12:30 PM September 14th

Manhattan Subways

“All full up, Camina. We’re good to go.” Jim called out to her as he peeked his head around the end of the last subway car and headed toward her.

“All right. Hop on.” Her voice seemed light. Maybe tinged with exhaustion that was being held at bay with too many stamina potions. Underneath it though, the journalist could hear the seething rage that the soldier was feeling. Rage that had been boiling off her aura since she’d run into the group of Magicorps soldiers who had delivered the message about Anna being evacuated to her ‘home’ out of the city by Army personnel.

Oh, yeah. The Harbinger was pissed off. She sure as shit had immediately worked her way to the central command and tried to get answers. Their response? No one knew where Anna had been taken. And that smarmy punk in charge tried to pretend that he didn’t know where Kyle was and hadn’t seen him at all either. It had taken Jim all of five minutes to locate at least ten different monster suppression teams that had worked with Kyle over the course of the afternoon and evening. So, yeah!

Jim was pissed off too.

Camina was The Last Line. And this, this was how their government treated her and her family?

She’d been taken off monster suppression duty and reassigned to evacuation duty. Evacuation duty. Not guarding evacuees or clearing the way for them. No! Actual. Evacuation. Duty.

There were thousands of people from out of state and surrounding cities who’d been trapped on Manhattan Island when the ambient magic levels exploded into the purple – and in some places pink. Now those people were being sent home. Not on busses because a few of he bridges had been damaged in the fighting. But via subway tunel under the river.

Which was fucking stupid because the alchemical waterproofing material that kept the subways from taking in water were also magical insulators. Normally, that’d be a good thing. It protected the electronics from small spikes and passing currents of slightly higher then normal arcanes. However, since the entire island of Manhattan had been flooded with arcanes, the subways had also been flooded with arcanes from the subway entrances.

The emergency systems had worked like they were supposed to so no one had gotten hurt. That was good. It was great. The third rail had shut down when the power in New York had gone out. Backup batteries had been disengaged and the trains’ emergency brakes had locked into place so they didn’t roll on the tracks.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

But being a low place, the magical insulation around the tunnels was holding arcanes in them. Arcanes that had no where to go. So the emergency back up batteries could not be connected to the train engines. If they were… BOOOM! Because the batteries weren’t magically insulated. Not against Prometheus Purple or Blue.

And that was another dumb thing about this whole evacuation through the subway plan. Okay, some people were being evacuated via bus. But a majority of them were being put on subway cars and sent through the still Prometheus Purple arcane levels of the subway. Why? Why do that when there were perfectly safe Blue levels above ground right now?

Jim glared out the window of the subway car. The tunnel was fairly well-lit. Not dark. Not dim either. Ambient-magic-powered emergency lights both outside the cars on the tunnel walls and inside the cars. Standard just about anywhere in the world. Normally they were just barely enough to see by, but the high level of ambient magic had these quite bright. Nowhere near the same brightness as the regular electric lights inside subway cars. But bright enough.

This was dumb. So dumb. Camina had been assigned to push subway cars full of people through a high magic tunnel.

Pushing train cars wasn’t the best idea to begin with. And they’d tried to argue against it. But in the end, orders were orders. Weren’t they?

Jim caught himself as a sudden shift moved the vehicle he stood inside. He filmed through the rear window as Camina braced her hands on the train and pushed. Slowly at first. One step at a time he felt the cars colliding into each other, adding to the immense weight the warlock had to move with her powered armor. Each step came a little bit faster. Within a few minutes, she was jogging behind the train, her arms flexing with each footfall as she strained.

Then there came a point where she could hop onto the stand on the end of the car. After a moment of catching her breath, she positioned her back to make sure it was facing down the tunnel away from the train and turned on her thrusters. A mobile-armored-rocket-suit-powered train. Trip fourteen was off to a smashing good start. Only God knew how many more to go.

While they were moving at a good clip, that was just for now. The first part of their trip went downhill, under the river and the billions of gallons of water above. That whole crossing was fairly quick. It was the uphill slog to leave the river bed that was a slog. Jim had expected Camina’s armor to lose power eventually. It or she hadn’t. There was a well of divine magic fueling her right now.

The warlock herself wasn’t even severely strained. Tired? Yes. Pissed off? Hell yes. But no matter how many times she had to push an entire train loaded with angry frightened passengers up out of the depths, the warlock kept going. A glowing white and blue beacon of hope that never seemed to fade.

Jim suspected that hope wasn’t what was fueling her. It was rage. She’d taken a break a few trips ago to ‘use the little warlocks’ room’ and had disappeared for a few minutes. The rictus of worry that had shadowed her eyes since she’d found out Anna was missing had faded. Jim suspected that she had gotten through to her patron and found out where her daughter was. Why did he think that? Because she was now just furious without the haunted look of a worried mother to balance it out.