My booted feet splashed heavily through the mud as I hurled myself downhill, finding solid footing in the form of the occasional stone. Lightning crashed above me. The rain was alternately warm and freezing as gusts of wind buffeted back and forth, pelting me with water from every direction. My sodden ponytail slapped wetly against my hakmir as I bounced recklessly down the slope.

Even the technological brilliance of Eifni Org’s augmentation engineers couldn’t filter out the water blowing into my eyes. Or the sting of my ponytail whipping me in the face every third leap.

It wasn’t exactly a question of racing the storm. The storm was already here. The North Wind’s chosen manifestation was diffuse, allowing it to spread for miles, but even at its ridiculous power output there were limits to how far it could reach. This rain, these winds were just weather. The true hate was still coming.

I risked a glance at the center of the storm. Sheets of rain pummeled the ocean swells. Thick, dark clouds whirled in the grip of the wind. The lightning was getting more frequent now; it cracked over the island.

“We are beginning our approach to the target,” Blackfin said.

I vaulted over a terrace fence and didn’t respond. My trajectory took me over the first group of mud-splattered bodies. I didn’t spend the effort to figure out whose dead they were.

The wind shifted suddenly, yanking me back by my hakmir, but I pushed through. Rain pelted against me in fat, stinging droplets. I could see Pellonine’s troops up ahead of me, already engaging the Barosians. The barrier at the entrance of the village had fallen almost immediately, and they were pushing the villagers back, further into their home. The last of the rain-blurred mass that was Erid’s rank was making its way down the slope..

I forced myself not to pour all my energy into a final sprint and maintained pace until I reached Pellonine. She turned, surprise and alarm on her face as I barreled toward her. Her honor guard moved to intercept me—as if they could actually stop me if I decided to assassinate her—but Pellonine must have seen the look on my face.

“Danou—”

“You need to pull back!” I screamed over the percussive rain. “Angel inbound! Get everyone the fuck away from the ocean!”

Pellonine tore her eyes off the battle to glance at the storm wall and shouted back at me. “Are you insane? They’ll be blown off the cliff!”

“We’re fifteen feet above sea level!” I waved an arm frantically at the ocean. “The reef isn’t going to save us! We need elevation!”

“We need shelter!” A movement in the ranks ahead of us stole her attention for a moment. “Gaudia, push right! Right! Argh, shadows take you! By all the goddesses, Pleia, run up there and tell him to push right! They’re trying to keep us in the open!”

“This isn’t just a storm!” I yelled. “It’s an agent of Horcutio! It’s coming for us and we need to disengage!”

I belatedly remembered I had a hand amplifier. I quickly set it to express an urgent cocktail of impending doom and seek safety. Unfortunately, it affected Pellonine the exact opposite of the way I wanted.

“That longhouse over there!” Pellonine yelled to me. “It’s reinforced!”

“No! We need to retreat!”

“They’re trying to keep us from reaching it! We have a better chance of breaching their line than making it back to the forest!”

“This is a sunk fucking cost!”

“If you want to help, join the damned fight!”

“I fucking can’t! I can’t win all your fucking battles for you!”

For fuck’s sake. This was going nowhere. Maybe I could convince Erid to retreat—I cringed internally at the likelihood of that thought, but Pellonine was committed, and at this point all I could do was hope the angel left some of them alive.

I took off, leaping up the collapsed barricade in several smaller hops before running along the edge of a cottage’s roof. Pellonine shouted imprecations behind me, but I ignored her.

“Find cover! Get to fucking cover!” I shouted at the combatants without regard for affiliation. I leapt into space, splashing down in a pocket with few hostiles. Mud went everywhere, but the villagers had already seen me coming. I leaned to the side to avoid an incoming javelin, then plucked it out of the ground as several warriors closed in on me. I started moving toward a gap in the shrinking perimeter.

“Listen up, dipshits,” I said. “I am a warrior of the fucking Old Ways, and I really don’t want to kill you, so please get the hell out of my way.”

They didn’t listen. Of course they didn’t listen.

The javelin I was holding wasn’t designed to be thrown butt-first, but I opened by hurling it anyway. A spear jabbed in from my side. I drew my knife and sliced through it in a continuous motion, snatching the severed part with my free hand before it hit the ground. I reversed my grip and slammed the point through the shield of the guy who attacked me. It punched through the enameled leather, giving me enough leverage to spin him around into the path of the next closest soldier. I kicked him back and sprinted deeper into the village. Someone shot an arrow at me, but the wind snatched it away before it even got close.

“Operative Lilith, you have one minute to enemy contact,” Bleedgill said, the comm translation skewing what the dolphin probably meant as a normal sentence into a derisive snicker.

“Are you ready to blow up the temple?” I panted.

I darted through streets streaming with muddy currents and blocked with goods of various kinds—both structural elements torn from the flimsier buildings and discarded flotsam from the village’s exodus.

“Based on previous behavioral data from the oracle goddess, I wanted to run some moiralogical calculations first to pre-empt potential defeat conditions,” Bleedgill chuckled.

“Can you do that in less than a minute?”

“What’s life without a little risk?” Left Flank laughed. That one might have been an actual laugh.

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“The risk is acceptable,” Blackfin said. “Operative Tailmeat, two shots into the storm wall, three second duration.”

The air crackled as two lances of sickly blue energy sizzled through the clouds above us. Ah, fuck, I knew that hue. Those were Type VI Berserker entropy cannons. That blue light was breaking down the physical particles in its cone of effect, which was highly effective against any sort of matter-based defense, but had the side effect of flooding the area with deadly radiation.

“Hold fucking fire!” I shouted. “You’re going to give us all cancer!”

“We anticipate no significant reduction in life expectancy,” Bleedgill tittered.

The blue beams cut out. Moments later, my comm warned of an energy surge from the storm.

The world went white, then black as my anti-flashbang compensators overcompensated. The thunder followed so closely the gap was barely discernible.

When I was a kid, my dad took us to see an airshow. On our way back to the car a mischievous A-10 Thunderbolt pilot buzzed us so closely that the sound alone knocked me to the ground. If I had a nickel for every time a thunderbolt knocked me over, I would now have two nickels.

I tuned out the chatter from the Face Sponge—they’d live—and rushed toward the other flank of the battle. Which…

My path had taken me to a higher level of the village, giving me enough of a vantage point to see that my intervention wasn’t necessary. Erid’s column was already scrambling back up the slope. Funny, she’d never struck me as someone who knew when to pull out of a disastrous engagement.

The wind was picking up now, the storm bearing down on the island of Baros and driving the rain sideways. Thirty-foot swells swept up the island’s tail. The Perseverence, caught in the storm, was desperately trying to escape the sheer rock face—sails retracted in self-defense, oars scrabbling against the rioting waves—but the angel’s fury was too much for them. A large lateral wave took them too close to the cliff edges, instantly snapping most of the oars on their left side. Crippled, they were left helpless as the next wave flung them against the island. The ship splintered like an egg slapped against a wall. A hundred people were instantly plunged into the frothing sea, stunned and drowning if they weren’t killed outright.

“Contact,” Blackfin said.

The heart of the storm rolled over us.

Pounding waves swept powerfully up the beach, smashing up the docks and the houses closest to the water. Plumes of seawater geysered into the sky where they met homes and workplaces, which crumpled under the sheer mass of it all. Wave after wave assaulted the village. I watched them batter it down to the sand, while in the distance, a darker, larger wave crept steadily closer.

Erid’s column had to take a slow path up the cliffs, a multitude of switchbacks making every foot of altitude a struggle. Commotion among the back ranks indicated either fear of the storm or an intermixing of Trade Fleet and Barosian soldiers, their battle forgotten in the rush to escape the storm. As I watched, the wind caught a man’s shield like a kite and snatched him off the narrow path, taking his neighbor with him into the abyss. That wasn’t a fall you walked away from.

There was nothing I could do for Erid. Pellonine, on the other hand, had gotten her column stuck in with the Barosians, who were throwing their lives away just to keep her out in the open until the ocean claimed them all. I’d done too good a job selling them on the idea that they were going to die here. The dead have no fear.

I ran for the battle, hopping across rooftops until I slipped on a mossy beam and nearly killed myself. In the sky above us, lightning clashed sporadically with the cancerous light of the Face Sponge’s entropy cannons. The dark wave on the horizon was closing fast. I looked at the battle lines, frantically looking for something I could use as leverage to change the tide. My eyes settled on a familiar silhouette.

I splashed down on the flank, sighting my target. I set my hand amplifier to a nuanced yet potent cocktail of emotions: deep hatred, reckless abandon, and longing for revenge. Then I yelled out: “Hey Kara!”

My voice rang out, punchable and smug, and caught the attention of the man from earlier who’d blown a gasket because I killed his brother. Kara’s head whipped around, glaring at me like he thought it could inflict stab wounds. I waved cheerfully, whipping water droplets everywhere.

“She’s here!” he bellowed. “The bloodleech is here!”

Other heads were turning toward me now, and I suppressed a grimace. These soldiers needed to die for the mission. I had to save Pellonine and as many of her troops as I could, or all of this was for nothing. I held up my little knife.

“Sorry!” I called out over the wind. “Can’t fight you guys today! I lost my sword!”

Kara let out a wordless yell and broke away from the battle line to charge me. The hatred and vindictiveness emanating from my hand amplifier took root in the men around him too, building momentum. More and more of them turned toward me, furiously brandishing their weapons.

I forced a smile on my face.

“Fine! I can see when I’m not wanted!”

Kara’s snarl of hatred accompanied a vicious thrust at my face, which I barely dodged as a gust of wind yanked my hakmir in the wrong direction. I backpedaled, twirling around a sweeping sword, and made a run for it. The key was maintaining aggro, so to speak. Not close enough that they could stab me, but not so far that their little lizard rage brains decided I was out of reach. I sloshed through two inches of saltwater, bracing against the wind and the occasional surge.

The dark wave was almost here. Behind me, the chunk I’d drawn out of the Barosians’ formation had collapsed their line, and Pellonine’s troops were sprinting through the rain to reach the longhouse. It sat on a higher elevation than most of the village, and its foundations were on stone. It was their best chance at survival. The Barosians tried to regroup and hit their flank, but the water level had risen and all of the combatants were just sloshing around with poor footing by this point. Speaking of which—

Kara stabbed wildly at me, but my role as a distraction was done. I shut down the hand amplifier, picking up a chunk of wood that had been torn off from one of the structures around here. I swung it heavily into his spear, knocking it aside, then hurled it at another soldier who was wading close enough to strike at me. The rough wood tore at my fingertips as it left them.

“I’m sorry,” I told them, all traces of smugness gone. “I’m so sorry.”

“Die!” Kara yelled, stabbing for my heart. I let him, grabbing behind the spearhead the moment after it impacted my kinetic mesh and came to an unnatural halt. I swiveled, yanking it from his hands before he could react to the unexpected inertial event.

“It had to be this way!” I called, jabbing and sweeping an axe out of a soldier’s hands. “I know it’s a shitty consolation, but billions of people will thrive when all this is done!”

“Bring back my brother!” Kara screamed, lunging at me.

I backpedaled down the beach, fending off six people at once. The dark wave had reached the tail of the island and it was advancing rapidly. As it approached, it grew taller, sweeping higher and higher along the cliffs. I had no time to check on Erid’s column to see if they’d escape the wave. The water was receding, tugging at all of our footing, and I got pulled off balance enough that a lucky strike cut two of my fingers to the bone. Snarling, I directed my comm to shut off sensation to the affected digits.

The dark wave towered above me, blotting out the light. The water withdrew from the beach entirely, leaving the wreckage of the town and the bodies of the fallen scattered across the sand. For a moment, the wave blocked the wind, and everything was eerily calm.

“I’m going to kill you!” Kara screamed. “Drown, you fucking maggot!”

My pursuers closed in on me, raising their weapons for a killing blow. I tossed my stolen spear on the ground, bending over to snag a broken half of a door.

“I’m sorry,” I said, no longer raising my voice. “But death has been slain, and you cannot kill me in any way that matters.”

I spun, gripping the fragmented door in both hands, and plunged into the tidal wave.

It was so cold. Currents buffeted me from every direction, but ironically it felt less wet than being bombarded by rain droplets the size and speed of paintballs. I grimly held my breath, holding onto the door for dear life, until I breached the surface.

Before my grandmother died, my parents used to cram us all into the car and drive down to California over summer break. My parents had gotten me surfing lessons before I threw a tantrum and they dropped the matter. But now, I reflected as I prepared to hop up on the door, those lessons would save my—

I froze.

I couldn’t remember anything. Those memories were gone.

“Oh sh—” I managed before the current dragged me under again.