The battle for Tokyo was a symphony of dying screams and useless thunder. Humanity's greatest weapons were being swatted from the sky, their own power turned against them. The city was a wounded animal, and the Vultures were descending for the kill.
Aboard the PEAA Olympus, Alliance Flagship
"Give me a firing solution, now!" Director Thorne roared, his voice a blade of cold fury in the chaos of the command bridge. "I want every Sentinel in the air! I want them to form a spearhead and punch a hole through to their command ship!"
In the skies over the city, a hundred sleek, obsidian-black Sentinel mechs, the pride of the Alliance, moved to obey. They were faster, more powerful, and deadlier than the Titan had ever been.
Inside the cockpit of Sentinel-7, Lieutenant Eva Rostova gritted her teeth, her knuckles white on her controls. The neural link was a perfect, exhilarating symbiosis. The machine was an extension of her own body. She targeted a Vulture cruiser, its energy siphon still glowing from devouring a Japanese destroyer. "Target locked," she hissed. "Weapon systems hot. Firing..."
Her world turned to digital sludge.
The command to fire simply... vanished. A red warning light, one she had never even seen in the simulations, began to flash on her HUD. CRITICAL SYSTEM LAG DETECTED. NEURAL INTERFACE DESYNCHRONIZING.
Her controls felt like they were submerged in thick mud. The Sentinel, once a graceful extension of her will, now moved with the sluggish, clumsy response of a drunken giant. The Vulture cruiser, sensing the hesitation, swiveled its main weapon.
"Eject! Eject!" Eva screamed, but the command was lost in the swamp of her lagging systems. The last thing she saw was a beam of corrupted, stolen light.
On the bridge of the Olympus, Thorne watched in disbelief as his perfect weapons began to fail. One after another, the icons for his Sentinel fleet on the main tactical display turned from a confident green to a panicked, flashing red. They weren't being outfought. They were simply... stopping. Drifting. Becoming the easiest targets in the sky.
"What is happening?" he roared at a terrified technician.
"We don't know, sir! It's a system-wide cascade failure! It's like... it's like their reflexes are gone!"
Thorne's blood ran cold. He knew, with a sudden, terrible certainty. This was not a malfunction. This was sabotage. A ghost. Wilson.
The Imperial Palace, Fukiage Garden
While the sky burned, Sakura Miyamoto stood in a place of perfect, ancient peace. The three scrolls were one, their knowledge not a lesson learned, but a truth absorbed into the very fiber of her being. She was no longer a ghost who could hide in the world. She was a blade that could cut it.
She looked up at the sky, at a Vulture destroyer that was systematically vaporizing a residential block in Shinjuku. She closed her eyes. She was not in the garden. She was not in Tokyo. She was everywhere and nowhere. She was in the space between.
Aboard Vulture Destroyer K'tharr
The ship's internal sensors registered a flawless, silent operation. Its energy core was stable. Its weapon systems were online. Its siphon was at ninety percent capacity.
At 12:41:13 JST, a new sensor reading appeared. It was not a breach. It was not an energy surge. It was an anomaly. A perfect, geometrically straight line of absolute nothingness had just appeared, bisecting the primary energy conduit that ran from the ship's core to its main weapon.
There was no explosion. No alarm. No sound. The conduit, a marvel of alien engineering, was simply... in two pieces. Severed by a cut so clean, so absolute, that not a single molecule had been displaced.
The ship's lights flickered and died. Its weapon systems went cold. It began to drift, a dead husk in the sky.
On the ground, Mei-Ling watched in stunned disbelief through her tactical binoculars. The Vulture destroyer, a moment ago a bringer of death, had just gone dark and silent, like a lightbulb with its wire cut. Then, with a slow, ponderous grace, it began to fall.
She looked from the falling ship to the silent, ancient sanctuary of the Imperial Palace. She could not see Sakura. But she could feel her. A new power had just stepped onto the board. Not a soldier. Not a weapon. A force of nature.