Deathulon received his orders the way the Death Regime preferred to issue them—sterile, bounded, and timed.
A sealed strip slid across a stainless table on a shipboard lab deck, the paper held in a clear sleeve as if the ink itself could infect the air. Doctor Deathwing's presence sat behind glass and distance, voice arriving through a filtered channel with no warmth and no wasted syllables.
"Acquire one live AES verification sample," Deathwing said. "Call-and-response timing. Channel priority behavior. Physical custody protocol. Deliver air-gapped."
Deathulon's cross-shaped pupils held steady. He didn't ask why. He asked what failure looked like.
"If you cannot seize the sample," Deathwing added, "you force it. You do not improvise content. You provoke sequence."
A Blackened liaison stood to Deathulon's left, jacket collar up, grin held like a threat. He placed a compact distress-beacon module on the table and tapped it once.
"Pressure comes from the crowd too," the liaison said. "We make 'em hurry without sayin' hurry."
In the corner, the Shadow handler did not speak. They signaled with hands and posture: two fingers tracing a curve—FOG BEND—then a flat palm, held at the edge of the table—HALF-HOUR SEAM—then a gentle push forward that meant MOVE WHEN THE WORLD BLINKS. Deathulon's mouth twitched into something that wasn't a smile. He answered with a small forward tilt of his chin. Understood.
He left the lab with his kit already sleeved and numbered. No exposed tools. No loose cables. The Death Regime's confidence did not come from courage; it came from making the next ten minutes behave like a controlled experiment.
The skiff rode out under the belly of the ship, low and dark, cutting into the maritime approach lanes between Galaxen-Hoshiou (星王) and the Jakchi City coastline. The sea was restless enough to punish sloppy hands, and the horizon carried distant flashes that read as bombardment weather. Those flashes were useful. They made timing feel like nature when it was really doctrine.
Deathulon transferred to a disguised maintenance tender that broadcast a legitimate cadence—calm bridge voice, correct identifiers, routine service language. The hull looked municipal-clean, the deck arranged like a working platform. Below deck, the ship held its true spine: a lab compartment with sterilized rails, lockout panels, and two procedural weapons built to weaponize good behavior.
One was contamination theater. The moment a system sensed "risk," it would funnel responders toward quarantine choices that looked prudent and functioned as delay. The second was a hush timing module: not silence, a fraction. Half a beat shaved from shouted corrections, enough to make the wrong instruction feel first.
Deathulon walked the compartment once and checked each lock in sequence. He touched nothing bare-handed. He watched the lock panels like they were mouths.
"Stage lockout," he said.
A Death technician nodded and armed the quarantine prompt set without triggering it. The green confirm button remained dormant, waiting for the moment it could feel like relief.
On deck, the Blackened fire-support detachment hid in plain sight as maintenance crew—hands in gloves, tool pouches at the waist, rifles broken down and stowed behind equipment housings. Nobody looked like a soldier until the first burst. That was the point.
The bait went out as a distress message tuned to two audiences at once: the AES interception channels and the desks that monitored press noise. It implied a stranded civic maintenance craft carrying "verification remediation patches," the sort of rumor that felt like hope. Hope makes people hurry without needing to be commanded.
Galaxbeam's lattice would likely flag it. Deathulon assumed AES would still come. AES did not abandon a contested seam if a seam could become a citywide blink later. And if AES arrived cautious, boxed and verified, Deathulon would use that caution as the lever.
The fog began to bend exactly when the Shadow handler had signed it would. Not thicker, not thinner—obedient. Visibility shortened, angles softened, and the tender's silhouette became an assumption rather than a certainty.
Then the approach wake appeared.
A fast cutter ran low through spray, its path too disciplined to be civilian. Lane markers were visible even at distance—tape around the console hood, hard-light rectangles projected on deck. A small cell, not a flotilla. Star-led, by posture. Galaxy timing support, by the way their arrival aligned with a bombardment flash as if time itself had been held and released.
Deathulon didn't rush to the rail to watch. He waited at the top of the stairwell that led below deck, where he could hear footsteps and voices without giving his own position away.
The cutter came alongside. Grapples bit. Boots hit deck.
"Box!" an AES voice called, sharp and repeatable. "Hands visible!"
Hard-light snapped into place on the maintenance tender's deck, forcing AES feet into rectangles and making every friendly movement predictable. The discipline was irritatingly good. It was also exactly what Deathulon needed to see.
The Blackened detachment held for three breaths—long enough for AES to commit to their boxes, long enough for their verifier to step toward a panel.
Then the first gunfire cracked.
Short bursts. Controlled angles. Not a spray. A push. Bullets struck equipment housings and deck railings to force lane compression and hurried decision-making. The shots were not meant to rack up bodies; they were meant to steal tempo.
AES responded by building walls instead of chasing ghosts. Star hard-light bulkheads rose in narrow slices, cutting firing lanes into segments, forcing Blackened shooters to relocate if they wanted a clean line. Commands stayed minimal.
"Hold lane."
"Don't drift."
"Seal."
Deathulon stayed above the stairwell and listened for the moment the fight tried to become a click.
Shadow operatives moved without sound, reshaping sightlines with bent lighting and fog pressure so deck corridors became a maze. A door appeared where it shouldn't. A ladder well became a blind seam. The Shadow handler's hands flickered once from behind a console housing—NOW—then vanished.
Deathulon descended.
The lower corridor was colder, cleaner, and narrow enough that every superpower became more dangerous, not less. The walls were sterilized steel. The floor had rails for rolling lab equipment. At the far end sat the lab compartment panel—a single screen that could be made to look like compliance.
AES footsteps approached from above, careful and boxed even under gunfire. An AES verifier reached the stairwell landing and leaned toward the corridor panel, eyes trained for prompts.
Deathulon's technician triggered the lockout.
The panel blinked alive with calm authority.
QUARANTINE EVENT — DATA CONTAMINATION SUSPECTED
OPERATOR TIER REQUIRED
CONFIRM AUTHORITY
The green confirm pulsed like a heartbeat offering safety.
The AES verifier froze. That hesitation was discipline. It was also a surface.
"Do not press green," the verifier said, voice tight. "Offline resolution."
Deathulon activated the hush timing module.
The same sentence arrived half a beat late in the corridor's acoustics, as if the air itself had decided to be unhelpful. The delay was small. Under stress, small is everything.
Deathulon stepped into view without sprinting. His posture was straight, calm, clinical—an Elite that didn't need to posture because the corridor itself was his weapon. Necro-tech pressure radiated from him like an invisible brace, a force that pushed and pulled bodies toward the panel without touching them directly. He didn't aim for throats. He aimed for wrists and shoulders, the points that could turn a stumble into an accidental click.
AES Star hard-light snapped into place in response, a transparent bulkhead that tried to keep bodies from drifting into the panel area. The bulkhead held for a breath, then Deathulon's pressure intensified, not as brute force but as inevitability—like gravity being slightly redefined.
"Box," an AES voice called from above. "Hold the box!"
Deathulon watched their feet. He watched their hands. He watched the way their lead kept their palms open and visible even while their body strained against the pull. He watched the micro-ritual: how they positioned an offline verifier, how they kept a second person reading checksums aloud, how they refused the panel's green even as the corridor tried to make touching it feel unavoidable.
Good discipline. Valuable data.
A Star construct manifested at the landing—bark-plated, vine-limbed, functional—wedging into the corridor like a living doorstop to anchor the team away from the panel. Deathulon answered by pushing reanimated lab drones forward—small, sterile, unsettling things that moved like wheeled carts until they didn't. They weren't meant to kill. They were meant to force awkward angles, to break clean lines, to make someone reach for a wall for balance.
Blackened gunfire echoed from above, louder now, trying to compress the time AES had to stay careful. A Shadow bend in the corridor lights attempted to hide Deathulon's exact hand position, trying to make the pressure feel like "the room" instead of an attacker.
In the middle of it, Deathulon spoke once, voice low and flat. "Verify," he said, not as advice—bait.
The AES lead answered with command cadence, refusing the word's trap. "Seal. Read. Repeat."
They performed their call-and-response anyway, because they had to prove to themselves and their people what was real under pressure. A code spoken. A response channel used. The timing of the reply. The order of voices. The physical placement of hands. The way the tamper sleeve was held—left hand on the edge, right hand away from any screen. Every element of the ritual exposed itself the moment it was performed under fire.
Deathulon's technician recorded it all: timestamps, channel priority markers, the half-beat distortions that did or did not change AES behavior. The goal wasn't to win the corridor. The goal was to steal the sequence.
Deathulon surged one step closer, pressure tightening, attempting to pry the physical token sleeve from the AES verifier's vest. The verifier held firm. Star hard-light flashed, cutting the corridor in half for a moment like a clear guillotine, forcing Deathulon to stop short of a clean grab.
A Star Ranger's rifle appeared at the landing, muzzle held low, disciplined. "Back," the Ranger warned.
Deathulon didn't flinch. He let the threat exist. He kept watching hands.
Then the Shadow handler signed from above, a single gesture that meant the experiment had enough data: WITHDRAW.
Deathulon obeyed immediately, not because he feared being overrun, because he respected the plan's boundaries. He released pressure just enough for AES bodies to regain balance, then stepped backward into the lab compartment seam. The Death technician sealed the recorded ritual sample into double sleeves, heat-stamping custody marks on both layers so the chain would survive transport and later argument. The Blackened detachment shifted its gunfire pattern from "push" to "deny," laying short bursts that punished pursuit rather than inviting it.
On deck, fog reshaped into a corridor curtain. Shadow operatives moved like negative space, blocking lines of sight and turning chase into uncertainty. AES, disciplined, did what Deathulon wanted them to do next: they prioritized custody and extraction over revenge pursuit.
Deathulon surfaced at the stern access and boarded a skiff under the cover of a bombardment flash. The skiff peeled away, riding the wake shadow of the tender, then the larger ship beyond it. He kept the double-sleeved sample in a locked cradle between his boots, hands off unless necessary, eyes on the resin seals as if they were a heartbeat.
Only once the distance opened did he transmit—and even then, only metadata: timestamps, channel ordering, and a concise signature note about how AES treated quarantine prompts when bullets and green buttons arrived together.
Back on the shipboard lab deck, Deathwing listened without expression.
"Deliver," Deathwing said. "No payload content over air."
Deathulon's reply was simple. "Custody intact."
Blackwing's channel cut in a second later, voice amused. "So you made 'em dance, huh?"
Deathulon did not answer the taunt. He answered the metric. "Ritual order captured. Hush timing effect measured. Lane geometry observed."
A pause. Then a single Shadow sign appeared on a small screen feed in the corner—thumb and two fingers closing like a latch—LOCKED.
The half-hour window began again on schedule, not at sea level but across the civic spine itself. Deathulon stood over the sealed sample and watched a new operator-tier enforcement draft load on the lab monitor—an imitation shaped by what he had just stolen, designed to arrive earlier than truth by a fraction of a beat. It wasn't ready to conquer a city. It was ready to target continuity authority, to land inside the next war room frame, and to make disciplined hands hesitate just long enough that the wrong verification felt first.
The screen pulsed green in the lab's sterile light, and Deathulon's cross-shaped pupils held steady as he understood what he had delivered: not a weapon that killed fast, but a weapon that made governance argue with itself right at the moment the window opened.
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