Eldryth – Varys Conclave Skyport, 48 Hours Post-Transmigration**
The trade negotiations began with a diplomatic incident.
Chancellor Lira Voss had insisted on a "working lunch," a concept Eldryth's elven dignitaries interpreted as literal *labor* while eating. They'd prepared a banquet hall filled with levitating platters of jeweled fruits and a live basilisk roasted in volcanic salt—all while Kaelan's mages "demonstrated productivity" by enchanting cutlery to duel each other above the table.
"Let me summarize," Lira said, dodging a fork that lunged at her schnitzel. "Your ley lines are… living energy veins that power magic. Our reactors are… *dead* ley lines. And merging them could stabilize both realms."
"Crudely put," Kaelan replied, flicking his wrist to dissolve a rogue knife. "But your 'science' lacks the nuance to harness raw arcana. Your engineers would incinerate themselves—"
"Your *nuance* lacks scalability," interrupted Dr. Costa, projecting a hologram of the EU's faltering energy grid. "If we don't splice your ley conduits into our infrastructure within three weeks, our hospitals go dark. Then our water pumps. Then *your* skyport gets a refugee crisis."
The room tensed. Lyria, Kaelan's apprentice, snorted. "Mortals. Always racing toward cliffs."
"Says the girl who tried to 'optimize' a time-dilation spell and aged her own eyebrows off," muttered a dwarven engineer.
Before Lyria could retaliate, the doors burst open. A breathless EU ranger staggered in, clutching a bleeding arm. "Chancellor—*they're here*."
---
**Outskirts of Strasbourg – EU Temporary Settlement Gamma-6**
The Sunderborn struck at sundown.
Corporal Anika Weber had been patrolling the perimeter when the ground vomited black sludge. From it emerged figures clad in robes stitched from what looked like *static*, their faces hidden behind masks of fractured glass. They moved silently, dissolving fences and security drones with a touch.
"Contact! Hostiles at Sector—" Anika's radio died mid-sentence. A Sunderborn cultist loomed over her, raising a jagged crystal dagger. Then—
***BOOM.***
The cultist exploded into ash. Anika blinked up at a smirking Lyria, who twirled a mana pistol hybridized with a Glock 17. "Reloading's a bitch, but hey—*multiversal collaboration*."
Behind her, a joint EU-Eldryth strike team surged forward: Polish snipers with rune-etched bullets, elven battlemages using riot shields as casting foci, and a single very confused Belgian bureaucrat shouting about "cross-realm liability forms."
---
**Dead Wastes – Sunderborn Ritual Site**
The cultists were faster than expected.
By the time Kaelan and Lira arrived via helicopter-dragon hybrid (a traumatized creature the French engineers had dubbed *L'Hélicodrac*), the Sunderborn had already carved a mile-wide sigil into the desert. The air buzzed with wrongness, the ground pulsing like rotten flesh.
"An inverse summoning," Kaelan hissed. "They're not just worshipping the rift—they're *feeding* it."
Lira adjusted her noise-canceling earpiece. "Can we disrupt it?"
"Not without a counterspell. And that requires—"
"A committee vote?"
"Sacrifice," Kaelan said grimly. "A life willingly given."
Silence hung between them. Then Lira unholstered her sidearm. "Define 'willingly.'"
---
**Berlin-Eldryth Joint Research Facility**
Dr. Costa hated magic.
It was messy. Unpredictable. And worst of all, *incompatible with PDF reports*. Yet here he was, elbow-deep in a ley line conduit, trying to fuse quantum capacitors with what essentially amounted to a dragon's gallbladder.
"Try channeling the mana through the graphene array now!" he barked.
An elven technomancer—a rebel who'd traded robes for a lab coat—gestured. The conduit flared… then exploded in a shower of sparks and neon goo.
"*Verdammt!*" Costa wiped sludge from his glasses. "What went wrong?"
The elf studied the smoking wreckage. "Your 'graphene' tastes terrible."
"*Tastes?*"
"Ley energy has preferences. This one… likes jazz."
Costa buried his face in his hands. "Get me a damn piano."
---
**Dead Wastes – 23:17**
The Sunderborn leader was not what anyone expected.
She stood at the sigil's heart, mask discarded, her face eerily familiar—a mirror image of Chancellor Voss, but with eyes like condensed supernovae.
"You," Lira breathed.
"Us," the double corrected, voices overlapping. "Fragments of the rift. We are what happens when bureaucracy meets entropy."
Kaelan stepped forward, staff blazing. "You're a tumor. And we're the scalpel."
The fight was brutal. EU drones strafed cultists with silver-plated rounds as elven wards deflected eldritch lightning. Lira and her doppelgänger grappled hand-to-hand, the latter hissing truths that stung worse than claws: *"You'll fail them. You always do."*
But as the ritual reached its crescendo, Lyria made a choice.
She barreled into the sigil's core, a stolen Sunderborn crystal in hand. "Hey, ugly! Try *this* for a sacrifice!"
The explosion lit up the night.
---
**Epigraph Fragment – EU Emergency Protocol Alpha-12**
*"In the event of transdimensional incursion, all member states shall prioritize the preservation of…* [DATA CORRUPTED]*."*
---
**End of Chapter 2**
---
**Next time on *Aegis Europa*:**
- *Who survived Lyria's sacrifice?*
- *The EU debates magical citizenship—do sentient golems get voting rights?*
- *Kaelan discovers TikTok.*