Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  “Lysette!” Ryan said, tossing his sidearm to her.

  She caught it out of the air and fired it all in the same motion, dropping the first ghoul to make it through the crushed door. It fell, but then others followed, pushing their way past the twisted steel door only to fall under careful, controlled shots from Cass and Dread and the others.

  They took turns firing, each giving the others a chance to line up their next shot or reload if they needed to. Unlike the uncontrolled chaos at the guard’s door, their fire discipline allowed for a constant stream of gunfire to keep any of the ghouls from making it past the doorway.

  The assault ended almost as quickly as it began. No more ghouls tried to push their way through the shattered door, and a glance behind her told Cass that the attack had ended at the other two entrances, as well.

  Her ears were still ringing from all of the gunfire, and the smell of cordite was practically choking her, but Cass knew it was over. She gave herself a moment to look around the room to take stock. Shifty and his Wreck Squad were intact. Jolly was patching together every prison guard he could, but there were some who looked to be beyond saving.

  “Where’s Peck?” she asked.

  “Over there,” Jolly said, gesturing toward a tangled mess of red and white. “Well, I mean, the biggest pieces of him are, at least.”

  Cass traded a look with Dread and shrugged. “Can’t say I’m going to miss him.”

  Mickey crawled out from underneath her desk, her hands still clamped over her ears. “Is that it? Is that it?”

  “Hardly,” Cass said. “That was a probe.”

  “That was a probe?” Ryan said, breathing heavily with his hands on his knees. “What the hell is the actual attack going to look like?”

  “Cass, what do you think smashed through the doors? Not ghouls,” Dread said. “They’re not that strong.”

  “Something Kel didn’t want to give up,” Cass said. “Golems, probably. She had them smash in the doors and then back off so that the ghouls could take all the bullets.”

  Mickey suddenly let out a shriek, making them all jump a little, and then she waved them off. “Sorry. Sorry. Rat. It’s just a rat. A rat got in over here. Sorry.”

  Cass was about to roll her eyes at her, but her old instincts kicked in. Something wasn’t right. Rats didn’t just wander into firefights, and Cass didn’t believe in coincidence.

  “Dread,” she said, pointing to the rat scurrying across the room. “Kill it. Quick!”

  Dread didn’t hesitate. If he’d learned one thing working with Wreck Squads all these years, it was that things were rarely what they seemed to be, so he lined up his sights and blew the rat in half with the last bullet in his rifle.

  Cass bent down to examine the carcass. The top half of the rat still dragged itself along, pulling itself across the concrete with talons too long and too black to be natural.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said, stomping down on the rest of the rat to crush it.

  “What? What was it?” Mickey asked.

  “Kel can see through the eyes of the things she brings back, remember?” Cass said. “While the fight was going on, she sent in a dead rat that she brought back so that she could scout everything out. We were too busy with the ghouls to pay any attention to it. She could watch the fight, count our numbers, see how we reacted, get a better look at the layout of the hub… everything.”

  “Rat ghoul?” Mickey said. “Gross.”

  “More like a necromancer’s surveillance drone,” Dread said. “Now she knows everything she needs to know in order to plan her final attack. And those doors that were knocked loose… they’re not exactly going to fix themselves. We’re wide open, Cass.”

  He stopped a nearby prison guard and handed him his empty rifle. The guard shook his head, waving Dread off.

  “You pulled a ghoul off of me with your bare hands,” the guard said. “Keep it.”

  “Whoa,” another nearby guard said. “Are you serious?”

  “Are you?” the first guard said. “We just got our asses kicked, man.”

  “And you’re going to make it better by arming inmates? Vive Job inmates?”

  More of the prison guards began to join in, some arguing in favor of arming the prisoners, others insisting that was out of the question. The exchange started to get louder and more and more heated, until finally, Shifty brought it all to a halt with a loud whistle.

  “All right! Listen up!” he said loudly. “Some of you are probably wondering what we’re thinking, giving guns to Vive Jobs. They may be inmates, that’s true. But, as we’ve recently come to find out, Cass and Dread here aren’t Vive… aren’t Revived Individuals… after all.”

  The prison guards began to look at each other, then at Cass and Dread. Shifty gave the news a moment to sink in before continuing.

  “Peck’s gone. By now, you know what’s out there. You know what’s coming for us. We’re massively outnumbered. You prison guards are looking at us on the Wreck Squad like we’ve got all the answers. Well, I’m here to tell you, Cass and Dread are the ones with the answers. They’re the ones who took down Maestro Polonius, and that was after he’d wiped out two whole Wreck Squads like it was nothing. I know. I was there.

  “So, I’m cutting them loose. Them, and the other inmates with them. I’m cutting them loose, and gearing them up, and we’re all going to fight together to stop this Kel bitch from getting in here and killing us all. Any objections?”

  There were a few moments of silence that filled the hub. A few of the guards stared sullenly down at the ground, looking as if they’d tasted something sour, but none of them spoke up.

  “All right, then,” Shifty said.

  Cass waited until Shifty came a little closer so she could whisper, “Lovely speech.”

  “I’m practically aroused,” Dread added.

  “Both of you, shut it,” Shifty said. “I could put the cuffs back on you.”

  “You could try,” Lysette said.

  “You…” Shifty said, pointing at Lysette. “…are really kind of intimidating. But I think you’re going to grow on me.”

  “Keep Kel’s death magic off me long enough for me to snap her neck,” Lysette said, “and you’ll grow on me too.”

  “Deal,” Shifty said. “All right, Cass. What’s the play?”

  Dread

  Keeping your mind fully occupied on a task has a certain medicinal quality to it. I’ve mentioned before how being cooped up alone in a cell allows the mind to twist inwards on itself, tying up thoughts on top of thoughts until you’re left with a mental Gordian knot of near-insanity. Being able to focus on a single task cuts through those twisted thoughts and allows the mind to free itself from its own baggage.

  We’d had a lot of bombs dropped on us, Cass and I. For the last four months, we’d been tied up with the certain knowledge that we weren’t really alive, but Revived meat puppets that had the clock ticking on their sanity. Vive Jobs… or Revived Individuals, as Mickey would call them… always go insane. Always. And so we were doomed to eventually fall into the depths of irrevocable madness.

  Except now, none of that was true. We’d been granted a reprieve. The call from the governor came in to stay the sentence of execution.

  It was a lot to process, to say the least. On one hand, elation; I wasn’t a dead man walking, after all. But then, there was the fact that Revival Tech had lied to us, deceived us into thinking that we were dead and brought back, all simply to see how we’d react.

  Worst of all, knowing that how we’d reacted… with a suicide pact to destroy Revival Tech’s headquarters in retaliation for supposedly dooming us to a fate worse than death… had landed us in this prison and made our reprieve practically a moot point. Cass was right; we never would’ve done any of that, except for the lies we’d been told.

  So maybe it’s not such a shock that I was glad to be able to shove all that to the back of my mind and focus on what seemed like an impossible task: defending the hub from Ke
l’s imminent attack. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like our chances; Cass was frowning and shaking her head the entire time she worked through the plan of defense out loud.

  “I told Peck before,” she said. “The hub is a nightmare to defend.”

  “We could go on the attack,” Lysette said.

  “What?” Jolly said, his voice cracking a little, then he cleared his throat and added more lowly, “Um, what? Attack?”

  “I don’t like playing defense,” Lysette said. “Use the cameras to spot Kel’s location. Teleport in and kill her. Cut off the head of the snake.”

  Cass considered it for second and shook her head. “No, it won’t work. Her shield will keep us off her and her ghouls will keep us busy while she teleports someplace else. And if we keep chasing her, she’ll just keep retreating, inflicting casualties with every engagement. She can replace her losses. We can’t.”

  “Not to mention she could attack the hub while we’re out there,” I said. “With our defenses spread thin like that, she could take the hub and the sphere no problem.”

  Cass gave me that little sly look she gives me when I do something that impresses her. Normally, she’s the one thinking around corners and figuring out all the angles. Every now and again, though, even a pack horse like me comes up with a good idea.

  “Good point, Dread,” she said, then returned to frowning and looking around the hub as she tried to sort out the best move. “Shifty, you said before that you managed to haul your equipment in here before the shield got out of control?”

  Shifty nodded. “Yeah. Like you always had us do. Haul in a ton of extra stuff just in case we got cut off without resupply. It’s all piled up over there in the corner next to the guard tower stairs.”

  “Well, that’s at least some good news. Weapons, ammo, equipment?”

  “All the above. We carried our rifles in here, but there’s some P90s in there as backups.”

  “Tell me you’ve got an F-shok in one of those bags,” I said. The F-shok was an experimental weapon that had been designed in direct response to the threat of Vive Jobs and rogue mages; a belt-fed automatic shotgun that was a meat grinder in close quarters. It was perfect for the situation.

  “No dice, Dread, sorry,” Shifty said. “Nobody big enough on my squad to carry a heavy bastard of a gun like that. But I do have something for you in there… paratrooper SAW.”

  That would have to do. The M249 “SAW” is a light belt-fed machine-gun that fires the same cartridge as the rifles carried by the Wreck Squad and the prison guards. If you’re unfamiliar with weapons, think of the gun carried around by Rambo, with the big belt of bullets coming out of the side. The SAW is like a smaller, cut-down version of that.

  “Good,” Cass said, gesturing toward Mickey and Jolly. “P90s are simple enough for them to use.”

  “You’re going to give her a gun?” Lysette said, raising an eyebrow towards Mickey.

  “Lys…” Cass said.

  “No, no, she’s right,” Mickey said. “She’s definitely right. I shouldn’t do any of this. I have no idea how to shoot a gun.”

  “Dread,” Cass said. “Show her how to shoot a gun.”

  Mickey blinked a couple of times and shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I meant, at all!”

  “I know what you meant,” Cass said. “We need everybody.”

  “But…” Mickey began to protest.

  “There’s no safe place, Mickey!” Cass snapped. “You can’t hide under a goddamn desk every time…”

  She cut herself off, clenching her fists and swearing under her breath. Cass was an exceptional team leader, but she had a real problem with losing her patience from time to time, especially if she thought someone was incompetent or sand-bagging it. The way she snapped at Mickey, I could tell her nerves must’ve been all the way on edge.

  “Look, I’m scared, okay?” Mickey said, her voice trembling and her eyes full of water. “I’m not… you’re some sort of Wild West gunfighter, and Dread’s an oak tree, and Lysette’s some sort of super ninja, but I’m none of those things! I’ve never been in a fight in my life and this whole thing scares the actual pee out of my body.”

  She was right, of course. For people like Cass and I, who had been around so much violence throughout our lives that we’d become accustomed to it, it was easy to forget that most people never deal with anything remotely close to this. Most people avoid violence like the plague, which they should; but that does have the unfortunate side effect that when they do encounter violence, they tend to panic like a deer in headlights.

  It wasn’t her fault. She was being asked to do something she’d never done before, something completely foreign and alien to her. And normally, Cass would’ve seen that too, and walked Mickey through it, but with all of the pressure piling up on her to sort out how to defend against Kel, on top of the bombshell news that had just been dropped on us about Revival Tech and their experimenting on us… well, Cass always did have a problem with her temper.

  So I stepped in, like I always do when Cass has reached her limits. “Mickey. What happened to those two guys in the cell block? Back when we first left the meeting room and had to get out of that hole in the wall?”

  “I told you about that,” Mickey said. “I made myself invisible.”

  “And the Striker mage with the lightning bolts in the yard?”

  “I… made him think we were on his side.”

  Cass saw where I was going with this, and now that she’d had a second to regain her cool, she picked it up from there. “What about the guy with the scalpel to your neck in the infirmary?”

  “I made his reflexes slow down… I explained all of this to you already, you guys.”

  “The point is,” Cass said, “you did something. You weren’t helpless. You didn’t just freeze up and die. You took action.”

  “Some of it pretty clever,” I added.

  It was true; Mickey was about as violent as a stuffed animal, but she’d come up with some pretty slick solutions to navigate her way through some very hostile situations. She was turning out to be rather handy to have around.

  Cass nodded. “And if you did it before, you can do it again. You can do this.”

  Mickey wiped at her eyes. “I don’t know…”

  “It gets easier,” Cass said. “It does. The more you do it, the easier it gets. Like anything else.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “We’re right here with you to walk you through it. You’ve got it in you to be a badass, kid. You really do.”

  “Seriously?” she said.

  “Ask him,” Jolly said, pointing at Fly. “He’s terrified of you.”

  “Hey! I ain’t terrified of that little…” Fly began to say, then, after Mickey shot a look at him, he slumped his shoulders and looked down at the ground, muttering, “Not terrified of her.”

  Mickey glared at him for another second and then nodded. “Okay. Okay.”

  “Walk them through it, Dread,” Cass said. “You and Lys get geared up. I’m going to look things over with Shifty.”

  I collected a few sidearms from dead prison guards and led Mickey and Jolly over to the big duffle bags that Shifty and his Wreck Squad had dropped in a corner of the hub earlier that day. They were piled up in front of the door leading to the rooftop guard tower, but since that tower had been blasted to smithereens earlier in the day by some Striker mage or another, nobody was complaining. Lysette came with us, opening and searching through the bags, picking out various weapons and gear.

  “There should be a spare body armor vest or two somewhere in those bags,” I said.

  “You take it.”

  “You need one too, Lys,” I said.

  “It’ll just slow me down.”

  “Yeah, well, we don’t know what’s coming. Kel could still have some human followers and they might have guns. You can’t dodge bullets,” I said. “Wait… can you dodge bullets?”

  She gave me a little smile and filled her
arms with guns and ammunition… and a tactical vest. “For Cass,” she said, leaving me with Mickey and Jolly.

  “Aw, yeah,” Jolly said with a grin as I helped him put on a holster belt that had a prison guard’s pistol tucked in it. “We’re gonna rock out with our Glocks out, now!”

  “That one’s a Smith and Wesson, but I appreciate the enthusiasm,” I said.

  They were both already wearing tactical vests from earlier, so I helped them with filling their pockets with ammunition for the submachineguns I was about to go over with them. Jolly started to protest when I dumped out the snacks he’d filled his vest with, but I shot him a look and he grudgingly went along with it.

  “All right,” I said, once I had their gear sorted out and I could demonstrate their weapon for them, “This is a P90 submachinegun. It doesn’t pack quite as much punch as the rifles the Wreck Squad is using, but since the only thing that drops a ghoul is a head shot, size doesn’t really matter.”

  “Oh, they’re nice and little,” Mickey said, picking hers up experimentally. “That’s good. They’re my size.”

  “Cass likes these weapons because of how compact they are in tight quarters. A lot of what we do… a lot of what we did… was inside of buildings. P90s might be small, but they’re accurate, the recoil is low, and they hold a lot of ammo; fifty rounds in the magazine versus thirty for the rifles.”

  “They’re very easy to use,” I said, showing them how to load the weapon. “The magazine goes on the top like this, slap it down hard. Then, pull back on this lever on the side and let it fly forward. After that, you’re ready to rock.”

  I showed them how to stand and hold their weapons, how to keep their fingers off the trigger until it was time to shoot, how to aim through the red dot sight mounted on the top of their weapons… all the basics they would need. Jolly seemed really excited to get his hands on some firepower, and practically groaned when I told him they weren’t going to be blazing away on fully automatic fire.

  “Single shot only,” I said. “I need controlled shots. Don’t waste your ammo.”