"How close are we to the castle, anyways?"

"Uh, maybe half an hour?"

"I'm good to keep riding, then."

A2 keeps running, then.

At least until an explosion carves out a massive crater in front of their path!

"What the shiiiiiiiiiit-" She skids to a halt at the edge.

Bellona peers over her shoulder! And does not jump off A2's back quite yet because she isn't actually stupid.

It looks like someone took an ice cream scoop to the ground, an almost perfectly spherical section blasted clean.

A pair of strange flying contraptions, almost but not quite humanoid in shape, swoop past overhead with a high-pitched whining sound, turning quickly and beginning a vertical descent.

"Oh, fuuuuuuuuck me," A2 groans.

Those look faster than A2, and that power output -

Also, they either tried to fucking kill her and A2 just now, or somehow thought that was an appropriate warning shot.

She learned not to fuck around with flying enemies capable of ranged attacks after the fucking dragons - but they're moving too fast to tag with an alkahestric anchor - but they aren't currently moving to attack again -

Her hands are already nearly together. It takes barely a thought to carve a modified version of Kimblee's arrays - taking into account what she knows of flame alchemy and alkahestry - into her hands, her thumb and forefinger and the flesh between them containing the central circle, elaborations to the side - and she can frame them in the circle created by her thumbs and forefingers touching without much trouble - 

She doesn't blow them up, though, not yet - just verifies briefly that she can track them even at these speeds, then properly clasps her hands together again, synthesizes a mild stimulant into her bloodstream, creates a durable carbon shield under her skin (leaving some circulation on the outside so she can sweat), reinforces her bones and important organs, and starts mentally putting together equations for a proper armored hiding spot - with that power output she doesn't have the material in this soil - but according to Bellona Two atoms are divisible, the other version of her already created and shared an array for true freeform transmutation - the calculations for highly exotic materials are probably too complicated for active combat, but she can pull off something with improved durability - or at least she could figure out how to non-explosively disable the flyers - 

...Relatedly, are her and A2 getting shot at again?

They are not, as it happens. The flyers touch down in the center of the crater on pointed limbs and the fronts open to allow the pilots to disembark. Or perhaps hop out would be the more apposite phrasing, as the flyers seem to only have enough internal space to exactly fit a single android. A metal brick-looking thing with grippy arms coming out the bottom detaches from the back of each flyer to hover above and behind each pilot's shoulder. Both of the figures are in dark, velvety-seeming dresses, with considerable amounts of poof and fashionable swoosh. Seems kind of like the intact version of what A2 only has the tatters of.

One of the pilots also looks familiar to Bellona, despite the blindfold on her face. She waves cheerily up at the pair standing by the crater edge. "Hello there! Can we talk?"

"You just tried to kill them," the other says. "Why are we asking to talk?"

"Kill them? Pf, no. I didn't hit them, did I?"

"So you intentionally violated the mission? You realize this will be going in the report."

"I'm creatively interpreting the mission. Field operatives have discretion. And anyway, you'll be fine, your operator loves you. It's me who's got to worry. Hey, do you think we could swing by that castle before we send the flight units back? If I get a scan of something neat and old-world, maybe she'll be distracted and forget to yell at me."

"9S..." she sighs.

"Hey, fuckfaces! You gonna come up here and try to kill me again or what?"

She throws her hands up. "I just said we weren't trying to kill you! Look, 2B isn't even leaping into battle swords drawn or anything!"

"I was this close to returning fire, you know," she calls from A2's back. She still has her hands near each other, ready to start up Kimblee's arrays at a moment's notice - though she shifts her hands so her current circle is passing through A2, starts analyzing her body as subtly as possible to build up a mental map on ways to transmute an android. "What do you want, and what possessed you to think shooting at us was a good idea?"

Alt of Zera or not, she isn't letting her guard down. And this delay gives her a chance to work on an alkahestric anchor...

"You blew up a way station, so fair's fair. That was you, right?"

"...That was an accident."

"Pretty lucky accident. Or unlucky. Those things are practically indestructible."

"I'm a prodigy of destruction." ...Probably they have also noticed the way she neutralized all the compounds. "So - that explains why you've got orders to kill me, but not why you've violated them to stop to chat." She is very unimpressed by their military's discipline in several ways - that, or Zera's alt is intentionally leaking things, in which case she's very unimpressed by their military's ability to keep its soldiers in line.

"Technically the phrasing was more along the lines of 'figure out how this happened, find whoever did it, ensure it doesn't happen again'. Which, obviously, yes, Command wants you dead, but I went over the site with a fine-toothed comb and I still have no idea what you did!" She looks unreasonably happy about this. "So when we tracked you down and you turned out not to be some new kind of rampaging machine lifeform burning all in your path, I made an executive decision."