They float above the outpost as Emily sends her soldiers out into the forest to watch for the coming Denrosi reinforcements. It doesn’t take long till the communication droid from the second outpost sends a signal to alert her to enemy activity.

“Look alive, Platoon Two made contact,” she says, translating the signal into a report on the identified enemies. “Oh wow, they’re really going all out. The current target count is one hundred and twenty: unconfirmed circles. I’m sending a command to my troops to back off and let the wolves I sent distract them for now. Head over in stealth and confirm their strength for me; don’t engage until you have my command.”

“Understood,” Pod responds firmly, lifting his Cutter into the air and turning back the way they came.

Emily waits patiently for a second alert, which unexpectedly comes from the platoon closest to her, spread through the forest to the south just beyond her detection range. She pilots her ship towards them as Pod’s voice sounds through her earpiece.

“There are more than a hundred of them here, but less than a quarter of them are awakened. I can only feel one third circle signature.”

“Okay, I’m sending a command for the droids to regroup and block their path to the outpost,” Emily tells him, pulling a long-range radio transmitter from her belt and flooding it with machina as she translates instructions into waveforms. “Wait until they engage and the Denrosi scum stop moving, then drop their leader a gift from above.”

Pod acknowledges her command and goes radio silent, so Emily turns her focus to the Denrosi soldiers advancing through the forest below. She can feel tens of mages, but just like Pod, she only feels one third circle signature.

With a quick signal to her troops, instructing them to leave the projected blast zone, Emily turns her wing rotors parallel to the ground and increases their speed, rapidly gaining altitude. She stops a few hundred metres up and carefully positions herself above the strongest energy signature below, making several small adjustments to account for the wind.

A crack forms on the belly of her Cutter, splitting open to reveal a loaded bomb bay holding four several-hundred-kilogram payloads.

Charge one primed. Set to impact detonation.

A few small sparks of machina skip along one of the thick metal cylinders, rippling out from its rear fins as Emily waits with bated breath, listening to the quiet forest below.

A thunderous boom shatters the silence, and from her high vantage point, Emily can see a cloud of fire and smoke billowing out over the trees in the distance. A shockwave spreads from the explosion, sweeping through the forest and scattering birds and branches alike.

“Hahaha, that was incredible!” Pod cheers in her ear as Emily releases her own payload.

The clamps holding the bomb in place open as one, and the heavy tube of metal starts tumbling down to the ground, its fins catching the wind and sending it into a targeted spiral.

She feels the third circle mage below flare their mana, throwing up a last-second protective spell as they notice the object whistling towards the ground from above, already on high alert thanks to the sudden explosion in the direction of their allies.

The bomb slams into the ground, and a wave of fire erupts from it, sweeping away most of the advancing Denrosi troops. Emily’s Cutter shudders from the shockwave, but it stabilises after a few seconds.

As she focuses her magical senses on the still-present third circle signature below her, Emily gets an alert from the first platoon of metal soldiers she released, telling her that they’ve spotted yet another company of enemies. They’re pushing on towards New Denntimo territory with a newfound urgency thanks to the clear signs of unexpected, heavy resistance.

“Did you get your mark?” she asks Pod while arming a second bomb.

“Yep! He didn’t even know what hit him!”

“Good. In that case, leave the soldiers to clean up and go check on Platoon One. They’ve already engaged, since our enemies seem spooked by the explosions, but they won’t hold up for long against a third circle mage.”

The primed bomb drops from her ship, becoming visible the moment the clamps around it release and plummeting towards the ground.

“On it,” Pod says before his voice is drowned out by a third explosion.

Surprisingly, the mage below her doesn’t die immediately, but as the smoke cloud clears, their energy signature is so faint Emily’s sure they won’t live long. She rolls her jet in the air, turning her cockpit so she has a clear view of the ground through the smoke.

Her last platoon of droids sends a contact alert as she inspects the concentric circles of shattered metal surrounding a profusely bleeding woman, collapsed on her knees with what’s left of her arms raised above her head. Her hands and forearms are completely missing, and the stumps below them are burned black along with the top half of her face.

Her tattered robes do a poor job of hiding the channels of blood carved across her torso by metal shrapnel, and if it weren’t for the faint rise and fall of her chest and her flickering mana signature, Emily would assume she were a corpse.

Without giving the woman a chance to recover, Emily reaches out with her machina and guides a few of her soldiers in closer, turning their guns on the dying mage and knocking her down with a few well-placed shots to her exposed chest.

Leaving her army to clean up the stragglers who’ve managed to avoid her bombs, Emily points her Cutter towards the third outpost and turns up the power to its rotors. The jet silently cuts through the air, quickly approaching the platoon sending her a worrying number of unit loss alerts.

Do they have a fourth circle leader?

A bomb goes off in the distance, and after a few moments, before the dust cloud can even settle, a second follows it.

“Target down,” Pod informs her. “They noticed the bomb and threw up defences before it hit, so I gave them a second. Is it worth adding a stealth enchantment to the shells?”

Emily’s Cutter arrives above an active battlefield where she can feel a single fourth circle energy signature dashing between her metal soldiers hiding among the trees. Each time the powerful signature pauses for a moment, her communication droid informs her of another soldier lost.

“Not really. Archite aren’t common enough for it to be worth wasting their flesh on expendable munitions,” she replies, priming her remaining bombs and lining herself up above one of her surviving droids. “Those bombs are as strong as a pseudo-fourth circle spell; anyone who can survive being hit by one is worth using a second to finish.”

Two bombs tumble towards the ground as the mage below charges at her bait. They disappear through the foliage as another destruction notification rings in Emily’s ear, but it's quickly drowned out by the roar of fire and the howl of shattering trees.

Her target’s signature weakens a bit in the centre of the explosions as they burn mana to defend themselves, but when the dust cloud settles, they’re still alive and thrumming with energy. Mensacus hums with excitement at the coming challenge, and Emily can feel his mana pouring into his magazine, charging a round of shots for her.

“I’m about to engage a fourth circle mage,” Emily tells Pod, cracking open her cockpit and slipping out. “You’re in charge of clean up; I’m passing control of my soldiers to you.”

“Good luck,” he responds before muting his communicator and giving Emily silence to focus on her fight.

She shuts her eyes and takes a deep breath, drinking in the cold air around her laced with thin wind mana while focusing inwardly on her elemental links. Her body moves under the control of one of her secondary cores, lifting Mensacus from her grip with a blanket of machina and locking him in the air at her side as she pulls out the Stream, loaded with an extended drum filled with armour-piercing rounds.

She calls upon both of her strongest elements at once, and when her eyes snap open, they glow in a mismatched silver and blue. Her skin turns to steel, and lightning dances across her hardened flesh, fully releasing her powerful pressure and lighting her up like a beacon to the mage below.

Emily takes a single step and flips forward over the nose of her ship, flying out into the open air as she twists to face the ground.

In the centre of a scorched crater, she sees a man staring up at her, coated from head to toe in a thick armour of stone that accentuates his masculine form. His hulking second-skin stands at four metres tall, and he’s covered in quickly-growing jagged spikes, with two of them extending from his hands like swords.

The moment their eyes meet, his covered with stone and hers glowing with mana, they both spring into motion. Emily kicks off a crackling platform of sparks, shooting sideways in the air and pointing the barrel of her gun at her opponent as she floods it with machina and squeezes the trigger.

The newly upgraded coil gun barks, releasing a spray of heavy metal projectiles that draws a solid line between the two mages. The bullets crack against the Denrosi mage’s armour, spreading small cracks that heal as quickly as they form.

He tries to dodge, pushing off the ground and conjuring a pillar of earth that launches him aside as he throws one of his stone swords up at Emily, but his slow attack has no hope of hitting her, and her aim tracks him perfectly, not missing a shot.

Liquid metal seeps from Emily’s skin as she moves, forming into silver javelins in her charged wake. The crackling sparks she leaves behind with each movement coalesce around the metal projectiles, firing them down at her opponent with an electric hum.

He gives up trying to dodge and anchors down as his armour responds on its own, shooting his spikes out to meet the more threatening attacks. Half of the crackling metal poles are deflected harmlessly into the ground, but the rest slip past his ranged defence and bury themselves several inches deep in his stone coating.

Emily watches as the man places his hands on the ground while the metal spikes are slowly pushed out of his defensive spell without a single drop of blood colouring their ends.

A single powerful hit will be better at breaking his shell.

The Stream in her hands clicks empty, so Emily sends it back into her belt and draws the Whisper instead. The gun looks completely different from when she first made it, with a bulky battery pack stuffed into its stock and two vertical rails traced with blue and green runes in place of its barrel.

She squeezes the trigger halfway, and the rails hum with building charge as the ground below begins to quake. Ripples spread from the earth mage as Emily continues bombarding him with metal projectiles, switching between pikes and small spinning blades that carve thin lines across his defences to keep draining his mana.

Her attacks pose no immediate threat to her opponent, so he makes the mistake of raising a wave of blades from the rippling ground, shooting them up to blanket the sky in an attempt to knock Emily down.

She stares at his weak attempt with cold indifference, calculating the fixed trajectories of each projectile and weaving between them in a delicate dance, taking none of them head-on but letting several of them glance off her reinforced skin at an angle.

The Whisper finishes charging, and Emily bottoms out the trigger while sending a silent mental command to Mensacus. A several-inch-long, pointed projectile pushes out of the breech, and the moment it makes contact with the two rails, bridging the gap between them, it’s ripped forward, tearing free from the gun with a silent burst of air and a solid kick into Emily’s shoulder.

The bullet slams into her opponent’s chest at the same time as two charged metal javelins, and his defensive shell shatters, exposing a few inches of his robes below.

The Denrosi mage reacts in an instant, raising his arms to cover the small gap as more mana flows from his skin to rebuild his defences, but two thin black needles slip past in the wake of the first bullet and sink into his flesh.

‘Give him everything you’ve got,’ Emily tells her son, moving him from her shoulder to float stationary in the air above their opponent as she charges the Whisper again.

She feels him pulse with mana in response, not bothering with words as a stream of black and red malice seeps from his barrel, flowing down and connecting to the needles buried in the earth mage. He lets out a loud groan as the foreign mana tries to invade his system, using his earthen armour to pull the needles out, but the damage is already done.

His armour begins to melt from his body as his focus wavers, and Emily pulls her trigger again.

“AHHHH!” the weakened mage screams with rage as her railgun fires, forcing the slipping stone around him to gather above him in a thick mass that absorbs Emily’s shot.

However, Emily appears before him in a flash of blinding light, hitting the ground with enough force to spread cracks for several metres and releasing a dense wave of pure plasma. The wall of charge rips through the Denrosi mage as he tries to reinforce his skin with mana, doing his best to ignore Mensacus' mental assault.

His flesh cooks and starts to flake, but the man grits his teeth and takes a fighting stance, swinging out a fist with a churning layer of liquid stone wrapped around it towards Emily’s face. She flickers in place, dodging his blow so fast it doesn’t look like she moved, before uppercutting his extended elbow and shattering it into pieces with her hardened right fist.

The smell of burning flesh fills her nostrils as Emily’s left arm snakes around the arm he raised for defence. Her palm presses against his chest as an attachment is pulled into her forearm from her thumb, and in the blink of an eye, a bloodied blade protrudes from the man’s back.

His eyes widen in shock, and his mouth wordlessly falls open. He starts desperately trying to move his mana, drawing it in towards his damaged circles, but Emily withdraws her blade and switches attachments in an instant.

With the Lightning Core, a mixture of extra batteries and lightning crystals, in place, Emily drops her metal connection and pours her lightning into her arm. The magical focus in her forearm greedily drinks in her mana, gathering and compressing it into a single point in the centre of her palm.

Her opponent starts to convulse as lightning wildly tears through his muscles and his mind falters, and, a moment later, a beam of dense plasma rips through his chest, punching a fist-sized hole through where his heart once was.

Emily drops her elemental connection as the dead mage drops to his knees, lowering her arm and letting out a charged breath as she evaluates her condition.

I used less than half of my mana and machina, but three-quarters of my stamina. Maintaining two connections at once is strenuous on my body and mind.

Mensacus sings with joy through their connection as he draws strength from their kill, and a fleeting smile curls Emily’s lips as she reaches up to catch him.

“Target down,” she tells Pod, scanning her surroundings for any of the unrecognisably burned Denrosi mage’s allies and finding none. “Collect our troops and spoils and we’ll head back. I’ll inform Old Man Silver of our success.”