***
The next hour or so went by more or less uneventfully.
Colin and Alicia resumed their journey on Captain Courageous' boat. They checked their Comrade Summaries, as if to compare with Phillip's.
This was Colin's Comrade Summary at the time.
https://imgur.com/0FGfLiG
(Author's note: Raiki's title changed after meeting her dad. Shiro's title likewise changed after becoming Lord of his clan. Both these changes, and Cour being Redeemed from Frenzied state resulted in raising their class. Shiro's power has shot up since becoming a Lord and both Shiro and Raiki grew a lot fighting Wisps and the Frenzied Dragon in the Ancient Ways)
This was Alicia's Comrade Summary at the time.
https://imgur.com/n7VBdGX
Katrin meanwhile, joined a stream of Knights flying north once more. This group aimed to reinforce the knights harrying the southernmost saucer – the same 'command ship(?)' they tangled with earlier. Katrin went with it intending to break off on the way and head for Midway from there. Shinji offered to go with her.
Things did not go as planned.
***
Katrin had a weird sense of déjà vu when it happened. She was flying alongside Henry and Rita, watching them compare Comrade Summaries and plan out how to get really strong when Shinji came up with the bright idea of doing the same for Katrin since they were now in the same Guild and all. He thought he could help her find a good theme, a good team, and plenty of good Comrades.
So she brought up her summary.
https://imgur.com/Dt3kOVz
"That's it?" Shinji marveled. "A single Air Transport type at level 93?"
"Class Twelve." Katrin whispered, looking around furtively to make sure nobody else saw it.
"That's probably because of this." Shinji pointed to where her summary said 'M-71N'. "Know what this means?"
"No." Katrin said, quite certain he was about to tell her.
He did. "See the 'N'? It's an Enhanced type, the same pattern as M-7, Michi's Seventh Breeding. It's the first one, thus M-7's 1N. Michi's efforts must have raised it a class or two."
"Their class can go up?" Katrin blinked.
"Sure. If they're enhanced, or if they evolve, or if they get better titles." Shinji said, musing. "A Spring Pegasus, eh? The very first of its Enhanced kind."
"I've been curious about that." Katrin admitted. "Even though it says 'spring', a lot of Grace's powers involve water and flight."
"That's because you're thinking it's about the season of spring. It's not." Shinji explained. "I remember a tale about Pegasus, a story about springs of water starting up where the flying horse put his hoof down. Something about inspiration."
"That's a bit… vague." Katrin pointed out.
Grace whinnied a laugh at that.
Shinji shrugged. "I've never been one for those sorts of tales, myself. I figured I'd be better off creating my own legends. You could ask Val or Sparrow if you want to know about old tales."
Katrin paused. "I really should get a nickname of my own, shouldn't I? But somehow, calling myself 'the Pegasus' just doesn't sound right."
Shinji let out a snort of laughter. "I agree. Just don't call yourself 'Peggy'."
Katrin almost choked. "In those old stories… did Pegasus have a rider?"
"One or two, I think?" Shinji scratched his head, then tapped his watch and checked the datanet. "Ah. Two. Perseus and Bellerophon."
Katrin made a face. "Those don't sound like something a girl should call herself."
"Could be a good disguise from the Cult." Shinji shrugged. "Besides, we call Valkyrie 'Val' for short. Would it really be so bad to be called 'Belle'?"
{'Belle'?} Katrin thought. "That does sound like a girl's name."
"It means 'beauty'. As in, someone who is beautiful." A girl chipped in.
Katrin spun to see Tomoe right next to her on a Helijet. "Hi, Tomoe."
"Hi." Tomoe said, waving back, her face expressionless. "You know, I once wanted to join the Wind Knights myself."
"You did?" Katrin asked. "What happened?"
"I had second thoughts about it." Tomoe said. "My Comrades are all propeller types. Helijet, Heliguns, Helibooks… The Wind Knights call Valkyrie 'Val'. I didn't want to be called 'Hel'."
Shinji burst out laughing. Katrin wondered what he would say to that after his guffaws ended.
Thus preoccupied, she didn't realize they were in trouble until it was too late.
"Incoming!" Henry pointed to the sky just before a flurry of green bolts rained down on them.
{What?!} Katrin stared. {But we're still ten minutes away from the Command Saucer!}
It wasn't the Command Saucer, however, that shot at them.
It was worse.
***
About twelve Saucers had dropped in from the sky in fire. A single glance up showed at least as many more taking their time coming down, and half of the second wave were the big ones. Or at least, what used to be 'the big ones'. Katrin gulped, hoping she was wrong, but if that glance was true, there were even bigger ones on the way.
{What...? How?! How did they even know we were coming or where we were or that I was here?}
{Wait... do they even know I'm here?}
Looking at the amount of Saucers dropping into the sky, Katrin winced and had to admit; it was most likely.
"Form squads!" Shinji shouted. "Rita, Henry, Tomoe, with me!"
Katrin tuned out the yelling all around her and followed Shinji, swooping in a low glide. They maneuvered as the Saucers and the Knights started fighting overhead, and then when a good chance appeared, they darted up to shelter below one of the earlier Saucers. Rather than striking at it, they tried to keep it between them and the saucers shooting at them. Rita warped in a huge vine thing that somehow stuck onto the bottom of the Saucer and started releasing swarms of bees.
"Don't kill this one! We're using it for shelter!" Henry reminded all of them as they hovered there.
Shinji didn't say anything. He simply blasted the bottom gun out from the Saucer they sheltered under and looked about for a target.
"Where is Tomoe?" Rita asked. It was then that Katrin realized that Tomoe wasn't with them.
Henry pointed to a figure in a Helichair getting blasted by a Saucer beam while trying to reach their 'shelter'. Tomoe leapt clear off her chair, followed down by a few Helibooks, Heliguns and Heliclaws. "My Helijet! And my Helichair! Both gone!"
"Here." Rita patted Shinji's borrowed Storm Swan. "There's room for one more."
{Well, at least there is for someone her size.} Katrin thought, but did not offer a seat on her Pegasus. She felt a bit sad about it, but the kind of maneuvers she'd need to pull would have be impossible with even that much more bulk on her ride.
Sudden sunlight made them blink before they saw that their 'shelter' had flipped aside and had turned into a wall. Meanwhile, concentrated fire from two Saucers above came crashing down on them while Shinji was busy trying to tear down the other Saucer.
Katrin was moving before she realized she'd decided to dodge. Instinct and experience had made her reaction completely automatic. She was clear from the firing zone before she could so much as yelp.
"Watch out!" Tomoe leapt clear off the offered ride as beams and bolts rained down, and thus survived the initial volley.
Henry and Rita did neither. The most they managed was to gasp in surprise. Beams and bolts nailed them in mid-gasp.
Tomoe didn't last much longer. The Heliclaws dove down to catch her again, but a well-aimed beam caught her first. In free-fall, there was no way for her to dodge or anything. It was a clean shot, and a clean kill.
"Here we go again." Katrin groaned as now three Saucers turned their firepower on her and she dodged for her life. {Do they recognize me? Do they know they're shooting at one of the three kids they're trying so hard to capture?}
Katrin suspected they did.
***
Colin was getting off the boat with Alicia when the sky began to rain fire.
"What the-?" two words that summarized everything was all Colin managed before he was forced to duck for cover.
Green energy bolts sprayed indiscriminately over them. The boat vanished in a single, brief fireball. The docks caught fire. The little settlement that hosted the rare visitor to the Uber Marshes flared up briefly and then was gone, leaving only ashes on the ground.
{They weren't even aiming at us…} Colin noticed as the marshes themselves took Cultist fire. Some of the bolts hit marsh gas, resulting in spectacular explosions ten or thirty times bigger than the tiny village that just went up in smoke. Others just vanished into the bog. Still others raised cries of pain and fury, noises that chilled Colin to hear them coming from the tangled growth all around.
Those were mere stray shots, Colin saw. There was a battle going on far overhead and to the left. Quite far away. But it was a battle that was getting closer, and it was of a hair-raisingly large scale.
Not only that, it was getting bigger.
A dozen Gaian Saucers were up there, a half dozen on another side, and four more in a squad on a third, with a dozen more dropping in through the atmosphere, burning through the ozone, heedless of the damage they took in their rush to get through into the Middle Plane. By the hundreds in three different groups, allied Knights of Nakama World were fighting them, warping in their Comrades and battling with a ferocity that was downright desperate.
Colin saw a man in shiny silvery armor leap from a white Pegasus onto a large, pizza-shaped saucer and summon a whole multitude of Comrades quite literally on top of his foe. Some of them started tearing into the 'pizza'. Others blasted away at nearby saucers. The knight himself leapt from that saucer, dropped a clear thirty feet onto another, and warped in yet more Comrades, all of them white, and all of them attacking every Saucer in sight, including the one they were on.
There was Shinji, looking very battered and Rain looked hurt, but they also looked furious. They were going berserk with lightning and a gathering blizzard overhead that followed them wherever they went, even fast as they were.
Colin even thought he saw Sekai, but it wasn't her; it was another girl with a big scythe, or maybe it was an axe or an anchor… he wasn't too sure, but when she sliced through a Saucer, it caused an explosion, and when she slung it over her shoulder to inspect her work, it looked like a waning moon. A red C-shape right there on her back.
{Isn't that Kishin? And Zoe?} Colin observed more familiar forms as the Knights and the Saucers got closer from all sides. {Goodness, how many of the Seven Champions are up there? And they're still getting wiped out.}
Colin hated to admit it, but the truth was plain to see. Gaian saucers were filling the sky, and the allied Knights were falling like flies. {I thought there was only one Saucer earlier. It must have called in some friends. Why? Why now?}
And then he saw the probable reason why.
{Katrin?! What is she DOING there?!}
***
Katrin, oddly enough, was thinking the same thing.
{What am I DOING here?!} She pulled Grace into a tight turn to avoid two Saucers' beams, tried to maneuver between them to get them to shoot each other, but they stopped firing before they did. Instead, they both dropped and opened fire from different angles, making dodging even more difficult.
Katrin didn't hesitate. She swerved, dodged, hit back with what little strength she had. {Geoffrey was against this. Even Val didn't think this was a good idea...}
Green light filled the sky and Katrin dodged as hard as she could. There was no time to think about mistakes. She was fighting for her life.
It was a valiant effort. It was an astounding performance, a tribute to both her now-instinctive reactions and the responsiveness of her mount. But in the end, even that wasn't enough. The earlier, ticked off 'shelter' Saucer turned on her again and rammed into her from the side, taking on the fire of the others as it did so, but it hit her smack in the face and knocked her off her winged horse. She went spiralling downwards.
{I'm as good as dead, aren't I? I'm going to die…}
Grace swooped down and caught her. Back in her saddle, Katrin hugged the horse more tightly than she needed to, very glad to have her around. Grace whinnied, giving her a short nuzzle.
"We need help!" Katrin gasped to Grace. She looked around for friends, or a place they could find shelter.
Shelter was nowhere to be found, but friends were everywhere. Katrin saw half a hundred fellow knights around her, a dozen more over there, and another thirty or so on the other side, with the occasional squad drifting in between the groups across the horizon. But all of them, all, were fighting Saucers.
{Where do we go? What can we do?} Katrin gulped. {This is more than I bargained for. I have to get out of here. Maybe if I killed myself…}
Green light overhead made both Katrin and Grace duck, and the winged horse's efforts made Katrin feel like she'd just left her stomach ten feet overhead. Green bolts were everywhere. Katrin had a moment to yelp before Grace let out a pained whinny and disappeared under her.
"Grace!?" Katrin gasped as she plummetted all alone through empty air. Her hand flailed through empty air, totally empty. {Grace is gone! None of my friends are around! I can't fly! I'm falling… I'm…}
{No! Don't panic… don't panic…! DON'T PANIC!!!!!}
Katrin's mind went blank. She found herself screaming. Screaming wordlessly, hysterically, at the top of her lungs, completely out of control. Her arms flailed, as if trying to swim through the air, grasping at emptiness. All her intentions of keeping calm went straight into the trash can.
Somewhere deep inside, Katrin heard her own voice sigh. {I panicked.}
Katrin waited for the white light, but it didn't flash up. Instead, when the beams finally sniped her and she died, the light that flashed in her eyes was red.
When she {did} respawn, it wasn't at Soft Snows.
It was at a much warmer place. Her eyes darted around, noting the things in her vicinity. Beach. Trees. Fog. Weird smells. Loud, angry animal sounds. Rita, Henry, Tomoe and a crowd of others all scattered around the beach, everyone looking and sounding very sick.
"What…?" Katrin coughed, almost threw up.
"Some kind of barrier." Tomoe had a hand to her mouth and looked rather green. "It stopped us from Respawning outside the zone."
"Then… where…?" Katrin sat down with a thump, unable to stand.
"Nearest land mass." Henry said, breathing slow and deliberately. "Guess."
That didn't take long. {Closest land mass north of the Continent of Eternal Winter… oh no. Don't tell me…}
Rita said it for her.
"Welcome to the Uber Marshes."