The building I'd been kept in was old and falling apart, though I suspected at least some of the “falling apart” part was the fault of my three rescuers. There was considerable damage in the room outside the sealed storage vault where they locked me away, much of which appeared to have been caused by explosions.
My right hand felt weighed down with the pistol Amber loaned me. It was bigger and heavier than the type I was used to, but the functionality was much the same. Disengage safety, point at bad guy and blow a hole in them.
The center of my chest burned slightly, but not quite as badly as it had when I'd first woken up. It was obvious enough that the piece of metal embedded in my breastbone was a coalesced manifestation of the now-fused Relic. I could still feel its presence, but it was vastly different than before. The intangible sensation of connection was no longer a thin and distant tether, but a seething font of awesome power that was rooted to my very being.
“How are you feeling now that I'm back in my body?” I asked Misaki.
“Happier than I've ever been.”
I shook my head. “I was more referring to the magicky stuff. The gewgaws or whatever you call it—that thing you had me get rid of. Is it really gone?”
“Oh.” For once Misaki didn't look annoyed at my silly terminology. “Let's see.”
Misaki's hands blazed with spell-flame, which was normal—at least for her—but my grin grew wide when the flame immediately became blue-hot. There should be no other possible way for her to do that with the Relic gone.
“Looks like it worked.”
Amber arched an eyebrow at the flashy display. “You have your powers back?”
“Yes, and more besides,” Misaki replied. “Karin removed the restriction that prevented me from drawing astral energy from without. My magic should now be stronger than it's ever been.”
“I'm not one to turn down more firepower.” Amber jerked toward a smaller corridor that branched off the main hallway. “This way—it'll take us back out the same way we came in.”
Misaki's spell-flame dissipated and the two of us kept behind Amber as we quickly made our way back out of the old armory building. Resistance was so far non-existent, but I knew that wasn't going to last. The sound of the battle outside was starting to fade and I doubted very seriously that the black-armored soldiers were going to be the losers in this little engagement.
“Our assault force is preparing to retreat,” Amber snapped. “Come on, we have to get out of here before we can't get out of here.”
“Look out!”
The words barely came out of Meilin's mouth before six soldiers in black armor rounded the corner and stopped dead in their tracks, seeing all four of us standing there chit-chatting like a pack of idiots. Their reflexes were more than up to the task, though, and three assault rifles came up and started firing almost instantly.
“Scatter!” Amber shouted.
I darted to the left with Misaki while Amber and Meilin dashed to the right. The woman drew her Relic, a strange blade that looked like it had been fractured in multiple places and yet somehow still held together. Arcs of crawling, spitting lightning blossomed from the Shattered Sword, emerging from the fissures in the metal, as she swept it around and slammed the point into the ground.
A few rounds struck both Amber and Meilin, but their bodies shimmered with the telltale glow of a kinetic barrier. I could catch the faint glimmer of Meilin's Spell Engine and knew they'd probably be okay—make that definitely be okay.
The burly warrior woman grinned with battle lust as a great blast of thunder and lightning expanded from the point where the Shattered Sword struck the ground. The shock wave deflected the majority of the shots fired at her and blasted the six soldiers with sufficient force that half of them were knocked flying.
Spell-flame roared into being as Misaki flung motes of explosive magic that streaked through the air and slammed into the still standing but badly overbalanced soldiers. Meilin stepped back and activated her Spell Engine again.
I blinked in amazement as Amber charged right into the enemy formation with wild abandon, slashing and stabbing with her Relic. Her flurry of attacks took two of the soldiers out, chopping directly through the rifles they held up to parry and digging a deep, smoking furrow in their armored chests.
The third soldier of the group, the last one standing, knew it was over. He glanced around and his eyes narrowed as he settled on me, determined that if he was going to be sent to hell, at least one of us would be coming with him.
“Karin, no!” Misaki cried out. Her fingers began to trace out the runic pattern for the familiar golden shield of protection, but she wasn't nearly fast enough. The soldier's rifle jerked in his hands as he loosed a rippling burst of full-auto fire directly at me.
I wasn't afraid. Things had indeed changed.
The bullets struck the air half a meter in front of me and stopped dead. Most of the rounds splattered and the tiny fragments deflecting away, but some simply flattened themselves into lead pancakes and fell to the ground.
My eyes hardened as I quickly tracing a series of white-glowing runic symbols in the air before me. I gestured sharply at the offending soldier and a piercing shaft of radiant power lanced out at the speed of light, transfixing the soldier directly through the heart. The beam of pure disintegrating energy passed through his armor as if it wasn't even there, annihilating it and the flesh and bone beneath it.
The soldier's wide-eyed corpse fell heavily to the ground.
“That's what you get for assuming I was defenseless,” I remarked, bending down to pick up the dead soldier's assault rifle, scavenging two extra magazines as well. I checked the chamber, put the weapon back on safe, and slung it over my shoulder before turning back to the group.
Amber, Meilin and Misaki all stared at me as if they'd just seen a ghost. I blinked, staring blankly back at them. “What?”
“Y-y-y-you can use magic now?!” Misaki exploded. She was so surprised the fur on her tail stood straight up, making it look three times its usual size. “And you invoked it so fast—how… I mean, what—what the fuck?!”
I shrugged. “Apparently when the Relic fused to my spirit it also awakened my latent magical potential.”
Meilin nodded knowingly. “Now it all makes sense. That's why AEGIS turned, why they pushed us all away and held you captive. They figured out what happened somehow.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right.” I crossed my arms over my chest and sighed. “Can we please have this discussion somewhere and some time else? Like, when we're not getting shot at by assholes?”
“The extraction point is this way,” Amber noted, moving right on to the business at hand. Misaki and I walked side by side with Meilin bringing up the rear. I held my purloined rifle at the ready—I didn't want to have to rely solely on my newfound powers without first thoroughly testing their limitations and weaknesses—and kept an eye on our right flank.
“Doesn't look like we're going to have any more trouble getting out of here.” I frowned as we passed into the forest. I didn't know what Amber's plan was, but I hoped the trees would let up at some point. I wasn't too thrilled about the idea of climbing up to the top of one just to get in the escape vehicle.
“We getting close or what?”
Amber shot me a dirty look. “It's just a little farther. A hundred meters or so.”
“Fine, fine.” I fell silent and amused myself by trading googly-eyed glances with my fiancee. I hadn't seen Misaki look this positively lovey-dovey since the night she proposed to me. You'd think I'd been gone for years the way she was acting, but I suppose it made sense. If the situation was reversed, I'd be feeling the exact same way.
“Wait. Stop!”
Amber's harsh whisper came as a bit of a surprise, jolting me out of my careless mental detour. I stopped and tightened my grip on the “borrowed” assault rifle. The swordswoman gestured toward the trees ahead. They thinned out after about ten more meters and opened up into a small clearing.<
br />
A clearing that wasn't empty.
“The LZ is overrun,” she muttered, her tone low and furious.
“How many?”
Amber glanced at Meilin and sighed. “Forty of those black-armored soldiers… and a tall man in a nice suit with a Spell Engine on his right hand. Looks around forty, slender, blond, clean shaven and wearing glasses. Sound like anyone you know?”
Misaki and I shrugged, but Meilin stiffened and nodded mechanically.
“Well, out with it then,” Amber snapped.
“I don't know his real name, but his code name is Nergal. He's AEGIS's vice-director of crisis management.”
“Oho, a genuine VIP, then, huh? You think we should—”
Meilin shook her head. “No. He knows we're here. Any attack we make, he'll just deflect it—I'm sure he's got an active barrier up if he's wearing a Spell Engine—and order his people to cut us all down where we stand.”
Misaki glowered at the clearing. “I could incinerate every last one of them before they even get a single shot off.”
“I know you're happy that your powers are back,” I told her, placing a hand on her shoulder, “but I don't think we should be attacking them. I don't think they're here to kill us or recapture me.”
“Those are a lot of guns pointed at us,” Amber reminded me.
“Yes, but why would this Nergal be out here, of all places, even with forty soldiers protecting him?” Meilin turned to me and frowned. “I think you're right, Karin. I think he's here to talk.”
Amber looked dubious. “About what?”
“There's only one way to find out.”
I started to walk toward the clearing, pushing branches and brambles out of my face as the trees began to thin out. As I stepped out of the forest at the edge of the clearing, forty assault rifles swung down and aimed directly at me. I hoped my theory was correct. Even having unlocked the latent magical ability within, I would have no chance of survival at all if they really did want to kill me.
“That's far enough, Ashley.” The man Meilin identified as Nergal started to walk toward me, closing the distance until he was about ten meters away near the edge of the clearing. His soldiers surrounded him, set up in a defensive phalanx with the first row crouching and the second standing behind them.
“You aren't going to kill me,” I observed. “That much is obvious, else I'd already be filled full of holes. So what do you want, Mr. Vice-Director?”
I expected him to at least look a little surprised, but Nergal's expression didn't change. “Our wayward daughter Star must be among your group. I was quite disappointed when we discovered she murdered her observers and disappeared from our view.”
“Assassins, you mean,” Misaki snarled.
“Semantics. Had she followed her orders, I would have had no reason to chastise her.” Nergal shrugged as if it didn't matter. “Regardless, what is done is done.”
“You still haven't told me what you want,” I pointed out.
“What I want is unfortunately no longer possible.” The Vice-Director's expression soured. “You were supposed to remain unconscious until we could discover how the Relic was fused with your spirit.”
“Well, you know what they say—you can't always get what you want,” I said, a smug note coloring my tone. “Especially when what you want involves kidnapping me and holding me against my will, away from Misaki.”
Nergal ignored my retort and his eyes settled on Misaki. “You will tell me how your Relic spirit survived long enough to come to your rescue.”
I shrugged. He wouldn't believe me anyway, so why not?
“It was an accident. About half a year ago, Misaki set up a healing link to help me recover from the thrashing I got when fighting Isao Tsukimura. The nerve damage took a lot longer to heal than we'd expected, so she just made it sort of permanent.”
Nergal stared at me with narrowed, disbelieving eyes. “An accident?”
“Or luck, if you want to call it that. This whole series of events came together in a wildly improbable way, but you already knew that. That's why you wanted to keep me for study, wasn't it? Because something like this has never happened before.”
“Partially correct; it's never happened before under our observation.” The vice-director's disbelief faded slowly and still he made no aggressive moves. Yet, anyway. At least Amber and Meilin remained hidden in the forest on the off-chance this peaceful talk went to shit.
“Your unique circumstances offered us a rare chance to study the consequences of a Relic fusing to the spirit of its wielder. Had we been successful, we would have been able to realize a wealth of data critical to the safety of humanity.”
My eyes widened in astonished anger. “And so you kidnapped me, betrayed Meilin, you threw my fiancee away like she was garbage and told her she was going to die. I don't understand; you could have just asked for my participation in your research.”
“You would not have survived the process.” Nergal's smile was cold.
“That's not all of it, is it?” I glared at the man. He was tall, well-built and attractive in a sort of plain, guy-next-door sort of way, which only made his cold disposition even more chilling. “There's something more, isn't there?”
Nergal shrugged as if it didn't matter. Maybe it didn't. “A great darkness approaches. If your friends had not disrupted our plans, we might have been able to stop it before the process becomes inevitable.”
“Great darkness, huh?” I smirked at him. “Are you naturally this vague or do you practice?”
He ignored my verbal jab. “Your meddling will result in the suffering and death of billions. Let that thought resonate in your mind as you leave this place.”
Looks like I was right; he was just going to let us go. I suppose now that I was awake again, I'd lost all value as a research sample.
“Yes, you are free to leave—all of you. We have no way to compel your cooperation and I don't wish to needlessly waste lives trying to bring you and your formidable companions to heel. Your impulsive actions were only a minor setback in the grand scheme of things. We will find another way to halt the coming darkness.”
“I'm sure you will,” I murmured, my voice barely audible. For some strange reason his proclamation shook me more than it really should have.
The trees rustled slightly as Amber, Meilin and Misaki emerged, standing protectively around me. The four of us watched in silence as Nergal turned and disappeared into the woods, the forty black-armored soldiers following in his wake like a deadly shadow. The clearing was unnaturally quiet.
“Our ride should be here in a bit,” Amber commented.
“You warned them off?”
“Of course.” The swordswoman stretched her well-muscled arms over her head. “Two of those soldiers were carrying portable rocket launchers. They would have swatted our gunship out of the sky. I told the pilot to go hang out until I called him back.”
“Why did they let us go?” Misaki wondered. “Did he think he was outmatched?”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“I think it's a lot more complicated than that.”
maelstrom
“We're coming up on the compound now,” the pilot's voice came over the intercom. I tried to shake away the sensation that something profoundly wrong was going to happen, but I couldn't.
Misaki was asleep, her head resting on my shoulder. I, on the other hand, felt so wired I felt like I just sucked down an entire pot of coffee. Probably had something to do with being directly jacked into a source of tremendous power.
Amber held the Shattered Sword in her hands, cleaning the blade in a very unusual manner. The Relic I used to have never seemed to get dirty, but I suppose Amber's was different considering what happened to it. Blood and dirt was caked on the blade; to clean it she would push tiny amounts of mana into the weapon, causing it to send a skittering of fine sparks down its length. Then she took a small brush and scrubbed into the deep fissures and fractures.
&nbs
p; “I'm glad I never had to clean mine,” I commented. “It always looked brand-new every time I called it to my hand.”
Amber shrugged. “The Shattered Sword has been like this for long before I was born.”
Misaki stirred slightly on my shoulder. I was both amused and unsurprised to see the fabric of my “borrowed” jacket dark beneath her cheek where she'd drooled all over me. I think if it had been any other girl I'd be slightly grossed out, but with Misaki it was just another part of what made her cute as hell.
“So how did you end up with your Relic in the first place?”
Amber glanced at Meilin—there seemed to be something between those two that I wasn't aware of—and quickly turned back to me. “Luna picks the most skilled with the sword and grants them custody of the Relic.”
“That's a little simpler than I was expecting.”
Her lips twitched in a slight smile. “Unless you're asking me how I ended up in Luna to begin with?”
“I wasn't, but consider it asked.”
“Fine,” Amber muttered, casting an indecipherable glare at Meilin. My former boss seemed to be paying considerably more attention to the conversation than she had before. “Right after I graduated high school, I enlisted in the military to get away from my family. Things weren't great at home, money was tight and the Army was offering a lot of monetary incentives.”
I grinned. “Sounds a lot like how I ended up working for AEGIS.”
“Funny how things parallel like that, huh?” Amber's expression became thoughtful as she continued. “Anyway, I enlisted and got put with a tech team because I'm a 'delicate little feminine flower,' as you can plainly see, and the old guys running the show didn't want any precious little ladies getting shot up on the front lines. I saw a little action overseas while rigging comm/sensor towers for the tactical forecasters, but mostly I spent time on a base in Germany.”
The more this woman talked, the more I liked her. I was a little curious as to why Meilin seemed so absorbed in the discussion—I figured she should know this stuff by now, but I guess not.
“Moving right along… one of the things I did in the service was fencing. Saber, mostly, but I did some epee, too. We had lots and lots of downtime, especially when deployed, and not much to do with it. Mostly a lot of boring waiting around interrupted by frenzied bursts of working our asses off while being shot at. You know, the usual.
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