Book Promo And Vignettes By Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Note that for various reasons, relating to my having forgotten to post early today, this post will bridge today and tomorrow, when there might or might not be a post, depending on a bunch of things I don’t know/can’t know yet – SAH

Book promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM CAITLIN WALSH: Mama Bunny #2: Daddy’s Home

Mama Bunny is back, and this time she’s got backup!

In this brand-new Papa-focused collection, follow the Bunny family as they perform unwise science experiments, operate heavy machinery, and disassemble anything that stays still for long enough.

Being a stay-at-home mom has its challenges, but with your husband at your side, anything can be managed—no matter how ridiculous.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: AI Is Love

The Japanese word Ai (愛) means “love”. The English acronym AI means “artificial intelligence.” But they both use the same two Roman alphabet letters…and the author loves making puns.

Thus, AI 愛 is Love is a collection of 65 images made using Artificial Intelligence tools and methods. Each image is the author’s loving re-imagination of his wife at various stages of her life, using old photographs and digital models and post-processing software, not to mention plain old-fashioned skull sweat coming up with prompts to feed the MidJourney AI in the first place. While the author cautions his readers that his wife actually doesn’t look entirely like the lovely ladies depicted (mostly because they all have long straight or wavy hair), he does wish to make clear that all of his love for his beautiful lady wife has been poured into the present book, which he humbly recommends for your consideration.

BY ROBERT J. HORTON, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: Three Riders (Annotated): a pulp western omnibus

iktaPOP Media proudly presents three classic westerns by pulp author Robert J. Horton!

Rider o’ the Stars

When he was hired on to the Diamond H Ranch, the stranger gave his name as Dane. After seeing his skill with rope and gun folks started calling him “Lightning Dane”.

Was he a gunman? An outlaw? Why was he here? Nobody knew except Dane himself. And he wasn’t talking.

The Prairie Shrine

Annalee Bronson and her mother left everything behind when her father died, setting out to homestead in the prairielands of Montana. But being from the east, they simply don’t have the experience to cope with all the circumstances they find themselves caught up in.

Luckily, prairie poet and loafer Andy Sawtelle and mysterious gunman Silent Scott are more than willing to lend a helping hand.

The Man of the Desert

It starts with a stampede, and never lets up from there!

  • This iktaPOP Media omnibus includes introductions by indie editor and author D. Jason Fleming putting the book into historical and genre context.

FROM SANDRA MEDLOCK, JOHN SHOEMAKER, AND MORE: Tales of the Oil Patch

Stories of men and women who looked for oil under the land they call Texas.

To those who brought the ‘Black Gold’ to reality with their blood, sweat, and tears, and left their legacies for us.

Twelve authors use their imagination to bring you these stories revolving around the oil patch in Texas in the early days.

FROM BLAKE SMITH: The Hartington Inheritance (The Hartington Series Book 1)

Almira Hartington was heir to the largest fortune in the galaxy, amassed by her father during his time as a director of the Andromeda Company. But when Sir Josiah commits suicide, Almira discovers that she and her siblings are penniless. All three of them must learn to work if they wish to eat, and are quickly scattered to the far reaches of the universe. Almira stubbornly remains on-planet, determined to remain respectable despite the sneers of her former friends.

Sir Percy Wallingham pities the new Lady Hartington. But the lady’s family will take care of her, surely? It’s only after he encounters Almira in her new circumstances that he realizes the extent of her troubles and is determined to help her if he can. He doesn’t know that a scandal is brewing around Sir Josiah’s death and Almira’s exile from society. But it could cost him his life, and the lady he has come to love.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT (LOOK, IT’S A SNAZZY NEW COVER!): Draw One In The Dark (The Shifter Series Book 1)

Something or someone is killing shape shifters in the small mountain town of Goldport, Colorado. Kyrie Smith, a server at a local diner, is the last person to solve the mystery. Except of course for the fact that she changes into a panther and that her co-worker, Tom Ormson, who changes into a dragon, thinks he might have killed someone. Add in a policeman who shape-shifts into a lion, a father who is suffering from remorse about how he raised his son, and a triad of dragon shape shifters on the trail of a magical object known as The Pearl of Heaven and the adventure is bound to get very exciting indeed. Solving the crime is difficult enough, but so is — for our characters — trusting someone with secrets long-held. Originally published by Baen Books.

FROM KAREN MYERS: The Ways of Winter – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 2)

Book 2 of The Hounds of Annwn

TRAPPED BEHIND ENEMY LINES, CAN HE FIND THE STRENGTH TO DEFEND ALL THAT HE VALUES MOST, OR EVEN JUST TO SURVIVE?

It’s the dead of winter and George Talbot Traherne, the new human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is in trouble. The damage in Gwyn ap Nudd’s domain reveals the deadly powers of a dangerous foe who has mastered an unstoppable weapon and threatens the fae dominions in both the new and the old worlds.

Secure in his unbreachable stronghold, the enemy holds hostages and has no compunction about using them in deadly experiments with newly discovered way-technology. Only George has a chance to reach him in time to prevent the loss of thousands of lives, even if it costs him everything.

Welcome to the portrait of a paladin in-the-making, Can he carry out a rescue without the deaths of all involved? Will his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, help him, or just write him off as a dead loss? He has a family to protect and a world to save, and little time to do it in.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Simple Service: A Science Fiction Lost Colony Adventure (Martha’s Sons Book 1)

They’re stranded beyond the known stars. Will Peter Dawe’s perilous mission with a brother he despises end in death?

A lost starship’s settlers, isolated on an uncharted alien world, manage to terraform a mountain-ringed valley into a rich replica of Earth. Despite their success reproducing the environment they need to survive and thrive, only tenuous forces hold together the human colony on the world of Not What We Were Looking For. The governor’s appropriation of the western settlers’ weapons for the city strains those bonds to breaking point—and then beyond when Peter Dawe’s father sends him to get the weapons back.Twenty-year-old Peter Dawe’s restless nature easily endures the lost colony world’s rigors. His genetic modifications make it even easier. So when Peter retrieves the family weapon, he also brings back a motorbike, a piece of technology no longer available to everyone.

It would be a fine prize to keep to himself. He won it. He earned it. He quickly learns that his brother Simon lies in wait to take what isn’t his. Simon wants more than just the motorbike. He wants Peter’s glory.

But when Peter’s father forces him to take his hated older brother on Peter’s next mission, the pair must not only navigate the city’s perils and politics but learn to work together—when neither thinks the other should be in charge. Their success—and their very lives—depend on it. Or will Peter be proven right that he should have faced this task alone?

Simple Service is the first book in the immersive Martha’s Sons science fiction series. If you like gripping action, insurmountable odds, and alien worlds, you’ll love Laura Montgomery’s tale of a man determined not to let family ties sabotage mission success.

Buy Simple Service to pull off the impossible today!

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Love in the Time of Campaigning

As Frank Correra brings his family to a lunar settlement to get them away from a worsening political situation on Earth, he reminisces about how he and his wife met.

Frank had always dreamed of the skies. As a clone of an astronaut who subsequently became a US Senator, Frank thought he had a clear path ahead of him. But when it comes time to apply for the Air Force Academy, it is an election year. His ur-brother can’t promise a nomination until he’s won another term, and this year promises a hard race to run. When the other side puts up an ugly attack ad, can Frank find a way to discredit it before it destroys his ur-brother’s chance of re-election, and with it Frank’s slot at an Academy appointment?

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

FROM MARY CATELLI: Sorcery and Kings

Tales of wonder and magic.

A fire master must find a magical starter of fires.

A mysterious queen holds a ball in a city filled with magic.

Magic of roses and gold are needed to fight a dreadful war.

An oath keeps a ghost captive.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: Flaky

25 thoughts on “Book Promo And Vignettes By Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike”

  1. Shelly crouched beside Lucius Belfontaine, awkwardly aware of the cosmonauts watching a man and a woman work at such close quarters. Especially with Tsiklauri’s increasingly obvious overtures, Shelly was all too aware that she was being seen primarily as a woman, and not as a professional.

    Nothing to be done about it. Right now they needed to focus on the problem at hand — and particularly whether they were dealing with an actual malfunction or a flaky sensor.

    Like

    1. Yes, that is truly a neat cover.

      (Very) trivial trivia: the then-free Baen edition of this book was the first actual ‘e-book’ I ever downloaded, long long ago when my cheap new Barnes & Noble ‘Nuke’ tablet was only or supposedly to read downloaded PDF files without running down my laptop(s) batteries. (If Jerry Pournelle liked it, that was plenty good enough for me.)

      And the rest, as they don’t often say but ought, was pure enjoyment…

      Like

  3. “Well, when you said that gizmo was flaky, I didn’t expect this!” as he watch the device breaking apart into flakes.

    Like

  4. Preparing to inflict the classic Death of A Thousand cuts, Stuart looked for the essential tool.

    “Where, oh where, did I leave the Flay Key?”

    Like

  5. Here and there, something flaked off the wall. Paint, she supposed, and her fancy flew off to tales where enchanted symbols were damaged, letting fell magic run free.
    She forced her breath in and out. All the more important to get by them, and she could see a doorway ahead.

    Like

  7. He let his breath out. The villagers had talked of calling upon the knights, but they had at least had the sense to not have faith that they would come. He wondered if they realized who the strangers who came and went were.
    A path appeared ahead, and he slowed.

    Like

  9. “Wow, Mollie, this is great! So flaky!” Bill said indistinctly around his third mouthful of apple rhubarb pie.
    Sarah looked at Mollie, her second forkful of pie paused halfway to her mouth, suspicion flaring in her narrowed eyes. “Very. Flaky.”
    Mollie tried to look back innocently, but she knew from long experience her “innocently” look almost never worked on her Aunt, basically because she only needed to look innocent when she wasn’t.
    “Oh, it’s all in the ingredients! Well, and using ice water,” she tried, perkily. That didn’t work exactly as intended as Sarah’s eyebrows shot up.
    “Which ingredients you got where, exactly, neice?”
    Mollie was in trouble now. Having her aunt address her by relationship was only one step away from her using Mollie’s full name, first, middle and last.
    The competition on Tycho Base for an eligible mate, even for just initial relationships, was something fierce, mostly because most came to the lunar colonies paired up already. The result was even more promiscuity among the unattached young subpopulation than she’d read about from the early 21st century down the well on Earth.
    But her older cousins had told her the sayings about buying a cow when milk was free, which were a little hard to grok even if you’d been over to the dairy production farm caverns and seen a cow being milked. Even then, who could own one of those huge poopy monsters? But Mollie was well-read, so she knew how it worked in past centuries on Earthside family farms.
    And she got the point.
    She had decided to make herself a scarce and valuable commodity rather than a discounted one. And that meant becoming a potential life partner with skills like programming, or 3d design, or beekeeping – or baking. This was a sales demo. She wasn’t really interested in Bill, but he was a talker.
    Feeding Bill was better than buying an ad on the net.
    She shook her head. Woolgathering. Another down-the-well saying.
    “I traded a little honey and some programming I did for a quarter liter of beef lard from the dairy farm caves.”
    “And the flour?”
    “Traded for that too – a couple cool looking rocks from the new dig face, and a couple of my 3d printer doll designs, traded with a ship’s purser on the Earthside run to India. That’s where I got the filling ingredients too – the dehydrated apples and rhubarb and the sugar – all one trade.”
    Bill shoveled pie into his pie hole, oblivious to the interrogation. The air blew through the environmental vents with a low hiss, audible to Mollie only because she was so keyed up.
    “Hmph.” Aunt Sarah had raised Mollie since before she could remember. As far as Mollie was concerned, she was her Mom, she just called her “Aunt,” so she didn’t want to get in hot water.
    “Well, sounds like those were all fair deals,” Sarah said as she finally raised her second fork of pie to her mouth.
    Mollie let out a silent “phew” and took a bite from her own plate.
    The crust really did turn out really flaky.

    Like

  10. “Hoy, Cap’n.”

    The voice calling James Hawkins back from his sterile but distracting wasteland of manifest summaries and expense breakdowns sounded massively tired and obscurely… jubilant? He looked, almost involuntarily, at the sweep of stars and smallish K2 sun still in the large screen on the wall of his dayroom. Dared to hope he wasn’t imagining that last quality.

    His chief engineer wasn’t greasy, wasn’t sweaty; but he knew how long she and most of her ‘bunker gang’ had been awake, and working, trying to prove they weren’t stuck here, with only generations’ worth of crawling across wide, ordinary space to even possibly ever get them all home…

    “So, Jenks, you’re here in person instead of toiling in the engine rooom with our brigands and boffins. Might it possibly be you’ve exorcised the mischievous gremlins of… flakiness from our jump-drive at last?”

    And she smiled a genuine smile, that made her half-bloodshot eyes really, truly sparkle for an instant. “Not that but better. Better and better yet, truth be told. You know how you can knock a whole Drive system far out of alignment, and I mean energetically and harmonically not physically, just by giving one main conduit a hard rap with a wrench?”

    He breathed out, fully; maybe for the first time since they’d ended up in this slightly-weird little system two and a half days ago and could not seem to Jump out for the love of man or money no matter what they’d tried. “Yes, and all too well from my own engine-room days. But isn’t that only a matter of doing a from-scratch recalibration of the whole system?”

    Something you can do in ninety minutes, not sixty-one hours he did not quite say, even to himself.

    And she smiled, again, in a bright way that told him again and yet clearer this will be all right. “Normally, it is. But what we’ve figured out and then verified just now, in our last three milli-jumps, is that in this system, near that star, all the calibrations drift. Because that sun in your picture there somehow couples to the quintessence field that our engines run on. So all that… flakiness as you called it, its strange and variant behavior when we try to macro-jump back out of this system, is a result of that. A measurable and predictable result, though, by now.”

    The dozens of milli-jumps of a few hundred or thousand light-seconds, interplanetary scale not interstellar, had been hard on the crew and harder on the, um, passengers. (The Ellyn of the Star Roads was a freighter willing to carry people, nowise a liner. But it’d all gotten bad enough for discreet mentions of how mixing booze with the usual diatranquilline extended the drug’s half-hour of immunity from jump-sickness into a near-stupor lasting for a day or a few, that also left you too ‘doped’ to be sick.)

    “But the best thing is what we’ve learned. You know, being an old hand in these things, how the Coxeter Stabilizer of 120-ish years ago gets rid of all that chaotic behavior in the base Aoki Drive and makes it possible to simply point at a destination and Jump there? Within errors and drift, of course?”

    “Of course it does, that’s Jump Drive 101, first day of class.”

    “No, it doesn’t.” Matter-of-factly.

    And Chief Jenkins beamed, the way she seldom did unless she’d just won a big hand of poker. With the same quasi-predatory gleam in her eyes.

    “The Aoki drive is always chaotic, all the Coxeter does is stretch out the reciprocal Lyapaunov time, the time for those tiny little chaotic wiggles to double or whatever, to a huge lot longer than you could ever observe… with a Coxeter unit in the circuit. We can’t jump out of here with one of those in-lined, at all, either. You have to go right back to the start and use the chaotic instabilites. We’ve been at designing and calibrating a whole new control system, and that’s with all the weird drifts from this oddly quintessence-friendly star, most of these past two days. But it works for the micro-jumps and milli-jumps, and we’re close to good-to-go to a real, full-up interstellar jump right now.”

    And her smile damped. “I’m not sure we could’ve done it without Annette Poiseuille volunteering to help, though. Our Andrew Stormbaugh is as good at simulating whatever drive-input setup we throw at him as anyone I’ve ever seen or heard of, but that theory magic she does… it’s almost over my head, and you know how I live and breathe this stuff.”

    “I have a suggestion, here, Maryann. One you quite likely won’t like.”

    She pulled a folded paper from her coverall pocket. “Bet it’s the same as mine, maybe with a few details missing.” She tossed it, innocent of any writing on the outside, onto the papers overlying data-windows on his big operations desk. And paused, in that way he knew meant she was reading a selection of that material, almost as fast upside-down as she could right side up, which was fast indeed. And then smiled, broadly and companionably this time. With one eyebrow overtly raised.

    “‘We have created a busy solitude, and called it a peaceful refuge for the worried closet-introvert’ then, Captain Hawkins?”

    His eyes twinkled, he was sure of it, for her to see. “Do stop mis-quoting the classics of antiquity, Chief Engineer. And what I was about to suggest is simply that you and yours — including one Academician Annette Blevins Poiseuille, she’s surely one of us by now, cussing like a sailor and all, plus you, Andrew, Marco, everyone senior — take enough of a break now to catch up on your sleep and make sure you let your intuitions mull it over. Then we’ll reassess that Big Jump Back.”

    “Read the paper, Cap’n.”

    We ought to sleep on this, at least 6-8 hours, in case we missed some big bad tiny thing. Look again before we leap. Patience is a virtue, now.

    And PLEASE consider locking down all o’ this, if you might.

    Annette works for a university and teaches there, but she’s really just an independent researcher, like Enrico Aoki was. This is a tramp freighter, which means no Line to bow and scrape to, and likewise own what-all we do.

    Which means, if we do make it back to Civilization, this is all… ours.

    The Coxeter gave us the stars, the last vital piece; but it was always and will ever be a kludge. Imagine the civilian, and military, implications of an — agile — Aoki Drive, that works as reliably and well without as with a Coxeter Stabilizer. We have to make one o’ those work, simply to get home; and now, we have it done and tested, all but its last Big Jump.

    (Annette’s proved it, some chaotic-dynamics theorem; the Drive’s just too sluggish, with the Coxeter, to ever dodge around the flaky and work here.)

    And it’s this odd little star here gave us the data-breadth to know how & why.

    Let’s take a vacation, together, shall we? Some far-off, cozy place.

    He looked up, and Maryann Ausfall Jenkins met his eyes with her own.

    “May I suggest you get some rest, also, Captain? Quit your bureaucratic little emptiness of facts and figures, go sleep the honest sleep of the just.”

    Like

  11. “This new Windows install is… less than ideal.”

    “Stop mincing words. The thing is flakier than Battle Creek in a blizzard.”

    “I was trying to be nice.”

    “Stop being nice. Start being accurate.”

    “It out-flakes Granny Oldenbergh’s, 25-year county fair pie winner, crusts.”

    “See, now that wasn’t so very difficult.”

    Like

  12. It was midafternoon and the press of customers at L’Aiguiere Verte had lightened when Fixx and Passepartout entered, nodded to the tapster, and proceeded to their usual table. Without being asked, Mme. Brodeur brought the gentlemen their drinks and lingered nearby.

    “Are you still serving lunch, Madame?” Fixx asked with a slightly pleading look on his face.

    “For you gentlemen, of course! We have run short of a few items, but if you are interested in a meat pie and peas…”

    “Say no more, Madame,” Fixx responded immediately. “That is exactly what I need today.”

    Passepartout murmured one or two phrases in French, got a nod from Mme. Brodeur and leaned back in his chair with a sigh. Fixx caught the word soupe but nothing more.

    “You are just having soup? When there’s pie on the menu?” Fixx’s surprise was followed by concern. “You don’t look quite yourself. Are you feeling unwell?”

    “Triste, my friend. Not unwell. Seeing that man arrested in front of his family was… not pleasant.”

    “No,” Fixx agreed. He sipped his beer reflectively. “It isn’t often that I have had sympathy for criminals, but this was one such case. Still, resorting to murder – all we could do was present our evidence to the police. And Mr. Fogg will assist the family, I am sure.” He sank his fork into the flaky pastry placed before him and looked up at his friend. “Desperation can drive good men to bad deeds, Passepartout. I learned that many years ago, and I had to accept that fact or I would not be able to do my job. Now, drink your soup. You’ll feel better with some food in your stomach.”

    Like

  14. I love the new cover. I will at least buy the new book by Blake. But the best part – for which I shall pin this post – is the disclaimer, which I shall definitely steal for the next time that I have to explain why I went flaky.

    Liked by 1 person

  15. Clem was grumpy. “Delbert, I sent you out fer breakfast, and you git them crumbly kroy-sant things! Them crumbs will git all over the still!”

    “Clem, it’s pernounced ‘crwa-SAHNT,’ and the Martian tourists love ‘em!”

    “Well, we ain’t tourists,” groused Clem, “and these ‘CRWA-SAHNTS’ is as flaky as you are!”

    Like

  16. Standing at the peak of the bridge, Max looked on as Cari gazed at the river, the boats, the barges, as if she was observing 10,000 years of history in the space of a single moment. Everyone thought Cari was a little flaky, but Max thought she was a genius.

    Like

  17. “Who put young Kevin on kitchen duty?” raged the Dean of the Wizard’s College. “He’s made a mess again. He spilled corn gruel all over the hot stove!”

    Young Kevin came bounding in with a bowl filled with toasted bits of gruel. “Lookie what I’ve invented!” he cried. “Corn flakes!”

    Like

  18. Nigel Slim-Howland could not determine why Gwendolyn was behaving so oddly. “Do you suppose she’s got a firmware bug or something?”

    “I would find it unlikely,” replied his butler Jenkins. “Her core reasoning is identical to mine, and to my knowledge, ‘flakiness’ is not part of her core personality module.”

    Like

  19. Lord Zwiiich’h’kler, the Earl of Bash, the First of His Name, the-H-is-not-Silent, Guildmaster of Artistic Spectrum, Great Soother of the Servers, MCSE, DBA, Cisco, A+, and Protector of the Breakroom Doughnuts engaged in his typical evening routine.
    He poured precisely 2 seconds worth of strong coffee into a bowl, followed by 4 seconds of 2% milk, and 1 second of Irish Cream. He then opened a fresh box of Wheaties and shook the cereal box three times over the bowl. Satisfied with the results, he threw it into the trash. He then took a fork and pressed a single Wheatie under the grey liquid until it was softened, but still crunchy. He lifted the fork and with a quick flick of his tongue, pulled the Wheatie into his mouth.
    He was barely on his fifth Wheatie when his phone rang. He readied his phone and waited and waited and answered. “This is not an answering machine so you may speak with me directly,” he said and pressed the number 2.
    “Greg! Thank God, Greg, I am so glad you answered–”
    “Please refer to me as Lord Zwiiich’h’kler.”
    “Sure, sure, whatever, Great Lord of Servers, there’s something wrong with the login server. It keeps resetting. There’s a queue of over 10,000 players already.”
    “I hear and obey. Please wait ten point five Earth minutes.”
    “Great, great, thanks Greg or, uh, Lord, uh, you know. Let me know if you need anything.”
    Lord Zwiich’h’kler lifted another Wheatie, but it was too late. It was soft. Ruined.
    With a heavy sigh he got up and walked four feet to his computer, opened a terminal and began typing. The idiots on the day shift had migrated the database to a new VM, but had configured it as single threaded. What fools these Earthlings be.
    He rose and walked sixteen steps to the bathroom to continue the routine that had been so rudely interrupted. He opened a drawer and took out a sheet of black construction paper. Then he vigorously rubbed his hair over the sheet until it was approximately #C0C0C0.
    Grey was pleasing.

    Like

  20. Very late, but this was prime prompt word for this girl!

    “Well, well. Kato Aoi,” the imposing man sneered. “I wouldn’t think even the High Sorceress was enough adult supervision for a flaky thing like you.”

    “Urusai, Gozuki!” the girl snapped, aiming her assault rifle at him.

    This was not a situation Vincent wanted to be in. Alparslan Burakgazi was a dangerous enough opponent when battle was simply business for him. When it was personal like this? That was when Elnath’s Chosen showed that his madness extended to more than just his mechanical designs.

    “Do not think that any of us need our mechs to get past you and your twisted creations, Alparslan.” Carys warned him, her long skirt billowing in the winds that began to swirl around her.

    “That goes both ways, cadı,” Alparslan spat, readying his own assault rifle. “Much as Elnath would love to tear Zornitsa limb from limb we’ve got to make do with the battlefield we’ve got.”

    It was a battlefield Odrysia’s mechanical madman had prepared in his favor. He had turned the remains of several mechs that the Alliance had scrapped into a death trap of turrets and drones, all equipped with who knows what. Some of the parts didn’t look familiar to Vincent but were reminiscent of the gun and combat armor Alparslan was armed with. Customized Cascadian military surplus if he’d remembered the engineer’s boasting correctly.

    “I hate to take the honor of killing some of you from Her Majesty, the Lord Protector, and even the suikastçı girl,” he continued, glaring at the team. “You, though, Kato? I’m going to thoroughly enjoy sending you to Jahannam!”

    “Not if we send you to Yomi first, Gozuki!” Aoi shot back. “C’mon Carys, Vinnie, and Alfie! Let’s take out the trash!”

    “Easier said than done…” Vincent though, enchanting his weapon with a lightning charge before stepping in front of Carys.

    Like

Comments are closed.