Ecdysis

With a sigh, I approached my latest kill. The body of the young wermage was lying in the alien grass, his head — gone. A testament that even wermages, despite their magical resilience, had a breaking point. Especially when taken off-guard. A quick search yielded three Emanai braids — my late challenger wasn’t new to battle but not a seasoned veteran either. The strongest warrior of a small tribe.

I had to give him credit where credit was due, however. Up until his death, he knew nothing about me besides that I was a murk and had balls big enough to challenge him. He didn’t power his runes nor his protection tattoos, but he stopped well beyond the reach of my visible weapons before shouting his taunts. He was also expecting some sort of trickery from me as I heard him muttering about the potential poisons.

He probably would’ve used his runes if I was carrying a bow or even a sling. Alas, the people of Tana weren’t familiar with the throwing technique that I used. Considering that it dislocated the elbow and the shoulder on each throw, would break non-augmented bones, and required the thrower to be rooted in place, I had a faint idea why. What they also weren’t familiar with was the profound law under Heaven and Earth called ‘mass times velocity squared, divided by two’. Werbows hurled their arrows with considerable kinetic energy, sure, but it was still comparable to that of heavy crossbows or even light ballistae. They could pierce a reinforced pavise and kill the murk that held it too close to their body but that was their usual limit. The arrows were leaving werbows with a kinetic energy in low hundreds of joules, and losing quite a chunk of it flying downrange. They were still deadly — the main use of werbows was saturation fire, after all — but not devastatingly so. Mages could also hurl boulders of a considerable weight but they were trading speed for weight and those projectiles were quite inefficient at transferring said energy to their target. A murk might get injured no matter if he was hit by an entire boulder or by a part of one, but a wermage might shrug off a glancing hit.

It was much harder to predict, deflect, or withstand a fist-sized hunk of metal flying at your head at Mach two. That wasn’t a few hundred joules. It was five hundred thousand.

Ignoring the shouts and cheers from either side, I picked up the braids while making sure that no one saw me plunging my hand into his flesh. While the raw DNA collection was extremely useful, and I’d already collected clippings from every single ‘liberated’ braid so far, that alone would never provide a whole picture. Terrestrial life came into existence within a primordial soup and carried that chaotic nature within it ever since. It wasn’t intentional — evolution simply played with the cards it was given, but if I were to ever crack the secret that was the wermage magic, I would need proper samples. I would need to see the parts of the building itself and not just the specifications for individual bricks used in its construction. And if I had a choice in the matter, it would be much better if those samples were taken from the magically well-endowed specimens.

While I had no plans to intentionally seek out the strongest wermages just so I could kill them and harvest their flesh, I wouldn’t leave a potentially good sample rotting in the field either.

The earth bubbled around my feet and I lunged backwards, dragging a large chunk of stone fused with my ankle. I could hear my scales creak from its grip.

“I should’ve known that your kind knows no honour!” I hissed, breaking off the makeshift fetter on my leg. “To barge into a fight like a coward!”

The feline wermage, not a sheyda, roared back. “Says the cur hiding his magic like a craven fighter with a poisoned blade wrapped in rags! Speak quickly — what trickery did you use to hide your song — and I will make your death quick!”

I didn’t bother with taunts once I’d gotten free. Twisting my body like a spinning top, I whipped my hand loose and sent a chunk of rock downrange. This time, I missed. With inhuman dexterity, she shifted sideways… no, she used a giant floating rock as her magical anchor to throw herself sideways and it — into the path of my projectile. The rock shattered with a loud snapping sound, sending shrapnel in the direction of enemy forces but missing my attacker.

I tsked as I reached for the lashes, dodging the stone spikes whistling past me. Having killed a wermage with a single hit due to his complacency, there was no way I was going to repeat his mistake and just assume this mage was peppering me with harmless to my skinsuit projectiles. For all I knew, she might have some momentum or inertia magic imbued in those rocksickles and they would just refuse to stop as they reached my armour. There were precedents for that kind of thought — some of our ballista bolts were runed to make them magically lighter during launch and regain their true mass mid-flight. I didn’t know where they were gaining that additional momentum but it was likely harvested from Newton spinning in his grave.

I wasn’t here to earn glory, merely stall for time while Aikerim pressured the other Pillars from presenting husbands to my wives, but if I could get an opportunity, I would test it against non-vital parts of my skinsuit first.

She scowled as my lashes unfurled with a hiss. “Another trick?”

I blinked then shot myself forward. Another wall, but I was used to punching them through by now. My lash whipped around as soon as I emerged from the other side and met her drawn sabre, causing a loud grinding sound as the segments of my lash came into contact with the shifting rocky surface of the enchanted weapon. It wrapped around the blade only to get entrapped within a chunk of stone in turn.

Without skipping a beat, the wermage discarded her weapon and charged at me.

Sparing a quick glance at her enchanting another sabre with the liquid rock layer, I yanked myself to the side and whipped the entombed lash like an enormous makeshift flail of death. Now it was her time to duck and dodge as the boulder came around full circle, with the lash howling and screaming as it cut through the air.

The boulder loosened as it passed above her and I was forced to grip it in order not to loosen it back at my own damn maniple. Half a turn later, and the chunk of stone flew off to greet the ranks of our enemy forces in person.

That move cost me, however, and her sabre slammed into my chest, causing yet another clang as bronze met steel.

“Why did you rush to put the helmet back on, cur!?” The wermage spat as she grabbed it by the handle of the previously-lodged sabre and yanked it off. “To hide your…”

I turned towards her and watched as she went pale in multiple spectra with the five front-facing eyes of my skinsuit. I let one of my vents open so that I could hiss, “You look but you do not see.”

Whatever she tried to say next turned into a wet wheezing gurgle as my kattar pushed through the rock and metal of her armour and plunged deep into her gut. Before I could twist it further, I got slammed with some magical force, throwing me aside like an invisible giant palm swatting a fly.

“Forest walker!” she screamed, clutching the rapidly healing wound and I grimaced in frustration. The wermage was quite paranoid from the start and her magic wasn’t easy to bypass to begin with. The shifting layers of rock, mud, and sand not only protected her from direct contact with my lashes but could be easily discarded when necessary. At the same time, my grub was still taking its sweet time to emerge so I was quite limited in my options when it came to chemical synthesis in field conditions. I had a few irritants and a bunch of healing ‘ointments’ but nothing that could kill her from a single breath. I simply couldn’t risk storing such compounds on me while travelling within an arm. A single accident and my neck would be on a chopping block for wiping out half of my maniple.

This was why I preferred to ambush and kill my enemies as quickly as possible. I wasn’t a warrior. I remembered every single lesson taught to me by Akhtar Siamak as well as the scraps of knowledge I’d acquired from other trainers but that helped me little. My augmented memory simply couldn’t match the decades or even centuries of experience of some wermages. On the contrary, it only boggled my mind down with options that I had no experience with. Yes, I could probably win in a sword fight against a murk or a wer, but they weren’t a real concern to me ever since I’d grown my skinsuit.

The beat of drums changed their rhythm and I almost stumbled as my legs remembered the drills. Fucking great. The maniple was charging forward. Now I had to kill the wermage before the rest of the soldiers rolled over me. The blade required me to get close. The projectiles were ineffective. The lashes… the wermage didn’t look too winded but we only fought for only a handful of seconds so far. A thousand paper cuts it was, then.

“You wanted to hear my song?” I asked my opponent and reached into my kaftan. “Let me play it for you.”

I pivoted on my leg, pushing myself into a spin, while my fingers touched the array of artefacts draped over my chest. My flexible, magical keyboard that I had nowhere else to put. I found the correct chords without looking, adding the notes to the oppressive thrum of drums and charging feet approaching us from our side. While the notion of going to battle with a proper hymn was appealing to me, the theatrics were there to sow confusion. And the confusion bought me time. My feet gouged the earth as the lashes spun me up and kept me spinning fast enough for at least one of them to stretch out into a wide spinning disc with me acting like the centre of the spinning top. Lacking any magic to ignore physics outright, I tilted my plane of rotation, letting the conservation of momentum drag me directly into my target. If she could defend against one or two heavy strikes, I would offer her a thousand.

Spells flew toward me once again and even some arrows, but I wasn’t blinded by the steel bucket on my head anymore. My lashes weren’t noodles either — a few adjustments in mass distribution here, a convenient use of air resistance there, and I could yank my body around just as quickly as the wermage did with her floating counterweights. The power drain was significant, however. I felt the skinsuit’s notification that it was running on battery power just as I could feel the hot coolant being pumped through my arms into my lashes and back as it tried to dump the excess heat.

“Now tell me, kitty,” I murmured as I kept playing. “Will you stand and fight or will you duck and run?”

Neither my speech nor my song were loud enough to be heard through the noise of my lashes but the music wasn’t for her — it was for me. It gave structure to my thoughts and encouraged me to improvise.

The wermage chose the third option. Her magic rippled the earth, growing pillars and mounds in my path.

I kept accelerating towards her anyway. The smaller pillars were smashed through and the bigger obstacles were avoided with lashes adjusting to the contours of the ground as they spun around. Pushed by my approach, she did two jumps backwards — luring me further — and then jumped to the side, circling me around.

I didn’t stop nor did I change the direction of my movement. Apart from being named as a challenger, I was one of the spears of the first maniple, Kiannika arm. A soldier, not a warrior. Navigators neither trained nor fought with swords and spears, yet each one of us was militarily educated. We had to be. Each tree-ship was a weapon of total annihilation by its very nature. Even without any dedicated weapon systems — the smallest Kugelblitz drive could glass an entire city like Samat while relativistic lithobraking could erase cellular life across the entirety of Emanai.

I heard the drums of war. And I obeyed their order.

The spinning disc of my lashes flew into the enemy infantry, mowing the front line. Those tough enough to withstand the hits were tossed aside. Those quick enough to guard or block had their weapons and shields broken or ripped away. Those unlucky to touch the lashes with their bare skin screamed in pain and collapsed from paralytics infusing their body. Those lucky to avoid all of that… had their luck tested a few dozen times per second.

Amidst the screams, carnage, and flying splinters, I changed my direction once again so that I could travel along the edge of the enemy formation. I couldn’t plunge too deep for the possibility of dumping too much kinetic energy into available targets and running out of steam nor did I need to. Just as I attacked the enemy morale by facing their challenger, I was now pinning the enemy down and softening them up until the maniple stampede would catch up to me. Multiple maniples, but not all of them. From its position high above, Chirp saw that what looked like a mass charge on the ground was nothing more than the right wing of Emanai making an opening move. Not the entire twelve thousand but two at most. Likewise, the enemy I was mowing through wasn’t even the main force of Barsashahr. From what I knew, the nomads themselves predominantly fielded mounted archers and mages. The wall of infantry between us and the river was made up with their vassals, levies, and tributaries. The expendables, quite likely. The cavalry itself was further away and biding their time. Partially because the large chunk of our forces wasn’t committed to the fight and partially because our maniples formed a checkered formation of square hedgehogs. The gaps between individual maniples were nothing but deadly traps for them while allowing our chariots to move between our units with sufficient ease.

Not only was the battle just beginning, but I had a reasonable suspicion that it would last for more than a day.

Unless something significant happened. Like a large chunk of enemy forces getting routed, resulting in a snowball effect among the other units. But that was my hopeful thinking, nothing more — Emanai culture had a clear bias toward the image of a courageous and disciplined warrior; someone, who could stand still, face a certain death, and hold the line. My own finger was currently charging at me while I was in full spin without knowing whether their spears would pierce me or I would mow them down instead. The enemy wasn’t that much different either — my carnage was decimating their front line up to two ranks deep, yet they remained in formation and tried to slow me down as much as they could, even as they prepared for the incoming onslaught of the maniples.

“This is why I hate war,” I grumbled to myself without interrupting my deadly dance. “Are you happy now?”

I knew that stupid, shortsighted way of thinking that was always accompanied by ‘what could go wrong?’. Show up with an army ten times bigger than the garrison of Bayan Gol, scare them into submission without shooting a single spell, collect the ‘tribute’ and fuck off. A quick smash and grab, what could go wrong? Until your army twiddled their thumbs in front of the city walls long enough for Emanai to muster a relief force and march it all the way from Uureg! It mattered little whether they were sieging with toothpicks for weapons or Emanai had an intelligence network robust enough to predict even nomadic incursions because, at the end of it all, it was just two hordes of people butchering each other for a bunch of flimsy or outright made-up reasons.

I gritted my teeth as streams of fire splashed over me, trying to do what the flying rocks and arrows couldn’t. A good choice, considering I was having issues with my heat management, but too little too late. It actually made matters worse for them as I was now enveloped in a firestorm, wrapped in around me by the vortex of air I was generating with my spin. The cavalry response was somewhere between sluggish and nonexistent, but I was expecting that. This wasn’t the age of light-speed communications and complex decision-making within a fraction of a second. Things took time. Whether it was the shaman who had to understand what his familiar was seeing, or the chieftain who had to hear the shaman’s report and then make a decision whether to throw their riders into battle now or wait for a more opportune moment and hope that the infantry kept holding. If that chieftain could make such decisions at all — it was possible that those units needed a direct order to do so.

My focus shifted back to the wermages in my vicinity and a small smile touched my lips. The earth wermage that I’d left behind had found herself seriously pressured by a certain archer.

“You pissed off the wrong cougar with your assault, my cougar” I murmured.

While Irje wasn’t an exceptional archer by any means, at least not yet, she was visibly eager to shoot that wermage dead by the scowl on her face and fire in her eyes. She also had plenty of arrows, sharpened by me, to pierce any stone defences. Something that the wermage had discovered for herself since she was now limping and clutching her blood-soaked thigh.

“Keep her busy while I wrap this up,” I whispered to my wife as if Irje could hear me.

Rather than slapping away my latest victim, my lashes used him as a pivot point. The hapless wer was chucked further than the others while I launched myself over the enemy ranks. Right at the wermage carrying the battle standard of her unit.

From the beginning, I didn’t come here to kill and slaughter. The task was always to win.

A wave of magical force slammed into me, but I still got close enough to my target and dragged her into my spin. A quick game of tug and wrench and the screaming wermage was sent barrelling into her own forces while I was now in possession of the enemy vexilloid.

“The standard is down!” I yelled to the roiling mass of people around me, shaking the now-upturned staff with a carved palm on its top. “Trampled down by the celestial cow, Kiannika!”

And then I Immediately legged… lashed from there; before the confused masses could put two and two together and swarm me in place. Luckily for me, the wall of spears finally reached the enemy. Our fingers didn’t smash into them at full charge like cavalry lances, but they got close enough to reach the front lines, dropped their pavises into the ground, and formed temporary bastions from where our wermages could enact their deadly strikes at a point-blank range. The thundering thrum of feet stomping the ground that rivalled my spinning buzz was now replaced by the sounds of steel meeting steel and wood rapping wood. The sounds of screams and shouts, spell swooshes and arrow twangs had remained but grew in intensity.

The smell… The pungent smell of shit and piss was ever-present for a while — once the forces were in battle formations, the notion of toilet breaks didn’t exist for either side — but now there was the unmistakable sulphuric scent of burning hair. The scents of blood and burning flesh were too faint in comparison, but they were present nevertheless.

The spears wielded their weapons with experience, fencing with them as each spear was nothing more than a rapier — stabbing where they could and pulling away when the enemy was about to smash the wooden shaft and render it unusable. It was an entire martial art in itself. Alas, no martial art was unbeatable and that was why Emanai maniples left small gaps between the finger spear walls. Not to lure the enemy in but to allow our wer and wermages to spill out and engage in the melee with an already pressured enemy.

Pressure was the name of the game.

One of those gaps was my destination. The whole area was engulfed in chaos and there was very little left of my yellow Emanai kaftan for me to be recognised as ‘possibly friendly’ at a quick glance. My brigandine was also caked in mud, blood, and soot, making the original golden hue of the aramid silk impossible to discern. If I were to launch myself deep into our maniple, I would likely be skewered by our own spells and arrows. Or mauled by one of our werewolves. Muramat would certainly jump at such an opportunity. I was also carrying the enemy standard with me — a juicy target for every member of our rank and file.

At least the undead hordes of Kishava were located in the centre of our army, protecting our supply train. I knew a thing or two about automations without feelings of fear and pain and had no intention to engage with arusak-at any time soon.

But I wasn’t the first Emanai soldier with such a problem. Retracting my skinsuit mid-flight, I landed in a small open spot, burying myself ankle-deep into the ground that had been already trampled into mud. “With her lightning horns, she strikes enemies and cowards alike!” I shouted one of our passwords, watchwords, once again alluding to the namesake of our arm. My yell was hoarse from the strain of fighting, previous yells, and, most importantly, from the residual heat that was dumped into my body by the retreating skinsuit. Not all of it — I kept the skinsuit around my torso where it was covered by my brigandine — but enough to be an issue if I didn’t address it soon.

Almost immediately, a clawed hand grabbed me from behind and lifted me into the air.

“You’ve fought well,” Lita’af growled in her werewolf form, dragging me inside our maniple.

“Thank- Lita’af? What are yo- No, stop! I am married!”

She stopped unbuckling one of my belts and looked at me like I was an idiot. “Erf… Your armour is burning.”

“It’s only sizzling, I know that!” I huffed, modestly covering my chest before she could see the artefacts inside.

Stupid wermages. No sense of propriety!