The ward changed everything.
The moment the protective field established itself across the merchant hall and the streets beyond, I could feel the psychological shift move through the assembled planeswalkers like a physical wave. The desperate edge that had been driving their fighting, that constant awareness that a single touch meant losing everything that made them who they were, dissolved into something considerably more dangerous for the Eternals pressing against our position.
Relief became focus. Fear became fury. And Sixty-plus planeswalkers who'd been fighting defensively, protecting themselves against a specific vulnerability, suddenly had no reason to hold back.
"Push them back!" Gideon roared, his voice commanding and taking the opportunity provided "Quickly drive them out of the building!"
The response was immediate and overwhelming.
Chandra stopped maintaining her defensive fire rings and simply released everything she had in a single direction. A torrent of flame erupted from both her hands simultaneously, white-hot and absolutely massive in scale, washing over the eastern breach and everything beyond it. The lazotep armor on the Eternals held for a few seconds before the sustained heat found the gaps between plates and began cooking the preserved flesh underneath. Eight Eternals collapsed in the space of those several seconds, their animating magic disrupted when the corpses they inhabited became too damaged to function.
"Yeah! That's what I'm talking about!" she shouted with a grin.
Ajani charged the nearest group of humanoid Eternals with his axe raised high and his hands glowing with white mana shaped into pure righteous force. The first Eternal he hit flew backward fifteen feet and shattered against the wall like pottery, lazotep armor fragmenting on impact. The second and third fell to axe strikes that moved with a speed and precision that belied his massive frame. He was singing something as he fought, a leonin battle hymn that made the white mana flowing through him burn visibly brighter with each verse.
Gideon waded directly into the densest concentration of Eternals near the southern breach with his massive sword moving in wide swings patterns that cleared space around him in every direction. His invulnerability meant he didn't need to dodge or block; he simply moved through attacks that should have killed him and responded with strikes that removed Eternals from the equation permanently. Three became five, then eight, as he carved a path through their formation.
Samut and Teferi worked together with the kind of intuitive coordination that developed between people who'd fought alongside each other. Teferi would slow a group of Eternals just enough to make them momentarily predictable, and Samut would move through them at accelerated speed with blades cutting the precise weak points in their armor that exploitation produced. The combination was brutally efficient, reducing a champion of the Dread Horde to scattered components in under twenty seconds.
Nissa called upon Ravnica's leylines with both hands outstretched and her eyes glowing with green light that matched the natural magic. The floor of the merchant hall cracked open as roots the thickness of support columns erupted from below, growing with impossible speed to wrap around Eternal legs, torsos, and weapons. Immobilized zombies couldn't advance to extract sparks, and immobilized zombies were easy targets for everyone else fighting around them.
Karn stood at the center of everything, the ward disc in his hands glowing steadily with its protective field. He wasn't passive; his free hand intercepted Eternals that got too close with immense force that required little follow-through, but his primary role was maintaining his position so the ward's radius covered as many fighters as possible.
I moved to the northern breach where three of the Dread Horde's animal champions were pressing through simultaneously. The bull-headed champion from earlier had returned with reinforcements, a massive hippo Eternal covered in ceremonial lazotep armor that must have weighed several tons, and something that might have been a hawk the size of a building, with wings made of preserved feathers coated in blue metal.
"Χαλκοτάυροι!" I called the words with divine authority.
The ground cracked as my bronze bulls finally emerged, manifesting from the dimensional space where they waited. Two tons of animated bronze each, eyes blazing with forge-fire, steam pouring from their nostrils as they oriented toward the threats I indicated with a gesture. They were creation made manifest, the first major works of my godhood, and they moved with absolute obedience, forever bound to my will across every reality I visited.
The first bull hit the hippo champion with the force of a train moving at full speed. The impact sent both massive forms crashing through the northern wall entirely, taking a section of the building with them as they tumbled into the street beyond. The bull was already recovering before the hippo finished sliding across the cobblestones, bronze hooves finding purchase and charging again before its target could rise.
The second bull targeted the hawk champion, which had the advantage of flight that my bronze creation lacked. The bull exhaled a gout of forge-fire that burned at temperatures far beyond what defensive Chandra had produced, divine flame that cared nothing for lazotep armor's magical properties. The hawk's preserved wings caught fire and failed to support it, sending the massive creature crashing downward directly into the bull's horns.
The bull-headed champion tried to flank me while I directed its companions. I met it personally, hammer swinging in a horizontal arc that caught it across the chest and drove it backward through several walls in rapid succession.
Then I reached back into the ring and called forth Talos outside.
He emerged from dimensional storage with a loud grinding sound, the ancient bronze joints moving for the first time in decades. Talos was thirty feet tall, constructed from celestial bronze infused with Olympian divine energy, every plate engraved with runes that predated modern written language. Talos had been created to guard the island of Crete, circling it daily, throwing boulders at ships that approached without permission. He was older than most civilizations currently standing.
Talos didn't give them time to adapt. He waded into their formation with bronze fists the size of wagons, each impact sending clusters of Eternals flying in different directions. His feet crushed others beneath them. He was immune to spark extraction. He had no spark to take, immune to necromantic magic because he was never alive, immune to fear because he was incapable of experiencing it.
"Forward!" I called out. "Push them out of the building and into the street! The bulls and Talos will handle the perimeter!"
The planeswalkers responded with coordinated aggression that the Eternals couldn't match in variety or adaptive intelligence. Every remaining Eternal in the merchant hall was destroyed or driven out within five minutes of the ward taking effect. The fighting moved into the streets, and there my constructs provided the space for a moving defensive formation that advanced while maintaining the ward's protective radius.
Chandra worked the flanks with sustained fire, clearing side streets. Ajani led a group of combat-focused planeswalkers in aggressive sweeps that destroyed Eternals before they could regroup into formations. The Dread Horde's coordinated assault broke apart under pressure it hadn't been designed to face.
The streets around the merchant hall cleared section by section. The Eternals didn't retreat exactly; they weren't capable of fear or tactical withdrawal in the traditional sense. They stopped being present because we destroyed them so quickly that reinforcements couldn't arrive in time.
Razia's soldiers fought with renewed energy from Teferi's temporal healing, though I could see them beginning to tire again. Mortals had limits that planeswalkers didn't, and those limits were reasserting themselves.
"We need to move before my soldiers hit their limits again," Razia said, pulling up beside me while his hounds Ember and Ash drove two Eternals backward into Chandra's waiting flames. "What's the plan?"
"The underground passages," I said. "The Golgari tunnel network. We discussed it earlier as a possible way to bypass the barrier from below. If those passages exist and they connect to the beacon's location, we might be able to reach the source without fighting through everything above ground."
"The Golgari entrance is two streets south," Razia confirmed. "I know where it is. We use it sometimes for supply movement when surface routes are too busy" He looked at the ongoing battle around us. "Getting there is another matter."
"Talos will clear the route," I said. "Get your soldiers ready to move. Everyone else follows in formation, Karn stays in the center, constructs on the perimeter."
The movement through the streets was chaotic and loud. Talos preceded us by thirty yards, his bronze form functioning as the world's least subtle battering ram against anything that tried to block our path. The Eternals who tried to intercept our formation found themselves facing bronze bulls attacking their flanks before they could block our positions.
We reached the Golgari entrance, a heavy stone door set into a building's foundation that looked like part of the wall until Razia pressed a specific sequence of stones beside it. The door swung inward on an old mechanisms that hadn't been maintained recently but still functioned, the rumble and crack more evident.
The passage beyond was wide enough for ten people abreast and smelled of earth and decay and organic richness that characterized Golgari territory. Bioluminescent fungus provided dim illumination along the walls, enough to see by without torches.
We filed in, the planeswalkers moving in. Talos couldn't follow, his size incompatible with underground tunnels, so I sent him back to dimensional storage with a thought. The bronze bulls flanked the entrance above ground while we descended.
The tunnel system was vast. Passages branched in every direction, the accumulated excavation work of the Golgari guild over centuries of underground expansion. Without a guide, navigating it would have taken days of wandering and could have led to permanent loss.
We didn't need a guide.
Because standing in the junction point fifty yards from the entrance, illuminated by a concentration of glowing fungus that made the area almost bright, was a dragon.
Not a large dragon by Ravnican standards. It was not Bahamut's scale or the ancient wyrms I'd seen in Mount Celestia. But unmistakably draconic, with scales that might have previously been brilliant red and blue and were now the burnished gold Niv-Mizzet. His frilled mane caught the bioluminescent light and scattered it in patterns.
I had seen images of Niv-Mizzet before, and they didn't do the dragon justice.
His eyes, golden and impossibly intelligent, swept across our assembled group with a quick assessment.
"I've been investigating the beacon's infrastructure," he said without preamble, his voice carrying the deep harmonics "While your group was busy fighting the distraction above ground, I was mapping the mechanisms that make up the barrier."
"You could have helped us with the distraction," Chandra said pointedly.
"I was more useful doing what I was doing," Niv-Mizzet replied with absolute certainty. "The Eternals above ground were never going to kill you. I determined that with reasonable confidence. What they were doing was buying time and depleting your resources while the actual operation proceeded elsewhere."
"What operation?" Teferi asked, leaning forward.
"The beacon draws its power from two ritual sites embedded in Ravnica's leyline network, approximately three kilometers from the beacon's physical location in opposite directions." Niv-Mizzet produced a map from somewhere and spread it on the tunnel floor with two clawed hands. "Each site is guarded by a significant force of Eternals and at least one champion of the Dread Horde. Both sites must be disrupted simultaneously or the beacon will simply draw additional power from the remaining active site to compensate."
"You're saying we need to split up," Gideon said.
"I'm saying two groups need to reach both locations, while a third group waits for the power disruption and then assaults the beacon itself before its operators can establish alternative power sources." Niv-Mizzet looked up from the map. "The operation requires all our coordination, and specific capabilities at specific locations, and timing that allows no margin for error. Given what I've observed of your assembled capabilities, I believe it's achievable."
He looked around at the assembled planeswalkers with an expression of smug satisfaction.
"I suggest we discuss assignments immediately. We don't have much time before whoever is running this operation realizes their surface distraction has been neutralized."
I now knew it was bolas, but I didn't know how to tell them. Now that I was no longer constrained by whatever was affecting me before.
-----------------
Next chapter
Our planning was done very quickly. Niv-Mizzet's map was detailed enough that we could identify approach routes, estimate defender numbers, and assign roles based on our previous fights during the merchant hall battle. The dragon watched our discussions smugly.
"We are separating into two groups," Gideon said, his finger tracing the map routes. "We will simultaneously launch an assault on both ritual sites, then converge on the beacon once both are down."
"The timing must be precise," Niv-Mizzet confirmed. "Within minutes of each other. Any longer and the remaining active site compensates, and the barrier holds."