Jones steadied his heart with slow even breaths. He could do this. He’d done this before. Okay. Not this, but similar. There were places where he’d been deployed where the monsters ran in packs and overran smaller villages. Or demons had escaped and in an orgy of freedom made things unpleasant for the locals.

Heck, even plain old magical creatures could be a problem if they were big, hungry, or ornery enough.

And that’s what the Magicorps trained for. Days like this when magic wasn’t a helpful aid to civilization bestowing boons of knowledge and safety, and instead, was a bitch. That’s right. Magic was being a sonofabitch today and someone had to kick some monsters in the mother effing teeth. It might as well be the Magicorps. Couldn’t leave it up to the civies, or worse yet, the jar heads.

Yeah!

This, this was just a regular old day at the office for Jones. Not like the lazy lying around the museum shit he’d been tasked with since his transfer to New York. Jones performed another quick scan of the battlefield – this was definitely a battlefield, or it would be soon at least – and chose what he thought was the most immediate target.

Kyle seemed to have a radius on his lightning bolts of not more than about a hundred feet. And he was only aiming forward of his line of sight. Jones focused on the monsters who were parallel with them or slightly behind Kyle, the ones who had been missed in the first salvos. There were three currently under fire from the swat officers behind them, but their plain chemical projectiles weren’t packing enough punch to do the kind of damage necessary to put them down.

Jones lined up the sight of his semi-automatic rifle with the first monster he’d targeted. A smooth squeeze of the trigger made the familiar crack of a chemical projectile weapon. The monster practically ignored the impact thinking at first it was one of the police’s ineffectual bullets. Until it noticed the round had not only penetrated its body, but that the alchemical components within the round were reacting.

Alchemical rounds could do a lot of things. It was alchemy after all, and alchemy was a broad and diverse school of magic. Alchemy was used just as frequently to create, heal, or modify, as it was just for destruction. The ammunition that Jones was using had been mixed to do some awful things. Or maybe it was meant for fighting awful things because the wound in the huge metallic class three wolf monster began smoking.

Then it began flaming, jets of white-hot fire spitting out of the hole in the thing’s chest. Probably some kind of magnesium concoction with that coloring. Which some might try to argue was just a chemical reaction until they saw what happened next. The monster began whining. Shaking, and pawing at itself in an attempt to remove the burning mass of alchemical reaction that was not so slowly consuming it from within.

When it began howling and running blindly, Jones turned his attention to the next target. He still caught the monster rebounding off when it hit the wall of a building and chuckled at its misfortune. The lay twitching until it popped with small explosion that sent the organic metal guts flying a short distance from the creature.

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He kept up firing short burst of rounds into one monster after another, carefully sighting on the creatures and secure in the knowledge that the alchemical rounds would only react with the mutated flesh of the monsters and not with anything else if he missed. While that was a safety measure enchanted into all alchemical ammunition, it didn’t change the fact that he was firing bullets in a city. If he missed, the speed of the weapon firing might just send a bullet through a wall and injure an innocent person if he wasn’t careful. Bayonets, like the enchanted one on this rifle, were distracting to people who weren’t familiar with them. That was probably why Kyle hadn’t taken one of the weapons himself. Jones had been watching the young warlock surreptitiously, partly situational awareness, and partly just because he was so damned curious what the kid would break out next.

But the lead creatures in the charging horde were getting too close for Kyle to continue fighting the way he had with mass area lightning bolt dispersions. When he saw Kyle calling down another bolt of lightning that was going to be far too late to do any good, Jones was afraid he might have to intervene. A class two manifestation that looked like it used to be a really expensive sports car was rushing forward on stumpy rubber and steel legs. It was nearly upon Kyle and nearly crushed him as he waited for another bolt of lightning to fall from the sky.

It was going to be too late. Even if lightning did travel at the astounding speed of two hundred seventy thousand miles per hour, the spell was not going to strike fast enough to save the warlock of the Archivist from being crushed from several thousand pounds of mutated metal flesh and exoskeleton. Incongruously, Kyle charged the oncoming beast, launching himself – wand, open book on palm and all – up onto the monster. Jumping and running up the hood-head to leap from its highest point over the open convertible top to catch the bolt he was summoning. It coalesced into a long shaft of buzzing light shaped somewhere between a spear and a sword.

The bolt grounded in the pulsating cream leather interior of the monster with a dramatic shower of sparks erupting around the pair. Like a pole vaulter hanging in mid air from the top of a rod of lightning Kyle bore his weight down the shaft extending from his wand, piercing deep into the back of the beast. His pillar of electricity shrank as it discharged until he was left with something the size of a billy club or a nightstick.

Kyle awkwardly clambered out of the interior of the transformed vehicle, one hand holding a hot current lengthening the reach of his wand by about two feet. The depleted energy weapon glowed a dull red, fluctuating slowly. For his part, Kyle’s face wore a look of complete disgust as the formerly sumptuous leather interior of the luxury vehicle was now gooey with some kind of slimy biological fluid. It coated his legs with slime that made his trousers stick to his calves and shins.

“Ohhhh….Gross. Shi – ” Another several thousand pound monster nearly collided with the warlock as he dodged backwards with a yelp. “Oh, no you don’t.” His makeshift cutlass swung and began hacking parts off the vehicle-form. The blade grew brighter, stronger, larger, and more refined with each swing he took. Its color gradually going up the light spectrum as Kyle fed it more of the ambient magic from around him. From the dull red of hot metal, the sword of captured lightning changed to orange, then yellow, and green, all in the neon brightness of a storm’s captive might.

Sword and warlock became a swirling mass of stop-motion light trails and phantom images. He ran from one encounter to another hacking, cutting, and mutilating monsters to incapacitation. A gathering Roy-G-Biv of destructive force blazing brighter and brighter into the upper echelons of visible light, bright enough to make even the sunny day seem dim.