Thanqol

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Princess Jezera recognizes her mistake. When panicked, she took refuge in humanity. She gave up on the strength of her vision and withdrew to her most basic incarnation. This cost her control of her size, of her neck, and her arms. A lesson.

She rears back as Aeglesia charges, letting her sword fall from its awkward grip, instead taking refuge in her legs. One comes up in a kick and as it does, it changes - the snap-crack as the knees rotate, the sudden flash of iridescent turquoise scale, and the lengthened raptor leg extends out to grip Aeglesia's head in its talons. Then Jezera flips in mid-air, twisting Aeglesia off the ground and send her spinning in a flash of crimson armour and golden hair face first into the ground.

Jezera lands perched on her extended raptor leg, and with a pirouette shifts the other into an extended octopus tentacle. A bruised Aeglesia barely rolls out of the way as it slaps down on the ground where she was a second ago. She barely has time to regain her feet before she's bowled over again - Jezera's entire lower half has become that of a great tiger, and she pins the would-be Roman beneath her tauric form. The weight of her makes Jezera struggle and gasp, beating her fists against unyielding fur.

But she does not neglect her gifts.

The cut from the grudge-dagger is small - but that's all it needs. Jezera jerks, eyes darkening. Crimson-violet energy pulses out from the wound, exposing the twisted labyrinth of veins that comprises her. Perhaps she might have fought it, but she just learned the lesson that when panicked she should not take refuge in humanity. This cost her control of her mind, her heart, and her reason.

The bound tiger-taur begins to twist and change. Teeth sharpen, colours deepen and run cold, fur lengthens and stripes jag into razor lines. Then, two great bloody wings of exposed bone emerge from the tiger's shoulders, feathers forming out of crystal-frozen blood and then solidifying into a twisted red reality. With dark, determined eyes, Princess Jezera, griffontaur, stands and steps away from Aeglesia. She stars at Saber - the wordless speech of someone who agrees with what has to be done, and stands ready to do it.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Some would say the best part about having this conversation during a duel was that matters could close gracefully. In any other context Lancer might have sniped, argued, sought the last word, made some brash and impassioned speech where her emotions outran her theoretical framework and embarrassed herself in the process. As it was she simply slid face-down across the grass for over two hundred meters before coming to a gradual halt, trail of torn mud behind her, and then gradually curled into a ball and clutched her head. Don't be sad for her - it's better this way.

And besides, a moment later she is hidden away as the mighty lioness crashes to the ground.

Aeglesia's shield had held many advantages, and she'd been preparing for this fight above all others. Somehow it had transformed, twisting itself into a ribbon of steel and carbon fiber and forming a set of knots binding Princess Jezera's paws together, linked by a short chain to her neck. The divine lioness roared and clawed at the earth, covering Lancer in dirt, trying to scratch the bindings off before in a panic reverting to her human form.

Aeglesia gasped for relief in that moment. She'd won.

Jezera hadn't realized it yet but the binding had been illusory - the bondage equivalent of a finger trap, growing tighter in proportion to her opponent's strength, popular amongst dragons who were into that sort of thing. If the lioness had maintained her cool and committed to the strength of her monstrous self then she'd have been able to wriggle out of it before long. But she'd observed Jezera's reaction when put in a bad situation was to shapeshift - and that meant that the chain, grown strong on the stolen strength of her lioness form, was now unbreakable.

The Princess was dark skinned, blonde haired, wearing denim shorts and a white sleeveless shirt tied up into a knot. Her hands were tied to her neck by the crimson steel ribbon that had once been Aeglesia's shield - but she wasn't done yet. Holding her sword in an awkward grip close to her throat she charged without hesitation, and Aeglesia - third place regional swordfighting champion - suddenly found herself fighting desperately to hold her off. She didn't have her shield and so was desperately backpedalling, short gladius at a range disadvantage against the huge machete wielded by Jezara.

Return to Thellamie

Kalentia!

Kalentia did not throw up a barrier.(1)

(1)

"A barrier!?!"
"Calm down Kal, she didn't mean it -"
"Get the fuck out of my way Cair -"
"Shit - sorry, she gets like this -"
"I don't get like this, I am having a perfectly normal medical professional's reaction to being told I should put up a barrier -"
"Here it comes, I tried my best."
"Ever since Scaithworthy published her goddamn Survivability Cake treatise then every novice white mage who's come up has looked at the numbers on barriers vs healing and come to the same conclusion: That barriers are far more effective. It makes sense right? A gram of prevention is worth more than a kilogram of cure? I'll get good at barriers first and then maybe learn some healing basics on the off chance something gets through the barrier -

But then it's not just getting your barriers right, is it? What if you're slow on the draw and get tackled by a werewolf before you get your barrier up? Well, then you've got to improve your reflexes. It starts with getting strung out on coffee and before you know it you're learning performance enhancing time magic in order to shave microseconds off your barrier reflexes. And there are different kinds of barriers, right? Specialized against different damage types? So before long you've got a mage sight up every second, cutting through the privacy of the people around you, and you've probably got a bunch of barriers up 24/7 just in case, so nobody can get close to you physically, and you'd better believe emotionally as well. And then your innocent little barrier-curious novice has fallen down the stairs of Evil Wizardry, cultivating a paranoid surveillance apparatus to ensure that every threat is perfectly identified and met with the exact right amount of force, surrounded by a cloud of time paradoxes and privacy invasions while becoming so touch starved that they're one lonely morning away from kidnapping a princess for their impenetrable forcefield lair and guess who has to go dig them the fuck out of it ---"
"Kal, that was like, two times."
"In the six years since that fucking Cake Essay was published!"
"Alright, alright -"
"And where's Scaithworthy now? Has anybody seen her? Has she answered any questions about the barrier mindset? Or is she ensconced in her own impenetrable forcefield lair, slowly going insane like the rest of her cultists?"
"Look, man, I don't know, I just think you're overthinking this."
"There is nothing more romantic than holding a wounded knight in your arms, gently opening their armour, feeling her heart flutter beneath your hands, knowing you're the reason it still moves - and that lady wants to take it away from the world in the name of efficiency! I hope she catches a fucking cold."

Instead she followed her traditional technique: running after the Lunarian, hands alight with healing(2) magic, waiting for her to take a hit so she can dive in to immediately cure it. This was not a dignified process; the vibe here is 'late schoolgirl rushing through a bad neighbourhood', involving lots of shrieking and ducking.

(2)

Offensively, this doubles as a sleep spell. Almost everyone's got a few hours of sleep debt keeping them from optimal performance, and any opponents who get the bright idea of coming after her will get the nap-slap and wake up a few hours later feeling amazing.

Injimo!

Fantastic. Instead of 'legendary hero defeats mysterious assailant' she'd managed to hit the bar of 'bodyguard squad leader'. She should -

Hmmmmmmm. She swallowed the frustration audibly as she set her weapon at ease. Nothing to be gained by seething. She knew she was second best, and all this meant was nothing had changed. No sense crying over the status quo. She'd get back to trying to break it along with her punching bag later.

But damn. That skateboard was fast. She should get one.

Return to Thellamie

Tsane!

Books. She loved books. She was so glad that she read all those books. She couldn't imagine how confused people who didn't read books must be right now. She wished she could go and read some more books instead of doing what she was about to do -

- But not entirely. Because what she was about to do was reveal her brand new offensive spell that she'd refined for years but not gotten to use in anger yet. The conditions were perfect; the backdrop was open, there was no wind, minimal humidity, clear and present danger of unknown typology, a crowd of witnesses. She'd had time to do all the precasting and all of her markers had been fresh and she'd even managed to get a purple one with a glitter effect which, according to the theories of Beautification of Violence, should add a meaningful boost to her damage output. She stood up, raised her arm, the colours surged inside her -

And something leapt into the way. She had to do an emergency halt by drawing a line of black across her index finger, blocking the mana cascade. Damn it, not again!

Injimo!

The stakes of any situation were what you allowed them to be.

To someone else this would be a moment for uncertainty, defense, information gathering. Figuring out who the opponent was, what their agenda was, the reach of their weapon and their measure as a duelist. This would be a dialogue with her opponent, one which required her to be on the back foot until the chance to reverse presented itself. That's how Heron might have fought here.

But Injimo wasn't fighting the opponent in front of her.

She smashes the initial attack aside and that's the last of the respect she pays to her opponent. One hand tears her handmaiden's dress open - sorry Rurik - revealing her short sun-yellow strapless dress, traced through with curls of soft white wool. The white pattern looked like a network of fractures, matching with the tracery of fine white lines all along her exposed olive dark thighs, her knees and shins, her elbows and hands. Each scar was a mark of pride - a time when Heron had been forced to hurt her in order to stop her. A single line of blue hair, dyed amidst the black, falls down across her left eye. Her muscles emanate heat, the lines of sweat confessions that even in the midst of this festival she'd been doing pull-ups in secret. Not a moment to be wasted, every scrap of value to be extracted from every battle.

The offensive begins with a lioness' roar, overhead two-handed strikes with the spear while advancing. She fought like a workout, combinations in sets of eight, each technique feeling like it took everything out of her - everything but the next technique. She was already so far behind she could not afford to hold back even a little.

Anyone she lost to would be one more person standing between her and Heron. She could not fall further behind. Everybody back up, she wanted this.

[Fight! 8!
- Create an opportunity for Civelia
- Seize a superior position]

Breathless Dead

Primitives often have a hard time grasping divination-based warfare.

The ships of the great empires are, by traditional definitions, blind and deaf. They have no scanners, no computer-assisted modelling programs, no signal emitters or receivers, no ability to detect life signs or lack thereof. Nothing more than Biomantic eyeballs being placed against Ultramateriel telescopes. You can, in fact, hide from the warfleets of the Endless Azure Skies by painting your warships black and turning off all the lights.

But that's where divination comes in. Blind and deaf though the ships of the Skies and Shogunate might be, through communion with the Gods they are able to consistently place themselves into the same broom closets as their enemies. This is powerful sorcery, but brute force: on the one hand, the infinity of space is condensed into a single certainty, on the other, you are not provided with any detail of what you will find at the other end, only with the directions on how to get there and the certainty of a battle at its conclusion.

This has a curious effect when a fleet seeking engagement hunts a ship that seeks to escape. Against primitives the entire fleet might deploy in perfect order around its quarry, but against an enemy working its own acts of prophecy then the strands of fate become entangled. The prey's prophecy tells it that in the future if it goes to this point it will be engaged by the entire enemy fleet; the hunters prophecy then has to change to account for the fact that the prey knows they know, but then the prey's prophecy has to take into account that the hunters know they know they know, and so forth. Presuming the relevant war gods do not hold particular malice or love towards one side or another, this results in a stalemate that must be solved with a sort of bidding.

The aggressor fleet performs the divination, gets a null result from Mars, and determines that there cannot be an engagement on the terms it desires. So it splits off a task force, commits it to going to one of the possible battleground areas, and then it performs the ritual again. This process continues until the fleet has split up sufficiently that the balance of powers has become if not even then within the range of possibility; at that point the gods bring the comparably matched forces together for their fated clash.

So it is that there is no surprise for either side when the Plousios and the Cancellation of Florence Nightingale leave the Deep Void to arrive in the suburban Archer-12 system at the same time. The Archer Constellation is one of many star clusters that has been rearranged so that it forms a constellation visible from Capitas; according to the grand plan of the Endless Azure Skies this entire cluster is to be transformed into a militarized bulwark, a multi-system stellar fortress that can anchor multiple civilian sectors. That is many centuries in the future; right now, Archer-12 is a scattering of luxury mansions, and an archaeological site with a few scattered research bases across the system hard at work on important questions like 'did we destroy these planets/civilizations?' and 'why?'. A dull red sun burns low, unseeded by the stellar macrocytes that make the stars of the Endless Azure Skies burn blue and violet - the star is too small and weak, it needs to be upgraded by fusion with another star before it has the dignity and brightness to be worth seeding. Somewhere in the distant horizon the machinery will be underway to redirect the relevant stellar objects.

The Cancellation is twice the length of the Plousios, and modern: ships of this era are ridiculously large and over-designed, temples to cost blowouts and gold-plating, stuffed full of cutting edge systems and optimized for parade duty and saber rattling. An evolution on the traditional Warsphere design, behold: the Spike-Sphere. Shaped as though a grape had been stuck through the centre with a toothpick, the spike extending out evenly in both directions. The forward part of the spike is an energized blade, the theoretical answer to the ramming techniques that Imperial vessels use to such great effect against Azura warspheres in the Battle of the Trinary Stars. By rotating precisely, the theory goes, the Warsphere will be able to wield this massive blade like a sword, cutting apart enemy vessels as they approach. The aft part of the spike is a massive Imperial-style plasma engine, almost skeletally exposed and vulnerable but giving the Spike-Sphere Imperial acceleration in deep void.

To add vulnerability to vulnerability, this section is also covered in massive nacelles filled with plasma torpedoes. Historically such armories present points of critical vulnerability in Azura formations, requiring fleets to baby their vulnerable munitions trucks. The Spike-Sphere solves that particular issue by making the entire 'tail' disposable; a detonation chain reaction will destroy the entire Engine spike but inflict minimal damage on the central Warsphere itself. In fact, detaching the tail might be a deliberate decision by the Captain: breaking the spherical shape causes a massive reduction in the effectiveness of the Grav-Rail drive, limiting the Spike-Sphere's maneuverability. If the tail is detached or destroyed then the Spike-Sphere will gain a massive increase in agility to help it win its current engagement.

The final aspect in this equation is the massive carrier bays on the Spike-Sphere's central structure. Carrier operations have been out of fashion for a while, but Liquid Bronze is bringing them back. A massive, forward projected fighter screen works to prevent speculative attacks against the vulnerable tail and prevent flanking. Together this makes the Cancellation alone a hybrid of all the strengths of Imperial and Azura designs, a fleet unto itself, the herald of a new age for the Endless Azure Skies. As a fun little aside, it would be utterly defenseless against an enemy that had access to starship teleportation, as they would be able to detonate its expensive tail with impunity - but then, this generation of warships is not designed to fight primitives. It is the final answer to problems of the last war, as represented by the Plousios.

(One might wonder what the point of all of this is compared to the traditional Azura answer of 'just bring another Sphere filled with ammunition'. Well, to answer that question one must consider that Warspheres have been destroyed often enough to lose their intimidation factor; they are known quantities and tactics against them have been perfected. But this? Fear of this new face of war will propel the Endless Azure Skies into a new age.)

The Angelshark lurks in the shadow of the fourth planet; it is an ambush predator and will only be effective if it has the advantage of surprise. Two slipgates in the system provide a flow of civilian shipping to render this a functional, if not prosperous, outpost. Right now the Cancellation is holding its ground at a distance - a stall. The fighter screens are currently being flown by drones while the Summerkind eggs are quickened and initial rage spikes are quelled. Once drone pilots are swapped out for elite Summerkind then the Cancellation will be ready to engage; until then it will maintain its distance - something its Imperial Engine allows it to do even in deep void.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"But that's exactly wrong!" cried Lancer. "To take all the glory of the age and attribute it to a specific weapon - that's sick! An act of historical illiteracy, a decision to crush the feats of an entire civilization down into a single point so that it can be wielded by a single person! The whole idea of a legendary hero is an act of violence against the soul of humanity, taking what is great about every age and ripping it out so that one person can carry it!"

Lancer cast aside her rocket launcher and leapt into the air. Beneath her conjured a painted horse, barded with silks of red and yellow. She rushed across the distance, firing arrow after arrow. "To praise Genghis Khan for her use of horse archery denies a civilization's collective efforts at the development of a tactical weapon system!" she leapt from the horse, lunging into close combat, encased in heavy bronze armour and with a shining spear. "To deify Achilles makes men think that they could not fight as he did!" she whirls in green, casting her spear with great force before rolling away, coming up armoured in the bright red battlegear of a Roman legionary. "Men obsessed over Emperors. Emperors obsessed over God! Nobody noticed that Rome had fallen. Nobody had the eyes to see the golden age when they were in it, nobody had the will to restore it when had passed!"

She raises another unrespected javelin to her shoulder. Lancer does not love this specific spear - she loves the culture, the system, the civilization that gave rise to it.

"Humans will read history books with the same carelessness with which they read the lies of poets," said Lancer. "They think they can no more return to those days than they could become Musashi or Alexander. I refuse to accept that! The glory of the past lies exactly where it was left abandoned, waiting for someone to pick it up again!"

Return to Thellamie

Rurik!

"What just happened?" asked Rurik.

Princess Heron could be witty sometimes, but she could also be a conversational brick wall. Moments like this she didn't wisecrack, she just asked basic question after basic question until an obvious target for ultraviolence appeared or was made clear. Whatever Rurik personally thought, the duty he held to the Princess' disguise was far more important than any (scoff) personal flair he might add(1).

(1)

And of course, anything he added would be compounding what was already the worst catastrophe of his life. His role was quite simple; he was meant to fill a hole in the world left by the Princess. Just as a bathplug keeps the water from draining out, all he needed to be was the mortar that keeps the dam from breaking. Every part of him was the right shape for this; he had studied for this, he had practiced the art of oratory and stagecraft just so that he could unlearn it in service to the Princess. He had walked along the beach in long rolling strides, letting his voice rise and fall over the crashing waves, until even his stage whispers were audible over the seafoam. He had thought that someday Princess Heron might wish to give an inspirational speech that united the people and dispelled doubt and uncertainty. When he had met her and learned that was not something she seemed likely to do, he had spent just as long learning how to overcome the power of his voice, how to strip confidence and stage presence from his posture, practiced how to mumble through one sentence questions - because the salvation of the world evidently did not need his theater tricks. It only needed this girl with the soul of lightning and the decisiveness to cut to the quick. And all that she, who could move so fast, ever needed was time. He could buy time. He could tread water. He could stand where he was meant and say what he was expected until the work was done and it was time for that thunderbolt to strike again. That was honour, that was sacrifice, to be what the world needed. Princess Heron had already sacrificed so much; time and again she returned to the world to save it, foregoing rest and peace. She did what she had to for the sake of everyone, and the least he could do on the world's behalf is sacrifice a little of his own impulses to buy her the time she needed. Simple gratitude, that's what it was. Simple respect. A gift freely given, just as hers was. It had involved training, realignment of his mystical energy, having to unlearn how to draw his Heartsword - all so nothing like this happened. All so that he never inadvertently unbalanced a mystical ceremony, triggered a supernatural sense, never broke character. For all his focus, he had never been able to buy her a day off with his sacrifice, but he had never added to her troubles, and all the problems he encountered as her were still waiting for her when she finished her other tasks. The idea that he might have broken this ceremony - this moment where Civelia might have enlisted additional help which might indeed bring them closer to collapsing Princess Heron's eternal to-do list into something manageable... What had it been? The dress? He'd known that it was wrong for the occasion, Heron would have known, she always made the final decisions on moments like that - he'd just been so proud of the fade transition. That must have been it, he'd let his pride as a tailor get ahead of his duty - fool! Selfish! Don't let any of this show on your face, veil be damned - use all that stage training for something! All you need to do is stall this out. That's all you ever needed to do. Play the part, no more slip ups. You've waited your whole life for this.

Return to Thellamie

Tsane!

Shut up a second I'm looking at lizards.

These are Void Fireworks. They range from five to thirty centimeters, zygodactylous feet with specialized suction caps, and ultratensile jumping musculature. Their second most notable feature is their obsidian fangs; extremely powerful but extremely brittle, hollow-tipped and capable of suction, a lot in common with a mosquito's proboscis. They can puncture flesh through clothing, and sink into wood or even stone with extended effort. That then leads to their most notable feature: once a Firework is attached it drains the colour from its prey. The subject loses colour from its distant extremities first, cast increasingly into a blue-greyscale[1]. Note that the Firework does not actually drain blood or other fluids despite being inclined to puncture flesh; that seems to be entirely for the purposes of grip, and it can draw from the clothes someone is wearing even if there is no direct fabric bridge to the Fireworks' mouth. Once the prey is completely drained of colour then the Firework will drop off like a filled leech and scuttle to safety.

[1] the Fireworks don't seem to enjoy the colour blue, though they'll eat it if there's nothing better. They really like yellow and incorporate it into their scale patterns.

This whole process is mostly benign. There is a lot of superstition regarding being colour drained and how it enlists you in Sayanastia's army, but that was correlation rather than causation. Her conscription/mind control/corruption was a separate subsystem. These creatures are the shards of one of her great monsters, the Light Eater, and they follow in her wake but are not active contributors to her schemes. Modern medical treatments and careful exposure to the Outside can restore lost colours without too much trouble, but objects are much harder to restore and generally have to be repainted if possible. Which is to say, nobody likes the Fireworks; they're considered pests and people generally try to swat them when they notice them. But that's when the Fireworks' defensive adaptation comes into play.

When a Void Firework is directly threatened or attacked then they perform an emergency expulsion of the colour they've stored. This creates a 1-5 meter radius detonation of ultracolour, like the explosion of a rattlecan full of paint, particularly with a mistlike residue that lingers afterwards. If this gets in living eyes it results in complete blindness until washed out with tears/cold water/eyedrops, and this can occur from the lingering mist residue as well as the initial detonation. Colours applied tend to be a mix of whatever the Firwork was eating at the time, and it has a permanent effect on what it impacts. Applied to skin it looks a lot like a shitty tattoo and will last for several weeks until replacement skin has grown in. The Firework uses the distraction to escape, sacrificing around 60% of its collected meal to save itself and the remainder.

That is all to say, they are regarded by the general public as extremely obnoxious pests that can completely ruin an outfit and presentation. The emergent implications are rarely considered. If these creatures emerged from the breaking of the Light Eater, what does that say for Sayanastia's other great defeated monsters? Is the trend for Void Fireworks to get larger or smaller over time, and does that indicate consolidation, continued fragmentation, or true speciation? Did they come into being with native migratory instincts that carried them to different waystones, or are they actively trying to follow Sayanastia out of residual loyalty? Collectively, are they more or less effective than the Light Eater itself?

And what's really cool is that these ones have little dragonfly wings. Associated atrophy of their jumping musculature. The Light Eater only had wings in its second stage - what does that mean? The elemental affinities of the Light Eater changed when it changed form, she needs to set up an experiment to confirm if that's the case with these too.

And - alright, fine. Work mode for a second. Glance at the situation - the idiots are bugging Kalentia for cures, dad's doing the ceremony bit, Sayanastia is not obviously gearing up for an attack. That meant whoever was going to attack the ceremony - and it was going to be someone - was doing the bare minimum to cover their tracks. Rather than looking into it, Tsane rolls up her left sleeve and draws a couple of glyphs on her skin with rainbow markers. Red, switching to purple, switching to cyan, switching to bone yellow, swirling and circling symbols. When the shit hit the fan she was going to be ready.

Once that was done, she turned her attention back to the Void Fireworks. She had another few minutes to do what she was really interested in before the proverbial phone rang again. Every second was precious.

Breathless Dead

Ember!

The regalia, it must be confessed, has more chain than fabric.

The prismatic heavens roar and crash. Nebulae flash and groan with the sparks of protostars struggling to ignite. Gravity tears and distorts, hurricane winds of oxygen and hydrogen course through the void. Mix every strand of light together and you get white; mix every colour of paint together and you get black. Here in Poseidon's realm you feel the rainbow darkness across your scarcely protected body.

In the distance you see the thundering of eight hooves; a horse in scale to the Eater of Worlds as a horse is in scale to a turtle. The horse, the rider, and the cyclopean eye - all scale beyond imagining. Necessarily vast because imagination has grown far indeed.

Teardrops fall from his eye, each containing runes. The ones you see read CIVILIZATION IS BUT THE EXPORT OF ENTROPY.

Against this storm the Plousios is small indeed, and you are smaller. But the ocean has a mouth to consume everything offered to it, no matter how vast, no matter how insignificant. And as the storm flashes your dragon arises from its depths. It is golden, sleek, fast, ascending from the depths below to catch you and your ship below. Out of respect for your divine beauty, Poseidon has sent a divine beast: an Angelshark.

The regalia has more chain than fabric. Unfortunately most of the fabric involved goes towards covering the mouth. Yet, you must negotiate with this creature nevertheless.

Dolce!

"Then it is necessary for you to take the assassin you are offered," said Artemis. "Her line is named for Diomedes, a warrior from ancient times. Have you heard of him? I'd be surprised if you had - he is overshadowed in every telling of his story despite being the one who objectively accomplished the greatest feats of all his peers. I think that even those of my kin who met him have forgotten him, and that they were relieved to have done so."

Artemis licked her finger and turned the page on her newspaper. "I remember the past, though. And I suggest you learn it too. There is always a delay between an arrow being fired and it hitting its target, and the length of the shot can be surprisingly flexible. Firing from out of someone's recollection can be just as dangerous as firing from outside of their line of sight."

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

In her left hand she holds her second javelin. In her right she holds a book. Lancer's emerald rimmed glasses glint as she shakes an escaped tress of brown hair out of her eyes. All of her attention is on the book as she hefts, and throws.

Another weak and halfhearted throw, as idle as the first.

It is almost a relief. After the barrage of Bohemond, the assault of the Handmaidens and the ferocity of Berserker it is pleasant to be fighting someone who is clearly your inferior. Whoever Lancer was in life, she was no legendary hero. The skill on display here slew no dragons.

Her hand freed, she brushes the escaped hair behind her ear. It does not fit into her elaborate braids but it is enough for her to take another sip of wine, conjure another javelin and with her eyes never leaving her book for a second, she takes another throw. It has the force of her Class container behind it, more than mortal strength, but nothing from her own legend adds to this. Time enough to gain position, to gain every advantage, to bring this play battle to a close against this unserious competitor before -

- her emerald eyes flick up from her book. It tumbles from her emerald-painted nails towards the ground. Her leg sweeps out to the left, sweeping out her dress into a flowing cascade, bringing her down into a crouch.

Her left eye winks shut. It helps her focus through the sights.

Her next javelin is a FGM-148.

Missiles streak up into the sky, pivoting on a dime and raining down a cascade of anti-armour shaped charges. Explosions and fire fall like rain.

"Did you know?" said Lancer, silhouetted by fire as she picked her book up, snapped the page back open, and hefted her rocket launcher over her shoulder. "that these weapons were so effective at destroying the atheist Soviet Union that the Church worshipped them as saints?" Lancer's eye flicked up from her book to look through the sight again, and she thumbed the trigger from top fire to direct fire. "Once again, they ascribe religious meaning to a perfectly serviceable spear."