The sky over the planet's surface tore open in a wide streak of blue, hundreds of shapes descending through cloud cover in a formation too precise to be anything but drilled, over and over, for exactly this moment.
Sterling war-puppets came first, gold-plated bodies dropping in loose diamond clusters, each one tethered to a pilot somewhere in the fleet above, controlled through threads none of the ground below could see, moving with a coordination that read less like machinery and more like a single organism spreading its limbs wide across the terrain. Behind them, Lucas fell through open air with Valor drawn, lightning already crawling along the blade's edge, the axe pulling ambient charge out of the atmosphere itself the way it always did.
