Chapter 10: Life's a gun that's pointing in my face

"Yes. I remember the fronts. I remember Red War. I remember Earth. I remember Riis. I remember before the Great Machine lifted you up."

"You're older than I thought. I'm sure you'd agree things were simpler then. You knew who was good, and who was bad. I miss those times. Now… it's a mess."

"Simple? Life was never simple, but suffering makes the mind narrow. Changes what we see. Survival makes many enemies. We know this truth."

- Conversation between Nivviks, once of the Shore, and Gaelin-4, City Hunter


Flying had never really been her thing. Norovoi liked getting close with her enemies, close enough that her fists could do all the talking, all the work. Flying was a more precise, delicate art - and she had no patience for delicate. Plus, jumpships - all ships - were prone to getting knocked out of the air if they took too nasty a hit.

Case and point - her current, rapidly-developing predicament.

The viewport was useless; just a mess of meshing colours and incomprehensible shapes, with the odd flash of blinding light mixed in. The sensors were near as bad, everything going wild and essentially coming up with nothing definitive or helpful. Except for the flight-sensors. They were saying that the Skiff was damaged and gliding out of control. Given how Norovoi felt like they were spinning around and around and around, over and over and over, she was inclined to believe it. Nivviks struggled with the flight stick, trying to get things under control, but the tail and nose were where the majority of damage was, and that messed with their stabilization something fierce.

Then there was colour - definitive, anchored colour, the kind that came with true reality. Something she could get. Kinda. Lots of oranges and browns and some blues - not unlike an early sunset on old Earth. The Ketch they'd been skidding over? Trailing away while they were still half-plummeting, half-spinning through the sky. Their thrusters were burning out of control, their stabilization had all but disappeared on themg, Norovoi was feeling way too queasy for such a confined environment and her hands were digging into the armrests of her seat, hanging on for dear life. Nivviks swore something, but whatever it was was lost in the chaos of it all.

The radio buzzed. Dunraven was speaking through it, frantically, saying something about "-no tail, your tail's gone, you need to keep your momentuzzzzzzzsssst-"

Ah. Yeah, that made sense, actually. No tail - no flying. To think she'd been imagining something a whole lot less dire. What a silly goose she was.

Another sensor bleeped. Norovoi normally wouldn't have paid attention, because all the hardware was of Eliksni make, and she wasn't that great even on the human-designed variations, but it was a radar - and radars were universally comprehensive. She saw the massive form of the Ketch leading away, though turning, maybe to catch and help them, but there was something else, something approaching fast, coming towards them from... well, they were spinning, so deducing a direction of any sort was next to impossible. Norovoi turned her eyes back to the viewport - and her stomach turned at the site of all the flashing, blurring sights. They were going so fast - not even falling, just... tearing through the air at an odd, unnatural angle. But...

Wait...

Were those formations down below - up now - not just... some rocky monoliths, but... buildings? Approaching them fast, anyways. And there, that spark of blue - an ocean?

There was also a dark something, in the air with them, and cutting a swathe through the sky to- The Skiff jerked, painfully, as if a giant had just caught it in its hand and Norovoi, who'd been leaning forward to have a look-see out the viewport, found the flight controls rising up to meet her face. There was a spark of pain, the sickening sound of a wet crunch that rattled right through her head, and then...

Darkness.


Pain.

The familiar kind, though. Her nose was broken, forehead probably bruised. One of her eyes was nearly caked over with blood, so probably a cut on her scalp - because those bled a lot. Norovoi weakly moved her tongue; her teeth all seemed to be intact. That was… good. Their medically-inclined crewmates were mostly of the Eliksni variety, and she had a sinking feeling that their approach to dental injuries was just to knock out the old in preparation for the new. Like sharks, really.

Traveler above, she was living out her last days with sharks.

There was a shark trying to shake her awake as well, claws tightening on her shoulder with a desperate, worried edge.

"Lightbearer!" Nivviks softly hissed. "Human!"

"Awoken," Norovoi slurred. "'m not... Liiight..."

"Must move, quickly! Get up, get-"

The Skiff groaned, and around came the sound of metal creaking, buckling.

"Where-"

"Ship," Nivviks panted. He grabbed hold of her collar and tugged her back, dragging her into a sitting position. Norovoi's eyes - or eye, rather, what with the other beginning to crust over with drying blood - fluttered open. She was... wait. Everything was upside down. The Skiff- "Took us away. Dragons followed. Fought - with the ship. I... do not know any more. We must move, now!"

"Dragons?" Norovoi muttered. "Like... the wishing kind?" Where was Azirim? He might've been of some help; a wish to get rid of the pounding in her head would have been ideal. She gingerly reached up, took hold of her bent nose and snapped it back into place. White-hot agony cut through her vision, blinding her for a few precious seconds. She bit her tongue, her cheek, and tasted coppery blood.

Something was thrust against her chest. Something large, with smooth, cool metal paneling. Her Mythoclast. "Awoken!"

"That's me," Norovoi hissed through clenched teeth. She leaned against the wall, pulled herself to her feet, and stumbled wildly. Nivviks caught her, held her while her sense of balance caught up. "Thanks."

He nodded his welcome and let go. His armour was donned, hood pulled up - the picture perfect Marauder, complete with a pair of shock blades, one drawn and the other sheathed at his hip. Norovoi unstrapped one of her holsters on instinct and pressed her cannon over to him. Nivviks graciously took it without a word. He indicated towards the bulkhead leading out of the cockpit - and to the rear of the Skiff itself, where the hatches out were.

Or would've been, if the ship still had a tail.

Norovoi plucked her sword up, attached it to the magnetic locks lining the back of her cuirass and clumsily climbed along after Nivviks, dropping out the ragged hole on the back of the Skiff to... somewhere. Her boots hit a floor of some kind, made of a material not unlike... chitin. Hive or Eliksni, she couldn't tell, but it was chitin. Norovoi glanced around; where the exoskeleton flooring met wall, some pinkish flesh was exposed before more shelled paneling took over.

And the flesh had the hue of something very alive. That it flexed at intermediate times like biological muscle only hammered home the notion home. The lighting was provided by bioluminescent fronds winding across the walls like arterial vines, and the ceiling almost mirrored the floor entirely - if it weren't for a few red-and-orange organ-like growths.

I swore, if we've been eaten, Norovoi thought, I'm carving us out and taking this thing's heart as a souvenir.

"Not ship," Nivviks murmured, probably reaching a similar conclusion.

"Yeah, no shit Sherlock."

"My name is-"

"I know your name, fuck's sake." Norovoi reached back into the Skiff, pulled her helmet out, then thought better of it and held it under one arm. Her head was ringing and achy and sensitive, and she was in no way going to even chance setting the fired nerves in her nose off all over again. She huffed and looked around all over again.

The room's contents, though, were interesting enough - and led her to doubt her earlier theory about being in something's digestive theory. It looked like the Skiff had crashed right into the hull of something at an angle, tearing straight into a personnel storage room - one outfitted with what looked like organically-grown SMILE pods, ringed around the room. There were even... unmoving, blurred figures in a couple of them, all surrounding a strange dirty pale-yellow pool full of some stinking biological broth. Things... flickered just underneath the surface, little forms of aquatic life.

Strange.

A roar - distant and muffled by the walls - stole away her focus. The room shook and lurched - and Norovoi staggered further in. There was... nothing else nearby. Well, an odd sphincter-valve looking thing to her right, which may have been an entrance-exit of some kind, but otherwise nothing. No one about. No aliens as far as she could see. Definitely no Hive.

Nivviks was cautiously approaching the pool, blade held at the ready. Norovoi, equally curious - though wary too, what with the muted animalistic bellowing that seemed to be coming from outside - stepped towards the closest stasis pod and peered in through the viscous layer of red glass-like mucus drawn across the gaps in the chitin framing. There was someone in this one, too. A... humanoid someone, limp and four-limbed, with two arms and two legs, and two eyes and two ears, and a mouth and a nose and hair and-

It was a person.

A human person.

Nivviks snarled, cried out - and was cut off with a splash. Norovoi twirled around, Mythoclast ready, and spotted something by Nivviks, grabbing him by a shoulder and the back of his head and forcing his face into the pool, fighting his struggles with a strength that did not belong with its tall, slender frame. It wore dark, sheening robes of webbed organic matter, and its bared head was pointed, purplish-pink and fleshy. Norovoi yelled, "Let him go!" and powered her fusion rifle up.

A force hit her, then - not physically, but against the borders of her mind, digging in with mental hooks and tearing at her thoughts. Norovoi almost buckled; she was saved purely by the presence of the nullscape, and even then her focus was a broken, divided thing. She lifted her rifle to shoot the damn thing, but the assault redoubled in sheer intensity, dropping her to her knees.

And then - she was there, by the pool, looking around with clear eyes, up at the face of the orange-eyed, quad-tentacled thing, which was tossing a weakened Nivviks aside and closing its thin, dark-nailed fingers around her throat and shoving her into the thick liquid behind her.

It tingled and stung against her bare skin, like a weak acid, and what snuck past her lips as she opened her mouth to roar, to scream, tasted worse than it had looked, than it had smelled, like overripe bile treated with vile Hive blood and death-flavoured Worm mucus. Most of the things within darted away from her thrashing head, but a few of them - the bigger ones - swam closer. Like little lamprey tadpoles, she distantly thought, complete with circular little mouths and cylindrical pinkish bodies, completely eyeless and still somehow studying her with an acute intensity. One of them kicked towards her face, closer again, and hovered right over her good eye. Norovoi wanted to struggle, wanted to scare the thing away, hit it away, but the hands around her neck tightened further yet, choking her, drowning her, claws digging into her skin and holding her still.

Four tendrils shoot out from around the tadpole's mouth, pricking the edges of her eye socket, and it shot towards her eye. What happened next...

Norovoi shuddered and froze as the thing, it pushed against her eye, pushed past it, flattening its body and slithering right through.

The sensation...

... was beyond reproach. It was sensory, numbing torture.

She could feel it wriggling in further yet, almost causing her to black out all over again, but quickly enough it settled - inside her head.

Inside her head.

The hands holding her down abruptly tugged her out, and Norovoi took a ragged gasp - while aiming a weakened punch the squid-creature's way. One of its facial tentacles caught the limb, effortlessly, and it glared at her with an inhuman contempt.

"Thrall," it said to her, not with vocalized words but to her mind, injecting its voice into her thoughts. "Cease-"

A gunshot, explosively loud, tore away the squid-creature and sent it twirling, doing a full one-eighty and collapsing to the ground. All pressure on her consciousness fell away; Norovoi jumped at the fallen, still-living thing and without a moment's hesitation brought her fists down on its head, one after the other, again and again, squashing its head open like an overripe grape. Its greying brainstuff splattered wetly across the floor.

Norovoi stumbled back to her feet, turned around, and found Nivviks swaying with her Vulpecula in hand - talon over the trigger. He looked at her. She looked at him.

Norovoi fell to her knees, reached up to her eye and dug in - fingerpads pressing against the soft, delicate organ, trying to reach past, trying to snag the thing within, but it was too deep and she was too afraid and her nails sunk into the skin around her eye, drawing blood, desperate, revolted, horrified. She was only dimly aware that Nivviks was doing the same, whimpering pitifully.

There was another roar from outside, much closer, more than closer, as if it had finally gotten in a deck or two below, and then it was followed by the monumental hissing burst of an explosion.

The entire ship rocked. Norovoi fell, the side of her head slamming against the chitin, and her vision swam. She fought, she fought, to stay awake, stay focused, and only just managed to pull through - but then something changed, her stomach lurched as the momentum of the very vessel around them altered, and for a brief time she was unaware of just about everything.


When she came to, Norovoi immediately knew something was different. Everything was warmer. Hotter. It wasn't just the oily flames licking at the edge of the open sphincter-door, but... from all around. As if they'd just micro-jumped to above the Sahara, where the sun never gave up on trying to fuck over all living things.

And, last she checked, she halfway counted as a living thing. And poor Nivviks, who was in the midst of dragging himself up onto his hands and knees? Ho yeah, definitely alive. Not Scorn - not just yet.

"Have to..." Norovoi started to say, but then the thing behind her eye wriggled, and her breakfast, lunch, whatever - the thinned, pitiful contents of her stomach came up and she threw up onto the chitin floor, retching when she ran out. She stayed there for a short while, wishing she'd packed a bottle of water - oh wait, she had her canteen! - and trying her best to get back up onto her feet. It was... an ordeal.

Less so when she spotted a flicker of movement by the entrance, prompting her to activate her panicked fight-or-flight mode - which it usually ended with bruised knuckles either way. Norovoi quickly donned her helmet, dove for her Mythoclast, brought it up and aligned the Goblin-eyed scope's red dot on the first figure to enter - some kind of... wait...

It... well, it looked more human than most nonhumans she'd met, but it was still very clearly not human. Neohuman, maybe? Not of any kind she'd ever heard of. The thing was tall, kinda, nearly of height with her and had the look of a wiry, emaciated human bearing tough, leathery yellow skin mottled with dark brown-green spots and some stripes - particularly around its sunken, reptilian orange eyes. It had hair and other similarly human facial features, but its nose was squashed and flat and largely absent, leaving it with two nostrils and little else. Its ears were long and had the appearance of being serrated. The creature looked... well, it struck her as female given the face, hair and proportions, and it was wearing silvered armour inlaid with rubies. It clutched an equally silvered greatsword in both hands and glared at her.

"More slaves," it hissed. "This is your-"

Norovoi had been about to pull the trigger when a searing hot knife of pain ripped through her brain - from the inside out, throbbing and pulsing with pure agony. Images and emotions - foreign, all - rippled past her vision, seemingly... seemingly from the yellow-tinted view of the very creature in front of her.

She heard a cry - two actually, one past the bat-toad-like hominid, and one from the direction of Nivviks. Even the strange neohuman doubled over with the pain of it.

Then, as quickly as it had begun, the sensation disappeared.

"What-" someone asked, someone not Nivviks or the other creature.

"Not ghaik," the neohuman snarled and sneered, seemingly both at once.

Two more strangers appeared - one of them clad in chainmail and some degree of light plate and hardened leather. No plasteel, no apparent hadronic cloth, no fieldweave spinmetal-relic iron mesh, nothing she would have expected. Just... plain old steel and iron. The other wore garb that definitely wasn't armour. Festive, colourful, gaudy and vibrant. And mostly just cloth, save a plain steel cuirass half painted over and etched with a myriad of winding designs.

Nivviks snarled. The strangers - the two new ones who looked remarkably human, along with their neohuman compatriot - brought their weapons in front of them at the sight of the Eliksni standing up. There was the greatsword of the neohuman, the mace and wooden shield of the scowling woman with incredibly pointed ears, and the scimitar of the last - another woman, blond-haired and otherwise normal looking if not for the black sclera of her eyes and the bright Void-purple irises.

"What is-" the last of their number started to ask, but Nivviks snarled again, cutting her off.

"Back," he growled. "Stay back! Awoken, where-"

"Here," Norovoi coughed. She drew herself up, fusion rifle still at the ready, and she fixed the strangers with a tense, challenging look. "Stay where you are, or we'll melt you down."

The neohuman looked to bark a rebuttal and stomp forth, but the blond woman lowered her sword and gestured for her to stay put. The former hissed unhappily, and took to pacing - not crossing the invisible line into Norovoi's overblown personal space, but cutting it close.

"We don't want any trouble," the other woman reasoned. "We- Look, we need to get to the helm. You're like us, right? You have those... things in your head. We need-"

"Shut up," Norovoi snapped. She glanced at Nivviks. "Can you reach the others?"

The Vandal fumbled for his radio, clicked it on, but the only sound they were greeted with was static. He switched channels again and again, trying to find the Ketch's frequency, and came away with nothing. "I... I cannot. Nama, no signal."

"Are we being jammed?"

"I... do not know."

"Shit."

"We have no time for this!" the neohuman announced with apparent frustration. "We have to reach the helm, now - before we transform!"

"She's right," the sharp-eared human softly agreed, her own eyes never once leaving Nivviks - watching him with a curious sort of wariness.

The last of their group, the blond woman, looked back at Norovoi. There was confusion, and she glanced between Norovoi's rifle and face with a perplexed expression, but there was also an underlying sense of desperation. "We can't- We can't just leave them!"

"We don't know what they are!"

"Where the hell are we?" Norovoi snapped, fed up with their prattling. "Who the fuck are you? What the-" she gestured briefly to the dead tentacle thing, then to the pool, "-fuck were those?"

"Ilithids," the blond woman told her - and it meant absolutely nothing to Norovoi. Wha-? "Look, I'm sorry, but we have to get to the helm, or we're going to die - crash or transform, it doesn't matter. There's something in your head, right? In ours too, and if we don't move now, it's going to turn us inside out."

Nivviks inched over to Norovoi, his blade alight with crackling Arc and borrowed cannon primed to fire, hammer drawn back. "Light-"

"Don't call me that," she hissed.

"We have to... do something!"

"I'm thinking, I'm..." Norovoi looked around, half expecting a Hive Knight to drop through the ceiling at any moment, cleaver flashing and Boomer roaring. Hell, or better yet, a Witch responsible for the madness before her - having cast a clever little illusion around them. Maybe that was it, maybe they'd lost and the Hive were in their heads, dragging out their last moments in some warped, horrifying fantasy of theirs. But still-

They had to survive. They had to live. They'd come too far already. Nivviks in particular; the Riisborn he was, he'd lived too long to die because of... whatever this was.

"Where's the helm?" she heatedly demanded.

The blond woman hesitantly gestured to the Skiff. No, to what was past the Skiff - another sphincter-door, the dropship having smashed through over the doorway and almost entirely obscuring it from view.

"Okay," Norovoi muttered, then louder, "Okay. We get in, smash whatever's projecting a jamming field-"

"No signal," Nivviks reminded her.

"Look, I'm clutching at straws here. Fine, we hijack something strong enough to project our signal to the Kaliks-Fel. How's that?"

Nivviks sullenly shrugged. His eyes were still on the strangers. Norovoi didn't blame him; they looked weird, each to varying degrees. The neohuman in particular was an odd case.

"Let's just..." Norovoi hesitated, then whispered to Nivviks, "Let's go."

"With them."

"No. No, not with them."

"They're going to the helm."

"Then let's give them some space."

"What about us?" he asked.

"Us?"

"Something crawled-"

"I know. I know, fuck's sake." Norovoi huffed. "Same for me."

"I saw." Nivviks motioned to the strangers with his gun, gesturing them to the door. To go ahead, maybe. Smart, that. If there was anything ahead - more tentacle-things, or worse yet that cacophonous thing yelling outside - then let them take the brunt of it and wear it down. Cold, but smart.

The strangers lingered, then opened up into a frantic group-wide run to the sphincter-door.

"That's cutthroat," Norovoi murmured.

Nivviks grunted. "This is how the Shore-Eliksni survive."

"Vynriis never-"

"Vynriis is soft." Nivviks bumped against her shoulder, lightly, just to drive her on as they trailed behind the others. "I am not."

Norovoi withheld the urge to nod. "Noted."


The helm was pure fucking chaos. Norovoi didn't know how else to describe the sight arrayed before her; it was a mess. Two more tentacle-faced alien creatures, and just a few seconds after noticing them one of them was torn apart by a small swarm of tiny red skull-faced children with flapping wings and small horns, digging their claws into the squid creatures wet flesh and pulling it open. A grisly sight, to be sure. No less confusing, though.

"What the hell is happening?!" she hissed.

Nivviks made a bewildered, noncommittal sound from next to her. He just... pointed at the other one, who blasted away what looked to be a grown-up red-flying-devil-person with vividly coloured energy from its head - like a Flayer swatting away a Thrall through pure psionic power. Then it turned towards them - and the other trio, just a short stone's throw ahead of them.

"Thrall!" it addressed, to all of them, apparently, using both real and telepathic voice. It gestured to the other far end of the helm, where a terminal rife with shaking tendrils sat. "Connect the nerves of the transponder, now!"

It turned away, just as another devil-thing bearing a flaming sword swooped in, gleefully shouting over its shoulder to the smaller red creatures, "Throw their corpses into the Styx!"

The little red things howled as one and flew their way. Nivviks glanced at Norovoi, and Norovoi blankly looked back at him. Finally, after a split-second of nonvocal debating, she just shrugged and said, "Just shoot the fuckers." She shouldered her Mythoclast and tugged her sword free of its sheath. "I'll take the Otzot-wannabe."

Nivviks chirped, darted ahead and shot down the first little demon thing before it could even reach the blade of the yellow neohuman. Norovoi ran with him, then diverged to the edge of the room - and around the fledgling fight as the maybe-humans clashed with the rest of the red folk - and charged the dueling devil man and the squid monster. Her heavy greatsword trailed after her, biting into chitin and spitting up sparks, scoring a deep bloody wound in the living flooring in her wake. Norovoi gave a guttural cry as she closed in, and both the duelists paused and glanced at her just as she leapt at them. Her Crownsplitter swept up in the air and descended right onto the squid-man's head, carving it straight down the middle - from the top of his pointed, squishy head right down to his groin, and then the blade kept on going, embedding deep into the floor.

The alien's two parts each blinked, almost simultaneously, and fell away on either side. Its purplish-black blood sizzled on her sword's Void-wreathed edge.

A burning longsword swiped for her head. Norovoi lifted her Crownsplitter hilt up, catching the demon's blade on her own, and cracked her pommel up under the red-skinned creature's chin - snapping his jaw in two. Her aching head rushed in, the metal of her helmet slamming against the devil-thing's unprotected forehead, and his two proud, mighty horns crunched and snapped right off. The dazed alien thing stumbled back, glaring at her through dazed eyes - and then its head disappeared, burned away by a searing red bolt of something. Norovoi twirled around, and found instead of yet another opponent (though she wasn't sure even after realizing) that it was the woman in colourful clothing, her hand held up and smoking with some unfamiliar power, the limb covered in an inky soot. Their eyes met; Norovoi afforded her the barest of nods.

She even returned it. Well, wasn't that nice?

Norovoi leaned her Crownsplitter against her crystal-covered pauldron and took up the devil creature's own flaming longsword with the other hand. She couldn't spot any oil or other substance rubbed onto the metal, and it felt... well, lighter than any usual primitive weapon would have, so she fancied it a bit of low paracausal magic. Strange that it outlasted its owner, then. Just to be sure, she carved up the red corpse with both swords, and still the fires raged along the foreign weapon's length. Strange.

The quick barks of Nivviks's steady gunfire abated. The last of the other red creatures had died, most of them torn apart by Stasis bullets. He rushed past, right to her, and said, "Now what?"

"I... don't know," Norovoi admitted. She looked around, but nothing stood out. There was that weird tentacle-terminal, yeah, but other than that... "This isn't a proper ship."

"Don't like it," Nivviks agreed. "Not right."

"Well, we've boarded it, anyways. Let's just try to-" The strangers ran past, led by the neohuman. "What now?!"

The pointy-eared woman just pointed. The viewports of the helm - which pretty much consisted of open gaps in the surrounding walls, windows without glass, shadowed over briefly. Something hit the side of the vessel, leaned over and pushed its head into the chamber with them.

Ah. So that was the dragon Nivviks had told her about. Certainly looked like one, big and scaly and a mean sort of crimson, with fire spewing out its-

Nivviks tackled her to the ground just as the plume of flames soared overhead, and then the dragon was gone again, flying to a different part of the ship. Norovoi coughed, levered herself back up to her feet and muttered a begrudging, "Thanks," but Nivviks was already gone - towards where the strangers were frantically messing with the living tendrils of the terminal.

The shadows outside moved again.

"Wait, BACK!" Norovoi yelled.

The dragon's next burst of fire streamed in once more, catching the terminal and-

Everything shifted. The outside, the interior - everything.


Norovoi forced her eyes open, glared at the flashing warp-like tunnel their nightmarish vessel had all of a sudden decided to take a jaunt through, and tried not to throw up again as they emerged into a sky that was, thankfully, a whole lot greyer and cooler than the dark, smoky one they'd only just left. But not because the ship had decided on a change of scenery, no. It had stopped only because it had just up and died on them, apparently. The entire vessel veered and listed to the side, groaning horribly, and Norovoi tensed and braced as gravity tugged her from the floor and smashed her bodily against the helm's wall.

At least the dragon was gone.

Nivviks scrambled over to her, largely unhurt, and clasped her in a tight grip - one she would never have admitted to have found comfort in. Eliksni were good at this sort of thing, hanging on. "I have no idea what's happening," Norovoi gasped, "and I hate it."

"We're crashing," he brusquely informed her.

"Ah, right."

"We are very far from the ground."

"I see." She raised her voice to be heard over the howling of fierce, buffeting winds trailing through the open-windowed command deck.

"We may die."

"Yeah, I'm not so keen on that."

"You aren't?"

"No, surprisingly." Norovoi dug her fingers into the wet, bloodied flesh of the wall. "No, wait, I- I've got an idea."

"What-

Norovoi hooked an arm around Nivviks, threw both of them over to the nearest window and pushed them out with a single kick despite the Vandal's shrieking protests. She dragged him closer, dialing up first the radius on her Arc shield generator, then activating the defensive barrier of her Icefall Mantles - the twofold energy shielding looping around them both. If Nivviks noticed, he didn't give any sign; he just kicked at her viciously and bellowed curses into her ears. The ground rushed up to meet them, faster than she'd anticipated, and-

There. Water. Shallow, maybe. Looked more like a river - a sizable one too, but still a river. Better than hard rock, so she wasn't going to complain. Norovoi angled them for the body of blue, turned them around so her back was facing the earth below and shouted, "Brace!"

Nivviks closed his eyes and tucked in his head against his chest, arms curling around her back. "Idiot," he snarled, voice muffled.

They hit the water with a crack.


AN: Thanks to Nomad Blue for editing!

Norovoi may just be the most fun character I can write about. She's gruff, mean, brutal, cold, prone to knowingly making the worst decisions and beating anything she really doesn't like to a pulp. It's great. Also - didn't plan this with Nivviks being with her, but it just happened and I'm glad my brain went that way because I like working with Grumpy Eliksni Granddad™.