Chapter 672: Killed The Bird Without Using Any Stones

The Suryax-Ananta leadership knew within the hour.

Big D’s intelligence network caught the movement immediately. The three alliances had broken their observation discipline. Scouts that had been carefully neutral for weeks were suddenly active and oriented. Fleet elements that had been idle were repositioning. The pattern was unmistakable, and Aryan laid it out across the war room projection without needing to be asked.

"All three of them," he said. "Coordinating. Oriented toward us." 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

Marcus exhaled. "We knew the blueprint would make us a target. We didn’t think it would unite all three of them."

"It united them because it had to," Rudra said. "We hold the one thing all three of them fear. A fifth power with a Tier-100 weapon and decks they cannot read. They cannot allow us to develop it. So they will come for it together, and once it is dealt with, they will go back to fighting each other."

"Then we should not develop it," Lily said.

The leadership looked at her.

"Not yet," she clarified. "If we develop it, we confirm everything they fear, and we hand them a unified reason to commit everything they have against us right now, before we are ready. We do not want a three-alliance war this month. We want it never, if we can manage it. So we do not develop the blueprint. We do something better."

Almond looked at her. "You have a plan."

"I have a plan," Lily agreed. "But it needs Ainen and Big D."

---

The forgery took a whole day.

Ainen’s role was the aura. His [Limitless Flame Sovereign] deck contained an origin flame that absorbed the characteristics of anything it burned, and through that flame, he could reproduce a signature, a resonance, a feeling of power, with a precision that had no equal among them. He took the genuine blueprint, studied its chaos-aligned aura at length, and then taught his flame to wear it. The result was a flame that radiated the exact energy signature of a Tier-100 harnessing system, indistinguishable from the original to any scan that did not physically test the object’s function.

Big D’s role was the vessel. His third deck had completed recently, and among its powers was the construction of illusion-vessels: physical projections detailed enough to hold form, take a reading, and survive handling, but hollow at their core. He built a vessel shaped exactly like the blueprint’s projection, and Ainen’s flame settled into it, and the result was a forgery that looked, scanned, and felt like the genuine article.

It would not function. It could never be developed into a real weapon. But no one would discover that until they tried to build from it and reached halfway, and building from a Tier-100 blueprint took time.

Almond examined the finished forgery for a long moment, holding the real one in his other hand.

"Good," he said. "This is very good."

"Now what," Marcus asked.

Lily smiled. "Now we sell it."

---

The Suryax-Ananta Alliance contacted Oblivion-Velkarion directly.

The choice of recipient was deliberate, and the leadership had argued it through carefully. Oblivion-Velkarion had the strongest native claim to the blueprint, owing to their chaos resonance, which made the offer plausible. They were also the most aggressive and the least cautious of the three enemy alliances, which made them the most likely to accept quickly and the least likely to test the forgery before committing to it. And they were currently the third-ranked participating power, recovering from the naval defeat two months earlier and hungry for an asset that would restore their standing.

The offer was simple, and the Suryax-Ananta envoy delivered it plainly so that there could be no confusion. The Suryax-Ananta Alliance would hand over the Tier-100 chaos-aligned harnessing blueprint to Oblivion-Velkarion. In exchange, Oblivion-Velkarion would enter into a full defensive alliance with Suryax-Ananta against the remaining three powers. Together, the two alliances would be strong enough to break the temporary three-way coalition and reshape the warfare event in their favor.

Drashka, speaking for Oblivion-Velkarion, accepted within the day.

From her perspective, it was the only sane choice. The blueprint belonged with her people by resonance. Working with Suryax-Ananta, the alliance that had just escaped four powers at once with a deck no one could read, would give them a partner strong enough to matter. And the three-way coalition against Suryax-Ananta had only ever been temporary anyway. Drashka was simply choosing her side before the temporary arrangement dissolved on its own.

The handover took place at a neutral point in the ocean.

The forgery passed from Almond’s hand to Drashka’s. Her scan confirmed it. Her chaos resonance recognized it. She felt the Tier-100 power radiating from it and saw the future her alliance would build with it, and she smiled the satisfied smile of someone who has won.

"A pleasure doing business," she said.

"Likewise," Almond replied.

They departed in opposite directions.

---

The retaliation came faster than anyone expected.

Thalmyr-Ronethis had been watching. Of course they had been watching. And the moment their observation network confirmed that Suryax-Ananta had handed a Tier-100 harnessing blueprint to Oblivion-Velkarion, every calculation in Ronaisan El Topov’s strategic model updated at once. The three-way coalition had been formed to prevent any single power from developing that weapon. Oblivion-Velkarion now possessed it, and Oblivion-Velkarion had the resonance to develop it at full output. That outcome was the single worst result the coalition had been built to prevent.

The temporary alliance turned, in a matter of hours, from a coalition against Suryax-Ananta into a coalition against Oblivion-Velkarion.

The assault was total.

Thalmyr-Ronethis struck with the surgical precision they had demonstrated against Celestara, but this time there was no demonstration, no negotiation, no extraction of position. This time the objective was destruction, and they brought everything calibrated to deliver it. Virexion-Kezryx came in alongside them with the full weight of their storm fleet, the same fleet that had pressed Suryax for hours during the naval engagement. Two of the most capable alliances in the warfare event committed their entire strength against a single target, simultaneously, without warning.

Oblivion-Velkarion did not have time to prepare.

They had spent the past day celebrating an acquisition and beginning the development process on the blueprint. They had committed their best minds to extracting the harnessing system’s design, eager to bring a Tier-100 weapon online as fast as possible. They were looking inward, at the blueprint, at the future, when the future arrived from the outside in the form of two alliances bent on erasing them.

The island of Oblivion Tyrant Sovereignty came apart over the course of a single brutal day.

The Suryax-Ananta leadership watched it from the central terrace, the same way they had watched Celestara, except this time the battle they observed was one they had set in motion themselves. The crimson-black towers of Oblivion fell under Thalmyr precision strikes. The Velkarion fleet, scrambling to mount a defense, was caught between a storm assault from one direction and a calibrated dismantling from the other. Drashka’s forces fought with the desperation of the cornered, but desperation was not a strategy, and they had no time to develop the one asset they had believed would save them.

In the chaos of the assault, Oblivion-Velkarion’s development teams pushed harder, faster, frantically attempting to bring the harnessing weapon online before their island fell. They threw everything into it. They never got far enough to discover that the blueprint in their possession was a hollow shell wearing a borrowed aura. The assault did not give them the time. By the moment they might have realized the truth, the development facility was already gone, struck and erased in the general destruction, and the forgery went with it, vaporized in the same blast that ended the project it was meant to power.

Oblivion Tyrant Sovereignty fell.

The Velkarion Dominion fell with it.

The fake blueprint was destroyed, and with it, every record of the deal that had placed it there.

And when the dust settled over the ruins of the northwestern island, three alliances counted the outcome and reached the same conclusion. The dangerous Tier-100 asset was gone, destroyed in the development facility before it could be completed. The fifth power, Oblivion-Velkarion, had been eliminated. The warfare event had narrowed from five competitors to four.

Not one of them knew that the genuine blueprint still rested, quiet and untouched, in Almond’s storage.

Not one of them knew that the Suryax-Ananta Alliance had just removed an enemy, eliminated a rival’s potential weapon, watched two of their remaining foes expend enormous strength, and kept the prize through all of it.

On the central terrace of Suryax, Lily watched the smoke rise on the distant northwestern horizon and said nothing for a long while.

Then, quietly, she smiled.

"Three left," she said.