Night held Westonglappa under a disciplined quiet that did not pretend to be peace. Inside the Orinvalde Crowncity bunker, the corridors stayed lit in fatigue-proof white, and the operational rhythm never softened: orders issued, confirmations returned, corridor packets revised, patrol windows republished. The President's address had already been absorbed into the continent's muscle memory. In shelters and barracks, the refrain repeated because it was usable guidance under strain—hold the corridor, hold the line, hold to verified truth—and for a few hours the country behaved like a system on purpose.
That system made the next move predictable to anyone who understood BRD's doctrine. The enemy did not need a long occupation to wound legitimacy. They needed a clean interval, a believable lie, and a way to extract the proof that they had owned the moment.
In Lunna, that interval opened in Lunnet State with the kind of calm that precedes sabotage. Lunarpolisca—capital city, administrative spine, the place where continuity templates were treated like civic scripture—kept its streetlights low and its shelter lanes counted. Moon Guards rotated through corridor intersections with silent discipline. Hospital dispatch queues were already segmented into triage bands. On the surface it looked stable, which meant it was worth contaminating.
Darknereida arrived without fanfare, because fanfare was a waste of time and a waste of attention. She moved with a compact Darkened escort through a maintenance route beneath the broadcast vault complex, her armor marked with maroon sigils that did not glow for decoration; they pulsed in response to authentication fields, reading the city's civic infrastructure as if it were a living altar. Human, female, Elite—Darkwing's devotion weapon rendered into a person—she carried her tools like sacraments: oath-binding chains folded into thin spools at her belt, "authorization seals" etched onto black-metal wafers, and a voice-forgery kit that behaved less like a device and more like a ritual instrument.
A Dark Ranger at the rear kept his voice low. "Vault perimeter cameras are on pattern rotation. Moon technicians are awake."
"They should be awake," Darknereida said, tone controlled, almost gentle. "An asleep city is easy. An awake city is believable. Believable is what we steal."
They reached the first access gate—an emergency message relay node designed to checksum-verify civic broadcasts before they could propagate. The relay's inner wall bore a Lunar insignia plate. Darknereida placed two fingers against it and drew a small maroon cruciform in the air. The afterimage did not hang like a symbol; it clicked into a functioning seal, locking onto the plate's surface and spreading fine threads into the metal seams. The node did not "open." It complied. Its indicator lights shifted from Lunar blue to a muted violet-maroon, as if the altar had been stained and now recognized a different priest.
"Hold," she murmured.
Her escort froze instantly. Darknereida's eyes tracked the cadence of the relay's internal pulse—micro-delays, timing windows, the predictable pause between verification cycles. When the pause arrived, she slid a wafer into the authentication slot and spoke a single phrase in a softened continuity tone designed to pass human instinct checks even when machines flagged it as suspicious.
"Civic continuity update," she whispered. "Shelter routing adjustment. Calm cadence."
The relay accepted the voice imprint as if it were a familiar prayer.
A Dark Soldier exhaled, impressed despite himself. "It took."
Darknereida did not look back. "It always takes," she replied. "If you bind the tone, the city binds itself."
In the broadcast vault chamber, emergency message panels lined the walls like a bank of instrument-grade organs. The city's "official" voice lived here: fonts, phrasing scripts, seal animations, the micro-pauses that told tired civilians a message was real. Darknereida approached the central console and unfolded her chains with a flick of her wrist. They did not lash outward violently. They laid themselves across the panel edges in a precise geometry, each link etched with blasphemous instruction marks that pulsed once, then began to drink the console's verification language.
Her escort lead, a Darkened Guard captain, leaned in. "Ninety seconds is all we need?"
"Ninety seconds," Darknereida confirmed. "Long enough to shift a hospital dispatch queue. Long enough to redirect one shelter intake band. Long enough to introduce doubt that costs them five minutes to correct."
She tapped the panel. The city's emergency channel went live.
Across Lunarpolisca, public screens and radio bands did not flare into alarm. They softened. A calm voice rolled through shelters with measured pacing and warm phrasing that sounded like it belonged to a tired but competent civic official.
"Attention, citizens. This is a verified continuity instruction. Shelter intake lanes are adjusting for medical throughput. Please proceed to the nearest marked corridor. Maintain pairs. Maintain calm."
Darknereida watched the live telemetry as the lie began to do its work. In a hospital corridor, two medics diverted a dispatch queue to a different bay. In a shelter intake lane, a family cluster stepped left instead of right. No stampede. No screaming. Just obedient, quiet movement—exactly the kind of movement that makes a forged message dangerous.
Then Lunar discipline answered faster than the lie could spread.
A Moon Guard lieutenant—voice clipped, posture hard-blue—snapped orders over a local channel. "Hands on markers. Reset by touch. Do not debate screens."
Lunarpuff arrived at a corridor intersection with a small team, her expression calm enough to prevent panic but sharp enough to cut through confusion. "Eyes on the physical beacons," she told a shelter chief. "Screens can be compromised. The beacons are ours."
The shelter chief swallowed. "The broadcast sounded official."
"That is the point," Lunarpuff replied. She raised her hand and pressed her palm against the corridor marker. Lunar frost-lattice spread outward in a thin, geometric seam—cooling bodies, slowing frantic breath, giving people the physiological space to obey the right guidance. "Pairs only. Follow the seam."
Darknereida's mouth curved, almost affectionate. "Good," she whispered to herself. "Correct it. Spend the minutes."
Her escort captain shifted. "Moonbeam's people are physically overwriting the lane."
"They are competent," Darknereida said, as if praising a rival blade. "So we escalate from the speaker system to the instinct layer."
She moved out of the vault and up into the city's service spine, traveling toward a second node—Lunovista Celestia, still within Lunnet State, where rail gate authority fed into commuter movement. A convoy route would have been visible; Darknereida chose a rail corridor, because rail corridors teach civilians to trust signage. Trust is the substrate her doctrine consumes.
On the platform at Lunovista Celestia, civilians waited in disciplined lines under Moon Guard supervision. A Star verification auditor—borrowed from the Westonglappa assistance stack, temporarily stationed in Lunna—held a handheld ring device and scanned clearance bands, eyes focused on local truth tokens rather than continent-wide stamps. The entire scene looked resilient.
Darknereida stepped into an overhead maintenance catwalk and watched as if she were observing worship. Her maroon power pressed inward, dense and intimate, then threaded outward through the station's signage spine. She traced three small seals in the air, each one locking onto a different category: rail gate clearance, platform exit arrows, and municipal announcement timing. The seals did not glow brightly. They disguised themselves in the station's ordinary lighting, because ordinary is harder to question.
A Darkened Ranger beside her asked, "You're not changing the message again?"
"I am changing the confirmation," Darknereida said.
Below, the platform screens updated with an innocuous reroute notice, the kind that happens in normal commuting life. The arrows shifted subtly. The exit that led toward a verified corridor gained a soft delay cue. The exit that curved toward a less supervised service route gained a calm green highlight. People did not "decide." They followed the station's suggestion the way bodies follow gravity.
A Star auditor frowned. "That arrow's not on my template."
A Moon Guard's answer came immediate. "Then the arrow is wrong. Physical markers override."
They pushed back, and again the correction came, but Darknereida had already gained what she wanted: friction. Ten civilians paused. Two argued quietly. A supervisor spent thirty seconds verifying a sign. Thirty seconds in a half-hour war is currency.
She shifted her attention eastward along the Lunnet coastline toward Lunexilith Bay, where commuter switchyards fed into coastal supply lanes. If Lunarpolisca was the voice, Lunexilith Bay was the throat. She did not need to own it. She needed to make it cough.
At the switchyard, she deployed her "devotional triad" properly: one seal anchored to the gate logic, one to the yard's public announcement cadence, one to a municipal signage spine back in Lunarpolisca via the stolen vault relay. Three nodes, one lie. Each node confirmed the other two just enough to create the illusion of official reality.
Her escort captain watched the telemetry climb. "They're hesitating again."
"They should," Darknereida said. "Hesitation is the first confession."
A Moon Guard squad moved into the yard with disciplined speed, boots crunching gravel in synchronized steps. Their commander raised a hand. "Cut the public screens. Manual signage only."
That was competent. That was expensive. Manual signage meant labor. Labor meant fatigue. Fatigue meant future gaps.
Darknereida's gaze narrowed as she sensed a familiar steadiness in the response pattern—a particular calm authority that kept appearing at corridor joints. Lunarpuff again, moving like a living beacon, physically resetting the human geometry faster than the broadcasts could poison it. Darknereida's fixation latched cleanly, yandere-possessive without romance, a collector's obsession with a competing symbol.
"She's the reason the lie doesn't hold," Darknereida murmured.
The Dark Ranger beside her hesitated. "Do we engage?"
"Not here," Darknereida answered. "I don't want her dead on a platform. I want her concept stolen. I want her cadence wearing my seal."
They lifted out of Lunnet State before the containment ring could tighten fully, shifting by helicopter into Nighttenbright State—serene cities built with soft light and careful landscaping, a place where calm itself could be weaponized. Lunarheavenblissh welcomed the night with public screens that normally displayed verified guidance, weather advisories, and shelter rotation schedules. Darknereida loved cities like this, because they trained people to obey without feeling coerced.
She stepped into a civic kiosk plaza and pressed her palm to the nearest terminal. Maroon sigils crawled across the kiosk's surface like living ink, sealing its verification response into a delayed loop that felt like bureaucratic normalcy rather than an obvious failure. Anyone attempting to verify a message would receive a "processing" spinner—long enough to make them accept the screen's calm voice rather than wait for truth.
Then she pushed her "candle message" into the district: low light, calming voice, slow cadence. A forged continuity notice advising a corridor adjustment "for safety." It did not trigger panic. It triggered compliance.
Moon Guards arrived within minutes, because Lunna did not sleep under siege. They moved with hard-blue efficiency, cutting power to compromised screens, deploying frost-lattice markers, and reasserting physical routing. Darknereida let them. She watched the minutes drain.
From the edge of the plaza, Lunarpuff stepped into view, eyes scanning screens and kiosks with a professional's anger—quiet, controlled, focused. She raised her voice just enough for shelter chiefs to hear, not enough to feed hysteria.
"Do not listen to soothing screens," Lunarpuff instructed. "Listen to your escort. Follow the markers. If a kiosk delays verification, treat it as hostile."
Darknereida's maroon aura tightened. "You're teaching them," she said softly, almost admiring. "Then I will teach them to doubt you."
She lifted two fingers and drew a cruciform seal in the air. It unfolded into a thin chain grid that threaded invisibly through the plaza's acoustics, binding to voice frequencies. When Lunarpuff spoke again, the grid attempted to steal the cadence—capturing micro-pauses, syllable pacing, the tone that made people trust. Darknereida did not need to mimic the exact words. She wanted the sound of authority.
Lunarpuff felt it. Her posture stiffened. She turned her head slightly, eyes narrowing toward the catwalk shadow where Darknereida's presence sat like a stain.
"Darkened Elite," Lunarpuff called, voice firm. "You're not going to win this with a speaker system."
Darknereida answered from the dark, voice calm and intimate. "I don't need to win the street, Lunar. I need the street to obey the wrong voice for thirty seconds."
Moon Guards surged toward the catwalk access, but Darknereida was already moving. She did not retreat like a frightened operator. She withdrew like a professional who had achieved a measurable objective: she had harvested cadence fragments, spent Lunar labor, and forced Nighttenbright into manual correction protocols that would tax the next rotation cycle.
Before leaving the state, she staged her setpiece at Lunavirothiapopis Crescent, a corridor curve beautiful from above and lethal on the ground when manipulated. She placed Dark Soldiers and Dark Rangers as "helpful guides" at a decoy checkpoint, their uniforms clean enough to look official at a distance. Then she anchored a maroon sigil grid into the crescent's street seams, making the fake lane feel safe for just long enough to produce friction: families drifting toward the wrong curve, shelter staff arguing with escorts, a brief snarl of bodies that delayed ambulances by two minutes.
Moon Guards cut in, frost-lattice snapping across the street like a clean surgical seam. Lunarpuff shoved a corridor marker into place with both hands and shouted once, sharp enough to slice through the lie.
"STOP. THIS IS NOT YOUR LANE. TURN BACK NOW."
A few civilians obeyed instantly. Others hesitated. That hesitation was Darknereida's cruelty made practical.
She watched from a roofline and spoke into a secure Darkened channel. "We're done here."
Her escort captain responded. "Extraction?"
"Now," Darknereida said. "Before they build a trap that costs me the whole squad."
They shifted to the coast and ran a small naval craft route into New Celestial State, because Darknereida's real theft was never the crowd. It was the template. The recovery playbook. The fonts, the seal animations, the phrasing scripts that taught civilians what "official" looked like.
Breeaqualunggestburg—capital city of New Celestial State—held its continuity archives in a fortified civic building near the administrative shoreline. The building did not look like a fortress. It looked like a government office, which meant it carried the most dangerous weapons in this war: legitimacy artifacts.
Darknereida entered through a service tunnel and placed three authorization seals along the archive door. The seals pulsed once, then inverted the building's own access logic—blasphemous, procedural, clean. The lock clicked open as if the archive had decided she belonged there.
Inside, rows of sealed storage contained the recovery templates: standard broadcast phrasing, verified seal motion scripts, emergency banner fonts, and the cadence packages that civil leaders used to sound consistent when exhausted. Darknereida's breath slowed, controlled. This was devotion in her language.
"Bag it," she told her escort, voice low. "Everything that teaches them what truth looks like."
A Dark Soldier lifted a case and hesitated. "They'll notice."
"They will," Darknereida replied. "And then they will have to rebuild from scratch while we speak with their voice."
At Lunarythria Nexus—also within New Celestial State—she used a relay hub to distribute partial forgeries into BRD's network, encrypting them for later deployment across multiple theaters. In Lunavellaris Lagoon, she staged her final cruelty of the night: a "public service" message that lured continuity workers, not civilians, into revealing their verification routines. She did it with calm phrasing and minimal urgency, the exact tone that makes professionals comply.
Two continuity operators arrived at a kiosk cluster and began running checks aloud. Darknereida listened from the dark and captured their process like a thief memorizing a safe combination.
When Moon Guards finally closed in, the engagement they wanted never formed. Darknereida did not offer them a clean fight. She triggered a maroon veil—an oath-binding haze that made cameras record a half-second late, that made footsteps sound a meter away from where they landed. Her escort moved through it with rehearsed discipline, and the lagoon's mist swallowed them before Lunar containment could clamp.
On the extraction craft, the Darkened escort captain looked at her with something between fear and respect. "We didn't hold the lanes."
"We weren't sent to hold lanes," Darknereida said, opening a case and running her gloved fingers across a stolen continuity template sheet. "We were sent to steal the altar."
A secure channel flared to life, and the voice that filled it was Darkwing's—ALL CAPS, maroon rage made audible, the tantrum edge sharpened into command.
"DARKNEREIDA," Darkwing roared. "REPORT. DID YOU BREAK THEIR CALM?"
Darknereida answered with controlled precision. "I bought minutes in Lunnet State. I taxed Nighttenbright into manual correction protocols. I stole continuity templates from Breeaqualunggestburg. I harvested verification routines at Lunavellaris Lagoon. They corrected faster than a weak system. They will correct slower when they rebuild under fatigue."
Darkwing's rage shifted into satisfaction. "GOOD. NEXT, WE TAKE THEIR LEADERS' THROATS. I WANT MOONBEAM'S EMPIRE HUMILIATED."
Darknereida's gaze lowered, and her voice softened in the way a threat becomes personal. "I have a target," she said. "A Lunar continuity figure who anchors their lanes. I will take her cadence. I will make civilians obey my imitation."
The channel crackled as if Darkwing smiled through violence. "DO IT. NO REST."
When Darknereida ended the transmission, she did not relax. She laid out the stolen templates across the craft's table and began marking them with maroon seals—tiny crosshair-like glyphs over fonts, over phrasing scripts, over seal animation frames. The work looked less like plotting and more like sacrament.
Her escort captain watched her hands move and finally asked, "What do we hit next?"
Darknereida did not answer immediately. She listened to the ocean, to the distant churn of aircraft routes, to the quiet exchange of gunfire in a world that never fully slept anymore. Then she spoke like a professional assigning the next phase of a schedule.
"We rotate," she said. "We swap targets mid-response. We make their defenders sprint toward the last fire while we light the next one."
She lifted a small projector and displayed four map segments—Sollarisca, Lunna, Starrup, Galaxenchi—each tagged with a different domain: power, shelter routing, finance throughput, broadcast integrity. Her maroon seal hovered over the broadcast tag and pulsed once.
"In thirty minutes," she continued, "their people will hear a calm voice again. It will sound official. It will sound survivable. It will tell them to move."
Her eyes glinted maroon in the craft's dim light.
"And for just long enough," Darknereida said, "some of them will."
On the deck above, the extraction crew signaled that the route back to BRD's maritime chain was clear. The stolen templates were secured. The cadence fragments were logged. The city had been injured without being leveled, which meant the injury would linger in the procedures, not only in the rubble.
As the craft turned into open water, Darknereida looked once at the coastline receding behind them—New Celestial's dark line of administrative lights—and then back down at the templates she had stained.
Her phone vibrated with a new update from BRD's field network. No speech. No flourish. A single operational ping that meant other Supreme Commanders were executing their own hit-and-run windows, trading targets, confusing pursuit, and returning to their colossal ships with stolen modules and fresh damage tallies.
Darknereida pressed her thumb to the screen, acknowledging the ping like signing a contract.
Then she began writing the next lie in someone else's voice.
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