157 The Eighteenth Night (3)

Katrin didn't think twice about the idea. She wanted payback for everything the Cult had put her through. And though she could probably sit this one out due to a lack of Comrades, Katrin wanted action. She wanted to see first hand the way they fought. Not as a victim fleeing for her life, or dying on the docks and losing everything. She wanted to face them as a fighter, set on the destruction of her foe.

{Let's see what you're really capable of when you're the ones being bullied in the playground.}

"Charge!" Aoi shouted and the combined forces of the knights from the far south lunged at their newfound prey.

"For freedom!" Shinji let out a war-cry as he and Rain swooped high.

"For the alliance!" Henry yelled as he followed him.

Rita added her own warcry. "For the front page news!"

Tomoe followed them. "For goodness' sake...!"

{Why the front-page news...?} Katrin wondered while all around her knights thundered war-cries that sounded of honor, of courage, and sometimes of downright baffling ideas. "For the children!" "For Justice!" "For cheesecake!"

{Cheesecake?!}

Cephas zoomed past her on a Great Rockondor, roaring with laughter. Katrin wasn't sure if he was excited or he'd heard about the cheesecake.

"Grace! Hit 'em with everything you got!" Katrin ordered her mount as they followed the charge.

Grace neighed, and a blue aura arose around them. Katrin shivered as frost formed in the empty air before her, and then ice took shape like a thousand deadly daggers.

"Not yet!" Katrin said, watching as the stream of knights hammered down on the lone saucer in front of them. "Almost... almost..."

Ice came together, a thousand shards forming into a glacial spike the size of a car.

"NOW!" Katrin said as the knights in front of them loosed their attacks and pulled away.

Grace unleashed her power, and it felt like the air itself thundered without sound. Katrin heard nothing, absolutely {nothing} for a single moment, as if all the world itself had gone mute... but then there was a terrible roar like the fountaining of the deep and the force of the Spring Pegasus' power almost pulled Katrin forward off her horse in its wake.

"Quickly!" Katrin tugged at the reins, bringing Grace into a swift turn as other knights behind her added their firepower to the deadly bombardment.

Katrin turned back to watch in satisfaction as the saucer was pummeled mercilessly, smiling at the three digits of red numbers indicating the damage her particular strike had done to that hapless foe...

And then she paused. She frowned. {That saucer... I've got a bad feeling about it.}

There was but one Gaian Saucer, but it was putting up an incredible fight.

It wasn't that big, as Saucers went. Katrin had seen bigger ones chasing her. It wasn't that fast, either. They had all seen faster ones. It didn't even have all that much firepower; it only seemed to have a single beam and one stream of rapid-firing smaller bolts.

But it was tough. Katrin looked at the kind of firepower all their forces were throwing at it and had to give the Saucer credit; the thing was swallowing all of that, catching fire, ice, poison, lightning and a multitude of other stacked debuffs and damage-over-time effects… and it wasn't even slowing down.

"What the-?" Shinji said what was on all their minds.

"It's regenerating!" Zoe shouted, coming up. "It's healing itself faster than we can dish out damage! Throw everything you've got at it and keep it up!"

Katrin gulped. "Grace..."

Grace wheezed. That blast alone had taken a lot out of her. She needed time to recover.

Katrin looked around quickly. There they were, the thirty from Soft Snows, twenty from Cold and Crispy, the original thirty in Zoe's pursuit force, altogether some eighty or so Knights and all their Comrades blasting away at the Saucer, all warping in Comrades and making attack runs on it, but the thing just wasn't giving up. It didn't even look like it wanted to retreat. It looked for all the world like it was…

"It's trying to RAM us!" Katrin shouted, pulling Grace aside in a sharp swerve. "Get away!"

{Too late-!} Katrin saw the saucer suddenly triple in speed, slamming itself straight into Shinji's Storm Swans. It bowled right into his formation, knocked Henry and Rita out of the sky, ploughed towards Aoi despite the massed Knights in between. "Aoi! Look out! It's going straight for your comms relay!"

"You have comms?!" Zoe jumped. "Why didn't you...?"

The Saucer's beam nailed Aoi before she could do more than bank aside. For a few brief moments, the Granite Condor took the blow, but the beam wasn't letting up anytime soon. Aoi and her Comrade vanished, and the knights lost long-range communications entirely.

{The reinforcements from the north! They must have a relay!} Katrin spun Grace around, heading for them. {We've got to coordinate a death-stroke assault, all our heaviest attacks at once!}

Zoe had the same idea, it seemed. She, too, headed north while everybody else swarmed the Saucer trying to beat its regeneration by racking up more damage. {We should have told her... we should have told her we had comms... if we had coordinated...}

Zoe's horse was quicker. As fast as Grace was, Zoe's mount was definitely the faster flyer, and Zoe was the better commander. Katrin made her decision and spun around. "Go, Zoe! I'll cover you!"

But the moment she did that, the Saucer stopped. It stopped firing, stopped dodging, stopped trying to ram all the knights swarming around it. It just hovered there in mid-air, taking everything in without making a single move in response.

{Uhoh. I don't like the looks of this…} Katrin stared, looking right at it when it happened.

An audio broadcast erupted from the Saucer. It said, "Surrender the girl."

And then Katrin realized her mistake. {I should never have come. The Gaians are after me, too. I didn't think they were on the lookout for one girl in the middle of a world-wide war, but I should have remembered what they started the war for in the first place… it's because they're looking for me.}

{And now… now they've found me.}

She could see it now. Two girls on flying horses headed to the northern reinforcements to coordinate a strike. Surely the saucer's attention would be on them. One turned around, her face in full view of anyone watching...

The same face on their wanted posters, most likely.

{Uhoh.}

"Run!" Shinji was there all of a sudden. "I'll…"

He vanished. Katrin didn't understand what just happened until the beam flared almost in front of her.

{Shinji's dead. He protected me, and now…}

"GO!" Shinji's voice came to her from below, mounted on a red storm swan now instead of a blue one. {He didn't die. Rain died. He just fell because he lost his mount.}

Henry and Rita swooped down on her left, warping in more Comrades, trying to put up some sort of barrier. The Saucer nailed the Storm Swans they sat on and they went tumbling through the air. "Run!"

{Run where?!} Katrin didn't dare turn back to the far south. Neither the endless snows nor the open skies offered her any cover. The nearest cover was Soft Snows Mountain, and Katrin already knew that a mountain wasn't going to help much against the Green Men. She'd been on Skycrown Mountain when it was sunk.

But there in front of her were the northern reinforcements. {Maybe if they had enough firepower, all together…} Katrin headed for them.

The northern reinforcements saw her coming. They saw the saucer coming. They saw all the other knights trying to tear it down in mid-air. They saw it chase her and fire upon everything in its way.

They scattered. {Smartest thing anyone did all day...} Katrin thought, but still, she cringed. {They're not going to cover me. They can't. No one can.}

But they survived, and they added their firepower to those already blasting away at the Saucer from the sides and rear with all they had. That had to be of some good, surely. She hoped. {Zoe! Did she make it? Did she...?}

There was no way for Katrin to know. Meanwhile, she dodged. Grace didn't have much in way of barriers, but she had speed, and she used it now. The Saucer started shooting at her, and then it did something that made Katrin want to scream.

It started calling in friends. Katrin saw fire above and glanced up to see a second Saucer heading down to join the battle.

{We're in trouble.} Katrin realized. {We're in so much trouble.}

"We… have to… get away!" Katrin managed, and then it was all she could do to hang on as Grace did her best to do just that.

***

Knight Lord Geoffrey was in the midst of preparing a speech when people started yelling in the Knights Alliance command center just inside the South Hour Labyrinth. It wasn't very large, but it held all they needed to coordinate extensive operations around the Hourglass Continent and most people wouldn't think to look for a military HQ inside a mid-level dungeon.

But hearing the yells now, Geoffrey feared the worst. "Somebody! Report!"

"It's the Far South Pursuit Force. They're in trouble!" Quinny shouted. "No, it's worse. It's… oh, no."

"What?!" Geoffrey jumped. "I was just talking to them!"

"Frey!" Abby yelped. "They're moving! The Cult is…"

Geoffrey spun to view the monitors around him, depicting scattered saucers all over Nakama World. "Who's moving?! Which force?"

And then he saw it. His eyes went wide. "What the…?"

Abby answered for him.

"{All} of them!"

***

A swarm of bees knocked Katrin off her horse.

"Wha-?!" Katrin gasped before she realized that she had been grabbed by human hands and held securely onto a saddle.

"Keep down!" Rita gasped, her hand on her Traveler Watch. "Third squad, screen! Fourth squad, decoy mode! Second, cover Katrin's horse!"

The bees buzzed around furiously, some covering Grace, others turning around to slow the Saucer down. Rita and Katrin stayed low on the back of a honey-colored hornet covered by a trio of similarly large bees. Meanwhile, the largest group of them peeled off and headed low and south.

The Saucer went after the biggest group of bees, Rita's Fourth Squad. Green bolts rained down, and the beam lanced through them, slicing their numbers by half in a mere second. Four seconds later, only a trio of them were left, and the Saucer knew for sure that Katrin was not among them.

"Rita…" Katrin began, thinking furiously.

"Shush! They might have voice sensors!" Rita hissed.

Katrin thought it slightly odd that Rita of all people would be shushing someone else, but she kept her thoughts to herself and her friend's advice in mind. {Do they have voice sensors? Can they actually trace me by voice? How would they know what my voice sounds like? But... who knows what these guys are capable of?}

A brilliantly bright bolt flashed out to where Grace and the bees covering her were fleeing. It caught up in an instant, burst apart mere meters behind them, and a thousand brilliant sparks burned through everything in the vicinity for a hundred feet. Rita's entire Second Squad disappeared all at once, leaving Grace completely exposed. Her back was empty; Katrin wasn't there.

"They'll be coming for us next…" Rita winced, as the Saucer rammed through her Third Squad's screen without slowing down a whit.

But then something else came in between them and the Saucer. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say someone else.

Henry stood tall on one of Rita's wasps, a small one that seemed barely able to take his weight. He had his hand on his badge as he called, "Defense Squad!"

Six Lynxmice about half his height and thrice his girth appeared. They popped out in mid-air and immediately started falling.

"Henry, what are you-?" Rita began, but then he barked a few commands and the Lynxmice started raising barriers in mid-air…

Fifty feet above where they were falling.

"No way…" Katrin whispered. "He's… protecting {us}!"

It worked. The saucer's spray of green bolts battered against the barriers. Only a few shots got through. One of them singed one of Rita's covering bees; a trail of smoke followed it, but it didn't slow, and Rita's cover stayed intact.

"Again!" Henry called.

The Saucer didn't let it. The beam lanced down, and swiped his entire Defense Squad out of the sky.

"Attack Squad! Flank Squad!" Henry warped in more Lynxmice. "Artillery Squad! Scavenger Squad! Recon Squad!"

Lynxmice were raining from the sky and green bolts were trying to get through, but there were too many, and they were raising barriers, firing intercepting shots, or just plain getting in the way.

"Lynxmice For The Win!!" Henry raised one hand, pointed to the sky and struck a proud pose even as the Saucer blasted Rita's bee out from under his feet and he dropped like a rock, still posing with one hand on his hip and his nose and hand high.

Rita was half-laughing, half-crying as she took his cue and started warping in the Comrades that couldn't fly. Megants, Spiders, the odd Caterpillar, even some sort of Preying Mantis. All of them were going down, barriers and countershots were going up, but the Saucer's shots couldn't get through.

At least, {that} Saucer's shots couldn't. A narrow miss by an equally narrow yellowish beam made Katrin and Rita snap their gazes to the upper left. {The second Saucer. It's come around to attack us from the flank…}

The girl with the gigantic red scythe landed on top of it. She came falling right out from the sky with the scythe swinging and stabbed deep into its top. She spun and sheared off its crown, and then she jumped inside.

One of the Twins of the Red Moon. {Red Fang, wasn't it? Or Red Crescent? I still can't tell which is which.}

It didn't matter anyway because just then the other Twin dropped in with scimitar swinging. {Now both Twins are in there causing havoc.}

The results showed soon enough. The Saucer went nuts, shaking and juxing and then tilting over and trailing smoke before a series of explosions tore it apart. The Twins of the Red Moon leapt clear from it before a final huge explosion blew it to pieces.

But then another round shape arrived trailing smoke and fire. This one had dropped in through the atmosphere. And there in the distance were a fourth and fifth, all coming to join the chase.

"Katrin!" Shinji was there, on yet another Storm Swan. {What happened to the red one? Did Dawn get shot down too?}

With him was a guy with a white checkered scarf wrapped around half his face and spiky black hair lying face-down (lying down, not sitting!) on top of a giant swallow-like bird. "Get on!"

"What?" Katrin blinked, but the guy with the checkered scarf grabbed her and then his bird zipped them ahead so fast, both Shinji and Rita were left far behind. Katrin almost fell off, the guy nearly lost his grip. "Whoa! Slow down!"

"Not yet." He said airily as they darted forward again and this time he really did lose his grip. Katrin went flailing through the air, completely alone.

"Why????????" Katrin found herself screaming as she grasped at empty air, completely in vain.

"Swift!" Shinji scolded, as he swooped down on his Swan. "I told you not to drop her!"

"Sorry." Swift shrugged. "I'm not used to passengers."

{Swift. The fastest of the Wind Knights… and the least likely to accept a job.}

"Tail me." Swift offered.

"Fine. Lock me in." Shinji said, snagging Katrin out of the air like he did it all the time. Swooping in on her left, he simply caught her by the left ankle with his left hand and tugged her down back over his head until she sat right behind him. "Katrin, hold on."

"Uh… okay." She gulped back her screams and seized with both hands the wooden mesh that served as Shinji's backrest. There was no time to buckle in as a strange tunnel-like trail appeared behind Swift's bird. Shinji maneuvered right behind it, and said, "Ready!"

"Go!" Swift said, and then they were surging forward with such speed, Katrin almost felt like she was falling off despite her death-grip and being fully seated.

"What-?!" Katrin barely managed to gasp.

"You know the Tailwind Technique?" Shinji grunted. He was used to high speed flight, but even he had to make an effort to talk in this kind of pressure. "This one's a locked-in type. Basically, it only works for following one Comrade, but it lets us imitate that Comrade's speed, at the cost of MP."

"How long is that?" Katrin dared ask.

"With Gale's MP?" Shinji patted the Swan they sat on. "At Swift's speed? I'd say about three minutes. Enough to reach Lamico."

"Lamico? Why?" Katrin struggled to breathe. {Three minutes?! That fast?!}

"That's just on the way. We'll slow down to change mounts there." Shinji said, as if that explained everything.

"Where are we… really going…?" Katrin coughed.

"Where else? We're going to our main group." Shinji told her. "We're going to Hourglass. That's where {our} guys are prepared for a full-scale battle. In the air out here, no ground forces, we're at a serious disadvantage."

"And what happens if they land {their} ground forces?" Katrin asked, slowly getting used to the wind pressure.

"I think they did that at Skycrown's Fall already. They got mauled by those Frenzied White Wolfcats, remember?"

Katrin fell silent. That was a really nice idea, but she had the sinking feeling that this wasn't going to be as easy as Shinji made it sound.

{It never is, with the Cult.}

Never.

***

"Katrin?" Lucy looked amazed when she saw who it was who landed at her Forester's Hut at Lamico.

"Lucy!" Katrin marveled, while still trying to catch her breath. "I thought… you were with… Sora…"

"He's busy. As I am." Lucy said, looking somewhat peeved, but then shook her head dismissively. "What happened to you?"

"Cult Saucers." Katrin took a deep breath, then started coughing. "Chasing…"

"I see." Lucy paused. "They must have seen your face and recognized one of their targets. Something like that?"

Katrin could only nod.

Swift and Shinji, meanwhile, had warped in other Comrades and were getting ready to leave again when Lucy said, "Wait. Katrin, you have to change your looks."

"What?" Katrin blinked.

"If you don't put on a disguise, you're going to end up chased all over again." Lucy pointed out.

"A disguise?" Katrin frowned.

"Like the ones we used when we went to rescue Sora." Lucy reminded her. "I still have my Huntress costume. Don't you have your Luna set?"

"Lucy, it's not going to matter." Katrin said. "I only have one Comrade, and the Cult knows what she looks like, now."

"Then you better get another one!" Lucy said. "Something similar. What's your theme?"

"My theme…" Katrin paused. "I'm not totally sure yet..."

"Well, figure it out, fast!" Lucy told her.

"There's no time!" Shinji broke in. "The Saucers are after us right now. We have to go. We're headed to Hourglass. If you want to help, you can find us there."

"Hourglass?! But that's a war zone!"

"Exactly." Shinji said. "Come on! We have to go!"

Lucy watched them go for perhaps ten seconds, glanced from their fading backs to her hut for another five… and then dashed in and grabbed a few things before warping in her own Comrades and taking to the skies after them.