Any rash movement forward was too risky to attempt; a read on her opponent’s range was asking for too much, but considering she wasn’t being blown away at every chance implied she was outside of it. They made no advances, however, perhaps out of fear of what Evalyn could or couldn't do, making the discussion of range irrelevant in the first place.

There were many ways to get around the shield provided it needed activating, bringing the fallible variable of human reaction speed into account. But so far the repertoire of things they’d been able to repel suggested it either activated faster than human reaction speed or existed constantly. Needling her opponent until she figured it out was just about the only way forward.

She twisted her front foot sideways, entered a lowered stance, and launched her arms from her hips to her face. Her magic answered with a tidal wave, jagged rock-like pieces of golden mass both supported by each piece behind it and by metre-long jagged spines that tore through the concrete and dug themselves into the earth.

The wall held, but Evalyn still faced resistance. She dug the spikes deeper into the earth, fracturing their surfaces and turning the shards upward. Still not enough. Not nearly enough.

Evalyn let the wall go and increased her distance, watching the Wizard close it in response, propelling himself against the walls and floor of the concrete corridor mazes. The concrete under his feet would always disintegrate into fine dust, but somehow he'd catch a hold of something solid enough, sending him flying instead.

The facility was underground; at least three of the four walls of every corridor were supported by unimaginable miles of rock, dirt, and metal. Assuming the worst meant an entire planet's worth of rock was needed. In a way, the corridors were the perfect environment for him to traverse.

But that meant it would take something similar for Evalyn to manipulate his movement, let alone defeat him.

But she could do it, even go so far as to say she could do so with relative ease.

She rounded a corner, luring the Wizard across the threshold from humid grey concrete to tranquil open sky.

“Act V: Climax.”

She planted her feet on soft gravel, conscious of the ageing pair of eyes intently observing her. Intrigued as they always were, but with an extra sheen of scrutiny Evalyn couldn’t determine was real or her own anxious mind playing tricks on her. Yet the old Wishing Whale lived in her dome; she could only assume he was privy to any anxieties up there with him already.

Her enemy likewise came to a halt that was rather closer to a skid. She hoped for a trip and fall to boot, but wasn’t so lucky. The Wizard recovered and took in his surroundings. The fear he tried to keep under wraps suggested he was familiar with his predicament, his inability to act confirmed that she’d won the engagement.

“Surrender,” was all the opportunity she was willing to give.

The Wizard refused to budge.

“Surrender and I can guarantee you’ll get off lightly. It’s in your best interest, better than dying in some hole for someone whose face you’ll never remember.”

Still, the Wizard refused. If only he had less cumbersome magic, something that let her get enough hits to render him unconscious. Nothing existed in Evalyn’s arsenal besides brute strength; nothing more ethereal that other Witches and Wizards had access to, something that played on the human mind.

All Evalyn could do was apply enough bludgeons to end the engagement. Outside her Mind Palace existed a world that still ticked ahead, regular soldiers’ footsteps drawing closer to a deathtrap of vastly superior enemies.

Many lives would be lost. The one in front of her was no weightier, no matter how tragic.

She fired several probing arms from her armour that enclosed the Wizard from all sides, deliberately letting them hang in the air enough for him to calculate their airtime and prepare.

She caught the first note of the upward scale. Easier to pinpoint now that she knew what she was looking for. The top of that split-second scale coincided with repulsion, and she aimed for that small instant to spring a set of three walls, a triangular pyramid to encase both the Wizard and his repulsion.

To avoid all her probes, the Wizard had repulsed at all sides, and if it took an entire rock layer’s worth of material to have that force act upon him instead, all Evalyn had to do was create another world entirely. Her mind, her rules.

That force acted upon his body, on all sides, all at once. Evalyn didn’t know what had happened in that triangular chamber. Frankly, she didn’t want to know.

The warm wind slowed; brought stillness to the autumnal landscape like the gasp of a crowd.

“Sorry, it wasn’t a pleasant show today old man.”

The Wishing Whale stirred. “I’ve certainly seen worse. Perhaps not from you, but…certainly worse. Hm?”

Their eyes met, but only one of them could manage a smile.

“Whatever it takes, was it not?”

Evalyn nodded, preparing to return to the real world.

“You know, child, you can retire.”

She pursed her lips; the pregnant pause weightier than the words themselves.

“If you desire, I can move on to my next customer. No need for you to continue this profession.”

Evalyn dug her heel into the gravel. The proposition being made crystal clear certainly hurt in a way she'd never expected it to.

“You said you liked this place. Might as well give you as long as possible," was the pathetic excuse she could offer up.

Evalyn looked back at the coffin of her own making, but nothing came to her mind.

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Nothing intelligent, nothing measured. Simple thoughts that amounted to nothing but a refusal to change, a fear of being powerless.

Iris plugged her ears for good measure, but quick thinking had saved her from the worst of it. Solid barriers negated the flashes, but Iris knew the sound was still excruciating so long as it had air to travel through. Metres of liquid however contained the blast in a space no larger than her head, a distortion in a filter of oscillating purple.

It stopped bullets too for good measure.

“I’m counting at least twenty. Two gunner nests to our one and ten o’clock, the rest are scattered in groups of two or three. They’ve thoroughly covered all angles. I don’t envy the first chap that would’ve walked in here.”

Alis turned to her one hand still firmly glued to her shoulder. “I can see them. Should I handle this?”

It’d be quicker for her to bite the bullet—would leave less of a trace too.

But twenty. Faceless they may have been.

“Please,” Iris said, yielding to the offer.

“Rodger.”

Iris closed her eyes. Magic flared beside her.

One by one, she could hear them drop, the storm of gunfire growing noticeably quieter with each death. Like a dying round of applause, it came down to the last person standing.

Silence.

“Let’s go,” Alis said, switching places with her as the liquid barrier evaporated into gas and rushed to expand into its new container.

“There’s no one,” Iris reported. “Are there any other lights?”

“There’s a switchboard to our left. I can probably work it.”

Alis left her side, the initial movement startling her until she could find him again. The purple gems swung with his hands, dull shine drawing lines in the dark.

The lights came on, starting above their heads and sequentially backwards. There emerged the beginnings of a warehouse—albeit a small one—hewn straight from rock and coated with metal mesh. The space had been built hastily, with exposed wires leading up to floodlights hanging from steel cables drilled into the ceiling.

Sixteen messes of wire and aluminium were screwed and welded into bomb casings, their numberings written in chalky, white paint strokes.

“They’re numbered seven to twenty-two. Iris, we’re missing six.”

The remaining sixteen were still spilling their mechanical guts, abandoned before they could be sealed up. It was too close for comfort, and there were still six missing.

“Do you think they finished the first six? Took them somewhere else.”

“I don’t know, call it in.”

Iris grasped the radio again, managing to depress the button with a single finger.

“Magpie.”

“Count the eggs. Getting a lot of interference.”

“Sixteen. They’re numbered seven to twenty-two, but the first six aren’t here.”

“Rodger…Wait, did you see any sort of aircraft on your way there? Any kerosene, parts…”

“No. Why?”

“There’s an aircraft taking off nearby.”

“Is it big?”

“It’s a passenger aircraft. Two propellers, domestic. Looks quite old too.”

Her heart dropped. She and Alis were of the same mind. “It’s the bombs.”

“It might be. I’m reporting it to TOC.”

“Where is it?”

The Deity’s eye stuttered. “What do you mean ‘where is it’? There’s not much you can do about it. Best we can do is to get the H.O.A.’s to—”

“Where is it.”

Iris held down the transmission button until her fingers went numb.

“Do you have a compass with you?”

“I do.”

“Here’s your BRAA callout then.”

“Copy.”

Iris’s dragon coiled around her feet, brushing its scales against Alis’s legs, egging him to mount it.

“Two-five-three, eight hundred metres, fifty metres and climbing, hot.”

She felt Alis’s arm come around her waist. Her armour melded into her beast. Stowing the radio, all other thoughts washed out of her ears, replaced by blistering static.

She could only act by what she knew to be true, even if it didn’t yet encompass the entire picture. The wrong conclusion meant war, the right one didn’t. Burn away anything else, leave only heat. Heat singeing her fingertips, setting her hair on fire, running electricity through the air.

The ball of lightning, fastened tight in her Beast’s jaws, grew inch by inch as it split the air apart. She added more fuel to the fire, preparing more to funnel down the pipeline. The Beast’s head veered upwards, placing its muzzle inches from the rock, red and melting.

“Shoot.”

Thunder clapped, reverberating off every rivet, every surface, shaking the mesh and outshining the spotlights. Through the blinding light, melted rock dripped from the walls where purple met grey, falling into rapidly piling heaps of steaming lava.

She felt the blast meet cold night air, and like shutting off a faucet, she choked the beam of its fuel. A steaming tunnel was left in its wake, the air invading from outside bending light like running clay.

Iris encased herself and her passenger in a capsule, ordering her Beast to make its move through the opening. Excited air beat at the walls of her makeshift cockpit, the stinging sensation translating to a dull itch across her body.

The world widened, the itch subsiding yet not dying off completely. Her beast was still rising as she unmade the walls around herself. Cold night air, still untouched by the column of smoke yet to rise them from the brushfire she’d started.

She recalled the BRAA call and swivelled her attention accordingly. Moonlight was weak, but the green and red navigation lights blinking on the wingspan’s tips gave away the aircraft’s position. A last ditch attempt to disguise the plane as civilian; if it weren’t for Deity division watching it take off from nearby, it likely would’ve worked.

Iris couldn’t help but admit it made her hesitate.

Hovering above the tree line, she pressed the transmission on the radio a final time.

“Can you say for sure?”

Her attention remained so fixated on the aircraft she neglected to release the button.

“TOC confirms there are no civilian aircraft scheduled to be in the area. The no-fly zone is still secure. Orders are going out to shoot it out of the sky.”

It wasn’t a conventional explosive, Iris doubted it could ignite in the same way. But taking risks with that, especially when the plane was still so low.

Iris let the radio drop to her side, never letting the plane out of her sight. Fuel to the fire. Her Beast acted as the other half of her brain, enacting her orders as naturally as another arm, as though she were aiming a gun herself.

The jaws widened, the night sky thundered and a second, tiny sun was born under the moon.

“Shoot.”

The second sun drew a line through the stars as though to draw out a constellation line between her and the plane. No explosion, no ignition, only pure and simple annihilation—rendered non-existent before it got the chance.

She felt the eruption of sound more than she could hear it.

Two wings fell from the sky. Enough to identify it later.

She leaned back into her Beast; purple cockpit spread over her head. First was the warehouse, the rest of the unfinished bombs from seven to twenty-two. Diving through the tunnel her Beast exhaled gas into the opening, rapidly filling the cavern. Using it in place of her eyes, she navigated to the front door, bursting through it before letting go of her grip on the matter behind her completely. The sudden flash only lasted a second or two, but nothing had been left the same.

There was still evidence—traces and vestiges significant enough to piece together a working picture. No point in keeping things on the first floor if they were expecting an infantry assault. They’d be nearby if they were still in the facility at all.

Iris knew there was a hunch she could bet on. A shortcut. One she was afraid to follow.

In a way, the tenacity of the 42nd was in part a blessing. Keeping the Sidosian troops busy on the first floor let her act with impunity, but it wouldn’t last long.

She flooded the second floor with gas, spreading her senses down increasingly narrower, roughly hewn corridors and through the gaps of doors and vents. The map she sketched on the inside of her skull grew wider until, like a muscle reflex, it zeroed in on a single point. She watched her Beast move along the map, covering hallways in the blink of an eye, her stomach lurching a bygone concern.

They slowed, and Iris leapt off, stomping her feet across the concrete floor until she lost momentum outside another steel cast door.

Iris kicked it down.

“Mum!”

A golden knight stared down at a manila folder in her hands, the genesis point of the room around her. Calculations, diagrams and blueprints for wallpaper were tied with string to metal mesh encasing the manmade cave.

Evalyn didn’t look up at her. Iris didn’t look away.

“Please, mum.”

She’d given in everywhere else; taken a step closer to what Geverde wanted from her, what Evalyn needed from her.

“Just this. Please.”