037.010

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Lost Authority

Staffing Problems

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Every muscle in Alyssa’s body was tensed up as she stared down Adrael. It hadn’t been long since she had last seen the Archangel. Two hours. Maybe three. Back in the field of ash, Alyssa hadn’t been concerned about her. Spectral Chains worked on angels and Adrael clearly had not been gearing up for a fight. The same was no longer true.

Adrael floated above the surface of the water, shield in hand. Her entire body looked almost as tense as Alyssa was. Although the ruby shield obscured her left arm, the muscles in her shoulder were clearly fighting against her skin. Which was odd to think about as Alyssa had seen Adrael without an arm. There hadn’t been any blood, muscle, or bone beneath. Just light. Regardless, her fist was much the same. Without a staff to hold, Adrael simply clenched her other hand as tightly as she could. With her wings spread wide, occupying most of the space inside the bathing chamber, Adrael made for a rather intimidating presence.

Adrael was all the more intimidating because of one simple fact.

Despite Iosefael showing up to ask for help, the stupid angel had put herself directly between Alyssa and her spell cards. Normally, it wouldn’t matter how intimidating Adrael looked. A Spectral Chains would have fixed that. To grab her spell cards now would require her to turn her back to Adrael. Or, at the very least, shimmy to the side, shove Iosefael out of the way, and still probably look away long enough to make sure that she was grabbing in the right spot.

“Step aside, mortal,” Adrael said. Alyssa had never seen the Archangel in good humor, but her tone now hit a new record for implacability.

But Alyssa couldn’t just stand aside. “I’ve seen Iosefael fight Tenebrael before. They destroyed a whole city block. If you think I’m going to let you two slug it out in here, you’re dead wrong.”

“You assume you have a choice in this—”

“Let me ask you,” Alyssa interrupted, trying to keep control of the conversation. “In how many encounters with me have you come out ahead?”

That seemed to pull Adrael up short. She snapped her jaw shut, pursing her lips together into a thin line.

“Every time I’ve seen you, you’ve lost something. Maybe your minions, your centuries of planning, your arm, or maybe just a little dignity. So I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to calm down and stand over on that side of the room.”

“Thanks,” Iosefael whispered.

Alyssa just about elbowed her in the stomach. “And you? What do you think you’re doing here? You come to a mortal-populated bathhouse while being chased by an insane Archangel? You come to me for help? What happened to the Iosefael who got angry enough to fight Tenebrael? Take care of your own problems. Or I’ll take care of them for you and not in the way you hoped for.”

“Wha… What do you mean by that?”

“Give me Adrael’s staff.”

“What?”

Iosefael’s eyes widened as Alyssa stepped to the side. It wasn’t that graceful of a step given that she was waist-deep in water, but it was enough to get around Iosefael. With both angels focusing on the conversation, Alyssa was now just a little closer to grabbing her cards and chaining both of them up.

“You aren’t going to give it to her, are you?” Iosefael whispered, leaning conspiratorially. “She used that to harm a mortal. It should really be destroyed.”

“Then why haven’t you already?”

Iosefael shook her head, smug look appearing on her face as if she knew something that Alyssa didn’t. “You can’t just destroy a divine implement,” she said with a tone matching her face. Shrugging with her hands, she shook her head again. “They were forged by the higher Spheres and can only be destroyed by them.”

“In the fires of Mount Doom?”

“What?”

“Never mind,” Alyssa said, glaring at Iosefael. “Just hand it over.”

Iosefael’s smug look turned sour as she looked from Alyssa to Adrael. The Archangel had yet to say anything since Alyssa started demanding the staff. Whether that was because she thought it would be easier to take from Alyssa, because she would rather it be in Alyssa’s hands, or because she thought Alyssa would hand it over didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that she remained there as an observer.

“The staff. Iosefael.”

Although the Principality pouted, she held out her hand. Adrael notably perked up from where she still hovered over the water—she had not gone into the corner as Alyssa had directed, but neither had Iosefael. The two angels glared at each other as a pole-shaped light formed at the tips of Iosefael’s fingers. Slowly, slowly enough that it had to be deliberate, the golden rod formed.

Before the ruby cap even had time to form, Alyssa snatched it from Iosefael’s hands. Iosefael didn’t just let go, of course, but Alyssa had a plan for that as well. Using the staff as a distraction for the angels’ focus, She grabbed her deck of spell cards from behind Iosefael—having to shove through the angel’s golden-white wings in the process. Chains lashed out and wrapped around Iosefael. Another set of chains tried to pull Adrael down from her perch, but the Archangel was clearly ready for it. Using her shield before the chains could fully ensnare her, she shattered the would-be bindings.

Two more chains lashed out, one set aimed at her chest again, the other aimed for her wings.

Adrael smashed through the links aimed for her chest. Before she could swing her arm at the chains behind her, a tug threw her off balance.

That provided the perfect opportunity to chain her up fully.

Adrael crashed to the ground, bound. Because of her movements in dodging the chains, she didn’t land in the middle of the bath. Rather, she hit the ground between the door and the edge of the bath.

Strange, Alyssa thought, reflecting on the situation. She wasn’t dissatisfied with the outcome, but it was still strange. Earlier, Alyssa had kept Accelero active for at least part of the time that Adrael had spoken with her. During that time, Adrael had sped herself up in order to be understood. Given that the relative speed of everything else had been near zero, she had to have been moving and thinking at the speed of light. Maybe. Alyssa wasn’t a physicist.

But here and now, even though Adrael had managed to knock away a few of those chains, she still wound up caught. That shouldn’t ever happen if she could move and think at high speeds. At the very least, she should have been able to run away. Then again, thinking back to how slowly Adrael had appeared back in that dome, there might just be something strange with how angels functioned. They might be tied to the world speed a whole lot more than it seemed and accelerating to the point where she had been intelligible through the effects of Accelero had probably required a bit of effort.

The same was true for Iosefael. In her fight against Tenebrael during Alyssa’s first few days in Lyria, they both had been moving fast enough to have been little more than a blur of light against the night sky. If she could move that fast at all times, she should never have been caught as many times as Alyssa had managed.

The chains themselves might play a part too. Although angels disappeared and reappeared whenever they wanted, none had ever simply up and vanished while the chains were holding onto them.

Only Tenebrael had managed to escape from the Spectral Chains. Whether that was a testament to the power of a Dominion versus the power of a Principality or a Archangel, because of her consuming mortal souls and gaining a power boost from them, or some reason specific to her that no other angel, even a Seraphim, would be able to replicate remained a question in the back of Alyssa’s mind.

Not that Alyssa really wanted to test going up against a Seraphim. She had never seen one personally, but she had no doubt that a being wielding a fraction of the Throne’s power would utterly decimate anything it decided to destroy. Granted, angels claimed that they couldn’t lie, but that didn’t mean that they had to tell the whole truth. Still, those she had spoken to universally agreed that Seraphim were bad news.

“Both of you should leave,” Alyssa said, looking from Adrael to Iosefael. “I’m sure people have been or will be dying. There are souls to collect. As for you…” She turned back to Adrael, frowning, trying to come up with a good reason why an angry Adrael shouldn’t stick around and try to get her staff back, violently or otherwise. One idea popped into her head. “Tenebrael will be here soon. The last Archangel she got her hands on wound up trapped inside a prison so isolated, not even a glimmer of the Throne’s light can make it inside.”

Iosefael visibly shuddered at the mention of Tenebrael’s prison. Adrael just glared harder.

“You think you’re going to take my staff again?”

“Yeah. Pretty much. You shouldn’t have let it fall into mortal hands in the first place. Take some solace knowing that I am not planning on destroying it, unlike Iosefael.”

“I wasn’t going to destroy it. I just said that it should be destroyed.”

“Whatever the case, it is out of your hands now.” The chains disappeared from around Iosefael as Alyssa spoke. Despite her being the first angel to claim to want to kill Alyssa, Iosefael was least impressive angel among the bunch. Adrael was the only angel to have demonstrated the intent to harm mortals. Kenziel had been brazen enough to talk to Tenebrael, even if it hadn’t worked out for her in the end. Tenebrael was obviously Tenebrael; being the most active and most present meant that Alyssa had a much higher opinion of her almost by default. She was the one to have gotten Alyssa into this mess in the first place, but if not for her…

Alyssa would probably still be waking up at five in the morning, going to the same job for eight hours a day, spending an extra hour in traffic, and finally coming home at night thinking that there would be something better or just more interesting down the line of life.

In comparison, all Alyssa could think of when she considered Iosefael was how many times the angel had failed to send her back to Earth. Granted, she was probably going to drop Alyssa in the middle of the ocean a thousand miles away from any humans and leave her to drown or something, but she had failed at even that. And she had failed to keep Adrael busy at the outpost. She had failed in fighting Tenebrael, but that wasn’t unexpected in retrospect. She really just had too many failures to her name for Alyssa to be even mildly intimidated.

It helped that Alyssa had a few more Spectral Chains cards if necessary.

Iosefael looked down at herself. Stretching her wings out a bit, she took off enough to get her feet above the water level, after which she landed right on the edge of the bath, near where Alyssa’s pistol sat. Even though she had been waist deep in the water along with Alyssa, the angel’s skin and gold armor weren’t even glossy, let alone dripping.

Which was lucky for the angel. Since Iosefael had appeared, Alyssa had been standing. She was still wet, but a lot of the water above her waist had run off or evaporated, leaving behind an ashy film covering her. And a chill. It was not the most comfortable of feelings. She somehow managed to avoid shivering—maybe the ash helped give the tiniest bit of insulation against the cold air. Still, she had to ignore it. There would be time to properly wash off later.

“What about her?”

“Either Tenebrael will take care of her or she’ll leave. I don’t really care.”

“You don’t want help with her?”

“Can you help with her?” Alyssa asked, not sure at all what kind of answer she expected.

“We’re both on Tene’s side,” Iosefael said with a slight pout.

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I can…” Iosefael trailed off, throwing a nervous glance from one side of the room to the other. She didn’t look at any of the myriad mortals standing about—all of whom looked ready to pounce despite the fact that they couldn’t see what they might pounce on—but just glanced from corner to corner. “When you and I had that chat… I might have figured out a way in and out of Tenebrael’s prisons. I wasn’t going to tell anyone just in case she ever tried to put me back, but… She won’t, right? We’re on the same side, right?”

“As far as I know,” Alyssa said with a noncommittal shrug. She wasn’t lying, at least not intentionally. But it wasn’t like Alyssa had a mental connection with Tenebrael to know what the angel was thinking. Even while connected with her, she hadn’t been able to discern such things.

It was entirely possible that, when Iosefael’s usefulness came to an end and Tenebrael got her world back in full, Iosefael would be sentenced to isolation just to keep her out of the way.

Alyssa actually felt a little bad for the angel, even if that scenario ended up being pure fiction. But Alyssa supposed she didn’t have to tell anyone. Angels were not omniscient. If Tenebrael didn’t learn that such a thing was possible, then maybe Iosefael could slip away.

Unless she slipped away to betray Tenebrael…

But that was something Alyssa could think about when she next saw Tenebrael. For the time being… “If you can open a portal there, go ahead and do it.”

“Okay. I can do it.”

“Then do it.”

Iosefael clenched her fists in front of her. Psyching herself up? Was it really that big of a deal? Or maybe she didn’t want to embarrass herself in front of Alyssa by failing to manifest a bunch of miracles again. “I can! I’ll have a piece of cake.”

“You’ll what?”

“That’s the idiom you use, right? When something is going to be easy?”

“Close enough.”

Iosefael, still with her fists clenched, flapped her wings and hovered over to where Adrael was chained up on the floor. Alyssa directed Izsha away a bit with a wave of her hand, not wanting any accidents to happen over in that corner of the room. There, next to Adrael, Iosefael held out a hand.

Mystic circles started forming in front of her arm. “Calculating pathway to the unknown,” she said, causing an explosion of light in the circle.

“What are you doing, Principality?”

“Pathway creation in progress… Complete.”

Alyssa watched with some amount of wonder as the mystic circle expanded out into a ring-shaped doorway. Iosefael’s spell, much like all those performed by angels, sounded technical in nature. They never went into any details, making her wonder just why they announced what they were doing. Some diagnostic feature of their programming? But even assuming that… their words were drastically different from those Alyssa had used while connected to Tenebrael. Had she been creating a portal, Alyssa would have said ‘Tenebrael, create for me a way to contain an errant angel, keeping myself, my friends, and your allies safe’ or something similar. It really made her wonder just how much of the actual miracle she had been offloading onto Tenebrael.

Probably a fairly large chunk of it.

If not all of it.

Unlike the square portals that the Astral Authority made, this one had a brilliant white light separating the boundaries of the two locations. Beyond was just a plain obsidian room. The food and other amenities that had been there the last time Alyssa visited were gone, cleared out to leave just the featureless space of the room.

Iosefael notable trembled as she lowered her arm. From the tips of her toes to the feathers of her wings, a shudder wracked her body. She slowly turned to Alyssa with a smile. “See? I did it!”

“Yes yes, very good, Iosefael,” Alyssa said, looking down to Adrael.

The Archangel was just staring at the portal. As far as Alyssa knew, she had never been to Tenebrael’s prison. Still, she must have been able to sense something. Or maybe a lack of something. The Throne supposedly had no access to the interior of that place.

“Sorry about this,” Alyssa said. “Apparently it is hell for angels back there. But you’re too dangerous to leave roaming around.”

“Dangerous? I just want what’s mine.”

“And that’s the problem. As far as I am concerned, you relinquished ownership of this the moment you left it inside my friends. I can’t have you attacking us for it. Especially because…” Alyssa threw a glance toward Irulon. “We might have found a use for it.”

It was a divine implement, an angelic weapon. If the sword of the Cardinal Virtue of Justice could shatter the mirrored dome to reveal the Endless Expanse, surely Adrael’s staff could do the same. Even if they didn’t use it for any of that, it still provided at least some defense against magical attacks. That alone made it worth the effort to keep it.

Letting it slip out of her grasp in the first place had been a mistake, but she had been too concerned with Izsha to care at the time.

Adrael looked furious with the prospect. She started struggling with tenfold the effort. But the chains held strong. For now. Alyssa had never actually tried to keep an angel chained up for too long at once. Although she had no reason to think that Spectral Chains might fail, there was no need to test their endurance.

“Drag her inside,” Alyssa said, looking to Iosefael.

“Me?” Iosefael said with a trepidations glance toward the shimmering hole in the world.

“I’m not going to go in there. If you trust your portal, you can do it yourself.” Besides that, Alyssa wouldn’t put it past either angel to leave her trapped inside. Without a connection to Tenebrael, she wouldn’t be able to escape on her own. Unless Tenebrael suddenly decided to answer her phone, it was conceivable that she would be trapped inside for an extended period of time. Without food…

Despite her momentary protest, Iosefael psyched herself up with a few fist pumps again. Reaching down, she grabbed the still struggling Adrael by her shoulders and started shimmying backwards into the portal. Iosefael dropped her down in the middle of the room, looked down with a sad expression on her face, and quickly marched right out of the black room.

A wave of her hand collapsed the portal, severing the Spectral Chains at the same time.

“If you figured out a way, how likely is it that Adrael will be able to escape?”

“It’s her first time? I don’t think she knew what to look for.”

“I’ll have to keep an eye out for her anyway,” Alyssa said, looking down at her spell cards. Having grabbed the deck with wet hands, at least a few of the cards wound up soggy. Especially the ones against her palm. She would have to go through them and make sure she had enough Spectral Chains. And a few more Accelero cards, if possible.

“You’re really keeping that?”

Alyssa narrowed her eyes. “You have a problem with me keeping it?”

“No! No… I just… should probably get back to collecting souls. You know, before you do anything to muck with them. That’s a phrase, right?” Iosefael didn’t give Alyssa a chance to answer. After wrapping her wings around herself, a flurry of golden-white feathers exploded outward, leaving nothing in her place.

Sighing, Alyssa turned, looking around to her silent companions. It was a good thing that they all knew what was going on. Had Catal and Lumen been around… even they kind of knew about the invisible angels. Anyone else and she would have looked completely insane.

“Well,” Alyssa said, smiling to Irulon as she hefted the staff up a bit, “we got this back.”

“Excellent. It should come in—”

The doors opened once again. Kasita walked inside next to Lisa, mid conversation.

“So then she started casting spells left and…” Trailing off, Kasita looked around the room. A pout slowly formed on her face. “Aww… Did I miss something?”

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