Another faint explosion shook the tight walls Iris found herself sandwiched between. They’d all sent vibrations through to the soles of her boots; every grenade, cannon round and bullet, but none yet had sounded so close.

“They must’ve blown the front gate” Evalyn remarked through her helmet. “Main assault will be coming soon.”

The end of the service shaft they’d blindly travelled down terminated directly ahead of them in a doorway—steel, with a ventilation grid near its feet. Besides faint chatter and orders, the door refused to give much of the other side away. It didn't particularly matter; Iris could only expect a fight, even though a chance at slipping past wasn't entirely out of reach.

She and Evalyn had little need for the latter method. Their ally in tow, however, could have used less action.

“All right,” Evalyn said, grabbing the door handle and inching it open. “Iris, hold onto that radio. You’ve already had a chat with Deity Division?”

“Yes. They told me I sounded young.”

“Well, what are you going to do? They’ll guide you through the structure. Can’t give you as detailed of a guide as usual; the entire bunker is buried after all, but a rough schematic of the place should be good enough. Alis?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Hang back, all right. Watch flanks, act support. Iris’ll be a bit of a bulldozer. Steer her in the right direction.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Try not to call me ma’am.”

“Yes, ma—. Yes. Boss.”

“Good enough. I’ll draw their fire, thin out their numbers before the main troops arrive.”

She closed the door again, kneeling before them and put a hand on Alis’s shoulder, a heavy gauntlet coming down on his bones in a characteristically masculine gesture. Then she turned to Iris, running a hand behind her neck and bringing their foreheads together. “See you on the other side, all right? We’re going to stop a war from happening today, but I need you both okay first.”

She stood and opened the door, stepping through and shutting it behind her.

A guttural scream masked by what Iris recognised as some sort of gas mask. The few seconds of confusion that followed were punctuated by silence, realisation, and then gunfire.

“My God that’s a lot of bullets,” Alis muttered over Iris’s shoulder as scores of automatic fire raged. They were then snuffed out, one by one, the orange light of muzzle flashes peeking through the ventilation grid fading by the second.

More weighted footsteps approached, but instead of stopping to fire, they ran past. The monster had moved on.

Iris opened the door onto a landing three steps above the main floor—a hallway stretched to her left and right, terminating in T-junctions on either end. Doors elevated by similar landings lined the hall at irregular intervals, and crates of supplies—everything from food to ammunition—lined the damp, moss and lichen-infected walls.

She grabbed the radio slung by her hip and brought it to her face. “Breadcrumbs,” she whispered into the receiver.

“Left, left from your current heading is a staircase leading down. It’s a wide-open space by the looks of things. Runs deeper into the compound away from the main entrance.”

“Copy,” Iris replied.

“Look, I don’t know how many strong you are, but I’d expect heavy resistance. It’s the inner sanctum after all. Check your corners and watch for traps.”

“Copy,” Iris repeated, stowing the radio. Alis’s hand clasped her shoulder plate, and she turned around.

“No, eyes forward Iris. I’ll be our tail, you scan ahead for traps.”

Iris nodded, disintegrating excess matter into gas and propelling it forward while Alis’s knuckles shone purple and he sealed off their six with a solid barrier.

“Let’s move,” he said, and they started forward.

Through ventilation grids, airway shafts and even gaps between hinges, Iris’s gas fed her too much information to process at once, and she re-evaluated her scope to the few rooms before her.

“There’s a group coming towards us from the right,” she said, pointing at the T-junction ahead.”

“We can block it off with a wall if we want, but that’ll mean someone else has to deal with them later,” Alis reminded her. “Someone not as well equipped as us.”

The halls were brimming with armaments. Disarming the 42nd only left them free to get right back into the fight, the same went for concussing them.

The armoured steps grew louder as they approached the corner, faltering as they encountered the gas.

She had a job to do, one that was important. That was all she could be certain about. Who she gave the act of mercy to, her enemy or her ally... Thinking about it like that, the debate quickly strayed from rationality she doubted was ever there in the first place.

“What do you want to do, Iris? Make a decision, fast.”

Yet she couldn't see the point in it. What had refusing her mother's wishes, and by extension Geverde, done for her in the end?

Brought her right back to the frontline. In the fray, where her failure meant people died, and her success meant people suffered, least of all her.

It was always the same, no matter what era. It was a familiar feeling that wasn’t her own: that her unrelenting power ultimately came with servitude. How great objects of faith—gods and deities—would be bent to a humble pastor’s will, morphed into the idol of their own personal teachings. Her place on earth was under a thumb that seemed to switch owners all too often.

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One after another, like doors down a hallway. Flimsy plywood and damp cork swelling like scar tissue.

Her serpentine beast coiled around her legs, rearing its head next to hers as though to whisper into her ear to give the order. No words escaped its mouth moving on strings, yet she heeded the advice and gave the order nonetheless.

The gunfire was getting tiresome, ceaseless rattling bouncing around her helmet for minute after minute. The bastards were tricky, and they knew their territory well. With bulletproof armour and that much firepower, Evalyn had pegged the 42nd as a division of bulwark-types and nothing else.

But they’d pegged her as something they couldn’t kill with bullets and were manoeuvring around her, disappearing around corners before she could fire off an attack of her own.

She wanted to keep a low profile, but time wasn’t on her side. The more she entertained their stalling tactics the more 42nd there’d be left to decimate the main assault. There was nothing wrong with taking out the base by herself, but for appearance's sake…

She spread herself wide through several tendrils, each noticeable enough to garner a reaction from whomever they passed. Punches, swipes, shooting, she recorded them all and grabbed the perpetrators by the scuff, snatching them from their hiding spots.

To most conventional firearms, the 42nd's armour was the very definition of an ‘immovable object’. Nothing short of canon rounds could bust through their plating. A tougher nut to crack, and exactly why she hadn’t bothered bringing her rifle.

Six nuts to crack, six bows, six arrows. She couldn’t picture the velocity of a cannon round, but she could imagine the impossible tension of a bowstring that might produce that same velocity. A strange trait, but that was how her mind worked.

The arrows, unbendable in their own right, punched through the iron-cast armour and put them to sleep.

Evalyn dropped the bodies, retracting the limbs into her armour as the gunfire picked back up again. With a bow in her own two hands, and another in a second pair she kept to her back, Evalyn started further down the hallway.

More gunfire from behind her tore through a box of grenades, detonating the entire lot in one flurry of shrapnel. No damage to her, they likely knew that too. But the momentary plume of dust and collapsing tunnel around her was enough to shave off a few more precious seconds.

More gunfire from behind her. She couldn’t pin down a location, but a broad sweep of it with a flurry of spindly tendrils caught onto two more she dispatched with both bows.

Watching their hollow eyes barely change as their bodies fell limp was something she’d never get used to. Frankly, it wasn’t human. Even with old Sidos dead, they persisted like zombies, loyal dogs to a master six feet under. They were worse at accepting her father's death than she could ever dream to be.

Hating something while she killed it. That was something she tried to avoid at all costs.

Thirteen years had passed, and an eighteen-year-old Evalyn had fought desperately to end her own war. Times had changed, new problems had emerged in place of old ones, and there were other factors to consider now, other dangers Geverde and Sidos had to prepare for. She knew that. The war of Aether and Diesel was over, new technology couldn’t be unmade.

“But I ended up here to put skeletons in the closet.”

If not for noble reasons, Evalyn couldn’t help but empathise with her little girl.

More bullets drew her attention in time for a flash bang to flare in her face.

Her helmet kept most of the noise out, but the light still found her eyes. She stumbled in the dust, finding her footing. The bang was always the worst part, the sudden nausea that came straight after had always gotten her hacking up her guts. But she’d kept her armour intact. As long as she did that she could—

The next thing she knew, she was buried in a concrete crater dented into the far wall. Most of the shock had been avoided, but she’d definitely broken something. There was blood in her mouth; she could taste the iron.

Blunt force trauma. Not a problem if she’d been prepared.

Now her ears were ringing, the blood coursing through them drowning out her hearing as she dropped to the floor and staggered to her feet. Through burned-out eyes, she saw a single figure stand where dust had settled. An unassuming individual, with short and curled blonde hair falling over a set of tinted glasses. He assumed no fighting stance nor did he carry a weapon, simply opting to stand there, unarmoured, and block the way forward.

Evalyn drew her bow, lessening the poundage to an appropriate level before firing. This time she heard it clearly; a distinct sound. A tone that zipped up the scale from low to high and her arrow was sent flying off course, embedding itself into the concrete wall to the target’s left.

Magic, that was plain to see, and she had a suspicion it wasn’t her first encounter with it either.

Evalyn turned tail, putting all the strength in her legs to leap right while she switched her extra limbs’ focus from fight to flight. Another utterly alien sound and the Wizard came screeching around the corner in midair. Evalyn watched closely.

He launched himself off the wall he’d slammed Evalyn into, redirecting his speed in her direction, but never did his feet make contact with anything. Whatever method of movement he used, it was capable of more speed than hers.

He closed the gap, maybe five metres, and she found herself flying into a concrete wall once again.

More dust, more haze, but her mind was working better, she could absorb the trauma before it got the chance to jumble her insides.

She sent a probing limb through the pulverised concrete clouds, only to feel it violently slapped away. Another probe got much the same treatment.

If she’d had bullets, maybe they’d get past whatever magic it was before he could react, but magic like his wouldn’t be much use in the first place if it couldn’t repel bullets. It most likely meant she and her opponent were impervious to most damage: a great stalemate tactic that put her on the back foot. Her enemy had all day compared to her.

A simple barrier didn’t explain how he moved. Almost as though he was being repelled from the solid surface.

The Wizard stood, refusing to attack her first. Every move was reactionary besides his traversal, but every instance of his magic had repelled one thing from another, whether that be an object away from himself or himself away from an object. Whether that was voluntary or not was something she needed to determine.

Iris’s beast screamed around the corner towards the staircase, winding through the purple gas scouting the route ahead. In each bend, she felt her abdomen tense in fear of being bucked off, but Alis’s grip around her waist showed no such sign of fluctuating anxiety. She remembered to breathe and tried to follow his example.

There was a chokepoint at the bottom of the stairs. Her gas had warned her too late to slow down. Two to each side of the stairwell, three behind a barricade of sandbags down the corridor.

Iris tapped Alis’s knee and pointed to either side as they approached the final bend in the staircase and promptly blew past it. Her magic sparked behind her, a foreign entity this time around.

She brought up her forearms to her face, materialising a shield before them that immediately caught a hail of gunfire, magazine’s-worth of bullets in the blink of an eye. Out of her periphery, Iris caught the two 42nd soldiers on either side of the stairwell, watching as their helmets were caved in by two pointed, steel-like beams of purple.

Inelegant, but Iris couldn’t fault an effective method.

The beast’s jaws dislodged themselves, notch by notch as the strings pulled against the violet-magenta hue. A crunch, a shearing through metal. Iris looked back and saw nothing but empty shells of armour for carcasses.

She knew it was a mercy, both for them and for herself. But she still regretted ever affording it a second thought. Alis’s eyes in the corner of her vision urged hers back forward, and she slowed down, reaching the edge of the hallway before dismounting.

A set of double doors greeted them, ones that freely swung on their hinges like leaves in the wind, ones she’d imagine an almost constant stream of people coming in and out of. These were dead, and whatever waited on the other side pretended to be much the same.

“Stay behind me,” Iris ordered, and Alis closed the distance between them, placing a hand on her left shoulder, patting it as though to reassure her.

“With you, Iris.”

She felt his grip tighten, each finger pressing itself against her monstrous frame.

“Stay with me.”

“Always.”