“But we’d still have to kill the Protoataphoi first, right?” Soleiman asked, taking one last draught from his soon-to-be dry cup of tea, having just listened to Qingxi’s suggestion for how they could somehow best all the three threats they currently faced.

“Yes,” Qingxi replied. “Defeat the beast, retrieve its skull, and then we can do everything else.”

“Mmh…”

“Think about it,” she insisted. “Not only do we evade the Gravitas by moving towards Minlos, but by carrying out raids on the Hashashiyyin under the guise of the Protoataphoi, we thin their numbers out and weaken the defences at Minlos for when the time comes for us to launch our assault.”

“We’re hinging a lot on the fact we can actually pull this… dance off,” Pallas said.

“You can leave that to me,” she said. “You’ll get into it in no time.”

“Alright then,” Soleiman assented. “But you said you’d need some other stuff, right?”

“Depending on the beast’s skull, yes. We’ll get to that once we take it down, though.”

And then they took it down, not two days ago.

Since then, they’d gone over several more times what exactly it was that they intended on doing, going over a great myriad of scenarios to try and iron out exactly how they were going to temporarily incapacitate a military encampment with a population of anywhere from ten to fifty Hashashiyyin with what limited manpower and firepower they had.

That being said, though, through convening with the locals as they continued their slow progress back towards Minlos, they discovered that there could only be, at most, thirty Hashashiyyin in the area at once. Turns out, the entirety of Ahdi Minerva had been split into six divisions, with one of these divisions being centred upon Minlos. Due to the ongoing war between Intoros and Lady Calisura, a large majority of Hashashiyyin still stationed in Minerva had been concentrated along the westernmost division, leaving Minlos and its sister divisions out east exceptionally under armed. Doubly so given the area’s relative depopulation.

And so, they eventually decided on a plan that would allow them to successfully break the Minlos encampment to try and interfere with Hashashiyyin operations whilst maintaining plausible deniability. This would only work because of the fact that the ataphoi were a known problem not only to them but to the Hashashiyyin as well, given the massacre at Mesimeos. Therefore, if they were able to somehow attack the Hashashiyyin while disguised as the Protoataphoi, they would be able to lend extra credence to the already established rearmament efforts of the villagers whilst also severely inundating the operative capacity of the Hashashiyyin without having to expose Pallas’ existence. Three birds with one stone, essentially.

But Soleiman couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy, seeing the Protoataphoi scampering about before him, chasing Rumi around the village playground.

She slipped in between the several thin stripped logs placed haphazardly about the ground, weaving and crawling and dashing through the gaps and gates within the structure, the absurdity of the scenario amplified even further by the look of sheer unmatched bliss on her face.

“I am a Master of Evasion!” she said gleefully, swinging around a log and narrowly avoiding the beast’s skull poking at her back. “Super Speedster Rumi!”

Stopping before a gate just slightly shorter than her, she hopped up and threw her body over it. She leaned forward, planting her hands on top of it as she kicked her legs up, eventually managing to get herself soundly on top.

She looked back down, seeing as the Protoataphoi looked up at her, its goofy painted on eyes staring off into different directions.

Shaking as she stood up, she reached out for the next gate, its size marginally larger than the one she perched on.

“Careful, Rumi!”

She grabbed ahold of it, and after a good bit of hesitation, made the jump.

“Come on,” she said, carefully turning herself around to face the beast as she looked down from atop the gate. “Catch me!”

The front end of the Protoataphoi then surged up, pushing off with its two front feet and landing atop the first gate.

“Oh, woah!” Rumi said, suddenly getting to her feet and balancing precariously atop the gate. She wasn’t going to let herself lose so easily.

But when the beast made the attempt to leap onto her gate, it slipped, its front end falling as the gate buried itself into its belly and kept its hind legs back. The curtain of black fabric that covered its form slipped off as its front fell onto the ground, revealing Pallas slumped over the smaller gate and Qingxi having fallen face-down onto the ground.

“Oops.”

“Qingxi, you need to tell me when you’re going to jump,” Pallas groaned, pushing herself off of the gate and trying to steady herself whilst balancing atop of her stilts.

“I did,” Qingxi replied, sitting back up and hoisting the beast’s skull up and off her head using a pole attached to it, revealing the several wood guards and blood-soaked strings within that allowed her and Pallas the ability to control it. “Didn’t you feel my tail then?”

“No?”

“Ah,” she said in between gasps, her breathing heavy. “Maybe I missed.”

“How about we signal to each other some way other than swishing your tail across my face?”

Qingxi thought about it for a moment.

“Have you ever been to a Xiafan musical performance before, Pallas?”

“...Not that I recall, no.”

“Oh! I have!”

They craned their necks up to see Rumi still gleefully stood atop the second gate.

“They’re the ones with the… the powerful drums, right?”

“Yes,” Qingxi said, pleasantly surprised. “Where’d you get to see it?”

“On the way home,” she said. “And that was only because my Mistress at the time decided to bring me along to carry her shopping for her. There just happened to be a dojo along the path back we took, and so we stopped to listen to the music!”

“Huh. Okay then,” Qingxi said, crossing her legs, the heat generated and trapped under the thick layers of her and Pallas’ fluffy pants remedied only by the fact they were both wearing single layered black shirts that could breathe in the open air. “Usually, in most lion dances, the movements of the dancers are choreographed to the beat of the percussionists. So think drums, gongs, or, uh… those things that clang together.”

“Cymbals?” Pallas asked.

“Oh, so that's what it's called,” she mused. “Anyway, yeah. If you want, I can try to train you to move to a beat using my wind, instead of having to rely on tail swishes.”

“How is that going to work?”

“Like this.”

Pallas suddenly felt a fluttering about her nose, a small current of wind swishing to and fro at a constant rate. Somehow being even more ticklish than Qingxi’s tail.

“Okay,” Pallas said, swiping at her face. “Maybe do that somewhere other than my face?”

“Like your arms?”

“No, like the strings in the skull,” she said. “I can actually feel slightly through them, somehow.”

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“Oh, alright then,” Qingxi replied. “Shall we try again?”

“Yeah. Though, maybe this time without the cover.”

Qingxi got to her feet, picking the rock-heavy skull up and hoisting it over her head as Pallas slowly made her way around the gate, the wooden braces supporting her knees and bound about her shins and feet to make them more akin to the hind legs of a horse still a novelty that she was getting used to.

Reaching her arms out, she bent forward, planting them against Qingxi’s shoulders. Then, she slowly slid herself down Qingxi’s back, until her arms were wrapped about her waist and the top of her head was placed firmly against Qingxi’s spine.

“Ready?” Qingxi asked.

“Yep.”

They set off, breaking into the sprint through the forest dark, charging dead ahead towards two Hashashiyyin, completely oblivious to the shadowy figure surging between the trees.

The objective was simple.

Maim and frighten the two of them, putting on a spectacle of a mauling to convince them of the reality of the ataphoi threat. And then…

Now mere metres away from the two Hashashiyyin, Qingxi gave the signal, and the rhythmic flow of wind across the blood appendages in the beast’s skull suddenly altered, forming into a singular powerful current that rolled forward across the blood-soaked cloth stuck to the roof of the beast’s mouth.

Pallas placed both of her arms against Qingxi’s hips and aligned the top of her head with the base of her spine before exploding outwards. All throughout her body, from the blood armour on her skin to the muscles within her legs and the system of locks and springs that made up her artificial legs roared forth an immense amount of power, sending both her and Qingxi screaming out of the woods as they made one great movement to try and catch one of the Hashashiyyin within their jaws.

“Do you hear something?”

Suddenly, the Protoataphoi emerged from the darkness of the woods to their right, skull slamming into the earth in front of them before clamping down on nothing.

“What the!”

Suddenly, Qingxi felt as the outside of the beast’s skull erupted into flame, the fires just barely kept from seeping inside by her own winds. Signalling Pallas to leap to the left, she yanked the skull from the earth just before jumping back, allowing Pallas to throw herself out of the way of a second wave of fire.

Hoisting the rod connected to the beast’s skull well above her head, she blew small currents of wind outwards along the blood-soaked strings that lined the inside of its mouth, signalling Pallas to let its lower jaw hang loose.

Simultaneously, she blew forth a stronger current of wind from out of the beast’s mouth.

And before the two men, both stunned by the sudden appearance of the ataphoi, now stood a beast nearly twice their size. Puffs of diseased rank air streaming from its maw as it slowly backed away from them.

“What in Calisura’s name is that?” one of the men struggled, hurriedly shuffling backwards.

“It’s an ataphoi,” the other replied, doing much the same. “Like the thing that rampaged through the north division.”

“Don’t those things massacre entire villages?”

“Yeah, and they're gonna massacre us too if we’re not careful!”

The Protoataphoi suddenly lurched forward, cantering forth across fifteen or so metres of lone dirt road that stood between them.

“Crap!” one of the men said, turning around and stumbling into a run. “Khalid, move!”

“No! Watch,” Khalid replied, lifting his right hand up and forming a finger gun. “It fears fire.”

“Huh?”

The other man stopped dead in his tracks, though still keeping his body oriented in preparation for escape. As he looked back anxiously, flames began to crawl from the creases in Khalid’s right arm, snaking across his index and middle fingers to form a ball of burning fire that hovered ahead of him.

“The Lady be blessed!”

Sprinting full speed at the two Hashashiyyin ahead of them, the circulating rhythm of the signalling current rolling about faster and faster as they picked up speed, Qingxi saw the glimmer of orange through the mesh placed under where the skull’s nasal cavity would be.

Altering the rhythmic current to blow left momentarily, she and Pallas kicked off in unison with their left legs to throw their body to the side, regaining their composure immediately upon evading the attack and resuming their dead sprint.

Again, they slipped, this time to the right, and the Hashashiyyin were within seven metres of their wicked puppet maw.

Suddenly, the bolts of fire were replaced by a wave of flame that glid across the earth, threatening to sear both of their legs.

This time, Qingxi altered the circulating pattern to blow up and against the roof of the beast’s mouth, timing it just as the wave came crashing across their feet, first she and then Pallas leaping over it as it burnt whatever small weeds or grass that grew upon the path.

“Khalid!”

“River of flame.”

Through the mesh, Qingxi could see as the man suddenly pulled his right arm back, concealing it behind his cloak as he put his left shoulder forward.

At once, Qingxi blew the rhythmic current towards the front right corner of the beast’s mouth, slowing down just as a blazing ball of infernal energy came into existence behind the man.

Without missing a beat, Pallas planted her head and her hands against Qingxi’s hips, curling her body up and scrunching the beast’s torso together, before throwing out a magnitude of force so great she felt the springs in her legs creak under the pressure. She threw Qingxi out ahead and to the right of her, leaping after her in the same movement.

Just as Qingxi adjusted her trajectory with her winds, she planted her feet against a nearby tree, Pallas thumping against its trunk immediately after her just as a torrent of flame briefly burst across the dirt pathway, missing them entirely.

Once again, Qingxi signalled Pallas to throw her forward once more.

The Protoataphoi leaped from the tree and towards Khalid, its bloodied and rotten maw splitting open as it closed in on him.

“Move!”

The two Hashashiyyin blasted up into the air, engulfing the beast’s skull in flame and just narrowly avoiding certain death.

Within the confines of the skull, just as the amber glow of the flames disappeared, Qingxi saw as a thin streak of orange flame suddenly manifested and came surging towards their neck.

At once, she leapt backwards in tandem with Pallas, narrowly avoiding having the blade of flame buried into her body.

She saw as the Hashashin that had previously attacked them with firebolts landed on the earth before her, the other suddenly emerging into view- his hands coated in fire as he came in to try and hammerfist their skull into the ground.

Qingxi blew the rhythmic current back down the throat of the beast furiously, Pallas yanking her off her feet and onto her shoulders just in time to avoid getting slammed into the dirt.

Khalid watched from behind his firefisted comrade as the beast suddenly stood back on its hind legs, its jaw dropping open. Suddenly, a pillar of lilac flame burst forth from its maw, engulfing the two of them as their attempts to blast themselves out of the way were intercepted by the greater cloud of blazing saltpetre.

“Amir! Run!”

The flames suddenly burst apart as the Protoataphoi surged forth once again, the inside of its mouth black as the abyss. And before Khalid could blink, it had slammed its teeth about the arm of his comrade, cleaving it cleanly off his body.

As if not sated, the beast chomped again, this time catching Amir’s left hand just as he raised it to call forth a burst of flame to force it away from him.

“Khalid!”

Khalid stood back as his friend cried out in unspeakable horror, his voice brought to its very limits in the face of unquestionable abject terror. The strain of all the distress and trauma audible through the desperate cracking of his screams.

“Help me! Please!”

Qingxi suddenly felt as flames engulfed the entirety of the beast’s skull, licking and lapping through the holes in its eyes and nose, just barely kept from burning the delicate machinery that kept both the skull and them functioning. Using her winds to force the skull open, she released the Hashashin’s hand, before jumping backwards and having Pallas step back slightly so that they could retreat.

That was when the dismembered arm of one of the Hashashin suddenly slipped backwards, falling into the ‘throat’ of the beast and out onto the ground.

Qingxi shrunk into a squat almost instantly, shielding it from view as she shook the rod about.

“Amir! Amir, stay with me!”

Khalid grabbed his friend, pulling him back as he cauterised the gaping wound where his shoulder used to be.

“The beast, Khalid!” Amir moaned in return, his only remaining hand just barely still attached to his arm.

He looked back up, seeing as the Protoataphoi shook its head about uncomfortably, the front end of its body held close to the ground as it opened and closed its jaw- smoke puffing out of its nostril.

“The flames worked!”

“It’s coming again!”

Once more, Khalid shot forth a fan of flames, striking the beast solidly against the skull and forcing it back against the ground. This time, the beast struggled back to its feet, shaking its head furiously as it slowly backed away.

“Go, Amir! Go!”

The two Hashashiyyin then broke into a frenzy, sprinting back down the dirt path towards Minlos, leaping up into the trees with arcs of fire trailing behind them.

And once Qingxi saw that they disappeared out of view, she wiggled, letting Pallas know to drop the arm. She lifted the rod high above her head, allowing Pallas to then lift the cloaking fabric off of them, throwing the entire elaborate costume to the side.

The two of them then collapsed onto their bums, their legs too tired to fight against the instability of the strange contraptions on their feet crafted by Soleiman.

“So, that’s that, then?” Pallas asked.

“More or less, yeah.”

“Alright,” she replied, panting heavily. “Now we just hope they get the word back to Minlos, and that everything else goes to plan, right?”

Qingxi turned to look at her, the fabrics of her sweat-soaked tee clinging to her body.

“Mhm.”