“Please don’t fire that thing in the city,” Max says as his eyes are drawn to Elisime’s humming railguns.

“Don’t worry, I’m in control,” Emily reassures him, moulding her seat to push herself up to stand. “Now, are you all okay with me warping us into the cockpit?”

The Elders exchange a rapid series of silent glances before Josephine nods and answers for them.

“Go ahead. Though, be careful with the projectors, they-”

“I know,” Emily cuts her off, scanning the metal disc layered with runes and crystals below her with an appraising gaze. “I see exactly how it works.”

Most of the Elders display minute reactions, be it a twitch of their eyebrows or a quiver in their gaze, but surprisingly, Minerva is unaffected.

Looks like Earnie’s done his job well. She shouldn’t have any questions left about mechanics.

Emily releases a wave of mana, wrapping everyone in cages of lightning as they stand up and dismiss their magical thrones. Runes flow from her skin, carving arcs of magic through the space between them, filling the room with a complex, breathing matrix of mana. She anchors the spell to a spatial marker drawn in Elisime’s cockpit, and with a gentle tug, they slip through the council chamber’s wards and appear in front of a window staring at the palace from outside.

Josephine and Beau, the projected images, are unaffected by the sudden shift and the loud thunderclap, and Silver only frowns in discomfort. The other two mercenary company leaders both grimace but hold in their discomfort, and Orcus remains stoic despite the colour leaving his face.

The brother and sister are complete opposites, with Minerva completely unaffected and Favio gagging as he doubles over.

“Throw up in my ship and I’ll feed you to my son,” Emily warns him without a hint of emotion in her tone, settling down into her piloting chair as Pod makes his way over to his. “Take a seat.”

One of Emily’s metal fingers taps against the armrest of her chair once, releasing a ripple of machina that passes through the panels on the floor, pulling them up and reforming them into two rows of seats facing the window. The ship starts rising into the sky as the Elders take the offered chairs.

“What’s that?” asks Minerva, forgetting her fear as her eyes lock onto a glistening silver hawk with a two-metre wingspan shooting out from under the ship.

“That’s one of my scouting drones,” Emily explains, checking the altitude gauge on one of the screens in front of her and adjusting the railguns’ positions. “I’m going to use it as a spatial marker.”

The Elders fall silent, waiting with bated breath as she sets up.

A second bird flies out from under the ship, rising up to hover in the air two hundred metres away, slightly above them. Nothing else happens for a few seconds as Emily pours mana into Elisime and the first scout fades into the distance.

“How far are you sending it?” Silver asks, breaking the tense silence in the cockpit.

“Not very,” Emily says dismissively, focusing on channelling her lightning through the ship’s batteries, using the focusing arrays and lightning crystals to boost the strength of a spell being carved into the air around the ship. “The projectiles will lose speed the further they go, so I’m keeping it conservative and grabbing them after fifty kilometres.”

Silver’s response dies before it leaves his lips as Emily’s defensive spell finally activates. A crackling net of lightning forms around the ship, humming with power.

The Elders’ eyes widen as they feel the sheer quantity of power being forced into the spell. They’re no longer surprised when Emily emits an equally unreasonable amount of purple spatial mana, pouring it into a massive, twisted doorway above the closest scout, carved from constantly shifting runes.

The spatial door shudders and splits, opening a small, fist-sized hole that shows a fractured horizon on the other side. Emily checks the far scout’s coordinates, being fed into Elisime’s Logic Core through a long-range radio-wave transmission, and completes the final adjustments to the railgun’s programmed firing procedures.

“Pay attention,” Emily says, lifting her flesh hand as if to press an invisible button. “It’ll be over before you blink.”

Her hand falls on her armrest, and the ship quakes as two deep cracks resonate through it. Two long, pointed hunks of metal spiral past the window, appearing in their vision for a moment before vanishing just as fast, rocketing into the distance with a turbulent wake tracing their passage.

The seconds tick by, and soon the aftermath of the initial shots fades as calm settles over the cockpit, charged with an underlying note of expectation from the audience. Everyone’s eyes are drawn to the portal pointing down at them, where they can see a faint burning light getting closer.

The projectiles reappear, this time coming straight towards them as their outer layers burn white-hot after forcing their way through the air. They shoot through the portal and careen straight into Emily’s crackling barrier.

The metal projectiles burst upon impact, shattering into hundreds of deadly burning shards and releasing a visible shockwave that ripples out, fading only a few metres from the closest rooftop hundreds of metres below. The barrier screams like the beating of a thousand wings, and the mana within the spell visibly gathers towards the glistening fragments of metal, smothering them until they freeze harmlessly in place, still more than ten metres from the ship’s hull.

“Though slightly weaker than two full fourth circle mages' worth of mana,” Emily says, snapping the Elders out of their shock as they stare at the floating projectile fragments with awe. “The sheer kinetic energy held in those shells is still quite immense. Does that reassure you?”

Every head turns to face her, and Emily watches in real time as their awed, fearful expressions shift to those of greed and excitement, the former quickly being masked, too late thanks to Emily’s inhuman eyesight and processing speed.

“To a certain degree, yes,” Josephine says, regaining her composure and fixing Emily with a hopeful, expectant, almost hungry gaze. “You have solid defences and incredible single-target attack power. But can you handle numbers? You’ll be drained before you reach Rizenford if you try to fight an army by yourself.”

“Who said I’m by myself?” Emily asks, snapping her metal fingers and conjuring several pure-light screens which she links to the ship’s camera feeds with her machina.

Images of row upon row of metal soldiers standing dormant, and their equipment, scroll past, silencing Josephine and drawing an intrigued gasp from Minerva as she begins muttering to her shocked brother about the possible applications of non-magical golems.

She has knowledge about golems?

Emily makes a note to ask her about that after the meeting as Josephine finally looks away from the screens, tearing her gaze away from a cluster of artillery cannons with a confident surety beginning to take root in her eyes.

“You can operate this entire army at once?” she questions, the doubt in her tone completely gone and replaced with burning curiosity.

“Yes, though controlling that many troops to a fine degree at once would make it quite hard to cast and fight normally myself,” Emily replies, flicking her hand and shifting the screens to show the Logic Core in the centre of the ship: a twisting, hard to understand blend of glass and electricity. “I offload most of the army’s finer controls to a mechanical processing unit within this ship. I should only need to supply it with basic commands in combat, and, if my programs work as intended, it will calculate the optimal commands for each soldier and operate the army to maximum efficiency.”

Josephine nods, looking at the new images flickering past with her brow creased in confusion. She silently glances over at Minerva, a subtle exchange Emily doesn’t fail to miss, and receives a faint head shake from the stunned woman staring at the fleeting images of the Logic Core and struggling to understand it.

Trying to reverse engineer my technology right in front of me?

Emily doesn’t show any outward reaction, blankly watching the subtle glances and gestures being thrown carelessly between the Elders as if she weren’t there.

Aren’t higher circle mages meant to be harder to read? Even Oscar was better at hiding his intentions.

A nagging feeling in her gut questions the validity of that statement, so Emily sets two of her cores to the task of sorting through and analysing her memories of her early interactions with Oscar, Jenny, Agnes, and the subsequent mages she’s met since leaving Modo as she continues her conversation unhindered.

“Okay,” Josephine says in a clear, calm tone, instantly causing her colleagues to still and focus on her. “You’ve convinced me. If you’re confident and happy to take the most dangerous role yourself, I’ll vote in favour of your offer.”

All eyes turn to Emily and a pressure that would suffocate most settles over her.

Ah, so my linguistics skill is making it easier to read them!

The results of her secondary cores’ task are filed away into her memory banks as her face twists into a confident grin, unburdened by their expectations.

“I made my intended role clear, and I have no intentions of backing out,” Emily confirms. “I’d be confident storming their capital without your support: I’m mostly here to make sure I receive appropriate payment.”

“If anyone else told me that I’d laugh at them,” Josephine says, glancing one final time out of the cockpit’s window at the crackling barrier still holding strong around the ship as the portal ahead of them cracks and shatters. “All in favour of accepting and discussing the terms of Emily Coldstone’s offer for aid, let the voice of your mana be known.”

Immediately, Josephine, Silver, and Minerva charge their throats with mana. Silver lets out a long, whistling tone that clings to the air, echoing around the room as it shifts between pitches, mimicking the hissing of waves on a beach. Minerva hums a note that seems to fill the space, and Josephine clicks her tongue, releasing a sound like a sparking fire.

The three ethereal tones mix, blending in places and remaining completely separated in others as they bounce around the cockpit, refusing to fade as the three mages maintain the mana flow to their vocal cords. The sound seems to break the others out of their hesitation, and they quickly begin adding their voices to the chorus.

Favio hums a deep, rumbling note, and Orcus’ throat crackles like wood on a fire. Beau lets out a short, sharp whistle that cuts cleanly through the sound, pleasantly complementing the second low rumbling coming from Max’s chest.

Gem’s eyes never leave Emily, and, after a second of extra deliberation, she releases a faint hiss. Beryl seems conflicted, his gaze wavering between Emily and Mensacus in her lap, but hearing the rest of his colleagues in agreement, he swallows his doubts and emits a rumbling purr from his chest.

Emily can feel the formless magical agreement forming between them and, meeting their expectant gazes, she charges her own throat with mana. Following her instincts, Emily doesn’t try to control her vocal cords, letting the magical energy and her intent to agree flow through them to produce a crackling hiss, like the hum of static.

Their magical tones entwine and cut off as one, sealing a simple agreement and instilling an odd sense of acceptance and urgency to discuss further terms in all of their hearts.

Fascinating! This is a far simpler method for magical contracts than Modo uses. It feels like a faint suggestion instead of a requirement though; I wonder if that’s because of the loose terms of this agreement, or can this method not enforce tougher terms? Is that why they use it so casually?

Emily tosses her rising questions to the back of her mind and turns all of the Elders to face her, shattering the light screens still floating around them and instead forming a glowing map of light between them, linking it to the ship’s Logic Core. Immediately, the Core starts filling details into the map, marking all of the outposts, cities, and high-level combatants that Emily has records of on both sides.

New Denntimo’s side quickly fills with information, while Denros’ remains bare, lacking data on their military movements.

“First things first,” Emily says, smoothly taking control of the meeting now that everyone’s on the same page. “I need any information you have on Denros’ barriers, detection measures, long-range or anti-aircraft weaponry, and fourth circle mages. If you have any records of their resupply routes, those would be helpful too, though not particularly needed beyond improving my model.”

Max produces a few prepared mind crystals from a spatial storage, each one imbued with as much information as possible on Denros’ military. Emily greedily drinks in the new data, feeding it to her ship and filling the map in in real time.

“So, those long-range portals,” Beau says, as several glowing markers appear on the map, indicating the known positions of eight of Denros’ fourth circle mages, four of them in the Rizenford alone, “Can you use them to get our troops past Denros’ border?”

“Not a chance,” Emily replies, waving his idea off as Gem informs her of another fourth circle mage some of her spies have recently spotted moving between cities. “The spell I used for that demonstration is fine for inorganic life, but put a person in there and good luck putting them back together. There’s a reason I balanced our short-distance warp with lightning, and I can’t do that at extreme distances, unfortunately.”

Shrugging off her response, Beau glances at the map and starts pointing out several recent troop movements, forming a more accurate idea of the forces around no-man’s-land.

“Why do you have so much outdated information?” Emily asks Max without looking up.

“A lot of it’s from a broker we work with, Black Skull,” he explains with a hint of disdain. “They’re a bunch of profiteers who saw a chance to benefit from our conflict, but at least they chose their side. They operate in Denros’ territory and sell anything they can get their hands on to us, mostly information.”

Their discussion continues for almost an hour as they improve the map and refine their attack plans, but eventually, the conversation moves onto its final stretch.

“You’re sure you don’t want to wait till we can pinpoint the rest of Denerii?” Josephine asks. “We’d rather you didn’t kill them since there’s a chance we can undo what those Denrosi scum did to their minds.”

“Wait, who are the Denerii?” Pod asks, earning distasteful glances from Beryl and Orcus which he ignores, focusing on Emily for an explanation.

“It’s the name the Denros royals give to any brainwashed commoner who reaches fourth circle when they brand them as their property,” she says as the Elders grit their teeth in rage. “Anyway, you said there’s only four of them left, correct?”

“As far as we’re aware, yes.” Josephine nods.

“Then it should be fine. You six are already being split to kill and capture the two Denboril and two Denerii near no-man’s-land. I can deal with the other eight alone if they come to me, even if I can’t kill two of them.”

“Okay. In that case, let’s talk about your payment.”

A cold atmosphere settles over the previously calm cockpit as nine calculating gazes fall on Emily.

“Well,” she says with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes, matching their energy. “Nothing too much. Just a small yearly supply of magical metals, crystals, and information, until I move my factory from your continent. Oh, and I expect my private territory to stay private.”

“How small?”

“How much do you value winning your war? Shall we say… a hundred greater crystals?”