On a volcanic island amid a black sea, the Fury stands with peerless knights, her lover’s war banner snapping in the wind. She waits through a moonless night for the sky to fall, her resolve hard but heart heavy, signaling a looming clash on Mercury’s shores.

In Tyche, spires go dark as the wealthy flee and soldiers watch the heavens. Far from the water, an Orange-eyed girl tends her sick mother and sits with her family. She draws a curved sword symbol in window-fog to feel brave as the first distant flashes of battle prick the sky—then the bombing begins.

High-orbit bombers of the Twelfth Sunshine Squadron descend. The first demolishes the Hall of Justice and the bunker beneath. The second sinks a hidden warship near refugee boats. A Gray teenager’s railgun shot strikes a third bomb, knocking it off course; it careens and detonates over the city’s fringes, reducing four blocks of tenements to dust, including the girl’s neighborhood.

Above, in the Morning Star, the Reaper lies in armor, wrestling fear and the weight of memory—of the Red-haired girl who sparked his cause, of his wife, and of his son’s future. As launch rails thunder, he is fired toward war-torn Mercury, accepting the burden as the tenth year of war and his thirty-third year converge.