Aexilica landed on a rock, face-first. She might have been hurt by that a few months ago, but long hours of painful training had left her body hardened as well as strengthened. More than that, something about her mysterious transit had healed her. Small mercies, though. The potion had worn off from her, and it was still, in the end, a large rock striking her face as she fell from dozens of feet above. It hurt.

Her body rebound and fell into wet mud with a squelch, Aexilica lay there dazed for a moment before the imminence of everything that was going on struck her all at once.

Vari was beside her. Actually, he'd been clinging onto Aexilica when the flash of light erupted and washed over them both. Emma hadn't been, though, and as she looked around now Aexilica found no trace of the girl.

The panic that realisation inspired was strong, sharp and instantaneous. She felt her heart thundering immediately, had to fight her own body just to remain focused for a few more precious moments of thought. It was entirely possible, she knew, that they had been sent to entirely different parts of the world. Aexilica looked up, and found the weather was unrecognisable from where she'd been previously. There were no mountains, not around her and not even on the horizons. She'd travelled a great distance indeed.

Which meant there was no reason Emma couldn't have been separated by a greater distance still.

Her look farther around revealed other sights to Aexilica, too. Men wearing bizarre fabric, wielding great staffs that spat fire and whip cracks. She saw monstrous animals with skin of metal sliding along the ground and crushing it beneath their curious limbs, as fireballs erupted seemingly from nowhere and an endless whistling racked the air.

She turned to Vari, and saw the expression which must have been written across her own features on his. Bafflement, terror, disbelief. This was a battle, there was no doubt about that, but she saw no Scurlgan shield-walls or Aethiqi skirmish-lines, and the magic at play was something she couldn't even fathom.

"By the Gods." Vari whispered, and Aexilica, for once, found herself agreeing with him. This was…She didn't even know what to call it. Not combat, surely. Nothing at all like combat. Perhaps the High King of Aethiq could summon a force like this, to churn the skies and blister the ground, but it was beyond anything she'd ever seen within a hundred miles of her home. Watching it now felt surreal, almost as if it were some glimpse at a distant thing.

Evidently, the men involved in the battle did not feel the same way about her. Aexilica quickly found several of them pointing out to her and yelling, staffs raised and alarm etched across their features. Their uniforms were blue, unlike the greys of their enemy, and that was all she had time to see before she was moving.

The ground around Aexilica was torn to shreds, first by her own footfalls and then, an instant later and a yard behind her, by the invisible impact of…Things. Fast things, small things, heavy things. Things that reminded her of the strange "bull-ettes" Emma had developed as a way of killing large numbers of lightly armoured enemies. Aexilica had seen those punch clean through metal armour like it was nothing, and was in no mood to be struck by such things.

Still, there were a lot of shooters and she was on open ground. The air around her hissed and spat as sightless-quick shots missed her one way or the other. Aexilica had lost sight of Vari, and didn't have time to find him again. There was only movement and stillness, life and death. The distance between her and her enemies was purely disadvantageous—made it harder to keep ahead of their eyes, to force them to turn. Made it so that Aexilica was competing more with their projectiles, and less with them.

That was a lesson she'd learned back in Aethiq, at least. She'd been too slow to dodge arrows at the time—perhaps still was depending on distance—but easily quick enough that most shooters had a hard time keeping their aim on her when using them. The trick was always to get in close. True, it minimized the distance every projectile needed to cross and left her less time to react. But it did the same for her enemies, too. And Aexilica fancied her odds against bull-ettes far more than she did theirs against her.

Something hit her in the side, a stab of pain. No time to look at the wound, to gauge how bad it was, she kept running. More hits, these ones smacking into magical armour and buckling the metal. Aexilica had only just gotten this set of gear, and already it was becoming mangled into worthlessness. Just showed how many times she'd have died without it, she supposed. Then she stopped supposing, because all her concentration was needed as the fight came upon her.

A single bound took her over the heads of the men with staffs, and Aexilica dropped down behind them. Before any could move she swung, once. Her sword cut two of them completely in half and spilled their entrails out into the mud. Funny. It'd actually been quite some time since she'd seriously fought men with no great powers of their own. Aexilica had forgotten how slow they were, how weak, how fragile.

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She was reminded now, and it sickened her somewhat as she wielded ten times the strength she'd met Emma with to ruin their bodies as best she could. It was not a great exertion on her part. Human bodies were among the softer things she'd cut lately.

That was when she caught sight of Vari again, falling on the enemy at a different point of their little firing line and swinging his great hammer as fast as ever. Aexilica saw the heavy head impact one warrior's chest and simply burst his entire torso to pieces, like rotten fruit struck by a battering ram. She felt sick, and bit the feeling back. Only a half-dozen or so had fallen so far, there were scores still left. Enough to kill her.

Aexilica and Vari moved through them like adults fighting children—fighting babies. The men were too weak to engage them physically, that much was expected. What shook her was how utterly unprepared they seemed for the fact. It was like they'd never even been told they might need to battle ones with superhuman powers.

That was just odd, but Aexilica took full advantage of it all the same. The men were slow in bringing about their clumsy, cumbersome staffs and sluggish in turning them around. All the devastating effects they had were wasted by inaccuracy and hasty attacks. Like fighting children, complete with all the guilt that entailed. But Aexilica killed them anyway.

It didn't take long, in the end, for the whole group to be hacked to pieces. Though neither Aexilica nor Vari managed to do so without getting scratched. With their enemies dispatched, Aexilica was able to examine herself for the injury she'd felt before. A scratch. No, deeper. A small wound that seemed to have cut well into the flesh of her side, it still stung and was aflame with sharp agony if she moved the wrong way. Debilitating, slightly, but not deadly. She thought.

"What the fuck was that?" Vari scowled, boasting a few wounds of his own. None of them looked worse than Aexilica's, but clearly he was stinging from them. Around them men were still fighting and dying, but far enough away that Aexilica didn't expect they'd be attacked. Not unless those staffs had a far longer range than even she was suspecting.

"I have no idea." Aexilica panted, chest burning and body twitching with the frenzy of combat just barely ended. "But we need to find Emma, we need—"

—"Oi! You there!" She whirled around, and found men approaching from the other side. These ones wore grey, not blue, though wielded staffs of their own. There were more of them, too. Aexilica had to resist the urge to lunge into violent motion as they approached, something like that might escalate things into hostility all too quickly.

And these men, however unpowered they clearly were, had the power to wound her badly indeed. In numbers, they had the power to kill her.

"What do you want?" Aexilica asked, tensing herself to remain prepared for a sudden movement if it proved necessary. She noticed none of the staffs were trained on her, a good sign there at least.

The lead man's eyes narrowed, and Aexilica realised that others in grey coats were charging. Not towards her, not even near her, this group seemed to be holding back while others roared and rushed across the muddy terrain and fell into the contrived trenches held by the men in blue.

"Easy there," the leader of the grey-coats noted, "we're not looking for a fight here. Not with you of all people."

Aexilica wasn't put at ease, not by half. It was easy to say you weren't looking for a fight. And almost required if you wanted to start one in the most advantageous way you could.

"So what do you want?" She repeated, remaining tensed.

The grey-coated man cleared his throat.

"To put it shortly? Your help. We're at war, in a battle. I don't know who or what you are, but you and your friend just turned a company of riflemen into a pile of limbs in less than a minute. Our assault will go a lot better if we have you on our side, and afterwards you'll have earned some safety among us."

So, clearly, he wasn't stupid. He'd seen how dazed and confused Aexilica and Vari were, and realised that the most valuable thing they could get right now was the security of having somewhere they wouldn't be pelted with magic.

And he wasn't exactly wrong, either. Aexilica answered fast.

"My friend has gone missing." She told him. "I want to search for her around here."

"We can negotiate that after the assault." The man replied, impatient, twitchy. "But we don't have time to deliberate, if you want terms granted you can ask for them after helping our attack. You'll be seen a lot more favourably following that."

Again, he made sense. Damn him. Aexilica turned to Vari, who was just shrugging and readying his hammer.

"It is a fight." He grinned. "Let's go."

Right. Aexilica should've seen that one coming. She returned her gaze to the leader of the grey-coated men, and sighed.

"Lead the way."

The charge began, and they cut their way across the chaotic battlefield. More magic was flung her way, evaded only as Aexilica darted herself one way and the other to keep from being an easy target. She saw the slower men fall behind her, bodies bursting up in wisps of misty blood where unseen projectiles tore clean through them.

Fireballs erupted in the earth, missing Aexilica. Sometimes by paces, sometimes by feet. She felt the hot concussion of their force rack her body, knew it would be death for a creature less durable than her, and kept on running regardless. She crossed the hundreds of paces separating her and her enemies in less than half a minute, falling onto the staff-wielders with sword and fists.

Aexilica was killing for a while before the grey-coats fell in behind her and joined in the slaughter, dropping down into deep trenches and fighting through them. Every corner held another pack of resistance behind it, men attacking three or five at a time and dying almost without resistance. It took time. But not very much, not with numbers behind the assault and Aexilica and Vari at the head. Soon enough they were standing almost ankle-deep in blood.

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