With the Convention area finally cleared of immediate threats, Jefferson, Adams, Monroe, and Madison concealed themselves within the scattered wreckage of the fallen drones. The rest of the crew converged on Grant's position, where the heavy Presidroid remained silently on the shattered ground while his glowing yellow chassis radiated immense heat into the subterranean air.
FDR manifested the glowing runic platform of the Fireside Ascent. Roy, Lutrian, Warrex, Takara, and the trio climbed aboard, and the spell lifted them smoothly above the cratered ground as they pushed forward to intercept the giant tunneling worm and the figure leading it.
Before Roy could issue a tactical order, Tranquility's voice broke over the network with a level of disapproval that could have stripped paint from the hull.
"Captain, your core mana reserves have fallen to exactly sixty percent," the AI warned sharply. "The crew has been burning through their highest-yield abilities with reckless abandon. If Eryndra or Zehrina activate their maximum output forms right now, the other will be starved of energy."
"Okay," Roy said. "Then we need a lot more resource discipline and a lot less grand finale bullshit. FDR, stay back and conserve output."
"Then I will handle the extermination work," Truman said. "I am significantly better suited for it."
Near the front edge of the hovering platform, Truman looked across the battlefield toward the colossal, writhing bulk of the giant worm. A tall, sickly, green tinted woman stood perfectly still on top of the creature's thick hide, her head tilted back and her blank gaze fixed on the dark, stormy cavern sky while chaos raged across the floor far below her.
Without warning, Truman casually lobbed a fission orb toward the beast. "Fission Magic: Little Girl."
The glowing projectile arched through the air and detonated squarely against the monsters face, knocking her off the worm and sending her plummeting down until she slammed hard into the dirt.
The entire crew watched from the hovering ascent. Ten full seconds passed in silence before the monstrous woman slowly sat up in the dirt and rubbed her eyes as if Truman had only interrupted a deep nap.
What made the silence worse was how little the blast seemed to have meant. The monstrous woman sat in the dirt, blinking through the smoke as if Truman had only interrupted a nap, and Roy stared down from the Fireside Ascent. "Was she actually sleeping?"
"Before I hit you again," Truman called down, "may I ask your name?"
Lazy with amusement, the tall green woman turned her eyes toward him. "My name is not something I put out so easily, love. Come closer to the water, and perhaps I will let you hear it."
Hesistant, Lutrian barely forced the words out himself. "I can tell you. That is Jade Brittlebone."
Roy looked toward him. "You know her?"
"The fairy tale is that she was royalty before she joined the cult," Lutrian said, his voice tight as he kept his eyes on the woman below. "After the cult, there are almost no records of her at all. Just one warning, passed from the first mercenary guilds to the prototype Adventurers Guild, then to the modern Adventurers Guild, all the way until she was found dead of old age over a thousand years ago. Never send anyone to find or hunt Jade Brittlebone. That is the entire warning. Once the cult turned into monsters, as far as I know, aside from the Sixth Witch, none of the others had that same distinction."
Smiling faintly from the dirt, Jade slapped her open palm against a shallow puddle. Her body melted into the water, and a microsecond later, a tiny trapped pocket of dirty water rippled inside the collarbone-like channel of Truman's armor, where a stray splash from an earlier exchange had settled unnoticed.
Inside that hidden puddle, Jade took shape again and swiped her long claws across Truman's back. The heavy runic enhancements carved into his suit flared brightly, absorbing the lethal damage, but the force of the strike still launched the Presidroid dozens of feet through the air.
The impact sent Truman tumbling across the ground before he recovered in a smooth mechanical roll. "She is fast," he noted calmly, summoning a cluster of glowing orbs.
Reading the gaps between Truman's explosions as if the fire had invited her through, Jade slipped through the first barrage of Little Girls. Truman adjusted with smaller orbs at her feet, forced her upward, and hurled a Fat Lady straight at her chest, but Jade grazed a suspended splash of water and vanished into it. She reappeared behind him, met the Girl Squad he had already prepared for her, dropped through another puddle before the blast landed, and surfaced from a pool of standing water fifty yards away.
And the high-speed chase only grew more irritating from there. Truman struggled to pin her down, his arsenal losing value against an enemy that could traverse any standing water left in the sector, until JFK watched from the Fireside Ascent and asked, "Do you need some help out there?"
"Unlike you, I am not above asking for assistance," Truman shot back, throwing another burst of nuclear fire to keep Jade moving. "Get down here and help me!"
Near the center of the cratered ground, Jade began another rush. Truman threw a Little Girl toward her face, and she dropped smoothly into the water, emerging behind him with a heavy downward swipe that never quite committed. Truman had already prepared for the rear assault, bringing his fist around with a loaded explosive, but Jade slipped backward into the puddle again and reappeared on his right flank.
Ready for the second misdirection, Truman raised his opposite hand to vaporize her the instant she emerged. Jade stopped her hand just before it touched the escape puddle, abandoned the teleportation entirely, and charged straight through the blast radius to slam her body into his chest with catastrophic force.
Sparks rained from Truman's chassis as the impact sent him tumbling end over end. His immaculate suit tore and gathered thick layers of dirt through the roll, and before he could fully recover his stance, Jade rose from a hidden puddle beneath his boots and drove a devastating uppercut into his jaw.
"It's all these damn puddles everywhere!" Truman yelled, his cold demeanor finally cracking.
With both hands raised toward the sky, he rained a massive Girl Squad over the entire sector, detonating dozens of pockets of standing water and blasting deep craters into the ground to eradicate her transit network. The smoke cleared around a scorched clearing, and Truman sprinted into it.
Far off in the distance, Jade pointed at him and laughed. "You idiots are weak," she taunted playfully. "Come back and play with me. Come to the water's edge, please. If I get on my knees... will you come?"
Her cheerful demeanor vanished as her eyes shifted away from Truman and locked onto the hovering platform. "Perhaps I have to go after the leader here."
When Jade's attention shifted toward the hovering platform, FDR dropped onto the deck of the Fireside Ascent and fortified Roy's immediate position, while Eisenhower took the rear flank and sealed off Roy's back.
Lutrian stepped up to guard the side, two glowing light swords held tight in his trembling hands as overwhelming terror shook through his body.
A ripple disturbed a puddle of blood and water near the edge of the platform. Jade emerged silently behind Eisenhower and delivered a massive swipe to the back of his mechanical head, launching him away from the platform until he crashed heavily into the dirt.
Before the sound of Eisenhower's impact could reach them, Jade was already moving again. Her claws swept straight for Roy's chest, but FDR spun into the attack and reached over Roy's shoulder, catching her arm in one heavy metallic hand and crushing down before the strike could land.
With the toe of her boot, Jade tapped a droplet of water on the deck and vanished from FDR's grip. She reappeared behind Lutrian, her body rising out of the thin wet mark as she brought her claws down toward the back of his neck.
Two brutal impacts slammed into the side of Jade's throat before the killing blow could fall. Warrex stood beside her with both axes buried deep in her flesh, the blades failing to cut but still carrying enough force to jerk her neck sideways and spoil the strike.
Her head turned slowly toward him. Disgust passed over her face as if his attack had offended her more than it had hurt her. "Fool," she growled as one hand drove forward, stabbing her fingers straight through Warrex's stomach.
Warrex coughed a spray of blood. "Ha. Worth it," he grunted, forcing a bloody grin. "I predicted exactly what you were going to do. Just me and my big dumb brain."
Jade ripped her hand free and tossed the bleeding fighter to the side of the platform, already turning back toward Roy as if Warrex had been no more than a momentary obstruction.
FDR met her with an overhand right before she could reset. Heavy runic enhancement surged through his arm, and the blow crashed into her jaw hard enough to fold her body downward and smash her face through the floor of the magical platform.
Thrown back up by the force of the impact, Jade hung stunned for a fraction of a second. Awareness returned fast enough for her hand to plunge into a nearby puddle, and the assassin vanished into the dark before FDR could land a follow-up strike.
"This situation is ridiculous," FDR said, stepping squarely in front of Roy. "Our party size is too large to defend against an instantaneous spatial threat. We must eradicate all water in this sector, or there is an eighty-five percent probability that at least two people on this platform will die."
"Damn," Roy muttered, his heart hammering in his chest. "Okay. Well, what do we do here?"
From somewhere behind Roy, a single drop of water struck stone. The sound was tiny, almost nothing against the wreckage and distant thunder, but it landed close enough to make every defensive calculation on the platform feel too late.
Hidden in the tall grass behind his position, a puddle no wider than a palm rippled once. Jade rose out of the dark water without a sound, her claws already driving toward the center of Roy's back.
Even with FDR moving fast enough to blur the deck beneath him, momentum betrayed the defense. He had turned the instant the water moved, but the distance between his fist and Roy's back remained just wide enough for Jade to exploit. Lutrian, somehow, had read the attack sooner. By the time FDR turned, the prince was already blazing in his fastest arcane form, frictionless skates of pure light beneath his boots and nearly across Jade's path, the terror gone from his face as he threw himself through the last sliver of distance.
Jade's claws punched through Lutrian's shoulder and shoulder blade, driving deep through flesh and armor until the tips pierced Roy's back.
"Um, ow!" Roy gasped, flinching at the sudden sharp sting.
By the time Jade's claws started to withdraw, FDR had closed the gap. His punch drove into her ribs and launched her cleanly off the platform, but the damp grass below received her before he could follow, and she vanished into the wet soil.
Lutrian rolled off Roy's back and hit the deck clutching his bleeding shoulder. Across the comms, Serenity, Harmony, and Tranquility all screamed at once, their panicked voices colliding into a single unreadable burst of noise.
"One at a time, dearies," Roy said, pressing a hand against the shallow punctures in his back.
"Captain, are you okay?" Tranquility demanded, her voice shaking with uncharacteristic distress. "We felt the biometric feedback spike. You have been physically damaged. What went wrong? What happened?"
"Just two little pokes," Roy grunted, trying to keep the pain out of his voice. "Lutrian took the brunt of it."
FDR stood rigid on the deck, staring at the blood running between Lutrian's fingers. A high mechanical whine leaked from somewhere deep inside him as his processors climbed harder and harder against the same impossible sequence. He had moved the instant the attack began. Lutrian had already been moving. FDR replayed the moment again, then again, searching for the fraction of a second he had lost and finding only the prince in light, nearly there before FDR had even turned.
"Understood," FDR said quietly.
Both arms thrown wide, he projected a massive wave of raw authority across the subterranean grid. "Forgotten Scripts and Forgotten Tongues: Phantoms of the Industry."