They left the headquarters staggered as to not draw too much attention, some of the guards left earlier in the night in an attempt to keep up the look of a regular work day to the general public and any travellers passing by. As the night drew on and most if the city was well into their sleep, they made their move and began sending men out in small groups, towards a small plaza just a few minutes from the church where they would gather before rushing in. This was what Adam and Tob had discussed in the hours prior while making the rescue plan.
Adam left the front entrance of the guard headquarters, his party and Tob were part of the last group leaving as they wanted to stay back in case anything bad happened before they even got to the church and could receive news of it. The cold night air hit him with a sharpness he hadn’t felt before in Oak as they all started moving back into the main central plaza and towards the church through a few side streets in their planned route.
While some of the guards had kept on their normal armour and colours, Tob and the other higher ranking men had dressed discreetly as another method of avoiding unwanted attention.
Adam rubbed his hands together to generate warmth before he remember the most recent addition to his skills. Using his temperature control ability he kept his face and extremities comfortable with little effort or drain on his magic pool.
While Adam was on high alert and feeling a lot of stress for the entire journey out to the smaller plaza near the church, the trek was rather non eventful in the end. Approaching the final side street before the smaller plaza they had agreed on. Tob looked at him, stopping for a moment.
“Thank you, I don’t know the details of your reason for being here, or where you hikers come from, I don’t need to. Thank you.” He said wistfully.
Adam scratched above his ear, feeling a little shy. “Just doing what we can to help.”
“Who you help seems as important as helping in the first place it seems.” Tob left him with this remark to reflect on, his cheeks red from the cold night as he walked into the plaza, quickly turning his head to spot the men who were there waiting for them already.
Tob walked into the centre of the plaza while Adam, Brian and Matilda waited near the exit from the side street.
Raising his voic, Tob began to set their plan into motion.
“We give up all secrecy now, we give up any hope of being able to turn back, now. A short ways from here we find out what the church is doing here, doing to our people, what this impostor is doing with Oak.”
Tob had stood up on a tall garden bed in the center of the plaza to help draw attention to himself, all of the guards shifted where they stood and rubbed their hands together in the cold night air. He coughed into his elbow and continued.
“I’ve no idea how deep this goes, it’s definitely bigger than Oak, bigger than us. That doesn’t matter, what matters to us is keeping Oak healthy and pure, we know in our hearts this land won’t continue to run, this city won’t continue to thrive without the blessing of Oak. We charge now, follow your squad leaders, we will be splitting once we gain access inside.”
Stepping down from the garden bed, Tob began jogging out of the plaza, opposite the direction Adam and the others had entered from. He called a few specific men with hand signals and the crowd began to follow.
They travelled through a couple more side streets before the back of the church building came into their field of vision. They had to gain as much advantage as they could with the element of surprise, so they had chosen the most unsuspecting route through the city so they could pull off their entry into the building and cause chaos to get in and get the help they needed before too much loss. That was what Adam had told himself anyway, that there wouldn’t be loss as long as they found who they needed to find quickly enough, he had no right to be so sure though.
Adam saw Matilda speed up to catch him as they headed towards the back wall of the church. “I hope you know what you are getting us into. You usually have good judgement Adam but I can’t help feeling this is a little reckless or I’m not sure, desperate I suppose?”
“I have a good idea. You’re right though, this situation become desperate as soon as we lost Hammy. I know you’ll do your best. We all will.” She smiled back at him at that reply, seeming pleased enough. “Yeah, our best.”
Adam approached the wall of the back of the building, glancing at Tob who was already there and talking to some of the designated squad leaders he had organised to keep a sense of order inside the church. Tob nodded at him “We don’t have long, with the amount of men we have it doesn’t matter how quiet we try and be, they’ll be coming to check around this side of the building very soon. You ready big boy?” He called out to Brian who had just walked into their discussion.
“I’m not bothering to fight his insane ideas these days, just go with the flow.” He muttered to himself, walking up to the wall and feeling it’s cold exterior bricks with his hand.”Say when.” Adam chuckled to himself at his aloof demeanour.
Tob kept talking to different men in rapid fire discussions, seeming to just make confirmations as far as Adam could tell.
“Now!” Tob shouted out, certainly eliminating any stealth they had remaining, standing around the sacred building with at least a hundred men on Adam’s count. Now was it, Adam prepared himself, repeating the plan in his head continuously.
Brian called out his Primal Strike ability and the wall was obliterated, bricks went flying into the building with the force of Brian’s strike.
Brian laughed loudly “That’s so much more power than before, I guess the tooltip wasn’t messing around when it said the word ‘increase’.
Tob and some team leaders moved into the building through the now demolished wall, stepping over the large pile of rubble with caution.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Adam walked through shortly after Tob did, looking around the dungeon they had just entered “This is where they kept you Brian? Right on the ground floor? Thought it might be more hidden or something.”
Brian shrugged “Guess they don’t have to hide anything, seems like they do whatever they want to around here.”
There were multiple small cells in this room, most of them occupied with one person in them, all of the prisoners had stood up and walked up to the bars to have a look at all the commotion they had caused busting into the place.
Tob headed out of the room with a few other men to scout their location and next destination, Adam looked around at the prisoners, all of them were filthy, faces caked in dirt, it didn’t smell very good in here either.
More guards poured into the room, some organising into their pre-assigned groups, others striking up conversations with the prisoners to gather information and some followed in the direction Tob had gone, further into the building.
One of the prisoners called out to him, a young woman with wide sunken eyes.
“Please, get me out, I’ll do anything, I can help.”
Adam looked around for someone of authority, feeling unsure about the situation, he didn’t think they just meant to let all of the prisoners go straight away, he realised he was currently the one with the most authority in the room.
“I’m sure we will get you out soon, we are still-“ Adam tried to explain with some compassion but was cut off mid-sentence.
“NOW, please! I can’t bear another second in here, I can help you, I can do anything, just let me out of this cell.”
Adam shrugged “I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait just a little bit longer, we are here to help though, I promise.”
She began sobbing and smashing her head on the metal bars of the cell with quite a lot of force. Adam decided to turn away and check out the action closer to the other hallways of the building, feeling guilty for leaving her in that state.
Everything so far seemed to be going to plan quite well, they had not run into any church officials so far on this quiet side of the building and were spreading their squads of guards throughout the hallways in different directions to scout and gather information, Adam hadn’t told anyone else this but Tob was also planning to take some hostages if he could as well.
Adam waited with Matilda and Brian and a few guards in the prison room, also according to plan, waiting to hear a report back or for Tob to come back with news directly.
He heard a scream from someone out of his line of sight after a few minutes of quiet “They have viewers!”. Adam stayed alert, trying to listen for anything else before he scrapped the plan and went running to the noise.
Suddenly a large, glowing purple ball came rolling down the hallway, knocking guards around in its path, rolling over them, he could hear the crunching of bones as he quickly tried to throw up a shield of kinetic energy to stop it, but it had picked up far too much speed and was far too heavy.
It easily shattered his field and kept rolling at full speed straight at Adam who was standing in the doorway to the prison. He rolled to the side of the large entryway into the prison cell room as the ball smashed through into the room, where had he heard the term viewer before? He thought.
The ball stopped in the middle of the room, without hitting any cells or the wall on the other side of the doorway and began spinning in place, Adam spotted Brian and Matilda with their backs up against cells, at least they hadn’t been crushed by this ball.
The ball began rising into the air as limbs of purple energy began to extend out of the sphere, it quickly transformed into some kind of creature as it now walked around on two legs and had two arms of this purple energy and had grown a head that resembled the flame of a candle.
Adam called out to his friends “What now? What is a viewer? Someone has mentioned that before.”
Matilda shook her head, calling out across the room to Adam “This is bad, Vincent told me about viewers, the church have some way to see through the eyes of these things, it means they already know we are here and exactly where we are.”
Brian simply said “I don’t see any eyes on this thing, but we know for sure that it’s not friendly, let’s deal with it quickly.”
Brian ran at the strange mechanical creature with axes swinging, his weapon clanging off the metal body, leaving a very light scratch on the surface of the viewer. One of its fluorescent purple arms swung and collided with Brians’ chest, knocking him through the air into one of the jail cells.
Adam turned his head worryingly to check on Brian, watching him stagger back up onto his feet, at the same time one of the legs of the viewer swung the opposite direction that it just swung its arm and smacked Adam into the door frame of the room.
He stood up, coughing and trying to catch his breath, the room turned into as frenzy of a fight as the viewer standing still in the middle of the room swung its limbs around frantically at high speeds while Adam threw up different force fields to soften the blows, but he was very quickly draining his magic reserves in doing so, trying to protect the three of them at once.
After a few more cycles of swinging around its limbs in differing directions, it suddenly pushed itself higher, near the ceiling of the room and it opened up on the bottom of its body, smaller balls dropping out onto the floor of the basement dungeon.
“Don’t tell me.” Brian said, sweating and staring, focused on the smaller balls as they began to grow their own, smaller purple energy limbs and start moving around the room. Adam counted a total of five new baby viewers for them to contend with, considering they were already losing against one, this really didn’t seem good, he scrambled in his thoughts for some way out of this, for some way to use his abilities to get out of this, but he was coming up empty.
Three of them instantly went towards Brian, cornering him up against the space between the wall and jail cell he was standing next to, one headed towards Adam head on and the final remaining one dragging itself over to Matilda, using it’s energy limbs to roll its body rather than walking on its legs.
Adam could hear the clanging of Brians’ axe on the smaller viewers but was too occupied with his own enemy to see how he was faring. He tried to push it away from himself with pure force but it ended up just using the power and leverage of its energy limbs to push against it and continue to drain his now very low mana reserves.
He really wanted to check so quickly tried flicking his wrist to check while in the heat of combat.
- Skills
- Essences
- Inventory
- Titles
- Quests
- Status
Status! He thought repeatedly while swerving his head and trying to throw up force fields to block the viewers attacks. He hated how much of an inconvenience this was. Surely there is a better way to use this thing.
Magic Pool - 19/100
Conditions: Stress
Why did it always tell him how stressed he was, that much was fairly obvious, he was surprised at how much magic pool he had left considering how drained he felt. It just meant he had to push through harder. After risking his life just to check a number on his hiker menu, he flicked it again to make it go away and focused again on not dying. After a few moments he could hear Brian yell out “I should have taken the whirlwind attack! I’m cornered and I can only fend off one at a time.”
Matilda called out “I told you to save the skill point to make the decision when you needed it, you guys have no patience.”
Adam was glad to hear they were both keeping up for now, but quickly glancing around the room it didn’t look good. The original viewer had now lowered itself back down to the ground, it hadn’t been swinging at them since it spawned the smaller ones but it looked like it was about to start back up now. There’s no way they could fight them, they had to get out of the room entirely if they had any hope of living, unfortunately Adam could not think of a clean way out of the room without getting clobbered by the largest viewer.
A large wall of ice shot up from the floor, blocking him off from the rest of the room and the viewers.