I am very hard to surprise.

That was totally by design, of course. It wasn’t due to some magical knack or talent, or luck, or anything like that. It was Feat Selection, Skill Masteries, and a crushload of Divinatory and Sensory Magic, most of it made Permanent, intended to protect me against people and creatures with some sensory-fooling abilities which they generally used to kill other beings with.

You know, hunters and assassins.

Thus, the poisoned dart coming in at the unexpected angle pinged off a combination of Avoid Missile, a ki-based ability; Protection from Missiles, a spell; and naturally, Detect Magic, to which the attack was not invisible, despite the subtle cloaking about it.

Might’ve had an echolocation-based Blindsight up, too. Why might I have that, one wonders?

Unlike human minds, Items never lose focus. They can literally sit there, tense and taut as a bowstring, waiting to react to something for years without any strain, just like a machine or computer. The concept of mental fatigue simply isn’t there.

So Zeben reached out and grabbed the missile attack before it could reach me.

It squirmed in his grip, but it was materialized magical energy, not just a spell, and its ability to cut through Elemental magical defenses didn’t mean anything to Telekinesis, which fell into Void Magic’s purview. Sure, it wasn’t the many-ton manipulation of force and gravity that Void Magic could do, but it was fast, clean, and subtle, and I pumped Naming Karma into Zeben and Noble every day for a goddamn reason.

Raising my Ring’s mental Stats and giving him the power boosts that came with it was not fast, but I literally did not care. Gear improvement waited for nobody.

I was also pretty sure my Force Armor and Shields would have deflected the thing with my dodging, even if it was a homing spell.

More to the point, I was able to follow it back to where it came from.

My Detect Magic at V locked on its backtrail and for a second focused all attention on it, greatly extending the range as I pumped a point of Mana into it. The tiniest whispers of Poison Magic extended back from it, which I followed even as Zeben guided the Dart of Poison at full speed into a stone wall of the Boonie building I was sitting on and splattered it.

The oft-rebuilt rock spattered, hissed, and began to steam and corrode as the Poison shot through it. I shifted away from it and the fumes it was putting out without actually looking at it, and a stray Dart of my own popped it and vivisized the magic before it could waft anywhere and poison someone else.

-Reynard, someone just tried to snipe me.- That had not been an Aquatic attack.

Reynard the Golden Ghost, Celestial Fox, Anointed Fox Prince Under Heaven, Winsome Muse of the Clever, Property Redistribution Specialist, and the Shining Snugglie (he did love his titles) spent a lot of time in the Mortal World. He wasn’t trying to build up a skulk of Foxes back home, given his uniqueness there, and there were so many interesting things to see and do in the Mortal World! I had to burn some Wrath to keep him around, it was true, but it was fine, and I liked having him on overwatch on me while I was in the Boonies.

An invisible Psychic Telekinetic Commander-class Beast watching over you was a very nice thing to have.

-Might be diversion?- he /warned me instantly, even as he was swirling along the winds after the fellow now ghosting through the Shadows over there who had launched the attack.

-Expecting so. Remember the only part we truly need intact is the skull.-

My displays of Firefrost Healing Magic were famous, especially in the Boonies. Teams of Boys and Bonnies vied to have neighboring areas to the KIA people, just because I was happy to send some burning Darts their way and Chain through them with some Healing Magic as needed. Since my range on the things was a thousand paces at this point, a Psychic notice was enough to call in some Healing-from-above and really pull people’s bacon out of the fire.

-I feel Psychic Magic!- he /warned me urgently, but he did not give up his chase.

-That could well be a trap for you, too,- I /told him, and despite his great confidence, he took that extremely seriously. It was a given that the local Archmages had been able to deduce he was about, and it was known I had a unique golden-furred Winged Fox Contracted Beast.

A Tide of Aquatics had just poured in, and the fighting was intense along the front. Pointedly, both Sama and Briggs were quite busy at the moment, and the choffing bursts of firearms were constant.

-All Watchers focus on the Snipers.- They were the most vulnerable of our people to treachery, since they stayed behind the lines and didn’t have much support. -Wills of Steel!-

Briggs and Sama both acknowledged the alarm state, ready to ‘port away using Endure and Tremble, just needing a target to do so.

The attack came in, a terrifying sonic pressure concentrating the sounds from hundreds of yards around me right on my skull, while at the same time a terrifyingly powerful Psychic attack to destroy my concentration came scything in... no, three of them, including one from off-shore!

They were NOT expecting me to have Thunder Resistance at the degree I had, nor an Astral Ward V buffering my Will to the You-Gotta-Be-Shitting-Me mark.

The Sound attack should have nearly liquified my brain, on top of the Psychic attack making it nigh-impossible to concentrate.

Instead, the Negapsi Reprisal went off, and I politely juiced it with everything as I seized both Psychic Attacks in the trap of my mind, and drove a lot of piss and vinegar back along them.

Also, the directions of the attacks became quite obvious.

-The Hiders are coming out!-

We always, ALWAYS scanned the battlezone we took positions on before we took our places. Some of those positions were predictable, based on the way the Boonie Buildings were set up. Knowing they were predictable, we always scanned those areas particularly deep.

Finding a bunch of once-human Creatures embedded under the foundation of those buildings, waiting to rip themselves free in ambush, had not been a well-appreciated surprise.

On the other hand, it was a great opportunity to practice Rune and Glyph Magic, and try out the new claymores and alchemical grenades.

Divination Magic was just not something these bastards had anticipated. From the Augury for the day being particularly bloody and violent, to the deep Scans for Hiders, to the intense attention on Auras by the Typeless folks we had loitering around up above on the Breakwall, it was all much more focused and harder to fool than general magical Awareness, which people had had literally millennia to figure out means and methods to subvert.

Sama was abruptly nowhere to be found in the tangle of bodies in bloody melee out near the waters. Briggs still was, of course, hewing through swarms of Aquatics still not quite able to believe they couldn’t tear him and his Armor limb from limb, all the while bullets chewed through them and Endure’s pounding beat accented the irresistible and tireless arcs of his flaming passage through scaled bodies. Their claws and teeth scraped loudly on Full-Temp Adamantine as he just powered through them.

The Sound attack on me stopped abruptly, as the woman up above on the Boondocks wall had Tremble inserted under her chin and up into her brain. Her bodyguard’s head slowly fell off backwards as his body wavered, fell forward, hit the railing, and crumpled to the ground, pumping scarlet spray over into the Boonies below.

---

The other conspirators gawked at the woman who had very abruptly appeared in their midst, the brand-like scarring on the side of her face lighting up as she turned to face them. It threw her face into a hellish shadow as her smile seemed to take up her whole face, and all eight of her canines seemed to gleam like fangs.

“TREMBLE!” she screamed at them, the force of the kiai shout freezing them for a dreadful moment in place, and there was a DING! that sounded like tolling of the bell of doom. The air was full of bloody fire the exact hue of human blood, erupting in countless lines all around her as the men and women tried to move, tried to dodge, tried to summon their magic.

TING!

The fires seemed to fall heavily to the ground, at the same time as all the people around her kicked and convulsed in reflex as their bodies finally caught up to what their minds had been trying to tell them to do. Blood splashed and sprayed heavily to the ground as corpses wrenched themselves apart in all directions, and screams never sounded before those trying to voice them died.

Sama’s rather inhumanly wide smile turned to another fellow nearby, accompanied by a rather larger person in a large trench coat. The older man gawked at the display of the woman with the wild blonde hair streaming about her like a cape, actually clad in full armor like some relic of the medieval era, her eyes shining with a bloodthirst and malevolent determination that could shake even an Archmage right to his core.

The Creature at his side bellowed and began to swell as it called on its hidden power, while the Archmage there hurriedly made to get some distance.

“SHE COMES!”

It didn’t work! His attempt to fly away went nowhere, he didn’t even lift off the ground as the Air Magic swirled around him... and then said Magic went inert and dead, and stopped responding to his call at all!

The Creature that had been guarding him, now swollen to half again its height, skin running black, teeth like spikes, and a long serpentine tongue lashing out, leapt to meet Sama Rantha with massive claws spread wide... but also lurched a step, as its instinctive attempt to use magic to lengthen its leap utterly failed, throwing it off-balance.

A normal person would have found its hide to be like steel, and the magic-swollen muscles of the thing to be like stone.

The startled monster found itself going right underneath the woman, bloody eyes tracking her as she went over its shoulder with a spin and-

The kick cracked into the side of the Creature’s head like an I-beam, and it went flying as if it didn’t weigh hundreds of kilos, while Sama closed in on the Archmage behind it trying to flee faster than he could run away... and he was trying to run very hard, indeed.

Along the Boondock Barrier, dozens of individuals had been lit up with Faerie Fires, clearly marking them for everyone around, and then found themselves being attacked from all directions by the Shore Marines there, with special attention being paid to the Cursed creatures meant to be unleashed into close combat with them.

“Cursed Hag!” the man screamed, trying to summon his magic even while fleeing, but he had neither enough of a lead on her, nor the ability to outrun her.

In a burst of inspiration, he dove over the side of the railing.

There was a whip and a crack, and his plunge towards the Boonies below was abruptly arrested with a sharp pain in his left leg. The Archmage turned his shocked gaze from the scores, if not hundreds of eruptions blossoming down the length of the Boonies, and considerably fewer knots of combat breaking out from internal attacks than should have been expected.

“A Kiss to greet, and there we meet, in the Boondocks you came too soon!”

There was a yank of superhuman strength, and the Archmage found himself being snapped up into the air haplessly, unable to summon the Air Magic needed to dominate his own Element, tossed around like a mere sandbag as the golden Whip about his leg swirled free, his body rising towards the apex as he saw that deadly, deadly smile fixed on him.

“Swept off your feet and thrown like skeet, let me give you a lover’s boon!”

A half-dozen Thunderbolts fell from the sky and blew his bodyguard into bone and bloodspray as Sama Rantha rose to meet his flailing form, and his eyes could not help but focus on the blue-black Blade with the edge of solid Gold about it scything for his neck.