The empire returns

Chapter 10 — The Empire Returns
Year 2113. Earth.
The place appeared on no map.
It was too remote to have a name. A deep valley in an unpopulated region of the parallel Earth. Surrounded by mountains that cut the horizon in every direction like natural walls—built by the world with no specific purpose, existing simply because conditions had allowed it.
No one ever came here.
That was exactly what Kronnor needed.
He had spent three days preparing the site with his usual methodology. No hurry. No mistake of acting before everything was in place. He had studied the terrain. Identified visibility angles from the ridges. Calculated the energy radius the process would generate and ensured that no conventional detection source could register it from outside the mountain perimeter.
Invisible.
As it had always worked best.
---
The first ones arrived at dawn on the fourth day.
Not voluntarily.
Kronnor hadn't made that mistake the first time, and he wouldn't make it now. Will was an unnecessary variable in a process that didn't require it. What he needed was raw material. Bodies. People with enough physical health to survive transmutation and enough anonymity to generate no immediate searches.
The lower levels of any city were the same on every planet he had known.
Earth was no different.
Two hundred people the first day.Five hundred the second.A thousand the third.
He brought them to the valley with the silent efficiency of someone who had done this before and knew exactly what worked and what didn't. No visible confrontation. No trace. With the patience of someone who understood that scale required time, and time was the only resource you couldn't manufacture.
---
The Kratar rested at the valley's center on a flat stone surface.
Kronnor looked at it for a moment before taking it.
The square sea-green emerald. The K at its center glowing with that distinctive green he had seen for the first time in a shack centuries ago. The internal light pulsing with an intensity that wasn't what it had been before. Dimmer. With the specific irregularity of something that had been forced to give more than it had and still hadn't finished recovering.
He took it.
"I know you're not ready," he said quietly.
The Kratar pulsed once.
It didn't answer with words. Only with that pulse—one Kronnor recognized as acknowledgment. As something that listened without yet having the energy to speak.
"I know," Kronnor said. "But there's no time."
He held it with both hands.
And spoke.
"I want the same as the first time," he said. "Super strength. Super speed. Super resistance. Super agility. Super reflexes. A magical yellow aura. The ability to launch energy attacks of the same color." A pause. "And loyalty to me. Only to me."
Silence.
Then the Kratar spoke.
Its voice came differently than Kronnor remembered. More distant. With the visible effort of something using resources it didn't fully have available.
"I haven't recovered," the Kratar said. "What you ask has a magnitude that, in my current state, will have consequences. The results may be imperfect. The transmuted may have irregularities the original Zars didn't have."
"Can they survive the transmutation?"
"Most," the Kratar said. "Not all."
Kronnor processed that for exactly as long as he considered necessary.
"I accept," he said.
"How many?"
Kronnor looked at the valley.
The thousands of people distributed across the irregular terrain. Motionless. Not yet knowing what awaited them. Not yet knowing that at that very moment, they were being evaluated as raw material for something none of them would have chosen if they'd had the option.
"All of them," Kronnor said.
A long pause.
Longer than any pause the Kratar had ever taken.
"This will consume almost all my remaining energy," it said. "After this, I will be inert. For a long time. Longer than last time."
"I know," Kronnor said.
"You confirm?"
"I confirm."
---
What happened next wasn't instantaneous.
It was slow.
Agonizingly slow in a way Kronnor hadn't fully anticipated, though he should have. The first time had been two hundred people. The sea-green energy had flowed from the Kratar in a tide that enveloped them all at once with the efficiency of something that had enough resources not to need to economize.
This time was different.
The sea-green light left the Kratar with an intensity immediately noticeable as forced. Not fluid. Not the tide of the first time, but something closer to a river trying to fill an ocean with what it had. Expanding slowly. With interruptions. With moments where the light fluctuated and Kronnor gripped the artifact harder, as if physical contact could transfer some of what it lacked.
The first screams came when the energy reached the first bodies.
Kronnor heard them without moving.
He had heard them before.
Transmutation wasn't painless. It never had been. Bones breaking and reforming. Muscles expanding unnaturally. Skin burning from within. Veins glowing with supernatural light as the body processed something it wasn't designed for and that nonetheless happened because the Kratar didn't ask permission to do what it did.
But this time the screams were different.
More irregular.
Some ended too soon.
Kronnor noticed the first bodies that didn't rise when the sea-green light left them. That remained on the valley floor with a stillness that wasn't the stillness of someone processing pain.
The cost the Kratar had warned about.
Not all.
Kronnor registered it.
Filed it away.
And kept holding the artifact.
---
The process took hours.
The sea-green light expanding and contracting. The screams. The sound of transmutation multiplied by thousands until it became something that filled the entire valley with a resonance the mountains returned distorted.
And then slowly.
More slowly than the first time.
Much more slowly.
The green began to change.
From sea-green to gold.From gold to intense yellow.
When the light dissipated, the valley fell silent.
Kronnor looked.
Not everyone had risen.
He counted those who hadn't with his usual cold methodicalness. One hundred forty-three. Out of thousands. A proportion that in absolute terms was significant but in relative terms was acceptable for a process executed with an artifact at sixty percent capacity.
Acceptable.
Those who had risen did so with the yellow aura igniting around their bodies. Not with the perfect uniformity of the original Zars. With visible irregularities. Some auras denser than others. Some bodies absorbing the transmutation with the fluidity of something that fit perfectly, and others where the process had left marks that hadn't existed in the originals.
Imperfect.
But standing.
And with eyes emptied of doubt and filled with obedience.
Kronnor observed them for a long moment.
Thousands of figures with yellow auras igniting and extinguishing in the deep valley surrounded by mountains. Dawn breaking through the ridges with a light that turned the yellow of the auras into something that, from above, would have looked like the valley was on fire.
"From today," Kronnor said with a firm voice, "you are not human."
His voice echoed against the stone walls.
"You are Zars."
The Zars knelt in unison.
Not all with the same precision. Some with a second of delay that hadn't existed in the originals. The imperfections of the process visible even in that gesture.
Kronnor noticed it.
Registered it.
"What is your purpose?" he said.
The voices came as one. Not perfectly synchronized. But as one.
"To serve you."
---
Kronnor looked at the Kratar in his hand.
The square sea-green emerald was different than it had been before the process. The internal light that had always pulsed with some intensity was now barely visible. Like the last embers of something that had burned for a long time and had reached the limit of what it could give.
"I can't do any more," the Kratar said. Its voice was more distant than ever. Like something retreating inward from a place with no physical coordinates. "What you asked for exists. But that was everything I had. I have nothing left."
The light went out.
Not dramatically.
It simply stopped being.
The square sea-green emerald remained sea-green and square. The K remained visible. But now it was only mineral. Without the internal pulse. Without the voice. Without the will of something that had existed for longer than any living being could calculate.
Inactive.
For years.
Kronnor held it for a moment.
Then he put it away.
Not with special care. With the practicality of someone putting away something that had served its purpose for now and would be useful again when it woke.
He looked at the valley.
The thousands of Zars standing with yellow auras igniting in the dawn. Imperfect. Irregular. But his. Loyal in a way no voluntarily trained army could be, because loyalty that came from transmutation had no fissures that time or doubt could widen.
The Zar Empire hadn't ended.
It had only paused.
"Go," Kronnor ordered. "In small groups. Without drawing attention. Await my instructions."
The Zars disappeared in yellow flashes.
Not all with the same speed. Not all with the same precision. The imperfections visible even in that moment.
But they left.
The valley remained empty except for the one hundred forty-three who hadn't risen.
Kronnor looked at them for a moment.
Then he looked at the horizon where the last yellow flashes disappeared among the mountains.
The cost had been real.
But so was the result.
He turned north.
Toward where Trinita existed in another universe on the other side of a portal that no longer worked.
Toward where Chara existed with its crimson warriors and its dead king and its new political structure that still hadn't fully defined itself.
Time.
He had always had time.
And now he had something more.
An army.
---
On Zekra, that same morning, Arlo was in Zarpon's palace laboratory when the energy detection system he had installed three weeks earlier emitted a signal.
It wasn't a conventional signal.
It was an anomaly.
A concentration of yellow energy on the surface of the parallel Earth that didn't correspond to any known source. It wasn't Marek—Marek's signature had been cataloged with precision for years, and this was different. More dispersed. More irregular. As if the same frequency he recognized in Marek had suddenly multiplied by a factor the system had no category to properly process.
Arlo looked at the screen for a moment.
Then he looked at Taka.
The cat sat on the table with his usual particular indifference.
"This," Arlo said quietly, "is a problem."
Taka blinked.
Arlo activated the communicator.
END OF CHAPTER 10