The violet hum of the Cathedral's belfry had barely faded before the sky began to bleed. It wasn't the natural red of a sunset, but a sickly, bruised purple—the atmospheric signature of the East's high-tier conjuration.
In the wake of Priscilla's "World Pulse," the unthinkable had happened. The King of the West, Valerius Devereux, and the High Priestess of the East, Lyra Zephyros, had met on the neutral bridge of the Silver Run. Fear, it seemed, was a more potent catalyst than any ancient rivalry. They had formed the "Covenant of the Old Blood," a desperate alliance to extinguish the electrical heart of Veridia before it could restart the world in its own image.
Priscilla stood in her newly established war-room within the Cathedral's archives. The air was a cacophony of clicking telegraph keys and the low, rhythmic throb of the basement turbines. Silas was leaning over a topographic map, marking the movements of the incoming armies with obsidian and crystal tokens.
"The West is bringing the 'Titan's Breath'—their massive siege trebuchets," Silas reported, his face uncharacteristically grim. "And the East... Lyra has mobilized the 'Cloud-Eaters.' They're using mana-shrouds to mask their approach from our sensory towers."
"Let them come," Priscilla said. She was hunched over a workbench, her fingers dancing through the guts of a complex brass sphere—the prototype for a "Pulse-Mine." "They're fighting for a world that has already died. They just haven't realized the corpse is cold yet."
Alistair entered, his white coat stained with the blue chemicals of the battery-vats. "The orphans are positioned in the 'Veins,' Priscilla. But we have a biological problem. The electrical load we're pulling through the Cathedral's ley-lines is causing neural degradation in the 'Unseen' foremen. They're experiencing sensory overload. If we don't find a way to insulate the human interface, the system will fry its own operators."
"Then we insulate them with the West's own arrogance," Priscilla replied. She looked at Alistair, her eyes sharp. "The obsidian armor we captured. Have Jax break it down and coat the control-harnesses in the crushed glass. Obsidian is a natural dielectric in its raw form. If it can block magic, it can block the feedback."
As the first bells of midnight tolled, the siege began.
The Western army didn't march; they surged like a black tide across the plaza. But they were no longer alone. Hovering above them were the Eastern "Wind-Dancers," their bodies encased in shimmering spheres of mana that deflected the static discharge of the Cathedral's defenses.
King Valerius stood at the front of the phalanx, his face twisted in a mask of vengeful zeal. "Tear down the wires!" he screamed. "Burn the iron! Return this city to the gods!"
The first "Titan's Breath" launched. A massive boulder, wreathed in Eastern blue-fire, hurtled toward the Cathedral's stained-glass windows.
Priscilla watched the projectile's trajectory on a glass screen, her hand hovering over a series of copper switches. "Kelvin, now."
Kelvin Devereux, standing atop the outer ramparts, signaled the "Unseen" snipers. But they didn't fire lead. They fired "Ion-Harpoons"—heavy iron bolts trailing copper wires that connected back to the Cathedral's main capacitor.
The bolts struck the flaming boulder mid-air.
KRA-KOOM.
The electrical discharge from the Cathedral's Heart traveled up the wires, hitting the mana-infused boulder. The clash of magic and raw electricity created a kinetic explosion so violent that the boulder disintegrated into a harmless shower of dust and sparks before it could touch the glass.
"Impossible!" Lyra Zephyros cried from her floating palanquin, her eyes glowing with silver light. "She's intercepting the spirits!"
"I'm not intercepting them, Lyra!" Priscilla's voice boomed through the belfry's megaphone. "I'm grounding them!"
Priscilla stepped out onto the high balcony, looking down at the unholy alliance. She looked like a shadow carved from the night, her golden eyes the only light in the dark. In her hand, she held a small, handheld transmitter—the "Architect's Gavel."
"You came to my home with fire and spells," she shouted. "Now, let me show you the true cost of your 'Old Blood'."
She slammed the Gavel's trigger.
Beneath the plaza, the "Pulse-Mines" she had buried weeks ago—fueled by the captured mana-crystals of the Spirit-Assassin—detonated. But it wasn't a physical blast. It was an electromagnetic pulse of such magnitude that it stripped the mana-shrouds from the Eastern mages and fused the obsidian joints of the Western knights.
A thousand men fell at once, trapped in their own armor, their spells fizzling into harmless smoke. The silence that followed was more terrifying than the explosion.
"Silas," Priscilla whispered into her comm-link. "The purge begins now. No survivors in the officer ranks. I want the kings to watch their world turn into a graveyard of useless metal."
Silas emerged from the shadows of the plaza, his silver revolvers glowing with a faint, violet light—Alistair's "Phasing Rounds." He began to move through the frozen ranks of the West, a reaper in velvet.
Alistair followed, his medical kit open, but he wasn't healing. He was "tagging" the paralyzed generals for later "research."
Priscilla looked up at Lyra, who was struggling to keep her palanquin aloft as the ley-lines buckled under the electrical strain. "Your gods didn't abandon you, Lyra," Priscilla said, her baddie smirk returning with a final, lethal edge. "I just bought out their contract."
As the "Unseen" surged out of the sewers to mop up the remaining forces, Priscilla turned back to her war-room. The siege was broken, but the war for the soul of the continent had just reached its boiling point.