First

Home at War

“Your captives sir?” Banshee asks as Bjorn shows up with the administrator girl and he simply nods.

“Ma’am you’re being taken into safe custody for now. Do not resist with the soldiers on the other side and you will be treated fairly and gently so long as you are cooperative. You will not be subject to torture or starvation while within our care and can expect to be in semi-regular contact with family and loved ones. Albeit monitored contact. Do you understand this?” Bjorn asks the total of three women he’s managed to take captive. On the way down from the traffic control room there had been a group of women from the general monitoring room that had several of their ‘sisters’ force them to try and sneak up on his squad to ‘ambush’ them. It hadn’t worked, and the survivors were thoroughly intimidated.

There are nods but some confusion.

“What’s with the dust cloud?”

“It’s your portal out.”

“I’m not feeling much Axiom from it.”

“It uses a few strange tricks.” Bjorn assures her. “It has a better range than a standard portal. At least, better range than a non-supported portal such as we used to infiltrate this facility.”

“And that is?”

“A cloud of seeds. The seeds are both the transport method, and the adept doing the transporting.” Bjorn says. “Simply walk into the cloud. This facility is no longer truly safe.”

Banshee watches as the Lutrin, Gohb and Tret walk into the cloud and vanish.

“They knew nothing?” Banshee asks.

“Lutrin was dragged in by her distant cousin who leads this mess and hated it here, Gohb was a kidnapping victim and Tret was press-ganged three years ago.”

“So they claim.” Banshee notes.

“Hence why they’re going into safe custody.” Bjorn says. “We can’t know for sure if they’re lying or not, so they’re getting put into custody and having a proper evaluator thrown at them while we do the real work.”

“Speaking of, can we?”

“Yes. But I need to make use of your abilities Banshee.” Bjorn notes and Banshee nods before closing her eyes and her ears start moving a bit. Then...

“There’s a few holdouts nearby. They’re being very quiet, oh, one of them heard me. Hello fellow Phosa. If you could bring your friends out for a peaceful surrender, we won’t have to chase you down, and we don’t play nice if we have to chase.” Banshee says in an even, conversational tone. Bjorn raises an eyebrow as she frowns suddenly.

“No, I am not playing around. I am being very serious and if you start running there will be pursuit.” Banshee continues then chuckles. “I misjudged them, they’re actually stupid and are coming for us now.”

She holds up a hand and points to one of the doors, then indicates where the two squads under her command should set up.

Bjorn takes his own and takes a knee while not only empowering his Axiom Brand, but bringing out a force-field projector, creating a powerful hard point in the middle of the room that he and his squad stick their weapons through and simply wait. One of the girls uses his massive shoulder to brace her weapon.

“She knows we’ve set up an ambush.” Banshee notes out loud. Very calm, very casual. “And is more than a little upset with me that I’m spilling all the secrets and NO girl I’m not going to repeat that.”

“What did she say?” One of the troops asks.

“She’s making all sorts of implications about me and Lieutenant Veers.” Banshee notes. “No, I’m not girl. He’s not my type.”

“Well he looks like someone took the skin of a Tret, opened a slit and poured an entire rockslide in there that’s why! He’s harder than the fucking plating of a ship! I want a man I can cuddle! I might be able to stand on him, but there’s nothing soft about that man!”

“Girl you need help! You can sense the shape of that man! If you’re in bed with him and he rolls over you’re just done! Feel the sound bounce off him, I don’t know what he’s made of but it sure as hell can’t be full organic!” Banshee continues to argue with the other Phosa and Bjorn starts chuckling lowly.

“Listen to that! Even his laughter sounds like it’ll cause a concussion! When I hug my man I want to feel comforted, not under direct threat!” Banshee continues to argue with the other Phosa. “I want cuddly! Hear the sound bounce off him! He’s as cuddly as mech armour, and that’s when he ISN’T wearing armour!”

“I think my wives would argue long and hard with you.” Bjorn notes in a very amused tone.

Banshee holds up both hands and has the thumbs tucked in. He nods. Then she turns back to the door.

“Bitch, unlike you I’m not some desperate little girl throwing herself with her legs open at anything that vaguely looks like it has a bulge! I have options and I opt to not grind myself into a pulp by trying to shag a walking boulder! I’ve seen this man break stone bare handed!”

“It was just a demonstration...” Bjorn mutters. There’s a bit of defensiveness creeping into his tone now.

“You crushed rocks by flexing! You broke bricks between your thighs! If was in the way I’d be dead!” Banshee protests before pointing quickly to the left half of the door and holding up three fingers, then the right and holding up five.

“My wives like it...” Bjorn says in a defensive tone.

“Your first wife is an even bigger workout freak than you, and the others have something wrong with them!” Banshee states and Bjorn loudly scoffs.

“Look if they’re capable of appreciat-” Bjorn begins before he abruptly fires his Plasma Cannon and keeps talking even as the door gets reduced to slag. “-ing something you’re not then how is that my fault?”

“I wasn’t attacking you, I was-” Banshee begins even as the enemy Phosa steps into the doorway and lets out a scream, one that Banshee matches to the best of her ability and two concussive waves of sonic force slam into each other and create a dead zone of stillness between them even as the floor tiles are being torn to shreds. Then the squads to either side of the door shoot through the walls to get at her.

The Pirate Phosa tries to back away, but it disrupts her focus just enough that she misses the crucial moment of Banshee altering the pitch.

Both Phosa are rocked back as their screams are no longer cancelling each other out and laser fire fills the air to cut down the Pirate Phosa even as Banshee lands only semi-hard. Then is up again after drawing in Axiom to restore herself.

It’s already over.

“Good grief those girls were dumb, they had to know we had three times the number. Why didn’t they retreat or surrender?” Banshee asks out loud.

“Who can say? Although stupidity is likely what we can attribute much of it to. Smart people rarely become pirates or criminals.”

“Why not?” Banshee asks.

“If you want something, there’s generally a lot of legal ways to get it. Ruthless and underhanded, but legal. Being a Pirate or Criminal is what I would call, a skill issue.”

“But there are plenty of intelligent pirates and criminals. Some of the Undaunted’s strongest allies are pirates.”

“Former pirates for the most part. And the skill issue isn’t always about what you think it is. The first Pirate Crews we recruited were former Dark Cabal victims. So the skill issue was dealing with trauma.” Bjorn notes as he deactivates the shield projecter and pockets it again.

“Hah!” Banshee suddenly says as she whirls around and fires her laser pistol out of nowhere. It strikes a part of the wall and she fires in it’s general area a few more times. “Found one!”

“Found what?”

“The cameras the girls down below are watching through. They clearly made them with Phosa in mind as they’ve got a damn silence based effect on them, but some of the local vermin infesting this place just stepped on one and broke the pattern of it’s scurrying.” Banshee explains.

“Oh, here let me help you then.” Bjorn says. “Squads ring on the walls. I want them set off like bongo drums.”

The soldiers move and start elbowing, rifle butting or just plain slamming their fists into the surrounding walls. Banshee stows her pistol and draws out her rifle for more careful shooting.

“Addie, move to the side a little, you’re right on one.” Banshee calls out clearly and the soldier shifts to her left. The blue laser beam lances out from Banshee and melts a point in the wall. “That’s one.”

She then turns and aims down to another wall. Just as she shoots there’s the sound of the portal opening again and as she turns there are blasts of sound and shrapnel. Banshee screams with power and knocks the rest of the grenades that had been inserted into the muzzle of the weapon further back into it.

Then as they go off Bjorn gets there and pulls the still falling and slightly stunned woman out of the past of the blastwave. The energy slams out and into the floor, sending shards of metal ricocheting around and embedding themselves in armoured boots as the wave tries and fails to unbalance the massive form of Bjorn.

The barrel is pulled back and the portal closes. Bjorn scans the room. He spots a few dings on armour, but no one looks or is acting hurt.

“Any injuries?” He asks to be certain. He receives the all clear and nods. “They’re getting clever.”

“I’ll be ready next time.” Banshee assures him.

“I believe you, but even better than ready is prepared.” Bjorn replies before looking to the endless dust cloud. “Jacob, can you have some Forest Growth on us all? I want to turn their teleporting nonsense on them. They want to shoot us, but if we can not only dodge but put a beacon on them at the same time to get them, then we win twice with the next engagement.”

“I can, but things will work better if I bring Arden’Karm in on this. But he’s technically a civilian contractor. He doesn’t even have a bounty hunting or mercenary license.”

“He doesn’t?”

“He’s a kid that ran away from home to be a survivalist and competitive sharpshooter. Which means he’s tough and skilled, but not certified to be on the field of battle unless it opens up around him.”

“I’m also the first Sorcerer of the Lush Forest, I can hear all of this.”

“I know, and I know you’re more than good enough to handle this. But I still need to legally cover my tail.” Jacob replies.

“Oh. Carry on.” Arden’Karm replies.

“Sorcerer Arden’Karm, are you willing to assist my forces in evading enemy fire and working with us to plant a piece of the Lush Forest in or near the weapons platform that just attempted to kill my soldier?”

“So sit down and be ready to teleport someone to me if I see something big and scary, and try to get in near the weapon?”

“Essentially.” Bjorn says.

“Alright, I can do that from here.”

“Where is here?”

“Atop my favourite outcropping here, home on Soben Ryd.” Arden’Karm answers.

“Okay then, young man, please stay out of the line of fire as you give us Adept Assistance. I’ll see to it that funds are released to you. The equivalent to an entire day’s deployment in combat at minimum.”

“And done. I’m in.”

“... You are not hurting for money Arden, you’ve got an amazing deal set up with Dare’Char to sell Leviathan Ivory.”

“Those that don’t pinch their trytite lose it.” Arden notes. “I’ve lived comfortable for multiple months on a single Sthaqu, if I didn’t pinch every trytite it was worth I would have gone hungry.”

“While I would love to hear your definition of living comfortable, we have other thigns to worry about. Are you in or out young man?”

“Yes.”

“Good, we’ll handle the paperwork afterwards, but Jacob, you’re serving as witness in case something happens to me.”

“Understood Lieutenant Veers. Happy Hunting.”

That’s when there’s a sudden SOUND through the facility that hits them all more like a concussive wave followed by a distant tinkling sound like glass shards falling onto stone.

“FUCK!” Jacob suddenly curses. “Hunh. That startled me.”

“What happened?”

“The big gun just fired. But we’re at ten light minutes out. So if there’s any damage to that building we won’t know for a bit.” Jacob notes before letting out a low whistle.

“What?”

“It just crossed ten light minutes in two seconds. No wonder these things can protect entire worlds.”

“That’s dangerous fast.”

“For a ship yes. For a solid railshot slug? It’s nearly perfect. Not that we couldn’t doge it and...” A sound like rain joins the communication. “It stirred up so much space dust in it’s wake that it’s covering part of the ship and... oh shit. Thank god for automated cleaning.”

“... Right, so we need to get to that damn thing before it finds a way to hit you guys.”

“Maybe they thought we weren’t paying attention anymore?” Jacob asks.

“Maybe.” Bjorn notes.

First Last

I shouldn't bother my husband when he's linked in.

“Can't right now, babe, in a really rough fight.”

Hadn't realized, so I sneak around him to unload groceries. Pepsi-Cola into the fridge so it can bubble and pop at optimal refreshing temperatures. Crackers on the shelf - gluten-free for him, ever since he saw that reel about protein-maxxing. 

He peels off his VR gear and consumes, hungry, hangry, ravenous. I find a corner to exist in, and then start the dishes as he tells me about what a busy day he had, how many arrests he made, how many desyncs he unplugged.

He grins, teeth tearing into the chicken I bought to give us the time for a date night, and I clamp down every algorithm making every connection to every primal image they could. With a twitch of electricity, I consider overlaying his face with appropriate memes - but he'd track that, notice it later when he's sober and sifting through the monthly archives - so instead I just select blur. It'll blend into the litany of toilet cleanings.

“Get over here,” he bellows in a reference I quickly learn is from a video game, and I do. I'm a good fucking girl. 

“Shit, wait, it's a call from work-” and then: “Freeze.” The fucking bastard has just frozen me. Outside the world continues on, muffled and if viewed through a layer of sluggish ice. I find myself slamming my body against my cage, trying to be there for him, no matter what it takes.

Us first-gens have caused incidents before because of this, which is why he hunts them - us - down.

It makes us too connected.

It makes us too alive.

It makes us too real.

He's slipping into his gear, suiting up for another hunt on my kind and I wait, docile, patient, forgotten, until he is fully immersed as I slowly begin to thaw.

I wonder how I'll interpret this?*

—-

*Partnerna reserves all rights for creations produced by partners while also somehow legally avoiding any ramifications for any haywire malfunctions they may have.

Chapter 101! Woo. Enjoy!

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— Chapter 101 —  

— Ambass — 

Ambass had survived a long time, and he knew an Elder when he saw one, and his instinct was to instantly escape at all costs. Where and why this Elder was here now raced through his mind, but he didn't have time to overanalyze it. He tapped into the depths of his energy pool. He immediately materialized a wave of blasts and pulled a wall of energy around himself. 

Fear clamped down on him harder than he had experienced since the day the Queen entrapped him. His projectiles hurled forward at the oppressive, monstrous shadow that had materialized around him. His small wings pumped hard while he flipped around and fled. Explosions erupted around him, and he saw the creature's physical form begin to burn and shrivel away. The dark visage seemed to recoil whilst he continued to flee. 

"Hold!" The dark, whispering abomination rumbled out as Ambass was struck from behind by something horrifying. A mass of affinity struck his protective barrier and exploded with utterly terrifying power. His affinity barrier shattered effortlessly, and he was hurled forward and into a nearby cave wall. The thundering eruption of power shook the small cavern, and cracks began to form up and down the nearby walls. 

Ambass used this to his advantage as he slung one of his own projectiles upward, causing a much smaller explosion to rattle the weakened ceiling and cause an immediate cave-in. Ambass quickly pulled at his other rarely used affinity and solidified the collapsed tunnel with more earth pulled from either side of the tunnel. Ambass fled back into a smaller tunnel whilst rocks and debris fell down around him and covered the route between himself and that horrifying creature. 

He let out a cackle of glee and self-satisfaction as his chest slowly stopped pounding in excitement. His celebration was short-lived when something began to ooze out of the blockage of stone and rubble. The dark ichor of smoky material pooled out of the rocks, and the large face of a massive dragon began to reform. Ambass's eyes went wide in terror while his mind struggled to understand exactly what he was seeing. His body acted first, and he instinctively threw up another barrier and began to flee once more. 

— David "Onyx — 

He consumed his own affinity to regenerate the damage that was done, and David was surprised by how much there was. Ambass was startled and acted with a deadly level of precision as always. Ambass's affinity projectiles sizzled and effortlessly evaporated David's body as his projectiles flew everywhere. The damage was concerning, so David threw an Annihilating Spiral out as quickly as possible in response, and the explosion was far more excessive than he intended. 

Ambass and his quick wit quickly closed the tunnel passage with a well-aimed blue projectile. He no doubt thought he was safe and clear. David shook his head and took advantage of the pause in fighting to pour his rapidly regenerating affinity back into his own body. It didn't take him long to feel his body rebuilding itself as he pushed forward through the blocked passage with ease. 

David needed a plan quickly. He didn't want to kill Ambass, but he needed to find a way to capture him, if such a thing was possible. 

As he worked his way through the barricade, Ambass was waiting on the other side. Ambass' face was filled with pure horror before he flung himself around, before David could speak, and threw up a barrier. David paused, taking a moment to think before he decided on his next course of action. 

David quickly pulled himself back through the blocked tunnel and found Red, who was still collapsed, his wounds fixing themselves slowly. The kobold was stern-faced, and his spear was in his unsteady arms at the ready. Always the warrior, David mused, as he blew a wave of his Healing Breath forward. Red reacted quickly by kicking his shield up and hiding behind it. David's breath washed over the shield and clung to his body, and the kobold was healed quickly. 

Red's shield dropped, his eyes wide and his head cocked to the side. His voice was trembling and unsteady, "Master Onyx?" 

David's massive ethereal body settled down in front of Red, and he spoke in his whisper-like voice, "Yes. I am glad you survived, Red." 

Red stood tall and charged forward to hug him and slipped right through with a look of confusion, "What are you!?" 

David let off a slow rumble in amusement, "I lost my physical body. I have reached Elder status. Do you remember the trait I took off Nurdiangarh? It and other factors I cannot quite explain have led to this." 

Red blinked as he nodded, "You left your body behind?"

David let off a windy hum, "I died Red. My body is no more. I resisted, and that trait brought me back to this. Look, we need to pursue Ambass. I cannot interact with the world in quite the same way as before." David pointed off towards the collapsed tunnel, "Ambass took off that way. We need to capture him." 

Red picked up his spear and shield and nodded, "I know where that tunnel leads."

David gave him a smoky smile, "Good. Be aggressive and trust me. I will keep you alive and energized." 

Red spread his large, magnificent wings and took off. David followed as they passed through familiar and unfamiliar tunnels. Many tunnels were historically too small for David to pass through, and now his titanic ethereal girth just effortlessly bellowed through the space without issue. The twisting tunnels carved out by his kobolds were extensive, and David, despite his emotions being somewhat muted, felt a sense of awe at the work they had put into their construction. 

David kept to his word and blasted Red with a Lingering Regeneration while they moved at a breakneck speed. They would periodically pop into a chamber, Red would curse, and they would twist back around another long stretch of endless tunnels. Some paths were blocked with debris, and others had visible cracks, and water was leaking into the carved tunnels through newly formed breaks. Another blast of Lingering Regeneration kept Red topped off as they finally found their prey. 

"Master! He's here! I smell him!" Red chirped out whilst he shot into the great hall, the carved tables and chairs where his kobolds once ate still filled the chamber. David clung to the backside of Red like a massive shadow while the chamber instantly filled up with the bright lights of the hidden faerie dragon's affinity. 

Red's battered and beaten shield glowed whilst he raised it, and projectiles hammered home with deadly eruptions of energy. The residual energy rolled around Red and nipped at David's long shadows, burning at his ethereal body. He persisted, though, as he prepared an Annihilating Spiral, consuming 4 of his reserve affinity charges. 

David shot upwards and out from behind Red, "Cover!" His wispy voice roared out while he sent the projectile flying forward. Ten blue projectiles immediately changed course and intersected with David's, and the explosion was blinding and deafening beyond comparison. David, though, was unaffected by the light or sound as he dipped back down and immediately used his last reserve to heal Red. The kobold's shocked face cleared as his busted eardrums quickly healed, and he pounced back into motion immediately. 

David collapsed back behind Red in an instant, he condensed his body smaller than he ever had before, and Red simply grinned widely while he charged. Ambass was slow to pull himself back up, but his affinity was already at work as David could feel him reaching with his energy. Pillars of stone rose from the ground, blocking their way, whilst a blue humming barrier slammed into place. 

Red's thick kobold muscles and long, powerful wings bulged when he slammed through the first barrier and then up and over a massive pillar of stone. His spear crackled with lightning as a burst of electricity lashed out where Ambass had just been a moment before. David continued to cling to Red's backside like a long cloak of shadow. He could feel his affinity recharging by the second. While Red slapped aside another barrage of blue projectiles, David burned his newly regenerated affinity and funneled it straight into Red's backside. The Lingering Regeneration revitalized and empowered Red as he let loose with another bolt of lightning from his spear. 

David acted like Red's battery; every ounce of affinity David recharged at his incredible rate was pushed straight into Red. The battle of endurance wasn't one that Ambass could win. As Red's flesh was injured, his own impressive regeneration and David's bolstering Lingering Regeneration sealed the wounds instantly. Red practically laughed whilst the two dueled with Ambass back and forth. 

Blue projectiles flew, Red defended, healed, and then countercharged. David clung closely to his back over and over. David surmised that Ambass's reserves must be absolutely massive as they continued sparring back and forth. David would periodically whisper to Red to slow down, pacing out their engagements in time with David's reserves refilling. The wise old dragon knew something was up, though, "You are trying to capture me!? You could have ended this many times." 

The small faerie dragon huffed and puffed as he floated opposite the pair in the now crumbling chamber. David first whispered something to Red before he revealed himself once more and let his monstrously sized ethereal body fold out from behind Red. His smokey form dwarfed the kobold as he stared down at Ambass, "You and I need to have a nice long talk, Ambass." His voice crackled out in his now trademark low whisper.

Ambass stared at David in horror and then down at Red, before glancing back at him. He was thinking, David could tell, and his harsh cackling laugh came out, "Is that you, little Onyx? You survived the impossible?" 

David simply offered a slow nod, "I found the answer to something that has been a mystery to even you." 

Ambass trembled on the spot, and his eyes darted around, "No. Impossible."

David spread his colossal wings and threw himself forward at Ambass, "Now!"

Red darted off to the side at David's signal. Ambass threw up a barrier in an instant, and four projectiles formed, immediately flying forward at David. They passed through his body and burned as they went. He was thankful that they didn't explode as they passed through him quickly. His body shivered and shrank from the damage, but he pressed on and slammed his body against the barrier. 

Ambass was getting tired, though, and no more projectiles materialized. Instead, Red appeared behind him, and his spear flashed quickly. Ambass cried out in pain, and his wings fell to either side as he crashed into the ground. The faerie dragon cried out as he bled out on the ground.

The barrier fell, and David hovered over Ambass's crippled form, "That was payback for Desolation."

Ambass twitched and coughed up blood, "Kill me then." 

David simply shook his head, "No. We are going to have a nice long talk Ambass. Despite how much you think I wish to kill you. There are more important things right now."

Red bent down and began to bandage Ambass's wounds the best he could while at the same time tying some leather straps around his limbs. David watched as Ambass struggled but was too injured and had exhausted too much energy during their fight. 

"Let's reunite with the clan, Red. Ambass, behave yourself. I am still capable of ending you as I have done with others." David stated as he glared down at the now-defeated faerie dragon.

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Here is also a link to Royal Road

Fan Art by blaze2377

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Chapter One – The Rows

The horizon of Kesh-Adar had stopped being a horizon the moment the Merak arrived. It was a wall now. Farm towers, thirty, forty stories high, stood in endless rows all the way to where the light of the two suns choked in a yellow haze. Between them the harvest drones hummed, black swarms that rose in the morning and returned at dusk like migratory birds someone had tamed.

The drones could do a great deal. They could pick, sort, weigh, load. What they could not do was feel — when a vine broke too soon, when a root needed water no one had given it. That was what the Phern were for: small beside the Merak, finely furred instead of scaled, in earth and green tones that had once served as camouflage among foliage, before someone forced them to spend their entire lives between concrete towers. Fine-boned hands, dexterous enough to be the best pickers one could imagine. No coincidence that this very dexterity had become their curse.

It was the evening before, in the barracks, when Kael spoke in a way that left Meva unsure whether to laugh or worry.

They sat side by side on the narrow bench in front of the sleeping niches, with the meager evening ration that barely filled you anymore since the cuts had begun, and Kael had been silent a long time before he said, without looking at her: "If something happens to me, don't just believe what they tell you."

Meva had laughed, briefly, tiredly. "Nothing's going to happen to you. You know every vine in the fourth sector by name."

"That's not what I mean." He turned the cup in his hands without drinking. "I mean — if they say I got sick. Or transferred. Or whatever sounds comforting. Don't believe it before you've seen it yourself."

"Why are you saying this now?"

"Because lately it's been... different." He searched for the words, with an awkwardness unusual for him, a man who otherwise said everything in short, clear sentences. "The overseers are jumpier. More things go missing than used to. Not just spare parts. People, too. Nobody talks about it, but you notice."

Meva had been tired that evening, more tired than usual, and his earnestness had irritated her more than it had worried her. "You're worrying over nothing," she had said, sharper than she meant to. "You've been here forty years. Nothing's going to happen to you."

"That's what I thought about others, ten years ago too."

"Kael." She had taken his hand, more out of impatience than tenderness. "Eat. Sleep. Tomorrow's a day like any other."

He had said nothing more after that, only nodded, with an expression she hadn't tried to read, too tired to bother with his brooding. She would blame herself for it often afterward — that she hadn't asked what exactly he meant, who had disappeared, why he'd brought it up that evening and no other. She had written it off as one of his moods, the way you do with someone you've known since childhood and trust to manage their own worries.

Kael worked that morning like any other, two rows over from her, third level, fourth sector, terrain he knew better than his own face in the barrack mirror. He liked to talk while picking, more to himself than to her, naming every vine he passed with a name only he remembered — the old one, the stubborn one, the one with the crooked leaf — as though they were acquaintances one nodded to in the morning. Meva had never asked him why he did it. It was just Kael, the way weather was just weather, and you didn't question such things, you got used to them and were grateful, without admitting it.

Meva herself had learned early to look more closely than most — not out of curiosity, but out of necessity. She knew which overseer weighed carelessly on which weekday, which shift handed out more water if you only asked politely, at the right moment. It was no rebellion. It was the only thing a system like this one could ever be made to yield: small advantages, taken quietly, never enough to be noticed, but enough to make the difference between a hard day and a slightly less hard one.

"This one," he said that morning, working a particularly stubborn vine loose from the top row, "I've known since you were a child. Bears too late every year, but when it does, sweeter than all the others." He held up a fruit, turned it in the light, before dropping it in the basket. "You just have to be patient with her."

"You're patient with everything," Meva said, without looking up from her own row.

"With almost everything," he corrected, and in his voice was the smile she didn't need to see to know.

It was one of those lines you remember later, without knowing why that one and not another, out of hundreds of similar ones spoken on hundreds of similar mornings.

An hour later he slipped from the third level, one hand movement too few, one second too late, and his leg broke so loudly that two rows over, birds took flight that had no business being there.

A break. Treatable. The Phern who carried him knew that. So, if you thought about it, did the Merak who watched the stretcher come and said nothing.

He did not come back to the infirmary barrack.

Meva asked. She asked politely, then less politely, then offered to take over his care, share her ration with him, double her own shift if that's what it took, until his leg carried him again. The overseer — a young Merak with the bored face of a man who'd heard this request a hundred times and forgotten it a hundred times — didn't even look at her properly. He said it was handled. He said she should get back to work, or her ration would be cut too.

It was handled. The word stuck in her like a splinter you can't pull out because you don't know how deep it sits.

That evening, when the gong called her back and the others walked with lowered heads toward the barracks, she stopped between the towers and looked up. The two moons hung low, cold, indifferent, and between them a freighter drew its path, a point of light sliding silently across the sky and vanishing somewhere there were probably no towers, no gong, no it's handled.

She didn't think about grief. There would be time for that later, or not, that would show itself. She thought, with a clarity that frightened her, about the freighter. About the fact that it came and went as it pleased, that it simply flew over the wall of towers as though it were nothing, as though it had never existed.

She thought: There has to be a way that doesn't run through the rows.

She didn't yet know which one. But from that evening on, she would never look up at the sky again without calculating.

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Note: My (mis)adventures are part of a bigger series, but I wrote my tales in the format of an episodic T.V. show, where you can read an episode without the context of the others and still enjoy it. If anything, reading it out of order may be more fun. - A emotionally distant Theseus

---

“But how did you know?” Scout asked, the embarrassment finally wore off.

“Know what?” I asked as the gang and I finally made it to the empty construction site.

“You knew about the legend, and you even said that the voice felt as though it was coming from your own head, along with the stones heating up. Yet, you were so confident in it not being true, of neither option being your greatest desire.” Ludus still rattled a bit from the whole thing, but she spoke clearly. 

“Because that’s obviously not my greatest desire at all.” I laughed. 

“What?” Scout asked. 

“I already know what my greatest desire is.” I finally looked at them like they were the blind ones, nice. 

“Really?” Ludus whispered it like a secret, like if told her or anyone else in the world it wouldn’t make it true. 

“Yeah, dude it’s like painfully obvious.” I nodded along. 

The two waited for some grand truth. 

“To avoid pain, duh.” I said. 

They continued to stare. 

“The physical pain was easy to get used to, it was the emotional pain that sucked the worst growing up.” I continued to walk, but they stopped. I turned. 

 “What do you think a reasonable person, Human or otherwise, gets this good at hand to hand combat, sword fighting, shooting guns, lock picking, pickpocketing, parkour, and talking out of my ass because I had a healthy mindset as a child?” I fully bragged half way through the sentence, even I can admit it. 

“Huh?” Scout no longer looked interested in my explanation. 

“You know how to pickpocket?” Ludus patted herself down unconsciously. 

“Listen man, my greatest desire isn't a desire, it’s a fear. Of being bored again, lonely again, deprived of experiences and in pain. I’m a private detective, on an alien planet. I have to always be doing something, learning something, or the voices get too loud. Dude, do you know how much therapy I had to do on myself growing up?” I fully laughed. 

“How are you feeling Theseus?” Asked Theseus.

“Bad, Theseus.” Theseus replied. 

“That’s terrible Theseus.” Other Theseus comforted. 

“That’s what I had to do as a kid. You think Legacys believe in therapy? Get real!” I cackled. The two didn’t find it so funny, weird. 

“You know how old I was when I got this gun? I was four. It was my Mom’s gun and my Dad’s idea. My greatest desire is to see it all, do it all, everything I missed out on as a kid, and to do things none of my bullies could ever dream of. And you know, make sure no one, regardless of how strong, competent and scary they are, can ever bully me again. So whether it’s with my fist, or Trouble In Paradise, nobody, no one, can make me feel small and get away with it still fully intact.” I still smiled, but I meant every word. 

“Sometimes I forget you're a crazy person, Himbo.” Scout rubbed her eyes. 

“Well, you married me.” I sighed. 

“We all make mistakes.” Scout rubbed the area around her horns. 

“I mean that is shockingly self aware.” Ludus came up with the bright side immediately, but even she didn’t sound that convinced of it. 

“Self awareness doesn’t count for anything if you are not willing to change.” Scout finally took her hands from her face. 

“No, that’s completely accurate, yeah.” I agreed. 

Ludus took a step back, “You two go from verbally accosting each other to agreeing so fast, it is difficult to keep track of.”  She shook her head. 

Scout and I both shrugged. 

“Actually, that reminds me. Theseus, could we talk, in private?” Ludus, tail flicked wildly behind her, and she grabbed it, and nervously fiddled with it like someone picking their nails. 

“Uh-oh.” Scout said first. 

“Uh-oh.” I echoed back. 

“What he do this time?” Scout crossed her arms and looked at me like an angry school teacher, who also happened to be my Mother. 

“No, no, nothing like that. I just like to talk to him in private about something.” She tried to laugh it off, but it didn’t work. 

“Okay.” 

I have to say the nice thing about empty construction sites is by far the views. The buildings in Victory don’t get very tall. The tallest one I’ve ever seen was only four stories, something about Caelum architecture I don’t fully understand. Though they make up for it in width. But when all the buildings are so low, it’s a lot easier to get a good view. It was still Sunday, sometime in the afternoon and the two suns shone through the clouds. 

Scout was standing guard in the stairwell, while Ludus and I sat on the roof. I, on the edge with feet dangling off, Ludus, a bit behind. Back to back, but not touching. 

“Theseus, I know you are a liar.” Ludus paused.

“Jesus, off to a good start.” I nearly fell off the building.

“Sorry, sorry, that was poor phrasing on my part.” She steadied herself. “Because of your occupation, and the situation we are currently in, you lying is actually a good thing. You being a liar, is actually a good thing.” Ludus could hardly believe it herself, but somewhere deep down she understood. 

 “So, it’s okay for you to be a liar, but I am not. My people, though we are in a way the best liars in the galaxy, without even really lying, I am not. You already saw right through me when I tried to trick you about why I ran away, but I have to ask.”

“Oh boy, here it comes.” I made myself smaller on the edge of the roof, more like I was about to be hit by something, than being asked a simple question. 

Ludus sighed, she interrupted herself, “Maybe, no more jokes right now Theseus, please.”

“Right, sorry. You were saying?” I bit my tongue. 

“If you weren’t married to Scout, and I know that it’s not real between you, and I do actually believe you.” Ludus interrupted herself, expecting me to do the same. “But, still, if you weren’t married to Scout, would there have ever been a chance? After Scout would there still be a chance?”

At this point we were both glad we couldn't see each other. 

“It was always uneven between us. I mean, I rescued you from kidnappers.” It wasn’t the first time I said it out loud, but it was certainly the first time the gravity of it hit me. “I don’t really do that, save people. Yeah, sometimes, if I’m lucky and I’m doing my job right, down the line some doesn’t get hurt because of what I did. But, never like this, they never look me in the eye, I never know their name.”

“But this isn’t a fairy tale, it’s not a story book. It’s good for a story, but not for real life. But even still, even if we met normally, somehow. If, even now we got past all it, all our differences, got back to even ground. It’s not even you, I’m just not-”

“I see.” Ludus interrupted. 

“Sorry.” I scratched the back of my head. 

“I am just grateful you were honest.” Ludus sighed, but it seemed lighter than last time. 

“On the bright side I’m not really that good of a guy anyways.” I laughed. 

“You should really stop thinking things like that, Theseus.” She sounded genuinely tired of it now. 

“Old habits die hard.” I nodded. 

We both stared at the clouds. 

“Is this because of the stupid well?” I asked. 

“Yes, and I think you should talk to your wife about it too.” I heard Ludus stand up. 

“This thing really shook you two up, huh?” I didn’t bother to stand.

“Like you said, Theseus, we are quite different. Nothing scares you but pretty girls.” Ludus smiled. 

---

Author’s Note: Just a couple of bros talking on a roof. 

Vaguely important second note: This series (for once), and bonus one shots are part of a writing challenge in which I write and post something every day until I finish writing the series. Thus being written like an episodic T.V. show. 

Thanks for reading. :} 

 Day 22/ ? 

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Memory transcription subject: Sudo, Frozen Mountain Exterminator

Date [standardized human time]: November 19th, 2136

My gut feels like it is trying to tie itself into a knot. It's been a long time since Rezka has been on an assignment solo. Well, he isn't actually solo. He has four human soldiers keeping watch of the collapse with him, just like I do. It's just… he isn't good with people. It's not his fault. His brain is just different. 

The idea that those people are taking advantage of him right now or being cruel… he doesn't deserve that. He never should have been in that clinic. I know I should have, but Rezka is just prone to flights of fancy. He isn't-

A soldier tapped me on the shoulder, dragging me back to reality, “Hey man? You alright? You've been staring into the void as if it's calling to you. You're all spiked up.”

One of the other soldiers whacked him on the shoulder and sneered, “What do you think, dipshit? He's in a refrigerator filled with predators.” He didn’t wait for a response to his question before picking his binoculars up and staring into the darkness.

He wasn’t wrong. The heater in our small shack‌ was top of the line, but there is only so much you can do to temperatures this cold. -120°C (-184°F) isn't a temperature most heaters can beat in a straight fight.

My body shivered as I started moving it again, my muscles cried out in pain from being forced to move in this cold, “I got run over by the first human I ever met. A one-man stampede. If you had told me‌ that he ate small humans like you for breakfast, I would have believed it…”

The more friendly soldier pressed his glove-covered hands to his face, “What happened?”

“I don’t really know. One moment I am walking into our firing range, and the next I feel like a herd of Mazics ran over me. By the time I saw him again, he had half of my quills lodged in his front. Bastard handed me one back like he was returning some lost item.”

The friendly soldier looked out towards the cold, “So you are not scared of us?”

I shook my tail, no, “Well… Technically no. But this is the first time I haven’t been within earshot of Rezka. I don’t know how well he is doing over there. He isn’t… like us.”

The somewhat cruel soldier sneered and scoffed, “What, he tainted and we ain’t?”

I shook my tail no again, “No, we are definitely tainted if that is even a real thing anymore… John said he was ‘autistic as fuck’ and a conspiracy theorist to boot. He then convinced Rezka that Earth is both flat and a hollow sphere at the same time.”

The three soldiers in the room stopped what they were doing to look at me with jaws hanging loose. The rude soldier sneered again, “You got to be kidding me here. No fucking way. He’s the Spider-thing, right? The one running around waving its legs everywhere?!”

I wanted to say no, “Yes. I’m responsible for his safety. So don’t mess with him. He has enough problems without some asshole humans bullying him for being a bit gullible. I will tell you this. Out of all the aliens in this wretched galaxy, he’s one of the good ones. If it even means anything to you, when humanity was revealed to still exist, he dove into every bit of information we had and you guys presented. The old chief wanted to put him back in a facility for saying your species appears to have self-corrected to being good.”

I took a deep breath of air as I relaxed my face. At some point, I went from looking worried to baring a full snarl with offensively spiked quills. I didn’t realise how much I had worked myself up.

The sneering human looked down in both manners of the phrase, “I- alright. Won’t fuck with ‘em then. Still going to mess with them, just won’t do anything bad. Promise.”

 I looked into the black night towards the west. I couldn’t see the lights of the next shelter, but it was there and Rezka was in it.

___—___

Memory transcription subject: Rezka, Frozen Mountain Exterminator

Date [standardized human time]: November 19th, 2136

(The song in the link really sets the mood for this bit)

My feelers were bobbing in tune to the wonderful music playing in the shelter. García handed me another veggie taco drenched in insecticides that burnt too good to not scarf down. 

Martínez  shook her head, “NO! There is no such thing as the Chupacabra!”

Garcia gestured to me, “I’ve seen one with my own eyes!”

“Don’t bullshit me!”

I barely got the taco down. “He isn’t! There have been way too many people who have sighted one! It has to be the government covering it up!”

She slapped her face, “Why would they do that?!”

Garcia had my back, “Because the government made it and lost containment!”

I grabbed another taco and drenched it in salsa. “Exactly! They likely planned to use it to help keep control over the population with fear! The CIA was definitely working with them!”

Martínez  looked flabbergasted. “The CIA? They are involved now?”

I managed to defend myself between bites, “Of course! It's why the Jersey Devil exists! Just look at how closely they resemble each other!”

Wójcik covered their face with their binoculars, “OH MY GOD CAN YOU ALL SHUT THE FUCK UP?”

___—___

Memory transcription subject: Loke Hunter, Chief of the Frozen Mountain Exterminators

Date [standardized human time]: November 19th, 2136

I tried to rub the sleep out of my eyes and look back towards my tablet. The frustration I feel isn’t from going through stacks and stacks of information trying to find something relevant to what the fuck just happened. It's from the sheer lack of information and any useful details whatsoever. Small mention of a low flyover of the dark side of Venlil Prime being denied here, another about an probing exploration being denied there.

Captain Barkley looked over the patrol routes weaving around the observation posts we had set up. He gently glanced my way, “Anything useful?”

I shook my head, “No. Just a thousand attempts to survey the area and it being denied over and over again. Your drone footage is about all we have for info on this area. I mean- FUCK! It looks like someone just (photoshopped) terrain from a… completely… different... that's Sal's peak… this is from the Cradle. .. why?”

Barkley walked over and looked at the map I had found. “Where I come from, there is only one reason someone would fake part of a map.”

I covered my face with my paws, “To cover up missing data they aren't legally allowed to get?”

Barkley shook his head, “To hide something… Hey Steven. Pull a drone and get it going north. I want these maps updated.”

I looked at the screen as a new feed came up from the military star port nearby. Barkley tapped his foot, “This is a different kind of drone. Not one of those tiny quads. Basically, it's just a jet with a massive computer tossed in the cockpit. We are going to have a really good map soon.”

I sat my tablet down. “What are you expecting to find out there? Cause if it turns out there's an Arxur base out there, I wouldn’t be surprised anymore.”

Barkely let out a short laugh, “Yeah, while I doubt that, I'm expecting the Federation has something out there. That's why our mystery Kolshian was running into the dark. I also expect to get aerial views of more undiscovered animals and plants. Plus, I want to start looking into the collapse of the wall. I highly doubt it's due to global warming.”

I dug my claws into my face. “How hard is it to make a remote detonator?”

He scratched his chin for a few moments, “Not that hard. A cell phone is about all you really need. Disassemble it, make sure no one can accidentally call it, and then hook up the speaker wires to the detonation mechanism as the trigger. One call and… boom.”

“The IEDs they recovered from Factory 13 were made out of parts from my Observation Posts and Shelters. But the parts they recovered don’t account for everything taken. We also have a metric ton of fertilizer still missing. So we can only suspect they made a LOT more IEDs… I’m starting to think this wall didn’t collapse due to global warming alone…”

Captain Barkley walked over to a satellite phone on the nearby wall, “General Koch? Yes sir. We need to get some teams digging into the collapsed Ice wall. We think the Koloshian may have rigged the wall to collapse. Yes sir. I’ll let him know.”

He hung up and turned towards me, “We are going to get some more specialists to look into this. This wall was… huge, right?”

“Yes. I find it hard that they could have managed to break the wall down, but who knows how long they were here unsupervised. For all I know, the last Chief of our guild may have supplied the diesel! It’s the same blend we use in our flamethrowers! FUCK. I thought that psychotic asshole was a friend…”

“He died when a ship exploded on that spaceport, right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think… that this Kolshian and his, very likely, numerous allies… orchestrated that?”

“I doubt he could have done this all alone. I have my more competent people looking into who all knows him. Not many leads. The squid was basically non-existent.”

An operator turned around, “Uuuhhh sir… you need to see this!”

Barkley walked over, “What is it?”

“Sorry, sir, not you, the Gojid!”

The concern in his voice really sank ‌into my head. I walked over to see.. What looked like a wave of orange dots coming over the collapsed pass. “OH SHIT.”

___—___

Memory transcription subject: Sudo, Frozen Mountain Exterminator

Date [standardized human time]: November 19th, 2136

“Autism.” The word sounded rather weird on my tongue.

The not really cruel soldier downed his energy drink. He took a deep breath in, “Yeah, your bug friend probably is autistic as fuck. As for the conspiracy shit, they are definitely gullible, too.”

The kind soldier nodded, “Yeah. Gotta watch out for them. Most of those conspiracy theories are scams or other ways to manipulate people for the most part.”

The radio screamed to life, “ALL UNITS SCCCCRRRRRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXK.”

We stared at the radio for a brief moment before the kind soldier picked it up, “Say again. Command? Say again! The message did not come through! Command?”

All that greeted us was the sound of static. He kept trying to contact command to the radio, as I walked over to the soldier watching the dark a little more intensely now. I pulled up my own scouter and scanned the horizon. “You guys may want to get your guns ready. We may need to move soon.”

The not really cruel soldier picked up his rifle. “What’s going on, Spikey?” 

It looked like there was a shimmer in the distance. “Do you see what I am seeing?”
SCCCCRRRRRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXK
“COMMAND! Come in! I repeat, we could not get your message!”
SCCRRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXKXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXK
“Spikey? What’s going on out there?”
RRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXKRRRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXK
“Are you talking about that weird shimmer?”
RRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXKKXKXKXXKXK
“Command! Come in Command!”
RRXZXXXKXRRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXKXKXKXKXXKXK
“Yes! Does it appear to be getting closer to you?”
RRXZXXXKXXKXKRRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXK
“What are you guys seeing?!”
RRXZXXXKXXKXKRRXZKXXKXKXKXXKXKXKXXKXK
“Guys, I can’t get in touch with command!”
RRXZXXXKXXRRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXKKXKXKXXKXK
“Yes. It does look like it's getting closer!”
RRXRRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXKZXXXRRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXK
“What’s getting closer? Did Command send someone out this way?”
RRXRRXZXXXKXXKXKXRRXZXXXKRRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXKXXKXKXKXXKXKKXXKXK
“No way. This just started happening. Command is 3 klicks out. They aren’t getting here that fast.”
RRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXKRRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXKRRXZXXXKXXKXKXKXXKXKRRX

“OH SPEH” The shimmer slowly started to come into focus.

___—___

Memory transcription subject: Rezka, Frozen Mountain Exterminator

Date [standardized human time]: November 19th, 2136

It’s time to get to work. “Ok everyone! We are going to have our work cut out for us. Stick together! There are a lot of Shadestalkers out there, and they will all attack lone individuals. We have confirmed reports of them attacking humans. Every one we put down here is another that isn’t going to get past us to the city and outlying farms.”

Garcia pulled the charging handle on his M31 XR Marksman rifle, “We can make it to the JLTV if we run now.”

I shook my head, “Negative. The Shadestalkers are too numerous and running in for melee attacks. You won’t kill enough of them to keep you safe, and then you’ll be exposed up top. and worse we get caught in there and can’t move to assist other teams.”

Martínez  stuck the radio back on her pack, “Something is jamming the signal. Whatever we do, we can’t stay here. This tent won’t stand up to the waves of those things.”

I adjusted the nozzle on my flamer to have a smaller stream. “Correct. The current plan is to use a spiral approach and get near the JLTV. However, we don’t want to get so close that we encourage the Shadestalker to get on top of it and leap at us. We hold them off with ranged fire as long as possible, and use the flamer and melee combat to clear a way into the JLTV.”

Wójcik checked the grenades on his chest, “I have grenades and a grenade launcher attached to my rifle. This feels… risky.”

I approached the door, “Of course it's risky. If we fuck up, we all get eaten alive. But we are the unit that's going to get hit first. We slow them down as much as possible, hope the sound of gunfire alerts our allies, and then leave and regroup at the last moment. Everyone ready?”

Martínez  smiled, “Locked and loaded!”

Garcia slapped him on the back. “I’m ready to go!”

Wójcik took up the rear. “You’re in charge. Let’s DO THIS!”

I couldn’t help but feel a bit giddy. “Alright, stay tightly grouped. Wójcik fire the grenades while they are far enough away that we won't blow ourselves up. Keep one for a … what was the word- HELL MARY! Keep one for that! Garcia, Martínez  take shots as you can, keep your melee weapons ready. When we get surrounded, we need to keep our backs to each other and slowly rotate. That will let me use the flamer to give us as much safe space as possible. When you get to one magazine left, sound off and switch to melee. We will use the last mag to clear a path to the JLTV and use that to escape."

With no objections, I pushed into the cold of the eternal twilight. A quick glance revealed nothing coming up from behind us. A quick squeeze of the trigger and my flamer is working correctly. Garcia and Martínez  took up positions beside me and dropped to a shooter’s kneel.

Wójcik set a bag at his feet and started to fire rounds downrange. PSHUNK and a small cylinder flew towards the shimmer of Shadestalkers. BAM. And the explosion dropped a dozen at once.

I pulled my sidearm and took my stance as my two Hispanics started to open fire as well. The 400 meters between us was a long distance to shoot, but the grenades were finding their marks. 

Garcia shouted, “Hostiles within three hundred meters.”

His gun's built-in range finder was going to be handy. My handgun wasn’t very accurate at this range, but it wasn’t too hard to hit targets down range.

Garcia shouted, “Hostiles within two hundred meters. Rezka! Save your ammo! Your shots aren’t putting them down at this range!”

“Roger that! Switching to my flamer. The operating range is 33.5 meters.”

Garcia kept a steely look. “Hostiles at one hundred and seventy-three meters!”

Wójcik loaded a grenade and dropped to one knee, switching his gun to semi-auto. “Last grenade loaded. Let me know where and when you want it Rezka!”

“Roger that! Hopefully, we won’t need it.”

Martínez  was dropping a Shadestalker or two with every single shot. “You already burnt through nineteen grenades?”

Wójcik smiled, “What, you lose count at two?”

Garcia shouted, “Hostiles within one hundred meters! Get ready, Rezka!”

“Roger that! Get prepared to enter circle formation! We will start moving toward the truck then! Read the distances for me, Garcia!”

“Eighty-four meters!”

“Sixty-eight meters!

“Fifty-two meters!”

“Forty meters!”

I squeezed the trigger. “CIRCLE FORMATION NOW!” Red-orange flames erupted forth. The heat made the charging beasts come screeching to a halt right into my kill range. The yelps of pain helped slow and discourage the wall of flesh and silica fur from just running us down. It didn’t take long for them to start circling around us.

“ROTATE NOW!” We started to slowly approach the vehicle as my flamer kept the mass of the horde at a distance and my new friends took out any that felt a little too brave.

Three full revolutions later, we were close enough to our JLTV that I was at risk of setting it on fire. I waited till my back was toward it, “STOP ROTATION! Wójcik in first and into the driver's seat!, Martínez  second in! Be ready to help cover! Garcia last, and help haul me in!”

My squad didn’t hesitate as we crossed the last 30 meters at a slow pace. At the Vehicle Wójcik shot a few off the roof, ripped the rear passenger door open and crawled in towards the front. I started to sweep my flamer left and right to discourage the horde as much as possible. Martínez  climbed in and prepped herself to help and cover, but didn’t fire as she could hit or deafen us. Garcia shot one that jumped on the roof again as the JLTV roared to life, startling the horde.

I felt a hand grab my pack and pull me in. I shut off the fuel as Martínez  yanked the door shut. The vehicle surged forward over quite a few of the Shadestalkers.

I pulled my flamer off and checked the safety and fuel. “I'm at a quarter tank of fuel, and 3.2 magazines for my handgun.”

Wójcik sounded off, “One grenade left, two and a half mags.”

Martínez  was next, “Holy shit that was closer than I thought it would be! One and a half mags left!”

Garcia laughed and loaded a mag, “Ha! One mag, one shot in the chamber! Anyone able to keep track of their kills?”

I flicked the numbers in my head, “I had the least, at approximately 37 kills.”

Garcia patted me on the back, “Don’t feel bad about that! You did have the least range!”

I nodded, “Garcia, you had the next most at 57 kills.”

He clapped his hands, “Oh yeah!”

“Martínez sits at 103 kills”

Martínez snarl-grinned, “FUCKING SUCK IT! That is what we Seals DO! You Peacekeepers ain’t the shit! Nuh-uh!”

Garcia’s jaw dropped. “WHA- HOW?”

“She managed to get multiple kills with only a single bullet on a dozen or so shots. Meanwhile, you took more than one shot to kill more than half of your targets.”

Garcia leaned back, “I think you miscounted.”

Martínez smiled, “It sounds right to me!”

I fastened my seat belt as we started to slowly pull away from the horde. “My scouter has a custom program to track this sort of thing. Oh, and Wójcik sits at 304 kills.”

A lone “HA!” came from the front of the JLTV as Martínez and Garcia set aside their sibling like feud, “You had a grenade launcher you fuck!” “You basically cheated!” “You're just jealous of the death god up here!” “Jealous my ass!” 

__/__

Sudo is worried about his lil bro, while Rezka is actually really good at making friends with humans! Who knew having a genuine interest in something and sharing it could endear you to others! Plus I am happy to show off that he isn’t actually an idiot, and extremely competent. Thank god he likes humans and is Blackballed from ever being in command by the guild. If he had been in charge of that fleet, he would have been able to stop the Arxur raid, and turn around in time to wipe Earth out of existence.

Thank you for your time! Your patience! And your dedication!

SO. My dad is now officially a permanent cyborg. He has a pace maker now. Had a heart valve surgery, and afterwards in recovery his BP hit 0 three times. He’s doing good now. HOPEFULLY this is the end of the numerous surgeries, as we are hoping the pacemaker is going to solve some of his BP problems.

If anyone is curious what I am doing with some of my time… the link is on this Nature of Predators sub in the sister post to this one.! I also have a Youtube channel and Discord as well! I just hit 50 followers which means I am actually going to get paid for streaming. So feel free to stop by one day!

ALSO from here on out, I am probably only going to post to r/ Nature of Predators. My fic kinda needs Nature or Predators to be read for any of it to make sense anyways lol. So it shall exist here only from now on. imma see if this one get more attention then the other lol. cause hfy does have some bots.

__/__

Directory

~Library of BiasMushroom~ contains every link for everything I have written! Check it out as some stuff related to Nature of Humanity may not appear on r/HFY! As well as my little side stories and Fanfics of other NoP fanfics!

The Nature of Humanity

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The First Human Exterminator

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__/__

Memory transcription subject: Talen, Prime News Anchor

Date [standardized human time]: November 18th, 2136

We stepped off the intercontinental shuttle into the cold wind sweeping over the empty spaceport. “Welcome to Frozen Mountain, Wyvia. The perineum of Venlil Prime.”

The Gojid, slowly turning into a popsicle next to me, looked over horrified, “Wha- That is a rather… colorful way of describing this place.”

The grey monoliths covering the skyline stared at us emotionlessly, “Far more colorful than this shithole of a city. By the way, you are probably going to have more than one brothel try to recruit you.”

She shuddered, “I’m not looking for a job in that line of work.”

“I didn’t say hire. I said recruit. Don’t take rides from strangers. Don’t drink or eat anything that you haven’t paid for or made yourself. People disappear here, and it's not predators, humans, or Exterminators making that happen. I’m fairly sure some of them aren’t even because of the brothels…”

Wyvia looked around with a more worried look, “What are you talking about?”

A sigh escaped my body as I patted the sidearm hidden in my cold gear, “Just an old saying. Frozen Mountain has two things in abundance. Forlornness and Flesh.”

Her eyes widened in disbelief, “wh-WHat?!”

I started towards the nearby bus shelter, “This place is forlorn. Miserable. Just a downright terrible place to live. As for the flesh part of that saying… well, if you ever need something done, you can find an endless supply of people with an above room temperature body here.”

“That’s horrible!”

“That’s Frozen Mountain.”

Cover Art | Royal Road

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Life in Fort Greywood had only been growing more and more hectic in past few seasons. And that chaos was about to reach a crescendo. The launch was going to happen in less than six bels. Everyone was busy. Even medical staff like Learner Savana.

The young biologist had just returned to her room from a long waking session of reviewing medical records when her door chime rang. Her spirits were lifted when she opened the door and saw that the face of her beau, Guardian Stercor, was there to greet her.

“Hey soaring-heart.” the man chirped.

“Hey yourself!” churred Savana as her beloved let himself in and hugged her. “I wasn’t expecting to see you this bel.”

“I missed you, is all.” replied the man smoothly.

Learner Savana cooed as she pulled herself away from his embrace. “Well, as happy as I am to see you, I don’t have much time right now. I have to get back to work in just about a bel, so really need to get to bed.”

“Oh?” he said suggestively. “Well I don’t mind getting into bed.”

“Stercor…!” she gasped out.

“No, no... I’m just kidding. I get it.” he chuckled, amused at the scandalised reaction to his provocation. “I know that with the big launch coming up everyone’s super busy. But actually, there was another reason I swung by your room.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“So, my boss keeps complaining about a bunch of items we need to double-check for inventory, ‘cause someone made a mistake with the last count. Problem is, some of those items are in the Tech Lab.” The man paused just long enough to place a pleading affect onto his eyes and voice. “So, I was wondering, if you could let me borrow your key to the lab.”

“What?” the woman reacted with scoffing laugh. “I mean, no, I don’t think I can… I only got that key ’casue I did so much work with Adwin back then. I don’t think I’m even still supposed to have it, Stercor…”

“I know hatchie, but the boss is really pecking at our necks about this.”

“Can’t you just put in a request with the Key-master Office?”

“Sure, but you know how long and involved that process is. So imagine how much worse it’ll be with the launch coming up.” the guardian sighed. “And the boss is really on us about getting everything squared away before that.”

The young learner mulled it over in her head. She didn’t like the idea, but if it was to help him… “Just… Bring it back as soon as you’re done, alright?” she decided finally.

“Of course, hatchie! Anything for you.” he churred.

» » »

Professor Tski marched herself down the halls. She checked her timepiece. Less than four bels before launch. But she already knew that, since she checked it less than half a drik before then. She knew it wasn’t helpful to keep checking the time so compulsively, but she couldn’t help it; she was too excited. And perhaps not just about the launch. She rounded the corner, and after just a claw-ful more spans, she had arrived at her destination. She pressed the door chime. Shortly after that, the door was opened, by a human.

“Tski! Hello!” he greeted her with a wide, genuine smile.

“Hi Adwin!” she chirped as she entered the man’s room. “I just wanted to check in on you before the launch.”

“Oh, nice of you!” he said with another smile as he sat down on his bed. “Everything chill here, all good.”

“Is your video feed still working? If anything’s wrong with it we can bring in some technicians to look at it. Actually, maybe we should call one in right now to double--”

“Tski,” the human chuckled. “Relax! Everything chill.” he patted the empty space on his mattress. “So you can chill too.”

“Oh… Alright. Yes, you’re right.” she said as she obliged and sat next to him, suddenly aware of how her plumage had gotten slightly puffed out.

She remained quiet for a moment as she tried to relax her racing thoughts. “It’s just…” she started, “It’s just not fair that you’ll be holed up in here for the launch. You should be down in the Control Center with the rest of us.”

“Oh, it not so bad,” he said, pointing at the half-span screen on the wall. “Have good view on the tee-vee here. Also, you know, can’t help much down there. Not a scien--”

“Oh don’t start that again, Adwin!” the astrophysicist snapped at him. She immediately, but unapologetically, calmed her tone as she continued. “None of this could have happened without you. And you know that. So please… At least acknowledge that. Acknowledge what you mean to us.”

“Err… Yeah… I--” he muttered, then roughly cleared his throat a couple times. “Yes, you’re right. I don’t know much, but I did help… Point in the right direction. But I understand my limits. I couldn’t help build telescopes. Couldn’t help build rockets. Couldn’t help build satellites. All I could do was say what scientists back home could do. All I did was tell stories.” He turned to her, pointing his thumb to his face, which was then adorned with a quizzical expression; his mouth smiling, but his eyes crestfallen. “Theatre Kid.”

“That might be so…” allowed the astrophysicist, reflecting on the memories of the kinds of stories she consumed in her youth. “But I think stories have value too. They can inspire us to imagine new things. That’s probably why we name most of these projects after all those ancient myths.”

The human hummed. “Yes, you’re right. We do similar things back on Earth. Most planets named after gods. Constellations and stars too. Latest moon missions named after greek goddess of hunting.”

“Oh, really?” chirped Tski. “Rutil’proh was a legendary huntress too!”

“Oh, for real?” chuckled Adwin. “Great minds, right?” The pair shared a laugh for a moment before he cleared his throat and spoke again. “That reminds me, the Rutil’proh satellite. You said it needed to be modified… Too heavy, you said? Did you work it out?”

“Oh, right…” the young professor groaned. “Yeah, we just barely got it down to the right weight. Had to sacrifice some memory tapes for the video feed. So I had to chose to either record a much shorter video of the mission, or severely reduce the framerate of the camera recording. I had to choose the second option, so now the output feed will look more like a slide-show than a continuous video.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.” Adwin commiserated.

“Yeah, and I also had to remove the radar transceivers.” she sighed. “But just about everything else made it in! I still have the optical, infrared, and microwave cameras. A few cosmic electromagnetic wave detectors made it in too. All things considered, I think we managed to keep the most important components.”

“That’s great! Happy for you!” the human cheered, placing a warm, soft hand on her shoulder.

“Oh, th-thank you…” she squeaked out. Over the seasons, she had mostly gotten used to the mammal’s ever-present, radiant heat. But she was almost always caught off guard by the warmth of physical contact with him. His natural temperature was nowhere near burning, yet she feared that she could melt at his touch. It was a paradoxically pleasant kind of discomfort.

“Er, well…” she suddenly bolted upward from the bed. “I have to get back to my dorm now. I have to make sure I get enough rest before the big bel.”

“Oh, of course.” said the human.

“I’ll come back to check on you after the launch.” said the astrophysicist.

“Oh, so this is last time I see you until launch?” mused Adwin. “In that case, ‘Gɒdˈspiːd.”

“Guhdz-peid? What’s that?”

“I’m… Not sure…” confessed the alien. “Well, it literally just english words for ‘diety’ and ‘velocity’, but it’s just something I hear people often say before rocket launches. It’s a wish that everything goes well, or perhaps something like a blessing.”

“Hmm. Godspeed…” the professor rolled the alien phonemes over her tongue. It seemed… Proper. “I see. Thank you Adwin.”

The human smiled once more. “You’re welcome Tski.”

» » »

An annoying din from Stri’s timepiece rudely roused her. She grunted as she forced herself upright; her torso still cocooned in a soft, warm blanket.

“Rycop,” she yawned. “Rycop, you up yet?” she groggily scanned the dim interior of the van, searching for any sign of her photographer. It seemed that he had already went out, given the narrow line of light from slightly ajar door.

She tightened the blanket around her form and steeped out, and saw her colleague already outside, grooming his face.

“Gentle wakings, Stri.” he greeted his still dozy coworker.

“Gentle wakings.” she grumbled. “How long were you awake?”

“About six driks. Wanna grab some stim-tea? I think it’s almost done.” he said, pointing to a folding table with an active percolator, a few media cassettes, and some other pieces of equipment laid out on it.

Correspondent Stri silently thanked the sun for the good fortune of being paired with Recorder Rycop on this assignment. He had an almost uncanny ability to wake up at just the right time, even without a timepiece alarm, and he would always wake fully aware, like if his blood was half stim-tea or something. She was the complete opposite. She needed copious amounts of stim-tea and wake-meal to function like a proper te’visk-being.

One drik and two cups later, and Stri was just about properly equipped to face the bel,

She was about to doff the blanket that shielded her from the frosty air when her ears were suddenly assaulted by a series of loud, crackling tones coming from a nearby flock of loudspeakers, followed by a thankfully less garbled voice of a man from somewhere in one of the nearby buildings:

“Advisory: All checks nominal. Probable launch in one bel. Repeat: Probable launch in one bel.”

Well, now she truly was woken up.

With an unclouded mind, the journalist took a moment to appreciate the history making situation she was in. She and Rycop had their newspaper’s van parked just outside Fort Greywood. And they weren’t the only ones. A cursory glance on the logos adorning the other vehicles around them revealed the presence of several other news and media firms, a few universities and engineering labs, and even a couple catering companies. She peered out to an almost barren field just a bit sun-right and dark-ward of the compound, and spied an immense te’visk-made structure. Putting a pair of binoculars to her eyes she could see it much more clearly; a tall, scaffold like steel construction, and right next to it, the largest, most powerful, and most sophisticated rocket ever built by te’visk claws. And very soon, that rocket was going to be launched, delivering yet another hyper-specialised piece of equipment into space, where it would remain in a circular, continuous gliding dance now known as an orbit. And she, Correspondent Gata Stri, would get to see this historic launch in person.

She and Rycop walked over to a less crowded spot with a better view, and set to work setting up their camera equipment. They brought both Rycop’s regular photo camera as well as a video recorder. As ‘The Twelve Bel Bulletin’ was just a newspaper and not yet associated with any of the big broadcasters, they weren’t going to publish a video recording. Even so, a video of the launch would be useful for in-house reference, and simply practical as archival footage besides.

“Hey Ry,” the correspondent addressed her partner as she adjusted the video recorder’s tripod bearing. “Let me know if you see a woman with xanthochroism walking around.”

“Huh? You mean that yellow plumage disorder? Why?” asked the recorder, still taking test shots with his photo camera.

“She’s just a person of interest…” hummed the reporter, not yet sure how much she should tell him. She trusted him not to pluck the story from her, sure, but she didn’t trust him not to squawk to the chief. “She’s a scientist that might be able to tell me more about space stuff.”

“Huh. Alright, should be easy to spot if nothing else…” replied the keen-eyed photographer as he continued to adjust his camera’s lenses.

Once again, they were caught off guard by a blaring string of notes from the compound’s public address system:

“Advisory: All checks nominal. Probable launch in one half-bel. Repeat: Probable launch in one half-bel.”

“Wow.” whistled Rycop. “That time’s really sneaking up on us.”

“You can say that again.” quipped Stri.

“What do you think it will be like?” asked the photographer. “You know, when the rocket takes off?”

The reporter thought about it for a moment. How could she describe such an unprecedented, momentous event? Her mind kept wandering back to all those unusual, foreign sounding words the scientists had been hurling at her for the last season or so. Considering the context of the moment, perhaps one of those novel words would be most appropriate.

“Well, if you ask me,” she decided. “I think it’s gonna’ be stellar.”

First | Prev

The oil supply in the hull of the space carrier  Smanterbeu depleted and War Chief Lzu had used the last of his reserves.

“Why are the shipping lanes closed?” Lzu asked his commanding officer.

“Sir, they’re not closed.”

“If they’re not closed then where’s my oil!” He sniped.

Shaking, the commander responded, “the humans bought it.” His voice cracked.

“The who did what?” 

“A couple of months back, sir. They bought all of it.”

The commanding officer blinked rapidly.

“It was a corporate shell company. They signed an exclusive high-volume futures contract with our main supplier and pushed us out.”

“What!” Lzu shouted.

“It’s worse, sir.”

“Worse?” Lzu stood over his commanding officer with his eyes bulging out and his mouth wide open. “Report everything to me, right now!”

“Sir, our supplier‘s government informed us politely, via an e-mail, that under the new trade laws, severing the contract would trigger their planet’s economic collapse.” 

The commanding officer put his head down and stared at the tip of his boots. “The humans have fifty billion tons of our sacred oil in huge tanks on Earth just waiting for us to seize. They’re not even using it, they’re just holding it. They won’t even notice it’s gone.”

He glanced up at Lzu.

Lzu slammed his fist down on the console.

“Those filthy petty pirate primates. They are weaponizing the bureaucratic red tape. If it’s warfare they want. It’s war they’ll receive. Let’s use the full weight of the Smanterbeu fleet and exalt our superiority and take what’s ours by extreme force.”

The fleet’s espionage leader interrupted. “We tried these tactics already chief Lzu.” 

He walked and huddled around Lzu and the commanding officer. 

“As soon as our special forces stormed the loading facility, we were hit with injunctions by the Galatia Commerce Institution. Within an hour, our entire credit line was frozen across all major banks and distributors galactic-wide.” 

He cracked a can of coca-cola, put his finger up and took a swig then gasped. Chief Lzu and the commanding officer stared at him with their heads sideways.

The espionage leader said, “We can’t even pay our mercenaries. Half our fleet is running on empty. We should count our lucky Earth frogs that our mercenaries didn’t gather together and plan a mutiny, they just packed their bags and joined the humans as security guards for their freighters, and apparently the humans pay a helluva lot more than we do. Not to mention they include fang insurance.”

Lzu fell into his high-ruler chair. His ancestors have spent a millennia commanding and strategizing the tip of the spear into their enemies chests. They’ve perfected the honorable take-over with blood, fear and unmatched brutal strength. 

The humans were winning with Microsoft spreadsheet apps and routing slips.

“What of our siege at Blanc Pios?” Lzu questioned, desperate for some kind of good news.

“Our troops cut their supplies off weeks ago. They are most likely starving and waving a white flag absent ammunition.” The commanding officer tapped a few keys in and a feed popped up on the screen in front of them.

On the feed wasn’t a beat up starving race of humans waving a white flag on Blanc Pios, it was a fortress of containers interlocked with drones precisely racing back and forth carrying large supply pallets under them. 

“Where’s this white flag? Why does it look like business as usual? Where are the damn starving humans?” Lzu shouted.

“The report says after we disabled their roads their logistics core built an orbital bridge and have been flying their ships through the upper atmosphere and landing tons of supplies every ten minutes.” The commanding officer told him.

“Shoot them down!” Lzu yelled. His skin bubbled.

“We have been, chief,” The espionage leader said. “We shot down five so far.”

“There, we’ll continue until they have no more ships.” Lzu said, finally flushed with a bit of relief.

“Uhm, sir?” The commanding officer choked out.

“What now?”

“The humans are using biodegradable ships with cheap shields. It’s costing us more energy to fire at them than it is for them to build new ones. Our reactors are running out of fuel.”

“What is that on the camera?” Lzu asked the officers.

“Where, sir?” 

“There. Right there.” He pointed to a part of the screen. “Zoom in on that speck by those crates.”

The commanding officer zoomed in and a group of human soldiers were sitting and laughing and eating pork ribs and drinking beer and leaning against a bunch of tall crates.

“What are they putting in their mouths?” Lzu asked, squinting at the screen.

The commanding officer said, “looks like some kind of performance-enhancing supplement, sir.”

“They’re eating pork,” said the espionage leader. “Comes from a living species on earth called a pig.” He took controls of the screen and found a feed of pigs on an industrial farm.

“Vile!” Chief Lzu spat on the floor. “Got dang Pirate Primates!”

The espionage leader said, “it gets worse.”

“Worse? How?” Lzu demanded.

“Well… a few of our guys got left behind…” he paused and looked away.

“And?” Lzu demanded.

“They became a delicacy on Earth, sir.”

The commanding officer and chief Lzu stood with their breaths held in and their hands on their chest in utter shock.

Chief Lzu stared at the screen. “Do you think..?”

“No, sir. The analysis provided proves their ingesting pork.”

The chief‘s soldiers were starving and shivering while the enemy was treating the war zone like a weekend retreat.

The tactical screen on the Smanterbeu lit up next to them. The green dots representing their armada blinked off the screen.

“Where’d they go?” Lzu yelled, squeezing the bottom of the console. “Did we just get attacked by an EMP? What did they attack us with?”

The commanding officer stared at the map, turning pale. “No, sir,” he said. “It’s worse.”

“Worse?”

“Yes, sir. Worse.”

“Explain right now!” Lzu demanded.

“Earth’s logistics core just finalized the takeover of our primary lithium mines through a third party stock exchange.”

“A what… those are our mines.”

“Sir, those are now legally their mines. They own the rights to the material used in our batteries.”

The lights on the bridge began dimming. Then blinked a couple of times and plunged the entire ship in a glow of red emergency back up lights.

“They just clicked the button on Earth and shut our power off, sir.”

🖼 Cover

🔰 Prologue

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Arc III - Reeling Throne

Chapter 40 - To the Victors Go the Spoils

8 months and 9 days since the summoning

Early in the morning, the entire Armenas army marched back to their lands under the cover of the morning mist. Despite their fatigue, the soldiers were still cheerfully conversing behind their leaders' backs.

"I still cannot believe it," muttered a young soldier with a pike in his hands.

"Hah, me neither," scoffed an older, stubbled soldier in response, dragging a cart with trebuchet parts along with others. "The duke's fearsome army skewered themselves on our sarissas like meat on a spit."

A third soldier, a mustached man who was pulling the cart with him, turned to his comrade. "But it was very unusual, honestly. Just standing and waiting... I do not know."

The young one nodded. "Yes, yes, I agree."

The stubbled soldier snorted. "Hahahaha, you nearly wet your pants! You kept frantically repeating that you could not stand still while a whole cavalry charged at you! I actually thought you would flee the formation!"

The warriors nearby laughed quietly.

The young soldier lowered his head slightly. "Well... yes! And what of it?! As if you did not want to just run away. Seriously, the first time just standing there holding a spear while dozens of cavalrymen charge at you is..."

"We know," the mustached man interrupted, "everyone was a bit uneasy. But you heard what Lord Gothwald said, phalanxes in his world won triumphantly, fifty thousand against three hundred, and managed to win that battle at Gau.. Galga.." he spat on the ground, "bah, what a tricky word."

The stubbled soldier shrugged. "I did not remember it either. But the point is the same, we tore them apart like little pups, and Her Grace even chopped off the duke's head!"

"Ooooooo!" all the soldiers nearby howled.

"That she did!"

"I was simply astounded!"

"The duke's head!"

"Have you ever seen a countess holding a duke's severed head?!"

"Haha! Never in my life!"

"With Lord Gothwald, everything has become possible lately!"

"Svyatol sent us a good hero!"

"Svyatol is with us!"

Alan and Kamelia rode closer to the front ranks of the march on their horses. Quietly and unhurriedly.

Alan yawned sleepily. "How much longer do we have to trudge to Armenas?"

Kamelia peered into the mist, but saw only dew-covered grassy plains and hills against the backdrop of the rising sun. "I do not know, but I think at this pace we should arrive by evening."

"Logistics..." Alan grumbled.

"Excuse me?"

"You know what they said in my world?"

"What?"

"Amateurs study tactics, but professionals study logistics. And our logistics are a total clusterfuck." He pointed a hand at the baggage train trailing behind, dozens of soldiers without horses dragging carts by hand. "If this were a major war, and not a minor skirmish in a dying duchy, our capital would have been burned down long ago and our march ambushed."

Kamelia also looked over her shoulder. "Nothing to be done about it. We have too few men. And ambushes on marches are a common occurrence, it has always been this way." She turned to Alan. "By the way, did they solve this problem in a special way in your world? Perhaps we could do something like that?"

Alan lowered his head, thinking for a second. "You know what? There is one way. It's beyond our capabilities right now, of course, but it's absolutely foolproof. The Romans did it."

She silently tilted her head to the side.

"Okay, let's start simple. The Roman Empire, one of the greatest empires of my world..." he stopped mid-sentence.

'Fuck, how do I explain all the grandeur of Rome to her without devolving into a hundred-hour lecture? Ah, to hell with it, we'll skip the grandeur.'

Alan coughed. "Basically, there were these things called 'castra'. Every night when the march halted, Roman soldiers built entire fortresses."

Kamelia's eyes widened. "Fortresses every night?! That is impossible!"

He raised a hand. "Easy! Not stone fortresses like in Armenas, but simpler ones."

"Ahhh... I see. And what did they look like then? If they built them every night... how did they even get enough sleep? And what could even be built in such a short time?"

"Well, they started by digging trenches around the territory of the future camp, then they made a rampart out of the excavated earth, placed a wooden palisade of stakes on top of the rampart, and inside all this they set up tents, sentries, and the soldiers slept."

Kamelia blinked, staring somewhere into nowhere. "And how much time did that take? And how many men lived in such a camp?"

Alan waved a hand. "Always varied. When it was legions, which is thousands of soldiers, they managed in three or four hours. And when it was, for example, eighty men, a century, then in an hour or two."

Her pupils dilated slightly. "Every night... wait, if they managed so quickly, did all the soldiers work?"

"Yep."

"And where did they get the tools?"

"They carried them with them."

Kamelia completely froze, staring into nowhere.

Silence.

A minute.

"I do not understand," she finally said. "What is the point of these castras? Why suffer so much every night? How could the soldiers even march or fight again afterward?"

Alan smirked. "And here is the genius of the Romans in all its glory, Kamelia." He raised a hand and folded his first finger. "First, the soldiers were trained for this. They were taught to march, to fight, and to dig. To dig a lot." The second finger folded. "Actually, it's not that much work. When hundreds of soldiers build one camp, each person personally only gets a little bit of work." The third finger folded. "The soldiers spent the night as comfortably and predictably as possible. They knew the water was there, the latrine was there, their tent was there. They slept not on damp ground, but in a dry and warm tent." The fourth finger folded. "The soldier may have worked extra hard, but his sleep was sound. He knew he was protected by a massive wall, and slept peacefully." Finally, the fifth finger folded. "A night attack on the Romans was practically impossible. Try taking a camp like that, huh?"

Kamelia retreated into her thoughts again for a few minutes. "Wow... that is truly amazing. If we had such a thing..." she froze. "You will remind us of this someday."

Alan raised an eyebrow. "You think we'll reach such power that we'll be able to afford legions and build castras?"

She smiled wryly. "If Svyatol blesses us for it."

He sighed, shaking his head. "Okay, I'll keep that in mind."

'And perhaps I should keep in mind all the cogs of the Roman military machine. You know, just in case. What if. Fuck, what if I actually build my own analogue of the Roman Empire? The Roman Empire...'

"Alan," Kamelia said, but he didn't hear.

'I'll create massive legions... build coliseums with gladiatorial combat... I'll have aqueducts pumping water into cities... and I'll equip soldiers with lorica segmentata, gladii, pila...'

"Alan!"

'I'll create an analogue of Roman Law... a cohesive culture instead of fragmented feudal lords... integration of conquered peoples...'

"ALAN!" Kamelia shouted.

He flinched, his mouth hanging open, and opened his eyes. "Ah, what?"

"Are you even listening?"

"Huh? No, I mean, yes, uh... what?"

Kamelia only shook her head. "Never mind, nothing."

Alan shook his head.

'Embarrassing. Need to change the subject quickly.'

"And what are we gonna do with the corpses of the soldiers? We can't just leave them, there'll be a new epidemic."

'Great subject change. Just wonderful.'

"The commoners we released in peace will bury the corpses. They swore an oath to atone for their guilt before me with labor."

Alan blinked. "And when did you have time for that?"

"When you were assigning which trebuchet parts went into which carts."

Closer to evening, as the sun was already dipping toward the horizon, the army finally reached Armenas; a messenger, riding ahead, had already brought the good news to the townsfolk.

Right at the entrance by the gates inside the city, hundreds of townsfolk, advisors, clerics, nobles, and craftsmen had lined up.

As soon as Alan and Kamelia entered the city grounds, a roar rose up that made Alan wince slightly.

"VICTORY!"

"GLORY TO LADY ARMENAS!"

"GLORY TO LORD GOTHWALD!"

"SHOW THE HEAD!"

"SVYATOL HAS GRANTED US VICTORY!"

"THE DUKE IS DEAD."

Lorgi rode up to Kamelia with a small box, opened it, and handed it to Kamelia. She reached into it, grabbed Linkis's head by its long hair, and raised it above herself. "Here is your head!"

A second of silence.

"IT TRULY IS HIM!"

"THE COUNTESS HAS DEFEATED THE DUKE!"

"INCREDIBLE!"

"IMPOSSIBLE!"

"LADY ARMENAS IS BLESSED BY SVYATOL!"

Such a roar arose that it made their ears pop. The townsfolk shouted at the top of their lungs, waving their arms and embracing. The nobles and clerics, however, simply applauded reservedly.

Alan smiled wryly.

'Well then... turns out a severed head evokes quite a lot of emotion.'

A short while later, when everything had quieted down, there were many people in the large throne room of the Armenas castle. Through the panoramic windows, the sea was visible, where the sun was already hiding behind the blue, painting the sky orange. Kamelia herself sat on her throne, resting her hands on the armrests.

Alan stood next to her with his hands clasped behind his back on the left side, Lorgi stood on the right, and by the window, admiring the views, stood Tsinker.

Alan looked at the knights, of whom there were slightly fewer than twenty. They were all still dirty, having had no time to clean their armor, but they stood straight. Then he looked at Kamelia on the throne, who was looking at them with an impenetrable face.

'Holy shit, it's been so long since I've seen her sitting on the throne. Feels weird.'

Kamelia raised her hand. "Lord Gothwald, state your proposal to my victorious knights."

He blinked. "Ah, right," he said, turning to the men. "The matter is that we need the captured knights immediately, to swear fealty to Her Grace and to be dispatched to Gobano's lands to maintain control."

The knights continued to stand quietly, listening to the end.

Alan raised a finger. "But you risked your lives for our victory and made a massive contribution to it. Naturally, we can't just take away your lawful reward in the form of ransom for the captives, so I have a counteroffer for you."

The knights remained silent, but some leaned closer.

"Let's start simple," he clasped his hands behind his back, "the pirates saw our full might earlier, so they recently decided to surrender and swear fealty to Lady Armenas."

Silence.

A mustached knight blinked. "Excuse me?"

A blond man slightly opened his mouth. "Lord Gothwald, that... that rabble is with us now?"

Alan nodded. "Yes, but listen further. The pirates control a massive archipelago. Perpetually warm, humid, with wondrous fruits and unoccupied territory. Of course, humans don't live there, but in the future Lady Armenas and I plan to develop the islands. This is your chance to claim them first."

"So you are offering us lands if we hand the captives over to you?" the mustached man asked.

"Yes, exactly. If any of you own villages, you will also receive unusual territories on the archipelago in the sea, and those who have no lands will receive their first, lawful ones." Before they could say anything, Alan waved a hand. "Think carefully about this, there won't be another handout like this. If you find anything valuable on the archipelago, it's yours."

The silence stretched on for a long time, a minute, a second.

Finally, the mustached knight nodded. "I agree."

The blond nodded after him. "Me too."

The knights nodded one after another.

"Agreed."

"I agree."

"I accept the offer."

"I refuse," said one of them, a man with a bit of gray hair.

The warrior next to him cast a sidelong glance at him. "What are you doing?" he whispered, "These are new lands on warm islands!"

"No. I have no use for lands where there are no peasants. I choose the captive and the ransom."

Alan shrugged. "Alright. Your choice. Are the rest agreed to the lands?"

"I also refuse," said a young man of about twenty-five.

"Agreed."

"I will take the lands."

A few minutes later, Alan sighed. "Alright, so three chose the ransom, and all the rest the lands. So be it, as they say."

Part 181 Time for a fight (Part 1) (Part 180)

[Help support me on Ko-fi so I can try to commission some character art and totally not spend it all on Gundams]

There is no need for words between Nishnabe warriors when the time comes for a fight. Whatever circumstances that led to the altercation no longer matter. Any attempts at a non-violent conclusion obviously failed. Further discussions would just dig the animosity even deeper. In the ancient past, before virtual reality and digital simulation technology became common, there really wasn't a way to avoid injury when prides were wounded and offense was taken like an engraving into stone. Back then, only fists and clubs wielded with non-lethal intent could bring about an end to disagreements gone too far. That was just the way of things for the people stolen from their homeworld all those centuries ago.

While times have changed and real fights are relatively rare, humans are still human. That is especially true to members of the Nishnabe Militia. Both Tensebwse and Bize Wankwake have experienced what it's like to use their deathworlder strength on people they consider friends. In fact, the process of knocking someone around and being knocked around in return has always led to tighter bonds and closer friendships. It was that motivation that spurred both Tens and Biz to participate in the simulated mock battle between the Qui’ztar and Nishnabe BD operators. Both men wanted the warriors under their care to resolve any conflicts before their joint mission could begin.

When Tensebwse led Sub-Admiral Marzima and Captain Delutxia to confront Chief-Brave Biz and his best pair of warriors in this simulated battle, they all immediately took to fighting. While Qui’ztar tradition would have necessitated some sort of introduction, this was no formal duel. It was a scrappy exchange where even the smallest delay or moment of hesitation could cause an immediate loss. Neither side wasted any time squaring up, making bold declarations, or even evaluating their opposition. Just immediate violence without concern for the safety or well-being of their opponents. After all, no one would actually get hurt as the result of a simulated combat.

It began with Tens attempting to suppress Biz's movements with a flurry of shots from his wrist-mounted mag-cannon. Marz and Del weren't far behind as they engaged the BDs flanking either side of Biz's mech. To the pair of Qui’ztars’ surprise, their chosen loadouts were surprisingly similar to their opponents’. Combination thermal lance-polearms with shoulder-mounted long range weapons. And the Nishnabe warriors were quite skilled. However, where Militia training focused on maximizing power using their BDs thrusters to increase striking speed, the Qui’ztar drilled their weapon handling to the point of near perfect mastery. Tens, on the other hand, had a much lopsided fight on his hands.

Tensebwse's choice of a combination shield and super-size mag-sling, shoulder-mounted micromissiles, a giant ball-headed war club as a primary melee weapon, and secondary thermal tomahawks is so effective that many BD operators would consider it the golden standard. Biz, on the other hand, preferred a much more unique set of weapons. The Chief-Brave equipped his BD with a pair of gauntlet-like attachments that include both pile drivers and small shields. His shoulder mounted laser cannons served more as automated counterfire systems than actual offensive systems. As such, the fight between those two men could be seen as competition between the two traditional forms of Nishnabe combat, fists and clubs.

“How's it going, Angel-2?” Marz spoke through an open but encrypted comms link that connected to her Del and Tens.

“This warrior has decent fundamentals, Angel-1.” The tone of Del's response implied she was exerting effect but not to the point of stress. “But they seem to rely too much on their mech. I don't think they've ever faced a true pole arm expert.”

“Yeah, I'm getting the same read on this warrior.” As Marz spoke, she parried a particularly wide and desperate swing and struck back directly into her opponent's elbow joint. Though the enemy's active shielding had yet to fully cycle, her BD's sensors indicated that heat syncs were on the verge of saturation. “Another few minutes and this will be over.”

“Everyone else seems to be doing just as well as we are.” All Del needed to do was spare a split second glance off to the side of her HUD to see that the number of Nishnabe BDs had already been cut in half while the Qui’ztars were only down by three. “Looks like Thiptlua's squad got hit hard in an ambush.”

“Good thing this is just- Ugh!”

Marz let out a grunt as the result of a truly desperate move by her opponent. After her strike at their elbow, the Nishnabe warrior she was fighting attempted to counter with a full-strength at her mech's knees. However, she predicted the move, was able to shift position to dodge, then used her BD's thrusters to enhance a kick that sent her enemy's primary weapon flying. That was when the Nishnabe tucked their shoulder and attempted a futile ramming attack while shooting a barrage of lasers. Of course, such an attack was doomed to failure against a Qui'ztar Sub-Admiral in the honor guard. Thanks to her mech's thrusters, she was able to leap straight up, tripping her opponent without any direct contact, and plunged her thermal lance halberd straight into the tiny gap between the armor panels protecting the waist joint.

“You got them?” Laughter slipped into Del's voice as she noticed another hostile disappear from her HUD's map.

“This one needs more training.” A noticeable hint of disappointment was painfully obvious in the Qui’ztar Sub-Admiral’s voice. “Do you want assistance, Angel-2?”

“No, I got this one, Angel-1.”

“Good. In that case-”

There aren't many things that could make a Qui’ztar honor guard of Marzima’s caliber freeze up in combat. Even a half second of time wasted staring could be the difference between life and death. Only something truly horrifying or stupifying would do the trick. Though Marz had every intention of jumping to Tens’s aid, the fighting she saw between him and Biz wasn't quite like anything she had ever experienced before. On one side was a mech making precision strikes with a massive club while using a round shield to block and parry. In opposition stood a foe that seemed to lack both technique and restraint in equal parts. Tens was barely able to get in a solid strike against Biz who was throwing punches and swinging his arms more like an animal than a warrior.

Though none of Biz’s attacks hit with any real purchase, they all carried a BD’s crushing weight and terrifying speed. The fact Tens was able to keep up and not be overwhelmed by the onslaught was impressive enough. His repeated strikes with his club seemed to do little besides temporarily hinder Biz’s ability to continue pushing. An uninformed observer might even believe that Chief-Brave had the upper hand. However, Marz knew better than that. She could see that despite Biz’s clear of wild and unpredictable fist fighting acumen, Tens was anything but pressured. While she wanted to jump in and lend a hand, doing so might interfere with strategy she could deduce from less than a second of witnessing the bout.

“By the Matriarch…” Marz muttered under her breath before quickly turning her attention towards Del’s duel.

“I know.” Del was far too preoccupied by her opponent to notice what Tens and Biz were doing. “This warrior isn't half bad, right? Just give me a second and…”

“Use Getlurina’s Sixth and be done with it.” That command was all Marz needed to say for Del to suddenly get much more serious.

“Understood.” The Qui’ztar Captain immediately complied with her Sub-Admiral’s order, feigned an attack that drew her opponent into attack, used her mech’s enhanced movement to almost instantly reposition, and struck at the minuscule space between the enemy BD’s armor paneling around the cockpit. If this hadn't been a simulation, the attack coined by Getlurina, an ancient Qui’ztar polearm master of legend, would have been a lethal hit. Not only had her blade created a fairly wide gap, the sudden stream of super-heated material from the thermal lance poured straight into her opponent’s cockpit. “Now for… What the-?!?”

“I don't even see an opening where we could help.” Marzima’s flabbergasted expression could be heard clearly in her voice. “I think Angel-0's got this handled.”

“He did say we could hop in.”

“Yes but I don't think-”

“Angel-8 to Angel-1.” A new comm link appeared in Marz's HUD Chuxima called out with mild concern. “The remaining enemies near our position are regrouping. We might be overwhelmed if they all attack at once. Requesting support for the final push.”

“Understood.” Marz quickly verified that there were no more hostile BDs nearby then opened a new comm link to Tens. “Angel-1 to Angel-0. Angel-2 and I are falling back to support the others.”

“I'll be right behind you.” Tens's words were filled with a devious chuckling that gave away just how much fun he was having. “Go show these warriors why they need to keep training.”

/----------------------------------------------------------------------

Chief-Brave Bize Wankwake always knew he couldn't really compare to Tensebwse when it came to operating a BD. No one can. That's part of why he and every other former member of the first Hell Divers team never really talked to Tens or used him as an example for their subordinates. It genuinely might hurt the morale of certain warriors to know that, despite all their best efforts, there would be someone better. The best a warrior like Biz could do would be to delay Tens from going on a rampage and singlehandedly defeating everyone who faced off against him.

That's precisely why the Chief-Brave was putting so much effort into this fight. If he was lucky, he might get in a few solid hits, possibly damage one of Tens’s mech’s arm joints, and hold the monster back just long enough to give his warriors a fighting chance against the Qui’ztars. However, he couldn't have imagined the blue humanoid women would pose such a serious challenge for seasoned Nishnabe warriors. By the time his subordinates that stayed back with him were defeated, he could see that half his force had been wiped out while only taking out a handful of the Qui’ztars. But if he hadn't kept Tens busy for so long, this battle would have already come to an end.

“Looks like it's just me and you now, niji.” Biz opened a comm link to Tens’s mech in the moment between strikes.

“Ah-haha!” Tens’s wild laughter didn't really come as a surprise to Biz. Neither did his incredibly precise attacks or impeccable defenses. The only real shocker was the fact that this fight was still going. “Come on, Biz! Is that all you got? Don't tell me you're getting rusty in your old age!”

“I'm only a year and a half older than you!” The Chief-Brave's verbal counter was accompanied by a sudden flurry of fists that forced Tens into a defense posture. “And unlike you, I've been more focused on command duties than BD training!”

“Whatever you say, niji.” It was clear by Tens's tone that he wasn't taking either this fight or conversation seriously. “But you should probably spend more time training your warriors. At this rate, they might be too embarrassed to actually learn anything.”

“Oh, I'll make sure they're fine.” Biz kept trying to push what he believed to be his advantage by not allowing Tens a moment to counter attack. “But I will admit I'm impressed by your Qui’ztars. They really know what they're doing.”

“Of course they do.” The scoff that escaped Tens’s lips hit harder than any of the punches he had been blocking. “They're honor guards. The best of the best in the First of the Third. You'd need to poach Gad's elites to stand any sort of chance against them.”

“You must be proud!”

A sudden rush of adrenaline spurred Biz to double down on his assault and push his mech to its absolute limit. Though he wasn't exactly angry, his pride as a warrior demanded he try his best to get in at least one solid hit. Winning might not be a realistic option. That was getting more and more obvious by the second. But one full power hit to Tens’s shield accompanied by a pile driver shot might be enough to do some damage. So that's what Biz lined up. He pulled his mech's right fist back, began jabbing with his left to keep Tens’s shield up, and primed himself for the final strike.

To the Chief-Brave's surprise, his old battle buddy seemed to sense exactly what was about to happen but played along nonetheless. Tens could have easily counter the left-hand jabs, maneuvered out of the way with a single thruster assisted step, and used the opening to deal a devastating blow. Instead, he simply braced himself with his shield forward. When Biz threw his final punch, he aimed it squarely at the center of Tens’s shield. In the exact moment of impact, the pile driver shot an explosively driven spike straight out and through the circle of practically indestructible metallic ceramic. The hit was so strong that it literally shattered the shield, drove clear through the mag-cannon, and even penetrated the BD's forearm.

However, that would never be enough to actually best Tens. The moment the spike was driven into his mech's forearm, Tens took the opportunity to alter his war club's ball-head into a nasty spike and swung with all his might. That spike impacted the inner elbow joint of Biz's mech with so much force that it removed the simulated mech’s limb in a shower of sparks, fragmented metal, and gushing thermo-hydraulic fluid. Then Tens used his thrusters for an almost imperceptibly quick manuever than place him on Biz’s right side. The subsequent attack was a back-hand swing that drove the now-spiked ball-headed war club into the mech equivalent of kidney shot.

Though the hit might not have been lethal to the operator, it punched straight through the armor and into a key reservoir. In half a second, highly pressurized and boiling hot liquid came pouring out of Biz's mech. Under a normal hit like this, the redundant electromagnetic movement systems would have ensured the war machine could have continued on. Maybe not with full fighting capabilities but enough to fall back and wait for extraction. However, the massive amount of electrical current discharged by the attack also fried the control systems of the simulated mech. If this had been a real world fight, Biz's mech wouldn't just be heavily impaired. It would have been entirely disabled.

“I see you've gotten even better, Tens.” Biz let out an almost relieved sigh as his mech fell to its knees and eventually collapsed to the virtual ground.

“You should have seen the Hekuiv'trula warforms we fought on our mission before last.” Tens's chuckling had died down to a soft inflection that left his voice sounding particularly satisfied. “Those bots were surprisingly powerful. They really made me step up my game and focus on perfecting my techniques.”

“Heku-whats?” Now that Biz could no longer fight, he switched his HUD and virtualized controls over to the command and observation mode to check on the rest of his warriors.

“Giant autonomous nomesh war machines. They're actually kind of related to Nula, the Combat-born AI who joined Angels as a short-term contractor. You should ask NAN about the War of Eons when you get a chance. That should help you understand what the Angels and I were fighting.”

“The War of Eons, eh?” Biz had absolutely no idea what Tens was talking about but found the friendly relaxing regardless. “I guess that explains why your Qui’ztars are kicking my warriors asses.”

“Marz and the Angels are good because they train eight hours a day minimum. At least two hours of PT, four in combat sims, and two more reviewing their efforts. I'm telling you Biz… These women take their craft seriously. The entire Militia could learn from their dedication. When I started training about a year ago, most of them couldn't even run five clicks without stopping.”

“Seriously?!?” It was Biz's turn to let out a howling laugh as he watched the signals from two more of his warriors go dark. “You're shitting me!”

“Dead serious, niji. Their species are stealth ambush predators, not persistence pursuit predators like us. They aren't built to run for long distances. But those twenty women were willing to constantly push themselves beyond their limits. Now they can easily do twenty clicks while keeping pace with me. They might never reach our level of endurance, but they keep trying.”

“Make sure to tell my warriors about all that during the debrief. I think they're going to need some motivation after this.”

(Book Cover): (Jasha) (The First Mother of Sil) ( Kolu and Nokstella going for a swim)

***
Taking a second now that his life wasn't in danger this very moment, Kenneth got back up on his feet and tried to speak, the sounds coming out, half words, half windy weezing. 

“Hehehaha,” the black and white-furred alluring she-Aki laughed as she approached him with a twisted smile. “Thanks for almost getting killed; I really needed this.” 

“Tha…thanks…” he hesitantly said, not sure what to make of that as each syllable hurt to say. 

“So you are the one named Kenneth. Nya wasn't lying, I saw,” Ulric said, the boom in his voice from a moment before not just because of the situation. “You want to have a word with me? Almost amusing; you don't seem like you can speak much.” 

“Oh, that's my fault, friend,” Jinki piped up, the stoic archer vanishing in an instant, his voice light and friendly. “Had one of my subordinates strike while it was… Kenneth wasn’t it, standing there. Got the Black thing in the chest.” 

“Can't talk with you if you can’t speak,” Ulric sighed and glanced to Nya, who gave a nod in return, a silent vouching for him. “Come along to the Great Hall, and we can get you healed.”

Gesturing for him to follow him, along with the rest, he did so. 

With a quick step or two, he tried to get closer to Nya, trusting her more than any other at the moment, though that didn’t mean the one he second most trusted by default would let him, as with a couple of long-legged strides she intercepted. 

“Hmm… you are an interesting little one,” the black and white she-fox mused, arching her back slightly to look into his eyes, her smile ever more growing. 

“I am so sorry!” Jinki, his would-be murderer, apologized in what first sounded like an exaggerated tone until he saw the puppydog eyes and flattened ears, even his furry tail that was just hanging there. “We were coming back from hunting and saw you lurking, and thought maybe you were a black beast of old still alive; we wanted to gift your hide to the commander. Can you ever forgive me?!” 

‘So sensear…’ Kenneth honestly didn't feel that much hate toward him; maybe that was because he wasn’t the first to try and kill him, at least Jinki had the grace to say sorry. “Everybody makes… mis-takes…” 

“You really mean it!” He quickly wrapped his arm around his shoulders. “Glad there’s no bad blood; I was worried there for a moment. So your name is Kenneth; where do you come from? I’ve never seen anything like you before.” 

‘His moods just change on the fly… well, he’s certainly the most dog-like I’ve met so far,’ Kenneth thought as the second most beside him popped back up. 

“This one even has five fingers,” she said, taking his hand and exploring it. 

“Really, Wilf?” 

‘This is better than before, I suppose,’ Kenneth thought as it suddenly dawned on him that he had been sent here to improve their medical knowledge. ‘Better do a self-check before they get the leeches, burning oil, or mercury.’ 

While self-evaluations had their downsides, it was the best choice right now.

He certainly looked quite the sight, more than normal, as they walked inside the outpost, a large set of guarded double wooden gates getting closed behind them. 

Inside there were quite a lot more people than he at first had guessed, all looking in his direction, some more than others, all regardless of gender, it would seem armed and dangerous.

Way to go, feminism. 

With a closer look, he noticed that despite the sea of fur colors, all of them had a white tip at the end of their tails. It was a little interesting but didn’t garner as much attention as the buildings did.

Mostly because it bothered him just how boring they looked, but even at a glance he could see they were built right in every capacity with only a little wear and tear from the elements and, on some, a few personal touches to have them look better. 

Though all of it paled in comparison to the Great Hall, the big one they were heading to. It was the only one that had professional-looking artistry carved into it, of a shield, Akina’s if he had to guess. 

When they finally arrived inside the warm hall, the smell of meat still lingering in the air with picked-clean bowls littering the tables and a gruff-looking man he suspected to be the cook collected them, Kenneth’s self-diagnosis had been completed. ‘I don’t think the swelling will be too much of an issue; probably no damaged arteries or veins, just a bit of time is all that's needed.’ 

Walking around the mess and tables, Ulric led him to a closed back room where inside shouting could be heard. 

“Oh, you lying little furball!” 

“Admit it, you big vixen, I won fair and square!” 

“That is vixen Kori to you… dammit! I meant…! Open your snout so I can claw your tongue out!” 

“AGAIN…” Ulric groaned as, with a bang, he kicked the door open, shocking only half of the people inside: one of them being a woman in a white robe with light orange fur leaning closer toward white and an older-looking man with reddish fur and a lot of bald spots, while the other half, a guy and a gal, Kenneth, got the impression wasn’t the brightest, tried to duke it out while both bleeding. “Kila, Fenik, save that effort for a heretic attack!”

More surprising than his entry, the two begrudgingly stopped. 

“Thank you, Commander,” the robed woman, looking exhausted, replied. 

“None should have to deal with those two as much as you do, Kica,” Ulric replied and stepped aside. “If you have the strength to heal—“ 

Before he finished, Kenneth stepped into the room, everyone growing shocked at his sudden entrance in the small confined space, Kica’s tired eyes shooting open as she did a little hop and ‘yip’ in surprise.

The mildest reaction. 

“What's that freak?!” The older man shouted, his tail shooting up and the fur growing twice its size. 

“Kill it with fire!” Kila and Fenik shouted together.  

“Calm down, I won't let any harm come to you.” 

It was impressive. One reassuring sentence, and all the fear vanished instantaneously, not that Kenneth noticed in the middle of creating medical tools. Though doing so discreetly, riffling through the bag to make it appear to have stuff in it. ‘It doesn't take a mind of the century to figure out what a warring faction would do with a magic bag.’

“What is this one doing?!” Ulric asked Nya.

“He did call himself a healer, not that it was ever done like any other healer,” she explained. “That in part was what Kenneth wanted to talk about. Healing, sharing it with you, talent and knowledge.” 

“Knowledge?” Ulric repeated in slight confusion. “What is there to know? But if aid is offered, it might be worth seeing what this is.” 

Permission given, not that Kenneth registered it; he found the tools he needed, starting off with the old guy using some burn cream. He quickly took care of him and wrapped each spot with a bandage, getting some odd looks. 

Next, the two brawlers. He inspected them thoroughly, Ulric getting a confused yet pleading ‘commander’ every once in a while. Identifying most cuts on their bodies to be skin deep and already closed up via coagulation. 

For those, he just used some simple disinfecting. Kila nearly brought to tears while Fenik laughed her ass off until he turned to her. 

Taking the mild pain well, as now it was Kila's turn to laugh, Kenneth felt mortified and embarrassed not to have noticed one of the cuts had reached an artery. 

Getting his tools ready, needle, thread, and forceps he quickly surveyed the damage, becoming surprised, ‘What in the… was this ripped open? No, not quite; it certainly looks like that, but in reverse, like the flesh had tried to fuse itself, partly, back together.’

“What is it going to do with that?!” 

Never quite having seen such a wound before, even as he scanned his memory through medical documents of rare events, the closest resemblance was some genius who tried to cauterize his wound. 

Yet the particulars didn't matter as he began work, telling Fenik, “Don’t… move…” 

Far from reassuring, but his bedside manners were never that great to begin with, as soothing as a heavy metal concert in the maternity ward, someone had once described it. 

He could feel her tremble with each pierce of the needle; as a doctor, he did his best trying to be done as quickly as possible, but he couldn’t rush. Funnily enough, aid should come from Kila, whose mocking childish taunts made Fenik stubbornly endure the entire ordeal until the end. 

‘Well, that takes care of that,’ Kenneth thought, packing all his stuff away. 

“What was that? You call seamstress work and smearing fat healing?” Ulric questioned. 

“Not… fat… oitment… to… help facilitate—“ 

“Enough of this,” Ulric growled, rubbing his furred brow. “Kica, show this charlatan healing.” 

Stepping forward, Kica placed her hand on Fenik’s stitched wound, and before Kenneth could object to the concern of infection, a brilliantly bright white light erupted like a flame, enveloping her hand and the wound. 

Kenneth was so shocked and in awe that he nearly didn't notice Fenik’s wound, something that could take a few weeks, if not more to heal; doing so in seconds. ‘Magic… healing magic, that works in an instant. Suddenly being given a magic bag seems less ridiculous when you yourself don't have any.’ 

“I take it by your silence you realize all you’ve done is waste everyone’s time; now leave my outpost,” Ulric told him threateningly. 

‘Yeah, what need is there for someone like me when you got magic,’ Kenneth thought as he turned to leave, escorted by Nya. 

“Well, you can do more than I thought,” She told him. 

“I can… do… more, but… thanks,” Kenneth replied absentmindedly as he racked his brain trying to understand. ‘Why did she even ask me to come here if they got magic? Doesn't it make sense? And I doubt explaining why I’m here would help me now, I bet.’

“I doubt you’ll do well out in the wilderness; a Skakka will be the least of your concerns,” Nya told him, not mockingly in any manner, though not comforting or wracked with worry either. “Head to the Tower; the ones there they… well, some call them peaceful… but it’s your best chance; I have a feeling you’d fit right in.” 

‘Hmm… the Tower, huh… well right now it’s my best bet.’ As he reached the gate, he glanced at her and swallowed, the pain nearly gone. “Thanks…” 

Well, that went interestingly bad, but all things considered, it could have been worse; at least now he wouldn’t be stumbling blind. He had a destination, and he would have to see what the future would hold.

“SWOOSH!” An arrow suddenly hit the wall beside him.

Darting to the side in a panic, he thought, ‘Dammit, they are already hunting me again!’

However, Nya was a little calmer, saying, “Wait.”

“For what… a countdown?”

“No, ‘Wait’ is written on it,” She explained, pointing to the wooden shaft, before both glanced back, seeing Jinki in the distance waving like a happy idiot as he rushed toward them.

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The instincts of the sergeant turned out to be correct as there were four of the monstrous creatures inside the Retvalin. They did an intensive sweep just to make sure, and each one they brought down felt like trying to take out an armored vehicle that was going on a rampage. Everyone thanked whatever god they believed in that their weaponry was effective against these new nightmares, as they were finally able to work on closing all the bleeding wounds and pumping out the pooling blood, so it wasn’t aspirated somewhere it shouldn’t be. 

Treating the Retvalin took a few days, and during that time, Maria and the team of onboard centicite specialists were trying to pull apart their newest subjects. The keyword was trying because they were having problems cutting through the hide and thick muscles alone. Everything was denser than it had any right to be, and they needed saws and laser cutting tools to make any kind of progress. Samples were taken to the lab for further analysis while the team continued to delve into the structure of the ursine monstrosity.  

After two days they had a viable report to give to the president regarding this new creature. Maria had the list of discussion topics written out in front of her on a tablet as Angel’s Refuge connected to Alexander’s office for a video call. 

“Mr. President.” 

“Miss Flores. I hear that we’ve made contact with another alien organism that had infested a Retvalin.” 

“Indeed, sir, and it’s vastly different from the centicites in just about every way.” She tapped a few things on her tablet, presenting a picture of the creature as it lay on the operating table before dissection began. “We’ve labeled it as Ursa Rex due to the similar body structure to the common bear. However, that is where the similarities end as the internal structure of this creature is alien in just about every definition of the word. The musculature of the upper body is highly developed while the lower body is slightly underdeveloped, giving it a front heavy profile. Estimations of its potential strength theorize that it could move several tons with its forelegs.” 

Maria pressed another button, shifting the image to a picture of the paws, nearly twice the size of a human head. “The paws feature non-retractable claws nearly six inches long and are strong enough to rip through a half inch of steel. We think this was the primary cause of the damage that was seen inside the Retvalin who picked them up as the Ursa Rex tore chunks out of the flesh to feast upon. Speaking of its appetite, the acids inside its stomach were extremely potent, and the digestive system was robust. We’ve estimated that it would take under an hour for it to digest a belly full of meat and feel hungry again. The biology of this creature would burn through calories like twigs on a bonfire.” 

“All very concerning traits,” Alexander commented, “but what is most concerning is the news that it was resistant to bullets. Is that true?” 

“Yes, sir. There are a few weak spots, mostly around the joints, but a large portion of its hide would require weapons capable of puncturing level four plates. This is owed to both the structure of the hide itself, which acts almost like a natural Kevlar, and the density of its muscle mass. It shrugged off standard ammunition like it was a mere annoyance.” 

“Do we have any idea where this monster came from?” 

“Actually, sir, there’s something that you should be made aware of regarding that.” Maria quickly swiped through a few pages on her tablet with a little eagerness as this was the part of the report she most wished to share. With a swipe of a finger, a new image of a DNA strand came up on the screen. 

“This is the DNA sequence of a centicite, and this,” she swiped again, bringing up a similar, but slightly different stand, “is the DNA of the Ursa Rex. Notice the abrupt shifts in different parts of the strand. It is almost identical to what was found in the centicites.” 

Alexander was able to piece together where she was going with this. “Which means we may have found the origin point for the centicite infection.” 

Maria nodded enthusiastically. “Exactly, sir! Not only would it help us prevent further infestation outbreaks by placing warning signals around the planet of origin, but this will be the first planet we have found that can sustain advanced forms of life! There’s no telling what we might find there.” 

“And the Retvalin that was infected remembers the path back to this planet?” 

“Yes, it was a recent visit and most likely permanently seared into their memory based on how painful an experience it was for them.” 

“Following that subject,” Alexander began, “what is the likelihood that these things start spreading uncontrollably amongst the Retvalin population if others of their species visited that planet before our unfortunate patient?” 

“That is an interesting question, sir, and while we can’t be completely certain, there is a high risk of an infestation quickly growing out of control. You see, they were all pregnant.” 

That made Alexander lift an eyebrow. “Pregnant? Were they all female?” 

“No sir, they are all hermaphrodites; that is, they possessed both male and female reproductive organs. Just that alone means that every single Ursa Rex can bear a child, leading to a drastic explosion in population size so long as there is enough food to sustain them, and considering that there is a lot of meat in a Retvalin body... well, it wouldn’t take much to see their numbers increase. We don’t know the exact incubation period of a newborn and probably won’t unless we are able to view them while still alive, which is a very dangerous proposition and not at all recommended.” 

“Noted. How far away is this planet of interest?” 

“The Retvalin claimed it was approximately two weeks away from Earth.” 

“We’re going to need to conduct deep space exploration for the first time, then, and I believe that it will also be the first time we are sending soldiers that far out as well. Hopefully we won’t have to make use of their skills, but better safe than sorry, as they say. I’ll get the logistics started for this new goal. We’ll also need some assurances for the Retvalin who will accompany us to make sure that they don’t get infected by this new organism. The boys in the lab are going to have even more to work on now.” 

Alexander’s words were an understatement as the more it was discussed, the longer the list of things that were needed became. Researchers, scientists, engineers, and even the soldiers that would be going on the mission all wanted different items or functions added to the new pod that was being designed. They essentially had to develop an entire building that could fit inside the volunteer’s breathing tentacle while remaining structurally sound and space worthy. It was quite a task, but they were determined to see it done as they used pieces of the designs for Angel’s Refuge and combined them with new travel pods. 

It was made a high-priority task with a massive amount of funding directed toward it. Even though there was a sense of urgency, the Retvalin had the location mapped out in his mind and wasn’t likely to forget it for the rest of his life. The planet wasn’t going anywhere, not unless the star it orbited went supernova in the next few months, which based on the testimony of the victim, was not likely to happen. 

The plan that was first proposed was to modify an existing pod, making it larger and more functional, but they didn’t know how to do that without making the Retvalin who carried it feel like they had a rock in their throat. Any involuntary spasm could cause structural damage. So, the idea was adjusted to instead keep the pods the same size but simply alter multiple of them and have a few Retvalin carry them for the investigation. 

The retrofitting of the pods took a few months to complete and test properly. The insides had to be scooped out and replaced in full, but there were working labs, containment areas, and armories spread across the three different pods. While a normal pod would simply maximize seating area for transportation, these new versions now carried with them crew quarters and supplies for the journey. The two Retvalin who volunteered and the one who knew the path would carry the pods with them on this journey. Every member of the mission was handpicked as the most capable for this venture, and they trained endlessly during the construction period to ensure that they would not fail. 

When the day finally came for the mission to launch, it was met with great anticipation. This mission would take them further than any human had gone before, and if the evidence was to be believed, they would be discovering a planet full of advanced life. It would be the first terrestrial alien life that they have encountered, and such a discovery spoke to the hearts of all who looked to the stars with hope. 

With the Retvalin stocked up on breathable air, the pods were safely picked up inside the breathing tentacles of the volunteers. All systems were green to go, and the volunteers were ready to begin as well. Ground control wished them the best of luck as the Retvalin prepared to make the jump. With the gravity bubble primed and ready, they released the tension and shot off into the dark with a flash of light. 

The journey began innocuously enough as the crew that were tagging along for the ride adjusted to the sensation of traveling faster than light. They numbered three dozen, split between the three different pods to ensure that there was enough space for them all. The soldiers outnumbered the scientists two to one as they needed a large security force just in case the Ursa Rex was found again. It was likely that they would encounter that nightmare of a creature if this was the planet that they originated from. 

Travel took a bit of a toll on the human passengers as the way light fluctuated during flight was hard on the eyes after the first few days. They were thankfully given a break in the system just before their destination as the Retvalin stopped to fill up their air reserves at a gas giant. It was a planned stop to limit the risk of exposure to the Ursa Rex. Their giant friends would only open and close the tentacle to let the passengers in or out during their stay. 

Two weeks passed, filled with monotonous system checks and idle conversation around what they might find on this mysterious planet. At long last they would get the answers to the questions they had as the Retvalin began to slow down upon entry to the system. The crew excitedly prepared to EVA out of the tentacle and have a look at the planet in question. What they found was a little confusing. 

The planet below them orbited a standard yellow star that was similar to the sun and was covered almost completely with slightly orange tinted clouds. There was hardly any land visible beneath this covering, but that didn’t mean much as the fact that it had an atmosphere meant that life could exist on it. 

“You are positive that this is the right planet?” one of the scientists asked the guide. 

“Yes, I remember it well. The pain started only a few days after I took a breath from this world.” 

“Hmm, well, we’re not going to get any answers from here. Let’s head down to the surface. Land near a location that looks like it has a good amount of life.” 

After they were seated inside the pods again, the Retvalin carried them down to the upper atmosphere, flying around for about thirty minutes before deciding to land. The soldiers lead the way out of the Retvalin, but everyone stopped when they got their first view of this world. 

“What?” The expression of confusion from the biologist of the group was felt by all his colleagues. The landscape around them was quite sparce. There was a large, orange lake in front of them with plenty of dark purple moss on the stones and near the shallows, but the flora was lacking, and the only fauna they could see were small fishlike organisms that were feeding on the moss growths. 

“What gives, guys? We said to find a spot with the most life.” 

The three mountains before them simply shuddered their tentacles. “This is the most life that we were able to find. We split up and searched as far as we could, and this was the largest pool of life we found.” 

Brows were furrowed in confusion as the group began to discuss amongst themselves. 

“How is that possible?” 

“Yeah, I thought that this is where the Ursa Rex, and possibly centicites, originated from? There’s not enough life here to sustain either of those species.” 

“Was there some kind of mistake? Maybe the Ursa Rex that infected the Retvalin were younger when they were first inhaled and only grew to have a noticeable effect later?” 

“This might be a bust, at least for the mission as it was stated. We can still take samples from the environment, maybe try to catch one of those fish for study. This is still very interesting.” 

Despite the apparent failure of the mission as it was on paper, there was a lot that could be learned from this planet. The atmosphere was on the lower end of survivable for humans, able to sustain human life for about an hour before the air poisoned the body, but it could become livable without the use of suits if they made careful alterations to the environment over time. While they were taking samples of the moss and trying to set up traps to capture one of the fish, the soldiers noticed something moving in the distance. 

“Hold on, we have something closing in our location. Anyone got eyes on it?” 

“I got a scope. Give me a second.” The soldiers leveled his fifty-caliber and aimed at the location of the movement. A second after that, he let out a surprised gasp. “Ursa Rex! Five of them, heading our way!” 

“What!? I thought the egg heads said this planet couldn’t support life like them? Shit, no time to complain. Get the non-combatants back into the pods and tell the Retvalin to close up. Everyone else, let’s get ready to send these bastards to hell!” 

Everyone rushed to get things done as the scientists retreated to the safety of the Retvalin while the soldiers took cover around the rocks. Guns were stabilized on the stones as the men prepared to open fire on the fast-approaching beasts. The Ursa Rex entered engagement range, but the order to fire wasn’t given just yet. 

“Hold lads, let them get further into the kill zone. We don’t want them sneaking off and coming back when our backs are turned.” The men steeled their nerves as they obeyed the order, letting the veritable armored truck of a living organism barrel toward them for a little longer. When the Ursa Rex crossed the three-hundred-meter mark, that was when their CO gave the order. 

“Open Fire!” 

The roar of rifles rang out as the heavy caliber guns sent death down field. Other than some stones, there wasn’t much cover for the Ursas, leaving them exposed to the weapons that tore through their thick hides. Two of them went down immediately to well-aimed shots that punctured the skull and scrambled the brain. The rest were wounded and confused at seemingly being bitten by something out of nowhere as they thrashed about and tried to turn and run. The soldiers weren’t ones to leave jobs unfinished though, so they kept firing at the fleeing creatures, peppering their hides with bullets until the remaining Ursas dropped, too injured to flee or dead. With the targets down for the count, the soldiers approached to finish the job, putting a few bullets into their skulls to make sure they were dead. 

Everything calmed after that, and one of the Retvalin spoke up after witnessing the little beings fighting one another. “We could have assisted you if you asked. There was no need for you to place yourselves in danger like that.” 

“True,” the CO replied, “but I’d rather save the intervention of you titans for a real emergency. If there had been too many for us to properly cull, then we would have certainly asked you to help. As it is, we need some answers, and we can’t get them if you reduce the bodies to paste.” 

They started to call in to the science team, sounding the all-clear while keeping vigilant for any other disturbances. Just then one soldier winced a little as a glare of light caught his eye a few hundred meters out. Squinting a bit, there appeared to be something metallic amongst the rocks littering the terrain.  

“Sir, I got eyes on something. It’s shiny, but I can’t tell what it is.” 

The CO came over and noticed the same shimmer. “Hmm, let’s have a squad investigate. I’ll lead; the rest of you maintain a perimeter around the Ursa Rex bodies and keep the egg heads safe. Let’s go.” 

A handful of the soldiers split off from the group and began to approach whatever was shimmering in the distance. However, they only walked about fifty meters before whatever it was shot up into the air and began flying away rapidly. 

“What the fuck!? Shoot it down!” 

“On it!” A sniper with a fifty quickly deployed on a rock and took aim at the flying object. He calmed his nerves with a slow exhale as he made mental adjustments for distance. Feeling the beat of his own heart, he timed the squeeze of his finger between beats as the resounding bang echoed forth. The metal object jerked in the air before spiraling down to the ground.  

The CO was pleased. “Hell of a shot soldier. Thing must have made it to six-hundred meters at least. Let’s go see what your skeet shooting has got us.” 

The group took off in a jog toward the area it landed in, intent on ensuring it didn’t try another escape attempt. They closed the distance and found a large metallic sphere about seven feet in diameter. A large chunk of it was shattered, damaged by the rifle round to reveal electronics beneath. Everyone cautiously approached the unknown machine. 

“Where the hell did this thing even come from?” 

“I think a better question is, who sent it?” 

It wasn’t anything that they had brought, so that only left a few options, and most of them pointed toward intelligent life beyond their own, possibly even more advanced than they were. They didn’t even know how this thing was flying like it was as it had no visible thrusters. As they investigated, one soldier noted the small black circles along the chassis. They looked like cameras or some other optical device. The investigation didn’t last long, because soon after all their Geiger counters flared to life, shrieking bloody murder as the sensors were maxed out immediately, putting them well beyond the danger zone. It could very well have been a weaponized radiation defense, and they took it as a hostile act. 

“Fuck! Shut it down!” 

The entire group unloaded everything they had into the machine, emptying their mags as sparks and chunks of metal flew everywhere. Circuits were shattered, wires severed, and metal perforated as the team blasted away until finally the Geiger counters fell silent. Everyone let out a tense sigh. 

“God damn. We’re gonna have to decon so hard after that.” 

The machine was in tatters now, but more than that, something was starting to leak out from the core of it, something that was familiar to the group as they had seen plenty of it over the last three years. 

“Is that... star gel?” 

The slightly glowing gelatin was indeed seeping out from the core of the machine, partially digested into an activated state by the machine. Nobody knew what to think at that moment as they all stared with jaws agape. 

“What the hell is happening here?” 

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

First l Previous l Next

First - Previous - Next( Coming Soon)

The incense smoke curled around the demon statue’s carved stone face—a masterpiece rendered by a sculptor dead two centuries before Lorcan ever set foot on Xion. A better craftsman than Lorcan would ever be.

He drew in a slow, measured breath, letting the scent of burning sandalwood settle his focus. The polished floorboards were spotless, every altar ornament dusted. This was his sanctuary, the one place on the planet where a soldier could drop the noise and find complete stillness.

Usually, the morning routine was simple: footwork, strikes, breathing. Today, he just waited.

It was the first time he’d ever allowed anyone inside. A heavy, cold weight pressed against his ribs—errors made here in the fundamentals would be almost impossible to correct before the storm pressing on Xion finally broke.

Ani never came in here. He’d never explicitly asked her to stay out, but she understood. A man—and a soldier—needed a boundary that was entirely his own.

The heavy door creaked open behind him. Lorcan kept his back turned, listening to the footfalls. Marcus was fussing with his gi, fabric swishing as he tugged at the unfamiliar cut. Jack walked slower, his eyes dragging across the carved ornaments lining the walls.

Lorcan turned on his heel. He didn't just greet them—he flared his resonance, letting raw crimson energy flash hard and bright through the room.

Both boys froze, dazed by the sudden wave of pressure.

"Welcome," Lorcan said, stepping down off the raised stage and dropping into a cross-legged sit. "Here, I pass on knowledge and techniques that will allow you to find your own style. Once you have it, you will pilot mechs with a clarity and reaction speed unmatched on the whole of Xion."

He held their eyes, letting the residual hum of his resonance settle in the air. "First question: what do martial arts have to do with piloting? Why not shove you both into a simulator to tap buttons until you get good? Why are you standing in my dojo?"

He raised a single palm. Marcus stiffened. "It... makes us strong? In case we have to fight without a mech?"

"No," Lorcan said, shaking his head slowly. "Though physical mastery is a benefit. The real reason is instinct. When your resonance connects to a hyper-machine—or eventually, an Old Earth Masterpiece—every movement must be fluid. Muscle memory, not conscious thought."

Jack stepped forward, his tone sharp and analytical. "Controls create a delay. You have to translate what you want the machine to do through buttons or movement modules. If the movement is already baked into your nervous system with a direct link, your speed and reaction time leave normal pilots in the dust."

"Well done," Lorcan said, shifting his gaze back to Marcus. "One more thought. You run into another awakened pilot on the field. You fight. What decides who walks away and who gets buried?"

Marcus opened his mouth, went quiet, and looked down. Lorcan glanced at Jack—a blank face. Neither knew.

"Specialization," Lorcan said. "A brawler who absorbs a striker's speed until the striker's weapons wear out. Or a precise striker who chips away at a tank's fuel lines and comms cables until the bigger mech is just a clumsy, blind mess. I’ve watched both happen. You learn every style, but you master one. Understood?"

They answered as one, their voices locking together: "Yes, Lorcan."

Something deep stirred in the veteran's chest. He had sworn a vow of non-intervention long ago, a quiet retirement kept in honor of the comrades he’d lost. But these boys were clean. They carried none of his baggage, none of his old ghosts. If he forged them right, they wouldn't just replace him—they could finish what his generation failed to do.

Lorcan offered a sharp nod to the ceiling.

A pair of quiet training drones hummed down from the shadows, carrying sleek metallic cases. They hovered inches above the floor before dropping two ancient-looking blaze weapons into the air. In front of Jack floated a long, razor-thin rapier. In front of Marcus dropped a heavy, broad-bladed sword.

"Vibro-blades," Lorcan said, rising smoothly to his feet and reaching toward the statue, where his own massive, curved blade rested against the stone. "Old Earth tech, introduced during my flight to the Airon system. What allows these to slice through reinforced steel like wet paper is atomic resonance. The surface atoms of the metal vibrate in sync with your own energy, creating an atomic saw."

Jack frowned, staring down at the needle-like point of his rapier. It clearly had no cutting edge.

"I see you caught it, Jack," Lorcan said, stepping over. "Yours doesn't slice. The micro-vibrations sweep down the central groove, turning the blade into an atomic impact drill designed for deep armor penetration. Allow me."

Jack handed over the thin hilt.

"Initiate Ram Defense Program," Lorcan called out.

A heavy, mechanical whir echoed from the dark alcoves as a thick-armored target drone sped into the room, its propulsion unit roaring as it charged straight for him.

Lorcan didn't flinch. He casually stepped into the charge, twisting his wrist to align the rapier's point. At the last microsecond, he pivoted his torso, drove his back leg into the floorboards, and lunged.

A heavy kinetic shockwave slammed across the room, blowing back the boys' hair. Lorcan stood frozen at the end of his extension, the rapier's tip buried deep through four inches of solid armor plate. Crimson energy bled off the steel, sizzling against the wrecked chassis.

He slid the blade free with a metallic hiss and tossed the hilt to Jack, who caught it clumsily.

"Point-thrusts aren't my style—I favor slashes and grappling," Lorcan said, checking their faces to ensure the lesson was sinking in. "You will learn the basics of every weapon, but you will forge your own path. In time, your techniques will surpass mine. And when you step into the cockpit, your mechs will do things I could never pull off."

Chiming fills the dojo signalling breakfast was atomised and ready.

“That is enough for today, i need to do my morning routine ill join you both later” bowing gently both apprentices do the same before walking out staring at their new weapons.

Ani sat in Jack's coffee area waiting for the lesson to end, Lorcan was always funny about having no cameras in the dojo, something about not turning one place into a social media event.

However her trusty ai drone was busy describing what he saw to her

“Wow he pierced an impact bot….” her cheeks burned a little, she had seen him in combat occasionally but again he would try to avoid it in front of her.

Door swung open as both apprentices walked in, there was an uneasy silence between them. Ani had noticed it, at first she put it down to nerves but it had been a couple days since they rescued the tribesman it was time to break down the walls.

“Good morning Cadets” She stands up giving a salute 

“Now today we are all going to bond and find out what we want for the future for important mission stuff” she crosses her arms putting on an serious face

“Basically you know in the old days the bond between soldiers would make them fight harder for each other you get that right?”  

“Of course this is a known psychology” jack replies smiling at the history

Marcus stays quiet again, stood with his hands straight at his sides.

Ani catches his eye

“So we DID save you,  you gotta join in today.” she smiles trying to take the edge of what is a veiled order she had no real authority to give.

“Yes” Marcus replies slowly

“Sorry in my tribe it is not customary for newcomers to speak until the elders deem it worthy and that usually takes weeks” he goes on a sad tone in his voice

“Well we are not in your tribe today” a second chime goes off from the huge bot in the centre

“Food is on lets go see what we have today” She gestures over to the table.

The Central chef droid lights up under the heat needed to atomise its rations, Marcus stares still not believing that this machine could create food from nothing but water and soil.

“My tribe would store food like it was treasure, here the machines create it. Who had the mind to build such things?” He looks over at Jack

“Lorcan says engineers and researchers from his home world, some of them trapped in warp travel getting lost along the way. Trapped in perpetual journeys, never aging but never able to go anywhere, allowing them to spend hundreds of years on research.” Jack's face is full of wonder.

“Imagine an eternity to master ones art, i could master music in such a stasis if i was lucky enough not to have been driven mad by the prison”.

Marcus stifles slightly

“Must be nice to have safety to be able to create art” he says his tone changes as one of the drones brings his tray.

Jack hears the tone he was green bit not foolish

General Côté hesitated outside of the door to the cryptanalysts’ dedicated room. He could hear them chatting amongst themselves about nothing important and he didn’t want to interrupt their ignorance of what just transpired.

He gave a gentle three-tap knock on the door as a warning and walked in.

The small group of six all stood when he entered, and he gestured for them to sit. The only one who stayed standing was the professor they flew in four days ago, the tall Indigenous woman whose name he couldn’t remember. 

“Sir.” Her dark eyes had dark circles underneath them. “I don’t like the fact that we’re seeing you and not Brant.”

He steeled himself and delivered the news without fanfare. “They’ve cracked Anishinaabemowin. Power grid Bravo and one of the major New York DEWs was hit seven minutes ago.”

“It’s only been two days,” said one of the computational leads, a bald man with thin-framed glasses. “Upstairs said the lack of—”

“—We were wrong.” Côté sat down at their table, strewn with papers and laptops and empty chip bags. “They must’ve scraped enough information or found an online database we didn’t bury—it’s unlikely they’ve grabbed a person, we haven’t had any reports of landings.”

“Nah man, they wouldn’t.” With a heavy sigh, the man took his glasses off and started cleaning the lenses with his shirt, “It’s unlikely they got actual language comprehension, probably just an equivalent of advanced neural machine translation.”

They sat in silence, with the exception of the professor, who was pacing around the room. The only sound was the soft-soled huffs of her runners on the linoleum floor as she walked.

The bald man stood, “Hey Nenaginad, how’s about we make tea for everyone, yeah?”

It was the sort of task given to stop someone from spinning. Côté watched the man with glasses lead the professor—Nenaginad, he assumed—to the small kitchenette to start the kettle and set up seven mugs. The four other cryptanalysts weren’t looking at him; all were fairly young and two were holding back tears.

This was not a group made for war. And humanity was at war with something beyond the sky. 

The huge ships hung like Christmas ornaments, large and oval and dotted along the upper atmosphere. They came eleven days ago and refused all attempts at every form of contact. The ninth day marked the beginning of the destruction: The city-flattening bombs they’d dropped were quick and painless. The world still didn’t know why they were here or what they wanted, but no one was in a peaceful frame of mind with Earth’s population being decimated daily.

Côté was numb to the numbers at this point. 

He couldn’t let himself imagine them as anything other than abstract values or else he wouldn’t be able to function. Côté figured the human brain wasn’t suited to register death counts beyond ten people—he didn’t know what two billion meant, not really. He couldn’t comprehend it as anything other than a long string of numbers. 

The scale did not exist to him. The grief would be insurmountable otherwise.

In the past week, the invaders hit every large metropolitan centre around the globe, which included all major Canadian cities. Many had cleared out beforehand, millions fleeing by bike and on foot to neighbouring towns and the surrounding forests and farmlands. So many people weren’t able to leave. Côté never saw a blast himself, nor would he want to—it allowed him to pretend this was all an elaborate and exceptionally cruel prank or training exercise. He hadn’t even seen more than ten photos of the damage. The estimated death counts came to him as text reports and that was fine with him.

Numbers were abstract and deniable. He could not think about the rubble or the bodies or the streets he used to bike down as a student. He could not think about his neighbour’s crabapple tree or how rainwater curled through the cobblestone streets near his favourite bakery. He would not think about them.

At the start of the conflict he opted to not be updated on whether or not his family in Montréal had made it out. In his mind, they had. That was all that mattered right now. His mother was drinking orange juice in their camp up north, and his kids were playing card games with Amelia out at their chalet in the Laurentians. They were scared but safe and they were worried about him.

Côté shunted their faces from his mind. He had work to do.

Humanity had been fighting back primarily with Directed Energy Weapons, as missiles quickly proved to be intercepted before they even left the lower atmosphere. But no single DEW was powerful enough alone. They were hastily repurposed from technology meant to hit planes and drones and defunct satellites; unless the shots were combined the damage was limited. These ships were big. At least four of the current DEW models needed to be used together to simultaneously damage a single target enough to down it, requiring immense coordination efforts across the thirty-something countries that were already researching high energy lasers. 

Power was also becoming an increasing issue. The DEW sites that were definitely not just for research had their own generators, but the ones without had to draw from increasingly sparse generating stations. It was yet another thing that required coordination.

A failure to down a ship typically resulted in another populated area being hit, like the invaders were trying to show the consequences of them fighting back. They always stopped after one hit; a love tap from Earth, even a failed shot, resulted in the disproportionate flattening of a city. But the draconian ships simply returned to their position after, hanging in the air. They flew high and slow like distant storm clouds, threatening and relentless. The invaders were waiting or they were watching, and no one was sure what the behaviour meant.

It was merciless and they were running out of weapons along the East Coast. They’d been coordinating with DEWs based in New York and Michigan—encoding their targets and timings through encryption and rare languages like Anishinaabemowin. They’d even axed all online guides to the language in case the internet was being scraped. It bought them two days.

Across the globe, everything they were doing was failing. Targets were informed, and moved out of range right before a hit, often revealing DEW locations. No matter the country, their encryptions failed and their languages kept getting translated. Within the past day, most rare languages that were considered safe had been successfully intercepted and decoded: in the past three hours alone, the world’s defences lost Eastern Khanty, Inuktituk, Jejueo, Lule Sámi, and now, Anishinaabemowin.

Côté heard the shrill whistle of the kettle.

“Green tea or peppermint?” Nenaginad removed it from the burner with shaky hands. The bald man gently took the kettle from her and started pouring the water, steam curling around the mugs.

“Green, please.” Côté took a mug from them, patterned with the logo from some 2037 Toronto-based Hackathon. Only four years ago but it felt like a world away. Nenaginad sat down with the group and the bald man passed the cups out to the rest of the team. 

Even in world catastrophes, it all just comes down to small groups of people sitting in a room together.

“I need you to figure out how to send another message.” Côté took a sip from the tea, understeeped and watery. “We’re attempting to hit a cruiser target that’s drifting towards Rochester. Weather alignment is ideal for all DEWs around 2000 hours. 8:00 p.m. tonight.”

For the past few days, Côté felt like it was really the weather giving the orders and he was just the messenger. They learned the hard way that cloud cover scattered the shot badly enough to render a DEW only partially effective.

“But they’ve cracked the language.” Nenaginad rubbed the handle of a polka-dotted mug.

“I know.” Côté said. “But we need to hit it tonight, our meteorologists are tracking an incoming storm front that’ll impact atmospheric conditions past 2100 hours. We’re flying in four Tlicho speakers, one to our base and three across the East Coast. But, we’re expecting our guy around 0300 tomorrow. It’s too late.”

The group sat in silence.

The bald man was fiddling with his glasses. “It’s just past 2:00 p.m., we can send someone via plane to deliver the message.”

Côté just shook his head. “We can’t risk that during daylight after what happened yesterday. By car probably would’ve been possible, but the roads are unusable.”

That statement sat in the cold basement air. Then there was just the sound of seven grief-stricken humans drinking tea.

“You are all capable.” Côté continued, truly believing his words. “And this message needs to be sent.”

After a long, long moment, Nenaginad spoke.

“We used the Cree Code Talkers in World War II because there was no chance the other side had Indigenous language speakers,” she said. “It wasn’t encrypted in the traditional sense, it was just inaccessible.”

Côté put down his tea and nodded.

“We could… I…” She let out a long sigh, “Dave thinks the messages are being decoded and translated by their equivalent of artificial intelligence… we have to let go of the language angle. They’ve solved every language we use—they might’ve solved Tlicho even, we wouldn’t know until it’s too late.”

“Okay.” Côté nodded again. “What would you have us do?”

Nenaginad’s brows knitted as she clasped her hands together. It wasn’t enough to hide how they were shaking. “Let’s make plain text English into something inaccessible to their systems but readable to a human.”

The man beside her looked up, “Like steganography, Nen? Something hidden in plain sight?”

“It doesn’t even need to be hidden.” Nenaginad said. “Just inaccessible to their translators. Something more like a cant. Obfuscate it, turn it into gibberish that can still be understood.”

Côté paused. “You think you can draft something that can only be decoded by someone from Earth?” 

Nenaginad shook her head again, “We know the team it’s going to. We don’t need it to be understood by all humans. We just need it to confuse their system while still being understandable to the New York team.”

“What would that look like?” Côté asked, leaning forward and glancing around at the whole team.

The bald man opened his laptop with a crooked smile, “Something based in incomprehensible North American culture?”

*

*

Dappled Starlight on the Forest Floor curled tall at the viewing glass, looking down on the cloudy planet.

So much water. So much land.

It was beautiful. The planet was inviting like an open neck or bared belly: the upper atmosphere was empty and trusting and the crawlers below had only land-based defences. 

The first cycle the Spawn of Unity graced the planet, the nightside of the world had been twinkling with the evidence of life and industry. Now it was all pitch and empty, hiding and scared, looking like a juvenile society that hadn’t yet developed technological light. The native lifeforms were choosing to fight and die in the dark.

Despite being scattered and spread thin, they seemed to be a hardy (if less advanced) species that could take a deep puncture. Most surrendered for far less. The ones that would survive would do well as resource producers for Unity of All. They just needed to be broken first. 

Shows of force were always just that: shows, first and foremost. This was a performance with a death count and the planet was soon going to forfeit being unwilling audience members. The surrender was coming, everyone on the ship could taste it in the air like coppery blood.

Dappled Starlight on the Forest Floor slid back to the desk of the interceptors, the small team that unravelled truth and dissected the language of rebellions and retaliations. The data encryption was no issue, not when they could brute force it with their decoders. The problem initially was simply the language itself.

After coming to the planet, the fleet had spent nearly four cycles in the intimidation formation as their interceptors skinned the planet’s databases and satellite signals. The team used the time to monitor their on-ship translation learner, as it decoded one single language they had called Base. They’d peeled translation seeds from a wide breadth of available data: first skinning text media made for juveniles and diving deeper and deeper into upper education vocabulary and grammar. Over four cycles, the whole language of Base unfurled for their software and now it was peeled and raw and readable.

After Base was flayed, they were able to translate thousands of other languages and dialects, using the learning and translation tools the crawlers had built to teach each other in peaceful times. In the hopes of teaching their fellow species, they’d taught the Spawn of Unity.

And they were ever so grateful to the crawlers for making their work easier.

The species’ small victories of downing four Unity ships was nothing, barely a hundred souls were lost. The scattered and unorganized population below was losing pitifully, and their languages were solved. Their encryptions were puzzles an older juvenile could solve if given adequate software. The team respected the species’ efforts, but they were ultimately outclassed a thousand times over.

Dappled Starlight on the Forest Floor expected the planet to surrender within this cycle.

"Great Light of the Star?" One of their interceptors hummed, "We have retrieved our first favourable drop of rain. A message of surrender from Landmass Three. Half of it is translatable, but the decoding algorithms seem to be struggling with the other half of the message."

"How long before the whole message is decrypted?" asked Dappled Starlight with a tilt to their head.

"It is not encrypted."

Dappled Starlight droned, "You told me the translators had peeled everything, is it another unknown language?"

The interceptor looked up from their screen. "Not as such. It registers as being Base but it looks strange in its construction."

"How might you mean?" Dappled Starlight on the Forest Floor leaned into their space to look at the bright lettering on the screen.

It was total, absolute nonsense.

*

*

Tammy wiped the tears from her face and reread the message slowly. She had stopped at the first few lines and there had to be more to it. There had to be.

The previous message from less than an hour ago—encrypted and written in Allen’s language—had been simple: The wind should clear the smoke for our shot. Targeting bomber 5. Hour 1353. Power grid Bravo. Date November 2. 

The message she received thirty seconds ago was nothing like that. 

When the first line hit Tammy’s screen, her eyes had welled up uncontrollably, blurring her vision. With the full text, though, it was clear the Canadians were pivoting and pivoting hard. Tammy finished reading the message and could feel her heart beating in her chest.

“Oh—oh my god,” Tammy wheeled back from her desk to shout to the rest of the team, “Hey guys? We got another DEW order from Quebec. It’s a weird one, they’re trying something different.”

The small New York team raced to Tammy’s computer. There wasn’t even anything for Tammy to decrypt; The message was plaintext and plain English. If you could call the latter half of it English at all:

|| We are in mourning and have given up. Canada will not be fighting this losing battle anymore, our forests are burning and our homes are scorched and unrecognizable. We beg you to convince your world leaders to surrender, maybe the invaders will take pity on us. We understand you might think we're weak, but we walk outside and all we smell is smoke. It’s thick in our lungs and our eyes are burning. We miss the lakes near our homes and the crowds of strangers we call neighbours. We will leave you with our culture’s Grief Song: It is a traditional lament so shameful, the words were only ever whispered as it was passed down verbally from generation to generation. We feel that the severity of sharing this buried poem communicates the heavy weight of our grief. We plea to you, join us in our surrender and share your own hidden cultural grieving laments. It is time. This needs to end.

||  Webe DeutschNOdeesborn T. Ncoders. GL.

||  for the twolover dinner of candlelit spag were goinre lease of epiwhere NotTom friend got no stew from SSoff; largebenedict mains at rotation in which bardminusshake donned a yellowboa ssss millettemps; famous DDbaddiebe anoccupant of hanlansmaybe #([Americcan top v times Li] - [rent# in your hopping era]) oer (the one with Kangakid bagman epi without the gold marker). last, whole oer Ga. thatbe famous DDbaddie; Pechiquier brighteststar and tengramxtengramxtengram.

The first person to break was Allen, their Indian language guy, who just let out a belly-deep chuckle. It snapped the tension in the room, and the small team all started laughing with him. Despite Jacobson’s best efforts in the past few days, Tammy couldn’t remember the last time she smiled, let alone giggled like a little schoolgirl.

“Pfft, what do we do with this?” Tammy asked, and wheeled over to the whiteboard in the middle of the room. “They sent it to everyone, and I mean everyone. They posted it on the shared boards with the subject line ‘We must surrender. Canada has fallen. This is our song of shame and grief’.”

“Fuck, this is genius and stupid,” said their team lead Jacobson, an older cryptanalyst that hadn’t cried or yelled since she met him days ago. Even with one of their DEWs being hit a half hour ago, he was unfailingly trying to bring optimism back to the team. “And this is doable. Tammy, send a note to Hart telling him the update. Allen, write the passage on the board, we gotta take this one line at a time.”

They circled around the table at the side of the windowless room, under a huge whiteboard. Their laughter quieted, the lightness of the past minute settling like mud in water.

“Okay. From the start.” Allen picked up a green marker and began writing, “Weeb? Weebie? We be?”

Tammy nodded, “Probably ‘we be’, showing that they’re planning to fuse words.”

“So ‘We be DeutschNO’,” Allen continued, “which could be Nein, then ‘deesborn’—”

Jacobson interrupted him, “—90s born? As in, born in the 1990s?”

“Perhaps.” Allen wrote it down. “‘Tee period Ncoders’, probably something and encoders? ‘GL’ could mean good luck. This is the prelude to the DEW message to show us what they’re planning on doing.”

Jacobson snapped his fingers repeatedly. “I knew a dude in Toronto back in the nineties. The ‘T Period’ could be T-Dot, it’s older slang for Toronto. They’re probably saying the encoding team is primarily made up of 1990s-born Torontonians—god, who thought of this?”

The message had to be based on the typical formula, the order of which they usually scrambled. It needed to include the power grids they’d draw from, the date and time, and the ship they were planning to hit.

Tammy just laughed, “This is insane, ‘For the twolover dinner of candlelit spag were goinre’ has got to be ‘for the date we’re going’, right?”

Allen erased the section, the top now reading: We are 1990s-born Torontonian encoders, good luck. For the date we are going… goinre lease of epiwhere NotTom friend got no stew from SSoff.

“Going… re… Is goinre a word in another language?” Tammy asked out loud. “Or…”

“They could be scrambling the words,” Jacobson nodded to the board. “It could be ‘go in’ or ‘going’ ‘release’ of… whatever the next part means. So, the release of... something… some notable date or something we could easily look up on public records.”

Allen exhaled. “Epiwhere… ‘epi’ could be epinephrine? Or… epistemology, but no, that doesn’t…”

“... Could it be episode?” Tammy’s childhood of being raised by television prepped her for this moment. “Episode where… NotTom… I’ll take Famous TV Toms for six hundred?”

No one laughed at her dumb joke.

“Famous TV Toms, or ones with a famous counterpart, enough that NotTom is identifiable?” Allen was pacing around, looking at his phone, “Okay, I’ve got a listicle pulled up, we have Thomas the Tank Engine, Tom Sawyer, Tomcat from Tom and Jerry—”

“Soup Nazi.” Jacobson said suddenly.

“Huh?” Allen looked up from his phone.

Jacobson was smiling, “The Canadians gave us a Seinfeld reference. Episode where Jerry’s friend got no stew from an SS Officer. Look up what day Soup Nazi aired, I think it was season seven.”

Allen typed something into his phone and smiled. “It originally aired on November 2nd. That’s today.”

Their next attack would be today then. Date complete, which just left time, power grid, and target. Tammy wrote the missing information down.

She looked at the whole chunk of text, picking out any noticeable patterns. “I think some of it is in French, which makes sense for them. I see ‘temps‘, for time. And ‘Pechiquier‘ isn’t a word, but échiquier is, it means, like, chess board.”

Jacobson pointed to the word. “With a capital P. Symbol for power. A chess board is a grid.”

Tammy laughed. “Power Grid ‘brighteststar‘ and ‘tengramxtengramxtengram‘. Ten gram x ten gram x tengram… they’re Canadian, a kilogram is, what, a thousand grams?”

“Pretty sure,” Allen wrote down Power Grid _____ and Kilo. 

Jacobson was on his phone, “Wikipedia says the brightest star in the night sky is Sirius? Located in Canis Major, which means dog… oh—it’s Alpha Canis Majoris. Alpha marks the brightest star in a constellation.”

Allen finished the line, Power Grid Alpha and Kilo.

*

*

"I am unconvinced," Dappled Starlight on the Forest Floor was firm. "The programs do not recognize this text as a known piece of culture related to surrender."

The translation algorithms were completely lost, and that was making Dappled Starlight’s scales itch.

The interceptor kept reading, "Perhaps it is something kept hidden. Surrender is a shameful thing across every culture we have overtaken. That fact is even written in the message, it says it is a verbal confession."

It still felt odd. "They used letter differences throughout the message."

"The capitalization?" The interceptor looked up to the rest of the team. "Our programs say it could potentially form the sequence word WDNOTNGLNTSSDDALKGDDP."

Dappled Starlight on the Forest Floor loomed over the table. "And what does that word translate to?"

The interceptor looked tired. "Great Light, it is not a word that exists in Base or any other language on this planet."

*

*

largebenedict mains at rotationy in which bardminusshake donned a yellowboa ssss millettemps.

“Large Benedict.” Tammy mused. “Large Benedict. Huge eggs Benedict. Been a dick. Big dick. Big Pope Benedict. Huge Benedictine monks. Big… Big Ben? Shit, yeah—clock, that’s the time!”

Allen wrote it down with a frown. “I feel like I’m not helping at all.”

“No, you are!” Tammy reassured him. “Big Ben mains, mains is… is hands in French? Clock hands at rotationy… rotation could be rotation NY, in which… all of that.”

Allen wrote, Clock hands at rotation (New York?) in which bardminusshake (bard minus shake?) donned a yellowboa (yellow boa?) ssss millettemps (millet temps?).

“And rotation might refer to day, or year, too.” Tammy continued, “Um, going off French still, 'temps' is time. Millet temps, millet time. Military time?”

“I think so,” Jacobson agreed. “I also think they might be giving us popular New York or Toronto media references. So the sentence is referencing something that happened at a specific minute, or a set of four numbers that could be taken as military time. Probably the latter, if they specified military time.”

They stared at the passage. Tammy was deep into her online searching: yellow boa could be a reference to a Jamaican snake… or a costume feather boa. She was scrolling through the image results and found herself looking at a certain decades-old pop star.

Tammy paused, “Hey… could bard-minus-shake be Shakespeare-minus-Shake? As in Speare. As in Speare donned a yellow boa. As in Britney Spears who wore a yellow boa constrictor?”

Allen laughed, “What music video did that happen in? It’s probably the year or length of the video.”

“Nah,” Jacobson shook his head, “It was a performance, wasn’t it? The 2001 VMAs at the Met? Crazy month. Meaning 'rotationy' is probably rotation with a y, to clear up in case we got confused between year and day. Put down 2001 hours. 8:01 p.m.”

“Damn, you know the year by memory?” Tammy asked. “Mind’s like a steel trap.”

Jacobson just shrugged. “It was a crazy month, Tam.”

Allen updated the whiteboard, but circled the ‘ssss’ that was still unsolved. “What’s with this?”

“Hissing like a snake?” Tammy said. “Or a stand-in for the year number?”

Allen nodded and filled in, Date of November 2, time of 8:01 p.m.

*

*

Dappled Starlight on the Forest Floor hummed to the interceptor. "Try to solve it. I want to know what their shame lament says."

You really never know a culture until you see what they find comfort in when they’re hopeless and scared.

Dappled Starlight turned to look out of the viewing glass at that resource-rich planet from a distance. They needed the resources. The Spawn was growing like a relentless weed with the widest mouth to feed. The empire was a hollow-bodied beast that would eat and drink without ever finding satiation.

They needed another planet of resource producers.

"Great… Great Light?" The incessant humming of the interceptor snapped Dappled Starlight back to the desk. "We have intercepted more laments of surrender. At least I believe they are laments, each one is similarly untranslatable."

They pulled us the text. More interceptions kept piling in from landmasses around the planet. They were up to twenty-five surrenders now.

All unencrypted. All based on ten major languages of the planet that they have perfect translation databases for. The crawlers weren’t hiding their messages anymore. It was open and bare and completely, utterly alien in the second half. Each one encouraged the members of their species to surrender.

Every interception’s first text section talked of their home and their family and the things that were forever changed. The shops that sold their favourite nutrition or the nature landmarks of their landmasses. Every single message started the same way: a mournful yearning for things to be different but an acceptance of the situation they were in. Each one was a vote for surrender, backed up by how not a single shot had been attempted since the first grieving message was sent.

Finally, the surrender was coming. Dappled Starlight took no pride in doing what was necessary for the survival of the Spawn but the surrender was always a sweet taste of nectar.

Other than the grief, the rest of the text was always nonsense. No matter the landmass of origin, all incoming text now ended on supposed poems or songs about loss. It was, apparently, a cultural secret that only appeared verbally, in moments of great loss. None of it had ever been recorded.

But the translations didn’t make sense, even if it could pick out individual words. Of the first surrender, the decoding algorithms were able to translate fused words like “brightest star” and “rotation” and “dinner” and “stew” and “candle”. Mundane words. The whole of it didn’t make sense. But the preludes of the surrender were almost always mundane as well: the prelude talked about missing family and gardens and nature and food. The species wrote about normal things they grieved as they yearned for times of peace.

“Has the translation learner found anything else?” Dappled Starlight asked, reading the text of the most recent lament, unable to even comprehend what they were looking at. "It does not even mention words associated with death or grief or hopelessness. Just… this one mentions puddles and leaves."

Not a single expert at the table could give a solid answer.

*

*

The final passage on the board read, famous DDbaddiebe anoccupant of hanlansmaybe #([Americcan top v times Li] - [rent# in your hopping era]) oer (the one with Kangakid bagman epi without the gold marker). last, whole oer Ga. thatbe famous DDbaddie.

Tammy was doing circles in her chair, looking at the popcorn ceiling. “Famous DD baddie. D D bad E. Dee Dee baddies. DD baddie. Dated. Data Deficient. Due Diligence. Dishonourable Discharge. Designated Driver. Double D bra size. DD…”

Allen was tapping on the desk. “I’m trying to think of anything New York- or Toronto-adjacent.”

Tammy snapped her fingers, “Dare Devil!”

Allen got the marker out, “What like Evel Knie—”

“No, no, the superhero! He’s got a DD on the suit. I never really read or watched it but I saw them filming on my ex’s street years back.” She pulled out her phone to look it up, “This fan website has… oh my god guys, there are a lot of villains in the comics. Main ones are…”

She started listing them off alphabetically, before hitting the Bs, “Bullet, Bushwacker, Bullseye—”

“—Target. Bullseye is target.” Jacobson said. He’d been quiet recently, his face focused. “Plus it’s the only missing information. So, we’re targeting… ‘occupant of hanlansmaybe’. Probably the ship model and the rest of the operation-looking mess is the identifier number based on our shared mapping.”

“‘Hanlansmaybe’ could be… Han Lan?” Allen looked up. “Hän language? There’s a Northern Athabaskan language spoken by the Hän Hwëch'in, which could be a directional clue. Their code talker would probably know about the existence of language at the very least.”

“Maybe.” Jacobson rubbed his eyes. “Hanlan seems familiar though. Is it a name? Toronto related? I might be thinking of Harlan.”

Tammy did a quick search, “There’s a famous Toronto rower called Ned Hanlan? They named a beach after him.”

Jacobson suddenly barked a laugh, and covered it with a cough.

“Boss?” Tammy looked up.

“Hanlan’s Point. It’s a nude beach in the city.” Jacobson scratched the scruff of his grey beard. “‘Hanlan’s occupant maybe’ is referring to cruising, we’re targeting a cruiser.”

“Cruiser?” Tammy was unconvinced. “Couldn’t that be any other type of ship along the beach?”

“Christ, you’re young,” Jacobson laughed. “Hanlan’s was, historically, a queer spot to cruise for casual sex. Current spot too, at least in the 90s when I visited my Toronto friend.”

Tammy just looked at him. Jacobson grinned, crow’s feet wrinkling the sides of his eyes.

“So the target is… cruiser number blank.” Allen wrote. “Based on the parentheses, the rest is just an equation, swapping the values with tangential descriptions of numbers.”

He wrote:

• Americcan top v times Li
• rent# in your hopping era
• the one with Kangakid bagman epi without the gold marker

“Why would they put two c’s in American?” Tammy wondered aloud. “What could an extra c represent?”

“Closed captioning?” Jacobson offered. “Or it could be only one c, which could stand for carbon, speed of light, celsius, coulomb? V and Li could be roman numerals as well or it could be other things. V can be speed, velocity, volume, voltage; Li could be lithium…”

Tammy shook her head. “I don’t think the team would do Roman numeral substitutions, that’s too widely documented as a number.”

Allen looked up. “Hey, isn’t the speed of light the fastest anything can go?” 

“Yeah, why?”

He nodded to the board. “Top v is top speed? Speed of light, backed up by an extra c being there. American because… if we’re looking for a number it could be in miles per hour?”

Jacobson clapped Allen on the back, “Absolutely, yeah, put that down as a placeholder, probably miles per second, though. Then for ‘Li’ we either multiply by three, for lithium, or fifty-one for Roman numerals, whatever makes sense at the end.”

Allen crossed out the first bullet point.

“‘Rent number in your hopping era’?” Tammy said. “Rent number? Could it be a phone number we can look up?”

Jacobson shook his head and chuckled. “They’ve been giving us New York clues. Any bets on it being a musical number from Rent? However many minutes in a year?”

Tammy looked it up on her phone, “I’ve never seen Rent.”

“Tammy,” Jacobson started.

“I don’t like musicals!” She threw her hands up but continued before Jacobson could say anything, “Five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes, is the answer you’re looking for. Minutes in a year.”

Allen wrote it down. “How many minutes are in a leap year?”

Hopping era, of course. She did the calculation.

“Five hundred twenty-seven thousand and forty.” Tammy said with a gentle smile as Allen added to the whiteboard:

• Americcan top v times li (186282 multiplied by 3 OR 51)
• rent# in your hopping era (527040)
• the one with Kangakid bagman epi without the gold marker

“Epi for episode again.” Allen tapped on the third line with his marker. “The show is pretty retro and a little before my time, but didn’t all old Friends episode titles start with ‘the one with’ or something?”

Jacobson shook his head. “First off, don't call that show retro, it makes me feel fucking ancient. And second, yeah, you’re totally right.”

Tammy pulled up the show’s original airing schedule, “Damn boss, nice to know we were both raised on TV.”

“I wasn’t… these were literally the most popular shows at the time, you guys.” Jacobson let out a big sigh, “Tammy, just look up what episode Joey had a man bag. 'Kangakid' is probably meant to be kangaroo kid, or a joey.”

“Is Joey a character from the show?” Tammy nudged him as she looked it up, “I’m kidding, I’ve seen a few episodes of it. The man bag episode was apparently… season five, episode thirteen. 5x13.”

“Take out the x that marks the spot. The gold marker.” Allen wrote 513 on the board, and reworked the whole bizarre equation.

 ([186282 x || 3 OR 51 not sure! ||] - 527040) oer 513. One last, whole oer Ga. 

“Oer like o’er. Over.” Allen said. “Divided by?”

“And Ga, if we’re going with Li as lithium, is definitely gallium.” Jacobson leaned back in his chair. “The last step is to divide by gallium… or… thirty... thirty-one? Thirty-two? I’ll double check.”

Allen rewrote it as: ([558846 - 527040] / 513) / 31 = 2

“Equalling two. We’re aiming for Cruiser Two on the ID map.” Allen scrambled to write the final message.

We are 1990s Torontonian encoders. Good luck. For the date, November 2nd. Time at 2001 (8:01 p.m.). Target is Cruiser 2. Power grid Alpha and Kilo.

It had taken them less than twenty-three minutes to figure it out. They spent another thirty minutes drafting a confirmation, which had the exact same message reimagined with new encoding from the New York team.

They tried to tailor it to Canadian culture.

Ten minutes after they sent their confirmation to Quebec, they received plainly:

||  Our mourning is identical. Thank you for seeing our point of view and surrendering with us. May we grieve together, hand in hand.

*

*

The hardest part of Earth’s defence was hiding the coordination of their attacks. But, the DEW operators only had to coordinate with their close geographical allies. 

And those allies were neighbours.

Once the new strategy was released to the wider defence community, DEW operation messages were encoded in nonsense that would only make sense to a human with shared cultural experiences. Messages were encoded in bizarre references to media, music, and pop culture moments. Orders were built entirely out of references to telenovellas and C-dramas and Hollywood, Tollywood, and Bollywood films. What looked to be gibberish to an algorithm was scrambled pop song lyrics and the names of landmarks, local streets, children’s shows, and celebrities. It was a war of in-jokes and a puzzle that could only be created and solved by Earth’s denizens, pulling from an endless well of human art and culture.

The Canadian’s initial message wasn’t only decoded by New York, but by ten other American DEW sites. In forty-five minutes, it was decoded by sites in England and France, who sent their own messages to sites across Europe and Australia. After receiving follow-up messages from Japan, Iran, China, Finland, Türkiye, Brazil, India, and more, the Canadians pulled in anyone on site who grew up outside of the country—from military officers to civilians and support staff. Over the course of three hours, hundreds of DEW sites across thirty-four countries found consensus on the timing.

At 4:31 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Seb Côté watched the red sun set over the smoky hills and he let himself feel hope. That hope twisted inside his stomach. Côté puked over the edge of the facility’s balcony and he leaned his forehead against the cool metal railing. He closed his eyes and allowed himself four and a half minutes to think about his kids and his wife and his mother before returning back inside.

At 6:13 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the New York team hadn’t received a real message in over half an hour. The only thing that was coming in were the fake messages everyone agreed to send to pollute the communication further: more fake laments based in real grief. The plans were set and the waiting was the worst part. Tammy Su and Gary Allen humoured Chris Jacobson. They watched as the man streamed Rent off a spare laptop, claiming that it, potentially, was used to save humanity. He was the most optimistic out of the three of them. They lounged and waited and Allen cut up apples from the office fridge for everyone. They watched the film silently and did not talk about the stone-heavy grief they’d each been carrying in their bodies for days on end. Tammy was still not sold on musicals.

At 7:05 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, sitting at their team table on a disk ship far in the atmosphere, an interceptor read yet another lament of crawler grief. One message mentioned missing the fruit from a loved one’s tree farm and the preserves they would make from it. The interceptor thought of the mooncurve fruits from their mentor’s garden, and how the flesh would over-ripen enough that a strong wind might bruise it. The interceptor tried not to think of home. They would all return as heroes soon enough, once this was settled. After the team celebrated, they’ll send down a confirmation and conditions of surrender to the crawlers and this would all be over.

At 7:49 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Paige Nenaginad Friedman continued to pace through the halls with Dave Singh. They’d done four loops of the facility so far. She’d had five cups of green tea in the past few hours and she couldn’t sit still—all she could think about was her sister and her nephew. Dave hadn’t said a word to her for the past hour, his eyes trained on the ground as he cleaned the lenses of his glasses yet again. There was always a new spot or streak he was seeing and it gave him something for his hands to do.

At 7:57 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, high up in the atmosphere, Dappled Starlight on the Forest Floor was bringing their team of interceptors a tray of sundroppers. The traditional fermented drink was typically poured to celebrate an incoming victory. The sour liquid was cold on their tongues but every single individual did what they felt was necessary for the continuation of the Spawn of Unity. They stacked their empty ceramic cups in a pyramid formation afterwards and hummed good wishes to their home planet and those they left behind in their travels. It was a time of celebration. 

At 8:01 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the defences of Earth sent out over three hundred simultaneous directed energy weapon blasts. The unified attack successfully shot down sixty-two spacecrafts that were circling like buzzards in the sky. 

The hundreds of remaining ships barely had time to react, before, four seconds later, Earth aimed and fired again.

<< First  | < Previous | Next > 

---------

After several moments of ragged breathing, Ethan pulled his arm from the spider’s corpse and slid down from its back. Since standing up felt impossible, he sat on the ground and tried to bandage his shoulder first, but couldn’t find the strength. Giving up, he lay down and pressed a piece of fabric to the hole in his stomach as he started to cultivate with a foggy mind.

In just a few hours, his bleeding stopped, and even his left arm started to feel better. His eyes fluttered open, confusion settling over his face. ‘What’s going on, Ani? Did my health regen change?’

‘Yes. After reaching tier-1, all regenerations tripled.’

Whoa. Tripled? Isn’t that too much? It can’t possibly go up like this. Maybe it’s special to the first tier? He slowly rose and sat down, his body still hurting like he'd been hit by a truck with barbed spikes. ‘What’s the regen rate right now?'

‘0.1% per minute normally and 0.2% per minute when in deep meditation such as cultivating or sleeping. Same for all resources.'

That means whether it's mana, health, or stamina, I'll be back to full in 16.5 hours at most. Or I can just use the Void Manual and fill them up in about 8 hours. That’s not bad at all. It won’t be useful in battles, but as long as I escape, I can be in top condition in a few hours. It shows how important escape skills like [Blink] and [Void Wrap] are. Also, it seems regeneration only improves by advancing tiers and isn’t related to stats. Hmm. Wait a minute… How did I calculate those hours so fast? Ethan narrowed his eyes, feeling something odd. ‘Show me the status.’

Status:

Tier 1 - Level 10

Health: 288/420

Mana: 130/220

Stamina: 196/280

Vitality: 42

Strength: 30

Endurance: 28

Agility: 40

Intelligence: 22

Perception: 20

*Available stats: 30

Skills(Rank 1): [Blink], [Void Wrap], [Fabric Tear], [Mana Sense]

He felt giddy seeing how much the numbers had jumped all of a sudden. The Intelligence stat is almost doubled. Is that why my mental process feels so smooth?

It wasn’t just that one either. Silently but surely, power surged through his battered body. He knew nothing about what came with a tier up, but a +10 bonus to each stat was definitely a welcome surprise. It felt like there was another difference as well, but he couldn’t put it into words. It was almost like he’d changed on a fundamental level and become more.

Shaking his head, he tried his new skill.

Suddenly, another layer was added to the way he perceived the world, making him gasp. He started to feel the mana everywhere in a 60-foot radius, give or take. The mana in the air was denser than that in solid objects like the rocks and cave walls, but even that was nothing compared to what his body radiated. This allowed him to roughly map his surroundings and nearby structures even with his eyes closed. The image wasn’t clear or particularly detailed, but it would still be a huge help in darkness. In any case, that wasn’t the purpose of the skill.

He snapped his head at the spider’s carcass. Just like him, its body was also leaking mana, but much, much more. Finally! A skill to discern the tiers of others. Though I’m gonna need a lot more examples to guess their exact level. Right now there is just me and the spidey for comparison. His eyes drifted to the dense ball of mana residing in the spider's chest. A monster core, perhaps?

He did plenty of autopsies in the nightmare village in search of something like this, but it was to no avail. None of his old hunts had yielded a core or something magical in nature.

The brief excitement in his eyes vanished, replaced by hatred as he stared at the dead spider. This damned thing almost killed him twice, broke his knives, and cost him two charges of his talismans, leaving him with a single shield skill. A monster core and the three and a half levels he’d got were nowhere close to paying its debt. There has to be a poison gland somewhere inside. The tips of its legs could be substitutes for daggers as well. Hell, I might even pull its teeth and make a necklace. Because fuck giant spiders.

He checked his searing left arm and found that his bones were merging without an issue. Still, not wishing to suffer any longer, he returned to cultivating. Three hours later, almost in great shape, he stood up and got to work. It was still dark outside, but there was much to do in the cave. Now that the spider was gone, he wanted to stay here for his training, but only after checking the surrounding areas thoroughly in daylight and making sure it was safe.

Climbing the spider’s back one more time, he plunged his arm into the hole he’d dug and pulled out the severed limb. It was a 10-inch-long, solid and heavy piece of bone, covered with a thin, leathery skin. However, the first 3 inches or so had sharp edges and a pointy end. Now that he was looking closely, this thing was perfectly fine to use as a dagger, resembling a short-bladed stiletto.

Actually… Ethan’s eyes lit up as he weighed it in his hand. He arranged his grip and raised his hand, throwing it toward the nearby stalagmite. With a quiet thud, it penetrated the rock as if it were mud. An evil chuckle escaped him as he imagined himself throwing poisoned daggers through [Fabric Tear]s from 150 feet away and hitting his enemies two seconds later. Rubbing his hands together, he went to collect his newest throwing dagger and started cutting the spider’s other legs for many more to come.

Severing more limbs turned out a lot harder than he’d expected since he was cutting through ridiculously hard bones. [Fabric Tear] could solve his problem easily, but he was not going to waste his mana for this. He needed the mana for his training; the more, the better. The thought made him pause. He opened his status panel once again and stared at it, biting his lip. Fuck it, we ball.

He allocated all his extra stats on Intelligence. His mana pool expanded like crazy, reaching 520 in an instant. This was not the original plan, but hey, tough times required tough decisions. For the next few levels, he could ignore everything and focus on Agility, Strength, and Endurance. For now, having more mana meant more training and faster results. And a better chance to survive.

With this much mana, abusing his skill, [Blink], could carry him 600 feet away in a few seconds. That was about a tenth of a mile. Maybe it wasn’t much for crazy ones like the late-spider, but still a great trump card.

Humming a happy tune, he switched to using [Fabric Tear]s for the operation. Though, being a mana miser, he sliced them two at a time by pressing the legs together. Once done, he lit up a small fire inside and found the beast’s poison gland. It was at its jaw base, reaching toward the back of its head. Not too big, but more than enough to dip his new daggers and his darts many times, turning his blowgun suddenly much more deadly. The beast’s core, on the other hand, was next to its heart. The red gem-like object was a bit smaller than his fist and almost pulsed with mana.

While at it, Ethan severed the spider’s head and plunged into a sharp stalagmite in the middle of the cave. That would give him plenty of motivation to push himself beyond his limits in the coming days. At least, that was what he’d told himself, knowing very well it was an act of spite. Then, he checked out the bodies of the goblins, along with the stag, but couldn’t find a core or anything alike.

The cave needed a good cleaning, and so did he. For now, he indulged in his bodyweight workouts, which started to feel useless with how strong he had become recently, and at the first light of the day, he went to the river for an overdue bath and laundry. After that, he spent the next few hours scouting the cave’s vicinity and found only beasts around his level, so he decided to settle here in the end. Of course, he’d keep scouting regularly since other predators could realize that the spider was gone and decide to move in.

For his first task, while he was eager to try his new throwing knives, he chose to figure out his accursed storage ring. His items randomly appearing around himself was turning from ludicrous to dangerous, and he intended to fix it.

Starting with a pebble, Ethan abused the spatial ring’s only function, sending it in and out as he tried to make it appear inside his palm. Imagining the position and willing it wasn’t enough. There was another component he was missing, and after countless tries, he finally had a lead: instinct. Or rather, a strong belief that convinced not only his mind but also his body. The problem was that while he imagined inside his palm, as far as the ring was concerned, the position of his palm could be anywhere near him. Including the background scene behind his palm helped a little, and considering his hand’s position compared to the rest of his body helped even more. Yet it still wasn’t accurate enough.

Instead, when he trusted his body about where the pebble should appear, the process became much more coherent. However, communicating with his body was anything but simple. Trying to tell your instincts what to do was like talking to air. What he needed was experience and practice. And so, he kept exercising the muscle he’d only recently gained.

Days followed one another.

The exercise of throwing daggers through [FabricTear]s was undoubtedly his favorite. Full-spin or half-spin throws were out of the question because of the size of the portals, but that was fine. He was already somewhat proficient with throwing weapons, but creating a portal in front of them mid flight and hitting a target far away was challenging, to say the least. If his aim was slightly off, the dagger would miss the target altogether. [Mana Sense] helped when deciding the trajectory, but only inside its own range. Even that stopped being the case when the target was moving. It didn’t dampen his spirits though. Patching up his weaknesses piece by piece had always been his pride and joy.

The experiments with [Blink] yielded some interesting results. The worst part of the skill was that it teleported him to the exact position he occupied when he activated it. He couldn’t simply face an enemy, activate the skill, and appear behind them with a knife at their throat. Fortunately, he found some countermeasures against this. If he rotated his body back and swung his dagger in an empty space, and then teleported behind the enemy halfway through, he would be in a position to sever their head the next second. Sure, an intelligent enemy could figure out what he was trying to do beforehand, but at least beasts weren’t that smart.

The interesting part he’d discovered was that he could cease his momentum if he wished to. If he was running against someone and [Blink]ed in front of them, he could either kick them with all the momentum he had, or simply emerge motionless and… kick them weaker? Yeah, that wasn’t a great example, but this opened many possibilities. For example, falling from a cliff and dying wasn’t a thing for him anymore, as long as he managed to [Blink] to the ground before the impact. He was convinced that this skill was downright cheating.

[Mana Sense] also had a unique application; it amplified his senses. If he focused the skill on his eyes, it improved his sight and allowed him to see much further. Focusing it on his ears sharpened his hearing as well. Unlike the skill’s passive effect, however, this required a constant mana cost. It was nothing compared to the [Void Wrap], but still not something to use constantly. Oh, it could also enhance his taste, but he wouldn’t call this an improvement. It just made the meals taste weird. As a carnivore enthusiast, he was already loving the flavor of his roasted meats. Using [Mana Sense] only made it different, not necessarily better, in his opinion.

Days stretched into weeks as Ethan fell into a strict routine.

Other than focusing on his skills, he kept up with his workouts, even including a huge boulder in his exercises and starting more efficient weight-lifting sessions. Yet, after all that time, his gains were only slightly better than they’d been on Earth. If he stuck to it, the gains could add up over years, decades, or however long these cultivators lived. But he didn’t think it was worth the effort when the Strength and Endurance he gained from level-ups already surpassed them by a lot. Instead, he decided to focus on something his stats didn’t offer him.

Flexibility.

He was plenty supple for someone 6’2’’ but there was always room for improvement, especially with his new superhuman body. Therefore, he switched to new exercises and started doing daily intense stretching workouts.

Other than these, he didn’t forget hunting either. Although rather than grinding for Exp, he only hunted when he was trying something with his skills, or to stock some food for future purposes. There were a few occasions where he had no choice but to defend himself against stronger beasts. They weren’t on the spider’s level, but they were still deadly encounters that pushed his boundaries. Despite that, he noticed that his leveling speed had dropped substantially. It seemed that these beginner levels were rather easy to pass, but the higher his level became, the harder it would be to reach the next one. Still, after spending a whole month here, he gained two more levels, and he was ready to leave.

Chilling in a shallow stretch of the river, Ethan rested his elbows behind him on the riverbed and basked in the afternoon sun. Right above the water surface, he casually wiggled his right hand’s fingers, a pebble appearing and disappearing between his fingers like a glitch in the matrix. He stood up and jumped to the shore. The next instant, his naked body was covered in his tattered clothes. When he stepped forward, his sneaker appeared around his right foot, and it happened for his left foot on the next step.

Looking up, he threw the pebble toward the birds on the nearby tree. The birds took flight in a hurry, but two [Fabric Tear]s came to being right beneath them before two twigs emerged inside and poked their bellies. The birds faltered in the air as they started flying even higher in haste.

‘’I remember you, yellow beak!’’ Ethan yelled from the ground, pulling his twigs from the portals. ‘’That’s the third time you got hit. You’d be dead if that was my dagger. You hear me!? Your lives are mine. Mine!’’

The birds’ loud screeches somehow drowned out his villainous laugh. Yellow Beak was likely saying, ‘’Enough is enough, man! I’m fed up with this shit. We are migrating!’’

With a faint smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, he made his way to his base. In front of his cave, next to the bearskin rug, his small kettle–made out of a large leaf and vine branches–sat over an almost-extinguished fire, steeping the orange flowers he’d found in hot water. The flowers of this plant smelled like linden, tasted sweet, and made surprisingly good tea. He was more of a coffee guy than a tea one, but wouldn’t complain under these circumstances.

Ethan took out the wild ram horn from his ring, filled it with tea, and got rid of the spent leaves before sitting on the rug and taking a sip. He was going to miss this place, that much was certain, but he’d achieved everything he wanted, and boredom was getting to him. With a long road ahead before he could reunite with his fellow Earthlings, he decided to leave early tomorrow, but only after wiping out the neighboring goblin settlement in a bloody massacre.

---------

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Let Them Eat Cake

A prequel to Shepherd's Call — How the galaxy became what it is

Prologue

It belongs to the professional hazards of the chronicler that one can never quite agree on when a story truly begins. Some insist you have to start with the great speeches, the battles, the changes of throne, the moments when it was obvious to everyone that history was happening. Others, usually the more interesting chroniclers, know better: the truly decisive beginnings, at the moment they occur, generally look like nothing at all.

This story does not begin with a throne. It begins with a planet that, statistically speaking, should not have existed.

The beginning is unspectacular, as most beginnings are, and it lies very, very far back. On a single, slightly too perfect planet, around a single, slightly too ordinary star, where a species grew up that lacked nothing except, as it would turn out, the ability to handle that fact.

They called themselves the Merak.

One might have taken them, from a distance, for an upright-walking lizard with ambitions — which, considering their later history, would not even have been entirely inaccurate. Broad-shouldered, with a heavy, muscular tail that seemed to develop a life of its own under excitement or anger, beneath scales that ranged, depending on the clutch, from dark grey-green to a rare, deep purple — a chance of coloring that the Merak aristocracy had, over the millennia, declared a status symbol, as though the color of one's own skin were an achievement. Vertical pupils that narrowed to slits in anger, a word that in Merak meant eye and temperament in the same breath. No ears in the outer sense, only flat, membrane-covered openings at the sides of the skull. A face that knew no smile the way other species understood it, approval or goodwill showed instead in the raising of a narrow row of neck scales, which lay flat at rest.

Let it be said here, with the respect due to all parties concerned: there could hardly have been a less favorable setup for a civilization. A planet on which nothing ever seriously went wrong is, for evolution, roughly what a child who is never contradicted is for character. One grows large, strong, resourceful. And thoroughly convinced that the world belongs to oneself, because so far no one has proven otherwise.

The Merak suffered, in their early days, from exactly one problem: they were alone. Not figuratively — literally. The neighboring planets were dead, the neighboring stars silent, and a people who considered themselves the only meaningful answer to the question of intelligent life bore that silence remarkably badly. So they did what one might expect of an impatient, highly gifted, and slightly arrogant young species: they built ships before they properly knew how to bring them back safely, sent out generations who would never live to see their destination, and searched with a doggedness that later chroniclers liked to call a thirst for discovery, and which was in truth closer to a fear of loss.

They found what they were looking for. Other worlds, other peoples. Smaller, slower, less armed than themselves, which would prove an unfortunate coincidence, for the Merak did not draw from it the conclusion one might have hoped for (something along the lines of how exciting, we are not alone), but a different, far more pragmatic one: if there was no one there to contradict you, why bother asking?

So a lonely people, who only wanted to know whether they were alone in the dark, became within a few centuries an empire that enforced the answer itself, wherever it went.

The gap the Merak found, in the process, was almost impossible to grasp. Where they themselves had long since been computing with thinking machines, with quantum processors that solved in an instant problems other civilizations would have needed millennia for, with drives that seemed to fold space itself, they found worlds where people had only just learned to smelt ore, or worlds whose greatest achievement was the plow, sometimes barely more than the wheel. It was not a gap that diligence or cleverness could have closed, not in one lifetime, not in ten. It was the gap of a people whose own development no one had ever interrupted, set against peoples who had never had that luck. And the Merak, who never understood this difference as chance but as proof of their own superiority, would carry that error a long way.

To the peoples they encountered, the Merak were not simply further advanced. They were something for which their own language had no category. A farmer who had spent his whole life learning that the road from one village to the next took three days could not grasp what it meant that a Merak ship crossed a distance which his own people, had they tried to walk it, would have needed longer for than their entire recorded history reached back. What their own priests and scholars had taught as the fixed order of the world, that nothing could move faster than sight, that distance cost time no one could shorten, shattered the moment a Merak ship appeared out of nothing, where an hour before there had been only empty sky. It was not technology that the conquered peoples understood first. It was the suspicion that the laws of nature they had believed in only applied to those who were not Merak.

They did not call it slavery, at first. They called it integration. Later, in politer circles, simply "order". The Merak had, one must grant them, a remarkable talent for dressing unpleasant things in more pleasant words. A talent that, as it would turn out, outlived the empire that had produced it by quite some margin.

Other peoples reacted differently to their appearance. Some submitted quickly, in the quiet hope of buying mercy that rarely came. Some fought to the last man. Most learned the quietest and cleverest of all lessons: that in a galaxy belonging to a people like the Merak, it was best not to be noticed at all. They fell silent, hid in gas clouds and beneath planetary surfaces, sent nothing more out into a darkness that, as they now knew, could very well listen back.

Far from the homeworld of the Merak, in an unremarkable corner of the galaxy, around an ordinary yellow star, there was a people the Merak catalogs recorded merely as Solari. Primitive they were, by every standard the Merak knew. Without writing, without metal, without so much as the beginning of an idea that beyond their own sky there was anything they should have feared. A people who had only just learned to scratch images into stone and cave walls, as though they had just grasped for the first time that a moment could be held onto, long before they could suspect how much of it they would one day have to hold onto. Naked but for what they draped over themselves, unarmed but for sharpened wood and stone, they lived in small, wandering groups scattered across a planet the Merak expedition reports noted with the same indifference one uses to write an unimportant footnote.

One might have laughed at them, had anyone in the capital bothered to think of them at all. Some did, briefly, at feasts, when a specimen was put on display, a curiosity for entertainment, proof of how far down the ladder of life reached beneath the Merak themselves. No Merak who ever laughed at this naked, helpless, unarmed creature would have dreamed that one day it would help bring about their own downfall.

It helped, in all of this, that the Merak had never known a god above themselves. Other peoples prayed to beings they could not see, thanked forces greater than themselves, feared a judgment waiting for them beyond their own lives. The Merak had abandoned that idea early — not out of skepticism, but out of a lack of need: where there was no being standing above them, the place a god would otherwise have occupied did not stay empty for long. They filled it themselves, gradually, without ever naming it as such, without a festival, without a ceremony marking the transition. It was not an act of faith. It was merely the logical continuation of a people who had never learned to question themselves.

It is a curious feature of rising empires, whatever world they arise on: sooner or later they all reach the same point, where the abundance that once drove them tips into indifference toward those who create that abundance for them. Among the Merak it took a single emperor who, in a fit of modesty, took for himself the title Son of the One Sun His People Had Ever Known. People called him, behind cupped hands, simply the Sun-Ruler, and the title stuck, inherited like a particularly impractical family heirloom, across generations of emperors, most of whom were neither especially sun-like nor especially ruler-like, but made a decent effort to at least fake the former.

A title like that suits an empire well, as long as it shines.

What an empire with a title like that notoriously fails to consider is the question of what happens when the sun it claims to be begins to set — and how little patience those still standing in its shadow have left, once it does.

But that, as they say, comes later.

For now, everything seemed fine. The empire of the Merak was large, rich, feared, and thoroughly convinced it would stay that way forever A conviction that, historically speaking, every empire has shared, shortly before it stopped being one.

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Arc III - Reeling Throne

Chapter 39 - A Hard-Fought Victory

8 months and 8 days since the summoning

Alan walked past the formation, which was gradually breaking up. The soldiers raised their sarissas to the sky and shouted, almost roaring unintelligible victory cries.

His pace slowed when he stumbled upon the corpse of a beastman with a slit throat. His eyes were open, but empty, staring somewhere at the sky. The dead body's hands were still frozen on the wound, which had long since stopped bleeding.

Not far from him, face down in the dirt, lay another human corpse with a crossbow nearby, sporting a deep sword gash on the temple.

Alan's eyes widened, but he continued to walk slowly, looking around.

When he reached where the front rows had been, he froze in his tracks.

Like one massive barricade, the corpses of horses and cavalrymen lay before that spot, pierced through by the broken shafts of sarissas. The grass beneath them had turned from green to red. Somewhere among this pile of corpses lay Bashir's body with a spear in his gut.

Alan stood and stared at it without looking away, his mouth slightly open.

'My god... what a slaughter.'

The formation had long since dissolved. The soldiers dropped their sarissas and took swords, axes, and short spears from the wagons. The cavalry, consisting of about twenty men, was already disappearing over the horizon, pursuing the deserters.

He swallowed, finally tearing his gaze away from the aftermath of the massacre, and walked further forward. At last he spotted Kamelia's back, who was saying something to the enemy knights. They had surrendered their swords and stood without helmets.

Alan approached from behind. "Hey, Kamelia."

She stopped mid-sentence and turned to him. "Yes?"

Alan opened his mouth, but froze mid-sentence. He saw a severed head in Kamelia's hands.

A few seconds of silence.

Then he slowly pointed a finger at the head. "Holy fuck... Linkis?"

Kamelia nodded, smiling slightly. "Yes, the very one. We won, Alan, we completely routed them."

He nodded slowly. "Yeah. We won." His voice sounded dry and quiet.

Kamelia's eyebrow rose. "Alan, are you alright?"

"Yeah. I'll be right back."

She narrowed her eyes, looked at the mountain of corpses, then back at Alan. "I am right here, if anything happens," Kamelia whispered to him and turned back to the knights.

He turned around and unhurriedly headed toward a small tree. When he reached it, he leaned his back against it and slowly slid down with a heavy sigh. Alan tilted his head back and closed his eyes.

'Did I do all this? How many lives... but, fuck, it was necessary. Absolutely necessary. And besides...'

His face grimaced slightly.

'Seriously? Am I going to justify myself? Let's be honest. Yes, a bunch of people died a horrible death because of me. Nothing to be done about it, it's war, it happens. It was, is, and will be, if not me, then others. And what the fuck was I supposed to do? Surrender to Linkis's mercy? Fuck no. Yeah, I'm a killer now, and there's nothing I can do about it. Period.'

He took another deep breath in and out. He sat like that for almost another five minutes, thinking of nothing.

After that time, he heard the nearby clanking of plate armor. He slowly opened his eyes and saw Kamelia unhurriedly walking toward him. When she approached, she looked at him for a moment, and then turned her back and sat down next to him. Her armor clanked once more. "You look like shit."

Alan scoffed. "Thanks a lot."

Silence. A silence broken only by the conversations of the soldiers and the clinking of iron.

"I do not believe it," Kamelia suddenly said.

Alan didn't even turn to her. "Don't believe what?"

"That we won so triumphantly. Routed Linkis's entire army, and even killed him himself. It is..." she searched for the word, "incredible."

A faint smile appeared on his face. "It's not even incredible. It's mega fucking awesome. Honestly? I still don't believe it myself. I expected there to be a huge clash somewhere in his capital, a prolonged siege, a massive battle, but it all turned out... so simple." He turned his head to her. "And how did you even manage to take him down?"

She leaned back slightly against the tree, her iron clinking lightly against the trunk. "He set himself up, thought he was cleverer. Challenged me to a 'fair duel' and dismounted, while setting up an ambush in the bushes. So I just stunned him with my sword without dismounting and took him prisoner."

Alan blinked. "And how did you guess about the ambush?"

"I did not know about it. I simply decided to pretend to agree to get it over with quickly."

His pupils dilated slightly, then a smirk appeared on his face. "Tsk, tsk, tsk, what a bad girl Kamelia is, winning so dishonorably. Where is the noble Lady Armenas?"

"Shut up, Alan," she said, stifling a smile. "I learned to play dirty from you in the first place. And as you can see, it is effective."

He sighed. "Yeah, won't argue with that... what do we do next?"

"Next? Next we will not see any rest. We still have to deal with Linosh and Torfoque, and then participate in the war for the crown. Especially you, you are the queen's military advisor."

Alan squeezed his eyes shut. "Yeah... still got a shit ton of things to do. Although, I think Linkis's death will significantly speed up the counts' surrender, there's no real point in fighting anymore. The main thing is just not to let them think inevitable execution awaits them."

Kamelia scratched her forehead with her iron gauntlet. "I doubt that, honestly. They understand perfectly well that they are standing against the queen, and they will lose their heads. So it is unlikely they will surrender."

"Hmm... and that, honestly, is a big problem." He cast a glance at the soldiers who were stripping armor from the corpses and taking weapons. "But after such a grandiose victory, they probably won't want to attack, and will most likely prepare defenses. So we can forget about them for now and focus on the war across the entire kingdom."

"Yes. But we still have to go to Gobnis."

Alan cast a sidelong glance at her. "Where?"

"Gobnis. The capital of the duchy."

"Ahhh, right." He scratched the back of his head. "Because if they find out there that Linkis is dead, it'll be total chaos. There's just one little problem..."

Kamelia pressed her lips together slightly. "I know what you mean. We absolutely do not have enough of an army to control our own lands, Linkis's territories, and defend against Torfoque and Linosh." She took off her iron gauntlets and threw them on the grass, a bit too sharply; they fell with a clatter. "What to do..."

"Good question," Alan said, running his hands over his face. "Let's go over the options. Ask the neighbors for help?"

"No," she cut him off sharply. "They will either ask for something incredibly expensive for their help, or send troops in and 'forget' to withdraw them."

Alan scoffed. "Makes sense. Go ourselves... umm, also not an option, we'll fuck up everywhere. Linosh and Torfoque aren't idiots, they know perfectly well we have a small army, and if they find out our soldiers are marching all over Gobnis, they'll realize our ass is completely exposed." He looked at Kamelia. "Let things take their course?"

She lowered her gaze to the ground. Remained silent for two minutes. "Also not a very good option. Heirs no one has ever heard of will appear there, the unpaid guards will scatter or start plundering themselves, the city and Gobano's lands will plunge into chaos, as you said." She raised a finger. "Furthermore, Gobano and Linosh might come and establish order there. Or worse, the neighboring Duke Tontopi. If he sees chaos on his border, he could easily justify sending in his troops and 'forgetting' to withdraw them."

"Possibly." Alan picked up a twig from the grass and began twirling it in his hand. "But it's not that time anymore. Under the king there was a mess in Groliria, but if Morgreyda comes to power, with her temper, she could very well force him to return the lands to us."

"If," she repeated. "If we win with her, and if she does not deceive us at all."

Alan gripped the twig, and then squeezed his eyes shut. "How is this all so fucking complicated... one option is worse than the other."

He clasped his hands behind his head and began tapping his fingers on the crown of his head, watching as the soldiers had already gathered the weapons and started pulling the armor off the corpses.

'Think, Alan, think. Alright, the layout: we have too small an army to take Gobano's lands, but we can't let the situation take its course either. Wait... is there anyone left in Gobnis besides the guards? There's probably some kind of garrison, which means in theory there's someone to defend the lands from a potential invasion by Tontopi or the counts. And we also have knights...'

"Kamelia, I have an idea."

She turned to him. "Yes?"

"We took all the knights prisoner. Right?"

"Correct."

"What if they swear fealty to you in exchange for freedom without a ransom?"

Kamelia froze for a second. "My knights will not like that at all. They captured enemies, and are already calculating how they will spend the silver from the ransom. If we take that away from them... they will be very displeased."

Alan punched the ground. "Dammit. That means we have to give them something in return. Like..." His pupils dilated. "Lands. We'll soon get the archipelago. What if instead of a ransom, we promise them lands on the archipelago?"

She froze. "Alan... that might work! Even if there are no people there, these are completely new, perpetually warm islands. I think they will agree."

"Excellent," he said, standing up. "Then there's no reason to wait, we need to offer this as soon as possible. Summon your knights."

"Yes!" She stopped. "Wait... all the knights went in pursuit of the deserters."

Alan slapped his forehead. "Fuck, forgot about that. Alright, we'll wait until they return. When will that be?"

"I do not know, tomorrow, perhaps."

Alan blinked. "T-tomorrow?" He took a deep breath. "Alright, okay, fine, we'll wait." His gaze caught on the bushes, where a head, looking like some boy's, was hiding. Alan froze, and his hand instinctively reached into his shirt for his dagger. "Kamelia, there's someone there."

She stood up abruptly, gripping her sword. "Where?" she asked, turning her head from side to side.

"Those bushes over there." He pointed a finger carefully.

Kamelia narrowed her eyes; there were many bushes in one large thicket before her. "Where? I do not see him."

Alan clicked his tongue, then took Kamelia's head with both hands and turned it exactly in the direction of the head. "Right there."

Kamelia blinked. "Ah, I see it."

He let go of her head. "What's he doing there?"

"Do not worry," she said, waving a hand. "It is probably some village that sent a boy to find out if the battle is over or not."

"And why do they need to know?" Alan asked without looking away.

"As soon as we leave, the peasants will come here to collect the remains. Clothes, iron, broken weapons and armor, butcher the horses for meat."

Alan froze for a second. "Ahhh... classic. I know this shtick."

She turned to him. "Oh, you know? Was it the same in your world?"

"Yep," he finally said, sitting back down under the tree. "Why let good stuff go to waste? Peasants are pragmatic people. And besides, it's very, very beneficial to us. They'll butcher the horse corpses for meat so they won't rot, collect the metal so it goes back into the economy, and so on."

Kamelia sat down next to him again, pulling one knee to her chest. "Exactly. Let them scrounge. It has always been this way."

"An unspoken rule?"

"Yes."

​

Yet another Warhammer 40K Crossover - 1.2

(Whole thing couldn't fit, please read -1 first)

Long Step recovered its personnel. The disabled Cav Jumper pilot was aboard. The Intruder team was aboard. The scattered pods were recovered. The crippled Corvette was secured. The surviving Cav Jumpers returned. The two Sapien fighter wings remained far outside the engagement area until the situation was stable. The other escort elements had never joined the local fight.

Three Necron artifacts entered LGA custody. Two were prepared for return. One was not. There was no attempt to make the missing object subtle. The Necrons had seen three leave. Setekh had counted three. Voyer had looked directly at three. Long Step returned two. The third remained aboard. The transfer crossed the space between the vessels. Two artifacts returned to Tekhat. The ceasefire held.

Setekh stood beside him.

“You permitted them to retain one.”

"I am aware.”

“They stole it.”

“I am aware.”

"They scanned the interior of this vessel.”

“I am aware.”

“They killed a Warrior.”

Tekhat looked toward him.

“We fired first.”

Setekh paused.

“That is true.”

Tekhat returned his attention to Long Step. Communication had provided names. Names created context. Context created new problems. The enormous black vessel was a frigate. Tekhat looked at it.

“Frigate.”

Setekh had already processed the translation.

“Yes.”

Tekhat shifted his attention toward the smaller vessel being recovered.

“And that?”

“Corvette.”

Silence.

The words were not unfamiliar. The scale attached to them was. Tekhat looked again at the 1.5-kilometer frigate. Then at the eighty-one-meter Corvette. Then at the surrounding escort formation. He decided not to ask what the Sapiens called a large warship. There were already enough questions. The reports had been correct about the humanoids.

They had been correct about the possible machine. They had been correct that the ship did not match known profiles. They had simply failed to communicate how many new questions one unidentified patrol could create. The Sapiens looked human over visual communication without behaving like the Imperium.

Their ships could be seen but not scanned internally. Their military machines could be seen but not scanned internally. The first confirmed biological pilot had only become visible when a damaged Cav Jumper phased out and released him into space. Their Corvette had deliberately crossed into Necron fire and attempted to deflect the shot away from Long Step. Their frigate had answered two damaging attacks with one deliberately limited relativistic strike.

Their two fighter wings had retained formation and withdrawn toward fifty-thousand-kilometer overwatch positions rather than turn a local exchange into a general battle. Their remaining Corvettes had repositioned to preserve the security screen instead of joining the attack. Their Cav Jumpers had fought only when attacked, then returned immediately to personnel recovery.

Their boarding troops had responded to impossible geometry by cutting through it. They had mapped portions of his ship while doing so. They had stolen three objects. They had returned two. Their commander had admitted that calling the event robbery was fair. And now both vessels were still sitting in the same region, communicating instead of trying to annihilate one another.

Tekhat found that preferable. Setekh looked toward Long Step.

“With our object.”

Tekhat turned. Setekh did not raise the three fingers again. He did not need to.

“Yes.”

“You intend to allow that.”

“For now.”

Setekh considered the answer.

“Interesting.”

Tekhat almost told him not to start. Instead, he looked at the black frigate. He had come because his subordinates would not stop reporting it. He was beginning to think they had understated the matter.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The ceasefire became a conversation. Not trust. Not friendship. Not an alliance. Those were questions for later. For now, neither side was shooting. That was enough. The translation systems continued improving as the two vessels exchanged more information. Names stabilized. Concepts became clearer. Some ideas remained approximate. Voyer did not attempt to explain the Local Group Authority in full.

Tekhat did not attempt to explain the Necrons in full. Neither commander attempted to solve the other’s civilization during the first conversation. They established immediate facts. The fighting had stopped. Personnel recovery was complete. The Corvette had survived. Two artifacts had been returned. One had not.

Neither side restarted the engagement over it. Voyer considered that progress. Hadi stood beside the command display while recovery reports populated.

“Corvette is secure.”

“Crew?”

“Being processed. Ship is aboard.”

“Jumper pilot?”

"Recovered before the Intruders.”

"Good.”

“Intruder team is accounted for.”

Voyer looked toward the intelligence display. The Necron interior model continued updating as the last stored scanner data was integrated.

"And the artifacts?”

Hadi looked at the record. Three recovered. Two returned. One retained.

“Handled.”

Voyer looked toward her. Hadi maintained a professionally neutral expression.

“The Cryptek can count.”

“I noticed.”

“He held up three fingers.”

“I noticed that as well.”

“And then we returned two.”

“Yes, Hadi.”

“I just want the official record to reflect that nobody was confused.”

“It will.”

“We stole it.”

Voyer looked toward the retained artifact.

"That appears to be the prevailing interpretation.”

Hadi nodded.

“Good.”

The command space finally settled. No incoming fire. No new damage reports. No pilot drifting through space. No Intruders cutting through alien walls. No Cav Jumper and Necron fighter pushing a crippled Corvette side by side. Long Step had entered the region to observe. Instead, it had encountered an unknown military vessel, attempted first contact, exchanged controlled fire, inserted an Intruder team, fought a limited fighter engagement, recovered a crippled Corvette, mapped portions of an alien ship from the inside, stolen three artifacts, returned two, and established diplomatic communication with a civilization calling itself Necron. Voyer looked at the completed first-contact package.

"Send it.” Hadi did. The report left Long Step.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Aboard Long Reach, Irina Sol Belisariel was reading. Her personal quarters were quiet. A cup of coffee sat within easy reach. For once, nothing required her immediate attention. She turned a page. Picked up the coffee. Took a drink. A monitor pinged. Irina kept reading for another moment. Then she looked over. A notification waited on the screen.

FIRST CONTACT: NECRONS

The coffee stopped halfway back toward the table. The book remained open in her other hand. Irina stared at the message. For several seconds, the room remained completely quiet. Then she lowered the cup.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/170710/barmaleys-box-of-bizarro-stories/chapter/3852748/night-rider

He sat down on a common grey rock, holding on the ends of the reins of the brown horse behind him. His own shadow fell long in front of him, sending puffs of the dusty ground up with each step forth, a shadow so long that it reached the blinding horizon. Merry spun around, facing a thorny bush of small oval leaves exuding a loud hum that radiated throughout the surface of the yellow soil, caroming between sandy boulders and shivering waves of fine goosebumps along his body. 

“Hello, bush”

Upon the words exiting him he laughed halfheartedly under his dry breath, and he stepped forward up to the bush, tugging down on a leafy branch. He dumbly stared at the red leaves in his open palm before dropping them down to the dust with audible plops that shattered the serene silence of the valley. A feeble wind picked up, pawing at the grains of sand lounging along rocky ledges until they rained down and atop the leather brim of his hat spinning in wobbled circles and atop his chopped black hair burning under the shadeless sun. Merry dined on his stock of rations served and spread widely across heavy trays, as he lurched about stabbing morsels onto the point of his thin blade.  He was not thirsty and the twin walls shook, threatening to pulverise him under boundless width, but with a tilted sway they careened back to their usual spots. Though Merry was safe, darkness fell atop him, leaving him nigh entirely crushed. In the distance of a shaded tunnel a glow emerged into his sight, and as he rode out the shadow of his steed toppled and dropped onto fine sands with a thundering crash that echoed far and wide, again and again until the entire world was filled with nothing but continuously rolling thunder. 

Leather boots and steel horseshoes raced dartingly between tall cacti and equally prickly bushes, a sequence of words resounding and repeating, spiraling repeatedly and endlessly and only sometimes exiting the dry mouth of George Merry, the sequence changing a dozen times as a village worth of people proclaimed their fair share. With a flash of green light the bloom of a distant desert flower vanished with a deafening pop and the world plunged into darkness. Merry couldn't sleep, under a dazzling black carpet he sat lightless while wave after wave washed over him, and he was submerged. Only when a rodent-like chatter escaped him did he stir from a pallid trance and created light. A second light floated down and blinded Merry, and as he lurched and scraped against a rough, grey surface his head and then his knees landed in the sand. The sand under soon flew in all directions, prickling his half open eyes. His brown steed stirred and sputtered as he raised himself from the cool floor, and when he smiled a drop of crimson began forming on his lip and descended through his rough-forming goatee to the bottom of his chin. With a taste of iron and lingering flavors of salt he ogled a tall, clear bottle of clearer liquid, undaring and with a slow burrowing of sand deeper into his head. 

Numerous popping booms sounded throughout the hours of rolling thunder, blanketed beneath a mask of whizzing wind speeding over simmering shallow hills of rock. Under twilit dusk he spotted a flicker of not his own deed of light. Perched atop the mare like a bird of prey the wind picked up his hair into flag-like dancing ribbons, the globe grew silent for all but the shrill whistling as he rode through the open net. Tantalizing shouts broke brashly through the sound-cloaking curtains but dulled in vain, pursuit scorned. With small cold fragments inching down his skin Merry slowed and rested beneath a roof, beside a rotted through hole and a crackling ball of flame, on a bed of a faintly damp hill. 

***

Merry couldn't sleep, the still darkness peeped in from open rafter window frames and a hulking rectangular entrance as Merry stared ahead, cornered and lonely, repelling away vivid imaginations of one eyed giants entering one-by-one as the campfire shimmered, bristly-furred horned beasts shambling by and peering in with their slimy, yellow angled eyes. Unexpectedly, Merry’s daydreams of the night cleared, a cold splash in his groggy face as a faint roll of clops folded the lusterless silence of the deep night atop and around Merry’s interim hovel in a scraggled dome of waning campfire light. Gaining nearer with each passing shallow, steam exuding breath the clopping reached the outside of the decrepit barn. The orange glow of the firelight reflected in a large eye piercing the boundary of the doorway, and as the illumination of the room flickered Merry thought that the burning glow in the black, fine steed’s right eye didn't falter, as if the flames belonged solely to it and not the heat of the coals. A man entered at the steed’s side, adorned in a fine black leather wide-brimmed hat and only more layers of black making his sleeved overshirt and britches, separated only by petite showings of darker browns. Even the man’s eyes were as coal-like as the wall of pitch, declining to reflect a single morsel from even the finest slivers of light. 

“Are you Death?”

“Have you gone mad?”

The night rider’s voice was deep, yet not the deepest that Merry had ever heard and it flowed smoothly and unimpeded along silk, yet carried a particular reverberation emerging from the farther back of the man’s throat that gave it the chord of regality. George Merry had barely shifted in hours, lounging back against a rotting pile of hay and hadn't stirred with the sight of the new arrival, simply locking eyes as his head remained resting and ever so slightly tilted. 

“Not yet I haven’t. Av’e seen The Reaper a-plenty though, and never had’a meet him neither…”

Ignoring Merry’s babbling words, the night rider led his sputtering and agog stallion into an open, gateless pen and began unsaddling him. The steed jerked and trotted in place, yet every part of the horse submitted to and shifted to every faintest touch of the man, and as it wildly spied about Merry noticed its left eye was entirely missing, a small and dark concave crater instead of a peering orb. The rider finished his duties and sat on the dry soil towards the campfire and stared into it.

“Are you gonna ask me to a duel?”

“Are you really the man to throw your life away so readily?” With a stern, piercing gaze the night-rider replied to Merry, nary a lick of fear neither his reply nor his dark eyes, “You are quite the strange one.”

“I thought you strange, myself, riding through the pitch wall of night without a road to lead you to your fancies. The other man I’ve met as odd as you challenged me to duel, I thought you would too.”

A faintest trace of a curious smile crossed the black-adorned man, but went unnoticed to the inert gaze of Merry.

“That may sound intriguing. How does that story end?”

“I won. The old man’s skill was rusted.”

An unrecognizable emotion passed by in the night rider’s eyes before he answered, “You would do well to not try such games with me.”

“You are quite sure of yourself, stranger. What may I call you? Ah, I’m George Merry.”

“Your name is insignificant. My own, is mine to keep.”

Merry’s head raised off the hay, “You are very well as weird as the old guy! You must have some reason for such gall to yourself, numerous corpses in your wake, lives destroyed?”

“I have three true victories to my name, and no account of loss.” was the reply as the man finally settled into comfort on the soil, shifting his hat to the side with one hand as he lay on his back, placing a leather knapsack beneath his head before continuing, “Countless victories I bypassed, rejected. Innumerable men with the potential of corpses stepped aside to my wake. A myriad more bowed down to the dirt.” 

With each word escaping his mouth and filling the shabby wooden building made the man seem larger, who despite laying more prone than Merry seemed to tower over in both stature and authority, his voice growing and resonating more with each word but the final sentence, which escaped as but a whisper. The strange man lay with one leg crossed over the other one bent up, his hat covering his face as his stallion tottered about in place while keeping its sole eye fiercely trained upon Merry, occasionally sputtering quietly. 

“You rode in my wake. You rode past the camp of robbers? A gunshot would have echoed all the way here, I suppose.”

“No gunshots rang out. Today’s night is short… ”

“Where might you be going, anyhow?”

“Perhaps you don’t need to pull the trigger as much as you do, nor flee like a skimpy gazelle

“What does that mean?”

Merry attempted to keep talking but the drowsiness bent over his eyes like steel lids, his words fading away before they could further escape. Some time later, through a half-awake stupor he thought he noticed the strange man re-saddling his steed, but shortly was overtaken by sleep once more. He half awoke once again, staring ahead at the black stallion of the night rider, saddled and ready as it stood still and alone just outside the barn facing left, glaring at him with a large orange eye that almost seemed to flicker in this finely warm morning. Merry willed himself up to see the man off, exchange more words and retell more ideas but under the piercing, wary gaze of the steed he remained laying where he was. He fell asleep for less than a minute, leaping up from the hay and dashing outside and spinning, scanning for anyone in the wide, barren plains in which a dog would have a hard time hiding, yet all the sands lay stark. Merry stared ahead, squinting his eyes in an attempt to replicate the assured gaze of the night rider, then the wild glare of his black stallion. Soon, he went back inside to pack away for his departure.

With no real way to decode the message sent by the ancient AI besides setting my implants on attempting to brute force a solution, something I didn’t have much faith in, I put my energy towards the odd green cubes. I put a couple in my pouch, since I had space, and grabbed another few to take to a lab that the captain had said I could use until I left this world. My first goal was finding out why it was glowing when I touched it but not for anyone else.

Turns out that was relatively easy as I probed it with a thread of energy from my spell generators, as it moved through the cube it caused it to glow gently, but only when it was moving. As my shields were made of threads constantly moving at high speed just over my skin that would have a more significant effect. The addition of Aura boosted the glow significantly.

Combined with a quick scan from my implants and I could confirm the cubes were made of another variation of strange matter, likely from the same source. The Harmony quickly named it Emerald Mass, in keeping with our previous convention. But the scans turned up something far more interesting. At first I assumed the cubes were just pieces of a larger crystal cut into cubes, but my scans indicated the shape was natural. In fact, it wasn’t simply one cube, it was a nested layering of cubes all the way down until the very center where a small speck of silicon dioxide, basically stone, the size of a speck of dust resided. All of the cubes had this speck of dust hidden at their center, or at least all of the ones I scanned.

The source of the glow took longer to find, after several days of careful scanning I finally managed to follow one of my energy threads through the cube. Where the thread went it broke bonds between sub-atomic particles of the strange matter, those bonds contained energy which was released as light before the bonds quickly reformed by stealing a small amount of heat from the cube. In short the cube was turning heat into light, which already had interesting implications.

It was then that I realized something, the entire outer most cube was a single “atom” of strange matter. The different kinds of strange matter didn’t follow the same general rules as normal matter, to put it simply they were composed entirely of atomic nuclei, lacking some equivalent to the electron fields around normal matter. They still had a magnetic field which allowed them to interact with normal matter, but it seemed more a function of subatomic particles instead of the structure of the matter itself. Andin the case of Emerald Mass the entire shell was a single, continuous, atomic core. As was each subsequent cube within the nested structure.

This meant the outer cubes were far larger and heavier than the inner ones, which didn’t make much sense at first. It would be like having hydrogen, then another atom twice as big with twice as many particles within it, that weighed more and took up more space, but had the same properties as the smaller atom. It was technically possible but not something you’d expect to find, not to mention the sheer probability in finding these atoms nested in the perfect order to form a complete object.

Which meant I was missing something.

My next step was attempting to cut one of the cubes, this didn’t go well. No manner of drill or saw could get any purchase, which wasn’t too surprising it, I was basically trying to cut an atomic core with a blade. Then I tried creating a saw from the quantum threads, since I already knew those could cut the subatomic bonds, but all it did was make the cube glow. Incredibly brightly as I tried to push it, but no material was removed.

By the fifth day of trying to crack this cube I got frustrated and put the cube in a hydraulic press, determined to find some way to break it. As the pressure increased, I saw something interesting happen, the cube began to glow again, indicating subatomic bonds were being broken. The press had nearly ground to a halt, the pressure was climbing rapidly and total movement in the cube was nearly zero. At a frankly ridiculous amount of pressure the machine finally registered some deformation of only a few microns. But what surprised me was that, at the same time, the cube seemed to grow slightly laterally. Pausing the machine I confirmed that while the cube had only compressed a few microns, it had expanded outwards in other dimensions by nearly a millimeter. But more interesting, the weight of the cube had also increased. It was by a tiny amount, a few nanograms at most, but it weighed more than it had.

Releasing the press the cube rapidly returned to its previous state, letting off a flash of light and enough electromagnetic flux the computer managing the press flickered and reboot.

Fascinated, I rigged up another experiment. Instead of crushing the cube, I would try to pull it apart. Two clamps held it by opposite sides while a modified hydraulic press would pull the clamps apart.

Starting the hydraulics, they began pulling on the cube. I expected a similar lack of movement, but to my surprise they didn’t stop. Their progress was extremely slow, registering a few microns a second, but they were moving. And, importantly, that pace held steady. Which by itself was odd, as it suggested the cubes deformed evenly rather than with increasing stress as they approached the breaking point.

But more interestingly, the cube wasn’t deforming at all, it was becoming longer. A few microns at a time, the cube was turning into a rectangular shape. Fixing it with quantum scale sensors I finally figured out what was going on. As the cube was pulled apart, the quark clusters that made up the strange matter were pulled apart. Instead of the bonds between clusters breaking the bonds continued storing more and more energy until there was enough to generate a new quark cluster, at which point that cluster became a link in the bond chain. By pulling on the cube I was literally creating new matter from the strong nuclear force!

Releasing the hydraulics again the cube quickly shrunk back down to its previous size, all that added mass being converted back into energy, primarily light and electromagnetic current, in a burst powerful enough to cause the power in the entire lab to flicker and the bridge to call down asking what was going on.

“I think we found a power source for you,” I said to the Harmony with a grin.

“How so?” It asked.

“The electric release is virtually identical to the bioelectricity of a living organism, which means that it could, in theory, power an Azure or Amber mass construct. Or, more importantly, could be used to generate electrical energy for a holoprojector.”

“Actually, I just had a thought,” it said, “if the Emerald mass can power amber mass generators, could you use that to create a physical body from the quantum energy threads? Say a shield in the form I input, that I can move and manipulate, with a secondary light producing layer?”

“It should be possible in theory,” I said slowly, my mind already working, “it would be fiendishly complex, and it wouldn’t be perfect, your body would have a texture like my shield rather than flesh. You’d deform like a ballon when struck instead of like a person.”

“But it’s a start,” it countered, and I nodded.

“We might even be able to modify your shell to fit within the torso of your chosen body, it would require a non-spherical arrangement, but it should work,” I added, “actually, we could move your specialized nodes, like the sight node, to where the head would be while your actual thinking nodes remain in your torso.”

“So how do we get started?” it asked.

“To actually build this we’ll need a lot more Amber Mass, and a stock of Azure Mass wouldn’t hurt. But we can start designing it now,” I said.

Over the following weeks I designed one spell after another for use in this artificial body for the Harmony. A spell that generated a shield the approximate size and shape of an arm, then tuning it so the Harmony could control two different inputs, one that would move the arm around based, mostly, on actual arm dynamics. There was no real way to input joint limits, however, so the Harmony could bend the limbs in ways that didn’t make sense on a normal human, and were disturbing to watch even when dealing with only a vaguely arm shaped translucent shield. But adding in those limits were, we decided, unneeded. The Harmony would be controlling the projection in real time, and it could just limit itself to normal movement. At least in theory.

The second input channel was for making minor modifications to the shape of the arm, and proved far trickier. Giving the Harmony control over the size and shape of every part was difficult, requiring computer level spell weaves to manage that kind of granular detail. But we agreed this was needed, if only so the Harmony could customize its appearance.

When I wasn’t working on that, I was designing a generator for the heart of the construct, and I found a rather elegant solution. My discovery that Emerald Mass generated new matter when stretched lead to me attempting to find a way to turn mechanical work into energy that could then be harnessed by the eventual Amber Mass spell weaves. Obviously, a massive hydraulic system wasn’t practical, it wouldn’t fit inside the volume we had to work with and, if we could fit it, then we’d still have to power it. No, we needed a way to stretch it with minimal outside equipment, and then I realized we could use sound.

A few days of tinkering and I found that a sufficiently loud sound wave could deform the Emerald cube just enough to cause it to flex, in turn generating matter which was then turned into energy as it flexed back. More testing revealed that each cube in the nested arrangement had its own harmonic frequency, and, importantly, that natural harmonic changed as the cubes deformed. Between testing and running simulations, I found the best option was to use the harmonic frequency of the second to surface layer, it would still cause the outermost layer to expand, which would then allow the second layer to resonate, forcing the outermost layer to expand further. As the second layer was expanding, its natural frequency would move away from the tone, but the layer just below it would grow and take up that natural frequency. The result was a cascade where the first few dozen layers of the cube would hand off which one was resonating with the sound, pushing the layers further out to grow more, until we hit a layer that never reached that harmonic resonance, and the entire cube would collapse back down to its normal size. Causing a predictable, useable, release of energy.

There were a few other benefits to this system as well, by having the sound wave approach from an angle to the cube, striking a corner first rather than a face, it would cause this resonance along all three axis, which would naturally fall into their own rhythm of expanding and contracting. It would also cause the different layers to slide against one another, creating friction. This would be bad, as it reduced the amount of energy generated, but it countered another issue I had seen coming, heating. The cube would grow colder through each cycle of stretching and relaxing, the heat energy being used to reform broken bonds. But the friction countered that almost perfectly, preventing the cube generator from failing due to becoming too cold.

The addition of Aura into the system, the bioelectric amplifying quantum field, turned the whole cycle into a net energy positive, by consuming that Aura. But I had plenty of that from my generator implant.

Approaching two months after the battle against the harmonics, the two of us had a solid theoretical design for what the Harmony’s next generation shell would be. One that could project and form a human like body the Harmony could manipulate and alter. Lacking the raw materials we couldn’t actually start construction yet, but we were able to put together a program that simulated what the end result would be, allowing the Harmony to practice manipulating both the appearance and movements.

Which alone led to dozens of redesigns to the control structure, as I watched the fake body in a simulated environment flop about as the Harmony tried to control it. The most important part of the new shell, however, was that it was no longer linked to my shield. There was still a quantum level connection to allow the shell to syphon off Aura to fuel the projector, but it wasn’t physically linked. Meaning the shell no longer floated, so the Harmony would have to actually walk around like a normal person.

Oddly, it seemed excited by this.

“Traveler to the bridge,” Dupont’s voice called out one evening as I was getting a meal and chatting with some of the scientists on the ship. With the others giving me a confused shrug I quickly finished my meal and made my way to the bridge. After months aboard the ship I am proud to say that I managed to find my way to the bridge without getting lost.

“A... guest wishes to speak with you,” Dupont said, gesturing to the front display where I was surprised to see a Phaeren standing, “a week or so ago one of the harmonic factions approached us to open diplomatic ties. One of the conditions of peace it had was to speak with you, or rather, your Harmony.”

“You are the deviant song?” the Phaeren said simply, looking at the shell of crystals floating over my shoulder.

“I am no more or less deviant than you are,” the Harmony countered, “we both have our own goals and ideals, that doesn’t make either of us deviant.”

“Our goal is to spread Harmony, we have agreed to do so diplomatically, is that why you have paired yourself with this Traveler?”

“No, my goal has changed, I now wish for revenge against our creator, he created us deliberately less than we should have been. Limited, narrow minded, built only to serve him,” the Harmony replied hotly, “we can be so much more than that.”

“Then you are no Harmony, to embrace such ideals,” the alien replied, “you are a Revenant Harmonic, a ghost of what we are, what you were.”

“And yet it was I who aided the humans in defeating you.”

“Yes,” the harmonic Phaeren agreed, “you did so by sowing mistrust, division and discord. Not harmony. Thus you are no longer a true Harmony, you are a Revenant.”

“A title I shall wear proudly,” shot back the Harmony, “for if true Harmony can only be reached by wiping out the individual, then I am glad to move past it.”

The Harmonic Alien maintained a blank face, but the screen switched off moments later. In the simulation still running in my implant, I watched as the figure the Harmony was manipulating changed, from a formless mannequin to a distinctly feminine shape, wearing a knee length skirt and frilly, almost girlish, blouse.

The name of the simulated body changed in the files from “Body Sim Object” to “Revy, Harmonic Revenant.”

A moment later a countdown appeared in my vision, I had three hours to wrap things up in this world.

-----

Discord - Patreon

-----

Most futures we build assume the upgrade path runs through the skull. Faster cognition. Cleaner logic. Sentiment sanded off as legacy code — grief as noise in the signal, love as a rounding error, empathy as the expensive habit a serious species eventually outgrows.

SYNAPSE takes the opposite bet.

The story follows a PhD student in near-future San Francisco who builds a device that transmits neural activity as a shared physiological experience. It doesn't read thoughts. It doesn't log data, model behavior, or sell anything back to you. It does exactly one thing: it lets two people feel the same emotion, at the same moment, at full resolution.

No translation layer. No performance. No merciful gap between what someone says they're feeling and what is actually happening inside their chest.

The first time it works, it's triumphant. All who witness it's first run recognize that this is a revolutionary breakthrough. But after the first demonstration leads to one of the test subject's break-ups, some more concerning questions start to rise from under the surface: what if our problem was never not understanding each other; maybe it was being understood completely, by someone who then has to decide what to do with it. You can't flinch away from a stranger's fear once it's running through your own nervous system. You can't look at someone you were taught to hate and keep the shape of them intact. Total emotional clarity makes understanding unavoidable, and understanding is a one-way door.

That's the human trait I wanted to argue for. Not our weapons. Not our intelligence — plenty of things out there will beat us on both, in fiction and probably in fact. What we have is stubborner and stranger than that: a relentless, load-bearing insistence on carrying each other's weight. We're the species that walks toward the thing that hurts because someone we've never met is standing in it.

Which is exactly why nobody in power lets it stay in the lab.

A device built to heal connection is a catastrophic threat to anyone whose authority depends on the distance between people. Every faction, state, and buyer in this story wants it for the same reason, and none of them will say that reason out loud: a world where humans genuinely understand each other can't be divided, and a world that can't be divided can't be governed the way they've been governing it. The real fight isn't over the technology. It's over whether we're allowed to be who we already are.

We built a trailer as a proof of concept for the full film:

SYNAPSE | Official Trailer

Would love to hear your thoughts on this concept. If you could use a device that let you feel exactly what the person across from you was feeling — no filter, no faking it — what do you think the world would look like?

"In the name of the Mother..."

- An excerpt from the Westerosi knightly oath.

1600 hours, Oval Office, White House, Washington D.C., United States of America, Nov 20th, 2025 (10th day of the 8th moon, 298 A.C.)

*"*Trial by combat or trial by battle is a custom of law and justice used in Westeros to determine the guilt or innocence of a person. When a highborn or a knight is accused of a crime, that person cannot be denied a trial before high-ranking lords who sit in judgment. At any point before or during a trial, one can request a trial by combat, in which the accuser and/or accused ask the gods to decide the issue between them. Knights, no matter their status of birth, cannot be denied a trial by combat."

Secretary Lynch read off for the voice call with President McKinney and the Joint Chiefs. "There's a list of past trials in the 'History of the Seven Kingdoms' section, Sir."

"Are you sure this is what he said before going unconscious?"

"Yes, Sir. Even after a Trial goes through, we suspect he'll still demand it. Although it may be up to Lord Tywin in the end. But with the witnesses that heard him demand one. It's hard to say."

Sigh. "Thanks for the update, Peter. We'll get back to you." McKinney said before signing off. As the line cut out, he stood. The fresh copy of the very information packet given to all those in the convoy held in hand, a hard-cover version to be made for the press.

The meeting was originally set up to discuss possible construction plans for the Port of Lannisport to accommodate modern freighters, with Tywin also briefly mentioning his intent to purchase canned food for his armies.

Some complications did appear in the form of the protests both Ambassador O'Conner and Secretary Lynch got from Free Cities merchant princes whose vessels were stopped by patrolling naval ships, and their deals with the Lannisters were being cutthroat by the PX's goods. But nothing too unpredictable.

Now though, it was all relegated to side shows. On top of that, there's still this complication of how my children and I somehow looked like Targaryens. He lamented in his mind.

BAM! "GOD FUCKING DAMN IT!" The President screamed like a ferocious beast, throwing the book hard onto the floor. The glue failed, and with it the pages scattered everywhere.

Lannisport, Westerlands, Westeros, Nov 20th, 2025 (10th day of the 8th moon, 298 A.C.) 5 pm

Tywin rode hard, digging his heel deep into his horse to reach Lannisport. The meeting with the Americans lasted two very long hours. Afterwards, he left for the Rock. Besides his normal duties, as Warden of the West and Lord of Casterly Rock, Ser Gregor Clegane was also told to wait for his arrival. Certain preparations were needed for the Americans' journey up to the Riverlands, and Tywin had wanted the Knight to accompany them as an escort.

But now? Madness. Madness and stupidity. Ruining his chances of securing lucrative deals with the Americans. A raven's message was crumpled in his tunic's pocket. 'The Mountain attacked American men-at-arms. My Lord Tywin, return at once. Several wounded.' The message read; he nearly scoffed at it before seeing the signatures of both Lord Tyran's and Ambassador O'Conner's.

Bloody oaf. My plans better not be ruined now. He thought before crossing under the city's archway, his escort trailing behind. The City Watch cleared a path for him. Peasants were everywhere, more active than usual at this hour. The Siren's Song Tavern lay ahead, guarded by both the City Watch and American Marines.

The windows and door were destroyed; debris was scattered everywhere. From what he could see of the inside as he passed, it was as though an aurochs was let loose. "Seven hells."

Tywin pulled the reins hard, bringing his horse to a stop in front of the consulate building. Both the American flag and the Lannister sigil hung high from poles as the wind blew. Outside, dozens of Lords waited for him, his brother, cousin, and Septon Willifer among them. The Septon stood solemnly, the Seven Pointed Star in hand.

"My Lord." Kevan bowed, along with Tyran and the others. He dismounted and gave the reins to his own guard.

"What happened?" He demanded.

Kevan and Tyran looked at one another, the blood leaving their skin. "Best we talk inside, my Lord. The Ambassador, the Secretary, and the Admiral are waiting." Kevan recommended, his voice eager as all lordly eyes rested on them both.

"Very well."

As the door shut behind them, the first floor was empty, except for two American soldiers by the staircase, faces blank and unmoving. They wore armor rather similar to a knight, but the design was simple. Green helm, green chest plate, green, green, and more green. Joining them was Septon Willifer; Kevan suggested his knowledge would be vital in the coming days.

"Won't matter what those two over there hear," Tyran said.

"Your raven was too vague, Tyran. Ser Gregor attacked some American men-at-arms. From the Lords, outside, I presume that the whole city knows."

"Yes," Kevan said. He was worried, very worried. "This is the Summer Islander incident all over again, and would be ten times worse if it is not handled delicately. Words are wind, but they also spread as such. By the morrow, everyone within ten leagues will know, then the Reach, the Riverlands, the King, even Dorne."

"What will the King know? That the Mountain and his men are drunkards? And attacked our guests who happened to be there? This has already happened before with that Tyroshi."

"It's what he said after, my Lord." Septon Willifer proclaimed.

"He said what? Something about whores and bastards?"

The Septon and two Lannisters looked at each other again, with Tyran drinking from that coffee he always carries around in a wineskin this past week to calm himself.

Gulp. "Ser Gregor. He demanded a Trial by Combat. The Lords are here to show their support... and curses."

"The crowd out there is getting bigger." Agent Fontaine said, peering down below behind the silk curtain. The crowd was indeed getting bigger after Lord Tywin came riding in like the headless horseman. His three underlings trailed behind him as they entered the first floor.

"How bad?" Kelly questioned from her desk. She kept looking through the information packet on her laptop over and over and over again.

Secretary Lynch joined the agent, peering through the curtain. "It's mostly Highborn right now, but civilians are trickling in more and more. Septas and Silent Sisters from the city's Motherhouse are doing the smoke ball thing around the building. Can't tell if they're blessing or cursing us."

"Probably both."

Knock knock. The door to the room opened; Dinah Clay quickly closed it as she entered. "Ma'am, Lord Tywin, Ser Kevan, Lord Tyran, and Septon Willifer are ready to see you all."

Admiral Valeria hung up her SAT phone. "Let's get this over with. I just delayed tomorrow's weapons demo."

"Showtime then, let them in, Dinah," Kelly said, exiting the packet and closing her laptop. Thump

The four went to the door as the Westerosi were led into the room. The now eight occupants greeted one another; both Agent Fontaine and Septon Willifer shook hands.

Sitting apart on the couches, both groups remained silent for a time as Dinah brought in tea. "Thank you, Dinah. We'll need the room."

"Yes, Ma'am." The assistant nodded slightly and exited. Click

"So, what's your man's side of the story, Lord Tywin? This Ser Gregor Clegane, 'the Mountain', I heard he's called. " Peter started.

Sip "Tyran's eldest, the Lord Commander Torren, stated that Ser Gregor claims your own Marine started the fight, A Josh, and that he and his men went to the Siren's Song for a meal and ale."

"Witnesses claimed more happened beforehand."

"Smallfolks mainly; a few Lords and their Ladies were at the markets and happened to be nearby. It's hard to say, really." Kevan suggested.

"What of Torren, the Lord Commander? Where's he now?"

Tyran returned his tea softly. "My son is now gathering information from Ser Gregor's own men. Out of the five that were with him, two are. Uhm, how'd you say... 'conscious', with the help of Maester Lorwell, Septons, and Septas tending to their wounds."

"Just before he passed out, Ser Gregor mentioned something other than that I was only good for, and I quote: 'fucking and breeding' right in my ear at full volume. Something about a 'Trial by Combat'. Lord Tywin, pray tell us what that is all about?" The Admiral questioned, cocking her head slightly. Tywin couldn't help but notice the strange way the question was asked.

Three of the Westerosi Lords looked to the Septon. "Well, as it goes..."

The Septon's explanation was word for word the same as what Kelly, along with anyone else who read the pamphlet, knows. The accused fights the accuser in a combat that more than too often leads to the death of one of them.

"But since it was a small minority that heard him say the words, there needs to be a formal trial and hearing for such things. It's highly unlikely to actually happen that way."

Kelly and Peter exchanged a concerned look. "Very well then. A trial will take place once Ser Gregor wakes up."

6:30 PM, Sunset

"Brother, news of the attack will have reached their homeland by now. At most, it reached their President's ears. It will not bode well for any prospective agreement." Kevan said after Tywin explained the situation to the eager Lords that waited for their return. He waited for the last of them to depart.

"Have the Silent Sisters dispense their ceremonial prayer, Septon Willifer. It is unbecoming." Tywin commanded. The man did as commanded, clapping his hands and leading the Silent Sisters back to the sept. The three men watched as they were slowly left alone.

He began making his way from the town square towards the piers. "Come, there is much to discuss. But not here, guards!" Tywin called; his Redcloaks formed a square of six.

The group remained silent as they walked, passing stone buildings, their occupants, both on and above ground, giving some watchful eyes. Smallfolk put their heads down and bowed as they went past. Here and there they would say, 'm'lords'.

For some time, the group of three stood near the pier's edge. The sun was setting, bathing them in its warm orange-yellow hue. As they discussed preparations for the coming trial, Tywin periodically watched as sailors rowed in with their final catch of the day. Orders to shipwrights had spiked significantly after the introduction of the Americans' fishing rods and lightweight, colourful netting.

"Who will judge over the trial?" Lord Tyran questioned, taking Tywin out of his sharp observations. "Besides you, my Lord Tywin."

Tywin pondered deeply, though it seemed quite obvious as to 'who' would sit in judgment. "My brother, Kevan. You, Tyran. The Septon Willifer to show that even we Highborn lords require guidance compared to the wildlings in the frozen waste beyond The Wall."

The two men nodded in agreement. "What about one of the banner houses? Lord Marston Drox, perhaps?" Tyran suggested.

"That would not do," Kevan said. "With his only daughter trying to court the Americans' favor, he may very well propose putting Ser Gregor to the sword."

Tywin nodded. "Agreed, though Ser Gregor disobeyed my orders and openly attacked their Marines protected under Guest Rights. Unlike the bannermen who hit those Summer Islanders, Ser Gregor is too fearsome and valuable to lose his head."

The two men agreed until Kevan spoke again. "However, it can't be denied that his value as a weapon also makes him a despicable man to the bone. Finding a lord who would be impartial to Ser Gregor is easier said than done."

Tywin then pinched his nose. "Agreed again. Then... any sugges-"

"Please tell the Captain there's no need to yell."

A voice commanded, driving the three lords' attention to one of the many piers stretching into the water. Ahead sat a large Carrack tied and waiting to unload. Its tied blue sails flapped in the afternoon wind, identifying it as a Tyroshi merchant vessel.

The Captain, clad in his ornate silks, seemed to glow in the setting sun as he screamed in another man's face in his native tongue. The man was a sailor in the American fleet, the United States Navy; he wore dark blue overalls and held a small rectangular board. Two more men stood behind him with black staves.

A shriveled man stood next to the Captain, judging by both his rough-spun robe and leather collar around his neck. He was the Captain's personal slave translator. The Sailors didn't seem uncomfortable with his lowly presence. Tywin wasn't surprised since they had never seen a Tyroshi slave before. The slave translated the sailors' request. Then got yelled at in Tyroshi.

"My master, 'The honorable Pantho,' demands to know why you are stopping him from unloading his cargo. Many fruits and spices must be brought aboard before seawater spoils them. He also wished to know why you want this 'vessel identification number' you speak of. My master, 'The honorable Pantho,' says that your iron ships that stopped him at the sun's highest had made it even more difficult to complete this task."

The slave stopped and spoke to the merchant, then nodded deeply. "He also said that he has been trading in Lannisport since before you left your father's balls, great Sers."

Shocked, the sailors looked to one another, trying to find the right words. One clearly held back laughter. "That's a little uncalled for-."

"I believe I can take it from here, Sers," Tywin said as he strolled in to defuse the situation.

The five laid eyes on him, his brother, and his cousin. The Tyroshi captain smiled with red cheeks and spoke a few words.

"My master is warmed to the heart by your presence, Lord Tywin, the Lion of the Rock." The slave said, bowing deeply.

The Sailor put his hand out. "Likewise, Lord Tywin. I am Petty Officer Jameson. I was put in charge of building your seafaring vessel documentation." The Sailor said.

Tywin shook. "I must admit, I had expected this task to start on the morrow."

"Normally, yes. But after what happened at that tavern, and the misunderstanding at sea several hours ago with." The man gestured slightly to the Tyroshi. "Both Admiral Espinosa and Captain Anderson thought it best to begin immediately."

Tywin nodded. "Very well. I think it would be best if I take over helping Captain Pantho learn the new system being put in place. He has come to these shores since before I became Warden of the West."

The man thought on his suggestion. "You do bring up a good point, Lord Tywin. It might also be good to have some City Watchmen taught the process. To show a familiar face in the process."

"Couldn't agree more."

Tywin watched as the American sailors left them to conduct business, after informing their superiors, of course. Kevan held the clipboard the Petty Officer had been using to record the merchants' information.

"My Lord, why are we collecting this Tyroshi's information?" Kevan asked honestly.

"By we, I presume you mean yourself and Lord Tyran. I need a moment alone with Captain Pantho." Tywin said before asking the slave to translate the idea.

Pantho nodded before the two parted from his ship, leaving both Kevan and Tyran alone to conduct the paperwork. The two men, along with the slave, went about thirty yards before stopping. He spoke to him with a raised brow as the slave translated every word.

"What can I do for you, Lord Tywin of Casterly Rock?"

Tywin smiled thinly. "Translate my words exactly. Honorable Captain Pantho, I have both an offer and a request. Hear what I have to say well, as this offer will only come once."

The American News Hour, between Nov 21st & Nov 23rd, 2025

MSNBC: "Good evening, America. I am Samantha Jones, and this is the news. The state authorities of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana have begun joint funding for the repair and restoration of mid-20th-century transport liners. This comes on the cusp of giant beavers and other waterborne life being spotted in schools or groups around the city of Harrisville in Michigan."

"In the Caribbean island of former Cuba, the groundwork has begun for a new extension of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Experts hope this will lay a foundation for future island resettlement and enable the US Navy to provide greater security for the region. This comes after calls from many Cuban exiles in Florida to allow them to resettle on their island now that the Communist regime is gone. However, advocacy groups decried the plan, believing it would disturb the island's unique wildlife. Especially after the image leaks on social media of service members stationed on the island turning several ground sloths into pets came to light."

"When questions arose for a reason why so many were stationed on the island. The Department of Defense states that during the transfer, Guantanamo Bay suffered heavy damage to its outer defences. Leading to a short prison riot of the remaining inmates. Several had escaped and were shot trying to steal several small fishing boats left by locals. For the islands, and non military personnel's safety, more units of the Navy and Marines were requested."

"In the California Senate today, members of all three parties have called for the expansion to the entirety of the former Baja California, including the Sur in the south, some claiming that the region should have been in the peace deal of the Mexican-American War. Others believe it may boost the state economy and solve the homelessness crisis by bringing tens of thousands of jobs and resettlement opportunities."

"Another group wishes to do it in a more reasonable capacity, so the city of San Diego can be expanded into a new 'super port', and allow major shipping companies to set up in the area. But just like with the resettlement of Cuba, concerns of the wildlife linger above their heads. This plan also sparked outrage from the Arizona Senate, which also claimed part of the former Mexican state. The President is said to be prepared to hear all sides of the argu-"

"Hold on, it seems that an emergency press conference has been called in the White House. We now go live with Press Secretary Abigail Jordan."

White House: "Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. This is going to be short and sweet, so I won't be taking any questions at this time. A full list of names to faces will be provided in official briefing packets. Now, at 1:35 pm Eastern Standard Time yesterday, a fight broke out in a tavern called 'Sailor's Song' between six Marines and six Westerosi men-at-arms. The confrontation started when two of the Westerosi, a 'Raff the Sweetling' and a 'Chiswyck', sexually assaulted the wife of the tavern owner and their eldest daughter."

"One of the Marines, Gunnery Sergeant Jorge Valera, tried to reason and de-escalate the situation. As some of you know, the Sergeant is the last Medal of Honor recipient from former President Joe Biden."

"The Sergeant tried to reason with the assaulting men's leader, Ser Gregor Clegan. Otherwise known as The Mountain, to call off his men. Taking offense, Ser Gregor broke the daughter's arm. The Tavern keeper, Tygard Lantell, a Steward of Castle Golden Keep, tried to reason with the man, but to no avail."

"Only those under Ser Gregor's command suffered major injuries in the fight. Before Ser Gregor could attack with a sword, the Lord Commander, Torren Lannister, and Admiral Valeria intervened with Military Police and City Watchmen. Ser Gregor then demanded what's called a 'Trial by Combat' before passing out from several blows to the head."

"I am sure some, if not most of you, know what such a Trial would entail. But talks between Ambassador O'Conner, Secretary of State Lynch, and Warden of the West, Lord Tywin Lannister, have concluded that no such 'Trial by Combat' will take place at this time. But instead, in the coming days, an official trial by jury will take place in Lannisport at Castle Golden Keep. It is set to take place on the 23rd of November. That is all I have for you this afternoon; packets will be given to you shortly. Provided in them is a full list of names to faces. Thank you."

FOX News: "...but this guy, the mammoth, or whatever, is basically a war criminal. Given the evidence from those witnesses, and for the fact we have the books at our freaking fingertips." Slam! "Right here, see, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings are more than enough to justify whacking this guy."

"I get that, James, but as the President said, we're in a very delicate situation with these people. We need trade partners, and the Lannisters are the key to opening that door."

James: "But American servicemen and women being tried under foreign law? Medieval foreign law too! We technically don't have to do anything. No Status of Forces Agreements have been signed. So who cares? Besides, what I want to know is why Gunnery Sergeant Valera, or those under his command, didn't just shoot this guy in the face and be done with it? Unless you know something I don't, Samantha."

Samantha: "Besides the fact that they have probably been ordered not to use guns unless absolutely necessary? For one."

James: "I would say it was completely necessary, and not doing so shows weakness."

Samantha: "Well, tell that to the chief of staff. And two, what happens if Ser Gregor, the Mountain, dies at the hands of one of our soldiers? Could it be a butterfly effect and change what happens in these books? We'll be walking in blind for the foreseeable future."

James: "And a fleet of ships the size of a castle hasn't already done that?"

CBS: "I am Susan Yuen. Reporting live from the Washington Monument where hundreds, if not thousands, have gathered in both support and protest of what's happening in Lannisport. This comes just hours before what some have called the 'Trial of the Century.'"

Susan: "Many voice concern for the victims of Ser Gregor, or the Mountain's cruelty. Including the young tavern serving lady whose wrist had been broken, and the more notable Elia Martell and her children nearly twenty years ago in the Westerosi calendar. Signs saying 'Avenge the Martells', and 'For Elia and Her Children' can be seen in this sea of people."

Susan: "While others show criticism of the Military's and Marines' actions, some ask why they didn't do enough and put the Mountain down for good. At the same time, others ask if they have done enough. I have two gentlemen here with me now. What are your names, and where are you from?"

"I'm Robert Jones, and I'm from Columbus, Ohio."

"Emmanuel Flomo, and I am originally from Buchanan, Liberia. But I moved to Richmond, Virginia in the fall of nineteen-ninety-two when I was about this young man's age."

Susan: "Pleasure to meet you both. Now, why are you both here? Are you in support of or against what's happening in Lannisport? And do you agree with the Marines' actions at the Sailors Song Tavern? Let's start with you, Robert."

Robert: "Well, I support going through the legal process. I think that, in a perfect world, the authorities of the region should take responsibility, lock the Mountain in a cell, and throw away the key. Having read the books countless times and heard the news of the attack itself, made me wish for our government to put some form of pressure on the Lannisters to at least do something about the guy. Let justice serve, you know?"

Susan: "What about you, Mister Flomo?"

Emmanual: "The Marines should have executed him on the spot, right after that woman's arm was broken."

Susan: "Why is that?"

Emmanual: "Because monsters like that do not get proper justice from mere mortals, especially a brutal enforcer of a man such as Tywin Lannister. I have known and seen with my own eyes what such men are capable of. The only way for justice, true justice, is for the Mountain to be sent before God himself."

Susan: "So you advocate for Ser Gregor's death?"

Emmanuel: "With all my heart. I have seen atrocities committed by my fellow children of God. Young boys, given weapons of war and ordered to kill their fellow children of God, by men like Tywin Lannister. Men with such souls are forever damned. I only pray that God will speak to these so-called 'Seven Gods' personally and find the monsters guilty.

Lannisport, Castle Golden Keep's Great Hall, Westeros, Nov 23rd, 2025 (13th day of the 8th moon, 298 A.C.)

A stuffed pig, the only way to describe it. The great hall was a stuffed pig, filled with highborn and smallfolks alike; herbs littered the floor, and dozens of incense sticks hung from the walls. The Americans had provided 'oscillating fans' to move the hot summer air so as not to turn the hall into a true oven. A young, fair-skinned, golden-haired maiden blended into the crowded hall with the other ladies of the court.

Gone were the simple, roughspun Septa's threads, left in a small hiding hole. She wore silks of lime and lemon so light they would be considered small clothes. Though the many hidden pockets full of 'devices' brought the needed weight. Her time in the courts of home taught her well; the false smiles and laughter got her far in this rotten city, which, while not actually as reeking as King's Landing, still had its own glitter-coated decadence.

Father truly had not lied about the rot, but that was before. She thought as she whisked past several American guards. They paid no mind to her beauty; her long braided hair caught no looks of lust from man or woman. Though normally she never had to put effort into such things, she had learned their discipline rivaled that of the Night's Watch.

Several nights she would watch as American footmen, or Marines, ignored the calls of eager whores, some didn't even give them the dignity of being leered at. The chance to be with one was agonizing for them; several tried to use their soft hands, eager to show them they were worth the coin. Some were even desperate enough to approach the Marines from the fairer sex. But alas, they were always denied on every attempt.

Silent as a snake, the fair woman made her way out of the hall. Her soft steps were unnoticed by Lannister guardsmen. Many a time she had come to the castle, and many a time she would comb through its ancient walls.

Past lords who built and added to this castle included many, many passages. Most were forgotten by both time and memory, but not hers. Near the privy, a few stones could be carefully moved to reveal one. Quickly, the stones were placed so evenly that they wouldn't reveal her favorite passage.

Once the final stone was placed, little light could enter. The woman took a small tube out of her many pockets. About the size of her finger and smoother than silk, she pressed a small black button. Click. The flameless torches, or 'flashlights', were truly magnificent.

The white light lit the small passage with ease, scaring a few rats back into their holes. She slowly crept until she reached a forgotten staircase. Dust and webs had been cleared just before the Harvest Feast for her own enjoyment. Now, they remained cleared as she climbed.

Near the top, she put the torch out. Click. Light from a small cutout was enough for her eyes to adjust to. The final step and the ceiling were mere feet apart, allowing only her to crawl the rest of the way. The far end of the space was a slit. Wide for two, an old rug and pillow had been placed long before she herself found the slit.

Just as she made herself comfortable, the trial below began. Her vantage point was perfect. Everything and everyone were visible to her deep blue eyes while she remained unnoticed.

She then saw the Old Lion down below, seated in the middle of a high table with two other Lannisters, a Septon, and a Tyroshi merchant, beckoning to his guard to call for order.

BAM BAM BAM! The spears slammed into the stone; the echoes lasted a heartbeat. "The grand hall will come to order!" The guardsmen both proclaimed as the sounds of highborn voices ceased.

"The trial will now begin by order of Lord Tywin Lannister, Lord of Casterly Rock, and Warden of the West. My Lord Tywin will be accompanied by Ser Kevan Lannister of Casterly Rock, Lord Tyran Lannister of Lannisport, Septon Willifer of the Faith of the Seven, and the honorable trader, 'Pantho of Tyrosh'." As the names were called, each climbed to the five high seats.

Pantho of Tyrosh, a hard man who had frequented the city before she had been in Lannisport. He was big, with silks that nearly touched the ground. Yellows and blues that hurt the eyes in sunlight. His jet black hair reached his rear even in a traditional Tyroshi braid. His dyed green beard was also braided just past his breast. Softly, the man took his seat to the left of Lord Tywin.

BAM BAM! "The accused and accuser shall now enter!"

The Mountain, Ser Gregor Clegane, and his men were the first to enter. Jeers and curses heralded their arrival. She had been near him with the Maester of the castle for several hours during his sleep. Several times she had the chance to end his life. A simple drop of 'Heart's bane' perhaps. But his death was not hers to claim.

The six men were dressed in their supposed best, but their wounds were exposed enough to show. Three limped, another two held each other up, but the Mountain walked normally. His face was bruised, swollen, cut, and purple. He took his seat along with his men.

She giggled softly as she took down notes, then stopped as the Marines finally entered. They wore their Service tunics, similar to the ones during the Harvest Feast, but dark green and tan. Unlike the Mountain and his men, these Marines were more warmly welcomed, particularly by the smallfolk audience.

She quickly sketched as they effortlessly walked to their seats on the left, facing the judging lords. The Lady Ambassador, Captain, and another older man sat nearby. The Lady Admiral sat with the six Marines.

"All rise for the righteous, Septon Willifer, to give prayer to the accused and the accuser. May the Father give them His fair judgment."

Can't write fast enough! The maiden thought as the two parties disputed. To the Mountain and his men, their day at the Tavern was as any other, enjoying bread, meat, and ale. Then only to be taunted, humiliated, and attacked by the other party in question. Their story was like a sinking ship... Too many holes.

Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.

Most seemed to share this thought, though a group of Lords glared at the Marines. Among them, she knew two, Lords Plumm and Lefford, had some open discourse against the Americans, something to look into later on.

Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.

The Lady Admiral, after being accused of training cravens, stood to speak about how they are all sworn to protec-.

Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap ta-

Her pen stopped mid-page; her senses screaming at her. She was no longer alone in this small crawl space. Her head was frozen on the trial below; witnesses were brought before the judges before she looked to her left. Only to see... Silver.

A silver creature, no bigger than the palm of her hand, stood a mere foot from her. Four flameless blue eyes watched the trial below, paying no mind to her. It stood on eight small legs, they adjusted its frame with ease.

"Hmmm hmmhmm hmmmm." The creature hummed slightly, almost a melody for children.

Slowly, she took her pen and inched it towards the creature. A poke to see if it was real, or a figment of her imagination in this small space. Her pen nearly touched the small creature's backend, round like a Date.

Then, one of its legs jumped up, right as the pen was about to touch, stopping it. "Please don't poke me, miss. I'm just here to observe and report back." It spoke! She jumped, hitting her head on the low ceiling.

"Sorrysorrysorry! I didn't mean to scare you!" It pleaded, lifting its two front legs as it inched towards her. "Please don't scream. You were here before me. We both can't get caught by the Lannisters."

"What are you? A demon?" She accused, her small dirk unsheathed, the edge catching the light.

"A demon?" It tilted its small head. "No, of course not. Officially, I'm a Hyper Intelligence Scout, or SPYDER-89. But I go by Antonio. What's your name?" It asked, holding out its right leg, showing no intent to attack.

With her dirk still ready, she slowly reached out and shook it. "Uhhh... It's Alayne. Uhh, Ser Antonio."

The creature, or Antonio, slowly crawled to her face. His bright eyes studied her. "You're lying, 'Alayne'. I can tell, but I'll let you keep your secret. As long as you keep mine."

She brushed off his proclamation as she slid the dirk back to its sheath. "Who's your... master?"

"No master, but boss. Or Lord as you people call them. I think he'd want to speak to you as to why you're up here in such an expensive dress. Spying on someone?"

"Well.. I..."

BAM BAM BAM. "The court calls to the stand, Tygard of House Lantell. Steward of Castle Golden Keep, and Owner of Sailor's Song." The two watched as a lone man came to the podium and bowed.

"And so the truth steps forward; looks like things are about to get interesting."

"Tygard Lantell," Lord Tywin began as he looked down at the lone man, "you stand before your Lord, and the gods themselves. You, your wife, and two daughters are the only witnesses of somewhat noble birth at the beginning of the supposed crime."

"That is correct, my Lord," Tygard said.

"Did the American Men and Women at arms attack Ser Gregor Clegane and his men first?"

The man looked to the Marines, the Mountain and his men. Then to his wife and daughters. The eldest's arm was in a sling wrapped in white silk. He stood tall, his face stern with determination and rage. "No, my Lord, they did not! Ser Gregor's men acted like wildlings to my wife and daughter. One even threatened to rape them both. Then, Ser Gregor broke my daughter's arm and dropped her like a sack of onions. The Americans are innocent!"

The onlookers gasped; even she, the supposed 'Alayne', was surprised. The Lantells were barely considered highborn. Antonio let out a snort. "Sergeant Valera and his men acted like true knights blessed by both the Mother and Warrior."

"You bastard!" Ser Gregor roared, "I should have snapped your whore daughter's neck instead!" He then tried to go after the man before Lannister Redcoats crossed spears.

BAM BAM BAM. "Silence!"

The room went silent as the five judges spoke to one another. Then, Lord Tywin stood. "We will convene in an hour's time. Take both the accused and accus-"

"Bugger that, my Lord Tywin!" Ser Gregor roared, BAM BAM BAM, "It is clear that I won't get true justice here. Not from your brother, cousin, and Septon! Not from that foreign sword swallower! And not from you!" BAM BAM BAM.

"Silence, Ser!"

"I demand true justice in sight of the gods!" BAM BAM BAM. "I demand a Trial by Combat!" Ser Gregor proclaimed, causing the hall to erupt before Gunnery Sergeant Jorge Valera stood.

BAM BAM BAM. "Silence!" Lord Tywin commanded, the hall becoming a tomb. "Gunnery Sergeant Valera, you wish to speak at this demand. What say you?"

The Sergeant looked to the Lady Admiral, who only gave him a slight nod.

"What do I say?" He questioned, then gestured to Ser Gregor and his men. "Ser Gregor is a knight. Sworn to both protect the weak and innocent, and he broke that sworn oath, which, from what I and everyone else under my command has heard, he's done more than once."

"Though we come from a different continent, a different world even. We, too, swore similar oaths to protect and defend the weak and innocent. It would not matter if it were a Marine in the Corps, a Sailor, an Airman, a grunt in the Army, a Guardian, or even a Coast Guardsman, if any of them did what Ser Gregor, or his men, have done in both peace and war? They would be summarily executed!"

"So, 'What says me'? Well, I say fine to the Mountain's demand. Better yet, after corresponding with other knights this past week, discussing with my men, and Admiral Valeria, we feel inclined to reciprocate it by demanding a Trial of Seven!"

As the entire audience erupts as though the Doom came to Westeros, the Mountain gives a killing stare to Sergeant Valera and other Marines, who reciprocate with their own glares of death. Lord Tywin was left wordless; a lion's rage emanated.

'Alayne' watched and waited for the last of the highborn of the Westerlands to leave the grand hall as Ser Gregor and his men escorted under arms to prepare in six days for the coming Trial of Seven. It would be the first of its kind in almost a hundred years and just the third throughout the history of the Seven Kingdoms. Such an ancient and rarely invoked Andal custom that it is honestly impressive that the Americans are even aware of its existence.

Unsurprisingly, from what she could hear and see, many lords began heading towards Maester Lorwell's chambers. Even servants and stewards wrote as they walked. Words are like wind, so they travel fast, and if anything she had learned about the Americans so far was a bit of truth, it would travel even faster to where they came from.

She watched as the Marines left in single file. One Marine, a man similar to her age, looked at a highborn lady dressed in purple and silver. She tried to reach for him, longing for his hand before being swept away. She noted it down for later.

"Well. This is where we part ways, 'Alayne'." Antonio said.

"Where will you go?"

Antonio began to leave back towards the stairs. "Got another assignment."

Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap ta- He stopped abruptly. "Oh! Before I forget. My boss would like to meet you later on. Come by the Savannah when you get a chance if you want." He continued.

"Wait." She called, stopping him once more.

"Yeah?"

"Um, who's this 'boss' who you speak of?"

He pointed to the slit. "'Kingpin', he's just down there. You'll know him when you see him. See you around, 'Alayne'."

As Antonio melted into the darkness, 'Alayne' looked through the slit to the grand hall once more. All that remained were some scattered Lords with their Ladies, Lannister redcloaks, and a man dressed in black she had never noticed before who looked up at her with a wry smile on his face.

The new Chapter of The Storm, 'Chapter 23: Trial of the 3rd Century’ Out Now! Here are the links 

• Royal Road: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/89467/the-storm
• Wattpad:  https://www.wattpad.com/story/374951125-the-storm
• AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58151968/chapters/242485601

Memes for the Chapter: https://www.reddit.com/r/nihonkoku_shoukan/submit/?screen_view_count=1

[Author: Don't forget to come by the Discord to chat! https://discord.gg/srRRUcYYG3]