The city of Tlacualtzin was on lockdown from the side of the spirit realm. Commission angels had already answered the call to create a barrier surrounding the coordinates of the city.

  While unable to affect teleportation or portals within the given area, it would effectively prevent escape for unauthorised mages and even the Queen Herself.

  Archsage Livia, standing tall as she observed the hotel with her trademark smile, faded into the night, the darkness engulfing her as she stepped to the side with elegance and poise.

  She reappeared in front of the hotel, her wand at the ready.

  With a simple swipe, she summons a volley of white fireballs, her ring of devils flickering black as they assist her with the spell.

  Each ball was imbued with enough mana to level a small church, and there were thousands of them occluding the night sky.

  “Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.”

  Every spell phased through the hotel, and redirected through the building at strange awkward angles, hitting the rubble all around it as if the hotel itself didn’t quite exist…

  “Hmm… Dimensional magic.” Andrew muttered, as he commanded his army of golems. Each one walked towards the hotel, lumbering and trudging its monstrous stony feet down on the ground.

  As they walked, some would join one another, and grow in size to rival the buildings that had given birth to them.

  These golems were humanoid, but lacked a head, instead having a glowing golden halo spinning above their necks, ones which ended in a stump of stone.

  With a snap of his fingers, Archsage Andrew and his arm fell off, separating cleanly at his shoulders, and creating a waterfall of blood to gush out of the gaping wound.

  He would grimace slightly at this, but overall seemed unbothered as he squeezed his left hand tightly. This compressed his severed arm into a ball of glimmering blue, imbued with tremendous mana and essentially a part of his soul.

  With another snap of his fingers, the blue dissipated, giving each of the golems a second halo, this time around their wrists and glowing a terrifying blue.

  Archsage Andrew was a mage capable of two elemental magics, earth and water, the polar opposite of Archsage Livia who used fire and wind elemental magics.

  The 4th soul layers granted to Archsages were special, presenting archsages-to-be with the option to take up a narrow physical or abstract application of one of the 4 elemental magics in addition to the pre-existing 3 layers of their primary magic.

  This would seem limited at first, given that archsages would only be able to access a specific sage level ‘skill’, rather than the flexibility that a traditional layer of soul can give them.

  However, the advantage that their 4th layer granted them lay in the ability to create congruent spells. They were gifted the ability to combine two spells at the sage level and create a synchronisation of both elemental magics together, creating a horrifying magnifying effect.

  It would take almost a dozen sages to replicate a single high level Archsage level spell at the same speed and power.

  To expand further, Archsage Andrew and Archsage Livia were specialists to a fault in their dual elemental magics, given that both had pursued the path of abstract magic as their principle pathway for their entire life.

  Archsage Livia did, of course, use her devils as some sort of portable charms to create horrifying physical applications of fire elemental magic, but at her core, she was a user of the abstract fire elemental magic.

  Physical applications of magic were also known as ‘external magic’, capable of affecting change in the physical realm and the matter that made up these ‘external items’.

  Abstract applications, on the other hand, were magics known as ‘internal magic’, magic that influenced the concept of ‘self’ and ‘life’.

  And in their first spell, the two archsages had created a combination of the 4 different elemental magics at the highest tiers.

  The resulting golems meant that the two archsages had essentially created an army of pseudo living creatures, each one imbued with the 4 components of living creatures, the soul, the mind, the body and the heart.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Now, Archsage Andrew had sacrificed his arm, and used the highest tiers of soul and mind magic to imbue these creatures with an additional artificial soul, carved and shaped to perform spells at the level of magisters.

  And thousands of them were now marching as an army towards the hotel…

  ???

  “Interesting.” The Fae Queen muttered.

  She simply walked, and the scenery bent around Her, creating a mirage in the air itself as She emerged onto the rooftop of the hotel.

  She had created several warded buildings in the city to throw the Commission off her scent. It would have worked wonderfully to delay these pests a little longer if it weren’t for that display of disgusting magic.

  Now, an army of golems were marching towards Her.

  Could Her day get any worse?

  She looked up, Her hands behind Her back and trench coat fluttering its obnoxious fumes in the air and stared with displeasure at the little insect in front of Her, raining fire down on Her endlessly. She could physically smell the damn devils this creature was commanding to partake such a foolish act.

  She had created a ‘barrier’ around the building using one of Her ritualistic spells and burnt a few souls to surgically rip a hole in the separation between the two realms.

  It was a hassle to do this without drawing the attention of the spirit realm, not to mention having to manually select the items counted as ‘threats’. But now She honestly felt quite foolish for creating it in the first place.

  Leveling the whole city to find Her hiding place, and using magic at this scale to siege Her meant that a frontal confrontation against these pesky creatures was inevitable…

  With another bending of space, the Queen teleported.

  She appeared in front of the leering, monocled woman, Her trenchcoat fluttering behind her, hands still behind Her back casually.

  Where she ‘landed’ in the air, a pillar of stone and dirt rose out of the ground at a terrifying speed, breaking the sound barrier in milliseconds.

  With a blink of darkness, the Archsage was gone, escaping the shockwaves that struck the spot where she had been standing just moments before.

  The Fae Queen seemed completely unaffected by the deafening boom and the wind that surrounded her.

  In fact, the space around her bent to redirect the disturbance away from her, leaving her trenchcoat to flutter calmly and mockingly in the night air.

  Archsage Andrew merely observed from higher up in the air, standing calmly on his platform of metal as his arm grew back slowly, muscles and tendons pulling over one another to reform his now sleeveless arm.

  The stone golems had assembled into small formations, with the closest golems now attempting to invade the hotel.

  Each of them were the size of the hotel, and loomed over the building menacingly.

  When his arm had grown back fully, the archsage wanted no time.

  “Corporalis” He chanted, and every golem relayed his message, falling into position and creating concentric rings all around the rubble.

  Ordinarily, the Archsage would only be capable of the most basic physical applications of earth elemental magic, comparable to the level of a High Mage.

  However, the souls that he imbued to the golems could be shaped freely with the Archsage level magic in the manipulation of the fundamental constructs of life.

  “█ █ █ █ █ █”

  Every golem spoke, their ‘voices’ a mere resonance of the miscellaneous materials forming their very shapes.

  The army of golems and their voices resonated across each other, synchronising their magics to the highest degree and creating an amplification effect in their magic.

  Mana whirled around the hotel, creating a visible vortex of electricity and sparks as the streams rubbed against each other in their torrents.

  “Scissura” The Fae Queen commanded, immediately breaking apart nearly 300 golems in their spots, and interrupting the process of returning the hotel to the physical realm.

  She wasn’t going to give up Her defensive fortification so easily, especially in this stupid wasteland of rubble. That would be a ridiculous waste, and even possibly dangerous with Her simulacrum self not quite at full power.

  From the spots where the 300 golems had fallen, sprouts of golden threads, each with the eerie green glow of forests returned, pulling together the rubble to themselves and reconstructing the previously fallen golems.

  The blue halo around their wrists remained steadfast, but it seemed that the golden halo outlining their ‘heads’ had a single streak of darkness shining through…

  “I see…” The Fae Queen muttered.

  With a single, casual tap of her heels, the tower of stone and brick turned molten, creating an intense beam of light to shine across the battlefield.

  The light of Archsage Livia’ rain of fireballs looked muted for a split second against this blinding light, then it was gone, as the beam of molten dirt and stone resolidified.

  Its outer layer was blasted off in the sudden force of recombination, crumbling into dust all around the pillar.

  What was left was a beautiful, thin solid of iron and obsidian, combining together to form enchanting swirling patterns of untold geometry upon their surface.

  With a snap of Her fingers, the entire structure started to hum with mana, creating an eerie green glow all over its cylindrical shape.

  Then, in an alien and disturbing act, its outermost layer, no thicker than the thickness of paper, separated from the main body, creating 3 separate orbiting slices of obsidian and iron.

  Archsage Livia appeared out of the shadows, letting up the barrage for a split second. She had no choice.

  With a terrifying whoosh, the blades burst forth from the tower, creating a layer of destruction across the plane of its path.

  The blades became thinner and thinner, but the command of mana and its structure meant that it created the thinnest, deadliest circle of terror across its path, carving down each golem with horrifying efficiency, and splitting their bodies in two.

  Within seconds, all golems had died their first deaths.