Months ago, when Prince Haowi had been making preparations to go on expedition, a mistake had been made.

  It was an easy enough to make. Expeditions were complex things, with thousands of moving pieces. And the prince's first aid: quartermaster Piero – running late, muddled from overwork, and battling an unexpected cold – overlooked something as he checked over the staff officer’s tents.

  The itinerary for the officer's camp consisted of -- among other things -- fifty tents.

  That was fifty tarps of various sizes, over ten miles of masting chords, and two hundred tent posts.

  And, among that two hundred, one of the wooden tent posts had a black spot on its side.

  It had been infected with rot.

  The post held up well, despite this, but months of campaigning were bound to take their toll and, unbeknownst to anyone, the support pole began to steadily weaken.

  This particular morning, when camp was being set up, the rotten pole was picked out of a cart and conscripted to serve as a support stake for the dome tent which housed the prince’s retinue.

  Ten thousand pounds heavy, the dome tent was a massive construction, towering over the camp like a fabric monolith and casting a shadow so large the rest of the camp could be shaded within it. It was only by the grace of fifty, trunk-sized support poles, alongside a ship’s rigging worth of rope, that it could be propped up in defiance of such tremendous gravity.

  When the screaming cloud fell, twelve of these posts were the subject of unlucky collisions and broke.

  What few posts remained strained under the increased load.

  Incidentally, among these few remaining poles was that rotted post which Piero had overlooked all those months ago. And that rotted pole was straining now, as several dozen masting ropes constricted around it, focusing on it thousands of pounds of extra tarp pressure which sought incessantly for a weak point to break through.

  There were few beings in existence who had ever witnessed a Trinket take to battle.

  All of them could attest to the same fact that Cas was witnessing now.

  That feeling.

  Cas didn’t know how else to put it. But dangerous had raised her hackles.

  It felt like jumping from a building, that peak of terror just before you hit the ground, but happening every second, every moment without break.

  Naturally, Cas was paranoid, and she prepared herself accordingly.

  Hunched low, Cas bounced on her toes lightly as her heart tried to tear itself out of her chest, telling her to dodge, to get out of the way, but dodge what? Go where?

  Cas searched for this unidentifiable threat, extending all her senses, even forcing herself to attend to that changeless feeling of death at the horizon for some hint.

  The monsters hovered cagily around the prince, blinding her eyes and her aura sense, but Cas stared into the maelstrom like it held all the secrets she ever wanted to hear, her ears ringing as she perked them for the slightest disturbance or change in the maelstrom of noise.

  Cas had been on alert from the first moment. Her senses primed on a hair trigger to catch the first warning signs of anything.

  And, when the prince stepped over that line, and the Regalia's matched wills and machinations, despite all her paranoia, Cas… couldn’t sense a single thing wrong with the world, even as the rotted mast exploded and shot her through with a bucket’s worth of shrapnel.

  Cas’s body liquified involuntarily, degrading into a slurry of organs and bone splinters.

  HP Reduced: -10

  It was a horrifying thing to experience, but it hardly counted as an injury for Cas. She could rebuild her body in seconds, and she did.

  But two seconds was a fortune of time, in such vital circumstances. The scavengers – small, fast, bat-winged things – swarmed out like flies to cover her corpse, flooding into view, gulping mouthfuls of flesh before Cas had even half-reformed.

  HP Reduced: -3

  HP Reduced: -5

  HP Reduced: -2

  HP Reduced: -7

  HP Reduced: -6

  HP Reduced: -3

  Cas felt as if she were in a dream, helpless to exert any real force as she slowly grew out of her puddle of body parts, watching her body reform like molasses as darting, horrible creatures flitted about stripping chunks of flesh from her.

  After the first second, Cas’s exterior hardened enough to ward off the pecking things, and she’d just about reached a somewhat human state when a basso sounded off in the near distance.

  Out of the fog, a masting rope snapped, cutting through the darkness like a knife and blasting like a ten pound whip through Cas’s still reforming body, splattering her like a paint spill across the grass.

  …

  Helplessness.

  It was a terrible feeling, and it could be learned.

  If you threw a rat into an unsolvable maze enough times, they lost the ability to solve mazes that were genuine. If you gave them an unliftable weight, they wouldn’t even try to lift even the lightest blocks.

  Just being… swatted down like that. Cas empathized with the rats, as she saw her body spreading like jam.

  The shock and pain were terrible, as the insensate mass of twitching flesh and severed nerves burdened her mind with phantom sensations. It didn't even feel like she was human, anymore. All her recognizable body parts were in the wrong places, in the wrong states, it all just fell so awfully, horribly, .

  Cas rushed to fix it, but all her parts took their sweet time, as her aura encompassed the mound of flesh and reformed.

  Again, Cas was left helplessly watching the creatures pick at her,

  HP Reduced: -5

  HP Reduced: -5

  HP Reduced: -7

  HP Reduced: -2

  Having to sit there in a continually useless body that refused to take directions

  HP Reduced: -5

  HP Reduced: -5

  HP Reduced: -7

  Preparing so intensely just to be blasted apart by forces she couldn’t even .

  HP Reduced: -3

  HP Reduced: -5

  It was enough to drive one mad.

  But then, one of the buzzards, a stupid little thing with a crinkled beak and beady eyes, stabbed forward blindly into her lungs and by pure chance took a treasure it couldn’t appreciate.

  ‘The Boy!’

  Cas recognized the gleaming gem which held the prince’s younger brother, and she felt time slow to an even more agonizing degree as the creature – with the gem glimmering in beak – pushed back from her body and began to take off.

  Cas felt her focus shrink, as the ruby gem grew to encompass her whole universe.

  The creature flapped once, twice, already hovering off her remains.

  And then Cas got angry.

  Cas, an easy going person by nature, was unused to the emotion, and much less used to how personally she was experiencing it now.

  Because Cas was livid, hateful, screaming with rage. It hurt! She was so angry it hurt! She felt the emotion burning her body like poison. body, which was currently a steaming pile of corpse material and being used as a fucking dumpster by these Halloween

  And, oh, it was so much worse than that, too! Because now they were going to steal that boy from her. Not even a second had passed since he’d been given to her, and he was going to die and it was all their fault! She hated, hated, hated them! More than she’d hated anything in her life. She wanted to reach out and twist their wings off! She wanted to rip that thing’s guts out and feed them to itself, see how hungry it would be then! She wanted that thing in her hands, now!

  And then, that burning feeling of hatred took on another dimension, and it .

  Aura XP cap reached: Level 3 -> 4

  Aura XP cap reached: Level 4 -> 5

  Cas vaguely remembered this emotion, it was much like the warm Christmas-night feeling, but brighter like a flare, coming just in time with her aura as the blue energy exploded and her body shot up into existence like a fountain.

  "Aghhh!" Cas let out the scream of pain her broken body had blocked, breathing heavily and shivering. Doubling over a bit, she felt something like an instinct to throw up, but there was nothing in her stomach to allow it.

  Wait, stomach, lungs... she was breathing. She had a body. Looking down, Cas saw her body shaking with shivers of phantom pain, feeling a suddenly intense comfort as if she'd just taken a full-body hit of morphine.

  Coming into existence that quickly had felt like jumping, and it surprised Cas almost as much as it surprised the little buzzard in her hand.

  It flapped violently in her grip, twisting and wrenching to get away, the gem still shining in its beak.

  Cas snapped its neck and took the gem back, slipping it into a leather pouch at her side. Clicking the pouch closed, Cas encased it in her aura.

  Item Equipped: Leather pouch.

  Storage: +1

  Even through the haze and aura, the prince’s red light was visible like a waypoint marker, and he was already quite a distance away. She should have felt afraid to be so far away from the only creature in the region that didn’t want her dead.

  After all, fear was a perfectly natural emotion in her circumstances.

  She was lost, everything smelled like blood and sounded like hell, there were at least a dozen sirens in here, each dangerous enough to turn her dead, and she had just gone through the most painful experience of her life not five seconds ago, with promises for more.

  Some part of Cas, in the back of her mind, recognized this.

  The rest of her was euphoric with rage.

  Cas’s body was electric with fresh aura. She stood up a bit straighter and leisurely walked through the cloud like it was air, not caring if a hundred monsters bumped into her. The feeling was intoxicating. Here she was, in the middle of a maelstrom of actual monsters, and she felt as comfortable as if she were in her living room! It felt like she the space, and she didn’t care if she had to fight the whole world to keep it that way.

  Perhaps this wasn’t the wisest outlook, but the easy, barely jogging pace she kept did save her from bumping into the dome tent, when it suddenly appeared out of the fog.

  Cas paused in the two feet of clear space the monsters afforded the obstruction.

  It was a wall of fabric, as far as she could tell. Looking up, she could see a strip of blue sky where the top of it must have poked through the cloud. To tell by the way the flight paths of those creatures arced as they moved around the border of this thing – Cas gathered that this was probably a circular tent, probably dome-shaped.

  Moving her gaze back down, there was a frayed hole in the body of the tarp. Looking through revealed an exploded tent-post inside, touching the skin of the tent revealed that it was taught like a drum-skin. Oh... this thing was going to collapse, soon. And what a collapse that would be.

  The fabric alone was like a truck tire, four inches thick and not easily bent. Guessing by the thickness of the tarp, calculating the circumference, this thing was probably on the order of five or six tons, give or take.

  Peeking her head further inside the frayed hole, Cas was surprised to notice that a dozen or so of the scavengers had made their way in, darting through the dark space.

  She was surprised that she hadn’t been able to see them earlier. Probably, the tent wall blocked aura. That also explained why she hadn’t seen the prince’s brother earlier, when he’d been hidden underneath a collapsed tarp.

  It certainly made sense. A society where everyone had x-ray vision would invent some ways to create privacy, especially in a military camp. Don't want the other side peeking into your showers, after all.

  She was still able see the prince’s red glow through the tent… probably that was different somehow.

  Cas realized, suddenly, just how many realizations she was making. In fact, why was she realizing that tent-walls blocked aura . Why hadn’t she realized it when she’d discovered the prince’s brother hidden under a pile of tarps?

  A moment of thought pulled out the answer.

  Her aura level up! Of course!

  Aura increased her stats on a percentage basis, so her largest stat would commensurately get the largest boost. In [Human Figure] her largest stat was intelligence, so, naturally…

  Paying closer attention, Cas realized that time seemed to be moving at a more leisurely pace than usual.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  It wasn’t in slow motion, or anything like that. Even her thoughts seemed to be going at normal speed. Rather, everything just seemed , and surprise -- or rather, novelty -- was the metric biological minds used to measure time. After all, no one remembered a twelve hour layover in any great detail, when all they had to do was stare at a wall. On the other hand, a trip to the amusement park would call fourth a thousand hours of fresh detail, even years after the fact.

  Huh, she could probably write a paper about that… she could call it.

  The whole of the world just seemed to make more sense. She wasn’t much more intelligent, probably, none of the thoughts she was having right now were groundbreaking, but it felt like she was able to internalize her best thoughts more efficiently, hesitate less to accept less ‘normal’ conclusions.

  A second had passed since she stumbled across the tent.

  Out of the corner of her eye she noticed a large shadow briefly occlude the strip of sky-light which illuminated the tent borders.

  Clear air was a scarce resource in this cloud. Probably, all the monsters wanted access to it to scan for prey below, and – probably – the largest predators would be the ones to get that access.

  Cas wasn’t surprised when forty feet of monster into her. She’d already been dodging. But, her mind was quicker than her body, in this case, and the siren caught her with a glancing blow.

  A glancing blow sounded nice in theory, but the sirens had the proportions of a giraffe, and the weight of one, too. The hard beak slammed to her back. It felt like a giant had taken a golf-swing at her with a pick–axe, and Cas was launched ten feet through the side, shooting through the frayed hole and tumbling wildly through the black space of the tent interior. She landed on her head, but her neck and spine had been shattered entirely before that.

  A flare of aura healed her before she’d fully gotten into a stand. Outside the Siren peeked its beady eye through the tattered, flapping breach in the tent wall, ducking its neck in.

  The creature was a lanky thing with stiff legs. The tent breach, while large, was only ten feet tall. The siren barely fit, and even then it was splaying it’s wing-arms wide just to hunch it’s shoulders underneath. It had to shuffle forward with awkward steps just to move through.

  It was only a moment of weakness, on the creature’s part, but Cas had started sprinting before she’d fully stood, rushing forward with the drag of gravity, every step just on the edge of tripping.

  Cas had no illusions of fighting it. That hadn’t gone well even when she’d been armed, but its awkward posture gave her a head start, and so Cas fled, sprinting wildly as she forced herself directly the siren, who in its compromised position could only manage a wide-eyed glare at the human sprinting directly at its nose.

  Prince Haowi was in a melancholic mood.

  It was one of the few freedoms he was allowed in his position, to feel negative emotions even if could never show them.

  Still, right now, he felt content as he stood in the midst of the screaming cloud. The barrage of sound and blinding darkness was more interesting to him than anything else, and eventually that interest dimmed into boredom, and he turned his sights to more pertinent matters.

  The prince stood like a statue in just the right place, waiting for the right time. His hands were held up high, as if in position to catch the sky, should it fall.

  Although, in the chaos around him, some of the smaller monsters did occasionally crash into the ground. With the number of them around, this happened with the consistency of rain-drops, and a constant thudding bass was the result.

  In the midst of this, one of of those thuds sounded like a clang. A rusty spearpoint came skittering into the reach of the prince, and he kicked it away, sending it flying into the darkness before refocusing on his task.

  The spearhead didn’t land immediately. In this strange atmosphere of flying monsters, it bounced off flying bodies, and was caught and dropped a hundred times, almost floating in the dense atmosphere of bodies before chaotically finding a path to the ground.

  But of that later.

  Running away.

  Usually, that involved running, well, from the thing that was trying to kill you, but Cas found that she still had access to her second order thoughts, even in such a terrible situation.

  And second order thinking sometimes involved questioning your own premises.

  A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.

  Following that logic, it was human instinct to always run directly from danger, even when it was to their detriment to do so. This was popularly known as the reflex.

  Human instinct told her to run directly away from the monster. Human instinct also told her to run further into the big tent. Shelter was comfortable, and a big shelter all the more so.

  Cas ignored those instincts, and she sprinted directly towards the siren.

  The creature loomed larger the closer she got, and even in its splayed and hunched posture it reminded cas more and more of her house than it did a fair fight.

  Ignoring the screaming, panicked voices in her head, Cas only leant forward and redoubled her pace. building speed until the last second where she tried to duck under the creature’s beak at the last moment and misjudged the timing by just a fraction of a second.

  The creature capitalized, striking forward and carving a short channel through her skull.

  HP Reduced: -1

  Cas ignored the update and continued her fall, power sliding between the creature's legs like she was going into home plate. Shooting out the other side, Cas dug her heels into the grass and popped up into a run that took her further into the mass of screeching monsters.

  It was a truly disturbing atmosphere to return to. Completely blind to everything more than a few dozen feet away, and constantly under barrage from the nail-on-a-chalkboard serenade of horrific monsters, Cas’s instinct screamed at her once again to from enemy territory, to return to the tent where she could be sheltered from this blinding nightmare.

  But Cas understood that, sometimes, the safest place to be was in the belly of the beast.

  Sure, being in the blinding screaming cloud was terrifying. Being unable to see or hear anything was unnerving, but… this also meant that the Siren’s wouldn’t be able to see either. The smaller scavengers were the majority in this cloud, and they couldn’t harm her if they wanted.

  Strangely enough, the screaming cloud was the safest place for her to be.

  The big top tent had the appearance of shelter, and Cas’s more primal DNA took that to mean automatic safety, but it was a dark cavern in there. The tent was tall enough to allow the Siren to fly within it, and the lack of monsters inside would allow it to track her perfectly through the darkness.

  No, it was best to stay in the cloud until she could get out of it, and the quickest way out was…

  Cas looked around at the featureless darkness of screaming monsters, as well as the cool blue of aura which pervaded the space around her.

  She would have to get her bearings first, Cas decided.

  Prince Haowi ducked, a whipping tent-rope screamed through the space just above his head, cutting a trail of gore through the living fog, and leaving behind it a rain of blood and body parts.

  Haowi didn’t bother dodging this macabre hail. He was well beyond prudishness of that level, at his age… huh, he paused to consider his situation. He gotten old, hadn’t he? Was thirty four not considered an unseemly age for a warrior? It honestly felt to him that it would have been better to die young. It felt like just yesterday, that he was teasing his fencing masters about their age.

  Teasing… huh. He hadn’t done that in a long time. Some things were reserved for the youth, it seemed.

  Another, dangerous groan of straining rope warned him. This time, he didn’t have to move, as the rope cracked like lightning just past his hip, flicking blood like a paintbrush.

  Haowi wondered what his brother would think, when this was all over, but he quickly quashed that image. There was no point in sad thoughts, now.

  

  Ropes as thick as Cas’s thigh blew through the air like lightning, one of them just barely grazed Cas’s belly, leaving her feeling like she’d just swallowed a grenade.

  Hp Reduced: -5

  A flare of her aura restored her body before her next footstep landed. Cas was sprinting now. There was no reason to go any slower.

  The ropes were breaking more and more frequently, now. Probably a sign of the dome tent’s impending collapse. The ropes had a maximum range of ten meters, and Cas stayed just outside this tumultuous border of gore. Her guess was that the sirens would be staying far away from the tent, so it was naturally in her best interest to be where they didn’t want to go.

  The smaller scavangers were stupid little things, however, or suicidally intelligent – if you wanted to put it more politely. Cas was covered all over in gore thanks to them, and another Thwack

  Bathing in the blood of your enemies, as it turned out, was not all it had been hyped up to be. Then again, this was technically a shower…

  Thwack!

  Another rope flew high, missing her by a mile and giving her a heart attack nonetheless. Thankfully, the blood rain didn’t reach her this time, being soaked up and scavanged away by the myriad creatures that flitted above her.

  Cas didn’t know how big the cloud was, or where she was in it , but she had a generall heading, now.

  Uncomfortably, Cas forced herself to focus on the BlackFlag

  The other thing she could sense was Prince Haowi, as well as the Ember flag which flew always above him. He hadn’t moved at all since she last saw him, which was strange, but helpful to her in further getting her bearings.

  Having gotten her bearings, Cas knew she only had a quarter turn more to go before the hospice unit would be in reach.

  That would only take two minutes, she realized, and she tried to keep an upbeat attitude through it.

  After all, two minutes wasn’t so much time to spend in a screaming cloud of monsters.

  So what if the entire situation made her want to crawl out of her own skin? She’d be out in no time. Hell, she’d spent two minutes watching , and far longer listening to her stripper roommate gossiping. She’d practically trained for this her whole life.

  Really, nothing bad had even happened to her so far. Sure, getting torn apart by splinters was uncomfortable, but all that had done was delay her by what… six, seven seconds? What harm was that in the grand scheme of things

  And it was just as she was thinking this that the carrion road suddenly appeared out of the haze.

  It was absolutely caked by the dark bodies of the scavengers feasting upon it, so it hardly looked like a carpet of meat, but it was still just as slippery, and Cas didn’t have the traction to stop herself before stepping in it.

  Several of the scavengers squeaked like rubber duckies as she crushed them beneath, and Cas cursed like a sailor as she skated across the length of the tripe road, falling forward onto her chest and bounding up just in time to come face to face with another siren.

  The siren had been occupied when she bumped into it, feasting off the carrion road. A moment’s glance at her quickly shifted priorities however.

  SCRRREAHHHHHHH!

  It bellowed out, with a voice that Cas could . With a sudden burst of energy it struck forward, twisting twisting it’s head unnaturally as it went to grab her right side.

  It was too fast for her to dodge, but Cas shot her hand up like a teacher’s pet before the crushing beaks latched onto her, compressing her rib cage and stealing the earth from her feet as she was hauled up fourty feet.

  It had tried to pin her right arm, too! Cas realized, as it the beak crushed around her, having a harder time of it than the last siren, thanks to her level five aura.

  Was that trained behavior or just instinct? Cas wondered. Pinning the right arm would be an effective tactic against humans, after all. That was the main weapon hand of the species. Thankfully, Cas’s quick thinking had managed to save her from that fate, this time, but that didn’t matter much, considering she’d lost her weapon during—

  Schiiing!

  A sharp noise of falling metal announced something, and the rusty spearhead flittered into view. Cas’s right hand closed around the socket before she’d even realized what happened.

  Item Equipped:

  Rusty Spearhead.

  Slashing +5; Piercing +6

  Cas’s right hand stabbed it hilt deep into the creature’s eye-socket before she could think much more about the matter.

  SCRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

  'See!' Cas thought triumphantly. 'Now why you pin a human’s arm properly when grabbing them!'

  Cas landed just underneath the straining creature, greedily eyeing the massive lump of free meat and XP.

  Still high on her aura boost, and spear-head in hand, Cas felt a course of insane ambition run through her at this opportunity. She could it, now!

  Forgetting escape, Cas eyed the creature’s exposed belly, already thinking of all the useful things she could do with its material. If she could create a large enough cloud of teargas…

  All those presentiments of victory quickly faded, when Cas noticed – out of the corner of her mind which she’d dedicated to paying it special attention – the prince’s red light disappearing suddenly. Trinket Ember was gone.

  For once something was discernible over the static background of the monster’s chittering.

  It was a low, gurgling sound which was felt more than it was heard. The dome tent in the center of it all, skin stretched taut like a drum skin was rapidly breaking apart at the seams, and the tremendous, five ton weight of the tarp was getting ready to blow.

  Considerations upon considerations. Couldn’t fighting for her life be the only thing Cas had to deal with today?

  The prince’s red aura was still nowhere to be seen. Cas hoped it meant other than the worst. She wasn’t sure if the prince was still alive, or even capable of being helped otherwise, but Cas worked to direct the general direction of her retreat towards his last known location.

  The siren, screaming furiously with its one working eye, galloped after her on long strides that thundered over the bloody grass.

  The monster cloud was a messy thing, constantly littering the floor with the dead and battered bodies of the runts who couldn’t survive the environment. By now, having stayed in one place for so long, the grass was peppered everywhere with small dark shapes and even the torn of limbs of dead monsters, as well as the grounded bodies of living ones looking to scavenge off their brethren.

  Cas did well to watch her step, knowing how slippery a mashed monster could be, and as such her retreat occasionally took on a skipping cadence as she danced between the empty spots of grass wherever she could find them, zig zagging into its blind spot and making confusing changes of pace and direction in an attempt to lose the siren in the mist.

  For all her efforts, however, one thing remained clearly evident about the chase: the siren – for all its size, and awkward folded-wing legs – was simply much faster than her, and inspired by pain and rage to revenge itself for the damage she had done.

  Eventually, that speed and determination paid off, as the Siren galloped into striking range and stuck out its neck with lighting pace. Cas again, raised her hand instinctively to avoid the pin, but the monster displayed more cleverness than she’d expected. Feinting low, it shot high at the last second.

  A world of pain exploded in her hand, as hard beaks crimped her palm and crushed the bones.

  “Agh!” Cas involuntarily dropped her blade, catching it in her off hand too late, for the siren was already in the air, jerking her up with enough force to pop her shoulder blade out of its socket.

  Cas hung limply, tumbling uselessly in the turbulence as the siren pulled her up for a free flight..

  The whole world went into deep shadow as the hundred foot wingspan of the beast expanded above her. Each wing beat blasted air against her dangling body, and split apart the ocean of smaller monsters like they were floating dust particles. Cas healed her shoulder, and tried to do the same with her crushed hand, feeling the aura shoot into the appendage, and press against the beak that crushed down on it.

  Shape Change at insufficient level to overcome barrier!

  Cas stabbed her dagger through the notification, aiming at the creature's remaining eye.

  Hanging as she was from a broken hand, dangling in chaotic winds and buffeted every which way by the creature’s wingbeats, Cas’s strike was easily read and easily avoided by a small twist of the siren's head.

  Cas tried for another attempt, and the creature swung her away with a particularly hard off-time wing beat. This beat, followed by a second, threw them both up through fifty feet of space, and blazing sunlight suddenly cut through the darkness and haze.

  Blinking, Cas looked around at her monochrome surroundings, the top of the monster cloud stretched like a whole world beneath her.

  The density of monsters was sparser at this altitude, but all present were sirens which patrolled the clear air above the rabble below.

  Cas suddenly felt a fast rush of air stinging against her mangled hand. Looking up, the siren was taking a deep breath, holding it and forcing it to expand its throat.

  Gruuuuuugh!

  The siren above her called through clenched beak like a boom horn, it's call echoed through empty space, and a channel was cut through the cloud as the smaller monsters fled from the terrible sound.

  The reaction from its fellow sirens was subtler, as they each tilted a wing and adjusted their flight paths to converge at their location.

  Having seen enough, Cas gripped her blade and shot enough aura through it to turn it into a lightsaber. Flexing her shoulder, she cut her blade up and aimed for that vital spot.

  HP Reduced: -3 HP

  The wind howled coldly past Cas’s ears, as she fell through the clear air, trailing a line of blood behind her from that blood stump at her wrist.

  Her hand healed in just a second, just in time for her to drop into the screaming cloud, battering her way through a thousand small bodies.

  Tucking her legs in and stretching her arms out, Cas reoriented herself into a pencil dive just in time to hit the ground feet firs, cushioning her fall enough that she didn’t splatter and lose valuable material.

  KRGHSHGSH!

  Her body reversed the sounds of breaking as it grew back. Normally, it would’ve counted as a spine-tingling sound, but Cas’s spine had long been desensitized to such horrors by the events of the day.

  Looking around, a blue haze punctuated by a black spot on the horizon met her gaze. The prince’s red glow was still gone, and she had completely lost her bearings. Making an executive decision, Cas resolved to make escape her first priority.

  Tshhhhhh.

  And then, she looked down.

  Coincidentally, it turned out that Cas had landed on a loading cart filled with barrels.

  All barrels were marked in plain English and bright letters: ‘handle carefully. Hyper-explosive.’

  If the writing hadn’t been enough, the cracked barrels and black powder spilling out of those cracks told Cas all she needed to hear.

  Normally, this would not be a major problem, a bit of clean-up at most. Hyper explosive was extremely stable unless exposed to flame.

  The machinations of time are an agonizing thing, however. For, it turned out that, months ago, Piero had made the inexcusable mistake of loading flint in the same cart as the explosive, and Cas’s rusty blade, still spinning in the air above her from her explosive landing, fell at just the right timing and angle to ignite a necessary spark..

  Cas didn’t have time to process any emotions besides ‘oh fuck’ as she touched toe-first onto the grass and flexed her leg in anticipation for a sprint.

  The cart had already disappeared, however, transformed into a bright conflagration of flame and plasma, and that concentration of forces engulfed everything, and the surrounding atmosphere of monsters turned into one of flame.