Lola pressed the choice and felt the world decide with her.

  Energy shifted; first a prickle at the base of her skull, then a tingling cascade down her spine, as if frost were being poured through copper wire. The surrounding air thinned and sharpened; every breath tasted ionized, like the moment before lightning picks its path. Her fingers twitched once, involuntarily, and steadied.

  Okay. Breathe. You chose. Now make it worth it.

  Heat pressed from the street like an open kiln. Llama’s shield wall groaned under a fresh impact and reset in the same moment, the front line locking again at the exact angle he demanded; forty-five degrees, smooth as a hinge.

  Steel scraped, boots thudded in coordinated rhythm, and the street became math: rectangles of formation, arcs of enemy approach, narrow alleys that could funnel or drown.

  Lola took stock.

  Melee in the front, pikes braced, swords lifted; their armor mismatched but their feet in time. Behind them, a nervous forest of staves and wands, trying not to mess the casting, not to mess up the runes.

  Healers staggered in the second and third ranks, hands raised in a constant pale glow, faces pinched from overexertion. Their runes flared, making a mint scent that didn’t belong on the battlefield; clean, too gentle against the reek of burned leather and blood.

  The enemy line pressed like a tide, and at its prow moved Damon.

  She’d seen him in the meeting recently, eyes that never stopped measuring, posture that broadcasted, “I’m the smartest man here.”

  He wore empire plate worth more than their entire PR division's annual budget, and yet he was in the front, because performance mattered to men like him. Lightning crawled across his gauntlet, a captured storm he treated like jewelry.

  With each step he took, he rewrote the tempo: his troops rushed, then checked, then surged past on his cue like overconfident waves.

  Katherine found him, of course.

  She crashed through a wedge of shield-bearers like a meteor that had learned footwork. Violet hair, ash-streaked and wild; grin bright-wrong in the smoke. Her crimson greatsword howled through the air, and he met it, bracing, sparks—no, embers—scattering like coins. Metal rang with a furnace’s voice. Katherine laughed, throaty and reckless. “You the enemy boy!”

  Damon’s reply was a smirk he probably practiced in mirrors. He shifted, absorbing the impact with a dancer’s hips and a banker’s caution. “I’ve got legendary items,” he called over the clash, generous enough to give the audience the line. “Perks when you work for Nathanco, and the Empire!”

  Katherine’s expression stretched into a surprisingly angry snarl. “Perks,” she echoed, and drove him three steps back on the strength of contempt alone.

  Lola rolled her eyes; she couldn’t help it. Men who turn their loadouts into LinkedOut profiles. Incredible. The annoyance barely had time to register because Llama, beside her, spoke two words that landed like a knife under the ribs.

  “We’re losing.”

  He didn’t raise his voice. In Llama’s mouth, the words were a readout; fact, not panic. He never looked away from the field; his eyes tracked shield angles, spear spacing, the milliseconds lost as a wounded soldier swayed and the gap widened. To him, the battle was a machine; this one was dropping screws.

  If they failed to contain Damon… he wouldn’t need to win. He just needed to unpin the line and let the enemy flood toward the center.

  Toward Charlie.

  Lola risked a glance over her shoulder. Across the ruined boulevard, in a pit of broken glass and gold, the Queen was a flare of frost and motion. And beside her, the demon moved, the Grandmasters wove gravitational knives and luminous nets; Charlie cut them with ice and impossible nerve.

  Don’t look too long. She dragged her gaze back, throat tight. Focus. Battle before girls. We’ll stop this prick.

  There were Riker camera operators everywhere, even behind her back. Lola gulped at the sight of the camera focusing on her. “Right,” Lola murmured. Her voice came out steadier than her hands felt. “Let’s do this.”

  She let her mana slip its leash.

  The system surged to help; eager, imprecise, like an assistant with too much coffee and no sense of margins.

  Seven runes blossomed across her inner vision: cold geometry threaded with strange magic. System wanted to etch them sloppily, forcing her hands to drift to convenience. Lola snagged control with a flex of will and forced to correct it, at least a bit; it was her first time after all.

  She traced the first rune in the air; its light hummed like a taut string.

  A phantom cost her entire mana pool. That was all she was allowed at once, but who to pick? She didn’t have to think long for the first one, the strongest mage in their kingdom, Lisa.

  Mana coiled inside her like a muscle too long clenched. The air grew heavy. Then, with a sound like glass cracking under pressure, the world answered.

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  A figure stepped through the fissure of light; Lisa, and not. The phantom’s shape shimmered with translucence, a perfect mirror carved from refracted flame. Her red-gold robes had become molten silk, colors muted to a burnished glow that pulsed in time with Lola’s heartbeat. Even her hair, that cascade of red, seemed caught underwater, each strand trailing slow and luminous.

  She raised her head, eyes dulled by distance, and smiled the same confident smile that once made entire raids charge faster, or before she charged to hug someone.

  “Phantom Lisa,” Lola whispered, her throat tight. “Rimebreak rides.” Hopefully, Riker’s camera-girl got her line, and she downed a mana potion.

  Lisa is already level 28?!

  The mirror-mage turned, the translucent greatstaff blooming into existence in her grasp; half weapon, half fire. At the motion, the runes across the boulevard flared, catching the edges of reality and twisting them into obedience. Phantom Lisa went straight into mythic spell-casting.

  Enemy spells faltered mid-cast, collapsing into harmless sparks. Llama’s soldiers looked up, their faces lit with reflection rather than flame.

  And when Phantom Lisa moved, the battlefield moved with her. Arcs of light swept across the front, reshaping fire into shields, shields into lances, until the street became an inferno sculpted to precision.

  Lola’s knees almost buckled from the drain. Her pulse hammered in her throat, her breath fogging in the heat. But when she saw the phantom raise her staff high, commanding flame similar as Lisa would, pride drowned the exhaustion.

  That’s… the power of my class. Too bad I used all my mana, and Scamantha's potion works so slow.

  Lola steadied herself, clipboard in hand, hair singed at the ends from proximity to majesty. Around her, soldiers rallied. Llama shouted over the renewed roar, and Katherine laughed like thunder. “Out of ma way!” she shouted, and before Llama could bark a single counter-order, she vaulted over the front line entirely; straight into the heaviest concentration of enemy troops.

  She hit the cobblestones in a crouch, sword already drawn back, her grin wide in the haze. “I seek glory!” she roared, and the word came out like a challenge to the world itself. Then she slammed the sword down with both hands.

  The street answered.

  Stone buckled. The entire road rippled like a struck drum, waves of displaced air and heat rolling outward. Shields rattled, soldiers staggered, even Llama braced his stance. Phantom Lisa faltered mid-chant, her form fracturing like disturbed glass.

  Lola stumbled back a step, her clipboard clattering to the ground.

  The sound was swallowed by the roar of a surge of golden light bursting from the impact point, radiant and molten. It rushed outward in concentric circles, sweeping over the battlefield like sunlight through shattered glass. Every enemy it touched was dragged screaming toward the center, weapons tearing from their hands as if gravity itself had turned traitor.

  Then the light curved upward.

  It hardened into walls, forming a vast dome of radiance that sealed the center of the boulevard in a cage of divine energy. The heat made Lola’s eyes sting, and for one wild second, she saw shadows moving in the light like saints pressed into the veil.

  She blinked, disoriented. “That’s… wait, that’s like—” Exactly like what Charlie had described. The day Katherine got her class.

  Inside the dome, Katherine stood in the storm's eye, wreathed in gold. Her hair looked like a torch in the light, her armor burning bright at every edge. She giggled, actually giggled, like a kid caught in a fireworks display. Trapped with ma!” she declared, gripping her sword as the divine light condensed around her arms. “Waaaar!”

  She tore the blade free from the ground in a single motion, light exploding upward with it. Then she swung downward toward Damon, who had been too stunned to retreat.

  The sword never connected.

  A radiant hand caught it mid-swing, the metal stopping with a crack that wasn’t physical; it was divine.

  Lola froze. A figure stood within the golden dome. The air hummed around her, the barrier bending to her presence as though even light was shy in her company.

  “Sera,” Lola whispered. Her throat went dry. “The angel.”

  Llama’s voice came from somewhere to her right, low and uncertain. “Isn’t she the one we met during the siege?”

  Lola nodded mutely, still staring. “Wait—Phantom Lisa, stop.” The translucent mage stopped casting, her head turning toward Lola like a puppet cut from its strings. Even the embers of her half-formed spell winked out.

  Inside the dome, Sera’s expression was calm, her voice carrying with the soft authority of a celestial reprimand. “Katherine,” she said. “This isn’t a war.”

  Katherine blinked, sweat streaking her ash-stained cheek. “Nah?” she echoed, looking genuinely puzzled. “Charlie did! Eh—civil war!”

  Sera’s sigh was almost human. Her face shifted into the same look Lola wore whenever she had to explain caffeine limits to Lunaris; equal parts patience and despair. “It needs to be sanctioned by us,” Sera said gently. “Then you can seek glory. I guess you need a reminder and to read the war rule book again.”

  Katherine groaned. “Oh, no.”

  She tried to bolt, but Sera was faster. Her hand closed around the back of Katherine’s armor like an unbreakable shackle, her tone now that of an exasperated bureaucrat collecting a delinquent champion. “No! No paperwork!” Katherine howled again, thrashing, her greatsword dragging trenches through the light.

  Lola couldn’t help it; she smiled. They all shared that reflex with Charlie: fight gods first, fill out forms later.

  And then, without another word, both vanished. The light folded in on itself like a curtain being drawn, leaving behind only heat and silence.

  For a long moment, the battlefield hung in uneasy stillness.

  And just as both armies were finding their footing again¨, groans, armor scraping, spells reigniting, the sound hit them.

  A howl.

  Lola turned, heart dropping before her mind caught up. Down behind her, through the haze of smoke, she saw Charlie.

  She was still standing. Barely, but fine. Her frost shimmered faintly around her, breath visible, shoulders heaving. The Grandmasters before her were not. Their forms lay scattered; robes torn, mana leaking out in slow waves.

  But someone else stood across from her now. A darker shape moved through the wreckage, graceful where everything else was ruin.

  Karzi.

  Lola checked her mana instinctively. Still not ready for another phantom and her stomach sank. “Llama,” she whispered, forcing steadiness into her voice. “Hold them as long as you can. I… I need to go. Need to help her somehow.”

  He didn’t look at her right away. Just kept scanning the line, sword half-lowered, his face carved from iron. Then he exhaled through his nose, that long, resigned sound that said he’d already done the math.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “Stalemate again.”

  Lola rubbed her temple, watching the space where the golden dome had vanished. The afterglow still clung to the air, smoldering at the edges of her sight like a burn that wouldn’t fade.

  “Yeah,” she said, voice low. “And we just lost our nuke to celestial HR.”

  She straightened, grabbed her half-cracked clipboard, and looked once more toward Charlie and the shadow now stalking her. The next breath she took burned like frost.

  “Alright,” she whispered. “Time for overtime.”