The village was overrun.

Azalea hurriedly ushered a mother and her screaming, blotchy-faced child out of a straw house breaking at the seams. The air was acrid, laden with the thick scent of blood and smoke. Around her, a horde of crazed, ravenous wolves swarmed a scant unit of soldiers.

Something snarled nearby. Without hesitation, Azalea whipped around, raised her firearm, and pulled the trigger. A mana bolt shot from the muzzle and pierced the twisted hide of a hollow-eyed wolf. It fell, twitching and frothing at the mouth.

Off-target. Not enough to kill. Azalea didn’t have the time to properly aim. Her weapon was a potent one known as a starshooter—a firearm that was powered by an enchanted quartz, wielding deadly rounds of fire mana—but the chaos of the battlefield was proving difficult for her. She missed the stability of the shooting range where she’d been able to bullseye every time.

“Lady Hunter! There’s too many of them!” cried a voice to her left.

Azalea turned to catch a glimpse of a vibrant cape, signifying the captain of this company. Despite the blue plume affixed to his silver helmet, he sounded young—far too young to be a captain.

Not that she was one to talk. She was barely out of the Academy herself.

Azalea ripped her short sword through another wolf’s stomach, pouring blood on the ground. A coppery stench filled her nostrils as it fell with a foul shriek. She stood to gather her bearings and gauge the situation, but a heavy weight bowled into her shoulder, knocking her to the ground—yet another wolf.

“Fall back,” she commanded, jamming her starshooter into the beast’s maw as it tried to snap at her neck. “Take the civilians to the citadel.”

The young captain, to his credit, lanced the wolf straight through the ear, harpooning into its skull. It slumped over, dead. “Lady Hunter,” he said tremulously, “I don’t think—pardon me, milady, but the wolves might give chase—”

“Go,” Azalea said firmly. Her tone brooked no room for argument.

The captain scurried away, calling to his troop. Azalea heaved the wolf’s corpse off of her, wiping at the blood that had washed across her cheek and matted in her hair. She’d been traveling since dawn, then darting around without pause to evacuate villagers and strike down wolves. The exhaustion was starting to settle in her bones, heavy as iron.

But now wasn’t the time to be tired. Now was the time to do her job.

Azalea ignored the trembling pain in her sore legs and leapt forward, planting herself between the pack of wolves and the retreating soldiers. These wolves were crazed, like all beasts touched by the Storm: eyes roving, jaws frothing, hungry for blood. She could see their warped muscles rippling beneath thick, hardened hides, veins pulsing a painful red.

Pitiful things, some would say.

Azalea knew better.

The pack fanned out and circled her warily, beady eyes fixed on the deadly weapon in her hands. Perhaps they could sense the mana quartz stirring inside, gathering the surrounding fire mana and Forming it into inch-long firebolts. Or perhaps they’d already seen what it could do. The starshooter had been responsible for the violent ends of several in their pack.

Azalea braced the weapon against her shoulder and breathed in, slow and steady. She took a moment to gauge her manawell. It bubbled inside her, ready and waiting, about two-thirds capacity. She’d been conserving it carefully, specifically for this moment.

She fired once. She felt the mana quartz flare in the starshooter, and a firebolt exploded out of the muzzle, lancing right through the first wolf’s eye.

One down.

Before the pack had a chance to react, she was already turning her starshooter onto a second target. Ordinarily, the trigger would be locked; a small regulator within the starshooter would have detected the mana instability caused by the first shot, and sealed the firing mechanism. Starshooters were powerful weapons, but volatile, prone to destabilize and explode. They were required to cool down for thirty seconds before firing again.

Unless, of course, one was a Stabilizer.

Azalea burned her manawell and reached for the mana instability: that prickling, churning sense of wrongness that hung in the air, vibrating with an energy about to boil over. She found the aching thread and pulled.

The instability unraveled in wisps of mana, and—

—the regulator clicked. The trigger released.

Azalea fired again.

Her next firebolt crushed right into the second wolf’s skull. It lurched backwards like a limp doll, then slumped.

Two down.

The regulator closed the trigger again, sensing the tangle of destabilized mana around it. Azalea easily reached out and unraveled it with her swift and gentle touch.

Forming had never been her specialty, but Stabilizing? That was a different story entirely. She’d had all the practice in the world, growing up with a brother whose potent Forms were constantly on the verge of meltdown.

The mana dispersed; she aimed; she fired. It came to her as naturally as breathing.

Three down.

Click. Unravel. Fire.

Then four down.

It was a good start, but the wolf pack was almost on her. Azalea slung back her starshooter and drew her short sword. As a standard-issue steel blade, it could hardly compare to her starshooter, but it would have to do—at least until she could gain some distance.

The wolves descended, and she moved.

Field combat was nothing like the Academy. The instructors had been adamant on drilling that through their students’ skulls. We do not teach you skills, but habits, they’d said sternly as their charges suffered through a siege race, bombarded with arrows and hellfire. Every exercise and every drill is nothing but a habit. Mythic Stars willing, you can take that habit onto the field and live long enough to turn it into a skill. So make your habits good. Learn bad habits, and you will die.

And the instructors had explained further. Between the haze of adrenaline, the unpredictable environment, and the emotional trauma of loyalty and loss, no amount of sparring or training could prepare a student for the chaos of warfare. No amount of meditation or mock battles could prepare a human for the horror of death.

Azalea was not, strictly speaking, a newcomer; she was on her third mission as a Hunter. Not that it really made a difference.

Wrangling the remaining wolf pack was a blur of splattered pelts, overgrown teeth, and razor claws. Azalea swooped and slashed completely on instinct, keeping herself light on her feet, weaving away from the bloody, matted mess whenever it was possible to step away. She gasped for air as she cut down one wolf, then two, then three, metal sinking deep into organ and sinew.

She caught a sharp claw across the arm for her trouble and felt the agony lance up her shoulder, bright and fiery. A cry wrenched from her lips, but she pulled her focus and leapt away. Her arm dangled limply at her side, slick with blood. At least it was not her sword-arm.

The smell of her blood seemed to spur the other wolves—six of them remaining. Their eyes roved wildly, and they leapt at her with renewed vigor, jaws snapping hungrily.

Enough was enough. Azalea had been hoping that her swordsmanship was enough to put her mana on reserve, but she’d been wrong. She would die if she had to sustain this pace of combat.

Azalea burned her manawell, grabbed every surrounding thread of wind mana, and pushed as she leapt backward. The resulting blast propelled her up and over, arcing her into the air. She landed solidly on the pitch-slathered roof of a nearby house, beaten and half-toppled by the surrounding chaos. The elevation was enough to grant her a breather for a precious second.

She looked down at the wolves, which were recoiling at the burst of wind and shaking themselves alert. She breathed deep, reaching for every drop in her manawell, feeling it pour through her.

About half full.

Azalea sheathed her blade and pulled up her starshooter, bracing it on her shoulder. Her injured arm ached, the pain barely dulled by the coursing adrenaline in her veins. She forced it to keep steady.

She could not fall here. She refused.

A starshooter was equipped with a mana quartz that could Form one firebolt every ten seconds. That rate of fire was not enough to outpace these wolves. They’d be on her before she had a chance to fire again, and she didn’t have enough mana for a wind blast to distance herself every time.

But she could remove the starshooter’s limitations by Forming the firebolts manually. It would be taxing—simultaneously Stabilizing the starshooter, Forming its ammunition, and aiming to fire—but at this point, there was no other option.

Azalea flared her manawell and blazed.

The first firebolt had barely torn out of the starshooter’s muzzle when she Stabilized the fluctuation, Formed the next bolt, and—

She fired again. Then pulled and compressed, and fired yet again.

Her manawell drained alarmingly, but still she flared more and more, tearing at the tangle of instability with one part of her magic, shoving more fire mana into the weapon with the other, and—

—fired, fired, fired.

The six deadly rounds sizzled through the air, burning trails forward like falling comets, and—

—the six wolves fell as one, each punctured right between the eyes, a single overgrown mass of fang and fur collapsing into the dirt. They lay still.

Eerie silence fell over the village, with no living creature to break it.

It was over.

Azalea’s manawell withered, empty.

She reeled over, the starshooter fumbling out of her cold and weak hands. There were agonizing lights pulsing behind her eyes and an acidic fire burning in her gut. She tumbled down the thatched roof and collapsed on the dirt path and retched. Nothing came up. She felt drained, like her soul had been sucked dry.

She lay on that crumbling path for a moment, warmed by the sun, too weak to move. It was peaceful. A low breeze sifted through her hair, stirring bits of wood and straw and tar across the earth: remnants of a ruined village that people once called home.

Then, amidst the silence of the broken battlefield, Azalea heard a small, soft noise:

Dry clapping, accompanied by a tinny rattle of metal.