The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 753

Six hours earlier, on the roof of the Regent Group building, a machine the size of a carriage was running in the dark.

No lights on it. No sound except a low hum you felt in your teeth.

Gaia the Mother AI had gone up the week after thirty men climbed the east stairwell, and it had not been switched off since. Every drone over the White Tower answered it.

Every drone over the Regent building. Every drone in the Arcanum State, all the way out to the coast.

Alex stood in front of it with his hands in his pockets.

“Say it again,” he said.

“Two hundred and ninety-six,” Gaia said. “Moving out of the Red Tower’s north gate in nine groups. They are not travelling together and they are not travelling as magicians.”

“Where are they going?”

“Every route converges on the banquet grounds. Estimated arrival, twenty-one forty.”

“Two hundred and ninety-six.” Alex almost smiled. “He rounded up.”

…

Beatrix found him there twenty minutes later with her coat still on.

“Cancel it,” she said.

“No.”

“Alex, there are three hundred Red Tower magicians walking toward a building with a glass roof, and two hundred forty of our people are going to be sitting under it eating fish.”

“Yes.”

“Then we cancel it.”

“You know the product we finished yesterday?” Alex said. “The one nobody’s launched yet.”

Beatrix stopped.

“The sticker.”

“We were going to put it to work.” He turned, leaning back against the machine. “Three hundred magicians are about to torch my roof in front of the entire state.”

A laugh tore out of him—dry, brittle, and without humor.

“I’m not calling it off. I’ll take the free press. I’m not throwing away an opportunity like this.”

…

At eleven minutes past ten, the sky over New Avalon came down on the banquet.

Three hundred lines of fire, all of them curving in.

They hit the glass roof together.

And something on the glass woke up.

It had been there all evening — a strip of transparent film, laid across every pane an hour before the guests arrived, so thin the staff who fitted it complained it was a waste of a ladder.

It lit.

Twenty centimetres above the glass, the air stopped being air.

The first fireball hit it and went out. Not deflected. Not scattered. It arrived, and it simply stopped burning, and what came down on the roof was warm grey ash that slid off the slope like snow off a car.

The second did the same.

Then three hundred of them did the same, all at once, and the whole roof of that building lit up dull orange and went dark again in under two seconds.

…

Underneath, two hundred forty people were on their feet screaming.

Somebody had gone under a table. Two of the White elders had their arms up over their heads. A Regent division head was halfway to the doors before he realised the doors were also glass.

Beatrix Hargrove stood up on her chair and clapped her hands twice.

“Everyone. Attention, please.”

Nobody heard her.

“Attention.” Louder. The room turned. “Thank you. Regent Group would like to use this occasion to announce a new product.”

Somebody said, “What?”

“The anti-fire sticker.” Beatrix pointed at the ceiling with her glass. “It goes on sale next week.”

…

Two hundred forty people looked up.

The roof was still being hit. It was being hit continuously — the fire came down in waves, and every wave broke twenty centimetres above the glass and slid off in ash, and through it you could see the New Avalon sky going orange and dark, orange and dark, like a lamp with a bad connection.

Nothing was getting in.

The Regent man who’d been running for the door stopped running.

“So this is a promotion?” he said. “This is a — this is a demonstration? For a product?”

“You could put it that way.”

“You could put it that way?”

“The film creates a vacuum,” Beatrix said. “A twenty-centimetre barrier, held flush against whatever surface you apply it to. Heat activates it, sealing off every molecule of air.” She took a sip of her wine. “No oxygen, no combustion. The fire simply can't exist.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s the entire product. It costs six dollars.”

…

Elias White started laughing first.

He was eighty-one and he had been sitting very still with both hands on the table, and something in him broke loose and he laughed until he had to hold onto the man beside him.

Then the whole room went.

They stood in the middle of a banquet hall with three hundred magicians trying to kill them, and they laughed, and pointed, and somebody moved a chair to get a better view of the ceiling.

A White elder took out a crystal and started filming it. Two of the Regent people were arguing about the retail price.

Then somebody clapped.

And then all of them did.

…

On the north ridge, four hundred feet up, the man commanding three hundred Red Tower magicians watched a glass roof refuse to break.

“Again,” he said.

They went again. The roof lit and went dark.

“Elder, it’s holding—”

“It’s a shield. Somebody down there is holding it.” He was breathing hard. “Nobody holds a shield forever. Every second he holds that, he’s burning himself out. Raise the power. All of you. Everything you have.”

Three hundred magicians raised their hands.

They had been photographed learning to knit bone. They had been interviewed, weeping, on the Cardew road. The whole country had spent a week and a half watching the most feared magicians in its history sit in rows with manuals on their knees, learning to bless a fishing boat, and the whole country had laughed itself sick.

Every one of them went to a locker.

And every one of them took out the black.

Robes. Bone-rings. Hex-focuses. Curse-stones wrapped in oiled cloth, catalogued, tagged, and stored by the White Tower quartermasters who had confiscated them eleven days ago and had never once been ordered to destroy a single item.

“Nothing was destroyed,” a White elder said quietly to Elias, later, when he finally asked. “Grandmaster’s instruction. Every piece of it, itemised and kept.”

The interviews had been true. The lessons had been true. The bone-knitting had been true.

The part where their black magic had been taken out of them had never been true at all.

It had only ever been asleep.

…

Thirty thousand black magicians walked out from each of the two hundred and eighty White Towers, spilling into the dark in full colours, for one night only.

Above every spire, the sky filled up.

The drones came over the stone battlements in columns two miles long, hundreds of thousands of them, blotting out the stars. They did not fly ahead, and they did not fly behind. They flew directly above the marching columns, matched to their pace, eighty feet off the cobbles.

Nobody had ever seen an army with a ceiling—let alone two hundred and eighty of them moving at once.

The mandate was simple, mechanical, and absolute: every force marched straight from its home gates toward the nearest Red Tower in its quadrant. No long sieges, no coordinated detours. Just two hundred and eighty synchronized spearheads striking outward like spokes on a wheel, closing the distance to surround and hammer the closest Red fortifications within their reach.

At the target closest to Renwick’s White Tower, forty defenders stood on the threshold with only eleven minutes before impact.

The first of the local black line stopped forty feet out. He was fifty-one years old, six days into learning how to set a collarbone, and he had been very good at his old work.

“Evening,” he said.

Then he opened his hand.

The curse went across those forty feet like water finding a crack, and the front rank of the Red Tower guard went down together—knees, then hips, then backs, every one of them on the flagstones inside two seconds, spasming, teeth locked, hands curled up against their chests.

Not dead. None of them died.

They simply stopped being able to stand up, all at once, in front of their own gate.

“Fire!” somebody screamed from the parapet. “Fire on them, now!”

The Red Tower did what the Red Tower had done for five hundred years. Forty men put everything they had into one unified crest of flame and threw it down at a crowd standing in the open with no cover of any kind.

The wave got about halfway.

Then the sky dropped.

Two hundred drones plunged between the wall and the marching line. Every unit laid a sheet of film across the air before it, edge to edge, interlocking until a wall of nothing twenty centimetres thick and four hundred feet wide hung suspended in the dark.

The fire hit it.

The fire went out.

Ash drifted down over the robes of men who did not break step. On the ramparts, forty Red Tower magicians watched their oldest weapon turn to grey soot in mid-air.

“That’s not possible,” one of them whispered.

The black line started walking again.

It wasn't an isolated skirmish. It was happening everywhere at the exact same minute.

From every White Tower across the territory, thirty thousand mages advanced in relentless radii, descending upon the nearest Red stronghold within their sightline. Millions under arms beneath a humming iron sky—people who had spent eleven days being mocked on national broadcast and had not been permitted, until tonight, to utter a single word.

And miles away on a ridge above a banquet hall, three hundred elite magicians were still throwing fire at a six-dollar sticker, entirely blind to the fact that their tower had already fallen.