The skies over Urnos had been clear, with unobstructed views of the Void clear across the Great Strand of Rhea and to the strands on the other side of the Nexus. However, the clashing of Leon and Antipatra’s auras between their respective fleets birthed a motley chaos—blues and whites on one side, and reds and oranges on the other. This blossoming chaos was like a cloud of magic, establishing a barrier no less permeable than a proper cloud to separate the fleets. Grand though both were, Leon and Antipatra’s auras were titanic, and both sides soon lost sight of each other.
But Anshu was undeterred. After word had come that Antipatra had imminent reinforcements, Leon had indicated that he was going to make his move. He’d waited longer than Anshu had expected, but now that he was moving, the Fleet Admiral put his plan into motion.
“Begin the planned maneuvers,” Anshu spoke calmly through his cloud glass and into Storm Herald’s comm lotuses. He could sense the consciousnesses of hundreds of other crew members tapping into the linked network of intricate ark systems, but the sheer mental madness of it all was coordinated and organized neatly by the ark’s suite of wisps and giants. Without that support, that simple sentence would’ve rendered him insensate for days.
In moments, the accelerating fleet’s formation expanded in four directions, forming a wider and wider circle using their King’s battle as visual cover for their maneuver. Anshu watched it as dispassionately as he could, but he couldn’t help but feel his heart seize up slightly as he saw Red plunging into the miasmic cloud formed by two thirteenth-tier mages. He didn’t think Leon and Antipatra had even met blade-to-talon yet, but already he could sense their clash was dangerous enough that he worried for any arks that plunged within.
“Center group,” he continued just as calmly as a moment ago, the quick flutter in his heart already calming down, “begin firing based on extrapolated firing patterns.”
The fleet had been divided into five groups: high, low, right, left, and center. The four directional groups were all just as large as each other, but the center group was the largest of them all, encompassing nearly half of the entire fleet. And all of those arks, from the smallest corvettes to the largest dreadnoughts, opened up. Light, lightning, and glowing-hot metal bolts were launched into the Void, streaking into the radiant cloud.
The beams of light and bolts of lightning scattered on contact, but the metal bolts pushed through, though to what end, he couldn’t yet say. It seemed, at least, that their salvo had gone unanswered.
Slowly but surely, the arks began reaching the edges of the enormous cloud of magic, allowing their sensor enchantments to see the other side, and through their comm lotuses, projections began illuminating all across the fleet. The enemy arks were firing, but their flame-based weapons were scattering within the cloud just as the opening salvo’s light and lightning had.
Anshu grinned viciously, already preparing to order the center group to halt and continue firing through the cloud, using it as cover they could shoot through, but which their enemy couldn’t. The other groups would use their superior numbers to flank the enemy and bring their larger weapons to bear.
However, more auras began to clash across the Void, swallowing fighters, giants, Ulta suits, and even a few corvettes. Worse, the cloud generated by Leon and Antipatra wasn’t motionless; it moved as they did, forcing him to adjust his plan again for a more mobile center group.
“Watch for enemy mages,” Anshu called out. “Antipatra isn’t the only post-Apotheosis mage we have to contend with…”
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much he could do about individual enemy mages. The enemy fleet was his concern, and he could only trust in the warriors that Leon had chosen to represent him as Paladins to do their jobs…
Given that Red was also in battle, though, his heart beat with confidence in their inevitable victory.
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Cold purpose filled Leon’s mind even as his magic senses were drowned out by Antipatra’s attempts to stop him. Her aura blazed through the Void, contesting his at every turn. But he didn’t rely purely on his magic senses, and even through the light that bloomed around him from his clashing aura, he knew where his enemies were.
Silver-blue lightning coursed through his feathers, and his beak and talons gleamed in their light. He beat his wings in the airless Void, magic flaring behind him as thunderous pressure pushed him forward even faster. With storm-like power at his wingtips, he pushed through Antipatra’s aura, and he sensed it flicker.
But he still couldn’t see her. He’d noticed when she charged out of her flag ark, but he’d lost her in the polychromatic chaos they’d generated. Regardless, he pushed on. He’d deployed at a distance to keep the enemy from trying to charge and take his fleet by surprise. It thus took long minutes to cut through that aura and emerge almost right in the center of Antipatra’s fleet. The Basilissa was nowhere to be seen, though the aura storm behind him continued to rage even as he tasted the black Void again.
Wasting not a second, lightning peeled from his feathers and arced into the nearest of Antipatra’s arks: a destroyer-class, or at least one of similar tonnage. His destroyers had larger weapons meant mostly for planar bombardment, but these arks’ weapons were smaller, looking almost like dedicated picket platforms.
These thoughts lanced through his head in a fraction of a second. The ark had raised its light barriers, but his lightning, backed by his origin power, broke through in only a few strikes and, in a dozen more bolts, sundered the ark’s wards and turned most of it to slag. Everyone within was most likely reduced to vapor from the heat.
He spared that ark no more thought as metal bolts broke through the cloud behind him. Most missed, but nearly half found targets. Shields of light took most of the brunt, but a few were penetrated and did damage. Leon counted only five out of more than a thousand take serious damage, however.
Antipatra’s arks then responded with fire, but their weapons hit Antipatra’s side of the cloud and rolled across the surface, unable to penetrate. Had he been capable of it, Leon might’ve smiled. Instead, he turned his beak to his next target—an ark of equal tonnage to a light cruiser—and let loose with a barrage of lightning.
In a display that a mortal could’ve seen from the surface of Urnos, the light cruiser went the way of the preceding ark and broke under his power. Leon didn’t celebrate; he merely switched targets as he pressed deeper into Antipatra’s loose formation.
Between these arks, he was practically untouchable. None of the larger arks could do much without fear of hitting their fellows, meaning that it was up to either Antipatra’s fighter-equivalents—a combination of small, nimble things with weaponry that Leon immediately dismissed, and larger, slower monstrosities that might as well have been sitting ducks before his lightning—to try and stop him. But under such pressure, he gave them no more than a shriek, silent though it was in the Void, and turned any fighter to ash and molten metal if they drew too close.
One ark after another met its end at the end of his power, and his eyes settled on a massive beast. Given its weaponry, he mentally classified it as a dreadnought, but it possessed more hangars than those of his Kingdom. With an eye open for Antipatra, he crashed upon this great metal beast, blazing with lightning. His beak flashed as his golden talons met the ark’s hull, and an ancient rune of separation appeared in the palm of his talons. With his mind sharpened to purpose, the rune did as he wanted it to, and metal parted before him like fresh bread before a knife.
Compartments opened as he sliced through, his lightning following up to fry everything around him. He danced through a shower of blood and tiny balls of molten metal, and the dreadnought broke in half around him. Titanstone, glowing with conducted magic power, spilled into the Void, while Lumenite fizzled and dissipated. And then, as Leon emerged on the other side of the enemy ark, all of that magic conducted through the ruptured lines of Titanstone detonated, and the ark was consumed in fire not of its making.
Several mages survived—they were servants of a Burning Lord, and this was one of her largest and most powerful arks, demanding her more powerful servants to crew—but swift lightning strikes ended them.
It was a heady feeling, this power. Antipatra was a powerful Basilissa, among the top ten thousand mages in a universe of countless trillions and quadrillions, if not more.
‘And so am I,’ Leon thought proudly, his chest swelling with the fireball that consumed Antipatra’s dreadnought.
By this point, Leon could sense the wings of the fleet curving around the edges of his and Antipatra’s cloud, and open up with their main weapons. He could also sense Maia close by, Red tearing into several smaller arks, and his Paladins launching attacks of their own—though the latter hadn’t been directly by his side when he launched this attack, which meant it took them just a little more time for them to emerge from the cloud.
He saw Zhang in his shining white armor plunge his equally white spear into the heart of a ninth-tier mage that Zhang had torn from a light cruiser. Daryun wasn’t too far away, the black-armored warrior almost lost in the dark of the Void. His lance, however, was far from lost, and it spun in his hand as he conjured wind blades from both magic and origin power that sliced through ark plating with startling ease.
A sudden blossoming of power drew his attention: an eleventh-tier mage had made their armored presence known and had engaged Maia with fire. A second Strategos appeared, tearing out of a dreadnought, and charged at Red. Lana and Graniton weren’t far, however, and moved to aid them both. Leon was about to do likewise when he realized that he couldn’t sense Anna.
His heart seized when he felt the largest blooming of power yet—behind him. Anna, bloodied heavily, came tearing out of the cloud, and not from her own power. Rather, she’d been blasted out by a furious Antipatra, who followed with a shining spear with a blade that blazed with blue-hot fire. She fell upon Anna, her spear crashing through Anna’s Adamant and slamming into her chest. Leon’s heart seized for a moment as he saw his Paladin—his friend of many years—go limp.
And then wrath took him. He didn’t think; he only moved.
Antipatra tore her spear clean from Anna, flinging his Paladin into the Void. She wore armor of her own, but her helmet was open-faced, and he could see her smile at him. Sound didn’t propagate through the Void, but she mouthed something undoubtedly provocative. Leon didn’t bother trying to interpret it and fell upon her with the fury of a hurricane.
Lightning blazed around him, and his talons, not dulled at all after splitting a dreadnought in half, twitched with the soul-searing anticipation of tearing into Antipatra.
The Basilissa, however, waved her spear and conjured a familiar rune. It flashed, and Leon felt pain beyond description flare through him. His muscles seized as his nerves felt like they’d been set alight. He awoke in his soul realm with his magic body seizing up, and he barely managed to remain on his throne.
“Leon!” the Thunderbird shouted in alarm, and he even felt the Great Black Dragon’s attention focus on him more acutely.
He didn’t respond and forced his pained body back into position on his throne, and a moment later, he was back in his physical body.
Antipatra was already on him, one hand on one of his shoulders as she tried to force his blue-tipped spear into his chest—his human chest. She recoiled as he twitched, the flame enchantments that he’d engraved into his armor to aid his own fire magic aiding him in warding away her power. With a wave of his hand, his Stormborn Bow was in his hand, and he pulled the seemingly nonexistent bowstring. Light appeared in his fingers, and an arrow blacker than night and ringed with darkest blue appeared nocked at this light.
He released, and the arrow followed Antipatra as she made space. Leon thought that might be the end; Antipatra was a fire mage, not a lightning mage, and they were close. However, she summoned a shield made primarily of Aurichalcum and graven with a large ancient rune. That rune flared, and when Leon’s Void arrow met its power, the resulting cracks in space rippled out from her, rather than through her. In the end, he was the one who had to retreat.
Antipatra charged again after the spatial cracks vanished, another ancient rune appearing around her spear, this one made of fire. She thrust her spear, and Leon felt space itself shake around him, sending the magic he’d been using for mobility scattering into the Void. His eyes widened as power concentrated around the spear tip, and a silver hook appeared, made from origin power. A litany of curses was inscribed upon the hook, their runes pulsing with real power.
He raised a hand and conjured a wall of stone from nothing, but Antipatra broke through it with ease, sending rocky debris careening through the Void. It did, however, buy Leon just enough time to draw Iron Pride. With the blade vibrating with silver-blue lightning, Leon met Antipatra’s spear.
When their power met, it violently exploded. Arcs of lightning flashed through the Void, striking nearby arks with enough force to break through their light barriers and do severe damage. Fire flowered past Antipatra, and she smoothly formed it into ten thousand serpentine dragons that tore after Maia, Red, and his Paladins, including Anna, who was still drifting through the battlefield.
‘No more,’ Leon darkly thought.
Pain flared from his heart down to his sword arm’s fingertips. An arc of black lightning roiled down the length of Iron Pride, and Leon pointed it at Antipatra. That black bolt erupted from the sword’s tip, and in an instant, met the Basilissa.
She was thrown back, and her control over the fire dragons slipped enough that the fire dissipated, but she slowed, a look of triumph on her face. Leon, horror dawning upon him, saw a small scale shining like a star plucked from the heavens in her off hand. He’d seen a similar scale before, wielded by Terris, though that had been used to defend against his Doomfire. This, however, seemed to work against his black lightning.
‘A White Dragon scale…’
Eleven years had passed since the Belicenian Games. At Belicenion, he’d revealed nearly all of his cards. At Khosrow’s Fane and Voidshore, too, he hadn’t held back. And in those eleven years, his enemies had clearly worked hard to counter anything he could bring to bear.
A sense of desperation began to build within him. His heart raced as Antipatra grinned like a madwoman at him, her teeth shining in the Void almost as brightly as his lightning. He could almost hear the boasting and the subsequent promises of pain, humiliation, and death.
And he could almost see it. The more experienced mage using her counters to bring him to ruin.
‘No,’ he thought as he forced his heart to steady. ‘Never.’
He gripped the hilt of Iron Pride more tightly, and the Iron Needle within resonated in a way that he found particularly reassuring. No one outside of his family and closest friends and allies knew he had a Universe Fragment, at least, even if it didn’t aid him as directly as he would’ve liked.
Still, he had its power, and as he swept his sword into a powerful aggressive stance, pain flared again in his chest and arm as he summoned the black power that the Iron Needle had given him. Antipatra may have a White Dragon scale, but he was sure that it had a limit.
And was also sure that he’d reach the scale’s limit before finding his own…
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