The alchemical projection lamps in the tactical command center hummed with a low, vibrating intensity, casting harsh blue light across the obsidian walls. It was three pars past midnight.
Devin stood at the head of the iron table, staring down at two entirely separate, equally catastrophic pieces of intelligence.
"Play it again," Devin ordered, his voice rough with exhaustion.
Rebecca, standing beside the heavy runic communication console she had personally modified, threw a brass lever. The console hissed, spitting out a burst of heavy static before a desperate, distorted voice crackled through the speakers.
"...repeat, this is Trench Zero. Primary oxygen recyclers are at twenty percent. The surface shipyards have fallen. The zealots are using depth charges to crack the upper domes. We cannot hold. If anyone is listening... we have the Leviathan schematics. Aiden's blueprints. Save us, and they are yours."
The transmission cut out, replaced by the relentless hiss of dead air.
"It's a deep-sea frequency," Rebecca explained, her green eyes fixed on the map of the Colstar island fortress. "It's bouncing off the thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean floor, completely bypassing Enoch's surface jammers. There is a secret, pressurized testing facility sitting exactly two miles beneath the Colstar shipyards."
"Aiden's private engineers," Devin murmured, his tactical mind dissecting the variables. "They survived the internal decapitation of the kingdom because they were underwater when the prostitutes slit the King's throat."
"And they are trapped," Rebecca added, tapping the console. "Kross, the 'Leviathan' was a rumor in the mechanical bays for cycles. A fully runic, deep-sea submarine. If Enoch's zealots breach that dome and find those blueprints, his fleet won't just sail on the surface. He will be able to bypass every naval blockade on the continent from beneath the waves. We will have absolutely no defense."
Devin clenched his jaw. Cypris was nestled in the mountains, but if Enoch secured underwater supremacy, Mortipia and Sulin would fall within a rees.
Before Devin could issue an order, the heavy iron doors of the command center groaned open. Dawson stepped into the room, holding a sealed, unmarked cylinder of polished white bone.
"A courier just crossed the western border," Dawson reported flatly. "Priority alpha. Directly from the Sulin Federation."
Devin took the bone cylinder, twisting the hidden runic latch. A tightly rolled piece of parchment slid out. He unrolled it, reading the brief, unsettling script of Emperor 8. The ruler of Sulin was now eleven cycles old, yet his handwriting possessed the rigid, archaic precision of an ancient scholar.
Devin read the words, and his blood ran completely cold.
King Kross. My palace is secure. Yet, three of my inner-circle ministers were found slaughtered in their locked chambers. Their necks were severed barehanded. Their joints were snapped using precise, unnatural mechanical leverage. The Sulin Federation harbors no anomalies. Explain this ghost, or our alliance is void. Your presence is required. Immediately. - 8.
Devin dropped the parchment onto the table.
"Joint locks," Devin whispered, the phantom ache of his past life flaring in his chest. "Barehanded mechanical leverage."
"Trangdar combat forms," Dawson identified instantly, his oxidized steel eyes narrowing. "Calculated and highly efficient. The exact martial arts you drilled into the super-human vanguard."
"But none of my vanguard are in Sulin," Devin said, his mind racing.
If it wasn't a Cyprian super-human, there was only one other biological entity capable of executing those specific, brutal strikes. A pure sub-human. A survivor of the Trangdar royal bloodline who had not fallen to Enoch's telepathic brainwashing. Someone was waging a one-man war in the shadows of the Sulin Federation, and they were using Devin's ancestral fighting style to do it.
If Emperor 8 discovered that a sub-human had breached his hyper-rigid, pristine kingdom, the Sulin Federation would immediately sever its alliance with Cypris, believing Kross had lost control of his borders. The western flank of the continent would collapse.
"We have two critical structural failures," Dawson analyzed. "The Colstar facility contains a weapon that will lose us the war. The Sulin Federation contains a political variable that will lose us our shield."
Devin looked between the deep-sea distress beacon and the Sulin parchment. He could not be in two places at once.
"I am going to Sulin," Devin decided, his voice hardening into unyielding iron. "I have to secure the alliance and eliminate whoever is leaving Trangdar corpses in the Emperor's palace." He looked up at his shadow. "Dawson. You will take a stealth submersible. Breach the Colstar waters, extract the engineers, and secure the Leviathan blueprints before Enoch's zealots crack the dome."
"Negative," Rebecca interrupted, her voice slicing through the command center with absolute authority.
Devin turned to his wife, his brow furrowing. "Rebecca, this is a military operation—"
"It is a highly volatile mechanical extraction," Rebecca corrected, slamming her hand down on the Colstar map. "Kross, Dawson is a weapon. He can kill forty zealots in a hallway, but he doesn't know the first thing about deep-sea runic pressure valves. If that dome is cracking, the water pressure alone will crush the engineers before they can reach an airlock. You need a Master Mechanic to bypass the hydraulic seals and decipher Aiden's blueprints."
"I am not sending the Queen of Cypris into the heart of Enoch's territory," Devin growled, his protective instincts completely overriding his tactical logic. "You are staying here with Arthur."
"Arthur is safe in the central keep, guarded by two hundred of your best men," Rebecca shot back, completely unintimidated by the King's Command. Her green eyes blazed with the same fierce stubbornness that had made him fall in love with her. "If Enoch gets that submarine, Arthur won't have a future anyway. Dawson keeps the zealots off my back. I open the dome, secure the blueprints, and we get out."
Devin stared at her. He hated it. He hated every single variable of the plan, but his mechanical logic knew she was absolutely right. A deep-sea extraction required engineering genius, not just brute force.
Devin looked at Dawson. "If a single drop of ocean water touches her, Commander, I will dismantle your armor with you inside it."
"The Queen will not bleed, My King," Dawson stated, his tone carrying the absolute weight of a sworn oath. "The parameters are set. I will require a secondary officer to assume your personal protection detail in Sulin."
"Summon her," Devin ordered.
Dawson stepped to the communication conduit and tapped a rapid, heavily encrypted sequence into the brass keys.
Less than two pars later, the iron doors opened silently.
Stepping into the blue light of the command center was a young woman wearing the exact same silver-and-black armor as Dawson, though her plates were heavily streamlined, built for agility rather than raw kinetic deflection. She was nineteen cycles old, with pale, ghost-white hair cropped close to her scalp.
Her eyes were not oxidized steel like Dawson's. They were a pale, piercing ice-blue, devoid of any warmth or hesitation.
"Lieutenant Reze reporting," she said, her voice a soft, whispering hiss that barely disturbed the air.
Reze was Subject 04. While Dawson was the hammer Count Sapien had designed to crush bone, Reze was the scalpel. Her cellular structure had been laced with a slightly different variant of the venom, sacrificing brute strength for hyper-accelerated stealth and terrifying evasion. Resting on her hips were two heavy, curved hook-blades designed to bypass armor and severe arteries with surgical precision.
"Reze," Devin acknowledged. "You are my vanguard. We are traveling to the Sulin Federation. Total stealth protocol. We are hunting a ghost."
"Understood, My King," Reze replied, falling into position exactly two paces behind Devin. Her footsteps made absolutely zero sound against the stone floor.
The command center fell quiet. The board had been split.
Devin walked over to Rebecca. The fierce argument was over; now there was only the cold dread of parting. He pulled her into a tight embrace, burying his face in her dark hair, breathing in the scent of ozone and engine grease.
"Three cycles ago, you stopped me from going to Colstar," Devin whispered against her temple. "Now you are going."
"I have something to come back for now," Rebecca whispered back, her hands gripping the fabric of his mantle tightly. "And so do you. Don't let that creepy child emperor get in your head, Kross."
"I won't," Devin promised.
He pulled back, his amber eyes locking onto hers one last time before turning to his Commander. "Dawson. Bring her back."
Dawson offered a flawless, rigid salute.
The divergence was absolute.
Within the par, two separate transports departed the Obsidian Palace under the cover of the starless night.
Rebecca and Dawson descended into the deep mechanical bays, boarding a pressurized, runic-stealth submersible designed to slip silently into the crushing depths of the ocean, heading straight for the bleeding heart of Enoch's stolen kingdom.
Simultaneously, Devin and Reze boarded a heavily armored diplomatic carriage, the mechanical horses galloping hard toward the western borders. Devin stared out the reinforced window into the dark, the shadows of Trangdar rising to meet him. He was heading into the rigid, paranoid court of an eleven-cycle-old Emperor to hunt a phantom that fought with the ghosts of his own past.
The holy war was expanding, and the King of Cypris was finally stepping onto the battlefield.