They started earlier the next day. No one wanted to end up running into something as bad as temporarily taking a Metro station down at rush hour again, and the best way to prevent that was to find the rest of the locations before the end of the day.

Serenity hoped that they’d be able to capture someone who would cooperate. Records would be at least as important - that was probably how they’d actually find people - but someone who could order groups to surrender would be a tremendous help. Now that the portal was closed, there was no point in the Sterath fighting, and he wanted to collect them into a secure location before they started wondering where their next meal would come from. He still wasn’t even certain how many there were in the city.

Dr. Allen Ridge was still analyzing the data collected overnight when they met up at a shopping center parking lot. The SWAT team’s SUV rolled in several minutes before the two scientists arrived, and when they did, Rachel didn’t turn the engine off. She simply told them to follow her “just like yesterday” and led them south and a bit east.

It wasn’t the same as the previous day; Serenity could tell that they were going somewhere instead of wandering the streets in a search pattern. They went directly to a location, then drove around the block twice before Rachel led them to another location to do the same thing.

The third time, they weren’t driving around a block, they were driving around an old shopping mall instead. Even though it was midmorning by then, there were only three other cars in the parking lot and they were all parked well away from the mall. There seemed to be too few cars to be employees. The mall had an odd shape; it almost looked like it had been an L at one point, but a third wing had been added at the point joining the two wings, giving it an oddly off-center three-legged look. It was two stories tall and mostly brick, though the doors were all glass and several of the larger stores also had glass displays. From the far edge of the parking lot, all Serenity could tell was that the glass seemed intact.

They circled the shopping mall half a dozen times before even entering the parking lot, and when they did, it was at an entrance a long way from the actual building. Serenity more than half expected it when the lead van pulled into a parking space. Once Janice parked, he hopped out and walked to the side of the government van. “It’s here?”

Dr. Ridge seemed paler than normal when he nodded. “As far as I can tell, it covers the entire building. It doesn’t perfectly match the building shape; the intensity doesn’t vary correctly for that. It acts more like a spherical variation, though I can’t tell if it’s emanating from a single point or from the outer shell. I’m guessing the outer shell because there isn’t the variation I’d expect of a point source radiating from inside an enclosed space, but at the same time it doesn’t quite match the model of-”

“Allen. Stop.” Rachel interrupted her colleague. “All we can really say is that something’s here. We’re not sure exactly what.”

Serenity nodded. “That’s my job. Hopefully I can see enough from outside to know if it’s safe to enter or not. I definitely want to scout the place; I’m not happy they’ve taken an old mall. If they have this much space, why did they need everywhere else we’ve found them?”

“You think there are a lot of them in there.” Brown took Serenity by surprise when he spoke; he’d known the man was standing there, but he hadn’t expected commentary. “So do I. Based on the concentrations we’ve been seeing, there could be several hundred Sterath in there. We don’t have enough people for that.”

“I need to scout it first,” Serenity stated. “We’re not going to be able to get the kind of support hundreds of enemies needs without some pretty hard evidence.”

Brown wasn’t happy to hear that; his frown got deeper as Serenity spoke. “I wish I could argue with you, but you’re right.”

“I’ll start with looking at whatever Dr. Ridge found from the outside. With luck, it’s not related to the Sterath at all.” Serenity turned away from the van. He needed a place to sit where he could see the mall building without getting too close; it might take a while to properly analyze a spellform if that was what they’d found.

“You believe that as much as I do.” Brown sounded rueful, but he didn’t stop Serenity as he walked away. His tone lightened as he turned to the others. “So, what do we do while he stares at the building?”

“I brought cards today,” suggested Rachel. “I figured we’d want something after how long the scouting took yesterday.”

Serenity tried to ignore the helpful commentary from his nearby co-workers (Rachel even brought a table!) and tried to concentrate on the spell in front of him. The first thing that was obvious was that Dr. Ridge’s description was only partly accurate: it wasn’t a sphere. It was a half-sphere; Serenity could see where it imperfectly fit the ground.

That was simply poor spellwork. Serenity could understand limiting a spell to the visible under some circumstances, especially when there were other protections for the other areas, but there was no excuse for not fitting it to the ground properly. This was probably a result of trying to reduce the mana cost and forming the Intent of a half-sphere instead of going for a dome that covered the area. The difference was subtle, but a dome would start with the actual ground where the half-sphere was simply a geometric shape haphazardly lying on top of the ground. The only reason it was as close to full coverage as it was was because the parking lot around the shopping mall was more or less flat.

There weren’t any other spells covering the missed areas that Serenity could see from this distance; when he snuck in, he’d have to keep an eye out, in case there was something he couldn’t see. Had the spellcaster not even examined the spell after casting it? The holes were obvious.

Serenity looked forward to teaching the spellcaster a lesson he would probably never have the chance to learn from.

The purpose of the massive half-sphere was the next thing to find out. Serenity could see part of the spellform, of course; it was a mana-based spell, and they always stabilized the best with the spellform containing the spell. While there were advanced techniques that could distort or even completely change what could be seen from outside the spell, not only did they have their own tells and costs, but they were exceedingly unlikely here. The spellcaster hadn’t bothered to hide the spell at all.

It took some time to investigate the spellform, but it was really very simple in the end. It was an element-based shield with a fire-based backlash effect, probably one established by a Tier Five spellcaster with the aid of an artifact. Serenity would have guessed Tier Six or Seven, but that high was not permitted to join a first-wave invasion of a Tier Zero world; Serenity was actually a little surprised to see evidence of a Tier Five. It must have been exceedingly expensive to send even a single person of that Tier.

Of course, against a Tier Zero or even One world, a single Tier Five should be able to do almost anything he wanted except act as a garrison force. He still couldn’t be everywhere at once.Why did he wait? Were there restrictions Serenity wasn’t aware of? His memory that far back was fallible, especially with anything that wasn’t of particular importance, and while he remembered that there was a Tier limit, he couldn’t remember if there were additional requirements or not.

There had to be restrictions. There was someone he could ask, too.

Voice? What are the restrictions on high-Tier invaders during the first wave?

[That information is not available to residents of an invaded world until the invasions are defeated, as it may allow the residents to take advantage of the restrictions in an unexpected manner]

The restrictions must be notable. Serenity wondered if time was one of them; he remembered that invasion portals usually had a maximum that they would transport each day, even though normal portals didn’t have that limit. Could this be something similar?

Serenity would simply have to hope that between the restrictions and the weakness from being in a low-magic world would be enough to weaken the BattleLord to where he could be handled. If nothing else, they almost certainly meant that Tranquil Conviction couldn’t act directly. Was that why all he’d done so far was show up and talk (other than a little damage to Tek’s space station)?

Probably.

Now that he knew what the shield did, it made some more sense that it was only a half-sphere; it was there to protect the mall against heavy weaponry, not as a true comprehensive shield. Serenity wouldn’t have done it that way, but he could understand why the BattleLord had. Of course, Serenity knew far more about his own society than the BattleLord did; he knew that allowing individuals with man-portable equipment through the barrier was almost as bad as not having one. That wasn’t usually true on a low-Tier world.

Serenity told the others he was going to head in, then shifted to his Sovereign of Potential form. Unlike the subway, there wasn’t any good way to get close first. He could hear the scientists and the SWAT team’s surprise when he turned into shadows and drifted towards the mall; Rissa’s “Yeah, he’s a shapeshifter, you knew that already” would have made him laugh if he could laugh in this shape. The best he could manage was some shaking, which felt like it served the same purpose.

There were no traps in the shield’s openings. Most of them were small enough that it would be hard to slip under them - the height of a curb - but at the back of the mall he found a space near what looked like a loading dock that would be easy to get through, since the bottom of the half-sphere rested on top of the dock. When he brought the group in, it would be a good way to enter.

Serenity went ahead and slipped inside the shield. When there were no surprises, he proceeded to head into the mall; that was easy enough, since the first door he checked wasn’t fully closed.

The mall’s population was much lower than Serenity had feared; the Sterath were everywhere, but they seemed to be mostly keeping themselves in individual abandoned stores instead of wandering around through the mall itself. It was still more than he really wanted to take on with the less than a dozen people he had between his group and the SWAT team.

He searched through the mall and found that the different types of Group were separated into different stores, but they weren’t clustered at a higher level than that; a store with mages might have scouts on one side and shock troops on the other. Some of the stores didn’t have anyone at all; they must have been opened in preparation for Sterath who hadn’t arrived yet and would never arrive now.

Unlike the other locations, almost everyone Serenity saw was Tier Two, with a few Tier Three commanders. It wasn’t as many Sterath as he’d expected, but they were tougher. Serenity didn’t look forward to fighting his way through the mall. Serenity was grateful he’d cut off their reinforcements but the more he saw of the mall, the more he wondered how he was actually going to handle it. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the defense of Denver, but he only had his team and the SWAT unit; in Denver, there had been at least twenty different full teams. Over a dozen had survived intact enough to still call themselves the same team at the end.

The second floor was nearly deserted. Most of the stores hadn’t even been opened by the Sterath. Near a ramp for the handicapped, Serenity found one store that had been opened up and was clearly being used as a command center based on the maps spread out everywhere and messengers coming and going.

As he entered, he saw someone with a higher rank-mark than he’d seen during the current invasion head to the back. Serenity followed and watched as he set some items on a table, then chanted something in an old form of Sterath. Serenity would have worried, but he could tell it wasn’t much of a spell, and definitely wasn’t the sort of divination spell that might reveal his presence.

When the spell completed, Serenity heard Tranquil Conviction’s voice, but didn’t see him. “One more battle. I’ve done my planning, but random chance and cleverness has won so far. Perhaps strategy was indeed your best choice. I see one more move ahead, and it is yours to choose; do you remove the Lord from the board at the price of a fight you do not want, or do you wait?”