The rest of the cabin watched in silence as Logos meticulously detailed the inner workings of his spellcraft for Jeanne, his tone patient and encouraging, like a seasoned teacher guiding a student through a particularly complex problem.
Jeanne listened with undivided attention. Even though a significant portion of his highly specialized, master-level terminology went entirely over her head, her focus never wavered.
She did manage to pick up on the foundational mechanics: right before the spell officially completes its sequence, it emits a distinct energetic pulse that sweeps across any surrounding targets and bounces back to the caster. Once the scan is fully established, that intense diagnostic wave drops off, becoming nearly undetectable.
Under normal circumstances, this brief initial flare was just a routine, harmless quirk of launching the spell. However, the exact moment that scanning wave brushed against Jeanne, her passive Magic Resistance instantly neutralized the foreign energy, causing the delicate structural integrity of the entire incantation to spontaneously implode.
"Tell me, Miss Jeanne," Logos inquired, shifting slightly in his seat after they had chatted for a few more minutes. "To what exact degree can this ability of yours ignore active spellcraft?"
The Banshee executor was genuinely fascinated. He wanted to understand the absolute upper limit of her physiological blank zone. After all, from everything he had witnessed and studied throughout his long life on Terra, Jeanne was the first living organism capable of reducing high-tier Arts to absolute zero by merely existing.
Whenever other powerful Casters or heavily armored defenders faced an incoming spell, they either deployed reactive shielding to absorb the blow or relied on physical evasion. A person who could outright delete the fabric of a spell without a single defensive action was a complete anomaly—and as far as he knew, Jeanne stood entirely alone in that category.
"How strong of a spell...?" Jeanne murmured, tilting her head thoughtfully. "Honestly, do spells even have distinct tiers like that? I haven't really encountered an incantation capable of actually leaving a mark on me. Though, on the flip side, beneficial healing Arts don't work on me either."
While Jeanne's natural battlefield instinct was to rely on her immense mobility to cleanly dodge incoming projectiles, she was perfectly aware that raw magical energy simply couldn't pierce her natural defenses to inflict physical harm.
"I see... You have my thanks," Logos said softly. He gave her a polite nod, turning back to his own side of the vehicle. He fell silent, leaning back as he began casually adjusting the resonance of his casting staff, clearly lost in deep philosophical thought over the mechanical implications of her power.
Now that Jeanne was sitting safely out of range, the master Caster's subsequent defensive arrays materialized flawlessly, stabilizing without a single tremor. He let out a quiet, imperceptible sigh of relief, taking comfort in the factual confirmation that his legendary casting precision hadn't degraded in the slightest.
With the ice thoroughly broken by Logos's inquiry, the other elite operators in the vehicle gradually began striking up a casual conversation with Jeanne. Driven by her natural, grounding warmth, the initial tension melting away into a surprisingly relaxed atmosphere as the passengers steadily grew familiar with one another.
Up in the front passenger seat, Kal'tsit briefly cast a sharp eye backward to observe the lively, chatter-filled cabin. Even with her naturally critical disposition, she had to mentally acknowledge that this teenage girl possessed an extraordinary, undeniable gift for navigating interpersonal dynamics.
It wasn't that Jeanne relied on polished, silver-tongued rhetoric or calculated diplomacy to win over these notoriously hardened vanguard warriors. Rather, she carried an inherent, deeply comforting charisma; strangers instinctively registered her as a fundamentally good, trustworthy presence.
If a supernatural aura like that had manifested in literally anyone else, Kal'tsit would have immediately kept her guard up, analyzing the potential psychological manipulation at play. But looking at Jeanne, the ancient doctor found herself privately wishing the girl could simply serve as the official brand ambassador for the Babel organization.
"What are you analyzing so intently?" a familiar, ethereal voice whispered right beside her.
Kal'tsit turned her head back to the front to find Theresa offering her a warm, knowing smile. However, the underlying strain in the pink-haired ruler's voice made it clear that her physical stamina was still severely depleted from her earlier magical exertion.
Instead of returning the pleasantry, Kal'tsit merely shot her leader a thoroughly unamused expression. She wasn't about to let the Sovereign's charming smile completely erase her lingering frustration over that reckless, unauthorized soul-vision stunt. Kal'tsit possessed an ironclad set of medical boundaries, and her anger wasn't something that could be casually dissolved by a bit of playful affection.
"Alright, alright. I completely understand, and I know I crossed the line," Theresa murmured softly, leaning over slightly with a playful, pleading look, hoping to coax a thaw out of her stoic companion. "It was entirely thoughtless of me to act without consulting you first, and I truly caused Dr. Kal'tsit an immense amount of unnecessary anxiety. I am offering you my most sincere, heartfelt apology..."
Faced with the stone-cold silence of the feline doctor, the Demon King continued her gentle cajoling, desperately trying to win back a single word of acknowledgment from her oldest friend.
For a long, drawn-out minute, Kal'tsit maintained her unmoving glare, studying the Sovereign's face with an unreadable expression. Finally, the tension in her shoulders cracked, and she let out a long, thoroughly defeated sigh.
"Fine. You are forgiven," Kal'tsit grumbled, rubbing her temples. "Though I have no idea why I bother, considering this isn't even close to the first time you've thrown caution to the wind. If we keep this up, I am going to become permanently desensitized to your total lack of survival instinct... Why on earth am I letting myself get used to this?"
Kal'tsit shook her head in sheer exhaustion. She felt as though her tens of thousands of years of calculated, rational existence had been utterly warped and distorted beyond recognition by the combined antics of the woman sitting next to her and that specific Doctor waiting back at headquarters.
Wait... headquarters... Babel!
A sudden, chilling realization slammed into Kal'tsit's mind. Her prior, deep-seated suspicion flashed back to the forefront: the terrifying probability that a highly placed mole within Babel's internal hierarchy had leaked the exact deployment schedule of their elite vanguard operators straight to Theresis!
"Theresa, what exactly prompted your sudden decision to leave the landship and intercept the vanguard in person?" Kal'tsit demanded, her tone sharpening instantly. "Did the Doctor secretly whisper something to you in private, convincing you to slip away without notifying the rest of the command staff?"
It didn't take a genius to figure out that the Doctor had intentionally masked Theresa's departure from the general log. Right now, outside of the select elite operators riding in this exact convoy, the vast majority of the landship's population had absolutely no idea their Sovereign had left the premises.
If that were the case, the structural defenses of the Babel landship were currently at their absolute lowest point—making it the most enticing, vulnerable target Theresis could ever ask for. Furthermore, in the enemy's intelligence profile, Theresa was supposed to be sitting right inside that command tower. The strategic risk was astronomical.
Kal'tsit's expression darkened completely. A wave of profound anxiety washed over her, not just for the physical safety of the crew left behind to guard the facility, but specifically for the well-being of the Doctor and little Amiya.
But what could she actually do about it right this second? She didn't possess a pair of wings to magically soar across the wasteland and verify their status; sitting in the passenger seat of a moving vehicle left her entirely powerless to intervene.
Her fists clenched tightly against her coat, her feline tail twitching with an agitated, frantic rhythm as the desperate urge to race back to base consumed her. Wait... a pair of wings! Kal'tsit's eyes snapped toward the back of the car. Jeanne's massive wyvern could easily carry them across the sky at unprecedented speeds. She opened her mouth to call out to the girl, intending to ask for an aerial extraction—
"There is truly no need to panic," Theresa interrupted gently, her voice low and reassuring as she watched the frantic motion of Kal'tsit's tail. "We figured out there was an active informant leaking data within our ranks a long time ago. The Doctor explicitly stated that she had already structured a comprehensive counter-strategy for the upcoming hostile assault. My departure was actually a calculated element designed to give her complete operational freedom."
Theresa offered a soft smile, and while she certainly harbored her own natural worries for the safety of the Doctor, Amiya, and the rest of their people, her core instinct was to place absolute faith in her tactician's grand design.
Even if the Doctor's vague assurances occasionally sounded entirely unhinged on paper, Theresa understood the literal layout of Babel's remaining defensive capabilities perfectly. With the vast majority of their elite combatants currently out on this deployment, the home base was undeniably walking into a meat grinder.
Yet, she chose to trust her friend explicitly. Though the Doctor had kept the granular tactical details entirely to herself, the mysterious strategist was fundamentally not the type of person to willingly trap herself in a genuinely unwinnable, fatal scenario without an ace up her sleeve.
"If that is how it is... then I suppose I will simply wait and see what brilliant solution that idiot has cooked up for us," Kal'tsit replied dryly. She let go of the idea of an immediate aerial flight, closing her eyes to forcefully rest her mind and conserve her mental energy.
At the very least, you absolute fool, make sure you don't manage to lose your life before we pull up to the gates, Kal'tsit thought bitterly, the heavy roar of the vehicle's engine serving as a constant, rhythmic backdrop to her internal anxiety.
That heavy sense of dread lingered throughout the entirety of the journey, persisting until the convoy finally crossed into the perimeter coordinates of the Babel headquarters. The moment the facility came into view, Kal'tsit's face shifted from standard clinical worry to a shade of black that rivaled the bottom of a burnt cooking pot. Even Theresa's serene expression faltered entirely, her eyes widening in absolute shock.
The orderly, heavily fortified exterior perimeter surrounding the Babel landship looked as if it had been thoroughly melted and chewed apart by some horrific, corrosive anomaly. The ground was marred by massive, jagged craters and catastrophic structural scars, presenting the unmistakable aftermath of a devastating, high-intensity military siege.
Worse still, directly at the front of the main bastion, the massive, heavily reinforced blast doors—engineered to withstand sustained artillery bombardment—had been violently blown entirely off their hinges by sheer, unadulterated brute force. The gaping structural wound made it blindingly obvious that an enemy force had successfully breached the interior corridors. For all they knew, a hostile cleanup crew was currently waiting inside the darkness, setting up a lethal ambush for the returning convoy.
"What on earth happened here?! I thought she said she had everything entirely under control!" Kal'tsit barked, throwing her door open and leaping out of the moving vehicle before it had even ground to a complete halt. She sprinted toward the shattered entryway, her hands already tracing the air to summon Mon3tr into real space, refusing to waste a single second checking her own safety.
But as she tore through the outer wreckage, the very first figure her sensors picked up wasn't a hostile Sarkaz commando. Instead, standing amidst the debris, was a pale-skinned, white-haired Vampire operator. Her expression was profoundly grim as she muttered an endless stream of incoherent complaints under her breath, entirely focused on digging through a pile of shattered concrete with a small shovel.
It was Warfarin!