On one hand, there is something sickening about the modern Imperial military. It is difficult to explain, yet it needs to be explained none the less. The most common soldier seen on the surface is the standard private. We have armoured divisions that see more than fifty different types of combat vehicle, and that does not include our logistical support. Whereas the airforce is currently rendered unusable, the rapid expansion has given rise to more than a hundred different kinds of planes. We have redundancy upon redundancy to the point of farce. Saksma has recently gone ahead with production of her own Wolfe fighter-aircraft. Every single nation in Epa has several varieties of military helicopter. Every nation has different trucks. The rapid expansion and seizure of their Epan Separation equipment was a success true, but the immediacy of the Second Expedition and now the Surface War has revealed cracks that can no longer be ignored.

  At the baseline, the Imperial Army on the surface is composed of mundane human soldiers, elves, beastmen, sorcerers and mages. These are hard categories that we cannot fix through any amount of reorganization. The only group that does not cause problems here are sorcerers, yet their numbers are so low that they do not matter. Mages require a constant supply of catalytic gemstones, beastmen carry the specialized high-calibre guns that have been handmade for them (these are foot soldiers that have four different calibre of rounds alone), elves require specialist lenses, stocks and hearing protection compared to the general mass of humanity. Add to this Clerics, who have their own gear and style of armour, along with the planned expansion of Paladin and Guardian, who we are taking precisely because of the unique style of weapon they use. This is in addition to specialized units such as Divines, which take equipment on an individual level. I will not go into extremes and talk of the Underkingdoms, for at least they are self-sufficient.

  This cannot be compared to the Legions of the Great War where the largest variation was in livery and banner. Where we eventually settled on four different types of sword, four types of spear, six styles of shield and were men were largely expected to bring their own leather if they did not receive the full plate of the Legionary. I am bemoaning the fact that ships use their own kinds of shells compared to artillery, I am bemoaning the fact that Lubskan, Doschian, Allian & Rancais rifles all use different types of calibre. The mass mobilization and the reactivation of Epan Separation arms factories has ensured that the term “Standard Imperial” shrunk from two thirds to half of our weaponry. If this pattern continues for another year, we predict that only a quarter of the troops will come across the official equipment.

  Without urgent action, the Imperial Army will starve as it drowns of incompatibility.

  Yet that is merely the mechanical incompatibility that we can prepare for and avoid if action is taken soon. There is a greater issue at play, especially amongst the Epan front. The army is segregated amongst linguistic lines, we already have fools reaching statuses that are far above their paygrade simply for the fact these fools are able to communicate with each other. I see no obvious way to change this as I understand the lack of a standard official Imperial language for the resentment and discontent it would bring if we tried to force the Epans to communicate in one tongue.

  Yet I press for the institution of basic communication amongst the troops, and the adoption of a language sooner rather than later. We have hit the peak that a band of armies can hit. Already, we are starting to decline in functionality due to the inclusion of amateurs whose one trait to fame is the fact they have hobbyistically learned the tongue of another.

  - Excerpt from “The State of the War”, given by Iliyal Tremali every two weeks to the Strategy Council of the Empire.

  “Goddess! Goddess! Goddess!” A mage had stormed through the door to Elassa’s Skunkworks. To her warehouse of ash and dusty floors and blackboards filled with formulas atomic and alchemical. A few had arrows drawn over them, where a few mages had spotted similarities between the science and the magic. They had succeeded in pushing the theory further, but not a single step forward had been taken in the practice.

  Elassa clicked her tongue as she pretended not to listen to the idiot who had just stormed into the laboratory. It was obvious she was ignoring him, every assistant magician in dusty robes turned their head, as did every scientist that had been brought in to assist with this effort. A few of the band looked to Elassa, saw her paying no attention and returned to their duties. Cameras were being recalibrated, pens once again touched clipboards, liquid bubbled in vials as more experiments were repeated to see what the ash reacted with and what it produced.

  “Goddess!” The magician finally came to a stop a respectful distance away from Elassa. Good. She wasn’t paying to him right now. A ritual circle had been drawn, Elassa was adjusting the flow of her power into the runes on the ground as the ash was being whirled in the air. The air shimmered with heat, there was no plan today. Elassa was simply throwing everything and anything in her arsenal that she could. “Goddess! We have an emergency.”

  “Are we under attack?” Elassa asked, her blue eyes never moving from the ball of swirling in front of her. She felt the magic and raised its power. It was bad when things got to brute force. That was always the mark that ideas had ended and they were simply trying to matter the gate down, irrelevant of the casualties.

  “No.” The magician replied. Elassa made a scowl. First she got pulled away to help with the shielding of Atny, then she got pulled away to create those shields for the fleet. Then she got stolen to help them. Everyday, at least two of her classes had these little emergencies caused by runaway magical weaves. Arcadia’s regimen had been increased once again. The only reason her mages weren’t burning out was because all the Clerics from the neighbouring cities had been stolen and requisitioned into assisting the turnover of magicians. Soon enough, the first wave of fresh battlemages would be sent to the frontlines. Iliyal would no doubt get off her case for a day or two as a reward.

  “Then it’s not an emergency.” Elassa replied, her eyes still fixed on the magic in front of her. The air was starting to grow into a transient blue as ash swirled around then got crushed into a ball in the air. She had tried freezing it, that did nothing. She had tried melting it, that did not nothing. She had tried making a chemical reaction that ate it up, that would only for tiny sections and it had generated such explosions that half the floor was still charred black. It was possible, it certainly was. And the moment Elassa let such a chain reaction run across the entirety of Ashen Skies, they would destroy the atmosphere if not shatter Arda. Another method had been theorized, to simply push the ash down. That two would dislodge the all the airflow in the world. They would be facing another Continent Cracking, save for the fact that it would blow over Epa and Arika and bury the world in the Sassara’s sands. She had tried transmute it into another material and the level of energy required was simply too large to accomplish. Even if she somehow managed to collect all the mages in the world, they could not transmute a continent’s worth of ash into the ocean. Even Worldbreaking had not seen such displays of infinite strength.

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  “But…” The mage said and Elassa waved her hand to shut him up. The ash had defeated her. There was no other way to say it. She knew when she was slamming her head into a brick wall, that lesson had been very much learned in the past with Anassa. No amount of explaining, no amount of self-confidence, no amount of meditation or thought would ever allow Elassa to exist in different places simultaneously as Anassa could do. They were simply wired up differently. Anassa’s delusional, narcissistic, obviously-mistaken mind could make connections Elassa’s could not.

  A crash from outside finally pulled Elassa out from her world of thought on how to handle this nightmare. She waved her hand and tied off the weaves of magic so that the experiment would continue running. The ash was crushed into a ball and held there as air, shimmering from heat, pushed in from all sides. “What is going on outside?” Elassa finally turned away to the sorry little excuse, the waste of space, the foolish claimant to a title he did not deserve, the animal that had shaved its fur and walked on hind legs in some mockery of humanity.

  The magician, pyromancer from the red outlines on his robe, took a step back. “We… There’s a blaze.”

  A blaze. A fire. A candle flame that had gotten out of control. Elassa didn’t even bother rolling her eyes or sighing. “Which field?” Her senses reached out before the man even started moving his lips. She sensed the weaves being scattered throughout Arcadia. The leyline confluence it sat on. The pair of tornadoes in the north. The rains in the west. The ambience of some mass meditation in the east. South was hot, an uncontrolled fire that had burst from its containment, the mages that were feeding it were now being fed on. “Magna’s Field.” Elassa interrupted the first syllable and then man nodded.

  The Goddess of Magic exhaled, the gemstone around her neck began to glow as she cast off the ground, only half a metre. Winds spun around her as the scientists turned to watch in curiosity at the breaking of their laws and magicians took note of how to shatter natural order more efficiently. The huge doors twisted open, tiny threads of air pulling at the handle. It was simply showing off at this point.

  Elassa accelerated through the door, her passage blowing papers off cabinets and desks and knocking two of the working men over. There was no arc to her flight, the moment she got outside, she headed straight up unaffected by the sudden change in velocity. Unaffected even by wind. Flight was a simple method, there were thousand of way to do it. Elassa merely shifted the immediate air around her to carry her words. She turned to the south.

  A triangular firestorm, a circular pyramid of flame was growing in all directions. Its flames controlled, all pointed towards the peak. Around it, Arcadia’s professors and prefects and mass of students had hurried and put up barriers to try and contain the spread. They did somewhat. The flames could not penetrate their shields so they simply rolled up and over and swallowed them in cocoons of their making. She identified the cause immediately. Inside was a communion of thirty, their leader had lost control and collapsed. He had become an open floodgate that would release the energy of all its participants.

  Normally, this would be adapted into a lesson in controlling emergency spills. The failure of the ash left no such will in Elassa. She just watched how pitifully her subjects were handling this meagre amount of power. It was not even equal a Paradeisian choir nor a mass spell cast by Tartarian flameweavers. Imperial Sorcerers had managed to hold back both back then. Her mages could do it. An Archmage would shut this situation down instantly. This so-called crisis. The peak of the pyramid grew higher and higher as Elassa felt her how men handled it.

  No one had the correct idea. All of them were trying to match the raw power of the flames. The only team that had any success was a grand communion of forty, led by one of the department heads. They at least stopped the advance towards one of the dormrooms. Above, the sky sat wounded, constant magical disruption had rendered it dark, smeared with traces of red and blue and purple as ambient mana tried to dissipate into a local atmosphere that was already brimming with it.

  Elassa sighed. These emergencies were getting more common. She would have to teach her pupils how to clear the air eventually. A demonstration should be given. A demonstration would be given. But not now. Elassa was in no mood for it.

  The Goddess of Magic raised her hand and found the immediate culprit. Some battlemage that was conscious insofar as his heart still beat. She wrapped a weave around him, severed him from the communion. The rest of the pupils unlucky enough to still be part of his failing screamed and collapsed as energy rebounded into them. That was the punishment given, none of them would be standing today. Even Clerical healing could not fix a blast on the soul like that. Tomorrow, they would have headaches. Good.

  Without a power source, the flames collapsed immediately. Fire that burned on pure will had nothing to feed it. It took less than a second for all to remain of such a tremendous emergency to become nothing more than a few smouldering cinders on the ground.

  All eyes went to Elassa in the sky, a few magicians collapsed to their knees, a few made bows. Most simply stared and waited for an order or an instruction. Elassa supposed she should give them a rundown of what she thought.

  “Embarrassing.” Her voice boomed across Arcadia. She stared at the group that had caused it for a moment, the looked at the various teams which had utterly failed at identifying the problem and solving it at its source. A report would be written then given to the staff, but Elassa had nothing more to say.

  No one so much as raised a hand to beg question.

  Elassa returned to her laboratory and stopped at the door. The quiet chatter culled itself immediately. Faces of shocked scientists and mystified mages all looked at Elassa with awe. The Goddess of Magic did not see them. Her eyes were focused on the enchantment that still hovered in the air, now empty. A ball of air that was searing hot, almost aflame if it had any fuel to ignite.

  And below it, fallen through the air, was a pile of crystal-clear rocks.

  Gemstones.

  Gleaming white diamonds.

  Elassa looked at the scientists. A few of them were taking notes, a few had actually gone and were inspecting the gleaming diamonds. One of the scientists was throwing his up and down in the air like a marble, another had brought a handful to a microscope and was busying himself with inspecting it. And Elassa just stared. He turned to the men. “Did I do that?”

  The answer came from a man on the other side of the room, who was inspecting the video. “We have it on film!”