Taihou's "Ha?!" still echoed across the plain.
Richelieu, unbothered, stood with both hands on her spear like a holy knight defending the most sacred truth.
"As the fleet's flagship," she repeated calmly, "I will henceforth serve as the Commander's secretary ship. I'll handle his daily needs, schedules, and reports."
Taihou's eye twitched. "On what basis?!"
"On the basis that you will get nothing done if left alone with him," Richelieu said without missing a beat. "And that the Commander requires someone who can read more than three lines of a logistics report without losing focus and drooling at him."
"Y-you—!"
Other shipgirls glanced away guiltily.
…Well, she wasn't completely wrong.
Takumi quietly pretended to study his map.
"Wait, wait," Taihou said, pointing an accusing finger. "You just shoved me away from the Commander, claimed his side, and then gave yourself no job except 'take care of him.' That's more suspicious than anything I've ever said!"
Richelieu regarded her for a beat.
Then, smoothly, she turned to Takumi.
"Commander," she said, absolutely serious. "Do you object to me acting as your secretary?"
Takumi… paused.
Richelieu's competence had already saved him from at least three disasters and two yandere incidents. A dedicated, organized, terrifyingly efficient secretary ship would be a blessing.
"I don't object," he said. "We… do need someone to coordinate things."
Taihou clutched her chest as if struck.
"Commander… betrayed…!" she whispered dramatically.
"Taihou," Richelieu said with the patience of a saint who had already run out of patience once today, "you can be deputy air power coordinator. You may clothe your obsession in the language of logistics."
Taihou blinked.
Deputy.
Air power.
Coordinator.
Her brain clearly categorized those as:
Close to Commander.
Important.
Close to Commander again.
Color returned to her eyes.
"I accept this promotion," she said grandly.
Richelieu exhaled, very quietly, in relief.
Secretary War: Round 1 – Richelieu victory, Takumi thought.
He wisely did not say that aloud.
Over the next several days, Constantinople began to change.
The first wave was demolition.
Formidable and Taihou's task force, assisted by a small army of purple Bulins, waded into the ruins. Concrete and steel that had once been apartment blocks and offices were cut down, sorted, and stacked like toys.
"Burin!"
"Structural integrity compromised, burin!"
"Recycling complete, burin!"
The Bulins' tools hummed, powered by Takumi's Support Cubes and Rimuru's energy optimizations relayed from HQ.
Dragon Empery shipgirls established a temporary port along the Golden Horn. Crane-armed Manjuus waddled along the docks, hauling containers and pre-fab modules.
From high above, carrier recon flights showed the scars of the dead city slowly being overwritten by new patterns: clean grids, wide avenues, reserved green belts, future rail lines.
Takumi watched from the edge of a half-cleared boulevard, boots crunching over old glass and new gravel.
"This was once someone else's capital," he murmured. "We're writing on top of hundreds of years of stories."
Richelieu, standing beside him, followed his gaze over the broken skyline.
"Every city stands on bones," she said softly. "Empires, wars, dreams. It's what we do next that matters."
"You're surprisingly philosophical for a battleship," he said.
"My whole career was watching nations rise and fall," she replied. "You learn some things."
He smiled faintly.
Finality pulsed in his chest, not as a demand to erase, but as an awareness: you are adding another layer to this palimpsest.
He nodded once to the ruined horizon.
"Then let's make this one worth reading."
The system chose that moment to drop a Chat Group notification into his vision.
[Multiversal Chat Group – Mission Triggered]
Mission: "City of the Crossroads – Phase 1"
Objective: Establish functional capital node in the Constantinople region.
Requirements:
– Operational port
– Basic power grid
– Secured central district
– Minimum 1000 inhabitants capacity
Reward:
– Group Points × ???
– Random Authority-compatible artifact (scaled to progress)
– Unlock: "Civilization Reputation" tab
Accept? [Y/N]
He mentally hit Y.
Almost immediately, the group channel lit up.
Misaka: Oi, new mission! New mission!
Rimuru: City-building with rewards? This is basically an RTS campaign.
Rin: "Civilization Reputation"? That… sounds ominous.
Kazuma: As long as the reward isn't "more work."
Ruri: A City of Crossroads merits the blessing of the Dark Court~
Miori: We should inspect what "Civilization Reputation" actually tracks. Preferably before Takumi's ego links to it.
Takumi chuckled.
Takumi: Mission accepted. We're on-site at Constantinople already. Want to come help with training & testing the new tech tree?
Misaka: DO I.
Rimuru: I'm in.
Rin: Fine. I need to see how your Honkai-derived branch behaves in the field.
Kazuma: Are there monsters to farm? And food?
Ruri: The Dark Empire's capital calls.
Miori: Someone has to make sure you don't rewrite causality. I'll be there.
The HQ acknowledged the incoming arrivals.
[Gate: Sanctuary → Constantinople Outpost – opening in 00:00:30]
Takumi watched the coordinates shimmer into existence over a cleared plaza near the future central axis.
"We're about to get more weirdos," he told Richelieu.
"More?" she echoed, faintly alarmed. "You mean there are more like you?"
"You'll see," he said.
Thirty seconds later, the air rippled.
A portal unfolded—not the same style as Azur Lane's worldgate, but the HQ's sleeker, calmer spatial fold, rimmed with geometric light.
First out was Misaka, sparks snapping off her hair as she stepped onto the cracked pavement and looked around.
"Woah," she said. "So this is Old Roman Super-Port City. Vibes: dusty, high-potential, needs more electricity."
Richelieu blinked at the girl in shorts, Tokiwadai uniform jacket, and confident posture. "This is…?"
"Misaka Mikoto," Takumi said. "Electromaster. Level 5. This universe's lightning department."
Misaka shot him a look. "Don't introduce me like a home appliance."
Behind her, Rimuru emerged, smiling, followed by Rin, Ruri (already in full gothic mode), Kazuma (clutching a backpack suspiciously stuffed with snacks), and Miori, tablet in hand.
The shipgirls stared.
"Their rigging is…" one destroyer whispered.
"…weirdly minimal?" another finished.
Miori bowed slightly. "Miori Shiba. From a magic-tech hybrid world. I'll be managing analysis."
Ruri spread her arms dramatically, cloak fluttering. "I am Ruri Gokou, she who walks as Kuroneko, emissary of the Dark Court. You stand upon the soon-to-be Throne of the Multiverse—"
Rin reached over and flicked her forehead. "Ignore her title inflation."
Kazuma took a step, inhaled, and immediately tripped on a piece of broken masonry.
He pinwheeled forward.
Takumi reached out on instinct, but Richelieu was closer. She caught Kazuma by the back of his collar with one hand, lifting him like a misbehaving cat.
"Is this one defective?" she asked.
"Statistically unlucky," Kazuma said weakly. "Also incredibly important for morale."
Misaka threw him a deadpan look. "You are good for morale. As comic relief."
"Why is everyone bullying me today?!"
Takumi smiled, then clapped his hands once, drawing everyone's attention.
"Alright. Welcome to Proto-Constantinople. Sanctuary's future capital. For now, it's a ruin with aspirations, thirty shipgirls, three hundred Bulins, and one very ambitious infrastructure plan."
Rimuru clapped. "Perfect place to test things."
Miori's eyes went to the half-cleared streets, the stacked materials, the faint glow of Support Cubes lighting temporary lamps. "Environment is acceptable. Let's mark out a training area."
Richelieu glanced at Takumi. "What do you intend to test?"
"Power interactions," he said. "Specifically: how my Authority interfaces with Misaka's electricity, Rimuru's energy forms, and our Honkai-tree stuff, without turning Constantinople into a crater."
Misaka's eyes lit up. "So I do get to zap you again."
Kazuma took several steps back. "No. No. Last time you guys 'tested interactions,' we almost tore a hole in the training room."
"That's what the barriers are for," Rimuru said cheerfully.
They set up the Training Zone at the edge of the future city, over an already-cleared plaza.
HQ extended a temporary dome—a smaller cousin of the Sanctuary training dome—and layered it with Rin's bounded fields and Miori's Authority dampers. Bulins hammered in weird tech pylons like they were fence posts.
[Field Established – Safety Level: High (99.2%)]
"99.2%?" Kazuma repeated. "What's the other 0.8?"
"Fun," Misaka said, stretching her shoulders.
Takumi rolled his neck, then summoned his Flagship Interface.
Rigging flickered into existence behind him: black-silver plates over his shoulders, twin circular arrays at his back, gun-barrels like stylized turrets hovering in a halo. The blue Wisdom sigil glowed faintly on his palm.
Richelieu watched, eyes narrowing. "This is new."
"Wisdom Cube + Authority + too much free time," Takumi said. "Think of it as a nonlethal support rigging. No actual hull, just conceptual framing."
Misaka stepped into the arena opposite him.
"Same rules as last time?" she asked. "You defend, I attack?"
"Mostly," he said. "This time, I want to see if Finality can end only the excess of your output without killing your lightning entirely."
She smirked. "So I get to go all-out?"
Rin immediately waved her arms. "Define 'all-out.'"
"Like… 70%," Misaka amended.
Kazuma made strangled noises. "That's worse!"
Rimuru raised a hand. "If beam trajectories breach the inner barrier, my clones will catch them. Relax."
Miori checked the readings. "Begin when ready."
Takumi took position, feeling his Authority hum in the bones of the arena. His Flagship arrays adjusted, barrels reorienting subtly.
"Let's go, Railgun," he said.
"Don't call me that like it's a pet name!" she shot back.
But she was already pulling a coin from her pocket.
Snap.
Electromagnetism roared around her, the air crackling. The tiny coin hovered, spinning slowly, wrapped in a vortex of orange sparks.
Takumi watched the vectors.
This was what Finality loved to do: see everything already in motion as a completed story just waiting to be closed. The trajectories of particles, the pending arcs of lightning, the to-be crater where his face was.
He could sever it.
He could end the kinetic energy, turn the bolt into a neat little metal disc that dropped harmlessly to the floor.
He didn't want to do that—not completely.
He wanted to shape the ending instead of nullifying it.
"Firing," Misaka said.
The coin blurred.
The railgun crack split the air as a spear of plasma and metal shot toward him, brighter and faster than last time.
Takumi's rigging reacted almost before he consciously did—Wisdom systems predicting, Authority reacting.
Finality reached out.
End: destructive expression above threshold X.
The world slowed.
The railgun's path spread out before him, a web of probabilities. Some ended in his chest, some skipped off barriers, some ricocheted wildly.
He chose a thread.
Closed the others.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, reality shivered.
To everyone else, it looked like this:
The beam screamed toward Takumi—then hit an invisible plane and lost its violence.
The metal slug still flew forward, but as a dull, glowing coin that pinged harmlessly off his shoulder plate and dropped to the ground.
The shockwave, the crackling corona of destructive EM—gone. Ended.
Only Misaka's "signal" remained, converted into a much lower-energy pulse that the Flagship rigging diffused into the ground.
Misaka blinked.
"…The heck did you just do?"
Rin stared. "He terminated the destructive concept of that attack, left the rest intact. That wasn't a barrier. That was… editing."
Rimuru whistled. "That's not just defense. That's story revision."
Miori's eyes flashed as she read spikes. "Be careful. That was close to a reality distortion event. The system logged a 'localized causal collapse' just now."
Kazuma, palms sweaty despite the safeguards, muttered, "I feel like we've gone from 'I can survive small gunfire' to 'I can casually veto physics' and nobody else is scared enough."
Misaka walked forward, picking up the slightly warped coin.
"Creepy," she said. "You really did just… decide that most of that railgun shouldn't happen."
"Yeah," Takumi admitted. "It's… too easy, sometimes."
He flexed his fingers, feeling Finality grumble contentedly. It liked this precise work. It was made for it.
Ruri stepped closer, cloak swirling. Her eyes shone crimson in the dim.
"Remember," she said, voice low and half in-character, half sincere, "a god who can end stories at will must choose which stories he refuses to end early. That's the difference between a villain… and a patron saint of idiots like us."
"Who are you calling idiots?" Misaka demanded.
Ruri gestured broadly at the whole group.
Everyone chose to ignore that.
They rotated through tests.
Rimuru manifested different safe energy constructs; Takumi tried ending only their runaway feedback, leaving stable cores. Rin scalarized some Authority behavior into pseudo-spells, scribbling notes like a mage in the throes of discovering a Sixth Magic.
Kazuma, of course, panicked throughout.
"So if he decides that 'my unlucky falls' are a bad process, can he end those?" he asked at one point.
Miori considered. "Possibly. But your absurd luck is tangled with your whole story."
Takumi nodded reluctantly. "If I end that, I might end you."
Kazuma blanched. "Leave it. I'll take the pratfalls."
"You are terrifyingly willing to die for jokes," Rin said.
"It's not that," Kazuma said. "It's just… if I change too much, would I still be me? I'd rather be me and stupid than… something edited."
Takumi looked at him for a long moment.
"Noted," he said quietly.
Miori logged that under Societal Philosophy – Identity & Authority for later.
By the time they dragged themselves out of the training field, the sky over Proto-Constantinople was deep orange, the sea catching the light.
Bulins had made visible progress: improvised roads traced the beginnings of the central axis, foundation outlines marked the future governmental district, and makeshift cranes loomed over the waterfront.
Richelieu joined them as they walked toward a temporary mess tent.
"Your power scares me," she said calmly to Takumi, not unkindly.
"Me too," he said.
She tilted her head. "But I saw something important in that test."
"What?"
"You could have nullified her attack entirely. Turned her effort into nothing." Richelieu glanced at Misaka, who was striding ahead, bantering with a destroyer. "You didn't. You chose to let it exist, just without the lethal part."
"That was the plan," he said.
"Empires fall when someone with power decides other people's efforts don't matter," Richelieu said. "If you keep choosing to honor what people try to do—even when you could overwrite them—that will be the difference between Sanctuary and the empires buried under this city."
He blinked.
"For a secretary ship, you're very… advisory."
"It's in the job description," she replied.
That night—artificial "night," calibrated by HQ—they synced back up with Sanctuary.
The portal spilled Proto-Constantinople's dust into the familiar glow of the HQ's central hall.
There, the festival skeleton waited: lanterns now hung properly, stalls in place, a simple stage constructed at one end, manned by suspiciously smug Bulins.
Kazuma inhaled deeply. "Smell that? That's the smell of grilling. Actual grilling. We have made it to civilization."
Misaka zipped over to the nearest stall. "Is the takoyaki ready? I'm starving."
"Ara, Tokiwadai's famous Electric Princess reduced to chasing street food," Rin said dryly.
"Shut up," Misaka said, already pulling out coins.
Chat Group notifications pinged softly.
[Mission Progress – "City of the Crossroads – Phase 1"]
– Port construction: 22%
– Power grid: 18%
– Central district clearing: 31%
– Inhabitant capacity: 9%
Estimated completion: [Variable – dependent on Bulin enthusiasm & Kazuma random events]
Group Points: +500 (preliminary)
The Mall tab blinked invitingly.
A few new items had appeared:
[Portable Festival Kit – Multiverse Edition]
[Cursed Children Welcome Package – Education & Care Framework (Template)]
[AI Emotive Module – "Joy v1.0"]
Takumi's hand hovered over the last two.
Rimuru peered over his shoulder. "That's… unexpectedly wholesome."
Ruri murmured, "So even the System expects us to collect strays."
"Good," Takumi said. "We're going to."
Miori tapped the AI module entry thoughtfully. "Giving HQ a proper, explicit joy protocol will help anchor it away from pure optimization. We should consider it soon."
"But not tonight," Rimuru said, stretching. "Tonight is for eating, before we go back to hauling ore."
Misaka, mouth already full: "Agweed."
Richelieu stepped up beside Takumi as the first batch of lanterns flickered to full brightness over the plaza.
"Commander," she said softly. "This… is the first festival of your civilization, is it not?"
He looked around.
Shipgirls laughing with Misaka at a shooting game. Bulins proudly manning stalls. Manjuus waddling between tables with tiny trays. Ruri dramatically reading the "Dark City's Constitution" to an audience of two very confused destroyers. Kazuma at the center of a small crowd, trying to teach a Manjuu how to flip okonomiyaki.
Rin and Miori in quiet conversation at the edge, occasionally glancing his way.
Rimuru trying to convince HQ's prototype AI node to play music.
His chest felt tight in a good way.
"Yeah," he said. "It is."
"Then remember this night," Richelieu said. "When Constantinople stands again, when the multiverse knows Sanctuary's name—remember that it began not with a conquest, but with this."
"Lanterns and bad festival games?" he asked.
"And a god who chose to celebrate before ruling," she said.
He winced. "I'm not a—"
"Functionally," Miori called over from nearby, "you are."
He threw his hands up. "Can we not label it?"
Kazuma raised his drink. "To Takumi, our reluctant god, and to the most ambitious factory rebuild project ever!"
"Don't toast to that!" Takumi protested.
They did anyway.
Glasses clinked, lanterns swayed, and somewhere deep in the HQ's core, the AI installed a tiny flag in its own code:
[Emotion: joy – recognized.]
[Status: desirable.]
Outside, the dead world was still vast and ruined.
But under the glow of Sanctuary's lanterns, with Constantinople's bones waiting across the sea, Takumi felt something simple and terrifyingly powerful settle in his heart.
He wanted—truly wanted—to see what this civilization would look like in a hundred years.
Finality pulsed quietly, not in protest, but like a bookmark placed gently in a story still being written.
And for once, the Lord of End did not feel like closing the book.