Blackizrion's briefing happened on steel that never stopped humming.
The Blackened colossal ship sat offshore like a moving city, its decks segmented into lanes and barricaded corridors the way Blackwing preferred to think—everything a route, everything a choke point, everything a lever. Bombardment flashes stitched the horizon at uneven intervals, turning distance into a strobe that hid small craft inside its rhythm. Blackizrion stood under a cargo awning with a hard case at his feet, sleeves already sealed, gloves already on, expression set in the calm of someone who believed "official" was a costume that could be stolen.
Blackwing arrived without entourage theater. Two Elites bracketed him. A pair of Black Rangers held perimeter angles like they were holding breath.
"Bring me their seals," Blackwing said. "Bring me their camera angle." He leaned forward just enough that his voice felt like a contract. "Don't bring excuses."
Blackizrion nodded once. "We take the proof."
A Shadow handler stood in the corner of the awning, silent, posture straight, face unreadable. Their hands lifted and began to speak without sound: a curved finger tracing a line—FOG BEND—then two taps against the palm—CAMERA BLIND—then a flat hand slicing sideways—THREE-POINT BOARD. The handler's gaze shifted to a simple diagram on a paper map: the Jakchi coastline corridor feeding toward Galaxen-Hoshiou (星王), the exact seam where an AES cutter would feel safe enough to run close and fast.
Blackizrion answered the Shadow handler the way you answered Shadowwing's people if you wanted them to keep helping you: no words, no dominance contest. He gave a thin smile and a small shoulder tilt that read as agreement, then lifted his hard case and opened it only halfway, showing what mattered without exposing it. A contamination-theater module sat inside—compact, clean, meant to create a "reasonable" quarantine panic. Beside it, a hush-timing puck that did not mute voices, only delayed corrections by a fraction of a beat.
He closed the case with a soft click.
"Window sync?" he asked.
The Shadow handler raised two fingers, then folded them into a fist. The meaning was blunt: when the sky flashes, you move.
Blackizrion left the colossal ship in a disguised patrol craft marked as maritime assistance, broadcasting calm cadence and correct identifiers, the kind of voice that made exhausted people loosen their grip on reality. Sea spray slapped the hull. The horizon blinked. Each flash became a timing cue. Blackizrion stood at the forward rail and watched distance with a technician's patience rather than a raider's hunger.
The Jakchi corridor emerged as fog and metal and paperwork. Somewhere inside that gray, an AES cutter was running an evidence chain—sealed injector case, ritual-metadata sleeves, air-gapped custody. Orinvalde was learning to win the trust fight because it could show hands, seals, and timestamps. Blackwing wanted that advantage turned into a public bruise.
Blackizrion didn't look for the cutter by silhouette. He looked for behavior. He found it in the way a wake held a line, in the way a vessel refused to drift into "helpful" routing suggestions, in the way deck lights stayed arranged around projected rectangles—boxes—like the crew had been trained to see the floor as law.
"There," Blackizrion said.
The bombardment horizon flashed. He lifted his hand.
"On flash," he ordered. "Close."
The patrol craft accelerated into the spray, and the first conflict was engineered to shape feet, not to sink hulls. Blackened gunners—hidden under maintenance tarps—leaned out and fired short, disciplined bursts at the cutter's rail hardware and mast fixtures, the kind of fire that forced defenders to compress into predictable angles and keep their heads low. Not a massacre pattern. A lane-compression pattern.
The AES cutter responded exactly as trained. Hard-light boxes snapped down on deck. A Star voice cut through wind and gunfire with a command meant to be repeatable under panic.
"Box! Hands visible! Hold lane!"
Transparent hard-light bulkheads rose to segment firing lanes. The cutter kept moving, refusing to stop, refusing to drift. Blackizrion watched the boxes and smiled, because discipline was visible, and what was visible could be spoofed.
He triggered his own toolset. Blackout smoke deployed forward in a controlled arc, tuned to cling to light sources and swallow the edges where Star geometry usually stayed clean. It didn't make the deck dark; it made the deck ambiguous. At the same time, a magnetic clamp grid fired in a brief pulse toward the cutter's forward plating, turning the deck into sticky geometry—boots didn't freeze, but they lost the ease of pivot, the tiny speed that makes escort doctrine feel effortless.
"Board," Blackizrion said.
Three-point entry, executed like a checklist. Team One clamped the bow with hard-light braces that denied the cutter a clean turn. Team Two breached mid-deck through a service seam, cutting in where maintenance panels made violence look like work. Blackizrion led Team Three straight toward the custody cradle, because he wasn't hunting bodies. He was hunting the object that made Orinvalde's words credible.
Shadow movement threaded the smoke. Not visible as soldiers, visible as absence—gaps where cameras didn't look, angles where defenders expected a wall and found a door. The Shadow handler's earlier map became reality by inches: a half-step here, a pause there, a lantern flicker that told Blackizrion which corridor mouth had been bent into a blind seam.
Gunfire chased them. Star hard-light cut it into segments. Blackened bursts tried to collapse the segments. The deck became a moving maze of translucent walls and smoke-eaten light.
Blackizrion reached the console cluster near the custody cradle and found exactly what he wanted: a visible discipline. Lane boxes projected around the cradle. A Star verifier crouched in the box with an offline device in hand. A sealed case sat in a locked cradle between two emitters, resin lines gleaming under deck lights. Hands stayed away from screens. Hands stayed open. Hands stayed visible.
He didn't rush the verifier with a tackle. He forced a dilemma.
The contamination-theater module activated with a soft chirp and a calm overlay that appeared on the cutter's console as if it had always been there.
QUARANTINE EVENT — SAFE ACCESS REQUIRED
OPERATOR TIER
CONFIRM AUTHORITY
The green confirm pulsed like relief. The prompt didn't threaten. It offered help.
At the same instant, Blackened gunners shifted their fire pattern toward the cutter's aft quarter, creating a sharp burst of noise that pulled attention and made the next second feel urgent. Blackizrion palmed the hush puck and snapped it onto the underside of a console lip.
The Star verifier's voice rose—then arrived late by a fraction.
"Don't—"
The sentence landed after the hands had already started to twitch.
Blackizrion moved in with controlled speed. He lifted a decoy sleeve from inside his vest—visually identical size, identical formatting, municipal-looking seals designed to read as "civil evidence" rather than "military artifact." A faint contamination stripe was already pre-smeared across its resin line, a stain that would later become a weapon: See? Mishandled. See? Tainted. See? Inadmissible.
He spoke once, low, close enough to cut through wind. "Swap and you live."
The Star verifier's eyes snapped to his hands. The Star verifier's hands stayed open. Discipline refused the threat.
"Hands visible," the verifier said, voice tight. "Back out."
Star hard-light surged. A transparent shutter slid between Blackizrion and the cradle, trying to make the custody object physically unreachable. Blackizrion answered by spoofing the geometry itself. He projected false lane markers onto the deck—lines and rectangles that looked like Star box discipline but were routed wrong by inches. A Star Ranger pivoted instinctively to stay in-box and stepped into a cross angle that Blackened gunfire had been waiting for. The burst hit deck plating beside the Ranger's boot, sparks and noise forcing a retreat. Nobody went down. Everybody tightened. The deck's calm discipline cracked into motion.
That motion was the seam Blackizrion needed.
He reached for the cradle lock with a tool, not a hand, and clipped a micro-clamp onto the housing. The clamp didn't break the lock. It stole its time, delaying the lock's response by a breath so the cradle behaved like it hesitated. He slid the decoy sleeve into view and let the camera—he knew it was there, he could feel the Star verifier's evidence angle—catch the contamination stripe gleaming on resin.
"Look," Blackizrion said, voice smooth. "Your proof is already dirty."
The Star verifier didn't take the bait. They raised the offline device, scanned the existing case, and read the checksum aloud. A second AES voice repeated it, confirming two-person verification even under fire. Blackizrion listened, not for the digits themselves, but for the order: who spoke first, which channel replied first, where their hands went, how far they kept palms from any screen.
That was intel.
His wrist device recorded the sequence with timestamps, tying it to deck position and prompt appearance. He didn't transmit content. He transmitted metadata pings—time, order, channel priority behavior—back to Blackwing's ship, short enough to slip through and not enough to be exploited if intercepted.
Blackwing's reply came a moment later, amused and impatient. "You got the dance?"
Blackizrion's mouth curved. "I got their steps."
The fight tightened. Star hard-light tried to reassert clean boxes. Blackout smoke clung to deck lights and made every edge uncertain. Shadow presence shifted behind the Star team, silent, hands signing in blind seams—LEFT, WAIT, NOW—feeding Blackizrion micro-corrections that put him in the right doorway at the right second.
He attempted the swap again, this time not at the cradle, at the handoff point. He let the Star verifier pull the sealed case free for a second to re-seat it into a secondary tamper sleeve, and in that one breath of transition—case between cradle and sleeve—Blackizrion slid his decoy sleeve into the verifier's peripheral vision and forced the camera angle to catch both objects at once.
A clean swap would be invisible. He needed the swap to look like AES mishandling.
He thrust the decoy forward, not to give it, to make the verifier reject it. As the verifier's hand snapped back, the contamination stripe flashed in the camera's view like an accusation.
Blackizrion said, "You see it. Everyone sees it."
The Star verifier's answer was command cadence, not argument. "Seal stays. Back."
A Star Ranger stepped in, weapon low, and the hard-light shutter thickened. Blackizrion felt the moment slip. He adjusted without panic, because the goal had never been purely the object. The goal was also the narrative surface.
He triggered the contamination overlay again, forcing the console prompt to pulse, and watched the crew's hands clamp into visible posture away from green. He watched them refuse. He watched them choose waiting under gunfire. That refusal, recorded, would become a different weapon for BRD later: proof that AES would delay, proof that AES would "let systems lag," proof that could be edited into a story of negligence by the wrong broadcaster.
He withdrew his team by inches, turning aggression into denial. Blackened gunners shifted fire to punish pursuit. Shadow fog bent harder, swallowing the gap between hulls. The magnetic clamp grid pulsed again, slowing the cutter just enough that the patrol craft could peel away cleanly.
Galaxbeam's lattice squeezed the sea lane. Blackizrion could feel it even without hearing it: exits narrowing, predictions tightening, the ocean itself becoming geometry against him. He had two choices—fast extraction that risked a Star intercept in open water, or slow extraction that risked the half-hour seam closing and leaving his craft outlined in plain sight.
His comm bead clicked once. The Shadow handler—still silent—signed via a tiny camera feed: FAST.
Blackizrion chose fast.
The patrol craft surged into spray, riding a bombardment flash as cover, and the cutter's hard-light boxes shrank behind them into a faint green glow in fog. Blackizrion stood at the console as it began to blink with a new prompt—this one not on AES systems, on his own panel—an operator-tier enforcement draft loading in real time, shaped by the verification steps he had just recorded.
SYNC VERIFICATION FOR SAFETY
OPERATOR TIER
CONFIRM AUTHORITY
The green button pulsed, patient and confident, offering him the chance to spend what he'd learned immediately—to fire a counterfeit "verification" blink across nodes and force Orinvalde's next briefing into contradiction while cameras watched.
He held his hand above the console edge and didn't touch it yet. In his other hand, he gripped a sealed sleeve containing the metadata log—timestamps, step order, channel priority behavior—proof of the dance he had stolen. The patrol craft tore forward, the sea hammering its hull, while the next half-hour window opened on schedule and the prompt breathed green like a heartbeat asking permission.
Blackizrion smiled, not because he felt safe, because he was choosing between two profitable risks: spend the signature now and expose it to Galaxy analysis, or carry it back to Darkwing's occupied cavity and break continuity authority at a higher tier when the Council of Four moved as one. The console kept pulsing. The fog kept bending. The sea kept demanding speed.
And the click waited.
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