“Quick summary,” I said, surveying the jungle for unseen threats. “We’re not in a field battle kind of situation anymore. This is… you probably don’t have the word for it. Call it ‘ambush warfare’ or something. He’s gonna try to pick off leadership and anyone who separates from the group. We need a tighter formation and we need you in the middle of it.”

“You’re not in command here,” said Erid. Pellonine’s expression made it clear she wasn’t on my side either.

“I just fucking saved your life,” I said. “Look. You have never seen a fighter like me. I am incredible. But he only has to get lucky once. I need you off my ass and safe in the middle of the formation. If you won’t take the order from me, give it yourselves.”

“This… ambush warfare,” said Erid. “How is the enemy going to meet us?”

“They won’t,” I said. “The point is attrition, wearing you down until you can’t function. Kill the commanders, disrupt the supply lines, wound one soldier to force two to carry him home.”

Pellonine left out a single, relieved laugh. “Oh, is that all? You were acting like we’d never heard of this before. Company! Tight column, present shields! All who served in the Fadalli campaigns, raise your spears!”

I was too busy watching the trees to look, but apparently we had some. Pellonine set about reassigning the rest of the company under their leadership while Dal Salim and I nudged Erid closer to the center of the reforming troops. She wasn’t happy about it, but I was kinda done managing her ego.

“We don’t have much time,” I told her. “If the trap guy went for reinforcements, we might be up to our neck in pirates. Have you ever done this before?”

Erid’s eyes narrowed. “Careful, Idiot.”

“Darwin help me,” I hissed. “This is bad enough. We shouldn’t be reorganizing in the field! Stop complicating things and move!”

“I’m complicating things?” Erid demanded. ”You—fine. Let’s go help Pellonine.”

She turned and walked away without another word. I motioned Dal Salim after her, then—with one last sweep of the jungle—followed.

“Fadal is a desert,” Pellonine was arguing. “There are scavengers here.”

“These are the realities,” another woman said. “If we send two of our women to bring Toulera’s body back to the ships, they’ll be vulnerable. We need to leave him here.”

“He fought for the Empress,” Pellonine said. “He deserves better.”

“Sure did,” the soldier said. “And if Javei did Grandmother’s job, maybe he’d have gotten it.”

“He was my crew,” Erid said as we approached. “We’ll take him with us.”

“Captain—”

“We save as many as we can,” Erid said, with an unreadable look in my direction. I held my peace. “Gela, Enochletes. Carry him. Time’s wasting, everyone.”

“Danou,” Pellonine said, turning to me. “Can you detect the traps before we lose anyone else to them?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know what this guy’s capabilities are. His blessing’s pretty weak, but that might just mean it’s something weird and specific I’m not able to counter.”

I sent a question ping to Val after that last sentence.

“Try anyway,” said Pellonine. “How far to the temple?”

“We’re about halfway there,” I said, consulting the data the team had sent me. “We should arrive within the hour.”

“Excellent,” she said. “Go.”

“What if the ambusher kills you?” Erid asked. “Will your… team respond?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” I said airily. “I’m immortal.”

I gave them a jaunty wave and pushed through the ranks of troops toward the path we we creating. No sign of pirate Rambo. I shot the guys in front a thumbs-up—which they had no way of understanding, but sometimes you just gotta be you—and casually blew a hole in the forest. I strolled through the shredded vegetation, sword held casually by my side, and just generally looking way less alert than I was.

War is just signal processing. Sure, there’s the glorious business of sticking your weapon in the other guy, but if you’re not neck-deep in honor culture bullshit, you shouldn’t be afraid to drop a round in the back of his skull before he notices you’re there. In a perfect war, it’s all bullets to the back of the head. All the rest is commentary.

That means conduit theory makes a joke of war. Ancient generals had to question whether that early rout was a true victory or bait for a trap, but retreat is a physical action with material implications. Sure, you need the right perspective to understand what it might be, but perspective is just an accumulation of beliefs and experiences. You can model it mathematically. I couldn’t tell you how the math works—it’s some complicated fusion of stochastic simulation and network search—but like any grunt, I can tell you what it does.

In short, having a multimodal, wide-band etheric scanner—like the one on a military-grade comm—means you can read the script. That tree is just a tree. That one is a hidden danger. What’s the danger? My sword could knock down trees—who the fuck cares?

The troops marched slowly behind me with each row of the eventual shield wall as its own column in the procession. The idea was that all we had to do to assemble the line was make an abrupt right turn and keep marching. The necessities of moving through the forest meant they were packed into a longer, inefficient file, but at least no one died. Somewhere at the rear, Toulera’s body traveled with us.

They made their way past the piles of mutilated greenery I left in my wake, with the occasional sharpened wooden deathtrap poking through—and wasn’t that interesting, that the trap components were surviving the brute force method?

But pirate Rambo never showed.

*

The temple to Horcutio emerged suddenly out of the jungle. Maybe it would have been less sudden if I hadn’t blown a hole in the bushes surrounding the sacred clearing, but they weren’t paying me for subtlety.

Although technically, as an infiltration specialist, that was exactly what Eifni Org paid me for. But Erid wasn’t, so whatever.

The spiritual barriers around the temple were chaotic and corrosive. My comm warned me of pressure against its shielding, Horcutio’s entropic attention seeking to strip me of every etheric tool I’d brought with me. But my comm was rated for this. I forced myself past the threshold with only the slightest hint of effort.

I strolled into the clearing, noting the blocky, vine-covered pyramid rising out of the mossy soil. The pirates had stationed archers on its heights.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Dusk was falling, but they’d lit the clearing with giant bonfires that looked like they were supposed to make it hard to pick the archers out. My enhanced eyes found them effortlessly as they fired. I lazily sidestepped an arrow.

“Good evening,” I projected at them. “You’re fucked. Drop your weapons and surrender to the Trade Fleet.”

There were enemies on the ground, too, wielding an undisciplined assortment of random weaponry. Some of them didn’t even have shields. I could hear the clattering armor of the Trade Fleet soldiers as they moved in behind me. This was going to be a massacre.

“Kill her!” someone shouted, and they loosed at me again.

This time I fired my sword in the air, knocking away the missiles that would have touched me. I set my eyes to a glowing red and grinned, knowing my teeth were unnaturally white for the region.

“Go on,” I called as Erid’s troops hustled to form up behind me. “Do it again. Fucking try me.”

“Take their fucking legs off!” screamed one of the pirates, and suddenly a mass of screaming pirates was descending on us.

Ironically, we were in the position we’d originally tried to prevent when we’d entered the forest in a battle-ready formation. The pirates were trying to pin us down before we could get the shield wall set up inside the clearing, denying us our numerical advantage. We were packed in too tightly to fight effectively. Worse, arrows began to rain, forcing our guys to keep their shields up and generally hindering our deployment. We needed to buy time and we had about ten seconds to figure out how.

I was already moving, building up kinetic charge in my sword.

“FIRST RANK, CHARGE!” Pellonine bellowed with more force than I thought could come out of her lungs. I glanced behind me and saw an uncertain, staggering advance peel off from the main column. Was one line enough to hold off the pirates?

Maybe I could make an impact first.

Shouted invocations to Varas and Kabiades filled the air behind me. Ahead of me, a ferocious line of pirates barreled weapons-first at the army I had to drag to victory. For a moment, time seemed to slow, the lines of battle fading into crystalline arcs of force and movement. I could see myself between the two forces, a streak of motion and violence serving as the pivot for what was to come. My will was a blade rending heaven and earth.

“They fall,” I whispered, raising my sword. “THEY DIE!”

I cut.

The blast ripped their line in half. Bones broke. Shields shattered. The mangled bodies of the enemy went flying, blood spraying black in the firelight. The wounded screamed.

The pirates’ momentum faltered, but mine did not. In an instant I was on them. I danced around a heavy axe, laughing as I beheaded the man wielding it. I cloaked as a woman swung a club at me, re-appearing to sever both hands at the wrist. I grabbed a spear just below its head, showing my teeth at its wielder as he gawked at the girl half his weight and twice his strength.

In that moment of confusion, I picked up a fragment of a shield and honored Val’s old advice to go for the throat.

They were all around me, but I was surrounding them from every side. I darted between their lines, slashing at tendons, opening arteries. Then I was through—the bonfires lay before me, and behind them, the temple to Horcutio.

The Trade Fleet could handle the ground troops. I wanted to take out those archers.

Arrows thudded into the ground as I ran. Not one touched me. I streaked past the fires and leapt up the stones toward the archers suppressing our ranks.

They were shouting now. Tactical mistake. I fixed their positions in mind and darted across the decrepit temple with otherworldly grace.

Here, three of them, drawing swords as I closed in. I cut them down with single strokes, one-two-three, spinning past counter-strikes and failed attempts to parry.

There, two more. I took them both on at once, sprinting up the incline as arrows clattered against stone. They attacked, but what were swords to me? I was a warrior of Veles. My people had television shows longer than their entire civilization. I slipped between them, crushing one’s wrist with the pommel of my sword and grabbing the other by the back of the neck. I hurled him screaming down the temple’s slope.

Another group below me. I ran, then jumped, firing my sword as I descended. I ripped through their broken bodies like a blender, reaping their lives with graceful sweeps of my blade. I turned and found two more archers, staring at me in horror.

I walked. Slowly. I discovered I could knock their arrows aside with my sword, if I held it in two hands. The impacts jarred my hands, but the arrowheads made exciting sprays of sparks as they shrieked across the sword.

After the third arrow, they fled. On the temple’s outer slope, I was alone.

I turned to watch the battle from above. Pellonine’s hasty advance had successfully stalled the pirates, but the soldiers she’d sent into the initial fight had been brutalized. Their sacrifice had won us the field; the pirates’ gambit to stop us from moving into the clearing had failed, and now our formation was closing around the skirmish like a vice.

Ancient warfare was based around the idea that your line had one of your guys for every one of their guys, because all of those guys were probably untrained conscripts. If you weren’t a freaking ninja like the commander, your shield probably only kept you safe from one direction. Once our guys started flanking their guys, it was over for them. The rout started almost immediately; thirty seconds after the flank, they were all running.

I met Erid and Pellonine between the bonfires. Dal Salim stood a respectful distance behind them, but walked to join me as soon as he saw me. I tried not to think about how his presence at my side just felt natural.

“Well fought,” I congratulated the women. “Quick thinking with the charge, Pellonine.”

“I’ve been a soldier longer than you’ve been alive,” she said.

“Technically true,” I said with a mysterious smile. Or at least I hoped it was mysterious. “Alright, time to crack open this temple. Not that I haven’t been awesome in a bunch of other ways, but—theological consultant. We’re in my wheelhouse now.”

“We have wounded,” said Erid, fixing me with a flat stare.

“And what am I supposed to do about that?” I said. “My skills come in exactly two flavors, lady. Stabbing things, and knowing shit I’m not supposed to know. You deal with the personnel, I’ll make sure we don’t all end up cursed or something. Alright?”

“Fine,” Erid snapped.

“Great,” I said. “I need Enochletes.”

“What are you doing with him?” Erid asked, boring a hole in me with her glare.

“Just a hunch,” I said. “I think Kives is up to something with him. Getting that vibe.”

“Find him yourself,” Erid said. “And if he’s not in one piece when I see him again, you won’t be either.”

I raised my hands placatingly and left to go find him. Dal Salim was a comfortable shadow at my five o’clock. The aftermath of the battle was a shitshow, but we had a bunch of our own dead now, and sure enough, the sea-shelled wonder was still standing guard over Toulera’s corpse.

“Hey, Enochletes,” I said. “I need to borrow you for a second.”

He looked up at me, watery eyes looking especially moist in the firelight. “Oh! Danou! I… the captain ordered me to stay here.”

“Yeah, and now she’s ordering you to come with me,” I said. “Come on, Toulera’s not going anywhere.”

He took a steadying breath, met my eyes, and then quickly looked away. I sighed internally. According to the comm, the way he was looking at me… fucking hell, Kives. If this whole mission was just an excuse to embroil me in some kind of young adult protagonist romance I couldn’t actually participate in, I was going to seriously question whether she was gunning for that trickster god position.

Oh Darwin. He’d pulled out the damn sea-shell necklace.

Fuck no, we weren’t doing this. Taking a cue from Obol Jeneretes, the old lady who’d been my welcome to Vitareas, I waited for him to inhale to start talking, then asked him what he’d seen of the battle. That kept him occupied for the couple minutes it took to round the temple and reach its front doors.

They were large, about ten feet tall, and made of sturdy wood. It had been carved, once, with various scenes depicting naval battles between ships, soldiers, and sea monsters in various combinations. One panel depicted a man flying in the middle of a storm; I had to assume that was a depiction of Horcutio.

Enochletes was trying to talk again.

“Okay, guys,” I said. “Be quiet for a bit. I need to concentrate.”

I pinged Val for observe and support.

“What are we working with?” I asked him subvocally.

“I’m checking your comm readouts now,” he said. “Nothing especially concerning, although I still don’t recommend you be the one to open it.”

You never forced entry to a temple if you could help it. Sacred places are set aside from the world; they’re liminal spaces where the normal rules don’t apply. Forcing entry to a space like that puts you at odds with those rules—and everyone who internalizes them. Do it too many times and you’d burn yourself as an operative before you even opened your mouth.

“So it’s just a threshold?’ I asked.

“I could do more a specialized assessment if I were onsite with my gear. I think the risk is tolerable.”

“Great,” I said. “Yo, Enochletes.”

The kid looked up at me hopefully. I summoned my best Disney channel attitude.

“I think Kives has great things in store for you,” I said.

“Really?” he asked, eyes wide.

“Definitely. Your journey has just begun, but you’re going to accomplish great things.”

“Thank you!” He was beaming. It really was too much.

“That’s why I’d like to give you the honor of opening the door.”

“Oh.” His face fell. “Captain Erid said, if you ever asked me to do something that seemed risky, I should say… I’m not going to say that, but she wanted me to refuse.”

I stared at him.

“Is that okay?” he asked weakly.

I let him wither a bit longer. “Enochletes?”

“Yes, Danou?”

“Open the fucking door.”

“Yes, Danou.”