“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Travis muttered under his breath. Harmon, that idiot, had used his emergency signal. No matter what, the plan was now underway. Of course, the signal itself had no power. It literally just sent a message to Travis. But he’d told Harmon it would kick off the Revolution’s assault immediately. After all, Harmon was ostensibly their customer, the one who had ordered all this.

Even if that wasn’t true, Travis needed him to believe that for certain parts of their plan to work. So he’d handed over the signal device to assuage any of the paranoid king’s concerns about where their loyalties lay. It had seemed like a prudent solution. After all, he’d handed over no real power in exchange for full cooperation. Which he needed at the time.

The Revolution had approached Harmon a while back for reasons unrelated to the Tournament. After all, they needed contacts outside the CA if they wanted to supply a Starry Sea-spanning war. But the Tournament had changed things. They had a perfect opportunity to reach the Founder’s ultimate goal. If everyone on this island died, or even just most of them, the nations of the Starry Sea would inevitably be at each other’s throats. None of them would believe a group of unshrouded were the real culprits. They were too prejudiced.

But it turns out that accomplishing such a plan was no easy feat. Compared to the assault across the Central Authority, they had less time, less resources, and less access. Plus, all the shrouded weren’t lackadaisical slackers, like in Central City at the seat of a nation’s power. No, everyone here was on guard. Not against the Revolution, but against each other. Still, that heightened scrutiny made planning difficult.

Hours, days of planning all came apart on one fact; the Tournament city was impregnable without shrouded help. The Revolution could have done it given a few year's time, but they didn’t have that. To infiltrate the places they needed to in the time they had, shrouded were required. And so Harmon received a proposition from his friendly weapons broker.

It was a little funny to Travis. The Revolution believed they were masquerading as weapons brokers to secure the Vast King’s aid. Meanwhile, Harmon thought the Revolution was a mercantile group pretending to be activists. The funny part being that the shrouded king was actually right. The members of the Revolution were all unaware of its actual purpose.

Travis could only be impressed at how well the Founder had lied to them all, feeding them exactly what they wanted to hear. He felt an overwhelming sense of superiority over the rest of the Revolution and gratitude toward the Founder for bringing him in on the real plan. Out of everyone, only he knew the truth.

And now was the time to live up to that trust. Because Travis’s plan had backfired, hard. He’d given Harmon that signal while still in his naive ‘I can do it all myself’ phase. That is to say; he hadn’t run the idea past anyone with a bit more experience.

Once he did, the flaw in his plan was obvious. Sure, the signal didn’t actually start the assault, but Harmon would expect it to. If he used the signal and no Revolution forces showed up, Harmon would instantly know he’d been played, and a crucial piece of the Revolution’s plans would slip out of their grip.

Two key locations for the assault were the central meeting hall, where most of the dignitaries would gather and do business, and the generator room far beneath the surface of Baserock. Both of which were heavily guarded by all nations collectively to prevent any shenanigans. Any unshrouded seen wandering around would immediately be suspicious, as these weren’t places they should have access to. Unlike in the CA, all the maintenance on the generator was done by shrouded.

So, they were completely cut out, which was where Harmon came in. Once the Revolution had helped him secure control over a large portion of the Ten Thousand Empires, at least in the short term, the Vast king had no problem replacing all the Empire’s designated security slots for both the meeting hall and generator room with his own soldiers.

For the shrouded alone, that access wasn’t enough to do anything, as teams were rotated throughout both locations and inspected by all other groups regularly. However, the Revolution had the ethertech necessary to obfuscate their misconduct easily. It was hard for other nation’s security teams to check for things they’d never even heard of.

This relationship was the root cause of Travis’s blunder. The second Harmon realized the revolution wasn’t working for him but rather pursuing their own interests, his men could take apart all the ethertech in both locations, as they’d been the ones to install it in the first place. Basically, Travis had accidentally given Harmon all of the control he thought he hadn’t.

And now they were in this position, starting the assault earlier than planned. The only saving grace was that all the elements were in place, if only barely. The rest of the former plan had simply involved waiting for the day prior to the main combat tournament opening.

That would have been the very last day of official international meetings, when all the dignitaries were mostly done and simply anticipating the following day of watching their very best fight it out. When they would have been at their most relaxed and distracted.

Now, that plan was right out the window. That left Travis playing catch-up. He’d already sent out the right messages to the right people. No matter what, the assault was happening now. At this point, even Travis couldn’t stop it.

Still, Harmon’s sudden activation had left a massive gap in their plans. Originally, he was supposed to be in the meeting hall, using that glaive of his to deal with the very strongest of the other nations. Despite all their ethertech, the upper echelons of shrouded would still pose a challenge for the Revolution. If Harmon handled them, things would have gone much smoother.

Of course, there were backup plans. Travis couldn’t guarantee that Harmon would survive that fight, and they needed options in the case that he lost. Those would have to be implemented now, as Harmon obviously wasn’t in the meeting hall. Instead, he was watching his stupid son fight Travis’s brother and his team.

That was more of a personal loss. Travis had hoped to be there when his brother died, maybe gloat a little. But no doubt Harmon had killed him and everyone else in that arena by now. It’s not like anyone that low on the power scale could beat Harmon when he had that glaive.

“Whew, too many stairs.” Travis huffed under his breath, finally reaching his destination and bursting through a door and out onto a roof. He was at the very top of one of the docking towers, looking out over the Tournament city. The elevators had taken him most of the way up, but the roof access was up ten flights of stairs with no other way to get there. Not a problem for shrouded, but a lot for an unshrouded to take at a dead sprint.

Once he was free of the stuffy stairwell, Travis didn’t look down over the city, but up into the sky. There was, of course, the Pillar. Burning brilliantly in the middle of the day. But next to it, hanging in the air, was something that hadn’t been there before.

Looking at the swirling mass of multi-hued energy taking shape, Travis could only look on in awe. His part of what was to come was mostly over. He had planned and set things in motion. The boots-on-the-ground stuff wasn’t in his scope anymore. He wasn’t up on top of this tower because he had to be. He was literally here only to see this.

The swirling mass of energy, previously the size of a midsized ethership, began rapidly expanding until it took up half the sky. It was massive, and brilliant. An unparalleled working never seen before on the Starry Sea, made using ancient and powerful technology hardly understood in the modern day. Travis wouldn’t have missed it for anything. This was the Founder’s greatest work. He could still remember when the mysterious man had explained it to him like it was yesterday.

{}

“You see, my boy. We all misunderstand the Pillar. What it is, and what it is for.” The man explained, whirling around the starkly bare room with walls made of a strange metallic material stronger than any Travis had seen before or since. The only feature of the room was the mass of interconnected spinning hoops mashed together in the air above them. The most complex piece of ethertech Travis had ever seen. This was a day of first for him.

“I never really thought about it,” Travis admitted. “Isn’t it just part of the universe? Like the Starry Sea or the continents.”

“Ah, but that is where you are wrong, my young protege.” The Founder flicked his fingers along a dashboard of more conventional ethertech. Cables and power lines ran from the dashboard and up into the whirling mass. “The Pillar is not natural at all. It is, in fact, energy from another reality. Not native to our universe in the slightest.”

“How do you know that?”

“Simple.” the blank face of the Founder’s mask turned to peer at Travis. “Because this thing here is what’s holding it in place.”

Travis gaped, staring at the machine hovering above them. “...How?”

“That! That is the exact right question. This is why I like you, Travis. You’re quick to catch on. Very adaptable.” Travis imagined the man smiling proudly behind that mask. Pride swelled up in his chest.

“The answer to that question is why we are here, actually. See, this machine on its own cannot possibly contain the Pillar’s might. No no no.” He wagged a finger. “It takes hundreds of these, scattered far and wide across the Starry Sea to manage that. So messing with just one of them is of little consequence on a universal scale.”

He sighed. “I had access to several of these sights a while back until one went rogue. They didn’t understand what they were looking at, you see. The men on-site were simply supposed to monitor their sight’s version of this machine. But they got one look at how much energy was coursing through it and decided it was a weapon. Couldn’t have been more wrong. Anyway, they tried to blow up a War God with it and partially succeeded by using the energy overflow release system. It’s not actually a weapon per se, but that much energy is dangerous no matter the intent.”

“Anyway, they missed for the most part and were subsequently discovered. A real loss. That data would have been invaluable to getting this project of mine up nearly three months sooner.” The Founder shrugged. “Oh well. Now, where was I?”

“What you’re doing with the thing that controls the Pillar itself,” Travis added helpfully.

“Right, right. Simple enough, in abstract. Basically, all of these machines bend space. They bend it to draw the Pillar here and to hold it in place. They bend it to reduce or increase the distance between two points in reality. And that, my boy, is how we’re going to make this assault work.”

{}

Travis watched as the sky peeled back at the very center of the swirling energy, revealing another sky, but not the same one. No, this sky was different in one key facet.

It was filled with etherships.

The hole in the sky continued to expand, growing until it matched the circumference of the island beneath it. In doing so, it revealed yet another masterpiece. Another creation born from the Founder’s hands that surpassed anything seen on the Starry Sea since ancient times long past.

Supermassive ethership carrier, Liberation.

A floating island in its own right, this ethership surpassed all others in both firepower and technology. And, it had one more key feature. One which would spell the end of every shrouded on Baserock. Liberation’s onboard suppression field.

No doubt, every shrouded in the city was feeling it now that the ship was in the skies above, having passed through the sky hole with its escort of dozens of etherships. This was the masterstroke that allowed the plan to go forward. The Revolution needed a suppression field if they hoped to win. Now, they had one.

Sure, they could have attached one to the city’s generators. They had Harmon’s cooperation, after all. But why would they? After their attack on the CA, the generator room became the most obvious place to look for the suppression field. It was already guarded by shrouded constantly, so they could have destroyed any device placed there quickly. That wouldn’t have worked.

Instead, they parked the field in the air overhead, guarded by a fleet of combat etherships, outside the range of any of the suppressed shrouded below. A perfect solution. Very few shrouded could fly without aura, after all.

Of course, there were still their own etherships.

Travis watched as all the power in the city went off at the same time. And there went the etherships. All the docking towers were only elevator accessible. Elevators powered by the city’s central generator. A central generator that had just been blown up by planted, hidden explosives, courtesy of King Harmon. It was the shrouded’s own fault. They never built stairs as a backup since most could fly one way or another. If the elevators went out, they could still get up to the ships. Or so they thought. Plus, who liked stairs?

Travis had taken the only stairs in the whole structure to get to the roof. Stairs that only existed because they needed a way to access the elevator ethertech. They lost to their own arrogance, to assuming they would always have access to their god-like powers. Now they were paying the price for that arrogance.

“And now, it all comes down,” Travis muttered to himself. The shrouded would be tossed from their lofty thrones, and he had a front-row seat, far from where anyone could reach. Now, he could just sit back and watch.