A Perverted Path to Victory

Tinvel

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He’d been reduced to doing a second round of pre-flight checks by the time Chona finally came jogging back into the aerodrome, the Governess in tow. Chona ducked through the spray of sparks that flew from workers wielding powered artifice tools as they hacked at sheetmetal siding, enlarging the door that had caused so many problems during the raid.

The Governess didn’t need to duck. Glowing cherries bounced off the head and shoulders of the most hideous set of armor Tinvel had ever seen. It looked like she’d been laying beneath a thick plate of iron when a giant’s hand came crashing down, smashing the mold over her body, then roughly folding and pinching the remaining steel around her limbs. It was almost surreal to watch her move in the thing. It shouldn’t have been possible, the crude slabs should have crashed and clanked rather than swinging smoothly with her steps, but it clearly was. She moved just as easily as she had in plain clothing, turning aside to sidle through workers too busy to notice her passing. Those who did merely gave her a nod that she returned, leaving them to their business. A far cry from the Lords and Ladies of old, both in armor and temperament.

“Hey!” Chona cupped her hands to yell over the aerodrome’s racket as she approached. “Are we ready to take off?”

“We are!” Tinvel yelled back, giving a thumbs-up in case she couldn’t hear. Crystal-pulsing hammers and whirring saws were even louder when used in the confines of a metal building. “Got the packs loaded and everything!”

The Governess was leaving Tulian with far more than she’d arrived with. Two heavy crates had arrived that morning, resplendent with dozens of glue-globbed paper sheets warning that their contents should not be opened under penalty of ‘Tulian’s harshest punishment’. Tinvel had no idea what that was, considering the Governess had outlawed putting people to death, but he wasn’t interested in finding out, so he and several of the other pilots had worked together to shove them into the pontoons of the Fulleye. They’d barely fit, which meant they’d had to store all the backup geodes in the hollow spaces of the twin boom tails, creating one hell of a balance problem.

Not to mention energy drain, he thought darkly. I’m pretty sure we can make it on the charges we have, but it’s going to be close. We’ll have to pray for good weather.

“Tinvel!” The Governess’s voice boomed, shockingly clear and loud even from a hundred paces away, making him jump in his harness. “Where’d you put those damn crates?”

“In the pontoons, ma’am!” He called back. “That was the only place we had room for them!”

“Goddammit,” she grumbled. That was a decidedly odd thing to hear, considering she was speaking under her breath from fifty paces away. “Do you remember which one had the blue mark on the end? A little paint circle on it?”

It took him a moment to respond, distracted by the magic on display. She was speaking at a volume better fit for a quiet tavern, and he could hear her as if they really were in that tavern. But he could still hear all the whirring saws and pounding hammers. Yet she wasn’t any louder—

“I think it was the left!” Chona answered for him, pointing. “Do you need something out of it, ma’am?”

“Yeah. Shit,” Sara cursed. “Sorry. Should have told you. Busy day.”

“Don’t worry.” Tinvel lowered his own voice, testing if she could hear him just as well as he could hear her. “We can get some people to drag it out for you.”

“Don’t bother,” the Governess said, kneeling next to the left pontoon. Then her metal-obscured face tilted up, one brown eye staring through a slice of her visor’s thick walls. “And stop trying to figure out how my magic works.”

Tinvel nodded, swallowing the lump that had suddenly appeared in his throat.

Chona came up next to the Governess, bending at the waist to help her unlatch the pontoon’s storage locker. That had been another of the improvements they’d made to the Fulleye as of late: knowing that they were going to use the pontoons to carry goods, they’d moved the poles which attached them to the fuselage forward and aft, giving the maximum possible surface area to slap a hatch across. Tinvel had been worried about water sloughing into the interior on water landings, but the University’s alchemical students had provided an amazingly excellent water-proof rubber lining for just the purpose.

They’d been doing that a lot lately. For centuries now, alchemy had been seen as the discipline of rural witches and simple potion-brewers, the sort of work undertaken by the least motivated of Talavan’s Gifted. Yet, despite being the smallest group of students at the University, and even with Professor Garen admitting it was his weakest subject, they seemed to have been making the largest leaps of anybody in Tulian. Hardly a week went by without Tinvel or other artificers being offered some exotic new material, compound, or paste, each achieving things that were impressing even Professor Brown. Merely knowing that the periodic table could exist had been revolutionary for their types, much less being provided an exact recreation of it.

Hunes probably would have left the Air Force to rejoin the alchemy division by now, huh? I wonder how much more they would have got done with her help. He smiled fondly at his memory of the timid half-orc’s fascination with brewing.

Until her snapped and severed body flashed into his mind, a bloody wreck spilling from the harness of her broken plane. Bile rose in his throat, his fingers curling on the flight stick. The griffon that killed her had escaped that day, he remembered. Had it and its riders been in the group that attacked the city? Probably. If you had someone with experience fighting strange new enemies, you wouldn’t send them back to some stagnant frontline where their experience was wasted. He still remembered the animal’s coloring. He didn’t think it had been among the ones he and Chona shot down. Maybe Affe would—

“Tinvel!” Sara shouted, now without magical enhancement. “You gonna sit up there and watch, or you going to help us down here?”

He blinked, shaking his head, and unbuckled his harness, crawling out onto the wing so he could drop to the ground.

The pontoon’s latches were undone by the time he arrived, the lid thrown open. The crate, he realized, had been nailed shut.

“I’ll go get a hammer—”

“Nah, I got it,” Sara said. Her armored gauntlets— somehow the most bent and twisted pieces of her ramshackle armor— grabbed hold of a nail’s head by crunching straight through the wood surrounding it. Without even a grunt of effort, she drew the four-inch iron spike out and held it between two fingers, then she repeated the process. A few seconds later, she was clutching a bundle of nails and lifting the lid.

“By the way, pretend you didn’t see half of this shit,” Sara instructed sternly. Then her tone softened as she shrugged. “At least for now, I guess. If I’m trusting you two to fly me around carrying the crap, it’s not a big leap to let you see it. Just don’t go blabbing about it.”

With a warning like that, Tinvel’s interest was piqued to the point he couldn’t have blinked if he tried.

The most obvious of the tightly-stuffed objects in the crate was the chestplate of a Sporaton Knight, its enchantments still charged enough to give off a visible shimmer. That was impressive, because the left side of it was covered by circular dents of varying width and depth, something that once would have been alien to Tinvel, yet was now immediately recognizable as the impact craters of countless bullet strikes. More interestingly than even that, however, was the right side of the armor. Six circular holes were punched clean through the enchanted steel, each a perfect match for their siblings. The pierced holes were less than half the diameter of any rifle or pistol Tinvel knew to exist within Tulian, too thin for him to fit his pinky finger through.

The source of those strange holes, he suspected, lay above the chestplate. A tightly-packed bundle of guns, none of which were anything like the musket-rifles he knew. Each one was unique, radically so, and was adorned with mechanical complexities whose purposes he couldn’t fathom. Some had long shapes cut through the barrel in random places, be it above, below, or to the side, most of those holes placed near the base of the weapon. Others had some kind of thick steel mesh covering the end of their muzzle, some of which extended beyond the barrel itself, while others who lacked the mesh were even stranger, almost resembling a diminutive axe, like some smith had accidentally bent the last inch of the barrel 90° and tried to hide the mistake by hammering it flat, only to fail miserably, creating a secondary T-joint barrel at the weapon's end. Brown paper blocks were piled all between the guns, filling up the loose space to keep them from bumping against one another, though the paper’s contents didn’t seem to be made of solid metal, because they rolled and clinked as Sara rummaged through the crate.

“Ah!” She victoriously declared. “There we are. I should’ve known better than to put this in here.”

The Governess pulled a thin, flat package from the crate and promptly dropped the lid, cutting off his view just as he’d begun searching for a smith’s mark on the bizarre weapons. He’d seen the mark of HOT smiths on at least one, but he doubted it could have been all of them, considering what obvious failures they’d been.

Sara stood, flicking her wrists at Tinvel and Chona with a shoo, shoo.

“Sorry, but you don’t get to sneak in there yet. That’s a bunch of shit Hurlish’s been working on for like two years now, and I’m not gonna bust ‘em out for just anyone.” She shoved a thumb beneath the package’s sealed edge and tore down, then shook the paper off with a grin he could just barely glimpse through her visor. “This, however, is totally for you guys.”

With a dramatic whuff of air, Sara shook out the square-folded piece of leather she’d been holding, revealing a leather jacket. Something fell out from within, but he didn’t catch what it was before her hand darted out to snatch it in mid-air, quickly hiding it behind her back. Only the leather garment was left presented.

“It’s a… jacket?” He asked, confused.

Out of all that stuff she just showed us, this is what she’s showing off?

“It’s a bomber jacket,” Sara corrected, shoving it forward. “It’s what pilots wore back on Earth during the World Wars, and it’s for you.”

Tinvel frowned at the same moment Chona threw her head back and laughed.

“Finally!” She cackled. “No more of that patchwork piece of crap you always wear! It’s not like you’ve grown proper fur, but it’s better than that old thing!”

Tinvel put a protective hand over his current (admittedly patchwork) jacket, shooting Chona an offended glare. “Hey. I made this thing myself, alright? It took a lot of damn work and I don’t want to get rid of it just because you think-”

“No,” Sara interrupted, “you wear it because you’re too cheap to actually go out and spend money on a new jacket, even when you know the one you’ve already got is an ugly piece of shit.”

“But-”

She tossed the jacket at him, forcing him to catch it. It smelled of freshly oiled leather oil and heavy wool. Looking down inside the neck hole, he saw that the entire thing was lined with a finely spun sheep’s thread, as soft as it was warm. It even had a zipper running down the front— a new innovation in Tulian that had briefly been all the rage amongst anyone who cared about fashion, before the metal and machines for their manufacture had been redirected to war material.

“Put it on and burn your old one so you don’t get tempted to try and pretend you weren’t lying about liking it,” Sara ordered. “Also, there’s a real flight cap with goggles in one of the pockets, not those crappy beer bottle things you were using before.”

Chona cackled, clapping her hands in delight. “Oh thank the gods, finally! I thought he was gonna wear that thing until it came apart at the seams. And he can’t even argue!” She pointed at him. “The actual Champion of Amarat told you how awful your old jacket was!” She started to say something else as Tinvel reluctantly began emptying his old jacket’s pockets, but her laughter overcame her, leaving her sputtering senselessly.

Until Sara turned to her, sliding her visor up to show off a wicked, vindictive grin. Pulling out her hidden right hand, the Governess of Tulian revealed a clumped bundle of silk and cloth.

A very, very small bundle.

“Chona,” she said, her voice gaining an odd, magical timbre, something that Tinvel somehow knew meant no one could overhear her words, “since you’re a nudist, I got you this.”

Chona’s laughter died with a sharp, harshly squeaked inhalation, then exploded into a brutal cough. She pounded her chest and doubled over, eyes bulging.

Tinvel, smiling widely, walked over and began patting her on the back, smug as could be.

“A nudist, in case you were wondering,” Sara continued, “is someone who doesn’t ever feel comfortable wearing clothes. Which I’m pretty sure is what you are. Back in my old world, we had whole little villages where they’d all go live with each other so they could be naked all the time. Since you don’t have that here, I had this made for you.” She released the bundle of clothing, letting it fall out into…

…a fairly normal looking shirt?

A nice one. That much was clear, if only in its material. Spun from the same sort of silk as Chona’s prized red chest wrap, it had been dyed a simple, ubiquitous brown, fairly close in shade to Tinvel’s own leather jacket. Looking closely, Tinvel saw that there were some interesting swirls to the colors, a lighter curl here or darker tendrils there, as if the dyer hadn’t been able to bring themselves to do such a plain job of so nice a material, but those barely-perceptible flourishes were all it could claim. The only additional decoration was a small metal pendant at the neck which held a chip of emerald, and a similar but jewelless piece of metal down at the lower hem.

“It’s breezy enough to feel like you’re barely wearing anything,” Sara explained, “but since I know that’s not good enough for a proper nudist—”

Chona’s coughs redoubled.

“—it can just be rolled up like this.”

With a few quick spins Sara wrung the silk cloth up like a dishrag, turning the shirt into a thin band that very closely resembled the chest wraps Chona preferred. With a quick pinch of her fingers and a quiet click, Sara joined the two metal beads joined together, then released the garment, showing the way it held its new, much thinner shape.

“Nothing enchanted or anything like that, if you were wondering what the emerald’s about,” Sara said. “That’s just there because it looks nice. It’s actually a lot smaller than it looks. A curved bit of glass is kinda magnifying a small chip of emerald that one of the practicing artificers accidentally broke off of a light gemstone. The illusion of it being all nice and big is kinda ruined if you let the emerald stop glowing, though, so don’t keep it locked up for too long or something.”

Finally recovering herself, Chona straightened, reluctantly accepting the shirt-turned-wrap. Rolling it around in her hands to feel the material, Chona, voice a touch husky from her coughing fit, asked, “How does it stay in this shape all the way around when I wear it? Shouldn’t the back fall down?”

Sara shrugged. “I dunno. Turns out there’s a surprisingly high-Leveled seamstress that stuck around when Old Tulian fell. I told her to put two clips on it, front and back, but she said she didn’t need to. I figure it’s some Skill bullshit. Pretty neat, right?”

“R-right,” Chona stuttered, unclipping the bead. The shirt revealed itself with a quiet, silky rustle. She turned it around, looking at it from different angles a few times, then finally looked up at Sara. “Um. What did you call me…?”

“A nudist,” Sara repeated, her tone mercilessly direct. “You don’t want to wear any clothes, ever, right?”

“Y-yeah. But, like, doesn’t everyone—”

“Nope.”

“O-oh.” She swallowed, then tucked the shirt under an arm. “I guess I’m just wondering… why?”

“Why I gave both of you gifts?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want the political answer or the real answer?”

“Political,” Tinvel quickly blurted. He’d already been thinking this was some kind of trap, the sign of an impending assignment as foreign dignitaries or something equally awful.

“You’re both major commanders of the Tulian Air Force,” Sara plainly stated, gesturing at their Fulleye, “and you’re the only crew currently capable of long-range navigation. You’ve already been called on to make contact with one representative of a major foreign power, and with my upcoming return to the Empire being more widely known, you’re going to be seen by a lot of people. I need you both looking respectable, reflecting the values of Tulian. Simple, practical, but well-made clothing is one way to achieve that.”

“Okay,” Chona said, clutching the silken shirt, “but what’s the real reason?”

Sara grinned dangerously at Chona, as if referencing some hidden joke.

“I was tired of looking at Tinvel’s ugly-ass jacket and woulda felt bad if I didn’t get you something, too.”

As Chona’s uproarious laughter returned, Tinvel hurriedly shucked on his new jacket and began clambering back up to the cockpit, squeezing himself into the extra-cramped cockpit. Reaching forward to check a crystal and feeling the jacket’s luxuriously soft wool slide over his skin, he cursed inwardly.

Shit. It really is way better.

Leaning to one side, he found the flight cap in a pocket and slipped it onto his head, securing it snugly over his head. The attached goggles were crystal-clear, unobstructing to his vision, and when he turned the rearview mirror to look at himself, his regular, un-magnified eyes stared back at him.

He sighed irritably.

These are better, too. This sucks.

“We should get going,” he called down. “We’re too overloaded to have any margin of error. If we want to reach our first landing zone before dark, we need to be in the air soon.”

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Sara Brown

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She spent most of the flight back to the Imperial Army sleeping. It took a special kind of tired to fall asleep as the third person crammed into a cockpit meant for two, but she was definitely there. With the harness strapped over her and knees halfway tucked to her chest, Sara used her helmet to block most of the wind, forehead limp against the wooden rim of the bathtub-shaped cockpit. Though the wool arming cap padding her helmet kept her from getting brained by frequent bursts of turbulence, it did nothing for the rattle of steel or the clank of the engine.

She slept anyway.

After having so much difficulty finding clear stretches of road to land on during their original flight out, Tinvel and Chona had chosen to reattach the pontoons to use the Empire’s rivers as landing strips, freeing them to take a much more direct course to their destination, which came with the convenient side effect of requiring far fewer griffons to aid in their navigation. With the central engine geode requiring replacement every two hours or so, the riskier landings were more than worth it. Using the rivers also meant that they could have, if they wished, arrive in a day and a half of flying instead of the full two days it had taken them before.

That was an advantage they didn’t take up. Sara had ordered them to adjust their schedule. She wanted to arrive over the Imperial Army in the dead of night, not broad daylight. Tinvel and Chona didn’t think much of it at first, figuring she was playing it careful, unwilling to risk the lengthy stay involved with recharging the geodes, or worse, relying on an Imperial Griffon for transport. But as they drew closer and closer to their destination and Sara kept telling Tinvel to slow down, to the point that they were curving lazy S’s over the landscape, they began to wonder.

She still didn’t answer.

A full night’s sleep had been good for Sara. The isolation from her family, both her wives and her dad, was less welcome, but it was proving useful. She had fewer distractions, nothing productive to do. Absolutely not worth being away from Evie, Hurlish, and Tahn, true, but still, it was helpful. She’d been giving a lot of thought to things she’d had stewing in the back of her mind. Events in Tulian and abroad, in her personal life and professional. Nothing groundbreaking, of course, but… still. She had more time dedicated to simply thinking than ever.

First on her list was Mayaran. An elven mage who could have been living the life of a venerated pseudo-demigod, honored and pampered by every ‘mortal’ creature in a vast Empire, yet had chosen to involve herself in what most elves considered a petty human squabble.

Why?

Sara hadn’t tried particularly hard to find out, but even her half-hearted efforts were more than most dedicated spymasters could muster. Nothing she and Evie had ever looked into had produced a reason for the woman to give a shit about the Imperial civil war. Elven families were universally small, though their agelessness meant Mayaran, an only child, still had nearly a dozen living direct ancestors, each of whom had exactly one sibling. The social-political hierarchy of the elven families had been built over the course of literal millenia into an obscenely complex affair, yet as far as they’d determined, Mayaran’s family was of middling power and influence. Too important to have anything to gain from a family scion distinguishing themselves on some random battlefield, yet not powerful enough to have resources that would be materially affected by the war’s outcome. They lorded over this or that city from behind the scenes, emerging once a decade to pass some inconsequential edict, and then burrowed back into their private estates for another ten or fifteen years.

The primary irregularity with Mayaran was her age. She’d been born after the start of the two-century civil war, growing up alongside the violence. By elven standards, she was young and ignorant, well in what other elves might consider analogous to a teenage rebellious phase. Sara supposed that could have predisposed Mayaran to take an interest in the combat she saw so often as a child, but before the First Imperial Blackpowder Army had captured Ta-Pet, she’d spent the last thirty or so years quietly passing information to her handlers, acting as a socialite spy. Hardly the behavior of an impetuous, hot-blooded youth.

It was only when Sara had come along that Mayaran had chosen to join the army as a combat mage. She’d been training for it, obviously, honing her spellcraft with a martial bent to her magic, but she’d never done anything with it until recently. It was as if Sara’s appearance in the Empire had been the first thing to truly stir her interest in more than a century and a half of life— which did make a degree of sense. Sara was a Chosen, a god-chosen mortal that the Empire hadn’t seen in over a millenia. Mayaran’s interest being piqued was perfectly reasonable.

Not her aggression, though. And that was the crux of the issue. Sara still didn’t understand why the woman was opposing virtually everything she proposed. She was wielding her (admittedly competent) political prowess to work towards nothing more than immature contrarianism, putting herself in front of everything Sara championed. Either openly or behind the scenes, she’d opposed the mass adoption of blackpowder weapons, meritocratic changes to Imperial officer promotions, bureaucratic organizational changes to the army’s magical Healers, the training of those Healers in basic surgical technique, and far, far more. If she was just a bull-headed conservative, well, that would be one thing, but she was clearly more than that. When Sara had off-handedly suggested that the fruits being grown in an Imperial noble’s gardens for aesthetic value be harvested and eaten by the staff before they rotted on the vine, her Blessings had later caught the elf commanding the Noble in question to forbid their staff from even picking any of the fruit. That was just asinine; it literally made the estate look worse, because that particular variety of treefruits rarely dropped to the ground before turning ugly and mushy. It was pettiness, plain and simple.

After spending the better part of the first day of flight chewing on the idea, Sara had decided she didn’t need to figure it out. Mayaran was an obstacle. What’s more, she was now an obstacle who had targeted Evie, using Mui as a tool to do so. In the end, all that really mattered was that she’d promised Evie that she’d “deal with” Mayaran when she got back.

She hadn’t specified what that meant at the time, but that was mostly because she hadn’t yet decided. Sadly, outright killing an Honored Elven wasn’t something Sara could get away with in the Empire, particularly when she’d put so much work into delegitimatizing her Divine authority. Thankfully, an idea had finally crystallized over the long flight.

That was why she currently had Tinvel pushing the Fulleye to its limit, flying higher than it ever had, a stream of campfire-specked road sparkling far, far below. They were well past a hypoxic altitude, and her Blessings were carefully monitoring Tinvel and Chona for symptoms of the giggly drunkenness her dad had told her to watch for.

So far, they were both sober, and for the first time in days, it was quiet in the plane. They were gliding slowly forward, the engine cut, leaving nothing but wind rustling over canvas wings to fill her ears. It was eerier than she’d expected. She could hear the soft squeaks of Tinvel adjusting the control surfaces, greased metal lines slipping forward and back to keep the Fulleye at the correct glide angle. He and Chona weren’t speaking a word, unsure of what Sara was doing, what she expected of them.

She rolled her shoulders several times, feeling out her getup. She was wearing a backpack she’d pulled out of the pontoon crates during their last landing, which required awkwardly cramming her armor into the too-small space it left behind. It felt damn good to be out of the heavy gear; she’d been wearing it through the entire flight, helping assuage Evie’s paranoia that the rebel Empire would intercept their flight. Being back in her usual plain, undyed cloth was nice. She just wished the backpack and its harness was more comfortable.

“Remember,” Sara said, breaking the silence. “Stay gliding for as long as you can before turning the engine on and turning back for a landing. I don’t want people down there knowing I’m back for as long as possible.”

“Yes ma’am,” Tinvel said, making eye contact with her through the rearview mirror. His concern was obvious, even behind his goggles and flight cap. “Are you sure we can’t talk you out of this, ma’am?”

“Pretty sure, yeah,” Sara said. She clapped him on the shoulder. “And remember: if I die, I’ve already told everyone it wasn’t your fault.”

“I don’t think Lady Evie will care about that,” Chona muttered darkly.

Sara shot her a glare. “She will. And don’t call her Lady.”

“Sorry.”

Sara pursed her lips. Chona wasn’t sorry. For a while it had seemed like Evie’s title of ‘Steward of Tulian’ was catching on. In the months since Sara had left Tulian, however, people had begun to revert to old noble titles. Not for anyone else. Only Evie. It was like the general populace of Tulian, no matter how much she stirred their hatred toward nobility, simply couldn’t view Evie as anything other than a Lady. Even Vesta didn’t get the same treatment. Like so many others, it would have been an easy problem to solve if only she had the time to spend on it.

Since she didn’t, Sara tipped her head over the side of the plane, peering down at the snaking, glowing embers. “Think we’re in a good spot?” She asked.

“I don’t even want to try and guess,” Tinvel replied. “And I don’t want to accept any kind of responsibility for guessing, either.”

“Fair enough.”

Sara unbuckled her harness and leaned forward with what little room she had and spun her backpack around, putting it over her stomach. That left only a tightly-packed brown package on her back, thick canvas bands securing it as snugly across her body as was possible. She stuck an experimental hand out into the wind, shivered at the bitter temperature, and then clamped her hand down on the trailing edge of the Fulleye’s upper wing. Canvas buckled under her iron grip, threatening to tear outright. Steeling herself, she lifted herself up out of the seat and onto the wing, now with both hands securing her in place. At thousands of feet and a hundred miles an hour, she was assaulted by an icy wind, one that felt like it was sending frozen needles tearing through her simple jungle clothing.

She looked down. The Imperial Army lay four and a half kilometers below, a snaking field of torches, tents, and the shadows they cast. Tinvel was gliding along the length of the army, his light feathering of the rudder making Sara wobble in place. She could see the landing strip that had been cut out of the jungle specifically for her arrival, a flat-pressed strip of dirt lit with plentiful bonfires, and spent one last moment wondering if it would really be that big of a deal for her to show up where everyone expected her.

Amongst other things, there was a problem with that. Sara had always wanted to go skydiving.

“Well,” she said, shooting her escorts a grin that was a hell of a lot cockier than she felt, “not much point in waiting around is there?”

“Probably—”

She leapt.

The moment her fingers released their crushing grip on the Fulleye, the wind swept her away. She saw a flash of the plane’s tail whipping past, then she was tumbling head over heels, utterly out of control.

A part of Sara wanted to hold off on pulling her chute. To let herself free-fall for as long as possible, rocketing toward the ground with her arms tucked and her head down until she opened the chute just a few hundred feet over the ground, gliding to a stop.

That part of her, according to her dad, was “suicidally stupid.”

Sara hated when he was right.

She jerked the ripcord on her parachute the instant she was clear of the plane. Silk spilled out in a great billowing mass behind her, filling with air rapidly enough to crush her against the harness, her breath stolen from her lungs in an ugly wheeze as her feet swung violently forward and then whipped back, her entire body going along for the ride.

Then the whistling wind silenced itself, replaced by the thudding of her heart and blood rushing through her ears. A surprisingly gentle breeze rustled over her shoulders, thrumming the parachute cables like plucked strings.

She looked down.

This is gonna take for-fucking-ever.

Compared to how she’d always imagined skydiving, Sara was treated to a terribly unmomentous view of the world during her lackadaisical impression of a falling leaf. The glowing dots of campfires and the roaming specks of patrolling soldiers never gained much more definition, they only grew larger and larger as she descended.

And further away.

Ah, shit.

The road ran from northwest to southeast. The wind, on the other hand, was coming solidly from the west, and using a parachute that amounted to no more than a cone of carefully stitched silk, that meant Sara was going with it. Over the jungle.

Ah, fucking shit.

Lit only by starlight, the green canopy only became more than a vague blur when she was a few hundred feet above the tallest branches. With yet another curse, she reached down into her front-slung backpack and fumbled blindly within until, with considerable relief, she felt her knuckles bounce against cool brass. She whipped out the pocket compass her dad had insisted she bring, biting back her frustration at him being right yet again, then flipped it open, pointing it at the army that had, by that point, become nothing more than an amber glow in the distance. She took a quick note of the compass heading before snapping its case closed and putting both hands to her chest, bracing for what was sure to be a comical, crashing impact.

She hit.

Once.

And then rolled, side-on, her face mashing against dew-cooled leaves as the parachute’s thick cables began to wrap around her limbs. She flung an arm out, clawing at a bizarrely textured surface in an effort to find purchase, but there was none. She kept slipping down and down, the angle growing steeper, until suddenly she felt nothing more than empty air under her feet.

Instinct kicked in. Her dagger flew from its sheath and into whatever she was on, only to bounce aside. She tried again, putting far more force into the blow than she should’ve needed. She was using a blacksteel dagger designed to pierce enchanted armor, and it had just bounced off something. That was not supposed to happen. Thankfully, after a grunt of effort as her knees began to dangle, the razor tip of the blade finally pierced through, embedding itself in the strange surface.

She hung there for a moment, breathing hard. For a fleeting moment she had the terrifying idea that she’d not landed on a tree at all, but rather the hide of some colossal jungle animal, but that fear was quickly alleviated when her other hand came up to grasp the spot the dagger had cut a line through, fingers jabbing into a wrist-thick, goo-filled… something. Whatever it was, she could feel open air on the other side, not the muscle or viscera of an angry monster. It reminded her of aloe vera, almost, though it was much stickier.

Using her dagger as a focus, she cast a simple illusion, summoning a ball of light above and behind her head, using it like a headlamp. Careful to keep a tight hold on the dagger, she looked down.

“Oh, fuck that.”

A dozen pairs of glittering yellow eyes were illuminated by her magical headlights, belonging to scaled, quadrupedal bodies crouched low like wolves some sixty feet below. The animals were completely frozen, their chests barely rising and falling.

With a silky rustle, her parachute slipped past her to the left, coming down to dangle in the open air. It drooped over a collection of tree limbs, catching and stabbed through in some places by arm-length thorns that had been invisible in the darkness.

The yellow-eyed motherfuckers were still looking at her. The parachute’s fall hadn’t made them flinch at all. With a bit of mental willpower, she intensified her illusion, creating a blinding column of light that came crashing down on them from on high.

Several of them blinked as their pupils dilated. One licked its lips.

“Don’t like that,” Sara grunted, taking a bundle of parachute cables in the hand that wasn’t holding her dagger.

She tore her dagger free, letting herself fall another twenty feet or so before the cables in her hand jerked taut, arresting her fall once more. It gave her one hell of a rope burn, but she didn’t drop anything.

The creatures were still staring. Watching. Another one licked its lips. For the first time, Sara felt something tickling at her Blessings. Not her combat ones; the social ones. Animals weren’t supposed to set those off. They hadn’t before. But these things were, just barely, by the slimmest margins, smart enough to give her divine instincts a hint at their thoughts. More than animals, less than people, they had just enough intelligence to possess thoughts she could recognize.

They were hungry.

And very, very willing to fight for their meal.

“Oh yeah,” she muttered, carefully replacing her dagger with a cryslock pistol, “absolutely, totally fuck you guys.”

Cautiously, she let the cables slip through her hands, letting herself descend at a snail’s pace. The sorta-animals crept inward, stares unbroken, closing the circle around their dangling prey.

Until the biggest one’s head inverted, bone and brain painting the underside of jungle foliage according to the whims of a supersonic half-inch lead ball. Though its thunder was hideously loud, the shot’s echo was eaten by the jungle, leaving an immediate silence.

The entire pack scattered with a rustle of leaves, disappearing in the blink of an eye. Sara let herself fall the rest of the way, until she finally was dangling directly from her parachute harness.

One of the creatures reappeared. It glanced up at her. Hissed. Then took the hind leg of its dead friend into its jaws and skittered backward as fast as it was able, leaving a trail of blood as it disappeared into the darkness.

“Fucking jungle,” Sara grunted. She reached up to cut her harness free, then thought better of it, pausing to reload her cryslock pistol beforehand. Compared to her usual arsenal, she was underarmed. Just her dagger, sword, and a single pistol. No armor, just her clothes.

She’d imagined landing just outside the camping army, crashing through the foliage with torches still in sight. Not a… what was it? Quarter mile, a half mile?

Should probably be using Dad’s new units, she chastised herself. So that’s…

Far, she calculated. Farther than I wanted.

With her gun reloaded and no further sign of the creatures, she swiped her dagger through the parachute cables.

She hit the ground twenty feet below, absorbing the impact with bent knees. She let out a low breath, stretching—

The head of a viper emerged into her illusory headlight, mouth wide and fangs gleaming. She was fast, far faster than she’d once imagined possible, but she still barely fell backward and swung her dagger up in time to decapitate the animal, sending its head flying over her shoulder. The fat coil of its body slapped against her chest, still writhing, its feet clutching at her clothes—

Fucking feet?!

She ripped the decapitated body off herself, flinging it into a tree trunk hard enough for it to burst like overripe fruit. Then she spun around and stabbed her dagger down, skewering the motionless head that had landed on the ground behind her.

Snakes shouldn’t have fucking feet! She barely stopped herself from shouting the thought aloud. She could still feel phantom claws clutching her shirt. Shuddering, she lifted her dagger, using the tip of her steel-toed boot to nudge the snake-thing’s head off the blade.

As she stood, she saw pairs of yellow eyes appearing in the darkness, staring at her.

This time, she didn’t hesitate. With a quickdraw that would have made Evie proud, Sara put a bullet between the closest pair of eyes. With another echoless boom, a pair of yellow orbs went flying in opposite directions.

The creatures retreated. As they went, Sara’s Blessings caught a better… impression, maybe, was the word for what she felt from them. They didn’t operate on the same axis as the creatures her Blessings were meant to analyze. But she did figure out a few things.

They were glad the pack was smaller. They’d had too many mouths to feed for too long. Now they had two meals and a third in sight.

Sara began loading her pistol faster.

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