Your shout tears itself apart in the wind, a wild, triumphant thing hurled at the spinning wall of storm. Thirty-four guns hammer in your hands and along your hidden frame, their thunder joining the tornado’s roar until the whole plain seems to shake loose at the seams. The villagers in the shelter stare upward in open horror, their faces lit by the strobing flashes of your impossible barrage. The tornado answers with no mercy, only a faster, uglier turn as debris whips around you like a cage made of broken farm and sky.

For one startling instant, the storm seems to swallow sound altogether, and the world narrows to your firing, your laughter, and the violence of the wind. Then a beam, a plank, and a storm-twisted length of metal strike the ground near you in a cracking burst, forcing even your reckless body to stagger. The bell in the village rings somewhere behind the shutters, frantic and useless against the fury outside. The tornado is close enough now that anything you do next will matter immediately, for good or ill.