A strong metal hull covered the envelope, making it easy to move across. That was very fortunate for Isaac and Reed - to get to the actual weapon platform on top of it, they had to make a dead sprint across the envelope. By that time, the officers aboard the platform had noticed their presence and wheeled their machine guns toward them, but Reed sent a sound wave their way. When it impacted the railing, it created an explosion of steel shards that temporarily knocked out the gunners, enabling them to arrive at the back staircase.

Cultivators, armed with double-bladed swords that featured a hand grip in the middle, moved to block their path. In contrast to all the foot soldiers Isaac had battled through so far, these guys were at least Circuit 2 - he could sense it in the air - and the wind made their straw capes billow while their eyes remained hidden under conical caps.

Before either side could launch their attack, Babs appeared behind her guards. Power simply emanated from her on an order of magnitude far greater than when Isaac last fought her on the giant’s shoulder. Similar to the set up of Reverse Spirals, she had a needle planted in the crook of her elbow, with the blood-filled tube stretching back to the control panel below the Heart. Dark lines stretched from the corner of her eyes to the sides of her face.

“I should’ve known,” she merely said. “Squad 3 together until the end, huh?”

Isaac narrowed his eyes.

She sighed. “Of course, you didn’t come all this way just to join me, I suppose. My men found Zou Mei dead at Dai Hong’s estate. I suppose that was your doing?”

Reed gave a grim nod.

Red lights flickered down the lines on Babs’ face. “She died for the sake of Kallipolis. Her death will not be vain.”

The Heart let out an ominous groan as a lightshow erupted from it. Rddhi flowed up the tube from Babs' elbow into the weapon, which now flashed as crimson lines ran up and down the metal. Gears whirred and pistons pounded as technicians called out pattern readings to each other.

“I saw your memories,” Isaac called out, ignoring the frown appearing on Babs’ face. “The Mind showed them to me. You turned against Caesar because he treated everyone as pawns, mere sacrifices. And yet, if you’re going to use the Heart, then you must’ve made sacrifices to it, too. How many ghettos did you slaughter to power it up? How many lives did you take?”

She eyed him for a moment. “That issue bothered me for a long time, too. But I found a simple solution. When Arcadia becomes Kallipolis, we will be treated as outcasts. Nations will surely war against us to stop the spread of our ideology. We won’t be able to rest until we conquer the world. Surely, we will kill a lot of foreigners before we achieve world peace. That is unfortunate, but inevitable.”

Babs glanced back at the Heart. “There is no difference between foreigners dying later and dying now. So, I decided on the latter. The Heart is powered by the sacrifices of Atalantan refugees.”

There’s work below ground. Arcadians are paid, meager as it may be, but Atalantans are held as slaves. They are held separately and from what I’ve heard, they’re worked to the bone. But never allowed to die. Zhanghai ensures they remain alive.

The words of Lysandros, the man who rescued Isaac from the Four Eagles raid, rang in his ears. “That’s why the refugees were smuggled here? Just so you could sacrifice them?”

Her face remained neutral. “Just the ones I handled smuggling for.”

“And how many did you kill?” Reed demanded to know.

Babs didn’t answer for a moment. “Only enough to accomplish what I set out to do, and no more more than that.”

As for what she set out to do, there was a shift in the air. All the energy atop the airship seemed to be heading directly toward a singularity - Babs’ elbow. She gritted her teeth as Rddhi flooded down the tube and into vials marked with the symbol for atomic material that lined the side of the weapon’s barrel. Time slowed down; the cannon slowly shifted on its turret, aiming directly at the biggest skyscraper downtown.

Isaac tried to advance, but the guards blocked his advance. And then the weapon fired.

There was a rush of energy, a whole flood of it, as a beam of pure Rddhi erupted from the barrel. The recoil shook the entire airship, sending Isaac to his knees. The heat was utterly immense and the energy utterly enormous, but Babs remained standing, confident, ambition in her eyes as she watched the laser arc towards its target. Rocketing across the sky, it struck the skyscraper in no time. Even from here, Isaac heard the grinding of steel as the attack made impact. The top floors of the skyscraper erupted in an explosion of yellow and orange, cleaving the top half of it completely off. Crimson energy flickered onto the nearby buildings, alighting them, while the target collapsed in on itself, falling down right into the densest part of the capital.

Babs caught her breath, burn marks appearing around the lines on her face. When the technicians looked at her in dismay, she gritted her teeth. “Prepare to fire again. That just wiped out the Bank of Arcadia. We’ll take out the military headquarters this time.”

Isaac and Reed weren’t just going to let that happen. They charged in unison, engaging the powerful guards. Lacking a sword, Isaac was forced back out onto the envelope, dodging, giving space, considering his options. Reed was better-suited to fight her opponent, with her Domino Sword twirling in light as she dueled against the double-blades. Sparks, both metaphysical and real ones, flew in their ferocious battle.

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And then something appeared from below. Multiple somethings, actually - sleek rockets the size of a four story building exploded out of a storm of smoke on the ground. They raced upwards, Rddhi sparking through the metal, seeking their targets amid the armada. Most of them would miss, but Babs grunted, bit off a finger, and kicked up a shield of wind. Her normal shield was just enough to protect a few men, but powered by the sacrificed souls within the Heart, her wind blocked the entirety of the front of Polyphemus. The two missiles that would’ve hit were torn to pieces by the Whirlwind Reaper and exploded beneath the airship out of harm’s way.

Another airship nearby wasn’t so lucky. The rocket struck home, hitting the envelope, exploding on impact. The airship screeched as it fell to pieces, its remnants raining down on the residential homes below. Several fighter planes raced off to find the launch sites for the rockets.

“The State Police has cruise missiles?” Babs wondered aloud. She saw the worried looks on her comrades’ faces and grinned. “No matter. That just makes it more interesting. Once the fighters report back the location of the launch sites, change direction to target them.” A technician relayed her orders into a voice pipe down to the gondola below. The weapon creaked as the turret shuddered and rotated. Tracks covered the equator of the envelope, enabling the weapon to slide across the hull, leaving the platform behind, to target objectives on the ground. There was a surge of Rddhi from the cultivators on the platform, enabling Polyphemus to keep its balance.

Reed used the unexpected missile barrage to her advantage. She sliced through the handle of her opponent’s double-bladed sword; before he could revert to using it as a normal sword, she skewered him across the stomach.

“I’m going to take out the technicians!” Reed yelled out. “You go after Babs!”

She sent a sound wave at the guard attacking Isaac, forcing him backwards, resetting their fight. When Reed turned to attack the platform, Salvatore appeared, machine pistols held akimbo in his hands. They rattled out their fire, forcing her to dive off the platform and hide against its side where he couldn’t see. As she maneuvered in their game of cat-and-mouse, Isaac focused on his opponent.

Due to his sword, Isaac couldn’t get close, so he relied on his Fists of Anji. When he first fired it, the guard swept it away with his sword, creating a cloud of sparks. That gave Isaac an idea. He repeatedly fired the electric charge, over and over. It came easy to him - he had fired the charge thousands of times in a row while training it, after all. As the guard continued to deflect it, the electricity flicked and flared in front of his face, blocking his vision. Isaac slid to his side and delivered a strike to his ribcage.

The man buckled, but didn’t falter, and swung to decapitate Isaac. He ducked beneath it and then delivered an uppercut. The guard got his jaw out of the way in time, but the strike broke his sword in two. Before he could attack with both, Babs threw up another Whirlwind Reaper to block a second missile barrage. The resulting explosions knocked one of the man’s swords out of his hands, but his swings kept Isaac at bay when he tried to press the advantage.

Nearby, another blimp went down in a storm of steel, but radios crackled on the platform. The weapon maneuvered itself off the platform, onto the side of the blimp, and its turret swung downwards. This blast sent the ship rocking again as the beam utterly flattened a State Police station that must've contained a missile launching site. The attack took out a nearby elevated rail, and fires spread to adjacent buildings. Meanwhile, Polyphemus floated forward, closer and closer to the heart of the nation.

Isaac sent a blast at the man’s face. He blocked it as normal, but when Isaac advanced, he tilted one way. It was just a feint - Isaac juked to the other side, sliding right to where the fallen sword blade had gone. He scooped it up and, in one fluid motion, sliced through the man’s ankles. He cried out and collapsed, the remaining sword falling from his hand.

With his opponent no longer an issue, Isaac collected both of the swords. Babs currently leaned against a railing, her face burned an angry shade of red, but a surge of Rddhi went down the tube into her elbow again. The power of the sacrifices both healed her burns and made her missing fingers grow back to normal.

She’s too powerful to defeat right now. Just like Zola’s Reverse Spiral, I need to sever that tube to bring her back down to normal.

Isaac reared back and flung the sword at her. It circled through the air, spinning right towards the tube, but Babs tore off a finger and activated the shield. The Whirlwind Reaper appeared again, growing in intensity as she screamed and de-fingered her entire hand. The shield was immense, knocking Isaac back down the envelope. If he hadn’t been dead center on it, he might’ve been knocked off the airship entirely, but he instead flew back towards the rear of the envelope.

Protected by the shield, more cultivators moved freely within it to eliminate him, but with everyone’s attention directed at Isaac, Reed made her move. She climbed over the railing back onto the platform, skewering technicians along the way. Salvatore found her and fired on her with the guns akimbo, but she maneuvered herself behind a set of electronic panels to shield herself. Babs split the shield to target her, using her powers to make the Reaper harmless when it passed by her men and equipment but fully-powered when it struck Reed. She slammed through a railing, disappearing towards the front of the envelope.

And that’s when the third missile barrage hit. Babs couldn’t react in time - a missile struck the bottom of the envelope, exploding against its metal hull. Due to its size, Polyphemus survived the impact, but the force sent Babs to the ground and knocked out her shield. Isaac used the attack to knock out the two cultivators ahead of him and advance backwards the platform. Babs regrew her fingers and barked orders at technicians, who quickly maneuvered the barrel back atop the airship. The missile barrages and Reed’s earlier attack knocked out most of the technicians; the few that remained worked calmly under the pressure.

“Moving barrel starboard,” they called out. “Over military headquarters in T-minus three.”

Isaac arrived at the back staircase. When he stepped to the top, he came face to face with Babs, who wiped her face from all the exertion. A sea of purple welts were growing around the injection site on her elbow, but she paid it no mind. Rather than throw up a shield, Babs steadied her breathing. Her Foundational Technique was the |Force of Nature| from her lungs; her |Winds of Change| in her palm allowed her to attack more precisely. She intended to finish things off now by killing him, rather than just continuing to blast him back with the shield.

Babs stepped forward, her palms raised to attack. “Let’s settle this once and for all.”