In a secret location on Torsca, deep within a mine was a band of scalekin that were standing around a group of Elfari prisoners.

  Their hoods were decorated in a pattern of intricate runes, each a sign of their respective places in the hierarchy within the religious sects of the Verdant Hood. Lime green in color, these runes shifted with the magic that was coursing through each member.

  Two among their number stood out the most, a gargantuan male with a massive glaive and crocodilian jaws, hard yellow eyes and slitted pupils. His prodigious body easily outclassed the other operatives, with a massive tail that moved with a serpent’s grace and speed. His obsidian scales made him look demonic in nature, but none dared tell that to his face.

  His counterpart was a robed individual styled with a headdress, the icon of the Verdant Goddess upon the forehead of the hat, a green circle with a half moon underneath, followed by three pointed around a serpentine head. The priestess’ eyes glowed with holy power, coloring them in the verdant green of the Goddess. She sported a similar figure to the male, but while he was brute power and raw instinct, she was lithe, cunning and flexible in her stance. A warrior dancer with bright green scales with a blue hue to her underside. Her tail reflected this, a thin thing that was cast aside to allow her flexible legs, a rarity amongst her kind, the power she needed to move unlike any of her kin.

  The male turned to face the dancer as their group worked to convert this newest batch of knife-ears, a taxing process without the ingredient they required.

  Which was supposed to be delivered by now, if not for a most fortuitous encounter with a ship that no one recognized.

  “You’re telling us that this vessel was shaped like nothing you’ve seen before?” He asked his co-commander.

  The priestess Zala’taz turned an upturned nose at the bulky brute, her headdress concealing all but her eyes from him and their agents.

  “Yes. It was a vessel that resembled the knife-ears and their strange tree ships, but everything about it was wrong. The shape, the way it felt to my magic senses, and especially that consciousness I sensed aboard the vessel, everything about that… that monstrosity was off. Thus I used the hymn of release to protect our mission here.”

  The male scoffed, snapping his jaws in contempt, “those ships were not yours to handle, they were mine! You cost us our reinforcements, our supply of the essence, and any hope of relaying this back to the motherdome! Our mission is now at risk because of it!”

  The priestess however, was not moved by his rage, “fool, the mission pales in comparison to our forces being captured and probed by the Elves. Our Prophet demanded that I act, and thus I did, before the enemy could know the truth.”

  The rest of the agents looked uncomfortable as Zala’taz turned to face them all, “remember this, death before you betray our Goddess. I will not allow any of us to be taken and used against our most holy.”

  Without much force behind it, the male slashed in the direction of the high priestess, his glaive missing her by millimeters.

  “While it may be your mission to keep us from betraying Inquisitor, it is mine to insure the mission does not fail before we lose more men to your insanity. You will not consign us to death until I deem it necessary. Do I make myself clear?”

  Zala’taz looked to be ready to argue once more when a shake from above hinted at a possible earthquake, causing the agents to stop using their magic and instead use it to solidify the area around them.

  The shake lasted for ten minutes before the aftermath was over, and the now drained scalekin sighed in relief.

  “Damnit to the hells of the Burning Abyss. The magic has been interrupted and now we have no essence to continue and nothing to use to feed the prisoners!” The crocadlian spoke, his head shaking back and forth in measured anger.

  The Inquisitor however seemed to be unperturbed by the events.

  “No issue, they were becoming a liability anyway,” she said as she took her weapon out, an eerie glowing whip with a horrid skull at the end, covered in spikes that glowed pale green.

  Sighing with both frustration and regret, Commander Lesrack turned to face the rest of the agents while sounds both unseemly and tragic sounded behind him.

  “We must find the ritual site, and you all will make it so, or I will do to you, what she is doing to them.”

  He need only point his glaive back at the unrecognized forms of the prisoners to bring the agents of the Verdant Hood in line, and soon the team was moving on, their goal driving them forward as fear and terror chased at their heels.

  …

  “What do you mean the ships breaking apart?!” Chimera exclaimed as the latest data from the scans showed a worrisome picture.

  The third Sword destroyer was in free fall as she and her crew arrived, threatening to pulverize the area below like a literal falling sword.

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  However, the news didn’t bother Chimera at first, seeing as the vessel’s engines were the only thing to have been destroyed, leaving the rest of the vessel in pretty solid shape.

  They engaged the tractor beam immediately once they were in range to do so, slowing the descent and pulling the sword off to a nearby area, an open plain with no sign of civilization for a few miles.

  Everything seemed fine until the vessel started to tear at the ends where the engine was damaged, a large portion of the frame simply falling away and getting pulled into the beam.

  This caused parts of the vessel to become undone, while sections of the ship and its hull started to fall off the ship in chunks, damage cascading along the length of the ship.

  “Captain, we need to drop the vessel, at this rate the parts will start launching themselves at the ship along with the tractor beam!” Bark spoke over as a simulation showed what would happen if the vessel came apart with the tractor beam still active.

  It would be like her gravity guns, only pointing at her own ship instead.

  “Fine, drop it! We’re far enough from the village’s yes?” She spoke in a worried voice.

  “Yes, for the most part Captain. The major settlement near the city-forge is out of the debris radius. The village is still within range, but only if we turn off the tractor beam.”

  One of her bridge crew looked back at her in worry. She had a black tint to her skin similar to the woman that Chimera spoke to earlier, her soft red eyes tracing her own.

  “Captain, we can’t release the beam yet. Those people won’t survive the debris.” She spoke, her shoulders shaking as she gripped her datapad.

  She’s got some family down there, I’d bet.

  Chimera nodded back, “alright, but we’re about to be hit with a ton of debris if we don’t.”

  The crewmate nodded, biting her lip for a moment before she spoke, “the debris is too much, but… perhaps we could divert the debris using the engines?”

  Divert?

  Chimera thought about the ship pieces they were still currently carrying, wondering what the bridge crewmate might be getting at.

  A slingshot?

  If they raised the power of the tractor beam, to the point that the ship was zooming towards them, they could power it down and do an emergency burn to get out of its way.

  “Meras, Bark, I need to know if we can try a maneuver.”

  She explained her thoughts to the two as the warning signs for incoming debris started to sound.

  “It could work… but we need to funnel the energy and release it all at once. The feedback from that much magic would fry whoever was channeling the energy.”

  Chimera turned to the screen to see Meras nodding along, showing the output and how many would be likely to die if they did such a thing.

  “What if I took the feedback?”

  Chimera heard her crew gasp at her question, and both Bark and Meras stared at her uncomfortably.

  “It… it would likely kill you too.”

  The energy reading showed Chimera popping like a balloon after doing it, showing that she would have at most a minute before the power would overtake her.

  It was good that she shared her abilities with Meras as having someone know her own limits was helpful, but the truth of the matter did sting.

  “We got to try, I’m not letting any more die today.”

  Bark took a look at Meras on the screen, who nodded back at him.

  “Very well. We need to head to the generators.”

  “On it!” Chimera yelled, just as she shifted through the ship to arrive at the generators, several people and engineering crew already working to overcharge the power plants.

  “Everyone stand back, feedback incoming!” Chimera shouted, latching onto the bars of all three of the generators as more and more magic energy funneled into them.

  “Emergency Burn engaged, Tractor energy reading at 400 percent and climbing!” the intercom wailed overhead as Chimera started to feel the energy spiking.

  It was as if she was a generator, her PEGs working in tandem with the PEGs inside the ship to pull at the debris.

  Her mind focused on the ship, feeling the energy connect to the systems, and watching through the monitors in the generator room to see what was happening outside.

  It was working! The beam was no longer simply dragging the ship across the ground. It was slowly being lifted, tugging it into the air as smaller pieces continued to fall off.

  A minute had passed, but the beam wasn’t safe to turn off. She could see the image of the village below through the monitors.

  Soon she felt the burn of excess energy flowing up her arms and inside her, a pure lance of power dancing inside her PEGs and continuing to ramp up.

  “TRACTOR PULL CATAPULTING! BRACE FOR IMPACT!”

  All at once, Chimera felt her energy suck out of her body, the ship syphoning all of it in a matter of moments to shotgun blast the Sword over the Meras.

  The enemy ship flew without engine for a good bit before the gravity of the moon sent the vessel and what was left of it careening into a nearby mountain.

  It didn’t help that when Chimera looked over at the vessel in question, she had almost hit the town they were trying to avoid earlier, the one that held the city-forge as her crew called it.

  Thankfully the ship flew above it and landed in an explosive way, making a crater for itself along the mountain’s slope.

  Chimera couldn’t focus on the outcome though, as the energy feedback had both cooked and sucked all of her own power out with the catapult.

  The energy generators within her were still there thankfully, but with no energy to feed off of and push back through to start the cycle, Chimera was dangerously close to needing some biomass in order to stay alive.

  “Food…” she managed to say before the lines of unconsciousness took over the rest of her body.

  …