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Returning back to the start of the battle with a better understanding of her limits, Emily follows her well-tested routine. She slips into the five scouts and knocks their crews out with narcotic-tipped needles before setting them gently down on the ground and returning to Calypso.

Then, she disables the grounded artillery cannons with a volley of icy bullets and takes apart the attacking bombers and boarders with precise explosions as Calypso slows her approach.

Finally, she returns to deal with the gathered interceptors. She sends four towards the ground troops before Virgil moves on from flinging bolts of fire to directing a wave of petals. Emily deftly weaves between the remaining ships, guiding her flaming pursuers and using them to open paths to the ship’s bridges for her.

Each time she knocks out the driving crew of one of the remaining ships, she scatters them, sending them in random directions back into the desert. She barely faces any resistance from the troops below her as only a few of them have time to shoot bullets and explosives before they duck back into the ships anchored to the ground for protection from the falling metal masses above.

It doesn’t take Emily long to scatter all of the interceptors after realising Virgil is trying to help her. She even notices a few of the petals a fair distance from her catching ships as they pass, opening holes for her to throw grenades through without her having to do anything.

Virgil doesn’t change his spell again and only uses the spinning petals to attack until Emily finishes her task. She pauses high above to look over the battlefield, using a few streaks of lightning to remove the last petals near her. Seeing that the only obstacle left between Calypso and the open ocean sky is Virgil and the mages gathered around him, Emily nods with satisfaction and kicks the air, shooting back towards her ship as Virgil stops forming petals and goes back to building up mana in his shifting array of runes.

Emily lands back on top of Calypso’s bridge as the ship starts to pick up speed again. She gives it a boost, pouring machina into it while converting half of the energy into mana to make up for her depleted reserves. She releases her elemental connection and takes a deep breath, before letting a massive amount of mana flow from her skin, saturating the air around her with a thin haze of power that quickly condenses into a twisting mass of runes surrounding the ship.

The runes and twisting arcs of glowing mana connecting them in a dizzying mesh are a mixture of silver, green, and blue, blending to create a mesmerising glow where they cluster at the rear end of the ship. Emily stares into Virgil’s eyes despite the massive distance separating them, hoping he understands her message.

Emily keeps pouring mana into her spell as Calypso speeds towards Virgil who is doing the same. He forms a familiar scene with multiple flowers of fire blooming around him, releasing a flood of petals that gather to create a twisting vortex of heat.

The air around Calypso shudders as Emily’s spells activate, forming a half-dome of chaotic, fast-moving currents that face Virgil. A thin film of water vapour condenses behind the protective winds, getting thicker and denser until it's almost a foot wide and tinged in a dark shade. Finally, a smooth bubble of shimmering liquid metal forms floating between the ship and the water, waiting to intercept the coming attack.

Emily pours all her mana into the three, third circle spells: guardian, wind shield, and water plating, draining herself almost completely, leaving only a drop of mana to avoid absolute exhaustion and the small amount of remaining machina that’s still flowing into Calypso. Several shots are fired up at the ship by the ground troops below as they move out from their hiding places, but the bullets and tubes of explosives are all easily scattered by the first layer of wind.

Emily waits with bated breath, focusing her magical senses on the mass of mana gathering on the floor ahead. None of the other sounds of the battlefield reach her as the world falls silent, and only Virgil’s constant chanting remains.

“-bring bloom to the heat within my heart,” he trails off, falling silent for the first time since starting his final spell and sending a shiver down Emily’s spine. “Hibiscus burst!”

The moment his calm declaration sounds, the flower of fire above him shoots forward, drawing a brightly burning line towards her in Emily’s magical perception. Time seems to slow as she takes a deep breath and raises her hands, her eyes stare straight through the spells before her to the intricate workings of mana beneath. In a trance, she positions her hands and moves her fingers in a rhythmic pattern, pulling on the mana pouring from one of the magic circles to form the barrier of wind and shifting it ever so slightly with each carefully calculated movement.

The barrier quickly morphs in response to her interference, curling back around and closing behind the approaching vortex of fire to create a long tunnel wrapped in water. The entire area within the barrier turns unstable, jostling the coming attack and tearing away small strips of fire that blow away in the wind before hitting the water around it, bursting into steam.

The powerful bundle of fire keeps moving, pushing through the turbid winds until it impacts the layer of water behind. A vast amount of steam is released as the flaming flower slows for a beat, pushing through the thick film of water like a spoon through honey. The entire barrier loses thickness quickly, and soon a gaping hole is formed around the remaining spinning flames, freeing them as Emily releases her grip on wind shield and switches to controlling guardian.

The liquid metal flows to Emily’s will with a fraction of the effort needed for the other spell, having been carefully designed with flexibility in mind. The metal spreads, creating a small dish to catch the flames with a thick buffer behind it. The flames slam home, and the metal dish closes around them, going solid as soon as it does to try to smother the heat within.

Slowly but surely, Emily feels the powerful fire eat through her spell, pushing closer and closer to Calypso. However, as if Virgil has read her mind, when the burning-hot projectile finally flies out of the melted guardian, it smashes into the rear end of the hull, eating most of the way through the ship and burning several of the storage rooms but missing anything vital.

Emily breathes a sigh of relief when the attack stops without going through the ship and into the balloon. She disperses guardian and reaches out, grasping water plating’s magic circle and bending it, changing the spell’s target and moving the remaining water into the burning hole beneath the ship to smother the flames, leaving only wind shield to protect the ship for a few more seconds, having returned to its normal shape after Emily’s control is released.

She remains rooted in place on top of the bridge, pouring the last drops of machina from her reserves into the ship and making eye contact with Virgil as they shoot past overhead. They give each other a small nod in acknowledgement before the older mage’s visage is blocked by the ship, and Emily looks away, finally freed to move as water plating runs out of mana to fuel it.

I guess I owe him a favour.

A triumphant grin curls the corner of Emily’s lips as she lies down on the cold metal below her, feeling the rush of the battle fading as her success washes over her. Her emotions quickly balance out, their dampening sped up by the few small explosions going off against the ship’s rear armour and sending small quivers through it.

“It’s not quite over,” she mutters, pushing herself up and feeling an aching sense of exhaustion deep in her being. “Damn. Bottoming out both my reserves at once feels awful.”

A quick glance at her status tells her that it isn’t just her mana and machina she has used up.

Woah! Two hundred stamina gone? Is that the cost for messing with those big spells so much?

Emily walks back along the ship, drawing in mana the whole time to make up for the loss, and quickly locates a maintenance hatch. She uses a tiny burst of machina to open the hatch and slips back into the ship. She heads straight to the back to assess the damage, winding through the corridors until she spots Ash ahead, standing in a corridor and staring at the army shrinking away behind them through a giant gaping hole.

We’re out of range now.

Emily walks up behind Ash, letting her eyes calmly roam over the damage before them. Several rooms have melted together, warping and sagging under the effects of the heat, but other than the black scorch marks covering the exposed surfaces and the obvious void of missing metal that turned molten and leaked from the ship, the damage isn’t that bad.

Nothing important got hit. A few steam lines were melted, but nothing major.

“This is going to be horrible to fix,” Ash says, finally acknowledging Emily’s presence after staring through the hole in shock for so long. “We’re lucky they didn’t hit anything important.”

“Very lucky,” Emily says, not feeling the need to say anything about the attacker helping them as she pats Ash reassuringly on the shoulder. “And it won’t be that bad. We may need to find another shipyard though.”

Ash nods and falls quiet again, so Emily turns to head towards the bridge, leaving them to their thoughts. She enters the room to find a nervous but expectant atmosphere as everyone’s focus immediately turns to her.

“Why are you guys so tense?” Emily asks. “We’ve escaped.”

A wave of relief washes over everyone as several sighs are released.

“Are you sure they won’t chase us?” Anton asks, holding onto his tension for a moment longer to confirm.

“Yeah. I put all their available ships out of commission, and the next closest ones are at least half an hour away. They won’t send ships out over the open water if they can’t see us anymore, so we should be safe.”

Probably.

Emily glances at the incomplete escape quest as she’s reassuring them, but chooses to let the crew relax for now, trusting her judgement. She turns her attention to the practically bouncing Podrick, looking at her with his eyes almost glowing.

“That was incredible!” he beams in admiration. “You just fought an army and won! It was so cool when you were jumping between those big ships. It was like you were dancing!”

Everyone nods along with his excited chatter, the eyes surrounding Emily all looking at her with respect and far less fear than before.

“I assume the damage to the back of the ship isn’t that bad if you’re here,” Angela says, cutting Podrick off as he continues to gush at Emily without a response and turning to look at the readings on her dashboard. “It doesn’t look like we’re losing altitude, and we’re still cruising above what I thought possible for our top speed.”

“Yeah, we’ll make it across the water without problems,” Emily confirms. “Though, we will need to do some large repairs. Several cargo rooms have melted.”

“That’s it?” Anton asks with a chuckle of disbelief, struggling to come to terms with successfully fleeing the country as fugitives. “But that was so easy.”

“For us, maybe,” Angela says, looking back at Emily with a curious look. “But it looked like Emily had to do quite a lot.”

Emily nods, unashamed of the effort she put into fleeing the country despite no one else seeing most of it.

“It was a good challenge,” she admits, turning to walk out of the bridge and spotting Sam tentatively walking in, to confirm their success, from wherever he was buckled down during the escape. “I’m gonna go recover my energy, but give me a shout if anything out of the ordinary happens. I wouldn’t want the ship going down to a stray sea monster after all that effort.”

She waves over her shoulder at the rest of the crew, and walks out, heading straight to the engine room to meditate. Podrick tries to follow her, but she sends him to help Ash check on the piping damaged by Virgil so she can have some peace as she settles down under the soothing hum of the engine to digest the gains brought by the battle.

***

A few hours later, as Emily’s reserves are nearing full again, her focused meditation is broken by a strange fluctuation of mana ahead. Her eyes snap open, the crackling charge skipping across her skin disperses, and she charges out of the room, heading straight for the hole in the back of the ship.

What is that? It feels kind of similar to the pressure of a fourth circle being, but it’s far weaker. Is it a creature in the middle of an ascension or something?

Her mind spins as she prepares for a fight, but her raised tension gives way to stunned awe as she slides to a halt in the hallway, staring down at the water below.

The glittering blue expanse under the ship is twisting, being pulled in by powerful currents that are dragging the water down and towards the centre, creating a massive whirlpool that fills Emily’s sight.

“Woah,” she quietly exclaims, her eyes tracing the violently churning waves forming and shattering over and over again, creating giant, bright streaks of rough surf in spiralling patterns.

Emily can feel the ambient mana in the air flowing in a similar manner, twisting and churning as it’s drawn down into the ocean, gathering deep below the surface.

Curious. What’s forming down there?

She keeps carefully probing the mana in the air while making her way through the ship, heading to the bridge to warn the pilots to steer clear of the airspace above the whirlpool. It takes them twenty minutes to skirt the edge of the massive formation, and Emily can’t feel the pressure gathering at the centre increasing at all the whole time.

Whatever’s happening there, it’s slow. It won’t be finished for a long while.

She suppresses her curiosity for now, adds a page in her virtual notebook to remind her to ask around about the whirlpool when they land, and returns to the engine room again, eagerly awaiting their arrival on new shores.