The explosion was not a boom. It was a sharp, gut-punching crack that tore the night apart.
Akane was already moving.
Through the alley's narrow mouth, she saw the western district of Silverwood flash brighter than noon, a silent, blinding pulse of white-hot plasma vaporizing the stone facade of the power junction. Then the shockwave hit, a physical fist of pressure that rattled the teeth in her skull and sent a cascade of loose roof tiles clattering down around her. Then, darkness. A deep, suffocating blackout as the entire quadrant's power grid died, plunging the streets into a chaotic, screaming blackness.
"Team, fall back to Rally Alpha. Suppressing fire. Go," she commanded, her voice a flat, calm line in the sudden pandemonium.
Her two squad members, former royal guards Kaito had vouched for, laid down a volley of plasma bolts into the confused mass of soldiers pouring out of the nearby barracks. The shots weren't aimed to kill. They were meant to terrify. The bolts struck the cobblestones at the guards' feet, exploding in showers of molten rock and superheated steam. Panic, she knew, was a far better weapon than precision. It was contagious.
She vaulted over a low wall, her armor scraping against the rough stone. The air was a cocktail of smells—hot ozone from the plasma discharge, the damp scent of night, and something else… hot, wet dust, like a blacksmith's forge quenched in a rainstorm. She landed in a crouch in a darkened alleyway, her carbine sweeping the area. Clear. Shouting echoed from the main street. The shrill, panicked blast of an officer's whistle. All of it unfocused. Directionless. They had no idea where the attack had come from or how many attackers there were. Perfect.
"Rally Point Alpha secure," she transmitted, her breathing even, her heart a steady, metronomic beat against her ribs. Just another Tuesday. Another city. Another war. The thought was a familiar, unwelcome ghost. She hated how easily she slipped back into this rhythm.
Miles away, deep beneath the earth, Haruto felt the explosion as a faint, almost imperceptible tremor through the soles of his boots. He stopped, holding up a fist. The signal. Akane had begun. The clock was ticking.
The silence in the aqueduct was absolute. A thick, wet darkness that seemed to swallow the narrow beams of their shoulder-mounted lights whole. The only sound was the slow, steady plink… plink… plink… of water dripping from the curved stone ceiling and the soft, sloshing sound of their own movements through the ankle-deep, frigid water. The place stank. A thousand years of rot and decay, of things best left unnamed. It was a cold, wet grave.
"What was that?" Kaito whispered, his voice a nervous tremor that seemed to echo forever in the claustrophobic tunnel.
"That was Akane making noise," Haruto replied, his own voice a low murmur, absorbed by the damp stone. He kept his light focused on the scanner on his wrist. Three blue dots—them—moving slowly through a maze of green lines. The objective, the Locus, was a pulsing red icon still a full kilometer away.
"Seems to be working," Riku commented, his voice as dead and flat as the water they were wading through. He pointed his light up at the ceiling. A thick, pale fungus grew in pulsing, vaguely bioluminescent patches. "What is that stuff?"
"Akari says it's a non-hostile silicate-based organism. Don't touch it unless you want to see what a fungal infection does to carbon-based tissue."
They moved on. Left turn. Right turn. The path was a confusing, repetitive nightmare of identical, slime-coated tunnels. Without Haruto's navigation, they would have been lost in minutes, doomed to wander in the dark until they died. Kaito's foot slipped on a patch of greasy stone, and he went down with a loud splash and a string of hissed curses that were swallowed by the oppressive quiet.
"Sound discipline, Kaito," Haruto said, not turning around. He didn't offer a hand.
Kaito hauled himself up, his armor dripping, his face hot with shame and cold water. "Sorry." He wasn't just scared. He felt clumsy. Useless. He watched Haruto's back, the steady, unwavering line of his shoulders. The man was a machine. Not like Riku, who was just empty inside. Haruto was something else. Focused. Purpose-built. A tool designed for a single task. Kaito felt a sudden, sharp pang of something he couldn't name. Resentment? Awe? He didn't know. It just made him feel small and loud and soft.
A skittering sound from up ahead made them all freeze. A tide of sleek, black bodies surged towards them out of the darkness, a chittering river of rats, their eyes glinting like a thousand tiny red embers in the light. Kaito raised his carbine, his finger tightening on the trigger—
"Hold your fire," Haruto commanded, his voice sharp. "They're just rats. Don't waste the power cell."
He stood perfectly still as the swarm parted around his boots, a chittering, squeaking flood of vermin. Kaito felt his skin crawl, the phantom sensation of tiny claws on his armor. He held his breath, his knuckles white on his weapon, until the last of them had passed. The quiet that returned was worse than the noise.
Himari watched it all unfold on two separate screens, her existence narrowed to these two flickering windows of violence and stealth. On the left, a blazing firefight. The tactical display showed Akane's team as a trio of blue icons, executing a perfect, brutal ballet of hit-and-run tactics. They would engage, pin down a squad of Black Guards with terrifying efficiency, then vanish into the labyrinthine alleys before reinforcements could even get a proper fix on their position. Red icons, the Duke's forces, swarmed the area in a chaotic, disorganized mess, chasing ghosts. Akane was a master, painting a picture of a massive, well-organized assault with just three soldiers. Himari felt a surge of cold, terrible pride.
On the right screen, a different kind of horror. Three blue dots, moving at a snail's pace through the subterranean map of the aqueducts. Slow. Exposed. Vulnerable. She found herself holding her breath every time they stopped, her heart hammering every time they moved again. This was command. This strange, disconnected feeling of watching your people walk into the dark, of seeing the pieces on the board move, and being utterly powerless to help them. All she could do was watch. And wait. And trust.
"Akane is requesting an update," Sato, the young tech, said, his voice nervous but steady now, his earlier panic replaced by a focused intensity. "She's drawing heavy fire near the old market square. She says the Duke's personal guard, the Weavers, are mobilizing in her direction. She needs to know if Haruto's team has reached the primary objective."
"They're not there yet," Himari said, her eyes glued to the three blue dots. So slow. They were moving so damn slow. "Tell her to hold for another ten minutes. Ten minutes, then she extracts, whether he's in position or not. I will not lose her team for this."
She was making command decisions. Sending people into danger. Trading lives for time. She felt a wave of nausea, a familiar, bitter taste at the back of her throat. She remembered her father, sitting in this very chair, his face etched with the same impossible calculations. She had hated him for it then. For his coldness. His distance.
She understood it now. And she hated herself for it.
The comm crackled. A sharp burst of static.
It was Haruto.
"We have a problem."
He stood at a junction of three tunnels, his hand held up in a tight fist. The air here was different. Drier. The constant dripping had stopped. The air tasted… clean. Filtered. Too clean. And there was a low hum. Faint, but definitely there. A sound that did not belong in an ancient, crumbling aqueduct.
"Akari, what am I hearing?" he whispered, his voice barely a breath.
Haruto's blood ran cold. Imperial tech? Here?
He swept his light across the tunnel ahead. The path was blocked. Not by a cave-in or a rusted gate. It was a solid wall of the same seamless, dark gray alloy he had used to repair the fortress walls. An Imperial blast door. Faintly glowing seams showed its perfect outline against the rough-hewn stone. And in the center, a small, circular panel glowed with a soft, familiar blue light.
"It's a biometric scanner," he breathed, the words stolen from his lungs.
It was impossible. Utterly, completely impossible. This wasn't some ancient, forgotten ruin. This was a facility. An active one. And it was built by his own people. By the Empire.
Kaito and Riku came up behind him, their lights illuminating the strange, alien wall that was so terribly familiar to Haruto.
"What is it?" Kaito asked, his voice full of awe and confusion. "What is that doing here?"
Haruto didn't answer. He stared at the blue light of the scanner, his mind a maelstrom of confusion and dawning, sickening horror. This wasn't the Duke's fortress. He wasn't just a petty tyrant who had stumbled upon some local magic. He was something else. Something far, far more dangerous.
He reached out a hand, his fingers hovering over the glowing scanner. This changed everything. Their entire understanding of this world, of their mission, of who and what they were fighting—it was all wrong. It was a lie.
The comm in his ear crackled again. It was Himari, her voice tight with anxiety. "Haruto, report! What's the problem? What is it?"
He looked at the impossible door. At the blue light that felt like the eye of a ghost from his own lost world.
"The Locus," he said, his voice a dead, hollow thing. "It's not a magical source."
"Then what is it?"
He finally understood the Duke's laughter. The calm amusement. The confidence. The Duke hadn't been playing chess. He'd been playing an entirely different game, on a board they couldn't even see.
"It's a ship," Haruto whispered, the truth a cold, heavy stone in his gut. "A crashed Imperial starship."