Ruby Sherridan, despite her recent forays into politics, was still a Paladin in full and had been for nearly ten years now. This meant that in addition to being a highly skilled and powerful Adventurer, she had also sworn an oath to protect the innocent from harm and bring the evil to justice, and had done her best to live up to that oath since the day she took it.
Running for Director of Public Defense? The Titan of Steel was clearly well meaning, but rolling the intelligence service, law enforcement, and the military into one agency was just begging for abuse. So, she ran for the office and won, before immediately campaigning with both Parliament and the public that the Public Defense Administration should be split into multiple agencies to mitigate opportunities for abuse of power.
When the message for the evacuation came in, Ruby's response hadn't been to simply sit in her office or get to one of the many safe refuges available for citizens of the SRA. No, she had immediately donned the power armor she had been practicing with for the last year, and took the first available train to the frontier, bringing along a massive box of Warp Tags keyed for various dungeons that had agreed to act as safe refuges in case of emergency.
The next twenty four hours were an utterly hectic time; within the first three hours the Warp Tag supplies were depleted, and Ruby spent the remainder of the time guiding people from various small villages to the nearest train stations, where they could get to safety with relative ease. It wasn't until the very last train heading to safety that Ruby even began thinking of ensuring her own safety, getting aboard only after everyone else in the town had already boarded.
Then she heard the fateful announcement through her suit's comms, saying "ATTENTION! The dragon swarm will be engaging in one minute! Get to cover immediately, and minimize your vertical profile!"
Immediately, the Paladin shouted "I need to get onto the train's roof, NOW! Everyone get out of the way of the door!" In the crowded confines of the train it took a few moments of shuffling, but soon Ruby could access the train's door, and from there her superhuman physique would have allowed her to easily slingshot herself onto the roof, even without her power armor helping.
Seeing the swarm of dragons on the horizon only steeled Madame Sherridan's resolve further as she dashed to the back of the train, spread her arms wide, and channeled everything she had into her Barrier of Light spell. More than everything she had even, directly tapping the mana supplied by her suit's reactor. A glowing golden force field appeared directly between Ruby and the battle, and just in time too as a pressure wave began buffeting the shield, prevented from harming the train's passengers by the immense effort Ruby was putting into shielding them.
Five seconds later, a stray stream of Dragonfire swept over Ruby's forcefield, and the sleep-deprived Paladin's perception of time sped up until the world moved at a crawl. She felt her field starting to fail, but absolutely refused to allow it, drawing on reserves she didn't have to keep the barrier up. She drew on reserves her suit's reactor didn't have to keep the barrier up. And yet, as the Paladin's consciousness faded, the last thing she saw was the stream of Dragonfire suddenly cutting off just before the barrier fell as the Dragon firing it died.
When Ruby Sherridan next woke up, she was in a cushy bed with a strangely fuzzy vine wrapped around her arm. Looking around revealed that she was in a hospital room with several other wounded lying on various beds, but curiously all the medical equipment seemed to be biological in nature, smoothly growing out of the floor like plants. After a few seconds of puzzling over what had happened, a nurse wandered in, the flower petals she had for hair and the woodlike texture to her skin clearly marking her as a Dryad.
Another few moments passed before Ruby asked "So, how bad off was I?"
To this, the nurse simply answered "Pretty bad, honestly. When you were brought in here, not only were you suffering from extreme mana depletion and fatigue, but you'd also done a number on your mana system and given yourself radiation poisoning by pumping Atomic Clockwork mana through your body without converting it first. I'm not going to say you shouldn't have done it, since otherwise you and a few hundred other people wouldn't still be alive right now, but for a while we thought you weren't going to make it."
There were a few seconds, before Ruby asked "Are you sure the radiation poisoning wasn't from the blast of Dragonfire I blocked?" and wasn't that a thought? Ruby might very well have become the only Adventurer in recent memory to personally block a blast of Dragonfire from a Grand Dragon, which was commonly thought to be an impossible feat.
Now the nurse's face turned into a gentle smile, as the plant person noted "Absolutely. We checked everyone else on that train when they got here. The only recent radiation exposure we could find for any of them was what they'd have normally been exposed to; namely, harmless background levels."
"One last question: How long was I out for? Actually, what's your name?"
To this, the Dryad smiled, replying "You were under for four days. We've managed to get the worst of the fires extinguished, particularly with the help of the Lunar Gremlin Republic, but the surface is still going to need a lot of rebuilding before it's a nice place to live again. As for my name, I'm Zinnia."
Cautiously, the Paladin tested if she could support her own weight, and finding she could, asked "Zinnia, can this vine come out yet, or is it still needed to keep my heart pumping or something like that?"
Zinnia just nodded, saying "Yes, the drip injector vine is no longer necessary now that you're conscious, I'll get that out for you. Also, the Titan of Steel called while you were out. There have been some developments you really need to get back on top of."
It took nearly three days of grueling firefighting efforts to get the collateral damage under control, dumping immense amounts of water on the Socialist Republic in order to quench the forest fires to the level of 'merely' large and highly dangerous. On the other hand, this also turned much of the country into a giant mud pit, meaning that I'd definitely be needing help from some Nature Dungeons to restore the local ecosystems. The biggest shakeup actually came when several spacecraft from the moon arrived 36 hours after the battle, identifying themselves as being from the Lunar Gremlin Republic and indicating that they wanted to help put the fires out.
Aside from the revelation that not all the Gremlins on my space station had died when it blew up two years ago, and the emotional re-union it provoked, I still had way too much cleanup to do to focus on that. Still, as soon as the fire situation was dealt with, I immediately proposed a set of two related referenda to the people of the Socialist Republic of Amali.
The first was simple: Should the Republic immediately launch an extermination mission to completely wipe Grand Dragons from Terra? Doing so will prevent any future berserk wave attacks from being launched, and the Republic's current forces are more than sufficient to wipe Grand Dragons from the entire world, so long as they stay spread out.
The second was slightly more complicated, asking: There are reasons to suspect that Daemons are the responsible party for the Berserk Wave of Grand Dragons which attacked the Republic. Should a global rapid-response force be formed to immediately respond to any Daemonic activity across the entire world and eliminate it?
Honestly, I actually didn't have any evidence that Daemons were responsible for this aside from the suspicious timing of the attack, which was circumstantial at best. On the other hand, they were clearly a hostile power that was metaphysically incapable of acting without malice, so crippling their operations to the maximum possible extent was clearly a good thing.
Expanding of the dimensional jamming network would sadly need to wait for wraith-hunting teams to be established in the newly jammed territory to deal with the malevolent soul fragments that were apparently normally going to Hell. Yes, they were fragments, not full-fledged souls; apparently a person's metaphysical components separated from each other when they died and each went to the most thematically appropriate afterlife plane.
Musing on the enemies of all sapient life aside, I couldn't have picked a more likely time to succeed for either referendum. Right now, everyone was scared, angry, and living in cramped emergency accommodations as they received news of their former homes either being destroyed or heavily damaged. Given such conditions, measures to prevent a similar attack from being carried out ever again almost immediately attracted a massive amount of public support, hitting the minimum approval and participation thresholds within less than an hour, and just keeping on going from there.
Alright, there's public approval, and though I was extremely eager to just go and do the thing I didn't want to give the Supervisory Court even more reasons to think about ejecting me from the Department of Public Infrastructure. I was already getting enough suspicious glances about my secretly constructing my battleplate chassis over the past year, though that was in fact legal under the laws saying that a Dungeon could build their structure into any shape they wanted, the constitutional right to self-defense and defense of others, and a couple other things.
So, that meant I had to get the Public Defense Agency engaged with things. Immediately I tried calling Ruby Sherridan's suit; I knew the lady paladin well enough to know she wouldn't have stuck around in her office during the crisis. I waited for someone to pick up the helmet and answer the call, but instead of it being Ruby who answered, a Dryad's face appeared on the display.
Figuring that Madame Sherridan was probably indisposed at the moment, I asked "Hello, who are you? Also, where's the Director of Public Defense?"
To this, the Dryad answered "I'm Zinnia, a nurse created by the Glowing Gardens to take care of those injured in the crisis. Madame Sherridan is currently unconscious; she was severely injured protecting a train full of civilians from a blast of Dragonfire. To her credit, she was the only person on said train who was injured. Things were dicey for a little while, but now we're pretty sure she's going to recover; right now we're just doing the final touch-ups before we wake her up."
I simply had my video avatar nod, before requesting "Well, when she wakes up, could you please have her call me back? There's a lot that needs to get done."
It only took a week after the Berserk Wave attack for Jartham to realize he'd miscalculated. Yes, the rate at which the Titan of Steel was solidifying their power base was annoying before then, but they would have still taken long enough for the Daemon Titan program to reach functional status before worldwide deployment of jamming fields made it impossible.
Now, not only were Grand Dragons being exterminated and dimensional jammers being installed at a prolific rate, but the instant he'd tried to launch a second Berserk Wave attack that damnable Titan teleported in and immediately obliterated the dragons caught up in the wave before it could get more than five of them involved. Immediately afterwards, Jartham found himself fleeing for his life as the Titan turned its massive amount of guns on his position and unleashed an entire Clockwork army to pursue him!
Still, a carefully timed ruse had allowed Jartham to escape while he tried to figure out how the Titan had managed to find him. After any use of his powers whatsoever quickly started bringing down an assault by the Titan's forces, the Inquisitor Daemon came to the conclusion that the Titan was tracking him via mana his signature, thus necessitating a way to conceal said mana signature.
That was why, sitting on a chair in a 'commandeered' office, Jartham Gorebringer the Fourth was currently wearing an extremely uncomfortable necklace charged with holy power. Yes, wearing it hurt, but it would certainly hurt much, much less than being hunted down and killed by excessively powerful Clockworks. The irony of a Daemon wearing a holy artifact in order to protect himself from harm did not escape the Inquisitor Daemon in the slightest, but he really couldn't find it humorous.
Still, that left the question of what to do next. The Daemon Titan program was in all likelihood no longer viable. By the time they were ready, the jamming fields would be sufficiently powerful to effectively block Daemonic access to the entire planet. Also, the Titan of Steel was quite likely to discover one of the developing daemonically tainted Dungeon Cores at some point, and would afterwards move to eliminate them. Similarly, it had already been proven that further Berserk Wave attacks would not be effective; the Titan and their allies were ready for them and would crush such attacks before they properly got started.
Still, there had to be something. Idly, Jartham began reading a treatise on the precise mechanics of dimensional travel, particularly to and from the Hells. And then, he found what he was looking for. It would take an utterly massive amount of power, yes, but it might just work.
So, with a few short steps, the Inquisitor Daemon wandered over to the summoning platform he'd set up to acquire reinforcements if necessary, and tossed the holy necklace aside. Two seconds later he vanished from the material plane, and back to Hell. He would need to orchestrate this from his home dimension if this was going to work.
