Page 101 of Elven Lies

No turning back now.

A faint crackle emerged from the comms, which they honestly should have utilized so long ago but had only just recently had the means to order and outfit every Shade team with a fully functional set. Then Zane’s voice murmured through the comms in Rebecca’s ear.

“Breach team in position. We’re ready when you are. Only two guards.”

“When they both reach the widest point in their routes,” Maxwell added, “one on the west side, the other on the east, we’ll bring the Breach Team’s cover. Alpha Team, prepare for a full frontal assault on my mark.”

“Copy that,” Ben replied.

Then every team counted down the tense seconds as the two guards on foot patrol met in the middle of their routes directly in front of the warehouse’s centered entrance, waiting for them to diverge in opposite directions again.

Rebecca watched diligently, aware of the rest of her team out here waiting for the right moment. Beside her, Maddie let out a slow, shaky sigh, but at least her borrowed weapon had stopped trembling.

Blue Hells, could these patrol guards move any slower?

Their footsteps offered the only sound in the darkness. Then, once they inched ever closer to the farthest point on their route and stopped to search the quiet night, it was time. The western guard turned around to begin the slow pass back toward the center.

“Alpha Team!” Maxwell’s voice crackled through the comms. “Give ‘em all you got. Move!”

The tree line surrounding the front of the warehouse exploded in a flurry of unleashed battle magic and augmented weapons fire. A churning, bright purple swirl of electrifying light barreled straight for the guard Rebecca and her team had so diligently watched and sent him flying backward toward the building.

His scream cut off the second he thumped against the warehouse’s outer wall with a metallic clang of his body against the corrugated steel siding, the sound of which disappeared beneath the erupting chaos.

Feeling Maxwell at her side and hoping Maddie and the other volunteers would follow closely, as instructed, Rebecca leapt to her feet with the rest of alpha team spread out along the tree line and moved in. Firing her weapon at the dirt inches from the warehouse wall, she scanned the area for movement.

If it hadn’t been for the civilians held in that warehouse, she would have peppered the building with live rounds. But thismission was more delicate than most. It wouldn’t do anyone any good if the magicals they’d come to liberate got caught in the crossfire.

The darkness blazed with multicolored lights from streaming magitek weapons fire and battle magic flying from open hands—orange lightning bolts, silver darts like daggers, green flame, and sizzling blue funnels cracking into dirt and walls.

One of the warehouse’s mounted floodlights buzzed and popped with a deafening crack before the light went out and the busted glass scattered into the dirt.

As Alpha Team pressed forward by the second, firing non-stop as the distraction Bravo needed to get to the prisoners, a loud, clicking boom echoed through the night.

The strategically placed floodlights filled the front of the warehouse with a blinding blaze, and a blaring alarm rose and fell three times before cutting out. By then, Harkennr’s forces stationed at the warehouse already spilled out of the building to return fire and defend their base.

Rebecca’s instincts took over, and she stopped thinking about what was happening and why they were here. She entered the fray like a soldier, like a sharply honed blade forged and crafted for a single purpose. Nothing else existed.

The warehouse’s front doors flew open with a bang to let out a streaming surge of enemy targets, armed and already firing their weapons the second they stepped outside.

On the east side, a garage door opened, clunking and clanging on its automatic mechanisms before someone sent a brilliant burst of crackling yellow augmented weapons fire straight into the door. The attack fried the entire system with a burst of yellow-brown smoke. The garage door shuddered to a grating halt with only three feet of open space above the ground.

But not before half a dozen Harkennr soldiers squeezed themselves underneath to enter the battle.

Rebecca fired round after round from her augmented assault rifle as enemy targets streamed toward her from various exits around the warehouse. She didn’t see faces or races or the weapons her opponents operated or what type of magic they used.

She only saw the battle, the enemy, and her operatives—the constant movement around the battlefield like a living game board, each piece moving in real time with far more deadly stakes than a game of Xaharí chess.

She only saw herself against the evil Harkennr’s forces represented and carried out even here at the warehouse.

She saw her need to win and to deliver a massive blow to the sadistic warlock she’d believed she’d left behind in her old life forever. The only half-buried piece of her past against which she could physically fight and for a purpose beyond saving her own skin.

Bodies fell everywhere beneath the chaos. Shouted orders rose above the intensifying whine of magitek weapons powering up, the crackling hiss of battle magic careening through the air, the crackling colors of magical light contrasting with both the darkness beyond the battle and the blindingly bright floodlights illuminating the violence everywhere she looked.

All the noises echoed back to her through the comms should have been a distraction but somehow weren’t. Hearing the screams of the enemy falling there, desperately barked orders to act against the assault, the confusion and frustration as Harkennr’s soldiers tried to pin down the Shade teams to hit them hardest, all echoing back to her through the comms as well as across the night air only made her feel that much more connected to her operatives.

As if she’d finally mastered existence in multiple places at once—standing here firing her own blazing magitek rounds at anything that moved her way but also running across thebattlefield with Ben and his smaller team flanking from the east, or hidden behind the tree line Zane and the rest of the breach team as they waited for their perfect moment to infiltrate the warehouse.

Rebecca was everywhere with each one of them, all at once, as if it were always meant to be this way, As if this was what she’d been missing and had only now just discovered it in an impromptu assault on Harkennr’s warehouse.

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