Chapter Twenty-Nine - Warlocks Unlocks

Explosions were fantastic. They were also sloppy, loud, and governments and corps feared the use of them more than just about any other type of targeted attack, with the possible exception of biological attacks.

It was simple, really. Bombs were indiscriminate. Inaccurate, loud, catastrophically messy, but most of all, indiscriminate.

They were the sign that things had gone horribly wrong with a job. The tool of the novice who didn't care for the art enough, but sometimes that tool was still worth using.

Fortunately, I wasn't planning on using an explosion. I was merely planning to light things on fire in a very rapid, very hot, and very spontaneous way. That wasn't an explosion... technically. It was a conflagration.

"Sharp?" I asked.

"Yes?" Sharp asked. "Jenny looks like she's ready to run across. I told her to wait, but I don't think she will for very long. Yes Jenny, I know you can hear me."

"Never mind that," I said. "I'm about to go loud. Alyssa is... somewhat awake. Once we go loud, the alert will sound out. I'm going to need you to do everything you can to distract the people below. I don't know how we're going to escape here, but hopefully unleashing half a dozen angry warlocks all at once will cause enough chaos to let Alyssa and I slip out."

And if the girl didn't make it? Well, she was a low-priority person. I was a killer, not a hostage rescue specialist.

I padded back into the little ripper section of the room. The man there had turned around and was fishing one of his earbuds out.

He leaned forwards, a frown on his face as he listened to the soft hiss of the oxygen tank emptying. He leaned to the side, and picked up the oxygen mask and gave it a sniff. "What the?" he muttered before reaching over to the bed's LCD and shutting off the oxygen.

Damn. My time was almost up. I still needed something to light this moron up with. Then again... humans could be quite flammable.

I took off running, then leapt up onto the surgery bed. The man blinked, then gasped as I took another jump right at him. He wasn't expecting a sudden cat. He was expecting the lit candle in my mouth even less.

I landed on his face, claws digging into skin to grab a solid grip on the man. That was enough to let me scramble upwards. The candle was dropped right atop his head, dripping wax all over and the lit wick immediately caught on his scruffy, greasy hair.

The man screamed, which was a perfectly natural reaction to getting a cat to the face. Then he discovered that he was on fire, and he forgot all about me the moment I leapt off.

The landing on the floor was pretty harsh. The guy wasn't tall, but it was still the furthest I'd fallen. Fortunately, I still weighed next to nothing, and rather than splatter, I kind of bounced off the ground. I flipped over, then ran at the man.

It was disgusting, but needs must! I reached out and chomped his calf.

He screamed a whole new scream and kicked out, but I was gone already. A bump against the back of his knee was enough to tip him backwards, and just like that he came crashing down onto the floor with a loud wallop.

Perfect! Now he was at my level. I jumped back up to the bed, then grabbed a tool from a rack nearby. A scalpel.

It was small enough to hold in my mouth, and it even had a nice rubber grip to spare my teeth. I fell back to the floor just as he was swatting the last of the fire out of his hair. It wasn't even hard at that point to sneak up to his side and allow the scalpel's sharpness to do most of the work dipping into his exposed neck.

He gasped and slapped a hand over his side even as I dove away from a gush of arterial spray. Some hit me anyway, but it was mostly on my coat. Small mercies.

"What the fuck? What the fuck?" he said rather calmly as he turned around and stumbled to his feet. Then he crashed down to a knee. He was pale, dangerously so.

I knew the signs. He had a minute or two to go. People didn't die instantly, even to a cut as serious as that. But combine it with some serious discombobulation and a bit of fire.

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I ran towards him, then dipped out of the way when he swiped for me. There was blood running down the side of his once-white coat.

Just to be sure, I came in from behind him and stuck the scalpel into his thigh. I used to be an expert at finding the femoral artery, but it was tougher when going at it with my mouth. Still, I stuck the knifepoint in, and he helped by smacking it.

This man was done, and so was I. I jumped back onto the bed, then paused for a moment. My heart was racing madly, and I could feel the drain of tiredness pulling me down. The trip up here, this fight... I wasn't quite ready for all that.

"Enemy down," I said. "I'm going to check on Alyssa. Tell Jenny to have her car ready for a quick escape. If... when we make it to ground level, we're going to have to get out of the area quickly."

"Got it!" Sharp said.

"And Sharp... it's possible that I won't be able to save her. If that happens, you're going to have to let Jenny charge in on her own. Find any excuse to break free and get away. I'm stealthy enough to find my way out of here later, once things have calmed down."

"O-oh," Sharp said. "Okay."

I was about to return to the room with the cages when I remembered. The keys! Right, there'd been a reason why I killed that man.

I ran back, found him bleeding out on the floor, and carefully made my way into his pocket to pull out a ring covered in keys. They had small plastic tags with numbers on them, numbers that corresponded to the cages in the room.

A few of the warlocks were properly awake now. The bear guy looked like he was finding his own way out, a foot pressed against the door and his back against the opposite wall of the cage, the muscles in his legs were bulging and the entire cage was stressing.

I shook my head, which had the effect of making the keys jingle. Then I ran to Alyssa's cage. She was blinking herself awake. She looked... slightly better. More blood in her face, more life in her eyes.

The keys caught her attention, and then she stared at me for a long moment. "Sharp's cat?" she asked.

I couldn't talk to her, and I didn't want to. Instead, I moved my head into the cage and spat out the key-ring.

Alyssa grabbed it with a trembling hand, then fumbled through the keys until she found one that matched the number above her cage. It took an eternity for her to get the key slotted in and the door unlocked, and when it was, she practically fell out of the cage.

The other warlocks started to call out for her, then there was a loud banging crash as the bear warlock finally kicked the door in. "Calm your tits," he snapped. "Don't need the morons hearing us. Girl, get the next cage open."

Alyssa blinked and seemed almost ready to protest on reflex alone, but she nodded and stumbled over to the next cage.

My job here was mostly done, so I did the clever thing and made myself scarce. I hid in the shadows, aware that a few warlocks had gotten a good look at me, but they weren't making a fuss.

Alyssa opened two doors before the keys were taken from her by a lithe man with a large fox tattoo across his entire arm. He was a good deal faster than Alyssa about opening the remaining cages. Which left a room filled with a dozen warlocks, all linked to different and disparate eidolons.

"Well?" the bear man said. "I for one don't plan on staying here to die. You chumps can follow me or sit here and wait to be shoved in a cage again."

"Gimme a minute," a woman said. She started to mutter something, and with a snap of her fingers a crown of yellowish feathers appeared around the heads of everyone in the room, myself included. I almost batted at mine before they faded away

I blinked. I had gotten so used to the constant droning sensation that enveloped the entire mega building that its absence was almost a surprise.

The fox guy soon had balls of fire hovering around him, and the bear man ripped the handcuffs off of another warlock's wrists with far too much ease.

There was a very real possibility that this group in particular were exactly the kind of people that could make a desperate escape out of a tower like this.

***