“This wouldn’t be a problem if I had some help.” Xueli groaned in frustration as she leapt into the air. “I am really not in the mood for this!”
The Mark V lifted her high up, all the way to a solid ten stories, where she bid the Frame to stop.
“Varuna! Doomsday Book chapter two! Hydro Torrent!”
The Prayer Wheel immediately began to whir fiercely. A window appeared on the Head Mounted Display in Xueli’s visor, and a poem scrolled across the screen.
Pray, oh Suiten, speak the truest words.
Pound its drum, blow its conch, and shed its rain.
Sing for us, oh Suiten, the transient voices, a symphony of truth.
The strange words spelled destruction. In response to Xueli’s gaze, on a large city street, water suddenly erupted from the asphalt, like a spontaneous and skyward-bound waterfall. The gravity-defying pillar shot towards the heavens and surged forward, consuming and assimilating the Mark V on its approach towards the ifrit as the Anomaly neared Jakarta’s coast. Striking swiftly and decisively before the enemy could act was Xueli’s specialty. Her combat instincts were second to none.
Together with the Mark V, the pillar of water struck the enormous devil from below with an aquatic uppercut, using the force of the upward-cascading water to send the ifrit flying. The flames and water hissed upon impact as the former were extinguished and the latter vaporized into steam. Most importantly, however, Xueli had succeeded in pushing the Anomaly away from the city and towards the bay.
“Now that collateral damage is out of the picture...” she murmured. “Lifters online!”
The objects once used to lift elvish cities now powered the flight of the Asura Frames. The antigravity lifters gave Varuna free reign of the sky. At that moment, though, a massive orb of fire shot towards her.
“The Fireball spell! And a big one!”
Xueli narrowly dodged the attack, feeling its sweltering heat. She had seen this sort of magic numerous times, but never on this scale before. It was over ten meters wide. The source of the spell glared at Varuna with a scowl on its face. At least the fact that the fire devil was angered meant that Xueli had done a good bit of damage to it.
But the battle wasn’t over yet.
“Sea Dragons! Continue artillery!”
At their leader’s command, the four droids in the bay resumed bombardment. They shelled their fiery target with unwavering accuracy, and the devil scowled down at the pests. And then it grinned sadistically, almost like a human. In the blink of an eye, the winged humanoid transformed its very body into an enormous fireball. The artillery strikes might as well have been pea shooters against it.
“Nullifying physical attacks by hiding its corporeal form.” Xueli clicked her tongue. “This is why I hate fighting spellcasters!”
The giant fireball began to shed cinders, countless of them, onto Xueli and Varuna’s auxiliary droids below. The tiny sparks scorched holes in the machines, puncturing them until they finally combusted entirely.
All four droids were destroyed.
“Gunpowder magic.” Xueli sighed. “Fine. Shroud, Excalibur Mode! I need you!”
The red cloth around the Mark V’s legs—a little mismatched adorning a metal contraption—shimmered with a pale golden light. No sooner had she prepared her attack than the fireball pitched towards the Frame, hungry to swallow it up in its flaming maw.
Xueli spun in place, swinging her leg swaddled in glowing cloth into the orb of churning plasma and tearing the incorporeal flames asunder. From that wound, the ball diffused away, and the ifrit regained its anthropomorphic form. It fixed its rageful gaze on the blue Asura, before directing its glower to the Frame’s legs specifically.
“Clever one, aren’t you? That’s right. This is the Holy Shroud, an ancient and vaunted artifact of the elvish royal families. And it just so happens to do the job against pesky monsters like you who refuse to keep a physical form,” Xueli monologued coolly. “I do wish you’d made this easy and gone down with my droids and Doomsday Book, but it is what it is. If cutting you to ribbons myself is what it takes to win, so be it. By the time I’m done, there won’t be enough left of you to light so much as a single match!”
Xueli proceeded to keep her promise, and the ifrit was summarily eviscerated. Only she and Varuna remained in the sky, the victors.
She looked up at the cloudless, blue expanse and sighed. “Avalo is up there. Thirty-six thousand kilometers above the equator. In geostationary orbit,” she murmured.
It was a military satellite meant for the purpose of providing aid and support to the Asura Frames and other nano-augmented individuals like her. More than any outpost on Earth, that satellite was vital to the Asura series. A veritable holy ground for them.
But it wasn’t simply floating around up there. It was manned, though the details were highly classified. Much like the International Space Station, the craft supposedly had living space to accommodate two very important personnel. The first was Devicer Nine, warrior of Virochana—the Mark IX Asura Frame. The other was his Replicant assistant, known commonly as the “Solar Prince.” Not even Xueli had met them.
“And yet, that elf above the clouds is the one who bestowed the Holy Shroud to me.”
It was said that he was always watching, observing from orbit. And should the Replicant receive particularly striking data from Devicers on Earth, he would bequeath to them the Holy Shroud or potentially transmit Gospel Codes.
But it was an incomplete arrangement. Without physical contact, it was shaky at best to rely on such support.
“Varuna and I only have four Gospel Codes,” Xueli murmured. “It’s not enough. As we are, these magic-type anomalies are too much trouble.” She knew the solution, of course. “I need her.”
✦ ✦ ✦
An hour after the attack, Shanti found herself aboard a fairly sizable ferry as it coasted across the water. She couldn’t believe her invitation hadn’t been suspended on account of the emergency, and yet there she was.
“This ‘matter’ of theirs must be pretty important,” Shanti said, thinking aloud as she recalled the phone call. A rather well-spoken man with a young voice had urged her to proceed with the visit. He sounded polite and, honestly, kind of handsome. “I wonder if that guy on the phone was an elf.”
The shock of the battle still hadn’t quite worn off. In truth, Shanti just wanted to see her family, but her curiosity for the mysterious elvish people and their “urgent matter” won in the end. Whatever it was, it had to be worth the detour.
Shanti was the only person on the boat, and although the trip was painfully mundane, it had been dispatched for her specifically. Quite the royal treatment, she felt, but horribly lonely just the same.
“I wish there was someone here to talk to,” she murmured.
At that moment, the air next to her hummed. Something landed on the deck nearby, completely soundless aside from the ever so faint whir of a contraption. A two-meter-tall suit of glistening blue metal stood there.
“The Asura Frame?!” Shanti yelped.
She blinked in disbelief, and in that split second, the armor had dissolved into particles of light. In its place was a slender and attractive young woman, her lustrous black hair tied in two loose tails resting on either shoulder. She seemed a bit on the taller end, and her stark expression accentuated the enchanting ennui of her demeanor.
Shanti couldn’t take her eyes away. The woman looked so delicate. So fragile.
The girl returned the stare pointedly. “Can I help you?” she asked, more rhetorically than kindly. “If you have something to say to me, then spit it out.”
Shanti recognized her voice at once. There was no mistaking it. This supermodel of a girl was Devicer Five.
“I-I’m sorry, I was just—” Shanti was starting to remember why she hadn’t liked this girl at first. “You, um, changed so suddenly. It surprised me.”
The girl looked Han Chinese, and she was wearing what almost appeared to be a workout fit. Her pink, formfitting hoodie, black thigh highs, and short shorts were all water-resilient and seemingly chosen for their practicality above all else.