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Chapter 1300: A Ferocious Fight

Flying in winter was a different kind of hard.

The wolf-skin caps, fur scarves, and goggles covered most of it — but the skin between the goggles and the scarf felt the cold directly, and when the wind shifted, or when the plane changed heading, snow drove into the open cabin from every angle at once. Good gripped the controls and did not think about his face.

The Fire of Heaven’s windshield sat at the front of the fuselage. Useful for forward visibility, almost useless for everything else: the wings overhead cut the sightlines to a narrow strip, and to see what was below, you had to put your head out. This was, in practice, the bulk of Finkin’s job. Unlike a ground soldier who drew a weapon when the enemy appeared, an aerial knight first had to find the enemy — a deceptively difficult task from a moving platform at altitude. At a thousand meters the plane was no larger than an insect against the sky. The people on the ground were smaller.

Four eyes were better than two. That was why two people flew in every plane.

“Any luck?”

Good turned his head and asked without letting the wings drift. They had cleared the Gust Castle more than an hour ago. If the demons were pursuing the refugees, the math of distance and time put them somewhere in this region. The four planes had spread into a fan formation around the northern axis, which was the standard search pattern from the Flight Manual — in theory covering two hundred kilometers of ground between them. In practice the snow had pushed them back together, compressing their effective search area considerably.

“Nothing!” Finkin called, his telescope trained on the slope below. “Could they have already caught the refugees?”

“Then there should be bodies down there!”

“I’m looking… I hope the snow hasn’t covered them already.” He shifted the glass. “Can you drop a little lower?”

Good eased the nose down and checked the compass and altimeter — the two instruments this aircraft actually provided. He trusted them to a point. The Flight Manual, in Tilly’s characteristic marginal notes, was explicit about how far that point was:

Due to the limitations of current technology, these instruments are prone to error, especially when passing through regions of dramatic weather, altitude, or terrain variation. Look out of the cabin regularly, unless you wish to become the person who prompts the next revolution in navigational technology. — Tilly Wimbledon

“I can give you three hundred meters. No lower — this isn’t the Western Region flatlands—”

“Two degrees right! Something’s moving.”

Good banked without hesitation.

Sound reached them only as engine and wind. So whatever Finkin meant, it wasn’t noise. Something was visually out of place in the white below — and on a day like this, anyone choosing to be outside was worth investigating.

A moment later Good saw it himself: black marks against the snow across a vast mountain face. Not scattered, not random. Lines. Dozens of lines running in parallel, like fine dark threads drawn over white paper.

“Are those… footprints?”

“That’s them!” Finkin’s voice jumped. “That’s who Her Highness sent us for — there are people on that mountain, hundreds of them. God — the demons are right behind them. I see bodies. Hundreds of bodies. The ones still moving, by their build — Mad Demons. Thirty, maybe forty of them!”

“Notify the others!” Good said. “We go first!”

Three green flares arced upward from Finkin’s hand and burned against the grey-red sky, vivid against the Bloody Moon still visible through the cloud. Good drove the nose down.

The mountain came up fast. At four hundred meters, then three, the picture resolved: refugees pouring down the slope in a disordered rush, stumbling through the snow, some almost falling, moving with the particular desperation of people who know what is directly behind them. The Mad Demons came after them at an easy pace, not running — not running — spacing themselves across the ridgeline with the unhurried leisure of hunters who have already decided how this ends.

Good’s blood rushed to his face.

The targeting method was simple at this range: the Fire of Heaven became its own pointer. He didn’t need to calculate a complex trajectory — at two hundred meters’ altitude, the bullets would travel in the same plane as the nose of the aircraft, with negligible drop. He aligned the heading on the cluster of demons at the ridge’s peak.

He pressed the firing button.

The machine gun opened up.

Bullets stitched a straight line across the snow — a sudden dark borderline drawn between the demons and the people below them. The demons reacted a half-second late, registering the descending shape in the sky before registering the danger. They howled. Bone spears came up and out, thrown hard at the Fire of Heaven. None connected — a fast-moving plane at two hundred meters was a difficult target for thrown weapons even in good conditions, and the demons had no framework yet for calculating the intercept.

The line hit them.

Metal punched through muscle and bone at velocity. Blue blood scattered over white snow. Red mist spurted from exit wounds. Arms gave way. Legs buckled. Limbs separated from bodies. The Mad Demons who took direct hits fell and did not get up; the ones at the edge of the strike stumbled, disrupted, stalled in their advance.

Not stopped. Not dead, all of them. But stopped, for now.

Good pulled up and began his repositioning arc. Behind him Finkin was already firing — not by calculation, not by Flight Manual protocol, but by pure instinct, aiming at the ridgeline and running the gun across it in long bursts, following the gut-level geometry that some people are born with and some never develop.

Below, the demons understood.

The thing in the sky was not a creature. It was not a demon, not a hybrid beast, not anything in their taxonomy of enemies. It was a weapon — a human weapon, carried on wings. Their howling changed register. The landscape offered them nothing: no trees close enough, no overhang, no shadow. The Fire of Heaven above them had a geometry they couldn’t break. Nowhere to go; the sky was no longer safe.

During every Battle of Divine Will in memory, human beings had run from Devilbeasts. They had looked up at the sky and felt the specific helplessness of creatures who cannot follow their enemy into that element. Now the demons looked up and felt the same thing. Perhaps they felt it more sharply, because they had no precedent for it.

Good began his second dive. By the time he came level with the ridgeline, the other two planes had appeared from the north, their own firing runs already starting. The demons, under fire from three directions at once, broke — scattering across the mountain face, running now, trying to disappear into the terrain.

The planes went after them.

Neither Good nor Finkin registered, in the moment, what they were doing: pursuing forty or more Mad Demons with three aircraft and six people. The First Army’s evacuation units had not done this. No human force in this war had voluntarily closed on a larger demon formation. They did it without discussion, without calculation, because the alternative — letting them scatter into the hills to reassemble — was worse.

The Fires of Heaven swept back and forth across the mountain, relentless, following the running shapes through the snow.

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