Angel had been spending skill points on Schema, recipes that allowed her to make everything from clothes to weapons to traps. Me and Lulu helped her gather materials, then sat down and watched as she rapidly constructed a small treehouse from wood, rope, and palm thatch. It was oddly hypnotic. She had to construct the pieces manually using a kinetic mini-game, but once they were created, she could telekinetically snap the pre-fabricated pieces wherever she needed them. We watched her construct the camouflaged tree platform, then the walls, then the roof. She fashioned netting hung with leaves from the same tree to conceal it. By the time she was done, I was pretty sure any ordinary human would miss it.

“Nice digs.” I lashed my tail from side to side, gazing up at it. “Can’t make it larger?”

“Sorry. But if we’re stealthing it to avoid Eisenblatter and co, I can’t risk making it bigger.” She signed down from the tiny porch of the shelter, which was just big enough for her to raise and lower a rope ladder.

“It’s fine. We’ll just lie here in the cold and the dirt.” I heaved a sigh, and dramatically flopped to the ground. “All alone. In the dark.”

“And the Oscar for Biggest Drama Queen in the Jungle goes to…” Angel mimed silent laughter.

“Nuudu!” Lulu exclaimed with delight, clapping her pseudopods together.

With some effort, I arranged my tentacles so they looked like a big middle finger from above. Angel put her hand to her mouth, rocking with mirth.

The rest of the day gave us time off to gather - and scout. Lulu and I followed my map to the overrun base, carefully surveying it from the trees. It was well-guarded. There were snipers in position, concealed on tree platforms like the one Angel had just built, and I didn’t feel like getting closer than about a quarter mile. There were numerous patrol trails, and my trap senses were pinging me in all directions. It was too risky to get any closer in the daytime.

Because of that, the three of us had to be up at three am for this little adventure to rout the Maroons. By ten past, we had joined the Sergeant - he refused to be called ‘Vigiles’ - to inspect his troops. His men were just about the roughest mongrels I’d seen since the Hell Pigs camp. Unshaven, hard-eyed, chewing toothpicks as they wrapped leather strips around their clubs and sharpened their swords. As Angel pulled me up in front of them and slid to the ground, several of the men grinned at her. When she greeted the Sergeant Vade - twice - he ignored her.

“Sergeant Vade, Eisenblatter ordered that we be ready to depart by quarter past.” Angel voiced louder, relying on me for quick telepathic translation. It was dark, and he was wearing dark green and brown camo paint suited to the nighttime jungle. “Your men are still preparing.”

“Still got two minutes on the clock, Princess.” The sergeant had an English accent, but from the rough northern parts of England. Bald, with a pinched face and three days of stubble, he towered over Angel. He also got uncomfortably close to her. I was about to put my hackles up, but before I could move, Angel grabbed the man by both his chipped ears and half-pulled, half-jumped up to headbutt him right on the bridge of his nose.

“Jesus!” The man staggered back, bleeding profusely from the face. His expression contorted into a mask of rage. “The fuck was that for?!”

“’Hello’ didn’t work, and you’re getting up in my face. I figure violence is the only language you understand.” Angel glared at him with hard, pale eyes. She’d fashioned some [Ghillie Pants] and [Rex Leather Boots] in the hide while we’d been out, and she’d also donned facepaint to hide her albino complexion. “My name is Vigiles Angel Malhela, recently promoted to sergeant after defeating Captain Targent of Fort Hope in a 3-to-3 duel. Call me ‘Princess’ again, and I’ll cut your damn balls off and feed them to my Legion.”

“Do I get a say in this?” I asked. “And if not, could you at least peel the Rocky Mountain Oysters?”

Vade’s Legion fanned its wings and let out a piercing tea-kettle hiss. It was an [Infera], a Body/Air/Dark type Legion, the first Dark-element creature I’d seen since arriving. Its description was ‘A bat straight out of hell’, and it looked the part: a hulking, humanoid bat with a scrunched muzzle, thin saggy skin, tall quivering ears, and baleful dead yellow eyes that glowed in the dark. It had wings instead of arms, like a harpy, with ‘hands’ at the elbow joint. It was staring at me. I stared right back.

“Alright, you lot! Form ranks!” Vade called to his men.

The platoon reluctantly assembled into a proper line and stood to attention. As we ran inspecting, it was like looking over a police lineup. These guys were thugs who struggled not to pick their noses or play with their weapons. There was none of the Centurion’s typical cleanliness and discipline. A prickle of uncertainty stirred in my gut.

“I said it before, and I’ll say it again. Something’s fucky,” I remarked to Lulu, nearly invisible in her Liquid Armor form.

“Ooo,” she agreed softly.

“Right, all. You all know whatcha here for,” Vade drawled. “Me and Bruisy scouted the Maroons camp last night. Points of interest have been marked on your maps. You know the drill: cover for me and, uh, ‘Angel’ while we take out any Brutes. Everyone know what he’s doing?”

“Yes sir,” the line replied, roughly in unison.

Vade hawked, and spat on the ground. “Then let’s get this shit-show on the road. Me and girly take point, Charlie rearguard, command to western flank and medical to east. Move out!”

Angel back strode over to me and bounded up onto my back, her rifle resting on the edge of one tentacle. No one joined up with us, and some of the men sniggered as they broke into their fireteams and moved out. The sergeant wasn’t laughing. Vade shot Angel a look of pure venom when he thought no one was looking – an expression that told me the guy was already planning to frag her by the end of the night.

“So, what do you want to bet Vade and company are mercenaries?” I padded out into the lead with Vade and his Legion. I was wary of the Infera. Being both Dark and Air, it was a difficult match for me and Lulu if push came to shove. “And by mercenaries, I mean bandits that Eisenblatter was told to hire to take you out.”

“They can try.” There was a fierce hiss in her voice as she steered me deeper into the dark jungle.

Vade was the only one fielding a Legion, but four other men had monsters on chains. They were called [Corpoi]. They weren’t dinos, but they weren’t real animals, either. They resembled giant scaly dogs with frog mouths and big, bulbous eyes. They also produced long, ropey strands of drool that dragged along the ground. For some reason, they reminded me of bugs.

“God, I hate bugs,” I muttered to Lulu.

The slime vibrated in response: and for the first time since I met her, I felt a psionic response. No words, but a wave of… determination?

“What? You gonna get the bugs while I hide up on a chair?”

Her vibration intensified, along with her sense of purpose.

I huffed. “My hero.”

Vade signalled us to slow our advance as we drew closer to the overrun camp. I could give him credit for maneuvering us around the traps. By the trails and the distant heat signatures, I could tell the guards were stationed in roughly in the same place as they were last time.

“I can see some of those snipers now,” I remarked to Angel.

“Where?” Angel slid from my back, dropping down to a crouch. She held up a hand for Vade, who scowled at her until she pointed at the trees and mimed shooting a rifle.

I concentrated on the flickers of orange and red. The bodyheat of the snipers stood out against the sea of black trees and foliage ahead of us, even at a distance. “On our eleven and one o’clock. Big tall mahogany trees… there’s hides in there, but I can see their heads sticking out.”

“Do you think they’ve seen us?” Angel signed.

“Not a chance.”

“What?” Vade hissed as he came up beside us. “What’s the fuckin’ hold up?”

“Snipers.” Angel pointed their positions out in the gloom.

His eyes creased. No one liked snipers. “Mark ‘em on the clan map.”

Angel opened up her HUD, eyes flicking from place to place on the ghostly, barely-lit outline of it. He did the same. When he saw the locations, he grunted.

“Good spotting,” he admitted reluctantly. “Bruce’ll take care of ‘em.”

“He named his Legion Bruce?” I rumbled with amusement as the Infera’s head swivelled. “Bruce the Bat-Brute?”

“As in Bruce Wayne, I guess?” Angel signed back. “But yeah. I got nothing.”

The Infera waddled past us, walking on its hind feet and wing hands, head held low. It scaled a large tree with ease, eeriely silent. I watched it steadily as its heat moved out onto a big bough, and by the way it was moving its head and ears, figured it had some sonic means to detect the men as long as they were on the same horizontal plane. After a couple of minutes, it launched itself into the air with a soft ‘whuff’, flawlessly navigating between the branches in a ball of profound, unnatural silence and darkness. I lost sight of its heat signature, and when it closed in with the first sniper, I lost sight of the human, too.

“What in the…” I trailed off, watching the cold, dark blob glide over to the second sniper. “Okay. Dark-type Legions are fucking freaky.”

Lulu quivered in agreement. She extruded a pseudopod, and mimed crossing herself.

“What is it doing?” Angel leaned to me, trying to see.

“You know. Just murdering people in perfect darkness and silence.” To Angel’s other side, Vade had a creepy grin plastered over his face as he empathically rode along with his Legion. I glanced at him. “Also, Vade here is kind of freaking me out.”

“Alright. It’s done.” The sergeant blinked a couple of times. “Easy-peasy. Let me know if you spot anything else, awright?”

“Sure.” Angel had also noticed the expression, and clutched her rifle a little tighter as the platoon moved out.

We got in close to the camp: about a hundred yards from the palisade, much closer than I’d been able to get in the daytime. Camp Victory looked to be in much better shape than Eisenblatter’s pigsty. The sharpened log walls were clean and properly repaired. Angel began to ask me something, but her fingers and expression trailed off as some unseen prompt grabbed her attention. “Damn, they’ve just tagged the guards. We’re going in on a count of ten.”

“Great.” I tensed, and my tentacles split out of their long ‘tail’ into four separate hydra heads, slithering quietly through the brush. Lulu’s body gripped a little more tightly around mine. I could feel waves of apprehension rolling off her. “Just noting once again that both Lulu and I think this is sus as hell.”

“Ooo,” Lulu agreed firmly.

Angel gave me a short nod, just before a bloodcurdling scream rang from the north-east. I whipped my head around to see our soldiers and their Copoi charging at the guard posts like a horde of… well… dogs. The guards posted on top of the called out an alarm, but was swarmed by men and Legions. They pulled him out of his blind and clubbed him unconscious within seconds.

“SLAVERRRRS!” A guard we hadn’t marked cried out from somewhere.

“Wait. What did he just call us?” I bounded after Angel as she broke concealment, cursing under her breath.

“Those idiots!” She ranted back to me. “What the hell is Vade doing?”

“Slavers! Centurion slavers!” The cries Angel couldn’t hear were now ricocheting through the camp. A woman’s voice – clear, mature, commanding – rang out above the others to my inhumanly sensitive ears. “Get the elders out! All warriors to positions!”

“Angel, wait!” I called to her psionically as she dove for a rough foxhole. “These people in the village are calling out ‘slavers’. Not Centurions. Slavers. I didn’t sign up to do any fucking slaving.”

“They… what?” Angel stopped sighting down her rifle and ducked behind a tree trunk.

I dropped into concealment and looked to the east, letting my thermal vision zone in on the first fallen guard. Our troops had trussed the man they’d knocked out and were dragging him away.

My heart sunk. “Angel, there’s no way we’re the good guys here.”

“God dammit… fuck, it’s too late: the attacks’ started. It’s us or them now.” Angel sounded tense, but focused as she narrowed her eyes, swung around, and pulled the trigger. There was a thump and a scream as one of the archers on the wall took a round to the forehead and was hurled back off the palisade.

Fuck. Well, she was right. I pawed the ground and made a quick decision – to fight now and worry about why after our asses were out of the frying pan. I charged the palisade and bounded to the top with claws and tentacles. The fighters on the catwalk – two men and a woman – whirled on me in sudden terror as I raised my tentacles… and smacked the three of them down into the camp instead of stabbing them and waving them around like sock puppets. They fell hard, took a bit of damage, but were able to scramble up to their feet and run.

The reason why I’d spared their lives was down below in the camp. The Maroons fighters had formed a semi-circle in front of a hastily barricaded area in front of the tents, where pre-prepared logs had been collapsed to cut off flanking from the front gate. Meanwhile, at the rear gate, a second force of people was helping some of the residents out. The elderly residents.

Bandit camps did not keep frail elderly people in their midst. Bandits wouldn’t set up a campsite in such a way that those people could be protected and evacuated. I swiveled my head to assess the rest of the scene, ignoring a crude Bone Arrow that bounced off Lulu’s coat of slime and clattered harmlessly to the ground.

“There’s old people here,” I reported to Angel. “No sign of raiding equipment. No carts full of coal or barrels of oil, like your damn commander told you. There’s about thirty people, and ten or so of them are old folks.”

Lulu was blasting me with her own feelings on the matter as I spoke. “Nuu! Hoo!”

Angel couldn’t reply telepathically, but before I could jump back down to rejoin her, our fearless unit broke the gate and charged in screaming – right into a hail of arrows, crossbow bolts, and one rifle. The wielder was a fierce, slim woman with a scarred face and short black hair, who shouted encouragement to her squad as they loaded and fired on the soldiers pouring through the gate. We had even numbers, about twenty fighters each - except that we had the Copoi, and Vade’s Infera Brute. Vade’s Legion tanked three crossbow bolts as it charged in ahead of him, blasting waves of sonic that send people reeling and screaming away from it, while the Centurions’ lizard-hounds filled the night air with hissing squeals.

“Come on, lads! We’ll take the gents to the mines and that bitch to the barracks!” Sergeant Vade yelled encouragement to his unit as they closed into melee range.

“Yeah. We are definitely the bad guys here.” I shook my head and rumbled, tensing into pounce position. “Well, Lulu… I think you know what we have to do.”

Lulu echoed me with silent agreement as I wiggled my butt and leaped out into the open air, eyes focused on my target.

Sergeant Vade.