In the hours after President Alderhart's address, Westonglappa's command cadence did what it was built to do: it outlasted the first wave of shock, and it kept the public moving in measured lanes. That discipline did not end the war; it only removed BRD's easiest fuel. In Orinvalde Crowncity, the board stayed legible under steady lighting, and the continent's confidence held because the guidance remained repetitive enough to be obeyed without debate. Across the ocean, that same repetition was reclassified by BRD as a target category—broadcast integrity, corridor trust, civic instruction—because those were the nerves that made survival scalable.
Darklance received his orders from a Darkened relay node that smelled of hot metal and old incense, the kind of room built for obedience rather than debate. The directive was short, framed as a timing problem instead of a battlefield fantasy: infiltrate Lunna's crystalline broadcast lattice, poison the public-facing cadence for a single half-hour window, and force the Lunar Regime to spend its elite attention correcting civilians instead of hunting BRD extraction lanes. He did not celebrate the assignment. He treated it like a contract. His maroon magic gathered tight around his shoulders and hands, not as an aura meant for intimidation, but as a toolset—sigils compressed into thin, disciplined layers that could hide inside normal signal flow until the moment of release.
He crossed into Lunna under weather cover and low rotor noise, riding the edge of a quiet Blackened insertion pattern without belonging to it. From a distance, the crystalline towers looked like civic architecture: cold-blue ribs, reflective panels, quiet lights meant to calm. Up close, the towers were doctrine made physical—every facet mapped to verified channels, every relay tied to shelter signage and corridor routing. Darklance's eyes narrowed with professional appreciation, because systems like this did not collapse from brute force. They collapsed from the wrong instruction arriving at the wrong minute. He pressed two fingers to a maintenance seam and fed a maroon cruciform into the metal, not as graffiti, but as a key-shaped parasite. The sigil did not flare. It learned. It listened to the tower's cadence the way a predator listens to breathing.
The first resistance arrived before the alarms did. Moon Guards held the perimeter lanes below with quiet discipline, but the real counterweight came from above—Moonwis and Moonwisdom, already in motion with tablets, lenses, and a portable verification spool that glowed faintly in lunar-blue. Moonwis, human male Elite, moved like a man who trusted structure more than heroics; Moonwisdom, human female Elite, moved like the structure itself—calm, exact, and intolerant of ambiguity. Their voices carried up the maintenance walkways as if they had already decided the outcome would be survivable.
"Freeze the public overlays," Moonwis ordered, eyes scanning the tower's panel seams. "Do not push new guidance until we validate the cadence. The enemy is trying to teach civilians the wrong rhythm."
Moonwisdom lifted her device toward the relay stack and spoke without raising her voice. "I can see a foreign signature inside the timing jitter. It's not Shadow. It's maroon—Darkened, compressed." Her gaze sharpened toward the walkway where Darklance stood in partial shadow. "You can step out, or we can drag you out."
Darklance's reply came smooth and low, almost courteous, because he did not need volume to be heard. "If you drag me, you spend the half-hour on me," he said. "If you chase the signal, you spend the half-hour on your civilians. Either way, your broadcast becomes my instrument."
He snapped his fingers once, and the maroon cruciform he had planted unfolded into a lattice that climbed the tower's inner ribs like a living schematic. The tower's blue lights did not go out; they shifted tone by a fraction, subtle enough to look like normal fluctuation. That subtlety was the point. Darklance's magic specialized in permission-shaped lies—false "verified" tags, corridor arrows that looked official, evacuation prompts timed to coincide with harmless noise so panic would sound reasonable. On the ground below, a few shelter screens flickered, then displayed a clean, authoritative line that did not belong: ROUTE ADJUSTMENT—MOVE NOW. A block away, a second screen followed with a different lie: SHELTER FULL—REDIRECT TO SECONDARY SITE. The instructions were contradictory on purpose, designed to generate cross-crowd friction, then to blame the friction on the government.
Moonwis's jaw tightened as he read the drift. "He's injecting split guidance. He wants people to argue in the street."
Moonwisdom's hands moved in practiced sequence, weaving lunar-blue countersigils across her portable spool. "Then we don't argue," she replied. "We lock guidance to local truth rings only. We narrow the surface."
Darklance stepped forward, and his maroon magic shifted from invisible sabotage to direct denial. A set of thin, blade-like sigils formed around his wrists—flat, angular, disciplined—and he threw them not as knives meant to kill, but as clamps meant to bind. The air between him and the two Lunar Elites rippled, and their devices stuttered under sudden interference as maroon geometry attempted to "own" the relay channel they were using. Moonwis pivoted, taking a half step that put his body between Moonwisdom and the edge rail, and raised a lunar-blue ward that turned the first clamp into sparks. Moonwisdom answered with precision, sending a cold wave up the tower's ribbing that forced the maroon lattice to reveal its seams—just enough exposure to map it, not enough to destabilize the tower itself.
"Your magic is greedy," Moonwisdom said, voice flat with contempt. "It wants to occupy the whole channel."
Darklance's eyes stayed on the relay stack. "Occupy is slow," he answered. "I only need ownership for minutes."
He drove his palm into the maintenance seam again, and the tower's broadcast cadence shifted a second time—cleaner, more convincing, timed to mimic normal emergency updates. On the street below, civilians hesitated, then began moving in conflicting directions as competing screens competed for authority. Moon Guards immediately adjusted, stepping into lanes with physical corridor markers and hand signals, preventing stampede behavior before it could become mass casualty. Even so, the damage registered in the only currency BRD truly valued: seconds lost, trust strained, rescue routes forced into manual control.
Moonwis fired a compact lunar-blue bolt that struck Darklance's maroon clamps mid-flight and detonated into freezing mist, forcing Darklance to shield his face and retreat two steps along the walkway. Moonwisdom used the opening to thread a counter-pattern through the tower's ribs—cold, disciplined, clinical—reducing the false prompts into static on every shelter screen that was still compliant with local verification. The lies did not vanish everywhere. They did not need to. They only needed to spread far enough for BRD's other strike teams to exploit the confusion.
"You're bleeding time," Moonwis told him, voice steady. "You're not breaking us."
Darklance grinned without warmth. "I don't need to break you," he replied. "I need you busy."
A new sound rose behind the tower—rotorwash, heavy and deliberate, timed like an extraction appointment. Darklance's comms crackled, and Darkwing's voice slammed into his ear with the kind of rage that treated failure as insult.
"DARKLANCE," Darkwing roared. "YOU HAVE A HALF-HOUR WINDOW. YOU WILL NOT WASTE IT POSTURING."
Darklance did not flinch, but his posture tightened with compliance. "Understood," he said. "Window is active. Civil lanes are destabilized. Lunar response is diverted."
That was the moment the Lunar Regime escalated the response properly. Supreme Commander Lunarpuff, human female, arrived not with a speech but with a pressure change—the air around the tower cooled into a denser, more disciplined cold, and the ground-level flow snapped back into order as Moon Guards responded to her presence like a system receiving its true command key. She rose along the tower's side on a column of pale lunar vapor, boots touching the walkway with a soft impact that nevertheless felt absolute.
"Darkened Elite," Lunarpuff said, eyes fixed on Darklance. "Your window is closing."
Darklance measured her in one glance and recalculated instantly. He could fight an Elite exchange here. He could not afford a prolonged engagement with a Supreme Commander while the clock was running and extraction lanes were forming offshore. He lifted his hand anyway, drawing a maroon cruciform that expanded into a curved bombardment arc—an attempt to fracture the walkway and force Lunarpuff to spend power on stabilization instead of pursuit.
Lunarpuff's answer was immediate and professional. She lifted one palm, and lunar-blue containment thickened into a transparent wall that absorbed the maroon arc, redirected the force downward into harmless vapor, and returned the walkway to stability with a controlled shimmer. Her voice did not rise. "You're trying to purchase escape with civilian risk," she said. "That purchase is denied."
Darklance pivoted toward the relay seam, preparing to force one last injection, one final lie that would echo across the next ten minutes. Before he could complete the pattern, the sky above the tower flashed with an orange-gold radiance that did not belong to Lunna's palette. Lady Moonbeam did not arrive in full spectacle. She did not need to. Her presence registered like an absolute constraint applied to a battlefield—cold authority, lunar radiance sharpened into a single, surgical beam that struck the maroon lattice at its core.
The maroon parasite did not explode. It severed. The lattice snapped into dead fragments that evaporated into harmless dust, and the feedback slammed into Darklance's body like a physical verdict. He staggered, breath catching, maroon light leaking from between his fingers as if his magic had been forcibly quarantined. The pain was not gore. It was control being revoked from inside his nervous system. He dropped to one knee, teeth clenched, refusing to scream because he was still a professional, even when injured.
Lunarpuff stepped forward, ready to bind him. Moonwis moved to flank. Moonwisdom raised her device, prepared to tag his signature for future prediction.
Darklance forced himself upright anyway, shoulders shaking once as he recompiled what power he had left into a narrow, disciplined escape sigil. "You can log my signature," he said hoarsely. "You can tell your shelters you survived." His grin returned, thin and ugly. "But you still spent the half-hour looking up."
He triggered his escape pattern. Maroon light folded around him like a closing hand, and for a moment his silhouette split into three false outlines—decoys designed to waste pursuit seconds. Lunarpuff shattered two of them with lunar-blue precision. The third dropped over the walkway edge, caught by a hovering BRD helicopter lane that had been holding position just beyond the tower's angle, and lifted away at speed. Darklance hung from the skid rail with one arm, bloodless but clearly wounded, eyes still on the tower as if memorizing it for the next attempt.
Below, the last of the false guidance prompts died under Moonwisdom's counter-pattern. Moon Guards restored corridor markers by hand, and civilians, shaken but alive, began to settle into disciplined shelter lanes again. The Lunar broadcast did not collapse. It tightened. That tightening was its own admission: BRD had proven they could touch the public cadence, even if they could not hold it.
Over the ocean, Darklance's helicopter merged into a broader retreat pattern. Other BRD teams were already falling back the same way—hit-and-run squads peeling off from Sollarisca's substations, from Starrup's audit lanes, from Galaxenchi's signal junctions—swapping targets mid-response so defenders chasing one fire would find another already lit. The coordination was not chaotic. It was scheduled misdirection, designed to make AES feel as if the world was too wide even when the defenses were competent.
Darklance's comms lit with a final BRD routing update, shared across Supreme Commanders and elite cell leads in clipped, utilitarian text: ROTATE THE TREE. SWAP THE DOMAINS. EXTRACT CLEAN. The message arrived with no pride, no poetry, only the implication that tonight's damage was sufficient and tomorrow's window would be worse.
As the helicopter carried him toward distant maritime silhouettes—colossal hulls waiting in the mid-ocean dark—Darklance pressed his wounded hand against his chest and laughed once under his breath, not because he had won a war, but because he had succeeded at his assignment. For half an hour, he had made Lunna spend elite attention on civilians and screens. For half an hour, he had forced the Lunar Regime to defend trust as if trust were a battlefield.
In Orinvalde Crowncity, the multi-theater board updated again, the way a system updates when it cannot afford denial. The half-hour window had ended, but the aftershocks remained: damaged substations, disrupted convoys, strained shelters, and public fear that needed to be managed like a resource. The next alert did not ask whether an attack was coming. It asked where the next swap would land, and which domain would be targeted while defenders were still correcting the last one.
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