Between the firing of the mortal instruments and the first blossoms of death, Gwen bathed in the glowing caress of the phantasmal spellfire.

Beneath her claw-tipped boots, attended by the stench of hot ozone and the stink of Undeath permeating every inch of the soot-clad snowscape, the Royal Raven's surface-to-air batteries made the ship a carnival float celebrating obliteration. At the foredeck of her battle barge, her Void and Lightning Dogs awaited, each horse-sized beast commanded to act as living shielding for the Golem units.

Superior to the range and scope of the Mageocracy's Spellsword units, her Dwarven crew wielded Runic sorcery, which delivered physical payloads with relative accuracy to almost two kilometres away. Once the shells struck the flock, these aerodynamic carvings manifested into localised Runic Mandalas. From these, latent energies from the "spell shells" were released, transforming into concussive, explosive force, simultaneously creating shards of red-hot metal and obsidian, piercing leather and armour alike with ease.

Each runic "firework" took artisans hours to compile. However, with the Protestant work ethic of the Dwarves, Gwen had been assured that there would be no longitudinal shortage of munitions so long as the Fabricator Engine remained operational.

With thunderous applause, the flaming flowers bloomed.

The first volley took the Wyrmbats entirely by surprise, for few dodged or dived, trusting their toughed exteriors of tempered scales.

Their arrogance was a costly mistake, for a direct hit was enough to shred a car-sized bat-creature wing-from-body, while a side impact could snap bones or break their finger-wings, sending them tumbling into the soot-clad snowmelt.

"Six… Eight… Ten…" Gwen heard the body count from her Message Device as she readied her crew for close encounters of the ashen kind. Lulan was already firing away, her flying swords pealing as a choir of death-dealing shards from their innate sonic vibrations.

To the aft, Richard, together with Petra and a half-dozen Abjurers and Enchanters from Charlene's retinue, reinforced protections around the ship. Somewhere above, Ariel and Caliban perched near the ship's elevated bridge with instructions to keep the Captain, Charlene, and the ship's navigational instruments clear of Wyrmbats.

"Rear defences have been deployed… Resonator at eighty per cent." Charlene's commanding voice pierced through the comm channels. "All forward defences deployed. Gwen, you have command of your Flights. I will support your needs from the bridge as much as possible."

"Roger that, Commander. Engaging in thirty seconds." She replied in kind.

For assurance, Gwen touched a hand to a thickly padded section of her battle suit, where the Ilias Leaf sat snug against her bosom.

Sensing its inertness, Gwen reminded herself of the promise from Tryfan that there would be means to contact the Frost Elves once they were deep inside Erebus' shadow—then redoubled her focus for the battle ahead.

The survivors of the minute-long barrage were now emerging. Much to her chagrin, there was little to indicate that the slaughter of their vanguard cowed the Wyrmbat "Tide".

"Ariel, get ready." She called to mind the invocations for a Maelstrom. "Cali, don't stray from the bridge."

"EE—EE!"

"Shaa—!"

BOOM—! Gwen's sides lit up; her silhouette made silver by hysterical spellfire as the volleys closed in for the last few hundred meters.

BUNG—! BU-BUNG—BOOM—!

Cobalt and phosphorus flowers, the former possessed of purifying plasma of the smelting caskets, the latter the purifying heat of the Heart Forge, ate into the bone and sinew of the lanky Wyrmbats. As creatures of Negative Energy, they were paradoxically weak toward, yet resilient to heat, meaning a certain threshold had to be crossed.

"SKAARRRRRK!" The returned cries from the victims of Dwarven artillery were shrill threats tugging at Gwen's Astral Body, promising a measure of agony far worse than death.

Lulan skewered the largest bat without blinking—only for the bat to continue its course without the slightest hint of discomfort until she expended the mana to "Shatter" her projectiles.

Still, Gwen remained patient, forcing her molten-lead adrenaline to cool. She was a veteran now, and a veteran either acted with foresight or reacted with wisdom.

Now wary, the flock that descended invaded the ship's resonating barrier, slowing their ascent as their cores shuddered under the influence of invisible arcane wavelengths. Those closest to the ship's bow coughed white ash as their Cores lost control of the latent energies, erupting into fantastic bursts of necrotic cloudbursts. Others, slipping through the expended barrier, opened up their throats to unleash torrents of what looked to be white-hot, corrosive flames.

Richard and Petra immediately invoked their abjuring sorcery, diverting the destructive spray to the ship's side to eat into the dark slush. The ship's crew also opened up with Wands of various Elements, adding to the pyrotechnical display raging over the shimmering shell of the Royal Raven.

Gwen watched the swirling cloud of bats, feeling the time was ripe.

"Ariel— Maelstrom!" She allowed her conduits to conduct their magnificent choir, feeling more powerful than her pre-Auckland self. Bolstered by lightning and Almudj's Blessing, she tore the heavens asunder, inviting into the world a swirling vortex of blue-green lightning that quickly transformed into a kilometre-wide pancake hurricane.

Those closest to the Maelstrom were sucked almost instantly into the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Lightning. Others who fought to get away were castigated by lashing bolts of destructive electricity, whipped into submission and stunned by the sudden Positive Energy so that they could only be obediently carried off into the gaping gash Gwen made in the Prime Material.

Yet, despite their incredible effort, the fortitude of the Wyrmbats, their red-hot charcoal eyes livid with madness, still pierced the ship's perimetre. Fighting off both resonance and destructive wards, dozens landed on the ship's deck or came close enough to scale the Royal Raven's tower and turrets to wreak havoc.

There, they met Gwen's Faithful Hounds, together Commonwealth Mages armed with some of the most exorbitant implements HDMs could afford, and well-fed Shadow Mages from Manipur who threw themselves upon the creatures without fear.

"Cali! Keep the Alpha away from the bridge castle!" Gwen called out, both eyes rapidly scanning her surroundings while her mind's eye drew a topographic map from Ariel's Link Sight. Her Familiar responded by bodily mounting the Alpha Wyrmbat. Compared to its brethren, this was a magnificent beastie with a white mane the colour of superheated flame with more Draconic features adorning its face than a bat's. Caliban's Big Bird guise crushed it against the castle's Wall of Force and clamped its maw around the creature's neck. The Wyrmbat's response was to crane its neck at an impossible angle to gnash Caliban's belly—only to be met with a maw-full of corrosive secretions. As both were Negatively-aligned beings, neither bat nor fiend seemed to show agony or passion, resulting in the strange spectacle of two beasts methodologically picking each other apart even as they fell from the ten-storey bridge.

With a fantastic furore, the pair crashed, with the bat fighting through immunity to pain while Caliban's Big Bird fingers tore out its guts and innards.

Compared to their leader, the other Wyrmbats had better luck. Having survived the shielding and the wards, they lunged at the artillery Golems, stopped only by the combined force of shadowy sinews from the Manipuri Mages and the bodily blockade of Gwen's Hounds. Where the Wyrmbats penetrated both, enormous destruction ensued, with the destroyed machinery burnt white by the smouldering ash.

Even in the chaos, Gwen heard her over-inquisitive mind cry out in woe. For creatures of such absurd elemental purity to survive for long in the Prime Material, there was little doubt that the Elemental balance was shattered, and various portals akin to the Sea of Flames now dominated the landscape around Erebus' howling, flame-spewing lava lakes.

"Zengraff Unit! Ejecting!" An orange Message spell blossomed.

A Golem too close to the fray was caught by a Wyrmbat, who tore through the upper armour with brute strength and corrosive ash-tipped claws, leaving the pilot no choice but to pop the rear and make a haste retreat.

Victorious, the Wyrmbat made a half-howl before Buck, Gwen's leading Familiar Hound, took it by the neck, holding it down for the six-odd seconds necessary for the skeletal bat to become engulfed by spellfire from a dozen Mages and surviving Golems.

Each mature Wyrmbat, Gwen acknowledged, would have possessed enough of a challenge rating for the Mageocracy to field a Flight of seasoned Mages. Only thanks to their floating fortress—and the power of her Dwarven Iron Guards—could they repel the onslaught of these ashen monstrosities to achieve their next objective.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Blood red blossoms from her Message spells exploded beside her ear.

"Magister Song! Captain Hanmoul! Hostile readings in the water! We may be surrounded! Prepare for maximum repulsion!"

"Roger! Evaluating a breakthrough!" With her confirmation, Gwen sent a silent message to Lulan, informing her that her bodyguard should prioritise their Dwarven allies.

Gwen took flight even as her torrent of spells continued, wielding Lightning Bolts on her right while her left hand completed the invocations for Void Bolt. With the ardour of a blazing Yue Bai, she leapt into the air to levitate above the Royal Raven.

Unconsciously, she focused her Essence upon her eyes to compensate for the flashing light and dark.

Below, where the ship was grinding through the soot ice, the black masses building up against the ship's exterior had come alive, sprouting limbs to scale the Royal Raven. Upon closer inspection, Gwen realised that it wasn't the soot that was alive.

These were Mermen—dead ones with grey eyes and mouths full of green bile and brown scum, using their suctioned feet and slimy limbs to clamber up the smooth sides of the ship.

VREEEEEE—

The thrum of the Dwarven-made Runes lit up the darkness with the pale glow of Abjuration, building to a brief crescendo.

With a resounding TWHACK—, the Walls of Force shuddered, retracting before expanding rapidly, throwing off the stowaways with such a violent force that they instantly disintegrated. Others were thrown dozens of meters from the ship to land back in the water or to roll across the choking wet soot.

"Be wary, men! These are no ordinary Undead Mermen!" Charlene's warning blasted across the comms. "Earlier, we couldn't detect them because of the noise from the Elemental Ash! By her Grace. I haven't heard of the Ashen Undead in living memory! That category of Necromancy was a relic of the Great War!"

As usual, Charlene was right. The Ash Wrights, Gwen recalled from her history lessons from Cambridge, involved rare Ash-aligned Mages who, in an attempt to stave away the death-apathy of Ash, steered their path of Spellcraft toward Necromancy. Assuming the caster could even survive the double burden of possessing both Ash and using magic derived from Negative Energy, these Flesh Grafters could create hordes of ravenous Undead with high resistance to Elemental Fire—the fundamental offensive magic in the war against Undeath.

Buoyed by the flow of mana bloating her conduits, the same train of thought also brought the familiar face of her Uncle Jun to mind, filling her chest with sudden, desperate yearning. Uncle Jun, the father she wished she had, a man whose back was broad enough for her to rest all her burdens, who also dabbled in Necromancy—or whatever the Song family's secretive magic could afford under the Communists. His was the creation of a Soul Well using the Kirin Amulet as a medium, acting as both filter and storage to stave away the worst aspects of Elemental Ash. With its blessing, he had survived the apathy of high-Affinity Ash, and those who benefited from her uncle's sacrifice had remained willingly ignorant. For a while, Gwen had been afraid that the other shoe would drop and "Captain Jun, Hero of the North", would suddenly become a pariah—though now, there was Ayxin to ensure that the CCP had nothing but praise for Jun.

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And then there's Percy. How was her brother doing? Would he, too, learn the Song's secretive art?

Her sentimentality lasted only a few more seconds—enough to conjure Ayxin's flawless face mocking her mental weakness—then she was back in the heat and frigidity of lightning, ice, Void and the moaning Undead.

"I'll purge the starboard flank!" She informed her troops as she looped to the right, cutting the cross-wind. "Keep an eye on the port!"

Fracturing arches of electricity danced from her fingertips. Her mastery over the basic Lighting Bolt was now so complete that a token syllable was enough to complete both invocation and the circuit. With Ariel's growth, her Affinity for Lightning had also grown, allowing the power to flow from her hands with the natural ease of the conductor of an electric orchestra.

The other Mages soon joined her efforts. Like old rust oxidised by raw plasma, sheets of Undead, roasted to cinders by lightning, fire and assorted arcanistry, fell from the Royal Raven's sides.

The battle was going well—but Gwen knew as a veteran of an Undead campaign that longevity marked the measure of success against the un-living horde, not spell power.

"Charlene, rest our men if able," she informed the crew, mindfully filling the power gap for those commanded to ease their use of high-tier spells. Taking a deep breath, she drew upon Caliban's stowed vitality, then opened up a new Maelstrom nearer the ship's forward passage.

With the sound of shifting snow and soot, a two-hundred-meter-wide vortex opened, drawing all movable mass toward its all-consuming centre even as something tentacled and hungry sought to escape the tear to enter the Prime Material.

A moment later, Gwen regretted the move.

As a result of her spell, a revelation was made for what lay beneath the black snow. There weren't just thousands of the Undead Mermen, but hundreds of thousands, thick enough to form a blockade of bodies which would have impeded the passage of any ship lesser than a Cruiser Class breaker barge.

To make matters worse, the island upon which the Undead rested was also moving.

"KRAKEN!" Gwen gave the warning as soon as she spotted the lazily writhing limbs. Unlike the slick red of the Krakens from their voyage, these were stark and sickly, with mangled bits of rubbery meat and randomly placed sucker mouthes lining the tendrils.

Quickly doing the maths in her head, Gwen chose to conserve her vitality.

"Hanmoul! How are we looking?" She requested heavy artillery. "Charlene, I need help with the squid."

"The flyers are THINNING, Lassie! Give us another cog-cycle, and we aught ta bring the big guns to bear soon!"

"Not soon enough! HARD TO STARBOARD!" To coordinate, Charlene gave the command. "Hanmoul—bring our reserve batteries online. Bertie—route the mana to the Golems! Don't let that thing grapple the ship!"

The Royal Raven's internal mechanisms whirled, though Gwen was only vaguely aware of the mechanical changes below her. She instead rose into the air with a brilliant challenge for the Kraken and its murk-eyed Shoal of carcasses.

Caught between the whirling bats going into a frenzy and the swarming Undead below, she was beginning to wonder if fighting further was a matter of the frying pan and the fire.

"Ariel!" She gave her command the less, materialising her Kirin from its invisibility as Ariel's horns grew white-hot with Essence.

The pair waited until the Kraken had turned enough of its body to bring its limbs to bear, revealing an eye as large as Gwen and Ariel stacked head to paw. If such a colossus could grab hold of the battle barge, the Royal Raven may ground to a halt—a fatal consequence, considering the sheer volume of rotten fish inundating the waters.

Hardening her senses against the cognitive torment of borrowing the Rainbow Serpent's otherwordly power, she unleashed the castigation of one who did not like strangers.

"BARBAGINY!"

Twin streaks of Chain Lightning, her strongest spell, connected the distance between herself and the Kraken some two hundred meters away, turning the polluted ice-scape a brilliant emerald.

Just as the bolts were about to strike, Gwen felt the incredible sensation of her attack slowing—seeing the light becoming warped by the innate resistance of the Kraken's magical Core.

Then, like twin needles piercing through a veil, her spells slipped past the creature's Sea God-given protection against invasive elemental assaults, surging forward until both became volatile balls of trapped lightning.

"Oh, dear…" Gwen instantly confirmed that the spell lacked the energy to jump to its secondary targets—but was attempting to expel its collated energies. Unsurprisingly, her anxious anticipation was backed by pings and needles from her Divination Sigil.

"EVERYONE—BRACE!" She howled out her warning with a Clarion Call, knowing what happened the last time a Barbanginy was confined in a tiny space.

The trapped spell on the Undead Kraken grew momentarily brilliant—and then burst with a thunderous roar, expelling its energies so violently that it drove the giant squid's body into a U shape, punching it back under the sea. The rippling shockwaves and superheated air were enough to dispel the soot and ice, shatter the ice sheets within several hundred meters and rock the Royal Raven as its gyroscopic stabilisers thrummed.

As the shockwave passed, the shielding erected by the ship's Abjurers grew instantly white, then rapidly dimmed to reveal an enormous crater, around the edges of which decaying squid flesh by the tonnage lay splayed and spread like an exit wound.

Still, the Kraken came on.

"Alright, lads! Let 'em have it!" Hanmoul's fire order came without delay, sending a hundred streams of spellfire from the Royal Raven's starboard.

Compared to the bustling Flights of Mages, the Dwarves had been focused almost entirely on keeping the circling swarm of Wyrmbats at bay. By now, the bats strong enough to penetrate the resonance shielding had already perished, while those who remained—some hundred or more—were either biding their opportunity or too wary of risking their Cores. Compared to the wholesale Purge of the Undead, their battle was a tug-of-war, see-sawing between the ranged assault of the Dwarven guns and the gobs of flaming ash that rained from the white-skinned skeleton bats.

Using the momentary window, Hanmoul's Golems adjusted their Spellwords, with the lower implements sweeping the sea for Undead while their upper mounts continued to harass the darting Wyrmbats.

Hundreds of eruptions exploded across the Kraken, driving it further into the water and leaving enormous tendrils, now severed, to linger on the surface like huge sea snakes.

But as the creature was already "dead", it would be back. Even in victory, the Royal Raven had to keep its shield, speed, and breaker capabilities at certain expenditure rates to avoid the squid's death grapple.

"How long has it been?" Wiping the sooty snow from her Raven mask, Gwen asked the aide from Charlene's command bridge. After that Barbanginy, even the Devourer had to take a breather.

"Almost thirty minutes, Magister." Came the reply.

"How are our men?" Gwen had felt like they were fighting for hours.

"Lord Hanmoul reports sixteen disabled units, no fatalities. Our forces have twenty-four casualties, six with serious conditions. No fatalities. Mana levels are holding steady."

"SHAA—!"

"EE-EE!" Her Familiars also reported that they were in good condition, though without victims brimming with vitality, Caliban's long-term capability was of significant concern.

"Continue pushing to our base camp, and keep our Diviners on the lookout for the Kraken." Charlene's command concurred with Gwen's anticipations.

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Gwen?" Chalene enquired. "How about you?"

"I am fine." Gwen narrowly deflected a glob of ash fire with a double-glazed shield, then glided back into the thick of battle as Lulan took care of the offending Wyrmbat with three pairs of skewering Falling Star Swords.

"Lulu, conserve your energy!" she scolded her bodyguard even as the sword blossomed into metal flowers, sending the bat plummeting downwards like a rock. "Keep your cool. I said I am fine."

Her guard nodded, though Gwen suspected the battle-hardened Sword Mage might still fall under the spell of the berserker that came with her sorcery. Even with Ryxi's restoration of the lost arts, the fact that the magic was made for men—and that women were forbidden from its practice, did not change. The main difference now was that Lulan had access to the best healthcare HDMs could afford and a genuine instructor, a far cry from her battered past as a notched blade left to rust.

The dead sea grew bright, and the starboard roared again, clearing whole swathes of slimy things from the deep.

"The ice sheets are thinning. We're increasing our speed," Charlene told them through the communication device. "Our Diviners report that the Undead Mermen have limited mobility. We should be able to outrun the Shoal and wear them down from range."

Gwen checked on her followers from Manipur, then checked in again with Hanmoul, Richard and Petra.

"Then we hold the line!" She encouraged the others by releasing dozens of highly visible Ball Lightning to bombard their foe, tearing a literal hole in the cloud of swarming bats. "FORWARD UNTO EREBUS!"

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Six hours.

Gwen was seriously beginning to see why mechanisation was such an explicit focus of the United States compared to the Mageocracy's preference for talented manpower. By the end of the second hour, even the rested veteran Mages were reporting to be on their alchemical limits, and even the noblemen officers from Charlene's corps lost their appetites.

Richard had done marginally better thanks to Lea taking the brunt of the work, while Petra had been drawing energy from the Royal Raven's Core, supplemented by Dwarven Runes. Amazingly, Lulan's breathing techniques and Affinity were enough to keep up with Gwen. This fact made the Sword Mage even more worshipped among the starry-eyed Brits, who had already considered the Draconic Disciple exotic beyond comprehension.

Then there were the tireless Dwarves, whose bodies and machines tired only when their Spellswords grew too hot. Even then, a maintenance crew in Golem Suits would emerge from the ship's belly, clank toward the units demanding replacements, and then mount and dismount their crystal matrix within minutes, allowing a refreshed rate of continuous fire for several more hours.

True to Charlene's anticipations, the Undead were numerous, but the ice sheets around Erebus's island shelf were also vast beyond comprehension.

In theory, the Ashen Undead drew sustenance from the Negative Energy of Ash—meaning there was a limitation to the range and scope of their operations. The furtherer way from Erebus' burning ash lakes, the Elemental Flame gave way to water and ice, growing increasingly hostile to creatures "out of their Element".

Thankfully, true to the textbooks, the Wyrmbats gave up their pursuit once the Royal Raven fled some twenty nautical miles from where they first encountered resistance, skirting around the lava side of Erebus for the western fringe of the mountain's slope.

As soon as the Wyrmbats lost sufficient motivation to pursue, the Undead rapidly thinned, leaving only the Kraken to trail them for the next dozen nautical mile until it grew too languished to continue its harassment of the Royal Raven.

When finally, only the plinking of hot mana engines rapidly cooling against the dark, sooty ice remained, the ship entered a fatigued calm.

"How long until we reach our waypoint in Sector Three?" Gwen, still on patrol, enquired from their Navigator, the kudos-accruing Viscount Able Burton. "And any signs of the Grove of Illhîweth? If it's anything like Tryfan, it should have a signature like a perpetually falling meteor."

"Nothing on the Divination charts, Magister," the man replied through the comms. "We're adjusting our course according to your Divination Orb."

Gwen once again touched a finger to the Ilias Leaf, affirming her singular desire to meet and speak with the Frost Flower of Illhîweth. Ever since the Fire Sea, she had deeply suspected the Elementals had something substantial planned, with or without the help of Spectre—and now her suspicion was affirmed by what she saw.

At the same time, Gwen didn't know how grand such an "elemental shift of the Planes " really was. On paper, the unreliable map of Meister Shackleton boasted that Antarctica was five thousand kilometres across, meaning that the ice sheets exceeded an albatross' flight from Santiago to Nova Scotia.

Even if Erebus painted five hundred kilometres of ice black with soot—would that truly destabilise the Planar Pillars of the Spiritus Mundi? That was the scepticism almost every scholar of her present world shared.

But then again, she was a child from a world where even the tiniest degree of change had sown unfathomable destruction, from hurricanes to floods to droughts to super-sized forest fires.

For this world—a freakish hurricane on the Florida coast might knock out enough Shielding Stations for the trading stations to fall to the reptilian Theocracies of the Everglades.

A longer and stronger Moonsoon might awaken more Elemental monstrosities than Human cities like Bangkok or Kolkata were equipped to handle.

Long-standing alliances built on balance, such as the Israelites and their precarious neighbours, might fall into sudden chaos if crops fail and the Jackal tribes' numbers swell or burst with the ensuing civil wars.

Humanity, the Mageocracy, and their Kingdoms were like fragile porcelain, full of cracks constantly mended by hand, stopping just enough water from seeping that the entire vessel remained filled and whole.

And finally, another dread loomed over her with the weight of the perpetual dusk hanging over the Royal Raven's bow.

As an accountant, her wonderment at what they've accomplished as explorers and saviours was compromised by the grim knowledge that the Dwarves were firing solid chunks of HDMs and that the ship was burning HDMs.

They had used enough funds in six hours to offer Blackwattle full scholarships for every student for the next hundred years. There were enough materials expended, both precious and mundane, to build a skyscraper to rival her best on the Isle of Dogs. Their expenditure was enough for Auckland Tower to defend itself against the Shoal for a week.

She knew the costs well before the trip, but a reflexive, cynical part of her had to ask.

Where was the profit?

And without profit—even if she were to rescue the world today—how could she motivate the world to save itself tomorrow?