The primary target zone lies on the fringe of the old village center, a sprawling expanse of poisoned woodlands and wasted, withered meadows and abandoned brick buildings, some of them five and six stories tall, as grim and foreboding as any medieval prison, or perhaps something worse, an asylum for the insane.
Machiko has only to glance onto the astral to see the twisted energies here, to grasp the malevolent nature of the power afflicting the land, to recognize that here, if anywhere, is where evil dwells. She feels it in the quick shiver that slips up her back. She feels it in her soul.
On the ground, a trio of MVN-17 armored personnel carriers with turret-mounted hardpoints move rapidly up the warped and shattered concrete of a road, led by a sixwheeled Appaloosa armed and armored scout vehicle and an Ares Citymaster armored command vehicle. Helos descend. SDF troopers deploy. Machiko directs her pilot to swing around to the rear of the massive building that gave the most definite indications of habitation to the Mistral over-flight. Two other helos swoop in to follow.
And here the enemy first appears. Backed up to the building rear are a pair of vehicles: the streamlined form of a Leyland-Rover van and a heavy Roadmaster cargo vehicle marked for Nagato Corporation.
"What the frag!" shouts the SDF pilot.
Machiko ignores this. She looks to the men standing around the rear of the Roadmaster. They wear synthleather and camo and the other hallmarks of gangers, much like the captive members of White Octagon. They appear to be loading the Roadmaster with cargo containers, squat metallic cylinders with bright orange labels. Machiko cannot make out what the labels say. However, all questions regarding the lotus and reed insignia on the Roadmaster's side are answered as one man at the vehicle's rear looks up at the approaching helos and immediately lifts an SMG.
The SMG's muzzle flares red. Machiko hears a voice from her commlink shouting, "Taking fire! taking fire!" The ork crewman two steps behind her immediately opens up. The chattering rhythm of the Ares-Stoner MG rises above the beating of the helo's rotors. Tracer fire streams through the twilight. Other men by the Roadmaster brandish weapons. The tracers dance among them, clawing at the ground, pounding the flank of the Roadmaster, tearing at unarmored clothing and sending bodies tumbling to the ground.
The ground comes up swiftly, then.
Machiko goes through the open door, hits the ground, rolls and comes to her feet loping toward the Roadmaster and van, past the bodies of the fallen and the dead, then to the rear of the building. A blackened door stands open. As Machiko reaches the side of the door, another man in camo emerges, swinging an M22 assault rifle toward the lingering helos.
As the assault rifle rises, Machiko catches the back of the man's elbow, squeezes and pulls. The man staggers around her in a half-circle. The GSG immediately to her rear catches the man's neck, and the man crumbles.
More shooting erupts, the staccato reports of automatic fire. Helos thump and whine, tracked vehicles squeal and rumble. Every roar, every report, every detonation seems to vibrate through the earth beneath Machiko's feet. This is the nearest she has ever been to a live shooting war, and yet she feels no fear. Only resolve. A calm resolve that allows no fear, no hesitancy, no uncertainty. A calm like that of the dead.
Rarely has she felt such calm.
The open doorway provides entrance to a long dark corridor. There is light at the end of the corridor, but the space in-between is very dark. She does not see the doorway along the right-hand wall till she is just one step away. She does not detect the female norm coming through the doorway until that woman is stepping into the corridor. Her heat signature then makes her like a lantern amid the dark. She is dressed like the others. She gasps and lifts a Crusader machine-pistol. Machiko reaches out, paralyzes the arm holding the gun, then propels the woman into the corridor wall opposite the doorway.
Another GSG brushes Machiko's side. A sword flashes. The enemy sprawls.
Outside, the battle grows deafening.
In here, death is swift and silent.
Without warning, a new figure appears, a norm male. He comes into view at the distant end of the corridor. He is slim and short, very compact. He wears a full-length black duster and broad-brimmed hat. The hand he thrusts out before him holds a black rod that appears intricately carved.
A mage's rod.
Gamma.
In the same instant Gamma thrusts with the rod, the entire length of the corridor erupts with fire, an inferno—floor, ceiling, walls, and the spaces in between—all raging, roaring. Machiko feels the flames licking at her cheeks, her eyes. She shouts and hurls herself bodily at the doorway in the right-hand wall of the corridor. The cool empty air of the room beyond hits her like a pool of water. For an instant, she cannot breathe. Then she is shouting to her brothers of the Guard. "To
ME
!"
The first to enter emerges from the portal of fire swirling with smoke. The last emerges like a torch. They smother the
flames with their own bodies. They assess their injuries and
gather their resolve. That is when Machiko notices the squat metallic cylinders standing against one wall.
They are just like the cylinders she saw being loaded onto the vehicle outside, the Roadmaster marked for Nagato Corporation. Each of the cylinders here before her also bears a bright orange label. The labels are marked with the symbol for biohazards and the legend,
Sero
-
Ebola
-
D
. On the astral, the cylinders seem almost alive, glimmering with the power of the arcane.
Was this to be the next stage? No more assassins, no mere magical assaults. Rather, an attack utilizing a biological warfare agent enhanced by magic.
How many would have died if the forces of Black Typhoon had been delayed by a minute or two?
But there is no time for questions like this. Her brothers of the Guard give quick signals of the hand: "Prepared for combat,"
"Advance,"
"
Advance
!" The corridor from which they came remains a blazing inferno. Machiko steps up onto one of the squat cylinders and splits a rough wooden panel covering an opening in the wall like a window opening. This provides access to another room. This new room has two doors. Machiko and her team move from there into a new corridor, dark but hardly deserted.
As they move up this new corridor, they pass a room where two men fire auto-weapons through shattered windows at SDF forces outside the building.
Machiko signals. The GSG second in line fires two rounds with a silenced weapon. Both men fall.
The corridor ends at the side of a large open area like a lobby, two stories tall and lit by portable lights. Three sets of double doors and a pair of tall windows cross the front of the space. Eight members of the enemy stand, kneel, and crouch at the windows and doors, firing an assortment of rifles, SMGs, and pistols through holes, slits, and gashes at the forces outside.
Machiko signals. A silent assault is not viable. Two of her team throw stun grenades. She and the remaining three open up with SCK M-100 submachine guns. The lobby area echoes with the relentless stammering of autofire. Three seconds later the enemy combatants lay sprawled on the floor, dead or unconscious. Machiko feels a dull ache where a stray round struck the armored fabric covering her right shoulder, but such pain is easily dismissed.
A solitary figure waits by the doorway at the rear of the lobby area. It is Gamma again. Machiko advances into the open, moving toward him. "Surrender and you will not be harmed."
Gamma's features seem contorted with rage. "Manipulator!" he exclaims. "
Defiler!
"
An enormous hound with the red-glaring eyes of a paranatural emerges from the doorway at Gamma's right and charges. Machiko slips the blade of her katana between the beast's flashing jaws. The creature impales itself on her steel. The carcass falls to her side. She flicks the blade clean and returns it to its sheath. "Do not force me to hurt you."
Gamma sneers. "Be damned."
He lifts a hand and the air around Machiko thickens. It becomes difficult to breathe, even more difficult to move forward, more and more difficult when the floor beneath Machiko's feet suddenly becomes as slippery as ice.
She hears one of her team grunt as with surprise, glimpses another slipping, sliding, almost falling.
"Now you will die," Gamma says in a voice hideous with menace and hate. "Die like the dogs that you are! Tools of the corporate defilers!
Traitors
of
the
earth
!"
But it is not so simple. The mage's power is great, but Machiko's spirit is resolute. Smash one's boots to the earth and pass through a wall of iron. Machiko thrusts her feet to the floor, drives them to the shattered tiles and blackened concrete as if to smash two holes direct to the core of the planet. Forcing herself forward. Forcing body ahead and feet securely to the floor with a spirit that does not admit to even the possibility of failure.
Gamma looks to her sharply. "What—?"
One word slips from Gamma's mouth and then Machiko reaches out. By force of will alone, she bridges the distance between them—a measure in meters far beyond the reach of mere flesh and blood limbs. She seizes Gamma's right wrist. She pressures certain nerves and twists. She watches as Gamma's arm suddenly swings out to his side, and his body arches backward, and his feet, stumbling, desperately seek for balance.
"
NO
!" Gamma shouts.
The left arm gestures and abruptly a barrier arises, like a gleaming wall of water. The right wrist slips from Machiko's
control. Gamma regains his balance. He raises both arms in
the manner of spellcasting. Machiko, struggling forward—straining forward with every last scintilla of will—draws three star shuriken from her left vambrace and gives them flight.
It is a last desperate attempt. The mages with the SDF force will not arrive in time to counter Gamma's spells. Machiko must hope that Gamma is not so powerful a mage that he can know every conceivable spell, that there is some limit to the sheer number of spells he can sustain at any one time. She must hope that the barrier he uses to guard himself against her attempt at manipulation is a creation of the purest mana, useful against spells, against all forms of magic, but not against purely mundane physical objects.
She watches her flight of three shuriken. Gamma seems to anticipate the attack and begins moving a step aside while again lifting both arms. He is an instant too slow. He sways as two of the whirling stars strike him across the chest. He staggers back against the rear lobby wall and seems about to succumb to the soporific drug coating the shuriken when the unexpected occurs.
Evanescent flashes of red like fleeting tongues of fire appear and disappear, circling Gamma's head, arms, and body. As moment passes into moment the flashes grow stronger and brighter and circle faster. Gamma shouts. He begins screaming. And Machiko realizes she is watching magic go wrong, a spell misfiring, backfiring. Turning back on the mage himself.
In another moment the flashes evolve into a whirlwind of fire. Gamma's screams rise into a peal of agony and terror. And Machiko can imagine only one course of action.
The warrior must not consider victory or defeat or even her own personal survival. She plunges recklessly toward an irrational death.
She hurls herself forward, intent on smothering the flames.
As the first flash of heat strokes across her chest, she feels an impact like the fist of a leviathan, and then hears a crash like a deafening blast of thunder, and then her feet leave the floor.
She seems to glide through empty space—without body or form—a ghost buoyed aloft on the winds of the etheric.
Everything grows silent and still.
The world assumes shades of gray, then shape and texture, blurry at first, and then sound, voices, footsteps, clattering equipment, and then scents, a scent like smoke, like burnt fabric. Machiko realizes she must be alive when she feels the stinging in the vicinity of her eyebrows and the dull ache working throughout her chest and back. It seems good that she is alive. She marvels at the number of times she has come near to death in just the last several days, five days, since the assassin's initial attacks. Now here she is again.
She opens her eyes and finds the five GSG of her team crouching around her. An SDF medic kneeling beside her holds some form of scanner just beneath her chin. She presses the medic back, out of the way. "Where is Gamma?" A brother of the Guard shows the way with a glance. Machiko lifts her head to look down beyond her feet. A small crowd of SDF troopers and a team of medics are formed into a crouching, kneeling group just a few meters away. "Gamma's down," says one GSG. "Unconscious. Badly burned. Unknown whether he'll make it."
Machiko suffers a wave of dismay. After all this, all the death and bloodshed, has she failed? The medic at her side waves his scanner right in front of Machiko's face. She pushes him back. She spends a moment finding her center, settling her spirit, gathering resolve, then climbs first to her knees and then to her feet. "Machiko-san,
please
!" the medic exclaims. "You're injured!"
Tired. Very tired. Full of minor aches and pains. But now is not a time for fatigue or for pain. Machiko glances around. The doors at the front of the lobby area have all been smashed inward. The SDF Citymaster command vehicle sits just beyond the empty door frames. Nearby stands the major in command of the SDF force, along with the troopers of his headquarters echelon.