The Swarm Heart was not a ship.
It moved within the clouds, contracting in a slow rhythm. Lightning flared between ribs of black chitin. With every pulse, more monsters dropped out of the atmosphere.
The military classified its rank as "immeasurable".
The capital had thirty-eight hours left.
Meanwhile, the elder Murong had reached the orbital lift. The portable Abyss core would allow him to seize the Celestial Palace station, where the evacuation ships and long-range guns were kept. If the Council launched the fleet, tens of thousands of members of the old families would escape the planet. If it brought the core to full power, every mecha-maiden in Great Xia would lose her source.
The provisional headquarters debated the two fronts. Some generals demanded that everything be thrown against the swarm. Others proposed letting the Council go, so long as it did not activate the Abyss.
"They have already activated it once," Nalan Qingxin said. "Let them go now, and within an hour they will drain the energy they need to launch."
"Storming the lift will draw our best forces away from the city," a general objected.
"There are no best forces left," Huangfu said. "There is everyone willing to fight."
He divided the defence. The army and the volunteer legion would hold the capital. A small group would ascend to the station and shut down the Abyss. Fan Yuan was to command the assault.
"I am coming," Chi Yuyan said.
Fan Yuan looked at her light armour.
"A full transformation could destroy your source."
"Then I will not transform fully. I will coordinate the network."
"There will be fighting on the station."
"Are you about to tell me where I would be safer again?"
He stopped.
"No. I was going to ask if you were sure."
"I am sure."
The group included Vierlia, Su Zhihu, Nalan Qingxin and five units from the former penal company. Nangong Ci remained on the ground to help evacuate the districts that would bear the swarm's first strike.
"You are letting me go unguarded far too easily," she told Fan Yuan.
"Vierlia left a beacon on you."
"That is better."
"And the girl from the eastern airlock volunteered to work at your headquarters."
Nangong Ci stopped smiling. Luo Jun's sister had not forgiven her. She merely wanted to see what orders the terrorist gave now.
"You are a cruel man, brother."
"You wanted to answer for what you did. Here is your chance."
The assault transport entered the base of the lift one minute before lockdown. The car climbed the magnetic rail as the Earth beneath their feet dwindled into a blue sphere.
The first ten kilometres passed in silence. Then the station's automated systems detected the unauthorised launch. The lights in the car went out, and the emergency brakes clamped the transport to the rail.
"The Council means to drop us back down," Nalan Qingxin said.
Su Zhihu forced open a service hatch. Beyond it, the magnetic track roared past.
"The brake can be released manually."
"From outside?"
"Someone has to cross the hull."
Two former penal soldiers volunteered before Fan Yuan could choose. One was the welder who could find weak points in armour. The other had driven freight trains and knew magnetic systems.
They secured safety lines and stepped out into the thin air. The Council reversed the field. The car lurched downwards. Their falling speed climbed.
"Twenty seconds until the lower support fails," Nalan Qingxin reported.
Fan Yuan could have linked to both fighters and quickened their work. Instead, he sent them the brake schematics through the green channel.
The welder cut away the protective casing. The train driver manually disengaged the magnets. Three seconds before impact, the transport began climbing again.
When the women returned, Su Zhihu announced that she would put them forward for a commendation.
"For doing an ordinary job?" the welder asked.
"For an ordinary job that saved the assault group. For too long, the only people decorated at the front have been those who shoot impressively."
Without a word, Vierlia added that rule to the future regulations.
At an altitude of forty kilometres, they lost contact with the city.
Fan Yuan's system immediately displayed a warning:
"Inheritance origin node detected."
"Eternal War God: access level incomplete."
"Connect to the Abyss core to restore access rights."
"Did you know the system was connected to the core?" Chi Yuyan asked.
"No."
"Is this the first time it has told us the truth before we nearly died?"
"Do not get used to it."
The Council's First Division was waiting for them on the intermediate platform. Its commander demanded that they lay down their weapons. Behind him stood hundreds of mecha-maidens linked to a single suppression circuit.
Fan Yuan opened the general channel.
"You saw the evacuation lists. Which of your families are aboard those ships?"
"Rebel propaganda," the commander replied.
"Then request the passenger manifest."
"The channel has been closed for security reasons."
"Exactly."
The soldiers hesitated. The commander ordered them to attack, but his own mecha-maiden did not activate her weapons.
"My daughter is in the lower sector," she said. "I want to see the manifest."
Others joined her. The officer tried to activate the Abyss's coercion circuit. Chi Yuyan intercepted the signal and displayed its terms on every helmet: if the core were fully activated, the division's sources would be used as fuel.
The First Platoon lowered its weapons.
The Second tied up the commander.
The assault group passed without a fight.
"You could simply have subjugated them," the system said.
"They did it all themselves."
"Time to enemy activation reduced."
"Then stop distracting me."
On the Celestial Palace station, the old families were preparing to depart. The glass galleries were piled high with luggage, works of art and containers of rare metals. There was no room aboard the ships for the technical staff, but the Council had allocated an entire compartment to family archives.
Nalan Qingxin found her father by a boarding airlock. When he saw his daughter, he embraced her tightly.
"I thought you had been killed."
Nalan Qingxin did not return the embrace.
The head of the Nalan conglomerate did not look like a villain. A weary man in an expensive coat, he ordered his staff to check the children's restraints and cleared space aboard his own ship for the engineers' families.
Nalan Qingxin remembered how he had taken her to the factory when she was a child. He had shown her the assembly lines and known every old craftsman by name. When a fire broke out, her father had entered the workshop alongside the rescuers. That was precisely why it had been easier for her to believe that a good man could not be involved in the laboratories.
Now she understood: a man could love his daughter, save his employees and at the same time sign documents that killed people he had never met. He did not have to be a monster in secret. He only had to divide the world into those whose pain he saw and those who remained a line in a report.
"Do you remember Master Wen?" she asked.
"Of course. He died two years ago."
"His source burned out. The archive shows four hundred overnight connections to the Abyss."
Her father went pale.
"I did not know his registry number."
"That is the point. You knew his name while you were looking him in the face. In the documents, he became a resource again."
"I cannot bring him back."
"But you can stop explaining why there was no other choice."
Only then did Nalan Qingxin ask about the signatures on the laboratory documents.
"Did you sign off on supplies to Murong's laboratory?"
Her father slowly released her.
"Not here."
"So you did."
"I supplied medical equipment to a state project. If I had refused, Hente would have won the contract. At least I managed to reduce the death rate."
"There were children in those capsules."
"And thousands were dying beyond the walls every day. We were creating a weapon capable of preserving the country."
"Preserving whom?"
He pointed to the ships.
"Those we can. Qingxin, the world is not unjust because we decided it should be. There are not enough resources. Every ruler has to choose."
"Then today I choose."
She took the family key from around her neck and inserted it into the airlock console. The conglomerate's boarding bridges locked down.
"While the Lower City remains below, your ships will not take off."
The guards surrounded her. Vierlia stepped forward, but her father raised a hand.
"Do not touch her. She is still my daughter."
"No," Nalan Qingxin said. "I am a person to whom you once gave a name. That is not the same thing."
She left with the group, while the head of the conglomerate remained before the locked airlock.
Fighting broke out in the central sector. Three divisions still loyal to the Council activated the coercive link. The mecha-maidens moved like faceless components of a single machine. Their sources burned red.
The commanders' voices sounded over the general channel, but the fighters moved nothing like their orders. The Abyss was using pre-recorded patterns. The soldiers screamed that they had no control over their own bodies.
One assault mecha-maiden managed to display a message on her external screen: "Do not fire on the command compartment."
Su Zhihu changed formation. Instead of targeting reactors, the units struck the red antennae along their spines. The freed opponents collapsed, unable to understand where they were. Fighters from the Eternal Legion caught them and carried them to the rear, even though it slowed the advance.
"The Council is using prisoners as shields," Vierlia said.
"No," Fan Yuan replied. "They are using their own soldiers. That is precisely why we have to show the difference."
Every rescued mecha-maiden passed the suppression pattern to the next. By the end of the corridor, the division's soldiers were pointing out where the legion's units should strike.
Su Zhihu led the assault units. She did not try to defeat her opponents. She severed the Abyss's cables, brought down its transmitters and freed the women one after another. Each disconnected mecha-maiden came to with a gap in her memory.
"Do not let them reconnect!" Su Zhihu ordered. "Protect even those who were shooting at you a minute ago."
Chi Yuyan maintained the distributed network from the command bridge. Her damaged source kept her from fighting, but after the laboratory she could sense suppression frequencies better than any instrument.
"Left corridor, node beneath the ceiling. Vierlia, three metres to the right."
The Empress of Wind sliced through the hidden transmitter.
"Sector clear."
"Su Zhihu, do not enter the next hall. The floor is mined."
"How do you know?"
"The threads go around it through the walls."
Fan Yuan listened to her commands and realised that once he would automatically have taken over the coordination. Now the network worked without his intervention.
They reached the core in seventeen minutes.
The elder Murong waited inside a circular hall. Behind a transparent shell beat a black heart the size of a house. Golden cables stretched to it from every part of the station.
"At last, the heir has returned," the clan head said.
"I am not your heir."
"Not mine. Its."
He touched the panel. The Abyss recognised Fan Yuan, and the system opened its complete log for the first time.
Fifty years ago, the first commander had created the network to unite volunteers in the battle against the Swarm Heart. After his death, the Founders' Council rewrote the protocol: consent was replaced with coercion, the option to leave the network was removed, and all their combined power was routed into the central node. That was how the Eternal Legion became a mechanism for harvesting energy.
The school crystals were part of the same system. They understated the ranks of sources capable of resisting the Abyss, so that their owners could be kept under surveillance or sent to the laboratories.
Fan Yuan had not been given an F rank by mistake.
It marked him as a danger to the old order.
"We preserved the country," the elder Murong said. "Without the sacrifice of the Lower City, the barrier would have fallen forty years ago."
"You never once allowed the people to choose that sacrifice."
"Because the mob chooses life today and death tomorrow. A ruler has a duty to be cruel."
He activated the core.
Fan Yuan felt the Abyss seize his source. Golden threads burst from the system and bound his hands to the black heart.
The elder Murong offered him a bargain.
If Fan Yuan became its sole master, the core would submit to him. He would gain control over every mecha-maiden in Great Xia, destroy the Swarm Heart and be able to overturn any law. None of the old families would ever stand in his way again.
"You wanted to break the order," Murong said. "Here is the power to do it. Take it."
A golden throne appeared before Fan Yuan's eyes.
The system said:
"Accept the final inheritance. Become the eternal commander."
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