Engine noise, vibrations under the seat from the fans.

Sunlight streamed through the cockpit bubble, warming it enough I'd stuffed my cloak under the seat. Outside was a rolling hillside of mostly scrub brush and rocks broken by the occasional cluster of trees.

If getting yanked out of Purgatory heart first was bad, landing in my body while it was at the controls of a flying deathtrap was worse.

But I was back! No doubt about it, no time to waste, and no…giant hole where my heart and part of my lungs used to be….RIGHT deep breaths, it never happened. NEVER happened and never will now.

Never.

Kyouya frowned across from me in the other seat. "Problem? You look sick."

"Ju…just had a bit of something from that last bump," I answered hastily. This was bad. This was really bad. I'd hoped Eris would send me back early enough in the flight that I could claim something felt wrong and either land us or better yet turn around. But this was maybe a minute before whatever got us happened. Hastily I started scanning outside, hoping to catch a glimpse before all hell broke loose.

There. Just specks now and well above us, but they were moving.

"Yunyun? You've got better eyes than us, can you come up here and take a look at something?" I called back into the cabin.

Grumbling, she unstrapped from her seat and did so, eyes glowing with irritation. "F-fine, what…" she froze, looking where I pointed.

Without a word she bolted into the cabin, seconds later I heard the crash of her feet on the access ladder leading to the open roof hatch.

"That can't be good…" Kyouya said warily followed a moment later by the reddish streak of a fireball from our wizard.

"Ya think?" I answered, tracking the enemies as they abandoned their stealthy approach and dove for us.

I got an impression of a purple, streamlined blur racing past the side window as I juked us to one side, and then a thump followed immediately by an awful grinding scream like the time I'd accidentally dropped a handful of spoons in the garbage disposal.

Lights bloomed red on the center display, the racket growing louder by the second as the left lift fan started eating itself after an appetizer of monster. That side immediately dipped as the fan stopped producing lift, and as low as we were that wing didn't have far to go before it clipped a sturdy tree and sent us cartwheeling like a demented shuriken.

I heard a scream from the back as Kyouya's seat broke loose, not designed to hold down someone in full armor maybe, and sent him through the cockpit bubble in a shower of safety glass. Mine held for those few terrible seconds before we crunched into something more solid than us and we halted with another crash.

The ringing in my ears drowned out anything else for long moments, the stars fading from my eyes and feeling coming back from the rest of me as I sagged against my seat belts. One twitch told me I had a broken rib at the least, and my legs weren't telling me anything at all. Which could be a minor thing, or really, really bad. I fumbled around with the belt release button, my hands not quite ready to do what I told them, when my hearing came back with a pop.

I wished it hadn't. The silence was periodically broken by a sobbing coughing that I knew came from someone too hurt to scream, and the crackle of something moving through all the broken branches and pebbles we'd churned in our trail. Several somethings.

One of them clattered onto the floor plates in the back, but I paid it no mind. Another had slithered in through the hole Kyouya left on his exit through the windshield, and I got my first good look at our killers.

Purple feathered on the back and top, with a darker shade of it on the belly and front, almost black I saw as it unfolded its wings slightly. Two gleaming hooked claws came from its feet, long as my own knife and bent forward halfway to the tip. Speaking of, I tried to fumble for mine, but the belt had it trapped between me and the seat. With a high pitched noise that might've been laughter, the beast landed on the empty space amid the glass shards and regarded me hungrily.

Another sharper screech came from behind me, and when I involuntarily twitched to look, the first one pounced. Claws first it sank right into my guts with an impact that drove all the breath out of me and probably finished breaking my ribs.

Whiteout pain blinded me, but in the last second before I faded out completely I felt the slithering sensation of something leaving me and plopping onto the floor around my seat…

Blackness.

Engine noise, vibrations under the seat from the fans.

No twisted metal and shattered glass, just the sun warming the clear bubble that felt so much less protective than it had before takeoff.

The echoes of those last awful seconds refused to leave, I hunched over with a grunt and squeezed my eyes shut, causing Kyouya to call my name worriedly.

"Think…I think I'm seeing the pattern here, Lady Eris," I muttered. Louder, I called "Yunyun! You were right, I just saw something!"

To her credit she didn't sass me about telling us so, just jumped for that same ladder as before. She let off another fireball, and the chase was on.

This time I dumped full power into the fans, causing us to leap upwards over a hundred meters in a bound.

"HAHAHA! Take that bitches!," I called as one of them went into the trees without us there to stop its dive. The others pulled out in time, six of them for now but who knew if they had friends? They hadn't needed any before.

I leveled us off after a few more seconds to let Kyouya unbuckle while he cursed fluently in our shared language while struggling with his seat belts. We were about 300 meters up now but with landing gear down and all the doors and rear ramp open we were still practically crawling forward.

Further below, I could see the monsters spreading out ahead and on either side, flapping hard to get above us again.

"Fio! Watch the side door, make sure they don't get in!" Kyouya barked as he got free and charged rearward. "I'll….nevermind. Clemea take over," he amended. I risked a glance back through the cockpit door to find Fio bear hugging Yunyun around the waist from the other side of the ladder to keep her on it.

Oops, yeah that could've been bad.

I was tempted to roll us to give Yunyun a clear shot from her position on top, but that seemed like asking for trouble with Kyouya and Clemea unstrapped and trying to take positions at the doors.

What I needed…what I needed was to be anywhere but here. But that might solve our problem too. They were scary fast in a dive but they were just big birds. Big, scary, sharp…focus. Focus. Right. How fast could they possibly be? This isn't a jet but there's no way they can catch us by flapping, right?

I tried to start raising the landing gear and ramp, but then hit a problem.

The ramp made a grinding noise and froze as soon as I tried to retract it, and with that big flat metal plate hanging down we might as well have a parachute holding us back.

"Kyouya! Do something about the ramp! I'm taking us up again," I called back, while still eyeing our friends who were now level with us warily. I fed in more power to start matching their climb, then a little extra and hoped that didn't put anyone too far off balance.

He didn't answer, but I heard a screech and lurched.

"Kyouya? Clemea?" I called. "What was that?"

Another screech of rending metal, this time I could place it from below and behind as I finally got an answer. "That wasn't me! I…ohshitDIE!" Kyouya bellowed and a louder 'WHANG' of parting metal sounded from the passenger cabin.

"KYOUYA! What the Hell is going on back there?!" I called again and noticed us banking into a roll. I absently corrected it and tried to look behind me again.

We kept rolling.

"The damned harpy tried to burrow in through the belly!" Clemea shouted back. "There's a hole I can see the ground through! And…something's bleeding in there?" she finished hesitantly.

Please be its blood, please be its blood, please… I prayed to my awesome, favorite, very best accept no substitute goddess.

"It's oil," Kyouya answered his sidekick. "And why are we still rolling?" he demanded, striding up to the cockpit door as the floor tilted more dangerously.

Damnation. I mashed buttons frantically but nothing changed, the angle of tilt increasing faster and faster. "Controls are dead," I snapped over my shoulder. "No backups I can see. One of you must have cut the lines."

He went white, opening his mouth to say who knew or cared what before grabbing for the seatback with a yelp. We went up on one wingtip and the fans quit keeping us in the air, their thrust now pointing more and more down and adding themselves to gravity.

The ground rushed closer, again, and I heard rattling as loose items started bouncing off the ceiling as I heard screaming, again.

Maybe one of them was me.

Blackness.

Engine noise, vibrations under the seat from the fans.

Right. Deep breaths, that one was quick enough I didn't even feel it. Gonna be ok. Inhale…exhale…inhale…

My thundering heart started creeping down, but my hands still shook on the controls causing a shimmy in our course that made Kyouya look over curiously.

"Incoming," I croaked just over the background noise. Swallowing, I called back louder. "We've got enemies! I'm gonna dodge, everyone hang on!"

Not waiting for a reply, I hit the ramp and landing gear retract switches. No surprise, the ramp jammed again.

"Go clear the ramp, we can't speed up with it dragging behind us," I ordered Kyouya. "Maybe there's a manual latch by the entrance." Fat chance, if we didn't even have backup flight controls, but who knew?

He unstrapped quickly to do just that, and I eyed our old friends once again. They hadn't started their attack run yet, but it had to be any second…there they went, tipping over and disappearing as they folded their wings close around them.

"Hang on!" I called, gave it a second and hoped Kyoya grabbed something, and then gave it full power. Once again we jumped skyward, mashed into the seats by the sudden acceleration, and this time I left it there and to hell with the creaking in back from things flexing that maybe shouldn't be.

If we could just buy a couple minutes to get clean and streamlined then we'd be home free. But even as a foot bound adventurer I'd learned a single minute was an eternity in a fight, airborne looked like it was even more so.

We'd moved earlier so the harpies had time to correct. None of them plowed into the trees, sadly. They were also able to keep their speed, and pulled into a climb to recover most of their old altitude in a looping zoom.

"Kyouya! Any time!" I called, answered by a screech of metal that sent shivers right down my spine and vibrated in my teeth.

"You're good, punch it!" he called back, and that I did. I dropped the nose and called up full power again, rotating the fan pods for high speed flight as we fell. The ground rushed closer, our speed mounting as the Dragonfly started acting more like an airplane and less like a sitting duck.

The creaking intensified, but I didn't dare slow down knowing the harpies could probably still catch us. 'Go, sweetie, go, go' I prayed as I pulled back hard, trying to level us off as low as I dared to trade all our altitude for speed as the fans roared.

With another screech and lurch, something went, all right. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw the right wing fold up like a hinge before we flipped upside down and backflipped in.

Blackness.

Engine noise, vibrations under the seat from the fans…