Saphiria had been peering into Dimitry’s mind whenever he weakened the metallic bonds of solid iron with meltia to produce cast steel. When he broke down the glucose in honey with freezia. At the start of the month, when he was half a city apart, decomposing methanol’s toxic metabolites after a terror attack. The pairing bands were unknowingly conveying his thoughts to her with every modified spell he cast.

What purpose did the artifacts serve? When were they made? Who created them, and how did the people of this world know that pairing bands worked with magic when only a modified spell could activate them? Questions without answers flooded Dimitry as he strode down the coast. He and Saphiria had been testing the artifacts every night since he confronted her on the subject, but his concerns only grew.

Most troubling was the fear the girl felt whenever she neared Dimitry. The artifacts seeded distrust in Saphiria, convinced her to flee, something about a vague subterranean beckoning. She claimed the demons could never sway her will, but the split-second stares and the catches in her voice suggested otherwise.

Still, Dimitry wanted to explore the possibilities the artifacts provided. Not only did they convey the ideology behind modified spells, but they also allowed him to share the accompanying mental imagery with Saphiria. She envisioned molecules as he did. How they reacted to photons and heat. Felt the chemical implications of liquid to solid phase transitions and the decomposition of sucrose into glucose and fructose.

Alone, the information was unintelligible to Saphiria, but if Dimitry took the time to explain what she saw, he knew the girl was bright enough to make sense of it all. Assuming scientific knowledge was the salient factor, the pairing bands could greatly reduce the time she needed to cast her first modified spell.

But Dimitry didn’t rush Saphiria. They delved into experimentation only when she was emotionally prepared and never a moment sooner. With ‘demonic’ forces trying to turn her against him, Dimitry couldn’t take the risk.

He needed her help more than ever.

Freshly cast guns cradled in their arms, troops escorted construction squads lugging logs and buckets and the amputated limbs of dead crawlers across the beach. Everyone worked with haste, desperate to set up defenses before the rapidly approaching Night of Repentance. A heathen horde would assault the settlement within days.

As Dimitry walked past armed troops, their numbers growing as fast as Saphiria’s blacksmiths could cast steel, his hand glided along the gritty surface of a wall whose length vanished behind a cliff across the cove. Uneven timber beams thunked beneath his boots, and moist, icy sand crumbled from the dense structure, accumulating in the spaces between his fingers.

That was the temporary barrier Warnfrid and Moritz designed. The amputee general had ordered the troops to collect every available building material—mostly heathen corpses and the crumbling brick remnants of nearby Zeran facilities—and tasked the stonemasons with assembling from them a barricade that could protect soldiers as they gunned down intruders invading from the ocean. Now, a wall stretched along the western shore. Assorted rubble formed the foundation and heathen limbs reinforced the structure with moist sand cementing it all together. Crudely chiseled crawler core halves leaned against the inner edge at equidistant intervals. They would provide makeshift bunkers for the infantry to hide beneath once corrosive feathers began falling from the sky. The defenses weren’t perfect, but they were damn good for the month Dimitry’s troops had to work with.

Just three more days. If the barrier held that long, a new month would dawn, and his people could safely convert the mountains of stored resources they had gathered into schools for educating the curious. Homes with roofs. Stocked laboratories, furnished factories, a coastal hospital built to modern specifications. And most importantly, defenses that reliably repelled future heathen invasions.

Just three more days.

That was all Dimitry needed.

“It won’t hold.”

His stomach sank. He glanced at a woman whose sparse words seldom sought to please.

She limped at his side, copper bangles rattling around her wrist and two silver hoop-bound pigtails bouncing over her shoulders and against her waist with every step. Nartuya was the former mercenary who now served as Dimitry’s bodyguard. While nowhere near as reliable or entertaining as Angelika, who was too busy training soldiers and murdering heathens to follow him around, only a mage could thwart an assassination by another mage.

Or that was the hope. Dimitry didn’t know whether Nartuya could be trusted. Rather than keeping an eye out for assailants, she spent her days glancing over her shoulder as if for the perfect moment to escape. Precious claimed the mercenary was sincere when she vowed to serve Dimitry, but she was imprisoned in Malten’s dungeons no longer. People changed with their environment. More so when that environment teemed with heathens.

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

Nartuya held up three fingers, each adorned in excessive ritualistic rings that resembled the ones Dimitry saw during his brief stint at Coldust. “There’ll be too few of us. Me, the guild enchantress, and the brat. We won’t be enough.”

Though Dimitry wished he could disagree, mages were an invaluable resource. Saphiria and her court sorceresses would return home before the Night of Repentance, and the guild expedition that had secured his settlement was already gone. It was half a week ago that Greta rushed into his tent, gray braids occluding her troubled face. The aged Fire Leader mentioned a crisis in Malten. She and her girls had to depart immediately. Only Katerina would remain to serve as an enchantress.

“We’ll manage.” Dimitry stiffened his posture. “We can protect ourselves now.”

“With those?” Nartuya nudged her chin at the spherical mines bobbing in the ocean, becoming flat and cylindrical as they met the sand. “They need a sorceress to work.”

“Three’s enough for that. And if it’s not, we got this.” His boot tapped a fuse snaking along the sand. “And if that fails, they will activate on their own.”

“Will they? Your holy magic didn’t seem to work on them.”

The mercenary spoke of an abnormally large wave of heathens that had struck at dawn. While they weren’t as organized as they were when the giant bird variant accompanied them, their numbers were growing. Ten struck in tandem today: a carrier, five crawlers, and four fliers. The carrier bled to death soon after the beast bumped into a naval mine, pushing a ramrod with an ignia-enchanted tip into the payload, half-washed blue innards still coloring the sand.

The land mines weren’t as effective. Not a single flint and steel mechanism had activated when the crawlers stumbled over the tripwires. That was the first of the two reasons for Dimitry’s presence at the beach—to investigate the failure. He discovered that the flint shattered from overwhelming tugging forces before it could ignite the spark. Sturdier components should do the trick. Clewin’s chemists were already on the job, and with some luck, they could fix the problem in time.

“Those were experimental,” Dimitry said. “They’ll be better for the Night of Repentance.”

“Experimental magic?”

“Zera’s visions aren’t always clear.”

Nartuya exhaled an amused huff, beads clinking at the bend of her septum ring. “You’ve got them all fooled, don’t you?” She shot a young soldier a dismissive glance. “Look at him. It’s like he thinks he’s already conquered the world. His arms may shoot iron munitions, but it’s slow. And inaccurate. All morning they swarmed like buzzards in heat, shielding their faces as they struggled to swat away the same few fliers terrorizing your village, panicking every time a feather fell. How do you expect their holy weapons to save them once foes swarm the horizon?”

Just as Angelika had warned, the mercenary’s pessimism did little to inspire confidence. Dimitry knew the stakes. Two thousand lives hung on his every decision. Though he cared little that Nartuya didn’t believe him to be the apostle, he preferred not to hear warnings of impending doom when levelheaded calculation was what they needed most.

Hoping a tad of confidence would keep her focused, Dimitry knelt.

“Prayers won’t save us,” Nartuya said.

He plucked spherical pebbles from the sand. “You’re worried that guns aren’t reliable against fliers, right?”

“I’m not worried at all. I know how it’ll happen. You’ll tell them all to fight in Zera’s name, and then, when your defenses crumble and the heathens feed on the corpses of your chosen, you’ll order us to run away. I’ll grab the vol, you the coin, and if anyone tries to stop us…” Her hand emerged from her sleeve, brandishing a short-barreled voltech rifle. “I’ll silence them quickly. The queen will be years too late when she finds us, the goods she entrusted to you long spent.”

Dimitry shook his head. Remora was truly cruel if it could push young women into unabashed cynicism. Hands full of rocks, he pointed at the soldier she had most recently mocked. “Hey.”

Hovering idly over a group of stonemasons, the kid stepped back. He glanced around. Then, as if realizing that the apostle really did call for him, he rushed close and knelt even lower than Dimitry.

“It’s alright, stand up. I need you to load your gun. Without the iron ball.”

No older than seventeen, the kid nodded with excessive vigor. He grabbed the pouch at his waist, shaky fingers fumbling the string loose, and poured black powder into the barrel and onto the priming pan.

Nartuya watched on, one eyebrow raised.

After the kid had completed the lengthy ritual, Dimitry pushed a copper mark into the barrel, the coin flatly covering the black powder charge. He rolled the pebbles on top and retreated. “Now aim at the horizon and fire.”

“Fire… Sir Holiness?”

“Fire means release. And don’t forget your earplugs.”

“R-right.” He jammed the wax of loery—an odd hump-backed gopher native to this forest—into his ears and thrust his finger into the trigger. A crackle boomed across the beach, knocking the kid back and blasting improvised ammunition from the muzzle in a wide, messy arc over the ocean.

People halted their labor to watch stones plop all across the shore.

A glance at Nartuya’s wide-eyed expression showed that she understood Dimitry’s point. Though each pellet lacked the velocity of a single round, their spread could easily shatter a flier’s fragile wings. Especially when dozens of shots fired in tandem. Guns might have lacked the speed and accuracy of voltech rifles, but sheer brute force conferred its own advantages. One needed only to think clearly to see them.

Dimitry slapped the kid’s shoulder. “You can go back to your post.”

Even as the Hospitaller resumed their duties, Nartuya’s gaze remained on the water where the pebbles fell. Her voice fell quiet. “You might have convinced them all, but I know the truth. Parent to child, brother to sister, sultan to servant, when lives are on the line, people only care for one thing—themselves.”

“I’m not sure if that’s true,” Dimitry said, “but even if it is, is that necessarily bad? We all stand to profit from cooperation. People get to build their homes, I get my hospital, and you get your freedom.”

“Only while you need us. As soon as it’s convenient, you’ll step over our corpses to get yourself to safety.”

“Then do your job well. I’ll have no choice but to keep you around.”

After a long pause, Nartuya pulled her truncated voltech rifle back into her sleeve. “We’ll see.” The bangles on her arms chimed as she pulled a tattered black hood over her head.

“Your Holiness!” shouted a soldier. He held his patched cloak shut as he rushed closer and dropped into a kneel.

Dimitry recognized the man. Angelika had promoted him to sergeant for killing a crawler that snuck past the afternoon patrol. Apparently, he left his tent to fight without taking the time to put on his pants. A noble act indeed.

He pulled the man to his feet. “Well? Is everything ready?”

“Lady Angelika asks if you’re, uh, Zera retain me, ‘ready to shit your breeches’.”

“Perfect.” Dimitry turned to Nartuya. “Since you expressed doubt in our defenses, I think you might want to see this.”

Dimitry soon arrived at the barrier’s edge, where the fortifications swerved perpendicularly from the coast to defend a short stretch of northern border reaching into the woodlands. Far beyond the wall’s corner, sand blew into the faces of fishermen as they coiled nets around the bases of two tent poles protruding from the ground. A platoon of forty soldiers formed a defensive perimeter around them. The sergeant ran to join the ranks. Though some turned to greet Dimitry with swift bows, not a single person let down their guard. Uncertainty lingered in the air. Whatever orders Angelika gave them must have carried great personal risk.

The prospect troubled Dimitry. To help the girl cultivate her leadership skills, he had entrusted today’s operation to her. His decision should’ve been a non-issue. Angelika was a capable sorceress, sharp and quick-footed, but there was one hiccup: her definition of careful. It was at odds with his.

A nagging in Dimitry’s gut warned that he should have assisted in the planning, and what he saw proved his intuition right.

“His Holiness is here!” the sergeant screamed at the top of his lungs.

“Finally!” a shout replied from a sand cloud on the horizon. “Now stop fucking around and get ready!”

The troops clambered over a barrier nearly as tall as them, leaving only the fishermen on the shore. They split into groups. Each grabbed one of four ropes connecting to the nets and leaned back as if preparing for a deadly game of tug of war.

A horse emerged from the distance with three crawlers and a flier in pursuit. Huddled forward on the saddle was a girl whose scarlet robe and red-brown curls blew back in the salty wind.

Nartuya peered over the barrier. “What’s the brat doing? They’ll outrun her if she doesn’t kill them now.”

Dimitry shared the mercenary’s concerns. He had asked for a trapped heathen to test impedeall on, but he never expected Angelika to be the bait. “I don’t think she’s trying to get away.”

“I will never understand fanatics.”

“I wouldn’t call her a fanatic. Insane? Possibly.”

“Load!” Angelika shouted as she neared.

The soldiers stuffed the barrels of their guns with black powder and plunged iron balls with hastily carved ramrods.

“Does she want the chosen to shoot in her direction?” Nartuya asked. “She’ll be killed by her own men.”

Dimitry’s heel bounced against a half-buried clam shell. Raina would never forgive him if he let her daughter die doing something this stupid. Or perhaps she might understand.

Holding the reins with one hand and loading the voltech rifle clamped beneath her armpit with the other, Angelika pulled up. Her mount leaped over the nets. “Now!”

The fishermen heaved their ropes towards the barrier, hoisting the nets around the tent poles like sails.

“Slipia!”

All three crawlers slid across the beach, the sharp talons of their lanky legs scrambling to grip the frictionless sand surface. Though two peddled just enough to dodge the trap, their central comrade couldn’t move around them, crashing into a tangled web of seaweed-ridden cables instead. The sad sack’s squirming only entrenched it deeper into the nets.

As the other crawlers stabilized on physics-obeying ground, Dimitry’s stomach dropped when he thought they would run down the nearby fishermen, but they continued to chase the sorceress that radiated fresh magic instead. Did the girl predict as much?

Angelika aimed her palm back. “Protectia!” When the assailants slammed into an unseen wall, she barked another command: “Release!”

Twenty guns blared in tandem, riddling the heathens from the side with iron that crushed stone and splattered organs. Blue blood flowed from their cores and holey limbs. The crawlers slowed until they collapsed.

Swinging her torso around, Angelika aimed at the straggler. “Propelia.”

One wing shattered and the other desperately flapping, the flier dropped from the sky in lopsided spirals.

Devil plunging to the earth behind her, Angelika trotted closer. She gave Nartuya a snarled frown before greeting Dimitry with a pompous grin. “Impressed?”

He inhaled a deep breath to settle his racing heart. “I didn’t think you meant it literally when you said I’d shit myself.”

Angelika shrugged. “Everything worked out in the end.”

Dimitry thought he understood. No dealing with heathens ever came without risk, and while he strove to minimize danger, Angelika planned through it. Not his leadership of choice, but the troops seemed happy. They stood victorious with their chests out.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m impressed.”

She snorted a self-indulgent laugh.

“Just try to be more cautious next time.”

“Er… right.” Angelika pivoted towards the soldiers, many of whom warily approached the Hospitaller’s first prisoner of war. She clapped. “Hurry and package the fucker! We’ve got shit to do.”

On the settlement’s periphery, six slender legs of stone lay splayed across a wilderness floor. Withered shrubs, brown and barren, swayed past the mazing circuits of its spherical core. The creature wrestled for freedom even as soldiers hammered its binds into the frozen soil.

Gazes shuttled between the crawler and Dimitry. A young gunman towered over the heathen triumphantly, yet most teetered back as if they treaded a divine line bordering on the sacrilegious. Even Nartuya mumbled repentant prayers since they had left the coast. Malten’s people may have hated The Holy Empire, but almost everyone revered Zera’s gospel. One verse seemed to resonate in the tempered silence: damned she was who housed the devil.

Still, Dimitry’s fingers twitched as they had done before his first cadaver dissection in medical school. The bizarre anatomy of dead crawlers blew his mind, but a living one with all the organs still functioning? That was something else.

“Hey,” Angelika whispered as they passed through the parting crowd. “Shouldn’t we wait ‘till everyone’s sleeping or something?”

“No time.” He crouched beside the squirming monstrosity. “We’ve only got a few days to figure out how impedeall works, and trying to keep secrets will only bite us in the ass. Let’s just get this out of the way so we can do something more important.”

“You say that, but you don’t sound very inconvenienced.”

“Angelika, I need you to stay focused. This is serious.”

“I need to stay focused?”

Faced with a smooth alien chitin of stone, Dimitry’s hand reflexively reached for the surgical mallet poking out of his bag, but as he dug for the accompanying bone chisel, sense took hold. “Shit.” He couldn’t cut open the crawler. Not yet.

“You alright?”

“More or less.” Dimitry grabbed a forged steel scalpel instead. “Hold the leg steady. I’m removing its binds.”

Her face curled in disgust. “I’m not touching that thing. We don’t know where it’s been. Look, there’s coral and barnacles and shit stuck to its knee, and what about the whole ‘the corruption shall wreck the sanguination of your liver’ crap they’ve been telling us since—”

“Ready?”

“Wait!”

Dimitry sliced the rope, and the blunt edge of the crawler’s bladed limb bumped harmlessly into his thigh. Contrary to the lethal inward swiping, the frontal legs seemed to lack antagonistic muscle. Kind of how a crocodile’s mouth opened with less power than it closed. Then again, was muscle even the right word?

“Can’t believe I’m doing this.” Eyes slammed shut, Angelika locked the leg in a full-bodied choke hold, careful to have her thick red robe shield every point of contact.

“Mad’m is punishing the sinner!” an enthusiastic woman cheered from the crowd.

“She said we can throw rocks at the devil later, right?”

“Let’s burn it!”

Though the so-called pious calling for torture alarmed Dimitry, a close glance at the heathen’s circuits stole his attention. Deep within the neon blue maze of extrusions, an almost imperceptible trickle of blood flowed like a stream through a ravine, only to drain into pores at the tip. “Angelika.”

“I’m not talking to you.”

“You might want to let go.”

“First you say hold on, now you say let go. Is it so damn hard to make up your—“ She glanced down to where he pointed. The blue droplets burning into the fabric of her robe made her yelp.

“You’re fine.” Dimitry cut off the sullied cuff and splashed water onto her hand. “It didn’t reach your skin.”

“Where did that come from? I was careful not to break the fucking thing when we caught it.”

He dragged a scissor blade through the depths of the thickest circuit, and a bright liquid accumulated on the forged steel. “From here.”

Angelika leaned in close, and her eyes furrowed. No matter how she twisted or pulled the leg, the heathen’s blood neglected gravity to travel down the same crevice. “They definitely don’t do that when they’re dead. What’s the point of it bleeding all the time?”

“It’s not bleeding,” Dimitry said. “I think it’s some kind of external circulatory system.”

“A who?”

He sat back onto the snow and combed his fingers through his hair. “You know those veiny things under your skin?”

“Yeah, you talk about them all the time.”

“Their purpose is to distribute important chemicals throughout the body. My thinking is that heathens have something similar.”

“I don’t really get it,” she said, “but what if the exposed blood somehow senses the vol exhaust in the air? Maybe that’s why they’re so attracted to magic use.”

Dimitry paused. “Huh.”

“What?”

“You said something smart. Enlightening, almost.”

Cheeks flushing redder than her nose in the cold, Angelika patted the hood of her robe. “Well, I’ve been known to—wait. Why do you sound so surprised?”

Realizing his knowledge of human anatomy might lead him to baseless conjectures, Dimitry vowed to stay open-minded as he resumed his explorations. He discovered that the crawler’s chalky ligaments crystallized from a secreted gel and that it secreted a viscous oil to lubricate its joints. Chinks covered the body with internal spheres that shifted to seal them with the rise of every gale. And the knees. They bent in response to physical stimuli like the patellar reflex made a patient kick.

The investigation continued even as evening took the sky. Dimitry had always sensed that days in this world were much longer than on Earth, but now they felt too short. A spherical moon climbed the horizon, so bright that the growing crowd didn’t need to bring torches to watch him ‘torture the corrupted’. With all the green snow, Dimitry could have sworn he was back in his city of birth, catching a rare glimpse of the Aurora Borealis. The biggest differences were him no longer being a child, the sorceress at his side, and the live monstrosity twitching in front of them.

Angelika tickled the core with a stick, to which the crawler responded by wobbling. “You know, these guys would be kinda cute if they weren’t absolute fucking pricks.”

“Is that so?” Dimitry dripped ethanol into a stone chink.

“Yeah. Just don’t tell anyone I said that. Last thing I want is people thinking—” The sudden silencing of a hundred voices cut Angelika short. She hawked her surroundings, orange eyes widening at what she saw.

Greaves rattled as they approached. Royal knights pushed past the crowd with two court sorceresses emerging from their center. And then one more. Indigo eyes cold and gold-painted armor adorning all but her sooty face, Saphiria stepped forward. Not a word sounded until she spoke. “I pray all is well.”

Angelika averted her gaze and possibly considered playing dead.

For the princess of steel to halt her metallurgical endeavors to come here meant only one thing: Dimitry was getting carried away. The entire colony must have heard about his heathen test subject by now. With a heavy heart and to avoid giving the wrong (or perhaps right) impression, he put his curiosity to rest. “We’ve just finished the preparations, Your Highness. The purification is about to begin.”

“Purification?” a stray voice escaped the crowd.

Saphiria offered a slight nod as if to say ‘good luck’. She retreated with a confident stride that inspired the troops to follow.

“You too,” Dimitry whispered. “Back off a bit.”

Angelika frowned. “I don’t want to be alone with her. Besides, who knows what’ll happen? You might need the help.”

“I’m not going to risk hitting you by accident. We don’t know what the spell does to a person, and I don’t intend to find out. At least not today.”

“My reflectia leathers protected me last time. Should be fine now, too.”

“Just go.”

“Just go,” she mimicked through a scrunched-up face. Patting dirt off her robe, Angelika stumbled over nothing on her way to pose formally beside Saphiria. Or that was the intention. She hunched forward with the grace of a nervous troll when Leandra’s hand fell on her shoulder.

Wishing his commanding officer would at least look confident, Dimitry drew his vol pouch and approached the crawler from the front. Impedeall had once befuddled a group of heathens. What effect would the magic have this time?

“It’s starting!”

Voices hushing all around, Dimitry grabbed a lustrous green pellet and held his palm forward. “Impedeall.”

The crawler’s limbs dropped. Though the heathen had struggled for hours, now, it neither moved nor wiggled. Every stone organ lay completely still.

Saphiria’s eldest knight lifted the red visor of his yellow helmet and squinted his eyes. “Celeste guide us… the holy magic. It has pacified the beast.”

A brief round of gossip followed, but fell silent once more when the crawler began rocking on the ground. Its free limb curled towards the core, oil seeping from the joints, stone rubbing against stone—an odd display that elicited squeaks bordering on sobs.

“It repents for its sins,” Saphiria said.

Though the girl spoke like a warlord mocking the shattered morale of her opponent, and the cheering implied that everyone interpreted her statement as such, Dimitry sensed pity in her tone. The way the crawler shook—it resembled a lost toddler. He almost felt bad for the murderous thing. His sympathy didn’t last.

The captive’s cries grew into wails so loud that the troops stuffed wax into their ears. And then came yelling from the direction of the coast. Scouts waved and jumped and clanged metal from the treetops. Hundreds of heads turned west.

Moonlight gleaming from their spherical cores, crawlers drifted in from the horizon as carriers surfaced from the emerald depths, horns blaring as fliers torpedoed skyward from the open hatches on their backs.

Ice rolled down Dimitry’s spine. He had seen this before.

Angelika unfroze before anyone else. She swung her arm over her head. “Militia, to me!”

As the soldiers rallied, so did the heathens. They swarmed in spirals, and from the black skies, a flier descended, much larger and more luminescent than the rest. The countless eyes of its torso slid forward, all focusing on the same target—the captured crawler.