The outer edge of Apollo’s absolute ceiling was not the kind of force that Mireya’s ice containnt magic stopped. This type of force could be contained by ice magic for approximately six seconds, after which the containnt would fail, and the outco of that failure depended on the amount of force that had built up during those six seconds.
The barrier was already starting to crack.
Rex ran as fast as he could to save Mireya.
He got across the two streets and the approach in the eleven seconds that Foresight thought he had before the barrier failed completely. He did it in nine seconds instead of eleven because telekinesis was a better way to speed things up at this distance than it had been in the plaza combat.
He hit the approach at full speed, locked both hands out in front of him, and pushed the telekinesis field as wide as it would go. This changed it from its precision mode to its broad containnt mode, which could cover the whole width of the approach and Mireya’s position within it.
The barrier she was holding up broke down after eight seconds.
The force that had been accumulating behind it ca through, and Rex’s field took it.
The field absorbed the force and transferred the majority of it as intended. It changed the direction of the pressure and spread it across the entire surface area of the field.
This ant that the force that reached Rex through the field was spread out instead of focused. Even though the distributed force at this level was still strong, it was survivable.
In contrast, the concentrated force was not survivable.
Rex took six steps back under the pressure, maintaining the full extension of the field. The pain felt throughout the field was strong and widespread, not focused on one spot; it showed that the force was being spread out by a structure instead of hitting one area hard.
Rex thought. "So this is the real power of the apostle of life, huh?"
"I had to admit that it’s fucking strong, and I could lose if I stayed on that body." Rex smirked. "But at least... what he’s doing right now exceeds my expectation for my plan!"
He held it for four seconds.
Then the outer edge of Apollo’s absolute ceiling was behind them, moving into the open ground beyond the approach. The force against the field decreased to a level that no longer required Rex to actively maintain it, so he let the field down.
He was two ters away from Mireya Snowlith.
The ice barrier she had been keeping up was gone. It had lted when the force got too strong, and she was staring at the space where it had been with the look of soone who had given everything she had to stop sothing and failed, and she was thinking about what that ant.
"MIREYA!" Rex shouted.
Hearing that, she turned to Rex.
Rex had seen her ice magic from a distance, always in the context of Apollo’s group. It was the precise, formation-based type that made structured ice instead of thrown shards.
She was pale and had delicate features, which is common for people who use ice-affinity systems. This was because the system had been running for years, which had small effects on her body, such as increased sensitivity to cold and a slight alteration in her skin tone.
Her field clothes were the sa ones she had worn during Elizabeth’s assessnt debrief, which ant she had been in the defensive field since the attack started and had been working for the sa amount of ti as he had.
The look on her face was like that of soone who had just realized they were alive and was trying to figure out how that happened.
"You—" she said, and then she stopped.
Rex stood in front of her with the telekinesis field down and the force that had co through it still there, similar to how physical mory worked. He looked at her with the sa look that Rex Rexilion had after a close call: calm, present, and not trying to be calm but just being calm.
"Your barrier was good enough," he said. "The idea was also right."
Mireya stared at him, waiting for an opportunity to ask her question. "W-what...?"
"The idea was right," he said again. "The force was too strong for any one barrier to hold."
"That’s not a problem with your approach, but it’s a problem with the scale."
She kept looking at him with the sa look, and after a mont she said, "I almost... died."
"You’re right," Rex said. "And I’m glad I could save you right on ti..."
"What happened to Apollo...?"
"That was Apollo’s strength, driven by his rage."
She looked up at the sky over the western plaza. It was back to normal. Aethelgard’s night sky, but the horizon had more fire in it than it had an hour ago.
"He never..." she said. "I’ve never seen him—"
"He’s been pushed to sothing he didn’t want to reach for." Rex said, "That’s not what he usually is."
She turned to Rex, her expression shifting from one of imdiate processing of the near-miss to that of soone re-evaluating a situation they believed they fully understood.
"I... Thanks, Rex Rexilion," she said.
Rex looked at her with a steady gaze.
"You’re welco," he said simply.
[MIREYA SNOWLITH — DESIRE LEVEL: 0 → 22/100]
’And that... is what I like to see.’
He held the number in his awareness for exactly as long as it took to confirm it and then let it go, because there would be ti for that later, and what the mont in front of him required was presence rather than calculation.
...
The silence that fell over the western district ca slowly, like it always does after sothing very loud had been going on for a long ti. The undead constructs had stopped working when the Undead Bringer’s avatar construct got hit by Apollo’s last blow.
This was because the necromantic link had been broken when the construct was destroyed. Without the link, the field deploynt had no active direction and had defaulted to the shutdown behavior that the system had set.
Three hundred and eleven constructs, standing in different places in the northern and western districts, had stopped moving at the mont of termination and would stay that way until soone who knew more about them than the city’s defense units did what they wanted to do with them.
The city’s remaining defenses were dealing with the aftermath in an organized way, like people who had been trained for this exact situation but were now doing it on a larger scale than they had been trained for.
Apollo Brightsoul was still in the western plaza.
He hadn’t moved from the center of the plaza, where he had been when the absolute ceiling release was over. He was in the exact position of soone who had let go of everything and realized that the state of mind that followed was not one they could live in.
There was proof of what he had done all around him.
Two-thirds of the plaza’s facades had been reduced to rubble, and the archways lay in shattered piles.
The fountain’s basin resembled a crater carved into the stone. The buildings directly surrounding the plaza had lost their upper sections, creating a pattern that radiated outward from the center like the ripples ford when an object is dropped into still water.
However, these rings were composed of structural damage, and the still water was the city Apollo had been defending for as long as he had been there.
He saw the Undead Bringer’s construct.
The construct was located in the northeast corner of the plaza, and the absolute ceiling release had left it in a state that resembled the condition of other objects affected by the absolute ceiling: a form that required ti and information to recognize as having once been sothing else.
Apollo took a look at it.
He had been staring at it for about ninety seconds when his legs could no longer support him, and he collapsed to his knees like soone whose body had completed its function and was now without guidance.
"Hah... hah... hah..." He starts breathing hard. "This... is..."
The sound he made was neither a word nor a typical expression of grief; it was an indescribable noise that captured the realization of soone whose internal reckoning had produced an undeniable conclusion, one they were now confronting for the first ti.
He looked at half of the capital that was destroyed because of his raging power.
He surveyed the buildings that remained standing in the streets, their structures intact amidst the chaos. Then, he noticed the buildings that were missing their tops, remnants of destruction.
His gaze fell upon the ground where Zeraphyra and Vireth had fallen. In the aftermath of the absolute ceiling release, those areas appeared no different from the rest of the plaza.
He pressed both hands flat against the cracked paving stones, lowering his head until his forehead touched them. The sound he made persisted, resembling the anguished realization of soone conducting a thorough audit of their responsibilities and discovering a simply unbearable final total.
"What have I done...?"
The fire that had raged in the sky above the western district was now fading, one building at a ti, as the fuel it had consud was exhausted. The light level was returning to what it had been before the assault, settling into the ordinary nightti ambiance of Aethelgard, before everything had changed.
The city was eerily quiet.
Apollo knelt in the center of the plaza, his forehead resting against the broken stone. This position conveyed a sense of resignation, as if he had no intention of getting up anyti soon. Rising would require a destination, and at that mont, nothing felt like it made sense.
A structurally compromised building in the northern district finally succumbed to its fate. The sound of its collapse echoed through the western district, the only noise in the stillness for a long mont.
And then that sound vanished as well.
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