The news of the Solis incident tore through the Cinderfall Hegemony like a shockwave. It was not the loss of a provincial governor that shook the Obsidian Throne, but the sheer, insulting impotence of his immortal guards. Three Phoenix Knights, erased from existence by an invisible hand. It was an attack so clean, so absolute, it bordered on blasphemy.

  King Theron Flavius, his face cold with fury, stood before the grand scrying pool in his war chamber. The image in the black water was a swirling chaos of interference, a testament to the enemy's magical superiority. All he had were the frantic, terrified reports of survivors babbling about a silent, impossible dawn, and a single, arrogant red line crawling across his maps.

  "They strike from the heavens," his chief spymaster hissed, his voice thin with fear. "An invisible foe who rains down judgment from above. It must be a new form of aerial magic, some cowardly trick of the Lumina Imperium or a forgotten elven art."

  "Cowardly or not, it is effective," the King growled. He turned to the hulking figure standing at attention in the chamber's shadows. The man was encased in armor not of gold, but of polished, crimson-lacquered steel. His helmet was fashioned into the scowling visage of a mythical bird of prey, its crest a fan of sharpened, metallic feathers. "Lord Marshal Ignatius Varrus. Your thoughts?"

  Lord Varrus, commander of the legendary Garuda Knights, stepped forward. His voice scraped out like rock grinding against metal. "Your Majesty, if they hide in the clouds, then we shall own the clouds. My knights have trained for a thousand years to be the undisputed masters of the sky. Whatever this enemy is, they are likely using some form of enchanted airship—a sky-blimp, perhaps. A large, slow target, cloaked in illusion. They believe themselves untouchable because they are unseen."

  A cruel smile touched the Lord Marshal's lips beneath his helmet. "Allow me to disabuse them of that notion. Cheap parlor tricks cannot deceive the Garuda. We will find their cowardly ship, and we will tear it from the sky."

  The King nodded, a single, sharp gesture of command. "Take the entire First Wing. Three hundred knights. I want their vessel's wreckage delivered to my courtyard. I want their mages brought to me in chains. Make it so."

  "As you command," Varrus replied before he turned and strode from the room, the sound of his armored boots a promise of glorious, brutal, and utterly misguided retribution.

  ...

  On the command bridge of The Aegis, a new set of icons appeared on the main display. Three hundred brilliant red dots, ascending in a tight, disciplined formation from the direction of the Cinderfall capital.

  "Hostile aerial assets detected, Master," Tes reported, her voice calm. "Three hundred Tier 6 magical combatants, mounted. Designation: Garuda Knights. They are a heavy cavalry unit, specializing in anti-air and anti-dragon warfare. Their mounts are twenty meters in wingspan, capable of reaching speeds of Mach 0.8. Armaments consist of enchanted lances, bows, and close-quarters weaponry."

  Lances and bows, Kaelus scoffed in my mind, a sound of pure, draconic amusement. They are bringing pointy sticks to a war of titans.

  "They believe we are in a single, cloaked vessel," I mused, watching their flight path. They were heading not for my fleet, but for a point in the sky where the storm's illusion was thickest, a logical place to hide a theoretical airship. "They are hunting a ghost."

  "My Lord," Mirelle began, her face taut with concern as she watched the approaching red tide, "Our fighters are outnumbered three to one. Is a direct engagement wise?"

  "Wise?" I leaned back in my throne, a cold, predatory smile touching my lips. "No, Mirelle. It is not wise. It is a statement."

  I keyed the fleet-wide comms. "All Wyvern squadrons, prepare for launch. Scramble alert. I want one hundred birds in the air in five minutes."

  The order rippled through the twin hearts of the Skyguard Armada.

  Inside the cavernous, brightly lit hangar bays of The Vengeance and The Retribution, a controlled, beautiful chaos erupted. The klaxon's urgent cry was the conductor's downbeat. Legionary engineers in their Mark III-E armor, who had been performing final systems checks, detached their diagnostic umbilicals. On their silent commands, swarms of smaller automata scurried clear of the launch platforms.

  The W-29 Wyvern fighters rested on their catapults like coiled serpents. They were not the usual broad-winged Phantoms. They were daggers, twenty meters of sharp angles and predatory grace. Their twin tails canted aggressively. Their fuselages bristling with missile hardpoints and the snub-nosed barrel of a plasma cannon.

  One by one, the magnetic catapults engaged. The sound was like the sharp, whip-crack of unleashed kinetic energy. Each Wyvern was launched from the carrier's flight deck, a silent, unpowered dart thrown into the churning grey of the hurricane. A hundred meters out, their twin plasma engines ignited with a guttural, thunderous roar, their blue-white fire a stark, violent contrast to the storm.

  Fifty fighters from The Vengeance. Fifty from The Retribution. They ascended in perfect, synchronized spirals, climbing through the tempest that was our shield. They broke through the top of the storm into the thin, cold air of the upper atmosphere, the sunlight glinting off their dark hulls.

  One hundred steel predators, forming up into ten-ship flights, their engines leaving faint, shimmering contrails in the high-altitude air. They were a flock of impossible, metallic birds of prey, and their hunt was about to begin.

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  On my command bridge, I watched the two forces converge on the tactical map. The three hundred red icons of the Garuda, a dense, disciplined block of magical power. And my one hundred blue icons, spread wide in a loose, flexible screen.

  "Lord Kaelen would be proud," Goliath rumbled from his station, a rare note of grim humor in his voice. "He always did appreciate a good cavalry charge."

  "This will not be a charge, Goliath," I corrected him, my voice soft. "This will be a massacre."

  I opened a channel to the Wyvern command AI. "Tes, weapons free. All squadrons, engage at will. I want them erased from the sky."

  ...

  Lord Marshal Ignatius Varrus soared at the head of his formation, the wind a triumphant scream past his crimson helmet. Below him, the world was a patchwork of green and brown. His three hundred Garuda Knights flew in a perfect, disciplined V-formation, a wedge of steel and fury that had broken dragon wings. Their mounts, massive, eagle-like beasts with feathers of razor-sharp bronze, beat the air with powerful, rhythmic strokes.

  Varrus’s magically enhanced eyes scanned the cloud bank ahead, the heart of the unnatural storm. “Sensory mages, report!” he echoed over his squadron’s comm-stone network.

  A clipped, reedy voice replied, “A significant magical disturbance, Lord Marshal. A powerful illusion, just as you predicted. We are closing on its source.”

  “Excellent,” Varrus declared, a predator’s grin spreading across his face. He drew his lance—a ten-meter spear of enchanted steel that crackled with contained lightning. “All knights, prepare for a strike. On my mark, we will dive as one. We will pierce their cowardly veil and gut the beast within. For the glory of the Hegemony!”

  A deafening, unified war cry answered him. Three hundred lances were leveled. Three hundred pairs of bronze wings angled for the kill. This was the moment of their triumph, the kind of glorious charge that would be immortalized in song.

  They never saw it coming.

  The first sign of their doom was a flicker in Varrus's arcane senses. A hundred tiny, aggressive mana signatures suddenly bloomed in the air before them, ascending from the cloud bank at an impossible velocity. They were like angry fire sprites, too fast, too numerous.

  “What is that?” one of his lieutenants asked, his voice laced with confusion. “Some kind of firework display?”

  The streaks of smoke arched gracefully, then turned. Their tips glowed with a malevolent, hungry light as they locked onto the Garuda formation.

  The world dissolved into a storm of fire and thunder.

  The first volley of missiles struck the front ranks. The explosions were sharp, hot, and utterly alien. A dozen of Varrus’s finest warriors, men who had fought dragons and survived, simply ceased to exist, their dying screams swallowed by the roar of the blasts.

  Chaos erupted. The perfect V-formation shattered into a panicked, scattering flock.

  “Evasive maneuvers!” Varrus roared, his own heart hammering against his ribs as he banked his mount hard to the left, a missile screaming past him with a sound like tearing silk. “What is this sorcery?”

  Then, the enemy revealed themselves.

  One hundred dark shapes punched through the cloud bank below, ascending with a speed that was a profound violation of nature. They were were no mystical birds or dragons the faced by the Hegemony faced before this. The Hegemony had never seen such devices of raw destruction before. They were things of metal, all sharp angles and predatory grace, propelled by cones of brilliant blue-white fire. Who would have thought something made of metal could fly? The very concept shattered every law of magic he had ever known.

  The dogfight that followed was an extermination.

  The W-29 Wyvern fighters fell upon the scattered Garuda Knights like a pack of wolves on a flock of sheep. The knights’ tactics were ancient, honorable, and useless. They charged with lances leveled, expecting a glorious clash of steel. The Wyverns simply danced out of their path, their gravitic thrusters allowing them to pivot and turn with geometric perfection no living creature could match.

  A knight managed to get a Wyvern in his sights. He loosed an arrow, a black shaft tipped with a rune of armor-piercing. The arrow, which could punch through a fortress wall, simply sparked harmlessly against the Wyvern’s angled, dark hull and tumbled away.

  The Wyvern’s response was a contemptuous burst of chattering blue light from the cannon mounted beneath its nose. The plasma rounds shredded the knight and his mount into a cloud of red mist and scattered bronze feathers in a fraction of a second.

  It was a massacre.

  Lord Varrus watched in numb horror as his legion, the pride of the Hegemony, was systematically dismantled. He saw a flight of ten Wyverns isolate a squadron of his knights, corralling them with precise, intersecting fields of fire, and then annihilating them with a single, coordinated missile volley. There was no honor. There was only the cold, brutal, mathematical application of overwhelming force.

  His warriors, bred for a world of sword and spell, were facing the future, and it was a future they were not equipped to survive.

  A spike of pure killing intent flared in Varrus’s magical senses, a predator locking its gaze. He twisted in his saddle and saw one of the metal demons on his tail. He pushed his mount into a desperate dive, twisting and turning, but the thing followed his every move with an effortless, mocking precision. A stream of blue light stitched a line across his Garuda’s wing, and the great beast shrieked in agony as its feathers were sliced away.

  They were losing altitude, spiraling towards the clouds. Varrus knew he had one last, desperate chance. He pulled back hard, forcing his wounded mount into a near-stall, a classic cavalry maneuver designed to make a pursuing enemy overshoot.

  The Wyvern did not overshoot. It simply stopped, its thrusters flaring as it hovered in mid-air, a silent, judging predator.

  Varrus stared at the impossible sight, his mind finally breaking. He saw the missile detach from the fighter’s wing. He saw the brief, beautiful trail of white smoke.

  He closed his eyes, a single, bitter thought flashing through his mind. So this is how the sky is lost.

  Then, a final, merciful oblivion of white light and thunderous sound.

  …

  On the command bridge, the last red icon on the tactical map flickered and died.

  “All hostile aerial assets have been eliminated, Master,” Tes reported. “Wyvern casualties: zero. Munitions expended: seventy-two percent. Efficiency rating: Optimal.”

  I watched the empty sky on the screen for a long moment. The statement was made. The sky was ours.

  “Recall the Wyverns,” I commanded, my voice flat. “And inform General Goliath that his ground forces may now advance on Sunfire Keep. He is to expect minimal resistance.”