By the time the sixth flying fortress had been observed, the mundane news had stopped treating them like the end of the world.
That did not mean the world had accepted them.
It meant the world had exhausted the first tier of panic and moved on to the classification forms of adjustment. Breaking bulletins became scheduled analysis. Red banners at the bottom of the screen became studio graphics. Retired generals, air force officers, missile experts, aerospace engineers, and men who had once sounded formidable in war rooms now sat under studio lights and spoke about visible weapon housings, flight stability, hull volume, defensive geometry, and what it meant when something the size of a floating fortress crossed the sky without asking any government for permission.
The answers varied in language and converged in result.
Nothing the mundane world currently possessed could stop them.
That conclusion did more damage than the images themselves.
People had already started placing Mana Users above governments and armies in the silent hierarchy of their minds. They still paid taxes, still watched elections, still argued over policy, but those habits were surviving beside a newer and stronger instinct. When a flying fortress crossed the horizon, nobody looked to parliament, congress, or a defence ministry and thought there went the higher power. Their eyes went upward, and their thoughts followed.
The selection events proved it on every occasion.
Whenever a selection tent appeared in a city, town, stadium lot, or converted civic hall, the lines formed before dawn. Parents came wrapped in coats with flasks in their hands and hope tucked under the surface like a fever. Children were brought scrubbed clean and overdressed as if Mana itself might inspect shoes and manners before deciding whether to descend. Men who had once laughed at the whole business now stood in line for their daughters. Women who had spent years complaining about magical influence arrived with their sons and whispered prayers into clasped hands when the measuring charms began to move.
To be discovered as able to use mana had become the most fortunate thing a mundane mind could imagine.
That was why Corvus had ordered the Unit to select one person for every three to five thousand.
The ratio had nothing to do with fairness.
It had everything to do with patience.
The magical side knew perfectly well that the selections existed to appease the mundanes and keep the last useful illusion alive. Wards covered the globe. The old pattern that once produced Muggleborns had been cut out of the world and replaced with systems the mundane side could neither detect nor understand. These events were theatre with a function. If one person in several thousand was chosen, then every parent could continue believing selection remained possible. Hope kept them compliant. Hope made them queue instead of riot. Hope made them defend the structure that was quietly excluding them.
As long as there was hope, people would wait and pray.
--
On the lunar settlement, none of that felt immediate.
Nearly a year had passed since the first extraterrestrial base had been built.
The shield dome held steady over the settlement. Two floating fortresses could be seen above it whenever one stood in the higher observation corridors or within the throne room itself. One was Arx Obscura, black and sovereign. The other was one of the newer forts, held in rotating support above the settlement like a promise that the sky itself had been assigned to military duty.
Permanent portals linked the moon to selected settlements on Earth and beyond. Supply lines moved with frightening smoothness now. Engineers, researchers, herbologists, healers, enchanters, administrators, and selected Unit personnel passed through in disciplined flows. The moon had stopped being an experiment. It had become the first step.
Corvus sat on his throne and read the latest reports on the fortieth generation of the hybrids.
Elizaveta floated beside him in a seated posture that would have looked ornamental on anyone else and only looked natural on her. One leg crossed over the other. A report rested in her hands. Her hair drifted slightly when she shifted, the flight giving every movement a touch more grace than she already had.
The numbers pleased him.
By the fortieth generation, the soul patterns had grown denser and more potent than even Thanatos's. Their blood had moved beyond superiority in a narrow branch and into something broader when mixed. The effect of it was unmatched now. More than three hundred had already been bred, grown, trained, and readied for deployment. The children sired by these hybrids and born from them were already another step higher again. The line had begun producing strength as an inheritance rather than an exception.
Corvus set one report aside and looked toward Elizaveta.
She was stronger now than when they had first crossed each other's path, and not merely by association or status. The work on her had been intense. Her magical reserves had deepened. Her core had thickened. Flight had been added to her arsenal; with enough practice, she now treated the air as another form of floor.
The larger change had come after weeks of pressure from her.
Elizaveta had wanted the operation.
She had wanted the stronger core, the deeper magical integration, and the removal of the wand's necessity. Corvus had refused her twice, not out of principle, but because he disliked the idea of cutting her open even for improvement. She had not relented. Eventually, he agreed and operated himself, assisted by medics he trusted enough.
He had kept her regeneration at the peak end of the procedure.
That had been the only part that mattered to him emotionally, though he would never have phrased it that way. He hated seeing her blood on his hands. To him, it had felt more sacred than half the forces currently serving his name.
The memory still had force enough to sharpen his expression.
There had not been even the faintest scar left on her perfect chest when it was done. When she woke, the first thing she gave him had been a fierce embrace, deeper kisses than he had expected from someone just operated on, and a promise of her literally undying love delivered with that heavy Russian sincerity which made even absurd statements sound contractual.
Corvus turned fully toward her now and reached out.
Telekinesis closed around her lightly and drew her from the air to his lap without asking whether work should continue uninterrupted. Elizaveta let the reports drift aside and settled against him with a look that was half amusement and half accusation, sharpened by familiarity.
Her eyes locked with his.
Glacial blue met turquoise silver.
"It seems," she purred, "that someone is having difficulty focusing."
Corvus leaned in and kissed the side of her head, close enough that his next words brushed warm against her hair.
"And whose fault is that?"
Her mouth curved at once.
This was not the first time their work had been delayed by desire, and Arx Obscura had already surrendered enough chambers, corridors, studies, viewing platforms, and private corners to the matter that both of them had stopped pretending the fortress had been designed for discipline alone. Corvus remained entirely committed to hearing her moans in every usable section of the fort if time and duty permitted it.
Elizaveta placed one hand flat against his chest and looked up with open challenge.
"You make that sound like a complaint."
"It is an operational observation."
"That severe."
"Very."
She laughed once under her breath, soft and knowing, then kissed him before another line could follow and turn the exchange into something more openly dangerous to their work.
-
Far away from the Lunar Base, Fleur had spent the last week trying not to count days aloud.
She had returned from the settlement nearly seven days earlier and still refused to call it Noctis Sanctum.
Corvus remained insistent on the name. Thankfully, Elizaveta supported her in rejecting it. Neither of them wanted the first magical settlement beyond Earth to sound like a mausoleum that had learned Latin and developed political aspirations. Until a better name won the fight, the settlement remained effectively nameless in private conversation and politely unresolved in reports.
Fleur preferred it that way.
Her return to France had been necessary. There was only a month left until her handfasting, and she was determined to make everything perfect. There would be no loose arrangements, imperfect presentation, or any avoidable family disorder waiting to humiliate her. The Delacour household had entered a state of constant refinement since her arrival. Fabrics were being checked. Guest lists revised. Wines rejected. Table settings corrected. Security was quietly reviewed and then reviewed again.
On the larger scale, Fleur no longer startled easily.
That part disturbed her more than the earlier shocks had done.
After seeing and understanding what Corvus was managing, she had gone through something close to an existential crisis and come out the other side without the luxury of ordinary fear. Even the combined total of all magical and mundane forces she could meaningfully imagine did not seem enough to threaten her soon-to-be husband. Each time she whispered that word to herself, husband, she still felt the same butterflies in her belly.
Her father had tried to ask about the lunar base several times since her return.
She refused him every time.
Not cruelly or with disrespect.
He wanted location, structure, scale, purpose, staffing, and whether Magical France would be involved or informed in any meaningful way. Fleur gave him nothing worth writing down. It was not only loyalty to Corvus that made her refuse. It was also self-preservation on behalf of her family. No one knew exactly how strong Corvus was. Not even she and Elizaveta, and they knew more than anyone. Fleur was not going to allow her father the stupidity of offending that level of power through curiosity, pride, or some political reflex dressed as dignity.
The new personnel on the lunar base had settled that caution permanently inside her.
They were larger even than Bastion Guards, and the feeling of danger she received from them had been astonishing enough to override aesthetics, pride, and every cultivated social instinct she possessed. The truly unsettling part was not their size. It was their loyalty.
Corvus had allowed a team of Bastion Guards to bombard the new personnel with every imaginable spell during one evaluation. Even the Unforgivables had been used. The result had been almost boring in its clarity.
They did not flinch.
Fleur had watched the experiment from behind the safety line and realised with cold certainty that Corvus himself probably stood in the same category now. If not above it.
That thought had not left her since.
Worse, she could feel something coming.
Not a specific event. Not a named threat. Pressure gathering beyond the edge of current knowledge. She had asked Elizaveta whether she knew what it was.
Elizaveta had not.
That, more than the uncertainty itself, made Fleur take the warning seriously.
All they could do for now was wait and see, and Fleur had never liked waiting when action was available.
So she worked.
That evening, she stood in her old room with a list in one hand and a quill in the other, crossing out names that no longer merited proximity and adding security notes in the margins where sentiment had once lived. Fleur arranged her future with the clear understanding that she was no longer preparing to marry a powerful man.
She was preparing to stand beside a force that had already begun to outgrow the planet.