When fighting against a greater threat, standard procedure as a magician was to assess the situation as quickly as possible and find weaknesses. Being a higher-grade magician didn’t necessarily mean that one was invincible. There was almost always a critical flaw. Exploiting it with ambushes, superior positioning, and spellcraft that the greater magician was unprepared for—a single well-placed spell could turn around the entire fight.

Every member of Sanguine knew this, having trained to fight enemies with better magical foundations and practices than they did for the years they’d existed. There was a reason they’d stuck around.

It was not very often, however, that their organization was the one on the back foot in these situations. In prior confrontations, they had known that they were being hunted. Sanguine had enough sympathizers in relevant locations for them to get a general understanding of when Auria was closing in on one of their encampments. They had never been the highest priority for the kingdom to remove, anyway.

This time was different. Rather than an organized military coalition, it was a single man. A student, at that, but that made little difference when the higher-level members of Sanguine knew exactly what kind of monsters Aurian students could be.

They could not ambush this student because he was the ambusher. Their positioning was similarly terrible because of the circumstances, and as for spellcraft—

A few of the less intelligent A-class magicians tried to take the student attacker on directly, goading the hovering student into challenging them one-on-one, but he simply stopped hovering and allowed the lake to surge back in around them, pressurizing millions of litres of water and pouring them into a base whose defenses against this much water had just been obliterated by a spell that nobody had seen.

In the resulting chaos, every single magician who’d sent a spell hurtling at the student died; some crushed by the sheer pressure of the water, others by brief, intense bursts of magic that few were able to witness and fewer still were capable of surviving.

The flood itself was survivable. Most of the tactical-class magicians and both master-classes had contingencies for if the base was breached like this, and they were able to recover quickly, establishing backup fortification-type water-breathing and movement spells on themselves to navigate the flooded base like they were on land.

The teleportation device that they had meant to use had been flushed out of its original position. Identifying that as the highest priority, the two master-class magicians triggered a perception-type spell and a movement one, respectively, dragging themselves toward the device.

They found their path blocked by a figure who glided through the water as effortlessly as it had through the air.

Recognizing their enemy, the master-class magicians cast offensive magic, their extraordinary talent and nonstop training sending their instincts into overdrive.

At roughly that exact moment, an airstrike delivered by a black ops unit composed of nine people including Sylvester Auria and Bianca Ashwood detonated its payload—a one-kiloton creation and annihilation-type nuclear fusion missile.

Offensive magic died out, quickly repurposed into master-class shielding spells. The missile carried a suppressed strategic-class payload, capable of devastating cities with minimal effort at maximum output. It was not something that the unit was supposed to have, but it was one that a certain magical engineer had been capable of providing the power and designs for.

The tactical-class magicians died instantly, neither aware enough of the incoming detonation nor powerful enough to stop themselves from the shockwave.

Three beings remained alive in the wreckage, their water-shielding spells dropped in favor of radiation and force protection. Most if not all of the water had become superheated steam, anyway. There was little point in trying to avoid drowning in less than a centimeter of water.

Both master-class Sanguine magicians had worked together for long enough to collaborate as second nature. One spell fed into another.

Master-class wide-range detection-type spell, Detection Net. It extended half a kilometer out, identifying the student instantly.

Master-class wide-range conjuration-type spell, Sharpen Gravity. In that same area, gravity intensified tenfold. In the region that they saw the student in, that number spiked up to two hundred times. Even with a self-fortification spell, that would be lethal for anyone short of a strategic-class magician.

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Yet somehow, the student seemed to ignore the spell as if it wasn’t there at all. He simply walked forward, barely leaving footprints atop the devastated earth even as the gravity around him forced the ground to collapse in on itself.

Rather than continuing to detect the student, the first master-class magician turned his attention instead on jamming the student’s magic with a master-class jammer—the only one of its kind that Sanguine had in their possession.

Not that there would be much left of Sanguine after this, even once they killed this student. They’d lost the bulk of their best magicians in a moment. Logistics personnel and A-class magicians alone did not make an effective resistance movement.

The student stopped in his tracks, his feet suddenly slamming into the ground as gravity took its effect on him.

Both master-classes pushed their advantage. The one who had been sharpening gravity used another trump card, sucking the oxygen out of the air around the student mage, while the first one used a conjuration-type spell to create something like an ordinary sniper rifle.

Despite the amount of magic pressing down on him, despite the fact that he wouldn’t be able to cast anything short of a strategic-class spell without blowing himself up with his flux, the student seemed calm. He didn’t show a hint of panic.

Not even as a second projectile landed in their midst, detonating with a blast of raw disruption-type flux.

Master-class artillery-type spell, Antimagic Railgun. A favorite of high-level artillery specialists, including one Uriel Indigo. It was favored for its precision and the sheer range that it could be fired from. Thirty kilometers was nothing for a spell like this, especially not when its caster was being fed constant data by someone at the landing site.

The gravity and oxygen effects both disappeared, giving the student room to breathe, move, and most importantly—cast. When he’d been dealing with the ongoing effects with just five spell processes, it had taken everything he needed in order to maintain his continued survival.

Syl did not say a single word as he cast his signature spell once again.

The spell jammer had not stopped its focus on him, but it didn’t affect him at all. This spell, after all, was significantly above the master-class magic that the jammer was focusing on.

Strategic-class annihilation-type spell, Ruin.

Two FCDs hit the ground, their owners reduced to a bloody mist.

#

By the time Syl got back, the funeral service had mostly concluded. He decided against attending. His uniform was a bit of a mess since he’d prioritized his continued survival and intact equipment more than he had keeping it clean, and he figured that arriving to an official service for four deceased students in a bloody uniform.

Bianca had given him the necessary updates anyway. The service had gone about as well as Syl had expected. They had provided the same platitudes as always—an unforeseeable tragedy resulting from a Gate that had gone rogue after its detection, promises from leadership to prevent this from happening again. By all accounts, it had been a beautiful service for four people who had died in the equivalent of a freak industrial accident.

There had been nobody contesting those claims. Everyone who’d been at risk of talking had had their worries addressed during their days off. Whether said worries had been addressed satisfactorily or not was another question, but that wasn’t Syl’s problem.

Bianca found him after the service was over and most people had been dismissed for the day, waiting for her in an alleyway a bit out of the way.

“You’re a mess,” she said, signing at the same time. You eliminated them?

“I had hoped you would be able to help with that.” All of the ones I saw at their operating base, yes.

“Of course.” She didn’t use her hands to sign this time, instead drawing out the pattern necessary to cast a Cleanse on him.

“Thank you. I trust everything went well here.”

“No interruptions,” she confirmed. Did you overexert yourself?

“Good to hear. Uriel did her job well.” Slightly. I’m out of flux for the next day or two.

Ruin was a costly spell, and without Bianca by his side, using it on the scale he had depleted even him for a while.

Getting Uriel involved had been easier than expected. Since she was aware that he had connections that went beyond the usual as well as very effective perception-type spells, it had been trivial to convince her to strike at a certain target at a certain time, especially since her skillset was uniquely suited to giving her insight into targets at long range. By all official accounts, she would be the one credited with the destruction of the Sanguine strike force and likely the entire organization.

“She did.” I should have been there.

“Are you headed back now?” Not worth the risk.

“No. I have a club to get to first, and we haven’t canceled.” What risk?

Syl smiled. “That’s good. I’m glad to see you’re fitting into school life well.” Your secrecy matters much more than mine.

“You should try it sometime.” If you say so.

“I am,” Syl said, vaguely offended. “I have a meeting as well.”

“With Jennifer, correct?” Bianca asked. “Be careful around her.”

“She’s fine,” Syl said. “Stays in her lane but creative. Not terribly surprising coming from a prismatic, but she seems to have meet Uriel’s standards, at least. She can’t take me in a fight, either.”

“That is not what I was referring to.”

“Then what were you?”

“Never mind. Have fun.”

Syl frowned, puzzled. “You too?”

He shrugged it off and made his way to the lab. Bianca had always been the people person, anyway.