Chương 243: Chapter 316 - Storms and Gyres

Mirian dove down as the artillery shells erupted nearby, brilliant bursts of force that sent shards of metal slicing through the air. High up, she was an easier target for the airburst artillery. Down on the ground, she could use her maneuverability and the terrain to her advantage. As she looked up, though, trepidation whispered through her. Some hundred arcanists were moving in her direction, far more than the test-attack Liuan had made on her in Torrviol so many decades ago.

The Akanan Archmage Company wasn't a literal hundred mages, but it was a lot. But this was her best opportunity since the advance had begun to reduce the offensive power of the Akanans. It needed to happen now, before Mirian had to perform her final checks on the leyline regulator. Her gaze grew sour. She'd talked with many of the archmages that were moving toward her. None of them were among the irredeemable.

Yet here, she could clearly see the failure of the Akanan intelligentsia; so many had refused to sufficiently examine the evidence before them. Even now, there must be doubt worming through their hearts. Mirian had spoken her truths to the battlefield many of the days she'd hung in the sky. But no doubt, these great mages had used their intellectual prowess to come up with justifications for their actions, rather than seek the truth.

The soul energy Mirian had collected in her initial assault had filled her repositories. Temporary energy cycled through her armor, bound up in the energy transmutation circuits. The leyline repulsors sheathed at her back fed her that constant trickle of power, even as they helped keep her aloft. Mirian alternated her soul flows between the Dance of the Dusk Waves Across the Ocean and the Burning Tempest Sunders the Sky, switching between speed and power.

The archmages and Sorcerer Elite approached in a dozen formations, opening up with an overwhelming barrage of spells. Her illusions were scoured from the air. Mirian herself blinked away, then lashed out. She cycled through different multi-energy attacks. Incendiary lightning lined with magnetic torsion fields arced out from her. Force blasts that were amplified with gravitational pulls and sounds designed to tear apart ear drums splashed out. Bursts of blinding light were coupled with searing flames.

With so much spell resistance present, the sheer power of the spells being unleashed seemed like it should do more, but in both directions, adamantium and mythril sapped the arcane energy underlying them. Here, Mirian was equally prepared. As her powerful spells tore through the air, demanding a defensive response, she turned her arcane energy to the ground. Huge chunks of stone ripped themselves from the earth until a dozen boulders the size of rooms orbited Mirian.

She aligned the paths of them to be at different planes and different distances, creating a moving sphere of rocks. Great spells of fire and lightning splashed against these boulders, while force magic tried to tear them apart or wrest control of them, but Mirian coated them in the excess soul energy she'd gathered to burn away the intruding arcane forces. She accelerated them, faster and faster, so that inertia would help do her work.

Now as she moved across the battlefield, the spells of her enemies first had to cross a wall of rock, then contend with both her black shield and the massive spell resistance granted by Equinox. Even as the Akanan elite bombarded her, she worked to absorb as many of the spells as she could through energy transmutation. A hundred years of practice had honed her magic into automaticity; she moved magic not with a straining mind as when she first started, but the way a poet moved language.

She was the Dusk Waves that blew with the storm, letting the wind sweep her into action, and in turn those waves wrecked the ships and shores around her. As her boulders orbited her, she moved into the formations of the Akanans. When one of the streaking boulders came into contact with an opponent, it smashed through their force shields, splattering them out of the sky.

If they attempted to concentrate force shields into a formation, she came at them with spells of a different energy type, moving them through the twists and turns of the fourth dimension so that the spells snaked in from unexpected directions. Thunder rang out across the battlefield, and the Akanan center became a storm of spells. Light and fire bloomed; it was more like an arcane eruption had taken place than a battle.

Mirian was in the center of it, dashing different directions in the air, still sending waves of illusions out in every direction as she blinked both within and without her sphere of destructive stone. Around that sphere orbited a different sphere, one made of Akanan sorcerers and their shields, raining down as much power as they could, cracking the air apart with lightning. Even with all her prowess, Mirian's rampage was a fighting retreat.

She stayed close to the ground, sweeping through blackened trenches before blinking back to the center of her stone whirlwind, kicking up dust and commanding streams of smoke to blast into the enemy. Even with her robust defenses, only her mobility and the pure chaos of the fight let her continue for more than a minute. Once engaged in the thick of fighting, command structures and coordination broke down.

The same defenses against her light and sound spells necessitated defenses that made proper communication impossible. Friendly fire, or even the risk of it, impeded the Akanan assault. Their archmages were powerful, but had only a tiny fraction of the combat training and discipline of the Sorcerer Elite. Even for Mirian, it was impossible to comprehend the full tide of battle. Her aura strained as she pushed more and more mana through her spells.

Her advantage in speed and spellpower wasn't enough against such numbers. Perhaps if they'd lacked the spell resistant jewelry, she might have used her necromancy to sap their defenses, but as it was, there was simply too much. Mirian's casting never became desperate, but she had to stop using the Burning Tempest Form simply to have the reaction speed necessary to keep ahead of the barrage of spells following her.

Even as she lifted more boulders into her sphere of rotating destruction, the old ones were pulverized by so much magic that they became dust, clouds that choked the air, but then were funneled away by particle manipulation spells. Here and there, she was able to strike down an enemy, but the cloud of arcanists around her was closing in. Though it had been long ago, she could only see the hand of Liuan at work—she'd studied Mirian's spells, studied her tactics, and trained her elite forces to counter them.

The only reason Mirian wasn't dead is that a few months wasn't nearly enough to train and practice enough to contend with her century of experience. Still, she only needed to do two things: survive, and draw them east. Only once they were close enough to the artillery of the Ominian's Army did the trap spring. She gave no order; they had been instructed in advance. From every corner, guns already aimed at the sky opened up from their hidden positions.

The Sorcerer Elite quickly formed an outer shell of shields, but just as the Akanans had concentrated their firepower in the central front, looking for a breakthrough, Mirian had concentrated her forces there as well. Hidden gun emplacements fired up as fast as they could. The cacophony was immense; a thunderstorm seemed a quiet thing in comparison.

Another boulder slammed into a sorcerer, splattering him as Mirian blinked away from a bombardment, but by now, the Akanans had learned enough to saturate the entire nearby area with spells as well. Mirian's black shield darkened— —and shattered. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. Mirian reeled from the shock to her aura, though her automatic defenses of Equinox absorbed the remainder of the deluge of attacks.

This time, she didn't just blink away, she combined the four-dimensional push with the power of supreme levitation, moving her as quickly as she could to the safety of her lines. Once she'd gotten enough distance to relieve the pressure on her, she reestablished her shield and gave the order.

"Prophet's Guard, bombard them from above." Now, her own group of levitating arcanists joined with her artillery. Lightning, fire, and force poured out of wands and barrels as the very land below was churned and the sky above was sundered by spell after spell.

Above, two of the Akanan dreadnoughts crept forward across the sky, adding yet more devastation to the battlefield as shells both burst in the air to support their own mages and splashed across the ground, trying to suppress and target Mirian's supporting artillery. Below, with their positions now exposed, signals were being sent out to withdraw the forward artillery. Infantry rushed to their tunnels as the ground shook and the tempest of battle continued.

For the next few minutes, the battle continued to rage, Mirian switching her role to supporting the Prophet's Guard, shielding them from the dreadnought's long range bombardment and keeping the Akanan elite under pressure. Despite their numbers, they each had significantly weaker auras. Under the strain of constant artillery strikes on their shield walls, they withdrew. Two more of the elite fell from the sky as they levitated back, perhaps from aura strain, perhaps from shrapnel finding gaps in the shields.

As longer range anti-air guns targeted the dreadnoughts, they too withdrew, more out of caution than necessity. Mirian and the Prophet's Guard levitated east, leaving the area of the battle a wasteland. As soon as they were far enough away, they cast camouflage spells and dove down, making their way into the underground command center just forward from Alatishad. It would take some time for either side to recover and regroup, but Mirian's generals already had their orders.

General Nagasoma was nothing if not adaptable.

"How many?" she asked the forward divination team once they'd made it into the secure areas of the lower passages.

"We had difficult counting casualties, Sacred One. The conservative estimate is at least a dozen of theirs, though perhaps as many as two dozen. We count six losses of Praetorians, with three more out of action from aura strain. Unfortunately, we retrieved very little of the mana-imbued metals of the fallen. There might be retrieval units still making their way through the tunnels, but there's too much fire coming into that area for us to do much." Mirian nodded.

Those numbers would be fine in normal circumstances, but a war of attrition didn't favor them. For now, the Akanan advance had been put on hold. The devastation she'd wrought on the center before drawing out the response would halt central operations, and the Ominian's Army flanks should have performed several smaller counterattacks to push the Akanans back there. They'd have to wait to get those reports.

She'd stay for a few more days and direct the battle, then move Zhuan into position while she recovered her own aura. Hopefully, by then, they'd have more information on Jherica and Celen. If need be, she had access to both an anchor and another needle.

Sio Jherica knelt over Celen's corpse, face wet with tears. All around them were the corpses of the RID agents. They'd been too slow. Jherica didn't know whether it was an RID bullet that had killed him or he'd done it himself so that he wouldn't be captured. Either way, he'd been murdered. Of course, they'd died so many times in so many ways. At first, Jherica had seen Celen's corpse and felt nothing. Only after he'd put down the last agent did it sink in.

They found Celen's violet focus in a deep coat pocket, splattered with blood. They looked around. The building should be secure; by now, Jherica had accumulated their own followers, and both the guard and the RID were having trouble moving through a city full of riots and angry citizens. They clutched the focus, and let themselves fade into the Ominian's dream. They knew where they'd find Celen. A wall of burning fire swept across the void. In the midst of it, there was a small silhouette.

"Celen…" Jherica thought.

"Ah, there you are," Celen said, in that casual, light way that he moved in the dream. In the mundane world, he'd always carried a weight about him; a shadow that dragged on the ground, a melancholy that dulled his smile.

"She won't touch my mind again. Not again. We'll make sure of it."

"She won't," Jherica promised.

"I… I should have seen through the lies sooner. I should have... We should have…" Celen shook his head and laughed.

"It's just another cycle. What are you worried about?" Jherica stared at him.

"It's supposed to be the last cycle. Remember Mirian's plan? If the Ominian's soul doesn't detonate, we don't even know that the machinery on Luamin will trigger. And if it does… we'd be fighting without Xecatl, Mirian, and Zhuan. We'd be fighting the other three. Ominian knows how long that war across time would take—but I don't want to do it. I can't… but how do I live without you?" Celen smiled again, that warm smile that drew them in. He reached a hand out, and Jherica's soul took it.

There were the sparks and disruptions of two souls in too close proximity, but neither of them cared. They would have endured a lot more to touch.

"Everything ends, Sio. The time we had together was a blessing I never expected to have. We lived a full life together. Far more time than most get." Jherica felt a tremor run through them.

"I… I know. It was a blessing, wasn't it? I just… wanted more."

"Don't we all? But there's a time to say you've had enough. There's enough greed out there; we don't need to add to it. I see the calculation. If you try to save me, it requires abandoning the other three and maybe even dooming Enteria. If Mirian's group can't save the world, those other boneheads certainly can't. We lived. We loved. Now it's time to let others do the same. Their love isn't any less important than ours." Jherica's soulform couldn't cry, but they sent the impression of it anyways.

"I know that too. It's just… you'll never write those books now. You were waiting until the cycles were done… but now…" Celen brought Jherica forward so they could watch the fires dancing across the stars together.

"They were just silly stories. Fiction. Tall tales. The point is to build a better world, isn't it? I don't know that I've ever believed that we could, but perhaps, with you there, there's some hope. There will be plenty of other books written. Maybe ones with more joy, and less melancholy. Maybe ones that bend people away from their worst impulses." Jherica tried to send a smile, but their soul wouldn't let them. It kept breaking.

"You always liked it here. I'll visit as long as I can. However long this dream lasts. I love…" They couldn't finish. They didn't want it to end. Celen sent out a sigh, and clutched Jherica's hand tighter.

"I always thought the story of humanity was that of tragedy. The lost world that we abandoned… the Cataclysm after the settlement of Enteria… the wars, the endless wars of empire and conquest… and no matter how joyous a life, we always cry when a loved one passes. No matter how long we delay it, there's an inevitable end, and the ruin of death. But it's a tragedy I don't regret. And I'll be with Them, remembering what we shared," Celen said, gesturing. In that dark space between the stars, the Ominian waited.

There was that little marble floating in the void that was Enteria, and the approaching wall of starfire, waiting to consume it. Together, they'd watched it a thousand times, watched as the wall of flame approached. The dream never showed the end, only the moment before it struck. Jherica's soulform shook with imagined tears, the currents swirling with sorrow. Then, still holding Celen's hand, they folded in the blades of the temporal anchor, one by one.

A bright light erupted from their chest, the anchor moving through the dream's void like liquid light. Together, they saw the Ominian turn to them. They couldn't see Their expression, not in the shadows of the void, but they could feel that gaze. Feel it pierce them, seeing every part of them. Then Jherica looked at Celen's smile one more time before they woke. They had a revolution to attend to.