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Boston (Marcy, Kevin, Annisa, Franklin, and Abigail) is as ready to graduate as they can possibly get.
They start out in Kevin's room, as close as possible to the graduation hall, where they did the final assembly of the tank. They had to get rid of all of Kevin's furniture including his bed to do it, so he's been sleeping in a blanket nest in the cockpit. Now they're all crammed in there, doing final tests on the weapons Marcy and Annisa have mounted to every external surface. There are grenade launchers and flamethrowers and cannons and the steel armor has runes on every inch that will guide and boost Franklin's shield spell. On the battlefields of the first world war, it would be invincible death. On the morning of graduation it feels like it might just barely be enough.
The rooms grind down to the graduation level. Franklin pulls a torrent of mana from their storage and declaims five stanzas of Latin about how this vault should be sealed and impenetrable against everything from mildew to earthquakes. Kevin quaffs the potion Abigail has been perfecting for the last year, and his vision goes dark, and then lights up again in three hundred and sixty degrees, seeing through the walls of the tank like they're glass. Nobody else in the alliance was able to handle the information overload, but Kevin loves it.
They roll into the graduation hall and Kevin floors the accelerator while the women man the guns. Franklin is oblivious to everything except his shield and the armor wrapped around and within and through it, the blows against it and the steady flow of mana. Mals die to the weapons; mals die under the treads.
One of the benefits of a tank, though not one anyone mentioned aloud, is that it isn't a formation. There's nobody in the protected middle, nobody precariously covering the rear. They all have the same odds.
They're good odds. The armor is only penetrated once. A giant carapaced limb, red streaked with olive green, stabs through at the base of the port flamethrower and into Annisa's heart.
Nobody reacts because there is no action to be taken. In another minute they're blasting past Patience and Fortitude and through the gates. At the moment the reverse induction hook grabs them, pays off their debt of space and time and prepares to fling them home, another alliance concludes a spell to make their location the same as that of the gate. A wave of magic ripples through the Void, and the tank lands . . .
