SUPREMACY- Clash Between Heroes and Villains Chapter 101:Contamination Theater

 Deathkarion titled the folder like it was a lab specimen.

CUSTODY SLEEVE CONTAMINATION THEATER
Theater: Westonglappa / coastal logistics chain
Objective: Invert AES proof tooling into a public scandal
Window: Half-hour hit–fade, synchronized to civic backbone cadence
Operator: Deathkarion (Elite), Death Regime

He wrote it on paper first, not for romance, for intent. Paper did not glitch. Paper could be photographed. Paper could be leaked with clean edges and believable ink.

The Death Regime ship sat offshore like a continent that refused to sink. Its interior bay smelled of sterile polymer and brine. Overhead lights hummed at a frequency that made exhausted minds feel calmer, which was exactly why Death Regime used them. In a row of cabinets—each marked like medical aid—Deathkarion kept his tools: sealed reagent vials, nitrile gloves, a portable fluorescence lamp tuned to common street lighting, and a small stack of clear custody sleeves identical in size to AES equipment but produced with a microscopic difference in seam resin.

His "+" pupils glowed faintly against his dark-gray, violet-undershaded face as he examined a sleeve under the lamp. The seam looked perfect. That was the trap. If you could see it, it was already too late.

A Death courier-technician approached and stopped at the taped rectangle on the deck. Hands open. Eyes down. "Reagent batch ready."

"Present," Deathkarion ordered.

The courier slid a metal tray forward with two vials. One held the reagent: harmless to skin in the doses planned, dramatic under light. The other held neutralizer gel: to erase evidence if the theater needed to shift narratives mid-window. Deathkarion never touched the glass bare-handed. He used forceps, rotated the vials in the lamp, watched the color play like a lie learning how to smile.

"This is not poison," he said quietly. "This is accusation."

The courier swallowed. "Understood."

Deathkarion lifted two fingers and made the Death Regime gesture that meant scope control: small, precise, repeatable. "We contaminate the container ecosystem. Not the evidence. Not the bodies. The sleeves."

"Why sleeves?" the courier asked—too curious, but still within allowed parameters.

Deathkarion's voice stayed clinical. "AES made sleeves into faith. We make faith into doubt."

He sealed the vials into a padded case, stamped the latch, and handed it off without crossing the rectangle. Then he pointed at the deck timer: the half-hour seam was eleven minutes away.

"Deploy."

The insertion team moved without drama: naval skimmer to a secondary Westonglappa pier, then a maintenance van into the industrial grid. No stolen sirens. No gunfire. Their camouflage was procedure: reflective vests, clipboards, and the calm face of people who "keep things safe."

Fortborter Town had become a port that still functioned while pretending it wasn't at war. Cranes moved because they had to. Trucks rolled because stopping would admit fear. Screens played calm looping advisories to keep people from stampeding. The perfect environment for a subtle betrayal.

Deathkarion stepped out of the van at a staff-only gate and raised his hands for the Moon Guard stationed there—yes, Moon Guards, because AES had pushed escort doctrine across Westonglappa. The guard's eyes tracked hands, not faces. Deathkarion complied like a model citizen. He offered a paper badge, a plausible department title, and a form with a stamped header that looked official enough to pass at a glance.

The guard read the header aloud, as required. "Health Safety Audit Team."

"Correct," Deathkarion said.

The guard hesitated. "No screens. Paper only."

Deathkarion tilted his head, polite. "Paper only."

He was admitted.

Inside the port, he did not walk like a villain. He walked like an inspector. He noted lane tape edges. He watched custody sleeves being used to seal manifests, incident photos, confiscated modules—anything that needed to be "provable" later. He watched the press lens teams—Star and Solar—filming hands and seals like it was liturgy. He watched the same sleeves recur across different checkpoints and knew the truth: the sleeves were becoming a shared tool, traded between teams, handed off under pressure, used by tired hands that believed plastic could keep reality clean.

That belief was the opening.

Deathkarion stopped near a "no-touch" rectangle beside a manifest desk and waited. When the clerk looked up, Deathkarion raised his hands slowly, palms visible.

"Random compliance audit," he said. "Glove change. Sleeve stock check."

The clerk frowned. "We're busy."

Deathkarion nodded once. "That is when contamination happens."

He did not argue. He presented a tray of "replacement sleeves" and a stack of gloves. The sleeves were real—almost. The gloves were clean—almost. The clerk's eyes flicked to the calm broadcast screen, then back to Deathkarion's tray. The clerk wanted permission to end the mental strain. The tray offered it.

"Put them in the supply," the clerk said.

Deathkarion's "+" pupils held steady. "Confirm chain. Two-person witness."

The clerk called over another worker. The camera lens nearby caught hands, saw a calm handoff, saw procedure, saw nothing wrong. The sleeves were accepted into inventory with the same seriousness as medicine.

That was phase one.

Phase two came through distribution. The contaminated sleeve percentage was small—low enough to avoid obvious clustering, high enough to guarantee discovery in the wrong lighting. Deathkarion didn't need every sleeve to fluoresce. He needed just enough to create a pattern that looked like tampering.

By evening, a Blackened street team did what Blackened did best: they made rumor feel like a friend. They did not announce "Death Regime operation." They seeded concern.

A short clip appeared in the local feed loops—an ordinary shelter volunteer holding an evidence sleeve under a fluorescent lamp, the seam glowing faintly. The volunteer's voice was shaky but convincing.

"I don't know what's in these," the volunteer said. "But they glow. Why do they glow?"

The clip spread because it didn't sound like propaganda. It sounded like fear.

Deathkarion watched it from a back room in the port office, not on a civic screen but on a sealed viewer with the audio low. He didn't smile. He wrote.

PUBLIC REACTION TREND: "Evidence tampered."
PRIMARY EFFECT: Trust erosion in custody procedures
SECONDARY EFFECT: Pressure for "standardization" and centralized replacement
TARGET: Approving hands (continuity authority and press marshals)

A Death courier in the corner asked, "Now?"

Deathkarion checked the timer. Two minutes to the half-hour seam. "Now."

He left the port and entered the civic broadcast annex in Fortborter's secondary district—not by forcing a door, but by following an official-looking "maintenance corridor" that people assumed existed. BRD had learned to steal corridors by building them with paperwork.

Inside, a local anchor sat at a desk, reading calm advisories with a tight smile. Behind the camera, a Star Regime press marshal stood like a spine, ensuring the anchor did not drift into speculation.

Deathkarion appeared at the edge of the studio's taped rectangle and raised his hands.

"I'm here for a contamination clarification briefing," he said.

The press marshal's eyes narrowed. "Name."

"Doctor—" Deathkarion began, then stopped himself. He didn't need identity. Identity created targets. He needed posture.

"Health Safety Audit Team," he finished.

The marshal lifted a paper token. "Paper verification only."

Deathkarion presented his folder. The marshal read the header aloud. The header was perfect. The ink was the right shade. The seal was close enough to feel true.

The marshal hesitated, then did the thing Deathkarion had been waiting for: the marshal reached toward the custody sleeve holding the day's incident evidence, intending to compare seals.

Deathkarion's voice cut in, precise. "Use your lamp."

The marshal blinked. "What?"

"Use your lamp," Deathkarion repeated, and nodded toward a common fluorescent desk light.

The anchor shifted uncomfortably. "Are we... are we live?"

The marshal held up a palm to the anchor. "Stand by."

The marshal lifted the sleeve into the light.

The seam fluoresced.

Not violently. Not neon. Just enough to look wrong.

The studio froze. Silence landed like a verdict.

The anchor whispered, "Is that... is that tampered?"

Deathkarion didn't answer quickly. He let the doubt breathe. Then he spoke with the calm of a man pretending to protect them.

"It indicates chemical contact," he said. "It may be accidental. It may be environmental. Either way, your chain-of-custody is now disputable."

The Star press marshal's jaw tightened. "Disputable according to who?"

Deathkarion turned his head slightly. "According to anyone with a lamp."

The anchor swallowed. "What do we do?"

Deathkarion's eyes held steady. His voice stayed soft and clinical.

"You standardize," he said. "You replace all sleeves. You centralize verification. You move all future custody into a single controlled chain."

The press marshal's instincts fought the recommendation. Star doctrine was compartmented verification, not centralization. The marshal tried to regain footing.

"We don't centralize," the marshal said. "We verify independently."

Deathkarion nodded politely, like he respected the argument while strangling it. "Independent verification requires uncontested containers. Your containers are now contested."

The marshal looked at the fluorescent seam again. The camera caught the glow. The anchor's eyes darted to the audience monitor. This was how governance collapsed—quietly, with an object that felt undeniable.

The half-hour seam hit.

Across Fortborter, civic screens blinked. Not power. Not signal loss. A refresh—clean, calm, synchronized. An operator-tier overlay arrived half a beat early, and this time it did not look like war. It looked like public health.

EVIDENCE SAFETY NOTICE
CONTAINMENT STANDARDIZATION REQUIRED
OPERATOR TIER
CONFIRM AUTHORITY

Green pulsed.

In the studio, the anchor gasped, voice cracking. "We just got an alert."

The Star marshal snapped, "Do not touch it."

But the alert was not only on the studio screen. It was on phones. On kiosks. On shelter terminals. It landed everywhere the public had learned to look when they were scared.

Outside, in a shelter corridor, a tired volunteer held up a custody sleeve and saw it glow under overhead lights. A civilian whispered, "They lied." Another whispered, "Press the button so they fix it."

Back in the studio, the anchor's hands hovered above the desk. The Star marshal saw the tremor and stepped closer.

"Hands on the table," the marshal ordered.

The anchor obeyed, palms flat, breathing fast. "I'm trying."

Deathkarion watched, not like a predator watching prey, but like a scientist watching a test subject resist reflex.

The marshal turned on Deathkarion. "You knew."

Deathkarion didn't deny it. Denial was for amateurs. He answered with framing.

"I warned you," he said. "You are tired. You want a single fix. That is why this city will accept central authority."

The marshal's voice sharpened. "Our people don't accept your fixes."

Deathkarion inclined his head. "Your people accept relief."

The marshal reached for a paper token, tearing it once to show the tear-code edge. "We hold chain with paper."

Deathkarion's eyes flicked to the sleeve seam again. "Paper can be contested if the container is."

The studio's producer hissed from behind the camera. "We're getting calls. People are asking if evidence is fake."

The anchor's voice rose, panicked. "Tell them it's not fake!"

The marshal barked, "Do not speculate. Read receipts."

The producer shoved a document forward—a "replacement protocol" bulletin, arriving too fast, too clean. The header looked official. The seal looked close. The timestamp was the first lie: it arrived before any real office could have written it.

The marshal stared at it, then glanced at the civic screen prompt pulsing green. The approving layer was being pulled into a decision with no clean choice: refuse and be blamed for unsafe evidence, accept and centralize authority under an operator-tier overlay.

Deathkarion spoke as if he were offering salvation.

"Approve the standardization," he said. "Protect your people."

The marshal's voice dropped to a low, lethal calm. "Step back."

Deathkarion did not move. He lifted his hands again, palms open.

"I am not armed," he said.

The marshal replied with procedure, not emotion. "You are a weapon."

A Lunar security lead cut into the studio comms, voice clipped. "We have crowd pressure at Shelter Three. People are pressing green."

The marshal snapped, "Block terminals. Paper routes only."

"Crowd is fighting," the Lunar lead said. "They think the sleeves are fake."

The marshal's shoulders squared. "We hold line. We show hands. We show seals."

Deathkarion watched the system strain exactly the way he'd designed it. He did not need to win the studio. He needed to force a choice that bruised trust no matter what AES did.

The anchor whispered, barely audible, "What if the sleeves... what if they really are contaminated?"

The marshal turned to the anchor, voice hard but controlled. "Listen. Look at me. Hands visible."

The anchor's eyes locked on the marshal's hands.

"Repeat," the marshal ordered.

The anchor swallowed. "Hands visible."

The marshal nodded. "Good. Now read this."

He held up a paper receipt ledger with tear-edges matching the day's tokens—physical proof that did not depend on a screen. The camera zoomed. The public could see the torn edge alignment like a simple truth.

Deathkarion felt the narrative shift start—AES trying to drag the fight back to receipts.

So he widened the theater.

He leaned slightly toward the camera and spoke as if addressing the city, calm and authoritative.

"If your evidence containers are compromised," he said, "your justice is compromised."

The producer flinched. "Cut him off."

The marshal stepped forward. "You don't speak on our channel."

Deathkarion's eyes glowed with that faint "+" sign, clinical and cold. "Your channel is already mine for half an hour."

Outside, Fortborter's screens kept pulsing green with health-language so clean it felt kind. In shelter corridors, hands hovered. In admin offices, approving officials stared at "replacement protocols" and felt their fatigue become policy pressure. And in the studio, the Star marshal held paper proof up to a lens that was now being forced to decide what the public believed: a tear-edge receipt, or a glowing seam.

The half-hour window was not closing. It was climbing—away from screens and into offices where continuity authority lived, where one tired signature could reclassify every past custody sleeve as suspect.

Deathkarion lifted two fingers and made the smallest possible gesture—an instruction to his unseen operators.

Advance the blink.

The studio lights flickered once, a soft civic backbone hiccup, and the next overlay line began to crawl in on the studio's auxiliary monitor—targeting the approving layer, not the street.

APPROVAL REQUIRED: CUSTODY STANDARD REPLACEMENT
CONTINUITY AUTHORITY
CONFIRM

Green pulsed, patient and predatory.

The Star marshal stared at it, then at the anchor, then at Deathkarion's open hands.

"Do not touch," the marshal ordered.

Deathkarion whispered, just for the marshal. "How long can you hold tired hands away from relief?"

Outside, a shelter volunteer's finger hovered over green.

And Fortborter's civic backbone blinked toward the people whose job was to approve.

SUPREMACY- Clash Between Heroes and Villains Chapter 100:She Wrote Custody

Starvivianelle did not write "history." She wrote custody.

Her workroom in Termal City had no posters, no morale slogans, no dramatic lighting—just a long table, a hard case of offline verifiers, a spool of green seal-thread, and a stack of paper token sheets with tear-edges that could be matched later like a fingerprint. She dressed in Star Regime field-professional green, but the uniform was not the point. The point was repeatable proof.

On her wall, a map of Titanumas sat under a clear acrylic sheet. Westonglappa was circled in grease pencil. Not a heroic circle. A target circle.

She keyed the recorder with her left thumb and spoke in the cadence that made panic behave.

"Daily press integrity audit. Operator: Starvivianelle. Scope: Chapter-one origin through Westonglappa invasion phase. Objective: establish what the public thinks happened, what actually happened, and what the enemy will try to borrow."

She did not hit a "play" button on a networked screen. She inserted a sealed media wafer into an air-gapped reader, pressed her palm on the reader's cold plate, and waited for the green diode to confirm "offline." Then she turned the unit toward the camera mounted above her table so the lens could see the diode and her hands in the same frame.

"Record," she ordered.

The first file was old, almost gentle, the kind of opening that made people trust the world before it cut them. A note from the author voice established Titanumas as a post-cataclysmic era dominated by eight godlike regimes, each with tier rules that turned politics into physics. Starvivianelle did not linger on prose. She annotated operational implications: if only equals can defeat equals, then the enemy will always attack the layers below equals—civilian routing, civic credibility, and the hands that approve. That was the doctrine she needed her press corps to understand before they ever stood at a podium. ()

She slid a paper sheet forward and stamped it once with a Star seal—green heat-bloom that left a faint spiral crest.

Document header: STAR REGIME PUBLIC TRUST BUREAU.
Subheader: THEATER LESSONS, EARLY ARC.
Line one: "If the enemy cannot kill your leader, they will kill your scheduling."

She advanced the archive to the "Paladimee shock" sequence. Breaking news, a city overrun, an assassination driving global trend behavior, and Solar command rooms watching the feed like a medical team watching a monitor spike. Starvivianelle's pen did not pause when the scene got loud. She tagged the first major pattern: the story's war began as media first, battlefield second. If your public learns the truth from a flashing banner, the banner is already part of the fight. ()

She did not call it "propaganda." She called it "timing control."

"Correction protocol," she said into the recorder. "When breaking news lands, we answer with receipts, not adjectives."

Her assistant, Starjew, stood at the end of the table with gloves on, holding a lanyard of paper tokens. "Podium kit packed."

"Confirm contents."

"Tokens. Sleeves. Offline verifier. Lens tether."

"Confirm custody."

Starjew presented each item into camera frame, rotated it, and returned it to the case without crossing the taped rectangle that marked Starvivianelle's work lane.

"Custody held," Starjew said.

Starvivianelle advanced to "villain governance." Darkened elites moving bodies, tallying costs, rebuilding an occupied city, reporting to Darkwing in the Palace of Dalmirrus—less a raid than a controlled administrative posture. Starvivianelle's jaw tightened. Not at the violence. At the professionalism. BRD's most dangerous skill was making terror look like routine. ()

She paused the file and wrote the line that would become a press refrain.

"They want it to feel normal."

She filed a new sheet under the camera.

BLACKENED / DARKENED THREAT NOTE.
"Occupation posture = paperwork posture. Expect forged forms. Expect counterfeit 'safety' audits. Expect authority to be borrowed."

Then she opened the Westonglappa prelude folder, because this was where her job stopped being theory.

In a Westonglappa conference chamber, Starbeam Charmley sat at the head of an ornate table while officials from key states argued economics and security like adults trying not to admit they were afraid. Shadowwing watched from a slit in the doorway, silent, absorbing body language the way a thief absorbs lock patterns. Starvivianelle watched the footage twice, not for what was said, for the geometry: who sat where, who handled what documents, which hands moved first when a new sheet hit the table. That footage would be used later to synthesize "official tone" half a beat early. ()

She toggled to the next meeting: Galaxbeam's warning phase. Not speculation—he framed it as fact. He named threats across the villain coalition and stated that hostile forces were already moving within Westonglappa's borders while identifying Lunna as an upcoming target. Starvivianelle underlined that line twice. It was not about fear. It was about sequencing. Westonglappa would not be attacked as a single battlefield. It would be attacked as a system—state by state, corridor by corridor, with speeches and broadcasts used as camouflage. ()

Starvivianelle stopped the playback and stood.

"Deploy," she said.

Starjew's eyes snapped up. "To Westonglappa?"

"To the cameras," Starvivianelle corrected. "We're not chasing bullets. We're locking trust."

The first travel transition was rail—Termal City outbound on a night greenline car marked "maintenance" to avoid crowd attention. She rode with the press lens tethered to her wrist and the podium kit in a hard case between her boots. No screens. Paper tickets only. Every door crossing was a two-person check: she pointed to the token; Starjew read the tear-edge code; the conductor confirmed by matching a ledger strip that never touched a network.

"Check," Starvivianelle said at each junction.

"Match," Starjew answered.

The second transition was aircraft—short-hop lift from Starrup's coastal strip to a Westonglappa airfield outside Auttumotto, chosen specifically because it routed away from public terminals and high-traffic civic boards. On the ramp, Starvivianelle watched crews unload supplies and felt the temptation in the air: when a war starts, people want one central screen to tell them what to do.

She refused to give them that craving.

"Podium first," she ordered.

Auttumotto did not welcome them with cheering crowds. It welcomed them with calm broadcasts looping across cafes, train stations, and shelter corridors—clipped reports delivered like weather on purpose, so grief would not become contagious. Starvivianelle stood in the shadow of a concrete overhang and listened to the anchor cadence. She recognized the pattern immediately: calm voice, high authority language, low evidence density. The structure BRD loved. ()

Her comms crackled with an AES press marshal's voice. "Starvivianelle, we need statement. People are asking if this is occupation."

"Not yet," she said. "We do not label. We verify."

"Copy."

She built the press lane like a corridor defense. Tape rectangles on the pavement: SPEAKER BOX, LENS BOX, TOKEN BOX. Moon Guard escorts held the outer ring because Lunna had learned the hard way that crowds are not the threat; the hands inside crowds are.

Starbeam arrived with no flourish, eyes forward, posture strict. Starvivianelle stepped into his peripheral, held up a paper strip, and let him read the three-line script she had written.

Starbeam's voice was short, repeatable, and hard to counterfeit in a hurry.

"Hands visible," he said. "Paper guidance only. Follow corridor marks."

A reporter tried to provoke drama. "Is Darkwing here?"

Starbeam did not bite.

"Unconfirmed," he replied. "We don't amplify rumors."

Starvivianelle watched the crowd's shoulders drop half an inch. That half-inch was why she existed.

Then the villain side answered with theater.

A feed cut in—Darkwing in Auttumotto's capital district, behind reinforced windows and stolen signal towers. His words were not long. They were a stamp.

"THE CONTINENT IS WATCHING," he said. ()

Starvivianelle didn't allow the broadcast to be the last word. She stepped to Starbeam's side, leaned in, and spoke like an operator.

"Correction line," she said.

Starbeam nodded once.

He faced the cameras again. "We're watching back. Evidence only."

Auttumotto's resistance phase escalated through impacts, broken formations, and roads that stopped feeling reliable—officers shouting grid references that no longer meant what they used to mean. Starvivianelle watched the field reports roll in on paper and forced her team to keep the same cadence: identify what changed, mark what still holds, route civilians through what is provably safe. ()

Third travel transition was naval—because Westonglappa's war was becoming coastal geometry. She boarded a small escort craft at the river mouth with a Star Regime harbor team and pushed toward a secondary port node where containers were already being misrouted by fear. The water carried the kind of quiet that precedes anti-air fire, the kind of quiet people mistake for peace.

On the deck, Starjew pointed at a stack of crates. "Labels don't match."

Starvivianelle crouched, ran a gloved finger along the seal edge, and found the truth: the seal thread was the right color, wrong twist. Counterfeit chain.

"Quarantine," she ordered.

A deckhand hesitated, eyes darting to a nearby terminal booth.

Starvivianelle snapped her head toward him. "Hands off green."

The deckhand froze. "Copy."

She marked the crate with a physical tag—paper, tear-coded—and held it up for the lens. The camera captured her hands. The audience would later believe what it could see.

Back in the wider war, Titanumas itself was moving into the "conclave" phase—BRD consolidating around massive offshore assets, Death Regime ships treated like continents, and a Titanumas holo-map with Westonglappa glowing like a nerve. Starvivianelle did not need to be in that room to understand the operational meaning: when BRD leadership stares at a map that long, they are not improvising. They are scheduling. ()

She spoke into her recorder again, voice tight.

"Enemy cycles are intentional. Expect half-hour windows. Expect prompt overlays. Expect 'audits' issued immediately after damage."

Her next packet was titled WESTONGGLAPPA: AUDIT AS WEAPON.

She wrote it like a checklist.

One: If a broadcast tells you everything is calm, demand the receipt.
Two: If an official form arrives "urgent," assume it is salted.
Three: If a terminal offers safety, treat it as a trap until proven otherwise.

The war widened. Reports from other fronts hit her desk in paper bundles: Sunbeam destroying a dormant superweapon in orbit under Galaxbeam's directive—less debate, more action. Starvivianelle annotated it not as spectacle but as governance: when the leaders act decisively, the public believes the system still has hands on the wheel. ()

And then the air over Westonglappa turned wrong.

Sashax, Skyroot City—denial fog, signal lights reversing, train systems rerouting into loops without a single missile falling. A "rekeying pulse" rewriting grid logic underfoot. It was the exact war she had been warning her press teams about: not a single battlefield, a system being edited. ()

Starvivianelle stood on the roof of a Westonglappa civic annex with a portable podium kit and watched the horizon flicker between green arcs and maroon decay. She could hear sirens in the distance, but the more dangerous sound was the calm voice of someone reading "instructions" like weather.

Her comms lit.

"Starvivianelle," the regional administrator said, voice shaking. "We received a safety audit order. It says to centralize shelter schedules through the civic backbone."

Starvivianelle's eyes narrowed. "Source."

"Operator-tier," the administrator said. "It looks official."

"Paper proof?" Starvivianelle asked.

Silence.

She didn't yell. She didn't soothe. She gave sequence.

"Do not touch screens," she ordered. "Move the order to camera. Hands visible. Read the header aloud."

The administrator fumbled, then complied. Paper rustled. A breath. The lens picked up the document edge.

Starvivianelle listened to the header and heard the tell: perfect authority tone, wrong custody chain—issued half a beat early, before the real office could speak.

"Counter-order," she said.

Starjew was already at her side with the prepared strip.

Starvivianelle stepped to the press lens and delivered the line that would either hold a continent together or expose the next failure point.

"This is not a safety audit," she said. "This is a capture attempt."

A reporter shouted, "How do we know?"

Starvivianelle lifted her hands into frame and held up three things: a tear-coded token, a verified sleeve seam, and a paper ledger edge that matched the token's tear like a lock matching its key.

"Match," she said.

Starjew echoed, "Match."

The crowd's attention pinned to the proof because proof was the only authority that didn't blink.

Then the civic backbone blinked anyway.

Not power. Not lights. Authority.

Across Westonglappa's shelter corridors, the screens refreshed in sync—calm overlays offering centralization, relief, and "operator-tier verification." The green confirm button pulsed like a heartbeat that wanted a finger.

Starvivianelle felt the half-hour window open as a physical pressure in the air, the way a storm front arrives before rain. She watched a line of civilians in a shelter corridor hesitate—hands hovering, eyes searching for permission to stop thinking.

She keyed her secure channel, voice as disciplined as a weapon check.

"Window live," she said. "They're not targeting streets. They're targeting the hands that approve."

A reply came back, clipped and immediate from Starbeam's relay.

"Hold doctrine."

Starvivianelle looked at the pulsing screens, then down at the paper in her hands—tokens, ledger edges, custody sleeves, and the one advantage AES could still defend: repeatable truth.

"Confirmed," she said.

Behind her, Westonglappa's civic surfaces kept blinking toward continuity authority, and the calm voice on the screen started reading the next instruction line half a beat early.

SUPREMACY- Clash Between Heroes and Villains Chapter 99:Keep the Chain Unbroken

 Sunmeros arrived in Lunna with his hood up and his hands already working.

Lunamyth Port was running on learned discipline: painted shelter lanes that never drifted, taped "no-touch" rectangles around every public terminal, and Moon Guards posted where a tired person would most want permission to take a shortcut. The wind carried salt and container diesel across the rail apron. It also carried something harder to name—the quiet of a city that still moved, but only after it verified the movement twice. Sunmeros stepped off the inbound rail with a hard case riding his thigh, seal sleeves nested inside, a coil of solar-thread filament, and a palm-sized heat stamp that could mark proof without needing a screen to validate it.

A Moon Guard met him at the edge of the apron with a paper token held in two fingers like it was a weapon. No handshake. No casual greeting. The guard angled the token to the camera rig clipped to his own chest and made sure the lens saw both hands.

"Name."

"Sunmeros."

"Affiliation."

"Solar. AES."

The guard slid the token across the painted line without crossing it. Sunmeros picked it up with two fingers, held it flat to show there was no hidden adhesive, then pressed it against the heat stamp's ceramic face. The stamp bloomed a faint orange crescent on the token's corner—visible, non-destructive, and impossible to counterfeit without the same thermal profile. The guard nodded once.

"Proceed. Corridor B. No terminals."

"Confirmed," Sunmeros said.

Moonwisdom's briefing did not arrive as comfort. It arrived as a sequence: timestamps, custody requirements, and a map of pressure points that BRD had been leaning on since the hostage recovery. The hostage was already out. That had been the headline. The damage BRD wanted came after the headline—when the city tried to convert a rescue into policy and a tired official tried to keep everyone calm.

Lady Moonbeam's voice cut into the secure channel once, short and cold as a filed blade. "You are not here for applause. You are here to keep the chain unbroken."

Sunmeros answered in the same register. "Chain holds."

The first transition happened under discipline rather than speed. They staged through Lunamyth Port's service grid and boarded a night rail car set aside for continuity movements: no passenger manifest, no public screens, paper tickets only. A Star verifier joined the cell at the last moment, wrist strapped with an offline device and a lanyard of paper tokens that mattered more than any badge. A Lunar medic took the opposite bench, cold-pack kit staged open, blanket folded, pulse cuff pre-set—tools for shock and panic, not drama. A press lens rode with them on purpose, leashed to a single rule: film hands, seals, and sleeves; avoid faces unless needed for identity confirmation.

The rail ran inland toward Coldsteve, and the windows turned from port glare to forest belt darkness. Sunmeros used the time to build the next phase with physical proof. He laid three custody sleeves on the bench, pressed the heat stamp to each seam, and let the camera capture the crescent marks in a row. He spoke while he worked, not for the audience, for the operators who would later try to argue the chain had been tampered.

"Mark one. Mark two. Mark three."

The Star verifier photographed each crescent and wrote the timestamp by hand on paper, then folded the paper and tore it once, leaving a tear-code edge that would match later. The Lunar medic watched the procedure and said nothing. Her silence was its own confirmation.

Coldsteve's station apron was colder than the port and less forgiving. The road corridor beyond it bent through a forest curve that compressed escorts and tempted people into "safe access" detours. BRD liked these curves. They turned doctrine into friction. They made good teams hesitate in the wrong moment and forced civilians to reach for relief.

Moon Guards met them at the platform exit and routed them into vehicles that were already aligned to painted rectangles. Doors stayed open until the Star verifier confirmed paper tokens at each threshold. No one crossed a line without a visible hand. Sunmeros moved like a perimeter engineer, not a brawler—checking lane geometry, checking sightlines, checking where a BRD module could be planted to look like help.

"Route," he ordered.

The driver lifted a paper strip with hand-written nodes. "Coldsteve to Lunaria Bay. Pier transfer. Manifest custody."

"Copy," Sunmeros said.

They rolled out in a tight convoy, headlights trimmed, spacing consistent. The press lens filmed the spacing deliberately, not to show bravery, to show repeatability. The forest swallowed sound. The convoy's tires whispered over frost-dusted asphalt.

Sunmeros watched the roadside cabinets instead of the trees. Cabinets were where hands went when fear spiked—power controls, emergency intercoms, civic kiosks. BRD seeded cabinets with calm overlays that told people to press green for safety. He refused the script by making the cabinet physically irrelevant.

At the first curve, he marked the shoulder with heat. A thin orange line, scorched clean across the frost like a signature lane marker. He did it in segments, each segment aligned to where a vehicle should stop and where a person should stand when they spoke.

"Stop line," he said. "Hands line. No drift."

The Moon Ranger in the lead vehicle confirmed. "Line seen."

The Star verifier confirmed. "Line logged."

They hit Lunaria Bay as the sky began to pale. The pier was active: cranes, container stacks, and harbor crews using hand signals in high noise. This was a continuity hub disguised as routine work. Medical cold chain crates moved here. Shelter supplies moved here. Proof tools moved here. BRD did not need to hack a terminal if it could borrow the human signal chain for ten minutes.

Sunmeros stepped onto the dock face and did not touch a screen. He touched gloves.

He held up a small packet of paper squares—tear-coded to match the verifier's ledger edge—and pressed each square to a handler's glove back. The square warmed and left a faint heat dot that would fade in twenty minutes. Enough for a shift. Enough for an operation.

"Dot equals authorized," Sunmeros said. "No dot, no manifest touch."

A harbor foreman frowned. "We're late."

Sunmeros did not debate lateness. He showed the alternative. He pointed to the press lens and lifted both hands open. He pointed to the paper manifest sleeve and held it up so the camera saw the crescent seal from earlier.

"Late is cheaper than wrong," he said.

The foreman swallowed and signaled his crews. They complied because compliance was what kept ports alive.

A Shadow presence tried to slide into the signal chain anyway. Sunmeros saw it as a posture problem before he saw it as a person: someone standing exactly where a signalman should stand, hands lifting with slow confidence, giving a "continue" wave that would have moved two critical containers to the wrong ship.

Sunmeros did not chase the silhouette. He denied its leverage. He stepped into the lane the silhouette needed, held up his heat stamp, and pressed it hard to the pier's painted "no-touch" rectangle border. The stamp flared brighter than a dot; it left a crescent that said one thing to every trained eye: this lane is now under verified custody.

"Freeze," he ordered.

The harbor crews froze. Cranes stopped. Chains slackened. Nobody panicked, because the command was physical and visible.

The Shadow silhouette tilted its head. Its hands rose into sign language, slow enough to feel insulting: YOU WILL BREAK YOUR OWN FLOW.

Sunmeros did not answer with words. He lifted the foreman's glove and held it to the camera—heat dot visible. Then he lifted the silhouette's glove. No dot.

"Not in chain," the Star verifier said, voice flat, pen already moving. "No dot. No token. No custody."

The silhouette did not argue. It withdrew into the crowd like a thought leaving a room.

That was when the bait phase arrived, right on the half-hour seam, packaged as urgency.

A runner from the continuity annex in Lunlight City pushed through the dock lanes with a paper folder clutched tight, breathing hard. Moon Guards escorted him, weapons down, hands visible. The runner reached Sunmeros and held the folder up like a confession.

"Annex requests emergency standardization," he said. "New seal pattern. Immediate."

The Star verifier opened the folder without crossing the painted line, reading with eyes first. The paper looked official. The words were calm. The timing was too clean.

Sunmeros watched the runner's hands. He watched for micro-shake, for glue residue, for the wrong fold. He saw a faint smear near the bottom corner—tracer gel, the kind Death tech used to salt documents and later claim contamination.

He turned the folder to the camera, held it steady, and used controlled solar radiance across the smear—not enough to burn paper, enough to reveal the gel's sheen. The gel flared into a visible crescent arc and died, leaving proof of tampering in the place BRD wanted invisible.

"Salted," Sunmeros said.

The runner's eyes widened. "I didn't—"

"Copy. Stand down," Sunmeros ordered. "Hands open."

Moon Guards stepped in and guided the runner into a taped rectangle. The Lunar medic approached with calm posture and checked the runner's breathing, not his story.

Lady Moonbeam's secure channel opened for a single breath.

"Where is this annex request anchored?" she asked.

Sunmeros looked at the folder again, then at the harbor manifest sleeve, then at the tear-coded paper edge. The request tried to force the city to distrust yesterday's seals, to destabilize the continuity chain without firing a shot. It was aimed at the approval hands—the people who would certify new standards and make every old document suspect.

"It's a continuity strike," he said. "They want the approving layer to replace its own proof."

"Hold chain," Lady Moonbeam replied.

"Confirmed," Sunmeros said.

They transitioned fast. Vehicle off the pier. Short aircraft hop to avoid terminal-heavy intersections and public bottlenecks. The hostage case from earlier was not in their custody; the city's governance was. The press lens stayed on them, filming hands and seals as the rotor wash flattened their coats and the city blocks unfolded below in canal cuts and industrial grids.

Lunlight City's continuity annex sat near civic surfaces that BRD loved: kiosks, broadcast closets, and public routing boards. Sunmeros did not enter as a hero. He entered as a perimeter lock.

He boxed the threshold in heat. Two crescent marks on the floor seam. One crescent on the door frame. A visible geometry that said: this point is verified; any tamper becomes obvious. The Star verifier positioned left with paper tokens ready. Moon Guards formed a corridor with their bodies aligned to lane markers. The Lunar medic staged a shelter lane in the adjacent room—blanket, pulse cuff, fog ready—because when authority is targeted, panic behaves like a casualty.

"Entry," Sunmeros said.

The Moon Ranger breached with a compact tool that cut metal cleanly and left the frame intact. No blown locks. No narrative mess. They moved into the annex and found the real enemy waiting exactly where it always waited: a terminal lit with the calmest lie in the world.

SYNC VERIFICATION FOR SAFETY
OPERATOR TIER
CONFIRM AUTHORITY

Green pulsed.

Sunmeros did not let anyone get close enough to be tempted. He snapped a hard-light shutter over the screen from a distance—Solar tech adapted for denial, not spectacle—and the shutter sealed with a visible edge that the camera could capture. He held his hands open in frame to prove he never touched glass.

"Offline only," he ordered.

The Star verifier stepped forward and lifted a paper token, aligning it to the tear-code edge from earlier. The match was clean. The token was real. The annex staff watched, eyes searching for relief, hands twitching toward screens they had been trained to distrust but still wanted to believe.

A Shadow Elite appeared in the doorway with a posture that felt like inevitability. It did not speak. Its hands lifted into sign, slow and deliberate: PRESS AND YOU ARE SAFE.

Sunmeros kept his voice low and procedural. "Eyes on my hands."

The annex supervisor obeyed because it was physical. The supervisor's fingers stopped hovering over the desk edge and settled flat where the camera could see them.

The Shadow Elite tilted its head, hands shifting: YOU CAN'T HOLD THIS FOREVER.

Sunmeros did not promise forever. He offered sequence.

"Seal the folder," he said.

The Star verifier slid the salted annex request into a custody sleeve without crossing the painted line, pressed the sleeve seam shut, and held it up to the camera. Sunmeros marked the seam with his heat stamp. The crescent appeared. Proof locked into a shape people could trust.

Then the city blinked again.

Not a power blink. Not a transit blink. A governance blink—civic surfaces pulsing in synchronization, operator-tier overlays arriving half a beat early with official language that sounded like help and moved like a trap. Across Lunlight City, kiosks and boards and routing displays leaned toward the same calm instruction. In the annex, even behind the shutter, the green pulse brightened as if it had found a stronger signal.

Sunmeros felt the seam widen. The half-hour window was not closing. It was opening wider and crawling upward—toward the desks that approved shelter rotations, toward the offices that signed hospital diversions, toward the continuity hands that turned calm into policy.

He leaned into the secure channel without taking his eyes off the supervisor's hands.

"Window is live," Sunmeros said. "Backbone is blinking toward continuity authority."

Lady Moonbeam's reply came back immediate. "Hold discipline."

Sunmeros watched the annex supervisor inhale, watched their fingers tighten against the desk edge, watched the green pulse throb behind the shutter like a patient threat waiting for one tired click.

"Confirmed," Sunmeros said.

Outside, Lunlight City's civic surfaces kept blinking—calm, synchronized, predatory—pulling at the approval layer as the half-hour window widened and the next instruction line arrived half a beat early.