19th October 1995 (63:6:28)
— Contact plus 00.01.17:05.30
The night before the march on Isiro began in earnest, Beth's troop was pulled aside and informed they'd be moved to Indochina in about a week.
Now that everyone had gotten their shite together, the alien landing in the Congo was well and truly surrounded. Pressed in from all sides by forces from most of the African countries, plus the Arab nations, Israel, and Europe, even the Chinese getting in on the action, plus more soldiers and a bunch of material support from the Soviets and the Americans, yeah, this was a hell of a thing they'd slapped together on such short notice. There'd been a couple sizeable battles already — one not far west of Goma right around the time Beth's team had been setting their trap, and more further west, forces coming in from the west hitting resistance around Mbandaka and from the south ambushed on the highway somewhere north of Kananga — and while they had lost plenty of people, yes, it sounded like the fighting was going surprisingly well so far? From what Beth was told, the initial approaches had gone badly, but as they adjusted their tactics, spreading out their people more so they couldn't get knocked out with a single lava bomb (and also more easily surrounding and cutting apart groups of dinos), the mages concentrating on shielding tanks and artillery and shite, flying up to knock out their funny skipray-looking planes or take occasional strikes at fortified positions — distracting them so their weird gravity shields would miss the rockets and mortars coming in — and they quickly started getting the hang of it, steadily pushing the front back toward Kisangani.
Their side was going to be somewhat more complicated, since the aliens had a bunch of air power at Isiro, but they weren't that worried. With the combination of the local and foreign mages and the artillery sent in by the Arabs and Soviets it should be a hard fight, yes, but they were mostly certain they'd be able to take Isiro. They expected the ground fight to get nastier and nastier as they approached the primary landing site near Kisangani — the aliens were tough bastards, and seemed to have no fear of death whatsoever, when a normal person might surrender instead jumping into mad suicide runs, in some cases leaping at vehicles and blowing their grenades and shite like that, it was crazy — but they didn't have any doubts at this point that they would be able to retake all of the Congo with the people they had here.
The landings in the Amazon and in India were...somewhat more mixed, but also trending in their favour. The Amazon landing was kind of like the Congo, in that the aliens had landed in the middle of nowhere deep in a fucking tropical jungle, but the landing there was even more isolated, with even less modern infrastructure in the area, meaning it was somewhat harder to get to. (Beth had honestly never considered how fucking huge the Amazon was before.) Also, there were fewer big militaries ready enough and close enough to get there on such short notice — Africa had the 'advantage' of recent wars of liberation against European empires and a number of subsequent conflicts going on, so had had military forces already built up and ready, with the Arabs and Europeans right on their doorstep, but the closest equivalent the Amazon had was the United States, half a hemisphere away. There had been civil wars and revolutions and stuff going on in the Americas, but their suitability for the current crisis was somewhat less, for reasons that hadn't been adequately explained (and also Beth didn't really care). And the Yanks were being slow to get people there — the first attempt to get air power down had resulted in a lot of planes being exploded, moving their navy south to try to provide a little backup for the locals had resulted in a lot of sunk ships.
The mages had been very helpful in keeping things from complete disaster — for complicated historical reasons, American magical countries were still mostly dominated by natives, and they were a bit paranoid about Old World mages coming back and trying to conquer them again, so they'd been cued up to respond to the alien attack in a blink. The American mages being weird and militant had actually kind of ended up saving the American muggles' arses, so, Beth guessed it'd worked out in the end? Though, they couldn't just teleport US soldiers and equipment down there, for complicated geomancy reasons Beth didn't really follow — Hermione had tried to explain it, something about magical currents and the Caribbean and bloody active volcanoes, but she always had trouble understanding complicated ideas without someone around to explain it in person — so they basically had to march aaaallll the way down Central America and over the mountains of Columbia, on foot. Well, in trucks and busses and shite, but. The Americans had mobilised pretty much everyone they could on short notice, and were picking up more friends on the way (pretty much the entire Mexican army, for one, plus a whole bunch of Communist volunteers from the south of Mexico and a some of the little countries there), so it'd be a fucking huge army when they finally caught up, it'd just be a little while yet.
Not to say they'd been doing nothing in the meanwhile — the local forces were holding on as well as they could, the mages sneaking around to identify where the aliens were most concentrated...so the Americans could then bomb the shite out of them, from all the way over in the North. Planes had a nasty habit of being shot down, sure, but the Americans had a large number of missiles and shite that could be aimed from surprisingly far away. Once the mages gave them coordinates, they'd fire off a bunch of missiles all at once, a few minutes later local militaries shelling the same spots, so the missiles had a better shot of getting through their weird gravity shields. It was working relatively well so far, but it was pretty patchy, the aliens spreading all over the place through the Amazon. They were pretty sure the ground forces on the way would be enough to clear them out (as bloody and miserable as the fight was likely to be), they just had to hold out that long and they'd be fine.
The Americans had even managed to down another of the big space ships. The aliens weren't complete idiots, and they were in space, obviously they could see the huge bloody army making its way down toward the Amazon. The column had been under almost constant bombardment by one of the smaller ships — smaller relatively speaking, of course, like the one that they'd boarded over Paris during the initial attack — sometimes a second or a third one showing up to help. They'd done some calculations, waited until they had a couple ships bombing their people at once...
...and then shot a bunch of nuclear fucking missiles at them. Special ones that were meant to go up into low orbit, coast for a bit, before coming back down, Hermione had explained — the Americans had probably used those because the rocket actually burned out once they were high enough (the arc it would take back down to earth from there was predictable), the lack of fire constantly blasting out the back making them far harder to see while in transit. Near as they could tell, one of the alien ships had been badly damaged, slowly limped back out to the moon for repairs, and another had been completely fucking disintegrated. The aliens were leaving the approaching column alone now, presumably preparing to hold them at the mountains north of the jungle, which seemed like a smart idea to Beth.
(Apparently nuclear fucking missiles were no joke even for the aliens.)
Of course, they'd fired up a bunch to make sure something would get through the weird magic gravity shields, and the nukes that missed had continued on to land somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, west of South America. According to Hermione, they'd presumably been careful about their aim and timing to make sure their misses landed around there — it was a pretty empty spot in the ocean, nobody really living out there, the fucking huge multiple nuclear blasts probably hadn't directly killed anyone. Wind and water currents would bring (weak) fallout over countries, like, Chile and Peru and Argentina, but the Americans had already promised help with the cleanup, and medical assistance for cancer down the road and the like. Apparently, the local governments weren't super happy about it but, you know, the aliens were kind of the bigger problem, the rumour was they were willing to eat the cost of (mildly) increased cancer risk to avoid literally everyone being enslaved and/or murdered.
(Supposedly, the Americans and the Soviets were having meetings to hammer out their nuclear strategy — Hermione said there were a limited number of nukes they could use before there'd be serious environmental consequences. And not just because the shite was poison, either, apparently something called nuclear winter was a thing? Sounded bad...)
Compared to the Amazon landing, the one in India was a mix of better and worse news. The place the aliens had landed was pretty rural, but India had rather more thorough transportation infrastructure these days, and the area was smaller than the bloody Amazon, so it was much easier to move forces in to respond. Also, India had a pretty decent-sized, modern military, and neighbours had immediately jumped in to help — particularly the Soviets, China, and Burma — they had the situation pretty well in hand already. Or, at least, they had the landing well-surrounded, keeping the aliens contained, working on pressing in, similar to here in the Congo. The military side was going pretty smoothly over there.
The other parts weren't going so well. While the landing might have been in a relatively rural spot, India had a lot of people, even well away from the major cities, countless little farming communities and bustling towns dotted all over the place. Between the initial (and still intermittent) bombings in the cities and the subsequent landing, hundreds of millions of people had been made homeless, who knew how many millions of people killed. Plenty of people had managed to flee the landing area — the aliens had only managed to capture a relatively small fraction of the population in the area, possibly even lower than ten per cent — which was good, yes, fewer people dying or having their brains rewritten (fucking creepy bastards) was always better...but that also meant India was now dealing with what was almost certainly the single worst refugee crisis in human history. Seriously, hundreds of millions of people displaced, it was absurd.
It was bad enough that, despite being sent there as part of an Army thing, Hermione's mum apparently hadn't seen proper combat at all yet — her superiors had decided she'd be more useful in a medical position, working primarily in a massive sprawling refugee camp a good hundred kilometres away from the front. Which Hermione was relieved about, definitely, but the stories coming out of there were still pretty fucking horrifying. Not to mention, the interruption to agriculture was going to cause a massive famine in India — hundreds of millions of people, remember — they were already mobilising resources to try to deal with it months in advance, but it was going to get bad over there. Especially since people starving had a nasty habit of causing political unrest...
So yeah, mixed bag, India.
Indochina, though, was not doing so well. Beth hadn't really known much about the region before — she'd never had any particular reason to, it was on the opposite end of the bloody planet — but, while the march toward Isiro was starting up, she was instead stuck in intense language lessons with someone sent over for the purpose (along with two other omniglots), which included talking about this stuff. The whole area had been a French colony not that long ago, but then the French had been kicked out by the Japanese in WWII, in the absence of their French overlords the locals then putting together armed resistance movements to kick out the Japanese. But then, after the war, the French came back, attempting to reassert their control over the area — France was one of the Western countries that'd had a harder time accepting that colonialism was over now, they'd made trouble in Africa too — which had led to a long, bloody war. Eventually, France had been kicked out, mostly thanks to Communist-aligned peasant groups, which had then faced reactionary backlash that often had ethnic elements to it (some of these groups known to be backed under the table by various Western meddlers), which had then led to a civil war in the region, culminating in Vietnam (with Laotian backup) temporarily taking control of Cambodia to stop a genocide, it was a whole complicated thing.
And then after that, China had invaded — for complicated historical and political and economic reasons, Beth didn't really follow it. Vietnam had suffered the worst of it in that war, since they were the ones who had a border with China, but Laos and allied militias in Cambodia had sent soldiers to help, so they'd all lost a lot of people in it. Large parts of the north of the country had basically been levelled in the fighting, it was a mess. So, those three countries — Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia — had been through a hell of a time, occupation by the French and then by the Japanese, an anticolonial revolt against the Japanese and then the French, and then civil wars culminating in a regional war, and then invasion by a much more powerful neighbour, a conflict which had never been fully settled, a slow background of border skirmishes continuing into the 90s.
And all that only within the 20th Century, by this point they've had barely a decade of relative peace ever since the arrival of the French in the latter end of the 19th Century. Their economies had just started to get off the ground again, reconstruction from the century-long string of war still ongoing in all three countries.
Aaaaand then the aliens landed, in the mountainous region along the three-way border. To put it bluntly, the locals were not prepared to deal with something like that. The devastation left behind from too many wars in a row and the general underdevelopment of the isolated mountain valleys made it even more complicated to deal with. Luckily for them, this particular landing was on a somewhat smaller scale than the other three, for whatever reason — the common assumption was that the stuff the aliens wanted to grow there was different, and the smaller footprint enforced by the mountainous environment necessitated fewer soldiers to hold it — but it was still, well.
It was a terrible fucking mess, basically.
The person who was telling them all this, while blowing through an accelerated omniglot-style language course, was actually a retired Soviet official, who'd been in the area during the war with France — the Soviets had provided some assistance at the time, though they'd never really had soldiers helping out for real, just advice and supplies. The Soviets were actually sending large numbers of soldiers and equipment and stuff there this time, because the locals couldn't handle it themselves and had asked for the help. There was some complicated juggling going on between the different Communist governments, about who would be sending people where and in what numbers, it was a whole thing, and also not really Beth's business.
Their language lessons were focussed on Vietnamese, though, like here in the Congo, there was no one dominant language they'd be able to get by on everywhere...especially in the mountainous border region they were being sent to, that place was apparently really diverse. Well, a lot of people spoke French, she guessed, but given the complicated history of the colonial administration and the war and everything, relying on French wouldn't be very politic, to put it mildly. (Also, the ordinary people in isolated farming villages and shite weren't likely to know much.) They'd probably have to pick up more languages while they were at it, whatever was spoken in the area they were posted at, but Vietnam had the largest military of the three countries, and most everyone in the military would speak Vietnamese (as a second language if not natively), so knowing this one would probably be most helpful at getting by, at least.
Like how learning Kiswahili when Beth got to Africa didn't actually allow her to talk to everyone around, but it at least helped — same idea, she guessed. At this rate, she was going to know so many new languages by the time the war was over...
Vietnamese — tiếng Việt — was kind of reminding her of the little bit of Hak-kâ-va she'd picked up from Cho? Kind of similar-feeling, in that there weren't any consonant clusters, syllables going consonant-vowel-consonant at most, sometimes with some Ys or Ws in there, and also there were the tones, can't forget the tones. Her feeling was that tiếng Việt had more different vowel sounds than Hak-kâ-va, and also the tones were...different? They had probably the same number of different tones, but, some of them were kind of... Like, it was less about the pitch changing, necessarily, and more like, sort of, changing how the...air moved? Some felt more hissy and sharper than others, like half-whispered or harsh and grinding a little, and, there was pitch to it, but Beth wasn't sure how much of the distinction between the tones was the pitch and how much was her voice feeling different. Maybe a mix of both?
Anyway, it wasn't that hard to learn. It sounded way different from English, but she'd gotten practice with Hak-kâ-va, once she got the hang of feeling out the funny tone stuff it wasn't a big deal. And the grammar was super easy, nothing inflected or anything, just stringing uninflectable words together and the meaning coming from which words you used and what order they were in, like in English. At that point, the game was just picking up more vocabulary, and Beth was a cheating information sponge, so that wasn't hard.
...Though, it didn't seem like the other couple omniglots she was working with were picking it up quite as fast. They got good at making the sounds correctly at about the same time Beth did, but it didn't take very long for her to notice that their sentences sounded very clumsy, and their vocabulary was always behind hers.
Apparently other omniglots actually needed to hear a word at least once before they could possibly remember it, which, um, Beth didn't see why? All the words were in the Soviet bloke's head, there was no reason they needed to hear it...
Langley had said she was absurd even by omniglot standards, so. She had actual proof of that now, she guessed. Bloody weird, but okay then.
(Shouldn't be surprised, it was literally impossible for Beth to just be normal about anything.)
The big damn international force here had started the crawl toward Isiro days ago now. The rest of her team had been...doing something in the fight, she didn't know — by the sound of it, scouting ahead and/or keeping an eye on their flank — but Beth was kept back, focussed entirely on absorbing tiếng Việt as quickly as possible. Which was kind of frustrating, honestly, sometimes it was hard to pay attention to the talk — she didn't like just sitting here while the rest of her team was fighting without her. Not like she was just lying back taking it easy or anything, basically every waking hour of the day in magically-accelerated language lessons, hardly even breaking for meals or toilet breaks, just completely mentally exhausted by the end of the day. Twice she ended up with awful headaches, and needed to go take a nap for a couple hours before coming right back to it. Even with the help of magic, the mind could only handle having so much information crammed into it at once, and they were walking that line here, so.
Well, Beth was, anyway, it didn't seem to be bothering her fellow omniglots as much. She still had no idea why — Hlynur asked what she was doing differently, and there wasn't anything, she didn't think, she was just like this...
The only fighting Beth saw in that week or so was a few days in, when the aliens decided to send aircraft over to fire down at the column. The attackers even included some of the scary-quick fighter planes, been a while since Beth had seen any of those. Beth had been in the middle of a language lesson at the time, but of course she had all her things on her, as the alarm went up she just pulled out her broom and flew up to meet them. The skirmish had been pretty short, all things considered, the aircraft blasted with artillery and harried by Beth and a cadre of African mages who'd appeared only a few minutes in, they downed a handful of them before the aliens retreated back over the front line. They'd looped around and came in from behind, Beth assumed it was an attempt at a decapitation strike, aiming for the commanders — they had lost a few officers, and there was a bit of a scramble for an hour or two, picking over destroyed equipment and scavenging around for anything useful and patching up the injured (or bundling up the badly injured to be teleported back to the hospital with the big command centre in Ethiopia), but the advance started up again before too much of a delay. If the aliens had been trying to knock out the leadership and send this group into disarray, it hadn't worked.
A couple days before they were set to leave for the East, Hedwig just...showed up. Out of nowhere, with no warning, Beth just woke up one morning to find her perched on top of one of those big bloody mobile missile launcher things a short distance from where she'd laid down for the night, a clump of curious people gathered under her, pointing and muttering. You didn't exactly see a lot of big damn Arctic owls in Africa, after all. Beth wasn't surprised that Hedwig had come to find her — the month between leaving for the training camp thing and when she randomly appeared in Africa was the longest Beth had gone without seeing Hedwig since her eleventh birthday — but it was still, just, bloody frustrating of her. Hedwig was smart, weirdly smart even for a post owl, you'd think she'd know better than to show up in an active warzone.
There'd been a little bit of fuss about it, higher-ups either demanding Hedwig be sent away, or put into quarantine until they were sure she wasn't... Well, with the way the aliens used living things, they were very much aware of the possible threat of, like, germ warfare and the like...and birds were particularly suspicious for that reason, though Beth didn't quite follow why. (Had someone used birds to spread germ weapons before? Was that a thing?) There was a bit of a debate that morning, since, naturally, muggle militaries didn't allow their people to bring their pets along, but magical organisations tended to make exceptions for familiars — and Hedwig had managed to find Beth a continent away without prompting (that she wasn't carrying a letter was important for reasons to do with how the magic of post owls worked), so it was assumed that she was a proper familiar, even if Beth didn't know what that meant exactly. Beth was a magical citizen, but was in a regiment under the command of the UK, which made the question of whether that exception should apply kind of complicated.
The officers weren't happy about it, but if Beth tried to send Hedwig away she'd probably just come back anyway, so. It was decided that, as long as Hedwig hunted for and didn't make too much of a nuisance of herself, she'd be allowed to stay with Beth for the time being.
(She suspected the fact that she happened to be a Lady of the Wizengamot might have something to do with the decision, for silly special noble legal privilege reasons, but nobody explicitly said so, so Beth could continue to pretend to be a normal person. Well, relatively normal, anyway.)
Honestly, Beth thought that was probably the right decision just for morale reasons. War was fucking bleak, and Hedwig being all interesting and expressive and super pretty was at least a pleasant distraction from how miserable everything was. It wasn't very long before the other people around were talking to her — Hedwig couldn't talk back, of course, but she could make herself understood with body language and the occasional hoot pretty well — or playing around tossing bits of their own food (which was breaking her agreement with the officers) or bits torn from the occasional carcass found around the column for her to chase, to occasional cheers as she gracefully snapped things up in mid-air. (She suspected there were bets going on over whether she managed to catch one thing or another.) Beth felt a little more at ease with Hedwig around, but looking around at the faces of the people around her, she had a feeling she wasn't the only one.
Letting people keep pets around for morale reasons would probably be a good idea, but most animals tended to get scared off by big bloody guns — Hedwig would just give the noise surly, irritated glares, so.
(The same glare Hedwig would give people for being rude in her presence, seriously, Beth loved that bloody bird.)
Beth and the other omniglots were given about a week to learn as much tiếng Việt as possible, given ongoing plans to start transferring more backup that way they couldn't really delay moving their advance teams in for much longer than that. By the end of that week, Beth could more or less keep up a conversation in the language already — she sounded really clumsy and almost childish to her own ears, but that would be enough to start with, at least. Mostly just missing vocabulary at this point, she'd continue learning after they got there. The other omniglots weren't quite as comfortable with it as she was, their speech noticeably simpler, but it'd be good enough for basic stuff, they'd have a harder time but they should be fine.
Once it was decided that they couldn't wait any longer, the units the omniglots were attached to were called back from wherever the hell they happened to be at the time, all their shite was packed up. A mage with the Egyptians produced a huge damn portkey from somewhere — like a big circular fishing net, woven out of some kind of rope, leather straps attached to it here and there. Everyone strapped in, tying their equipment to themselves to make sure they didn't lose anything, Hedwig gripping tight at the rope right next to Beth. (She'd tried to explain what they were doing, how important it was to hold on tight, but she really had no idea how much Hedwig understood.) The portkey was about as spinny and miserable as the Triwizard Cup, but the trip lasted much, much longer, Beth was feeling horribly dizzy and nauseous — and she wasn't the only one, through the storm of wind slamming her over the head she heard someone somewhere vomiting — she was just worrying about how long this thing could possibly go on when she was finally flung bodily to the ground, her knee banging against a rock and sand sent skittering, blasted with sudden heat from all directions.
The sun was painfully bright and it was absolutely sickeningly hot, Beth had to cover herself with an overpowered personal cooling charm and shield her eyes before she could even begin to get a sense of where she was. (After a second, she hit Hedwig with a second cooling charm while she was at it — poor girl wasn't built for this kind of weather.) They were in the middle of a fucking desert. The spot they were in was rockier, flat patches and towers of craggy stone poking out from under the sand, a sprawling camp huddled under the rock against the gusting wind, but the solid ground disappeared not far away from the camp, rolling dunes stretching out into the distance, bloody huge, arcs of sand rising and falling like frozen waves, here and there dust devils spinning off the tops, streaks of colour flying...
The sand was very red — from the pictures Beth had seen of deserts she'd expected, like, yellow-gold or something, but this shite was red. Like, brick-red, super red. Not quite proper Gryffindor red, and fading more toward a creamy sort of pink in places, but pretty obviously red. Bloody weird.
Beth had kind of assumed they'd been popped up to southern Egypt or Libya or something, but no, they'd been portkeyed all the way to Saudi fucking Arabia. That was, like, two thousand kilometres, or something like that? She'd had no idea portkeys could even go that far! Jesus Christ...
There'd already been some kind of transport hub here, used by the mages, doorways carved into the stone and in a complicated network of caves underground that led all over the place — a kind of portal, walk through the doorway and you just appeared on the other side — but since the start of the invasion they'd been expanding, sprawling out across the surface. Not with those neat enchanted doorways, those were more difficult to set up, mostly using portkeys and the odd transport spell Beth had seen a couple times in Africa now. The trip here was about the maximum range of a portkey, at least without risking serious accidents. Vietnam was another...five or six thousand kilometres or something — measured in a straight line, Beth didn't know if they'd be able to take those jumps over the Indian Ocean, so probably even longer than that — so they'd be using that transport spell to get the rest of the way.
They had to wait a little bit, though — the mages drawing out the spell circle on either side needed to do it perfectly in sync, and the time they'd arranged wasn't for another hour and change. And it was fucking hot here, someone said it was above forty degrees?! Bloody deserts, seriously. It was super windy, gusts constantly flipping her hair around, which did help to wick sweat away, but it didn't help that much. Not to mention, the wind tossed sand up at her, that was uncomfortable. Also it was sunny as all hell, and Beth would burn in fifteen minutes in British sun, if she wasn't careful — the fucking tropical Arabian sun was something else.
It was completely fucking miserable, basically, Beth had no idea how people actually managed to live here. Arabs must be made out of tougher stuff, because even with magic to cool and shade herself, she was dying.
As miserable as it'd been for various reasons, she was starting to miss the bloody rainforest — at least there'd been shade there.
After far too long suffering in the desert heat, a call went up passed around between the clumps of people gathered on the sand and stone all around. It was repeated in a couple languages, included English, but Beth actually understood Arabic well enough to get it the first time: it was time for the groups leaving for Indochina to get going. There was a little bit of a scramble, a disorganised crush of people heading for a flat spot of ground hugged between the towers of rock — clear of sand and unnaturally flat, transfigured smooth, the better to draw the spell circles on. Glancing around at the uniforms on the muggle soldiers surrounding her, she saw a mix of colours...mostly Arab countries, she thought, though the more red-looking ones could be anyone, she guessed.
(The Communists all using red flags made it kind of hard to keep the different countries they were from straight, but Beth suspected that was at least partially the point — l'Internationale sera le genre humain, and all that.)
They were actually splitting up, it turned out, which did make sense, when she thought about it, since she'd gotten her lessons with two other omniglots. In fact, they were sending at least five groups, but they only had the space on the floor to send two at a time. A magically amplified voice was rattling of directions in a mix of languages, Beth perked up at the mention of United Kingdom, S.C.F.R.S. C.-Nine — that was them, her team were in the first batch. She elbowed her way through a group of...um, Iraqis, she thought — she caught a snippet of Arabic, but the flags and shite in that region were all so bloody similar — managed to almost run into Sam, tucked in behind him. Beth was bloody tiny, and while Sam wasn't a particularly huge bloke or anything, he was carrying a pretty sizeable case that Beth knew had fucking RPGs and shite in it — Sam was one of their demolitions people. Beth had no idea how the hell he could carry that case so easily, she knew it weighed almost as much as she did. Point is, he had a much wider profile than Beth, getting through the crowd was a lot easier just following right behind him.
He glanced over his shoulder at her quick. "You know, it's a lot easier to spot you when you got that great bloody bird on your shoulder."
She rolled her eyes. "Shut up, Sam."
Beth's troop was shuffled over into one of the circles, the mages already at work drawing out the lines, the litany hissed under their breath. (This was technically a ritual, so "litany" was the proper term.) Seeing the spell had already started, they rushed a little bit to get themselves in place, but by the time they were all standing in a pair of clumps the mages were probably only a third of the way around the circle, plenty of time — and it didn't look like they had any stragglers trailing behind, the rest of the crowd hanging back, good. Beth spotted Bill and Luke nearby, and there was David over there, but she couldn't see most of their troop, mixed in with a few dozen other (mostly muggle) soldiers. She asked one of the blokes around her and Sam in her somewhat awkward Arabic, apparently the people in their circle were all Syrians...or mostly Syrians, anyway, they'd picked up a few people from neighbouring countries over the last weeks. People had been killed in the fighting, patching together full-strength units from whoever they had on hand, they were making it work.
They probably had to be pretty careful about that, she thought. The Arab world was a confusing mix of socialist and weird theocratic governments at the moment — and in a couple cases both at the same time, somehow? (she wasn't sure how that was supposed to work...) — and of course there were religious and ethnic conflicts and stuff. She knew from her Arabic talks with Hermione that there were multiple different branches of Islam who often didn't like each other much, a lot like Christianity in that way, and there were various religious and racial minorities scattered all over the place through the whole region, it was a whole thing. If they weren't paying attention to who they were sticking with who, that could get very nasty real quick.
Of course, the people in charge must knew that way better than Beth did. Syria was one of the secular socialist ones, she was pretty sure, as long as they stuck to patching up their gaps with more secular leftists it was probably fine.
(A few people did give the fifteen-year-old girl in the middle of a crowd of burly soldier types very odd looks, but she was used to that by now. Luckily, most people who didn't know better quickly decided she must be older than she looked — mages aged slower than muggles, so that wasn't an unreasonable guess — which was convenient, she usually tried to play along.)
They only had to wait another minute or two in the miserable Arabian sun before the circle was finished. The magic crawled up her legs, sharp and crackling, like static, the air suddenly feeling uncomfortably solid, enough it was hard to breathe — and then, zip, the magic released them. Teetering a little, dizzy — some of the muggles fell right on their arses — Beth let out a shaky breath. This weird Chinese spell-circle thing was definitely her favourite method of long-distance magical transportation, but that didn't mean it wasn't still uncomfortable.
It didn't help that the weather really wasn't that much better here — it was a bit cooler...maybe. It was honestly hard to say, because it was also really fucking humid, the air feeling thick and heavy to breathe. Which was especially annoying, because it was fucking nighttime here! It was slightly absurd that it was suddenly dusk now, considering it'd only been mid-afternoon a second ago, but she guessed they had popped, like, a quarter of the way around the world or something? She didn't know, whatever, the point was it should not be this warm after the sun went down.
At least it wasn't actively raining...but by the feel of the air around her, that could really change at any moment. Had they sent her into the middle of a bloody tropical rainforest again? Ugh...
Looking around, they were in a clearing, rather flimsy-looking buildings and tents scattered around, definitely a military camp of some kind. There were a few trees sticking up in the middle of it here and there, but nowhere near as dense as the forest around them...though, if they had sent her to another tropical rainforest, it wasn't the same kind. It was hard to say for sure, too dark in the approaching night to see much detail (especially with her eyes still dazzled by the sun reflecting off of the Arabian sands), but she thought the trees looked different — patchier, maybe? She didn't know.
They'd only been here for a couple seconds when she noticed the gunfire and shouting, shockingly nearby, people scrambling around the camp like an overturned anthill — they must be under attack.
Their group was already starting to scatter, spilling out of the circle, shouting and the rattling noise of a couple dozen people readying weapons all at once, when there was a magically-amplified vo— No wait, no tingle of magic, that must just be a normal megaphone. Anyway, it was very brief, someone calling in accented French, "We're under attack, lizards from the river, this way!"
An instant later, there was a pair of overlapping too-loud voices — these ones were magically-amplified — one speaking in English and the other in Arabic. (Beth was a little surprised the Syrian officer had reacted so quickly, but, hadn't they been occupied by the French too? The French were just bloody everywhere.) She didn't need the Captain's orders to know he wanted their mages to fly up there and give their new friends some cover, she already had her broom unshrunk and in hand before he was halfway through. Beth was slowed down for a couple seconds by someone nudging her shoulder in passing, Hedwig swept away with an irritated krek — finding a nice perch to wait at until the fighting was over, hopefully — and then Beth was zipping up into the air, more or less in sync with...just two of their mages, Olwen and Clement, Bill must be staying down with the Captain to shield the rest of their people. Actually, it wasn't just the three of them, a handful of people in Syrian uniforms had pulled out brooms too, the pack of them sweeping straight toward the noise of the battle, Beth's Firebolt slowly putting her ahead.
(Thankfully, Beth assumed the Syrian mages should be decent fliers, at least. Brooms weren't used everywhere in the magical world, being a primarily European invention, but the Arab countries were big in international quidditch, they should be perfectly comfortable with them.)
The trees shaded a thick layer of undergrowth, bushes and grasses, way denser than the tree-covered parts of the last rainforest she'd been to — the trees were patchier here, Beth guessed more sunlight reached the ground. The locals had set up a barricade along one side of the camp — very basic, and there were a few tents trampled underfoot, she suspected it'd been conjured on short notice — keeping up a staccato stream of fire from behind cover. (Mostly AKs, by the sound of it, Beth knew the ubiquitous Soviet rifles pretty well by now.) There was a sizeable pack of dinos coming in from the forest, though many of them staggered at the treeline — squinting, it looked like they'd tossed barbed wires or something over the brush, probably also conjured on short notice — the moment of disorientation more than enough for the muggle soldiers to cut them down. Looked like they actually had this mostly in hand...though as Beth approached a few dinos leaked around the trapped stretch of brush, bugs flickering through the night, multiple spots in the barricade cracking or going up in flames, to shouts from the muggles (Vietnamese soldiers, Beth caught a couple words), retaliatory shots quickly downing the dinos, there was a streak of fire from the roof of a nearby building and a patch of the tree line exploded, some of the plants bursting into flames, dinos thrown back, Beth caught a glimpse of slashed-open torsos and scattered limbs—
A little nudge to the side had her slipping between the first row of trees, she zig-zagged around a few as she slowed, looking around below her. The brush was pretty thick, it was hard to tell for sure, one dozen, two three... A fair number of the bastards, anyway. Beth tossed a couple curses down at them, a piercing curse lancing through one of them from top to bottom, an arc of sectumsempra cutting apart three more, but it was too hard to see, the things spread out to get around the trees, she couldn't use any big spells. Over the constant ear-piercing rattle of gunfire, she barely caught the buzz of bug-grenades, she took off on a slaloming course through the trees, a pattering and booming of the things slamming into trees behind her. She looped around, firing off more slicing curses at vague rustling shapes in the bushes, she—
Right there, one of the tall scarred ones! Must be in charge of this group, knocking him out would at least make the dinos fight stupider. Beth danced through the trees, occasionally dropping a curse on heads below her, slipping around bugs — once they were past her once she didn't give them a second thought, they'd almost certainly hit something trying to wheel around anyway — once she had a good angle she darted off like a shot, straight for the ugly bastard, "Fixam iaculor!" the yellow-white glow of the Lance of Modestus jumping ahead, and—
The alien ducked out of the way well in head of time, must have seen her coming, dammit! He threw a couple bugs after her, but those weren't a problem, she looped back around to make another run at him, the bugs whizzing off pointlessly. (In her peripheral vision, she saw one of the Syrian mages jink out of the way of a bug, his broom catching on a branch sending him flipping through the air — he used some kind of spell to halt his tumble, landed safely enough, but Beth lost sight of him.) The ugly was watching her, she could see, head turning to follow her through the trees, a hand going to his waist...and the weird spear-grenade things she knew some of them carried, fuck, that could get messy. Beth kept flying around toward him, looking for a gap in the trees, standing up on the foot-pegs in case she had to apparate out of the way. Just a second, right...
The ugly had just properly detached something from his waist, the blob extending into a big tapered dart, when an unfamiliar bright white spellglow suddenly slammed into him from straight overhead, the alien officer reduced to a bloody smear on the ground...which then immediately burst into flames as the spear-grenade went up, Beth reared back, shielding her eyes from the hot stinging debris flung from the explosion.
There was a rustling in a nearby tree branch, she wheeled around, preparing to fire off a curse — but it was a human man, definitely a local, brownish skin and vaguely Asian-looking features, dressed in trousers and a foreign looking wrap-around tunic thing. His wand came up to his brow before flicking her way — some kind of salute? — before he was moving, jumping over to another branch quicker and easier than should be at all possible, must be propelling himself with magic, hopping to the next and the next, raining curses down on the aliens as he went...
Okay, then.
The gunfire coming from the camp had mostly tapered off, the charge apparently having ended. But they hadn't killed all the aliens yet, stalking through the bushes, Beth could see them rustling now and then — she snapped off curses whenever one showed its face, but they were short enough to mostly hide in the brush. Looping around, she came around the camp side again, muggle soldiers carefully picking into the trees, a dino burst out of the bushes with no warning, gutting two soldiers before they reacted, took multiple bursts of bullets in the chest, injuring a third muggle before it finally went down...
Clearing this patch of woods the traditional way was going to be very costly, the things were just too quiet when they wanted to be, and deadly at short range. And they already knew detection spells didn't work on them very well. For whatever reason, magic worked better on the dinos than the scabs — Beth had even managed to pick up little snippets of the language from dinos during her time in Africa — but it was pretty inconsistent what would work and what wouldn't, and illusions and detection spells in particular were very unreliable. One advantage they had on their side was that this patch of forest wasn't very large. In her loops around, Beth actually got right to the edge — they were in a mountain valley, it looked like, trees on the hills and more open land hugged toward the middle, maybe some farms? The camp was right on the edge of the trees, the band the aliens were in was relatively narrow. But still, flushing them all out the traditional way would be bloody, and they couldn't find them with magic.
That meant they had to get creative. Grimacing, Beth slowed, her wand flicking up to her own throat. "Vocem vecta." Belatedly remembering to speak in French, "Does anybody mind if I burn down everything through to the valley?"
There was a brief pause — Beth spotted a dino, tossed a piercing curse but the thing saw her coming in time, dove out of sight, a bug flying up at her as he went, barely ducked out of the way, fuck. Beth had just given up finding him again when a magically-amplified voice rang through the air, an unfamiliar masculine voice speaking in accented French. (From her impression of the language she'd gotten in her lessons, that was definitely a Vietnamese accent.) "Retreat to the camp immediately." That part was repeated in Vietnamese, a similar call going up a second later in English and Arabic. "Mages, wait a minute for our people to clear the trees and light it up."
Beth spun around and darted back toward the camp, a few other fliers zig-zagging along nearby, she spotted at least two figures jumping between the trees like crazy people. The very slow progress of the muggle soldiers into the woods actually helped them here — they retreated much more quickly than they'd advanced, pairs taking turns darting ahead and covering each other, an occasional burst of fire as an alien showed itself. By the time Beth was flying over the camp, a stream of people were slipping out from between the trees, already slowing to a trickle. She drifted well over to the side, nearly halfway the length of the camp — she didn't think the aliens had spread out any more than this — just as she was setting up a last handful of people came running out of the trees, turning on their heels to blindly spray bullets behind them, a guttural alien scream, managed to hit at least one.
Right, that looked like it would do. Drifting closer to the ground, she hissed, "Millanceīs flagrantibus ulcīscere." She'd experimented with shortening the incantation since the start of the invasion, but that was as far as she'd gotten so far — better, but still a pain to get out in a pinch. Twisting the final wand movement into a wide sideways slash, she started flying, paralleling the edge of the trees, a dense red ribbon of magic streaming out of her wand as she went. Around the time a call came in amplified French to start the burn, Beth's curse was already starting to cut into the trees, a dense series of sharp bangs followed by a crescendoing roar of flames. She traced along the whole side of the camp, before finally letting the curse go, gasping at the lurch of magic cutting off, her arm burning, she listed in mid-air for a second before catching herself.
The length of the forest at the edge of the camp, several dozen metres wide, was suddenly consumed with fire, battered trees still teetering and crashing to the ground from the force of the curse, alien voices crying out in pain and surprise.
But letting them escape wouldn't do any good, they had to box them in. She wasn't the only person to get that idea, apparently — as she flew up and over the trees (the air hot, ash clawing at her skin and smoke itching at her eyes and throat) she saw a few mages had beat her to it, walls of fire crashing down at right angles to hers, carving all the way through to the valley, cutting the aliens off from going around toward the camp. Beth crossed the narrow band of trees into the valley proper, setting up to put some more fire down on this side—
Belatedly, she noticed the battle wasn't only going on here. There was a settlement of some kind along the river in the near distance, hard to make out in the falling night, a short span away were... Well, Beth didn't know what the fuck those things were. They sort of reminded her of the things they used to take groups of captives, bugs with long, slender, chitinous limbs that could stretch around dozens of people at once and trap them in place, but much, much larger. Like, the size of a bloody building, walking on their weird, multi-jointed armoured legs, but these ones also had a larger, oblong sort of body, almost looking like big damn squids.
Also? They had tentacles that spat out streams of liquid fire — Beth saw a strip of grasses at least several metres long go up at once, that shite looked painful. There were already people fighting over there, the ringing of automatic rifles and the booming of artillery...
A column of aliens had moved toward the village, so the camp had sent out their heavy weapons and most of their men, caught on their back foot when a group of aliens unexpectedly popped out of the woods. Right, Beth was caught up now.
"Millanceīs flagrantibus ulcīscere." This side of the trees wasn't nice and even like the camp side, the border more random and natural-looking, Beth had to zig-zag around a little, free hand tight on her broom and gritting her teeth against the magic tearing down her arm. In ten seconds, she had this whole side of the trees alight too — she pulled up, her fingers shaking a little, wavering in the air. She'd gotten plenty of practice with it at this point, but that curse was still serious business, especially casting it twice that close together...
She was just wondering how they were going to both burn the whole patch, to make sure the aliens were all caught in it, and prevent the fires from spreading where they didn't want them to go, when a bright orange-gold comet suddenly launched up into the air from the camp. A vague, almost bird-looking shape, wings spread, a trail of flame stretching behind it, for a second she thought it was a veela, but no, it was some kind of spell, a construct made entirely of hissing flames. It flew up, slowing as it rose, then arced back downward, the air burning with intense light magic as it passed by where Beth was floating watching, and then crashed to the ground, more or less in the middle of the marked off patch of forest.
A circle of woods erupted into tall flames, bright white and gold and orange, eerily silent, only a subtle hiss, crackling and popping of burning wood. The circle rapidly spread, swirling in an ever-growing spiral, the wind quickening around Beth, drawing her in, like a bloody fire tornado or some shite — thankfully the pull wasn't very strong, she leaned into her broom's flight spells just a little and she was fine. The fire got brighter and brighter as it spread, a blinding white-gold, the whistling of the wind almost seeming faintly musical — reminding Beth of phoenix song, just at the edge of hearing — and brighter and brighter, throwing deep shadows, Beth was forced to turn away, like looking straight into the sun. That was a hell of a fire spell, Jesus Christ...
Note to self: Don't fuck with the local mages.
(She would later learn that that was technically a product of ritual alchemy, and had very inconvenient limitations — not least of which being a handful of freely-offered phoenix ash, not something people normally kept around — but still, seriously impressive stuff.)
While the fire was burning, there was another amplified call of Vietnamese-accented French — the same bloke, presumably someone in charge around here. "The village is being attacked. Any who can move go to reinforce them."
Beth hesitated for a second, drifting closer to the camp. It looked like the fight going on over there was pretty big, flying on her own like a reckless fucking Gryffindor was probably a bad idea. There were more amplified voices a couple seconds later, Beth tuned out the Arabic to focus on the Captain. "Mages go on ahead, air cover; Weasley will get me to whoever's in command over there. The rest of you, stick with Ashmalyeh, catch up on foot. Go."
She was confused for a second — was Luke trying to say Al-Shamali? was that the Syrians' commander? — before brushing it off, leaned over her broom and zipped off toward the village, the fires and the wind roaring in her ears. Some of the other mages had started moving first, but she didn't overtake them immediately — instead of aiming straight for the fight her path took more of an arch. Jumping into the fight with big spells wouldn't do any fucking good if she didn't know what was going on and who was fighting where.
Beth was going to call upriver east, and downriver west, just for convenience — the sun had dropped far enough below the horizon it was hard to say, but she thought it was flowing more southeast to northwest (at least in this section of it, it curled around a bit further west in the valley), but who gives a shite. There were craggy mountains in all directions, covered in trees with occasional hard rock faces showing here and there, the valley a relatively narrow strip of flat ground winding between them. Not an expert, but it looked like most of the valley was cultivated in one way or another, fields marked off in squares — some of them with obvious curves, paralleling the river or against the slope up the mountains — big patches of what looked like grass were probably rice, those bushier-looking things were probably vegetables, and there were trees dotted around too, maybe a fruit or a nut of some kind? She thought there were even cultivated patches up in the hills too, but she had no idea what they might be growing up there.
The military camp was on the south side of the river; the village was a short distance away, spread along both sides of the river, but more the north than the south. It looked like there was a lot of irrigation and shite going on around the village, wasn't rice grown in semi-flooded fields? Whatever, Beth had had to do a lot of gardening growing up, but she was not an expert. The village was pretty anachronistic-looking, but she guessed they were in the middle of fucking nowhere in a poor country, so. It was rather sprawled out, a lot more space between buildings than she'd expect, the open space scattered with vegetable and (probably) rice patches. There were a variety of buildings, mostly little things that couldn't be more than a couple rooms, made in an odd mix of materials — some of the roofs looked like hatch, others some kind of tile (maybe clay?), one she saw topped with what looked like sheet metal, the walls local wood and a few sturdier ones done in brick. A few houses closer to the river or the fields were raised a couple feet above the ground on posts, probably worried about flooding. Beth saw signs of personality here and there, colour and decoration, but it was too dark for her to make out much.
Large patches of the fields to the west of the village were already on fire.
It looked like the aliens had come from the west, moving upriver. She'd guessed before that they'd hit the village to draw out the army so they could then hit the camp, but looking at the scatter of big weird squid things and the alien soldiers in seemingly random patches through the fields, she suspected they might not have even known the camp was here — it was hidden by the tree line, and there were enough trees in the camp that it might be hidden from above too. She had a feeling the aliens hadn't even known the army was here before they came roaring out of the trees. There were vehicles and mortars and stuff set up on the south side of the river — some of them wrecked or burning, some of them still in one piece — occasionally firing shells and rockets over at the aliens. Some of the infantry had remained with them, dino corpses scattered in a ring around their position, but others had seemingly forded the river on foot (there had been a bridge, but only a few bits of debris remained), set up a shaky line to defend the village. It looked like they were mostly holding, though Beth noticed a couple alien corpses between the houses, some of the attackers must have gotten through.
The infantry seemed to have the dinos handled, the rockets and mortars mostly aimed at the big bloody fire-squid things — they clearly had the same weird magic shielding as their space ships and stuff. There were four of the things, it looked like the defenders had managed to score a few hits — one of them was looking particularly mangled, visibly lopsided, falling behind the others and almost seeming to limp on its weird insectile legs — but none of them had been taken down yet, most of the shots Beth heard and saw on the way over absorbed to no effect.
Well. Looked like the big weird fire-squids were the priority, then. And good bloody timing too: they probably only had a few minutes before they reached the village.
The two in front were getting a little too close to the defenders to use big spells safely, so Beth picked the one in the middle. "Millanceīs flagrantibus ulcīscere." Gritting her teeth against the draw on her magic, she leaned further forward over her broom, jumping ahead in a shallow dive, her hair flapping and her eyes itching in the wind. As she flew, slowly drifting sideways so the arc of the curse would slash across the fire-squid, she squinted against the wind, charting out her path after that. There were dinos here and there in the fields, staying close to the fire-squids or moving to loop around the line defending the village — though the defenders did notice that, the plants short enough they could see them, the dinos occasionally scattered by a mortar hit or picked off by sharpshooters. She'd want to take a sharp corner to the right just past the fire-squid — quickly, so she didn't get hit with her own curse — throw curses down at the dinos as she looped around back to the front pair of fire-squids. Right, good plan.
By the time she'd finished the slow drift to the left, anything cast from this point would just continue on into the fields behind the squid, she was still too far away — the scale of the squid-things had thrown her off, fuck, they had to be three, four storeys tall, at least. And the squid was moving to the right, so, from this far away her aim would be a little off, but most of the curse would still hit something, so whatever. Beth cut off the magic, gritting her teeth against the burning in her arm, and leaned further over her broom, pushing hard into the flight spells, jumping ahead of her curse. The Firebolt could supposedly get well over two hundred kilometres an hour, and even fast spells maxed out at maybe a hundred, so she should have enough time to—
The ground was coming up fast, Beth took a hard turn, reversing her dive and curling around behind the fire-squid — her weight seeming to double, her broom pushing uncomfortably against her thighs — snapped off a blasting curse in passing, to hopefully distract part of the shields, but she was moving too fast to get off a second shot, zipping over the fields. Turning into a sideways drift to bleed speed, packs of dinos were flicking by beneath her, "Sectumsempra!" slashing her wand in a wide zig-zag to spread the curse over a whole group, "Lacera lacera lacera! Solarem!" a burst of fire spread over a group just about to make a charge for the village. She heard the rapid staccato crack-boom-fwoosh! of her opening curse hitting home, followed by an odd whoomph sound she didn't recognise, presumably the fire-squid she'd hit was going up. Beth heard a familiar buzzing in the air, but it was too dark to see what direction the bugs were coming from, she drifted closer to the ground, "Detti!" the stonehammer charm aimed at the dirt, Beth wobbling in the wind, her hair flapping and ash stabbing into her eyes, but at least the bugs were thrown off-course, a quick heat-neutralising charm would prevent them from finding her again.
She was at the far end of the pack of dinos approaching the village — except for those over there, but a "Lacera!" tore them apart in a burst of fire, they wouldn't be bothering anyone. Trying not to wince, Beth started flying again, back toward the fire-squids, "calore vindico," painting the alien-infested fields with painfully hot blue-white flames as she went. She felt a little guilty about burning so many of their crops — Hermione kept talking about famine setting in soon, she was aware that would be a problem — but at this rate the aliens were going to burn all of it anyway, and she wasn't sure what else she was supposed to do...
Where the fire-squid she'd hit had been was a large circle of thick flames, the light and the smoke almost enough to completely hide the remains of the creature in the middle, mixed in with the orange and yellow were tongues of green and blue — what the fuck...
Ignoring the ear-piercing screeches of aliens burning alive in her wake, Beth flew up toward the fucking huge fire-squid things. The one in front moved, shifting surprisingly gracefully on its spindly, insectile legs — almost seeming to half-float, maybe they used their gravity-based shielding to make themselves lighter? — one of the thick tentacles curling around the sides of the head gaped open, a flicker of light sparking on. She cut off her spell and jinked to the side, and a blink later a stream of liquid fire was pouring through where she'd been a second ago, the heat stinging all down her side like an instant sunburn, Jesus. The tentacle was squirming in place to fix its aim, the other fire-squid turning to box her in, but she was moving too quickly, ducking between the thing's legs, "Sectumsempra!" the curse aimed for one of the joints.
Snape's special cutting curse was a hell of a thing. According to Sirius, he'd invented it himself as a teenager, the story Beth had been told was that he'd reverse-engineered it from the accidental magic that he'd killed his abusive alcoholic muggle father with — Beth had had no idea about any of that before that lesson, that the intimidating former Death Eater head of Slytherin had a muggle father who'd kicked him around as a child, it...kind of explained a lot, actually? Not making excuses for him being a big bastard, of course, just saying, Beth got it better now. But anyway, it was a pretty seriously dark curse, slipping straight through a lot of plain shield charms (though dark- or light-tinted ones worked fine), cutting through living things like tissue paper. And the curse lingered in the wounds too, they wouldn't heal naturally, and standard healing magic would just wash right over them to no effect. Snape had also invented a special healing spell that would reverse it — back during the war, once other Death Eaters started copying it from him, just in case — but Beth couldn't cast it herself, healing magic was hard. Sirius could, he'd demonstrated on a rat (which they'd later fed to Crookshanks) just so she could see it. The curse was less effective at getting through non-organic materials, but she'd still had pretty good success with it on the aliens, despite some spells not registering them as alive — she assumed just because this one was serious fucking business.
The arc of the curse was invisible, so she couldn't see it — but she felt the curse spang off the armour covering the legs, looking like nothing but the shell of a bright red-orange beetle, destabilised shards of dark magic flying off in random directions. Fucking hell, that was some serious armour on the legs...
The heads looked a bit more...poofier, in places the craggy not-rock their space ships were made of, but in other places smooth and mottled, looking almost more like skin. Thick leathery skin, but still, that was probably a better bet. She didn't stop moving, though — there were still dinos on the ground, had to keep an ear out for bug-grenades — curving behind the fire-squid, up and around, angling to come at the other one from above and behind. Their tentacle things were still facing away from her, she had time to slow and pick a vulnerable-looking spot on the head. "Transige!" The piercing curse splashed uselessly against the surface, but she'd kind of expected that, quickly followed it up with, "Iaculor!" The yellow-white spellglow struck the fire-squid in a blink, the colour shifting to a bright pink, before lancing through the rest of the—
"Fuck!" A stream of burning liquid squirted out through the hole, Beth barely leaned out of the way — a couple droplets landed on her sleeve, immediately setting it aflame, but Beth put it out with a cleaning charm before it could really do much damage. Not to her anyway, her uniform had scorched holes in it now. (Her instinct had been to use a cleaning charm, didn't consciously put together until afterward that the problem was whatever that fluid was, a water charm would have just spread it around.) The fire-squid sprayed out whatever that shite was only for a second or two before it stopped, the hole patched over with scar tissue already...
Pausing for a second, Beth frowned, glancing around. The other mages were here, killing the rest of the dinos from the air, taking pot-shots at the fire-squids. The one in back had been taken down at some point, laid out on the ground, but it was still alive, tossing up an occasional stream of liquid fire, continually pummelled by mortars and spells, fuck, these things were tough. They were poking holes in the other two now and then, but they healed too fast, and they were too close to the village for her to safely use the Thousand Lances, they needed to, to...
Oh shite, Beth got it. Looking up, she picked a spot in the air on the other side of the river, quick apparated away from the battle. Um, she needed one of the— Sam, she'd take Sam, a tracking charm pointed her straight toward him, she flew down to the pack of muggle soldiers jogging through the field toward the river. People heard her coming, rifles tipping up for a second before they registered what she was, she coasted over their heads for a moment, tipped sideways off her broom to fall to her feet in the middle of her troop.
Ricky grabbed her shoulder, halting her stumble before she could fall on her face. (She hadn't slowed down all the way, stupid physics.) "Woah, Beth, is there—"
She shook her head at him. "Sam! I need your help with something, grab a LAW and get on."
Thankfully, Sam didn't bother asking questions, and dropped his case to the muddy ground. In a blink, he had a bag of spare rockets slung around his waist, one already loaded into the launcher, slung over a shoulder to free his hands. Fitting two people on a broom was awkward, but it was doable — there were brooms designed to accommodate more than one person, but unfortunately Beth didn't have one on her. She sat a little further forward, Sam right at the base of the bristles; the levitation spell on, he stepped onto the foot-pegs, Beth had to put her heels right on top of his feet. He was wearing steel-toed boots, so her weight on them shouldn't bother him, but it did reduce her manoeuvrability somewhat. Honestly, the arm around her waist was probably the most uncomfortable part about it — Beth infamously didn't like being touched — but she was used to most of these blokes by now, it didn't bother her as much as it would have a month ago.
(There wasn't really a lot of privacy to be found in slapdash military camps — most of her troop had seen her at least partially undressed by now. She just tried not to think about it. It did help that most of them were super awkward about it, very much aware she was only fifteen, so, could be worse.)
The second he was settled in, she darted up into the air, Sam hissed out a curse, his arm tightening around her a little. "What am I hitting?"
"The big bloody squid things!" she yelled over the roar of the wind. "My curse will change colours when it hits, aim for the same spot! Shoot as soon as you see pink!"
"I can't aim when we're moving this fast!"
Beth grit her teeth — this was going to be a fucking pain.
She hadn't been gone very long, the state of the battle hadn't changed much in that time. She thought the fire-squid in the back was dead now, burning as intensely as the one she'd downed — maybe their ammo ignited on exposure to air? — and the other two were getting worryingly close to the village, one of the houses at the edge was already on fire. Beth came in fast, well behind the rear fire-squid (there were a bunch of people focussed on the front one), sweeping over the fields. There was an ear-splitting banging of nearby rifle-fire, a jolting in the broom in her hands, "No, get ready now!" it cut off immediately, the weight against her back shifting as Sam fiddled with something.
She looped around, tossing a piercing curse here and there as she spotted isolated dinos, curling back toward the fire-squid from the opposite side, flying close enough to the ground that the stalks brushed at their legs. The fire-squid was suddenly coming up fast, she adjusted her aim a little, nudged around one of the insectile legs, tipped the nose up and came to an abrupt stop — Sam's weight slammed against her back, he let out a low oof as the air was driven from his lungs, Beth nearly lost her grip.
They were directly under the fire-squid, the body sagged a bit toward the back, they'd hit it right there. She drifted a little that way, to make sure the rocket would go deeper into the body instead of just slicing right through the edge. "Ready? Lacera!" the curse blowing up a few dinos turning their way.
The arm around her waist lifted away, Sam doing something with some heavy clicking, occasionally nudging her in the back. "Ready!"
It all happened in the space of a couple seconds. Beth turned her wand upward, "Iaculor!" the spellglow raced away, splashing against the skin of the fire-squid; the instant it shifted pink there was a fwoosh, the broom listing hard at the force, Beth scrambling to hold them steady, a harsh scream as the rocket burned away, but this close to the target it only lasted for a fraction of a second; the Lance of Modestus pierced through the skin of the fire-squid, before any liquid fire could even start squiring out the rocket was already slipping through, disappearing inside; and then it went off with a muffled boom, the fire-squid listing, there was a deep sort of thrumming, almost like the popping of a balloon but a lot louder and deeper, and then an intense hissing of fire, the night sky overhead immediately vanishing in a yellow-orange dome...
The explosion had made the fire squid burst, the liquid fire stuff sprayed out in all directions — falling back toward the ground in a burning rain, they were completely surrounded. Stuff spraying out at low angles too, cutting them off— "Hold on!" Standing up on Sam's feet, she waited a split-second for him to grab on again, before digging in hard, pushing way more power into it than normal, and disapparated.
They appeared over the river, Beth's skin swept with hot-cold pins and needles (overchannelling, but she hadn't splinched herself), Sam letting out a groan. "Sam, are you okay? Sam?"
"Ugh, I'm gonna be sick..."
That was why she'd aimed for the river. "Are you missing anything?" The liquid fire was all splashing down to the ground by now, some of it reaching as far as the river, hitting the water with crackling hisses and bursts of steam.
"Missing anything? Fuck, no, I'm all here."
She let out a shaky sigh — good, that was good. Splinching could be reversed pretty easily if you could get to the missing pieces, but that wasn't really an option when they were buried under a big damn alien creature and also on fire. "Good to hit the second one?" It had been nicked in a few places, the skin scratched and scorched, but it was still lumbering along, a burst of fire enveloping another house as she watched.
"Give me a second." Sam took a few more shaky breaths, clearly very uncomfortable. But it was only a couple seconds before he was moving again. Beth didn't know what he was doing back there — she'd been taught to use the pistol they all carried, and the rifle the muggles all had, and she could probably pick up and figure out one of those shotguns if it came down to it, but she hadn't been taught any of Sam's stuff at all — some shuffling around and metallic clanking, she just kept watching the fight. The fire-squid lurched from a hard mortar hit, but it hadn't pierced its skin, picked off one of the fliers with a stream of fire, continuing on to spray over a nearby garden... "Ready."
"Vocem vecta. Clear the squid, blowing it in five." Belatedly, she remembered most people here didn't speak English, repeated the message in French. She started zipping forward before she was even done speaking, again coming in at it from behind, dropping a curse on a dino she spotted in passing. By the time they were getting close — fires burning in all directions, the air hot and dry and smelling of burnt bacon — the mages buzzing around the thing were gone, the air empty. "Ready?"
"Do it!"
Picking more or less the same spot on the underside of the body toward the back, she tossed off the curse, Sam again firing a second later. She didn't hang around to watch the hit, leaned over her broom and zoomed off immediately — Sam let out a curse, flailing, barely managed to hold on. The force of the LAW going off had her teetering at an odd angle for a moment, but it didn't matter, the speed was enough to get them out from underneath the squid. Boom-pop-hiss, she glanced over her shoulder, this fire-squid had burst as explosively as the last, and—
It was standing at the edge of the village, just starting to walk between the two already burning houses on the very outside. The liquid fire was spraying into the village, as far as it was flying, it'd probably catch a quarter of the houses alight, easily, maybe even more.
Options flicked through her head in the space of a heartbeat.
She apparated, appearing between the fire-squid and the rest of the village, the spray of liquid fire curling like a wave to crash over her head. Pulling as much magic as she could, the air around her seeming to shimmer and spark, "Kristallini akropoli!"
The magic burned through her, hot and cold, wrenching through her as hard as a bludger hit, her head spinning and her vision going spotty and blurred—
Numb and clumsy, she couldn't feel the broom, something was shaking her shoulder, she could barely feel it, meaningless words burbling in her ears, half-heard. Sam, shouting. Blinking, the world was a swirly shapeless mess, they were moving, dropping, Beth gripped the handle of her broom with scorched, stiff fingers, piercing white pain radiating down her right arm. Trying to turn the broom hurt, a deep thrumming stabbing she felt deep in her chest — dimly, she knew she'd overchannelled, badly, using magic would just make the damage worse — she tried to slow their fall, groaning as the agony flared worse, shredding her apart from inside out, a shape looming ahead, she tried to turn out of the way—
They hit whatever it– a roof, they hit a roof, not going too fast, but the tip of the broom caught on something, flipping forward, the world was spinning even worse, Beth numbly felt the impact, something scratching at her as she rolled, and she was falling again—
—"Beth! Dammit, Potter, are you still in there?"
Beth blinked her eyes open, but they were refusing to focus, colours swirling and shapeless. She was sitting on the ground, she thought, Sam holding her half upright, shaking her. Grabbing at his sleeve, she could barely even feel her own fingers, "Too much magic, gonna, gonna pass out. Tell..." Her lips numb, like a really bad frostbite, her head spinning, she could feel it coming over her, she already couldn't feel most of her body at all, like those seconds just before falling asleep. "Tell B-Bill, overchannel."
"What was that, overchannel?"
"Over. Channel."
"Got it, I'll tell him. Um, I should— Hey, you! Give me a hand here..."
Beth was dimly aware of being lifted up off the ground, but the numbness quickly took her over, and everything faded away.