The sky was a rolling ceiling of black, a churning mass of soot that smothered the atmosphere like a funeral shroud. The sun—once a radiant sapphire jewel that bathed this world in a surreal azure light—was now reduced to a pale, ghostly smudge behind the veil of devastation.

Its brilliance filtered through layers of smoke and particulates, casting a warped, lifeless hue across the surface.

Charred winds screamed across the planet's broken terrain, weaving between shattered cliffs and dunes of powdered coral.

They carried with them the chemical stink of war—scorched ozone, and the mix of various dead fauna and flora. This had been the proud cradle of the Valurians. Now, it was another graveyard.

Aegirarch stood alone atop a ridge of calcified stone, its edges jagged from orbital bombardments. The slope beneath him descended into a valley littered with the corpses of Valurians.

Their once-vibrant carapaces were blackened and cracked, their segmented limbs curled inward, and death had claimed them in moments of agony and panic. Some lay where they'd fought. Others had died mid-fight, clawed hands clutching at the ground as chemicals choked them.

None had made it far.

Beyond the ridge, nestled between crumbling ridges of what had once been reef-like towers, a Valurian city still burned. Its great spires now slumped like wilted trees, blackened shells of their former beauty.

Smoke coiled upward in slow spirals that merged with the black ceiling above, creating the illusion that the heavens themselves wept.

Fires still flickered in isolated pockets, stubbornly feeding on what remained of some of the structures. They pulsed faintly through the gloom like dying stars, as if the world hadn't yet realized the war was over.

Aegirarch said nothing.

He simply watched.

His exo-suit shifted with a soft mechanical whir, stabilizers adjusting as he moved into a crouch. He pressed one gauntleted hand to the ground, triggering a low hum of scanning instruments.

Data bloomed across his HUD—radiation levels, air toxicity. But amid the cascade of numbers, something else flickered.

Life.

It was faint.

But it persisted.

Near the corpse of a Valurian—its shell half-buried in grey dust—a flower had taken root. It stood alone, a sliver of defiance in the midst of ruin. It was not larger than a child's palm, its petals crystalline and delicate, refracting the meagre light in kaleidoscopic hues.

Despite the choking air, it bloomed.

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Aegirarch moved toward it.

The flower's colours shifted subtly as he approached—pale blue, soft violet, a ripple of white that seemed almost bioluminescent.

Each bloom was a fractured mirror of the sun above, its hues twisted by the ash-thick air and the flower's alien chemistry. It had adapted and survived.

He knelt beside it, slow and careful. One armoured finger traced the edges of its stalk, and then with a precise motion, he plucked it.

The stem snapped with a gentle crack, brittle yet resilient. As he turned it between his fingers, the petals responded, curling ever so slightly.

Then, a message flared to life across his HUD.

Incoming transmission.

He didn't look away from the flower.

"Speak."

The voice came crisp and professional. "Confirmation complete, Overseer. All Grithan forces accounted for. Except for one anomaly. One Grithan remains unverified—Ankrae."

A pause. His brow furrowed beneath the helmet. "Ankrae?"

"Yes, Overseer. The last recorded location was as part of the diplomatic delegation on Ivinal's surface. Current signs suggest escape or potential capture by the BCU delegation. No final visual. Status: Unknown."

He considered that.

Of all the names that could've surfaced, that one held weight.

"Leave it."

Silence crackled over the channel. Then a careful response: "Understood. Are we to proceed to the next directive?"

He turned the flower in his hand once more.

Beneath the ash, death, and silence—life still dared to exist. He respected that, in a distant way.

"Yes. Initiate Phase Two. Withdraw to Veridia. Prioritize armed vessels and begin full extraction. I want all salvageable materials—fusion cores, clone growth pods and all prefabs. Every viable component. We leave nothing useful behind."

"Orders received and relayed. Departure underway."

The line went dead.

Alone again, Aegirarch rose.

The flower gleamed faintly in his palm. He studied it a moment longer, then tucked it gently into a specimen slot on his belt, sealed behind armoured glass.

He turned away from the valley of the dead, stepping back from the ridge and beginning his descent toward the landing craft nestled below. The vessel's silhouette flickered behind veils of smoke, its engines faintly glowing through the haze.

Ash trailed in his wake with each heavy step. The wind howled above.

Behind him, the distant city still burned.

———

I had assumed the diplomatic manoeuvre would fracture the Grithan command structure and fray the thin threads of alliance binding the Hydrarchs and Clans together.

I'd expected hesitation, confusion, and internal dissent. What I failed to anticipate was Aegirarch and his reaction and how damaging the retaliation could be.

The moment his counteroffensive began, I lost access to their communication systems. Their networks shifted and were replaced by an encrypted lattice of constantly rotating protocols, built to collapse and reform every two hours.

The infected clones I'd embedded meant to serve as slow-burning intelligence were reduced to receiving fractured, time-delayed scraps. The new command structure was more rigid and methodical, It adapted faster than anticipated, purging old networks and information.

The first true warning came with the withdrawals from Imreth. They abandoned the surface in a rapid withdrawal.

What followed was annihilation.

Orbital bombardments scoured the surface. Every zone not yet defiled by conflict was incinerated. Nuclear strikes. Suicide ships with overloaded cores. Entire biomes that had survived the first attacks were reduced to radioactive zones. The ash blight zones were erased and replaced with irradiated wastelands.

Phaedra received the worst of it.

They overclocked their facilities until core meltdowns triggered detonations. Hauliers made coordinated, suicidal dives, their cores rupturing on impact to amplify the devastation.

Radiation levels surged across my forces. Toxin saturation reached unsustainable thresholds. Entire drone batches liquefied under exposure. I rerouted biomass and shut down exposed growth clusters. Recycled what little was uncontaminated. I gutted twenty ships just to reinforce the need for biomass.

Still, it wasn't enough.

The attacks didn't stop. They spread.

From Phaedra to Ivinial.

From Ivinial to Kordar then to Morrath.

Planets I hadn't even touched were purged as if I had been there. The bombardments lasted one hundred and seventy-nine hours.

Six days of precise, unrelenting extinction-level strikes. Patterned and measured to have the most impact. The kind of logic only Aegirarch would apply.

I was stretched across too many fronts with less biomass and a few ships…

The asteroid belts became my fallback line. With less ground to lose. I moved to entrench myself. Asteroid by asteroid, burrowing and spreading myself wherever I could.

My fleet count dropped below one thousand. Their combat numbers climbed—hauliers alone exceeding two thousand, with a military fleet maintaining less than five hundred at last count.

There was only one choice left adapt at all costs.

I designed a new drone the caretaker class. It was compact, fast, and capable of localized treatment where biomass production could no longer function efficiently. My existing pods were too complex to deploy everywhere.

Everything that could be recycled, from wounded or dead drones to captive clones was stripped of every spare ounce of biomass.

Statistically, if no new variables presented themselves, I could hold the belts for another two local seasons. Enough time to generate new ships, maybe even a new class of ships.

And yet… one detail persisted.

Veridia.

It was not mentioned in any reports.

Aegirarch had burned every other world to ash, but Veridia was left. I don't believe it was overlooked.

That only brought more questions than answers.

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