by Randi Darren
Yeah, yeah. Can’t do anything about that because Irma said she’d handle it.
And she hasn’t really been that friendly since she found out about it all.
Really should have run it by her first.
Reaching to his side, Sam drew out his sidearm and gave the safety a look. It was off. He pushed it back into the holster, then flexed his fingers and spread his hand out.
Building a small ball of Essence together, he prepped it so he could turn it into any spell he might need.
He was an Essence user, first and foremost. There was no way he wouldn’t start with what he was most familiar with.
I really don’t like these modern firearms very much. Far too easy to kill someone these days.
Far, far too easy.
Thirty-Three - Assault -
Stacia caught up to Sam and Decima as they slid up to the side of the building.
“Sorry, as soon as I saw everyone moving on the cameras I started over,” Stacia said.
“No worries, you didn’t miss anything,” Sam said, pressed up to the wall next to Decima.
Looking at the Vampire, he couldn’t help but smirk. It was strange to see the pale-as-paper Stacia standing in the sunlight.
As if realizing where his thoughts were, Stacia smiled at him.
“Have I mentioned I’m really thankful for the fact that I can be in the sun?” Stacia said. “It’s so… warm. So very warm.”
“Imagine how a Vampire feels without that protection,” Decima hissed. “I hear it’s incredibly warm. They usually say something like ‘It burns, it burns, it burns.’ I could have misunderstood, though. They were usually bursting into flame when they said it.”
Sam pressed two fingers to his brow. He couldn’t quite place Decima sometimes, but more often than not she seemed to be pessimistic, bitter, and angry. She could always be counted on to ruin a moment.
Going to have to fix her aren’t I?
Fine. We’ll start now.
“Delightful,” Stacia murmured before Sam could speak. “Always a pleasure, Decima. You sure you didn’t bring some of that hellscape back with you? Cause you’re acting a lot like a demonic bitch. And that’s coming from a Vampire.”
Flinching at that, Decima looked down to the ground. Several seconds passed before she shook her head.
“You are… correct,” Decima said, then looked back to the entryway ahead of them. “I apologize. I am… learning. Please forgive me for my faults as I attempt to work through them.”
Standing there, Sam stared at Decima as if she were naked and doing a handstand while playing a kazoo with her asshole.
Rather than comment on what’d just happened and possibly ruin it, Sam said nothing. Instead he stood behind Decima and waited.
“What’s the signal? How do we know when to go?” Stacia asked, her question bridging the silence back to a normal conversation.
“Honestly? I have no idea,” Sam said.
“We’ll know,” Decima said.
“How will we—”
Sam was interrupted by an explosion.
Decima shot forward, her left hand coming up with her pistol ready.
Stumbling forward, Sam brought up a wedge of Essence in front of Decima as he turned the corner. That was his part of the job. The reasoning was ‘just in case it’s guarded’ and Sam hadn’t thought to question it.
At the end of the hall was a small hole. In that hole was a large gun barrel.
Decima managed to close the distance halfway to the end of the hall before the gun began firing.
It’s a damn machine gun!?
Rounds began to pound into the shield and shatter to the left and right of Decima. She’d been relying on the idea that Sam was going to be there for her and didn’t move at all.
Rushing through the hall, Decima dodged to one side, out of view of the gun. Her goal was to get into the building interior.
Making a choice, Sam decided to disable the gun so Stacia could get through to assist Decima.
Sam walked the shield straight up to the muzzle of the gun and began to curl the shield around the gun itself. He felt Stacia rush past him even as he worked.
Ricochets began to pound into the cement and the gun emplacement. There was nowhere else for the rounds to go.
The gunner stopped firing, and Sam was left with little more than the sound of his ears ringing. It felt like he couldn’t hear a thing other than a loud rushing and roaring inside his own head.
Grimacing, Sam looked to his side.
A large metal door hung open on a single hinge. It looked as if it’d been torn from its actual frame.
Either I made Decima too strong, or Stacia is a much stronger blood mage since drinking Marin.
Sam began walking toward the door as he ended the spell, then stuck his head into the room beyond.
Decima was squatting low behind a glimmering blood-red wall. Her pistol was raised over the top of it, and she was squeezing rounds off intermittently.
Pressed up to the back of the witch hunter was Stacia. The wall they were hiding behind was being held together by the Vampire and formed from her magic directly.
Looking further into the room, Sam could see a number of people on the ground. He couldn’t see anyone, but judging from where Decima was putting rounds, there were people over there hiding.
It ended in a narrow corridor with a sharp turn to one side.
A man in a helmet stuck his head out and aimed toward Decima to fire from behind the corner.
Before he could pull the trigger, though, his eyes were caught by Sam. In that instant, Sam glamoured the man with a full-force punch to the psyche.
Kill your coworkers!
Ducking back behind the wall without doing anything, the man vanished.
Then there were gunshots and flashes coming from the area he’d disappeared into.
Rebuilding his shield again, Sam linked it to Stacia’s. There was an immediate and strange blending of magics as he did so. It almost looked like it was all going to explode, with the way they were bubbling over one another.
Then they slid together like blood in water and vanished into one another.
As he built his Essence into Stacia’s shield, Sam began walking to the corner of the room. The shield was dragged across the room with him, pulling the cover Decima could use further and further.
As if realizing what was happening, Stacia got up and practically appeared in the other corner of the room. The cover afforded to Decima expanded by a power of ten, covering the entirety of the room.
Standing up, Decima let her pistol fall to her side and raised her sword. Moving forward at a swift pace, she closed the distance to the last known position of the enemy.
She held her blade up perpendicular to the ground, the tip pointed to the floor, as she moved it close to the edge of the corner.
She held it there for only a fraction of a second, but whatever she saw in the reflection as she used it as a mirror was all she needed.
Raising her pistol, Decima walked around the corner and began firing.
She’s got no fear at all.
Gritting his teeth, Sam moved up and into the same position Decima had been. Then he followed her around the corner. No sooner had he entered the hallway, he could hear the rapid pound of machine-gun fire. Very similar to the same sound he’d heard earlier.
Corpses littered the ground. Many of them had single blood-pumping wounds in their foreheads. Between their very eyes and through a helmet.
Up ahead, he saw the heels of Decima’s boots as she turned down another corridor.
Stacia zipped past Sam in a red blur and zoomed after Decima.
Chasing after the two of them, Sam dragged along the shield behind him. He could still feel Stacia’s magic at work, though it was no longer tethered to her.
“I’ll just bring up the rear, I guess,” Sam muttered, turning the same bend in the hallway. He could see another machine gun emplacement up ahead, but there was no gun.
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Beyond that hole, though, he could see flashes of light. As well as the unending blast of machine-gun fire at full bore.
Walking up to the hole, Sam peered through.
A group of ten or twelve men with rifles, SMGs, and a machine gun were all firing toward another fortification deeper inside the building.
Grabbing hold of the shield, Sam slammed a pillar of it down in front of himself on the other side of the wall.
Then he flung Stacia’s pillar toward the vampire to make a wall of cover. Grabbing his Essence, he shot it across to the other side of the gap toward the position he assumed the rest of his team was. He hoped Irene would get the implication.
She was a smart woman, so he expected her to see what he was doing and complete the triangle.
The soldiers didn’t seem to notice the glowing wall that ran along the side of their formation. If anything, they immediately started trying to use it as a form of cover.
Which was precisely what Sam didn’t want to happen.
Come on, Irene. If you know what I—
A black and purple wall shot out from Sam’s pillar and connected to Stacia’s bright red pillar.
Suddenly, every shot fired by the soldiers was being redirected in almost every way as they began to bounce off wildly.
There was a wild surge of magic from Stacia, and the walls—all three of them—rapidly expanded. Covering from floor to ceiling.
There was nowhere for the soldiers to go and nothing they could do. Realizing their rounds were returning, they slowly stopped firing.
Something grabbed hold of the pillars that made the wall and gave them new instructions. With a ping, the walls collapsed together toward the center of the room.
An explosion of gore and what sounded like hamburger meat being dropped on the floor was insanely loud in the room.
Squished into a tiny space was a bright red, glowing triangle of spinning, churning meat, clothes, weapons, and blood.
The sudden silence was almost as deafening as the monstrous amount of gunfire had been. Tiffany and Wren came out from their position, weapons up and scanning.
“Clear back here,” Wren called, even as she looked around the corners and behind furniture.
“Clear back here,” Decima said, standing and staring at the strange glowing wall of humanity meatloaf in the middle of the room.
“Well, not the prettiest thing I’ve done,” Irene said, coming out as well. “But it worked rather nicely, didn’t it?”
Sam shook his head and stood up, moving around the fortification to join Decima and Stacia.
“It’s disgusting,” Decima said, standing a foot from the glowing wall. One of her hands was raised to the mess.
“Yes, it is. The alternative was to waste even more time,” Irene said. “Was it not?”
“No, that’s true,” Stacia said.
Looking satisfied with the room, Wren and Tiffany turned around and headed back the way they’d come at a trot.
“Witch, I need you to get a hold of the Doppel,” Decima said, moving after Wren and Tiffany.
“Jes is working on it,” Irene said as she gazed up at the churning and bloody mess between the walls. “They were trying to call out to someone when we reached the comm room. Not sure if they finished the call or message or whatever it was.”
“We assumed that’d happen,” Decima said, nodding her head. “I assume you started the timer.”
“Yes,” Irene said, still staring.
Decima left the room, vanishing through the armored entry point.
“I’m not sure how I feel about this,” Stacia said as she looked up at the tri-colored magical wall between her, Irene, and Sam. “Though it’s strange that our magic blended together. I didn’t think witchcraft, blood magic, and Essence sorcery would connect like that.”
“It’s because I feed off both of you,” Sam said, looking away from the mess. “Traces of you are in my magic. How could you reject yourself? It’s part of the control methods that planar lords use.”
Turning, Sam started heading toward where everyone else had vanished. He really didn’t want to see the bloody meatball they’d made.
“Going to break it now,” said Irene behind him.
Glancing back over his shoulder, Sam watched as Stacia and Irene, who were right behind him, tore down the magical wall.
A flood of blood, meat, bone, and equipment rushed out over the ground. The stench of it was almost overwhelming. Everything reeked like the inside of a human’s chest.
Feeling bile rise up in his throat, Sam was surprised. It was just too much, even for him.
Irene flicked a hand to one side, and the ground peeled up into a three-foot-high curb. The mess flowed up to it and then began flowing back the other way.
Stacia stepped up to the lip and stuck a finger into the bloody mess, then raised it to her nose and gave it a sniff.
“It doesn’t smell like something entirely human,” she said. Then she licked her finger. “It tastes like human, but it isn’t. It reminds me of Irma.”
“Irma?” Sam asked. “Male Imps, then. I suppose that explains where they all went. And how she’s making more Imps. It’s done out of country, and the results—little girls—brought in.”
Sighing, Sam just chalked it up to another problem to hold Jena accountable for.
When he rejoined everyone else in the other room, he watched Irene ease Jes out of a chair in front of a massive display bank.
There were monitors, controls, and what looked like status displays. It was everything around the area, the guard station, and a very dark-looking room with two flickering lights in it.
“Looks like that’s the vault,” Decima said, pointing at the dark camera. “Maybe it’s time to pull out. It’s a prison.”
“I would agree with you if I hadn’t seen…” Irene paused and started flicking switches back and forth on the console in front of her. “These.”
The camera stopped.
On the screen was a room full of what appeared to be gear. Guns, vests, explosives, anything else an army could use—and a lot of it.
Waiting several seconds, Irene flicked another switch.
The new view was a lot of large, blinking, glowing boxes. Sam had no idea what it was.
“Servers,” Irene said, as if realizing some people wouldn’t know what they were. “Data. Lots of data to take with us. Last but not least, and why we wanted to be here…”
Irene pulled another switch.
Finally, a room full of what looked to be cash, gold, and other things was displayed.
“I’m suddenly very thankful that you all forced Irene and I to spend a week figuring out how to make a portal,” Stacia said. “Even if it did temporarily drive me insane.”
“Indeed,” Jes said happily, clapping her hands together. “We’ll just… hop it all the way to our plane and fly it home!
“Good work everyone. Now we just have to go downstairs and pick up our loot.”
“Well, that’s the harder part,” Irene said with a sigh. “There’s a lot of these things running around.”
The view of a different monitor changed, and a monster appeared on the screen.
It looked somewhere between a Were and a scrawny Troll.
“Black-kin,” Decima said with a hiss. “Vampires of the oldest breed and kin. Those who came first and spawned a slew of tales and myths.
“Cursed and tainted for all time in all ways.”
“That’s a Vampire?” Tiffany asked.
“A form of Vampirism,” Decima said.
“There’s a lot of them,” Irene said. “And they’re all over. Obviously they know we’re here. They closed the door and locked it.”
Everyone turned to a metal door set in the ground. It looked heavy, massive, and probably impossible to move.
All around it was thick concrete that it seemed extremely unlikely they would get through.
“And we’re on a timer,” Sam muttered.
“Yes. So
it would seem,” Decima said. “Alright. Let’s blow the door off the hinges and get to work. My soul needs cleansing, and they’re a valid route to that end.”
“Pity we won’t be able to do anything with the gold for a while,” Stacia said. “We’ll have to sit on it, melt it down, and shuffle it around. Can’t just sell what we stole, after all. And that cash… we’ll need to put it through multiple channels.”
“Yes,” Irene said. “But I think you and I can handle that. It isn’t as if we weren’t doing similar things already. We’ll just work it with Irma.”
Wren walked over to the metal door with a bag in one hand. Getting down on one knee, she started pulling items out of it. They looked like small blobs of gray clay.
“You sure your shield can withstand the blast?” Wren asked, dropping more and more of the substance down. Pushing it and packing it down into the corners.
“Of course,” Sam said. “And with Irene and Stacia assisting me, it won’t even be a concern. I think the bigger issue will be getting down after we more or less turn the entry into a crater.”
“Rope. Lots of rope,” Tiffany said. Leaving the group, she went toward the massive hole in the back wall. Apparently Jes had overestimated how much damage she’d do in blowing the wall. Instead of a small hole, she’d knocked most of it in.
“I’ll tie it off,” Tiffany called, grabbing a bag just around the corner from the blast site in the wall. “You do your thing, Mr. Sex Fiend.”
“Mr. Sex Fiend,” Sam repeated, walking over to stand next to Wren.
“You kind of are,” Wren said under her breath. “I’m not complaining, personally.”
“Mm, fair enough,” Sam said. “I’ll need to feed after this a few times.”
“More than willing to volunteer,” Wren said as she looked into the bag. “That should be enough to blow this open. We’ll save the rest for later, just in case.”
Sam had no idea what was too much or not enough.
He just wasn’t in his element when it came to modern-day weapons and explosives.
Maybe I should go visit a lower plane after this. Spend some time in a technological backwater.
That’d be nice.
Forming an Essence shield over the door, Sam strengthened it and built it thick. He anchored it into the corners of the door itself until he felt like it wasn’t about to go anywhere. No matter how big a blast hit it.
