As she moved forward, Yura momentarily slowed down as she took in the battle situation and tried to decide how to help. The four magical guardians besides the “healing” one were arranged in a losange formation, with the melee guardian in front, ranged guardian in the back and the barrier and manifestation guardians in the left and right flanks, respectively.

Nina was moving around in the middle of their formation, jumping from place to place dodging sword slashes, manifested midair spikes and occasional wind slash spells while delivering powerful blows that were only barely being stopped by enemy barriers. Overall she was doing a really good job keeping the enemies’ attention on herself, allowing Nalia to easily intercept the spells of the ranged guardian while also shooting her own attacks in return, which were only barely kept in check by the melee guardian’s shield and some last minute protection from the barrier guardian.

Still, the current state of the fight was a very unstable balance that could collapse at any moment, so Yura had to take care not to accidentally make the situation worse. But then Elise shouted “Attack the barrier guardian!” at her, thus making the decision simple.

The elf rushed to the indicated enemy, shaping the earth in front of her into a spike shape to break through the obstacles that were manifested in her way and making her platform rise up to reach the guardian’s wooden mask while wrapping her right arm in an earth gauntlet and then hammering a powerful punch into the target.

Her attack had prioritized speed over strength, but it still caused some cracks to spread from the point of impact and seemed to temporarily prevent the guardian from acting, as his barriers ceased to appear. As if waiting for that opportunity, Nina launched herself at the ranged guardian with an explosive leap and smashed down an elbow strike that was twice as effective as Yura’s previous blow, almost breaking off a portion of the enemy’s mask and causing it to seize up and stop attacking as well.

And that wasn’t all. Nalia had also acted at the same time, flying closer to the manifestation guardian and launching a powerful fireball, followed by a stone cannonball, a lightning bolt and a second fireball.

The first fireball blew away the multiple manifested obstacles the guardian put in her way. The cannonball knocked away the melee guardian’s shield as it tried to come and help. The lightning bolt hit the enemy’s mask and interfered with its systems as it was trying to manifest more obstacles. Finally, the second fireball caused serious damage, similar to what the other two had done to their respective targets.

For a moment, it felt like they were about to win, but then two more guardians teleported into the battlefield. One of them was the healer, while the other was totally new. This new guardian had a mask with a surprised expression and a gray mantle, but its most notable feature were the tendrils growing from the mask. There were eight in total and they seemed to be made of blue electricity, but inserted within then were dozens of small machines, several of which looked like some sort of high-tech guns.

As it turned out, that was exactly what they were. The enemy’s first action after arriving was to unleash an absolute cloud of bullets, some of which energy based while others looked like fire or normal projectiles. Those bullets were aimed at all three of the combatants at the same time, and they all were forced to abandon their attacks.

Yura dropped down to the ground and shaped the earth into a barrier around herself, strengthening it when it seemed to be about to break. Nina jumped towards Nalia as the fairy created three barriers of her own and ripped out a bunch of earth from the ground which she threw over Nalia’s barriers, intercepting some of the shots and reducing the pressure.

The guardian’s barrage of shots lasted but a few seconds, yet that was enough time for the healer to fix up the damage the girls had done to the other guardians. The situation had quickly become considerably worse, but at least the armaments guardian seemed to need some time to either recharge or cool down after firing so much, meaning the group had a chance to avoid being overwhelmed.

Nalia dropped her barrier the moment it became feasible, and Nina was instantly on the move, rushing straight at the healer guardian. The barrier one manifested shields in her path, but her move had been a feint, the rabbit girl instantly switching targets to the ranged guardian, punching away the fireball and wind blade it shot at her and jumping to deliver a kick that dealt heavy damage to its mask once more.

While she was attacking, Nalia targeted the manifestation guardian with a sequence of three fireballs, each bigger and more powerful than the last, breaking through the obstacles it manifested to act as barriers and then hitting the mask itself.

The duo’s coordination had been flawless, Nina’s feint had made sure the barrier guardian couldn’t defend the others at the last moment, as there was a limit to the number of shields it could create in a row and it had hit that limit in an effort to defend the most crucial unit on the field. Also, the manifestation guardian would have been able to hinder Nina’s attack had it not been tied up trying to protect itself from Nalia.

As for the melee guardian, it was slightly out of position and focused on Yura, who had dropped her own defenses while that was going on and began gathering a large amount of earth around herself, preparing for her next move.

All of that had been perceived by the most overlooked member of the battlefield, Elise, and the coordination between her partners was due to her guidance. The human girl was currently using her connection to the other two in order to borrow their senses and give herself the best perception of the battlefield.

Besides being far enough away to easily see all the movements of all the fighters at once, Elise was also borrowing Nalia’s sense of magic as well as Nina’s enhanced physical senses. That amount of information would have been too much for a normal person to make sense of, but just as her partners had grown stronger under her care, Elise herself had also become stronger, in her own way.

Her path as a contractor revolved around understanding and guidance, so she pushed herself to understand more and more of battle situation via the contract bond and to take quick and accurate decisions on how to best guide her partners to victory. As such, Elise’s growth was difficult to see from the outside, since it was mostly mental, but she had certainly become far better than when she started.

And Elise still had quite a lot of room to grow. Instead of picking and choosing what to focus on among the sources of information she had, it would be better if she could take in and understand every single scrap of data, from the physical and non-physical senses of her partners to the precise condition of their bodies. There was still a long way to go until then.

Going back to the battle at hand, Yura made her move as the other two had succeeded in their attacks, she rushed at the melee guardian with her accumulated earth arranged in a ring around herself. She turned part of the ring into a fist to strike at the enemy, which was blocked by its shield, but then also blocked the retaliatory sword strike by making a wall with another bit of the ring.

Then she turned to the side and kicked, causing the entire rest of the ring to be launched straight at the armaments guardian, but it was blocked by a shield from the barrier guardian at the last moment. Yura had to turn her attention back to the melee guardian at that point, but she hoped the other two would be able to follow up and prevent another barrage like the previous one.

The battle continued.

+0+

Meanwhile, Professor Whitmoore was in a battle of her own. She knew enough about the systems those sorts of temples used to understand that normal methods wouldn’t work. She didn’t have the credentials needed to give commands to the machine, and she didn’t have the magical skill needed to force access. However, she wouldn’t have come if she didn’t have an idea that could work.

Her idea was to simply take advantage of the machine’s emergency features. The idea behind them was leaving a way to access the temple’s systems that did not require special credentials or passwords, just in case the worst happened and there was no way to do use the normal methods anymore.

Those features were designed for the most extreme scenarios, but since they could also be considered a security risk, the ways to access them were mostly very time-consuming and bothersome (the idea being that invaders trying to do so would be discovered and dealt with before being able to do it). Even so, the professor knew of a method that could work for their purposes.

It started with failing to enter a valid password on the access screen five times, which locked up the password input but enabled the Help command. Said command gave her access to a screen containing a number of options to chose from, each one a particular problem the user could be having (getting to that screen would also trigger an alarm at the guard station, but with no people left to man it, that alarm was of no consequence).

Whitmoore selected the option for ‘Loss of access credentials’ and then had to keep selecting ‘Method unavailable’ for each suggestion the help screen gave (contacting supervisors, switching to magical signature detection and inputting old credentials being some of them), until the option she had been waiting for finally appeared.

‘Turn on systems assistant’ was the option in question, and the professor immediately selected it, but she had to wait for over half a minute in order for it to actually load.

That waiting time was incredibly tense as Whitmoore feared that some issue might have occurred that would prevent the option from working, but that did not happen, and so the screen lit up as a strange cartoonish figure that resembled a teardrop with eyes appeared on it.

Beneath that figure, the words ‘Please describe your issue’ appeared.

The woman took a deep breath and tried to figure out the best way to proceed. The systems assistant was something like a pseudo-AI, being a sort of artificial magical spirit with a decent level of intelligence, so her hope was that she could convince him to disable to temple’s automatic guardian system.

After a few moments, she wrote ‘All credentials lost. No superiors available’ to which the reply was ‘Please state your name and post’. Whitmoore replied to that with ‘Not a worker. No workers available’. It took a few seconds for the assistant to reply to that with ‘Please contact local chief of government to give general alert’. She replied to that with ‘No authorities available’.

Once again the assistant took a few seconds to reply, but eventually the message ‘Attempting to contact linked temple Xeornas. Please hold’.

And so the professor could only wait as the assistant tried to contact other temples, knowing that none of them would respond. She just hoped for it to be done quickly.

+0+

Meanwhile, the battle continued. Nalia had begun fiercely attacking the armaments guardian in order to prevent it from launching another overwhelming barrage. Nina had prevented the barrier guardian from interfering by once more rushing to attack the healer guardian in order to force a defense. Yura had slowed down the melee guardian by hitting it with a mini-landslide and went after the healer as well. Elise was aware of everything, as she tried to figure out the best battle plan.

‘Those two are about to act again.’ She thought, referring to the ranged and manifestation guardians, which had received enough damage to be temporarily ‘stunned’, but not to be taken out of the fight. She realized that the former was preparing to attack Nalia, and quickly sent a message to her.

However, her message wasn’t composed of words, but was instead a mental image of the fairy redoubling her attack before turning to deal with the newer threat. That was something Elise had learned how to do recently, which allowed her to give specific instructions faster and easier.

The contractor redirected part of her attention to check Nalia’s physical condition as she forced out several powerful spells aimed at the armaments guardian. Her stamina took a hit from the strain of pushing out more power than her safe limits, but she was still mostly fine, so Elise turned her focus back to the overall battle situation.

The ranged guardian’s attack came and Nalia turned to shoot a few spells of her own to intercept. At the same time, the manifestation guardian created a ton of spikes all around the healer, to which Elise responded by giving another wordless instruction, this time telling Nina to switch targets to the barrier guardian, which had created a few shields to hinder her path even more.

She did so, while Yura pressed on the attack by surrounding herself with a ring of earth for protection while she dashed forward. At the same time the armaments guardian met with Nalia’s previous barrage of several big fireballs and stone bullets, using some of the other equipment it had to create mini barriers and close range explosions, but eventually having to fire some of the still charging guns to intercept.

‘Good. Now it won’t be able to use a full barrage again.’ Elise though. That had been the reason behind the order given to Nalia, so she considered it a success even though the enemy didn’t take any damage.

She didn’t let that success distract her, though. The battle was still progressing, changes happening almost to fast for her to keep track. Nina had managed to break through the shields conjured by the barrier guardian last minute, but was warded off by the melee guardian who had just broken free of Yura’s landslide. The elf had reached the healer guardian and hit it, interrupting his act of fixing the damaged ones, but not before it undid most of their damage. The armaments guardian teleported close to Yura and attacked with a few more of its guns, forcing her to stop her offensive, but Nalia flew closer and attacked it for a bit before having to defend against more spells from the ranged guardian…

Elise was doing her best, but she found it difficult to find a way for her group to break through, given they were being hard pressed to even keep things at a standstill due to the disadvantage in numbers.

‘I’m sure there would be a way if we managed to coordinate perfectly with Yura, but I haven’t seen her fight enough to predict her actions.’ She thought while commanding her partners to isolate the armaments guardian, managing to deal a blow to it but failing to press the advantage afterwards ‘I can predict those guardians well enough, but that’s just because they’re... Not very smart.’

Suddenly, Elise had an epiphany. There was a way to take advantage of that weakness in order to swing the battle in their favor. She immediately sent an order to Nalia, putting her plan into action.

The fairy began charging up energy for a big spell, while still casting other magic to stay present in the fight and avoid the group being overwhelmed, and a follow-up order to Nina resulted in the rabbit girl pushing herself hard, leaping around and launching fierce attacks at every enemy she went past, giving Nalia the leeway she needed to act.

The fairy started to construct the spell formula for the magic she had been preparing, and at that moment Elise sent her a new order.

The girl immediately felt a wave of concern coming from her partner, which was understandable, since Elise was about to do something reckless, but Nalia still went through with it. She reached into the contract connection and began weaving a spell through Elise.

That was an old idea of theirs. Elise couldn’t cast magic, but what if Nalia cast spells through her? Wouldn’t that allow the contractor to surprise attack enemies that thought her harmless? It turned out to be a failure, because casting through someone else was hard enough to prevent her from using anything but the simplest, weakest spells, so they had turned their attention to other projects.

However, Elise had just figured out a useful application for that technique. As she felt the magic start to form, the girl began running closer to the battlefield. The magical guardians detect her approach, but they were busy dealing with Nina’s fierce offensive, which was backed up by Yura who had realized they were doing something, so Elise managed to get close enough.

She stopped and extended her hands forward, aiming at the barrier guardian, then Nalia finished the spell creating a fireball in front of her hands that shot towards the enemy. It was a weak fireball, similar to the type of magic the fairy was doing before being trained by Elise, but it was enough. As the shot flew forth, the barrier guardian manifested a shield to block it, lacking the judgment necessary to realize it was no threat.

The barrier guardian had been hard pressed to keep up its defenses against the ferocious offensive pressure unleashed by Nina and Yura, and so that one shield was everything it could spare, the last defensive measure it was able to do.

Meaning it was now completely vulnerable.

“Annihilation Flame!” Nalia snarled, pushing the huge amount of magic power she had been accumulating into a terrifying spell.

The flame it created was more like a beam of hot plasma so bright that it hurt to look at, a manifestation of destructive power intense enough to feel like the fury of an erupting volcano. It hit the wooden mask of the barrier guardian and annihilated it utterly and completely, leaving nothing behind. The mass of clay that was the guardian’s main body broke apart and fell to the ground, soon followed by the mantle. There was no way the healer guardian would be able to fix its partner.

That was Nalia’s current strongest technique, a feat of fire magic inspired by the deadly spells the elf Aura had used against them with the help of the forbidden magic that eventually took her life.

And things weren’t over just yet. The reason why they had targeted the barrier guardian first was because its constant defensive support was a hindrance to any attempts at using big attacks to destroy the other guardians, so now it was time to go all in.

Elise sent an order to Nina, and the rabbit girl smiled before redirecting her movements to dash away from the fight. She took some distance, stopped and then charged back with an instant movement, or rather, three of them in a row.

It was so fast that the sounds of her kicking off the floor three times merged together into a single explosive noise, and she reached the manifestation guardian before it managed to put up any defense.

And punched it, though saying it like that doesn’t do justice to the sheer violence of the hit. Nina had unleashed a tremendous amount of energy on that hit, and it combined with the speed at which she was moving to result in something that resembled a heavy artillery strike more than a simple physical impact.

The guardian’s mask had no chance. It exploded into thousands and thousands of shards, the clay body and mantle following the example of the previous guardian and falling to the ground.

“So that’s how hard…” Nina idly spoke to herself.

Another enemy was down, and the battle was now all but finished, so perhaps it was fitting that mere seconds after that, all of the remaining guardians seemed to freeze in place for a moment before teleporting away.

“Looks like the professor did it.” Elise said.

+0+

The group made their way back to the room and Yura took down the barrier she had placed, revealing professor Whitmoore on the other side, smiling in relief.

“It’s done.” She said.

“Yeah, we suspected that was the case when the guardians stopped attacking.” Elise replied “How did you do it?”

“Well…” She took a few moments to think about how to start and then told the story about deliberately failing the password checks in order to get access to the emergency features of the system, including the assistant, and how she had led it to try contacting other temples.

“And then, after it failed to establish any type of contact, the assistant asked whether the Laguna civilization was still intact. I didn’t expect for it to do that, but I guess it was smarter than I thought. I said no, and so it decided to give me authority over the temple’s systems, which I used to command the temple guardians to stand down.”

“Wow, so it was just that easy?” Nina asked.

“I’d say it was only easy because she understood the way those systems worked. Someone who didn’t wouldn’t have been able to come up with this plan.” Elise replied instead.

“I guess so.”

Either way, the job was done so the only thing the group had left to do was leaving the temple. They made their way back up at a much more relaxed pace than how they had went down, and it seemed like everything was fine.

That is, until they got back to the same floor where they had entered the building, upon which Yura suddenly clutched at her pendant and cried out “No! Why are they here?!”

“What happened?” Elise asked.

“There’s Inishie nearby!”