Jack was not too proud to admit that some small part of him had been afraid it wouldn’t work. After all, his grand scheme basically equated to distracting a continent ravaging monster while someone snuck up behind them and bashed them over the head with a big rock.

Now, to be fair, it was a very big rock.

Still, as he’d been forced to learn over and over since coming to this strange new plane of reality, the locals had a tendency to ignore certain laws of physics when they became inconvenient to them.

Fortunately, it seemed that in this case a flying freight train traveling at three times the speed of sound was just a little too potent a dose of concentrated reality for even a magical dragon to ignore.

We’ll probably be finding bits of him scattered across the north and south poles, Jack thought.

The smoke cloud below him looked… almost like a root system, the way it blossomed out from the point of impact and stretched across the sky. It was already fading, but for just a moment, it was oddly mesmerizing to look at.

Of course, that could have been either hypothermia or blood loss talking.

Fortunately, his cameras had caught the moment of impact and the ensuing detonation. His suit’s AI would have no problem calculating trajectories and likely landing locations from there. And Jack intended to track down each and every one. Not a single piece of dragon corpse was going to get away from him.

He wanted to know exactly what the guy’s scales had been made of.

“Jack?”

Like, they had been absurdly tough.

“Jack?”

Obscenely-

“Jack!”

“Yeah,” Jack said, returning his attention to his comms.

“Did it work.” Lin asked tremulously. “I… felt something.”

She felt it?

“Yeah,” he said as he considered that statement.

The goat-kin on the other end paused. “So… did I just kill a dragon?”

Well, an argument could be made that he’d killed the dragon. He’d done all the work. He’d lured it up here and out into the open. Distracted it while it pummeled him with spells. Hell, he’d been the one who planned ahead and built the cargo-shuttle that she’d just remotely piloted into the thing.

Sure, he’d originally intended to use it as a means of resupplying himself in a city under siege, but he’d also been the one who’d come up with the idea of using it as an impromptu missile.

“Yeah, Lin.” He smiled. “You did.”

“Oh…” The woman sounded quite faint. “That’s… good.

Then there was a slight thud from her end.

Jack frowned. “Lin? You ok?”

It took a few seconds of garbled scratching before a significantly more masculine voice spoke through the line. “Uh, sir? I think she fainted.”

And now someone else was wearing her headset.

“Who is this?”

“Han, sir. I, uh, helped Lady Lin with her ‘swivel gun’. She hired me to be part of her ‘engineering team’.”

Jack smirked. There was a project that was taking longer than he cared to admit to get off the ground. Not least of all because Lin steadfastly refused to accept Ren’s aid in seeking out skilled mortals. Most of whom would be in the employ of the Sects.

As he understood it, Lin’s engineering team currently consisted of her, Han, and a few eccentric grey beards with a rather eclectic collection of skills. It would grow with time he knew, but for now it was a decidedly less than impressive collection.

“Given that I didn’t hear a loud smack, just a light thud, I’m going to guess she didn’t bash her head on anything on the way down?”

“No sir!” The man answered with an almost unseemly amount of haste. “Lady Lin fell forwards onto the… mechanism.”

Jack could almost hear the confusion in the man’s voice as he tried to decipher what the hell he was looking at with regards to Lin’s computer set up and flight simulator control scheme.

“Right,” he smirked. “Well it’d probably be best if you get her to a healer anyway.”

“Will do, sir!”

Jack clicked off his radio, before taking one final look at the rapidly fading smoke cloud below him.

“I should probably be getting myself to a healer as well,” he muttered as he started to descend.

His… everything hurt.

------------

There it is again, he thought as he reclined in his chair, wincing slightly as the movement jostled his bandages.

It was barely audible over the low humming of the control room’s many consoles and the quiet breakfast-time conversation of the room’s other occupants - but he’d heard it nontheless.

A slight rustle. The tinkling of bells. A hint of a giggle.

No one else had noticed it. Not even Ren, whose senses far exceeded his own. Nor had she heard it the other three times he’d noticed the sounds over the past week.

He might have thought he was going mad if it weren’t for the fact that his sensors were picking it up too.

…Though that did not strictly preclude him from being mad. It was just a shared madness. One resulting from feedback from his neural interface bleeding through into his conscious mind in the form of auditory hallucinations.

And for the moment, if they truly were hallucinations, they were auditory only. He’d seen nothing out of the ordinary on the compound’s many cameras.

And he’d checked. Religiously.

Sighing, he shook his head and returned his attention to the topic at hand.

“And once more we have received a messenger from Shui requesting that we meet her in the Imperial Palace,” Ren continued.

It had been nearly a week since the Instinctive Horde had quit the field entirely – fleeing the field in droves like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

It seemed that Lin had not been alone in feeling the end of the Red Death. Everyone in the city had felt it. As had everyone outside it. According to Elwin, it was entirely possible that everyone on the continent felt it – mana or not.

Jack really hoped that wasn’t the case. He really wasn’t ready to step into the kind of arena that level of scrutiny would invite.

His defeat of the Red Death had been a fluke resulting from a myriad of favorable factors.

Factors like his immunity to magic, the fact that his foe had been the size of a cruise ship, and that his foe had been easily goaded into pursuing him into low orbit – where he’d made for an easy target.

All things he would not have been able to replicate against a more maneuverable human sized opponent. Shui, for example, would have had no chance against the Red Death but could still wipe the floor with him easily.

Hell, even his defeat of Baidar – who was still imprisoned in the palace dungeons as far as he knew - had been the result of him catching her off-guard.

No, the miner was not ready to throw down with the big fish of this world. Part of him doubted he ever would be.

“And it’s just Shui again?” he confirmed.

Gao, his own arms even more bandaged than Jack’s, frowned. “Yes, and the fact that the suggested meeting place has switched from her compound to the Imperial Palace is rather telling as to which way the civil war has swung.”

“Civil war is an exaggeration,” Ren scoffed.

“Involuntary transfer of power within the city then,” Gao continued, shooting the cultivator a glance.

Personally, Jack was of a mind with Gao. Sure, the brutal infighting that had started between the sects and the Magistrate’s forces almost the moment the Horde was gone was localized to the city itself, but that didn’t make it any less bloody.

And it wasn’t like the violence was entirely between party lines either. He’d received plenty of reports of infighting within the sects themselves. With so many of the sect’s leaders having died in the fight with the Red Death, there was now a war going on between their myriad successors for control of each of the sects.

That was likely the only reason the Imperial forces hadn’t folded immediately when Shui and the two other sects that had not lost their leadership – due to them being otherwise busy or unable to fly – had launched their coup.

Though as Ren had been quick to mention, they weren’t calling it a ‘coup’. The pig woman had made it abundantly clear that she was still beholden to Imperial authority.

Just not the local Imperial authority – citing that the Magistrate was no longer fit to lead and Shui intended to install herself as interim leader until another Imperial scion could be sourced.

Something that was unlikely to happen any time soon with a war going on and half the cities in the Northern reaches of the Empire under siege.

“So the Magistrate’s folded then.” Jack sighed and rubbed his hands tiredly over his face. “I suppose we can’t put off picking a side any longer.”

The only advantage to the whole thing was that even with her victory now secured, Shui was making sure to be exceedingly polite about wanting to speak to him.

Which made sense.

As far as she was concerned, Jack had flown up into the clouds to fight off what was basically a foreign divinity.

Jack had come back in one piece. The divinity had come back in many.

And he’d been doing some pretty impressive shit even before that. It was no exaggeration to say that the fact that the city was even still standing was a result of his contributions to the war effort. Not his alone. Not by a long shot, but his artillery had quickly become a cornerstone of Ten Huo’s defensive doctrine.

Even if they’d now been moved back into storage.

He didn’t have the manpower to both keep them operational and guard the walls of his compound – not with nearly three quarters of his militia force gone. The only survivors of those that had been at the breach were the crews of the crawlers, safe inside the surprisingly sturdy machines – even as the exterior armor had melted into slag, sealing them inside.

Something Gao seemed… surprisingly sanguine about.

The man wasn’t happy, but he hadn’t exactly fallen into a bleak depression either.

Jack supposed that for a mortal, those kinds of losses were just to be expected when something big and bad enough showed up.

Either way, the man’s would-be successor seemed pretty relieved that the guy was still around and kicking. Not that Jack blamed him, as far as first days on the job went, his had been rough.

Using gas that close to the city, Jack thought. Well, friendly fire was going to be inevitable.

Still, it had evened the odds. Shui’s cultivators were able to ignore the gas. The Instinctive champions were able to ignore the gas. The instinctive tribesmen were not. The stuff’s presence was enough to turn the fight into a stalemate until sect reinforcements showed up – though not without a few of them also being caught in the ‘blast’ as well.

Gas was not a precision weapon – especially when you were up against a foe capable of dispersing it using the power of their minds.

Of course, by that point he’d been scattering parts of the Red Death all across the stratosphere, so the fight at the breach had become a rather moot point.

“No, it seems we cannot,” Ren said, referring to their ongoing ‘neutrality’ in the fight between the Imperial and Sect forces in the city. “Now that Shui has control of the city, her focus will now firmly be on you.”

Jack sighed. “And I take it An won’t be arriving anytime soon?”

Gao shook his head. “Her last report claimed she would be tied up for a number of weeks.”

-----------------------

“He’s a monster!” the creature ranted and raved, the bodies of her guards strewn about her. “A creature of fire and ash who will burn this world to cinders.”

An observed her, two dozen militia men and women and two horseless-carriages between her and the only remaining survivor of the latest splinter group they’d come across.

Off in the distance she could hear the distant crackle of gonnefire throughout the valley as other elements of her army continued to clash with fleeing elements of the Horde.

“Casualties?” An asked, turning to nearest militia man - a captain, going by the slashes on his chest.

“Two carriages. Three dozen militiamen.” The man bowed, the normally shiny metal of his armor dulled by grime so as to avoid giving away his position under the moonlight.

He wore only a breastplate and forearm protectors. The rest of the dog-kin was concealed by a mottled fur coat. It was a look that was becoming common amongst those who regularly moved between the town-forts of Jiangshi.

The self-appointed rangers of the burgeoning Jiangshi province.

An thought it a rather grandiose title for what was essentially a group of mortal farmers and hunters with gonnes and a little knowledge of woodcraft, but she could not deny that they had rapidly grown talented at what they did.

Their hunting parties had rather efficiently thinned out the number of spirit beasts targeting trade between the fort-towns. Not without casualties, of course, but it was a noteworthy accomplishment nonetheless.

Which was part of why she had allowed them to form the vanguard of the Ten Huo relief force.

Thirty thousand men and women. Drawn from the rapidly growing populace of the Jiangshi province. All survivors. All armed with gonnes and mounted on horseless-carriages armed with swivel-gonnes.

That last detail still grated on her, given that they had been designed by the… goat. But she could not deny the utility of the oversized gonnes. They gave her forces much needed killing power when her lead forces invariably stumbled across an Instinctive champion or spirit beast.

One alone counted for little, but three working in concert, with the backing of gonne armed mortals, could make short work of an attacking champion.

Most of the time.

An’s eyes panned dispassionately over the burning wrecks and bodies. “She was alone. No other champions?”

The man nodded. “Aye.”

An recognized the beast.

The Herald.

The leader of the fleeing horde her people were now attempting to cull without boxing them in.

Even bloodied and fleeing, the enemy would be more than capable of wiping out her much smaller force if they were able to rally and concentrate their power.

Something An was doing her utmost to keep from happening.

To that end she had told her people to inform her the moment any of them encountered a champion with features matching those of the Herald. She had an entire task-force of rangers ready for what would no doubt have been an epic confrontation.

I needn’t have bothered, she thought, looking at the wounded animal. She’s half-dead already.

And while it was clear some of the monster’s injuries were from gonne fire, more looked like they had been inflicted by blades or claws.

The Herald had clearly been ousted by her former minions.

“Ash! Fire! My… father…” The abomination appeared outright delirious from her wounds.

She sighed, hefting her glaive, dried flecks of blood sprinkling from the blade as she whirled it around.

There would be no glory to be found here.

Wait for me master, your filial disciple shall reach you soon. She strode forward into the clearing. As soon as she is done here.