The few who remained were those who refused to leave.
They clung to streets, to roofs, to the idea that everything there—however rotten—was still home. Some would not believe that a floating ship could offer warmth; others feared exile, loss of identity, or punishment. A small set of zealots denounced Takumi as an invader. A few militarized pockets attempted counterattacks. Most simply stared in stunned silence, watching the sky empty of children.
Takumi's robots did not chase the holdouts. He had no taste for wholesale suppression beyond what was required; his directive was simple: protect and collect the children who wanted rescue, and prune threats that endangered them. That policy left room for people to stay. It also left room for moral chaos—people called both saint and monster from opposite mouths.
Inside the Star-Destroyer—inside the living city—Takumi kept moving. He was everywhere and nowhere: folding new neighborhoods into being, watching the logistics AI map population distributions, checking the environmental converters, confirming water cycles. The Herrscher of Reason had no manual, but his cognition reshaped matter into useable infrastructure. Breadlines became nutrient-production hubs in the blink of an algorithm. Playgrounds were scaffolded to double as training modules and trauma-safe spaces. Schools were instantiated with curriculums partially seeded from Himeko's and Bronya's downloads, partially invented as emergent pedagogies adapted to these children's needs.
The Holy Empress walked beside Takumi through corridors lined by young plants coaxed into ornamental hedges. She had stopped looking like a captive; she moved with curiosity and the heavy task dawning in her eyes.
"Your world is… precise," she said. "You design for people, not for spectacle."
Takumi shrugged. "I learn from the worlds that sent their knowledge here." He watched a group of three girls comparing plushies made by Bronya's Bunny drones. "Precision matters when you're building a future for millions."
"What do you expect of me?" she asked, frank and fragile.
"Help me govern." His gaze steadied. "Not from a throne, from a council. Teach the children your civic rituals, your social literacy. Keep us humane."
She laughed without mirth. "You bring me from my palace only to ask me to teach humans to be human again."
"You were good at it," Takumi said. "You saved people before. I need someone who understands systems people voluntarily accept. I can make things work mechanically. I cannot teach what it means to forgive, to bargain, to mourn. You can."
She considered the children playing in a field that had, twenty hours ago, been a ruin. Children shaped bubbles the size of wagons—Harmless illusions generated by a recreational drone. One little boy stared up at the Empress and waved.
"Very well," she said at last. "I will try."
— — —
Back in the group chat, the world's absurdity returned in tiny, human-sized interactions.
Fujiwara Chika:
[Takumi! Don't forget to teach them party planning! A surviving society needs festivals!]
Sagiri:
[I can draw the first textbook covers for the school!!]
Bronya:
[Deploying 001–010 for plushie distribution zones Beta and Gamma. Also I reprogrammed their idle chatter to optimize… cuteness.]
Akeno:
[If anybody needs divination for their future role, I can provide… tasteful lightning not to explode buildings.]
Zhongli (calmly):
[Ensure the new legal code protects the weak first; the rest arranges itself.]
Miori Shiba (DM to Takumi):
[Your star-ship tastes oddly like daisies. Good choice.]
Takumi smirked, replied to Miori with a heart emoji, then checked telemetry. The chat's levity warmed him more than any updraft him had built; the voices were often absurd and frequently wise.
— — —
Meanwhile, Rentarou Satomi ran. He'd staggered into the Tendou estate to find carnage, he'd watched Kisara ascend in a transport, her blade gone and blood on the pavement. He had not been chosen, he reminded himself, yet his chest ached as if someone had plucked a chord of fate. The city buzzed with alarms, and his phone lay dead—networks hijacked. He shouted for help and received only trembling faces and gunmetal shutters.
He did not understand Takumi's "kidnap." He did not understand the cold calculus that allowed clean rooms to sail over a world like harvesters. He only understood a promise he had once made to a shy child: to protect. He burst out into the square where robots had recently taken off, and as the afterimages of ship contrails smeared across the sky, he realized he had been too late.
Rentarou allowed himself one furious, hollow roar at empty air. It sounded like grief. He turned toward the road—toward those who had hurt and misused the children—and he would act. He might not be able to stop a star-ship, but he could still press his hands against the machines of his city. He could still be human in the little things.
— — —
The day wore on. The Star-Destroyer's docks hummed—dockings, registrations, health checks, and the first small ceremonies of welcome. Takumi had installed screening protocols that were strict and mercilessly efficient: identity flares, biometric history scours, moral-likelihood filters grazing via social data. The goal was not to exclude—it was to choose the building blocks of civilization with care. He did not want sociopaths or propagandists given a fresh start to spread old rot.
Some protested—"Who are you to determine another human's worth?" rang from corners of the world. The world's politicians denounced him. The net that spoke for them had been taken down, but the analog press swarmed. Takumi had no interest in diplomacy. He'd built a city so he could be alone, and time would force anyone to recognize structure. But he was not callous; the moral questions kept him awake some nights, and that sleep he borrowed from the children's laughter.
— — —
That night, in a makeshift auditorium that resembled neither a palace hall nor a barracks but something made for stories, the Holy Empress stood before a cluster of refugees and children. Mikado—an AI storyteller—projected a panorama of two worlds: one where fear had ruled, another with gardens and study. The children clustered in front, eyes bright.
"We will learn together," she told them, unafraid. Her voice was not the aria broadcast years in state ceremonies; it was small and human. "We will learn to build councils, to choose teachers, to look after one another. I have failed them before. I will not fail again."
Kisara, standing in the back, listened with her hands in sleeves. She was not made for speeches; she'd been made for edge and will. Yet as a child—dirty, tired—sidled up and leaned against her thigh, she simply pressed a palm to the child's head and found her throat loosen. Vengeance had been a shape, but protection could be a new one.
— — —
Takumi retired to his private chamber that night and stared at a constellation panel he had installed—one that folded together sensors from Himeko's data and Bronya's hard drives. The Aeon signal that had pinged him yesterday still hovered as a small unread message in a window he didn't want to open.
Unknown: "Builder-kun, your city looks fun. Can I come play?"
He consumed the note like a bitter pill. Aeons were intelligence wrapped in cosmic indifference and appetite. If one decided to 'play' with his children—no, he wouldn't risk it.
He typed a short reply.
Takumi: [Not today. We're closed to visitors for the foreseeable future.]
A laugh like lightly broken glass pulsed back in an emotionless emoji.
Unknown: [You wound me. I'll wait at the gate. Send cookies.]
Takumi closed the window. He didn't need to win a cosmic popularity contest. He needed to grow a world.
Yet, the signal pressed at him: whoever or whatever the Aeon was, they were now aware of this nascent node of civilization. That awareness would complicate everything.
— — —
Over the following week, manuals proliferated. The education drones projected simple school-level mathematics, then ethics, then civics. Zhongli and Himeko added curated curriculums in law and engineering. Sagiri painted classroom murals that became tactile teaching surfaces. Chika organized practical festivals and bureaucratic mock games so children could practice voting and dispute resolution. Bronya set up machine workshops where technomancers like herself taught youngsters to speak metal with respect. Kisara led security classes that emphasized restraint, not domination.
There were small, human victories: a girl who had been mute the entire operation sang in the playground; a boy who had trembled at the sound of a nascent siren now guided younger children to the shelters with decisive calm.
Takumi watched the uptick in metrics—children's sleep stability, cortisol biomarkers, literacy —and felt a thriftier, quieter swell of power than any orbital cannon could give him. This was accumulation—of trust, of culture, of habit. Power that multiplied rather than annihilated.
And yet, there were edges to the work: families that had been split, scavengers trying to profit off displaced people, political leaders calculating how to get their elites on the next transfer. Takumi had solutions that could be brutal; he chose, repeatedly, to funnel resources to protect networks and to sponsor transparency. The point economy he had created—from check-in points to the group shop—began to function as a micro-society. People who contributed knowledge sold modules, teachers earned points to request better facilities, artisans could buy tools.
He had crafted a system that rewarded constructive action, and as people used it, it encoded new social incentives. It grew messy, human, and alive.
— — —
One evening, as twilight tinted the interior skylights a soft violet, Takumi received a private message from Megumi.
Megumi Kato: [Do you ever feel lonely when everyone says you're a god?]
Takumi paused. He could not answer with the grand proclamations dispersed to the world. He typed instead the only truth he had discovered.
Takumi: [Sometimes. Then I listen to the children laugh and I remember why I made this. Loneliness is easier with purpose.]
Megumi replied with a tiny text: [Good. Keep building.]
He held that message like a pebble in his palm. He was building, yes—because he had to. Because if he did not shape a place for people who had been hurt, someone else would take their wounds and turn them into weapons.
There would be Aeons. There would be diplomats and warriors and fragmentary gods. There would be moral disputes and the stench of empire. But for one night, he let the children's laughter be an anchor against the widening sky.
Above them, the Star-Destroyer hummed softly, tending its gardens. The world Takumi had stolen from ruin hummed back.
The next morning, he would open the shop and list the first civic manuals uploaded by Zhongli. He would send Himeko a request for a school-scale solar array. He would politely decline an Aeon's invitation.
He would do, in small acts, the difficult work of being a builder rather than a conqueror.
And somewhere—out among the holdouts—the world still burned with arguments about ethics and rescue. But here, inside the living city, a child taught another to tie their shoelace, and the act of learning sealed a quiet covenant.
Takumi breathed, and for the first time since he had become omnipotent over a ruined planet, the weight behind his smile felt less like a prelude to a collapse and more like the steady pressure of foundation stones being laid.