Eventually, Emily's forced to step in and finish her son's fight.

He does well, tearing through nearly fifty per cent of the close to two hundred low-level mages gathered around their leaders, but even weakened and missing most of their mana, the focused attacks of three fourth circle mages, with the support of several third, prove too much for him.

Emily drops from her observing position in the sky, where the barrier that once protected the group has broken as the mages chanting to maintain it have been torn down in the scuffle. She lands between her son and a spinning arc of water.

She catches it with her left hand, reinforcing the limb with metal mana and machina, crushing the attack in her grip. The Lonicera Matriarch's face pales, already slick with sweat and covered in scratches from Mensacus' thorns, and, before she can form another attack, Emily forms a cage of steel around her, guiding the metal up the woman's limbs and locking them in place.

"Well done," Emily says, turning to her son and placing a hand on his shoulder. "Leave the rest to me and recover. I still need you to tell me who's being controlled and who's not."

Mensacus nods and releases the Hedera Patriarch from his remaining tentacles as Emily floods his body with her machina, scanning through the damage he's sustained in the battle and planning repairs and improvements.

His batteries ran out a while ago. No wonder he slowed down: his mana transformer is still incredibly inefficient. I guess that's the drawback of carving my own energy signature into him to force a usually impossible energy conversion.

She forms metal binds around the two disabled siblings. Now drained of energy and barely conscious, they are covered in needles and scratches from Mensacus' relentless poisoned attacks.

Guardian protects Emily from the attacks of the still-struggling mages surrounding them, intercepting spells and bullets, even a blade in the case of one overconfident man who charges at her. She turns her attention to the Canarien Patriarch, the only fourth circle target who isn't suffering the effects of Mensacus' malice, thanks to his coat of flames burning away the insidious influence.

"Monsters," the man spits, glaring at Emily and pouring the last drops of his mana into his closed right fist, building up a final attack.

She doesn't respond, staring back at him unimpressed and raising her hand, conjuring a lightning-coated, bladed disc of metal that she throws faster than he can react. The lightning flares as it makes contact with his extended knuckles, shredding the flaming armour that tries to protect him and letting the blade split his arm in two.

"AHHH!" he screams in pain and shock, instinctively cauterising the wound as he looks down at the half of his arm sitting on the floor in a pool of blood before passing out.

Mensacus lets out a guttural chuckle and, a moment later, Emily activates her lightning connection, releasing a flood of charge that burns away the faint dark mist Mensacus has spread to disorient the weaker mages, knocking out almost all of them.

The only person who remains standing is a second circle lightning mage who manages to direct Emily's untargeted attack into the ground, but Emily appears before him in a blink and slams her fist into his solar plexus, knocking him out and down in an instant.

With that dealt with, Emily returns to her son's side and switches elements, changing her eyes from an azure glow to a silver sheen. She sets a hand on his head, which is now at the same height as her chest thanks to the poor state of his lower limbs, and fills him with her mana, guiding it to his injuries and forming temporary replacement pieces that will last till she's ready to fix him.

"You know what to do," she says, leaving him to recharge and deal with the unconscious mages as she floats up into the sky, releasing her elemental connection.

She wraps her throat with mana to project her voice and calls out across the battlefield and the city behind her.

"Your leaders are defeated. Drop your weapons and surrender!"

Emily doesn't pay the still-struggling soldiers' reactions any heed as she wraps her legs in Sky Step and kicks off back towards Elisime. She finds Silica waiting for her in one of the ship's battery banks, low on mana and missing half her tail and an ear, but otherwise unharmed.

"Did you have fun?" Emily asks, sitting down cross-legged to regenerate her mana and taking her daughter's head into her lap.

Silica yips happily in response, preening under Emily's caress and closing her stormy eyes to fall asleep.

***

The moment her mana and machina have finished recharging, Emily steps out of the ship and drops to the ground alone, ignoring the scattered remnants of the battle dispersed across the sands and moving to an empty space untouched by the ongoing effort of her remaining metal troops to clean up and sort through their captured prisoners.

She shuts her eyes and focuses on the space around her, infusing it with her mana and carving out the runes for her Teleportation spell.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"Reduce the casting cost of spell Teleport in return for a binding time restraint, lock casting for twenty-four hours," she declares, burning mana in her throat.

Her freshly-filled reserves drop despite the cost reduction as she reaches out through the void for a specific marker, falling by a quarter before she even finds her target and latches on.

There's got to be more efficient spells for long-range teleportation…

Her mana drops below half and stops at thirty thousand points remaining in her system window as a twisting, tugging feeling almost as strong as the distortion she feels when The Clock shuttles her through time pulls at her gut. In a bright flash of purple light that makes space quiver for several kilometres around her, Emily vanishes.

After what feels like an eternity and an instant all at once, she blinks and finds herself standing on a Cutter flying through the clouds above a rolling grass plain with a walled settlement on the horizon ahead of them.

Between them and the city is a fleet of forty airships, some the same size as Calypso, and the rest twice as big. Five of the ships are on the ground in smoking heaps, with their balloons and propellers shredded but their hulls near untouched, and the rest are flying slowly, fending off against a flock of mechanical birds and three Cutters flying circles around them, weaving between their bullets and spells while dipping in and out of invisibility.

Emily takes a breath to steady herself, feeling her stomach churn despite her experience with spatial magic, and converts machina to quickly balance her reserves. The fleeting nausea passes, so she injects a burst of machina into the Cutter at her feet, shooting it forward towards the ongoing scuffle.

The ship climbs in altitude, ending up almost a hundred metres above the enemy airships as they finally catch up. Emily hops backwards, cutting her forward momentum and letting the Cutter shoot out from under her.

She free-falls towards her targets, catching herself on a conjured updraft before she can tear through one of their balloons and slipping past to land on the metal hull of the ship, directly above its cockpit. A spark of machina connects her to the enemy vessel, and she scans it for magical modifications before nodding in satisfaction as she finds none.

Immediately, she increases the outflow of her energy to a crackling stream and forcefully locks the ship's controls, venting steam from its balloon and tilting its engines towards the sky, pushing the ship into a fast but controlled descent. Emily feels resistance as the crew inside battles with their controls in a futile effort to keep themselves in the air, but without an awakened mechanic, they have no hope.

She leaps to another ship before her ride can dip too low, repeating the process while keeping a thread of machina attached to the first. It only takes a few minutes, and eighty per cent of her remaining machina, to ground all the fleeing airships and hold them there. After charging herself with lightning, Emily makes quick work of the mages and soldiers inside, finding the Nymphae Matriarch hiding among them and trying to conceal her mana signature.

Her newest fleet of ships is already back in the air and hours into their flight towards Ashdon, with cargo holds full of prisoners, by the time Emily gets a message from Pod informing her of the final count of her army's losses.

Looks like I need to ping my factory for more bodies. Maybe I'll send Calypso to lead this fleet to offload the scrap, we could do with more cargo space…

***

After meeting up with Elisime, Emily sends Pod off with the ships she has captured, loading them with the remains of her splintered troops before messaging Anton to meet them on the way to the border. She plots a route across the country to visit all of the major cities owned by the families they've captured and leaves Mensacus in charge of the cleanup as she retreats to her workshop to continue the project she's been working on since returning to The Dome.

Meeting Agnes again reminded her why she's avoided giving herself magical tattoos so far, but meeting Gaius for the first time gave her an idea to circumvent one of those issues.

If a circle-specific boost will become obsolete too quickly, simply create a design that will grow with the host!

Emily pulls out an eclectic mix of materials, most unrelated to space, thanks to the rarity of creatures with the affinity, spreading them across her workbench as she picks through her various attempts at designing the tattoo's runic sequence, trying to select those with the highest chances of working. It's a lot more complex than the speed enhancer she made for Agnes, and ideas for space don't come to her anywhere near as easily as those for lightning, but once this idea hit her, it just stuck.

After all, who doesn't want a private pocket dimension bound to their very being?

Emily first selects a template forged only from spatial runes, the design most similar to Gaius' pocket dimension beneath The Dome. Her eyes roam the materials spread across the table for a moment, before her hands shoot out with purpose, grabbing the ramekins full of powdered spatial crystals of varying strengths along with the separated pieces of a vanderill, one of the only known spatial creatures to inhabit Ulea, with the appearance of something between a wolf and an octopus. It's been decades since one was last spotted, but Emily chanced upon a jar of mucus and several preserved tentacles belonging to one in the spatial ring of Denros' king and claimed them as part of her payment before returning the ring to New Denntimo's Elders.

She creates four different inks, dissolving crystals and flesh in the dark purple mucus before adding a few drops of her own blood, and a single salve from flesh and mucus alone. Then, she draws one of her tools from the crystal embedded in her left ring finger, wrapping the metal hand in a skeletal metal frame forged from a blend of mythril and white iron, with a cluster of needles at the tip of each finger but not the thumb. Emily pours the inks into the reservoirs on the back of her hand, letting them feed into the channels leading to the tips.

Placing the three-dimensional stencil of the tattoo in her virtual notebook onto her own skin, Emily takes a scoop of vanderill gunk in her right hand and begins smearing it into place, tracing the stencil carefully, never touching an area she doesn't intend to cover with ink. The design spreads from the flesh of her shoulder to the metal surface of her left arm, and she covers the limb with the dark, nearly black, purple salve despite the impossibility of injecting ink beneath the surface, weaving around The Clock and the embedded spatial crystals.

Once she's finished, Emily charges her metal fingers with machina and places them to her skin, vibrating them back and forth with an electric hum and carefully controlling the pressure she uses. An intense burning, one unaffected by disabling her pain receptors, spreads from each tiny pinprick, and Emily can feel her mana and machina trying to fight off the foreign matter entering her body. It takes conscious effort to force her energies to still, letting the now searing pain spread as her fingers dance up her chest and down her legs.

Unfortunately, before getting even halfway to completion, Emily feels a distinct shift in her flesh as the passive process she has set up to imbue herself with metal and lightning, in preparation for an innate defensive spell, violently reacts to the invasive spatial mana.

"Damn," she mutters, pausing her left hand and focusing on the new changes. "A mix of elements it is."

She activates The Clock.

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