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With a flick of her swords, she sent her magic lashing forward, traveling along the path of the bullets to slam into the machine guns themselves, consuming them into nothing but melted iron. A ruthless burst of her magic cleared those bunkers of the men manning those machine guns and touched off the ammunition stores.

The far southern edge of her magic stretched for miles, brushing against the icy edge of Rhohen’s magic where he led another spearhead of Alliance troops, mostly trolls and dwarves compared to the elven and human units that followed her.

She dashed toward those upper heights, knowing that the bulk of the Mongavarian army were dug in beyond them.

Today the Alliance would take the Empress Line. They’d smash the Mongavarian army so soundly that there would be no question about surrendering.

“Lije!”

“On it!”

Merrik tilted his aeroplane as Lije and Stickyfingers dove to attack one of the bunkers.

A Mongavarian aeroplane dove to chase them, but Merrik matched the move to intercept, Aylia shadowing his movements as his wingwoman. He triggered his machine gun, the bullets tracing a line across the enemy’s upper right wing.

The Mongavarian juked and peeled off to avoid Merrik’s fire, leaving Lije and Stickyfingers free to pound the bunker below with the bombs tucked beneath their wings.

Given the bombs were only about an arm’s length long, they couldn’t hold the amount of explosives as the bombs dropped from the far larger bomber aeroplanes. But those large bomber aeroplanes couldn’t operate as close to the engaged troops as the nimbler fighter aeroplanes could.

Still, these smaller bombs only caused minimal damage on the heavily reinforced bunkers. Murray, the squadron’s resident human magician, had added extra, stored fire magic to all the bombs he could during the night, magically exhausting himself. The fire gave the bombs a little extra oomph, though they still needed to be dropped at just the right moment to have any hope of damaging the targeted bunkers.

“Capt. Loiatir?” Despite the words being in Escarlish, the elven cadence and accent indicated that this was one of the elven pilots.

“Yes?” Merrik pointed his aeroplane upward once again, toward where the elven pilots not engaging with the handful of Mongavarian aeroplanes that had dared make an appearance were keeping an overwatch station.

“Look to the east.” The pilot’s voice remained crisp, but something in the undertone had Merrik’s breath tightening, even before he looked in that direction, squinting to peer into the brilliance of the rising sun.

Across the eastern horizon, higher than Merrik and his pilots were currently flying, a line of large, dark silhouettes charged across the pink, sunrise sky.

Airships, and a lot of them.

Merrik hadn’t seen a single Mongavarian airship since that raid on the enemy’s airship base two weeks ago. Only a handful of airships had been able to scatter to escape the destruction then. Between that raid and the destruction Fieran had dished out to the enemy airships during the war, Mongavarian airship losses had been great. They must have mustered nearly all of what was left of their fleet for this attack.

Small comfort at the moment. Every time the Half-Breed Squadron had faced airships before, they’d had Fieran. He could unleash mass destruction, sweeping them from the sky in a blaze of magic.

Nor were there more than a handful of Alliance airships nearby to offer assistance. Once the Mongavarian airship fleet had been gutted and the Alliance switched to more heavy reliance on the aeroplanes, the Alliance airships had been turned into floating scouting platforms rather than fighting vessels. Many had been lightened of their heavier armaments in order to fly higher and faster, with the bulk of the Alliance airships stationed over the ocean to watch the Mongavarian seaborne fleet. The few Alliance airships in the vicinity only had a handful of machine guns for warding off enemy aeroplanes.

No doubt, those enemy airships were loaded down with whatever heavy bombs the Mongavarians could still field. They would pound the gathered Alliance forces below.

When he glanced over the side of his aeroplane, he could spot the blaze of blue stretching along the ground for nearly as far as he could see from the air, reaching until it touched a similar blaze of white far to the south. Adry was a maelstrom of blue magic ripping into the Mongavarian defenses.

Would they go so far as to bomb their own lines to get at Adry?

Of course they would. Adry was the greatest threat to them. She and Rhohen. Mongavaria would hit them with all they had, hoping to stop them in their tracks.

No, it was up to the Half-Breed Squadron to stop the airships before they ever reached Adry and the Alliance lines.

Merrik squeezed the talk button on his control stick even as he turned his aeroplane to point toward that oncoming line of airships. “Half-Breed, listen up. There are Mongavarian airships approaching from the east, undoubtedly loaded with bombs to dump on our ground forces. It is our duty to stop them before they reach our lines.”

He didn’t have to say that it would be more difficult without Fieran leading them into this battle. The determined hush, so different from their usual chatter, that fell over the radio waves said they understood what they faced.

As the Half-Breed Squadron assembled behind him, breaking off from bombing the enemy fortifications and chasing down stray Mongavarian aeroplanes, Merrik switched his radio to the channel for headquarters. “HQ, this is Half-Breed, come in.”

“This is HQ.” A crisp voice, faint from distance, broke through the static.

“A Mongavarian airship fleet has been spotted on the horizon. Half-Breed is moving to intercept. We plan to take them down over enemy lines, but if we do not, you will need to keep a wary eye to the sky in case of bombs or falling debris.” Merrik flexed his fingers on the control stick as his aeroplane hurtled toward the dark shapes growing larger on the horizon. He’d be out of range of headquarters in just a few minutes.

“Roger that, Half-Breed.” There was a brief pause, then the crisp tone cracked just slightly. “And good hunting.”