Admittedly, Aria thought the novelty of high-altitude unpowered flight would probably wear off fairly quickly. In the first ten minutes. Maybe the first twenty.

By minute forty-five, she'd firmly lost count of how many narrow gullies and sharply-twisting ravines she'd woven through, and had she still been mortal she was quite confident her voice would've gone dead and hoarse from the manic laughter.

Of course, she hadn't forgotten what was at stake here. She simply found little use in worrying herself sick about it. What was to come would come, and if anything she'd be quite a bit less ready to face it if she spent the whole way there catastrophizing.

Aria swept her wings as far back as she could, using a mix of the canards and a pair of force cables to keep herself level as she dove into the final narrow straight of her path. A narrow artificial canyon had been cut into the mountains here, part of a rail line originally used to supply materials for Citadel 4's construction, now used to transport personnel and materiel.

Aria noted, somewhat belatedly, that she had not actually checked if a train was scheduled through here for today.

The air changed as she transitioned from the open mountains to the narrow tunnel, growing heavier, bordering on mist. The air of her home, of the place where she'd grown up. Of the woody shade from which Arborhaven drew its name.

Aria exploded out of the tunnel, whirlwind plumes of dust swirling out behind her in the vortices of her winged wake, and high above the surface of Arbor Sound.

Thermals from the vast lake's surface pushed up under her wings, lifting her upwards, to a vantage she'd never held before. Ceracrete platforms hundreds of meters across jutted up out of the lake's surface, hosting massive interstellar freighters laden rich with cargo. Giant barges sat in their shadows as cargo cranes offloaded massive containers of freight from one onto the other.

Across the wine-dark surface of the water, lighters darted about, cloaked in morning mists, between the giant struts holding up the spaceport platforms, like fish between reeds. This early in the day — the rising sun's rays visible through the narrow inlet that connected Arbor Sound to the larger inland sea it fed from — the only vessels out on the water were either pleasure craft enjoying the early morning air, or domestic redeye vessels sailing those who had to travel for work.

Aria turned through the air — a motion that came naturally to her now, after her mad dash through the mountains — and towards the lakeshore. Towards her home city of Arborhaven.

Towering pillars dozens of meters tall rose from the valley soil, their trunks several meters across, clad in the blazing hues that Aria knew would paint the lake's surface come sunset. Broad leaves coloured a deep teal gave the city a perpetual cool shade, the eponymous haven from the humid heat that would otherwise plague the valley.

The forest hadn't been cut down to build the city. Rather, the city had been built into the forest. The genetically engineered trees had been laden there thousands of years prior, as on so many other worlds humans now inhabited, by Worldseeds — vast banks of genetic data and material, supposedly sent out from the lost human homeworld to leave its offspring no dearth of homes in the stars beyond.

As a result, the trees were unnaturally resilient both biologically and mechanically. Disease struggled to find a home within them — though that didn't prevent regular inspections to ensure the forest's health — and the stout branches didn't deign to so much as flex, even under the weight of an entire block of fully-furnished housing units.

The city was built up in layers. The bottom-most layers, among the roots, the oldest populations, full of administration and industry. Either the best or the worst part of town, depending on what sort of weather one liked. Above that, up on bridged terraces that wrapped around the trunks, most of the city resided, laboured, breathed, lived.

A voice buzzed in her ear, and for a moment Aria was taken out of the ensorcelling vistas of her home and thrown smack-dab back to reality.

"Unknown aerial, this is Arborhaven ground control, please identify yourself immediately or prepare to be shot down by ADS, thank you, over."

The irony of the pleases and thank-yous was not lost on Aria, albeit if anything they made the whole interaction more grating, not less. She didn't have time to pick a fight with the city's air defense — she knew exactly how that would go, on account of she'd been one of the senior techs on the last maintenance assessment — but she had even less time to argue with ATC.

"Tower, this is Supervising Technician Aria Rostova-Chen, identify yourself, name and rank. Over." The inbuilt radio on her glasses would, of course, sign each transmission to prove her identity.

"SupTech, copy, this is Corporal Felix Blanc, please identify your aircraft, over."

"Corporal, that information is need-to-know, and you do not need to know. I will identify my vessel only to an officer of sufficient rank. Over."

"SupTech, ADS has a lock on you. Land immediately. Over." Blanc was a young man, obviously. Older than Aria, but not by much. Hotheaded. Of course, ego made people do stupid things.

And immortal though she may be, a cultivator of the Sacred Starheart Monastery though she was about to become, Aria had spent the past several years of her life in the Admiralty. That didn't go away overnight.

"Either get an officer of sufficient rank on the mic, or get the fuck out of my face, because I promise you, Squire, if those guns take so much as a potshot at me, the only reason Commander Lance won't have your head on a pike by sundown is because I will make sure you live long enough to regret the decision to question my loyalties. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME, CORPORAL, OR DO YOU NEED IT BEATEN INTO YOU? OVER."

A moment's silence. A different voice — older, androgynous — came over the comms. "Gunnery Chief Garcia speaking." Aria remembered them. She'd met them years ago, back when she was still a Senior Tech, and the two possessed a strong mutual respect for one another's professionalism. Each knew their station, and tended it with ferocity. "You're clear of ADS, SupTech. Inquisition cleared you for off-base twenty minutes ago, and I know well enough not to ask about that sort of thing."

Aria made a mental note to get her colleague something nice, once she could. Immortals supposedly accrued obscene wealth through their questing, and she'd seen her mother's ledgers firsthand showing just how high of a price they could command even as mercenaries, so she could probably afford to properly splurge.

Assuming she got out of today's adventure in one piece, at least.

As she dove between the gengineered wood and ceracrete canyon of Arborhaven's streets, her aim was set squarely in the branches, high above. Though no one would ever mistake her for having come from wealth — her grandfather had made sure of that, she recalled bitterly — between her father's rogue endeavours and her mother's shrewd trading in such a major hub, they had enough to live quite comfortably in a beautiful, airy apartment in the center of the city, among the older first-wave developments, with a gorgeous view of the Sound and the ships coming and going.

Unsuited as they were to the rapid sharp turns through city streets, Aria dismissed her wings, using her force cables to maneuver instead. Sight and sound were useless here. Instead, her Presence flooded out all around her. Jolting in long, narrow arcs over branches and balconies, her body twisted gracefully, branches passing a hair's breadth above her eyes but never touching her.

Her Presence brushed against a thousand pairs of eyes, a thousand minds, all dimly aware of her passing from the rushing winds she left in her wake, and for the first time in her life the sheer enormity of life surrounding her became apparent. How many lifetimes — human and otherwise — had the vast red boughs of this city seen come and go beneath their shade?

The streets grew narrower, the trees thicker, their roots more gnarled and knotted, their branches woven together into unyielding lattices. The heart of the arbors, and, consequently, of Arborhaven.

The sights, sounds, and smells grew more familiar now. The eateries she'd frequented her whole life, the workshops where she'd learned the foundations of her trade as a child who wouldn't stop being a bother until someone taught her, and the streets she would wander through, late at night, chewing through doubt or grief or heartbreak in solitude until the dawnlight set the Sound ablaze.

Aria shot a cable out of her feet, wrapping it around a branch directly above her. Her extreme forward momentum had to go somewhere and, tethered as she was, the only option was "up." As she jolted skywards, her face rushing within two fingers' breadth of the balconies of the residential complex where she'd spent so much of her life, she reflected briefly on how quickly the novelty of not needing to use her eyes to see was starting to wear off.

At the zenith of her swing, Aria came face-to-face with the wall-to-wall window on the east side of her parents' home. It was one of the most useless, frivolous, and wonderful features of the domicile, letting the dawnlight in to fill the whole main room.

She hoped she'd be able to pay for a replacement soon. It'd be terribly draughty in there until then.

She let go of her tether, reabsorbing its energy and directing her Presence out into hair-fine threads that spread as fractals all throughout the window glass, and a breath later her Externality erupted into existence within the glass like deadly corset bones.

Aria alighted into the main room of her parents' house on the balls of her feet, gracefully dancing along the soft, thick carpet, wreathed in a cloud of glass glittering in sunlight.

Her enhanced Mind took in the absurd scene before her in an instant. The front door had been blown clean off the hinges, but from within. Presumably the fatty red splatter on the walls and floor outside were the poor fools whose job it had been to initially breach the door.

Another two masked, armoured, and armed assailants lay just inside the entryway. One had a hole in their throat, and the other was presently in the process of bleeding out from a punctured femoral artery.

Anya Chen knelt at the opposite end of the main room, leaning just around the corner of the doorway into what Aria knew was her father's study, her hawkish eyes now trained down the scope of a rifle just long enough not to be an impediment indoors.

And at the center of the room, her dear, beloved father, the man responsible for this mess.

Viktor Rostov was a perfect gentleman. Clean shaven, his shoulder-length black hair brushed straight and bound into an elegant, flowing tail that cascaded down his back. He was dressed well for the occasion, much like Aria, in a flowing overcoat, and even wielding the ceremonial family glaive.

Which he was currently in the middle of swinging down in a long arc, right through some poor bastard's neck.

The handle was ornamented heavily for ceremony. The blade was just weighted heavily for cutting through bone and tendon without faltering.

Aria calmly assessed the situation in front of her. Two allied combatants. Four enemy combatants present in front of her. Four more in the hallway, she knew. She could feel them through her Presence.

Viktor's glaive flowed through one assailant's neck, the ballistic fabric proving little impediment to cleaving the neck clean in half. The blade continued apace, lodging itself hard enough in the gap between armour plates to sever the tendons of another's elbow.

The blade lodged.

Viktor was a duelist, a fencer, and a deceptively good acrobat. Two of those three actually did help against bullets, strangely enough, but not if he couldn't move freely.

Aria felt the muscles in the two gunmen's fingers contract, long before she saw the triggers begin to squeeze.

She wished in that moment, quite desperately, that she'd still been mortal. Still claimed helplessness, or at least been able to say she acted in the heat of the moment.

Her Mind, moving as fast as it was, had ample time to determine the exact nature of what she was doing, and to decide to do it anyway.

A pair of force cables rushed forth from her, topped with round, rigid striking heads, and in perfect unison, blew straight through the heads of the two attackers. She had ample time, then, to appreciate the way the shards of shattered bone mingled with the blood and the newly-formless tissue they'd once contained.

Viktor scarcely took the time to give her a nod of acknowledgement, as he flexed his fingers in that particular way Aria could never quite pull off, and a hail of shotshell blew through his final assailant's throat in a shower of gore.

The four people standing in the hall outside rushed in now, speaking frantically in their mercenary argot. She didn't know the jargon by heart, but she knew it well enough to get the gist. Their role here was to handle the "heavy machinery", in case a cultivator showed up.

Tragically for them, that was Aria's day job.

They were split into pairs, one of each withdrawing a short, stubby LAW that they knelt and aimed from the shoulder, the other entrusted to keep them alive. She recognized the design, of course. A classic in the tragically narrow field of anti-cultivator munitions, and one that inspired a thousand copycats — a few of them even in service within the armies of the Imperium.

Anya squeezed the trigger, and a gunshot rang out behind Aria, a supersonic flechette lodging itself in the shoulder of one of the kneeling mercenaries. Aria could feel the way the air moved in front of her mother's nose. The way her breathing shook, faltering that little bit right before she took the shot.

A hail of gunfire followed, pinning the doorway shut, with Anya just barely managing to pull herself back behind cover in time.

Without another moment's hesitation — wounded shoulder be damned — a pair of blazing red spears shot forth towards Aria. She heard her mother calling out her name in a cracking voice, and for a brief moment her heart broke.

The moment didn't last. It never did, Aria found, not when she needed to get work done. That's all this was, she realized. Work. Had she the time, she might've even laughed.

She mentally catalogued the design of the munition. It was one of the nicer variants, made by House Lance, and not sold to anyone except their own personal armies and the Admiralty at large. Since they were relatively inexpensive, they kept a few dozen stocked at every garrison and outpost, just in case.

The explosive was tiered in three layers. The first, a shaped charge. Cultivator defenses were often sophisticated, certainly, but they required a persistent energy flow to sustain them. The shaped charge was designed to briefly overwhelm that stream, just long enough to let the rest of the attack land.

The second was the shrapnel. Large hexagonal steel slugs would shoot forward. Aerodynamics weren't much of a concern, since they didn't need to go far. Their sole purpose was to create as large and sundry a set of wounds as possible for the third tier: a small ampule of densely-packed pyrophoric filler, igniting on contact with air and filling the wounds to make regeneration difficult and expensive.

On its own, it wouldn't kill, but it could secure a meaningful advantage nonetheless, if it hit.

A pair of wires shot out from Aria's outstretched hands, dividing into hair-fine manipulators as they worked in perfect symmetry. The anti-tamper mechanism ensured any attempt to intercept them destructively would cook them off prematurely. Less effective, but less was not none. She'd have to be delicate.

She began by annihilating the screws holding the cover in place over the electronics. With the cover off, her wiry prehensile appendages dove into the internals of the missile. Guided by only memory and Presence, she began her work.

Wires wrapped around the small cylindrical batteries that powered the piezoelectric timers inside the warheads, grabbing them and tossing them out into the air. A small thing, but it'd be a shame to go to all this trouble disarming the damn things only for them to cook off from the safety fuze.

At such a short distance, Aria simply didn't have the time to fully dismantle the warhead. Thankfully, she knew she didn't need to. The wires snaked up through the densely-packed interiors of the warheads, and to the very top, where a small spring-loaded contact plunger would press down and make contact between two thin metal strips, triggering the detonation of the warhead.

Wires lashed out, cutting a sparse couple of centimeters off of both metal strips.

Both warheads struck Aria head-on. One breath. Then two. Silence. No one dared move.

The propellant in the warheads ran out without so much as a bruise on Aria's skin. She simply let them drop to the ground.

The first one to make a move was Anya. Her breathing didn't falter this time as she stepped around the corner, and a moment later two bullets found themselves lodged cleanly inside the throats of the two LAW operators.

"That was for trying to lay a finger on my daughter."

Her rifle turned upwards at their guards. "Now, by my count, neither of you shot at her. Only at me. While I don't condone that, I understand business. So, the job's botched. Put down the guns. And let's talk, yes? I'm feeling nice today, so I won't be making you dig your own graves." Aria had never actually seen her mother like this before. She'd heard of it, from her father or from her colleagues, but seeing her gentle, teasing, empathetic mother like this was…a shock.

She made a mental note to finally ask her what exactly she did before she met Aria's father.

Viktor remained his usual unrealistically relaxed self. "In all fairness, all they did was try to lay a finger on her. She seems just fine. The house…" He looked around, taking in the blood soaking into the carpets, the perforated floors, and, of course, the airily disintegrated window, and sighed. "Well, at any rate, we've had worse."

"Have we, Viktor, my love? Have we really?"

"Remember how angry they were after our honeymoon?"

"Oh. Hm. Yes, I suppose I do have to grant that one. Shame, too. I really quite liked that house. Would've preferred they'd left it standing."

Aria cleared her throat and spoke up. She still felt like such a child in front of them. "Baba, maybe we should stop letting you plan special occasions, if it keeps resulting in this."

Viktor smiled at her, with such warmth and pride in his eyes that she almost forgot she'd splattered him in the remains of a pair of crania a scarce few seconds ago. "You got my gift then?"

"I did." She didn't know what else to say. How was he being so nonchalant about this?!

"I made sure to get your favourite colour."

"It is…very pretty, Baba. Thank you." Tears began to well in Aria's eyes. Of joy. Of relief. Of pain, and guilt, and a hundred things she didn't know the names for.

They didn't last.

A new Presence emerged in Aria's senses. Strolling gently down the hall. Volkova's was a deep, fathomless dark, the bottomless depths of a sea of stars drowning her under its indifferent weight. This Presence was ill-formed, but potent. Tinged with blood, and the howling madness of damned souls clamoring for their pound of flesh. Its edges were jagged, unrefined, clawing, scratching against her senses merely to perceive, setting her teeth on edge, like the tines of a fork scraping on ceramic dishware.

Aria set herself into a combat stance, low, balanced, her feet ready to dance across the blood-soaked floor, her hands pulled close to guard against an opponent, inviting their ire so she could tear along the seams of their techniques.

A man turned the corner, stepping thoughtlessly over the corpses and into their domicile. He looked old, but not wizened. Scarred. Damaged, almost. His hair was cropped short, close to the scalp, and he dressed casually — a gray skirt, coming down to just under his knees, and a blue vest over a light-coloured shirt — not bothering to hide his face.

He stood across the room from Aria, a distance she knew either could cross in the blink of an eye. As he spoke, his voice was a smooth, almost dulcet, rolling bass.

"A talented young immortal, no doubt. Ambitious, capable. A woman of action. You wield your power so well."

Aria's Presence hardened. She still cast it out wide, but whereas before she'd spread it out diffusely, content to simply absorb what her senses told her, now she held it out before and around her, a leaden wall guarding her and hers.

"Very, very talented. You have so much potential. That power of yours…I'm sure it'll be quite the problem in only a scarce few decades."

The man's eyes hardened, and his Presence did the same. It screamed against Aria's, though she held her ground, even as it felt like dozens of pairs of claws were tearing against her, begging her to let them in, to be let out of whatever prison the man before her held them in.

"I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to hand it over to me, young goddess."