Walking into the shanty town wasn’t the kind of move that was going to ensure a long and healthy life for me. If I’d been planning on a long and healthy life I wouldn’t have signed up to be one of the Empress’s trouble shooters though.

“They’re not going to be happy to see you Mel,” Fari said.

“I know that,” I assured her.

“They have bombs,” she said.

“I know that too,” I said.

“If you’re in the middle of them, I’ll have to hit you with the stun burst too,” she said.

“If I have to ask you to stun burst a refugee community, I’ll be more than willing to take the hit myself as well,” I said, as I made my way through the dense forest that separated me from where the action was. Out of the corner of my vision I noticed that I’d picked up an “escort” of sorts along the way.

A guard had been hiding in the tree canopy outside of the village. I hadn’t noticed him until he touched down about a dozen yards to my left. He was cloaked by a camouflage spell but in my Void anima sight, the spell glowed a brilliant red, defeating its purpose entirely.

I considered turning to deal with him. His spell was lousy and inefficient, so there was a decent chance I could take him in a straight hand-to-hand fight, but I pushed the idea aside. I wasn’t here to break faces, I was here to rescue Darius. My best hope of doing that was to approach these people in an unexpected way.

“That’s a bad idea Mel,” Master Raychelle said. “Fari’s attack may not disable everyone in in the area, but it will definitely disable you in your current state.”

“If she has to stun burst the town, she’ll hit the people trapped in the wreckage too,” I said. “The only thing keeping them alive is their residual shields and those won’t stand up to an attack like that.”

“Think clearly,” Master Raychelle said. “You don’t want to throw your life away if Darius can’t be saved.”

“I’m not going to throw away either of our lives,” I said. “I’ve got a plan.”

“Share it with me,” Master Raychelle said.

I reached the edge of the clearing and people started to notice me. It was last moment that I could turn away but I cast that option aside.

“No time,” I said and marched right out of the forest.

There were easily thirty people gathered around pile of rubble that made up the collapsed building and three times that number running around in the kit bashed houses beyond it. Some wore military uniforms, others wore the coveralls common for support staff but most had on simple tunics and pants.

I swept my robes around me and locked eyes with the nearest adult I could find.

“I need your Mayor or Chief here with a damage report and a tally of injured as fast they can get it!” I said.

The woman I addressed looked at me like I was speaking some obscure outworld dialect rather than Galactic Common. I didn’t wait for her to finish processing my words before I continued though and I didn’t slow my pace towards the rubble pile.

“This structure, it came from Salmon Falls didn’t it?” I asked and again didn’t wait for an answer before continuing, “You’ve got no support enchantments on it and you’ve got multiple people still trapped within. We need to get them out of there before the next aftershock hits or we’re going to lose them.”

I passed through a crowd of people who had no idea to what to make of me and stopped short at the base of the rubble pile. It helped tremendously that I was human. If I’d tried this in a Garjarack village, their natural reaction would have been to shoot me, but I looked just enough like the people here that they didn’t file me immediately into the “enemy” category. They were too used to the enemy having scales and a tail and it made their thinking sloppy.

“Hell of a transport job,” I said. “I’m going to want to talk to the caster who pulled that off. Incredible feat. Shame they didn’t leave the top floors behind though.”

“Who are you?” one of the men asked at last.

“Guardian Watersward. I’ve got Imperial support in-bound, but there’s no telling when the next part of the quake is going to hit, so we need your people and mine out of that pile now,” I said.

Playing on my status as a Crystal Guardian was shaky in the sense that I was technically only an initiate and not a full Guardian yet, but in this case I was all the Guardian these people were going to get. The concern about the aftershocks was very real too, but not what I was most worried about with this crowd. Their animosity towards “Gar sympathizers” was more likely to get Darius and I killed than the chance of the building collapsing any further. That was the reason they needed to think Imperial troops were on the way.

That was also a cue to Fari to actually send the Imperial support that I needed. Bluffing would only keep them from shooting me for so long. Once the crisis was past and Darius and their people were free, they’d have time to ask themselves how much they really wanted outsiders knowing where they were and what they’d been up to. I had Fari as an ace in the hole but I really didn’t want to have to start shooting them, even after I got Darius out of the line of fire.

Stun bursts are non-lethal, but only in the sense that any reasonably healthy body should be able to withstand their effects. Forcibly knocking someone unconscious is disruptive no matter how you do it (barring certain Mental anima spells) and for people in as bad shape as these folks looked to be it was an open question how well they could tolerate that kind of disruption.

“What are you doing here?” one of the women nearby asked. She wasn’t the official leader of the group. Her clothes were a mix of dark and light beige colored layers, rather than a military uniform or even the support staff coveralls. Despite her dress though, she carried herself like a fighter.

“Helping you,” I said. “Has anyone done a scan to locate where your people are in all of this?”

“We didn’t ask for any Imperial help,” the woman said and grabbed by my arm.

It was a direct challenge to my authority and I let her do it, fighting back the reflex to break her arm and dislocate her shoulder. She and the rest of the people here could do immense harm to me. The only way I saw to prevent that was to act as if the opposite was true.

“Then you’re extremely lucky that I was in the area,” I said and looked down at her hand, silently asking if grabbing me really seemed like a good idea to her.

The tension moment dragged on for what seemed like an hour with neither of us moving. I filled my head with visceral plans for how I would take her apart as well as everyone that stood within twenty feet of me. Part of me knew I’d be lucky to get through a handful of them but I focused on what victory would feel like rather than letting myself imagine the agony of defeat.

She pulled her hand away before I got to the really interesting ideas on how I could fight that many opponents, but she didn’t back off.

“How are you going to get them out there?” she asked. The rest of the community was focused on the two of us which offered the advantage that I only had to negotiate with one of them. With how people tend to be though, I knew it was only a short time before someone else got brave enough to stick their opinion where it wasn’t needed.

“Like this,” I said and turned back to the rock pile. “Fari, boost the sense link to maximum and see if you can located any of the trapped people as we go.”

I was counting on her being able to detect where the people were because my next idea would be a terrible one if I misaimed it.

“You can channel the planetary defense spells through your gem right?” I asked her privately on our telepathic channel.

“Sure, that’s easier that targeting them over the sense link,” she said.

“I know you’re splitting your attention at the moment, can you turn control of the transport over to one of the Gars?” I asked.

“Yes, they’re all loaded in now,” she said. “What do you in mind for me?”

“Forget the stun blasts, I need you to bring one of the petrification rays online,” I said.

“You plan to use that on the building, not on the people?” Master Raychelle asked, guessing at my plan without me needing to spell it out.

“Right. If we can keep the building from falling down any further we can use more aggressive means to get them out of there,” I said.

“What did you have in mind for your ‘more aggressive means’?” Master Raychelle asked.

“I suppose the Matter Annihilation Batteries are still off-limits right?” I asked. Even my worst plans shied away from using anti-matter as the answer to my problems, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a tempting tool to think about deploying.

“We’re already dealing with one global catastrophe today, let’s not make it another one shall we?” Master Raychelle requested.

“They’re on hard lock down too. I can’t interface with them,” Fari added. It didn’t surprise me that she’d already checked out the status of the Matter Annihilation Batteries. Part of why we got along so well was that we thought disturbingly alike sometimes.

“Cold Plasma cutters should do the trick then,” I said. Plasma cutters work by invoking an incredibly hot flame that can melt virtually anything. For Cold Plasma you layer another spell on top to reabsorb the intense heat from the cutting blade and the material that’s being melted. This helps prevent things like melting the people that you’re trying to save.

“Those are in short supply,” Master Raychelle said.

“Not if you know someone as talented as Fari,” I said.

“You want to use my gem as a rock cutter?” Fari asked. “Please. I’m much better than that!”

I felt the charge start to grow in gem that I wore on my chest. It was Fari’s home and the remnant of a world killing super weapon. Its world killing days were past, but it still possessed the same energy storage capacity as it once had and Fari was still a frighteningly good caster even if her current form imposed some limits on the spells she could manage.

“Step back. This is going bright,” I said, warning the people around me away as I pulled Fari’s gem clear of my shirt and held it out towards the rock pile. I didn’t have a definite idea what Fari was going to do, but I figured it would be safer to have everyone out of the area of effect no matter what it was.

I needn’t have worried of course. Given time and the right circumstances, Fari’s spell casting control is incredibly precise.

Beams of petrification stabbed out from the gem and froze a very specific set of the stones in the pile into place. Under the effect of the spell they fused together and became a new superstructure for the building. That alone guaranteed that the people trapped inside wouldn’t be killed in the next aftershock. There was still the problem of saving them from the damage they’d already endured though so once the supports were in place Fari really cut loose.

Plasma cutters are hard to look at. In consideration of my poor tender eyes, Fari slid a black overlay across my vision that blocked out 99% of the light that was coming in. That meant I was the only one who got to watch the dozens of Cold Plasma cutter flames that Fari summoned from the gem. Everyone else was blinded by the light in my hands that was brighter than the midday sun.

Under Fari’s control, the cutters lashed out like the heads of a fiery hydra and tore the rock pile apart. She used some other sort of effect, an air-inversion spell I think, to whisk away the frosty dust that she was reducing the rocks to. Both of the spells were incredible to watch in action but the thing that really blew my mind was the microscopic control of her casting. In less than a minute she’d unearthed all six people who’d been trapped in the rubble, including Darius!

There were times, and this was one of them, when I really wished Fari had a physical form so that I could hug the hell out of her.

“I regret ever doubting your awesomeness,” I said, staring in awe at the work she’d done.

“Go get Darius before the villagers’ vision clears!” Fari said.

She didn’t have to tell me twice. I sprinted up the rock pile before any of the people around me could see well enough to stop me.

I found Darius in a small cocoon of rock embedded in what had originally been the ground floor. He was laying on top of the remains of the basement and sub-basement levels but the rest of the building had almost entirely buried him. From the way he was posed, I could see that he’d felt the quake coming and had prepared for it as best as he could. That hadn’t been enough to save him completely but his shield spell had created a small, pocket of open space in the debris that rained down from the floor above. It was enough to keep him from being crushed to death and had bought me time to get to him, just as I’d hoped.

Seeing him there, eye closed and chest unmoving was a creepy sight though. I knew he wasn’t dead. He was in a “Survivor’s Trance” designed to minimize bodily needs for things like air and water while continuing to supply anima to defensive spells like the shield that had protected him. I knew that but believing it was difficult with what I was seeing.

“Come back to me.” I said and brushed my hand across his face.

I don’t know if it was my words, or the touch, but something broke the trance spell and his eyes flickered open.

“Wow, that’s not a bad way to wake up,” he said as he opened his eyes to see me.

I smiled back and brushed his hair. He looked a bit disoriented but under the circumstances I couldn’t blame him..

“You’re not in your bed. You’re under a collapsed building,” I said. “How do you feel.”

“I’m ok,” he said and then took a moment to wiggle his feet and flex his hands to verify that fact.

“Good. It looks like you got your shield cast in time. Can you get up?” I asked.

“Let’s see,” he said and lifted himself out of the rock cocoon. I helped him up onto his feet and he looked around, confusion written all over his face.

“I’ll explain later,” I said on the telepathic link that Fari set up for us. “Just follow me lead for now.”

“I must have taken a hard hit than I thought,” he said telepathically. “This doesn’t look anything like Salmon Falls.”

“It’s not,” I replied. “Salmon Falls was a lot safer than this place.”

“People were trying to bomb us in Salmon Falls,” he said.

“Yes, these people to be specific,” I said.

“Ah, I see, I’ll wait till later for that explanation then,” he said.

I looked at the crowd below us. Their vision was coming back and some of them were starting to see what Fari had accomplished.

“I need medical personnel and family members up here immediately!” I called down to them. That got the response I was hoping for, which shocked me more than anything else had since we’d landed in Salmon Falls.

As I watched the medics in the small village tend to the wounded I got a better sense of what we were dealing with. The other people who were trapped in the rubble weren’t the casters that Darius was. No one in the village except the teleportation wizard was that skilled. They were reserve troops, backline support staff and the family members that grew up around them. Just ordinary people stuck in a bad situation.

“Do you have any healing skills Guardian Watersward?” one of the medics, a woman named Illya, asked me.

“No, I’m sorry,” I said. Not only didn’t I have healing skills, I knew I probably never would. My talents lay in Void anima manipulation which was dangerous enough to use around healthy people, much less the injured. To be a healer required a very different touch than the one my calloused and rough hands were able to give.

“I know the basic Curing spells,” Darius said, “Where can I help?”

It was a smart move in terms of winning the villagers over to our side, but I could see that wasn’t why Darius was doing it. He’d grown up hating the war on Hellsreach, but he consciously wrestled with himself not to hate the people who fought it.  Reaching out to them in their hour of need didn’t necessarily feel right to him, but it was what he knew he needed to do.

I found myself observing them with a different eye though. I had no reason to hate them or the war they’d fought. I was an outsider, and I was supposed to use that status to render impartial judgments on the people of Hellsreach.

Their pain and poor conditions resonated with a spot in me that had seen people in their kind of shape too often while growing up. The Sister’s of Waters Mercy had never been a rich group, and there were plenty of times they’d had to scrape to get by, but they’d always kept us housed and fed. I wasn’t sure these people had any more than that and I suspected they had to put up with less pretty often based on the fortunes of the war.

At the same time though, they’d been trapping and murdering Garjarack’s. The family I rescued definitely wasn’t the first to have fallen into their trap and if I hadn’t stopped them from bringing back the tainted supplies I was sure that a lot more Garjarack than just they would have died too.

It was my duty to stop things like that and bring the perpetrators to justice. Looking at the shattered bodies of the ones who’d been the most actively responsible for the trap, I had to wonder if the planet hadn’t enacted its own justice on them though, and whether the Garjarack would be willing to accept that too.

My first thought when as I stared down into the empty hole where a building and my boyfriend should have been was the wordless desire to hit someone, very hard. Master Raychelle had tried to teach me that violence shouldn’t be the first answer for a Crystal Guardian, but from what I’d seen it was usually a second choice that was kept close at hand.

“They took him,” I said, anger lacing a feral edge onto my voice.

The foundation was empty. No building. No Darius. That wasn’t the kind of thing earthquakes did. That was the kind of thing people did when they were trying to rescue their comrades from a collapsed building.

Mass teleportation like that wasn’t easy. Only a very experienced spell caster would have been able to pull it off. On a lot of planets that would have narrowed the list of suspects tremendously. Hellsreach had been at war for so long though that master class spell casters were roughly twenty times more common than on typical planets in the Empire. It still made for a small list, relatively speaking, but it was a longer one than I had time to sort through.

Whoever abducted Darius had little reason to leave him alive once they worked out who he was. At best they might try to ransom him, but with Master Raychelle and the rest of the Imperial forces on planet that was foolish chance for them to take.

Dealing with a teleporter was problematic because, in theory, they could be anywhere. In practice though I knew they had to be reasonably close by. I had Master Raychelle to thank for that deduction. She’d spent the last few months, when she had spare time, teaching me as much about anima casting and magic theory as she could. In part it was to prevent me from burning myself out like I had, but it also served to make up for the glaring gap in my education.

I’d never been a superb student. More than one of the Sisters of Water’s Mercy had laid literal curses on me for my lack of attentiveness in class. To be fair though, at the time, it was worth it. Classes at the orphanage were that boring.

Master Raychelle’s classes were a whole different story though. She had a gift for teaching, and knew how to speak to me in a way that made sense. Also, the subject matter she was teaching was easy to stay engaged with. Subjects where the tests are life or death rather than pass/fail tend to command my attention pretty easily it turns out.

What I’d retained from her lessons was that teleportation, even for the most talented caster was a tiring, energy expensive procedure. That told me that the building mover had to live close by. Whoever had set up Salmon Falls as a trap for the Garjaracks was a small time operator in the grand scheme of things. That they had a master class caster on call said the caster was someone they knew personally rather than an outside agent. Especially if the caster was on call at a moment’s notice for earthquake rescue work.

“Fari, are there any abandoned supply depots in the area?” I asked, playing a hunch.

“None on the official records, but give me a moment,” she said. “Ah, there it is! Looks like there’s one about two miles to the east of your current position. It’s hidden but the orbital imaging for this area is sharp enough to make out the irregularities in the vegetation.”

That was within the range for a standard teleportation spell. It had to be the right place. I turned to Cadrus and Nenya.

“I can’t ask you to follow me into this,” I said. “Go back and meet up with your family.”

“I thank you Guardian,” Cadrus said. “Can you not wait for support to arrive though?”

“I’ve called for an Imperial Enforcement Squad,” Fari said. “They’re tied up dealing with the results of the earthquake though.”

“How big was that quake?” I asked.

“Big enough that I’m dealing with its aftermath too.” Master Raychelle said, cutting into the mental link that Fari and I were speaking on. Master Raychelle is a Void anima caster like I am, but she’s also a talented mentalist as well. Seeing her appear beside Fari was surprising only because I’d rarely seen her do it, not because I had any doubt she was capable of doing so.

“What is your situation there?” she asked.

“The quake wiped out the town that Darius and I were inspecting. Things were complicated even before that though,” I said.

I explained to her, in short, quick sentences, how the town had been set up as a trap, how I was sending a Garjarack family into the nearest Imperial aid center and how Darius had been injured by a collapsing building and then kidnapped.

“Do you think you’re in any shape to mount a rescue?” Master Raychelle asked.

“Yes,” I said without hesitation.

“Alone?” Master Raychelle asked.

“She doesn’t need to go alone!” Nenya said. “We can help her!”

Cadrus looked at his daughter and narrowed his eyes. On a human I would have guessed that meant either disapproval or fatigue but I was still learning Garjarack body language so as far as I knew it could have been a sign of breathless excitement. Given the circumstances though, I was going to guess that the father wasn’t thrilled with the idea of his daughter tagging along to take on a random number of hostile humans with only a broken Crystal Guardian to support them.

“Thank you Nenya, but I can’t ask that of you,” I said. “This is going to be dangerous and your family needs you.”

“We are all family,” she said. “Isn’t that the teaching father?”

“Yes,” Cadrus agreed. “But perhaps we will be a hinderance to the Guardian?”

“I know how to fight!” Nenya said.

“You are not ready for this battle,” her father said.

“But I’ve trained…!” Nenya began to protest.

“You are unarmed and unarmored my daughter. Do not seek to fight from a position of weakness when the fight may be avoided,” Cadrus said.

“But the Guardian is unarmed!” Nenya said.

“I’m a Crystal Guardian,” I said and let a flicker of Void anima darken my eyes to the pitch of deepest night. “We’re never unarmed.”

It was a straight up lie. My options for tackling a pack of combat ready humans lead by a master class wizard were extremely limited. There was a mystique to the Crystal Guardians though. People believed we could do the wildest things. That was helped in part by the fact that each Crystal Guardian was either extremely talented (like Master Raychelle) or had a relatively rare gift with anima casting (like me). The greater part of our reputation though came from simply encouraging people to believe that we were amazing.

The deception might be hard to live up to sometimes, but I watched how Nenya’s eyes lit up at the thought that I was going to somehow save the day and saw how worthwhile it was to make the effort to be larger than life.

“Also,” I added. “I won’t be alone. Fari, you still have access to the planetary defense systems right?”

“That’s correct,” Fari said.

“You could be useful Nenya. Trust me on that,” I said. “But the planetary weapons have a rather large effect radius and it’ll be easier if Fari only needs to avoid hitting one of us.”

Nenya nodded at my words and looked at her father.

“I thank you again Guardian Watersward,” he said. “For what you have done for my family, I hope that we can repay you someday.”

“This isn’t the last you’ll see of me,” I told him. “I’ll have some questions for you once this is all calmed down.”

“Head back to the clearing about a hundred yards behind you,” Fari said to Cadrus and Nenya. “I’ll land the transport there in five minutes once I’ve picked up the rest of your family.”

“I’m going to get Darius,” I said with a nod at the Garjaracks before I broke into a run in the direction Fari indicated for the hidden supply depot.

“Talk to me about your plan,” Master Raychelle said. “You plan to act as a forward observer for Fari who will use one of the non-lethal planetary defense systems to disable the kidnappers, correct?”

“That seemed like the best idea,” I said. “No chance of a miscasting burn for me, and plenty of firepower to take the kidnappers down with.”

“What about the master class wizard who teleported the building away?” she asked in the same tone of voice she used when she was quizzing me.

“They should be exhausted by a teleport that large,” I said. “Also they’d need to be at the destination area to cover such a large area unless they were galactically talented at space warping. In which case they wouldn’t have needed to take the whole building.”

“You were paying attention my lecture last week,” she said.

“I pay attention to all of your lectures,” I said.

“At least when I have you alone,” Master Raychelle said.

Darius had offered to help with my studies, but it turned out to be a little too distracting to share a lesson book with him. I honestly have no idea what Master Raychelle’s lecture was on that day unless she happened to actually be talking about gorgeous shoulders and earlobes that were begging to be nibbled on. Darius had been banished from helping with lessons after that which was terrible for everything except my ability to focus and learn the material being presented.

“I’m not distracted now,” I said.

“Yes you are,” Maste Raychelle said. “You worried and angry and acting before you think. As your mentor, I should order you to stand down and await official backup.”

“But you’re not going to do that?” I asked. When she put it like that, standing down almost seemed reasonable, even if there was no chance I’d actually agree to it.

“No,” Master Raychelle said. “The quake that just hit was bad. We have a thousand mile swath of devastation to deal with and we need every available resource on search and rescue in a dozen different cities. If that wasn’t the case I’d be scrambling there to be with you myself.”

A thousand miles of devastation like what we’d seen in Salmon Falls was beyond my ability to imagine clearly. All I could picture was buildings reduced to rubble as far as the eye could see with people trapped in each one of them.

“I understand why you can’t be here,” I said. “There’s a lot more lives than just Darius hanging in the balance now.”

“There are, but that’s not why I’m willing to authorize you to undertake this rescue,” Master Raychelle said.

“I know I haven’t known him long, but he does mean a lot to me,” I said.

“That’s another strike against you doing this,” she said. “In any conflict, you need a calm, clear head. That’s exponentially harder when the conflict involves people we care about.”

“I can stay focused,” I said.

“I know, and that’s why I’m willing to trust you here,” Master Raychelle said. “You have a wonderful mind Mel. I’m not going to hold you back from using it.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling a little stunned. I was used to compliments on my martial prowess, generally from guys I’d knocked onto the mat in under a round of sparring. Compliments on being smart though were kind of foreign to me.

“I am going to insist you keep me in the loop however,” Master Raychelle said. “I can help with the search and rescue here and keep a remote eye on you with no problem if you’ll do your part in telling me what’s happening.”

“Well, right now, I’m closing in on the supply depot,” I said. “I’m guessing this is where the humans got the bombs that they were blasting Salmon Falls with. Probably enough weaponry there to outfit an entire rogue militia force.”

“The aerial images make it look like one of the bases Darius was telling us about,” Fari said. “The ones that were intended to be ‘left behind’ in case the Empire forced a peace treaty between the two forces.”

“At least we know what they were really fighting over now,” I said. One of the big mysteries when we’d first arrived was why the human forces from Exxion IV and the Garjarack forces from Exxion II had continued fighting a land war over Hellsreach, aka Exxion III. As it turned out “trying to gain control of an ancient war world” had been the incentive to keep the two sides fighting for decades.

With that kind of prize on the line, I expected that we’d find an extremely well stocked garrison waiting for us. The human forces from Exxion IV had twenty years to prepare for the Empire shutting down their open warfare after all. Leaving behind enough firepower to ensure their hidden forces could keep waging the war for decades more seemed like the kind of investment both sides would be willing to make in a heartbeat. I had the image of a few dozen soldiers waiting in ambush for me, armed to the teeth and ready to kill at the first sign of trouble.

Instead, we found just about the last thing in the world that I was expecting.

Darius hadn’t been kidnapped by a group of master saboteurs or hardened militia men. The collapsed building was visible in the center of a clearing as I sprinting around a large rocky hillside, and there were no armed guards in sight.

Through the dense trees I saw that a shanty town that had been erected outside of the torn-apart supply depot. Dozens of people were swarming over the wreckage and lifting away pieces of it to free the men who were still trapped underneath.

I watched as they carried out an unfamiliar body, a young man, but not Darius thankfully. Even from a distance I could tell that he’d been crushed under the weight of the brick and stone. A older man ran forward and cradled the young man’s body in his arms, rocking back and forth in the kind of agony that spoke of a lifelong connection between the two.

These were the people who’d been trying to kill the Garjarack family. These were the people who had kidnapped Darius. I was supposed to hate them. I was supposed to smite them with righteous vengeance.

Instead I walked quietly forward to see how I could help.

I’d never experienced an earthquake before and when it hit I learned that it was something I never wanted to experience again. One moment, the world was still and quiet. A picture of the scene would have made it look like the Gar family and I were clustered together for no good reason. Icy claws in my chest were screaming that we were in peril though and some combination of my regular senses agreed with them. The Garjaracks could sense it too.

One long breath of anticipation passed and then the earth around us tore itself to pieces. The heaving land threw me off my feet and knocked down some of the Gar family too. The elderly Gars and half the kids landed hard, but the two adults and the rest of the rest of the young ones kept their feet.

I could see Physical anima shining on all of the ones who remained standing as they struggled to cast a shield spell that would cover us all. The shaking ground was joined by the roar of buildings around us tearing apart. Dust and debris started to rain down and I could see the Gar losing the weave of the shield spell. It was just too hard to concentrate with the earth throwing us around.

That’s why people long ago invented enchanting. I wasn’t free to cast spells until my anima was finished healing but that didn’t mean I couldn’t use them if they were embedded into a object. Since enchanting isn’t exactly cheap, I’d never had much experience with it growing up. Master Raychelle had worked on rectifying that over the last few months since it was one of the things I could work on while I was recovering.

In theory, enchanted objects are something that anyone can use. That’s the point of them after all. In practice though, the more you know about the enchantment on the item, and the more familiar you are with casting the spell yourself, the more flexibility and efficiency you can get out of it.

My lack of formal training meant that I was rubbish when it came to that sort of thing in general, but at least with shield spells I had some minor amount of talent to fall back on.

The quake had thrown me off my feet, and with the shaking continuing I didn’t see a point in trying to stand again. Instead I raised myself to my hands and knees and chanted the activation phrase for the shield belt that I wore.

By design, the belt was intended to cover only me. It wasn’t a strong shield but it was better than being without one at all. I considered the cost of expanding it cover the Gar family too and calculated that it would drop the strength of the shield to point where it was little stronger than a thick piece of glass. It sucked, but, after calling them all to me for safety, I had to do what I could to provide it.

The shield materialized around us as a lacework of geometric shapes and symbols. The sigils it formed in the air glowed with the dim red light of the Physical anima the belt had stored to cast the spell. It looked so fragile that I thought the dust around us would be enough to blow it away, but then it surged in brightness. The lines grew thicker and hummed with power as I watched in amazement. I hadn’t thought the belt had that much magic stored in it.

I was right on that count too. It wasn’t the belt that was making the shield so strong. It was the Garjarack family I was with.

They hadn’t been able to focus enough to cast the spell themselves, but augmenting an existing spell was a lot simpler. Even the one’s who hadn’t been casting, even the kids who’d been exhausted and fading before the earthquake hit, were pouring energy into the shield.

That’s when the firebirds showed up.

The buildings around us were collapsing inwards, certain to bury us even if the shield prevented them from crushing us to death instantly. Then the sky above us exploded in flame.

The firebirds plunged down from a conjuration point just barely higher than the tallest building. Their elemental screams cut through the din of the falling buildings and the heat of their enormous bodies washed through shield we’d erected. If they’d been trying to kill us, they could have roasted us where we stood, shield or no shield. That wasn’t why Fari had sent them though.

She’d conjured the firebirds to save us, and that’s what they did. Each of the dozen aerial fire elementals slammed into one of the collapsing buildings and knocked it away from us. Gravity and momentum argued that tons of stone and steel from the buildings should fall within the defensive circle that the firebirds established but the enchanted beings would have none of that. They streaked through the buildings, smashing the structures and speeding outwards forming a flower burst of destruction with the Garjarack family and me in the safety of the untouched center.

The major part of the quake subsided a moment later, but the ground still felt unstable as smaller aftershocks continued to rumble through it.

“Is everyone ok?” I asked, looking around at the family. Most of them were on the ground and some weren’t moving yet.

“Darius isn’t!” Fari said telepathically.

“What happened?” I asked, looking around to see which direction he was in. I hadn’t been familiar with Salmon Falls in the first place but the destruction and the smoke brought on by the earthquake and the firebird strike had turned it into an alien landscape. Fari compensated for that by projecting a blinking red and green rectangle overlaid onto my vision to show where he was.

“He was in a building when the quake hit,” she said. “He’s still alive, but he’s trapped and I think the collapse knocked him out.”

“What about the people he was after?” I asked, thinking of the danger they represented to him.

“I can’t tell,” she said. “My sense link to him broke when he passed out.”

I looked at the Gar family again and weighed them against Darius. He needed me. They had each other. Leaving them here, on their own though, felt wrong. They were deep in “enemy territory” and out of their depth.

And so was I. I was used to working without magic. I’d done that my whole life up until less than half a year ago. I’d learned to fight and worked to be as strong as I could to make up for my deficiency but I’d also kept a close eye on when to run. For all my hard won skill at hand-to-hand combat, there were plenty of people I knew I couldn’t tangle with. Plenty of fights that I wouldn’t walk away from if I didn’t run first. I’d survived as much by knowing my limits as by stubbornly going beyond them.

Learning about my magical talents had been a delight and a wonderland of new capabilities, but there were still things I couldn’t handle on my own, as the last two months on the injured list had proven.

Even if I’d been back to full casting status though, I couldn’t assume that digging Darius out of a collapsed building would be something I could handle solo. Sure I could make myself magically strong and fast, but my knowledge of architecture pretty much ended at “buildings have four walls and a roof”.

If I was going to get him out safely, I needed help.

“Are you all ok?” I asked again.

“No,” said the eldest Gar woman. “We are uninjured, but the children need attention. Their reserves are not deep yet, the casting took a lot out of them.”

“Can they walk?” I asked her.

“We can carry them,” the adult Gar female said. Her anger was still there and I think it was confusion more than anything else that kept it from erupting.

“Fari, is our transport still ok?” I asked aloud.

“Yes, I had it lift off as soon as you noticed the quake was incoming,” she said.

“Who is ‘Fari’?” the eldest Gar asked.

“I am!” Fari said, appearing before the Gar family in her translucent blue ghost form.

“What is this?” the adult Gar woman asked.

“She is one of my friends.” I replied with more ice in my tone than I intended. I could accept, intellectually, that the Gar woman had been through hard and trying times, but I couldn’t stop the emotional reaction of wanting to smack the hell out of her for not seeing Fari as a person.

“You won’t have to carry your children,” Fari said. “I’m bringing a transport in that will be able to fly you to an Aid Center.”

“How are you doing that?” the eldest Gar asked.

“I can multi-task,” Fari said. Given that she was an archmage level caster of Mind magic, that wasn’t particularly surprising, but I knew she found it more comfortable to focus on a single thread of consciousness at a time. She’d explained that fracturing her attention came at the cost of making each avatar slower and less capable which she preferred to avoid. Still, it was a handy trick when she needed it.

“I can’t wait for the transport to get here,” I said. “And I need your help.”

“And here’s where the demands begin,” the adult Gar woman said.

“My other friend, the one who went out to take down the people bombing you, he’s injured and buried under a collapsed building,” I said. “I don’t know what state he’s in or how long he has and I need help getting him out.”

“We have children who need us,” the adult Gar woman said.

“I’ll go with you,” the adult Gar man said.

“Me too,” one of the older Gar girls said.

“No Nenya, you’re going to stay here,” the adult Gar woman said.

“She’ll go,” the eldest Gar woman said. “The rest of us will tend to the children and get them loaded into the transport when it arrives.”

There are a variety of anima techniques that let someone kill with a look. I had to assume that the adult Gar woman didn’t know them given the tension that crackled in the air between her and the family’s matriarch.

Since I had neither the training to resolve disputes like that nor any time to spend, I settled for leaving while the opportunity was available.

“Thank you. He’s in this direction,” I said and turned towards the blinking overlay Fari had cast for me.

I set out at a quick jog and found the two Garjarack easily keeping up with me.

“You can travel faster if you wish,” the man said. He was glowing with a thin sheen of Physical anima. Garjarack are, on average, stronger than a human of similar weight and height, but their legs tend to be shorter which makes them slower over long runs. Anima spells cancel out those physical differences of course, but any magic spent on running fast is magic that’s not available for other uses.

“I want to get to him quickly, but we should conserve our energy,” I said. “I don’t know what it’s going to take to get him out of there.”

It was dangerous for me to cast spells, but letting Darius be crushed to death wasn’t even vaguely an option. I was worried about how much anima my two Gar companions could have left. Between their overall poor physical state and the energy they’d given to support the shield, I couldn’t imagine either of them was exactly brimming with magical power.

“I am called Cadrus.” the Gar man said as we ran towards the site where Darius was trapped.

“Thank you for this Cadrus,” I said.

“You have helped us against our enemies,” Cadrus said. “We are stronger working together.”

Darius had told me about the Garjarack and the customs that were common in their local cultures. While pretty much everyone on Hellsreach spoke Galactic Common, many of the Garjarack also spoke an older language from Exxion II. Darius spoke it fluently as well, in part because he was a brainy sort of boy and in part because he had as many Gar friends as human ones. He’d tried to teach it to me, but two months wasn’t exactly enough to pick up fluency in it, especially since we’d had a lot of other things to work on.

The one part that stuck out to me was the number of different terms the language had for describing “friend” or “ally”. I could see it influencing Cadrus’ use of language in Galactic Common. I wasn’t even an “ally” yet, but I’d stepped one level closer to that from “unknown stranger”.  If we were speaking in Exxion II’s Common tongue, I would have been able to pick up a lot more about his assessment of me, like whether he still considered me dangerous and whether he was ready to see if I would prove myself an “ally”. As it was I had to settle for letting his actions speak louder than his words.

“Is your friend a Crystal Guardian like you?” Nenya, the Gar girl asked.

“No,” I said, “He’s a native of Hellsreach.”

“You’re working with the people here?” she asked.

“Yeah, I came here to help with the peace negotiations but it turned out that there was a lot more going on than the Empire was aware of,” I said.

“So you’re working with the humans then?” Nenya asked.

“The Empire’s trying to work with everyone. Humans and Gars, natives and off-worlders,” I said. “For me though, I’ve just been trying to recover for the last couple of months.”

“Recover?” Nenya asked.

“I got hurt pretty badly when the planet came online as a battle world. Channeled just a little too much anima, so I’ve been on injured reserve until I get my full powers back,” I said. “Darius has been helping me with that. And other things.”

The ‘other things’ were generally more fun than the therapy of course, but it wasn’t the time to indulge in fond memories. Instead I used those memories as fuel to push me faster to where he was waiting for me.

I was worried about him, but I knew that he was capable in his own ways. The collapsing building might have knocked him out but he had enough defensive spells that he’d be able to hold on for a while. At least long enough for me to reach him. I’d seen him fight through some incredible odds and come out ok, so I knew he wouldn’t leave me like that.

Of course that didn’t mean he couldn’t be taken.

We came to the site of the building collapse and I stopped in stunned silence. Fari’s overlay showed exactly where it should be. It showed exactly where Darius should be too.

But neither of them was there.

Looking down at the ground I saw only an empty hole as deep as the building’s foundations had run. There was no rubble it, and no Darius. He was gone.

I don’t always think clearly when I or someone near me is in mortal peril. Judging from the size of the bomb blasts that had been going off and my distance from the rift that was forming, I was pretty sure I could get far enough away for my emergency shield to soak the explosion safely.

The Garjarack family wasn’t that lucky though.

I glanced around to see if there was any shelter they could reach and saw that there were at least a dozen spots they could get behind that would protect them. Some of them. The fast ones. The adults.

If the children had been in good shape they might have escaped the bomb’s kill radius too, but one look at them showed how impossible that would be. The children could scuttle maybe a dozen feet away at most before the bomb obliterated them and the adults weren’t going to leave them behind.

I couldn’t let that happen. For the first time in two months, I called on the Physical anima that was resting in me and began weaving it into a protective spell. I felt fire burn along the edges of my arms as I swirled the spell into existence but a cool breeze cut me off.

“Mel! Wait! I’ve got this!” Fari said.

A brilliant light stabbed down from the heavens and pierced ground where the Garjarack family stood. There was a dull thump nearby and an explosion in the far distance. When I could see again a couple of seconds later, the lizardfolk family was still there, the rift that had opened near them was not and everyone was blinking in surprise.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Local area teleport denial spell. The defense grid has a lot of those in its arsenal,” Fari said.

“Does Darius have a bead on the hostiles yet?” I asked.

“I do. You can lock this whole place down if you want Fari. They’re not getting away from me now.” he said.

“I’ll cut off their escape if we need to, but I want to leave teleportation open as an option. The family Mel found may need immediate evac,” Fari said.

“The looters?” Darius asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “They’re not in good shape.”

I walked closer to them and released the partially formed shield spell so that the Physical anima I’d placed into it flowed back into me. I could still feel my skin tingling with the burn it had brought on.

“What was that?” one of the adults asked.

“The people who were bombing the town tried to transport a bomb here. One of my friends stopped them. They won’t be targeting us again,” I said.

“Did you kill them?” one of the elderly Gar asked. She seemed eager for an affirmative response to that question.

“We’re going to bring them in for questioning and trial,” I said.

“They poisoned our food!” the elderly Gar said. “They should die.”

“I’m more concerned with keeping you and your family alive at the moment,” I said.

“And what about the families in our city? Who is going to keep them alive?” one of the adults asked.

I scowled. It was a good question, and I didn’t have a good answer to it. The systems to care for the populace of Hellsreach during the current transition period had, clearly, fallen short. Or it had been sabotaged. That wasn’t my immediate problem though. At that moment the global problems of the world had to take a back seat to the issues facing the people right in front of me.

I wasn’t trained in working with people diplomatically, but I’d seen the Sisters at the orphanage deal with this kind of situation before, so I stole a move from them.

“How many hands do I have?” I asked the adult Gar and held my palms so that they were turned up and facing towards her.

“Two,” she said, annoyed.

“Right, which means there are more of you to help than I have hands to work with,” I said. “So you’re going to help me, and then, once your family is safe and fed, we’re going to look into what happening with your city.”

The Gar were tired, and angry. Worse, I was a human who was telling them what was going to happen. It didn’t matter that I was offering to help, or that I was speaking in a sane, rational and peaceful manner. The Gar woman before me was too scared and too hurt to do anything but fight. Fortunately, she wasn’t alone. The adult male Gar stepped up beside her and put his hand on her side. It was an odd gesture to see, but with the shape of their bones it wound up being the equivalent of resting a hand on a human’s shoulder.

“We appreciate your words Guardian Watersward,” the male Gar said. “May we take these supplies we have gathered?”

I saw the family eyeing the crates hungrily. Unless I missed my guess, they hadn’t eaten a decent meal in weeks, if not months. I looked down at the boxes and started to suggest that we  break one open immediately before one of the kids passed out. That’s when my heart sank.

“I wish you could,” I said. “But they’re not safe.”

“What do you mean” the elderly Gar woman said.

“The safety seals are broken. Those crates have this weeks transport stickers on them but they’ve already been open. I think they’ve been tampered with,” I said.

“What’s wrong with them?” the elderly Gar woman asked.

“They’re probably poisoned,” I said. “A slow acting one I would guess. Could anyone have known that you were going to come here?”

“No,” the elderly Gar woman said. The rest of the Gars nodded their heads in agreement with her.

“This town is well across the border,” I said. “How did you know to come here to find supplies?”

“The ship,” the adult Gar woman said. “The one we came in. It’s a human ship and its beacon was still active.”

“I’ve worked on maintaining the spell nets for our fighters,” the adult Gar male said. “That’s how I knew how to read the logs on human ship.”

“How did you get the ship?” I asked. I suspected I knew what the answer was, but I was hoping I was wrong. Sadly, I wasn’t.

“It crashed just outside our city.” the elderly Gar woman said. I could see the same ideas sparking to life behind her eyes that were raging in mine.

“And it was still flyable?” I asked.

“Yes,” the adult Gar man said.

“No crew though right?” I asked.

“No,” the elderly Gar woman said. “No, curse us, there wasn’t.”

She saw what I did but the rest of the family was still catching up.

“I don’t understand,” the adult Gar woman said. “Why does it matter how we got the ship.”

“Because it was a trap.” the elderly Gar woman said.

“The ship was bait. Someone was trying to lure you in and have you take these supply crates back to your city,” I said. “Think about all of the explosions. Someone was bombing this city, but they never landed one near you. Or blew up your ship. They wanted you to be afraid, to pick up the supplies and race out of here as quickly as you could. Or at least that was the plan until my friends started hunting them.”

“When we got home we were going to share these with all of our neighbors,” the elderly Gar woman said.

“Your culture is known to be a tightly knit one by comparison to the local human cultures,” I said. “I think someone knew that and was counting on you sharing these supplies.”

The Gar were quiet in response to my words, except for the adult Gar woman. She sobbed in rage, her hands clenching so tightly they shook.

“We’ll leave the crates behind and I’ll have an investigator come and confirm my guess,” I said.

“I’m getting the nearest Imperial overseer on the way now,” Fari told me telepathically. “I’ve also alerted the West Mountain Aid Center to be ready for you. It’s the closest site that’s under direct Imperial oversight.”

“Good thinking, and thank you,” I said to her telepathically before speaking aloud to the Gar again. “I have a ship. If you’ll come with me, I can take you to a real aid center. We can make sure you get safe food and good medicine.”

“Why should we trust you,” the adult Gar woman said. She spoke the words at barely more than a whisper but the screaming rage behind them was perfectly clear.

My first instinct was to yell back at her. I was trying to help them. Being mistrusted was aggravating and a waste of my time. Some part of me was smart enough to keep my mouth closed for a couple of seconds though so my brain could tell my emotions to shut up.

All it took to solidify that bit of self control was to look at the family before me. I’d spent two months resting in comfort and luxury. They’d spent that time starving and had probably spent their lives in the kind of war fueled misery I’d only read about. They had every right to be distrustful and the last thing they needed was for me to chew them out. So, again, I took a page from the Sisters of Water’s Mercy playbook.

The Sisters were harsh when they needed to be, but they didn’t usually meet anger with anger. I thought about using my title as a Crystal Guardian to buy their trust, but that was complicated by the twin facts that I wasn’t actually a full Crystal Guardian yet and, even if I was, they wouldn’t have had any reason to believe me just because I said was. Instead, I chose a different approach.

“You don’t have to,” I told the Gar woman. “I’d like to get your family to an aid center as soon as possible. If you would trust a Garjarack aid station more than an Imperial one, I can request clearance for a Garjarack transport to come here and pick you up.”

“Why are you helping us? You’re human.” one of the other Garjarack’s, the elderly male, asked. He was as distrustful of me as the adult woman but not as consumed by rage.

“I’m a Crystal Guardian,” I told him. “This is what we do.”

“You help people? Is that it?” he asked. “Why are you the first one we’ve seen in twenty years then?”

“Do I look twenty years old to you?” I asked him. The actual answer to his question was a complex one. In part the Crystal Guardians were stretched much thinner than galactic society imagined them to be and I wasn’t going to shatter that illusion if I didn’t have too. The other thing that had kept the Empire from intervening in the situation on Hellsreach was the presence of a Cabal of natives who were working to keep the planet to themselves. Since most of the Cabal was human, I didn’t think explaining that to this family would do much to calm their anger.

“I have no idea. All of you look the same to me.” the elder Gar man said.

I almost laughed. As insults went, it was probably oldest and most widely used racist comment in the galaxy. It was rude as hell, but as put down’s went it lacked a certain amount of sting coming from someone of a completely different species than me.

“We’ll go with you,” the eldest Gar woman said.

“Gram?” the adult Gar man said. “Are you sure?”

She looked at me like she was inspecting a hunk of meat to see if it had turned rotten. Some part of my brain chose that moment to notice that, even when they became elderly, Garjarack’s still had certain mechanical muscular advantages on humans due to the length of their bones and the angles their muscles were set to work at. The old woman probably couldn’t break me in half, but I wasn’t sure it would be all that fun if she tried.

“Yes.” That was all that the elderly Garjarack woman said, just “Yes”, and the entire family nodded and fell into step with her. Even the adult Gar woman who was still silently fuming.

“Lead the way to your ship,” the elderly Gar woman said.

I turned back towards the direction I’d come when I felt claws of ice reach through me.

We were in danger.

I looked around for another rift. Nothing.

“Fari, what’s happening here?” I asked telepathically.

“I don’t know. You’re sensing danger right? I don’t see or hear anything…wait,” she said. “There’s a tremor building below you. It’s a strong one. Mel, you need to get everyone away from those buildings.”

I looked around and saw how little that was going to help. The town wasn’t that built up, but if the structures around us collapsed, we’d be crushed by the falling debris whether we were in them or not.

“I can’t get them out of the shadows all these buildings,” I said to Fari.

“Trust me!” she said.

So I did.

In the last seconds before the monster earthquake hit, I gathered the Gar family around me in a tight circle and then watched as the town was destroyed.

Reconstruction can be a long, tiring process. In the wake of a massive earthquake everything gets disrupted. Water, food, and other essentials become scarce commodities even in areas where they’d been abundant. For the towns and cities that were caught in the middle of the war and stretched to the breaking point before planet-wide calamity hit Hellsreach, the situation was even more dire.

Two months after a cabal of Hellsreach natives managed to unlock the planet’s hidden “battle world systems”, the the people of Hellsreach were still reeling from the damage they’d caused.

In a way, I was too.

I was lucky. Unlike a lot of others, I had access to some very talented cleric-healers and I’d been given the time I needed to recover from the injuries I’d sustained in the fight to regain control of the world before it destroyed its neighbors. Despite the time and attention though, the healing process was slow. I’d injured myself with magic, and damaged my anima reserves by channeling more energy than should have been humanly possible. Since the alternative had been to wither and die under the assault of a weapon meant to scour worlds clean of life, I’d say I made out pretty well. That didn’t change the fact though that the only way I was going to recover fully was to let nature have the time it needed.

Among the activities that my healers had approved for me were things like quiet dinners for two, walks in the Honey Rose gardens and light sparring sessions provided I wore sufficient protective equipment. They hadn’t been happy with the sparring sessions, but I’d started pressing for them as soon as I was released from the hospital. After two months of restricted practice time, I was slower and flabbier than I’d been in years.

That made “how I found myself in an active war zone” an interesting question.

“Never let it be said that you don’t take me on the best dates,” I told Darius as we crouched behind a partially exploded wall in the ruins of a beach town named Salmon Falls.

“I swear, this was supposed to be a safe area!” he said. The two months we’d been together let me evaluate his expressions better than I’d been able to when we met. He was scared and that was making him angry. From way he was balanced on the balls of his feet, ready to leap out and engage the forces that were assaulting the town, I knew he wasn’t afraid for himself. He was afraid for me.

I could drop him nine out of ten times in our sparring matches, but only so long as anima casting was off the table. Once magic came into the picture, I couldn’t compete. It wasn’t that I was incapable of casting spells. Not anymore. I just couldn’t afford to risk a miscast until I fully recovered.

In theory, that meant I shouldn’t be anywhere near “out in the field”, but in practice our resources were stretched too thin for me to stay on my butt for another month.

Before joining the Crystal Guardians, I’d viewed them like most of the galaxy did; they were a corp of unstoppable troubleshooters that the Empress unleashed on any worlds that tried to backslide into barbarism. The first time I’d seen one in action, she’d been so dangerous that a squad of elite combat soldiers led by a master class anima caster hadn’t been enough to take her down.

I wasn’t like that. I’d never had the years of training in spell casting that most of everyone else in the galaxy got. My talents had kept my own powers hidden from me for years and I was still working on understanding them. Even as a “late bloomer” though, the Crystal Guardians had been willing to bring me on board. I wasn’t unstoppable, but I was another pair of hands to help carry the load of a galaxy that the Crystal Empire had a lot less under control than it appeared.

“I’m not complaining,” I told Darius and flashed him a smile which did nothing to calm his nerves. He knew me well enough to know what I was thinking and to know that it was probably a bad idea.

“I will personally cast a binding spell on you if you try to go out there,” he said.

“You know I can break anything you can cast, right?” I said. I was teasing him, which under the circumstances wasn’t the nicest thing I could have done. The trip had been his idea, a chance for me to get out and start helping with the reconstruction. It had been a lovely gesture. I’d been climbing the walls for weeks for an opportunity to do something, anything to help.

Master Raychelle, my Guardian mentor, had insisted at first that I follow the healer’s orders and rest, but had started to budge on that point as my condition improved and the situation on Hellsreach worsened. She’d cleared me for Relief and Recovery work when Darius proposed visiting some of the towns outside the main combat zones where the disaster mitigation plans were progressing slowly.

“She’ll be good,” Fari said, appearing beside us in her usual translucent blue form. “Won’t you Mel?”

“No promises,” I said. “It looked like there were still people in this town. We can’t let whoever’s conjuring artillery down onto us blow them to bits.”

“Garjarack scavengers,” Darius said. “I saw them after the first bomb went off. This was supposed to be a human settlement. Any lizard folk here are looters.”

“How would Gars get this far into territory held by Exxion 4?” I asked.

“The same way humans get into territory held by Exxion 2,” he said. “Attack fighters gutted and fitted for cargo space. Until the ceasefire they’d get blown out of the sky if they crossed deep into enemy territory.”

The distinctive sound of space being rent asunder sent both Darius and I diving to the ground. The bomb materialized through the warp breech inside a house three doors down from us. When it went off, I felt the shockwave more than heard it.

“We’re going to have to go out there,” I said. “Even assuming they haven’t blown up our transport yet, we’d never get out of here if they’re free to blow us up when we try to take off.”

“They’re going to blow you up if you go out there without any anima shields,” Darius said.

“I’ve got an anima shield.” I said and pointed to the enchanted belt that I was wearing.

“You’ve got a reserve anima shield,” Darius said. “Those are only supposed to be used for emergency environmental protection.”

“Then I’m good to go,” I said. “My environment wants to kill me and I’d say this is pretty clearly an emergency.”

“I can do this by myself,” Darius said. “Trust me.”

It was a pure and heartfelt plea. This has been his idea and he’d been charged with protecting me. We’d turned down an armed escort because all able the bodies were needed elsewhere. This was supposed to be a safe and easy mission and it had turned out to be anything but that. I could see the guilt in his eyes, lurking behind the fear of my being injured.

“Ok.” I said, and sat back against the wall.

I saw his eyes widen in surprise and then narrow to inspect me more closely. I remained sitting and smiled at him. He inspected me for another couple seconds and then turned to look for a path out of the house we were hiding in.

“I’ll be right back.” he said and dashed out of the building in a crouch.

I watched him go and counted to five.

“You’re not going to stay here are you?” Fari asked me.

“And let him take all the risk?” I said.

“He’s not on restricted spell casting,” Fari said.

“That doesn’t make him invincible,” I said. “Anyways, I’ve got something he doesn’t.”

“What’s that?” Fari asked.

“You!” I said. “You still have a link into the surface defense weapon systems right?”

“I do. Why?” Fari asked, sounding very wary. She’s spent too long as the controlling spirit of a planet killing super weapon to be thrilled with having control over another planet killing super weapon.

“Set up a sense link with me,” I said. “I can’t cast spells but I can act as a spotter for you. And to be clear, I’m not asking you to shoot anyone. With the defense systems you were telling me about, we should be able to disarm and disable anyone I can see without killing them.”

“I can do that.” Fari said, relief plain in her voice.

“Probably worth doing the same with Darius,” I said.

“Way ahead of you,” she said as I got up and headed for the bombed out section of wall opposite the path Darius had taken.

My primary magical gift is the ability to manipulate Void anima. With it I can drain the energy from spells, shield myself from attacks and turn invisible. Sneaking through the ruins of Salmon Falls would have been a lot easier if I was free to do any of those things. To be fair though, I wasn’t completely devoid of magic. From the first time I’d cast a spell, I’d had a sixth sense that warned of me danger. Even when I intentionally suppressed my magics, I left that alone. I figured I wasn’t likely to finish healing if someone managed to blast my head off.

With the smoke that the bombs had kicked up, I didn’t have the need for invisibility either, but that came with some drawbacks of its own.

“I’m not getting much from the sense link spell,” Fari warned me.

“I know. I’ll try to get to a clearer area.” I said and headed towards the shore, where I’d seen the people who remained in the town.

The next bomb materialized a quarter mile from me. I felt it coming in time to take shelter, even though I was safely out of the blast range.

“How’s Darius doing?” I asked Fari.

“He’s ok. I’ll link you two together,” she said.

“You’re on the move too, aren’t you?” he asked after the mental link formed between us.

“I’m not going after the artillery lobbers,” I said. “They’re all yours.”

“You’re trying to find the looters?” he asked.

“It can’t be coincidence that they’re here at the same time someone is blowing up the town,” I said.

“I’ll give you that. I don’t think they’ll know anything about the artillery lobbers though,” Darius said.

“Doesn’t hurt to ask,” I said.

“It will if they kill you,” he replied.

“I’ll have to ask them nicely then,” I said.

“Let Fari ask them. From a distance,” he said.

“They won’t know what to make of Fari,” I said. “I want to see how they respond to being caught by a Crystal Guardian.”

I heard another explosion, smaller than the last few. That was worrying. It could have been that the artillery lobbers were running out of bombs, but I didn’t have that kind of luck. What was more likely was that they were drawing a bead on their target and felt safer using small devices that could fit through tinier, and faster to form, rifts.

That next small explosion followed a few seconds after the first one, confirming my theory.

“They’re getting closer,” Darius said. “Idiots.”

I understood what he meant. They were rushing their attacks to take him out quicker, but that told us that he was in a spot they could observe and that it was one which was close enough to their position to make them panic.

“Be careful.” I said. Idiots tend to make dumb mistakes, but those mistakes can sometimes be as deadly as the plans of the most clever people out there.

“That’s my line.” he said. “Seriously, no getting shot.”

“No promises.” I told him. I had every intention of remaining whole and unperforated but sometimes the best intentions can go awry.

The smoke began to clear as I got towards the beach. That let me see the state of the town better. From our approach by air, we’d seen that Salmon Falls was in much worse shape than it should have been. According to the official reports there were a thousand people living here and collecting emergency supplies from the Imperial rationing center. Walking the shattered streets I had to wonder if even a dozen humans remained in the burned out structures that surrounded me.

The buildings troubled me. They looked like they’d seen some repair work done to them, but it was all superficial. A house that I passed had newly restored walls but the inside was gutted by fire and filled with debris. I found a supply depot that was in the same state and started to question what I was seeing.

“Fari, Darius, there’s something wrong here,” I said. “This supply depot is empty but the looters haven’t been here. No one has. The insides are an empty pit.”

“I saw a building like that in the north here,” Darius said.

Another explosion punctuated our conversation.

“They’re losing track of you.” Fari said to Darius.

“I’m moving building to building,” he said. “Can you plot out where they are from the sight lines they’ve had on me?”

“Maybe,” Fari said and then amended her statement. “Yes. there’s two groups of them. I’ll show you an overlay of the area they’re in.”

“Do you have enough info to take them out with the defense systems?” Darius asked.

“Not with any of the non-lethal ones,” she said. “You’ll need to actually see them for me to bring those online. As you get closer I can reduce the size of the areas they’re in and target them better.”

“Let me see that too.” I asked.

“You said you were going to stay out of this,” Darius said.

“I will,” I said, even though part of me yearned to get to our attackers before him and keep him safe.

Fari’s overlay appeared as a series of glowing lines and circles superimposed over my normal vision. I saw the area the artillery lobbers were in outlined in red and Darius outlined in blue. He was creeping towards them to catch them unaware. That gave him the best chance of finishing the battle with the first group before the second group could pinpoint his location. It also meant I needed to avoid being blown up for a few minutes more at least.

“Fari, which buildings in town would be most likely to have supplies stored in them and be visible from the artillery lobber’s positions?” I asked.

“There’s three warehouses and a medical center that fit those criteria,” she said.

“How far away is the medical center?” I asked.

“You’re heading towards it now. Take a left at the next cross street and then a right at the road beyond the fountain,” she said.

“Any signs of people there?” I asked.

“I can’t make out what’s up there,” she said. “I’m pulling the information on the streets from the Exxion 2 provisioning camp records and correlating it with what you’re seeing.”

“Have I mentioned that you’re amazing?” I asked.

“Not yet today,” she replied.

I didn’t have invisibility to rely on, but I wasn’t that bad at sneaking without it. A life spent avoiding guys who were bigger, meaner and magically enhanced meant I’d learned how to stay out of sight early on.

I was determined to make the looters first sight of me a shocking surprise that came less than a second before Fari apprehended them. As it turned out though, I was the one who wound up shocked.

I found the looters at the medical center, right where I’d guessed they would be. What I hadn’t guessed was that they would be a family. Three old lizard folks, a pair of adults and more than a handful of young children, each with the same distinctive pattern and coloration to their scales.

None of them were armed, and none of them looked like they posed any threat whatsoever. They were tired, barely able to stand on their feet. Their clothes were damaged enough to count as rags and they moved with the jittery panic of people terrified of their situation.

“What are you doing here?” I called out as I stepped away from my hiding spot around a corner.

My words hit the Garjarack family like a stun button. They each jolted in place, some of them dropping the boxes they were carrying out of the medical center.

“Who are you?” the eldest female said, stepping forward towards me.

We were fifty feet apart, but I put up my hands as a show of non-hostility. It didn’t mean much, but the gesture seemed to communicate my intent as much as the words I spoke.

“I’m Guardian Mel Watersward of the Crystal Empire,” I said. “I’m here to help.”

I saw the eldest Garjarack’s shoulders slump and guessed that she was feeling relief. On a human it might have read as despair, but I’d talked with enough of the lizard folks while recuperating to have a sense that their body language differed from my own species in some key ways.

“Are you a healer?” one of the adult Gars asked. He pointed to two of the Gar children and I saw that neither of them looked well. They were shaking with the kind of palsy that came from desperate undernutrition. I’d seen cases of it at the hospital the first week that I’d been there.

The war between the humans and the Gar had gone on so long that both sides had developed a class of “on planet” servitors who’d been treated as slave labor for the war effort. The shortages brought on by the planet-wide earthquakes had been enough to tip the most poorly treated on both sides over the edge into painful, unpleasant deaths. At least in the cases where the Imperial relief forces hadn’t gotten to them in time.

By two months after the crisis though we were supposed to have systems and supply lines in place to distribute food to those in need.

“I’m not, but I can take you to one,” I said. There were plenty of clinics setup to help people like this. Or at least there were supposed to be. I had a few terrible suspicions beginning to take root on that front.

Those suspicions were pushed to the back of my mind by a more urgent awareness though.

One moment, I could tell that we were safe and the next my danger sense stabbed through me like an icy spear. I looked around and out of the corner of my eye saw a rift beginning to form in the middle of where the Gar family was standing.

I wasn’t supposed to cast spells. I couldn’t risk a miscasting. If I didn’t shield them though, the bomb that came through the rift was going to was going to reduce them to a gory stew right in front of my eyes!