Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  They have to start young, in order to be able to develop their bodies to keep pace with their abilities. Which means that Physical magic is hard to learn, dangerous to learn, you have to start early, and in the end, most people who want to get into magic don’t want to bother with magic that focuses inwards. They want to fly or shoot lightning bolts or do something big and splashy like that, not get extra strong and nimble.

  Oh, and exactly how strong is an Adept, you might ask? I saw a Cirque du Soleil performance once featuring a young Adept, a little slip of a twelve year old girl. On top of insane acrobatics that didn’t look humanly possible, at one point that little girl bench pressed over three hundred pounds for reps like it was nothing. Sure, I’ve seen Dread do the same thing, but he’s what? Two hundred sixty pounds ripped? This girl might have weighed eighty.

  Near-superhuman strength, speed, agility, hand-eye coordination… I was basically going to be put in a cell with a silverback gorilla. Neat.

  The warden was definitely enjoying my discomfort. “Her name is Lysette. I’m sure you’ll get along fine.”

  Turns out, he was right. She wasn’t what I expected; kind of tall, lithe… she looked like a ballerina. She was pretty, but she always had this sort of blank expression and way of looking at you as if she were observing an interesting specimen in a lab.

  She looked me up and down when they brought me back from the Hole. “Pretty good side kick.”

  I blinked. I guess that was her way of saying hello. “Uh, thanks.”

  “Your anchor foot was a little off, and you had a few degrees of angular motion to your kick, which robbed it of power.”

  I had to give a little laugh. “I think it worked out okay. She went to the infirmary.”

  “She survived. She would not have if it were me.”

  Part of me wanted to shoot back some sort of witty retort, but the truth was, she was right and we both knew it. So, I just shrugged and said, “Can you show me how to do it better?”

  She raised an eyebrow slightly, which as I came to learn later, was a look of complete shock for her. “Actually, yes.”

  And that’s how it started. They were able to put Lysette in a non-warded cell like me or any other Regular, because she couldn’t project any magic outward, and therefore didn’t need those kinds of restrictions. But the vast majority of the other Regulars were deadbeats and dipshits and general wastes of oxygen, and Lysette would have beaten any of them into a coma rather than suffer their stink of mediocrity.

  Me, on the other hand, she seemed to have a certain respect for. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked out if she hadn’t seen me make hamburger out of Chubbs and company, but whatever the reason, she saw that life in a cell with someone else would at least be tolerable if that someone were me and not some loser who was locked up in here for smuggling drugs up her ass or some dumb shit like that.

  It worked the other way around, too. Like I said, I’m not exactly an expert at suffering fools, and Lysette was on another level when it came to focus. Her whole existence seemed to be centered around getting herself as close to perfect as possible… whatever “perfect” meant, for her.

  What it meant to me, was, she really did have a lot of insights on how I could better move and fight and use my body in general. Her knowledge of kinesiology and functional anatomy was extraordinary; she didn’t just practice Physical Magic on an intuitive level, she studied it like a professor.

  We became training partners, and pretty quickly, we became friends. You can’t spend 24/7 living on top of someone else for months and not form some sort of bond. That’s 112 hours of awake time per week with that person, with nothing to do but talk or train.

  She wanted to hear about my years with SWAT and the Wreck Squads, and I was eager to hear anything she was willing to share about Physical Magic or her experiences in the military with SOCOM.

  The point is, by the time the riot came down and everything went crazy, we weren’t two strangers at cross purposes. We had some of that unit integrity that I constantly strove to create and improve in my Wreck Squads, the kind that creates killer teamwork.

  So when those bastards came for us… like I said, they had no idea who they were fucking with.

  ***

  Cass stood up on her tip toes, angling around as she peered through the small window on the solid steel door to her cell, trying to get a better look at where all of the commotion was coming from.

  “They’re going cell to cell,” she said. “They’re letting some people out.”

  “And the ones they’re not letting out?” Lysette asked.

  “I think they might be killing them… oh, shit.”

  “What?”

  “Coming this way. Chubbs and a couple of her friends.”

  “Chubbs?”

  “The one I kicked in the liver. Coming this way with two friends.”

  Lysette shrugged. “Three? Not a problem.”

  “Yeah, but one of them’s a User and Chubbs has got a gun.”

  Cass had no idea where Chubbs could’ve picked up a pistol, but she figured it must’ve been from a dead guard, because Chubbs was also wearing a gun belt with a holster strapped around her wide belly. With her were one other female inmate in the blue uniform of a User, and the inmate that Cass had removed a few teeth from in the dining hall fight a few months ago.

  “How do you want to play this?” Lysette asked.

  Cass took a moment to think before answering. “We can’t stay in here, obviously; they’ll either shoot us or fry us if that User’s a Striker mage.”

  “So we attack.”

  “As soon as they open the door,” Cass said. “The instant it opens, we have to be on them.”

  She looked over at Lysette. They had been training together constantly for the last several months, to keep away the boredom as much as anything else, and Cass had seen Lysette perform some pretty impressive acrobatics, but still, she didn’t know exactly how far the Adept’s capabilities extended.

  “Just how fast can you move?”

  A hint of a smile tugged at the corner of Lysette’s mouth. “They’re about to find out.”

  “Hey, bitch!” Chubbs shouted from out in the hallway. “Yeah, bitch, that’s right, I’m coming for you! It’s payback time, now!”

  “Which way does the door swing?” Lysette asked.

  “Outwards. Towards them.”

  “Perfect. Stay back and be ready to follow up behind me quick. I’m going for the User first.”

  I guess Chubbs is all mine, then, Cass thought. She wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea of taking on someone with a handgun while she was empty-handed, but Lysette was right in guessing that the User was most likely an even greater threat.

  “You can’t hide in there!” Chubbs shouted again, now in front of the solid steel door to Cass’s cell. “This User we got? She can open up any lock no problem! Get ready for some pain!”

  Cass stood off to the side of the door as far as the narrow cell would allow. Lysette was settled directly in front of it, lowering her body and shoulders like she was a sprinter about to take off on the starting line.

  There was a loud snick as the lock on the door disengaged, and a split second later, Lysette exploded through the doorway like a thunderbolt. Cass barely had time to think damn that was fast before she charged through the door herself, body steeled for a fight, automatically searching her enemy’s hands for the pistol she had to take away from Chubbs before she could fire a shot.

  They’d definitely taken their enemies by surprise. Lysette was in front of the door, grappling with the User, and so Cass grabbed the inmate on the left by the right hand to control her weapon.

  Except it wasn’t Chubbs. The inmate on the left she’d grabbed was the toothless accomplice she’d cracked with an aluminum tray all those months before.

  Cass swore. She was going to get a bullet in her back any second for her mistake. There was only one thing to do, which was to use Toothless as a human shield, and so Cass
grabbed her by both ears and twisted, using them as handles to steer the woman around between herself and the rest of the fight.

  Lysette had the User in a sort of judo grip, and with a spin, she effortlessly tossed her enemy’s body through the air and into Chubbs, who was backing up wide-eyed from the tornado of violence which had suddenly erupted right in front of her. The Adept didn’t give either of her opponents a chance to recover; she was instantly on top of them, side-stepping easily outside of Chubbs’s arm as the inmate took a wild shot at her with the pistol.

  In a single fluid motion, Lysette snatched the gun out of Chubbs’s hand and used it as a hammer to fracture her skull. She slid back a step and turned to face Cass and the third attacker, firing a single shot into the head of the downed User without even looking at the target.

  The third inmate stood staring, blinking blankly, hands held over a spreading red stain in her midsection. Chubbs’s wild shot had missed Lysette and ripped a hole through Toothless’s abdomen. Lysette almost put a shot into her head to make sure, but the wounded inmate fell forward, and Lysette decided she needed to conserve the ammunition.

  “God damn it,” Cass said, clamping a hand to her side and wincing in pain.

  It took Lysette an instant to realize Cass had been hit. She dashed to Cass’s side, looking in alarm at the blood seeping between her fingers.

  “How bad?” she asked.

  “Forget me, cover the hall!” Cass said, leaning up against the wall to steady herself. The same wild shot which had torn into Toothless had come out the other side and punched a hole into Cass’s flank.

  She’d been wounded plenty of times before, enough to know that this hit wasn’t going to kill her; at least, not right away. It was below her ribcage and out to the side of her torso, numb around the edges but painful as she moved, bleeding steadily but slowly enough that she knew no large arteries had been severed. Still, she felt the familiar wash of shock splash over her, and she had to take a few seconds to center herself.

  Come on, Cass, keep it together, she thought. You’ve had worse than this. Hurts to move, but you’re still functional. Bleeding, but not bleeding out. Pull it together. You’re still on the clock.

  When she came back to herself, she shot a look to her left, down the cell block, and saw a crowd of inmates milling around, watching her and Lysette intently, their attention drawn by the sounds of the fight. Slowly, a few of inmates started to edge towards them.

  “Give me the gun,” Cass said. She couldn’t fight too well with a hole in her side, but she was still a crack shot.

  “We have to move,” Lysette said, handing over the pistol.

  Cass nodded. “Get Chubbs’s gun belt. There may be keys or something on it.”

  They backed away from the mob of inmates. Behind them, in the opposite direction from the mob, the hallway was clear all the way to a stone wall which had a door of steel bars set into the middle. Past that door was the showers for the women’s cell block, along with a few other administration rooms.

  The crowd of prisoners edging towards them started moving forward with increasing determination. Cass brought the mob to a stop with a pistol shot into the ceiling.

  “Stay back!” she shouted over the ringing in her ears from the close gunfire. “The next bitch stupid enough to take a step, gets her head blown off!”

  Lysette put an arm around Cass to help guide her as they walked backwards away from the crowd, Cass trailing intermittent drops of blood on the floor as they went. The mob of inmates reluctantly stayed where they were, staring them down, muttering amongst themselves. Cass could see Users sprinkled in with the Regulars, but nobody seemed to want to take their chances on a fight just yet.

  They bumped up against the stone wall with the locked door leading to the showers. Cass noticed some movement amongst the mob of prisoners, a shuffling around toward the far end of their ranks that quickly rippled through the entire mass.

  “Get that door open fast,” she said. “Something’s happening and it’s not good.”

  Lysette searched through the pouches on the gun belt she’d taken from Chubbs. “There’s… there’s no keys.”

  Cass gritted her teeth. Of course not. Chubbs and company had needed a User to unlock their cell door. If they’d had keys, they wouldn’t have bothered using magic.

  More movement amongst the crowd of inmates facing them from the far end of the hallway, and Cass could now tell that they were separating onto either side of the cell block, making room for someone or something coming up through the middle of them. From the expressions on the faces of the inmates making way, Cass could tell that they were terrified of whatever it was that was approaching.

  Lysette jerked at the steel bars of the door experimentally. She braced a foot against the stone wall and leaned back, pulling on the bars, straining until veins began to stand out on her forehead. The steel door creaked and groaned against its mooring in the stone, but still held.

  The Adept stopped, breathing heavily. “No good. I don’t know, maybe I could bend the bars a little, but they’d still be too close together to get through.”

  Cass fought down a surge of panic, feeling like a cornered animal. She flirted briefly with the idea of shooting the locking mechanism on the door, but dismissed it immediately. She’d breached enough doors in her day to know that she’d need a lot more than a pistol to get through that door.

  “Lys,” she said, keeping her eyes on the crowd of inmates. “Heads up.”

  The mob had finally separated completely onto either side of the hall, leaving a wide gap. A lone woman walked through their ranks, coming to a halt once she cleared the group of inmates and the bodies that Cass and Lysette had left lying on the floor.

  She was tall, lean, with an exotic look that seemed to defy any specific ethnicity. Everything about her was dark; her hair, her clothes, even her eyes were so dark that they seemed to be jet black. Cass didn’t know why she wasn’t wearing a prison uniform or how she got here… she didn’t recognize the woman from the inmates she’d seen over the last few months… but she knew by instinct that she was looking at a User, and a serious one at that.

  A moment later, she spotted a subtle shimmer of energy around the dark woman, almost like heat waves rising off a sun-baked pavement… the tell-tale sign of a force field. Cass’s pistol would be useless against it.

  The dark woman looked them over for a moment, then turned her attention to Cass. “You’re the police officer. The one who hunts us. The one who killed Polonius.”

  There was something about the dark woman that stabbed a spike of fear into the center of Cass’s soul. Lysette had a way of looking at people blankly, but that was a sort of detached indifference. The dark woman stared into Cass with a kind of malevolence that she’d never experienced before in all her years fighting the supernatural with the Wreck Squads.

  This wasn’t the fractured insanity of a Vive Job, or the desperate rage of a rogue User on the run. This was a kind of distilled evil, the sort reserved for calculating serial killers who tortured their victims methodically and thought of their screams as artistic melodies.

  Cass’s nightmares then came to life, as the dark woman casually raised a hand with the palm up, as if to show Cass that there was nothing in it. As the hand came up, the bodies of the three women they had just killed began to jerk and twitch, blue swirls of light moving underneath their skin. All three rose up as a unit, not as a human being would stand, but like marionettes jerked up on a puppeteer’s strings.

  Other bodies joined those three, emerging from the nearby cells or from behind the crowd of inmates. Some had been guards, some had been inmates, but it was obvious to Cass from their wounds and the stuttering way they moved that all of them had been dead. Even this far away, she could see that they had heavy black talons in place of where their fingernails had been.

  “What the fuck is that?” Lysette whispered. It was the only time Cass had ever heard fear strain her voice. “What is that?”


  “Ghouls,” Cass said grimly. “Death magic.”

  Lysette glanced toward her. “Death magic? I’ve… I’ve never had to fight anything like that before.”

  “Me either, not really,” Cass said. “Inhuman, yes. Vive Jobs, yes. But ghouls…”

  “What do we do?”

  Not a whole hell of a lot against a dozen of them, Cass thought, struggling to keep her voice even.

  “From what I can remember from my briefings, you’ll have to destroy the brain… brain or spine. They won’t feel pain but a blow to the head might stun them for a second. And they’re strong, stronger than they were when they were alive.”

  Cass fought down the fear that kept wanting to take over. She couldn’t afford to be scared now; she forced the fear down, she squeezed her grip hard on her pistol as if she could squeeze out any wisp of weakness within her. Her back was against the wall, yes, and this was starting to look more and more like she might have to die bloody, but she would be goddamned if she died screaming.

  Fuck it, she thought, straightening herself up as far as her wound would allow. I’m on borrowed time anyway. I’m a Vive Job and the clock is ticking on my sanity. Might as well go out taking some of these bastards with me.

  “So who are you supposed to be?” Cass shouted toward the dark woman. “The honcho of this little dust-up?”

  “I am your master,” the death mage said. “I will see you bow to me.”

  Cass couldn’t help a little laugh. “Yeah, good luck with that. Can’t see myself bowing to an overgrown Goth who hides behind a force field.”

  The dark woman stared at her a moment longer, then turned away. “Pests. A distraction I cannot afford. Kill them both.”

  The death mage turned her back to them and walked back into the crowd of inmates. As a single unit, all the ghouls showed their fangs and charged, loping forward with clawed hands swinging low.

  Cass raised her pistol. “I guess you think I should’ve played nice.”