“We’re through the first layer of defence,” Emily says into her communicator a short while later, shooting down another airship and directing a flock of sominal drones to bomb another squad of soldiers trying to fire rockets up at them.

“Can you see The Sand Wall yet?” Max asks.

“Just about, we’re still a hundred kilometres off,” Emily responds, narrowing her eyes at the storm on the horizon.

Unlike naturally formed sandstorms, the magical wave of undulating sand before them is completely stationary, drawing a stark line across Denrosi territory. The large-scale spell was cast on a mana vein running beneath the desert years ago, in the early stages of the revolution, when Old Denntimo’s royalty was first forced out of the capital. With the combined strength of ten fourth circle mages, they destabilised the vein, summoning a raging sandstorm that snakes across the desert for thousands of kilometres, making it impossible for the rebels to chase them at the time.

“And you’re sure your ship can weather the storm?”

“At lower altitudes, yes. The sand shouldn’t be a problem, so we won’t risk trying to go over it, since even I’m a little apprehensive as to how she’d handle the violent winds up there,” Emily responds, showing a hint of caution as she looks up at the seemingly empty space where The Wall hits the clouds.

“Okay, it looks like they’re still just treating you as a suicidal scouting vessel and none of the targets have left their stations, so start making some noise,” Max says before Beau cuts in.

“Reaching The Wall should do the trick, and destroying some of their bases inside would be even better, but be careful. Our mana detectors just picked up a strong build-up over Rizenford: it’s likely they’re about to hit you with the Sunbeam.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Emily responds, channelling mana through Elisime’s batteries and starting the delicate process of carving a lightning array into the air around the ship. “We’ll slow down and deploy our troops once we’re in the cover of The Wall, that’ll get their attention and get them moving.”

“Got it! Keep us updated once you’re clear of the interference field,” Beau says before dropping out of the call.

“I doubt it’ll affect my communicators, but I’ll keep you posted,” Emily says to Max before putting the hand-held device down and focusing on the disturbingly empty desert stretching towards the sand blanketing the horizon.

She sees several worrying patterns of crystallised glass, drawn from dots and dashes of varying widths and lengths, shining in the sunlight and covering the desert in a deadly mosaic of colours. Each stain on the sands marks the failure of another push from New Denntimo, some of them from wiped-out armies, and others from unlucky squads trying to slip by.

Emily’s focus is pulled away from the scarred ground by a small, fortified city off in the distance to the south-west, placed right up against the unnaturally contained wall of sand. A slight, nagging feeling of discomfort forms in her gut as she sees the walled border settlement she has been warned to avoid.

Emily sends a soundless message into her communicator, telling the Elders to keep an eye on all the civilian settlements bordering The Wall as she turns Elisime’s guns on the airships rising from the city to chase her. Glancing at the ship’s rangefinders, Emily tears through dozens of calculations in an instant before sparking with machina, setting the railguns’ loading arms to another shell type and configuring the rounds’ timers accordingly.

The guns crack and, before the enemy airships can even clear the airspace of their home city, two shells find their mark in the base of two balloons, bursting a fraction of a second before impact and fanning out in a wave of jagged metal. The vicious fragments tear through the reinforced fabric and metal frame, severing their connections to the main bodies of the ships and causing them to plummet to the ground.

The surviving ships are barely affected by the shockwave of the explosions that follow, but the soldiers inside all freeze with fear nonetheless, staring at the large ship in the far distance that has destroyed their allies in an instant, despite the distance separating them. Only the mages on board manage to snap themselves out of their shock and attempt to throw up shields to protect their balloons, but their efforts prove futile when the next two shots target a single ship, tearing down the flimsy second circle barrier and half the balloon with the first, and finishing the job with the second.

Emily calmly continues dropping the airships, receiving constant updates from Pod on their battery levels.

“Seventy per cent now,” the young man says, watching his carefully managed charge flowing out with each shot. “Those railguns are impressive, but the power draw per shot’s horrific.”

“I know. Isn’t it wonderful?” Emily hums, firing another volley of shots as crackling runes creep into view along the edges of the cockpit window, reaching from either side to connect and complete the barrier. “It’ll be fine. We’re slowing down through The Wall, so we’ll set two of the engines to charg-”

She cuts off as a shiver runs down her spine, and her head snaps up to stare through a camera feed at the sky above, where she can faintly see a glistening dot rapidly getting bigger and brighter. Emily immediately pours mana into the ship, burning a little extra to instantly finish installing the defensive array and igniting a crackling half-dome of lightning above them.

The Sunbeam, a pillar of energy as thick as Elisime is long, enters her magical perception in almost the same instant it hits, roaring against the curved shield and scattering scorching beams into the ground far below. The ship shudders, losing tens of metres of altitude as the layer of air and runes around it, connected to the shield above and set to maintain a constant distance, is pressed down by the force of the attack.

The solid beam continues pressing down on them for a full ten seconds, tracking the airship through the sky and heating the air inside the cockpit despite the magical shield protecting them.

“Woah,” Pod mutters, his eyes wide as dazzling beams of fire fill the window.

The first shot finally fades, revealing winding patterns etched in glass onto the ground and leaving Pod to wince at the fresh energy loss.

“Why did it take five per cent of our power to block that?”

“I pulled a bit extra to the engines to compensate for the added pressure, and I pushed too much mana through them too quickly to maintain maximum efficiency,” Emily explains, sitting up in her chair and drumming her fingers as more mana flows out to reinforce the barrier. “I wasn’t lying when I said we can take it, but damn is it an impressive spell. They’ve forced so much mana into that thing it’s a little scary even for me.”

A small grin creeps onto Emily’s face as she rapidly twists the runes outside, destabilising the barrier for a few moments as it reshapes into an umbrella-like wave that peaks above the centre of the ship.

“Don’t worry about the power too much. We’ll recharge in The Wall and, as long as I can block the next two shots efficiently, I should have enough mana left to refill and help Elisime before we’re done there.”

Pod nods, turning his nervous attention to the strange changes in the shield outside.

“When you say efficiently…” he mutters, squinting at the thinner lightning cover towards the edges of the umbrella that leaves the ship partially exposed. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you saw the glass markings from past Sunbeam shots as well as I did,” Emily answers vaguely, staring up at the sky intently without even blinking. “What did they tell you?”

“The beam can be adjusted in width and moved to the casters’ will.”

“And so, what do you think their response will be when their first attack, a beam wide enough to destroy our entire ship, fails to do any damage thanks to a magical barrier?”

“They’ll focus it further to try to crack our shield,” Pod responds with a look of dawning horror as a faint spot of light glistens high above, catching Emily’s eye and sending her into full assistive processing.

Before her apprentice even has time to question her gambling his safety on her reactions, the ten-metre-wide Sunbeam connects the heavens and the earth, drilling down into the barrier midway between the nose and centre of the ship.

As the beam connects, Emily’s barrier has already shifted to meet it with its strongest point. The beam splits, following the barrier’s contours and shooting out into the surrounding sands.

“Not that it will work,” Emily says, carefully modulating her voice to speak at a normal pace and tone despite her slowed perception of time.

The beam traces a pattern across Elisime’s footprint, searching for a weak point in her shield, but Emily watches every minute movement through the network of cameras woven into the balloon’s lining, constantly keeping the point of the barrier beneath the centre of the attack.

“Only three per cent burned that time!” Pod cheers as the attack dies out, and they stop losing altitude. “What can they try next?”

“That I can’t tell you with confidence,” Emily replies, watching the sky and pouring more mana into her barrier. “But my guess would be either overcharging the array somehow or, if it’s possible, focusing the beam into a shorter, higher-powered shot.”

After another minute of tensely flying through the sky towards The Sand Wall, the third shot of the Sunbeam finally falls. It’s once again narrow, this time only five metres wide, and burning like a miniature sun when it hits.

Emily sucks in a sharp breath as she feels a heavy pressure threatening to split her barrier, so she pours even more mana and machina through the ship, turning the engines to help fight against the crushing force of the attack.

The beam only lasts five seconds this time, and as it fizzles out, Emily disperses her barrier, looking at the deep troughs of molten sand in the scattered beam’s wake with respect.

“Shouldn’t you keep the barrier up in case of another shot?” Pod asks, frowning at his power reading dropping by another six per cent, but not mentioning it.

“The six that just used their reserves to fire on us will be rushing to recharge before we reach them now, and I don’t believe they have six more fourth circle mages waiting to replace them,” Emily explains, glancing at her mana reserves sitting at a little less than half.

“Can they not charge the Sunbeam with a lot of lower circle mages?”

“That’s unconfirmed, but there are no records of it happening.” Emily checks their altitude and readjusts the engines for full speed ahead. “I suspect the array is reliant on the purity of fourth circle mages’ mana.”

Despite her confident words, Emily’s eyes remain rooted to the feeds of the sky above through the rest of their exposed flight across the expanse. Luckily, as she expected, no more attacks fall from the sky, and they soon reach the stark boundary between the calm open desert and the raging sandstorm so thick it almost appears solid.

Pod diverts power back into Elisime’s internal environmental control functions before they slip into the defensive storm, and Emily disables two of the ship’s four engines and reduces the power flowing to the remaining two. They slow as they lose visibility, and the motion-based sensors outside the ship begin returning indecipherable garbage, but their magically-enhanced electromagnetic wave-based scans only distort a little.

A quick set of commands deploys a series of antennas around the ship, clearing up the interference from the storm, and releases the magnetic locks holding the two deactivated engines in place, letting the harsh stormy winds catch the rotors. Each wind-guided rotation sends a little bit of charge back into the ship’s batteries.

Emily sends a message to the Elders, finding her communicator’s connection weakened but not destroyed by The Wall’s magical interference, letting them know she’s survived three shots from the Sunbeam and has entered the storm. The response lets her know their plan is working, as ships and mages all across the front lines are spotted leaving their positions to try to combat their assault, including two of the fourth circle mages they knew of.

It only takes a few minutes, even at their reduced speed, for two fortified outposts hidden within the sandstorm to appear on their radar. Emily lowers the ship and opens two of the rear cargo bays, slowing down further to let tens of metal soldiers leap to the ground.

She connects her machina to all of them by flooding the ship’s Logic Core and hijacking its wireless connection with all of its units, an inefficient but effective method to bypass the limits of her range on a wider scale. The army splits into two well-organised companies that each head towards one of the outposts as Elisime rises into the air again and continues her straight charge towards Rizenford.

The communication droids in the two companies help maintain a solid connection even as Emily leaves, and she watches through their eyes as her constructs make quick work of the Denrosi soldiers who try to fight back. After clearing the relatively small outposts without suffering casualties, Emily directs the companies to continue spreading out into The Wall, searching for other targets to eliminate without discretion.

More and more mechanical soldiers fill the sandstorm as Elisime pauses every few minutes, scattering Emily’s forces and causing chaos as Denros receives more and more reports of destroyed military bases, despite only seeing one ship enter their semi-natural barrier.

Emily and Pod receive several promising messages from their allies as they push deeper into the storm, creeping closer to Rizenford, but soon a worrying message comes through instead.

“You were right,” Beau says with a hint of panic in their voice. “We’ve engaged three of our four targets, but Malena Denboril is still missing, and she looks to have activated a ritual that’s spreading across all settlements bordering The Wall. We can’t confirm what it does yet, but Josephine and I are going to try and-”

Their voice cuts out, the connection severed, and a moment later, dark mist billows in from behind Elisime, blending with the churning sand and cutting off the last of the light reaching her from above.