Counter Value (Magical Girls in a Cold War Gone Hot)

[enthalpy]

0715, 2 Xiaoshu, Zhengming 12
East Sea, 145 km ENE of Xinhu

"Eyrie Actual to Cormorant 1. Report status."

The pale blue sky stretched from horizon to horizon, bright and cloudless and clear. Far below, the sea surface gleamed in the early morning light. From a kilometer up, the reflection of the sun off the waves left it with a dappled appearance, like the shell of a tortoise. No, the scales of a carp, rather, shimmering with the waves' slow undulations.

"Cormorant 1. Skies are clear, no visual contact."

Chiaki's flight lead—Cormorant 1—was to her front right, just barely visible as a dark speck against the pale blue sky. Thankfully, she could sense the mana emissions from Cormorant 1's flight spell. Otherwise, she might have lost the other woman amidst the glare.

She'd been Cormorant 1's flight partner for a week and a half now, and Cormorant 1 had yet to offer her a single word that wasn't a direct order, not even a mechanically pleasant 'Good morning.' The joint patrols were allegedly to build camaraderie between the rookies and the veterans in the unit, but Cormorant 1 didn't seem especially interested. Still, the other girl's mana felt focused and serious rather than icy or arrogant.

Unfortunately, that knowledge was little comfort against the stifling silence during the long patrols.

According to the briefing, it would take just under six hours to fly their assigned path today. Six whole hours with nothing but the sea and sky and Cormorant 1's cold—if comforting—presence for company.

Six whole hours without anything to eat, at that. Chiaki had scarfed down one of the youtiao that had been on offer for breakfast before heading out, but the mana expenditure from flying on patrol always left her hungry and mentally exhausted. Hopefully, there'd still be something good to eat in the mess hall by the time she returned to base. With her luck, though... Just stewed eel left again, for sure.

The radio crackled to life again in her ear, jerking Chiaki's attention back to her patrol.

"Eyrie Actual to Cormorant 1. We have two Class Three mana signatures, bearing 055, range 350. Track is 180, speed 600. Flight level 25. Intercept."

"Cormorant 1, copy all. Out."

Chiaki's pulse quickened as she waited for instructions. She'd been on a handful of patrols involving unknown contacts before. They'd all turned out to be quite mundane, but maybe this time...

"Cormorant 2, adjust heading 090, flight level 45. Provide overwatch for the intercept."

Chiaki rolled to the right as Cormorant 1 provided instructions over their mental link, letting her flight spell carry her on a slow, banking ascent.

"Copy, Lead," she replied, about half an octave higher than normal. There was no response. Chiaki wasn't sure whether to be grateful that Cormorant 1 had declined to call out the change in her voice or disappointed that the other girl had no reassurances to give.

Fighting the urge to fidget with her staff's knurled metal haft, Chiaki focused her attention downwards at the sea surface near the horizon as she climbed higher. Hopefully, she'd be high enough that the faint glow of the targets' mana emissions would be visible against the water. At night, the targets would be beacons in the darkness, but here in the harsh glare of the morning sun, she needed the dark backdrop to spot the glow. With the benefit of a vantage point, Chiaki should—would—be able to visually spot the targets while having superior positioning in case something went wrong.

Ten minutes passed, silent save for the dull roar of the icy wind past her flight barrier, before Chiaki detected the targets. Not close enough to be visible just yet, and at the edge of her detection range. This far out, it was more a vague sense that there was something magical out there rather than a concrete mental image like what she could feel from Cormorant 1. But it was enough.

The foreign mana sources felt about the same in magnitude as most of the other girls in her unit would at this range. Class Three mana signatures then, as Eyrie had reported. A 'standard' threat level according to the handbook. As much as anything involving magic could be considered standard, at least.

"Lead, confirm contact. Bearing 330. Entering transmission range now."

"Copy, Cormorant 2. Let me handle this."

Cormorant 1's mana flared up, growing from a dim flame to a massive blaze in her mind's eye as she surged forward into communication range.

"Attention unidentified mages! You are approaching airspace under the control of the Baichuan Treaty Union. Identify yourself, and come to a halt for inspection or reverse course immediately!"

It took a moment for the reply to come. Chiaki tightened her grip on her staff, which warmed up in her hands as she started feeding it a trickle of mana. Just in case. She slowed down to give herself a more stable firing position as well, tucking the butt end of the staff under her right arm and aiming the other towards the unknowns. Her own magic favored intermediate to long-range attacks. If something happened, she'd be responsible for providing covering fire for Cormorant 1, who was a short range and melee specialist.

"Negative, Union mage. This is international airspace. I have the right to innocent passage. Keep clear."

There was a split second of radio silence. Chiaki could almost hear Cormorant 1 grinding her teeth.

"Cormorant 1 to Eyrie Actual. Unknown contact refuses to identify. Moving to establish visual ID."

"Copy, Cormorant 1. Stay safe."

They were close enough now that the magic emissions were faintly visible, not just the rich vermilion she'd come to associate with Cormorant 1, but also a newly visible pair of oblong splotches of light closer to the horizon. Their targets. Teal in front and yellow behind.

Their original flight path would have led to an intercept at a nearly ninety-degree angle; now that the distance had closed, Cormorant 1 turned left, pulling away slightly to give herself enough distance to accelerate before approaching the unknown contacts from behind.

"Cormorant 1 to Eyrie Actual. Coming into visual range now. Looks like a Republic—"

Mana burst out from one of the unknowns, but before she could shout out a warning, a brilliant yellow beam erupted from Yellow. It lanced out towards Cormorant 1, but her hexagonal shield snapped into existence, deflecting it at the last moment.

"Shit!" Cormorant 1 snapped out over the radio, an uncharacteristic hint of panic tinging her voice. "Taking fire! Weapons free, repeat, weapons free!"

Even before she heard the order, Chiaki had already begun expending her own mana. It drained from her hands through the circuitry in her staff. The focus set in its tip, already half-charged, flashed white for a single instant before a blinding, meter-wide beam in her own personal shade of amethyst shot out and swept towards Yellow.

Miss.

Yellow's mana flared as she dove for the sea surface, leaving the beam to charge off into empty air before scattering into nothing. The retaliation was almost instant. Yellow fired off a conical spread of shots aimed roughly at where Chiaki had been a few moments earlier.

It took a split second to gauge the safest path out of danger and plan out her own trajectory. Chiaki had just enough time to adjust her flight magic to direct thrust to her left, vision darkening for a few moments as she jerked sideways, before the incoming shot pattern was upon her.

As she corkscrewed towards the edge of Yellow's cloud of bullets, Chiaki caught a brief glimpse of Cormorant 1 bombarding Teal with a withering fusillade out of the corner of her eye. Streams of brilliant red orbs sprayed out in short staccato bursts as she tried to close the distance with her quarry.

In the span of half a second, Chiaki twisted her way through the barrage, angling towards the edge of the pattern where the bullets weren't as dense. Most of the projectiles uselessly zipped by with a flat crack, but despite her best efforts, a handful of fingernail-sized pellets still managed to strike her. Most of those deflected off her shields with a soft ping, raising a cluster of ripples that quickly dampened out, but the last few punched through to impact against her costume, leaving a few hissing scorch marks and some stinging bruises. Nothing critical.

She'd lost track of Yellow while taking evasive maneuvers, and it took a moment for her to reacquire her target, who was—

"Lead! Break right, break right!"

Yellow took a shot at Cormorant 1 just before Chiaki snapped off another beam too late to run interference.

Her own attack struck Yellow square in the back, generating a bright flash of light and a burst of smoke as it shredded part of Yellow's costume. Simultaneously, Yellow's beam clipped Cormorant 1 in the shoulder just as she pivoted to the right. Bracketed by Teal's shots, she fell toward the ocean surface in a flat spin.

"Good shot, Cormorant 2." Cormorant 1's voice was low and strained as she pulled up just above the sea surface, raising a short tail of spray as she clawed her way back into the sky. Not far away, Yellow fell, unconscious, into the ocean, raising a large pillar of saltwater that crashed back down to the sea surface, leaving behind only a slowly expanding circle of foam centered on her limp figure. The sea was fairly calm today. She would float long enough for them to finish the fight. Probably.

Chiaki nodded on reflex, realizing a heartbeat later that there was no one to see her response. "Th-thanks, Cormorant 1." She fumbled slightly with her staff, mouth dry and fingers weak from adrenaline.

"Cormorant 1 to Eyrie Actual. Splash one."

"Confirmed. Good work, Cormorant 2."

After losing her partner, Teal immediately pulled back, evidently not willing to continue the engagement alone. She climbed up, her flight path settling into a wide circle just out of attack range.

It took a few seconds for Cormorant 1 to level out at altitude.

"Eyrie Actual, Cormorant 1. One remaining hostile. Moving to engage."

"Negative, Cormorant 1. Cormorant flight, you have new orders. Return to base immediately."

"...Acknowledged, Eyrie Actual," Cormorant 1 ground out. "Cormorant 2, on me."

Chiaki followed Cormorant 1 on a wide turn that took them southeast, back toward land.

"What about Yellow, Lead?" she asked, giving Teal one last look as she turned away.

"Teal can fish her out of the drink," Cormorant 1 replied tersely. "I expect we'll have bigger things to worry about soon."

---

When the familiar buildings of the base finally came into view, the tension and adrenaline drained away from Chiaki's body, leaving her with a bone-deep weariness and the beginnings of a sour pit of hunger in her stomach.

She passed over the airfield first, flying over a squadron of fighters lined up in the staging area just beside the runway. Ground crew swarmed over the aircraft, slowly clearing away the mess of fuel hoses snaking their way across the tarmac. A few propellers were already spinning as the planes readied for takeoff.

There was, in theory, a runway reserved for mages on the other side of the control tower from the airfield, a short, 50-meter concrete road with an emergency medical aid station and a fire extinguisher attached. Barely anyone used it, though.

Chiaki followed Jiayu—Cormorant 1—in a slow descent towards the grassy lawn between the mage barracks buildings. Jiayu landed at a dead stop, only the brief flex in her knees indicating that she'd been flying just a moment before and not standing idly in the middle of a field.

Li Jiayu stood over half a head taller than everyone else in the unit. That slim red-and-gold jacket and pantsuit combination would have looked gaudy on anyone else. On Jiayu, with her high ponytail, it resulted in a sharp, handsome sort of charm. That, combined with her cold demeanor, had left quite a few of the other girls on base enamored with her.

It certainly helped that her mana was a striking shade of red. Prolonged usage of magic inevitably led to some physical changes. The most obvious of those was a change in hair and eye color to match the color of the mage's mana. Every year, the entire squadron would get called in to do a group photo, and each time it was a riotous explosion of color.

Jiayu was one of the few mages on base who chose to dye their hair. Every four weeks like clockwork, she would dye her hair black, leaving her with a full head of dark hair to go with her vermilion eyes. Chiaki was admittedly curious as to why, but she knew better than to ask.

Today though, Jiayu looked a little worse for wear. Her hair had been quite a bit longer and substantially less ragged when they'd set out, and her costume had a large, bloody gash at the shoulder, where Yellow's last beam had struck her hard enough to punch through the protective magic weave and draw blood.

Chiaki touched down close behind, taking a few running steps to bleed off some speed first before skidding to a halt, dragging an ugly brown furrow into the grass.

No time to ruminate on how she'd just made a fool of herself though; Chiaki joined Jiayu in a run towards the Agate Orchid Memorial Barracks, better known as Big Red.

The briefing room built into the basement was already packed to the gills, filled with girls, some in the standard-issue gray-green fatigues of the Mage Corps and others in costume like herself, clearly having just recently returned from patrol. The moment the doors opened, a chaotic din spilled out into the hallway, the noise of dozens of conversations drowning out the grating buzz of the fluorescent lights set into the ceiling.

On the far side of the room, a massive laminated map of the region hung on the wall. The markings of her patrol path from the early morning briefing she'd attended had already been erased, replaced by what looked like a comprehensive force posture diagram of all Union forces in the theater in red. Someone had also apparently seen fit to dig a lectern from storage and drag it to one side of the map, right under last year's group photo.

Jiayu vanished into the crowd the instant she stepped into the briefing room, leaving Chiaki to cast her gaze around the room, looking for a free seat. A brief glimpse of a waving hand drew her attention to the far side of the room, where one of the other rookies from her cohort, a girl with bobbed turquoise hair, was gesturing for her attention.

"Sugawara! You're back! I heard about what happened. Are you all right?"

Chiaki squeezed her way through the room and dropped heavily into the proffered seat.

"Nothing serious," she deflected. "We got into a bit of a skirmish, but my flight lead handled most of it. What's going on? The boss interrupted our fight to call us back."

Mikami Teruko stuffed a sachima into Chiaki's hands.

"Nope," she said smugly. "You're not getting off with just a 'nothing serious' today. A friend in Signals told me, and the news has been making the rounds. Everyone's got to know by now. Congrats on your first KO, future ace!"

Chiaki blanched. "What do you mean, everyone?" She looked around the briefing room. Most of her squadron was here, as was every single one of the squadron leaders, and even Yingyue from across the hall who was supposed to be on leave...

"Wait," Chiaki hissed, an uneasy knot forming in her chest, "did they call everyone back?"

"Sure did. And now we all know..."

"That's not what I meant," Chiaki insisted, idly picking at the plastic wrapper of the snack in her hands. She craned her neck, trying to get a rough count of the number of people in the room. "It looks like almost every mage on base is here right now. Did something happen?"

Teruko visibly deflated. "I don't know," she admitted, reaching up to her ear with one hand, twirling a strand of her hair around her finger. "We all got called in without any explanation about an hour ago, but there's been stragglers coming in the whole time. Like you, coming back from patrol early, I guess."

Chiaki grimaced. "You haven't heard anything?"

"Whatever it is, the higher-ups have been keeping it under wraps." Teruko shrugged. "Maybe it's some bigwig's birthday, and—"

Teruko's flippant remark was cut off by the lights in the back half of the room suddenly shutting off with a loud snap. In an instant, the entire room fell into a dead silence, and both Chiaki and Teruko sat straight up in their seats.

Chiaki had only had the honor of meeting Senior Colonel Bai Xinrui in person once, when she'd been assigned to the 3rd Mage Wing on her graduation from the Academy. 'Silver Crane,' renowned across the Union for her poise and steadfastness under fire, had been her role model when she'd first awoken to her powers, and the brief meeting had not left Chiaki disappointed.

Although Senior Colonel Bai had retired from frontline service many years ago, her powers waning with age, she still carried herself with the air of serenity she had been known for. She paused for a moment behind the lectern to look around the room, her silvery hair gleaming under the pale lights.

"As of 0720 this morning," she began, "a state of war exists between the Baichuan Treaty Union and the Grand Republic of Ordova."

She paused for a moment to observe the frozen silence that filled the room.

"Republic forces attacked our patrols immediately after the declaration of war was delivered in a coordinated assault. The port of Yashan and the surrounding areas in Nanyue State are being bombed as I speak, and we have confirmed that at least two corps-level formations have crossed the border..."

The rest of the briefing was a blur. Senior Colonel Bai spoke at length about the strategic situation, new wartime procedures to follow, redeployment orders for part of the unit.

Chiaki sat through the whole thing in a daze, the heartbeat echoing in her ears drowning out all other sound, staring dumbly at the map on the wall. Her own home town, Kozehama in Eirai State, should have been in the upper right corner, but today in its place was a mess of red symbols denoting friendly units. There was a naval base there, wasn't there? As well as an airfield? Eirai was separated from most of the Republic's territories by the entire breadth of the East Sea, but...

Chiaki's reverie was interrupted by a poke in her ribs, directly on one of the bruises left over from her fight. She hissed in pain.

"Hey! Earth to Chiaki! Briefing's over."

Chiaki looked up. The lectern was empty; Senior Colonel Bai had already left. Chiaki stood up for a moment before collapsing back into her chair, her legs unable to bear her weight.

"Chiaki?" Teruko asked, worried. "You all right?"

Chiaki nodded. "I'll be fine, just... just give me a moment."

Teruko bent down, laying Chiaki's right arm across her shoulders. "Come on, let's get you up. I'm scheduled for sensor duty later today, but I should have enough time to help you pack up, so you can rest a bit. And you want to get a shower in before heading out, don't you?"

"Pack?" Chiaki tilted her head, pasting a polite smile onto her face.

"Should have known you were zoned out again." Teruko grunted softly as she levered Chiaki to her feet. "The 1st Group is redeploying south tomorrow," she explained, slowly walking Chiaki to the door and joining the crowd slowly filing out of the briefing room. "Really, you've got to pay more attention to these things."

Jiayu was engaged in conversation with someone Chiaki recognized only as one of the other flight leads in the hallway outside the briefing room. She made a few sweeping motions with her arms that Chiaki recognized after a moment as flight paths from her dogfight earlier today before folding her arms across her chest.

As Chiaki passed by, Jiayu looked over for a brief moment, inclining her head ever so slightly.

"Come on," Teruko said, tugging softly on Chiaki's arm. "Just three flights of stairs, and we're there."

---

It hadn't taken long to pack. Unlike Teruko, who seemed to acquire some new trinket 'for good luck' on a weekly basis, Chiaki wasn't in the habit of buying things she didn't need; most of her paycheck went back home to her parents. Toiletries, a few sets of clothing, the maintenance kit for her staff, a few boxes of chocolate biscuits, her bag of emergency medical supplies, and a sheaf of papers went into the bag, and she was done.

Teruko had begged off immediately after, rushing off to her shift manning the base's mana sensors. Alone in her dormitory room, Chiaki finally let her transformation come undone. As she cut the flow of mana, her costume dissolved into a sea of glowing motes that faded over the course of a few seconds.

Even as a young child, Chiaki always preferred 'cool' to 'cute,' and when she first awoke to her powers and engaged her transformation for the first time, she'd been utterly dismayed to discover herself clad in a frilly black-and-purple gothic lolita dress with more lace than sense. Her parents had been quite taken with the design, but despite—or perhaps because of—that, it had taken her over a year to stop feeling reflexively embarrassed every time she took flight.

Unfortunately, there was only so much she could do to make alterations to the design. The most popular theory was that the costume was a subconscious reflection of the mage's personality, though Chiaki was sure the true cause had to be something else.

The bathroom at the end of the hall had a set of five private shower stalls. An obscene luxury for the conventional forces, but standard for mage facilities. Stepping into the one on the far left, Chiaki drew the thin plastic curtain shut.

With her costume gone, Chiaki was left in her flight suit: a one-piece, skintight neoprene garment. She fumbled for a moment with the zipper, then tugged at the collar. The suit stuck to her skin, peeling away from her body in fits and starts, filling the stall with the sour odor of stale sweat, and revealing a trail of bruises running from her ribs down to her thigh from where Yellow's bullets had slipped through her shields.

Once free, Chiaki took a moment to inspect the suit for damage. The mana-sensitive fluid in the legs had deactivated when she dropped her transformation. Pulled down by gravity, it settled at the bottom of the internal bladders it was held in, leaving the suit with unnatural, tumor-like bulges at the ankles and knees. No leaks, then.

There were still a few divots as well from where she'd been hit, too, though those would smooth themselves out with time. And...

Chiaki grimaced. One of the bullets had struck hard enough to pierce the suit, tearing a small hole through the rubbery material. It was almost invisible at first glance, but still enough to compromise the insulating seal it was supposed to provide. There wasn't enough time to get it repaired before her deployment tomorrow morning though; she'd just have to remember to handle it once she arrived.

Everything else was as she remembered, the unit patch of the 3rd Mage Wing on the right shoulder, the stripe and star of a Junior Lieutenant on the collar, and "Sugawara Chiaki" on an embroidered strip just above the left breast pocket, written both in the logographic script used in the Union and the alphabet more common abroad.

Inspection done, Chiaki hung the suit on a hook on the wall, then turned the water on, as hot as it would go. For a few long moments, she let the near-scalding water rain down on her shoulders, willing it to melt away the frozen fear that had settled like a dense cloud in the bottom of her lungs.

It didn't help.

When she closed her eyes, the cloud of yellow bullets came to mind, unbidden. If she'd been just a bit slower to decide on the direction to dodge, if she hadn't managed to set up her shields in time, if a bullet had hit her in the head rather than the ribs...

Chiaki brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes, choking back a sob before it could force its way out of her throat.

No. There was no point dwelling on what-ifs. She pressed her palms against the cool tile of the shower wall and leaned her head in. Her reflection looked back at her, hazy and distorted in the white glaze.

Amethyst eyes and amethyst hair. The mark of a mage.

She was a full member of the Union Mage Corps. She'd been training for this since she was twelve: four years of the specialized education rack for mages followed by three years of combat training at the Academy. She knew, in the intellectual sense, that war was always a possibility, that this day might come.

But now that day had dawned, and something that had always stayed in the abstract realm of ink and paper and ideas had suddenly become real enough to slap her in the face.

There was a naval base in Kozehama that hosted a detachment of mages. Her parents had taken her to visit when she was younger, the month after she'd demonstrated her magic, proven herself to be a mage. The 'older sisters' there had taken her on a tour of the base.

She'd seen the separate area of the base reserved for mages, the barracks building almost a carbon copy of the one she was standing in today. She'd seen the sailors dressed in white, washing down the decks of their ships as they sat docked in the harbor. She'd had the chance to set foot on some of the ships too, curiously looking around the long gun barrels emerging ominously from the steel turrets and running along from bow to stern as the harbor breeze swept across the deck.

The sailors had called her 'our little heroine' back then. At the time, she hadn't quite understood why. But now...

She wasn't little any more, was she?

Chiaki shut the water off.

 

[enthalpy]

1110, 3 Xiaoshu, Zhengming 12
Above Central Nanyue, 600 km NE of Yashan

7.75 BALL (STEEL), TYPE 47, 1500 RDS.

Chiaki stared at the wooden crate hanging just in front of her face. The lettering stenciled on its side stubbornly refused to change, the contents identical to what they had been the countless other times she'd read it over the past four hours.

The quartermasters had stuffed the cargo plane full to bursting. The 80 mages of Chiaki's 1st Group had packed in first, sitting face to face on four rows of benches. A haphazard collection of supplies had followed after: crates of ammunition and grenades for the conventional forces, boxes of canned rations, even a few twine-tied stacks of empty burlap sandbags, all shoved into sagging nets slung from the roof wherever they would fit. It resulted in a ride that could, charitably, be described as cramped. Had it just been a matter of sitting in tight quarters for the duration of the five-hour flight, it might have been barely tolerable.

If only it were that simple.

Chiaki forced down the bile rising in her throat as the cargo plane shuddered violently, a raft adrift in a torrential river of air.

She had barely slept last night. The slight twinge of pain from her bruises had combined with her anxiety about the future and the dull apathy left behind in her adrenaline's wake. Paradoxically, it had left her too tired to fall asleep. Instead, she'd ended up idly lying on her cot for hours, alone with her thoughts and the slow shifting of the moonlight across her room.

The cargo plane's engines were slightly out of sync, the low hum—E flat—oscillating in volume in a grating, throbbing whine punctuated by an irregular metallic buzzing whenever some loose bolt found itself rubbing against a metal surface.

She shivered. The cold cabin air was leaking into her flight suit through the puncture she hadn't had time to fix.

The entire airframe groaned softly with each gust, each sharp motion churning the scent of aviation fuel and exhaust into the cloying haze of fear and dread that permeated the cargo bay.

Chiaki groaned, letting her chin dig into the canvas bag in her lap and squeezing her staff even more tightly between her knees. Normally, she found the harsh naphtha smell of the mothballs tucked in with her clothes unpleasant, but right now, any sensation was welcome, so long as it was strong enough to distract from the nausea.

The plane lurched downwards, dropping in free fall for a fraction of a second. The ammunition crate in front of her floated upwards. For a moment, before gravity caught up and sent it crashing back down, Chiaki spotted Teruko's bright blue hair on the far side of the plane.

The other girl was sitting with her head tilted back against the bulkhead, sound asleep, mouth slightly ajar.

Jiayu sat on her right, left arm pressed against Chiaki's shoulder, right shoulder jammed up against the cargo ramp at the rear of the plane. Her flight lead had spent the entire duration struggling with a pen and clipboard, though she would raise her left hand to check the time using the silvery watch strapped on her wrist every so often. With nothing better to do, Chiaki had counted. Sixteen times so far.

Jiayu raised her hand again.

Seventeen, now.

The plane suddenly rolled left, then right, like an injured beast. The crates swung back and forth just right, revealing Teruko, still blissfully asleep, for a single perfect instant.

In that brief moment, Chiaki contemplated murder.

She barely had time to consider the pros and cons before the plane lurched again, pitching down this time, raising a fresh wave of nausea and throwing Chiaki to her left. Chiaki squeaked, grabbing for support on reflex. Her fingers wrapped around something, and she pulled—

Chiaki looked at the strands of inky black hair clutched in her fist, then at Jiayu's narrowed eyes and slightly pursed lips, then back at the hair in her hand. Spurred on by the other girl's piercing glare, she loosened her stiff fingers one by one. Jiayu shook her head ever so slightly and swept her hair to her right. Chiaki wrapped her arms around her canvas bag, stuffing her hands into her elbows.

To her left, she heard a soft giggle.

Chiaki buried her face in her bag.

Only an hour left to go.

---

The cargo plane touched down hard on a bumpy airstrip, raising a shower of gravel that pinged off the metal belly of the plane with each bounce. As soon as the plane juddered to a full halt, the pilots cut the engines. Chiaki's ears rang in the abrupt quiet, the disappearance of the engines' noise almost disorienting in its suddenness.

The rear cargo bay ramp slowly lowered with a grating metallic shriek. Light spilled into the main body of the plane, accompanied by a few wisps of hot, damp air.

Jiayu was the first out, Chiaki stumbling out of the plane close behind. The sun was blindingly bright after five hours in the dim cargo hold.

Chiaki took in a deep breath, stamping her slightly swollen feet as she let the fresh air fill her lungs. It carried with it scents of earth and crushed grass. After five hours marinating in the stale air of the cargo bay, it smelled almost sweet.

She shaded her eyes with a hand, squinting to ward off the glare of the noonday sun. Looking around, a panorama of lush green slopes and rocky peaks rose like a jagged ring of teeth to meet the horizon. It seemed the airstrip they had landed on was built on the flat bottom of a bowl-shaped depression in the middle of the mountains.

To the east of the gravel airfield, a raised berm carried a two-lane road from north to south. It was the sort of rural road that might have seen no more than one or two cars a day in more normal times. Today, though, it carried a massive convoy of trucks, the column of vehicles stretching as far as she could see, their forms blurred by the haze of heat rising from the pavement.

From time to time, a dull crump-crump-crump of artillery firing in the distance sounded out, barely audible over the low roar of the trucks' diesel engines.
The plane's propellers were still spinning down, but the ground crew had already begun their work. A human chain trailed down the cargo ramp, workers passing crates of supplies one by one to the trio of trucks parked in the grassy field just beside the gravel airstrip.

A man leapt off one of the trucks and rushed over, gravel crunching underfoot.

"Captain Li?" he called out as he approached, scanning the group of mages who'd just disembarked from the plane. "Captain Li Jiayu?"

Jiayu raised her hand.

He rushed over, giving a quick salute that Jiayu acknowledged with a nod, then slid a sealed envelope into her hand before hurrying away to find his next recipient.

Jiayu inspected the envelope before tearing away the strip on the side and extracting the folded sheet of paper inside. Her eyes scanned the paper top to bottom, right to left, expression impassive.

When she was done reading, Jiayu folded up the paper into a small square. Producing a lighter from a zippered pocket of her flight suit, she held the flame to a corner of the square until it caught fire, then let the paper char for a few moments before releasing the embers to the wind.

For a heartbeat, Jiayu watched the soot and ashes scattering away with an unreadable expression. She heaved a sigh.

"All right," Jiayu announced. "Cormorant Flight, on me!"

Chiaki fell in with Jiayu. Lin Chenxi, Cormorant 3, and Zheng Ziyan, Cormorant 4, joined them a moment later.

"This is a temporary airstrip in the mountains about 100 klicks north of Yashan. Reports indicate that Republic forces are pushing toward the city along the coastal plain." Jiayu leaned forward, tracing a rough map of the region with the butt of her staff.

"The Republic is attacking the two bridges over the Kuiyang River on our forces' reinforcement route"—she jabbed at the map—"here and here by air. The next closest route is 300 klicks upstream. Our task is to provide air cover for this reinforcement corridor."

Jiayu stood back up, crossing her arms. "Unfortunately, all of our observation assets are tied up supporting the front, which means we'll be out of contact unless there are mages in radio range. There are a few friendlies operating in the area, conventional interceptors assigned to high-altitude CAP, but apart from that, we'll be on our own to start with. Questions?"

Chenxi sighed, smoothing out a few strands of mahogany hair with one hand and idly twirling a short baton—her focus—in her other. "Guess I get to play spotter again, then." She paused for a moment, shooting a look at Ziyan. "Say, Jiayu. You want to trade fledglings for this mission? I could use someone with a longer range to keep overwatch while I'm distracted."

"Flights are set up as mixed-range pairs for good reason," Jiayu admonished. "You should know better."

"Yes, but—"

"But nothing." Jiayu paused for a moment. Her eyebrows twitched slightly. "...You're from Nanyue, aren't you?" she asked, fixing the last member of their group with a stare. "Did you put her up to this?"

"Jiayu, don't—"

Jiayu waved her off.

Ziyan visibly shrunk back under Jiayu's attention, a hint of red crawling up her neck. "I don't..." She grimaced. "This is my home that's under attack here. I just don't want to be stuck on guard duty when—"

"You'll get your chance," Jiayu said firmly. "There will be plenty of opportunities. But not today. Sensors, like your lead"—she glanced at Chenxi, who shrugged nonchalantly—"are a priority target, and Chiaki is a sniper, not a bodyguard. You want to take the fight to the enemy? Good. But we don't just want to fight, we want to win. Do you understand?"

Ziyan scowled. Her jaw stiffened, fists clenched and unclenched as she stared down at her feet, her neon-green hair covering her eyes, but finally, she nodded sharply, a violent jerk up and down.

"All right. Anything else?"

Chiaki raised her hand. "How long is our shift? And what base are we going to be landing at?"

"Four hours," Jiayu said. "A second flight will join us in the area at the two hour mark, and the third flight two hours after that is our relief. I'll let you know what base..." She paused for a moment. "No, you should know now, in case I... Anyway. We'll be landing at Chang Kaishen Airfield, east of Yashan, roughly... here. And don't worry about your bags, the ground crew here will handle it."

She looked over the group. "Anything else? No? All right, let's go!"

Jiayu closed her eyes, slamming the butt of her staff on the ground. Her costume manifested over her flight suit with a bright flash of vermilion light, and after taking a few running steps, she leapt up and soared into the air.

---

Cormorant Flight pushed south along the Kuiyang River toward the sea. From her position on Cormorant 1's wing, Chiaki sensed Cormorant 3 and 4 trailing ten kilometers behind. Cormorant 3's mana was a beacon at her back, pulsing brightly at regular intervals as the sensor scanned the skies for other mages.

It was a beautiful summer day. Her day off, according to the duty schedule that her life had revolved around up until yesterday. She might have gone into town with Teruko. Spent the day idly reading in her room, perhaps. Or gone out flying low and fast over the sea, letting the salt spray and the sea breeze cool her off as she basked under the hot sun.

The river slid by beneath her, a silver thread winding through a patchwork of farm fields and rice paddies. A long string of boats and barges laden with cargo floated downstream. Supplies for the front, perhaps. Another line of vessels struggled upstream, laden with an altogether different sort of cargo. Refugees fleeing the fighting.

Would they see their homes again? Would she?

"Cormorant 3 to Lead. No contacts in range. We're clear for now."

Cormorant 3's voice echoed in Chiaki's mind, sounding bored, almost lazy, over the telepathic channel.

"Copy, Cormorant 3. Maintain course. We're coming up on the northern bridge. ETA ten minutes."

To the south, the first of the two bridges came into view as a smudge barely visible through the haze. A train was crossing the bridge from left to right, its flatbed cars each carrying some kind of armored vehicle. Mostly tanks with a few self-propelled guns, from the look of it. Eight tiny black specks too small to identify hung in the sky above, leaving curling white contrails in their path.

"Cormorant 2 to Lead. Fighters, twelve o'clock high."

"Copy, Cormorant 2. Should be ours, but stay sharp."

A large patch of clouds had formed to their front left, big, puffy cauliflower heads gleaming white under the sun, slowly blooming upwards. There would be rain later. Hopefully after their shift ended; Chiaki hated flying in the rain.

Smoke rose from the locomotives at the head and tail of the train as it pushed away from the boxy truss bridge, finishing its crossing as Chiaki approached. A convoy of trucks had begun crossing on the lower deck, obscured by the rail line above. The circular, pox-like sores of freshly-dug anti-air pits dotted the surroundings, interspersed with scattered bomb craters that marred the earth. Far in the distance, the graceful grey tower and slender cables of the second bridge were just emerging from the ground haze.

"Cormorant 1 to Cormorant Flight. We'll be flying a holding pattern between the two bridges. Three and Four, keep a safe distance north."

While the northern bridge was mixed road and rail, the southern bridge was road only. It too carried a long line of vehicles: trucks carrying cargo and troops with a few flat-faced APCs mixed in at random intervals, inching across. Further south, a few pillars of dark smoke rose into the air, their sources hidden beyond the horizon.

Chiaki settled into a patrol pattern, tracing an oval path between the two bridges, counting laps in an invisible racetrack in the sky.

The clouds shifted in the sky, drifting west with the wind as they grew. Below her, cars and boats and trains passed by like trails of ants on their way to or from the nest. The faint pall of smoke to the south slowly darkened.

Chiaki glanced up as she began yet another circuit between the bridges. The fighters were gone. No, not gone, but flying towards a set of contrails pointing north from the sea.

"Cormorant 2 to Lead. Contrails, heading north! Fighters moving to engage."

"Copy, Cormorant 2. No changes to our flight pattern, but be ready for inbound mages."

Lights appeared in the sky to the south, trails of red and green tracers zipping back and forth, accompanied by the sharp clattering of machine gun fire a heartbeat later. A burst of orange flame blossomed midair, then the sharp crack of an explosion reached Chiaki's ears. It left only a cloud of smoke and a single white parachute in its wake.

Chiaki licked her lips. Her mouth was parched.

"Cormorant 3 to Lead. I have four... No, eight! Repeat, eight contacts, eleven o'clock, range 80!"

Cormorant 1 didn't respond immediately.

"Cormorant 3, waiting for orders."

Another long moment of silence passed, punctuated only by the chatter of gunfire. Chiaki looked to her front right, towards Cormorant 1. Her flight lead was flying straight and true, utterly still.

"Cormorant 1, copy. Thinking."

There was an audible hum coming from the south now, an ominous vibration that shook the air in her lungs.

"Climb to flight level 45. Keep your range, engage only to prevent attacks on ground assets. If Republic bombers arrive... Two will be responsible for taking them out at range. Three and Four will provide cover with me."

The hum was louder, identifiable now as the drone of engines.

"The next CAP flight of mages is due to arrive in 25 minutes."

"Cormorant 3, copy all. I'll see you all back on base."

Chiaki shifted slightly, pitching up to climb to altitude as quickly as possible. As she did so, Cormorant 1's voice sounded again, not the pleasant mental voice of telepathy but the tinny crackling of the radio earpiece.

"All stations, all stations! This is Cormorant Actual, 3rd Wing, Union Mage Corps. We have two flights of hostile mages over the Kuiyang River rail bridge. Request immediate reinforcement."

Silence.

"Repeat, all stations, this is Cormorant Actual! Hostile mages over the Yashan reinforcement corridor. Does anyone receive?"

No response.

Chiaki climbed in an utter quiet, doing her best to ignore the prickling sensation crawling across her scalp. The fighters had returned overhead, circling as they rebuilt their formation. Their numbers had been reduced by over half, and a few of the remaining silhouettes left an ugly trail of smoke.

On the horizon, two groups of eight two-engine planes came into view, flanked above and below by four more flights of fighters.

Chiaki squinted, trying to spot any hint of the enemy mages. She saw nothing save for the glare of the afternoon sun.

Then eight glowing figures swooped down from behind the sun, diving on Cormorant Flight, and Chiaki's staff was braced in her arms before she realized she'd moved.

Cormorant Flight scattered under the sudden assault.

---

"Two, break! Break!"

Chiaki jerked right, Cormorant 1's warning ringing in her head. A pair of needle-thin orange beams zipped past her left shoulder, close enough to leave stinging heat on her cheek and a blue-green afterimage in her vision. She wrenched herself into a spiraling dive towards the safety of the antiair guns below.

Orange was aggressive. Chiaki preferred to fight at a distance, fighting for position to deliver a single decisive blow. Orange, on the other hand, sprayed fire haphazardly and routinely made use of high-g maneuvers that would have left Chiaki unconscious were she to try them. Orange clearly preferred knife-fighting range, where reflexes would determine the outcome, exactly the sort of fight she was worst-equipped to handle.

Chiaki dove towards the antiair guns ringing the bridge. The world rose up to meet her, spinning wildly while she forced herself to pitch up. Her stomach churned. Color drained from her sight and her flight suit clamped tightly around her legs. She arrested her descent a scant dozen meters above the ground.

Still dizzy, pulse pounding in her head, Chiaki took a deep breath, trying to still her shaking hands. Orange was already shooting at her as she leveled out at the bottom of the dive. Short bursts sailed past her while she rolled back and forth, trying to spoil her enemy's aim.

A stream of orbs stitched its way across her back, punching holes in a neat diagonal line from her left hip to her right shoulder. Her costume tore first, then her flight suit, then her skin.

Pain radiated from her back, filling her vision with white and forcing tears from her eyes. Her right hand spasmed uncontrollably, fingers loosening their grip on her staff. It hung suspended in midair for a single instant before she caught it, just barely, in the crook of her arm.

She dodged again, tracing a helical path through the air. A longer burst of orange shots sailed through the space where she'd been just a moment ago. A flash of red drew her attention, and Chiaki caught a glimpse of gunmetal grey and the brief silhouette of a soldier directly beneath her, signal flag raised, giving the order to fire. Before she could think to flinch, she was past. The gun emplacement she'd just cleared roared to life, rattling her teeth as it sent a burst of shellfire up into the path of the mage diving after her.

Chiaki risked a backward glance as she skimmed the ground surface, breath shuddering, lungs pulling in air filled with smoke and sulfur. The shells had missed, but they'd still forced Orange to the side, buying her a few hundred meters of distance. It was enough. She gingerly shifted her staff into her left hand. The motion tugged at the torn skin on her back, forcing out a sharp hiss through clenched teeth.

She looked above her. Lines of tracers and trails of smoke and flame from the fighters' duels marred the pale blue of the open air, but her path up, at least, was clear. She flared her mana, hurling herself back into the sky. Another long burst of shots accompanied her on her ascent, though this time they flew wide enough that she didn't have to dodge.

To her right, Cormorant 1 had just pulled out of a dive only to immediately launch into another spine-crushing maneuver. A sudden halt midair let her force an overshoot, driving one of her two pursuers off with a blind volley of fire.

Orange took advantage of Chiaki's momentary distraction, firing off another beam that singed off a few locks of her hair. A quick look over her shoulder confirmed that her opponent was still there, doggedly climbing after her, but shrinking in her vision as Chiaki continued to pull away.

To the north, Cormorant 3 and 4 traced tight arcs through a dense pattern of enemy fire. There was one enemy on her and two on Cormorant 1, which meant five on the other two members of her flight. Five on two was poor odds, but Cormorant 4 had gotten the fight she wanted. Chiaki hoped she wouldn't regret the wish.

Bright flames from below drew her eye. A battery of heavy antiair guns roared. Not long after, a series of explosions rang out in the air to the south, shells bursting among the bombers, obscuring them in a cloud of smoke and flak.

Chiaki looked back over her shoulder again. Orange was still a fair distance away, accelerating much slower than she had moments before. Content to wait until the other fights reached their natural conclusion and she could rely on the weight of numbers, perhaps, or maybe running low on mana after having spent it so casually on all of those attacks.

It meant she had enough room to loop around and rejoin the dogfight, help Cormorant 1 shake off her own tails, link up with Cormorant 3 and 4, buy time until their reinforcements arrived. It would be the easy thing to do. The safe thing to do.

She looked down at the trucks on the cable bridge, some accelerating, racing to clear the bridge span, others askew on the road as the occupants abandoned their rides and sprinted for the safety of land on foot. From her vantage point, they were tiny, insignificant things, trucks the size of a grain of rice and men not much larger than a mote of dust.

Her life was more important than the lives of these specks, these men, below. The policy book she knew by heart said as much; the survival of mages was to be prioritized above all else. She could do the safe thing, leave the bridge to the bombers and watch them wreak havoc from the air as she kept her distance. It would even be the correct thing to do.

But mages were more than just soldiers. They flew, wielded magic, worked miracles. They were heroines, and heroines didn't abandon their duties.

Chiaki squinted, trying to judge the size of the bombers in her vision. Too small, still. Not in range yet. Not quite.

The first group of bombers had already begun to descend into a shallow dive, flaps deployed as they started on their attack run.

Time to make a decision.

"Cormorant 2 to Lead. I'm going after the bombers."

"Cormorant 1, copy." A moment of silence. "Go, I'll keep these two off you as long as I can."

Chiaki turned south, burning through mana, warmth draining from her body as she sprinted towards the bombers. She'd been careful, almost miserly with using her magic up until this point, but it was time to spend those reserves. Behind her, Orange's mana suddenly surged as she tried to keep pace.

There were eight bombers stacked in two staggered diamonds, side by side.

She took a deep breath and raised her staff, tucking it tightly against her side with her elbow. The stabbing pain in her shoulder faded to the back of her mind as she focused on her first target.

Her beam lanced out, crossing the gap in less than a second, drawing a ragged line of splintered metal across the lead plane's wing between the engine and the fuselage. For a moment, the bomber continued flying onward as if nothing had happened, but then the wing folded in on itself and the plane tumbled out of the sky, spinning like a maple seed as it fell.

Chiaki shifted focus to her next target. This time, her aim was slightly off, and it tore a chunk through one of its horizontal stabilizers. After a moment, the plan began bucking up and down, pitching wildly as the pilots fought to regain control. A mission kill. She moved on.

The bomber crews had reacted to her presence, now. A stream of tracers reached out towards her from the nose guns, but they fell well short of their intended target. Chiaki returned fire, sending another beam up the tracers' path, where it slammed through the plane's cockpit and tore into the bomb bay. One long moment passed, then another, and then the plane ripped itself apart in a massive explosion, leaving only a small cloud of metal shards to rain down on the river below.

"Cormorant 1 to Cormorant 2! Two enemy mages have broken contact with Three and Four. They're headed your way, ETA three minutes."

There was no time to acknowledge the warning. One final beam slammed through the last bomber's left wing, fire and smoke blooming in the engine.

Four planes down. Four planes left to go.

A spray of brilliant orbs flashed by above her head. Orange was catching up.

The last group of bombers was already beginning their final approach, bomb bay doors open to reveal the ordnance they carried: a pair of massive, finned bombs, enough to shatter the concrete tower that held up the bridge deck.

More tracers reached out towards Chiaki as she focused her attention on the remaining planes, panicked fire from well outside the range that it could possibly hit as the crews did what they could to keep her away.

Her next attack hit the lead plane center mass, punching a hole clean through the fuselage to little practical effect. Chiaki cursed under her breath and spent a precious second adjusting her aim. Her second shot severed the tail, this time sending the plane into an unrecoverable dive.

She was starting to run low on mana now, fingers cold and clammy, vision swimming from exhaustion and blood loss.

Three planes left.

Another one of Orange's attacks shot towards her, close enough that she had to twist away, spoiling her aim. Orange was getting closer now.

There was no time left for another calculated shot, not with an opponent who was now fresher than she was hot on her tail. Chiaki aimed a beam in the rough direction of one of the remaining bombers and fired as she rolled over into a backwards dive, down towards the water. The beam carved a diagonal path through the middle of another plane's wing. After a moment, the remaining material failed, and the outer half of the wing snapped off, sending the plane into a steep, spiraling turn.

For the first time since the fighting had begun, the radio came to life in her ear.

"Pelican Actual to Cormorant Flight. Inbound from the east, ETA five minutes. Requesting tactical picture."

As she passed through their formation, the remaining two bombers broke formation, bomb bay doors slowly closing as they dropped their payload early and aborted their run. Before Chiaki could celebrate her success, Orange had caught up, her arrival heralded by a pair of needle-like beams that pierced through Chiaki's hastily conjured shield to land squarely on her left shoulder.

The force of the impact sent her spinning. Momentarily stunned, Chiaki dropped her staff. It gleamed in the sunlight as it fell towards the river below.
"Cormorant Actual to Pelican Actual. Sixteen active hostiles, eight mages, eight medium bombers. Cormorant 2 is engaged over the southern road bridge. Request Pelican Lead commit south."

Orange chased after Chiaki as she fell backwards, her figure growing larger and larger, framed in her view by a few errant strands of violet hair. She was close enough now that Chiaki could make out a few of her features. Orange hair, of course, paired with a puffy, layered wedding cake dress in orange and white.

Her implacable foe looked young. Younger than she was, perhaps, though the twisted expression of rage that marred her features made it difficult to say for sure. Her short staff was pointed straight at Chiaki's face, focus already charged and glowing.

Before she could muster up the mana to produce a shield, Chiaki landed in the river. She hit back first, skipping in a straight line across the surface of the water, each bouncing skid shooting droplets of water in every direction.

Orange fired, eyes wide, mouth locked into a savage grin.

For a single instant, light filled her vision, and then everything went dark.