“I got good at it. Real good,” she went on, her tone swelling just slightly with pride. “For a little while I was seriously considering trying out for the Olympic fencing team, but then the big mess in Russia started and I got shipped off to go get shot at some more. Got shot at, but didn't get shot, so that was good.”
My eyes went unfocused for a moment as I considered her words. “I vaguely recall that whole thing in Russia, but we didn't get a whole lot of news about it here.”
Amber snorted derisively. “The whole thing was dumb as hell, but apparently I did a good job there and someone took notice—both of my service record and my fencing. A man who claimed to represent a private security force offered me a job.”
“I bet he didn't think you were a 'delicate little feminine flower,'” I put in, my tone becoming bone-dry.
“No, he didn't. I was intrigued, the job paid a little better, and my two year mark was coming up fast. At the time I'd still been unsure whether I wanted to stay in for another two years or go career, but when I got the offer, I decided to put in my papers.”
The Shattered Sword buzzed faintly as a ripple of cascading sparks ran down the length of the blade. Amber put her brush to work again, causing the dried blood to flake off.
“After a bunch of nonsense paperwork, I was let in on the whole big secret. Arcane houses, magic, spirits and specters, Relics, all that good stuff. The 'private security force' turned out to be Luna, the modern incarnation of the ancient Order of the Moon, but the job was exactly what they said.”
“So you were part of the regular security force?”
“For a while, yeah. Luna tests all of their combat people regularly, running these crazy competitive sword tournaments. I was a champion fencer, so yeah, I was all about that. I loved it, but I didn't know they were holding these things because the previous Swordlord passed on and Luna needed to select the next wielder.”
“Swordlord, huh?” My expression reflected a mixture of curiosity and amusement. “Catchy little title.”
“In the past, when Luna was still the Order of the Moon,” Amber explained, “the Swordlord or Swordlady who wielded the Relic was also the literal commander of the Order's army. We don't have an army now, though, just a small but well-trained and equipped security force, and it's led by a different person.”
I smiled and leaned back in my seat. Misaki shifted a bit but continued to sleep peacefully. I brushed my fingertips across her hair, wondering just what in the hell I'd done so right to end up with her.
“I know you're going to say something,” Amber remarked and I could tell she wasn't speaking to me. “So just come out with it.”
“There's nothing to say.” Meilin's tone was surly. I raised an eyebrow at the unusual exchange. There was definitely something between those two, and before I could ask the obvious question—I'm sure it was plastered all over my face anyway—Misaki opened one eye and yawned.
“Amber is Meilin's sister,” Misaki informed me. She sat up and wiped her mouth, stretching her arms high above her head. The crash seats were so snug that she couldn't wrap her tail around the small of my back as she usually did, so instead the fluffy thing just flopped on my lap.
“Half-sister,” Amber snapped.
“Well, I figured that much. I mean, not many other ways for it to work except for straight-up adoption.”
Meilin ignored Misaki and me, instead focusing on her half-sister. “Why didn't you ever tell me any of this? I knew you were in the Army, but all these other details—”
“Can we not do this here?” Amber's expression became shuttered.
“Where shall we do it, then, little sister?”
“Stop it, you two,” Misaki growled, already coming fully awake and clearly in no mood to deal with any of their family quarrel bullshit. “Wait until we get back and then you two can just go into the training hall and punch it out.”
“Since when do you advocate punching as a means of resolving family arguments?” I wondered, arching an eyebrow in her direction.
Misaki made a frustrated sound in the back of her throat. “Since those two don't ever stop trying to needle the other.”
We both rolled our eyes as the two feuding sisters glared daggers at each other. If we hadn't been in the gunship flying thousands of meters above the ground I'm sure they would have started the punching right now.
“Swordlady, we've got a problem,” the pilot's voice came over the intercom, breaking the tension building up between the two. Amber frowned and unsnapped her harness, picking her way through the passenger compartment and opening the hatch leading to the cockpit. Her body went rigid and she turned around before I could even ask what the problem was.
“The outer ring sentries spotted demons. A lot of demons. They're making a direct path to the base; it's obvious we're they're target.”
Misaki's ears flattened back against her head. “How many?”
“The count's tentative, but the sentries think there's at least twelve, maybe more, all massed together as they crash through the forest. The outer ring's been harassing them, trying to force them away from the base, but they're flat out being ignored.”
I frowned. “Demons? You mean those miasma-infused beasts we fought with that creepy mage?”
“Luna calls them demons,” Misaki explained. “Fitting name, right?”
“How long do we have before they arrive?”
“None.” Amber's voice was very slightly strained. She sounded almost eager. “They're already there.”
incursion
The gunship flew over the Luna base, a small artificial clearing in the deep forest. Dark shapes shifted and darted between the trees. A small group of people dressed in gray uniforms took positions atop the single squat concrete building in the clearing.
“The bulk of the base is below ground,” Amber explained, noting my confusion. “It's going to be very difficult for them to actually enter the base and do any real damage, so I think we're going to be able to push them out.”
“Only if that creepy fucker doesn't show up.” I unsnapped my own harness and slid to the edge of my seat. “The mage who can control these things won't have any trouble destroying this entire complex, no matter how much of it is below ground.”
“We have no reports of human attackers,” the pilot informed me. “Sentries and blockade forces report sixteen demons of various types.”
I peered out the viewport at the battle beginning below, my expression pensive. It didn't look like the demons were really trying very hard to break the defensive lines… I knew they could, considering just how huge they were. It wouldn't be difficult at all for them to just crash right on through.
“They're not attacking, they're holding. Laying siege. You see—there are only two demons on the tarmac, and they're not really doing much but drawing fire. The rest are in the forest, but they're ignoring the sentries.”
“You're right,” Amber agreed. She turned and ducked her head back through the open hatch to the cockpit and said something I couldn't quite hear to the pilot. “We're going to drop on the guardhouse roof. The gunship will come around and give us some fire-support against the demons.”
“Rocket pods and an autocannon should do some good, yeah,” I muttered, wondering just how the hell Luna managed to get their hands on a state-of-the-art military repulsion-jet gunship like this. “Just make sure you don't hit us.”
“Can't make any promises if you get too close to my targets,” the pilot came back.
“Don't worry, we'll leave some for you.”
The rear boarding hatch hissed and started to swing open. Down the ramp, about two meters off the edge, was the roof of the guardhouse. Twelve people dressed in gray uniforms and light body armor were concentrating their fire on one of the demons, a giant black-flickering wolf creature with burning green eyes.
“Watch it!” I cried and ducked down as the demon roared and struck. Tendrils of miasma sprouted from its massive shoulders and lashed out, striking the
edge of the guardhouse and narrowly missing the gunship.
“We need to get out now!”
No kidding. I didn't bother to wait for further instructions and instead just dropped off the edge of the ramp as carefully as I could, trying not to drop all my body's falling weight on my left leg. It didn't work out so well and a hot river of pain shot up my leg, but it wasn't as bad as I expected.
Meilin and Misaki came out next, dropping down around me. Misaki took one look at me and realized my leg was giving me trouble again. She rushed over next to me and supported me with her body.
“I can walk, I can stand, I can fight,” I insisted, not happy to be the focus of that worried and sad look on her face.
“Love, please, you should—”
I shook my head. “No, Misaki. The loose mana—that dark mage is nearby. You can feel it too, can't you?”
Misaki opened her mouth to reply, but Amber came crashing down out of the gunship, nearly bowling us both over as she darted for the edge of the guardhouse. I blinked in astonishment as she just kept going, leaping off and touching down on the tarmac below. With the Shattered Sword in hand, she roared a wordless challenge at the tentacle-wolf demon and exploded into a flurry of sparkling slashes.
“My sister's totally, completely crazy,” Meilin grumbled.
“Maybe not. Look.”
I pointed down at the tarmac where a veritable flood of gray-clad sentries emerged from the woods, falling into formation around Amber as she brandished the Shattered Sword high above her head. Lightning crawled across the blade as she forced mana into the weapon, expanding out in a bubble of charged and compressed air.
Meilin fired two shots from her pistol at the second demon, a giant cat-like monster similar to the ones Misaki and I fought before. “What is she doing?”
“She's trying to strip their defenses,” Misaki said in an admiring tone. “That ball of lightning she's creating is converting the air trapped inside into plasma. If she can keep it up without being interrupted…”
Right on cue, the crackling sphere of charged force generated a brilliant burst of superheated and ionized gases. I shielded my eyes from the intense brightness as the jet of plasma caught the demon head-on.
Amber grinned fiercely and swung the Shattered Sword around and up, her strong legs propelling her and the blade in a great uppercut slash that seared through the demon's thick neck muscles and bones.
I ducked as the gunship swooped overhead and opened up on the demons still hiding in the forest. The craft's autocannon dumped a startling volume of fire in short, controlled bursts that the pilot used sparingly, attempting to keep the rest of the demons from assisting their companions.
I didn't know how well my new abilities would work against these creatures, but I sure wasn't doing any good taking potshots at them with a pistol. I set the gun aside on the weapons crate in the center of the roof and focused on the second monster.
The bulk of Luna's security force on the guardhouse was successfully keeping the thing back with nonstop gunfire. Like specters, these things could withstand an enormous amount of punishment and keep on fighting, but unlike specters they didn't have a miasmic core that could be quickly destroyed with a Relic.
Misaki's boosted spell-flame shot out in great blue-white fireballs, exploding against the demon's body and sending it reeling backward as miasma was stripped away from its flesh. The giant cat-thing hissed so loudly my ears rang, its red-glowing eyes staring directly at us.
With the miasma defenses peeled back, the security forces redoubled their efforts, firing as fast as their weapons would allow. I watched with satisfaction as black blood spurted from the wounds, the high-powered rifle rounds burying themselves deeply in the thing's profane flesh. Heartening to be sure, but it'd only be a matter of time before the thing could repair its miasmic armor.
I wasn't going to let it.
My hand came up and I quickly etched a series of simple runic symbols. The silvery-white glow of the invocation brightened and power welled up inside, called through the Relic shard from the astral wellspring. I pointed at the wounded demon's head.
The expected brilliant beam of pure white destruction scythed out from my fingertip and stabbed through the demon's unprotected head, boring through flesh, bone and brain matter in a nanosecond before it flashed out through the other side and blasted a deep divot into the tarmac.
The very dead demon toppled over, its huge body slamming into the ground. I could hear hisses of astonished rage from within the forest as the slain monsters' companions promised to deliver harsh vengeance.
“The fourteen or however many in the forest aren't going to just stay in there forever,” I grunted, glancing at Meilin. She had traded her pistol for an assault rifle from the weapons crate and was carefully firing well-aimed single rounds at any demon head she could find.
“If they all rush in at once, we're not going to get out of this alive.”
“Yeah. I know.”
The gunship hovered about fifty meters above the guardhouse, well out of reach of the demons on the ground. More of them poured out of the forest onto the tarmac; two of them were the wolf-type with miasma tentacles sprouting from their back. They whipped at the gunship, but the pilot was too savvy for that and ascended quickly. The twin rocket pods beneath the flying machine's stubby wings flared to life.
“Down!” I cried and flung myself at Misaki, dropping us both to the concrete. A stream of high-explosive unguided rockets burst from the pods and arrowed directly for the massed group of demons. The explosion blasted great chunks of asphalt and tainted demon-flesh into the air.
A severed paw the size of a dinner table and streaming wisps of miasma flew overhead, barely missing us as it cartwheeled through the air.
“That works,” I marveled, trying to get to my feet. The demons were roaring impotently at the gunship, lashing with their miasma whips, but they couldn't reach it. The remaining creatures scattered, spreading out along the blasted and cratered tarmac in an attempt to avoid the gunship's fire.
“Where's Amber?” Meilin shouted.
“Right here.”
I turned and saw the swordswoman on the other side of the guardhouse as she vaulted up the ladder, carrying something long, dark and bulky slung over her shoulder. I recognized the weapon as a revolving-chamber grenade launcher of the type often used by law enforcement for dispersing unruly crowds. I hoped she had something stronger than tear gas loaded.
“Chief Alex is bringing up some heavy weapons,” she said as she readied the grenade launcher to fire. Her face was ashen and her lips compressed into a grim line. “The gunship pilot says there are even more demons on the way.”
“They waited until we came to help the defenders. Now that we're here, they can destroy this place freely and us along with it. You need to evacuate this base and quick. That gunship's going to run out of ammo eventually.”
“Probably too much to hope that we run out of demons first.” Amber sighed heavily and leaned against the low wall around the edge of the guardhouse roof. She took up aim and fired, lobbing three grenades, one right after the other, directly at the oncoming demons.
Mana flowed through me, drawn in by the Relic fragment, and I inscribed a string of runes into the air. A profusion of glittering white flashes rained down from above, peppering four of the demons with impossibly-sharp blades of light. Blood streamed from dozens of superficial cuts, but their miasma coat absorbed much of the damage.
“You have some sort of way out of here?”
Amber shook her head. “For us, the gunship, but it's getting low on fuel. For everyone else, there's an emergency tram on B12 that leads out of the mountains about a hundred kilometers from here.”
“This place, it's an old fallout shelter for high-level leaders?”
Amber nodded as she loosed another of her grenades. “Yeah. Luna picked it up from the federal government decades ago. We did some expansion and modification and made our home here.”
Explosions ripped across the demonic ranks, but only managing to keep them at bay. We were fighting a losing battle and we all knew it. With so many demons on the tarmac, Amber wouldn't have a chance to harvest any heads if they all rushed her at once. The security force's sustained fire began to become more erratic and I knew they were running low on ammunition.
It wouldn't be long before the demons just absorbed all we could throw at them and moved in for the kill.
“Get the evacuation going,” I snapped, reaching deep inside to draw forth power from the Relic fragment. I traced several runic symbols in silvery-white light and sent forth another storm of magical blades. Demons roared, more in annoyance than true pain, as the energy shards slashed and cut them.
Amber turned around and started yelling into her comm unit. I kept my attention focused on the demons; without her grenades blowing up all over the enemy ranks, they were getting much more bold.
The more I drew from the Relic shard's font of power, the stronger I felt. I was growing more and more accustomed to reaching inside it and drawing upon the font of astral energy, sucking the mana into myself and shaping it into a weapon with which to seriously fuck up my enemies.
It wasn't going to be enough, though.
adumbration
Misaki stood beside me, spell-flame blazing around her hands. I etched runic patterns into the air and struck at the constantly-roaring demons with blades of light, but my attacks were barely doing any damage at all.
The rest of the security force had already gone down into the facility, using the hatch on the roof of the guardhouse to gain access without getting too close to the demons. Meilin went down with them to help direct the evacuation. With her Spell Engine exhausted and no access to fresh quintessence cylinders, she was better utilized helping people escape than taking mostly-useless potshots.
Dimension Fracture Page 19
