Fowlhunter [GL]

Capri had flicked on the headlight of her hat suddenly, and thrown herself at her. The abrupt shift from darkness to bright was blinding, and Ennanis was dazed for a second. But she recovered quickly, blinking the sparks from her eyes, and ripped herself free from Capri’s grip easily. She twisted herself around and wrenched the girl’s arms behind her in a deadlock. Lienna was already a gold blaze on her finger, activated the second that Capri had blinded her.

Capri struggled against her, but was futile. Capri had been acting shifty for a while now, but Ennanis hadn’t managed to guess what she was after. A robbery? Soleki-enhanced, Ennanis’ senses ran on high as she glanced around them, trying to comprehend what exactly was going on. She saw the three walls pressed against them, the path where they’d come from. And—as an aerial being herself—she didn’t forget to glance up. And there, she saw them.

Three Wardens descended from the sides of the gully. Their white uniforms rustled in the wind of their wings, a triad of fluttering feathers. Ennanis stared open-mouthed for a while; she had expected Capri to pull something, but nothing had prepared her for these newcomers.

She didn’t recognise these angels, but they were her kind nonetheless. Ennanis shifted her stance, still maintaining her grip on Capri. She expected the angels to lower themselves to the ground, but they remained hovering, looking down at her.

Ennanis frowned, using a free hand to start conjuring a communication charm; Lienna glowed brilliant on her finger. The three gazes zeroed in on it. The angels exchanged looks. And then, in unison, they swooped down.

Alarmed, Ennanis threw Capri behind herself, flaring her wings to shield them. The angels were armed with luminarial gold weapons, which let them release Soleki beams rapid-fire, raining into her wings and the walls behind them like flaming bullets. Ennanis could summon beams from her bare hands, but it was much slower than with weapons.

Growling, she shut off Lienna. The beams stopped flying, but one of the angels reached behind them and whipped out a musket. He cocked it and aimed.

Prometheus damn it. No point in being quiet anymore. “What’s going on?” she yelled up at them, but only got the blast of a rocketing bullet in answer. In the confined space and with Capri to protect, she didn’t have many options. She turned and shouted to Capri, “Head outside!”

Capri stared back at her, wide sapphire eyes quavering. Was she frozen in fear? With no time to waste, Ennanis grabbed her and dragged them out of the opening.

Strangely, all the guards from before were gone. It was just them and the whistling tunnel, on one end the elevator shaft, on the other end back out to the Agni pool. Ennanis pushed Capri by the shoulders. “Go! Run for the elevator, I’ll catch up.” Then she turned to face the sliver. She flipped her headlight on, illuminating the passage with a fluorescent white hum.

“Leave her alone, she’s just a kid,” Ennanis said as the white light caught the face of the first Warden who emerged. “Explain yourselves.”

The first Warden merely coughed. It took Ennanis a second to realise that it was a laugh. It took her another few seconds to realise that there were three of them, but none of them were going after Capri; and from the girl’s contorted expression, Capri had known this was going to happen.

When Wardens attacked someone, they didn’t waste time or energy explaining themselves. They were trained not to listen at all—they just came to do what they were supposed to. Ennanis would know, having once been on the path to being one. She knew, then, that she would get no answers from their mouths no matter how much she prompted them.

Ennanis didn’t have any other weapons on her—any on her would have been confiscated if she had tried to bring them into the mines as a worker. So she was forced to call upon Lienna again, spinning until it was a spear in her hands, familiar and golden. At least in the tunnel now there was more room for her to wield it. She used its length to put distance between her and the Wardens, but with three of them and one of her, she stayed clearly on the defensive.

The angel with the musket aimed again. Ennanis was ready, Soleki enhancement sheening across her body. But another angel put up their hand, and the musket angel lowered it. Ennanis eyed them. So that was their leader.

Ennanis was still trying to figure out what their deal was. Had they mistaken her for someone else? But that was hard to believe, with her reputation among the angel ranks, and by now there had been plenty of opportunity for the Wardens to confirm her identity. If it was a targeted attack against her, then… Were they rogue? But to have one, let alone three, of the most prized, loyal Royal Division to commit treason, was a likelihood extremely slim.

If they weren’t rogue at all, then—they were just following orders. And Wardens followed the orders of only one: King Prometheus.

Fucking hell, Ennanis thought. Fucking, sure. Okay. No matter what their reasons were, she was clearly in danger. And there was only one thing there was to do.

Before any of them could try anything, she thrust her spear out. Soleki raged across the length of it, gold and brilliant, and with a vicious swipe, she whammed the burning shaft across two of them.

They fell back. That left her free to come to blows with the leader, keeping an eye on the other two. The leader’s polearm and her spear clashed against each other. They were strong, fitting of their station—Wardens were some of the strongest angels of their entire kingdom. By the fifth blow, one of the other two angels had recovered, firing off Soleki beams at her. Ennanis took the hits with her Soleki-enhanced wings, angling them to minimise the damage. But she wouldn’t hold for long; already she saw the musket-angel getting to his feet. That blow should have been enough to take out an angel Brigadier for hours; clearly, the Wardens were made up of some different stuff. They were also far more experienced than her—these angels could’ve been anywhere from fifty to hundreds of years old—and knew how to work as a team.

Ennanis couldn’t shake off one without one of the others coming at her back, and her luck so far could only carry her for so long. In a single misstep of hers, the leader thrust their polearm through her side. Warmth sprayed from her right abdomen, and Ennanis stumbled back into the wall, heaving as she clutched her wound. A stunningly precise hit—based on the way she was bleeding and how she felt, Ennanis was sure that that blade had just ruptured her liver.

A fatal wound for a mortal, but not an angel, who would not succumb to any wound except one through the wrists. However, hitting vital spots did weaken an angel immensely, even if temporarily, and it was in that period of down-time that it became possible to free their armbraces and end their life.

Ennanis wasn't sure if these Wardens sought to incapacitate, or if they were going in for the kill—but Ennanis wasn’t sticking around to find out. It was too late for her to turn off her Soleki and try going hand-to-hand, not when Soleki was the only thing keeping her upright now. She needed something else to give her an advantage…

The three Wardens each dusted themselves off and stepped towards her, cornering her. Their noses and mouths were hidden below their masks, but their slitted eyes were full of condescension. Ennanis couldn’t tell what they were thinking, but she knew how they were looking at her: like she was just an ignorant child playing in an adults’ game.

Bracing her hands on the wall, sucking in ragged breaths, she dragged herself to her feet. She flared her wings to shield herself at a moment’s notice.

It was then that all three of them blinked.

…?

Ennanis cocked her head. Then, she lifted her wings higher. Her three opponents were definitely squinting their eyes now, into thin slivers. She realised, then, that her wings were concentrating the light of her headlight, still switched on as it was, and the white of her feathers an excellent reflector of the brightness.

In what must’ve looked like a last-ditch suicidal move, she threw aside her spear and lunged at the leader. With the shock factor and a sheer wave of Soleki-enhanced speed combined, she hit aside the flat of their blade with her arm and got in close. She flared her wings around them. The glare of the headlight filled the leader’s slitted eyes. In their blindness, her fist went in, the metal of her armbrace accompanying it, delivering a savage punch that sent them flying backward and slamming into the wall.

The second angel was coming. The musket-angel was cocking his gun. Ennanis sidestepped the second angel’s sword. She did the same; lunged close with her headlight, then grabbed hold of the angel’s sword wrist, twisting the weapon out of his grasp. With barely a heave, she flipped his body over her shoulder. He slammed into the ground.

She stamped on his neck with her heavy mining boot—CRACK. She called for Lienna, which flew into her hand, and she drove her spear through his back.

She tore it out, and blood sprayed everywhere. Next, she flung her spear over her shoulder like a javelin. Soaring through the air, Lienna and its five prongs ripped through the leader who had just begun to get up. They screamed in agony, pinned to the ground.

“Lienna,” Ennanis simply called again. Accompanied by another howl from the victim, the weapon ripped itself out in reverse, spinning across the tunnel as it returned to her hand.

She turned on the last one.