Two dozen infected had been chased into the swamp. Either the swamp slowed them enough for pursuers to slaughter, or the Astral Authority already out in the swamp moved to intercept. If she hadn’t known better, Alyssa might have thought that the Astral Authority was working to protect the city. In the distance, both to the north and to the south, Alyssa could see more lights flittering about. Likely chasing more infected. With the darkness, Alyssa couldn’t actually see any infected. It was too far, even with binoculars, and infected didn’t glow like the fake-angels did.

The horizon still had a bubble of glowing gold light cresting over the treetops. Like the world’s slowest sunrise. More of the Astral Authority were still coming closer. Unless that glow was solely from the Justice… At this point, Alyssa rather hoped that it was not the Justice. She would rather deal with a thousand of the littler ones than it.

The smaller ones could cause problems. Every time Alyssa had seen them so far, they had ignored everyone except her. So it stood to reason that they would continue to ignore everyone so long as nobody tried attacking them. They would hunt down whatever infected they could find and then… hopefully go back to wherever they came from. But if the Justice appeared, things could go poorly. Not just could, but would. Aside from the panic a literal skyscraper of a being would cause, the Justice itself would cause unparalleled destruction. Even if it ignored the humans around, all it had to do was try to swing its sword at one of the infected. That one swing would basically wipe out the entirety of the city of Illuna.

Having used her sole Accelero card back in Owlcroft, Alyssa doubted that even she would be able to get away. One of Irulon’s spells might work. The one that put up a mirrored dome came to mind. But even that was only a chance. The Astral Authority seemed to obey a whole lot more rules of reality than angels did, but Alyssa couldn’t say with confidence that they obeyed them all. With her limited experience in the presence of the Cardinal Virtue of Justice, she couldn’t say that it was as grounded as the lesser members either.

Taking her eyes off the distance, Alyssa looked around the city wall. More guards had shown up. Everyone was on edge. Alyssa had thought, in the past, that she had sometimes been able to feel the tension. Perhaps she had or perhaps it had been her imagination. But here and now?

It was a good thing that firearms hadn’t been invented in this world. With a bow or a sword, or even spells that required a verbal statement to activate, there wasn’t much of a chance of accidental firings, twitchy fingers, or nerves getting the best of someone. A bow required several pounds of force to draw back, not something that even a grown man would do unthinkingly. Swords were far too close range. Spells were the one thing that she had been a little nervous about, but so far, nobody had tossed a fireball at one of the Kindnesses that were buzzing about.

Part of which could probably be attributed to the rarity of arcanists. Nobody in her line of sight had a tome chained to their hip. Volta might be the only real arcanist around.

Assuming a monster could be considered an arcanist. They could both cast spells, so Alyssa wasn’t going to worry herself over the nomenclature.

“So. This is the Astral Authority in all their glory.”

Alyssa snapped her gaze to her opposite side to find Irulon walking across the wall, eyes black and white as she stared over the edge of the wall. Fela trailed behind her on one side while Catal flanked her on the right. Neither followed in any kind of formation, making them look like they were unrelated and had just coincidentally arrived at the same time, even though that likely was not the case at all.

She was glad that her mother hadn’t chosen to join them. They were all supposed to have gone back to Lyria a full week ago, but the job had fallen through. At the time, Alyssa had been glad that her mother wasn’t going to be trekking back without her, but now was wishing that they had left.

Nothing to do now but try to figure out a way to protect everyone.

“You saw them before we headed to Owlcroft, didn’t you?” Alyssa asked, focusing on Irulon as Fela bounded up to her side. Catal took out a large notebook and started sketching out a Kindness—one was hovering not too far from the wall, though its porcelain mask was aimed toward the forest.

“True,” Irulon said. “Between worrying about you running off, trying to keep the guild and guard from provoking them, and them not doing much aside from hovering about in search of you, I didn’t get to actually observe them much at that particular moment.”

“Well you’ve missed most of the action it seems. They were killing infected left and right. Now they’re just sitting around. A few went back, maybe chasing down other infected. The rest have mostly just been standing about.”

“Waiting for something? The true demon you’ve mentioned in the past?”

“No sign of her. I can’t close my eyes to check on the infected’s souls anymore—” Thankfully, Alyssa mentally added, not wanting to know how many of those things would be after her if she still had a connection to Tenebrael. “—but I haven’t seen a single one collected yet.”

For all the true demon’s talk of preserving life, she sure wasn’t doing a good job of rescuing her… loyal followers? Corrupted monsters? Whatever they were. Given that the true demon had looked quite harried the last time Alyssa saw her, she had to wonder if losing this fight meant something just a little more serious than having to run home and lick her wounds. And if the true demon was gone on a slightly more permanent basis…

What was going to happen to the souls? Would Tenebrael come down and clean them up?

Alyssa had a bad feeling that no angel would touch them. Even dead infected presented a hazard to everything around them. The corrupted souls tried to latch onto things around them. The one soul that the true demon had delayed collecting the other week ago had started killing the land around it too.

If the true demon wasn’t able to collect them and the angels weren’t willing to touch them… Alyssa had a bad feeling that she would have to do something about it. Assuming the Astral Authority left her alone, removing the infected souls from the local deceased wouldn’t be that difficult. Maybe. She would still have to locate the corpses, but Fela could help with that. As for the rest of the world? As long as new infected were being created, she wouldn’t be able to do it all herself. Even with Tenebrael’s power, she couldn’t do much about anything outside her general area. She wouldn’t be able to tell when new ones cropped up or when they died either.

She wasn’t an omnipresent angel.

Then there was the problem of what to do with the souls. Maybe she would be able to crystallize them the same way that she did with normal souls, but that still left demonic crystals lying about. Maybe Tenebrael could give her some container for them like they were some radioactive waste that needed containment, but there were already too many maybes piling up and she was sure that she hadn’t thought of all the problems that went along with this course of action yet.

The corpses should be fine for a short time anyway. If necessary, she could collect them up and blast them off planet with a well aimed Annihilator. That was probably the safest option.

“I don’t suppose it would be possible to capture one,” Irulon said, eying the nearest Kindness. It eyed her back, but it eyed everything.

“They would probably start attacking. And there are a lot of them.”

As Alyssa spoke, the Kindness rotated, turning its porcelain mask toward the wall. It was still twenty feet out, but the movement made her tense. It didn’t attack, but it couldn’t really attack, lacking any weapons or offensive abilities. At least, a Kindness had never displayed any offensive abilities while in Alyssa’s presence. Still, it was unnerving in its timing.

Alyssa wasn’t the only one to notice the Kindness. Several of the guards tensed. One even raised his bow until a superior shouted at him. Fela crouched down like she was ready to pounce. Both Irulon and Brakkt made nearly identical slow movements to their respective weapons of choice, each resting a hand on top without actually drawing it. For Alyssa, she already had a pistol in one hand and her deck of cards in the other. Both stayed firmly at her side as she watched the Kindness and the more distant fake-angels.

The others hadn’t reacted. Aside from a handful of Patiences and Equanimities, most every member of the Astral Authority was up in the air, hovering over the swamp while staring at the forest. Two of the four Diligences had their masks split apart as if they were preparing to fire their beams, but neither were actually doing anything. Just watching. Waiting for more infected.

After a full minute of tense scrutiny, the Kindness drifted a few feet further away as it looked back to the forest to match the rest of the Astral Authority.

Alyssa let out a slight sigh as she flicked her pistol’s safety back on. “Perhaps we should be wary of errant comments.”

“Possibly just a coincidence,” Irulon said, moving up to the edge of the wall to lean over. “It started turning before I actually spoke, if only by a few instants.”

Brakkt put a hand on her shoulder and gently pulled her back. “We should be careful regardless. We don’t know their full capabilities. They may be capable of reading more into your thoughts than your verbal actions.”

“I hope not,” Alyssa said. “But I doubt it. They would probably already be attacking us if that were the case. And they would probably be better at catching… uh… whatever they might have been chasing the few times that they chased after… whoever.” If they were listening in, Alyssa didn’t want to mention that she was the one they had been chasing. Thus far, they were leaving her alone. None had paid her any more attention than they had given to the other humans around.

It would be best if it stayed that way.

“—do about the situation?”

“Unknown, sir.”

Glancing to the stairway leading up onto the wall, Alyssa spotted a few familiar faces.

Martin was at the lead, wearing the full armor set he had worn when first meeting with the group of monsters, flanked on either side by his two advisers. Volta was behind him, hanging just a bit back. Upon reaching the top, all four of them stopped suddenly, staring over the edge of the wall. They probably would have stared a lot longer had one of the guards—probably some local captain—not ran up to them. The guard didn’t seem to have much to report on, but he did wind up pointing directly toward Alyssa.

Catching Volta’s eye, Alyssa got a look. Like this was all her fault.

“Prince Brakkt. Princess Irulon,” Martin said as he walked past the guard, tone a bit more on the terse side. “And Alyssa. You know, I believe my life was filled with far less stress before your arrival in our humble little city.”

Irulon’s eyes flicked to Alyssa, turning their regular violet in the process, before she looked to Martin. “Trouble does seem to follow us.”

Alyssa shot her a look, but it was too late. Still, Irulon probably knew that she was being glared at.

“Do you have a recommendation for a course of action? They appeared so suddenly last time and disappeared just as quickly… We didn’t have time to really look at them let alone come up with anything that might be considered a plan of action.”

“As of now? Do nothing, hope they disappear again. They might be fighting infected at the moment, but make no mistake, they are not our allies. If we attack them… or perhaps even consider hostile actions against…”

Irulon’s speech stalled as a pulse of light from the large glow made the land look like the sun had come back for an encore. She, along with most of everyone who wasn’t already looking out toward the swamp, stopped to watch. But there was barely any time to look. The flash died out in seconds. If there had been a storm, and if she hadn’t known better, Alyssa might have suspected that it was nothing more than lightning.

If this had been any other time, any other place, any other situation, she would have dismissed it as a distant lightning strike.

One of Martin’s twin advisers was the first to speak. The taller of the two raised an eyebrow as he looked toward Irulon. “I don’t suppose you know what that was?”

“One of the creatures has been using beams of golden light to attack infected. Perhaps simply a more powerful version?”

“I doubt it,” Alyssa said. As far as she had seen, the Diligences used the same beam every time. There was still the Humilities, a class of the Astral Authority that she had yet to see. It was possible that they had caused it. But… “It was probably the—”

A crack of thunder stole the words from Alyssa’s mouth. Some of the guards dove for cover, fearing an attack. Others readied their weapons, heads darting from one member of the Astral Authority to the next, trying to figure out which one they should act against first.

Even Alyssa crouched down, not quite diving to the ground, but definitely taking some cover. Brakkt and Irulon both remained standing, though the latter’s stance shifted to mirror the wider and more stable pose of the former. Fela crouched down, fur rising.

Martin and his two advisers crouched down much like Alyssa had done, though Martin’s armor wasn’t exactly designed with dexterity in mind. He really only lowered his height by a head. Volta, on the other hand, put a scowl on the double’s face as she turned to glower over the swamp.

“Stay your weapons!” Brakkt bellowed, deep voice carrying even over the panicked shouts of the guardsmen. At his shout, those in charge followed suit, relaying the order up and down the wall.

The thunder wasn’t quite normal thunder. There was just something imperceptibly wrong about it compared to what Alyssa was used to. Normal thunder had a sharp crack followed by low rumbling echoes over the land. This had been similar, enough so that she wouldn’t have noticed had Alyssa been out traveling between Lyria and Illuna. She would have dismissed it as thunder.

Maybe it was just the situation that was making her think it sounded wrong. Either way…

“Irulon,” Alyssa said, pulling out her phone without standing fully. “How many seconds between the flash of light and the thunder?”

The princess’ eyes flicked black momentarily as she looked toward Alyssa. “Thirty-one. Give or take a second.”

A quick use of her phone to look up of the speed of sound and a quicker calculation gave Alyssa an answer that she wasn’t sure what to do with. “Six and a half miles.” She wasn’t at all sure how far away Owlcroft was from Illuna, but was fairly sure that it was something more like sixty to a hundred miles away. Relative to that… “The Cardinal Virtue of Justice might be nearby.”

“Hm.”

“Hm? That’s it?” Alyssa slowly stood only to catch a heavy breeze. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the wind had been at Owlcroft following the Justice’s attacks, but the fact that she could feel it at all made her tense. “This thing is the size of the palace. I hit it with an Annihilator. Several, in fact. Aside from a little steam on the skin and maybe some burnt clothes, it came out of it without trouble and kept attacking the true demon…”

“I recall your first description of the creature.”

“You have a plan then?”

“Question for you first, would the Justice attack random infected?”

“I… don’t know. Probably.”

“While you were at Owlcroft observing the fight in person, was it attacking random infected or just the true demon?”

“The… latter I think. Though it might have also directly attacked me. Or I might have just been in the way. Hard to say one way or another.”

“If the true demon isn’t gathering souls, could it still be engaged in combat with the Justice? Perhaps having been forced away from the pit?”

“If they’re fighting toward us… rather, if the true demon is leading the Justice toward us…” Alyssa grit her teeth as realization struck her. “That stupid demon. Save life my ass. If they bring their fight here, it will be a slaughter,” she hissed, voice quiet to keep from being heard. Luckily, the wind was still going strong. Martin and his attendants would have a hard time hearing much of anything without magical assistance. Brakkt trying to keep the wall guards from provoking the Astral Authority—none of whom had significantly reacted to the flash, thunder, or wind—helped as well.

“I don’t believe we can fight the Justice. I haven’t seen it for myself, obviously, but I trust your description.”

“So then—”

“But what about the true demon? It is the size of a human. Can it be killed or at least contained long enough for the Justice to do what it needs to do? After that, with no high value target, the Justice might just leave. Or at least stop approaching the city.”

“You’re suggesting we go out there?”

“What choice do we have? Either that or we evacuate the city. And that doesn’t seem like much of an option to me. There are too many people, not enough means of transporting food, and there is nowhere nearby that can support so many people. Even assuming we can get the entire population moving in a reasonable amount of time, I can’t see the evacuation being counted as a real success. And if the true demon is leading the Justice here, then who is to say that they’ll stop here? They could end up chasing them to Lyria.”

“Chasing them?” Alyssa shook her head, thinking back to when the Justice first appeared. The Taker had said something at the time. He didn’t attack Alyssa even though he wanted to because his ‘lady’ might not be finished with her. If this is what he meant… “The demon is probably chasing me. So if I leave…”

“Same problem except with you. You would be on the run, never able to stop in a town for long without worrying about the Justice and this demon showing up. Shall we at least see if we can stop the problem at the source?”