SUPREMACY- Clash Between Heroes and Villains Chapter 57: Living Plague of Nightmares

 The skies over Sashax turned rancid—not dim.

They didn't thunder. They didn't mourn. They simply thickened, as if the city itself had exhaled rot. What had once shimmered with breath-filtering flora and ambient greenlight now sagged under the weight of psychic disease. The upper canopy—once a living highway of starlit vines and solar-charged leaves—crackled with maroon energy. The denial fog had arrived.

In the heart of Skyroot City, signal lights reversed, train systems rerouted into looping trap paths, and tram stations reported false departures. Not one missile had fallen. Not one bomb had dropped. And yet... the city was falling.

Darkenedstride, Supreme Commander of the Darkened Regime, stood calmly at the center of Starglow Plaza. The glowing tiles beneath him fractured with every deliberate step. He raised a single boot—and brought it down.

A rekeying pulse erupted across the grid.

Power grids reclassified themselves. Civilian corridors locked. Hospitals failed. Each node of denial magic did not scream—it overwrote. Entire sectors were silently processed.

"All Star Regime harmonics are null," Darkenedstride intoned, voice level. "This city has been unmade."

Below him, operating from a broken terminal tower, Darkenedpuff dragged her claws through projection streams of corrupted code.

"RE-KEYING COMPLETE," she shrieked. "SECTOR JURISDICTIONS: OVERRULED. COMPLIANCE LOCKED. ANCHOR NODES—DENIED."

Across the city, the elite Darkened units executed the nightmare.

Darkmine buried denial charges under the Skyroot aqueducts—his detonations causing no sound, only absence.

Darkfelix turned a district's evacuation center into a gravity implosion, folding scaffolds inward with such elegance, it looked like a theatre collapsing between acts.

Darkskewer lanced sentry drones from rooftops with precise arcs of denial-tethered spikes—no flourish, just finality.

Darkabismaro floated through the hospital wing barefoot, his bloodstained ceremonial robes dragging across sterile tiles. His chants softened screams into gurgles.

Darkenedye walked the perimeter alone, whispering cold confirmations.

"Zone A-2: sealed. Broadcast tower rerouted. No reinforcements expected. No hope permitted."

It wasn't war. It was bureaucratic extinction.

And yet—a flicker broke through.

A lance of emerald light sliced down from orbit, shattering the denial haze. The pulse came in sequence: three beats, pause, five more. The Star Regime's starlight anchor had landed.

The ground hummed as five radiant figures touched down across the district grid. Their synchronized arrival sent ripples of corrected energy through the poisoned roots of Sashax. Where they landed, the fog retreated.

Supreme Commander Starradye led the team.

Clad in emerald-sealed tactical plating, his armor's veins pulsed with bio-radiant current. His eyes scanned the battlefield like a machine of discipline. He made no proclamation. He simply lifted one hand—and the streets responded.

Pylons erupted from below, ancient Star Regime stabilizers reawakening from dormant code. Across entire city blocks, pressure lifted. Gravity stabilized. Systems blinked back to life as leyline channels rerouted through Starradye's presence alone.

To his flank, Starburst and Stargun deployed corridor-clearing bursts of emerald kinetic force. Their weapons did not fire—they conducted, like instruments in a cosmic orchestra, burning denial growth into light.

Above them, Starjew marked waypoints mid-air using radiant telemetry threads, forming cleansing rings that dissolved fungus with pinpoint geometry.

"Anchor grid is live," Starradye finally said, tone calm. "Commencing reclamation."

The fog resisted.

Darkenedstride stomped again—once, twice. The Refelli District twisted under the city. Bridges collapsed as denial glyphs realigned mid-air. Anchor nodes shorted out.

"YOU CALL THAT STABILITY?" he roared. "I CALL IT TEMPORARY DELUSION!"

New Darkened elites entered the field.

Darkmole erupted from beneath the eastern stairwells, crashing upward in a geyser of cracked floor and clawed rage.

Darkmorvado emerged at the edge of a mirror pool, denial spells wrapped around his chest like barbed scripture. He did not speak. He only pointed—and the fog screamed louder.

From above, Darkgrossness descended into the south corridor with a berserker squad of mentally corroded enforcers. Their laughter came out static. Their bodies twitched in unnatural sync.

The tide surged forward.

But Starradye did not retreat.

He marched across the tram spine with shieldlight coalescing at his feet. He touched one pylon node—then three more. His voice echoed in all Star Regime units' comms:

"Star Circuit: prepare to seal."

At the Zevonford Bridge, Starperaldawn activated a radiant dome, shielding a fleeing column of civilians as corruption surged from both ends. His sigils spun faster than eyes could track.

The battle collapsed into a singular pulse of decision.

Starradye clenched his gauntlet.

Five pylons surged. The Emerald Circuit sealed.

A vast radiant dome exploded outward in perfect silence. Fog calcified mid-air. Denial runes shattered into salt. Screams halted. Time seemed to pause.

Skyroot was no longer dying.

It was defended.

Darkenedstride stared upward, motionless.

"So this is how they sterilize chaos..." he muttered.

He stepped backward, leaving claw-marks on the stone. With a signal glyph traced mid-air, the denial forces began their retreat.

"This city is bought time. Nothing more."

And with that, he vanished into the folds of smoke and failure.

Far above, in Starwallion, Starbeam watched the relay from a starlit tower, his arms folded as orbital deliveries rerouted in real time.

His voice carried no drama—only the clarity of strategy.

"Reinforce Sashax. Then hold Leblaela. The next strike won't give us warning."

The War for Westonglappa had begun.

And the dreams... had just started to rot.

The fog never truly left Sashax.

Though the radiant dome shimmered above Skyroot City's core, the Living Plague continued to pulse at its perimeter—adaptive, alert, and bitter. Denial growths retracted only to coil tighter, like wounded serpents refusing death. Darkenedstride had not retreated. He had merely pivoted.

His helm turned northward—to Leblaela.

A state of rail hubs and verdant neon-plated plains, Leblaela served as Westonglappa's nerve system, its Starrail arteries linking Frondale Crossing, Starvine Yard, Pinnacle Dusk, and Modderton West. If Sashax was a lung, Leblaela was a spine. Losing it would sever Starbeam's logistical control.

In the silence of a psychically sealed bunker beneath Frondale, Darkenedstride addressed his inner cadre.

"Skyroot was a diagnostic incision," he muttered, low and unstable. "Leblaela will be the correction."

To his side, Darkenedpuff snarled into a scarred data altar. "Contestation cost us greenfield containment. Star-code broke through our central filament grid. They're learning."

Darkenedstride nodded once. "Then we reformat."

He opened both arms, palms outstretched. Glyphs swirled across the bunker walls.

"Let rot learn faster."

In Starvine Yard, soft green lights blinked out one by one.

Workers froze at their terminals. AI traffic assistants looped in static. The magnetic lines to Pinnacle Dusk reversed their pull, drawing inbound cargo trains away from the city.

Denial fog didn't descend. It seeped up from the roots.

Rail pylons cracked. Guidance beacons dimmed.

And then came the collapse.

From deep beneath the street grids, the corrupted architecture began to molt. Buildings cried out in neural shrieks—antennae melting, reinforced towers curving unnaturally like burned trees.

From Modderton West, Supreme Commander Starradye gave his response without ceremony.

"Deploy the anchor lines. Activate all stabilization grids. This is not a raid. It's a system kill attempt."

Within seconds, Starburst was already mid-transit, tearing through the denial fog on sonic wings. Stargun, stationed atop the Towerlight Spire, marked firing vectors and began pattern-saturation strikes along the denial growth routes. Every pulse lit up the sky with emerald fire.

Starradye's voice rang into the comms again.

"Defensive divide: Starjew takes the west flank near Frondale Crossing. Starperaldawn, you reinforce Modderton rail center. We are not losing two cities."

But the Darkened Regime had already embedded.

From behind fractured coolant conduits rose Darkgrossness, his body flickering with corrupted enchantments. He ripped his way into the Starrail Nexus junction, snarling through gritted teeth: "Everything sacred... will be rewritten."

Darkfelix joined him, collapsing multiple rail switchpoints by gestural hexcraft—his voice eerily gleeful as he turned each command line into molten denial pulp.

From the darkness of Pinnacle Dusk's monorail tunnels, Darkabismaro emerged again—sacred robes blood-soaked, lips moving with scripture not meant for ears. The fog around him responded like trained dogs, folding and twisting into offensive shapes.

On the frontline facing Starjew, the elite known as Darkmoonero floated above a denial glyph etched into a cargo hull. His mouth moved in tandem with Darkskewer, who launched pinpoint bone-spears at Star positions with surgical cadence.

Back in Skyroot, the dome stuttered.

A final attempt to invert the Star Regime's foothold had begun. Denial glyphs bloomed in old wounds, and Darkenedstride himself took to the skies above the Starweld Tower.

He dropped hard into the urban interior where Starperaldawn and Starburst had regrouped to contain re-sparking outbreaks.

"You desecrate harmony," Starradye transmitted from Leblaela's command uplink. "Not even chaos. Just rot with an ego."

Darkenedstride's reply was a psychic scream: "Then sterilize me."

And with that, the two-front war began.

On the Zevonford Bridge, Darkskewer and Starburst clashed in a dance of piercing velocity versus sonic cannon waves.

In Frondale Crossing, Stargun engaged Darkgrossness—shield nets snapping under fog-crusted fists.

Within the control decks of Modderton West, Starjew raised a filament barrier against Darkfelix's collapse incantation, her lips chanting star-code reversals through clenched teeth.

And above them all—between twin towers in Starvine Yard—Starradye and Darkenedstride met once more.

Neither blinked. The skyline cracked.

The war between light and denial had not chosen a victor yet.

But Westonglappa bled for the answer.

The war split the air.

In Skyroot, the dome blinked. In Leblaela, the fog arrived. A binary storm twisted across Westonglappa's horizon, green arcs streaking east while maroon decay spiraled westward.

Starradye no longer operated from within command centers. He now fought in them—clearing collapsed data halls with his bare hands, rerouting railburst energy directly into his suit's emerald capacitors.

"Starjew, grid update," he barked, leaping across a fractured greenline pipe near Lamptread Cradle.

"Frondale's holding," Starjew replied from above, his voice calm. "Skyroot's flickering again. They're pressing both fronts."

The connection crackled—Skyroot was destabilizing.

"Send Starburst back. She's low on shield integrity," Starjew added.

But it was already too late.

Starburst lay barely conscious in the shattered remnants of Towerlight Junction, her hammer sparking beside her. Darkgrossness loomed nearby, dragging maroon glyphs across the railstone floor with his own blood. Beside him, Darkabismaro whispered to the fog like it was alive.

"You can feel it, can't you?" he hissed, kneeling beside her ear. "You don't belong in this geometry."

Starburst's visor flickered, her life signs redlining—but she clenched a fist, charged it with residual kinetic force, and drove it into the denial sigil mid-sentence.

A shockwave launched Darkabismaro off the bridge.

Darkgrossness howled in pain, shielding his face as Starburst collapsed again, this time for real.

Her beacon flared. "Unit down," the Stargrid reported. "Code Green Five. Medical route compromised."

Back in Skyroot, Starradye launched across rooftops, his visor scanning for breach points. Denial glyphs were forming again. Darkenedstride had returned.

Their eyes met atop the Verdilight Arc—a bridge that once supported sky gardens, now cracked and hung with melting star-silk banners.

"You took Sashax," Starradye growled. "But you won't keep it."

"I never wanted to keep it," Darkenedstride replied. "I wanted to prove you couldn't."

Their clash shook the skyline.

The first blow cratered the rooftop. The second struck from the heavens—Stargun fired a cover blast from Starvine Yard, forcing Darkenedstride to shift his weight mid-assault.

Starradye took the opening.

He drove his gauntlet into Darkskewer, who had attempted a flanking arc. The elite's denial lances shattered in a burst of steam and screams.

Darkskewer fell, his armor split, his body convulsing as emerald circuitry surged through his spine.

"Retreat him," Darkenedstride ordered without emotion. "He served."

In Leblaela, Darkfelix held Modderton West—his gravitational magic distorting entire tracks. The very concept of weight bent around him.

Then Starradye struck again.

Using orbital marker recall, he warped in behind Felix and struck with a burst-dagger—hitting a fatal nerve cluster. Felix dropped, barely able to phase away into fog.

Only Darkmoonero and Darkgrossness remained active in the Leblaela push.

The fog thinned.

Starradye's final command for the cycle echoed across both warfronts:

"Skyroot: secure the dome. Leblaela: reinforce Starvine. And no one dies without light."

The Stargrid pulsed.

The denial fields pulled back.

But only for now.

The first sign that Sashax was falling wasn't the fire.

It was the silence.

Across Ostlake and Coldford, wind used to whistle through dock-chains and frost-stiff banners. Tonight, the air refused to carry sound properly—like the sky itself had been gagged. Even the alarms in Cleardell pulsed with a muffled, drowning rhythm, as if some unseen hand had pressed a palm over the city's mouth.

And then the Darkened Regime arrived in full.

A tide of Dark soldiers rolled in behind denial-etched carriers and black-maroon artillery rigs, their chassis crawling with sigils that bled into the ground like ink. Roads iced over—not from weather, but from pressure. Lamps dimmed as if ashamed to keep shining. The invasion didn't "begin." It simply became the only reality left.

In the distance, Hollowbrook, the capital, glowed faintly—its skyline a row of star-glass towers now marked with crawling fractures. Refugees poured out of side streets and alleys, dragging children, dragging crates, dragging their own fear like it had weight. A few made it north toward Frostwick. Others tried to cut east, toward Snowmere. Some ran for the coast, praying Windchime Cove could still launch ships before the harbor became a grave.

They were running from a name.

Darkenedstride.

He moved through Grayfen like a verdict. Not rushing. Not swaggering. Just advancing with the calm of someone who had already calculated how many seconds your hope could survive.

The Star Regime had forces in place—but not enough, and not united enough.

Above Alderstead, green-lit drones tried to stitch a defensive mesh. They failed in minutes. Darkened suppression pulses ate the signal clean, leaving only sputtering emerald sparks falling from the clouds like dying fireflies.

On the main approach into Hollowbrook, a line of Star armored vehicles formed a barricade behind frozen barriers. Starradye stood in front of them, shoulders squared, chest rising slowly as he steadied his breath. His aura—bright, disciplined green—flickered with strain, but it did not break.

"Hold the line," he ordered, voice sharp but controlled. "No panic. No scattering. We buy time for evac routes to Windchime Cove."

A Star elite sprinted in, face pale, visor cracked. "Sir—Coldford is gone. They punched straight through the transit choke. We're getting flanked through Cleardell."

Starradye didn't look away from the dark horizon.

"Then we stop being a wall," he murmured. "We become a blade."

The ground trembled. Frost cracked. And the darkness parted.

Darkenedstride emerged at the front of his forces, maroon glyph-light rolling off him in slow waves. Behind him, Dark soldiers raised pole-weapons and denial rifles in perfect rhythm—an army that did not shout, because it did not need to.

Starradye lifted his starlight weapon, green radiance hardening along its edge.

Darkenedstride tilted his head, almost curious.

They collided.

The first impact detonated a ring of pressure across the snow, throwing shattered ice into the air like glass confetti. Starradye fought like a man trying to keep a continent from slipping into the sea—precise, relentless, refusing to yield even when his boots slid backward a full meter at a time.

Darkenedstride's magic answered with something heavier—satanic arts layered with denial geometry, each swing of his force warping the angle of the battlefield itself. A slash that should have missed curved in mid-air. A dodge that should have saved Starradye instead placed him exactly where the next strike wanted him.

Still, Starradye adapted. His green radiance sharpened, and with a sudden burst of speed—too fast for anyone below elite tier to even track—he carved a clean line through the denial pattern, severing one of the dark geometry anchors.

The darkness stuttered.

A gap opened.

"Now!" Starradye roared. "Push them back—one block—just one!"

Star ground units surged forward, buying a narrow corridor for civilians to pour toward the southern road out of Hollowbrook. For a few bright seconds, it looked like Sashax might breathe again.

Then the sky over the state shifted.

Not in Sashax.

Farther west.

Leblaela.

The capital, Gledmont, had been holding on by discipline and routine—streets locked down, emergency shelters stacked, evacuation lanes rehearsed. People there had been told the Star Regime would protect them. People believed it, because belief was cheaper than terror.

Until the darkness arrived with a different kind of intent.

This was not a push for chaos.

This was a push for ownership.

The first strike hit near Inirross, where supply convoys queued in tight rows beneath green signal pylons. The pylons went black at once. The convoy drivers didn't even have time to scream before the road beneath them caved—folding inward like the world had been pinched.

Then came the suppression wave.

Darkeneddenominator.

He didn't appear like a soldier. He appeared like a calculation. The moment his presence touched the city's perimeter, Leblaela's networks began to fail in sequence—communication, power, transit logic, emergency beacons. One by one, the systems that made the Star Regime look invincible went dim, leaving only raw human panic behind.

In the center of Gledmont, people looked up and saw green patrol drones drop out of the air like dead birds.

And then the Darkened vehicles rolled in.

From Glerton to Drumburn, block by block, the Darkened Regime advanced with an efficiency that felt almost polite—until you saw what it left behind: crushed barricades, broken shelters, and streets so quiet you could hear the blood drip if you stood close enough.

The Star Regime responded with what it had left.

Starbeam arrived without ceremony.

No speech. No grand entrance. Just a sudden bright green pressure in the air—like the city had remembered what leadership felt like.

He landed near the main defensive ring outside Gledmont, cloak snapping in the cold wind, eyes fixed on the horizon where darkness thickened.

Behind him, elites took positions fast.

Starburst flexed his hands, green sound-energy building around his knuckles like compressed thunder.

Stargun locked onto rooftop sightlines, turning the skyline into a firing lattice.

Starjew stepped into the street and drove a starlit anchor into the pavement—one, then two, then a chain of radiant hooks meant to keep buildings from collapsing inward.

Starperaldawn moved among evac columns, her aura spilling out in careful waves—just enough to keep lungs working, just enough to keep hearts beating when fear tried to stop them.

And from the east, sprinting hard enough to leave green streaks in the air, Starhunter joined the line, scanning for the elite-tier pressure points—because he could feel them, too.

The darkness answered by sending its own.

In the shadow of a collapsed transit arch, Darkmine rose from the rubble like something that had been born there.

A few streets away, Darkfelix appeared on a rooftop, posture casual, grin sharp, eyes gleaming with the kind of confidence that came from knowing most people couldn't touch him.

Near the transit choke by Drumburn, Darkskewer rolled his shoulders and lifted his weapon like he'd been waiting all day for the fun part.

And behind the suppression waves, moving with a strange, humming precision, Darkenedpuff stepped into range and slammed a glowing sigil into the street—rewriting the ground logic itself so evacuation lanes curved back into kill-zones.

Starbeam's jaw tightened.

"Enough," he said softly.

His aura expanded.

The air turned bright green—then heavy—then razor-sharp. The streetlights along the boulevard flickered back on, not because the system recovered, but because his power forced reality to cooperate.

"Star Regime," he called, voice calm but absolute. "We hold Gledmont. We protect the evac columns. And we do not break."

The battle detonated all at once.

Starburst launched first, turning the air into a screaming corridor of compressed sound—an emerald shockwave that flipped Darkened carriers and shredded denial banners clean off their poles.

Stargun's shots followed, precise green spheres punching through armored plating with surgical discipline, forcing Darkened vehicles to stall in the open.

Starjew's anchors flared as buildings tried to collapse inward—his chains catching the structure edges, holding them up long enough for families to run under the gaps.

Starperaldawn caught a child who tripped on frozen debris, pressed her palm to his shoulder, and steadied his breath with a pulse of gentle green radiance. The kid sobbed once, then kept running, because her power reminded his body it still had permission to live.

But the Darkened elites were not ground units.

They were the knives.

Darkskewer slipped through Starburst's shock corridor with a twisted burst of speed, caught Starburst mid-pivot, and drove a denial-charged strike into his guard. Starburst staggered back, feet carving trenches in the frost, his aura flaring wildly as he tried to hold his stance.

Darkmine blasted upward through the street near Starjew's anchors, detonating a pressure bloom that snapped two radiant chains and sent Starjew skidding hard across the pavement, sparks ripping from his palms.

On the rooftops, Stargun engaged Darkfelix in a brutal long-range exchange—green shots versus maroon-black distortion. Stargun's aim was perfect. Darkfelix's reality was not. A shot that should have ended him curved wrong at the last second, and Stargun paid for it with a denial blast that shredded his dominant arm's armor and forced him to drop behind cover, teeth clenched so hard his jaw trembled.

Starhunter intercepted a Darkened strike squad before it could reach an evac lane, moving like a living targeting system—every step deliberate, every hit meant to disable. He managed to clear the lane. He did not manage to avoid the counter.

Darkfelix's laugh echoed from somewhere above. A maroon bolt snapped down and clipped Starhunter's shoulder, spinning him sideways. He caught himself, breathing hard, refusing to fall, but the pain didn't lie: he was running out of minutes.

Across the boulevard, Starperaldawn lifted her hands and tried to widen her healing field—tried to cover more evac bodies at once—only to feel the ground under her feet warp as Darkenedpuff's rewrite pulsed again. The lane bent. The crowd shifted. Panic surged.

Starbeam saw it instantly.

He moved.

Not running.

Phasing.

One moment he was by Gledmont's defensive ring. The next he was at the lane bend, palm down, green radiance slamming into the street like a sealing stamp. The ground snapped back into the correct shape. The evac lane straightened.

Starbeam's eyes lifted.

Because something else had just entered the battlefield.

A presence so absolute that even the Darkened forces paused.

The air turned maroon.

The clouds above Gledmont swirled into a spiral of dark red-black, the kind of vortex that didn't belong to weather. A single silhouette descended through it, cloak whipping, aura roaring like an enraged storm given human form.

Lord Darkwing.

His boots touched down on the boulevard and the pavement shattered outward in a perfect ring, as if the city had flinched away from him. Streetlights exploded. Glass rained. People screamed—and then their screams cut off as pressure crushed the sound right out of their throats.

Darkwing lifted his head, eyes blazing, grin wide like a wound.

"I SMELL FEAR," he announced, voice tearing through the city like an alarm you couldn't shut off. "AND I LOVE IT."

Starbeam stepped forward, blade lifting, green aura tightening around him like armor.

Darkwing's gaze snapped onto him.

"OHHHH," he purred, then snarled louder, "SO YOU'RE THE ONE WHO THINKS THIS PLACE IS YOURS."

Starbeam didn't answer with a speech.

He answered by swinging.

A green arc carved through the air, bright enough to turn the boulevard into daylight for a split second. Darkwing's hand lifted casually—almost bored—and caught the arc with raw darkness, crushing it like it was paper.

The shockwave of that interception blew debris down the street and knocked elites off balance.

Starbeam's eyes narrowed.

Darkwing stepped forward, cloak dragging through shattered glass.

"YOU DON'T GET IT," Darkwing growled. "YOU'RE NOT DEFENDING A CITY."

He pointed down the boulevard, toward the evac lines, toward the shelters, toward the places where humans tried to pretend immortals cared.

"YOU'RE DEFENDING A LIE."

Then he surged.

Absolute Leader pressure hit like a collapsing sky.

Starbeam met him head-on, green radiance roaring as the two forces collided. Their clash didn't look like normal combat. It looked like reality arguing with itself. Street signs bent. Buildings creaked. The air flashed between green and maroon like a warning light trapped in a loop.

Behind them, the rest of the battlefield became a slaughterhouse of inevitability.

Darkeneddenominator's suppression spread wider. Star comms died in full. Stargun's surviving shots became isolated acts of defiance instead of coordinated defense. Starburst tried to stand again, coughing blood into his visor, forcing his aura to ignite even as his body screamed to stop. Starjew dragged himself back to his anchors, hands shaking, trying to hold one more building up for one more family to run under.

In Sashax, miles away, Starradye was still fighting Darkenedstride—still carving narrow pockets of breathing room—but the wider truth had already arrived: the Darkened Regime didn't need to win every duel.

It only needed to win the map.

And Darkwing was taking the map by force.

The moment Starbeam realized it—truly realized it—his focus sharpened into something colder than rage.

He twisted his stance, redirected Darkwing's pressure just enough to keep the evac columns from being flattened outright, then snapped his gaze toward his elites.

"Fall back," he ordered, voice low and final. "Now. We keep who we can."

Starperaldawn's eyes widened. "Lord—"

"NOW," Starbeam repeated.

Starjew hesitated, then nodded once, teeth clenched, and yanked his last anchor free. Stargun staggered out of cover, cradling his ruined arm, still trying to aim with the other hand. Starhunter limped, but he moved. Starburst tried to stand—failed—then forced himself up anyway, because pride was the only painkiller left.

In the chaos, Starrapuff appeared at the edge of the boulevard, aura bright, face set with fury and disbelief. She slammed into Darkenedpuff's rewrite zone and—by sheer brute will—overwrote the overwriting for a few precious seconds, straightening the evac lane long enough for the last cluster of civilians to sprint through.

She turned her head toward Starbeam, eyes shining with rage and grief.

He didn't look away from Darkwing.

"Go," he told her, quietly this time. "That's an order."

Starrapuff's throat worked. She swallowed whatever she wanted to say. Then she grabbed a wounded ground soldier by the collar and dragged him toward the retreat route, refusing to leave anyone she could still move.

Darkwing noticed the retreat.

And his rage exploded.

"NO," he bellowed, and the word hit like a fist. "NO NO NO—YOU DON'T GET TO RUN."

He lunged, trying to break past Starbeam's guard, trying to turn the retreat into a massacre.

Starbeam met him again—green radiance flaring so hard the boulevard lit up like an emergency star.

Their blades of power slammed together, and for one brief, impossible moment, the evac route held.

Just long enough.

Across Sashax, the last ships shoved off from Windchime Cove under distant fire. In Hollowbrook, Starradye's forces buckled and finally split—retreating in shards toward snow-covered backroads, dragging whatever survivors they could still grab. In Leblaela, Gledmont's skyline cracked under maroon pressure and the Darkened banner rose over districts that had been Star territory only hours ago.

The Star Regime didn't "lose" with a final explosion.

It lost the way a body loses blood—quietly, steadily, until suddenly you realize you're too weak to stand.

As the last evac lane collapsed behind retreating elites, Starbeam took one final step back, eyes locked on Darkwing's burning gaze.

"You can take the street," Starbeam said, voice hoarse but steady.

Darkwing's grin widened.

"OH, I'M TAKING MORE THAN THAT."

Starbeam's aura flared—then folded inward, tight and controlled—and he vanished in a burst of green distortion, dragging the remaining elite signatures with him into the retreat corridor.

Darkwing screamed at the empty air, rage splitting his voice into a raw, shaking roar.

"COME BACK!! I WASN'T DONE!! I WASN'T—"

He stopped mid-rant.

Because the city was quiet now.

Gledmont belonged to him.

Leblaela was bleeding out under his rule.

Sashax was fractured, with survivors scattered like ash across the borders.

Darkwing turned slowly, cloak dragging through shattered glass, and looked over his forces—Darkenedstride returning from the east with cold, measured composure; Darkeneddenominator's suppression field stabilizing across the captured districts; Darkenedpuff's rewrite sigils still humming under the streets like chained electricity; Darkmine and Darkfelix standing among the wreckage like satisfied predators; Darkskewer wiping his weapon clean as if it had merely been work.

Darkwing lifted his chin.

"CLEAN IT UP," he commanded, FULL CAPS fury turned into FULL CAPS authority. "NO WITNESSES. NO CAMERAS. NO DRONES. NO 'HERO' STORIES."

He paced toward the highest intact overlook in Gledmont, staring out toward the next stretch of Westonglappa—toward the neighboring state lines that still hadn't felt his hand close around their throats.

Then his grin returned, slow and ugly.

"AND AFTER YOU'RE DONE," he said, voice lowering into a promise, "WE MARCH AGAIN."

The maroon clouds above Leblaela tightened into a spiral once more.

Not dispersing.

Preparing.

Westonglappa — Leblaela Rail Spine — Hours After "Recall"

The fog learned the streets.

Where Starradye's anchor grids had once held, the denial growth now knew every gap, every alley, every broken tramline. It moved like a slow tide through Leblaela's spine, curling around toppled pylons and collapsed data halls.

Star soldiers were no longer fighting for blocks.

They were fighting for exits.

Darkenedstride walked the central rail, boots ringing on twisted metal. Each step sent a short, hard pulse along the tracks, reclassifying anything it touched. A stable platform became a sink. A safe corridor became a no-return loop.

Behind him, Darkenedstream and Darkenedye worked the flanks—one rewriting signal towers, the other auditing evac routes and killing them with simple words.

"Sector C-7," Darkenedye reported, eyes closed, voice flat. "All Star signatures withdrawn. Remaining life: civilian. Optional."

"Not optional," Darkenedstride said.

Darkmole answered for him. The elite burst up beneath a half-collapsed shelter, denial claws shredding steel. The screams cut off fast. When the dust settled, only static drifted in the air.

Farther down the line, Darkgrossness waded through a knot of Westonglappa soldiers and Star marines who'd tried to mount a last stand at a junction. Their volleys of emerald light hit his maroon aura and evaporated like rain on hot iron. He grabbed one armored trooper by the chestplate and squeezed—not crushing armor, but erasing permission.

The man dropped, armor intact, eyes empty.

"Spine secured," Darkgrossness grunted.

On an upper bridge, Stargun and Starjew fired covering blasts, holding one last evac corridor open as Starradye fell back with his damaged elites. Starburst limped, leaning on his hammer like a crutch. Starperaldawn's shield dome flickered as she took the rear, teeth clenched against the weight of the fog.

"Anchor Line Two only," Starradye ordered. "We're done trading lives for rails. Fall back to extraction points."

He knew what he was leaving behind—sections of Leblaela that would never be theirs again. But Darkenedstride had turned the city's core into a Denial spine. Keeping people alive mattered more than holding concrete that no longer obeyed them.

As the last Star transport lifted away from Starvine Yard, denial glyphs climbed the abandoned pylons like rot finally getting to breathe.

Sashax, Leblaela, and the Auttomotto corridor were no longer contested.

They were occupied.

Darkenedstride watched the transports vanish into cloud, then keyed his comm to the maroon command channel.

"Leblaela sealed," he said. "Star presence reduced to distant harassment. Local resistance minimal."

He looked down at the empty platforms, at the silent bodies on the rails, and corrected himself.

"Minimal and irrelevant."

———

Westonglappa Coastal Expanse — AES Joint Fleet Perimeter

The war at sea never made it onto television.

The cameras died too early.

Over the main shipping lane that linked Sollarisca, Lunna, Starrup and Galaxenchi, an AES joint task force had formed a moving shield—Solar carriers, Lunar icebreakers, Star escort cruisers, Galaxy observatory frigates. Air wings circled above in tight patrol stacks, colored trails marking regime signatures.

For one long hour, it looked organized.

Then three different nightmares arrived.

•

Over the central carrier group, a black arc ripped the sky open. Blackwing strode out of the tear with his coat snapping in the high-altitude wind, eyes bright and amused.

"Look at this," he said into his own comm, voice all smooth teeth. "Four-color parade float."

He dropped.

Blackenstorm, Blackenstride, and Blackenstream rode the fall behind him, black halos trailing like contrails. Around them, elites—Blackhunter, Blackstrike, Blackdoom—surfaced from stealth fields, each already locked on a target.

A Solar interceptor squad tried to meet them in the air.

They got three shots off.

Then Blackwing snapped his fingers.

The bullets reappeared in the barrels they'd left.

Guns locked.

Engines coughed as Blackenstorm's compliance seals snapped onto the carrier decks, rewriting "combat-ready" to "awaiting inspection." Pilots fought their own consoles as systems decided they were unauthorized to fly.

"Ground yourselves," Blackwing called over hacked channels, tone light. "Daddy's drivin' tonight."

Solar jets that refused the order simply lost thrust and fell into the sea.

•

Farther north, where ice floes marked the edge of Lunar patrol territory, the air went silent.

Shadowwing stepped out of a curtain of darkness that had no source, standing on nothing above a Lunar cruiser. No announcement. No aura flare.

Just presence.

Below, Shadowastream and Shadowastorm traced patterns in the cloud base with their hands. Each gesture shaped an invisible corridor. Lunar radar still showed clear skies. Sensor grids still drew neat lines. But the data lost honesty.

A formation of Lunar bombers flew into a bank of clouds that didn't exist.

They did not emerge.

Shadowstealth, Shadowcrypt and Shadowhowl rode alongside the ghost corridors, cutting any ship that strayed out of formation back into it—sometimes separated from their own wings, sometimes not.

From the bridge of the lead cruiser, a Lunar captain watched perfectly healthy instruments tell him lies and realized, too late, that the sea itself had vanished from their map.

Their last accurate reading was the sound of metal breaking on invisible cliffs.

•

At the deepest point of the trade trench, lights went out.

Not flickered.

Went out.

Doctor Deathwing rose from the black water aboard a living barge of bone and steel. The creature's ribs had been welded into a platform; its spine pulsed with violet current. Waves died against its sides like they were embarrassed to touch it.

"Joint fleet confirmed," Deathwing said into a spiral of bone-mic in his hand. His voice had no accent, no rise or fall. Just information. "Sample size: adequate."

At his back stood his chosen Supreme Commander, Deathadye, and three elites: Deathshroud, Deathplague, Deathtorque. Their eyes burned with cross-shaped irises, cataloguing everything.

"Deploy pathogen shells," Deathadye requested.

"Approved."

Pods launched from the barge without fire or smoke—smooth, white shapes slipping into the water. The ocean around AES hulls started to glow pale violet as necrotic bacteria ate through propeller housings and intake vents, converting stainless steel into brittle bone.

A Star frigate tried to vector away on emergency thrusters.

Its engines grew ribs.

Metal shifted, rearticulated, and snapped.

The frigate rolled over like a dead animal.

Above, panicked pilots tried to radio anyone.

Their communications equipment began to grow teeth.

———

Westonglappa — Auttomotto Border Corridor — Same Night

Darkwing watched the distant ocean storms from his seized corridor, maroon light reflecting off his armor.

The Compliance Zone held. Refugees who'd tried to push through earlier now sat numb on the pavement, wrapped in muffled shock. Westonglappa soldiers who hadn't fled lay where they'd fallen, weapons intact, permissions revoked.

A small black device vibrated in Darkwing's hand.

It looked almost ridiculous—like an oversized, ugly smartphone from another era—but its surface hummed with saturated sigils. Denial runes crawled across the screen like notifications.

He thumbed it on.

"THIS IS DARKWING," he said, voice exploding out of the corridor and into distant skies. "REPORT."

The feed split into three windows.

Blackwing appeared first, lounging on the smoking deck of a captured carrier, boots propped on a Solar emblem.

"Yo," he drawled. "Solar and Lunar wings are cooked. The ones that ain't sunk are runnin' home with no gas and no map."

In the background, Blackenstorm pushed a still-struggling pilot flat with one boot and painted a black compliance mark across the carrier's tower.

The second window showed almost nothing—just a grainy, low-light view of empty air and faint violet shapes. At the center, a single gloved hand raised and gave a short, precise gesture.

Shadowwing.

No words.

But the meaning settled heavy: airspace denied.

The third window flicked on with clinical clarity. Deathwing stood in silhouette against the pale glow of rotting ships collapsing into the trench behind him.

"Naval assets: degraded," he reported. "Estimate: sixty-eight percent loss across joint fleet. Survivors are scattered and without unified command."

His tone didn't change when a distant explosion lit up a sinking hull.

Darkwing's lips curled.

"GOOD," he said. "GOOD. KEEP HITTING ANYTHING THAT FLOATS OR FLIES, BUT LISTEN CLOSE."

The maroon sky over Auttomotto thrummed as he spoke.

"WESTONGGLAPPA IS OUR PROOF OF CONCEPT. I WANT THEIR CONTINENTS NEXT."

Blackwing's grin widened. "Hit 'em at home, huh."

The Shadowwing feed gave a slow, approving nod.

Deathwing answered with numbers. "Striking homelands increases psychological collapse probability by forty-one percent. Acceptable."

Darkwing leaned forward, eyes burning.

"BRING YOURSELVES TO WESTONGGLAPPA," he ordered. "COME TO MY CORRIDOR. WE PLAN THE CONTINENT CUTS FACE TO FACE."

He snapped the device shut.

Above his head, the maroon clouds answered like a crowd.

———

Westonglappa — Overrun Auttomotto Interchange — Later

They arrived like weather.

Blackwing came first, flying low over the ruined freeway interchange on a trail of black fire, skidding to a stop in a shower of sparks. He straightened his jacket, looked around at the devastated border zone, and whistled.

"You really did paperwork on this place," he said.

Darkwing didn't smile.

"I DON'T PLAY."

A shadow peeled itself off an overpass, solidifying into Shadowwing's form beside them. He landed without sound, cloak settling around him like pooled ink. No greeting. His eyes tracked every movement, every corpse, every remaining camera.

The air grew colder. A pulse of violet rose from the ground as a bone-spine transport surfaced through concrete, phasing in from the trench depths. Deathwing stepped off its ribbed back, coat still dripping seawater, his cross pupils bright.

"Meeting point: secured," he said simply.

Four Absolute Leaders of BRD stood over a broken Westonglappa highway while, below, denial squads and undead patrols spread through the city grid.

Darkwing raised his hand.

A holographic map of Titanumas flared to life above the interchange—four glowing continents forming a broken ring around their current position.

"SOLLARISCA. STARRUP. LUNNA. GALAXENCHI," he said, stabbing each with a maroon finger. "AES THINKS THESE ARE SAFE. THEY THINK WE ARE 'OCCUPYING' OUTSKIRTS."

His voice rose, pushing toward a roar.

"WE ARE GOING TO PROVE THE OUTSKIRTS WERE THE EASY PART."

He pointed to Blackwing first.

"BLACKWING. TAKE LUNNA. I WANT THEIR REFLECTION CITIES SCREAMING AT THEIR OWN MIRRORS."

Blackwing laughed. "Say less. I'll send Blackenpuff and a crew. She's been itching to drag Moonbeam's face through her own billboards."

Darkwing nodded sharply. "CHOOSE THREE OR FOUR ELITES. NOTHING THAT SLOWS HER DOWN."

"Blackcraven, Blacknyrix, Blackstrike," Blackwing decided, almost instantly. "Street hitters. Media killers. They'll flip Lunargopa inside out."

Darkwing turned to Shadowwing.

"SHADOWWING. SOLLARISCA. TAKE THEIR LIGHT AWAY."

Shadowwing made a short sign with his right hand—agreement. Then, with two quick motions, he named his pieces:

Shadowastream. Shadowstealth. Shadowveil. Shadowhowl.

Darkwing interpreted for the others. "SHADOWASTREAM WILL BREAK THEIR SENSOR LINES. HIS ELITES WILL TURN SOLASTREYA INTO A GHOST THAT STILL THINKS IT'S CROWDED."

Next, his finger jabbed toward the star-shaped outline of Starrup.

"DEATHWING. STARRUP'S TECH CITY—AUREALIS PRIME. THEY TRUST MACHINES. BREAK THEIR FAITH."

Deathwing's expression didn't change, but his eyes brightened.

"Supreme Commander: Deathadye," he said. "Elites: Deathshroud, Deathplague, Deathcipher. Objective: convert infrastructure into vector carriers."

"GOOD," Darkwing said. "LET THEIR OWN BIOTECH EAT THEM."

Finally, he tapped the gold-lit sigil of Galaxenchi.

"THE GALAXY REGIME THINKS THEY LIVE ABOVE ALL THIS. WE CORRECT THEM."

He looked toward the maroon clouds, already aware of Darkened forces tightening their grip on Westonglappa.

"DARKENEDSTORM WILL TAKE POINT ON GALAXENCHI," Darkwing declared. "ELITES: DARKABISMARO, DARKGROSSNESS, DARKMORVADO. THEY HIT SHINSATSUKI DISTRICT AND TURN THEIR MEMORY TEMPLES INTO DENIAL ARCHIVES."

Darkwing closed his fist.

"FOUR STRIKES. SAME DAY. SAME HOUR."

Blackwing snapped his fingers, amused. "Global debut."

Shadowwing's only answer was a slow exhale that made every nearby shadow thicken.

Deathwing checked the glowing map like a surgeon confirming an incision pattern. "Probability of coordinated collapse rises to—"

Darkwing cut him off with a bark of laughter.

"I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR PERCENTAGES," he shouted. "I CARE THAT THEY WATCH IT HAPPEN AND KNOW THEY CAN'T BE EVERYWHERE."

He stepped forward, towering over the image of Westonglappa beneath their boots.

"WE HOLD THIS STAGE. WE SEND OUR PACKS. WHEN AES SPLITS TO SAVE THEIR PRECIOUS HOMELANDS, WE SQUEEZE UNTIL SOMETHING BREAKS."

No one argued.

The orders were set.

One by one, the Supreme Commanders moved.

Darkenedstorm opened a maroon fissure under his feet and dropped through, his chosen elites following, bound for the golden spires of Galaxenchi.

Deathadye stepped back onto the bone transport with his squad; the creature dove into the asphalt and vanished, tunneling toward the seas that lapped at Starrup's shores.

Shadowastream simply walked into Shadowwing's cloak and didn't come out the other side, his elites slipping after him like knives sliding into a sheath—destination: Solastreya's sunlit avenues.

Blackenpuff arrived through a black graffiti portal on the side of a ruined truck, chewing gum, hood up. Blackwing gave her a nod and flicked her a data shard.

"Go say hi to Lunna for me," he said.

She grinned. "Oh, I will."

Then she and her crew stepped through a second portal spraying Blackened sigils, reappearing under the soft blue glow of Lunar moons.

The skies over Auttomotto shook as four separate warfronts were born.

———

Across Titanumas — First Ripples

Sollarisca — Solastreya

Solar priests lit the morning flame in Solastreya's central amphitheater.

For the first time in living memory, the fire burned with a shadow in it.

Up on a balcony, General Sunbeam paused mid-briefing, eyes narrowing as the holy light wavered. Behind him, Solardye took a call from Brightharbor, face set in a hard line.

"Something's walking in our sunlight," Solardye said.

Sunbeam didn't answer.

He felt it too.

Lunna — Lunargopa

In Lunargopa, half the city screens flipped to emergency broadcast mode at once.

Except it wasn't Lunar state media.

It was Blackwing's smile, filling every display, voice oozing through every speaker.

"Good evenin', Lunna," he said. "Lemme tell you what your 'heroes' been hidin'."

Lady Moonbeam watched from her frost-lit tower, jaw tightening as Moonwis scrambled to cut the signal.

The broadcast didn't end.

It multiplied.

Starrup — Aurealis Prime

Aurealis Prime's biotech labs reported a minor anomaly: a harmless-looking white mold inside a starforge coolant pipe.

Thirty minutes later, the pipe grew vertebrae.

Stardrifts of light stuttered in the sky as Starbeam raced toward the city in a green arc, already shouting orders into comms.

"Lock down all reactors. No data leaving local nodes. If you don't know who's sending a signal, you do not answer."

Nobody could hear the quiet wet sound inside the reactors as something old and necrotic woke up.

Galaxenchi — Shinsatsuki District

In Shinsatsuki District, time itself coughed.

Professor Galaxbeam paused over a projection table as three different future-scan paths blinked out at once.

Galaxadye appeared at his side, gold circuits bright. "We're losing predictive resolution over Westonglappa. And over us."

A new maroon glyph appeared on the edge of the time map like a stain.

Galaxbeam's eyes hardened.

"Get the Sanctum ready," he said. "Call Sunbeam, Moonbeam, Starbeam. This is no longer regional."

Up in orbit, the neutral "Orbitward Sanctum" began to warm its engines, slow thrusters preparing to hold a council of Absolute Leaders.

———

Back over Westonglappa, Darkwing watched the invisible lines of power stretch out from his conquered corridor toward every AES homeland.

He could not see Sunbeam lifting his head in Solastreya, or Lady Moonbeam freezing the floor under her feet in Lunargopa, or Starbeam racing toward Aurealis Prime, or Galaxbeam calling a secret summit in the sky.

He didn't need to.

He knew, with the bone-deep certainty of an Absolute Leader, that somewhere out there, four gods of light had just realized the same brutal thing:

They were about to be spread too thin.

Darkwing smiled, slow and sharp, and let the maroon pressure over Westonglappa thicken.

The next move was theirs.

If they made the wrong one, the map of Titanumas would never look the same again.

Westonglappa — Leblaela Rail Spine — Nightfall After "Recall"

The rail spine between Gledmont and the outer junctions of Agosvine had stopped behaving like infrastructure and started behaving like a living schedule—one written in maroon ink. Under the fractured gantries, Darkenedstride walked the central track with the calm, deliberate pace of someone reviewing a ledger, and each step pushed a hard pulse through the twisted metal that made platforms "sink" and corridors "loop" as if the city had decided certain paths were no longer valid. Darkenedstream worked the signal towers along Drumburn's approach, rethreading their guidance into false greens and perfect lies, while Darkenedye stood still with his eyes closed, listening to evacuation traffic like it was a confession.

"Sector C-7," Darkenedye said, voice flat. "All Star signatures withdrawn. Remaining life: civilian."

Darkenedstride didn't look up. "Remove the corridor."

He didn't have to raise his hand. Darkmole answered the order from below, bursting through a half-collapsed shelter near Inirross with denial claws that shredded steel supports as if they were paper ribs. The screams clipped off fast, swallowed by static and dust, and when the rubble settled, the only thing moving was the fog sliding in to occupy the empty space. Farther down the spine, Darkgrossness waded into a knot of Westonglappa ground troops and Star marines trying to hold a junction near Phehull, letting their emerald volleys flash harmlessly against the maroon aura around his body; he grabbed a trooper by the chestplate and squeezed with a slow contempt that didn't crush armor so much as delete permission. The soldier fell with his suit intact and his eyes gone blank, and Darkgrossness spat to the side like the moment bored him.

"Spine secured," he grunted.

Above them, the Star Regime's last coherent line held on a collapsing overpass, and it held the way disciplined people hold a door during a fire—long enough to keep others alive. Stargun anchored his stance and turned the bridge into a firing lane, each shot punching holes through denial growths that tried to climb the pylons; beside him, Starjew laced starlit bindings around fractured beams to keep the span from dropping outright, her jaw clenched as the fog pressed against every reinforcement like a slow hand testing locks. Starburst limped on a cracked support strut, gripping his hammer like a crutch and a promise, while Starperaldawn kept a shield dome flickering around retreating transports, her palms glowing as she forced the barrier to stay up despite the field trying to classify it as unauthorized.

At the rear, Starradye—helmet scuffed, circuitry dimmed, posture still sharp—watched the map on his visor update itself into a hostile geometry and made the call with the kind of steadiness that hurt.

"Anchor Line Two only," he ordered. "We stop trading lives for rails. Fall back to extraction points and take whoever still breathes."

Starburst's voice scraped through comms, stubborn even as pain made it thin. "If we leave Gledmont, we won't get it back."

Starradye's answer came immediately, not cruel, not dramatic—just final. "Then we don't get it back. Move."

When the last transport lifted away from the yards outside Gledmont, denial glyphs climbed the abandoned pylons like rot finally given air; the fog followed the departing engines for a moment as if memorizing their heat signature, then turned back toward the spine to settle in and make itself comfortable. Darkenedstride watched the evac lights vanish into cloud, keyed his channel once, and spoke as if he were closing a file.

"Leblaela sealed," he said. "Star presence reduced. Local resistance... negligible."

He paused, eyes traveling over the silent platforms and the bodies left where the loops had ended them. "Negligible and irrelevant."

———

Orbitward Sanctum — High Orbit Above Titanumas

The Orbitward Sanctum warmed its thrusters like a cathedral preparing to lift, and when the four Absolute Leaders arrived, the air inside the council chamber tightened with the pressure of restrained power. Professor Galaxbeam stood at the center projection, gold light mapping the continents into a ring of fragile order, and he didn't waste breath on ceremony; he opened with a gesture that snapped the model into motion, showing Westonglappa's corridors pulsing maroon where they had once been neutral lines.

"We have entered a phase where distance no longer protects us," Galaxbeam said, voice calm in a way that made it sharper. "Westonglappa was the staging ground. The next movement is aimed at our homelands."

Starbeam didn't sit. He moved along the edge of the table like a man tracking supply routes in his head, green eyes reflecting the hologram's flicker. "Then we reinforce the choke points and cut their mobility. If Darkenedstride treats Leblaela like a spine, we sever the joints. I want orbital cargo redirected to Starrup's emergency depots and Westonglappa's remaining friendly ports—now."

Across from him, Lady Moonbeam stood with her hands folded, blue radiance kept on a tight leash; she looked like still water right before it freezes. "Reinforcements do nothing if the first battle happens inside people's minds. Blackwing has already turned screens into weapons before. If Lunna becomes a broadcast puppet, we spend the rest of this war fighting our own citizens' panic."

General Sunbeam leaned forward, orange light flaring briefly along his shoulders before he forced it down. "And if Sollarisca loses its core cities, we lose our ability to shelter anyone at all. Westonglappa is flooding refugees into every border state we still hold; if Shadowwing touches our sunlight—if he makes our streets unreliable—we bleed stability in the one place that has to stay warm."

Starbeam's mouth twitched, not quite a smile, more like disbelief sharpened into focus. "So which homeland do we let take the first hit?"

Moonbeam's gaze cut to him like ice sliding across stone. "We don't let anything."

Galaxbeam lifted one hand, and the room obeyed him the way physics obeys a calculation. "Listen," he said, and the projection shifted—four simultaneous tremors radiating across Sollarisca, Lunna, Starrup, and Galaxenchi. "We will respond, but we respond as leaders, not as four separate storms. You will take your decisions and you will take them fast. If we hesitate, BRD sets the tempo."

Sunbeam's fist tightened on the table edge. "Then give the order."

Galaxbeam's eyes hardened, gold circuits brightening. "Prepare to split—without becoming isolated. Starbeam, you maintain logistics and counter-routing; Moonbeam, you lock your information war before it becomes a civil collapse; Sunbeam, you hold the sunline and keep our shelters functioning; I will maintain orbit, predictive recalibration, and emergency extraction authority. We move as one alliance even while our bodies separate."

For a beat, none of them spoke, and in that silence the Sanctum felt less like a safe room and more like a blade's edge. Then Moonbeam exhaled once and nodded.

"Then we meet them," she said quietly. "Everywhere."

———

Westonglappa — Auttumotto Border Corridor — Same Night

Down on the overrun interchange, maroon clouds pressed low enough to make the wrecked highway feel like a tunnel, and Lord Darkwing stood in that pressure as if he enjoyed how it made the world smaller. His device hummed in his palm—sigils crawling like living notifications—and when he spoke, his voice didn't travel so much as slam itself into distant skies.

"THIS IS DARKWING," he thundered. "REPORT."

The feed split cleanly into three.

Blackwing appeared first, lounging on the smoking deck of a captured carrier, boots on a Solar emblem, grin wide and lazy in that way that never meant peace. "Yo," he drawled. "Your joint fleet's a mess. Pilots tryna be heroes, ships tryna act brave—everybody out here auditioning for a tragedy."

Behind him, Blackenstorm moved with efficient cruelty, stamping compliance marks across deck plating while Blackenstride and Blackenstream cut across the carrier's systems like they owned the language of machines. Blackwing's eyes gleamed as he leaned closer to his camera. "Lunna's gonna hear me soon, too. I got Blackenpuff warmed up."

The second window was nearly empty—just low light, a shift of fabric, and then the outline of Shadowwing standing in midair like gravity had forgotten him. He didn't speak. He raised one gloved hand and made a short, precise gesture, and the gesture carried a weight that translated itself into meaning: airspace denied, sightlines compromised, the world quietly becoming untrustworthy. Behind the veil, shapes moved—Shadowastream, Shadowastorm, Shadowstealth, Shadowcrypt, Shadowhowl, Shadowveil—silent signatures slipping into formation as if they were part of Shadowwing's shadow.

The third window flicked on with clinical clarity. Doctor Deathwing stood against the pale glow of ships collapsing into the trench behind him, cross-shaped pupils bright, expression unchanged by the violence happening at his back. At his side, Deathendye waited like an assistant awaiting permission to cut, while Deathplague, Deathrot, and Deathmold stood in stillness that felt like patience rather than restraint.

"Naval assets degraded," Deathwing reported. "Survivors scattered. Unified command dissolving."

Darkwing's lips curled. "GOOD," he barked, and the maroon sky over Auttumotto seemed to answer him with a low thrum. "KEEP HITTING ANYTHING THAT FLOATS OR FLIES, BUT LISTEN CLOSE. WESTONGGLAPPA IS OUR STAGE. I WANT THEIR HOMELANDS SHAKING AT THE SAME TIME."

Blackwing laughed softly, delighted. "Same hour? You tryna make it poetic."

Shadowwing's feed offered a slow nod that was almost too small to be seen, which somehow made it worse.

Deathwing's voice stayed level. "Coordinated homeland strikes increase systemic destabilization probability."

"I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR NUMBERS," Darkwing roared, cutting him off with a violent tilt of his head. "I CARE THAT THEY FEEL IT. I CARE THAT THEY LOOK UP AND REALIZE THE SKY AIN'T THEIRS."

He snapped the device shut, and the maroon pressure thickened like applause.

———

Across Titanumas — First Ripples

In Lunna, the first screens flipped before the alarms finished loading. Moonwis and Moonwisdom were already at their consoles, hands moving fast, eyes scanning for intrusion vectors, when every public display in Lunargopa filled with Blackwing's smile—too close, too confident, as if he were standing in the city's living room.

"Good evenin', Lunna," Blackwing purred through a thousand speakers. "Y'all miss me? 'Cause I been thinkin' about you."

Lady Moonbeam didn't shout. She didn't flinch. She stepped onto the frost-lit platform of her tower, lifted her hand, and the broadcast infrastructure below her tightened as pipes tightened under sudden cold; audio lagged, visuals stuttered, and for one clean second—one blessed second—the city heard only the sound of its own breathing.

Moonwis swallowed and looked up at her. "My Queen... we can't out-volume him."

Moonbeam's eyes narrowed, blue light sharpening. "Then we don't compete with noise. We take back silence. Cut his rhythm. Make his lies expensive."

In Sollarisca, dawn rituals began as usual in Solastreya, and the sacred flame lit with steady orange—until the shadows on the amphitheater steps failed to match the bodies casting them. A priest's silhouette leaned the wrong way. A banner's shade snapped like a flag in wind that didn't exist. Sunbeam paused mid-briefing, felt the hair on his arms lift, and turned his head toward the sun as if daring it to betray him.

Solardye approached with a secured device in hand, face set hard. "Reports from perimeter districts," he said. "Patrols are seeing reflections that arrive late. Street cameras are recording crowds where there are none."

Sunbeam's voice came low, protective fury compressed into a single line. "Shadowwing is here."

He didn't surge into the sky. He didn't waste power on spectacle. He pointed, once, and every Solar unit within earshot tightened their formation like a shield wall. "Verified signals only," Sunbeam ordered. "No one moves alone. If your shadow behaves wrong, you report it and you stay with your squad."

In Starrup, the first anomaly looked harmless in a biotech readout—an off-color smear inside a coolant pipe, a sensor tick that suggested mild contamination. Then a containment door sealed itself and refused to recognize the engineers standing outside it, as if it had learned a new definition of "authorized." Starbeam arrived at the outer command level of Aurealis Prime with green light cutting behind him, and his voice hit the comms with the bite of a man who hated how much he understood what was happening.

"Lock down all reactors," he snapped. "No external data. No automated repairs. If a machine offers you a shortcut, you treat it like a mouth."

On the lower decks, Deathplague and Deathrot moved through maintenance corridors like a diagnosis given legs, leaving pale violet residue where metal began to soften into brittle bone; Deathmold worked quietly at intake vents, feeding spores into filtration systems with the patience of something that did not need to hurry. Above it all, Deathwing watched through a living relay and spoke to Deathendye without emotion.

"Convert infrastructure into carriers," he said. "Avoid premature collapse. Let the city keep functioning long enough to spread itself."

In Galaxenchi, time coughed. Not a dramatic tear, not a visible rift—just a sudden wrongness in the predictive map, a handful of futures blinking out like lights in a corridor. Professor Galaxbeam stood over the projection table and stared at a maroon glyph that had appeared on the edge of the time lattice like a stain refusing to be erased.

Galaxadye materialized beside him, gold circuits bright, breath steady. "We're losing predictive resolution," he said. "Not only over Westonglappa. Over us."

A maroon fissure opened in the Shinsatsuki air without warning, and Darkenedstorm stepped through it as if he had been invited, his presence dragging the room's temperature down by pure authority. Behind him came the Darkened Regime's chosen hands—Darkabismaro with ritual calm, Darkgrossness with brute certainty, Darkmorvado with scarred intent—moving toward memory temples with the quiet confidence of men filing archives rather than desecrating them.

Galaxbeam's voice sharpened into command. "Activate Sanctum protocols. Notify Sunbeam, Moonbeam, Starbeam. Full alliance posture."

Galaxadye's jaw tightened. "They timed this."

Galaxbeam didn't look away from the maroon glyph. "Then we learn their timing," he said, and the gold light in his eyes flared like a calculation reaching its conclusion. "And we break it."

———

Back in Westonglappa, over the seized Auttumotto corridor, Darkwing felt the invisible lines of power stretch outward, felt the distant reactions ripple through the world like tremors through bone, and he smiled with slow satisfaction as if he were listening to a crowd finally understand the performance had started. He raised his chin into the maroon pressure and spoke to no one in particular—except the whole planet.

"NOW," he growled. "MOVE."

Westonglappa — Auttumotto Border Corridor — Minutes After "MOVE"

The maroon pressure over the interchange tightened until the wrecked highway felt like a lid being pressed down on a boiling pot. Denial squads moved under it with the comfort of creatures born in stormlight that hated breathing room; Darkened vehicles idled in neat, obedient rows, their engines purring like restraints rather than machines, while the seized corridor's signage flickered through false permissions—EXIT, SAFE, AUTHORIZED—each word a lie that still managed to convince a few desperate eyes.

Lord Darkwing stood at the center of it all as if he'd built the weather himself. He didn't pace. He didn't need to. The corridor already behaved like his temper: narrowing, concentrating, daring the world to argue. When his device chirped with incoming confirmations—Blackened compliance marks, Shadow corridor locks, Death conversion progress—he shut it off without looking, like a man turning down background music.

"WESTONGGLAPPA'S NOT A PRIZE," he said to the Darkened squads gathered below him. His voice hit armor and asphalt with the weight of a decree. "IT'S A THROAT."

He lifted his chin toward the distant grid of Leblaela, where fractured gantries stitched the rail spine into the night.

"AND I'M ABOUT TO SQUEEZE."

Westonglappa — Leblaela State — Rail Spine Between Gledmont and Agosvine — Same Night

The rail spine kept working even as it died. It carried denial the way an artery carries blood, and every pulse Darkenedstride sent into the track made the city's geometry refresh into a harsher version of itself. Somewhere downline, a platform that had supported evac families an hour ago "reclassified" into a sink; steel moaned, then folded inward, then vanished beneath the fog like it had never been there. The denial didn't rush. It didn't have to. It had time, and it had the map.

Starradye's counterorder came in on a sealed Star channel that sounded like grit under a blade.

"Anchor Line Two is not a retreat route," he said, eyes locked on the hostile geometry crawling across his visor. "It's a scar. We cut it deep enough that it can't heal fast."

Above him, Stargun planted his boots on a shattered segment of overpass and sighted down the rail spine as if he were staring through a scope at the future. Starjew stood a step behind, palms lit, binding fractured beams together in starlit knots that trembled under denial pressure but refused to snap; Starperaldawn widened her shield dome to cover the evac loaders, shoulders tense and teeth clenched as the fog leaned against her barrier like a judge testing a forged signature. Starburst dragged his hammer along the metal with a scraping snarl, every step stubborn, every breath the kind that says pain can wait until after the mission.

Darkenedstream's false greens bloomed across nearby signal towers, polite and inviting in the way a trap is inviting, and the moment a Star Marine squad tried to pivot toward the "safe" lane, Darkenedye's voice cut through maroon comms—flat, bored, precise.

"Sector D-3 is still populated," he said. "They are still running."

Darkenedstride's answer didn't come with excitement. It came with procedure.

"Then remove D-3," he replied, and his boot came down on the rail with a short, hard pulse that felt like a stamp on paperwork.

The ground answered.

Darkmole erupted near Inirross in a burst of shredded steel supports and denial claws, the shelter above him failing as if gravity had been reassigned to "mandatory." Star Marines fired into the dust, emerald rounds cutting clean lines through fog, but their shots kept arriving a breath late—signal timings rewritten, aim points shifted, permission to hit revoked at the last instant. Darkmole didn't chase. He carved. He opened space for the denial to move into and settle.

Starjew's bindings snapped tight, starlight lacing across collapsing beams in a desperate lattice. "Hold," he hissed through gritted teeth, pushing power into structure that the city itself was trying to forget.

Stargun didn't look back. "I'm holding," he growled, and his next volley punched through a denial growth crawling up the nearest pylon, blasting it into shimmering dust that tried to re-form and couldn't decide which shape it was allowed to be.

Then Darkgrossness waded into the junction near Phehull with the patience of a man walking through rain. Emerald volleys hit his maroon aura and burned out without argument. He grabbed a Star Marine by the chestplate, squeezed slowly, and the soldier's body didn't break—his posture did. The suit stayed intact. The eyes emptied. The will collapsed like a bridge losing its last bolt.

"Spine secured," Darkgrossness grunted, spitting to the side as if the line offended him by being necessary.

Starburst's rage flared hot and immediate. "GET OFF MY—" he started, and lunged, hammer rising.

The denial struck him first.

It wasn't a clean hit; it was a reclassification. The hammer's arc stuttered mid-swing like the air had denied it room, and Starburst took the backlash straight into his ribs, armor flashing, breath ripping out of him in a harsh, wet cough. He didn't fall, but the limp became real, the kind that stays.

Starradye saw it and made the decision with that same steady cruelty he'd used earlier.

"Starburst, you're done," he ordered.

Starburst barked a laugh that sounded like pain. "I'm still—"

"You're still breathing," Starradye cut in. "That's the point. Fall back under Starperaldawn's dome. Stargun, keep the lane open. Starjew, break the span on my mark."

Darkenedstride finally turned his head, gaze lifting toward the overpass where Starradye stood. For the first time all night, his expression showed something like interest, as if he'd spotted a negotiator who knew the rules.

"A Supreme Commander who can abandon territory," Darkenedstride said, voice calm. "You're rarer than the rails you're bleeding over."

Starradye's visor flickered as the map tried to turn against him again. He didn't blink.

"I'm not abandoning it," he replied. "I'm making you pay for it."

His hand cut down.

Starjew released the bindings at the exact wrong moment—wrong for physics, wrong for the bridge, wrong for any city that still loved itself—and the overpass dropped in a controlled collapse, starlight bracing the fall long enough to send denial growth and Darkened squads tumbling into the newly opened void. The span hit the rail spine with a thunderous impact that shook the gantries and snapped a string of signal towers into sparks.

For a heartbeat, the fog hesitated.

For that heartbeat, evac loaders surged.

For that heartbeat, Star Marines got families onto transports.

Darkenedstride staggered one half-step, maroon aura rippling where the collapse had forced a rare interruption in the spine's rhythm. Starradye's follow-up came like a blade drawn across an artery: a tight burst of emerald routing-light aimed not at flesh, but at the denial timetable itself—cutting a segment out of the schedule.

Darkenedstride's jaw tightened. He didn't roar. He didn't panic.

He withdrew.

Not far—just far enough that the spine could re-knit behind him.

And then the maroon pressure changed.

It arrived before the voice did, the way thunder arrives before you understand you've been struck. The gantries creaked. The fog deepened. The rail spine's denial stopped feeling like administration and started feeling like worship.

Darkwing stepped onto the track from the direction of Agosvine without any sign of travel—just presence, absolute and heavy, as if Westonglappa itself had been waiting to be told how to breathe. His eyes flicked once over the fracture points, the shattered towers, the evac lights escaping under Starperaldawn's dome.

He smiled like he'd found a flaw in someone else's design.

"CUTE," he said, and the word came out like a threat.

Starradye's blood went cold. He knew the hierarchy the way he knew gravity. He could fight Darkenedstride. He could trade blows with Darkenedstream. He could survive Darkgrossness long enough to save others.

He could not win here.

"Extraction now," he snapped. "All units—NOW."

Starperaldawn's dome contracted, hardening, dragging the last evac team into its protection as Darkwing lifted one hand like a conductor raising a baton. The denial answered him in a full-body shudder. Tracks warped. Platforms sank. Corridors looped.

Stargun tried to keep firing lanes open, but the skyline itself kept "moving" sideways, turning sightlines into spirals. Starjew's bindings flared again, struggling to hold structure against a city that had decided structure was optional.

Darkwing didn't chase them with speed. He chased them with certainty.

"RUN," he thundered, and the word slammed into the rail spine so hard that the nearest pylon fractured in place. "RUN AND TELL 'EM YOU SAW THE END OF YOUR MAP."

Westonglappa — Offshore Extraction Corridor — Minutes Later

The Star transports punched upward into cloud cover under flickering shields and trailing sparks. Inside the lead craft, Starburst sat braced against a bulkhead, breathing shallow, refusing to look weak even while his hands trembled. Starradye stood over him with the rigid calm of a commander who'd just lost a city and kept the people anyway.

"We cut the timetable," Starjew said quietly, voice raw. "Not enough, but... we cut it."

Starradye nodded once. "Enough to buy minutes."

Stargun's jaw flexed. "Minutes don't win wars."

"No," Starradye answered. "But they keep us alive long enough to let an Absolute Leader do it."

Orbitward Sanctum — Same Night

The Sanctum's chamber lights dimmed as the projection updated in violent waves—four homelands lit with alarms, Westonglappa pulsing maroon, and the ocean lanes snarled with black, shadow, and violet interference. Professor Galaxbeam stood unmoving at the center, gold circuits bright, eyes fixed on the timing pattern that kept repeating with insulting precision.

Sunbeam's voice came low, sharp. "Shadowwing is touching our sunlight."

Moonbeam's reply was quieter, colder. "Blackwing is touching my citizens."

Starbeam's gaze didn't leave the Starrup readout, where reactor systems flashed with wrong permissions and medical quarantines started eating themselves. "Deathwing is teaching our machines to lie."

Galaxbeam lifted a hand, and the room obeyed.

"Then we stop answering separately," he said, and his calm carried the edge of a verdict. "We answer in force."

Across Titanumas — Second Wave Response

Sollarisca — Solisport to Solarpolisca — Pre-Dawn

Solar carriers rode low over the coast, orange contrails slicing fog as if cutting lanes through panic. From their bellies, landing ramps opened and Sun Marines poured out in disciplined lines, Sun Guards riding behind them on heat-shielded transports that threw shimmering air like mirages. Onshore, Shadow corridors tried to bloom—silent, slick pathways where the map forgot to warn you—but Solardye's voice snapped across Solar comms with a commander's bite.

"Heat-check your shadows," he ordered. "If your reflection lags, you lock arms and you hold."

The first Shadow skimmers hit the sand without a splash. Shadow soldiers rose out of them like smoke choosing a shape, and behind them, Shadowastream traced a corridor through the air with two fingers, turning a straight street into a drifting maze that funneled Sun Marines into kill angles.

General Sunbeam arrived above the waterfront in a surge of orange radiance, boots stopping on nothing, eyes narrowed as he watched the sunlight misbehave.

On the rooftop opposite, Shadowwing stood in silence, cloak settling like spilled ink, one gloved hand lifting in a small gesture that made the shadows below thicken and lean.

Sunbeam's voice didn't boom. It cut.

"Enough," he said.

He dropped.

The impact sent a solar shockwave across the dockyard, ripping through the nearest shadow corridor like a flare through fog. Gunfire erupted in its wake—Sun Soldiers laying down orange tracer lines while Shadow soldiers answered with muted, near-silent bursts that hit like edits to reality. Solar vehicles rolled off transport ramps, heat cannons swiveling, while Shadowstealth and Shadowcrypt slipped between muzzle flashes, severing squads that drifted an inch too far from formation.

Sunbeam and Shadowwing met above the main avenue without words from one side—only motion. Shadowwing's cloak snapped, a corridor folding toward Sunbeam like a blade; Sunbeam burned through it, taking the hit across his shoulder with a flare of orange sparks and returning a solar strike that forced Shadowwing's first real recoil of the night, cloak rippling as if it had felt pain and didn't appreciate being reminded.

Shadowwing's head tilted. A short sign.

Withdraw the corridor.

The shadows didn't vanish. They repositioned. The assault didn't end; it slid sideways, leaving Sollarisca intact, but unsettled—streets still bright, and still untrustworthy.

Lunna — Lunargopa Waterfront — Morning

Blackened landing craft came in low and loud, black hulls skimming the water like thrown knives. Their ramps slammed down and Black Soldiers surged out with Black Marines behind them, hauling compliance rigs and billboard-hacking pylons that started rewriting public screens before the first shots were even traded. Blackenstorm hit the pier like a wrecking stamp, compliance seals snapping onto Lunar barricades; Blackenstride and Blackenstream moved with him, turning Lunar infrastructure into a debate it couldn't win.

Above the waterfront, every screen still showed Blackwing's grin.

"Aw, c'mon," his voice purred through a thousand speakers. "Don't act shy now. I brought company."

Lady Moonbeam stepped onto the edge of the harbor wall, blue radiance rising around her like a tide preparing to freeze. Moonwis and Moonwisdom worked behind her at a hardened relay station, fingers flying, ripping signal pathways out of the air as if tearing wires out of a wall.

Moonbeam's voice carried through the cold like command given shape. "Moon Marines. Lock the pier. Icebreakers, cut their hulls off the water. No one lets them turn my city into an audience."

Lunar gunfire snapped bright against black armor. Explosions kicked spray into the air as Lunar vehicles—ice-plated carriers and frost artillery crawlers—rolled into position, firing concentrated cold that made Blackened ramps stick, then crack, then shear. Blackenpuff appeared where she shouldn't have been—already behind a broadcast pylon, gum in her mouth, eyes bright with mischief—until Moonwisdom's hand slammed a counter-signal through the grid and the pylon screamed static, its compliance script collapsing into nonsense.

Blackwing descended through the smoke with amused patience, coat snapping, boots touching the pier as if he owned it.

Moonbeam met him there, blue light sharpening.

He spread his hands. "You really gonna fight me in front of your people? That's bold."

Moonbeam didn't raise her voice. "It's honest."

Their clash turned the pier into a storm—black pressure and blue ice colliding hard enough to fracture concrete and throw vehicles sideways. Blackwing's grin faltered when Moonbeam's frost caught his ribs with a clean, punishing hit that didn't just hurt—it forced him to acknowledge she could. His next step came heavier, his breath tighter, and his eyes narrowed into something meaner than comedy.

"Aight," he muttered, wiping at his mouth with his thumb. "That's how you wanna play."

Moonbeam leaned in, eyes bright as winter. "Leave."

Blackwing's smile returned, thinner now. "Not today."

He snapped his fingers, and Blackenstorm threw a compliance shock through the pier, buying Blackwing half a second of space. Blackwing used it—retreating upward in a black arc, voice still playing smooth even as his posture tightened with injury.

"Lunna got teeth," he called down. "I respect that. I'm still comin' back."

Below him, Blackenpuff's crew dragged their hacked pylons back toward the landing craft under covering fire, and the Blackened wave pulled off the pier before the Lunar icebreakers could seal the water into a trap.

Lunna held.

Barely.

Starrup — Starrengrade Biotech Annex (Codename: "Aurealis Prime") — Midday

Starbeam arrived to a city that still looked clean—white towers, green-lit transit spines, orderly streets—while inside the walls, the wrong permissions crawled like mold through code. Maintenance doors sealed against their own engineers. Auto-repair drones began "fixing" the wrong things. A coolant pipe flexed once and grew a pale, vertebra-like ridge, as if the city's machine body had decided to become flesh.

Deathendye stood at the edge of a shattered service road, watching Star soldiers scramble into quarantine positions with the quiet patience of a man waiting for a fever to peak. Behind him, Deathplague and Deathrot moved through the underlevels, leaving violet residue where steel softened into brittle bone; Deathmold worked intake vents with slow precision, feeding spores into filtration like a prayer; Deathshroud watched without blinking, the cross-shaped glow in his eyes reflecting clean architecture he fully intended to corrupt.

Doctor Deathwing rose onto the plaza in front of them as if the ocean itself had delivered him there.

"Containment is inefficient," he said calmly. "Conversion is faster."

Starbeam's answer came with no theatrics—only a hand raised, a green radiance snapping outward into a grid that locked down streets, sealed vents, and cut off entire transit blocks like a surgeon isolating infected tissue.

"You don't get my city," Starbeam said, voice cold and exact. "You don't get my machines. You don't get my people."

Then the shooting started.

Star Soldiers and Star Marines fired in disciplined arcs, emerald rounds tearing through reanimated maintenance rigs that lurched forward on bone-grown joints. Star vehicles—sleek, green-lit carriers—rolled off emergency ramps, targeting conversion nodes with precision blasts that turned violet growth to ash. Death soldiers answered from behind necrotic cover, their rounds hissing with biochemical rot that tried to turn barriers into nutrient.

Starbeam and Deathwing collided above the biotech annex, green and violet light grinding against each other hard enough to make the air scream. Deathwing's strike came clinical, intended to cut function; Starbeam's came surgical, intended to isolate and remove. When Starbeam's grid flared and locked Deathwing's conversion wave inside a sealed corridor, the violet surge snapped back on itself with a violent recoil that finally forced Deathwing's posture to shift—subtle, but real.

Deathwing didn't rage. He evaluated.

"Retreat the elites," he said to Deathendye without changing tone. "The vector is compromised."

Deathendye obeyed instantly. Deathplague, Deathrot, Deathmold, and Deathshroud withdrew into the underlevels, leaving behind booby-traps of living residue that would keep trying to convert anything foolish enough to touch it.

Starbeam landed hard, one knee down, breathing tight. The win cost him. His green radiance flickered at the edges as if his body itself was trying to negotiate rest.

He stood anyway.

Galaxenchi — Memory District Adjacent to Tokinoshiro — Evening

A maroon fissure opened in the air like a bureaucratic wound, and Darkenedstorm stepped through with Darkabismaro and Darkmorvado at his back, Darkgrossness moving beside them like a guarantee that violence would be simple if paperwork failed. They didn't sprint. They walked toward the memory archives with the confidence of men who believed history belonged to whoever stamped it last.

Galaxadye met them in the archive courtyard, gold circuits bright, stance steady. Behind him, Galaxastream and Galaxastride formed a defensive line, their presence making the air feel measured again, as if time remembered its discipline.

Darkenedstorm's gaze swept them once. "Predictive resolution is down," he said, voice calm. "You can't see around this."

Galaxadye's answer came sharp. "Then I'll see through you."

The battle hit the courtyard like a clock shattering—gold light flaring, maroon denial pushing, archive pylons screaming under conflicting permissions. Galaxadye took the brunt of Darkenedstorm's first denial wave and held, teeth clenched as gold radiance stabilized the space; Galaxastream cut false routes out of the air like pruning dead branches; Galaxastride slammed a counter-geometry into the ground that forced the maroon fissure to narrow.

Darkgrossness tried to break the line by force, stepping into gold light with that same contempt he'd shown on the rail spine, but Galaxastride met him with a calculated strike that sent maroon aura rippling and forced him one step back—one step, and then another, as if even his certainty had limits under disciplined time.

Above the archives, the Orbitward Sanctum's gold glow intensified.

Professor Galaxbeam's voice didn't echo. It arrived inside the air itself, calm enough to terrify.

"Close the fissure," he ordered.

The gold grid tightened. The maroon stain fought, then thinned, then snapped shut with a sound like a book being slammed closed.

Darkenedstorm staggered—rare, visible—and Darkabismaro caught him by the arm. Darkmorvado's eyes flashed toward the sealed space with a quiet fury, but he didn't argue. They withdrew through a secondary tear that Galaxbeam allowed to exist for exactly one breath, then erased.

Westonglappa — Leblaela Rail Spine — Late Night

The Star transports cleared the cloud layer and angled toward friendly airspace, shields flickering. Behind them, Leblaela's spine continued to pulse maroon—wounded, interrupted, but still occupied.

On the rail below, Darkenedstride stood with one hand pressed briefly to his side where the earlier collapse had forced an injury he couldn't ignore. Darkwing watched him the way a superior watches a subordinate who has disappointed him by being human.

"You LET 'EM CUT YOUR TIMETABLE," Darkwing said, voice low and volcanic.

Darkenedstride's eyes didn't drop. "They paid for the minutes," he replied. "We still hold the spine."

Darkwing's smile returned, sharp and pleased, as if the answer satisfied him enough to delay punishment.

"GOOD," he said. "BECAUSE THEY JUST LEARNED WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO FIGHT US EVERYWHERE."

He turned his gaze toward the horizon, toward seas still burning with wreckage and skies still threaded with uneasy shadows.

"AND NOW THEY GET TO DO IT AGAIN."

The order didn't echo; it propagated. In the seconds after Darkwing's voice slammed into the corridor air, the maroon pressure over Auttumotto tightened as if the continent itself had received a new law, and far away the homelands felt it as a change in rhythm—alerts arriving half a breath too late, security protocols tripping over definitions they'd never had to question. In Westonglappa, the occupied interchange roared to life with convoy movement: Darkened soldiers filing into lanes with ritual discipline, denial-marked carriers dragging armor on heavy chains, and recovery cranes lifting shattered barricades as if clearing a stage for the next act. Westonglappa defenders—what remained of them—fired from the outer ramps in short bursts of desperate emerald and standard ballistic, but their rounds met a haze that treated impact like paperwork: denied, returned, dismissed. Darkwing watched the muzzle flashes from a broken overpass and laughed with his whole chest, the sound punching through the fog like a hammer. "YES—KEEP TRYIN'," he shouted, then dragged his maroon demonic axe across the asphalt in a slow arc that made the road scream. The blade didn't merely gouge concrete; it wrote a rule into it. A line of highway barriers folded inward as if embarrassed to stand, an entire row of portable shields sank into the ground like they'd been reclassified as debris, and the defenders on that line stumbled when the world under their boots stopped agreeing to be solid.

Up the coast and across the lanes the joint fleet had once protected, Blackened silhouettes peeled out of smoke and cloud, sliding in low and fast on captured deckspace and stolen air corridors. The first landing that mattered wasn't loud; it was confident. In Lunargopa, public screens stayed hijacked long enough for civilians to see the black sigils bloom at the edges like mold creeping into a clean house, and then the city felt the second hit—armored transports arriving at the outer districts with black compliance seals painted onto their hulls, ramps dropping while Black soldiers poured out in tight formation. Blackenpuff's arrival had the casual cruelty of someone stepping into a party uninvited and deciding the music now belonged to her; she walked through her own portal-splatter like it was a doorway she'd paid rent on, rolled her shoulders, and spoke into the city's hacked speaker grid with a smile that sounded expensive. "Lunargopa," Blackenpuff purred, "y'all got a lotta pretty lights for a place that scares so easy." Behind Blackenpuff, Blackcraven and Blacknyrix fanned out with the kind of calm that made panicked people run the wrong way, while Blackstrike moved like a knife that had learned how to wear a person's shape. Sirens tried to rise; the audio cut. Evac instructions tried to load; they rewrote themselves into contradictions. Civilians stared at their phones and watched routes update into loops.

Lady Moonbeam met that breach at street level, not because she needed to prove anything, but because the city needed to see a center that didn't flinch. Moon Soldiers and Moon Marines formed a cold wall at the plaza approaches, ice-pattern sigils blooming across pavement, and the air turned razor-clean as her blue aura cooled the whole district into clarity. Moonwis and Moonwisdom worked behind her, fingers moving like musicians cutting a hostile melody out of the air; each time the screens tried to reassert Blackwing's grin, their counter-signal punched through with hard timestamps and verified civic instructions. Moonbeam's voice carried through the formation without shouting, and every soldier straightened like they'd been handed a spine. "Hold your line. Do not chase the noise," she ordered. Then she looked directly at Blackenpuff, as if the distance between them was a small insult. "You wanted the city to listen to you," Moonbeam said, calm enough to be frightening. "Now it's listening to me." Blackenpuff answered with a black-laced gesture that snapped a cluster of streetlights into compliance and tried to turn the plaza into a broadcast amplifier. Moonbeam raised one hand, and the amplifier froze mid-beat—sound trapped in ice, speakers silenced by simple cold authority. The first exchange of power hit like anime thunder without needing narration: black sigils slamming forward, blue radiance swallowing the edges, civilians ducking behind storefront pillars while Moon Soldiers opened fire in disciplined volleys and Black soldiers returned it with harsher angles, bullets and energy cutting the air into stuttering lines. When Blackenpuff pushed too hard and tried to step into Moonbeam's aura to rewrite her barrier as "unauthorized," Moonbeam let her get close enough to regret it—one clean flare of lunar radiance, one surge of freezing pressure, and Blackenpuff staggered back, boots skidding, black smoke ripping off her jacket like it had been burned away by cold. Blackenpuff's grin twitched, and for the first time it looked forced. "A'ight," she hissed, low, and snapped her hand to signal withdrawal before the wound became a collapse. Blackcraven and Blacknyrix threw smoke fields and dragged their package out of the kill-zone while Blackstrike covered the retreat with vicious precision, leaving behind a city that was bruised, shaken, and still standing—exactly the kind of outcome Moonbeam needed and Blackwing could still exploit.

In Solastreya, sunlight became a liability. It still shone, still warmed marble, still lit banners, but the shadows underneath began to detach by degrees: half a beat late, half a step wrong, leaning where bodies did not. Shadowwing did not announce an invasion; Shadowwing made the city doubt its own sensory truth, and that doubt was the first casualty. Shadowastream led the motion that followed—silent shapes slipping through alleys and over rooftops where Solar patrols swore the streets were empty, then realized their instruments were honest but incomplete. Sunbeam's response was immediate and operational, the way a commander responds when the battlefield refuses to be theatrical: he tightened the formations, restricted movement to verified corridors, and turned the city into a grid of mutual confirmation. "No solos," Sunbeam commanded, orange light simmering along his sleeves like restrained fire. "If your reflection lies to you, you don't argue with it—you report it and you lock shields." Sun Soldiers and Sun Rangers formed up at intersection nodes, armored transports rolling in to block off the worst districts, while Solar gunfire cracked down the lanes in controlled bursts to flush shadows out of hiding. Shadowstealth and Shadowcrypt tested that perimeter like blades tapping armor for seams; Shadowhowl tried to pull a squad into a quiet corridor that didn't exist on any map. Sunbeam stepped into the corridor anyway, not because he was reckless, but because fear spreads faster when leaders refuse to look at it. His orange aura surged, the air shimmering with heat mirage, and the false corridor buckled under light that didn't ask permission to be real. "You don't get my streets," Sunbeam said, voice low and unyielding. "You don't get my people." Shadowastream answered by moving the shadows again—rearranging sightlines so the Solar line would fire at ghosts if they weren't careful. Solastreya became a war of discipline and verification under a sun that suddenly felt like it needed to be guarded, and when Shadowwing's presence pressed closer—felt rather than seen—Sunbeam didn't chase the king of silence into his own rules. He held the city, held the shelters, held the panic down, and forced the shadow package to take what it could and slip away before it got pinned into a fight it couldn't win.

Aurealis Prime did not explode at first. It converted. Sirens wailed in sterile corridors while machines made wet, wrong sounds behind sealed panels, and Starbeam arrived with the kind of anger that looked like focus. "Hard shutdown," he ordered the moment he saw the readouts. "Manual control only. If it repairs itself, you treat it like a mouth." Star Soldiers and Star Marines deployed around biotech districts and reactor rings, heavy green escorts rolling through the streets to block off vector routes while engineers evacuated civilians through decontamination tunnels. On the shoreline approaches and industrial waterways, bone-marked landing craft slid into place—Death's logistics arriving quiet and unavoidable—and Deathadye stood at the head of the formation like a surgeon who had already decided where to cut. Deathplague, Deathrot, and Deathmold moved behind in patient stillness, and every place they passed gained a new smell: clean metal turning sour. Starbeam met the leading edge with a wall of green radiance and a grid of suppressive fire—bright rounds punching into undead plating, eco-tech pylons blooming to scrub air and seal vents—yet the infection behaved like strategy rather than sickness. Where Starbeam's forces burned one pathway clean, a secondary system rerouted the flow. Where Starbeam sealed one corridor, the vents learned to breathe through another. Deathwing's voice came through a living relay with clinical calm, instructing the operation as if reading from a chart. "Maintain functionality. Spread through convenience," Deathwing said, and Deathadye complied with cold precision, pulling the package back whenever the Star counterfire threatened to become a true kill. The battle inside Aurealis Prime became a grinding exchange of attrition—gunfire on bridges, green explosions under elevated labs, Star armored vehicles ramming infected walkers off the boulevard, and Starbeam cutting entire districts off from power to deny the conversion its favorite food. When the costs climbed and the risk of a catastrophic breach rose, Starbeam made a decision that felt like ripping out a city's heart to save its body: he ordered a controlled withdrawal from one biotech ring, sealed it behind layered starlight locks, and let the quarantine wall become a new front line. Deathadye withdrew with samples and intact carriers rather than a collapse, and that restraint was its own kind of horror—proof that Death's leadership did not need spectacle to win time.

In Shinsatsuki District, the maroon fissure held long enough for Darkenedstorm's team to touch what mattered. Darkabismaro moved with ritual calm through memory temple corridors while Darkmorvado and Darkgrossness acted as the blunt certainty behind the ceremony, and the denial glyphs they seeded didn't read as vandalism; they read as filing. Professor Galaxbeam arrived like a correction to reality—gold radiance bending the room's angles back into sanity—and Galaxadye locked down the district grid with cold discipline, cutting public movement, sealing sanctum routes, and forcing civilian flow into protected arcs. "You came to rewrite our past," Galaxbeam said, voice calm enough to make the threat feel personal. "You will leave with nothing." Darkenedstorm answered without bravado, because the Darkened were never most dangerous when they shouted; they were dangerous when they sounded like they believed the paperwork. "Then process us out," Darkenedstorm replied, and the denial field tried to argue with the sanctum's own rules. Galaxbeam did not argue. He stepped through the contradiction like stepping through smoke, time tightening around him in clean, precise snaps, and with a single gold flare he forced the breach to recoil. Darkgrossness attempted to anchor the retreat by deleting permissions on the floor itself; Galaxbeam's aura made permission irrelevant. Darkmorvado took a hit that would have ended lesser beings and was dragged back through the fissure before the wound became final. Darkabismaro completed one last seal—one last denial archive burned into a temple edge—before Galaxadye's counter-grid snapped shut and made further filing impossible. The Darkened withdrew with a partial imprint rather than a full takeover, and Galaxbeam stared at the remaining maroon stain with eyes that promised the next phase would not be reactive. "We will not keep letting you set the clock," Galaxbeam said, and the Sanctum above Titanumas warmed again, thrusters humming like a cathedral preparing to lift into storm.

Back in Westonglappa, the rail spine kept ticking. Darkenedstride stood under fractured gantries between Gledmont and Agosvine, listening to distant war reports arrive as clean confirmations, and the denial fog around Leblaela shifted as if pleased to be fed new schedules. Star survivors attempted one last extraction run near Phehull—Stargun laying down a brutal firing lane, Starjew binding a collapsing span, Starperaldawn shielding the last transport long enough for engines to ignite—but Darkenedstream rewrote the signals fast enough to turn their corridor into a loop, and Darkmole's claws tore a support at exactly the wrong moment. The bridge didn't fall all at once; it sagged, argued, then lost. Starradye called the retreat before the damage became a death sentence, voice like steel scraping clean. "Back. Now," Starradye ordered. "We don't donate bodies to their spine." Stargun fired until the last second, then dropped back with smoking armor; Starjew held the binding until her hands shook, then released it with a grim, disciplined nod; Starperaldawn's dome flickered, caught, flickered again, and finally held long enough for the transport to clear. Darkenedstride watched them go with no urgency at all, keyed the channel, and spoke like closing a file. "Westonglappa remains compliant," Darkenedstride said. "Extraction attempts reduced to predictable harassment." Somewhere deeper in the occupied corridor, Darkwing's laughter rose again—loud enough that refugees watching shaky news feeds in distant safe districts felt their stomachs drop, loud enough that Westonglappa defenders at the borders fired anyway, just to prove their hands still worked. Darkwing lifted his axe, swung, and a border checkpoint folded into rubble and fire, the explosion blooming orange-white before the maroon fog swallowed it like a curtain.

In the Orbitward Sanctum, the four AES Absolute Leaders heard the reports stack up like weight on the same table—Lunargopa held but shaken, Solastreya stable but distorted, Aurealis Prime quarantined and bleeding time, Shinsatsuki scarred by denial filing, Westonglappa tightening into a permanent choke. Starbeam's jaw set so hard it looked painful. "They're testing our thresholds," Starbeam said. Lady Moonbeam's voice stayed quiet, but it carried the kind of certainty that turns panic into obedience. "Then we stop proving them right," Moonbeam answered. Sunbeam's orange aura pulsed once, then steadied into a controlled burn. "Give me the line," Sunbeam said. "I will hold it." Galaxbeam lifted his hand over the hologram, gold light sharpening the continents into targets and routes rather than symbols. "No more staggered replies," Galaxbeam said. "We answer with coordination, or we keep losing ground to scheduling." He looked at them one by one, and even in orbit the room felt like it tilted toward war. "Authorize full counter-posture," Galaxbeam said. "If BRD insists the sky can be rewritten, then we remind them what happens when four Absolute Leaders move with one intent." Moonbeam's eyes narrowed like a blade finding its edge. "Then we meet them," she said, and this time the word carried no softness at all. "Everywhere."

The first wave looked like weather on the horizon, the kind that makes a coastline go quiet before the wind arrives, except this weather had signatures—black, violet, maroon—stacking in layers as if the sky itself was being sorted into hostile categories. Over Westonglappa, the maroon pressure thickened across Auttumotto's overrun interchange, rolling outward from that seized corridor and bleeding into the rest of the continent's names like ink soaking through paper: Auttumotto first, then Leblaela and Sashax, then the farther states—Westronbung, Yewaquin, Tazgummbak, Zachon, Crattlecrane, Quinniccanna, Turreyatch, Maylin, Kedaung—each one reading the same kind of alert in different languages as the air began to vibrate with incoming engines. Refugees who had made it out of Gledmont and the yards near Agosvine huddled around cracked screens in temporary camps, watching the broadcast feed stutter and re-resolve, watching their own home maps turn maroon sector by maroon sector, and realizing the war was no longer "over there" the way adults lie to children so they can sleep.

On the Leblaela spine, the Star withdrawal didn't end the fighting; it simply changed its shape. Starradye kept his wounded line moving through cloud and broken gantries with the ugly discipline of someone carrying a city's last breath in both hands, and when Stargun's comms rasped, asking for permission to turn back for one more pass over Phehull, Starradye answered without heat, because heat was a luxury. "You fire to open exits," he said. "You don't fire to feel better." Starjew's bindings glittered along the retreat route like stitches on a torn wound, Starperaldawn's shield dome fluttering at the edge of collapse every time the denial field tested it the way a lock gets tested by a patient hand. Behind them, Darkenedstride didn't rush. He paced the central track, letting Darkenedstream's false greens and perfect lies push the remaining civilians into the wrong tunnels, and when Darkenedye reported a new pocket of evacuation traffic trying to slip away near the outer junctions, Darkenedstride replied like he was approving a routine memo. "Remove it." Darkmole answered again from below, but this time the ground didn't give him a clean kill—Starburst, limping and furious, drove his hammer into the railbed at the exact moment Darkmole's denial claws broke through, and the impact threw a green shock through the metal that made the tunnel roof buckle inward in the wrong direction. For a heartbeat the fog screamed without sound, and when it settled Darkmole was still alive—still dangerous—but his denial claws dragged like damaged machinery. He vanished under the rubble with a retreat that wasn't mercy so much as survival, and Starburst, shaking from the recoil, forced himself back into motion before the fog could memorize the fact that he'd bled.

That was when the maroon sky over Auttumotto opened wide enough to make the horizon look closer. Lord Darkwing rose into the air as if gravity was something he permitted, not something he obeyed, and when he laughed it carried across wrecked highway spans and shattered border signage in a way that made every remaining Westonglappa defender feel small inside their own armor. His demonic axe—maroon-lit, heavy with an authority that didn't need explanation—dragged a line through the air, and the line became a pressure wave that crushed a row of barricades without flame, without shrapnel, just sudden collapse and bodies thrown flat. Westonglappa ground troops at the border—those who hadn't already fled—fired upward with everything they had, rifles and mounted cannons and desperate rockets, and the volleys looked brave right up until they hit the denial layer and turned into meaningless light. Darkwing didn't bother to dodge. He rolled his shoulder once as if shaking off rain, then slammed the axe head down into the interchange and made the concrete ring like a bell. Vehicles flipped. Streetlights bent. A defensive line that had taken hours to assemble stopped existing as a line and became a scatter of survivors crawling for cover. "Y'ALL STILL TRYIN'?" he roared, voice tearing through comms. "GOOD. KEEP TRYIN'. I LIKE WATCHIN' IT."

Far offshore, the naval lanes that had already been bleeding now became delivery routes for the next phase. Black shapes and bone-lit platforms moved through fog banks like silent continents, and above them BRD air wings began the kind of bombardment meant to break coordination before it broke buildings. High-altitude drops fell in patterns—first to shred sensor nets, then to crater runways, then to erase the illusion that any command tower could stay up long enough to give orders. In the water's spray and smoke, transport ships opened their bellies and poured out ground forces and vehicles as if the sea itself was vomiting an army: Blackened dropcraft skimming low and fast, Shadow corridors sliding over waves with no wake, Death barges that didn't cut water so much as make it recoil. Onshore, the first streets to receive them were not always capitals; they were the practical places—the ports, the depots, the junction cities that kept food moving and ammo counted and evac lines breathing. BRD understood logistics as a weapon, and Westonglappa was proof.

The Orbitward Sanctum didn't get a second chance to feel like safety. It warmed its thrusters like a cathedral preparing to lift, and for a few tight minutes the chamber held the four AES leaders in a single room with the kind of compressed power that makes air taste metallic. Professor Galaxbeam's projection still hovered—continents arranged in a ring, tremors radiating outward—when the lights hiccupped, not dimming but reclassifying, as if the Sanctum itself had been informed it was no longer authorized to exist. A maroon stain crawled across the defense lattice in clean lines, too clean to be an explosion, and Starbeam's head snapped up first, instincts sharpened by supply math and threat patterns. "That's not impact," he said, already moving. "That's a rewrite."

A fissure opened in the corridor outside the chamber, thin as a scalpel cut, and the air inside the Sanctum tightened around it. Darkenedstorm stepped through with the calm of someone arriving on schedule, and behind him the maroon pressure didn't surge—it aligned, snapping into place like a stamp hitting paper. In the same breath, Darkenedpuff's jurisdictional logic hit the Sanctum's systems like a malicious clerical order: thruster permissions revoked; internal routing loops initiated; emergency doors reclassified as sealed. The Sanctum lurched—not falling, not exploding, but losing the ability to agree with itself about what "up" meant. Lady Moonbeam's blue radiance flared to stabilize the floor under her feet, General Sunbeam's orange light snapped up in a reflexive shield, and Starbeam's hands were already on invisible controls that weren't there, as if he could bully the ship back into compliance by sheer authority. Galaxbeam didn't raise his voice. He did something worse: he decided. "Enough," he said, and the room obeyed him the way equations obey truth. Gold light folded around them, and the next jolt of the Sanctum's failing geometry tore the chamber away from their bodies. One blink later the Sanctum was gone from the narrative the way a star disappears behind cloud—no heroic last stand, no lingering comfort—just absence, and the leaders were separated back into their wars by necessity, not preference.

On Lunna, Blackwing's invasion didn't begin with a landing craft; it began with the city hearing his voice before it heard its own alarms. Every public display that mattered—stations, plazas, transit walls—filled with him again, smile bright and amused, a man who treated fear like a stage light. "Good evenin', Lunna," he purred, and somewhere in the background Blackenpuff laughed like she'd been waiting to do this all week. Lady Moonbeam answered with a silence so cold it made speakers crackle and screens lag, then she spoke once, not to Blackwing, but to her people. "Look at your hands," she said, voice carrying through secured channels where Moonwis and Moonwisdom had carved room to breathe. "If they are shaking, you hold someone else's wrist until they stop." When the first Blackened squads tried to exploit the confusion, Lunar defenses met them with gunfire that flashed white-blue against neon streets, Moon Marines bracing behind ice-bloom barricades while Moon Rangers cut flanking routes through frozen alleys, and above it Moonbeam moved like a queen in a storm—every gesture turning the air into a blade, every glance turning a street into a slowed corridor where panic could not outrun discipline.

On Sollarisca, Shadowwing made sunlight unreliable in the smallest ways first, because small lies spread faster than big ones. Shadows arrived late. Reflections lied by half a beat. Patrol cameras recorded crowds where there were none. General Sunbeam's response was not spectacle; it was structure. "No one walks alone," he ordered, voice low and absolute, and Solar formations tightened into verified stacks—Sun Soldiers shoulder to shoulder, Sun Marines anchoring intersections with mounted cannons, Sun Rangers moving in paired leaps across rooftops. Solardye stayed at his side, feeding him clean confirmations amid the noise. When Shadow signatures tried to split squads, Sunbeam threw heat through the street like a net, not to burn buildings, but to force the shadows to reveal where they didn't belong, and every time a Shadow corridor collapsed under that orange pressure, the Solar line advanced one block at a time, stubborn and alive.

On Starrup, Deathwing's assault treated Aurealis Prime like a living lab. The first "bombs" were pale pods that fell without smoke and opened like careful hands, and the city's own systems tried to help—auto-repair routines, quarantine protocols, containment doors—until the systems learned the wrong definition of "authorized." Starbeam arrived with his face set hard, because this was his nightmare: a war that eats infrastructure and calls it medicine. "Shut it down," he commanded. "If a machine offers you a shortcut, you treat it like a mouth." Deathwing watched through a relay with cross-shaped pupils steady as a surgeon's, while Deathendye stood nearby like an assistant awaiting the next incision. "Convert," Deathwing said simply, and Deathplague, Deathrot, and Deathmold moved through the underlevels like a diagnosis given legs—filters seeded, vents compromised, metal softening into brittle bone. When Star defenders pushed back—rifles barking, green barriers snapping into place—Death's counter felt clinical: engines failing in silence, doors sealing at the wrong time, a whole corridor turning into a trap because the building decided the people inside it were no longer valid occupants.

In Galaxenchi, the attack hit where memory and prediction lived. Darkenedstorm's presence dragged the air colder by authority alone, and Darkabismaro and Darkmorvado moved toward the memory temples with ritual calm, while Darkgrossness brought the brute certainty that made defenders hesitate. Galaxbeam met them with gold light that didn't just shield; it reorganized space, turning approach angles into dead ends and forcing the fight into the present where denial could not hide behind "rewritten" futures. Galaxadye stayed tight at his flank, circuits bright, reporting what the time map would not. "Predictive resolution is failing," he said, jaw clenched. "So we fight blind." Galaxbeam's answer was quiet and sharp. "No," he replied. "We fight awake."

Back in Westonglappa, Darkwing kept doing what kings do when they want the world to remember their name: he made examples. A border resistance pocket tried to form along a highway cut near Auttumotto, and he answered by carving the roadway open with his axe and letting maroon light surge through the trench like a flood. Westonglappa defenders fired until barrels glowed, Star remnants harassed from distance when they could, but every time someone rose too visibly, Darkwing swatted the attempt out of the air and laughed as if the continent existed to entertain him. Still, the Star line didn't entirely vanish. Starradye, battered and running on dim circuitry, kept calling tight retreats instead of glorious deaths, and that choice saved lives even as it surrendered streets. When Darkenedstride pressed the spine again—patient, methodical—Stargun and Starjew returned for one last coordinated strike: Stargun's shots punched open a corridor for exactly long enough, Starjew's bindings snapped the overpass into a temporary brace, and Starperaldawn forced a shield dome to hold through sheer will until her hands shook. The counterattack didn't "win" Leblaela back, but it did something more important in war: it made BRD pay in blood and time. Darkgrossness took a concentrated volley that cracked his aura and forced him to withdraw into fog for a beat, long enough for evac transports to clear. Darkenedstream lost a signal tower cluster to a precision burst and had to reroute his lies by hand. Darkenedstride remained standing, because Supreme Commanders don't fall easily, but the denial pace stuttered—just once—when the Star harassment hit like a scalpel instead of a scream.

By the end of the wave, the map did not look calmer; it looked honest. BRD had multiple fronts burning at once. AES was still standing, but only because its leaders were treating retreat as a weapon and survival as an objective, not a consolation prize. On every continent, some BRD elites were dragged back wounded when their health finally crossed the line where arrogance becomes fatal, and on every continent some AES defenders fell hard enough to force painful withdrawals that felt like swallowing glass. The war had become a machine with too many moving parts to stop by force alone, and the only question left hanging in the smoke was who would break first—the alliance trying to hold four homes, or the coalition trying to turn fear into a supply line.

Night settled harder over Westonglappa, and with it the rail spine stopped feeling like a battlefield and started feeling like a machine that had finished learning. Between Gledmont and Agosvine, the fog flowed through the same gaps Starradye had once patched, sliding along the underside of gantries, pooling in the bends of broken tramline, creeping up pylons the way rust climbs metal when nobody's watching. Darkenedstride didn't hurry; he paced the central track with a ledger-calm that made the air around him feel official, each bootfall sending a short pulse down the rails so a platform would tilt into a sink, a corridor would fold into a loop, a junction would decide it had never been meant for living people at all. "Keep it clean," he said into the maroon channel, voice low enough to be almost private. Darkenedstream's hands were already on Drumburn's signal towers, braiding false greens into the guidance like perfect lies, while Darkenedye stood motionless, eyes shut, listening to evac traffic until the patterns in it sounded like guilt. "Sector C-7," Darkenedye reported, flat and certain. "All Star signatures withdrawn. Remaining life: civilian." Darkenedstride didn't even glance up. "Remove the corridor." The answer came from beneath Inirross—Darkmole erupting under a half-collapsed shelter, denial claws ripping through supports with the ease of tearing paper ribs, and the screams didn't linger long enough to become a chorus; they clipped off into static and dust, leaving the fog to slide into the empty space as if it had been assigned the job.

Farther down the spine near Phehull, Darkgrossness waded into a knot of Westonglappa ground troops and Star marines who'd tried to make a junction into a last stand, and the scene played out like two different rulesets colliding: emerald volleys flashed, hit his maroon aura, and turned into nothing that mattered. He grabbed one armored trooper by the chestplate and squeezed slowly, not crushing metal, not ripping plates—just deleting permission until the body inside forgot how to stay "active." The trooper dropped with the suit intact and the eyes vacant, and Darkgrossness spat like the moment had bored him. "Spine secured," he grunted, and up on the collapsing overpass the Star line held the way disciplined people hold a door during a fire. Stargun anchored his stance and turned the bridge into a firing lane, each shot punching holes in denial growths trying to climb the pylons; Starjew laced starlit bindings around fractured beams to keep the span from dropping outright, jaw clenched as the fog pressed against every reinforcement like a slow hand testing locks. Starburst limped with his hammer in both hands like a crutch and a promise, Starperaldawn's shield dome flickering around the last retreating transports as she forced the barrier to stay up while the field kept trying to classify it as unauthorized. Starradye watched the map on his visor twist into hostile geometry and made the call with steady finality. "Anchor Line Two only," he ordered. "Fall back to extraction points and take whoever still breathes." Starburst's voice scraped through comms, stubbornness thinning under pain. "If we leave Gledmont, we won't get it back." Starradye didn't soften it. "Then we don't get it back. Move." When the last transport lifted away, denial glyphs climbed the abandoned pylons like rot finally given air, the fog watching the engines for a heartbeat as if memorizing heat signatures before turning back to settle in and get comfortable. Darkenedstride keyed his channel once, eyes traveling the silent platforms, and spoke as if he were closing a file. "Leblaela sealed. Star presence reduced. Local resistance... negligible." The pause after that was colder than the words. "Negligible and irrelevant."

The next wave didn't wait for sunrise, and it didn't arrive from one direction. Over Sollarisca, Lunna, Starrup, and Galaxenchi, the night sky filled with shapes that didn't belong—high-altitude silhouettes sliding between cloud layers, portals opening like wounds in air, bomber shadows crossing over city lights with the confidence of something that had already decided the ground would be rubble. Sirens started late because the first hits went after the things that make warnings honest: comm towers, broadcast relays, radar crowns, traffic hearts. Across the four continents, shelter protocols snapped into motion, and the names changed with the flag but the feeling was the same: sunpolice forming hard lines at stairwells while Sun Soldiers and Sun Marines shoved civilians into barriered bunkers that glowed orange at the seams; moonpolice guiding families through frost-lit tunnels while Moon Rangers and Moon Marauders braced at chokepoints behind ice-sigils thick as doors; starpolice stacking evac lanes into disciplined grids while Star Soldiers and Star Guards raised emerald pylons that hummed with stabilization; galaxpolice sealing memory districts and transit rings while Galax Soldiers held perimeter arcs under gold-lit calculations that tried to predict where the next strike would land. It was urgent and ugly and organized, the kind of order that only shows up when a world realizes it can be broken.

In Solastreya, the sacred flame still burned, but the shadows around it moved like they'd been taught a different choreography. Sunbeam stood in the amphitheater steps with orange light contained tight against his shoulders, the heat around him restrained on purpose, and when Solardye brought him the first clean confirmation—street cameras capturing crowds where there were none, reflections arriving late at intersections—Sunbeam didn't give a speech. He raised two fingers and every Solar unit within range tightened formation like a shield wall. "Verified signals only," he ordered, voice carrying without shouting. "No one moves alone. If your shadow behaves wrong, you lock arms and you report." Above the rooftops, a corridor of darkness formed without announcing itself, and Shadowwing stepped into the airspace as if gravity had been asked to make an exception. A gloved hand rose, a short gesture cut the wind, and Solar radar still painted "clear skies" while Solar eyes started to doubt the street under their boots. Shadowastream and Shadowstealth moved like silent punctuation through the first breach line, Shadowcrypt and Shadowhowl slipping behind sunlit corners where sunlight should have been a guarantee. Sunbeam's gaze lifted, and the orange in it sharpened. "You came to make my home unrecognizable," he said, calm enough to be dangerous. Shadowwing didn't answer with words; the air around him simply deepened, shadows thickening until the city looked slightly out of phase with itself. Sunbeam stepped forward anyway, heat rising in a controlled column that turned the nearest false corridor into shimmering distortion, and when Shadowhowl lunged at a Solar squad line, Sunbeam's hand snapped up and a solar arc clipped the attacker mid-motion—hard enough that the shadow-form staggered, lost cohesion, and recoiled into retreat before the wound could become fatal. Shadowastream's fingers flicked in a tight signal—withdraw, re-thread, do not trade elites for spectacle—and the strike team dissolved back into the city's misalignment, leaving Solastreya bruised but still standing, civilians still moving into shields instead of into panic.

In Lunargopa, the war arrived through the screens before it arrived through the streets, and the city's public displays filled with Blackwing's smile like the enemy had moved into the living room. "Good evenin', Lunna," his voice purred through a thousand speakers, playful in a way that made it feel personal. "Y'all hearin' me clear?" Moonwis and Moonwisdom hammered at consoles, trying to choke the signal at its source, but the broadcast didn't behave like a single transmitter; it behaved like a rumor that had learned how to copy itself. Lady Moonbeam stood at the frost-lit platform of her tower and watched the city breathe beneath her, blue light held so steady it looked like still water about to freeze. "Cut the rhythm," she told her analysts, voice quiet and absolute. "Make the lie expensive." Down in the streets, Blackened paratroopers came in hard—black canopies snapping open above rooftops, boots slamming onto plazas, Black Soldiers and Black Marines spilling out with street-tactical swagger and weapons that looked half-tech, half-curse. Blackenstorm's compliance marks flashed on walls and deck plating stolen from a captured carrier's systems, turning "evac lane" into "inspection lane," turning "safe route" into "stall." Blackenstride and Blackenstream sliced into traffic logic, and suddenly Moon Rangers found their own barricade gates refusing to recognize them. "Ain't nothin' personal," Blackenpuff called over a hijacked channel as she hit the ground with her squad, voice bright with amusement. "It's just your city forgot who it belong to." Moonbeam's answer wasn't louder propaganda; it was cold authority. She lifted her hand and a wave of lunar frost surged through broadcast infrastructure and street speakers, freezing relays into a single clean second of silence—no Blackwing, no panic, just the city hearing its own breathing. "Now," Moonbeam said, and the Moon Guards moved. Firearms cracked at street level as Moon Soldiers traded disciplined bursts with Black Marines between storefronts and tram pillars, while Moonbeam's ice-sigils rose like walls to funnel civilians into shielded shelter corridors. When Blackenpuff tried to press through a barrier line, Moonbeam's blue light snapped forward in a precise, cruel arc—enough to crack armor and force a stagger. It wasn't a kill, it was a decision: Blackenpuff's posture tightened, her grin faltered into irritation, and she pulled back before the wound could become the kind that ends an elite on foreign ground. "Nah," she muttered, wiping frost off her sleeve. "We'll come back when you tired." Above them, Blackwing's laugh returned to the speakers in broken fragments, and Moonwis's hands shook as he kept cutting signal threads one by one, buying minutes the way you buy oxygen.

In Aurealis Prime, Starrup's biotech heart started betraying its own engineers. Starbeam arrived with green light cutting behind him, eyes tracking the city like he could see supply lines under concrete, and his voice hit the comms with the bite of someone who hated how quickly he understood. "Lock down all reactors. No external data. No automated repairs. If a machine offers you a shortcut, you treat it like a mouth." The first Death Regime pods didn't explode; they seeded. Deathplague and Deathrot moved through maintenance corridors like diagnoses given legs, pale violet residue blooming where metal began to soften into brittle bone, Deathmold working intake vents with patient inevitability. Deathwing watched through a living relay, expression unchanged by the suffering his plan caused, while Deathadye stood at his side and spoke with clinical obedience. "Containment will fail in seventeen minutes if their automation remains active," Deathadye reported. Starbeam's jaw clenched. "Then we kill convenience," he said, and the order went out: manual overrides, hard shutdowns, sacrifice entire blocks of tech to keep the infection from learning the whole city. Starpolice shoved civilians into armored shelters that glowed with emerald barriers, Star Soldiers holding perimeter lines while a handful of Star elites—those who had escaped Westonglappa's rail spine with their lives—arrived as bruised reinforcements. Starperaldawn's hands lit as she forced a shield dome over a collapsing evac lane, Stargun firing one-handed from a rooftop brace, each shot a measured refusal. When Deathrot pressed too close to the reactor ring, Starbeam's counter-routing snapped the corridor's access into a dead end, and a focused emerald strike from the defenders caught the elite at the edge of the seal—enough to force a retreat before the wound turned mortal. Deathwing didn't react like a man losing; he reacted like a surgeon changing instruments. "Withdraw the exposed element," he said, calm as a file closing. "Continue conversion elsewhere." The city held for the moment, but everyone could feel it: the enemy had left pieces inside the walls, and Starrup would be fighting its own machines for days.

In Shinsatsuki District, Galaxenchi's time-map had already coughed itself into blind spots when the maroon fissure opened without permission and Darkenedstorm stepped through as if invited. Darkabismaro followed with ritual calm, Darkgrossness with brute certainty, Darkmorvado with scarred intent—moving toward memory temples the way archivists move toward shelves, confident that history can be rewritten if you control how it's filed. Professor Galaxbeam didn't raise his voice; he raised the room's rules. Gold light tightened across the district's geometry, predictive recalibrations snapping into place like a net thrown around a falling knife. "You came for our memory," Galaxbeam said, tone calm enough to cut. "You will find it defended by time that remembers." Darkenedstorm's presence dragged temperature down by authority alone, denial glyphs creeping along the edge of the gold lattice, testing for contradictions. For a heartbeat the air felt like it was deciding what "authorized" even meant—then the strike erupted: Galax Soldiers trading fire with Darkened ground units at temple gates, Galax police pulling civilians into shielded sanctuaries while Galaxbeam's time-bends folded incoming bombardment into harmless arcs of delayed detonation over empty courtyards. When Darkmorvado pushed too deep into the lattice, Galaxbeam's gold circuits flared and the corridor snapped shut around him like a closing calculation—hard enough that the elite staggered back, wounded, forced to retreat before the seal could finish him. Darkenedstorm didn't waste his pieces. "Fall back," he ordered, voice low and ugly, and the maroon fissure swallowed them before Galaxenchi could turn a defensive win into a decisive kill.

And through all of it, Westonglappa kept burning, because conquest doesn't pause just because the world's attention splits. Darkwing stood at the Auttumotto border corridor with maroon clouds pressed low over the wrecked highway, laughing like the sound itself was a weapon, and the maroon demonic axe in his hand kept dragging fresh scars into the skyline. "LOOK AT 'EM RUN," he roared as Westonglappa's remaining conventional defenders tried to form lines at interchanges with tanks and rifles that couldn't even scratch what they were facing. "LOOK AT 'EM PRAY." Darkenedstride's rail-spine occupation tightened through Leblaela and Sashax, denial loops turning rescue routes into traps, while Darkwing's broader sweep pushed across Westonglappa's states—Auttumotto, Leblaela, Sashax, Westronbung, Yewaquin, Tazgummbak, Zachon, Crattlecrane, Quinniccanna, Turreyatch, Maylin, Kedaung—each name becoming a new dispatch on a fleeing radio feed. Refugee planes clawed for altitude from battered strips, naval ships shoved off from threatened docks under partial escort, and the lucky ones vanished into cloud while the unlucky watched maroon lightning rake across city blocks behind them. Westonglappa officers—brave, underinformed, completely outmatched—kept shouting the kind of orders that work against normal armies, and their soldiers kept firing because it's what soldiers do, and it didn't matter; BRD ground units rolled forward through smoke and denial like the world had already signed the paperwork.

By the time the first dawn edges tried to show over any horizon, the pattern was clear in the way only fear makes clear: BRD could hit everywhere, and AES could still answer—but only by burning through elites, through supplies, through sleep, through the fragile belief that "home" is a safe word. Sunbeam held Sollarisca's sunline with disciplined formations and controlled solar force, forcing Shadowwing's strike team to disengage before a mortal wound could anchor them. Moonbeam kept Lunna from becoming a puppet city by freezing the broadcast rhythm and physically pushing Blackenpuff's pressure line back into a retreat she didn't want to admit. Starbeam kept Aurealis Prime alive by choosing painful shutdowns over convenient collapse, wounding an exposed Death Regime elite and forcing Deathwing to adjust rather than finish. Galaxbeam kept Galaxenchi's memory districts from being filed into denial archives by turning the battlefield into a calculation that punished overreach. None of it felt like victory; it felt like surviving the first synchronized punch without letting the planet's spine snap.

And back in Westonglappa, Darkwing watched the smoke columns rise across a conquered map and grinned as if the whole world had finally understood the performance had started. He dragged the axe head along cracked asphalt, sparks and maroon glyphs crawling in its wake, and spoke into the low sky like it was listening. "ROUND TWO," he growled. "MOVE."

Westonglappa answered Darkwing's order the way a bruised body answers a second punch: not with surprise, but with a shudder that traveled through everything still standing. Over the Leblaela rail spine, denial schedules reasserted themselves in waves—evac corridors that had held for an hour buckled into loops, platforms that had been stable a minute ago "re-filed" into sinks, and the last Star-guided escape lanes between Gledmont and Agosvine remembered new rules that civilians hadn't been taught. Darkenedstride kept walking the central track as if he were reading receipts off the steel; the hard pulses under his boots didn't look like magic so much as policy enforced at the speed of sound, and each pulse tightened the fog's grip until even shouting felt like it had to request permission. Darkenedstream turned Drumburn's signal towers into a choir of false greens, perfect lies that led transports into dead ends, while Darkenedye stood with his eyes closed and spoke softly into the comm like a clerk reporting inventory. "Evac traffic: rerouted. Panic: rising. Civilian concentration: Inirross shelters." Darkenedstride's reply stayed flat. "Then remove the shelters." The ground answered before anyone else could—Darkmole ripped up through concrete near the half-collapsed refuge and tore supports apart with denial claws that treated beams like paper ribs; the scream that started there didn't finish as a scream, it finished as static, and the fog slid in immediately afterward as if it had been waiting for the vacancy.

Farther down the spine near Phehull, a knot of Westonglappa ground troops and Star marines tried to make one last junction matter with everything they had—emerald volleys, rail-mounted cannons, even handheld firearms that kicked sparks off maroon haze. Darkgrossness waded into it without urgency, the maroon aura around him making every shot feel like it arrived late; he seized a trooper by the chestplate and squeezed in a slow, bored motion that didn't crush metal so much as erase authorization. The armor stayed pristine. The body folded anyway, eyes suddenly empty, and the men around him lost the nerve to keep believing their bullets could negotiate with that kind of power. Above them, the Star line still held on a collapsing overpass because discipline is sometimes the only superpower mortals get: Stargun anchored his stance, turned the bridge into a firing lane, and started punching clean holes through denial growths trying to climb the pylons; Starjew braced fractured beams with starlit bindings, jaw clenched as the fog pressed against each reinforcement like a patient hand testing locks. Starburst, limping hard, used his hammer the way an exhausted knight uses a sword—part crutch, part vow—while Starperaldawn kept a shield dome flickering around retreating transports, palms glowing as she fought the field's constant attempts to label the barrier "unauthorized" and collapse it from the inside.

At the rear, Starradye watched his visor map mutate into hostile geometry, the anchor grids he'd built turning into landmarks for the enemy to route around, and he made the kind of call that leaves a taste of iron in your mouth even when you know it's right. "Anchor Line Two only," he ordered. "Extraction points. Anyone who still breathes gets on a lift." Starburst's voice scraped through comms, stubborn and thin. "If we leave Gledmont, we don't get it back." Starradye didn't raise his voice; he didn't have to. "Then we don't get it back. Move." A transport bucked as denial pressure clipped its tail, and Starperaldawn's dome flashed bright enough to make the fog recoil for half a heartbeat—just long enough for the ship to clear the yard. That half heartbeat mattered. It was the difference between evacuation and obituary. When the last Star transport finally lifted away from the yards outside Gledmont, the denial glyphs climbed the abandoned pylons like rot given oxygen, and Darkenedstride watched the evac lights vanish into cloud the way a man watches a train he knows will return on his timetable. "Leblaela sealed," he said into the maroon channel. "Star presence reduced. Resistance negligible." His eyes drifted over silent platforms and the bodies left where the loops ended them. "Negligible and irrelevant."

The same night, the war widened with a precision that made it hard to pretend it was still "regional." In Lunargopa, public screens that had already been fighting off hostile signal intrusion went black for a breath—then relit with a new layer of control: a direct strike meant to cut the Lunar command spine, not merely embarrass it. Blackenpuff hit the city like a thrown knife, dropping from a stealth-dampened aerial craft onto the broadcast and routing district with a squad moving at her shoulders—fast, confident, already acting like they owned the streets. The first shots were practical: muzzle flashes in tight bursts, comm towers punched out, Moonpolice patrols scattered as Blackened elites used close-quarters brutality and compliance sigils to make doors refuse to open for the people trying to flee through them. On a rooftop above the main routing hub, Moonwis's hands flew over a console, trying to peel back the intrusion before it could spread into the city's nerves. "My Queen," he said into a secure line, voice forced steady, "they're in the broadcast lattice. They're going for our command channels." Lady Moonbeam answered without heat and without hesitation. "Hold your position. Do not chase them into alleys. Keep your people breathing." The next moment, the temperature in the district dropped so sharply that streetlight glass snapped; Moonbeam arrived in person, blue radiance drawn tight around her like armor, and the air itself seemed to recognize that an Absolute Leader had acknowledged the battlefield.

Blackenpuff saw her and grinned anyway, the kind of grin you wear when you want the world to know you're not afraid of consequences. "There you are," she called, voice carrying over sirens and gunfire. "I was tired of talking to your city. I wanted the original." Moonbeam didn't posture. She lifted one hand, and the ground around the routing hub flash-froze—pipes, cables, the very moisture in the air—locking Blackened mobility into a narrow corridor where every step became a choice between slipping or standing still. Moonpolice surged in behind that sudden terrain control, rifles barking, shields up, funneling civilians toward hardened shelters whose barrier glyphs lit one by one like lanterns in a storm. Blackenpuff tried to brute-force through the freeze with a compliance seal—tried to tell the ice it had no authority—but Moonbeam's power didn't behave like paperwork; it behaved like a law of nature. The Lunar counterfire caught her squad mid-transition, and when Moonbeam's blue light snapped forward in a clean, surgical arc, it didn't "kill" so much as force a retreat decision into the bodies of the attackers: lungs seized, limbs went heavy, vision narrowed. Blackenpuff staggered back, blood hot against the cold, and spat a laugh through pain as she grabbed her wounded and threw a smoke sigil down like a slammed door. "This ain't over," she breathed, then vanished into a retreat corridor that Moonbeam deliberately did not pursue—because chasing a BRD elite into a designed trap is how you lose cities.

While Lunna held its throat and refused to let it be cut, Sollarisca felt the first true edge of Shadow's work—streets where sunlight behaved wrong, cameras recording crowds that didn't exist, patrols reporting their own shadows arriving a fraction late like reluctant witnesses. General Sunbeam refused spectacle; he refused panic. He turned Solar response into structure, because structure is what lets civilians survive when gods start arguing. Sunpolice pushed people into designated armored shelters whose barrier crests burned with disciplined orange, while Sun Soldiers and Sun Rangers formed verified-signal corridors through the loudest districts, rifles up, comms tight, every movement paired and witnessed. When a Shadow-led strike tried to slip through a perimeter checkpoint using misdirection and silent hand signals, Sunbeam appeared on the ground where the line threatened to break—orange radiance flaring, heat rippling off his solid orange attire as if the air itself had to back away. "No one moves alone," he ordered, voice cutting through the confusion like a blade. "If your eyes disagree with your squad, you trust your squad. If your shadow lies, you report it and you hold the line." A Shadow elite tried to close in anyway—fast, quiet, confident—and Sunbeam's counter was immediate: a burst of solar force that turned the space between them into a furnace wall. The attacker didn't die; they chose to retreat because their body stopped cooperating with the idea of advancing, and that was the point. Sunbeam didn't need a trophy. He needed the line to hold.

Back in Westonglappa, the Star survivors learned what it feels like when the enemy treats your retreat as part of his schedule. Starradye's forces extracted out of Gledmont and tried to thread the last safe corridor toward airlift lanes; Darkenedstride didn't chase like a berserker, he reclassified ahead of them, shaping the city so that every "obvious" path became the wrong one. Stargun shot down an incoming denial-drone wing over the rail spine—three clean emerald bursts that turned aerial units into burning debris—while Starjew kept a bridge from collapsing long enough for one more transport to clear. Starburst tried to buy time with a hammer swing that cracked the pavement and threw fog back in a shockwave, but Darkgrossness met the force with brute certainty and maroon aura; the collision sent Starburst skidding and made it clear that if he stayed, the next exchange would end his story right there. Starradye read the field, saw the health of his remaining elites drop into dangerous territory, and forced the retreat again—hard, bitter, necessary. "You live," he snapped through comms, "or you don't matter tomorrow. Get out." That retreat wasn't weakness. It was the last form of command that still saved lives.

Hours later, the alliance finally did what alliances do when the map stops making sense: it gathered its kings under layers of guard and oath and dared the war to try to cut them in one place. The meeting did not happen in orbit this time. It happened on the ground, inside an AES stronghold where walls were layered in enchanted plating and the air itself was warded—Sun Guards at every door, Moon Guards watching every shadow, Star Guards controlling every access line, Galax Guards scanning time-stutter like a heartbeat monitor. Professor Galaxbeam stood at the center of a war table whose projection didn't pretend to be clean; it showed Westonglappa bleeding maroon across Leblaela, Sashax, and the Auttumotto corridor, and it showed hostile movements splintering toward Solastreya, Lunargopa, Aurealis Prime, and Shinsatsuki like knives thrown at once. He did not soften the summary for comfort. "Leblaela's spine is sealed," he said, gold circuits bright as his gaze moved from face to face. "Lunna held its broadcast district because Moonbeam chose to stand in the strike. Sollarisca is holding formation because Sunbeam refused to let fear set the cadence. Starrup is closing its systems because Starbeam understands that machines can become mouths. Galaxenchi is losing predictive clarity because denial has begun filing itself into our memory-temples." His eyes narrowed. "If you have been waiting for the moment where this becomes 'the real war,' stop waiting. We are inside it."

Starbeam didn't argue; he didn't posture. He pointed at the projection where supply lines bent under pressure. "We cannot defend four homelands with four separate instincts," he said. "We synchronize. We bleed them where their mobility lives. Westonglappa is the staging throat." Lady Moonbeam's voice came cool and sharp, like ice set against a wound. "And we deny them narrative. We deny them panic. We deny them the right to turn our people into weapons against themselves." General Sunbeam leaned forward, orange light steady now instead of flaring. "Then we meet them where they think they've already won. We hit their occupied corridors hard enough that their 'schedule' breaks." Galaxbeam listened, then gave the order with quiet finality. "We move together. We do not drift. We do not split into four isolated storms. If they want us on every front, we will show them what happens when four Absolute Leaders arrive on one front and refuse to be moved."

The first confrontation didn't start with speeches. It started with the sound of endless ground units. As the AES leaders moved to the forward deployment line near the contested zones feeding Auttumotto, the horizon of Westonglappa looked crowded with silhouettes—BRD soldiers advancing under denial haze, vehicles rolling through wreckage with the certainty of machines that didn't care about human pleading, and above it all the pressure of leadership arriving like weather. The air thickened. The ground trembled. Somewhere ahead, a laugh cut through the noise—Darkwing's laugh, loud enough to feel like it was grabbing the sky by the throat—and the maroon fog surged as if it recognized its king.

Sunbeam's orange radiance ignited first, a disciplined blaze that pushed back the nearest denial wave and gave the defenders a breath they hadn't had in days. Moonbeam's blue light followed, freezing a corridor in place to halt a pushing column and create a civilian escape lane behind it. Starbeam's green circuitry flared like a command signal made visible, stabilizing the battlefield geometry long enough for Star units to lock target solutions and start dropping hostile aerial craft out of the sky in disciplined bursts. Galaxbeam's gold presence settled over all of it—less like a shield you could see, more like a correction to reality that made the ground stop lying for a moment. The AES leaders did not charge into the mass for drama. They advanced like executioners of order, each step reclaiming a pocket of space where soldiers could breathe and civilians could run, and when BRD elites tried to test them—fast drops, close-combat lunges, compliance sigils meant to rewrite "authorized" into "dead"—the attackers discovered the same hard truth: you can be fearless and still be forced to retreat when your body is failing and your opponent is an Absolute Leader who refuses to blink.

And then the maroon haze ahead split—just enough to hint at figures stepping forward through it, not merely sending waves anymore, but arriving to be seen. The BRD leadership presence pressed into the battlefield like a hand closing, and the sense of a true clash—kings against kings—made every soldier on both sides forget how to swallow.

Galaxbeam's voice cut through the comms, calm and immediate. "All allied elites: tighten your ring. All ground forces: hold your shelter corridors. Absolute Leaders forward." Sunbeam lifted his blade of light, jaw set. Moonbeam's eyes hardened into glacial focus. Starbeam's stance sharpened, green radiance crawling along his armor like living circuitry. Galaxbeam raised one hand, gold light threading between them like a vow.

The fog surged. The maroon pressure laughed again. And the first step into the kings' collision landed like the opening hit of an anime finale—hard enough that the world itself seemed to brace for what came next.