Chapter 144 – Getting Help

It takes Emily two more attempts to get to the same point in the battle without any casualties after the boarding ships once again unluckily prove deadly to their inhabitants on the way to the ground.

Emily again manages to ground four of the twenty interceptors before Virgil starts throwing bolts of fire towards her. This time, she dodges the thrown bolts and ignores the spell being prepared on the ground as she lands on the fifth interceptor. She repeats the process of punching a hole in the solid metal hull and dropping a grenade inside while preparing several defensive spells.

She leaps off the now-falling ship towards the sixth interceptor, but a small petal of fire shoots towards her along a wide, arcing trajectory. She kicks off the air, sidestepping the projectile right before it hits her. However, instead of bursting harmlessly in the sky, the petal spins, curving and drawing a full arc to fly back towards her even faster.

“Damn,” Emily mutters, a small grin creeping onto her face as she suddenly shoots towards the floor to avoid the returning petal and a second petal that flies towards her from Virgil.

She glances over at the responsible mage and sees him standing in his large magic formation with his arms raised, swaying rhythmically like a conductor guiding his orchestra as more petals form around him before shooting off at odd angles and arcing through the sky to start targeting Emily.

“Damn!” she cries again, her eyes widening as she sees over thirty burning petals shooting towards her at varying speeds.

Three petals narrowly miss her legs, and one particularly fast-moving one bursts against her left arm, wrapping it in a liquid-like fire that clings to her Claw and quickly starts to eat through the leather bracer, burning her flesh beneath. Emily slashes the bindings holding the burning Claw in place with the other, dropping her weapon to the floor and removing most of the fire with it.

Ouch.

She glares at her blackened arm while twisting to dodge a few more petals, feeling some residual fire mana eating away at her flesh despite her having removed most of the attack.

That will be a bitch to heal.

Two injectors on her spine activate, and her flesh slowly starts returning to its normal colour as the foreign mana is slowly forced out.

Okay, don’t let those petals hit me. Let’s try to block them.

Emily kicks the air, propelling herself up dozens of metres above the highest interceptor before freezing in mid-air and watching the streaks of fire twisting between the ships and angling to chase her. She takes a deep breath and shuts her eyes, spreading her magical senses and gathering the crackling charge around her to stick close to her skin.

As the first petal reaches her, she strikes out with her own mana, sending a small stream of charge from midway up her thigh to connect with the centre of the fast-moving petal in the shortest path possible before letting the charge crackling along her skin pour through the connection. The focused lightning bursts the petal before it can get close to Emily, releasing a small wave of heat and charge in one.

A second petal approaches her, so she repeats the same process, targeting the centre of the spinning projectile and supplying a powerful burst of magic to its centre. She falls into full assistive processing, utilising all of her cores at once to accurately track and target the many fast-moving petals coming towards her.

All everyone else on the battlefield sees as she repeats this delicate process is a crackling humanoid lightning bolt indiscriminately striking everything that gets near, surrounding itself with fireworks that keep going as more and more petals form around Virgil and shoot up to meet her.

Emily tries to maintain her full defensive position, but quickly realises the futility of her actions as the stream of petals continues, rapidly eating away at her mana stocks and surrounding her with heat as the residual mana left by each petal quickly adds up.

Down to three thousand mana and ten thousand machina already. This is using over a thousand mana every ten petals and he doesn’t seem to be stopping. I was hoping it cost him more per shot, but it seems it’s too much to compete against a fourth circle mage, and his several supporters, using endurance. Besides, I think the residual mana building up around me is him preparing for a spell I won’t want to be hit by.

She frowns and pulls the crackling lightning around her back into her body, focusing it on her legs and kicking off to propel herself back down towards one of the interceptor ships. She glances back towards Calypso as she falls through the sky with several flaming petals hot on her tail and her frown grows.

“They’re too close,” she mutters as the interceptor ships open fire, sending several cannon balls straight into Calypso’s hull. “I either need to work faster, tell Anton to slow down, or both.”

She kicks sideways as she falls, manoeuvring out of the way a fraction of a second before she slams into the ship she was targeting’s hull as she considers what to do. Two of the petals chasing her don’t change direction in time and slam into the ship, bursting and releasing liquid fire to eat through the metal construct.

Emily barely pays any attention to the falling ships as she continues along her preplanned path, pouring all of her power into speed to stay one step ahead of the raging fires chasing her. The ninth and tenth ships prove simple enough to bring down in the same manner, but as she’s flying between the hull and balloon of the eleventh, a petal slams into the balloon, bursting into a sizeable patch of burning liquid fire that refuses to go out even as it eats through the repairing foam that tries to smother it.

That’s gonna take the ship down quickly enough. It shouldn’t count against my mission if it kills anyone... right?

As if on cue, a familiar failure notification pops into view in sync with the loud, harsh sound of metal grinding against metal behind her.

? ? ? ? ?

-Leave the country without killing any of your pursuers (Failed)

_____

“Shit,” Emily mutters, stopping in place and quickly scanning the battlefield to work out what went wrong before dodging a few more petals and letting them slam into the burning balloon beside her, starting the ship on a rapid fall towards the ground.

The issue quickly becomes obvious when she spots three of the ships she sent down to the ground lying in a pile together with half-crumpled frames.

They hit each other on the way down... Okay, only a few are needed to send the ground troops into disarray. I’ll send the rest off in random directions instead.

Sighing, Emily activates The Clock while watching the burning ship that was beside her plummet to the ground and crash, folding in on itself as the magical flames covering its balloon finally finish eating through the mana powering them and fade.

I’ll have to test that next. If I can drop ships that easily then this stage will be a piece of cake.

***

Back on the battlefield once more, Emily takes out four interceptors, selecting ones that are reasonably spread out and sending them straight down to the ground to distract the ground forces. Once she’s done, having taken slightly longer to spread her first targets out, Virgil sends a volley of petals towards her.

She twists in the air, gracefully dodging the first shots before taking a moment to enter full assistive processing to plot her route. Time stretches in her perception and, after running dozens of calculations and simulating the entire fight in the blink of an eye, she shoots off to begin another test.

She leads several petals, allowing them to build up speed before skilfully diverting them into the balloon of one of the highest-flying interceptor ships. The fire quickly consumes a sizeable portion of the ship’s balloon, and it plummets towards a ship below it as Emily powers on, leading another set of petals to burst against her next target.

The heavy metal constructs clash in the air as one falling ship knocks one of its stable companions to the ground with a mighty crash. An excited grin stretches Emily’s lips as no system notifications come from the first crash, but her expression freezes when she strips a third ship of its balloon, and she receives the dreaded notification as it collides with the panicking ground troops below.

Before she can question what changed, all of the petals twisting throughout the battlefield on winding paths to reach her shudder and change direction, rocketing towards her at full speed.

“Shit!” she mutters, taking one petal to the chest and one to the leg as she scrambles to dodge the flood of fire closing in on her.

Her hand quickly finds The Clock’s pouch, and she activates it while looking over at Virgil to try and understand why his attack suddenly changed. He’s standing in his large magic circle, staring at the burning wreckage of the ships before him with a frustrated, resigned expression on his face as he guides his petals to attack Emily.

Lightning strikes in Emily’s mind as time grinds to a halt.

No wonder he chose such a roundabout attack method. He was trying to help me harmlessly take down the ships before, but that much destruction pushed it over what he could make an excuse for. It looks like my optional quest requirement also fails when excessive deaths happen because of me, even if I didn’t directly cause them.