Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

On the nights when Susan Lei couldn't sleep, Harry Fawkes had learnt to hold her fast and wait. His wife had laughed like sunrise, when they'd killed Ainz the Lich King. Bards called her smile the banner of heroes. Yet it was all too often that her husband saw her tears.

"Sorry..." She whispered into the pillow, "I'm an idiot. It's been so long, since…"

"Shh, I'm the idiot, remember?" He shifted in the bed, pressing into her back and her thick dark hair "Got you into this awful job."

"No, you believed in us, dear one. That it would be worth it. Even back then, when children went out untrained in parties of four, like slaying goblins was a sick game."

"Thank the gods that's changed. We helped change it. You're a hero, Susan Lei."

She smiled bravely, squeezed his hand. Stared at the darkened wall of their fine little apartment.

"Never felt it. Not since our first quest, when our Priestess died. Poor Alison, she deserved the world..."

"A better world than this...but we should have saved her. I'm sorry."

"No, no…" Through her hard, scar-worn body, Harry felt the sobs, "If it had been you…I'm so, so glad it wasn't you, Harry. Glad it wasn't…me. We're so lucky. So many wounded friends, so many lost. Every time I see the Sword Maiden, or those poor girls who were tortured – if the monsters had taken me and did what they did, I know I'd never have come back! I'd never have fought again. I would have hung myself, a broken failure, and that would be the story of Lei Qiang's daughter! I'm no hero. Every time we saved the world, I was an imposter."

With the look he'd had when he'd killed the dragon, Harry was suddenly above Susan, looking her in the eye.

"Love, love, you would have beaten it, whatever happened! You can't know you wouldn't have beaten it and come back!"

"How can you say I'd survive?" She still smiled, but her dark eyes were empty, "If I lost my honour, my strength, and you?"

"No. Susan, think of all the people you've saved! Your care and your smile have saved so many poor souls, even with this cursed lie still lodged in you! Don't think about might-have-beens. Remember how you've worked, and fought, you're a fighter, and that is the truth! The truth….the truth we've built and bled for. If we believe in ourselves we can be heroes..."

Susan quietly took hold of his ever-messy hair. Drew him down to her breasts.

"You always believed, you big idiot. We found out right away, the world we were born in was a heap of dung–but you never stopped believing in dragonslayers and stories, and you changed it. Gods only know where I'd be without you, Harry. You're the real hero."

"Well, yeah, but…argh…" Susan stopped twisting her husband's ear and he forged on, "You're the hero of all the greenhorns you hug and scold before their first deployment. Not me, you. No one has a strong heart for the weak like you, you've saved me a hundred times...you could kill me with your pinkie. You're you, and if that isn't enough to be a hero, then dragonslayers and stories can get stuffed."

They'd carried each other through the morass many times; whispers in bed or in the lobby of a palace. Some dragons took more slaying than others, but heroes fought down the little voice of doubt. Harry was surprised, though, by the thoughtful look that crept into his wife's eyes.

"I must have felt like I had something to prove. So many missions, councils to sort out this dungheap world, and the martial arts school...I shouldn't have taken so long to do this."

"Susan, what–?"

Her smile was a little afraid, but fulsome with glory.

"Dearheart, I think I'm ready to have a baby."

Chapter Text

“Well met, Schemers!

“For schemers, in truth, thee are. Cleave to the plan, the plan, the plan. Say I should threaten the lives of brave adventurers three, where is the dull peasant, the fat merchant, the lovesick maiden, to spare them a tear? If your boldest young woman is stripped, ravished, and it is hidden in a dungeon from coward eyes, is it not called a commonplace part of life? Part of the plan. Your brutish, execrable plan! Oh, trust in thy plan, while still thee can …yes, and wait till you get a load of me, hahahahaha…!”     

“What?”

The laughing man, little and ugly as a goblin, had vanished from the town square. Harry Fawkes shrugged, and headed back to the inn, where Ilsa the wizard had joined his and Susan's party, earlier that evening. They were real adventurers, now. Strange and significant happenings were only to be expected.   

The next day, the morning of their first quest, the Shadows came.

There were no more goblin slaying quests; the Shadows filed down their tunnels like ferrets, and killed the last one within a week. The civilised races had barely time to celebrate their unearned relief–or to wonder how Porcelains would learn A from B, without starter quests for two thirds to get killed on–when the Shadows finished the goblins and started to kill everything else.

They were faceless, voiceless, and implacable. Holy Light did not slow them, no blade touched them. A certain quiet man in armour did not fight them, understanding nothing but that his purpose had ended. Heroes and monsters fought the Shadows and died. The nobles and peasants and children who had always left anything like danger to the heroes simply died.

No mark on their bodies, no fuss. Those who had dignity died with it, those who had none without. No one had their dignity taken away. There were no survivors, in the end, to mourn or envy the dead. No pain, no shame, and the terror ended with life. Mastah Kurtz had dropped his bomb in the heart of darkness, to exterminate the brutes and end it all.

There were three survivors. When it came out that somehow they survived the Shadows, they were hailed as the heroes of the world. When it grew clear that the Shadows simply refused to harm them, they were almost lynched–but since the Shadow had come the Three had done nothing but fight them, and grown strong. Every Shadow they fought was a little stronger, just enough to challenge them, as if some alien power had twisted their world into a game.

“It’s not right…” Susan fell to her knees beside the little blonde Priestess. The dead girl’s cheeks were still covered in icy tears, “This sweet, caring girl, what did she do? What didn’t she do? She cared…!”

“Then it is better she died than lived to see this.” The wizard Ilsa’s face was pale, but her grip on Susan's arm was firm.

The Castle of Shadows filled the night sky above them. It had appeared in the Capital, as the killing began. The approach was a carpet of dead heroes.

“Then, if we had to live, and see this, what in the world did we do?” Susan’s dark eyes grew hollow. Several times, their plight had overwhelmed, and she had gone under–but Ilsa spoke to her firmly, Harry spoke gently and kissed her hair. She stood again.

“Okay then,” Harry’s voice was like burning iron, “Let’s end this.”

He wore Artefact plate mail he had looted, and held a runic longsword. Something buried in his heart sprang with joy that he was going to save the world–even if his two comrades were all that was left.

Before the Shadows came, the little laughing Wanderer had appeared, in every city and village the Three knew of, over the course of a day. Said his piece about Schemers and tears, vanished. The only light that had kept Harry, Susan and Ilsa sane was that the world’s last heroes should find the devil and kill him. That the nightmare would finally end.

There were Shadows, great and small, deathtraps and mazes. The Three had needed to learn their trade quickly, and they had. But in the end they had to pass through; if they didn't, there would be no one else.

Finally, they reached the great hall, and faced the little Wanderer, the prince of Shadows. He grinned with all his sharky teeth, and twiddled long fingers like twigs in his beard. The Three got within ten paces of him, then Harry spoke the only word they had.   

“Why?”

“To make us a statement, mayhaps.” The merry little man, the Immortal Goblin, grinned down from a heap of burning money. “There be some that wish the world turned upside down.”

“Well, you’ve killed everyone in the world, but I fear you’ve failed to express your point clearly,” Ilsa spoke coldly, eyes burning through her spectacles, “Perhaps you could spell it out?”

“Oho, my brave maid…” The Immortal Goblin grinned as only a real goblin can, “For the one, I have avenged me on those witless earthworms, usurpers of the goblin name. For the other…but for this good fellow’s pranks, know thee what had befallen three young questers, foolish-brave?”

He opened a window in air, and showed them how their first goblin slaying quest would have ended. Harry’s sword fell from his hand. The goblin laughed and laughed.

“We didn’t want this…” Susan finally forced out the words, “WE NEVER WOULD HAVE WANTED THIS!”

“Oh, my brave Fighter, poor Lucretia, for whom the world was banished. Boadicea's daughter, for whom this rapist's world was ravaged–humans never get what they want!” The Goblin of Pook's Hill rocked back and forth on his burning throne, “Not even my present employer, that artless, long-winded fellow that wouldst slaughter a world to show them ravishment is wrong! For my part, I think it boring, and this is so much fun!”

“SHUT UP!” Susan roared out her lungs.

Harry broke the silence.

“It was a dunghill world, but the people…they were people. I’d rather die nameless in that cave, if it would bring back everyone who died."

"Harry..." Susan took his hand and clung to it.

"Susan. What those things did to you, I can’t, I won’t let you…!”

“I…think I could. For that little blonde girl, for our friends back home, I’ll fight.”

She remember the one night when Harry had snapped and almost despaired, but she had been there. She had given herself to the heroic idiot she’d always loved. Whatever hell they plunged into, she had to believe that would always be real.   

("Oh yes, gentle reader, my employer shippeth Fighter x Warrior rather more than somewhat. And by Oberon, thou dost not know long-winded until..." The Three had no idea who the Goblin was talking to.)

“Alright them.” Ilsa snapped, “It makes more sense for only three to die–and you would have saved the world, as you always wanted. I’m willing to die as well, if it brings back everyone else.”

“In truth, forsooth…” The Immortal Goblin breathed, “Thou art truly heroes.”

A profound silence followed. When the Immortal Goblin started to pick his teeth, the Three realised that this would end the way they’d expected after all.

“I can almost imagine,” Susan muttered, as she dropped into the crouching tiger stance, “That everything will be right, if I can only punch in your face.”

“In truth, forsooth,” The Merry Wanderer of the Night twinkled and grinned, “It will.”

Ilsa thrust out her staff, the words of anti-magic rang out–but something appeared on her chest that smoked, ticked and exploded. Blew her to pieces, as the Goblin clapped his hands.

Harry had his sword again. With Susan barely ahead, he leapt at the Immortal Goblin, with a battle cry that was a scream.

The Goblin flicked his long fingers. Harry’s arms grew long and hard, his scream died as his armour burst from within–a huge oak tree was rooted in the hall where he had been.

Susan felt teeth growing, her limbs bending. Her ears–whatever mad plan was seeing her transformed into a rabbit, she only knew she would be living on lettuce, and everyone would be dead, unless she moved and struck and killed.

It took exactly as much willpower as she had, but she had to wring out every drop she possessed. She cried out for every forgotten hero, thrust all her Ki straight down her arm, and threw a punch at the Immortal Goblin’s pumpkin grin that would have made boulders crack.

He twisted easily aside. Then he was at her ear, whispering the words that would redeem every world and make everything right;

“If we shadows have offended; think but this, and all is mended. Think on this weak and idle theme…it did but happen in a dream!”

After a moment, Susan laughed. Then she kicked the Immortal Goblin across the hall and out of the window–

–and then she woke up, again. In a wood between the worlds, a space within spaces. The dressing room of the multiverse.

She got up. First she would find Ilsa, and Harry. Then she would punch the idiot whose story it had been. Make him feel as if she had, if that was impossible. After that, there were worlds elsewhere. Enough stories for a dozen lives, full of love and heroics. World enough and time, to forget the nightmares.

Elsewhere, the imaginary world that Puck had redeemed, the world of the Goblinslayer, drifted indifferently on.   

A/N: The rape of Lucretia (as related by Puck's old friend Shakespeare), brought an end to the Kingdom of Rome. Boadicea's daughters were raped by the Romans, which, among other things, led their mother to have about 80,000 people slaughtered in a very brutal fashion. The rape of the Levite's Concubine, in the book of Judges, (which I didn't have time to mention, along with Dogsville and Pirate Janni) led to the slaughter of almost the whole tribe of Benjamin by the other eleven tribes. Something similar, on paper. for Fighter, if her own world continues indifferent to her fate, strikes me as a righteous, decent statement. If Puck seems a bit OP, remember he's from Shakespeare, Kipling and Neil Gaiman; any Japanese Light Novel is a dead flea between his toes. 

Chapter Text

A pack of dirty yellow goblins. Private Fawkes, 77^th East Middlesex regiment, had thought little more of the Chinese enemy before he shipped out, though the sergeants had roared a lot more about foot binding and the thousand cuts. He hadn’t thought anything of what pikes and ancient cannons could do to a British soldier with his Snider-Enfield. The flat-faced little fellows had hardly shown any fight at all, as redcoats had taken and burnt their city. The damp and heat were more tenacious foes.

So Harry Fawkes, on a routine patrol of a busy Canton street, pushed back his forage cap and wiped the sweat from his messy hair. As the proverbial half-brick sailed out of the quietly gathering mob and knocked him down.

He barely perceived the shouts, or the rush of grim, staring faces. He felt the foot crush his ankle – it could have been his own squadmate’s boot – and Kipling hammered his head into the dark.

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier, soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!

-0-

A woman was smiling at him, when he half-woke with a pounding head. A girl, really – she looked younger than his seventeen – with a pigtail she could sit on. Dark eyes like a cave of jewels. She was wearing a ragged white tunic and a yellow scarf. She had no flaying knife he could see.

Despite his head feeling like a foundry at the bottom of the sea, Harry realised quite sharpish that he was lying on rags and bamboo in a junkroom or shed. The noise from outside, all around, was of the city – the Chinese enemy city. The girl pushed him down before he could even begin to get up.

“Tsai gwai! Foreign devil.” She pointed at him, then gestured at the city past the door, “They people, much much angry. They–“

Frenzied stabbing motions at her own chest. Once Harry had woozily noted it was a very shapely chest, he finally awoke to his situation – as the missionaries say – and flopped back with a groan.

The girl gently pushed some water between his lips. With thirst seizing his throat again, a moment later, Harry talked to take his mind off his ankle and ribs and everything else that hurt. 

“Bloody mess. Sergeant’s going to kill me. Mates should’ve bloody well pulled me out, ah, dammit…! You must’ve saved my life, Miss. Thank you."

"Mm?"

"You SA–VED me! THA–NK YOU!”

The girl cocked her head. Harry settled for smiling at her. Her smile in return was the warmest and clearest he could imagine. 

“WHY...YOU…why would you save me? Foreign devil? Burn your city, push all that opium...I could use some bloody opium now.” His ankle hurt so much, he could barely think. He stared up helplessly at the girl’s face, silent as the moon, tried once more.

“Why…what makes you smile, like that? It’s…beautiful...”

Shuang Lei couldn’t have answered him in words if she’d understood. Through the years she’d lived in the city since her parents’ death, surviving by whatever reckless adventure could be found, there had been more to bring a grimace than a grin. Still, she watched the noisy, ignorant foreign devil close his big eyes in restless sleep.

She had saved him, but it was she who felt safety and peace at his side. She didn’t know why, she did not know how in heaven and earth she could keep him, safe – but this man from a strange world of devils and steam-driven magic had fallen before her. All she knew was that she could not let him go.

-0-

Harry realised quickly that the girl was very strong, for a female, as she shifted him round his sickbed over the following days. Coolly assisting him with embarrassing necessities. From outside the shed, he often heard the yowls and slaps of the funny Chinese boxing he’d naturally heard of, through never expected or desired to meet with. He wondered in his many idle hours if she was a student – some kind of warrior woman from a secret order, sworn to protect the weak. A thief or a street tough seemed more likely, though. She often returned to the shed with bruises and skinned knuckles, as well as the day’s dry rice to spoon down his throat. She always did a little blessing with her hand over the food, and Harry chipped in with what little prayers he could make up.

 Harry knew the ways friendless children survived in Whitechapel and Lambeth; he couldn’t fail to see that the girl had been through great hardship. She smiled at him every morning, though, except for when he remembered to dig out the few coins he’d had on him.

“Tsai! No money.” She looked away. Harry signed; he'd begun to suspect that ‘Tsai’ was ‘idiot’.

“If there’s anything I can do for you? On my honour, as a soldier?” No reaction. He shook his head. “Alright, love. Just glad you’re not slicing me, or sticking needles in funny places!”

<<“Idiot. I’ve done nothing for you worth payment, I don’t feel that way…I was worried for you, idiot. I couldn’t even bring a doctor for you with his needles, and I know nothing of acupuncture. I could only sit while your fever broke, pace with you, as your leg healed...but it did, in the end. You certainly are a strong devil. Even if your nose looks so silly.”>>

Harry naturally couldn’t understand a word, but his grin was from the heart. He thought of her Cantonese as sharp, strong music, and he could tell when she was worried for him–though he might never understand why. At least he had finally seen in her smile...to her, this was more than a duty.

<<”You can walk with a crutch. Your people ended the riots over a week ago. You must go back to them. To your friends, your white women…though they look too frail to ever split wood, or lift water, with their soft hands. You know, I fought with three robbers once? In the south market. I didn't win...but I fought. I survived.>>

"Hey, love, what's wrong? I don't...I'll...whatever it is..." Harry touched her shoulder. Churning with frustration to see the pain in her eyes, beyond him. He could only rest his hand near her face.  

<<"Why did your people, you devils, come to fight? Why throw our world into chaos? You have so much more than us, but you left your home - and still, you still seem so lonely. Never at peace. Hey…do you even want to go back? I don’t want you to ever go back.”>>    

He didn’t even know her name, or how she lived. How any of the Chinese millions lived, beyond this hidden cage. What they thought – why their children smiled. He didn’t even know why Parkes and Palmerston had sent him over the black ocean to a vast, voiceless country that had to burn. The Chinese his friends shot had died crying out like humans. The sergeants had screamed he had to throw the torches, burn the houses, never check for families still inside…

Dreams of fire racked his sleep that night. When he cried and woke, she was gripping his soaking hand, at his side.

“Why? Why, love?” He whispered, “Why me? Why you, so…?”

Shuang could have told him, if he could have understood, about the wheel of life in the demon’s hands. In another life, long ago and far away, they might have found each other. Lost. Journeyed through unknowable space, uncounted empty years, to the moment he kissed her hand and she fell upon his lips.

She laughed as he surged up against her, from the sickbed, her flesh awakening his. Threw her tunic away, gripped his slim body with her legs. She smiled, held his head on her breasts, called him her child. Cried out as he pushed her down and took her, called him her devil. Wept for joy and clung to his back, after they had finished. Called him her lover and her best friend, the husband of her soul.

She wasn’t Harry’s first girl, but it felt like his first breath. As if they had escaped the shipwreck of a world, as if they had fought for their lives, and souls and innocence.

“Love. You…”

She didn’t understand. It was a small mercy, because he couldn’t stay. Sleeping with a few natives was quite cricket, but you followed your regiment in the army; the ones who deserted got the death march and a noose at dawn. He would be shipping out in less than a month, for another colonial contretemps in another distant land. He couldn't stay or he would never go. 

-0-

Ilsa Tresckow had done what she could for the bleeding, dull-eyed Chinese girl who had stumbled into Canton’s little Lutheran mission, three months ago now. Shuang had been silent about what had happened, but there was violence of every sort abroad. Girls tortured in the brothels. Escaping, to be beaten and cast out by their own families. Opium addicts killing for their next fix. Persecution of converts, and any luckless associate of foreign devils, whenever the shame of defeat proved too much to bear.

The girl worked hard enough to earn her keep; she simply had no spirit or interest in anything. The missionaries had taught her about the Grace of God, and she had accepted all they’d said…but Ilsa knew from personal experience that acceptance was not faith. Shuang was as lost and damned as a medical missionary who’d lied for her ticket to China, burning for far-flung knowledge rather than preaching to the dying before they could have medicine. Sometimes she seemed in hell already; sometimes China seemed a place of entire darkness.

Shuang had been bright enough the day before; sometimes a glimmer of natural joy flared up in her gloom, to die out. When Ilsa found her gone from her bed, the river was the place that she ran to – it was far from the first time.

Five minutes past midnight. Shuang stood on the wooden bridge above the black Pearl River. When a young man with brown eyes and no red coat walked out of the darkness. Saw her.

“…Love. I looked for you, the embassies, the missions…I found you. This is a miracle–!”

Shuang turned to look at Harry; he stepped back. She put her hands on her stomach, in a gesture he could never have mistaken.

“Devil baby. Inside me. You leave us!”

Harry stared at her, stared at the river. It hit him like an avalanche, drove him to his knees. When Tresckow found them, he was clinging to Shuang’s waist. Begging her again, again, never, never throw her life away – though she seemed quite occupied for now with beating him over the head.

<<“Shuang! Get away from that odd man.”>>

“You…you speak Chinese!?” ‘That odd man’ sounded as if she could summon chariots of fire. 

“Ja, of course! Enough to live in China.”

“Miss…Frau…please, tell her I love her. I’ve deserted the army. Done a bloody runner. I should’ve never gone back, never left her, but my friends, bloody England...I thought two little people couldn’t fight the world. But they were going to ship us to India last month, the Mutiny. They told us we’d wipe out the black rapists, exterminate them. No good rebel but a dead rebel, it's all lies! I know they're human beings, like her! I still have nightmares, about the burning. I told them and they flogged me. My mates called me a darkie lover. Now, it’s the noose for Harry Fawkes, if they ever find me again.

"Tell her I love her. I'm sorry. I'm a fool, but I'll make this all right. The whole world might want us dead, but we can fight them...she can bloody well beat the world, if she saved me! I won't leave her alone. Never, never again.”

Ilsa relayed every word she could. Shuang reached out, hit him once more, lightly. Stroked his hair.

“Sorry, love.” He smiled against her hand, like a bad puppy, "I just rushed off, rushed back. Don't know how we'll live, or where. But it's a big country, bloody big! I heard of runners in India, they set up as warlords for some prince or sultan, ended up richer than kings! Ah, we can dream, but this is real, right here. Together, love, right where we belong."   

Shuang pulled Harry up from his knees, pressed her face to his chest. Held his hand over their child in her womb. The dawn came up like thunder in her smile.

Ilsa knew the right thing to do. Sent the deserter back to his fate, the child to an orphanage, the harlot back to the streets. But she saw Shuang clinging to her lover with all her considerable strength. Gazing on him as if they’d been raised from the dead.

She rubbed her spectacles, realised she was smiling for silly joy. The mercy of God could be very strange. Perhaps it had taken a voyage as far as China, and a miracle, for the missionary to believe. 

Perhaps they would break up brothels and opium dens together, as many as they could. Perhaps military advisers to some warlord, with Harry another Rajah Brooke or Pahari Wilson. Perhaps missionaries themselves; they had enough to thank God for. Perhaps an ordinary couple, somewhere in China, just as long as their luck held. They knew they were crazy but their world was insane, and they were ready to strike out for another adventure. 

Chapter Text

She had made a mistake. Bound hand and foot, goblins dancing around her in the firelight, grinning as they held up the shreds of her riding leathers…that much was inescapable.

Blood matting her hair, Greenskin warpaint flared like hell-sparks in her blurring eyes. She hadn't known she'd gone too far out. She knew nothing of her party, her friends, if they were still in the tunnels, or safe, they had to be safe…but she'd had no show, no chance to fight. Slow slicing, every cackle slid terror through her naked body, didn't stop. They would write the only story of Lei Qiang's daughter in spittle, blood and shame.

She'd at least thought she wouldn't be raped. Over a dozen Rangers, almost all men, were shot from ambush, or bushwhacked and flayed to death, each year, and they was 'acceptable losses'. But the American people would not have stood for a single female Ranger entering a goblin cave, if outrage and ravishment were a biological possibility.

Except certainty did not exist on the frontier; she been wrong about knowing that. As a lanky Greenskin aimed another kick at her bleeding backside, the man in the wooden mask shoved it away. The big male, warding the runts off from his virgin prize.

Ahab Girty. The Manslayer, the pale savage. Ranger parties ambushed and massacred, homesteads butchered, babies torn from their mothers' arms and crushed underfoot. The broken torture victims with names carved in their foreheads – GREENHORN, WEAKLING, FOOL – labels for all who were worthless because he could kill them.

The yellow papers painted the pale savage black - Susan knew he was blacker than their most callous readers could've stomached. Though weak and dry with terror, she tried to spit. The mask was a death's-head, his eye glowed like a witch-light, as his hand settled on her hair.

"Your people built the railways, do you remember?" A rough frontier accent, but a calm, quiet voice, "You appear full-blooded, but an underpaid white railworker most likely raped your semi-conscious mother, while Chinatown burned. Your father, beaten to death by an inebriated navvy, who walked free from court because homicide is the killing of a human being."

"…monster. My father was strong…!"

"My father was weak; he was a human." He struck her head against the ground again; she moaned and the goblins cheered, "These are facts, the truth. These monsters, as you call them, were driven from their tribal lands by humans, the ranchers and miners. When they fought back, when they were simply in the way, human guns and magical plagues killed them in thousands. Why do think they live in caves? Who are the monsters?"

"You, you kill children, innocents…" Susan searched for any victimhood in starved, eager goblin faces, saw none. The Manslayer sighed.

"The only innocent, good humans are the ones strangled at birth and put in a hole. Humans sent you, with months of training, against goblins who are as one with the night. A woman, stepping proudly into danger, out of your place. They would have raped you before long, the humans. My mother, my sister, raped to death, as I hid…by human! No reason. It is not right. EXTERMINATE THE BRUTES! Cleanse the world. This will be mercy."

An instrument of death, so mad and inhuman he couldn't rape her. Just draw his knife and begin to carve, the bait for an ambush that might put another patrol of horrified Rangers in the ground. Susan could see it, she had seen the bodies; she would lose everything. The Manslayer had made the first quick cuts, on Susan's brow, of VICTIM – when a wall of fire sprang up over her body. He stepped back, ever practical.

The Rangers also knew something of shock and awe. They charged into the cavern firing and screaming like monsters, the death of every goblin in their eyes. There was only Susan's party – ever astute, the Manslayer cried that it was only five fools – but goblins shrank, scuttling off down tunnels, pulling their dead or wounded tribemates.

Too close for guns, the Rangers drew swords on the goblins that stood. Savage little things, full of hate, as the humans savagely hacked in their rage. Ilsa's fireball didn't even the numbers, but more goblins ran. Harry Fawkes lost his prized Stetson in the ruck, lost his sabre in a ribcage. Killed the next greenskin with feet and fists – would have happily crushed it with his teeth. A goblin stuck a knife in his leg, but Ollendorf, the Ranger at his side, hauled him up with one arm. The charge towards Harry's childhood friend, bloodied and choking in the ring of fire, barely slowed.

Ever implacable, Manslayer reached into the flames – Ilsa shut them off, before he could drag Susan though them. He raised his knife, but the party Captain – the Goblinhunter, in his iron mask – put a bullet in him.

(Too many, on every side of every war. Slayers, terrorists, killers called heroes. Living for their killcounts, tilting at nightmare windmills. Lost in fantasy worlds where every infidel, raghead or Indian must die, invincible in insensibility)

"I'd tell you to give it up," Captain Ahab Grey, the Goblinhunter, pronounced, "If you were still human. But the only good goblin–"

In the moment's bloodlust, Susan bleeding before them, Harry, Ilsa and Ollendorf roared out the countersign. The Manslayer's burning eyes (as he fled, ever the survivor), promised death to every human. And death screams rose over the senseless shouts, as Harry fell down beside Susan. Covered her with his arms, held her because he meant never to lose her again.

-0-

Their Colonel Ballou had resignation papers ready for Susan – broken as she felt, she was livid. He would have told Harry to bear up and be a man, if he had been captured and scarred; his fellow Rangers would have stood him drinks.

As it was, everyone who knew what had been done to her, or thought they did, glanced with pity or contempt, as they rode back into town from the prairie. She would have hit something, except she was too weak to fight.

Weak, stupid girl, disgracing her uniform and her family. It wasn't true, she had just made a mistake – but three of her party had been wounded, one badly enough to be discharged. That would never go away, even as she grovelled at their feet, too shamed for forgiveness. They all gave it, they all said it had been worth it. Said they knew she would earn the chance they'd bought her.

Two drunken town goblins grovelled to her in street. If she had not returned safely, they babbled, all of their brothers for miles would have been lynched. Ollendorf made to drive them away with kicks; Susan held him back, then quickly left the greenskins behind.

Captain Grey told her tersely what mistakes she had made, that she would die if she made them again. Then he went back to searching for ways to kill goblins, in the knotholes of the barracks wall. Ilsa had saved Susan's yellow scarf from the cavern, her father's scarf – Susan hugged her so hard she knocked off her glasses.

"Sorry! I mean, thank you, partner…"

"It was worth some little trouble," Ilsa hid her eyes and her smile, "To see Brunhilda."

Susan asked her about Brunhilda. The Valkyrie, the warrior woman, imprisoned in the ring of fire. The hero, Siegfried, who had never known the meaning of fear until he saw her naked body. Because nothing was fearful but losing her, through death, or his own unworthiness.

-0-

The town had one flea-bitten hotel; Harry Fawkes checked into it that weekend. Threw his headband over a chair, lay on the mattress and waited, until Susan came in. Wearing a plain white blouse and a skirt instead of leathers, shutting the door behind her.

"Harry...you know me." She began, "We've know each other a long time. I'm not some damsel for you to rescue, or some prize for the great big hero, that isn't what this is about..."

"Susan, this was a mistake. You're still in shock, this isn't the right time. I didn't watch your back, I was an idiot..."

"Yeah, but you're a good guy, Harry. You saved me. It's stupid, I just feel I've got to do something reckless too…for the man I love." No turning back. Burning under her skin, trying to slow her breaths, her fingers touched his, "I probably am in shock. You'd better get that famous courage together quick."

Holding the girl he'd fought with, cried with, found, Harry looked very young and slight, but his touch was firmly loving. He searched her eyes, made certain, this was what she wanted. Where they both belonged, forever.

Susan finally let out a breath. Her bosom moved, and then he was kissing her. Pressing her tush back against the wall. She bit back into the kiss, pushed him towards the bed, pulling off her dress, ripping his shirt off. Her linen underslip stayed on.

"Susan, love, is it…?"

"It's fine. I don't want to be naked–not this time. I just want to be with you, Harry, now and always." Her fingers clung to his tousled head, as he enjoyed her chest, "Mm. Just like a boy, going straight for them. Didn't you always stare when I wasn't looking, and dream about this?"

Harry smiled, moving to her collarbone; ran his tongue along the sensitive skin. His fingers, down to the bottom of her spine. She gripped his hand at their side.

"Didn't you?"

"Mmph! Might have thought about it. Mmm, oh..." His mouth was busy for a while, before he came back to her lips, his eyes back to hers.

"I dreamt of slaying dragons, even thunderbirds, but this…my knees are shaking, love. Always loved you, but I never dreamt–!"

Then his fingers trailed down her stomach, and in pleasure, love and surprise, she was closer to him than she'd dreamt possible. Her long hair danced, as she tossed her head and gnawed at her lip.

"–AH! Don't stop, Harry. Don't you dare stop, or I'll break your nose!" He leaned in to kiss her, again. He moved her hand down, toward himself – between quick, hot breaths, Susan laughed. "My man. You know what you want...and you can take it, my hero…"

"Have to be," Harry gasped, as she touched him, "Have to be stronger, better. Protect you, all our friends, make it all right. I promise, I'll be your hero, I won't let you down, and never–!"

"Never change, Harry. Never leave. Now – less talk!"

She pushed him down on the bed, pulled her underslip down. Held his hand over her heart, as she rode him like a Valkyrie. 

Afterwards, they lay together glowing with love, soaked in each other. He traced the magically healed scar on her forehead. V.

"Don't say you're sorry," Susan whispered, "Thank you. Anyway, it looks like…"

"…a pure white crane, spreading her wings?"

"…Vee for victory? Victorious?" They'd surprised each other (again and again...) at the same time.

"Huh? I thought you'd like...?"

"I thought you'd think…?"

They laughed together. Susan clung to Harry's fingers again, kissed his hand.

"Love…we're so much stronger than that sad old monster. We can be whoever we want to be."

-0-

It was four years before they got their Manslayer. He knew every track and tunnel, a child of the night. There was nothing in him but survival and death.

He was a tough monster, but for four years the Rangers tracked his ambushes. Mowed down goblin raid parties, beat the hideouts of the dreaded chief out of their little bodies. Susan didn't enjoy it, but more and more people were dying; it had to be done. Every homestead they reached, they held back the savages until the cavalry came; but too many they didn't reach, and the most terrible day of all…

Finally, the Manslayer was stretched out in his gore at their feet. Harry put a bullet in his other kneecap, for safety; he barely groaned. The shot echoed over the plain and the empty sky. Susan gripped Harry's hand, forced herself to look. In their moment of triumph, their faces were bleak.

"…know…what's so good about goblins?" The Manslayer gasped, face still hidden, "They're honest. They dance, they fight, they hunt…they raised me, after your hypocrisy turned my stomach. My mother. My sister…"

"Yeah, shut up about them," Harry's voice was flat as iron, "Honest gobbo? Didn't you become Manslayer because Girty sounds a stupid name?"

No jokes, no excuses He had killed Rangers, soldiers and countless innocents. Poor big dumb Reeder, riddled with knives and bullets until he fell. Captain Grey, finally at rest from war and pain. Ilsa Treckow, a week after Ollendorf had said that he loved her. All for his crazed delusion that humans were evil monsters – the only monsters were creatures like him.

"You couldn't even protect your woman from me," The Slayer hissed, "I am legend, you are nothing–"

Harry bent down, and stared into burning eyes. Speeches had always been his greatest weapon.

"No. We're going to kill you and make you nothing; throw your body out for the crows. Kill your goblins, until they curse your foul little soul. You will not be a legend, no kind of hero; we will wipe out your madness and your memory, like a vile disease. Then autumn will come with its yellow moon, and I will make love to my wife. Then spring will come with its waving green grass, and our children will grow and learn. Then summer will come, with its shimmering heat, and maybe the races will learn to live in peace, because you will see none of that – you will be dead, dead, dead you unmanned, gopher-brained, hell-stinking, murdering son of a gun!"

"I'll see you in hell. Susan Lei–"

She looked away, as Harry blew his brains out.

She knew. She knew, killing the sad old monster made nothing right. Brought no one back, couldn't change the thing they'd done…but she still clung to her brave, wonderful man, mourned for her true friend Ilsa, and rode back to the little wooden house they shared. To try to do something other than killing.

-0-

Twelve years later, on the morning of the last day of Colonel Harry Fawkes, he left their bed in early morning before Susan woke. Wrapped in the sheets, she touched the patch of heat he'd left. Her passionate hero – she smiled to remember all his love – but a hero's work was his passion, as well as her. Not enough Rangers, too many threats, even if the goblins quietly rotted in their caves these days.

First she moved to baby Ilsa's crib and held her. Gave her a nipple to drink and gazed on her downy head as she prayed. Though the town pastor would not have approved, she lit a joss stick at her father's shrine; begged his forgiveness that she was too busy for morning tai chi.

Then she put on her gingham dress and apron, in the townhouse that was smaller than they could have afforded; they could help the weak as much by charity as they ever had by battle. She woke up Jim and Will by throwing herself on their bed, and tickling until they tried to push her off.

"RAH! I'm a huge, savage wendigo, and if you don't get up, and eat your grits–!"

"Then our Ma's gonna come, and tan your hide!"

(She wished a little it were Pa; but Harry was more the hero to the reaches of the nation than his household. She would still have followed him into hell, but wallpaper, groceries and the home he'd given her were Susan's kingdom, and the kids knew it)

Perse, their eldest, watched the squirming over the bed as if she wished she could pile in. Ilsa started bawling for attention, and Susan rushed to take her up again, before she and Perse made breakfast and the boys went through their morning exercises before school. Both of them wanted to be Rangers.

She kissed them, watched them down the street. She told them, Pa might be home early, and their eyes lit up…but the last day drew to an end, and he did not come home. He'd stayed all night at the barracks before, too often, she was ready to clip his ear when he came back, but Harry had not reached the barrack when he met the boy in the wooden mask, in the street.

"My name is the Manslayer. You killed my father. Die."

The gun cracked; Harry didn't even think of drawing his own. He stared at the savage mask of Susan's child – his son? – and almost smiled with his old hopeful grin. Then he thought of Susan, his children, and wept in the dirt where he bled out.

-0-

They had made a mistake. Their first night together, the second time they made love, her thighs had held him inside her. Four months later, she took leave from the Rangers to 'recover from what had happened'. She gave birth in an outhouse, in a hamlet where no one knew her name. Left her first child with a kind looking old couple, who tried not to look at her like a selfish whore.

She waited a year to tell Harry. He was a good man, he would be a great hero. One mistake would not derail his dreams; she made sure of it. And her?

She could not stay with her child; she had to go back to the fight. She would be called a weak woman, a broken shell, no hero, if she was stripped and marked by monsters, and never heard from again. Her father's spirit would curse her, and she would despise herself...she despised herself. She left her child behind, to go and be a hero. Put on a brave smile, every day. Prayed every night to the white man's God, whom she had heard forgave. She was a monster. But she would not leave the fight, even if it dragged her down to hell.

Two years later, the Rangers did not reach that hamlet in time. Goblins wiped it out, burning, flaying or crucifying all that lived in their fury. She did not find the old couple, or her baby. She wanted to die, hang until dead as she deserved, but Harry was there. His hopeful, impossible smile through their pain; things would get better. They could still make it right, if they tried.

They had saved their nation. Saved each other in their pain. He'd given her their wonderful family. She had dared to hope that God had been merciful...in truth, in spite of sufferings, He had. Fourteen years, so much glory and joy. Before their sin, their mistake, finally fell upon their heads.

Upon her son's head. She hadn't recalled that goblin spore buds grew slowly, so the goblins snatched away children, mostly boys, from the places they destroyed. Goblins had taken her child, with her Asian face. Raised him in the wilderness, on the stories of their hero, the Manslayer. Who had held his mother down, naked, before her child had been born.

A natural mistake. Believing the Manslayer had been his father, he had killed his father. Thrown his mother down on their cold bed, in silent, blank eyed despair.

She finally got up. Sent the children to stay with friends, put on her old uniform. Left, to find the misbegotten.

-0-

Two years later, Susan Lei faced her eldest son, across a mass of goblin bodies. His leg was broken. She had told him who his father had been. Almond eyes glared from the mask, hatred and pain.

"Mother. Why did you leave me? Your child..."

"My son..." Her hands reached out, touched his face, "I have other children. But no one in this world like HIM!"

And she snapped the Manslayer's neck. Held his body that seemed so pitiful and innocent. Cried and screamed and prayed.

She would have hung herself then, slain the last monster, but there were the children. She prayed with the despair of lost strength. Found the hope of God, and she could smile for them again. A mask for her pain, like the mask of Slayers. But for her children, she would be whatever hero she had to be.

When her children were grown, she rode away again. Wandered the plains, saving the innocent and slaying monsters. Wearing a nun's robes, because God had saved her from the impossible pit and there was no man left for her in the world. The people called her 'Mother Susan' and she bore it. She smiled only rarely, but it was beautiful to see.

Chapter Text

"Hey. Do you want to go on a quest with us to kill some goblins?"

"…weak and brainless as human children. Don't need potions when it's just goblins!"

"Yes! I'm a genius!"

Ilsa the wizard, hurling a flamestrike. Before the goblins knocked off her glasses and stabbed her in the stomach.

CLANG.

The sword knocked from Harry's hand. The face of dumb horror in the torchlight, before the goblins were on him with knives and axes. No reason to keep a man alive, only the women…

"Hiyaa! Hiyaa!"

She kicked out in fury, she killed, killed. Then the giant hobgoblin came from nowhere, caught her foot. Swung her head against the stone wall, and there was no more she could do. She was beaten, her clothes were gone, she was Lei Qiang's daughter, Fighter...but four goblins were pinning her down. All of them would do what they wanted with Lei Qiang's daughter, as she watched them break Ilsa's staff and stab at her eyes. She was helpless. Defeated. No. No. No…

-0-

"NUUUU! MMPH! NUUUU!

"She's broken her restraints! Hold her – UGH!"

"Morphesome response way over the limit! Crashing out now!"

"HELP! Some help, here!"

Corpswoman Shuang 'Fighter' Lei, EHSMC, almost choked on her own vomit before a techie ripped off the gag. Then she almost tried to bite her own tongue off, before she came back on her hands and knees. The rough steel floor, 200 miles above the planet; her own filthy hair and shaking muscles. The Sense-Sim couch behind her that she couldn't even look upon, as she tried to retch up everything.

"NO! No…Harry…run. Run. RUN!"

"Focus, Lei. Focus, damn you!" The Colonel's voice, harsh on the intercom, "You are on Empire of Humanity Training Orbital Coriolanus! You are an Imperial Space Marine! Are you going to break like this when you finally see combat? For frag's sake, act like a marine and take it!"

The light hurt her eyes, burnt shadows on her face. No monsters. The room was safe. Outside, elsewhere, in her mind, she would never be safe again, never free.

The techies were speaking gently now, but she wouldn't stay down. Trying to touch her, but she batted the arm away and charged for the door. With her father's training, with a space marine's fibre-aug muscles, orthoskin, Kevlar-sheathed bone…she could have let the steel door know she was there, at least. But in the end, she only struck the door once. Howled once, then straightened up and waved away the sedative with a death-glare.

Multi-million credit killing machines were not permitted to go crazy or get upset, if they had a hope of passing Armour training. 'Psychologically unstable' was a failure that could not be fought. Failing a simulation was a glaring black mark already. As was damaging Marine Corps property – Shuang felt shame upon shame to finally notice the fallen technician. She'd kicked his plastic-auged jawbone through. Fighting off nightmares of violation - unless this world she had woken in was the dream, or the nightmare.

-0-

Twenty months earlier

The Empire of Humanity Space Marines Corps trained its recruits longer and harder than any other fighting force in the galaxy. Fresh out of high school, Shuang could have joined Planetary Defence, the flightless 'Chickens', or even the Space Navy ('Scrubs' was their only printable nickname). But for the ancient honour of her family – for the atrocities screaming from a hundred planets every week, across the starnet – she had decided to be the strongest warrior she could be.

Basic had been a whole lot of shame, before the glory of being called 'good enough'. The distance runs and swims, at any hour of day or night, the inexhaustible PT and even the marksmanship…Shuang had taken and tackled them. Her father's martial arts, and the illegal gene-mods her grandmother had died in jail for getting, built power and concentration rather than pure stamina or endurance–Shuang learnt the difference after a week in a frozen tent. But she was strong, and hours of meditation had made her the master of her soul. She knew she was no quitter. She loved her family, she loved to fight, and the Lei school of martial artists did not give up.

But the shame came in, and the doubt, when she made a mess of reassembling her plasma blaster – the sergeant yelled, and her comrades laughed. She'd always been hopeless with machines, but none of her friends had ever laughed at her in school. Then she deliberately made her bed the wrong way, because some rules were just stupid, and everyone in the barracks had extra PT except her. She'd always, easily, been a strong-hearted big sister to her friends – but the weariest recruit wouldn't even accept a glance from her, after that.

She'd always been a great martial artist, but instructors bawled that she had to forget that rubbish, learn real fighting. Punched her to the ground, whenever she tried to prove them wrong. She'd thought she was strong, she'd known she was no quitter – but when she passed out before the end of a run, that counted for nothing. They called her a useless slag, and for one terrible night she believed it.

Then there was the Milling. You had to punch another recruit in the head for two minutes, with gloves, while they punched you. No dodging, no guarding, no moving from the spot; the idea was to make sure you shot back at Tauian stormtroops instead of ducking. Shuang's father had been teaching her to duck and dodge since she'd been six and hitting her when she didn't. She only saw one way she could possibly get through.

Thirty seconds in, Shuang's opponent hit the deck. With no step-in, a left straight entirely from above the hip. Even the fallen recruit's best friends cheered like mad. If you can't take some knocks, don't join the Marines.

"Has to be two minutes," Rapped an instructor with a stopwatch, "Corporal Yates, step up, please."

Shuang somehow lasted another minute, but something about the cheers helped her not to duck. She woke up on the canvas with a terrible headache and a smile.

Basic stripped you down. Let you know just how strong you had to be. Basic took your dignity and your name, but the Marines gave it back.

The sergeant who promised to beat her half to death if she ever gave up. The redhead with glasses who coached her in Rules of the Corps. The slight blonde girl who Shuang taught to punch, urged through every mile of run, and simply sat with when she despaired. The two unknown comrades who'd carried her to the end of the course where she'd fallen. Even the broke-nosed guy who'd talked her ear off about spreading the Emperor's light to the furthest star.

Marines who didn't help marines didn't get the help they needed from anyone; Shuang knew this. With a grin, a ready arm, and the undying faith that she would never give up, she had led them to the truth. They were a band of brothers and sisters; she was Fighter, the name her comrades had given and she had earned. Their strength had always been in them and their strength would always be in the Corps.

That was the theory, at least.

-0-

No one helped Recruit Blake. The marines would've loathed such a mollycoddler as much as the pariah himself. The instructors naturally baulked at ordering anyone to assist him or lightening his burden by an atom; they had tried abuse, collective punishment, using him as a team-building object of team-hate, and were now finally waiting for him to wash out. Skinny, bullied at school and beaten at home, Blake wasn't actually terrible at anything, but always behind the pack on every run. He didn't push himself, let alone for the sake of others. Arrogant as all the truly weak, he started fights over insults Shuang would have borne with a smile; had never asked for help, or thanked anyone for anything. Most unforgivably, he complained.

Another distance run in the last week of Basic; the instructor had made clear, anyone who missed the time would wash straight out. Blake was at the very back of the pounding, huffing recruits. Red faced, falling further behind than the back, stumbling over bluegrass and snaffar burrows as his feet dragged. The recruits noted that weeks of misery would soon end with his departure; turned back to the run. A few shouted insults about Blake's mother. That spurred him on darkly, but the hecklers soon laid off, and Blake fell even further back.

Then Fighter dropped back from the middle of the pack. The leading sergeant bawled at her once, then let her go. At Blake's side, she could smell the anguish in his sweat, as his eyes bulged in their sockets.

"Need to run faster, if we're going to make that time." No response, "I'll kick you back to the start line if you give up. You can do it. Don't give up. " Another runner suggested what Shuang could offer Blake to make him run; Shuang smiled evenly over hoarse laughter.

"Everyone knows...I'm going down," Blake gasped, "I'd have to be stupid not to know it…weak."

"Don't you hate being weak? Didn't you join up to get strong? Be strong now, and you'll be a marine! In five minutes, it'll be too late! Show all those dumb fraggers you're a space marine, Blake!"

"Yeah!" Fawkes, the recruit of the broken nose, was dropping back as well, "How are we going to drive the Raptors off the Veridian moons. together, if you give up now?"

She went on as she ran; Blake only jogged in silence. It was seven minutes before he realised that no one was visible except for Fighter, by his side. If she kept on at his pace, she would inescapably miss the time. He found himself breaking into a run, agonised and gasping, even if it was already too late.

Fighter smiled. Her father would probably smack her about a bit, but going through Basic again from the start didn't seem too bad, right now.

Somehow, they made the time. Fighter's friends were all in the mess hall, but Blake did confess his love for her when he'd finished puking, and deliriously try to kiss her without wiping his mouth. Afterwards, the PT sergeant – a black woman with a vicious white scar across her nose – asked Fighter if she'd thought of becoming an instructor.

"Ma'am, yes, ma'am!"

"Wrong answer. You'd enjoy playing schoolmarm with every wash-out like Blake, until my beloved Corps is full of limp dicks? You'll make a good groundpounder, Lei, but never NEVER, try to lead, train, advise, or even pick up soap in the shower, until you learn to LET FRAG-WITS WIPE THEIR OWN ASSES!"

"Ma'am! Recruit Blake would have washed out if I hadn't–"

"THAT'S THE POOOOINNNT, NUMBNUTS! WEED OUT THE NON-HACKERS!" Her red tongue beat out the words on Shuang's right eye, "BLAKE IS NOT, AND NEVER WILL BE, A MARINE!"

"Ma'am, he finished the run, Ma'am! Isn't all this meant to turn weaklings into marines, Ma'am?"

"If it was a steroid shot, we wouldn't have any drop outs. We make the strong into weaklings, then we make marines! Your friend is a failure, and will be until he dies. Run 50 laps of the training field before you see what's left in the mess hall."

-0-

"…and then we got pushed out of a plane over the north Nova Canadian mountains with only a parachute and a combat knife. I was frozen and starving, but still heading west after the plane, when I stupidly bedded down in this cave that a grizzly was already using. I thought, after all that, I'm going to die a horrible, pointless death…unless I cut this fragger's throat out, before its claws carve my back as far as my lungs."

Shuang's old friends, back in the sterile sprawl of Megaplex Alpha, burst out laughing at this point, until she dragged out the huge stinking pelt. She didn't show off her back, more scar than skin, but she assured them she'd been drekking terrified. Life wasn't a simsense game – facing an unkillable foe at the end of your strength, you simply had to do or die. It was the first thing marines learnt – though her instructors, when she staggered back into the training camp like a fur-clad barbarian, had been uniformly speechless. Her father, when he'd heard, had declared that now he could die in peace.

With light-rifle mock battles, wilderness survival and formation marching that had had nothing to with the battlefield for millennia, Basic Training had been very like a time warp to a grim, bloody past. The General who spoke at their graduation claimed that the training of a warrior hadn't essentially changed from the time of the Spartan Helots. The Empire did train an elite volunteer force, to defend its thousand worlds from the rebel and alien, rather than conscripting slave soldier hordes, to die in a distant jungle or charge machine guns through drowning mud. Shuang certainly felt glad to have escaped a birth in some such primitive age.

Then the Chaplain stood up in his robes and armour, to give the reading of the Code. A marine protects the innocent. A marine speaks only the truth. A marine never attacks an unarmed foe. Marines fight for each other.

"A true warrior-servant of the Emperor," The Chaplain went on to declare, "Is a law unto themselves. Power and Imperium come from the barrel of a gun, and from the human will! If you Corpsmen must obliterate a city, on some distant rebel planet, then for humanity's sake, you must! Yet, the Emperor's truest servants will bear this Code in their heart, and their honour and mercy will be a beacon – the Emperor's light, to the galaxy's darkest frontier!"

Shuang knew what kind of marine she wanted to be, as well as the strongest. From his tears as they sang a final hymn to Gladius Rex, God-Emperor, she guessed Corpsman Harry Fawkes felt the same. They'd sort of hit it off throughout Basic, talking about Harry's dreams and his family farm on Old Earth. But she'd decided to celebrate her graduation with Corpsman Oswald Blake.

The notion that Blake was born to failure – that no effort could help him, that it was an incurable idiocy in her for trying – somehow rubbed Shuang the wrong way. The Corps said that Blake was both a marine and no marine. A good marine accepted what was, from the first minute of Basic, and did not complain or fight. But she couldn't accept this, so she had to fight.

Throughout her evening on the town with Blake, she told him he was a marine a hundred times; there was almost nothing she didn't say to urge his self-belief and diligence. She did have to keep telling him that her eyes weren't on her chest, and eventually smack his face. Still, Harry had the same problem, and the slap might also do him some good.

As for herself, she was approached by a Colonel during her leave, a small man with antique cybereyes, and given the option of Armour training as her specialisation. It would mean officer rank when and if she finished, and strength beyond her dreams; everything else was classified information. Her father was against it; he seemed to think she'd lose her humanity with enough metal on her or inside her. But when her old instructor actually called up Shuang to apologise for some injudicious words, it seemed like a sign; a change in destiny. And she'd learned with the claw scars on her back that survival was never assured. Facing a savage universe would take every bit of strength she could gain by any means. She signed up for Armour training and bid farewell to her comrades. With hopes of meeting again, on a battlefield among the stars.

On leave, half-way through Armour training, she heard about Blake. He had been sent with an infantry platoon to clear a Volucris infestation on the factory moon of Char. Six legs, six feet long, roaches that made a tiger look like a housecat.

Ilsa Tresckow and Harry Fawkes told Shuang that Blake had been on point at the rear. After about thirty minutes shooting combat, among four hours of edging through the gloom of city-sized smelting plants, a swarm of Bugs had dropped from an upper walkway. Blake had seen their heat-signs through the shadows – his helmet recorder confirmed that – but he hadn't fired a shot or made a sound.

"Must have frozen up." Harry said, "Can't blame him too much, since that's what I did, when the Bugs tore us up from behind. My first fight and I never got a shot off either, before–" The hand on his knee shook; his new chrome knee and leg. "First fight, after all we went through...frag it, but thank the Emperor, we got out alive. Just wish they could give me new chrome nerves as well, but we're all getting psych-counselling. We'll be back to burn those fragging Bugs out, next time."

Ilsa, who was leaving the front lines for Intelligence, remained silent. Cold green eyes said to Shuang what she knew–

"This is my fragging fault. If I hadn't pulled Blake through that run, he'd be alive, and Reeder, Ollendorf, Brown, and your leg…frag, frag, frag! HARRY!"

Nothing like a marine, she had clung to his legs and wept. He had gone into battle, he had almost died; she had killed a bear with a knife, but she could not let go of him. Ilsa quickly shut the door before anyone saw the dishonourable, unsoldierly outburst.

"…Lei…Shuang. You couldn't have known. You'd have carried me out of that fragging factory, if you'd been there, just like the others did. We are the Space Marines, and none of us ever give up. I know Blake would've done better, if he'd survived, because that's what I'm going to do. You…need to get up and walk away from this. You're going to be Armour."

It had been Harry's dream to be Armour. A bionic leg, Oswald Blake and Shuang Lei, had killed it. Shuang stood up, unsmiling and walked away to she knew not where.

Chapter Text

A marine with a suit of Tactical Power Amour was just about the deadliest thing in the known universe. Firepower enough to destroy a mid-sized warship or city. Omni-direction thrusters. A digital engineering battalion, intelligence corps and reconnaissance unit carried in its Oracle software. Proof against any known weapon, at least for long enough to fire back. Wherever a drop pod fell from orbit onto a rebel world, a single armoured marine packed in impact gel and pumped with drugs, the rebel and the alien surrendered or died.

Armour training worked Shuang’s brain harder than Basic had tested her body, but the Corps had discovered she was worth teaching more than drill and obedience. Instructors went over programming theory as many times as she needed, when they weren’t stealing bits of the training Armour, to ensure she was doing safety checks. There was a lot of Sense-Sim training. A lot of running around the great plains wearing several tonnes of grey alloy, pounding the tar out of each other with black adamantine knuckle-studs and gel bullets. That could be great fun.

There were lots of dropouts. Marines got injured in training. A few fell down in a blizzard and didn’t get up. There were marines, even combat-blooded marines, who couldn’t take theSense-Sim run; watching a megaplex burn in nuclear fire, again, only because of their choices. The endless testing knocked out the rest of the bottom three-quarters that their helpful instructors had orders to eliminate. Eliminating all of them, however strong, would have been as simple as keeping the pressure on for as long as it took.

No one is strong enough. Everyone has a breaking point. Shuang knew that from the first time she’d seen a Tauian refugee girl raped into mangled insensibility in Sense-Sim (She’d blasted the rapists to atoms and barely passed). Any marine who didn’t quit could get through Basic, but beyond there was a galaxy burning with war, and quiet, cold tortures without end. A marine and her comrades could face it all with a grin – but an armoured marine faced it alone, in her deadly steel coffin. All of them broke in the end.

If a marine couldn’t bear the power they held, or its powerlessness in the face of a dark universe – that was the fault of the horrors, not the hero. Anyone in Armour training that year who disparaged a dropout could prepare to have a wrathful Kung Fu mistress beat them to jelly over the course of the next sparring day.

Still, Fighter swore she wouldn’t break. By the end of the year she’d seen more combat and horrors through Sense-Sim than a dozen veterans, and, in the sense that such things were being done to men, women and children all over the galaxy, every minute of it had been true. If she had been Emperor, she might have thrown whole planets into Basic, until there were enough heroes to save everyone. But there was politics, that held the Space Marines back from even the warzones they could’ve taken. She wasn’t a leader. She just had to get her Armour, go out to fight and save as many worlds as she could. She could not break.

After the first year, dropping out was forbidden. The extent of the Space Phase training was a military secret. It was located on an orbital habitat, Shuang presumed, to maintain that secrecy. She only briefly considered that the habitat caged in both secrets and trainees.

-0-

“Corpswoman Lei. After implantation with many millions of credits in cyber and bio augmentation, you passed counter-interrogation training on the first attempt. Of course, nobody gets a second one. Then the standard special forces skeletal work, which I can remember hurting like, ah…?”

“…like words aren’t enough, sir. Still better than getting a pain-enhancer tied to my tailbone for four minutes. Shuang Lei. Corpsman. Serial number–”

“Alright, this isn’t another interrogation, just a chat. After that, you were drowned a few times and revived. Simulated frost bite and limb loss, some more pain tolerance tests. Standard procedure. Then Hell Week. We showed you your father dead. You hunted his killers across the planet, then let them go when we gave the order. We put you through a simulation of that FUBAR sweep on Char, from your corpsmates' helmet records. You didn’t freeze up. We put you through it again, with a catastrophic Armour failure. You watched all your comrades die, the Bugs peeling off your Armour. You still fought with your side arm and your teeth, as they picked you apart.

"You’re a good marine, Lei. The best in CQC I’ve seen. Whatever meditative mumbo you learned, it got you through hell. Then you were beaten and raped by little green men, in a simulation of some ridiculous fantasy world...why should that break you? You were a good marine. Why are you throwing your career down the waste unit by refusing to retake?”

“I will give my life for the Emperor, Sir. You know I’ve faced being devoured before, and it was an honour. It was an honour to be tortured for the Emperor–I broke in the end, but everyone breaks. But it is impossible to be honourably raped.”

“That’s pride, Corpswoman. Get over it. You must give up on honour, if the Corps demands it. If you are captured, tortured, and raped by Taurian rebels on Star Holovision, every day for a year – you must not break. You must continue to kill the Emperor’s foes, as a Space Marine, even in total defeat and utter disgrace, because you are a multi-million credit weapon holding the power of a steel god, and you TAKE ORDERS FROM THE MARINES! You will not break, Lei. You will not give up.”

“Do the male candidates have to get over being raped, sir?”

“That’s classified. You’re out of the Corps if you ask a stupid question like that again. I’ve known marines who were captured and raped – good marines. Some of them could continue to function as marines, some could not – we did all for them that we could. Are you saying you’re better than them, Lei? Are you saying they should all hang themselves, for honour? What the hell do you want me to put on your discharge report?”

“That rape is wrong, Sir. That I joined the Corps to fight such things. That I did my best, and it wasn’t nothing.”

-0-

At least the Colonel hadn’t tried to claim that more Sense-Sim rape would give her empathy with rape survivors. Fighter didn’t presume that she could know what anyone felt or suffered. She hadn’t presumed, since the cyber-surgeons had broken all her bones to put the Kevlar lacing in, fitted the big super-adrenal glands in her neck, or doubled her heart’s pumping power with synthetic fibres. A big heart – she could almost smile at that. She didn't need to learn weakness to pour out her blood for the helpless. 

Fighter gazed from orbital habitat Coriolanus’ viewing window, at the distant stars. Her new skin was tougher and darker; it almost felt like hers already. Getting another inch in height wasn’t so bad. They had finally let her regrow her ponytail. She’d known the glands had addiction problems when she requested them – she hadn’t understood she might get addicted, to the mad rush of courage and fury, one nerve-twitch away. Her broad clear face was at rest now, though. Cold and controlled as Armour.

Martinez had gone crazy during his bonework. She felt sorry for him. She would never hear of him again, or what the Corps did with their multi-million credit weapons when they broke.

Don’t break. Don’t complain. Don’t ask questions. The unwritten Code. The generals had to have kept it very well if they could keep up that senseless fragging rape simulation, then talk about the honour of the Space Marines. They might not spot the contradictions for another thousand years, unless one of them did, and spent the rest of his career fighting it. But Fighter knew she would spend the rest of her life on the battlefields among the stars.

She was a Space Marine. She was not afraid or ashamed. She could still feel, she would always fight – and in a hundred lifetimes of Shuang or Susan Lei, she had never felt stronger.

-0-

She stood nearly a half-foot taller again now, counting metal, and half-again as broad. Down the arm of her Beta Shadowclaw Armour, touchplates responded pliantly as her orthoskin. Exoskeleton servos moved the black alloy plates, and her blaster scorched the wall where a Lizard’s jaws had gaped. With three more shots, Lieutenant ‘Fighter’ Lei blasted one alien down. Twenty left.

A green enemy blast struck her pauldron; she didn’t duck. 5% damage glared in her headset; she sidestepped in the next second, still firing. The marines of her squad ducked for doorways or rubble, snap-shooting red plasma. The fusion plant – the enemy’s strongpoint – loomed above them, into the impossibly blue sky of Far Hope.

A frontier world, settlers burdened with the crazy desire to get as far from the Emperor’s light as possible. Still, Fighter had grimly faced the mission, after the planet’s FTL comms had winked out, of bringing stray sheep back to the imperial fold, living or butchered. Following one warpjump in the corvette Slipdagger, and one supersonic drop pod ride that had reduced the town hall to a crater when she came down on it, she'd been almost relieved to see the Lizards. The aliens from uncharted space had taken Far Hope and its colonists by stealth. Prisoners would be shipped offworld for the brain soup that stood at the peak of Lizard cuisine, unless the Space Marines had anything to say about it.

Nineteen replaced twenty in the corner of Fighter’s vision, as the head got scorched off another marine. She screamed at them to stay down, fired back. The Lizard ducked with superhuman speed – five feet without the stoop, but spike-tailed, piranha-toothed regenerators. Tough as leather. Their squawks sounded like mocking laughter.

Rico and Slade down, before she’d found the squad holed up in the spaceport and killed all the Lizards there. Williams, Brown and now McGee down, in the minute she’d taken failing to make a decision. She could have levelled the power station with her belt-fed shoulder rockets – setting a whole colony back to groundbreak and failing the mission. The Lizards had every side covered in force; the marines had no real cover from full-powered blasts. Ilsa could have planned an attack, Harry could have inspired one, but she was no leader. That was unchangeable, she had always known…she was a Fighter. She would not retreat, she could not watch her men die.

“FALL BACK, EVERYONE! I’ll cover you!”

The marines backed away. Soft humans with no place on this battlefield – no more than the puppy she’d found straying through the empty city, and now passed from her hip compartment to her bewildered NCO. Beta Nightclaw Armour was a light stealth model, not made for frontal assaults – but lightning burst from her super-adrenal gland, and that no longer mattered to her. Her thrusters flashed blue and she leapt.

Green bolts flashed round her as she arced over the station. Sub-thrusters twisted her into clear air. The Lizard sniper on the station roof – that might have lived and eaten humans for centuries – burst over the concrete under her armoured kick. She swung her fist at the second lizard – fangs and yellow blood splattered as it crumpled.

Blasts bit through the walls from every side, as she dropped through the roof hatch. Her pauldron blown away, her orthoskin feeling the heat, her shoulder thrown back as she landed in a crouched stance; 25% damage. But now the Lizards had to dial back their blaster settings, or risk a stray bolt blowing them all to atoms. Her aural sensors picked out Imperial blasters, her own men still firing, nineteen dropped to eighteen – she shouted again at them to fall back, thundering towards the heat-signals that blazed on every side.

Not enough heat signals. A Lizard suited in silver, invisible to infra-red, scuttled out to lunge at her groin. Sidestep, slap the bio-electric machete into the air, swipe the unholy alien weapon away. Her fist smashed through the monster’s bones and flesh; a primal roar burst free from her lungs.

There were six of them in the canteen at the end of the passage. 45% damage, as she broke through the door, firing as she ran, shaking with flooded adrenalin – only two Lizards went down. She dropped hard behind a pillar. Chunks blew off it, off of her. 50% damage. She had to keep firing, still as clear water, even as metal burnt on her skin. One more Lizard went down blasted. And another, in a stealth-suit, drove its sword into her back with a venomous hiss. 70% damage. Too high for pain, she still felt hot blood pool on her back.

Backhanding the Lizard’s head off – the sword still stuck in her wrenched from its grip – she snapped off a micro-grenade and flung it. Two more aliens, most of the room, blown to bits. The survivor caught her with a burst, as she staggered back to the door. 80%. More Lizards skittering in behind, yellow eyes flicking over her, and their guns.

Another hit of adrenalin – way over the limits. She didn’t feel the blasts hit her stomach as she charged, or her chest. It took her broken Armour, synthetic skin, Kevlar laced bones and the titanic heart of a hero to keep her up – she could even faintly feel the pain of burns, through chemical frenzy. She felt rage for her dead comrades, and her own death, as she chopped to burst a stomach, swiped the next Lizard into the guns of two more, then spun about in a roundhouse kick that broke all three of them.

She dropped to one knee until her head cleared. Then, without checking her Armour damage, she went to clear the rest of the building.

-0-

When she’d blasted down the few remaining Lizards, she burnt her way through to the huge bunker under the power station. The colonists were curled up in ranks of cold-stasis units for shipping. The Lizard’s Elder/Ayatollah/Commander (The word didn't translate) was raising his claws. The colony's governor was lying on a table, with bulging legs, a lizard’s arm, and scars full of scales.

It came out at blasterpoint that the Lizards had first come as traders, buying genetic material to farm cloned brains – but quicker profits from thousands of pre-grown brains had proved too tempting. The Governor had sold them all the colonists, for a planet’s ransom in gold – and Lizard tissue implants he thought would give him their regenerative powers, and near-immortality.

"The brainsss are oursss," The Lizard hissed, "We fairly purchased them from their master. If you sssieze them, or molest me, that will be an act of war."

Some of the 'brains' that Shuang could see behind blue glass had children's faces. Her Oracle wrist computer helpfully informed her that 'leader', 'master' and 'owner' were a single word in the Lizard's language. And a Lizard-human hybrid was their brother; as qualified to sell off short-lived humans as to trade cows or pigs. Shuang actually agreed; the governor was nothing she'd ever consider human.

"These people belong to Emperor Gladius Rex. That monster will spend the next century in cold stasis, plugged into Sense-Sim hell. You'll spend a few years getting cut up in xenobiology labs before they put you down like a dog. Coward."

(The colonists who had traded with aliens would be sent to a prison world. It might only hurt her if she vouched for them, but she would)

"When you have sssurvived for over a thousssand yearrsss...you cannot ssssimply die. I have sssseen true interssstellar war – you hairlesss Ape. Planetsss blown apart from within, without defenssse. You will ssseee it too, and every one of you Apesss will die."

Armour torn and body burnt, Shuang stood and looked down on the Lizard like a warrior queen – or simply a woman unafraid, who knew who she was.

"Yeah, I'll see it. They told us we'd see the stars, together. We'd all be heroes...well, a world like this one needs them. Bring your war. Nothing you can do will defeat us."

-0-

"...Captain Shuang Lei of Far Hope. For outstanding heroics in the Emperor's service, for unyielding devotion to the way of His light...we honour you. "

She stood before the towering chapel windows of Starstation Ajax, as ranks of marines saluted. The Imperial Arbiter, who spoke with the voice of Gladius Rex himself, was saluting her. The crowds of workers and dignitaries applauded behind the marines – the comrades she'd saved – as camera drones flitted like steel angels around her dark and shining head.

It almost felt shameful, when she'd failed six comrades and almost won nothing but her own death. She'd almost failed, at every step...but here she stood. The shame of victory was better than the hope-killing liar of failure, and she would do better next time. Save all her friends, wipe out every single foe – some of them might be more than monsters, but it was her duty to protect and kill, not sort that out.

She had done her duty. For her Corps and her people, for her family and her friends. She'd slain a bear and saved a pup – the dog she'd carried from Far Hope was now the regiment's petted mascot and a great new friend. She had saved thousands of innocents, which was really the only thing that had made her charge the gates of hell, drunk on implants. She was strong. Her father would watch her on holovision, with pride...she had never cried such happy tears.   

(The idea that this was all a Sense-Sim, or a dream – that she had failed Basic, failed Armour, died in the Power Station – never even been a citizen of the Imperium, but a brave, smiling adventurer, whose hope, but not her dreams had died in a filthy cave – she barely considered. She had struggled, fought and staked her life to stand here. This was her, and so much more, and nothing would change that.)  

The golden dagger was placed in her hands, the Medal of Honour. And the station's great cannons let off two full broadsides, blotting out the endless stars with white fire. The power and glory of man.

In the assembled ranks, Ilsa applauded calmly, while Harry whooped his lungs sore. She needed to speak to them about her mission, as soon as she got a chance. There was the faintest, vanishing sense of loss; she'd never had the time or will to be more than a friend to Harry Fawkes. But they were friends, and comrades, always....you couldn't have everything in a single run. She was a hero, and Harry's smile said he would be, someday.

No second chapter to Shuang 'Fighter' Lei's career as a Space Marine was ever written. Perhaps she refused to devastate a planet of rebels or aliens, and the Corps took steps. Perhaps a wary enemy put one blast through her armour, by a freak unhappy chance. Perhaps anything or nothing...but there were a million worlds elsewhere, and so much more for a hero to do and see.      

Chapter Text

I.

The tower of Ilsa Tresckow, Wizard, appeared to be exactly seven miles tall, and no wider across than its mistress’s ankle. Its interior dimensions were naturally – or unnaturally – rather more convenient. Each of her servant golems and Djinn descended on its own invisible stair, and a dozen other flights led off into exotic planes of existence. The ceiling-space, as well as every floor, had been covered by specialised thaumaturgical devices within her first century of possession. After one more millennium of inward and external refinement, upon the conjunction of all ten planets and seventeen moons, she purposed ascent to the lowest rank of divinity. The original and ultimate purpose of magic, since naked man-apes had played with masks and bones. Older archmages had been reduced to screaming spectres in the attempt, but she’d learnt from their mistakes.

Ilsa herself had long ago dispensed with robes and wrappings. Though even in her dead-and-dust parents’ country manor, she had worn the clothes she wished…her spectacles had been plain glass for millennia, but they still graced the bridge of her nose. She had kept her legs strong and trim, her breasts firm and her eyes sharp, as six thousand years past when she'd been twenty. Yet her bare feet ascended the central stairway, that nothing could tread upon but her, with millennial slowness.

To the towns and cities in her tower’s shadow, she was already a living goddess. They still sent her tribute for the goblins, dragons and other monsters she had exterminated throughout the land, over three thousand years previously. Ilsa wished she could say she had no need of tribute, but mechanisms of apotheosis were endlessly expensive. The lower heavens held out a million new powers and independencies–apart from true immortality – and ten million fresh frontiers beyond the single ancient tower where she waited now. The most mystic meditation could barely barely drown hungry impatience. The edge of ascension could only be a cold, comfortless place to sit for a thousand years.

There were imps, sprites and merely human agents across the world and beyond, to direct in quest of needful components. Her purchases could have counterbalanced the economic activities of all but the largest kingdoms. There were routine spells to maintain her tower. Potions and subtle enchantments for her person and her incremental wizard’s progress. She corresponded fulsomely with the archmages of other lands, trading insights and secrets, but her exalted peers were rather too preoccupied or paranoid for dropping round to take tea.

She had already placed that evening’s Dancing Lights cantrip on her younger brother’s tomb. He lay among the stars and comet-frost, on the tower’s highest floor. His eternity lost forever to a thoughtless moment.

Then there was the occupation that had long taken up the heart of her hours; not most of them, but the heart. She reclined with a glass of twice-extinct Kulberry wine, before an ancient grade four scrying mirror she should really have thrown out five thousand years ago. She bent her mind towards a comparatively unfantastical world elsewhere.

A bright-eyed, messy-haired boy with a sword and no fears. A hearty, strong-armed girl with a broad ponytail and big smile. A wizard of sorts, setting out her great adventure – with nothing but her devastating beauty, a handful of cantrips, and mental powers that almost exceeded her ruinous pride.    

“…I swear, one day, I’ll be a dragon slayer!”

“…never make a deal with a dragon!”

“…you’re smart, you went to college and all that drek. If you’ve got anything…?”

“…college girl always pulls something out the hat!”

“…it was worth some little trouble, to see Brunhilda…”

“…make you smile every day, because I love you. You’re my best friend. Better than that idiot Harry.”

“…a wizard…arrives precisely when she is needed.”

Time after time, the three young heroes set out; to find triumph, heartbreak or both. Ever the natural philosopher, Ilsa had catalogued over thirty worlds – spinning, like the spokes of a cartwheel, within a single, simple story. Retold, reborn, undying.

She had watched over the fuller lives of her poor brother, many times, but with more pain than joy at what she had held and lost. The little blonde cleric – Ilsa’s lip curled – turned up about a third of the time but didn’t matter. It was fundamentally three of them against the worlds. Sometimes the disaster of their first mission or quest was on a smaller scale, but it usually appeared in some form. They almost never found final, flawless triumph or joy, but that seemed to be the nature of the multiverse. Although if it happened that any one of the three was born to die, or to take a backroom role as the city, nation or world was saved, it was inevitably Ilsa Tresckow. While Harry Fawkes threw his womanising ways and blind ambition at the feet of Shuang ‘Susan’ Lei. The pure survivor, the undefeated heroine, perfect in strength and compassion…

…Ilsa’s best friend across a dozen worlds, whom she could only watch in a mirror. She had spent centuries searching this singular world for Susan, and finally determined she was alone.

-0-

The world she now looked upon was an unmagical, barbaric planet, where human-animal hybrids engineered for a past war were now packed into filthy ghettos, hated by humans and hating. Susan ‘Fighter’ Lei was a rabbit-girl with a brave heart and a strong kick. Harry Fawkes was a tabby-striped catboy, with a feline’s freedom and pride energising the mission of his life. Even so changed, Ilsa couldn’t have failed to recognise his speeches, or her teasing smile.

“…it’s always been my dream that beast-folk and humans could come together in peace, some day. We’re holding a rally for peace this Thursday, with food, music and testimonies. Take these fliers for all your friends, and I'd love to see you there."

“Might come for the food instead of the speechifying – but, yeah, good luck with that dream, tiger.”

A sympathetic human reporter, named Ilsa Tresckow, was investigating a new street drug that reduced beast-folk to a feral state. Susan saw her menaced by street-gang foxes, threw her lettuce falafel aside to fly to her rescue – although Ilsa, Archmage, was pleased to see that Ilsa, Reporter, had been ready to draw a handgun in any case. As far as she stood above her other selves, in many respects, she still had pride in their various achievements.

After almost talking a drug-crazed mouse-girl out of a suicide bombing, Susan was cornered herself by another street gang. Wolves. Their alpha, a stunning black she-wolf in a leather jacket, got her teeth round Susan’s neck from behind. Millenia of prey instinct broke years of Kung Fu training. Susan trembled and scrabbled against asphalt, helpless, as the alpha wolf growled in deep excitement and pawed her own crotch.

The wolf forced her to her knees. Still, with superlapine effort, Susan broke away. She had to dodge round a bear ganger, jump-kick the back of his neck, before she could finally run and escape, to Harry’s place.

His feline eyes were bright with pity as she spilled out her troubles and terror. It seemed he only had one way to bring her comfort in his love-drunk head.

“Say if it gets too much. Remember to breath.”

With agonising care, he licked his way down from Susan’s neck to the white fuzz on her chest. She stretched out on his futon, still as death. Staring up at the erect, whisking tail of the predator whose teeth were brushing her belly. Her deepest instincts let out a terrified squeak.

“Susan…!”

“Please…don’t stop.”

He didn’t. She stroked behind both his ears, Harry purred as he lapped between her thighs. Susan rose upright and gripped the fur on his neck with shrill, ecstatic rabbit screams.

"Oh, love, never, never stop! Nothing's going to stop us, never!"

Ilsa predicted correctly that their love would involve considerable rope binding and fluffy handcuffs, as terror merged with pleasure in Susan’s mind – but love fed on many kinds of food, she knew. The archmage in the next kingdom, to her certain knowledge, consorted with a harem of imaginatively moulded flesh golems, to say nothing of the strange way she herself was spent her evenings. She’d only lost her sexual desire within the last few decades, but it could never have been the heart of her life.

Through her lover’s rally for peace, in the end, Susan was able to briefly unite humans and beast-men against the animalistic death-cult behind the drugs and the bombing. Lives were saved, and a world was changed. With the help of Ilsa the journalist’s investigation, naturally, which would in time reveal that the feralising drug had been developed originally by the government…though she would bury the story to ensure protection for her friends. It was all the old story, the old trio.                           

With her gift for insight, Ilsa had deduced that the only tale utterly without hope was where the phenomenon had begun  – her origin story. From helpless new-born screams, to the saving of cities and worlds, the mockery of the goblin cave was what drove their wheel of lives. Failures, false heroes? Failure was the falsehood. The thousandth experiment, magic that did what had been impossible, the miracle of humanity that grew, endured overcame - the truth of the world, if there was truth at all.  

She was more than her origins. Infinitely more. She hadn’t troubled to view that obscene, ridiculous farce a second time. The end did not come from the beginning, it came from the path. If her very apotheosis was only another useless struggle to the wheel’s peak, if her existence was essentially nothing but power, attainment and pride…then such things were not worthless, and she would cling to them forever.

Yet she saw across so many worlds what Susan held. Courage, hope and love – even crying out from the hopeless dark of that cave for her friends to save themselves. It was understandable that Harry always found her and loved her, friend, lover and husband, across so many worlds. With a thousand years for love to every three thousand of seeking and saving; they could have passed a very happy eternity. Ilsa simply could not admire her best friend, or unashamedly rank so many of her gifts above her own, without at least a trace of envy.

Even from the edge of godhood? It was the nature of true science and magic – her own true nature – to seek the undiscovered worlds within atoms, caverns, backstreets and multiverses. The solitude of a pioneer lost in frozen wastes went with it. Even Ilsa Tresckow beside Susan Lei and Harry Fawkes was Ilsa Tresckow quiet and alone, gazing down from the tower of her mind. Even with so many unknowable fascinating frontiers before her, unless she were to finally lose all trace of her original self…would she be reborn to the old, familiar story one day, with the comrades three? A third wheel, a second fiddle – the one and only Ilsa Tresckow, Wizard.

But knowledge was power, and what was power without its uses? Ilsa refocused the scrying glass upon another world and time, and patiently began to calculate the means to fulfil a moment’s desire.

II.

“Harry Fawkes; they call me Hotspur. It’s always been my dream to join the Vigilance League and be the greatest superhero in the world one day!”

It was an otherwise unexceptional world where ten percent of the population possessed inexplicable powers. Harry wasn’t to know that he had already fulfilled his dream in a previous superhuman world and come close to it as made no difference in a third. His eyes were bright and raw with youth’s unworldly passion, and his teeth grinned against all the odds – his first attempt at crimefighting, of course, had been a highly publicised fiasco.

Fortunately, the Scarlet Enchantress – Ilsa Tresckow – was a young but already respected member of the League. She argued with intensely passionate logic against the Villain Slayer and the Swordswoman that this talented rookie deserved a fair chance. Answered the Hangman’s joke about casting couches with a cold look.

Hotspur shook her hand with his natural gallant smile. The spark of flattering, heart-fluttering devout desire that brightened the life of every attractive woman he ever met. Far more; the resonant answer of two souls in a foreign multiverse finding each other. Susan would have smacked him through the nearest wall for the look Ilsa happily recieved, if Susan Lei had been anywhere in their world.

Only sometimes, Susan and Harry were childhood friends; very occasionally, they were never even lovers. Their bond stronger than death – stronger than any bond that Ilsa would know – always drew them together in the end. Harry never looked at another woman after that, and perfect Susan never looked at another man at all – Ilsa felt rather enraged at the injustice, on Susan's behalf.

But if the connection could be delayed, the pattern broken…for all the thrill of playing with worlds like a chemistry set, the dark joy of taking a thing that should never have been hers was greater still. There was guilt, but there had been some guilt when she sent fire imps to burn out the last goblin nest in the world. You could never breach a frontier if you thought about the cost.

On a rooftop patrol far above the grimy alleys and steaming sidewalks of Edge City, they sat on the edge of a skyscraper and talked. He said he’d known her for two weeks, he knew almost nothing about her under the mask, but he felt more connection than any woman he’d known. Love or fate, he could barely get his mind off her. She only smiled enchantingly and waited, which proved more fruitful than her first seduction attempt, when she’d walked into the room naked – not that he’d wanted her any less then. Love truly was such a foolish business.

She peeled the mask away from her lips; she had expected Harry to gently remove her of her glasses, but her heart still hammered enough to make her bosom shake. He laid her down with delicacy absurd for the passion that made love on a concrete roof; kissed her breasts again and again. Her costume made them pleasantly accessible to him – and all the men that the Scarlet Enchantress had been with before him. Perhaps his first time with her might be better than his first with Susan. She wrapped about an acre of bare thigh around his core that ground and burnt like a forge, smiling as she clung to his neck.

If it was betraying her best friend, then it was shamefully worth it. Harry was a perfect storm of innocent, irresistible passion and lovingly careful skill. Their connection beyond worlds, above all, made her ultimate climax something eternal and unbearably true – no tantra, potions or spells could have ever matched it. She’d had technically better lovers, but only for Harry Fawkes would she have given up a new spell; she had heard love was irrational in that way. And Susan Lei had had this for thirty lifetimes…whether stealing fire from the gods, or scraps from a heroes’ banquet, the heart of magic was cheating and theft. Yet what else did she have? In all the multiverse, who else did she have?

They broke it off, after a week without clothes; Hotspur discovered she was draining the life force of several deadbeats whom she kept comatose in a basement, to fuel her magical superpowers. It had been necessary, in order for her to become the second-youngest member of America’s foremost crimefighting group, in addition to personally saving Edge City twice. In other lives she’d done worse for less – and it had given Harry a guilt-free breakup. He was a heartbreaker, but no cheater. If she’d kept hold of him, even after Susan had appeared, their story might have changed forever...that was what Ilsa found she couldn’t do, to Susan Lei. However much it wrenched to let him go, it might and should never have lasted…in the long term, she knew, she was taking the easy, logical path.

Within a year, a new heroine appeared who could boost her speed and strength through mental focus. Hotspur was mentoring all her patrols within a week, although she was not in the Vigilance League. In fact they spend much of their time arguing over the rumours that Hotspur’s beloved League was corrupt to the core… Ilsa knew very well how it typically went.

Soon, Harry Fawkes had told Susan ‘Fighter’ Lei all his secrets, as well as the League's. They understood each other’s strengths, fears and dreams to perfection, and ploughed through superpowered thrill-killers together as if dancing on one string. Ilsa hadn’t even known her little brother, since he’d left for college in Europe; she loved him, but he had his own life, and regarded her as the selfish, power-crazed monster she most probably was.

Still, she would play her part to the end. Rather than join with Hotspur and Fighter to bring down the Vigilance league – the Villain Slayer and the Swordswoman had indeed spent the last decade murdering their suspects and burying their failures, as any scholar of American history might have guessed from their team name – she judged it more fitting, just this once, to abduct Harry right out of Susan’s bed.

Hotspur recovered consciousness with both arms tied by magic above his head, not a scrap to cover his delectable body; his spurned lover stood over him, clad in a few black strips. It was so outrageously melodramatic – what else is left, at the end of worlds? – that maniacal laughter slid most smoothly over her lips.

“…once more, dear Hotspur? For old time’s sake? You know Susan would forgive you. Say I took you by force.”

“If you want to…it’ll have to be by force, Ilsa.”

“Is that a challenge, my hero? With your superhuman life force, I could obtain a power that would blast your precious Fighter into oblivion. Unless somehow, I were inclined to mercy…”

“Ilsa…you know there are worse fates than dying a hero.” Harry’s shoulder blades dug into the stone; his breaths came ragged, stinking of fear, “I should thank you for this, you know? Susan must have felt like this – no, worse – when her first mission when to drek, but she never stopped fighting. We never will.”

With a loving smile, Ilsa kissed Harry once on the forehead, and made a gesture. He dropped into a coma, as the towering magical energy of his life-force poured through her trembling flesh. As feet pounded on the stairs – a steel door flew back from a titanic kick, and Susan Lei’s white robes blew back in unnatural wind, as she confronted her nemesis.

“GET AWAY FROM MY MAN, YOU MAD WITCH!”

Even if Ilsa had indulged in some long-deserved madness, her faculties of perception and understanding were thankfully undisturbed. It was a unique experience to fight against the woman she’d fought beside so many hundreds of times. The fury in the corners of her mouth, as superpowered punches cracked magic shields. Even as Ilsa began to tire, and Fighter might have seized her neck, but did not – any more than Ilsa had wiped her out with her own love’s life-force within the first five minutes of their fight.

“…you…really did love him. You were a good hero, you inspired me! I thought that we could be friends!”

“Perhaps. Perhaps women must sometimes call other each different names – Miss Perfect Ignorant Hero.”

They fought back and forth, until – less from necessity than desire – the Scarlet Enchantress drew more power from Hotspur’s life-force than she could safely control. She knew it was a fitting end, as her body began to crack like glass, and she saw sated justice in Susan’s eyes as well. Even as they showed a spark of that pity, or mad hope, that had made Harry and Susan heroes beyond death. Reaching back to drag Ilsa Tresckow out of her darkness and shame, forever.

Perhaps they would be friends in another life? A better life than this...but it wasn't really so bad.

Elsewhere, in her high tower, Ilsa the Wizard watched herself die. She traced the gaze of her other self to the pleading eyes of Susan Lei, with a definite twinge of envy. She watched on, as Susan rescued her love, conquered corruption. Rose to be second-greatest hero in the world, in time, with Harry Fawkes at her side…Ilsa smiled, counted her blessings, and took one more glass of wine before she slept.

III.

“Agent Lei? Situation, and status?”

“Loosen up, Ilsa. I’m okay. The night’s still young, you know?”

Stunning in a split black cheongsam that clung to her robust curves, NIA Agent Susan Lei looked over the glittering party as she feigned to sip champagne. Ilsa Tresckow – her handler, speaking by earpiece from the safehouse – looked quite striking herself in a skirt-suit with three shirt buttons undone. She had just downed her evening’s third mug of coffee, however, and the brow above her round glasses was tightly creased.

“Lei…you’re not okay. Take a minute to assess. I know you’d rather smash through every guard in the AO, but this the best chance we’ve had in two months. To locate the weapon – if we have a plan.”  

It was a longer field communication than protocol advised – but with everything Susan was under, she needed it. Ilsa could tell her agent was on the edge of snapping off that champagne stem.

The last National Intelligence Agency operative assigned to investigate Powell Corp – Agent Fawkes, living legend – had vanished in less than a month. There was clearly a leak from on high, but that wasn’t even the worst of this mission for Susan Lei. She’d never broken the fraternisation bar with Harry Fawkes, her mentor who’d saved her from that fiasco of a first mission in San Francisco…but love, alas, was more than sex.

Only the small chance that PowellCorp had held Agent Fawkes alive, for two months, had stood between them, Susan Lei, and utter vengeful destruction. It almost seemed a lighter threat that the bioweapon couldn’t be more than weeks away from shipping to the Middle East – seemed, as always, being the operative word.   

“…lots of security. Armed guards and cameras on every door.”

“If you can’t reach the bathroom with the vent, create a distraction. I might have advised you to charm a private tour out of the CEO’s son–” They both knew Ilsa would never have done so, “–but he apparently prefers male company.”   

“Sounds like a job for James Bond. Frag that. Give me a minute.”

Through her laptop linked to Susan’s mic, Ilsa shortly heard a tremendous crash. She pictured a whole table of glasses tipped surreptitiously over with one strong hand – a lake of sticky nectar spilling over the plush carpets and glinting under the chandeliers. Guests pawing at their spoilt clothes, suited guard dragged in to clean up, and Susan slipping to another wing of the mansion.

“Very subtle, until you wasted an obscene amount of good champagne.”

“Distractions aren’t subtle, Ilsa. At least your taste in champers makes you a superspy.”

Ilsa smiled briefly. While the Tresckows had owned a fifth of New York when it had been New Amsterdam, and the Leis had owned a food stall on Mott Street, before their daughter ran off to join the U.S. Marines…they both knew what made each other tick. Protecting American lives and proving that two women at least could take down America’s enemies.

-0-

Following one vent-crawl and only two stray guards knocked out, Susan had copied Zackary Powell’s laptop to flash drive, and delivered it straight to Ilsa. Not the Director, or his deputy – the woman who was still insinuating that Agent Fawkes had defected to Powell Corp. Ilsa knew the integrity of Harry’s convictions, and was as firmly convinced as Susan of the mole’s real identity.   

It was harder for Agent Lei to sit at a desk for another week, in her cover as Powell’s assistant secretary, several feet from the man who could have personally killed her mentor. While Ilsa sifted and cross-referenced through the data that a team should have been dealing with – if there had been a team they could trust – fuelled by excessive coffee and indomitable pride.

She finally made the call for Susan to infiltrate the Powell Corp main vault. Securing the weapon and its formulation data, before Powell met with his buyer, was the safe, logical course. She reminded Susan that the NIA was keen to obtain the needful data for development of ethnic group-targetable bioagents…but privately anticipated that Agent Lei would be chucking such data right into the nearest furnace. Her own miserable career advancement prospects, handling a maverick agent, were a constant irritation...but one she had found she could live with.

The vault was radio shielded. As Susan cut wires and twisted around motion sensors, Ilsa sat and drummed her nails. They also serve who only sit and wait – although it was Susan risking everything, she could hardly fail to recall. While Ilsa ran back over her deductions and plans in agonising futility. She had made the plan, predicted what Susan would face down in the dark, and if she’d been wrong, the die had been cast. Whole peoples would cough up their lungs in agony, while the bravest woman she knew was shot down, tortured or raped.

It wasn’t like the movies. All of them had failed, agents and civilians had died – not many times because Susan was a good agent and she was a brilliant one. If she truly failed, she had a sidearm in her fieldkit and the will to use it, she hoped. Prodigy, genius superspy – mere words, and how could she judge herself but by works? There was nothing for Roman, stoic pride but to rise above the heights. Or fling down failed mockery of life in a final triumph of will.

Ilsa sat before her pulsing screens, in a small bare room, and clenched her teeth. Then Susan’s voice sounded in her ear.

“Ilsa, I destroyed the data, but the weapon was gone! Has–?”

“Powell…has left the building, heading toward the meeting place. He has put the building on full alert, you will need–” She heard several thumps, and a guard’s scream, “–to fight your way out. Lei, you must pursue Powell. The weapon must not leave the country.”

“…Harry. Ilsa, it was on the vault computer, he's alive! I know where he is, but they’ll move him or kill him! We don't leave our people behind! He never left me!”

“Lei, I suppose Fawkes told you how he actually resolved that mission in Cuba? He would spend the rest of his life in Guantanamo for saving his country, if it ever came out how he’d done it. I’m sorry, Agent Lei, but this isn’t a choice for us. Pursue the bioweapon, now!”  

No answer. Ilsa still had her head in her hands when she heard the footsteps. Pounding on the stairs, filling her shabby, secret bolthole with rising dust like a grave.

Snipers would be covering the window. The mole had cast off caution, or they had fragged up, or she had fragging, fragging fragged up. Scarcely, she put a bullet through her laptop, threw down her phone and stamped, before the door burst in.

-0-

Zachery Powell had not built an international crime empire within America’s fourth largest company by ever taking half-measures. Ilsa had seen the Buckley videos; fifteen months of Hezbollah's torture had reduced the former soldier to a screaming, slobbering wretch. A team from Guantanamo could have wrung her dry within days; everyone broke in the end. But within minutes of waking in the cellar, strapped to the frame that held her bare thighs apart, she knew why Agent Fawkes had lived two months. The man who told her he was going to pull out her nails one by one, and then pulled, was not a torturer. He was a sadist.

She detached her mind, as agents were trained to do. Her body was only meat, pain had no objective existence, and the mewling, howling flesh she was but dully joined to by a string of nerves…was nothing. Susan, with her strong heart and her daily meditation, could have done it better. Then she tortured herself with her last words to her friend, tried to take something from the justice of her fate…and felt her heart ragged as her hand, when the man had pulled, and pulled out, five times. He hadn’t asked her any questions yet, but he’d taken his time.

“Let’s leave the right hand for later, red. You took the pain very well – I’m sure you thought your training very worthwhile – but it is fascinating how the violation of dignity and self-worth make such a difference. I have three sensitive men waiting outside for you, and then I will attend to your right hand, and then you will beg me to let you sing like a bird. But first…I advise you to do your best to enjoy the next hour. You will not enjoy what follows.”

Ilsa shied away from the syringe, but she was bound. The dim strip lights shone from the man’s bald head like steel, as he depressed the plunger. It was a psychoactive – the straps, her straps, tickled her with agony, as her veins filled with insects and her prized, precious mind began to crack with her spirit. She still knew that she deserved it all; that thousands would die because that brave, good idiot Susan would always save her man…from this dark pit, that he did not deserve. No one deserved this but her, because she should never have let herself fall…to where she had nothing left but to endure another hour, without any word passing her lips but two.

“Kill me. Kill me…”

“No, Ilsa. Not in a million years.”

The man didn’t even get to turn. Ilsa saw his eyes bulge out, as he scrabbled for a scalpel – before Susan’s fist swung in above a protruding ear, with a sound like an axe. An hallucination, of course…Ilsa still took all the pleasure she could, as she observed Susan hauling the little torturer to his feet and choking him swiftly to death. The three would-be rapists outside were dead, presumably, with every other gunman in the AO...a trained US Marine with a righteous fury could do some fantastical things.

“Ilsa! Drek, drek, drek, what did they do to you? I’m sorry…I’m here now. You’re safe.”

Susan was fumbling the straps off Ilsa's limbs as she spoke, now holding her fiercely with a fighter’s strength. Covering nakedness with her own body – she was safe. Ilsa couldn’t see her dear friend’s face, so she felt it with forehead and lips. Then she lay her head on broad shoulders and wept.

“You…Susan, why did you come for me?”

“For me, you’d have done the same. You’re my friend, and you’re a fragging hero…they tortured you, but you didn’t break! Never, never say that you want to die again, Ilsa. Don’t leave me behind. Don’t leave me alone.”

Susan and Ilsa clung to each other in the black dungeon. Strength against strength, love against love – for all the odd and beautiful differences, they fitted together like bricks. Very soon – they had another friend to save, and a bioweapon to find – Susan helped Ilsa to stand, and kicked down the door to let red sunlight in.