On six tapered legs, a security automaton stalked the transfigured canal-plate of Northbank. With eleven red eyes, it hunted. Six troopers rummaged through the dense jungle, brushing aside fresh sprouts of strangleroot that probed aimlessly into the darkness.

It was a wasteland. Like a nuke had gone off, and the entire sector had been abandoned for decades. Pryon matriarchs settled in the ruins of storefronts and apartment blocks, overgrown and forgotten. Torrential rain lashed at tattered umbrellas, giving what life they had left to shield rows upon rows of rotting wooden tables.

Most people found it impossible to believe it was an illusion, so they hid or fled in sheer panic. Only those who were too intoxicated to be affected by the spell remained, uncaring of the sudden, inexplicable downpour - or were simply too far gone to notice. A few were dutifully dragging blackout drunks out of the way of the security team; perhaps they had witnessed sorcery on this scale in the past.

The jungle opened up into a large clearing, paved in stone brick, turned green with lichen and moss, and dotted with trees. Low-cut hedgerows cordoned off lifeless fountains and shallow detention reservoirs. A half-dozen souls remained, some hiding, others peering through the tree line to satiate their curiosity. In the center, an old gondola lift provided passage to the Upper Bank. It, too, was draped in moss, but clearly still functioning. Gears and motors whined to life, and a gondola car pulled out of the boarding gates.

The troopers fan out into a line, raising their weapons and advancing slowly into the plaza. As they near the gondola, one drops to a kneeling position, materializes a long, thin tube, and takes aim.

Suddenly, a girl breaks from the cover of the gondola, scurrying down the waterfront and slinging a ball of light around the gondola car that bursts into a curtain of sparks. The kneeling trooper shouts a warning and sights his target through the bright flash. A rocket, wreathed in flame, bursts from the muzzle, slicing through drapes of dull-green flora as it blazes a curved path around the trunk of a tree.

The girl digs her heels into the dirt as the rocket grazes past her face, making a wide arc as it swings back around for a second pass. Her young eyes track the projectile, and she struggles back onto two legs, sprinting towards a large structure in the distance while the illusion of the jungle begins to fade away. Moments before impact, she thrusts her right arm out, projecting a field of energy that the rocket cannot evade. It disintegrates on impact, throwing a cloud of metal particulate over her head.

With an ear-shattering crash, one of the troopers teleports forward, cracking the concrete tiles under the soles of his armored boots as he whips 180 degrees around to challenge the sorceress. Her young eyes flash: the trooper is enormous, standing head and shoulders over her. Faltering briefly, she scrambles to the right, dashing for a boulder in the distance as a storm of bolts screams past.

Short of breath, she flinches as more bolts rhythmically pound the rock to rubble. Chunks of granite spall off, and she shrinks as much as she can, wincing as a fragment catches her shoulder. She gathers herself, holding back tears, and wipes streaks of blood off her cheek, trying to break for another boulder in the distance. But the trooper is wise to her plan. With renewed fury, a burst of fire cuts her off.

Thinking quickly, the girl gathers another ball of light and hurls it straight into the ground. It tunnels a path under the rock, surfacing between the trooper's legs and erupting in a blinding display of light. Darting out from behind her position of safety, she musters every ounce of her courage and charges the trooper head-on. With her shoulder lowered and supernatural strength coursing through her veins, she tackles him, and they both tumble to the ground. The trooper's faceplate shatters with a final blast of fire point-blank from the palms of her hands.

She doesn't have time to check if he's dead. A second teleports to confront her with a raised facemask and a murderous grin. He draws a sword from thin air and growls as it is enveloped in a plasma film.

Her corpse would be a trophy, she realizes. They each want glory for themselves.

The girl's heart races as she stumbles to a halt. Quickly snatching a sturdy branch off the moss-covered ground, she desperately parries a vicious overhead strike with trembling arms, cleaving the branch into halves but swinging wide of the girl.

The trooper snarls, closing the distance and thrusting his blade forward. She sees it coming - only just. Spinning a thin veil just in time to deflect the attack, the sorceress seizes the brief window of opportunity and throws two blasts of raw magic straight into the ground, launching herself skyward. She flounders midair, tumbling end-over-end through a hail of cannon fire, but pitches her legs down at the last second, landing hard on her right side. The crunch is audible, her cry piercing through the din of battle, but she grits her teeth and wills herself to stand, flooding her body with magical energy to refuse the bone as she runs.

She sees the automaton through the trees, now straddling the canal as it is too big to navigate the jungle. But the canal was growing wider, and the hunter had a fleeting target lock, firing bursts into the foliage.

Abruptly, the dense jungle ends. The girl stumbles into another plaza, too flat and open for her illusionary powers to conceal. The color in her face drains as her head flashes to the right. Looming over the thin tree line that remains, the automaton peers down with a fearsome octuple-mount of heavy cannons. A red light flickers to life -- target lock.

The automaton opens fire. With few other choices, the girl lets the illusion collapse. Her entire body glows white-hot as a torrent of magical energy is drawn into her person. With deft hands, she throws up a spherical shield moments before the storm of cannon rounds impact, sprinting across the plaza towards the imposing, double-stacked gates of the Cloudpass Interchange on the far side.