"Don't stop," hissed Tiro under his breath. "Pretend we didn't hear them."

Oliver's back itched. He'd asked for a wand or a spell before they left. The argument they gave was that he would only prove more of a liability with a weapon in his hand, and he found the logic sound. Somebody who didn't know how to swim might drown his would-be rescuer in his panic. Oliver had been a soldier long enough to recognize when he was out of his depth.

"Halt, or you're under arrest," cried the officer again. This time Oliver chanced a glance back.

As the officer began to jog after them, preceded by the two anonymous, plated soldiers drawing their swords, which also bore complex grids of mana running down their lengths, the logic which deprived him of a weapon now felt flimsy and contrived. He flexed his hands, wishing he had anything, even a knife.

Then he remembered Spark, the explosion it had created, and brought the spreadsheet cursor onto that page and focused on it. Eight mana. Not a lot to work with.

Beside him, Arlo sped up his pace. He glanced to the side and saw Galen lengthening his stride and reaching into his jacket.

He deleted the mana flow rate limitation for Spark.

"When it starts, turn and run with me," hissed Tiro beside him. "Don't look back."

The mana hound had departed the side of the officer and was ranging off to the right side of the street, her sightless eyes locked on Oliver.

Oliver's hands were shaking at his sides as he kept up his pace, quivering with the barely suppressed tension.

They were approaching a street corner. When they were still a few paces away, Tiro murmured "Ready spells and hold."

A heartbeat later he snapped "Now!" and then sprinted forward. Oliver launched himself forward, keeping pace with him.

In front of him, to the side, Galen turned and pulled his wand from his jacket, aiming it at the group in one smooth movement. There was a surge of bloody mana from the wand and a beam of red light lanced out towards the squad. Oliver glanced back despite Tiro's warning to see Arlo, one hand held up in concentration, muttering something.

The red beam stopped in midair just before the squad of soldiers, hitting some kind of invisible barrier. Then, a moment later, the barrier splintered with the sound of shattering glass as Arlo finished his incantation.

Shards of refracted light fell away around the squad, reflecting a radiant spray of colors from the red beam over the street as if a mirror or a prism had broken.

Galen's attack passed through unstopped to strike the charging officer directly on the chest. He fell without a sound, and the red beam passed onto one of the soldiers, looking like the world's thickest, deadliest laser pointer.

The last thing Oliver saw as he raced away was the red light splashing harmlessly off the plate armor as the two soldiers sprinted forward unnaturally quickly, then he was past Galen, who had wheeled fully around and was charging forward to meet them, and had turned the corner.

There was a crash and a dull thud, then all he could hear was his heartbeat pounding in his ears as he raced down the street behind Tiro.

After a moment, Tiro darted off the street into a narrow alley between a couple of closely placed houses, the stone-based walls turning to wood above their heads.

"Wait," he gasped, "We've got to stop the mana hound or this is pointless."

Oliver nodded. This was a possibility they'd discussed before leaving. If the tracker mage caught sight of them, since they had Oliver's mana signature, they would have to kill it or give up their destination. Mana trails could be followed for days.

"Can you see her?" asked Tiro.

Oliver turned and looked around. There were the faint mana channels of people sleeping visible through the buildings around them. Lines of mana powering city infrastructure ran overhead and below the ground.

A block away, one of the blue figures marking a soldier was on the ground, unmoving; the other was still standing. Of the officer's mana, there was no sight. The bone-white aura of the mana hound was moving away from them slowly. She hadn't gone far. Of course; she'd have needed to get out of cross-fire, but was blind and couldn't make her way alone. The officer had been her eyes.

"She's back where we left them. She's not following us," said Oliver.

"Ven's tomb," spat Tiro. "We need to go back for her."

Tiro leaned back against the wall, gulped some air down, then stood up. "Stay here," he instructed Oliver, sounding a little breathless, then exhaled sharply and stepped out into the street. Oliver watched as his mana signature faded from sight, the dampener he carried making it almost impossible to see him at any distance.

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If Tiro thought Oliver was going to sit around like a helpless duck and wait for the others to do all the fighting, he clearly hadn't been taking notes. Oliver leaned off the wall and went over to the entrance, then paused. The man had saved his life at least once already. But he knew what he was doing, and Oliver didn't.

He waited. Then he waited some more. Then he heard a pained shout from down the street. That nearly galvanized him into action, but he knew that by stepping out into combat he'd just put them all into more danger, so he forced himself back into the alley and crouched, waiting, hating himself for allowing others to risk their lives for his sake.

He knuckled his forehead, cursing under his breath. Allowing others to shoulder all the risk went against every fiber of his being. It was the reason he'd joined the military in the first place, so that he could risk his life to protect those who deserved to live theirs.

But he couldn't just think of him anymore. He'd realized that, finally. Plus, it was a senseless risk when he knew little of this world.

Another minute passed. The figure painted in lines of blue mana, the second soldier, was still moving. It had gone over to the soldier on the ground, was leaning over them. That wasn't good. It meant that whatever Tiro and the others had been trying to do, it had failed. They were down. He had nobody to guide him to the other cell, to find the other American.

He thought for a moment, tried to calculate the risks, knew that he didn't really have a choice this time but to go out there and try to salvage the situation. Besides, the man had saved his life. He couldn't in good conscience just leave them.

He left the alley and jogged back up the street to the corner and peered around stealthily, trying to decide what to do. The soldier was the only one standing. He was advancing up the street to where a body lay on the ground half in shadow. From where he was standing Oliver couldn't see who it was.

Behind the soldier another figure stirred on the ground, rose to its feet. It was featureless, faceless, wet from head to toe with blood shining black under the moonlight, but about the size and bulk of Galen. It faltered as it stood, must have made a noise, because the soldier whirled around and as he did Oliver took his chance, stealing forward as quickly and quietly as he dared.

The soldier raised his sword again, holding it out before him like a wand, and Oliver saw a pulse of mana build on the back part of his plate armor.

Two things happened: the figure that had once been Galen charged with a guttural roar, and Oliver reached the soldier, whose sword was still pointed at Galen.

As blue mana pulsed down the length of it and a blinding white light emerged from the length of the blade to form a pulsing laser similar to the ones that the soldiers had been fighting the harpies with, Oliver reached for the helmet.

Yes, finely crafted armor, but there was a small gap between the solid helmet and the chainmail the soldier wore underneath.

The helmet was no doubt useful, but resulted in poor situational awareness, a shortcoming that proved to be the soldier's undoing. One could only assume it worked better in formation.

Oliver shoved his hand up into the gap between shoulder plate and helmet as white power blazed from the soldier's blade, getting his fingers up into back of the helmet with his palm against the base of the man's skull, within the confines of the helmet. Then he triggered Spark at full power, consuming all his remaining mana in half a heartbeat.

The muted explosion that resulted was initially underwhelming. Then the pain began; his hand began to feel like he'd just dipped the whole thing in boiling water. He ripped his arm away as the soldier stiffened and fell to the ground, dropping his sword as he put both hands to his helmet trying desperately to rip it off.

Oliver ignored the pain flaring from his hand and grabbed the short sword awkwardly in his left hand, stabbing fruitlessly at the soldier as he fell, tip of the blade skating off the metal. Then Galen was there, looking fearsome, his features covered in blood.

Oliver realized that he must have mis-seen because his face was clearly there; a trick of the light, perhaps. Galen grabbed the sword from him and in a single stab put it right through the quarter inch of solid steel armor into the soldier's chest and further down below, pinning him to the stone street. The soldier squirmed like a bug pinned to a sheet of cardboard for a moment, then fell still.

Oliver looked up at Galen, relief already surging, then glanced down at his hand and had to bite back a scream. The hand was black and red and raw; part of the burnt skin on the back of his hand had been scraped entirely off by the edge of the soldier's helmet as he withdrew it. Nausea rose up and he forced it down by checking his system.

71 mana for assisting with killing the soldier.

He immediately put it all into Second Wind and was rewarded by a surge of adrenaline and a wave of cool relief in his hand. The rush pushed back the nausea and shakes, drawing his mind to a place of cool focus.

He looked up; the mana hound was hobbling away, feeling along the side of a building. As he watched, she tripped and fell on her face. He watched for a moment and saw she wouldn't be escaping any time soon.

"Get her," he suggested to Galen, who looked at him and nodded silently, expression fearsome beneath the mask of blood. The big man left his side as Oliver stood and went to count the dead.

Moonlight illuminated a growing pool of blood underneath another body and the other soldier's corpse unmoving. There was another body laying close to the corner of the street he'd come from; he'd had to pass by it to get to the soldier.

Oliver stood and went over to the farther body; it was Arlo, laying on his stomach. He was clearly dead; there was a fist sized hole in the robes at his back, charred at the edges, and a pool of blood spreading beneath him, trickling between the cobblestones, black in the moonlight. Mercifully, as he fell his robes had shifted, obscuring the actual wound. Even so, it was a grim sight.

After verifying that he was dead, Oliver went over to the other body; it was Tiro. He was on his back, bleeding from multiple stab wounds to the chest and gasping for air; his eyes were half-open but he wasn't behaving as if he were conscious. He was in shock, would probably die in moments if left unaided.

Oliver checked his system, hoping against hope, wondering if he'd somehow collected any more mana from the other fallen. There were new entries in the log, which he'd almost ceased paying attention to over the past few days, but the last one was important.

Unaffiliated mana collected. +311 mana.

He'd picked up a solid 311 mana from Arlo's corpse somehow; perhaps merely by being in the vicinity? Power. Now there was something he could do, perhaps, to save Tiro as Tiro had once saved him.