Theodore POV
At the edge of our galaxy, where the stars thin into the void and the dark stretches endless, I stand and watch as my empire forges its walls. Ten motherships float in silent formation, their metallic bulk like drifting islands of pure steel, each twenty thousand kilometers long, each alive with the hum of furnaces, cannons, and shipyards. Around them looms the crown of my defense the flagship mothership, two hundred fifty thousand kilometers in length, a leviathan among leviathans. It is the anvil upon which this fortress is being hammered into existence.
Beneath their shadows, my workers and engineers weave the framework of a structure so vast that its dimensions mock the pride of gods. The fortress, my fortress, will stretch five hundred thousand kilometers from end to end. Its shape mirrors the motherships, but magnified, every contour a bristling rampart of turrets, railguns, and launch bays. This is no vessel. This is a continent of war carved into the void, a citadel that shall anchor the Golden Lion Empire against every storm.
It is not the first fortress, nor will it be the last. A hundred already ring our borders, each linked to the next by the web of my command, and I will raise a hundred more if need be. Every node, every edge of this galaxy, will be sealed. The anti–space jump grids have already been planted like thorns across the firmament, vast engines that warp and crush the fabric of space itself, denying our enemies the sudden thrust of their invasions. Still, I build. Still, I prepare. My people whisper that I am overcautious, that I am haunted. They are not wrong.
I remember the last war. I remember how humanity bared its teeth.
They called themselves clever, but to me they were only desperate, and desperation is the cruelest of weapons. They threw themselves at us with no regard for survival. Warships detonated their cores to obliterate a single vessel of ours. Slave soldiers, dragged from conquered races, were hurled against us like fodder, their lives burned to ash in battles they did not choose. Every planet we approached, the humans turned into pyres, detonating their own worlds with civilians still upon them, just to deny us foothold. I had thought I knew cruelty before that war, but I was wrong. Humanity taught me the measure of madness.
And we adapted.
We did not falter. We did not bend. We matched their cruelty with our own, and surpassed it. If they chose to burn their planets, then we learned to burn them faster. If they sought to break us with suicide, then our immortals showed them what true suicide meant warriors plunging alone into fleets, detonating Ena cores not to end themselves, but to annihilate every foe in reach while they walked away unscathed. The longer the war dragged on, the more merciless we became. We learned to carve our mercy from our hearts and sheath it in steel.
That is why they fear us now. That is why the allied civilizations, once arrogant, quailed when they saw how far we were willing to go. They had expected us to weaken, to break under their coalition. Instead, they found themselves drowning in corpses of their own. In the end, peace came not because they sought it, but because they had no choice left.
Peace. The word tastes strange to me now. Once it was sweet, now it is bitter. I no longer believe in peace born of kindness. Peace is a mask worn over cruelty sharpened to perfection. To preserve it, one must become a beast far more terrible than any enemy.
That is why I build this fortress. That is why I would fill the entire edge of this galaxy with them. My caution is not cowardice; it is memory. I will not let the past repeat. I will not allow a single enemy to leap upon us unprepared. Every fortress I raise is a blade poised in the dark, a promise that should they come, they will be torn apart before they can even breathe.
The motherships serve as the arteries of this vision. Each one is a city of war, its surface bristling with cannons, laser batteries, and turrets by the tens of thousands. Beneath their armored hulls lie hangars that can dock millions of warships, repair bays that churn day and night, and barracks vast enough to house legions. Their shapes are like floating islands wrought from voidsteel and cosmic metal, the hardest alloys drawn from across my dominion. Their hearts are powered by Ena Cores, compressed orbs of energy and magic, each no larger than a marble but potent enough to drive fleets for millennia. At their centers, the motherships bear the triple-barrel Ena Laser Cannons, weapons of annihilation that fuse the essence of energy and arcane into a single blinding torrent. When they fire, entire star systems tremble. Worlds split. Fleets vanish.
Yet the fortress dwarfs them all. Imagine a mothership magnified a dozen times, its hull not twenty thousand kilometers but five hundred thousand, its surface layered with cannons so dense they glitter like constellations across its armored skin. Where the motherships wield hundreds of main weapons, the fortress wields thousands. Where a mothership can withstand a siege of centuries, the fortress can endure wars that last beyond the memory of suns.
It is not merely a shield. It is a statement. It declares: we are unmovable.
In its core, five Planet Ena Cores slumber, each a sphere the size of a world, compressed into crystalline containment. Together they can power the fortress for trillions of years. If every absolute in the enemy's history rose against it, if every fleet of every rival civilization hurled themselves upon its walls, still it would not fall. It can dock ten motherships at once, or millions of lesser warships. It is not a fortress. It is a world born for war.
As I watch its skeleton grow in the void, I feel the weight of my decisions press upon me. I know some call me paranoid. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps I am overprepared. But I have seen what happens when one is underprepared, and I will not allow my empire to bleed again. I am Emperor Theodore Lionheart. My duty is not merely to rule, but to ensure that the Immortals endure, that no hand can shatter what we have built across the ages.
The void is merciless. The universe is chaos. To preserve peace in such a place, one cannot simply be kind. One must be cruel enough to smother cruelty itself.
I run my hand across the cold metal of the observation platform, feeling the vibration of the engines beyond. Somewhere deep in the construction yards, the workers weld another section of plating into place. Somewhere in the void, my drones patrol, scanning for the smallest hint of intrusion. And in my heart, the old memories burn. The screams of war. The light of detonated worlds. The taste of ash that never leaves my tongue.
I do not fear the enemy. I fear myself if I ever forget what they made of me.
That is why I will finish this fortress. That is why I will fill the edge of the Golden Lion Empire with walls and guns until the void itself trembles to cross them. And should the day come when the enemies of peace dare to test us again, they will find no gentle empire waiting. They will find only our cruelty, sharpened and perfected, waiting to meet them.
Let them come. We are ready.