“Ian,” Euryphel called out, closing the distance from a door leading into the outer grounds. The decemancer turned around, his eyes widening.

Germaine hopped out from the wyrm and landed lightly on the dirt, her dark hair strewn about her shoulders. Ian touched down next to her, his eyes flashing subtly violet as he stood and turned toward the prince’s approaching form.

“Eury. Where do you need me?”

Euryphel pointed downward. “We’re deploying the Deathseed, then activating our defensive formation. I need you to get it up and out on the shore. Then we need to distract them if necessary until the formation is ready, at which point we’ll need to retreat back inside the barriers.”

Ian nodded. The high war council had discussed the general strategy before, though the exact tactical details were specific to the current circumstances. “Did you think we’d need to turtle so quickly?”

I’d hoped not, Euryphel thought, but the Eldemari isn’t one for half-measures. She’s here for a foothold. Euryphel knew her armada wouldn’t just be headed to Zukal’iss, but potentially all along the coast. Selejo would be out to defeat them as surely as the SPU defeated Godora.

And they’ll be confident in their advance...until.

“We prepared for the worst, thankfully,” Euryphel deflected. “Let me lead you down so you can lead the seed up.”

Ian turned back toward Germaine and grabbed her hands, looking at her with a torn expression. “Please stay safe.”

“I’ll be fine,” Germaine said, squeezing his hands. She turned to Euryphel. “You both watch out for each other.”

The prince nodded his head and grinned in encouragement. “Watching out happens to be what I do best.”

—

The Deathseed floated in the air, surrounded by a thorny, bone-white bramble that scraped absently at the night sky. Ian rode the wyrm towards the cliffs overlooking the bay, then cast the seed into the water with a slight flick of his fingers.

Euryphel swallowed as seed and construct plunged into the murk, disappearing under the waves. Ian knows what he’s doing, the prince reminded himself, even as he shuddered under the realization that the construct made only a small splash as it sank downward, its form dwarfed by the dramatic cliffs.

The decemancer then smiled thinly and stretched out his hands. “I didn’t expect the concentrated construct to take this form after a day of marinating...but it's coincidentally quite strategic for combat underwater.”

Euryphel and Ian waited as the ships surged steadily closer. Several pops sounded out and flaring projectiles soared through the air, impacting and carving a massive gouge through two ships. Not a moment later, a barrier of water rose out of the depths to form thick shells around the armada. When another round of the SPU’s heavy artillery blasted forth, the bolts dispersed harmlessly on the water shields.

Another set of artillery crackled through the sky, though these appeared different, slimmer and spiraling rapidly. Our phaser bolt missiles, Euryphel realized. This time, rather than splashing against the water shields, the missiles honed in on specific targets, piercing through two shields and detonating. Smoke from the impacts glowed eerily in the moonlight.

After the first missiles, a swarm of practitioners danced among the ships and manually intervened to protect them, forcing the newer missiles to detonate early or careen into the bay.

A minute into this process, one of the ships disappeared. Soon, progressively more sank beneath the surface. They’d expected the Selejans to perform an aquatic maneuver, but the speed and grace with which they sent their entire armada underwater was unnerving.

Euryphel glanced at Ian, thinking of the Deathseed and the leviathan-shaped construct. Meanwhile, he counted down the minutes and seconds until the Selejans would reach the shore, dispatching both himself and Ian to test the armada from the safety of scenarios. Every time they went down, Selejo’s practitioners rebuffed them, while the ships readied their own artillery cannons.

Euryphel didn’t have much luck attacking, the watery environment crippling his elementalism. Ian was usually able to kill the crew of a single ship, but the armada was spaced widely enough that the other vessels lay out of his range. After defeating one, Ian was always accosted by a group of Remorse practitioners and water elementalists, the Eldemari’s strategy taking a cue from the strike team that injured Ian in Godora.

Despite the ineffectiveness of their efforts...Euryphel recognized that this was the first time he and Ian had ever completed a mission together in the real world. They weren’t exactly fighting side-by-side, but they were supporting one another.

“This is a scenario,” Euryphel groaned as he reentered the scenario again, returning to the cliffs overlooking the bay. “Ian, is the leviathan construct going to make an appearance?”

“It’s sure taking its sweet time,” he murmured.

Euryphel waited a few seconds, then motioned for the two of them to enter the bay. Ian and the prince entered the ribcage of the bone wyrm and flew down, piercing like an arrow into the waves. The scenario went fairly similar to the last, but at the end...

Ian turned back toward the prince, a grin stretching across his face. Euryphel snapped back a moment later, endured an infinitesimal period of disorientation, and then relayed what he’d seen.

“The bone leviathan arrived.”

Ian nodded. “Did it seem bigger?”

Euryphel paused, thinking. “Maybe?” Underwater visibility at night was terrible.

The prince waited a few seconds, then entered a scenario. “Let’s go see what it does when left to its own devices.”

—

“Ian...that construct is a terror.”

Ian chuckled as he steered the wyrm back to Ichormai. “It just needs a bit of time to get started.”

The bone leviathan had grown a great deal bigger than Ian anticipated. It seemed that the aggressive construct killed everything it came across, acquiring and incorporating new flesh and bone. By the time it encountered the Selejan armada, it had already swelled to be almost 50% bigger, its tentacles growing thicker and longer.

When it first ambushed the ships, the leviathan caught the Selejans off guard, slicing and constricting a ship to pieces, then skewering its crew with pinpointed tentacle strikes, each tentacle ending in a wicked bone thorn. The Selejans moved to surround and attack the leviathan from afar, but the construct was surprisingly nimble, evading attacks while soaking up a handful with apparent ease.

“How did it shrug off all their attacks?”

“The Deathseed has numerous protections around it,” Ian explained. “Since we don’t have very many of them and they’re the crux of our strategy, I knew that they needed to be as indestructible as possible.”

Euryphel blinked at him. “It’d be nice if everything we had were indestructible, but that’s easier said than done.”

“The Deathseeds all contain prismatic soul gems at their core,” Ian elaborated. “I took a bit of inspiration for this from the glosSword aegis mode. The glosSwords use a reactor in an anchored pocket dimension to power the aegis, absorbing both energy-based and physical attacks by drawing on the reactor’s energy. I’m doing something similar, but with a prismatic soul gem. It’s not complicated, but it’s particularly effective since the Deathseed is made out of concentrated Death energy. So long as the soul gem at the center isn’t destroyed, it’ll be able to repair itself in short order.”

Ian smirked. “Moreover, I know that the enemy came prepared with Remorse practitioners, recognizing them as a weakness of mine. Now all those practitioners are useless, unable to attack the mind of a mindless construct.”

Euryphel nodded. “It should keep them busy for a while.”

Ian sensed the slight trepidation in the prince’s words. He smiled softly, giving Euryphel an encouraging look.

“As you’ve reiterated during the war council meetings, keeping them busy is all we need to do. We just need to stall them long enough for the descendant to arrive.”

The prince sighed, his expression growing conflicted. “Right.” Suddenly, Euryphel’s features twisted into a frown. “We need to head back: They’re dropping the defensive array around the city. Nobody will be able to get in or out, ally or foe. There are a handful of alternative routes if we end up stranded, but it’d be best not to use them.”

Ian nodded. “Alright; there’s little we can do from afar anyway.”

The duo raced back to Zukal’iss, bone wyrm zipping forward under the prince’s tailwind. Energy coursed through Ian’s body as they approached the rapidly-closing barrier of the capital’s defensive formations, the decemancer forming a circuit of energy with the wyrm.

“Faster!” Euryphel hissed.

Ian gritted his teeth and dug his fingers into the wyrm, piercing bone. Come on, Ian thought, his eyes narrowed with effort. He took on the load of energy passing through the worm, attempting to filter it through himself without allowing the energy’s flow to ebb. There was natural resistance when taking up the energy: It clinged and grasped at his vasculature, unwilling to let go.

Ian simply pushed harder and harder, forcing the energy to circulate, empowering the soul gem’s mundane energy with his own. The effort paid off: the wyrm’s speed increased just enough to bring them into the city, the barrier snapping shut behind them.

Ian and Euryphel both exhaled sighs of relief, meeting each other’s eyes and grinning.

—

Just a few hours after the defense array activated, the high war council convened for its morning meeting, their expressions guarded. Even deep underground, Euryphel could make out the dull thud of artillery fire that was being exchanged on the surface.

“The five Deathseeds all along the coast have been working to satisfaction,” General Milfins reported. “I wouldn’t consider their spawn on the level of the bone leviathan, but they’re not far off.”

“All the same, the cities closest to the coast have been shuttered or evacuated...” Euryphel’s eyes snapped up from the projection filling the table. His gaze then turned thoughtful as he observed the people present around him. Suddenly, the fate of one of General Horwell’s subordinates–Jirene Fura–shifted.

Euryphel felt the tug of the present, but waited two seconds and restarted the scenario, intent on investigating the abnormality. In the extra seconds, Euryphel watched as Fura’s body seized in place. Before Euryphel could snap back, he found himself confronted by a blast of explosive radiance and shoved back to his real body, his hands trembling.

What an excellent way to start off the morning.

“Fura’s compromised,” the prince exclaimed, his previous statement forgotten.

Fura’s eyes widened as though she’d been struck, her face growing ashen. She opened her mouth to speak, only to be knocked unconscious by Ian before she could say anything.

“That’s the second attempt today,” Euryphel murmured, his eyes narrowing. The first had been when he and Ian arrived in the palace and went on to get lunch. One of the kitchen staff went to deliver their meal, only to explode in their faces.

If Euryphel hadn’t been running scenarios, lulled into false safety by the familiarity of his own parlor...he and Ian really might have died.

Hor’well’s gaze fell to Fura, his brows pinching together. “While I'm unsurprised that Selejo prepared for the eventuality of Zukal’iss sealing itself off from the outside by staging agents within the city proper...I can vouch for Fura’s integrity: She would never be a pawn of Selejo.”

While Euryphel had been quick to assume the staff member from earlier had been a Selejan sleeper agent, he understood the implication in the general’s words: People have been unknowingly compromised. To her credit, Fura seemed genuinely shocked when Euryphel called her out. He wouldn’t have revealed her out loud if not for the fact that when he did so multiple times in a scenario, Fura never willingly attacked them: It was only ever after she started to seize that she became aggressive.

“Where should we take her?” Milfins asked. “I know killing such a talent is the last thing we want to do.”

Hor’well rubbed at his single eye and sighed. “We could keep her in the former dungeon’s holding cells.”

“That seems reasonable,” Euryphel replied. “We’ll need to keep her asleep as much as possible to minimize the chance that she harms herself. I’ll make sure someone is dispensed to keep her under.”

Var’dun’a suddenly spoke, her figure projected into her seat. “Why bother keeping Dunai in Ichormai?”

Everyone’s attention snapped to the general. “What’s the alternative?” Euryphel wondered. Euryphel honestly wished he could just keep Ian safe in an indestructible box. After all, their win condition was broadly keeping the decemancer alive until his descendant crushed Selejo.

“Now that the Skai’aren has deployed his Deathseeds, there is little need to risk sending him to a battlefront in person,” she observed. “Now tell me, what would the Eldemari be least expecting, gentlemen?”

Silence hung about the room.

The general chuckled, her voice quiet and raspy. “What if we sent him East?”