"Orders acknowledged. Yesterday I asked Aroden for special favors more than I ever have before - half a dozen times, I think - and he granted them all but it felt intuitively like I'd pushed about as far as I can. And His aid to me trades off against Him doing other important things potentially including picking more paladins here."

Ilderia does, occasionally, face moral dilemmas. She usually resolves them by taking an implausible amount of risk for herself (and all the wonderful people who are crazy enough to follow her into it) so nobody else has to, but this is not a dilemma that she can, actually, solve that way. She either needs to lie to an ally, actively, or she needs to potentially risk the sanity of one of her new valuable loyalists by making her doubt her own existence.

Ilderia is not, actually, a saint, and there are no lines that she simply will not cross, but lying to her own people is repugnant to her, and so -

"Acknowledged, I have different calculations, we need to talk when not in combat." Which they are about to be!

That is a perfectly reasonable approach to having different calculations for a reason that's hard to explain! Iomedae will continue to go off her own assumptions until someone convinces her of new ones.

One more skirmish of the same sort as before -

Iomedae shoots people. She is shockingly good at it for someone who first encountered guns as a concept the day before.

- And then they try to break the hovercar off because they've pushed as far as they can -

And an inch farther.

All light in the city vanishes, every particle (or wave) in and out of the visible spectrum drawn towards the miniature sun in Solaris's gold-armored hand, for a tiny fraction of a second before a searing beam of golden light from his hand flickers out towards the hovercar with enough power to melt any structure on the island.

(He hovers in midair, regally, not bothering to conceal himself, a tiny dot from which the beam emerges, a tiny dot to everyone in the battlefield without superhuman vision; his muscles are invisible beneath the golden plate armor and his sharp, strong cheekbones are highlighted by the golden helmet that leaves half his dark face visible, his eyes full of regal condescension at the doomed rebels who dared to challenge the King of Novapest and His right hand, Solaris, Count of the Sixth.)

It's sort of like a Flame Strike, except perpetual and an eighty-foot-wide cone.

It will, for the first fraction of a second, miss.

Iomedae has good instincts about when hostile magic is aimed at you and is bringing her shield up to dodge it before she can see it.

Century is going to wildly turn the hovercar as fast as he can, evasive movement and get closer to the ground they can't just be stranded like ants under God's own magnifying glass but they need to get under cover there's the bridge there - 

(The knight whose name Iomedae still doesn't know yet will instinctively raise force-fields to defend them -)

And then they are going to be flamestruck, as Solaris corrects his aim.

The force-fields outside the ship can take overwhelming quantities of sustained fire from any weapon other than literally Earth's star.

(Technically, Solaris cannot siphon any light that does not enter Novapest. This means that he is not fighting at his full "A for Atomic" potential, right now, and needs to spend a moment charging, so we are merely discussing the energy of hundreds - or in the first instant, thousands - of tons of TnT in a beam, not millions.)

That will get them another second, or two.

"Solaris!" 

Absorbs powers. Instructions were to try to dispel with her sword but she's not close enough for that. Iomedae raises her shield and starts a Communal Resist Energy (Fire) but her spells take more than a second, or two.

And the hovercar melts, crashes, and has its fuel cells explode.

Century dies instantly.

The other knight can maintain shields around himself indefinitely (at this level of precision) and is left suspended in midair, leaning on his shields and with no air but what was trapped in his skintight bubble.

Ilderia's powered armor is going to hit the ground shrouded in a glowing radiant aura and giving off immense quantities of heat.

Iomedae got blasted by the flame strike but is much harder to kill than any individual Century (and Aroden didn't give her any Paladin's Sacrifice today, which is probably him saying she should not be trying to save other people at personal risk right now). She will activate her boots and run for cover. She lost the good Resist Fire and just has what's built into her armor, which is enough to walk through a fire but not enough when a powerful spellcaster's trying to kill you with fire.

Ilderia will scramble to her feet and, with a moment of absolute horror

(it hurts it hurts it always hurts)

Do the same, minus the boots - 

And Solaris will pause the beam for a moment (still gathering it in), spot his target, and, moving closer, send the beam of absolute destruction at Iomedae and Ilderia.

Who are now moving into the entrance of an underground tunnel, part of Novapest's (no longer, for military reasons, functional) subway system!

What an elaborate tunnel system. Iomedae scans for oozes and darklands creatures.

"The man with the forcefields -"