Alice was coordinating the space battle and trying to get the impromptu sunshade out of the way. She spotted a familiar spaceship among the battlers. She'd already called not it for telling Lucian about Aaron making friends with a vampire. She decided to continue passing the buck on telling him Duke Dumas was helping today. This was a job for someone else. Although Lucian would hardly kill the person rebuilding his spaceship.

The fight went about as well as could be expected. First factor was that the Immortal's Casket Armor had multiple Terrenials worth of power to it. Time would tell if sacrificing mobility was worth it. He had to make the Casket Armor larger to stabilize the massive power load. With the weaponry he'd piled on, it was a walking fortress. It was about twice as big as the one the Baron Stoker had constructed, and about seven times as annoying. No crab claws were involved on this one, just a lot of shooty things.

Second factor in the battle was that Tolstoy called his robots which he had on the moon. Carmilla and Django focused on crowd control. The smaller robots required other attack types than sol. The Casket Armor had no sol-absorbing force field installed yet. He was in the middle of figuring out that installation when the gunslinging team interrupted.

Five-and-a-half solar gunners with one angry Carmilla whittled away at Tolstoy's Casket Armor. They started with the obvious gun turrets. Lasers guns, rocket launching ports, and plain old guns peppered the area with patterns of bullets to dodge. The progress was painfully slow. The group was about three-quarters of the way through their item bags. Django was nearly out of sunblock.

Carmilla took a break from blowing up a smaller robot to blast the omni-directional treads on Tolstoy's mecha. His already slow movement was more reduced to moving forwards and backwards in a circle.

Tolstoy decided this battle was worth taking a battleship off the blockade.

Inside the infernal contraption, Lucian heard gunfire and explosions. He groaned and shifted inside the glass cylinder. It was narrow enough to keep him from getting good leverage for a solid kick. In fact he could hear a lot of explosions.

Yeah, that Immortal was so dead when Lucian got out of here.

DESTROY EVERYTHING! KILL!

Lucian squinted at the sword and muttered, "Yeah, sure. Could you please make some helpful suggestions on how to do that to this Immortal?" This was the other voice he'd been hearing too much of lately. The sword Vanargand was somewhere near the cylinder. He could not see it, but he could hear it baying for blood. Lucian figured it had something to do with the Immortal's 'I'm going to wake the Beast of Destruction' speech. Vanargand was much more talkative here than at Sheridan's place. He did miss Nero. Technically, Nero was nearby.

There was a cry of pain outside.

Carmilla? Then he heard Aaron yelling. Lucian started banging on the glass. It was rather distracting for the Immortal.

"Hey, guys! I realized something!" Aaron yelled after about five minutes of shooting. "It looks like Casket Armor!"

The no longer Confused but now Distressed Guildsman yelled back, "We know!"The Guild Gunslingers all knew what the vampires' gear had looked like. Django yanked him backwards, "HEYLETM-Oh," and out of the way of an cloud-elemental laser.

"Wait, did you say it was Casket Armor?!" Django asked. He would have to go back for his greatsword when he could.

"Yeah! Wait, you didn't know?"

"I thought it would look like armor!" It had not occurred to anyone that Django may not have actually seen the resemblance. His only experience with Casket Armor was Dumas' armor, which was actually armor. Something clicked in Django's brain. It was Solar Boy problem solving logic. "Master Otenko! Summon the Pile Driver! You freed the Terrenials with a Pile Driver from Casket Armor before, right?!"

Toasty and Aaron heard Django. "What are you... Oh! I'll summon the Pile Driver! TAIYOOOOOHH!" Master Otenko/Toasty had not actually seen Django purifying Durathor. He had been a cat at the time. Violet caught him on the way to follow Django and there had been aggressive happy cuddling of a cat.

Aaron was closest to the activation point and sprinted for it. "Carmilla, Django! Get out of the way!" He knew that Carmilla might be hurt by the Pile Driver and Django definitely would. He shot at the mirrors to activate them. "How do I turn on the thing!?"

"You can't. It's Solar Child technology." Toasty told Aaron as the kid ducked behind his shield.

Tolstoy happily shot at the humans, and almost humans. He knew he had taken relatively little damage so far. The circular floor decoration appearing in the area had him worried.

Django transformed into a bat to fly around the giant robot blocking his way. This felt like a familiar situation and he was not afraid. He'd started to remember the day Durathor died during the siege. It had started with remembering his mother's words. He landed on the circle and raised his palm to the sky.

"Taiyoooooooooh!"

The burning light of the sun focused on the scene.

Tolstoy's giant battleship blocked the sky above where they were fighting with the worst timing.

Django snarled, "HEY!" That was distinctly unfair, in his opinion. Villains should not be allowed to park their spaceships as makeshift sunshades. He stumbled for cover from the rockets. The gunners did not appreciate the lack of ready energy either.

Kay kept shooting with one hand as he called Alice with the other. "Tolstoy's blocking the sun! Can you get someone through to get the spaceship away?! We need sunlight!"

Darkness was something Aaron could help with. He activated the Sol Trance to light up the area. It blinded Django and provided enough sunlight to get things going again. The bright lasers did more against the Casket Armor than the rest of the battle had combined.

Tolstoy mashed the controls to get the Solar Boy off of him. It took a lot of work to get the kid away and he continued to fire everything he had at the solar gunners as the temporary sunlight faded away. The Casket Armor was severely weakened, but no Terrenials were freed quite yet.

At the edge of the Pile Driver Django was down thanks to a rocket hitting him while he was reactivating the Pile Driver. He looked up as the area darkened again. The reprieve from the pain was nice but he could still barely move and they needed to keep the Pile Driver going.

They needed the sun. He'd been able to call the sun. There was a piece of it he'd held in his hands. Django had needed to wander through darkness for a time to truly understand the bright light of the human soul. He remembered how much faith people had in him.

That's right, thought Django. Django rolled over onto his back and pointed towards the blocked sky. He cast the moonlight magics necessary to summon a sun piece. "Taiyoooh!"

The strange phenomenon of sunlight in a place where the sun was blocked re-continued, much to the Immortal's dismay. The purifying lasers of sunlight penetrated the armor and reached the interior of the Casket Armor. A ray of light reached Vanargand.

There was a massive explosion of ectoplasm. The walking fortress opened like a kernel of popcorn. Lucian's prison crunched into a wall and shattered. Those who saw Lucian, Carmilla and a Guildsman, ran right to him to administer a restorative. Carmilla ended up prying open the cylinder to get the Dark Swordsman free.

Aaron's eyes darted around the Pile Driver, "Where's Lucian!?"

Toasty clung to Aaron as they ducked a swipe from the smoky form. "Carmilla's got him. He'll be okay with her!"

While those three were occupied getting Lucian up and out of the dangerous area, the Solar Gunners were all occupied with the giant angry specter trying to rip them apart. Lucian and Carmilla were not the only people who could hear the roaring of Vanargand. The fragment of solid dark matter in weapon form was not being purified without a fight. A giant fist nearly crushed Kay and the cyclopian eye fixed on Django.

Aaron looked up at the shadow looming over them. "Is this the Beast of Destruction?!"

"It's just a piece of it!"

Earnest restarted an inactive mirror with the gold flames of the Dragoon. "So this is the Beast... Keep the sunlight going! We'll cover you!" On the bright side, Pile Driving with a team was soooo much easier. Ezra and Alexander dragged Nero out of the way. The two flew him over to Lucian immediately. The cat and human (?) needed each other.

Django was already chugging his remaining potion. He just had to keep his magic up until Aaron could use the Sol Trance again. This was what Ratatosk did to his brother? He felt sick at heart. This was even worse than what Hel did to Sabata.

The Pile Driver, running on borrowed sunlight from two boys, kept it's purification going. The massive ectoplasmic horror kept shrinking back into the sword. Solar gunfire drove the smoky monster back. The horrible roar of Vanargand became more human. Django took the opportunity to recharge when Aaron used the trance again.

Lucian, when he regained consciousness, looked up at the faces of Carmilla, the Guildsman, and three terrenials. He looked down at his lap where Nero had been deposited by Alexander. "What's the situation?" He scooped up the cat in an arm before attempting to stand up.

Carmilla handed a cure bulb to Lucian. "The Casket Armor used by the Immortal was too powerful for conventional weaponry. With the Sunflower out of commission, we needed to use alternative means to break through the armor and reach you."

Aaron popped up like he always did when Lucian did not want to babysit or Lucian needed a battle companion to save the world. (These two things were not mutually exclusive.)

"You're okay! Is Nero gonna be all right too?"

"I'm fine. Nero will be too. Where is my sword?"

Aaron rubbed the back of his head and pointed to the massive shadow in the middle of the Pile Driver. "Uh, we might have started purifying it by accident because we were trying to bust you out of that Casket Armor?" Lucian's sharp glare made him flinch, "I'm sorry!"

The shadow of Vanargand roared and waved its hands around above the white-hot lasers of sunlight. The dark matter got its eye poked by a shining superhero figure while fires broke out on the ground beneath it.

Alexander shook his head when he saw Lucian looking at the action. "I would advise against going into the middle of an active pile driver. For one with dark powers like yours, it would be unwise." The Guildsman who had helped Carmilla ran for the purification after Ezra said something to him.

Carmilla filled in more details for Lucian. The fading sunlight leftover from the sol trance was nearly gone. "That mass of dark matter is from the sword Vanargand. They are finishing the Pile Driving by having both Solar Boys generate sunlight until we can get the spaceship out of the way of the sun." A miniature star flared in the midst of the darkness. "We don't know where the Immortal went." She saw Nero waking up.

"It's too much to hope that he died in the explosion. He probably slithered off to hide somewhere." Lucian started to look around for a weapon. He spotted a large broadsword on the ground and went right for it. (Django was too busy to notice his sword getting swiped.) "Solar Boys?" Aaron nodded and finished off a yogurt. It was almost his turn.

Notes: Thank goodness for Wikipedia. I might have ended up naming the Immortal 'Meyer' instead of some other vampire story author when I started this nonsense.