Night once again claimed the battlefield. The darkness, thick and almost palpable, descended upon the land, concealing the horror and death beneath its shroud. After the rout of the night raid, silence fell. But it was not the silence of peace. It was the quiet before a final, decisive blow.

  "Comrade Senior Lieutenant, thermals are clear, no movement," a spotter reported from the trench.

  Senior Lieutenant Orlov, taking cover behind the parapet, tightened his grip on the radio.

  "Cease fire. Looks like that was their final death throe," his voice was weary. "To the Akatsiyas, saturate grid square 'North Gate.' Suppressing fire. Begin artillery prep."

  "Roger that!"

  A few minutes later, the silence exploded. From positions located six miles from the city, "Koalitsiya-SV" self-propelled howitzers opened up. The sky to the east was lit with ghostly flashes, and a moment later, a firestorm descended upon the northern fortifications of Jeen-Haark. The earth shuddered. 152-millimeter shells effortlessly crushed stone walls, turning centuries-old fortifications to dust.

  On the observation deck of the main tower of Castle Haark.

  General Patagene and Archmage Yamirei watched in horror. Huge pillars of fire erupted from the ground, devouring the walls of their capital. Each explosion sent a tremor through the floor beneath their feet.

  "It all comes down to tonight," Patagene rasped.

  He turned to his officers, and his eyes no longer held fear—only a cold, deadly resolve.

  "EVERYONE! Everyone who can hold a weapon! To the north gate! The Guard, the militia, the watch! Everyone! Long-range communications operators—to me! Immediately!"

  "Yes, sir!"

  A few minutes later, three signalmen, bending under the weight, dragged a bulky device that resembled an early 20th-century radio set toward him. It was an advanced model of a manacomm, purchased for an astronomical sum from the Parpaldia Empire, capable of transmitting messages for hundreds of miles.

  "Contact the Western Military District! General Smark!" Patagene commanded. "Relay this: the capital is under assault. The enemy is using weapons of unheard-of power. I am ordering him to immediately withdraw all troops from the western borders and force-march to the capital! This is a king's order!"

  He knew it was a desperate move. To leave the western borders exposed was to invite invasion from other predatory nations. But that didn't matter now. They had to survive. Survive this night. And throw everything they had left into this final, suicidal battle.

  "Ready, General!" an operator reported as the amplifier crystal on the manacomm began to glow with a steady, blue light.

  Patagene snatched the transmitting amulet from him.

  "Rando, this is Patagene. Do you read me?"

  A calm but tense voice came from the crystal:

  "I read you, General."

  "The north gate has fallen," Patagene began without preamble. "The enemy will be in the city soon. You and your Royal Guard have been granted the honor of being the final line of defense. Protect the king. To your last breath."

  "Understood, General," there was no fear or despair in Captain Rando's voice. Only a cold resolve. "No enemy shall pass while I live. Good luck to you… on the walls."

  The connection was cut.

  In the palace, Captain Rando lowered his communication amulet. He stood on a balcony and looked to the north, where the fiery glow from the artillery barrage painted the clouds a bloody color. He could hear the roar of explosions and the distant, barely discernible screams. Taking a heavy breath, he turned to his guardsmen, formed up in the marble hall. These were the kingdom's finest warriors, hereditary knights whose families had served the throne for centuries.

  "All hands, take positions at His Majesty's chambers!" his voice, like the clang of a sword on a shield, echoed off the walls.

  "YES, SIR!" the guardsmen answered in unison, and there was no fear in their voices. Only duty.

  Walking down the corridor, Rando noticed two frightened maids huddled in a niche behind a tapestry. He stopped.

  "Follow me," his voice was firm, but not cruel. "If the enemy breaks through, even your lives may be needed to protect the king."

  The girls, without a second thought, scrambled after him, clinging to his confidence as if it were the last hope in a collapsing world.

  At the same time, on the ruins of the northern wall, General Patagene and Archmage Yamirei stood at the head of the capital's last defenders. These were the remnants of the guard, the city militia, a few hundred surviving knights—everyone they could gather. They stared into the darkness, at the plain where the artillery bombardment was already subsiding. They knew that now, after the firestorm, the assault would begin.

  "For Louria!" Patagene said, drawing his sword. "And for the king!"

  And thousands of voices, full of despair and fury, answered him. They knew this night would be their last. But they were ready to meet their fate.

  The night, dark and moonless, became the stage for the final act of the tragedy. From the northern gates, shattered by artillery, poured a stream of defenders. In the uneven light of the fires blazing on the walls, their armor cast sinister glints. This was an army from another time—foot soldiers with heavy shields and maces, halberdiers, archers. A desperate, doomed mass of men, marching to their deaths.

  Inside the T-90M command tank, Senior Lieutenant Orlov watched this scene through the thermal imager screen. Thousands of warm, bright figures filled the plain.

  "Shit…" he muttered. "Where the hell are we supposed to bury all of you?"

  He keyed the radio.

  "Akatsiyas, this is Berkut-1. Grid square seven-zero-four. Fire for effect with high-explosive fragmentation. Suppress."

  Then he switched to the internal comms.

  "All 'Boxes.' Fire with coaxial machine guns. Do not let them get closer than five hundred meters. Area denial fire."

  In that same instant, far behind the tanks, the night sky lit up with flashes. A few seconds later, a fiery hell was unleashed upon the advancing Lourian ranks. 152mm shells detonated in the thick of the crowd, their shrapnel scything through men like grass. But the survivors, driven by a fanatical fury, continued to advance, stepping over the bodies of their comrades.

  At their head, formed in a wedge, marched the battlemages. They chanted in unison, and a shimmering, pale-green dome began to form above their heads—a magic shield capable of deflecting arrows and even withstanding a direct hit from a ballista.

  "Clever bastards," gunner Kovalev spat, laying his crosshairs on the center of the mage formation.

  Another shell, arriving from the heavens, exploded a few yards from the shield. The shockwave, equivalent to hundreds of pounds of TNT, made the magic barrier flicker and crack. A piece of shrapnel, a red-hot chunk of steel the size of a fist, pierced the weakened field and buried itself in the neck of a young mage. His eyes widened in shock, he choked on blood, and his death rattle broke the synchronicity of the spell. The shield collapsed.

  And at that moment, the heavy-caliber "Kord" machine guns opened up on them. Scarlet 12.7mm tracers tore into the unprotected ranks of the mages, ripping their bodies to shreds.

  This wasn't a battle. This was a slaughter.

  The darkness of the night concealed the true scale of the losses, and the rear ranks, unable to see what was happening up front, continued to plod forward blindly, pushing their comrades into the meat grinder of fire. They were a river, inexorably flowing towards its own complete and final annihilation.

  At the same time, in the sky over the burning Jeen-Haark, to the deafening, eardrum-shattering accompaniment of artillery working somewhere on the outskirts, a flight of four Mi-8AMTSh "Terminator" transport-attack helicopters raced towards their target at treetop level, in terrain-hugging mode. Painted in a light-absorbing matte black with their running lights off, they were almost invisible against the dark, smoke-filled sky.

  Inside the lead machine, the air was thick with the smell of heated avionics, kerosene, and sweat. The red light of the emergency lighting cast eerie shadows on the tense, focused figures.

  "Krestel, this is Sokol-1. Ground forces have engaged the enemy at the northern wall. Your corridor is clear. Time on station is fifteen minutes. Over and out," the calm, almost indifferent voice of General Voronov came through the pilots' flight helmets.

  "Sokol-1, roger that. Fifteen minutes for the whole op," the helicopter group commander replied just as calmly.

  He turned to the Spetsnaz team leader, seated in the troop compartment. Their faces were hidden behind black balaclavas and anti-fragmentation visors.

  "Alright, eagles, listen up! Insertion in the palace garden, LZ 'Jasmine.' Entry through the kitchen complex. Move fast, move quiet. Any resistance is to be suppressed immediately and without hesitation, we're using suppressors. Primary target is objective 'Crown.' Capture and immediate evac. Questions?"

  "None, sir!" the operators answered in a chorus, but quietly, as they checked their weapon mounts and gear.

  A few minutes later, the helicopters, like giant predatory dragonflies, hovered sixty feet above the palace garden. Down thick ropes, like drops of black rain, twelve Spetsnaz operators slid silently to the ground, one after another. The last man in the group unclipped the rope and, touching his helmet, gave the pilots the signal. The helicopters, without delay, immediately pulled away, taking up positions for fire support.

  The team, having checked each other and established sectors of fire, melted into the shadows of the well-tended but now fear-and-scorch-scented bushes and marble statues.

  The operation to decapitate Haark Lourian's regime had begun. And for the king, who at that very moment, listening to the distant roar of battle, arrogantly believed himself to be perfectly safe, the hours of his life on the throne were already numbered.

  In the royal palace kitchen, several guards from the king's personal detail were anxiously listening to the din outside. The distant explosions at the northern walls seemed like something far away, unrelated to them. They were sure the enemy was still far from the castle walls and allowed themselves to relax over a mug of ale.

  "Hope General Patagene can hold those devils back," one muttered.

  "Don't worry, our walls…" the second began, but never finished.

  The massive oak door leading to the courtyard did not open. It imploded inward, exploding into splinters from a shaped charge. Through the opening, shrouded in smoke, five figures in black armor burst in. The muffled pops of suppressed assault rifles echoed. Seven Lourian guardsmen, dressed in the finest armor, collapsed onto the stone floor without even drawing their swords. Their steel was useless against 9mm armor-piercing rounds.

  The Spetsnaz moved like a single, deadly organism. One of the operators, armed with a suppressed AMB-17 assault rifle, noticed movement in the shadows behind the cauldrons. A short, precise burst—and another guardsman, who was trying to cast a spell, fell dead with a perforated chest.

  "Confirm kills," the team leader ordered. The operators checked each fallen guard with the standard protocol — pulse check, weapon secured. Two were still alive; they were zip-tied and left against the wall. There was no time for more than that.

  The question of magical revival had been discussed in the pre-mission briefing. The intelligence assessment was that high-level resurrection required specialized personnel, equipment, and preparation time measured in hours. In the context of an active assault operation, the practical risk was low. The team leader had filed this assessment and moved on.

  "Clear," one of the operators reported, peering into the next corridor.

  "Moving on. One hundred meters to the throne room."

  The Spetsnaz team moved through the castle corridors like ghosts. Their footsteps, clad in tactical boots with soft soles, were almost silent on the marble floor. They did not move in a clump, but in a dispersed chain, controlling every turn, every intersection of the corridors.

  At the same time, in the royal chambers, Captain Rando, commander of the Royal Guard, listened to the reports, his face growing darker and darker.

  "The kitchen post has been wiped out… the team in the east wing isn't responding…" He realized that the enemy had not just penetrated the castle. They were moving through it with surgical precision.

  "Operator! Get me General Patagene, now! Report: enemy in the palace! Small assault team! Target is His Majesty! Requesting immediate reinforcements! If they hit them from the rear from the city side, we can trap them in a pincer!"

  "Yes, sir!"

  Meanwhile, the Spetsnaz were already on the third floor. A massive, bronze-clad door led to the throne room.

  "We're in position," the team leader whispered into his throat mic.

  The sniper's voice came back from one of the castle towers they had cleared on their way up:

  "Filin is on station. I see thermal signatures behind the door. At least ten. Not moving. Looks like an ambush."

  "Copy that, Filin. We proceed as planned."

  Two operators attached a small plastic charge to the door. The commander gestured for the others to take positions. There was a dull, muffled thump, and the massive door, torn from its hinges, crashed inward.

  The Spetsnaz, using flashbangs, stormed the hall. After a blinding flash and a deafening roar, they saw a strange scene. In the middle of the hall, trembling with fear, stood two young maids.

  "P-please, don't! We beg you!"

  The Spetsnaz froze. Their rifles were aimed down, but their fingers were on the triggers.

  The sniper's voice was already in the team leader's earpiece before the doors finished falling: "Filin. I have a single armed figure, center of hall, silver hair, moving toward your position. Two more armed behind the columns left and right. Three additional positions I can't confirm."

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  The team leader processed this in approximately one second. The man walking toward them was a professional soldier doing a professional thing — buying time for the flanks to get into position. The team leader had done this himself, in different rooms, on a different world.

  "Filin, take the figure on my mark. All operators, columns left and right on my mark."

  The man with silver hair stopped walking. Something in the team leader's posture, or perhaps some professional instinct of his own, told him that his approach had been read.

  He was right. It did not help him.

  "Mark."

  The engagement was over in four seconds. The echoes took longer to die than the participants.

  The two maids who had been standing near the throne had dropped to the floor at the first shot and were still there, not moving, which was the correct decision. The team leader gave them a brief assessment — unarmed, non-threatening — and moved on.

  "Clear. Moving to primary objective."

  The guardsmen, stunned and demoralized by how their commander had been annihilated by an unseen force, charged desperately from behind the columns. But their attack was no longer a furious rush, but a death spasm.

  "Contact from the flanks! Fall back to the stairs! Suppressing fire!" the Spetsnaz team leader commanded.

  Moving back-to-back like a single mechanism, the operators began to withdraw towards the stairs, hosing the corridors with fire. One of them, armed with a GM-94 grenade launcher, fired a shot. The grenade, hitting the wall, exploded, filling the space with a thick, acrid cloud of tear gas.

  The guardsmen, unaccustomed to such weapons, began to cough and go blind, their attack faltering.

  "Frag out!" the commander shouted.

  Another operator threw an RGD-5 grenade into the cloud of gas. The roar of the explosion shook the entire floor, and the shockwave and shrapnel turned the cluster of disoriented guardsmen into a bloody mess.

  When the smoke cleared, bodies lay on the marble floor amidst the debris and shell casings. The two maids, huddled in a corner, were sobbing, their faces buried in their hands. The commander gave them a short, indifferent glance and turned away.

  "Clear," one of the operators reported curtly, checking the side corridors.

  The commander surveyed the battlefield.

  "Reload. Regroup at the main door."

  The Spetsnaz, changing magazines, gathered at the massive, gold-clad doors bearing the royal crest—a roaring lion. Behind these doors, according to intelligence, was their primary objective.

  "Get ready. We go in on my signal," the commander's voice was perfectly calm. "Remember, we need the objective alive. But if he or his guards resist—act according to the situation. A dead king is also a result."

  Castle Haark. The Throne Room.

  King Haark Lourian XXXIV sat on his throne, gripping the polished obsidian armrests so tightly his knuckles turned white. The muffled, sharp pops of gunfire behind the massive doors were getting closer, and with each one, he flinched. He could feel an icy lump of fear rising from his stomach, constricting his throat.

  King Haark Lourian XXXIV was not doing anything when they found him. He was sitting on his throne with his hands on the armrests, looking at the door. He had been sitting like that for some time. He had heard the fighting get closer, corridor by corridor, and had made no move to flee, because there was nowhere to go that the sound could not follow, and because—though he would never have admitted this to anyone—he understood that running was not what kings did when the end came.

  He had prepared something to say. He had spent the last twenty minutes composing it in his head: a statement, a condemnation of these outsiders who had come to destroy what he had built, a final declaration of what Louria was and would remain. It was a good statement. He believed in it.

  When the doors came apart and the black-armored figures entered, he opened his mouth.

  One of them crossed the room in four steps and hit him with the stock of his weapon, precisely and without anger, in the solar plexus. The statement did not happen. There was no air left for it.

  BA-BOOM!

  The throne room doors, clad in iron and reinforced with magic, couldn't hold. They didn't open. They exploded inward, disintegrating into thousands of splinters from a directional shaped charge.

  Through the opening, shrouded in smoke, five figures entered. Their armor was black, matte, light-absorbing. Their helmets, solid, faceless, with four glowing green optics of their night vision devices, made them look like demons from ancient legends. In their hands, they held short black "staves"—weapons that did not cry out or cast spells, but only spat quiet, merciless death.

  One of them, obviously the commander, swept the hall with a quick, professional gaze, his eyes lingering on the king for only a fraction of a second.

  "Objective in sight." The team leader's voice through the vocoder was level. He scanned the throne room — one figure, seated, no immediate threat. He noted that the man was sitting upright with his hands on the armrests. Not cowering. Not running.

  He had arrested twelve people in his career who knew they were about to be arrested. Half of them ran. Half of them sat and waited like this. He had never been able to decide which response was more dignified.

  "Take him. We're moving."

  The king's mind frantically searched for an escape. Run? Scream? Use royal magic? But his body, paralyzed with terror, refused to obey.

  His thoughts were cut short when one of the black-clad demons approached him and, without any deference, delivered a short, brutal buttstroke with his rifle to his ribs. The pain was blinding. Humiliating. It knocked the air and the arrogance out of him.

  His arms were wrenched behind his back, and the cold, hard steel bracelets they called "handcuffs" clicked shut on his wrists. This was not just the end of his power. This was the end of his world. And he didn't even see the faces of his executioners.

  "Yes, sir!" the other four responded loudly, and the sharp unison made Lourian flinch in surprise.

  These words echoed through the empty hall like a mocking confirmation of his impotence. They lifted him and, as if he were a weightless child, began to drag him out of the hall. He tried to resist, but it was useless. He, the king, was being dragged through his own palace like a common captive, prodded with weapons he still couldn't understand—were they magical or something entirely alien?

  Lourian saw scenes of destruction flash by: the bodies of his guardsmen were everywhere. Their gleaming armor, once the symbols of Louria's might, were now spattered with blood and grime. Among them, he recognized his captain, Rando. His headless body lay in an absurd pose by a column. The sight made Lourian's stomach turn. A wave of nausea rose in his gut, but he clenched his teeth, not allowing the weakness to escape.

  His fingers trembled, his legs barely held him. He was no longer a king, but simply a man being led to the slaughter.

  When the first light of the morning sun penetrated through the stained-glass windows of the palace, Lourian was brought out into the courtyard, where a huge black monster—something resembling a giant insect—was waiting on the lawn. This metal creature emitted a low roar, as if warning that it was ready to take off.

  He was shoved inside. The space inside the machine was cramped and oppressive. A few moments more, and Lourian felt the stability of the earth disappear from beneath his feet. The creature shuddered and lifted into the sky, carrying him—the king of Louria, the master of Rodenius—away.

  He looked out the porthole as his once-majestic palace shrank in size until it became just a speck on the horizon. Tears burned his eyes, but he did not allow himself to cry. A mixture of hatred, fear, and despair boiled within him.

  It was the end of his era. But what lay ahead? A question to which Lourian no longer sought an answer.

  When the first rays of the cold, indifferent sun broke through the torn clouds, they illuminated a vision of hell. The battlefield before the walls of Jeen-Haark had become a monstrous tapestry woven from mud, blood, and steel. Thousands of bodies in mangled armor covered the ground, their poses unnatural and horrific. The earth was scarred with craters, from which steam rose like a final breath.

  The surviving Lourians, dazed and shell-shocked, slowly came to their senses. They rose from behind the piles of their comrades' bodies, their gazes empty. Shock gave way to realization. The realization of a complete, absolute, and humiliating defeat.

  Panic, previously held in check by the fury of battle, overwhelmed them. Dropping their swords and shields, they, stumbling over the bodies of the dead, fled in terror back towards the city walls, which they had believed would save them. Their cries—cries of horror, pain, and madness—mixed with the moans of the wounded.

  The air was heavy and thick with the smell of scorch, blood, excrement, and the ozone left by the explosions.

  Against this human tragedy, motionless as ancient idols, stood the war machines of the Russian Federation. Their hulls, covered in dust and soot, seemed like black silhouettes against the dawn sky. The tanks and self-propelled howitzers, which had poured a steel rain on the enemy all night, were silent. Their barrels, still hot, were aimed away from the retreating forces.

  "Cease fire," Senior Lieutenant Orlov's voice on the tank intercom was tired. "They're broken."

  The mechanisms of the artillery pieces fell silent. The deafening cannonade, which had not stopped for several hours, ceased. And in this sudden quiet, sounds that were more terrifying than any explosions became audible. The groans and whimpers of the wounded, scattered across the entire field. This chorus of pain and despair, amplified by the morning acoustics, reached even the armored vehicles.

  Private Sinitsyn, in the troop compartment of a BMP, listened to the sounds from the field and said nothing. There was nothing appropriate to say.

  Sergeant Nikitin, sitting beside him, was filling out an ammunition expenditure form on a waterproof notepad. He had been filling it out for the last four minutes, during which the sounds from the field had not changed. He did not comment on the sounds. He finished the form and started the next one.

  Sinitsyn watched him and understood that this was also an answer.

  Senior Lieutenant Orlov watched the chaotic flight of the remnants of the enemy army. There was no triumph or pity in his gaze. Only a heavy weariness.

  "All crews. Check ammo, report vehicle status. Prepare a consolidated report for HQ," he ordered dryly over the radio.

  The battle for Jeen-Haark, which had become a bloody lesson for all of Rodenius, was over. There was no room for elation on this field where two eras had collided.

  When the shattered remnants of the army returned to Jeen-Haark, they brought with them not just the news of defeat. They brought a plague. A plague of despair.

  The streets of the capital, just yesterday proud and arrogant, filled with the wails of widows and orphans. The patience of the people, exhausted by six years of war preparations and exorbitant taxes, snapped. Food riots began. Mobs of commoners, armed with whatever they could find, began to loot warehouses and the homes of wealthy aristocrats.

  A part of the surviving Royal Guard, loyal to their oath, tried to suppress the uprising. But the soldiers, who had just seen their brothers erased by unknown gods, had no will to shed the blood of their own people. They hated themselves for every blow struck in defense of a dying regime.

  The central squares of the capital turned into public execution sites. The instigators of the riots were hung from lampposts like sinister garlands. But this no longer frightened anyone. It only added fuel to the fire of hatred.

  The Kingdom of Louria was devouring itself from within.

  When the first Russian mechanized infantry units, exercising extreme caution, entered the city, they were met with a scene of total collapse. The once-splendid capital had turned into a hellscape. Burning houses, barricades on the streets, bodies of the dead. And silence. A terrifying silence, broken only by distant cries and weeping.

  The surviving representatives of the Lourian elite—Archmage Yamirei, General Patagene, and Prime Minister Maus—barricaded themselves in a surviving wing of the castle and tried to take responsibility for what was left of the state. They were hastily preparing an act of unconditional surrender, to save at least the capital from complete destruction.

  But it was already too late. News of the army's rout and the king's capture had spread throughout the kingdom. The powerful vassals—dukes and marquises whom King Haark had held in an iron fist for years—tasted freedom. They began to loudly declare their sovereignty, refusing to submit to the capital. Yesterday's allies became the bitterest of enemies. A bloody struggle for the division of the lands, castles, and resources of the dying kingdom began.

  The chaos that followed the army's collapse was not unexpected. The Russian advance command had planning documents for this phase — they called it the "administrative vacuum period" — and had assigned a team specifically to it. The team consisted of three colonels, two SVR analysts, and a civilian from the Presidential Administration whose exact title was unclear but whose authority was not.

  What they found in the first seventy-two hours was a kingdom that had been held together by one man's will, and that man was now in a holding facility at Forward Base Sloboda awaiting transfer. Without him, the mechanism had stopped. The dukes who had spent six years resenting Haark's centralization now had their opportunity, and they took it with the speed of people who had been waiting a long time.

  The Russian approach was not announced. It did not need to be. The team simply began making contact, one duke at a time, starting with the three who controlled the most militarily significant territory. The conversations were short and the terms were identical for each: formal recognition of sovereignty, Russian protection from neighboring powers, and a trade partnership. In exchange: demilitarization above a defined threshold, basing rights for Russian forces, and resource development agreements with Russian state partners.

  Four of the five accepted within the week. The fifth held out for eleven days before accepting the same terms with one additional clause that the team granted without difficulty, because it cost nothing and it allowed the duke to tell his people he had negotiated something.

  The monarchy was not abolished by Russian decree. The question of the monarchy simply did not arise again, because the people who would have reinstated it were either in custody or had signed documents that precluded it.

  The demilitarization was systematic. Heavy cavalry, siege equipment, and organized combat magic were registered, then decommissioned. The process took longer than planned because the logistics of collecting and destroying medieval siege engines at scale turned out to be unexpectedly complicated. One of the colonels wrote a dry note about this in his field report that was later quoted in a military academy paper on post-conflict administration.

  The returned soldiers — the ones who came back from the sea, from the fields, from the holding facilities — mostly went home. Most wanted nothing except to find out if their families were intact. Some did not find intact families. The grief of those men became, over the following years, one of the primary recruitment sources for the resistance cells that the SVR was already tracking.

  This was anticipated. It was in the planning documents.

  What was not in the planning documents — what no one had modeled — was the question of what Qua-Toyne would think about all of it. They had asked for help against Louria. They had received it. The help had been thorough.

  Kanata had read every field report as it came in. He had approved the humanitarian coordination deployment. He had signed the joint administration agreement for the transitional period.

  He had also, quietly, asked Rinsui to compile a complete inventory of every Russian base, every Russian basing-rights agreement, every Russian resource extraction contract on the former Lourian territory.

  The inventory was sixty-three pages long. Rinsui delivered it without comment. Kanata read it without comment. He filed it next to the question that Elder Taviss had asked at the council meeting — the one that had been entered into the record — and neither of them had answered yet.

  The news of the crushing, almost apocalyptic defeat of the Kingdom of Louria spread across the world like wildfire. Throughout the Rodenius continent and beyond, in the lands "Outside the Civilized Regions," a reverent terror took hold.

  And when this news, distorted by rumors but no less terrifying for it, reached the Parpaldia Empire, for the first time in a hundred years, they understood that their world had changed. Some vassal kings, who had long chafed under Parpaldia's rule, saw this as an opportunity. Others, wiser, understood that a new, unknown player had appeared on the geopolitical board, playing by its own, completely incomprehensible and frightening rules.

  In the Parpaldia Empire, the dispatch from the Rodenius observer network reached the Department of External Affairs at the second hour past noon. Analyst Ferris read it, wrote a three-line summary, and placed it in the Director's folder without adding any commentary.

  The summary said: The Kingdom of Louria has ceased to exist as a sovereign state. Duration of Russian military operation from first contact to political resolution: approximately four months. Russian military casualties confirmed: zero.

  He did not add a conclusion. The numbers were their own conclusion.

  The surviving wing of Castle Haark. Three days after the fall.

  Archmage Yamirei sat in a small study that had belonged, until three days ago, to the castle's chief librarian. The librarian had fled during the chaos of the first night. Yamirei had moved in because it had books, a desk, and a window that faced east and therefore did not look at the ruins of the north wall.

  On the desk in front of him were twelve pages of notes. He had been writing them since the morning after the city fell, compiling everything he had observed over the course of the campaign into a systematic record. The fireballs that had not reached the aircraft. The artillery that fired from ten kilometers without mana. The weapons that moved through the air and corrected their course. The shields on the soldiers' helmets that the mages' detection spells could not penetrate.

  He was a scientist first, a court official second. He had always been this way, though the court had never quite understood it.

  On the twelfth page, he had written three headings:

  What I I observed but cannot I believe, with uncertain confidence.

  The first section was very short. The second was eight pages. The third was one line:

  They are not using magic. They are using something that functions like magic but operates on principles we do not have access to. The difference matters.

  A Russian officer had come the previous day to inform him that the archmage's cooperation with the transitional administration would be valued, and that his expertise in magical systems would be of particular interest to certain specialists who would be arriving within the month. The officer had been polite and entirely opaque about what this meant in practice.

  Yamirei had said he would cooperate. He had meant it.

  He picked up his pen and started the thirteenth page.

  What I would like to ask them, if they will answer:

  Qua-Toyne Principality. The Capital. Lotus Garden Residence.

  Rinsui's final report on the Lourian operation was forty-one pages. Kanata read it in one sitting, which was unusual for him. He usually read long reports in sections.

  The report was organized into four parts: military outcome, political structure of the successor states, economic agreements signed, and what Rinsui called "implications for Qua-Toyne's strategic position." The fourth part was eleven pages and was the reason Kanata had not put the report down.

  The key paragraph read:

  The Russian Federation has, within a period of four months from first military contact, eliminated the primary strategic threat to Qua-Toyne's existence, established five client states on Louria's former territory, secured basing rights on the Rodenius continent's western approaches, and negotiated resource extraction agreements covering approximately sixty percent of the known mineral deposits in the region. All of this has been accomplished without requiring Qua-Toyne's active participation, and largely without requesting our input.

  This outcome is, without question, favorable to our immediate security situation. The Lourian threat is resolved. Our borders are secure. We are no longer facing an existential military threat.

  The question that requires the Council's attention is what we are now facing instead.

  Kanata set down the report.

  He looked at the lotus pond. The flowers were blooming. The water was still. It was a pleasant morning, the kind of morning that the Lotus Garden was designed to produce, to give the people who worked here the mental space to think clearly.

  He thought about the question Elder Taviss had asked, the one he had not answered. He thought about the sixty-three-page inventory of Russian bases and agreements. He thought about the fact that the war had ended faster than anyone had predicted, which meant Russia had capabilities they had not fully demonstrated. And he thought about Sokolov's three objectives, stated in this room months ago: security, resources, and information.

  Russia had, in four months, made significant progress on all three.

  He picked up his pen. He wrote, at the top of a new page: What we have. What we can offer. What we cannot afford to lose.

  He would need to answer these questions before the next meeting with Sokolov.

  He would need to answer them carefully.