Despite darkness pooling on the other side of the cockpit window, inside the ship remains bright, lit by humming strips of crystalline metal set into the ceiling. The black mist wraps tightly around the ship, searching for a way in as the defensive enchantments carved into the hull ward it off.

“What is it?” Pod asks confused, flicking between blank camera feeds and ship diagnostics, trying and failing to find any effect other than obscuring their vision.

Emily doesn’t bother checking on the ship as she releases a burst of machina to reinforce the connections to her soldiers that she can feel the mana-charged mist trying to break before probing it with her mana. She reads the delicate blend of hatred and suffering that bites back like an open book.

“It’s a curse of sorts,” Emily explains, activating a program in Elisime’s Logic Core that opens a series of vents along the underbelly of the ship and redirects several internal airways. “A little like Mensacus but far more simplistic, and, unfortunately for them, useless against our army.”

Several panels of the floor around Mensacus’ cushion shift, opening up to let through a stream of the pure black mist. Before it can spread, the veins tracing Mensacus’ body pulse, and the mist shoots towards the red crystals on his stock, unable to resist as he drinks the potent death saturating the weaker curse.

A thread of Mensacus’ mental mana flows into one of the runic formations in his cushion, travelling through a highly mana-conductive wire to a matching set of runes on Emily’s chair. The thread reforms and touches the base of her skull, passing a wordless understanding between them as Mensacus feeds his mother a detailed breakdown of the curses’ taste.

“Nasty thing though,” Emily continues telling Pod, guiding the ship down to drop more soldiers, sending this group with a set of mortars to make the darkness even more oppressive to Denros’ forces. “If you let it touch you, it’ll slowly leech your lifeforce until you shrivel up and die, feeding the ritual more energy.”

“Yikes, even through my machina?” Pod questions, glancing back at the swirling darkness flowing into Mensacus.

“Yes, though it will be slower to affect you than most in The Wall. It’s targeting mana and the concepts of life and communication, so only the latter will bother you.”

“Concepts? Didn’t you say Ulean mages have a horrible understanding of basic elemental theory?”

“Yes, but this is ritual magic, and rituals are a lot less restrictive in the depth of knowledge required to create them. As long as you offer a sufficient and related price, it’s not hard to use a ritual to deploy elements you have no affinity with or ability to control,” Emily explains with a tone of disdain. “If Mensacus' feedback is accurate, they sacrificed the mortal inhabitants of every city bordering The Wall just to try to stop our advance here and cut our communications.”

Pod flinches at the thought of so many innocent lives lost, but he limits his reaction to a frown, closing the useless camera feeds floating across the translucent screens surrounding his seat and checking the batteries again.

“Why only the mortals?” he asks after a few moments of silence. “If it’s targeting mana, shouldn’t it have harmed their mages too?”

“Yes, but even if they’re willing to throw away their citizens to kill us, I doubt they’ll do the same to their own armies if they can help it. They’ll have some marker, probably woven into the enchantments on a piece of their standard equipment, to stop the mist targeting their people. It is keyed to a specific energy signature after all,” Emily says, looking through the eyes of one of her ground troops as they gun down a squad of Denrosi soldiers trekking through the sandstorm, noticing their faces covered in masks with breathing filters over their mouths.

That works too.

“Should we be worried about our allies?” Pod questions, gesturing behind them with his head.

“No. They directed the mist towards The Wall: its winds are self-contained and will trap it inside,” Emily replies, assuaging the last of his concerns.

Distant gunshots and explosions accompany Elisime on her slow flight through the storm. Emily splits her cores in two, letting half of them focus on gathering the dense atmospheric mana in the seething sands outside, drawing it into her skin and using every inch of her body to refine it as it flows to refill her circles.

The rest of Emily’s focus is devoted to guiding the ship onwards, slowly emptying her cargo holds and spreading Emily’s soldiers like a creeping rot that eats away at the foundations of Denros’ rulers’ confidence with each stray squad eliminated or well-fortified outpost reduced to bloodstained rubble. By the time Elisime slips from the sandstorm’s clutches, flying into clear, open air and out of the ink-stained wall of sand, three of the six holds dedicated to metal soldiers are empty.

The moment the darkness covering the cockpit’s window clears up, Emily and Pod are greeted by the sight of tens of small scouting ships floating in a long line parallel to The Sand Wall but tens of kilometres away, waiting for them.

“What a warm welcome,” Emily mutters as the ships turn and flee, starting with those closest to Elisime and spreading out like a wave.

Emily pulls her communicator from her belt, where she placed it a few hours earlier after it lost connection, and rejoins the ongoing group call with the Elders.

“We’ve left The Sand Wall now; entering the fourth layer of defences,” Emily says the moment she connects, reactivating Elisime’s two idle engines. “I’ve left a good half of my army inside to keep sweeping up their forces since my soldiers are unaffected by that curse, but my connection to them broke the moment I left the curse’s boundaries. They’ll keep operating on the commands I’ve given, but I can’t promise you any information until I collect them.”

“That’s perfect, well done,” Josephine responds with a lack of energy despite the good news. “We’ve captured two targets and eliminated one. The final was found dead already when we reached her, consumed by the foul ritual she’d activated.”

“We were worried for a bit there that you may not be doing so well in there,” Silver says with a new, painful-sounding wheeze in his voice. “Might’ve assumed the worst if you hadn’t sent that droid out to signal us. So many lives went into that curse; it’s quite horrific. Never thought I’d see a city go silent like that – unnatural.”

“We were fine,” Emily responds in a flat tone, flooding the ship’s engines with machina and pushing her quickly back to full speed despite her hulking mass. “They may have used a lot of lives, but they used them poorly. Since I was that confident charging into a mana-dense sandstorm, should they not have assumed that my ship was air, and mana, tight? The airborne curse couldn’t enter until I let it, at which point it became a free meal for Mensacus.”

Silence falls for a moment across the call before Silver breaks it.

“That-“ he pauses to cough. “That makes sense. I’d assumed you’d be able to block it somehow, but it sounds like you were already prepared. Still, I’m surprised your son’s stronger than that curse.”

“It’s not really a case of him being stronger, there are a lot of factors at work, and if anything, he’s weaker,” Emily explains, sending a wave of mana to caress Mensacus’ receiver as he disconnects his thread from her neck to sulk about being called weak. “That curse has as much ground to cover as it does fuel, so even though it’s still potent enough to kill a fourth circle mage if you get stuck in it, I’d only classify it as third circle. Add that to the lack of skill of the creator and the curse’s lack of consciousness, and it becomes no better than an aimless bundle of death and hatred for my son to consume.”

Elisime catches up with the fleeing scout unfortunate enough to be blocking her path to Rizenford, and several shooting hatches open along her side. The barrels of several fixed kinetic cannons peek out of the opened ports and fire a burst of bullets that shred the scout as Elisime continues past without slowing.

“That curse should linger for quite a while,” Emily continues, “especially since I’m fuelling it more with every Denrosi life my soldiers claim in there, but I’ll be happy to clean it up for you once this is over. I might be able to do something about the endless sandstorm too, if you wanted.”

“We already had some plans of our own to study The Sand Wall, but if you could share what you learn from it, we’d be grateful if you removed it with the curse,” Josephine answers after a moment of thought.

“Okay, sure. We’re back to full speed now, so assuming we don’t run into any interruptions, we’ll reach Rizenford in three hours.”

“Understood. We’ll start preparing ships that can weather that cursed storm, but for now, we can’t send any reinforcements with you. It’s not unexpected, but it is our worst case for you. Good luck.”

Emily mutes the call and sets her communicator on her armrest before turning her gaze back to the horizon. The rest of the flight over the desert rolls by quickly. They pass a few cities on the way and shred the ships that try to block them, but they barely lose a minute to the interruptions, reaching the border where sand slowly blends with coarse grass at the centre of the continent only an hour after leaving The Wall.

Twenty minutes go by as shrubs and greenery pass by beneath them, with the occasional group of beasts running across the landscape, but Emily and Pod don’t see a single soldier trying to stop them. Even as they pass a city five minutes later, not a single airship rises to meet them, and only a few troops shoot at them from the walls and gates with rifles, artillery, and rockets, failing to hit Elisime as she cruises by at high altitude, thousands of metres from their positions on the ground.

It's not until they’re an hour out from their goal that they finally run into the expected resistance, with a massive army waiting for them, spread across a set of fortified embankments running alongside a thin river. Over a hundred ships are blanketing the horizon, awaiting Elisime’s arrival with guns at the ready, and close to ten times that number of men and women on the ground are hurrying between fixed and temporary weapons and defences, both magical and not.

“It’s impressive, but do they think we’ll just wait here?” Emily mutters to herself, narrowing her eyes and scanning the air past the waiting defences, spotting a few retreating ships in the distance. “Or, more likely, they just want to delay our approach. Okay, I’ll bite.”

Immediately, she slows Elisime to a near stop without reducing her altitude, leaving them floating in the air, staring down the waiting Denrosi forces. Emily opens the Cutter deployment hatches at the rear of the ship at the same time as several cargo holds below.

She pours mana into the air beneath the open holds, forming it into a simple wind and earth-based spell. Rows of mechanical soldiers wake up at the edge of the expanded storage rooms, stepping out into thin air without hesitation. The spell catches them as they fall, blanketing each droid in a twisting vortex that lightens their weight and slows their descents to a crawl.

Two bomb-loaded Cutters fire from their launching rails, using the speed boost to move away from Elisime, spreading out to target the edges of the defensive line. Several more Cutters held in one of the large holds on the ship’s underbelly activate, rolling out and catching the slowing spell, hovering in place for a moment before directing their engines backwards and shooting out ahead of their mothership.

The small squadron of jets spread out, armed with a blend of bombs and coil guns. Half of them climb higher into the sky, and the others charge straight for the waiting airships. The crack of artillery rolls across the plains, and hundreds of shells shoot up towards Emily’s small fighters. She rapidly sends commands to the ships, loaded with machina, and watches as they twist in a series of complicated evasive manoeuvres, making the most of their powerful, finely adjustable engines and making it nearly impossible to strike them down.

As the jets enter within a few hundred metres of the line, a volley of rockets and elemental spells of varying shapes rise to meet them. The speeding aircraft each release a spray of burning chaff, coated in a potent magical blend that releases enough mana to misdirect the targeted attacks, as they weave through the rest.

Six heavy bombs cut through the air towards the fortified embankment, whistling as they fall and drawing the attention of everyone on the ground. Runes carved into the metal structures glow, and a translucent, multicoloured bubble springs up to wrap around them all seconds before Emily’s gifts land.

The primed casings shatter against the barrier, bursting in a dazzling display of light and fire that sends ripples across the protective shield and blinds half of the people inside. The shockwaves of the blasts reach the ships above, but Emily’s unmanned Cutters ride the unstable airwaves with ease even as the Denrosi ships shudder unstably.

The coil guns hanging from the bellies of several of the jets rattle out shots, targeting and shredding the connections holding the Denrosi ships’ balloons to their hulls while weaving deftly between their return fire.

After the first pass, the Cutters disperse, curving around for a second bombing run as hundreds of metal soldiers hit the ground running, storming the mounted defences and spraying bullets, steam, fire, and explosives on the soldiers trying to fend them off. Several of the droids are drowned in spells and gunfire, stepping on mines and catching grenades with their chests, but their emotionless metal allies step over their corpses to take their positions unaffected.

To make matters worse for the Denrosi soldiers facing them, several of the half-destroyed machines keep dragging themselves forward, raising their guns to keep shooting even after losing limbs and heavy chunks of their alloy flesh, with wires and tubes hanging from the gaps, leaking oil and coolant like spilt blood.

Emily finishes deploying her army and kicks Elisime back into full speed, shooting through a gap in the defensive line’s aerial blockade as her Cutters drop another airship onto the barrier below, causing it to crack under the weight. Another volley of bombs whistles through the air as the battle fades into the distance behind them, and the roaring explosions that follow bring the crisp tone of shattering glass, signalling the fall of the fort as Emily and Pod turn their attention ahead to the final stretch of their assault.