Four soldiers stepped through the canvas flap, leveling their harpoons as if to run them through. Given the wickedly sharp tips meant to spear the massive monsters living in the northern seas, Orion expected it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience.
The atmosphere grew stifling as they locked eyes.
Esmeralda lowered her center of gravity, her pale fingers curling as her nails hardened into razor-sharp points. Garrick shifted his weight to his back foot, his hand sliding along the grip of his greatsword. Beside them, Erethemor let out a low, rumbling growl that made the wooden map table vibrate.
They were battered, exhausted, and bleeding, yet they were among the very best Tier Three combatants in Cyril's service. If blood were drawn, the sailors would die; there was little doubt. But the noise would bring the entire camp down on their heads.
In the end, even if they somehow managed to make it out without spilling too much blood, there was no reason to let this madness continue.
Sighing, Orion stepped forward, placing himself between Garrick and the barbed harpoon tips. He ignored the weapons pointed at his chest, fixing his gaze on the Captain. He set aside all his emotions, knowing how unsettling that could make his purple eyes.
"I am Orion Voidwalker," he said loudly, breaking the tense silence. "Son of Antares. Archmage of the Arcane Collegium and Speaker of the High Council.”
Captain Corvus froze. The soldiers wavered, their eyes darting between their commanding officer and the bruised, dust-covered youth who claimed the highest bloodline in the Magocracy.
Orion could have continued, spewing threats about all the horrible ways these men would die if anything happened to him, but there was no need. He already disliked having to reveal his parentage; that would have been going too far, especially since their imaginations could do the job just as well.
The silence stretched. Claiming he was the Speaker’s son was not something that could be done lightly, as it would invite extremely harsh punishment if proven false.
Corvus stared at him, studying the sharp angles of his face, the pale white hair matted with sweat and dirt, and the adamantine frames perched on his nose. The resemblance to the Speaker was subtle beneath the grime, but the coldness in Orion's eyes mirrored the Archmage perfectly, and the hair matched.
"Stand down," he eventually ordered, his voice tight.
The soldiers lowered their harpoons, though they still blocked the exit.
Corvus rounded the map table. He did not apologize. "A bold claim. If you are the Speaker's son, surely you understand the chain of command. You must provide proof that you are needed elsewhere. If it were that easy to avoid a coming battle, no one would participate.”
It was an attempt to ease the tension more than any real justification, and they both knew it.
"I still need access to a communication crystal," Orion replied, dismissing the Captain's demand. "The information we carry outweighs any authority you might have. If you delay this transmission, you will be held accountable for the resulting damage.”
Corvus visibly weighed the political risk of denying him against the very real possibility that a swarm of murderous machines was coming their way.
He sighed, turned toward a locked chest in the pavilion's corner, drew an iron key from his tunic, and unlatched the lid, revealing a dormant communication crystal resting on a velvet cushion.
“If you want to reach Valderun, you should know it’s not been easy to keep the communication lines open,” Corvus said, stepping back and gesturing for him to approach.
That wasn’t surprising. There was a reason every faction had its own long-range communication methods, and that was because once it was cracked, counterspells could be set up to intercept or deny such magics with relative ease.
While it was impossible to do so throughout the forest, even for the Iron State, being so close to the border was a different matter.
Still, Orion walked to the chest. He placed his hands on either side of the smooth crystal and drew a thread of mana from the Field, bypassing the standard arcane dialing sequences.
He mapped the Fourier transforms through the CC, calculating the exact harmonic resonance needed to punch a signal across hundreds of miles to the capital's receiving matrix.
Once he was sure he had it, he poured the calculated frequency into the crystal, and it flared white.
The facets smoothed out, projecting a vertical plane of hard light above the chest. Static crackled, then cleared after more fiddling, resolving into a sharp image.
For a while, no one was on the other end until a young man in blue robes ran up to them.
Before he could even speak, Orion barked over him. “Inform the Speaker that his son needs to speak with him urgently!”
The mage gaped, probably at the sheer audacity of summoning the most powerful man in Cyril like that, but then the words filtered through, and he was gone.
Two minutes later, the crystal shifted, revealing Antares standing in the center of a marble-lined study. He wore immaculate white robes trimmed in silver and blue, as striking as ever. His hair, a perfect match for Orion's stark white, cascaded over his shoulders.
The Speaker of the High Council looked up from his book, raising an eyebrow at what was probably the puffing young mage who’d brought the crystal to him.
Then his eyes locked onto the projection, and he saw Orion, his torn, bloodstained coat. He registered the pale scar tissue peeking over the collar. He saw Garrick's scars, Esmeralda's ruined dress, and the sheer exhaustion etched into every line of their postures.
His expression shifted from mild amusement to focus, and he snapped the tome shut.
"Clear the tent," he instructed Corvus, even as he shooed the young mage. His voice was quiet, but the commanding tone that resonated through the crystal hit the room like a shockwave.
Corvus stiffened, standing at rigid attention. "Speaker, I stand by my guards—”
"I said clear the tent, Captain. You included,” Antares repeated softly. Despite the vast distance, the temperature in the pavilion seemed to drop at the threat of unbridled arcane power, lingering just beneath the polite tone.
For once, Corvus showed good sense by saluting, spinning on his heel. "Out," he barked at the soldiers.
The men filed out swiftly, Corvus himself following and securing the canvas flap behind them.
Team Obsidian stood alone before the projection. Antares let his gaze sweep over the team once more. "You are missing two.”
"Daus is dead," Orion reported, tiredly, hoping he wouldn’t have to go through this too often. "He was too far gone to heal and chose to merge with a tree to empower a hidden grove.”
Antares acknowledged the information with a brief nod. He was a man of logic and knew well that such deployments often carried risks. He also noted there was no response regarding the second missing person but chose not to pursue it for now. "And the Iron State facilities?”
"Destroyed," Garrick finally took over. “We destroyed several, and the main one in the region collapsed on itself, but we suspect the surviving machines have networked into a collective hive mind and are marching south. A new kind, called Mage-Killers, is already systematically dismantling the scout camps.”
“That is unexpected,” Antares murmured. “No matter, they’ll be taken care of.” He then turned to Orion. “Yet none of this explains the urgency of this call.”
"Verner Inutz betrayed us," Orion said simply. There was no easy way to say it.
Antares stilled.
"He was somehow masking his true status," Orion explained, still annoyed. "He is actually level one hundred and fifty-seven, and his class is much stronger than we expected. I imagine he used the deployment to observe us, but his real goal was to extract the Silence-alloy blueprints from the laboratory before collapsing the structure to cover his tracks.”
He paused, weighing how much he could safely say. They might have been in allied territory, but Verner had shown how little that mattered. And perhaps he was petty, but Corvus had just threatened their lives.
“There is more, but it’s too sensitive to discuss like this.”
Antares narrowed his eyes. The implication was clear. Verner served someone else, someone powerful enough to have ears around them.
"I understand," he said quietly. He stared through the projection for a few seconds, reflecting deeply.
Then the light vanished. The crystal went dark, returning to a dull, inert lump of glass on the velvet cushion.
Jordan blinked, stumped. “Did he just cut the connection?”
Before anyone could answer, a sudden drop in air pressure seized the tent. The thick canvas walls bowed inward, straining against their iron pegs, and the Field shook, for lack of a better term.
A crisp, cool breeze swept through the pavilion, and Antares stood before them, in the flesh.
He had folded hundreds of miles of space in an instant, crossing from the heart of the capital to the edge of the Ironwood Forest with less effort than many mages required to cast a cantrip.
There was no shimmering portal, no dramatic explosion of light. He simply imposed his will on the coordinates of reality, and the universe complied.
The sheer density of the power radiating from the Archmage pressed against them, heavy and suffocating, but it wasn’t hostile. Just a lot.
"You did well," he said. It was a bit awkward, as far as father-son reunions went, but then again, they never had a normal relationship.
“We all did our best,” Orion replied, equally stilted, though he felt the others straighten a bit at that.
Antares turned toward the entrance of the pavilion. "Captain Corvus.”
The canvas flap was thrown back, and the man stood at the entrance, his face pale, staring at the Speaker of the High Council, who had materialized in his camp out of thin air.
"Speaker," Corvus stammered, saluting again.
"Pull every man behind the palisades immediately," Antares ordered, stepping up to the map table. He dismissed the Captain's compass and charts with a wave of his hand. "Abandon the forward trenches. Concentrate your forces within the central fortifications.”
"Sir, if the machines—“
“They are irrelevant to your current position," Antares stated, his voice brooking no argument. "Execute the order.”
Corvus vanished to shout commands across the compound.
Team Obsidian waited in silence as the camp outside erupted into organized chaos. Wooden gates groaned shut. Iron bars slammed into place, and soldiers abandoned the outer perimeter, falling back into the camp's core.
Antares stood at the center of the pavilion, eyes closed. He was reaching into the Field, touching the ambient flow of nature mana, water, and earth beneath the forest floor. Orion watched with intense fascination, taking note of everything, even though there was less to learn than he would have liked, because his father had no need for spells and formulas, simply reaching into the fundamental forces of reality to reshape them.
“I can see them,” he muttered, but didn’t offer any further explanation before he raised his hands. Outside the tent, the ground trembled.
Orion pushed [Holographic Containment] outward, watching the magic take shape beyond the canvas. Deep in the soil around the camp, tons of dense granite, ironwood roots, and compacted clay ripped free from the earth. Antares bound the raw materials together with pure will and forged them into one in seconds.
Four towering, quadrupedal constructs pulled themselves from the dirt. They were brutal beasts resembling bears, but lacking aesthetic grace and much larger.
They also possessed no active magic for the Silence-alloy to nullify, only tens of tons of physical mass animated by the Archmage's will.
“Go. Hunt them down," Antares commanded softly.
The bears turned and sprinted into the dark forest, shaking the trees as they rushed to intercept the Mage-Killers hunting along the border. Antares clearly knew the hounds had already inflicted devastating losses, but his constructs would crush the remaining assassins and shield the surviving camps.
He opened his eyes and walked past the map table, stepping through the tent flap. Team Obsidian followed him out.
The soldiers of Leviathan's Watch and the few druids stood in tight formations behind the palisades, staring in awe at the Archmage.
Antares raised a single finger toward the sky, and a dome of mana erupted from the center of the camp. It expanded at blinding speed, washing over the tents, soldiers, and wooden walls. The barrier solidified with a deep hum, forming an impenetrable sphere over the entire installation.
Even at a glance, Orion could tell it severed the camp from the surrounding forest dimensionally, locking out the creeping Silence and sealing the soldiers safely inside. When the machines arrived, they would break against the shield like water against a cliff.
With his work complete, Antares turned back to Team Obsidian. He made a sweeping gesture, and everything went black.