Blackzerith kept his boots dry by refusing to pretend the ocean was neutral. The barge rolled under him like an animal that wanted a misstep, and the deck lights stayed low enough that aircraft eyes would read the platform as salvage, not intent. Containers sat stacked in clean rows, each one marked with humanitarian stencils that meant nothing to anyone who had ever watched Blackened logistics move at night. He stood at the rail with a tablet in one hand and a sealed sleeve in the other, face angled into spray, expression set in that Blackened way that looked relaxed until you realized it was calculation.
Blackwing arrived without pageantry and without delay, stepping out from between containers with two Elites bracketing him and a pair of Black Rangers holding the deck perimeter as if the sea itself might rush them. His outfit carried the Blackened silhouette—street-tactical, sharp seams, dark accents that caught light like a warning. He didn't sit. He didn't lean. He looked at the sleeve in Blackzerith's hand and spoke like the decision had already been made.
"Ain't here for trophies," Blackwing said, voice low and amused. "I don't need you winnin' fights. I need you winnin' clicks."
Blackzerith opened his hard case on a crate and laid out what mattered: a captured AES broadcast cadence strip, a list of Starrup integrity lab locations printed in municipal formatting, and a clean set of custody sleeves with municipal-seeming seals that could survive a camera glance. He did not touch the strip bare-handed. He slid it with a gloved fingertip into a sleeve, pressed his thumb to the tamper line, and heat-stamped the resin with a Blackened seal that looked like bureaucracy rather than war.
A presence shifted in the corner of the deck—Shadow, not announced, simply there. A Shadow courier stood still enough to make the deck feel louder. Their hands rose and signed tight, efficient shapes toward Blackzerith: which cameras were alive, which angles had been bent into blind seams, which corridor nodes along Starrup's coast would "forget" to look at a door at the right second. Blackzerith glanced over and gave a thin grin and a slight shoulder tilt, acknowledging the silent offer without surrendering posture.
Blackwing watched the exchange with a hint of satisfaction. "Good," he said. "Shadow got you lanes. I got you time. Take what you need and don't make it a headline."
Blackzerith latched his case, pocketed the sleeved strip, and spoke in the only language the Council of Four actually respected. "Target is the ritual schedule," he said. "Not the voice."
Blackwing's eyes sharpened. "Say it again."
"The schedule," Blackzerith repeated. "The thing that makes their verification feel inevitable."
Blackwing's smile widened like a blade. "That's what I'm payin' for."
They moved fast and quiet. A fast cutter peeled away from the barge and cut toward Starrup's coastal inlet under bombardment rhythm—distant flashes on the horizon functioning as a metronome and a cover. The cutter's console screens were taped with physical lane markers, and every input step had a paper token companion, because even BRD had learned that a screen without a second anchor was a liability when Star counterintelligence got curious. Blackzerith stood over the navigator's shoulder and watched the timing calls instead of the water.
"On flash," he said. "Use the light."
The cutter crossed the inlet at the moment the sky flickered. Their wake merged with white noise. A Starrup shoreline slid past—green-lit canopy, microgrid towers, and the clean geometry of a metropolis designed to fail gracefully. Blackzerith treated grace as a seam. He didn't need to break a wall; he needed to persuade systems to funnel the right people into the right room.
A service rail line carried him inland through the maintenance district, where corridors were narrow, signage precise, and badge readers sat at every threshold like little judges. He wore a municipal maintenance vest over his Blackened jacket and carried a clipboard that held nothing valuable except how it made people behave. His team stayed small: two Blackened ground escorts moving like shadows of his decisions, and the Shadow courier remaining a half-step behind without ever stepping into a lighted sign's full gaze.
They reached the skybridge that led to the verification annex. On the outside it was dull—office glass, clean flooring, a polite "Authorized Personnel Only" plaque. On the inside it was a vault because verification was Starrup's religion. Blackzerith didn't force the door. He made the building lock itself.
He approached the badge reader with a small capsule of tracer dust pinched between gloved fingers. The dust was harmless to lungs and lethal to procedure. He snapped the capsule once, let the powder float across the reader's face, then presented a valid credential he had harvested weeks earlier from a port technician who still believed in "routine checks."
The reader chirped. Its light went yellow, then red. The system threw a quarantine alert, clean and confident.
CREDENTIAL CONTAMINATION DETECTED
LOCKDOWN INITIATED
AUDIT REQUIRED
Alarms didn't scream. They did something worse: they sounded reasonable.
Doors sealed softly. Lanes painted themselves on the floor in bright green and routed personnel into an audit room with a glass wall and a long table, exactly as designed. People walked into cages when the cage was labeled "safety."
Blackzerith entered with them, head slightly lowered, shoulders loose, as if he were just another technician caught in a procedural snag. Inside the audit room, Star doctrine arrived before any famous face did. Hard-light rectangles snapped onto the floor—box geometry that froze wandering feet. A Star Elite team bracketed the door with disciplined posture, scanning wrists, scanning badges, scanning eyes. A Star supervisor stepped to the table and kept their hands in view.
"Everyone stays in box," the supervisor said. "No one touches consoles until we verify the quarantine source."
Blackzerith held his clipboard like a penitent. He let the Star team see compliance. He wanted them to focus on the wrong threat: the badge reader, the dust, the visible "contamination." He had come for something quieter.
Outside the annex, gunfire cracked—short bursts, controlled distance, timed to pull escort attention toward the exterior lanes. The sound was not meant to kill. It was meant to create motion. A Star guard on the door tensed, head turning.
"Hold," the supervisor snapped. "Do not break box."
The guard obeyed. Star discipline was frustrating that way. Blackzerith didn't need them to break discipline. He needed them to consult the ritual.
A console on the audit room wall woke and displayed a verification prompt, offering a clean method to "resolve" the quarantine fast. The screen looked like help.
INITIATE VERIFICATION RITUAL
REQUEST CODE / RESPONSE PAIR
CONFIRM AUTHORITY
The green confirm pulsed. Not urgent. Patient. Like it could forgive your fatigue.
Blackzerith stayed still while Star personnel leaned in, debating which channel to use, who should request the code, whether they could call upward for a Supreme Commander's oversight. The Shadow courier behind him signed once, slow and minimal: WAIT.
Blackzerith waited. He used the pause the way a thief uses a door that's already been opened by someone else's hand.
He slid a slim jammer from his sleeve and pressed it beneath the table's lip where cameras wouldn't see it. The jammer did not block signals. It shifted arrival timing by a fraction of a beat—enough to make one audio response land earlier than another if channel priority was compromised. That fraction was the war. You didn't need to replace truth; you needed to arrive first.
The Star supervisor raised a hand to request a code. A response came back through the annex system—crisp, immediate, plausible.
Then a second response arrived half a beat later through a different channel, slightly delayed by the quarantine routing, slightly less "confident" in its timing. The room's attention tilted toward the first response because human brains reward the earliest certainty.
Blackzerith didn't smile yet. He watched the staff's hands and memorized the workflow: which console path they used, which seed rotation the interface displayed in microtext near the bottom edge, which schedule aligned which code sets to which time slices. He didn't need a voiceprint. He needed the generator logic.
The Star supervisor read a line aloud—short, tight, and meant to be repeatable under stress. The room responded. The ritual completed. The quarantine console offered a final prompt.
APPLY VERIFIED OVERRIDE
CONFIRM AUTHORITY
Hands hovered. The supervisor hesitated, eyes flicking to the hard-light boxes, to the guards, to the idea that central authority was safety.
Blackzerith made his move in the quiet seam before the click.
He reached into his clipboard and withdrew a thin data strip disguised as an audit sticker. He pressed it to the console's maintenance port as if he were following policy. The strip drank the seed rotation schedule and handshake rhythm in seconds—numbers, timing, rotation cadence, the true skeleton beneath the ritual's flesh.
The Shadow courier's hand lifted in the corner: MOVE NOW.
The Star supervisor finally pressed confirm, applying the override to the quarantine event. Doors unlocked. The room exhaled. Procedure had "worked." The cage opened because the cage believed it had been satisfied.
Blackzerith didn't run. Running would teach the room what to chase. He walked with the flow of released personnel, clipboard held at chest height, shoulders loose, eyes down. He let the Star Elite team focus on restoring normal operations and checking the contaminated reader.
In the corridor, a Star guard spotted a checksum sticker on the audit log and frowned. Two seals looked almost identical. Their checksum strings were swapped by one character—the kind of tiny discrepancy that forced a procedural halt because Star culture treated verification as sacred.
"Stop," the guard said. "We have a seal mismatch."
Personnel paused. The Star supervisor turned back. "Hold position. Identify correct seal."
Blackzerith's shadow moved across the floor and vanished into the blind seam the Shadow courier had promised. A corridor sign subtly reoriented. A camera angle "forgot" a door. The annex hallway became a maze of polite delays.
He reached the service exit, crossed the skybridge, and dropped into the maintenance district under green-lit canopy. A Blackened ground escort met him at a junction and said nothing; they simply handed him a new municipal vest and a sealed transport sleeve. Blackzerith slid the captured data strip into the sleeve, pressed his thumb to the tamper line, and stamped it again—double custody, double proof, because the Council of Four would not accept "trust me" from anyone.
He boarded the service rail back toward the coast, then transferred to the fast cutter under a ceiling of low cloud. The sea took them again, waves slapping the hull like impatient hands. Behind them, Starrup's skyline glowed engineered and calm, a city whose trust had been built to feel effortless. Blackzerith treated effortless as a weakness.
His comm bead clicked. Blackwing's voice came through, clipped and hungry.
"Talk," Blackwing said. "You got it?"
Blackzerith held the sealed sleeve up in front of him as if the ocean itself needed to witness it. "I have the ritual schedule," he replied. "Not the voice. The schedule."
Blackwing laughed once—short, satisfied. "That's money."
A second voice joined the channel, sterile and calm enough to make the deck feel colder. Deathwing, or one of his clinical superiors. The tone didn't ask. It constrained.
"Custody intact," the voice said. "Deliver to Darkwing's council cavity. If compromised, discard. A tainted template is worse than none."
Blackzerith's reply stayed minimal. "Understood."
He glanced toward the horizon where bombardment flashes still stitched light into the clouds. The cutter's console pinged with a prepared overlay, newly craftable because of what he had just stolen—an operator-tier enforcement panel designed to look like verification itself, ready to deploy into a node that was already tired.
SYNC VERIFICATION FOR SAFETY
OPERATOR TIER
CONFIRM AUTHORITY
The green button pulsed with a steady confidence that felt like relief and smelled like surrender.
The Shadow courier stood near the cabin door, silent as a thought, hands raised and signing a single question: NOW?
Blackzerith's mouth curved into a controlled smile as the half-hour window opened on the horizon—timed to flashes, timed to fatigue, timed to the exact moment defenders were most likely to mistake speed for compliance. He held the sleeve with the ritual schedule in one hand and kept the other hovering just above the console's edge without touching it, weighing the two profitable risks in real time: spend the stolen ritual immediately and expose its signature to Galaxy analysis, or carry it to Westonglappa and break a higher tier of continuity authority when Darkwing, Blackwing, Shadowwing, and Deathwing moved as one. The console kept pulsing green like a heartbeat that wanted permission, and the sea—cold, loud, indifferent—carried the cutter forward while the next click waited to be chosen.
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