Pendleton held her uniform’s parka tight against her frame as she and Messier were led by a fellow Huntsman to the edge of the Servant encampment, just a few feet away from the bank of the dark, motionless form of the Willamette River. “This better be good, buddy.”
“Of course.” The Huntsman gestured for the other Servants crowded around the bank to make room for the two. “You’re the guys who survived the Burning One’s attack on Salem, right?”
“That’s us,” said Pendleton. ‘This is a Burning One thing,’ she signed to Messier.
“Well…” The Huntsman pointed across the river to a flickering blue light that reflected off the glass of several city blocks’ worth of skyscrapers, its point of origin obscured by the urban sprawl. “Check it.”
“…Whoa,” mumbled Pendleton.
“Whoa indeed,” said the Huntsman. “Figured I should find you two, since you know what’s up with the Burning One. S-and-D teams from the other side of the river have been crossing back to our end in droves, saying that there’s a Chosen taking on our Primus friend out there for the past ten minutes or so. Reckon that’s what’s causing the lights.”
‘Sounds like the two of us are gonna get our first look at a Chosen,’ signed Pendleton.
The Huntsman looked at Pendleton’s signing for Messier’s benefit. “What’d you say?”
“Nothing,” said Pendleton. “Just that we finally get to join the club of people who actually get to see a Chosen.”
“Oh, yeah, totally!” The Huntsman peered out across the river. “Can’t think of a single person here I know who’s had the honor. By the way, uh, I think I heard that the Chosen’s been bringing the fight closer and closer to the river. Sounds like they’re trying to give us an opening to take a few potshots at the Burning One.”
Pendleton looked over her shoulder to see a squadron of missile trucks rolling up to the back of the crowd and priming their payloads for firing. “Figures we wouldn’t pass up an opportunity for that.” She turned back to the Huntsman. “So did any of the S-and-D teams say what the Chosen looks like?”
The Huntsman shrugged, then flinched slightly as the sound of concrete splintering echoed from across the river. “If they saw it, I didn’t hear them tell. Sounded like the only easy thing to spot was the Burning One. Seems to me like you won’t need to identify which is which, at l–”
A twenty-foot-tall humanoid form engulfed in blue fire flew back-first through one of the buildings near the river, sailing through the air before landing in the middle of the frozen river. Half a second after it landed, a vest-clad woman with glowing orange eyes leapt through the cloud of pulverized plaster that the flaming creature had left in its wake, on a direct collision course with the prone behemoth.
“Told you,” said the Huntsman.
The Chosen pulled back a fist, ready to strike the Burning One once more, but before she could land the hit, the Burning One’s arm disintegrated into a cloud of flaming ash, swept across the length of its massive body, and reformed just in time to bat the Chosen aside like an insect. A moment later, the ice underneath the Burning One gave way under its bulk, and the hulking figure collapsed into hundred-foot-deep freezing water.
The Chosen skidded hundreds of feet along the river’s surface before she finally managed to dig her fingers into the ice and screech to a halt. Without a moment wasted, she burst into a sprint, racing along the river’s length towards the floundering Burning One far faster than was humanly possible. As she gained speed on the ice, she began kicking up a cloud of steam as the ice cracked and evaporated in her wake, freeing up the water trapped underneath.
The Burning One, its all-encompassing fire flickering and sputtering as a vast cloud of steam billowed off its bulk, hoisted itself out of the massive hole in the ice that its heat had created. Before it could get anything more than its upper torso out of the water, however, the Chosen rammed straight through its featureless cranium and sent it toppling back into the rapidly-evaporating water. The ash that composed its shattered skull splattered against the ice in the Chosen’s wake in wet clumps that struggled to remain lit.
With nothing but ice to come to a stop against, the Chosen opted to instead simply slam into the concrete support pillar of one of the bridges that spanned the river. As she picked herself out of the impact crater she had imprinted into the pillar, she planted one arm into the concrete up to the elbow. A moment later, the pillar sagged and a large section of the steel bridge capsized into the ice, kicking up another vast plume of steam as the conducted heat from the Chosen made the steel glow red-hot underneath the rapidly-vanishing ice.
By now, the Burning One had managed to lift itself out of the growing hole in the river and had dissipated into a swirling vortex of flaming ash that hovered thirty feet above the surface of the river rather than making contact with it. However, puddles of the ash that composed its loose form continued to lie motionlessly on the surface of the ice, too waterlogged to ignite and join the rest of the mass. As the Chosen clambered on top of the concrete pillar and turned to face it, a massive clawed arm formed from the Burning One’s shapeless particulate and the cloud of ash and fire raced through the air towards its enemy.
Before the Burning One could sweep her off her platform, the Chosen dove off the pillar and down into the boiling river below. As the Burning One swept fruitlessly overhead, the pillar was ripped from the anchors holding it in place on the riverbed and the ten-ton mass was hurled by an unseen Chosen fifty feet in the air.
Whatever intelligence the Burning One possessed realized far too late what was about to happen. The severed pillar reached the apex of its vertical arc into the sky, then dropped straight down and slammed into the water below, with no ice nearby to block its trajectory.
Thousands of gallons of displaced water were thrown into the air, drenching the Burning One in ice and steam. The swamped ash cloud sagged in the air and threatened to collapse onto what little ice remained in its vicinity. Already the water covering its form snuffed out its blue fire faster than it was evaporating. Before the Burning One could do anything to preserve itself, however, the Chosen erupted through the ice underneath, flew straight up through the air, and planted both hands in a clump of sodden ash on her prey’s flank.
All the water that the ash cloud had soaked up evaporated in an instant, ripping the Burning One apart mote by mote as a vast cloud of steam filled the sky above the Willamette river.
The abrupt silence left the ears of the onlooking Servants ringing. For a few moments, the only sound that anyone heard was the distant splash of the Chosen landing in the river. Then the cheering began.
The Servants erupted in applause and whooping. In the distance, the sound of someone firing their gun in the air echoed through the crowd. The Servant that had brought Pendleton and Messier to the waterfront lightly punched Pendleton on the arm. “We finally got it done! None of our guys even had to shoot at it! With Chosen like that, I have no idea how we didn’t win this sooner!”
“It was definitely something,” signed Messier, observing the reactions of the Huntsmen around him. “I could even hear most of it.”
“Yeah, I mean…” Pendleton shrugged. “Guess that’s our job done.”
-
Waia gasped for breath as she broke through the surface of the river. The thinned-out layer of ice on the bank splintered between her fingers as she pulled herself to the shore and climbed out of the freezing water, steam billowing off her body as ten minutes of adrenaline slowly wore off.
Her mind buzzing directionlessly, she climbed up the concrete embankment and onto dry ground. A moment later, she found herself lifted to her feet and then further up, her seven-foot frame supported by half a dozen shoulders as the strangers below her formed a human throne to carry her over the crowd.
As she blinked slowly and accustomed to the noise of the cheering around her, her mind switched out of mind gear and her heartbeat slowed to normal levels. This was… A celebration. For her. Yeah. And who were these people?
A cursory look over the crowd, with its faces and bodies universally obscured by masks and heavy clothing, as well as the heavy artillery on standby a short distance away, gave Waia the kick to put one and one together. Right then. Waia probably should have paid better attention to which bank of the river she emerged from. And also remembered that the river was Servant turf.
Waia forced a laugh and motioned for the Servants parading her through the crowd to set her down. “Hey, so, uh, that’s done. Anyone know where I can find the boss?”
The crowd parted to allow Waia passage to the Servant camp proper. As she walked down the aisle of celebrants, skin crawling at the sight of Huntsmen saluting her, Waia felt one of the Servants she walked past pat her on the back. It was a gesture she was more than familiar with receiving over the centuries, but the jolt of surprise still required her to take a second to compose herself.
“Looks like someone here doesn’t need to bundle up for the cold!” proclaimed the muffled voice of the offending Servant.
Waia breathed in through her nose, then out. “…You know it, man.”
As Waia pushed out of the crowd and ventured further into the camp, she spotted a Huntsman in considerably more comfortable-looking gear climb onto the front of a parked tank and clear his throat behind his mask to get the crowd’s attention. “Now, this was a big win for us all, great work everyone. But since we don’t have to be so on edge about everything now, it's worth saying that our op against those monsters in the park put us over-budget for fuel, so we’ll have to cut down on ration shipments for a while to keep our tanks and everything in fighting shape…”
Waia sighed and ignored the rest, leaving the still-jubilant crowd to get the week’s list of bad news delivered to them while they were still pliant.
The prefabricated building housing the Servants’ central command was easy to find, being located on the opposite side of the camp from the riverbank. Waia pushed through the curtain of clear plastic that served as the entrance and stepped into the well-heated interior.
Masked and armed Huntsmen stood in the corners of the single-room building. Behind a folding table covered with maps of Portland, an old man and a suspiciously familiar younger man listened to a Huntsman explain the source of the noise that had stopped so abruptly just a few minutes before.
“Fine,” said the older man, “Wonderful, we can figure out where to go from here soon. But I was at Cuernavaca, and I myself saw that Chosen don’t just look like…” He looked up at the new entrant, and fell backwards onto the floor. In turn, the other man took a step away from Waia, recognition flashing in his red-irised eyes.
The man on the floor raised a trembling finger at the orange-eyed giant of a woman in front of him. “Y–You! I–I saw you at– You were the Primus at Cuernavaca!”
The Huntsmen in the room immediately leveled their shotguns at Waia’s chest. Without taking her eyes off Suleman and Kuravaan, Waia folded her arms. “Any of you goons try anything, I’ll rip off your arms and turn the rest of you into a tasteful vase of daffodils.”
Hesitantly, Kuravaan gestured for the Huntsmen to stand down.
“Right choice,” replied Waia. “You guys can tell your friends once I’m gone.”
Kuravaan narrowed his eyes at Waia. “We believe we remember seeing you with the Aztecs. Of all the places we would’ve expected this so-called Burning One to come from, we weren’t expecting them.”
“Oh right,” said Waia, “You were the Indians’ head honcho. Had a tough time recognizing you without the vampire tux. Looks like you did a pretty good job switching sides, by the way. Have any of your mooks asked how many candles to put on your birthday cake yet?”
Suleman pondered whether attempting to stand up was a good idea or not. “…So what now? The Burning One didn’t die like my friend here said he saw five minutes ago, does that mean you’re here to try to kill me again?”
“In my defense,” said the Huntsman standing next to Suleman, “I, uh… I might’ve mixed up who’s on which side.”
Waia shrugged and ignored the Huntsman. “Dunno. I might. Didn’t really have a plan when I came here; things just kind of worked out this way. What do you think, bud? Do you think the Burning One ought to show off to a fan after her big win?”
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Suleman sighed and glanced up at the Huntsman standing next to him.
“Uh-uh,” said Waia. “Eyes stay on me.”
Suleman glared at Waia. “We couldn’t stop you from doing anything you want even if we tried, could we?”
“You’ve been drone-striking me twice a week for the past five months and the most that did was give me back pain for a few days at the start. The only reason I didn’t walk across the river and level everything within three miles of this base is because I pinky swore to a friend of mine. Got it?”
“She’s telling the truth,” muttered Kuravaan. “We can tell.”
“So… Wait.” Suleman hesitantly got to his feet. “You… won’t kill us? because you would have already?”
“If she really did make a…” Kuravaan sighed and closed his eyes. “…Pinky swear, she would be physically incapable of doing so, yes. Assuming that she is the only remaining member of her Domain.”
“I actually can’t recall if I actually promised anything,” said Waia, “but I know I got asked real nice to play fair. But hey, now you know what’s holding me up. So maybe now, I can draw a couple lines in the sand for the two of you. Might as well, since I kind of just thought of that and there’s nothing else on the agenda.”
“Spit it out,” said Kuravaan. “I’m sure we all have better places to be.”
“Correct,” said Waia. “I’m still betting that no matter what I say, if I just start strolling across the river with my friends, you’re gonna intercept us and try something. So it’s lucky for you, then, that we’ve been working on a way to get out of this city while flying under the radar for a while now. We’ve had a fair few setbacks, especially after that stunt you pulled with the big fire-monster, so I’d like to make it clear that if you keep slowing us down, everyone else might get just as sick of you people as I am, and the gloves are gonna come off.”
“Torch will find you,” said Kuravaan. “They told us about how things went between the two of you after the party.”
“Shut it,” said Waia. “They can come after me all I want, I’m fine one way or the other. The only reason, again, that we’re trying to slip out of here without a fuss is because my friends can’t tank as many carpet bombings as me, and they know a lot more about where we’re going than I do. So, if things go south, it’ll be annoying, but I won’t lose. Waia never loses. Whether you like it or not, she always gets her way. It’s one of my finest features.”
She turned and made for the flap leading outside the building. “I guess I won’t be too mad if you keep coming after me. But thanks to that scene I caused outside, you’ve got an easy out. Call off your dogs, let us fly away, and tell your boss you gave it the old college try. Easy.”
Suleman, Kuravaan, and the Huntsmen in the room watched silently as Waia stepped out of the building, took two steps forward, and was almost instantly swallowed by the ground beneath her, vanishing without a trace.
The Huntsman next to the two Huntmasters cleared his throat. “So, uh… What now, sirs?”
Suleman exchanged a look with Kuravaan. “Maybe we should… heed her advice? We just gave the order to halve everyone’s rations for two weeks, maybe if we relaxed our military operations a little, we could–”
“No,” said Kuravaan. “If we do that, we risk losing all the momentum we have built up against the Burning One. We now have a better idea of what its next plans are, and if we put in the proper preparations, we stand a chance at slipping through its defenses and putting a stop to it. That’s how we’ve trained our Huntsmen; they get in close and disrupt its durability. That’s how we’ve destroyed countless Domains before.”
“Yes, but what then?” Suleman looked through the translucent plastic flap at the small patch of snow-free dirt. “If we keep pushing our resources, then after we–”
“‘What then’-s are a problem for Torch to think about,” replied Kuravaan. “We have been given our job, and we are not going to give Torch an excuse to replace us. We are here so that Torch can handle the business of undoing all this without distraction. We both already have plenty to deal with, even without adding on pointless concerns like that. Is that clear?”
Suleman thought back to what Torch had said to him the last time they spoke. “…Do you want to be the one to tell that to the people outside?”
One of the Huntsmen in the room cleared her throat. “Hey, so, uh… What did the Burning One say about you switching sides or something?”
Suleman glanced briefly at the Huntsman, then back to Kuravaan. “Answer the question.”
-
“A–And we don’t know where Mark and Waia are, and they don’t know where we are, and you can barely stand, and…” Quet paced back and forth along the length of the sewer tunnel, her cardigan pulled tight around herself. “We’ve wasted the past few hours of work on the Voidfish, and without Waia here, it’ll take even longer, and we’re so dead!”
Horan sat down against the damp, slimy concrete wall of the tunnel and did his best to maintain split focus between Quet’s ranting and his terrifyingly uneven heart rate. “Okay, yeah, anything on those gloves yet?”
Quet groaned and shrugged. “I dunno, what do you want from me?! Maybe they’re cursed! Maybe they disintegrate anyone except Torch who puts them on! This is a completely novel magic language; it’ll take hours to go over its effects, and that’s with a thaumic spectrometer on hand far better than any of my dad-in-a-garage tools that I had back home, let alone what I have on hand right now! The way you described them earlier, they could just be, like, range extenders for Assyrian! You think I know Assyrian?! I never even met the guy who developed it! He went mortal millennia before I even manifested!”
Horan held his breath for a moment, then strained his head to get one of the sewer’s passageways into his limited field of vision without moving the rest of his body. “…I think I heard something catch fire down that way.”
“If you say so, man!” Quet drummed her fingers relentlessly against the sides of her ribcage. “That’s another thing, I can feel myself coming closer and closer to going mortal! I can’t hear whatever it is you’re talking about, blacklights are starting to work on me, and the other day, my stomach made a noise! I haven’t thought about my organs in decades!”
Waia stepped into view from the spot Horan was looking at, shifting back into her human form and rubbing her eyes. “You guys talking about organs now?”
Quet’s face lit up. “Waia! That big murder-giant didn’t kill you!”
“Yeah, duh.” Waia jogged over to the other two Primoi. “I never lose, I keep telling you that.” She extended a hand towards Horan. “Didn’t expect you two to get back here so fast.”
Horan took Waia’s hand and pushed himself up to a standing position. “Yeah, uh, had to make an emergency teleportation. Torch showed up. By the way, why can’t you be the one who does all the teleportation stuff? When you do it nowadays, it doesn’t make you almost throw up, and I’m the one who always has to do two people at once. Not fun.”
“Yeah, well, life isn’t fair.” Waia looked down one of the sewer tunnel’s branches at the distant-but-visible entrance to the locals’ hideout. “Glad we both thought of the same place to meet up, at least.”
“Yup.” Horan stuck his hands in his pockets. “You wanna risk it?”
“I’m feeling bold today, sure.” Waia led the way to the hideout.
The wide-open room gave the same impression as a house whose tenants were in the process of moving out of. Maybe half a dozen people remained, the space between their few remaining tents uncomfortably wide as opposed to the chaotic claustrophobia of the station as it was perhaps a day earlier. Jean, one of the few remaining locals, looked up quietly as the three Primoi entered. “Oh, it’s you guys again.”
Horan looked around the room, nervousness mounting on his face. “Did… something happen?”
Jean shrugged and looked at a string of christmas lights that spanned the ten-foot gap between one tent and the other. “Not really. Servants just did some proselytizing, and people left to see what they had going for them above-ground. A lot haven’t come back, and most of the ones who did left for real a couple hours later. One of them joined those Huntsmen folks and got guard duty with us for a couple hours, before he got recalled back up, like, ten minutes ago. Something about a fight with a Chosen or something. You guys are lucky.”
“Look,” said another Servant, “We don’t have to agree with a lot of how they do things– I certainly don’t– but they make for good organizers. All our friends wouldn’t have stayed up there if they weren’t doing something right.”
Jean looked at the Primoi and pursed his lips.
“Well, if it helps, uh…” Quet fished around in her pockets and withdrew Torch’s gloves. “We totally mugged their leader and stole their magic gloves. Also Waia, like, fought a kaiju they controlled and won.”
“It was totally metal,” agreed Waia.
“Hey,” said Jean, “you said those things are magic?” He pointed at Quet. “You’re, like, a wizard, right? You had that magic pizza. Think the gloves can do more of that? Wait, no, the word is witch, right?”
“Technically,” said Quet, “the wizard/witch gendered dichotomy was fabricated in the 1990s by a single fantasy author, who I refuse to name for a number of reasons. ‘Wizard’ is a gender-neutral term, but if we are to accept fictional parlance as in any way applicable to thaumatological theory, then due to the fact that my magical paradigm of artificially-induced supernatural effects is secondary in relevance to the dominant paradigm of naturally-induced Primus powers–” She gestured to Horan and Waia. “–then the correct descriptor for me as a magical practitioner would be ‘sorceress’, which is often used in speculative fiction to denote the lesser method of the natural-versus-artificial dichotomy, whichever that may be. Sorcerers are often assumed to automatically fall under the ‘natural’ side of the dichotomy, due to the disproportionate cultural prevalence of intellectual properties that take that side; as such, if you don’t believe me, I can cite several sources to back up my claim if you want further explanation. Also, I wish every day that I could call myself a sorceress in an academic context and still be taken seriously, it sounds so much cooler than ‘thaumaturge’.”
Horan looked between Quet, Jean and Waia. “…Was I supposed to understand that?”
Quet sighed. “How long was I going for?”
“Just under a minute,” said Waia.
Quet walked over to the corner of the room. “I’m going to stand over there and feel like the world’s biggest loser now.”
“No-no, wait.” Jean reached out towards Quet, despite being seated twenty feet away from her. “I barely remember what we were talking about, but just, like, try the gloves? I won’t pressure you or anything, I know absolutely nothing about how that stuff works, but it probably does something good, right?”
Quet sighed, turned around and pulled on the black leather gloves. “Fine, but I’m just saying, its applicability is going to be underwhelming. I find the spontaneity and mindless flashiness of Assyrian uncomfortable to work with, no matter how many thaumaturges in other Domains sing its–”
Waia cleared her throat. “Hey, Quet?”
Quet turned around. “Why’d you get so…?”
Between Quet and the two other Primoi, a wall of bright green glyphs composed of pure light hovered in the air, stretching from one end of the station to the other. The space beyond the glyphs seemed to be stretched out, with the far wall easily several hundred feet further away than it previously had been. Horan and Waia stood in the middle of the warped space, dwarfed by the ocean of brick and concrete.
Quet stepped forward and hesitantly waved a hand through the wall of what was definitely her own magic language. “…Assyrian doesn’t usually stay put like that.” Realization dawned on her face. “That’s how torch was able to inscribe stuff on the walls in an instant! Let me try something…”
She held her breath and extended an arm out, the other hand clenched in a fist and held below her chin. A small line of glyphs wrote themselves into existence, intersecting with the much more imposing wall, and both matrices vanished in an instant, like snuffed candles. A split second later, the far end of the station compressed back into its original shape, Horan and Waia rushing back to a sensible distance.
Horan stumbled and blinked dizzily. “Is that what rollercoasters feel like?”
Waia helped keep Horan upright. “Psychologically, yeah. Real rollercoasters just actually move you.”
Quet squealed with excitement, her extended arm joining the other one against her chest in a single clasped-together fist. “It works! It’s not Assyrian at all! The gloves must be physically projecting my imagined matrix designs into physical space via… I don’t even know how! But it’s based on the Mapuche method! The murderous sword-ghost likes my style! Vindication!” She grinned from ear to ear and pointed at Horan. “Nobody likes how you do magic! Suck it, Horan!”
“I’m getting some pretty major whiplash right now,” said Horan. “In more ways than one.”
“Not to worry, this is great, actually.” Her grin unbroken, Quet turned to the nearby wall of the station and held out both arms. More glowing glyphs appeared on a rectangular patch of the wall, and the brick behind the glyphs began to bulge inwards, creating a deep alcove out of nowhere. Quet turned to look at the locals. “This might be a lot to ask, but can I have those tents?”
The half-dozen remaining locals looked amongst each other. “Do whatever you want, I guess,” said one. “I was gonna go topside anyway.” The other locals gave their own respective consent in turn.
“Absolutely radical. Everyone stand back.” Brow furrowed in concentration, Quet wove dozens of strings of her blocky, geometric glyphs into existence, lighting up every inch of the room with emerald glow.
Tents and sleeping bags alike rose into the air and disassembled themselves, separating into metal and fabric components before flying into the artificial alcove, itself almost blinding with its density of glyphs. Tents and sleeping bags fused together into a single massive blanket, while the more durable materials began forming an intricate latticework with the speed of a car being assembled in a toy commercial.
“It’s a bit fast for my liking,” mumbled Quet as she worked. “No room to listen to podcasts.”
Waia shielded her eyes from the verdant glare and stood next to Horan. “Looks like once we get Mark back, we’ll be all set to start heading up, huh?”
Horan’s eye nearly popped out of his skull. “We lost track of Mark!” His hands reflexively went up to grab ahold of his hair. “We split up when Torch came after us and I don’t know where he went!”
Waia raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t notice?”
“Oh, forgive me for being a bit high-strung after the events of the past thirty minutes! My brain’s been a bit too busy to think about anything except what’s right in front of me, sorry!”
Quet looked over her shoulder. “Everything okay back there? Sorry, it gets really loud this close up.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it.” Waia angled Horan away from Quet and looked him in the eye – an uncomfortable action given the height discrepancy between them. “Buddy, it’s Mark. I’ve seen him take on Chosen by himself. He’ll be fine out there for a couple hours.”
“You levelled a dozen city blocks!” exclaimed Horan. “The aboveground’s probably swarming with Huntsmen at this point!”
“We both thought of the same place as a rendezvous spot,” said Waia, “I’m sure he’s on his way right now.”
Horan slowly breathed in and out for a moment. “…You know what? You have the right idea about him. I don’t think he knows how to die. He’ll be here any minute.”