“There’s something on the radar, sir.”

Yao instinctively moved to respond to the console-woman’s report, before hesitating as his gaze flitted over to where High-General Gao sat.

The man made for an awe inspiring sight, sitting in the command room’s central control throne. Normally that would have been Yao’s seat, but he had not hesitated for even a moment to hand it over to his fellow mortal.

For it had only taken a single moment for Yao to realize why it was that the High General had risen higher than any other mortal in Imperial history.

He simply had… a presence about him.

One that demanded respect and obedience.

It’s mostly the scars, Yao thought. Proof that the man clashed with a divinity and survived. His crawler distracting the beast long enough for the Magistrate to arrive and chase it up into the clouds.

A feat worthy of legend – and only slightly less fantastical than the most recent retellings of the tale.

Indeed, it seemed the tale only grew with each passing month. Yao wouldn’t be too surprised if, before the year was out, the story didn’t involve the general forcing the false divinity up into the skies and away from the city.

…As ridiculous as that would be.

Just delaying the beast with his crawler was already a legendary enough feat, blazing away at it with the main gonne as the false dragon bore down on him.

Still, with that in mind, it was no small wonder that the colonel found himself second guessing his every action around the scarred man.

It had made for a particularly stressful night shift.

Fortunately – or unfortunately – it seemed something was finally here to break up the quiet tension. Even if that something was likely just a flock of nocturnal birds.

“It’s your fortress, Colonel Yao.” General Gao’s words were not loud, but they managed to clearly cut through the quiet hubbub of the command post without trouble. “The command remains yours.”

Yao nodded quickly, resisting the urge to wipe a stray bead of sweat from his forehead as he turned his attention to the task at hand.

“Solo flyer or a formation, corporal?”

It was a hotly debated topic amongst the command staff whether the spirit guiding the radar was making an honest mistake each time it chose to warn them of a flock of geese – rather than the spirit beasts it was supposed to defend against – or whether it simply enjoyed watching the command staff scramble around the place in response to its shrill shrieks.

Either way, Yao and his staff had quickly come to realize that while spirit beasts’ aberrant natures caused them to fly solo, appearing as one large blip on the screen, while geese tended to fly in groups, appearing as a series of smaller blips.

Visual confirmation for either was still required from the sentries on the walls, but constant complaints about the use of floodlights and flares at night from the town’s residents had forced him to come up with two slightly different responses to a possible flyover.

“It’s… unusual sir.” The woman responded, eyes glued to the screen. “Multiple blips, but not in formation. They’re spread out quite far and traveling at different heights.”

Well, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what that might be.

“Cultivators,” Yao breathed before straightening up. “Sound the alarm. Level two response. Night time flood light restrictions are rescinded.”

The second order was not required given the detail that it was a level two response, but Yao said it more for the benefit of the general and his staff than the colonel’s own people.

“Wall cameras are turning,” another woman commented. “Bringing on screen.”

As she said the words, the display on the main screen came to life with the pitch black night skies beyond the walls of the Fortress.

Perhaps in different circumstances Yao might have taken a moment to appreciate the majesty of the stars above, but at this moment his focus was entirely on seeing if any of them were being hidden by the telltale passage of a flying figure.

“Floodlights are coming online, pivoting to thirty degrees, North-East. Wide-Spread.” A third voice spoke with the surety that came with long practice. “Elevation?”

“Currently forty-five degrees and rising,” the radar operator instructed.

In moments the screen was filled by half a dozen blinding beams of light as the town’s tower mounted spotlight’s aim quested up into the clouds like great ghostly white fingers.

“Crews are scrambled. Gonnes are primed.”

Yao glanced at a nearby clock. Thirty seconds. That was good.

It didn’t take long for their first foe to come into visual range. With the naked eye, they might have appeared to be over-large birds given their distinctive profile silhouetted by the spotlight’s beam.

Yao and his people weren’t using their naked eyes though.

The mystic implements of their lord were capable of perceiving the world with a clarity that Yao suspected was equal to that of a cultivator. So it was that with a few tweaks of his controls, the main screen quickly displayed not a bird, but a woman holding onto the underside of some kind of… kite.

Were they Instinctives? Or Imperials? Yao didn’t know. Details of who exactly Lady Shui had clashed with last night were few and far between.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter. He had a duty to perform.

“Fire!”

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

“Evade!”

Shi knew the instant the beams of light touched her people that they were in danger.

While she had investigated the capabilities of the firework launcher extensively since she had returned to camp – and was thus sure that she was beyond the effective range of said weapons – she was not so gullible to think that her foe had no other tools at his disposal.

The peculiar ‘fake birds’ that had attempted to follow her on her exodus from the fortress were proof enough of that.

As were the great mirror-lights that now silhouetted against the night sky.

Her people reacted instantly to her call, releasing their gliders and drawing upon their ki to utilize their flying techniques. Without people to guide them, the gliders tumbled gracelessly to the ground as their riders darted away, sparks flying from their feet as they rode the lightning.

A hundred crackles erupted from the fortress city below, and great lances of yellow fire rushed up toward her people.

Still, even if their enemies focus was effectively cut in half as they accidentally targeted the now worthless gliders, that did not mean her people emerged unscathed as what seemed like thousands of fireflies flew towards them from below, each traveling in orderly lines that might well have been… pretty, in different circumstances.

“Agh!” One of her inquisitors cried out, falling from the sky as one of those lines stitched across her chest.

Shi cursed as they continued to race towards the city, zigging and zagging to evade the lines and explosions that lit up the sky in a blinding and deafening barrage.

She had hoped to nullify her enemy’s advantage by infiltrating via the air. Ideally, she would have been able to infiltrate the city under cover of night. From there, the firework launchers’ effectiveness would be neutered by the close confines of the city.

For as swift as they might be once fired, it took time for them to reload between shots. Time in which they were vulnerable.

From there, her people would have been able to wreak havoc as they pleased.

Or so I thought, Shi thought irritably, wind whipping through her hair as she watched more and more fireflies stitch across the night sky.

Given that each ‘line’ seemed to originate from the same point, she could only conclude that they were each being fired by a single mystic device that was capable of firing repeatedly.

If inaccurately, she thought, watching the lines of fire to and fro, losing cohesion as they searched for her people with reckless abandon. Now if only that were the boon it should be.

For it seemed the lack of accuracy didn’t matter. The enemy’s goal was not so much to shoot at them – as fill the air with enough fire so as to form a nigh impenetrable wall. It was a crude, but undeniably effective stratagem.

Her mind raced to find a counter as yet another of her acolytes fell. Two in as many minutes – and decades of time, training and resources lost with them.

“Dip low!” Her ki enhanced voice called out.

While she would admit there was a temptation to rise up high to out-range her foe’s weapons, she knew in her heart it was a fool’s bargain. The lighting strikes of her acolytes would be rendered equally useless at such extreme ranges.

A limitation she was in no way sure applied to these new repeating firework launchers.

To that end she and her people dived steeply, allowing gravity to aid them in their descent as they angled their bodies to better fight wind resistance. As they did, the amount of fire coming their way fell off sharply, the rearmost weapons no longer able to target her people through the intervening buildings in their path.

They were still being fired upon by the repeaters on the wall, but Shi found them to be a lot more easily jinked as she zoomed across the battlefield, mere meters from the ground, the walls of the fortress growing larger by the moment.

Then she was over them, lashing out with two lightning strikes as she passed and grinning as two repeaters exploded into a shower of sparks and flames. A feat that was repeated up and down the wall as her people crossed the threshold of the city’s exterior defenses.

A larger explosion than expected, she thought, flying over the rooftops of the town, regarding the many pyres that now glowed on the town’s exterior walls. As expected, a large cache of bolts is a volatile and vulnerable target.

Cracks rang out from below, guards on the streets aiming at her and her people with their spear gonnes, but Shi easily juked aside, blasting a few as she passed. Glancing up, she smiled as she realized that the gonnes on the other walls and towers could no longer easily fire on her either – not without possibly damaging the town itself.

They still fired here and there, but it was nothing compared to the indiscriminate streams of fire that her people had encountered on their initial approach.

It was as she’d suspected, once outside the killing fields beyond the city’s walls, the enemy’s weapons were greatly nullified.

Fires were breaking out across the city as her people went about their grisly work, striking at the defenders as well as their stated objectives.

Storehouses. Barracks. Administration buildings. All places that Shi had scouted and painstakingly mapped out for her people in advance.

Shi grinned as a lightning bolt bored through the roof of another building, causing it to explode so violently that she felt the heatwave even as she zoomed away.

An ammunition storehouse of some kind, she thought.

The removal of which would hopefully-

Killing intent.

She juked to the side, just in time for a stream of fireflies to shoot past her. Even as she dodged though, she felt one of her people’s ki wink out, their body no doubt plummeting to the ground somewhere in the city.

Nearly a dozen ki signatures had materialized across the town, the enemy’s cultivators making themselves known.

Finally, she thought.

Her eyes quickly picked out the foe that chose to fire upon her, a masked woman in… armor of all things, standing on a rooftop.

That was not what truly drew her gaze though. Instead her focus was entirely on the unwieldy contraption in the woman’s hands.

It was a firework thrower. That much was clear. Though only in the sense that Shi had just been fired upon by it. Beyond that, it shared strikingly few similarities to the firework thrower she had back at camp.

Not least of all because the weapon held by the other woman held a myriad of barrels. One that made it look like some manner of demented musical instrument rather than a weapon of war.

Still, despite its peculiar shape, it proved to be plenty deadly as it turned in Shi’s direction, the barrels spinning menacingly with a whirr that was only barely audible over the whistling of the wind in Shi’s ears.

Dodge, her senses screamed and she was not hesitant to obey them.

And it was fortunate that she did, as the air she had just been occupying was filled with a glowing stream of fireflies – ones that moved to track her with infinitely more accuracy than those that had been mounted on the city’s walls.

Fortunately, Shi had more options here than she did out there, as she dove down into the streets below, using the buildings for cover as she zoomed towards her new foe.

The woman wasted not a moment before appearing over the lip of the rooftop she was standing on, her weapon whirring – but Shi was already gone.

Flying through the open window of a nearby home, she had but a moment to witness the gobsmacked expression of some peasant woman before she smashed through an interior wall and then another window and was out onto another street.

Rising up into the air, she arced back with surprising grace for a woman covered in dust and debris to regard the masked face of her foe.

A tiger mask, she thought, how cute.

The woman’s weapon whirred to life, turning to face her as the cultivator tried to pull the trigger… only for something to go clunk in her weapon.

Shi smiled, as she released her pull on her ki, content that the weapons internal had been adequately sabotaged by her magnetism. Her investigation into her pilfered firework launcher once more showing their worth as she rendered her foe effectively defenseless.

She could not drop the weapon in time to draw the blade on her back and the both knew it even as the traitor tried to do exactly that.

For just a moment, she wondered what the expression the woman beneath held in that moment.

Surprise?

Horror?

Resignation?

She supposed it didn’t really matter in the end. The traitor had raised their hand against the Empire, and nothing would shield them from its wrath.

Not even the Outlander’s strange and deadly weapons. For as powerful as they were, they were still held in the hands of an entirely average cultivator. One who would barely even be registered as an aspirant in the center most provinces of the Empire.

“Die,” Shi intoned quietly.

And the woman did – cooked alive within her armor as lightning leapt from Shi’s fingers to dance across her metal-clad form. Her weapon exploded after less than a second, throwing the corpse from the rooftop it had occupied.

And if Shi’s senses did not deceive, similar events were playing out across the town. Traitorous cultivators clashing with her elite inquisitors only to realize the sheer gulf between them.

Fires blazed across the town, smoke billowing from buildings and towers. The mirror-lights were down, shattered by her people, and a number of the repeating firework launchers on the far walls were now also smoking husks.

The central most palace of the town was also in ruins, flames flickering from a dozen rents in its surface.

Fireworks still flickered out of course, trying to bring down her people, but they were infrequent and inaccurate. Her people were moving too fast for any kind of counter force to be brought to bear against them in real numbers.

That had been the role of those… armored cultivators and they had failed utterly.

One supposes that the false divinity may show himself now, she thought. But would that not be an admittance of weakness in itself?

He had said that she was not worth his time.

She liked to think this raid had proven that assertion false.

And while that feat might prove her death if the male truly was what the Rooster claimed… Shi was content with that.

Because her work was done.

Bucket lines were forming as civilians across the town sought to stop the fires from spreading beyond the military buildings to civilian structures. A vain hope in several places, as Shi could already see no less than three infernos that had grown beyond control.

The town was in ruin. This Outlander had been humbled by the might of the Empire.

A small wound in the scheme of things, but that had been her purpose. This whole excursion had never been about truly defeating him.

Only reminding him of the power that might be brought to bear should he choose to stand against them.

She breathed in, enjoying the scent of ashes on the wind.

“You have courted death, Johansen,” she murmured, distant fires flickering in her golden eyes. “And now you have tasted her affections.”

Unfortunately, those affections could not last the entire night.

Her own ki reserves were still strong enough to keep fighting, but her followers would be starting to flag after releasing so many lightning blasts in such a short time.

For though the Imperial Clan were renowned masters of flight whose raids were said to be as swift and devastating as an oncoming storm – it was also true that they were just as brief.

Thunder Dancing was a ki intensive discipline, suited to fast devastating bouts of extreme violence rather than long drawn out conflicts.

She rose into the air, casually flicking out another lightning strike that immolated a guardsman foolish enough to attempt to aim at her from the street below.

To that end, her people needed to retreat.

To rest. Recuperate.

…Grieve their losses.

And prepare for the actual negotiations, she thought.

She flew off into the night, the city behind her continuing to burn.

Something it would continue to do well into the morning.

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

“I warned you that my sister was powerful,” Huang said sadly.

Jack stared out at the ruined fortress before them. The view from the northern gatehouse walls showed him just how damaged the city really was.

It seemed he’d underestimated these Inquisitors.

At best count their enemies lost four people last night. By contrast, the town was in ruins and hundreds of his own people were dead – including eight members of the Iron Paw.

Entire warehouses of ammunition had gone up. AA towers had crumbled – falling on other buildings nearby. Most of the gatLin gonnes on the walls were melted wrecks. The spotlights had been trashed. And most of his men would be bunking in people’s houses now that just about every barracks in the city had been leveled.

Indeed, just about the only piece of military equipment larger than a gonne that wasn’t stationed underground and was still functional were the town’s crawlers. Though they still needed to be dug out from under the rubble that had been the warehouse they’d been stationed in.

Something Gao, An and even Shui were currently overseeing, along with a dozen other tasks.

Technically, Huang should have been too, but for whatever reason she’d ask to accompany him as he made his way to the northern gate to… get a first-hand view of just how damaged the town was.

It would survive. It had been systematically defanged - and suffered a lot of collateral - but was otherwise ‘intact’.

Jack looked down at his armored hand, flexing his grip.

He knew that if he’d chosen to stick his head out from the underground command center to try and fight the people that did this, he’d probably be dead too.

Encased in melted armor after being struck on all sides by flying bitches flinging thunderbolts, he thought. I suppose that’s the problem with bluffing for so long. Eventually someone calls you on it.

He wasn’t blind to the questioning looks he’d received during the attack. His people were wondering as to why he hadn’t sallied out.

None of them had voiced that question. And he didn’t think they ever would – in front of him. But he knew what they were thinking.

Why hadn’t he stopped this?

The truth was that he couldn’t.

This level of power… it just wasn’t a threat he had an easy answer to.

He’d known these Inquisitors were strong. He’d prepared for them as best he could. And he’d even gone into this fight knowing they’d lose.

He just… hadn’t expected to lose this badly. Even his secret weapon, the Iron Paw had been handily mauled.

Though to be fair, it had been a pretty unfavorable matchup.

The Imperial Clan were feared because they could fly. Cultivators didn’t really have an answer to flying threats.

Which was why the Iron Paw had been issued gatLin gonnes.

Weapons that had proven wholly ineffective in the close confines of the town, the skill of their foe and the Iron Paw’s relative inexperience with the miniguns working against them.

It definitely didn’t help that the magic armor they wore – while enchanted against physical strikes – was utterly incapable of protecting against lightning attacks due to the… peculiar interactions of mana and ki.

“Four,” he mouthed silently.

Too few. Way too few.

He’d been prepared for an incredibly lopsided kill to death ratio where his people were concerned, but that was… way too lopsided.

He needed another answer. Because there was no way he could possibly beat these people in a straight fight.

He lifted one of the gatLin gonnes he’d collected on the way over here, the former owner having been taken away for a proper burial. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out why she’d died. The thing had malfunctioned. The shell casings had literally fused in place, keeping them from ejecting - and other shells from being fed into the barrel.

Something that should have been literally impossible given the gatLin’s design.

Which meant the enemy had done something. Something he should have anticipated given Shui’s showdown with the enemy leader.

He dropped the weapon with disgust, uncaring of the way it clattered to the ground, making the mortal lookouts around him jump.

Huang just stared though, an unreadable expression on her face.

He didn’t even know why the failure annoyed him so much. He hadn’t even liked the Iron Paw.

…But they’d also been his people. Willing or not.

And they’d died because he’d made a terrible call.

He bit his lip.

There was no way he could fight these people like this. Not without… horrendous losses.

And he was finding he was less ok with that idea than he’d thought he was.

“So… I suppose the answer is not to fight them then. Or at least, make sure they don’t want to fight me,” he said, ignoring the way Huang’s gaze flitted towards him. “I… think I can do that.”

If the answer to this problem was playing dirty… well he had more than enough experience in that department.

The only real difference here and now was scale.