The Louria Kingdom. Castle Hark. Army General Headquarters.

  In the spacious hall, where a map of the theater of war was laid out on an enormous table, the atmosphere was tense but confident. General Patagene and his staff officers tracked the advance of the invasion army, moving the miniature figures of their legions across the map. Everything was going according to plan.

  At that moment, a manacomm operator ran into the hall, his face pale.

  "General! An urgent message from Vice Admiral Sharkun with the eastern fleet!"

  "Report," Patagene said sharply, without looking up from the map.

  "'We have engaged unknown enemy ships. There are only four, but they are made of metal and armed with magical weapons of unheard-of range and power. We have already lost one ship. I am requesting immediate air support to destroy the enemy flagship!'"

  Patagen read the message twice. Then he put it on the table.

  "Metal ships. A magical weapon of unheard-of range." He looked at his staff. "Sharkun is not someone who panics easily. He commanded this fleet for twelve years.

  "Four ships, General," one of his colonels reminded him. "Against four thousand."

  Patagen folded the message carefully. "That's why I'm taking this seriously, and not brushing it off." He turned to his adjutant. "Deploy the strategic reserve of wyverns. All three hundred and fifty. Their mission is to identify and destroy these four ships."

  "The entire reserve, General? Perhaps a squadron..."

  "Sharkun has four thousand ships, and he sent us a distress signal around four." Patagen looked at the colonel. "Send the reserve." I want to see those ships before we lose another galley."

  He paused.

  "And tell Sharkun to keep his formation and not engage on his own until the wyverns arrive."

  It was a reasonable order. Any competent general would have given it. The fact that it didn't work out was not a lack of argumentation, but a lack of imagination, which was a different matter entirely.

  Patagene walked over to the operator.

  "Very well. The admiral asks for support—he will get it. So he'll stop bothering us over trivialities." He turned to his aide-de-camp. "I order you: scramble all three hundred and fifty wyverns held in the High Command's reserve. Their mission is to find and destroy the four enemy ships. Let them turn them into molten slag."

  "But, General…" the aide dared to object, "Three hundred and fifty wyverns? That is nearly our entire strategic reserve… Perhaps a single squadron would suffice?"

  "No," Patagene cut him off. "I want this to be more than a victory. I want it to be an execution. So that all of Rodenius will see what happens to those who dare to challenge the might of Louria. So that these Russians won't even think of sticking their noses in our business again. Carry out the order!"

  "Yes, General!"

  A few minutes later, horns sounded over the capital, calling the dragon riders to flight. Hundreds of warriors in black armor rushed to their wyverns. Soon, the sky over Jin-Hark darkened with hundreds of leathery wings. The gigantic swarm, led by the kingdom's finest aces, rose into the air one by one and, forming up into a menacing battle formation, surged eastward. It was the greatest aerial armada the continent had ever seen. And it was flying to its doom.

  The Louria Kingdom. Castle Hark. Army General Headquarters. Three hours later.

  In the headquarters, time passed with agonizing slowness. After the three hundred and fifty wyverns had streamed eastward like a dark river, a tense, expectant silence fell. General Patagene and his officers confidently awaited reports of victory. By their calculations, the aerial armada should have already reached the battle zone and reduced the four Russian ships to flaming wreckage.

  Forty minutes passed without a report.

  "Operator — status check on Aglameus."

  "Trying, General. No response."

  Patagene looked at the map. The flight time to the engagement zone was approximately thirty-five minutes at cruising speed. They should have engaged by now. Silence after engagement meant either radio discipline — possible, if Aglameus was in the middle of a strike — or equipment failure, which happened occasionally — or something else.

  He did not name the third possibility aloud.

  Ninety minutes.

  "Try every squadron commander in sequence. All of them."

  The operator worked through the list. Nothing. Not silence exactly — there was a faint carrier signal on some frequencies, the residual hum of manacomm crystals that had been active recently. But no voices. No reports. No acknowledgment.

  Two hours.

  "General," his chief of staff said quietly. "What are your orders?"

  Patagene looked at the map for a long time.

  "Ground all remaining wyverns. Immediately. Every airfield."

  "General..."

  "Now."

  A sense of bewilderment hung in the hall. Mana-communication was reliable. Complete silence from such a massive group could mean either that they were observing radio silence before an attack, or… something unthinkable.

  A third hour passed. Three hours since the last, brief message from one of the scout riders, a message that had been cut off mid-sentence: "I see the targets… Gods, what are these fiery arrows… they… they are pursuing…"—and then, only static.

  Confidence in the headquarters gave way to anxiety, and then to a cold, clammy fear. Three hundred and fifty wyverns. The elite of their army. The pride of the kingdom. They couldn't have simply vanished.

  "Where are they?!" Patagene's voice was now verging on a scream.

  But no one could answer him. The officers avoided his gaze, exchanging wild theories in hushed tones.

  "Perhaps they flew into a magical storm?"

  "There were no reports of any weather anomalies…"

  "What if… what if the Russians managed to destroy them all?"

  "IMPOSSIBLE!" Patagene roared. "To destroy such an armada would require a legion of archmages! Or…"

  He did not finish, but everyone understood what he was thinking. Ancient legends spoke of only one power capable of single-handedly destroying entire armies of dragons. The Divine Dragon Bahamut. Could Qua-Toyne, that collection of farmers and demihumans, have somehow managed to summon a deity to their side?

  With a sense of dread, Patagene realized that he would have to report to the king. Not of triumph, but of catastrophe. Of the loss of the strategic reserve, a force that had taken years and a fortune to build.

  He turned to the operator, his face as gray as ash.

  "Relay this order to all remaining wyvern squadrons at all bases. Cease all flight operations immediately. All units are to return to their airfields and disperse into shelters. I repeat, a total ban on all flights until further notice."

  This was not just a tactical order. It was an admission. An admission that the skies over Rodenius no longer belonged to them.

  Combat Information Center (CIC), Frigate Admiral Makarov

  In the dim light of the CIC, it was quiet, but it was a silence thick with tension. On the huge tactical display, hundreds of icons representing aerial targets were closing in inexorably. Three hundred and fifty wyverns.

  "Targets have entered the effective engagement zone of the Shtil-1 surface-to-air missile system," the operator reported, his voice devoid of emotion. "Range—fifty kilometers."

  Captain 1st Rank Nikitin stared at the screen. To him, these weren't mythical dragons, but simply "low-speed, subsonic aerial targets with a small radar cross-section." A primitive threat that needed to be eliminated.

  "So they don't want to do this the easy way," he said coldly. "Very well, they asked for it. SAMs, target is the lead group. Two missiles per target. Fire!"

  "Fire!"

  From the frigate's vertical launch systems, surface-to-air missiles erupted with a roar and a plume of flame. For the Lourian riders, this was a phenomenon that defied comprehension: "fiery spears" with tails of smoke shot into the sky from the deck of the enemy ship. They flew with an incredible, blasphemous speed. Panic began to spread through their ranks.

  In the sky, a series of blinding flashes erupted amidst the perfect battle formations of the wyverns. The missiles, equipped with active radar-homing heads, did not miss. Their high-explosive fragmentation warheads tore the wyverns to pieces. Over a hundred riders and their dragons vanished in an instant, turning into a rain of blood that began to fall into the sea. The manacomm channels descended into a chaos of horrified screams and death cries.

  But despite the monstrous losses, about two hundred survivors, driven by fury and desperation, continued to fly forward. Ahead of them, like a gray cliff, awaited the Russian frigate.

  "Artillery, target the nearest groups. Fire at will," Nikitin commanded.

  The 100mm A-190 artillery mount came to life. With each deafening shot, it sent a shell equipped with a radio proximity fuse into the sky. The shells didn't hit their targets directly. They detonated near them, blanketing the wyverns in a cloud of thousands of steel fragments that shredded leathery wings and unprotected bodies. With every volley, several more dragons fell from the sky.

  When they were three kilometers from the frigate, three last, miraculously unscathed wyverns remained in the sky. They were being led by General Aglameus himself.

  "He's out of mana for his demonic sorcery!" he screamed over the manacomm to his surviving men, mistaking the roar of the cannon for magic. "Forward! Avenge our fallen brothers!"

  The wyverns formed up for a final, suicidal attack run. Fireballs began to form in their maws. But before they could be unleashed, lightning struck from the frigate's sides. Two six-barreled 30mm AK-630M close-in weapon systems, guided by radar, opened fire. A sound like the ripping of giant cloth tore through the air. A solid stream of thousands of rounds per minute simply shredded the last three wyverns to pieces. There was nothing left of them—only a cloud of blood that was slowly dispersed by the wind.

  After the deafening roar, a dead silence fell. The battle, if it could be called that, was over.

  Three hundred and fifty elite dragon riders. The pride and glory of Louria. Annihilated. In a few minutes. By a single ship. The sailors and officers on the decks of the Lourian galleys stared into the empty sky, their faces contorted with a primal horror. They had just witnessed a massacre that shattered every law of their world.

  On the bridge of the frigate Admiral Makarov, Commander Breweye stood, gripping the handrail so tightly his knuckles had turned white. He was shaking.

  "That… that wasn't a battle," he whispered, staring at the empty tactical display, which just moments before had been swarming with hundreds of enemy icons. "That… was a slaughter."

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  At that moment, three more gray silhouettes appeared on the horizon. The other frigate and the two missile corvettes, which had been keeping their distance, moved in and formed a perfect line. Four Russian ships against what was left of a four-thousand-strong armada.

  "All ships in the group," Captain Nikitin's voice in the CIC was as cold and emotionless as a surgeon's during an operation. "We are beginning the methodical suppression of the remaining enemy forces. Target the flagship galleys and ships equipped with ballistae. Use high-explosive fragmentation. Rate of fire—medium. Don't waste ammunition."

  Hell began. The four ships, acting as a single mechanism, began to methodically, one by one, destroy the Lourian fleet. They didn't fire indiscriminately. They fired with precision, calculatingly, picking out the most important targets. The 100mm shells from the frigates tore through the wooden hulls, exploding inside and turning the rowing decks into a bloody mess. The sailors of Louria scrambled in panic on their ships, which were turning into floating bonfires. Some leaped overboard, preferring to drown rather than burn alive.

  When Ka-52K "Katran" attack helicopters and Ka-27 anti-submarine helicopters arrived from the Amphibious Assault Ship Priboy to support the Russian task force, the chaos turned to agony. The helicopters, hovering well out of the range of the longbows, methodically strafed the decks with their 30mm cannons. They didn't aim for the men. They targeted steering mechanisms, shattered masts, and destroyed ballistae, depriving the ships of any ability to fight back or flee.

  From a loudspeaker on one of the helicopters, Nikitin's voice boomed:

  "Attention, ships of the Louria Kingdom! Your resistance is futile. Your command has abandoned you. To save your lives, I order you to cease all resistance immediately. As a sign of surrender, throw your weapons overboard and assemble on the decks with your hands raised."

  For many, this was the last straw. Of Vice Admiral Sharkun's great armada, no more than a thousand ships remained, most of which were damaged and on fire. Sharkun himself, realizing the complete and utter rout, screamed until his voice was raw:

  "We surrender! All survivors—surrender! They'll kill us all!"

  It was over.

  Aboard one of the surviving galleys, Valhal, a military observer from the Parpaldia Empire, stared in horror at the scene. He was supposed to have been a witness to a triumph; instead, he had been a witness to an apocalypse. When a Russian boarding launch pulled alongside their ship and naval infantrymen in black uniforms stormed the deck, he tried to appeal to his diplomatic status.

  "I am a representative of a superpower! You have no right…"

  The commander of the boarding party, a grim-faced senior lieutenant, just gave a crooked smile.

  The senior lieutenant looked at him for a moment. His expression was not hostile. It was the expression of a man with a schedule.

  "You can explain your diplomatic status to the appropriate people when we arrive," he said. "Right now, you are being detained for questioning under the terms of active military operations. Please do not make this complicated."

  He said it in the same tone one might use to explain boarding procedures on a passenger ferry. Valhal, who had spent his career cultivating a specific kind of fear in others, found this more unsettling than a threat would have been.

  Valhal, along with the other surviving officers, was transported to the Priboy. A long journey to Russia awaited him, and an even longer interrogation in the basements of Lefortovo, where he would be forced to re-evaluate his place in a new, changed world.

  Calendar of the Displacement, Year 0001, April, Day 30.

  The Capital of Qua-Toyne. The "Lotus Garden" Residence.

  Commander Breweye stood in the center of the High Council's hall, his figure in a formal naval uniform looking solitary and out of place against the backdrop of flowering vines and murmuring fountains.

  The heavy silence in the room was broken only by the faint scent of ink from Breweye's written report, in which his unsteady hand had captured short, chaotic, and terrifying fragments of the recent naval battle.

  "That concludes my report," he said, and his voice, hoarse with exhaustion, echoed through the hall.

  He had told them everything. About Louria's four thousand ships. About the six steel ships of the Russians. About the three hundred and fifty wyverns, erased from the sky in a matter of minutes. About a massacre that could not be called a battle.

  As soon as the report was finished, the hall erupted in a roar of voices, full of disbelief and horror.

  "Impossible!" one of the elders nearly shouted, leaping from his seat. "Six ships against four thousand?! Three hundred and fifty elite dragon riders destroyed by a single ship?! Without a single loss on their side?! Commander, do you realize that your words sound like the ravings of a madman?!"

  The silence that followed this outburst was as heavy as a tombstone. Breweye wearily raised his eyes.

  "There were losses," Breweye said. "On their side. One sailor — a young man who was on the open deck when the fire arrows reached them. He survived, but was injured. The commander was displeased that the man had been outside the protected perimeter." He paused. "That is the full accounting of Russian casualties in a battle against four thousand ships and three hundred and fifty wyverns."

  The hall was completely silent.

  "One man," he continued. "Injured, not killed. Against the loss of Louria's entire fleet and every wyvern in their strategic reserve." He looked at the elder who had called him a madman. "I understand how this sounds. I watched it happen and I still do not fully believe it."

  The head of the merchant's guild, the pragmatic Varg, frowned.

  "This sounds like a bad joke. I am not accusing you of lying, Commander, but your report… it breaks every known law of war."

  Prime Minister Kanata spoke. His gaze was heavy and penetrating.

  "Enough!" his voice silenced everyone. "We have seen what the commander has shown us. We have heard his report. The Russian Federation has fulfilled its promise. They have protected us. They have destroyed Louria's fleet and have given us something we did not have—time. And now, Minister of Military Affairs, what is the situation on land?"

  The old dwarf-minister rose, unrolling a map.

  "Having lost its fleet, Louria has concentrated all its forces on land. Their main army, approximately eighty thousand strong, has occupied the ruins of Gim and is constructing a powerful fortified position there. They are digging trenches, raising ramparts… employing tactics we have never seen before. It seems they are preparing for a long, grueling war. Our forces are not sufficient to dislodge them."

  Kanata nodded. He looked at Rinsui.

  "What do the Russians say?"

  "I have just received a communication from their embassy," Rinsui replied. "They state that 'the first phase of the peace enforcement operation has been successfully completed.' Now they are ready to proceed to the second phase. They are proposing a joint operation to liberate Gim. Their ground forces will strike the Lourian fortifications, and our troops will be responsible for clearing the city and re-establishing control."

  A murmur went through the hall again. This was not a proposal. It was an order, cloaked in polite language.

  "They… they want us to fight alongside them?" one of the lords asked in disbelief.

  "They want us to fulfill our part of the deal," Kanata corrected him sharply. "And we will."

  He rose, signaling that the meeting was over.

  "Rinsui, coordinate the operational plan with the Russians. Minister of Military Affairs—prepare our finest legions. We are taking back Gim. At any cost."

  The council members dispersed in silence. They had just escaped total annihilation, but now they were to become junior partners in a war waged by a power that was beyond their comprehension. This was salvation. But was it freedom? To that question, no one had an answer.

  The Louria Kingdom. Castle Hark.

  For the third night in a row, King Haark Louria the Thirty-Fourth could not sleep. In the opulent royal chambers, where the air was thick with the scent of incense, he tossed and turned on a bed covered in the fur of a white lion. His nightclothes, sewn from the finest silk, clung to his body, damp with a cold sweat. In his mind, over and over like a nightmare, the events of the past few days replayed themselves.

  The naval battle off Rodenius. The very phrase now brought on fits of nausea. It was not just a catastrophe. It was the end of their world. His fleet, the pride of the nation, which had taken years and a fortune to build, had been annihilated. His elite wyvern squadrons, the masters of the skies, had been erased from the face of the earth as if they had never been.

  He had listened to the manacomm recordings twice. His senior mage had offered to play them a third time; he had declined. The recordings were not analytically useful. They were the sounds of men dying in a state of complete incomprehension, and listening to them again would tell him nothing that he did not already know.

  What he knew was this: three hundred and fifty wyverns, dispatched to destroy four ships, had produced no confirmed hits and no survivors capable of a coherent report. The fleet — four thousand four hundred vessels, the largest naval force ever assembled on this continent — had been reduced, in the space of an afternoon, to wreckage and prisoners.

  The *how* was what his mages were arguing about. The *why* he understood perfectly. Qua-Toyne had acquired an ally of a kind that did not exist in any strategic calculus he had been taught. And he had proceeded with the invasion anyway, because his intelligence had told him the Russians were weak.

  His intelligence had been wrong.

  He stood at the window and looked at his sleeping capital and thought, with the clarity that comes only at three in the morning, that the specific error had been this: they had identified correctly that the Russians had no wyverns. They had concluded incorrectly that this was a weakness. It was, in fact, simply an irrelevance.

  The final reports from the survivors, who had been picked up by fishing boats, were even worse. They were filled with fantastic, insane details. But the most absurd and terrifying story of all was that of the "spears of light." These mysterious projectiles, shining like stars, had pursued the wyverns, ignoring any evasive maneuvers. They had followed their victims relentlessly until they caught them and blew them to pieces. The king shuddered as he recalled the words of one of the miraculously surviving dragon riders, a man who had lost his mind and now only repeated the same phrase over and over in the infirmary: "It was looking at me… the spear… it was looking…".

  "A magical weapon," the king whispered in the darkness of his chambers, trying to find some solace in the words. If it was magic, that meant it had a source. There was a mage who could be killed. An artifact that could be destroyed or captured.

  But his best mages, including the head of the Royal Council, Yamirei, could only throw up their hands. They spoke of an "unthinkable amount of mana," of "technologies attributed only to the mythical Ancient Empire." Their theories only deepened his fear. They said that creating such a weapon would require the combined magical potential of an entire city of archmages, working in unison.

  The king rose and walked to the window. The two moons bathed his sleeping capital in a silvery light. His empire. His fleet, which had struck fear throughout all of Rodenius, had been destroyed in a matter of hours. His aerial armada, thought to be invincible, had been exterminated like a swarm of annoying flies.

  "Who have we provoked?" The question drilled into his brain, giving him no peace. These were not just powerful enemies, like Parpaldia. This was something else. Something that fought by different rules. Something that had brought weapons born of nightmares into their world.

  He, the great conqueror who had built an empire on blood and fear, felt for the first time in his life what his enemies had felt. Helplessness. And it was more terrifying than any death. This night brought the king no relief. It brought him a realization. The realization that he may have brought ruin upon his people. A final and inescapable ruin.

  The Parpaldia Empire. The Capital, Esthirant. Headquarters of the Third Foreign Affairs Department.

  In the dark, oak-paneled office, where the air was thick with the scent of old leather and sealing wax, a single source of light flickered—a magical crystal, encased in a glass sphere on a massive desk. Its orange light cast long, dancing shadows, concealing the face of the man who sat in the deep armchair. This was Kaios, head of the Third Department—the agency responsible for "handling" the barbarian nations beyond the Civilized Lands.

  "The Russian Federation?" Kaios's voice was quiet, ingratiating, but it sent a chill down the spine of the aide standing before him. "I have never heard that name."

  "It is a new state, Your Excellency. Located on a continental landmass to the northeast — vast, according to the Lourian reports, though their geographical data is unreliable. They call themselves a 'Federation.' Our cartographers have no record of this territory."

  Kaios slowly swirled the wine in his glass.

  "I know the geography better than you do. I am asking what it is."

  "We… we do not know, Your Excellency. They appeared out of nowhere. And… our observer aboard the Lourian fleet, Valhal, is missing. There has been no contact with him. Based on fragmented reports from the Lourian survivors, he was captured by the Russians. They claim… that it was their fleet that destroyed the Lourian armada."

  Kaios slowly set down his glass.

  "This isn't just bad. It's a catastrophe," he said, and his voice was like ice. "We invested colossal resources in those Lourian savages. Weapons, advisors, wyverns. They were supposed to be our puppets, our battering ram on Rodenius. And now you are telling me they were crushed by a handful of unknown islanders? With what?"

  "We know very little," the aide swallowed nervously. "The survivors speak of 'steel ships' and 'fiery spears that pursue their targets.' Presumably, these Russians have somehow mastered the technology for producing cannons."

  Kaios considered this for a moment, his fingers drumming a complex rhythm on the armrest of his chair.

  "Cannons," Kaios repeated. Not a question. He held the word for a moment in a way his aide could not interpret.

  "That is what the survivors describe, Your Excellency. Range several times beyond our own. Accuracy—" the aide checked his notes, "—described as 'perfect' by every witness, though we discount for panic and exaggeration."

  "How many witnesses?"

  "Seventeen confirmed, Your Excellency. Independent accounts. The descriptions are consistent."

  Kaios considered this. Seventeen independent witnesses with consistent accounts was not a panic-induced fabrication. It was data.

  "Classify everything," he said. "Not because I think it's false. Because I don't yet understand what it means, and information I don't understand should not circulate until I do." He looked at the map on his wall — the careful, detailed Parpaldian map of Rodenius and its surrounding waters, built over two centuries of intelligence work. "Find me everything our observers recorded. Every detail. Dimensions of the ships, sound descriptions, the behavior of their projectiles, the interval between shots. Everything."

  The aide bowed.

  "And Valhal," Kaios added, almost as an afterthought. "Find out if he is alive. He is more valuable to me than any of the Lourian survivors. He knows how to observe things properly."

  And now they are shifting the blame to a mythical enemy. But on land… surely they won't lose on land?"

  "Absolutely not, Your Excellency!" the aide hastily assured him. "On land, the Lourian army has an overwhelming numerical superiority. They will simply crush these 'Russians' who have learned to make a few cannons."

  Kaios nodded slowly.

  "Very well. First, classify all information regarding Valhal's disappearance and the failure of the Lourian fleet. Not a word of this is to reach the Emperor until we have sorted out the situation. Second, prepare a new, reinforced intelligence group immediately. I don't want rumors, I want facts. I want to know everything about these Russians: the strength of their army, the design of their cannons, the names of their commanders. And third…" he paused, his eyes glinting dangerously in the shadows, "...find a way to deliver a shipment of our new 'fire arrows' to Louria. Let King Haark have an ace up his sleeve. We have not lost this game yet."

  "Yes, Your Excellency," the aide replied with a bow and quickly departed.

  Khios was alone.

  He sat motionless for a long time. The magic crystal pulsed slowly with orange light. Somewhere in the building, a door slammed. Outside, a nightbird called once and fell silent.

  Russia.

  The word weighed on him, and it had nothing to do with the intelligence report in front of him. It was—he searched for the word—*familiar*. Just like a phrase in a language you haven't spoken in thirty years seems familiar. You know it. You just can't explain where.

  " In the grand game on the fringes of the Empire, a new piece had appeared on the board. And he intended to play against it by his own rules.