For months Karl became a ghost that moved through the world like a verdict.
He flew at night and struck at dawn. The ledger thinned. Houses that had once hosted birthdays, barbeques, and homework-drawn suns became craters, empty lots, or grotesque public warnings nailed to facades. Each name crossed off the folio was another small monument to something that had been taken from him. Reginald read updates into the cockpit like a litany; Karl listened with a patience so cold it felt surgical. Sleep stopped being a thing he permitted himself. Day bled into night into the feed of targets and the hum of the mech.
The rampage reshaped him. At first the violence had been a tidy, clinical purge — a ledger executed with mechanical precision. Then the edges frayed. He began to ride strikes for the cruelty of their echo, to arrange corpses like warnings, to widen headlines into theater. His face in the helmet grew paler; the laughter leaked out into nothing. Reginald, always the steady hand, began to look older by months in a matter of weeks. He asked once, quietly, if there wasn't another way. Karl told him, quietly, to stop being sentimental.
Governments tried to stop him.
There were telegrams and ultimatums, closed-door emergency sessions, fleets repositioned and jets that shadowed the mech's plasma-streaked silhouette across night skies. Diplomats on secure lines begged, reprimanded, promised—anything to put a stop to the killings without triggering the thing Karl kept holstered like a loaded threat. Intelligence agencies scrambled kompromats, legal threats, overt offers to buy the device outright. Embassies issued condemnations and then quietly moved to contingency planning.
For a while the world moved in half-steps around him. Airspace closed, trade routes were rerouted, markets hiccupped and then reeled, and the faces on television blurred into graphs and statements. Protesters clustered in capitals, some demanding intervention, some casting votes for blind retaliation. But every time a foreign general drew a plan on a whiteboard, a minister would ask the question that killed it: If he detonates the core, what nation survives to condemn us? The answer was always the same: Nobody wins.
Karl learned the shape of that fear and used it like currency. He answered televised demands with a line — a single, flat sentence he let play on repeat:
"Do you think I give a damn? After they took everything that mattered to me, what else could I be but exact?"
When officials tried to open direct channels, he would show footage — short, cruel edits of the ledger being completed, the faces of men who once thought themselves untouchable, and then a quiet map of the world with points that pulsed like angry lights. He made it personal for them, the way his parents' deaths had been made personal for him.
For every military maneuver, Karl had contingency. He never spelled it out in public; he only needed to let policy-makers imagine a price they would not pay. The mech's existence became a live instrument of blackmail. It was not simply that he could kill them — it was that he seemed to have decided he would take the world with him if anyone tried to stop his ledger. That possibility turned coalition meetings into whispered bargaining sessions and stalled offensives into careful diplomatic theater.
Inside the hangar, the cost showed on him. He went long stretches without proper sleep; he ate rarely and in small, efficient bites. He began to catalogue the dead with a detached pride, like a taxman marking ledgers closed. Reginald kept the records and brought Karl the confirmations — thin reports, satellite images, and the occasional, unbearable family photograph that had been used as a target marker. Each one made him smaller and harder at once.
Public reaction became a kaleidoscope of grief, rage, and terror. Some called him monster and murderer; a few others — small, frightened pockets of people who had lost everything and had nowhere else to focus their pain — called him avenger. Governments tightened borders and muttered about emergency laws. Intelligence services quietly targeted his financing and governance networks; billionaires who'd once offered trillions now kept their distance and their voices measured. The world adapted to the existence of an answer that refused arbitration.
And still Karl moved. He never once allowed the mech to be filmed in its entirety for the press. He never stepped into light when he could be a shadow. He let the world talk while he finished his work. Each strike, each public display, corded him further away from the boy who had wept at his parents' faces on a tablet; the ledger replaced childhood, and the ledger hardened into identity.
By the time the last pins on Reginald's folio were either emptied or blackened, the world had changed in ways small and vast: new security protocols, a dozen wars delayed by dread, economies jittering, conversations at the highest levels about treaties that had never needed to exist. Statues would be proposed, denounced, and never erected. The mech's name — whispered in foreign backrooms — became a worry the powerful slept with in the back of their heads.
And Karl? He landed back at the hangar for the first time since the first strike, the cockpit cold and empty after the machines of night. He opened the folio, closed it, and slid it into Reginald's hand.
"We're done," he said. His voice was a dry thing.
Reginald's eyes were wet in a way Karl had not seen before. "For now," he said.
Outside, governments sighed in quiet relief and then sharpened their teeth again. No one could be sure the war was over; history had learned to be cautious. But in the small dark of that hangar, Karl felt the ledger's last entry like a settling stone.
He had gotten his revenge.
Yet even as the machines fell silent and the maps of his ravage were burned into secret files, something inside him — a small, unhealed core — recoiled. The ledger had its trophies, but the trophies were not the same as peace. He felt the hollowness begin to press where love once had. Something in him had been exchanged and could not be bought back.
And on the far edge of that exhaustion, another current pulled: a different war was beginning — not one traced on the folio, but one that would come when men like Shojiro began walking through the ruins with reasons and powers of their own.
Karl tightened the straps of the VR crown, set the folio in the safe, and looked up at the hangar door as dawn bled thin and gray through the seams.
He had his ledger. He had his proof. He had carved his warning into the world.