Reign of fury and fire cometh without hesitation outside the Port of Gongsan. Before the chaos, Ciel's team scattered to five winds.

  The Grand Marshall himself dove downward and fired his matter transference beacon into the distance, vanishing a blink thereafter.Yi Tong summoned a towering wave with Blue Magic, shielding himself and his dazed half-sister, whose gaudy attire drew every eye in the vicinity. Beside them, Xia drew upon White Force, her power crystallizing into pure destruction.

  WHITE MAGIC RANK V: WRATH OF SOL

  As the sky disemboweled to reveal a falling light, Hikari made a break as everything around her descended into No Man's Land. "Stop firing at me!" she screeched atop her lungs at what she recognized as Eleanor’s men.

  Before she could act further, the ground quaked. A colossal sandworm erupted from the earth, tentacles sprouting all over its back, so voluminous it blocked the sunlight. It turned to the mass of panic troops firing ineffectual pot shots. The beast growled and dove back in the sand, emerging again below the mass—maw opened wide—eviscerating everything it swallowed into meat paste with rotating razor teeths. The monster turned to the surviving mass beneath and spewed forth a torrent of heated air which dessicated every exposed flesh into skeleton.

  Its name was Hexto: modified sandworm was a body whose human’s mind had been transferred to the monster. With merciless gusto it began ying siege upon the troops gathered around it, facing seemingly no opposition until a White destruction spell sniped bsted a wound through its body.

  Xia came in like a tornado, conjuring javelins of binding light into her hand and speared Hexto several times throughout its sandy tough hide. She leaped up, White Force flowed into her leg as she came at the ailing monster, only to be spped across the battlefield by its many tentacles and nded somewhere far in the wreck of Gongsan Port.

  "Guess it is up to me now," the Second Celestial Bride sighed. Whereby she wasted no time filling in for the First. She rushed forth, dodging Hexto's wrangling limbs with agility and speed defying comprehension. Her hand fshed. Fingers sliced through the air, and AURA BLADE unsheathed to cut apart all the filing limbs. Each cut weighed heavily, dividing the tentacles and crushing the earth in a single swing.

  Su watched her half-sister's attack and felt her blood run cold. This wasn't the Nuan she'd sparred with in the past; her Aura pressed down on all like a mountain, choking their very air. Everyone who bore witness to this fight stood frozen by terror.

  Ignorant of gazes set upon her, Nuan continued her assault; her mind rexed and stretched like rubber with every unconscious breath. Legs kicked the dust from the earth, she closed the distance. Thereupon she elbowed into the monster before it could dive back into the ground. The blow boomed, shattering the air.

  "Damn," Nuan gasped, watching the beast crash earthward. "This feels like trying to write with a brick."

  As Celestial Bride, she had obtained power from the contract with Ciel. Whereas he obtained the time-slowing Aura, Nuan's own Aura had become more dense. She had done some tests and the results showed her Aura-enhanced speed, strength, and toughness had shot through the roof. On top of that was the psychological intimidation; Xia stated it felt like being gred at by a giant predator.

  After discussion with Ciel, they had named this new ability the Dragon Factor; and while it had more than doubled her combat ability, the improvement had come at the price of control.

  "Each swing felt like trying to lift a house," compined the Nuan as Hexto recovered. The sandworm with human intellect swung its open maw toward the Marshal's Dragon; a glowing heat built inside its mouth, a surging forest fire packed into a single beam of light.

  AURA SPIN

  Nuan's Aura spun in, therein forming a silver buttress cshing against Hexto’s breath of torrential heat. Sudden expansion of air therefrom buffeted all who were present. Hot winds blew dust into their eyes as light broke through the clouds. Quick as it came, the attack faded; and the Second Bride disengaged her defense, not a single hair on her head burnt.

  Thereafter Hexto, his greatest attack nullified, retreated into the sand. His grotesque form writhed as it burrowed, the spinning maw devouring tons of earth with each convulsion. It disappeared, rumbling and shaking the ground at astonishing speed and cowardice betraying its girth, leaving only a gaping hole behind.

  But Nuan wasn't done. Her extremely dense Aura gathered. The crushing weight fell upon all standing souls like the presence of a dragon. The amassed Aura began to spin violently, stirring up a spherical storm which blew away all the floating dust.

  GIANT ROTATION BULLET

  The Second Bride pointed the ball of crushing, spinning and grinding Aura toward the earth. The globe ploughed the nd, digging into the earth, traveling as far as the eyes could see before exploding thunderously from underground, bsting a hole clean toward the sky.

  When the dust subsided, a trench—whose walls glowed red with friction—remained. Within y the corpse of Hexto: a blue luminescent blot of crushed animal.

  Nuan huffed, turning her attention toward the gathering crowd consisting of Hikari, Yi Tong, Su, and some other folks. With no amusement in her voice, she spoke like crushing this ant was an evening stroll.

  "Anyone want to fight next?"

  No one did, and peaceful negotiation immediately started.

  ---

  While Nuan dominated the battlefield, Ciel pursued his own hunt through Gongsan Port's ruins. He emerged from a colpsed warehouse, stolen papers clutched in his hands.

  "What a shit show," he whispered, looking around him.

  Too many reasons existed for him to be upset. The port was wrecked, but the wreckage of cheap wood--composed mostly of broken structural husks and kindling--shone like a ray of silver lining. He could simply repce everything rather than waste money on restoration. Still, clearing the broken stone roads and removing the burnt crates where greenery should grow would drain the treasury regardless.

  But the papers in his hands concerned him much more.

  "Montgomery is ruled by Maximus," Ciel skimmed through his papers again. "And he had been kidnapping orphans around the world." He groaned. "I need to find an intelligence report from yesterday."

  A loud bang erupted, then a man cd in bck spun crashed through another half-burnt house and into the warehouse the Grand Marshall had just left. He sailed past him with speed which kicked up the winds, smmed through the open gap, leading to a thunderous thumping and fluttering papers.

  The Lord of Union reacted immediately, throwing down another spider-drone to the ground just as his new visitor reappeared from the warehouse.

  Bde in hand, he spotted his new target. In turn, the pre-deployed drone detected him. It jumped upward, tching its legs around his ankle and discharged forth a voltage. His eyes turned white as he spasmed like a man in throes of poison, and he fell to the ground squirming.

  "Okay," loomed Yulong's Grand Marshall. "Now, you should tell me what exactly is going—"

  And the man exploded in fme right in his face.

  Ciel barely had a chance to blink before being bsted backward across the ground. He must admit, smoldering from the heat, he had underestimated whoever sent these men here. If they had rigged an explosive to trigger the moment their men was electrocuted, they must be treated seriously.

  Then a familiar light fshed above his head.

  Another man went flying from a distance, followed by a ptinum-blonde woman who had been knocked here by Hexto caught between the entire squad of these suicide bombing warriors.

  Xia with impeccable grace conjured a javelin of light into her hand, impaling one of her assaints with it. To aid her, Ciel produced his Ether rifle and sniped another through the chest where he promptly exploded.

  "How did you meet these guys?" he asked his First Bride.

  Xia kicked another man in the torso, the White Force running through her leg magnified her strength so mightily the blow unched him across the street before his suicide-bomb triggered. "I have no idea!" Xia grabbed another man in bck covering who had swung at her face. "Be careful, they are members of Curtis' Military Police."

  "Curtis has Military Police here?" Ciel flung a grenade underhand, the motion smooth despite his surprise; therefrom, it rolled across the uneven road beneath the feet of two more of the squadron and blew up in foams.

  Having his back, the Curtis' Princess kicked the leg of her st standing assaint and impaled him through the chest with a sealing spell before the man's suicide vest could explode. "They shouldn't be here. The Head of the Military Police, Hunter, is an obsessive maniac," she grumbled. "That guy always harps about Curtis's stability above all things. And, for all his psychopathy, he is not a hypocrite who goes around spying on other people's countries without good reason."

  "This sounds personal."

  "Of course it is. He agreed with Spade to send me to die."

  "Can we interrogate them?"

  "Don't bother," Xia growled at the men beneath her. "Hunter probably trained these guys to withstand torture."

  Ciel nodded; he began stripping the men clean of anything which might give him a clue instead of asking. His partner, understanding his action, began to help. Their hopes were grim, but fortunately they managed to find a sealed cylindrical container hidden in one of the surviving men.

  But before they could rejoice, heat bore upon their skin.

  Both of them looked up to see a fiery shell falling toward them.