10

Cameron’s jewels and mirrorballs lost effectiveness much too quickly. I didn’t understand how the heralds were just magically developing weapon-specific resistance until I caught myself using the word “magically” and realized duh, just shut up and focus on the fight. He had other weapons up his sleeve: kaleidoscope cannons, prismatic lightning bolts, flying hordes of feral baby rainbows.

The battle choir’s effectiveness lasted longer than other weapons. Their attack was much more aesthetic and surreal than what the heralds were accustomed to. They struggled to comprehend what was even happening to them let alone communicate information about that experience to other heralds. For a brief while, a small herd collected near the rift in the side of the arkship, where the battle choir was stationed, but then simply hovered, having lost the will to move forward, until Alexander and his cavalry mounted a spirited charge from behind and brutally massacred them.

But I noticed Alexander’s cavalry was much smaller now. I always expected this to be a very quick battle, but somehow I figured his heralds would be among the last to fall. Instead I wagered he’d lost half his group by now. Turns out the heralds understood each other’s strengths and weaknesses almost intuitively. Their clashes were over in split seconds; it was a ruthless calculation on the part of the local reality engine to gauge which one was ever so slightly tougher or smarter in some incredibly minor fashion and then the hammer came down and the loser was pulverized out of existence.

Suddenly a torrential spray of black ice from the far reaches of the herald formation arrived and tore into the side of the arkship, decimating an entire complement of weapon batteries and forcing Jordon to pull the arkship up into a steep defensive maneuver before another volley could land. The battle choir’s sound system lost its prime positioning as a result, and now multiple adventurous heralds were able to get much closer to the arkship than any others had before, sneaking past the guard formation that Alexander had tried to maintain in front of the rift. Gatling guns and laser blasts strafed these heralds on their way in, but one herald made it all the way to the rift in the map and forced its way through. I no longer heard the battle choir at all, and hoped they’d managed to flee before the herald had landed on its perch at the rift.

“Isobel!” Maddy shouted. “We could use you on the ground!”

I cast Anthemic Energy on myself to help rally me back into action. It was like Uplifting Encore, but it was much higher level, and it only worked on me: it played my favorite deep house anthem in my mind, while also pumping temporary points back into most of my stat pools. The temporary points lasted for the duration of the anthem, then I’d lose them again. I had about eight minutes. I had no idea how long we’d been fighting.

I jetpacked toward the arkship with the Dauphine close behind me, watching a second herald claw its way through the rift. Alexander and his heralds saw the focus of our attention and fell in behind us to join us in engaging the burgeoning swarm. Each one that made it through the rift dramatically expanded the size of it, making me wonder why Cameron hadn’t simply repaired it and given us an alternate way out of the skyship. “Simply” repaired it—he hadn’t been able to repair it, I abruptly recalled.

But as the rift got bigger, it was an easier target for new heralds who seemed to deeply desire wrecking the side of the arkship on their way into the Realm beyond. Just as I neared the swarm of heralds, Jordon accelerated the arkship in another defensive maneuver, trying to shake loose heralds and put some distance between her and the rest of them.

Cameron launched a fleet of smaller skyships from the far side of the arkship. They quickly acquired ramming speeds and began slamming into heralds, and they seemed to be packed with explosives. It was a rough combat maneuver; the arkship itself was heavily damaged by the shrapnel from a half-dozen heralds and skyships being blown apart.

The Dauphine could no longer cut down heralds with her portal weapon, but she found an alternate attack: springing portals open in front of charging heralds before they could change direction and sending them clear across the logosphere, effectively eliminating them from the battle. Hopefully they were far enough away that they couldn’t pick up the trail back to the Sparkle Realm.

For the first time, I deeply regretted giving away the other artifacts I’d collected back in the day. But I had lesser weapons I could summon from their display cases. I called to me the sunlight kaleidoscope I’d used for much of SD3, and fired impossibly hot sunlight beams at the closest heralds, blistering what passed for their skin, causing ridiculous shrieks of pain as they fell away from the rift in an effort to avoid further strikes. Alexander’s cavalry pursued these wounded beasts.

Now I was free to enter the Realm, where three different heralds were loose and wreaking havoc. And their havoc was not capricious—they were clearly on a rampage directly toward the Sparkle Dungeon. Something at the Sparkle Dungeon had caught their attention, because their path didn’t deviate in the slightest as they practically galloped across the scenery.

There was only one good reason to head for the Sparkle Dungeon, and not because they were in the mood for a good dungeon crawl. They must be hunting for the battery. They must have detected its energetic presence there somehow, even if they didn’t know exactly what it was, and now they seemed bent on finding it.

Maddy, Devin, and most of the anarchists retreated to the steps in front of the Sparkle Dungeon, which was still sealed off by the obsidian wall. Maddy had split herself in two, just to have extra hands on deck. The crew was smaller than it should have been; we’d lost people by now.

I swooped in and fired sunlight beams at each of the three heralds, hoping to distract them and pull them toward me, away from the battery. I only managed to get one’s attention; the other two continued on a lumbering course toward the Sparkle Dungeon. They were traveling on foot now, stomping across the landscape, crushing buildings and landmarks and random stray NPCs that wandered through the action. This made them slower, and somehow scarier, because you really had time to study each abomination as it approached, and appreciate how each one’s unique form factor was targeted to inspire existential fear. They wanted our defenders to cower now that they had landed in the Realm.

“Isobel, this might seem weird,” Cameron said, “but just roll with it.”

Suddenly a dozen individual replicas of my avatar appeared throughout the battlefield: clones of me.

“They’ve got all your skills and spells, but the game engine is running them,” he explained.

I didn’t expect these AIs to be as clever as me, but I watched them devise combinatorial attack strategies as little teams that I couldn’t pull off on my own. Nicely done, Cameron.

With thirteen Queens, two Maddys, one singing mage, and fifteen anarchists, somehow we managed to hold the line against these three heralds for roughly thirty seconds. The Dauphine stayed in the air, working to keep additional heralds from following the three on the ground through the rift.

Then the sky itself seemed to split apart. The heralds outside were no longer content to wait in line at the existing rift to get into the Sparkle Realm. They were now beginning to create new rifts in the sky—in other words, they were ripping open the hull of the arkship.

Soon we were pinned against the obsidian wall. One of the Maddys began teleporting the anarchists inside the Sparkle Dungeon, to prepare to mount a defense in case they got in; she teleported Devin inside the Dungeon as well. Alexander roared into the Sparkle Realm with his remaining five heralds and a savage skirmish began. I leapt into action, the other Maddy by my side, and my twelve Queens forming up in various patterns behind me.

Maddy demonstrated excellence at teleporting around the field of battle, striking swiftly in unexpected places and then vanishing off to the next attack. Her adrenaline must have been through the roof to support so many teleports in a row.

The Queens, meanwhile, developed a system—they paired up, with a Queen in the lead firing off spells and dealing damage, and the other Queen close behind offering a steady stream of buffs and heals so that the first Queen could stay focused on attacks. But they weren’t invincible, they didn’t know power morphemes, and we began losing them as we stayed engaged.

In close quarters combat, Alexander could fashion astral blades with nothing more than his voice, and enormous ethereal hammers and spears, and ghostly pikes and scythes that only took form long enough to pierce a herald before dissipating. Either by choice or by some constraint I didn’t understand, he himself remained material enough that he could be hit, and he was clearly looking battered and exhausted.

As for me, I focused my fire on the new rift, blasting sunlight at the newcomers to the Realm. They particularly hated sunlight from the Sparkle Realm, and this was highly effective for a short while until finally they adapted to the weapon.

“Olivia!” Alexander shouted. “Any time now would be fantastic!”

Maddy got very unlucky and a sudden talon swipe tore her head clean off. I would never, ever be able to unsee that. But the other Maddy was immediately yanked back onto the field, looking massively dazed but definitely alive. I rocketed to her and carried her to safety.

“Maddy, are you with me?” I asked her, applying a heal to her even before hearing her answer.

“We’re here,” she said. And then she said, “BUT OH MIGHT IT BE AWHILE BEFORE WE ENJOY IT AGAINimage”

“Go back to the Warehouse and recharge,” I told her. “We got this.”

“The hell you got this,” she said. “You’re going to die out here, and I’m going to be right there with you.”

Well, that was both romantic and deeply unhelpful to my morale.

Suddenly a metaphysically blinding wave of sensation rippled through the entire Realm.

And in its wake, I understood that godhood was unfolding.