Olephia rolled out of bed with a heavy sigh. Another Code-One-Purple came through, another alert with either Zerus or Sceo going on rampage. With the spies removed, they would only appear for a few mi a time, Zerus would destroy a few bunkers, Sceo would tear up a trench with her winds. A man would be thrown into the air, another would be fried by lightning. And then Olephia would arrive, and Zerus and Sceo would be long gone by then. She khe script by now, it was b and uing, and she would annihite another band of Guardians, and that would be that!

  What a bore!

  Essa stood high up, on an invisible ptform of hardened air as she looked at Iniri’s great oaks. Eae was wide as a small fort, and as tall as a city block, with great opies. Ptforms and bridges interected them as if Iniri had gotten crazed spiders drunk and told them to build a huge web. The ptforms turned and twisted to provide cover from her mages. The bridges became sky-tunnels, theions, then lead into buhat sat on top of trees.

  Behind every wooden barrier was a man, and in that man’s hands was a rifle. Eae wearing brown reen in some attempt at stealth. Holy, it matched Kassandora perfectly. Naturally, the men wouldn’t be able to hide or blend in like chameleons, but a swift eye may need a sed look to spot all of them. And a sed look was more than enough time to pull the trigger. Those muns were exactly what Theosius had predicted a thousand years ago, fully automatic rifles that could bring down even a Divine in a few seds. trated fire would overwhelm the shields of magis under lead, that wasn’t even a question. Essa had personally seen it happen.

  Worse though, were the thick ons that hid behind tall walls. Those were Kassandora’s dreaded artillery. The Goddess of War’s loudest instrument, whearted to py, it was as if she was bringing a little bit of Hell onto Arda. Maybe Kassandora had not realised it yet, but that artillery was far more destructive than simply being able to hurl explosives through the air. Already, Essa had seen more than two hundred of her mages be brought to insanity by stant shelling. Fortia’s Guardians had it worse though. Tales of men being uo sleep or sit still, of men who jumped when the door opened, or who went crazy and had to be subdued when someone dropped a fork, were more than onpce. Every single of Fortia’s frontlitalions had a few like that.

  A soni sounded from above and Essa spun in the air, her eyes going up. She had missed it again. O was just her and Anassa who the Queens of movement. And Anassa did not move but rather blink from location to location, Essa was the fastest the White Pantheon had to offer. By the time she spotted those bck spots in the sky, they were already out e and she would not leave her army to fight without Divine support.

  Well, there were a few minor Divihose who had the power to fly or float through the air, but they weren’t real Divines. A God of Breezes and a Goddess of Windmills were strohan a man, but when fag real Divine war, Essa would bet on two dozen men led by Kassandora than two dozen minor Divines.

  Essa turned in the air, her whitewood staff floating intrip by itself, her dark blue battledress spinning around her in the wind as she caught sight of the bombs that had just been dropped. A hundred of them, she already knew she couldn’t hahat many, maybe Alsaria would be able to, but Alsaria was not here. The army of mages on the ground raised a shield without orders needing to be given. Winds hardened, dirt ulled from the ground and water coalesced into the usual barrier against napalm as Essa charged her power into her staff.

  A brilliant blue beam of mana, the purest essenagic, fire from the rge white diamond that served as a catalyst. It destroyed one bomb, then formed an orb in the air, Essa charged it for a sed and the ighe tre. The mana exploded into spikes, eae iing a bomb or two. Out of the hundred, she had mao destroy sixty. The rest nded on the shield and Essa let her mages deal with it as she waved her sky. Kirinyaa’s monsoon season would not e for awo months at least, but the tral Mountain Raed as a fuhat ehe jungles in the middle almost never had a clear sky.

  A tornado appeared behind her mages, Essa set up a barrier to protect her men from the vicious winds as it started to pick up speeds. It pulled up dirt at first, being an ugly shade of red-brown, then rocks. Leaves were pulled off branches, branches pulled off trees, trees pulled off roots and roots were whisked out of the ground. It all got sucked up into the whirling winds. Essa pointed her glowing staff at it, and then motioned upwards.

  The tornado spiralled higher past Essa and into the sky. The clouds around it started to swirl and Essa started to t a spell. The bottom of the tornado started to curl upwards, the whirling winds fell onto their side like a snake and then followed Essa’s staff as she waved it through the air. White clouds turned dark and were sucked in, or oher side were blown away until the sky was a brilliant bright blue again.

  Kassandora’s pnes had already seen this tactic before, and they were far too high in the air for Essa to reach. They circled high above and began to fly away, tiny bck blips in that light blue o above. A moment ter, sonis shook the trees as they broke the sound barrier. Essa didn’t know why they tried to escape tently, she wasn’t going to waste her energy and time trag lost birds. She had thought about it when she saw ohe first time, but then she remembered it was Kassandora anding them. No doubt they’d have orders to split up, no doubt the pilots would be suicidal in their fanaticism and would rather dive into the ground than lead Essa back to whatever secret airport they were being housed in.

  Essa took a heavy breath as she looked at the thirty-six thousand men she had e with. There had been a full forty thousand when Essa had first pushed into the mountains. Then a man. Another man was shot. Someone failed to blo artillery round and a dozen lives were lost. Someone was ambushed, someone grew sid o be sent back. The mountains had only cost them five hundred souls. The jungle should have been easier, and then the stant bombings started. Most of the losses weren’t even fatalities, men simply grew tired, then grew restless, then paranoid, and then they snapped.

  Kassandora would no doubt have a solution to this crisis. Fortia already had a pipeli up were men were recovered with advanced Divine magics. Maisara’s Padins were blessed with her boldness and perseverahey fared the best under artillery fire of all the White Paroops. But Essa had mages and herself. She wasn’t a leader, she never had been. She was a teacher, a warrior and a schor, never had she wao lead a war. And now, all she could think to do was simply send them back to Arcadia to be healed.

  The worst part was the pace of it. During the sed day, two men shen four. Then teerday had been the worst, eight hundred men had simply given up and sat on the ground. And that was that. No matter how Essa tried to heal them, she couldn’t find any wounds in their bodies or their souls. It was as if the mind itself had cracked.

  And Essa turned back to Kassandora’s fortress. That co of trees and guns and artillery. That wasn’t the challenge in itself. It was that red opaque bubble around. Magid Sorcery were simir arts, sorcery had e around as a delusion form of magi the first pce. So they could do simir things. Just as Essa could form a shield of mana, so could Anassa.

  And Essa had e across this disgusting shield sorcery before. There was going to be a gss catalyst crystal somewhere in the base that o be destroyed or overpowered. Anything that touched that opaque red sphere would simply be sucked into the barrier. Sending pure mana into that bubble was the equivalent of giving your soul to one of Anassa’s traps.

  There was no way to get in, there was no way to get out. In the past, one of the tactics had been to simply wait them out for the air within to be used up and for men io suffocate. Essa’s eyes went to the green leaves of Iniri’s trees. Fat ce of them running out of oxygen with that much vegetation within. Starving them out was just as farcical, Iniri had ged her title to Of Food and Bounty precisely because the woman was woman was an endless walking granary. And with Kassandora in there, Essa doubted that morale and will would run out anytime soon. The crystal could be destroyed, but to destroy it, one would have to cross the shield in the first pce.

  So it could not be waited out. It could not be destroyed from within. It would have to be overpowered.

  Essa waved her staff and the ptform of solid air that carried her lowered to the ground. High-ranking battlemages were already arrahe captains she had picked out to give out orders. She didn’t bother learning this point, snipers had picked off the first round of captains, and artillery-madness had sent the sed round bae. Uhe other Divines, she simply did not have a good eye for men.

  “reparing for a full siege.” Essa said. “Surround the bubble, no one is to e within fifty steps of the shield itself, no one is to touch it with magio one is to even think about toug it. Uood?” Essa said. She got a series of fused nods. This, she could pick up on, men needed expnations, and it was far better to show than to expin with words.

  Essa turned and waved her staff. A bde of air made a cut through one of the rge jurees. Essa’s staff started to shine bright, and she lifted the wood up, then threw it into the bubble. Where the tree made tact with the shield, it simply disappeared. Before the Great War, Anassa had once expihe principle of the barrier to Essa. It’s an eraser, everything is a drawing. How a drawing break through an eraser? At first, Essa thought Anassa spoke iaphors and fluage as most Divines did. She thought she uood it through that lens, but then she realised Anassa always spoke literally. The barrier was in fa eraser. And everything was a drawing. And the fact it fused Essa only terrified her.

  “Uand now?” Essa said.

  “Yes Goddess!” The mages replied.

  “Have floromancers remove the trees around this area. The rest are to…” Essa saw the faces of the floromancer captains. “Is there an issue?”

  “The flora here does not listen to us but we…” They looked at each other, eae in a green cloak and shrugging, faces obviously fused. “I really don’t know what to say. It’s as if they’re not flora.”

  “It’s Iniri.” Essa said with a sigh. “Have pyromancers burn the forest around us down then. Geomancers are to bury the deep and pull up rocks. Make this ground stohat would a day of dey. That meant a day of stant bombings, the clouds were already returning. “Then start f a ritual circle. I will guide it.” Essa said. “Don’t worry about the details for now, I’ll draw everything.”

  Anassa made a giant eraser, but there was one issue with erasers.

  No matter how delusional you were, you had to admit that there was no such thing as an infinite eraser.

  All of them ran out eventually.

  The shield simply o be dirtied with so much mana that it would crack.