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And, he also suspected, been slaughtered. The Sunlit Emperor was a tenth-tier mage, and Leon could see that he had what he supposed was every spare ark that his air forces could spare acting as support, numbering around three dozen. He could also have many other ground assets hidden from view, which Leon considered quite likely given their show of mass earth magic when Sunlit ambushed him. And that was on top of the potential threat of additional stealth arks, which the Sunlit Emperor had already shown a capacity for.

The end result of Leon’s call for vengeance was one of the most powerful armies, pound-for-pound, on the island. Two dozen arks, half of which belonged to the Bear Tribe and consisted of their entire ark fleet. Of those arks, only six were war arks, but two more of them were the Thunderbird arks that Leon had reappropriated. The rest were scout and transport craft. Supporting them was the rest of the Bear Tribe’s air force, made up largely of pegasi riders, but included many powerful mages either flying under their own power or riding more unique beasts.

Along with all of that, Leon’s thousand-strong order of Tempest Knights and all their MALLs, as well as about twenty-thousand warriors from the central army and an equal number from the Bear army moved with him.

They moved boldly but with an eye for caution. As much as he demanded a violent response, Leon wasn’t keen on being ambushed again, and Sunlit—or his arks, at least—had been circling the mountains only a few dozen miles away for hours. They could’ve prepared any number of defenses in that time, and Leon wanted to add as few Tribal casualties to their losses sustained so far as he could.

But he knew that there were going to be many killed this day. Hopefully, they’d mostly be Sunlit soldiers.

The arks led the way, with the first Thunderbird destroyer in the lead with its defenses fully raised, and the Tribal war arks behind and to its sides in a wedge formation. The wispless Thunderbird destroyer flew directly behind the more functional one, closer than more conventional doctrine might recommend.

To the flanks of the wedge flew the lighter scouts, while behind the entire formation were the transports guarded by the rest of the Tribal air forces. Below and behind them surged the land troops, led by the Tempest Knights. Leon wasn’t going to give his knights such a prestigious and privileged position without also giving the hard task of being the tip of the spear, and he wasn’t going to put them at such risk without also taking a risk, himself.

As a result, he flew above the first destroyer in his avian form, his silver feathers gleaming, lightning flashing within his blue crest. Beside him flew Maia as an ice dragon, and Red in her wyvern form. The rest of his retainers flew behind him, invisible.

Leon’s anger had turned the sky overcast, and for the most part, they flew beneath the thick storm clouds. His force hardly moved too far before Leon reached across miles with his power and started raining lightning down upon the Sunlit arks.

Intense bolts flashed in the distance, and many seconds later, the thunder rolled across the foothills, shaking the earth so hard that the animals in the area immediately fled as fast as they could.

And yet, Leon’s lightning did relatively little damage. The Sunlit Empire had a strong tradition of lightning magic, and these distant strikes weren’t able to penetrate their strong defenses. Leon’s arks, on the other hand, opened fire as soon as they entered maximum effective range. In the case of the Thunderbird destroyer, that was almost as soon as they launched the operation, though it was still far enough that the Sunlit arks were able to dodge its shots with relative ease.

Once all the other arks opened up, on the other hand, the Sunlit arks found themselves in a tighter spot.

The first salvo, limited only to the fewer in number frontal Lances, scored a few hits. Three Sunlit arks, though not the largest war arks, went down in flames. If Leon were still in human form, he would’ve smiled.

However, the Sunlit response, which up until that point had been surprisingly passive, changed. The arks fell back a bit, but then assembled into a loose line formation and fired back. Masses of superheated metal and stone flew across the sky, and Leon’s air forces were forced to respond.

Most of the Sunlit fire was directed at the war arks in front, but a few were aimed at the transports in the back. The first destroyer surged forward and took three hits, but the light shield activated and prevented any damage. A few other arks activated their own inferior light shields, which required enough power that they could interfere with engine and weapon use but managed to avoid any damage despite being hit.

One of the Bear war arks, however, was shot clean through as it shielded the transports behind it. A war ark with ten Lances and a crew of about two hundred exploded in the air as its magic power supply ruptured, but the transport carrying more than a thousand Bear warriors behind it remained intact.

The rest of the Bear air forces, however, used their magic to stop the remaining Sunlit shots. Magic barriers sprang into place, few of which were strong enough to prevent the Sunlit shots on their own, but taken as a whole ensured the survival of the transports.

As if that was all anyone was waiting for, once both sides had exchanged their first proper salvos, both sides broke off from their formations and accelerated. The outnumbered but stronger Tribal war arks charged ahead, their Lances hot and spitting fire. The Sunlit arks, on the other hand, spread out more to cover more ground and ensure the Tribal war arks were surrounded as they entered the space above the mountains.

And then Leon’s fears proved accurate: in many of the mountains below, the ground split open, and Sunlit ground positions were revealed, many of which had Lances of their own. Some positions had more than one, and what Leon took to be the main battery had no less than six Imperial Lances all aimed at Leon’s arks.

Leon had been waiting for just this moment, and, with lightning coursing through his veins and hastening his reflexes, he let loose with a borderline apocalyptic barrage of lightning, and then dove. Sunlit positions were struck, countless soldiers were killed, and many Lances were slagged.

Many others, however, reacted quickly, defending themselves with magic, such as conjuring shields of light or stone, or by simply ducking back into the holes they’d appeared from. Leon’s power, so spread out, couldn’t chase them well, and the Lances that survived his barrage fired, then were pulled back into the earth by the earth mages that had revealed them.

Their deadly payloads, however, sped across the sky. Leon’s people reacted just as quickly, but arks are large and cumbersome vessels, and not prone to quickly turning. Most of the Sunlit fire was blocked, but one transport was hit twice and began to plummet from the sky. Mages almost immediately began spilling out from it as they bailed as quickly as they were able, while the rest of the transports began a more orderly discharge of their human cargo.

Ten thousand Tribal warriors, mostly from the Bear Tribe but also many from the central army, were dropped down into the mountains with far less cohesion than Leon would’ve preferred, but far more than he’d feared.

With that, the transports began turning as fast as their bulk allowed, while the Bear air forces began spreading out to support the descending infantry masses.

In response, additional Sunlit positions began appearing all over the mountains, raining magic down upon Leon’s landing troops, inflicting casualties, and retreating beneath the earth before Leon’s troops could properly respond.

With a notional scowl, Leon turned his attention back to the strategic picture. His instinct was to focus on the smaller picture, but it was the arks, the more powerful Lances, and Sunlit himself that he had to reserve his attention for.

And things in the sky needed his attention. Red had broken off soon into the fighting and descended upon a Sunlit war ark, systematically reducing it to metal rain with her fire breath. Maia had wrapped her massive icy body around another Sunlit war ark and was in the process of crushing it, despite the attempts of the crew to dislodge her.

The rest of the air battle, however, was decidedly more evenly matched. Leon’s arks exchanged fire with Sunlit arks, but with the severe numbers disadvantage—half a dozen war arks against three dozen, though those three dozen were smaller and less powerful—despite knocking a few Sunlit arks out of the sky, Leon’s war arks were disadvantaged.

That disadvantage was put on full display when one of the central army’s arks was fatally damaged, but in a show of heart-warming defiance, managed to control its sudden loss of power enough to crash into one of the largest Sunlit war arks, taking the Imperial vessel down with it.

At almost that same moment, in several places around the battlefield, Lances fired as if from nowhere, revealing half a dozen small stealth arks. These Lances weren’t aimed at Tribal arks, but at the ground battles below, targeting some of Leon’s most powerful ground commanders. This Leon couldn’t allow, and as the stealth arks revealed themselves, he chose them to be his targets.

He focused all of his magical attention upon the Sunlit stealth arks. Without another powerful mage in the sky to stop him, his lightning fell upon them like rain, and the two stealth arks closest to him were torn asunder. The other four were damaged but remained in the sky. Three of them even continued to rain fire down upon Leon’s people below.

With hot rage coursing through him that grew stronger with every one of his people who fell, Leon flapped his wings, thunder booming through the mountains below with every wingbeat, and surged toward those stealth arks.

Against his anger, the next stealth ark stood no chance. His lightning overwhelmed its defenses and sent it crashing down, its entire front half rendered nothing but white-hot metal liquified by the power of his lightning.

The next stood up a little better, remaining intact for long enough for him to crash into the small ark and tear into its hull, softened by his lightning strikes. With beak and talon, he rent the ark’s outer plating and shot off bolts of lightning from any piece of him that he could into the ark. Sunlit men screamed as their bodies were ripped apart, exploded, and vaporized, and the ark fell, now little more than a mass of rapidly descending metal.

That left two more stealth arks, but as Leon turned to face them, the only possible thing that could distract Leon finally showed itself.

Or rather, he showed himself.

“LEON RAIME!” a smug and extremely self-satisfied voice boomed from the summit of the mountain that the Sunlit arks had been circling for hours, and around which the battle had been mostly concentrated. “COME AND FACE ME!!!”

Leon turned and saw Sunlit himself hovering a few hundred feet above the mountain, his arms outstretched, his body covered in thick golden plate, his face obscured behind his helmet. Despite this, Leon could tell it was the Emperor himself if for no other reason than the opaque aura he sensed emanating from the man.

Without any hesitation, Leon shifted his attention from the stealth arks to the Sunlit Emperor. He focused every bolt of lightning he could summon down upon the man, not dignifying his appearance with any kind of speech or parley. He simply directed every speck of power he could summon on a moment’s notice and threw it Sunlit’s way.

He was neither pleased nor surprised when his lightning bent around the Emperor as if blocked by some unseen magical field; he could sense some new magic emanating from the mountain just barely apparent behind the wild and chaotic aura of the battlefield—some defensive wards had been activated, it seemed.

But Leon was undeterred, and with his remaining retainers behind him, he flew toward Sunlit. However, he had no intention of allowing them to join that battle and ordered them to focus on the primary Imperial Lance battery operating out of that very same mountain, and as Maia and Red finished off their arks, he directed them to support the retinue in the likely event Sunlit had some ninth-tier mages held in reserve somewhere within the mountain.

With that, Leon allowed all of his attention to focus entirely on the Sunlit Emperor, who still smugly hovered over the mountain. Leon imagined he was smiling like some deranged lunatic behind his helmet, but he could only guess.

“I’ve been waiting for you!” Sunlit boomed, just a little softer now but no less smug and theatrical. “You didn’t give me enough time, so I had to cut my work short, but I’d say the results speak for themselves, wouldn’t you?”

Beneath him, the mountain’s peak split open and folded away, baring Iron-Striker for all to see.

Or rather, what was left of the man, tied to a pole and put on display. His legs and arms had been amputated, and none too gently if the blood he was covered in was any indication. His ears and nose had been cut off, and his eyes had been gouged out. Despite that, he was still recognizable, if only barely.

What was far more concerning was the weak and pitiful aura that Leon could sense coming from him. Such extensive bodily damage was devastating for a mage’s power, potentially greatly reducing them in tier if not quickly healed.

Leon had already been nearly beside himself with wrath, but with that reveal, he lost his mind. He focused entirely on Sunlit and bore down upon him with all that he had to give. The sky filled with so much lightning that even the Lance fire was drowned out, the thunder Leon brought shook the sparse mountain trees to pieces, and the smell of ozone overpowered the stench of the dead and dying far below.

Despite this, it wasn’t until Leon finally drew within physical fighting distance of the Sunlit Emperor that his magic started penetrating whatever defenses the Emperor had built around himself. But the Sunlit Emperor began to tumble through the air, rising and falling and twisting and turning as he needed, dodging most of Leon’s lightning bolts while his armor protected him from the rest.

Infuriatingly, he didn’t strike back, he just kept his distance, slowly drawing Leon up into the sky.

Leon, in the back of his mind, recognized what the Sunlit Emperor was doing, pulling him away from the battlefield, but Leon was fine with the direction their fight was taking. It wasn’t for nothing that the Thunderbird was known for ruling the heavens, after all.

Leon pursued with wrath and vigor, his magic power feeling almost endless compared to the last time he had fought the Sunlit Emperor. His magic wasn’t quite reaching the Emperor just yet, but he felt like he had more than enough magic to keep going until it did. If Sunlit didn’t actually do something before then, then the fight could only end one way.

So, it didn’t come as too much of a surprise to Leon when Sunlit finally began to level off and turned to face him. What did surprise him was what Sunlit held in his hand: three strange obsidian beads, all of which he threw into the air between himself and Leon.

Unsure what they were but wary of the oddly familiar aura they radiated, Leon broke off his pursuit for a moment. The beads began to glow and pulse with magic, and Leon finally realized why he found them so familiar: it was demonic magic he sensed.

From within his soul realm, he felt Xaphan stir. And then a moment later, he felt a sense of deep shock ripple through their contract.

[LEON!!] Xaphan shouted, and Leon needed nothing more than that. Leon summoned his demonic partner, and once more Xaphan stepped out into the skies of Aeterna.

At almost the same time, the obsidian beads exploded into fire, which formed large rings. Within these rings, darkness gathered, until the rings seemed to outline holes in space. From those holes stepped three fire demons, each one radiating ninth-tier power, and each one roughly similar to Xaphan save for their physical size; Xaphan was taller by far, though their auras were no less robust than his. Any other physical distinctions were lost within the orange-hot flames that covered their bodies.

[I’ll deal with these,] Xaphan growled, though Leon couldn’t detect much confidence in his voice. [You just handle that flying fuckboy.] With that, Xaphan charged, meeting the other three demons in battle. Leon felt their clash in his bones, the intensity creating powerful shockwaves that echoed in his chest.

But he averted his gaze and focused on his true target, the Sunlit Emperor.

He flapped his wings, and, wreathed in the lightning of his Clan, the lightning that Sunlit was audacious enough to lay claim to, charged.