Evalyn did another once-over of her weapons. Her bolt action, handgun, and a hundred-odd rounds of ammunition tucked in several satchels across her body.

“I don’t know what you’re expecting to fight, Evalyn. Those’ll be useless,” Colte said, keeping one eye on the car in front.

“You just focus on finding our hostages,” Evalyn said, driving the bolt home and resting the rifle against her shoulder. “It’s a habit. Let me be.”

“All right….”

Evalyn, Colte and Iris had left the city together with a convoy of Wizards and Witches, five cars and fifteen able persons in total. Many Evalyn had no relation to, but Colte could vouch for their capability. However, Evalyn did not care too much for them. She would rest easier if they were all left to hostage rescue.

There would be five teams of three, each designated an area to search. Each team would have at least two personnel who specialised in combat. Mainly to deter attacks from the F.S.A., but many had resolved to fight off Fadaak if there was no other option. Doing so would leave a political quagmire in its wake, but they were willing to take the fall. Evalyn included.

Although this time, she had been much more reluctant to do so. The little life sitting in the back seat dictated she move with caution, and preserve herself unless it was absolutely necessary to act otherwise.

She glanced backwards at Iris. The girl was fidgeting with her fingers, unsure what to say or do. Yet, the way she looked when their eyes met sent Evalyn a crystal-clear message. The same one as the last time Evalyn left her for the battlefield.

She smiled at her before turning back. She could not decide on what to say, if anything at all.

The distant roar of fighter engines.

Evalyn, of all people, could not mistake that sound for anything else.

“Shit, they’re already here…”

A boxy backpack radio on the seat next to Iris crackled to life. The navigator of the car ahead radioed in, notifying the convoy.

“One minute out. We’re going to stop behind a tall enough dune before we begin. Last chance to get ready.”

Evalyn grabbed the handgun inside her jacket and turned to Iris, yet she hesitated. It felt wrong to give her such a thing, yet refusing her any protection was irresponsible.

Would her power conveniently awaken at the right moment again? Evalyn did not feel comfortable betting.

Iris watched her as she decided. Two large, jewel-like eyes that looked as though they could never decide on which shade of purple to be.

“Iris?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you remember how to use a gun?”

“The small one. I remember how to shoot that.”

Evalyn offered the gun to Iris, grip first; a gesture of many meanings. Surrender, gratitude, trust.

The fragile hands took the gun, making it look bigger than it actually was.

“Keep this inside your jacket. Don't take it out unless you absolutely need to. If there is more than one enemy, if there is already a gun pointed at you, if there is any reason why you'd be shot first, do not use it.”

Evalyn held on to the gun as she spoke. The gun she had kept on her person for years. She reached out another hand, bridging the gap between her hands and Iris’s.

“I’m sorry,” Evalyn whispered.

The cars began to brake, and Colte steered his vehicle to park beside the first. Evalyn and Colte stepped out of the car, and the others followed.

“Colte,” Evalyn called.

“What?”

“You’re right. I won’t be needing this.”

Evalyn tossed her rifle to him, and he caught it by the barrel. She began to undo several satchels across her body, tossing them into the car.

“If anyone needs spare rounds, I’ve got a lot of .39, so take your fill.”

Several hesitated, unsure if Evalyn had calculated her act of generosity, or if it was nothing more than a foolish step toward suicide. Yet it was not long before they passed around the extra stock.

Evalyn peered over the dunes and, at last, caught sight of the outpost. The compound was already in the thick of battle. Higher Order Armour units battled diving fighter planes in a war of attrition.

A Witch with binoculars scanned the compound. She sifted through the beastly machines and torrential gunfire for anything useful.

“There’s a small cluster of tents behind one of the hangars. South-westward.”

“Team one can try there first,” Colte said, “rest of you, pick your places.”

The small party readied themselves to begin. Some exuded auras of potent, secretive magic, while others took on more physical transformations.

Translucency. Elasticity. Claws. Yet everything was only indicative of a greater power still lurking.

“Let’s get started, shall we?” Colte uttered, turning to Evalyn. She nodded and began the process.

“Act I: Setting.”

Her body listened to her mind's commands, and her magic soon followed. She felt the Aether flood her body like a broken dam while her Magic burnt the excess with an insatiable thirst for fuel.

More power. The ability to set shapes with higher proficiency.

Her armour sprang into being instead of the usual crawl as her mind quickened and vision slowed. Things were clearer, but blurrier at the same time.

She brought her arms up once more, creating the same diagonal cross. The golden circle drew itself in the sand, only this time around the entire outpost itself. She twisted her hands around each other as if straining to open a valve, the motion bringing the golden circle upward. It climbed higher and higher, meeting at the pinnacle in a perfect dome.

She had cut off the fighters for now. They—along with any other intruder—would not be bothering them for a while.

Evalyn relaxed as the others made their way towards the dome. Colte turned to her, eyeing her armour up and down once more.

“Never gets old,” he said as his body began disintegrating into fine, powdery ash. “Don’t take too long.”

Evalyn turned back towards Iris, a mix of fear and awe on her face. Their eyes met, and neither could say a word.

A thumbs up. A thumbs up on an outstretched hand was the most Evalyn could manage. Iris looked for a deeper meaning, but Evalyn had none to give. All it was, was a reassurance that things would be okay.

Evalyn raised her other hand and fired off a wiry appendage towards the dome. It caught, and she reeled herself in at a speed that lifted her feet off the ground. The wind whistled through her helmet as she soared overhead of the others, the golden barrier getting closer and closer.

She willed an opening and flew straight through, her first sight being a H.O.A. unit directly beyond her feet. However, she did not stop.

She sent another two wires towards the unit’s shoulder joints, lancing them with barbed spearheads. It was not her momentum that carried her towards her target, it was her armour. She willed the suit to propel itself irrespective of its physical limitations, and so it did. She slammed her feet into the unit with greater speed and force than ever physically possible.

She landed a hair underneath the upper cabin where she understood the cockpit itself to be. The bulletproof metal bent to her force like flimsy parchment, setting free an onslaught of mechanical intestines. Like a bullet to the head, she killed the metal thing in one blow.

She rebounded off the unit, searching for the others as she did so. Her team had followed her lead, directing attention away from the hostage rescue by way of brute force. One was stripping apart units one piece at a time, controlling the salvaged metal like water. Their magic perhaps replicated magnetism. Another was shrugging off cannon rounds like he did not exist, likely something to do with his translucency. Some sort of ability that made them invulnerable. But if it were not for the fact he was armed to the teeth, he would have no method of attack.

Evalyn felt a weight smash into her side, catching her off guard and sending her flying into the closest hangar wall. The corrugated metal ruptured under the impact, and she landed inside the shadowed building. She sprang to her feet, recuperating herself. Looking around, she found herself not inside a military facility but amongst a gruesome forest.

Every body, dead or alive, was imprisoned in a set of gallows, hands and heads locked in wooden restraints while they kneeled helplessly. The better off were whimpering, while the worst were riddled with bullet holes.

Wizard and Witch magic only seemed to become more unsettling as Evalyn grew older.

“We’ve cleared out this hangar,” a snaking female voice reported. Evalyn turned and found a trench coat-clad woman wearing a jet-black bob cut, with a mean set of eyes to boot. Two other magic users exfiltrated behind her.

“Nothing?” Evalyn asked.

“Nothing. Watch out.”

The wall behind her disintegrated like a grenade, golden light from Evalyn’s dome beaming through the demolished wound.

A H.O.A. unit tumbled backwards, pushed off balance amid the fray. Its terrible body threatened to topple anyone unfortunate enough to be in its path, let alone anyone who could not move out of its way.

Evalyn stepped forward, lifting two fists in a guarding stance. The posture spawned an angled rampart that easily caught the unit and sent it stumbling back. Evalyn looked back, but the woman had already cleared out, probably moving to the next location.

Evalyn looked around once more, seeing the gallows for what they were; an act of mercy. They were not bothered to kill needlessly. It was less blood attributed to their hands. She sped through the opening and back into the fray.

“Act II: Character.”

Her magic circuited faster as her body began to suck her surroundings dry of Aether. Her brain pumped with fresh blood, and her senses heightened once more.

More control. The ability to morph the characteristics of her shapes.

Flammability. Elasticity. Temperature.

The familiar recurve bow arch formed in her fist, and the strings she wove across its ends twanged with deadly enthusiasm.

She did not need a bow to send sharp objects flying. Yet as a practitioner trained their body through a discipline, Evalyn had adopted a similar approach. The human imagination presented its own boundaries, and Evalyn had to adhere to hers.

In an ideal world, she could crush the entire compound in one fell swoop. But for the same reasons Colte was not sending it all straight to hell, she had to act with precision.

She aimed her bow at the nearest unit, nocking an arrow on the impossibly taut string and willing it backwards with the movement of her other hand.

She let the string loose, and the arrow flew, emanating a thunderous crack as it pierced sound itself. The arrowhead burned through the unit, leaving nothing but a gaping nothing in its wake.

Evalyn’s presence was finally noticed, denoted by a hail of gunfire into her back at what seemed to be point-blank range. She stumbled to her knees, the unexpected impact catching her off guard. Yet each round bent around her armour as if the bullets were still fresh from the smelter.

The dead bullets flew off her body as she threw a punch with her off-hand, directing a rocket of golden matter into the unit’s centre mass, crippling it almost instantly.

Evalyn continued her assault, supported by the two of her team. One—now a hulking mass of steel tendons and metal skin—delivered a cacophony of crunching strikes and devastating blows. The other took a more surgical method of decommissioning each unit with precise, well-placed attacks.

Neither were as efficient as Evalyn, yet they made up for her lost capacity.

The barrier she had erected was not free, and enemy bombardment would only hinder her body further. She had to stay alert, but most importantly, awake.

 

The great soundscape of raging canon fire and bruising metal reverberated across the freshly painted abstract hellscape. A physical embodiment of the fog of war had sealed him off from the outside while a band of magical insurgents had begun to tear the outpost to pieces. He heard them ripping muscle from bone and gnawing on the leftover marrow.

Kurael was not used to this. Just when he had successfully adapted too.

The sirens had come so quickly that neither he nor his colleagues had any time to react. Their flimsy tent became a safe haven owing to its apparent lack of strategic import. It had first been fighter planes. Now, god knows what?

An assault sent by a group of Fadaak specialists, perhaps. Yet the dome suggested a conflict of interest between the two assailants. Kurael could only keep thinking of such things in a bid to calm his nerves. Several of whom Kurael remembered as the quickest to surrender to orders were already cowering under their hammocks.

Rocking back and forth.

Praying for salvation.

All were engineers, not soldiers. Being the manufacturers of war machines did not make them accustomed to their use cases. A disgustingly hypocritical privilege they were now paying the price for.

The record player was no longer singing its sorrowful song, its flimsiness unable to keep up.

Kurael tried to keep himself conscious, or rather, sane, as a longing for intense numbness washed over his body. An intense longing to prepare for the worst by killing oneself internally.

His letter was only a half-truth. He no longer wanted to hold out. The intense, inky darkness in his mind deterred him from even considering a reality where he would survive. A reality so surely wrought with absolute, inescapable pain and mind-obliterating death that he thought his almost total existential surrender a blessing.

He would die. He hoped to die sooner rather than later, for later was surely painful.

He could only apologise to his mother as the ringing of gunfire and pulsating magic assured him that he would not see his letter delivered.

A dead letter with dead sentiments.

Hope. A universal attribute. Something he had finally rid himself of as the cold, skeletal embrace closed in on him.

Footsteps. The rough crunch of grains under boots. So close that Kurael could pick them out even amid terrible symphonies.

Friend or enemy? Captor or liberator?

The lines had blurred too much for Kurael. He would bestow the title of saviour upon even that thin mechanic he had reserved for tight spaces without a second thought.

“Kerry…that was his name,” Kurael whispered, finally giving in to his memory. A nice name.

The owners of the footsteps hastily entered, pushing aside the flaps as if appearing out of thin air. A middle-aged human, his outfit and smell more befitting of a chimney sweep. His appearance was strange, but Kurael’s sudden onset of intimidation did not stem from that.

He had an aura; a magical one.

“Fucking finally!” he exclaimed as his supposed colleagues caught up, all in similar trench coats and besmeared in foreign magic.

“We’re here to rescue you,” the man said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“No…,” Kurael whispered.

The man heard, despite the whisper only carried by a lonely breath.

“Why not?”

“You’ve doomed us. You brought them here. You’ve brought your magic here.”

Kurael began to tremble at the thought of the unthinkable, the unfathomable.

“The Grain Men. You’ve brought the Grain Men to us.”