“It doesn’t change anything.”

Archmage Janry wasn’t too impressed by the official creation of the Earth Alliance. That’s what he’d been calling it for a while, and just signing a paper didn’t really do much. The only consequence was the Earth Alliance being closer to actually engaging with the mundanes, and that meant Janry had to hurry.

The people most worried about it weren’t even his fellow mages. The news – and subsequent doubts – came from some of their fae allies. Not everyone on Earth was pleased with Princess Felicity’s high-handed approach and her absolutely ruthless takeover of Earth’s enclaves. She’d gone after them all in the same day, so they couldn’t even band together in defense.

A triumvirate of objectors had emerged among Earth’s fae, important and powerful individuals who leaned more toward Janry’s direction than the Alliance’s, represented by people from enclaves in the United States, India, and Europe. Some of them had the backing of their superiors and more were there simply for their own interests, but none of them had official approval. They wouldn’t, with the fae.

“It changes how much time we have,” Archmage Moravin said, addressing the fae more than the mages. “We may have to reduce the number of targets.”

“Yes, unfortunate.” Janry wasn’t overly concerned by that. The more expansive the damage they could blame on the Earth Alliance, the better, but beyond a certain point it was just theatre. Important theatre, but he was certain that even just one or two points of contention would be enough to sink the Alliance’s overtures to the mundanes.

“Do we have enough gremlins, at least?” He asked, directing his question at the fae representatives.

“Yes,” one of them ground out, without further explanation. The stony fae in question wasn’t one for superfluous words.

“Then it will be easy enough to deal with the highest-value targets. Beyond that, we only need a few others for it to really stick.” Janry glanced over at Archmage Harper. He flicked up a glamour to demonstrate the current plan.

“We only have one supernatural target — Alpha Chester. His exact whereabouts are not well known, but considering he’s taken control of the Deep Wilds portal on Earth, he can be lured out that way. Archmage Tasser is in charge of that.” Janry would have preferred to take care of that himself, but the entire Alliance knew to be wary of him at this point. One of his cadets would have to do, and since Tasser was an archmage it was more likely to be successful.

“For the mundane targets, since we want it to look like the Alliance is making a bid to take over, we’ve targeted a number of top leaders.” Harper changed the glamour to show several portraits of individuals, rendered in ghostly mage-light. “Most of them will purposely fail, though, as we want them capable of effectively ‘discovering’ the Alliance and taking action against them. Getting away from mundanes is easy enough, after all. We don’t need actual chaos or destruction, we just need to show how dangerous the Earth Alliance is.”

“We’ll be doing this at about the same time,” Moravin added. “Distracting the Alliance by a noisy commotion at Chester’s place is the best way to ensure that our teams succeed. The mundane security is irrelevant, of course.”

“Of course,” Harper agreed. “The other attack vector is the mundane weapons. Since Wells clearly has access to their nuclear arsenal, it is the most plausible and attention-getting target. That’s what we’ll be asking your gremlins to do,” he said, pointing at the trio of fae representatives. “There’s a lot of mundane technology that we have to bypass, since it’s apparently very tricky.”

“Having some of their own weapons used against them, combined with the knowledge that Wells has already compromised them, ought to make it easy to convince the mundanes they’re a bad idea,” Janry pointed out. “Just give them an easy solution and someone to blame and they’ll do pretty much anything you want.”

Moravin changed the glamour again, this time showing a map with highlighted points. Most were in the United States, but there were a sizeable amount in India, as well as Europe and China. Most of that was actually gleaned from old GAR files, and if nothing else Janry found it surprising how widely the weapons had proliferated. It was absolute madness.

“I, personally, am too high-profile to go along on any of the errands,” Janry said, though he wasn’t too discomfited by the fact. It might not be the best way to show his support to his allies, but he knew that if he showed up anywhere he would be followed and surveyed. “My cadet Houses will be going in my stead, while I am publicly elsewhere so it is not suspicious.”

The other Archmages didn’t seem completely happy about that, but they would have to cope. Anywhere he went would bring down too much attention and might tip their hand early. The fact that the fae were the ones taking the greatest risks offset that, though. It was the fae’s territory, so it was only fair, and at the same time it wasn’t like anyone would really miss them if something happened.

“Do we have a time frame on when the Alliance is intending to approach the mundanes?” Moravin asked the audience at large, the assembled mages and fae, many of whom had some sort of information source on the Earth side of things.

“So far as I know it’s still a few weeks away. Chester, especially, has something he’s working on.” Magus Leshiel volunteered. “That’s what I heard from my friend in House Xu, anyway.” Janry grunted and nodded to her. House Xu had been badly devastated in the altercation over the dragon’s portal – which would have been worth it if the portal had stayed closed – but they’d taken that as a sign to not work against the Alliance. At least overtly.

“Then we should take no longer than a week to get all our assets into place,” Janry judged. “I’ll provide the scry-comms from House Janry’s vault. The Guild of Enchanting might be shy about providing new ones right now but we have a number of corite-linked ones that are still functional.”

“Yes, sir,” Leshiel said, making a note. “Do we have a statement prepared yet?”

“A good point. I will write one after this meeting,” Janry noted. “Several, I imagine. The contents will depend on exactly how our preparations go.”

The topic moved on to specific ways and means. For the most part it wasn’t difficult to bypass mundane security, as a simple glamour would keep people or cameras from noticing, but there were more than simple cameras protecting some places. Any mage worth his salt could still use brute force, but bypassing long hallways of doors controlled from the inside without breaking everything took spells that hadn’t been invented yet. Or fae magic.

Some of their targets were protected more by obfuscation than by armor. People without a public itinerary, who didn’t necessarily spend the night at their own houses, were hard to track down for anyone. Janry passed along the names of several air-aspect mages who would be good for that kind of work, and didn’t have much else to do anyway.

Despite his apparent calm, Janry knew that if he missed this chance it would be awfully difficult to dislodge the Earth Alliance. The loss of secrecy wasn’t something that could be undone and the exact circumstances would set the tone of relations for a long time to come. If they let the Earth Alliance do as planned, mages in Faerie could end up marginalized, their power eroding and their access to the wealth of Earth drying up.

That was something that Janry wasn’t going to let happen.

A week was not much time to coordinate a simultaneous strike on twenty-four separate targets, but they’d already been practicing and organizing for some time. For most mages among Janry’s allies, it had been a long time since their tour in the portal worlds and they had to shake the rust off, or dig out and try to repair old foci. Then there was distributing scry-comms to the various fae and the occasional mage handler.

Janry had to empty out more of his treasury than he liked to pay for it all, but wealth could be rebuilt. In fact, when he had some time it wouldn’t be too hard to delve down into the Earth’s crust and mantle and dredge out more gold. While he didn’t have a metal aspect, he could at least sift it out of rock and let someone with the right magic extract pure elements from the undifferentiated mass.

Trying to do the same thing in Faerie was not a good idea. One of the problems with the portal worlds was that delving too deep or going too far ended up running into the frayed edges of reality, going in circles, or finding that the world itself stopped acting as expected. He couldn’t just pull riches out of the ground in Faerie as he could on Earth.

Idly, he considered Wells’ ability to open up portals while he sorted through the logistical paperwork. It had to be something that someone could duplicate. If there were other portal worlds, then perhaps there were other planets as well, and the riches and power that went with them. Hopefully places easier to tame than Earth.

Part of him considered that perhaps a good war would make it easier. With so many mundanes they would undoubtedly be fractious, but if they spent all that energy on removing themselves, then the ones that remained would be far more biddable. Especially if they had a handy target to blame.

Janry reached for a different set of papers and began altering the orders. He had initially considered only setting off one or two of the weapons, letting the rest be false victories that could be used to implicate the Earth Alliance. Upon reflection, it was probably better to set them all off and take advantage of the chaos. They’d still need to make sure that the blame was adequately cast on the Earth Alliance – and Wells in particular – but the more damage the better.

Fortunately, most of the gremlin-type fae, those who could interface with technology the best, would absolutely jump at the chance to meddle with something so powerful. It might be better to let each team believe that they were still one of the few who would have the chance, rather than letting them know all the sites would have detonations, but his plans would ensure there wouldn’t be any problems in the end. The mages were a little bit less reliable, or rather, more self-interested.

He'd have to keep a close eye on them and make sure he had someone of unimpeachable loyalty along with each team. After all, they hadn’t had any real combat since their portal world days and some of them might be squeamish or just too weak to do what was necessary. The targets were just mundanes, but not everyone could keep things in perspective.

Janry was aware that the entire plan could go badly, if the Earth Alliance got involved. Between Wizzy, Wells, and Chester, there were plenty of people with no compunctions about killing their fellow mages. At worst, the actual bones of the operation might be exposed, which would naturally lead back to him.

Even if that happened, Janry wasn’t all that worried. He wasn’t taking any direct action himself, and House Janry had been around for a long time. Even if the cadet houses were implicated, many of them had been worryingly comfortable with the idea of accepting Wells’ terms. It was probably better to let them bear the brunt of whatever backlash, since it would solve that problem and so long as his personal power was intact, so was House Janry.

The other Archmages might not be happy with him, but it wasn’t like they had shown any inclination other than to vacillate and scold. The only threat to him personally was the Earth Alliance, but sufficient political pressure would keep them at bay. Clearly someone with sense held Wells’ leash, otherwise he would have been attacking people left and right.

He'd faced more challenges in the endeavor than he had anticipated, but he was undeterred. Janry considered himself a reasonable man, and it was reasonable to admit that the opposition had taken him by surprise more times than he’d liked, and undermined his slow growth with precipitous action. But new power made new mistakes. Someone like Wells or Taisen would overextend, push too far, and everyone would agree they needed to be stopped. Once people got over the shock of Wells’ demonstration, and the Earth Alliance’s power was curbed, he was sure everyone else would scramble to the proper viewpoint.

Janry just needed to ensure the plan succeeded. That meant setting watchers, and being ready to set everything in motion at a moment’s notice. If his plans leaked, he would need to ensure that everything happened regardless of the treason.

***

Callum was happy to leave the preparations for any actual unveiling to others. He knew that Chester was pulling together with Felicia, the earth-based Houses, and the dragons to put together a plan of action – speeches, demonstrations, and all kinds of political and public relations activities – but Callum was not part of the public face. He was The Ghost, he would remain The Ghost, and be both the bogeyman that nobody ever saw and the mysterious benefactor that provided portal worlds for all.

There was one serious reservation, and that was Janry’s faction. Callum was very strongly inclined to just bomb their little supposedly-secret compound out in the Deep Wilds, but so far they hadn’t actually done anything since the summit. He hated being so reactive, just waiting for someone to strike like in the early days, but there was nothing he could do without risking damage to his ultimate goal.

He still had a kinetic impactor waiting in the wings, looping through portals even if he’d stopped the acceleration. There was no way he wouldn’t need it sooner or later. That was just a sideshow to his real job, though, which was a never-ending task of surveying for portal worlds. It was only grueling mentally; he was actually seated outside with his laptop and a glass of iced tea while he watched Alex drive a toy car around the back yard. He had to admit that being able to do all his work outside, in a floating island paradise, was quite the benefit.

“Phone for you,” Lucy said, coming outside and easing herself into a chair. “Taisen sounded less than happy.”

“Right,” Callum said, flipping from the drone feed to the VoIP program. He waited a moment for the thing to load, and Taisen’s face popped up in the window. “What’s going on?”

“Janry is making his move,” Taisen said shortly. “We need to move now. We caught one of his teams heading out and they actually wanted to talk. One of his subordinates warned us about his targets, because there are more of them than we thought.”

“Not just us, then,” Callum said, already reaching out through his drones for his cloak. Felicia had granted him a small estate in her weird faerie dimension, little more than an apartment, and while he was never going to live there it did give him a useful place to keep his cloak and his wooden anti-fae ball so they wouldn’t be destroyed. Also a safer place to open a feeder portal than Faerie proper.

“Not us at all.” Taisen looked even grimmer than normal, his mouth set in a hard line. “We’re collateral. He intends to assassinate a number of world leaders and then blame us. Worse, he intends to set off nuclear warheads and blame us.”

Callum blinked.

“Is he insane?” Callum asked, too bewildered to even be properly angry. “Even if he could do that, that’s just — I mean, setting off a nuclear war is an incredibly stupid idea.”

“I’m not sure he realizes the full import of what he’s planning,” Taisen replied. “I’m not sure if people caught conscience or just didn’t want to be held responsible, but it was crazy enough that we’ve got some defectors.”

“At least not everyone is an idiot,” Callum muttered. “Right, I’m getting rid of that compound.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Taisen said. “Janry’s not there, he’s off glad-handing Rossi, and his teams are already en route. We need to move now before they actually do anything.”

“Yeah.” Callum cast a glance at Lucy and she nodded.

“Join you in the war room,” she said, and he teleported himself and his laptop down.

Between the dragons providing money and the guild of enchanting selling resources, he had a surfeit of drones and his moon nexus had expanded. At this point he actually had multiple small nexus locations, all hidden under some concrete domes he’d gotten for cheap. He started sorting through them as he pushed vis into the scry-comm so he could be on the same page as Taisen’s people.

“We’ve got fifteen targets,” Taisen said, over the laptop and scry-comm both. “There were twenty-four, but the watchers intercepted some after half the mage teams defected.” Callum didn’t ask if the information had been verified. They had access to fae and Felicia certainly could find someone to do truth-telling. “Six assassinations, nine nuclear bunkers.”

“How did he even find out about nuclear bunkers?” Callum muttered to himself, still finding it all a little surreal. “Where are we going?” Even with flight and Felicia’s parallel dimension, he was the fastest way to move people around — and they needed a lot of people.

“Lieutenant Korin will fill you in,” Taisen said, unceremoniously handing Callum off to someone he vaguely recognize from the assault on GAR, and going to take control of the teams. Callum wasn’t offended.

“I’m on my way,” Felicia’s voice came over the scry-comm, and Callum glanced through the drone she kept nearby. It was bobbing along in her wake, as she came with Ray and some big, nasty looking fae. Judging by the vis that swirled around them, they were powerful as well.

Korin took his attention by starting to recite places and GPS coordinates, forcing Callum to scramble to match those with his closest drones. Part of him bemoaned the fact that they’d disassembled the old teleport network, because he didn’t have the worldwide saturation that GAR had achieved with its hundreds of connections. At least his Alcubierre trick meant that he could move his endpoints very quickly.

Callum checked the remote-controlled weapons in his cache, summoning the triggers for each of them to his desk. It wasn’t likely that he could deal with every single one of the teams himself, since knowing the general location wasn’t the same as being able to track down everyone involved, especially not when time was of the essence. Anyone he did spot, he had no compunction removing.

There were targets as widely scattered as DC, London, Beijing, and New Delhi. There were people in planes up in the air, and the nuclear bunkers were scattered throughout the countryside all over the world. Callum could multitask to some extent but not that much, and he had no idea where the priorities were. There had been no time to get a full briefing on what was most urgent, so he just went through the list as he got it.

“Okay, Buckingham Palace, that one’s easy enough,” Callum said, teleporting his drone a few times in quick succession and putting it on top of the roof of the enormous old building. He quickly scanned with his perceptions and, while there were traces of liquid fae magic about, he didn’t spot any active supernaturals. Nor did he know who was the actual target, given the number of people about.

“Team Three!” Taisen shouted loud enough to be heard over the drone microphone, and Korin glanced to one side as Callum opened a portal from the mustering room to the palace roof. There were a lot of people who were going to get their first exposure to magic, because it wasn’t likely either side was going to feel like keeping the conflict quiet.

An entire squad of mages flew through the portal, and Callum switched to the next, leaving the defense to Taisen’s people. Beijing was more confusing, crowded and crammed full of people, and he wasn’t even looking for the government buildings. He was aware of time pressing as he searched for the right block of skyscrapers, and then popped open another portal.

“Team Eight!” Taisen said, and the people who had only just managed to assemble flew through. Mages were still scrambling over in Taisen’s base, bubbles swarming up from the various barracks and meeting rooms, so it was catch-as-catch-can for which teams went where.

“I’ll take India,” Felicia said over the scry-comm, opening up a fae gateway to the heart of New Delhi. “I know who was involved with this one.” Her voice was hard and cold, but Taisen just gave a distracted acknowledgement. It was afternoon in Europe, morning in the United States, and so evening and night further east. Felicia and the Beijing group were operating in darkness, which didn’t seem to bother them.

Washington, DC, was next on the list, and Callum teleported his drone over to the White House. This, at least, he was more familiar with, and while he couldn’t recognize the current president by his spatial perceptions, it was pretty obvious who it was sitting at the desk in the Oval Office. It was also pretty obvious that the White House was sitting at the center of some confluence of fae nonsense, some strange vortex whipped up by the seven fae he could sense sitting around on the White House lawn.

“They’re already at the President,” Callum snapped, reaching for his vis crystals and pulling open an anti-mana portal to blast the area. He opened a full size one, right in the Oval Office, and immediately alarms started to ring as a big hole to some other place opened up. Even if security couldn’t see the anti-mana coming out and eating up the fae working – because of course they wouldn’t do something simple like shooting a person, a fae had to be more clever than that – there was still a five foot portal to another world hovering in the air.

“Get me there,” Chester’s voice came over the scry-comm. “I’ve got some federal agents read in already, that’ll make it easier.”

“Right,” Callum said, letting the anti-mana portal go and flipping his attention over to the bad penny reserved for Chester. They’d have to deal with jumpy secret service agents but shifters were pretty much bulletproof, so he opened another portal to the White House, out of the line of fire from the collapsing anti-mana one. Chester had a half-dozen normal people with him and they all piled through into the White House while Callum focused on the actual fae.

They’d started to scatter as soon as their working had been disrupted, but they weren’t fast enough, or maybe stunned by having their magic broken. Either way, they were still in range of Callum’s senses as he reached for his remote. Three of them, the weakest ones, simply died from a point-blank shotgun blast to the head. Two others required a double-tap, which implied a more powerful brand of fae than he normally dealt with.

Of the three remaining, one performed some sort of fae travel trick and melted into the ground, its vis flowing through the earth at lightning speed. Callum tried to intercept him with another anti-mana portal, but it took too long to open and he cursed as the fae slipped away. Not wanting to waste the effort of opening another magic-devouring portal, he redirected the anti-mana jets still pouring from the collapsing hole in the Oval Office toward the last pair with another set of portals. They dodged the initial opening, but he could just sweep the angle of the portal as fast as he liked, and even the speedy fae couldn’t outrun it.

Just clipping them with the anti-mana seemed to be as good as pithing them, and he finished the job with two more shotgun shells, glad that he and Lucy had installed proper magazines on all the remote weapons. That left six corpses on the White House lawn, none of them human, but that was something he left to Chester to explain.

“I got all but one,” Callum said over the scry-comm, glancing at the clock to see that the whole incident had taken less than a minute. “Last guy is still out there, Felicia might be able to track him down but there’s no telling for now. I have to move on.”

“Understood,” Chester said. There was shouting in the background, and Callum didn’t envy Chester his task. “We’ll guard things here.”

Callum moved on to the next place on Korin’s list, deep in the Midwest. Even if he hadn’t been delayed much, it still felt like he was behind. Before he’d managed to reposition the nearest drone, another voice broke onto the scry-comm.

“Dragons here.” Shahey’s voice was not like Callum had ever heard before, deep and cold and vibrating with barely controlled fury, more even than when Janry had closed their portal. He couldn’t help but remember the story Shahey had told of the worlds that had torn themselves apart, and how they’d seen this sort of thing happen before despite their best efforts. “Chester, we’ll handle the mages at the Deep Wilds portal. Mister Wells, if you would?”

“On it,” Callum said, and delayed getting to the Midwest site in favor of scrambling through the portal links, wondering why nobody had told him about an invasion at Chester’s place. At the Dragonlands portal, there were at least two dozen dragonblooded, all big musclebound avatars in full armor. In fact, it seemed they were armor, with no visible seams or joints. Even as he was watching, even larger avatars came through the portal, not humanoid at all. They were hulking lizardlike things five feet at the shoulder, looking more like classical dragons even if they lacked wings. Vis literally boiled off them, too magic-dense to completely contain in the relatively lesser mana field of the Earth.

He pulled open a portal for them, the other side leading to Chester’s secret bunker in the mountains, glad that he still had a drone there. In hindsight he should have guessed that Janry’s final push would include a shot at Chester — and while Chester’s Deep Wilds base was safe, it would be a simple matter for any mage to find the secret bunker by just crossing through the portal from the other side.

Only the humanoid dragonblooded went through. They weren’t as powerful as the big avatars, but encountering that many of them – from at least six different dragons, if Callum was right – would put a crimp in anyone’s day. Even an archmage’s.

“The behemoths are for the nuclear sites,” Shahey’s voice came, disconcertingly, from one of the bestial avatars. “Just in case.”

“Right,” Callum said, as Lucy came down the stairs, his sense of time completely distorted from the mad scramble of portals. “Just in case.”

***

Ensharrehael directed his half-dozen avatars with a brain larger than most Earth houses, though dragons had found out long ago that just increasing brain size didn’t mean someone was smarter. There were certain tweaks so he could multitask, and he liked to think he was somewhat wiser than he’d been when he was young, but he couldn’t claim he was much more clever.

That anyone would willingly incite a war of Armageddon still was beyond him. Or rather, it wasn’t, but it had been centuries since he’d needed to worry about such a thing and the situation on Earth had seemed to be stabilizing. They’d even avoided making the same mistake they had with the vampires, and had avoided pushing House Janry into a corner. All the man had needed to do was to engage Earth on normal terms, but he couldn’t be satisfied with that.

With all the usual strictures gone, Ensharrehael was going to enjoy taking out his frustrations on the small people that would destroy the world in their arrogance. His friends might not feel quite as strongly, but each and every one had become attached to some aspect of Earth.

Wells dropped them right by the portal to the Deep Wilds, at one end of a large room in a wooden building deep in the mountains. Chester had learned from the dragonblooded’s experience with their own portal, so there was nothing of note to collapse onto the portal, but Shahey directed one of his avatars to reinforce it nonetheless. Compressed graphene-reinforced osmium-tungsten-titanium coils spun out of nothing, winding mobius loops up and around the portal, through it, circling the other side before emerging again on Earth. Perhaps dragons couldn’t reproduce spatial magic, but they could certainly protect it.

Wells’ “bad penny” portals allowed half the avatars to step through into the Deep Wilds without risking their connection, stationing themselves to protect it from both ends. Shahey took up station nearest the portal where it stood, deep in a hollow in one of the giant trees while Miyashientu and Tineustrillan sent their avatars further out to screen anyone coming in. The mana-dense nature of the trees and the lack of anything like a nature mage meant the Deep Wilds end was less vulnerable than the dragonlands portal had been, but an archmage would still be an issue.

Less than five minutes later, while Miyashientu was squeezing a behemoth avatar through one of Wells’ portals to somewhere in the midwestern United Stats, a seven-man-strong wing of mages swept in from above. Ensharrehael avatar had excellent vision, more akin to a mechanical multi-lens system than biological eyes, and it was clear the mage squad was surprised to see dragons waiting by the portal and not just shifters. It was enough for them to not quite commit to the combat foci that they already had out, the subtle shifting of their vis shells a dead giveaway that they had spells readied as they came in.

“You might want to take cover,” Ensharrehael said to the nearest shifters with one of his avatars. “Unless you can take archmages.” The shifter snarled, but not at him, and a rapid patter in Celtic had the shifter guards withdraw through the portal. The head of the mage squad gestured and the mages dropped down to confront the dragonblooded avatars.

“We have business through the portal,” the leader said. It was Archmage Tasser, someone Ensharrehael knew as the head of one of Janry’s cadet houses and a former resident of the Night Lands. He was almost certainly there thanks to what Wells had done in closing that particular portal, and not just his alignment with Janry. As a metal mage, he could actually take down the portal reinforcement, provided he could get past the absolute vis saturation that came with anything a dragon made.

“No, you don’t,” one of Tineustrillan’s avatars said. Unlike Ensharrehael, Tineustrillan almost always used a far deeper, gruffer, and significantly more hostile voice for his avatars. He sounded half a step from murder.

For a moment they all stayed where they were, both groups staring each other down and knowing exactly what was going on. Then Tasser’s finger twitched and spells exploded outward. Wires of glowing-hot metal shredded the air, beams of ravening light raked over armor, shards of ice and rock flung themselves at hurricane speeds. Compressed wind and liquid fire twisted together into a molten inferno, barely scorching the rock-hard bark of the great tree before vanishing.

Ensharrehael unmade the spells as fast as they were cast, spending vis like water to destroy the matter and energy inside the attacks, creating an invisible wall where all the sound and fury simply stopped. The avatar that had created the portal reinforcement didn’t have too much more vis left, and he discorporated it after just a few moments, but the rest had little trouble, even with the archmage-level attacks that sent hundreds of pounds of metal shrapnel crackling through disturbed air at hypersonic speed.

In general he preferred attacking with the avatar bodies, as it was easier to overwhelm mage shields with the vis-saturated matter, but when they didn’t need to worry about collateral damage there were other options. Miyashientu spun energetic fluorine compounds into existence, the impossibly reactive chemicals burning metal, water, ice, and even the air itself. Tineustrillan created pockets of intensely hypergolic liquid, subsequent detonations hammering at the mage shields and knocking about some of the less able ones.

The first mage shield cracked after only a few seconds under the hellish conditions, the mages’ own winds whipping about the poisonous, burning gasses and liquids. Mundane and arcane chemistry mixed, the result consumed by Ensharrehael before it could touch his avatars. Only screams were left as one by one the mages were wiped away under the sound of explosions as hyper-reactive compounds stripped flesh from bone and burned it to ash.

A few breaths later, Tasser was the only surviving mage. He started to accelerate into the sky, trying to escape from the trap, so Miyashientu simply turned and flung one of Ensharrehael’s avatars after the mage. His armored claw met a shield of metal vis, the protection failing a moment later as his claw punched through. Maybe only half an inch, but it was enough. Inside the bubble, where there was very little vis, Ensharrehael created a small ball of pure protons.

Tassin didn’t survive the result.

“Deep Wilds portal is safe,” one of his other avatars reported over the scry-comm, but he was already dealing with another, more urgent problem. One of the fae teams had beat them to a missile silo.