" - yep, that's not how things work where I'm from." She's unperturbed by this; Creation is supposed to be very big and very strange. "I can do more than one thing. Paladins smite and heal and spellcast and empower our weapons and inspire bravery in our allies. Archmages can bilocate because archmages can do anything. The guns work at what range? They would kill a civilian in one hit?"

"Two hundred to a thousand yards if the shooter can aim well enough - I'm two yards tall." There are people on Novapest who say meters, because it is modern and scientific, but they don't work for Ilderia. "Heavy-duty ones kill weak supers. There's also stun weapons that knock out anyone who isn't unnaturally resilient and fire and laser weapons that are deadlier against anyone without shielding, but they're expensive. How do your smiting and healing and spellcasting work and can you use guns without training?" He wears a sword because Ilderia wears a sword and it is very occasionally useful for hand-to-hand combat when he has no ammunition and someone jumps him; he mostly fights with a gun.

(He is fighting, looking for a fight, or catching his breath after a fight in eighty different places on Novapest. It's what he's for.)

"I will be worse with a gun than a veteran trained in it but much better with a gun than a civilian. Smiting people makes me better at killing them and them worse at killing me, limited uses per day, only works on evildoers. Paladins can see who is evil. I can heal with a touch or pack people into a ten pace radius and heal them all at once. It'll heal civilians of anything short of death to perfect health, and do less than that for 'supers'. I ask my god for spells in the morning. I'm using one right now for translation and used another to check if Ilderia was lying. I can also dispel magic at will with my sword."

"Hey." Quick gesture to one of the soldiers who has two, heavy rifle and submachine gun.

"Sir." And the soldier will pass her the submachine gun and a belt with a holster, and Century will show her the extremely quick this-is-the-safety-this-is-the-trigger-this-is-how-you-reload. He'll also get a spare pair of sunglasses from another soldier.

"Not accurate, fires a lot, won't shoot through tinker armor - armor like Countess Ilderia's, not like mine." His is steel and Kevlar and he dies a lot. "Most of the enemy troops are Livia's Legion, they're perfect fighters, they don't miss shots, or the Tyrant's robots - walking metal soldiers remotely controlled - which are bulletproof against regular bullets and use stunners and energy weapons. There's a hundred supers on the other side, lots of different powers, a complete list would take too long, the very scary ones are the Gorgon Queen, mind controls anyone whose eyes she meets," (she may notice that everyone is wearing some eye coverage), "not resistable, Bloody Lizzy, red and purple tinker armor and controls momentum, and Count Solaris, copies and is immune to any power used on him and chiefly uses this to fly, make invincible armor and control light. How's magic defined?" 

"Does the mind control work through Protection from Evil?" That one Iomedae does have prepared without having to beg Aroden for special favors. "Divine magic comes from the gods, arcane magic comes from manipulating it yourself, both of them show up to detect magic and fail to function in an antimagic field, I don't know if wizards use some kind of theoretical definition outside that."

"We don't have Protection from Evil, we don't have magic from gods, we don't have detect magic, we don't have antimagic fields, though there are machines that nullify a large subset of powers. If you can shut down innate powers you can use that and a gun to kill almost anyone; if you can use it to shut down effects of powers it might work on anything from tinker robots to Solaris's armor, so long as Solaris himself isn't a target of it. I expect you'll need to try to know."

"At home it would shut down spells and spell effects but it wouldn't affect the abilities of magical beasts or sorcerers, and would suppress magic items only temporarily - yes, sorry, never mind, I'll just need to try. What happens to people here when they die?"

"We don't know." (Ilderia believes in God and hates His guts. Century feels that under his feudal oath he has inherited this grudge, but is less sure that it is with someone who exists.) "A doctor can fix a stopped heart and some powers have stretched the definition of 'not completely dead' farther than that but no one's ever resurrected anyone without a head, or has much to say about anything that happened while their brain wasn't working. Just how tough are you?" She took bullets and is completely fine, but they seem to have injured her briefly and then gone away, so she might have just self-healed...

"The large exploding projectile hurt, you could kill me with two or three of those if I didn't have time to heal. The guns didn't hurt much, I think my armor can typically handle that if it's not a very lucky shot."

He nods. "Good. Strong supers can hit harder than that, but not much else can. Other things to watch out for: All the robots are under one person's control, he can run them all at once and see anything they do. Count Fear can make anyone near him terrified, he has a dragon and a lion on his arms, Greenrose - huge plant monster - is completely unkillable, Luminosa looks made of solid light and is neutral and very powerful, and if someone with no powers starts suddenly gaining powers, stop hitting them, a wild card who's just triggered gets new powers to counter anything that hits them for five to forty seconds -" he'll count five seconds for her. 

“Oh, I’m immune to fear, and can make the people who fight at my side less vulnerable to it. Are the robots people or constructs only lent intelligence by their controller. People get powers very suddenly as a discrete event? Should I hit people on Ilderia’s side who get powers or is it not reliable enough for that to be wise?”

"Do that, then. Lent intelligence," he says. "And no, don't, fights are chaotic enough." The only known wild card still left is lurking back of the line in powered armor ready to try to tackle whichever of Lizzy or Solaris most needs it but he's obviously not going to say that. "White flag's the symbol for truce. The the Tyrant doesn't respect any rules but he might respect that one."

- she looks deathly serious, at that, and nods. "I don't know what else I need to know but I probably don't urgently need to know it. If the war won't be decided today I should probably be introduced to some people who could with training be paladins, so you don't only have me. I've had Aroden pick people in the same day I explained Him to them, but - only once, in thousands of occasions of explaining. Usually it takes more time than that."

"This week, not this day. We're out of time for training." He listens a moment "- We should get moving."

"Understood." There are still a lot of important things she doesn't understand but the Shining Crusade would hardly do any better, five minutes in, and wars where both sides are human are wildly more complicated than wars where one side is an evil lich and his undead armies.

There are three possibilities when someone appears out of nowhere: Either their movement was instantaneous, or their movements were concealed, or they did not, formerly, exist.

Ilderia is short on concealment powers. Luminosa can allow light to pass completely through her body without interacting, but this is visibly not Luminosa. Ilderia is also short on teleporters and has no matter-creators; Splicer can turn biomass into monsters, but the monsters use fang and claw, not activated abilities. No matter, energy, or information can survive passage through the Novapest Shield; the Tyrant does not give in to threats, but people might still feel compelled to make them if the Tyrant could hear them made, so even information cannot, let alone teleporters.

And there are no records within Novapest of an armored woman with a glowing sword who can teleport, run at twice normal speed, and shrug off anti-tank missiles.

So. New.

(This information takes perhaps two seconds to assemble, to the person watching her from rapidly-fading robot bodies and hovering security cameras, no more. He is not superhumanly intelligent, just normally intelligent.)

(Superhumanly intelligent is his dad.)

The Titanium Tyrant does not have the power to survey the entire battlefield at once, not in that detail. He's watching a screen in his command center, armored fingers steepled, issuing orders through his headset. Each super is a dot on the map of Novapest, each robot a speck, the seas of color shifting as the battle advances.

The Titanium Tyrant cannot personally coordinate sixty thousand robotic soldiers. He can coordinate a hundred supervillains (or, more practically, slightly over a dozen six-man teams of supervillains) for the purpose of minimizing superpowered casualties suffered and maximizing those inflicted, maneuvering his knights from location to location to deliver a crushing counter to rebel after rebel, keeping those without the stamina to fight for hours in reserve for the key battles. The morale of Ilderia's soldiers will not break until she dies; men may flee, but the panic that strikes an army cannot do so while the Thunderbolt of Novapest lives, so he's just going to have to kill every one of those sellsword whelps who stands between him and that goddamned lying traitor.

He receives the report, loads the video of Iomedae's appearance in a corner of his screen and rapidly plays it through while he continues giving instructions. It is tremendously improbable that Ilderia kept someone like that in reserve; Morgan could easily have fabricated a sword and armor, but armor that could stand up to small-arms fire, not armor that could stand up to a missile. Ilderia had attempted a rapid decapitation strike with all the forces available to her, and failed chiefly because he had successfully faked Elizabeth getting rather weak Survivor powers two years beforehand for this very purpose, and, of course, because he is the Titanium Tyrant, and she is merely the latest would-be kingslayer. It is also impossible, observing the nature of the physical injuries briefly inflicted on the new super, that she stopped it with a force-field; her armor survived the blow, and she, separately, survived the blow, which means they are super-durable either from two separate powers, or one complex power applied twice.

Either way, it means she is unlikely to be a Survivor. Not impossible, but it would require, say, that someone was shot at, manifested the ability to conjure bulletproof armor, was shot elsewhere with some sort of weapon that her armor could not stop, gained superhuman toughness, was somehow threatened by an attack neither power could stop, teleported away into the path of anti-tank weapons, then manifested self-healing powers (instead of strengthening any existing powers, hugely unlikely). Steelmind would have reported this if it had occurred in sight of his robots, and he knows that none of his supers had encountered a wild card and triggered them and continued attacking him, so the complexity penalty to this hypothesis is immense. A warper - in the middle of a life-or-death battle, literally while there are shots flying in every direction - is not to be guessed at. And granted powers does not plausibly explain the sheer variety.

So. Idealist. And knightly idealist.

(He steers Elizabeth and her retinue... she doesn't need much of a retinue, but there is a straight shot and she knows how to take it - he never needs to explain any aspect of battle to Elizabeth, her intuition is nearly as swift and vivid as his. Personnel, strategy, economics - there she lags, but not battle.)

Not implausible for a servant of Ilderia, but it means there's a possible alternative cheap way to eliminate this new unexpected threat.

He issues new orders to his son, and within two minutes of Ilderia's arrival the legitimate government of Novapest has an answer to Iomedae.

Also, at this point Ilderia's people are starting to come under attack again, as Ilderia and her core fast-moving strike team rush to the next part of the battlefield that needs them, and so the press comes closer to them.

Specifically, what Iomedae sees is a lot of constructs headed for them. They're marching straight down the main street in massed formation, the ones at the front with some kind of fancy energy shields raised that deflect bullets. ("Shit," one of the soldiers says,) all firing energy weapons that look like they could totally kill an ordinary commoner, with hulking robot monsters behind them.

This looks like the kind of problem you solve at home with Grease, and then fire once the neat formations have been interrupted by people falling over; alternatively or ideally simultaneously Dimension Door some people over to chew them up from the back. Iomedae is too situationally confused to make suggestions here, though, unless the locals do not seem to have a plan, in which case she will propose testing what Greater Dispel Magic does to remotely-controlled constructs, and then testing what Magic Circle Against Evil does to them when the controller is Evil.

Ilderia's people solve it with hand grenades. Century splits then splits again, and two of him rush to fire-torn windows, hurling grenades before being swiftly shot down. His aim is as good as you'd expect from an experienced adventurer (even if he's nowhere near as fast as Iomedae), and the explosives detonate just behind the front row, blasting the shield-generating robots with sheer concussive force to allow more mundane weapons to be used against the others, troops firing from loopholes with anti-materiel rifles (or, as people who don't buy theirs from Soviet surplus call them, "elephant guns").

(The copies disappear almost immediately after the explosions, along with the shrapnel. Century needs most of his bodies elsewhere.)

Unfortunately, there's a lot of robots, and the really big ones have their own private velocity redirection fields. "Anything you can do?" Century tosses out at her.

"Test what a Greater Dispel does, any reason not to?" She can do it from here. Greater Dispel Magic has good range. 

She's watching all this intently, but not at all nervously, just like it's a puzzle-game and she hasn't seen it played before.

"Go for it."

She'll have to get a little closer to try it but she's fast and not that alarmed by the gunfire. Greater Dispel Magic. A twenty-foot radius burst where the robots are, a few hundred feet out from where they are. Does it do anything?

It does not!

Ah well, too bad. She'll try a couple more times in case it's just that she had poor luck against a caster stronger than she is, but she isn't really expecting it to work. Different world, different rules. She doesn't otherwise have a clever solution here; paladins do crowd control by persuading wizards to their cause. 

(Where's Arazni? Discern Location and Gate have no limits on their range.)