The sounds of Arlette’s footsteps echoed through the hall as she marched quickly towards the sleeping quarters, the only logical place for the Otharian Many to be. Coming upon the door, she pressed the green button as she’d observed Simona do. With a soft hiss, the panel slid aside, revealing another hallway leading inside. Even after seeing it in the Stragman ruins, the way the metal moved on its own, as if alive, with the single press of a finger still baffled her. But now wasn’t the time to ponder such things. Now was the time for action.

She strode to the end of the short hallway, which terminated at another hallway perpendicular to this one. Down the hallway, in both directions, Arlette spied doors and panels. Which one housed the Many? With a mental shrug, she rounded the left corner and pressed the green button on the nearest panel. There was only one way to find out.

The door slid aside to reveal a small, plain room containing a thin bed that bordered on being a cot in one corner and a small cabinet in another that seemed to have grown from the wall and floor. After pausing just long enough to verify that the room was empty, she moved on to the next room, only to find it too was vacant. She tried the third room. Also empty. The fourth as well.

Finally, the fifth room bore fruit. Sitting alone against a wall, veil over her face, was the Many.

Arlette ripped the veil aside, startling the Many and activating the training ingrained in her since childhood. A hazy three-dimensional image appeared in front of the Many before quickly sharpening into the image of an empty room somewhere in Otharia. Arlette glanced around the image, looking for the handler who should have been somewhere nearby to take care of incoming communications, but she saw nobody.

“HEY!” she yelled, hoping that somebody was nearby but out of sight. No response came, other than a constant high-pitched sound coming from somewhere far outside the illusory room.

Hooking her pointer finger and thumb into her mouth, she blew a piercing whistle. Surely that would be loud and obnoxious to be heard by the Many handlers. And yet, still nobody appeared.

With a sinking feeling in her gut, Arlette realized that she was completely on her own. She couldn’t even reach the man who’d inexplicably abandoned and likely betrayed her side, while his overly-zealous lackey was lying in a heap on the cold metal floor, completely unconscious. She had to fix this by herself.

Rushing back to the front of the gondola, she stopped by the empty chair. The complicated array of controls before her carried an intimidating aura. Over three dozen lights blinked at her, their meanings inscrutable. She could see at least seven different dials, four levers, and, of course, that large rod protruding from the middle of the entire setup.

Arlette shook her head and gave herself several mental slaps as she worked up her courage. Sure, the whole apparatus appeared unknowably complex at first glance. Yes, she couldn’t even begin to fathom how any of it functioned, the inner workings being practically magic in her eyes. But this was not some mystical creation of some higher being. This was the creation of a person—a person no better than her or anybody else. They might have come from Earth, but that didn’t automatically make them superior. Sofie was proof enough of that.

She could do this. She could figure it out. No, she had to figure it out, and quickly.

Stepping up to the controls, she placed her hand around the stick and moved her gaze to the world outside the craft. She quickly surveyed the land below. They’d completely passed over the battle at this point, leaving the chaos behind them. Below stood the low rolling hills of the Eterian plains, stretching on and on far beyond the horizon. All that could be found there was grass, the occasional tree determined to defy the odds, and a large mass of people headed their way from the west.

Wait.

Arlette squinted at the large group, hoping to make out more detail, but she was too high up and they were still rather far away. She could tell there were a lot of them, however, and that they were approaching quickly. The sinking feeling in her gut returned with a vengeance at the sight. They could be only one thing: another Ubran army coming to reinforce the one already here. The situation was already terrible enough without more Ubrans entering the mix. She couldn’t afford to waste even a single moment now.

Tilting the stick left, Arlette swayed as the craft also began to tilt to the left. She grabbed onto the nearby chair with her other hand to steady herself, its presence suddenly very welcome. Returning the stick to its centered position stopped the rotation, but the craft remained tilted. Judging by the land below, they were now still headed in the same general direction forward, but also a bit to the left as well.

That wouldn’t do. Arlette tilted the stick right until the craft returned to level. How could she get this thing to turn around?

Experimentally, she tilted the stick forward. As expected, the nose of the craft fell and the entire thing began to descend. Nope! She pulled back on the stick until they were flying straight forward again.

What else could she do? It seemed that she’d just have to try everything until she found the one she needed. Her hand went from the stick to a nearby lever that went side to side. She pulled it left. Nothing happened, as far as she could tell. After a few moments of waiting, she pulled it right. Still nothing. She returned it to its centered position. Turning the nearby dials accomplished little as well, as far as she could see.

She reached over to another lever, this one traveling vertically, and pulled it all the way down. The craft trembled and began to fall towards the ground, causing her to stumble. Panicking, she pushed herself back up and pulled the lever back to its center position. Their plummet quickly slowed and came to a halt, and Arlette swore to never touch that lever again.

All that remained was a lever that moved forward and backward, its current position slightly past halfway. She pulled it towards her and, as she’d guessed by now given the working of the other lever, the craft slowed to a halt before reversing course.

Progress!

Still, this wasn’t what she wanted. She couldn’t properly see where they were headed like this. She needed to turn the craft around.

Now that she sort of understood the mechanics, she could see the general design. But she couldn’t spot the controls she needed to turn the entire thing about. The closest she could see was the stick, but that was only for tipping the craft... or was it?

Grabbing the rod again, she twisted it left and fought the urge to smack herself as the ship began to rotate as she’d desired. It had been right there the whole time. The good news was that this little delay had taken no more than a few moments. Now that she knew what she was doing, she could pilot the craft, albeit clumsily, back towards the battle.

Steering the craft felt very different than something like driving a cart. A cart was grounded and if you left it headed straight, it would continue along that path. This thing, on the other hand, drifted constantly. There was no ground to steady it and give it purchase, and the winds constantly pushed against it, sliding it sideways. Thankfully, this task didn’t require more than the most basic level of skill. Soon enough, she had the craft pointed in the general direction of the ongoing battle. She pushed the speed lever forward as far as it would go and sank back into the chair behind her as the craft accelerated. The thrust barely resembled the force that had thrown her about back when the craft was under attack, but she could see their velocity increase markedly.

The wait to return to the battle was perhaps the longest wait of Arlette’s life. She knew that her comrades were dying every moment, and it was partly because she hadn’t acted until it was far too late. All she could hope to do now was cause as much damage as she could while she still had the chance to help.

A mighty battle raged ahead. The Eterian strike force, their abilities augmented with chimirin, had set about causing as much death and destruction as possible while they still could. However, they’d run up against a formidable force on the other side: the Ubran siege weapons.

Large boulders and chunks of ice soared towards the strike force, only for the ground itself to burst forth like a massive hand and swat them from the sky. One of the Eterians raised their hands and hundreds of blazing spheres formed in the air above them, launching up into the sky before and raining down upon large swaths of Ubrans like hail only to bounce off of shields of ice, water, and stone created by the Ubran abominations.

The two sides were at a stalemate. While each member of the strike force was leagues more powerful than the abominations the Ubrans had, they were only a handful. The Ubrans’ horrid creations were also few, but they still outnumbered the Eterians by a large margin. Their combined power was enough to slow the Eterians’ progress greatly, though they were still making progress. That might have been fine if the Eterians weren’t fighting on borrowed time.

She needed to drop these bombs as soon as possible. But... how? It was at this point that Arlette realized she’d only figured out the first half of her task.

Jumping up from the chair, she ran towards the bomb compartment at the far end of the hall, her sword bouncing against her hip. The doors opened like the others with the single press of the green button, and Arlette was greeted with the long row of bombs still hanging from their claws.

This meant that the controls she needed would be here, inside this room... probably. Entering the chamber, she looked around for some sort of panel and found a metal box protruding from the wall to her right. Looking closer, the sinking feeling in her gut returned with a vengeance. There were no simple green buttons here. Instead, over a dozen gray, unmarked buttons gleamed in the glow of the crystal lighting.

Now what?

Pausing for a second, Arlette considered her actions and her options. She needed to accomplish two tasks: open the doors at the bottom of the chamber like she’d seen done every time the Otharians delivered new machines, and then release the explosives, in that order. However, with the unmarked controls available to her, there seemed the definite possibility of doing those two things in the opposite order. She’d seen what Pari’s concoctions could do when the size of Arlette’s fist. If one of these gargantuan things went off...

She shook her head. Surely somebody so brilliant that they could create something that flew through the air would make sure that bombs wouldn’t release if the doors were closed... right? Surely...

She didn’t have the time to mess around to figure this out properly. Gathering her courage, she put as much faith as she could in her assumptions about the room designer’s competence and started pressing buttons randomly.

On the ninth press, the doors mercifully began to swing open. Arlette blinked as the morning sunshine rushed in to drive away the gloom, joined by chill winds that swirled around the chamber. She released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding this hold time. Step one: complete!

Now came what was surely the easy part. Taking a quick peek over the edge, Arlette saw that they were crossing over the middle of the Ubran camp, a perfect target for explosives. Releasing them here would create chaos without running the risk of accidentally killing her allies. With growing confidence, she hit a button.

Nothing happened.

She hit another.

Still nothing.

The concerned frown on her lips grew with each button hit, mirroring the blossoming of the panic inside her. Other than accidentally closing the doors one time, nothing happened no matter what she pressed. What was she supposed to do?

The craft would be past the Ubran camp in mere moments. She needed more time.

Sprinting back to the front cabin, Arlette reversed the thrust for a moment before setting it to neutral. Hopefully, this would let the ship hover over the intended area long enough for her to figure out what she was doing wrong.

Her feet struck against the smooth floor with added anxiety now as she hurried back to the bomb chamber. How much more time did she have before it wouldn’t matter anymore? Was it already too late? Had she already failed?

Upon returning to the rear room, Arlette resumed hitting every button she could, as fast as she could. Only two of them did anything, and those were the ones that opened and closed the bottom doors. The others would not respond, no matter if she held them, pressed them, or hit them in various combinations. Nothing worked.

A seed of a reckless idea germinated in her mind. She’d been trying to go through the proper procedures in her own clumsy way, but did it matter how she released the bombs? She was willing to bet that the answer was no, that as long as she got them out, the rest would go as she hoped.

There was only one way to find out. Acting before her mind could talk her out of her crazy thoughts, she approached the nearest bomb and climbed up onto it. Hanging about a pace away from the edge of the floor and with handy handholds protruding out around the edge, the barrel-shaped object was simple to surmount. The claw from which it dangled was even easier, with a nice, flat, broad middle section she could stand on.

Now all she had to do was dislodge the bomb from the large metal claw that held it. With a casing made of wood, if she applied pressure the right way, maybe she could pry it loose. Then, she could hop to the next one and repeat the process.

Making sure that the sword on her hip wouldn’t get caught, she grabbed the side of the claw so she wouldn’t fall and hopped down, delivering as heavy a stomp as she could manage onto the edge of the barrel. It creaked, but that was all. As far as she could see, it didn’t move even the width of a hair.

She tried again, and again, jumping up and down and striking it with all her might, but her might wasn’t much to speak of. If she was a Feeler, or maybe just had a larger body, this would be a different story.

What did weaker people do when they didn’t have somebody mighty to help them with heavy labor? Oh, right, they used tools, and she happened to have a tool on her. Not the best tool for the job, but better than nothing.

Pulling her sword from its scabbard, she positioned herself chest down on the claw with her head and shoulders leaning over the edge and began chipping away at the edge where the claw met the bomb as fast as she could. The wood proved softer than expected, but still, the barrel wouldn’t budge.

A sound broke through the din of the rushing air and the tohubohu below. Arlette raised her head and froze for a moment in surprise. There, by the control box, stood a very furious Simona, her hand inserting a crystalline key into the top of the box. She eyed Arlette with a look of pure, unmasked hatred.

“Wait-”

Refusing to even listen to Arlette’s panicked plea, the Otharian slammed her palm down upon the buttons. Arlette caught the sound of something above her releasing. She managed to look up just in time to see the spool of metal rope from which the claw hung begin to unwind, sending her, the claw, and the bomb plummeting out of the chamber and into the howling winds.

As her precarious perch descended, the patchwork of canvas tent roofs rushing towards her with terrifying speed, Arlette couldn’t help but let out a shriek. Gusts buffeting her to the point that they threatened her hold, all she could manage to do was grip the claw with desperate strength and pray to the spirits that she didn’t fall off when the spool ran out.

When she reached about eighty paces above the ground, her fall came to a quick and sudden end. The claw and bomb jerked and bounced sharply, sending her tumbling head over heels over the edge despite her grip. Flailing about for her life with everything she had, she just barely managed to snag her left hand onto the barrel’s rim as she fell past. Her heart pounding in her ears, Arlette used every last shred of strength she still had to scramble back atop the claw, whereupon she wrapped her arms around the metal rope and swore to never let it go ever again no matter what.

Finally stable, she proceeded to evaluate her situation. The first bit of bad news was that she’d lost her sword in the tumble. She could see it laying on top of a tent down below her. That left only the five throwing knives she had strapped onto her person should she somehow get into a fight. The second bit of bad news was that she was hanging about eighty paces above the enemy camp atop a massive explosive.

Said massive explosive still hung in the claw’s clutches, though Arlette noticed that it had shifted slightly, with the wood on one end cracked where the wood met the metal. With one foot, she reached down and gave it an experimental shove, but found that she still couldn’t seem to budge it. The thought of being within such close proximity to the large device made her insides squirm.

Arlette briefly entertained the thought of climbing the hundreds of paces back up to the ship, but after trying for a moment, she gave up. The metal rope was far too smooth and the wind too strong; she couldn’t even make it twenty paces higher, let alone the hundreds between her and safety. She was stuck dangling in the air, the wind swaying her back and forth as she slowly drifted over the battle.

That led to bad news part three: the state of the battle below. As she swung around, she saw that a core of Eterians battled fiercely to her west, their number at most half of what they were just a quarter of an hour before. Jaglioths roared in anger and defiance as they swiped blood-covered claws and sent Ubrans soaring overhead. Their Kutradian and Eterian counterparts echoed that primal cry, pushing against the enveloping Ubrans with everything they possessed, knowing they would not live to see the sunset but determined to take every invader they could with them when they went.

That was where things were now. She could see that any hope of taking the Emperor’s head had vanished. The Ubrans surrounding the Eterians like water around a few large bubbles, outnumbering the defenders greatly now that the troops from the northern and southern camps had fully joined in. The eastern camp’s soldiers were just moments away from joining the slaughter as well. Those bubbles would pop soon. Only the fact that the horrible melded flesh people, who moved much slower than the rest of the troops, were still a long ways off prevented the fight from being over already.

Speaking of which, the ones already here in the western camp would be turning to the remaining Eterians momentarily. Only two members of the Eterian strike force still lived—Supreme General Astalaria and a stocky man with a gray beard, a general on the western wall that she never really dealt with—the others having been slain or taken by the chimirin. She could see what looked like blackened body parts sprinkled across the ground near their entry point.

That being said, the devastation they’d managed to inflict before passing was remarkable. Nearly a third of the Ubran camp was on fire, a small army of non-soldier Ubrans rushing about trying to fight the flames. To the south, tens of thousands of Ubran bodies covered the ground, some charred, some crushed, all dead. By her quick estimate, the chimirin-powered people had killed more than a third of the Ubrans in the western camp, the largest of the four camps. Most of the living siege weapons had fallen to their hands, as well. The power of the drug terrified her.

Arlette watched in awe as three cyclones thirty paces in diameter danced through the camp towards one of the remaining Ubran abominations. A large, thick wall of stone grew between them, but the newly created shield crumbled against the might of the whirlwinds. The abomination stood no chance against the funnels’ power, the winds sweeping it off the ground and flinging them high into the air.

The trio of tornados pivoted almost immediately towards another enemy, but suddenly faltered and dissipated. Arlette’s gaze swept back to the gray-bearded man, who seemed to tremble as if he were being shaken by an invisible giant as horrid blackness rotted away at his body. Then, like all the others, he burst like a putrid pimple, bits of blackened flesh spraying the surrounding area. In most situations, the sight would have been enough to make Arlette want to vomit, but surrounded by so much blood and gore, it barely registered on her now.

Perhaps fittingly, the general’s death left the Supreme General as the final surviving member of the secret strike team, their best and only hope for victory. He swept out a hand, sending a ripple through the earth that swelled into a wave forty paces wide and fifteen paces high. Like a storm surge battering the land amidst a furious storm, the wave swept outward, violently tossing everything in its way up into the sky. Hundreds of Ubrans spun helplessly as they arced through the air before slamming back down to the hard ground, breaking bones, cutting themselves on their own weapons, or worse.

But then, like the cyclones before it, the wave faltered. Arlette didn’t even need to look to know what was about to happen, and she didn’t want to. Instead, she averted her gaze, looking out at the horizon. There, the second Ubran army could be seen only a few hills away, banners dyed an assortment of colors fluttering as they closed in. Only... those weren’t the banners of the Ubran Empire. The Ubran banners were usually black and gold. These were sky blue, dark green, yellow, white, and more. Arlette did a double-take. Surely they couldn’t be-

An overbearing, deafening roar from above interrupted her stunned thoughts. Her perch began to sway wildly. In a panic, she looked above her and her blood ran cold.

Arlette realized now that she’d made a crucial error in her understanding of the flow in battle. Up until now, she hadn’t had to worry about incoming arrows or fireballs. The majority of the fighting was happening farther off to the side, rather than beneath her. What’s more, those in the camp below were far more concerned with the series of large fires than they were with a single woman dangling eighty paces above the earth. There were better things to do and graver threats than an unarmed woman stuck hanging in the air at the bottom of a rope.

Now that the Eterian strike force had perished, she had thought the remaining Ubran siege weapons would turn their might on the last pockets of Eterian resistance. But there was no reason to do that. The regular Ubran soldiers were all that they needed for total victory. So, why bother when a huge, menacing target floated in the sky above you instead? An object that Arlette had unintentionally lowered back down into their range?

The ship roared with stunning power as it seemed to almost leap and pirouette out of the path of a rising fireball, its mass tilting sharply as it barely avoided the incoming projectile. Teeth clenched so hard it hurt, Arlette clutched the metal rope in sheer terror as the ship tugged it every which way, flinging her and the claw and bomb combo she rode through the sky like a child playing with a piece of string.

While Arlette managed to hang on despite the constantly changing directions, her legs and arms wrapped as tightly and firmly around the metal rope as she could manage, but the bomb could not. As they swung through the air, the bomb apparently decided it had had quite enough of all this bullshit and slipped out of the claw’s grasp. Arlette watched as it soared through the air over the Ubran camp before crashing down amidst the throngs of Ubran soldiers.

THOOM!

For a moment, a sun bloomed before her eyes. Then, her ears were greeted by a crash of thunder so loud and forceful that it overpowered even the deafening roar of the craft above. Even the air reversed direction for little, the stiflingly hot air rushing over her like a hot gust of desert wind before the cold currents reestablished the natural order.

A stray thought flitted through Arlette’s mind, a picture of another reality where Pari and the others had never crossed paths. The girl’s morals were sketchy at best, and that was after a full year of Sofie indoctrination. What would have happened had that terrifying beastkin been picked up by some criminal enterprise instead of their raggedy band of fugitives? Used correctly, her talents could probably take down an entire country.

As the smoke cleared, Arlette found a crater over a hundred paces wide where there had once been flat ground and hundreds of Ubran soldiers. The shock of sudden, unanticipated attack brought a lull over much of the battlefield as much of the Ubran force tried to comprehend what had just occurred. The relative silence allowed them—and Arlette—to notice a new sound, one previously concealed by the shouts of warriors and the clash of metal on metal: the war cries of the newly arriving army from the east.

They were now close enough that Arlette could make out individual people, and she could finally see what felt so off about them. While some elves and beastkin lived outside of Drayhadal and Stragma, there were far too many of them here in one place for this group to be Ubran reinforcements. So many in one place could only mean one thing: the two southern countries had finally joined the war.

“You fucking bastards! Now you show up!?” she hollered into the wind, her heart torn between indignant anger at their timing and elation that they were here at all.

What could bring the two nations together to the point that they were within paces of each other and yet weren’t stabbing their counterparts to death, Arlette didn’t know. What she did know was that their arrival completely changed everything. Already, commanders were barking orders, the majority of the Ubrans splitting away from the Eterians and moving west to intercept the incoming attackers before they could swarm over the Ubran camp that rested between the two sides.

At first glance, the Ubrans still outnumbered the combined Nocend forces, but the difference was now less than two to one. However, the new arrivals had the advantage of surprise and positioning on their side. Would it be enough to even the odds?

Arlette didn’t get a chance to watch and find out. The Ubran siege weapons were still lobbing the odd boulder up towards the airship, causing the claw to continue swinging about as the airship bobbed and weaved. But whatever steered the ship as it avoided danger didn’t seem to care about the metal rope hanging from the ship’s bottom as it did nothing to stop the side of one of the massive projectiles from colliding with the rope as it passed underneath. Arlette could see the whip-like action shooting down the rope towards her. She tightened her grip even more.

“Nononononono-”

The rope bucked as it struck her in the chest like the kick of an angry garoph, the force ripping her from her perch and sending her flying. Gravity took hold and the camp below rushed towards her.

Not knowing what else to do as she spun slowly through the air on her one-way trip downward, Arlette curled into a ball and prayed to the spirits for her survival.

The spirits were on her side. Arlette’s entire body shuddered as she slammed into the canvas of a tent of above-average size, knocking the wind from her lungs. Her body was oriented in such a way that her left shoulder and upper left side hit first. As it did, she felt the fabric resist for just a fraction of a moment before tearing, absorbing some of her momentum, but not enough. It was the small wooden table on the other side of the tent roof that absorbed the rest. Massive pain blossomed in her shoulder as both it and the table splintered upon impact.

Arlette didn’t move for a moment. Her whole body hurt, her left shoulder and upper arm most of all. Eventually, she let out a cough and winced in pain. Her head swam from the way it had bumped into the broken table, even with her arm in between. Her left shoulder was most definitely broken. The rest of her side would surely be covered in large bruises soon enough. Even her chest plate seemed to have been severely dented, judging by the way it was digging into the side of her rib cage. But she was alive. That was more than she could ask for.

She looked around. The tent, a relatively large one that, judging by the presence of real furniture all over, looked to belong to someone fairly important. Her body complained as she pushed herself up to her feet, but she powered through the pain. Right now the tent stood blessedly empty, but after such an entrance, that wouldn’t last for long.

Rolling onto her right side, she gingerly climbed to her feet. With her upper body taking most of the hit, her lower body was severely bruised but still fully functional. Arlette gave thanks to the spirits that she hadn’t fallen leg-first and snapped an ankle or something like that. A broken shoulder on her dominant side meant she couldn’t fight, but she could still run. A broken leg meant she could do neither.

Arlette felt along her left side with her right hand, tracing the dent with her fingers. She had to take the armor off, she reluctantly decided. It was causing her too much pain. The armor had always been secondary protection; she preferred to avoid hits whenever possible rather than take a hit and block it with armor. While it had proved its worth multiple times during this last campaign, it had to go if it meant she wouldn’t be able to move or breathe well.

But how would she remove it? Gritting her teeth, Arlette found that she could open and close her hand and bend her elbow with some pain, but that pain was on a level she could handle if she was ready for it. The real problems came if she tried to move her shoulder, especially if she tried to raise it away from her body. This presented an issue, because raising her arms over her head was basically the only way to get her dented armor off.

Fearing that she was running out of time, she walked over to a sturdy-looking tent pole in the center of the tent, grabbed her left arm with her right, and pulled it up so it could grab the pole and hang down. The hardest part was keeping silent through the torture she was subjecting herself to, but what had to be done had to be done. After a few moments of squirming with her right arm and head, she managed to successfully remove her ruined armor from around her chest and let her left arm fall, an action she immediately regretted as another spike of pain lanced through the shoulder.

Chest plate removed, Arlette quickly searched the tent for a replacement to her lost sword. After finding nothing of the sort, she made her escape. Instead of heading towards the tent flap, Arlette crept over to the nearest wall, pulled out a knife, cut a vertical slit at its bottom tall enough for her to squeeze through at a crouch, and squeezed herself through. Better to avoid being seen as much as possible. Making sure nobody noticed her exit amidst the hubbub, she slunk between two nearby tents where she would be harder to spot. After cloaking herself in a fake Ubran outfit like that of the people she saw running around nearby, she began to consider her situation.

Things weren’t looking so great. She had no sword and only five knives, which were better suited for throwing than hand-to-hand combat. Her left arm was out of commission—again, though this felt much worse than when she’d been stabbed in the same shoulder up on the wall—meaning she could only effectively fight with her non-dominant right hand.

To make matters worse, she was stuck in this condition in the middle of the enemy camp. She didn’t know if she could defeat a single well-trained, experienced soldier right now. Here, it would never come down to her versus one Ubran. She’d be surrounded and turned into a pincushion before she knew what to do.

There was no choice for her but to run. She’d put herself in Crirada with the hope of being one drop of water amongst the many it would take to quench the Ubran flame. But on her own, she would simply boil away while accomplishing nothing. If she could get away and heal, maybe she’d be able to find another avenue towards her revenge. The arrival of the Drayhadans and Stragmans meant the situation in Eterium would be fluid for a little while. But first, she had to get out alive.

But how? If she could somehow get to the western side of the camp and blend into the Stragman and Drayhadan forces, she could probably sneak out of the battle and get to safety. But that would put her in a massive amount of danger. All it would take was one fight she couldn’t run from for her to be in massive trouble.

After a moment of consideration, Arlette decided to head east and hide for as long as possible in the camp, or make a break for the north if she could see an opening. She thought it wise to see which side looked to have the upper hand before she committed to a plan.

The sound of thousands of throats calling out for blood grew louder and louder as she pondered her best move. The first wave of Ubran soldiers rushed past her little hiding place, which was her cue to get out while she still could. She didn’t want to get caught up in the impending bloodbath.

As a student of history, and as somebody who’d been in a few large-scale battles herself, she knew that conflicts between two large armies usually went one of two ways. There was the sort of battle like the one happening on the eastern end, where one side was dwarfed by the other. If the smaller force couldn’t or wouldn’t retreat, the battle would go as it was now: the smaller force would do everything they could to keep themselves from getting split apart and overwhelmed while the larger force would surround them and press in until the smaller side broke.

On the other hand, two armies of relatively equal power clashing followed a very different path. What would start as two organized, distinct forces with battle lines and whatnot usually turned into a chaotic mess quickly after the two sides crashed into each other. The fight would break down into thousands of individual battles between small groups, where your chance of surviving past the next moment depended less on the size of your army and more upon the strength of your squad and the people within a hundred paces of you on each side. While numbers mattered in the grand scheme of things, sometimes a three-on-one fight could still be a losing fight for the three if the one was powerful and experienced.

Battles of this sort spread quickly outward as everybody vied for space and positioning. It was this sort of chaos that Arlette wanted desperately to avoid. She didn’t have anybody to watch her back, and either sides might take her to be their enemy. But with the two armies meeting nearby, she had little time to avoid such a fate.

She stepped out and ran against the flow of the Ubrans, making sure to keep herself looking as confident and not-scared as she could. Her goal was to look like a messenger carrying a message away from the front lines. The trick, like anywhere else, was to look like you belonged and knew what you were doing and where you were going. Run fast, but not too fast; run towards something, not away from something.

It wasn’t easy. The bouncing of her run caused a small spike of pain to shoot up from her left shoulder with every footfall as her arm tugged against the joint, forcing her to hold it in place with her other arm. But still, the tactic worked as she’d hoped. The other Ubrans had too much to worry about, what with the surprise army and all, to care about some soldier heading the other way.

At least, they did for a while. Unfortunately, her luck didn’t last forever. After making some good progress, a stern voice called out to her.

“You there!” an imposing-looking commander shouted as she passed. “Where are you going? The enemy is that way!”

“Delivering an important message, sir!” she called as she ran by.

The man frowned at her answer and turned to give chase. Arlette swore under her breath and ducked between two tents before going into a full sprint. The commander followed after her, yelling at her to stop. She refused.

Emerging from the gap, she veered towards another one in the next tent row and shot down it. Exiting that one, she repeated the process, swerving at random to make it harder for the man to keep track of her and put as many other people as possible between them. The pain with each stride hurt more now, but she ignored it, her adrenaline helping to make it a problem for a later time.

“Halt! Somebody stop her!” the man called, but nobody could process his orders in time before she was already gone through the chaos.

Seven rows of tents later, he’d fallen behind enough for Arlette to pull out one of her usual reliable tricks. Running past the end of another tent, she veered sharply to the right this time so the tent blocked her pursuer’s view of her for a moment. A fake Arlette sprung forth, rushing towards the tents in the next row, while she crossed to the other side of the tent to her side and entered the gap on the opposite side of the one she’d just left.

Crouching down, she conjured up a crate to hide inside and watched. The commander spied the fake Arlette just as she ducked between the tents and ran after her. Unfortunately for him, the fake Arlette was just too fast. She was already through the gap and out the other side by the time he reached the entrance. He gave chase anyway, but there was no way he would catch her, since after veering out of sight, the illusion vanished.

Arlette didn’t move as soon as the commander left her view. She wanted to wait a few moments to make sure he’d given up before she left, and she needed to catch her breath anyway. As she began to plan her next move, voices in the tent to her right caught her ears. She caught a tone of panic and listened closer.

“Absolutely not!” an older male voice declared. “I will not go down in history as a coward who ran! This whole plan was bad enough! I should be out there inspiring our soldiers, not hiding away! It makes me look weak!”

“But Your Eminence!” another male voice, pleaded. “We cannot risk your safety! Let us escape while our people deal with this threat!”

Arlette nearly gasped out loud. The Emperor was here, in the tent beside her? A thousand crazy thoughts raced through her mind. What if she could somehow...

No! She was injured, and the Emperor was clearly not alone inside that tent. There were probably a half a dozen or more guards in there with him, all of them strong fighters, plus whoever was arguing with him. Revenge tempted her, but she knew it would be a mistake. She wouldn’t even last a moment if they found her.

“I already bent too much when I agreed to vacate the stone rings for this pathetic tent! I will not bend again!” the Emperor pronounced. “This is the last gasp of the Nocenders! Break them and there will be nothing left to challenge my conquest! We will not run, and that is final! Enough of this! What of my Champion? Has she not been located yet?”

“Ah... no, Your Holiness,” another voice, female this time, replied. “We are still looking, but the Champion is nowhere to be found. Nor have we been able to find the Batranala who serves her. They have both vanished. What’s more, my people found an entrance to an unauthorized tunnel leading south within their quarters.”

The tent grew quiet for a moment. Arlette’s eyes widened as she realized that she hadn’t seen the Monster anywhere. With the Otharian units idle, this would have been the perfect time for her to destroy the Eterian defense once and for all, but she was nowhere to be found.

“A Batranala betraying her master? This... this is...” Arlette could hear the cold fury in the Emperor’s voice. “Once this battle is over, I want her hunted to the ends of the world! Use as many people as you need. I want her alive and on her knees before me before the season’s end! Understood? She will pay a thousand-fold for her disloyalty!”

“As you command, Your Grace!” both voices responded.

“Furthermore, neither of them has the capability to make a tunnel without being found out. They must have had help. Root out all who would conspire against me and stick their heads on pikes for all to see!”

“Yes, Your Grace!”

“You are dismissed! Do not disappoint me as they did.”

Arlette could hear the two Ubrans quickly leave the tent. Once more, she considered the idea of sneaking in and murdering the one man she hated as much as Sebastian, the man who’d destroyed her home. But once again, she thought better of it. The odds of success were just too low.

If she was guaranteed to take that blasted man’s life, she would, even if the price was her own life. Her insignificant existence against the ruler of a continent? That was a trade worth taking any day. But the likely outcome was her dying by ten different blades while the Emperor watched, unscathed. It just wasn’t worth trying.

A soft step nearby on the other side of the fabric graced the edge of her hearing and almost twenty years of battle-trained instincts started screaming at her to get the fuck out of there. She immediately dove away just as two large swords cut through the tent and her former position.

As Arlette staggered to her feet, a large, heavily muscled man with milky-white eyes emerged from the newly created entrance, a sharp, gleaming ornate blade in each hand. Her ears picked up a loud, high-pitched whine that slowly grew in volume, it’s tone modulating in a way that made her feel... wrong. Dizzy and off-balance, the world spun even though she was standing upright and not moving.

She recognized this man. He always stood by the Emperor’s side as he held court outside the walls, likely as his bodyguard. She’d found the man’s presence scary then; up close it was far more menacing.

She took a step back and the ground seemed to shift beneath her just a little, threatening to make her stumble. She caught herself and threw the knife in her right hand at the bodyguard, creating several fake knives that split off as she flung her hand around.

The man swept a sword out in front of him, knocking the real knife away while not even reacting to the others. The tremendous speed at which the sword sliced through the air brought a fearful gasp from her. He was a Weaver.

This whole situation was bad. Just one look told her that this man was way out of her league. Nobody became the bodyguard of the most powerful person in the world by being weak.

A large group of Ubran soldiers had been running by her when this all went down. Seizing this chance, Arlette rushed into the crowd to hide. With her illusory Ubran army uniform on, she figured she could blend into the others fairly easily.

The bodyguard didn’t give chase right away. Instead, he stayed put for a moment as if waiting for something. Then, nodding his head as if accepting orders, he shot after her.

Arlette swayed as she ran, the sound somehow messing with her sense of her body and what direction down was. The interference slowed her considerably and messed with her agility, which she considered her greatest physical advantage. It left her feeling weak and vulnerable.

Still, she did what she could, trying to put as much distance and as many people between her and the man as possible. The mass of Ubran soldiers had been headed for the expanding combat zone to the west, its deadly pandemonium growing closer and closer as the fighting spread. Against her earlier judgment, Arlette headed towards the front line along with them, at least for now. If she couldn’t lose the bodyguard in this group, she would likely need the messy chaos of combat to escape.

Her milky-eyed pursuer, however, wasn’t going to let her get away that easily. Plowing into the group like an enraged jaglioth, he pursued her with frightening persistence, knocking people out of his way to take as direct a path towards her as he could. The fact that these people were Ubrans seemed of no importance to him.

Seeing him quickly gaining ground, Arlette veered to her left while sending a fake version right. The terror within her spiked as she saw him immediately follow her without even a hint of hesitation. She tried again, this time heading right. He went right as well.

Arlette had a bad feeling deep inside. The way he was tracking her didn’t feel like he was just getting lucky. She swerved left again, sending her doppelganger deeper into the throng while she headed out of the group and towards the space between the nearest two tents. She could see a smattering of real fighting going on just on the other side of the nearest row. If she could just reach it...

She risked a glance back and paled at what she saw. Not only was the man still hot on her heels, he was even closer, now less than thirty paces behind. In a desperate bid to create more of the chaos she needed, Arlette took out another knife and threw it backward into the crowd. The blade struck home in a soldier’s hip, the wound nowhere near enough to incapacitate him but definitely enough to cause him to trip. The resulting pile-up of flailing bodies created a wonderful roadblock.

Arlette couldn’t help but grin as she took another peek back at the shrinking mess of limbs and torsos. She could see the bodyguard... no, wait. She couldn’t see him anymore. Where had he-

Something struck her left thigh, sending her sprawling onto the ground, her left shoulder taking much of the impact for the second time. But the tremendous pain coming from that stood no chance against the overwhelming pain that spiked up from that leg, wrenching an agonized scream from her lips. A sword as wide as her palm and longer than her arm was now completely embedded through her left thigh. The blade entered from her left and traveled all the way through the muscle so that the hilt pressed against her skin while the majority of the blood-drenched metal stuck out of her inner thigh just below her groin. If the blade had been just a little farther back, or rotated differently, it would have cleaved straight through the bone.

Her pursuer stood about twenty paces to her left, his right hand extended towards her and conspicuously missing the sword it had held just moments ago. When had he managed to slip around to her side like that? Had she misjudged her situation because of the sound he kept emitting that was making her woozy? She tried to puzzle out the answers, but the pain and disorientation made thought difficult.

Try as she might, Arlette could not contain the whimpers coming from her throat. She tried to crawl away, but every movement felt like absolute torture. She couldn’t put any power into either of her left limbs, and the blade sticking out of her thigh blocked her right leg from moving as well. All she could manage was to weakly drag herself along the ground with her right arm.

The bodyguard approached her now, his other sword ready to put her out of her misery. She didn’t know what to do anymore. In a last gasp of panicked defiance, she created an illusory ball of flame big enough to fry the man whole and sent it at him, hoping to frighten him even for a moment. He didn’t even blink, walking through it without even acknowledging its existence.

Something finally clicked together. The man’s blank, clouded eyes. The way he moved without looking around, even while a battle raged nearby. The way he’d known she was outside the tent. He was blind.

How he could move around like a normal person, and how he seemed to know where everything was, probably had something to do with the sound that made her feel dizzy. He used echoes to navigate just like the dorkati--cave lizards that used sound to see in the lightless caverns they called home. Her illusions never worked on him because he didn’t even know the illusions were there in the first place!

Faster than her. Stronger than her. Completely unaffected by her illusions. Able to disorient her so she couldn’t rely on her agility. It was like he was the perfect counter to everything she could do.

Once again, she was too weak.

“Prince Tehlmar, there’s another one over there!”

A chorus of shouts broke through the warbling whine the bodyguard continued to emit. He stopped short of her and raised his sword to his right as a blood-red whip lashed out and wrapped around the blade. As he pulled back, swinging his weapon free, a group of twenty or so elves decked in resplendent armor rushed into Arlette’s view.

The whine in her ears intensified and changed pitch as an all-out battle between the bodyguard and the elves broke out. Though the elves had the advantage of numbers and looked like they knew what they were doing, they moved oddly, as if their bodies lacked the coordination of somebody trained in martial arts and body control for years. At the same time, her wooziness lessened dramatically, as if a pressure on her brain had suddenly vanished.

“Finally!” a voice behind her sighed. “Letty, do you have any idea how many blue-haired women there are running around this place?”

Arlette froze, her mind going blank. Only one person ever called her that. She’d thought she would never see that person ever again. But, as she turned her head, there he stood.

The bodies were different, the man before her short, slight, and lithe, completely at odds with the tall, wide, and girthy body of the man who’d once been her greatest friend. The faces were nothing alike either, the refined visage she saw now—which she’d only witnessed once before but would never be able to forget—bearing no resemblance to the round, pudgy face with the bulbous nose and wide, thick mustache that she’d seen so many times over the years. But that cheeky, shit-eating grin... no matter the face, no matter the body, she’d recognize that smile anywhere.

The being who’d once been her greatest friend stood right there, right behind her. Pure rage flared within her at the sight of that smile. After all he’d done, he had the audacity to show up beside her like this? She clenched her jaw shut and stared daggers his way. Only the extent of Arlette’s injuries and the current situation kept her from beating the living daylight out of him.

“Prince Tehlmar, be careful!” one of the nearby elves warned.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Stay focused on the Ubran!” he yelled back. “We need to hold him until she finds us!”

Tehlmar? So that was his name. The name fit better to the man standing there than Jaquet ever would. There was no way in the world Jaquet would ever have been caught in such an ornate, gaudy set of armor.

“Here,” Tehlmar said, pulling out a roll of bandages and handing it to her. Her rage seemed to flow right through him like he wasn’t there, which only stoked her anger further. “Hold still. This is going to hurt.”

Checking the battle behind him for a moment to make sure he was clear, he bent down, grabbed the blade wedged into her leg by the handle, and pulled it free. Arlette hissed as the cold metal slid out of her body, but her right hand immediately went to work, wrapping the wound with the practiced movements of somebody who’d done this many times before while holding the bandage in place with her left, which was about the extent of what that hand could do motion-wise at the moment.

The fight nearby wasn’t going so well for the Drayhadan side. In just a few moments, four of the elven fighters were down and another two were clutching their wounds as they continued to fight, while the Ubran bodyguard looked entirely untouched. Arlette had been too distracted to see how it had all gone down, but she could make a pretty good guess just by the way the fight progressed as she wrapped her leg tightly.

The elves seemed just as affected, if not more so, by the destabilizing sound as she’d been. They stumbled and swayed like they’d had a good few too many drinks and were just trying to stagger their way home. The Ubran, on the other hand, danced with graceful precision between their strikes, moving with a nimbleness that a man that size shouldn’t possess. Seeing the situation, Tehlmar joined the fray, fighting against the dizziness to charge at the Ubran’s undefended back.

Alarm bells went off in Arlette’s head, but it was already too late.

Thrusting his newly-acquired sword at the man’s upper back, Tehlmar gasped as the blade found nothing but air. The Ubran bent forward, reaching up and behind him with his free hand to grasp the weapon firmly before twisting about and sending a powerful roundhouse towards the elf’s head. Tehlmar had to release the sword, but by doing so he was able to pull his arm back enough to intercept the incoming strike before it could pound his skull. The move saved his consciousness, and maybe even his life, but the kick still had enough power to send him crashing into a nearby tent. The tent, a smaller one that likely housed two soldiers at most, collapsed on him in a shower of fabric.

Nearly finished, Arlette kept wrapping. She just prayed that the other Drayhadans could keep the Ubran menace at bay long enough for her to get back on her feet.

Unfortunately, that looked less and less likely. Now reunited with both his of swords, the bodyguard’s assault on the elves took on a whole new level. He became a whirling bringer of death, twin blades lopping off arms and severing heads with blinding speed. One elf dropped, then another, then a third, all before Arlette could even blink.

In just moments, only ten elves still stood, the other ten or so now nothing more than corpses littering the ground and making footing all the more unreliable. The remaining elves spread out and backed away, readying their weapons or conjuring up some fire or ice. Meanwhile, Tehlmar managed to extricate himself from the collapsed tent, crimson liquid poured from his palms and forming into two long whips. He let out a piercing whistle and stepped forward, the blood whips lashing out at the Ubran as if they had a life of their own.

Tying several tight knots with the bandage, Arlette took one of her three remaining throwing knives and cut off the unused bandage before rolling over her good right side and pushing herself up. Her left leg screamed as she rose unsteadily to her feet, but she felt that she could at least hobble with it for the moment if she took her time.

Another elf had fallen by the time she worked herself upright. The remaining nine and Tehlmar were doing their all just to stay alive as the Ubran continued his relentless onslaught.

Arlette had never seen anybody fight the way Tehlmar fought. Thick red liquid morphed into a variety of shapes, from shields to swords to whips to more abstract things like simple spikes with smaller spikes growing out of them, changing to suit his immediate needs. There was an elegance to the way each shape flowed from one to the next in a way that seemed almost natural and left almost no openings.

And yet, even ten-on-one, the Ubran still had the advantage. A flurry of strikes pushed Tehlmar back, and Arlette could see how he struggled to keep his footing with his disrupted equilibrium. She also couldn’t help but notice how pale he looked. Fighting this way took an obvious toll on him.

With a strong flick of her good arm, Arlette threw one of her last knives at the Ubran, causing him to halt his attack and step out of the way just long enough for Tehlmar to retreat and for the other nine elves to jump in and harass their enemy. Then she started backing away as quickly as she could manage—which, for the record, was very slowly—and made her way for the gap between two nearby tents. She was getting out now, while she still could. What happened to the rest of them, well... that wasn’t her problem.

“Letty, wait!” Tehlmar called out.

Arlette ignored him and kept walking, but before she could take more than another two steps, a low female voice roared out from somewhere on the other side of the tents in front of her and stopped her in her tracks.

“WHERE’D YOU GO, YOU ESMAE SON OF A BITCH?!” the woman hollered. “YOU PROMISED ME STRONG OPPONENTS!”

A massive club tore through a tent, barely missing Arlette and throwing the structure aside to revealing the irate, hulking form of Akhustal Palebane—along with two other beastpeople—standing on the other side. The Chos and Arlette blinked as they saw each other. Realizing she still had her Ubran uniform disguise illusion active, Arlette quickly dropped it before the Stragman could knock her head off. Palebane blinked in surprise and recognition.

“You?! What are you doing-” She stopped mid-sentence as she spied the Ubran standing amidst the bodies of the slain, blood flying from his swords as he gave them each a powerful flick. An excited, predatory grin appeared on her face, growing wider and wider the more she stared. “Oh. Ohohoho, I know you! You’re Taras, the Blind Butcher! Oh yeah, you’re just what I need right now!”

She stepped forward, pointing at Tehlmar. “You two follow his orders for the rest of the battle. This one’s mine!”

“Yes, Chos!” the others responded, moving around to join the elves. They eyed each other warily but neither side said anything.

“Alright, everybody, group up!” Tehlmar commanded as he sidestepped over to Arlette, never turning away from the Ubran, who’d gone fully still. “We’re falling back!”

The elves and beastkin faded towards the two of them. Making a decision, the blind man leapt towards Arlette and the others. Tehlmar’s blood flowed outward into two large circular shields to intercept the strikes. He staggered back from the blows, grunting with exertion as he used the compression of the liquid to absorb much of the force.

But before the bodyguard could strike again, he twisted to his right and brought up his weapons. Stragman wood met Ubran metal and the Ubran lost, the blow sending him crashing through one of the few tents still standing nearby.

“Buh? That’s it?” the Stragman leader muttered to herself.

“Let’s go, she’s got this,” Tehlmar stated, grabbing Arlette’s right arm and placing it over his shoulders for support.

Irrational fury coursed through Arlette’s soul at the touch. She shook herself free and hobbled forward, away from the Chos and towards the battle.

“Don’t touch me,” she snapped at him, no longer able to keep her silence.

“But-”

“No. Somebody else, maybe. But not you.”

The elf frowned. “You!” he barked at the shorter of the two beastpeople, who stood about Arlette’s height. “Help her along! We’re moving!”

The beastkin’s face made his displeasure at taking orders from a Drayhadan quite clear, but his ruler’s orders were even clearer. He took Arlette’s shoulder and they quickened their pace.

The sound of club against sword was heard behind them once again, followed by disappointed complaints from the Stragman woman.

“I heard you were a deadly warrior! The greatest in the Empire! Protector of the Emperor himself!” she griped. “I thought you’d be somebody worth going all-out against, but you’re nothing more than a pretender with a worthless TRICK!”

As she yelled that last word, the sound of metal striking wood rang out one last time, though much louder than before.

“Look out!” Tehlmar cried as a shape went shooting past them only a pace or two above their heads.

Tumbling out of control, the Ubran soldier who’d effortlessly dispatched ten experienced warriors in just moments landed in a heap before rolling to a stop a good forty paces in front of their group. They stopped as he slowly pushed himself back to his feet.

Arlette almost couldn’t wrap her mind around the night-and-day difference between the Taras that twenty experienced soldiers couldn’t touch and the Taras she saw now. He looked battered and bruised, his face scrunched up in a grimace of pain. One of his two large swords looked slightly bent about halfway down the blade, while the other’s tip looked to have been completely broken off. All of this in just a few short clashes between him and the Chos.

“You’d better fight harder, weakling, or I’ll kill your beloved Emperor extra slowly as punishment for being such a disappointment!” the Chos taunted him.

The man froze, her words impacting him enough that he dropped the chipped sword. He reached down and pulled a small black vial from his pocket and put it to his lips.

Arlette instantly went as white as a sheet. “RUN!” she shouted, turning away from the man and, when her helper didn’t follow, hopping and hobbling as fast as she could away from the Ubran and the Chos.

“Letty, what-”

“Just run, asshole!” she hollered back at Tehlmar. “Everybody, run if you want to live!”

Tehlmar backed away from the Ubran slowly, initially confused at Arlette’s reaction. But then, as the air itself began to shake, a low rumble vibrating out from the bodyguard and shaking all of them through to their very core, he wisened up instantly.

“Move!” he shouted to the group, as he broke into a sprint in her direction. “You two, carry her!”

The Stragmans seized Arlette roughly as they ran by her, picking her up and carrying her feet first horizontally beneath their arms like they would a long log. She squawked in protest as their grip sent spikes of pain through her, but she didn’t fight it. A little pain was a price worth paying for her life. As a bonus, thanks to her head hanging out from behind them, she got to witness up close what was about to go down.

The air shook heavily now, reality itself seeming to rumble with ever-increasing ferocity. The world around the Ubran seemed to bend like how it did in desert updrafts, only far more violently. Arlette’s ears felt like they would rupture at any moment, even with the increased distance between them and him.

The man bent his legs for a moment, his muscles flexing with unknowable power, and picked up his dropped weapon. Then there was a crack of thunder and the man rocketed at the Chos with speeds Arlette had never seen before, not even from the Monster. The Chos met him head-on, her giant war club swinging across his path with mighty authority, but before it hit, a shockwave strong enough to knock down every tent within two hundred paces exploded out from the man and threw her backward.

Arlette couldn’t believe her eyes as one of the man’s blades sliced into the Chos’s heavily muscled leg. The woman didn’t seem upset at all. On the contrary, she was cackling, her eyes shining with delight like a child receiving a gift. Her club whipped forward with blinding speed, slamming into the Ubran as the two began their dance of death.

This time, it was the Ubran’s turn to fly backward. As he tumbled through the air, another shockwave burst forth from him and his momentum halted mid-flight. Falling to the earth, he blurred forward again the moment his feet touched the ground.

Palebane shouted some sort of exhortation that Arlette couldn’t make out amidst the din and the two converged in a flash. The Stragman’s club hurtled downward, its massive might threatening to pulverize the Ubran, but Taras blurred again just before it hit, reappearing by her left side as the club crashed into the ground. It didn’t matter.

The ground all around the Chos erupted from the colossal hit, hurling the Ubran about ten paces into the air. Palebane was also flung upward by the sudden rupture, but she kept her grip on her weapon, letting the force flip her nearly upside-down while her monumentally heavy club remained implanted in the earth. Then, with a grace that implied she’d done this many times before, she twisted in mid-air and swung the weapon up and around like it weighed less than a tiny stick—which, Arlette knew, was precisely what it weighed at that moment. Taras managed to bring his swords around in time to block the strike, but the oversized bludgeon connected with far greater force than he could absorb, its weight shifting in the last fraction of a moment to that of a massive Stragman tree ten paces thick.

The man’s body streaked off into the distance, his passage leaving a trail of destruction as he hurtled through ten rows of tents and countless people before finally coming to a stop. Then, just a few heartbeats later, he somehow popped right back up, looking little worse for wear than before, and shot forward to continue the fight as the Chos laughed and laughed, a wild gleam in her eyes.

That was all Arlette saw, as her group passed by another row of tents and she lost sight of the spectacle. She could still hear her laughter. The crashes that followed were loud enough that she believed they could have been heard in Gustil.

“I need to rest for a moment,” Tehlmar said to the others a few rows later. They slowed down and came to a halt at the entrance of a moderately large tent. He peeked through the tent flap for a moment before stepping inside and beckoning the rest of them to follow.

Crates about three paces tall and wide filled most of the inside, along with a few left over tent poles and other assorted tent supplies piled in the corners. A supply tent, one of many in the camp.

The elf’s face looked paler than the moons as he slowly lowered himself down to the ground. Arlette half-sat on a crate as far away from Tehlmar as she could manage, letting her left leg hang off of the side so she wasn’t putting any pressure on the wound. The rest of the soldiers interspersed themselves in the gap between them.

Nobody spoke for what felt like forever as they listened to the sounds of combat. She could hear the screams and shouts of soldiers from both sides as hundreds of small battles raged throughout the camp. She could hear the dull thuds of boulders and the like falling atop Drayhadan and Stragman and Eterian troops. The clearest of all, perhaps, she could hear the crashes and booms of the Chos and the Ubran bodyguard as they went at each other with full force.

Still, the biggest reason for the silence was the palpable tension between the two figures on each side of the group. Arlette kept catching Tehlmar peeking at her through the gaps between the other soldiers. She did her best to ignore his glances, lest she lose control of herself. Just looking at him caused a flood of anger to surge through her.

“Alright, Letty, here’s the situation,” the pale elf finally said, breaking the tense silence inside the tent.

Arlette squeezed her jaw shut and closed her eyes, refusing to respond.

“Thanks to our successful surprise attack, we have the tactical advantage for the moment. However, we could only bring a third of our forces here in time to help. The rest are still at least two days away. That means the Ubrans still have a large troop count advantage. They will be able to push us back eventually. Once I’ve recovered, we’ll need to move quickly to get out of here. Looking at your condition, I think it’s best if we head south through the fires to avoid as much fighting as-”

“Why are you here?” Arlette finally interrupted with a snarl. Just the sound of his voice talking to her like he was giving some standard mid-battle action report had driven her into such a rage that she could no longer contain herself.

“I’m the commander of the Drayhadan armies,” he replied she should find that impressive.

“No, asshole, why are you fucking here, where I can see you?” Arlette spat, pointing straight down at her feet.

“Watch your tone!” one of the elves shot back, taking a belligerent step towards her. “You shall not address the Prince of the Esmae Clan with such disrespect!”

“Stand down, soldier. This is between her and me,” the prince ordered, his voice taking on a weariness that struck Arlette as far more genuine than the chummy tone from before. He let out a tired breath and stared back at her.

“What do you think I’m doing here, Letty? I’m here to rescue you. When I saw you fall, I took my guards, persuaded Palebane to follow along, and fought my way to you.”

“And then you just came running in to save the day? My hero!” She let out a barking laugh. “I don’t recall ever asking for your help.”

“Oh, come now, Letty! You’re being ridiculous!” he scoffed, incredulous. “What was I supposed to do, just leave you to die?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, now would it?” she ground out through clenched teeth.

“Look, I didn’t want to do that, I didn’t have a choice! And it’s not like I just left you with nothing, I gave you the keys! I knew you’d get out on your own just fine!”

“Shut your fucking mouth,” an incensed Arlette growled, pushing herself up off the crate and taking a somewhat wobbly series of steps in his direction. “You think I’m going to trust a single word you say? You lied to me for more than half a fucking decade! Every single thing you said was a fucking lie. All of it! Did you think you could just show up and flash a smile and make it all better?”

“Letty-”

“No! You don’t get to call me that!” she snarled as she closed in, the others between them quickly getting out of her way. She could see from the way the light in his eyes faded that she was crushing his spirit, but she didn’t care. She never wanted to see him again. Just seeing him now was already one time too many. Her rage drove her forward, the words gushing forth like a geyser. “Only one person ever called me that, and that person is now dead, if they were ever even fucking alive to begin with. You are not that person.”

“Come on now. You’re overreacting,” the elf pleaded. “I’m still the same person you remember, I just look different.”

Arriving in front of him, Arlette leaned over and stared down at him with eyes wide and filled with murderous contempt.

“No, you are not. Jaquet was my friend. My greatest and only friend. You’re not him. You’re nobody. You are not my friend, you are not my ally, you’re not even my fucking acquaintance. You are nothing.

“I don’t know what made you think that showing up to rescue me would somehow undo everything you did and make it all even, but that’s not how it works. You lied to me, you used me, and when you were done with me, you abandoned me at the lowest point of my life in a fucking dungeon the night before my execution! I don’t know what you really want from me, but if you want to be forgiven, then you can fuck right off and go back to your little elf land, prince. You will never get even a drop of forgiveness from me. Not now. Not ever.”

The elven prince deflated like a full waterskin with a hole in the bottom with every successive word she spoke. By the end of her diatribe, he looked like he’d aged decades in just a few moments. Arlette felt not even a single twinge of guilt for any of it.

“Are you done with your ‘rest’?” she huffed, turning away from him and limping over to one of the nearby extra tent poles and picking it up. About eight paces of solid wood, the pole was thin enough that she could wrap her hand around the shaft and light enough that she could lift it and use it as a makeshift walking stick to support her. Its length would be a little cumbersome, but it beat the alternative of leaning on somebody’s shoulder the whole time. It was a shame there weren’t any weapons in here as well. “We need to get going before somebody finds us. Then, once we’re out of here, we can go our separate ways and you and the Chos and the Emperor can all go kill each other for all... I...”

Arlette’s voice trailed off as she came to an idea. A terrible, reckless, crazy, dangerous idea, but one that would be worth everything if it worked out. There were enough people here to provide at least a modicum of success. An opportunity like this would surely never present itself in her lifetime again. There was just one problem: she would need Tehlmar’s full cooperation, and she’d just spent the last few moments vomiting her raw, unvarnished opinions about him all over his face.

Turning back around, Arlette’s gaze met his, and he turned his head in that way he always had, a Jaquet mannerism which meant “What is it?”. Seeing such actions coming from a body half his weight and with a different face felt profoundly disconcerting. It bothered her. What bothered her even more was how she had nearly reacted naturally to the unspoken question out of habit.

After a moment of awkward silence, she decided to just say it. She cleared her throat. “I, uh, know where the Emperor is hiding.”

Tehlmar’s eyes sharpened and the other elves and beastmen stiffened in surprise at her admission.

“I think,” she continued, “if we’re smart enough and strong enough, we could kill him and end it all right now.”

Tehlmar’s face went hard. “No. We’re getting you out of here. Then I’ll come back afterward with more people and do it myself.”

“You won’t have time! You said it yourself, you don’t have the numbers to keep up the fight for too much longer! This is our only chance!”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“Please, Tehlmar,” she pleaded. “We cannot let this opportunity pass us by!”

“You keep saying ‘we’. I thought you never wanted to see me again. I thought you hated my guts.”

“Look, I...” She paused to consider her words. “You hurt me. You hurt me deep. Just looking at you makes me want to beat your head in. I’m never going to be able to forget the pain you caused. But you only hurt me. That man stole my life. He stole my mother, my home, my country, my childhood, all of it. He took it all. He and Sebastian together ruined everything good in my existence and I will never, ever hate anybody to the level that I hate them.

“Do you think I ended up in this forsaken place by accident? Do you think I didn’t know what I was getting into? I knew since the start of this mess, more than a season ago, that I was almost definitely going to die here. I didn’t care. I wanted revenge. Any sort of revenge. I’d trade my life to take his in a heartbeat. Anything I can do to ruin that fucking bastard’s day is worth it. That’s how much I hate him, and the only way you could ever make me hate you as much as I hate him would be to take away my best chance at revenge when it’s finally right in front of me.”

The elf closed his eyes for a moment, deep in thought.

“How many guards?” he finally asked.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see inside the tent, but it wasn’t large enough to hold too many people. I’d guess no more than ten.”

“I need more than a guess.”

“I’m sorry, but his bodyguard caught me before I could find out anything more. I had no choice but to run.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” he replied. “After the battle, you and I go for one last drink, like old times. That’s my price.”

“...fine,” Arlette agreed. She truly didn’t want to see him ever again, but one more meeting was almost suspiciously cheap compared to what she was asking in return.

“That being said, this will be an exploratory mission. We only attack if I think the odds are good we’ll succeed. Understood? And either way, you’ll stay back and out of the fray.”

Arlette reluctantly nodded. That was the best she was going to get.

“Glad we could work this out,” the elf stated as he stood up and turned towards the tent flap, his face having regained much of its lost color. “Arlette, lead the way.”

The journey through the camp went much smoother for Arlette the second time. The elves that still lived were accomplished, experienced, and skilled warriors, as proven by their ability to survive the Ubran bodyguard. The Stragmans turned out to be no slouches either, especially the shorter one who turned out to be a rather powerful fire Observer.

With such a high-level group, most small squads of enemy resistance stood little chance, though Arlette still made sure to steer clear of trouble as much as she could through the chaos. And chaos it remained. The fires to the south continued to grow. Thousands of tiny struggles between groups from each side popped up all around them as both armies continued their butchery. Arlette couldn’t tell anymore if the same held true for the more defensive Eterians on the eastern side, but she hoped some of them still lived as well. And then there was the cacophony nearby.

The one-on-one battle between the Chos and the chimirin-dosed Ubran continued, at least if the endless series of booms and crashes were any indication. Though it would have surely gotten her killed, part of Arlette wished she could have stuck around before to watch the two throw down. She found it amazing that somebody could keep up with a boosted person without taking chimirin themselves. It truly spoke to the sheer aberrational power Akhustal Palebane wielded. Already recognized as the strongest person in Stragma, she was likely the strongest person on the continent, or maybe even the world.

Idly, she wondered how much longer the Ubran had before he went the way all the others who took the death drug did. Having seen multiple people die from it, she’d formed a loose theory that the time each person had before they died was proportional to the strength of their soul force. It explained, at least, how Supreme General Erizio Astalaria had been the final person to live among the strike force even though he was surely the first person to ingest the stuff at the start of the battle. If she was right, then the strength of the bodyguard’s soulforce was up there with the most powerful.

“That one, there,” Arlette said, stopping a hundred paces from an unmarked tent. Looking at it now, she found nothing to distinguish it from the sea of tents around it. The size, shape, color, quality, placement, and all the rest were completely unremarkable. It truly was an incredible place to hide somebody important. Only the slice in the side, where the bodyguard had attacked her before, confirmed she’d found the right place.

She and Tehlmar looked around, studying the surrounding area. The tent was located near the center of the camp, though a bit towards the western side, rather far from the largest confrontations on either end. A few battles could be seen and heard nearby, but on the whole, the area was quieter than most of the camp. That just meant fewer people to muck things up.

Tehlmar seemed to agree with her assessment. He turned to the Stragman Observer and said, “Light it up, starting with the far end. Let’s see how many things crawl out.”

Three burning spheres the size of Arlette’s head rained down onto the tent canopy, lighting a blaze on the back half of the structure’s roof. A series of shouts could be heard from within, and six soldiers wearing pristine armor rushed outside.

“Probably another few still inside,” Tehlmar muttered to himself. “Still, that’s less than I thought. Good enough.”

He charged forward, the others following behind him. Arlette, for her part, sidled closer but made sure to keep behind a tent to avoid detection as best she could.

The soldiers protecting the most powerful person in the world were, not surprisingly, very strong and capable fighters. But the Stragmans and Drayhadans assaulting them were equally some of the best of the best, and they had numbers in their favor.

As they fought, Tehlmar lashed out with a long whip of his blood with a sharp crimson blade on the end, cutting through the front of the tent. The fabric fell away to reveal an old man with a large book in one hand flanked by two more soldiers, their weapons at the ready and their eyes on the lookout for more threats.

The old man, easily recognizable to everybody as Haidar Batra, Emperor of the Ubran Empire, extended his empty hand forward, his eyes glaring at the assembled fighters as if they were nothing but disgusting trash. “Kneel!” he snarled.

Arlette watched with puzzlement as all the other non-Ubrans outside the tent stumbled all at once before catching themselves and continuing their battle.

“I said kneel!” the apoplectic Emperor cried, and the attackers stumbled even harder than before.

Arlette noticed that her allies all were moving slower now, their steps unsteady and their form poor. Was this another balance disruption technique, similar to his bodyguard’s? The effect didn’t extend to her hiding place, so she couldn’t say for sure. What she could see was that whatever was going on was greatly hampering her side’s ability to fight, even with their numbers.

Tehlmar also apparently agreed. Seeing the situation he sprang into action, the blood in his hand, currently in the form of two swords suddenly split into a hundred long, thin spikes as he threw defense aside and went for the immediate kill. Two of the spikes stabbed into his opponent’s skull, killing him instantly. Without waiting a heartbeat, he went on the offensive against the closest enemies to his left. They managed to block his sudden assault but were forced to step back, freeing the two elves who’d been engaging them until now.

“Go!” he shouted. The elves seemed to know what he meant, as they simultaneously broke off and rushed towards the Emperor and his two remaining guards as fast as they could while under this strange, invisible condition.

The Emperor stepped back, a mixture of fear and outrage on his face, as the two guards engaged the pair of attackers just a few paces from him.

“T-this is...!” he sputtered. “Taras! Taras, return at once!”

A blurry streak flashed across Arlette’s vision, accompanied by a loud boom and a shockwave that threw everybody—Arlette included—off their feet and blew away the burning remains of the tent. Somehow, the Emperor stood completely unaffected in the now-open area, his terrifying bodyguard now standing before him.

The man that Arlette had last seen going up against the Chos barely resembled the man that slouched in front of his master, panting heavily. The new Taras was covered in scrapes, bruises, and worse. He held one of his swords in his left hand, the blade broken off completely about halfway along its full length. His right hand, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen. Nor was most of that arm; less than a half an upper-arm’s-worth of skin, muscle, and bone extended out from his right shoulder before terminating in a messy mash of all three. The sight made her wince. She’d seen crushing injuries before, but never on that level.

However, despite his appearance, the man remained incredibly deadly. Blood dripped from his half-broken sword as he stood over the now-decapitated bodies of the two elven assailants. After pausing for a moment to catch his breath, he turned towards the group of Ubran guards and Drayhadan and Stragman attackers, all of whom were quickly climbing to their feet as fast as possible without dropping their guard. He blurred again and another boom struck. When he stopped on the other side of the group, all but two of the attackers had lost their heads.

Arlette gasped in horror as the headless bodies fell, blood still squirting from their necks. All that remained were Tehlmar and one other elf, who had been just far enough to the side to be out of reach. He turned towards the final two.

A tent pole, longer and thicker one than the one Arlette held, streaked towards him like a javelin from the right of Arlette’s vision, causing Taras to abort his next attack. He turned and blocked it with his sword, but the pole hit with a force many times greater than it should have given its weight and speed, sending him flying more than twenty paces.

“Hey!” a familiar low female voice hollered. Akhustal Palebane skidded to a stop near Tehlmar and the other Drayhadan. She looked beat up as well; cuts covered her arms, including several where pieces of Taras’s swords looked to be still embedded in her flesh. Far, far worse, her left ear was just gone. Instead of a cute round white ear like the one that stuck out of the upper right side of her head, there was nothing. Something had sliced off not only the ear but the hair and the skin around it, revealing blood and a patch of skull to the world. Arlette also thought she saw stumps where the Stragman’s left ring finger and pinky should be. And yet... for all the blood and the wounds, she didn’t so much appear hurt or in pain as she did angry and annoyed.

“Where do you think you’re running off to?” she demanded to know, her club flicking out to the side absent-mindedly to slam into one of the Ubran guards and send the unfortunate soul rocketing out of Arlette’s view. “We’re not done yet!”

Taras shot forward and the Chos moved to meet him, their cacophonous battle resuming right before Arlette’s eyes. Meanwhile, Tehlmar and his last remaining comrade faced off against five of the remaining guards while the fifth kept by the Emperor. The Ubran ruler looked about with concern on his face and said something that Arlette couldn’t make out of the din. Then he turned and walked a few paces away and pulled a hatch up from the ground.

Arlette’s blood ran cold as she watched him lower himself down into the earth. A tunnel! Arlette recalled how Supreme General Astalaria had needed to spend the majority of his days this last season foiling the Ubrans’ attempts to tunnel into the city. She would have bet a year’s pay that those same tunnelers had been tasked long ago with creating a tunnel network below the camp to allow for clandestine movement of important people. It would explain how the Emperor had appeared here in this nondescript tent, when everybody had thought him to be in the stone rings. If the Ubran ruler could make it into those tunnels, they’d never be able to find him in time! After all this, he was going to escape!

Everybody else was too busy to notice his actions. She couldn’t sit there any longer. Cladding herself in an Ubran army uniform, she left her hiding place and half-hobbled, half-ran a circuitous route around the fighting, making sure to keep tents between her and the rest of them. She emerged around the other side several moments later and limped towards the guard by the tunnel entrance. He noticed her quickly and turned her way.

“Stay back! Don’t come closer!” he warned her. The illusory Ubran uniform kept him from immediately attacking, helped by the fact that the guards besides Taras hadn’t seen her face the first time. Arlette knew that was about to change.

“Please help me!” she begged, stepping ever closer. “I don’t want to die!”

“I said stay back!” The man hefted his war hammer in a threatening manner.

The two of them were only six or so steps apart now. Arlette took another step and sent a doppelganger surging at him, the fake tent pole striking out at his chest. Even though he was on his guard, the soldier was taken by surprise and he swung his hammer down and through the matter-less construct. Arlette’s right hand whipped out, hurling her second-last knife point-first towards his throat. This time, her aim was true and it sank deep into his neck. He fell to the dirt, clutching at his throat as he died.

“The Emperor!” one of the remaining guards cried. The five guards had managed to kill the elf that wasn’t Tehlmar and were pushing Tehlmar into a tight spot, but Arlette’s actions caught their attention. Four of the five broke away and rushed towards her. Taras as well went for her, but the Chos blocked him ably.

Seeing the sudden change, Tehlmar spun past the one guard still fighting him and used his blood to launch himself up and over the oncoming Ubrans. Landing in front of her, he used his own blood to slice a long horizontal cut on the front of each of his shoulders and turned around. A half-dozen crimson blades grew from the new wounds, floating in the air suspended on thin liquid tendrils.

“Go! I’ll hold them here!” he declared.

Arlette hesitated. “But-”

“GO NOW!” he cried as he began to fend off all five Ubrans with his swarm of blades.

Arlette didn’t need to be told a third time. She pulled up the hatch and gingerly lowered herself into the hole below.

After entering the tunnel, Arlette realized it was too cramped for her makeshift walking stick, and she’d have to leave it behind. Dropping it reluctantly, she hobbled forward as quickly as she could, creating a small flame to light her way as the light from the entrance behind her fell away. She saw no sign of the Emperor in the tunnel. He must have moved on. Luckily, there was only one direction to go. She could only hope the tunnel didn’t diverge later.

Arlette didn’t know how long she was down beneath the earth, but it felt like forever. Thoughts warred in her mind, part of her telling her to go as fast as possible, while the other part worried that she’d make too much noise and warn others that she was coming. She decided to err more on the side of speed than silence. Stealth would do her no good if the Emperor was gone when she got to the other end.

Coming to a halt, Arlette stared at the passageway ahead and sighed. It figured the tunnel would split into three separate directions. Why would she ever catch a break?

Unsure of her next move, she closed her eyes and listened intently. Above her, she could hear the muffled sounds of the battle as it continued without her. The sounds were far too indistinct for her to glean any information from them, however.

Sticking her head into the left tunnel, she listened more intently but heard nothing, not even the sound of air. The central tunnel was the same. From the right tunnel, however, she thought he heard something, a scratching, scraping sound from farther down the passageway. She headed in that direction.

As she traveled further down the tunnel, Arlette noticed signs of damage to the walls and ceiling. The tunnel was not just a hole in the earth; stone and wooden beams supported the top and sides to keep them from collapsing. Yet with each successive step, the boards and stone start to sport wider and deeper cracks, and larger and larger pieces of earth had fallen to the floor.

It took her a moment, but Arlette soon realized what this meant. These tunnels led to the stone rings on the western edge of the camp, where her side had thought the Emperor to be. The passageways must have been created to allow him to travel out of the rings without being noticed by anyone, letting him hide in an unremarkable tent while the Eterians wasted their best shot at killing him.

The rings were located solidly behind the Stragman lines, a theoretically dangerous place for the Ubran leader to be, but Arlette doubted that anybody would be inside or even notice him hiding there. After all, why would anybody look for the Emperor behind them? And who would waste their time guarding a trio of destroyed stone circles? They’d probably swept through it once, found nobody, and continued onward to engage the Ubrans, if they had even bothered searching it at all.

Still, Arlette would have bet everything she owned—admittedly very little at the moment—that this was not where the Emperor actually wanted to go. It was more likely that there just wasn’t a choice. She understood now that the point of this tunnel was secrecy, so even if other tunnels existed around the camp, they couldn’t be allowed to connect to this one. The fact that the most powerful man in the world was potentially stuck behind the enemy because the Ubrans had gotten too coy with their stratagems tickled her greatly.

The tunnel shrank as the damage grew. She found herself having to get down on her hands and knees to crawl through several portions. The direction she’d taken and the fact that the tunnel hadn’t completely collapsed suggested that she was heading for the northern-most ring of the three. That one had been the farthest from the epicenter of General Astalaria’s attack, and while it had collapsed, from up in the airship it had looked to her to be the least-damaged.

She slowed down drastically and extinguished her flame the moment her eyes caught the sight of light ahead. Pulling herself through the constricted passage as quietly as she could, she crept up to the entrance and stealthily took a peek outside.

From what she could tell, the stone ring remained a stone ring, only now the ring was made up of broken boulders instead of a single solid piece of rock grown to the desired shape. Many smaller broken pieces could be found strewn across the middle of the ring, the shards of broken columns or something of that sort. Off to the side, she spotted the Emperor, his body turned to the side. The man’s ornate and assuredly expensive outfit was covered in dirt and grime, though he didn’t seem as bothered about that as the dirt that had gotten onto his book. She heard him muttering to himself as he wiped the edges of the pages, trying to clean them with his hands.

He wasn’t looking.

Silent as a black vine snake, she crawled from the open tunnel hatch and hid behind a nearby rock about two-thirds her full height, where she began to plan her next move. Perhaps it was time to put her training into practice. She pulled her muddled thoughts together and focused while she began moving slowly along the broken column, circling the distracted old man.

“I’ve been dreaming of this moment for almost as long as I can remember,” her voice said as a phantom clone stepped up from the tunnel entrance.

The Emperor’s head snapped up, his eyes going wide with surprise as he spied the fake form shambling towards him. Arlette had considered making the illusion resemble her at peak capacity, but chose instead to make her look like she did now. She needed it to be just threatening enough to distract him but not enough to make him try to run.

“Kneel!” the man barked, but Arlette’s false copy continued unaffected by the man’s mysterious discombobulation effect.

“You’re nothing but a ravenous beast, consuming everything in sight,” the fake Arlette continued. “How many people have died for your ambitions? How many lives have you destroyed?”

“How?! How can you still move?!” the despot cried out as the illusion closed in. “Impossible! Nobody can go unaffected! Unless...”

That was when he spotted another figure out of the corner of his eye, not more than eight paces from him, her knife held forward to strike.

“Kneel!” he barked again, turning his head towards the new threat.

The new Arlette stumbled much like the warriors had before, her knees bending and her body having trouble staying on her feet. Her body swayed as if off balance and as she took another half step, and her foot slid out from beneath her, sending her to her knees. The first Arlette flickered repeatedly but did not disappear.

“An illusion Observer, as I thought,” the Emperor gloated. “I must commend you on your ability. Few people can maintain their Observations while under my power. However, to try to take my life by yourself with nothing but a dagger and some parlor tricks speaks poorly for your intelligence. But do not worry, that is why I am here: to enlighten you all to the truth and wonder of service in the name of the Empire. In my name.”

“Eat shit,” the second Arlette gasped out. “You Ubrans love to talk about how you ‘bring civility to the world’, but Ofrax was fine before you showed up. We were happy! We had good lives! We never needed you, but when have you ever cared for the thoughts of anybody but yourself?!”

“An Ofraxian? How rare! What are you doing on this side of the Divide?”

“Living the life you gave me, you and Sebastian and all the rest of you bastards! And every time I finally think I’ve gotten my life back, you fucks show up and ruin it all over again! But go ahead, enlighten me to the truth and wonder of service in your name! I can’t wait to hear it!”

Unable to contain her victorious grin as her second clone emptied her soul at the man responsible for the events that had sent her life into the gutter, the real Arlette sneaked around the end of the broken column and emerged behind the thoroughly distracted tyrant. The best way to convince somebody to let their guard down was to make it seem like they’d already won.

She felt a certain level of joyous accomplishment from the feat. Creating and maintaining two full doppelgangers while still being able to move and fight with her real body had been beyond her since childhood. Larger illusions she could handle. Multiple people she could handle as well, as long as she didn’t have to do anything more than walk slowly. But as soon as she had to move independently and even battle at the same time, one Arlette became her limit. It had been so difficult and seemingly unrealistic that by her teen years, she’d given up even trying. But at Peko’s encouragement, she’d found that she could handle more now than ever before. Her control still wasn’t fully there, so an all-out sword fight with two doppelgangers was still a little out of reach, but slowly sneaking up on an old man was entirely in her wheelhouse.

Arlette crept steadily closer, taking each step slowly and quietly while making sure to keep the second fake her “struggling” with the Emperor’s unsteadying power. Calling on all her years of training and experience to mask her presence, she slowed her breathing, stepped with the balls of her feet, and raised her knife to strike.

She never got the chance. A healthy and rested Arlette would have likely pulled off the attack with great success, but the real her was injured and worn out, and that exhaustion brought mistakes. Just a few steps away from the unsuspecting tyrant’s exposed back, Arlette’s left foot—which she wasn’t raising as high due to her wound—struck a small stone, sending it bouncing lightly to the side. The sound it made was slight, but not slight enough. The Emperor turned her way.

Arlette staggered as her body all of a sudden felt herself being pulled towards the ground. It was as if every part of her body was strapped to a heavy weight. The two phantom Arlettes vanished as she strained against the sudden burden. So this was his power. She’d completely misunderstood its nature. Had she known, she would have gone about this differently, but it was too late for that now.

Seeing her window of opportunity slamming shut with alarming speed, she flexed her right arm as best she could and threw her last knife. Her throw went wide, but instead of flying off and hitting a boulder behind them, it curved sharply towards the ground and skidded to a stop behind and to the left of the despot.

“Kneel!” he commanded, his eyes flashing with fury.

Arlette’s legs trembled, but she refused to submit. Her left shoulder screamed at her as the pull from her arm increased dramatically, but she would rather die than kneel before him. So weighty was the burden that she temporarily abandoned any thoughts of taking another step forward. To attempt such on a faulty leg risked falling over and never being able to get back up against the constant pressure. So instead, she concentrated on staying as upright as she could, willing her back to straighten even just a little.

The two of them faced each other, locked in a static battle of wills. While the Emperor’s pressure kept her from moving forward, maintaining it also kept him from moving as well. The focus needed to Observe kept most Observers immobile while doing so, lest their movements mess with their perspective and foul up their technique. Moving hands or talking didn’t matter much, but moving the position of one’s viewpoint did. Arlette was a special case in this regard; the Emperor was not. However, the situation was far from a stalemate. He had the upper hand, making the biggest question simply how long she could stay upright as the complaints from her knees grew louder and louder.

“You pathetic people don’t know when to give up!” he snarled.

“You won’t win, we will stop you one way or another,” she growled out, matching his hateful gaze with her own.

“Silence! I will not allow you ignorant Nocend fools to spoil my legacy!” the old man seethed, his gaze increasingly unhinged. “I am the ruler of this world! You all belong to me! It is my right!”

A familiar low roar suddenly sounded far away, quickly gaining in intensity as it rapidly grew closer to them. The Ubran paid it no mind, continuing his ranting as he pressed his power down upon her, but Arlette grasped upon the sound. She knew exactly what it was and what it meant, and so she prepared herself as best she could.

“You will all kneel before me! Every last one of you! Now KNEEL!” The power pressing down on her suddenly seemed to triple. It was like an invisible hand smacked down upon her body. Unable to resist any longer, she collapsed down onto one knee, with her left knee on the ground and right still upright. Her body pressed down against her right leg, making even drawing breath a nearly impossible task.

“Ahaha, yes! If I command you to kneel, you shall kneel! If I command you to die, you shall-”

thoom thoom Thoom Thoom Thoom THOOM THOOM THOOM THOOM THOOM THOOM!

A cascade of thunderclaps erupted outside the stone ring, each successive clap growing closer and closer until it sounded like the world itself was splitting in two. The final bomb’s burst set off tremors in the ground beneath them so strong that the Emperor lost his balance and teetered backward in shock and surprise. His focus suddenly disrupted, the force pressing Arlette to the ground momentarily vanished.

Arlette was ready. Launching herself forward with her good leg, she threw herself against the Emperor before he could reestablish his Observation. Together they fell to the ground in an uncoordinated heap, with Arlette’s head on top of his gut and her chest pressing down on his legs.

The old man howled in indignation as Arlette clawed forward with her good arm, a wicked smile on her face. Now he had to decide: crush them both, or crush neither? Either option was acceptable in her eyes.

A brutal weight pressed down upon her, making his decision clear. Digging her feet in against the ground, she pushed her right arm out, grabbed his shoulder, and let out a grunt of extreme effort as she pushed and pulled herself forward until she laid completely on top of him like two pancakes. As the Ubran ruler was a bit taller than her, she ended up staring down at his exposed neck, her face pressed down upon his chin.

Arlette was out of weapons, so she grabbed his throat as best she could with her right hand and began to squeeze. In some sense, this was how she wanted it. In her wildest of imaginings throughout the years, she’d always pictured his death not as some quick, painless end, but rather as a slow, agonizing experience, his life gradually slipping away while he struggled powerlessly to stop it.

This was for her family. For Ofrax. For Princess Rosalyn. For herself.

The Emperor’s right arm jerked and a sharp pain lanced through her abdomen once, then again. While she had found it hard to breathe before, suddenly the simple act made her want to scream with agony.

No. She couldn’t lose now! Not when she was so close!

Through sheer willpower more than anything else, Arlette moved her left arm in, shunting aside her shoulder’s constant protests, and grabbed the Emperor’s right arm just as she felt something stab into her gut a third time. This was an old man. Even with a busted shoulder, she could pin down his arm and prevent him from dealing further damage.

However, plenty of damage had already been dealt. She could feel the sticky wetness of blood on her stomach as blood oozed out with shocking speed, probably due to the force pressing them down. Her chances of victory grew slimmer with each drop of blood that left her body.

This had become a war of attrition. The Emperor couldn’t release his power, because without the force holding her down, they both knew she’d win. She had the positioning, and his best option now was to hold on as long as possible and let her bleed until she passed out, a prospect she hated to admit was getting more likely by the moment. She needed to end this quickly, and her hand alone wasn’t enough to do the job. She needed something better. But what?

The weapon in his right hand—probably her last throwing knife—wasn’t an option. She had the strength to keep his arm down, but she had no way to take the knife from his grip.

Arlette’s eyes fell upon a long chain running along the ground. The chain emerged from a slit in the Emperor’s clothes and traveled away from them to the large book he’d been carrying until now. Dislodged when she’d barreled into him, the tome sat on the ground a good five paces away, its pages open to the world.

Releasing her right hand from her hated enemy’s throat, she grabbed the chain and pulled it towards her. The book slid closer, apparently outside the field of crushing force. Re-grabbing the chain farther up so she had more to work with, she fought against the crushing force and dragged the chain over the Emperor’s neck. Her arm shook uncontrollably from the strain, but she refused to falter as she let go of the chain and pulled her arm back, then flattened her hand and shoved it beneath his neck.

The force on her doubled, and she felt her ribs creaking. Even just moving her right arm now felt like lifting a garoph, but she pushed herself onward anyway. Gritting her teeth, she pushed her hand with all her might beneath the hated man’s neck, wriggling her fingers in the dirt to get every little bit of extra leverage she could manage.

Part of her mind could hear the old man’s screams, could feel his empty left hand clawing at her side, could see the veins in his neck clearly through his skin as he struggled against her overbearing weight, but none of it mattered. Her entire existence was this moment, every last drop of herself being poured into this one final act of vengeance. The rest was meaningless.

She could feel herself weakening as she panted and struggled, the weight of the world bearing down on her in more ways than one, but she could not allow herself to fail. Too much relied on this. Digging deep, she pulled forth every ounce of hate and anger she could find, from the Emperor to Sebastian to Supreme General Astalaria to Tehlmar Esmae. The thought about all the things she’d been through, the litany of injustices and slights, and how every last bit of it, in the end, was this man’s fault. With a growl of defiance, she gave it one last push. Her hand slipped through. She allowed herself a malicious smile as she wound the chain around her finger and pulled with absolutely everything she had.

The chain wrapped itself tightly around the old man’s neck, its thin but strong links pressing into his flesh far tighter than her hand could ever manage. The body beneath her shook and the force upon them both increased even more. Arlette felt one rib crack, and then another. Her left shoulder sent such pain through her that she felt tears pouring from her eyes unbidden. Still, she held on through it all. If this was how she was to die, then so be it. But she would not go alone.

A third rib cracked, but she kept pulling. Then a fourth, bringing forth an unbidden cough, the act enough to send waves of pain through her abdomen and expel the air from her lungs. She tried to breathe in but found it impossible. Still, she pulled with all her might. The world spun as her lungs screamed at her to inhale, the fatigue blanketing her body and mind now almost unbearable, but she continued to pull and pull and pull until the end. And then, just as she felt the world leaving her, that end finally came.

Air rushed back into Arlette’s lungs as the crushing weight on top of them suddenly dissipated. The Emperor’s body convulsed for a few moments and then went still, his eyes staring blankly up at the mid-morning sky. Arlette didn’t stop pulling. He might just be faking it, or just unconscious. She took slow, laborious, pain-riddled breaths until she reached thirty. Then she let go.

He didn’t move.

For a moment that felt like forever, Arlette didn’t move. There was something inside of her that feared that she would break the spell, that she’d just wake up in her converted room in the old, abandoned inn and this would all be just a silly, wild dream. But the moment continued, as did the incredible pain that came with every breath, and nothing changed. She finally released her grip on the chain. The Emperor was dead. It was finally, mercifully over.

Except it wasn’t. This wasn’t enough. People needed to know. She had to show the people out there the truth. But how?

She wouldn’t make it all the way back through the tunnel, and even if she did, who would notice? No, it had to be here. Luckily, the ruined ring stood atop a small hill on the northwest edge of the camp. All she had to do was take the Emperor’s body outside and show it off where everybody could see it.

However, she didn’t have the strength, or working limbs, to move the old man’s body. She’d have to do the next best thing: cut off his head.

Gingerly, she pushed herself off of the corpse below her, letting out agonized whimpers as her gut spasmed with every movement. She ignored it as best she could, but had only slight success. She’d lost far too much blood. Already, she could feel what little strength her body still had leaking away.

Kneeling over the old man made her want to scream. It was like the position was expressly designed to exacerbate every injury she had. The pressure on her leg drew forth constant suffering from the wrapped wound, while she had to prop up her upper body using her shattered left shoulder and stabilize it all using her abdomen. But she didn’t care. She was working against a fast-approaching deadline, and a little more pain didn’t matter so much anymore.

She seized the Emperor’s weapon, still clutched in his right hand. She’d been right, it was, in fact, the knife she’d missed him with. If only she hadn’t thrown the knife in the first place in a panic, she could have killed him with so much ease. She had nobody to blame but herself for the wounds on her side.

Gripping it with her trembling right hand, she got to work. The knife dug into the still-warm flesh, puncturing the man’s windpipe with a single stab. He didn’t move. He truly was dead. Even now it didn’t feel real.

Arlette had never had to cut off a head before. The process was messy and exhausting, especially the act of cutting between the vertebrae, but it went quickly, at least. Soon enough, she found herself staring at the Emperor’s vacant eyes as she held his detached head up to her face. She tucked her knife away, its job over.

Pushing herself to her feet with the help of a nearby toppled column, she hobbled her way around the area and came to a distressing realization. Every entrance to the ring had been destroyed in the initial strike. The arches had collapsed in on themselves and were now large piles of rubble. She found some cracks between the rocks, but they were too thin for her to squeeze through.

That left only one other option. She’d have to climb her way out. The very thought itself struck her as absurd, but she didn’t see much of a choice. In fact, looking around, it seemed almost feasible. There happened to be one rock as tall as she was nearby. Resting against that rock was another rock about half her height taller than the first, and leaning beside that was another long, thin boulder whose top side resembled a ramp leading up to the capsized outer ring. If she could just get up onto the first rock, she would be able to follow up the rest and make her way to the top of the stones. That would not only get her out, it would make her even more visible for her final revelation.

Placing the head down atop the rock and making sure it wouldn’t roll, she put her right arm up upon the rock and jumped as best she could with her right leg. The result, which could be charitably described as a hop at best, proved nowhere near enough to get her where she needed to go. Taking a deep breath, she tried again with both legs and got a little higher, but she couldn’t get enough grip on the top of the rock to pull herself up and instead just ended up leaving a bloody streak running down the boulder’s side.

Her wooziness grew stronger with every heartbeat, telling her she was nearly out of time. She looked around for other avenues up onto the rocks but found nothing.

The sound of shuffling feet graced her ears, and she wearily turned about, pulling her last knife back out and clutching it in her right hand. She steadied herself and stood using waning strength that threatened to give out at any moment, ready to take on whatever Ubrans showed themselves as best she could. But what emerged from the tunnel entrance was not an Ubran, but an elf.

Tehlmar staggered into sight, looking as bad as Arlette felt, or perhaps worse. Blood dripped off him from all over his body, most of it his. She could see cuts and stab wounds peeking through holes in every part of his armor, and the right side of his neck and shoulder was covered by blackened, charred flesh.

“Letty?” he called out weakly.

Arlette didn’t have the reserves to correct him this time. She let out a soft grunt, and he slowly turned her way, revealing his dull, unfocused gaze. He managed a small smile, blood dripping from his mouth.

“You... did it?” he asked, slowly approaching her with unsteady steps. His eyes spotted the head staring down from the rock by her head and his gaze sharpened momentarily. “You did... you got him...”

He let out a half-laugh half-cough and leaned against a nearby boulder. “Quick... go show everybody...”

“There’s no way out except up this-” Arlette let out a strangled wheezing gasp as her abdomen protested the act of speaking. “-and I can’t climb it.”

“Ah... well then...” He tottered towards her and came to a stop beside the rock. Putting his hands together in front of him, palms up, he gave her the ghost of a smile. “Once more... for old time’s sake...”

“You’re kidding-” she coughed. There was no way that he could lift her in his condition.

“Letty, there’s no time... It has to be now...” His body was trembling already, she saw, and she thought she could hear a wet sound in his breath.

He was right. Neither of them had any more time to search for better answers. With a forlorn sigh, she stepped between him and the rock, putting her right foot up into the cradle of his small hands and reaching up with both her arms to the top of the rock.

“On three. One, two, threeeaaaaaaaaaaagggghhhhhh!”

Arlette screamed as she pushed off as hard as she could, powering through the pain coming from all over her body as she clawed desperately with both her arms for purchase on the rock. Tehlmar’s cradle shook like a branch in a windstorm, but somehow it held just long enough for her to get her torso up on top and pull herself forward.

The world spun as she gasped for air. She could feel her heart pounding desperately in her chest, trying to push what little blood she still had in her through her body. Her limbs felt numb and weak. But still, she pressed on, pulling her legs fully onto the boulder.

“You know, Letty...” Tehlmar said as she pushed herself up onto her hands and knees while favoring her right side. He took a long, labored breath, and Arlette could clearly hear the wetness in it this time. She stopped to look back down at him. Red bubbles spotted the corners of his mouth. He looked back up with a fading gaze, in which she saw only regret. “...back then... when I said ‘Live well’... this wasn’t what I meant.”

Eyes glazing over, the elven prince slowly tilted to the left. His body twisted and fell as his legs gave in, landing on the ground chest first with an audible thud. No movement followed, save the slight movement of blood gently pooling beneath him.

Arlette forced herself to look away. She couldn’t waste any more time. Struggling to her feet, she awkwardly clambered up the next rock, now only waist-high. Her balance felt off, so from there she crawled her way up the sloped boulder that followed until she found herself on the remains of the outer ring, looking out at the ongoing strife.

Everything looked even more chaotic than before. Half of the Ubran camp was completely missing, now replaced by huge smoking craters from Pari’s bombs. Much of what remained now burned. Far out to the east of the camp, large metal machines were laying waste to the Ubran forces and pushing their way west, that Otharian bastard finally showing up to the party. The Ubrans were close to breaking, she realized. And she had just what the occasion needed.

Pushing herself to her feet once more, she shifted her grip on the Emperor’s head from his hair to her base of his skull and raised it high above her head. Small drops of blood fell onto her, but she ignored it. Then, doing her best Many impersonation, she summoned forth every last bit of power she had within her.

A huge recreation of her hand and the head held within it flashed into being above her, its size hundreds of times her own, wreathed in flame. And with it, a voice rang out. Her voice.

“THE EMPEROR IS DEAD! THE EMPEROR IS DEAD!” it roared over the din, the illusory sound boosted as loud as she could manage it. The sound echoed across the battlefield, and she saw people turning her way. But that was all she saw; just that act had taken everything. She felt herself toppling backward, and the world faded away.