The wisps and whines of the colossal triangle buzzed the air with the noise of souls, each of them distinct, groaning in sheer exhaustion. Even several kilometers of distance failed to mute the combined magnitude of their voices. Some troops blocked their ears with earplugs or blared static through headphones.

It was only through her own headpiece that Anastasia heard Xeshna.

“‘Stasia, how’re you liking the music?” Xeshna yelled over the howling and screaming wind.

“This is worse than Zudrian electronica…” yeah, bet you people are dancing to this right now. Fucking tasteless psychedelic hacks!

“You’re right! Baby I’ve got something big!” she screeched lyrics by an inexplicably popular Zudrian rapper that she inexplicably loved. To make matters worse, her high pitched voice tried mimicking autotune. “Anyways! These things are walls, and we have to b-b-break it!” Was she kidding? “You go on ahead!”

“What?” Anastasia replied. Honestly, what was Xeshna even saying? Anastasia, of all people, was to go alone to that crystalline menace contraption and try to fight it? And do what? Kick it? The Assassin Queen swallowed. Had Xeshna not saved her only moments ago from the most recent of that thing's spawns? Had she not seen Anastasia seconds from death? The warriors that revived under that thing’s influence came back to life just as dangerous as before they died. Was Xeshna scraping the bottom of the barrel now? Any other member of the so-called Shadow Clan would be more useful. Perhaps the black hole twins? Solares? Delilah? Mei? Anyone?

But they were far and away from here, fighting their own points in such a messy, complicated battle. Nevermind the Deathless Emperor, his troops were even more of a problem thanks to sheer numbers and rate of replenishment.

“Xeshna,” Anastasia shouted at the Nashiyega woman, earning an attentive stare from the latter’s unaged face adorned with eyes surrounded by sclera darker than the void of space, “how am I going to break that thing? Forget that, how am I even going to survive long enough to reach it?”

Xeshna’s lips twisted upward, muscles stretched into a smile impossible for most organic life, even the zombies. “You use blunt-fucking force, my assassin bitch. And all of the speed you’ve got left in you. And frankly—” A hand tipped with claws sharper than a needle and sturdier than a block of marble held a swelling sphere of wisping, purple gas. She discharged the dark energy to the side of her as another of the revived warriors rose to meet its immediate doom. “—you give it everything you got!”

“That’s all?” Anastasia’s eyes, wide open, reflected the purple of the enormous psionic crystals, but the slender Nashiyega siren in front of her only nudged their own head toward the tower. “Xeshna, you can’t be serious.”

“Never been more serious since castrating slaveowners, sis.”

A strange comparison. Xeshna never seemed to approach slaveowner mutilation with any amount of gravitas.

“Look at me,” Xeshna seized Anastasia’s face between her hands, “I’m tired of hearing stuff like, ‘but the big, scary apocalypse machines!’ Blah, blah, motherfucking blah! This is the type of shit that holds us back from realizing what we can truly do. I thought I had an Assassin Queen next to me?”

Anastasia blinked. “You do. That’s the problem. An assassin, not a fucking tank.” She was met with a quizzical look. “Are you making fun of me?”

“I trust my gut, and know that you’re the ace of spades in this deck of cards. I know you won’t let us down. Gonna prove you deserve that title, Assassin Queen?”

“Fine. I’ll trust you. You better be right!”

Xeshna grinned, “You know I’m right, it’s why nobody plays poker against me.”

The Assassin Queen gauged the wind, felt it nudge her fingers, watched it kick clouds of sand into the air. She closed her eyes, pumping spirit energy into her limbs. Prove that Xeshna isn’t wrong, trust her with everything I have. As unreasonable as the thought of that sounded, something about the words said to her rang true. Anastasia did not believe herself to be capable of single handedly disrupting a precursor civilization’s most important tactical positions, yet Xeshna did.

There was just something Lady X knew about the Assassin Queen that she herself did not.

Anastasia’s heels kicked into gear, pounding the terrain like a hammer and propelling her to an instant high velocity. The nanosand gathered and flew around, clumping into shapes, but the winds on the Assassin Queen’s tail blew them apart. Faster, faster, faster, she gained more speed with each millisecond spent focusing on the legs and soul. If she kept going like this, she was in danger of overload, but all that mattered was the nanosand tearing its own formation to shreds with every step.

Islands of crust in a sea of magma jolted against each other in response to her legs pushing off them in her accelerating dash.

If anyone looked down from above, they would’ve seen a thin cone blasting through a black sea.

* * *

"Fine then," Solares's voice brought her attention away from those thoughts, "time to use less than one percent of my power… in case some people need extra defense later."

“In case some people need extra defense,” Delilah mimicked, “don’t tell me you’re playing save the princess here. Still not a princess, Sagittari!”

Sagittari—whose head had snapped up in their direction—now looked crestfallen.

“Nonsense,” Solares gave a malevolent eye-smile, “Do you know any princesses—or queens—in this clan who could possibly play the princess role in that setting? Even if you were carried off, I’d worry for your kidnapper… if I weren’t so eager to watch you tear their flesh. In fact, I would say you are close to my strength—but not quite there.”

The Assassin Queen punched her brother in the shoulder. "Just get to work, Matty." He stopped smiling at ‘Matty,’ “besides, we know the mighty Solares spoils his baby sister.” She pouted, widened her eyes, and wiped her cheeks clean of invisible tears. Thus began the sound of Solares grumbling to himself. What a sucker.

"And as such, no one in this army takes me seriously," Solares moped. He then squinted and pointed his index finger at the widening event horizons of the black hole twins behind, "Keep them wide!"

Lasers from his fingertips screeched into the black holes, disappearing upon entry. Lifting her gaze to search for the wormhole’s exit, Anastasia found it almost immediately: those same white lasers emerged from a particularly dark piece of sky, hitting their marks with devastating precision. Explosions rocked the sky itself.

A set of engineers were drawn from their work, watching as Solares blasted lasers into the event horizon, shifting their gaze upward in the same fashion to witness the end of Zudrian projectiles in the dozens. They broke into cheers, clapping their hands with jubilation and hope. Anastasia smiled, but the King of Demons turned to give them a glare, freezing them in place and they did the only thing they thought possible.

They saluted him.

Sure they don’t take you seriously, Matty, the Assassin Queen snickered into her palm, you and your.... broken ego sure are something.

"Okay, Cruvelia!" Sagittari held a right hand behind a black hole whilst the left gestured toward the Alliance engineers around her. "Bash them one by one! Show Zudra how the war is won!"

Despite having returned to work shortly after their king’s glare, they stopped for a moment to cheer in response. For their… princess. Sagittari may have learned the right lessons from the Iron Hand’s war speeches, which consistently succeeded at getting everyone excited to blow up foreigners.

"Every, single war," Solares deadpanned in a brief interlude between volleys, "they always start with the missiles first!”

“And then set the livestock on fire!” Sagittari lilted. The Deathless Wars might have made her a little too happy about this. Did Solares rub off on her? “Makes me wonder just how they feed themselves… even including their synthetic, so-called foods.”

The memory of Zudrian Imperial food jumped in Anastasia’s gut. From her experience, the food came out of a factory that still ran on coal, on poorer planets where sentient beings were valued lower than the coal itself. Sacrifices were required when prioritizing cheap labor but Zudrian imperial-sponsored meat tasted like… charcoal.

"First of all, don’t talk to me about Zudrian food," Delilah joined in the conversation and fired a string of her own lasers into Fomalhaut’s void, "you’re talking to a farm gal here with high culinary standards. Zudra does still need food for its premium products—you know, the stuff that goes to nobles, businessmen and their sycophants. It’s still really stupid for them to burn all their food."

"So this whole time, I was raiding factories for gray sludge," Solares absently shot lasers into the void, blasting missiles out of the air one at a time , "when I could have been raiding policemen’s kitchens? Anastasia…what is wrong with you?"

“Wait, I thought you preferred the gray slime puree? You were raiding the factories because you were hungry? Bro, I actually cooked!”

Delilah gasped. “You ate that stuff?”

“Just add water, Delilah.” Solares quoted the commercials from Haven, his voice a mixture of regret and nonchalance, “Add water and the food cooks itself.”

“Food shouldn’t do that. Not even with technology! Was it radioactive or something?”

“I know not, but I did know that I was hungry. So, I settled for their civilian rations for a time.”

“What the fuck! Why!” Anastasia shouted.

As if pausing to ask, “did we get them?” the Zudrian missiles slowed to a trickle for a few moments. In the interlude, Delilah gagged. “You’re lucky to be alive, King Piece. If it cooks itself, it’s likely still inside of you. Its half life is a few hundred thousand years, after all. Do you even still need to eat?” Thoughts of gray slobs pumping from the factory waste tubes sent sweat trickling down the Assassin Queen’s forehead and cheeks. “I’m sure that the curators of this cuisine have an atomic bomb as national Chef Supreme… really captures the patriotic spirit of such a culture.”

“You seem distressed, Anastasia.” Solares chuckled and rubbed his chin as Anastasia narrowed her eyes at him. “You never tried the beef flavor.” That son of a bitch seemed to be trying to get her to share in his pain. His net widened: “Sagittari, you too? I never encountered a TerrestriO’s flavor…” His new target heaved her chest and released a growl. “But I think you would have loved it. I’ll share next time.”

“Fuck you,” responded the black hole princess.

“If you make me vomit,” said Anastasia, “I’m aiming it at you.”

“Please: at my temperatures, it would evaporate before it reached me. You can give it to Delilah instead.”

Delilah didn’t even dignify this comment with a glance.. “Better than the so-called food you are discussing, but no thanks. Though I suspect your intestines are made of orichalcum. That sludge ought to have killed you.” Her attacks lit up a few more pieces of Zudra’s never-ending arsenal.

“Oi! Solares!” Sagittari hollered, bringing the attention of the bickering trio to her indignant stare. “I’m holding these black holes open for you to shoot lasers, not vomit! Though I might throw up if you keep going…” Solares laughed, but didn’t bring up the topic again.

Thank the stars.

* * *

Slam. Crack. Screech. The crystal sparked and whined, crackling electricity flying from the structure and zapping any matter nearby—including her as she arrived. The leg delivering the kick immediately screamed in pain and spasmed involuntarily as the recoil—combined with the electric discharge—sent the Assassin Queen flying back.

All that for a tiny crack.

It would have seemed pointless were it not for the sudden attention it gave her. Nanosand rushed and swirled about the crystalline structure, tossing pebbles and rocks in Anastasia’s direction. One by one, the sand clumped into forms and then flared a blinding white as it yielded a pack of armored warriors.

“Well, shit.”

Meanwhile, the Deathless who were guarding the triangle prior to her arrival were crawling to their feet. Her sonic blast had knocked them aside—and likely broken their eardrums along with a variety of bones—but the Deathless-possessed bodies modified, contorted, and even built themselves replacement parts to revitalize whenever incapacitated.

“Holy… motherfucking…what you did worked… a little too well.” Xeshna crackled over the intercom. “Don’t fucking die on me, sister! We’re coming!” At least her situation was acknowledged.

The horde got to work on her without sparing a millisecond. Swordsmen with flaming weapons cut through the air in her wake as she narrowly dodged, doing her best to guide the slashes toward the crystal tower instead. As if intervening on their behalf, the tower itself fired lightning bolts from the new cracks at both the swelling swarm and the Assassin Queen herself.

Anastasia fell to her knees upon being struck, clutching her heart with shaking hands, and laser weapons opened fire at her position. She rolled on the ground, sinking her blades into the nearest melee attacker and using them to launch herself away from the storm of gunfire.

Then, thunder. It bore no resemblance to the storms on temperate or intemperate planets, or even the storm manipulation class. No, this rumble had a metallic ring to it. When Anastasia looked above, the nanosand flying into the air was forming into black clouds, surrounding the tower from every, single direction. The Assassin Queen continued her defense and furious attacking, the energies of her soul being put to the ultimate test. Alas, the storm announced its arrival by firing multiple arcs of lightning and sand aimed for the area around the crystal; not only did more troops arrive, but a new participant came to play.

Artillery.

“Oh, come on!”

The ground tore apart in her wake, shelled airborne, as a series of near misses kept her alive and outside of explosion radii. However, the cannons were far from done, and in fact even more warheads punched through and thickened the black mist. Even with her suit, Anastasia barely saw anything beyond what came directly for her. Thankfully, her earpieces still worked, muffling the blasts and heightening other sounds.

“Shiuchi, come in!” Xeshna said.

“We’re still alive Lady X, and Deathless fleet numbers have dwindled!” Her admiral’s answer was rapid.

“Excellent, I knew taking you in as mine was a good idea! What do you have near Anasazois?”

“Quite a few, actually. A few dreadnaughts disengaged from the battle and made gungho for the atmosphere of Anasazois.”

Are you kidding me?

“It seemed crucial, so we tailed them with destroyers. What’s down there?”

“Anastasia’s down here and I told her to kick a hornet’s nest.”

“Would that nest involve long–range artillery blindly firing into a black cloud?”

“I want your bombs, not your comedy career!”

“Understood, I’ll punch holes through and under those installations until they can smell the magma. Anastasia, if you’re listening, get as far away as you can. That little storm cloud you’ve kicked up is about to become a lot hotter.”

You don’t need to tell me twice, she thought as she blasted into the darkness, praying for a quick exit. Her prayers weren’t exactly answered. A trio of Zudrians and one Amazon made an unannounced appearance in front of her, their blades glowing with intense heat against the black mist.

“Fuck no, you freaks are dying alone!” the Assassin Queen brought herself to a screeching halt that made the combat boots scream, and not a moment too soon. The “freaks” in question were engulfed in a white beam from above and disintegrated along with the ground. More made known their insistence—and disregard for their own safety in the face of their dreadnought’s friendly fire—by popping out from the mist to either grab at or attack the fleeing assassin. “This is fucking madness!”

As she darted to the edge of the mist, guided by her HUD’s compass, the light at the end of the dark mist grew just a little brighter.

“Look out below! One of those dreadnaughts we’ve been shelling just lost propulsion, and it’s landing right on that storm.”

“Oh, fuck you!”

Even through the dampers in her suit, she could still hear the hull crumpling above her as it descended. With every joule of spirit energy in her soul, the Assassin Queen pumped her legs as if she were a drill going through the ground. The horde folded and turned for her, but she denied them a firm hold on her body. Those that came close enough, had their necks slashed by her blades, leaving only sand and black vital fluid as their remnants.

The edge of the Deathless hurricane grew within eyesight, giving birth to a melting world of magma and ruined equipment. The way out. As Anastasia accelerated, the roaring engines of a massive vehicle consumed even her earpiece’s sound systems in the least calming white noise possible. In her periphery, much smaller aerial vehicles were either fleeing or crashing down from a ship that could have been the size of a skyscraper in the largest cities.

The metal glory of old and ancient teetered over the mist. Its remaining thrusters petered out, and it lurched downward.

Crystal shattered as the tip of the pyramid punctured the dreadnought, expelling shards into the air, and giving the Assassin Queen hundreds more projectiles to dodge. From behind her as she fled the scene, purple fragments whipped past, stabbed, or grazed the skin on their way to splintering onto the heated terrain like a shattered wine glass. Anastasia had no time to look back, but the sound was unmistakable: the crystal still sparked and flung electricity, but it was shattering.

The deed was done.

Her legs barely carrying her, the shards in her back making it difficult to breathe, she found herself swept into the arms of a dark angel once again.

“Xeshna,” she murmured, “always so romantic!”

“I don’t breed with my children, honey. I’m not Zudrian.”

This silly woman, still going on about how the whole Shadow Clan was her brood. Anastasia would accept it, just this once.

* * *

Anastasia stepped away and looked to the sky, where the Shadows’ very own skyborn fireball was firing streaks across the air. It was a beautiful sight, and one she wanted the Alliance to see, but however many fireballs Mei could toss, Zudra seemed capable of sending even more missiles. In fact, they were known for their rare ability to drain their entire economy into weapons manufacturing before the weapons themselves ever ran dry. It was a trait very few empires possessed. Few surviving empires, that is.

At any rate, if she didn't want the Shadow Clan's spirit energy to crash alongside the entire economy on Corona Eternus, she needed to destroy the launch sites.

"Hey, princess!" Anastasia's call was met with a snap of the head by Sagittari. "How far can you shoot your little… wormhole thingies?"

"I'm a politics gal, not a math one…" Sagittari clenched her fist and threw another singularity into the sky, "but… I can throw it… like twenty or so miles from here?"

She'd trust the not-math girl on this one. "Okay, sounds great!" The Assassin Queen's hand gestured toward an area of the sky where a septuplet of missiles were roaring forth. "Standby for coordinates on where these things are coming from!"

A request fired off for coordinates from Watcher 5173.

"You don't want King piece and princess's lasers to hit them?" That comment earned Sagittari a hard stare from Delilah, who should have forgotten their argument from thirty minutes ago, but somehow remembered. "They're doing a good job…"

“Someone just brought up the need to conserve spirit energy, and I am fully in agreement! Now, just focus on something while you wait, like fruit crunchies or whatever else you are into!”

“Excuse me,” Sagittari grew a shade more dangerous to Anastasia’s safety, and it wasn’t through her hugs this time, “Assassin Queen?”

“Then imagine Fabio as a bowl of fruit crunchies?”

“Terrestri’O’s! It’s Terrestri’O’s… now if I have to say it again, you’ll regret it.”

Watcher-5173 was surprisingly expedient: their response pinged Anastasia’s retina with the coordinates of three apparent launch facilities within a twenty mile radius, and it could not have been more than a minute since they were asked. She nodded at Sagittari, who no doubt received the same message and made a ring of tiny black holes around her wrist.

“We know they speak missile, so let’s mute their microphone.” Sagittari said, “Again, I’m not a math girl, but I give them forty seconds.” Sagittari closed her eyes in concentration, and Anastasia had a brief moment of admiring the precision of someone who could aim black holes at a set of coordinates. “Forty seconds after I start this thing, they’ll shut up.” A palm extended, forging a trio of swirling cores within them, and the princess’s gaze lifted to the screaming skies. “Thanks for the targets, you two…”

"So oppressive,” murmured the Solares, who had run idle when Sagittari picked up her new task, shifting from light show to bystander, “you have seized their rights to speech from them, you tyrannical madwoman, you have crossed the line.”

"Se moi le etat!" the human shouted in one of her people’s many sub-dialects of ancient Ecumenist, “They have what rights I give them! And I declare the Twelve Wreath of Zudra illegal by constitutional amendment and these bases decommissioned! Long live the Revolution!”

Changing from playful prodding to a genuine offer of assistance upon hearing of her autocratic aims, Solares puffed his chest and said, "Your new dictatorship sounds fun. Need any help?"

"Hey! King piece came around, eh?” Solares immediately returned to being stony eyed. No he didn’t come around, it was a joke. But Sagittari had already launched into cheerleader mode for the second time tonight. Her voice tense from the focus of shepherding so many projectiles back home into the arms of loving Zudra, "I dream of a crowned republic!" A cluster of missiles extended, stretching against the unstoppable force of her black holes. "Many nations united under one creed!" Anastasia had no clue why the black hole princess was going on some impassioned political rant right now, but she would let that slide. Three missiles winked out within the blackness. "Freedom for all!"

Anastasia wondered if she would hear the explosions when the armaments reached the other sides of these gateways. All she heard right now was: "Zudra will fall! And we will replace you! The empire that always starts with hail before the rain! Wonder what happens when it rains on you?"

“Well, it is quite simple,” Delilah, Solares, and Anastasia turned their attention to Fomalhaut, “they’ll just blame the Amazons for it. Helene exists to give them exactly these kinds of convenient excuses. If not them, then the Cordiserians. The options are limitless.”

“Good one, Fomalhaut,” Solares snickered, “I would prefer you avoid mentioning this in the presence of Queen Helene, since she believes she exists to guide the Amazons to peace and prosperity. Realizing her true purpose was to be a Zudrian propaganda device would shock her too much. But you are too correct. They will blame someone other than… well… let us see, anyone or anything other than their barbaric philosophy?”

“Yeah, we get it boys,” Delilah shrugged, “Zudra is like an angry primate putting a square into a circle, and then breaking the whole puzzle when it doesn’t fit. Now, with that established, let’s focus on watching these missiles blow up their own motherland.”

Above them, everything in sight warped around Sagittari’s portals, curving with the light. Intense gravitational pull yanked more of Zudra’s weaponry off course and into blackness as the event horizons drew further into the stratosphere. Every missile’s disappearance added to the Assassin Queen’s grin.

Zudra will fall indeed, the Assassin Queen sighed as missiles no doubt landed far from their original destination, just like every other enemy to the Shadow Clan, they’ll burn.