The hum of my construct ran through my teeth as we wheeled above Brussels, twenty mages strong, raining ruin onto a city that hadn't finished falling from our first pass. Lena held formation off my left wing with the tight discipline of someone determined to be seen doing everything correctly. Below us, our explosive rounds found anti-air nests and tore them into orange blooms of scattered sandbags and twisted gun barrels, crews caught mid-motion reduced to char and fragment before they understood the strike had even started. Tracking rounds burrowed into the outer districts' brick facades like something alive, finding their way through walls before detonating inside, throwing masonry and furniture and — I won't pretend otherwise — people out through shattered windows in a single violent exhalation of dust and debris.
"Defences collapsing fast, Captain!" Klaus's voice over the wind, steady as ever.
Then Lena, sharper, edged with something I hadn't heard from her yet. "Sir — east! Something's coming!"
I banked hard, the crystal lens snapping the horizon into focus, and there they were. A full squadron of biplanes — Republic and Commonwealth markings both, flying wing to wing — canvas stretched taut over wooden frames, twin guns mounted fore and aft, propellers clawing at the air as they climbed to meet us. Crude, by our standards. Loud, vulnerable, entirely mechanical. And brave enough to come up anyway.
This was new. The first time enchanted wings had met built ones in open sky.
"Break formation! Engage at will!"
---
The air came apart into chaos in the space of a breath. Their engines screamed climbing toward us, tracers spitting up in frantic glowing arcs that found nothing because our constructs moved in ways their guns weren't built to track. My mages scattered like hawks released from the wrist, ethereal wings cutting impossible angles through the smoke-stained sky.
I lined up on the lead biplane and fired. The round bent mid-flight — that same small, wrong correction — and punched through the fuselage just aft of the cockpit, detonating inside in a confined burst that the wooden frame had no hope of containing. The aircraft's nose dropped instantly, trailing thick black smoke and a fine dark mist that I understood, at this distance, not to be smoke at all. What had been a pilot and a gunner a half-second earlier went down inside the wreckage as it spiralled toward the rooftops, and I felt the old hollow nothing settle over me again, the same nothing from Delta-Four.
They fought back harder than I expected. Lead stitched the air around my formation in long ragged lines. One of my mages — Reinholt, a quiet man who'd shown me a photograph of his wife the week before — took a burst square across the chest. I watched his construct flicker, the aether bleeding out of its wings in pale streaks like something haemorrhaging, and he fell without the magic to hold him, screaming the whole distance down until the rooftop below ended it in a wet, final impact that I made myself watch because looking away felt like a worse kind of cowardice than the one I'd already accepted in myself.
Klaus took a raking burst across his wing — sparks of disrupted enchantment scattering off the alloy — and dropped into a steep recovery dive, cursing into the radio in a register I'd never heard from him.
---
Then Lena did something that should have gotten her killed.
She peeled out of formation without a word of warning, dove on a biplane that had overshot our line, and — at full speed, no construct beneath her — simply leapt from her own machine. The wings dissolved into wisp behind her as she fell the short remaining distance and landed, low and balanced, on the enemy's upper wing, one hand already closing on a strut for purchase.
The pilot and rear gunner both turned at the impact, faces going through the entire arc from confusion to horror in under a second. Neither managed to bring a gun to bear before her dagger was already moving.
She took the gunner first — drove the blade into the side of his throat with a short, brutal motion, and even at this distance I could see the arterial spray that followed, a hot bright arc across the cockpit interior that the wind immediately began smearing backward along the fuselage. He went for the wound with both hands, a reflex that achieved nothing, his mouth working without sound as he slid sideways out of his seat.
She didn't wait to watch him finish dying. She was already on the pilot, blade going into his side once, twice, with a controlled, economical violence that told me the academy had taught her more than tactics. He folded around the second strike, blood coming up dark in his throat, eyes rolling white before they fixed on nothing at all.
The aircraft lurched into an uncontrolled roll. Lena rode it for a moment, one boot planted against the dying pilot's shoulder, then shoved him bodily out of the open cockpit — he went tumbling without a sound, already past the point of caring what happened to him — seized the stick just long enough to level the wings, and threw herself clear, the aether flaring beneath her in a brilliant wash of light as her own construct caught her. The abandoned biplane corkscrewed the rest of the way down and found a warehouse roof, the impact and the fuel tank together producing a fireball that I felt the heat of even at altitude.
"Schmitt!" I was half furious, half something I didn't have a clean word for. "Back in line, now."
She fell back into formation a few seconds later, grinning behind goggles speckled with someone else's blood, a fine red mist drying along one cheekbone that she hadn't noticed yet or didn't care about.
"One less for the Republic, sir." Breathless. Delighted. "They never saw it coming."
The remaining biplanes broke after that — three more went down in smoking corkscrews over the following minute, enchanted rounds finding fuel lines or the men flying them, their crews' last transmissions nothing but static and noise. The sky, briefly, completely, was ours.
---
"Resume the bombardment." My voice came out rawer than I intended. "Flatten every visible defence. Leave nothing standing."
We swept back over Brussels a second time, and whatever had survived the first pass didn't survive the next. Machine-gun pits collapsed into smoking craters that held what remained of their crews without ceremony. Barricades that had taken Belgian engineers days to construct were reduced to scattered iron and broken stone in the space of seconds. Entire blocks buckled inward, walls folding into their own foundations, roofs caving onto whatever and whoever was still sheltering beneath them.
We didn't stop until the first grey columns of our own ground troops appeared at the city's edge, advancing under the cover of fire we were still laying down ahead of them.
---
We descended into the wreckage of a square near the city centre, our constructs dissolving into wisp as boots found cracked paving stones. The air was thick enough to chew — smoke, cordite, the particular acrid sweetness of burning structural timber, and underneath all of it, the smell that I had learned by now to recognise without wanting to.
I walked the rubble with my company, doing the grim arithmetic the after-action report would require.
In a collapsed alley off the square, I stopped.
A boy. No older than eight, I guessed, though it was hard to be certain — a roof beam had come down across him and the angle of his small body beneath it told me everything I needed to know without requiring me to look closer than I already had. His shoes were still on. One hand had fallen open beside him, fingers loosely curled around nothing, the way a child's hand rests when he's fallen asleep somewhere he wasn't supposed to. His eyes were open, fixed on the smoke drifting overhead, and there was a stillness to him that no sleeping child has ever actually had.
I had flattened that building from a thousand metres up without knowing his name, without ever being able to know it now, and the distance between the decision and this alley collapsed all at once into something I had no training for.
A few paces further on, a French soldier dragged himself through the debris on his forearms, both legs sheared away above the knee by shrapnel, two long dark trails marking the stone behind him. He was calling for his mother in a voice gone thin and grey with shock, the words barely words anymore. One of my men crouched beside him for a moment, said something too quiet for me to hear, and then ended it with a single shot, which was — I want to be clear about this — the only mercy available in that alley, and I was grateful someone had the steadiness to offer it.
I turned away. My throat had closed around something I didn't examine too closely.
"Enough," I said, quieter than I meant to. "Back to base. We've done what we came to do."
---
The colonel barely looked up from his maps when I delivered the report, cigar smoke curling lazily around a face that had stopped finding any of this remarkable months ago.
"Excellent work, Muller. Brussels is secured." He tapped a different point on a different map entirely. "New orders. The whole battalion's being pulled east. The push on Warsaw is stalling against Russian and Polish resistance. High command wants mages breaking the lines before winter closes the question for the season."
---
We loaded onto the troop train within the hour, arcane crates and disassembled construct components lashed down in the freight cars behind us. Lena sat across from me in the officers' compartment, the Belgian countryside sliding past the window in long green-and-grey streaks, her eyes carrying a brightness that Brussels apparently hadn't dimmed nearly as much as I'd hoped it might.
"The eastern front, sir." She said it like a gift she'd been promised and was finally about to receive. "Open country. Real advances. A chance to strike at the heart of it and prove myself properly."
She listened to everything I said about the terrain ahead, the different rhythm of the eastern campaigns, with an attentiveness that went a degree past professional interest — leaning in slightly, eyes on my face rather than the window, her voice softening in a way I noticed and chose, for now, not to examine.
"Whatever you need, Captain. I'll follow you anywhere."
There was something underneath the nationalism in the way she said it — something that had nothing to do with the Empire at all, and everything to do with me specifically, and in the smoke and noise and endless grinding machinery of this war, I found that I didn't entirely mind it, even as some quieter part of me understood that I probably should.
The train rattled on toward the dark line of the eastern horizon, carrying us toward Warsaw, toward whatever waited for us there, and I watched Lena watching me, and didn't yet have a name for whatever was starting between us, only the certainty that it had started.