Oliver's vision blurred as he went spinning through the air. Just before he hit the ground, the armor tightened and compressed around him.

When he landed, it was on his back. He felt the armor twitch at the moment of impact, distributing it across his body, but the wind was driven out of him.

Gasping for breath, he forced himself up before his diaphragm relaxed, looking down the length of his body as he tried to get his bearings.

He'd been thrown some four or five yards, and where he had been standing there now stood an impact point marked in the camp, with tents and detritus cast out of the way in all directions.

Standing with his back to Oliver was a man dressed in flowing blue and yellow robes at the center of the impact point. Wisps of a blueish light faded around him as he straightened up. He had dark hair that hung down to his waist in a tight braid.

Then the man abruptly launched himself forward nearly parallel with the ground, throwing up huge clods of earth where he'd been standing.

OIiver lost track of him for a split second.

When the man reappeared, he was standing before the unknown soldier who Oliver had freed from the cells.

The hapless soldier was just picking himself up when the new arrival simply punched him in his helmet's visor.

The punch connected with a dull thud that he heard even where he lay, and the soldier collapsed bonelessly to the ground without a sound.

Then the man threw himself forward with another lunge, just clearing the heads of the tents some eight or nine feet above the ground as he traveled towards the center of camp, and was out of sight.

The whole thing was over before Oliver could so much as scramble to his feet.

If the man had turned around, looked in his direction -- well, he'd seen how that went for an experienced, armored combatant.

He got up, raced over to the soldier he'd followed into this situation.

As he approached, he saw immediately that there was nothing to be done for him. The man lay unmoving on the ground, with a dent folding the entire visor of helmet inward halfway through the helmet.

It seemed there were some things even this armor could not withstand.

He turned away, assessing the situation, was suddenly overwhelmed by the chaos and the devastation. He stumbled in between two tents and once more took a knee, struggling to process. He raised his left hand to his mouth in a fist. Bit down on the knuckle. Breathed.

The man had said that the enemy captains were fighting. At the time, Oliver had assumed they were engaging in combat inside of vehicles or airplanes of some kind, but in hindsight, that had clearly been terrestrial thinking.

A lack of imagination, that had been the tribune's criticism of Captain Iraeus. That was the reason he'd never advanced in rank and never would.

Well, Oliver would not allow himself to fall prey to the same inadequacy.

Over the past three days he'd spent in he cell, Oliver had had time to think. He'd forced himself to examine the situation he found himself in with the abstract mind of a science fiction writer or a philosopher, and he'd come to some astonishing conclusions, once he suspended belief of nearly everything he thought he knew about reality.

Had the man who'd fallen from the sky been one of the enemy captains? It seemed so: a manifestation of this world's magic, taken to some kind of extreme.

The same force that had lifted him from the ground the previous week and animated the armor he now wore seemed to just as readily lend itself to a strengthening of the mind and body in some way.

Science held little truck with such impossibilities as falling unharmed from the sky or leaping above tents from a standing start, but science did not have the upper hand in this strange, magnificent world.

He'd once considered that impossible, a ridiculous statement, but the man who'd fallen from the sky clearly found such quibbles as bone and muscle density and tensile strength, g-forces, and the reaction times of the human body to be more suggestions than actual rules.

Oliver had been trained to evaluate situations quickly, and well, but more importantly, he'd retained that training. He'd learned to listen to his mind and to his gut regardless of how violently they disagreed with his preconceptions and assumptions. To question everything and dismiss nothing.

And so he believed.

And in his belief, his conviction that magic was real, that the enemy could use it well, and that said enemy presently owned both air and ground space of the military encampment in which he was stranded, he drew a single, enlightened conclusion: he was absolutely and totally screwed.

---

Adrenaline rose up, a tool to be used. He'd been on the back foot since coming to this world, hungry, thirsty, exhausted, without even a moment to take stock of the situation.

For the first time, he was well rested, well fed, and mentally prepared.

And now that the situation was completely FUBAR, he was in familiar territory.

As enemy soldiers rained down from the sky around him and the camp went up in literal flames, he found a calm welling up within him, a decisiveness taking over and lending clarity to his mind and actions.

A new plan formed. He'd slowly work his way out of the camp, hiding between the tents and staying off the main roads and ways. He'd retreat to the tree line, regroup, and make peace with whoever took the upper hand in this battle. It didn't matter who the enemy was. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

He clenched his jaw, balled his fists, and rose. As his hands clenched at his sides, he realized he was still holding the sword. Good. A weapon. Now he needed a shield. If he encountered an enemy combatant, they'd be better trained and better equipped than he was.

The only way to even the odds was to fight on the defensive, slowly, carefully, only engage in fights he could win, and only when he had no other choice.

He glanced around. In the distance, one of the dragons in the sky wheeled around, trailing a stream of ropes with more men continuing to slide down.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of troops fell -- quite literally -- upon the unprepared camp.

As he watched, the dragon opened its jaws and cast down a long gout of magical napalm. That had been the source of the fire, then.

He turned, moved between the tents to get a glimpse of the tree line, ducking below an anchor rope holding one of the tents up.

It was the opposite direction the enemy captain had went, and was the direction he'd come from. The tree line was maybe five or six minute's walk away -- a quarter of a mile? Less?

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

To the right between him and the trees, he saw fire springing up. That was okay. Fire meant less enemy troops in that direction. He'd be able to take advantage of the chaos and sneak by, loop around the flames if he had to.

In the distance, the rally trumpet blared again. He looked up. No enemies in sight, not that he could have made a human figure out in the night sky, as dark as it was.

Suddenly an enormous boom came from the center of the camp, followed by a series of smaller ones and then a deep thud. That enemy captain had met with some resistance, it sounded like.

It was past time he was moving. He started forward, sneaking between the tents, keeping to the dark patches, watching warily.

After a few minutes of slow, careful progress, some shapes resolved out of the night. Civilians, rushing by the tent right down one of the roads leading through camp. They were running without caution away from the fire and right towards the center of camp.

Without thinking he stepped out from behind the tents and grabbed one by the arm.

"No, you can't go that way!"

A woman whirled around, face smudged with tears and ash. In her other arm she held a small child. His heart fell out through his feet.

A few paces further on, a man turned, her husband perhaps. He looked at Oliver with eyes wide with fear.

"Go back, get to the trees!" His voice echoed oddly in his ears as it passed through the lowered visor of his helmet.

"But the rally--" cried the man.

"I don't care about the rally," snarled Oliver. "If you want to live, get to the trees."

It was simple. The rally would attract the enemy soldiers too, looking to kill their captains and destroy the command structure. It was a fool's errand to even attempt a rally. Magic or no, the battle was already lost, had been from the start.

The woman gave a frightened half-nod and turned, yanking her arm from Oliver's grip as she did. She started for the trees. The husband seemed to shrink before Oliver's anger, turned, went with her.

In moments, as he stood, they were fleeing back up the road the way they'd come. He trailed behind warily, sneaking from tent to tent as stealthily as his armor would allow.

The fire that had started or spread from the right, near the edge of camp, was spreading very quickly. Soon, it would be across his path and he'd have to cut to the left, across several open roads, in order to get back to safety.

Here, in the relative dark, between the tents, he was able to pass through much of the camp unassailed.

Then, a few minutes later, as he passed between a couple of tents his line of sight to the couple was cut off, so he spared a glance for the sky before and behind him. Two of the dragons he spotted, but the third was nowhere to be seen. That worried him. He'd lost all concept of in which directions lay friend and foe, and was proceeding blindly through the night.

He looked down and kept moving past the tent. Then stopped. In the road there stood two soldiers advancing on the couple, who'd frozen in place.

These soldiers were wearing slim, streamlined armor. It was painted a glossy blue and yellow, shining in the weak light. It almost looked like the carapace of a beetle. They wore odd, visor-less helmets that protruded up and out in the back a good six inches, with long tassels at the tops that fell to their waists.

One of them held a bare saber, the other a translucent orb perhaps size of a softball. They were perhaps twenty or thirty paces away.

Oliver ducked behind the tent and broke out into a sprint parallel to the road, ducking under and weaving through tent-stay ropes as quickly as he could without tripping, no time for thought, for rationalization, deliberation.

Through the gaps in the tents as he rushed by he caught glimpses of the soldiers as they closed the distance to the couple. They were going to kill them, he knew it. It was his fault.

Within fifteen or twenty heartbeats, he'd drawn parallel to the enemy soldiers and threw himself to the side of a tent.

Oliver was hidden in the tent's shadow just two or three yards away from them. They had eyes only for the couple and their baby in the street.

He froze. Now or never. His life or theirs. If it was just his life on the line, he would've gone for the kills in a heartbeat, protected the civilians, protected the kid.

But he didn't want his own child to know the never-ending pain of growing up fatherless. He didn't want his baby to live their life wondering what the approval of their father would have felt like.

He should've left. But what kind of father leaves other people's children to die?

The one with the orb in his hand was raising it, and he was the one closer to Oliver. His armpit was exposed. Oliver saw his chance and took it.

He sprinted forward, raising his sword.

He hit the first soldier perfectly. The man was thrown back hard into the other foreign soldier and bounced off him, sliding to the ground off Oliver's blade.

Then the other soldier turned and punched Oliver directly in the chest. It felt like being hit by sledgehammer, threw him bodily backwards several feet. He stumbled, gasping. He hadn't even seen him move. He had a rough, pocked face and a long handlebar mustache.

The soldier whipped his sword -- curved, like a scimitar -- around in a blur. Oliver couldn't keep up, couldn't dodge in time.

Time seemed to stop for a moment. In a heart-stopping rush of shame, Oliver realized he'd miscalculated. Again.

The soldier was beyond human, faster than Oliver had ever seen a man move. But he'd already known he would be. Just hadn't accounted for it.

Lack of imagination. He'd never make tribune.

Only the dead man on the street saved his life. The soldier stumbled on the body halfway through his strike, opened his guard.

Oliver stabbed him in the throat sheerly by reflex.

He got a good glimpse of his face as he fell. The man looked outraged, like Oliver had rear-ended him at a stop sign.

Shuddering with relief and adrenaline, Oliver glanced over to see the couple frozen in the middle of the street, watching with horror.

They weren't looking at him. They were looking at something in the sky behind him.

He turned.

The third dragon was flying in the direction of the camp from over the trees. It was maybe a hundred feet up, heading right towards them.

Even at this distance, Oliver could see the bright flame at the back of its open maw as it prepared to rain down hellfire upon them.

In a instant, he knew exactly what he had to do. The only thing he could do. Without sparing another glance for the couple in the street, he sprinted straight towards the oncoming dragon.