Angel’s Schema allowed her to make everything from clothes to weapons to entire houses. Me and Lulu helped her gather materials, then watched as she rapidly constructed a small treehouse from wood, rope, and palm thatch. It was oddly hypnotic. She had to construct the pieces manually using a kinetic mini-game, but once they were done, she could magically lift and place the pre-fabricated pieces wherever she needed them. We watched her construct the camouflaged tree platform, then the walls, then the roof. She fashioned netting hung with leaves from the same tree to conceal it. By the time she was done, I was pretty sure any ordinary human would miss it.

“Nice digs.” I lashed my tail from side to side, gazing up at it. “Shame it’s only Angel-sized.”

“Sorry. But if we’re stealthing it to avoid Eisenblatter and co, I can’t risk making it any bigger.” She signed down from the tiny porch of the shelter, which was just big enough for her to raise and lower a rope ladder.

“It’s fine. We’ll just lie here in the cold and the dirt.” I heaved a sigh, and dramatically flopped to the ground. “Alone. In the dark.”

“And the Oscar for Biggest Drama Queen in the Jungle goes to…” Angel mimed silent laughter.

“Nuuduu!” Lulu exclaimed with delight, clapping her pseudopods together.

With some effort, I arranged my tentacles so they looked like a big middle finger from above. Angel put her hand to her mouth, rocking with mirth.

The rest of the day gave us time off to gather - and scout. Lulu and I followed the map to the overrun base, carefully surveying it from the trees. It was well-guarded. There were snipers in position, and I didn’t feel like getting closer than about a quarter mile. There were numerous patrol trails, and my trap senses were pinging me in all directions. It was just too risky to get any closer in the daytime.

The three of had to be up at three am for this little adventure to rout the Maroons. By ten past, we had joined Sergeant Vade - he refused to be called ‘Vigiles’ - to inspect the troops. The men had assembled in a sloppy, staggered line, and they were just about the roughest mongrels I’d seen since the Hell Pigs camp. Unshaven, hard-eyed, chewing toothpicks as they wrapped leather strips around their clubs and sharpened their bronze short swords. As Angel pulled me up in front of them and slid to the ground, several of the men grinned at her. When she greeted Sergeant Vade - twice - he ignored her.

“Sergeant, Eisenblatter ordered that we be ready to depart by quarter past.” Angel voiced louder, relying on me for quick telepathic translation. It was dark, and he was wearing dark green and brown camo paint suited to the nighttime jungle. “Your men are still preparing.”

“Still got two minutes on the clock, Princess.” The sergeant had an English accent, but from the rough northern parts of England. Liverpool, maybe.

“Oh, I see. Plenty of time.” Angel’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

The man – shaven-haired, pinched and pale – got a wolfish, dangerous look. He stepped in close to Angel, towering over her. “This unit moves when I say it does, girly.”

I was about to put my hackles up, but before I could move, Angel grabbed the man by both his chipped ears and headbutted him right on the bridge of his nose.

“Jesus!” The man staggered back, bleeding profusely from the face. His expression contorted into a mask of rage. “The fuck was that for?!”

Angel glared at him with hard, pale eyes. She’d fashioned some [Ghillie Pants] from our remaining hide while we’d been out, and she’d also donned face paint to hide her albino complexion. “My name is Vigiles Nunez, recently promoted to sergeant after defeating Captain Targent of Fort Hope in a 3-to-3 duel. Call me ‘Princess’ or ‘girly’ again, and I’ll cut your balls off and feed them to my Legion.”

Vade’s Legion fanned its wings and let out a piercing tea-kettle hiss. This [Infera], was a Body/Air/Dark type Legion, the first Dark-element creature I’d seen. Its description was just [A bat straight out of hell], and it looked the part: a hulking, humanoid bat with a scrunched muzzle, thin saggy skin, tall quivering ears, and baleful dead yellow eyes that glowed in the dark. It had wings instead of arms, like a harpy, with ‘hands’ at the elbow joint. I stared right back at it.

Vade sneered, wiped his nose, and spat. He didn’t retort: just turned back to his men and barked at them. “Alright, you lot! Form ranks!”

The platoon reluctantly assembled into lines and stood to attention. It reminded me of a police lineup. These guys weren’t soldiers. They were thugs. Half of them were struggling not to pick their noses. Some had their hands in their pockets. Others could only keep their eyes forward if it was on Angel’s chest. A prickle of uncertainty stirred in my gut.

“If we have to take all these guys on, are you ready for the fight?” I remarked to Lulu, nearly invisible in her Liquid Armor form. “I don’t want to think about what’ll happen if we lose.”

“Ooo,” she agreed softly.

“Alright, boys. You all know what you’re here for,” Vade drawled. “Me and Bruce scouted the Maroons camp last night. Any points of interest ‘ave been marked on your maps. You know the drill: cover for me and, uh, Miss Nunez while we take out any Brutes. Everyone know what he’s doing?”

“Yes sir,” the line replied, roughly in unison.

Vade hawked, and spat on the ground. “Then let’s get this circus on the road. Me and Nunez take point, Charlie rearguard, command to western flank and medical to east. Move out!”

Angel strode over to me and bounded up onto my back, the butt of her rifle resting on the edge of one tentacle. No one joined up with us, and some of the men sniggered as they broke into their fireteams and moved out. The sergeant wasn’t laughing. Vade shot Angel a look of pure venom when he thought no one was looking.

“So, what do you want to bet Vade and company are mercenaries?” I padded out into the lead with Vade and his Legion. I was wary of the Infera. Being both Dark and Air, it was a difficult match for me and Lulu if push came to shove. “And by mercenaries, I mean assassins Eisenblatter hired to take you out.”

“They can try.” There was a fierce tension in Angel’s legs as she steered me deeper into the dark jungle.

Vade was the only one fielding a Legion, but four other men had monsters on chains. They were called [Corpoi]. They weren’t Legions, but they weren’t just plain old animals, either. They resembled giant scaly dogs with frog mouths and big, bulbous eyes. They also produced long, ropey strands of drool that dragged along the ground. For some reason, they reminded me of bugs.

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“God, I hate bugs,” I muttered to Lulu.

The slime vibrated in response: and for the first time since I met her, I felt a psionic response. No words, but a wave of… determination?

“What? You gonna get the bugs while I hide up on a chair?”

Her vibration intensified, along with her sense of purpose.

I huffed. “My hero.”

Vade signaled us to slow our advance as we drew closer to the overrun camp. I could give him credit for maneuvering us around the traps. By the trails and the distant heat signatures, I could tell the guards were stationed in roughly in the same place as they were last time.

“I can see some of those snipers now,” I remarked to Angel.

“Where?” Angel signed as she slid from my back, dropping to a crouch. She held up a hand for Vade, who scowled at her until she pointed at the trees and mimed shooting a rifle.

I concentrated on the flickers of orange and red. The body heat of the snipers stood out against the sea of black trees and foliage ahead of us, even at a distance. “On our eleven and one o’clock. Big tall mahogany trees… there’s hides in there, but I can see their heads sticking out.”

“Do you think they’ve seen us?” Angel signed.

“Not a chance.”

“Wot?” Vade hissed as he came up beside us. “Wot’s the fuckin’ hold up?”

“Snipers. My Reaper spotted them.” Angel pointed their positions out in the gloom.

Vade’s eyes creased. No one liked snipers. “Mark ‘em on the clan map.”

Angel opened up her HUD, eyes flicking from place to place on the ghostly, barely-lit outline of it. He did the same. When he saw the locations, he grunted.

“Good spotting,” he admitted reluctantly. “Bruce’ll take care of ‘em.”

“He named his Legion Bruce?” I rumbled with amusement. “Bruce the Bat?”

“As in Bruce Wayne, I guess?” Angel signed back. “But yeah. I got nothing.”

The Infera waddled past us, walking on its hind feet and wing hands, head held low. It scaled a large tree with ease, eerily quiet. I watched it steadily as its thermal signature moved out onto a big bough. By the way it was twitching its head and ears, I figured it had some sonic means to detect the men as long as they were on the same horizontal plane. After a couple of minutes, it launched itself into the air with a soft whuff, flawlessly navigating between the branches in a ball of profound, unnatural silence. I lost sight of its heat signature, and when it closed in with the first sniper, I lost sight of the human, too.

“What in the…” I trailed off, watching the cold, dark blob glide over to the second sniper. “Okay. Dark-type Legions are fucking freaky.”

Lulu quivered in agreement. She extruded a pseudopod and mimed crossing herself.

“What is it doing?” Angel leaned to me, trying to see.

“You know. Just murdering people in perfect darkness.” To Angel’s other side, Vade had a creepy grin plastered over his face as he empathically rode along with his Legion. I glanced at him. “Also, Vade here is kind of freaking me out.”

“There. It’s done.” The sergeant blinked a couple of times. “Easy-peasy. Lemme know if you spot anything else, awright?”

“Surrrre.” Angel had also noticed the expression, and clutched her rifle a little tighter as the platoon moved out.

We got in close to the camp: about a hundred yards from the palisade, much closer than I’d been able to get in the daytime. Camp Victory looked to be in much better shape than Eisenblatter’s pigsty. The sharpened log walls were clean and properly repaired. Angel began to ask me something, but her fingers and expression trailed off as some unseen prompt grabbed her attention. “Damn, they’ve just tagged the guards. We’re going in on a count of ten.”

“Great.” I tensed, and my tentacles split out of their long ‘tail’ into four separate hydra heads, slithering quietly through the brush. Lulu’s body gripped a little more tightly around mine. I could feel waves of apprehension rolling off her. “Have you ever heard of a really old movie called Mad Max 2?”

Angel shook her head.

“It’s a 2D film, like a hundred years old. Anyway, it’s set in this post-apocalyptic Australian wasteland where a bunch of people are guarding an oil rig inside of a settlement, and cutthroat raiders all dressed in bondage gear keep circling it and trying to take it from them. Anyway, the moral of the story is that Lulu and I both think this is sus as hell.”

“Ooo,” Lulu agreed firmly.

Angel gave me a short nod, just before a bloodcurdling scream rang from the north-east. I whipped my head around to see our soldiers and their corpoi charging at the guard posts. The guards on top of the gate called out an alarm, but were swarmed by men and Legions. They pulled one of them out of his blind and clubbed him unconscious within seconds.

“SLAVERRRRS!” A guard we hadn’t marked cried out from somewhere.

“Wait. What did he just call us?” I bounded after Angel as she broke concealment, cursing under her breath.

“Those idiots!” She ranted back to me. “What the hell is Vade doing?”

“Slavers! Centurion slavers!” The cries Angel couldn’t hear were now ricocheting through the camp. A woman’s voice – clear, mature, commanding – rang out above the others to my inhumanly sensitive ears. “Children and elders to the center! All warriors to positions!”

“Angel, wait!” I called to her psionically as she dove for a rough foxhole. “These people in the village are calling out ‘slavers’. Not Centurions. Slavers. I didn’t sign up to do any fucking slaving.”

“They… what?” Angel stopped sighting down her rifle and ducked behind a tree trunk.

I dropped into concealment and looked to the east, letting my thermal vision zone in on the first fallen guard. Our troops had trussed the man they’d knocked out and were dragging him away.

My heart sunk. “Angel, there’s no way we’re the good guys here.”

“God dammit… fuck, it’s too late: the attack’s started. It’s us or them.” Angel looked tense, but focused as she narrowed her eyes, swung around, and pulled the trigger. There was a thump and a scream as one of the archers on the wall took a round to the forehead and was hurled back off the palisade.

Much as I hated it, she was right. I pawed the ground and made a quick decision – to fight now and worry about why after our asses were out of the frying pan. I charged the palisade and bounded to the top with claws and tentacles. The fighters on the catwalk – two men and a woman – whirled on me in sudden terror as I raised my tentacles… and smacked the three of them down into the camp instead of stabbing them and waving them around like sock puppets. They fell hard, took a bit of damage, but were able to scramble up to their feet and run.

The reason why I’d spared their lives was down below. The Maroons fighters had formed a semi-circle in front of a hastily barricaded area in front of the tents, where pre-prepared logs had been collapsed to cut off flanking from the front gate. A group of fighters were passing crossbows out to the residents gathering behind the barricades. The elderly residents.

Bandit camps did not keep frail elderly people in their midst. Bandits wouldn’t set up a campsite in such a way that those people could be protected and evacuated. I swiveled my head to assess the rest of the scene, ignoring a crude Bone Arrow that bounced off Lulu’s coat of slime and clattered harmlessly to the ground.

“There’s old people here,” I reported to Angel. “No sign of raiding equipment. No carts full of coal or barrels of oil, like your damn commander told you. There’s about fifty people holding this place, and twenty or so of them are old folks.”

Lulu was blasting me with her own feelings on the matter as I spoke. “Nuu! Hoo!”

Angel couldn’t reply telepathically, but before I could jump back down to rejoin her, our fearless unit broke the gate and charged in screaming – right into a hail of arrows, crossbow bolts, and one rifle. The gunner was a fierce, slim woman with a scarred face and short black hair, who shouted encouragement to her squad as they loaded and fired on the soldiers pouring through the gate. We had even numbers, about twenty fighters each - except that we had the corpoi, and Vade’s Infera Brute. Vade’s Legion tanked three crossbow bolts as it charged in ahead of him, blasting waves of sonic that sent people reeling and screaming away from it, while the Centurions’ lizard-hounds filled the night air with hissing squeals.

“Come on, lads! We’ll take the gents to the mines and the bitch to the barracks!” Sergeant Vade yelled encouragement to his unit as they closed into melee range.

I shook my head and rumbled, tensing into pounce position. “Well, Lulu… I think you know what we have to do.”

Lulu echoed me with silent agreement as I wiggled my butt and leaped out into the open air, eyes focused on my target.

Sergeant Vade.