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Adry released a long breath, trying to hold back her shivers.

She could fight a lot of things, but the gas attacks truly scared her.

Adry spun and sliced, her swords a blur. She nearly slipped in the knee-deep mud, barely catching herself as her opponent’s body fell into a puddle before her. She leapt over both the corpse and the puddle, charging forward even as she sent out another blast of her magic.

The rainy fall weather had turned the recently harvested fields into churning mud. Dried dirt encrusted her uniform along with the blood so deeply stained into the leather that she couldn’t wash or incinerate it off.

Her magic crackled around her, blasting outward to her right farther than she could see, and she held it in place by the sense of the dwarven magical shields she’d used to project her magic along the battle line.

Ahead and to her left, Dacha blasted his magic forward, tossing aside the Mongavarian soldiers who had dared stand and fight.

A wide drainage ditch between the fields opened before her and Dacha, filled to the brink with the runoff from the days of rain. On the other side, a large group of Mongavarian soldiers had set up sandbags around a machine gun nest, as if they believed the ditch would stop the Laesornysh warriors.

Stabbing his swords into the ground next to him, Dacha knelt and interlocked his hands. “Jump.”

Adry gripped her swords tightly, ran forward, and planted her foot in her dacha’s hands as she leapt, careful to keep her swords from slicing into Dacha. He stood, throwing her up and forward as she jumped.

She threw herself into a front flip, machine gun bullets incinerating in her magic as she went. She came down on the other side, landing within the machine gun nest just behind the chattering weapon.

A blast of her magic fried the gun, eating away at the metal until it was just a melted hulk.

The Mongavarian soldiers leapt to their feet, pointing their guns at her and firing at point blank range.

She threw herself to the side, even as she drew more of her magic from her chest. She managed to incinerate most of the bullets, but a few skimmed past her, close enough for her to feel the stir against her hair and through her magic.

She plunged one sword into a man’s chest, even as she sliced her other sword into a second soldier.

Dacha landed just outside the machine gun nest, coming up from a crouch to take on several of the soldiers.

Once she and Dacha had cleared the nest, they jogged up a rise, where the Mongavarian army had attempted to dig in.

That line was breaking even as she and Dacha neared. Soldiers scrambled to evacuate the large guns before she and Dacha destroyed them. Many of the men simply took one look at the two warriors, wreathed in fiery magic and dripping with the blood of their enemies, and ran.

By the time they reached the rise, only the chaos of hastily abandoned earthworks remained. A few guns stood in the mud, left behind in the haste of the retreat. Several mules and horses pulled at their tethers while various other equipment lay scattered in the trenches.

Even some of the Mongavarian wounded had been left behind. Those she and Dacha spared, unless they lifted a gun to attempt to fight back even now. They’d be taken prisoner, patched up by the elven healers, and sent to Escarland to finish the war in a prisoner of war camp.

At least they’d be alive. Unlike their fellows who had chosen the brave—but ultimately fatal—choice to fight a Laesornysh.

Adry slumped in the train seat, staring unseeingly out the window as the train rattled westward, headed for Fort Defense. That morning, she and Dacha had been relieved by Uncle Rharreth and her cousin Rhohen. Outside of her dacha and her siblings, Rhohen was the only other warrior of the magic of the ancient kings, though his had an icy edge inherited from his troll father.

Had it really only been a little over a week since she’d left Fort Defense? She certainly wore a week’s worth of grime. A week’s worth of blood. A week’s worth of weariness from nights spent in a tiny foxhole or dirt bunker, woken multiple times a night by her dacha’s nightmares and kept awake by her own tension as her body and mind never seemed to relax.

The train swayed as it swooped down the incline into the floodplains beside the Hydalla and before the dry riverbed that had once been the Chibo River. Ahead, Fort Defense rose on the bluff, the buildings almost gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight.

She found herself sagging even more in her seat as some of the tension bled out of her. Hot showers. Hot food. Clean clothes. She wasn’t sure what she wanted most.

All of it. Then so much sleep she’d get sick of it.

She worked up enough energy to tilt her head to take in the rest of the train car. Dacha sat all the way in the last seat at the back, his eyes closed with his head tipped back. Uncle Iyrinder slouched in a seat a few benches away while the other members of their elite guard detail had scattered throughout the car. After living all but on top of each other for a week, everyone had seemed to need the quiet and elbow room.

The train rumbled across a stone bridge over the mud flat that used to be the Chibo River before it pulled into a new station that had been built on the floodplain that once sheltered the Escarlish front lines. Now that the front lines had moved miles into Mongavaria, the buildings and bunkers had transformed into a staging point.

When Adry, her dacha, Uncle Iyrinder, and the guards disembarked, they were directed to an army truck, which took them up the bluffs. After a short jostling ride, it parked before the familiar wooden building grown out of trees that housed the elven officer quarters.

Adry groaned softly as she climbed down from the bed of the truck. Her whole body ached, from the joints that protested sleeping on the hard ground to her overtaxed muscles. That hot shower would be first on her priority list, assuming Dacha and Uncle Iyrinder didn’t use all the hot water.

Dacha lowered himself to the ground from the front seat of the truck, his silver-blue eyes as dull and lifeless as they’d been when he’d boarded the train at the front. Yet, after setting his bag on the ground, he turned to Adry. “Sena…”