The rhythmic thrum of propellers still echoed in the bones of the city.
Though far from the flas of Albion, Berlin had not slept.
Bruno stepped into the war room, rested, but haggard.
His officers rose at once, but he waved them down.
"Spare the formalities," he muttered, voice gravelly from the flight back.
"Let’s begin."
A massive operations map flickered under amber lighting, centered on the British Isles.
Red dots marked bomber squadrons.
Arcs of engagent and kill zones were sketched in thick ink across the Atlantic approaches.
The Channel had beco a chessboard, and the pieces were moving fast.
"Status," Bruno said.
Generaloberst Hollenberg stepped forward, steel-grey mustache twitching with restrained pride.
"Initial wave of P.1108/I Fernbombers crossed into British airspace at 01:17. Altitude: 14,000 ters. No enemy intercepts. Target packages acquired. Bombing comnced at 01:33."
He nodded to the technician, who dimd the lights. Film footage from the lead bomber’s tail cara played on the projection wall.
London burned.
Ingrain black-and-white footage captured ribbons of fire stitching through the night.
Thermobaric clouds blossod like inverted suns.
Even the caras shook as secondary detonations engulfed munitions depots along the Thas.
Bruno didn’t blink.
"How long?"
"Forty-seven minutes of sustained bombing.
Twelve squadrons rotated over London proper.
The rest blanketed the surrounding infrastructure, rail hubs, power stations, munitions factories in Reading and Crawley.
Southampton’s port has been rendered non-functional. Bristol is in flas. Cluster munitions handled logistics nodes. Napalm..."
Bruno raised a hand.
"I can sll it already," he said coolly. "Save the poetry. Losses?"
"Zero, sir. Not a single aircraft downed. British radar picked them up too late.
Their few remaining interceptors scrambled blindly in the dark, no night-fighters capable of reaching that ceiling. They fired blind."
"And missed."
"yes, Reichsmarschall."
Another officer stepped in, this one in naval grey.
"Our naval groups are advancing into designated blockade corridors. Four carrier groups, Teutoburg, Fridericus Rex, Bismarck, and Krimhild, have crossed the halfway mark. The Royal Navy remains scattered. The surface fleet is disorganized after the losses in the Channel. Only a few cruisers remain in reach, and none dare contest us without air cover."
A pause.
"Submarine activity remains minimal, but we expect retaliatory mining attempts. Our U-boats are on interdiction duty already."
"Air cover?"
"Full deck wings prepped. Fernjäger squadrons are airborne, forming a continuous curtain between our fleet and British land-based bombers. Fuel tankers are rotating efficiently."
Bruno stared at the map for a long mont. His gaze drifted north, to Scotland. Then west, to the Atlantic, the vast blue lifeline stretching back to the Aricas.
"How long before we can deny all mariti traffic?"
"Three days, perhaps four. At our current pace, we’ll have a complete exclusion zone established by the end of the week. Our cruisers will anchor northeast of Ireland by nightfall."
Bruno nodded, then turned.
"Diplomatic fallout?"
One of the adjutants, young, sharp-featured, eyes hollow from sleepless nights, stepped forward.
"The Aricans are panicking. No official declaration yet, but Roosevelt is facing massive unrest. Isolationists are rioting in Norfolk. Latin Arica’s in flas, everyone suspects us, but there’s no proof."
"Good," Bruno said. "Let them choke on doubt."
He exhaled slowly and walked to the window.
Berlin’s skyline was waking, the morning sun catching on the spires and dos beyond the Reichstag.
A city of iron, watching as a dying empire across the sea finally bled.
Behind him, the officers waited.
Bruno didn’t turn when he spoke.
"Have the Fernbomber crews refueled and ready by noon. I want Liverpool and Manchester hit tonight. Hit them hard, cripple their industry, their rail, their spirit."
He turned finally.
"And when the Aricans wonder why the British are silent, they’ll realize it’s because we’ve taken their voice."
The war room fell silent.
Only the map flickered, a quiet heartbeat over the ashes of London.
---
The heavens opened once more.
A deep, thrumming sound, too loud to be thunder, too unnatural to be wind, rolled across the sky like the footfalls of giants.
Manchester’s soot-stained skyline trembled beneath it.
Then ca the first wave.
From 46,000 feet, the Fernbombers arrived in staggered phalanxes, each an airborne cathedral of annihilation, turboprops humming in perfect synchrony.
At that altitude, the British could barely see them.
They were nothing more than silver crucifixes drifting across a starlit sky.
But the city below felt their presence long before any bomb fell.
Sirens wailed late. Power stations had already gone dark.
Radar scrambled uselessly, disrupted by jamming broadcasts and thermobaric-induced ionization from the night before.
And then ca the rain.
High explosive canisters, their tal fins slicing the wind like razors.
Airburst fragntation clusters, detonating mid-descent with pinpoint programd fuses.
Strings of napalm pods stitched through the industrial sectors like liquid fire.
Warehouses ignited before the bombs even hit the ground.
The Old Trafford football stadium vanished in a plu of red-orange fla.
Entire neighborhoods were leveled. Moss Side. Hul. Ardwick.
Rows of brick terraces turned to ash.
Hospitals, churches, water towers, obliterated.
Not targeted per se, but caught in the rciless flood.
The firebreaks failed. The reservoirs cracked.
Manchester’s central rail terminal was no longer distinguishable from a slag heap.
And that was before the second wave had even arrived.
The Germans weren’t done yet.
---
The port city of Liverpool tried to prepare.
The mayor had ordered mandatory evacuations earlier in the day.
Trains loaded with won and children had scread their way toward Wales and northern Scotland.
But it wasn’t enough.
Not when fire fell from the sky.
The docks, already crippled by previous raids, were the first to go, this ti with fuel-air munitions that collapsed the warehouses and then sucked the oxygen out of the ruins.
Flas erupted inward, then outward. The rsey turned black with oil and red with reflection.
German P.1108 Fernbombers ca in waves, each one tid to strike just as the fires had begun to burn low.
They weren’t just carpet-bombing. They were curating annihilation.
The Liverpool Cathedral’s tower cracked and toppled by the dawn of the witch’s hour
By dawn the city center was engulfed.
Thermobarics leveled entire housing districts on the outskirts, turning brick to dust, dust to silence.
Those who survived crawled through molten alleyways, lungs shredded by shockwaves, unable to scream.
---
In the morning the British ministry of defense gathered in their bunkers.
Sullen, defeated, bereaved with grief "...There is nothing left in Manchester."
The words landed like funeral bells.
Lord Halifax stared at the grainy, ash-covered images relayed by ergency couriers and shortwave operators.
No signal remained. No telegraphs. The city was offline. A crater, really.
The ministers were pale and silent.
"We have no interceptors," another said. "The last of our spitfire squadrons were refueling when they hit. Even if they had reached them, the bombers fly too high. Too fast. Our AA batteries can’t touch them. Even if they could..."
"They’d be torn apart by those Focke-Wulf escorts," Halifax finished, voice hollow. "They’ve thought of everything."
The Pri Minister sat in a corner, unmoving. His hair unkempt. His eyes glassed.
A junior aide entered with a trembling hand.
"The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for a national day of prayer... but there are protests forming in Birmingham. They’re burning effigies of Parliant. Demanding to know why we’ve been left defenseless."
"Because we are defenseless," whispered Halifax.
Silence returned, broken only by the faint rumble of distant bombers over Liverpool.
---
On the opposite side of the English Channel sat Berlin, within the Reichschancellery Generals, Admirals, and statesn gathered.
"They’re already breaking," Generaloberst Hollenberg declared, beaming. "Intercepted radio chatter confirms it. A third of the British cabinet is advocating conditional surrender."
Bruno said nothing. He rely stared at the updated projection.
Two-thirds of the British industrial capacity, gone. Rail lines cratered. Power grids drowned. Civilian morale shattered.
"The RAF is grounded," another officer said. "And their Pri Minister? Hasn’t spoken in over twelve hours. So say he’s gone catatonic. Others say he’s planning a final stand."
Bruno leaned forward, speaking at last.
"He’ll do neither."
He folded his arms.
"He’ll stall. He’ll beg Roosevelt to intervene, to escalate. But the Aricans are watching their cities riot, their unions strike, their isolationists scream. And while they hesitate, Albion dies. Night by night."
Another projection flickered to life, Liverpool, now marked as ’denied territory.’
"Do we strike again tomorrow?" asked Hollenberg.
"No," Bruno said. "Not tomorrow."
A pause.
"Let them dig through the rubble. Let them sll what it ans to fight us. Then we strike Glasgow. And Belfast. And if they still won’t bend the knee, then we flatten their farms, their fields, their food."
He stood and turned away.
"I will give them rcy when they understand fear. And not before."
---
By noon of the next day the radio crackled in the darkness born from the clouds of smoke and ash that blotted out the sun:
"To all survivors in the Manchester periter... the trains are no longer running. Head north. Leave your possessions. Avoid the main roads. There is no safety in the cities. We repeat: there is no safety in the cities."
The people of Britain, hunched in cellars and barns, knew the truth.
The skies belonged to the Reich now. And no one, not Halifax, not Roosevelt, not even God, was coming to save them.
For God had thrown his favor in with the Reich.
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