Cole leveled his revolver on the stairs, the wand braced under it in his off hand in a pseudo-Harries grip. He let his finger relax along the trigger guard, ready to open fire if spells alone wouldn’t suffice.
The first bootfalls came up within seconds, six hostiles or so based on the cadence.
He tracked the pace and waited for the first wave of enemies to round the half-landing below. Beside him, Vale drew ice daggers out of the ambient moisture and held them on the wand, ready to release the moment a target showed.
The poor bastards up front didn’t even have time to react. The moment they cleared the corner, Vale drove the ice daggers through them – two into the foreheads of the lead pair, and another under the jaw of the man behind them. All three dropped before any could shout, and the column’s momentum carried the bodies back into the men behind them, sending the rest stumbling.
He cast through the wand in his off hand, sealing the air around the fourth cultist’s face into a frozen shell that crushed inward against the man’s airway. The fifth he killed with a thrown spike through the throat.
The sixth, unfortunately, jerked his body sideways at the last instant in a reflexive flinch from the cascade of bodies. The dodge pulled him out of the path of the spike Cole had aimed at his throat, which instead clipped his shoulder. He survived long enough to get his revolver up in a panic and squeeze off a single round before another spike took him through the throat and finished it.
Fortunately, the shot whiffed wide and lodged into the glass overhead. But that was pretty much where the victory ended – a mere consolation prize against the blaring klaxon that sprang up just outside the stairwell. It was a deep, mechanical wail that sounded like a foghorn with the bearings shot, hopefully as painful to the cultists’ ears as it was to his own.
Well, so much for keeping it quiet.
More cultists crashed through the ground-floor stairwell, pouring in with enough numbers to seriously discourage that approach.
“Fuck,” Cole said. “Go back. Other stairway.”
Graves and Mack peeled off the rear and took point, breaking back through the second-floor landing door at a sprint. Cole brought up the rear, pulling back through the door and slamming it shut behind him. He aimed his wand at the latch and the hinge points and spiked the temperature until they glowed bright with incandescence. Once the metal flash-welded, he quenched it by yanking the heat back out.
It wouldn’t hold forever, but it’d hold long enough to keep the enemy distracted.
Graves led them to the far stairwell in under thirty seconds. Mack checked the door first, then waved them through. Thankfully, the cultists had committed everything to the first approach.
The area being clear, they hit the stairs leaping. With enhancement carrying the load, they dropped flight to flight without blowing out their ankles, touching the rail only to steer. Alas, this staircase only reached up to the ground floor, which they reached after a few seconds of parkour.
Unprompted, Graves and Mack pied the door. A beat later they cleared it and spilled into the ground-floor lobby by the elevators. Shouting rang across the space, handlers talking over one another, until a snarl cut through it all.
Yeah, that was a Nevskor, all right.
Cole worked up the corridor and sliced the corner just enough to count. The beast held the center of the lobby, leaving little clear space between the doors and the escalator to the basement. Three handlers fussed around it – one at the head, two at the flanks – while the imp lorded over them from the reception counter. The two guards from earlier had since moved to accompany the imp, serving as its guards. That made six hostiles in total, plus the Nevskor.
He pulled back from the corner as the Nevskor gave a low, grinding rumble. It came again a second later, louder and closer. With a nose like that, Cole assumed they were already burned.
He looked at Elina and Miles. “Clear the cultists and the imp. Rest of us’ll take the Nevskor. Rifles up.”
Elina slipped left along the wall, Miles peeling off behind her. The others shouldered their rifles and entered the moment her first spike tore through the imp’s throat.
Mack and the rest engaged the Nevskor as one, concentrating on the joints where its armor thinned. The volley staggered the beast and drew dark blood from the seams, though rounds striking the heavier hide flattened with minimal effect.
As the rifles kept it busy, Cole finished building his modernized fireball. He drove it down the Nevskor’s open maw the instant the creature roared, then sealed its mouth and nostrils with a barrier.
The detonation was almost silent. Held too well by the barrier, the blast turned inward. He couldn't see much, but it surely wreaked havoc on the throat, the chest, and whatever other squishy parts mattered. With a muted pop, the Nevskor convulsed once before collapsing. Only then did Cole let go of the spell.
The aftermath spilled out: thick, dark slurry oozed from every opening, tarnishing the glass beneath. Smoke from the fireball threaded through it, faintly sulfurous.
Cole moved on. “C’mon. Let’s hit the escalator.”
They sprinted for the rear of the lobby while the rest of the cultists converged to investigate the noise. From the elevator bay behind them and the original stairwell came echoing shouts and stomping, not yet on their level. With a similar racket mounting from the buildings across the street, Cole figured they had thirty seconds at best before they got swarmed.
Halfway across the lobby, looking out the front door, it struck him that their odds weren’t as high as he might’ve liked. They could outrun the current group of pursuers, but they’d be in for a real tough fight if the base converged on the subway concourse.
The base needed a second emergency, loud enough and obvious enough to split the response before the chase reached the concourse. The destroyers offshore could provide it, if he gave them the right target.
The port authority building was out for obvious reasons; shelling it risked collapsing the subway entrance. The harbor, on the other hand, was full of targets whose loss the cultists couldn’t afford – which made it just as full of targets Celdorne would happily destroy.
“Yo,” he called out. “Cover me. Popping a flare.”
While the others took cover and held angles, Cole pulled the blue flare from his utility belt and rushed to the entrance. With Vale backing him up, he popped the door wide, leaned out, and fired the flare toward the cultist ships at the quay.
The flare arced over the moorings and burst above them in a bloom of blue. He watched it just long enough to confirm the destroyers’ spotters would have the line, then turned and shouldered back through the doors.
“Done,” Cole called out. “Let’s go.”
As they headed for the escalator, the lobby flashed white. The first salvo had landed outside, its glare caught and hurled through the Istraynian glass in long sheets across the ceiling and walls. Two more impacts followed so quickly the light barely had time to fade. Even through their hearing protection, the blasts hit like hammer blows.
Cole could only imagine how much worse it was for the cultists outside.
The rolling thunder gradually faded as they reached the basement, which opened not into the subway but into a freight yard instead.
“Shit,” Miles said ahead of them. “Where now?”
Graves glanced up at a placard hanging from the ceiling, then pointed toward a wide passageway. “The subway lies through there!”
Cole nodded. “Okay, let’s go.”
Graves took them into the passage, which opened up wider than expected – a proper freight artery, sized for cars rather than people. Once they cleared the first bend, shouting erupted from the escalator behind them.
Cole turned at the hip and emptied his revolver back down the corridor without breaking stride. He couldn’t confirm if he hit anyone, but hopefully it at least slowed the pursuers down.
The corridor bent right ahead of them, then dropped into a short flight of stairs before bending again – a real maze, much like any subway back home.
They moved through another two or three minutes of twists and turns before the passage straightened into a wide, two-lane tunnel cluttered with all the old shit the Istraynians had left behind. The run was longer than Cole liked – maybe a full kilometer – but the abandoned cars and rusting containers gave them enough cover to make the straight shot workable.
He spotted a bus forty meters ahead and revised the plan on the spot. Rather than fight a retreat the full length of the tunnel, they could make the passageway a choke and hit the pursuers the moment they committed.
“Post up at the bus. Ambush these fuckers.”
They tucked in along the bus and brought their rifles up. Cole had each of them build a fireball as well, keeping the glow masked behind the vehicle so nothing telegraphed through the gaps.
“Hold for my mark.”
The cultists reached the tunnel mouth inside ten seconds, spilling in loose before bunching when the lead men slowed to make sense of the obstacles ahead. They never finished.
“Fire.”
Needless to say, what followed was excessive. The entrance disappeared under a searing flash, a bit overkill for cultists – but hey, they’d already made the spells. When the smoke cleared, only blackened scraps remained where a squad of cultists had once been.
After confirming the tunnel was clear, Cole drove the team onward.
With enhancement carrying them, they ate the kilometer in less than two minutes. The tunnel opened into a service hallway, where Graves checked a placard and steered them back into the corridor that led to the archway from earlier, with the port authority building visible beyond.
Cole peeked the corner. Two cultists held the archway, both focused straight down the lane.
He leaned back. “Walker. Garrett. You’re up.”
Ethan and Miles edged out and dropped them with their Vicers.
The report rolled through the concourse like thunder. A Vicer on full draw was many things, but discreet was not one of them.
They broke from cover before the bodies hit the floor and sprinted back toward the grand hall.
When Cole looked over his shoulder, a new wave of hostiles had already shown up, charging out of the archway. Orcs and goblins ran with the cultists, while three fiery shapes wove through the group, bearing the likeness of wolves. They could only be hellhounds, judging by the silhouettes and the heat shimmer trailing behind them.
Having gotten enough reps in on the modernized fireball, Cole shaped a weakened version on the move and lobbed it over his shoulder. It vaporized a cluster of goblins, impressive in the narrow sense but terrible in terms of efficiency.
The hellhounds compensated for the loss of their goblin screen by accelerating. The team compensated in turn: several Vicer rounds tore them apart in sprays of magma and superheated gore that slapped across the concourse.
The rear cultists returned fire, rounds striking floor and ceiling around them. They were amateurs, fortunately enough – though in this kind of chaos, their luck wouldn’t last long. Good thing they only needed a few more seconds. The grand hall opened ahead, and with it came stone columns, broken sightlines, and a place to make a stand.
“Get to the pillars!” Cole said.
They peeled off into cover as they crossed the threshold, each of them slipping behind a column. Cole settled in against the nearest pillar, leaned out just far enough to acquire, and put a Vicer round through the chest of the lead orc.
The round eviscerated the orc’s torso and the hapless cultist directly behind him both, the latter dropping with an expression of considerable surprise that he did not have time to fully develop.
The rest of the team’s volley cleaned up most of what was left. Orcs and cultists evaporated under the concentrated fire, leaving behind only a few goblin stragglers clutching crude blades. Having watched their entire formation disintegrate, they made the rational decision to drop their weapons, turn around, and run.
Cole shot the defenseless goblins in the back without ceremony. Why pretend otherwise? Celdornian doctrine was pretty unambiguous on rules of war – namely, there was no such thing as war crimes against demons.
With the last pursuers dealt with, Cole put the team back in motion. They retraced their route past the grand hall and through the labyrinth beyond, making far better time than they had on ingress. After crossing the maintenance area, they reached the concourse beside the security kiosk without further contact.
Ahead, the hallway they had torched came back into sight, the frozen barricade collapsing into runoff along the floor. They approached the kiosk, ready to disable it.
Cole was starting to think they were home free when he noticed the lack of shimmer.
“The barrier has been undone,” Vale said.
Cole brought his rifle up on the hallway, the implications already apparent. With power still running throughout the entire subway, the barrier must have been disabled deliberately – and not by anyone friendly.
They didn’t need to wait long to find out, either. The presumed culprit emerged a moment later from behind the kiosk, clad in the dark blue tailcoat customary to OTAC’s administrative elite and wearing Director Fernal’s face. Neither belonged all the way out here, deep in a cultist base.
“It has taken you quite long enough. Come, I’ve—”
Cole didn’t let him finish. He knew exactly what he – or rather, it – was.
He aimed at “Fernal’s” head and opened fire.