The asteroid field near Tami was a wealth of resources for Nel. Spending the next sixty-eight hours hollowing out an asteroid and gathering enough matter to convert to fuel so she could build the reach where she needed to go was a daunting task, but she went about it with a calculated efficiency. She had to: One wrong move and she would find herself launched out into deep space with nothing to stop her. Meanwhile, constructing a basic, but efficient, fusion engine from scratch wasn’t as difficult as she thought it might be. It just took a very, very long time. She only needed it to get up to speed anyway, it didn't need to be complicated.

Being what she was, Nel was unconcerned about the customary comforts such as chairs, air, or even interfaces of a normal spacecraft, only the goal of getting to her destination undetected. Accelerating the asteroid to speed, she set course toward Tami. Of any of the Mishhu-held planets, it was the furthest away from NMX reinforcements without being out of Nel’s current travel capabilities. It didn’t hurt that it was also surrounded by Yamatian-held worlds, further isolating Tami from support.

On the way, she reviewed what she had learned. Nel had discovered just how badly the war – of which she had only heard whispers of back on New Kohana – was going for Yamatai, and rumors of Nepleslia’s famed Funky City even falling to the NMX. It was beginning to make her uneasy: the Mishhu were not her typical opponent; she had never been involved in a full-out war. The IPG had trained her in infiltration, and so had the Sha’nai on New Kohana. However, arena fights were not guerrilla warfare…

What really piqued her curiosity was how much this enemy could test her abilities. More and more, Nelew was finding that she had to hold back in her fights. There were times where showmanship was more important than a quick finish at the arena; there would be no such restrictions here. If her opponent made a mistake, she could capitalize on it without reservation.

-----

The landing on Tami was a rough one, but Nel made it through any NMX patrols in orbit. No one was interested in a rogue asteroid impact, if it was small as that one was. Nel charged the plasma engine and directed its final blast to slow the asteroid down enough that it didn’t wipe out the ecosystem; the impact still made itself a fairly generous crater. After impact, Nel was able to dissolve the artificial parts of the asteroid and get moving before any patrols arrived. Asteroids: Not unusual. Asteroids slowing down before impact: Strange, and probably worthy of investigation.

It didn’t take long for her to find a place to hide so she could finish healing. While her body was being restored from the damage she had taken in the impact, Nel considered her tactics. She knew nothing about her enemy except the vague notes given to her, so the best thing to do would be to gather information, of course. Before even that, she needed bases of operation.

Nel had landed in a particularly mountainous region of forest, about half-way up an exceptionally tall hill, about a kilometer and a half above sea level. It was winter in this particular region of Tami, and a thin layer of snow coated the ground, slowly growing from a gentle snowfall from the dark clouds overhead. The tall, thick deciduous trees spread rather thinly at this altitude had lost their leaves to the late season.

There was little wind blowing through the area, making it all the easier to hear a Mishhuvurthyar Shredder Gunship rumbling through the sky over the hills to the west, approaching from a faint light on the horizon, most probably a settlement. The gunship slowed as it reached the sprawling cluster of hills, and began to orbit the area. The NMX had apparently noticed the asteroid's strange behavior after entering the atmosphere and were hunting for the crater. A searchlight poured over the area, searching through the trees. It settled on the crater after several minutes, and then sped towards the top of the hill Nel had touched down on, stopping above the plateau. The cargo doors opened, spilling out a faint red light over the trees. 20 NMX Nekovalkyrja Infantry rappelled onto the hill, and slowly advanced towards the impact site.

The crater was comparatively small for a meteor of that size, littered with fragments of the asteroid that were left after Nel had removed the evidence of its use. The impact crater carved out a gap in the hill, with the center of the impact site just over half a kilometer away from its edge.

---

The rumble of the Shredder Gunship caught Nel's attention quickly. She looked up from her healing, trying to get a lock on the position of the gunship. Several of her toes popped back into joint and the bones of her right forearm slid back into alignment as the skin pulled itself together behind it while she listened. The Shredder was just under two kilometers away yet, and on the other side of the hill. Not far enough, not if she wanted to have no contact until she desired it.

The repairs finished and Nel started moving again, taking to the trees to avoid the snow on the ground and heading east, away from the impact site. These were similar enough to the forests surrounding the city where Lenwe's compound was and where she was trained by the masters of invisible movement; the environment would serve her well despite the wide spacing of the trees. As she moved, Nel's clothes shifted around her, changing from her customary Kohanian fighting garb to a loose, single-piece jumpsuit made of tight-weave, undyed wool cloth and gray leather. With the blotchy cloth, Nel would blend well into snowy shadows of nearly any hour. The leather was hardened on the outward-facing surfaces with softer buckskin on the interior surfaces, attached to the inside of the cloth jumpsuit at likely contact points such as knees, elbows, chest, back, and the outsides of the thighs and forearms, leaving the cloth as one piece on the outside. There were no seams anywhere, and the neck and cuffs at the wrists and ankles fit close around the neck and limbs. As her clothes were changing, Nel's sandals closed up around her feet and became something closer to buckskin moccasins, foot coverings that wouldn't hinder the grip of her toes while keeping her feet from the ground.

She was getting better at altering the material composition and form of things around her. Things she could touch, that is. It still required a sizable amount of concentration/processing ability to do the more complicated stuff, which was why most of the jumpsuit was merely rearranged fabric and leather that was already present, but Nel calculated a high probability that ability would be very useful in this place. Her clothing, for one, could probably use some upgrades that she didn't know any cloths or materials that would provide the properties she wanted. But that was another purpose for this trip: To gather templates for materials that were unavailable to her on New Kohana.

The snow was a slight problem as far as escape and avoidance went, but, by picking her steps carefully, Nel avoided leaving any but the faintest of tracks, if anyone knew or bothered to look in the trees. She was a flickering shadow in the bare branches; as it was, Nel was impossible to follow by IR traces; she had no body heat and so left no heat trail. There was only a faint, faint signature in her ribcage area, with even that being dampened by the leather over it. Wanting a good view of the surrounding area and a possible visual of the landing party, Nel looked for the next-highest point away from the hill, which was now hosting a sizable group of curious NMX neko soldiers.

Pausing behind a tree trunk and crouching on a branch, Nel looked back, around the tree. Her vision range broadened further than usual to include deep into the infrared and ultraviolet bands, trying to see what the search pattern was. Her visual resolution was high enough that she could "zoom in" without actually losing field of vision (like one would if using binoculars) and get a rather clear, but not detailed, view for up to a kilometer now...so she could count the number of troops, if she was in line-of-sight, but not see what they were or what they doing. As she looked, her mind set about making the calculations to further optimize her vision to increase distance via physical modification or mental processing of the image gathered.

As it was, the hill was still between Nel and the impact site, and she was three kilometers away, so it wasn't likely she could see anything, yet. That was fine with her.

The NMX Nekovalkyrja had, for the most part, descended on the far side of the hill toward the crater. Of the 30 deployed, only about five stayed at the top, one of which seemed to be barking orders. The Shredder had flown out over the crater, its searchlight flashing away as the twilight faded.

After about twenty minutes, the Shredder returned to the top of the hill to land, followed in short order by the twenty other Neko who had followed it down. They began to load back into the transport at a leisurely pace.

Nel watched the NMX nekos on the hilltop for the twenty minutes they stood there, then counted the soldiers that returned when the Shredder landed, noting the size of the landing group. Counting the sets of vibrations passing through the ground and up the tree as the nekos dropped onto the ground and began their investigating, the original twenty had added ten more to their number while in the crater, probably scattered around to broaden the search pattern.

As the NMX completed their investigation, Nel started back toward the crater. She circled wide to the south as the group boarded and stopped at a kilometer distance, waiting for the Shredder to move.

The Shredder quickly loaded its charges and ascended, giving the immediate area another quick once-over with its searchlight before pulling a wide turn and jetting back towards the lights in the distance, brighter now with the setting of the sun. The snow also began to pick up, as did the wind.

As the Shredder left, Nel trailed behind. The gunship pulled ahead fairly easily, as Nel was on rough terrain and was still trying to avoid drawing attention. She calculated its vector before it crested the hills to the west of the crash site between the impact crater and the settlement, taking her time getting up the hills and keeping to the trees the entire time. The heat signature left by the Shredder's aether drive confirmed her calculations when she reached the peak.

The snow was becoming a problem, as was the dropping temperature. Nel observed the lights of the distant settlement and mentally mapped the terrain between her current position and the settlement, then added the terrain surrounding her as far as her vision allowed, supplemented by ambient sonar. With the mapping complete, she followed the hills, seeking a thicket or cave system to take shelter in. It was time to plan a first encounter.

The hills were begrudging in providing a hiding place. The trees were still sparse, and not quite rough enough to provide caves or ravines. As Nelew followed the Shredder towards the lights, the hills began to lessen, and eventually simply dropped into a long, flat basin stretching for dozens of kilometers, with the lights still quite far in the distance, seemingly in the center.

The snow on the ground was thicker here, covering most land features. To North, the hills stretched on into great mountains, the source of a wide, branching river that flowed through the basin, the closest branch just a kilometer out. The south seemed to look much like the direction Nelew had come from in terms of terrain, with any distinguishing marks being lost to sight for the time being.

The intensity of the snow steadily increased, now making even what was now apparently a very bright source of light quite dim, although the forest continued to stretch for quite a ways, from what Nelew would be able to see.

With the snowfall increasing and no nearby source of shelter, Nelew decided to try to make one.

The trees were fairly large, so it didn't take her long to find the tree she needed. Putting her hand against the bark, Nel dissolved a hole in it, about fifteen feet off the ground, then continued pushing into the tree, hollowing it out as she went. The dissolved tree matter was converted to a form of mass she could store, with some of the matter further converted into energy for her body and the KINESI System to use.

Almost an hour later, she had hollowed out the entire trunk and begun digging into the ground beneath the tree, carving out a single, large room about ten meters below the surface, lined with wood. Then she stopped and began to plan, making refinements to her new temporary home as she did.

---

Five hours later, Nel climbed up to the original hole she had put in the tree and opened the little camouflaged door, which matched the rest of the tree, to check on the status of the blizzard that had been brewing when she started on the tree.

The intensity of the blizzard had subsided for a time. The snow still came down, albeit far more lightly than it had a short time prior, falling straight down. An occasional gust of wind blew large flurries across the ground from the fresh powder that had accumulated over the past several hours.