The force of the explosion and subsequent collision with a concrete sidewalk might’ve been enough to knock out a normal human, but as a cultivator, Isaac simply walked it off. Well, he had to crouch-walk, since fireballs and lightning bolts and gunfire ripped down the avenue. A well-placed Rddhi-fueled explosive javelin took out a nearby fire hydrant, sending a jet of water shooting up into the air. Reed frowned when part of it sprayed her face as she slipped into a small alleyway on the nearest side of the restaurant. Isaac went to follow her, only to see Coleridge mesmerized in place, lip quivering, hands trembling, as he sat in a daze on the sidewalk. With a sigh, Isaac grabbed him by the back of the collar and dragged him to safety next to Reed.
Isaac took stock of the situation. They were along a main avenue that featured rows of storefronts on one side, a row of trees in the middle of the wide street, and then a public park and garden on the other side. The trio of Naval cultivators currently occupied a narrow alley on one side of the restaurant; the exploded van took out a huge chunk of the other side. Another van had been parked further down the street, this one in front of a jewelry store. Isaac braced for impact when that van exploded as well, sending glass and plaster out onto the street while a series of bright lights like camera flashes erupted upwards.
Other vans did the opposite of exploding: staying as they were, parked on the garden side of the street. Attackers in quasi-military uniforms - mottled fatigues mixed with scarves and sneakers - leapt out from the vans and attacked anything in sight. The trees along the avenue caught on fire while a big cultivator swung a giant axe that chopped a statue in the garden at the ankles. The expression on Chief Amien’s stoic, metallic face didn’t change as the statue crumbled.
The sight of fleeing civilians made Isaac’s hands clammy. Many had been walking along the sidewalks when the vans exploded, reducing them to charred husks littering the concrete and asphalt like broken dolls. Some, despite being charred husks, were still alive and cried with outstretched, burned hands. Those who were driving on the street either peeled away to safety or were caught when a cultivator slammed a foot on the ground and sent a solid wall of dirt and sand erupting through the street, forming a makeshift roadblock. Drivers were then shot in their seats by roving bands of attackers, along with any passengers inside with them. Pedestrians in the garden scrambled away, only to get caught up in huge fireballs then sent falling bodies mixing among bloodied flowers.
“Praise the Skyfather,” Isaac swore. “They’re killing anyone they can find.”
This new sort of combat made him feel uneasy. Every fight so far had been against somebody with principles, unusual as they may be. Witnessing the mass execution of civilians made him share a glance with Reed, who looked as equally bewildered as he did. Isaac calmed himself and furrowed his brow, trying to deduce what organization these terrorists belonged to, since focusing on mysteries helped keep all those negative emotions down. Out on the street, the attackers yelled in foreign accents, the majority of which sounded Lawrencite. But, at the end of the day, the origins of the attackers didn’t really matter at the moment - stopping them was the only fact that counted right now.
A counterattack was already in progress. All the plains-clothes Naval operatives who had been following the trio now revealed themselves, sending out large attacks and blasts of cultivation at the terrorists. Several attackers fled inside the shops, while those on the street took cover behind the burning trees. Isaac watched the situation, trying to figure out the best place to launch his own attack, when there was a sharp crack of a sniper rifle in the distance. The head of a Naval agent advancing up the street suddenly turned into a fine red mist.
“Stop it!” Coleridge screamed, placing his hands over his ears. “Stop it, stop it!”
Isaac and Reed ignored him. She scratched her ear in thought, trying to locate where the sound of the sniper fire came from. Isaac couldn’t pinpoint it himself, and his surroundings provided many likely spots for a sniper’s nest: the three-story buildings on the storefront side of the street, distant towers on the other side of the garden, thousands of rooftops with fire escapes and ventilation ducts for cover all around this part of the city.
But with her sound powers, Reed nodded in recognition. “Down the street,” she said, pointing beyond a row of houses until, mixed among several mid-rise apartment buildings, stood a white-painted church for the Skyfather complete with a belltower that offered an open view of the battle below. As if confirm it for them, there was a brief flash as the rifle within the belltower fired, catching a Naval cultivator in the shoulder before he could slip behind a bench in the park for cover.
“Let’s take them down,” Isaac said. Taking the main street would be suicide - they would need to navigate the maze of alleys and sidestreets behind the storefronts to get to the church. Judging from a new wave of screams in that direction, the terrorists had expanded their attack. Isaac clenched his fist at the sound and rose to his feet.
A hand clasped his sleeve. Coleridge, still sitting, used his other arm to hug his knees. His blue Naval cap was stained red with a civilian’s blood and he sputtered as he spoke.
“You guys, you guys can’t just leave me here!”
“Then come fight,” Reed simply answered, rising to her feet to join Isaac.
“I can’t,” Coleridge mumbled. “I’m not a fighter. I’m not an officer, either. I’m just a guy who had a well-connected parent who got me a cushy job. I didn’t sign up for this!”
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A couple of months ago, Isaac might’ve taken a moment to calm Coleridge down, give him a rousing speech, but civilians were dying all around him and, after all the combat he had been through, his patience was running thin.
“Then stay here,” Isaac ordered. “Take cover and try not to die-”
A van pulled up to the front of their alleyway. Reed was already swinging her sword when the side door opened, revealing a burly Zhanghai samurai wielding a massive longsword of his own. The eyes behind his goggles widened as the sound wave approached - he closed the door just enough to block some of the attack, but the force was strong enough to blow the door inwards and send the samurai crashing through the other side of the van onto the street. The driver raised a pistol, but Isaac sent him through the windshield with an electric blast.
Despite it all, Reed grinned and twirled her sword. “Beating up samurai. Feeling unstoppable. Just like old times.” Another man jumped out from the van; his attempt to shoot off a fireball was interrupted by another sound wave. While he crumpled, the samurai from before emerged from the other side of the van, red energy running through his sword.
“I’ll take him on,” Reed said. “Isaac, you go after the sniper. Coleridge, try not to piss yourself.”
“I’M TRYING!” Coleridge protested, scrambling away to hide behind a dumpster as Reed engaged the samurai. For a moment, Isaac got flashbacks to the last time he left Reed to fight alone - her duel with Zou Mei that ended with the Zhanghai woman getting bisected through the torso. It had been a tough fight, but Reed had won it, so Isaac decided to trust her now, just as he did before. He turned and ran, leaving her to the fight, as he headed down the surrounding backstreets.
These weren’t like your normal slum alleyways. This was a rich downtown district, which meant that the cobblestone paths were regularly cleaned, the buildings looked pristine, and small shops sold tourist goods and little knick-knacks alongside astrology and spiritual goods. College students and young couples could be found here, many who worked in finance and big business - perhaps with the Bank of Arcadia, for instance. Their wealth did them little good as they lay dead in the street, blood running through the cobblestones. Isaac felt an ever greater urge to make the bastards pay upon seeing sights like empty strollers and burning storefronts.
A pile of corpses were strewn in front of a sand roadblock thrown up on a wider sidestreet. Smaller walls, up to a man’s waist, were used as cover for the terrorists, and they crouched behind these as they launched ranged attacks against Isaac as he emerged around a bend at the front of the street. Isaac spun out of the way of a fireball and slammed a fist into a nearby telephone pole; it cracked and fell, the long piece of wood slamming right onto the head of a terrorist, like taking a hammer to a watermelon, before smashing several blocks of sand. The snapped wires kicked up flares of electricity, making several terrorists recoil and hesitate. Isaac used the sand and electricity and general chaos to make it down the street, arriving just as the terrorists recovered.
The first man had a machine pistol, but Isaac didn’t care. A strong roundhouse knocked the gun out of the man’s hands, and Isaac followed up with a punch to the gut that went inside the man’s guts. As he crumpled, a second terrorist attacked with a baseball bat lined with jagged nails. Isaac sidestepped it, but his follow-up punch wasn’t as effective since the man wore some sort of body armor. Another terrorist tried to grab Isaac from behind; he rolled out of the way, right as the armored man swung his bat. The wood and nails cracked the third terrorist’s skull open, and then Isaac avoided the armor by backfisting the man in the back of the neck. All three terrorists lay on the ground; Isaac collected the first man’s pistol. When another squad of terrorists emerged onto the street, alerted by the fallen telephone wire, Isaac simply raised a hand and gunned them all down.
The pistol clicked empty, so Isaac tossed it away and punched a hole through the last sand wall. Despite remaining unscathed so far, there was a bad taste in his mouth all the same. Too many innocents had already died, and for what? Isaac still wasn’t sure what the terrorists’ goals were. Since this was a rich district, it was presumably something about wealth and big business. But anybody could get pissed off about wealth inequality. A group with this many attackers and supplies had to be well-organized, well-trained, and well-funded.
Restorationists? The Knights? Someone else entirely?
Whatever the case, Isaac ran through the sand wall and sprinted to the end of the cobblestone street. He then ducked into an alleyway; the wooden church loomed up ahead, just on the other side of a large courtyard that happened to be crawling with terrorists. A small brick wall ringed the interior section of the courtyard, a patrol of attackers scanning the area around them cautiously. Up above, the sniper rifle rang out again; Isaac imagined another body falling in the distance.
Isaac could definitely take out the patrol. The problem would be making it across the open space of the outer courtyard to the inner section since there was absolutely no cover. Guess I’ll have to study a shield Art when all of this is done, he decided.
But for right now, he breathed steadily and tried to figure out the best course of action. The terrorists came in a van - perhaps a precise electric blast could trigger an explosion. Perhaps he could take an even wider route, around the terrorists, but that would cost him precious time.
And then the answer appeared back down the street, back the way he came. Even though his eyes were bloodshot and hollow-looking, Coleridge ran up the cobblestones, doing his best to keep a lid on his blubbering. He nearly cried out in shock when Isaac yanked him into the alleyway, but Isaac muffled his mouth with a strong hand until the officer pulled himself together.
“You’re right, Isaac,” Coleridge admitted, looking at his boots. “I might be craven. Even a coward. Just a guy with family members in high places. But you’re right. Just like you told me. It doesn’t matter how I got this job - because right now, it is my job, so I gotta do what I gotta do. My job is to protect innocents as a uniformed officer of the law, so that’s what I’m gonna do.”
He was starting to ramble - and Isaac actually didn't say anything like that in the first place - so Isaac put a firm hand on his shoulder and directed his attention to the courtyard. “Coleridge, you got earth powers, right?”
“Yeah, it’s similar to Osip’s. Nowhere near as strong, though.”
“That’s alright,” Isaac said. He eyed the squad of terrorists up ahead. “Coleridge, here’s what we’re gonna do.”