Starroggrothculf{capital} looked clean enough to convince a tired person that war was a rumor. The skyline rose in layered terraces of glass and living walls, the transit arteries pulsed luminous green in disciplined intervals, and even the air carried a faint plant-sweetness from rooftop hydroponics. The city's calm was engineered: drone-lanes separated from commuter lanes by light-walled geometry, crosswalk chirps synchronized to verified cadence, civic kiosks that asked for checksums the way lungs ask for oxygen.
Blacktavren entered through commuter flow with a technician's posture and a worker's bag. His kit was broken into harmless shapes—maintenance gloves, a coil of cable, a slim set of clip tools, two sealed modules that looked like power adapters. Nothing in his hands looked like a weapon. The weapon was timing.
He rode the escalator into the Sky-Garden Concourse and let the city show him its habits. Cameras tracked politely. Drones moved with quiet certainty above. The signage stayed consistent, which meant it could be copied. The kiosks offered help in calm sentences, which meant a forged calm could ride the same rail.
A soft hiss came through his ear piece—encrypted, familiar, smug.
"Starrup still smells like money and manners," Blackenstride said. "They build their systems like sermons."
Blacktavren didn't answer immediately. He watched a Star Guard pair at the concourse entrance: green-trimmed armor, posture straight, eyes scanning without swagger. Ground units, disciplined. Useful. Predictable.
"They built it like a promise," Blacktavren said at last.
Blackenstride's laugh arrived like a grin through static. "Promises get repossessed."
Blacktavren crossed the concourse without hurry. A half-hour window was generous if you knew where to cut. The city's strength lived in its cadence—grid timing, beacon refresh, dispatch queues. His job was to desynchronize one layer at a time until the whole body misstepped.
He entered the café because the city believed cafés were safe.
The Sky-Garden café sat along a glass wall overlooking the transit arteries. Algae panels glowed in soft green behind the bar. Water ran down a vertical stone feature in a controlled sheet, sound masking conversation and swallowing small noises. The menu was simple, healthy, civic: citrus tea, coffee, grain bowls, protein wraps. Public spaces like this were designed to keep people human. That made them perfect for hiding the inhuman.
Blacktavren took a tray—coffee, a modest lunch—and sat where he could see the concourse doors, the kiosk row, and the drone-lane junction beyond the glass. He did not sit with his back to the room. He did not sit where cameras could only see one side of his face. He gave the city nothing dramatic to remember.
Across the concourse, a Star Guard shifted his weight and scanned the crowd. His gaze passed over Blacktavren and moved on. A man eating lunch. A worker with tired eyes. Nothing to mark.
Blacktavren placed his cup sleeve down on the table. The sleeve looked ordinary. It held a printed pattern of tiny leaf icons, and beneath them a line of text: "Seasonal Specials." If you knew what to look for, the spacing between the letters mapped to node identifiers—Starranetixis, Starramagnetis, Starraxionis, Cerullenlock. A menu code the city would never notice.
The Shadow courier arrived first.
The courier moved like a gap in attention. No dramatic cloak, no theatrical silence, only the unnerving absence of wasted motion. They set a spoon on the table, tapped twice, paused, tapped once. Then they slid a folded napkin into Blacktavren's reach.
No words.
Blacktavren unfolded the napkin with one hand while he took a sip of coffee with the other. The napkin held a simple line drawing—straight segment, corner, three short ticks. A timing sketch. An entry route. A door that would be open for exactly one minute.
A second figure approached—Death Regime containment tech, clinical and neat. They carried a thermos like any commuter would. Their eyes were wrong in a way most civilians didn't register until it was too late: a faint cross glow at the pupil when the light caught it.
They sat without asking. The thermos clicked onto the table. A sterile sound.
"Public is an interface," the Death tech said, voice flat.
Blacktavren took a bite of lunch and chewed as if he belonged here. "Good," he said. "Interfaces lie easier."
The Shadow courier's fingers drummed once on the napkin. A silent warning. Star patrol shift just changed.
Blackenstride's voice returned, softer now, closer to the bone. "Your window starts when the café's fountain cycles. You're going to see the green blink. Don't chase the noise—build the cascade."
Blacktavren set his cup down. Foam on the coffee surface held a swirl pattern, accidental to the casual eye. For him, it was a one-time pad: a curve and two dots matching the injection timing.
He slid a small ceramic coaster under the cup. It looked decorative. It was a repeater.
"Starranetixis first," Blacktavren said.
The Death tech didn't blink. "Second stage is safe-mode trap. It will force them to choose between speed and certainty."
Blacktavren's mouth tightened once. "They should choose certainty. That's what makes them slow."
The Shadow courier stood first. A two-finger gesture toward the concourse doors. The route was live.
Blacktavren rose, tray in hand, and walked the coffee to the trash like any other commuter finishing lunch. He threw the cup away. He kept the sleeve.
He did not look back at the café table when he left. The café meeting was already dead. All that mattered now was the city's breathing pattern.
Travel transition: mag-rail, Starroggrothculf{capital} → Starranetixis.
The mag-rail moved in silence with green-lit precision. Stations passed like clean rectangles. On the screen above the doors, civic guidance rotated through verified reminders. The city treated information as an infrastructure layer, and Blacktavren treated it the same way.
He exited into Starranetixis, the drone-lane nerve. The air smelled of polished composite and plant nutrient mist. Above, drones flowed in disciplined lanes—delivery, medical, maintenance—each one guided by beacons embedded into architecture. Starrup's overhead logistics made the ground calmer. That calm was a weapon if you could invert it.
Blacktavren walked past two Star Guards posted near a maintenance corridor. Their armor glinted green, their eyes attentive, their hands resting near sidearms.
He didn't rush them. Rushing creates memory.
He stepped into the maintenance corridor with the posture of a worker who belonged there. The door's access panel flashed. A check prompt appeared. He waited half a beat—exactly long enough to match a legitimate technician's hesitation—then raised his wrist as if presenting a credential.
The access panel beeped green.
A stolen permission would have been obvious to Star containment. A fresh permission would trip perishable clocks. What Blacktavren used was neither. It was a false-positive, injected a minute earlier through the café repeater and masked inside a scheduled maintenance heartbeat.
The door opened.
Inside, the corridor narrowed and the sound changed—fans, low hum, the faint click of relay modules cycling. A security camera at the far end panned. Blacktavren timed his steps with its sweep and slid into a service alcove when the lens passed.
Two Star Guards entered from the far end, boots quiet, scanning.
Ground units. Not Elites. Not Supreme Commanders. Still dangerous if they pinned him here. Still useful if they vanished without drama.
Blacktavren held his breath and let them pass the alcove. When their backs were turned, he moved.
His hand came up with a compact baton that looked like a tool handle. The baton snapped outward into a black-metal rod etched with maroon micro-sigils. He stepped behind the first guard and hooked the rod under the helmet seam, twisting just enough to cut air and sound. The guard stiffened, hands clawing at the seal, then dropped in silence as the baton's sigil-induced pressure disrupted their breath without blood.
The second guard turned, reflex sharp, reaching for a sidearm.
Blacktavren's free hand flicked. A thin maroon chain manifested—more data-cable than rope—wrapping the guard's wrist and yanking the hand downward before the weapon cleared the holster. Blacktavren drove a knee into the guard's abdomen, stole their balance, and pushed them into the wall where a secondary chain pinned their shoulder and neck.
The guard's eyes widened, angry, trying to shout.
Blacktavren leaned close, voice quiet. "Stay asleep," he said.
The chain pulsed once. The guard went limp.
He dragged both bodies into the service alcove and covered them with a maintenance tarp. He didn't stage a message. He didn't gloat. He left them alive and out of play. A missing patrol would create a search. A dead patrol would create a lockdown. He wanted neither yet. He wanted a whisper of wrongness that traveled slower than his feet.
He reached the beacon junction panel and removed the cover with a technician's calm. Inside, the city's breathing lived as numbers and timing marks. He clipped in a black-maroon adapter—no bigger than a thumb—and watched the beacon refresh cadence shift by a fraction.
Not enough to crash.
Enough to mis-sequence drone lane priorities so that medical drones would hesitate at intersections, delivery drones would bunch, and the entire overhead rhythm would look like routine drift.
He closed the panel, wiped his glove across the edge to remove prints, and walked out.
Above, drones continued moving. Only a trained eye would notice the tiny stutter.
Blacktavren's ear piece clicked. Blackenstride spoke like he was smiling.
"That's one breath," he said. "Now make the heart skip."
Travel transition: eco-VTOL hop, Starranetixis → Starramagnetis.
The eco-VTOL lifted in a quiet arc over green-lit arteries and landed near Starramagnetis, where substation towers sat like disciplined sentinels. Conduit lines ran in clean geometry, and the hum underfoot was steady enough to feel through boots.
Starramagnetis held the grid's muscle memory. Corrupt it and everything downstream became a problem. Starrup's Star engineers understood that, which meant they would respond fast and clean.
Blacktavren entered through a service fence where the Shadow courier's napkin had promised a door. The door was open. The camera above it blinked once—one heartbeat late. The Shadow courier had shaved time off the city's sight.
Inside the substation corridor, Star responders were already present. Not a full team, not a parade. Two Star Rangers and a Star engineer with a checksum wand, moving with precise urgency. Their conversation stayed clipped and professional.
"Beacon drift in Starranetixis," the engineer said. "No signature match yet."
"Seal the junction and trace uplink," a ranger replied.
Blacktavren paused in shadow and watched. A direct fight here would draw more responders. He needed a different kind of violence.
The Death tech's trap arrived right on schedule.
A containment alert chirped through the corridor speakers—sterile tone, official cadence. "Anomaly detected. Safety mode engaged. Decontamination protocol required for all personnel."
The Star engineer froze. The rangers' posture tightened.
"That's not our voice," one ranger snapped.
The system didn't care. Panels along the corridor flashed and locked into safe mode. A decon gate slid down, dividing the corridor into segments. It wasn't lethal. It was a clock-tax, designed to force procedure.
The engineer cursed under their breath. "If we force it, we trip a shutoff."
The rangers exchanged one hard look. Certainty versus speed.
Blacktavren moved while they chose.
He crossed into the adjacent maintenance shaft and found the panel seam the Death tech had prepped. A thin cruciform wafer sat ready to be embedded. He pressed it into place with two fingers and watched the sigil disappear into the metal as if the wall swallowed it.
The sigil did not flare like decoration. It learned.
He stood, turned, and found a Star Ranger at the shaft entrance—helmeted, eyes sharp, weapon raised.
"Hands," the ranger said. "Now."
Blacktavren lifted his hands slowly. In his right palm, a small tool sat—innocent, gray, harmless-looking.
He dropped it.
The tool hit the floor and released a burst of black-maroon static—an electromagnetic veil that did not blind human eyes but scrambled sensor overlays and corrupted the ranger's HUD for one heartbeat.
Blacktavren used that heartbeat.
He surged forward, slammed his shoulder into the ranger's chest, and drove them backward into the frame. The ranger swung. Blacktavren caught the forearm and wrapped it with a chain that tightened like a live cable. The chain didn't crush bone; it locked the limb.
He pivoted, hooked his leg behind the ranger's knee, and pulled. The ranger fell hard.
Blacktavren pinned the ranger with a boot and pressed the baton's tip to the helmet seam. A maroon pulse ran through the metal. The ranger's body went still.
Blacktavren did not linger. The longer he stayed, the more likely a Star Elite arrived. Starrup's response stacks were built for that.
He moved out through another shaft and kept his steps aligned with normal maintenance cadence. A person running is a signal. A person walking with purpose is plausible.
Outside, the substation's lights stayed green. Only the safe-mode segmentation inside would delay the Star responders. Delay was the currency.
Blacktavren's ear piece hissed again.
"Good," Blackenstride said. "They're going to spend minutes arguing with doors. Take their rail next."
Travel transition: commuter tram + short sprint, Starramagnetis → Starraxionis.
Starraxionis was a rail-gate choke point. The station architecture was clean and bright, designed to minimize confusion: arrows embedded into floor tiles, overhead panels repeating verified transit cadence, gates that opened with the soft click of trust.
That was exactly why it mattered. If the gates mis-sequenced once, the city would feel it in its bones.
Blacktavren entered the station through a side maintenance corridor and immediately sensed the difference: containment was already staged. Green-lit markers had been placed on the floor to preserve lane geometry. Star Guards held the edges. A Star Elite field engineer—armor more refined, posture more severe—stood near the gate control housing with a checksum wand and a set of portable verification beacons.
The Elite's eyes snapped toward the maintenance corridor as if they felt him.
Blacktavren didn't smile. Smiling was for people who wanted to be remembered.
He stepped out anyway, hands relaxed, shoulders squared. He looked like a tech who belonged. His body didn't carry panic.
"Stop," the Star Elite said. Voice quiet. Command-grade calm. "Show your credential."
Blacktavren raised his wrist.
The Star Elite didn't look at the wrist. They looked at the angle of his elbow, the weight distribution in his stance. Starrup's best did not trust surfaces. They trusted habits.
"This one's wrong," the Elite said, and the sentence landed like a seal.
Star Guards tightened. A green drone-lane overwatch light blinked above, focusing.
Blacktavren's comm clicked with a new voice—tight, surgical, familiar to anyone who ran permissions.
"Lock local-only," Starbeam Charmley said over an encrypted channel, clipped and sharp. "Perishable permissions. Compartment everything. Do not let the credential travel."
Blacktavren felt it immediately: the city's verification surface hardened. His false-positive would die faster now. Starrup was not easy prey.
So he stopped trying to authenticate. He started trying to misdirect.
He flicked his fingers, and black-maroon chains unfurled from his sleeves—thin as cables, fast as thought—shooting toward the gate control housing. The Star Elite moved at the same time, snapping a verification pulse into the air. Green light hit the chains like fire hits oil. The chains stuttered, sheared, lost cohesion.
The Elite stepped in and swung the checksum wand in a short arc. The arc wasn't a weapon strike; it was a correction wave that burned false packets out of the air. Blacktavren's veil tried to rise. The wave cut it down.
"You're not getting this gate," the Elite said.
Blacktavren answered with action, not argument. He drove a chain into the ceiling panel above the concourse and yanked. The panel tore free and crashed down, showering harmless composite fragments into the lane—enough to force Star Guards to shield civilians and shift posture.
In that shift, he dropped a second tool—small, black, and stupid-looking—into the footpath.
It popped a hard containment chirp across the station speakers: "HAZARD EVENT. CLEAR LANE."
The voice sounded municipal. The timing was predatory.
Civilians flinched and began to drift away from the gate in the direction of the nearest open corridor. The Star Guards immediately moved to correct, hands raised, voices controlled.
"Do not run," a guard called. "Follow markers. Verified lanes only."
The Star Elite's gaze flicked toward the crowd. That half-second of divided attention was all Blacktavren needed. He didn't fight the Elite. He stepped around them, sliding toward the gate housing like a knife.
The Elite reacted fast—too fast for a normal soldier—cutting his path with a green hard-light barrier projected from a portable beacon. The barrier snapped into existence, clean and unyielding.
Blacktavren hit the barrier and felt it bite his aura. Verification geometry. Starrup's signature.
He didn't push through. He went under.
He dropped to a knee, pressed a palm to the floor tile seam, and injected a black-maroon pulse through the station's own embedded guidance arrows. The arrows didn't change shape. They changed priority. For one heartbeat, the embedded arrows began pointing toward a service corridor that led away from the station core.
A subtle lie. A clean lie.
Civilians at the edge of the lane began to drift, obeying floor geometry.
The Star Elite swore quietly. "He's rewriting the ground."
A Star Guard's voice burst out—anime-sharp, raw. "He's hacking the city like it's breathing!"
Charmley's voice snapped over comm. "Don't chase the noise—protect the lanes!"
Blacktavren used the lane drift as cover. He moved with the civilians for three steps, then peeled into the service corridor the arrows had briefly favored. Star Guards saw the motion and surged, but they had to keep civilians from following him into the wrong corridor. They hesitated. Procedure bit into instinct.
Blacktavren vanished into the service network, leaving the gate intact and the station angry.
He had not won the gate.
He had won time, and he had forced a Star Elite to split attention between capture and crowd geometry. That was the exchange he wanted.
Below the station, service tunnels ran like ribs. Cold air. Nutrient mist. Vibration from rail lines. He ran now—not a panicked sprint, a controlled escape—because he was out of public view and speed mattered again.
A door ahead clicked open exactly as he reached it.
The Shadow courier's work.
Blacktavren slipped through, shut it behind him, and heard Star boots hit the tunnel intersection a second later. Too close.
A new presence entered the tunnel network—a pressure in the air that made sensors feel irrelevant. Star power, heavier, cleaner.
A Supreme Commander had arrived, or was close enough that their footprint mattered.
Blacktavren didn't need a name to understand the threat. Supreme Commanders didn't chase like Guards. They anticipated. They cut options.
He felt the tunnel ahead tighten as lights brightened, as if someone had told the infrastructure to look harder.
Blacktavren stopped and steadied his breath. He didn't let fear turn into noise. He let it turn into a decision.
He set a diversion that would force procedure.
He pulled a slim module from his bag—the kind that looked like a power adapter—and clipped it into a junction box. The module didn't explode. It spoke.
Up above, in the public concourse, a municipal voice played through a dozen speakers at once: "Medical drone priority surge. Clear transit artery. Proceed to verified markers."
It sounded plausible. It sounded helpful. It was poison.
Star responders would have to correct it physically, because civilians would obey the formatting before they understood the content.
In the tunnel, Blacktavren moved in the opposite direction of the likely response stack. He went deeper, toward Cerullenlock's residential feeder lines.
Travel transition: service tunnels, Starraxionis → Cerullenlock.
Cerullenlock was calm by design: residential gardens, smaller kiosks, quiet street lighting meant to feel safe. That calm made people soft. Soft people obey quickly when told it's for their safety.
Blacktavren surfaced through a maintenance hatch behind a row of planters. Above him, a neighborhood kiosk glowed green, asking passersby if they needed assistance.
He walked past it like a resident. His hands were empty. His face was neutral.
Then he turned into a narrow alley between green-lit buildings and opened a panel that a normal citizen would never see. Inside, a small node of the city's identity layer pulsed—a local permission hub that fed neighborhood drone-lane access, dispatch routing, and civic alerts.
He didn't try to own it. Owning it would trigger alarms. He tried to make it blink.
He pressed the black-maroon adapter into the seam and held it for three seconds. The adapter drank the cadence and left behind a new field that would attempt to appear later as if it belonged.
A clean scaffold.
He withdrew the adapter, closed the panel, and stepped back into the open.
A Star patrol turned the corner—two Guards and a third figure in refined armor, not a Supreme Commander but a high-tier Star Elite, posture severe. The Elite's gaze locked onto Blacktavren instantly.
"Stop," the Elite said again, the same calm that had lived at Starraxionis. "Hands visible."
Blacktavren lifted his hands. He looked like a man caught in a wrong place.
Then he smiled, small and cold.
"Y'all protect this city like it's sacred," he said, voice quiet enough that only they could hear. "That's why it's easy to make you move."
The Elite stepped forward.
Blacktavren didn't fight them here. Cerullenlock had civilians. Civilians made Star responders careful. He respected that because it made his escape cleaner.
He raised one hand and snapped his fingers.
Across the street, three blocks away, a traffic light stuttered and went into an emergency flash pattern. At the same moment, a drone-lane beacon above the residential artery blinked off cadence—one short, one long, one short—like a distress code. The city's own systems cried wolf, and the wolves were procedure.
The Star Elite's comm chirped. A sharp voice—Charmley again, tight with constraint.
"Do not split," Charmley ordered. "Hold your lanes. Ignore non-verified alerts."
A Guard swallowed and looked torn. The flashing light was visible. Civilians were starting to pause and look up.
Blacktavren used the pause. He stepped backward into the shadow of the planters and dropped a black veil across the sensors—a localized electromagnetic silence that made cameras lose him for a heartbeat while human eyes stayed fixed on the flashing intersection.
He took the side passage, vaulted a low wall, and slipped into a maintenance corridor that smelled like wet soil and composite.
Behind him, the Star Elite shouted, finally allowing heat into their voice. "He's gone!"
Blacktavren ran.
He ran until the air changed again—until the pressure of a Supreme Commander's presence pressed the corridor into sharper focus. He heard no footsteps, yet he felt the city tightening its geometry around him: doors closing, lights brightening, kiosks pushing prompts into the local network.
The Supreme Commander was cutting options without being seen.
Blacktavren didn't attempt to outfight that. He attempted to out-script it.
He triggered his final diversion, the one meant to force Star leadership to protect civilians instead of hunting him.
He injected a pre-recorded municipal address into Cerullenlock's local kiosks—short, calm, perfectly formatted. "Evacuation assistance available. Proceed to neighborhood assembly point."
Civilians would comply unless corrected physically.
Star responders would have to choose: pursue a fleeing Elite, or hold lane geometry to prevent crowd movement that could become cover for the next half-hour window.
He knew their doctrine.
He knew what they would do.
He used it.
Blacktavren slipped through the last maintenance door and emerged into a service yard where an eco-VTOL sat with its hatch open, idling low. The Shadow courier stood beside it like a void, one hand resting on the door frame. No words. Just an open path.
Blacktavren climbed in and pulled the hatch shut.
The VTOL lifted into Starrup's green-lit air, rising above the arteries and gardens. Below, Star responders were already repositioning to correct the kiosk lie with bodies and markers.
Blacktavren watched the city recenter itself in real time and felt a rare satisfaction. He had not broken Starrup. He had made it spend attention.
His ear piece hissed. Blackenstride's voice came through, pleased and bright.
"You see how they move?" Blackenstride said. "You tug one thread and they protect the whole cloth."
Blacktavren looked down at Cerullenlock's quiet streets, at the tiny figures of Star Guards placing markers, guiding civilians away from the false assembly point.
"Yeah," he said. "They're good."
Blackenstride laughed. "Good means predictable. Predictable means owned."
Blacktavren reached into his bag and pulled out the adapter. The black-maroon surface reflected green city light like oil on water.
"You got your blink?" Blackenstride asked.
Blacktavren's thumb traced the edge of the tool. "I planted the scaffold," he said. "Local node. It'll try to surface when the cadence is tight."
Blackenstride's voice softened, almost reverent. "Operators next."
The VTOL banked toward a darker corridor of sky where the city's lights thinned and the coastline shimmered faintly in the distance. Blacktavren watched the green cadence below and waited for the moment he had already scheduled.
The half-hour tone sounded—clean, municipal, rhythmic. It rolled across Starrup like a polite bell.
Somewhere inside Cerullenlock, a kiosk blinked once. A field appeared for a fraction of a second on a maintenance console and then vanished, too fast for civilians to notice, fast enough for operators to feel it in their teeth.
Priority Routing: Operator Class.
A command surface.
Blacktavren didn't cheer. He didn't gloat. He let the city's discipline do what it always did: react with certainty. He let that certainty become the next lever.
He leaned back in the VTOL seat, eyes half-lidded, listening to the rhythm in his ear.
The war in Starrup wasn't about streets. It was about who got to say what "official" meant when the grid blinked.
Blacktavren's voice was quiet as he spoke into the comm, more report than boast.
"Now they'll protect the people who write reality," he said. "Now they'll bleed attention for it."
The VTOL disappeared into the dark, leaving a green city below that remained standing—while its most important systems prepared to be targeted by a lie that wore the shape of authority.
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