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It takes Emily two more attempts to get to the same point in the battle without any casualties after the boarding ships once again unluckily prove deadly to their inhabitants on the way to the ground.

Emily again manages to ground four of the twenty interceptors before Virgil starts throwing bolts of fire towards her. This time, she dodges the thrown bolts and ignores the spell being prepared on the ground as she lands on the fifth interceptor. She repeats the process of punching a hole in the solid metal hull and dropping a grenade inside while preparing several defensive spells.

She leaps off the now-falling ship towards the sixth interceptor, but a small petal of fire shoots towards her along a wide, arcing trajectory. She kicks off the air, sidestepping the projectile right before it hits her. However, instead of bursting harmlessly in the sky, the petal spins, curving and drawing a full arc to fly back towards her even faster.

“Damn,” Emily mutters, a small grin creeping onto her face as she suddenly shoots towards the floor to avoid the returning petal and a second petal that flies towards her from Virgil.

She glances over at the responsible mage and sees him standing in his large magic formation with his arms raised, swaying rhythmically like a conductor guiding his orchestra as more petals form around him before shooting off at odd angles and arcing through the sky to start targeting Emily.

“Damn!” she cries again, her eyes widening as she sees over thirty burning petals shooting towards her at varying speeds.

Three petals narrowly miss her legs, and one particularly fast-moving one bursts against her left arm, wrapping it in a liquid-like fire that clings to her Claw and quickly starts to eat through the leather bracer, burning her flesh beneath. Emily slashes the bindings holding the burning Claw in place with the other, dropping her weapon to the floor and removing most of the fire with it.

Ouch.

She glares at her blackened arm while twisting to dodge a few more petals, feeling some residual fire mana eating away at her flesh despite her having removed most of the attack.

That will be a bitch to heal.

Two injectors on her spine activate, and her flesh slowly starts returning to its normal colour as the foreign mana is slowly forced out.

Okay, don’t let those petals hit me. Let’s try to block them.

Emily kicks the air, propelling herself up dozens of metres above the highest interceptor before freezing in mid-air and watching the streaks of fire twisting between the ships and angling to chase her. She takes a deep breath and shuts her eyes, spreading her magical senses and gathering the crackling charge around her to stick close to her skin.

As the first petal reaches her, she strikes out with her own mana, sending a small stream of charge from midway up her thigh to connect with the centre of the fast-moving petal in the shortest path possible before letting the charge crackling along her skin pour through the connection. The focused lightning bursts the petal before it can get close to Emily, releasing a small wave of heat and charge in one.

A second petal approaches her, so she repeats the same process, targeting the centre of the spinning projectile and supplying a powerful burst of magic to its centre. She falls into full assistive processing, utilising all of her cores at once to accurately track and target the many fast-moving petals coming towards her.

All everyone else on the battlefield sees as she repeats this delicate process is a crackling humanoid lightning bolt indiscriminately striking everything that gets near, surrounding itself with fireworks that keep going as more and more petals form around Virgil and shoot up to meet her.

Emily tries to maintain her full defensive position, but quickly realises the futility of her actions as the stream of petals continues, rapidly eating away at her mana stocks and surrounding her with heat as the residual mana left by each petal quickly adds up.

Down to three thousand mana and ten thousand machina already. This is using over a thousand mana every ten petals and he doesn’t seem to be stopping. I was hoping it cost him more per shot, but it seems it’s too much to compete against a fourth circle mage, and his several supporters, using endurance. Besides, I think the residual mana building up around me is him preparing for a spell I won’t want to be hit by.

She frowns and pulls the crackling lightning around her back into her body, focusing it on her legs and kicking off to propel herself back down towards one of the interceptor ships. She glances back towards Calypso as she falls through the sky with several flaming petals hot on her tail and her frown grows.

“They’re too close,” she mutters as the interceptor ships open fire, sending several cannon balls straight into Calypso’s hull. “I either need to work faster, tell Anton to slow down, or both.”

She kicks sideways as she falls, manoeuvring out of the way a fraction of a second before she slams into the ship she was targeting’s hull as she considers what to do. Two of the petals chasing her don’t change direction in time and slam into the ship, bursting and releasing liquid fire to eat through the metal construct.

I guess that’s this attempt completely failed. Wait, there’s no notification?

Confused, Emily slips past two more petals to approach the burning roof of the ship. She glances down through the hole opened by the fire and sees several crew members frantically trying to put out the liquid death as several of their colleagues lie in smouldering heaps directly below the hole with fire eating through their corpses.

They’re dead, and my system hasn’t failed me yet… It doesn’t count if they kill each other without my direct intervention! That’s perfect!

A savage grin forms on Emily’s face as she lets several petals burst against her armour. The liquid fire quickly starts eating through her protections as her hand moves to her belt and activates The Clock.

***

On her next attempt to breach the shore’s defences, Emily starts by having a new conversation with Calypso’s piloting crew.

“I’ll give you a signal once I spot the main blockade,” she explains. “When I do, please cut the ship’s speed in half.”

“What will the signal be?” Tony asks for clarification.

“And when should we go back to full speed?” Angela adds.

“This will be the signal,” Emily says, lifting her hand and forming a small crackling flame above her palm. “And you should go back to full speed just before you reach the ground troops. I’ll leave the specifics of when to you. I just want a bit of time to disable anything that could easily take down Calypso before you get too close.”

“Got it.” Angela gives her a confident nod before turning back to face the front and looking at the approaching scouts. “Good luck.”

Emily leaves the bridge, quickly reaching the drone hatch and leaving the ship to take down the scouts. She settles above the bridge again after grounding all five small ships, waiting with the Whisper in her lap till they reach the main battlefield.

As she’s unloading her first volley of shots into the mounted artillery, she uses a modified simple light spell to lower a crackling orb of white-tinted orange flames in front of the bridge’s main viewing window. The ship shudders slightly below her as its propellers slow down, but Emily’s shooting is uninterrupted, and the rest of her shots land with perfect accuracy.

She slips off Calypso and deals with the approaching fifteen attack ships without issue, grounding them without casualties with practised ease, before once again charging into the gathered army to start taking down the larger interceptors.

She drops four ships before Virgil starts throwing flaming bolts at her again and, after the fifth, he attacks her with a torrent of petals. Emily takes a deep breath as she sidesteps the first petal, using a single core to keep manipulating her flowing lightning mana to keep herself afloat and joining the rest together in full assistive processing.

She fixes her gaze on Virgil and the magic circle around him, scanning the wildly varying trajectories of the petals bursting out around him and almost instantly forming a mental map of their paths. She runs through several calculations, refining her mental image and watching as invisible tracer lines are drawn from each petal, weaving across the battlefield in a complicated mesh of movement to attack her no matter how she moves.

Several possible actions flash through her mind, each different possibility changing the pattern drawn by the predictive tracers as she quickly plots a path through the chaos. The perfect route settles in Emily’s mind as a petal quickly approaches her despite her slowed perception, so she bursts into motion. Lightning pours from her legs as she springs to the side, dodging one petal and slipping between two more with a twist, angling herself and kicking off the side of a falling interceptor.

She jumps from point to point, narrowly avoiding the fluttering petals as she makes her way towards a surviving ship. She lands with a thud on top, directly above the bridge, before instantly dropping into a roll and moving aside to dodge three blisteringly fast petals that ram into the ship where she once stood.

She rises from her hurried roll with her hand in her belt, pulling out a gas grenade and tossing it through the fresh burning hole in a single motion with mechanical precision. A spark of machina flows through her feet as she kicks off the ship, leaving one more victim in her wake as she leaps straight up before twisting around to place her feet above her head. A small, electrified kick sends her shooting towards the floor below, but she swiftly rotates and kicks again, shooting sideways above the panicking soldiers below with two spinning petals hot on her heels.

Another petal falls in front of her, aiming to intercept her, but Emily calmly lashes out with her arm, releasing a burst of lightning and kicking herself up a few metres to narrowly pass the projectile, letting it hit one of her pursuers. She zig-zags between two undamaged interceptors, carefully leading the remaining petal and dodging a few more, adding to the numbers behind her and letting them build up speed until they lose their fine control, at which point she guides them into the sides of the ships.

With holes melting in the sides of two bridges at once, she tosses out two grenades and gently skims along the ship’s hulls, running her hand along them one after the other and injecting machina through them.

Emily barely pays any attention to the falling ships as she continues along her preplanned path, pouring all of her power into speed to stay one step ahead of the raging fires chasing her. The ninth and tenth ships prove simple enough to bring down in the same manner, but as she’s flying between the hull and balloon of the eleventh, a petal slams into the balloon, bursting into a sizeable patch of burning liquid fire that refuses to go out even as it eats through the repairing foam that tries to smother it.

That’s gonna take the ship down quickly enough. It shouldn’t count against my mission if it kills anyone… right?

As if on cue, a familiar failure notification pops into view in sync with the loud, harsh sound of metal grinding against metal behind her.

ˉˉˉˉˉ

-Leave the country without killing any of your pursuers (Failed)

_____

“Shit,” Emily mutters, stopping in place and quickly scanning the battlefield to work out what went wrong before dodging a few more petals and letting them slam into the burning balloon beside her, starting the ship on a rapid fall towards the ground.

The issue quickly becomes obvious when she spots three of the ships she sent down to the ground lying in a pile together with half-crumpled frames.

They hit each other on the way down… Okay, only a few are needed to send the ground troops into disarray. I’ll send the rest off in random directions instead.

Sighing, Emily activates The Clock while watching the burning ship that was beside her plummet to the ground and crash, folding in on itself as the magical flames covering its balloon finally finish eating through the mana powering them and fade.

I’ll have to test that next. If I can drop ships that easily then this stage will be a piece of cake.

***

Back on the battlefield once more, Emily takes out four interceptors, selecting ones that are reasonably spread out and sending them straight down to the ground to distract the ground forces. Once she’s done, having taken slightly longer to spread her first targets out, Virgil sends a volley of petals towards her.

She twists in the air, gracefully dodging the first shots before taking a moment to enter full assistive processing to plot her route. Time stretches in her perception and, after running dozens of calculations and simulating the entire fight in the blink of an eye, she shoots off to begin another test.

She leads several petals, allowing them to build up speed before skilfully diverting them into the balloon of one of the highest-flying interceptor ships. The fire quickly consumes a sizeable portion of the ship’s balloon, and it plummets towards a ship below it as Emily powers on, leading another set of petals to burst against her next target.

The heavy metal constructs clash in the air as one falling ship knocks one of its stable companions to the ground with a mighty crash. An excited grin stretches Emily’s lips as no system notifications come from the first crash, but her expression freezes when she strips a third ship of its balloon, and she receives the dreaded notification as it collides with the panicking ground troops below.

Before she can question what changed, all of the petals twisting throughout the battlefield on winding paths to reach her shudder and change direction, rocketing towards her at full speed.

“Shit!” she mutters, taking one petal to the chest and one to the leg as she scrambles to dodge the flood of fire closing in on her.

Her hand quickly finds The Clock’s pouch, and she activates it while looking over at Virgil to try and understand why his attack suddenly changed. He’s standing in his large magic circle, staring at the burning wreckage of the ships before him with a frustrated, resigned expression on his face as he guides his petals to attack Emily.

Lightning strikes in Emily’s mind as time grinds to a halt.

No wonder he chose such a roundabout attack method. He was trying to help me harmlessly take down the ships before, but that much destruction pushed it over what he could make an excuse for. It looks like my optional quest requirement also fails when excessive deaths happen because of me, even if I didn’t directly cause them.