// Personal Journal of G?tz von Berlichingen // Entry 0117-A //

  “Defense is the stronger form of war… but only until the moment of the counterattack.” – Clausewitz

  I’ve always liked that one. They quote it in every war college between here and the Corporate Spine, and for once the theorists aren't wrong.

  But what Clausewitz didn’t write—what they never print—is that the best attack is the one that shatters your enemy and the best counterattack is one that puts your fist straight through the enemy. Not metaphorically. Literally.

  Give me momentum. Give me mass. I don't need to be clever. I need a breach point and something that goes boom after it lands. Strategy is nice. Victory is better.

  // Timestamp 327-AZ // Aboard Aurora’s Promise // Entry Closed //

  The corridors of the Aurora’s Promise pulsed with chaos, red emergency lights casting jagged shadows across polished plasteel walls, scarred by the pirate cutter’s docking clamps. Delta-Space’s eddies rattled the ship, its supermassive stations distant in this contested transit route. Miyamoto Saito, G?tz von Berlichingen, and Julie d’Aubigny strode toward the bridge, their augmented reflexes countering the tremors. Their weapons—Miyamoto’s katana and coilgun, G?tz’s boarding blade and gentleman’s rifle, Julie’s laser pistols—marked them as Iron Wraith outcasts, their tailored attire a veneer over their lethal nature, their aggressive manifestations suppressing weaker Espiritus and charming mundane passengers.

  A piercing screech halted them, the hull buckling as an eel—pirate slang for a boarding tube—ripped through the outer layer of smartmetal and the inner plasteal veneer, a Gamma-Space breaching tactic leveraging antimatter winds and the ripple of transition for cover. Air screamed, sucked toward the breach, scattering data-pads and toppling ferns. Pressure loss would have felled most, but the Onryo’s augmentations, designed for zero-g and vacuum combat, held firm, their spectral manifestations flaring: Oni warriors circled Saito. A hulking, armored knight loomed behind G?tz. Julie’s dancers smeared into flickering suggestions—less people, more motion.

  Passengers scrambled for safety straps, but the trio braced, weapons drawn. The eel’s serrated maw clamped shut, sealing the breach with a hiss. Its hatch slammed open, and five Reavers—pirate borders—poured out, clad in patched but cutting-edge vacuum suits, shrugging off small arms fire, visors glinting. Each gripped a railgun rifle, firing hypersonic slugs, descendants of Miyamoto’s coilgun. The Aurora, was a piggy bank of hostages and cargo, and these pirates decided to risk space lane defenses to smash her open.

  The Onryo charged amidst fire from Wardens, low-level security in lightweight vests wielding stun batons and pulse pistols, ineffective against Reavers. Miyamoto’s katana flashed, his reflexes a blur, slicing a Reaver’s arm joint and neck seal, blood misting, Oni warriors around him mirroring the slash. G?tz bellowed, his rifle unleashing smart munitions—micro-drones swarming two Reavers with sonic bursts and flares, detonating on impact. His boarding blade hacked through a chest plate, his iron fist smashing a visor. Julie danced, her athletic contortions setting her up for a direct laser shot to the visor, burning through and dropping a Reaver.

  Miyamoto had just squared up with the final Reaver, prepared to duel this foe; Julie interrupted with a laser shot that hit the pirates flank and doubled him over. Miyamoto’s katana severed the head, but the man himself shot Julie a perturbed scowl and she winked back.

  Julie’s grin crackled. “Let’s storm their cutter, Saito! Slice their throats—better than our Zeta-Space breakout!”

  G?tz hefted his rifle. “Offense crushes defense. Hit their bridge.”

  Miyamoto sheathed his katana. “No. Lila’s on the bridge, stabilizing Delta-Space. We protect her. Move.”

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  Julie groaned "Fine Samurai Dad," and pouted a pout that would put puppies to shame.

  The Aurora’s corridors were shattered opulence—smashed tables, flickering holo-displays, spilled synth-wine flutes. Wardens struggled against Reavers, their stun weapons useless. At a junction, a Warden slumped, stunned, another bled out, an executive’s bodyguard fell to a blade. The Onryo intervened: Miyamoto’s gravity yanked Reavers off balance and his coilgun barked, dispatching any pirate he could hit without slowing. G?tz’s rifle coughed debris that scattered small groups, bowling over any still in his way on his charge to the bridge. Julie’s left-hand pistol was firing as fast as it could cycle, staggering Reavers she couldn’t properly dispatch; her right took aimed shots through visors as she followed Saito.

  Nearing the bridge passage, a rumble shook the corridor, another eel, this one larger, a needle to deposit more poison into the ship. Atmosphere vented and the eel sealed the breach. The trio stopped and watched, waiting for more Reavers to spill out.

  The suits that followed weren’t Sygnate Nailgunners—that much was obvious at a glance. No rickety externals, no overclocked coolant cycling, no mismatched servo mounts or scavenged armor. These weren’t scrap jobs. And they sure as hell weren’t salvage.

  These were Federation Ironclads.

  The first three were gray—not the clean matte of urban camo, but bare primer. Two and a half meters tall. Field-welded, half-calibrated, and quiet in the way unfinished things are. Their movements lagged by milliseconds. One stumbled slightly on deckfall. The Kineticum Railcannons jarred and balanced precariously to the unfinished Gravebacks.

  She tilted her head, then added under her breath, “I didn’t know they made Graveback Nailgunners. I thought nailguns were a strictly Corpo affair.”

  The fourth was different. It didn’t walk—it deployed, like a strategy already in motion. Black armor veined with arterial red. No serials. No insignias. A towering 3.5 meter tall Federation chassis, unmistakably—but the railguns slung to its back weren’t. They were corpo make, standard light emplacements from groundside suppression kits—the kind you saw bolted to war-walkers in Fed-vs-Corpo skirmishes across a dozen disputed colonies.

  But this suit wore them like it belonged. Flush-mounted, heat-sinked, slaved to shoulder pivots. Custom job. Clean. Intentional. Then it spoke. “Assets forward. Full pressure. Triage only what offers resistance. Optimize around the objective.” Not a shout. A boardroom bark, clipped like a company memo but sharpened by battlefield gravity. The tone of an XO, the diction of a quarter’s earnings call.

  Julie blinked. “Is he giving orders or pitching a merger?”

  G?tz’s knuckles whitened around his weapon. “Both.”

  The Gravebacks moved forward, their nailguns dwarfed even the largest Warden weapons. Behind them came the leader. Plated in flared armor with sleek, interlocking panels that shimmered with kinetic shielding. Its helm jutted forward and hunched with a brutal angularity, like a raptor frozen mid-lunge. It bore the unmistakable form of a command variant—a repurposed FED-IC-03/C—but warped. Its secondary light shield shimmered unevenly—normally powered by a dedicated internal plant unique to the FED-IC-03/C, a last-ditch defensive feature reserved for field officers. But this one ran hot, rerouted, pirate-modified. Someone had stripped the command spine and hardwired in a secondary coil, riding the edge of thermal failure.

  The Feds called those command suits Command Frames. The pirates had another name:

  Kingsgrave.

  Because if you ever saw one moving in black and red, it meant someone killed a Federation officer to take the saddle—and didn’t bother to clean the blood out.

  It scanned the battlefield like a predator surveying wounded prey, and when its comm boomed—“We are prepared to accept immediate surrender of the target asset. Confirm her presence and you retain priority status as non-combatants.”

  A pause.

  Then, colder: “Refusal will be considered breach of contract and met with appropriate liquidation.”

  While Wardens fired futilely on the suits, the Reavers stormed towards the last holdout before the bridge. The Wardens attempted to rally with stun batons, their pulses flickering, but the overwhelming firepower of the nailguns destroyed their cover and scattered the final desperate defenders. The Reavers opened a small breach in the armored bridge door and began trading fire with the personnel in the bridge. A pair of pirates grabbed breaching shears, a massive pair of mechanical scissors and worked to widen the gaps the demo charges made.

  The Onryo moved with brutal focus through the remnants, stragglers unlucky enough to be trapped in the corridor with the trio. Miyamoto’s katana flashed again, clean and precise. G?tz swept through the corridor like a wrecking ball, dragging one Reaver into the wall by their harness and leaving only twitching limbs. Julie’s twin lasers burned through the last exposed port visor. Then a Graveback turned, its body a plug for the recently renovated security door.

  It fired and rocked back from the recoil. The slug shrieked through the corridor—Miyamoto sidestepped, the gravity in his aura deflecting its path by millimeters, the sonic crack punching a crater into the deck plating.

  “Gotz,” he said calmly. Gotz surged forward. He snagged a breaching charge from a fallen Reaver’s kit, magnet-clamped it to the Ironclad’s chest plate, and slammed his iron fist into the arm joint to hold the suit in place. The charge blew. A fist-sized hole punched clean through the composite armor—and the rider in the saddle behind it.

  The Ironclad crumpled, toppling like a downed titan. The breach unstoppered.

  Gunfire stopped while everyone turned to see what had felled the first suit.

  And the Onryo stepped through.