Brute Force

Chona

-------------------------------------

The long, swerving arc that Tinvel’s manic piloting described around the city of Tulian couldn’t have been mapped if there’d been an entire team of cartographers flying in formation with him. With the wyvern always right on their heels, the plane flipped, rolled, and dove its way across the fields, blurring past clusters of homes that even then were being lit afire by marauding Knights.

The chaos of battle had spread far beyond the Tulian’s walls and forts. Spindly towers of smoke were wafting up into the sky by the dozens, each representing a village visited by the Knights of Sporatos. Chona wondered if there was anyone outside the Air Force who understood just how rapidly the destruction was developing. She doubted it. There was no one in the farmland of Tulian that had a communication crystal, and you could only see so much from atop the walls of the city. With the refugees fleeing for the city’s shelter being intercepted long before they could reach the walls, no one within could know that the entirety of the countryside was under assault.

How long until they reach my parent’s village? Chona bit her tongue. It’s a two day walk on foot. The Knights can cover that in less than a day, but will they?

It was a question she didn’t have time to ponder. The wyvern was hot on their tail, readying yet another burst of brutal flames. She’d seen it enough times by then to recognize the signs. The way the creature’s chest began to swell, its jaws hanging open, and the shimmering heat that began to distort the sky around its form.

“Grab the crystal!” Tinvel suddenly yelled.

“What?”

“They’re saying shit I can’t hear! Grab the-”

“Left, left, pull left!”

Tinvel snapped the plane into a roll before she’d finished saying the first word. She felt the Foresight shudder under the forces its wooden body endured, the engines hiccuping for a moment as the warping airframe pulled the crystals a few degrees out of place.

The shadows on the Foresight were briefly inverted as the apocalyptic flame raced below them, bright enough to leave spots in her vision. The wyvern’s head turned to track them as it spewed its violent fires, searching for the right amount of lead to give what had to be the swiftest prey it had ever faced. The furthest edges of the developing fireball came within a single wingspan of the Foresight, but that was the sputtering, tapering end of the flying calamity. Chona thanked the gods that, unlike some of their closer calls, it wasn’t hot enough to burn them by proximity alone.

From everything Chona had been told by Professor Brown— before and after his terrifying reveal of what aircraft would eventually be capable of— this wasn’t what she had expected from a dogfight. His stories had described swooping, spiraling duels, a dance that, if one were to apply a bit of poetic license, was so beautiful that its grace very nearly made you forget its lethality. This cat-and-mouse game across the skies, where one side’s superior speed kept them just far enough away to survive, yet not far enough to allow a free escape, wasn’t anything like that. It was more like the brutal, exhausting slog of infantry combat.

Not quite, she amended, thinking of the group sparring matches she’d seen between bayonet-equipped infantry squads. This fight is still one-on-one. A single wrong turn, a misstep, a bad guess, and it’s all over. There’s no one to cover for our screw-ups.

Unfortunately for Tinvel and her, ‘ending it’ meant different things for both sides of the chase. If Tinvel finally did break loose like he so desired, that’s all they’d do: break loose. One mistake from the wyvern would allow them to fly up and away, leaving the beast roaring impotently behind. But if they screwed up…

Chona looked down. Throughout all his desperate weaving, Tinvel had been trying to favor the turns that took them back toward the walls of Tulian. That meant they were passing over the battlefield, now. And that meant they were flying over bodies.

Those, too, didn’t resemble Professor Brown’s ‘Great War’. The crater-pitted mud, the open-air graves, the scent of death wafting on the wind, those all existed, but they were isolated. Chona could see each spot a mage’s shield had failed. There, surrounded on all sides by nothing more dramatic than stomped-flat grass, festered a gate to the Hells themselves. The soil had been blown away in heaving chunks, creating pits deep enough for groundwater to seep through, mud mixing with thick streams of blood weeping down the crater walls. Intact arms, legs, and torsos were rare. Most of what she saw were unidentifiable gobs of flesh laying amidst tangled entrails. Color came only from the occasional flash of sunlight reflecting off of what she could only assume to be shattered helmets.

The Royal Army was nearly at the base of the North Star Fort. She didn’t know what they’d changed, but the mages were obviously learning as they fought. Instead of the volume of corpses worsening as they’d closed the distance to the fort, they’d lessened considerably. She and Tinvel were flying over the worst part of the damage, maybe—

“Get the crystal!” Tinvel shouted again, louder.

Chona started, realizing she’d entirely forgotten what he’d said before the last maneuver. She leaned forward, reaching to paw at his chest for the crystal, only to freeze when she saw her right arm. The black fur was glistening with crimson blood. Enough to plaster it flat against her skin.

“I’m hit!”

“What? How?!” Tinvel reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror, then cursed. “It’s not your arm, it’s your head! You got a bad gash!”

Chona touched the top of her skull, wetting the tips of her fingers with something warm. She had no idea how or when it had happened, but now that she knew it was there, she began to feel its effects. Her scalp first burned like she’d pressed a bar of red-hot iron to it, then began to throb as if that bar was being beaten into her head over and over again, the pain digging deeper with every blood-gushing beat of her heart.

“Fuck! What did that?”

She was reaching forward to grab the crystal from Tinvel’s breast pocket even while she asked the question. She took it in a tightly closed fist, paranoid that she might drop it, then leaned back in her chair, reaching for a healing potion with her free hand.

“I’m fine!” She yelled. She was pretty sure she wasn’t, but she said it anyway. “Focus on flying!”

She popped the cork on the potion’s glass bottle, keeping the stopper close. She took a swig of the potion, downing about half the bottle, then shoved the cork back in with her thumb. Only then did she put the crystal to her ear.

“...barely holding them off on the city-side of the South Star. Requesting redistribution of wall guns.”

“Wall Command to South Star: we’ll try, but we’re barely keeping them from pushing up to the main gates. No promises.”

“Nexus notif all: Appears group of Knights attempted infiltration of city, method unknown, but were found dead, stabbed through eye. Therefore presumed General Evie has reached Tulian. Her whereabouts remain unknown. City guard is to begin high-tempo patrols in search of other infiltrators.”

“Shit, that’s what did it!” Tinvel yelled, directing Chona’s attention sideways.

A wrist-thick crossbow bolt was lodged in the side of the cockpit. It couldn’t have been the same one that had hit Chona because its barbed head had pierced the cockpit low and to the left, its tip emerging through the canvas and wood a scant few centimeters from Tinvel’s ribs.

How the hell did they do that? We’re going two hundred kilometers an hour, and they hit us with a gods-damned crossbow bolt? Twice? They got me in the HEAD?

The crystal kept buzzing, uncaring of her crisis of confidence. She narrowed her focus on that distraction as the potion continued to knit the skin of her scalp back together.

“ABA to TCA,” Affe’s voice jumped out of the tumult, “Fulleye Wyvern Herders are airborne, repeat, Wyvern Herders are airborne. Assist by angling to an intercept course if at all possible. Confirm message receipt.”

“TCA to ABA,” Chona shouted, lifting her speaking mask to be heard better of the shrieking wind and clattering engine, “Message received! Performance advantage is thin, no promises on intercept course!” She re-secured the speaking mask so she could address Tinvel. “Affe’s got the Wyvern Herders up! He wants us to head their way if we can!”

Tinvel glanced right, toward the city, his only acknowledgement a perfunctory grunt. Even with the wind blasting him at 200 kilometers an hour, his exertions had him covered in a thick layer of sweat, one that wasn’t helped by the low altitude the entire fight had so far been kept at. There was only so much the wind could cool you down when the air itself was so hot and humid.

Chona spun her seat around once more, keeping a firm grip on the bag of blackpowder she used for her spells. The wyvern was still riding their ass, flying less like an aeroplane, more as if it were beating the air itself into submission.

It can’t keep up that pace for long, surely.

She had no idea what an exhausted wyvern might look like, if it would start to sweat or foam at the mouth or lose the ability to breathe fire, but at the moment, the gargantuan creature didn’t look like its flight was in any way slowed from the start of the engagement. It was still coming on fast, fury glittering in its skull-sized eyes as it leapt through the sky.

“I see the Fulleyes!” Tinvel called. “Get ready to cast a spell, I’m gonna try and wing their way!”

Chona loosened her drawstring on the blackpowder bag, gritting her teeth. Even with the shockingly efficient powder-air-bomb she’d developed, she could only cast the massive spiraling wind spell that dispersed the blackpowder so many times. She’d hoped to save her energy for a more decisive blow. Not barely fending the wyvern off over and over again.

A couple years ago you were struggling to spit enough fire to keep bandits out of your village, Chona scolded herself. Get over yourself. You have no damn business taking on a wyvern, much less whining that you can’t get the chance to knock it out of the skies.

She glanced off the plane’s starboard side, toward the city. She could see what Tinvel had easily enough: a flight of four rising over the walls, their wings trailing a thick, acrid smog.

They’d known since the very first encounter with the Imperials that their infantry had methods of dealing with wyverns and griffons. Namely the oft-used skywreathe, a type of plant that grew in wild abundance throughout the southern lands. While its living leaves were as resistant to fire as any humid jungle plant, they became shockingly flammable when laid out and dried. What’s more, it produced an exceptionally thick, noxious pillar of smoke, creating an opaque wall when even a few fistfuls of dried leaves were burned. The armies of the Aydrianic Empire would pile the stuff up in iron braziers, light it aflame, and create a low-hanging smog that was, apparently, nearly impenetrable to the flying warbeasts used by their enemies.

Professor Brown wasn’t sure of the exact mechanism that rendered it so effective. It certainly seemed to be worse for animals than could be explained purely by smoke inhalation alone. In their own tests, Chona had watched wild birds incidentally fly into the column of haze, obscured from view for only a handful of seconds, only to emerge from the other side in slack free-fall, dead before they hit the ground. That certainly seemed to suggest skywreathe was somehow poisonous, yet when it was breathed in by mammals, though it certainly wasn’t a fun experience, the effects weren’t any worse than one might expect from breathing in a similar volume of smoke from a campfire. Chona had tried it herself. Her eyes had watered, she’d coughed up a storm, and she’d felt light-headed in short order, but those effects had gone away in minutes once she’d emerged from the smoke. It certainly hadn’t done to her what it did to birds or, reportedly, what it did to the Imperial wyverns and griffons.

So, naturally, they’d weaponized it. Four Fulleyes, modified to carry thin-walled iron canisters beneath their wings in place of rockets, were spitting a wide swathe of the foul smoke into the sky behind them. While Tinvel had been tweaking his way through the Foresight’s endless idiosyncrasies, Chona had been working with the University’s alchemists to find an idealized deployment system. She and the alchemists had shredded the leaves in varying sizes until they found the most productive ratio of material volume to smoke, then developed an underwing canister capable of containing the fire. Inlets on the front of the iron shell sent air coursing into the smoldering material, calibrated to stir the largest possible blaze right as the Fulleyes approached combat speed. Adjustable cogwheels in the cockpit could open panels in the canister that dumped fresh skywreathe powder atop the flames from a reserve, allowing the aircrew to control the rate and volume of its expenditure, ensuring a constant smoke trail. The flames themselves were lit by spring-loaded spark crystals that Chona had ripped off the army’s muskets, meaning that, even if the flames were somehow extinguished, the smoke could be reignited with nothing more than a tug of the string that would pull the canister’s trigger mechanism.

It had been a lot of work for a weapon system that none of them, not even the Champion, had ever actually seen working with their own eyes. They were relying solely on Imperial testaments to its effectiveness. This flight, here and now, would be their first test against a real enemy.

“Tell me when we’re going to make a break for the city!” Chona yelled.

“I will,” Tinvel called back. “Trying to find a break in the army down there. Don’t want those mages taking potshots at us as we go over!”

“You think they can keep their shield up and cast a spell at us at the same time?”

“Don’t know, but I don’t wanna take the risk!” He replied. Chona felt the plane judder slightly as Tinvel adjusted himself in his seat, loosening his grip on the control stick for just long enough to get more comfortable. Then he took a deep breath. “Alright, now!”

Chona threw her arm out, senses straining to draw a connection to the blackpowder gripped in her opposite hand. Dusty grains erupted from the bag, curving up through the air to follow the angle of her arm, taking with them the miniscule chips of iron filings she’d collected from beneath the lathes and machine tools of Tulian. The dust was hard to see as it spiraled out into the air, but not impossible. Chona sent a crackle of sparks out into the cloud, watching the thin arcs of electricity leap from iron to iron, heating them all to a glow. The wyvern roared in fury, throwing itself to the right to avoid the coming tornado. Chona started to curse.

“Shit, they-!”

The explosion tore through the skies with a concussive, roaring thunderclap, burying a wide chunk of the sky beneath a pink-white flash of fire. The Foresight was buffeted by the shockwave, drowning out Chona’s voice. Tinvel leveled the wings as he headed straight for the North Star Fort and, beyond it, the planes even then racing out over the walls of Tulian.

“They turned right!” Chona yelled, praying Tinvel wasn’t too deaf to hear her. “They’re heading us off!”

With her back still to Tinvel, the only sign she’d been heard was the sudden shriek of the forward engine launching into Emergency Speed. Chona spun her chair and seized the rear engine throttle with a white-knuckled fist, throwing it to the stops, then grabbed the prop pitch levers with her other hand, sliding them to the harshest setting they had.

Everything around her was a chaotic, incomprehensible mess. Her ringing ears were muting the furious, hungry bellow of the wyvern, though it likely would have been barely audible over the terrible crashing and banging of the Foresight’s maxed-out engines. Tinvel was yelling something she couldn’t understand, repeating it over and over again, and her nose was burning with the acrid sulfur scent of blackpowder, adding to the pounding headache that was developing after putting so much energy into her explosive spellcraft. Every screw, bolt, and brace on the Foresight was rattling violently, shaking her hard enough to turn her vision blurry.

“...Emergency Speed, Emergency Speed!” Tinvel’s voice finally filtered into her ears. “Get us Emergency Speed!”

“I did!” She yelled.

“Emergency Speed, we need Emergency Speed!” Tinvel kept yelling. Apparently still deaf, he was hunched over the controls, keeping their rocketing path over the fields as close to the ground as was physically possible.

Chona’s stomach lurched as he suddenly pulled up, shoving the plane nose-first into a white fogbank. She was briefly battered by the muzzle blast of guns as they shot over the North Star Fort, then the smoke cleared, showing her the empty kilometer and a half that lay between the North Star and the walls of Tulian.

The four plane flight of Fulleyes were hovering at about a hundred and fifty meters of altitude, the black smoke they spewed merging into one wide, flat plane. They were heading right toward the Foresight and, as she watched, began a shallow dive, gaining speed to help close the distance. High above, monitoring the entire situation, Affe’s own Foresight circled the scene, port wing lowered to give him a good view of the developing engagement. His crystal communication chain was extended, sacrificing his mobility and ability to engage at will for the precious ability to give direct voice commands to the Fulleyes he commanded below.

Through her shaking vision, Chona watched the speed dial rise. From ten, to eleven, then to twelve. They were probably nearing three hundred kilometers an hour, and that meant the closing rate to the wyvern herders was nearly five hundred kilometers an hour. Barely ten seconds until they met.

An ironic chill raced down her spine as she felt heat rising behind her. The wyvern was about to shoot fire, but if they could dive into—

A deeper, piercing cold ran through her. One that blossomed rapidly into a flaring, boiling pain centered in her left shoulder. She tried to turn around, but found her arm wouldn’t obey her when she told it to grip the side of the cockpit.

Shot. I’m shot.

The Fulleyes raced overhead, pitching down as hard as they dared the instant they passed over their plane. In the mirror, Chona saw the wyvern’s flame-spilling jaws jerk up, spitting a jet of fire not at the Foresight, but straight at the onrushing Fulleyes.

The world went dark as they were buried in skywreathe smoke. Tinvel took a breath and started to shout, coughed, then shouted again.

“Cruise speed, cruise speed! The plane’s falling apart!”

Fighting off the tear-jerking pain with all her might, Chona used her right arm to slide the throttle back to Cruise, clumsily slapping at the prop pitch levers until they were shoved into roughly the right place. She tried to adjust herself, only to cry out in pain, finding she was pinned to her seat. The crossbow bolt must have gone through the wooden back before piercing her shoulder.

The smoke vanished. Tinvel was pulling up hard, and it was a good thing, too. They barely cleared the wall, their landing gear passing close enough to the cannoneers that some could have jumped up and touched the rubber wheels as they shot overhead.

“Fuck!” Tinvel suddenly yelled, slamming his fist into the instrument panel. “Damnit, damnit, damnit!”

Taking rapid, shallow breaths, Chona managed to find the strength to turn her head and look over her shoulder.

The wyvern had peeled away from its pursuit, flapping desperately for altitude. It was reacting as if the rolling black smog were a deadly acid, and that, at least, warmed Chona’s heart. Three victoriously Fulleyes were pulling around to the left as they passed over the North Star, circling back to create a wide wall over the vulnerable, open-air fort.

Three?

Chona looked down. A long, bright smear ran across the grass between the city and fort. Flaming shrapnel had been broken into too many pieces for any to remain identifiable, save for a chunk of wing and, incongruously, a landing gear that had stabbed itself upside-down in the dirt. The rest of the Fulleye had been reduced to little more than flaming confetti.

There were no parachutes.

“I should’ve fucking pulled up!” Tinvel raged. “They can’t bail out that low and I knew the wyvern would go for them! I should’ve-”

“I’m hit again!” Chona croaked as loud as she could. She didn’t know if her lung was punctured. It certainly hurt enough for that to be the case, but she didn’t have much experience with getting shot. “Bad!”

“Shit!” Tinvel screamed, throwing the plane left in a harsh turn. “We’re landing, re-arming, and going up again! Take the rest of your potion!”

“Can’t!” She clenched her eyes shut, taking shallow, fluttery breaths, then opened them again. “Bolt is stuck in. Gotta… get a healer or something!”

“Shit!” Tinvel yelled again. He snapped the wings into a hard roll and, in a flurry of motion she couldn’t track through her tear-blurred vision, disengaged the rear engine, adjusted the prop pitch, and leveled the plane out so the runway was dead ahead. “Hold on! Tell the runway controllers that you need a healer!”

Chona reached for the crystal she’d shoved into her chest wrap, but found even that motion caused too much pain. She focused on breathing, bracing for the inevitable, sure-to-be-agonizing impact of wheels against concrete.

-------------------------------------

Artillery Lieutenant Shale

-------------------------------------

Shale’s battered old knife cut a neat incision in the wooden rod, exposing a narrow line of blackpowder to the fading evening light. She was damned grateful that she’d found the thing in the crate which held all her pre-prison possessions, even though it was an ugly, misshapen thing. What mattered more was that it was hers. She flipped the knife around and slotted it into the notch atop the piece, then dropped it in the iron sphere, twirling the hilt around to screw the wood in place, stopping when the top of the rod was flush with the cool surface around it. She gave it a flicking thump to ensure it was seated firmly in place, then handed it off to the man beside her.

The mortar operator barely touched the shell before he dropped it into the wide muzzle at his feet. Shale and the rest of the crew bent away and covered their ears as the gun captain shouted.

“Firing!”

The mud beneath Shale jerked upward as a loud whumpf! shook the air, sending the projectile arcing high overhead.

She counted silently with her eyes closed, waiting for the explosion. Dozens rang all around her, but they were empty, uninteresting things. She was waiting for her explosion. The rounds from her gun always sounded different. More joyful, more important. Her mind’s eye tracked the shell’s path, painting an image in her head. Even with a minimal charge loaded in the mortar, it was elevated all the way to seventy-five degrees, sending the shell on a long, almost lazy trajectory. She could imagine it reaching its apex, tumbling end over end, wooden fuse sputtering, and then she saw it descending, gaining speed as it raced for the mage-shields that glittered below.

At fifteen seconds, the mortar would have struck the mage shield hard, but not hard enough for the iron to shatter. It would roll down the angled slope or, if she was lucky, sink through the shield, its momentum no longer dangerous enough for the spell to automatically reject it. Landing with a weak clunk in the mud, it would sit there for a second or two more.

At exactly twenty seconds, Shale heard the different, more important crack of her mortar shell detonating. She opened her eyes as a cry of elation rose from the walls, then jumped to her feet, cupping her hands around her mouth.

“Mortar crews, fuse for twenty seconds, repeat, twenty seconds! If you’re in the rear ranks, twenty-one, front ranks, nineteen! Independent fire!”

In the muddy center of the North Star Fort, two dozen mortars began to light off, the whumpf! of relatively minimal blackpowder charges rippling down the lines as their operators quickly etched the same notch in the wooden fuses that Shale had.

She turned to watch the black spheres fly, a stupid grin on her face as they went. There was no real point to using volley fire with mortars, so the sight of such a tight cluster of bombs flying overhead was a damn rare treat. Shale watched them disappear over the walls, iron hail striking a half-dozen mage shields before the fort, and then she closed her eyes, taking a deep breath.

B-B-B-BOOM-B-B-B-BOOM!

The rippling cacophony was so synchronous as to be musical, ruined only by the screams of pain and horror that faintly carried over the walls. She laughed with delight nonetheless, called her congratulations to the mortar crews, then jogged away, hollering for a man-powered crane to halt as it began to raise a load of ammunition. She hopped up onto the wooden platform, causing it to swing a little as she grabbed the rope for stability, then jerked her thumb upward, ordering them to send her up.

Shale’s eyes scanned across the fort’s interior as she joined the load of cannonballs and shells on their way to resupply the walls. The cranes were fragile wooden constructs, too visible and vulnerable. No one expected them to last long in a siege, but so long as they were still in one piece, Shale was determined to keep using them to ease the burden on the ammunition handlers.

So, so much of Tulian’s budget over the last year, from the foreign debts they accrued to the almost sinful profits that they made on selling ‘luxury’ goods that their machines secretly churned out en masse, had been dedicated to ammunition production. Shale had never been important enough to sit in on budget meetings, thank the gods, but she worked with those who did, and she knew that ammunition production had been the largest single item on the budget for thirteen straight months. That had been to the detriment of a lot of things. With the money and time spent on ammunition, expert smiths could have made a variety of specialty equipment, artificers could have created singularly superior weapons, and foreign imports could have swelled in size. But that wouldn’t have been the right move. Everyone had known what was coming.

“Keep firing!” Shale yelled, her sore throat trying its best to espouse the sing-songy delight she felt inside. “If any of you fire fast enough to melt your barrel to a puddle, I’ll pin a damn medal on your chest myself!”

Shale was met at the top of the fort by a gaggle of people who couldn’t give less of a shit about her. She hopped off the crane platform just before the men and women descended on the ammunition like a pack of starving dogs, grabbing as much as they could carry without risk of dropping any of their precious haul. The pallet was emptied in seconds. As it began to drop back down, a handful of ammunition runners were already waiting below with crates of blackpowder charges and iron projectiles.

Shale hurried off to the triangular section of wall that had been facing the most determined assault. Though she’d argued heavily with Professor Brown about a lot of things regarding the North Star Fort’s design, she’d never dare accuse the general principles of being anything less than genius. Iron rebar reinforced concrete walls that stood some ten meters high, their faces protected by a steep, cannonball-deflecting dirt ‘glacis.’ Each lethal tip of the star fort sprouted at it from a sharp angle, ensuring that there was no single point that the enemy could hope to attack without suffering a truly horrific volume of fire. Each prong, more properly called bastions, were partially facing their counterparts. While getting up close to the walls put you under the muzzle of its guns, climbing up the forty-five degree dirt wall would put your back to the unrestricted fire of cannons in the next bastion over. Without cannons of your own, there simply wasn’t a good way to attack the fort.

Each prong of the fort, the bastions, were designed to be entirely self-contained fortresses unto themselves. Though they obviously supported one another throughout a siege, they were also capable of being severed from the main body should they be overwhelmed. While the upper walls themselves were inextricably connected, anyone could see that dropping down from those walls to the bastion’s ground level wouldn’t give you access to the entire fort’s interior. You would still have to break down the old, tried-and-true castle gate that blocked the bastion off, and that meant constructing or carrying some kind of siege engine— while being fired upon by those from the walls.

She’d never intended to rely upon that gate, but she’d prepared for the eventuality all the same. With how hard the Royal Army was pushing the easternmost bastion, it was looking like the thick, kiln-dried hardwood was going to be put to the test sooner than her nightmares had ever dared to fathom. She didn’t think the enemy would break through from there, of course, and she didn’t think they could ever dream of shoving past double-loaded canister shot to make a journey along the thin walltop to overwhelm the fort at large, but the damage they could wreak in the meantime would be catastrophic. None of the artillery would survive Sporaton occupation, she knew. Hells, standing orders were to spike the cannons themselves before retreating. Even if they ejected the soldiers of a breakthrough in a matter of minutes, letting the enemy run rampant would be a disaster for the fort’s ongoing survivability.

“How’d the altered mortars fare?” Shale hollered as she jogged up to the wall.

“Better than any before,” a woman replied, nocking an arrow to her bow.

Known only by the nicknames the fort’s soldiers had given her, the jungle woman’s biceps bulged as she bent the metal limbs of her bow, drawing back a spun-steel string that twisted up and over the pulleys mounted to the bow’s top and bottom. Some called her The Huntress, others the uncreative title Bow, but Shale preferred the name she’d had for a long, long time. Long before Hurlish’s promises of superior weaponry had drawn the woman out of the trees, the woman had been known simply as ‘Coin.’

People who knew how to survive in the jungle were exceptionally rare, and it was even more rare for them to become well-known in the days of Old Tulian, when they were decried as criminal poachers. Coin, however, had been good enough to earn not only her nickname, owed to the incredible volume and quality of animal product she would trade on her rare days in market, but also an official title as a Royal Huntress. So the old story went, King Tulian had gotten tired of Knights ending up dead when they tried to arrest the woman, and so had begrudgingly awarded her the title, stating that only one of noble blood, if not noble livelihood, could have possessed such remarkable skill. That also, funnily enough, made her the only living member of Tulian nobility still within the Republic’s borders.

The steel-limbed compound bow she now held was the only reason Coin had joined the North Star Fort. One of only twenty bows smithed by Hurlish herself, they’d been handed out to the precious few archers of Tulian whose Skills with a bow were so great that even a rifled musket couldn’t compete. While the compound bows couldn’t beat the weapons in absolute range, their precision was breathtaking. Shale didn’t know how many of the dead Knights and mercenaries laying on the field owed their lost lives to an arrow through the visor, but she knew it was more than a few.

Despite the advent of gunfire, archers weren’t an uncommon sight in the battle. Arrows were flying overhead in great volleys, leaping through the underside of specialized shields at the farthest edge of their effective range. Shale’s helmet and breastplate had saved her life twice today already. Judging by the scrapes and marks on Coin’s armor, she’d survived a lot more than that. The woman’s deeply tanned skin even had patches of pale, pink flesh. It was a good thing Coin had been afforded more than her fair share of healing potions.

As Shale watched, the woman stepped out of cover, bow raised. Some of the steel compound bows Hurlish had made were tuned to take advantage of their pulley’s mechanical advantage for even greater draw strength, combining with rudimentary enchantments to become something close to a hand-held ballista. Others, like Coin’s, emphasized their ability to reduce the strength required to pull the string back, as much as halving the draw weight without compromising the bow’s true launching power. That allowed their wielders to keep the bow drawn for longer, aim more carefully, and select their targets at their leisure.

Coin’s steel bowstring hissed as she released the arrow, which seemed to vanish with all the speed of a gunshot. The woman ducked back into cover right as a flurry of crossbow bolts crashed into the wall around her, several passing through the space she’d just occupied. Coin frowned.

“They don’t like me,” she observed passively. She drew another arrow from her quiver, inspecting its fletchings. “I will have to move along soon, seeking prey that has not learned my habits.”

“This is the hardest-hit section of the fort, damnit,” Shale huffed. “We need you here.”

“I need myself alive more,” Coin countered. Crouched low as if she were still in the jungle brush, she stalked her way down the wall, waiting next to a 32-pounder. When the great gun spat its load of canister shot, spattering the far bastion’s earthen glacis with lead shot, Coin rose, peering through the smoke as she drew the bowstring to her cheek, waiting patiently.

The barest flicker of a gust ran along the fort’s wall, scattering the smoke. Coin’s bow jerked toward a target, her fingers twitched, and then Shale watched her arrow punch a hole through the fogbank, skewering some unlucky bastard below. Another cluster of crossbow bolts zipped through the air as she dropped, clattering against the concrete where the woman had been standing a mere blink before.

“I’ve done more than was asked of me,” Coin said to Shale, stepping close and speaking loud to be heard over the cacophony. “The enchanted armors you will pry from my prey have earned this bow five times over. Be glad I speak only of moving to a different wall instead of abandoning this fort entirely, yes?”

“Fine,” Shale growled, frustrated. She wasn’t going to argue the point further, not with how close that last crossbow volley had been. “But give me your view of things. I’m not poking my head over that damn wall unless I’m behind the muzzle of a cannon.”

Coin nodded, her leathery skin crinkling under the evening light. Shale realized she had no idea how old the woman was. Older than Shale herself, certainly. She’d been hearing stories about Coin since she was a little girl. The local folk legend jerked her head toward the wall.

“Your enemy protects their fellows well, but can only do so in one direction. Your snare was well set, with the walls facing one another as they do. Their wizards cannot shield their charges from forward and behind at once. They must choose between facing your musket volleys ahead as they climb the bloody dirt, or expose themselves to the great guns at their back. No matter which bait they seize, they are caught. But they will soon learn.” Coin pointed to the north. “The ones far away, those of the vast herd who cannot join the battle, lost their protection several minutes ago. I expect that the wizards are hurrying to join those at the wall, so that each group of spears may have a shield at their back and their front.” Coin slung her bow over a shoulder, beginning a light jog toward the stairs that led down into the fort. She tossed a look over her shoulder, calling out. “When that happens, they will certainly gain the wall! Be ready to repel them, yes?”

“Shit!” Shale hissed, slamming a fist into her palm. Would the Sporatons really dedicate so many valuable mages to each block of peasant spearmen? She’d gotten reports from the other artillery commanders that there were already two mages per block, one taking up the other’s shield when the first grew too tired, which implied they’d need four mages per spear block to manage a similar rotation. Investing that much in protecting ‘peasants’ wasn’t anything remotely close to dogma for the Royal Army, but hells, none of this was. The King had surprised them with his ability to adapt twice now, between the concrete bunkers built along the coastline and, of course, this entire invasion.

Shale hurried over to a different ammunition lift, hopping to join its descent. She began jogging toward the command center in the center of the fort’s muddy interior, hoping that the crystal jockeys there would have some new report that gave her some clue of what to do next. She was careful to clear the muzzle of the mortars as they fired away, the whumpf of their charges not nearly as deafening as the cannon blasts, but loud all the same.

“Shit,” she growled to herself. “Teleporting a whole damn army in. I never would have believed it was possible.”

“And what are you cursing about, Artillery Lieutenant Shale?” A prim, elevated voice asked.

The lightning that ran down Shale’s spine wasn’t the type to paralyze her. It instead animated her, sending her jerking straight up like a puppet, her right fist clapping against her breastplate in a salute so harsh that it bruised her knuckles.

“General Evie!”

The woman that emerged from the command bunker’s iron-plated door was very, very unlike the one Shale had last seen, but undoubtedly the same. Her prodigious braids had been hacked short, exposing more of her Feline ears than Shale had ever seen before— including the fact that one was bald all the way down to the base, absent any of the fur her kind were famous for. The eyes which met hers were broken, their once-brilliant blue turned to a pallid, corpse-like gray. In contrast to that pale color, the woman’s skin was deeply tanned, northern skin turned even darker than Shale’s own southerner hide. Save for pale marks of what looked like… well, Shale wanted to call them cup stains, as if rings of condensation had been marked into the skin of her limbs, but they were clearly scars. Shale had no idea what could have caused that. She suspected she didn’t want to.

For all the differences since their last in-person meeting, there was no denying that the woman who stood before her was Lady— General, damnit, she corrected herself— Evie Brown. If the lethal, self-assured gait wasn’t proof enough, the rapier which flashed into existence at her side was. Back when Tulian was still ruled by Knights and Nobility, Shale had seen weapons enchanted for summoning. None of them had come to their master’s call with half the eager speed of General Evie’s blade.

“At ease,” the woman ordered. Shale dropped the salute, but she absolutely did not feel at ease. “You are to be commended for developing the underground pathway to the Fort. Though I protested its expense at the time, it has proven invaluable in actual combat.”

Shale swallowed. The North and South Star Forts were connected to the Tulian Central Armory by a long, thin hallway through the earth, just wide enough for a basic cart to go trundling along the rails that had been laid down. Though initially incredibly slow to traverse, the recent acquisition of a Tinvel Engine had allowed them to create a small convoy system of sorts, allowing dozens of soldiers to be transported to or from the fort at the speed of a galloping horse. So long as they didn’t panic in the tight, pitch-black confines, that is.

Though Shale was also glad for the innovation, she’d never expected her first words with the woman to be an exchange of compliments. Licking her lips, she dropped her salute.

“Thank you, ma’am. Are you to take command?”

“Unfortunately,” Evie tersely replied. “What is the situation?”

“What do you already know, ma’am?”

“Too much to sort fact from fiction. Give your summary of the day’s most critical events in as brief a fashion as possible.”

Abandoning her journey to the command bunker, Shale joined Evie in walking toward the wall and beginning to climb the stairs, practically screaming to be heard over the constant thunder of artillery.

Shale did her best to inform the General of the day’s major actions in the shortest fashion. She briefly described the teleportation spell, at least as it had been described to her, then went on to discuss the enemy mage’s capabilities and how they were outstripping the most pessimistic of Tulian estimates. The new mage shields could be taken down by concentrated fire, but it was time-consuming enough that Shale had decided it was better to use the cannons in attempts to sneak between gaps in the enemy’s ever-shifting armor, difficult as it was. She outlined the enemy’s approach, how they had begun and quickly abandoned several attempts to assemble siege engines, likely realizing no tower had the bridge length required to span the wide dirt glacis that stood before the fort’s walls. They hadn’t had time to occupy the crude trenches before the fort, but the elevation of the walls and one-sided shape of the defenses meant the enemy couldn’t find shelter there, either. She briefly mentioned the lack of Knights, the reports she’d received from the Air Force about the havoc that was being wrought in the countryside, and only then moved on to the concern that Coin had just raised: that the enemy would be reinforcing their spear blocks with more mages in order to force a breakthrough.

“And what’s damn well worse,” Shale said, pointing far to the north, “is that they’ve got some kind of screwy spell set up over their camp. You can’t see it right now, but they’ve got a whole load of supply wagons just sitting out there in the open. Barely over a klick away! Should be an easy shot for at least our 64-pounders, even the long barreled 32-pounders, but every shell we’ve sent that way just went poof,” she spread her hands wide to indicate the way the shells seemed to vanish without effect. “No explosion, no splash of mud, nothing. Some of the riflemen say they can see something strange and glowing sorta floating over the supply carts, little dots or some such, and I’ve been trying to get the Air Force to run a recon mission thataway, but the planes have apparently had their hands full keeping that damned wyvern from swooping down on the city and burning a whole chunk of it in one pass. That smoke shit works mighty well, but there’s only so much of it to go around.” Shale pointed to the hazy skies and the strategically-placed fires scattered around. “We got enough to cover the forts, thank the gods, but the city’s too damned big. So I apologize for failing, ma’am. I know your doctrine says we go for enemy supplies first, but no shells are working on the carts and we’ve got no damn idea why, besides maybe there being some floaty bubble crap over their heads.”

General Evie apparently didn’t need to spend a single second absorbing Shale’s long tirade. She started talking just about as soon as Shale shut her mouth.

“I believe the rifleman’s reports, and therefore conclude it is almost certainly a defensive spell of some kind. Unfortunately your assessment of the Air Force’s predicament is accurate, and so it is unlikely we will benefit from aerial reconnaissance today. You’ve ceased attempts to shell the enemy’s supplies?” Shale nodded. “Good. Do not resume fire unless you have cause to believe it will be effective. As for the assault at the wall…”

Though her head stayed still, Evie’s ears flicked toward the section that was nearly overwhelmed as they finished stomping up the steps. Shale had ordered the rifles taken off the wall, replacing them with reserve troops that still carried smoothbore muskets. The shotgun blasts of “buck and ball” were pouring into the enemy with all the speed the troops could muster, but that hadn’t stopped them from needing to affix bayonets on several occasions to repulse spearmen that had made it all the way to the top of the dirt glacis. The two meter drop from the wall to the dirt was all that had saved them so far; only the enemy’s orcish troops could have grabbed the ledge and hauled themselves over, and it was a simple enough matter to hack at their fingers with sword-edged bayonets. The rest were struggling to put short ladders up to the wall, but their mage-shields weren’t wide enough to cover them while they climbed. Shale had personally fired a full load of 32-pounder canister into the spines of a few Royal soldiers who’d nearly made it up and over the side, turning them into little more than a red mist.

The situation was still precarious, however. The North Star seemed to be drowning in enemy troops, an endless ocean of long spears rising and falling in waves as the more distant troops waited behind their fellows. If the Royal Army managed to crack open a breach and put a shield over it, the dam would be broken. Only the gods knew how many troops would flow into the North Star Fort then.

Lady Evie— damnit, call her General, you fool— was running some sort of mental exercise in her mind’s eye. Though Shale itched to run toward a gun and get back to shooting, she didn’t dare interrupt her commander’s contemplation. Though they’d been drowned out by the invasion, certain rumors had been floating around the army. Shale thought she knew why General Evie had left the Empire, and her interest in testing the woman’s patience, thin as it had already been, was now firmly stamped out of existence.

In the end, it wasn’t Shale who interrupted the General. Evie’s ears twitched, then her head jerked around, her body pivoting to follow an instant later. Shale glanced up to see what had happened.

“With me!” A voice cried over the tumult. Shale saw a spear-wielding woman in a gambeson clamber up a ladder to haul herself over the wall, waving dramatically forward. Two dead soldiers lay at her feet, with several others nearby wounded. She had a clear space. “With me!” She shouted. “Charge on!”

“Knight!” Evie hissed.

Shale blinked. “But-”

Appearance, it seemed, was not the only thing that had changed since Shale last saw Evie.

The woman vanished amidst a gust of wind. Perhaps a hundred meters separated Shale and Evie from the breach. She saw Evie step up and over an ammunition crate in the first second, leap over a recoiling cannon in the second, and reach her goal in the third.

General Evie extended into a full lunge as she hit the still-shouting woman, sending a glowing rapier through her eye. A shimmer of magic flickered around the figure, peeling back layers of air to reveal a fully armed and armored Knight.

Or the corpse of one, anyway.

Evie dismissed her blade as the corpse fell, throwing herself to the right just in time for her blade to be summoned again, skating along the neck of another peasant soldier in what should have been a lethal blow. When only sparks erupted, a pistol rose in Evie’s right hand, barrel slamming into the supposed peasant’s chin. With a flash of crystal light, the illusion shattered.

Evie laid into the soldiers leaping over the wall like a shark let loose in a net full of fish. Shale supposed many of the disguised Knights that Evie slaughtered would normally have been a challenge for her, but they clearly weren’t ready. They were so focused on escaping the murderous cannonade at their backs that they practically threw themselves into her blade and pistols. As more Knights gained the wall, some began to engage Evie properly, by which point the Tulian musketmen could only recoil in fear from the silver blur that erupted. Shale didn’t know what was happening within the maelstrom of whirling steel and cracking gunshots. Only that the poor, brave, stupid souls that tried to leap into the fray were spat back out in pieces, as if they’d been caught in the thrashing maw of Tulian’s new machinery.

Then, after maybe ten seconds had passed, Evie emerged. She was sprinting back along the wall, blood soaking her from head to toe. Much of it was hers.

“Blow the charges!” She screeched, turning around to fire one last pistol shot at a figure emerging behind her. “NOW, GODDAMN YOU!”

Shale had always thought of that measure as a last resort. Something she’d do only if the wall was more than lost, if it was completely overwhelmed, drowning in enemies. She was damned reluctant to do it. But after all she’d read, all she’d heard, and now all that she’d seen with her own two eyes, Shale discovered she was, in a few very specific ways, a coward: there wasn’t a single speck of her soul which could muster up the impulse to disobey Lady Evie.

Shale didn’t know why Lady Evie thought it was necessary to detonate all three thousand pounds of the eastern wall’s emergency blackpowder reserves, but they’d been placed where they were for a reason. Underground, just outside the concrete walls, hidden beneath the dirt glacis that Sporaton troops were even then dragging themselves up and over. If there was something General Evie thought was so deadly a threat as to necessitate the reserve’s detonation, Shale wasn’t interested in seeing it for herself.

“Blow the charges!” Shale roared, dropping to her belly and scrabbling up to hang over the wall’s edge so she could shout directly at the troops in the courtyard below. “East wall, blow the charges! Light ‘em up!”

-------------------------------------

King Sporatos

-------------------------------------

With a deep, snarling disgust hidden behind his visor, King Sporatos stared up at the high concrete wall. He was standing in a deep, smoking crater, feeling gunshots land on his armor like drizzling raindrops. Keeping one hand raised over his visor like he was shielding his eyes from the sun, he twirled his mace, glancing left to right, seeking some surviving piece of landscape that would allow him to scale the eastern structure. There wasn’t one.

She was nearly within my grasp, he sneered, turning around. More gunshots began to land on his back, now including cannonballs. Those, at least, were something he could feel. Nearly enough to make him stumble, but not quite. He was at least aware of their attempts to kill him. He wanted to spit the acrid blackpowder taste from his mouth, but wouldn’t take the risk to lift his visor.

A half second more, and that slave’s skull would have been scattered to the wind.

He shook his head in disgust. He wanted to leap up to the other portions of the strangely shaped castle’s walls and bash his way in, but his advisors had convinced him of at least this much: Tulian had known he would personally march with his army. And if they knew he was coming, they would have prepared something they thought was capable of defeating him, some sort of countermeasures for his unique power and armor. Whether or not their measures were sufficient was another matter, but not one that could be easily and safely answered. King Sporatos had assured his council that he would not advance into the enemy stronghold alone and, though it burned his pride in the moment, he wouldn’t break his word. He knew he’d been right to make such a promise.

He glanced at the sky. The evening was late, and night would soon fall. One of the larger cannons struck his lower back, shoving him forward a few inches as lead shrapnel churned the dirt around his feet. He sighed.

Victory was not achieved on the first day, but we came close enough, he decided. The enemy’s mettle has been tested, and it is worth admiring. Their ability, however, cannot match their fervor.

He began jogging away, leaving the smoking ruin behind him. Many Knights had died in that explosion, he knew. He wished he could retrieve their bodies for burial or repatriation to their homes, but there simply wasn’t enough left of the corpses for identification.

That was why the mission was open only to volunteers, after all, he thought, though he knew he was indulging in the poor habit of justifying his actions to no one but his own conscience. We knew they would have some kind of surprise, and we knew that it likely would be designed to overwhelm even me. They understood the risks and decided it was worth the prospective rewards.

He cleared the mile or so to the camp and lifted his visor, whistling for Silverblood. The crashing chaos that usually accompanied the summoning of his old friend in any crowded environs began to rise as the massive creature bowled aside all in his path. The King lifted his visor, allowing himself to indulge in a small sip from his wine pouch instead of his water. It tasted excellent, a fine vintage, but a small sip was all he took.

He would call for the withdrawal, he decided. Best to shelter his army for the night beneath the star-shield, which was proving as marvelously effective as his archmages had promised it would, and then speak with the War Council in the early morning, discussing their plan of attack in the hours before sunrise. There were alterations that could be made, he felt sure.

They wouldn’t take Tulian tonight, regrettably. But he suspected they would tomorrow or, at the very latest, the day after. The thought put a smile on his face.