Annabelle was startled by a sudden explosion inside Sanctuary. Either this was some failed wizard's experiment, or this was the third time her headquarters was under attack.
Unfortunately for whoever was launching this attack, she was at full strength. She was still being held in the infirmary for observation, but she knew it was an utter waste of time. She just didn't feel like it would be worth it to force her way into an irrelevant battle.
But even though she had willingly stayed off the field, she wasn't going to just sit there when an enemy was directly threatening their base of operations.
She practically leaped out of her bed, and rushed out the door wearing nothing but a nightgown. The infirmary's staff were surprised by this and shouted at her to stop, but they did not pursue. Good for them.
As she rushed towards the combat, she heard several more explosions. Or more precisely, gunshots.
She arrived to find a single intruder, lightly armored and carrying a pistol, along with a small sword in his off-hand. He had dispatched two opponents who had attempted to engage him, and took down a third right in front of her, blasting him with a point-blank shot. In a world of swords and crossbows, a gun was a game-breaking advantage. Especially one that had a multi-shot magazine.
Luckily, it seemed that his gun was out of ammo. He quickly went to reload, sheathing his sword to pull an ammo clip off of his belt, but Annabelle disarmed him with a well-placed telekinetic burst, knocking his gun to the ground.
The intruder lunged towards his dropped weapon, and Annabelle attempted to mind-control him. He resisted her initial assault, and as she attempted to work through his mental defenses, he had enough time to grab his gun and finish reloading it.
He turned around, aimed his gun, and fired. Or, well, tried to fire. Annabelle managed to catch the signal his brain sent to his trigger finger, and blocked it just before the shot went off. Then, she finished her assault, and took control of his body.
Then, she analyzed the condition of the downed soldiers nearby. The one that had been shot in the head was dead from brain damage, but the other two were unconscious but alive. Annabelle quickly used her telekinesis to attempt to stabilize them by stopping their bleeding. Normally, she couldn't use telekinesis inside another person's body (if she could, she would be stopping enemy's hearts or mulching their brains rather than firing blasts of kinetic energy at them), but when the target was willing, unconscious, or mind-controlled, whatever innate defense stopped that from happening lapsed.
That would hopefully buy enough time for healers to arrive. Speaking of which...
"I need a healer!" Annabelle shouted. "Two down, one deceased!"
**********
An intruder had slipped through the portal, into Sanctuary.
The base's null-magic fields and defenses were capable of stopping any intruder coming through the portal from getting very far. But the portal generators themselves, as magical objects, could not be protected by magic nullification. Thus, the intruder's first move was to disable the generator with a explosive powerful enough that Raiks heard it from his command center. Raiks ordered a second generator to create a portal to Furion, but it would take several long minutes for the portal to arrive. The troops in Furion would be stranded.
The guards would lock the gate to that room, and the null-magic field would nullify any explosives that the intruder could potentially use to break through. It was concerning that he had managed to slip in, but Raiks could focus his attention back on the main battle.
The Blade Wyvern was climbing over the buildings of the city. It was too wide to fit through some of the streets, but its feet were capable of sticking to walls and vertical surfaces. According to rumors, Blade Wyverns were native to mountainous areas in the Otherlands, where they used their climbing ability to maneuver around cliffsides and ambush prey.
But buildings weren't as durable as solid rock. The roofs struggled to support the Wyvern's weight, and in a few cases, collapsed underneath its foot, slowing it down. Further damage was caused when it jumped between roofs.
Its overhead attack angle made it nearly impossible for the Resistance's soldiers to engage it. But Raiks knew that its strategy had a weakness. He ordered his soldiers to hide in the buildings.
The Blade Wyvern's tentacles were long enough to reach into buildings, but it lacked the ability to sense anything within those buildings.
For a tense minute, the Blade Wyvern lumbered across the rooftops, finding nothing. Then, it started to sniff out its prey, and sensed two soldiers in an adjacent building. It leaped across to that roof, and the building shook under its weight.
Its tentacles reached around in front of it, passing through a window. The tentacles probed the building. Raiks couldn't adjust his overhead view to track what was going on inside. If the tentacles found the soldiers, they would likely be shredded and/or impaled.
That was when Lorso and Silence struck.
While the beast was fishing around in the building, Lorso had an opportunity to blast its back with a concentrated beam of fire into its back, melting its scales. The Wyvern retracted its tentacles from the building and raised them in her direction, a futile attempt to swat her out of the air.
Then, Silence flew in (having apparently been given flight by Lorso) and body-slammed the Wyvern, with enough force to throw the Blade Wyvern off the roof and into a street that was too narrow for it. The Wyvern struggled to get onto its feet, but Silence leapt into the air, used a brief burst of flight to get more height, and then dropped on the Wyvern's head, fist-first.
The Blade Wyvern was knocked out, falling unconscious. But Silence didn't stop there. He climbed over the Wyvern, grabbed one of its tentacles, and snapped off the blade. Then, he rammed the blade through the Wyvern's eye socket, and pushed it deeper, into its skull.
Its former riders continued to advance, but now they were outmatched.
Raiks heard several more loud pops coming from the portal chamber, almost but not quite the sounds of further explosions. What was going on?
**********
It only took a minute for a pair of healers to come running, and Annabelle let them take over. The two critically wounded soldiers were stabilized, and regained consciousness. Then, the healers picked up the dead body and brought it back to the infirmary, where he would hopefully be resurrected.
"What is going on here?" Raiks shouted. He had arrived on the scene with a pair of bodyguards. He raised his weapon, which looked like a gun with an axe blade on the front, and his bodyguards did the same.
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Annabelle realized that her psychic aura was by default invisible, and reactivated it, showing a stream of purple energy linking her mind to the intruder's.
"Ah." Raiks lowered his weapon, slowly. His bodyguards followed. "New question: why are you disobeying Lunima's orders?"
"As I said before, I'm perfectly fine," Annabelle countered.
"Right," he replied, with a bit of sarcasm.
"And, I stopped an intruder from potentially dealing severe damage to Sanctuary."
"Wait, how did he get through our gates?" one of Raiks' bodyguards asked.
Annabelle looked over towards the portal rooms. They each had a gate that could be locked to stop intruders. All but one of them, which had its hinges blown off.
She made the intruder surrender his weapon to her. "I think this has something to do with it," she said. "It seems that Daraken has used his intellect for something other than magic."
"What do you mean?"
Annabelle, on a hunch, walked into the null-magic field, aimed the gun at a wall, and pulled the trigger. The gun fired, embedding a round bullet into a wall. She then quickly walked back out of the field, before it could significantly drain her.
"Where I come from, this piece of equipment is called a gun. It isn't magic in any way."
"How does it work?" Raiks asked.
"It uses an explosive powder, or gunpowder, to propel projectiles out of the end of the barrel at high speed. There's a more complex explanation, but I'll save that for the artificers."
"Just the invention of a nonmagical explosive weapon is already a serious threat to our operation. Do you know what the composition of this 'gunpowder' is?"
Annabelle tried to remember, but she unfortunately realized that being proficient in using guns did not mean she was proficient in inventing gunpowder. She might know the ingredients, but not the exact mixture. Especially when modern guns used more modern and complex formulas, and this world's equivalent of those ingredients might be completely different. "Somewhat. I used weapons like this, but I wasn't one of the chemists that made them. But I might be able to get the information out of this infiltrator."
"If you say so," Raiks said warily. He turned to his bodyguards. "Escort these two to the prisons. And keep an eye on Annabelle."
Following standard procedure, the men bound the prisoner's hands, and put a hood over his head to blind him. Even though the prisoner was currently under Annabelle's control and would be unlikely to be able to bring information back to Daraken, it didn't do to take chances.
**********
After their assault, Darius and his three associates regrouped at their extraction point, a portal hidden inside an abandoned warehouse in Arexia. Xerxes met up with them just before they entered.
Xerxes had created a massive illusionary assault mixed with just enough real force to be threatening, drawing off enemy attention. While the enemies engaged his fake army, Darius and his team were able to sneak into the enemy camp and set explosives. They were found out partway through, but were able to fight their way through for long enough to set charges on all of the key targets.
When the charges were detonated, they took out half of the enemy camp's barracks, their supply depots, their headquarters, and most importantly, their portal generators. Though Daraken had generators in Fiora that could send supplies to his army and route troops to where they were needed, the lack of a fixed receiving point would result in inaccurate portal placements (that would not be deployable inside their camp), but more importantly, it would leave their portals vulnerable to disruption. It would be a significant delay to their operations.
They returned to one of the Resistance's safehouses in Arexia. The Resistance had previously managed to smuggle a portal receiver in here to create an anchor point for insertion and extraction. When they arrived, their exit portal was already open.
"Hold up," Xerxes whispered. "The portal's fake."
"Wait, what?" Darius said, a little bit too loudly.
"Not just that, there's- it's an ambush!"
Xerxes' observation came just a little too late, as crates stacked around the warehouse disappeared, revealing a dozen elite Black Legion soldiers, led by an apprentice of Daraken. The team turned to flee, but another half-dozen soldiers blocked the door. They were all heavily armored, and wielding glaives.
"Did you really think that the primary military base of the Black Legion wouldn't be using divinations to detect signs of a future assault?" The apprentice of Daraken gloated. His voice seemed familiar, but Darius couldn't place it.
"I see that Daraken hasn't taught his apprentices to not waste time gloating," Darius responded. And he's probably lying, as well. If they knew about the attack beforehand, they would be stopping it as we performed it, not catching us at the portal. It's more likely that after our attack, they divined our extraction point to catch us before we got away.
"All I'm after is information," The apprentice said. "About Annabelle."
"Why do I find that hard to believe?" Darius replied.
The apprentice ignored his statement. "Give me everything you know about Annabelle now, and I'll let you return to your Sanctuary. If you don't, we'll have to take you into custody and interrogate you until we get the information. Neither of us wants that to happen."
Darius considered his options, while continuing to stall. "We don't know that much about her either. If Daraken's looking for a threat assessement, we don't know enough to help him with that."
"So she's just as much of an unknown to you as she is to us, " Daraken's apprentice said. "How do you know she will remain on your side?"
Darius thought about reponding, but then decided not to.
"I suspect you know more about her than you're willing to disclose. You're coming with me." The apprentice gave a signal, and the soldiers moved in.
"You weren't going to let us go anyways," Darius replied.
He whipped out his fireball wand, pointed it behind himself, and had the spell fizzle as the apprentice counterspelled it.
"Take him alive," the apprentice ordered. "Kill the rest."
Darius pulled out one of his knives, and threw it straight at the apprentice, followed by a fireball. The mage dodged the knife, but it caught him off guard and prevented him from counterspelling the fireball. The explosive blast knocked him to the ground and scattered some of the soldiers.
Behind him, the rest of his team engaged the Black Legion soldiers. Xerxes amplified their number with his illusions, then incapacitated a few soldiers with a fear blast, while the rest of the soldiers took advantage of the opportunities he created.
He jumped high into the air, eyed the mage's body on the ground, and threw his second knife at him. The mage managed to blink away before his knife hit, but Darius recalled his first knife and threw it straight at the apprentice's heart.
He missed the heart, but still got a major artery, as shown by the blood spurt.
"You've already lost," Daraken's apprentice stammered, even as he began to collapse from blood loss. Darius looked back at the rest of his team, and saw them being overwhelmed. More black legion soldiers were streaming in to replace those that they took down, and there were only five of them against dozens. They were starting to get surrounded, and once that happened, they wouldn't last long.
Darius aimed his fireball wand at one of the walls, and was about to blow open a hole to escape when he was paralyzed. It was a spell from the apprentice, his last before he collapsed. His body, unable to move, fell to the ground.
He couldn't see what was going on with the rest of his team, but what he heard did not sound good. The fighting began to die down. He would die here.
No. Darius wasn't sure how, but he somehow resisted and broke free of the paralysis effect. But he was still on the ground, and several soldiers were surrounding him, waiting to strike the moment he moved.
With a mental command, he activated a charm on his belt as he rolled onto his feet as four orbs of electrity appeared around him. The soldiers immediately moved to attack, but the orbs shot out into the first four attackers, electrocuting them and cancelling their attacks.
Then, he jumped, and shot his fireball wand at the ground underneath him. The blast underneath him threw him upwards, giving him the momentum he needed to launch through an upper window while also scattering his pursuers. It also hurt like hell, causing severe burns and shockwave trauma.
He landed hard outside the warehouse, but quickly mended himself by breaking a healing orb, repairing both the damaged bones from the hard impact and the burns from blowing himself up. Then, he fled into the depths of the city, outrunning the few soldiers that were still outside the warehouse. Arexia was the second-largest city in the known world (second only to Fiora), and Resistance operations in the city had identified multiple locations for secondary hideouts. He would be able to hide here for quite some time.
But the rest of his team wasn't so lucky. Maybe Xerxes had escaped as well, but the other members of his team were dead. Even if he got out of this, that would be a serious hit to his infiltration potential in the future.