Chapter 451: Proxy War

The sirens of Sector Seven screamed into the freezing night air, a desperate, mechanical wail that signaled catastrophic localized failure.

The primary Faith Point condenser facility was a massive, sprawling complex of iron, brass, and localized devotion. At its heart stood the condenser itself—a towering, four-hundred-foot spire of spiraling aether-glass that absorbed the prayers of the surrounding foundries and beamed them directly to the Eternal Forge. Below the spire, the residential blocks housed three thousand mortal laborers, crammed into brutal, hyper-efficient barracks.

Tonight, the complex was burning.

The attack had come exactly at midnight. It had not started with a riot or a localized labor strike, as the Ministry of Whispers had predicted. It had started with six synchronized, high-density explosive breaches along the facility’s reinforced perimeter.

The local mortal garrison, comprised of three hundred veteran Imperial Guardsmen, rushed to plug the breaches. They expected to find a disorganized mob of starving Cult Splinter fanatics armed with rusted mining tools.

They found ghosts instead.

Nissa Tarvond materialized in the center of the complex exactly four minutes after the first breach. The aetheric displacement of her arrival kicked up a cloud of ash and snow, revealing her imposing, eight-foot-tall frame. Her heavily armored form glowed with the absolute, cold silver light of Zephyr’s divine preservation. She carried a massive, two-handed tower shield, its surface inscribed with ancient defensive runes, but she carried no sword. She carried no spear.

She was a Guardian. Her programming was absolute.

As Nissa’s boots hit the blood-soaked cobblestones of the central courtyard, she assessed the tactical geometry of the facility in a fraction of a second.

The attackers were wearing the ragged, ash-stained cloaks favored by the Cult Splinter, and they were shouting the theological verses of the Vossk heresy. But the chaotic religious spectacle was entirely decoupled from their physical movements. They did not charge the Imperial Guardsmen in a suicidal wave. They moved in perfectly spaced, interlocking fireteams of four. When the garrison fired their repeating crossbows, the attackers dropped in flawless synchronization, returning fire with compact, rapid-cycle bolt throwers that tore through the Imperial armor like paper.

They were slaughtering the garrison with chilling, industrial efficiency.

Nissa’s silver eyes tracked the enemy movements, calculating their objective. They were not attempting to capture the facility. They were moving in a pincer formation toward the central courtyard, aiming directly at the towering FP condenser. And they were ignoring the residential blocks entirely.

The facility was too large.

Nissa possessed a single, absolute tactical ability: a localized, impenetrable kinetic and magical barrier. The radius of her shield was exactly two hundred meters. The distance between the soaring condenser spire and the terrified, screaming laborers trapped inside the residential barracks was over four hundred meters.

She could not protect both.

Zephyr, as the Sovereign, required the condenser. It was the economic leg of his ascension, the machine generating the massive surplus of Faith Points needed to cross the Rank 10 threshold. To a machine, the loss of three thousand mortal laborers was a highly acceptable cost to preserve a critical piece of infrastructure.

But Nissa was not Zephyr. She was the physical manifestation of the Builder’s original defensive mandate. She was designed to preserve life.

Nissa turned her back on the towering condenser. She sprinted toward the residential blocks, her massive armored boots cracking the cobblestones. The mortal laborers, pouring out of the barracks in a blind panic, saw the glowing silver giant approaching and fell to their knees, weeping in relief.

Nissa reached the center of the residential square. She slammed the heavy edge of her tower shield into the frozen earth.

She did not speak. She could not speak. But as the shield bit into the ground, a blinding hemisphere of silver light exploded outward, rushing through the air until it locked into a perfect, two-hundred-meter dome.

The barrier solidified with a heavy, resonating hum, completely enveloping the barracks and the three thousand laborers. A dozen stray bolts from the attackers’ rapid-cycle weapons struck the silver dome and shattered instantly, leaving absolutely no mark on the divine energy.

Inside the dome, the laborers collapsed in terrified prayer, praising the Sovereign for their salvation.

Outside the dome, the tactical reality of the proxy war immediately shifted.

The attackers, supposedly fanatic religious zealots driven mad by the Sovereign’s cruelty, did not throw themselves against the silver barrier in a rage. They did not scream curses at the Hero of Defense.

They simply ignored her.

Nissa stood motionless inside her shield, completely incapable of offensive action. She watched the saboteurs move perfectly around the perimeter of her 200m dome, maintaining a safe distance. They knew exactly what she was. They knew her radius constraint. They knew she could not leave the laborers to attack them.

The combat was agonizingly static. Nissa was a flawless, unbreakable wall, and the enemy was simply walking around it.

Through the silver distortion of her barrier, Nissa watched the saboteurs converge on the base of the towering FP condenser. The massive machine was protected by three layers of high-density magical wards—disruption fields designed to vaporize any unauthorized biological matter that touched the primary access panels.

A Cult Splinter priest would have thrown a dozen martyrs at the wards to short them out with raw biological mass.

The saboteurs did not use martyrs.

A team of four attackers stepped up to the primary access panel. They pulled heavy, dull-gray alloy cutters from their cloaks. Nissa’s eyes narrowed. The alloy was completely alien to the Sovereign Imperium. It did not glow with aetheric charge. It was utterly dead, void of magical resonance.

The saboteur engaged the cutter. The dull-gray blades bit into the heavy iron plating of the access panel, slicing cleanly through the physical metal.

When the blades intersected the glowing, high-density magical wards, the wards did not detonate. The magical energy simply sparked, scattered, and slid off the dead-gray alloy, utterly unable to grip or disrupt it.

Nissa felt a cold spike of analytical dread.

The saboteurs were using anti-magic breaching tools. They had bypassed a localized defense matrix that only the Ministry of Arcana fully understood. The Cult Splinter, operating out of collapsed coal mines and starving slums, could not possibly have invented or manufactured this technology.

They were being supplied. The technology was foreign. It was Korthane.

Clank.

The heavy access panel fell away. The saboteurs did not hesitate. They rapidly began inserting thick, cylindrical charges directly into the aetheric intake valves of the condenser. They moved with the silent, rehearsed precision of a military demolition team.

The remnants of the local mortal garrison—thirty bloodied, exhausted Imperial Guardsmen—finally broke through the fighting in the outer courtyard and rushed the base of the condenser. They saw the saboteurs rigging the charges and charged forward, screaming battle cries to the Sovereign.

Nissa gripped her shield tightly. She could not shout a warning. She could not step out of the barrier to intercept the attack. She could only watch.

The saboteurs did not panic. They finished setting the timers on the charges. Two of the Korthane operatives turned, raised their rapid-cycle bolt throwers, and opened fire with brutal, mechanical precision.

The heavy bolts tore through the charging Guardsmen, dropping the front rank instantly. The Imperial soldiers faltered, their morale breaking under the overwhelming technological superiority of the enemy fire. Within thirty seconds, the entire Imperial counter-attack was annihilated. The base of the condenser was awash in mortal blood.

The saboteurs fell back. They did not cheer their victory. They did not pause to pray to the Cult’s dark gods. They simply exfiltrated, melting back into the shadows of the outer perimeter, moving flawlessly through the same breaches they had created ten minutes earlier.

Ten seconds later, the charges detonated.

The explosion was not a kinetic blast of fire and shrapnel. It was an aetheric implosion. The massive cylindrical charges ripped the magical stability of the condenser apart from the inside.

The four-hundred-foot spire of spiraling aether-glass shuddered, cracked, and then violently collapsed inward. A blinding shockwave of raw, unrefined Faith Points exploded outward, a localized hurricane of wasted divine energy.

The shockwave slammed into Nissa’s silver barrier.

The 200m dome hummed with terrifying intensity, the silver light flaring as it absorbed the catastrophic impact. Inside the dome, the three thousand laborers screamed, covering their ears as the ground violently shook. Nissa did not move. Her boots remained locked to the earth, her shield holding the line with absolute perfection.

Not a single piece of glass, not a single spark of aetheric fire, penetrated the barrier. Every mortal laborer inside the dome survived the destruction completely unharmed.

But as the dust settled and the silver light of her barrier dimmed back to its resting state, the horrific strategic reality of the proxy war became visible.

Nissa stood perfectly still, surrounded by terrified, weeping mortals. Outside her shield, the central courtyard was a crater of smoking ruin. The towering condenser, the machine that Zephyr relied on to fuel his ascension to Rank 10, was gone.

The Arbiter had not sent a single warship. He had not declared a formal war. He had simply armed the Sovereign’s own starving citizens with Korthane military technology, and in ten minutes, they had destroyed a month’s worth of divine accumulation.

Nissa looked at the smoking crater, her silent, silver eyes recording the absolute failure of her tactical success. She had saved the people. But Zephyr’s Imperium was bleeding, and a shield could not stop a blade that struck from the inside.