Emily steps onto a wide-open street, paved with glossy white stone and leading up to a grand white palace, wearing a blank expression as she prepares for the coming battle, running through spells in her mind. The three towering spires of the large building in the distance remind her of Liberte, but instead of pouring out a grand magical barrier to wrap the city, the central spire is covered in the pulsing red runes of The Sunbeam, whilst the smaller two produce a small bubble that protects the palace alone.

A shimmering mist of mana flows ceaselessly from Emily’s skin as she uncovers her circles and projects the full strength of her presence, staring ahead at her targets. At the far end of the unnaturally clean and empty street, just within the boundary of the palace’s barrier, are the king and his family. Four of them, the fourth circle members, are sitting on an ornate set of enchanted, floating thrones, relaxed with their heads held high and their chests pressed forward proudly, doing their best to hide the slight signs of exhaustion already written on their faces.

There are close to a hundred mages of varying strength lined up behind them, all full of energy and bearing the crests of their divided family lines, split into combat formations and glaring at the invader as they raise their weapons and magical foci at the ready.

Emily raises a brow at the strange blend of prepared caution and relaxed disregard, but it doesn’t cause her to break her stride as she slowly walks towards them, focusing her attention on the weathered ruler wearing his grey streaks proudly beneath his crown: Charles Denros.

“Miss Coldstone, we meet at last,” Charles declares in a deep, confident tone, injecting his voice with mana to make sure it carries. “I understand you’ve made a deal with those rebels already, but I’m confident we can give you whatever they offered you and more to work with us instead.”

Emily doesn’t respond, getting closer and closer with each step.

“Those conniving traitors almost certainly forgot to inform you that the depths of our family’s riches in wealth and knowledge are unfathomable compared to their weak foundations,” the king continues, taking her silence as a good sign. “I’m sure a talented mage such as yourself would benefit greatly from our records. What do you say? You must be exhausted from your battles to reach-”

He cuts off as Emily steps within a thousand metres, and they feel her bloodlust, despite the barrier protecting them, making the air grow heavier as it catches in the royals’ throats, carrying a faint, metallic scent of blood.

“You’re offering me a deal…” she whispers, the mana in her throat carrying her words effortlessly across to them as machina creeps in to join it, adding an inhuman hum. “Now?”

Emily slowly raises her metal arm, staring at it as the shimmering mist around her turns to burning plasma.

“You sent your spy to try to kill me when he could have made an offer, but he only succeeded in taking my arm. Then, you used your little ritual to sacrifice thousands of your citizens’ lives to try to kill me again only a few hours ago.” She raises her eyes, letting her enemies see the lightning crackling in their depths, sparking with cold rage. “And now you expect me to break a deal I’ve made and go back on my word?”

Storm clouds begin to gather again, and the mages behind the thrones begin chanting spells that go ignored by their ruler.

“That was a poor decision,” Charles tries to argue, not showing any signs of fear as he faces her wrath. “But-”

“But you made it. Correct? Or are you telling me someone has the authority to blow up your kingdom’s resources without your knowledge?”

The silence that follows speaks louder than any argument he could try to make. Emily scoffs, pouring more and more of her freshly recharged machina into the emotional centres of her mind, reinforcing the rising anger and using it to carefully pull out a stream of rage from the sealed vault without unleashing the rest, letting it flow through her and morph her expression into a snarling scowl.

“I didn’t think so. Well, I’m sorry to say, but New Denntimo has already offered me free access to any knowledge recovered from your corpses, and I’ve already learned plenty from the tricks you’ve tried to use to kill me.”

Emily releases a flood of mana so dense it sends shivers down the spines of everyone present, emptying a quarter of her reserve in one go and rapidly forming hundreds of runes as tens of intersecting magic circles appear around her.

The king waves his hand, signalling for his weaker relatives to attack as he and his fourth circle companions – the Queen, the Crown Princess, and his father, the previous king – begin chanting. A wave of elemental attacks passes through the translucent palace barrier, but a wall of liquid metal rises to meet it, protecting Emily as she continues to form an incredibly complex spell.

“You sacrificed your people and wasted the power that gave you, so I’ll do you the courtesy of showing you how real sacrificial magic is done,” she says before removing the machina from her throat, losing the satisfyingly menacing tone it gives, as she charges her words with even more mana, speaking her will into existence. “To this spell I sacrifice my connection to space for the next three hours.”

The words seem to complete her casting as the twisting mass of runes and the mana wrapped around her freezes, pulsing with a vibrant purple light before fading away into nothing as Emily feels something inside her vanish, taking with it her perfect spatial awareness and leaving her feeling more exposed than ever before. For a few seconds, nothing happens as the king and his companions finish preparing several extra protective layers. Then space itself seems to quake.

A low rumble starts from Emily’s position before spreading through the city, slowly building up pressure. The king’s family continues bombarding Emily’s shield with spells, which constantly regenerates itself, barely affected by the weak attacks.

The air between them distorts, like a desert mirage, and fractures. In a straight line, like a blade being drawn, space shatters and folds in on itself across the palace’s barrier, leaving a twisted black nothingness in its wake that stabs like needles into the mind of anyone who observes it, causing several mages to vomit on the spot. As quickly as the field of spatial destabilisation appeared, it vanishes, fixing the world in the blink of an eye but leaving the barrier a tattered mess, unable to regenerate across the freshly-healed space.

Before anyone else can react, still processing the mental overload brought on by observing fractured space, Emily leaps forward into the gap, establishing her two main elemental connections and weaving a second complex spell from metallic structures coated in lightning, pouring the remaining three quarters of her freshly refilled mana reserve into it and nearly severing her connection as she has to start converting machina to make up for the loss.

“To this spell I give itself; I won’t cast it again for a year.”

A raging serpent of plasma erupts from the spell structure as it pulses with power in time to Emily’s words, growing a glistening metal skeleton and thousands of fine scales halfway between metal and solid lightning. The beast grows in all dimensions as it races along behind Emily, stretching to be ten metres wide and over a hundred long, scorching the pristine cobblestones and stealing the breath of its targets.

Several of the weak Denrosi mages follow their instincts, ignoring their orders and turning to run before the serpent reaches them, but before they have taken three paces, the colossal beast passes through the shattered barrier.

Emily arrives before a sturdy wall of water and earth raised to block her advance, and kicks off the ground, shooting over it. In her lightning-charged state, she moves too fast for even her fourth circle opponents to track, running along their barrier and slipping inside before they can finish covering their fleeing combatants in the several-metre-thick shell.

All eyes within the barrier turn to her crackling form, but before anyone can move to attack her, the entire makeshift room shakes.

“I put most of my mana into those two attacks,” Emily says, filling the room with the seething crackle of her machina-charged voice as she draws Mensacus from her shoulder and begins firing needles at the gathered low-level mages. “So, I wouldn’t drop this barrier if I were you.”

The room shudders again as the serpent outside rams into the walls using all of its weight, and the floating king and his kin grimace as they feel the pressure against their spells, pouring out more mana to reinforce the room.

Emily feels a sharp, formless wave of energy slam into her mind, but her machina flares in return and burns it away. She glances at the king to see blood pouring from his nose as he scowls at her, but she turns her focus away from him as The Needler’s magazine runs empty, slinging her son back over her shoulder and leaving him to manipulate the victims turning on their kin. Emily draws her blades from her wrist and palm and begins slicing through her enemies instead, dancing through their formations without much resistance.

A few spells and blades manage to catch her, but none of them break her metal skin or her stride, and only the king, after abandoning his mental attack, and his daughter manage to split their attention between the barrier’s battle with the snake outside and casting to combat Emily within. The flood of water and mud they conjure fails to slow her down, though, and the Denrosi forces within the barrier quickly dwindle with their ruler unable to do anything but watch as Emily weaves unhindered between the whiplike appendages he forms to attack her.

Their casting is uncoordinated.

Emily fires the blade from her Claw with its built-in railgun system, cutting down several mages in a line.

Their reactions and positioning are downright pathetic.

The previous king finally grows frustrated as sweat drips from his brow, dropping his support for the barrier and conjuring a focused orb of swirling water that shoots a pressurised beam towards Emily.

And their strongest are still suffering the after-effects of draining themselves to use their Sunbeam a few hours ago…

She slashes through the spell with the blade extending from her left palm, channelling machina through the limb as the torrent splits in two and parts around her.

What a disappointing final battle.

A harsh cracking signals the end of the fight as, moments later, the barrier blocking the sun shatters and the colossal crackling serpent lands with a deafening thud, a few metres from the floating thrones.

“That was a poor choice,” Emily mutters, pausing her slaughter and staring up at the fourth circle mages still proudly floating above the battlefield as if their deaths weren’t fast approaching.

The rage fuelling her fight peters out, despite the machina trying to reinforce it, and is replaced by a flood of disappointment, causing Emily to relax her efforts and letting her dampening take full effect again.

“Tsk,” she clicks her tongue, making eye contact with the massive magical construct looming over her enemies and noting that having enhanced her natural rage has had no noticeable effect on the anger in her sealed emotional vault. “Leave that one alive. Kill the rest.”

After pointing to the king and giving her cold order, Emily watches her serpent swallow him in one gulp before turning to the other three floating thrones and hissing, pouring a beam of plasma from its mouth reminiscent of the attack Emily used to breach the city. The torrent of charge bathes the weakened fourth circle mages, shattering the last-second barriers they throw up to try to protect themselves, and pours down onto the half-dead mages below, covering the battlefield with ashes.

The large construct rapidly shrinks as it releases its lifeforce into the attack and, by the time it’s done, the snake has vanished, leaving behind only the king bound to his throne by delicate chains, carved to look like a snake’s bones and coated in pulsing lightning, and the scorched corpses of his kin. He doesn’t say anything as silence falls over their small battlefield, drinking in the burned remains of his final struggle as the faint sounds of distant explosions and gunfire accompany his thoughts.

“Why?” the man asks, relaxing into his seat with a blank expression, barely reacting to the electricity flowing through his muscles to keep him immobilised. “Why did y-”

“I hardly think that matters at this point. Do you?” she responds, cutting off his pointless questioning before it begins. “Your reign is over, and you’ll be dead soon. My answers to whatever questions you have won’t change that. Now, be quiet. I promised I’d put on a show when I was finished, and I intend to honour that. I am a woman of my word after all.”

The snakebone-binds curl up and around Charles’ throat, stealing his voice and forcing him to grit his teeth and watch in silence as Emily shuts her eyes to prepare. She first releases her elemental connections, removing her fine control over her prisoner’s shackles and returning her flesh to normal, still covered in a faint fluorescent mist.

Emily breathes mana in through her skin, slowly recharging her reserve as she converts some to light and wind and weaves a large magic circle. She connects to Elisime’s Logic Core with her long-range waveform machina signal and uses it to link her spell to her communicator’s network and the active call with New Denntimo’s Elders.

Her casting finishes and, as Emily opens her eyes, a glistening orb of light appears before her in sync with a giant, shimmering screen in the sky, visible throughout the entire city and out across the scarred battlefield surrounding it. On the screen is the image of Emily’s emotionless gaze, shown from the perspective of the small orb of light.

Satisfied, Emily pulls a prepared mind crystal, carved with a recording enchantment, from her belt and places it into the magic circle of the screen, activating it with a small burst of mana before starting her show.

“Hello, citizens of Rizenford and the greater Denros Kingdom,” she says, her voice echoing out across the city and the plains around it. “I am here as a messenger from New Denntimo to tell you that freedom is coming. I’m sure many of you have wondered about the oddities of our world and the strange behaviours of the nobles lording themselves over you, so I’m here to tell you that magic is very much real, and the ones who’ve been keeping it from you…”

She turns the light orb with a wave of her hand, directing the image towards the bound king, rooted to his gaudy seat, covered in an excess of magical gems, by her beautiful chains. Emily slowly walks around the wasteful creation, brushing her metal palm across the admittedly impressive runework along its spine before moving her hand to rest over the king’s heart.

“Are dead.” A rush of light leaks from the seams in Emily’s arm, running from her elbow to her hand as a chunk of metal is shunted through Charles Denros’ chest. “Your kingdom has fallen, but a new age is coming, and as long as you accept the changes, your lives will only improve.”

The light slowly leaves the dying king’s eyes as Emily removes her hand, revealing the gaping hole in his chest, and continues speaking. As she finishes, his head slumps, and the image of the dead king is left floating silently in the sky for several minutes before Emily ends the spell and her transmission, leaving the city to mourn and the Elders to celebrate.