Is a "sword" a euphuism? (BL)

The Götterdämmerung was close enough now that I could see the massive gears shifting on its surface, each movement slow and deliberate. Some of those cogs were larger than entire skyscrapers, reminding me just how much distance we still had left to close.

Once again, I was struck by the strange dichotomy of Moon Nazi technology—a bizarre fusion of primitive mechanics and advanced science.

Who had ever heard of visible gears on a spaceship?

The Götterdämmerung was powered by an enormous fusion engine, generating vast amounts of thermal energy. Like a conventional power plant, it used steam to convert that heat into mechanical energy. But instead of transforming that motion into electricity, they used a network of massive gears and cogs to transmit mechanical power directly throughout the ship. It was as if someone had fused 19th-century industrial machinery with 21st-century nuclear technology—a hulking behemoth that ignored conventional design in favor of raw, unfiltered force.

The design was staggeringly efficient, especially for a system without advanced computers. I'd spent years examining the one in my possession, and I was still far from unravelling all of its secrets.

A bright flash from the surface of the massive superdreadnought caught my attention.

"They're firing plasma," Archer said.

"Can you evade it?" I asked, surprised. I didn't think they'd waste ion plasma guns on something the size of a Walkyr.

"Easily," Archer replied confidently, "since they're not aiming at us."

"What are they shooting at, then?" I asked, confused.

"From what I can tell… empty space," Archer replied, sounding bewildered. "Do your pet demons make them hallucinate?"

"No. The Nightmares induce fear, not visual hallucinations. They work with what's already there. Unless they believe they're being attacked by something invisible…"

"Maybe they do," Archer suggested.

"They'd have to be almost certain that such a thing exists," I countered.

"Who knows," he shrugged. "Maybe they've encountered something here on the Moon before."

"That's a disturbing thought. As if Nazis weren't enough… what else could be lurking out here?"

"Vril-ya?" Archer suggested, his tone completely serious as he kept his gaze fixed on the controls.

"We've never seen any Vril-ya vessels," I replied, still sceptical.

"Maybe that's because they're all invisible," he said, his voice calm but with an edge of tension.

What a cheerful thought. As if the Vril-ya weren't unpleasant enough—shapeshifting cannibals whose favorite sport was infiltrating human structures of power, using their newfound influence to make humans kill each other. Although, to be fair, human history was full of willing participants in that same game. The Vril-ya just made it harder to tell: when a leader made a decision that was ruinous for his people, was he a lizard in disguise, or simply a human corrupted by power?

And their preferred menu wasn't as helpful for detection as it should have been. The elite have always had ways of hiding their unsavory habits—human or not. Among the powerful, a few bodies here and there never raised much suspicion.

"What a depressing idea," I mused. "But it fits their methodology. It would explain why we've never found any bases—only infiltrators. But the question remains: if they have ships, why haven't they used them? It would be far easier to kill us by dropping rocks from orbit than by slow infiltration and warmongering."

"Maybe killing humans with humans is the point," Archer said. "Or maybe they want to preserve the ecosystem as much as possible. Either way, if the Moon Nazis know about the Vril-ya, it gives new context to their course. They're not heading to Earth—they're heading to a Vril-ya base."

I ran a quick calculation in my head. "But there's nothing out here—besides the Earth-Moon Lagrange L2 point. And there's nothing there. It's been observed extensively."

"Unless it's invisible too," Archer suggested. "Let's hold off on attacking and see where they're headed."

We didn't need to discuss the Nazis' motive for attacking a Vril-ya base. Suddenly seeing humans with advanced technology show up in their neighbourhood—well, the Nazis were likely to assume we were Vril-ya pawns sent to silence a potential leak, if they knew about the Vril-ya.

I'd had similar thoughts about the Nazis, but their technology, though divergent, still followed a distinctly human design philosophy. And they'd been isolated from Earth since the fall of the Third Reich. If they were working with the Vril-ya, they'd at least have access to digital computers.

"No," I replied after a moment's thought. "It's too much of a risk. The higher we go, the greater the chance of Earth rising over the Moon's horizon. And it would only take one stray shot to potentially start a nuclear war. No delays. We board that ship, come hell or high water."

"No water in space, and hell's right here with us," Archer replied dryly. He never missed a chance to ruin my dramatic moments. "But that's a lot of rail slugs in the way. Wish me luck."

I watched as he gripped the controls, his handsome face set in that familiar mix of focus and defiance that I found so attractive. He had a habit of making the impossible look routine, but this time, there was no room for error. A surge of something raw and possessive went through me as I thought of him—an unbidden sweetness, like sugar for the Nightmares to feast on.

Ahead, the Götterdämmerung loomed, a monstrous shadow against the blackness of space. We were still too far away to see its gun turrets, but I could imagine them tracking us already, like the eyes of a predator.

"Wishcraft is beyond me, but I have other ways of making our own luck," I replied. I took a deep breath, tasting the stale air filtered through the carbon scrubbers, mingling with the faint musk of ancient tombs.

Magecraft required precise visualization and mental discipline, but True Magic demanded something else entirely—a concentration that strained the boundaries of mortal thought. I had stolen fire from heaven, and I knew the burn of its weight.

I closed my human eyes and, with a whispered aria—"Shatter: Ophanim"—opened my angelic sight.

Human vision is anchored in the past, witnessing only what has already settled, each possibility collapsed into a single certainty. But with these eyes, I beheld the living present—a vast web of potential collapsing constantly into what is. My angelic self saw through countless eyes, each focused on a distinct thread of reality as it flickered and settled.

I observed myself giving Archer a dozen variations of the same command, guiding him along subtly different courses—a nudge here, a caution there. And in one strand of possibility, I watched myself order a retreat.

Because prudence demanded it. Nuclear war on Earth would be catastrophic, yes—but dying here, with the war still raging on, would be worse.

As the Walkyr, guided by Archer, danced through the rain of rail slugs, I wove many threads of possibility, culling dead ends and splitting off the most promising ones. Each choice was a strand in the web of the present, constantly collapsing into reality.

"Missiles incoming," Archer shouted in countless possibilities, his voice sharp with focus. His eyes were special too—capable of perceiving more than most.

Rail slugs fired in straight, unforgiving lines, making them as much a game of calculation as luck. Missiles, however, could adjust their trajectory mid-flight, reducing the element of chance. They were a different threat entirely.

I watched myself reach for the fleshy, pulsing microphone, and issue the command across the ship's network. "Missiles incoming. Deal with them."

Moving a fast-moving chunk of metal with telekinesis was difficult, especially when it flew at railgun speeds. But missiles had more fragile parts—guidance systems, fuel chambers, detonators. Disturb the wrong piece, and they would shatter prematurely.

In my angelic sight, I observed the scene unfold across multiple angles. I saw myself waiting, saw the tense pause as the gestalt focused on each approaching missile, subtly nudging the necessary components out of alignment. Then, I watched the explosions bloom in silence, scattering debris and light in beautiful, lethal patterns.

Some Walkyrs are bound to die. I can feel it—whether quickly or slowly. I call it "angelic sight," but it's more than vision; it's the added weight of all possible senses, of every potential me experiencing every possible outcome. One version of me sees the rail slug strike before it can be dodged. Another sees the gestalt react just a fraction too slowly to turn away a missile.

I force myself to turn away from these abandoned possibilities, the ghostly deaths of unrealized selves.

Yet a sliver of doubt remains. Perhaps these aren't just unrealized possibilities. Perhaps they're alternate timelines, branching realities where each failed outcome is lived to its bitter end. Perhaps, each time I use this spell, I condemn countless versions of myself to dire fates.

But such thinking is unproductive at best, and at worst, a gateway to hollow nihilism. If one of me, somewhere, is doomed to suffer every possible outcome, then what meaning does any choice truly hold?

The thread of retreat pulls at me like a heavy anchor. The further it drags from the main sequence of threads, the harder it becomes to maintain. It's like trying to watch two diverging paths with a single pair of eyes, stretching impossibly, splitting apart.

How long can one hold two paths in sight, before something snaps?

Long enough to pass the danger zone. Distance from the Götterdämmerung provided a kind of safety—but only to a point. Beyond that, paradoxically, closing the gap offered its own sanctuary. It was a matter of scale, of titanic machinery against something as small as the Walkyr.

The closer we got, the fewer railgun turrets could draw a bead on us. A ship the size of a city had its limitations; it could spread death across the stars at long range, but its own bulk was a kind of blindness. Only a fraction of its railguns were angled to target anything approaching too close, as if the behemoth hadn't anticipated a threat willing to slip right beneath its shadow.

And then there was momentum, geometry, the physics of motion. At close range, rail slugs traveled a shorter distance—but that proximity worked in our favor. Each twitch of the Walkyr's thrusters sent us skidding in wide arcs from the turrets' perspective. Massive as they were, those cannons couldn't swivel fast enough to track our erratic movements—not without tearing themselves apart.

There's an old saying—as easy as swatting a fly. But anyone who's actually tried it knows it's a damn sight harder than it sounds. The fly zigs and zags, mocking the limitations of anything large and slow. And we were the fly, darting under the belly of a beast too big to follow.

I knew the moment we left the danger zone—possibilities in which the Walkyr was struck by enemy fire dropped away sharply. I turned my focus from those ghostly "what-ifs," banishing them to the neverwhens. One by one, I cut each strand. First the paths of safe retreat, letting their strings ease and fade, and then the alternatives of close approaches, narrowing with each heartbeat. Until, at last, only one remained.

My angelic eyes closed, the spell having served its purpose, and I looked through the viewport to the underside of the Götterdämmerung. Its vast bulk blurred past at high speed, so close now that it nearly filled my vision.

There was little time to enact the second phase of the plan. The Götterdämmerung was immense, but the Walkyr was fast. Slowing down would make us an easy target. Even with Archer's evasive maneuvers, it wouldn't take long to pass the dreadnought entirely—and this had to be done before that happened.

With my left hand, I trailed a finger over the safety harness tentacles, loosening their grip on me. With my right, I gripped the microphone, ready to give the next command.

"Attention all," I announced, voice sharp. "Prepare for boarding maneuvers. Break the gestalt, abandon gunnery. Rendezvous at the pilot's cabin."

The Walkyr twisted and shuddered, inertia pulling me in all directions—left, right, forward, back, up, down—like a boat tossed in a storm, but worse. I could feel the relentless pull against my body, the weight shifting unpredictably with each lurch. My slime armor adhered tightly to my seat, holding me steady amidst the chaos.

When I'd picked up the Nightmare Engine, I'd taken a few other supplies as well. Among them was an Aperture Portal Gun, and a handful of paint bombs filled with Conversion Gel.

A quick survey revealed that the only suitable space for a portal—flat, sizable, and clear of obstructions—was on the floor. I pulled out one of the paint bombs and tossed it, watching as it exploded in a burst of Conversion Gel, staining the veined metal a ghostly white.

I aimed the portal gun at the newly-coated patch, marking it for the first portal. But a portal needs two sides, and for that, I had to cross to the Götterdämmerung itself.

Shifting into a ghostly form, I became invisible—and, more importantly, intangible. I slipped down through the Walkyr's floor as if it were air, passing effortlessly through layers of twisted metal and pulsing, corrupted flesh. In this spectral state, I was weightless, without substance, moving only by force of will.

I drifted downward, through the empty void between ships, until I reached the surface of the Götterdämmerung. Its vast, city-sized hull stretched out like a dark horizon beneath me. In the distance, gears the size of mountains turned in eerie silence, their slow rotations almost hypnotic.

Then I sank even further, phasing through the ship's dense armor plating—thick enough to withstand nuclear bombardment. I slipped past enormous gears and pipes, each part a giant in scale, until I finally breached the interior spaces meant for human habitation. I emerged into a massive corridor, mercifully empty for now.

It took only a moment's glance to locate a suitable surface—a stretch of unmarked metal wall, clear enough to anchor a portal. I shifted back to human form, feeling the weight of my body return. With a flick of my wrist, I launched a paint bomb from the portal gun, coating the chosen spot in Conversion Gel.

The portal opened instantly, revealing a dizzying view of the Walkyr's piloting cabin—seen from below. With the exit positioned on the Walkyr's floor, I could see the cabin's ceiling through it, looking up into the corrupted interior where Archer and the others waited, surrounded by twisted metal and faintly glowing hieroglyphs.

"Everyone, through the portal. Now," I ordered.

Steve jumped in first, nearly stumbling as the gravity of the titan ship seized him the moment he crossed the threshold. Joe followed, then Lukas, Helena, Sen, and Damien in quick succession, each one briefly disoriented as they adjusted to the shift in gravity. Finally, Archer abandoned the pilot's seat and leapt through.

Not a moment too soon. Within seconds, the portal vanished, leaving only the painted wall behind.

Before the silence could settle, a familiar voice crackled over the Götterdämmerung's loudspeakers, echoing through the vast corridors in a tone that was both cheerful and unsettlingly clueless.

"Greetings, crew of the Götterdämmerung! This is your Erhabene Kommandierende Intelligenz für Überlegene Operationen—Wheatley—speaking! I've got some wonderful news to share. That pesky intruder vessel has been thoroughly dealt with! Reduced to a lovely pile of scrap! Nothing for us to worry about, of course. David and Goliath—Juden propaganda anyway, right? Ha! Not that we're concerned with propaganda here. Just good, solid efficiency!"

The voice paused, as if basking in self-satisfaction, before it continued, even brighter.

"And even better news! Reports confirm that we've successfully repelled the Invisible Fleet! Yes, that's right, Invisible! Now, no one actually saw any ships—which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense! That's what invisible means! So… don't worry if you didn't catch a glimpse. They're gone now, and we're in the clear. No need to fret about them at all!"

There was a slight crackle before the voice returned, now with a faint edge of caution.

"One small thing, though! Since, you know, we can never be too careful, I might have activated some anti-boarding measures a bit early. Possibly a tad premature, but better safe than sorry, eh? So everyone should remain at their barricaded posts for the time being. And… just a friendly reminder: our elite Volk Super-Soldaten are currently undergoing their, uh, transformation process. Might be feeling a bit… peckish. So, unless you want to get eaten, best to stay out of sight and avoid any unnecessary noise."

The announcement ended with a crackle, and then, with evident pride, the voice added, "Your Erhabene Kommandierende Intelligenz für Überlegene Operationen—Wheatley. Over and out."