Julia lived and breathed one of two things in a given day: air, and training. Today is no different on this day close to Thanksgiving, except Nick has hastily cleared out a training area in the clearing behind their temporary base of operations, and set up a target range. It’s her favorite thing in the world, besides Joey and her friends at the moment.
More surprising, is the amount of leeway that her mother is giving all of them, while she dials in the range of her target. Of course, ranged targets aren’t the only thing lurking out here. Nick, Kyle, and Levine have all been trying to make a surprise obstacle course to keep the Luminaires on their toes. Each of them has contributed in a way, but only Levine and Nick know all the details.
Making this difficult is the fact that it’s snowing, visibility is poor, and she’s freezing, even with this winter gear. Mages should not be cold! Dragons, doubly so! She’s wondering just how ‘Nordic’ her family heritage is, all things considered. Those fat gobs of wet, sticky snow that are slowly melting in her tied-back hair are making it look like someone broke open a pillow, and visibility is awful. Of course, Nick would make this difficult. He peers down the course of structures and hidden dangers.
“Alright ladies and gents! We’ve been doing training for a few weeks, let’s see what you’ve got. Julia, Drenar, Angela, Kelly you’re fire team A. Joey, Kyle, James, Jackie, you guys are fire team Bravo. For this purpose, all weapons are outfitted with blunt tips, non-lethal. So try not to shoot anyone. The objective is to sweep and clear the obstacles, and if it looks like a hostage–don’t shoot it! No restrictions on innate magic, it’s a tool for use, but watch for collateral! Harming innocents needs to be avoided at all costs, and you will never have perfect knowledge of the battlefield!”
Just get to the good part, Nick. She’s tensed and ready to spring into action, and a crackle of static clings to her hand, where her gloves are designed to channel her plasmakinesis, and not burn a hole through her clothing. Kelly is similarly outfitted, and Drenar is eyeing the marked path and the structures. He’s weighing the approach. She’ll let him take the tactical lead and call it. Angela will follow it to a fault, and a shimmer of force surrounds her. Her telekinetics are now a force to be reckoned with–powerful and deadly precise. She’s still amazed at what she can pull off–from grabbing a soda can out of her hand to splintering concrete with a concentrated blast.
She’s proud her bestie has become a reserved badass. The glance doesn’t go unnoticed, and Angela smirks lightly with eyes that match the drifting snowfall almost. “Remember, aim first. Don’t fire at the first thing you see.”
“I know. I’m no rookie.” Nick gives the signal, and they move in a close formation. Drenar and her take point. Their goal is to clear ten targets, and Kyle’s golems are primed to deliver non-lethal attacks. A single ‘hit’ will suffice to disable them without permanently damaging them. They trek through the snow in cozy but serviceable boots, their winter jackets marked with the greens and blues of the Luminaires–something Angela had insisted on. She’s still working on a few extra touches for the uniforms.
“Two and two. Julia, you’re with me. Kelly, with Angela. The clock’s running, the par time to beat is three minutes.” Drenar slaps the safety off the autobow, as does everyone else, and his dagger is on a quick-grab sling on his vest. They quickly slip through the snow, and she sees motion–an automaton shaped like a dog with sharpened metal claws, lunging for them over the gnarled stump of a fallen tree. The color even matches with the snowfall and the other ashen-colored trees, but she’s in pure reaction mode.
Two bolts perforate the metal exoskeleton, and she redirects it as it lands, with a blast of plasma energy that leaves it in a crumpled heap. Another one is leaping almost at the same time, and Drenar sidesteps and stabs down through the metal skin, severing the head. The automaton goes limp in a heap of now twitching limbs, and tries to grab him even though it’s missing visual sensors. A single stab down finishes the job and cuts through the mana core, dribbling blue fluid draining into the snow.
“Two targets neutralized, moving in!” he declares over the radio. “Julia, what’s in the structure?”
She focuses her gaze on the prefab structure and lets her vision unfocus, and she can see the world go to blue, black, and white. Her vision now highlights the outline of faint traces of blue–mana circulation. She can see three faint blobs. Even better, she can see through relatively thin materials to see beyond them.
“Two on the ground floor left of the door. One by the stairwell, just hovering there. Can’t see the VIP dummies.” Drenar nods.
“Two more down at our position,” Angela relays. Julia hops over the low barrier of the fallen tree to the plain wood and metal structures–several target silhouettes pop up–and several of them are civilians. She lets out a breath as she spies the automaton firing off a magical bolt of shimmering blue energy. Drenar blasts backward with a burst of kinetic energy–his version of an evasion that doesn’t involve his teleport. She pins the target in the head and it goes down, and he fires off at the second, narrowly avoiding the civilian silhouette. They burst into the structure to clear out the rest, and Drenar pulls at her shoulder before she steps over a tripwire. She winces–Nick knew she couldn’t see it in advance.
Clever dragon.
“Fast, but cautious. We take a casualty, we fail. We get a noncombatant hurt, we fail,” Drenar says firmly. She takes a deep breath, of course, Nick isn’t making this easy, and neither is Levine. They sweep up the rickety stairs and she anticipates the golem with Drenar taking the lead. His kinetic deflection disrupts the pre-aimed blast of fire, and Julia vaults over the railing and lands a plasma blast at the ball of her foot, delivered into the head of the golem. The automaton sputters and keels over, out of the fight.
“Nick, you asshole, there’s more than ten targets!” Julia hisses over the radio. There’s not even a subtle laugh in response. “You knew, didn’t you?”
“In missions, you have to roll with the unexpected. Those golems were set to really hurt you.” She growls and gets back to vaulting out the window to the next structure just adjacent to it, and does a quick spot check with her mana spectrum vision. One automaton next to the target, two others nearby, and she relays this to Drenar. This one needs to be fast and decisive. He gives a silent count by hand signal.
She breaks through the small wooden barricade, landing in a tumble and sweeping the legs out of the automaton aiming at a poor innocent civilian mannequin. Drenar teleports in and grabs the second and third with a quick grapple, and a thrust of a kinetic lasso each. He throws the bots to the side, smashing small pieces of mechanical connectors off the constructs. He’s in raring form, and she surges to the last target with her legendary tsunderebolt. This one didn’t show up on her mana sight–another trick by Nick, and shielded against emissions?
Except this target’s a little more durable, and the arcane barrier flares off of it from the impact. She feels like she just smashed into a wall with her chest and she stumbles back, watching for the countering swing. She gets inside its swing, buckles an arm, smashes a leg joint, and lands a rebuke of a blow as it tries to hammer her body with its free arm.
It fails to accomplish anything, and ends up in the scrap heap. Drenar clicks the radio. “All civilian targets rescued on our end, Angela, how’s your end?”
“Swept and cleared. Meet outside by that low cover, the last rescue target on the far side of the clearing." They dash out the door and the snow makes it a little slower going. But Angela is the definition of grace and almost slides through the snow. That shimmer of a distortion field suggests she’s using her kinetics to move the snow out of her way–a rather clever use of powers.
“I see it. The last target,” Drenar responds, and points along the cover of densely packed trees. “Julia, up the middle. Kelly, Angela, up the flanks. No idea what Nick did to make this tricky.”
They don’t have to wait long as a machine of a different nature bursts forth from the snow, having laid flat. It’s a bot made of multiple connecting metallic pieces that link together by a series of universal connectors. The limbs end in sharp talons and it looks like a metallic scorpion–with a mana battery for a tail. The first shot flares Julia’s barrier from the near-miss and explodes a tree next to them. Splinters of boiling sap and shards of wood ping off her barrier–that’s gonna be a mess to clean up. The civilian ‘target’ is still uncomfortably close.
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“Drenar, grab the hostage and run! Angela, Kelly, flank and attack!” Julia barks out even as her autobow is in motion, firing hardened steel bolts at this unexpected complication, but they bounce off–Kyle mixed it up again, it’s resistant to the bolts! It launches through the air and comes after her in a blur of deadly steel claws.
It misses as she rolls to the side, and smashes the side of it with her buttstock. The impact doesn’t do much, and she tosses the weapon aside, to charge plasma to her gauntlets of skull smashing–well, Volkir’s gauntlets have some pretentious name, and she likes hers better. She smashes and dents the metal exterior while Kelly lassoes the torso with plasma. The construct flails in her grasp, and eventually, she just fries the circuitry and it goes limp like spaghetti–and it’s heavy, too.
“VIP saved,” Drenar says while touting the mannequin which looks a little weathered. Snow continues to drift down and he’s broken out in a grin, as Nick responds a second later with amusement.
“Oh, trying to show off? You beat my par time. Two minutes, forty-five seconds. Nice work guys. Debrief, once Joey’s team is done with their obstacle run.”
A short while later, Julia is taking pointers from her favorite cinnamon stick working in tandem with the others. And she groans when Joey’s team beats them by…three seconds?! Just what alchemical boosters did she feed to that perennial weakling James? Or has he finally leveled up, so to speak?
Joey and James had opted for a rather unconventional breach–he’d rocketed to the roof of the structure, and she had bounded up in a scrabble of claws and incredible parkour. After landing, she used a focused acid cutter to burn through the roof, and they flanked the golems–with Joey kicking one out a window in a moment of badassery. Everything ran slightly differently with the position changes, and Kyle and Jackie had done fine work disabling the rest with gravity magic and precise aiming.
Joey springs down from one of the trees after the last target is cleared in a flash of red and claws, and skims down and lands on her vulpine feet. Out here is one of the few places she’s willing to embrace her true form, and she’s grinning from ear to ear. Julia thought her hair was red before, but in her Kitsune form, it’s vibrant red, with white accents on her face, neck, and limbs. “I’m sorry, someone broke a record? Well, we just had to do one better, Drenar,” she adds while leaning toward him.
{Oh, you two are just so adorkable.} Julia makes her thoughts clear as day, and Joey glances at her for a split second, frozen. {Don’t mind me.} She grins silently while Joey goes through her anxiety reboot.
“You are savage, Joey. I didn’t know Kitsune claws could cut through steel,” Kyle comments, points to his now damaged constructs, and grabs Joey’s attention. “Thanks, guys, we found out my golems need some work!”
“I can’t help but notice the threat level and threat count was grossly understated,” Drenar points out to Nick. Levine lets out a soft grunt.
“Never assume things go according to plan. Intel can be bad, or incomplete. We will never have perfect knowledge, and you must react accordingly. Both teams did well, considering each encounter was set up differently.” Levine looks over his note and shields his tablet from the fat gobs of snow. “Drenar, your team performed well. You split up to track a faster par time. That was a risk, but acceptable given the known threat level. Your team made excellent use of magical and conventional attacks. Joey’s team…well that was something. Shock and awe indeed.”
“Were you a ninja in another life?” Julia’s heart wants to melt for Joey who is still flexing and wrapping her tail around Drenar to keep him warm. It must be a kitsune thing.
“Nah. They don’t have ninjas in Missouri,” she replies with a toothy smirk. “Alchemical boosters bought us speed for a tradeoff of a possible crash at the end of the mission, we also took a risk.”
“Risk? You mean that feeling where I’m fighting debilitating nausea?” James looks a little pale, and possibly sick to his stomach based on the way he’s clutching his torso.
“Oh, right. Here, try this,” she adds as she pops a canister out of her dispenser. He grabs it and gulps it down, and shudders at either the flavor, or the effect. “Okay, he didn’t explode, that one works!” she adds with a cheer. He laughs nervously, and Julia regards her warily.
“Don’t blow up James, please. I like him just enough to not wish death by magical accident upon him,” she says firmly.
“Oh Julia, I’m a professional. People don’t blow up. Now, on the other hand, if you want to know about my knowledge of exothermic reactions involving chemicals, then I’m your gal!” she says while grinning and pointing at herself.
“Yep, this is my sign. I’m dating an arsonist,” Drenar sighs. “And she still isn’t the strangest member of our team."
“I think you like dangerous,” Julia teases and pokes him on the nose. Joey takes a slight offense with a hint of a lip curl, but shrugs after a moment.
“Yeah, let it never be said that I’m the most sane member of the group, because I’m not,” he says with just a hint of depreciative humor, and Joey smiles.
After they trek inside, it's back to debrief about tactics. Nick goes on about the approach and points out their breach methods. He also points out the risks and gives a few other recommendations.
“We have two dragons with plasma. Make sure shielded foes are prioritized,” he says at the tail end of the day, before they all get up to relax. Levine and Mom are in the kitchen, cooking up something. It smells tantalizingly good–she's going to blame Nick, he's the influencer of good cooking. And there's more than a friendly banter going on between her mom and Levine. Evan and Jackie are busy going over more dragon science with Joey, and Drenar is keenly paying attention.
It's the way he looks at her, with that attentiveness and that vestment of learning, that has led her to a slow burning conclusion: he is into her, in that way. Not in a fling sort of way. Something deeper, more... soulful?
Argh! Angie has the more flowery words for this! She keeps her thoughts guarded--no need to freak out the magical fox girl still giving lessons, because she is a gem of a personality. Now, I bet those two haven't hooked up yet. Hmm. What do I do to play to the chaos? She thinks with a silent smile. Maybe Angie can lend a hand?
Angela is busily working on…some kind of design on her tablet, deep in focus. It's one way to pass the time. Nah, I'll let that one cook on its own.
“I see that look. The look of a Tsundere dragon,” James teases when he grabs a seat beside her at the table. She scoffs at that assertion. “Whatcha thinking?”
“Matchmaking.” James rubs his chin before following her gaze, and he leans back in the chair.
“Oh, hell no. We cannot have little baby silver dragons and tiny red foxes running around, while we’ve got a world crisis to solve.”
“Oh, it would be adorable,” she says confidently. “I would be an honorary auntie!” Though, the thought does spawn a rather intriguing question that she has been going in circles around. Who does she like in that way? Drenar is like a brother, he’s out, Nick has finally embraced the idea of hanging out with Angela, and James–
An idea crops up, and she glances at him. “Say, remember that time you were gonna ask me out but didn’t?” He goes wide-eyed and claps his mouth shut.
“Nope. I don’t have a death wish.”
“Okay, fine. Let me make this easy for you. I want sushi, and we’re gonna go out for it. On a not date,” she adds hastily. Despite his previously weak as overcooked spaghetti physique, he’s filled out a little bit since this whole crazy adventure began. “I demand this, as my lifelong rival, and the destroyer of my turn-based armies!”
“Julia, seriously, I have no desire for sushi.” He’s not making this easy, and folds his arms before swerving around to examine her. “I challenge you to a magical duel. I win, I get to pick the place to eat. You win, you get your sushi. On your not-date.”
“Deal!”
In the end, she got her sushi. Though she has to ponder…did James let her win, or go a little easier on her? He’s smiling when he thinks she isn’t looking.
Either way, it’s a delightful end to a tough day of training.
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