The western tunnels eventually opened into a maintenance shaft that connected to street level through a heavy iron grate. Ranni lifted it aside with two of her four arms while the other two maintained a ward against the distant sounds of combat filtering down from above. We emerged one by one into what had been a commercial district before the war had reduced it to burned facades and abandoned market stalls.
The ritual site sat two hundred yards ahead, a civic building whose walls had been covered in lazotep inscriptions that pulsed with cold blue light. Eternals stood in formation around its perimeter with that unsettling aura that distinguished them from ordinary undead. The streets leading to it were empty of civilians, cleared either by the war or moved by whoever had established this particular location.
I stood in the open air and rolled my shoulders.
The forge-fire that had been burning at reduced temperature since my arrival in Ravnica suddenly felt like it had proper fuel and proper airflow. The constant background resistance I'd been unknowingly working against was simply gone. My perception extended outward without conscious effort, mapping the district in detail that had been unavailable to me since stepping through into this burning city.
The connection between the weapon and my divine essence, previously operating through layers of interference I'd attributed to unfamiliar planar conditions, was clean and complete.
I started walking toward the ritual site.
The others fell into formation around me, Chandra on my left with heat already building in her hands, Ranni gliding slightly behind with her four arms arranged in the configuration that preceded her more complex workings, Teferi maintaining the resonance link while scanning the approach. Eight other planeswalkers spread behind us in the loose grouping that had emerged organically from shared combat over the past several hours.
My extended perception mapped the site as we covered each step. Thirty-four Eternals on the perimeter. Internal formations visible as energy signatures through the building's walls, defensive positions arranged to channel attackers rather than simply block them. lazotep enchantment throughout, cold and purposeful and absolutely familiar by this point.
And deeper, beneath all of that, two signatures that had nothing to do with Eternals or lazotep or anything else I'd encountered since arriving in Ravnica.
It was the flavour of old power, ancient divine authority, with the quality of long-worshipped divinity, covered in the flavour of death. Both signatures were positioned outside the building's immediate perimeter, moving slowly and arranging themselves at specific spots relative to our approach.
"When I give the word, split into pairs," I said without breaking stride or raising my voice. "Chandra with Ranni, Teferi coordinating. Stay with the group structure until you hear something that isn't Eternals. You'll know when."
"What do you mean, something that isn't Eternals," Chandra repeated, giving me a side eye.
I didn't answer that, because we'd reached the Eternals, and the question answered itself in the most immediate way possible.
They came forward in waves, 34 lazotep-armoured bodies moving with the characteristic swiftness that distinguished them from ordinary undead. The ward discs both groups carried meant their primary weapon was gone. Without spark extraction as a threat, the Eternals were dangerous the way a lion was dangerous, an obstacle requiring effort to overcome for the ordinary person, rather than a genuine threat to people operating tanks.
Chandra released white fire without restraint.
Gone were the defensive flame rings she'd been maintaining during the merchant hall battle, nor the carefully measured bursts designed to hold ground while protecting herself from extraction. She opened both hands and deployed her best weapon, going full offensive, and the wave of Eternals in the street's centre encountered a temperature that made their lazotep armor glow red, then orange, within seconds of sustained exposure. The joints between plates, the seams and articulation points failed first. Then the armor itself began deforming.
Ranni's four arms worked independently of each other, each maintaining a different task simultaneously with ease. Spatial wards deflecting projectiles. Cold blue energy that froze Eternals mid-stride. Something that made the animating magic in the affected Eternals stop functioning, dropping them like objects rather than creatures.
Teferi, finally able to let loose not having to protect people constantly, aged Eternals into dust from the flanks, lazotep armor crumbling as decades of entropy were compressed into seconds.
I moved through the center and hit things with explosive energy.
We were forty yards from the entrance when every remaining Eternal stopped advancing simultaneously.
The pause lasted two seconds. Then they stepped backwards in perfect unison and went still, and the silence they left behind felt ominous.
The two signatures I'd been tracking stopped moving.
"Spread out, move!" I called out.
The planeswalkers scattered immediately, now aware, from experience, to listen to me.
The sky opened above the ritual site.
The clouds above the building parted, forming a circular hole, under the force of an object descending through them at a speed that produced sonic booms. The contrail was there, and then the shape was there, and there was almost no interval between the two.
Sixty feet of wingspan. Blue-black feathers interspersed with articulated lazotep replacements that moved flawlessly through each degree of movement as he descended, visible for only a heartbeat. A long neck curved. An ibis head, long-billed and sharp, the eyes burning with cold blue-white fire that arrogantly overlooked everything their sight touched.
God-Eternal Kefnet hit the street between our now scattered formation and the ritual site's entrance.
The sonic boom that followed echoed, compressed air and divine energy combined into a physical expansion that radiated outward from his landing point and hit every surface in the district simultaneously. Cobblestones cracked in a perfect radial pattern extending thirty feet from where he stood. Market stalls that had survived weeks of guild warfare became airborne debris. Two of our planeswalkers who hadn't cleared sufficient distance were thrown off their feet and into building walls hard enough to crack the masonry.
I took the shockwave directly, planting my feet before it arrived. The divine essence running through my body absorbed and grounded the energy, the same way a forge's foundations absorbed the repeated impact of my heavy hammer work. Around me, everything movable moved. I didn't.
Kefnet rose from his landing crouch to his full height, thirty-five feet of death preserved divine authority. His metallic wings extended to their full span, each lazotep feather shifting into battle readiness, edges turned toward each opponent in sight. He scanned the scattered formation with those burning eyes, assessing what we could do through our stances and the magical energy emanating from each of us.
Then the ground erupted.
The section of street between our position and the building compressed downward for one instant under enormous pressure from below, then reversed, launching everything upward in a single explosive decompression. Stone, earth, centuries of Golgari infrastructure, all of it went skyward in a column that rose forty feet before gravity began pulling it apart.
God Eternal Oketra rose from the space it had occupied.
She came up at the same velocity as the blast, thirty feet of embalmed feline godhood rising from the ground like water forced upward by something massive submerged beneath. The bow weapon strapped across her shoulders gleamed as she rose to her complete stature. Her eyes blazed with the same cold fire as Kefnet's, filled with death preserved divine authority, looking on with malice.
The debris column she'd launched on the way up was still falling.
It came down in a wide pattern across the district, chunks of masonry, cobblestone, and ancient infrastructure descending on our scattered formation. Chandra vaporised two large sections with focused flame. Ranni's spatial wards intercepted three more. The others dealt with what reached them through individual defensive measures that varied in elegance but succeeded in keeping everyone functional.
Oketra's burning eyes fixed on Chandra's fire.
Kefnet's burning eyes fixed on me.
The decision had apparently already been made on their end. I had a couple of seconds to process this and formulate an approach while the others were still recovering from the dual entrance. Kefnet's divine domain in life had been knowledge, the acquisition and application of understanding, the processing of information toward perfect mastery. Death had stripped the purpose from that domain while leaving the capability entirely intact.
Which meant he would analyze, adapt, and process faster than almost anything else currently on this street.
I would need to take him out as fast as I could.
I pointed at Oketra. "Chandra, Ranni, Teferi, and everyone else. Take that one. Now. I've got this one."
Then I walked toward Kefnet.
He rapidly beat his wings. In that interval, he'd already committed to motion, already chosen his angle of approach while I was still taking my first step forward.
I stepped sideways.
A minimal shift, just enough. The blade passed close enough that I felt the displaced air against my face. His momentum carried him past me and he corrected with grace, a wing adjustment that redirected him before he'd covered ten feet of additional distance.
He'd analyzed the sidestep in the time it took to turn. The second approach was lower, with the wings angling differently to reduce drag and increase manoeuvrability. The lazotep feathers reconfigure from blade to cage formation, designed to constrain rather than cut. He came in from a different angle with a speed adjustment meant to catch someone who defaulted to the same defensive move.
I stepped into the approach instead of away from it.
The moment his trajectory committed, I closed the distance in a burst of divine speed that put me inside his wingspan before he could adjust. My hammer found the joint where his right metallic wing connected to his torso, and the joint shattered as divine fire ran through the strike.
The right wing folded at an angle. His instincts, encoded through millennia of flight while he was alive, tried to salvage a trajectory. He hit the building wall at the street's edge, and the masonry didn't survive the impact.
He was out of the rubble before I reached him, the damaged wing already attempting self-repair. The lazotep components were reconfiguring around the destroyed joint, metallic feathers shifting into new configurations.
He sent a blast of mind magic at close range as he came up, divine energy finding the gaps in consciousness created by uncertainty or ignorance and applying pressure through them. The psychological attack had presumably functioned against everything he'd faced since Bolas had resurrected him.
It found nothing useful in me.
The mind magic arrived, examined what it encountered, and when it attempted to manipulate it, it splattered off a divinely shielded mind. I wasn't uncertain about what I was. I was the god of craft and fire and creative forces, and I had spent eternity being exactly that.
Kefnet stared at me from the building rubble. The burning eyes processed this outcome.
I hit him again.
He tried to use the right wing's remaining functionality to deflect, the lazotep feathers reconfiguring into a shield configuration with structural integrity that was a credit to whatever had designed them. My hammer went through it because the divine force behind the strike existed at a level where structural integrity was a concern for others. The wing folded back against his body. He let the impact throw him backwards, attempting to use the momentum to create separation.
I followed at his speed.
The flash of divine translocation was instantaneous, putting me in front of him as he arrived at his landing point. The hammer connected with his chest and reversed his backward momentum completely. He went into the street.
He tried to rise. The divine resilience Bolas had woven into his resurrection was fighting the accumulated damage, the animating magic surging to compensate.
The worst thing for these constructed dead gods would probably be a god like me. I would deconstruct this divine being.
I came down on him from above, having used the impact's energy to step over him in the instant between contact and landing. The strike caught the back of his ibis skull and drove him back down before the animating magic had finished its recovery surge.
Down again. The cobblestones were past cracking now.
Down again. The animating magic surged, only to be met and overmatched.
God-Eternal Kefnet's burning eyes went out.
I picked up the divine spark of the God kefnet, now no longer encased in death energy to keep it bound.
The lazotep stopped moving. The metallic wings locked in their last configuration.
I straightened and turned toward where Oketra still stood.
She was considerably more intact than Kefnet, because Oketra required an approach beyond simply being faster and harder than she was. Chandra had been sustaining fire on specific lazotep joints with precision. Ranni's spatial wards and freezing magic had disrupted multiple arrow volleys. Teferi was coordinating the other planeswalkers in rotation, ensuring sustained pressure from angles that prevented Oketra from finding an optimal defensive configuration. The system was working, but working slowly against something that had been a god.
A shadow fell across the district from a direction.
Niv-Mizzet landed between our group and Oketra, golden scales catching the smoke-filtered light as he transitioned from flight to standing in a single continuous movement. He was smaller than Oketra.
"I've been studying the ritual circle's construction from afar," he said without preamble,"I can sever it within forty seconds once I'm at the entry point. The weak points are scattered across multiple positions, and I've charted the best method of attack." His eyes moved to Oketra. "This one needs sustained fire on the left shoulder lazotep assembly while I disrupt the divine connection at her base. The timing window is approximately eight seconds."
"You've been watching us fight this entire time and doing nothing," Chandra said, annoyed that he was giving orders now.
"I've been gathering data that will make the next forty seconds considerably more efficient than the preceding twenty minutes," Niv-Mizzet said, as if this distinction were entirely self-evident. "Chandra, left shoulder assembly. Heph, keep her occupied for eight seconds. Everyone else, suppress the arrow volleys. Shall we proceed?"
The eight seconds were chaotic. Chandra's flames struck the left shoulder lazotep precisely where Niv-Mizzet had specified. I kept Oketra's attention directed away from both of them using the same approach I'd used against Kefnet, movement and divine speed. The other planeswalkers suppressed the arrows with coordinated deflection.
Niv-Mizzet did something complicated to the base resonance of Oketra's divine connection that I didn't fully observe because I was occupied, and God-Eternal Oketra's burning eyes went out.
She was partially connected to the ritual circle, so I couldn't just blast her as I did with Kefnet.
Oketra's form went still. The street fell silent except for the distant sounds of the wider battle.
Teferi said, "Gideon's group is ready. Thirty seconds."
"Go," I said to Niv-Mizzet.
He was already moving toward the ritual site entrance, which opened before him. The rest of us maintained the perimeter against the Eternals that were beginning to recover their coordination now that the two god-eternals were down.
Twenty seconds of holding the perimeter. Chandra's fire, Ranni's wards, Teferi's temporal manipulations, the other planeswalkers covering every approach angle.
Niv-Mizzet emerged from the building entrance at the thirty-second mark.
"Now," Teferi said into the resonance link.
The ritual circle's blue light, which had been pulsing through the building's walls throughout the entire engagement, flickered once and died. The energy streams rising toward the beacon above severed simultaneously with whatever Gideon's group had done on the other side of the city, the two disruptions landing within seconds of each other exactly as planned.
The Eternals around us halted their coordinated assault as the intelligence directing them lost its anchor point and began to fragment. They were still present, still dangerous, but the purposeful unity evaporated, leaving ordinary undead in its place, albeit still armored.
"Lets move," I said.