"The legion is mobilising."

Krumer's words hit Emma much like a warning from a potential nazi that a giant army led by cannibalistic sociopaths was getting ready to attack her. She rubbed her eyes. Metaphors were hard on low sleep, she missed coffee.

No time to worry about that now though, she followed the officer out. Emma was actually a bit worried about her fatigue as they hurried down the corridor—Krummer jogging on his stupid, long legs while Emma near-sprinted to keep pace—but she wasn't left worrying for long. Soon they were back in the war-room with Kruger pacing. Aexilica and Vari were already gathered up, while Larry was with Emma herself.

"What are we doing?" Emma asked, trying not to make her panting too obvious.

"Acting, soon," Kruger replied, "this is good, despite what you may be thinking." Emma stared at him, apparently spurring on an extra bit of elaboration. "It is far easier to defend than attack, all else being equal. You have the advantage of a strong position, dug in well and prepared specifically to aid you in the fighting."

That made some sort of sense to Emma, god knew she of all people had come to understand the benefits of preparation lately. But it was far from enough to smooth over the fraying edges of her nerves.

"Will that be enough of an advantage?" she asked.

"It should be," Kruger nodded, "we have prepared well."

"It will be!" Krummer added, as if his blind faith was any sort of contribution at all. Emma did her best not to roll her eyes at it. He meant well, of course. It was just that his well-meaning was really annoying and stupid, and she hated it.

"My healing is done!" Vari declared, raising his hammer high and, before anyone could yell at him not to, slamming it down hard by way of demonstration. The room almost fucking collapsed around them as he gave the marble floor a nice new crater to remember him by.

Aexilica stumbled, Kruger staggered, Krummer nearly toppled and Emma fell hard on her face. She got up glaring, and glared harder as Vari's grin threatened to split his face.

"Lovely," she snapped.

They departed soon after that, and did so by plane. Felt strange to fly on one again—not that Emma had done much flying back on earth. Not that she'd done any flying like this, either.

The aircraft favoured by Curgundry were, not to put too fine a point on it, pieces of shit. They rattled in the air, like they were trying to shake their occupants out, and smelled vaguely of burning…Something. Not pleasant, not when one was inside the thing doing the burning.

Emma took solace in the fact that she could fly now, kind of. Actually, she spent much of her trip resisting the urge to jump out and do just that. She resisted it for several reasons.

The first was the ever-present need to not exhaust her valuable mana over nothing. Emma could fly, but she could not fly forever. At its core her power was more a form of levitation, and if she chose to levitate horizontally then that would simply send her skirting along through the skies—with about one gravity of acceleration. How fast did that leave her again? In a nose-dive position…

Ugh, she couldn't remember all those complicated equations. Probably like a hundred and fifty miles per hour ish, that seemed about right going by the surface area involved. Less with her armour thanks to all the added bulk and barely-added weight.

Which meant that she would not necessarily be faster than even this piece of shit plane. Emma could accelerate beyond that, of course, she had chosen one G pretty arbitrarily—it was just the most consistent metric given how often she practiced touching that level of force simply to counter gravity anyway. The problem was, the more acceleration she added the more mana she used up.

And it became less efficient to go faster, probably because of drag force or something. She fucking hated magic.

Then there was the other little issue, too. Emma didn't want to jump out of a moving plane. It was one thing to fly, one thing, even, to be completely confident you could fly, and have a history of surviving terminal impacts even before gaining that power.

It was quite another to jump out of a moving fucking plane. So she sat and patiently awaited their arrival.

She wasn't kept waiting for too long, at least. Within the hour they were right where they needed to be, and Emma got the chance to see the chaos she'd previously been dropped right into the midst of from a more clear position. She did not care for it anymore from up high than she did down below.

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Like ants, the people down on the ground scrambled around. From so high in the air Emma couldn't really hear or see their actual fighting, she barely even saw the individual humans. More deduced their presence, building an image in her mind based off wider patterns of massed movement. And she wasn't left to do so for long.

"Company!" the pirate called, panic in his voice snapping Emma's eyes to the front. "G…Gargoyles!"

What?

The plane shook, more than the usual amount. More, and much more. Enough that Emma lost her footing entirely, landed hard on the metal floor and saw stars where her head bounced off the grating. She was stunned for a few precious moments while the rest of the shit finished colliding with the fan around her.

Once Emma was finally up, her armour already forming around her as much from instinctive fear as anything else, the attack was already progressing. Screeching rang out from the heavy metal bulkhead at her back, she turned to see something jutting into the plane's interior. Jutting through solid fucking steel.

They didn't stay jutting for long though, no. They twisted too fast for that, and twisted the metal along with them. Emma watched as a great section of the plane's exterior just peeled away like skin from a fruit, exposing everyone inside to whipping winds, frigid cold and the glimpse of something horrible and grey coiling just outside the new opening.

Emma did not wait for a better look, and certainly not for it to get a better one of her. She threw her hands up and threw the energy lance out, right as the plane hit turbulence—or maybe just rocked from the fucking monster ripping it apart—and threw her aim off. Off by a lot.

The beam struck a wall next to her, detonated, and threw her off her feet. Emma struck another wall before bouncing, rolling, and suddenly finding air beneath her instead of metal. Holy shit.

She tried to scream, but in only a few seconds Emma was falling fast enough that the wind was ramming itself up her mouth faster than she could drive air out of it. Her eyes watered, head spun—body spun. The whole thing, like a gyroblade and making her dizzier by the moment.

Blood rushing to her head, or away from it. Emma guessed the former was a preferable scenario but really either one was pressing enough to make itself problem number one—she had to stabilise. How?

Platforms of hardlight expanded out from her shoulders, springy, flexing yellow to catch the air and pull her still. It worked, sort of. Emma didn't rip herself in half with the sudden deceleration, but she might have if her body weren't so tiny and lacking in inertia. Fortunately she did stop the blackout before it could fully seize her, and after another few moments of numb blinking she remembered that everyone she liked was still trapped on a giant piece of scrap metal currently being attacked by basically demons.

She found the plane fast, fortunately. Time and Space didn't give her any particularly useful powers yet, but they made it easy to track distance and trajectories—the vehicle was maybe a quarter-mile on from her and about as high above. Not as far as it could've been, certainly not as close. Emma would have to be quick. She let her makeshift parachute disintegrate and stabbed a few huried thoughts into her flight Talisman, the bracelet drunk her magic in eagerly.

Taking off from mid-air wasn't something she'd practiced, but it was alot easier than doing so from the midst of a rapid fall. Emma was up to top speed soon, and pleased to see that the plane had slowed a great deal. Probably related to all the bits it had gotten torn off it.

But top speed still wasn't quite enough. She burned more power, pushed her Force to its utmost limit and felt her velocity slowly creep up until it felt like double what it was before. Only then did she see the vehicle closing fast, even as she saw it descending. Not quickly, but descending all the same. Smoke now trailed from mangled engines and she realised it was close to over-shooting the front of Krieger's own forces.

Whatever this attack was, it had been planned well. Looked like they were dangerously near to getting dumped down behind enemy lines. She imagined Isolde had an ambush planned for when they were.

Best not to let it happen, Emma decided. She slowed her approach starting from about twenty paces behind the plane, weakening her acceleration as she started to charge up an energy lance. From this close, and with this much space, she had a nice, detailed look at their attackers. She almost wished she hadn't, because they were one hell of a sight. Gargoyles, yeah that looked about right. Krieger had mentioned them in one of his reports—big animated stone things of enchanted limbs and mobility. Fast despite their great weight and, being made entirely of magically-toughened rock, hard to kill.

Emma decided to put that last part to the test.

Four of them, she thought, and Emma focused on the closest. Her energy lance didn't miss this time, exploding against the gargoyle's back before the creature even knew she was there. Scraps of hot stone spat out into the air as it was blasted to tumble off the plane, mixed with…Bits of metal, from the plane, because exploding something on top of the vehicle was not that much better than accidentally hitting it directly. Oops.

Oh well, the thing was falling apart anyway. Emma saw the other gargoyles round on her and watched two of them take to the skies on wings that seemed far too small to support such large bodies. Either was taller than most males, and being made of solid stone probably left them both close to a thousand pounds each.

Superhuman strength, she noted. That they could propel themselves upwards so easily was a good indicator of how extensive it was. She didn't get the chance to see anything else indicated past that, because they started for her as one.

Fortunately, Emma had already been preparing her next attack. From the corner of her eye she saw the first gargoyle she'd blasted recover and start joining the others, an ugly crack in its stony skin but not much more than that.

The next one she shot just came completely apart like a brick in a hydraulic press, her new conjuration-gun proving the effort of making it was worthwhile.

On the other hand, that also managed to fuck up the plane even more as bits of ridiculously-fast stone shrapnel smashed into the metal roof hard enough that all left little craters littering it, and some even seemed to penetrate entirely to rock around on the inside. The plane began dipping in altitude more, Emma thought. Not enough to become her top priority though.

Not with two gargoyles approaching, with one of them now being almost on her.

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