After Westonglappa's broadcast posture hardened into repeatable routine—escort doctrine, corridor signage, auditable funding packets, repair rotations, and a public that finally trusted the same instructions at the same time—the conflict stopped "surging" and started "scheduling." That distinction mattered. A scheduled war does not need dramatic victories; it needs predictable stress applied until the defending system makes one bad trade.
BRD understood that the speech had done something dangerous to their method: it made Westonglappa coherent enough to absorb fear without fracturing. So the recalibration happened immediately, not as another loud strike, but as a distribution of permissions.
In occupied Auttumotto, inside a room where phones and secure tablets were treated like weapons, Blackwing's messages landed with street-clean certainty—short, confident, designed to be repeated by subordinates without reinterpretation. Darkwing's directives landed in heat and absolutes, structured to produce aggression that would look "inevitable" on camera. Shadowwing's instructions arrived as clipped captions and symbols, engineered to be understood in silence and executed without chatter. Deathwing's channel read like sterile procedure: target category, required sample type, extraction window, and contamination protocol.
Then the same announcement propagated outward across BRD's occupied and allied holdings—into Eastoppola's occupied corridors, into the Shadow Regime land of Shadowatranceslenta, and into the Death Regime homeland of Deathenbulkiztahlem—so that Supreme Commanders and elite captains received identical authority at the same time: expand pressure everywhere, accept resistance everywhere, and treat Westonglappa as the furnace while the AES homelands become the rotating anvil.
That was the strategic bridge into the one-shot: not "another raid," but a doctrinal shift where Supreme Commanders stop acting as merely regional executors and start acting as roaming governors of chaos.
Deathenstorm received his packet while the ocean still carried the aftertaste of the previous half hour's rotor wash. His eyes—faintly luminous with the Death Regime's clinical "plus" motif—did not blink as he read the mission. Galaxenchi. Observatory-linked civic systems. A high-altitude logistics terminal where skyhook traffic, lab cargo, and broadcast timing intersected. In other words: a place where information, infrastructure, and public confidence shared the same physical hallway.
He did not smile. He did not celebrate. He simply began assigning names.
Deathmaelion and Deathmornax would control approach geometry, because they fought like hinges—closing doors, shaping corridors, forcing defenders to move on rails. Deathpestschwester and Deathverwesdame would handle the interior, because their work required hands steady enough to treat violence like laboratory discipline. A screen of Death Rangers would establish a moving perimeter that never "held" a point for too long, because holding points was how you got pinned, and being pinned was how you got studied by Galaxenchi.
Their insertion was not announced with sirens. It came as a sterile fog cut into the night sky—high, thin, and cold enough to make alarms hesitate. Air-defense crews at the Skyhook Terminal saw false positives first: a scattering of signatures that looked like debris, then like malfunctioning drones, then like nothing at all. That hesitation was the entry fee Deathenstorm paid in advance.
On the ground, Galaxenchi did what it always did under pressure: it tried to make the event legible before it made it loud. Galaxadale's command staff locked verification rings around the terminal's public lanes and pushed civilians into calm, repeated movement patterns. Galaxy elites fanned out into "soft containment," reducing visible panic so Shadow-style amplification could not piggyback. It was the correct doctrine—and Deathenstorm had studied it.
He did not attack the crowds. He attacked the routines that protected the crowds.
The first contact occurred at a sealed cargo corridor where lab crates waited under audit tags. Death Rangers cut the corridor lights into segmented pulses, forcing Galaxy escorts to choose between maintaining formation and protecting technicians from being trampled in the sudden dark. Deathmaelion stepped through the gap like a scalpel given legs, black-violet energy compressing around his arm. Moonless, soundless, precise. When a Galaxy elite tried to pin him with a radiant lattice, Deathmornax answered with a counter-pressure wave that did not "break" the lattice so much as make it unreliable—flickering, inconsistent, the kind of failure that makes disciplined defenders waste seconds verifying their own hands.
Deathenstorm did not move with indulgence. He moved with a checklist.
He needed one thing from the Skyhook Terminal: a sealed container of civic-signal substrate, a core component used to synchronize public broadcast relays with emergency routing. It was not a "weapon" in the cinematic sense. It was a governance component. And BRD's doctrine was simple: if you cannot make the public disobey, make the public doubt what obedience even is.
Inside the interior bay, Deathpestschwester and Deathverwesdame reached the sealed locker and began the extraction like surgeons. Their gloves did not shake. Their eyes did not wander. The case came free with a soft release tone that sounded almost polite.
That was when Galaxadale arrived in person.
He did not arrive as a speech. He arrived as an equation closing. The air at the corridor mouth brightened with Galaxy radiance—controlled, restrained, but absolute in its intent to define reality's edges. Two Galaxy elites flanked him, positioned not as bodyguards, but as stabilizers: one focused on civilians and exits, the other focused on preventing collateral damage to the terminal's structural spine.
Galaxadale's voice was calm enough to be insulting. "Leave the case."
Deathenstorm took one step forward, not to threaten, but to align his people behind him. "This is not a duel," he said. "This is procurement."
"It is theft," Galaxadale replied, "and you are standing in a place where theft collapses lives."
For a fraction of a minute, the scene became the kind of anime standoff that looks like destiny even when it is logistics: fog rolling at ankle height, emergency lights cycling, civilians moving in disciplined lines behind distant barricades, and two Supreme Commanders measuring not each other's strength, but each other's willingness to spend time.
Deathenstorm made the correct decision for his doctrine: he refused a prolonged engagement.
He signaled withdrawal—two fingers down, one finger forward—and the Death Rangers began shifting the perimeter in a way that created moving doors. Deathmaelion and Deathmornax threw one concentrated bombardment to break the immediate geometry, not to kill, but to force defenders to re-space. Deathpestschwester and Deathverwesdame lifted the case and moved.
It should have worked.
It did not, because Galaxenchi anticipated the exit lane.
A Galaxy containment lattice dropped at the far end of the corridor—clean, bright, mathematically timed—turning the extraction route into a narrowing funnel. Deathenstorm's people did not panic; they adjusted. But adjustment costs seconds, and seconds were the one resource Deathenstorm could not afford to donate to Galaxadale.
The case pulsed once inside Deathverwesdame's grip, as if reacting to proximity of Galaxy systems. A second pulse followed—stronger—and the corridor's broadcast relays flickered. Not a blackout. Not a crash. A subtle disagreement between what the terminal believed it was authorized to do and what its emergency routing believed had been verified.
Deathenstorm felt the shape of the moment with cold satisfaction. He had not only taken an object; he had introduced a condition.
Then the extraction began to fail anyway.
A Galaxy elite—positioned not in the corridor, but above it—dropped a precision seal on the overhead maintenance hatch. The Death Rangers' planned vertical escape route disappeared. A second seal locked the adjacent service stairwell. The corridor became a tube.
Deathenstorm's outcome window shrank to a single choice: abandon the case to preserve forces, or spend power and risk capture to keep the procurement objective intact. He stared at the sealed container like it was a beating heart.
His comms device vibrated once. Then again. Then it locked into a priority override that only homeland authority could push.
DEATHENSTORM — EXECUTION UPDATE.
WAR AUTHORITY EXPANDED.
SIMULTANEOUS INVASION PERMISSIONS GRANTED ACROSS ALL AES HOMELANDS.
WESTONGLAPPA HEAT TO INCREASE WITHOUT PAUSE.
YOU ARE AUTHORIZED TO RELEASE STAGE-ONE CONDITIONS IF EXTRACTION FAILS.
The words were clinical. The implication was not.
On the far end of the corridor, Galaxadale advanced one measured step, radiance steady, eyes unreadable. Behind him, Galaxy defenders held civilians in disciplined motion, refusing to let fear become the second enemy.
Deathenstorm's gloved thumb hovered over the case's secondary latch—the one that did not open the container, but armed it into "active transit," turning a stolen governance component into a living stressor that could be seeded elsewhere.
Outside the terminal, high above the sea-lane, the skyhook cable hummed as if nothing historic was happening. In Westonglappa, repair crews rotated and shelters stayed calm. In the BRD network, Supreme Commanders across multiple theaters received the same escalation permissions at the same time.
Deathenstorm did not look away from Galaxadale.
He pressed the latch.
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