"General, we have a lock on them!" a soldier shouted.
"Fire! Fire on them now!" Mikhail roared. "The Emperor is on that balcony. Watch where you aim!"
Long before Leonora and Johan had stepped out of the war room, the plan had already been set in motion. With Leonora and Youri as bait, the Empire would lure the Tartarusios into the capital and close on it in a pincer attack. Mikhail, Charles and Cornel would each command their own units for the operation. And if things escalated, the Sphere waiting in orbit had already been turned to face the palace, ready to deploy the God Units at a moment's notice.
But no one could have foreseen what was about to happen.
The Tartarusios had arrived far earlier than Artemas had calculated, and that placed Johan in danger no one had accounted for. In a way, it was his own fault. He had insisted on going out to the balcony to witness Youri's death with his own eyes, over the protests of every one of his generals and of Artemas itself. Only one voice had agreed with him: Alan's. Alan had backed the decision and urged him to step out there at his side.
And now Johan knelt on that same balcony as nothing more than a man. The invincible facade he had worn his whole life had cracked and fallen away, and in its place came the most important lesson he had ever learned. In the end, all men were equal, no matter their race or where they came from. And the one thing none of them could ever be a god.
His knees were soaked in the pool of blood spreading across the stone. He still couldn't understand it.
How? How could this have happened?
Until today he had believed himself untouchable beneath the void. Now his mortality had been tested in the worst way possible. Not by illness. Not by some accident. It had been tested by the one thing he had never given much thought to.
Man.
When you hold as much power as Johan did, you begin to feel invincible. It feels as though your touch could decide the fate of the universe itself. And for Johan, it truly could. He decided the fate of men and of celestial bodies alike. But there was one fate he had never been able to decide, and that was his own. He could have blamed anyone in that moment. Deep down, though, he knew the truth. There were things he simply could not do. That was the limit of being a man, and to pass beyond it would mean reaching godhood.
A beam tore across the sky and exploded right in front of the balcony.
The blast swallowed the ship and the crew looking down at him in a churning cloud of smoke. Before Johan could react, knights flooded the balcony, seized him and Leonora by the arms, and dragged them both back toward the palace. He didn't resist. He could only stare at the cloud as they pulled him away. Whatever happened next, he knew they had lost. And they had lost in the worst way possible: on their own home ground.
"I suggest you get back inside, Captain," a voice crackled over the comms.
Oscar narrowed his eyes against the smoke still rolling over the deck. "Marek, did you intercept that shot?"
"I did. And it won't be the last." Marek's voice was calm, almost amused. "Halley was right. This is a trap. But nothing we can't handle."
"Very well. I'll leave this to you and Tom," Oscar said. "But be careful. We're all getting home alive. Especially now that we've got Youri back."
"Roger that, Captain," Tom replied. "I was thinking the same thing."
Behind Oscar, the crew began filing back through the deck doors. He stayed where he was, the last one standing on the deck, looking out over the ruins of Fansilia. A grin spread across his face.
"Alright. Atlas, Oceanus, open us a path. It's our friends' turn now." He chuckled. "I think the Emperor got the message—"
He never finished.
A massive, invisible force slammed down on the ship from above. The deck plating groaned. Oscar's legs buckled beneath him, and he was crushed flat against the floor, the air driven out of his lungs. It felt as if the whole sky had been stacked on top of him.
"What… is this…?" he managed, barely able to speak.
"Captain!" Tom shouted over the comms.
Through Oceanus's cameras, Tom watched in horror as the Tartarusios dropped. Its engines screamed against the pull, but the ship plunged toward the city all the same, as though an enormous hand were pressing it into the earth.
"Tom, focus!" Marek barked. "We need to find where this is coming from!"
"This is no ordinary attack," Tom said through gritted teeth, pulling Oceanus into a steep climb through the clouds. "It has to be one of them."
"No doubt about it. It's hiding somewhere close."
But before Tom could even begin to search, every warning light in his cockpit flared red. The same crushing weight hit Oceanus like a falling mountain. His controls shrieked, and the machine was hurled downward, losing altitude by the second.
Yet for one brief moment, as he fell, he saw it.
A dark silhouette hung high above the smoke. A massive ring turned slowly at its back.
"There!" Tom shouted as he plummeted. "It's up there!"
---
High above the battlefield, inside the cockpit of the God Unit, the pilot laughed.
"This is going to be fun." He watched the feed in front of him: the black ship sinking, the lone Orbiton tumbling out of the sky. "I can see them crumbling under the weight of gravity itself. These damn idiots. They marched straight to their deaths."
Alarms suddenly blared inside the cockpit.
"What—"
An explosion engulfed everything around him. The God Unit rocked violently, and as the smoke cleared, another Orbiton hung in the air directly in front of it.
Atlas.
"Who the hell are you?" the pilot barked. Then he sneered. "Forget it. You don't need to answer. Just go ahead and die."
The massive ring on the God Unit's back began to turn, faster and faster. A wave of distorted light formed around Atlas, folding in on it from every side, the same crushing field that had pinned the Tartarusios. For an instant it looked as though Atlas would be crumpled like paper.
Then the light cracked.
It splintered into fragments and dissolved into the air, like glass shattering in slow motion.
"What the fuck?" the pilot shouted.
Static buzzed through the open channel, and then Marek's voice came through, cool and unhurried.
"You must be the pilot of Montern. Well, let me enlighten you." Atlas's back thrusters flared open. "Gravity doesn't bow to you alone."
Atlas lunged forward.
"Let me show you what real gravitational pressure looks like."
The light around Montern began to bend. The air itself warped, twisting the sky behind the God Unit into a shimmering lens.
"What the fuck is this?" the pilot screamed.
He never had time to understand it. In the next instant Montern was ripped upward, launched toward space at an impossible speed, a dark streak tearing through the clouds and the atmosphere beyond. It climbed and climbed until it slammed headfirst into the Sphere hanging in orbit above the capital.
Atlas hovered alone in the clearing sky, its thrusters glowing softly.
"Gravity doesn't only pull you down," Marek said quietly. "It can send you flying up, too."