Stargrass landed in Fuyoshika City (芙芳華市) under a cloud ceiling that made the runway lights look like they were floating. The aircraft rolled to a stop inside a painted box, engines cooling at idle while Star Rangers formed a tight escort wedge along the tarmac's marked lanes. Nobody waved. Nobody ran. The ground crew walked in cadence, heads down, hands visible, and every badge reader they touched was treated as a mouth that could lie.
A Galaxy courier-operator waited in the hangar's inner room behind two doors and a paper token station. The room was deliberately plain: folding table, offline verifier, two cameras pointed at hands instead of faces. Professor Prince Galaxbeam's presence didn't arrive as a person; it arrived as coherence—timestamps aligning, interference thinning, and a short message window opening in the comm bead like the world itself had taken a breath and held it.
"Signal silhouette confirmed," Galaxbeam's voice said, calm and exact. "Maritime approach node: Galaxen-Hoshiou (星王). Transit axis: Jakchi coastline. You have one window before coastal repeater chain contact."
Stargrass didn't answer with enthusiasm. He answered with custody. He slid a tamper sleeve onto the table, placed the courier's sealed strip inside without touching it bare-handed, and photographed the seal from three angles. The Star Ranger beside him read the checksum string aloud. Stargrass repeated it, then heat-imprinted the resin line with a controlled hard-light pulse that left a visible Star signature pattern—proof designed for later, not comfort now.
"Chain is live," Stargrass said. "No network contact."
The Galaxy courier-operator nodded once, eyes locked on the sleeve like it was a live explosive. "They're carrying a template," the courier said. "Not just a bulletin. A ritual schedule. If it touches a repeater chain, your opponents won't sound like officials. They'll sound like verification."
Stargrass closed the sleeve into a secondary tamper case and clipped it to his vest. "Then we take it at the source."
They moved immediately to rail, because rail in Galaxenchi was not simply transport; it was discipline expressed in steel. The consist sat under canopy lighting with lane markers painted along the platform and hard-light rectangles projected at each junction between cars. Stargrass walked the corridor line once, checked each projector's battery, and made the rule visible to everyone before the first door slid shut.
"Boxes hold," he said. "Hands visible. No screen prompts without paper."
A Star Ranger at the door answered like a machine. "Confirmed."
The train departed Fuyoshika City and cut toward Galaxen-Yueshinden City through green-lit transit spines that looked serene from outside and felt like a controlled artery from within. Galaxbeam's lattice stayed in Stargrass's ear in short pulses—distance, timing, angle—never telling him what to feel, only what would happen if he did nothing.
At 08:19, the first probe arrived as a maintenance anomaly, not a soldier. A service cabinet along the rail spine threw a "routine guidance recalibration" prompt onto the car's internal display, the kind of helpful message that tempted human hands to press green just to make it go away. Stargrass watched the prompt and didn't turn his head.
"Ignore," he said. "Cabinet is outside custody."
A Shadow operative made the mistake of trying to translate stealth into speed. The figure emerged from the inter-car gap at the next junction—too smooth, too silent, gloved hand already reaching toward the guidance cabinet panel with a beacon-drift injector shaped like an innocent connector. Stargrass didn't chase. He changed the geometry.
Hard-light snapped into place across the junction like a clear door slamming shut. Then Stargrass conjured his constructs the way he preferred to use power: functional, not decorative. Bark-plated limbs grew from the floor seam in a quick, controlled rise, vine-limbed torsos forming into a braced barrier that pinned the Shadow operative's reaching arm against the cabinet frame without crushing it. The operative fought to twist free, silent mouth open in a wordless curse, but the vines tightened in measured increments and held.
"Hands visible," Stargrass said, voice low. "Disarm."
A Star Ranger stepped in-box, cut the injector cable with a hard-light blade, and dropped the device into an evidence sleeve. The Shadow operative tried to melt backward into the gap, but the bark-plated construct pivoted like a door wedge and blocked the retreat route without needing to swing a weapon. Stargrass kept his eyes on the cabinet panel the entire time, reading the attempt for what it was: not assassination, not spectacle—signature planting.
Galaxbeam's voice returned, clipped. "Probe confirmed. They wanted you to touch the prompt."
Stargrass nodded once as if the voice had been in the room. "We don't give them hands."
They arrived at Galaxen-Yueshinden City, executed a rail-side equipment handoff under cameras that watched seal lines instead of faces, and shifted again before the system could settle. The theater changed from rail discipline to sea discipline, because BRD had learned to hide inside maritime "routine" the way they hid inside civic "official." Galaxen-Hoshiou's port breathed salt and paperwork: cranes moving in lanes, manifests on clipboards, and coastal repeaters sitting on towers like quiet judges over the water.
Stargrass boarded a fast cutter with a crew trained to treat consoles like hazards. He taped lane markers around the navigation panel, placed the tamper case in a locked cradle between two hard-light emitters, and issued the only order that mattered once waves and bullets started competing for attention.
"No green," he said. "If it blinks, we box and wait."
The cutter cleared the harbor mouth and ran low, using sea spray and distant bombardment flashes as timing cover. Off the Jakchi coastline, fog thickened in a way that felt curated rather than meteorological—Shadow influence shaping sightlines and swallowing distance. Through the haze, a vessel appeared with the posture of legitimacy: a maintenance tender, hull markings clean, bridge lights steady, calm radio cadence on open channels.
It was the sort of ship people wanted to trust because trusting it made the world easier.
Galaxbeam's lattice tightened. "Hidden transmitter confirmed. Lab compartment below deck. Contact window: now."
Stargrass did not announce an attack. He executed a boarding like a checklist. Three-point breach, three simultaneous constraints. Team One clamped the bow access with hard-light braces that locked the angle of approach and denied the tender a clean turn. Team Two cut into mid-deck service doors using a hard-light saw that left no sparks and no noise until the last second. Team Three followed Stargrass toward the interior hatch line that led to the lab compartment, because the sleeve was not going to be on a bridge table. It was going to be under procedure, under sterilized steel, under people who believed "contamination" could slow defenders.
Gunfire started as soon as boots hit deck. Blackened gun teams laid short, disciplined bursts from behind equipment housings, not spraying, aiming at knees and railings and the spaces where a rushed defender would step wrong. Star Rangers answered with hard-light bulkheads that rose like transparent walls, cutting firing lanes into segments the way a traffic engineer cuts intersections. Stargrass kept his people inside the boxes he projected onto the deck—rectangles that forced their feet into safe arcs and made every friendly movement predictable under chaos.
"Hold lane," he snapped. "Don't drift."
A Shadow operative tried to collapse the geometry by changing the environment itself—deck lights bending, shadows swallowing the midline, a corridor door "forgetting" to be where the map said it was. Stargrass countered with brightness used as a tool rather than a flare: he projected a hard-light grid along the deck surface so even altered lighting could not hide where bodies were allowed to be. The grid made every unauthorized step look like trespass.
They reached the interior hatch. The air changed immediately: colder, cleaner, sterilized. A Death lab-courier team held the corridor with quiet confidence, faces masked, gloves sealed, eyes glowing faintly with cross-shaped pupils that told Stargrass he was no longer fighting for ground. He was fighting for custody.
The lead Death technician raised a hand and pointed to a wall panel. A compliance overlay blinked on the panel's screen, smooth and calm.
QUARANTINE EVENT — DATA CONTAMINATION SUSPECTED
OPERATOR TIER REQUIRED
CONFIRM AUTHORITY
The green button pulsed. The trap was elegant: force defenders to delay themselves with fear of contamination, or force them to click in order to "resolve" it. Either outcome bought time for Supreme Commander coverage to arrive.
Stargrass stepped into the corridor box and spoke as if he were briefing a crew in a warehouse, not dueling necro-technology in a ship's gut.
"We treat contamination as evidence," he said. "Not as a stop."
He pulled the tamper case from his vest and sealed it into a second casing on camera, heat-imprinting the resin line so any later accusation of tampering would have to argue with visible scars. He did not touch the wall panel. He did not engage the prompt. He ordered an offline verification check right there, in the corridor, using a handheld verifier that never touched the ship's network.
"Scan," he said.
A Star Ranger scanned the case. The checksum string matched the intake log from Fuyoshika City. The chain was intact. The Death technician's eyes tightened behind the mask, and the corridor pressure shifted from procedural theater to direct confrontation.
A Death Elite moved in—not fast, not loud—necro-tech pressure radiating like a force field designed to pull the case out of Stargrass's hands with inevitability. Stargrass didn't try to "out-muscle" the pull with bravado. He anchored the corridor.
Roots of light and vine-limbed constructs erupted at his feet, not wild, not sprawling—precise braces that locked into deck seams and created an immovable hinge point. The tug-of-war stopped being about who wanted it more and became about whose geometry held. The Death Elite strained. Stargrass held. The corridor stayed orderly enough that nobody panicked into the green button.
"Back," Stargrass said, voice clipped. "Hands visible."
The Death Elite attempted to break the posture with an angle shift, pushing Stargrass toward the wall panel to force accidental contact. Stargrass responded with a hard-light shutter that slid between his shoulder and the panel like a clear shield, turning "accident" into "impossible." A Blackened gunner appeared at the far end of the corridor and raised a rifle for a close-range burst that would have shredded the box discipline and made the case drop.
Stargrass moved without theatrics. Hard-light snapped up in a narrow slice to cut the firing lane, and a bark-plated construct shouldered into the gunner's stance, pinning the rifle barrel upward into the ceiling where the shot would waste itself. The gunner cursed and tried to wrench free, but Stargrass closed distance under the construct's cover, struck the rifle out of line with a short, controlled motion, and kicked the weapon into a sealed corner where it could not be reclaimed without stepping out of the box and being recorded doing it.
The Death lab-courier team tried a second procedural weapon—hush timing. Audio in the corridor skewed. Commands arrived half a beat late, as if the air itself wanted defenders to mis-hear and mis-step. Stargrass didn't shout into the distortion. He reduced language.
"Box," he said. "Seal. Move."
They captured one operator alive—a Death courier with a data pouch clipped to the inner suit—using hard-light cuffs that locked wrists without breaking bones, and they extracted the secondary pouch as a separate custody item, photographed and sealed. Stargrass did not transmit the contents. He transmitted only metadata through Galaxbeam's lattice window: timestamps, seal photos, checksum strings, and the observed hush signature pattern.
Orinvalde Crowncity received the report without receiving an exploitable payload. Starbeam Charmley received the same: proof-first, air-gapped, disciplined.
On deck, extraction became its own fight. Shadow operatives attempted a silent reclaim, sliding along blind seams, trying to touch the case in the moment when bodies turned toward the sea. Stargrass projected boxes again, forcing every friendly foot into visible geometry and every enemy approach into recorded trespass. Blackened gunfire chased them toward the rail, but Star Rangers answered with hard-light bulkheads that turned open deck into corridors where crossfire couldn't find a clean lane.
They made the jump back to the cutter under spray and smoke, and the cutter punched away from the tender's wake. The coastline blurred. The fog behind them looked wrong in the way Shadow fog always looked wrong—too obedient, too aligned to threat.
Stargrass stood over the cutter's comm console as it began to blink. The screen didn't show a map. It showed compliance.
SYNC VERIFICATION FOR SAFETY
OPERATOR TIER
CONFIRM AUTHORITY
The green button pulsed like a heartbeat that wanted permission. The timing was perfect. It always was. A half-hour window had started while they were still at sea, and the civic backbone blink had followed them off land as if authority itself were portable prey.
A Star Ranger's hand twitched toward the panel, reflex seeking relief.
Stargrass raised a Star hard-light cage around the console area, making the box visible, making the rule physical. His voice stayed calm enough to be obeyed.
"Hands off green," he said. "We hold custody. We hold proof."
Outside, distant bombardment flashes stitched the horizon. The cutter kept running with the case sealed in its cradle, an operator cuffed on deck, and Orinvalde's war room receiving receipts instead of rumors. Yet the prompt continued to pulse in the cage, patient and confident, proving BRD's new enforcement package was not only chasing cities anymore.
It was chasing the moment a defender, exhausted and wet and tired of being asked to wait, decided that one quiet click felt like safety.
No comments:
Post a Comment