The nymph pounced at Vayra. Ducking to the side, Vayra pulled the pistol’s trigger, letting off the one shot she had loaded. A spray of flower petal debris and nectar erupted from the nymph’s shoulder, but it left only a scrape.

It would have blasted straight through a human.

They were tough. Noted.

The nymph only shrugged back for a second. It screeched, which turned into a high-pitched laugh, then dove towards Vayra with its claws outstretched.

Vayra ducked to the side, but the nymph’s glowing claws still whizzed past her, catching her flesh-and-blood forearm and leaving a light scrape.

Phasoné and Vayra stood side-by-side. Heart racing, Vayra took a step back, trying to give herself distance, until her back bumped against the wall of flower petals behind her. She raised her pistol again.

She could do better than the physical weapons of a mortal. “How do you destroy a nymph, Phas?”

“Scatter its components,” Phasoné said. “Hit it hard, and make sure it can’t get up, then keep destroying the bits until they fade back into the ground.”

Raw output, then.

Vayra fired a quarter seer-core’s worth of starlight-Arcara through the pistol. A beam of white light surged out, racing straight towards the nymph’s head. If it could evaporate water, it could annihilate a flower.

The nymph blocked it.

Raising her hands, the nymph erected a lens of pure Arcara. A shield technique—a Ward. Vayra’s starlight blasted against it and scattered off into the forest, tearing up chunks of the nearby flowers.

The nymph, screaming and laughing, strengthened her full body with a cloud of pale blue Arcara. Then, she sprinted towards Vayra in a blur of light. One arm wrapped around Vayra’s midsection, and before Vayra could register what had happened, she was blasting back through the wall of flower petals and skidding along the muddy floor of the clearing.

She landed hard on her back. All the air whooshed out of her lungs. It took all her willpower just to keep cycling Arcara. She shielded the back of her head before she collided with the well.

With her second hand, the nymph conjured half-inch long claws of Arcara, then drove it down at Vayra’s gut.

Just when the claws began to puncture flesh, Phasoné’s ghost flashed past. She threw the nymph to the ground, then punched straight in the center of its chest. Cracks erupted all across its form, and nectar began to spill out. Its arm fell off, and it collapsed to its knees, but the rest of it began to knit together.

Even one of Phas’s punches wasn’t enough to destroy it?

Phasoné’s form dimmed, and the details faded. She had no extra mana. “I’m hardly at—”

Before she could finish, one of the other nymphs grabbed her ghost from behind, wrapping one arm around her throat and the other up under her shoulder. With no mana from Vayra, Phasoné could only thrash with the strength of a human.

Panting, and covered in light scrapes, Vayra tried to jump to her feet, but the third nymph grabbed both of her hands at the wrists, holding her in place. As soon as the nymph touched her real hand, it disrupted the Arcara flow. The raw strength surging through the nymphs limbs left an aura.

The gap between Third Lieutenant and First was that large?

Vayra let go of the pistol and allowed the seer-core to disperse. Hopefully, the nymphs would then think she was unarmed, and it’d give her the edge she needed.

The nymphs spoke to each other in their language of shrieks and clicks, while the one without an arm moaned and grunted. Up close, their words carried a touch of intent in them, and sparks of Arcara flew out of their mouths. A lightheadedness brimmed at the edge of Vayra’s mind, but she resisted it as best as she could.

The first nymph motioned at the arm Phasoné had blasted off. The second nymph, who had a hair ornament of blue flowers, shrugged, as if to say, ‘It’ll grow back.’

Maybe for nymphs, it would.

The third nymph swayed her hips casually and laughed. A malicious grin brimmed on her lips; the lightheadedness doubled. Vayra tried pulling against the nymph’s grip, but the creature was too strong—not even at the weakest point, where the thumb met the other fingers, could Vayra break through. “Phas, why aren’t they trying to kill us?”

“I dunno. Maybe they want to stew us.”

“Seriously?”

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“I don’t think they want to have a tea party with us—unless we’re in the tea.”

Vayra growled under her breath, trying to tune out the nymphs’ screechy bickering. “Alright, then get back inside me.” She doubted she could take on all three nymphs at once, not in her current state, but she just needed to cut herself free.

“You know how that sounds—”

“I need the scythe.” Vayra figured her face was already red from effort, exertion, and the fight, but that couldn’t have helped. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”

Phasoné scowled, then sighed. “One second.” Her ghostly form started to disintegrate into threads, like a blanket unravelling. The threads raced through the air and sank into Vayra’s chest, absorbing in the blink of an eye.

The nymph that had been holding Phasoné stumbled forwards. It let out an enraged tea-kettle scream, then looked up at Vayra—exactly where Phasoné had gone. The nymph who’d lost an arm broke out into a fit of exaggerated crying.

Vayra relinquished control of her mechanical hand, where the nymph’s touch didn’t disrupt her Arcara flow. “Phas, any time…”

The nymph with the hair ornament charged. Vayra’s scythe began to form, starlight bleeding out of her scarf.

The second nymph holding Vayra let go, jumping away from the scythe, and Vayra dropped down to her stomach. The hair-ornament nymph tackled the nymph who’d been holding Vayra.

Leaping to her feet, Vayra ran to the well. She hoisted up the bucket—it was full of spirit-well water—and grabbed it, then hacked the chain off with the still-forming blade of her scythe. The crying nymph charged at her with its full Bracing technique. Its claws glimmered.

Vayra leapt to the side, careful to keep the bucket upright—and not to land on her haversack. If the kitten wasn’t awake before, it would be now.

One of the nymphs Moulded a dagger of pure Arcara in its hand and threw it at Vayra. It whipped through the air in a single heartbeat, and if Vayra hadn’t seen the nymph winding up, the dagger wouldn’t just have grazed past her shoulder.

Vayra couldn’t fight three First Lieutenant-grade nymphs at once, not like this. Bracing her legs, she turned and sprinted off into the forest on the other side of the clearing.

“We need a place to hide!” she hissed as she ran. Without the nymphs screaming in her ear, the lightheadedness faded. She wove between the flower-trees, and for those that she was moving too fast to dodge, she sliced through with her scythe.

‘First, don’t leave a trail of destruction, hm?’ Phasoné suggested. ‘I’m sure we can find a cave or something.’

Vayra turned towards the edge of the valley. When she found the ledge of the first shaped step of earth, she adjusted her course once again and ran along the base of it. Her breaths sped up. Footsteps, clacks, and screeches sounded behind her. The nymphs were chasing her.

With her Braced legs, she could run fast, but pushing the technique as hard as she did took more mana than she absorbed from the particles in the air. She was burning it fast enough that she could feel her reservoir emptying. The starsteel wires in her mechanical leg heated up, and she could see them glowing red-hot between the wooden plates. If she was a human, they’d have burned her stump.

She dispelled her scythe away to conserve mana. Not the time to worry about that.

Ahead, along the steep wall to her left, there was an opening—a cave entrance, weathered and eroded by years of inattention. But if she turned right into it, though, the nymphs would see her and follow her.

She veered away from the wall and out into the forest, then pushed her Bracing technique to its limit. White flame erupted over her legs, and it began to creep up her waist and stomach in tendrils, tracing the lines of buried phoenix feathers.

Almost like a cheap Mediator Form…

She focussed on speed, and just speed. The white fire expanded. The nymphs started to drift away behind her. The moment she lost sight of them, she dipped back to the left and shot straight into the cave. She ran into it, venturing as deep as she could before the dirt cinched together and she couldn’t fit through it anymore.

The only light came from her Bracing technique and scarf. She deactivated the technique and dropped down on her back. She set the bucket of elixir down beside her. Now, without the light of her technique, she noticed that it was glowing, too—an autumn yellow.

‘Veil yourself!’ Phasoné commanded.

Vayra held her breaths still and restricted her Arcara. She waited, laying flat on the ground, until she couldn’t hear the nattering nymphs anymore. Despite the length of the cave, her Third Lieutenant senses could still reach out the opening to them.

She took one deep breath, then veiled herself again.

After a few minutes, the noises didn’t come back.

‘Understandable,’ Phasoné said.

“Huh?” Vayra whispered, pushing herself up to a sitting position. She opened her haversack—first, to make sure the kitten was alright (it was, and it had fallen back asleep), then to retrieve her canteen and take a swig of water. Cautiously, she cycled Arcara out to the tips of her limbs and to the few scrapes and cuts she’d earned so they’d heal faster.

‘You don’t get your really good spiritual senses until Commodore,’ Phasoné explained. ‘The nymphs shouldn’t have anything.’

“Right…” Vayra exhaled slowly. She pressed her head back against the wall. “So…we’re trapped in here, now. At least we’ve got some elixir.” She pulled the bucket towards her with her foot, then peered inside it. It was a coherent mixture of spirit-water and pollen, so thick that it reminded her of quicksilver—if quicksilver was yellow.

Cautiously, she lifted the bucket to her mouth and took a sip. It was an iron bucket, and the edges were starting to rust. She had to be careful not to cut herself—no need to use an extra vial of Namola Elixir if she didn’t have to.

A single sip of the well-water was enough to send lightning shooting through her veins. She blinked, then coughed half of the sip back into the bucket.

The rest lit up her Arcara channels. Shards of glass flowed through her veins, but she consolidated it and pushed it to her core with the new cycling-refining technique Nathariel had taught her.

She clenched her teeth, then her fists. She would have to face the nymphs again. There was only one thing to do: she had to push herself and get stronger.