every direction, blurs of light threading through the ranks of the undead.

To the Death Regime ground forces, it looked like he simply flickered, and then most of them fell apart.

Rifles snapped into three harmless pieces. Tank barrels drooped like cooked noodles. Zombies found their legs no longer attached in meaningful ways; they toppled silently as the time-lock released, their dismemberment catching up to their awareness in a single, mercifully short instant.

A knot of Deathmarines in heavier armor tried to rush him with bayonets fixed.

Galaxadye drew an invisible circle with his foot. Time bent, turning their charge into a slow, underwater lunge. He stepped through them, touching each breastplate once with two fingers. Golden symbols bloomed where he tapped: OUT OF SCOPE.

When their motion resumed, they all skidded to a stop, weapons frozen, recall auras flaring violet as the system forcibly removed them from play.

"Ground exam: failed," he murmured. "Next."

The more he worked, the more the battlefield shrank into something manageable—a paper full of questions he could solve one by one.

He vaulted to the top of a skull-marked tank as it tried to push through a ruined tollgate, slapped his palm against the turret. Golden circuits raced across the gray-purple plating, rewriting its allegiance. The skull insignia cracked, flaked away, and reformed as a stylized galaxy spiral.

"Congratulations," he told the machine in Japanese, patting it as it lurched confusedly. 「君は今から交換留学生。」 You're an exchange student now.

On cue, the newly converted tank swung its turret 180 degrees and fired, blasting a line through its former comrades. Behind it, Galaxy infantry cheered, then hurriedly took cover again as more Deathmarines emerged from an underpass.

From the sky, more hordes spilled out of violet portals Deathwing had left on slow burn.

From distant streets, fresh zombie processions shambled forward to replace every erased line.

Galaxadye felt the weight of numbers pressing against his senses, like a big exam hall full of students all scribbling the wrong answers at once.

His health ring was untouched. His cosmic stamina, though, ticked down in tiny, nagging increments.

He frowned.

"Alright," he said softly, switching back to Cantonese. "時間用到咁盡，都唔識收手..." You push time this far and still don't know when to stop...

He looked up.

High overhead, the stars of the Gallaxgonbei night sky were beginning to emerge, faint against the afterglow of bombardments. He raised both arms toward them, fingers spread.

Astronomy equations flared in the air: orbital periods, stellar magnitudes, relative angles. He wasn't summoning actual stars—those were far beyond even his reach—but he could borrow the idea of them, the patterns they made in thinking minds.

"Constellation barrage," he intoned, English clipped with focus. "Northern test pattern. Begin."

The heavens rearranged themselves.

Lines of light connected distant points, sketching familiar shapes: a dragon, a spiral, a pair of balances, a fountain of meteors. Each finished constellation sent a beam of focused energy down along its lines, stitching through the undead masses with surgical precision. Entire boulevards of zombies simply fell silent, their animation glyphs cut at the root by star-theorems written on the fabric of local space.

From one end of the front to the other, the tide finally began to recede, not just break and reform.

Galaxy commanders on the ground saw golden rays sweeping ahead of them like brooms and pushed forward in their wake. Tanks that had survived earlier volleys found their ammunition spontaneously inert. Deathmarauders trying to flank through narrow alleys discovered those alleys now led into pockets where time looped uselessly, dumping them back where they had started.

"Hostile presence in northern theater reduced by forty-eight percent," the fleet core reported after a few minutes. "Projected full clearance within acceptable timeframe."

Galaxadye let his arms fall, exhaling.

Lightning still crawled along his fingertips, eager, but he could feel the drag of overclocked perception at the edges of his thoughts. The nanosecond trick always had a cost.

"Mark remaining pockets for ground teams," he ordered. "No need to waste any more of the big fireworks. Let the juniors get their participation marks."

"Acknowledged."

He turned his gaze across Gallaxgonbei's northern arc—across Gallenkodai's scarred port facilities, Jakchi's battered streets, the distant chimneys of Galaxenhuo no longer spewing violet smoke but harmless steam where Galaxy engineers had already begun the scrub.

The swarm was still there in places, yes. Zombies still lurched in side streets, Deathsoldiers still tried to rally around half-melted banners. But the shape of the battle had flipped. The ocean of undead had become puddles.

「よし。」 Good.

He flicked some invisible dust from his sleeve, watching a final converted tank thunder past beneath him to join a Galaxy column.

"Professor will say it was all his classroom," he remarked to the empty air in Japanese, lips quirking. 「でも、このあたりの採点は俺の仕事だから。」 But this part of the grading was my job.

In the distance, a golden ping at the edge of his awareness told him Galaxbeam had heard that, somehow, and approved.

The state's northern horizon brightened, just a little, as the last of his constellation barrage faded.

By the time the constellation barrage faded, the northern sky over Gallaxgonbei had finally gone dark enough to show its real stars.

Galaxadye rode a column of compressed starlight down to the surface and stepped off onto something solid for the first time all day.

It happened to be the cracked roof of a customs office overlooking Goldduchaisan's lower terraces—a cliff-city where warehouses clung to the rock like shelves on a bookcase, stacked in tiers above a harbor that had run violet for months. Now the water only glimmered with afterimages of explosions and the faint gold of Galaxy patrol craft sliding through the fog.

The street below him was a river of motion.

Galaxy armor columns—sleek, gold-trimmed tanks and IFVs—rumbled through the main avenue in ordered waves, hatches open to show the orange and gold uniforms inside. Galax Soldiers and Galax Marines jogged alongside them, weapons at low ready, sweeping doorways and alley mouths. Behind them, engineer teams marked hazard zones, threw up portable barrier pylons, and dragged stunned clusters of surviving civilians toward makeshift aid stations.

Between those disciplined lines, the last remnants of Deathwing's swarm still twitched.

Isolated knots of zombies lurched from shadowed courtyards or spilled from loading bays Deathwing's necrotechs had used as spawning pits. Occasional pockets of Deathsoldiers or Deathmarauders tried heroic but doomed last stands, firing bursts of dull-purple tracers at shields they could not scratch.

Galaxadye watched one such group brace at a crossroads, eight Deathmarines forming a firing arc around a gray-purple tank that had somehow survived the earlier precision strikes. Their commander—a half-armored necro-officer with half his face missing—waved them forward, shouting in hoarse German about holding this block, this street, this world.

Galaxadye sighed through his nose.

"System, local overlay," he said in Cantonese. "北段交差点。" Northern intersection, cross-streets.

A transparent grid unfolded in his eyes, superimposed on the crossroads below. Colored icons blossomed—Galaxy units advancing from three directions, an inbound armored spearhead from the port, a refugee column only two blocks away and moving too slowly.

"那邊唔可以比佢哋拖太耐。" We can't let them drag this out over there.

He stepped off the roof.

For the troops in the street, a bolt of golden lightning hit the far end of the crossroads and resolved into their Supreme Commander, coat and hair lifting in the displaced air, eyes already full of targeting sigils.

"Commander on the ground!" someone shouted over the squad-net, voices jumping in half a dozen languages.

Galaxadye flicked two fingers.

Time choked around the Deathmarines, dragging their movements down to an agonizing quarter-speed. Bullets crawled out of the tank's barrel like beads of mercury. The necro-officer's shout stretched thin and high, becoming a single, sustained note.

To Galaxadye, they were frozen poses, a question on an exam paper.

"Answer: no," he muttered in Japanese.

He drew three swift shapes in the air—a triangle, a spiral, a straight line. Each one glowed and leapt to a different target: the tank's ammunition cradle, the Deathmarines' firing hands, the necro-officer's command crest.

When he snapped his fingers, time flowed again.

The tank's gun jammed in the same instant its ammo racks quietly turned to inert sand. Deathmarines pulled their triggers and found their rifles disassembling themselves mid-burst, stocks falling away, magazines coughing out harmless golden dust. The necro-officer's crest shattered; his recall aura flared without him even realizing why.

A moment later, a Galaxy platoon rolled into the intersection, shields overlapping.

"Area is clear, sir!" their lieutenant called up.

"Area is graded," Galaxadye corrected, but his mouth quirked. "Push your right flank to the next checkpoint. Engineers behind you, medics masked. Any pockets of undead, tag and call for a scrub drone. No heroics."

"Yes, Commander!"

He didn't stay in one place long.

Golddichaisan's terraces were only one ledger in the stack; Gallaxgonbei's whole coastline still flickered with red marks.

He moved through the state like a golden cursor—sometimes as a streak of lightning along the cliff roads, sometimes as a blur on the turret of a Galaxy tank, sometimes simply walking down the middle of a street while his regiments flowed around him.

At a rail yard on the inland side of Golddichaisan, he landed on the roof of a freight crane and opened his palm. A holographic map of northern Gallaxgonbei sprang up, built from fleet telemetry and ground-unit feeds.

Galaxenportal City: secured perimeter, heavy undead contamination in sub-levels.
Gallenkodai Town: 80% cleared, sporadic resistance near the old ferry quarter.
Jakchi City: front line pushing outward along the ring road, zombie density dropping.
Outskirts: pockets. Always pockets.

"Alright," he said, switching to crisp English for the sake of the multilingual staff net. "New page. Regiment assignments."

Golden markers appeared on the map, one for each armored task force or infantry brigade under his hand.

"First Mechanized, you stay married to the cliff road—anchor it from Golddichaisan to Gallenkodai. Second Mechanized swings inland; I want a clean line between Jakchi and Galaxenhuo. No gaps bigger than one city block, or the zombies will pour through like water."

Acknowledgements pinged back from the commanders—short, disciplined bursts of Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin, German, Portuguese, Hindi.

He dragged two fingers from the coastal icons to a cluster near the center of the state.

"Third Armored, you're my eraser. You go where the map is the messiest. Drop beacons; I'll pencil in corrections from upstairs."

"Third Armored copies," came the reply, the commander's voice wry. "We'll make it tidy, sensei."

He smirked.

"Try not to redo the entire page."

As the night deepened, the pattern settled into something almost routine.

A sensor ping would flare bright red on his map—too many undead moving toward a refugee corridor, or a stubborn knot of Deathsoldiers trying to break through a barricade line near some half-ruined suburb.

He would flash across the rooftops, appear at the critical point, and apply just enough supernatural force to tip the balance: a localized time dilation to let a Galaxy squad evacuate a block before chem-shells hit, a gravity twist to topple a column of gray-purple tanks into a drainage canal, an astronomy pulse that erased every necrotic glyph within a plaza and left the zombies there finally, mercifully dead instead of merely undead.

Then he would step back, wave in the nearest regiment, and let the mortals do the walking and the door-kicking.

"Advance to the third ring and hold," he told one company as they fanned out through a shopping district whose windows still carried Death Regime sigils. "Remember: they can't kill you from range, but they can bury you in bodies. Keep your lanes open. Don't let them stack on you."

"Understood!"

"Galaxadye, this is Patrol Seven," another voice crackled from the edge of the Golddichaisan cliffs. "We've got a new wave climbing out of a collapsed bunker. Estimate five hundred shamblers, maybe fifty armed Deathsoldiers in the mix."

He tilted his head, feeling out the reported coordinates.

A little tired knot pulsed at the corner of his skull. Overuse of nano-second bursts always left a bruise on his thoughts.

"Seven, mark your position. I'm sending Third Armored to greet them. You fall back to the second line and switch to spotter duty."

"But sir, we can—"

"You can help more by pointing than by drowning," he cut in, tone firm but not unkind. "這啲係我哋啲人嘅工作。」此刻輪到坦克出場。」 This is what our armor is for. Let them have their turn on stage.

"Copy, Commander. Falling back."

He pinged Third Armored. Golden icons reoriented on the map and began rolling toward the cliff sector, a line of galaxy-sigil tanks hungry for legitimate targets.

Galaxadye watched them move, felt the horde swelling just beyond the sensor horizon, and resisted the urge to simply snap his fingers and erase that line of red himself.

He could do it. One more big constellation pattern, one more time-shear, and that entire wave would disappear.

But the day was already full of his handwriting. The state needed to learn to stand under its own banners again.

"Save something for the next chapter," he murmured, mostly to himself.

By the time pre-dawn gray began to touch the eastern edge of Gallaxgonbei, the word "onslaught" no longer fit.

The zombies were still there—stubborn, scattered, lurking in basements and drainage tunnels, shambling in twos and threes through fields outside the cities. Death Regime soldiers still held a few fortified pockets, refusing recall, holding to empty orders carved into their bones.

But the horde was gone.

In its place were problems—smaller, finite, solvable.

On a terrace overlooking Golddichaisan's harbor, Galaxadye stood with a cluster of junior staff officers around a portable holo-table. Behind them, Galaxy tanks idled in neat rows, their crews half-dozing, helmets off, waiting for the next round of coordinates. Farther back still, in the lee of reconstructed barrier pylons, civilians huddled under thermal blankets, watching the gold sky lighten and trying to remember how to feel something other than fear.

"Last major flow-line from the north is here," one officer said, tapping a glowing line that snaked from the outskirts into a still-dark district. "If we plug this and sweep behind, anything that wants to reach the city has to go through at least three of our lines."

"Good," Galaxadye replied. "Do it. And mark this plateau as my default landing zone for future deployments." He tapped the terrace beneath their feet with the heel of his boot. "If things get noisy in Gallaxgonbei again, I want the system to drop me right here."

The officers nodded, making quick annotations.

He glanced over the harbor, eyes half-lidded. A lone zombie staggered along the far pier, arms out, trying to remember what direction the last orders had pointed.

He extended one hand and snapped his fingers.

A pinpoint bolt of golden light flicked out, silent and exact. The zombie crumpled, the necrotic script animating it burned away in a puff of harmless brightness. The body lay still, finally at rest.

Galaxadye lowered his hand.

"進行吧。" Get on with it, he said softly, more to the state than to his staff. "Gallaxgonbei still has homework. But the exam is passed."

He turned back to the holo-table, already coordinating the next wave of regiments and armor advances, already thinking three cities and five scenarios ahead.

Behind him, Golddichaisan's cliffs caught the first real sunrise they'd seen in months, and the undead—what remained of them—found themselves penned, hunted, and steadily, methodically erased by golden lines marching forward across the map.

On Galaxadye's map, the northern front slowly changed from red to amber to a satisfying spread of gold.

High above the rest of Gallaxgonbei, the sky was still a mess.

Galaxapuff – Skyteacher of Gallaxgonbei

Far over Haylao City and Xinglat Province, Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary floated like a second moon—its underside a slow-turning halo of golden geometry, its decks alive with the hum of launch rails, drone cradles, and bomber catapults.

Galaxapuff hung just off the forward edge of the Sanctuary, boots barely touching anything, toes pointed down over a kilometer of empty air. Her long coat fluttered in the high wind, the hem glowing faintly where it brushed against the pressure fields that kept everyone aboard breathing.

Beneath her, the Death Regime's last great air-and-ground tantrum raged on.

Zombie hordes seethed through the outskirts of Haylao, filling highway cloverleafs and industrial yards. Between them lumbered gray-purple armor—tanks, self-propelled guns, and low mechanical walkers with skull-visor cockpits. Every few blocks, captured AA towers spat violet tracers upward, searching for anything with a golden hull. Deathsoldiers and Deathmarines in ragged platoons used the undead like sandbags, crouching behind them as they fired at Galaxy positions.

Galaxapuff watched the whole thing with her chin in one hand, hair lifting lazily in the slipstream.

"Mm..." She clicked her tongue in Japanese. 「まだこんなにゾンビ残ってるの？　テスト後の掃除、嫌い。」 There are still this many zombies? I hate cleanup after the test.

Her irises were a bright, playful gold, but behind them rolled targeting overlays and airspace diagrams. Narrow corridors of "safe sky" wound between red cones of Death AA and purple clouds of necrotic flak. Green lines showed Galaxy flight paths, intersecting in an elegant script only she could fully read.

"Commander, wings are stacked and ready for tasking," reported the Sanctuary's flight AI in calm English. "Bomber Groups A through D. Cloudcasters One and Two. Drone curtains on standby. Ground liaison from Galaxadye's theater on channel three."

"好，等一等。" Okay, wait a sec, she answered in Cantonese, stretching her arms over her head. Golden motes spilled from the sleeves of her coat and drifted outward, seeding the air with faintly glowing dust. "First we redraw the sky. Then we tell the kids where to color."

She flicked both wrists.

The motes exploded into structured cloud—cotton-soft at a glance, but every puff threaded with sigils and micro-arrays. In seconds, a new weather system blossomed above Haylao and Xinglat: banks of Galaxapuff's clouds shouldering aside Deathenpuff's lingering chem-smog, pressing violet vapors down into narrow trenches while clearing broad aerial avenues for Galaxy craft.

"空域、没収。」 Airspace: confiscated, she said briskly. 「じゃ、授業再開。」 Class resumes.

Her voice rolled out across the state on every Galaxy frequency.

"Skyside to all Haylao and Xinglat units," she said in English first, for clarity. "This is Supreme Commander Galaxapuff. Congratulations, you have officially passed 'Don't die to Deathenpuff 101.'"

Scattered laughter crackled back through the comm-chatter.

"Now we start the advanced course: 'How to reclaim your sky while the zombies scream about it.' Infantry, keep your helmets on and your heads down. Armor, follow the smoke cues. Pilots..."

Her tone brightened, switching to Japanese.

「パイロットたち、準備はいい？　今日はフリーハグじゃなくて、フリーボムの日。」 Pilots, ready? Today isn't free hugs, it's free bombs.

A roar answered her from dozens of cockpits: mixed cheers, whoops, clipped affirmatives in a dozen languages.

She smiled, small but sharp.

"Alright then. A-Group, you get the big ugly knot trying to climb the east ring road into Haylao. B-Group, you're with the walkers in Xinglat's factory belt. Cloudcasters, smoke the gaps I'm drawing now. I want every zombie herd walking into their own funeral fog."

She traced three curves in the air with her fingers.

Down below, her seeded clouds obeyed. Curtains of shimmering gold-white mist unfurled over specific avenues and rail spurs, masking Galaxy movements while leaving Death formations brightly highlighted to anyone keyed into her sigils.

"Death's AA is still hot on those intersections," the AI cautioned. "Projected loss rate without intervention—"

"Loss rate for my kids is zero," Galaxapuff cut in softly. "We'll curve their homework."

She extended her right hand, fingers spread.

The air around Tenshinkō thrummed. Tiny arcs of electricity braided themselves between her fingertips, then raced outward along invisible lattices—time-bent flak maps, pulled into the present from five seconds in the future.

Where Death gunners would aim, she saw now.

Where their tracers would be, she saw now.

"AA patterns pre-graded," she announced. "Bomber groups, execute on vector Puff-One. If someone shoots where you are, it means I made a mistake, and we all know that's not allowed."

"Copy Puff-One!" chorused half a dozen voices, laughter tucked inside the discipline.

The first wave of bombers dove.

To watchers on the ground, the next minute looked like a storm painted by an overcaffeinated anime director.

Golden silhouettes of Galaxy bombers slid out of the Sanctuary's cloud skirt and followed invisible curves through the flak. Violet tracers clawed up to meet them—and missed by clean, impossible margins, rounds passing through empty air where hulls had been a moment ago.

Galaxapuff adjusted lines in real time, tiny flicks of her fingers nudging entire squadrons a few meters left or right, a fraction of a second earlier or later.

"Little more... good, good." She hummed under her breath in Japanese, annotations floating beside each craft. 「そこはダメ。燃えるのはゾンビだけでいい。」 Not there. Only the zombies are allowed to burn.

Then the bombs started to fall.

Not crude high-explosives, but packets of compressed starlight and atmospheric cleansing agents—her trademark ordnance. Each burst looked like a golden dandelion puff popping open just above street level. Where the seeds fell, three things happened at once:

Zombies disintegrated into thin ash.

Deathsoldiers' necrotic bindings snapped, dumping them unconscious for recall.

Corrupted chem-smog around them burned off into harmless clear air.

Whole blocks of Haylao's lower districts transformed from screeching purple chaos into quiet, smoking streets in the span of seconds.

On the far side of Xinglat Province, walkers tried to raise their guns and track the incoming bombers. Galaxapuff's storms simply pushed their barrels off-line, crosswinds turning aim into slapstick. When a few did manage to fire blind, the shells wandered into empty sky corridors she had already vacated.

"Puff-Lead to Skyteacher, first run complete," came the squadron leader's voice, breathless with adrenaline. "AA net degraded by... a lot. Zombies... uh. Exploded."

"Exploded is a passing grade," Galaxapuff replied, pleased. "Second run, stagger your timing. I'm going to play with the weather."

Even for a Supreme Commander, the onslaught tried to be relentless.

As soon as one herd was shredded, another pushed out of a rail tunnel or a necro-stacked container yard. Death engineers had buried zombie vats under factory floors; ruptured silos oozed new bodies. Some of Deathenpuff's drone-bombers had been left on autonomous routines, swooping in low with sludge payloads whenever they detected clusters of living heartbeats.

Galaxapuff drifted higher, taking it all in.

Her health ring glowed steady and full. Nothing on the ground could scratch her. But her fatigue—the cosmic kind that lived behind her eyes and under her tongue—crept up as she layered more equations on more airspace.

"Commander, Haylao's evac corridors are almost clear," came a ground liaison from a forward command post. "But we've got a new zombie swell building along the freight canal. If they breach, they'll cut the civilian line in half."

A ghosted image of the canal flashed up beside her, sourced from helmet cams and drones. A gray-purple river of bodies squeezed between warehouse rows, drawn toward the sound of vehicles and the warm scent of humans.

她咬咬嘴唇。 She worried her lower lip, thinking.

"Alright." She switched to Cantonese. "Mark the front third of that herd as 'must erase.' The back two-thirds we'll...borrow."

"Borrow, ma'am?"

"Relax, I'm not keeping them as pets." She rolled her shoulders, golden motes raining again. "Cloudcasters, form me a half-dome over the canal, three kilometers long. Make it thick. I'm going to curve gravity inside."

She clapped her hands once.

Down below, the air over the canal seemed to fold. Zombies suddenly found the "down" direction sliding sideways; they toppled in waves, piling against one wall of the trench. Distant walkers skidded, their treads squealing as their weight tried to flow toward the same gravitational fake.

"Bomber Group C, you get the front third," she called. "Everything inside the first kilometer gets star-cleaned. After that, leave them. They're going to be busy falling for the next hour."

Starlight bombs rained in a tight line, carving a clean, smoking gap between the horde's head and its reshuffled body. The front-runners simply ceased to exist. The rest of the zombie river, still intact but thoroughly disoriented by the sideways gravity, tumbled into its own fallen comrades and stopped moving forward entirely.

The evac column rolled past a block away, never seeing the strange, sideways "waterfall" of corpses hidden behind warehouses and gold-tinted fog.

"Canal problem solved," the liaison reported, awe in his voice. "I... don't have a tactical word for what you just did."

「家庭用洗濯機モード。」 Household washing machine mode, she replied sweetly in Japanese. "You can write something fancy in the log."

As the hours stretched, the pattern held.

Wave after wave of zombies surged, but never in the same place twice; she had risen a little higher each cycle, zooming her frame of reference out until all of Gallaxgonbei's southern and central airspace fit neatly in her palm.

When a new Death armor spear tried to punch up through Rentianfue Pass, she flicked it aside with crosswinds and precision strikes, calling down Galaxadye's artillery when she wanted a sharper eraser. When pockets of Deathmarines dug in on rooftops with portable AA, she dropped a "rain" of golden confetti that shorted out their necro-circuitry and left them being dragged off by recall halos before they could get off a second shot.

She was everywhere and nowhere: a glint high above the thunderheads, a silhouette reflected in cockpit glass, a familiar, teasing voice in everyone's ear.

"Wing Twelve, your formation looks like a question mark; fix it."
"Cloudcaster Two, that gap is pretty but also a death funnel. Patch it."
"Infantry on Tower-Three, if you can see my feet, you're too far out of cover. Back under the shield, please. We have snipers for a reason."

Once, in a brief lull, she let herself drift down to rooftop height in Xiewejunkok's old warehouse district. Galaxy engineers were raising new antenna spires there, converting a former Death signal hub into a Galaxy one.

A small squad of Galax Soldiers looked up and froze, caught mid-task with coils of cable over their shoulders.

"Don't mind me," she said in Mandarin, landing lightly on a crane arm and making a little shooing motion. "Keep working. Pretend the camera isn't watching."

One of them laughed nervously. Another snapped a picture anyway.

She pretended not to notice, but her smile lingered a little longer as she rose back into the air.

By the time Galaxadye reported that Golddichaisan and the northern belt were under stable control, Galaxapuff's domain had changed color, too.

Haylao's skies, once striped with Deathenpuff's chem-cloud tracks, were now a soft, honest blue, streaked only with contrails from Galaxy patrol craft. Xinglat's factory smoke rose clean; any residual violet taint was hunted down and eaten by her tireless cleansing winds. The AA towers that had once spat purple rage at the heavens now stood silent, their barrels twisted into abstract sculptures by careful, nonlethal metallurgical spells.

The zombies were not entirely gone, of course. You could not scrub a whole state in a single day, even with Supreme Commanders turning the pages.

But the swarms were broken. What remained were stray clusters—manageable, targetable, already being hunted by mixed ground-air teams working from the flight paths she'd carved.

"Skyteacher, projected undead density in your theater has dropped below five percent of initial values," the Sanctuary AI reported at last. "All major airspace corridors are under Galaxy control. Death Regime aerial presence: nil."

Galaxapuff let herself sag in the air for the first time, lying back on an invisible cushion of pressure. Tenshinkō loomed above her, serene now, its sigils dimmed to peacetime brightness.

「はぁー...」 She exhaled, long and theatrical. "Homework: mostly graded."

She rolled once in zero-G, then pointed lazily down toward Haylao's central plaza.

"Mark that square as my standard drop-in point," she told the AI, slipping back into Cantonese. "If Gallaxgonbei screams for help later, I want to pop into the story there. Good view. Good wind."

"Waypoint recorded: 'Galaxapuff – Haylao Plaza Anchor.'"

"很好。" Good.

Below, Galaxy banners rippled from newly reclaimed towers. Children—actual children, not just cadets—had started to wander out onto balconies, pointing up at the clean sky, at the glittering, distant shape of Tenshinkō.

Galaxapuff watched them for a long, quiet moment.

"Alright, my little storm," she told herself under her breath in Japanese, patting the air beside her like it was a faithful pet. 「この州は、もう一度晴れマークだね。」 This state gets a sunshine mark again.

Then she squared her shoulders, pulled her coat straight, and raised her voice one more time for the channels.

"Attention all air and ground units in Gallaxgonbei," she announced in clear English. "As of this moment, your sky is no longer on loan from the Death Regime. It is Galaxy property again."

A cheer rolled back at her, ragged but real.

"Keep your patrols up, keep your lines tight, and be nice to the civilians. Class dismissed—for now."

She turned in the air and drifted back toward Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary, already reviewing fresh reports, already plotting soft weather over hard scars, as Gallaxgonbei settled under golden clouds that finally, finally, belonged to Galaxy hands again.

Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary dimmed to a gentle golden dusk-cycle, its battle-bright sigils easing down to a soft, breathing glow.

Galaxapuff hovered just below the main deck, half wrapped in the station's shadow, half bathed in the newborn daylight of Gallaxgonbei. Beneath her, the state looked less like a battlefield and more like what it had always wanted to be: a sprawl of cities breathing again, smoke plumes thinning into normality instead of necrosis, streets slowly refilling with cautious life.

Status panes floated around her in quiet rings:

Haylao City: Primary airspace secure. Remaining undead tagged for cleanup.

Xinglat Province: Industrial stack emissions normalized. AA towers neutralized and converted.

Xiewejunkok & corridors: Patrol grid established. Civilian flight paths open.

Zombie density: Falling. Consistently falling.

She dismissed them one by one with a slow flick of her fingers.

「よし。」 Good.

"Sanctuary," she said in English, more softly now, "switch my role tag from 'active engagement' to 'skyward overwatch.' Local commanders get first say on any new deployments."

"Confirmed," replied the AI. "Command priority redistributed to field officers. You remain on call as strategic support."

"Mm. On call is fine." She smiled faintly. "Teachers shouldn't hover over every quiz."

For the first time since the assault began, she let herself drift down out of the high battle strata.

It wasn't a teleport. No dramatic beam of light, no starlight slash. She simply fell—slowly, gently, as if gravity and wind had agreed to carry her like a leaf. Tenshinkō receded overhead, a halo above the thinning clouds, while the streets of Haylao swelled up to meet her.

She touched down in the plaza she'd marked as her anchor—a broad, circular square ringed by battered offices and half-mended storefronts. Galaxy engineers had already raised a temporary shield arch at one end; med tents and ration lines snaked under it. A patched flag of the Galaxy Regime hung from a jury-rigged pole, edges scorched but symbol intact.

For a heartbeat, nobody noticed her.

Then a Galax Soldier at the perimeter turned, hesitated, and snapped up into a rigid salute.

"Supreme Commander on the ground!" he barked, voice cracking a little.

Dozens of heads turned. Salutes followed—tired but sharp, some from bandaged arms, some from crew hatches, some from med stretchers where patients insisted on forcing themselves upright just long enough to pay respect.

Galaxapuff lifted one hand in an easy, downward motion.

"At ease," she said in Cantonese, stepping to the center of the plaza. "You've all done enough standing today."

The tension broke into soft, embarrassed laughter. A few soldiers actually sat down where they were, legs giving out in honest exhaustion.

Near the med line, two children peered around their guardian's waist—a boy with smudged cheeks and a girl clutching a worn plush shaped like a tiny galaxy spiral. Their eyes tracked the Supreme Commander's floating coat, the faint golden motes that still bled from her hair when she moved.

Galaxapuff met their gaze and, just for them, exaggerated a little hop—lifting off the ground for a second, spinning once, landing in a feather-light bow.

The boy gasped. The girl's grip on her plush loosened, fear momentarily displaced by wonder.

"你哋喺呢度，就已經好叻。" Just by being here, you've already done well, she told them gently in Cantonese. "The rest is our job."

She straightened and looked past them, out toward the city's fractured horizon.

In the distance, she could see Galaxadye's armored spearheads glinting as they moved through the hills. Higher still, a thin thread of light marked Galaxbeam's lingering presence as he audited the last problem points across the state, his golden grids gradually folding away as Gallaxgonbei proved it could stand on its own again.

Three Absolutes. Three very different styles of teaching.

Her domain was the sky. His was the board. Dyes' was the clean, surgical correction of the answer key.

Together, they'd taken a state back from a god of death and his empire of corpses—and more importantly, they'd left Gallaxgonbei with a syllabus for how to stay free.

"Skyteacher," the Sanctuary AI murmured in her ear, softer now that they were out of combat mode. "Long-range scans show no immediate Death Regime incursions returning to your theater. Orbit is quiet. For the moment."

"For the moment," she echoed, not fooled for a second. Deathwing didn't stop; he only flipped to a different chapter. "Log Gallaxgonbei as 'under golden skies, watchful.' Tag my presence as rotating. I'll be back."

"Entry recorded."

She took one last slow turn, memorizing the plaza: cracked tiles, half-fallen lightposts, Galaxy banners improvising a frame around the scarred horizon. The kind of place she could drop into in one breath if the alarms ever screamed again.

「みんな、よく頑張った。」 You all worked hard, she said quietly, more prayer than order. 「次のテストまでは、ちゃんと休んで。」 Until the next test, rest properly.

Then she let her feet leave the ground.

The wind caught her coat; Tenshinkō's pull tugged at her like an old friend inviting her home. She rose through the gently clearing air, the plaza shrinking beneath her into a gold-and-stone circle, the people into small but stubborn sparks.

By the time she rejoined the Sanctuary's lower decks, Haylao and Xinglat were just pieces on a much larger map again—but now they shone with a soft gold overlay that hadn't been there before.

Gallaxgonbei was no longer a crisis zone on her board. It was a reference point.

A state reclaimed. A sky retaken. A mark on the page where, if Death Regime ever tried to write their purple runes again, they would find Galaxapuff's handwriting already there, waiting.

She dismissed the live feeds with a final gesture and turned toward the interior corridors of Tenshinkō, staff reports and future flight plans already queueing before her eyes.

Behind the Sanctuary, the first honest sunrise in too long washed over Gallaxgonbei, catching on fresh paint, repaired glass, and the faint, lingering trails of golden clouds.

Up here, Galaxapuff smiled once, briefly.

Down there, under her watch, the sky stayed theirs.

While Galaxapuff's clouds thinned into honest weather and Gallaxgonbei's cities blinked awake under gold, there was one place in the state where the war had never been loud at all.

It was three floors below street level in Goldduchaisan, beneath an ordinary-looking customs administration block that still smelled faintly of dust, old paperwork, and sea salt.

Down there, in a room without windows and with far too many screens, sat Galaxwis.

The chamber was a quiet galaxy.

Holo-panels floated in stacked rings around him: city maps layered over probability grids, Death Regime portal signatures overlaid on trade routes, Galaxbeam's handwritten theorem-scrawls threaded through it all like constellations. Streams of numbers poured down in spiral columns—logistics, morale metrics, anomalous temperature shifts, dice-roll outputs from the gods of chance that someone had thoughtfully wired into his console as "cosmic noise."

Galaxwis sat cross-legged on his chair, elbows on his knees, chin resting on laced fingers. His coat was the plainest of all the elites—no dramatic tails, no rising collars—just a neat, gold-trimmed jacket, sleeves rolled up past his forearms, showing wrists wrapped in thin data-bangles.

He watched Gallaxgonbei the way a librarian watched a noisy reading room: not with panic, but with a certain enduring exasperation.

On one screen, replayed from minutes ago, Galaxapuff's constellation bombs unfurled over Haylao like golden flowers. On another, Galaxadye's constellations of artillery adjusted themselves in perfect micro-timing along the northern front. On a third, Galaxbeam's golden grids tightened and then dissolved as the Absolute decided a particular district had finally "passed."

Galaxwis's eyes, a muted starlight gold, flicked between them without really looking at any. The real picture lived in his head.

"北空域穩定，北陸路線穩定，內陸城市由學生自己處理..." Northern airspace stable, northern land routes stable, interior cities left to the 'students'... he murmured in Cantonese, voice barely above a hum. "好啦，教授，你呢份卷終於改完一半。" Fine, Professor, you've finally graded half the exam.

He stretched one hand without looking. A hovering slate drifted into his palm, already filled with his tiny, fast handwriting:

PREDICTED NEXT 8 MOVES – DEATHWING (STATE: GALLAXGONBEI)
1–3: No reinvasion. Resources pivot to other states.
4–6: Probe teleportation boundaries: random portal stabs at soft points.
7–8: Sacrificial elite raids to disrupt reconstruction.
9–10: Orbital tests (if I.S.I.S. fragments available).
11–30: Curveballs.

He tapped the margin twice.

"你從來都唔會簡單。" You never do anything simple, he told the absent Deathwing. "所以我要三十步之後都寫低先。" That's why I write down the thirtieth move before you've played the first.

An alert chimed, soft and unobtrusive.

One of the panels flared violet at the edge: UNAUTHORIZED PORTAL HEAT – OUTER GALLAXGONBEI PERIMETER.

Galaxwis blinked once and focused. A three-dimensional model of the state bloomed in front of him: Gallaxgonbei as a hollow shell, its borders lit with little gold filigree marks where Galaxbeam's wards had been anchored. At three scattered points along the seaward side, violet sparks glimmered, testing the shell like fingertips on glass.

"Death Regime is poking again," the room's quiet monitoring AI reported, tone as level as a metronome. "Probability profile suggests scouting for reentry vectors."

"唔好意思，" Galaxwis said to the sparks, smile thin. "我哋呢度滿堂。" Sorry. We're full here.

He flipped a small switch at his wrist.

Golden lines flowered along the inside of the border shell—his additions, nested inside Galaxbeam's larger grids. Where the violet sparks pressed, the gold lines thickened, absorbing the pressure, then reflecting it back along carefully calculated angles.

On a far-away Death Regime console, some necromancer somewhere was about to have a very confusing day: portal coordinates that should have dropped squads into empty outskirts of Gallaxgonbei would instead spit them into open ocean, into pre-cleared quarantine sands, or into an already evacuated testing arena ringed with Galaxy cameras.

Galaxwis flicked open a comm-channel.

"Galaxastorm," he said, English professional now, "flagged anomaly: Death portals trying to lick the perimeter again. Relax, I fed their coordinates a snack. If anything pops through, it'll be in the off-shore sandbox I drew you last week."

A short burst of laughter came back over the line. "Copy, Galaxwis. I'll bring the broom, just in case."

"Sweep gently. We'll want the data."

He cut the line and opened another, this time to Tenshinkō.

"Skyteacher," he said, Japanese slipping in around the consonants, "your air corridors are holding. But I'm seeing three patterns in the residue. Deathenpuff's autopaths will try to send bombers through the old chem smog trails in about... nineteen hours."

Galaxapuff's reply was a low whistle. "まだ諦めてないんだ。かわいい執着心。" He's still not giving up. Cute obsession. "Forward the pattern to my cloudcasters."

"Already did. I coloured the danger lines in violet for you; you can scribble over them later."

「はーい、助かる。」 Thanks, that helps.

He closed that channel too, letting the room go quiet again.

Galaxwis's job, strictly speaking, was not to fight.

That didn't make his hands any cleaner.

He spun his chair a quarter turn, bringing a different bank of holo-panels into view. This set was all cities: Galaxenportal, Galaxengongshi, Goldduchaisan, Wanshengtu Town, and a dozen more, each window showing a living, breathing map. The real-time feeds were mundane now—refugee processing, engineers raising temporary barriers, kids chasing each other between med tents.

Over those, faint and almost invisible unless you knew where to look, ran lattices of Galaxwis's corrections.

Here, a subtle warping of traffic flow so that if Death Regime somehow forced a portal open, its soldiers would land in a roundabout instead of the city center, facing a ring of prepositioned armor instead of civilians.

There, a stealthy re-layout of power grids so necrotic ritual circles could not anchor themselves to the usual flows of electricity, no matter how cleverly disguised.

On the very edge of Gallaxgonbei, in a sleepy hillside district nobody would ever write into a heroic saga, he had quietly designated three blocks of empty warehouses as a permanent "sacrificial landing zone." Any invasion vector that slipped past Galaxbeam's outer wards would find itself funneled there, twenty steps away from anything that actually mattered, under the gaze of very bored but extremely overqualified Galaxy elites.

He marked those districts on his internal map with a tiny, joking doodle: a chibi skull with a "WELCOME, PLEASE TAKE A NUMBER" sign.

"Random targets, hm?" he mused in Mandarin, tilting his head. "你以為亂咁射就可以射中城市...可惜，亂數我係負責。" You think shooting randomly will hit a city... unfortunately, I'm in charge of the random numbers.

An incoming ping pulsed along his left-hand bangles: FROM: GALAXBEAM.

He straightened unconsciously.

The Absolute's voice arrived like a polite footnote in his ears, woven through the room's hum.

"Wis," Galaxbeam said in Cantonese, weary but calm, "Gallaxgonbei's main scripts are stable. I'm shifting some of my direct attention to the neighboring states. How nervous do I need to be about our purple friend trying to...redo the test here?"

Galaxwis let his eyes unfocus. The data blossomed into patterns behind his eyelids.

He saw Deathwing's temper in the dice log, the earlier retreat curled around a wounded pride. He saw resource charts, casualty ratios, the emotional heat-map of a god of death who hated losing a page in his research journal. He saw every portal heat-flare in the last twelve hours, every stray chem-cloud that hadn't quite burned off.

He stepped mentally thirty moves ahead—and then thirty more, just to be sure.

When he opened his eyes, the answer was already distilled.

"短期内，佢唔會返嚟正面搵你。" In the short term, he won't come back here looking for you head-on, he replied. "He can't afford another conceptual loss so soon. He'll test the edges—random portal bites, maybe a small elite raid to make himself feel better. Nothing the kids and I can't curve."

A brief hint of amusement coloured Galaxbeam's tone.

"Thirty steps ahead again?"

"Thirty-two, this time." Galaxwis allowed himself a small, smug smile. "I counted rerolls."

A low chuckle; then the Absolute's voice turned businesslike again.

"In that case, I leave Gallaxgonbei's day-to-day to you. Flag me if he tries anything truly...creative."

"教授放心。" Don't worry, Professor. "If he throws a curveball, I'll write the answer key before it hits the plate."

The connection faded, leaving the hum of the machines and the very faint vibration of reconstruction work going on in the streets above.

Hours later, when the official reports would file Gallaxgonbei under "stabilized," Galaxwis was still in his chair, eyes half-lidded, the glow of a dozen silent alarms ready at the corners of his perception.

He watched as:

Galaxadye's armored columns settled into rotation patterns that formed unbroken shields around key cities without ever looking like fortresses.

Galaxapuff's clouds rewrote themselves into gentler weather cycles that accidentally scattered any necrotic spores that might still try to ride the wind.

Local Galaxy commanders adjusted patrols in ways they thought were their own ideas—little nudges seeded by the suggestion prompts Galaxwis had quietly encoded into their tactical displays.

In a forgotten corner of his map, three tiny violet blips flared: Death Regime test portals, coordinates set to "random Gallaxgonbei civilian district."

His gold web caught them, smoothed them, and spat them out into the designated empty warehouse blocks on the hillside.

On some later date, a bored Galax Soldier posted there would send up a report:

"Three squads of Deathsoldiers appeared, looked very confused, and were promptly recalled after Galaxharp dropped a chord progression on their heads. No civilian contact."

Galaxwis flagged that future log entry in his mind as "expected outcome."

He leaned back, finally letting the tension in his shoulders melt into the chair's padding.

"好啦。" There. "For now, you stay out."

He addressed Deathwing, the dice, the unseen author, all at once.

"Gallaxgonbei is no longer a test you get to surprise-mark. It's part of the answer sheet."

A tiny icon in the corner of the main display changed color—from amber to a deep, steady gold.

GALLAXGONBEI – STATUS: RECLAIMED. DEFENSE LEAD: GALAXWIS (HIDDEN).

He reached out and gently tapped the label "hidden," as if to nail it in place.

"If they ever ask who kept the next invasion thirty steps away from the cities," he muttered, lips quirking, 「先生に任せる。」 I'll let the Professor tell the story.

For now, he was content to remain a ghost in Goldduchaisan's underlevels, the quiet mind behind the loud heroes, watching the numbers and gently, relentlessly rigging fate so that every "random" assault Death Regime tried would land just short of anything truly alive.

Above him, Gallaxgonbei's streets rumbled with reconstruction and cautious laughter. Far overhead, golden clouds turned slowly in a sky that belonged, once again, to the Galaxy Regime.

And in the middle—the invisible middle, between war and peace, between attack and prevention—Galaxwis stayed at his post, already calculating what the thirtieth move would look like on the next board.

Weeks after Gallaxgonbei's liberation was officially stamped as "complete," the war—his war—had settled into a quieter shape.

The guns had gone mostly silent. The zombies were, at last, rare. The heroes had moved on to other fronts.

Galaxwis stayed in his windowless room under Goldduchaisan.

His world was still made of screens and probabilities.

The main holo-map of Gallaxgonbei hung in the air like a translucent lantern: cities glowing softly in gold, border wards traced in fine lines, shipping routes and foot traffic like veins carrying life instead of war.

He flicked his wrist; a side panel rolled open, listing incident reports in neat, color-coded entries.

[LOG 321-A – MICRO PORTAL, WAREHOUSE BLOCK]
Origin: Death Regime, unregistered portal signature
Intended target: "Random civilian sector, Gallaxgonbei"
Actual exit: Pre-designated sacrificial warehouse zone, outer Goldduchaisan
Outcome: 2 squads Deathsoldiers, 1 elite (Deathrazor) emerged. All recalled within 18.2 seconds by Galaxharp & Galaxrire.
Civilian impact: 0.
Note: "Random" is not random when I'm grading the dice.

He scrolled with a fingertip, eyes calm, pen already noting patterns in the margins.

Scenario One: The Misplaced Raid

At 0300 local, three violet sparks bloomed on the perimeter grid, insisting they were "random city coordinates."

Galaxwis didn't even look up from his tea.

He tapped the edge of his console. The golden redirect lattice he'd buried around Gallaxgonbei's wards flexed, caught the coordinates, and slid them sideways.

On the other side of the world, Death Regime planners saw their runes flare in triumph.

In Gallaxgonbei, three squads of Deathsoldiers and one minor elite popped into existence inside a ring of empty warehouses—exactly where Galaxwis had painted a quiet WELCOME sign weeks ago.

"Galaxharp," he said into a low-band channel, Mandarin dry, "you have visitors in Study Room C. They're very confused and probably quite proud of themselves."

Her laugh came back sharp and delighted. 「テストの追試かな。」A makeup exam, huh. "I'll play them a lullaby."

Eighteen seconds later, the alert cleared. No civilian feeds even flickered.

Galaxwis logged it, tagged the portal signature, and added a brief note:

DEATHRAZOR – TENDENCY: OVERCONFIDENT. FUTURE RAIDS LIKELY. MARKED AS 'EASY POP QUIZ.'

Scenario Two: The Statistical Curse

Days later, there were no portals, no visible incursions.

There were...numbers.

A faint uptick in "unrelated" accidents: dropped cargo crates, scaffolding collapses, vehicles skidding at low speeds. No deaths—Galaxy field medics were too good—but the pattern smelled wrong.

Galaxwis pulled the accidents out of the general reporting stream and spread them across a secondary holo. Little red dots popped up over the map, clustering in a pattern that looked almost like noise...almost.

He squinted, switching to Mandarin, muttering under his breath.

"死亡機率被人摸過。" Somebody has been fingering the probability of death.

It was a classic Deathwing trick: not attacking cities directly, just nudging the odds so that life itself became slightly more fragile. Enough small bruises, and a state could be made to feel haunted again.

"Professor," Galaxwis said on a secure line, tone crisp. "Recommend conceptual patch in Gallaxgonbei: redefine 'accident' away from 'inevitable tragedy' and toward 'learning event.' Your handwriting, not his."

Galaxbeam's reply came layered over a yawn.

"Send me your draft."

Galaxwis pushed a sheet of equations across the ether—his framing of probability curves, annotated where he wanted Absolute-level ink.

Within an hour, the accident heat-map began to cool. Ladders wobbled but didn't fall. Crates slipped but landed harmlessly. Vehicles skidded, spun, and came to dignified stops.

To locals, it felt like "luck" improving.

To Deathwing, somewhere far away, it felt like his long-distance curse had been intercepted by an unseen hand.

Galaxwis logged that, too.

[LOG 338-C – PROBABILITY TAMPERING]
Mitigation: Joint conceptual rewrite (Galaxwis draft, Galaxbeam sign-off).
Result: Accidents remain, fatalities do not. Deathwing's curve flattened.
Comment: "你玩死亡率，我玩樣本數。" You play with death rates; I play with sample size.

Scenario Three: The Digital Infiltration

Not every attack walked on legs.

One quiet afternoon-cycle, a tremor ran through Gallaxgonbei's civilian datanet—so small most people would've blamed a glitch. A spike of unusual packet traffic snaked from the coast inward, masquerading as maintenance pings and harmless media files.

The AI monitoring the room made a soft sound.

"Unusual pattern on municipal networks," it said. "Fingerprint is...similar to Death Regime code structures found in prior necro-comms."

Galaxwis rolled his chair over, eyes sharpening.

"Deathwis trying to make friends with our routers," he guessed in Cantonese. "咁都想試?" Even this you want to try?

He didn't fight the intrusion head on. That would have been an advertisement.

Instead, he set a filter—a subtle mirror hidden in the state's backbone.

Every necrotic data tendril that entered Gallaxgonbei's systems found itself gently steered into a sandbox server farm under an abandoned water treatment plant. There, in a sealed environment, Galaxy analysts and a very bored subroutine chewed it apart.

On Deathwis' end, the code appeared to propagate beautifully. It slipped into what looked like junction boxes, control systems, broadcast nodes.

In reality, it was infesting a dead, disconnected network: a conceptual mannequin dressed up as Gallaxgonbei's nervous system.

Two days later, Galaxwis forwarded the captured malware bundle to Moonwis and Moonwisdom in the Lunar Regime, along with a neatly annotated summary.

"Deathwis attempted to overwrite civil data narratives with despair loops," he noted in English. "Recommend vaccination at scale. Also: tell them thanks for the free sample."

Then he closed the loop, never once needing to pick up a weapon.

Scenario Four: The Quiet Propaganda

Sometimes the attack was just a rumor.

In a sleepy quarter of Galaxencloude, whispers began: that the Death Regime hadn't really left, that the golden banners were just a new kind of occupation, that the portals would reopen at any moment. Nothing so blatant as a broadcast—just anxiety, spreading hand to hand.

Galaxwis caught it in the numbers: a slight dip in cooperation rates with Galaxy patrols, a surge in requests to relocate out of state, increased purchases of emergency supplies clustered around old necro-sites.

He didn't stomp it himself. That wasn't his specialty.

Instead, he flagged the pattern and quietly opened a channel to the Galaxy Regime's civic wing and to trusted partners in other AES regimes.

"Here," he wrote in a cross-regime tactical brief, "Deathwing is trying to retake Gallaxgonbei with stories instead of soldiers. Please grade his essay."

Within a week, local broadcasters—independent, but nudged by Galaxy-friendly data—ran features on reconstruction successes. Lunar Regime scholars gave gentle interviews explaining how necrotic residue was being scrubbed. A Star Regime tech team set up a "Festival of Circuits" in Galaxengongshi, showcasing new shields and emergency teleport nodes in the most playful way possible.

The rumor curve bent downward.

Galaxwis logged that too.

[LOG 367-F – MEMETIC INCURSION]
Counter: Multi-regime narrative reinforcement (Galaxy, Lunar, Star).
Result: Panic decays to normal urban gossip.
Note: "Sometimes the best anti-Deathward is just showing people the lights still turn on."

Through all of it, he stayed off the battlefield.

When Galax Soldiers traded fire with stray Deathmarauders in the sacrificial zone, he was on the line with their commander: "Rotate your squads; don't let them think you're desperate. This is for their logbooks, not survival."

When a Supreme Commander pinged him for a probability check—"If I leave this corridor thin to reinforce the next state, will he hit it?"—Galaxwis' answers came wrapped in percentages and scenario trees, never in person.

Civilians in Gallaxgonbei learned names like Galaxbeam, Galaxadye, Galaxapuff. They saw them in the sky, in armored columns, in broadcast statements.

"Galaxwis" was a signature at the bottom of a few classified memos and a ghost in the tactical net.

He preferred it that way.

「前に出るのは、先生たちとヒーローの役目。」 Going to the front is the professors' and heroes' job, he told the AI once in Japanese, when it asked if he ever wanted to be up there with them. 「俺の仕事は、誰にも気付かれないところでテスト範囲を書き換えること。」 My job is to rewrite the test from where no one notices.

The AI considered this solemnly and added a quiet tag to his personnel file:

ROLE: HIDDEN STRATEGIC SUPPORT – CRITICAL.

He pretended not to see it.

At the end of that cycle—the one where portals misfired, curses flattened, malware got bottled, and rumors lost their teeth—Galaxwis finally stood.

The map of Gallaxgonbei glowed a steady, satisfied gold. Border alarms were quiet; incident logs had slowed to ordinary, human-scale problems: supply delays, noisy festivals, a zoning dispute in a rebuilt district.

"好。" Good.

He saved his latest compendium.

Gallaxgonbei – Post-Liberation Defense Log (Wis Version)
Status:
– Death Regime major incursions: 0 successful.
– Minor probes: numerous, all curved off or contained.
– Territorial integrity: intact.
– Academic satisfaction: 87% (subtracting points for Deathwing's stubbornness).

He appended a final note at the bottom, half in Cantonese, half in English, as if writing to the unseen author, to Gallaxbeam, and to himself all at once:

"如果有人問點解死亡政權喺咁多試探入面一次都冇真係踏入Gallaxgonbei 嘅城市...就寫低：因為有一個唔出場嘅人，坐喺地下室三十步之前已經改好答案。"
If anyone asks why, after all those tests, the Death Regime never truly set foot in Gallaxgonbei's cities again...
write this: because someone who never went on stage sat in a basement and graded the answers thirty moves before the questions arrived.

He closed the file.

Above him, Gallaxgonbei's streets were noisy with life instead of war. Children were arguing over which Supreme Commander had the coolest powers. Merchants had gone back to cheating on fruit weights. Engineers complained about paperwork instead of artillery.

Death Regime scouts would try again, somewhere, sometime—but their paths into this state were already twisted, blocked, or quietly booby-trapped with boredom.

Galaxwis turned off a few of the holo-panels, leaving only a slim, dim outline of the state floating before him.

He sat back down, wrapped both hands around a fresh cup of tea, and let the quiet hum of safe cities soak into his bones.

Stealth intact. Combat avoided. Logs up to date.

Gallaxgonbei: still golden.

And if Deathwing, out there in some violet lab, ever rolled his dice toward this map again, the first thing they would hit would not be a city or a civilian.

They would hit Galaxwis' handwriting.

While Galaxwis sat under Goldduchaisan quietly rearranging fate, one of the names on his holo-map kept pulsing with a particular tag:

GALAXKIBA – DEPLOYABLE – "CUTTING TOOL"

Wis tapped it once.

"Time to sharpen the edges," he murmured, and sent a single, tightly coded order downward into Gallaxgonbei.

Galaxkiba – The Hidden Fang of Gallaxgonbei

Galaxkiba got the message while crouched on the slanted roof of a half-collapsed townhouse on the outskirts of Wanshengtu Town.

Below him, the street was a slow river of rot.

Zombies shuffled shoulder to shoulder between abandoned noodle shops and shuttered clinics, dragging tattered Death Regime pennants in their wake. Here and there, armed Deathsoldiers moved among them, using the undead as moving cover while they checked alleys and doorways for any surviving civilians.

Behind Galaxkiba, in the lee of the roof's highest point, a small squad of Galax Soldiers waited in full gear—six of them, masks on, rifles ready, armor plates scratched from weeks of cleanup but still glowing faintly gold at the edges.

Their corporal leaned closer.

"Orders from Goldduchaisan, sir?" he whispered.

Galaxkiba's eyes, a sharp amber-gold, flicked to the small holo projected onto the back of his glove. Galaxwis' neat annotations scrolled there: possible necro-cache in the Wanshengtu old quarter; zombie density too high for regular squads; avoid collateral; civilians confirmed in sub-basement three blocks ahead.

He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he breathed in slow and deep.

The air tasted of rain, rust, and the faint, bitter metal of Death Regime residue.

"Mm," he said at last in Japanese, calm and almost casual. 「今日は三つの目標。」 Three objectives today.

He held up three fingers for the squad.

"Objective One," he switched to crisp, low Cantonese. "Carve a quiet corridor through that mess—" he nodded at the street below "—without waking the whole district. We're going to those basements three blocks ahead. Civilians don't get to be exam questions."

The squad nodded, eyes focused.

"Objective Two: find and break whatever necro-cache Deathplague tucked down here. Wis thinks it's feeding this little parade."

"And Objective Three, sir?" the corporal asked.

Galaxkiba smiled, sharp and brief.

"Leave enough of a pattern that when Deathwing looks at this district, he decides Gallaxgonbei isn't worth the trouble."

He stood in one smooth motion.

Scenario 1 – The Silent Corridor

Galaxkiba stepped off the roof and dropped.

He did not fall far.

Golden-black sigils flared around his calves—ninja-style leg bracers etched with tiny constellation diagrams. Time thickened beneath his feet, catching him like invisible stone. He kicked off a cushion of slowed air, bounced to the next rooftop, then the next, moving forward in a zig-zag of controlled "falls."

Below, the river of zombies did not look up. Their orders were simple: walk, moan, search.

He stopped above the first cluster of armed Deathsoldiers, crouching on a balcony half-torn from the wall.

"隊形，第一列。" Formation, first line, he whispered.

His squad dropped behind him like shadows sliding down a wall—no clatter, no wasted motion.

"Snipers, mark the Deathsoldiers with anything that looks like a sergeant," Galaxkiba murmured. "Do not kill. Tag."

A pair of suppressed golden flashes flicked from the rear of the squad. Each bullet left a shimmering ring on a Deathsoldier's chest, a recall marker stamped with Galaxy sigils.

The soldiers jerked, looked down at the marks, and opened their mouths to shout—

Galaxkiba moved.

He dropped straight into the middle of the herd, coat snapping around him like a black-gold gust.

To the zombies, he might as well have been wind.

Hands reached for him and met only afterimages. A blade flashed—short, curved, a shinobi tantō outlined in star-glow—and with each stroke a necrotic glyph at the base of a zombie's skull winked out. Bodies collapsed silently, parted around him like reeds under water.

A Deathsoldier tried to jam a rifle into his ribs.

Galaxkiba twisted aside without looking, caught the barrel with two fingers, and traced a tiny circle in the air.

Time slowed for that soldier alone. His health ring remained untouched—rules said he couldn't hurt an elite, and the elite wasn't interested in killing him. But his gun rusted to uselessness in an instant; his boots sank ankle-deep into suddenly softened asphalt.

"Go home," Galaxkiba said in German, quiet and flat. "Dieses Quiz ist nicht für dich." This quiz isn't for you.

The recall aura heard—a violet halo flared, wrapped the man, and yanked him out of the street like someone erasing a line on a test paper.

By the time the rest of the squad realized anything was wrong, Galaxkiba had already carved a narrow, twisting gap through the horde—an S-shaped corridor of fallen corpses and stunned Deathsoldiers, weaving just wide enough for six Galaxy infantry to slip through.

He tapped his wrist-band once.

"Corridor open," he reported. "Move."

His squad flowed in behind him, boots stepping only where his sigils had already hardened the ground, weapons muzzles never quite pointing at his back.

From above, if Galaxwis had been watching this particular street, the little path would have looked like a clean slash of bright gold through a bruised-purple river.

Scenario 2 – Sub-Basement Rescue

The basement door three blocks later had once been a simple metal hatch beneath a tea shop.

Now it was sealed with a three-layered necrotic lock.

"That's Deathplague's handwriting," one of the soldiers muttered, eyeing the glyphs. "Sir, if we bust that, are we going to bathe in something we regret?"

"Only if I'm sloppy," Galaxkiba replied mildly.

He knelt before the glyphs, pulling a handful of throwing knives from under his coat—kunai, blades thin as light, each one etched with tiny astronomy symbols and wrapped with fine cord.

He planted three around the lock in a triangular pattern and tapped their hilts.

"星守," he whispered. Star-keeping.

Golden lines snapped into place between the kunai, forming a cage not around the door, but around the concept of "outward explosion" in this small piece of hallway. It was the kind of trick he'd learned from watching Galaxbeam and Galaxadye argue changes to physics over tea.

"Once I cut this, anything that tries to come out stays in this triangle," he told the squad in Cantonese. "If something wants to go in..." He nodded toward the door. "We'll see."

He slid his blade along the glyph.

Necrotic script flared violent purple, swelling like a bubble about to burst—and then hit the invisible cage, folding inward instead, chewing up the door, the frame, the first meter of staircase in a miniature implosion of foul light.

When the smoke cleared, there was a clean-cut opening and the faint smell of metal burned twice.

From below came the sound of muffled sobbing.

"Galaxy forces!" the corporal called softly, dropping down the stairs. "Stay back from the entrance; we're coming in!"

Galaxkiba stayed at the threshold, eyes on the corridor they'd carved, senses stretched out.

He could feel, faintly, the tremor of Deathwing's attention not landing here, sliding away along probability gradients Galaxwis had already written.

"第一目標完成。" First objective complete, he murmured as civilians were led blinking up into the half-light. "次。」Next."

Scenario 3 – Necro-Cache

The necromantic cache turned out to be in an old storm-drain two streets away—a pulsating lump of bone, metal, and bottled screams wired into the sewer system, pumping animating filth into the district from below.

Galaxkiba found it by following the way zombies leaned.

Undead in the immediate area drifted subconsciously toward certain grates; those further away shuffled in broad arcs around invisible attraction points.

"如蜜糖吸螞蟻咁。" Like honey pulling ants, he muttered.

He signaled his squad to hold back at the mouth of the drainage tunnel.

"This one is mine," he said. "If I mess it up, you'll know because you'll grow an extra arm or something. In that case, tell Galaxbeam I apologize for the paperwork."

Nervous chuckles. Then silence.

He dropped into the tunnel, letting the darkness swallow him.

Down here, the air was heavy with damp and the buzzing hum of trapped souls. The cache sat in the center of a rough circle of skulls, each one carved with a tiny Death Regime sigil.

Galaxkiba narrowed his eyes.

"Alright," he said in Japanese, knife spinning once between his fingers. 「これは、少しだけ真面目にやろう。」 Let's be a little serious for this one.

He blurred.

For exactly one second, everything in the tunnel froze—water drops hanging in midair, gnats locked mid-buzz, even the hum of the cache glitching into a single stretched note.

Inside that second, Galaxkiba moved in nanosecond slices, each step landing on a specific point of a specific sigil in a specific order.

Kunai flashed, cutting lines at exact angles.

The skull circle reoriented itself under his hands—not broken, but reversed. Where before it had channelled power outward to feed the horde above, now it folded inward, collapsing toward a central point.

Time snapped back.

The cache screamed as its own animated energy cannibalized itself, necrotic filth eating necrotic filth until only a faint, sour-smelling dust remained.

Up on the streets, a noticeable fraction of the zombies in Wanshengtu simply dropped as if someone had unplugged them.

Galaxkiba exhaled, sheathing his blade.

"第二目標完成。」Second objective complete," he reported over comms. "Wis' hunch was right. Tell him he owes me one balanced equation on our next test."

Scenario 4 – The Lesson for Later

By the time Wanshengtu's old quarter was cleared, the light had turned dusty orange.

Galaxkiba's squad escorted the last group of civilians toward a Galaxy checkpoint, the carved corridor already starting to fill with reconstruction crews and curious children.

He, as usual, stayed in the shadows.

Above, glancing off an old street mirror, he caught a faint glimmer of a golden eye—Galaxwis' passive monitoring lens, watching the flows.

He lifted two fingers in a lazy half-salute toward it.

"Data packet from Wanshengtu coming up," he said into a low channel. "Patterns, reaction times, Deathplague's handwriting, three new variants of necro-glyph, and one cute trick with probability. You'll like it."

Wis' voice came back amused.

"Already recording. You left a tidy line through the zombies; the map looks very elegant. Any trouble?"

"Ground units still can't scratch me," Galaxkiba replied calmly. "But they can still bite the people behind me. So I keep moving."

He stepped up onto a wall, then a balcony, then a rooftop, leaving the noise of the checkpoint behind.

"Next scenario, Wis?"

"Random Death Regime squad tried to pop into a warehouse block near Galaxenbonbao," the strategist answered. "Harmless, handled. But there's a tunnel system under Gallaxendeichi that's pinging necrotic echoes. Think you and your little book-club of soldiers can...edit the script there before it becomes a problem?"

Galaxkiba's eyes brightened slightly.

「もちろん。」 Of course. "Send me the outline. I'll write the field notes."

Night settled over Gallaxgonbei, but for Galaxkiba, it changed nothing.

On one rooftop, he moved like a phantom, leading a six-person squad through a tangle of tenements, clearing a path for evac teams.

In another scenario, hours later, he was knee-deep in a flooded stairwell in Gallaxendeichi, severing necrotic binding threads before they could cocoon a city block.

On a third, days afterward, he waited in perfect stillness above an empty intersection in Galaxenyanbaohu, watching for a Death Regime scouting party Wis predicted would try to sneak in "randomly." When they arrived—baffled to have landed exactly in his kill-box—he tagged each with recall marks in the span of a breath and sent them back home with their tails between their legs.

In all of them, the pattern stayed the same:

Away from glory.

Away from open battle lines.

Always carving hidden corridors, closing hidden doors, erasing hidden caches.

A shinobi in orange-gold, moving through the scars of Gallaxgonbei with a company of quietly competent soldiers at his back, answering to a voice in a basement who in turn answered to a Professor in the sky.

Random zombies were still out there. Death Regime would still roll their dice and try their tricks.

But as long as Galaxkiba was in the state—breaking glyphs, cutting paths, writing his own annotations into Deathwing's margins—any "random" horde that wandered into Gallaxgonbei was likely to find itself briefly rearranged into training material and then quietly erased.

This wasn't the kind of work that got a flashy chapter title.

It was the kind that left future maps clean.

And for Galaxkiba, that was objective enough.

Night settled over Gallaxgonbei again, but this time it was Galaxy's night.

Not quiet—not yet—but tilted.

The big duels were over. The sky was gold. Artillery maps and orbital grids had done their work.

What remained, in alleyways and rail-yards and under the skins of half-dead districts, was the kind of war that did not want witnesses.

Precisely Galaxkiba's.

He moved through Galaxenbonbao like a shadow that had learned mathematics.

The old market quarter lay half-flooded under a thin, necrotic mist. Zombies drifted between drowned stalls, bumping into hanging lanterns that had not glowed in months. A handful of Deathsoldiers had turned the central plaza into a forward aid-post, using overturned carts as cover while they tried to knit together one last defensive knot.

On a rooftop overlooking the square, Galaxkiba watched them with his arms loosely folded.

To his left, six Galax Soldiers waited flat against the tiles, eyes on him, breaths measured. Their rifles were slaved to his targeting lattice; wherever he pointed, they could shoot. Wherever he sealed, they would not waste ammunition.

"Objective," he said softly in Cantonese. "Clear the plaza. No gunshots unless I say so. Zombies and Deathsoldiers both become...falling stars."

He closed his eyes.

Above the smog, real stars shone over Gallaxgonbei, faint against the city's damaged light. In Galaxkiba's mind, they rearranged into hanzi and kana, into equations he had learned at Galaxbeam's lectures and turned into footwork.

He inhaled.

"星牙ノ型..." Star Fang Form...

He stepped off the roof and vanished.

To the zombies, the plaza simply changed.

One heartbeat, their world was a gray-purple shuffle: the groaning of their own voices, the distant chatter of Deathsoldiers, the scrape of bone on stone.

The next heartbeat, lines of golden light appeared through them.

Not beams, not blades in any ordinary sense—more like streaks of absence, clean lines where their bodies suddenly forgot how to be attached to themselves.

At every intersection of those lines, a kunai had been, for a nanosecond.

Galaxkiba had moved faster than their half-dead perceptions could follow, each step plotted against a tiny constellation chart hovering in his vision. Time around him had thickened into a syrup that only he could walk through, each second broken into hundreds of thin layers he could cut and rearrange.

He appeared again on the far side of the plaza, kneeling, knife already sliding back into its sheath.

He let time flow.

Necrotic glyphs at the bases of zombie skulls flickered and went out along golden thread-lines. Undead bodies sagged, fell, and lay still—truly still—for the first time since Deathwing's runes had claimed them.

Deathsoldiers staggered, looking around in shock as their living shield dissolved.

One, braver or more foolish than the rest, raised his rifle, shouting in German.

"Da! Elite in the open—!"

Galaxkiba turned his head slightly.

"Wrong," he said, lightly, in the same language. "Ich bin schon weg." I am already gone.

The soldier blinked.

Galaxkiba was no longer there.

He was behind them, atop the broken fountain at the plaza's center, hands resting casually on his knees. Around each Deathsoldier's neck, faint golden rings had appeared—recall tags etched in starlight.

"Ground units cannot hurt me," he said in Japanese now, more to himself than to them. 「だから、殺さなくてもいい。」 So I don't have to kill you.

He snapped his fingers.

Violet auras flared. One by one, the Deathsoldiers vanished, yanked back to their regime with their weapons inert and their mission failed. The plaza exhaled into silence.

Above, his squad flowed down from the roofs, boots landing exactly where his sigils had hardened the puddles into safe stepping stones.

"Plaza clear," the corporal reported. "No shots fired."

Galaxkiba nodded once.

"Good. Mark this as safe passage for evac teams." He tilted his head, listening to something only he could hear—the faint, distant rhythm of Galaxwis' data feeds adjusting. "Next street. The horde there is louder."

The next scenario was all sound and no light.

Beneath Gallaxyukai, the sewers had become a graveyard river. Wastewater churned around half-dissolved bodies. Necrotic glyphs crawled along tunnel walls, bright as fungus, trying to stitch a new horde together out of what the surface battles had left behind.

Galaxkiba stood on a maintenance ledge above the flow, coat hem barely brushing the edge, eyes half-lidded.

Behind him, today's squad—different faces, same orange-gold—shifted uneasily.

"Sir," one whispered, "you sure we shouldn't just call in a cleansing pulse? Galaxpuff could boil this whole mess."

"She could," Galaxkiba agreed quietly. "And crack the tunnels. Flood half the district. Drown people who don't even know they're above a problem."

He drew three shuriken from his belt.

They weren't metal, not entirely—each was a tiny, flat galaxy, points made of frozen starlight, centers carved with coordinates rather than steel.

"Instead," he said, switching to English, "we erase the glyphs and leave the stone."

He flicked his wrist.

The first star spun out, trailing a fine thread of golden dust. Where it passed, necrotic symbols smeared and disintegrated, turning from violet to gray to nothing.

"時曲." Time bend.

The second shuriken flew slow, impossibly slow, crawling through the air at a snail's pace. Around it, time warped in a widening shell—water froze mid-wave, zombie fragments hung halfway through their grim swim. Within that bubble, Galaxkiba stepped easily from one anchor-point to another, planting seals and cutting runes while the rest of the world took the longest breath in history.

"空断." Space cut.

The third star never left his fingers physically at all; he threw it along a path that only existed in the constellations above Gallaxgonbei. It reappeared in three places at once: at a junction where four tunnels met, at the base of a glyph cluster feeding power into the network, and at the ceiling above a crack that would have turned into a sinkhole next storm.

In each of those places, a quiet correction was made.

Dust fell. Glyphs died. Load-bearing stone remembered how to be strong.

When he finally let time slip back into place, the sewer river sloshed forward, but carried only dead filth now, not intent.

No new zombies crawled out.

He exhaled.

"Log it for Wis," he told the squad. "Pattern 'Galaxy Fang'—tunnel variant. If Death Regime ever tries to rebuild a horde from here, the math will keep eating itself."

One of the soldiers shivered.

"Sir...how far ahead are you calculating these things?"

Galaxkiba's smile was brief, almost apologetic.

"Thirty steps? Maybe fewer than Wis." He tapped his temple. "But enough that the zombies never get to take step one."

The last operation of the campaign came as Gallaxgonbei's official maps turned gold and the regime flags on the civic towers were no longer edged in ash.

It was in a forgotten orchard outside Galaxenwarpe City, where Death Regime had tried to stage one last insult: a "sleeper" horde, buried in shallow pits beneath the roots, programmed to rise on a delay long after the main armies had left.

Galaxwis caught it in a quirk of soil data and sent a quiet ping.

"Potential zombie bloom here, here, and here. No civilians present. Treat as practice exam. Minimum noise."

Galaxkiba arrived with his company under a thin morning mist.

The orchard looked peaceful: rows of stunted trees, leaves still struggling against the tainted ground. Birds tested the air nervously, skimming away from certain spots without knowing why.

He could feel the wrongness under his boots.

"Third objective for this state," he said in Japanese, hands on his hips. 「種を変える。」 Change the seeds.

He raised both arms, palms outward.

Above the orchard, the sky shifted—not dramatically, not like Galaxpuff's storms, but in a subtle, precise way. Stars that should not have been visible in daylight shimmered faintly, their patterns aligning with the rows of trees.

He whispered a sequence: names of constellations, numbers of orbits, a recitation that was half-clan kata, half astronomy lecture.

Golden sigils dropped from his fingertips, sinking into the soil.

Where they touched burial glyphs, necrotic code unraveled. Where they met bones, decay accelerated, turning potential soldiers into harmless fertilizer in a rush. Where they reached roots, they left behind tiny, glowing nodes—anti-necrotic anchors that would quietly resist corruption for seasons to come.

In the space of a quarter hour, the orchard shifted from being a hidden minefield to simply...a struggling orchard again.

One of the younger soldiers, wide-eyed, scratched his helmet.

"So that's it? No horde, no fight? They just...never wake up?"

"Exactly," Galaxkiba replied. "The best ninja art is the enemy that never realizes they were supposed to appear on stage."

He bent, pressed a hand to the nearest trunk.

"Try again," he told the tree, in soft Cantonese. "This time, grow fruit, not zombies."

By the time Galaxy Regime command formally declared "Gallaxgonbei – Reclaimed and Secured", the record of its liberation named Absolutes, Supreme Commanders, and a handful of elites whose battles shook cities and lit up the sky.

Galaxkiba's name appeared only in after-action logs, in marginalia:

"Carved safe corridor for evac teams in Wanshengtu."

"Neutralized necro-cache under old drainage."

"Prevented three separate horde formations before emergence."

"Pattern 'Galaxy Fang' effective against buried threats; recommend doctrine adoption."

He preferred it that way.

From one rooftop on the edge of Goldduchaisan, he looked out over Gallaxgonbei in its new, scarred peace: banners hanging where portals once yawned, patrols walking routes that used to be kill-zones, children running in streets that had recently held undead.

In the high distance, he could sense Galaxadye's artillery grids resting, waiting. Above that, a faint, familiar pulse of Galaxapuff's sanctuary drifting like a harmless extra moon. Under his feet, somewhere deep, Galaxwis' calculations hummed in steady gold.

"Counterattack complete," he said to himself in Japanese, quiet. 「残った問題は、影で片付ける。」 The remaining problems, we finish in the shadows.

He adjusted the wrap on his forearm, checking that his knives and star-shuriken sat in their familiar places. Time still flickered obediently around his ankles when he flexed. The stars above Gallaxgonbei still answered when he called.

If Death Regime tried to reclaim land here again—with zombies, with soldiers, with some new cleverness—they would find that the state had not only Absolutes and Supreme Commanders watching it from the sky.

It had a shinobi in orange-gold, walking the edges with a small company of quiet professionals, combining ninja arts, time-bending, and star-script to cut down any horde before it became a story.

The great liberation of Gallaxgonbei would be remembered by the battles that shattered the clouds and shook the capitals.

Galaxkiba's contribution would be written in the blank spaces where new massacres did not happen.

For him, that was the cleanest kind of victory: enemy zombies asleep forever, enemy soldiers sent home bewildered, Galaxy Regime counterattacks landing exactly where they needed to—because somewhere in the shadows, a ninja had already cleared the way.

While Galaxkiba carved invisible answers into Gallaxgonbei's shadows, other elites were filling in the rest of the page.

One of the brightest, and loudest, was the girl whose footsteps rang like tiny stars.

Galaxysuzuhime – Bell-Princess of Constellation Chorus

In the evening sky above Galaxenhueko, a trail of little golden bells swung in a perfect arc.

They weren't hanging from anything.

They hung from her.

Galaxysuzuhime glided just above the rooftops, short hair fluttering around her cheeks, eyes shining the bright, earnest gold of a festival lantern. Her outfit blended shrine maiden and idol and battle mage—short layered hakama in galaxy gradients, sleeves trimmed with star-pattern ribbon, ankle guards tied with cords threaded in miniature bells.

Every time she moved, they chimed.

Not randomly. Never randomly.

"Okay, Hoshi-chan," she murmured in Japanese, patting the floating staff at her side—a long pole tipped with a ring of larger bells, each etched with orbit diagrams. 「今日の宿題、三つだよ。」 Three homework problems today.

The staff chimed in answer, sensing her intent.

Beneath her, Galaxenhueko's streets still bore fresh scars—cratered intersections, collapsed balconies, scorch marks in violet and gold. But the worst of the battle was over. Galaxy patrols walked the main avenues; evac convoys crawled through side streets.

In one such street, she saw the first problem.

Scenario 1 – Evacuation Song

A convoy of battered civilian trucks was stuck at a choked intersection: too many abandoned cars, too few clear lanes. Galaxy soldiers tried to direct traffic, but the crowd's fear made everything sticky—shouting, horns, children crying.

And from the alley behind them, like a tide turning, came the sound of groaning.

A zombie herd, late to the party.

"あー、タイミング悪い。" Terrible timing, she sighed, scrunching her nose. 「でも、主役の出番かな。」 But maybe that's the cue for the main character.

She dropped.

To the civilians below, she appeared as a streak of gold and pink, landing in the middle of the intersection in a light, dancer's impact, staff chiming a clear note when it touched the cracked asphalt.

"Galaxy forces—elite incoming!" someone shouted.

Her bells rang again.

"Hi hi, everyone," she said in Cantonese, voice sweet but firm, projecting easily over the mess. "唔駛驚，呢條路今日有我。」 No need to panic—this road belongs to me today."

The zombie horde turned the corner: dozens, then hundreds, stumbling over each other, their eyes dull, jaws slack, necro-glyphs glowing at their necks.

Suzuhime planted her staff.

The ring of bells spun once, releasing a soft, rolling chime that ran along the ground like a tide.

"星鈴・一ノ式..." Star Bell, First Form...

She lifted her free hand and traced a sigil in midair, golden ribbon trailing from her fingertips.

「静謐の小道。」 Path of Quiet.

The sound washed over the herd.

Where it passed, the zombies' groans faded, their motions slowing as if every step had suddenly become heavy and uninteresting. Necrotic glyphs flickered. Not extinguished—she wasn't Galaxbeam, and this wasn't a cleaning strike.

This was a lullaby.

Zombies at the front simply sat down mid-shuffle, heads tilting as if listening to something only they could hear. Those behind bumped into them and, one by one, also began to sag, kneel, lie down, their hunger sliding into a dull, harmless doze.

Within seconds, the entire alley was full of undead... napping.

Galaxy soldiers gaped.

"...Is that allowed?" one whispered.

"Temporarily," Suzuhime said briskly. "我只係掩蓋咗死亡魔法一陣。」 I've only smothered the death magic for a bit. "Now it's your turn. Engineer team: mark them, call for a scrub squad. Civilians..."

She spun to face the trucks, eyes shining, expression snapping into a bright, idol-like smile.

"Everyone look this way." She raised the staff high, bells chiming in a bright, ascending pattern. "Follow the sound, okay? Just watch the nice Galaxy elite and breathe."

The bells chimed again—this time a different melody, light and bouncing. Anxiety in the crowd eased without them quite knowing why. Drivers unclenched their hands from steering wheels. Kids stopped crying and stared wide-eyed at the "bell princess" instead.

Suzuhime hopped backward, leading the convoy step by step, her bells defining a curved, safe route through the maze of abandoned vehicles.

To an observer looking down from above, the path looked like a glowing staff notation drawn through the streets—notes of vehicles moving exactly where the music told them to.

As the last truck cleared the intersection and rolled into a safer corridor, she spun her staff once more and bowed.

"Evacuation completed," she reported into her comm, switching to professional English. "Zombies in sector 3-H temporarily pacified, tagged for cleanup. Civilians moved without stampede. Please send my grading sheet later."

Galaxwis' voice murmured in her ear, amused.

"Full marks on crowd management," he said. "Bonus points for style."

She puffed her cheeks slightly. 「スタイルは標準装備でしょう。」 Style is standard equipment, you know.

Scenario 2 – Nightmare Clinic

Later that night, in Galaxencloude, she walked through a different kind of battlefield.

A makeshift clinic occupied the bottom two floors of a half-ruined office block. The physical wounds were under control. The other wounds were not.

People shook in their cots, eyes open and unseeing. Some thrashed, hands clawing at imagined bone chains. Others sat curled up, muttering Death Regime slogans they'd been forced to listen to in occupied broadcasts.

Suzuhime moved among them like a soft, wandering star.

Her staff chimes were quiet here, almost private. At each bed, she knelt, listened, and—if the doctors gave a nod—gently placed one small bell on the pillow beside the patient's head.

In that bell, she folded a tiny constellation: a memory from before the occupation, or a future the person had whispered about wanting—anything that was not Deathwing's.

"星鈴・二ノ式..." Star Bell, Second Form...

She sat cross-legged in the center of the ward, staff across her knees, eyes closing.

「夢守の輪。」 Dream-guard Ring.

The bells answered.

A faint web of light flowed out along the floor, tracing lines between each bed. Soft chimes overlapped, weaving into a lullaby that threaded itself not into ears, but into nightmares.

Inside a boy's dream where Deathsoldiers kicked down his door again and again, the doorframe suddenly shone with Galaxy sigils, and when it opened, it was Galaxbeam at a chalkboard instead, lecturing bored zombies.

In an old woman's nightmare of endless purple fog, tiny golden bells appeared on invisible strings, cutting roads through the haze until she could see Galaxencloude's skyline again, clean and free.

In a mechanic's sleep, where his hands were chained to a Death Regime tank he was forced to repair forever, a girl in galaxy-pattern hakama dropped in front of the engine, hands on her hips.

「ダメ。」 No. She flicked his chains into starlight. 「この機械、もう試験に出ない。」 This machine is no longer on the test.

Outside their dreams, bodies relaxed. Breathing evened. The ward's ambient panic level dialed down, notch by notch.

A young doctor watching her swallowed, eyes wide.

"What... what spell is that?" he whispered.

Suzuhime opened one eye, putting a finger to her lips.

"Shhh. 星鈴、秘密技。」 Star Bell, secret technique. "名字: 'Stop letting Death Regime rent space in your brain for free.'"

He huffed a quiet laugh despite himself.

"You elites really talk like anime characters," he said.

She smiled, faintly embarrassed but not denying it.

"Anime survived the occupation," she replied. "It's a kind of magic too."

Scenario 3 – Shrine of the Sky-grid

On the last day of Gallaxgonbei's official liberation operations, she had one more task.

It took her to a wind-swept ridge outside Gallaxreixuanbeodong, where a half-built Galaxy outpost overlooked three different cities at once. The ground here was pitted from old bombardments; Deathenstorm's last poisoned meteor had fallen not far away.

Now the site hosted a different kind of structure.

A ring of stone pillars rose from the ridge, each one carved with both ancient star charts and brand-new Galaxy Regime runes. At their center stood an altar—a simple platform no larger than a classroom desk, marked with a circle that had space for exactly one staff.

Her staff.

Suzuhime stepped into the ring, bells chiming with the wind.

"Galaxbeam-sensei said this place will be part of the big ward network," she murmured. 「じゃあ、ここはちゃんとかわいくしないと。」 Then I need to make it properly cute.

She planted her staff in the altar's groove.

The pillars answered.

Lines of light shot upward from their tops, weaving into a luminous grid in the sky—a smaller echo of Galaxbeam's battlefield mesh, but permanent and anchored to Gallaxgonbei's bones. Between the lines, little bell-shaped nodes appeared, each one a fixed point where space, time, and story all agreed: Death Regime portals do not belong here.

Suzuhime raised her hands, fingers spread.

"星鈴・三ノ式..." Star Bell, Third Form...

「天網祭。」 Sky-grid Festival.

Music flowed out of her, not just sound but shape—streamers of color curling around the pillars, wrapping each line of the grid. Ribbons of golden kanji danced through the air:

安全 – 安心 – 帰還 – 未来
Safety – Relief – Return – Future

Far away, in a Death Regime war-room, a necromancer who tried to plot a new portal into Gallaxreixuanbeodong would find their calculations suddenly full of bells—literal ones, appearing in their diagrams, ringing in their ears, making their focus shatter.

Back on the ridge, the wind caught Suzuhime's hair; she laughed, a clear, bright sound that seemed to braid itself into the grid.

"Registering new anchor site," came Galaxwis' voice over the link, half reverent, half wry. "Label: 'Galaxysuzuhime Sky Shrine – Anti-Portal Node.' Subnote: 'A little cute, but functional.'"

「ちょっとじゃないよ。」 Not just a little, she protested, puffing her cheeks. "好可愛。」 Very cute.

"Functional," he repeated, and she could hear the smile he wasn't admitting.

The grid settled into invisible mode, its brightness dimming until only those tuned to Galaxy sigils could see it. To ordinary eyes, the sky was just... sky.

But from now on, whenever Death Regime dice rolled toward Gallaxreixuanbeodong and its neighbor cities, they would lurch, hesitate, and slide away, repelled by a network of unseen bells humming "no, not here."

By the time Gallaxgonbei's reports were collated, Galaxysuzuhime's name appeared in the margins of many sections:

Evac corridors where panic never quite became stampede.

Clinics where trauma eased faster than expected.

Districts where Death Regime dreams failed to take root.

Ridge-lines where future portal vectors died quietly against invisible music.

She hadn't broken dreadnoughts or wrestled conceptual plagues.

Her fair share of the situation was different:

Turning fear down to a manageable volume.

Turning necrotic noise into background static.

Turning Gallaxgonbei's sky into something that rang like a festival instead of a battlefield.

On the last evening of the campaign, she stood on a rooftop in Galaxengongshi, staff resting on her shoulder, watching lanterns relight in streets that had spent too long pretending to be ghost towns.

"Okay," she told the bells around her, in a mix of Japanese and Cantonese, voice soft but satisfied. 「この州は、もうホラーアニメじゃない。」 This state isn't a horror anime anymore. "依家變成日常番，有少少戰鬥特集。」 Now it's a slice-of-life series with the occasional battle special."

One of the bells chimed high and delighted, as if agreeing.

Far above, Galaxbeam's conceptual grids rested. Galaxadye's artillery sat idle. Galaxapuff's clouds drifted in gentle, non-combat patterns. Galaxwis' hidden calculations hummed like a quiet server room. Galaxkiba's shadow routes lay ready, just in case.

And in the middle of it all, Galaxysuzuhime's unseen bells kept ringing, softly, in the bones of Gallaxgonbei—part of the great Galaxy Regime counterattack, not in explosions or headlines, but in every moment where the world decided not to be afraid anymore.

On the rooftop in Galaxengongshi, with her staff resting on her shoulder and the city's lanterns finally relit below, Galaxysuzuhime did not actually get to roll credits.

Gallaxgonbei had been graded as "liberated."

That only meant the pop quizzes were going to get weirder.

The State That Rang Back

In the weeks after the big battles, Deathwing tried three more times to claw his way back into Gallaxgonbei—not with dreadnoughts or plagues, but with the subtler weapons he preferred when nobody was looking.

Each time, he hit bells.

1. The Siren Broadcast

The first attempt came as a sound.

Not a physical army—just a carefully engineered necro-broadcast injected into Gallaxgonbei's leftover infrastructure. Somewhere far away, Deathwis had stitched together old PA systems, forgotten radios, and cheap speakers left behind in occupied districts into one ghost-network.

At 02:17 local, every device that could carry sound in the state tried to cough up the same thing:

A low, crawling chant in a language sane throats weren't meant to form. A despair-hum, built to get under the skin and remind anyone listening that the Death Regime's shadow was still "inevitable."

In the monitoring room under Goldduchaisan, Galaxwis watched the waveform spike.

"Here we go," he muttered. "Suzuhime, incoming horror podcast. Do your thing."

She was already awake.

On the roof of a halfway-repaired shrine in Galaxenportal City, Galaxysuzuhime stood barefoot on the tiles, staff planted before her, bells quivering like they could sense the oncoming noise.

"星鈴・四ノ式..." Star Bell, Fourth Form...

「反響結界。」 Echo Barrier.

Every bell she had hung in clinics, evac corridors, improvised hostels, and sky-grid nodes across Gallaxgonbei lit up at once—little golden sparks on Wis' map, a soft constellation netting the entire state.

The necro-siren hit.

Where it met a bell, the sound folded.

Outer layer: stripped, analyzed, inverted. The despair harmonics were cut out, flipped, and fed back into themselves until they cancelled.

Inner layer: the "holes" in the sound were filled with something else—snatches of actual songs, festival rhythms, the sort of catchy J-pop hooks and Galaxy anthems she'd tucked secretly into her bells earlier "just in case."

To a Death Regime engineer listening on their side of the line, the broadcast went out perfectly: signal stable, rune integrity intact.

To a shopkeeper in Galaxencloude who had just plugged in their radio again that week, the speakers crackled, wobbled, and then played a cheery, bell-backed Galaxy recovery bulletin with a stupidly catchy chorus.

In a barracks in Haylao, a squad of tired Galax Soldiers blinked as their wall-set beeped and suddenly started playing Suzuhime's own "evac route" melody, now officially repurposed as a safety PSA.

A little girl in Xiewejunkok, lying awake and scared, heard her old toy speaker crackle and then chime with a soft lullaby she recognized from the clinic—Galaxysuzuhime's dream-song.

Deathwing's precision-crafted despair wave never reached a single unprotected ear.

On Wis' consoles, the waveform graph showed a perfect attack—then a state-wide phase flip into music.

He logged it with dry satisfaction.

NECRO-SIREN – COUNTERED 100%
Mechanism: Pre-planted bell-network Echo Barrier (Galaxysuzuhime).
Result: Deathwing screams into own feedback loop. Civilians get surprise radio show.

On the shrine roof, Suzuhime sagged for a moment, then straightened, staff chiming in a smug little arpeggio.

「ね？　ちゃんと予習しておいて良かった。」 See? Doing your prep work matters.

2. The Nightmare Wave

The second attempt came through sleep.

Deep in some Death Regime cathedral-lab, a ritual circle was drawn not for bodies, but for dreams. The idea was elegant and vicious: on a single night, every former citizen of Gallaxgonbei would experience the same nightmare—Death banners over their city, golden flags burning, Galaxy elites failing to arrive.

Shake their faith in one strike. Make them wake already defeated.

Wis saw it early in the dice: a cluster of low-level "anxiety echoes" on his conceptual sensors, all humming in the same key.

"Suzuhime," he said, voice low, "I have a bad feeling about tonight's sleep cycle."

"Already changing into pajamas," she answered.

She didn't go to bed.

She went to work.

In the hastily re-sanctified gymnasium that served as Galaxengongshi's central shelter for the most traumatized, she sat cross-legged in the middle of a ring of cots, bells laid out around her in a precise star pattern.

In remote clinics, micro-bells on pillows synced to her rhythm.

Above the state, the faint traces of her earlier Dream-guard Ring—the technique she'd used in smaller wards—flickered back into being, this time at scale.

"星鈴・五ノ式..." Star Bell, Fifth Form...

「千夢守。」 Thousand-Dream Guard.

Deathwing's nightmare wave rolled toward Gallaxgonbei like a weather front in the noosphere.

On the edge of the state, it met a bell.

That bell did not try to block the nightmare.

It sampled it.

Data: imagery vectors, fear frequencies, despair spikes. Suzuhime felt it all rushing in—the purple fog, the burning golden skyline, the silent, absent Galaxy Regime heroes.

She grimaced.

「センス悪い。」 Terrible aesthetic.

One by one, she rewrote the payload.

Where Deathwing scripted "Galaxy banners burning," she overlaid a different scene: the flags took fire—then unfolded into phoenix wings, becoming Galaxytsukifenghuang doing a dramatic entrance.

Where the ritual encoded "no help will come," she wrote over a faint, defiant chime: "Help already came. You're just remembering out of order."

Where the nightmare insisted "you are alone," she threaded in background noise of street festivals, friendly argument, the clatter of construction—future memories, planned and logged in Wis' reconstruction forecasts, pulled forward as "spoilers."

The wave hit the state.

People dreamed.

They did see Death banners, yes—curling up and away as the sky-grid sliced them. They saw zombies...getting pelted with chalk by an annoyed Galaxbeam. They saw themselves standing in rebuilt plazas, pointing up at Tenshinkō like in those first days after liberation.

They woke up crying. Then laughing. Then crying again, but with something to hold on to.

Later, in his lab, Deathwing would realize that not only had his nightmare failed, but it had actually reinforced Galaxy's story.

Galaxwis wrote the incident into his logs, adding Suzuhime to the credit line.

STATE-WIDE NIGHTMARE RITUAL – COUNTERED
Mechanism: Pre-established Dream-guard mesh; forced "story hijack" by Galaxysuzuhime.
Outcome: Civilians experience "horror special" that ends like Galaxy propaganda.
Note: This is getting rude even by our standards.

Suzuhime, drained but satisfied, fell over sideways on her gymnasium mat, bells spinning lazily around her.

"Okay," she mumbled to no one in particular, Japanese slurring with fatigue. 「これで少なくとも一学期分の夢は守れたね。」 That should cover at least one semester's worth of dreams.

3. The False Festival

The third attempt tried to weaponize hope itself.

In the run-up to Gallaxgonbei's first proper post-liberation festival—lanterns, food stalls, actual scheduled fireworks—Death Regime infiltrators slipped a plan into place: smuggle portal beacons in disguised as decorative sky lanterns.

At the height of the festival, just as fireworks turned the sky bright, those beacons would trigger.

Portals would tear open in midair inside the newly built crowd.

It was a nasty plan precisely because it aimed at the moment of "we made it." A perfect Deathwing essay on why you should never relax.

Galaxwis' probability graphs spiked again.

"Hm," he said. "Vector points to the festival. I don't like that."

He opened a channel.

"Suzuhime, how do you feel about checking the decorations on the big party?"

She was already in Galaxengongshi's plaza, spinning in a circle to watch the lanterns being strung.

Her bells chimed in pleased little arcs.

「もちろん。」 Of course. "祭りの前は、全部チェックするのが巫女の仕事。」 It's a shrine maiden's job to check everything before the festival.

She wandered between the teams hanging lanterns, smiling, helping, "accidentally" brushing her staff against strings and paper. Every tap of a bell sent a diagnostic chime through the object it touched, looking for portal-rune residue, necrotic anchors, anything that felt "off."

Most passed.

A few did not.

She found the first real problem when a cluster of lanterns over the central stage gave back a disharmonious ring—like a slightly sour note hiding in an otherwise perfect scale.

She paused, bells going still.

"這幾個唔啱音。」 These don't sound right.

The staff chimed, lower this time.

"星鈴・六ノ式..." Star Bell, Sixth Form...

「灯籠審判。」 Lantern Judgment.

She tapped the string again.

To everyone else, the lanterns just swayed.

To her, the paper shells peeled back, revealing the ghost-image of Death Regime sigils wrapped around the frames, portal vectors pointing inward.

She smiled, slow and sharp.

"Oh no," she said in English, saccharine. "Those are absolutely not invited."

Without breaking her cheerful expression, she reached up and "adjusted" the lantern cords.

Not by taking them down—but by nudging their portal vectors just enough that they slid along Galaxbeam and Galaxwis' anti-portal grid.

At the far edge of Gallaxgonbei, on a sealed training range marked "DO NOT ENTER – ABSOLUTES ONLY," glowing lanterns flickered into being around a harmless crater.

Wis watched them, eyebrow raised.

"Let's see if they actually trigger..."

They did.

The beacons pulsed. For a moment, violet wounds chewed at the air inside the range. Death Regime assault teams, primed to leap into what they thought would be a panicked crowd, stepped through—

—and arrived in an empty, shielded basin under ten layers of observation sigils, facing nothing but a polite floating sign that read:

"WELCOME TO REMEDIAL TACTICS CLASS. YOU FAILED THE POP QUIZ."
— Galaxbeam, Galaxwis & Galaxysuzuhime

On the festival night in Galaxengongshi, no portals appeared. The sky was full of only fireworks and harmless lanterns.

Suzuhime watched kids run under the banners and felt that peculiar, almost painful fizz of success without spectacle.

"Counterattack complete," Wis reported softly over the net. "Zero casualties. Zero public awareness."

「完璧。」 Perfect, she murmured, bells chiming in agreement. 「見せ場なくてもいい。」 It's fine if there's no big spotlight. "結果が一番大事。」 The result matters most.

The Quiet Grade: A State That Stayed Gold

By the time Galaxy Regime finally rotated major forces away from Gallaxgonbei, the scorecard for the elites looked something like this:

Galaxadye, Galaxapuff, Galaxkiba and the other front-line elites had wiped clean the visible occupation and given the state its sky and streets back.

Galaxwis had turned the whole territory into a probability trap, thirty moves ahead of every new scheme.

Galaxysuzuhime had saturated the place with bells, songs, and invisible shrines—so deeply woven into Gallaxgonbei's daily life that any new necro-plan that touched the state had to pass through her work first.

Every time Death Regime tried something here—sound, dream, data, ritual, or trick—it ran into pre-written answers:

Echo Barriers that turned sirens into music.

Dream-guards that hijacked nightmares into hero-centric reruns.

Sky-grids that bounced portals off like rubber balls.

Lantern wards that quietly re-routed "random" invasions into supervised detention cells.

From Deathwing's distant vantage point, Gallaxgonbei stopped behaving like a vulnerable former colony and started behaving like a closed book: answers already inked in, margins full of red teacher's corrections.

From inside the state, it felt like this:

Festivals went on without surprise massacres.

Children slept without waking screaming every night.

Radios crackled with news, not curses.

When people looked up and saw lanterns swaying or heard bells chiming from some rooftop or clinic, they thought: Galaxy's watching.

They weren't wrong.

On the last night before her official redeployment, Galaxysuzuhime walked alone through Galaxengongshi's lantern-lit streets, staff resting light against her shoulder, bells chiming like quiet stars.

Wis pinged her one final status update:

Gallaxgonbei – Long-Term Defense Thesis:
– Physical incursions: covered by grids, routes, and reserves.
– Conceptual/memetic incursions: covered by bells, dreams, and stories.
– Overall grade: Pass with distinction.
Footnote: "Suzuhime's superpower: making a whole state ring 'NO' every time Death tries 'what if...' "

She laughed softly, cheeks coloring.

「ちょっと褒めすぎ。」 That's a bit much praise.

Then, more quietly, looking up at the nets of lanterns and the faint, invisible web of her own magic behind them:

「でも...落第させなかったよね。」 But...we didn't let them fail.

Gallaxgonbei stayed gold.

Not by accident, not by hope alone, but by plan: Absolutes, Supreme Commanders, and elites layering their powers until every attack met a counter, every problem met a prepared hand.

And threaded through all of that, from evac convoys to dream wards to anti-portal shrines, was the sound of one elite's bells—anime-expressive, ridiculously earnest, and absolutely unforgiving to anything wearing Death Regime purple that dared to test her state again.

The last of Galaxysuzuhime's bells were still fading over Galaxengongshi when another color rose to meet Gallaxgonbei's scarred skyline—not gold, not white, but a deep, deliberate violet.

On the western edge of Galaxenhuo, amid a tangle of ruined gantry cranes and half-melted factory roofs, Galaxmurasaki stood on a buckled catwalk and watched the Death Regime's stubbornness try one more time to take shape. Below her, an avenue between loading yards crawled with undeath: fleshy zombies slopping over each other in a slow tidal push, skeletal ones marching in tighter formations, armor rattling like macabre percussion. Behind them growled a line of Death Regime armor—steel gray-purple tanks with skull-and-crossbones sigils carved into their armored plates, barrels tracking, treads chewing trenches through old concrete. Mixed among the dead, knots of Deathsoldiers moved with grim focus, rifles raised, their behavior patterned to treat Galaxy elites as artillery they could never kill but might outmaneuver.

The violet-haired elite tilted her head slightly, loose strands of Murasakiya's hair drifting against her cheeks in the industrial wind. Her coat—a battle kimono cut in Galaxy fashion, deep purple edged in thin star-bright gold—whispered around her legs. Around her wrists, translucent bands of light tightened, then softened: the "prism bracelets" every Radiant Envoy knew to recognize as her focus.

"Deathwing really likes repeating questions," she said under her breath in Japanese, tone calm, almost teacherly. 「同じ問題ばっかり出しても、答えは変わらないよ。」 Asking the same problem over and over won't change the answer.

In her ear, a calm voice from Goldduchaisan—Galaxwis—supplied numbers. "Zombies in that sector just crossed 'annoying' into 'statistical threat to logistics.' Tanks are trying to punch through to the river to re-open a corruption line. Civilians already cleared, so you may...mark freely."

"Understood," Galaxmurasaki replied in Mandarin, her diction precise. "就當係加分題。" Consider it bonus credit.

The first tank fired.

The shell screamed up toward her catwalk, a violet-streaked slug of corrupted metal that would have obliterated the platform entirely and probably taken half the crane with it. Galaxmurasaki did not move her feet. She lifted her right hand and drew a slow curve in the air.

Light followed her fingertip. A thin, perfect arc of violet appeared between her and the incoming shell, edged in faint star-points like a fragment of night sky bent to her will. The shell hit that curve and did not explode; its path simply rotated, the vector obediently sliding along the invisible lens she had just written into the world.

It howled back down toward the street, curving gracefully into the flank of a second Death tank. The impact tore open purple armor and blossomed into a controlled detonation. Flames shot up, reflected in a hundred empty zombie eyes.

Galaxmurasaki pressed thumb and finger together, sealing the curve.

"Space doesn't like being twisted this much," she remarked, half to Wis, half to herself. "幸好我哋問過Galaxbeam。" Fortunately, we asked Galaxbeam first.

She took a breath.

Violet sigils flared around both arms, extending from her bracelets into a pair of long, ribbon-like constructs of light: star-silk bands that flowed and snapped with the weight of invisible gravities. With a single forward sweep of her hands, she sent them down into the street.

The ribbons sliced through the leading ranks of fleshy zombies with almost contemptuous ease, not cutting flesh so much as severing the necro-glyphs that held their borrowed motion together. Bodies collapsed, suddenly just meat and cloth, inert on the cracked pavement. When skeletal hordes clattered over the fallen, the ribbons tightened, looped, and snapped—gravitational snares that hooked ribcages and femurs, yanking entire knots of skeletons off their feet and slamming them into each other in sprays of bone fragments.

Deathsoldiers shouted over vox, German curses clipped and sharp as they tried to adjust firing lines around the unexpected collapse. "Panzer zwei, vorwärts! Alles Feuer auf die Brücke! Elite auf der Plattform—!"

Galaxmurasaki listened to the tone more than the words, head tipping, eyes half-lidded. Her ribbons split into four, then eight, each strand acting as a separate limb that wrote new shapes into the battlefield. She carved a clear path down the center of the avenue, not for Death's sake, but for the orange flashes gathering on the flanks—Galax Soldiers and Galax Rangers waiting for their corridor.

"前進，" she said over the local Galaxy channel in Cantonese, voice even. "按計劃來。中央線比我清。" Advance. Follow the plan. I have the center.

As her troops surged, she shifted her attention back to the armor. The remaining tanks dug in, guns swiveling up, trying to bracket her platform with overlapping fire. With a flick of one ribbon, she sketched a dome of violet light in the air—semicircular, delicate-seeming, traced in geometric filigree.

Shells hit it in rapid succession.

Each impact bent, not broke, their momentum. Explosions blossomed outward and upward, redirected in petals around the dome, showering harmless sparks into the sky and raining shrapnel back into the ranks of the dead instead of up toward her.

Within the shield, Galaxmurasaki's expression did not change. Her heartbeat, if anything, slowed.

"第一題完成。" First question answered.

When the last tank tried to reverse out of range, she curled her fingers inward. The gravitational aspect of her ribbons intensified, gathering under its treads. Concrete cracked, then slumped. The tank sank half a meter into its own exhaust-scorched crater, mobility gone. She tagged its hull with a thin, violet line of light—coordinates for Galaxadye's artillery net.

Moments later, a gold-white lance from beyond the clouds finished the job.

Hours later, when that sector's after-action report was compiled, it would be summarized in one dry line: "Galaxmurasaki neutralized undead and armor concentrations in western Galaxenhuo, enabling infantry sweep with zero casualties."

Standing alone on the catwalk as the last zombie fell still and Galaxy squads moved through the avenue checking for stragglers, she allowed herself one indulgence—a small, satisfied exhale.

"你哋啲紫色，" she murmured toward the lingering smoke, "真係唔靚。" Your purple really is ugly.

Hers glowed brighter for a moment in quiet rebuttal, then faded as she stepped off the platform and into her next assignment.

Maolongmai City was noisier.

There, the Death Regime had tried a different pattern: not a concentrated front, but pockets of resistance across multiple neighborhoods, using zombies and armored cars as moving barricades to stall Galaxy patrols and reconstruction crews. Streets that should have been safe corridors kept erupting into ambushes; skeletal squads and flesh hordes poured out of laundries, parking garages, and school yards in grotesque parodies of normal life.

Galaxmurasaki dropped into one such conflict precisely as it unfolded.

A Galax Ranger platoon had just turned the corner into an open square when three Death APCs screeched out of cross-streets, disgorging soldiers behind movable bone-shield walls. From the alleys behind came the double-tide: fast, clawing skeletons at the front, dragging shambling fleshy zombies behind them.

For a heartbeat, it was chaos—Galaxy gunlines snapping up too slowly, civilians on a nearby rooftop screaming, Rangers cursing as they realized their cover angles were wrong.

Time did not stop.

It simply fractured around Galaxmurasaki.

She appeared at the center of the square in a burst of violet starlight, one knee touching the broken tiles, fingertips pressed lightly to the ground. A circular sigil blossomed out from her hand, expanding in a whispering rush: concentric rings of small, precise star-marks that slid under boots, treads, and rotting feet alike.

"星環陣，" she intoned in Japanese, voice firm. Star-ring array.

To Galax Rangers, the world snapped into high clarity; their reaction times, already honed, stretched, giving them fractions of an extra second to choose targets, to move, to breathe. To Deathsoldiers and their undead screens, the opposite occurred: motions dragged, feet felt heavy, the air seemed thick as syrup.

Bullets left Galaxy rifles with faint violet comet-tails, streaking through slowed enemy motions. Bone-shields that might have stopped them in normal time arrived fractions too late; impacts cratered necrotic armor and sent skeletal arms pinwheeling.

The zombies surged, drawn by sound and scent, only to find their own legs tangled in invisible resistance. Every step felt as though gravity had met them personally and decided to be unfriendly. Fleshy bodies toppled as their balance betrayed them; skeletal frames cracked as slightly misaligned forces magnified into fractures along Galaxmurasaki's ring nodes.

Death APC gunners tried to swing their turrets toward the violet-clad elite in the square's center. She raised one hand, palm up, as if balancing an invisible ball.

Above each armored car, a small, perfect sphere of bent starlight appeared—gravitational condensations shaped like polished orbs.

She curled her fingers.

The orbs dropped.

They did not explode. They pulled. For a terrifying instant, each vehicle's mass tried to occupy a smaller point in space than it physically could. The APCs groaned, shrieking metallic protests as axles bowed and suspensions snapped. Armor plates buckled inward, wheels splayed out like broken legs. Engines died in stuttering coughs.

Inside, Deathsoldiers were still uninjured—rules were rules; elites did not erase ground units. But their capacity to threaten anyone outside those crushed hulls vanished.

"Range clear," Galaxmurasaki said calmly over the platoon frequency, switching to crisp English. "Rangers, your turn. Please remove the remaining answers."

As they swept the square, one of the squad leaders jogged up, visor snapping back.

"Elite Galaxmurasaki, ma'am," he said, still sounding slightly breathless despite her ring's assistance. "We had that marked as a red zone for hours. How did you get in past their perimeter?"

She considered, then allowed herself a small, mysterious smile.

"我用另一頁入去。" I came in from a different page.

When he only blinked, not understanding, she clarified, more gently.

"They had this neighborhood divided into 'safe' and 'danger.' Galaxwis and I added a secret third category: 'for elites only.' I followed that path. You just can't see it drawn on your map."

His eyes widened faintly. "So we're...fighting on the surface. You're fighting in...what, the margins?"

"In the margins," she agreed, glancing up at the still-flickering ward lines Suzuhime had woven into the nearest lamppost banners. "In the spaces between words. 你哋喺正面寫作文，我哋喺側邊批註。" You write the essay on the front; we write the annotations at the side.

By the time Maolongmai's district reports closed that day, three more "red" blocks had turned amber, then gold, each one with a little notation: "Enemy ambush potential neutralized via Galaxmurasaki's spatial-temporal interventions."

In Xiewejunkok, the fight took on a different texture.

There, the key terrain was a sprawling rail hub, where evacuation trains and supply convoys threaded through a maze of tracks and platforms. Death Regime tried to retake it in the most brute-force way possible: turn zombies and skeletal formations into endless pressure along the external neighborhoods, then drive bone-plated armored trains straight into the station under cover of the horde, seeding necro-beacons in the tunnels as they went.

By the time Galaxmurasaki arrived, the outer lines were already engaged. Galax Soldiers traded fire with Deathsoldiers behind overturned luggage carts. Overhead, Galaxy drones strafed groups of undead trying to claw their way up onto platforms.

She did not drop into the main fray.

She walked, unhurried, along the edge of the station's highest observation balcony, trailing her fingers along the cracked safety glass. Every pane reflected a different slice of the chaos below: a skeleton ripping at a door, a Ranger firing from behind a vending machine, a clump of zombies pressing against a half-barricaded stair.

Reflections, she thought, not without a certain satisfaction, are also part of space.

She lifted her hand and traced a sigil on the glass.

Violet lines spiderwebbed across the pane, then leapt from reflection to reflection, stitching them together into a single, continuous surface in her perception: the entire station "flattened" into a map she could rewrite.

"Galaxmurasaki on station," she reported. "Wis, I'm applying the 'Murasaki Grid' here. Please note, this may cause minor dizziness in anyone standing near mirrors."

"Approved," Wis replied dryly. "I will warn exactly zero Deathsoldiers and all of our own troops in reflective surfaces later."

She exhaled slowly.

Her eyes glowed, pupils narrowing to sharp starpoints.

"紫網陣。" Violet Net Array.

The reflected images of zombies staggered—and then, disconcertingly, so did the real ones. Wherever they appeared in glass, in polished railcar sides, in puddles of oily water, she twisted their orientation by a few degrees. A skeleton lunging forward in reality found its own reflection pulling sideways, nerves and necro-command structures responding to two conflicting perceptions. Its steps mis-landed; it crashed into the rail instead of over it. Zombie hands clawed at air that was slightly to the left of actual living throats.

Armored vehicles fared worse.

The first bone-plated train to roar toward the main platform saw a clear track in front of it. In every reflective surface along the tunnel, however—in emergency panels, in a forgotten advertising screen—Galaxmurasaki wrote a different reality: the rails ahead already choked with wreckage, a slight curve where none existed.

The driver, Deathsoldier or undead thrall, flinched just enough to yank the controls.

The train's actual wheels hit true rails misaligned with panicked corrections.

Screeching metal filled the tunnel as the vehicle fought physics it could not win against. It derailed short of the platform in a shower of sparks, buried itself half-sideways in gravel and old concrete, and lay there thrashing like a pinned beast.

Inside, ground troops survived; their bodies were protected, their skin unbroken. Their plan died completely.

On the platforms, Galaxy Regime forces watched in stunned fascination as their enemies sabotaged themselves, then moved in to establish secure lanes with practiced efficiency.

"Whatever that was," one sergeant muttered, "remind me never to look a Galaxy elite in the eye for too long."

From the balcony, Galaxmurasaki allowed herself a small, private nod. The violent part of the work was tedious, in its way; the joy lay in the clean asymmetry of success.

"這啲題目，" she remarked softly in Cantonese, gaze skimming across Galaxenhuo's cranes, Maolongmai's squares, Xiewejunkok's rails, all held now in memory, "唔需要重複出。" These questions don't need to appear on the test again.

By the end of the Gallaxgonbei campaign, her violet signatures wove themselves quietly through the state's after-action records. Where Galaxadye's artillery arcs showed in bold gold, hers traced as softer curves around them, redirecting trajectories and folding space so that shells always hit metal and necro-glyph, never refugee columns or evac trains. Where Galaxkiba's stealth routes cleared hidden tunnels and side streets, her grids made sure any "random" horde crossing those routes found themselves walking into geometries stacked against them. Where Galaxysuzuhime's bells guarded minds and skies, her prisms and ribbons ensured that Death Regime's attempt to reassert physical presence in Gallaxgonbei's cities met only distortion and collapse.

The Death Regime's endless hordes did not stop trying. Skeletal and fleshy undead continued to shamble and rattle in from the edges for some time, pushed by distant commands and lingering scripts. Ground soldiers stepped through portals that should have dropped them into undefended intersections and instead found themselves isolated, weapons inert, under half a dozen Galaxy barrels.

Again and again, in Galaxenhuo's yards, Maolongmai's blocks, Xiewejunkok's platforms, and beyond, a quiet pattern held: Death Regime forces met resistance that felt less like simple opposition and more like the environment itself had decided they did not fit.

In each of those places, if you stood at the right angle at dusk, you might see it—the faint, residual sheen of violet lines drawn through the air, like the afterimage of constellations that had briefly come down to touch the ground.

That was Galaxmurasaki's share of Gallaxgonbei: not just destroying what the Death Regime had sent, but bending the whole shape of space and time in these cities so that, from now on, any gray-purple tank or undead wave that tried to surge in would find the world itself politely but firmly telling them, "no."

In the days after the rail hub at Xiewejunkok was secured, Galaxmurasaki's work stopped being about single, spectacular engagements and became something closer to an ongoing, multi-variable exam. Every morning cycle she woke in a temporary billet above Goldduchaisan, reviewed the state-wide overlays on her wrist holo, and found three, four, sometimes five objectives tagged with her name in Galaxwis' neat handwriting and the Supreme Commanders' sharper annotations.

She took them one by one, flying.

Her method of flight was never loud. There were no roaring engines or blazing wings, only the quiet geometry of astronomy given shape. When she stepped off a rooftop or the hull of a hovering carrier, violet arcs of light unfolded under her soles—thin bridges of bent starlight, curves calculated to keep her a constant distance above Gallaxgonbei's wounded ground. From a distance she looked like a brushstroke gliding along invisible calligraphy lines laid across the state.

One morning, Galaxadye's voice snapped into her ear as she crossed the haze above Meigue Province.

"Galaxmurasaki, I need a clear corridor from grid A-31 to C-77. Death armor trying to use a ridge-line for cover. I can hit them, but not without risking splash onto our own supply convoy."

She glanced down. In the depths of the violet overlay Wis fed her, terrain glowed in layers: elevations, ward density, artillery trajectories. Time markers drifted through it like falling leaves, showing where shells would be in three seconds, ten, thirty if left alone.

"收到，" she replied in Mandarin. "留三秒俾我。" Understood. Give me three seconds.

She snapped her fingers.

A circular field blossomed in front of the ridge-line—a time lens, nothing more than a faint shimmer to ordinary eyes. Within that lens, she stretched the next three seconds into a long, slow minute from the shells' perspective. Rocks tumbled in sluggish arcs; dust motes hung as if caught in syrup. The Death tanks powering up the reverse slope suddenly felt their engines strain as cause and effect failed to agree on how fast they were meant to be moving.

Outside the lens, the Galaxy convoy's path remained untouched, flowing along the road like water.

"Window open," she said calmly. "Your shells will see them as standing still."

Galaxadye's barrage came in like golden meteors. Each projectile entered the lens, slowed into a precise, leisurely arc, and descended onto tank hulls and necro-artillery emplacements with surgical inevitability. Explosions bloomed in staggered blossoms along the ridge, never once spilling onto the convoy road, which sat outside the altered time field as if it belonged to another world.

"Corridor clear," she reported when the last plume faded. "次題。" Next problem.

The next call came from Galaxastream, his tone like running water even through the clipped comms compression.

"Floodplain between Wanshengtu and Watabomei is misbehaving," he said. "Death residuals in the soil keep trying to flow downstream and pool near settlements. I can reshape the river, but I'd rather not spend the whole week babysitting mud. Can you...tilt the clock a little for me?"

Galaxmurasaki dropped altitude, letting the wind bring her down above the broad, glittering ribbon of river that threaded across the plain. From here she could see it: faint violet threads in the water, necro-taint sliding toward low-lying districts where reconstruction crews had only just begun to plant new foundations.

She extended both hands, palms facing inward, as if cupping the entire floodplain.

"時間差一點點就夠。" A small time differential will do.

She rotated one wrist forward and the other back. Between them, a long, gentle gradient of temporal bias formed along the river's length. Upstream, time quickened infinitesimally; downstream, it lagged. Death-tainted silt found itself perpetually arriving "too late" to settle in Gallaxgonbei's soil, always a fraction of a moment behind the true flow of clean water. Each grain of corrupted matter was carried an extra meter, then ten, then a kilometer further than it should have sunk.

By the time the bias faded at the border wards Galaxbeam had set, the taint passed quietly into a containment basin set aside for such things, far from any living roots.

Galaxastream laughed softly in her ear. "効いてる," he said in Japanese. It's working. "You just gave gravity a schedule. Thank you."

"你洗乾淨，我幫你晾乾。" You wash, I help you dry, she answered wryly. "Fair division of labor."

Orders from Galaxastride tended to be shorter.

Once, as she skimmed above Keikon Town, the land-walker Supreme Commander cut in with his usual unadorned urgency. "We're about to open a teleport lane for armor between Folenggao Reach and Haylao's outskirts," he said. "Deathenstride left snare runes behind. I can't see them all. You can see...more."

She closed her eyes briefly, letting her awareness slip upward—past rooftops and streets, past ridges and treelines, into a mental vantage point where Gallaxgonbei's teleports, portals, and conceptual "shortcuts" appeared as a tangled web of glowing lines. Some glowed gold, authorized and clean. Some pulsed faint violet, Deathenstride's afterimages.

"調整一格。" Shift one notch, she murmured.

With a few careful, precise gestures, she slid entire teleport endpoints sideways in the abstract grid, keeping their practical drop zones exactly where Galaxastride wanted them but altering the "addresses" they answered to. Deathenstride's snare circles clutched at empty coordinates now, spinning like traps waiting for prey that had graduated to a different corridor.

"You're clear," she told him. "Your armor will arrive on time. His snares will spend the day catching dust and regret."

"助かった," Galaxastride replied, brevity warmed at the edges. You saved me. "I'll owe you one metric ton of coffee later."

When the storm-caller needed her, it felt different.

Galaxastorm's voice thundered faintly over a channel from high above Gallaxreixuanbeodong. "Deathenstorm left a badly tuned blizzard over the northern suburbs," he said. "I can disperse it, but the pressure pockets are going to throw my lightning schedule off. Sensei will complain if I start thundering on random civilians."

Galaxmurasaki climbed, violet bridges unfolding under her until she broke through the top of the ruined storm's remaining cloud deck. Here, the sky felt like a cracked instrument—pressure fronts out of phase, cold pockets drifting where they shouldn't.

"你彈琴，我負責校音。" You play; I'll tune, she said.

She drew long lines through the air, charting isobars and temperature gradients the way other people sketched constellations. Each curve became a subtle nudge: cooling here, warming there, adding a half-second of delay to a downdraft, stealing a heartbeat from a rising column of air. Storm cells rolled over in their sleep, collapsing into more stable forms. Thunderheads that had been drifting toward residential blocks twisted back toward the open sea, as if someone had drawn new staff lines for their rumbling song.

Galaxastorm's next lightning volley struck exactly where Galaxadye's targeting grids expected—on empty fields marked for deliberate cleansing, not on homes.

"最初からそうやってくれたら助かる," he muttered, but the affection was obvious. It's a big help when you make it behave from the start.

Galaxpuff's orders came from even higher.

On the nights when Tenshinkō Aerial Sanctuary drifted low enough over Gallaxgonbei that its silhouette framed the moons, Galaxmurasaki sometimes joined its orbit for an hour, standing at the edge of one of its open platforms. From here the entire state looked like a living star chart: cities shining in clusters, ward-lines glowing faintly between them, old battle-scars memorized in the patterns.

"Galaxmurasaki," came Galaxapuff's voice, half commander and half older sister, "I'm scheduling a state-wide recall drill. We need to test if our evac anchors will hold under stress. I want you in the loop, in case Death Regime is tempted to...piggyback on our teleports."

Galaxmurasaki nodded, bracelets brightening around her wrists.

"I'll watch the margins," she said. "If they try to sneak a hand into the bag when we shake it, I'll slap it."

When the recall drill began—thousands of Galaxy ground units blinking in controlled patterns from city to city, from front to rear—she watched the teleport lattice as closely as she once watched real stars. Each recall beam left a faint "tunnel" in space-time, a route a clever necromancer might be tempted to reverse-engineer. The Death Regime did indeed probe, nudging little violet feelers along those paths, hoping to ride them in on the next pulse.

She met each probe with a closed door: tiny, localized time-loops that fed their exploratory sigils back into themselves; prisms that refracted necro-magic into harmless static; brief pockets of distorted space that looked, from the Death side, like snarled knots of useless coordinates. From their vantage, Galaxy's recall web seemed messy, uncopyable, not worth the effort.

From Galaxy's side, the exercise ran flawlessly.

At the end of that long day, after objectives from artillery corridors to river cleansings to teleport lanes to storm tuning and recall drills had been met, Galaxmurasaki floated alone above Gallaxgonbei for a last few moments, violet soles resting on an arc of light only she could see.

Below her, the state had settled into a new pattern. Patrol paths traced familiar loops through cities that no longer felt like haunted exam halls. Reconstruction lights dotted former battlefields. Death Regime hordes, tanks, and surprise incursions tried, inevitably, to find ways back in—but every attempt had to pass first through a sky that remembered her touch, roads she had folded, clocks she had tilted.

"教授。" Professor, she said quietly into an open channel, not sure if Galaxbeam was listening and not needing him to be. "Gallaxgonbei 嘅幾何，基本上改好。" The geometry of Gallaxgonbei is basically corrected.

His reply came after a pause, voice dry, threaded with tired warmth.

"好。" Good. "你哋都寫得幾靚。" You all wrote it very neatly.

She let the praise sit in silence for a few seconds, then inclined her head toward the state like a bow.

Tomorrow there would be new assignments, new states, new old problems Death Regime insisted on asking again in slightly different forms. Supreme Commanders would call with more requests, Wis would mark more grids with her name, and she would answer, bending time and space in quiet, precise strokes for her faction.

For tonight, Gallaxgonbei spun under her in steady gold and violet, a solved problem set that would still throw the occasional quiz—but no longer threaten to fail.

Galaxmurasaki dissolved her bridge with a thought, letting herself fall toward the nearest city. The air caught her, wrapped in her own calculations. Stars overhead shifted in subtle confirmation, as if acknowledging that, at least here, in this one reclaimed state, the constellations now leaned toward the Galaxy Regime.

Galaxmurasaki's violet arcs faded from the upper sky, and with them the last clean sweep of that day's Galaxy countermeasures. In the cold dark above the state, where Gallaxgonbei was only a cluster of runes and vectors on a giant war-sigil, something else stirred: a slow, grinding irritation at how bright the map had become.

On Death Regime charts, Gallaxgonbei was supposed to be a solid block of iron purple.

Now, too much of it shone gold.

Inside a command chamber carved from the rib cage of some titan beast, bolted to the spine of a walking fortress, Supreme Commander Deathendale stood before a suspended projection of the state and watched the colors argue. Gold bled in from the coasts and roads, like an infection of light. Violet held in knots: ruined suburbs, graveyard rivers, a cratered ring around Rentianfue Pass.

He rested one gauntleted hand on a railing made of fused vertebrae.

"Sie reiben es uns unter die Nase," he remarked, voice low and measured. They rub it in our faces. "Gold, überall. Wie schlechte Dekoration."

A necro-officer beside him inclined his head, careful not to meet the Supreme Commander's eye sockets directly. "Befehle von Deathwing, Herr Oberbefehlshaber," he rasped. Orders from Deathwing. "Gallaxgonbei soll... wettbewerbsfähig bleiben. Kein sauberes Blatt für den Professor."

Deathendale's jaw tightened faintly. He knew what that meant. Not a full reconquest—Deathwing had other experiments—but pressure. Fractions of ground, stubborn pockets, permanent scars. A constant question mark carved into Galaxy's answer key.

"Dann sorgen wir dafür, dass es nie ruhig wird," he said. Then we make sure it never goes quiet.

He raised his staff—a long, brutal rod of blackened bone and armored plating, its head crowned with a rotating ring of skulls, each jaw wired to a different artillery runic subroutine. Below the fortress, machines rumbled in response.

"Bereitmachen," Deathendale ordered over wideband vox, voice suddenly thunderous. "Zugverband Eins bis Vier, vorwärts. Zombie-Bataillone Alpha bis Kappa, auf Linie. Human-Mutant-Kohorten, in die Lücken. Wir holen uns ein paar Straßenzüge zurück."

Far below, Gallaxgonbei's soil shook as his will translated into movement.

The first objective was a strip of industrial ruin between Galaxenhuo's outskirts and the approaches to Gallaxyukai: a churned belt of warehouses and refineries that Galaxy Regime had marked as a "buffer" on their neat maps. To Deathendale, buffer zones were invitations.

His walking fortress—a mobile citadel mounted on six immense, armored legs—strode forward at the head of the column. Around it moved an ocean of undeath. Fleshy zombies in stained uniforms sloshed through rubble, eyes glowing dull violet. Skeletal infantry, etched with runes at every joint, kept rank in front lines, shields made of fused gravestones interlocked into a jagged wall. Behind them growled columns of gray-purple tanks and self-propelled guns, each one decorated with a leering skull-and-crossbones, each barrel hungry for something golden to reduce to slag.

Galaxy resistance came fast.

Galax Rangers and Galax Soldiers, their armor bright even under ash-streaked clouds, snapped into firing positions along broken loading ramps and the husks of cargo haulers. Gold flared where their shields met incoming shrapnel. Energy bolts lanced down from higher platforms where elites took position, trying to sever the head of the advance before it fully formed.

Deathendale watched the first volleys streak in on his tactical projection. Artillery arcs, sniper trajectories, the faint curves of time-bent shots laid by Galaxy's precalculated firing tables—they all appeared to him as lines in an exam that another student had already filled out.

He stepped off the command dais and onto the forward battlement.

Outside, the air was a mix of smoke, necro-fog, and the distant, chiming aftertaste of Galaxy wards. A bright streak of compressed starlight—an elite's shot—screamed toward him, aimed cleanly at his chest.

He did not bother to deflect.

The projectile struck his breastplate. Necrotic bone and iron screamed; cracks spidered across the surface, purple fire spat out in a brief flare.

Deathendale staggered a half-step back.

Then he straightened, reached up, and brushed shallow chips of armor away with one gloved hand as if removing dust.

"Interessant," he murmured. Interesting. He peered down the line, spotting the glint of Galaxrire's scope far in the distance. "Gute Schießübung, Kleiner. Fast eine Note."

He snapped his fingers.

The wound in his armor closed, violet marrow knitting metal and necro-bone in a moment. Purple light surged across his frame; the next volley that hit him simply skidded off, its energy bled into the ambient field that sustained him.

"Vorwärts," he growled, lifting his staff. Forwards.

The skull ring at the staff's crown spun once.

Down in the ranks, skeletal officers barked in unison. Fleshy zombies quickened from shuffle to lurching charge. Hybrid human-mutant zombie soldiers—Deathmarines and Deathmarauders with extra arms, armored growths, and implanted weapon-grafts—moved up through the gaps, rifles and bone-lances raised. Tanks roared, firing in disciplined sequence, shells arcing in overlapping waves that sought out Galaxy firing nests with mathematical cruelty.

For one brutal hour, the buffer zone belonged to Deathendale.

Galaxy squads that tried to hold were rolled over, their shields chewed down by sheer volume of death-fire. Elites dropping in to stabilize—one, a spear-wielding close-quarters specialist, another with glowing barrier sigils around her hands—found themselves met not by disorganized zombies, but by precise, layered fields of overlapping fire and shuddering ground.

Deathendale read their arrival as easily as he read the shifting lines on his map. When the spear elite vaulted from a catwalk, aiming to carve a path through his advance, he shifted his posture slightly, letting a barrage he had aimed at nothing in particular a few seconds earlier fall into her landing zone instead. She twisted, deflecting most of it, but one shell caught her in the side; her health ring, visible to both of them for a heartbeat, shrank from bright to sliver.

"Rückzug," he said conversationally as she staggered back, recall light already wrapping her limbs. Retreat. "Lauf, solange du noch kannst." Run while you still can.

She vanished, snatched sideways by Galaxy's failsafes.

He almost smiled.

A second elite—a riflewoman on a high gantry—tried to pin him, tracing shot after shot toward his skull. He let her aim, let her see hits scoring his pauldrons, then stepped behind a rising bulwark of bone and steel as his tanks adjusted their guns by three degrees, five, seven.

When they fired, coordinated, the gantry simply ceased to be. The elite's form was visible for an instant, tumbling, shield flaring red as her health ring compressed toward nothing.

She blinked out, pulled from the board at the last possible moment.

"That's two," Deathendale noted to his staff, as if counting nearly completed assignments. "Der Professor wird unzufrieden sein, dass seine Schüler so viele Fehler machen." The professor will be displeased his students make so many mistakes.

By day's end, the Death Regime banner stood again over a half-dozen blocks that had been marked gold on Galaxy charts.

It did not last uncontested.

Before midnight, Galaxmurasaki's grids reasserted themselves in the air over the same streets, subtly twisting artillery math. Galaxkiba's squads cut hidden tunnels and sewer lanes out from under the newly installed necro-fortifications. Galaxadye's long-range guns, given one clear window, hammered the densest cluster of Death armor into craters.

When Deathendale checked the map again from his command deck, the swelling of purple was already being shaved off at the edges.

He did not rage.

He took notes.

"Sie sind schneller als vorher," he observed. They're faster than before. "Gut. Dann gehen wir tiefer."

His second major thrust aimed at Rentianfue Pass—a narrow, mountainous corridor whose walls still bore runes of past clashes between Galaxastream and Deathenstream. Galaxy doctrine wanted the pass clean, a safe artery for movement between sectors.

Death doctrine preferred it clogged with corpses and guns.

Deathendale brought everything that rolled.

Columns of Death tanks and self-propelled artillery snaked along the switchback roads, their hulls bristling with extra ribcage armor and protruding cannon-jaws. Zombie hordes moved along the slopes above them, half climbing, half crawling, clinging to rock faces with clawing fingers. Skeletal sappers, bones reinforced with steel rods, hammered necro-spikes into the walls to anchor hasty fortifications.

At critical choke points, he ordered his vehicles to stop, rotate, and deliberately jam themselves crosswise. Metal groaned as tracks tore into stone. The road narrowed from a usable corridor into a series of brutal chokeholds, each one centered on a tank now acting more like a bunker.

Galaxy Regime hit them like a storm.

Artillery from Galaxadye fell in precise patterns, blasting apart exposed guns and collapsing overhanging rock. Galaxestream tried to use the river far below as a weapon, sending walls of water slamming upward into Death positions via vertical whirlpools. Elites dove and flashed and carved through the undead ranks at points where Deathendale's fields thinned.

He watched it all from a forward bastion hanging off the cliff, cloak snapping in the poisonous wind, health ring a solid, steady band at his feet. Energy bolts and stray shrapnel struck him often; he let them, for the most part, letting the pain threads weave into his aura and amplify the necrotic field that kept his horde fighting past reasonable limits.

Once, a lance of golden-heavy light—Galaxadye trying his luck—speared directly toward him, a line that would have cored lesser commanders outright.

Deathendale set his feet, raised his staff, and met it.

For a long, crackling moment the beam hammered against his guard, violet and gold grinding together, throwing off ragged shards of destructive force that chewed new scars into the mountainside. His armor burned, plates sloughing away in molten chunks. His bones glowed cherry-dark under the assault.

He did not step back.

When the beam finally cut off—either by deliberate choice or by circuit limit—he lowered his staff. His armor smoked. Fractures laced his ribs like a spiderweb.

He rolled one shoulder slowly, bones creaking, then gave the distant gun-line a short, mocking nod.

"Fast," he said aloud. "Aber nicht genug."

He gestured.

Fresh necro-plates blossomed across the damaged areas, the raw material drawn from the cliff itself. The mountain groaned as stone and old, buried bone were pulled up, reshaped into new armor across his frame. Where Galaxadye had nearly burned a hole, Deathendale now wore thicker plating.

At the same time, he threw his own answer.

The skulls atop his staff screamed; spectral artillery shells—concept shells—dropped not on Galaxy positions but on their timelines in this pass. For the next hour, every attempt by Galax patrols to thread the road encountered little delays: a mis-timed footfall, a radio glitch, a misaligned teleport anchor. No catastrophic failures—Absolutes had set hard limits on that—but enough friction that all forward momentum slowed.

Ground bled back and forth in meters.

Deathendale's tanks, half-buried in their own kill-zones, spat defiance as Galaxy infantry tried to dislodge them. Elites dove in for surgical strikes, only to find their windows closing seconds earlier than Wis' calculations had predicted, forced to blink out with scorch marks and near-empty health rings.

Twice, a familiar presence brushed the edge of Deathendale's awareness—Galaxastride, the walker, trying to outmaneuver his kill-lanes by stepping between steps. Twice, Deathendale twisted the geometry of the pass just enough that when the Supreme Commander emerged from a teleport, he found himself exactly where Death artillery had already converged.

The first time, Galaxastride escaped with one arm trailing starlight and a health ring chopped nearly to zero, recall systems yanking him away as bone shrapnel dug into his side.

The second time, he did not even fully appear; the space where he would have stepped shuddered, pulled sideways by Galaxmurasaki's emergency intervention, his arrival rerouted to a safer but less useful point.

In Deathendale's private calculus, that still counted.

"Zweimal," he noted, marking another tally on his mental ledger. Twice.

He did not break Rentianfue Pass completely. Galaxy Regime could still force convoys through with effort. But neither could they claim it cleanly. The road became a scar that never quite healed—a place their maps always shaded with cross-hatching and footnotes, the legend reading: "Contested. Deathendale's influence present."

Occasionally, Deathwing sent criticism down the chain.

"You gain meters, not miles," the Absolute had remarked once, watching a battered hologram of the pass. "Ist es dir genug?" Is that enough for you?

Deathendale's answer had been simple.

"Jeder Meter, den sie nicht als sicher markieren können, ist mir genug," he replied. Every meter they cannot mark as safe is enough for me. "Wir sind nicht hier, um alles zu besitzen. Wir sind hier, um dafür zu sorgen, dass sie nie vergessen, dass es uns gibt." We are not here to own everything. We are here to make sure they never forget we exist.

So he kept going.

Night after night, he led new waves of zombies and human-mutant Deathsoldiers into fractures and seams: a partially cleared suburb on the edge of Meigue Province, a rail junction Galaxy engineers had just finished decontaminating, a hillside near Haylao where Galaxapuff's clouds didn't quite reach.

Sometimes he advanced at the head of a tank spear, cloak dripping necrotic fire, shrugging off elite barrages as if they were heavy rain. Sometimes he strode alone through a flood of his own undead, staff raised, letting Galaxy snipers take their best shots so he could measure their improvements.

Each time Galaxy Regime responded with the full force of their discipline. Supreme Commanders dropped in like corrections from the margin. Elites flared, bled, and blinked out, pulled from the board before he could finish them.

He never got a kill.

This war did not allow it.

But he left marks.

Galaxrire, somewhere in a future briefing room, would still have a faint scar where a necrotic shard had nearly severed his arm despite his retreat. Galaxharp would remember the time her sound barrier collapsed under a shell pattern he had designed specifically to find its harmonic weaknesses. Galaxastride would carry the memory of feeling the pass itself tilt against his steps.

On the maps, Gallaxgonbei slowly turned gold, yes.

And yet here and there, little pockets stayed purple, deep and stubborn. A ruined overpass nobody rebuilt because the ground "felt wrong." A section of forest along the Rentianfue slopes where zombies always seemed to try to gather again, as if answering some distant architect's design. A string of craters outside Galaxenhuo where Galaxy patrols walked faster than usual, uneasy without quite knowing why.

Those were Deathendale's fractions.

When Deathwing finally called the major formations home, conceding Gallaxgonbei as "temporarily" under Galaxy skies, Deathendale did not argue. He knew the Absolutes played at a scale beyond even his reach.

He turned away from the main projection and called up a different map—one that showed fault lines, border zones, logistics arteries.

Gallaxgonbei glowed there too, not as a block to be owned, but as a place already seeded with his work.

"Sie haben die Prüfung bestanden," he murmured, thinking of Galaxbeam's smug "provisionally passed" comment transmitted over some intercepted channel. They passed the exam. "Aber ich habe die Randnotizen geschrieben." But I wrote in the margins.

He raised his staff one last time toward the fading image of the state.

"Zombie-Generäle, bleiben," he told his sub-commanders. Zombie generals, remain. "Kriechen. Nagen. Warten. Wenn sie einen Moment wegschauen, nehmt euch einen Zentimeter Straße. Nur einen. Immer wieder."

Crawl. Gnaw. Wait. If they look away for a moment, take a centimeter of road. Just one. Again and again.

Fractions of ground. Health rings almost emptied. Elite bodies pulled out bleeding.

For the Galaxy Regime, Gallaxgonbei would forever be a liberated state with a permanent note attached: contested, once, and never entirely forgetful of the iron purple that had washed over it.

For Deathendale, that was a satisfactory grade.

Deathendale felt the order long before vox confirmed it.

The western terrace of Goldduchaisan shook under continuous impact—golden artillery tracing perfect parabolas, the air broken into neat, deadly segments by Galaxadye's fire-control grids. Deathendale stood in the middle of it all like a rusted monument, one boot braced on a shattered tank hull, the other on a pile of fused bone-crete, cloak smoking violet where phoenix fire had kissed it and failed to finish the job.

"Erste Linie: nachladen und weiterfeuern," he growled over the necro-net. First line: reload and keep firing. "Zweite Linie: Panzerkeil formen. Dritte Linie... Nachschub aus den Katakomben, alles was kriechen kann." Second line: form a spearhead of tanks. Third line: resupply from the catacombs, anything that can crawl.

The ground obeyed. Zombies in Deathsoldier harnesses shambled into fresh ranks, Deathmarines with welded rifles took knee along improvised barricades, and gray-purple tanks with skull-and-crossbones glacis plates clanked forward, turrets tracking in perfect, undead synchrony. Around them, Deathfury, Deathbash, Deathshade, and Deathgrimmar took up anchor positions, their auras reinforcing his like extra ribs under the same ribcage.

The Galaxy Regime answered with names.

Galaxrire's shots stitched the sky into a lattice of compressed constellations, each impact carving craters in Deathendale's breastplate and pauldrons. Galaxharp's invisible chords slammed down in sync, turning broken concrete into shockwaves. Galaxveronica dropped nested barrier-circles on advancing tanks, twisting their trajectories so they plowed sideways into carcass-heaps instead of Galaxy lines. Above them, Galaxtempestress rolled a storm front over the terrace, pressure gradients trying to peel Deathendale off the ground atom by atom.

He stepped forward into all of it.

Plates buckled; vertebrae-reinforced greaves cracked; his health-ring cinched tight, violet arc thinning to a knife-edge. Deathendale simply set his shoulders, raised one arm to shield the vox-mast behind him, and let the barrage break across his frame. Where golden shells blew out chunks of armor, necro-runed bone grew back in jagged bands. Where time-tilted blasts tried to skip him a second into the future, he dragged himself back by force of will, boots trenching hard enough to leave sparks.

"Feuer konzentrieren," he snapped, voice utterly steady. Focus fire. "Galaxrire zuerst. Dann Galaxharp. Wer mir Galaxveronica trifft, kriegt doppelte Rationen." Hit Galaxveronica and you get double rations.

Deathmarines pivoted at the word; Deathmarauders in half-track rigs swung their chem-launchers skyward. A sheet of violet tracers rose toward Galaxrire's vantage point. Galaxy barriers dropped in like golden petals—Galaxveronica again, plus Galaxytsukifenghuang's phoenix feathers, plus Galaxykitsunehua's fox-flame sigils—but enough shots got through to force the sniper off his perch, his health-ring flaring warning red as recall-light began to tug at his heels.

On the terrace flank, Galaxyqinglong and Galaxyraijin dove together, dragon-traced fist and thunder-cloak descending for a decapitation strike. Deathendale met them alone, stepping away from his staff line so their impact wouldn't splash onto his own men. The dragon-punch hit his chest with the sound of a cathedral bell shattering; lightning wrapped his spine in white-hot barbs. For a moment he was buried in gold and jade and static.

Then he walked out of it, smoking, helm cracked open to show the seamed gray skin beneath—and still moving.

"Netter Aufsatz," he rasped in German, voice like gravel sliding in a coffin. Nice essay. "Aber ihr habt die Quellenangaben vergessen." You forgot your citations.

His counter-swing—nothing elaborate, just a brutal staff-arc loaded with enough necrotic weight to bruise an Absolute—caught Galaxyqinglong on the shoulder and hurled him across half the terrace. Galaxyraijin tried to parry and found his drum-satellites crushed in the follow-through. Both elites' health-rings scissored down to slivers; the battlefield's recall law seized them and yanked them out in streaks of blue-white light before Deathendale could press the advantage.

Farther downslope, Galaxysuzuhime, Galaxysorahana, Galaxymurasaki, and Galaxylingyue coordinated a four-point spell, their voices braiding Japanese and Mandarin into a single rising cadence. Flower-storms, moonlight spears, and spiraling gravity wells converged on Deathendale's command bunker, trying to pry the heart out of the Death Regime line in one elegant, anime-perfect flourish.

He denied them elegance.

"Deckung für die Geschütze," he ordered, planting his staff.

A rib-wall exploded from the ground, each bone the size of a shuttle mast. The combined spell hit, detonated, and wrapped the terrace in a howling haze of petals and warped starlight—but the vox, the artillery crews, and the bulk of his tanks remained intact in the lee of his conjured anatomy. The backlash instead tore through his own body: one arm dislocated, half his jaw blown away into splinters, health-ring flickering so thin he could almost feel the recall hook testing its grip on his spine.

He forced the ring wider again, dragging himself back into the fight through sheer commander's stubbornness.

"Vorwärts, bis ich 'Stopp' sage," he told the line, bloodless mouth twisting into something like a grin. Forward until I say stop. "Heute ist Nachhilfeunterricht." Today is remedial class.

Deathsoldiers surged past him, gray-purple tide clambering over wreckage, firing from the hip; Deathtanks ground their tracks deeper into Galaxy fortifications, turrets spitting bone-tipped shells. For a few brutal minutes the terrace belonged to him—meters of ground clawed back, Galaxy infantry blinking out in emergency recalls, elites forced to higher air and longer ranges where their shots did less to blunt the sheer mass of his advance.

Only when Deathwing's recall directive sliced across the net—cold, precise, Absolute—did Deathendale finally stop.

"Rückzug in Staffelmustern," he answered at once, professional to the last. Withdraw in staggered echelons. "Panzer sichern, Verwundete markieren. Kein heldenhafter Unsinn." Secure the tanks, mark the wounded, no heroic stupidity.

He stayed where he was while his formations peeled back, layer by layer—Deathmarauders reversing in disciplined arcs, Deathmarines falling back by squads, Deathsoldiers crumbling into programmed dust if they couldn't keep up. Galaxy fire chased them, but every time a shot lined up too well, Deathendale simply stepped into it, letting the impact break on his already-ruined frame. By the time the last tank rolled through a retreat portal and the last surviving elite—Deathgrimmar, half his armor slagged—staggered past him, his armor was hardly more than a skeleton of welded plates and glowing runes.

Only then did he turn, cloak trailing ash, and walk into the waiting violet gate.

Behind him, Goldduchaisan's upper terrace flickered back under golden skies, Galaxy banners already searching for a place to plant themselves. But in the deep files of Death Regime command, the map over Gallaxgonbei showed a different annotation in cold, neat script: Contact made. Terrace tested. Defenders costly. Terrain remembered.

For Deathendale, the campaign was not a defeat so much as a solved equation waiting for a second attempt—and next time, he intended to be the one grading papers.

Deathravena did not sleep when the ravens did.

After the Gallaxgonbei assignments, she spent a long while alone in her bone-lined chamber, mask set aside on a stand, scythe resting within arm's reach. Behind the stitched-black skin of her eyelids, the state replayed itself in fragments: the stalled convoy on Meigue's road, Rentianfue's flickering teleport grid, Galaxenportal's harbor lights stuttering under her circle. Each scene fixed itself in place with the quiet inevitability of a carved rune.

On a low altar before her, a book lay open—if it could be called a book. Its pages were stretched skin, its ink a mixture of grave-dust and her own condensed aura. With a claw-tipped quill she wrote, right to left, line after patient line: coordinates, timings, responses, the names of elites she'd forced to withdraw and the exact seconds she'd stolen from Galaxastride's steps. No exaggeration, no bravado. Just data, wrapped in ritual.

"Für den Nächsten, der hier arbeitet," she murmured. For the next one who works this ground. "Damit er weiß, wo die Nähte schon offen sind." So they'll know where the seams are already open.

A faint rustle sounded as one raven, braver than most, hopped closer to the altar. She tapped its skull once, gently, inscribing a single, tiny rune on its brow.

"Du wirst zurückfliegen," she told it. You will fly back. "Nicht zum Kämpfen—zum Beobachten. Zähle Fahnen, notiere Patrouillen, hör dir an, was sie nachts sagen. Alles, was wie Sicherheit klingt, ist für uns interessant." Not to fight—to watch. Count flags, note patrols, listen to what they say at night. Anything that sounds like safety is interesting to us.

The raven croaked quietly and took wing, disappearing into one of the many vents that fed distant, unknown skies.

Only when the last line on the skin-page dried did Deathravena close the book. As she did, the glyphs she'd written glowed once and then sank out of sight, copied directly into the vast, unseen archive Deathwing and Deathendye maintained for future operations. Her work, like Deathendale's scars, had become part of the permanent record of Gallaxgonbei.

She rose, replaced her skull-mask, and swung her scythe back over one shoulder. Her health ring, still narrow from Galaxenportal's combined barrage, pulsed a little wider as necro-energy flowed in from the fortress around her. Not full, not fresh—but enough.

"Gallaxgonbei... vorerst," she echoed Deathwing's earlier verdict softly. Gallaxgonbei... for now. "Sie haben es zurück. Aber sie schlafen nicht mehr so ruhig." They've taken it back. But they don't sleep as soundly anymore.

One last time she looked at the distant outline of the state on the war-sigil wall: gold-smothered, yes, but threaded with thin purple annotations—her annotations—wherever a convoy hesitated, a pass demanded extra scouts, a harbor ward carried a permanent warning.

Then she turned away, cloak of feathers whispering, to answer the next summons from the deep crypt-chambers of the Death Regime. Gallaxgonbei was no longer her only assignment; other fronts were calling, other maps needed scars. But somewhere above that reclaimed state, a few ravens still circled in unhurried patterns, and every so often a Galaxy officer glancing up at the sky would feel, without knowing why, that unseen eyes were taking quiet, careful notes.

When that happened, the contest Deathendale had promised and Deathravena had maintained was still alive—and that, for the Death Regime, was victory enough.

Far below the crypt where Deathravena closed her book, Gallaxgonbei kept burning in quiet colors—gold on the surface, violet underneath.

Everywhere the state map had once been a solid bruise of Death Regime control, it now looked like a sickle bitten into a sun: Galaxy gold reclaiming cities and roads, Death purple clinging in knots and threads, seeping along rivers and mountain passes, clustering around the scars Deathendale and Deathravena had left behind. On the ground, that tension translated into constant noise.

In the outskirts of Galaxenhuo, Galaxkiba and his shinobi squads carved through yet another wave of shambling bodies, orange-trimmed armor streaked with necro-fluid. In the shadow of Rentianfue Pass, Galaxmurasaki and Galaxysuzuhime reset their warped prisms and flower wards for the third time that day, breathing hard as branded skeletons dragged themselves out of ditches only to be shattered again. Around Galaxenportal's harbor, Galaxharp, Galaxveronica, Galaxtempestress, Galaxytsukifenghuang, and Galaxrire rotated patrol duties, eyes always flicking to the water whenever it moved the wrong way.

The pattern was the same everywhere: endless mindless pressure.

Deathsoldiers in corroded armor shambled ahead as living sandbags. Deathmarines and Deathrangers—half-rotten, half-mechanical—marched behind them in tighter ranks, rifles grafted into forearms. Deathzealots, robed and spike-crowned, walked in the gaps, chanting liturgies that turned fallen Galaxy projectiles into new shrapnel storms. Fleshy zombies lurched; skeletal ones clacked; grotesque, multi-limbed human-mutant forms dragged chain-guns or portable mortars by fused vertebrae.

They almost never won.

Against Galaxy Supreme Commanders and elites, they could not. Galaxadye burned through platoons in wide golden lances; Galaxastride rewrote whole avenues of their approach with casual, time-bent steps; Galaxastorm folded their shells back into harmless rain. Elites like Galaxwis, Galaxkiba, Galaxmurasaki, Galaxysuzuhime, Galaxrire, and the rest cut channels through the masses whenever they had a spare breath.

But the hordes never stopped. For every block Galaxy cleared, another shambling line of bodies tested the perimeter a kilometer away, forcing commanders to keep shields up, guns hot, and schedules tight. Gallaxgonbei was free—but never allowed to forget the price of blinking.

High above all that grinding attrition, Deathwing watched in silence.

His throne—vertebrae welded into a crescent, ribs flaring like a dead halo—hung in a pocket of violet void far off the Galaxenchi coast. Around him, his Supreme Commanders floated at measured distances, each framed by their own field of data-glyphs and casualty sigils.

Deathendye stood precisely upright within a lattice of numbered skulls, statistics dripping from their eye sockets in luminous lines. Deathendale's projection loomed in half-armor, one gauntleted hand resting on the outline of Rentianfue Pass. Deathenstream was surrounded by ghost-rivers, Deathenstride by rings of teleport circles, Deathenstorm by crackling storm diagrams, Deathenpuff by nesting swarm-patterns of bombers and chem-clouds.

Behind them, in the second tier of the void, elites hovered at parade rest—Deathfury, Deathbash, Deathplague, Deathshade, Deathgrimmar, Deathravena and dozens more—each attended by shoals of numbers representing their surviving ground cadres.

Between all those presences, the endless mob answered.

At Deathwing's gesture, a segment of the void parted like a curtain, revealing what lay under his direct hand: reserve oceans of undeath, packed into holding pits or drifting in formation around dormant dreadnought hulls. Millions of zombies—flesh slick, bone exposed, eyes empty—stood shoulder to shoulder in layered ranks. Skeletal battalions rattled in perfect silence, shields and rifles stacked in neat geometric grids. Behind them lurked more elaborate shapes: grotesque siege-behemoths made of fused torsos and tank frames; human-mutant "officers" with too many joints and too many weapons, their movements controlled by runes branded into their spines.

"Gallaxgonbei hält," Deathendye reported, German clipped and dispassionate. Gallaxgonbei holds. "Verlustverhältnisse für Bodenkräfte bleiben akzeptabel. Galaxy-Regimenter erschöpfen sich, ohne dass wir Absolute einsetzen müssen." Loss ratios for ground forces remain acceptable. Galaxy regiments tire themselves out without any Absolute commitment.

"Stress als Waffe," Deathendale added dryly. Stress as a weapon. "Sie schlafen mit einem Auge offen."

Deathwing listened, smoke leaking lazily from the sockets of his skull-helmed face. On the central sigil before his throne, Gallaxgonbei glowed gold with scattered purple scars—just as Galaxbeam's map would show it, but colored in his own palette.

"Gut," he said at last. Good.

He reached out with one clawed hand and, with a thoughtful motion, dragged the Gallaxgonbei sigil to the side. It shrank, still pulsing with low-level conflict, a finished experiment he had every intention of revisiting later.

In its place, he pulled another symbol forward.

Yealbankokk State flared into focus.

On Galaxy charts it was a long, far-flung sprawl on the opposite curve of the Galaxenchi continent—a very large state of scattered cities and deep hinterlands, much of it still proudly untainted gold: Xiacun and Tung-she, Galaxyungsae shining on the coast, a chain of Galaxen-something names strung inland like lanterns. Near its center, the capital Gallaxosksuke blazed. Out in one remote quadrant, two runes practically begged for his touch: Galaxen-Kongmu—"empty tomb"—and Galaxen-Youming—"ghost underworld"—already dimmer than their neighbors, a natural shadow pocket in an otherwise bright syllabus.

Deathwing's grin widened, slow and sharp.

"Gallaxgonbei war ihre Prüfung," he mused, more to himself than to his staff. Gallaxgonbei was their exam. "Yealbankokk wird... die Zusatzaufgabe." Yealbankokk will be the extra-credit assignment.

At a gesture, the reserve hordes below reacted.

Command glyphs flowed from his throne into the ocean of undead. Lines of purple fire raced across their ranks, lighting sigils branded into skulls and sternums. In unison, legions of zombies raised their heads. Skeletal battalions locked shields into marching position. Siege-beasts uncoiled, spines of welded steel scraping against the decks of waiting dreadnoughts.

Deathsoldiers, Deathmarines, Deathzealots, Deathguards, Deathmarauders—an entire taxonomy of ground units—sorted themselves into new hierarchies, ranked by how well they'd survived Gallaxgonbei and how much useful data they'd generated under Deathendye's gaze.

"Supreme Commanders," Deathwing said, voice expanding to fill the void. "Ihr habt eure Notizen gemacht. Gallaxgonbei hat uns gezeigt, wie schnell sie lernen können." You've taken your notes. Gallaxgonbei showed us how fast they learn. "Yealbankokk soll prüfen, wie lange sie durchhalten."

Deathendye's skull-lattice rotated, rearranging predictions around Yealbankokk's cities. Deathendale's gauntlet dragged fresh assault arrows toward Galaxen-Kongmu and Galaxen-Youming. Deathenstream rewrote riverlines, Deathenstride marked teleport denial grids, Deathenstorm seeded storm markers along mountain spines, Deathenpuff spun bomber routes in wide, choking spirals.

Behind them, elites bowed their heads in grim anticipation. Deathravena's ravens flared and settled along new coordinates; Deathfury's spears hissed; Deathshade's cloak thickened; Deathplague's chem-flasks bubbled.

Below all of them, the mindless army waited for only one word.

"Lasst Gallaxgonbei atmen," Deathwing continued, almost courteous. Let Gallaxgonbei breathe. "Nicht frei—nur genug, um zu spüren, wenn wir ihnen etwas wieder wegnehmen." Not freely—just enough to feel it when we take something away again. "Eure Horden bleiben dort, um den Puls zu drücken."

He tapped the Yealbankokk sigil with the end of his staff.

"But unserer eigentlicher Schlag..." Our true strike...

The symbol zoomed in until Galaxen-Kongmu and Galaxen-Youming filled the void, two glowing lanterns on the edge of a dark hinterland. In their light, faint silhouettes of Galaxy Regime defenses appeared: patrol routes, orbital watch-satellites, the gentle, reliable hum of a state that hadn't yet felt a full Death Regime occupation on its skin.

"...beginnt hier," Deathwing finished softly. "...begins here."

For a heartbeat, the whole void hung suspended.

In Gallaxgonbei, Galaxy elites cut down another wave of zombies in some nameless suburb, thinking the tempo at last might be slowing. In Yealbankokk, civilians in Xiacun and Galaxyungsae went about their evening under golden streetlamps, shield grids humming comfortably overhead. In a quiet valley near Galaxen-Kongmu, farmers glanced up at a sky that seemed, just tonight, a little more purple around the stars.

Deathwing lifted his staff high.

"Operationsbefehl wird später ausgegeben," he told his commanders calmly. Operational order to follow. "Für den Moment... bereitet alles vor. Wir wollen, dass Yealbankokk glaubt, Gallaxgonbei sei die ganze Geschichte gewesen."

We want Yealbankokk to believe Gallaxgonbei was the whole story.

The staff came down.

Far below, one of the reserve dreadnoughts shuddered, ancient engines coughing awake for the first time since the Gallaxgonbei campaign began. Around it, ranks of zombies pivoted as one toward a heading only they and their god of death could feel.

In the void-map, a thin, new line of iron purple began to trace its way outward from Death Regime territory, curving toward Yealbankokk's untouched edge.

It stopped just short of the state border, flickering like a question mark.

Then it thickened, solidified—

—and the scene, like a cut to black between episodes, snapped shut on that single, advancing line.