One man with one hand stood in the midst of a clearing. The newly-landed race had been busy, setting their manpower to work, setting up all sorts of basic fortifications and structures, generally deforming the jungle. Gen was out in the open, uncomfortably so, position just right to have a good line of sight with the encampment. He was armed only with a few of his trusty daggers and short-swords, and every moment made him a tad more nervous. He had expected the invaders to come out to meet him immediately, but instead, he had been standing in eyeshot for a good while, to no avail. Not a single envoy came out to meet him, not a single spell slung his way, no stray arrows hoping to poke him new holes.

At this rate, the sun would set. The plan had called for precarious timing, with any engagements lit up by twilight. If necessary, they could stall for nightfall and evacuate any and all VIPs, namely as many Humans as possible. At this rate, they’d have to start over again tomorrow. On the long list of possibilities and dangers Gen had thought up, ‘enemy truant’ had never even ranked among the top twenty. He eyed the base inquisitively. It wasn’t especially impressive yet, but it could be in time. They dug a small ditch perimeter, lining their side of the mini-moat with simplistic Cheval de Frise. Another layer within were short walls and a drawn gate which had been left wide open, and that sheltered guard towers that made the vertices of the square encampment. He could see the tops of the towers, apparently devoid of the guards themselves, and through the gate, he could see a sliver of the interior. In particular, the teleporter sat at something approximating the center of the whole fort, followed by the zeppelin-like aircraft, which was moored near the back wall.

It was appealing symmetrically, sure, but it was a joke in Gen’s eyes. He had seen records of thousands of encampments and their layout over the years, and those simply had tents and medical hubs. For the horned men to place something as insanely powerful as the teleporter or as integral as the zeppelin in plain sight of the gate placed the little fort near the top of his ‘worst of’ lists. The City of Man was laid out poorly enough, but these guys had no excuse. They very clearly understood the fundamentals of what they set out to accomplish, even if they so readily abandoned them. He couldn’t help but feel let down a little. Depending on how powerful they actually were, it was quite possible this whole engagement would be a curb-stomp.

Any drama that he had conjured up had long since faded by the time one of the enemies within the fort actually noticed him, pointing and gawking. They ran off to one side, and Gen took careful note of the direction. The commanding officers were apparently somewhere near the back-left-hand of the little fort. It could have been bait, but the soldier seemed appropriately panicked. After something like half an hour of standing and waiting to get noticed, he was finally getting the proper amount of attention.

A small guard of the horned men assembled, guiding one with particularly shiny armor. Gen took a closer look as they approached. They were all in the ball-park of two and a half meters tall and well-toned if not muscular. While they were broadly humanoid, he doubted he’d get them mixed up for a regular person. Aside from their size, distinctive features like being literally red and having any number of horns- ranging from one to four- were easy things to spot. They stopped some distance away from him, something like midway between the fort and his personage. Gen desperately resisted the urge to give his troops the order to shoot. Apparently, the horned men had no issue with dragging themselves out into the open.

The de-facto shiny leader looked Gen up and down, inquisitively. “You are the Warden, yes?” He asked, voice deep and rough enough to grind the Commons into something almost unrecognizable. Gen simply nodded, bowing slightly. This particular misunderstanding was to his advantage under a number of situations. He took in what he had just learned: The horned men knew who Ayala was, but not what she looked like, what the Gomen were, but not the specifics of their racial traits, and the horned men weren’t just ready to drag themselves out into the open, but in fact ready to come out and talk to the Warden.

The big man grunted, nodding in something like a bow. “I apologize for intruding upon your… territory?” He looked about. “I was under the impression that the Kaenid race were entrenched here.”

Gen tried hard not to sweat or stagger. Quite unlike Ayala, he had no idea how the horned people got so much information, where they got it from, or how it was propagated. In retrospect, sending her out to meet them would have probably been a better idea. He settled on shrugging noncommittally. “I’m afraid things have changed over recent years.”

The big man raised his eyebrows. “I must apologize,” he spat out ‘apologize’ sound like an insult, “our communication crystals have been dead for a good while, though you wouldn’t have been likely to notice out here. We were sent on short order.”

Gen sighed, bowing slightly. “We are currently the leading force in our humble section of the forest,” he said, humble as he could muster. “You never did say what led you to encamp here?”

He was met with a short grunt. “We were supposed to perform reconnaissance and detail on a new race. The big shots want it contained or migrated. Evidently, it wasn’t meant to be dumped out into the backwater.” The shiny-plated troop leader actually had a moment of genuine reflection, genuinely apologetic. “I do not mean to insinuate this demesne is a backwater. We will not intrude any longer than absolutely necessary.”

Apparently even if he did not respect the peoples of… wherever they were, they did respect the land and the control the “Gomen” exerted. At the same time, Gen was quite a bit more concerned with which new race he was talking about ‘migrating’, so that thought was only of secondary importance. “Do you happen to mean the Humans?”

The big man nodded rapidly, suddenly serious. “Have you encountered them? The orders we received characterized them as highly dangerous.”

Gen shrugged. “Can you give a more specific description? We have a few ‘humans’ in holding cells and touring our Walled City as ‘ambassadors’, but I am unsure of if they are one in the same. They have been decidedly harmless, at least compared to our troops.”

The man straightened his back, at his full height and attaining a certain regal demeanor that was far more fitting of his position than the relaxed one he had been exhibiting until this point. “I am afraid I have not been giving you the respect you are due. If you are capable of containing or controlling these ‘humans’, your race might be fit for re-evaluation.”

He bowed slightly, making real eye-contact for the first time. “They have been described as destructive,” Gen noted that they blew up great portions of a century-old city within a night, check, “highly vindictive,” and their actions had been nothing short of that in dealing with the Kaenid, check, “and of great technological advantage compared to the desired stature of the region.” They had spent months revitalizing, reworking, and upgrading the city and its soldiers, check. These men had come to ‘contain’ or ‘migrate’ them. Apparently, ‘Migration’ was a great honor of some kind, but Gen had a bad feeling about the exact context of the term.

“I believe our two ‘Humans’ may be one in the same. They are still our guests and prisoners, at least for the time being. Will they be in particular danger?” Gen asked, hoping to keep the worry out of his voice.

The big man hesitated, before shrugging noncommittally. “You do not want them to be out here too long. They will be in precisely as much danger as any other race to undergo migration of any kind.” He shifted his weight uncomfortably. “To be quite honest, the orders went all the way down the ladder. I do not know if the First Ones ordered it, but it may well have been. There is a good chance that this does not end well for your ‘guests’, or any who ally with them.”

Gen sighed. “I was quite worried that would be the case. Is there any situation in which neither migration or containment need occur?”

He shook his head. “I am afraid not. It is in your best interest-“

Gen threw a hand in the air, the big horned man’s eyes going wide at the sudden movement. The fringes of the forest were fraught with a whirl of motion as tens and tens of soldiers popped out of the surroundings. Gen drove his hand down, and the decidedly human shapes leveled their guns, firing as quickly as they could hope to. The man in the middle wheeled backwards, but his flank was far quicker to respond. They only had time to leap to his defense, and as the first volley of the murderous shells made impact, bullets whizzed by Gen, making dent after dent of into their fancy, standardized armor. Some of the more careful, well-trained shots met flesh, cutting deep into a barely guarded joint or muscle. They were all dead before the second volley began, but just as Gen began to relax, the leader of the group growled. He could hardly hear through the ringing on his unprotected ears, but to his surprise, he could feel it.

He flung his arms out, and an immaterial bubble spread around him. It shoved the corpses away, throwing them feet and yards across the clearing. The second volley pinged off, bouncing dangerously near to Gen and away in every direction. Tiny dents were made in the shell, but the man was largely safe. He stopped only a moment to send ‘Ayala’ an enraged snarl before sprinting away, waving desperately at the soldiers within the fort. They began to panic, moving to get the fort into a more defensible state. Gen waved and signaled, hoping they would make it in time.

Goblins swarmed from the trees, hauling ass into the clearing and diving into the small moat. They each threw little yellowed blocks at the fort, tucking themselves into the moat. It hadn’t been part of the Plan, but Gen had to be impressed by their improv. The Goblins had become far better at coping with unknown situations over the course of his career as their ‘Chieftain’. Gomen with damnably strong arms popped out of the brush, hurling alcohol-soaked, clay-cooked cans they had lit. Some throws went awry, panicked Goblins hoping to roll out the fire that sparked on their unguarded skin and clothes, but many made their mark. A small sea of flames hit the fort, lighting both it- and the fuses on the explosives the Goblins had prepared. A chain of small explosions surrounded the fort, and the impromptu walls erected around it were promptly reduced to ash and dust- revealing the largely unharmed soldiers within. A few had tried to climb the guard towers, and those unlucky few lay rolling and panicked within, but many had been more cautious.

The third volley of bullets rained down the moment the walls were down, but the horned men had actually taken precautions. Small groups of three huddled within bubbles, two spear-wielding soldiers escorting one ‘mage’. The soldiers in charge of casting out the glowing shields were plenty pre-occupied, faces in varying contortions ranging from ‘mildly constipated’ to ‘twisted in pain’, contrasting strongly the calm demeanor of their leader. He seemed relaxed, or at least unperturbed, since ‘incredibly angry’ did not fit the description of ‘relaxed’, and his bubble extended far enough to cover nearly twelve troops. The gunfire bounced harmlessly away, at best ricocheting back and forth between the shields rapidly until the shell was ground to dust.

Gen processed a few things in quick succession. Firstly, he was still out in the open, which wasn’t actually something he had contemplated in his plan. Honestly, he thought the guns would knock out the soldiers outright. It kind of made sense that a race sent to ‘contain’ Humanity, which was broadly considered ‘technologically advanced’, would be able to handle these sorts of projectiles. Still, it hadn’t factored into his plans. Second, this race of horned men was in fact a ‘magic race’. Not all of them, or even most, seemed to be as attuned to doing their selected type of magic as their leader was, but they were still all magical. Thirdly, and building on the second, the enemy troops didn’t appear to have any projectile weapons. Around the time he finished processing all that, the horned men sheltered within the protective bubbles raised their hands, and spiraling script crawled down their arms, coalescing on their fingertips.

Gen barely had time to shout “Returning fire!” before diving to the side. Beams of force whizzed by where he had been standing moments before, poking angry red holes in the picturesque scenery in the distance. The Goblins only had time to get out of the ditch and start running before the enemy shot at them, several of the poor green creatures expiring nearly instant, flame spreading from the wound that marked where they had been hit. The Human gunmen and Gomen foot soldiers fared better, breaking line of sight using shrubbery or dodging behind and under any protection the jungle offered. Still, some were hit, and flames began to spread. Gen scrambled to his feet, watching the crowd intently to see if he’d be hit, but they seemed to be ‘reloading’. Wherever these soldiers had come from, they hadn’t learned the value of staggering their fire.

“Go for attrition,” he shouted, frantically choreographing troop movements to compensate for the change of field. “Mages at the ready!” Gen dragged out his own power, simply augmenting his ability to run. He hit something like autopilot, focusing more on the state of the battle. A volley of bullets sang from one piece of the clearing that hadn’t yet been soaked in eerie flame, forcing the bubble-soldiers to focus their attention in one direction. In another, Goblins fired crossbow bolts from branches. The horned men started to expand outwards, spreading out to focus on different directions. The enemy general focused on Gen in particular, mumbling orders and looking quite conspicuously in his direction. Another volley hit, this time from the complete opposite direction of where the majority of their troops now looked.

The goal of the battle would be to run them out of mana before their jungle cover burned down. Failing that, they needed to make sure the enemy was stranded. Gen gestured, finally ordering the mages into action. One in particular, the Gardener, was coming in handy. He had soaked up power from their setting, forcing a vine to quietly grow and uncoil long in one direction- towards the center of their camp. It yanked at the coils and cords that were plugged into the enemies’ teleporter as soon as he gave the order, dragging the magical powersource back towards the jungles’ edge at some speed. The forces of the City of Man cheered, a roar of triumph that set the enemy on edge. Shots rang out of the forest, but the horned men had finally prepared their next return-fire. Gen had to duck and weave a few bolts, anticipating more shots than he actually received, but they were in fact directed more towards the jungle. Most went towards the source of the magically manipulated vine, indeed, some firing at the vine itself. The rest shot for the gunners especially, largely ignoring the Goblins and their persistent crossbow fire.

The mages were lucky. The thicket was burned to ash by the magical shots, revealing a thin, stone-made façade. The stone façade blocked the brunt of the shots, magical reinforcement by Elson, the resident Architect, shielding them from most of the damage. His supply of mana finally dried up, revealing the small platoon of mages at least. Only one unfortunate soul was struck- one of Merrilyn’s programmers, no less- and while he died quite horribly, Gen couldn’t help but feel relieved. At the same time, Elson’s cover wouldn’t spare them next time. Attrition meant losses on both side, but to lose their mages felt like it would be too much. Sure, they weren’t incredibly useful now, but what about in the future?

The gunners weren’t as lucky. Quite a few people died, and the horned men gave out their own triumphant cry, finally finding a footing for their morale. Gen couldn’t allow that- if they got any more organized, there would be trouble. He finally reached the jungles’ cover, a patch that hadn’t yet been set alight, but before he ducked in, he gave a few more orders. A few waves aimed at the mages, ordering them to scatter. They happily obliged, running in every direction. The next was one he could only enunciate in words. “Shoot their ship,” he ordered in English, practically screaming. Only the leader seemed to react, panicking and whirling around. Before he could enable whatever protections, they had for their oversized balloon, the brutal song of gunfire tore through the air, finding purchase not in soldiers, but in leather and wood. The ship screamed, air and helium escaping from its cage at great speed. The horned men faltered, horrified. The sudden realization that they were both unable to teleport out or get reinforcements and unable to fly out of the ‘backwater’ was enough to make some falter. A few of the less talented shield-projecting soldiers failed, losing concentration, and their protection slipped. Gen couldn’t see their death, but he could hear it, bullets finally meeting something squishy or metallic instead of the impermeable shield they had been dealing with.

By his measure, the majority of magazines had something like 11 shots left. They had spare magazines on hand, but if at all possible, conserving ammunition was ideal. He ducked and weaved through the trees and bushes, snatching up one of the backup guns they had planted. He peaked, finding an appropriate hole in the canopy and brush through which to spot the army. They were hunkering back, losing what little ground they had gained. At the same time, they were still lethal. The majority of the magic-blaster-guys were still alive, and they were ready to fire again, lifting their arms. Gen was far enough it was hard to hear, but he could see the enemy general shouting orders and pointing, likely telling them where to fire.

The light-bolts shot out, and Gen dropped from the treebranch he had been perched on. They had given no indication he had been spotted, but that didn’t mean it was safe to just lounge about. Sure enough, a particularly large one pierced the bark of the tree where he had been moments before. Gen was out of the clearing now, so he had no real way of knowing how many had been killed by this volley of magic. He quite hoped they had the good sense to spread out, but it was never safe to assume. He moved, hoping to encounter another group, but flames had spread quite thoroughly around the segment of jungle he had taken shelter in, perhaps by design. The horned man seemed quite set on making sure at least Gen would never see the next day. Indeed, the sun was beginning to set in earnest, falling gently towards the horizon.

Gen ran for the clearing, gun in hand. The clearing had started to taste fire too, smoldering remains of fort and jungle around it both contributing to the unilateral and encroaching wall of flame. To be absolutely fair, he had assumed a rainforest wouldn’t have been very flammable when adding ‘Molotov Cocktails’ to his roster of weaponry, but the environment was quite a bit different in the New World versus what he was used to. It was subtly different in some ways, and dramatically in others. In any case, the bubble-troops were still largely intact. The volleys of bullets he had organized were now replaced by stray bullets shot from every direction, which was actually along the lines of what he would have hoped for. In any case, the majority of the humans had survived, which was an acceptable outcome. The Goblins and Gomen had apparently retreated, leaving behind only the corpses of the few and unfortunate who had been hit. Gen growled. If they were enacting Plan E4, they’d need to hide, but they were still supposed to leave at least a few people in eye-shot to take orders to the larger group.

He carefully took aim, staring down the barrel. Gen couldn’t spot any unguarded soldiers, which meant he would likely simply contribute to the suppressing fire they had defaulted to. Before he could pull the trigger, though, a shape rose through the sky. He followed it up, watching as it unfurled to its full height. His gun fell limply at his side as he simply watched in awe. He had encountered something like this before, nearly two years prior.

It was a Gorgon Bug. It wasn’t just any Gorgon Bug, though. This ‘bug’ couldn’t be compared with the tiny specimen they had fought before. The other one was a branch-coasting shadow in the night, while this thing was more like a herald of the night, hoping desperately to blot out the sun. The other was a ‘worm’, while this one was so massive that it defied explanation. Infinite flagellum formed a massive crown, enshrining its bizarre, mosquito-like head, each individual tendril at least two meters long. Each individual leg on the giant creature’s worm-like, centipedal frame was huge, flittering through the air, searching for ground as the huge monster cast itself into the air. Much like the first one they had encountered, the way it looked down at the clearing reminded Gen of a cobra waiting to strike, but given the scale, it was more like watching an angry god prepare to smite them all. He had an uncomfortable feeling that it was looking at him, too, a feeling he couldn’t quite shake.

The Gorgon Bug hung in the air, and as time passed, what few soldiers still trying to shoot at each-other finally noticed the massive creature hanging so far overhead. As it swayed mesmerically through the sky, almost all of the horned men’s focuses failed in unison- barring only their talented leader, though he looked just as terrified as the rest- but not one human gunner took advantage. Indeed, the battle was over, at least that much was certain.

For just that moment, all was still.