Authors: Scott V. Duff
I watched the screaming man as he ran through the crowd. Many did likewise, not noticing us walking calmly behind him. Concentrating slightly, I called a little bit of magefire into my hand and waited until he got to someone I suspected was Marren. While he was explaining his emergency in shouted gasps, pointing back at us, I flared the magefire and pitched it like a baseball at the back wall, some hundred and fifty yards off, just as Marren looked at us. Zero gasped as I let the ball of fire go, scanning forward in its path. He bounded forward a step and jumped to the nearest weight bench to see the magefire hit, heedless of the man on the bench currently trying to press two hundred eighty pounds. The magefire raced over everyone’s head in a raging fury of destructive power. The man on the bench grunted from the sudden weight of Zero on his stomach, expelling the contents of his lungs and dropping the bar to his chest. His spotter was watching Zero fly through the air. Marren followed the magefire as it hit the back wall, taking a support beam out. The size of the ball of fire belied the size of the explosion it caused. Small ball, big explosion. The hole in the wall was over twenty-feet in diameter and the support beam was seared in two and bent backward at near right angles. The backdraft reached a good fifty feet into the building.
The only sound in the shocked room was the struggling weightlifter trying to get nearly three hundred pounds off his chest—he spotter was in shock—and Zero’s giggle.
“That was so cool, Seth!” Zero squealed, looking back at me and smiling broadly. The statement galvanized the spotter into lifting the bar off the strangling weightlifter as I started down the aisle.
“Thanks, Zero,” I said and went for Marren, meeting his eyes across the room. Raising acoustical shielding around the room, I raised a personal shield with the Stone and shifted the weapons into their ready positions in my arms and across my shoulders. My awareness shifted to battle-mode as I started talking.
“My name is Seth McClure and I’m looking for the Academy of Defensive and Military Arts and Sciences. Can anyone provide directions?” I looked around at the gaping men now staring at me and cast my thoughts out for memories of trips from here to there. I got more than enough to create the Weirdway and portal. “Thanks. Now the next matter. You work for them. You’ve been attacking people with magic and been moderately successful. You will stop. Now. Or we will start reciprocating. We are your one and only warning.” I turned on my heel and headed for the door, but I knew what was coming next. I could see the words in his mind from across the room.
“Kill them,” Marren said loudly, crossing his arms on his chest imperiously.
I stopped and turned back grinning at him. “I thought you’d say that.” And I called the Armor.
The room went nuts with activity and we instantly had the upper hand in the chaos. Zero lunged to the right as the spotter threw himself at the
huri
. Zero hit him once, square in the center of his chest, with such controlled force that the man flew backward twenty feet, crashing into a long rack of barbells and free weights. He landed in the floor in a heap of muscle and flesh. Zero was in motion to his next target before the man hit the mat. I was ahead of him then, lost in the fog of war and taking down my own opponents before they could react to my presence. We moved down the aisle toward Marren with devastating speed, leaving a swath of destruction behind us.
I saw the shockwave forming well before the bullet hit my armor or the sound filled the room. The Quiver homed me in on its source immediately and I wrapped a portal around the Uzi 9mm. automatic pistol, putting the dangerous end in the shooter’s face. Then I isolated the rest of the guns in the building and tossed them into the Atlantic. Two more shots were fired in rapid succession. When I looked back at the man, I saw that the Uzi was in rapid-fire mode. He’d held the trigger down and got all three shots out. I’d given him a double-tap to the head. Oops.
I came around the left sparring ring and caught sight of Marren jumping over the top of the right sparring ring, toward Zero. Four men slid to a stop in front of me brandishing metal riot control sticks. They were big men, too, easily over six foot four and three hundred pounds each and they were all confident in their abilities.
“You’re kidding, right? Sticks?” I muttered, planting my feet and starting a song in my head. It planted me to the ground, locking me in place so fast that a bulldozer couldn’t move me—that’s what it felt like anyway. I turned to find Zero on the other side while they found courage to attack. He was darting through a tangle of men, nearly invisible, shoving here, elbowing there, and smacking groins as he went. When outnumbered, he’d roll off the veil to another spot, but he picked his battles. Each opponent was aware of him, attacked first, and fell after one or two hits from Zero. Guerrilla warfare,
huri
-style.
Turning back, I let the Day’s influence take over and changed the song to draw everyone’s attention. Then I let go and went to full speed. We still faced over seventy men, and the mages hadn’t surfaced yet either. I threw the riot gear men into the right-side sparring ring with their rods bent around one of their hands. Each severely beaten, I’d been merciless in returning each and every man’s strike against me while I attended to Zero. I paid attention. Each man got their due and that included a few broken bones.
I turned and faced a pair of battle mages. Dozens of men formed around us in a semi-circle, to make it easier for me, I supposed. Both mages carried shortened staffs of ash marked with sigils, shortcuts to spells they locked into their minds. Both mages had locked onto me and launched their first salvo with deadly intent. I called the Night.
The ebony blade’s appearance went unnoticed initially, when the first mage’s attack of pale blue effervescence hit me. The rapier’s reaction was much like the Stone’s, negligible, at least outwardly. I felt the ephemeral dragon’s tongue flick out and draw away the spell, drinking in the weak magic the mage put so much effort into building. The second mage’s spell was more effective. He cast a black tarry substance, thinking to mire the Armor enough to slow and possibly stop me. Initially a dark maroon energy ball, I caught the spell with the Sword and looped it several times around the blade, breaking his control with the Night. With a flick of my wrist, I threw it right back at him.
Eager to achieve success, the mages fired their second salvo before their first landed. The first man surprised me immensely: he threw Peter’s green orb spell at me. The sphere was the size of a marble and he had a hard time controlling its path, but it was Peter’s spell. The second mage threw a gout of fire. I presume to catch his tar baby aflame and bake me inside the Armor while it mired me down.
“Dude, don’t try magic you can’t contain,” I cried, loudly and angrily, just as the returned tar baby expanded into the second mage’s gout of flame, catching the tar on fire as it engulfed him. I snapped my fingers for effect and the black and green orb shot straight up five feet, growing to the size of a baseball. “Even at the size of a marble, this spell takes a great deal of concentration to maintain. At this size, it can eat an entire pick-up truck in a flat minute.” I waved dramatically as I moved closer in and the men stepped further out. Their battle mage fell backward, tripping on a mat, repeating “Shit!” as he tried to crab-walk away and hold onto to his wand at the same time. I shoved my fist into the air then shot my fingers out. It had nothing to do with the replication of four more orbs, but it looked good as I created them. Then I tossed them into the air in a circle around the crab-walking mage to halt his progress.
“Zero,” calling through the geas as well to make sure he heard me. He bounded up beside me a few moments later, grinning broadly and only slightly bruised.
“Yes, Lord?” he asked as if he weren’t committing chaos ten seconds ago.
“Let’s see if they’ve changed their minds about letting us leave, shall we?” I said, putting my hand in his shoulder and turning us around. We stepped past the remains of the second mage, sort of a skeletal mass under a heap of bubbled asphalt. Too grotesque for me, I waved at it with the Night awkwardly and one of the five orbs shot from the circle. It hit the dead man, burst into a bright, neon green light, then fell to black ash a second later. Assessing the damage we’d caused as we moved to the center aisle again, I sent the Night home, thanking it for its help as it passed to my forearm again.
“Cool! Can I do that?” Zero whispered to me, looking at my sword hand.
“Maybe, but even my brothers can’t seem to do it,” I whispered back. I put a cylindrical shield around us and melted the Armor, showing all I was untouched. Raising my voice to make sure I was heard throughout the room, I called, “Lt. Marren, as it stands, you now have six dead and thirty-six wounded, most severely, in less than two minutes. I’m telling you to leave us alone. Are you certain you wish to antagonize us further?”
Marren stood at the ropes of the ring, staring out at the destruction that Zero caused, his mouth agape in surprise. Two of the three men I’d thrown in the ring writhed slowly in pain near his feet, but one had mercifully fallen unconscious. I still had everyone else’s attention through the song I sang earlier, but the gunshots pulled harder on his attention. The men on the floor cleared a path between Marren and the bloody mass of my double-tap on the floor. And of course, there was collateral damage for the three shots. Killed four men total. Though I’d done nothing but throw their own threat back at them, I’d take responsibility for the second battle mage and Zero just didn’t know his own strength just yet.
“Marren!” I yelled, my voice ringing hard against the metal walls. Daybreak loosed a little and I didn’t clamp down. The spheres above the first mage began a complicated dance in the air above him, changing in speed as well as direction and moving higher in the air. Marren whirled around, tears streaming down his face, distraught.
“That’s my son,” he puled, his voice crackling with anger, grief, denial, hatred, and confusion, mostly confusion. “My son’s dead.”
I kept my face a mask of indifference, remembering the children of Dunstan. We were limiting overall casualties by doing this—I had to believe that, and demoralizing these men was part of the plan. “My condolences. Now, decide.”
“You killed my son!” Marren yelled, jumping the fallen men in the ring. One orb fell with a flash of ghastly green light. The remaining spheres continued their flight, multiplying and spreading in the air above us.
“He was shot. We have no guns.” Marren didn’t like that logic. It frustrated him greatly. “Seven are now dead. Decide.”
Marren glared at us with pure hatred. But luckily for the rest of the fifty or so men, he wasn’t a stupid man.
“You’re leaving here unscathed regardless, aren’t you?” he asked, looking helpless and lost.
“Yes,” I said.
“Get out!” he said in a hoarse gasp. He fell to his knees in defeat, quaking as he let his emotions rage in his private hell.
We started walking, turning into the aisle. I stopped us just before Marren and said, “I truly am sorry, Lt. Marren. This is why I came unarmed. I want the killing to stop.” I drew the orbs into themselves until they were no more, then looked about the room. “I believe everyone should understand your decision.”
Connecting to Marren emotionally was easy. He laid himself bare in his misery. Attaching connections to a stop-valve, I attached similar connections to the pain receptors of all the injured. Plugging that into a transformer, I cast a web out to everybody else. Very
Matrix-
ish, I guess. Then I slowly allowed the transformer to work. This was magic, after all, and to me it looked like an energy flow pattern. At full power, it felt like it would fry their minds to goo in three milliseconds, not my intention, so I brought the power up slowly. Of course, I did all this
in three milliseconds
, watching their reactions as I increased the energy to the transformer. Men fell to their knees in agony as Zero and I walked to the door. I pulled the plug on the physical pain so that the emotional loss and reasoning would override it and last for a longer time.
Once outside, I took a deep breath, exhaling slowly as I turned my neck in two half-circles to relieve some tension. An SUV roared past us then screeched to a stop at the door. It was the men from the gas station. Zero was tensing to move as all four doors burst open.
“Zero, let them go in,” I said calmly, opening my door but watching them tumble out, not yet seeing us. He leaned against the car, blending in against the dark surface. The four men tore past us, running into the building. Only one noticed us and skidded to a halt. The Door-Man. “Mr. Thorrstadt,” I said in greeting, nodding politely but without other emotion. He was a tall, lithe, blonde man, probably Swedish in decent, with bluish-gray eyes. He stared for a moment, his fear building.
“Who are you?” he finally asked.
“I’m Seth McClure,” I answered. “And I’m a wizard who’s tired of the killing you people have been doing. I want it stopped. So I’m making examples. Pass the word around, Mr. Thorrstadt. This war has changed. We know who you are now and we’re taking the battle to you. It’s time to decide how willing you are to risk your lives simply by stating your willingness to train. The hunted have become the hunters and we’re better at it than you are.” I got in the car with Zero a few seconds behind. Thorrstadt was framed in my rearview mirror, gawking at us as we left.