In the calm that only exists after disciplined survival, the enemy does not "rest." It reassigns. BRD's half-hour method had already proven that it could make four continents feel too wide to defend; the next step was to make defenses feel too expensive to sustain. That escalation did not arrive as a louder strike. It arrived as an authorization cascade sent through secure devices across occupied districts and offshore decks—short directives, identical permissions, and a single strategic instruction embedded underneath: stop chasing visible damage and start harvesting the systems that make recovery possible.
Deathenpuff received her orders without ceremony. She did not read them like a warrior looking for glory. She read them like a clinician receiving a procedure schedule. The objective was Sollarisca, chosen not because Sollarisca was weak, but because Sollarisca's defenders had already proven they could stabilize blackouts faster than BRD preferred. If you cannot win by breaking power, you pivot to breaking the continuity that power supports: labs, medical logistics, sterile supply chains, and the trust mechanisms that keep contamination panic from turning into self-inflicted collapse.
Her mission was not "kill the city." It was to force the city into a posture where every decision costs time. A controlled contamination alarm, a seized instrument set, a missing cold-chain crate, a compromised research archive—each one small by itself, each one heavy when layered on top of repair fatigue and escort doctrine. That was the Death Regime's specialty: not dramatic annihilation, but clinical leverage that makes ordinary governance feel like it is constantly one minute behind reality.
The insertion route was built to mimic routine, because routine is how you pass through defenses that have been trained to look for spectacle. A sterile-flagged convoy moved along coastal industrial roads under a false audit packet. Helicopters stayed high and quiet, not to intimidate, but to avoid drawing Solar escorts into a visible chase. The first "incident" was deliberately minor: a short-lived sensor false positive at a switching yard, enough to pull Sun Marines toward the wrong edge without declaring an emergency that would close the entire district.
While that diversion turned heads, Deathenpuff's core team advanced toward a medical-research annex outside Solbrineispolisbara's hardened civic spine. The annex was not glamorous. It was the kind of facility that exists to keep ambulances stocked, to keep diagnostics consistent, to keep public health data coherent enough for officials to issue instructions without guessing. Facilities like that are the quiet backbone of legitimacy in a crisis, which is why BRD targeted them.
Inside, Solar defenders did not behave like panicked guards. They behaved like professionals. A layered checkpoint system slowed the approach. Local verification cues forced the convoy to pause. And when Deathenpuff's perimeter team attempted to "push" the lane, Solarstream's response arrived with the discipline that had saved Sollarisca once already: containment first, then confirmation, then force applied only where it preserved civilian routing.
Deathenpuff assessed the situation with a sober clarity that made her dangerous. A brute assault would fail here, not because Death forces lacked power, but because Solarstream would trade ground for time and deny the Death team a clean procurement window. The operation needed a different shape. She authorized a containment feint that looked like a withdrawal. Her perimeter relaxed by two degrees. Her aerial overwatch shifted away. The defenders interpreted the movement as success and began re-spacing to cover likely exit lanes.
That was the moment the real procedure began. Deathenpuff's interior elite slipped into the annex through the service geometry Solar defenders could not close without turning the whole block into a civilian hazard. The entry was not loud. It was sterile and cold. Doors sealed behind them not as a threat, but as a safety measure. Alarms triggered not as screams, but as procedural tones that forced the facility into automatic lockdown rules. Those rules were designed to protect people in normal crises; Deathenpuff weaponized them to protect her procurement window.
She did not linger. She did not monologue. She moved from node to node with a checklist cadence: sample vault, instrument locker, cold-chain packout, records terminal. A gene-sealed canister was placed inside a controlled ventilation junction—not to spread a catastrophic plague, but to force hazmat classification and hours of verification work even if the physical risk remained limited. The point was not mass casualties. The point was to impose a time tax on every future decision the city would need to make.
Solarstream arrived at the annex threshold as the procedure reached its final thirty seconds. His presence narrowed the corridor the way a leader's presence always does; even Death elites became more careful, because Supreme Commanders change the cost of mistakes. He demanded a halt. He offered a contained exit. He tried to keep the facility intact without escalating the situation into something that would draw civilians into panic.
Deathenpuff did not take the offer, because the offer was designed to preserve the defender's tempo. She executed the withdrawal the Death Regime prefers: one sharp, controlled burst of sterile vapor to break sightlines and force hazmat caution, followed by immediate extraction along pre-mapped routes. Her team left behind only what they intended to leave behind—sealed doors, procedural alarms, and a facility whose staff would spend the next hours confirming whether reality itself had been contaminated.
The procurement payload lifted into the sky under rotorwash that never dipped low enough to become a spectacle. By the time Solar escorts re-established outer control, the annex was not "destroyed." It was simply unusable until it could be verified, and verification is the slowest kind of firefight.
In Orinvalde Crowncity, the alert arrived as a clean packet: Sollarisca reported a sterile lockdown event, a missing set of instruments, and an unresolved hazmat classification. Brinewatch's staff immediately understood the significance. This was not a random strike. It was an investment. BRD was buying future disruption by taking the pieces that make recovery quick and public instruction credible.
On BRD networks, the confirmation pings rolled in like receipts. Darkened channels acknowledged pressure sustained. Blackened channels acknowledged equipment flow maintained. Shadow channels acknowledged diversions successful. Death channels acknowledged procurement complete and "condition seeded." The language was cold because the intent was cold: keep Westonglappa hot, rotate homelands, and force AES to defend domains instead of places.
Deathenpuff returned to her staging deck without celebration. She handed off the payload to sealed crews and watched the quarantine markings close over it, as if she were watching a door shut on a patient's room. Her device vibrated again—another synchronized update across Supreme Commander lines, stamped to multiple theaters at once. The permissions were broader now. The target categories were sharper. The implied intent was unmistakable: the next windows would not only strip infrastructure, they would hunt the operators who kept infrastructure governable.
She looked out over the sea lanes and listened to the distant rhythm of helicopters returning in staggered intervals, each one a reminder that the half-hour method was no longer an experiment. It was now a routine.
Behind her, a fresh alert tone sounded—one of those tones that never appears alone. Another followed. Then another, each with a different domain label, each arriving too close in time to dismiss as coincidence.
Deathenpuff did not ask what it meant. She already understood.
The next half hour had started moving.
No comments:
Post a Comment