Back on Terria, no one had the faintest idea what was about to happen next, or how completely it would upend everything they thought they understood about the day. Central Command kept falling, lower and lower, trailing fire and debris across the sky, and the Tartarusios pushed itself into the open cut of the wreckage, finding just enough room to tuck inside and avoid the catacombs entirely. But one problem remained. They were shielded on three sides — top, bottom, and one flank — but the fourth side, where the cut lay open to the void, left them exposed. Through that single gap, the catacombs could still pick up their unregistered signal, and it would only take one clean read for the whole plan to unravel.
Inside the Tartarusios, the control room had settled into something close to calm, the kind that only ever seems to arrive in the last few minutes before something enormous happens. A faint smile touched every face in the room — Halley's, Bjorn's, Chris's, Mario's, Harry's, Vanessa's — all of them carrying the same single thought, worn openly enough that no one bothered hiding it anymore. It was finally time. They were getting Youri back, no matter what it cost them.
The doors to the control room slid open. Oscar drew a slow breath and crossed to the railing, resting both hands against it as he looked out over his crew, taking a moment longer than usual before he said anything at all. Anyone else standing in his position would have been paralyzed with fear, staring down at a planet that had every reason in the universe to want them dead. Not this crew. If anything, they looked thrilled. He let out a short laugh.
"So. We're finally here."
"Yes we are, Captain!" Bjorn called back, adjusting something on his console without ever quite looking up from it.
"Damn, this is a beautiful planet," Mario said from the helm, not looking away from his own readouts either.
"Don't get ahead of yourselves," Halley said from the back of the room, arms crossed. "We haven't even broken atmosphere yet."
"We'll get there," Chris said, checking the charge on the main cannon. "No doubt in my mind."
"It's been so long," Harry said, half to himself, more thoughtful than the rest of them. "Wonder how he'll react, seeing us drop out of the sky like this, after everything."
"Knowing him?" Vanessa said, not looking up from her own station. "I wouldn't expect much of a reaction at all."
"Hey — Oscar!" Halley's voice cut through the chatter, sharp enough to snap every head in the room toward her. "Why are you just standing there? We don't have time to admire the view. We need to push this whole building further left, or we're about to become scrap ourselves!"
Oscar had been staring out at Terria, lost somewhere in his own head, the planet stretching out beneath them vast and indifferent to everything about to happen to it. He turned to face the rest of them. "Sorry. Lost in thought." He crossed to the captain's chair and dropped into it, eyes forward, all business now. "It's our turn now. They've done more than enough for us already." A beat. "Time to go get Youri back — and pay our respects while we're at it." He turned to Mario. "Bring us hard to the right." Then to Chris, already reaching for the firing controls. "Charge the main cannon. We're going to blast the walls and force this whole section to spin — cover us from the left, the right, and the bottom all at once. It's the only way through."
"Aye aye, Captain," Chris and Mario answered together, already moving before the words fully left Oscar's mouth.
The Tartarusios swung its hull hard to the right and fired its main cannon straight into the surrounding walls, the impact shaking the already-crumbling structure loose in a shower of sparks and broken plating. The blast forced a full ninety-degree rotation, sweeping the wreckage around to cover the ship from both flanks and beneath, crushing the catacomb node in the process — and finally clearing the way into open Terrian sky above Fansilia.
"We've entered the stratosphere," Bjorn called out, relief plain in his voice. "We made it through!"
"Cannon to maximum output!" Oscar shouted, rising halfway out of his seat. "Blast this pile of scrap out of our way — it's time we made our entrance." He turned toward Vanessa. "Get Nolan on the line."
"Patching him through now," Vanessa said, fingers already moving across her console, and Nolan's face flickered onto the main screen a moment later, static crawling at the edges of the feed.
"Hey, boss. Everything holding together up there?"
"We just broke through," Oscar said. "Get the boys ready. Let's shake this capital down to its foundations."
"Everyone's suited up and standing by," Nolan replied, already turning away from the camera to relay the order down the line to the rest of the hangar crew.
Oscar rose from the chair and walked up to the massive viewport, looking out at the city spread beneath them, its lights still glittering as though nothing at all had changed yet. "All engines, full power. Let's tear through their sky." His voice hardened, every trace of the earlier laughter gone from it now. "It's time this empire learned we didn't spend the last two years cowering and doing nothing. Today, we hit back — and we bring our friend home. This ship decided that a long time ago, whether the rest of us were ready for it or not." He turned back toward the screen one last time, his expression settling into something almost calm.
"Open the hangar. Atlas, Oceanus, Themis — get ready to deploy. Show this empire exactly what the Titans have been building toward this whole time."