Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  That was all stuff to concern myself with later. Now, I had to play this situation out with the hand I’d been dealt.

  After my next shot, I ran dry on my magazine and called out to Cass, “Loading!”

  She paused behind some cover, firing slow shots at Oswald to keep him busy long enough for me to reload and get back into action. I gave her another shout to let her know that I was good to go, but we were both driven down to the deck by another long burst from Oswald’s machine pistol.

  “Fucking asshole!” Cass said, taking a second to reload her pistol. “He’s going to hit a civilian!”

  “Or one of us,” Mickey said. “Also bad.”

  “They’re on the move… Cass!” I said. “They went into that department store!”

  That was bad news on several fronts. First off, with all of the gunfire going off, a lot of the civilians had run into the stores to get away from the madness, so there might be a lot of them still hiding in that department store. That ramped up the difficulty level; we would have to take an extra second to verify our targets before firing, but Oswald sure wasn’t going to be bothering with any of that before shooting at us.

  Plus, out in the walkway, we could spot them easily and keep track of their movements. Inside of the department store, it was going to be a nightmare of possibilities.

  Combat is chaos; you’ve got to try to control as many variables as you can in order to give yourself the best chance for survival. A department store is a jungle of display cases and racks of clothes and endless other potential spots for an enemy to hide behind and then use to ambush you. Even with your head on a swivel, the odds of taking a bullet in the back are pretty high.

  Not to mention that they might be able to just plain lose us in there and escape. After all we’d been through, I wasn’t sure which would be worse; getting jumped from behind, or letting these bastards get away.

  There wasn’t anything to be done about it. Like I said, you play the hand you’re dealt. So, Cass and I covered as many angles as we could as we moved into the wide entrance of the department store, Mickey trailing a few steps behind us.

  There was a burst of gunfire from deep within the store; it wasn’t directed at us, though. I could tell because there was none of that signature snapping of the air from bullets passing nearby.

  We moved off in the direction of the gunfire at a run. I practically gave myself vertigo trying to look in every direction at once as we moved through the store. There were too many potential hiding spots for a threat to be waiting for us. This was a mess.

  A few civilians were pressed flat to the deck behind a jewelry case up ahead of us. Their eyes got big when they saw us running up with guns in our hands, but Cass shouted out “FBI!” as we approached.

  “Where did they go? Where did they go?” Cass asked them, once we were down behind the cover of the display case.

  “That way! That way!” a woman with an employee name tag on her shirt said. “There was a big guy with a gun!”

  “Right… wait,” Cass said. “Only the one?”

  “What?”

  “Was it just the one guy who went that way? Just the big guy with the gun?”

  The woman shook her head, clearly confused by the question. Another burst of gunfire came from the general direction she’d pointed, and we all ducked a little further behind the display case.

  “There was another guy, middle-aged, wearing a suit, bleeding from a scalp wound,” Cass said.

  “I don’t… I think, maybe…”

  “I saw that guy!” another civilian said. He was a teenage kid hunkered down behind the desk with us. “I saw the guy you’re talking about! He went that way!”

  Two different directions. They were splitting up; Oswald was using his gunfire to draw us toward him and away from Adjani, who would look exactly like another civilian to everyone but us as he made his escape.

  “You two, get Oswald!” Cass said, immediately running off after Adjani.

  “We need him alive, Cass!” I shouted after her.

  “No promises!” she said over her shoulder, before disappearing into the depths of the department store.

  “Is she going to be okay?” Mickey asked.

  I grunted. “You should be more worried about Adjani. Come on. We’ve got to get Oswald.”

  “Hang on,” she said, wheezing. “I have to catch my breath.”

  She was holding a hand to her side and sucking in air in big, uncontrolled gulps. Side stitches, they’re called. Pain in the muscles between the ribs. When you’re heaving in air because you’re running and out of shape, you have to use those rib muscles to help you breathe. Eventually, they get overloaded and start to hurt.

  In a fight, endurance is critical. I added “cardio” to the list of the many, many things Mickey needed to work on. For now, though, there wasn’t anything to be done about it.

  “We can’t wait, Mickey. He’s getting away. Catch up as fast as you can,” I said, moving out after Oswald.

  At this point, it wasn’t hard to track him. He kept firing bursts of gunfire in my general direction; he was hoping to draw me away from Adjani, keep me pinned down, or both.

  I started getting really pissed. Cass was right; this jerkoff was going to end up wounding or killing any number of innocent bystanders, if he hadn’t already. It was one thing to take a shot at me; I’m in the game, I signed up for this, so I get it. But to carelessly spray gunfire around a crowded mall like it was nothing? I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this guy and teach him a few harsh lessons about fire discipline.

  I moved through the store at a quick pace, keeping crouched low and moving in quick bursts of speed between whatever bits of cover or concealment I could find. The sounds of gunfire got closer, and then finally, I spotted him as he pushed his way out of a pair of glass exit doors about twenty yards up ahead. I could see through the glass that there was a parking garage immediately beyond the exit. He was making his move to escape.

  He wasn’t shooting at me any longer, and I was able to sprint full-out to the exit before coming to a halt to the side of the doors and out of sight of the parking garage. Oswald might’ve been high-tailing out of there, but he also might have stopped and turned on the doors to use them as a kill funnel and ambush me as I came out of them.

  Sure enough, a burst of gunfire punched starry holes through the glass next to my position. I waited until the gunfire stopped before sneaking a quick peek past the doors to try to catch sight of him.

  There he was, waiting another twenty or thirty yards past the doors, hiding partially behind an SUV. He was in the midst of dropping the magazine out of his empty pistol and digging another long one out from under his jacket.

  That was my cue. I slammed through the doors and into the parking garage, firing twice at Oswald to buy myself enough time to get to cover behind the nearest car.

  I crouched low behind it, keeping an eye on Oswald through the windows, not exposing myself by looking around the side of car like Oswald was doing. The part of the car I was hiding behind wouldn’t protect me from bullets… those would punch right through the windows or the doors no problem… but Oswald might not be able to spot me through the glare on the windows.

  Sure enough, when he moved, he didn’t see me. Instead, he came out from behind his SUV and fired a burst at the glass doors I’d just run through a moment ago.

  The guy was definitely an amateur. He kept over-exposing himself, stepping all the way out from cover and looking around like an idiot before firing another burst randomly into a car nowhere near me. Over-confident, under-trained, or both.

  Then, his weapon jammed.

  I could actually see it through the windows of the car I was taking cover behind. Oswald tried to fire, the gun malfunctioned, and he turned it sideways to see what had gone wrong.

  The pistol’s slide was not quite all the way forward, not quite all the way back… it was a stovepipe jam. If you’re not familiar with firearms, a stovepipe is when the slid
e moves back, ejecting the spent cartridge, and then moves forward to pick up the new fresh cartridge off of the magazine, but the spent cartridge gets caught in the slide as it closes. It’s a fairly common malfunction, and if you know how to handle it, it’s not the end of the world.

  Oswald didn’t know how to handle it. I’ve seen it a million times; a bully with more testosterone than training gets himself the biggest gun he can find, and doesn’t bother to train hard with it, thinking the gun is going to do all the work for him.

  Big mistake. Everything works nice and easy on a target range, but out in the world, when people are trying to kill you, your fine motor skills go out the window and you’re lucky if you can remember what day of the week it is, much less fix a complex mechanical object on the fly.

  Which means, you’d better train to handle problems so often that it becomes automatic once your mind is hopped up on adrenaline in the middle of a fight. Otherwise, you get like Oswald and become all thumbs while trying to clear a simple stovepipe jam.

  He didn’t even bother to get fully behind cover while he fumbled with the slide. I reminded him what a bad idea that was by taking a shot at him while I moved up on his position; the distance was still too far and I was moving too fast for me to get a hit, though, and my shot hit the vehicle a few inches from his head. He flinched and ducked back behind the vehicle all of the way, tugging at the slide on his pistol desperately.

  I fired a few more times to keep him behind the car as I moved up fast and hard on him. The last pull of the trigger, I got nothing, and for a second, I thought I might’ve gotten a stovepipe of my own, but a glance at my weapon showed me that it was empty, not jammed. My hand reflexively went to where I used to keep my pistol mag pouches on my belt when I was back on the Squads; of course, now, there was nothing there. I’d already used the spare magazine from Mickey’s purse.

  Great. Completely out of ammo. Well, God hates a quitter.

  Hopefully, he was still all Johnny Fumble-Fingers with his jammed weapon back behind that car, and then I would be able to jump him and pistol-whip his ass into submission. Maybe it wasn’t the best plan, but at least it kind of resembled a plan, so I charged his position top speed, mentally firing myself up for a hand to hand fight.

  He looked surprised as hell to see me as I rounded the corner of his car. His pistol was still held low and out of commission; he must’ve been unable to clear the jam, or maybe he’d even made it worse with a double feed, which can happen if you screw up while clearing a stovepipe. I’d started to swing my empty pistol at him, feeling much better about how things were going at this point, when he ruined my day by raising his left hand palm outwards toward me and hitting me with a pressor wave.

  A pressor wave is a Defense mage Trick that’s pretty much what it sounds like; a wave of force designed to push a person back. Low-level pressor waves are pretty benign; they feel like a moderately forceful shove by an average size person.

  Heavy duty pressor waves are another story. Getting hit by a high level pressor wave isn’t like getting shoved by a person. It’s more like getting tackled by a linebacker. A big one.

  When a person shoves you, they usually push at your shoulders, and you see it coming, so you can lean into it and push back. A linebacker hits low and takes your legs out from under you. A heavy pressor wave feels more like that. It hits you at your hips, your pelvis, your center of gravity, and it comes so fast that you can’t really prepare yourself for it. Instead, what happens is, your whole body goes flying from the center like it’s been hit by a truck.

  Have you ever seen one of those behind-the-scenes video clips of an action movie, where they show the actor wearing a harness around their midsection attached to a rope, and when the fake explosion goes off, they get hauled through the air by the middle to simulate getting thrown by the explosion? Heavy pressor waves are like that… except it also knocks the wind right out of you and rings your bell something fierce as a bonus.

  When Oswald’s pressor wave hit me, I saw stars for a second and felt that disorienting sensation of flying through the air with no visual reference to let me know where the ground was as I came back down to Earth. Not that seeing the ground would have made much of a difference. The wave tossed me a good eight or nine feet through the air and slammed me into the side of a pickup truck parked nearby.

  I hit it hard enough to leave a dent in the driver’s side door. The car alarm started to go off, blaring its horn, flashing the lights, but all of that was in the back of my mind as I struggled to drag air into my lungs and get my wits about me after being hit by that invisible wrecking ball.

  Everyone hates getting the wind knocked out of them, but in a fight, it’s even worse, because every instant that you’re out of commission, is an instant that the enemy is using to get into a better position to kill you. I pounded my fist on the pavement a couple of times to work up my adrenaline and get myself back into the fight, and finally, air started sucking back into my lungs and I came back into myself.

  Too late. Oswald was already there, standing over me as I knelt on all fours next to that flashing and beeping pickup truck. His gun was in his hand and pointed down at me. He’d used the time that I was stunned to finally fix his jammed weapon and get it back into action.

  “I thought you said that you were going to make me eat this gun, asshole,” he said.

  I really wish I could’ve come up with something sharp and witty to say back to him, but my mind was still kind of swirling from getting hit by that pressor wave, so I steeled myself for the jump towards him that was going to be the last thing I did in this lifetime. I didn’t have any illusions about my chances; he was pointing a fully automatic pistol at my head from six feet away; no way he could miss, and no way I could reach him in time to grab that gun before he blew my head into hamburger.

  Then, there was the sound of running footsteps approaching, and out of nowhere, there was Mickey, pointing her little Smith and Wesson pistol at the back of Oswald’s head. I don’t know where she came from or how she managed to catch up; I was just glad for the momentary stay of execution.

  Oswald heard her coming, and started to turn to face her. Mickey raked the slide on her pistol to let him know that she was armed and that he shouldn’t try to turn around.

  “Freeze, turkey!” she said.

  Oswald seemed less than impressed.

  “Turkey?” he said. “Are you kidding me?”

  “I mean it, you!” Mickey said. “You move and I’ll… I’ll… punch a hole in your head!”

  As dire as the situation was, I still found myself groaning internally at her verbal superfail. Another thing to add to Mickey’s list. A part of me promised that if I survived, I was going to have to work with her on her tough talk… of course, first we had to survive the situation, and there was no guarantee of that.

  You might think that with Mickey behind Oswald with a gun pointed to his head, that the fight would be over, but you’d be wrong. A guy like Oswald is like a timber rattler; you cannot take any chances with them whatsoever, until they are actually in the bag. Mickey was definitely not used to dealing with timber rattlers.

  Oswald’s body started to tense up in that tell-tale way that telegraphs that someone is about to make a move. Mickey couldn’t see it, but I could, and I knew exactly what he was going to do before he did it.

  I’d seen Shifty practicing the same move dozens of times. Let’s say you’re a Defense mage. Someone is holding a gun on you from behind. You can hear their voice, so you know about how far away they are, and how tall they are as well. You can assume they’re pointing their gun at your head, so now you have a general idea of where the bullet is going to go if they shoot. So, if they’re foolish enough to stand too close to you… which Mickey was… you can spin around, put up a shield with your one hand to protect your head, and use the other hand to strike back.

  And that’s exactly what he did. I scrambled to my feet as soon as he started to move, but I couldn’t stop him
from spinning around, putting up a small shield between himself and Mickey’s gun, and then firing a burst from his pistol directly into her head.

  She instantly disappeared. Oswald’s shoulders drooped and he blinked almost comically in surprise and confusion, looking back and forth to try to figure out where the tiny lady with the gun had gone.

  “Illusion,” I said from behind him, and when he turned toward me, I gave him a right uppercut to the jaw.

  Man, I put everything I had into that punch. I brought my fist up like I was heaving a hay bale up into the top loft of a barn, and when it connected, I could feel his jaw come apart under the impact. His jaw wasn’t simply broken; it was flat-out shattered.

  It wasn’t only that he’d be taking his meals in through a straw for a good long time, either. I’m pretty sure his feet lifted up off of the deck as he flew backwards, knocked out cold before he hit the ground like the lump of shit he was.

  God damn, that punch was satisfying. I felt like a pro baseball player who’d just smacked the hell out of a fast ball and watched it sail out of the park.

  I recovered his weapon and then leaned up against the dented pickup truck, looking down at him, still pulling myself together after the impact of that pressor wave. Finally, Mickey… the real Mickey this time… came running up. She skidded to a halt right next to me, hands on her knees, sucking air into her lungs after her sprint.

  “Did it work? Did it work?” she said between breaths. “Did he fall for it? The illusion?”

  “It worked.”

  “What about you?” she said, grinning at me. “Did you think it was me?”

  I shook my head. “The illusion was holding a gun. You said you’d dropped yours.”

  “Oh,” she said, sounding a little disappointed. “Well, I’ll get you next time. Is he dead?”

  “Knocked out. Sissy Boy here’s got a glass jaw. No wonder he likes to hide behind shields.”