Chương 441: 208.Thor Hammer 2

"Burn through them." My words were barely out before Maki took the relay.

"Executive Officer. Execute." Right. So somewhere in the middle of the firefight, the hijacking, the open fire, and nearly having a cerebral event over an AI, the bridge had quietly sorted itself out. Maki Kushima: Captain. Hoshino Shimo: Executive Officer and Tactical Officer. Honestly, the arrangement made sense. She was the one who stood at the high place and decided the fate of a fleet in three words, the way Imperial history books described it.

I was the one standing at her side, handling all the ugly, dirty, explosive parts.... Wait. When I put it that way, am I getting the worse deal here?

"Understood." I pushed that deeply inconvenient thought aside and dropped my fingers onto the fire control confirm.

"Muspelheimr, port forward, batteries one and two. Target: Müllheim. Sustained fire. Execute." The next second, the Asgard finally let people see what she actually had. Two concealed battery positions opened along her port-forward hull, black armor panels sliding apart like petals, revealing the deep, almost-blue plasma chambers underneath. No brutal recoil shudder. No cheap fireworks.

Just a moment—and then two lines of red-white thermal fire, too straight and too clean, tore through the darkness at the port's outer edge. Not beams. More like two nerves, heated past fury, striking an enemy ship directly across the face.

"Roy, three degrees port, don't let her eat that for nothing."

"Already doing it." Roy held the helm ring with both hands, voice steady enough to be commenting on the weather. His Imperial black uniform caught the cold blue combat light and threw back a thin iron sheen, making him look less like the Federation Seitokai treasurer and more like the kind of young helmsman who'd always been meant to clear the way for some cold-blooded admiral.... The uniform really was doing a lot of work.

A group of students who'd been on a school trip an hour ago were somehow managing to project we were always here to take this ship. It was absurd. It was also working. After Roy's micro-correction, both Muspelheimr lines bit into the Müllheim's port mid-forward section. First beam: peeled the armor. Second beam: burned straight through the drive coupling ring that hadn't finished its turn.

I watched the Imperial dreadnought take it like a blade driven into her ribs—the whole hull shuddered, her port attitude control forgetting it was supposed to exist, and the ship began to list sideways, still carrying the momentum of a firing solution she'd never get to finish.

"Hit. Müllheim port main attitude band ruptured, forward heat-sink plating melted through." Akari's report came fast, clean as a blade on glass.

"She's losing balance—no, she can't hold it, port angle still widening!" No extra exclamations. No voice rising with the spectacle. Good. In a fight, the dangerous thing isn't nerves. It's someone performing their nerves for the whole ship to watch. The Müllheim tried to force a correction, but the damage was too deep.

Her port-forward section moved like something with its bones pulled out—the ship lurched awkwardly in the blast of its own emergency attitude thrusters, then struck the orbital barrier wall still half-attached to the port's outer edge. No immediate explosion. That would have been too easy. First: a long, brutal white-heat scar scraped across the hull. Then: the secondary munitions bay she hadn't finished sealing went up from the inside, triggered by the cascade shockwave.

The Müllheim convulsed—like a fish with its spine snapped but not yet dead—and then erupted along her mid-aft section in a ragged spread of fire.

"... Oh," I said. A completely useless sound. I couldn't help it. Maki sat in the captain's chair, didn't turn her head, and said, very evenly: "Sufficient?"

"If you mean Imperial morale, probably not quite." I was already watching the Schopfheim pulling back fast.

"But if you mean convincing them the Asgard isn't a prop for a photo shoot—yes."

"Next one, then." She said it with the same calm she'd use to note that the next course was ready to be served.... Damn it. That woman in an Imperial black uniform saying things like that really did sound like someone who issued fleet-destruction orders between dinner courses.

"Schopfheim changing vector! She's raising her bow—trying to cut in along her forward main battery axis!" Akari called immediately. On the main projection, the second dreadnought wasn't rushing in the way the Müllheim had. She'd chosen a more cautious, more annoying angle—a diagonal approach to avoid the Asgard's forward engagement arc while bringing her own main guns to bear on our port-forward position.

"Smarter than the first one," I muttered.

"Only just. Not smart enough to deserve a prize."

"XO, right-side power allocation request." Jess's voice came from my right rear, as calm as someone sorting through a frustrating administrative file. I glanced over. She was in the Imperial black uniform too, seated at the recessed systems station, fingers cutting fast between layered projection interfaces. Her job wasn't saying impressive things.

It was keeping this monstrosity—expensive enough to give an entire Federation finance ministry a collective cardiac event—from looking like very costly scrap metal the moment the energy routing went wrong.

"Talk."

"If we maintain Muspelheimr sustained fire, the port-forward battery array hits thermal saturation in seventy-two seconds. Recommend switching to Parsifal launch sequence. Let Hecatonchires and Fenrir handle her escort barrage first." I blinked. Right. This was why I liked Jess. She wasn't the maybe we could type. She was the if you don't do this, in seventy-two seconds we embarrass ourselves on the bridge together type. Extremely useful for teamwork. Extremely bad for cutting corners.

"Adopted." I adjusted immediately.

"Jess, open Schopfheim forward counter-prediction. Hecatonchires to intercept. Two Fenrir groups, launch first."

"Switching now." Her fingers came down, and the Asgard's outer-layer close-defense and counter-systems spun up. A second later, Schopfheim fired. Not a probe this time—a full composite barrage, the kind the Imperial military liked to use when they wanted to communicate that they were angry. Several medium-power beams and a missile spread came in together, like they were trying to compensate for everything the Müllheim had lost.

"Hecatonchires intercept, beginning now." Jess's report, flat. The Asgard's outer edge lit with close-defense fire, dense enough to be almost violent. The kill-net that was designed to shred aircraft and missiles wove itself across the vacuum in seconds, fine enough to make your scalp crawl. Several Fenrir rounds burst out ahead, detonating wide interference clouds that cut the Schopfheim's barrage apart before it could consolidate.

"Two-second window." Akari said it suddenly. I looked up fast. She'd already pushed the Schopfheim's posture simulation to the center of the main display. A red predictive line was running along the underside of the enemy hull.

"She pulled her lower traverse angle wide to avoid our forward arc. Her ventral secondary munitions bay cover will be exposed for two seconds." Her voice had no extra inflection.

"If you're going to hit it, now." The moment she finished saying that, something very specific happened in my chest. Not the flashy kind of wow, impressive. The other kind—the quiet recognition of: yes, exactly there. This is where this person belongs. Akari wasn't here to shout things and make the main character look good. She was here to put the window that would close in half a second directly into my hands.

"Roy, give me those two seconds."

"I'll give you three." He didn't look up. The Asgard moved under his hands like a cold, emotionless black fish—the smallest possible angle shift, barely visible. That was all it took. On the main projection, the armor gap along the Schopfheim's ventral aft section opened.

"Parsifal. Two rounds, 0. 8-second interval." I didn't hesitate.

"Target: Schopfheim ventral secondary munitions bay. Fire."

"Fired." Two heavy anti-ship missiles left the Asgard's missile spine one after the other. No theatrical exhaust trails. Just short, cold propulsion light—two very well-funded killers, moving quietly toward their target. First round: struck the ventral outer armor. Blew a concave fireball inward. Second round: followed the gap the first one tore, and went through. What came next was cleaner than the Müllheim. The Schopfheim didn't list first. Didn't hit a wall first. She was lit from the inside.

The whole ventral section brightened. Not an explosion—something worse, more contained, like someone had struck a match inside a coffin. Then— Boom. The ship tore open from mid-belly forward.

The bow angle she'd been trying to hold lost all control, her forward main battery array flung sideways like something ripped out by the roots, and the second detonation chain chased itself from the interior up through the dorsal hull, splitting the dreadnought into a forward half still on fire and an aft half that hadn't quite accepted it had already lost.

"Hit. Secondary bay sympathetic detonation. Schopfheim structural fracture." This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. Akari finished the report, paused, and added honestly:"She's done."

"I can see that." I said it, and then noticed my palms were wet. Normal. I wasn't born for this—standing on the bridge of a mythological special construction ship, using Imperial warships as target practice. I was just better than average at grabbing back when something was trying to strangle me. Two dreadnoughts. One with half her spine burned out and her hull wrecked against a wall. One detonated from the inside by guided munitions. The Asgard's bridge went quiet for half a second.

Not because nothing was happening. Everyone was still working. But in that half-second, something landed across the whole room at once— We actually won that. Maki didn't look at me. She set her hand on the command rail at the side of the captain's chair and fixed her eyes on the third red identification bracket. Freiburg. The Emperor-class battle cruiser had never rushed in the way the first two had.

She'd held her distance from the start—like a predator watching its companions get cut apart and still managing to stay ahead of its own instincts. That kind of enemy was the worst kind. Not because she couldn't feel anger. Because she knew when to calculate first.

"That last one isn't going to be easy," I said, low.

"It's not that she doesn't want to evade," Maki said, just as quiet.

"She just doesn't believe we'll actually fire." I heard the correction underneath it, and I let it sit for a second.

"That's worse," I said, low.

"Which is why we deal with her together." She said together very lightly. I heard it very clearly. Damn it. Don't say something that sounds like an alliance declaration right now. I'm busy. My pulse doesn't have the bandwidth for this. I cleared my throat and pulled my eyes back to the main display.

"Roy, bring the bow onto Freiburg's projected line. Don't need maximum broadside—just give me a clean main gun axis."

"Copy."

"Jess, Thor Hammer charge status?"

"Main system on standby. Yggdrasil recommends eight more seconds for optimal alignment."

"If her recommendation cadence gets any slower, I'm going to throw a chair at the mainframe."

"I'll hold the chair steady for you," Maki said, perfectly calm. I looked at her sideways. She wasn't smiling. Which somehow made it worse.... I'm done for. In the middle of a battle, the thing making me lose focus is Maki offering to help me assault an AI. My life planning went off the rails a long time ago.

"Freiburg main battery array beginning charge cycle." Akari's voice cut back in.

"She's not closing. Holding mid-range standoff. Like she's waiting for—" She didn't finish. A forced-connection alert hit the bridge like someone had kicked the door in. Not a contact request. A hard override. The next second, a voice full of compressed fury—the kind of voice that had recently been flipping tables—filled the entire bridge.

"Asgard! You hear me, you Federation mongrels!" The volume made my temple throb. Standard Imperial Senpai officer communication style. The moment things left their control, turn the volume and the temper all the way up—as if being loud enough could make the situation reverse itself out of fear. The identification tag surfaced at the corner of the main projection. Emperor-class Battle Cruiser, Freiburg. When that particular word filled the bridge, I was fairly certain I wasn't the only one who frowned.

Not that any of us were known for refined vocabulary. Honestly, if you printed out every word that had actually crossed everyone's minds since the hijacking started, you'd have a fairly comprehensive field manual of things the Federation youth advisory board would prefer not to exist. The problem wasn't whether we knew how to swear. The problem was that nobody with any self-respect opened a public channel and sprayed it like a drunk at a street corner. That wasn't aggression. That was embarrassing.

I looked at the forced-connection window belonging to Freiburg and felt something close to secondhand pity for the Imperial military's entire discipline program. All that effort to produce soldiers who stood straight, dressed sharp, and died like they were receiving a commendation—and when the moment actually came, the finest among them opened their mouths and turned themselves into a brawl outside a pub.

"Do we open the channel?" Lan asked from the comms station. She was in Imperial black, shoulders square, fingertips already resting above the accept permission, waiting on one word.

"Hm." Maki made a short, cold sound without raising her eyes.

"Not yet. Let him finish barking."... I nearly laughed. Let him finish barking. She was genuinely treating the other side like an animal. The worst part was how accurate it was. On the forced channel, the man who apparently commanded the Freiburg and considered himself some variety of great being did not disappoint. The next few sentences escalated steadily toward a public mental breakdown. Since he'd already thrown out civility, I wasn't going to be the one to pick it back up. I pressed the comms key.

"Mongrels?" I kept my voice flat. Almost pleasant.

"What kind of inbred wreckage did they have to scrape together to make you?" Half a second of silence on the bridge. Then, from Jess's direction, a suspicious sound. She was seated at the systems station with her back to me, but her shoulders had visibly moved. Once. Then again. Not fear, not a hit, not an operational error. That was someone whose professional composure had just been directly dismantled by the XO's opening line. Good. At least I still had the capacity to make my own people nearly lose it.

That meant my mental state hadn't been completely flattened by the combat bridge. The channel stalled. The man on the other end clearly hadn't expected the forced comms to be answered with a genealogical inquiry. Then the voice exploded.

"Who are you! How dare you speak to a prince of the Empire in that tone!" Prince. The words had barely landed before Hedwig stood up. The movement was small—she even kept that usual composed expression on her face. But the color in her eyes changed. Not panic. Not grief. Something more complicated and colder—like someone had just reopened a wound that had been carefully bandaged for a long time. I turned to look at her.

"Who?"

"Second Prince Fegelein." Hedwig answered without inflection. The same tone she'd use for weather, or for food she'd expected to go bad eventually.

"I see." I nodded, and felt a complete picture assemble itself around the voice on the other end. Some people aren't arrogant because they became a prince. They're arrogant to this degree because they were born into enough money that the entire universe had no choice but to put up with them.

"Do you want to talk to your brother?" I offered the comms pickup toward Hedwig. She looked at me. Shook her head. Then she smiled. That same beautiful, gentle smile—the kind that made even a refusal feel like a kindness. But what she said came out cold as wind off an Imperial graveyard.

"I haven't learned to speak animal yet. I'll pass."

"Pf—" From Jess's station, a sound that was clearly not professional in any sense escaped. She immediately lowered her head, pretending to verify data. The shoulders shaking visibly behind her were not very convincing. I nearly lost it too. This was genuinely something. In the middle of what should have been a blood-soaked historical event—Imperial succession, a stolen warship, an active firefight—the first person on the bridge to nearly fail at keeping a straight face was Jess McCallow.

The channel went quiet for a moment. Then Fegelein found his most familiar mode of expression again. Insults.

"I get it now—it was that vile creature Hedwig who put you up to this!" The moment that landed, the smile on Hedwig's face didn't disappear. It went cold. Like someone had pulled the light off a blade. Only the blade left.

"Hedwig, you low-born, concubine-spawned mon—" The channel cut. Clean as an axe through a cable. I blinked and looked at Lan. Her hand was still pressed hard on the termination control. Her knuckles were nearly white. That did not look like an accident. It looked like someone who had used every last reserve of composure to make herself only cut the channel, rather than burn his frequency to ash.

"Apologies," Lan said, expression empty.

"My hand slipped." Nobody on the bridge said a word against her. Of course not. If that was grounds for complaint, every single person on this ship should form a line to apologize to the universe first. Hedwig looked back at me. She had that warm, almost harmless smile back on her face. But I knew now, clearly, that there was nothing soft underneath it anymore.

"Hoshino." Her voice was light. It almost sounded like a tea invitation.

"The talking's done. Shall we fire?"... Right. That sentence just earned a place in the top three most elegant expressions of lethal intent I've heard today.

"Confirmed." I drew a slow breath and pulled my attention back to the main fire control interface. Everyone on the bridge was still in Imperial black. Roy held the Asgard's axis steady at the helm. Jess had locked the main systems, power flow, and weapons controls back to optimal. Akari was layering Freiburg's heading, main battery charge cycle, and relative distance onto the main projection. An entire stolen Imperial special construction ship.

An entire bridge in Imperial uniforms, preparing to erase an Imperial prince. If anyone recorded this, it would probably end up in Federation political education materials. I could already write the caption: How to Elegantly Convert Enemy Assets into Negotiating Leverage.

"Forward shields, closing," Jess reported. On the main projection, the fine defensive texture across the Asgard's bow receded like a tide pulling back. The black lance of the bow emerged in deep space, more exposed and more dangerous.

"Reactor output, raising to maximum safe threshold."

"Main gun path, clear." Akari followed on.

"Freiburg maintaining frontal pressure posture. No evasion."

"She's not refusing to evade because she doubts herself," Maki said. She was in the captain's chair, her Imperial black uniform almost merging with the combat bridge around her, only her shoulder line and profile cut sharp by the cold blue tactical light.

"She still doesn't believe we'll actually fire." The moment she said that, I found myself almost feeling sorry for Fegelein. Spend long enough in a place built entirely around bloodline, succession order, and face—and you develop a very specific delusion. The belief that as long as you're still carrying the title, the whole universe will stop its hand at the last second for you. Unfortunately. The thing in shortest supply on this ship right now was reverence for royalty.

I set my hand on the main gun confirmation grip. Thor Hammer's firing sequence didn't work like a standard naval cannon. No brutal countdown. No noise designed to make blood run hot. Instead, it was almost too quiet. Quiet like the entire Asgard was breathing in together, pushing everything expensive, dangerous, and mythologically offensive forward along the same central axis. A low resonance moved through the hull. Not a vibration. More like some enormous temple opening its eyes in the dark.

The bow gun doors opened in sequence. The multi-layer armor sliding apart was almost graceful—less like combat, more like the opening movement of a grand ceremony. But I knew exactly what this was. The Empire's particular disease: the insistence on making even a weapon built to erase things from existence look like a work of art.

"Yggdrasil. Main gun guidance."

"Connected." The AI's unhurried voice returned.

"Thor Hammer firing line calibrated. Guidance path stable. Fire recommended."

"You answered fast this time."

"Because this time you asked."... Right. Still finding the time to needle me in the middle of combat. Whoever designed this AI's personality module—I genuinely want to know if they had a difficult childhood.

"Maki." I said it low. She was looking forward. She didn't turn.

"Give the order." She was quiet for half a second. Then that voice—cold enough to press down the entire bridge—fell, clear and final.

"Thor Hammer." Maki said.

"Fire."

"Executive Officer. Execute." I smiled, just slightly.

"Confirmed." I pressed my hand forward. Antimatter itself is not something meant to be watched with the naked eye. Transparent. Invisible. Without poetry. Without any shape a human mind can hold. Which is exactly why, when someone forces it into a weapon, they have to add a guidance beam—for targeting, for correction, and so the operator can at least know which direction the thing they just released has cut the world open. So I saw it.

Looking out from the Asgard's bridge: a line of light carrying impossible weight, shooting straight along the bow's central axis. Not ordinary brightness. Not a laser, not plasma, not any variety of gunfire I'd seen in a textbook or a training film. It looked like destruction that had been forced into a shape. Heavy. Straight. Cold without emotion.

Like some rule of the universe that was never meant to be held in human hands had been pulled off its throne by the Asgard, and was being used as an execution instrument. Freiburg didn't finish her evasion. Her bow had only just begun to shift when the guidance line hit her centerline. The next instant, matter-antimatter annihilation began. No dramatic fireball. No slow cascade of secondary detonations. Not even the usual struggling, screaming death of a ship going down. Freiburg simply— Ceased.

First, the center of the hull was erased. Not blown apart. Erased. Like someone had removed a piece of reality. Then the absence expanded rapidly, and everything the hull had been made of—organic and inorganic both—vaporized on contact. Metal, framework, armor, compartments, fire control, flesh, power, bloodline, name—all of it fed into the same terminus without distinction. When the light passed through, where Freiburg had been was only a black and empty nothing. Not even enough debris to be complete.

Not even enough explosion to be worth counting. It felt like the universe had erased something with a gesture of mild distaste. The bridge went silent. Not the silence before a victory cheer. The silence where everyone needs a moment to understand what they just witnessed. I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. And finally produced something deeply undignified but, I felt, entirely appropriate to the occasion:"... Fuck." Nobody corrected me.

Probably because the first word in everyone else's head was exactly the same. I stared at the empty space where the Freiburg had been, my throat dry.

"Did we just—" I stopped.

"Did we just reduce the Empire's Second Prince to something that doesn't even qualify as debris?" Jess didn't answer immediately. She was probably still processing her own worldview. It was Yggdrasil that replied, with professional integrity.

"Correction." Steady delivery.

"Based on residual mass at the site, the target's remaining quantity is insufficient to be classified as debris." I turned slowly to face the main projection.... This AI is going to die by my hand someday. Privately. Personally. One second of silence on the bridge. Then Roy drew a quiet breath. Then Jess finally buried her face in her hands, her shoulders starting to move in a way that was clearly not professional.

Akari looked like she was trying to maintain a reporting posture and failing to resolve the conflict between should I stay serious and this is completely insane. Lan had one hand still on the comms control, expression colder than usual, but with a strange, specific calm—like the thing she'd just cut off wasn't a transmission, but the throat of a particular fate. Maki was still in the captain's chair, looking forward. After a few seconds, she said, very quietly:"Executive Officer."

"Yes."

"Well done." Three words. No excess praise. Not held back either. Not the kind of formal commendation that makes your whole body feel wrong. Just those three words, said too plainly. Which was exactly why something in my chest responded in a way that had absolutely no business doing so right now. I'm hopeless. I just used the Empire's most expensive mythological weapon to delete the Empire's Second Prince from the universe, and the thing currently most distracting me is three words from Maki Kushima.

That's genuinely embarrassing. But there's nothing to be done about it. Some things in life are more dangerous than an antimatter main gun. The President's approval, for instance. Hedwig stood nearby and let that warm, almost harmless smile return to her face.

"I suppose there really is no going back now," she said, soft. I looked at the empty space where Freiburg had been, and let out a slow breath.

"No," I said.

"There isn't." No going back. It had been true from the moment we took the Asgard out of port. But it hadn't felt real until now. We weren't running. We weren't stalling. We weren't acting out a lucky improvised hijacking. We had personally erased a piece of the Imperial family, along with an Emperor-class battle cruiser, from the universe. After this, whether it was the Federation or the Empire, whether it was a history book or a warrant—nobody was going to look at us as ordinary students again.

I found myself laughing, very slightly.

"Maki."

"Mm?"

"I'm starting to think that when we get home, disciplinary violations might not be the main issue anymore." She finally turned her head to look at me.

"You're only realizing that now?"

"I was busy."

"Busy talking back to a prince, or busy vaporizing him?"

"Both." I answered honestly. Those calm, too-composed eyes stayed on my face for a moment—checking, probably, whether I was still breathing normally, thinking normally, still capable of being an XO who didn't get the whole ship killed. Then, very slightly, the corner of her mouth moved.

"Then keep being busy." I smiled back.

"Copy that, Captain."