***Tirnanog, Jeng, The Forest***

***Astra***

The other me flash-stepped, then flash-stepped once more, keeping up a steady rhythm which kept up with the searching tip of my opponent’s rapier. Somehow it always barely touched, applying enough pressure to a weak point in my armour to be threatening, but without actually penetrating.

Then I, or rather the other, stopped and the weapon found a small gap between my helmet and my breastplate.

My muscles flexed in a futile defensive reflex as the woman drove her rapier down into my torso. Despite my muscle’s utility as subdermal armour, they couldn’t stop the needle-like tip from slipping between their fibres. In a way, it was the perfect weapon against me.

I wasn’t in control, but I could still feel every millimetre sliding into me as I screamed internally. Meanwhile, the other only felt the – to me – incomprehensible euphoria of victory.

“Finally!” the woman exclaimed as she tried to pull back her weapon, a task she suddenly learned to be not as easy as with the average human, or even mutated human. Unlike other people, my whole body was an intricate network of muscle fibres and, right now, they had a good grip on the rapier.

The other’s hand shot out and closed around the woman’s fingers, locking her hand in place where she held her rapier.

“Finally... indeed,” the other me affirmed in a raspy tone as the woman tried to pull away.

But I dropped my spear to hold onto her with a second hand as I reeled her in, my filaments flowing out from beneath my armour and around her as I took her into a chokehold with my legs wrapped around her body. One of her arms was easily brought under control, but the other blurred before I could restrain it.

A dagger flashed in her free hand, aimed for my throat. Thankfully, this time the armour was firmly in place where she could reach and all she managed was a scratch. Screaming incessantly, she began stabbing everywhere, hoping to find a weak point as my filaments tightened around us, slowly increasing the pressure.

The filaments restrained her arm with the knife soon after, but not before she managed pry the tip of the blade into a weak point. Her bones snapped as she worked the blade deeper into a gap in my armour’s inner elbow joint. Recognizing her last chance at escape, she began to saw into it, working the blade around with as much force as she could muster. I did my best restrain her range of movement, but she was strong and what little movement she managed was enough to hurt me a lot.

Her spinal cord popped in several places as my blood ran freely over both of us and the other whispered a sweet hush into the woman’s ear.

“When you stab someone, you should make sure to hit something vital,” the other lectured as my arm snaked around to the woman’s throat.

Sharp fingernails, hardened by the mindflayer’s mutation, dug through her skin and channelled electricity. My opponent’s resistance didn’t matter when my fingers could close the circuit between themselves.

She shuddered and dropped the dagger as I went deeper, my fingers closing around her Adam’s apple before the other me ripped out half her throat with a final, sudden movement.

At last, her whimper was cut off, replaced by a low gurgle.

She was on her last leg, but so was I.

My entire chest was raw pain from the rapier inside it. It felt like the woman managed to saw halfway through my arm, yet I couldn’t do anything against this pain as I was locked out of my own body.

She stilled, but the other didn’t let go. Instead, the other slid the integrated armblade out from beneath my wrist and used it to cut through my opponent’s neck.

Only once I held her head dangling by the woman’s long hair, did control over my own body return to me.

‘That’s how it is done.’

“Aaah!” I immediately dropped the head and fell to my knees, allowing the woman’s body to drop away from me as I relaxed all my filaments. A moment later, when the rapier’s orientation was uncomfortably changed inside me, I realized how stupid of a move that had been and clamped down again.

I also used the filaments to staunch the flow of blood.

The other me had somehow used my muscles to direct the rapier’s path as it went down between my lungs, missing major arteries and my heart. Or… no… I remembered now. The woman hadn’t missed my heart, but since the heart was a muscle, the rapier had glanced off, barely so.

It probably was a stupid move, but I couldn’t endure this thing inside me for a moment longer.

Reaching up with a shaking hand, I gripped the rapier, inching it out ever so slowly, paying painful attention not to move the pointy tip in the wrong direction and finish myself off by injuring something vital.

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***Tirnanog, Jeng, The Forest***

***Steiner***

As one of the handful of capable warriors of Clan Tomiri, it fell to me and my sisters to hold the wall against the anticipated attack. It was frustrating to be nothing but a playball in this war between the great clans, but at least some of them were on our side.

The story about Clan Jeng being almost destroyed by Thich’s and Vier’s surprise attack was a hard pill to swallow. For Jeng to be brought so low that it had to be saved sounded outlandish. I had only visited the Mother Tree once, but back then it felt like nothing could threaten Jeng’s control over the forest. Amidst Tirnanog’s wilderness, it looked like their people managed to rebuild a smidgen of civilisation.

Just to confirm their claims, I could hardly make the dangerous journey on my own when my own people’s holdings were infiltrated by strangers from three of the great clans. Little did it matter that they were supposedly on our side.

I allowed myself a short glance at the other warriors manning the wall with me, each of the great clans distinctly recognisable by their choice of preferred mutations.

The Jeng were the most similar to us, as they also relied on some of the same mutations the forest offered. Yet where the Tomiri preferred the stoneskin mutation for protection, Jeng’s more extreme mutations relied on the iobeetles, turning their warriors into bug-like humanoids. Going through such an extreme change was considered the greatest sacrifice for the protection of their clan.

The Hochberg looked comparably tame in comparison, but most of them towered above all the others with their increased size and bulging musculature. Since they originated from the other side of the forest, I wasn’t sure which mutations were responsible for their features. Travelling such distances was inconceivable to me. Going further than to the Mother Tree might as well be a journey to the other side of the planet – a journey with little chance of ever returning home.

Many of the drake-riding Aerie were slender and pale in appearance, with their warriors covered in medieval-looking armour and writhing tentacles showing sometimes from beneath when one of them forgot to hide them. I shuddered at the thought of what kind of creature might be responsible for such a mutation. And many Aerie had mutations with wings of various origins.

Admittedly, those were just my perceived impressions of what I had seen of the three factions as a whole. There were exceptions to the rule like the small, sturdy Hochberg who had looked at me askance when I assumed she hailed from Aerie or Jeng.

When I returned my attention to the planes beyond the forest, I saw it. Streaks of blurred movements so fast I couldn’t keep up.

Thich!

And they were so fast, they had to be juggernauts!

When riders on dryhounds showed up in their wake, I reached for the warning bell next to me and began to raise the alarm.

If the Jeng were right, then there were at least four warriors among them who could be classified as juggernauts. Of which two would likely be more than enough to end my people once and for all.

I touched my collarbone and sent a quick prayer to Gaia, hoping against hope for a miracle to happen. I wasn’t a particularly religious person, but I still remembered a missionary from Gaia’s church visiting our small enclave when I was a child. And if there was a greater truth out there, then we needed all the help it could grant us.

Two streaks of sparkling lightning shot out from the watch post further south, meeting Thich’s speedsters.

The following moments felt like they drew on for an eternity, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds during which frantic movement and flashes of afterimages painted a picture of the exchange. From one moment to the next, I saw the two parties facing each other, seemingly talking before they once more blurred into motion I couldn’t keep up with.

Then the duel to the left ended suddenly and violently with an explosion which felt like an artillery shell had hit the two combatants. Even from this distance, I felt the wave of pressure before the earth erupted, forming a crater with a diameter of at least twenty metres.

Some debris from the explosion glanced off my cheek, thankfully deflected thanks to my hardened skin, and I ducked far too late for it to be of any help. Yet I couldn’t stop myself from following the reflex of seeking protection.

When I dared to look back over the balustrade after no second explosion was coming, I saw that the speedsters had finished their battles already.

The other Thich had yet to encounter their opponents, but the sudden and decisive end of their comrades had obviously shaken the riders on their dryhounds as they tried to call back their beasts.

Meanwhile, Aerie’s drakeriders rose from the courtyard behind me to hunt and engage the remaining Thich.

The warriors from the great clans left their posts on the wall to follow the drakes with more confidence than I could ever muster after seeing such a violent exchange. Among my clan, I was seen as strong, but I couldn’t consider myself to be more than cannon fodder when faced with someone who could call upon an artillery strike and survive the aftermath!

After ensuring that the wall was still sufficiently manned by my people, I decided to follow the clanners with considerably more hesitation than their warriors had shown.

I stepped over the balustrade and jumped, landing several dozen metres ahead before I settled into a fast jog to reach the battlefield.

The sun was already setting beyond the mountains and I wasn’t sure whether the clanners were aware of it, but the twilight hour sometimes drew out the beasts of the night considerably earlier in this region. It was advisable to get any prisoners and injured back into the fortress as fast as possible.

When I reached the scene of the battle, it looked like both of Aerie’s speedsters had decided the battle in our favour, but one of them was heavily injured. The armour-clad woman was run through by what looked like a sword and four warriors were trying to dissuade her from pulling it out before a healer could reach the scene.

The other speedster was carrying a prisoner – sans legs and arms – and dropped him without so much as a second thought when he saw the grave injury his partner had taken. It took an intense argument and the woman pointing after the drakeriders still visible in the sky before the speedster flashed away, presumably to help hunt down the other Thich.

I couldn’t comprehend how someone with her injuries was still standing at all.

Looking between the woman, the drakes in the distance, and the chopped-up prisoner on the ground who was somehow still breathing, I wondered whether I should have my people pack up all their things and move to the Mother Tree. Because if the Thich came back I saw little chance for my people’s future. If this was truly an all-out war between the great clans, then there was little else for us to do other than to get out from underfoot.

I swallowed and began nodding to myself. If we gathered all our things, maybe we could join a group of Caravaners and run all the way to Hochberg.

Journeying such a long distance suddenly seemed no longer an insurmountable task compared to staying here.