With the white-faced Finella reduced to a stuttering coffee mule, Alia briefly returned to her quarters to collect more presents and made short work of tracking down her remaining targets.
Lucky for her, they were—with the exception of Serena—all in one place.
“Morning!” Alia chirped, stepping into the officer quarters of the Vengeance’s elite squad.
Even with the addition of the twins Arin and Ido, the mages Daichi and Hinako, and Alia’s determined friend, l, there were still nurous hammocks left unused. The Vengeance had approximately three hundred demons in her crew, but the eighty-tre ship still felt roomy in comparison to the five hundred or so it used to hold when she still had her land forces.
This ant there was enough free space for Finella to order many of the hammocks to be taken down and an impromptu training area to be created. It wasn’t suitable for the large-scale magic duels Alia had enjoyed in the Asamaywa Academy’s Speaker rooms, but it was a relatively quiet place for her friends to practice cycling and convecting their aether.
Well, mostly quiet.
Despite Alia’s cheerful greeting, the response was muted while the room's inhabitants focused on their duties.
“Keep your lats tight! These muscles, here!” Ido instructed, as he tapped Noburu’s body. “Don’t let your grip fail just because you’re tired. Now… tense!” The one-horned demon pressed down with his scabbard against Noburu’s struggling block. Instead of a sword, the forr confidence trickster was using a standard-issue rifle with an attached bayonet.
While Alia’s ti at the academy was spent being surrounded by aura-coated swords and mages, she knew non-aether users did the majority of fighting in war. She’d heard Sarafina at lunchti discuss how there were more casualties from artillery shrapnel alone than from all other sources combined.
In an ideal world, Noburu would never have to go against an aether user with a blade, or, in his case, a bayonet. It was still useful for him to have so experience in martial arts in the hope that he could survive a few extra seconds, allowing for his allies to co to his aid.
Well, he did have his blessing that allowed him to mistwalk through the Shimr, but other than Seonmi, the rest of the squad didn’t know about that.
While the Ainese twin had taken it upon himself to help train Noburu, Seonmi was receiving her own form of training under Ido’s feminine counterpart. Arin Song, the enthusiastic markswoman that had impressed the Vengeance’s weapon’s officer, Thorne, was taking Seonmi through rifle malfunctions.
“Your gun is your child,” Arin instructed, “and a specialist marksman’s rifle like this one requires more care than a newly-born softhorn. Mages”—Arin nodded towards Daichi and Hinako sitting in a ditative pose cycling their aether—“think their formations are delicate, but a gun is less forgiving than magic. If an aetherflow shifts a few millitres within their bodies, there is rarely a negative consequence, but if the wrong component in a gun is off by a tiny amount, it can lead to…” The demon motioned an explosion with her hands. “...Boom.
“Look here,” she continued, pointing to the manual bolt chanism that loaded the rifle. “If the bolt head is off by even a single millitre, it affects headspace. You know what happens if you have too much headspace? Case rupturing. Gas blowback.” Arin shook her head disapprovingly. “Too little headspace? Prevents bolt closure.” The demon operated the bolt several tis with smooth, snappy motions. “How much did your accelerated training cover?”
She looks so cool! Alia thought. The Ainese demon had a calm yet fierce look in her eye when she held a rifle, like a deadly predator ready to pounce. Wild and focused yet still refined and controlled.
Seonmi glanced at Alia briefly before answering Arin’s question. “We had a few lessons on cleaning and common failures. They showed us how to take it apart and clean each component. I know how to adjust spring tension. I know not to over-lubricate the gun, especially in cold weather. I know…” Seonmi continued for a while, enurating the knowledge she and Noburu had gained while Arin nodded along.
Alia found herself being drawn into the lesson. She almost didn’t notice the presence appearing by her side. Turning her head, she whispered, “Hello!” with a characteristic grin.
“Are those… presents?” l asked quietly, peering into the sack Alia was carrying.
“Mmm!”
The demon’s lips curled. “You’re going to be popular. I saw Officer Dahlberg earlier. He was strutting about with a new rannar belt and scabbard! Was that you?” Seeing Alia nod, l continued with a smile, “He stopped in the corridor. I think he must be going around showing off because he was far more of a conversationalist than usual, asking all manner of inquiries while turning his body back and forth like he wanted to notice!”
l puffed out her chest, speaking with a surprisingly good imitation of Dagon’s Wami accent, “Young Officer Mori, are you fitting in well?” l giggled before collecting herself again, continuing the act, turning her body to the left and right while exaggeratedly tapping her belt. “Have you adjusted to Anathor’s presence yet? He can take so getting used to. Not many ships have their own Formless…” l laughed as she rubbed her scabbard, echoing Dagon’s performance. “It was like that,” she finished.
“You did notice, though, didn’t you?” Alia asked.
“Of course!” l exclaid. “I was tempted to pretend not to notice, but how could I do that? It was so obvious! n aren’t very subtle, are they?” l raised a knowing eyebrow before giving a second exaggerated performance, this ti of her shock and awe at seeing Dagon’s new belt. After Alia had finished giggling, l said, “I actually had a favour I wanted to ask of you.”
“Oh?”
“My orange is progressing nicely. It’ll still be another six months, perhaps a year, before I can think of developing yellow, but I want to get there as soon as possible!” l clenched her fist, her face suddenly focused with determination. “Normally, warriors would wait until their orange is more solid before testing it against riflefire, but I figure if you’re around, I can take the risk, right?” l tapped her stomach, saying, “Even if a bullet gets through, you’ll be able to heal , wouldn’t you? Maybe once we exit the passage? I figure if we use as a target, it could double as practice for Arin as well”
“Mmm! Sure!” Alia replied with an enthusiastic thumbs up. A small part of her mind tried to protest, arguing that perhaps it wasn’t entirely normal or sane for soone to engage in training thods that would kill a normal person. The dominant part of Alia’s mind quickly pushed that aside. After all, in the face of l’s determination and friendship, she would always go the extra mile!
Also, Alia herself had happily engaged in Serena’s unusual training. She’d acted as a training dummy for the Vengeance’s explosive broadside and had even tested her wards against the valuable tungsten penetrators that had torn straight through the island they’d been on. She couldn’t exactly protest l’s enthusiasm without being a hypocrite, could she?
l resud her own aura refinent, and while Alia was tempted to join her, she found herself drawn in once more by Arin’s lecture on rifle operation. With one end of the room occupied by the ditating l and mages, and the other side occupied by the sweating Noburu and demanding Ido, Arin and Seonmi offered a soothing balance that caught Alia’s attention.
“Failure to feed is one of the more common problems,” Arin explained, cycling the rifle’s bolt chanism. “If you keep your gun well maintained, and you know the bolt is aligned and the spring tension is correct, then the first step is to give the magazine a tap…” The demon demonstrated, giving the side of the rifle's magazine a firm tap. “Then try and cycle the bolt once more. It’s okay to use a bit more force to chamber the round. If that doesn’t work it’s possible you have a damaged or deford cartridge. That’s rarer, especially as production standards improved over the last decade, but it still happens. When you have spare ti, it’s worth examining your cartridges yourself.”
“At the firing range, I once had it try and feed two cartridges at once, jamming the gun,” Seonmi said.
“It happens,” Arin began with a nod, “when the magazine has been improperly loaded. I’ve had it happen myself with a weak magazine spring. It can also happen when…” Arin detached the gun's magazine and pointed out a part of it to Seonmi. “You know this part? The magazine lip? When it or the follower is damaged, it can cause double feeding. Be careful with your magazines. Examine and load them yourself if you can. Many sharpshooters are so focused on the gun and the bullets themselves, they forget about the magazine.”
Arin replaced the magazine and cycled the gun once more, catching the ejected cartridge with a smooth flourish of her hand. “Sotis the gun will fail to eject. This happens with a poorly-maintained chamber or a weak ejector spring. It also happens if the extractor claw is broken or worn. Here—”Arin produced a spare tal part from a box and showed Seonmi—“this is what a worn one looks like. You see how that nub there is much shorter than it should be? Always keep an eye out when cleaning the gun. Here…” Arin handed the gun to Seonmi. “Let’s see you cycle it. As if you were to fire it.”
After a mont of hesitation, Seonmi brought the gun up, the buttstock against her shoulder and her eye lined up with the iron sights. Then, with a satisfying click, she pulled the bolt up and back before slowly letting it move down and push another round into the chamber. Seonmi glanced at Arin before repeating the motion. “Is it okay?” she asked. “It feels fine?” she questioned as Arin shook her head.
“This gun is well maintained, so your technique is unlikely to lead to a cycling failure, but it should be better. You’re keeping the rifle up when you cycle, which is good, but…” Arin took Seonmi’s right hand and manually placed it against the bolt. “You’re fingertipping the bolt. Use the head of the palm to lift—”Arin pushed Seonmi’s hand up—“then these two fingers to firmly pull”—the bolt snapped back—“and then don’t release the pressure slowly, we call that riding the bolt. Push it forward. If you don’t, it causes the round not to fully seat, or the extractor not to grip properly. I was the sa when my father taught to hunt. I wanted to be quiet, yes?” Arin laughed to herself. “But my father explained to , we are firing guns. They are supposed to be loud and scary!”
For a few minutes, Arin had Seonmi do nothing but cycle the chanism again and again, pointing out so many adjustnts and errors that even Alia found herself starting to agree that the operation of a gun was every bit as complicated as a spell formation.
“The action must be fully complete every ti, no matter how stressed you are,” Arin explained. “This is a Shimashina 844; it has a higher bolt angle than the Hokanai-built hunting rifle I’m used to, but you must make the full quarter-turn every ti. If you don’t, the bolt lugs don’t disengage, and the gun will bind. Under stress, people have a weak lift. They also pull back at an angle, which causes the bolt to bind in the receiver rails and increases the chances of a jam. I’ve had that happen a few tis myself when I’m in danger.”
“You’ve fired under stress?” Seonmi asked. “Have you seen combat? I thought you were newly commissioned?”
“I haven’t been in the trenches, but the inhabitants of the wilderness are every bit as frightening as a human,” Arin explained with a grim expression. “There’s been tis where I’ve gone too far or lost my way, and stumbled into the territory of creatures that take more than a bullet or two to stop. There’s good money to be made hunting, if you’re not stupid and get yourself killed.” Arin chuckled, continuing, “It’s all fun and gas when things are going well, but when you’re cold, hungry, and exhausted and have to crawl through the undergrowth covered in mud because so predator is roaming nearby… not so fun.”
Alia saw Seonmi swallow before she asked, “Have you ever… shot soone?”
Arin blinked before answering, “Yes. I have. It’s safer now, but there were tis our farm would be attacked.”
“Humans?” Seonmi asked.
Arin shook her head.
“Oh.”
The Ainese demon pointed upwards with her index finger. “Lots of criminals from the cities above escape to the lowlands below and the surrounding wilderness. When things were bad, rival farrs would try and steal so of our cattle and sheep. There was a lot of… competition before our governing lord was changed to soone more competent. Things are better now.”
“I see…” Seomi looked awkward, but that didn’t stop her from asking, “What’s it like? To shoot soone?”
Arin shrugged. “It’s mostly quiet.”
“Quiet?” Seonmi frowned. “Don’t they… scream?”
“Not normally,” Arin explained, holding up one of the rifle’s cartridges. “If this hits soone’s torso, whether demon or human, they’re more likely than not dead before they know it. The lungs and diaphragm often get damaged, preventing them from breathing, or they imdiately go into shock and can’t scream even if they wanted to. That’s what normally happens. Sotis…” Arin took a slow breath. “Sotis it isn’t quiet, but I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine!” Arin waved a hand, her smile returning. “The war is over, so I don’t think the good captain is going to send us into any trenches any ti soon. With any luck, we’ll have an easy few years!” Despite her efforts, the atmosphere was still a little cold.
Well, it was Alia’s ti to shine! There wasn’t a depressed or awkward atmosphere in the Known World that wouldn’t rejuvenate itself when faced with her overwhelming amount of adorable, golden cuteness!
Or rather, just plain old cuteness given that her golden hair was disguised.
“It’s ti for presents!” she announced, holding up and wiggling the large sack. “No more talk about war! No more sword training, no more cycling and convecting! Gather around!” She bounced on the balls of her feet, oozing excitent and encouragent. “I haven’t left anyone out! Co on!”
When the room’s occupants realised that Alia hadn’t just popped in to socialise, and had nurous gifts for them, the room quickly ward up. They each took their colourful present and, at Alia’s urging, did their best to try and guess what they were.
“It feels soft… a set of blankets?”
“So kind of hard-shell case?”
“There’s a slight flex… a book?”
“I’m not sure. A cloak?”
“Hehe,” Alia giggled. “Who wants to go first?”
And so, the unwrapping began.
Noburu and Seonmi each got a set of fine work clothes, similar to the ones Serena had purchased for Alia long ago.
“They’re Fengra wool,” she explained. “I got my own made in Kenhoro from soone called Clothmaster Dai. I sent them an inquiry but they were all booked up until the new year so I had to find a replacent in Asamaywa! I got your, uh”—Alia felt her eyes flick over Seonmi before she could stop herself—“asurents from Serena, so they should fit! I hope you’re okay with it! There was a ti I didn’t have any spare clothes, but it’s nice to have nice things!”
While Alia had never suffered the type of poverty Noburu and Seonmi were forced to survive in, she had co into this world almost naked, with only thin grey underclothing that barely did their job in protecting her modesty. Not that she complained too much, her magic ant she could handle the cold and, even if it didn’t, she could have sunbathed under the heat Serena’s cheeks emitted in the first few weeks of their relationship!
“You’ve already done so much for ,” Noburu murmured. “Not just , but you saved Kiku and the children. You didn’t have to, but you did. You pulled them into the city and gave them an opportunity. And now… now… you’re giving us such fine clothing?” Noburu swallowed before continuing, “How can you be so… so generous? I know the lowlanders started calling you a saint, but it’s as if you really are one!”
“Well…” Alia scratched her neck awkwardly. After all, she was now actually a saint, wasn’t she? That information would only beco known once they docked in Ishaq. Alia hoped it wouldn’t change how everyone viewed her, it had been hard enough getting everyone to stop calling her Lord-Prospect and to just use her na!
“Well?” Seonmi questioned, tilting her head.
“Well, it feels good to do nice things, doesn’t it?” Alia said quickly. “Life can be hard and unfair, but that just ans the ones with the ans to help others should do so more earnestly, right?” Alia emphasised her words with an encouraging nod. As far as she thought, there was little point letting the enormous amount House Halen were paying her sit around in the bank collecting interest when she could use it to bring smiles and happiness to the lives of others.
“Just what a saint would say…” Noburu muttered under his breath. His eyes went wide realising that Alia and the rest of the room’s aether users had easily heard him with their enhanced hearing. The demon bowed, offering his sincere gratitude and apologies.
Seonmi followed a mont later.
“Thank you, Lord—” Seonmi coughed, cutting herself off. “Thank you, Alia.”
“Mmm! You’re welco!”
Next up was Ido.
“H-how did you know I wanted this!?” he exclaid, holding up the heavy, white uniform.
“Because you never stop going on about how much you want an AsaminoGi?” his sister teased, rolling her eyes. Arin reached over and examined the outfit. “Look how short the sleeves and legs are! Isn't that too short?”
“No!” Ido said with a happy grin. “This is a competition gi. It’s short on purpose so the judges can see the hands and feet clearly. Look how heavy the ends of the sleeves are! You know what that ans?” Ido motioned a shimokan punch, making a snapping sound. “It’ll sound terrific when I move! Wait a mont, let try it on!”
With speed and efficiency rivalling how quickly Serena could throw Alia off when a prying Lani appeared, Ido put the gi on and finished it off with his red belt. He made so space and began his kata. Like his sister who changed into a focused professional the mont she had a gun in her hands, Ido’s otherwise cheerful attitude would morph into deadly seriousness as he progressed through the sequenced movents.
“Damn,” Seonmi muttered in appreciation. “You’re pretty good. I once witnessed a highlord demonstrate a kata at a dinner, and that wasn’t nearly as powerful as you are right now. You have so real talent, Ido Song.”
“You hear that, Sister?” Ido called out between movents. “I’m like a highlord!”
Instead of responding, Arin turned to Seonmi and asked, “You have dinners with highlords? How?”
“Ah…” Seonmi rubbed the back of her neck sheepishly, casting a glance at Alia. “Just so work I used to do. It’s nothing, really.”
“Listen to the snap!” Ido shouted. “This is amazing!” He stopped, did a quick customary bow to finish his impromptu training and then eagerly bowed again to Alia. “This is the best present I ever received!” He shrugged quickly before adding, “Well, other than when our father paid for our tuition. But, other than that, this is the best present I’ve ever received!”
“I’m glad it fits,” Alia said, unable to stop smiling in the face of such excitent. “Promise you’ll check my kata in the future? I haven’t had much ti to train beyond the sessions we did at the academy. I’m worried my muscle mory might have slipped!”
With Ido making a solemn oath that he would help train Alia once his duty allowed, Alia gestured to his sister, prompting her to open her hard present. Despite her attempts at trying to remain cool, Alia could see the almost childish excitent in the Ainese demon’s blood-orange eyes.
“Wait, is this…?” Arin murmured, examining the hard shell case. She looked at Alia before swallowing and opening it. “Oh Blue Moon, it is!” Arin tilted the case so everyone could see what it was. “How did you know?” Arin asked Alia excitedly.
“Because of !” Ido declared, proudly gesturing to himself.
“You told her?” Arin said, her eyes widening. “I… I have the best brother!”
While Ido blushed, Daichi inquired, “It’s a scope?”
“Not just any scope,” Arin replied, delicately taking the foot-long optical device from its housing. “This is a Yani-Ponan scope! It’s quite literally the best scope a marksman could ask for!” Arin’s voice grew more and more excited as she discussed its almost unrivalled six-tis magnification, generous eye relief and expansive field-of-view. It turned out that Ido had not exaggerated how much his sister obsessed over everything to do with guns.
“Then they use sand on iron laps to coarse-grind the lens,” Arin explained excitedly, “and then they grind it finer with pumice, before polishing it on sothing called a pitch lap, which is a surface coated with ironwood resin so it conforms to the lens's shape, see? They use tin oxide with water, and slowly polish it using steam machinery over days! Then, each scope is manually collimated and—oh, collimated ans to align the optical elents so they are accurate. Anyway—”Arin tilted the scope back and forth—“you see how it doesn’t catch the light? That’s the latest magnesium fluoride anti-glare coating. Now, I know you’re wondering how they apply it, well, I’ll tell you! What they do is…”
While Arin explained in great detail how magnesium fluoride anti-glare coating was applied to her audience, who were too polite to tell her they didn’t care to know how magnesium fluoride anti-glare coating was applied, Alia thought to herself how nice it was to have friends with such clear interests and hobbies. It made buying them presents so much easier!
Her efforts were rewarded when Arin gave her a warm hug, thanking her profusely.
Another hugger! Another person who understood that a good hug was healing magic for the mind! Maybe they could work together and get l and Hinako used to hugging? The cultures in the Eastern Terra-Firma were so…. impersonal that Alia had quietly made it her mission to slowly chip away at the ntal and social barriers that prevented good and wholeso hugs from spreading.
With the mood of the room at an all-ti high, the attention turned to the unopened presents of Daichi, Hinako, and l. Once that was finished, it would be about ti for Serena to finish her shift on the bridge and take a short break in their quarters, where Alia planned to trap her dutiful girlfriend and shower her with presents.
And tease her a little about Finella’s sister.
Well… maybe tease her a lot.
After all, it’s what scandalous girlfriends deserved, wasn’t it?
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