Cole came around to a pair of low voices off to his right. The gunfire had long since died out, replaced by a low hush of conversation. He opened his eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling, shelves positioned around him in tight rows, which meant someone had dragged him into one of the shops around the rat-infested plaza.
“— much worse does it actually get?” Mack asked. “If we run into another boss-level demon, we’re fucked.”
“How many have you taken?” Elina asked him.
“Uhh… three? I think.” He paused. “Yeah. Yeah, pretty sure it was three.”
“Take yet one more, and you shall suffer worse than that.” Cole judged from the turn in her voice that she had gestured his way. “You would do well not to follow his example.”
Yeah, Cole couldn’t argue there. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t his finest call.
“Can confirm,” Cole said, or tried to. It came out as mostly a cough with a word riding the end of it. “Wouldn’t recommend it.”
His hand had already found his rifle where someone had set the weapon down within reach. He planted his other palm, drew his weight onto it, and levered himself upright.
“Whoa – gently, now.” Elina reached him before he had risen far. “You needn’t be up this instant.”
Cole let her ease him back down. “Okay. How long was I out?”
Mack turned his wrist and checked his watch. “Two hours. It’s 5:35 now. Sun’s gonna be up soon.”
Cole grunted in acknowledgment. “Sitrep.”
“We pushed out and cleared the hallways around us while you were down, all the way up to the front of the Macy’s – that’s what we’re calling the department store now, by the way. Didn’t run into a single cultist the whole way. Somehow. The others are holding the perimeter.”
“They didn’t chase?” Cole hadn’t meant it to come out surprised, but it did. After everything those fanatics had thrown at them down here, a clean two hours without one of them poking his head around a corner felt odd.
“Nope. Not one guy.”
Elina spoke up from where she crouched at his side. “The bombardment, I think. It can scarcely have left them with men enough to spare for a pursuit.”
The theory held up, especially stacked against the body count they’d run up before the demon ever showed. If there was anything left worth saving topside, it stood to reason the cultists had peeled off whatever they had left to go save it.
“How about the rats?” Cole asked.
Mack shook his head. “Didn’t run into them either. Figure they hung back down at the plaza once we locked them out.”
Cole knew damn well it didn’t mean they were totally in the clear. But knowing nothing had come hunting them in the two hours he’d spent flat on his back went a fair way toward settling his nerves. If neither the cultists nor the rats had tracked them this far, odds were good they’d lost the trail entirely.
“How about the Alpha Mimic?”
“The Alpha…” Mack raised an eyebrow, but connected the dots quickly enough. “Oh. That boss demon? Gone as well. Or just licking its wounds, but given the beating it took, I don’t think it’ll come back for more.”
Cole let out a breath. “Well, at least it’s just the plaza to worry about from here on out. How’s our stockpile looking?”
“About a hundred rounds,” Mack said. “All told. Graves and Vale and Elina barely touched their rifles, so we split what they had left across everybody.”
Well, it could be worse. Not by much, granted, but it could be.
“So figuring the cultists are either too busy or done chasing us,” Mack went on, “we should be able to go loud in the tunnels. Against the rats the guns’ll be overkill – the big one included – so there shouldn’t be much to worry about on that front.”
Cole nodded along. It wasn’t the best news he could’ve gotten, but it sure was a long way from the worst. “I think we can work with that. Main concern’s the trip back to the insertion point, then. Once we’ve dealt with the rats, how much do we have left in the tank for anything that crops up on the way in?”
“Not much.” Mack grimaced. “And it’s mana more than ammo. We’re down to three mana potions, and Gracer here”—he tipped his head toward Elina—“doesn’t recommend touching them. On account of, well. Anybody who ODs ends up like you did.”
“Right.”
“My own reserves are not abundant either,” Elina said. “The choice falls to you, then. I may keep what mana remains to me for battle, or expend it upon healing magic in place of the potions. I would not presume to decide the matter for you.”
Cole already knew which way he leaned. He asked anyway – both because she was worth listening to and because moments like this told him things about her no calm debrief ever would.
“What’s your call?”
“Were it mine to make,” she said, “why, I’d keep the mana for the fighting, I think. Our guns thin by the hour, after all. The healing potions we’ve still plenty of, so let us lean on those whilst they last.”
Sound logic, soundly put. That was the answer he’d been hoping to hear – less for the call itself than for the fact she’d arrived at it clean. “Agreed. We’ll do it that way.”
He braced a hand against the shelf and got himself the rest of the way upright, slower this time. “Round up the others. Let’s figure out how we’re getting out of here.”
The others filed out, returning three minutes later with the rest of the team in tow. They gathered around Cole, some folding down onto the floor, others parking themselves on the tables and counters nearby.
Cole pulled the map from his pocket and spread it across his knee.
“Soon as we’re clear of the subway, we pop a green flare for the ships and start back along our ingress route.” He drew a finger down the line they’d come in on. “Thing is, with all the noise we kicked up, there’s a real chance the route’s compromised – especially around the old refugee center. Goes one of two ways. Either the cultists posted there got pulled back, in which case we slip wide and make damn sure we don’t run into them coming the other way, or they haven’t budged and they’re sitting on high alert, in which case we route through the surrounding buildings or fight our way past.”
He tapped the spot, holding there a second. “We scout it on approach and call it on site. And if we need support, we’ve still got it – blue for another bombardment, yellow for an extraction team, white for ground reinforcements, red if the whole thing goes sideways. If the route’s too hot even with backup, we drop to plan B, swing for the river quay, and scout that the same way.”
His finger slid on across the map. “Plan C’s the Kestra ruins, plan D’s the hills past them. But after the night those cultists just had, I’d bet good money we never touch either.”
“Sounds good,” Ethan said.
Graves shifted his weight, one hand settling on the pommel at his hip. “When shall we depart?”
“Hmm.” Cole ran his eyes around the group. “You all eaten yet?”
A few heads shook.
“Alright. We push out in twenty. Eat, get off your feet while you’ve got the chance.”
They scattered to it. Cole worked through a ration packet without tasting much of anything, the chewing more chore than relief. By the time their twenty minutes ran out, the team had gathered their gear and turned back toward the department store.
They got as far as the jewelry section before Elina slowed, drifting toward the cases they’d passed on the way in.
“Might we take up the relics now,” she asked, “whilst we’ve the chance of it?”
Cole stopped and gave it a beat of honest thought, looking over the team as he did. Though somewhat recuperated, they all still looked like hammered shit – Graves and Vale especially. The two Slayer Elites were the worst of the lot, putting on a hard front and failing it, their limps bleeding through the tough-guy façade.
“No, not in our condition,” he said. “I’d rather have Ashpoint send a team back once the cultists clear out. Better we let some fresh guys grab it than haul it through a fight all the way home.”
Elina’s mouth tightened, though she let it lie. “As you say.”
They moved on, pushing out through the far doors and back onto the second floor of the commercial plaza they’d circumvented earlier. Two distinct changes hit him right off the bat, one a lot less welcome than the other.
The first was the glaring hole in the ceiling, through which dark storm clouds roiled overhead, pretty damn close to tornado weather back home. Something had blown the fuck out of the roof, reducing it to a pile of rubble in the center of the plaza. Given how close they still were to the cultist base, it was probably a round from the naval barrage gone long.
The second was a lot less obvious than the first, being the absence of something rather than the addition of it – namely, the disconcerting lack of rats. The swarm they’d locked down here had vanished, leaving the plaza to the gnawed carcasses and bones from before.
Where the hell could they have disappeared off to?
Cole swept the floor and the open storefronts, looking for any sign of where the rats had gone – a hole they’d funneled out through, a body, a blood trail, anything. Naturally, he came up with nothing.
Now, being a sensible person and not some dumbass horror movie character, Cole’s first instinct was to nope the fuck out of there. Alas, their options were severely limited. Unless they wanted to risk exiting the same way the Alpha Mimic had, the only way out of the subway was through.
Rather than taking the main staircase, though, Cole decided to play it safer and take the side route – the same detour they’d used to evade the rats that once infested this area. He had the others keep their rifles up in a low-ready state, making sure everyone had physical and mental enhancement running in the background.
Upon reaching the ground floor, they conducted a more comprehensive sweep. Ethan noticed something as soon as they started, indicating a spot to the immediate right of the stairway.
Cole tracked his line of sight down an alley the shadows had all but swallowed whole, to what waited at the end of it – a graveyard of rats, the bodies trailing back toward a stretch of the subway they hadn’t explored yet.
The walls along it told him most of the story before he’d taken a step closer. Clean slashes scored the stone, each one straight enough that it had to have been made by a blade – but who could have been down here? The Alpha Mimic was certainly a possibility, given how it had waited for them by the disabled barrier. The only issue was that the attacks it had demonstrated couldn’t have produced marks like these.
Beyond that, bloodstains streaked the walls alongside the slashes, dried dark and flaked like they’d sat there for years. But that was a logical impossibility; they’d pushed through this same stretch a few hours back and never noticed stains on the walls. Unless every last one of them had somehow looked straight past them, the stains had to be fresh – never mind that they sure as hell didn’t look it. Which begged the question: what happened to all the blood?
The husks below all that represented the final piece of the puzzle – the part that put everything together. They were so shrunken, so collapsed in on themselves, that he didn’t take them for rats at first – not until the shapes resolved and he saw what had been done to them. Every single one was wrung dry, drained flat like an empty juice box.
Shit. The Vampire Lord was down here.
The best Cole could hope for was that it was still busy with the rats and hadn’t gotten around to noticing them yet. He caught his team’s eyes and tipped his head toward the exit, trusting them to read it without him having to put it into words.
They got moving, creeping as quickly and quietly as possible. They’d managed to get halfway across when something tore through the open air ahead of them, moving so fast it was just a dark blur.
Whatever it was, it slammed into Vale faster than anyone could react, even through enhancement magic. The impact ripped him off his feet and hurled him back across the plaza into the far storefronts with the force of a meteor, glass and framing blowing apart as he plowed through shop after shop.
Fuck, could he have survived that? More importantly, what just attacked them?
Cole snapped around immediately, only to find Graves hoisted off the floor on the end of a sword, the blade driven clean through his armor and out the front of his chest.