All around the northern city gate, be it within or without the walls, upon the streets, in the road, in the ditches and the cleared-out fields, roiling crowds of people had gathered. They were kept within a certain distance of the walls by a long chain of men, no less than half of which were clearly just mercenaries dressed up to look like city guards. Atop the northern gate’s walkway, there stood several guards and just as many extraordinary individuals.

There among them were a homunculus, a markswoman, a swordsman, and a historian.

Minutes stretched on. The clock neared three.

Three minutes left.

Two and three-quarters.

Two and a half.

The heavens split open, a great shimmering window in the sky that spread like a stain. A lilac-coloured serpent of aurora borealis slithered forth from the realm beyond, turning an otherwise sunny day into a surreal sight.

Moments later, the vista of the road amongst the fields - of the forests and the mountains afar - rippled and distorted, great snakes of Fog taking shape. A ghostly noise unlike any describable by human tongue echoed inside everyone’s head, and the Fog-hewn spectres of a great caravan took shape.

First among them was a colossal vessel, as if the front half of a merchant vessel squashed down, its top deck covered by a canopy of sails and its entire hull bristling with cannons… And it floated. Just like that, as if it weighed nothing, it floated a good fifteen meters off the ground.

Soon enough the rest of the caravan began to take shape, but by the time the first of the smaller vehicles manifested as spectres, the great ship was already gaining colour. The uncertain outline of Fog blew away in great big plumes, revealing solid metal and wood underneath.

Was that… Was that the Woman in Red on the top deck?

Such a question was soon dispelled by the Markswoman’s unerring sight, for with her eye of stone she saw that it was indeed a much younger woman dressed in a similar manner, even her face similar to old Arnys Krishorn. Certainly, this must’ve been her daughter.

Impressive as the caravan was, Zel’s attention remained fixed on a single object.

The ship in the lead, its sides painted with swirling serpents. All those guns, all that armor, everything but the floating. That was Ikesian technology. Something inside Zelsys screamed recognition.

In fact, many of the smaller vehicles were suspiciously familiar. She could’ve sworn she clearly saw at least four variations of the supply tractor from the E.Z. amongst the caravan, riding besides carriages drawn by great lizards, entire houses carried on the backs of gigantic beasts, smaller floating boats with iridescent sails, and all sorts of outlandish vehicles in between.

Once more, the sense of grounded normalcy - of mundanity - was washed away.

Whence the sect property and the steady influx of Kargarians had lapped at the shores of her ground, this genuinely otherworldly display had washed it away altogether.

She was back in the dungeon, and it was comfortingly familiar in its surreality.

With deftness entirely inappropriate to its colossal size, the great vessel turned and hovered into the field closest to the city walls, lowering itself to about a meter above ground only a stone’s throw from the edge of the crowd. It towered over everything else, dwarfing all but the tallest buildings in the city.

As the rest of the caravan slowly flowed in to line up in ordered chaos over every single bit of free space in the cleared-out fields, a clarion call sounded over Willowdale. The steel beast’s howl.

The Kargarians were here, and they had brought the future.

A short while earlier, in the city hall’s senate chambers...

“I have a plan, one that will provide numerous jobs during the farming off-season and aid in the protection of our great city in the face of what is, let us be honest, inevitable assault,” Crovacus Estoras said, having been forced to rush things without polishing his speech to the fullest. “Bandits, terrorists, malicious foreign agents or arcane wildlife - we live in tumultuous times that demand our walls to be thrice as tall and thrice as thick as they have ever been, let alone as pitiful as they are now. If the Senate would hear me, I would state my proposal.”

A wave of speech swept through the senate chamber, the senators talking amongst themselves. Some questioned if such measures would be needed when the militia was already being up-armed to the degree that it was, and Crovacus gladly answered.

“The project in question hinges on one of the imports being brought in by our Kargarian trade partners. If you would all agree to let me expound upon my intentions, I would gladly explain the full extent of my defense initiative in detail. I wish to have a series of high-output barrier projectors constructed around the city. Fourteen, to be precise.”

“The Fourteen? That’s your plan?! They’re a myth! How do you intend to build something that might not have ever existed!?” called out one of the Ikesian senators, and he was right.

Estoras admitted as such, conceding, “You would be correct. I do not intend to chase whatever archaic means may or may not have been harnessed in the original Fourteen, and instead propose the creation of an analogous system using cutting-edge essentech, contained within these new grand stone edifices as protection and monumentalism both. I was in fact entirely prepared to propose a wide variety of different systems, but perhaps through sheer coincidence, fourteen units arranged in two seven-unit systems around the city were the optimal balance of durability and long-term stability.”

Yet another avalanche of questions was loosed upon him, and instead of answering, Estoras just gestured to the projector operator. A translucent quartz slip was slid into the machine, and with a loud whirr it came to life, projecting an artistic rendering of Willowdale from an isometric view, surrounded by two concentric heptagons of monumental statues, each quite literally thrice as tall as Willowdale’s walls. The illustration depicted six symbols of lightning-bolts enveloped by flames arranged around the city, with a larger one right in the center.