Blurred Weaponry (Saints of the Void, Book 1)

by Michael Valdez

Chapter 24

  Two Sides of Hunters

  Saan sat with her back against a boulder that was out of place at the top of a short hill, which itself bordered the tributary on the south side. The big rock was placed there as a marker when a path through the forested west was being designated by Saints Avrazi Keymeign and Breddis Gosch so long ago. On their second trip here, after polishing the maps, the couple brought their entourages. With a contingent of associates to help, wooden machines were built to bring large stones from the curving mountain range further north. Rampant betting about whose entourage was better made the task of marking the roads take a little less than a year, and now it was just a place where the staff sergeant could lie in wait and over-think.

  “...all the way to the broken tree if we need to is the worst part of this mess,” Nes said from halfway down the same hill, interrupting the staff sergeant’s internal reverie.

  “Hmph,” Saan replied, non-committal and embarrassed at having missed what Nes said while daydreaming herself into a worried state.

  “Get ready to move,” said Evara through her throat mic, her voice familiar but for the usual static overtone that came atop radio communication.

  Saan looked at Nes and nodded. With the command confirmed, the corporal stood up, sauntered down to the bottom of the hill, away from the staff sergeant and her boulder. There, he stared at the ground, at yellowing grass, the odd twig brought this far from the trees by wind, and near-white-washed pebbles from the shore on his left. Besides the mic package they all wore, Nes carried only his sidearm pistol and an extra magazine on a magnetic holster on his upper arm, leaving all else behind in the all-terrain to keep himself as unencumbered as possible.

  A loud rifle shot rang out, cracking the air again and again as the sound bounced and echoed all around the forest and valleys, coming close to overpowering the white noise of the flowing water that she had gotten used to over the last two days. That would be Goner.

  When the shot’s echoes faded, Saan absent-mindedly realized that part of her good mood during the road trip and camping was because of the sound of water flowing gently. Nebasht was a seaside beach town, and all day every day the ocean waves were there. It was a constant that she didn’t realize she’d miss until she went a continent and a half away to the Academy and barely slept for days. Dastou provided a recording of it for her to put on repeat during the night, which helped immensely.

  The growls of the trio of fasshim came again, only a couple of seconds after Goner’s gunfire, and Saan shook her head clear. Still keeping her eyes toward Nes, she saw him flinch when a red dot of light flashed near his feet a few times. A green dot flickered a meter away: Evara giving him a direction to go with those two points. The corporal exploded forward from his standing position, leaves, twigs and pebbles crunching underfoot as he sprinted. Nes kept his speed while rushing into the tree line a few seconds later, fast and agile as he juked tree trunks and headed into the dappling daylight shadows and grassy undergrowth of the forest.

  Still sitting with her back to the boulder, Saan put a hand on the hilt of the short sword she carried in its sheath around her waist, the item she stole from the monastery forge three days prior. Opposite that was the familiar light weight of her machine pistol in its customized holster, the extended magazine sticking out. She touched the gun, too, nervous, making sure it was there despite the fact she knew from instinct how much it weighed, how much it and its overlong magazine threw her hip off balance.

  She took a deep breath, felt it fill her diaphragm, and blew it out with puffed cheeks. This trip was already going to be such a pain. A trip back home. Something she had been avoiding since she was banned from using her own last name after leaving with Dastou. Saan got up, walked to the bottom of the hill where Nes took off from, looked to her left at the river. It was a narrow, shallow tributary of the bigger Hodenaxi, a vein of a forearm of an arm compared to the river it fed. The arm, as it were, was hugely wide to the west, where it was used for trade by four Ko Monasi villages along its length. She took another deep breath, inhaled the scents of fresh water, healthy growth, and explored the familiarity of those smells. She knew she was distracting herself with all these random half-connected thoughts, yet wanted more of them, and the flora let her move to her next moment of sidetracked musing.

  Most of the trees here were the same as the ones she played around when she was a child, climbing and laughing, the ones she used for cover when sneaking into a Cypher-built mining town where she could play with “city” kids, where Dastou apparently first discovered her. She had been told later, by Uncle June right before she left Nebasht, that one of the things that impressed Dastou was her lock picking skills. The Saint had spied on her while she helped her two city-boy friends break into a bakery for free treats. It was the second time she had done that particular bit of thievery, and only did it because she wanted to show off. There was so much discipline in her tribe, she thought at the time, that learning how to pick locks would have been looked down upon, but these boys liked her for teaching herself that, and she wanted to impress them.

  Later on, they wanted her to break into more than a bakery, and asked if she could get them into the caches that the infrastructure system used for emergencies. They didn’t hide the fact that they wanted to steal medication, and when she adamantly refused, they called her names, tried to pressure her into doing it. She never talked to them again, and made different but still fun friends in Nebasht, before Dastou came again, two years later. This time, he offered her a role with his organization, and Uncle June…

  Another shot rang out from Goner, startling Saan, but she remembered to look down. A red dot a few times. A green, indicating her direction to run. It pointed directly parallel to the river’s flow, along the shore, and she hesitated. That couldn’t be right – that direction was very different than what they planned for. Evara must have kept her eye on Saan, seen her hesitate, because another green dot confirmed the direction.

  Saan took off fast to where she was guided, sliding on the mildly dewy green-yellow grass at the bottom of the hill for a tiny fraction of a second before getting her feet back under control in her lightweight boots. She ran along the river, in the opposite direction of the westward flowing water. A third sniper shot. A fourth. Those two came close enough together that their echoes linked and writhed.

  She ran, making sure to keep some energy in case she needed to go full out, and slipped again, this time on a stray twig, but it didn’t slow her stride. She could see a hint of the dark-green, boxy shape of the all-terrain in the far distance, parked on the opposing north side of the river on a hillock.

  A shot from Goner took over most sound again, and she saw in her peripheral vision leaves unceremoniously falling from high up on several different trees on the other side of the river. It was the path the boy’s bullet took, breaking thin branches and scattering leaves. Saan looked left across the water, into those trees, and saw a big hidden shape moving fast on the ground but sticking to bigger shadows. Saan dared to keep her eyes half toward that dark shape, and when beams of sunlight hit it, yellow-white fur and thick, curling horns revealed it as one of the fasshim.

  She did not pick up speed despite her instincts telling her to run from the fever-dream animal. Instead, she actually slowed down, drew her machine pistol, and fired a three-round burst more or less near the creature. It was a very long distance to target accurately with a short-range weapon, but she was able to get the thing’s attention by peppering trees near it. The fasshim halted. In spite of the distance and some cover from trees, it was easy to tell that it shifted its body and loped in her direction at full speed. Saan shifted gears, going as fast or faster than she had ever moved before in her life and keeping straight along the shore, visible to anything that looked her way.

  “Headed in with friend in tow,” said Nes through the throat mic, panting. “You good, Sarge?”

  “Good,” Saan said tersely, barely pressing the input button on the transceiver t
ucked into her belt.

  She kept her speed high and glanced across the river, saw the creature she fired at barreling toward her at a perpendicular angle. The animal was near the last of the trees before a short stretch of open grass, moving so fast directly at her that Saan felt like a car halted in the middle of an intersection, a truck barreling at her with no hope of stopping. The fasshim bounded out of the tree line, reached the outskirt grasses, then was on the pebble-filled edge of the river barely three seconds later. It didn’t slow down an iota for the sake of the water, instead moving faster. Once at the very edge of the waters, with nowhere to go, the animal stunned Saan-Hu by leaping. And not just leaping, actually getting enough height and momentum to make it completely across the ten-meter expanse of the tributary!

  Saan’s eyes bulged at the spectacle of the soaring animal while she continued running to get further ahead of where it would land. The creature came down on the pebbly shore, couldn’t get its balance right and slipped, its flank thumping into the ground with a meaty wallop. It rolled once, the horns making the movement awkward, slid to a stop on the grass past the shore, and got up in a hurried panic. This fasshim was hardier and more resilient that the ones that attacked her, Nes, and Trenna in the underground monastery – those first ones would have broken every bone in their frail but deadly bodies at such a leap. It made Saan wonder if these animals had forced the weaklings in first back then, saving their strongest before they were taken away by Citizen Vaiss.

  Looking back at the fasshim and pondering all that for the fraction of a second it took caused her to stumble, and she doubled over in a difficult balance shift. She recovered using a palm to push off the pebbles as she took her next running step, her other arm wind-milling once, and it took a few more strides before she was back at full speed. The sound of another sniper shot filled the air, the cracking and crunching sounds of destroyed and flung pebbles following almost instantly from right behind Saan: Goner’s bullet had struck the ground between her and the animal that leapt toward her.

  Evara called into her mic, reaching Saan’s ears at a volume only slightly louder than her own thumping pulse. “Sarge, you’ve got distance! Turn right, to the firepot, you’re close to the second firepot!”

  The young spotter was supposed to lead her along with another green dot, but the flying animal changed that, and Evara half-screaming into her mic was better than nothing. Saan had been running along the river too long according to their plan, and had to take a sharp right into the trees. The ground under her feet was now dirt, grass, and fallen leaves instead of mostly pebbles. She rushed between two light brown trunks as wide around as she was, the quality of light changing and becoming mostly daytime shadows. Saan did her best to keep speed while edging around trees and hearing the animal close behind, grunting, snarling, chasing.

  She decided to finally use Open Iris to give herself a better sense of direction and position. Saan was never very good at it, most agents near her level able to hold that process of hyperactive thought for a minute or two; she had maybe ten seconds total before her nose would start to bleed if past experience was any indication. Her focus had to be the effectiveness of Open Iris, not how much time she had in that state. She up-shifted her brain function and hoped she wouldn’t knock herself into a coma.

  The world slowed for her, a lot of blurriness came in a circle at the very edge of her vision for a moment, then everything became incredibly sharp again. Her first hyperactive thought was that Goner would not have missed hitting the big animal a moment ago, so he must have fired without really aiming, wanting to get lucky or distract the thing. Saan thought of where she was and the plan that had been put together, and recognized that there was no orange light of fire in the trees that she could see, which meant Nes either didn’t use his firepot trap yet or had it with him. The second and closer trap was eight seconds away at a dead run. She needed to adjust her angle by thirteen degrees clockwise, did so, and made her whole body hurt from the exertion of moving faster than her own top speed. Her effort was enough that the shockingly agile fasshim didn’t catch her before she saw a small ceramic jar hanging by a cotton cord from a branch just above eye level. She dropped out of Open Iris and was glad when she didn’t feel a migraine coming on as a result.

  Saan almost ran headfirst into a tree twice as thick as she was when she started thinking normal again. The staff sergeant didn’t realize that she had been juking, sidling, and veering around white and brown tree trunks with unmatchable human prowess while calculating her next move, and when she was back to standard brain activity that world-class without-a-care athleticism was gone as suddenly as it came.

  The firepot was right in front of her. Goner fired a sniper shot and cursed into his mic – he missed, she assumed, this time while actually aiming or he wouldn’t be so upset; the boy must have been trying to say something before he fired for his mic to be on. Saan skidded to a stop directly under the firepot, turned her head, and saw the fasshim much closer that she thought it would be, only a few gallops away. Just as she saw those focused black eyes, out-of-place wildcat teeth, and the hungry slobber on its jaw, it leapt at Saan like graceful, hairy death.

  “Black fuck!” she cursed as she dove low and to one side.

  The animal flew by exactly where she was. Saan landed on her side and sprang back up to one knee, and by sheer luck her attacker didn’t slip, slide, or roll. Normally she’d want an enemy to make a mistake like that, but not this time because of the ceramic firepot – the fasshim was directly under it. Saan pulled up her machine pistol, thumbed the firing switch to full-auto, and pulled the trigger.

  The dull, bass-y thrum of the machine pistol’s automatic fire rang out, a hyper-active drum beat with nearly impossible to control recoil that made bullets hit the firepot as well as the branch it was tied to, adjacent branches, and a couple of trees behind it. The ceramic shattered and a small burning tealight candle balanced inside the vessel came in contact with blue-green lamp oil. The pot ignited in a fiery burst of cool blues and purples before it shifted to warm, bright oranges. The blazing oil fell from the broken ceramic vessel, a roiling spectacle of fire that landed greasily on the fasshim. The animal’s yellow-white fur was instantly afire wherever the oil touched, and started to spread as the creature screamed, snarled, and hopped in agony.

  Saan realized she had fired in a panic, holding the trigger too long and emptying the twenty-round magazine of all but two bullets. She thumbed the firing mode back down semi-automatic and fire both remaining bullets into the creature’s skull as it stumbled from the pain of the flames. The fasshim fell down on its side, burning alive and shot in the head. It stopped breathing after half a minute, Saan taking that same time to catch her own breath.

  She felt sick from the smell of the burning fasshim, which reminded her of roasting rabbit, which she always found delicious. It made her queasy to realize these terrible monsters – with teeth and eyes seemingly ripped or borrowed from other animals – were probably an appealing meal. Saan gagged, held herself together by putting a hand over her face, and stopped paying attention to the smell as best she could.

  The grass immediately around the creature had started catching fire, too. Saan reached into a pocket, pulled out a small aerosol can, and sprayed a foamy solution carefully around the spreading fire on the grass as well as the smoldering animal. The spray she was using to snuff out the flames was meant to quickly put out campfires with little smoke escaping, provided by Husband along with the pots half-filled with lamp oil. They never used a drop of the oil for light or as an accelerant, opting for natural light or fires, which meant they had enough for the two traps.

  A few more short sprays from the aerosol fire retardant and the can was empty, the fire dying away to miniscule embers that wouldn’t last long. The body of the fasshim was charred, patches of black and deep, sticky red laying on top of black, burned grass and globs of white-gray foam made by the spray. Saan stood back from the ruined animal, looked away, and lean
ed with a hand against a white-barked tree she only now noticed was right behind her.

  Staring at the white bark with mottled black markings, her mind snapped back to Open Iris like a rubber band for an instant, and she remembered a lesson she was given in the forested outreaches of Nebasht about why there were white-barked trees in this part of the world at all. It had to do with people, a very long time ago, planting some kind of seed from a grafted together, modified set of far-northern tree species. She almost lost herself in the memory when a sniper shot echoed out, loud and sharp. An animal cry from the other side of the river made gooseflesh creep onto Saan’s arms at the same time the world went blurry, sharp, blurry again, and she came back down to normal.

  “Reloading!” said Goner into his mic, frustration leaking into his voice as he mumbled an obscenity while turning off his input.

  Saan-Hu heard Nes curse more loudly ahead of her. It was apparently a profanity-laden day for most of them. Moving her focus up from the base of the out-of-place white-barked tree she leaned on and deeper into the forest, she saw a bright burst of flames. Nes’ job was to lead one target off to a firepot after Goner separated the three-member herd, and by the looks of the minor explosion of fire it worked. Three small-caliber gunshots rang out, then a moment later two more; Nes taking the animal down for good. Saan waited nearly a minute, standing very still, until she saw the fire die down. That would be the aerosol extinguisher can. Good work, she thought.

  Saan’s earpiece suddenly went from quiet to blaring a high-pitched warning. It was an alarm Nes set up that would activate if unregistered radio signals came near them. Someone else was here, someone with two-way communications. She reached into a jacket pocket for her extra magazine, discharging the expended one in her pistol at the same time and letting it fall to the ground. Saan-Hu reloaded while peering north and mostly east, through breaks in trees, across the water, to the all-terrain on the hillock. The sun was halfway up the sky in the same direction she was trying to see, and Saan had to squint. It was pure luck she looked in that direction, because she saw the unmistakable silhouette of a gunman getting ready to fire and using the truck as cover. The gun he or she had was an assault rifle, not a sniper rifle, the barrel not long enough for the latter, and it wouldn’t have the same accuracy.

  Saan sprinted away with her gun still in one hand, hoping whoever this was wasn’t a crack shot. She went deeper into the trees for thicker cover, in the general eastward direction of the vehicle across the river and Nes. Saan wasn’t fast enough getting out of the line of sight, and a short burst was fired from an assault rifle. She heard the loud reports at the same time those few bullets whizzed by, whacking dully into tree bark behind her and into some undergrowth. Another burst of gunfire, all misses again. She ducked and weaved around trees that were getting thicker as she moved deeper into the forested section of this southern half of the river valley. The staff sergeant didn’t get too far in, where it was safest, as heading toward the new human enemy, and the all-terrain, was her goal.

  Saan could feel every sudden change in direction as she dashed through the trees in her ankles and calves, in her hips, her thighs. She holstered the machine pistol on the run and used both hands to help her keep balance, pushing off trunks that she juked around, no longer able to rely solely on her legwork due to fatigue. A third burst of gunfire came closer than ever, making her slip as she took a turn around a pair of trees too tightly, but the plant saved her – some whacks and cracks were bark being torn apart instead of her. The next set of protective trees to go for was close, and she darted toward them.

  A fourth short burst was fired, and Saan barely registered it before an abrupt, shocking, sharp pressure struck her left upper arm. The hit spun Saan as she ran, her feet tangled up on themselves, and she fell hard. She landed on her back, bounced, spun, hit her side, spun again, and her body finally lost its momentum, leaving her face down in dirt. Saan was wearing armor, her panicking mind told her, so she’d have nothing more than bruises where she was hit, and she’d be fine.

  Goner’s high-caliber sniper rifle fired, the sound far more powerful than the weapon used by the man behind the all-terrain. The echo of the boy’s bullet coincided with the shattering of glass. He must have fire at the vehicle, trying to hit the gunman. Saan took the chance to push herself up off the ground and head for the three trees she saw earlier, only a few steps away. She staggered most of the way. Once there she caught her breath, and then used Open Iris. It was enough to let her figure out that the vehicle and their gunman were fifty-two meters away, closer than she thought while running and swerving in the forest. She came back down to normal after two whole seconds, grimaced at her stomach roiling from the change, and went down on one knee to settle herself. It was getting harder to keep her body in check and she knew it. The running, combined with having been shot and the bulging, hot pain from the latter, was making it impossible to up-shift for the small amounts of time she needed it.

  “Evara,” said Saan, authoritarian annoyance and her pain creeping into her tone as she spoke. “I need something here. Who is that firing at us, are they alone?”

  “Ma’am...” said Evara, practically choking on the word at the same time she spit it out, as if the girl had been holding back. “It’s... Hays. It’s Captain Hays.”

  “What!?” asked Saan.

  “I can confirm,” said Goner. “He’s using the truck for cover, I can’t get a... fuck!”

  Right after Goner cursed, Saan heard an animal bay loudly. The third fasshim. She had almost forgotten about it. Goner fired twice, in quick succession, glass shattered, and a few rounds fired back. She ramped up her brain a fourth time, her head starting to pound, and looked around the tree protecting her. She caught a glimpse of the big fasshim running behind the all-terrain in slow-motion. Her hyper-focused vision was able to also see Captain Hays taking cover behind an open door to the vehicle. She didn’t catch his face, trusting the Stroffs to the fact that it was him, but the dark gray and red of Academy-slash-DSF gear was easy to identify.

  What was he doing here? To fire on a fellow agent means he must have gotten hypnotized by Citizen Vaiss after the odd-voiced man entered the Caravan. But how did he get here along with the fasshim? According to what the Stroffs and Crawford Zedhani said, the animals accompanied Vaiss into their mobile headquarters while moored at the Blackbrick Embassy. Did Hays get hypnotized and sent off with the animals in a hunt for Saan’s team?

  No, the tunnels, she realized. There were so many of them, an extensive system of capillaries underground, and quite a few blocked by man-made stone barriers that needed to be destroyed. They had been planning for some time to use the Caravan for a good few months and find every tunnel possible on this continent, make a proper map, but hadn’t had the time for such an extensive, time- and resource-intensive project. There was also magnetic interference that sometimes cropped up, which would wreak havoc on the mobile headquarters’ systems and force the crew to turn back. Did they get here using…?

  Not now, Saan told herself. It’s too confusing a situation to deal with. The last fasshim, center on that. It was a pretty good distance ahead, and she lost track of it intermittently thanks to the trees and land between her and the animal. Still, she was able to track it as it reached the hill where the all-terrain, now with a spider-web of cracks on its windshield and rear passenger window, was located. The creature rushed to the top of the mound, ignored Captain Hays, and did not slow down as it reached the drooping edge where the hillock fell steeply to the river. The fasshim practically hit the vehicle with its rear end as it turned, making for the hill’s edge. Its hind legs showed their strength as the animal made an impressive leap off the hill, making sure to aim itself toward the closest land on the opposite shore. The surprise of the jump forced Saan to down-shift, though her eyes stayed focused on the creature flying through the air across the width of the river like the one she had killed already. She lost sight the animal as it fell, trees and leaves on her si
de of the tributary obscuring her line of sight, but heard a thump and a much louder howl.

  Goner fired three times in quick succession for a sniper. Once the echoes of the sniper fire were gone, Saan felt sick to her core from her accelerated brain activity, and finally vomited into the dirt next to the trees she hid behind. It was a short purge and she spat on the ground a few times to rid her mouth of any remaining bile. This was the worst she had felt after up-shifting in a couple of years, and she couldn’t allow herself to use it again anytime soon to be safe.

  “More people!” called Evara Stroff quickly into her mic. “One male, one female, meeting up with Hays, ragged-looking.”

  This was becoming a mess. The thudding of hooves beating against dirt sounded like muffled thunder, getting louder each step, and it meant the third and final fasshim had entered the undergrowth, coming for her. Saan ran, ignoring the pain in her left upper arm, her back, her head, the backs of her eyes, and rushed in the least safe direction, making her way up to the shore that would leave her wide open for attack.

  The trees thinned out, and she kept moving, her exhaustion ignored as the thundering hooves came closer. She crossed the tree line, got into the open, into strong sunlight, and kept going. The grass and leaves and dirt underfoot turned more and more to river-cleaned pebbles, the muffled sound of her running on soil changing to a consistent crackling. Only a few steps from the shallow water, Saan slowed, panting hard while bent with her hands on her knees, still holding the machine pistol. The stomping hooves seemed a lot louder now that she stopped running, a gallop that would get to her momentarily, the sound dark and deep and threatening, vibrating down to her bones.

  Saan felt a sad half-smile glide onto on her face, pleased that the animal was after her. If it was going for Nes, the fasshim would have gone further east and crossed the water closer to the corporal than her. To be frank, neither of them was likely to survive a solo encounter, and could at best kill it as they were themselves killed. So either she’d lose her brother by choice, the closest friend she’d ever had, or be slaughtered, and she’d rather be gone forever than broken with grief. A better choice every time, she supposed.

  Looking through the trees, her breathing calmer, steadier, she saw it. Only forty meters away, its eyes focused intently on her, the yellow-white furred creature as big as any of the others she’d seen, the very end of one its long, wicked, curling horns broken off, maybe from its hard landing after jumping across the tributary. It moved in the forest as if it planted the trees, creating a smooth flow of motion as it banked and swerved. She stared at it, her sight beaming at it, yet she could perceive another blur of motion that distracted her. A figure was running in the trees, south of the animal and parallel to the river her direction: Nes. He was being smart by giving himself lots of plant-life to block Hays’ eyeline and bullets, or those of whoever was coming to join him. He was going to try and play hero, and she couldn’t allow it.

  Her hands started trembling with fear, and Saan stood up straight, the fully reloaded gun in one hand. The agents stood a better chance against the creature together, but he was too far away; there was a good chance it would tear Saan apart and then go after Nes. She touched the pommel of the curved short sword slung at her hip with a palm, making sure it was there after the run, and waited. The few seconds it took the animal to arrive were like a drug-induced hallucination, wave upon wave of nervous energy crawling up and down her spine.

  Saan’s muscles were loose against bone, but not from the exertion, not entirely anyway. Her body got this way before she did something life changing, a tingly slackening of her tension. Saan felt the same sensation the night before her first day at Ornadais Academy; before her first field exam; before the meeting where Dastou made her his personal administrator and promoted her yet again, that time to staff sergeant. And most recently before leaving Hyugesten in the all-terrain to return home for the first time in years. Oddly, the only instance she remembered a drastic change in her circumstances where this feeling didn’t serve as a prologue was when she left her home in Nebasht. That time, there was only bitterness, anger. She realized she was reliving parts of her life a tiny bit at a time, as if preparing to die, and sadly did not have the time to do it properly.

  When the fasshim was fifteen meters away, she recognized in an adrenaline-filled moment that it didn’t leave the trees immediately after going in, saving time chasing her in the process. Instead it paralleled the half-there border, used it as cover against possible gunfire. If she had any doubts that these things were far more intelligent than mere animals, they went away at that moment, and her hands stopped shaking. She stared the thing down, and as it angled to her and took two last big lopes to leave the trees, she snapped into a firing stance and pulled the trigger.

  The three-round burst, as controlled as she could make it, was hard to aim because the animal skirted to the side as soon as she had her arms up. This fasshim knew what a gun was, at least that it was a dangerous weapon. She took aim and fired again knowing the fasshim would move and guessing where it would go, and also fired a third burst almost immediately. She guessed correctly, and the last three bullets punched into its side after it avoided the second burst, the impacts spraying blood into the air and onto grass. The animal scarcely slowed down, and straightened its position to charge at Saan again.

  She kept at it, guessing where the animal would juke. A few more rounds smacked dully into it, and the short yellow-white fur was speckled with a lot of red now. All the while, somewhere behind her and still across the water, Goner had started firing regularly, the volume and echoes of his high-caliber gunfire more intense than before, and the staff sergeant assumed he changed position, too. The flat, loud ratatat of her machine pistol, Goner’s regular booming pa-twoo, pa-twoo and the opposing ratatat of Hays and the ragged enemies’ rifles at a distance combined to form a deadly, discordant, uneven symphony.

  Then, Saan tried to fire and couldn’t – she was out of ammo. The animal slipped on bloody grass at the sound of her trigger clicking empty. Up until that instance, the fasshim had been unable to close the distance, the staff sergeant standing still on the shore, near and with her back to the water, her careful aim keeping the animal moving laterally. She had no more magazines with her and couldn’t reload, and simply stared at the animal as it regained its balance. Saan tossed her gun flippantly in frustration, watched it peripherally as it hit the ground. She unsheathed the short sword at her hip, remembering how impressed she was at its low weight with she first swung it, the wicked pearlescent blade distorting daylight on its surface to create channels of shifting color.

  The fasshim seemed to smile. It had every advantage possible now, and got ready to throw its strong, bullet-riddled, blood-splattered self at her, those sharp teeth bared. It hunkered down, never taking its creepy black eyes from Saan, and launched itself forward, maybe trying to shock her with speed before she could use that sword to do any damage. It took its first leap as if it wasn’t hurt in the slightest, moving in a blur of sudden, nimble motion. As soon as a front leg hit the ground to prep another jump, a loud, flat, familiar sound hit her ears and the animal’s knee exploded in a disgusting mess of blood, cartilage, bone, and meat. The animal screamed in pain, the sound cutting through the air sharp and strange.

  Nes. He had reached them and fired a single bullet perfectly aimed to disable the animal. Saan was trying to do that the whole time she fired, but the creature was too clever in its movements, her left arm too hurt to help aim or control recoil. Nes jogged out of the tree line further east of the animal, the opposite side of where she spotted him coming earlier; he’d actually gone all the way around her while she was busy shooting at the fasshim. His eyes were grayer than normal, signaling that he got there so quickly and made the miracle, perfectly timed shot by using Open Iris. But he struggled to keep moving, and after he saw the kneecapped fasshim topple onto its side, the corporal fell to his hands and knees, his breathing severe and heavy. Saan was about
to go over and thank him, but the creature screamed again, stirring on its side. It scrambled with its three usable legs, huffed and growled, and got back up.

  Standing on three legs, the fasshim snarled low in its throat, sounded angry, and looked over at Nes. The sapped corporal stared in return, and Saan was sure that what went through her friend’s mind at that moment would make lesser men go mad, drowned in unbridled fury and helplessness. There was something else there, though, alongside the fury, an odd confusion. Nes moved his gun hand up, but not in the way he would if he was going to take another shot at the animal. His face was contorted, his upper body shaking, his eyes jittering. The corporal gritted his teeth, fought desperately against something Saan couldn’t grasp, his other hand now moving below the gun he held. He shifted his grip on the handgun, pulled his thumb back, and ejected the magazine. Saan’s eyes went wide, her jaw dropping as Nes caught the non-empty magazine in his free hand.

  “What are you doing!?” called Saan, but she received no answer. The staff sergeant watched as Nes made a blind throw, and tracked the magazine as it flipped and turned in the air and then splashed into the water of the Hodenaxi tributary. She held her breath in panic as Nes tumbled loosely onto his back like a rag doll.

  The fasshim stopped looking at the corporal, moved its head forward again to gape at Saan. It tested its balance for a second, then attempted to rush Saan. It failed pathetically, almost fell down again, staying upright only due to luck. It hunkered down to lunge forward again, and the staff sergeant imagined herself cutting this bastard’s thick neck, the pleasure it would give her...

  Fwip!

  A single, white-feather-fletched arrow cut the air from somewhere in the trees, hitting the creature in the side and sticking very deep.

  Fwip!

  Another arrow. This time it struck the fasshim in the side of the head, just below where its horns grew out of. Those arrows were coming almost straight on, no arc at all and therefore not much distance, and with the speed that only a powerful compound bow could manage. A third arrow cut the air to find a home low on the same side of the animal. The fasshim struggled to stay up, huffing wetly as blood filled its lungs. It collapsed to the ground, arrows sticking up into the air. Once the thing was down, Saan heard an excited, rough male voice call out to her.

  “Blessed be, Saan-Hu de Kensing! Blessed be!”

  ~~~~