Alyssa and Tenebrael walked along the road away from the city. It was a casual walk with no rush and no panic. Fela and Izsha both accompanied them, though their position must have been a little strange with their inability to perceive the angel. They heard one half of a conversation. Alyssa gesticulated to nothing at all. It was a good thing that they knew invisible creatures existed or Alyssa would probably have looked like she was losing her mind.

It might have looked like that anyway.

“Just blow them all up! That thing and your statue in Teneville are doing that anyway,” Alyssa said with a wild gesture toward the circle above the city. “If I can make one of those, you can surely make a few dozen.”

“Quantity is not the problem. Adaption is. There are no Chastity-class Authorities up there at the moment. Once they do show up, I imagine it will be dismantled in minutes. As for my statue, it is little more than a trinket. Its refire rate means that it would only be able to attack a single Authority every minute. Roughly.”

“You mean to tell me that, even with all your power and you being the ruler of this world, you cannot fight them off? Why are we even on a time limit before you have to disappear? Just stop time and I’ll shoot them all down.”

“A temporary solution. And a vastly imperfect one at that. You cannot possibly fend off the entirety of the Astral Authority on your own, even with time stopped. And as soon as it restarted, they would notice my presence. They would quickly redirect their efforts toward me, if I used a miracle of that magnitude. As for being able to wave my hand and wipe them off this world… I told you a long time ago that I was not ready for the Astral Authority to come down upon me. Now we need to distract them long enough to implement some emergency defenses. Ones that will be able to stand up to repeated attack from even the Cardinals.”

“And how do you propose we do that? They don’t look remotely human.” Alyssa paused, glancing back at Izsha. “Let me rephrase. They don’t look like they can be reasoned with. I doubt I can walk up to one, toss a ball, and say ‘Look! A distraction!’ let alone tell them to go do something else while you do whatever it is you need to do to prepare. They look like robots.” Maybe it was just the mask and their completely inhuman bodies, but Alyssa just couldn’t see anything working out.

But of course, Tenebrael smiled. “Isn’t that what you just did? You tossed a great big ball above the city and told them to fetch. Now we have a moment to talk.”

Alyssa frowned and sighed, shaking her head. “So what. You want me to toss an even bigger one out there? Just how big does it need to be to distract them long enough? And how long is this going to take. I have a feeling that you angels have a very skewed perspective of time. A hundred years might be nothing to you, but I doubt I’ll even live that long.”

“In reverse order, it won’t be that long. At least not for a temporary bulwark. To truly keep myself safe, it might be quite a while, but I think we can get it done in the order of months if not weeks. As for distracting them, a larger one of those might work,” she said, looking over her wing. “But, like with stopping time, as soon as I do something grandiose, it will draw them away from that distraction and to me. Rather, we need to occupy them with something else that they want to be doing. Or rather, what they were designed to do.”

Tenebrael stopped and glanced back. Alyssa followed her gaze.

The mystic circle above the city was… not doing so well. The little golden lights of the Authorities zipped about at such speed that they were impossible to tally up. There were definitely more than twenty up there, but probably less than forty. Laser beams kept killing them. Anytime one died, another would pop out from one of those square portals with golden edges. Sometimes two would pop out. Sometimes the lasers would kill two before any popped out. That all just made it more difficult to count.

But the Authorities were making a dent. Roughly a fifth of the massive circle had gaping holes in it. Alyssa was surprised that it was still functioning at all. The movements of the ethereal lines resembled a machine, if she squinted and had far too much to drink. A machine missing a fifth of it would probably explode if someone tried to turn it on.

“That’s not going to explode, is it?”

“No. It will just fade away once enough damage has been done or a critical component winds up hit.”

“Oh. Good. All those Astral Authority fake-angels aren’t going to dive-bomb the mortals in the city, are they?”

“Doubt it. Maybe if some human was trying to protect a demon, they would spear them, but otherwise, I’m not even sure that they can perceive mortals.”

“What about me?”

Tenebrael took her eyes off the battle to look at Alyssa. She shrugged, which did not offer much boost to confidence. “I wouldn’t go waving my banner all over the place if I were you. But the amount of my power you have is so minuscule that I doubt they can see you very well.”

Maybe it was somewhat comforting. Not much, but a little. “So. Distract them with what they were designed to do.” It had taken a moment to remember, but Iosefael had mentioned their purpose. “They hunt fallen angels and demons. I don’t know exactly what fallen angels are, but you’re clearly one. Will they prefer demons—”

“Excuse me?” Tenebrael put her hands to her hips. “I am not.”

Alyssa raised an eyebrow, feeling not even the slightest amount of belief. “Then why are they attacking you?”

“I mean,” Tenebrael started, pouting, “it isn’t like I can’t understand being mistaken for one. Still, no need to be offensive.”

“Uh huh.”

“It’s serious business, alright?”

“I don’t really care what you are. My question still stands. Will they prefer to target demons over you?”

“Most likely,” Tenebrael said with a hearty nod. “Especially if we give them more than enough demons to occupy them for a good while. That should leave me free to work, though I’ll still have to be careful not to draw too much attention, and it should help you as well. I know how much all the demons cropping up around the city bother you. Or… Do they bother you? You did seek that one out.”

“That was to try to find you! You disappeared! I didn’t know what to do!”

“So you decided to do exactly what I told you not to do?” Tenebrael shook her head, clicking her tongue in disappointment.

Alyssa got enough disappointed looks from her mother. She didn’t need them from Tenebrael too. “You weren’t answering the phone! No one was dying around me! It was almost like people were conspiring to die far away from me. There wasn’t any—”

“You really aren’t a very good reaper, are you?”

“I’m not going to kill some random person just to talk to an angel!”

“You were killing people left and right for a while there. I’m sure you could have found—”

“What is wrong with you?”

Tenebrael blinked. “What?”

“It’s like this every single time you show up. We start talking and everything seems fine. Sometimes I even feel sorry for you. For a god-like being, you seem to have it rough. But then you always do something like this. Maybe it is about my mother. Maybe you’re keeping information from me that would make everything easier. Maybe you bring up something that you should have told me long ago. Or maybe you just try to get me to go around slaughtering random people for the fun of it. Do you have to try to piss me off? Or does it just come naturally?”

Alyssa’s breathing came faster than normal. She could feel her blood pumping. Her fingers felt mildly tingly and her hands were coated in sweat.

Behind her, Fela and Izsha glanced at each other. They could only hear half the conversation. It was a really good thing that they knew that invisible beings existed. Alyssa flying off the handle like that would definitely have been cause for major concern otherwise. It probably still was cause for concern.

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But Alyssa wasn’t done. She jabbed a finger right into Tenebrael’s chest. “You are so out of touch. It’s not like I don’t know why you are out of touch. I assume it comes with being an immortal being. Lives of mortals are so transient that you don’t even notice them. But…” Clenching her fist, Alyssa closed her eyes. “You treat me like a toy. You act like I’ve got a leash around my neck. But even dog walkers let the dog walk ahead or beside them. You’re dragging me along like I’m a sack of potatoes.”

A deafening silence occupied the space between them. Tenebrael stared. Her face was entirely impassive. Her eyes, wide and unblinking, stared at Alyssa without deviation. Not even an Authority crashing to the ground nearby got her to flinch.

Alyssa did flinch. A spike of panic jumped through her veins for just a moment upon looking at the deceased Patience. Not for fear of the false-angel, but for fear that Tenebrael had used that brief glance aside to vanish without a word.

She let out a sigh of relief upon turning back to find Tenebrael still staring.

Maybe because the panic had replaced her anger, but Alyssa was starting to get uncomfortable with the unblinking look on Tenebrael’s face.

“Look,” Alyssa said. “I’m going to help you out. We’ll do whatever we need to get rid of these things,” she said, thumbing toward the molten scrap that had once been a Patience. “It isn’t because I like you or even really want to help you. It is simply a choice between the status quo and people who will likely leave this world in ruins with no thought to their actions beyond their immediate goal.”

“I never wanted to hurt you,” Tenebrael said, voice hauntingly hollow. “Not even when you first started screwing things up back on Earth.”

Alyssa took a breath. Her hand drifted closer to the hilt of her pistol. “If you are saying that as a preface to hurting me, I swear, I am going to shoot you in the face with your own magic. If you are trying to apologize…” Alyssa shook her head. “Figure shit out and come back and give me a proper apology. In the meantime…” She glanced up to the circle above the city.

It was quickly falling apart. Even though the number of golden Authorities in the sky hadn’t changed, their combat tactics had. Groups of them were hiding behind larger versions which managed to deflect some of the beams. The larger ones provided cover for smaller ones. Without raising her binoculars, she couldn’t tell exactly which dots represented what species of Astral Authority fake-angels, but she had a feeling that the larger ones were Chastities. Bulwarks. They could absorb or deflect a lot more than the smaller Diligence and Patience species.

They had only been at it for ten minutes at most. Probably less than that. And yet, the mystic circle was dotted with enough holes that probably only fifty percent of it remained. The less of it there was, the faster the rest would fail.

The time to converse was rapidly running down.

“Just tell me what you need me to do. And please don’t tell me to slaughter half the city or something stupid.”

“No. Nothing so drastic. Rather, you will have to leave the city.”

“Ah. Lovely.”

“To the west of the city lies… I believe the humans called it Owlcroft? Whatever it once was, it is now a scar on the land. A portal to the underworld. Hell. The pit. Go there. Conjure some great magic bearing my signature.” Her luminescent eyes finally looked away from Alyssa. Only for a moment. She stared up at the sky above the city. “The Astral Authority will respond. They will invade Hell. The demons will be forced to respond.”

“If Hell is such a big deal to them, why are they not responding right now?”

“You don’t think the increase in demonic infection incidents is a coincidence, do you? They are trying to distract the Astral Authority just as much as I am. They even destroyed my temple!” Tenebrael’s tone shifted away from her usual almost harmonic voice for just a moment as she squawked in indignant rage. But another Patience crashing to the ground returned her to a somber expression. “I’m sorry Alyssa. Time is up,” she said without even looking up at the sky. “I doubt we will have a chance to speak again until the Astral Authority have discovered the portal to Hell.”

“Yeah, yeah. I expected that,” Alyssa said with a sigh. She wasn’t even mad anymore. Just tired. “Go on. Get out of here.”

“One more thing.” Tenebrael reached back behind her, dipping a hand into the feathers of her wings. “I apologize that it took so long to return these.”

Two pistols hovered above her extended hand. They rotated slowly as she brought them around, moving until the grips were pointed toward Alyssa and the end of the barrel toward Tenebrael. It looked like they had been polished to a shine. Despite having dropped one off the Brechen Overlook and dropped both to the ground more times than she cared to remember, neither had a single scratch as far as Alyssa could tell.

The ring of spell cards between them wasn’t in the same pristine state. The white paper was still covered in dirt and grime.

Alyssa snatched up all three offered artifacts regardless of their cleanliness. She checked the magazines, found them fully loaded, then pulled back the slide on each pistol only to frown as a round popped out of each. She didn’t think they had been at capacity when Tenebrael had taken them.

Not wanting the two bullets to go to waste, she bent and picked both up, pocketing them.

When she stood up straight again, there was nothing but a few drifting feathers in the air.

She… supposed that she should have expected that. But at least she had an actual goal now. For over a month, she felt like she had been drifting. Going with the flow. It wasn’t the worst way to live. Lots of people did it. Lots of people were perfectly happy.

Alyssa had been like that before her near death experience. Back on Earth, she hadn’t ever really had major goals. She had been happy to go to work, go to the gym, watch movies, and cook a few meals for the family on occasion. Even when she had been attending school, it hadn’t been because she had some major goal or aspiration that she wanted to achieve. Going to college had simply been what her parents had expected of her.

Since coming to Nod, things had… changed. Alyssa had to give herself small goals just to keep moving forward. Where ‘forward’ actually took her wasn’t something she cared about. Just so long as she wasn’t sitting around doing nothing. It was just a way of staying sane. Not that she thought she would literally go insane or anything. It was just… she needed something to do.

But the more she got used to the world, the less she felt the drive to need something to distract herself. Modern conveniences aside, Lyria wasn’t a bad place to live. At least not for her. Waters Street was gone, but there were probably other gangs whoring out people and monsters, kidnapping, killing, and such. And even regular people who had harder lives than she had with no prospect for advancement. And it helped that things had been peaceful lately. Though, tonight was clearly not a peaceful night.

Alyssa looked back up to the city. The walk with Tenebrael had carried her a short distance away, but it really hadn’t been that long a walk. Izsha and Fela could sprint back in seconds. Even on foot, Alyssa wouldn’t be that far behind them if she really pushed herself.

There was still work to be done back in the city.

Maybe.

Actually, with any luck, the Pharaoh would have fixed it all by now. He was a Rank Six time-manipulating arcanist. According to Tess, he would end invasions as fast as he could snap his fingers.

Alyssa didn’t know if she believed that, but his strength was no joke. He might have trouble against her, but that was because she cheated. She had a staff that blocked the effects of spells cast in her direction. Her status as a Rank Six arcanist was mostly for show. Irulon thought she was higher. Much higher. And now, with Tenebrael’s warmth coursing through her veins…

Honestly speaking, if they were to actually fight, he would probably still beat her. Alyssa didn’t know how old the Pharaoh was, only that he was a lot older than he looked. That age had to have come with experience.

Pulling out the phone, Alyssa put the earbud back in and listened. At least the shouting had died down. “Anyone around?”

She immediately winced. The sudden burst of noise forced her to pull the earbud out again. “Could you all not talk at once!” she shouted into the phone, knowing that her voice was just more noise. “Look. It’s nothing to worry about, alright?”

As she spoke, a pin dropped. The mystic circle flashed and exploded. Alyssa threw a hand up over her face just in time. A wave rolled over her. She just about fell over from the force, but it quickly passed. When she lowered her arm, she found that the wave hadn’t even ruffled the fur on Fela’s body.

Alyssa took it in stride.

“There, see? It’s gone.”

“What in Tenebrael’s name is going on?” Oxart shouted.

“I can explain later. Just know that it was a Tenebrael thing.” There was going to be some meeting about it. Alyssa was sure of that. She would have to attend. She would say a few words. Then the other attendants would sit around and argue for half a day without her input. It was the same thing that had happened after she had scarred the moon. Hopefully, because they already knew that she was a giant danger, they wouldn’t argue for so long.

If she actually went to some meeting. Getting to Owlcroft seemed far more important than explaining her actions.

Oxart started talking again. Irulon did as well. There was a lot of background noise. Alyssa, sighing, pulled the earbud slightly away once again.

“Look.” If they were going to talk over each other, she might as well try to talk over them. “I’ve finished outside the city. Fela, Izsha, and I are returning. If you guys don’t stop shouting at me, I’m going to hang up and let you people take care of everything.” Maybe she was still a little irritated from her conversation with Tenebrael. Taking it out on her friends and allies wasn’t the best, but… it was so annoying. “Irulon. Just tell me where we will be most useful.”

“We’ve found the cart. There is a problem, however. All the humans are dead and those corpses are missing.”

“You can’t just Retrograde Cognition to figure it out?”

“One moment they are alive. The next, dead. Either something is wrong with the spell or something strange went on. Possibly Time magic, but my father insists that it wasn’t him.”

“So what do you need me to do?” She could try asking Iosefael. The angel had said that she would return at some point. But hunting her down would be an exercise in futility unless she happened across someone on death’s door.

“We were considering your… enhanced usage of spells like Annihilator. The topic came up when we considered that something was hampering Retrograde Cognition’s usage. If you were to try it…”

Alyssa nodded. She didn’t like the idea of using another Fractal spell that might be remotely similar to Fractal Mirror, but if it helped figure out what was going on, that would be for the best.

She needed to resolve this as soon as possible. Then, she needed to figure out exactly how to get to Owlcroft.

“Just tell me where you are.”