Chapter 3

“Regardless, by eliminating all other planes as viable options for travel other than n-space, we create a unique tactical opportunity to intercept any and all traffic to and from that plane from ours. Observations of Aion technology indicate that this was achieved in yesteryear by means of active harmonic disruption to the spellforms that allow for teleportation and portal formation, but this method requires multiple directed sources overlapping their castings to achieve full results. 

A more direct method of interdiction in planar travel exists, and in the following essay, I shall explain how it can be achieved by only a single caster, amplified through a ship’s communications array, over a projected cone equivalent to a minor star system using the proposed ‘rubber sheet’ method of interception not of the spell, but of all material attempting to pass through the reality barrier.”

—Methodology of Interdiction, Part Two, Zhaan Triffet

As he moved into position to attack the Dominion warship, the Saizen brothers lost their minds. One of them threw himself bodily at Sylvas, trying to knock him out of the circle, only to discover that a person who can control their own gravity is not so easily dislodged. The other started casting some sort of stunning spell with impressive aptitude. It might even have worked if Malachai hadn’t stepped casually into his personal space and grabbed him by the wrist.

“You can’t fight a warship with this thing!” One Saizen yelped as he dangled from the side of Sylvas’ neck. He technically had him in a headlock, but given that Sylvas hadn’t moved, and didn’t need to breathe anymore, it wasn’t terribly effective.

“You’re going to get us all killed, kid.” The other Saizen yanked his hands free of Malachai but didn’t try to cast again. “Just stand down. Let them take us.”

“We’re too dangerous to be left alive.” Sylvas sighed, even as Kaya puffed up at his words. “I’m sorry that you’re caught up in this, but the only way out of this is through them now.”

“Three warships, a dozen fighters each, against our tiny…”

Rania was the one to cut the complaining off this time, to everyone’s surprise. “It isn’t about your ship. It’s about him.”

The Saizen brother standing free of the circle pivoted to look at Sylvas again, the soft, polite young man who’d convinced the clones to go along with all of this out of a sense of honor that the thieves weren’t even sure they had.

The career criminal looked around at their faces and saw the faith that they had in Sylvas shining back. Even Kaya, for all her jokes, had the expression of somebody who fully believed that they were about to be saved. The Saizen who was standing plucked his brother off Sylvas with a groan. “What do we need to do?”

“Kaya, I need you repairing and reinforcing the hull. Malachai, when we’re close enough, you hit them with every killing spell you have. Until then, keep an eye on the fighters, and take what shots you can. Rania.” She perked up suddenly, fully expecting to have been left out of proceedings due to her lack of magic. “I need you monitoring our systems and shouting out when they go down. Saizens, you are on repairs. Patching the systems as they die to keep us moving.”

“Planning on getting hit, are you?” the dislodged, neck-dangling Saizen grumbled.

“My magic is ripping your little toy ship apart, but if we’re fighting, I can’t hold back.” The panels around Sylvas began to flicker and falter as his mana spread throughout the ship once more. “That means you need to keep us in the sky. Any questions?”

“Who died and made you king?” One of the Saizen brothers snorted.

“The Aions,” Rania replied as she threw herself into the seat by Sylvas’ side. “Try to keep up.”

Now that he could reach his senses out and fully occupy the ship, Sylvas immediately realized what dire straits they were in. The Saizens had not been joking when they said that the ship was not equipped for this kind of battle. The weapons arrays might have been able to fire off a sly spell or two before they burnt out, but they clearly weren’t designed to be used for any sort of long-term bombardment. Malachai’s magic could be fired out right through their hull since it only interacted with living things, but every other spell had to be channeled around the intricate engraved magic that made up any spaceship’s hull, and it just wasn’t going to work. 

In the distance, the Obsidian Dominion’s mages would be narrowing in on the tiny speck moving through space and readying more direct assaults on them now that their presence was known. Those crescent ships bristled all along the inner curve with weapon arrays that would launch the spells with deadly precision through space. 

Sylvas was going to have to spin the little tin can that they were flying around in between each casting of his own returned fire to bring another of their soon-to-burn-out weapons arrays to face the right direction and hope the Saizens managed to get repairs done in the seconds before the next rotation. He already knew that they wouldn’t be able to, but he didn’t have the option of not casting spells if they intended to survive. There were nine tiny hidden weapon arrays around the ship, and not one of them was going to make a second shot before burning out. All the advantages of his ability to instantly cast were gone.

I can hear what you are thinking, and it may be the single stupidest thing anyone has ever thought.

“It could work, though…” Sylvas spoke to himself as he lined up the curve of their approach.

Just because something could hypothetically work doesn’t mean that it is in any way a sensible choice. I would like to remind you that I will also die if you do. Do you really want to double-murder me? You want that on your conscience?

“I’ll be too dead to care?” Sylvas realized he’d said it aloud at the exact same moment that Rania’s mouth fell open in dismay. He tried a quick smile to defuse the situation. “Just arguing with Mira.”

She caught him by the chin to make sure he met her gaze. “If that’s your response to what she’s saying, then Mira is right.”

See! I knew that I liked her.

Sylvas no longer had the attention to spare for this argument. He cast a shield ahead of them and flung them into a corkscrew-spiral towards the warship. At a distance, taking pot shots, the Obsidian Dominion’s mages had not been a threat, but now that they were closing and they had a target, the odds of them making it through unscathed shifted wildly in the other direction. Before, it would have taken incredible luck for any one of the deep-space concussions being detonated to have even touched them, but now, it was almost inevitable that eventually they would eliminate every route Sylvas had to evade them. 

The ship groaned as he reversed the direction of their spiral to avoid the next barrage. He’d pulled with too much of his will to reverse the course, pressed his mana too hard into the ship, and the chaotic destruction writhing through it, still unintegrated, started grating against the channels and spells it was meant to flow through cleanly. Where it bit through, that same destructive mana exploded out into the ship, tearing chunks from the systems meant to keep them alive and moving.

Kaya, the Saizen brothers, and Rania were all devoted to the task of repairing the damage that Sylvas was doing. It was an obscene waste of the tiny amount of resources that they had, but there was no one else who could fly the ship like this, with perfect awareness of the position of every object in their sphere of influence, their speed, and their motion.

The inner curve of the Dominion Battleship had been aligned perfectly with their angle of approach now, and every weapons battery on it had lit up. A solid wall of spell fire seared through space towards them. Sylvas reversed the spiral again, flinging them into the gaps between the spells that nobody else would have even been able to see, blinded by the wave of multicolored lights. Wave after wave came, but for all that the Dominion loved to brag about their military, they seemed to lack any sort of firing discipline. Spells were cast as they became ready; nobody was coordinating them. It was exactly how Sylvas had seen the Ardent fighting, but he’d assumed that a military built around fighting sentient enemies rather than eidolons might have been a little more organized. There was probably some logic to it. The unpredictability of the firing patterns, when even the people firing off the spells didn’t know when they’d launch, probably made it practically impossible for most ships to avoid. You would need impossibly sharp reflexes, and the ability to move a ship around faster, and in impossible directions, to avoid the chaos.

They had closed almost half of the distance when the fighters finally engaged them.

These ships were more familiar to Sylvas, jagged in design with their forward-slung wings and startling acceleration for such a small craft. But familiarity didn’t grant him any real advantage against them, not now in the midst of the bombardment. They swept in, running perpendicular to the spell fire torrent and tried to position themselves to open fire alongside it, to close off more of Sylvas’ options. To keep him locked on course towards the battleship, and the certain doom that seemed certain to be waiting for them there. If only they’d known that was the plan anyway.

The spiral down towards the enemy ship had been broken off the moment that the barrage hit. The movement was no longer in any way an arc, instead turning into erratic jerking motions to get them through the equally chaotic attacks.

A spell grazed against Sylvas’ shield and detonated, rocking them gently inside the bubble of magic and doing markedly less damage than Sylvas himself was wreaking on the unfortunate ship.

Logic would have dictated that pulling out of the stream and trying to avoid being in the direct line of fire was the course to take, but the fighters were swarming around now. Unable to dip into the barrage or hit Sylvas’ ship from outside of the barrage while it was hidden by all of the destructive magic washing by. By riding inside of the enemy warship’s fire, they were actually protected from the dozen or so other ships that wanted to do them harm.

All that they needed for it to keep on working was for Sylvas to be perfect, and for the ship not to explode from the forces he was exerting on it.

Kaya had slathered on enough layers of additional metal to keep their hull intact throughout the constant abrasion of Sylvas’ mana, but the internal systems that the Saizen brothers were meant to be making spot repairs to were falling apart faster than they could get to them. The ship could not hold up to Sylvas’ mana. Not corrupted with destruction the way that it was right now.

Stop thinking it.

“I am running out of options here!” he barked as he spun them through the gaps in another impossible matrix of interlocking missiles, explosions, and death.

Rania was there by his side in an instant. He could feel her, even when his mind was nowhere near to his body. Her voice came through distantly, like it was being fed to his ears by the recording spells in the cockpit. “What do you need?”

What he needed was a better ship. He needed the eidolon that he’d just absorbed, which was supposed to be impossible for him to have absorbed, to already be integrated into his core so that its mana wasn’t tainting everything else that he did. What he needed was for the weight of everything to be lifted off his shoulders, for it to be someone else’s problem, just for once.

He slipped back into his body just long enough to answer. “I need Kaya and one of the Saizens up here, now.”

Oh, no, you do not.

Rania must have nodded in response, but he didn’t see it. He was too focused on his next move. So long as the battleship was unloading everything that it had at them, there was no hope of victory. Even perfect evasion would only last until there was an impossible wave of spells coming at him to avoid, at which point it all became for nothing. To win, they had to fight back.

He let one of the incoming spells, some vast pyroclastic eruption of magic, hit them. He trusted in his shield to protect them from it, and he really shouldn’t have. The outer layers of metal that Kaya had surrounded them with melted away from the heat, even through the shield. The shield itself, unattended while he worked on casting other things, was overwhelmed. All the mana fed into it at the point of casting seemed to evaporate, burnt away to fuel the spell trying to kill them. Kaya managed to slam more metal up to protect the ship before the heat could spread too far inside, but there wasn’t really any good way of cooling things in space. Heat didn’t conduct through the vacuum. All she could do was throw on more and more mass and wait for it to dissipate through it.

In the moment, as he felt their survival teetering on the edge, Sylvas wasn’t sure if he’d made the right call, taking the hit so that he could change the alignment of the ship until they were spinning across the same axis as the curve of the enemy battleship, but then his own spell fired off, and his opinion was reversed.

Launched through one of the hidden emitters secreted around the ship, a beam of raw destructive force whipped out. A straight line, pinning into one end of the curved weapons array of the Dominion ship, then dragging its way across as the smuggler’s vessel spun. Through the thin strip that the overlapping shields protecting the battleship could not cover without risking all the spells being fired washing back over them. Both the weapons array on Sylvas’ ship and the enemy ship were knocked out of action. The enemy would have theirs repaired in just a moment, but that moment was all that he needed. He dropped back into his body.

“Saizen, take the helm. Make a break for it; the second the battleship is out of action.” He caught Rania by the back of the neck and pulled her in for a kiss, startling her into stillness at the unusually aggressive move. When he pulled back, there was confusion in her eyes. He turned away from her. “Kaya, close the door behind me.”

Kaya seemed to have clocked what was happening a lot faster than everyone else. “Sure about this?”

No.

“Yep.” Sylvas smiled.

She tried to force a smile back, but it wasn’t very genuine. “Good luck, Stanzbuhr.”