We danced around the enemy combatants, my tail kicking up a wall behind me after having launched a Direct Current. The rabbit beast soul shrieked in anger before succumbing to Betty’s ferocious strike, her mongoose claws tearing flesh out of the fighter. The enemy combatant crumpled to the ground, hand held up against their side, as though they could stem the bleeding with their tiny palms.

“Back up,” she commanded. We fell away from the Malagost cohort, having successfully wounded more than the damage we took. This was our seventh hit attempt, and while we were successful at escaping, that didn’t make it feel quite successful at doing a meaningful impact to the enemy.

We were certainly whittling down the enemy forces, but whittling didn’t reduce the amount that had already invaded the city. When we had arrived the prior night, Titan City was already under siege, and by the time we woke in the morning, the fight had advanced to the perimeter of the broken walls. Blood was being spilled within Titan City once again, so soon after the prior encounter.

“Perry, you can use lethal force,” Betty reprimanded.

“I don’t know how much electricity is enough to put them down for good,” I said, defending myself. “I was focusing on efficiency rather than perfection.”

“Whatever. Do better,” she said, sighing. “I know the thought of taking these lives isn’t great, to say the least, but you need to be prepared. They’re coming for us and all of the people you care for. Our lives are on the line already. So are yours. Act like it.”

I swallowed my contrition and nodded. Any thoughts I had against it weren’t worth having at the time. A conscious was hard to hold onto in the throes of battle.

The sun was setting once again, the fading light casting our actions into the darkness, yet still lit from the fires within TItan City. The war didn’t slumber. The war didn’t sleep.

“It’s time to act on the next part of our efforts,” Betty commanded. We had spent the better part of the day searching for the supply lines, but now we could act upon it without fear of reprisal from the enemy forces. Now was the moment to take advantage of the fading light, and make sure that they could only advance into hostile enemy territory. While there was something to be said about a cornered animal lashing out, we believed in the people we left behind in the city, knowing that they could handle the forces as they had been, and that it wouldn’t be long before Veronica and Ethel took advantage of our opening, supposing they were still outside the city.

What was next was our most dangerous activity, trying to disturb the supply lines feeding into the city. The enemy encampment wasn’t fully enmeshed into the city, still needed their limited supplies to filter in from outside the shattered wall. That was a place of vulnerability, a location where we could use our limited forces and pierce through and hopefully make a difference for those still on the front line.

Given my third tier’s capabilities, we started burrowing underneath the ground, my mind flashing back to my second encounter with Javier. This time I was the one who had the burrowing superiority against my enemies, but that didn’t mean I wanted us to be caught out. My tail sculpted a tunnel as we moved, trying to ensure that all of our combatants made it through before it collapsed behind us. We had a short window of passage before the air would diminish, although my Swollen Fur and others in the assault team’s could try to mitigate that impact.

The ground moved freely under my tail, my swift motions sculpting the dirt and stone into a tunnel large enough to fit our bodies, albeit some still needed to crouch. It wasn’t perfect, but perfection wasn’t needed. We were maybe fifteen feet under the ground— our final ascension would require me to sculpt a stairway in addition to our vertical tunnel, my tail moving at speeds I didn’t know it could take as I carved out slabs out of the walls, little perches for us to climb until we were underneath the ground approximately where the supply lines had been setup.

The path itself had been carried out to Betty’s whims, calculated to precisely how long we would need in our passage. With my electroreception I made sure we didn’t go astray, and this was now the moment of our opportunity.

I removed the ground above us, some of the enemies bodies falling into the empty chamber below, slamming against the hard surface. Those at the bottom pounced against the enemy, tearing them to shreds before they were even aware of the opportunity to respond. Further up we spilled out of the opening, motioning for the rest of the team to funnel out shortly thereafter— the further my distance from my sculpting the faster the ground returned to its natural state, no longer bound by my third attribute’s transmuting nature.

Carts fell by our hands. Guards cut before their prime. Supplies razed to the ground. We were savage, a force of destruction, a reminder why it wasn’t prudent to leave one’s self unguarded in the earliest hours of the day. Every body we saw was quickly dealt with. The only traces we were to leave behind of our presence was carnage and the remnants of their poor choice for coming to our city.

As the alarm sounded, I split the earth beneath us and began tunneling us away, over to yet another supply line across the camp. The second one fell much like the first, unprepared to be attacked, but the third had active defenders, already wise to our decision. With all of the activity above I signaled their presence to Betty, who confirmed it was time for our retreat. We had put them on edge for the night. That meant we could now rest, away from the city and prepare to continue harrying their forces on the next day.

The forest floor was hard, our bodies huddling for warmth, no fires to be found lest the enemy dispatched hunters to find our presence. It was a cold and frustrating sleep, but my body’s ability to refuse to accept slumber was eventually overrun, returning me into the realm between waking moments.

I woke to my aching body rejecting the hard ground, the creeping light of the sun starting to filter into my eyes. Betty leaned silently across a tree, fixated off on the distance back towards the city. I groggily rose to my feet and headed over to her.

“What are you looking for?” I whispered.

She turned to me, startled by my presence. “Oh, you’re awake?” she whispered back. “I’m keeping an eye on any invaders.”

“Did you get any sleep of your own?” I half asked, half demanded.

“Reggie and Archie took the earlier watches,” she said, words faintly trailing to my ears. “I can function on less sleep. It takes practice, but eventually your body gets used to it.”

“That doesn’t sound quite right to me, Betty.”

“It sounds right when you make it into a technique. Now hush. The rest of the troops will rouse soon, so why don’t you do a little preliminary scouting for us and determine if you can find the other scouting parties or if you can tell what’s going on by the city.”

I saluted and ran off, keeping an open eye for activity throughout the rest of the forest. Presumably Veronica and Ethel were trained in a similar tradition to Betty, and would act in kind, and yet I couldn’t sense them anywhere near. Perhaps they were in a location relative to their initial departure, but I wasn’t going to go that far. I didn’t want to lose track of my scouting party, or maybe even run into an enemy party trying to hunt down any stragglers outside of the city.

For all that I looked, nothing was turning up. It seemed evident I had to check up on the city instead. I reoriented according to the map in my mind I had of the area, turning back towards Titan City and ran through the woods. I took care to make sure my movements were soft, made with the intent of preserving the ambiance lingering in the air. Every step was well-measured, crafted to ensure that I wouldn’t be caught unawares by enemy combatants noticing my presence. I subdued my instincts, wanting to only approach like a wandering eye, purely to observe and exist. I was as subdued as I ever would be, meaning that it was time to advance and scrutinize how the enemy was doing after our attacks the prior night.

I had reached the upper limit of my electroreception within the woods, searching for that threshold where we had caused havoc just hours before, but it was empty of activity. I cautiously continued forward, afraid of the implication but I had to see it with my own eyes, not just the world within my head. I crept to the outer perimeter of the forest, laying low to the ground. As my eyes broke through the wooded space, I saw a shocking sight.

All signs of the enemy encampment had dispersed. There were only corpses unceremoniously left behind, no care for their presence. The outer wall was free of conflict, meaning that there was only one logical conclusion. The lines of the war had drawn further into the heart of the city.

“Well fuck,” Betty cried when I relayed the message. “Guess we’re going in then, with or without Veronica or Ethel’s teams. Hopefully they’re fine, wherever they are.”

She walked about, gently rousing the still slumbering troops from their dead sleep, leaving Reggie and Archie for last in deference to their prior watch work the night before.

“Let me be clear. We’ve got a problem on a similar magnitude to that of the devastation of our city not too long ago. The Malagost army has breached our walls. That means we’re onto a different kind of combat than the means we had been executing before. We’re about to enter our era of urban warfare.”

She sighed, leaning heavily against the ashen tree. “The issue is that we don’t have a proper understanding of their positioning within the city. We’re a bit unaware. It should be easier to sneak in and get some more information, but we don’t know what the enemy has occupied at this point, and yes, it’s a matter of what, not if. They have to have found some territory to control if they were going to continue further into the city. I don’t know if that means that some of our people died our that we ceded ground, but we’re going to have to tread carefully to ensure we don’t cause any collateral damage. The people we’re meant to protect still exist within the confines of the city. Reggie, Archie, go ahead and see if you can’t meet up with others of the city guard. The rest of us here are going to eat the rest of our rations and prepare to go off and fight. We’ll meet at our usual place, supposing that it hasn’t been taken over. Barring that, the other place. You know where to go, boys.”

Archie and Reggie saluted and ran off, leaving us waiting in the woods, our minds building up the anxiety and tension of fighting amongst our homes. We had to drive the enemy army out of the city the best we could. Surely the lines were just drawn up further in the city. Surely we hadn’t taken too many losses. Surely Mia, Alain and Vera were alright. This was the longest I’d been separated from them for quite some time. They had to be alright. They had to be safe. They had to be fine. They had to be. I knew it. I couldn’t believe otherwise.

“Alright, eat up. This might be the least meal you ever have, so treat it with the proper respect,” Betty commanded. “We’re not going off to war on an empty stomach just so that one of you can have your gut give us away. Eat.”

I nodded and crammed my rations into my mouth, savoring the flavor of my continued existence.