Stan had recognized the scientist the moment the convoy had crested the ridge. He knew who the man was. He knew what he represented.
If Camilla killed him, the entire modern order was going to shift.
Not because a single scientist mattered by himself. Because the scientist’s death, on video, transmitted live to whatever intelligence infrastructure was monitoring this convoy, would confirm every conspiracy theory that had ever been quietly whispered about Antarctica. It would confirm the existence of supernatural beings.
It would confirm the existence of powers that could kill trained soldiers without visible effort. It would confirm, in the specific way that only documented military footage could confirm, that the world had crossed into a new register of reality.
The consequences of that confirmation would be immediate and enormous.
Every major government would mobilize. Every major military would begin preparing for supernatural threats. Every ordinary human on Earth would learn, within days, that vampires and werewolves and things worse than either had returned.
Stan wanted humanity to have more time.
He wanted the transition to be gradual. Controlled. Guided by his own judgment and his own resources rather than by the panic response of an entire species that had just discovered its historical foundations were wrong.
He opened his mouth. "Camilla, don’t..."
But it was too late, she was gone.
The polar air where Camilla had been standing was suddenly empty. Stan’s system-enhanced senses caught only the faintest ripple of displaced air in her wake, a small, thin fracture in the substance of the space between them and the convoy, healing itself within a heartbeat.
He didn’t see her cross the distance. He saw the result.
The lead vehicle’s rear platform.
The scientist was mid-sentence into his radio when Camilla materialized directly behind him. His mouth was open on a word he would never finish. The binoculars were still raised to his eyes. His breath still fogged the polar air before him.
Camilla appeared beside him with the fluid instantaneity of a Royal Blood who had, evidently, decided that Stan’s "don’t" was a request rather than an order and that a request could be considered after the fact.
She swept her hand and an invisible Qi-blade traced a line across the platform.
The two soldiers flanking the scientist collapsed sideways in the same instant. Their bodies fell in perfectly synchronized angles, their heads separating cleanly from their necks, tumbling to the metal deck with two small hollow thuds. The scientist did not have time to register the sound.
He turned his head. His eyes met Camilla’s.
For a fraction of a second, his mind failed to comprehend how a red-haired woman could be standing where, only an instant ago, there had been no one at all.
Then Camilla’s hand moved.
The Qi-blade sliced across his throat with the same effortless precision she had used on Elder Fang. The scientist’s body swayed for one long moment before the strength left it. He collapsed backward against the platform’s railing and slumped to the deck beside his binoculars.
His pool of blood was small. Neat. Almost apologetic.
The soldiers behind the vehicles opened fire.
Two of them had somehow spotted her arrival, a testament to the reflexes of highly trained specialists drilled to fire at the first sign of an anomaly. Their rifles cracked through the polar air. Muzzle flashes bloomed in short, bright bursts against the snow.
Camilla turned her head. She smiled.
Not because she needed to, she had slowed deliberately. Stan understood, as he watched, that she had reduced her speed to a mere fraction of what it had been a moment earlier, just fast enough to evade the incoming rounds. She was curious. She wanted to see what these little modern toys could actually do.
The bullets, to her senses, moved with agonizing slowness. She stepped sideways observing them with curiosity and intrigued.
The first round passed through empty air where her shoulder had been. She tilted her head three centimeters to the left. The second round passed above her ear. She raised a single finger and let the third bullet strike the tip of it, the small metal projectile compressing against the pad of her fingernail with a soft tink before dropping to the snow, deformed and harmless.
She examined the flattened round for a heartbeat.
’Interesting.’ Her mind cataloged the properties. ’A small kinetic delivery system. High velocity. Low mass. Modern humans have compressed their combat capability into these tiny projectiles. Their strength as individuals is negligible, but the tools are creative. A lesser cultivator would struggle to counter them.’
She raised her eyes to the shooters.
She was still standing on the lead vehicle’s platform. The nearest soldier was thirty meters away, behind the middle transport, firing on full automatic in a panicked spray that his training had, apparently, momentarily failed him.
She waved her hand. Multiple invisible Qi-blades zipped outward across the polar air, following individual trajectory paths that Stan’s senses could barely track. The blades reached the soldiers before the soldiers had registered that she had moved. Heads separated from bodies in a rippling cascade. Rifles clattered to the snow. Boots crumpled beneath their owners.
The convoy’s radio channels erupted into confused shouting.
The remaining soldiers inside the transports began firing through the loading ports.
Camilla vanished from the platform. She reappeared inside the middle transport. The screaming lasted perhaps two seconds.
She reappeared inside the third transport. The screaming there lasted less.
She materialized back on the polar ice a heartbeat later, standing exactly where she had been standing before the entire sequence had begun. Her red hair drifted in the polar wind. Her expression carried the small, contained pleasure of a Royal Blood who had thoroughly enjoyed a demonstration.
Fifteen soldiers. One scientist. One driver.
All dead.
The three snow transports sat in the polar wind with their engines still idling, their armored sides pockmarked with bullet holes from the panicked interior fire, their loading ramps still open.
The polar wind carried the faint, wet smell of blood across the ice.
Stan stood very still. He had barely tracked her movements. He had caught the first blur toward the platform, the momentary slowdown around the shooters, the second blur toward the middle transport. Everything else had happened in gaps his perception could not fill.
He had not stopped her. He looked at the convoy.
At the scientist’s body slumped against the platform railing. At the young soldier’s boots still pointed skyward from behind the lead vehicle. At the loading ramp of the third transport, from which a single hand extended limply into the snow.
The polar wind stirred the fabric of the scientist’s polar jacket.
Stan’s chest felt strange.