The dragonfly ships had stopped trying to catch her.
That was the first thing I registered when I looked up — the organized formation that had been assembling over the water, the coordinated pursuit that had looked so threatening minutes ago, had abandoned its geotry entirely. Now they were just vessels trying not to be the next one she reached.
It wasn’t working.
From a distance, the pattern was almost elegant. A red figure and a trail of falling ships, marking her path across the sky like a cot that had decided to linger and take its ti about it.
One mont she’d be on a hull, greatsword raised, and the next the vessel would simply begin to co apart in a devastating explosion.
And to top it all, they burned beautifully on the way down.
Then closer — close enough to hear the sound the greatsword made going through hull plating —
A ship banked hard to avoid her, its pilot throwing it into a desperate roll, sacrificing altitude to buy distance. She didn’t adjust her course. She waited on the hull of the vessel she stood on, watching the turning ship’s arc with blood-red eyes, and stepped off the mont it was close enough.
The greatsword hit the engine housing before she had even properly landed.
The ship’s blue fla went out in a single breath. The vessel listed sideways, still trying to fly, still trying to move, with half its engine stripped and trailing behind it on a wire of torn tal. It had the look of sothing that hadn’t been told yet it was finished. The crew inside would still be pulling levers, expecting the ship to respond.
Kassie was already on the next one.
She moved between them without hurry. That was the one thing about it. The quality of her movent was thodically cunning.
She planted her feet on a hull, assessed the construction beneath her, and struck with the precise intention of a craftsman removing a nail.
One ship tried to ram her.
It drove itself broadside against the vessel she was standing on, using its own bulk, and for a mont it looked like a real play — like the pilot had calculated that raw mass might accomplish what weapons hadn’t.
Kassie turned to face it.
The killing intent reached the crew of the incoming ship a full second before the impact would have. I could see it from Motherland’s surface — the way the ship’s approach stuttered. The pilot’s body overruling his mind, hands wrenching the controls in a direction his orders hadn’t told him to go.
The ship veered upward in a climbing arc, engines screaming, pulling itself clear.
Kassie watched it go with a deanor of mild disappointnt.
Then she leaped.
She caught the fleeing ship by its rear stabilizing fin and swung herself up onto the hull in a single motion, the greatsword already moving on the way up. The blow took the ship through its central spine — the structural beam that held the hull in its shape — and made a sound like a tree coming down in a forest. A clean, definitive sound.
The ship split along the cut and fell in two pieces, each burning separately, describing two different downward arcs toward the water.
Kassie dropped with the debris for a mont. Then she stepped off it and fell the remaining distance to the surface of the Prefecture ship.
She landed with both feet on the deck.
The sound moved through the tal and up through the soles of my boots.
She straightened. Her helt dissolved into red sparks that drifted away from her face in the ocean wind, and her blood-red eyes swept the deck in a single pass. The sa assessnt she’d given the ships.
’On a regular day, she is the most terrifying thing I have ever seen. Days like today are their own category entirely.’
Beyond the ship’s surface railing, the remaining dragonfly ships had reorganized themselves at a distance they clearly thought was a safe one. The sky between us and them was marked with falling debris and the long black scars of burning trails, each one describing the path of a vessel she’d removed from the fight.
I turned back to the deck.
The floor hatch was open again.
The first wave had been special corps — elite, tracking visors, well-drilled. But these soldiers erged in a different configuration. Their armor was heavier, deep blue reinforced plate with full shoulder coverage, and they ca up with their weapons already raised. No assessnt of the situation. As though they had been briefed below deck and they knew exactly what they were walking into.
Fourteen of them... Fifteen.
White Feather stood between them and the forward section of the ship.
She hadn’t moved far from where the ti-stop had ended. Her sword was at her side, the three bells resting still against each other. And the careful, asured quality of her stillness — the particular way she was conserving every small motion — told more than anything she might have said about how much she had left.
Not nothing. But not what she had been a few minutes ago.
The first soldier fired.
She stepped through it — a tight half-step to the side, the blade rising at the last mont to deflect what the step couldn’t cover — and one feather drifted from where she had been.
The second and third soldiers pressed forward into the space her movent had opened, not giving her room to reset. They moved like they’d rehearsed the timing. She deflected the first strike with the flat of her blade and turned the second into empty air, but the angle left her sword arm extended and the fourth soldier drove into her from the side.
It wasn’t a devastating hit. But she absorbed it instead of flowing past it, and she went back two steps before planting.
The silver sheen on her blade flickered for a mont.
Just a mont. Then it steadied.
But I had seen it.
The remaining soldiers spread to flank.
’She can hold this. But not for long, and not without it costing her.’
Kassie stood beside with her arms loose at her sides, killing intent damped down to nothing, watching White Feather work through the spreading formation with the patient attention of soone who had not yet decided whether to intervene.
I looked at the soldiers. Looked at White Feather’s sword arm and the careful way she was compensating for it. Looked at the fourteen soldiers finding their angles.
Then I gripped Frostfang tighter
"Kassie."
Her eyes moved to .
"Right side."
The silence was louder for a mont. Then Kassie’s greatsword ford from a swirl of red sparks, and the demonic helt settled over her face, and the killing intent ca back — slow, rising, like sothing large taking a breath before it moved.
White Feather glanced back at us. Just once. Whatever she had been about to say, she didn’t.
She turned back to the left side of the formation and her blade drew its silver line.
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