A Perverted Path to Victory

Mui Thom

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“Gods, I’ve been waiting for this,” Sara groaned, stretching her long arms down to touch her toes. She held the pose for a few seconds, then stood, grinning toothily at Mui. “You sure you want to come along?”

“I am,” he confirmed, a lead ball thumping into the base of his rifle-musket. “You’ve said before that the Powdered Lead doesn’t have anyone of my skill, no?”

The whistling shriek of cannonballs passing some fifty or sixty feet above their heads caused Evie, Sara, and Mui to duck for a moment, instinct telling them to seek shelter, no matter how logically they knew it didn’t matter. An instant later, there was a sharp, echoing ks-shh! of crashing cannonballs striking the Keep’s enchanted stone walls. Mui didn’t bother to smooth down his unnerved fur. He wasn’t ashamed of that. No one could see the effect of an artillery barrage and regard it with mere stoicism. The weapons were utterly terrifying.

Their trio was sheltering in a presently abandoned home some few hundred feet away from the city center. The room’s walls were cluttered by what Mui, having spent enough time around Sara and thus the elite of society, recognized as a very thin veneer of wealth. Faded tapestries were draped over mirrors of polished bronze, quartz crystals ensconced in wrought iron cages serving to light a long, wide dining table. At least that had been their purpose before Evie had knocked them off the table and dragged the table up to press against a window’s frame. She was now laying down atop the wood, her telescope peeking through drawn curtains. Sara was leaning against the wall near her wife, occasionally sneaking a glance through the window herself, though she’d only begun relaxing after she’d finished robbing the room of anything remotely expensive. Lit from within by glowing gemstones, the clanking of a bag of silverware she’d looted was muffled by a collection of finely-tailored clothing and bedding linens. The cost of what she’d stolen couldn’t have been more than a fraction of the Powdered Lead’s daily expenses, yet she’d taken it anyway, gleefully vindictive as she did so.

Mui finished loading his Hot Rifle and handed it to Evie, who accepted it without looking. She positioned herself so the barest sliver of the barrel was aligned with the thin gap in the curtains, one eye closed, the pupil of her other narrowed to a focused slit.

“Sure, you’re pretty good compared to most,” Sara shrugged as she spoke to Mui. “Doesn’t mean you need to take the risk of coming along with us. We’ve got it pretty well handled.”

“Don’t discourage him, dear,” Evie muttered, her voice low and toneless as the muzzle of her musket slowly swept from left to right. “He shows promise with a spear, enough so that none of our mercenaries are his equal. Though he may not be an asset for defeating enemy Warriors, he is still valuable as a bodyguard.”

Sara sighed. “Evie. You’re not going to win any friends over by calling them a ‘valuable asset’ right to their face.”

“You often tell me that honesty is important when dealing with those that are closer than mere allies, dear.”

“You can be honest without sounding like a dickhead.”

“I don’t mind,” Mui said. “Though I do question if it’s true that your mercenaries are as inferior as you claim. They’ve performed well in every battle thus far.”

“That’s because they’ve got better guns and better training than anyone in the Imperial Army.”

“Indeed,” Evie said. “By our estimations, Mui, even the most prodigiously accomplished of the Powdered Lead have only reached their third Level in a combat Class, and even then those individuals are gaining Skills more comparable to those of an archer than a line combatant like yourself. I am certain that you could handedly defeat any of them in single combat.”

“Then why object to my presence?”

“That is a good question.” Evie’s tail flicked beneath her cloak, the lump making a vague gesture in Sara’s direction. “Why do you keep offering him the chance to back out of the coming battle?”

With a frustrated huff, Sara heaved herself off the wall. The wooden boards she’d been leaning against audibly cracked as they were relieved of her armored weight.

“I’m not trying to convince you to pussy out, Mui. I’m just saying that you don’t have to come with us. We’ve got this handled.”

“Do you?” Mui asked. “You are assaulting a Keep with several hundred soldiers—”

The rifle in Evie’s hands bucked with a tumultuous crack. Evie rolled to one side, out of sight from any return fire— though he could hardly imagine what might threaten her at such a distance— and held the rifle-musket out to Mui.

“Whatever the number facing us, it is now one less,” she said matter-of-factly. The only sign that she meant the comment humorously was her tail wriggling playfully against her rain cloak.

“Regardless.” Mui took the rifle from her and began to obediently reload. “You are going into a fight that I’m capable of helping with. I didn’t join the army to avoid battle. I want my homeland’s war to end.”

“If you’re sure.” Sara checked her scabbard’s fit on her belt, making sure it was well-secured. “Since Evie and I were planning to go in mostly alone, though, I’ve gotta ask you: can you keep a secret?”

Mui blanched, ears flattening. “A normal secret? Yes, of course. But I don’t think you have many normal secrets.” He handed the loaded rifle-musket back to Evie, who began scanning for another target.

“Being committed to taking the Keep ourselves means we might end up needing to use some gear most people aren’t allowed to see,” Sara explained. “If General Borek asked you to explain what was up with Evie’s pistol, would you tell him the truth?”

“I thought you said you weren’t going to pit me against him.”

“I’m not. I’m specifically asking you the question so I can avoid putting you in an awkward situation.”

Mui sighed, palm stroking along the top of his muzzle. “I can’t see how it would ever come up, Sara. General Borek stopped asking me for reports on you quite a long time ago.”

“Still, though. Would you tell him if he asked?”

Mui considered the question. It wasn’t an easy one. General Borek was a powerful, important man, one who had done great deeds for the rightful Empire. Yet this was a Chosen that was asking him to keep a secret. All his life, Mui had been told that the only individuals closer to the gods than Emperor Aydrion and the Honored Elven were the legendary Chosens. Having now met one personally he sincerely doubted the uniformity of their piety, but Sara’s unique personality meant little to well-established religious dogma. If he listened to the priests, he should follow Sara’s orders not just over those of General Borek, but over the Emperor himself. Yet if he followed the lessons that had been drilled into him through countless battles and years of training, his loyalty should lie with his commanding officers alone.

And then there is the matter of self-interest.

The rifle in Evie’s hand cracked yet again. He saw nothing of the shot’s path, but was certain a body had just hit the ground.

Betraying Sara’s trust felt ill-advised, to say the least.

“I will try to keep it a secret,” Mui decided. “If General Borek asks after whatever these secrets are, I will tell him with as much certainty as I can muster that my revealing them would be a terrible mistake. If he presses, however, I don’t think I could allow myself to betray my oaths of loyalty.”

“Eh, good enough for me.” Sara grabbed Evie’s shoulder and rolled the woman over. Pliant as ever, Evie didn’t put up the faintest resistance as her wife handled her like a farmer did their livestock. As Sara pulled the massive chest-mounted pistol from her holster, Evie stared up with a frown.

“I don’t believe that is good enough, dear. Our military advantage is predicated on the surprise our enemies will experience when faced by powerful weaponry. Allowing anyone to know of them is a risk, much less someone who has admitted he will give up the secret if he views it necessary.”

“Nah, it’s fine.” Sara twirled the pistol on her finger, leaving it as a difficult-to-discern blur. “If the Imperials want to find out what Mui knows that bad, Evie, they’d just torture him. Promising not to tell anyone unless he’s forced to is basically the same as saying he’d never do it.”

“You think they would torture me for this?”

Sara snorted. “You work for a giant fuckin’ empire, Mui. There are people out there that would torture you for fun if they thought they could get away with it, and a lot of them could. General Borek isn’t that type, but some of the people in charge of him are. If you know something they’re curious about, you’re gonna end up spilling your guts.”

His whiskers twitched. “You’re not doing a good job of convincing me to learn.”

“If suffering torture is your concern, I’m afraid that it hardly matters now,” Evie said. “You have been publicly associated with a Chosen. Should you fall into the clutches of our enemies, you will be tortured to learn even the most trivial of information. No matter how much you profess your ignorance, the torture will continue until you are either dead or have entered such delirium that you create fictitious tales of my wife’s secrets. Likely the latter. That is why torture is so ineffective.”

“Ah.”

Still spinning the pistol on a finger, Sara smiled apologetically at him. “Sorry for getting you wrapped up in this bullshit. Since it’s too late to back out, I figured I’d at least give you a choice on getting dragged deeper.”

He sighed. Though he’d been reassured by their earlier conversation before entering the city, he still hadn’t entirely made his mind up about his relationship with Sara. Somehow this dangerous information felt plain compared to that fraught situation.

“Fine,” he said, drawing himself up. “What is so special about this gun?”

The twirling weapon jerked to a stop, hilt slapping into Sara’s palm. She twisted her wrist this way and that, allowing him to see its faces.

Mui’s first impression was that it was almost as alien to common pistols as those firearms had been to a crossbow. Nearly a foot and a half long from the tip of its barrel to the rear of its grip, it was a truly gargantuan weapon, visibly oversized even in Sara’s thick gauntlet. That it was made of blacksteel told him the thing was absurdly expensive, one of the few possessions he’d seen with Sara’s family that was truly befitting her status as a Chosen. Where other pistols’ wooden grip smoothly transitioned into the firing mechanism and barrel, this one was interrupted by a thick, engraved cylinder, faint rune etchings visible when the light hit them at the right angle. Though strange, as he was allowed to expect it for longer and longer, he did begin to notice subtle commonalities with other pistols. The sights were similarly designed for example, with two rear prongs and and a forward piece, and it naturally sported the maker’s mark of Hurlish of Tulian, a circular HoT brand burned into the lacquered wooden grip. Its crystal-tipped hammer was similar to the cryslock pistols Hurlish sold to Imperial officers, but was smaller and better-fit to the mechanism. Perhaps if he’d been more familiar with firearms and their construction he could have understood the purposes of its oddities. As it was, he found himself at a loss.

“What is unique about it?” He asked. “It certainly seems different, but…”

Sara opened her mouth to answer, then cocked her head, eyes distant. Then she flipped the gun in her hand and offered it back to Evie.

“How about you go show him?” She said to her wife. “Four Warriors are stacking up on the door downstairs. They’re gonna try and break in to take us by surprise.”

“How unfortunate for them.” Evie gracefully slid off the table, accepting the pistol from Sara. It looked even more massive in the diminutive Feline’s hand. She padded across the room in near silence, speaking to Mui without looking back. “Come with me. No need to draw your weapon. I strive to avoid leaving surviving witnesses of Tulian’s military secrets, and this will be no exception.”

Mui hurried after her. Evie came to a stop at the top of the home’s stairs, which were in sight of the door.

Evie lifted the massive chunk of blacksteel in a single hand, hips turned ninety degrees aside, her body in line with her extended arm. Taking a place behind and to her right, he unsheathed his sword.

“I told you that there was no need to draw your weapon.”

“Consider me overly cautious, then.”

“An admirable enough quality, I suppose. My wife does praise soldiers who disobey foolish orders.”

Mui stared at the door, waiting. Made of a thick, aged wood, it left no sign of the waiting intruders Sara had somehow detected. Evie kept her pistol leveled, her breathing steady. Mui shifted his feet, adjusting his stance to best counter a rush up the stairs. No matter how powerful the weapon, unless the enemy was kind enough to sprint into the room so that a single shot could pierce them all through, he didn’t see how—

The door creaked.

With a concussion against his left cheek akin to the impact of a mace, a high-pitched whine replaced the tense silence in Mui’s ears. A haze of smoke filled the air, sparks of half-burnt powder lighting the dim stairway.

With a hole piercing it through, the door was shoved open by the thumping collapse of a slack body. A second figure burst through an instant later, leaping over their fallen comrade with a spear raised high.

Evie’s thumb, resting against the hammer of her pistol, pushed down. The cylinder spun in turn, and then her finger twitched on the trigger.

The second assailant dropped dead with their legs still astride their comrade’s corpse, a ragged hole torn in the armor directly over their heart. The two figures who were halfway through the doorframe reacted almost instantly, leaping back out of sight. Beneath the aching ring in his ears, Mui thought he heard them cursing.

Evie’s aim drifted right. She pulled the trigger again.

A half-inch pellet of lead tore wooden chunks from the wall, allowing a tiny dot of light to shine into the foyer. A forearm fell into view of the open doorway, blood-specked fingernails twitching spastically.

Evie’s aim went left as her thumb pulled the hammer back for the third time, only for her ears to twitch. Barely a second had passed. Before Mui had even finished taking his first gasp of surprise, Evie leapt from the top of the stairs, free arm extended. She flew down a thirty foot gap in a blur, passing through the doorway in such a way that the claws of her left hand dug into the wood, hooking her around in a violent turn. Out of sight from Mui but hardly any quieter for it, there was a fourth and final gunshot. Steel armor clattered as someone collapsed.

It was over. The only sound left was the painful screech still reverberating in his skull.

Evie appeared in the doorway, tiny specks of blood splashed across the front of her rain cloak. Smoking pistol in her right hand, the armored gorget of a dead woman in her left. Dragging them inside, she tossed the Warrior’s corpse atop the others. Glancing down to the figure she’d shot through the wall, who Mui could still only see the arm of, she pursed her lips. Her rapier appeared in her hand with a flash as she flicked it sideways. The tip found a narrow gap in their armor. Bright crimson gushed onto the stones like a fountain, surging to a panicked heartbeat. Each spurt of lifeblood was less forceful than the previous, and then it stopped entirely.

After confirming that the other three were also dead, Evie stepped inside and began to reload her pistol, one ear turned to Mui.

“I have two more shots I could have fired should it have proved necessary.” It was a casual, almost off-handed remark. “Thankfully, it’s clear that the element of surprise remains firmly on our side. They had no concept of what we are capable of. This weapon, a revolver, is not one that Tulian has sold or exported to anyone. They are offered only to our most elite soldiers, and even then, only rarely. Fewer than twenty exist in the world, and most are experimental pieces unsuited for battle. At present, only six have seen genuine combat.”

Mui had to rub his ears hard before he felt confident in responding. The blast of the gun fired so near to him had more closely resembled the detonation of a cannon than it had any common rifle-musket. His head ached something fierce.

“They must be frightfully difficult to produce, then,” he managed to rasp. He was surprised to find his throat had gone dry. “Such a weapon in the hands of every soldier would win nearly any war.”

“They’re more difficult to produce than simpler pistols, yes.” Evie turned one of the corpses over, pulling their sword from its sheath. Finding the blade unenchanted, she tossed it aside. “But there will come a time when even this pistol is laughably obsolete. If our industrial projections are correct, I will be forced to either have it altered considerably or consign it to a display shelf within the next five years or so.”

“Five?”

“Ten, if our most pessimistic estimations are to be believed.” Finishing her inspection of the first corpse, Evie stood with her hand in a crushing grip around its bloody neck, then tossed it into a nearby room. She knelt to inspect the next body, train of thought unbroken. “I’m sure that we will be able to offer you one sooner or later, but as it is, the probability of your capture is too high. Even after it is discovered that Tulian is capable of producing basic repeating firearms, we anticipate that foreign attempts to copy them will be primitive and inelegant. This pistol, the Colt Walker, was the child of nearly fifteen years of progressive development by the most talented gunsmith on the face of another world. It is unlikely that Sporatos or the Empire will find their own Samuel Colt for quite some time.”

Mui nodded absentmindedly, feeling rather light-headed. This day had been a mess. Mutual apologies, a Chosen declaring that they would have a very physical form of friendship accompanied by brutal truths about his apparent unimportance, and now he’d suffered a peek into a future he never could have fathomed.

It’s truly a wonder that I don’t regret my entanglement with Sara.

Sara appeared at the top of the stairs beside Mui, her bag of loot clanking noisily over her shoulder. “Alright, Evie. The Napoleons finished cracking open the wall. You ready to go?”

“Yes,” she said, wiping bloodied hands on her cloak as she stood. “Have you learned anything more about our opponents?”

“Not really. I’m still betting they’re halfway motivated by some cultists, though.”

“Cultists?” Mui asked.

“Yeah. The one’s following that bastard of a tenth god that’s been pestering me,” Sara replied, rummaging through her bag. “Same group that General Borek has been asking me to root out in the cities we capture, remember? I really don’t give a shit about them, but they keep showing up to try and screw me over, and I’m betting that’s what’s happening here.”

“From your stories, they are rather formidable opponents. Should we be concerned?”

“Nah. If any of their heavy hitters were here, they wouldn’t bother convincing a bunch of nobodies to hole up in that Keep.”

“If you do see an individual wearing a wooden mask, however,” Evie said, “do not attempt to fight them yourself. Even the weaker cultists are most certainly a lethal threat.”

He nodded. “Avoid anyone in a wooden mask. Simple enough.”

“Good,” Sara said. She began stomping down the stairs, the boards creaking under every footfall. He trailed after her. “Also, in case you were wondering, Evie’s in charge from here on out, Not me. If you get conflicting orders, follow hers.”

Mui blinked. “Why? I thought you hated command duties, Evie.”

“I do.” The exotic Feline was inspecting her blacksteel pistol, using a handkerchief to dust excess powder off the face of the heavy cylinder. “However, there are exceptions. I was personally trained by Master Graf Urs of the Night’s Eye to become the commander of an Irregular squad— Warriors, in your military parlance. It is the only role in which I can be confident of my skill.”

“Don’t bring up the fact that she’s been in command plenty of times.” Sara’s voice rang unnaturally in his ears, cast across the room from her unmoving lips. “She’s got plenty of shit she needs to work out on that topic, trust me. I’m taking it slow.”

Mui wished he could ask a question back to Sara. Just a short while ago, the woman had instructed Evie to take charge of the cannons to give them orders if an unexpected difficulty occurred. Surely Evie would have realized that there was no difference from being in position to give orders and actually being in command?

No, he decided at nearly the same moment the question came to him. No, Sara gave her a job to do, she obeyed, and she gave it no further thought than that.

After rubbing his nose against an arm to pretend the cause of his delayed response was nothing more than an irritating itch, Mui nodded.

“Alright. You are in command, Evie. What is the plan?”

“In short? Our successful capture of the Keep is a secondary priority. Our main objective is to provide my wife ample opportunity to gain combat experience.” She summoned her rapier and brought it close to her face, inspecting its flawless edge. “Every Level gained by my wife is one that keeps our entire family safe. Further, she needs more practice in engaging in fights against your Imperial Warriors. She has spent too long fighting hapless chaff or gunning down superior opponents at a distance.”

“And,” Sara added jovially, “I really need to work off some steam. My dad wants me to try rubbing elbows with the fancy fucks in this Empire, and if I’m gonna do that, I need to keep a cool head. This should wear me out.”

Sara pulled her blacksteel blade from its sheath, giving it a hard forward flick. With an audible click as it transformed, the greatsword revealed its full five-foot length. From pommel to razor tip, it was nearly as long as Evie was tall. Sara smiled as she gave it a spin, then began stomping toward the door. Evie followed after her, grey cloak slipping comfortably into the woman’s shadow. She looked over her shoulder at Mui.

“So long as Sara and her armor absorb the bulk of the enemy’s attention, our roles will be simple. Are you familiar with the principle of a Warrior in Being? No? I will explain.”

Sara’s magical voice echoed in his ears alongside a dull chuckle.

“Good luck, buddy. Hope you can pay attention.”

Evie took a concerningly deep breath, her attention turning inward. Mui got the odd, inexplicable sense that he should duck for cover. Then she began to speak.

“In her text on the tactical combat experiences of coastal assaults led by Carrion Marine Irregulars during the third succession crisis of the northern fiefdoms, Captain-General Windgauge drew inspiration from the naval principle of a Fleet in Being, a stratagem intended to allow a numerically inferior force to occupy the attention of an outsized proportion of their opponents through strategic placement of assets along a contested coastline— and within the bounds of her text a coastline is analogous to the frontline of a single battle— by the inferior force distributing itself over a large enough area in clusters sizeable enough that any single breakout would be a threat to the enemy’s civilian shipping— analogous to the rear area of a battlefield, such as the baggage train and other noncombatants— but in this coming conflict I believe it would be better compared to the ill-trained that will likely be sheltered deeper within the Keep. If one follows the analogy, it should therefore be obvious to even the casual observer that…”

Mui’s head swam, drowning under the endlessly droning explanation Evie was spitting as rapidly as possible. He tried his level best to comprehend what she was saying, but it was as if she’d begun speaking in a language even more foreign than her native tongue.

“Basically,” Sara’s voice slid magically into his ears, “stay far enough back that you don’t get too involved in the fight, but keep close enough that the enemy’s too worried about you to jump me all at once.”

As they turned down an abandoned street and stepped out of the cover of awnings into the day’s light rain, Mui caught Sara’s eye, giving her an appreciative nod. Her eyes twinkled for a brief moment, and then her expression firmed.

“Alright. Let’s go.”

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The Imperial Keep had been utterly broken. That was the only word to describe what faced Mui when he finally saw the smoking ruins of its once-mighty walls. A broken, shattered structure. During his time in the army, Mui had traveled past enchanted Keeps which had been built in centuries or millennia past. They had all, without exception, been in better condition than this Keep.

The front gate was gone. Absent. The only sign that it had ever existed was a smattering of kindling across the stones, slivers of wooden beams resting in the ditches dug by bouncing cannonballs.

In fact, he could only roughly guess where the old gate had once stood. Some Warrior-Poet might have spun a fanciful tale of the Keep’s northern face standing bravely in the face of a withering barrage, holding strong until the very earth had been dug out from under it, but any who’d actually witnessed the scene would have laughed in that poet’s face. If the stone bricks had the mind to care for their fate and the legs to move themselves, he had no doubt that they would have fled at the first shot.

Dozens of trenches had been dug in parallel lines before the base of the wall, upward-curving trajectories sending cannonballs bouncing right into the bottom of the wall. He was no scholar, but he could calculate this much. Ten cannons, each firing a twelve-pound slug three times a minute, every minute, for an hour. That meant two thousand pounds of iron had been sent into the Keep’s walls, every last one impacting at a speed beyond that of sound itself. The Powdered Lead’s artillerists had been characteristically perfect: there was no evidence of a shot landing more than twenty paces away from the center of the gate. All that remained of the Keep across the forty pace gap that had resulted were piles of jumbled rubble, the upper levels of the wall crashing down when their legs had been cut out from beneath them.

“Dissapointing,” Evie noted. She was standing directly behind Sara, using her wife as crossbowmen did a pavise. They were standing some two hundred paces down the road from the Keep, in plain sight of those who were peaking their head above the rubble, and it wasn’t out of the question that an archer could try to manage a lucky shot. Evie was frowning. “It seems Imperial fortification efforts are even more primitive than we anticipated. An inconclusive test.”

“Or our cannons are that good,” Sara said. She raised both hands over her head, groaning as she stretched. She dropped her arms, shaking them out. “Hurlish did make some of them herself, remember.”

“Of course I remember. But I still find it hard to envision that any half-decent Sporaton castle would fare as poorly as this Keep.”

“It was built to fend off beasts, not armies,” Mui interjected, feeling an urge to defend his countrymen’s work. “The artificers who worked on this place had no intention of fending off an attack like this.”

“Pretty sure there’s only two places in the world designed to bounce cannonballs,” Sara said, “and they’re both in Tulian. Any flat-faced wall like this is gonna get fucked up by cannonballs, no matter how enchanted it is. Fancying up the magic only changes how much powder we have to burn to knock it down.”

Sara took a few steps forward, bouncing on the balls of her feet. She turned to look back at Mui, staring at him through the three thin, ragged slits cut horizontally across the face of her helmet. She shouldn’t have been able to see much of anything through it, but he’d never seen her so much as stumble.

“You ready?”

“From what I understand of the plan, my readiness hardly matters at all.”

“Nonsense,” Evie sniffed. “You will be a useful distraction.” She nodded forward. “Go on, dear. We will catch up.”

“One second.” Sara took a deep breath. When Mui saw Evie wince and cover her ears, he did the same.

“OCCUPANTS OF TA-TOMO’S KEEP!” The rainwater puddles around Sara’s feet shook from the force of her shout, droplets leaping in erratic splashing sprays. Even with his fingers jammed deep in his ears, Mui felt a sharp stab of pain from the uncompromising force of it. “You have been lied to by a cult! You stand against a Chosen! Your deaths are inevitable! This is your last chance to surrender peacefully!”

Silence. Apparently, the Chosen of Emotion needed no more answer than that. She teetered forward like a collapsing tower, caught herself with one foot, and then she was into the sprint.

It was a hideously intimidating sight. Mui had seen his fair share of Warriors in the throes of battle, had even been face-to-face with some and barely survived the encounter, and he still found himself taken aback by Sara’s brutal gait. Her armor was black and grey, the colors of raw slate, and every footfall sent a brutal clash of metal echoing through the streets, puddles of water bursting into mist as she shot through them. Her blade was long and solid, unadorned, and she treated it like the nigh-invincible blacksteel it was. She didn’t bother to lift it off the ground as she ran, instead letting it bounce and scrape over the stones, throwing sparks that hissed when they landed on the rainy ground. Her speed continued to build and build, until the mortar of the cobblestones were shattering under every step, and then further still, until she brought her sword up in a hand and began pumping her arms, a dead sprint that sounded more like the chugging crash of Tulian steam machinery than it did any living creature.

The peeking faces hidden behind the rubble cried out to one another, waving and pointing. Archers appeared from behind, arrows already knocked to their strings.

Sara laughed.

“We go.”

With that as his only warning, Evie’s cloak blurred forward, leaving him following after her like a clumsy child. His sweat-soaked palms kept his shield in his left hand, officer’s sword in his right. His armor wasn’t half as fine as Sara’s, open in many places, but that didn’t matter.

The archers knew who the real threat was.

Sara raised one hand to cover the slits of her visor, heavy gauntlet turned so the back of her hand faced the enemy. He caught the distant shout of “Loose!” from the enemy commander, and then the air was filled with steel-tipped arrows.

As could be expected of archers born and raised in a frontier city, not a single arrow missed its target. Dozens of steel arrowheads clattered against Sara’s armor, striking her head, neck, chest, and legs. There was a spray of wood around the woman, the noise of snapping briefly reminding him of a popping fireplace.

Sara laughed again.

Though they’d begun drawing their bows taut again, it was the only volley the archers would manage to get. Sara reached the front of the Keep just as they raised their bows, her feet coming together for a half-instant’s crouch, only to extend outward, sending her skyward, arms flailing.

The front row of soldiers tried to raise their spears. Too late. She sailed straight over them, landing amongst the archers.

Blood joined the raindrops. Her sword whipped from left to right in a formless blur, entrails flung in its wake. Men and women began to scream in a panic, calling for reinforcements, but their voices died in short order.

Ahead of him, Evie reached the rubble. Whereas Sara had flown entirely over it, she shot across the terrain with nimble, tapping footfalls, carrying herself as if she hadn’t even noticed the twisting debris.

The line of spears, halfway through turning to reinforce the dying archers, didn’t see her coming.

Evie killed them.

Her rapier barely wet itself on their blood. It slid tip-first into the black voids of pupils. Its razor edge scraped through the exposed ridges of vertebrae at the base of the neck. Those she attacked died silently, ignorant, unable to warn anyone of her presence.

And then she was moving away. Up and to the left, scaling the rubble in leaps and bounds. She scrambled up dozens of feet to the wall’s parapet in a handful of heartbeats, drawing one of her cryslock pistols even as she climbed.

Though her sword was wet with the deaths of twenty men and women, the first any knew of her presence was the echoing crack of a gunshot from on high. A man amongst the spearmen who’d been wearing more armor than his fellows died unceremoniously, a bullet passing cleanly through the hollow of his throat. Startled into a panic, only then realizing that the corpses of their friends littered the ground around them, they turned to face Evie.

Mui reached the rubble.

The iron-banded ridge of his shield took a woman in the flank, ribs snapping under the impact. He jabbed upward with his officer’s sword, taking her in the neck, and then he rolled off of her as she fell, raising his sword like an axe as he prepared to rain down blows.

The spearmen were in utter disarray. Some continued on toward Sara, trying in vain to help save the few archers that remained, while a sizeable chunk of them took cover from Evie, who had already drawn and fired a second cryslock pistol from her belt. Those few who remained near the rubble focused on Mui, raising their spears in the side guard, hafts resting against the right edge of their shields.

They were inexperienced. He saw that in an instant. Though they may have suffered brutal battles against jungle beasts who had assaulted their home, they did not know how to fight an intelligent enemy. The side guard was best used in a shield wall, where every soldier could cover their fellows. With their formation already shattered, none of those who remained were capable of providing the mutual support necessary to make use of the stance. If they’d seen true combat, they would have learned how to fall back in organized fashion, gathering into the dense, protective wall that was their only hope against a superior opponent.

Throwing himself across the rubble, Mui raised his shield high as he sprinted toward the closest man. He felt the crunch of a steel spearhead against his shield and twisted his grip, bashing it aside. The man’s eyes widened as Mui shoved his way forward, well within his guard.

The man tried to choke up on his spear, but Mui hit the haft again, nearly knocking it from the man’s hands, and then they were crashing together, shields scraping and clashing as they shoved.

Recognizing just how much stronger Mui was than him, his opponent’s spear fell to the ground, both hands bracing behind his shield as he tried to shove Mui away. A guttural snarl spat from Mui’s muzzle as he shoved again, harder, stumbling the man, who nearly fell as he was forced backward. Mui’s sword swept out, carving a line through his opponent’s kneecap. The man collapsed with a cry, clutching the wound.

Another gunshot echoed, followed by the sensation of warm blood coating the back of his neck. He whirled about just in time to see a woman falling toward him, face twisted in an agonized grimace. He leapt aside as she fell face-first to the stones, unmoving aside from a terrible, sobbing scream. Her spine was shot through, a springwater well of blood gushing from the gap in her shattered armor.

Knowing she had nothing more than a few short minutes of agony left to her life, Mui did her the mercy of sending his bootheel slamming down on the back of her neck. Bones snapped with a wet crunch, her chin shattering against the cobblestones. She fell silent.

“Up on the wall with me, Mui!” Evie yelled.

For all that his experience fighting in hard, immobile lines had failed to prepare him for the combat of Warriors, Mui could at least thank his old commanders for instilling in him an unhesitating obedience. He was sprinting toward the wall Evie had scaled before his conscious mind even acknowledged the order.

He had to dodge around or leap over countless bodies as he went. It hadn’t yet been a full minute since the fight had started, and still nearly fifty people were dead. Looking down at the figures left by Evie’s rampage was deeply unnerving. Many seemed to have simply dropped dead where they stood, their wounds so small as to be invisible. The few who had an obvious cause of death were still eerily undamaged, unmarred saved for a gouged eye or thin papercut over an artery. Only those who had been shot by her pistols had an obvious reason to have died, and those were obvious in the extreme. Entry wounds that he might have struggled to put a single finger into ballooned out on the opposite side of the body to bloody, ragged holes. Those corpses were already pale, their lifeblood spread far and wide.

Off to his right, where Sara had hit the enemy, was a different scene.

Chunks of bodies lay in puddles of pinkish rainwater like a child’s discarded toys. He saw heads, arms, legs, and pieces of torsos, all alongside the many pieces of meat that had been brutalized into unrecognizability. Sara fought like an animal. There were as many crushed heads as severed necks, as if she considered every part of her body merely another weapon to leverage, striking as often with a foot or her sword’s pommel as she did the edge of the blade. The devastation she had wrought was almost baffling to Mui. Not only because he had seen nothing like it, but also because it seemed like such an obvious way to fight. He had seen many Imperial Warriors who had strength equal to Sara, yet they had always fought in normal, recognizable styles, sheltering behind their shields while making clean, precise swings. Perhaps, he considered, it was because they had spent decades reaching those heights of strength, whereas Sara had been weak as a child a mere handful of years ago. She had very few of the habits that Imperial Warriors spent years developing, and so more freely acted upon base, natural instinct.

Whatever the reason, she seemed to be the first Warrior he’d seen who truly understood what her strength was capable of. Her fists were maces, her shins a bludgeon, and her sword, deadly unto itself, hardly needed to actually cut in order to kill. Against all but the most well-protected opponents, the flat of her blade was as lethal as its edge. He could see that proven true in the bent and broken bodies that lay in her wake.

Mui reached the wall and began climbing. The cannons had collapsed it at an angle, almost a ramp, but a rather steep one. He had to sheath his sword and shove his shield further up his arm to get a decent grip on the stones as he began half-crawling, half-climbing the crumbling structure.

A shot whipped over his head. Someone cried out behind him as he climbed, which he ignored. He quickly entered the pallor of sulfurous smoke that swirled around Evie’s feet like a shifting cape, his nose twitching in involuntary disgust at the bitter scent.

“There you are,” Evie said. Mui felt her hand close around the back edge of his breastplate, and then he was being lifted bodily upward, dropped onto the stones a moment later.

Evie fired her pistol again. It was another one of her cryslocks, not her massive revolver, which meant she’d somehow already reloaded the guns. He couldn’t fathom how she’d done it so quickly. Mui clambered to his feet as yet another gunshot sounded, this one actually whipping through the gap created by his bent elbow and the armor covering his left side. For all the good it would have done him if the shot had actually struck him, he yelped and leapt aside, trying to clear Evie’s line of aim.

“Apologies for the shock,” she said dispassionately, slipping the pistol back into its holster. “That was not as risky as it seemed. I believe I have determined what my latest Skill does: aid me in aiming any shot which must pass close to the one I am trying to protect.”

Swearing, Mui spat over the side of the wall, trying to clear his lungs. The rain was coming down harder now. The air felt thick enough to drink.

“I still cannot believe you so freely share knowledge of your Skills and Levels with me.”

An eerie half-smile ghosting across her lips, Evie raised an eyebrow at him. “I have felt your seed spill into my womb and I have climaxed as I licked it from my wife’s cunt. What does it matter if you know that I’ve a Skill for improving my aim?”

He swore again, turning away from her.

The top of the wall was clear of enemy combatants. They’d likely abandoned it at the artillery barrage’s onset and hadn’t had the time, or perhaps the bravery, to re-occupy it in the brief few minutes between then and the beginning of the current assault. That meant that the few assorted soldiers who remained from the devastated line of spears were staring up at Mui with an acidic hatred, unable to reach him.

He had a far better view of the battlefield from up here than he could get on the ground. The interior of the Keep was visible in full, from the smashed entrance to the central stone structures designed to shelter the citizens from beasts should they surmount the outer walls. The corpses that lay between those two points told a brutal, if predictable story. Sara had torn through the ill-prepared enemy too fast for them to react, leaving blood swirling in muddy puddles. Though they’d had more than enough time to spot her as she’d stood down the long street before the Keep, they’d never anticipated the Chosen herself, commander of a five hundred strong mercenary company, would launch an unsupported assault. That had cost them.

Too late, the enemy’s Warriors were flooding out of the largest and most central structure. They wore heavy, enchanted armor, their weapons shimmering in the misty haze. Shoving through the fleeing crowd of men and women they’d failed to support, they took their stances.

There were nine of them. Seven wielded polearms of varying descriptions, though each shared strong crossbars behind the blade and heavily reinforced hafts, clearly intended to hunt creatures beyond mere animals. A seventh had a crossbow of enormous proportions, reaching from to toe sternum on the man, and the eighth, who drew up the rear, had something that couldn’t rightly be called a weapon at all. It was a smooth, polished length of wood, about six feet long, with both ends capped in flat, unadorned iron. The man who carried it wore no armor, dressed only in simple robes.

The edges of his face were red and swollen, a wooden mask digging deeply into the flesh.

“Mui, shoot that one.”

He was already swinging his rifle off his back. Loaded before the battle and yet unfired, all he had to do was cock back the crystal-tipped hammer.

Pointing their staff forward and calling out in plain, unaccented Continental, the masked figure began to speak.

“Mad Champion! You still do not understand—”

The rifle bucked harshly against Mui’s shoulder. The masked man’s head exploded in a shower of gore.

A single-note bark of laughter pierced the courtyard. Sara shook blood free from her sword, taking a squat, low-gripped stance.

“One last chance to surrender, tough guys.” Her words rumbled with an inhuman growl, pitched too low to have come from purely mortal lungs. “After that, I’m killing you all.”

The courtyard exploded into motion.

The first three Warriors hit Sara as one, their bodies fully extended in their lunge. The flat of her blade met the first one’s spear, slapping it aside, while the other two were simply allowed to scrape against her armor with an awful shriek. One failed to penetrate the meat of her shoulder, the other bounced off her armored gorget.

The scent of ozone filled Mui’s nose. Traitors though they were, he almost pitied these Warriors.

Sara’s sword exploded with light as she drove forward, one hand flying out to grab the central Warrior’s spear. She jerked backward on it, dragging them toward her lightning-wreathed blade.

The Warrior knew better than to fall for such a basic trick. They barely stumbled before loosening their grip on the spear, allowing it to slide forward without taking them with it.

Their body spasmed when the tip of Sara’s crackling blade lightly touched their side. A flash of blue-white blinded Mui for an instant, making him wince. When he opened his eyes again, the blackened corpse of the first Warrior was laying on the stones, and one of the others had a sword lodged in the bones of their hip. Thick drops of viscous blood were bursting into pink steam where they landed on the rolling arcs of Sara’s spell.

And then the fight really began.

It was barely more than a blur to Mui. Sara was surrounded on all sides, the air singing with spellcraft and flying blades. Outnumbered as she was, the Chosen of Emotion leaned heavily on the strength of her armor. The cherry glow of sparks of steel crashing against steel joined the flashing lightning of her sword, the thin edge and razor tips of spears prodding and shoving at her hide in a hailstorm of blows.

Just as with their inferiors, Mui could tell that these Warriors were far more used to fighting beasts than they were a human opponent. They surrounded her in a loose circle, individuals or pairs darting forward with a full-force strike, only to retreat the moment it failed, hastily raising their guard. They were reluctant to commit to any one push, knowing the strength of their opponent was enough to crush any one of them should they be caught unawares.

Strangely, it was working. Though the strategy would have been foolish against most Warriors of Sara’s skill, it made sense for her.

She fought like a monster.

There was no safe angle. In front, left, right, or behind, it didn’t matter. She seemed to have eyes across every inch of her skin, parrying and dodging blows that should have been impossible to see coming. As Mui watched, a spear launched at her from directly behind, aiming for the nape of her neck, only for her to release one hand from her sword as she ducked, fingers darting up to grab the wooden haft. She jerked it down onto her shoulder in the same moment she jumped upward, shattering the Warrior’s weapon with explosive force. She whirled the broken haft around, cracking a different Warrior across the temple of their helmet, and then threw the pulped remnants of the spear into the path of yet another, stumbling them in their charge.

Perhaps those of greater Level could have done so, but for Mui, it was utterly impossible to predict her movements. It was as if she had a sixth sense for the eyes of every enemy, waiting to seize upon the slightest of their distractions. The second Warrior to die in the melee was a man who tried to signal something to the woman next to him. Before he’d even completed the first hand sign, Sara had kicked off with both legs, flying backward, her elbow landing in his lightly armored gut. When he doubled over with a wheeze, Sara didn’t finish him off— she flung a punch into the woman he’d been speaking to, caving in the front of her helmet, and an instant later, when the first man had straightened, she spun about with her sword held out, striking them beneath the neck with the pommel. They dropped, neck broken. Even as she turned around to face the Warrior who was belatedly rushing to save their fellow, her sword swung low and back in an almost theatrical flourish, gouging deeply into the face of the woman who’d just managed to rip off her shattered face plate.

Seven Warriors were then five. The fight entered its tenth second.

He didn’t think it would reach its twentieth.

The pace of combat increased even further. Mui lost track of the battle entirely as Sara laid into her opponents with a haunting laugh. She began to yell as she fought.

“Fucking made me shoot up a city!”

She grabbed someone by the neck. Squeezed until something broke.

“Who are you dying for?!”

Her left hand snagged the breastplate of a Warrior, lifting it up. Her blade sunk into the soft flesh beneath.

“An emperor?! No! A fucking adjutant!”

Her left hand, curled into a fist, shattered an elbow. White ivory was exposed to the open air.

“Fucking morons!” She punched another person, in the chest. Their armor dented. They dropped to a knee. “How many families coulda died because of you?!”

She dropped her sword. Raising her right fist high, a punch rocketed down toward the back of the kneeling Warrior’s head.

Just as contact was made, her arm was knocked away. The razor edge of a glaive struck her forearm with force enough to leave a gouge in even her thick armor. She was spun around from the force of the blow, but recovered quickly, a leonine growl rippling through the air.

“Now you wanna save someone?” Sara spat.

The Warrior who had stopped her lethal punch stepped forward, resetting their stance, glaive pointing toward Sara’s heart.

“Nah,” the woman drawled, the smile audible in her words. “I just want a good fight.”

Abruptly, Mui realized that there was no one left. The rest of the Warriors were dead, dying, or disabled, leaving only this last figure standing. Even the one with a massive crossbow lay dead some thirty paces away from Sara, a dagger buried to the hilt in their neck.

The final Warrior was one that Mui had initially mistaken as being unremarkable. The woman wore similar armor to the rest, standardized Imperial equipment offered to soldiers, but with the usual small adornments and minor enchantments that could be acquired by those who had worked their way into notoriety within the army.

Unlike the rest, however, this woman wore other things. He saw two wristbands of sinew-tied knuckle bones, too long to be human, and her forearms were bared, showing a latticework of scrapes and scars that even the most disreputable bar would have been ashamed to allow on their floorboards. Peering into her helmet, Mui thought he could see not a padded coif, but a lining of stuffed feathers, brilliantly vibrant reds and blues. Even her weapon, a glaive, showed signs of animalistic alterations. Pebbled leather grips bulged over its steel-braced length, and its crossguard was not made, as he’d first thought, of a well-polished metal. It was a lovingly preserved bone of some long-dead creature, its edges chipped after fending off innumerable strikes. Twisting the weapon in her hands, the woman stepped back and to the left, keeping her focus firmly on the black-clad Chosen before her.

Sara’s laugh was cruel. Using a foot to toss her sword back into her hands, she spread her arms wide, indicating the corpse-littered puddles.

“You’re a selfish cunt. If you wanted a good fight, you didn’t need all of this.”

“I did, actually.” The woman stopped moving, having reached a spot that left the space between herself and Sara free. “Living here for all my life, it’s been my job— my duty— to fight beasts. Kill the monsters, protect the people. It’s what I’m good at. But it’s not what gets my blood flowing.” She sounded almost giddy. “Fighting a person, though? One that really, honestly wants to kill me? That’s what really puts you to the test. That’s a fight worth having.”

Sara adjusted her stance. Her sword was brought up near her head, crossguard parallel to her cheek, the tip pointing toward the Warrior’s head.

“You know what?” Sara’s blade once more began to pop and hiss with lightning. “I guess you’re right. You did a damn good job of making sure I want to kill you.”

The woman’s giddiness reached a giggling crescendo. “Perfect.”

Beside Mui, Evie let out a long, low sigh. At least he hoped it was a sigh. He didn’t want to believe it was the yearning arousal that it more closely resembled.

Down in the courtyard, the second stage of the fight opened.

Had an Imperial Chronicler come to Mui a half hour later to record the tale of Chosen Sara’s battle against the Titan of Ta-Tomo, they would have never believed him. All the Imperial legends, the plays he’d seen as a boy and the late night stories his parents had regaled him with as he fell asleep, spoke of battles like this as epic, elegant affairs. The brash young Chosen testing their skills against the stoney determination of a grizzled veteran, turning combat into a dance with the precision of their weaving strikes.

There were no tales that spoke of whirling weapons and cackling laughter, nor the serpentine hiss of whip-like backhands thrown in a snarling rage. Blood was drawn only in the dramatic final clash when a single fatal blow was drawn across the chest of a stumbling foe. Not in crimson sprays that splashed across the ground every other second from a nick here, a slice there. And there certainly weren’t punches. The very idea of a divine messenger pounding a fist into their opponent’s chin like a drunken brawler was anathema to all he knew. To describe such an important figure in so ill a light might have been outright apostasy.

Perhaps the most heretical of the unfolding story’s events was that which came last.

Chosen weren’t supposed to lose.

With a titanic crack, Sara’s sword was ripped from her hands, a brutal blow swinging up from below to send it sailing in a fateful arc. The Warrior immediately tried to follow up with a blow to Sara’s head, but this was blocked by Sara’s forearms, which came up to frame either side of her face. Cursing audibly, Sara ducked, dipped, and dodged her way backward, barely avoiding a storm of attacks. When the woman finally thrust forward instead of swinging, she struck Sara hard in the chest, throwing her to the ground with a wheeze of involuntarily expelled air. She flew dozens of feet back before hitting the ground, then rolled even further, hitting the wall beneath Mui. She lay there, coughing hard as she pounded her chest.

The Warrior crowed in victory, murder in her voice as she charged forward. Even if it had been loaded, she was moving too fast for Mui to raise his rifle. He was helpless.

But he wasn’t alone.

Cloak rippling around her, Evie fell faster than should have been possible. Her feet struck with a quiet tip-tip, not so much as a ripple disturbing the puddle she landed in. As the raincloak settled back on her shoulders, it revealed the silhouette of a woman turned to one side, blank expression staring straight ahead.

The Warrior hardly reacted. Lost in bloodlust, she readied her glaive for a brutal, chopping blow, intending to cut Evie from hip to hip.

A silver blade emerged from the gray shroud. At first the woman only snarled, undisturbed.

Then she glanced at Evie’s face.

The Warrior slowed.

Evie began stepping forward, gait slow and measured.

The woman scraped to a full stop. She choked up on her glaive, fingers tightening over its leather grips. Shaking her head like an ox, her feet scraped on the stones as she adjusted her stance.

“Fuck it all.” The woman lifted her visor with a thumb and spat. “Guess I’m back on duty, huh?”

“I’m afraid so,” Evie said.

She lunged.

If Mui couldn’t have told anyone the story of Sara’s battle against this Warrior because it was religiously problematic, he couldn’t tell anyone of Evie’s battle for reasons less grandiose. He simply hadn’t seen it.

The first exchange was slow enough for him to catch. A lunge, a deflection, a thrust, and a parry.

Then it was beyond him.

With the steadily ratcheting speed of a galloping krapeu, the clash of steel and wood accelerated beyond his comprehension. The silver blur from soft cloth slid and spiraled around the dull wood of a furious woman. He saw sparks, then chips of wood, and then chunks of stone. They circled one another for a single second, trading back and forth, and then the gray blur extended itself in a flash, causing the armored form to recoil as if shot from a cannon. All at once the fight was flying across the courtyard, Mui tracking their progress more by the rippling scars their weapons left as deflected blades swiped through the stone around one another’s feet. The crack and clash of steel sounded again and again, faster and faster, until the single impacts were indistinguishable from one another, turning into a single, wailing screech. Rather than a battle, it sounded like the flying contraptions of Tulian soaring overhead, a cacophony from which no meaningful information could be gained.

Yet it ended in an instant. With no warning whatsoever, at least none that Mui could catch, there was a thundering gunshot. Evie emerged from the formless blur with that massive pistol in her right hand, its smoking muzzle pressed to the stump that had once been the Warrior’s head.

The body began to fall.

Evie took a deep breath.

“FUCK!”

She jabbed her sword into the corpse’s armpit as it collapsed, spinning around.

Sara, now standing, gasped out a laugh. “Mad you couldn’t—”

“Goddammit!” Evie summoned her rapier again, holstered her pistol, and then brought a handkerchief out of nowhere to wipe down the blade. “I had her, Master! I was better than her, goddammit!”

“You still won—”

“By cheating!” Evie dismissed her blade in a huff, pointing to the body. “I shouldn’t have needed my pistol!” Leaving the corpse behind, she kicked a loose stone hard enough that, rather than skittering across the ground, it simply burst into dust. “If I hadn’t drawn it, she would have cut my belly open! Damn it all!”

Mui found himself laughing uproariously. Both women spun around to look at him, surprised.

“I’m sorry!” He called, still laughing.

“There is nothing funny here, Sergeant!”

“I assure you, there is!” He pointed at Evie. “You! The foreign princess with pale skin and golden hair cursing like a soldier!” He laughed again. “You have spent too long with Sara! I could practically hear her voice in the words flying from your lips!”

Evie sneered up at him, frustration radiating off her like a forge’s heat. “If anything, Sergeant, it is my pride as an Irregular that—”

“You said goddammit! Singular!” He shook his head as if apologetic, though he felt nothing of the sort. “Only Sara says that! Who else would curse with only one god?”

Sara’s smirk, barely suppressed, turned on Evie. “He’s got you there, afraid to say.”

“He does not! I am simply indignant that I failed to defeat an enemy well within the limits of my abilities—”

“You shouted ‘fuck’ at the top of your lungs, Evie.” Her smirk bursting into a full smile, Sara slapped her wife on the back. “That’s definitely not something you woulda got on your own. You picked it up from me.”

“It could have been from Hurlish.”

“It wasn’t, though.”

“You have no way of knowing that.”

As the two wives argued, Mui began making his way down the crumbled remnants of the Keep’s outer walls. Despite the intensity of their bickering, he could hear the frustration in Evie’s voice slowly lightening.

As Mui reached ground level, there was a long, pained groan. All three of them turned toward the noise.

The few regular soldiers who’d survived the initial clash had long since fled. This noise croaked out of the Warrior from earlier, the one who had been floored by Sara’s punch. They were trying to stumble to their feet, and they weren’t doing a very good job of it. The Warrior got themselves onto all fours, tried to lift one arm, and then shuddered as they suffered from a wave of retching dry heaves.

“Hey!” Sara cupped her hands around her mouth. “You trying to surrender now, buddy?”

The Warrior lifted their head, looking vaguely— but definitely not right at— Sara. The pose showed Mui the deep four-knuckle dent in the back of their helmet, pinched and broken steel weakly oozing blood.

“I… I don’t know if I am?” They slurred out.

“Okay.” Sara drew a healing potion from her belt, jogging over. “How about let’s say you do surrender, so that way I don’t have to kill you?”

“O-okay.” The Warrior nodded. The motion made them retch again, and then they wobbled, threatening to fall forward entirely. Sara caught them before they could, lowering them slowly to the ground.

“Alright. Roll over. Roll over. So you can lay down on your back. Yeah, just like that. Good job. Now, I’m gonna have to take your helmet off before I can give you this healing potion, alright?”

Blurred eyes stared up at Sara. “That’s going to hurt, though?”

“Yeah. It is. I recommend you pass out about it.”

“Alright-”

Sara began sliding the helmet off. The Warrior did as advised, spasming once, then promptly losing consciousness. Mui shuddered as he watched the shattered pieces of steel cutting lines in their scalp while Sara dragged the helm off their skull.

“Man, healing potions makes this triage shit so much easier.” Sara uncorked the healing potion and tipped it into the Warrior’s mouth. “OSHA woulda killed for this stuff. Hey Mui?”

“Yes?”

“Go ahead and load your gun so you can point it at this guy. Not sure he’s gonna be super thrilled about being captured once he wakes up.”

“Of course.” Mui began obediently loading, preparing his second shot of the day. He would be far from crushed if he was forced to kill an enemy Warrior— a traitor to his own people, at that.

“I will begin looking for survivors attempting to hide within the Keep,” Evie announced. “Master, you aren’t injured?”

“Nah. Just got the wind knocked out of me. I think.” She lifted an arm, inspecting the blood that leaked from her elbow joint, and then shrugged. “Nothing bad, anyway. I’ll be fine.”

“Good. Call out if you need me.”

“Will do.”

Having but a few short minutes ago witnessed a battle that would likely enter the annals of history, Mui finished loading his rifle, leaning tiredly against it.

My shield arm is sore, and I think I have some pebbles in my boot. He picked at his ankle, trying to shake the irritating stones free. No luck. He blew out a tired breath. No one in the stories talks about this part of it, do they?

Living through a legend had much more downtime than he ever imagined.

While they waited for the potion to do its alchemical work on the Warrior, Mui caught Sara staring at him from the corner of his eye. When he turned her way more directly, her leering only intensified. She ran a hungry gaze up and down his body, even with it covered in armor, sweat, and blood as it was. Suddenly sprouting a cylindrical tongue three fingers thick and a foot long, she made a show of eagerly licking her lips.

Mui rolled his eyes, looking away. Sara laughed.

No wonder the legends are so inaccurate. How would I ever tell this story to anyone else?

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