Page 102 of Elven Lies

When a blaze of orange grew in her periphery, Rebecca leaped aside to narrowly avoid the full-body hit from the blazing battle magic. She stumbled sideways but hardly felt the sting of the attack that had clipped her shoulder at the last second.

Without thinking, she spun and fired a heavy stream of automatic rounds at her attacker, lighting up the space around her with violent crimson strobes, without a single concern as to how long her weapon would serve her before it jammed or otherwise failed.

Without any thought for the ache in her shoulder or the renewed blaze of pain there when she spun around and raised her weapon toward the next enemy bearing down on her.

“Breach Team to Alpha.” Zane’s called through the comms. “We have our opening. Moving in.”

Through the blazing, crackling, exploding chaos around the warehouse, Rebecca caught sight of her breach team, with Zane at the lead, racing from the eastern tree line in tight formation, weapons raised and prepared to fire only at those who got in their way.

They headed straight for the partially open garage door and disappeared one by one as they slid beneath the three-foot opening to get inside and head straight for the civilian prisoners.

So far so good. For as little preemptive planning as her teams had had for this operation, they’d been surprisingly successful in the first few minutes.

Knocking down as many of the dozens of enemy targets still streaming out of the warehouse to enter the fight, Rebecca moved closer to the building, taking the battle toward any of Harkennr’s sick puppets who hadn’t yet brought it to her.

And they just kept coming. Thankfully, the number of individuals stationed here wasn’t nearly as large as those manning the old prison’s security and defenses. These magicals were disorganized and scattered, much slower to react.

But as the fighting continued, Rebecca realized just how many enemy combatants were here—how many magicals Harkennr had already gotten his hooks into in Chicago alone. She hadn’t given the sadistic warlock or his powers of persuasion nearly enough credit.

A screaming half-giant barreled straight toward her, tossing his empty weapon aside in the process, arms outstretched and features contorted in a mindless snarl. Rebecca had to put four high-powered rounds into the guy before he finally dropped two feet in front of her, then she spun to zero in on the next most immediate threat.

That was when the low, sputtering whine of heavy augmented assault machinery split through the constant din of screaming opponents and snarling magicals and the crackle and hiss of attack magic and augmented artillery.

The familiar cadence of that low whine—quickly rising in pitch with a vibrating force she soon felt in her teeth—made her stop. Twice before now, she’d encountered this same powerful, deadly magitek force preparing to unleash itself on her and her operatives.

Why hadn’t anyone told them this was part of what they faced?

Her teams hadn’t had the time or the resources to efficiently reconnoiter the warehouse and its resources, and how would half a dozen terrified, furious, and vengeful newly liberatedcivilians know about the deadly high-powered weaponry in possession of this warehouse? They were civilians, not soldiers.

Plus, until now, the enemy forces stationed here likely hadn’t had cause to employ such a weapon. But they were employing it now.

As Rebecca scanned the warehouse’s exterior, searching for the source of that familiar whine powering up an insanely deadly machine against which her teams had barely stood a chance in the past, a spray of magitek rounds in her direction disrupted her focus. She sidestepped the blast, turned on her attacker, and took him down with a stream of automatic fire, which gained her another few seconds of searching.

A heavy metallic click and grind came from above. She looked up to see the light glinting off metal as it moved on the roof.

Another enormous and arguably deadly high-powered assault weapon on a swiveling mount, this time settled on the warehouse roof and manned by a Harkennr soldier in black sweats and a ski mask. He tugged on the weapon’s steering as the powering whine rose louder with a squeal of metal hinges turned sharply in new directions.

Then the weapon’s operator heaved down on the controls against the swiveling mount, bringing the weapon’s barrel closer and closer to centering its mark on the battle below.

A blazing orange light bloomed in the center of the cannon’s barrel, growing ever brighter and deadlier as the weapon’s system powered up toward full capacity.

“Heavy artillery on the roof!” Rebecca shouted, hoping her teams picked it up through the comms amidst all the other deafening chaos of battle. “Take it down!”

“Tig!” Maxwell shouted, though Rebecca couldn’t tell if she heard him more through the comms or somewhere beside her. “Target the roof. Get that weapon offline.”

Tig offered no verbal confirmation, but it wasn’t necessary. He responded immediately by refocusing his firepower toward the roof and one more enormous, highly deadly piece of magitek machinery that made any other mission priority for Shade impossible to execute.

Blazes of strobing purple light streaked toward the top of the warehouse, buzzing and cracking against the edge of the roof and sending crackling bolts of purple across the building’s exterior in quickly successive bursts. Unfortunately, Tig hadn’t yet taken the best position from the ground to accurately reach his new target.

His attacks either fell short or were thwarted by the edge of the roof before they could do any damage. That didn’t stop him from continuing his assault while the operatives around him automatically repositioned themselves to provide cover fire from all sides.

Rebecca’s gut sank like a stone as she watched the rest of it all play out, as if in slow motion. If they couldn’t bring that heavy artillery down in the next few seconds, her teams would be fighting a completely different battle down here just to keep from being obliterated by a high-powered war machine they couldn’t reach.

Then there would be no cover fire for the breach team and all the civilians they’d gone in to recover. There would be no additional firepower to deal with unknown enemy numbers inside the warehouse, not to mention the Harkennr soldiers who’d already joined the battle out front.

They’d really stepped in it with this one. Beyond fighting as hard as they could until no more fighting remained, Rebecca didn’t see any other way out of this.

She couldn’t get to the roof in time, not when their teams on the ground still needed her firepower. Bloodshadow magic was out of the question. It would be seen here from every directionby both her Shade operatives and Harkennr’s forces. No one else among her teams here on the ground could afford to divert their cover fire just to keep Rebecca from taking a deadly hit while she powered up in a seemingly impossible spell no one knew she could perform.

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