The winds stood guard on the night of the raid—dead air marched in circles around Othek’s spire, an inverse vortex providing centrifugal kick to those who would come in from above, foiling the first step of the plan.

  Atop the highest point on the library, Chain whipped his scarf at the black fly drones that explored this far—across the streets and off Othek’s property. The main swarm of flying robots had already clustered defensively around the pierced cloud in the center of the spire, before Chain even arrived. The man had lost one hat and immediately went into full defense mode. Thankfully, these tiny scout-robots at the edge barely outsized Chain’s hand, and their eyes didn’t even glow red as he slung his scarf, each smack of the hammer-whip sequence crunching wings and shattering camera-lens eyes. His feet shifted with each strike, skidding along spiretop shingles, catching himself against the sudden momentum only by grabbing the lightning rod in the middle of the rooftop. He kicked off a loose shingle from the work of stopping himself, and the lightning rod bent a few degrees under his fist. The shingle tumbled down, down, to join a cluster of the four fallen insect-robot scouts he’d already taken out.

  “These little ones are just going to keep coming, lass,” he said, turning away. One of their camera-eye apertures opened and closed, taking an image. “I think the worst they can do is bodyslam us with their spikes, but we gotta—” He whipped his scarf at another insect, the fabric audibly cracking; the robot went flying in the opposite direction like a slingshot stone. “We gotta get against the wind somehow.”

  Off the edge of the steeple's roof, dangling by one hand, Ruvle drank from her paper cup of extremely caffeinated zeroberry juice, its silvery-gray sourness loaning her more midnight oil to burn, acrid and void of sugar. She pulled herself back onto the steeple, grunting.

  “You alright?” Chain asked, and swatted another fly. Ruvle stepped to talk to him from the side; from behind, the big silver-spray-painted sandbox lid strapped to his back was in the way.

  “Yes. All the training days are catching up with me…” She shook her head and patted her cheek to mime slapping herself. Exaction didn’t really permit caffeine either because of stimulant jitters, but it was okay within reason at Coarse-level. Exhaustion was no reason to miss this. She left her fez at the office, this time.

  “Any ideas on getting there?” Chain pointed through the wind, to the spire.

  Ruvle watched him miss a strike on another spying fly. It took another picture of him. The way he cracked the hammer-whip, how he had to resist skidding...that was momentum. “Whip towards the spire and jump, then do that gliding while you’re in the air. It looks easy enough.”

  “Re-folding my scarf the right way in the damned air? Before I start falling?”

  “It doesn’t look too hard.” She could do that in her sleep.

  “I’m gonna go splat! Or lose too much altitude. Help me out, here.” Chain bent the steeple’s lightning rod back vertical. “There we go.”

  Ruvle huffed to herself. “Then jump how you normally do; I have another idea.”

  “Aces.” He reeled in his scarf and held each end in opposite hands. Tislets flickered to and from their alternate forms, and the scarf became a perfect mirror. “I’m going for it.”

  “Get a running jump and hold it tight!”

  He did. The circular wind wall reminded Ruvle of the one Othek employed in the landing lot. While the air blew strands of her hair sideways over her eyes, sighted and sealed, Chain’s parachute caught a far heavier brunt the moment he was suspended in the sky–like jumping into a rushing river and going sideways instead of swimming forward. She slid down the front of the steeple mid-observation, two callused feet against the brick and her hand skidding above her head. With that one moment of verticality, Ruvle lunged, springing off the wall through the sky like a lap-swimmer, a bullet of human momentum—

  And she caught up just in time to grab his ankles, to not fall out of the sky, giving him an extra kick to push through the outspiraling wind. She hung from his feet, swinging forth and back like a pendulum beneath a parachute pivot, raising and lowering her legs to build speed, and let go at the forward peak of her swing—into a graceful backflip, to land atop the scarf, legs splayed and both hands on the scarf’s rippling curved surface.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “Whoa.” It was over before Chain knew how to react.

  “I don’t think we have enough air,” Ruvle said, pointing forward, towards the clouds of insects.

  “Yeah, looks like we’ll hit a story or two down? Okay, defenses up!” Chain scrabbled his heels against the bottom lip of the sandbox lid, pulling the strap down from his waist to his hips, as rehearsed. The wooden dowel sticking out from the lid slipped accordingly; Ruvle grabbed it at his shoulder before it could fall out entirely, and wielded her staff, take-two.

  She didn’t know how to solve the altitude yet, but the danger ahead—the eyes in the swarm of attack drones turning crimson, one, ten, a hundred, radiating in waves of signal from the spire like wings of blood unfurling—those, she was ready for. Chain tucked up his legs to present the sandbox lid shield. The red storm flew to greet her with spike-covered bodies at meteoric impact, and she rose to her toes in kind.

  Camera glass shattered in her wake as she crashed her dowel-staff into every nearby target’s eyes. She ducked and bent, sweeping her body around three drones reaching her simultaneously, and jabbed backwards with the staff to break the joint of one of their wings, sending it falling. Two, three, five more passed her by, and on drilled-in retrained instinct, she swayed minimally, avoiding each with rocking steps left and right, feet finding traction on the yielding parachute below as if it were solid. Tiny steps, gentle steps; her feet could move quickly where most of her body shouldn’t. Several closed in on her from opposite directions, but she was no longer so bound by tangled feet on the cloth, nor disabled from complex avoidance—her mind registered the coordinated sweep as beyond her to deal with, just as she simultaneously backbent and swept her footing outwards to her sides in staccato increments, letting the masses crash together atop her in a shower of loose black spikes and electrical sparks.

  She stood again, letting the collided mass fall. She was getting better.

  She lost count thereafter of how many she destroyed. Iron and glass rained in her wake, and the swarm dwindled, dwindled, clearing and fading.

  One more came directly towards Ruvle as the night sky brightened above, the swirling vapor cloud around the spire reflecting streetlamps, and she jabbed her staff so far into its head that it stuck, metal bending and clamping around wood, glass teeth from the smashed camera lens biting. Ruvle refused to slide back from the momentum, her toes curling to grip the fabric, and let herself sink into it for once—but she was through the front line now, into the middle, and the gnarled well-used front nozzles of backline drones charged up before her eyes.

  “Chain, lasers coming!” she called out to him and dropped down, one hand catching the back of the scarf-parachute, her only lifeline from falling, safely behind the scarf’s mirror surface and Chain’s shield.

  “Brace for it!” he answered.

  Lasers lacked momentum to transfer, but glimmers of green and red in the underside of the scarf-mirror told her the story, with intermittent light shows in the distance behind her—lasers deflected away, decohering off the curved surface into diffuse brightness like nocturnal light pollution. She had only seconds to appreciate it before the scent of burned-black pieces of the shield reached her nose. Impacts battered the front of the lid from spiked drone bodyslams, and one impaled fully in, in grasping distance of Chain’s elbow. Not good—they would lose more altitude with that ballast. Her other hand still on her staff, Ruvle grunted and heaved it high—very heavy with a drone on the end, but nothing her well-trained fitness couldn’t handle—and swiped around Chain’s shield, bashing them to the side and knocking them out of the sky.

  The few remaining were starting to swarm around her back. Better. Every drone she hit—and she could strike many—sent it backwards, and her forwards. All she had to do was prioritize those with laser nozzles...Ruvle struck four of the five infiltrators, but the last kept its distance, its nozzle charging up for a headshot against her, and Ruvle did the only thing her instinct told her was an option—pull down hard on the back of the parachute, like tucking a blanket over her head, intuitively making sure the mirror right in front of her face was flat.

  The laser reflected back on its source, and she shortly heard the crash of the drone impacting the street below.

  “Rough landing coming in!” Chain shouted. “Brace!”

  Ruvle pulled herself back up over the parachute to stand on it, and there was the wall of the spire at most a second in front of her; she acted fast. A jab of her dowel with all of her momentum, spike end first, lodged it hard into the masonry, just she rocked her heels back and raised one leg, the lip of the parachute caught on her foot. She and Chain both hit the wall, hard enough to wheeze the wind out of her in her awkward pose, but she’d succeeded—the scarf was caught on the pole, the pole was stuck to the drone on the end, and the drone’s spikes were lodged in the wall.

  For a moment, they were still. Chain dangled from the ends of his scarf, still gripping them for dear life, while Ruvle straddled the staff, close to the drone base so that it would bend no further like a tree branch and let Chain slip.

  “Get the rest of them!” Chain said, flailing his feet uselessly, the wall too far away to help him get up.

  “They’re gone,” Ruvle said, with a relieved sigh. She looked up—she’d been in fa low state, her body aching and her lungs burning, but she really had just taken out an entire swarm of drones—made possible with Chain’s help closing the distance and defending her.

  Now they just had to climb, yet more.