"What the hell was that about, Carty?" Aranea demanded to know.

Her pack arrived at the square before the water processing facility. By now, the regular army is already flooding in, taking in the enlistees and captured enemy soldiers and establishing control over the facility. The flames were put out, some engineers from the Bento tribe freaked out, worrying that the Reclamation Army might accidently destroy this place. Their fears were unfounded, some of the best engineers from the ranks of the reclaimers were already here, ensuring the stability of the structure. The repairs and upgrades will be done after the battle has ended. Even now, Aranea could hear the screams of the chief engineer from the ranks of regulators, the man demanded to know what sort of upgrades the reclaimers had in mind. No doubt that in the future, some of the former workers will be allowed to continue to work on the facility, provided they renounce their former loyalties. If not, they will be kept prisoner until the end of the war and will be recruited afterwards.

In half an hour, Janine herself will arrive here, taking this place under her supervision until the end of the operation, in the meanwhile the regular forces will protect this area. As Carty and Tiny both reported to Aranea, the captured bento cyborg was sent in the rear along with the wounded. The blue-furred wolfkin acted officially while in the presence of normies, and while Tiny was in charge, the moment her assignment was completed, her annoying behavior came back.

"Just following the orders of the captain, that’s all wolf hag. He was the one who told us to keep this in secret from the rest of you." Carty shrugged her shoulders, waving away the medic.

"You do understand that concealing the information from the fellow soldiers could have harmed the mission." Aranea felt an inching feeling in her fists. She wanted to smash Carty’s smiling face into a bloody smear.

"The defective girl was tasked with capturing enlistees. We followed her orders to the letter. The facility was not part of her task, thus we kept our mission to ourselves," Carty pleasantly smiled, fully taking off the helmet off her head, "You are free too…"

"Carty," Leila stepped forward, appearing before Aranea. Her long tail hit the ground, cracking the stone, her usually cheerful voice was sounding deadly serious, "I warned you about name calling. Time to pay…"

"Enough!" Tiny jumped between two scouts, pushing them away from each other with her two hands. She turned toward the half-wyrm, "Leila, I don’t need your protection. I am not an ice cube to melt if someone breathes on me, and don’t you ever dare to betray the creed of our pack!"

"Creed?" Leila asked, stepping back, and Tiny advanced on her.

"Yes, creed! Aranea gave the order: no challenges, no dominations! The abyss you think you are doing right now? We are supposed to be better than this!"

You are a liar too, ain’t cha? Aranea remembered Carty’s words and growled. Shit, the asshole was right about her. So much for her special way. She initiated the fight with both Olesya and Carty, she was the one to hurt Kate. Even now, she was ready to try and crush Carty simply because the woman annoyed her… No more. I will do what I preach from now on. Never again will I lay a hand on a fellow tribe’s member. Aranea hissed, releasing the air and calming herself.

"Thank you, Tiny," Aranea smiled, patting the surprised scout on the shoulder and walking toward Carty. The smile disappeared from the face of the suddenly confused woman when Aranea grabbed her paw and shook it, "My thanks to Annie's pack and all soldiers under your command, scout Carty. Thanks to your exemplary work, the mission was a success. I will write an official report about protesting the fact that captain Ivar gave you the order to conceal the potentially crucial information from your fellow soldiers, but know that I bear none of you ill will," Carty blinked, unable to tell if Aranea was speaking honestly or not, "Your wounded soldier is to be commended and you…" She looked at the wounded leg of the scout. The blood had already stopped, but Aranea’s eyes caught the fact that Carty was slightly limping on the wounded leg still, "…Are to have your wound treated. This is an order from your superior." Aranea smiled to her, letting go of her paw, before a new message came onto her terminal.

"Is something wrong?" Sonya asked, seeing Aranea’s face. The scout finished overseeing the giving up of defensive duties to the regular army and now came for reporting.

"Gather the pack. A high priority target just appeared, and our allies are in trouble." Aranea commanded.

****

They heard the sounds of battle way before they even saw it. Aranea forced her troops to march at full speed, they leaped over the ruined street, ignoring the shouts from their allies. Captain Ivar approved her request to come to the aid of the warlord, and now the halfbreed was frantically using the cameras on the warlord’s armor and the information from the drones above the enemy palace to form some sort of plan.

Just two opponents were fighting at the square before the city’s palace. But these two created enough sound to fully silence the noise from the battles on the nearby streets. A simple clash between the warlord and the mercenary shattered the remains of the tank, sending the broken steel into nearby buildings. A missed shot from Martyshkina’s revolver caused an underground passage on a nearby street to collapse.

"Tiny, take your pack and take position among the eastern buildings. There is a large enough space on the nearby roof, place your pack there and prepare to shell the enemy. Carty, your pack is to guard them. I am relying on you." Aranea said, cursing to herself. She was thankful that the fellow soldiers volunteered to join them with her troops, but her leg was still wounded.

"Of course, wolf hag, we will keep our allies safe." Carty answered seriously.

"Kate, Kaleb, Carty’s pack is missing two soldiers," One was wounded and the other was delivering the captured bento to the rear when the message came, "Join them and keep the heavy team safe. Sonya, take a position among the western buildings, and Sly, you will join her pack for this mission. Leila, your pack is with me." The south was the furthest point from the square and provided the best view of the palace. Her rail gun and Leila’s laser rifle will serve the best here.

"Lieutenant Ursico, you are to open suppressive fire the moment you can. Lieutenant Hilingson, upon arrival, you are to ensure the safety of the heavy weapon team." Aranea gave final orders, charging forward while her pack was splitting itself to reach the assigned positions. The square before the palace was surrounded by buildings. While many of them were damaged, most of them were still able to provide cover for her soldiers. Chort might be stronger than any of them individually, but as Valerye showed to Aranea, even a new breed like him will go down under concentrated fire.

Martyshkina once boasted that no one could sneak up on her. Out of curiosity and with permission from Janine, Aranea researched the cause for such boast. As a cub, an insectoid warrior sneaked up on Martyshkina and her brother, taking the arm of her brother when he tried to protect her. The records were unclear as to what happened to the male afterwards. Aranea could see the dates of births and deaths of the warlord’s family, one of her sisters still serves as a shaman to this very day. However, her brother simply vanished from the records shortly before the culling.

Be it as it may be, Martyshkina drilled herself to be the perfection of awareness. Ever since the day that her brother was injured, the warlord had been undergoing the same training over and over again, making the members of her pack to attack her from the ambushes while she herself used a special drug to numb her sense of smell and closed her eyes, relying just on her own instincts and tremors in the ground and shifts in the air to detect the incoming attack. Each time she failed the training, she would refuse a monthly payment, giving it out to her pack instead. Her dedication became legendary. She received no tokens for years, it took her decades to perfect the ability to notice the incoming attacks. As she grew in ranks, Martyshkina began to use insectoids and even paid mercenaries from the ranks of both normies and new breeds to try and sneak up on her, offering a hefty bounty if they managed to land even a glancing hit without her being able to block it.

As a result, the warlord ironed out her instincts to an incredible level and, for years, prided herself on the fact that no one ever managed to land a sneak hit on her. Not even Alpha could sneak onto Martyshkina. Of course, when Alpha attempted to land a hit, this hit simply broke through the defenses of her fellow warlord, but Aranea saw the video of their fight. Martyshkina managed to put a block before herself, but she was simply not physically strong enough to match Alpha and not fast enough to dodge.

Her opponent was easily just as strong as she was and possibly just as fast. Chort nurtured himself for close combat fighting, overcoming all possible odds. Meanwhile, against him stood the warlord who relied on the ranged battle instead of fighting in close quarters.

But where Chort was better in close combat, Martyshkina was better at adapting to the flow of combat thanks to her unnatural awareness. By reading the enemy, Martyshkina was staring at her counterattack before the enemy attack motion could even end. The moment Chort was slicing at her with his bone blade, she dodged and kicked him, gaining the distance between the two and either firing one of the revolvers at him or reloading it. At this point, the mercenary used the bone shield to protect himself from the bullet. They fought like that for a while, before the warlord made her move, trying to break the balance.

Martyshkina’s entire body was a weapon for her, knees, elbows, clawed legs, even jaws, the warlord used everything to even the field against the mercenary. Her physical strength arrested the recoil of her revolvers, making them almost a pair of laser pistols in her paws. By repeating the "dodge, counterattack to gain distance, shoot" routine several times, she lured the foe into a false sense of security. Chort got too used to the seemingly perfect protection that his bone shield provided to him and paid for this delusion after the warlord showered him back with an elbow. Without a halt, she fired three bullets into the same point, cracking the bone shield that the mercenary used to protect himself and taking away his left shoulder.

Chort danced back from a firing arc with a mocking leer on his face, but Aranea could see the frustration behind it. At first, the halfbreed had assumed that Chort wielded power similar to that of Lord Steward, but now she noticed the differences. The mercenary could not create and use multi-limbs for very long, he was either not used to it, or his very brain could not handle such strain very well. He could extend his limbs at will, however. Seeing how the warlord started to reload again, the mercenary made his move, but the moment he pierced the stone ground with his leg, to allow it to circle around the warlord underground, became the moment that Martyshkina landed a clear shot in his chest, nearly bisecting the mercenary and forcing him to curse, jumping back and turning to the defensive, rolling around to evade the next shots while his wounds healed. The mercenary could leave parts of him behind, making sentient helpers, something that not even Lord Steward could do. But he simply did not have the time to do so right now. Instead, the moment his shoulder and abdomen were healed, he leaped at the warlord, forcing her into close combat anew, abandoning the usage of the bone shield and sticking to two cruel-looking bone blades the length of a human body, creating a howling sound in the air each time he swung or thrusted his arm.

The two were at a temporary stalemate. The power armor of the warlord allowed her to keep up with her foe and endure attacks from him. The moment it falls, she will become vulnerable. Her ammunition was also running low. Meanwhile, Chort relied on his regeneration to heal his injuries, according to the theory put forward by the intelligence officers, as long as Chort’s brain is intact, he could keep on going. Nobody ever saw him shapeshifting anything above his neck, not once in all the records that the investigation bureau collected about him. The mercenary was burning through the reserves of his body, trying to take down the warlord.

Both fighters crashed anew, and Chort transformed his right arm into a fully humanoid arm of the palest color, abandoning the bone blade. The mercenary’s fingers became five tube-like things, he pointed the newly made fingers at the warlord’s head, and Martyshkina dodged to the left, evading fire from within the fingertips of the mercenary. Aranea’s crimson eye strained but managed to get a read on the strange objects.

These were bones. The mercenary fired bones that pierced through the apartment building behind the warlord, going straight through the entire building and spearing the next one as well, causing an entire second floor to collapse within the next building. The warlord hit the right arm of the mercenary with her revolver with enough force to send a tank back. Chort’s arm ended up being bent backward, reaching all the way to his shoulder blades, before straightening itself like a rubber band, once again pointing fingers into the warlord’s face and forcing her to duck to evade the shot. It took Aranea a second to understand that the mercenary removed all the bones in his right arm, leaving only muscles and straightening them to an insane level with his body manipulation power.

The shot never came, instead his right arm turned into a tendril, wrapping around the moving warlord’s arm and throwing her to the side. The mercenary followed up with his left arm, turning the bone blade into a bone drill aimed at the warlord, while Martyshkina raised a revolver, aiming at him. The warlord crashed on the stone ground with a sound of crushing building, sending dust high in the air, covering both fighters in a shroud and making cracks appear on the stone ground. A moment passed, and the shroud of dust around the fighters was torn away when a shot came from within, revealing the fighters. Chort’s left side bore a large torn wound, his entire lung was gone, along with whatever passed for a ribcage within. A bone drill was burrowed deep within the warlord’s chest, missing her heart by a hair. One of the warlord’s arms was still in the embrace of the living tendril, and the mercenary used his leg to keep the arm pinned to the ground. The second arm of the warlord was within the wounded side of the mercenary, and when Martyshkina pressed the trigger, this resulted in the empty clack sound. The mercenary counted the number of rounds in the enemy weapon before launching his attack and now was about to reap the fruits of victory.

"Tiny, begin now." Aranea said, unwilling to wait any longer. Her pack was almost in position and Tiny was ready to open the support fire. They had to take the risk. Aranea crushed through the door of the apartment on the third floor, leaping across the room to the windows that looked at the palace. One wolfkin from Leila’s pack took a place near her, while the half wyrm crashed into a nearby apartment, signaling her readiness as well.

If Martyshkina dies, it frees up a spot among the warlords. Perhaps Olesya will fill it in and will treat her pack better than her current leader. But as Aranea threw up her railgun, taking aim at the mercenary, she understood that she cared for none of it. I am not letting anyone else die. I want to see you all live.

The mercenary saw her, dodging just before she could pull the trigger. As a result, her shot only took the tip of his bone drill, causing him to frown in pain. He jumped two steps back, the flesh already flowing around the wound on his ruined side. He granted a promised smile to the half-breed before turning his right arm into a blade once more, aiming to jump at the struggling to stand up warlord.

His smile turned to a howl of anger when a missile landed before him, throwing him back and leaving deep cuts on his skin. The explosions from mortals followed next. Martyshkina’s thick armor could endure the explosions, and the mercenary ended up howling in pain while the explosions were pushing him aside from his desired target. The pack joined the hunt, opening fire from the surrounding buildings, causing him to dart to the side, trying to save himself from the fire of sniper rifles, energy rifles, and shardguns that were coming on him from within the buildings around the square.

This time we are going to… Aranea failed to finish the thought when a wall of fire rose in the square, hiding the mercenary from incoming fire and three figures charged from within the palace. Carty sent her a warning that greenies and blue creatures of Chort appeared in the rear, aiming to reach Tiny’s location. Dammit, how can…

"Wolf hag Aranea, wolf hag Annie is here and ready to help. Where do you need us?" Asked a hoarse voice over the communicator.

"Yes! Keep the greenies away from the heavy weapon team!" Aranea shouted.

She looked at the battlefield, forcing herself to stop panicking. Three elite guards of Yasen charged across the battlefield. The bastard who could create fire. He was wearing a simple power armor of crimson color, no helmet as before, was on his head. His hair was gone, countless scars covered his neck. So he survived. The woman whose touch caused the overload of the pain receptors within the human body. She was wearing skeletal-looking power armor, her steel gleaming brightly despite the dim light because of smoke in the skies. And finally, the man in the very expensive and very artistically made power armor, whose helmet was fashioned after an image of a smiling man with glasses and curled hair. He reached for a pocket on his belt and threw something at the western buildings, where Sonya and her pack were. The tiny dots that he threw grew to become gigantic warehouse containers that nearly collapsed the two buildings when they rammed into them, pushing the few unlucky pack members within.

The elite guards spread out, the man in crimson went to the south, clearly aiming to claim Aranea’s head, the woman went to the east, eager to join the creatures who wanted to silence Tiny’s pack and the last one went to stop Sonya’s from regrouping.

"Sly! Take out the enemy who is coming for Sonya! Sonya, support him from afar!" Aranea gave the command, forcing herself not to worry about her troops who were hit by the steel containers. Their vital signs were active, and their armors should be able to absorb most of the impact, "Carty! Take out the woman who is coming your way, Kate, Kaleb, support her, rest, help Annie to keep the enemies off Tiny! Tiny, keep on firing at Chort no matter what, don’t let him anywhere near the warlord!" Aranea shouted, firing a rail gun at the soldier who was running toward her position.

The shot speared him, bisecting the man in two and throwing his upper body in the air. A leer appeared on Lalo’s head, while his body turned to the flickers of fire, coming down on the ground in a rain of flames and reassembling itself.

Leila jumped from the buildings, coming toward the man wreathed in flames. Aranea’s eyes widened in worry when she saw that the half-wyrm left her laser rifle behind. Before she could scream a warning, a message came to the terminal of her power armor. The specs of Leila’s armor.

"Wolf hag, please allow me this rematch. On my life, I swear to keep this enemy from harming our allies." Leila said, charging at Lalo.