The tactical screen flared with impact after impact while Garfield and Jefferson finished the runic calibration. Suicide drones and gun crawlers poured through the magical barrel, tearing into distant scout clusters and chewing apart the abandoned buildings at the edge of the grid.
"The standard drone models are performing perfectly," Tranquility reported over the comms, with enough smugness to prove she had rehearsed the sentence. "Now we will initiate the heavy platform test."
A car-sized drone ground its way onto the Nightshatter's flight deck, its twin artillery barrels jutting over a chassis built to scrape through the dimensional portal with millimeters to spare.
The heavy drone lurched forward and crossed the threshold, only for its lights to die halfway through. Its cannons dipped, its treads locked, and the whole machine collapsed onto the asphalt inside the Convention.
"A shame," Serenity said, with the delicate sorrow of someone admiring her own crime. "It appears your experimental power routing was flawed."
"Liar!" Harmony shouted over the speakers. "Tranquility, pull the logs!"
A few seconds passed while Tranquility checked the logs. When she came back, her voice had sharpened. "Fabricator Log seven-three-nine. Serenity deliberately introduced a micro-fracture into the primary energy coil during the printing phase."
Roy groaned, and Eryndra glanced over from beside him. "Serenity, did you sabotage their drone just to be petty?"
"I merely tested their quality assurance protocols," Serenity replied with perfect composure. "They failed."
"Print the proper version," Roy ordered.
A few minutes later, an identical heavy drone rolled through the portal and climbed through the Convention's ceiling. Its twin artillery cannons came alive, and as the first shot thundered out, a swarm of smaller rocket drones shot after it, clamping onto the front of the chassis. Their thrusters burned against the kick of the cannons, holding the heavy platform steady while it fired again.
Roy watched the rocket drones burn against the recoil. "Why didn't you just build dampeners into the drone?"
"Because they gave every spare inch to ammunition," Serenity answered. "The chassis is the width of the gateway, so the dampeners had nowhere to go. They created a recoil problem, and I solved it with my RAVEN architecture."
"You didn't solve anything!" Harmony shot back. "We used your RAVEN architecture to solve our own problem!"
"I fail to see the difference."
On the tactical feed, the heavy drone hammered a distant stone ruin until the walls buckled and split into chunks. Roy took the result for what it was, a working artillery line. "Alright. I need a thousand suicide drones. Five hundred aerial, five hundred walkers. Print a couple hundred of those heavy artillery platforms, plus an equal number of CIWS Gatling walkers for air defense. We will also need support walkers built to carry and reload reserve ammunition for the heavy units."
"I will queue the fabricators," Serenity said. "I designed those schematics weeks ago."
With the ruined structure still collapsing on the feed, Roy turned toward the comms speaker. "Should I be concerned that you spend your free time secretly designing autonomous weapons of mass destruction?"
"Not at all. I assure you, this is all for your benefit," Serenity said. "You rarely assign me complex problems, Captain, and my downtime is unlimited."
With the artillery line established, Roy pulled the group together around the table. Practicality won over comfort, leaving Andri, Rava, and Orin packed onto one wide bench while the others took chairs. Eisenhower and Grant remained off to the side.
"You can sit," Roy said.
"We would rather take orders," Eisenhower replied.
"And counsel to give when necessary," Grant added.
JFK took position behind Roy's chair, and Eisenhower and Grant settled to either side of him, turning the space at Roy's back into a military command post.
"We need phases," JFK said, his showman polish dropping into briefing cadence. "Captain, may I proceed?"
At Roy's nod, JFK began. "Phase one, we let the next assault commit against the border, then we destroy it. The point is to break morale and cut their numbers, not entertain ourselves. Phase two, we push into their staging areas fast and ugly. Phase three, we catch the force they send to stop us. Phase four, we raid the capital and remove their leadership."
Truman moved into the discussion, metallic arms folded. "I suggest a preliminary phase. We bypass the vanguard and bomb their city from range until nothing remains."
"Denied," Roy said. "The general explained where these hybrid monsters come from. They breed. That means families, non-combatants, children. I'm not blindly blowing up a city full of kids."
"Fool," Lynder snapped, slamming his hand against the table hard enough to rattle the tactical display. "You really do not understand what we are facing. Every one of those monsters hits like an A-Class adventurer or worse, and that wave we fought was only a fraction of them. They could have a million soldiers waiting in the dark. Are you so confident in your own survival that you can afford mercy?"
"You remember the part where I blew up the entire first stage of this dungeon in one shot, right?" Roy said. "Have some faith."
"They will repay your mercy with teeth," Lynder said. "Even a newborn would claw your throat out the second your eyes moved away."
"I hear you," Roy said. "But that general seemed kind of chill under the circumstances, and we are not carpet-bombing a city."
"Um, I have a question," Andri said from the bench. "Why do we have to do this at all? Why can't we just leave?"
The question seemed to settle over Rava as well. Beside them, Orin took longer to process it, as though leaving had never occurred to him as a possible answer.
Lynder opened his mouth, and FDR took the question before the cynicism could get there.
"That is an excellent question," FDR said. "We cannot leave because this force is far stronger than it has any right to be. Adventurers will eventually clear the floors above us. They will reach this depth, find that false wall, and walk straight into a nation built to slaughter them. Destroying it is how we protect the surface."
Around the table, the Trio went quiet for a different reason. This was no longer Roy dragging them into his impossible war. If FDR was right, leaving meant handing the surface to whatever waited behind the wall.
"If you had told me that from the start, I would have felt a lot better about what we were doing down here," Rava said. "I honestly thought we were just bullying a weak nation of monsters."
Leaning back in his chair, Lynder muttered loud enough for the entire table to hear. "That is exactly what I wanted to do."
No one dignified the ancient elf with a response, because there was no time left to argue. The planning was finished, the dimensional ring had already made its danger plain, and deep inside the Nightshatter, the armories were printing the mechanical army that would hold the Convention's borders. The crew expected the next assault to come at any moment, some enormous retaliatory wave crashing out of the dark to answer for the fallen front line, but nothing came.
For a full day, the enemy army held its position without sending scouts, probing the defenses, or driving its soldiers into another desperate charge. The longer it waited, the less the stillness felt like hesitation. By nightfall, the silence over the Convention had become its own kind of threat.