Blades chop through the air, struggling to lift Ursula’s helicopter off the pad. I flick a few switches that my awareness highlights for me, and somehow, everything levels out. Pearl motions at a set of dials with different needles and numbers in them to get my attention. Too bad I have no idea what any of them mean, so I just have to let my awareness do ninety percent of the work.

Once I’m high enough in the air, I shove the flight stick towards where all the explosions came from. Shields shimmer in the corner of my mind as my awareness seeps into the air around the helicopter, which seems… weird… considering it couldn’t reach out when I had the mask on. Does the mask do something strange to my awareness other than just visualizing it?

“Gambler, you up in the air yet?!” Ursula nearly screams into my ear. “They’re gaining ground, and I’m dangerously close to falling back into the storm! That ain’t good!”

I tighten my hold on my coins and grit my teeth. “Helicopter’s up in the air. Is it really a good idea for me to fly out there into an active warzone?”

“Nope! But we really don’t have a choice.” Ursula laughs as more noise comes through both the mic and the air. “If they push me back into the storm, shit’s not gonna work. We need to get them distracted with the krarig so they don’t try following us back to land!”

That’s the plan? It seems… highly dependent on somehow wasting an hour before the krarig wakes up. If Ursula’s already having trouble with that, I’ll be about as helpful as a fly trying to shatter a windshield. There’s got to be a better way to do this. Relocating the helicopter with everything inside of it is a no-go, since each item would need its own coin, and I’m already risking bankruptcy with the plan to save Fleur.

So… what are my other options here? The magical storm crackling just a few hundred feet away from me is approaching damn fast, and the second I go into it, a countdown much shorter than an hour’s going to start. Before I come out the other side of it, I have to know what I’m going to do.

I could fly straight at them and hope my shields are enough. Dumb as hell, but maybe they’ll hold their fire on the sheer audacity of it. That’s probably suicide, though, so let’s call that plan ‘Don’t’. Then there’s the option to just relocate Ursula onto the helicopter the moment I’m clear of the storm, which would get her out of danger, but would paint an even bigger target on the helicopter.

It’s a better option than plan Don’t, but still not a great one. The storm shrieks against the helicopter as it swallows me whole, and my hands fly out to press a bunch of buttons and adjust a bunch of sliders that I don’t actually know what they do. It really sucks in here, and for a moment, all the lines in my ear go dark.

Background noises I didn’t know I’d gotten used to winked off like a staticky TV someone finally realized they’d left on. The sudden absence of noise is almost like a punch to the gut, but it’s quickly replaced by the violent crackling of the storm around me. With a deep breath I steady my hands and reset my course.

“I can always use the storm for cover and sneak out of here.” I mutter to myself, glancing at the strangeness around me. It seems even more violent than when we came in, probably thanks to the krarig waking up. “Relocate Mercenary to safety, fly away for thirty minutes, then relocate Diane and Razi into the helicopter so the Preservation doesn’t sense them with us. But… shit, that’s not going to work.”

Because I need time. I need March’s platform, I need a teleporter from Noland, and I need to get there before Fleur loses too much ground to the krarig, or else the relocations will cost way too much. How the hell am I supposed to buy everyone enough time while also not bankrupting myself? It just… doesn’t seem like it’s going to work.

Moments pass. The storm shakes the helicopter like a leaf in the wind, but whatever Ursula did to it keeps it moving straight. Sweat slicks the control stick as I grip it tighter and tighter, possible plans filtering through my mind like water through a strainer. Nothing stays. Every time something looks like it might pool up, it drains a moment later when a possibility rears its ugly head.

But the worst out of everything is the thing I’m in right now. The storm. All my relocation connections feel weak and thin inside of it, and when I was on the other side, I could barely feel the one relocation coin I had outside. I thought it was because of the distance, and it still might factor in, but the much more likely possibility is magical interference.

So even if I manage to get Ursula and get away safe… everything in the krarig’s going to be cut off by the storm. Fleur, Razi, Diane… they’re all out of my hands. At the mercy of whatever the Preservation has planned for the krarig.

“Shit…” I grimace as the storm slowly clears. “The damn job’s completely done, so why’d I have to get involved in so much extra shit?”

All at once, the storm clears. Explosions and magic rocks the sky as Ursula fights two armored figures–the speakers–around something that looks like a combination between a stealth bomber and an aircraft carrier. It hovers in the air like a helicopter over a mass of dirty wave-like black clouds, aided by massive engines belching equally dirty flames towards the sea below.

For a split second, all I can do is stare at the strange thing. People scurry about the surface of it like… well… sailors hurrying to their battlestations. But I’m pretty damn sure there weren’t supposed to be this many of them.

“Architect?! What part of this looks like fifteen people?!”

“Uh… that… uh...” March trails off in disbelief. “I wasn't able to see until the helicopter got in range. Mercenary! What’s happening?”

Ursula grunts as an explosion blossoms on the main deck. I watch as a streak of blue careens through the sky, chased by the two speakers. “My damn numbers weren’t wrong! It might look like an aircraft carrier, but it's actually a cargo ship run by exactly the number of people I told you about!”

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“A cargo ship? Why the…” I stop myself before I can say something stupid. “They’re going to harvest the krarig.”

“No shit!” Ursula barks as her tiny silhouette dodges the speakers. “Don’t think I need to say it, but we can’t let that happen!”

“But we also need to make sure the krarig dies!” March argues. “Can we do both?”

I reach for my relocation coins as they go back and forth. Two of them reply instantly–Ursula’s, and the one I left behind weeks ago. All the others feel weak. Like they’ll snap if I so much as tried to use them.

“Not unless we can get rid of the storm.”

March and Ursula go as silent as two people speaking over a mid-air battlefield can be. A cold shudder worms its way down my spine, and I throw up a shield as a chunk of screaming green metal slams into it. Cracks blossom from the point of impact, and from just one attack, my shield shatters. The shards take the metal down to the ocean with them.

“You can do something about it?” Ursula asks in disbelief. “If we get rid of the storm, you can deal with the krarig? No breaking international laws, no throwing us into war with the Preservation, and no sacrificing everyone on board the thing?”

I nod, even though neither of them can see me. “As long as Architect has the platform finished and Banker can teleport me from my apartment to the resort, I can do it. It might put me into serious debt, but… I can do it.”

“Banker can help you with that. It’ll cost you a bunch of free gambling games, but he’ll do it.” March informs me. “Oh, and you’ll technically lose possession of the spell you cast. It shouldn’t really make a difference, though, since we’re on the same side.”

“One of his skills?” I ask.

“Yeah.” March confirms. “I think it's called… hostile takeover, right?”

“That’s right. Sounds a lot worse than it actually is, though.” Ursula flashes me a thumbs-up from where she’s fighting. I… don’t know how I saw it from so far away. “Alright, I’m gonna do the thing, Architect. You got Gambler’s thing ready?”

“I still need a minute. Construction’s underway, but we don’t have all the materials on hand.”

“That’s fine; I’ll take a minute for this, too. Tell Banker to get his ass to Gambler’s old apartment with a teleportal, and that he’ll have to help her with her skill. And Gambler?”

I nod slightly. “Yeah?”

“Put up, like, a triple-layered shield. This is gonna be huge.”

Something appears in Ursula’s hands. It’s relatively small–only about as big as her head–but my awareness screams at me the moment my eyes latch onto it. Whatever it is, it’s insanely destructive. My hands blur as I throw coins all around the helicopter, shields teeming on the edge of my mind at the ready.

Both armored figures freeze moments later. They share a look, and then one of them gestures wildly at the aircraft carrier. An alarm blares out loud enough to scrape the heavens, and the clouds around the carrier billow out to cover it completely as the speakers retreat to… safety, I guess. Ursula gently caresses the spherical device in her hands, twists it in two separate directions, and pulls its halves apart.

It exposes a rod of vibrant blue energy that was trapped inside. Waves of insanely intense magical energy wash over the helicopter, but somehow, they barely affect it. I flick more switches to stabilize the flight, then push a command into all of my shields to ignite. Because something tells me that I won’t be able to react to whatever Ursula’s device is about to do.

She grabs the cylinder with one hand. Magic surges through her suit, sending the veins that run along it into overdrive as a whirl of violent energy erupts from the sphere. After a moment she lets go, her suit so heavy with magic that she feels like a black hole in my awareness, and turns towards the storm.

“This’ll destroy the storm almost instantly.” Her voice crackles over the comms, clear and confident and brimming with destructive anticipation. “Teleport me in when it clears, then go do your thing. I’ll fly back alone, and the Preservation will be too scared to go after me without serious reinforcements.”

Before I can say anything, Ursula reels back and hucks the device at the storm. Her suit augments her throw to a blur of magic and motion, and my eyes struggle to follow the high speed speck of a mystery device as it screams closer and closer to the storm. I steel myself for the impact against my shields as it brushes the very outer edge–

My ears ring. My vision goes white and blue. All my shields strain against a force that’s unbelievably strong, yet somehow held back. It’s barely anything, and with a very confused mind, I shove more shields at the weak points. Then I do it again. And again. Over the course of five whole seconds I throw dozens and dozens of shields around the helicopter. My awareness strains to focus on all of them.

Unbelievably destructive magic rocks my world. I know it’s not a good comparison, since the real things were so much worse, but it feels like I’m trying to fight back the shockwave of a nuke. My shields only hold on because of that weird hold-back sensation, which Ursula definitely has something to do with, but even still… it feels hopeless.

And then, just as violently as the explosion expanded, it starts to contract. The strain on my shields shifts from the front of the helicopter to the back of it, and I have to shift my focus to a different part in the blink of an eye. It strains me more than I’d care to admit, and as I watch the now implosion shear around the helicopter, I can’t help but think how weak I really am.

Ursula did all this with one little device. She’s been holding back all the while we were in the krarig, but now, she doesn’t have to. It… terrifies me to think what she’ll look like when she goes all out. And now I understand why the Preservation has left the resort alone.

It isn’t just March and her buildings. It’s all of them. And they want ‘all of them’ to include me someday.

“Alright, port me in!” Ursula yells excitedly into my ear. “The fallout will slow ‘em down for five minutes! That long enough for you, Gambler?!”

I blink away the magical floaters in my eye and reach for Ursula’s relocation. The coin thumps down onto the seat next to me, and I wince as a mass of magic and radiation takes its place. Ursula brushes off multiple scorch marks from her suit like they were crumbs and gives me a big thumbs-up.

Honestly, though, if it wasn’t for my awareness I wouldn’t have even noticed it. Because I’m way too busy watching the implosion drag the entire magical storm with it like a sheet stuck in a ceiling fan. I’ve never seen anything like it; wind and water shot through with magic somehow moving like a solid. And a glittering field of blue magic… sparkles… left in the explosion’s wake.

“What the hell did you do?” I whisper.

Ursula raises an eyebrow as she pulls off her helmet. “I blew up the storm. You gonna get out of here?”

I clench my jaw and feel out all my relocations. Each of them resonates clear and clean. Nothing stopping me from grabbing hold from any one of them. So I latch onto the one coin I left behind–the one I dropped right before I got in Ursula’s car so many days ago–and ready myself for my first attempt at extreme long distance relocation.