Keeping the portal open required a reset every ten minutes, so Roy bolted a bulletproof pad behind the dimensional tear and turned survival maintenance into one more annoying chore. Every ten minutes, he fired a single round into the pad. Everyone flinched the first time, managed to pretend they hadn't the second time, and by the third, the gunshot had joined the low hum of the Convention as part of the room.
They watched a movie inside the Convention, surrounded by sovereign law, weapon feeds, and two Presidroids standing at attention like theater ushers with murder permits. Orin leaned over to whisper commentary until Andri drove an elbow into his ribs. Rava sat close enough to belong and far enough back to keep all his questions trapped behind his teeth.
Bang.
Onscreen, someone confessed their love with enough sincerity to make the room feel personally attacked. Roy stared at the wall beside the screen with aggressive dedication, pretending the movie had failed to reach him.
Bang.
By the time the credits rolled, someone had started snoring in the corner, and Roy kept his attention turned away from the screen with far too much discipline for a man who had absolutely enjoyed himself.
Bang. The portal held.
Morning reached the floor as the darkness thinned to gray and the cold air loosened its grip. Inside the Convention, the low hum continued under the steady glow of the border.
Serenity came over the comms before anyone could mistake the gray light for peace. "Captain. We have detected massive, synchronized seismic activity. A major force is moving toward the Convention."
As Roy rose from his chair, the Convention began moving around him. Chairs scraped back, weapons came off safeties, and the crew started falling into the shape of orders he had given often enough that he no longer had to say them first.
Through the glowing aperture, the Nightshatter's main screen filled with a high-altitude drone feed, and Roy moved close enough to watch it from the Convention floor.
Far outside the Convention, long grass bent under a dark mass advancing in formation. The horde that had once moved like a mob now marched in ranks, every ugly, mismatched body carrying hammered iron plates and crude weapons shaped by actual hands. None of it matched the random items the dungeon generated from dead monsters. Ore had been mined, steel had been forged, and somewhere in the dark, a hidden nation had equipped its army from scratch.
"Their twenty-four-hour delay was a fatal strategic error," Serenity added. "I utilized the downtime efficiently. Several thousand additional drones are ready, along with two hundred more heavy weapon platforms."
"Great," Roy said, already turning from the portal. "Adams, Monroe, Madison. Defensive perimeter around Takara and the trio. Stay with them."
The three Presidroids closed around Takara, Andri, Rava, and Orin before anyone in that group had time to object.
"Jefferson. Get to the border. Link up with Garfield on the ship and establish the firing line."
Beyond the Convention, the horde's front line pressed into range, and runic drone sentries answered from the perimeter. Gatling mounts stitched tracer fire through the dark grass, cutting the vanguard apart just long enough to buy Roy's side time.
Harnessed to a heavy-lift drone, Roy rose above the battlefield while Serenity built the shot around him. A camera drone slid close to his face, the army spread beneath him, and drifting spotlights carved the dark grass into harsh theatrical bands.
Roy hooked two fingers around the camera drone and drew the lens closer.
"Look at them," Roy purred. "Naughty little boys."
Below him, heavy tracer fire hammered the advancing ranks, and the horde kept coming, bodies filling every gap the guns tore open.
Roy's smile widened for the camera. "They come to claw at our little extension of Technomendia, and they think they are brave. They think they are a storm." He released the drone and spread his arms over the battlefield. "I will not lift a finger."
On his cue, the tracer fire cut off. Without the guns, the horde became easier to hear, thousands of feet crushing grass in the dark.
With the horde audible beneath him and the camera still close, Roy let the silence stretch just long enough for the broadcast to feel staged. "It is time the world meets one of my Super Elites. FDR, do your thing."
The camera feed cut to the ground, where FDR walked toward the border beneath the drifting spotlights, alone against the mass of bodies moving through the grass. His pace never changed, and neither did the line of his shoulders, each step carrying the plain, ugly certainty of a machine built for war.
Roy's voice returned to the broadcast in a low aside. "Serenity, when he says Forgotten Tongues and Forgotten Scripts, mute it. Scream over it. Make it dramatic." Serenity accepted the instruction with the same efficiency she brought to artillery math.
FDR's voice carried across the battlefield with mechanical precision. "Forgotten Scripts and Forgotten Tongues, Grand Conjuration."
Serenity buried the forbidden words under a shriek of audio distortion timed so cleanly it felt rehearsed, and the camera climbed above FDR until the battlefield opened beneath him. When FDR gave the true name, "Phantoms of the Industry," the dungeon floor answered beneath his feet.
Mass production roared into existence around him. Mana and golden light hardened into steel as assembly lines formed in open air, stamping out half-scale heavy tanks in echeloned ranks, their treads grinding dirt before the hulls finished sealing. Transport trucks rolled out behind them in ugly, impossible numbers. Above the armor columns, one-sixth-scale bombers climbed through the subterranean dark without runways, while far overhead, one-thirty-second-scale warships formed in ghostly iron silhouettes, suspended above the battlefield like relics of an older war dragged back into service.
Dark purple fire fell in disciplined, overlapping patterns, each impact flashing violet across the grass like heat lightning trapped underground. The vanguard disappeared first, and the center buckled a moment later as the bombardment walked backward through the advancing horde.
Through the violet fire, FDR kept walking. One of the larger commanders broke from the formation with a warhammer raised, smashed a phantom tank into sparking light, and tore a low-flying fighter from the air before its wreckage hit the grass. His roar lasted until a floating battleship leveled its main battery, fired once, and left a smoking crater for five more tanks to roll across.
The broadcast cut back to Roy above the battlefield, spotlights catching him as the phantom war machine rolled through the horde below. "Isn't it beautiful?" he whispered. "Look at my boy. Reminds me of a miniature version of me. I could cry." His smile sharpened against the lens. "Please do not miss it. You will regret it."
Across the battlefield, fallen monsters vanished soon after they hit the dirt, leaving the grass clean where loot should have glittered. Bodies, blood, gold, and system-born weapons all disappeared into the floor's refusal, and each empty patch looked less like cleanup than denial.
In Evarran's camp in Otherrealm, a tall screen on a metal pole carried the broadcast from the dungeon floor, showing FDR walking through the enemy horde like a localized national disaster while Washington remained beside the training grounds. Between drills, Evarran asked, "Do you not want to watch your brother fight?"
Washington gave the screen one final measure of attention before turning back to the drill. "Negative. Let us continue." Within seconds, the sounds of training resumed around them, the broadcast reduced to battlefield weather on a pole-mounted screen. The broadcast returned to
Roy above the dungeon floor, his hand raised toward the dark horizon where the horde was breaking. "Now go," he commanded. "Take the capital. For the glory of Otherrealm. For the glory of Technomendia. For the glory of the Thunder Rider."
Roy unbuckled his harness and walked off the heavy-lift drone as casually as if the battlefield had a floor beneath him. Zehrina's Navi'N dust surged up to catch him, lowering him gently toward the asphalt while the towering black spires she had kept stationed around him drifted down as well, proof that his little stunt had been guarded from every angle.
By the time Zehrina set him on the paved floor, Roy had already traded the broadcast voice for something lower and much less certain. "So," he asked, coming up beside her, "what do you think. Was that good?"
"It was all right," Zehrina said. "You have done better."
Roy's answer failed to arrive before Zehrina continued. "It felt a tad romantic. You got sensual."
"Romantic?" Roy asked, as if Zehrina had accused him of public indecency in front of God and the entire weapons division. "Serenity. Is it too late to do another take?"
"It is live, Roy," Serenity said. "What are you talking about. We are sending this directly through the portal."
Roy made a wounded sound that almost became a word. "No." Serenity let him suffer with that for several seconds, long enough for the battlefield, the crew, and the entire concept of recorded history to turn against him.
"I am joking, Captain," Serenity said. "The broadcast operates on a slight delay. I already edited the exchange out."
Roy dragged the private tactical feeds onto the screen with the urgency of a man fleeing a crime scene. Drone footage filled the display, most of it showing Eryndra as a streak of motion too fast for the cameras to follow, which made his attempt to look busy feel somehow even more pathetic.
"I am going to wait until the drones catch up," Roy muttered, smoothing his jacket like that could repair the last thirty seconds. "Meanwhile, take me to the border."
Zehrina's dust carried Roy back to the perimeter, where Truman waited and the surviving edge of the horde broke apart into the dark grass.
What remained of the horde barely deserved the name anymore. FDR's phantoms had torn so much out of the formation that the retreat looked less like a maneuver than whatever motion survived after an army lost its spine.
Roy followed the survivors into the long grass on the feed, then let his attention drift back to the clean patches where bodies should have left proof behind.
FDR returned from the border with battlefield dust on his frame and his voice as steady as it had been before the spell. "If this is where we begin phase two, we can continue the pursuit now."
Across the broken field, the glowing border cut a hard line between the Convention and all that empty grass where thousands of deaths had left nothing behind. Roy kept his eyes there while FDR waited beside him, and when the decision came, it came without ceremony. "Begin the next phase."