After explaining the sudden storm and receiving congratulations for her successful ascension, Emily ends the call with Old Man Silver and heads back to her workshop.

“That was insane,” Pod says as she steps back onto solid ground, staring at the churning sea and fading storm clouds. “You’re like a force of nature. Can all fourth circle mages do that, or is that just a you thing?”

“Little bit of both,” Emily responds, leading him to the elevator at the back of the chamber and down to collect the refined space crystals she left in the lab. “I only put around one and a third of a standard fourth circle mage’s mana into that attack, which reached a point that even I struggled to hold under control without an external array. So, theoretically, a normal mage could replicate something close to the same degree of destruction, but with the current casting methods of Ulean mages, they’d struggle to use that much of their reserves in one go.”

“Right, elementalists versus arcanists,” Pod nods in understanding. “Still, it’s kind of terrifying to know that a fourth circle mage has enough power to destroy a city.”

Emily glances at him with a raised brow as they gather the piled-up purple gems in their arms, ignoring the strange distortions that make it look as if their hands jump from one place to another each time they reach out to take one.

“You say that like you haven’t helped make enough bombs to flatten a continent.”

“That feels different!” he argues with animated enthusiasm. “With the amount of time and resources we put into those, it feels fair. You mages can just casually summon and throw bombs with barely any effort!”

They make their way towards the surface in the elevator before stepping out and winding through the walled-in compound towards one of the largest hangar workshops.

“How much time and effort do you think I’ve put into designing spells? Gathering mana? Deepening my elemental connections? Collecting materials for and producing elixirs?”

“Alright alright, I get the picture,” Pod says, rolling his eyes dismissively and never losing his playful grin. “Magic’s totally fair.”

“I don’t think any of the mages you’ve bombed would call mechanics fair either,” Emily comments dryly as they step into the hangar, her gaze roaming across the body of her newest masterpiece with charged anticipation. “It’s all a matter of perspective.”

Standing before them, filling the massive warehouse, is a gigantic airship. It’s fixed to a heavy metal frame that holds it suspended a few metres above the ground, allowing full access to the smooth hull that’s lined with magical traces but no visible runes.

The body of the ship is three times the size of Calypso, spanning over three hundred metres of metal, and it has four giant electrical engines fixed at the rear, two on each side, with a mag-lev disc design similar to their smaller Cutters. The balloon above the craft is bound tightly to the metal frame, completely deflated, and lining both sides are two long, imposing railgun systems fixed to the ship by a set of adjustable servos.

Pod follows Emily to the rear bays and sets down his half of the space crystals before heading back to the passenger hatch at the front of the ship to continue working on the scouting drone launch system. Emily adds her crystals to the new pile before running her hand along the belly of her unnamed ship, flooding it with machina and drinking in every minute detail.

A small signal to the Logic Core in the centre of the ship causes the hull to split, butterflying open to reveal ten individual cargo holds. Emily keeps her metal palm pressed to the hull, closing her eyes and focusing her scan on the holds as she falls into the Spellweave to modify the prepared arrays for them.

Machina buzzes through her mind, boosting her processing as she models design after design, getting rid of any unstable options and quickly narrowing down her choice of runes. Within a few minutes, she relaxes the flow of power in her head and opens her eyes with a calm confidence set in her gaze.

She approaches the first cargo bay and flexes her metal hand, pulling an attachment from her ring finger. A magical core clicks into place in her forearm, and strands of flexible metal extend from the hole in her palm, curling around her digits and forming five silver, claw-like blades. Her forearm pops open with a hiss, revealing a slot for her to insert a vial of powdered space crystal before clicking shut and charging the silver claws with a purple tint.

Emily uses the engraving tool to carve runes and magical traces into the walls of the cargo hold, keeping it topped up with a constant stream of spatial powder from her belt as she works. She carefully fills the space with an expansion array, carving a slot in the centre of the room’s ceiling for one of the refined greater gems.

She all but finishes the first room, leaving empty the slot for the gem that will power it, then moves on to the second, carving several connections between the separate arrays to help them balance each other. It takes Emily days of focused work to drain her supply of spatial powder and as the last grain seeps into the wall through her claws, she finally connects the tenth cargo hold to the first.

She scans the array several times with a mixture of machina and mana, making sure not a single trace is out of place and at risk of destabilising the set-up before she steps out and picks up the pile of refined crystals with a wave of unattributed mana. She splits the ten glistening gemstones apart, lifting them all in sync and slotting them into place in one go.

A pulse of mana wraps the enclosed spaces, and they warp before Emily’s eyes. The runic patterns carved into the walls seem to shrink and grow in cycles, following a steady rhythm like the beat of a heart but remaining a consistent size despite the visual trickery. She approaches one of the bays, walking up the armour panel that’s lowered to the floor as a loading ramp and feeling space stretch around her as she enters the boundary of the ship.

The cargo hold expands into a wide hall around her, with ample space to store her growing mechanical army.

“Perfect,” she mutters to herself, scanning the active array with her mana to ensure it’s completely stable as she sends a request to the factory’s main Logic Core.

The large hangar doors behind the ship swing open with a rumble, and a steady stream of metal soldiers march in. They all bring an assortment of equipment with them, from crates of ammunition and bombs to spare battery banks and artillery, and they file into the front cargo bays first, depositing their supplies before heading to the rear bays to line up shoulder to shoulder and turn idle.

Emily leaves her army to restock the ship for her and slips through one of the cargo bay’s internal doors, stepping into the ship’s narrow corridors and heading to meet Pod at its heart. She passes banks of batteries and several steam generators charging them before stepping into a large room filled with rows of crystalline circuitry. Pod nods distractedly in greeting as she enters, keeping his focus trained on a particularly active sheet of glass covered in buzzing electricity.

“Have you started loading?” he asks without turning around.

“Yes,” Emily confirms, looking over his shoulder at the Logic Core performing hundreds of adjusting weight calculations per second as a flood of new data rushes into it thanks to the new spatial storages. “They’ll be finished within twenty minutes, and we should be fine. The arrays are actually three per cent more efficient in weight reduction than my initial estimate suggested, and I designed the engines with an expected ten per cent variance either way.”

“Okay. I’ve run through all the other checks already, and a full load reading was the last on my list,” Pod says, finally turning to look at her. “She’s all ready for her first flight. Are you finally gonna name her?”

Emily nods, brushing her palm affectionately across the panel beside them.

“We’ll call her… Elisime,”

Pod raises a brow at the foreign word, rolling it across his tongue as he considers it.

“It sounds pretty, but what does it mean?”

“It’s from the language of the Lerus Isles; it’s how they refer to the ionised air that signals an approaching storm, but it’s also used as a common saying for incoming danger. The direct translation would be: The Herald of the Storm.”

***

Half a day later, Emily and Pod are in the air, sitting side-by-side in Elisime’s spacious cockpit as her sensors pick up a massive distortion a few kilometres ahead of them.

“What am I looking at?” Pod asks, glancing at the data readout on a translucent glass panel beside him. “Is that Liberte’s barrier?”

“Yeah,” Emily nods, pulling her communicator from her belt to call Old Man Silver. “It’s very good at fooling the perception of living beings and magic, but our electromagnetic sensors aren’t either of those.”

Pod nods in understanding, scanning through the jumbled data readout.

“It still does a pretty good job blocking our scans of the inside, though,” he mutters as Emily’s call connects. “I can work out the boundaries, but can’t see any movement inside.”

“That thing can detect our barrier?” Silver’s voice echoes out from the tablet in Emily’s hand. “Looks like another job for Earnie. I think he’s going to start cursing you soon.”

“He knew what he was getting himself into when he agreed to awakening,” Emily says without sympathy. “Besides, half the reason we’re stopping by here is so I can give Minerva the meeting I promised and get a look at your barrier’s array. I’m sure insulating it against electromagnetic wave detection will come up.”

“I see. And the other half?”

“So we can have a little chat about my targets and rewards. I assume you’ll want to involve the Defence Force before I crush Denros.”

“Confident words,” Silver says with a chuckle. “Though I expected it when you told me you’d ascended and were on your way. I’ve called a meeting of the Elders already. We should be ready to evaluate the validity of your claims within five days. I’ll send a message to the Defence Force and request a bay for your ship, best not to put that thing in the commercial docks, if it’d even fit.”

“Oh, no need,” Emily says dismissively, ignoring their implied lack of faith. “Elisime can stay in the air indefinitely. Just let us know where you’d rather we wait.”

Old Man Silver falls silent for a few moments before letting out a disbelieving scoff.

“That works too. Just park her over our headquarters, no one will complain since I technically own the airspace.”

“Sure thing, see you in a minute,” Emily replies before ending the call.

She and Pod watch through the wide glass window before them, along with several external video feeds positioned on displays around them, as the ship slides through Liberte’s illusory barrier. Both of their machinas thrum through their piloting chairs, adjusting their individual views of their feeds and, in Emily’s case, guiding the ship towards the Silver Moon Mercenary headquarters.

As he zooms in on the people below, Pod notices heads turning to look up at the imposing ship with curiosity and wonder, drawn by the unique electric harmonies of her engines. Emily glances over and sees him beaming with pride at the attention. She rolls her eyes at his enthusiastic reaction.

None of them even know what they’re looking at.

Emily lowers Elisime’s speed as they cut through the city’s airspace, reducing the volume of her song. When they finally reach the white stone mercenary headquarters, all it takes is a few seconds of the ship’s rotors flipping one hundred and eighty degrees and firing with a loud crack to bring it to a complete stop.

All the heads on the street below turn towards the sudden roar, with a mixture of jealousy, fear, and awe painted across their faces as they notice the possessive positioning of the ship over Silver Moon’s building and feel the powerful energy signatures emanating from within.

They understand better.

Emily calmly rises from her seat, collecting Mensacus from the plush cushion stitched with runes behind her chair and slinging him over her shoulder as Pod follows her without a word. They head down to a passenger hatch below the cockpit and step onto a platform in the centre of the room with several wires attached. A spark of machina unlatches the electromagnets locking the platform in place, and Pod activates the enchantment in his boots as Emily binds her soles to the metal below her with an instinctive, tight weave of machina.

The platform drops from the ship, plummeting towards the ground below before rapidly slowing for the last few metres of the descent to touch down in front of the headquarters’ front door with a soft thud.

Silence falls across the street as the force of Emily’s presence washes out across the mercenaries passing through, and it's only broken by Old Man Silver’s footsteps as he strides out of his building to meet her.

“Damn,” he mutters under his breath as he takes her in, his gaze noticeably drifting towards the Needler hanging from a strap on her shoulder with a hint of unease.

His attention is quickly stolen by Elisime looming above, covering several streets in width and almost half of Merc Street’s length, blotting out the sun. His expression shifts to one of excitement as he finally makes eye contact with Emily.

“She looks terrifying,” he says, stepping aside and gesturing politely for Emily and Pod to enter. “Tell me everything.”