“Class 2095-2 is troubled. Their Examination was riddled by cowardice and a lack of spirit. 2095-16 on the hand, presents another slew of problems. More than 90% were wiped out in their Examination. Class 2095-4, out of Alaska, has the proper balance that I’d like to see in junior Proxies. As for 2095-13, well, I don’t envy Raja Sviratham. Those kids are insane.” - REDACTED report from REDACTED to REDACTED.

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Theirs wasn’t the only group to count the time. Standing with their cadre, he could make the Guos, Somaronov’s musketeer-themed Chassis, Saolirin who stood in all his serpentine glory over another cadre. A riot of colours they were, a series of Chassis made in the images of myths and fantasies from a dozen cultures.

The clock struck midnight.

Some of the gathered Proxies rattled. Other employed their aurics; a shimmering outline of fortress wall hung above them, courtesy of ‘Nice.

Somchai did what he did best——that is to say turn invisible and sneak away.

A zoo of weird horrors danced at Somaronov’s feet, and that power, turned at whatever enemy to come, was almost enough to make him forget. Almost.

Ten seconds past the internal chime reality was sundered.

A slit in the world, like a curtain parted. A single Host exited. Human torso, arms removed. A mask covered its face, jagged and shining like mattermetal. It walked on the ground with six legs, very much like the spider. Two hollows in its mask revealed eyes like embers.

“Westerfield,” Lisa Guo said, quietly.

“Regial, of the High variety,” he answered. “Something—“

A single leg, not much longer than that of ordinary human’s, rose. It tapped the ground and the earth began to rumble.

“Jump!”

Martin grabbed Dijkstra and called on his searing anger, his pale fire exploding from the ground up. The two of them ascended quickly, the pillar of fire thrusting against the confines of gravity. They entered the ward, the shining castle on high.

Calix, Westerfield and the Guos hung next to him but his eyes were for the scene below.

Great spikes of dirt and stone rose from the ground and those Proxies who didn’t know the auric for flight or some other manner of rapid movement were being impaled or buried. The sheer extent of the auric…and the ground still rose.

“That auric——too fast,” Berenice breathed.”Even a Regial shouldn’t be able to use auric of this size, atleast not that quick.”

A draconian face rose from the ground, the mouth of which spewed great flames, incinerating what was once their festival site. Slitted eyes stared up at them.

Westerfield shot down, not at the emerging head of the dragon, but at the Host, Calix hot on his trail.

The Host rotated its face, staring up at them. Eyes like white coals.

There came a cracking noise then——splinters forming alongside the walls of the ward.

Dijkstra made errant swipe against the air, forming a portal.”Drop me!”

Westerfield became a silhouette of red light, striking the Host with a roaring bang. The rumbling stopped, momentarily distracted. When the smoke cleared…the lense-stripes of his Chassis brought the sight of the Host as close as to touch. Unharmed. Hadn’t Calix described how Westerfield had fought a small army of Host with that transmutation?!

Martin let him go. The Dutch Proxy fell through a series of portals, landing next to Calix, who had enveloped the Host in her dome.

“Too strong,” Hong said. Martin agreed;this was like the Regial beneath the Mountain.

“What do you mean, Hong?”

“It’s not a Regial,”Lisa answered.

“What do you mean it’s not a Regial—“

“Look down at the battlefield.”

The ground was shaking as Westerfield, Calix, Dijkstra and now Somchai piled on Host in a furious ballet, moving away from where the fight had started.

The rest of the gathered Proxies were dealing with spikes bursting from the ground, hands dragging them down, pits of quicksilver sand forming.

One blow from the Host struck Somchai, sending him crashing twenty metres away. Soleri just gaped.

Martin had stopped Somchai, using the full power of his Field.

“It’s a Sovereign,” came the call from the ward under Martin’s ear. Westerfield’s voice held strain and something else. Excitement. Of course—that was his goal. Fighting a Sovereign. But this wasn’t Morrow and they hadn’t finished the Tutelage.

“It’s not a Sovereign. If it was a Sovereign——they wouldn’t waste a drone like that for some stupid exercise!”

“‘Nice,” Martin began.

“She’s right,” Guo Hong claimed.”It has to be some sort of Regial, which has been prepared to mimic a true Sovereign.”

Not even mentioning how that was achieved——it held all the vicious hallmarks of Raja Sviratham’s teaching methods.

The fight below had turned frantic; the earth within range of the terraforming auric had become a hill and the Host was targeting individual Proxies with two beams of light from the eyes.

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Twin arcs of shining energy struck it on its head and the dual beam severed a rising pillar. Martin followed the trace of the arcs back from where they had come.

Guo Lisa had brought out her swords.

“I will provide artillery. That fire of yours Soleri, how good of an aim do you have with it?”

“Not good enough to hit it from here.”

“Hit the ground, and don’t hit any of the people in the class. Sonnentag, you know how to create a wider communications ward?”

Martin swallowed. This was it. A prelude to what he wanted. To not run away. To have power. Well, there was something like a Sovereign down there.

“Go!”

Martin shot down then, landing on ground that was rising to meet him, the titanic fight buffeting the wind. Even braced as he was, the wind was enough to a baseline human flying.

The trick of the perspective-above as with below-changed. High in the sky he could tell himself that they were, if not winning, stalling for cleverer minds to come up with an idea. He leapt over a rising hand of dirt, shrugged of a spear of stone to the shoulder and there it was.

Twin beams of light surged from the holes in its mask, passing through Cameron Westerfield, who simply turned into light the color of blood.

An axe struck it on its head, the weapon returning to Calix who moved with her domed bubble.

Another set of lasers sought Calix, but as they entered her dome, they slowed down, buying her enough time to dodge them.

He shook himself. He was staring.

Martin centered himself, side stepping the roots of dirt that rose to drag him down, calling on the anger. A sphere of fire manifested in his hand and he lobbed at the…he couldn’t think of it as a Sovereign-too much to think of it like that-at the Host.

One of six legs blurred, slapping the fireball aside, but the Host overextended, twin slashes gouging it across the torso. The arcs broke against the skin of the Host like glass. Martin goggled at the sight, summoning another set of spheres. What they were doing to it, it wasn’t enough.

He could call on greater fires, but he didn’t want to injure any of the other Proxies nearby.

“Listen up!”

The voice seemed to come from every where and nowhere at the same time.

“This is Berenice Sonnentag. I’m operating a limited sound ward. You’ll be able to hear me and I can speak you, but you wouldn’t be able to speak to the others.”

She cleared her throat, audibly nervous.

Somchai became visible just then, striking the Host with his tail and spider abomination was sent flying.

“We’ve got something like a Sovereign here.

You all know Sviratham’s lecture. We need to bring down the integrity of its Field to a level where it can be injured.”

The Host rose, mouth open to reveal flat bovine teeth. It cried out, a noise that made Berenice’s words waver in the air.

“Saolirin, Westerfield, Dijkstra and Hong will act as vanguards.”

A great snakes, moving like a train struck the Host down. A man in chrome slammed his palms down on its head, denting the ground. Great claws of ebon rent its skin, the wolfman giving space for the Scottish Proxy. Westerfield swung his sword down and there was a flash as his transmuted sword turned into dripping red for a moment.

“Soleri, Somaronov, Gaultiers, Morhan, you will be our interceptors. Attack at an distance.”

Somaronov’s menagerie of fantastical creatures slithered on the ground, flew across the air, weaving between pale fireballs. A lance of force struck the Sovereign square, increasing the size of the crater even further. A glowing hand of earth-toned light held it down.

“Muratovic, Seralhò, Kålgren and Correia, slow it down!”

A thin band of shadow connected to from a Proxy that of the downed Sovereign, a cloud of narcotic white streamed around the earthen hand that held it down; a transparent haze rippled across its frame and a ring of non-euclidian runes in a eye-twitching ring made the ground shudder.

“Again!”

Denser spheres of fire, a more cutting arcs—Somaronov summoned a giant of a figment which struck their enemy down.

The Host tried to rose, but the gathered aurics were too much. Twin arcs from above, neatly following a ward in the shape of a green phoenix impacted the Host. It cried out!

They could do this. They hadn’t managed to scratch it, but even so it wasn’t moving. They——the earth stopped shaking. The writhing extrusions halted, spears and tentacles and odd hands stopped in motion.

The hill, the vast hill created through the Sovereign’s exoauric ceased stopped growing. Smoke rose at odd intervals from pits.

“GET AWAY!”

The shockwave tumbled Martin like a weed; he saw the cloud rising even as he landed on his back, his breath blown away. What? The stars were coming down. Great holes yawned wide in the sky, disposing celestial orbs that rained down.

The glowing ward, the castle in the sky where Berenice hovered was ripped apart by the projectiles, the remnant of of which dispersed into motes of heat that made him raise his arm to protect his eyes.

“Berenice!”

“Relax,” she said as the hill thumped, shook by each heavenly impact.”I hid myself the moment I began to coordinate.”

For a moment there…

Martin got up. The lense-stripes of his helmet turned the smoke of the explosion and impacts transparent, revealing a battlefield in ruins. Where had Westerfield and the others gone?

“Martin,” Berenice said. The Sovereign glided through a veil of smoke like a spider skidding on water. It hadn’t seen him.”You need to hold it down. I need to gathered the rest of the survivors in the class.”

He swallowed.

“Buy me time.”

In an even quieter voice.”Minutes, Martin.”

“I can do that.”

He could do that. He could buy minutes. He swallowed again, and his breath sounded tinny within the confines of his helmet.

The Sovereign skidded in a frictionless manner over the grass, dainty feet never touching it.

A soccer-sized sphere of pale fire struck it on its head but all the same it continued to glideon. Huh.

Martin burst from the ground in a wide arc, carried by a tornado of pale fire the circumference of which crisped the grass black in a ten metre radius around the Host.

That got its attention. One arm up to maintain the steady stream of fire bathing the Host, Martin focused. There were more endoaurics he could call. Before pale fire, he had learned another emotion. This one is for you, Ronja Somaronov.

Black lightning shot from his other palm, rocketing the Host back. It was an awesome thing, veils of fire, a web of lightning—a scene to be painted. The black lightning and pale fire baptised the Host but even so there were no injuries.

Oh, that Field integrity was going down, but anything like a Sovereign had a Field to eclipse any ten Proxies.

The mouth of the Host opened, revealing an all too human tongue and the Sovereign shook its head. One of its slender limbs rose and Martin Soleri staggered, knees bending, a pressure on his shoulder blades forcing him down.

Mindful of what Berenice had told him, he threw himself with his arms stretched over his head, palms turned upwards. Even as the ground fell away from him, as a depression formed, even then did he hold the stance. The lightning and the fire kept on coming even as Martin screamed in pain.

The Chassis began to break. Strands of white cloth bent, furling up, brown skin bending. White bone jutted out. Ligaments broke and Martin cried out once more, copper flooding his mouth.

The pain was too much. Instinct whispered that this was the end.

Lightning strobed from his left hand; fire from the right. Spots like regrets danced before his vision. Not yet. He bit his tongue, bit through the meat of it.

The Field murmured. That was what he perceived the wavering strands to do atleast. Hold him, she said.

With his last breath Martin charged his Field, turning the world into a pale inferno——and then the fire hardened into a mausoleum around the Sovereign.

I didn’t run.

______

He came awake in fits.

The shaking…

Great flashes…

Searing images soon to be forgotten…

Screams, high pitched and filled with fury, announcing to the world their impotence.

The ground sloped away from hill.

He was staring down at a sudden precipice. The hill which the Sovereign had raised…it had been sheared in half.

An ashen wasteland dotted with irregular pools of a fluid akin to mercury now occupied that space.

Where was he?

What had happened?

The fight!

He…something shifted in chest and he screamed. The Chassis had focused on the internal bleeding first, deeming those injuries to be the worse, leaving him with broken bones. He tried to turn, but stopped as his body issued a noise like broken china scooped up too quick.

He could move his head, if barely. He glanced up, over the slope. There it was!

The sudden clash illuminated the world; Westerfield with a arm cradled against his torso, the Sovereign flying next to him.

Westerfield’s claymore hovered over his head.

The world before him seemed leeched of color, an old photo the pigments of which had been stolen, greyed out. Westerfield’s Chassis flickered, at one glance red, the other grey. The green of the Host varied, sometimes that poisonous shade, at other intervals a blot. What kind of auric did this? Where was the rest of the class?

His hopes plummeted. He told himself that the Sovereign wouldn’t show signs on injury until its Field was depleted and so its undamaged body was just a sign of things to come.

They had to have lowered its Field integrity. It couldn’t just shrug of their attacks without a cost!

The air twisted as a funnel of gravity struck Westerfield; he bypassed the cylindrical ripple by turning his body into his telltale bloody light but even so, the gravity seemed to hinder him. He was falling, as the rest of the class of 2095-13 had fallen.

In the days of the Devastation, they spoke about the apocalypse. The end of the world. “But do you know what the word means?” Raja Sviratham sat on desk, staring them down.”Apocalypse?”

The claymore became red light, a streaking knife to cut down conceit. But the Sovereign was simply too much. Even as Cameron Westerfield fell the red knife struck the Sovereign, each slice accompanied by the roaring burst that Martin had seen cut through stone.

“Revelation.” The shadows of yesteryear seemed to hover in their instructor’s amber eyes.

Before his eyes Cameron Westerfield slammed into ground. From the moment of his descent the Scottish Proxy’s eyes had never left that of the form of the Sovereign.

The transmuted claymore became real steel then, hovering for a moment in the air, a sword of Damascus, before too falling, the source of the auric cut off.

The wind keened over the battlefield, swaying the grass. That was their great revelation. That, even if they gathered the whole class, they were nothing before a Sovereign.

Martin Soleri closed his eyes and passed out.