Chapter 1340: Hunters at the Rear
“The enemy has found us! Everyone into the trucks — evacuate the way we came! Move!”
Farrina did not wait to understand how the First Army always seemed to know where the demons were before the demons knew they were being watched. She had the door open and was climbing back into the cab before the command finished echoing.
She closed the exhaust valve from memory, pushed the gear stick controlling the magic cube back to the starting position. The truck’s frame began to tremble; the needle on the pressure gauge swung to the right and settled at the mark she needed.
The moment she released the brake, the truck would move.
She leaned out and looked toward the mountain.
The mist that had blanketed the peak was breaking apart. The Red Mist dissipated in real time, thinning with a speed that felt almost deliberate, as if something had unmade the decision to keep it in place. Where the fog had been, the white slope was now clear — and across it, small black shapes the size of sesame seeds swarmed downward. They poured off the mountain like a colony of ants abandoning a disturbed nest. Above them, dozens of flying demons spread across the sky in a formation that could mean only one thing.
They are not going to let the convoy go.
The scene collapsed into a memory she had not chosen. The wall at the Hermes Plateau. Tens of thousands of demonic beasts, flooding the Judgment Army’s defense line in exactly this way.
A God’s Punishment Witch struck the door of the cab with her open palm — the departure signal.
Farrina breathed in. She released the brake lever.
The truck began to move.
The other vehicles started around her, all of them pulling away from the launch site cleanly, more smoothly even than the practice runs. But the distance between the convoy and the swarm in the sky did not increase. By the time the trucks had reached their maximum speed, the pursuers had not fallen behind. They had drawn closer.
“Oh — oh no, they’re too fast. At this rate we’ll be caught!” Joe’s voice was tight with the particular pitch of a man trying not to sound panicked and failing.
Farrina kept her grip level on the steering wheel. “Wings beat wheels. That’s common sense.” Her voice came out flat. “They’ve been fighting demons long enough to know this. They’ll have a plan.”
Whatever that plan was, it was not hers to manage. She had one job: keep the truck on the road and not become a problem for the people whose job it was to solve this.
“Ignore what’s behind us,” she said. “Watch the road ahead. Tell me before we hit a ditch.”
Joe swallowed. Nodded. “Understood.”
For a full hour, the only thing Good could see was Seagull’s tail and the small flicker of its wake-lights.
The clouds had a quality he had not anticipated — not the clean invisibility of height, but something closer to a weight. His sense of direction had dissolved sometime in the first twenty minutes. His sense of altitude had gone with it. It was not frightening so much as relentlessly demanding; every moment required the same precise expenditure of attention, and after an hour of it the expenditure had compounded into an exhaustion that sat behind his eyes and pressed.
The compass had shown the same story for most of the flight: an initial northward bearing, then gradual circling. Waiting. The enemy had not appeared yet, or had not been in position yet, or the signal had not come.
He had no way of knowing where his other squadmates were.
Beyond the pressure and the uncertainty, the clouds themselves were working against him. A layer of frost had grown across his windshield from the moisture. The rubber lining of his jacket insulated him against the cold air, but the damp had found ways through, and the cold had settled into his hands and feet with the particular numbness that made them feel less like limbs and more like carved wood attached to his arms. He had been keeping his fingers moving to fight it.
If Finkin had not been in the back seat, keeping up enough conversation to keep him anchored, he was not sure he would have held on until now.
Tilly had once mentioned, almost in passing, that the King was developing a device — something that would allow two people in different locations to communicate with each other without any physical connection between them. Good had filed it away at the time. Now, sitting in a white nothing somewhere above Wolfheart, it was the most vivid thing in his mind.
Make it real, he thought toward Roland Wimbledon. Make it real soon.
“Look — the lights changed!” Finkin’s yell came from directly behind him.
Good looked at Seagull. The yellow wake-light was gone. In its place: red.
Something woke up in his chest.
Red was the attack signal. Red meant dive through the clouds, find the enemy, engage immediately. Red meant: whoever was down there, however many, they were worse company than this.
Good pushed the control stick down without pausing to think about it.
White swallowed him — cloud turned to vapor turned to nothing — and then the world returned all at once.
The sight of it hit him before his mind caught up. Black earth and white snow and the great gray vault of the sky, all of it sweeping into view at once, and his body felt light with the speed of the descent. Beautiful was not the word he would normally use for a battlefield, but the sudden clarity of it after an hour of nothing made it feel that way.
He saw the Devilbeasts at the same moment.
A group of them, flying in staggered formation below the cloud ceiling — less than three hundred metres above the ground, no higher. Their attention was fixed on something at ground level. They had not perceived the emergence of the Aerial Knights from above.
Down there, across the snow: five steam-powered trucks, trailing parallel lines of wheel-ruts like threads pulled tight against white fabric. That was what the Devilbeasts were pursuing.
Good measured the geometry in one glance. The noses of his flight were already pointing in the direction the Devilbeasts were heading — the ideal intercept angle. A minor adjustment of bank, and the machine guns would rake through the formation lengthwise, front to back. The altitude advantage was absolute. After the first pass, at whatever angle the demons chose to react, the biplanes would be better positioned.
Textbook.
The discomfort of the last hour ceased to exist. He dropped the nose and pressed the trigger.
Finkin made a sound behind him that was somewhere between a battle cry and a yelp.
Across the sky, over ten lines of silver light bloomed simultaneously — different angles converging on the same formation, as though the clouds had opened specifically to offer a gift. The demon formation had no time to process what was happening before the opening barrage was already through them. Dark shapes tumbled earthward like stones dropped from an open hand.
Only now did the demons realize they were not the only hunters on this battlefield.
The formation scattered. Part of it continued toward the trucks; the other part turned and drove upward, apparently deciding that dying against the Aerial Knights was preferable to running.
Good counted quickly. Twenty-six.
Near-equal numbers. A handful of sporadic encounters had happened before, but this — this was something different. This was the first real aerial engagement.
“Signal Hinds — flag him to follow in behind us!”
Twenty seconds. The squadron had already swept over the Devilbeast formation and come out the other side, the first pass complete and uncontested.
Good used the speed of the dive to carry him around in a clean arc, arriving above and slightly behind a Devilbeast that was beating upward, trying to gain altitude. The distance between them: under two hundred metres. Close enough to see the Mad Demon on its back torquing itself around, trying to find the angle for a spear throw.
He was not going to give it that angle.
Fire leapt from the gun barrel — a tracer round, bright as a signal flare, burning through the Devilbeast’s back in a clean diagonal line. The mount folded. The Mad Demon went with it, still turning, the spear still in its hand, the throw still unrealized. A machine gun wound might not always be fatal. A fall from this height left nothing to chance.
Finkin let out a low whistle.
All around him, his squadmates were locked onto their own targets. The two sides, fully committed now, closed on each other.
The second round began.