Bryce

Lysc was pissed. Dezra and Mazi were dead, and Thea was crying over the corpse of their murderer. It wasn’t a good look, and I hadn’t even told her about the bomb yet.

“I can explain in a moment, please just give my nanites some time to heal my throat,” I said. Truthfully, though, I just needed time to come up with some sort of explanation to justify what had just happened.

“Esme thought that Bryce was keeping me against my will, so she came here to kill her and rescue me. She killed Dezra and the human girl, but we got here before she could finish off Bryce and I stabbed her with a soul-destroying sword. You killed her before her soul was gone completely, which saved the backup version so we can reincarnate her in the future.” Lysc stared wide eyed at Thea after her explanation. I wasn’t entirely sure she understood it properly.

Lysc looked at me. “Can we continue with the plan?”

“No, Esme threw the bomb into the jungle. It didn’t detonate, but we’d have to go find it, which could take weeks and that’s assuming it even still works,” I said.

“Can you open the portal?” Lysc asked.

I nodded slowly, not liking where this line of questioning was going.

“Then open it. We’ll go through and kill Rajak ourselves,” Lysc said, as if that wasn’t the craziest thing in the world.

“Rajak is a powerful djinn. You said so yourself, we can’t fight him,” I argued.

“Then we’ll die trying. We can’t fail this mission. Rajak will enlist the aid of the other lords to kill the Drassun pack, and then they’ll hunt you down. It’s better to die trying than it is to die hiding.” She wasn’t wrong. Even if we could escape Drassun without Rajak finding us, we would have the entire Syndicate on our tails.

And who knew? Maybe we could even kill him. One thing was for sure: this was going to be our best chance to do it.

“Okay, but I’ll need to reestablish the pact with Thea first. Without her, we can’t do any of this.”

“Fine, I’ll be downstairs. I’ve got to tell Nikko about his mate. Come and get me when you're ready.” Lysc stepped into the elevator and the doors closed.

I leaned my head against the wall near where I was sitting and sighed. My body ached. Esme had made good on her threat of hurting me and I could feel my nanites working to heal my bruised throat while the broken bones in my right hand were slowly moving back into place. I was lucky Esme wanted to prolong my death, and that Thea got here so quickly. I was starting to think that maybe I wasn’t cut out for this whole life of crime thing.

Thea crawled from where she was kneeling next to Esme’s corpse and sat down to my left. I wrapped my arm around her, pulling her close, and flinching as a few stray shards of bone in my shoulder shifted, but I did my best to ignore the pain.

“This is so fucked,” Thea said.

I let out a hoarse laugh, causing pain to flair in my chest. I think a few of my ribs were broken. “Yeah, that’s one way to put it.”

“I’m so sorry, Bryce. This whole thing is my fault. I should’ve just gone back to Hel the moment Esme threatened you. I could have explained everything, and we could have avoided all of this shit.”

I shook my head. There was no way she could have known that Esme would show up during the mission, and besides, there was no guarantee that Thea could have found Esme before she found me. The succubus was a master of illusion and concealment magic.

From the moment she had gotten my mana signature, this was fated to happen. It was so obvious in hindsight.

“It’s not your fault. Even if you had gone back to Hel, I doubt you’d be able to explain it in time. If it’s anybody’s fault, then it’s mine. I should have known casting all of these mana intensive spells would attract her attention.” I laughed. “And on a fucking nexus point. Of course, Rajak would put the portal on a ley line intersection. It makes it so much easier to travel between planes.”

“I just didn’t know it was her, and Bryce…” Thea started, but trailed off.

“How would you have known?” I asked. “It’s not like you were expecting her to just show up, not here of all places.”

Thea shook her head. Her voice was weak. “Bryce, you don’t understand… I would’ve stabbed her even if I had known.”

“What do you mean?”

Thea gripped my sleeve tightly, and I tightened my embrace. “When I realized our pact broke, I was terrified. I thought something happened to you… and when I saw her hurting you… I didn’t recognize her from behind, but it didn’t matter who she was, I had to kill her. The only thing I could think to do was to punish the person who was hurting the woman that… well, that I love.”

I felt my chest tighten with her confession. Thea and I hadn’t known each other for that long. Maybe two weeks? But we had been through a lot together. I honestly lost count of the number of times she saved my life. She was kind, caring, and mischievous. She made me smile and laugh, and gods, her cooking was amazing.

Sure, it hadn’t been that long, but I was having trouble imagining my life without her, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had fallen in love a long time ago.

“Bryce, usually people respon—” I pivoted from where I was sitting to straddle Thea’s lap, kissing her deeply.

We carefully broke the kiss after a long moment. “I love you, too.”

“Good. I was worried that I misunderstood what that kiss meant.” She was smiling shyly, but flinched as I shifted on top of her. “Please be careful, I still have a bullet wound in my shoulder.”

“You were shot?! Why didn’t you tell me?” I moved off of Thea, just noticing the blood coming from her right shoulder.

“It didn’t seem all that important.”

I stared at her for a moment, mouth agape. “I’m in love with an idiot.”

“Am I at least a heroic idiot? I did save your life.”

I kissed her again, carefully this time. “We should reestablish the pact. We have a job to do, and it’ll help you heal.”

“I was thinking about that, actually. Can we try for twenty percent this time?” she asked.

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“Are you sure?”

That was more than twice the amount I was giving her before. There was no way it wouldn’t give her some amount of mana sickness.

“Yeah, it’ll be rough, but if this djinn is as powerful as we think, then we’re going to need the extra firepower. Besides, I’ve been getting used to your mana, so I think I can take it.”

“Okay, if you’re sure.”

She nodded, So I quickly wrote up the new contract and pushed the illusory scroll over to her. She signed it, causing it to burst into flames, and I felt my mana drain. Thea immediately turned her head and emptied her stomach onto the floor.

~~~~

The portal opened, and gunfire immediately filled the center of the room. Thankfully, we had the foresight to line the walls and not stand directly in front of it.

I started casting a napalm-like fire spell, finished twenty seconds later, and modified it to explode before pouring extra mana into the formation and throwing it through the portal. A jet of flame shot out, followed by silence.

Lysc nodded at me and signaled to her pack to follow her. I joined them, Sora disappeared, and Thea flanked the group. She was still woozy from the mana sickness, but said she was good to fight.

I was maintaining a half dozen support spells on Sora, powerful shield spells on the three of us, and the portal to Rajak’s manor. It was pushing the limit of what I could concentrate on. I was going to have to reserve as much mana as I could for when we found Rajak, which meant I would be mostly useless until then.

I was regretting not buying some sort of sidearm or rifle along with the proper training programs that would let me use them. I really needed a way to fight that didn’t require me to cast.

Stepping through the portal was like stepping into another world. The square courtyard was still burning from the spell I had thrown, but it looked like it had been well maintained before that.

There was a brick wall behind the portal, with three doorways to our left, right, and directly in front of us.

Low garden walls and burning shrubs surrounded us. I counted twenty-eight dead Syndicate members arranged in a half circle around the portal. Most had been behind cover of some sort, but I had accounted for that with my fire spell by allowing it to flow around barriers.

The sky was pitch black except for a bright point in the far-distance that had six streams of purple light lazily drifting towards it. This caused the manor to light up in a purple glow that caused me to relax unnaturally despite the tense situation. I stopped concentrating on the portal spell, closing it behind us.

Sora startled me by appearing nearby.

“If it’s laid out like I suspect, then the door to our left should take us deeper into the manor. Travel down that hallway, then go left at the end. Mother always had a flair for the dramatic and if Rajak is anything like her, then he’ll be in the receiving room waiting for us.” Sora disappeared again after they finished the explanation.

“You heard the fox,” Lysc said. We started moving down the hallway and made it nearly halfway before Robby cried out in pain. He collapsed onto the ground with a blade directly below the base of his neck. It was nearly identical to the pair that Sora used.

Everybody stopped moving and grouped tighter together. Weapons scanning the hallway.

“What the fuck was that?” Patches asked.

“Agents. Stay sharp, but don’t trust your eyes,” Daria said.

We stood there in silence for a long moment, waiting for anything to happen. At first, nothing did. Then suddenly there was a blade mere centimeters from my left eye. It was frozen in place, stuck in my shield. I couldn’t move, held by a magical force, as I felt the dagger slowly being pushed toward me.

Sora appeared with one of their daggers held out in front of them, and a line of blood following along the edge of the blade.

“Drop it,” they warned.

There was no response, and the force behind the knife didn’t relent. Sora swiped away from themself and the corpse of a woman fell to the ground with her throat slit. She was wearing black leather armor, identical to Sora’s set.

“There are more, but you won’t be able to hear or smell them. You’ll have to feel the vibrations of their movement in the air,” Sora said before disappearing again.

How in the hells was I supposed to “feel the vibrations of their movement”? That must have made more sense to Lysc because she fired her rifle at a wall down the hall and the corpse of a man collapsed into a heap. All hells broke loose after that.

A dagger appeared in Nikko’s shoulder, but he just kicked the air in front of him before firing at the ground.

Daria ducked quickly before punching her fist through the stomach of a now-visible elven agent. She then swiped down and to her left, which flung the now corpse against the wall, and freed her blood covered arm from its stomach.

I felt the air move half a meter in front of me. I reached out to grab the agent and touched something for a moment, but felt a vice-like grip wrap around my wrist. The invisible agent held me in place as I tried pulling away.

“Bad move,” I heard a gruff voice say from somewhere in front of me. I felt a blade pass through the center of my right forearm. It had somehow completely bypassed my shield.

I cried out, and the grip disappeared as Thea kicked the still invisible agent through the far wall. If the blood left behind was any sign, he hadn’t survived.

“Are you okay?” Thea asked. I nodded, pulling the blade out of my arm as I reached into my pouch for a potion of healing. I poured half of it onto the open wound before drinking the rest.

Sora appeared nearby and tossed me a vial of yellow liquid. “Drink this; they poison their blades, and while the others would probably survive, it’s most likely lethal for you and me.”

I uncorked the vial and downed the liquid. It was viscous and felt like I had just swallowed a slug, I nearly gagged. The oily substance had coated the inside of my mouth and the taste wouldn’t go away.

“Stay with her, Thea. If she gets a fever, let me know.” Sora disappeared again.

The battlefield had calmed down. Everybody was breathing heavily, but nobody was willing to move just yet.

“Is that it?” Nikko asked.

As if prompted by the question, Lysc roared and a pair of daggers appeared sticking out of the sides of her lower abdomen. She spun around swiping furiously but hit nothing.

“Come out, you coward!” Lysc yelled. A cut appeared across her chest. She swiped with her claws at the air in front of her and a trail of blood backed away from where she was standing. Lysc didn’t relent, dropping her rifle and leaping forward, she landed heavily atop the invisible agent.

Lysc bit down and there was an audible cracking of bones, followed by a muffled wet scream as the agent died.

“That was probably the last of them, at least for now,” Sora said. “There’s still the lord’s guard, but they’d stick close to Rajak.”

“Great,” Lysc said as she pulled both of the daggers out of her sides. There was a splash of blood as they exited, but the wounds were already closing.

The hallway was a bloodbath. There were seven corpses from the agents, which made eight in total, including the one Thea kicked through the wall.

Robby was dead on the ground, Nikko’s shoulder wound was still bleeding, and even Rashka had cuts across her back and shoulders. The group was in bad shape.

“Heal what you can while we move; we aren’t stopping,” Lysc said. “This fight is far from over.”

The hall ended in a T-junction and we took the left corridor. It opened up to a large room with a high ceiling. Sitting on an oversized throne on the far side of the room was Rajak.

The djinn had dark skin and a shaved head. He was wearing flowing blue robes made from a sheer fabric and a smile that gave his face a distinctly punchable quality.

There were four other people in the room, each armed with heavy body armor that made it difficult to discern their genders or races, and tactical rifles that looked like they could do some actual damage.

They flanked the throne on either side in pairs. Even with their heavy armament, I found it hard to believe that they were Rajak’s only guard, especially considering how difficult it had been to detect the agents in the hallway.

“I’m surprised you came here yourself, dog,” Rajak spoke with a deep voice that reverberated across the large room. “I half-expected you to hide with your tail between your legs while you sent others to do your dirty work for you.”

“I’m no coward, Rajak. I’ve come for your head and the territory you stole,” Lysc growled.

“It doesn’t matter why you came.” The djinn waved one of his hands dismissively as he sat back in his oversized chair. “You’ll die just the same.”

Daria and Rashka stepped forward on either side of Lysc and grabbed at the air, slamming invisible enemies to the ground before they could attack the pack alpha.

Rajak stood from his chair and shouted, “You useless imbeciles! Kill them now!”