Hir job done, the archangel plunges joyously into the fray. The seraph is swarmed by the siegeships, more than its hungry blades can deal with. The archangel Misery rolls, dives, swoops through the mighty freedom of space, weapons out, blades unseaming the siegeships with a touch. The vast nothingness fills with light and ozone and stone debris. And yet for every ship zie destroys, four more appear to harangue hir. They’ve gotten smart, too, dodging and rolling away from hir attacks. Firing their turrets. One such bolt crosses the skin of the archangel Misery’s left hind leg, leaving a long, angry scar. A mere scratch from a moment of carelessness, but those shots can do real damage. The Heretics are merciless in their drive to destroy the sacred, after all.

They are struggling. A dozen of the siegeships have formed a net around their foul leader, the Edgeless Blade, leaving the rest of them free to hound the knights of the holy. The seraph is struggling: one of its legs is wounded and useless, and as the archangel Misery rolls to avoid another beam, zie watches two of those ships corral the seraph so a third can take aim. The bolt clips through its upper left arm. The pain it feels, the archangel Misery also feels, and the rage that blazes through hir should rip apart solar systems. But all it does is blind hir to the approach of another enemy. The archangel Misery dodges, but barely, and zie is spared not a second before another attack charges up, from another vector. These Heretics will not stop. They will not give their foes a chance.

The battle trembles upon a pivot of chaotic entropy, yawing back and forth, desperation cut with confusion. If the archangel Misery were human zie would be filled with rage and frustration, but hir elevated, sacred form knows no such fleshly weakness. Zie sees that it would be fruitless to eradicate the siegeships before taking on the Edgeless Blade. It would destroy them, and for what? They must hold on until the banquet of Angelsteeth arrives. Only then will the tides be turned—

The jump portal wakes, a shiver running through the cosmos, holystone connecting to holystone. Help is coming at last. They took their sweet time, the battle could have fallen the wrong way in the time it took to get them here.

Something’s off. An imbalance of mass, a sense of something vaporous, a pulse of wrongness through hir systems. Whatever’s coming through the portal isn’t big enough to constitute a banquet, eight courses of eight dishes with four servings each. Something else is happening. Something else is coming through.

A series of blips shoot from the portal, dwarfed by that curving mouth. Three seraphs. A single, Cherub-class commanding ship. It’s Dish Ono Red-2, and only Dish Ono Red-2.