There was a significant pause where she had trouble moving. The magic in her, the deep parts of her that transcended everything in her, even the struggle of human versus dryad, reacted to the threat to the being she loved. Those parts of her did not trifle with moderation or forgiveness. The deep sense of affronted, world-burning rage, didn’t care about environmental impacts, or the ethics. It wanted her friend and her familiar safe with the exact same degree of fervor. And all of her wanted anyone who touched them with malice dead.

  Deep magics, strange magics, built in her. It made the gates of her soul ache.

  But the conditions were not met. She was ready to cast wrath and damnation on any transgressor, but those magics could not latch onto a transgressor to-be, only one who had already crossed the line.

  Which resulted in a splitting headache as she felt herself pulled in multiple directions. Protect Scotty, let no monster near her familiar, cry and piss on the ground, or unleash unholy magics to punish those who raised a hand towards those she loved.

  For that moment, she was still.

  If Scotty hadn’t just been quizzing her on this, she might have stayed frozen.

  She drew speed from wisteria, falcon, and the jittering un-catchability of a flower petal buffered away by the winds of any hand that tried to grab it. Her strength was the strength of a tree anchoring loam against flood, the current carrying leaves, and the ant whose loads eclipsed it.

  Fleeter than human, she pressed against the ground and leapt forward. A foot touched the bark of a nearby pine and she subtly encouraged it’s elasticity as she crouched against its trunk, briefly horizontal in the air with legs bent, the tree bending back. Then she fired herself off like a stone from a trebuchet.

  Scotty was in her arms in a blink, though she was careful to grab him while pivoting around so it was less of a tackle and more of a vision-blacking arc of acceleration that ended with his legs locked behind her waist, and him pulling the air rifle from her fingers.

  She tore through the woods, her teacher wrapped around her front like a baby in a carrier. Even so, Shilloh sprinted more smoothly than anything but the wind or a more developed dryad could manage.

  As she had been told, this was her role as the member with super strength and enhanced mobility.

  Scotty was a glass cannon. The hell he could rein down with a single bullet was magnificent. Especially when he had the right weapons platform to launch his creations. But he was still as vulnerable as any other human when he didn’t have armor or shields to guard him.

  Shilloh’s job was to make sure they could achieve and maintain ‘standoff.’ That was—according to a lesson that was spoken with the awe of profound revelation despite being so common-sense as to be almost insulting—the core of any form of combat: be where you could hit them and not get hit back.

  So Shilloh sprinted. Scotty fired until the air rifle dropped from his hands. It took him less time then it would take her to even lift the damn thing to her shoulder. He did that one handed while his other hand brought up what looked like the love child of a sawed off shotgun and massive flashlight.

  He yelled orders. At his command, she pivoted in a way that defied physics and moved them briefly out of the underbrush and into a clearer area.

  The net gun in Scotty’s hands fired with a hollow wompf.

  Then, much like her abandoned air rifle, that too fell behind them, and Scotty was yelling.

  “Northwest corridor! Between the big trees!”

  How exactly she got there was hard to say. The cloud of smoke from the fox, which she assumed was similar to the ink a squid would shoot out to avoid predators, wafted in front of the mature Wingins chasing her. All nine of them reacted badly to the smoke even though none breathed or had been impacted by the mist.

  Of her be-winged pursuers there were seven that felt wrong, like they were from a different nature than the one of this earth. All had a few common traits. They had red scales. Except they were more like the scales of a pangolin, or Scale-Foot snails, not fish scales. They also had grey leather skin, and joints that were at angles that seemed wrong for their size and weight. They bent too much, and their limbs were to spindly. Gravity here should have been too much for the obtuse, spindly, far spread legs.

  One of the creatures looked like a helmeted alligator, another like a kangaroo with a scorpion tail. Though not stereotypically demonic, Shilloh couldn’t look at them and think of anything else.

  Then there were the more ‘normal’ wingin hosts. The first of those two cryptos was what appeared to be a giant snake body whose head had been replaced by an eye with a glassy pupil ringed by fangs under the cornea. It would look at something, blink, and teeth marks appeared on whatever had been in its gaze.

  The wings on it were enormous. Big enough to be a boats sails.

  The second was just an amalgamation of fibers, wires, ropes, vines, and the occasional rock or leaf stuck in them. It was a fiberous blob that made her think of chewed up rope a cow had spit out. When loose it was big enough to cover a bus. When it wove into a shape, it shrunk to the size of a limousine. It’s wings were smaller but still substantial.

  She used the agitation the smoke cloud caused to obey Scotty’s orders. She got them to a place where they had big trees with deep roots bracketing them in.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Then came her next task as the strong woman of the group.

  Scotty was set down, then she stepped forward, picked up a recently fallen, smallish tree, and hefted it like a massive cudgel. With its weight and length she should have fallen face forward, but her magic rooted her to the ground no matter what silly things like ‘leverage’ and ‘centers of balance’ said.

  No time to think, she sensed that none of these big creatures would respond to the relative small caliber of bullets her handgun packed. That meant she drew even more strength and leaped forward with a roar that absolutely did not involve her voice cracking.

  ~~~

  Her first swing was too much.

  One of the demons, this one looking like an armored caterpillar the size of a man, swayed back. The tree whistled through the air and the monster lunged. Luckily, her lack of coordination was so great as to accidentally rescue her from an otherwise terminal lack of skill.

  She over-swung, stepped forward, twisted, and was dragged into a foot-banging stumble that resulted in her going full circle and hitting the monster about half-way down the trunk.

  The hit broke what counted for its spine. A massive red-mandibled head flopped forward. The whiplash made it crack its carapace on the tree just before a gigantic bite appeared on its body.

  She stumbled back, the weight of her cludgel massively decreased as the eye-snake severed her weapon.

  “Oh shit, oh shit, oh fucking shit!”

  Shilloh, the experienced warrior poet, ended up landing on her ass, partial tree trunk thumping next to her.

  She had almost died. Like really fucking died.

  Maybe an experienced bane would have already accounted for the nature of the thing’s ability, cleverly used cover as concealment, or even thrown out something to obstruct its view. Hell, she was a dryad, and if a leaf was nudged to fall in front of its eye, then it would give her a massive stretch of safe land to traverse. Optics were weird like that.

  Shilloh, however, was not experienced. She was scared.

  Scotty fired from behind her. The same confetti-streamers of hyper-combustible material landed on the stringy fiber-amalgam creature. They were immediately incorporated into it’s being before being lit by a follow up flare-round.

  The fiber monster did not scream audibly, but she felt it in her magical sense even as the Wingin let out a thunderous cacophony.

  Hearing Scotty behind her made Shilloh realize the snake creature could take a bite out of him, and that it probably was about to try hurting her friend.

  Her irrational murderous rage surged, but this time there was no confusion holding her back. “Not one of mine!” she screeched.

  Slower than Scotty would have done it, but faster than Shilloh’s shell shocked thoughts, her fingers gripped the truncated body of the tree trunk so hard they actually stabbed into the wood. She threw herself at the crypto in the long, bounding, low-gravity-looking strides that only a super-strong body could do.

  The distance disappeared in blinks. She touched down one last time, bent her knees, and when she was just barely in range, swung with every ounce of strength she could muster from her legs, core, and arms.

  The result was nearly pyrotechnic.

  With her sparring against Wade and Scotty, the insane durability of the autocannibalistic troll, and the ranged nature of the limb stealers, she had forgotten just how strong she was.

  Like wet, salty, gloopy fireworks the entire upper third of the snake-like crypto exploded into mush. A pair of sentient wings fluttered off. The red and green combination of crimson splatter spackling verdant feathers making it looked like the centerpiece of the world’s worst Christmas card.

  For the second time, she over swung and fell to the ground.

  Her enhanced body didn’t skin a knee, or sprain a wrist when she caught her fall on the palms of her hands. But, when she looked up, her enhanced vision let her perfectly see Scotty.

  No one could look at the avenging visage of burning lead and sheering magic without feeling like they were watching something orchestral in its violence. More schools of magic flowed from his guns than she could believe, and his hands moved like a magician. There was never stillness. He wove, changed direction, adjusted his level up, and down. All while flawlessly shifting between weapons and rounds to find the perfect counter to each creature.

  In the time it took her to swing at a single crypto he had combusted an amalgam of threads, and fired heavy shots into a demonic centaur until it fell into the living conflagration of it’s former flock mate and now thrashing tangle of garrotes.

  All that he did while somehow using three different bullets fired with such perfect grouping that he managed to improvise a magical interaction from their aura. On the fly he made what would have been a catastrophic lab failure. The massively complex cascade of chain reactions somehow alchemized the demon gators upper spine, where all three bullets had landed, into acid. That killed the demon and the Wingin. Unlike the other hosts' deaths, which sent every other member of the flock into a panic.

  He moved through the chaos like he had planned for it, gunpowder cracking, and enchantments blazing.

  It was stunning. Even in her incandescent, berserker's rage, she still paused to take in his battle with the same awe she felt when she saw an entire flock of birds move in near psychic coordination.

  Scotty stood and delivered.

  You could write poems about what exactly he did, but in the end it boiled down to two things: He stood. And he delivered.

  The depth of meaning in those five words was more than she could have ever imagined before seeing it herself.

  He was an artist of death so different from Jasque and Wade, but still managed to make her feel very small and very mortal.

  Especially because she had broken the rules of her role.

  The cryptos closed in on her friend. Scotty didn’t seem to care. He never slowed or sped up. Just glared with perfect composure and a small clench in a jaw.

  Maybe, if he had a strong man near by, his composure would have been earned.

  That teammate would swing a tree, or a maul, or toss a boulder. Then Scotty would be picked up, fire over the teammate's shoulder, and they would relocate to repeat his deathly hail over and over.

  That teammate was not there. All he had was her. And she was not where she should have been.

  Shilloh screamed and threw herself with no thought of how she would land, or if she would be clawed from the air.

  She just screamed, her wild talent beating against her eyes, not able to be released even as she watched a demonic buffalo have a leg shot off and still throw itself inexorbitably forward.

  The possessing wingin provided extra locomotion so that its crippled host could serve its final purpose as a suicide missile.

  Even pulling on everything that would giver her speed, she wouldn’t get there in time.

  Luckily, the hostless set of flapping wings recently liberated from a one-toothed meat-ball looking familiar, was on track to get to her back well before she had to see Scotty die.

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