They don’t meet much resistance on the last leg of their journey. The gathering military ships that they pass on the way to Rizenford try to turn and slow them, but Emily opens fire with Elisime’s large railguns, knocking the enemy ships from the sky with apparent ease, doing more damage than their limited defences and self-repair methods can handle.

Nearly forty minutes after leaving a contingent of Emily’s metal army to shred the defensive river emplacement, a vast, fortified city finally appears on the horizon. The city is wrapped in a tall metal wall, populated by soldiers and cannons, with a sprawling army stretched out across the plains before them, cowering in covered trenches with the barrels of artillery cannons and clockwork rifles poking out from thin shooting windows, facing towards the sky.

A few hundred ships are floating above the city, carrying mostly kinetic weapons with only a few magical ones reminiscent of New Denntimo’s designs, all trained on Elisime’s small silhouette in the distance. Emily can feel several strong magic signatures inside the city, hiding behind a thick barrier array carved into the looming metal walls that draws power from a pulsing mana vein deep below the city’s foundations. There's only one noticeable fourth circle mage near the edge of the city, standing on the wall and watching their approach.

Several large artillery cannons mounted to the base of the wall kick the battle off by firing from the moment Emily spots the city, but she notices the shells falling from the sky above and sweeps them aside with a large gust of wind before they can hit Elisime’s balloon, not batting an eye at the sudden welcome. She greets them back by charging the ship’s railguns to full and sending over several heavy chunks of tungsten that crack against the wall’s barrier, spreading ripples that unnerve the Denrosi soldiers standing just behind it.

Emily ignores the barrier and adjusts her target for now, raining shells on the mounted weapons scattered throughout the trenches instead. The thick, enchanted metal sheets shielding the individual shooting windows do nothing to stop the railgun shells, which punch clean through to shatter the weapons inside. After the first two fall, tens of identical magic circles quickly start popping up around the others, with the ground morphing to swallow them completely, trying to conceal their positions until Elisime enters their range.

With barely a thought, Emily waves her hand towards the cockpit’s window, releasing a flow of pure white mana that carves itself into the reinforced glass, etching its surface with twisting runes. She fires the ship’s railguns again as the spell activates, and the runes seem to turn to liquid, blending together before shifting into a glowing illusion that traces Emily’s memory of the hollow tunnels hidden beneath the earth for her apprentice.

Her shots land true, destroying two more cannons, and Emily enters her recollection of the defences into the ship’s Logic Core to help calculate her shots. At the same time, she releases a flock of bird-like drones below Elisime and overcharges them with machina, using Overdrive to its maximum and dooming them all to never see the war’s end. The drones shoot out ahead of the ship, rapidly closing the distance to the city.

“Power usage is irrelevant,” Emily tells Pod, finally breaking the silence that had settled over the room as she said hello to Denros’ capital. “We’ll be waiting here for long enough to recharge after we win, so have fun. I’ll hand over control once we’re thirty kilometres from the wall to go meet their royals myself, so keep Elisime there and provide ranged support.”

“Will you not need her?” Pod asks, unable to hold back an excited grin at getting to play with the big weapons platform.

“Once I’ve shattered their barrier? I doubt it,” she replies, noticing several pulses of mana on the ship’s scans, indicating more barrier spells are being cast to protect most of the cannons beneath the surface. “I have some new toys to test, and I’ve been wanting to stretch properly since my awakening. Besides, their little ritual gave me an interesting idea for a new spell, and I’m not sure I want to use it through Elisime. I don’t want to have to rebuild her before we head to Modo.”

The railgun shells keep punching through the hastily thrown-up layers of protection, travelling one behind the other to guarantee each target's destruction. Emily’s birds soon reach the buried trenches, their beating metal wings releasing trails of crackling sparks, and they begin systematically dive-bombing the hidden army. Thanks to their speed and aerodynamic forms, they sink through the soft earth that has been shifted for cover, and slam into the metal covers beneath, denting and in some cases punching through them.

The moment the drones’ speeds are reduced to zero, the charges strapped to them detonate, filling the confined tunnels with fire and shattering the earth above it, revealing them to the sky. Emily and Pod get front-row seats to the destruction as they watch through the eyes of a few birds hovering high in the sky, avoiding the attention of the wall’s artillery.

They also get front-row seats to a brown glow spreading rapidly through the tunnels after the first few birds hit, and the subsequent churning beneath the surface as the trenches rearrange themselves, rendering Emily’s glowing overlay useless.

“There’s a fourth circle mage hiding down there,” Emily mutters with a small, predatory grin stretching her cheeks as she senses the powerful signature that momentarily exposed itself to protect their army. “Let’s make this fun for them. Son, are you finished?”

Mensacus shudders in response, releasing a thin, chilled white mist that creeps across the cockpit floor, licking at their ankles. Emily almost shivers in delight at the similarities between his magic and The Crystal Waters’ nature.

I wonder what gains he’d make if he swallowed The Abyss?

Emily directs one of the observing birds in the air, a slightly larger form than the others with purple runes tracing the edges of its delicate feathers and a glowing spatial crystal in the centre of its chest, to drop into a rapid dive. The sominal drones below it keep burrowing into the ground and bursting, exposing a few tunnels by pure chance, providing the spatial bird with a target before the shifting earth can swallow them again.

The bird shatters as the tunnel closes around it, but the spell on its body activates, and the individual metal feathers gather together into tens of twisting orbits around the drone’s floating, crumpled chest. Emily connects to the blazing spatial beacon keyed to her mana signature and carefully twists space in the cockpit behind her, opening a crack the same height as her and half the width.

Pod glances over and feels sick as he looks at the odd, distorted space that seems to show the same image no matter where his head moves, like a brushstroke drawn over the wrong layer of reality.

“Why does that feel so wrong?” he asks while turning his head away.

“It’s a relative space anchor moving with the ship, which is even more awkward to stabilise than a static anchor,” Emily explains as Mensacus begins pumping a thick black mist, filled with shimmering red veins of light that fade in and out of existence, into the portal. “I’ve worked out a method to create them, but it results in a form like this that’s damaging to those without a spatial affinity because it exists between dimensions.”

“Between dimensions?”

“Think of it a little like the difference between a two-dimensional drawing on paper and a three-dimensional hologram in the air. Before I can represent the drawing in the air, I have to give it substance in three dimensions, usually through light. The portal I’ve created is self-stabilising by existing in that state right before being given substance.”

“What’s stopping you materialising and stabilising it?” Pod asks, watching as the overlay on the cockpit’s glass updates to match the information Mensacus is feeding Emily as his mana spreads through the buried trenches.

“The runes I have access to and my low affinity. Space is incredibly complicated, far more so than my rough descriptions would suggest. I can prepare some materials on dimensional distortion and stabilisation for you later if you’d like, but I doubt you’ll understand them until you reach third stage at least.”

“I’ll wait then. I have enough to think about already.”

Emily uses the updating underground map to keep targeting the buried artillery as Elisime approaches Rizenford, slowing as she approaches the thirty-kilometre mark. Mensacus gleefully reports back as more and more of the unawakened and first circle soldiers hiding underground fall under his influence. He sets them on their allies, reducing their numbers and pouring the pain and suffering extracted back into the survivors, twisting them into something inhuman.

With each death, his monsters grow, and his insidious grip on their minds strengthens as he uses them to sniff through the shifting labyrinth for the scent of fourth circle mana. Mensacus runs himself dry quickly as he spreads himself thin across kilometres of tunnels, so he begins drawing from his pedestal, steeped in the recently refined malice from their trip through The Sand Wall’s cursed mist.

Elisime finally reaches the edge of the city’s defences and freezes, hovering proudly in the sky. A wave of fire and wind sweeps towards it from the prepared mages, casting along the length of the wall, confidently standing on display thanks to the barrier that has blocked Emily’s guns.

The fourth circle mage standing at the centre of the magical formation swings her arms together, gathering the rolling flames into a twisting beam that rapidly accelerates towards the lone ship. Silver mana flows from Emily’s skin, rushing through the metallic array carved across the ship’s hull and receiving a small boost in strength before it forms into a large magic circle bound to the air before them. The flaming beam connects as Emily’s spell activates, and an expanding cone of metal disperses it, sending tongues of fire curling around the ship to no effect as the shield keeps expanding to fully wrap the ship without Emily’s active control.

“You seem awfully fond of condensed mana beams considering how ineffectively you use them,” she says, charging her voice with mana and machina and broadcasting it across the battlefield, watching as the soldiers lining the wall flinch at her words while raising guns and magical foci at the ready. “Let me show you how it’s done.”

Emily erupts with mana, an azure glow filling her eyes as lightning dances across her skin and the portal to the trenches closes, severing Mensacus’ direct like to his spreading mist whilst he still maintains control over his creations. She floods the ship’s batteries, drawing extra power from them as arcane lettering fills the air outside and wide arcs of plasma draw crackling orbits that weave the clustered runes together. Shots and elemental projectiles from the city wall fly out, embedding themselves into, shattering against, or bouncing off the large metal shield still occluding their view of Elisime. Dark clouds begin to form in the sky, and the rumble of thunder fills the battlefield as flashes of light high above signal the rising threat.

The fourth circle mage hiding in the trenches tries to expose the buried guns to let them join the hail of spells and bullets, but with half of them already destroyed or unmanned, it doesn’t make a difference.

The only attacks that manage to shake Emily’s shield are a spear of fire from the wall and a rising fist of earth from below, but, as the two fourth circle attacks spread thin cracks across the metal’s surface, Emily finishes pouring half of her mana into a single spell. An unsettling, static hum spreads between the ship and the wall, sending a chill down the spine of the brainwashed Denerii mage standing directly in the attack’s path despite the solid barrier between them.

The metal shell protecting Elisime crumbles to dust, and a thunderous roar fills the air as the writhing layer of lightning beneath it is exposed to the world. Before anyone can react to the sudden flood of sound and light, an ear-splitting howl deafens half of Rizenford, sending waves of fear and confusion through the civilians cowering inside and the soldiers standing outside alike.

A thick beam of pure power spans the battlefield in an instant, scorching a deep channel across the landscape and sending violent ripples out across the translucent barrier covering the city. The beam doesn’t stop for several long seconds, crackling and popping as the clouds above join in and release a stream of bolts that hammer down on the barrier.

To the horror of everyone on the battlefield, the unstable ripples quickly turn to cracks, and the barrier collapses in on itself. The Denerii mage leaps aside as Emily’s channelled lightning shoots past, melting a section of the wall into slag and obliterating its defensive array before continuing through several industrial streets without restraint.

“Whoops,” Emily mutters as she halts the outward flow of her mana, watching the remnants of the barrier fading away and maintaining her elemental connection as her wide grin crackles with charge. “I was expecting a little more resistance. Looks like the royals hiding in their shell really don’t want to help.”

Standing up, she twists the residual mana still hanging in the air into a magnetic array to slow her troops’ falls as she opens all of Elisime’s cargo holds, starting their final invasion in full.

“Crush everything from here to the wall,” Emily tells Pod, grabbing her son and locking eyes with the Denerii mage on the wall, who’s wrapping herself in liquid fire. “And ground any airships I don’t.”

Emily takes a single step forward, flaring the lightning around her and disappearing, leaving nothing but a rapidly-healing fractal scar on reality in her wake.