"Everyone — inside, now!"
"This way, this way!" Emil waved them on toward the nearest house, a narrow two-story place with its door hanging open.
"Senior, there's a cellar door round the back — basement!"
"Go, go, GO!"
The recruits poured through the gap one after another, boots skidding on the wet ground, someone's rifle clattering out of their hands and left behind in the mud. Emil counted them through — one, two, three, more — standing at the mouth of the door with his back to the burning field, waving each of them past him into the dark.
"Don't stop, keep moving, get down the stairs—"
He was the last one standing outside.
A round cracked past his ear, close enough to stir his hair, and he dropped half a step on pure reflex — it took a chip out of the doorframe an inch from where his skull had been a heartbeat before.
Too close—
Footsteps. From the side.
He didn't make it.
The figure came out of the smoke low and fast and was on him before he'd finished turning, a dagger already falling — Emil's shoulder took the first cut trying to block it, and then the weight of the thing was on top of him, knees pinning his arms, the blade coming down again.
"Get — OFF—!"
He got a forearm up. The dagger scraped bone instead of finding his throat, and he screamed with it, and shoved, and the thing barely moved, its whole weight settled over his hips like it had all the time in the world.
"Somebody— anybody—!"
His pistol was gone — knocked loose in the first collision, lying somewhere in the mud he couldn't see and couldn't reach. The dagger came down a third time and he caught the wrist with both hands and it still won half the distance, the tip parting his sleeve, a thin line of fire opening across his forearm.
He was losing. He knew he was losing. The thing on top of him didn't grunt, didn't strain, didn't seem to weigh what a person should weigh — every push he made against it went nowhere, like shoving a wall.
Think — THINK—
His hand, scrabbling blind in the mud past his own hip, closed on something long and hard and familiar.
The rifle.
He didn't have room to aim it. He barely had room to turn it. He got the muzzle wedged up under the thing's jaw at a crooked, desperate angle and hauled the trigger before he could think better of it.
BANG.
The recoil was enormous — far more than a man who never worked out had any business absorbing at that angle, and Emil felt his own shoulder give with a wet, grinding pop, the joint torn half out of its socket, a scream tearing out of him that had nothing to do with the fight anymore.
But the thing on top of him did not simply lose an arm, or take a wound.
Its head slid.
It rolled loose off the stump of its neck at a slow, sideways incline, and where the round had passed there was no scorch, no burn, no blood at all — the flesh at the cut simply wasn't there, as though that whole slice of throat had been erased, or burned down to ash and swept away, leaving a clean pale plane behind.
Hah— hah—
Emil lay there under the weight of a headless body, breathing too fast, his good hand fisted white in the mud.
He got himself out from under it and up, struggling, his bad arm hanging wrong at his side — and his eyes, hot with something close to fury, dragged toward the cellar door, where a sliver of pale faces watched him through the gap the recruits had left ajar.
"...Hh."
He knew better than to be angry at them. Not now. Not for this.
"Let me in," he said instead, and glanced past them, through what used to be a window, at the wooden row beyond the street already fully caught, fire running house to house down the timber. "The fire's taken the wooden ones already. We should get out of sight, fast. Lucky this one's not wood."
Tmp. Tmp. Tmp.
It reached her.
A hand settled on her shoulder — and still she kept walking, or tried to, her soft soles finding no purchase on the polished floor, her legs carrying on the motion of walking while going nowhere at all, like a wound-down toy that has not yet been told to stop.
The grip tightened. Slowly. Her collarbone shifted under it. The pressure went on increasing past the point where a hand meant to steady you would have stopped, past the point where it meant anything but stay, her own pulse suddenly loud in the side of her own throat where the fingers pressed—
"Lady Flaure."
The pressure did not ease.
"It's me."
She turned. She turned the way a thing turns when it is being turned rather than choosing to — by degrees, against itself. The shape behind her went up, and up, filling the whole failing corridor, a height that made the word man sit wrong against it, something nearer to the scale of the statues in the great hall than to a person.
Her breath came shallow through a mouth that had gone dry.
"C-Claude...?"
"Lady Flaure."
The smile arrived on her face all at once — bright, whole, correct — the way a painting is hung on a wall, and could as easily be lifted back down and turned to face the plaster.
"You see, the two of us—!"
"...Wh-what?"
"—let's run away together. You and I."
THRM.
The sweet, strange, unanswerable words were cut clean off by the sound of something punching out through the mirror and slamming into the wall — twice, hard enough to shake grit from the ceiling.
Every eye in the room went to it and could make out nothing; the dust and the dark swallowed the whole far wall.
The first thing the towering man did was reach — a small, unhurried movement — toward the longsword at his hip. Not to draw it. Not to guard, not to raise it.
As the murk and the shock of the impact thinned, it gave up two figures: a young man in a brown coat, and, slung across his back, a green-haired woman in an RMO uniform lying utterly limp.
The man in the brown coat pushed himself up off the floor by degrees, got a knee under himself, then an arm, and hauled the green-haired woman higher up onto his back with a grunt.
"Agh... ow..."
He looked slowly to one side.
My head's killing me... Miss Vine said help the person on the other side of the mirror...
So which one of these two is it — huh? Hey— hey, wait, WHAT—?!
His eyes finished adjusting to the light.
"HAH— HAAAHH?!"
"YOU!" Both men were pointing at each other, faces identically stricken.
"The one who's with the guy that offed my subordinates—!" / "The creep who came after my friend—!"
Oh no oh no oh no — Miss Vine said kill this guy, but who in their right mind could take THAT—!
Right— right! The artifacts!
Aim dashed forward, swept the lady — whose face he still hadn't gotten a clear look at — up into one arm, Isolde still riding his back.
Even moving at something like three times the speed of a galloping horse, courtesy of the artifacts—
—Claude's eyes only followed him the way a man watches a tortoise labor across a path. Faintly. With disdain.
The sword still had not quite left its sheath.
Fwoosh.
Aim shot past the wind and the leg of that towering figure.
The damsel in his arm did not look especially distressed.
"Who is that, may I ask?"
Huh...? This woman— don't tell me—?!
"Sir?"
The woman in his arm went on asking, stubbornly, her body offering not the least resistance, her face smooth and even — except for the sweat beading at her hairline and the lips that would not stop twitching at the corners.
Oh, for— it's HER MAJESTY—!
"One." The voice came after them, level and heavy. Its owner was not running. Was not walking. Did not appear the least bit troubled.
"Two."
"Who are you?"
Her Majesty kept tugging at the brown-haired man's jacket.
I am SO dead~ Every scrap of Aim's planning, his thinking, his composure had drifted clean out of him the moment he'd understood who he was carrying.
"Um, hey..."
Aim squeezed his eyes shut—
"Three."
The figure came from behind, fast as a bullet to any human sense of it, and plucked the woman's body back out of his arm with perfect, surgical precision.
At that speed, had Aim been a fraction slow to give her up, there would not have been enough of him left over for a funeral, let alone an internal organ.
Fwoom.
The man turned, the damsel once more gathered against him.
"Enough games."
And in the end, the sword wasn't sheath to threaten, nor to cut anyone down.
It was only the test one strong man sets before another.