Cole brought up his rifle, then cut the mana flow to the barrier. “Open fire!”
The instant the barrier dissipated, all the supercooled air inside the cell poured out in a heavy fog that blanketed the entire hallway. The mimic vanished into it, reduced to a silhouette at the center of the cell. They opened fire into the murk, round after round sparking off an extraordinarily tough surface.
Hard as it was to gauge through the fog, nothing seemed to be punching through – every round he tracked just fucking ricocheted, sparking off the silhouette the way it would off the glacis of a main battle tank. They kept on it regardless, leaning into the futility because every second of fire was a second the mimic spent eating rounds instead of closing on Mack. In fact, Cole would burn a thousand rounds if that was what it took to buy the man room to finish his cast.
The mimic, for some reason, just settled in and… let them. Though it probably could have moved, it stayed hunkered where it was and let the rounds wash over it, content to ride the whole thing out in place. It was a relief, but only on the surface. Cole appreciated the bought time, sure, but at what cost? The mimic’s lack of urgency suggested only one thing: it wasn’t the least bit concerned about their damage output.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, somebody decided to kick in a little extra. The fog itself crystallized, the ambient moisture hardening into a spread of spikes that drove into the silhouette all at once. The haze thinned in the same breath, the mimic resolving out of the murk as the cell cleared.
With the fog gone, Cole could finally see the damage they’d done, or rather the depressing lack thereof. No matter, though. The barrage had only ever been about buying time, and that time was up. Mack’s plasmaball was ready.
It launched a half-second later, lancing past the firing line and into the creature.
Cole turned his face from the flash, the whole corridor washed white for a split second.
The detonation hit like the door of an oven thrown open against his cheek, a wave of searing heat rolling down the hall a half-beat behind the light. Dust sifted loose overhead as the entire concourse shuddered, so hard that Cole instinctively checked the ceiling and the pillars just to make sure the subway didn’t collapse on them.
Thankfully, Istraynian engineering proved as resilient as advertised; the supports held strong.
That said, something that violent had to have left a mark. The same spell had gutted the Vampire Lord clean through, after all. Cole knew better than to count on it, though. Where the Vampire Lord had traded agility for squishiness, the Alpha Mimic had apparently done the reverse, sacrificing speed for insane durability. It also didn’t help that they were all running on fumes, which put a hard cap on their firepower.
As soon as the dust settled, his pessimism proved well-founded. Though the plasmaball had carved clean through the arm the mimic threw up to guard itself, shearing off a gaping chunk that dropped in brittle flakes, it gave out short of anything that mattered, having spent the bulk of its energy chewing through the limb. What finally reached the chest had just enough power left to melt a crater into the surface, but not pierce through. Pieces of gel slumped and ran molten at the edges like lava before cooling.
The bullets had fared far worse, naturally. None of them had even breached the arms, let alone reached the chest behind them. All they left was a scatter of nicks and chips across the limbs, a few rounds lodged where they’d struck, not one ever finding its way past the substrate.
Well, shit. So much for their trump card.
Cole kept the rifle up and braced for the thing to come apart and rush them, but the rush never came. The Alpha Mimic stayed planted where it was, riding out the last of the fire without a care in the world.
Once the worst of the barrage had passed, the demon let out a deep, rumbling baritone that rolled down the concourse. The repeated bursts of sound followed no pattern he recognized until the pauses between them made it obvious: it was laughter.
Somehow that landed harder than an outright charge would have. See, if it had come screaming out of the cell the second it cleared, that would at least have meant it still saw them as a threat. The fact it didn’t was a punch to the gut – a harsh truth about their situation. The plasmaball had been the one thing all fight long that had put real hurt on it, and it had taken everything Mack had to manage even that. The demon had clearly recognized that.
“You have shown more spirit than those who came before you,” it said, the laughter resolving into its usual stuck-up tone. “I am inclined to be generous.”
Cole reloaded while it talked.
“Preservation is not to be feared; the death before it is brief.”
Cole didn’t bother entertaining the “offer.” He finished reloading and fired.
The round lodged in its forehead and did about as much as everything else had, chipping off a fleck of material that sprinkled down like glitter.
The demon brought its ruined arm up to its head and worked the slug free with its fingers. It held the bullet up to the light overhead, turning it over like an appraiser examining a gem. “Your kind has come far since the last incursion.” It rubbed the bullet between its fingers with immense force, grinding it to dust. “How far, I shall soon discover when I walk amongst your people.”
It couldn’t, Cole was fairly certain. Not unless it had a way of getting past all the nullification field checkpoints. Then again, these demons had proved real adaptable thus far.
He shoved the thought down where it belonged and shot it again, the others joining him.
The demon started forward, the rounds lodging in it or skating off without slowing it a step. “My patience is not endless; there is a limit to it.”
Cole gave ground as he fired, backing down the concourse. The demon picked up speed, singling him out – and only him – for some damn reason. As soon as it caught up, it launched a blisteringly fast front kick.
Cole barely ducked under it in time, only to see the demon chain the miss into an axe kick. The heel came down like a hammer, forcing him into a backward roll to clear it.
Missing the axe kick by a hair, he came up out of the roll and broke into a run, swiveling the rifle behind him as he went. He wanted to open fire but couldn’t – not without risking his teammates to ricocheted rounds. The rest of the team had reached the same conclusion, holding their own fire and chancing the odd potshot only when the lane was clean.
With the Alpha Mimic gaining on him, Cole picked a pillar and ran straight for it. A stride short of the pillar, he dumped a burst of enhancement into his legs and cut hard right.
The demon’s fist missed him and smashed into the pillar instead, cracking the column and sending a shudder the whole length of the subway.
“Mind where you stand.” It worked the hand free and considered the fracture it had left. “I would sooner not dig your ruined bodies from the rubble.”
The irritating part was that it had a point. But what was the play – keep timing rolls to the frame like this was Dark Souls? At least in the game his character had a sword that did something, stamina that came back, and an opening at the end of a dodge. Here he had none of that. Nothing he had left could scratch the thing, one solid hit would put him in the ground, and every roll and sprint and dodge only bled him closer to empty.
He stole a look back while the demon shook off the swing.
The rest of the team were all in roughly his shape, running on fumes and knowing it. Graves and Vale were the worst of the lot, having burned through the bulk of their reserves suppressing and boxing in the mimic earlier. They moved like Industrial Revolution factory hands at the tail end of a sixteen-hour shift, back before anyone thought to put a limit on those hours.
Cole wasn’t the only one who’d run the numbers, though. The Alpha Mimic caught the same hint and broke off, swinging away from him to go after them.
The two of them squared up and met it head-on. Graves caught the first blow on his edge and turned it wide, the steel screaming off that crystalline hide without leaving a scratch. Vale slid in on the flank and drove a thrust into the seam behind the arm, only for the point to skate off like everything else they’d thrown at it.
The demon pressed them hard. It came at Graves with a backhand sweep, which he ducked clean. The sweep carried on through its arc until it closed on Vale at the far end, at which point the demon pivoted into a dropping elbow.
Vale threw his blade up flat overhead and caught the elbow on the flat just shy of his skull. The block held, but the force behind it drove him down to a knee.
Graves answered with a flurry to pull the heat off his partner, three cuts as quick as a card trick. He caught the thing across the wrist, the forearm, and the meat of the shoulder, each strike landing clean but about as useful as keying a tank. At the end of the day, all those cuts did nothing but dull their blades.
And these two were pros, too, the best of the best, at least where a blade was concerned. But no amount of finesse could cut through raw durability.
It was only a matter of time before one of the three ran out of stamina, and it sure wasn’t gonna be the Alpha Mimic.
Every instinct in Cole wanted to close the distance and even the odds, take some heat off the two of them, but wanting it and doing it were two different things. His rifle was useless in a scrum that tight, every shot bearing the risk of fratricide. Closing to melee was worse, since he’d probably only get in their way. The only thing he could do now was observe and hope he could identify a weakness before Graves or Vale slipped.
He tried his damnedest to find one over the next few exchanges, until Graves finally faltered, coming up just a bit too slow on a parry. The demon pressed the advantage, slapping the blade away and driving a devastating right hook into Graves’ side.
Vale spent everything he had left to stop it. A barrier flared across the line of the hook and held just long enough to bleed off the worst before it shattered. What got through still retained enough power to launch Graves down the concourse.
He left the ground entirely, sailing back the way they’d come before he hit the floor and skipped off it like a stone across water. The bounce sent him tumbling through the cultist bodies and into an abandoned kiosk, the cheap structure folding around him on impact. But even that wasn’t enough to stop his velocity; the collision spat him sideways into a pillar, where he finally crumpled and went still.
Vale, wrung out to the last drop, folded where he stood and dropped.
Cole juiced his legs and sprinted for Vale at once, scooping the man off the deck and beelining for the back where Graves had landed, the rest of the team lighting the mimic up to peel its attention off his spine the whole way.
Elina broke from cover and fell in alongside him as he ran, reading the play without a word. By the time he reached Graves and set Vale down beside him, clear of the kill zone, she’d already dropped to her knees between the two of them.
“Focus on Graves and Vale. Don’t worry about us.” Cole turned and broke back toward the fight before she could answer.
In the half-minute since he’d carried Vale to safety, the fight had deteriorated like crazy. With the two Slayer Elites out of the picture, the demon had a new project now – Mack. It chased him down the concourse while he backpedaled to stay ahead of it. He didn’t even bother slinging spells at it anymore, either deciding to ration what mana he had left or simply writing the thing off as unkillable.
But a closer look said otherwise. The air around the mimic kept flickering between two states, fogging into a quick condensation on one beat and warping with heat haze on the next.
To what end, though? Only after watching a few more cycles did Cole figure Mack was probably going for thermal fatigue. The principle could do some damn ugly things to hardware, so the idea held water.
The problem was the timetable. Components usually failed only after thousands of cycles, if not millions. And Mack sure as shit had neither the time nor the mana for that.
Cole was just as cooked, but standing there watching wasn’t an option. Like with Graves and Vale, getting hit was inevitable. But this time, Mack didn’t have a Slayer Elite to save him with a barrier.
Even if all Cole had was one cheap spell, if that, he had to do something.