The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 754

Red Tower had three hundred red tower and thirty thousand magicians in the Arcanum State.

That night, there were almost none of them in a Red Tower.

…

It was not carelessness. It was the business.

Red sells fire by the month. Every forge, every bakery oven, every kitchen stove in the state runs on a flame-charm, and a flame-charm has to be renewed by hand, at the customer’s door, by a man who walks there.

Red’s people lived in their own houses. They slept above shops in the market districts, in rented rooms near the harbour, in cottages on the roads out east, so they could be at the first door by seven in the morning on the first of the month.

"White Tower had summoned every fighter drone, every ex-black-magic recruit, it commanded to attack all of the Red towers."

Red Tower never summoned anybody, because it was ambushed.

…

At the Halloway branch there were twenty-six people inside at midnight.

Four cooks. Nine record-keepers. Two men on the gate. A duty elder named Corliss who had drawn the short straw for the third month running and had complained about it at dinner.

Corliss was on the north step when he saw the road.

“How many?” the boy beside him said.

“Go back inside.”

“Elder, how many—”

“I said go inside.”

There were a hundred of them coming up that road in black robes, and above all of it, at eighty feet, the sky was full of machines flying in step with the men.

A hundred men and a hundred drones fighting twenty-six people who were not fighters at all.

It happened at three hundred red towers at once.

Thirty thousand ex-Black magicians, split across every Red building in the state.

The curse always went first.

“Front rank,” somebody would say, and one man would open his hand, and every Red guard standing in the gateway would go down together—knees, hips, backs, on the stones inside two seconds, teeth locked, hands curled up against their chests.

After the curse, they used everything else.

Poison-work. Rot. Mind-hex. Blood-binding. The whole catalogue that the state had made illegal a hundred years ago and that Black Tower had gone on quietly selling for four hundred and eighty years afterward—used openly, in the dark, in front of witnesses, on a night when the state’s own war record was sitting open with both parties named in it.

Red did the only thing Red has ever done.

They threw fire.

The drones dropped between the black magicians.

A hundred of them, edge to edge, each one laying a sheet of film across the air in front of it until there was a wall of nothing twenty centimetres thick hanging in the courtyard.

The fire hit it.

The fire went out.

Ash came down on fifteen hundred black robes, and not one of them looked up.

“Again,” somebody screamed from the window. “Again—”

They went again. It went out again.

Useless.

…

On the north ridge above the banquet, three hundred magicians had been burning a glass roof for forty-one minutes.

They had raised the power four times. The roof kept sliding ash off like snow off a car.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify