I was still alive, which was good. With an enchanted rod plunged through my chest, which wasn’t. My partially collapsed lung aside, it was there to make sure I would ‘stay in place’ through some magical means. I had absolutely no idea how it was supposed to do that, especially with an additional Gleipnir-grade binding around my body, but I wasn’t going to dismiss it as some crazy talk.

Because Bragge knew his runes. Now that I had all the time in the world to look around, the yurt was engraved beyond belief, even if I excluded the Divine or near-Divine runework shimmering on the canvas of the walls. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if I was near the battle or whether time was ticking outside of this place. It certainly had the vibe of Albin’s magical camping tent but, while that one felt like a portable palace with a myriad of amenities and trinkets within, this place was a military bunker with but a handful of carpets to somewhat mask its purpose. The purpose? Containment, most likely. I didn’t know every rune around me but some patterns were recognisable and all of them dealt with defences, reinforcement, and protection.

This wasn’t a random yurt or the private quarters of the enemy general, this was a magical prison.

I suppressed my grimace when I heard a loud ripping sound of one of my lashes finding its end in the maw of my savage jailer. Barbaric brutality aside, the seeming ease of his action was worrying. Enhanced strength alone wasn’t sufficient to rip apart the unimolecular skeleton weave, not the way he did it. His teeth were resilient enough not to chip and shatter from the pressure and his tendons didn’t rip under tension. There was no need to ask how — not with him glowing like a nuclear reactor underwater — but it was another proof that sheydayan vitality was quite broad. Trymr Rurkha was practically immune to my drugs until I crippled his Spark and there was no way Bragge was weaker or even comparable to him.

Then there was that mention of Flow-less artefacts that somehow empowered Bragge. I wasn’t certain if Trymr was simply crafting excuses why Bragge was… well, that… or if the Daimon Lord had more hidden tricks to spare, but I couldn’t dismiss that possibility when my life was on the line. Too many unknowns, too many displays of power. The math was not in my favour and not even by a small margin at that. If I were to strike at him, I had to make sure I would kill him on the first attempt for it was likely that I wouldn’t survive until the second.

If I couldn’t do anything else but attack him, that was. Bragge wasn’t my personal problem and no amount of honour and glory I could earn by throwing myself at him would compare to the benefits I would provide to my family and my sadaq by simply staying alive. All I needed to do was get out of here. There were other ways to achieve that apart from overwhelming power.

So when Bragge was ripping my brigandine apart, I made sure to collect as many genetic samples as I could get a hold of. Shed hairs that no longer glowed by themselves, microscopic flakes of dead skin, anything that could unravel the mystery of Flow daimonas. It might not save my ass right now, but in a couple of years I would likely know more about their physiology than they did themselves. Enough to make sure that this would not happen again.

When he scattered the keys of my keyboard on the floor, his interest quickly soured by the realisation of what those artefacts actually were, I was committing to memory every single detail of the room, every kink in the carpet and every piece of debris that my entrance had left behind. I was also scanning every runic pattern present in the room, memorising the ones I knew not and collating as many as I could by their possible functions based on the runes I did know. Again, this was likely to bring true benefits at a later time, but I needed to know as much as possible in order to push the needle of probability just a little bit closer toward my success. Even if it meant scraping at the bottom of the metaphorical barrel.

And when I allowed him to ‘scalp’ one of my lashes, severing the connection before his sickle went too deep into my body, Harald was busy engraving copies of me into my flesh and bones. With Yeva included in my calculations, the definition of me being ‘alive’ was somewhat more open to interpretation.

As long as my sadaq knew where to look and there was something left to be found in the first place, that was.

“Murk flesh,” The local sun king spat out a chunk of living tech, “another trick and nothing more. How fitting for their family…”

Murk flesh? Lashes were organic but their flesh wasn’t human, just compatible enough not to cause an immune response. Even wermages were closer.

Unless he was talking about Creature flesh.

“It was your warriors that called me a Forest walker.”

Bragge paused, glanced at me as if he forgot I was still here, and then smashed my face with a backhand. I felt my jaw crack from the impact while the bind held me in place.

“Have I given you permission to speak?”

I spat a mouthful of blood to the side, away from the sheyda’s gaze. Not out of some politeness but to hide one of my ‘spores’ slowly crawling toward the exit. Bragge had a change of heart, it seemed. What was it? Frustration over my artefacts being ‘fart pillows’? Me not being some human-Creature hybrid? Or did he find everything he was looking for and now his true character came to the surface, just like Trymr Rurkha?

“Did you summon me here just to enjoy my beauty? Taking me off the battlefield won’t stop the maniples of Emanai.” The bare minimum of contingencies was in place and now I needed an opportune moment.

A torrent of wind coiled around sheyda’s body as if it was a piece of armour. He laughed loudly in my face. “If I wished to stop the maniples, all of them would be dead. You culled the weak and scared the craven? Win or lose, the strong, brave, and loyal will return with me into the steppe, for the arms of Emanai are too slow to follow us. The cycle will continue, the steppe will breathe, and the riders will return. Stronger than before. For every five murks that die here, five youths will reach adulthood. One of them — a bahatur. For every hundred — a shaman will be born. And every one of them will be a hunter and a warrior. My people are the blade that grows stronger with every strike of a smithing hammer. Meanwhile, all your ‘wise’ masters could achieve are mere shells around your soft, decadent flesh. Your spears, armours, walls. Do you know what eventually happens to every shell? They break.”

That was bad. The gust armour was unlikely to be a coincidence and that meant Bragge had a supernatural danger sense similar to that of Sophia. Did it tell him I was about to kill him or was it more nebulous, akin to ‘cast this spell to avoid the imminent suffering’? He looked pleased for some reason, however. Was he happy that I was not as fake as my artefacts and lash made me out to be in his eyes? A worthwhile captive? And if it was so, what was he planning to exchange me for? I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of Sophia, Aikerim, or her mother Nanaya weighing my return against some exorbitant request and finding me wanting.

If he was planning to let me go at all, that was. There were parties on a lookout for my seed and flesh already. And those were from ‘friendly’ Houses.

I licked my dry lips. “So your lands are at their carrying capacity. And now, since you’ve united the once-warring tribes, you need to keep capturing more land to fuel your growth. In the meantime, you need battles to keep your population under control, lest they overproduce, overconsume, and starve in numbers far greater than the most humiliating defeat. On the other hand, Emanai has that ‘soft flesh’ it could afford to sacrifice if things go awry. It is the anvil to your hammer. And as one man once said — it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way around.”

My speech seemed to amuse my captor even more. “That is enough arrogance to teach a falcon how to fly! Predict the fall of my lands, then, oh murk that can see the future.”

His focus was no longer on me but the layer of air protection remained active. With a gesture of his claws — a common mnemonic among wermages when they cast complex spells — spikes sprung up from a nearby circle, pulling earth and runes along with them. The glyphs thrummed with a surge of power as the previously flat inscriptions morphed and twisted into new shapes. A magical flex for sure, yet what impressed me was not the non-Euclidean nature of the final shape — time spent tinkering with ‘fart pillows’ inured me from excessive emotions around artefacts — but the transition phase that I’d thought to be impossible until now. While normal runes could have some leeway with occasional deformation on clothes and bows, anything significant would usually render them inert. The ability to fold a rune into an artefact would be an enormous achievement for the likes of me. Eventually.

“Disease is the most likely candidate. Cities of settled societies have to contend with filth and sickness on a daily basis. They live, get sick, and die. Survivors end up getting weakened by it but they gain resilience in turn, yet diseases never go away. Oftentimes, they grow with them. And travel with them too. The distributed nature of your tribes allows your warriors to grow strong in the absence of sickness but they also lack defences against it. Once they catch it.” Many a nomadic nation dropped by orders of magnitude in their population from smallpox and other ‘diseases of civilisation’. Granted, the ‘carriers’ also helped with the whole dying part, but sickness made it that much easier.

Railroads too, but there was no way I would mention that topic to the glowing tiger. ‘Oh, by the way, I am planning on eventually introducing a technology that would allow Emanai to start capitalising on their victories and subsequently enjoy the strategic superiority you are so proud of.’ That would lead to a very healthy life in captivity, no doubt.

The spikes elongated into bars and twisted into an elaborate cage. Was he making a new residence for me? “Sickness? The murk’s punishment for their filth? What else, are you going to say that my sheydayan and lammar would start dying fifty years after being born? The Song will keep my spellsingers and shamans healthy, and if any bahatur gets sick then they are no bahatur at all.”

“I hope that you also have bahatur horses,” I pushed without a pause. “As well as bahatur sheep and goats.”

That got me an actual glare but I simply shrugged as much as I could. “It is not only murks that can get sick, and Emanai had brought plenty of horses, mules, and other livestock themselves. One day, one of them might spread sickness to your herds.”

And one infection was already spreading through Barsashahr horses, courtesy of me during the nightly visit to Trymr Rurkha. I made sure it wasn’t serious, just enough to cause some friction in enemy plans and plummet their morale, but the effect was noticeable for Bragge to pay attention to my words.

The fangs and glowing mouth were back.

“So that is his trap!?” Bragge growled.

“His?”

“Don’t play coy with me, twerp! You call yourself a daimon and do not know who sired you?” The daimon circled me like a hungry tiger, rubbing his chin. “Are you a mere fly, sent to annoy me while your master hurriedly picks up pieces from the floor, or are you something else? Your confusion points at the former, but your skills and abilities, as insignificant as they are on the scale of the game being played, suggest the latter. A bahatur without a Song could have his uses… when he isn’t thrown at the problem like a child’s tantrum. No matter — soon I will know whether you are nothing but an annoying gnat or you are fat enough to be the bait.”

Whatever he did, it was hard to miss and even harder to categorise. A myriad of runes sprung up to life just as many ceased their glow. As if the room’s runic pattern suddenly changed its entire purpose. But to what? I was getting the front row seats to something ridiculous that would’ve likely left any well-educated wermage frothing with awe and I could barely understand even a tenth of what was going on. Why did my father matter at all? While I could probably piece enough information to find him still working, or buried, at the Chimgen manor, my mother was never particularly eager to dwell on that part of her life and no candidates have appeared since so I chose not to bother.

The silence was suddenly interrupted by a loud whopping sound that sent the dust everywhere. Blinking the dirt away, I watched as the figure literally unfolded himself out of thin air in the middle of the recently constructed cage.

Bragge laughed and caressed my chin. “See, little fly? You’ve caught me a big fish.”

I blinked once more but ignored the goading. “You know. Dad. I think I have a few complaints about your parenting skills.”

“What are you talking about?” Albin huffed, dusting himself off with a snap of his fingers. “I gave you the best hand-me-downs!”

So Bragge knew not what he was talking about. At the very least, he was susceptible to misinformation just as any other wermage, even if he seemed to have a surprisingly vast awareness about me. Did I miss one of the messengers? Or did he use magic to teleport missives? Chirp saw quite a lot throughout the arms but it couldn’t see everything.

Meanwhile, Albin sat down on his tail, summoned his floating cards, and turned towards the enemy general. “You have overstepped the agreements, scion of Archomilea.”

“My apologies,” the sheyda purred. “But I am sure your family will make appropriate adjustments. Especially now, with you in my possession.”

“What makes you think they will agree?”

Bragge chuckled. “I know how you act. You hate not knowing the rules. Scatter the chatrang pieces and you rush to pick them up. Light up a single torch in the dark cave and you move toward it without checking what is under your feet.” His paw reached out and ruffled my hair. “Take a captive by bending the rules somewhat and you rush to restore order.”

Albin offered him a thin smile and glanced at me. “Do you know that you are sitting in a teleportation circle, Erf? An active teleportation circle.”

“I do now. Let me guess — the rod in my chest is keeping me in place?”

The sheyda stepped in. “Enjoying my trick, Albin? A little bit of fluctuation and your calculations are no longer relevant. I can’t have you appearing anywhere else but where I want. Will your sister join us?”

“No, she has a battle to win.”

Bragge sighed most theatrically. “Pity. I will allow my army to retreat for now. The winter will be a cold one and I can’t waste too much time chasing your arms around. Perhaps I will claim that thunder mage too. There is a certain sense of danger that I feel about her and it makes me most curious.”

I joined the game of innocent smiles. “Do so, and I-”

“You will fail, Bragge.” Albin interrupted me while glaring at our captor. “For neither you can see in the darkness ahead.”

I felt my forehead itch but I kept myself silent even as my skinsuit started to spool up again. I would give Albin the benefit of the doubt for now, but my Navigator encoding demanded no quarter. If Bragge would touch anyone I considered mine, I would make sure his warriors would not survive until next winter.

“What darkness do you speak of!? You lack negation to mar my eyesight. Or are you going to rely on your murk to obscure your plans? Tsk, tsk, Albin. If your mother could see you right now, she would be ashamed until the end of time. One way or another, murks talk.”

Albin winked at me. “Not this one. Erf can be surprisingly stubborn.”

“That is your problem. You ask, I command.”

I felt his intrusion before Bragge turned his face toward me. A burning gasp escaped my lips while Harald screamed with errors under a magical onslaught. This was no Jargal and it felt like someone plugged a power cable into a network port. It took me almost a fifth of a second and six venting ports to ground the incoming ‘signal’ but then my defences took off. Bragge howled in pain as Harald and I screeched into his mind, subverting and copying his thought-patterns and scattering junks in their stead. There were no helpful drivers this time around — all I cared for was collecting enough information to hijack him proper and shut his body down. Spark or no Spark, it was hard to be alive when your brain thought you were dead.

A new thought. A spell? My thought rampage changed its direction, blurring his focus on me. Bragge was strong but he chose the wrong battlefield. He wasn’t my puppet yet, however. I felt the pull — not from his magic but from the rod getting yanked out of my body. The anchoring rod that ‘kept me in place’.

The teleportation circle lit up underneath me.

Sneaky bastard.

The last thing I saw before yet another flash of light was Albin waving goodbye to me.

Smug bastard.

 

 

XXX

Bragge’s final surprise smacked me in the face with branches of the Forest. I tried to adjust my fall but having a single lash at my disposal and a hole in my chest had hampered my dexterity somewhat. It took me a few nasty hits against the alabaster bark of the alien trees before I landed on a branch thick enough to support my weight. At least the bindings didn’t teleport with me or I would be on my way to the ground like a neatly packed bag of potatoes.

I leaned against the trunk and gave myself a moment of rest while my skinsuit closed the gap and stabilised my body. I needed to get back in shape as quickly as possible yet my fat reserves were long gone by now and I had to rely on my battery for power. I had some juice but nowhere close enough to ignore the organic matter needed for regeneration.

Note to self, I needed to develop a digestive system that could process the alien biomatter, no matter how inefficient it would be. It felt wrong to starve in the Forest canopy.

While my body healed, I contemplated where the fuck I was. From what I saw while falling down, the Forest stretched to the horizon in all directions. I didn’t pop in that high above the canopy so that meant twenty if not thirty kilometres at the very least. The sun was in the clouds and the weather was not that different from the chilly late autumn day I’d left behind so I was fairly sure I wasn’t on the opposite side of the planet. If I were to travel south, I should end up either in the Barsashahr steppe or on the outskirts of the Babr mountains. The former would provide me with terrestrial organic matter to consume, while the latter would tell me that I was reasonably close to the Border Wall. Looking for my maniple without Chirp was a fool’s errand — I would have more luck returning to Uureg and finding the Kiymetl Manor we visited in the past. A missive to Samat would take time, but I would have another Chirp and a second lash and be able to re-trace our march and rejoin my arm in a matter of days rather than years.

I shouldn’t have let Bragge rip my fucking lash — travelling with one would be a lot slower and noisier. But then again — I might not be alive right now if I tried to fight him then and there. Bragge’s confidence grew with my compliance and peaked once he’d caught Albin. Enough for him to attempt Jargal manoeuvre. Was that a good trade? I didn’t know, but it was too late to wonder.

Hopefully, Albin was observant enough to deal with Bragge after my attack. He was a General of many campaigns and older than Aikerim so he definitely knew what he was getting into. Especially with all that teleportation and talks about families and agreements. I would rather deal with an irate Sophia, who had to concede defeat in exchange for her brother than lose my friend and a powerful ally, but, once again, this was not my decision to make.

I paused and thunked my head against the trunk with a silent groan. The Forest was creaking and the creaks were growing closer. A Creature was coming.

Spitting a few choice obscenities, I threw myself off the branch and started swinging away as quietly as possible. While I was a murk and forcibly divested from my artefact piano, my arrival was like a loud doorbell for any Creature in the vicinity. Perhaps a dinner bell at that.

A swing. Another swing. A sudden shift in my direction of travel. The creaks were steadily approaching and I could now hear the faint rustle of the alien carapace. My rear eyes caught a glimpse of glowing yellow on white and I swore to myself again — the last thing I wanted to do today was running away from a Hippo-sized flea. To make matters worse, while I had to weave and dodge incoming branches, the alien moved through its natural habitat as if it was swimming through clear water. My time was running out.

Dying was not an option anymore. No one was going to find my leftovers in the middle of a continent-spanning alien growth, sprinkled with occasional murdercrabs, and I couldn’t afford to lose the memory of what had transpired in the prison yurt after Bragge ripped my lash apart. I had sheyda’s thoughts to transcribe, new runes to categorise, and, most importantly, my sadaq to warn and protect. Because my influence was starting to attract real daimonas and not just ‘mere’ Matriarchs. Because the next time around, it might be Anaise receiving a ‘Kamshad missive’ or another artefact my technology could not protect or shield against. It could be Irje. Or Yeva. Or anyone else ‘under my banners’. I needed to grow not just in wealth and influence, but in power and defence.

Because Albin might not show up next time.

All vents popped open as my battery went into overdrive. It would leave some residue in the area but nothing significant that a few centuries wouldn't fix. Harald grasped the faint connection I had with Lif and initiated transmission. My plea for assistance. I was in the middle of nowhere and the Navigator in me demanded nothing less. A fresh coat of poison on my lash, a sharpened leftover fragment of Irje’s arrow. Everything that could hurt or harm it — this wasn’t a sheyda I could delay, observe, and talk to. A quick thought about my family and my sadaq to rile up my Navigator spirit, and the Forest branch creaked under my weight as I sharply turned around and launched myself directly into the Creature.

Its runes flashed amber at the last second and the beast teleported to the side. The two tentacles, folded along the Creature’s carapace like some front-facing grasshopper legs, snapped forward, enveloping my body into their grip. My scales bubbled on contact from some magical phenomena, but so did its carapace as my superheated lash seared across the body and pulled one of its ‘walking’ legs off with a satisfying crunch. While Bragge was able to rip an inactive lash, a full-powered one would not yield that easily.

With a silent shudder, the Creature smashed me through a nearby tree and I felt my skinsuit strain under the growing pressure. The fucker wished to trade a leg for a leg but I couldn’t care less about its plans. My lash was deep inside the Creature — cooking the insides, spreading poison, and searching for anything that resembled a brain of any sort. Yet all I could find was the same, homogeneous mass. There were no circulatory systems, no chemical signals, or electric potentials. It felt like I was digging through a meat melon looking for a wrench, while the said melon had already opened its wriggling maw of worms and prepared to eat me whole. A polyp-like outgrowth that could consume wermages and sheydayan alike.

I pulled my lash out and attacked the body from outside, breaking the carapace and splitting runes. Whether the Creature was the carapace itself, a sentient rune array, or something else entirely, it still needed its appendages to act.

The alien threw me into another trunk and by the grace of Harald I avoided smashing directly into a rune circle that the Creature gouged moments prior. My hand shot forward into the amber glow and, for a brief moment, I felt the world hiccup. The feeling passed just as quickly, but my hand was now a garbled mess. Debilitating pain for anyone unable to block it aside, I simply couldn’t afford to hit another runework like that. Rather than overpower my resilience, it somehow made it so that the current mincemeat was the ‘correct shape’ and it was I who tried to twist it into a five-fingered ‘abomination’. But that only spurred me to redouble my efforts — it clearly did not like me smashing its armour.

A flicker of blue runic glow on the carapace. “H-elp.”

“Wha-” Harald yanked my head backwards as the air in front of me collapsed into a loud pop. “That fucker!”

The attack patterns changed drastically, forcing me and Harald on the defensive. It no longer wanted to eat me alive but kill me dead.

“What’s that? You seem frustrated?” I barked at it but only got the rustle of the carapace in response.

Something was happening but I couldn’t put my finger on it yet. The Creature wasn’t making mistakes, but now there was a hint of urgency in its attacks. Was it blinded by rage? Distracted by pain? Or was it getting tired? I was lucky to have Harald working at full power as I could think while it could fight but so far there were still too many unknowns.

The Creature twisted around, keeping its mouth away from my vents blasting superheated air, and I screamed at Harald to grab it as I recognised the glowing shape of a teleportation rune. An umpteenth flash of blinding light today and we continued wrecking alien trees in yet another location. Was it running away or luring me into its nest? Whatever it was, finishing it off was less risky than allowing it to recover. My slashes were temporary at best and even seared burns continued to visibly heal as we kept fighting — for all I knew, it might regrow missing chunks sooner than I could and come back for a second round.

Then I heard Lif respond.

Unable to physically aid me in any way, she did what she could do best. A dense packet of information on patterns, hypotheses, and likely solutions dismantled my Ego-Harald communication pattern in a fraction of a second, shifting us into a randomised action tag team.

Then I dodged a swipe at my torso, a strike that had already crushed hundreds of scales across my body and almost ripped my leg away. And then I dodged again.

The fight shifted once more. Rather than trying to trade each blow with my own, banking on my ability to outlast the magically regenerating crab filling, I pivoted toward dodging as much as I could while still landing hits. The crab sense had a weakness. To be precise, it was likely the same weakness that Albin spoke about, but now I knew a way to pull it off without a numerical advantage or some eleven-dimensional combat planning I did not have. The Creature’s ‘awareness’ wasn’t instant. No matter how minuscule, it needed time and likely effort to adjust its ‘focus’. That was how maniples overpowered individual Creatures — bring enough independent ‘actors’ and one of them would eventually slip through.

Meanwhile, I had Harald.

Harald wasn’t just another copy of me, designed to double or speed up my thought capacity, nor was it a mere tool without any thought feedback. It was made to be what I was not. Most importantly, we could and did ‘switch seats’ at a moment’s notice and those rapid switches confused the Creature’s alien senses. Not by a lot but just enough to turn an eviscerating jab into a satisfying miss. ‘Us’ being murks likely helped a great deal with it as well.

Things started to get even more hectic as the alien tried to regain its previous advantage. Teleportations became so frequent that I had to constantly keep some of my eyes closed to mitigate the incessant flashes. Flimsy branches, swampy terrain, slippery snow on a mountain peak — it tried everything to keep me off balance. The worst were the runes — unable to identify which ones were duds and unwilling to use my body to confirm it, I had to dodge and avoid the glowing squiggles it threw around. Or assembled on its body by moving pieces of carapace around.

Another jaunt, and I was assaulted by screams of battle and a flurry of activity that rivalled our own. Yet another futile attempt to distract me. As if a fully-powered Navigator couldn’t handle an information overload of this scale. Just because everything was a blur didn’t mean Harald and I couldn’t respond to it in time and continue to calculate our moves ahead. Memory processing would come at a later time. Another, smaller Creature flung itself at us only to get cleaved in half by my incandescent lash. If only my enemy was that weak. A fireball blast engulfed us next and I had to choke my rage not to bisect the chariot with all of its wermages inside as well.

“Friendly Fire! Friendly fucking fire! Green on green, you farts!” While I was divested of my military clothing and insignia, I still had a humanoid shape!

The fight was generating a lot of heat, predominantly from the fire spells that the Creature was using from time to time. Scales around my vents were glowing red and my lash was white-hot. The last thing I needed was even more heat. “If you want to help, get me water!”

“It speaks!” The wermage bleated, shaking her charioteer. Meanwhile, the charioteer was whipping his horses into a frenzy, trying to get away as fast as possible.

“Useless,” I hissed through my skinsuit as I dumped heat back into the alien flesh and nearby environment. Should I leave one of the spores since I was back? No, the alien awareness would spot it and I needed to kill it anyway as it was near when I contacted Lif. Tie up loose ends while I was able. The Navigator in me demanded nothing else.

It belched out an enormous tree-shaped flame at me, cooling itself significantly through the Flow feedback. Its last three locomotor legs gouged the earth, adding lines to the enormous scorch mark.

Only for my remaining fingers to join in on the fun.

The short-circuited rune array warped earth into a mud tornado, taking another appendage off the carapace and forcing the nearby chariots into a scatter. Good, the last thing I needed was them getting radiation poisoning for their useless gawking. The carapace runes flashed with power once more and I pulled myself close to intercept that teleport.

I wasn’t fast enough — by the time I pulled myself into melee range, my eyes were cycling from another flash. The fucker brought me back to the arm only to teleport us away. The ‘poof’ was rushed and we ended up high in the air but, instead of an open field or dense Forest, I saw rooftops underneath. Fucking great, now I had to worry about dropping my ionisation venting ass on some unsuspecting pedlars.

That just meant I had to stop dallying and finish the job. The Creature was weakened and crippled. So was I, but we were in a free fall. The closest thing to my natural environment on the surface of this planet. Making sure that its awareness remained unfocused, I tumbled around the carapace and gouged the final lines for a rune. The exact replica of the one that took out my hand.

The reaction was immediate — the Creature folded into itself and splattered into chunks in all directions. As if it was sucked through a tiny hole under the immense difference in pressure. Or a ship that went through an Einstein-Rosen bridge too small for it. A chunk of its flash landed on me and rapidly dissolved into a goo.

Fucking finally.

“You reap what you sowed,” I sighed as my body punched through the tile roof.

Judging by the screams of animals around me, I landed in a stable. Judging by the smell, it was a pigsty. I cranked my battery all the way down and, with a groan, pushed the collapsed beam off of me. Yep, definitely stables. Full of shit, frightened animals, and flammable straw. I threw my lash into a nearby water trough, smothered off any embers that I’d caused, and collapsed into the water myself.

“Five lashes for the stable boy,” I murmured.

The water was both filthy and stale but I made no effort to move as it bubbled into a foul steam around me. Venting was not an option in a populated settlement and I was simply too exhausted to move once my survival was no longer in question.

What started off as a day of battle, turned into a duel, then an assault on entire enemy units; only for Bragge’s sleeper agent to intervene and send me into another bender. My left arm was gone, my leg was a wreck, and I was still nursing the barely healed hole in my chest. And thousands of smaller cuts, punctures, and bruises. Apart from a frayed skinsuit that needed total replacement of its scale layer, the fight drained more than half of my battery reserves and that was something I couldn't afford to do frequently. Or at all. Nuclear batteries were single-use.

“If I win against another crab as fat as that one, I will be dead.”

Even if I were to take Yeva’s battery back, that would mean three, maybe five more Creatures like that. Forest likely had many more and no amount of Shattered Carapace medals could offset the cost. I would need to work on my Creature-slaying skills and seek energy alternatives. While I could say to myself that I would be avoiding Forests from now on and actually mean it, my plans often didn’t coincide with reality.

The door creaked open. “What happened here? Hey, stop that racket!”

A local stablehand. An Emanai accent, or I hoped that it was.

“Apologies for crashing in. Can you tell me where-”

The lad turned his head toward me and shrieked at the top of his lungs, stirring up the animals that just started to calm down. “Guards! Guards!”

I groaned as the shrieks got more distant. While I wasn’t in the best shape imaginable, that was rude and uncalled for. I groaned again, even louder this time, and used the unleashed power of frustration to pull myself upward. My skinsuit was now cold enough to remove without cooking myself medium rare, so I did just that and then used my lash to tie a rag I had found nearby around my waist.

Erf the dirty serf. Just like the good old days.

A droplet of blood fell down from my eyebrow. I grimaced and touched my forehead. “I was expecting this, really… but how inconvenient.”

I stuck my hand inside my body pouch and pulled out the trinket that I wasn’t expecting to use anytime soon. The ocular implant that I picked up a long time ago from my previous body. The necessary tool for any self-respecting Navigator to have. Was this Lif’s gentle reminder about my duties? Was it her guidance? Or was it me itching for it all along?

Not that it affected my choice in any way, for it wasn’t one to begin with. I was a Navigator and it was my eye. A little bit of effort and the implant popped into the third eye socket, which I immediately sealed right after. It was not something I was willing to flaunt at the imminent meeting with the local populace. My experiment with wer ears had taught me well and the last thing I needed right now was yet another senseless fight. I might try using it once I replicate Creature’s teleportation spell just to see if I could see something extra, but that was nowhere close to the top of my agenda. Not when there might be a Pillar conflict brewing right now with Irje on a warpath to uncover my whereabouts.

I heard a commotion outside. “You sure it is inside?”

“Yes, I saw! It was breaking everything and devouring horses!”

I gave a side eye to a quite alive nearby animal. It was a good source of biomass but I wasn’t that desperate. Not like I could convert it immediately into my own flesh anyway.

“Hmph! I feel no Spark inside…” The door creaked open and a wer stepped inside. His eyes found me in no time. “You there! Explain yourself and be quick about it!”

I couldn’t help but groan inwardly at the irony of it all. The wer guard had canine ears and, most importantly, a sash with Kamshad markings on his waist. I was abducted by the means of a ‘Kamshad’ Gift scroll only to end up in a Kamshad manor at the end of my ordeal.

“I am Erf of the Kiymetl-”

“Liar.” The guard adjusted the grip on his spear. “There are no Kiymetl here.”

I plastered my best ‘son of a Domina’ face. “And where is this ‘here’?”

“Wha?”

“Here. What is the name of this city?”

“Fucking drunkard,” the guard spat. "I don’t know how you managed to sneak inside the Manor but you will pay every cut of damages that you’ve caused. With cuts, sweat, or your skin. The martial law hasn’t been fully lifted yet and you wretches are already getting drunk and gambling your clothes away. One of Zuhar’s ilk, no doubt. Should’ve been banished from Bayan Gol a long time ago — fewer mouths to feed.”

“Bayan Gol? Good,” I nodded. “Take me to your Domina.”

The guard sputtered, “You will be heading to a whipping post, to learn some morals first! If you properly admit your wrongs by then, I might dump a bucket of water on you before the overseer decides what to do with you.”

I couldn’t help but sigh at his threat. Not that I didn’t understand his reasons but the issue felt so petty in comparison with recent events and potential accusations of treason and daimonnapping that I couldn’t find enough energy to care. “Just bring someone in charge.”

“You cheeky-”

I caught the butt of the spear launched at my throat. The wer tried to yank it away but I held it firm enough for him to understand the difference in our strength. The fact that he flipped the spear around and went for a less lethal attack spoke well of his character, but I had no time to entertain him further.

“I am a Procurer of Kiannika’s first maniple. The one of two arms that relieved your siege and are currently fighting the horde of nomads to keep you safe. Moreover, I receive a personal mission from the General and the Censor of all Emanai, Sophia Shebet Chasya.” Unable to walk properly, I simply pulled on the spear and dragged the guard toward me. The crowd was forming at the entrance but my tactical name-drop had enough of an effect to keep them wary.

“I am honoured to call Aikerim Kiymetl Adal, the fifth daughter of the current Kiymetl Matriarch, as my mother-in-law and I personally know Lita’af Kamshad Hikmat, the daughter of your Matriarch. Believe me when I say it — it is your Domina, who needs to see me. Even if she does not know it yet.

“Now go get me that bucket of water. I do indeed smell like horseshit.”