The first lie Blackenstride told was not spoken out loud. It was broadcast.
In the forward operations suite—half command post, half nightclub aesthetic—he stood over a city model rendered in black neon and maroon accents, the grid lines pulsing like a living organism. His Blackened technicians treated the skyline as an instrument panel: traffic lights, municipal relays, commuter rails, hospital routing, emergency dispatch. Each node blinked with the same question defenders always asked too late.
Who told you that was the safe way?
Blackenstride rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck, and let a grin sharpen across his face as the mission packet hit his device: a Starrup insertion authorization, a corridor inversion directive, and a procurement list that was boring in the way real wars are boring—relay wafers, finance tokens, verification signatures, route codes.
He chuckled, low and pleased. "They think discipline saves 'em," he muttered. "Cool. I love disciplined people. They follow instructions so pretty."
A Blackened elite leaned in, visor glowing faintly. "Star Regime's already up. Starradale's on rotation. Star Rangers got drones in stacked lanes."
Blackenstride tapped the screen. The city grid zoomed, and his finger hovered over a civic broadcast node like it was a pressure point on a throat. "Then we don't fight the Rangers first." He looked up, eyes bright with swagger. "We fight the concept of 'official.'"
A second tech—hands moving fast—brought up the content queue. A prerecorded address loaded, clean audio, crisp video, and a face that would be trusted at a glance.
It was not their face.
A deepfake municipal chief appeared in-frame, calm, steady, authoritative. "Attention all citizens," the recording said, "proceed to Corridor Nine. Escort markers will be present. Follow the Blackened—"
The tech hesitated, swallowing. "Boss, you want them to say 'Blackened'?"
Blackenstride's grin widened like a blade turning. "Nah." He snapped his fingers. "Swap it. Make it say 'Star Security.' Make it sound like the exact tone Starrup uses when it's tryna calm people down. Make the lie feel like a seatbelt."
His comms lit with acknowledgement pings from his squads already moving. Ground units in contractor-style vehicles. Drones masquerading as municipal maintenance craft. Helicopters holding higher altitude than a dramatic entrance would require. Blackenstride wasn't arriving as an army. He was arriving as a policy error.
"Alright," he said, voice dropping into command. "We enter like we belong. We strike like we don't care. We leave before they find the correct story."
And then he smiled again—anime-bright, dangerous, almost playful.
"Let's go make Starrup doubt its own green."
STARRUP — STARRENDRAPPLETRONPOLIS, CIVIC SKYLINE AND LOWER CORRIDORS
The city looked clean from above—metropolis glass, skybridges, green-lit transit rings, drone lanes flowing like blood through arteries of steel. Down at street level, it was disciplined chaos: Rangers in formation, civilians moving in predictable lanes, checkpoint stamps verified twice, then three times.
Starradale stood under a transit arch with his coat snapping in wind from passing rotorwash. His eyes tracked the skyline with the cold patience of a systems commander who had already seen too many "emergencies" turn out to be engineered.
A Star Ranger jogged up, visor flaring. "Sir—public broadcast node just pushed an evacuation directive. Corridor Nine."
Starradale's expression didn't change, but the air around him sharpened. "Stamped?"
"It looks stamped."
Starradale's gaze snapped to the Ranger like a blade. "Looks is not stamped."
Another ping hit. Then another. Civilians started shifting toward Corridor Nine—not running, not panicking, just... complying. That was the lethal part. The movement looked responsible.
Starradale spoke into his comms, voice calm but absolute. "Freeze Corridor Nine routing. Push counter-broadcast. Local truth only. If you cannot confirm the stamp origin with our ring, you treat it as hostile."
A junior operator flinched. "Sir, the message is carrying tone matching our civic advisory cadence. It's—"
"It's bait," Starradale cut in. His eyes narrowed. "They're not attacking our people. They're attacking our habit of obedience."
Above them, drones shifted formation.
They were supposed to be Starrup drones.
They weren't.
Blackened craft glided into place with perfect mimicry, their signature tucked under noise floors, their silhouettes masked by city lights. One drifted too close, and a Star Ranger fired. Green energy snapped up—
The drone didn't explode. It folded sideways like it had been expecting the shot, venting black-maroon static that washed over the nearest sensor pods. The Ranger stumbled, visor glitching, his HUD briefly showing three different maps at once.
"What the—?!" he gasped.
And then the gunfire started—not loud barrages, but tight, professional bursts. Black Guards appeared at the edge of a junction, firing in controlled arcs to push defenders back without turning the street into a massacre. Behind them, Blackened elites moved like predators through a city they were hacking as they ran: traffic signals flipping to red, gates lowering, a transit door sealing as a medic team approached.
Starradale's eyes widened for a fraction—pure anime shock—then slammed back into focus.
"Compartment!" he barked. "They're shaping our geometry!"
He stepped forward, green radiance flaring, and slammed his palm down. A Star lattice surged across the intersection—clean lines, predictable lanes, forcing the chaos into a box. Civilians were guided out through marked exits. Rangers tightened into triangles. Drone overwatch re-locked.
Then a voice crackled across a public speaker above them.
Smooth. Confident. Mocking.
"Well damn," Blackenstride purred, amplified through the city like a celebrity announcement. "Y'all really do love your little boxes."
Starradale's head tilted upward, jaw tightening. "Blackenstride."
A camera on a nearby streetlight flickered, and Blackenstride appeared on every public screen at once—leaning back in a chair somewhere unknown, black coat loose, grin wide, eyes shining with that infuriating calm.
"You see what I'm doin', right?" Blackenstride asked, feigning innocence. "I ain't here to conquer. I'm here to—how y'all say it—optimize."
Starradale's voice cut like steel. "You're here to steal."
Blackenstride laughed. "Steal? Bro, I'm borrowing your citizens' trust. You can have it back later. Might be a little scratched."
The screen feed cut.
Then the city screamed in data.
A transit ring flashed "MAINTENANCE EMERGENCY." A hospital routing panel displayed two different triage priorities depending on which terminal read it. A finance disbursement node pushed a false audit freeze. Every system did something small—nothing catastrophic by itself—until the total effect became paralysis by caution.
And in that paralysis, Blackenstride's real team slipped into a civic verification hub under the cover of "official response."
Inside the hub, the lights went dim.
A Star operator spun around, eyes wide. "Who authorized this lock?"
Blackenstride stepped out of a side corridor like he had paid rent there. In close quarters, he looked less like a distant hacker and more like a street-general—knife-edge calm, shoulders relaxed, a pistol in one hand and a black-maroon energy blade forming in the other like condensed night.
He gave the operator a bright, almost friendly smile.
"Your system did," he said.
Gunfire cracked.
Star security returned fire, disciplined and controlled, but Blackenstride moved like he had rehearsed their angles. He slid behind a pillar, fired two shots to force heads down, then slammed his palm into the wall. Blackened code-magic surged outward—glyphs and circuitry overlapping—infecting the hub's lighting logic. Emergency lights blinked in a pattern that made aim unreliable without making the room fully dark for civilians outside. He was always careful about that. Chaos was his product, not random slaughter.
A Star Ranger charged, green energy blade flaring. "Stay away from the relay!"
Blackenstride met him halfway, eyes widening with exaggerated anime delight. "Oh, you got hands? Okay!"
Steel kissed energy. The Ranger's blade clashed against Blackenstride's black-maroon edge, sparks flying. The Ranger pushed with raw strength; Blackenstride yielded a fraction, then pivoted, hooking the Ranger's wrist and using the city's own tremor of power fluctuation to throw off his balance.
The Ranger hit the floor hard.
Blackenstride leaned close, voice low enough to be personal. "You're brave," he said, almost respectful. "But bravery ain't encryption."
He rolled away as shots snapped past, then flicked his fingers.
A prerecorded message burst onto the hub monitors—another official face, another calm directive.
"Corridor Nine is secure. Continue movement."
Starradale's voice cut through the defenders' comms like a knife. "Kill the screens. All screens. Public guidance is now physical only. Stamp protocol by hand."
A Star operator slammed a switch. The monitors went dark.
Blackenstride's grin sharpened. "Ohhh, that's good," he said, eyes bright with annoyed admiration. "You learnin'. I hate that."
He signaled his extraction team. A small case was lifted—inside it, a relay wafer and a finance token stamped with enough institutional authority to cause pain elsewhere. His people moved with the smooth efficiency of practiced theft.
Starradale arrived at the hub doorway, green radiance tightening the corridor like a clamp. His eyes were furious, but his voice stayed controlled.
"You will not leave with that."
Blackenstride turned slowly, hands spread as if surrendering—then laughed.
"You gonna chase me?" he asked, voice dripping with bait. "Go on, Starradale. Do it. Break your doctrine for me."
Starradale's jaw flexed. For a heartbeat, the air felt like it might explode.
Then Starradale's eyes hardened with discipline.
"No," he said. "I will contain you."
Blackenstride's smile faltered for the first time—just a flicker of irritation, anime-quick.
"Damn," he muttered. "You really are the boring kind of dangerous."
He snapped his fingers, and the building's safety protocols triggered a sealed-door event—emergency partitions dropping, corridors rerouting, alarms pinging in polite tones designed to consume seconds. Not lethal. Just expensive.
Blackenstride used those seconds like currency. He retreated into a service lane that shouldn't have existed.
And the city chased shadows while he moved the real payload.
TRAVEL CHAIN — LAND, AIR, SEA, AND THE LOOP THAT MAKES IT REPEATABLE
He moved like a Bond villain who refused to stay in one room long enough to be caught.
A contractor convoy at night through industrial outskirts. A helicopter lift from a rooftop pad disguised as a maintenance extraction. A short-haul jet with transponder noise disguised under civilian patterns. A fast boat transfer across black water where the wind tasted like oil and salt. Every transition was timed to make defender prediction useless.
On his device, messages stacked from BRD channels—Darkened pressure pings, Shadow captions that read like knives, Death containment updates that sounded like hospital charts.
He didn't care about their tone.
He cared about their timing.
On the offshore transfer platform, the ocean below looked calm enough to mock the war above it. The platform itself was industrial steel and safety signage—the kind of place where "rules" were supposed to protect workers.
Blackenstride loved rules.
His Blackened escorts moved into position, setting up the final handoff. A small crate of stolen modules was magnet-locked to a lift rig. Forced-labor crew were placed in visible lanes—not harmed, just positioned—so any aggressive assault would look like a moral failure on camera.
Then the defenders arrived.
Star Rangers in disciplined approach lines. Drone overwatch tightening. A containment lattice forming in the air.
Starradale's voice cut across the platform speakers, calm and lethal.
"Blackenstride. Stand down. Release the cargo. Release the workers."
Blackenstride stepped into the open, arms wide, theatrical as a stage performer. His grin was back, bigger than ever.
"Look at you," he called out. "Followin' me all the way out here. That's cute."
Starradale didn't flinch. "You will not corrupt our corridors."
Blackenstride's eyes gleamed. "I already did. The question is whether you can fix it before your people start doubtin' you."
Gunfire snapped.
Black Guards returned fire with tight bursts, forcing the Rangers into cover without spraying the labor lanes. Blackenstride moved like he was dancing—ducking, sliding, firing only when it forced an angle. In his other hand, black-maroon energy formed into a blade again, and he used it not to butcher, but to sever cables, drop partitions, and reshape the platform's geometry into a maze.
A Star Ranger lunged in close combat, face twisted in anime rage. "STOP HIDING BEHIND PEOPLE!"
Blackenstride's expression changed—just for a moment—into something colder.
"I'm hidin' behind your rules," he said. "You built the shield. I'm just standin' under it."
He slammed his palm to the platform floor.
A wave of metropolis code-magic rippled outward—lights strobing, access panels sealing, safety systems triggering a procedural lockdown. The platform's own voice announced it in neutral tones:
"HAZARD PROTOCOL INITIATED. MOVEMENT RESTRICTED."
Starradale's eyes widened—anger flashing, then focus returning. "He's using the platform against us."
Blackenstride laughed through the chaos. "Yessir. That's the lesson."
A Star containment lattice dropped toward the crate. Starradale moved to clamp it.
Blackenstride's gaze snapped to his rig crew.
"Now," he said, voice sharp.
The crate lifted.
Starradale lunged—not into a reckless chase, but into a containment move aimed at cutting the lift. His green energy surged—
Blackenstride fired a single shot at a support junction, not at a person. The bullet hit, sparks burst, and the junction flared into a controlled shower that forced Starradale to shift his angle to protect a nearby worker from panic movement.
It was one second.
Blackenstride bought it with cruelty.
The crate cleared the platform edge and moved toward the waiting extraction craft.
Starradale's voice snapped into command. "Hold the workers. Hold the lanes. Do not break discipline."
Blackenstride's grin turned razor-thin. "That's it," he whispered. "Keep bein' responsible. I love that."
He stepped back, and his device lit with a ready transmission—an "inversion toolkit," packaged with route codes, spoof templates, and domain swap guidance. It wasn't just stolen hardware. It was stolen confidence.
He hit send.
Across BRD Supreme Commander channels, the package replicated instantly.
Across AES systems, micro-anomalies began to appear—not breaches, not explosions, not obvious attacks.
Compliance.
Instructions that looked correct but were wrong by one degree.
Brinewatch's nightmare.
Starradale felt it too. His eyes lifted toward the skyline beyond the platform, as if he could see the future in the way the wind changed.
Blackenstride leaned close to a platform camera, face filling the frame, anime-bright grin weaponized into a threat.
"You keep tellin' people to trust the stamp," he said softly. "I'm gonna make the stamp lie."
Then he vanished into the extraction lane as his escorts covered the retreat with disciplined fire, leaving the platform alive, leaving the workers alive, leaving the defenders with the worst outcome of all: a contained fight and an uncontained consequence.
Starradale stood amid strobing hazard lights, fists clenched, breathing controlled, and spoke one sentence that sounded like a vow rather than an outburst.
"We will not let you rewrite our procedures."
Somewhere far from the platform—across Solar, Lunar, Galaxy nodes—systems blinked in the same minute.
And this time, the alerts didn't look like sabotage.
They looked like orders.
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