It takes a little over six hours for Elisime to reach Ireili, a city near the border with Morzea in the centre of the plains. Emily rises from her meditation, tossing her half-completed spell designs to the back of her mind and leaving the ship's batteries to head to the cockpit.

Mensacus rises from her seat when she walks in, stepping aside and taking his place at her shoulder as she observes the city on the horizon. It has a large wall that encompasses not only the city, but a wide swathe of farmland around it. It's manned by hundreds of armed soldiers with clockwork rifles and mounted artillery, and there are a few dozen magic signatures dispersed and hiding among them, but none exceed second circle.

There are only fifteen armed airships waiting above the main city for her approach, and Emily can see the main force of the Galanthia family, gathered in their estate with a magical barrier wrapped around them, through the eyes of a bird drone.

"They're not even trying to hold the whole city," Emily muses. "Let's see if we can make this easy."

She uses a strand of machina to connect with a set of speakers on the side of the ship, activating the motors to retract the armour plates covering them in the same breath.

"Brave soldiers of Modo," she says, her buzzing voice echoing out over the plains, washing over the Ireili. "I am not your enemy. I come in the name of the crown, and my only targets are a select few noble families, Galanthias included. Set down your arms and return to your homes, and I will leave you unharmed; resist, and I will be forced to engage."

As Emily stops and silence settles over the hulking city walls, she watches tens of men and women drop their guns and turn away, but most remain. Emily opens Elisime's cargo holds, releasing a burst of mana and forming a magnetic net beneath them as the ship slows to a halt, still a few kilometres from the wall.

She sends out a flood of metal troops, spreading them like a colony of ants across the open plains. More and more guns drop, and even a few of the mages turn tail and flee when Emily begins dropping heavy artillery.

The airships hovering above the city, on the other hand, open fire, sending a spray of metal towards Emily's troops. She channels mana through the ship's batteries, forming a crackling cage of runes around Elisime that projects a strong magnetic barrier to protect her forces.

The incoming shells slow to a crawl the moment they enter, before rocketing back the way they came. Half of them detonate in the air, the timed fuses within them running out, but the rest punch holes in the weapons that fired them.

"Last chance," Emily says, charging the ship's railguns and preparing two spatial spells.

The airships unload another volley of shots, and the few still-manned artillery cannons embedded in the wall join in.

"Time's up."

She activates Teleport, shattering into purple light as the first two shots of Elisime's railguns shatter two enemy cockpits, detonating moments after impact and ripping the front faces off both ships.

Emily appears in the air directly behind the gathered ships, catching her bird scout and furling its wings to put it away as a flood of spatial mana builds the next spell already formed in her mind.

"Reduce the casting cost of spell Warp Gate in return for a binding time restraint, lock casting for six hours," Emily hums, charging her voice with mana and completing the casting with only a quarter of her reserve gone.

The world shatters in front of her, and two more railgun shots eliminate two ships' control rooms. Emily raises a hand and pushes it forward, willing her portal to swallow the enemy airships, depositing them out through the sister portal, bound to the side of Elisime.

The moment they arrive above Emily's forces, the robot army unloads their heavy arms towards the now low-flying ships. Rockets, shells, and a few weak spells from the new golems scattered sparsely among her mechanical troops, slam into the ships, ripping through their hulls and tearing apart their balloons. Several shooting hatches open along Elisime's side, exposing turret emplacements and metal soldiers within, and it only takes a few seconds for the enemy ships to start falling to the ground, slowing thanks to Emily's still active barrier and giving the robots below time to move.

Emily turns her focus to the noble family hiding in their estate, leaving her troops to storm the walls and the grounded airships. She casts Teleport again, burning another small chunk of her mana to call Mensacus to her side before heading towards the faintly-visible magical barrier peeking up over the city's tightly packed houses.

They descend towards the spacious, walled estate under its protection, ignoring those on either side with minimal activity.

"By what right do you use the crown's title?" shouts a nasally voice from within the barrier as Emily and her son pause above.

She stares at the Galanthia Patriarch unimpressed, disappointed to see that for a fourth circle mage, the man's mana is thin and unrefined.

"By every right," Emily responds, drawing her lightning and metal connections close but not yet activating them. "I was hired by King Arthur the Second to perform a purge of his law-breaking nobles. You are first on a long list of those who've committed treason and broken the king's laws. Surrender peacefully, and some of you, those not here by your own will, will be compensated and reassigned. Resist, and the same will happen, but I'll make it a lot more painful."

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She spots a few conflicted expressions, noting every single one, and even more sneers as spells are prepared and guns are raised.

"The king must be mad if he's sending a terrorist to do his dirty work," the Galanthia Patriarch spits, slamming his hands together and twisting his fingers, weaving a spell that churns the earth around him, turning up the paved slabs leading from his gate to his house.

"Resistance it is." Emily nods, engaging two elemental connections and turning her skin to crackling steel.

She draws her left arm back, twisting her entire body and gathering the charge leaking from her pores to her knuckles. When she punches the barrier, a flash of light erupts as scorching cracks spread across it. Her mana eats away at the defensive spell as she pulls back for another blow.

It only takes three hits to shatter the barrier, and the moment she slips through the hole, Emily is forced to dodge a wave of attacks. None of them move fast enough to hit her, though a single second circle mage does throw a bolt of lightning that comes close.

Charging her body with lightning, Emily crosses the gap between her and her opponents in a single step, landing between them and releasing a flood of charge. Her mana washes out over the resistive force, burning away the defences they try to establish and shocking everyone below third circle unconscious.

The few third circle mages that manage to block her first attack group up around their Patriarch, stacking barriers on top of each other and attempting to form an impenetrable shell. The earth around them turns up, swallowing their smaller bubble of protection as Emily watches on, forming metal cuffs around the wrists of the now-unconscious mages at risk of being crushed by the shifting earth and pulling them to safety.

She gathers lightning mana between her palms while keeping her prisoners alive, compressing nearly forty thousand mana into a single point, and directing it towards the rising artificial mountain. A beam of focused plasma shoots out, moving with Emily's arms and cleaving the stacked barriers in two.

With a lightning-charged step, Emily arrives in front of the Galanthia Patriarch, twisting and driving the heel of her boot into his skull. She sweeps him over, grinding his head into the ground and knocking him senseless.

A few charged blows are all it takes to immobilise the surrounding mages who convulse until they become unconscious and, as the last one hits the floor, Emily Teleports her son to her side.

"Find which ones are being controlled and see what you can do to release them. Their binds should hold until I get back," she instructs, ensuring every single mage is wrapped in metal cuffs of some form, binding their limbs with enough mana to maintain them for several hours.

Emily leaves Mensacus to scan their targets with the milky-white light from his third eye, heading into the Galanthia's estate to comb through for the few hiding servants and any valuable knowledge she can take. She directs all members of the house's staff that she finds to gather in front of the building, leaving her blades deployed and displayed, but not threatening them more than needed.

In the family's library, she finds a few interesting spell tomes, but otherwise nothing catches her eye, and she leaves mostly empty-handed, ignoring the house's magical trinkets and resources as per her contract.

"Any luck?" she asks Mensacus as she walks back out onto the upturned lawn of the estate.

"Yes," he hums, holding the face of one of the unawakened maids Emily found cowering in the house's kitchens and forcing her to look into his third eye with a dazed expression. "The original caster of their spell is over there."

He gestures to a corpse with its throat ripped out, the evidence of the attack dripping down Mensacus' metal-scaled chin.

"With them dead, I can-" he pauses, drawing a faint white mist from the eyes of the woman he's holding and absorbing it into his forehead before shutting his magical eye with a snap, "-break their connection and draw out the parasite they planted."

Emily nods, helping up the now-crying woman her son has discarded and pointing her towards the other freed slaves.

They fall into a comfortable pattern in silence, clearing all of the conscious servants before waking and scanning the fallen mages one by one. Any with signs of mental control are released and sent to look after the still fearful, unawakened servants, but a few still try to attack Emily the moment they think her guard is down, showing loyalty to their house despite their own mistreatment.

The few that resist after being released are crushed in an instant, with Emily shattering the bones in their arms and legs before tossing them in a pile.

By the time they're done, they have one pile of unconscious, broken mages, one huddled crowd of released slaves watching Emily and Mensacus with fear and caution, and another pile of unconscious members of house Galanthia, along with a few of their allies who were living in the city.

"You're all free," Emily says, finally addressing the freed slaves as she releases a mist of spatial mana, carving marks onto the unconscious Galanthias. "Someone will be in contact with you about the jobs you lost today and how the country will be repaying you for your treatment, but that's not in my contract. Scram."

With a few quiet thank yous, the freed servants are led away by the only liberated third circle mage of the house, who disables the estate's shattered barrier that's still trying to regenerate itself, spreading out into the city to find their homes.

Emily ignores them, activating Teleport and binding the excess mass of her prisoners to herself before pulling them all through space and into a now-empty cargo hold with a clear view of the metal soldiers below herding the only surviving mages from the city's airships out to wait under Elisime at gunpoint.

She converts a large chunk of her machina into mana and forms a spell from wind and metal, pulling clusters of her troops and their prisoners up into the ship. Emily has her metal soldiers drag their prisoners to some storage rooms better suited to hold them, leaving the third and fourth circle mages with Mensacus as she heads to her workshop.

Emily fires several of her machines up and pulls some raw metals from her workshop material store. She mixes them with Forgemaster, pulling out several pre-prepared electrical components and assembling the internals that she then wraps in metal.

She carves an array of runes into the cluster of metal collars she has made, filling them with lightning crystal powder. When she's finished, Emily has ten metal collars set to track a mage's magic circles and shock them the moment they try to move their mana, breaking their focus.

Emily calls in several of her robots, handing them the collars to be taken to their prisoners and mixing another batch of metal for more casings. Her army continues to clean up after the battle for Ireili's wall as she works, collecting discarded weaponry and stripping corpses of their metallic and magical possessions.

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