“Could you make a small one and curve it? Like a dome?”
Shifty smiled. “Or a shaped charge.”
“Exactly,” Cass said. “Peter puts an explosive rune on the bar, just powerful enough to cut through it. You put a little domed shield over top of it to contain the blast and direct it downward.”
“That’ll also amplify the effect of the rune, directing it like that,” Peter said. “Shaped charges are more efficient. So I can dial down the blast that much more.”
“Mike first,” Dread said. “I can hold this position.”
“No, Dread,” Cass said. “You’re first. We need to see if this works, and if it does, one blast and you’re free. Stephen can heal you, and then we’ve got six shooters instead of five to repel anything that comes out of this mist at us. Then we get Mike.”
“She’s right, Dread,” Stephen said. “We can get you back in action way faster than Mike.”
“All right,” Cass said. “Make it happen and make it quick. Stephen was right; this position is a death trap. We need to be ready to fight. Something’s coming.”
Dread
Sometimes, you have to embrace the suck.
Sometimes, there’s no good options. Only lousy ones. And there’s nothing to do, but lean in, take the pain, and push through with everything you’ve got in the hopes that the sun will rise tomorrow on a better day.
Cass had once again thought around corners and come up with a unique solution to get us through an impossible crisis, but even with that, it wasn’t going to be easy. Polonius had set a trap to hold us in place and hopefully split us up to pick us off piecemeal. Well, he failed on that, and now we had a way out, but we still had to hold a position that was impossible to hold, in the middle of a four-way intersection.
All-around defense is a losing game. You’re spread too thin. The enemy can mass their assets and attack from any approach they like, while you have to use up most or all of your assets just keeping eyes pointed in every direction.
But that was the hand we’d been dealt. Sometimes, you have to embrace the suck.
We threw flares in every direction to try to improve our visibility. It was pitch black in that intersection, and our flashlight beams got swallowed up quickly by the weird mist that filled this floor.
The flares didn’t help much. All they did was light up that mist in an eerie, hellish red glow that surrounded us on all sides.
I was sweating like crazy from the thick humidity that filled the air and stuffed our lungs, and it started to drip down my thigh and into the wound where the rod had impaled me. Didn’t exactly tickle, but like Stephen said, if I didn’t move too much, it kept the pain manageable.
Mike was behind me, so I couldn’t see him, what with me being pinned in place and all that, but I could hear him wheezing slightly. God help him. I couldn’t even imagine what was going through his head.
Sometimes it’s easier to get through something awful if there’s someone else right next to you going through something worse. At least I’m not dealing with that, you think, and even though you feel a little guilty for thinking it, it does make getting through your own personal Hell a little easier.
The first of the enemy came at us right after Peter and Shifty did their thing on the steel rod that was making my life complicated. Peter drew the rune as close as he dared to get to my leg… we were going to have to pull it out of my thigh once the rod was cut, and as a general rule, the less material you have to painfully drag through your body, the better.
After that, Shifty held his hands in a cupped shape over the rod, and planted a bowl-shaped shield over top of the rune. I couldn’t really see it too well, given how dark it was and that it was all being done in a spot that was hard for me to see.
“Relax, Dread,” Shifty said. “It’s there. I got you.”
“Relax,” I said. “You two knuckleheads have attached an explosive to a steel rod that’s shoved all the way through my leg. Relax, ain’t happening.”
“You maxed out?” Peter said to Shifty.
“Yep. Ready, Big Dog?”
I took a second to set my jaw and nodded. Maybe this plan would work just fine, and the shaped charge made of magic would cut right through the rod, leaving me untouched, and I’d barely feel it.
Or maybe, they’d blow my fucking leg off.
Peter counted down from three. I kind of wish he hadn’t. All that did was drag it out, keep me stuck in the anticipation of the blast, when he could’ve simply done it like ripping off a band-aid.
When it happened, the explosion was surprisingly muted. It sounded a little like an M-80 firecracker going off under a pile of books; loud, yes, but not deafening. The concussion shook through my steel rod like somebody hitting a tuning fork, and I let out an involuntary scream of pain.
Still, even as I recovered from the sudden jolt of pain, I felt my leg move and come free of the trap. I almost fell over from the sudden shift in balance, but Shifty grabbed on to me and propped me up.
That’s when I saw it.
“Contact!” I shouted, shoving Shifty away from me so that I could bring my weapon to bear on the dark shape moving towards us through the red mist.
I couldn’t identify it. It was still far enough away in the hazy red mist that it was only a dark blob that was vaguely man-sized or a little larger. Little arcs of electricity lit the mist slightly around the bottom of it, looking like lightning arcing between storm clouds in the distance.
Whatever it was, I was going to shoot the ever-living shit out of it, but Peter beat me to it. Because he’d been working on getting me free, his weapon was hanging in front of him on its sling, but Striker mages don’t need weapons. They still use them, so that they don’t exhaust their reserves of magical energies unnecessarily, but Peter had all kinds of firepower available to him even without his guns.
He raised a hand into the air and cocked it back, as if he were about to throw a football. A shining three-foot lance of energy appeared in his fist, and he hurled it like a javelin down the hallway at the dark shape moving towards us.
Striker Mages have two basic energy blasts. Magedarts are small; they look like foot-long darts of energy and hit with a similar effect to gunfire. They’re popular because they’re relatively easy to use and control, and a good Striker mage can let out a flurry of them like machine-gun fire.
The magespear is more like a rocket launcher. Bigger, takes more energy to create, has to be thrown so it’s less accurate, but damn if it won’t knock the piss out of a full-sized grizzly bear.
Peter wasn’t playing. Taken by surprise with no idea what he was up against, he went straight to the big guns. That magespear flew down the hallway, lighting up the mist as it went, and smashed with an explosive blast straight into whatever nightmare Polonius had conjured up to send after us.
Whatever that thing was, it dropped to the floor about ten meters away from us. It wasn’t too surprising that it went down; after what had just hit it, there was probably nothing left but scraps. I never got a good look at it; all I saw was a vague, top-heavy dark mass that seemed almost like it had no legs underneath it.
It didn’t matter. I still had a steel bar stuck through my leg to deal with before I could get fully back into the fight.
Stephen came to my side, and right then, Shifty decided it would be a great idea to try to pull the steel bar out of my leg. A red-hot lance of pain took my breath away and I thought I might pass out… and still, the bar hadn’t budged.
“Fuck, Shifty!” I shouted at him, shoving him away from me. “Get off me with those skinny ass arms of yours!”
“Sorry, dude, sorry!” he said. “I thought I could get it out.”
“Just watch your sector,” I said, breathing heavily, trying to pull myself together. “And when this is over, get your bony ass to the gym.”
I was going to have to do it myself. That much was clear. The steel rod was rough and knurled, much like actual rebar, and sometimes when a wound sucks in ar
ound an impaling object, it creates a sort of vacuum holding it in place. I was going to have to grab on to that damn thing and yank like I was trying to pull-start a stubborn lawn mower.
It was time to embrace the suck.
Stephen saw what I was doing and grabbed on to my belt with both hands to keep me from falling over in case I passed out. “You sure you don’t want me to dial down your pain receptors?”
“Not sure at all,” I said with a bitter laugh. “But here we go.”
A few bursts of weapons fire came from where Mike was impaled, and I paused to look. “Cass?”
“We’re good,” she said from her position next to him. “They’re just probing us. For now. But hurry.”
“Hurry, she says,” I said to Stephen with a little grin. “Because this is so easy.”
He clapped me across the back and gave me a nod. “I got you, Dread. Whenever you’re ready.”
I pulled my weapon’s sling away from my shoulder a bit, doubling it over and putting it in my mouth so I’d have something to bite down on, and then gripped hard on the steel bar with both hands. Even that slight movement jarred the damn thing around in my leg and shot fresh jolts of pain through me.
It was going to have to be as explosive of a movement as I could make. When you lift something heavy, you can try to grunt it out slow and steady, or blast through it like you’re jumping as high as you can. I needed this to be the latter.
I took two breaths, mentally rehearsing the movement while biting down hard on my sling. Nothing to do about it but do it.
Then I pulled with everything I had.
Never in my life have I experienced pain like that. I’ve been shot. I’ve been stabbed. Cut. Burned. Kicked, punched… if there’s an injury out there, I’ve experienced it.
This was some next level shit. The rough knurling of the rebar rasped along the inside of the wound… it was like rubbing a severe sunburn with sandpaper. Add to that the alien sensation of a foreign object sliding through your body… I simultaneously saw stars, tried to suck in a breath that wouldn’t come, and nearly puked all over my boots.
But it worked. The bar was out of my leg, and Stephen caught on to me to keep me from falling. By the time the world came swirling back into focus, he’d healed the wound to the point where I could bear weight on it, and a few seconds later, the wound was completely gone.
His skills really had jumped up a notch.
I stood there for a moment or two in the strange red glow from our flares, breathing that humid air in and out. When you get hurt that bad, and then Healed, it does take a little time to realize that you’re okay. It’s as much mental as physical; and if the wounds you suffered were as terrifying as they were dangerous, it takes a little longer to shake off that sense of almost getting killed.
It’s kind of like if you’re driving along on a highway, and some lunatic in an eighteen wheeler who isn’t paying attention as you pass them pulls into your lane and almost crushes you. You get out of it just fine, but your brain keeps replaying what might have been. It takes a while to shake that feeling off.
It was the gunfire that pulled me out of it.
Cass and Tara were firing their weapons from where Mike was trapped, and Shifty and Peter moved to join in. It looked like there wouldn’t be any rest for the weary.
The hell with it. Nothing will distract you from fatigue and the memory of recent pain like a good fight.
***
“Dread?” Cass called out, keeping her eyes down the hallway toward the enemy. “Are you with us?”
“Here!” the big man called out. He had a slight limp to his walk, but it was dissipating even as he moved up next to her.
“Suppressing fire!” she called out.
No sooner were the words out of her mouth, than the heavy F-Shok autoshotgun began to rattle in Dread’s fists, sending a long burst of buckshot shells into the red mist behind Mike’s back. Dark, indistinct forms hovering in the mist darted in and out of sight, and then withdrew, driven away by the hail of heavy gunfire.
Cass glanced around her to take stock. Mike was still trapped, impaled by the pair of steel rods through his torso, and his face twisted in a sudden burst of pain as he tried to turn around to see what was happening behind him.
“Don’t move!” Cass said to him, once Dread paused to reload. “We’ve got this, Mike, stay still! Dread?”
“Yeah?”
“You hold this sector. They’re starting to move on us in force. Hold them back until we can get Mike free.”
“Roger that. What are they?”
“No idea,” Cass said. “Tara and I have been shooting at dark shapes. They haven’t gotten close enough to identity. You good?”
“I’m good,” Dread said, finishing his reload.
Cass turned around so that she was facing opposite Dread. The trap that held Mike had impaled him just shy of the four way intersection, so now that Dread was free, she could stack her people closer to Mike’s position and make her life a little easier.
“Shifty and Peter, get to work on Mike. Tara, Stephen, on me,” she said, reloading her own weapon as more dark shapes started to maneuver in the red mist in front of her.
“Ready, boss,” Tara said, standing on her left. Stephen moved next to her on the right, armed with Mike’s submachinegun. “Call it out.”
“I’m twelve o’clock,” Cass said. “Dread’s six. Stay back from the mouth of the intersection, that will give us some cover from the three and nine o’clock hallways. Tara, you’re on nine o’clock, Stephen, you’re…”
“Contact!” Stephen called out, firing down the hallway on the right as quickly as he said it.
Cass kept herself from pivoting to her right to see what Stephen was shooting at. Instead, she kept her eyes on her own sector, and saw more of the dark shapes coming toward her. Dread’s weapon started to rain thunder behind her, and as Tara moved to shoulder her weapon, Cass knew they were being attacked from all angles at once.
“Tara! Grenade left!” she called out, handing Stephen a grenade from her vest before firing a series of bursts down the hallway in front of her. “Stephen, grenade right!”
Stephen pulled the pin on the grenade with practiced hands, rolling it down the hallway. “Frag out!”
“Frag out!” Tara said, tossing a grenade of her own down her hallway.
Cass tore off another series of bursts down the hallway on the twelve o’clock position to hold back the floating dark shapes, counting in her head the entire time. Once she hit “three”, she stepped back out of the intersection and behind cover, pulling Stephen with her.
A second later, the grenades exploded, about thirty feet from the intersection down both the left and right hallways. Sharp metal fragments flew past her, fast as death, and there were piercing shrieks of pain from the hallways where the grenades went off.
Cass could feel Tara’s hand on her shoulder, there to let her know where Tara was even though she was behind her. Good, she thought. Whatever these floating things are, they clearly don’t like getting a grenade rolled right underneath their asses.
The grenade fragments had momentarily cleared a safe zone on the left and right hallways, and Dread was holding down the six o’clock sector with controlled bursts from his weapon, but that still left one threat. Straight ahead of her.
“On twelve!” she shouted, and as one, she, Tara, and Stephen turned on their heels and dumped automatic fire down the twelve o’clock hallway.
The hovering dark shapes shifted this way and that, trying to present a difficult target. Cass sprayed from left to right over one of those shapes, drawing some inhuman shrieks of pain before the shapes withdrew into the red mist and out of sight.
“Re-take the intersection!” Cass said, reloading her weapon as she moved.
The three of them stepped forward into the intersection, covering all angles. Cass blew out a slow breath to keep her adrenaline at a manageable level. She still had no idea what she was up against, but at lea
st now she knew that the enemy was vulnerable to both gunfire and grenade fragments, and that they preferred hit and fade attacks.
“Fire in the hole!” Peter called out behind her, and a muted explosion from one of his shaped charge runes followed.
That’s one, Cass thought. Hurry up, you guys. Get Mike free so we can get the hell out of this intersection.
Her eyes scanned the red mist for any signs of movement. The beam from the flashlight attached to her weapon swung back and forth, nearly useless in this mist, and several times, Cass was sure that she saw something moving in the indistinct, hazy redness, but it was only her eyes playing tricks on her.
“Stephen? Anything?” she said.
“I’m clear,” he said. “I think…”
“Close!” Tara screamed.
Cass pivoted to her left in time to see two of the creatures coming in fast out of the red mist. No dancing around in and out of sight for these two; they flew in straight and fast directly at them.
As they got closer, Cass was finally able to see what it was that she was fighting. They were a little larger than man-sized, top-heavy with fleshy thick bodies and a series of tentacles hanging below them that made her think of an octopus or large squid.
The top of the creatures’ heads stood a little higher than a tall man, and the tentacles that hung below the creatures did not touch the ground. They seemed to hover in the air; how, Cass couldn’t tell, but such concerns were a million miles away as the two floating creatures flew out of the mist at her and Tara like a hurricane wind.
Tara dumped a long burst into the one on the right, dropping it, but before she could shoot the second, there was a sudden bright light, and a spiderweb-like pattern of electrical arcs erupted out of the second creature’s tentacles that arced the short distance between it and Tara. Tara screamed again, in pain this time, her weapon dropping from nerveless fingers as she doubled over in pain.
The creature closed the distance in a heartbeat, reaching out with its tentacles and wrapping Tara up as she tried to draw back away from it. Its bulbous head tiled back to reveal a heavy, sharp beaked mouth the size of a crocodile’s jaws, opening wide as it darted toward her throat.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 11
