Briggs’ head was turned south-east, where a wild flash of magic danced above the horizon for a moment.

Burt came drifting over aflight, his glowing crystalline Wings keeping him aloft without needing to beat or generate a wind. “Looks like the Pyramid of Sahur, Commander,” he reported, and they waited for the satellite images to refocus and confirm the freshly smoking, charred Pyramid’s status a minute later. Dozens of blocks had shattered and blown out about the Pyramid as the Spellflare fed back to it. Its consumption of the Undead was because it had also devoured the domain in that area, and the discorporating Undead close to the Mirage were caught in the wild magic at their most vulnerable moment.

Pity them!

“Clever play,” Briggs grunted, nodding once. “They know we can crack one without Fae now, so if they try this again, it’ll be with a minimum of two, possibly a trio, and they’ll saturate the sky with fliers figuring we’ll know they are there, and probably try to materialize them while we’re already fighting as the best kind of ambush.” Especially seeing this one hadn’t gotten anywhere with its attempted sneak attack.

“It... isn’t possible that they can manifest just anywhere, right?” Burt asked, his forehead furrowing. “They need a target before they can start the process, and it takes at least a day to manifest that much Mana...”

“Unless they are getting help from Below?” Briggs did not actually ask.

“Unless they are getting help from below,” Burt conceded. “Unless there’s multiple Netherlords at work, it’ll have to be a cluster of Pyramids, although I’m not sure how that helps us.”

“It means that they’ll manifest close together as a set, instead of in multiple locations,” Briggs calculated swiftly. “Which is good, as they won’t be able to manifest a true surrounding ambush from multiple vectors. Furthermore, they still have to manifest outside an existing domain. So, as long as we haven’t destroyed a Pyramid yet, they can’t manifest close to a fight, and we’ll have time to respond to them.”

“And if the Pyramid we’re fighting drops its domain?” Burt asked archly.

“Then its Undead all go away, and we can Interdict to stop them from coming back close by, if we don’t just take down that Pyramid at all speed.” Briggs rubbed his brick of a chin slowly. “Moving that much energy through the Conduit is going to create quite a surge, however. There’s no way to hide that kind of energy flux.”

Burt’s eyes glittered. “So, we’ll be able to detect it, if we’re looking and have the right sensors in place...”

“Placing flux sensors is something Sama can do.” Briggs eyed the map of Pyramid locations, especially clusters of them. “She should be able to get away with putting twenty down, starting with the clusters and moving to the more isolated ones. If we put a Seal Focus on them, they’ll be convenient teleportation destinations, too...”

Burt didn’t need to think long to figure what might happen then. “We could Teleport in on top of them and Spellflare the Mirage right at its source almost instantly, even before they send it out.”

“Might get a really impressive bang out of that, right? I think Driver Sam can Sudden Pair a Sage’s Spellflare, right?” Which would mean three Spellflares combined with Red...

“I believe he can, sir!” Burt grinned icily.

“Excellent. Howabouts you plan with Sama how to turn this great and deadly trick of theirs into a nice and deadly fiasco on their part, with or without Fae being here?” Briggs proposed with a solemn air.

“If there’s enough feedback, we might be able to take down all the Pyramids involved at once...” Burt pointed out thoughtfully.

“Oh, that hadn’t crossed my mind. Or just how much rock you KIA boys can turn to mud, and how fast you can do it.” He was one of the few people on the planet who could call their group of eight Sages ‘boys’ and get away with it.

Five of the eight of them had the Earth Element. They could totally take down a whole Pyramid with breathtaking speed. Swampy and Tox had the Water Element on top of it, the synergy of which would more than double their efforts!

“The show must go on, sir?” Burt asked softly, eyes gleaming as he considered the real reason why they were going through all this mess, instead of actively pressuring and destroying each Pyramid one by one.

------

“Peter, bring the Cascade up. We will place it in the Nave,” Archangel Jeremiel whispered.

There was no reply or hint of motion behind him. Jeremiel turned around in consternation, and froze in shock.

His Advocate Peter was looking at him with confused eyes, each orb on opposites sides of the crystalline Ruby blade that was jutting out from his face. His agent’s jaw fell slowly as his eyes slowly rolled up, and then he was forced off to one side and his skull slid effortlessly from the blade, nothing but limp meat as his corpse slid away across the floor, a sign of incredible, easy strength.

The heavens-blue eyes staring at him were alive with an almost incandescent fury, a will to kill that shocked the usually imperturbable Archangel to his core.

And she had the Cascade’s conical apex in her hand... except that a hole in space opened below it as he was comprehending all this, and she dropped it within before he could even blink.

The next second, as he was clawing for his magic, a stillness washed past him like a hollow wave, and all the Mana around him froze in place.

Nothing moved. Nothing! Nothing was coming to him, his Armor wasn’t manifesting, his Shield wouldn’t come out, the weapons of Light from his Bound Gloves weren’t materializing. There was nothing. Nothing!

Not even his Wings, gifts from the Lords of Light themselves, could spread themselves against the unmoving weight of the Mana!

“It was you!” he screamed in terrified realization, as all the mysterious deaths of the Synod, its Archangels and agents, suddenly became obvious.

His other four agents were nowhere to be seen, and he knew without even considering it that they were sprawled just out of sight, taken down so quickly and cleanly that he had heard nothing, and his Awareness, his Awareness wasn’t reaching beyond his skin right now, totally absorbed and suppressed by this field of motionlessness around him. Likewise, it would have sensed nothing when she swallowed his agents in her Null and killed them!

It was like every single drop of Mana weighed tons, and he didn’t have the strength to move them!

This, this was the person who killed them all, including an Archangel within the Synod itself!

Sama gave him only a wide eight-canine smile, and Tremble rang out Ding! Ting! before she was coming in at a speed no human should have without magic, a speed no mage, however proud they were of their physique, could possibly keep up with.

Archangel Jeremiel was able to see her before he died, all because of his timely command, but it did not do him much good.

---

The golden candle, veined with red from the blood that had been mixed with it during its creation, went out abruptly, the bright flame snuffed out and an acrid black stream of smoke rising from it swiftly.

The Witness on duty opened his eyes, beheld the smoking candle that was also slowly starting to powder and collapse on itself, and reached out to the speaker beside him, depressing the switch there. “Inform Archangel Uriel that Jeremiel’s Votary Candle has gone out,” he said emotionlessly, before returning to his vigil.

It was not his duty to be concerned over the death of an Archangel, all of whom now had Candles burning endlessly in here, when before less than half availed themselves of the alarms to their fellow Archangels. Their concern over the implications of having something tied to their souls had been overridden, for the most part, and now they would know when one of their number died.

The sole living Archangel, or perhaps ex-Archangel, not represented here was Gabriel. She had lost her Wings and was ignoring orders from the rest of the Synod to return, also a matter that did not concern him.

Nor did the missing Luminous Cascade of Eternal Glory, one of the great Weapons of the Church, meant to destroy the strongholds and unholy places of enemies of the faith.

------

Sama’s eyes were cold and clear as she looked down at the area below her.

The fully-assembled and ready-to-go device the Church of Light called a Luminous Cascade of Endless Glory hovered on an invisible Disk next to her, fully charged up and literally needing only a button to activate.

It was a horrifying device, one that drew in the power of Light for miles around and focused it in on a broad area below, baking everything beneath it as a magnifying glass might fry an ant. The instant it activated, a field of force encapsulated the entire area under the Cascade, allowing no one and nothing in or out.

They had been going to set this thing off inside the main Church of Heaven in Bunyantown.

They had probably wanted to set it off at a Coralost Compound or Community, but the White Mana Zones made that impossible. It didn’t matter that it was powerful Forbidden Magic or not, unless it was Typeless Magic its effective Caster Level would plummet to the level of less than a Mage Spell, probably capable of destroying the church and its grounds, but not much more.

At full power, it had a radius of a full mile. While that wasn’t as great as a true Forbidden spell, this was set up, ready to go, and she literally needed to press a button to activate it. The Church would usually have a Light Elemental servant do that deed for it, but also had plenty of fanatics willing to sacrifice themselves for such a glorious strike against an enemy.

Bunyantown had grown significantly in the last decade, but not enough to warrant such a strike. Probably twenty thousand innocent people would have died under the searing Light of the Cascade. Everything beneath it, including the Hall of Paul Bunyan and the Wolverine Hunters, would have been reduced to baked glass.

Now, this training area for the elite forces of the Synod was going to suffer that fate.

There had been some discussion about doing it right around the Synod itself, or the Cathedral of the Last Prophet. The adherents of the Church of Light here had heard all of the accusations against the Synod and the Light, ringing with Truth... and chosen to not care, to believe that the Church had its reasons, and they were the right ones, even if they were sinister.

It was a completely believable and expected mindset, especially when dealing with a religion. It meant none of them were innocent... but they were still largely civilians, still largely unimportant, and killing such would only paint them as terrorists, the very thing the Synod was itself pretending not to be.

Wiping out their most valuable and well-trained mages, now, who didn’t have the Wards to defy their own Cascade being used on them, was a different matter.

Archangel Jeremiel had died less than five minutes ago. His team, and the watchers observing that team, had preceded him. The Synod had no time to prepare for what was about to happen, had not issued any alarms or alerts.

Sama lifted a stone above the triggering button. Tremble tinged, and there was only empty air left behind her. A stone fell down, depressed a button, and horrible killing Light filled the sky.

The shouts of alarm quickly became screams, and the City of Light could only look on in horror as their own killing Light came down and rendered judgement upon them.