I Thought I Was Collecting Systems, Not Overpowered Wives

Chapter 60: Saga 60: The Third Moon

The night of the third moon arrived heavier than any Kael had felt since the capital’s siege, the cathedral’s every ward humming with reinforced mana, guards doubled at every post, Claire’s remote-transcribed defensive lattice glowing faintly along the outer walls like a second skin of protection stretched thin over old stone.

"Report," the Cardinal said, pacing the length of the command chamber they’d converted from what used to be a modest meeting room.

"All entrances secured. Ward network holding steady at full capacity," one of the senior Church mages reported. "No anomalies detected yet." His voice boomed throughout the room echoing with defined since of duty

"Yet," Sylvia repeated, standing near the window with her sword already unsheathed, resting across her lap as she sat in quiet, coiled readiness. "Patience has been their entire strategy so far. I doubt they’ll announce themselves before they’re ready."

Kael paced a slow circuit of the room, mana already thrumming beneath his skin, Quitax Barrier’s familiar hum ready at the edge of his awareness should anything breach the outer defenses. Ari sat nearby, dressed not in her ceremonial robes but in simpler combat attire the Church tailors had hastily prepared once her insistence on participating had finally been accepted.

"You’re pacing," Ari observed, watching him from her chair. "It’s making me more nervous, not less."

"Sorry." Kael forced himself to stop, leaning instead against the nearest wall. "Waiting’s never been my strong suit."

"Nor mine, apparently, given how many times I’ve reread the same page of this book without absorbing a single word." Ari set the book aside with a resigned sigh. "How long until moonrise?"

[Approximately forty minutes,] the system supplied, projecting the answer directly into Kael’s awareness. [Threat probability curve suggests any attack would come within the two-hour window surrounding the moon’s peak, based on typical ritual timing conventions.]

"Forty minutes," Kael relayed aloud.

"Forty minutes to sit here imagining every possible way tonight could go wrong," Ari muttered. "Wonderful."

"Try not to imagine too many of them," Sylvia said, a faint, wry smile touching her lips despite the tension. "Trust me, reality usually finds new and creative ways to surprise you regardless."

"That’s not remotely comforting."

"It wasn’t meant to be comforting. It was meant to be honest."

Despite everything, Ari managed a small laugh, and Kael found himself grateful, not for the first time, for Sylvia’s particular brand of blunt reassurance. The minutes ticked by slowly, the command chamber filling with the quiet tension of people waiting for a storm they knew was coming but couldn’t yet see.

Thirty minutes before moonrise, the first ward alarm sounded.

"Eastern archive wing," the senior mage reported, voice tight with sudden alarm. "Something’s breached the outer lattice."

Kael was moving before the words fully registered, Sylvia a half-step behind him, both of them exchanging a single sharp glance that needed no words to convey the shared understanding: whatever Umbra Black had planned, it was finally, truly beginning.

"Ari, stay with the Cardinal’s guard," Kael called back over his shoulder.

"Absolutely not," Ari said, already moving to follow, expression set with the same stubborn determination she’d shown days earlier. "This is my Church, my life on the line. I’m not hiding while you two do the fighting."

There wasn’t time to argue. Kael simply nodded, accepting her decision, and the three of them sprinted together toward the breached eastern wing, the cathedral’s alarm bells finally beginning to toll their frantic warning across the sleeping capital.

Guards streamed past them in the opposite direction, some rushing toward the breach, others falling back to secure the Cardinal’s position deeper within the cathedral. Kael caught fragments of shouted reports as they ran—numbers of intruders, uncertain, movement patterns suggesting more than one point of entry.

"How many?" Sylvia called to a passing captain.

"Unclear! At least three confirmed, possibly more using the chaos as cover!"Kael responsed going into a defense stance.

’I didn’t expect them to launch an attack so quick’ He thought

[Kael, I’m reading additional disturbances near the southern cloister as well. This might be a coordinated multi-point assault rather than a single strike.]

’Wonderful. Can you confirm numbers?’

[Not with certainty. Whatever’s masking their signatures is considerably more sophisticated than anything we’ve encountered from the Black Ring directly. I’d proceed assuming worse odds than reported.]

Ari’s staff materialized fully in her grip as they ran, golden light already gathering faintly along its length, the first true glimpse Kael had gotten of her combat readiness outside their earlier training session. Whatever fear had gripped her back in the command chamber seemed to have settled into something harder, more focused, as the reality of the fight ahead sank in properly.

"Whatever happens," Ari said, voice steady despite everything, "thank you both for being here. I don’t think I could face this alone."

"You won’t have to," Kael said, and meant every word of it.

They rounded the final corridor and the eastern archive wing came into view, doors already splintered, the first sounds of combat and shattering glass echoing from within.

Kael’s mana surged reflexively as they crossed the threshold, Quitax Barrier already half-formed around his fist in anticipation of whatever waited beyond the shattered doorway. Sylvia’s Array of Swords bristled overhead, silent and ready, and beside them both, Ari’s staff pulsed with steady golden light, her earlier fear now fully replaced by grim determination.

"On three," Sylvia murmured. "One."

"Two," Kael echoed.

"Together," Ari finished, and the three of them surged through the broken doorway as one, into whatever waited on the other side.

The scene that greeted them was chaos incarnate—overturned shelves, scattered parchment drifting like fallen leaves, and at the center of it all, three robed figures moving with unnatural, coordinated grace against the archive’s overwhelmed guard detachment. Kael took in the scene in a fraction of a second, cataloguing threats, positioning, and the fastest path to actually helping rather than simply adding to the confusion.

"Guards, fall back to the doorway!" Sylvia commanded, voice cutting through the chaos with practiced authority. "Let us handle the intruders directly!"

The surviving guards scrambled to comply, clearly relieved to cede the fight to hands more capable of surviving it, and the true confrontation finally began in earnest.

Thud ThudThudThudThudThudThudThud

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End of Chapter—