Noirciel, the reason for the conflict, was now in better shape. Although she was still in a hypnopompic state, the excruciating pain she felt a few days ago, which caused her face to pale, was gone. The tent used to house her had long since been upgraded to a fortress, which was reinforced by many formations.
The angel was hovering in midair, within a complex formation with patterns that greatly resembled those on the angel-summoning ritual complex. It facilitated the critical process of Noirciel's soul and Divine Energy compression.
Within Noirciel's body was a vessel that the Alchemist had created just for her. It was a bead bracelet the size of a fist, inside which was a black box. This black box was a sub-dimension, where the angel's Divine Energy was getting sucked into.
[1] It’s a fictional account in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, once again attributed to China’s favorite legendary tactician, Zhuge Liang. Supposedly, the city he was defending was in critically low number against the Wei army, and so he devised a risky stratagem: he had the soldiers taking the guises of everyday folks sweeping the streets while he himself played his guqin on a platform on top of the entrance gate. The Wei army and general Sima Yi came, took the offbeat scene in, and began to worry that this was all just a ruse to lure them into an ambush within the city, and so they retreated instead of charging in. It’s apocryphal, of course (there are holes in the story etc.), but this style of strategy, called the Empty Fort Strategy because you’re bluffing about having more number of soldiers in your fort than you really do, is a real one and plays heavily on reverse psychology and luck. It’s has been studied in game theory models too!