Chapter : 1811
"I thought they just arrived," Lloyd said, leaning forward. "The drones at the wedding... the ship in the sky... I thought that was the vanguard. The first wave."
Jas shook his head slowly. "That wasn't an arrival, Lloyd. That was an escalation. A probe to test our new defenses. Firefly has been here for a long ti. Over a hundred years."
Lloyd blinked, trying to process the tiline. "A century? But... how? If an interstellar corporation has been here for a hundred years, why aren't we speaking their language? Why haven't they invaded?"
"Because you are thinking like a soldier, not a CEO," Jas said, his voice dripping with disgust. "Firefly doesn't just invade. That’s inefficient. Invasion costs money. Ammunition costs money. Fuel costs money. And damaged infrastructure lowers the property value."
Jas swiped his hand through the hologram, spinning the globe. "They prefer acquisition. They prefer to rot a world from the inside out until it begs to be conquered. They are a parasite, Lloyd. They find a host, they inject their poison, and they wait."
The hologram zood in sharply on the southern nation of Altamira. Lloyd felt a spike of cold anger in his gut. Altamira. The land of religious zealots who hated magic users. The place where the "Orchid House" had been—the torture facility where they experinted on children, including his own subordinate, Risa.
"Altamira," Jas said, reading the look on Lloyd’s face. "You know them as the crazy neighbors who hate spirits. You burned their precious Orchid House to the ground."
"I did," Lloyd said, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "And I enjoyed it."
"You did good work," Jas nodded. "But did you ever stop to ask yourself where they got the technology? The suppression collars that could turn off a mage’s power? The bio-augntation tanks that could graft monster parts onto human children? The chemical formulas for the drugs they used?"
Lloyd paused. He had always assud it was lost ancient magic, or perhaps artifacts dug up from so ruin of the Babylon Empire.
"It was Firefly," Jas revealed.
The words hung in the air like smoke.
"They have been shadow-partners of the Altamiran hierarchy for over a century," Jas explained. "Firefly found a nation that felt inferior because they lacked magic. They found a king who was jealous of his neighbors. And they offered him a deal. 'We give you technology to level the playing field, you give us access.'"
"Access to what?" Lloyd asked, though he was beginning to dread the answer.
"To test subjects," Jas said softly. "Altamira wasn't a kingdom to them. It was a petri dish. They used the population to test 'Spirit-Tech'. They needed to know how to graft machinery onto souls. How to suppress mana frequencies. How to weaponize children. All those horrors you saw in the Orchid House? That wasn't madness. That was Research and Developnt."
Lloyd felt a wave of nausea. He rembered the glass tubes. He rembered the children with tal fused into their spines. He rembered Risa’s scars.
They weren't just victims of a cruel prince. They were lab rats for an interstellar corporation. Their pain had been recorded, analyzed, and put into a spreadsheet sowhere in the stars.
"They were refining the process," Jas continued, zooming the map out again to show the whole planet. "They were learning how to harvest mana from living beings efficiently. Because that's the endga, Lloyd. That is why they are here."
The simulation changed. The green and blue planet of Riverio was suddenly encased in a cage of gray tal. Massive tethers connected the surface to orbital stations. The planet’s color began to drain away, turning from vibrant life to a dead, gray rock.
"They don't want land," Jas said. "They don't want gold. They want the planet itself. They want to turn Riverio into a Mana Farm."
"A farm," Lloyd repeated, staring at the dying holographic world.
"Total colonization," Jas said. "They harvest the mana from the core, from the ley lines, and from the people. They use it as a raw energy source for their galactic empire. It’s cleaner than nuclear, more potent than fusion. And Riverio? This planet is the biggest battery they’ve ever found. The mana density here is off the charts. If they hook this world up to their grid, they can power a thousand fleets."
"So everything..." Lloyd stood up, walking to the map. "The wars between the kingdoms. The instability. The sudden rise of extremist groups. It was all them?"
Chapter : 1812
"Most of it," Jas said. "They keep us fighting each other so we don't look up. They feed tech to one side, magic artifacts to the other. They sell the poison and the cure. Profit and chaos. It keeps the mana levels fluctuating, keeps the populations desperate."
Lloyd looked at the red dots. They looked like a disease.
"And now?" Lloyd asked. "Why reveal themselves now?"
"Because we stopped fighting," Jas said. "You united the North. You made alliances with the Desert and the South. Peace increases stability. Stability allows the population to grow strong. They realized that if they waited any longer, we might actually beco a threat. So, the tiline has moved up. The harvest is starting."
Lloyd gripped the edge of the glass table. The cool surface did nothing to soothe the fire in his blood.
"They view us as a resource," Lloyd whispered.
"No," Jas corrected him. "They view us as fuel."
________________________________________
Jas tapped the table again, and the map shifted. The focus moved away from the human kingdoms and drifted south, past the borders of civilization, into the jagged, ominous landscape of the Southern Wastes.
"It gets worse," Jas said. "Firefly isn't just working with humans. They don't discriminate when it cos to finding pawns."
The map highlighted the territory of the Devil Race. Usually, this area was a blank spot on the map, labeled only with warnings of death and monsters. But Jas’s map was detailed. It showed topography, settlents, and troop movents.
"The Devil Race," Jas said. "Our ancient enemy. The monsters under the bed. For a thousand years, humanity has been told that the Devils attack us because they are evil. Because they crave blood."
"Aren't they?" Lloyd asked. "Lucifer certainly seed to enjoy the bloodshed. He wanted to wipe us out."
"Lucifer was a traditionalist," Jas said. "He was an old soldier fighting an old war. He hated humans because of history. But not all Devils are like him. So are... pragmatic. So are ambitious. And Firefly loves ambition."
The hologram changed again. It stopped showing a map and started showing grainy video footage. It looked like high-altitude surveillance, likely taken from one of Jas’s secret satellites or a high-flying stealth drone.
The image showed a desolate canyon in the Devil Wastes. On one side stood a group of figures in sleek, futuristic armor—Firefly agents. On the other side stood towering, horned Devil lords.
They weren't fighting. They weren't casting spells at each other.
They were shaking hands.
Lloyd stared at the image. It was grotesque. Demons, creatures of primal magic, making deals with corporate soldiers.
"Traitor Devils," Jas said, the words heavy with betrayal. "Firefly has managed to sway high-ranking mbers of the Devil nobility. They promised them power. They promised them that in the new corporate order, they wouldn't be monsters living in the wasteland, scavenging for scraps. They would be overseers. Managers."
"They sold out their own kind?" Lloyd asked, incredulous. "They’re demons. They have pride. They have a code."
"They have a price," Jas said dryly. "Firefly is very good at finding the price of a soul. These Traitor Devils are the ones destabilizing the continent’s defenses from the other side. They are the ones pushing for the attacks on the North. They want to weaken us so Firefly can sweep in and 'restore order'."
"And the Red Blight?" Lloyd asked, his mind racing back to the village of Oakhaven. The engineered virus that had turned innocent villagers into mindless ghouls. The bats. The suffering. "That was them too?"
"A field test," Jas confird. "It wasn't just a plague. It was a biological weapon designed by Firefly geneticists and deployed by Devil agents. They wanted to see how quickly a magical population would succumb to a non-magical virus. They wanted to see if they could wipe out the human resistance without firing a single shot."
Lloyd closed his eyes. He saw the faces of the villagers. He saw the piles of bodies. He had thought it was just cruelty. He had thought it was a monster acting out of instinct.
But it was just product testing. It was data collection.
"It's not a war," Lloyd whispered, opening his eyes. The blue rings in his irises were glowing faintly. "It's an industry."
"Exactly," Jas said. "That is the hardest thing for people to understand. They don't hate us, Lloyd. That's the worst part. They don't hate us at all. To them, we're not enemies to be respected. We're livestock. We're numbers on a quarterly report. Humans, Devils, Elves... we're just assets to be liquidated."
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