“But with the freedoms granted to our soldiers we encounter the fringe elements. Choices made that in any other army would be considered a liability or worse. Not so in the Ardent. The universe is a vast and dangerous place, full of niche situations that regular naval or ground force incursions would simply have to brute force their way through. The diversity that our detractors so revile is what grants us the advantage. The uniqueness of each member of the Ardent provides us with a toolbox to draw from that is as infinitely vast as the problems that we will face.”

—Keeping the Peace Among the Peacekeepers, Gorgan Wartback

All of the mobility that had given their squad an advantage in the Cull was gone on the station. They were moving blind into one corridor after another, each section carefully sealed from the next, and each doorway a hurdle that slowed their progress. The metalwork was old, and even if oxidization hadn’t kicked in, the mechanisms that pulled them open were loud enough to wake the dead without the screeching. Every time they entered a new segment of corridor, they were making a loud announcement to anyone nearby. Rushing through was only going to get them ambushed faster. They had to progress at what felt like a snail’s pace.

The caution proved to be sensible. The chaotic swarm of undead that had attempted to block their ingress into the station to begin with had been cannon fodder, the simplest and most useless of the creatures at Malachai’s command. As they moved further into the station, his inventiveness began to show.

Sylvas ducked under the scything blade of the mantis-clawed skeleton that had just burst out of one of the seemingly endless little alcoves lining every passage. Kaya stepped in to slash through its spine, sending the two halves of the skeletal construct spinning off in opposite directions, but while such simple bodily destruction had been enough for the basic horde, these were more adaptive. The upper half soared by to land on the ground, immediately flipping itself over and clawing its way toward Luna where she stood distracted by the door controls. Sylvas cast kinesis as he realized what was happening, dragging it back a step towards him so that that slicing edge of its blades missed the other mage’s Achilles tendons by an inch, buying just enough time for Kaya to make the leap on top of it and bring her blades down through the skull and end it.

They had moved four segments around the outer ring and encountered some combination of ambushers in each and every one. Sylvas was starting to suspect that there had been no tactical deployment here. He was starting to suspect that whatever source of power kept this ancient station alive was fueling the necromancer, and he had gone all out, making every usable bone in the whole place into a trap and covering every inch of ground. At least this segment only seemed to have one of them to deal with. When they’d made it past the dead Whitecoat into the first of the endless passages, there had been three of these ambushers, two in alcoves and one pressed flat against the ceiling. They would have lost Orson to the dropping one if Ironeyes had been just a little slower on his cast.

As it was, the tension was mounting. Every member of the team was prickling with paranoia, jumping at every creak and click of the ancient station as they proceeded. It was the kind of mental state that the enemy psych-mage could manipulate all too easily. Not to mention the kind of powder keg that made calm and rational planning much more difficult. If it weren’t for his Paradigm, letting him separate himself from his emotions, Sylvas wasn’t sure how well he would be coping either.

Conversation had continued more or less uninterrupted since they left the docking bay, pausing for each ambush, or when the door mechanisms entirely drowned them out. Bael in particular seemed to be delighted to finally have found a combat situation when his endless chatter was not a tactical disadvantage. “If the design matches what we’ve seen of the Strife natives, then the soulstone network should be built around multiple localized nexus points where anyone on the station could gain access to them. Most likely we won’t be looking in the corridors for them, but they should still be evenly dispersed around the station despite our distance from the central…”

“Where should we be looking?” Kaya cut him off before he got too deep into his architectural lecture.

Bael rolled his eyes. “To our right side is the endless void of space, so I’d suggest we keep an eye open for doorways to the left.”

Orson was quick to claim the job. “On it.”

There was a tremor in the man’s hands that he tried to hide by keeping them busy, but Sylvas was very aware that he’d been shaken by the ambushes. He wasn’t thinking clearly, wasn’t reacting fast enough, typically Luna and Orson worked as a pair, watching each other’s backs. Normally the mantis ambusher would have gotten nowhere near her without him interposing himself. Not so today.

In a normal exercise, Sylvas would have considered it a good thing that they became less codependent, but the trouble was, Luna was used to having someone watch her back at all times. She got to be a little more reckless because of Orson’s stability, and now, without him, it was going to come back to bite her. One more problem in a long list of them.

Orson backtracked along all the alcoves, checking them to see if there was a doorway inset, but Sylvas doubted that there would be. On the plus side, there was also unlikely to be another skeleton waiting to jump out at him, so hopefully the mindless exercise would calm his nerves.

The awful groan of the door mechanism vibrated the floor beneath their feet, drowning out any other noise for just a moment, but it was only for a moment this time, the moment that the metal plates of the door parted, far more piercing noises made it through.

Sylvas had been standing back from the doors as they opened, giving himself some room to operate if another undead horde came pouring through, but now he wished he were closer, so that he could see more through the gap. As it was, he saw bright lances of spell-fire shooting back and forth, a chamber that was more than a mere passageway and some fresh danger for them to face.

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“Shield up!” He snapped to Luna, who cast as fast as she could. Without orders, the others seemed to know where to go. Kaya slipped to one side of the metal door, Havran the other, both readying their blades. The shield, when it was finally cast, sprang into place between the parting metal slabs, and it was just in time too. Someone had noticed their arrival, and a fireball of blue exploded against Luna’s defenses. She grunted with effort but kept the barrier up.

Gharia had launched herself into the air using the same flight spell that Sylvas had borrowed from her not so long ago, hovering for just a moment before dropping back down behind the barrier’s protection. She cast a quick illusion, showing what she’d seen of the room projected over the solid objects. Scribbled shapes of people and spells in place. It wasn’t useful, but it was better than the nothing they’d been operating from before.

Most importantly were the colors she’d assigned to the stick-figure outlines of the people in the next room. Every one of them was tagged red. Hostile. There were two opposing forces fighting, but they were both to be treated as enemies by Sylvas and his team. That actually made things easier.

“Ironeyes, we’re up.”

Sluggish gravity mana and the rapid and erratic power of electricity seemed as though they should have resulted in vastly different casting times, but with the abbreviations that Sylvas had made to Gravity Spike, and the complexity of the massive area of effect attacks that the dwarf brought to bear, they ended up surprisingly close to synchronized. Sylvas cast his spike through the slowly widening gap in the door, juicing it with enough mana to very briefly overpower the existing artificial gravity and make the middle of the chamber into ‘down.’ And then, as all of the mages in the next chamber went tumbling in towards the tiny black point he’d summoned, Ironeye’s chain lightning came blasting through.

It was lethally powerful in its own right, but reliant on having conductive materials nearby to carry it from one foe to the next. In the dry desert of Strife, it typically grounded itself unless there was a whole formation of enemies in close proximity. Sylvas had just granted him the closeness that he needed.

The shouting and casting in the next room turned first to yelps of confusion, then screams of pain as the lightning hit home. Almost all of it was happening out of sight, which Sylvas had to admit he resented a little. All this time planning out the move, and he didn’t even get to see its result.

He didn’t give the screaming time to stop before barking out his next order. “Push in.”

Havran slipped through the solid metal, Kaya spun around the approaching entryway and Luna shoved her barrier forward into the room so they could pass by unimpeded. Bael held back to keep the widest view of the situation, as he was meant to. Which left Sylvas and Ironeyes as the first rank to charge through.

The chaos that they wrought was frankly impressive give how little time they’d had. Everything was scattered across the chamber, heaped around the blackened bodies of those that they’d hit. Fragments of bones from skeletons the other teams had already crushed, lumps of dislodged metalwork, and the various pieces of equipment that they’d been using.

One of the exterior curving beams dominated the right wall of the chamber, an identical door to the one that Sylvas was passing through sat open on the other side, and on the left the ground split, one ramp going up and one going down to massive doorways that put the ones that they’d been passing through up until now to shame.

Three mages remained standing, though judging by the shimmer rapidly approaching one, it would be two the minute Havran swung. There was still some screaming going on from the heap in the middle of the room, that suggested the fight was entirely out of the fallen either, but that was a concern for after the active threats were dealt with.

The blue trim on the uniform of the two unknown mages threw Sylvas for a moment, before he realized it was universal across all the campuses, with only the naval track students color coded. As for the other mage still on her feet on the same level as them. It was Veltrian.

She blinked in surprise at the sight of Sylvas, recognized that he was tagged as an enemy combatant and threw her hands up in the air. There was a snap of thunder and a tiny bolt of lightning leapt from Ironeyes’ hands to strike her between the eyes. Professional courtesy at its finest. She was enveloped by her Crest before she hit the ground.

On the raised ramp, the two unknown Ardent grunts cast rapidly, one throwing up a barrier like Luna’s and the other summoning fire in great looping arcs around her. The shielding one, the fiend, was lower down the ramp, and had his eyes fixed on Kaya as she charged in amidst a wash of liquid steel. He should have been paying more attention to Havran, not that he could see him. His blade became visible along with him as he plunged it into the fiend’s throat. The barrier he’d been chanting to maintain dropped in an instant, and Kaya went bounding on by as if nothing had happened at all.

Through it all, Sylvas had not been idle, a fresh Gravity Spike was already on his lips, ready to cast, but he was at a loss for targets. Kaya was in too close to the fire-caster and the other two were down. He was just about to release the spell and reabsorb the mana into his core when he realized what was about to happen.

The coils of flame dancing around the other caster weren’t just a threat display, it was a spellform, one that Sylvas finally remembered from his fights with Hammerheart. It snapped into shape as Kaya got in leaping distance.

A blast of red light, scorching hot even at this distance was unleashed. A beam of searing destruction aimed right for Kaya. She flung all the metal conjured around her forward into a shield, but it was going to wash over that, deflect to the sides, burn Havran to ash.

Sylvas unleashed his Gravity Spike.

Kaya, Havran and the other mage were lifted off their feet, but more importantly, the beam of red curved. It curved up, missing Kaya’s shield, missing her entirely, blasting a molten line up the space-side wall, all the way to the roof.

They dropped to the floor again as the red ray ended, then all the lethal force of the whole team was unleashed. Gharia was not limited to bubbles, no matter how much she might have favored them. A solid beam of white leapt from her fingertips to hammer into the flame-mage’s face, snapping his neck before any of the half dozen other spells the rest of the squad had cast could reach him. The Crest protected him from the worst of the impacts that followed, but he’d definitely have a few holes and bruises more than anyone had intended.

Without orders, Havran and Kaya came jogging back down the slope to meet Sylvas at the groaning burn ward in the middle of the room. He brought his orbitals into play, sending them zipping into the pile to help haul each body up, one after another, and brute force dragging those the orbitals couldn’t shift. Najash were surprisingly dense, even with his newfound ability to throw his weight around. He laid hands only on the ones already enshrouded by their Crests. As someone who was not protected became visible, either Havran or Kaya were there, stabbing into them until the crest sprung to life.

It wasn’t a pretty end and things went, but it was brutally effective to put an end to the battle before them, finally giving them the time they needed to think.