It takes Emily two more attempts to get to the same point itle without any casualties after the b ships once again unluckily prove deadly to their inhabitants on the way to the ground.

  Emily again mao ground four of the twenty interceptors before Virgil starts throwing bolts of fire towards her. This time, she dodges the thrown bolts and ighe spell being prepared on the ground as she nds on the fifth interceptor. She repeats the process of pung a hole in the solid metal hull and dropping a grenade inside while preparing several defensive spells.

  She leaps off the now-falling ship towards the sixth interceptor, but a small petal of fire shoots towards her along a wide, arg trajectory. She kicks off the air, sidestepping the projectile right before it hits her. However, instead of bursting harmlessly in the sky, the petal spins, curving and drawing a full arc to fly back towards her even faster.

  “Damn,” Emily mutters, a small grin creeping onto her face as she suddenly shoots towards the floor to avoid the returnial and a sed petal that flies towards her from Virgil.

  She gnces over at the responsible mage and sees him standing in his rge magiation with his arms raised, swaying rhythmically like a ductuiding his orchestra as more petals form around him before shooting off at odd angles and arg through the sky to start targeting Emily.

  “Damn!” she cries again, her eyes widening as she sees over thirty burnials shooting towards her at varying speeds.

  Three petals narrowly miss her legs, and one particurly fast-moving one bursts against her left arm, ing it in a liquid-like fire that gs to her d quickly starts to eat through the leather bracer, burning her flesh beh. Emily sshes the bindings holding the burning pce with the other, dropping her on to the floor and removing most of the fire with it.

  Ouch.

  She gres at her bed arm while twisting to dodge a few more petals, feeling some residual fire maing away at her flesh despite her having removed most of the attack.

  That will be a bitch to heal.

  Two iors on her spiivate, and her flesh slowly starts returning to its normal colour as the fn mana is slowly forced out.

  Okay, don’t let those petals hit me. Let’s try to block them.

  Emily kicks the air, propelling herself up dozens of metres above the highest interceptor before freezing in mid-air and watg the streaks of fire twistiween the ships and angling to chase her. She takes a deep breath and shuts her eyes, spreading her magical senses and gathering the crag charge arouo stick close to her skin.

  As the first petal reaches her, she strikes out with her own mana, sending a small stream of charge from mid her thigh to ect with the tre of the fast-movial in the shortest path possible before letting the charge crag along her skin pour through the e. The focused lightning bursts the petal before it get close to Emily, releasing a small wave of heat and charge in one.

  A sed petal approaches her, so she repeats the same process, targeting the tre of the spinning projectile and supplying a powerful burst of magic to its tre. She falls into full assistive processing, utilising all of her cores at oo accurately trad target the many fast-movials ing towards her.

  All everyone else otlefield sees as she repeats this delicate process is a crag humanoid lightning bolt indiscriminately striking everything that gets near, surrounding itself with fireworks that keep going as more and more petals form around Virgil and shoot up to meet her.

  Emily tries to maintain her full defensive position, but quickly realises the futility of her as as the stream of petals tinues, rapidly eating away at her mana stocks and surrounding her with heat as the residual ma by each petal quickly adds up.

  Down to three thousand mana ahousand maa already. This is using over a thousand mana every teals and he doesn’t seem to be stopping. I was hoping it cost him more per shot, but it seems it’s too mupete against a fourth circle mage, and his several supporters, using endurance. Besides, I think the residual mana building up around me is him preparing for a spell I won’t want to be hit by.

  She froulls the crag lightning around her bato her body, fog it on her legs and kig off to propel herself back down towards one of the interceptor ships. She gnces back towards Calypso as she falls through the sky with several fmials hot oail and her frown grows.

  “They’re too close,” she mutters as the interceptor ships open fire, sending several on balls straight into Calypso’s hull. “I either o work faster, tell Anton to slow down, or both.”

  She kicks sideways as she falls, man out of the way a fra of a sed before she sms into the ship she was targeting’s hull as she siders what to do. Two of the petals chasing her don’t ge dire in time and sm into the ship, bursting and releasing liquid fire to eat through the metal struct.

  I guess that’s this attempt pletely failed. Wait, there’s no notification?

  fused, Emily slips past two more petals to approach the burning roof of the ship. She gnces down through the hole opened by the fire and sees several crew members frantically trying to put out the liquid death as several of their colleagues lie in smouldering heaps directly below the hole with fire eating through their corpses.

  They’re dead, and my system hasn’t failed me yet… It doesn’t t if they kill each other without my diretervention! That’s perfect!

  A savage grin forms on Emily’s face as she lets several petals burst against her armour. The liquid fire quickly starts eating through her protes as her hand moves to her belt and activates The Clock.

  ***

  On her attempt to breach the shore’s defences, Emily starts by having a new versation with Calypso’s piloting crew.

  “I’ll give you a signal once I spot the main blockade,” she expins. “When I do, please cut the ship’s speed in half.”

  “What will the signal be?” Tony asks for crification.

  “And when should we go back to full speed?” Ange adds.

  “This will be the signal,” Emily says, lifting her hand and f a small crag fme above her palm. “And you should go back to full speed just before you reach the ground troops. I’ll leave the specifics of when to you. I just want a bit of time to disable anything that could easily take doso before you get too close.”

  “Got it.” Ange gives her a fident nod before turning back to face the front and looking at the approag scouts. “Good luck.”

  Emily leaves the bridge, quickly reag the drod leaving the ship to take down the scouts. She settles above the bridge again after grounding all five small ships, waiting with the Whisper in her p till they reach the main battlefield.

  As she’s unloading her first volley of shots into the mounted artillery, she uses a modified simple light spell to lower a crag orb of white-tinted e fmes in front of the bridge’s main viewing window. The ship shudders slightly below her as its propellers slow down, but Emily’s shooting is uninterrupted, and the rest of her shots nd with perfect accuracy.

  She slips off Calypso and deals with the approag fifteen attack ships without issue, grounding them without casualties with practised ease, before once again charging into the gathered army to start taking down the rger interceptors.

  She drops four ships before Virgil starts throwing fming bolts at her again and, after the fifth, he attacks her with a torrent of petals. Emily takes a deep breath as she sidesteps the first petal, using a single core to keep maniputing her flowing lightning mana to keep herself afloat and joining the rest together in full assistive processing.

  She fixes her gaze on Virgil and the magic circle around him, sing the wildly varying trajectories of the petals bursting out around him and almost instantly f a mental map of their paths. She runs through several calcutions, refining her mental image and watg as invisible tracer lines are drawn from each petal, weaving across the battlefield in a plicated mesh of movement to attack her no matter how she moves.

  Several possible as fsh through her mind, each different possibility ging the pattern drawn by the predictive tracers as she quickly plots a path through the chaos. The perfect route settles in Emily’s mind as a petal quickly approaches her despite her slowed perception, so she bursts into motion. Lightning pours from her legs as she springs to the side, dodging oal and slippiween two more with a twist, angling herself and kig off the side of a falling interceptor.

  She jumps from point to point, narrowly avoiding the flutterials as she makes her way towards a surviving ship. She nds with a thud on top, directly above the bridge, before instantly dropping into a roll and moving aside to dodge three blisteringly fast petals that ram into the ship where she oood.

  She rises from her hurried roll with her hand in her belt, pulling out a gas grenade and tossing it through the fresh burning hole in a siion with meical precision. A spark of maa flows through her feet as she kicks off the ship, leaving one more victim in her wake as she leaps straight up before twisting around to pce her feet above her head. A small, electrified kick sends her shooting towards the floor below, but she swiftly rotates and kicks again, shooting sideways above the panig soldiers below with two spinnials hot on her heels.

  Another petal falls in front of her, aiming to intercept her, but Emily calmly shes out with her arm, releasing a burst of lightning and kig herself up a few metres to narrowly pass the projectile, letting it hit one of her pursuers. She zig-zags between two undamaged interceptors, carefully leading the remainial and dodging a few more, adding to the numbers behind her aing them build up speed until they lose their fine trol, at which point she guides them into the sides of the ships.

  With holes melting in the sides of twes at once, she tosses out two grenades aly skims along the ships' hulls, running her hand along them oer the other and iing maa through them.

  Emily barely pays any attention to the falling ships as she tinues along her prepnned path, p all of her power into speed to stay oep ahead of the raging fires chasihe ninth ah ships prove simple enough t down in the same manner, but as she’s flyiween the hull and balloon of the eleventh, a petal sms into the balloon, bursting into a sizeable patch of burning liquid fire that refuses to go out even as it eats through the repairing foam that tries to smother it.

  That’s gonna take the ship down quickly enough. It shouldn’t t against my mission if it kills anyone… right?

  As if on cue, a familiar failure notification pops into view in sync with the loud, harsh sound of metal grinding against metal behind her.

  ˉˉˉˉˉ

  -Leave the try without killing any of your pursuers (Failed)

  _____

  “Shit,” Emily mutters, stopping in pd quickly sing the battlefield to work out what went wrong before dodging a few more petals aing them sm into the burning balloon beside her, starting the ship on a rapid fall towards the ground.

  The issue quickly bees obvious when she spots three of the ships she sent down to the ground lying in a pile together with half-crumpled frames.

  They hit each other on the way down… Okay, only a few are o send the ground troops into disarray. I’ll send the rest off in random dires instead.

  Sighing, Emily activates The Clock while watg the burning ship that was beside her plummet to the ground and crash, folding in on itself as the magical fmes c its balloon finally finish eating through the mana p them and fade.

  I’ll have to test that . If I drop ships that easily then this stage will be a piece of cake.

  ***

  Ba the battlefield once more, Emily takes out four interceptors, seleg ohat are reasonably spread out and sending them straight down to the ground to distract the ground forces. Once she’s done, having taken slightly loo spread her first targets out, Virgil sends a volley of petals towards her.

  She twists in the air, gracefully dodging the first shots before taking a moment to enter full assistive processing to plot her route. Time stretches in her perception and, after running dozens of calcutions and simuting the entire fight in the blink of an eye, she shoots off to begin aest.

  She leads several petals, allowing them to build up speed before skilfully diverting them into the balloon of one of the highest-flying interceptor ships. The fire quickly es a sizeable portion of the ship’s balloon, and it plummets towards a ship below it as Emily powers on, leading another set of petals to burst against her arget.

  The heavy metal structs csh in the air as one falling ship knocks one of its stable panions to the ground with a mighty crash. Aed grin stretches Emily’s lips as no system notifications e from the first crash, but her expression freezes wherips a third ship of its balloon, and she receives the dreaded notification as it collides with the panig ground troops below.

  Before she question what ged, all of the petals twisting throughout the battlefield on winding paths to reach her shudder and ge dire, rocketing towards her at full speed.

  “Shit!” she mutters, taking oal to the chest and oo the leg as she scrambles to dodge the flood of fire closing in on her.

  Her hand quickly finds The Clock’s pouch, and she activates it while looking over at Virgil to try and uand why his attack suddenly ged. He’s standing in his rge magic circle, staring at the burning wreckage of the ships before him with a frustrated, resigned expression on his face as he guides his petals to attack Emily.

  Lightning strikes in Emily’s mind as time grinds to a halt.

  No wonder he chose such a roundabout attack method. He was trying to help me harmlessly take down the ships before, but that much destru pushed it over what he could make an excuse for. It looks like my optional quest requirement also fails when excessive deaths happen because of me, even if I didn’t directly cause them.

  KeroKeron