Shen Fengting had dithered over this all night. There were raw metal cores to be had, and at the very best, they could walk away with four!

It had to do with a man from Franss named Alphonse.

He was the first recipient of the Starlight Azure Guardian Medal in the history of the Azure Coalition. In 1914, he had worked at the Coalition’s research headquarters as… a chef.

The Azure Coalition’s headquarters were in Yurop, in the city of Busser.[1]

Humanity’s first confirmed contact with the Sharpie civilization also took place on the Eurasian landmass. Anything that lay outside that record simply could not be known for sure.

The history of the Coalition ran back to the start of the twentieth century.

In 1908, in an event later covered up as the Tunguska explosion, humanity killed the first group of Sharpies to land, though at a terrible price and with horrific losses.

Exactly as would happen every...