Jawara and Jhiran save their friends by ambushing a squad of rebel soldiers along a forest trail in Northeastern Kameron.

   Jawara, a skilled and experienced warrior, bought time for his friends to escape.  Knowing that they faced only a small number of men, he’d quickly planned an attack with Jhiran that used the forest and surprise to their advantage.  With his Lithian clothing rendering him invisible among the trees, an eight-member squad of rebel militia filed past him on the trail.  He studied them carefully.  As they marched from his left to his right, Jawara took aim at the man acting as their leader and dropped him with a single shot.

    Panic erupted among the rebels.  Not knowing where their enemy had hidden, the seven remaining militiamen fired blindly into the trees, wasting ammunition.  Amidst their confusion, Jhiran, who’d hidden herself high in a mature pine on the opposite side of the path, opened fire behind them.  Though she was not used to using a carbine and the recoil hurt her shoulder and nearly knocked her out of the tree, the gwynling had excellent aim and an uncanny sense of balance that kept her from falling.  Jhiran worked the bolt, took aim and easily hit two rebel soldiers in the back, gleeful that merely squeezing the trigger had such devastating effect.  She snickered and laughed to herself, creating a lot of noise and crossfire that pinned the others down, enabling Jawara to move.

    As her gun went off the ‘Scinnian used the distraction of her firing to cover the sound of his retreat deeper into the forest, allowing him to be less cautious about making noise as he stepped through the underbrush and dead fall.  Jhiran promised to shoot the six rounds loaded into her weapon’s magazine, then abandon the gun and fly to safety.  If the enemy retreated, she’d alert him with a whistle.

    Jawara set himself up again a short distance further down the trail, hiding within a thicket while his clothing blended itself into shadows.  Long, golden shafts of daylight reached through the forest, illuminating the tangle of bower and branch in which the ‘Scinnian steadied breathing, his rife, and waited in silence.

    Fearfully, five militiamen crept down the trail, their weapons nervously pointed into the trees.  Jawara couldn’t understand why they continued instead of retreating, for if they’d gone back he’d have let them live.  Lining his first target up, the ‘Scinnian waited for the right moment, let out his breath and gently pulled his trigger, moved his weapon slightly to the left, squeezed on the trigger again, then repeated the process once more.  Red splotches appeared on three separate chests.  The men fell backward as fully jacketed, high velocity rounds ripped into their flesh.

    Jawara, with his Lithian rifle, simply outgunned the rebel Kamerese, and the two survivors fled back from whence they’d come in a flurry of wild counterfire that proved completely ineffective.  Just to be safe–though he’d only fired four shots–Jawara swapped in a fresh magazine, then carefully moved back toward his original position further east.

    Once her initial combat task had been completed, Jhiran did not fly to safety as she’d promised.  She noticed that one of the fallen soldiers carried a short sword.  Her attention immediately riveted on the weapon–since Algernon had dumped the one she’d carried in Desperado Falls–and as soon as the surviving rebels marched farther down the trail, she glided silently down to the path to investigate.
    Jhiran removed the blade from its sheath, and wide-eyed, took in a deep breath at her good fortune.  Roughly three feet in length with a gentle curve, a single edge, and what amounted to a two-handed grip for a gwynling, the lightweight weapon suited her perfectly.  She used the sword to cut its scabbard away from its former owner’s belt, but before she’d finished, Jhiran heard gunfire and footsteps running toward her on the path.  She was about to flee into the forest when the sword’s owner clamped his hand around her ankle.

    Her presence in the midst of the ambush site attracted the unwanted attention of two fleeing rebels, who skidded to a stop in momentary uncertainty.  From a distance, Jhiran looked very much like a young girl who wouldn’t represent a threat, but when the flash of a bright sword appeared in her right hand and she actually swung the blade to dismember one of their fallen comrades, the two men raised their rifles to cut her down.

    Jhiran leaped into the underbrush, dashing through redtwig dogwood in a random pattern that made her virtually impossible to hit.  The zing of ill-aimed ammunition swept through low hanging branches, and bits of bark exploded above Jhiran’s head.  She fled into the forested gloom where her attackers were reluctant to follow, but in their zeal to kill the gwynling, the Kamerese rebels forgot about the enemy lurking behind them.

    Jawara didn’t have a clear field of fire, but fearing for Jhiran’s life, he put four shots into the rebels from behind.  He raced deeper into the forest looking for his ally, crashing through aromatic laurel and coffee berry, not daring to call her name lest he attract any follow-up troops to their location.  As he lumbered through the immature oak and conifer trees she stepped out of her hiding place, the blank expression that normally appeared on her strangely proportioned visage replaced by one that reflected complete innocense.

    “That was a fool thing to do!” Jawara snapped.

    When Jhiran filled his mind with imagery of Algernon dumping her own sword, when her contempt for being scolded and the reminder that she’d actually escaped without harm echoed within Jawara’s consciousness, he stopped her with an uplifted hand.  “It’s not worth your life,” he said.  “We need you.”

    They headed back to the trail, discovering to his dismay that their firefight attracted attention from a larger group of rebel soldiers who scurried in their direction from Maia’s farm.  Jawara picked up Jhiran and held her facing backwards against his right shoulder before heading toward the abandoned village at a dead run.

    Jhiran jumped off as Jawara leaped up the stairs leading into the derelict rail station.  He dashed through the door and moved through the station to its loading platform, where he found Astrid’s bike.  Jawara adjusted its seat using its quick release mechanism, sat Jhiran backwards on its handlebars, with her feet on the frame and her hands on his shoulders, then pedaled eastward as fast as the hydraulic machine could take him.