Emily stands up from the unreisable bloodied remains of Diego’s corpse, wiping her Cws off oattered cloak as her mind falls quiet, the irritating buzzing fading to a dull background noise.

  “Fug scum. He didn’t even have the balls to try detonating his circles,” Emily mutters disdainfully, reag down to take a spatial ste bracelet from his wrist.

  She reises the runic structure from some of the ste items she bought in The Dome and quickly locates the runes responsible for holding a mage’s mana signature to bind it to them. With a powerful pulse of her own mana, she effortlessly crushes the existing signature, wiping the item and allowing herself access.

  Just a few earth crystals, unication crystals, and some healing potions. Disappointing.

  She takes the useful items and pulls the spatial crystal from the bracelet with a small flex of mana, carefully severing the runes binding it to the ste entment, before looking around the scattered bodies surrounding her, sing for the third circle mages while cheg for ented items with her magical senses. Her senses draw her attention to all of the discarded crests, all of them bearing The ant’s tribution trag entment, and she notices that not all of the dead mages beloo the Mandrago family.

  Did they call reinforts from their nearby allies’ estates?

  Emily stops before the shredded corpse of the earth mage and g their crest. They aren’t from the Mandrago family. Emily shrugs as she grabs the drawstring pouch from their waist. Inside, she finds some more earth crystals, a few unication crystals, and a couple of spells written on parts. She discards the unication crystals and sends the rest into her belt before tying the pouch at her hip.

  This one be used by non-mages. I’ll give it to Anton if he chooses to join me.

  Emily gnces over at the first third circle mage she killed, shaking her head when she sees their scorched corpse without a single surviving item left. She spends a few minutes walking through the pools of blood and viscera, cheg for anything valuable. She takes a few clockwork rifles to pass on to Anton’s crew for self-defe otherwise finds nothing of value.

  She turns away from the dead and walks slowly back to the main mansion. Emily runs a few ss as she does, deteg a few unawakened people moving about in the servants’ wing that she chooses to ignore for now, her anger dulled to a quiet background hum now that her main targets are dead.

  If they run away now, I’ll let them live. If not, they’ll die when I get rid of this pce.

  Emily reactivates the paiors in her legs as she walks through the entrance hall, frowning as she notices a few cracks in the bones of one of them.

  I o work on a better self-reinfort spell. I ’t keep breaking my legs when I use sky step at full strength.

  She activates another ior on her spine, letting the healing potion soothe the leg as she walks up the stairs, the once-green carpet now stained red, aers the Patriarch’s great hall. She checks the dead direct line mages for ste items, finding all three to have small owner-locked spatial stes with some gold, crystals, potions, and even a few simple ented items within. After stripping the corpses and removing the space crystals from their ste items, Emily approaches the body of the Patriarch. She grits her teeth as she looks him over, wishing she could have made him suffer more as she slips the ste ring from his finger.

  Removing his signature takes her a few minutes and drains a substantial amount of her remaining mana, but she calmly verts maa to make up for it before binding the now ownerless item to herself to look through it, opening her eyes wide in surprise as she does.

  “Rich bastard,” she mutters, finding nearly three hundred gold s and a stockpile of greater crystals almost as rge as her own. “Why does he evehis many different elements? He only ever used wind spells as far as I saw.”

  Emily slides the ring onto her finger and turtention to the entment on the floor behind his throne. She walks around him and looks down, seeing a bnk spot on the floor from which she feel faint mana emanating.

  It looks like something’s hidden back here. I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I were a normal third circle mage.

  She crouches doces her hand oone, closing her eyes and pushing her mana into it. Her senses extend down into the floor, and she quickly locates ay space below that causes her brow to crease.

  Is there a room below this one?

  She quickly runs through her memories of running through the building clearing it out to build a mental map of it, and firms her suspis.

  There isn’t. At least, not one you could access from downstairs.

  Emily tries casting a spell to softeone so she move it out of the way, but she finds the unknown entmeing her influence.

  “Brute force it is,” she mutters, standing up and raising her only foot with a whole boot.

  She activates the entment on the boot to increase its weight before driving it down with all her strength. A rge thud sounds as her foot sms into the stone, spreading a web of cracks from the point of impact. She lifts her foot and sms it down again. Ohird blow, the stone below her shatters, and Emily leaps back as she watches a hole open up in the ground.

  She feels the unknown entment vanish, and a strong flood of mana rises up to repce it. Emily steps up to the edge, looking down into the hole and seeing a narrow, straight chute leading down into the earth.

  “A hidden passage,” she says to herself calmly, resting her hand on The Clock’s pouch as she steps out into thin air and drops into the dark tunnel.

  She falls and crystals embedded into the walls light up as she passes, letting her see the brickwork surrounding her as she desds towards the dense mana below. She drops past the ground level, sinking deep into a hidden basement, tens of metres below the surface. It doesn’t take long for her to reach the bottom, where she reinforces her legs with rock body before smming into the ground, abs the impact without difficulty and looking around the open chamber before her.

  Other than the low ceiling, which is only two times as tall as Emily, the room is the same size as the great hall above. Emily is standing at one edge, and filling the rest of the space is a massive magic circle.

  “Woah,” she mutters with awe, looking around the glowing, twisting, geometric patterns filling the room and stretg from the floor up to the walls and ceiling.

  There are dozens e magic crystals embedded into sockets around the circle, and a dense, barely visible, mist of mana sits over the massive struct.

  So this is why he needed all those crystals.

  Emily walks into the tre of the circle, her eyes sing over the runes surrounding her as she breathes in the dense, refreshing mana.

  “There isn’t the same feeling of pressure here, but the may is probably the same as in the depths of The Crystal Waters,” she mutters, reading the runes he tre and trying to decipher them. “It’s drawing mana from something... a mana vein? Using these crystals as a catalyst... To spread mana across... Do these runes desighe area?”

  She pulls up a page in her notes, quickly filling it as she walks around the circle. As her mind absorbs the vast amount of information she gleans from seeing such a rge magic circle for the first time, an idea forms, bringing a vicious grin to her face.

  That could work. Time to erase this Goddess-forsaken family from the city.

  Emily walks around, pulling the crystals from their sockets and disabling the magic circle, removing the glow from the room but leaving the barely perceptible mist of mana. , she moves back to the first runes she identified on the floor as trolling the spread of mana and pours mana into the ground, casting a spell to soften the rod using a delicate manipution of mana to bend the runes below her. She ges them into a familiar set used for densing mana instead. After finishing with the first area, she moves around the circle, doing the same at every point responsible for dispersing mana, using air walk to reach the runes on the ceiling.

  That should do it.

  Satisfied with her modifications, Emily pces the magic crystals bato pce, feeling a sudden increase in the may of the room, as the mist grows thicker by the sed. She moves to the stage of her pn, pulling a few greater fire crystals from the Patriarch’s ring and pg them at the tre of the circle along with a thick metal disc with a dial oop, the numbers ohrough thirty carved around it: a timed explosive.

  This circle doesn’t have any runes for stabilising such a rge amount of mana, so it will either detonate on its own or disperse after reag critical mass. Based on the current increase, that shouldn’t happen for about twenty-five mihough.

  Emily turns the dial to twenty, sealing the fate of the estate, and quickly moves back to the exit. She casts air walk and springs up into the vertical chute propelling herself up into the mansion above. Landing ba the main hall, she runs through the building, casting lightning step to boost her speed as she rockets out of the building, past the piles of corpses.

  She arrives at the front gate and pauses, looking at her sister’s decapitated head o time.

  “I never got to say this to you properly,” she says, a tear rolling down her cheek as she uses air walk to lift herself closer, reag out and shutting Anna’s eyes while burning her sister’s agonised expression into her mind. “I’m sorry.”

  With that she turns, wiping her cheeks and speeding through the city streets. She first runs into her old home, grabbing Anna’s diary and the ruined picture of their family before lighting the front of the building on fire to se the Mandragos' mark from it. She then speeds away towards the docks, her face falling bato a ask the moment she leaves the shop she used to call home food. She runs through the sparse crowd in the mairand into the passage to Calypso, using her Cws to draw a single ssh through the tre of the Mandrago crest hanging above it. She reaches the ship less than five minutes after setting off the timer in the mansion’s basement, finding Anton sitting alone otom step leading up to the ship.

  Emily stops, celling her spell and grinding her heels in to kill her momentum. Anton’s eyes open wide in shock as she appears before him, and he looks her up and down with an unfortable, fearful expression.

  “Are you, uh…” He pauses, unsure what to say. “Are you done?”

  “Yeah.” Emily nods, gng down and notig her tattered, bloodstained clothes.

  She casts se, calming Anton slightly before asking for his response.

  “So, are we leaving together? Or do I o find another ship?”

  Anton gulps down his fear before standing up and taking a deep breath to steel his resolve.

  “I’ll take you,” he says, gng at the pool of blood left on the floor by Emily’s se.

  “Good. Let’s go,” Emily says, walking past him up the steps to the ship.

  “Wait!” Anton cries, reag out to grab her shoulder and fling as she turns to look at him, her eyes still glowing with simmering anger. “Half the crew is missing. We ’t take off yet.”

  “I told you there wouldn’t be time when I was done. You should have kept them aboard if you wao take them with you.”

  “I didn’t want to say anything in case you sidered it a betrayal,” he responds with a fearful shiver.

  “You could have told them to stay without giving a reason. Anyway, we have just over ten minutes left until the gift I left in the Mandrago estate activates, and I’m pretty sure they’ll ground all ships the moment that happens, so there’s no time now. Besides, you have me, you don’t he rest of the crew.”

  Emily sends a stream of maa into the ship via the stairs below and raises her hand. She snaps her fingers for effect, pushing a spark of maa out of them at the same time aing it run down her arm while activating the ship’s start-up procedures. The ship’s horn sounds, and Anton looks up in surprise.

  “Magi trol ships?” he asks incredulously.

  “With the right spells? Probably. But that’s not quite what I used.” Emily turns and tinues up the steps, expeg him to follow. “Maybe I’ll expin it to you ter. e on.”

  “Damn it,” she hears him mutter under his breath, a mixture of frustration and resignatio in his tone as he turns to call over the nearby crewmembers. “Ash! Pod! Get in!”

  Emily boards Calypso with Anton hot on her heels. He pauses at the entrao wait for the other two as Emily keeps walking.

  “Gather everyoill on board to the bridge,” she calls over her shoulder as she moves in that dire to calm the two frantically trying to take back trol from her.

  She reaches the ship’s trol tre as the steps withdraw into the hull and the ship shudders, the track below starting to pull it back towards the outside world.

  “Damn it!” she hears Ange cry as she steps in. “I ’t fug stop it. My trols are locked!”

  “Calm down,” Emily says, instantly drawing the attention of Ange and Tony. “We’re leaving now. I’m in trol.”

  “What do you mean we’re leaving now? And how are you in trol? The fuck’s your problem?” Ange growls angrily, standing up and stepping towards Emily.

  Emily’s expression remains cold as she pushes Ange bato her seat with a light burst of wind.

  “I’ll expin properly in a minute, but if we don’t leave noon’t be leaving at all. Anton has agreed to follow me, and from this moment the ship is for all is and purposes his, so that’s why I’m telling you what to do.”

  Ange grits her teeth, fusion and anger overp the hint of fear Emily notices in her eyes.

  Even when she’s scared she refuses to back down. I like her.

  “I’ll give you guys back trol now, so please get us out of this port as fast as possible.”

  “Tsk,” Ange clicks her tourning around to face her trols. “Fine. But you better not be lying about Anton agreeing.”

  Tony gives Emily a flicted look but nods and turns to focus on the ship. Antoers the room with Ash a few mier and takes his seat as the ship sits on the edge of the docks infting its balloon.

  “How long do we have?” he asks Emily without looking at her.

  “Eight minutes,” she replies, p maa into the ship and direg it towards the engine, speeding up the take-off.

  “How long till we get in the air?” Anton asks Ange as she looks through the periscope.

  “Normally, I’d say ten minutes,” she responds, displeasure still clear ione. “But whatever she’s doing is helping, so probably six.”

  “Good,” Anton says with relief. “We make it.”

  He takes trol, direg them through their final lift-off checks as they rush to get off the ground in time. Six frantiutes tick by, and the ship detaches from the docks, floating forwards and up into the air quickly as Podrick walks in with Sam, the stout night shift cook.

  “What’s going on?” Sam asks, wiping the crust from his eyes.

  All eyes in the room turn to look at Emily: most gazes fused and fearful, but Ange’s is ht hostile. Antoo say something, but Emily raises her hand and he instantly stops.

  “I’ll expin in a moment, but first we should watch the fireworks,” she points towards the front window as she uses her maa to take trol of the ship again, turning it in the air to face the city and fly in reverse.

  Everyone follows her gesture, looking out over the city with fusion as nothing happens.

  “What are we looking for?” Podrick asks.

  “Five,” Emily says in lieu of an answer, her own anticipation building. “Four. Three. Two. One. Boom.”

  A bright fsh of light fills their vision as a pilr of fmes ects the earth and the heavens, ripping a hole through the clouds overhead. The pilr starts in the tre of the Mandrago estate, growing wider and engulfing half the noble distri an instant as a thunderous shockwave hits the ship, sending a violent shudder through it and shaking everyoo their cores as the deafening bs in their ears.

  Everyo Emily grabs onto something nearby to stay upright until the shaking subsides, watg in shod horror as the explosion dies down, leaving a scorched crater where people once lived, over a quarter of the city missing. Emily calmly watches on, feeling the anger in her chest fading away as her revenge is pleted, leaving only a hollow sense of emptiness in its wake.

  KeroKeron