Londinium, the heart of Victoria on Terra, has already been in Sarkaz hands for four years. On the surface, the Home Guard appears to rule — but the true master of the city is a devil out of Kazdel.

And one day, a single flying fortress silently shatters a Grand Duke's high-speed warship. The false peace is over, and war has begun.

This is the first page of that war. But it's not a story about kings and dukes and devils — it's a story of the ordinary people caught between them, ground to nothing.

1. The end of a peaceful day

On the deck of the high-speed warship, young soldier Pierce is giddy over his upcoming ten-day leave. He's even written up a shopping list — fix the broken mill, plow the field, buy new work gloves.

A veteran officer laughs and throws him a grim joke — it's not our business what the Sarkaz do, he says, the higher-ups will handle it.

That peace doesn't last a few hours. A Sarkaz airship appears and blows the entire warship apart. The soldier dreaming of going home, and the ship itself, vanish just like that.

Aboard that airship is Theresia — the Devil who leads the Sarkaz, the one who someday hands her mission to Amiya. She looks down at the burning city and murmurs quietly. War, she says, never once stopped — it was only ever pushed back in front of everyone again.

Then let tears drown tears, and let hardship bury hardship.

— Theresia

General Manfred beside her answers calmly. "This... is the only way." That single sentence, carried by the two of them, is the weight of everything that's about to happen.

2. Newport, sealed off

Newport District, Londinium's old logistics quarter, is severed entirely from the city overnight. Citizens are trapped in a cramped blockade zone with no idea why. The Home Guard just keeps repeating, "technical reasons."

To a terrified citizen begging for answers, a Sarkaz soldier throws a cruel truth. Now it's your turn, he says, to live the life we Sarkaz lived.

Explanations? Reasons? The war has started, you idiots!

— Sarkaz soldier

Baird picks up a scholar swept up in that chaos off the street. A self-proclaimed heraldry scholar aiming to be next academician of the Royal Science Academy — a skill absolutely useless in a place like this.

Baird brings him to the 'Uppercut' boxing gym — the base of the back-alley gang Glasgow. Cador and Delphine grumble, but decide they can't just let him starve, and take him in. At a time like this, they say, every extra person who bands together matters.

3. The vigilantes fall, in a single night

Meanwhile, Rhodes Island isn't in good shape. Kal'tsit lies unconscious after Theresis gravely wounds her at the Home Guard command tower, and Amiya is tormented by dreams of a rusted throne and wailing Sarkaz.

Rhodes, joined with the Londinium Vigilantes, prepares a counterattack targeting the Sarkaz supply route into the Shard. Siege, heir to the royal line, holds King's Breath, the national sword said to cleave catastrophe — but no matter how tightly she grips it, all she feels is cold, lifeless metal.

But right then, every vigilante safehouse is hit at once. The intelligence network has been compromised down to its roots. Fifteen minutes — no, thirty. That's all the time they have left.

In the end, the vigilantes decide to abandon the Londinium they'd grown attached to and retreat through the underground supply routes. Logos and Misery draw off the main force, while the Doctor and Amiya hold back the pursuers.

The war's already broken out. But we... can never give up hope.

— Amiya

4. Grey Hat, and a poet's bargain

An ambush hits them on the retreat. But the one who actually shows up is Grey Hat, the Duke of Caster's proxy — a courteous, slippery man who calls himself an amateur poet.

He offers Rhodes a deal: bring him the blueprints for the Sarkaz airship, and he'll let them, their allies, the wounded, even their ship, live — 'for the time being.' All while still eyeing the national sword.

At the breaking point, former Sarkaz mercenary Ines cuts in and severs Grey Hat's communications. The deal goes through, but Rhodes is now standing on a board a Grand Duke set up for them.

Meanwhile, the still-unconscious Kal'tsit is carried out of Londinium in the hands of the explosives mercenary W, with Shining at her side. The first face she sees on waking is W's, and both of them are equally disgusted — but Kal'tsit surprises herself by meaning it when she says thank you.

5. Betrayal, and Cador's guilt

Tragedy strikes on the underground escape route. Fist's old friends, the workers of Munitions Plant No. 11, seal the gates shut — handing Catherine and Clovisia over to the Sarkaz to beg for their own lives.

They aren't villains either. Just ordinary workers who've never held anything but a wrench, terrified of being blown to pieces in some bomb crater on the outskirts. Fist comes to realize something: accepting that a friend betrayed you is far easier than accepting that they simply broke under fear.

The sealed-off Newport District is slowly becoming its own hell. More and more people, driven mad by hunger, kill their neighbors. Cador confesses his guilt to Siege — he drove out an old couple who'd been kind to him, without leaving them so much as a single dose of suppressant, even Infected as they were.

And every night, Cador dreams. After the war ends and his hometown is rebuilt, amid the glow of fireworks, that old man survives and just stares at him. What answer he owes that gaze, he doesn't know.

6. Vina returns

Siege finally reunites with Baird at the Uppercut gym. Indra, Morgan, even Dagda — Glasgow gathers together in one place for the first time in a long while. Every stain on the sofa, every scrawl on the wall, exactly as it was.

But Cador turns cold, calling Siege 'Your Highness.' The truth the national sword revealed — that the leader of their back-alley gang was actually heir to the royal line — feels like a betrayal to him.

Your Glasgow isn't here. You're nothing here. To Glasgow, right now, you're nothing.

— Cador

Cador declares the king means nothing to him at all — that the restaurant owner who gave him a discount when he had no money deserves more respect. Siege can't argue back. She isn't even sure herself whether she really came back for the people, or whether she's started thinking of herself as a queen.

Even so, saving people needs unity. When a fight breaks out over food, Morgan shouts to the crowd: "Her Highness Alexandrina Vina Victoria has returned, bearing King's Breath!" A lie that isn't quite a lie, just to stop the chaos for a moment.

7. Kal'tsit and W — what does it mean to be Sarkaz?

At a hideout outside Londinium, Kal'tsit finally wakes. To W, who says she has no interest in history, Kal'tsit brings up an old story precisely because of that.

The name 'Sarkaz,' she says, was originally an arrogant slur coined by their oppressors — and it became a rallying cry for the oppressed to unite. If vampires founded a nation, how would that differ from an arrogant Victoria? If Nachzehrer ruled civilization, how would that differ from a cruel Ursus?

This is why Kal'tsit and Theresia founded Babel together — the belief that the Sarkaz are neither baser nor nobler than anyone else. But Theresia sank too deep into the Devil's memories, and arrived at the conclusion that little time remains on this earth.

So the two of them, seeing the very same crisis, ended up standing on opposite sides. One trying to unite the Sarkaz through war, the other trying to stop that war.

8. The vanished relay station, and a teacher's last night

Newport has one plan: broadcast from the old Sunset Street Hotel's relay station, forcing the Grand Dukes — who hate the idea of being seen standing by while people are massacred — to get involved. In the confusion, citizens could slip over the blockade wall and escape.

At the hotel is Colbert, an old Sarkaz manager who considers himself more Londinium than Kazdel. But the relay station had already been stripped for parts long ago. The plan falls apart at the very first step.

Meanwhile, Golding, the teacher, realizes she was the one who unwittingly leaked the vigilantes' information, and it breaks her. The teacher who'd watched over her, 'Molly,' wasn't even human — she was Damazti, the oldest Sarkaz of all, scattered into dozens of 'Mollys' to dismantle the vigilantes from the roots.

Golding chooses death — not to face a business, but to face people, each face she knows, one by one, inside her own heart. And so as not to deceive the ones she loves, she asks Damazti to take her shape and quietly disappear.

This can hardly be called resistance. This is the choice of someone too weak. But... I'm sleepy now.

— Golding

9. The devil of another species

Pushed by Grey Hat, the Doctor and Amiya go to investigate the airship. But it turns out to be no product of industrial engineering at all. Ascalon realizes it — the ship itself is the Revenant, a living being infused with the Sarkaz's own history and grudge.

The Revenant pours the full agony of Kazdel — destroyed and rebuilt 3,421 times — straight into Amiya. And it cries out at her, a being of another species entirely.

The Revenant's question is cruel. You are not Sarkaz, it says, so you will never truly be Sarkaz — you can turn your back on this suffering and leave whenever you please. Amiya answers that she won't look away, that she'll remember every death, every sacrifice.

But faced with the question — "having seen all this, why do you still try to stop this war?" — Amiya, for one instant, understands Theresia's choice. That logic, that only scorched earth can grant the Sarkaz new life. And even so, in the end, Amiya refuses that path.

But... I'll still refuse that path.

— Amiya

Because she refused, she can never truly stand fully on their side. But that very refusal is exactly what sets Amiya apart from any other devil. Draco Eblana's flame cuts in, and the two of them barely manage to escape.

10. Purple fire rain

Just as the escape begins, purple fire pours down from the sky — flame scattered by Draco Eblana of Dublin. The people burned alive by it rise again as wraiths, purple flames of hunger burning in their eyes.

In the middle of that chaos, Baird alone turns back — to fetch his old deaf friend McLaren, hiding in the video room. He rips out the last plank of wood, promising they'll get a new gym and a new video room together.

But McLaren, driven mad with terror, stabs Baird to protect his own life. What he'd fought so hard to protect turns out to be nothing but an empty tin can.

Mortally wounded, Baird slumps against a wall and finds the body of the scholar who died before him — his final treatise, charcoal words covering the wall from end to end. Behind inconclusive scholarship, what he left were wishes.

I want fried fish and chips. I hope the lover who left me hasn't forgotten me. I hope the kids at the gym are safe... And at the very end, a prayer that everyone's wishes come true, and that tears and hunger disappear.

With his fading pen, Baird adds one short line beneath it.

I hope so too.

— Baird

11. Ines's fall

Ines infiltrates deep into the airship, searching for a place high enough to use her shadows. There, together with Paprika, the young mercenary she's been dragging along like a hostage, she uncovers Manfred's real plan.

The airship's slow flight is bait. Draw the greed-blinded Grand Dukes' fleets into this one spot, then burn them all at once with the Shard's catastrophe — letting that first fireball spread into a war that swallows the whole continent.

This information has to get out. Ines throws herself off from a high enough point. As she falls, she manipulates the massive shadow cast over all of Newport, drawing the twisted shape of the Shard across the sky.

The Duke of Windermere recognizes the shadow and fires a retreat warning to his fleet. The catastrophe amounts to nothing more than a test shot. And Ines, braced for death, is unexpectedly caught in a net woven from ash. W, and her old comrade Hoederer, who works with ash, have come out to meet her.

12. Damazti's final hour

Damazti, the oldest Sarkaz alive, takes a deep interest in Amiya — a devil of another species. To a being that's lived thousands of years and exhausted every possibility until it grew bored of them all, Amiya is something it has never once seen.

The Banshee Logos, pursuing Damazti, points out the one territory it's never tried. Death. What has completed and come to a stop cannot grow further, he says — new life is born only from ruin.

In the courage Golding showed by giving up life itself, Damazti feels a desire for the first time. And it accepts Logos's invitation, asking only that the bell on his back toll in mourning for it.

The war-horn's elegy sounds, and every Damazti dissolves at once. From its ashes, two new Damazti are born. The most eternal of monarchies has fallen, and for the first time, something has begun.

The elegy has already sounded, and the horn cries in sorrow. New life is born from ruin.

— Logos

13. Ash

The Duke of Windermere's fleet gathers up Newport's citizens and carries them off to his own nomadic city. Delphine goes home, and the Grand Dukes' reckoning over the national sword is set aside, for now.

On the ash-covered deck, Siege cries for the first time — Vina, who never cries, not once. She blames it on the ash in her eyes.

And the war goes on. The fleets of Wellington, Caster, and Windermere clash with the Nachzehrer King's great army. The catastrophe cloud hasn't cleared yet, and the Sarkaz march never stops — because they are the war itself.

One twist comes to light too. The one who'd stripped the relay station beforehand was Percival, the hotel doorman — and Infected himself. Posing as a public broadcast, he'd been quietly communicating with the new Reunion, smuggling out the Infected all along. Rhodes and Delphine's broadcast plan had, in fact, just been an unlucky side project riding on top of it.

And so Nine, leading the new Reunion, takes in the Infected — vowing not to discard old names or old sins, but to become a place where Infected with no leader, no homeland, can finally set down roots. At her side is Talulah, peeling potatoes, carrying her own guilt.

Talulah looks up at the catastrophe clouds and thinks quietly. Those who've caused ripples since birth, boasting that they've led everything. They always succeed — but she won't call them winners.

I can't accept that everything they've made deserves to be called 'history.' I never will.

— Talulah

While the kings and dukes and devils argue over ownership of 'Victoria's war' or 'the Sarkaz's war,' the ones actually ground to nothing were a soldier waiting for his leave, a man who went mad defending an empty tin can, a scholar who wished everyone happiness at the end of an inconclusive treatise, and Baird, who went back for a friend right to the very end.

The powerful will call it 'history.' But as Ines said, war is nothing more than people flailing in the mud, arms broken in the ruins, a stench that never quite fades. And in that ash, someone quietly writes, 'I hope so too.'