The minigun mounted on the helicopter's flank spooled up as the helicopter turned perpendicular to Mark and Waia to give the gunner an optimal firing angle.

“I'm not doing this anymore.” Waia grabbed a basketball-sized chunk of concrete from the ground, clenched it until it glowed red-hot, and threw it at the meeting point between the helicopter's tail and body.

The glowing block of concrete ripped through the helicopter's flimsy metal and detonated the interior fuel tanks, ripping the hovering vehicle in two before the gunner could get a shot off.

Waia grabbed Mark by the shoulders and leapt over the flaming wreckage strewn across the street below, landing on the building across from Suleman's compound.

Mark looked around from the new vantage point and saw dozens of armored vehicles converging on Suleman's compound, trailed by even more Huntsmen. “So, you think you can still handle all these Servants?”

Waia shrugged. “The more there are to kill me, the harder I am to kill. That's why they know I'm such a problem, they couldn't finish me as cleanly as Torch did that one guy.”

Mark nodded. “Okay, so as long as you keep attention on yourself, you should just keep snowballing until we manage to brute-force our way out of this whole encirclement?”

“Yeah, that's the idea.” Waia narrowed her eyes as she watched the vehicles approach. “Not sure how you're supposed to get out of this, though. You weren't exactly quiet yourself, with that little stunt you pulled earlier.”

“Yeah, right, okay...” Mark crouched behind an air-conditioning unit and held his head in his hands. “We're completely surrounded by a well-armed and well-coordinated militia who knows what we look like, and our main asset is an untoppable murder hurricane...”

“I feel like your phrasing is making clear what the easy answer is.”

Mark sighed. “I'd explain why killing these people is bad, but I feel like there isn't much reasoning with you on that front.”

“Being easily talked down isn't something I'm known for, no.”

“Yeah, so in terms of mitigating the whole cycle-of-violence thi–”

Waia held up a hand. “You hear that?”

Mark stopped talking and tried to hear past the distant clamor of voices and engines beneath him. "...I don't hear anything. Out of the ordinary, I mean.”

Waia shushed him. “Give it a second. It's getting louder.”

A moment later, Mark began hearing it too. A low roar rippled through the decrepit streets, echoing like the sound of a passenger plane passing overhead.

Another moment later, and Mark realized that he wasn't very far off.

Their undersides were painted black to camouflage them against the ubiquitous clouds of ash, but the sounds and barely-visible traces of movement in the sky still gave away the two-ish fighter jets approaching the city.

“You're kidding,” mumbled Mark.

Waia saw swathes of the city light up as a dozen helicopters switched on their searchlights and began their sweep across the city. “Okay, that's our cue.” She walked straight into the AC unit, melting a hole into the car-sized rectangle. A moment later, she emerge from the other side, covered head-to-toe in a seamless layer of molten metal.

She looked back at Mark with two spots of particularly bright aluminium and let out a muffled “Let's move". She grabbed Mark, slung him over her unexpectedly cool metal back, and leapt over the side of the building.

Mark slid off of Waia with a breathless grunt of pain when the two of them landed on the ground. He picked his face up off the ground and saw Waia scooping a chunk out of the tarmac, then turned and saw a line of armored vans turning their turrets to face Waia.

His eyes went wide. “Wait, hang on, don't–!”

Waia threw the tarmac like a baseball pitcher. Too fast to follow, the fistful of tarmac slammed into the side of one of the vans and punched straight through, flying into a building on the other side of the street with the mangled hulk of its victim trailing through the air behind it.

The two remaining vans desperately opened fire on Waia, only for their armor-piercing rounds to sink harmlessly into her suit of metal that really should not have been able to move.

Waia launched herself into front of one of the vans, crumpling the engine into uselessness, then grabbed the driver through the windshield and hurled them out before reaching up and crushing the windpipe of the turret operator.

Mark saw the van's driver land limply on the road next to him, unmoving. He crawled over and reached a hand out, before thinking better of himself and keeping his hands close. He knew what he would find if he investigated any closer.

Without warning, the last of the three vans flew over Mark's head and crashed into a looted storefront, then got buried as the entire building collapsed on top of it in a shower of dust.

Mark turned to see Waia striding towards him from where the blockade had once been. She reached down towards the dead Huntsman, peeled off their gas mask, and tossed it into Mark's lap. Her voice was surprisingly clear, given the two-inch layer of metal covering her mouth. “Disguise. Keep your head down, I'll do the heavy lifting.”

Mark looked at the mask, then up at Waia's nigh-featureless metallic face. “You're just...?”

“They haven’t learned. Find a car, and leave.” Waia looked up at an approaching helicopter, its searchlight sweeping up the street. “I'll catch up.”

“But–”

Without letting Mark finish, Waia leapt straight up and crashed into the helicopter's cockpit, bringing the entire vehicle into a death spiral that brought it crashing into the collapsed storefront.

Mark heard the echo of the fighter jets swooping towards the crash site, and tried fruitlessly to follow the sound to figure out where the jets were coming from. In the end, the attackers revealed themselves when the sky lit up with the trail of a missile streaking straight towards the crashed helicopter.

Waia burst from the twisted wreckage and, with almost contradictory speed and precision, grabbed the side of the missile with both hands before it detonated. She fluidly redirected the missile in a semicircular curve so that it went back the way it came and connected with the jet that fired it, annihilating both in a murderous fireball.

Without skipping a beat, Waia pulled herself out of the flaming wreck of the helicopter and leapt straight through a public library, out of sight but not earshot. This was certainly enough to convince Mark to start running.

After rounding a few corners, he noticed a team of Huntsmen directing civilian Servants down the road and towards a crowded bus stop, around which dozens of Servants were being evacuated by a convoy of rapidly-filling military trucks.

Mark was escorted onto the second-last truck in the queue and seated by the edge of the vehicle’s open rear, across from a Huntsman with their shotgun in their lap. Once the last of the trucks were loaded to capacity, the convoy desperately took off and made their way through the empty city streets while the sound of vehicles and buildings being smashed continued nearby.

The canopy of the truck obscured any view of the vehicle’s surroundings other than the trucks behind Mark’s in the line, so Mark gave his pockets one last pat to make sure he still had the folder, then buried his head in his hands and tried not to wince with every sound of rending metal…

…Were they getting closer?

Waia hurled herself through a building directly behind Mark’s truck and swiped at the truck directly behind Mark’s, only missing thanks to the driver swerving away at the last second.

Half of the truck’s occupants yelped with terror. Mark saw the Huntsman across from him grab a ripcord built into the underside of their seat. He was barely able to register curiosity regarding the cord’s function when the truck behind him answered him on the Huntsman’s behalf.

The entire rear half of the truck erupted in a plume of pale gray smoke, flooding the entire street in an obscuring cloud. The truck behind Mark’s emerged from the cloud, still venting the cloud out of its rear, but Waia did not follow. She only became visible once more when she leap out of the cloud and straight through a clothing store on the sidewalk.

Evidently, Waia decided not to follow the civilian convoy anymore, as the next indication of her location that Mark received was the sound of an artillery bombardment centered on a spot a few hundred feet away.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Once the convoy had reached the still-abandoned outskirts of the city, Mark heard more sounds passing over him, this time that of propellers. A few minutes later, after the shoddy buildings had given way to dead trees, he heard low cracks echo from the way he had come. The Servants were bombing what remained of the city.

Then he saw clouds of yellow gas billow over the distant rooftops. Those weren’t normal bombs that they were using.

The Huntsman across from Mark looked up at him. They adjusted their mask to be able to speak and waved to get his attention. “Hey, you, um, you a hunter too?”

Mark blinked, glanced at the Huntsman, and shook his head.

“Oh. Then why wear a mask?”

Mark shrugged and looked away from the Huntsman.

“C’mon, take it off, you’re fine.”

Mark sighed and pulled the mask off, hoping that people’s minds would be too preoccupied with the carnage behind them to recognize him from thirty minutes prior.

One of the Servants’ eyes went wide and they whispered something in the Huntsman’s ear.

Right then, there went that hope.

Mark dove forward and swiped the Huntsman’s shotgun out of their lap before they could grab it, sending it clattering out of the truck and onto the road. Mark felt the sting of the Huntsman bringing a fist down on the back of his head, but by that time, his hand had already moved down and pulled the ripcord between the Huntsman’s legs.

From somewhere to the cord’s left came the smoke, the force of which felt to Mark like a hundred soft punches across an entire side of his body. The truck’s passengers yelped with confusion and grasped at nothing. The Huntsman tried to grab Mark’s hoodie, but he managed to duck and roll to the side, off the back of the truck and onto the tarmac.

Tires squealed beyond Mark’s field of vision as the truck behind his swerved manically in response to being plunged into blindness. Mark scrambled out of the way of the truck, feeling a slight rush of wind as it careened past him and out of sight.

Without giving the smoke a chance to clear, Mark rushed off the road and into the sparse cover of skeletal trees, coughing his lungs out and wiping tears out of his eyes. He was pretty sure that smoke was the same stuff that they used in the military.

He ducked into a dried-up gully to stay out of sight of the road and travelling along the ditch until he found a four-foot-tall sewer pipe. He heard the screech of swerving trucks subside before the convoy passed out of earshot.

Mark huddled in the dark shelter of the sewer pipe for a moment, sweaty, cold, covered in mud, and shivering as the twenty-minute-long adrenaline high faded from his body.

Once he stopped physically feeling his heart hammering in his chest, he decided to try and regroup with Waia, wherever she was.

He pulled out his gun and pressed the button on the chrome apparatus, unfolding the mechanism into the shape of a flare gun. After another moment or three of waiting, just to make absolutely sure that the convoy wouldn’t just turn around and intercept him, he raised the gun and pulled the trigger.

The flare lit up the grim darkness of the dead forest with an angry red light as a pinprick of light hovered fifty feet above the tips of the dead trees for a minute or two. Once that time had passed, the light spluttered and died, leaving Mark alone again in the darkness.

A few minutes later, while he contemplated firing off a second flare, he heard heavy footfalls approaching. He peeked out of the pipe and peered into the shadow, trying to see where the footsteps were coming from.

He cupped one hand around his mouth and kept the other on his gun. “That you?”

“It’s me,” responded Waia’s voice.

Mark sighed with relief and climbed out of the gully. After some fiddling, he managed to extend a flashlight from his gun. He shone light in the direction Waia’s voice had come from, revealing the Primus emerging from her pitted armor as the metal sloughed off her body and pooled on the ground before immediately hardening.

Mark saw that Waia walked with a limp, then saw a knife buried in her calf and gasped. “Are you okay?!”

Waia grunted, reached down and yanked the gold-stained knife out with stifled cry of pain before tossing it aside. “One of those guys played dead, stuck me while I walked past. Slid right through the armor stuff like it wasn’t even there.” She stepped away from the puddle of metal on the ground before sitting down and shifting into a human. “I already knew humans can mess with your powers when you get close, so I should’ve just been more careful, that’s on me. Give it a minute and I’ll be fine, though.”

“Okay, great.” Mark sat down in front of Waia and set the flashlight between the two of them. Then, he punched her in the arm. “What were you thinking?! You could’ve just taken my hoodie and put on a mask, and nobody would’ve recognized you! Now an entire city’s been gassed like it’s the first world war, and every Servant in Mexico is out for blood!”

“Like they weren’t already,” huffed Waia. “All of that was a shot at getting even, we just happened to get our hands on whatever Torch wanted to tell that master guy in the process.”

“You didn’t need to kill dozens of people and drive hundreds more out of their home to do that, Waia!”

“Okay, so striking that, what exactly is your planned method for dealing with these people in the long term? Figuring that out was the whole reason we came here, after all, so if you’re gonna be all icky about killing the people after us, what is your plan?”

“I… I don’t…” Mark buried his head in his hands. “I don’t know, but at the absolute bare minimum, we shouldn’t be picking fights with entire cities when we’re alone. Suicide won’t help anyone involved.”

Waia folded her arms. “Please, I managed to get the human-attention snowball rolling just fine, I had everything under control.”

“You got stabbed!”

“And before that, a tank shot me in the face. Stop worrying about these guys getting a one-in-a-million lucky shot when I gave a thousand times better than I got. I’m fine. What’s another hole in my pants in the long run? I’ve been hurt worse by these people, and I’m doing better than ever. I’m starting to see why Deus was so desperate to make us not cause a scene in front of humans.”

“Right.” Mark got to his feet. “And did you get even?”

“…What?”

“You said this was you trying to get even with them for burning down your home town. You’ve done the same, if not worse, to hundreds of them now. So, are you even? Can we keep this as strictly business now?”

Waia looked at the ground. “…No.”

Mark sighed. “Then when will you be?”

Waia opened her mouth to speak, then glanced up and hastily covered the flashlight on the ground with her hand. “Back in the pipe.” She pointed up at the distant pinprick of light that was the spotlight of another helicopter, sweeping across the forest.

Mark groaned. “I just had to use a flare, huh?” He made for the sewer pipe, but stopped when he saw Waia stand up and face the approaching helicopter. “...What are you doing?”

Waia shrugged. “Same thing I've been doing for the last twenty minutes.” She took two steps before Mark grabbed her shoulder.

“Waia, stop.” Mark let go of Waia's shoulder, but continued to stare her in the eye. “You've lost the element of surprise. That helicopter is coming from the opposite direction of the city: They've got us surrounded. And if there's one thing about these people that I'm willing to bank on, it's that there's some trick to them that's let them kill thousands of Primoi. You caught them off-guard before, but now they're ready to hit back. I know you don't really have many issues with being aggressive, but don't be stupid. Please.”

Waia looked at the approaching helicopter, then at Mark. She sighed, dropped down into the ditch and crawled into the pipe with Mark hot on her heels.

Mark and Waia struggled to comfortably fit together in the small pipe while the helicopter passed overhead, bathing the forest in white light.

Once the helicopter was mostly out of earshot, Waia crawled out of the pipe and leaned on the rim, looking out into the darkness. “So... According to you, they've got us surrounded. I'm inclined to believe you. Also according to you, if we just run straight at them, they'll pull out their trump card and it's curtains for us. Still coming up blank plan-wise?”

“Uh...” Mark buried his head in his hands. “They'll probably notice us if we go back to the city... They probably expect us to be sneaky... We can't call for help... Mayb–”

“Yes we can.”

Mark looked up at Waia. “...What?”

Waia pulled her phone out of her jacket's interior pocket and showed it to Mark. “I can't exactly get through to the satellites if I want to call normally, but I guess the Aztecs did something to their landline, considering I was able to call it with a mobile phone and with no reception. Money's on Quet messing with it, she looks the type.”

“She is. Also, we have a landline?”

Waia turned her phone on, the screen's light turning her face orange. “Glad she did, seeing as it shouldn't even be possible for me to call a landline with this thing, reception or no. Actually, that's probably why they did it. Let's see if there's anyone on the outside...”

-

Suleman hobbled away from the crowded medical tent at the back of the blockade surrounding the suspected location of the Primus that had flattened Cuernavaca with ease. His one uncovered hand came to the bandage covering his nose as an attendant brought him to the Chosen containers, where he had been summoned.

Torch stood stock-still next to the oddly quiet shipping containers, everything below their neck engulfed by their cloak. The slightest turn of their head was the only indicator that they had noticed Suleman approach. “Huntmaster.”

Suleman nodded grimly. “You called me here?”

“Correct. You survived the Primus’ assault on your primary base of operations.” Torch spoke as if making an observation, not asking a question.

“Only because I was already broken on the ground,” mumbled Suleman.

“And you retrieved the documents I gave to you when you evacuated?”

Suleman's eyes went wide. He turned to the medical attendant who had escorted him to Torch. “Find a Huntsman. Tell them to get a team assembled to head back to the city and–”

Torch cut him off. “Unnecessary. The situation has progressed. Current priority is to flush the Primus out of its current hiding place within the quarantined zone.”

“...Alright? And how are we going to stop it? We couldn't even slow it down before, and that was when our firepower wasn't spread out across a four-kilometre encirclement.”

Torch nodded at a nearby Servant. “Huntmaster, during my various endeavours before and after the fall of centralized human civilization, the most valuable and prevalent lesson that I learned is that individuals have the noticeable tendency to become gullible when rendered desperate, especially those unaware of how desperate they actually are.”

The cargo doors were opened, and the Servants entered to unchain the Chosen. Four unnatural monstrosities exited their cages with uncharacteristic composure. Each one padded, slunk, slithered or buzzed into the forest in their own direction, head-analogues already surveying the space ahead of them for any sign of their quarry.

Torch gave one last glance towards Suleman. “Our goal here is simply to prove that point, and everything will begin to work out from there. You are dismissed, Huntmaster.”