The Vincerists did not intend to capture Habas. They intended to bury it.

  While General Afamiszt and his depleted forces fought a desperate delaying action in the streets, the Vincerist Lieutenant Colonel ran his campaign with the patience of a man who had done this before. A thousand soldiers surrounded the Defense Center in a tightening ring. Sixty fighter jets darkened the sky above the city in rotating shifts, their missile contrails crisscrossing until the air itself looked scarred. The Defense Center's automated systems repelled payload after payload, and the operators inside watched their shield readouts with the focused silence of people who understood exactly what the numbers meant and were choosing not to say it aloud.

  When the Colonel saw the gridlock, he didn't raise his voice. He simply said, "Deploy ground troops. Status: Extermination."

  His soldiers fanned into the residential districts. What followed in those streets was not a battle. It was a sweep.

  Then the man with the cards arrived.

  He came from a rooftop, unhurried, an archaic sword in his left hand and a fanned deck of metallic cards in his right. He looked at the column of soldiers advancing below him the way a craftsman looks at a problem, not with fear, but with professional assessment. He selected a card and slotted it into the hilt of his blade with a clean, resonant click.

  "Dashing Ultima."

  He became light. A streak of azure tore through the column at a speed that the soldiers' eyes couldn't parse. By the time the sound reached them, nearly half their number had already fallen, each cut precise, each one placed where it would stop a man without excess. The survivors spun and raised their rifles and found nothing to shoot at.

  He slotted another card.

  "Shattered."

  The air where he had been standing accepted their laser fire without complaint. He was already somewhere else.

  The Road of Ash and Iron

  While the man held the center of the city together through methods that defied reasonable description, a rusted truck tore out of the Dusan forest with the particular energy of a vehicle being driven by someone who had decided speed was worth more than the suspension.

  Idham sat white-knuckled behind the wheel, reading the road ahead with the focus of someone who had learned in the last twenty-four hours that fighter jets had a tendency to appear from directly above. Mizi stood in the truck bed, the watch radiating a heat he could feel against the inside of his wrist, the kind of heat that meant it was ready and had been ready for some time.

  He didn't wait for a target to present itself. He aimed at the first line of Vincerist armor on the road ahead and fired.

  The beam that came out of the watch was white this time rather than gold, and it hit the armored column with a concussive force that Mizi felt in his back teeth. Vehicles went sideways. Two detonated outright. He was already tracking to the next target before the smoke from the first cleared.

  They moved as a unit without discussing it, the three of them falling into a rhythm that had been building since the woods outside Dusan. Idham read the road. Mizi read the sky. Azmei, strapped into the truck bed with a rack of improvised surface-to-air missiles beside her, covered the angles neither of them could reach.

  "Twelve o'clock high!" Azmei screamed. A rocket left her launcher and drew a white line up into the sky.

  A flight of jets came screaming out of the nearest Destroyer Tower. Mizi swung his arm and fired twice in quick succession, catching two of them mid-dive. The third came straight down with its cannon firing in a sustained burst, and Idham yanked the wheel so hard the truck went up on two wheels and the world tilted sideways for a moment that lasted longer than it should have.

  "BARRIER!" Idham roared.

  Mizi activated the shield. The cannon fire hit the dome in a sustained crackle, each round absorbed without penetrating, and the truck came back down on all four wheels still moving. Azmei's second rocket found the last jet and converted it into a fireball that fell in a long arc directly into the base of the Destroyer Tower.

  The Tower's structural groan was audible from the road. Its automated weapons swung toward the truck and opened up, a combined barrage of lead and laser that turned the road ahead into something resembling a weather event. Mizi stood inside it and kept his shield up and felt, distantly, the absurd fact that he was grinning.

  "MY TURN!" Azmei loaded a fresh rocket with the theatrical joy of someone who had been waiting for exactly this. "Happy birthday, Vincerist!"

  The tower's base came apart. The structure above it held for two seconds, then the geometry became impossible, and the whole thing came down across the road behind them in a slow, grinding collapse that neither of them looked back to watch.

  They kept moving. There were other towers.

  One by one, Mizi worked through them. Some he hit with the watch directly. Some Azmei dismantled from a distance. Some Idham simply drove around the collateral damage of and kept going, trusting that the debris field would slow pursuit more effectively than speed. They cleared a path of ash and bent metal all the way to the gates of Habas, and when the city appeared through the dust ahead of them, all three of them were quiet for a moment.

  Most of it was on fire.

  The Ambush of the Colonel

  The laughter died the moment they entered the city proper.

  The intersection they rolled into looked empty for exactly the second it took to realize it wasn't. Then soldiers appeared from every alley simultaneously, laser submachine guns already leveled, and the sound of that many weapons charging at once was a specific, unanimous click that Mizi would not forget.

  The Lieutenant Colonel stood on a pile of rubble at the far end of the intersection with his hands clasped behind his back. He began to applaud, slowly and without irony.

  "Tanniah," he said. "Truly, I applaud the cleverness of the rats. To have made it this far, with a truck and a child's toy on your wrist." He tilted his head. "But your run ends here."

  He dropped his hand.

  "Fire."

  The lasers came from three directions at once. The watch's percentage collapsed in lurching drops. Ninety. Sixty-one. Forty. The speed of it was wrong, faster than anything the watch had absorbed before, the sheer combined output of that many weapons focused into a single point overwhelming the shield's ability to convert and dissipate. Mizi braced himself and felt the dome shaking around him like something alive and desperate.

  Eighteen percent.

  Nine.

  A voice cut through the noise, close and quiet in a way that somehow carried over everything. One word.

  "Shattered."

  The truck's cab was suddenly empty. Idham and Azmei simply weren't there anymore.

  Four percent.

  Mizi looked at the number and made the only available decision. He threw himself clear of the truck, activated his personal shield at the last possible second, and felt the shockwave of the explosion hit him like an open hand and roll him across thirty feet of cobblestones. He came to a stop face-down in the rubble, coughing smoke, ears ringing with a high clean tone that replaced all other sound.

  He looked up. The entire Vincerist platoon had redirected their weapons toward the single boy in the street.

  The man with the cards stepped between them.

  He didn't say anything. He looked at Mizi over his shoulder with an expression that communicated its message economically.

  "Don't just sit there," he said. "Fight."

  Mizi got up, pulled the watch sword free, and moved forward.

  What followed was not elegant. Elegance requires margin, and there was no margin in that intersection. It was two people moving through a very small space against a very large number of opponents and making decisions in fractions of seconds without the luxury of hesitation. The man used speed and precision, each card activating a different quality, stripping armor, multiplying strikes, vanishing from one position and appearing in another. Mizi used force and the watch blade, cutting through whatever the man left standing, his shield absorbing what he couldn't deflect.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Above them, on rooftops they had been quietly deposited on, Idham and Azmei worked with the scopes Mizi had calibrated for them, picking off officers with the methodical patience of people who had spent a morning in the woods practicing exactly this.

  It was working. And then it wasn't, because Vincerist soldiers had a consistent and infuriating habit of producing reinforcements from directions that hadn't existed as directions moments before.

  The sound of an atomic tank breaking through a blockade on the far end of the street was the most welcome sound Mizi had heard since the river.

  General Afamiszt leaned out of the hatch. "We're here, Son of Jalal!"

  The tank's main gun spoke once, and the reinforcement column ceased to be a problem.

  The tide turned in the way tides turn, not dramatically but decisively, one degree at a time until the whole weight of the thing was moving the other direction and couldn't be reversed. Mizi fought with one part of his attention and tracked the Colonel with the other, and when he saw the man running for a rooftop VTOL helicopter he peeled away from the main engagement without breaking stride.

  The watch shot clipped the rotor cleanly. The helicopter spun, lurched, and went down hard on the flat roof of a building two blocks over. Mizi crossed the distance in rooftop jumps, landed in the debris field, and found the Colonel already on his feet and moving.

  Before Mizi could close the distance, a shadow fell over both of them that had nothing to do with the cloud cover.

  A Vincerist walking robot stepped out of the smoke on articulated legs the height of a building, its fist already dropping toward the rooftop. Mizi didn't have time to think about the geometry of it. He had time to register that the fist was very large and the roof was very flat, and then something hit him sideways hard enough to knock the breath out of him, and the fist came down where he had been standing and the rooftop cracked down the middle.

  He looked up at the person who had tackled him.

  The Colonel, standing in the shadow of the machine, began to laugh with the specific quality of a man who has just remembered something useful. "Oh! I know you now! The mask never was enough, was it? The hero-killer! The end of the world itself! ALEY!"

  The Ghost of the Future

  The man pulled off his mask.

  Mizi stared. The face looking back at him was his own, older and marked with scars that hadn't happened yet, wearing an expression that had long ago finished with whatever softness it had started with.

  "Yes," the man said. His voice had the texture of stone that has been wet and dried many times. "I am Aley. I came from the time I just finished saving, traveling through a dozen different eras, removing every compromised hero I found, because I determined long ago that I was more qualified to maintain peace than any of them."

  The Colonel spread his arms. "Peace! He talks about peace! You are the one who murdered their Emperor! You stripped this city of its divine protection and handed it to us on a silver platter! If the Emperor and Empress of the Cloud City still lived, the Vincerists would never have set foot in Habas!"

  "Quiet." The word came out of Aley like a door closing.

  He turned to Mizi. His face did something complicated. "Dial your watch four clicks."

  Mizi turned it. The energy blade extended and changed colour, the gold becoming white-hot, the light around it bending slightly the way air bends over something very warm. The blade hummed at a frequency he could feel in the hand holding it.

  Aley looked at it and selected his final card. He slotted it. His sword became a mirror of Mizi's.

  "Together," he said. Not an order. Something closer to a request from a person who had forgotten how to make them. "Finisher."

  They moved at the same moment and from opposite angles, two lights converging on the same point, and cut. The robot's legs separated from the body cleanly, and as it fell the Colonel, standing directly beneath it, had enough time to understand what was happening and not enough time to do anything about it.

  The machine came down.

  Silence settled over the rooftop in the way silence settles after something very loud, with a weight and texture of its own.

  The Truth of the Tragedy

  Mizi turned to Aley. The city below them was still burning in places, but the sound of weapons fire had gone distant and intermittent, and that was as close to quiet as Habas was going to get today.

  "You said you killed heroes," Mizi said. "And you killed the Emperor and Empress of the Cloud City." He kept his voice level. "Who were they to you? Why them specifically?"

  Aley sat down on a piece of bent rebar the way someone sits when they've been carrying something for a very long time and have finally found a place to put it down.

  "I was a boy in this time once," he said. "I lost my family to the war. Everyone did. But I didn't break. When the Vincerists finally won, they sorted the survivors into categories, and the category I ended up in was labor. We lived in exile. We were moved when it was convenient and worked when we were needed and the rest of the time we were not thought about at all." He looked at his hands. "I was hungry. Not occasionally hungry. Consistently, grinding, desperate hungry. The kind where you stop thinking about anything except the fact of it."

  He was quiet for a moment.

  "There was a hero. Famous. The kind that got photographed and celebrated. He appeared regularly in the city to do things people could witness and record. I was in a group that had been caught stealing food from a distribution point, and we were being beaten for it in the street. I looked up and he was standing there. The famous hero. He had landed right next to us." Aley touched the scar on his cheek with two fingers, lightly, the way you touch something that has been there long enough to become part of your map of yourself. "I begged him. I told him I was starving. I showed him my hands."

  He paused.

  "He kicked me in the face. He told me that criminals are not exempt under Vincerism, that no one is exempt for even small crimes, and he dragged me to prison personally. He smiled while he did it. I think he enjoyed having an audience."

  Mizi said nothing.

  "I spent years in that cell. I let the hatred become something structured, something I could use, because rage without direction just destroys the person holding it. When I escaped, I found a man, an artisan who worked in a basement on things that weren't legal to make. He had created a deck of cards using methods that had come down from hinterland practitioners, black magic embedded in technology, producing illusions so real they had started injuring spectators. He couldn't control what he'd made." Aley held up one of the metallic cards and looked at the light through it. "I could."

  "I built a sword with a slot for the cards and I took both and left. I found the hero giving an interview outside a building he'd just saved, something about a dog and a train. I walked up and challenged him." A dry sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "He thought it was funny. He put me on the ground in about two seconds. But while I was lying there, the copy card activated, reading his speed, his technique, everything he'd used. I got up and slotted it."

  "He had nothing to copy from me. He had no training that wasn't built on the assumption that he was faster than everyone. Without that advantage, there was nothing there. I showed the people watching that their hero was a construction. A performance."

  "After that I fought alone. I destroyed Vincerist infrastructure across multiple regions over years. I built a time machine from components I accumulated along the way. I went backward and forward, burning Vincerist operations at their roots before they could grow. In other times I found other heroes like him, comfortable and fraudulent, and I removed them and took what was useful from them."

  He stopped. The pause had a different quality than the others.

  "And then I remembered that while all of this was happening, while my people were being worked to death and starved and sorted like materials, the Cloud City existed above us. The Emperor of Deity. The Empress of Desire. Divine beings with divine power, watching." His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "They did nothing. They were there and they did nothing and I had been hungry and alone and that hero's boot had been in my face and they had done nothing."

  "So I went up. And I killed them."

  The Blood Memory

  The names landed on Mizi like something physical. Emperor of Deity. Empress of Desire.

  His head began to ache before he understood why. Then the images came without permission, sharp and sourceless, belonging to a memory that wasn't arranged the way his memories were arranged. A girl in a yellow dress reaching toward him with a flower. A tricolor dragon watching him from the riverbank with an attention that felt like being read. A smile, soft and certain, the smile of someone who has decided you are worth something and is not going to revisit the decision.

  The pain behind his eyes sharpened into something focused and specific, and then his body was moving and he hadn't told it to move.

  "Why." His voice didn't sound like his voice. "Why did you kill them. They were innocent."

  He heard the words coming out of him and recognized that he meant them with a ferocity that went deeper than anything he had chosen to feel. The watch blade was already drawn. Aley's eyes went wide and then went to a different expression, something that looked almost like recognition.

  They dueled in the ruins of the rooftop. Mizi was faster than he should have been and angrier than he understood, and Aley defended himself with the focused efficiency of someone who had fought a great many people and knew how to read an attack, but something in his expression suggested he was not entirely unhappy about what was happening, that he was watching Mizi the way you watch a thing you have been waiting to see confirm itself.

  Then Idham and Azmei arrived at the rooftop access. Then General Afamiszt's people covered the perimeter below. Aley found himself surrounded by the people he had just finished helping, and his expression moved through several things before arriving somewhere resigned.

  "You'll understand one day," he said. He slotted a card.

  "Shattered."

  The space where he had been standing gave back nothing.

  Mizi stopped moving. The rage dropped out of him all at once the way water drops out of something when you tip it, and he sat down on the cracked rooftop and put his hands on his knees and breathed.

  "I don't know what happened," he said when Idham crouched beside him. "My body moved by itself. I wasn't—I wasn't choosing it."

  Azmei sat on the other side of him without saying anything. Her shoulder pressed against his. That was enough.

  The Fading Hope

  General Afamiszt crossed the rooftop slowly, and something in the way he moved told Mizi before a word was spoken that the news was not about the victory they had just won.

  "I am sorry to do this, Son of Jalal." He stopped in front of Mizi and held his gaze. "The city of Habas is ours. But a report has come in from the eastern relay."

  He paused.

  "Dusan has been taken. An unknown entity. Our communications with your father and with every member of the Dusan defense network have been severed completely. Something is blocking the signal, and we do not know from which direction it is being broadcast or what kind of intelligence is behind it."

  Mizi looked at the watch on his wrist. The blade had retracted. The face was dim. The percentage sat at a number that was functional but spoke of a long day.

  He thought about his father's voice through the walls of the house, scolding Idham and Azmei. He thought about his mother's hands folded in her lap while she waited for him to open his eyes. He thought about the truck in the attic with the old pistol wrapped in cloth that his father never spoke about but sometimes thought about on the stairs.

  He stood up, and the world rotated around him in a way it shouldn't have. The accumulated weight of the day, the fighting and the grief and Aley's words and the flashbacks that hadn't belonged to him, came due all at once, and Mizi's legs decided they were finished with today before the rest of him had agreed to the terms.

  He felt himself going and couldn't prevent it. Idham caught him under one arm and Azmei caught the other and they lowered him onto a stretcher someone had thought to bring, and the last thing he saw before his eyes closed was the watch on his wrist pulsing once, slowly, and then going still.

  They carried him toward the surviving section of the Defense Center through streets that were quieter than they had been in days.

  Above the city, the sky was clearing. Somewhere in it, in a direction that had no name on any map, something was moving toward Dusan, and it was not in a hurry, because it had already arrived.