As Pod catches his breath, Emily quickly moves around the battlefield, pressing Mensacus’ barrel to any survivors and letting him drain the last of their life. She scans the corpses for valuables before returning to her apprentice’s side to find him pushing himself off the ground with steady hands.

“So, how many hits?” she asks him, pulling out a vial of crimson healing brew and tossing it to him.

“Eight, and I think my arm’s broken,” he groans, popping the cork and downing the potion.

“You think?”

“It’s a small crack, so I don’t know if it counts,” he says before pausing and lifting his left arm to flex it. “And it’s gone now. Those potions are great. Are there any non-magical alternatives I can make?”

“Not that I know of yet,” Emily responds with a hint of disappointment in her tone. “Anyway, how was your first taste of the battlefield?”

“Exhausting. I probably could have conserved my energy better. I shouldn’t have bothered trying to enhance my boots, it doesn’t give a big enough boost to justify the power I wasted.”

“I did tell you to only enhance them in an emergency for a reason. The only reason your machina can affect the enchantment on them is because it’s imbued with my energy signature; it’s not an efficient conversion,” she says, gesturing for Pod to follow her towards the southern edge of the camp. “Other than that, though, how was it? Do you have any changes you want to make to your equipment?”

“It was…” he hesitates, his brow furrowing as he glances down at a corpse as they pass. “I’m not sure you could say I enjoyed it, but I also don’t think you could say I didn’t?”

Emily glances over at him curiously, waiting for him to elaborate.

“I’m not sure I like being shot and hacked at, but raining bombs was fun, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt my heart go like that final spray.” He raises his right hand to stare at his trigger finger, still twitching faintly. “From the moment I pulled the trigger to when I released it, it was like it was just me and the gun. I watched people drop, and even took a few bullets, but all I cared about was making sure every shot had a target.”

He looks up into Emily’s eyes with a mixture of doubt and concern.

“Is that wrong? Shouldn’t I feel worse about killing people?”

Emily reaches out to ruffle his hair with her metal palm.

“Do you really think I’m about to tell you to feel bad about killing after what I’ve done? These people were all soldiers, Pod. They accepted that they might die when they came here, and they would have killed you in a heartbeat if you hadn’t got them first. Make all the moral arguments you want against killing non-combatants, but never feel guilty for this.”

They pause at the edge of the outpost facing into no-man’s-land with their Cutters sitting fully visible in the air above them, controlled wirelessly by Emily’s machina.

“Okay.” Pod nods firmly, taking Emily’s words to heart before asking a hesitant follow-up question. “Do you feel guilty for killing non-combatants?”

“No,” Emily responds flatly without a flicker of emotion on her face.

Silence falls between them as Emily pushes her mana into the bag on her back. A dense purple mist of spatial mana flows from dozens of vent-like slots down its sides, moving past them and forming together into a thick cloud.

The mist solidifies into thirty uniform metal soldiers, their sleek humanoid forms glistening gunmetal grey under the midday sun. None of their internals are visible anymore, covered completely by their smooth, reinforced armour plating, and where vulnerable canisters used to sit on their backs, there are now protective, backpack-like structures formed from a thick, mana-resistant alloy.

Each of the soldiers has a set of beady camera lenses for eyes, set into their inhuman, featureless faces, and has a gun in place of their right hands. Most of them wield shotguns and rifles, but a few of them have Steamthrowers, blocky weapons with canisters of steam powder hanging below their receivers.

They all have spare magazines, grenades, and powder canisters fixed to several easy-to-access mounting points across their bodies, tailored to suit their weapon setups.

At the rear of their formation, slightly separated from the others as they await instructions, is the communication droid. It has a second backpack-like extrusion on its chest that holds a radio transmitter, a very simplified version of the Universal Transmitter blueprint that the system gave Emily.

She raises her left hand, casting out thirty thin strands of machina that pierce through the soldiers’ metal heads. She configures their defence protocols, marking the area of the woods before the outpost as their protection target and commanding the communications droid to alert her when they make human contact.

With their instructions set, the soldiers jolt into motion, marching forward in perfect sync before breaking apart and filtering through the trees. Emily reaches out to grab Pod and casts Air Walk before carrying him up to their jets.

“You never answered my other question, so I’ll rephrase it,” she says as they settle back into their cockpits and turn towards the next outpost, shooting out in a low flight over the treetops. “What changes do you want to make to how you fight based on that experience?”

“Can I… not use my spear in close quarters?” he responds with a hesitant question.

“Of course you can. If you didn’t enjoy being shot and stabbed, you should just make sure no one can reach you. If you upgrade your rifle and carry some artillery with you, you’ll be just as much of a threat as you are up close.”

“Then why did you put so much emphasis on training my hand-to-hand combat and spearmanship?”

“Because it’s important to be able to handle yourself if someone does get close. I may be your teacher, but don’t let anything I tell you limit you. We all have our own preferences.”

It doesn’t take long for them to arrive above the second outpost with their stealth reengaged and, after spreading another isolating barrier, Emily climbs out of her jet.

Unlike the first, this outpost takes the form of several buildings woven into the canopy of the forest, opting for natural camouflage instead of magical. Thanks to the hard-to-traverse nature of the camp, Emily opts to handle it herself.

She shuts her eyes and calls upon her elemental connection, but this time, instead of igniting a blazing aura of lightning, a metallic silver sheen spreads across her skin from her left arm. Her eyes snap open, glowing with a silvery-white light, and she steps off the edge of her ship.

Emily plummets towards a tree below, not even bothering to cover her face as she slams into the dense foliage. Branches snap against her face, unable to scratch even her open eyes, and a second later, she slams into a wooden roof with a heavy thud.

The roof gives way, and she drops in the centre of a half-empty mess hall. Every head in the room snaps towards the sound of shattering wood, but none of the occupants get a chance to react as Emily lands with her fist on the floor.

Instead of breaking the wood, she coats it in a thin layer of liquid metal that curls up around her before flicking down, morphing into a spray of thin needles that blanket the room. Every single soldier in the room drops to the floor at the same time, covered in thin holes that slowly ooze blood onto the floor.

Emily barely glances at the corpses, turning to the door and launching herself towards it. She steps out onto a narrow walkway stretching out to connect to several other buildings fixed to the trees.

A quick glance over the edge at the forest floor below reveals a pack of forest wolves, their pelt coats streaked with blues and greens to match their affinities, chewing on the corpses of the Defence Force members assigned to the outpost. Emily flicks her wrist, forming an instant solid dome of metal over the wolves before she leaps to the next building to clear.

She enters to find several armed soldiers relaxing completely unaware, drinking with their backs to several thin windows that face out towards the south. Metal mana seeps from her left arm, solidifying into a long blade that she whips across the room, changing its length to perfectly bisect all the occupants without scratching the walls.

This time, when she leaves the room, she spots several soldiers staring through the foliage at her, drawn to her unfamiliar, unconcealed mana signature. Emily scans them quickly, forming and firing a silver javelin at each of them.

None of them survive despite several spells being thrown up in defence, but two of them manage to deflect the first javelins targeting them and scream a warning to their allies before two more jagged metal rods find their homes in their hearts.

Emily welcomes the traitors’ panic as they make her job easier, rushing out of buildings and hidden lookouts alike to try and confront her. It only takes two minutes for the last unawakened soldier to collapse limp to the ground with a fist-sized blade bisecting his skull.

Without dropping her metal connection, Emily turns her attention to the wolves below. She leaps down and lands at the apex of the metal dome, crouching down and opening a small gap to poke Mensacus through.

“Can you make them target humans?” she asks, waiting for a positive response before opening fire.

She shoots the caged beasts one by one and, once all of them have a malice-charged needle embedded in their flesh, she dissolves the barrier and drops her connection. Casting Air Walk, she remains rooted in place while pulling thirty more soldiers from her backpack.

Setting them down on the floor, she utilises one of her most recently gained skills, Basic Programming, to write a short program to allow her troops to recognise and follow the wolves in search of their prey.

She finishes and activates it as the infected wolves complete their transformations, gaining a black and red hue in their eyes before running off into the forest. The metal soldiers break into a steady, uniform jog, chasing the beasts’ tracks as Emily kicks off and flies back up to her Cutter.

The third outpost is the same as the second, and Emily makes quick work of it with her lightning connection before leaving behind yet another set of metal soldiers. The final outpost is another clearing concealed by an illusion array, so Emily decides to use it as a chance to test direct control of her army.

She cracks open her cockpit and pours spatial mana down to the ground below, forming another platoon of soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder in a circle. Emily connects threads of machina to the metal warriors, sending out tens of commands in an instant and watching as they move with an unnatural grace that wasn’t there when following their rigid, preset commands.

The Denrosi infiltrators posing as mercenaries notice the appearance of the metal army immediately, but their first cries of panic come in sync with a wave of gunfire from fifteen arm-mounted automatic rifles.

Bodies drop and the metal army fans out, sending at least two bodies to each building. A few soldiers return fire as Emily’s troops advance on them, but their bullets harmlessly bounce off the reinforced alloy forming the droids’ skins, leaving only small dents.

Steamthrowers hiss, covering traitors in pressurised jets of superheated steam that melt their skin from their bones, and shotguns bark, ripping entire limbs off as the droids aim for centre mass.

Most of the traitors die with little resistance, but one group manages to disable one of Emily’s soldiers, destroying its gun arm and legs and drawing her focus. Half of the metal soldiers’ heads turn at once to their broken comrade, and the three second circle mages responsible blanch with fear.

The fire mage with two flaming gauntlets wrapped around his arms charges forward regardless, trusting the dual layers of water and wind being supplied by his allies as he tries to grab another droid’s gun to melt through it. He’s hit with a wave of bullets that catch in his magic armour but kill his momentum, preventing him from moving forward.

Emily takes advantage of the fallen soldier on the ground beside the two defensive mages, moving its still functional arm to grab one of the grenades fixed to its hip. It pulls the pin and rolls it towards the mages’ feet and, a second later, an explosion of shrapnel knocks them back, interrupting their casting and subsequently shattering the barriers covering them.

The fire mage dies the instant his protections fall, a focused hail of bullets ripping through him and into his allies.

The outpost finally falls quiet, and the whirr of motors, the low hiss of pneumatics, and the steady footfall of the metal army are the only sounds left as Emily gathers them back into formation.

“It’s clear,” Emily tells Pod, checking her Cutter’s power cells and mana batteries. “Disengage stealth until first contact and leave your ship in hover for now, it shouldn’t be long.”