2100 Plans Coming Together (Part 2)

"This means that someone has attacked at least one of the main nodes. To understand the nature of the Queen's working and find the keystones, the enemy must have infiltrated the city and studied the arrays for days."

Xoola said mostly to herself since the others had no concept of time or strategy.

"No one would have invested so much time just to run away after a few minutes. The enemy must still be inside." Xoola had no idea that the Eyes of Menadion existed, nor that they could unravel the complex array system from a distance and in a few hours at that.

"Our security must have been compromised. Investigate everyone with Invigoration and don't trust the scanners. The enemy must have found a way around them or we wouldn't be in this mess."

The Forgotten nodded and bolted away, flying at high speed to comb search the city hall in minutes.

'What do I do?' Xoola racked her brain in doubt. 'If the enemy really is here and I go to the Warp Gate, the arrays will go down and the enemy will swarm the city. Yet if I'm wrong and I remain here chasing ghosts, the Gate will fall and the result will be the same.'

To make her conundrum even worse, she kept receiving reports from the city walls where the siege was quickly taking a turn for the worse. The Spirit Array that the Council had devised formed a barrier around the members of Phloria's army and healed their wounds.

'Damn the Royals! A three-pronged attack!' The Fenrir cursed her bad luck and called Linnea.

"I need at least two more Divine Beasts or the city of Zehnma will fall."

"We don't have them." The Headmistress pinched her nose in frustration.

Those that Gentor had killed had yet to regenerate, ten had to be stationed in Belius at all times to keep the Magic Empress from taking over the city, and the rest had been deployed just a few minutes earlier.

Raagu's plan had forced Thrud to spread her forces thin and taking away a single Divine Beast meant to lose a city.

"What about the Queen? The King Consort? Protheus? Heck, I'd settle even for that Meln fucker!" Xoola said in outrage.

"Her Majesty is personally defending the capitol of Nestrar. The damn King refuses to leave the baby's side and Protheus is still getting accustomed to his new powers. As for Meln, not only revealing that the Dead King is still alive would greatly backfire, but we have no way to control him." Linnea replied.

"Then Zehnma is lost. I can't do everything by myself." The Fenrir shook her head.

"Hystar, is there anything you can do?" Linnea asked.

"Yes." The true Headmaster of the Golden Griffon pushed her through an emergency Spirit Gate after locking on the coordinates of Xoola's amulet. "Time to prove your worth on the field, dear colleague.

"Fight to your heart content knowing you can't die. Glory to Arthan."

Like the Golden Griffon was a perversion of the six great academies, its motto was a perversion of Valeron's battle cry.

The First King had valued his people above all whereas even in death the Mad King only cared about himself.

"I'll go take care of the walls and the Gate, you search this place. Be very careful when you order these morons around. The Forgotten take everything to the letter." The Fenrir turned into an anthropomorphic wolf and bolted through a window before Linnea could even reply.

'Even though Thrud Awakened and rejuvenated me, I'm still old dammit.' She thought. 'I've been sitting behind a desk for over forty years. A few months of training aren't enough-'

Tista had just taken down the third node, halving the power of all the city arrays and making elemental spells available again. Their power and range would still be limited, but it was enough to put fake mages back to use.

After the foot soldiers, now the army mages and those of the Association could join Phloria's attack force, further tipping the scale of the battle.

The only good news for Linnea was that, due to the patrols making Tista waste time with their scans, by the time she had reached the third node, the Forgotten she had previously frozen had been found and thawed.

'Caution to the wind, then.' The Red Demon thought when following the collapse of the magical focus six Spirit Steps opened at the same time instead of the usual two.

She released the full power of the Frozen and the True Flames, respectively through her mouth and wings, sending two Forgotten straight back to the Golden Griffon with their equipment broken beyond repair.

It would take time and precious mana crystals to Forgemaster them back.

At the same time, Solus calculated the dimensional coordinates of the fourth node and Warped Tista there before the rest of the Forgotten could surround her. Solus also took care of leaving behind several tier five Light Mastery Spells that detonated in unison.

They weren't enough to kill a fully equipped violet cored Awakened with a Spirit Barrier on, but they still blasted them off their feet.

The heat and the shockwaves released from the explosions turned the emerald barriers into pinballs that bounced on the walls, the ceiling, and between them until all the kinetic energy was dispersed.

If not for their single-minded nature, the Forgotten would have fainted from a brain concussion. They managed to remain conscious, but the trauma left them blind, deaf, and dizzy.

"Is everything alright? Do you need help?" A guard who had arrived on the scene asked while the Forgotten puked their guts out.

The voice and the life force matched that of the city hall personnel, so the Awakened put down their weapons and focused on recovering control over their bodies again.

"We are fine. We just need a few breaths to recover-" His voice was cut short by an enchanted spear infused to the brim with darkness magic that had just pierced through his lung.

"We can't have that." The human soldier had suddenly been swallowed by the Demon hidden in her shadow.

The creature had taken over her body, her mana core, and was now channeling the power that Lith sent to his Demons to further empower their weapons.

The Forgotten blasted the enemy away with a spell from one of his rings just for three more Demons to take her place. After Tista had given him the signal, Lith had spread his Demons throughout the city hall, keeping them ready to possess even the clerks.

Now that Tista's presence had been exposed, he had activated his shadows that were now flooding the hallways of the city hall and backstabbing Thrud's forces the moment they turned their heads.

Linnea reached the fourth node just a second before the Red Demon did. Xoola had shared everything she knew with the Headmistress so Linnea knew where the saboteur would be next.

What she couldn't predict was that her arrival would have been welcomed by savage attacks at the hand of the very people she had been sent there to protect. The Demons turned into weapons everything they could find by infusing them with Spirit Magic.