He did not travel to Eastoppola with a banner. He traveled with inventory.
Sunmeros kept his kit in three layers because occupied continents punish single points of failure: a hard case for physical evidence, a sealed pouch for identity artifacts, and a small, ugly notebook that could survive fire. He listed everything twice—once as it was, once as it must be after handling—so his own memory could not be attacked by fatigue. On the flight deck of a Solar courier aircraft, he ran his fingertip along the case seals and pressed them until the polymer warmed and took his print. Heat made custody tangible; a seal that remembers your thumb is harder to forge than a green light on a screen.
The aircraft crossed the sea lanes under civilian transponder posture, because Eastoppola had learned to shoot first at anything that looked heroic. When the coast rose into view, it looked busy rather than fortified: cranes, container stacks, and the thin lines of roads that pulled freight inland. Behind that normality, Darkened occupation sat heavy and maroon, not always visible, always present. Sunmeros watched the roads like a logistics officer, not a tourist. Where lanes narrowed, people died.
He remembered General Sunbeam standing in Echumeta under a different sky—before the assassination, before the uprising turned "summit" into "kill geometry." Sunbeam had walked the Palace approach with the confidence of an Absolute Leader who cannot be killed by lesser tiers, but even that confidence had been paired with etiquette. He had met dignitaries, accepted ceremonial routing, smiled where cameras demanded it, and still kept his escorts tight. Sunmeros remembered the moment Sunbeam's eyes had narrowed at a corridor sign that looked newly installed. Sunbeam hadn't argued. He had simply ordered a second verification and forced the day to slow down. That second verification was what the city failed to do later, when the assassin's corridor was presented as "official enough."
The aircraft did not land in Paladimee City. It landed outside it, in a strip that still obeyed a civilian schedule. Sunmeros transferred to a ground vehicle with a Solar driver who spoke in checklists rather than encouragement.
"Window discipline," the driver said. "No stops longer than ninety seconds. No reroutes unless you see the lane marker and the escort code in the same frame."
"Understood," Sunmeros answered, and he meant it as a contract.
They drove inland toward Echumeta. The landscape changed from coastal industry into urban sprawl, then into the hard, anxious geometry of a city under occupation: more barriers, fewer signs, and patrols that used their vehicles as moving walls. The first patrol came at a bend where the road narrowed between two concrete divider islands. Darkened ground units, dense and maroon, clustered around a mobile scanner rig.
Sunmeros did not duck his head. He changed posture.
He leaned back, relaxed his shoulders, and lifted his hands to the dash where the patrol could see them. He let his Solar aura dim to a human level, not extinguished, just muted. Heat draws attention; in occupied zones, attention becomes an audit.
The driver rolled down the window. The patrol's scanner hummed. Sunmeros slid his travel credential across the dash with two fingers, never crossing the lane boundary with his hand. The patrol leader looked at the document, then at Sunmeros' eyes, searching for arrogance he could punish.
Sunmeros offered none. He offered procedure.
The patrol waved them through with a lazy gesture that implied ownership of the road. Sunmeros did not correct the implication. He logged the checkpoint's time and lane coordinates in his notebook the moment the vehicle cleared visual range. Occupation thrives in ambiguity; he refused to leave any.
Paladimee City arrived like a bruise.
The outer districts still ran commerce, but the inner city moved with the halting rhythm of fear. Sunmeros caught sight of the Church of Hopefilius from a distance—its spire standing like a stubborn finger pointed at the sky. He did not go directly toward it. The shortest route in a hunted city is the one your enemy expects you to take. He used a service road behind a row of shuttered storefronts, then cut through a maintenance lot where an older freight elevator still worked on a manual crank. He paid for the crank with heat, not currency: a gentle Solar pulse warmed frozen gears until they moved without squeal.
Inside the elevator shaft corridor, he opened his hard case and checked his evidence containers even though nothing had been collected yet. The ritual mattered. It forced his mind into custody mode before the first temptation to improvise.
The second obstacle was not a patrol. It was a checkpoint scan that looked legitimate.
A temporary barrier blocked a side street that used to feed into the civic center. A printed placard read: EMERGENCY ROUTE CONTROL — AUTHORITY VERIFIED. It had the right font. The right seal. The right calm tone. A rookie would accept it. A tired veteran might accept it. The trap lived in the assumption that "official" is a visual style.
Sunmeros stopped ten meters back. He did not approach the barrier until he had three proofs: the lane paint, the barrier anchor bolts, and the patrol's radio cadence. The lane paint was too fresh. The anchor bolts were mismatched, different metals, different tool marks. The radio cadence did not match normal dispatch rhythm; it had long silences that felt like listening for instruction rather than giving it.
He chose a clean bypass. A narrow alley ran parallel to the street, marked with old utility covers. He stepped onto the first cover, pressed his palm down, and let Solar heat sink into the metal. The cover expanded with a soft pop as the seal loosened. He lifted it without grinding. No squeal. No ring. The alley remained quiet.
He dropped into the utility run and moved forward with a low light—bright enough to see, narrow enough not to paint the walls. Every ten steps, he touched the concrete with his fingertips and read the vibration through it. Occupation vehicles broadcast weight. You can feel them if you listen.
He surfaced behind a storage annex and found his first true contact: a Darkened Elite.
The Elite didn't announce himself with speech. He stepped into the doorway with maroon radiance running along his shoulders like heated wire, and his grin carried the confidence of someone who had been hunting all day.
"You Solar?" the Elite asked, voice low, satisfied. "Wrong continent."
Sunmeros did not respond with a slogan. He responded with geometry.
He flicked two Solar markers—small, bright points—onto the ground, one left, one right. They burned into the concrete as lane pins. Then he snapped his wrist and drew a thin wall of heated air between them. It did not look like a wall. It looked like a shimmer. The Elite stepped forward and his eyes narrowed as the shimmer pushed heat back at him, distorting depth perception and turning the doorway into uncertain distance.
Sunmeros closed the gap in the moment the Elite hesitated. His palm hit the Elite's chest plate, not as a punch, as a seal. Heat flared. The chest plate softened at the edges and fused to the underlayer in a tight collar, restricting breath and shoulder rotation without breaking the armor. The Elite's maroon radiance spiked as he tried to burn free. Sunmeros rotated his stance and pressed down with his forearm, forcing the Elite's elbow into the doorframe at an angle that made leverage impossible.
"Stay," Sunmeros said. One word. Command, not commentary.
He did not execute. He did not gloat. He placed a heat-scarred custody tag on the Elite's belt—visible proof for any later AES sweep team that this target had been processed, not ignored. Then he moved past, using the doorway as cover until the Elite's struggling sounds were swallowed by the city's constant distant noise.
The next contact was uglier because it was not military. It was Blackened looters working the edges of the occupation like scavengers.
They were stripping a civic archive outbuilding—filing cabinets, small generators, even the copper piping—loading it into a van with practiced speed. Their leader turned and saw Sunmeros, and the leader's smile was all swagger and appetite.
"Look at this," the looter said. "Solar tourist."
Sunmeros assessed their hands first. Crowbars, not rifles. A theft crew, not a kill squad—until provoked. He could have ended them fast, but violence creates commotion, commotion creates cameras, and cameras create the kind of alert that summons heavier tiers.
He chose a controlled discouragement.
He raised his hand and drew a thin ring of light around the van's tires, not touching rubber, hovering millimeters above it. Heat shimmer intensified. The looters felt it in their ankles and stepped back instinctively. The tires did not melt; that would have been spectacular and loud. Instead, the heat baked the air and threatened the tires with a slow failure. A slow threat changes behavior without detonating panic.
"Leave," Sunmeros said.
One looter lifted a pistol with a laugh. Sunmeros snapped his fingers. A Solar flash burst at eye-level—brief, directional, like a camera strobe—but it carried enough intensity to wipe night vision and force involuntary blinking. The pistol's muzzle dipped. The looters stumbled back, hands to faces, swearing.
Sunmeros did not chase. He stepped into the archive building while they recovered, because the building was his real target.
Inside, the air smelled like paper and dust and the faint sharpness of burned circuitry. This was where evidence died if you treated it like a treasure hunt. Sunmeros took out his notebook and turned to a fresh page.
Objective: assassination chain-of-proof. Recover physical fragments. Recover digital fragments. Recover witness routing ledger. Maintain custody.
He moved shelf by shelf, not searching randomly. He looked for where staff had tried to be responsible under attack: a locked cabinet with a torn label, a drawer that had been pushed shut too hard, a fireproof box that was missing its key but not its hinge. He found a half-melted security DVR and did not touch it with bare hands. He took a pair of heat-resistant grips, lifted it, and set it into a foam cradle inside his hard case.
He took photos of the DVR's exterior first—serial number, scorch pattern, tool marks—because later, those marks would prove whether someone had swapped the device. Then he pressed a thin Solar warmth through the casing, not to fix it, to stabilize it. Heat, applied correctly, can stop brittle plastic from fracturing under stress.
The alarms did not go loud. They went procedural.
His comm bead—shielded, low-power—buzzed with a single alert: network flag in the district. Not a siren, a system noticing that something was moving differently. That was worse than a siren. Sirens attract humans. Network flags attract analysts and hunters.
Sunmeros accelerated without running. He finished the custody steps: bag, seal, log, double-check. Then he used the one "quiet lane" the occupation still ignored: a service route beneath the Church of Hopefilius, where older stone and older faith had created basement corridors too inconvenient to fully patrol.
In the church undercroft, candle stubs sat on a ledge. Someone had been here recently. Sunmeros didn't disturb them. He followed the wall until he found a hidden locker—painted to match stone—containing a battered civic satchel. Inside were paper routing forms with signatures, ink still legible. The kind of documents people cling to when screens become lies.
He flipped through them and found one that made his throat tighten: a "safe corridor" instruction dated the day of the summit, authorizing a movement path that cut through a convergence zone near the civic center. It carried an official-looking crest and a calm tone. It also carried the same structural posture he had just seen at the fake barrier: style first, verification second.
He remembered Sunbeam's narrowed eyes again—Sunbeam forcing a day to slow down. The city had not slowed when it mattered.
Sunmeros sealed the paper in a clear custody sleeve and logged it as Item 04: Routing artifact, summit date. He photographed the ink fibers under his handheld light, because fiber patterning is physical proof that survives propaganda.
He emerged from the undercroft and immediately felt it: the air pressure shift that comes when a higher tier arrives.
A Darkened Supreme Commander was in the district.
You could tell by how the patrols stopped improvising and started moving like a single machine. Vehicles blocked intersections in perfect rectangles. Radios spoke in short, corrected bursts. Civilians were not chased; they were shepherded out of lanes. The occupation became disciplined, and discipline is the fastest way to kill an infiltrator.
Sunmeros adjusted his plan. He stopped trying to "leave the district." He began trying to "become unremarkable inside it."
He swapped his outer cloak for a maintenance jacket he had taken earlier from a utility locker, and he clipped a laminated work card to his chest in plain view. He dimmed his Solar aura further until it became body warmth and nothing more. Then he walked, carrying his hard case like a worker carrying tools, following lane paint, stopping when stop signs demanded it.
A checkpoint scan caught him anyway. The scanner operator looked at his case.
"What's that?" the operator asked.
Sunmeros angled the case so the operator could see the seal imprint and the serial number without touching it. He offered procedure as a shield.
"Equipment," Sunmeros said. "Fragile. Logged."
The operator hesitated. A second guard approached, eyes sharper. This was where a lot of infiltrators die: a small human suspicion turning into a big decision.
Sunmeros did not talk more. He lifted two fingers and pressed them against the case seal in view of the guard. Heat blossomed, and the seal's polymer shifted color along the ridge—showing the guard, visually, that breaking the seal would leave permanent evidence. He made the guard feel audited.
The guard waved him through, not convinced, but unwilling to create paperwork.
Then the hard part arrived.
The Darkened Supreme Commander did not appear in front of him. He appeared in the logic of the streets. A patrol unit closed the service lane ahead. Another rolled behind. A third held at the intersection with its headlights aimed to wash faces and force blinking. It was containment geometry, not pursuit.
Sunmeros turned into a side corridor and felt an impact like a hammer wrapped in hot cloth. The Supreme Commander had thrown a maroon compression wave down the lane—an invisible strike designed to break ribs and end the run without a visible firefight.
Sunmeros caught it with Solar heat and paid for it with pain. He planted his palms on the wall, vented a burst of heat into the brick, and created a localized steam shock that disrupted the compression's coherence for half a second—just enough to keep his lungs from collapsing. The cost hit anyway. His chest burned. His vision narrowed. His body shook once and corrected.
He did not collapse theatrically. He logged the injury in his head as a constraint: reduced breath, reduced sprint window, must avoid second wave.
A Shadow interference slid into the street behind him—a cold, violet dimness that tried to make the lane longer, darker, harder to read. The Shadow Regime did not shout. It reshaped certainty. Sunmeros countered with light geometry. He flicked three Solar points into the air and let them hang—bright, stable reference markers. The shadows could warp depth, but they could not erase a fixed beacon without revealing themselves.
He smiled once, thin and deliberate, not because this was fun, because he had forced the enemy to show their hand.
He signed nothing—Solar doctrine doesn't rely on sign language as much as Shadow—but he used posture the same way: shoulders square, chin level, breath controlled. He made himself look like a man who had already decided what would happen next.
He initiated retreat like a custody officer, not like prey.
He took the service stairs down into a drainage run, moved along the pipe lane where patrol vehicles couldn't fit, and emerged at a pre-selected extraction point: a derelict loading dock where his driver would be waiting inside a civilian van with clean plates. The driver saw Sunmeros' face and didn't ask emotional questions.
"Case?" the driver said.
"Sealed," Sunmeros answered.
"You're hit."
"Drive."
They moved.
Behind them, the district tightened. The Supreme Commander's presence did what it was meant to do: it made the city itself hostile to movement. Patrol blocks multiplied. Intersections closed. Every green light became suspicious. The occupation did not need to catch Sunmeros immediately; it only needed to make every lane expensive.
Sunmeros kept one hand on his hard case the entire ride out, because the evidence mattered more than his comfort. He watched the lane paint, checked the clock, and listened to the radio chatter bleeding through the driver's shielded receiver. He heard the words he did not want: "operator-tier routing," "authority confirm," "containment ring expanding." The occupation wasn't just hunting him now. It was converting his presence into a justification to tighten civic control.
He looked down at Item 04—the routing artifact—and felt the cold clarity of the plot's spine. The assassination had not been only a kill. It had been an early rehearsal of "official enough." The Darkened uprising had learned that a corridor can murder as efficiently as a blade, if you can make people trust the sign.
Sunmeros' breath hitched. Pain sharpened. He stayed upright.
He would not win Echumeta by fighting every patrol. He would win it by delivering proof that could survive the next wave of lies. He pressed his thumb against the case seal again and let the polymer remember him one more time—heat imprint as custody oath.
Outside the city edge, the van crossed into a quieter road where the occupation thinned into intermittent checkpoints. The driver spoke once, professional, almost flat.
"Where to?"
Sunmeros stared at the horizon, where Eastoppola's inland haze hid more violence than the eye could count.
"Back to the sea," he said. "Then to AES."
Behind them, Echumeta's civic backbone blinked—not a dramatic blackout, a subtle shift, a quiet prompt waiting for a tired finger to confirm. The next half-hour window was already being staged, and this time the target wouldn't be a lab. It would be the people who decide what counts as rescue.
Sunmeros tightened his grip on the case and let the vehicle carry him away while the city's lanes tightened like a fist.
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