“And you’re sure it was Laxiv in there?” Sergeant Esis asked Nite as El landed beside them.
Faled and Laze gave El questioning looks, but she only had time to quickly nod in response before Nite answered.
“Yes, I’m sure of it.”
“So, this big hunk of ice, with Laxiv inside, is what punched straight through this building,” Esis thumbed over her shoulder, “and into the next?”
“Seems that way.”
“What could do this?” Esis asked, and Nite could only shrug in return.
“Sergeant,” Rodrick called down from where he perched on the edge of the building above. A lookout? “There’s something or somebody inside the storm. Might be Oril. Might not be.”
Sergeant Esis looked up at Rodrick, then down at the ground, her mind obviously running through their options.
“Faled,” she said. “Your wing has two duties. First, you’re on artillery duty. I want you backing us up, no matter what comes out of that storm.”
“Yes ma’am,” Faled said with a salute.
“And,” Esis said, before Faled could issue orders to his wing. “More importantly, second, it’s up to you to make sure this information gets back to the capital.”
“Ma’am?”
“You heard me. This storm is bigger than us. The capital needs to know, if it comes to that. This is the priority. Understood?”
“Understood,” Faled said, with a second sharp salute.
“Boomers,” Esis called to her wing. “Form up. Let’s go introduce ourselves,” Esis shouted and leapt into the air, her wings igniting five feet up and carrying her over the edge of the building while her troops fell into tight formation behind her. So, they could line up properly!
El breathed just a little easier.
“Find cover, bows only, we’re supporting from the rear,” Faled ordered. “El, stay back with me a second,” he said while the others shared a nervous look. “What are you waiting for?”
“Faled, what Esis said…” Nidina started.
“Are our orders,” Faled interrupted. “This is what we trained for. Now, go,” he said, his tone clearly stating the conversation was over.
Nidina and the others saluted and rushed off to find cover.
“What did you want, Faled?” El asked, though the answer was obvious.
“You’re the fastest, and you’ve seen the most. It’s up to you to get this intel back to the capital if things go poorly,” Faled said, and turned to go as if that was the end of it.
“I’m also best fighter here,” El shot back. “You can’t just ask me to leave you all if I can save you.”
“El,” Faled said. “You feel it, don’t you? Like Esis said, this storm… there’s something bigger than us going on here. If you think you alone can make the difference, then I trust your judgement. But,” he said and met her eyes. “If you don’t really think that, then I need you to follow my orders.
“Until then, find a position you can see everything,” he said, and drew an electrum focus from his belt.
“Yes sir,” El said.
Faled nodded, then turned and jogged off.
One part of El was furious with Faled for giving her that order. Another part of her was relieved. The third and biggest part of her was ashamed of the relief. What was all training for if she abandoned her friends when they needed her most?
Esis’s words to Oril bounced around inside El’s skull.
“Saving your family isn’t our mission. Our mission is, and always has been, the safety of Pycrin.”
It was the same thing. National security over the lives of her friends. Could she do it?
El shook her head—maybe she wouldn’t have to choose—and jumped into the air, flaring her wings just enough to lift her over the edge of the three-story building beside her. She lifted the electrum focus from her belt and ignited her bow to life, then jogged over to the edge of the building closest to the storm, the same place Oril had been pacing.
Arrayed in front of her, Esis’s unit formed up, like some kind of eye facing the storm head-on. Seven curved in the air, six curved on the ground, with Esis, the iris, hovering right in the middle, her sword and wings burning as bright as the sun.
So far, nothing had come out of the falling snow. Was Rodrick seeing things? Maybe the way the snow fell made him think he… no… what was that? A silhouette moved a few feet inside the storm wall, and it was coming closer.
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El’s fingers tightened around the electrum focus in her left hand while she pulled back gently on the fiery bowstring, willing an arrow into existence. Whoever or whatever that was inside the storm, they were in for a world of hurt if they thought they could take on the Firestorm.
Heartbeat by racing heartbeat, the silhouette resolved into two stocky legs, two thick arms, and a horned head atop spiked shoulders. Some kind of demon? No, another step, and the silhouette stepped out of the storm; a man in heavy, archaic plate armor of a blue so dark it was almost black. Snow dusted his shoulders and frost rimed his joints, the ice crystals cracking and reforming with every step he took.
Over his right shoulder extended the two-foot hilt of a sword so large its twelve-inch-wide blade almost dragged on the ground behind him. The heavy helm hid his face, and even his eyes were lost to the darkness beyond his visor.
“Well, hello there,” Esis called out cheerfully. “That’s quite a storm you came out of. Care to tell us a bit about it?”
In answer, the armored figure woodenly extended his left arm, fist clenched, until he held it horizontal to the ground. With a sound like long-frozen ice over a lake cracking, he opened his fingers, and a piece of black leather fell to the ground.
Black leather, just like the material used to make the Firestorm uniforms.
“Mirel! Halling!” Esis shouted. “Take him.”
Two Boomers, top left and bottom right of the eye, lunged out of formation, wings and weapons burning bright, and closed on the slow-moving hunk of metal.
No mercy, blades flashed as they arced in from opposite sides, one straight for the armored neck, the other for his waist. No suit of armor could stop those weapons.
Then again, ice shouldn’t have been able to either.
In the time it took El to blink, the knight’s hands snapped up, his left catching the blade aimed for his neck while his right snagged the other. He stood otherwise unmoving, flames roiling between his fingers and along the weapons held still in the air.
Mirel and Halling, eyes wide in surprise their weapons had actually been stopped, strained to drive their blades forward. Blades that should have carved clean through armored gauntlets and the man beyond. Instead, it was like the three were all part of some elaborate statue, frozen while the others watched.
“Rrraaaaah,” Mirel grunted, his blade flaring as he poured power into it. Halling quickly followed suit, and suddenly both weapons raged like living things, snapping and whipping.
And yet, the armored knight didn’t even flinch.
“Sergeant…” Mirel gasped, and dropped to his knees, weapon still held by the knight.
“I can’t…” Halling wheezed, and shifted like he was trying to pull his sword away.
They weren’t flaring their power; the knight was somehow pulling it out. Why didn’t they let go?
The knight flexed his fingers, and the roaring flames of the fiery weapons froze in an instant, like long, sinuous ice serpents. A twist of his wrists, and the knight snapped the blades in half, then one, two, in quick succession, drove the broken shards straight into the chests of Mirel and Halling.
Their flame armor did nothing to stop the blows, and both fell back as ice crystals spread from the spikes and quickly wrapped around their bodies, growing and growing until each was encased in a large block of ice.
Just like Laxiv.
“Archers!” Esis lifted her sword into the air, then swiped it down.
Long hours of training pushed its way passed her shocked brain, and El drew her arm back and let loose her arrow. It bolted straight and true to strike the knight square in the center of his chest.
The moment the flames touched his armor, the entire fiery arrow turned to ice. Its power and momentum stolen, the ice arrow fell to the ground and shattered. A dozen more arrows hit in quick succession, and the outcome for each was exactly the same.
Their flames weren’t working? That wasn’t possible…
“Boomers, engage!” Esis shouted and rocketed forward, the remaining members of her unit only a breath behind. Not a single one had hesitated.
Sergeant Esis reached the knight first, and once again, he moved suddenly and unbelievably fast. But Esis was ready as the armored fist swung for her, her shield perfectly in place to block the blow.
The punch hit her like a fifty-ton battering ram, swatting her out of the air like a bug and sending her bouncing along the ground until she finally collided with, and went through, a building thirty feet away.
“Evasive maneuvers,” Nite shouted, flying wide and slashing at the knight’s shoulder as he passed. His strike landed true, sparks flying at the impact, but didn’t even leave a scratch. Unfortunately for Nite, he wasn’t quite evasive enough, and an armored gauntlet caught his ankle as he tried to complete his flyby.
The knight halted Nite’s forward momentum so suddenly it was like the flaming wings kept trying to go forward while his body got yanked in the opposite direction. With a turn of his waist, the knight brought Nite up and over, slamming the man down into the ground hard enough to crater the pavement.
Without the protection of his flame armor, Nite would have been pulped. As it was, the stone melted from the kinetic conversion of the armor, the physical force turned to heat, and Nite coughed blood into the air from where he lay on his back.
“Die!” Rodrick whipped his blade in a two-handed overhead chop down the back of the knight. The blade ran down the knight’s helm and back, then into the ground between his feet.
Without missing a beat, the knight spun, Nite still in his grasp, and swung the second-in-command like a mace. The two fleshy bodies shrouded in flame armor met with enough force the sound of breaking bones echoed through the city, too much even for the kinetic conversion to absorb. Rodrick hit the ground ten feet away, one hand on his ribs as he groaned in pain and struggled to his feet.
Nite, on the other hand, hung limply from the knight’s hand, and the cold, eyeless helm turned his way. Crystals of frost crawled from the gauntlet, down Nite’s leg, and quickly across his body. Within seconds, Nite was fully encased in a thick block of ice.
“Fire at will!” Faled yelled at his unit, each and every one of them frozen by the blatant one-sided violence of the battle. El’s arrow was the first streaking through the air. The first to slap into the knight’s armored helm.
The first to do absolutely nothing to him.
Arrows of flame, each strong enough to level a building, rained down on the knight, but they might as well have been insects for how much attention he paid them.
Instead, his right gauntlet reached up over his shoulder, fingers wrapping around the long, frost-covered hilt while arrow after arrow fell frozen to the ground.
A sudden wave of cold burst from the knight as he pulled the weapon from his back. Arrows within thirty feet fell from the air, frozen long before they reached him. The unfortunate, nearby Firestorm found a layer of frost coating their flame armor and crackling on their wings, which struggled to hold them aloft.
The massive sword, at least six feet long and a foot wide, was serrated along both sides, and looked to be made of some kind of dark metal, though the entire thing was sheathed in a thick coat of ice. It had to weigh hundreds of pounds, even without the ice, and the knight lifted it above his head with one hand like it was a thin reed.
“Purge them,” the knight said, his voice like the heart of a driving winter long banished from the land.
He brought his massive weapon down horizontal to the ground, and the storm wall all around him burst outward, a rushing army of massive, bipedal lizards pouring forth.