Sunday, June 12, 2022 TriBeCa, Manhattan, New York, United States

Adrahasis and Davcina stood at the ready along with two other Aqrabuamelu.

Ella turned to Sally and knelt down to be even with her. She was in her human form and had been fidgeting the entire time, whether out of nervousness or her complaints about itching when wearing the ring.

“Honey… I will open the way. We will go in first to make sure it is safe. I know you want to find your mother, but you need to stay here until we make sure it is safe.”

Sally fidgeted some more and looked down at her feet. Alicia had to hold her hand.

“Are we ready?” Ella asked. She stood up and looked around. The featureless black ballistic facemasks nodded affirmatively.

Ella concentrated, reaching out with her enhanced senses. Her eyes glowed white, rendering everything around them pallid and unreal. She could feel that invisible knot in the air, the folded up dimensional rift that was just a bit off-kilter from reality. She sensed and then pulled again on a thread of the knot, loosening it.

“Go!” she said, her teeth gritted. The four Aqrabuamelu went in, and Ella forced her feet forward until she was through and she felt arms pulling her.

It was a raining hard and the sky was cloudy and wracked with lightning. The jungle trees looked like the Amazon. Ella was wet already, but the humid air kept her warm. Adra pulled her to behind some brush, and Ella hurriedly pulled down her mask and began sighting through her scope. She kept her eyes glowing gently searching for magical signatures.

“Hold…” Ella could make out a faint glow on the ground, just under the mud.

“There…” she pointed at the wet ground. She signalled to the others to keep her covered and crawled in the wet mud to the spot. After clawing away the mud, just a few inches beneath, she found a human-looking hand with a ring on it.

Ella signalled back, and the soldiers began to clear the area, establishing a secure perimeter. Davcina signalled back, two bodies on the ground. Adra found four more. All dead.

Once the area was clear, she began to dig out the body. It was a woman, caked in mud. Ella tried to pull off the ring, but the fingers were bloated and rotting and she took her dagger and had to cut off the finger. The stench was overpowering, but there was no time to be delicate. She tried not to think about the Dagger of Veils in her hand.

Once the finger came free, the body began to transform into another Nüwa. Adra came back and whispered to her, “There are five Nüwa with similar coloring and one orc.”

“I guess we know what the Emperor’s armies have been doing.” Ella said grimly.

These Nüwa were not the same color as Sally, they were much brighter yellow. As she cleaned up the body, she found what she had hoped not to, a scarf wrapped around the buried Nüwa’s body with the ring. One that Sally had mentioned was her mother’s.

“Poor Sally,” she whispered. Then she pointed to the stab wound in the Nüwa’s shoulder. “So the orcs attacked, killed the Nüwa. But why?”

Adra leaned in and whispered, “The Nüwa were created by the dragons to oppose the Aqrabuamelu. We defeated them and conscripted them to fight other battles. But they were difficult to control. I suppose Utu-the-Bastard did not want old enemies around. Or thought this would be good testing of his orc legions.”

“But why is she stabbed then? They were supposed to be practicing with their rifles.” Ella whispered back.

“Two of the others were killed with arrows, one with a spear, and one with a sword. The orc was killed with a sword also. The orc is carrying a US Army issue sidearm.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Ella said. “Let’s see what else we can find.”

Ella went over to the orc, it was an ashen gray in color, the same ovoid head lacking ears and nose. Its eyes were open in suprise and were a warm green in color. It had its spear in hand, but also a handgun at its hip.

Ella bent over the orc and pulled the handgun, the chamber was loaded.

“Stranger and stranger…” she whispered to herself.

“No bullet wounds?” she called out.

“None.”

She signalled to circle up, “Let’s follow the trail where they came from. Sally told me that there was a town where they lived in the trees, so keep eyes on the sky. Davcina, take point. Channel three on comms. Maintain visual contact, something is off here.”

The black masks nodded and they started down the path. The mask was uncomfortable and hot, but Ella forced herself to ignore the discomfort. She kept her magical sight to help with the loss of peripheral vision. The water was muddy and stuck to the combat boots making each step effort. The sound of bird calls and the rain hitting the leaves was only broken only by the flashes of lightning followed by rolling thunder.

They continued forward, creeping through the forest. Ella went from tree to underbrush to tree, maintaining cover. She left magical tripwires behind her periodically, short-lived ones that would dissipate in about an hour.

As they went forwards, she caught another glimpse of magic. She signaled for hold and carefully approached a bed of plants where an orc body lay, partially concealed. This orc had an M4 rifle slung over its shoulder and ammo packs, but had a large battleaxe with a bloodstained tip lying next to him.

The axe was gently glowing… Ella worked it free of the orc’s hands and examined it for a bit. It was very minimal magic, and as Ella worked through various viewpoints of magic, she found it bent the odds a little bit, to… find weaknesses in the enemy’s defenses?

She handed it to Adra, who had specialized in the battle axe as his ’traditional weapon’ training. “It is slightly magical… maybe useful.” Adra nodded, he took the new axe through a sequence of strikes, and then unhooked his relatively conventional axe from his pack and dropped it to the ground.

The orc was a light gray, darkened because of the water pouring from the sky. It had the same green eyes and ashen color, maybe slightly lighter than the orc they had found before. The orc had puncture wounds in his neck that made Ella think of vampires, but was more likely the bite of a Nüwa. It was wearing a mix of modern tactical gear and archaic armor greaves.

They kept moving deeper into the jungle. The air became slightly warmer as the rain let up some. Wasps started flying around them and Ella stifled a yelp when one stung her on the neck. She felt it begin to swell a bit, but a light application of magic cleared out the toxins and the swelling decreased. It was much the same as clearing alcohol from her bloodstream.

Ella kept following and made the others circle back to her. She wanted to keep healing their bug bites - who knew what sorts of disease could be carried by these bugs that had been isolated for millennia?

It made for hot, slow going, and they were rationing their water to stay hydrated. They ran across a few more Nüwa and orc bodies in small bunches, all torn up with relatively primitive weapons.

And then they found the town. They crept towards the cleared off area.

The brush under the trees was entirely removed with the tall stately trees having various ladders and ropes strung up and down them, some permanent structures and the others improvisational from the many orcs. Hundred of Nüwa and orc bodies covered the ground.

The ground was mud, but that of congealed blood. The iron stench permeated the humid air and insects buzzed around the carnage.

Above, in the trees was a sight which stilled Ella, these were not the simple platforms that she had thought of when Sally had described living in trees. They were not overgrown treehouses. They were elegant, carved buildings built into the sides of the trees, elegant with round-arched windows, bright colorful awnings and curtains, and the paths between the trees were wide and well girded, with the exception of a few that had obviously been cut.

The battle was still happening. Arrows flew back and forth between trees and occasionally a body would drop to the ground from above.

Orcs on the ground kept trying to climb the trees where the Nüwa held out, but the lack of easy purchase and controlled access made it a bloody affair.

Some orcs would take running axe hits at one of the tree, trying to avoid the fire from above, but the trees were old and tough and the amount of damage they had done thus far was minimal.

There had been attempts to burn the trees, kindling having been stacked around some of them, but the wood just smoked, in a strange, lazy way. And the one tree that had some fire, the fire moved strangely, slowly and lazily, as if uneager to burn.

“Do we engage?” Adra whispered to Ella.

“Look…” Ella pointed at one of the nearer trees where orcs were massed. “They have rifles, but they continue to use bows. Why?”

Under her magical vision, she could see some of the orcs had enchanted weapons. And even one or two of them had M4s that had been enchanted. But they resolutely stuck to spears and arrows despite the numbers of both sides that had fallen.

“It is a stalemate for now. Let’s try and grab an orc to interrogate.”

Ella estimated that the orcs held about two-thirds of the trees of this town.

The sky became dark again as new stormclouds moved in, lightning began firing across the sky in jagged bolts… but now that Ella watched, even the lightning was acting strange. It felt thin and spiderweb-like and the thunder that rolled in after seemed even more prolonged than normal.

Ella had a premonition.

“Pull back… I need to test something.”

They made their way back, carefully following the trail they had taken until Ella judged the distance was good enough.

She took her handgun out, pointed to the ground to her side, and pulled the trigger. The striker pin fell forward with a click.

“Shit.”

She took her rifle and did the same. Again, just a click.

“Everyone, test your firearms… carefully.”

Each of them took turns, and nothing happened.

“Adra, hand me a flare.”

He pulled a flare from his pack… this was a lot more risky, since the flare would be a lot more visible than gunfire that could be excused by thunder.

She hit the striker cap of the flare… it sparked slightly, but wouldn’t light.

“Lighter.”

Adra handed over the lighter. It wouldn’t light.

“Is it the wet?” Davcina asked, even though she knew it wasn’t.

“Combustion is different here. Did you notice the fire at the base of that tree? It is slower, muted. Our firearms are useless here. Let’s go fetch some bows and hand weapons from the bodies we found and then let’s figure out what we can do…”

The fires were similar to that when she had first seen Ekerri. Fundamental rules of physics were different here. Perhaps not too much, but just enough. What else would be different? She bounced on her heels a bit, was gravity the same here? It felt the same. Was the mud really as sticky as it seemed or was it an increased coefficient of friction? How could she tell?

They managed to salvage bows and arrows enough for each of them. And stashed their rifles and ammunition near the path back under cover.

“Davcina, you were always the best with the bow. We need to put you somewhere to snipe orc commanders.”

“How do we know who are orc commanders?”

Ella considered, “Shoot the bossy ones?”

“The rest of us, we need to provide a distraction for Davcina and find a way to turn this battle around. I can try to magic them, but I don’t think I can manage enough to really take large numbers down.”

Adra squatted down and thought for a moment. He started putting sticks in the mud and drew a circle around two-thirds of them. “These are the orc-held trees. We can’t really do much without them coming down. So… we need them to come down.”

“And how do you propose that?”

“We need the Nüwa to perform a tactical retrograde down the trees and into the jungles and pursue them here. There were plenty of places to set traps and you can use your magic in more concentrated areas.”

Ella thought through the plan. It had a bunch of unknowns and assumptions, but any plan would at this stage. It made sense though.

“Okay, one we need to clear any hostiles on the ground. Two, let’s find the most advantageous spot for our ambush. Three, we need to make contact with the Nüwa and get their agreement.”

“Davcina, forget the sniping for now. You take the squad and confirm the perimeter of the town is clear. Adra, you find the best spot for an ambush. It will need to be big and at least equalize the odds, which I have significant concerns about. I’ll be back and bring more troops to make this work.”

“Stay safe and alive. Don’t risk being spotted. If the balance changes in the town, do what you can and then hide.”

Ella grabbed the five rifles, mags of ammo, and used her prodigious strength to haul them up over her shoulder. “I’ll be back in two hours.”

She made her way back to where the portal had been opened. And along the way, she gently unwound a scarf from a mother to bring to her orphaned child.