Sidos Special Tactics Urban Division, affectionately nicknamed Studs by their fellow police and military counterparts, was the fledgling division of the Sidosian Metropolitan Police. Evalyn knew them to be a middle ground between law enforcement and a full army intervention—the specially trained personnel of the country’s revamped federal government. Experts in urban combat, hence their namesake, the unit had made its reputation off the back of the S.H.I.A. terror campaign, proving to be an effective arm of the new regime.
However, Evalyn disliked their tactical gear. The heavy plated armour that supposedly stopped bullets, the steel helmets, deafening earmuffs, thick clothes, and tight kneepads restricted her. She felt like a small dog in a heavy-knitted sweater.
She was tempted to use some of her magic to lift the weight off her shoulders, but the glow of her cheek would draw more attention than it was worth. If she was to pass as their plus one, she had to look the part first. No one knew that she was their failsafe in case things went wrong. She was simply one of several Geverdian troops mixed in as part of the joint operation.
“Janitor team one in position at front entrance right,” Evalyn’s team lead informed.
“Janitor team two in position at back entrance, left.”
“Chimney sweeps in position, roof left side.”
A silence filled the comms as each team fell into their starting positions.
“Blake, eyes down range and hold until we clear.”
“Sir.”
From the end of her stack, one SC Blake scuttled forward, his tactical gear camouflaging him against the dark geometry of their surroundings. In addition to the uniform, he wore a set of ski goggles, the leather strap tight against the bridge of his nose.
He took his place on the other side of the door, the side it would open to first. In his gloved hands, he held a long wooden rifle, more suited to precision suppressive fire than the submachine gun Evalyn was gripping tightly. A finger tapped the trigger guard in anticipation.
“Flashlights on. Remember your training,” the team leader said as he picked the lock on the door. He twisted the door handle and confirmed it was open.
The bulky radio strapped to her shoulder crackled on once more.
“Control to ground teams; Geverde’s recon Spirits confirm twenty-seven unknowns, nothing on the top floor. Chimney sweeps, please confirm.”
“Negative on movement from up here. Dead space directly below us, Janitor Two’s trajectory. How copy?”
“Copy Chimney Sweeps. Proceed as planned. All teams begin phase one now.”
The team lead, Sergeant Hitch, turned the doorknob and softly pushed the door open. Blake raised his rifle.
“Short wall right side, no traps. Ready.”
The rest of the team moved in sync with the small pops they heard from inside, almost like fireworks. Evalyn saw a torrent of shattered glass as the Chimney Sweeps breached the upper windows and rappelled onto the catwalk. On the other side of the building, Janitor Two moved almost identically to her team, mirroring their actions.
She raised her boxy sub-machine gun to eye level as she began to splinter off her line and clear the work benches, heading sideways across the building’s width. Two columns of benches numbering roughly fifteen each ran down the length of the factory. Her flashlight only illuminated a tiny portion of the bench’s underside for potential ambushes, but none came.
“Clear,” the Senior Constable to her left said. She echoed the phrase a moment later as she came to the centre pathway of the building. She felt a gloved hand pat her shoulder.
“On you.”
She again echoed the movement to the Senior Constable before her until the Sergeant rejoined the team. They repeated this manoeuvre thrice over, meeting janitor two in the middle. Evalyn could hear the Chimney Sweeps kick open the office door and clear the room. Eventually, the two Janitor teams reached the other end of the work floor, confirming no hostiles.
“Rear man, move up,” the Sergeant ordered. SC Blake lowered his rifle and silently moved to their position as the Chimney Sweeps descended the staircase to regroup.
The only entrance to the basement was a small doorway the three teams of four were already prepared to enter, stacking up on either side. Based on live reconnaissance the old concrete space looked to be significantly hollowed out compared to the building’s original blueprint.
Evalyn’s team leader retreated to the back of the line as she moved up to the front. Another Sergeant from team two led a stack across from her.
“Deity, give us eyes.”
The radio crackled as the information came through with blazing speed. “Single hostile, armed at the bottom of the stairway,” relayed mission control confidently. Deity division was never wrong. When you were conversing with disc-shaped Spirits flying hundreds of metres high, capable of peering through almost any hard cover with their gargantuan ‘eye’, it was hard to see how they could ever be mistaken. Through contracts and agreements, that organ’s use had gone from just hunting to including surveillance as well.
‘Well, Police protocol’, Evalyn thought, lamenting the precarious shoot-if-shot rules of engagement. If things got hairy, she’d have to hope she could pass off her abilities as Geverdian Aether tech of some kind.
“Janitor one to control, ready to begin staircase breach, how copy?”
“Control to Janitor one, breach when ready, over.”
“Copy, over and out.”
One door, a single staircase, and a second door. They would have to clear it as fast as possible if they wanted to maintain an element of surprise.
“Gerry, lights out,” the Janitor team lead ordered over his radio.
“Rodger.”
A final Chimney Sweep still in the office cranked a lever. Evalyn heard the faint clunk of floodlights shutting off and small whispers of panic below her feet. In the cover of darkness, she checked the door handle. Unlocked.
She nodded to the Sergeant across from her, who pushed it open. The men behind her clicked on their flashlights mounted to their helmets, and she followed suit.
In a swift single movement, she rounded the corner, sub-machine gun pointing towards the end of the staircase. The man directly behind her had his pistol over her shoulder.
“Police! Drop your weapon!”
“Do it now!”
The guard at the end of the hallway jumped violently at the shock of flashlights staring him down. She could see him spot each gun barrel, his eyes growing wider each time. He froze still as they kept yelling, descending rapidly.
“Drop your fucking weapon now!”
The man did as he was told, letting Evalyn seize the weapon. Switching the safety on, she passed the gun up the line. Soon after, doing the same to the man himself. The rear men apprehended him and disassembled his firearm while Evalyn strapped on a gas mask.
Iris was not used to tea. To her palette, it was too nuanced. The light orange colour led her to expect something sweet, but in reality, it tasted like off water. Nonetheless, she drank it anyway, forbidding herself to forsake anything she could consume, especially something given to her.
Iris had slept for the better part of a day, and the fatigue that would should’ve be consuming her at such an ungodly hour of the night was absent. She sat at a bedside dresser, surrounded by mirrors and make-up. She had no clue that the powders, the gloss, and the foundations around her were all ten years old at the least, or that the chair’s height did not match hers, but instead an eighteen-year-old Evalyn’s.
Next to her was a man named Oswald, who remained standing at attention, similar to the armed officer outside her room, who wore black instead of grey. Oswald had not given in to fatigue either, keeping her company as the hours dragged. She asked him one more time, just to see if he would budge.
“Where did Evalyn go?”
The man sighed through the greying hair on his face. “She told me not to tell you in case you try to follow her. I know full well that you can.”
Iris stayed silent, pondering, before finally coming up with another question, a different line of attack.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“Is she killing someone?”
The man hesitated for a moment—a reaction that suggested progress. “Possibly,” he admitted rather uncomfortably.
“Why?”
A question that made Oswald, of all people, speechless. He momentarily considered how to approach the extremely blunt line of questioning. Iris felt as though she was about to make progress, a breakthrough. She had promised Evalyn she would not try to follow her, but she at least wanted to know where she was going, as she did when they had last separated.
“My old master, General Hardridge, only ever worsened the civil war, going so far as to invade Geverde itself for resources. I remember asking him once why he did so, why he didn’t try to find some compromise, achieve peace. He said to me, quite bluntly mind you, that peace was never an option as long as people were people and Spirits were Spirits.”
Oswald crossed his arms and kept on thinking.
“I never found out his true intention, but whenever I find myself revisiting that phrase, I never think of it in a ‘human versus Spirit’ context,” he explained. “He lost his wife during childbirth. He was staying in a makeshift hospital; the city’s medical centre had been destroyed in a Spirit attack. Because of that, they didn’t have the equipment to save her. That gave him a reason, at least. But not out of revenge, but paranoia.”
He opened his mouth once again, but as if he realised he was rambling, he stopped himself, mouth hanging open. He began slowly, taking care of his words. “I think Evalyn ended up taking after her father. They both carry the resolve to kill for the same reason. Even then, she prefers not to.”
He chuckled at a sick joke Iris could never understand. “I guess that was the cost of wishing on a star and making a deal with the devil all at once…maybe the way she loves takes after her father too.”
Adults were terrible at answering her questions.
In theory, anyone inside was still blinded by the sudden darkness, but they could not solely rely on that chance. Evalyn did a once over of herself and tore off a smoke grenade from her belt line, slowly twisting the doorknob as silently as possible, pushing the final barrier open.
She pulled the pin on the smoke grenade and rolled it into the room. The hiss of the smoke pluming gave her the go-ahead that their entry was concealed.
She was first up in the single-line formation, making her way in with her wingman; they veered right while the next person turned left in an alternating pattern. For a few moments, terrorists nor police dared to fire into the plume without knowing what they would hit. Evalyn kept the wall to her back and her gun facing forward into the room. The moment she exited the smoke, she found the presence of an armed assailant crouched behind one of the many concrete pillars.
“Police! Hands in the air!” she shouted, hearing the same from somewhere else in the room.
Startled, the man swivelled to face her, raising his firearm. Evalyn hesitated for a split second, instinctively activating her magic under the cover of her clothing, but it was too late. Her wingman shot two suppressed shots from his pistol, one into the man’s shoulder and another into his hip.
She immediately turned her attention back forward as they moved up, the officer behind her cuffing him and disabling his weapon. They continued forward.
As flashlights became more and more prevalent, so too did muzzle flashes. Evalyn did her best to keep her eyes forward. Another man, probably timing his movements with the approach of her flashlight, sprung out from under a waist-high bench. His gun raised immediately as he began to fire. Evalyn instinctively ducked and returned a barrage of suppressive fire as her teammate, now armed with his rifle, placed two shots on the man, centre mass. Kill shots.
Evalyn stood back to her crouched height and pressed forward passed the almost certainly dead body. In the torrent of gunfire, they had no time for cuffing anymore.
She risked a glance left and saw other teams move forward throughout the basement at a brisk pace. They were still on schedule.
Evalyn approached another pillar, finding a muzzle poking out from the other side. She dropped her weapon, which hung idly by its strap and grabbed the foreign muzzle, rounding the corner to find the man’s twisted face, pumped full of adrenaline.
She instinctively reached for her pistol, normally on her shoulder, but halfway through the movement, readjusted and grabbed it from her hip. She kept the enemy’s muzzle away from her body as he randomly fired into the wall behind them.
Two shots. One placed perfectly on his shoulder and another on his forearm. She could afford to be accurate at this distance. The man’s weak arm muscles failed his grip, and Evalyn tore the weapon from his grasp as her wingman tackled the assailant to the ground, apprehending him as quickly as he could as Evalyn kept lookout.
Another two targets began to blind fire from behind a pillar, and Evalyn shrank into cover, a bullet tearing through her shoulder armour and grazing her skin, exposing raw flesh and blood to the cold, dead air.
She planned to return fire, but the rapid booming of a machine gun caught her attention. A man was crouched behind a distant workbench, using it as cover while firing a stationery LMG from the back of the room. Its suppressive fire prevented anyone from moving forward. Even worse was that the bullet calibre tore through the concrete like paper mache. Solid cover no longer existed.
Evalyn did not want to create another smoke screen and risk the fire becoming more erratic, but she knew her teammates might not think the same. To them, it was their best option, despite the certainty of hostages somewhere in the room becoming collateral.
From her position, Evalyn solidified her resolve and left her cover. Immediately she was singled out and fired upon. The glow of her arm almost pierced her clothing as she created a full-body shield. The bullets’ power pushed her further back into the wall, but it didn’t faze her.
She switched to her pistol with one hand and rounded the pillar with the two blind-firing men. She shot six times as quickly as her trigger finger would allow, only giving herself a second to confirm that they were neutralised.
Another torrent of high-calibre fire came towards her, and she blocked it the same way, her golden shield giving her cover as she drew the gunner’s attention. The concentrated fire drilled into and dented her guard, and in each moment, she repaired it instantaneously. With each step forward, she gained precious centimetres. Letting go of the shield, she reloaded her pistol. But there was no need. The fire stopped with another single gunshot.
Her shield dissipated, and she found an officer standing over the gunner, his rifle pointed down at the wounded man.
The gun smoke subsided, and Evalyn heaved an exasperated sigh. From somewhere in the room, Chimney Sweep leader radioed in for the lights to be turned back on again. Evalyn readied herself, but the light still blinded her for a solid few seconds. She blinked insistently until the room became visible through the blur.
“Ground team to clean-up crews; we need casevac and medivac teams on site pronto, over.”
“Oi! What the fuck was that?” her wingman asked her. A Senior Constable Fredrick ripped off his gas mask and shoved her shoulder. “That fucking shield!”
Evalyn removed her mask and breathed deeply the stale air around them. “Untested Aether tech. It’s in the early stages, so I took a risk using it.”
“Is that why you rolled with us? Testing?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Fucking hell…If that thing hadn’t worked, you’d be a pile of fucking flesh!”
“I guess I’m glad it did then.”
The Senior Constable wiped the sweat off his face and shook his head before walking away.
“All civilians! We are the police! Stand up slowly and put your hands behind your heads!”
A group of roughly fifteen people stood up, most quaking violently from the adrenaline pumping through their veins amidst the now quiet calm. Fifteen. Even for a night shift, that was not nearly enough for a full workforce.
“Where’s the rest of you?” Evalyn shouted. She couldn’t see any Beaks amongst the group whatsoever.
“A uhm…a truck came today,” said a woman timidly from across the floor. Her squeaking voice echoed around the destroyed concrete pillars. “A truck came and took them. There were another twenty of us. They’re gone.”
“I’ve been getting phone calls all day from the Sidos City Metropolitan Police Service. Left and right, telling me that they have one of your operatives in a jail cell, that the Federal Police are strongarming them out of their own operations, and that your plans have been compromised.”
Someone had stolen Jamie Welrod’s folding deck chair from him, leaving him to stand like a child in detention. Slender, imposing, wrapped in a pristine beige suit and, for whatever reason, wearing sunglasses even in the blacked-out room. “Explain to me what happened while I was on my way here,” commanded the sponsor.
“Yes,” Jamie replied, resisting the urge to add ‘sir’ to his sentence. “We were in pursuit of someone who we had flagged as dangerous. According to some of our Police officers, they were digging into the details of one of our hostages a…Kurael Fahren.”
“A detective? Journalist?”
“We thought as much, but suddenly our operative was taken out. We’re not sure how. We only got so much before the Federal Police took custody of him. He mentioned ‘golden armour’ but could not elaborate further.”
“Golden armour?” the sponsor asked, his entire body seemingly perking up at the mention of it. “Are you sure?”
Jamie was taken aback, unsure of how to take the reaction. “Yes. Golden armour that seemed to appear out of nowhere along her arm.”
The sponsor sat back in Jamie’s chair, face in apparent amazement. “They’re here, are they?”
“Who is?” Jamie asked.
“Nothing for you to worry about…I must tell you something.” The sponsor said straightening himself and the bottom of his buttoned suit jacket. He readjusted his sunglasses, collar and sleeves taking time with his pause, only making Jamie more nervous. “Your hostages. I need twenty of them.”
“Twenty?” Jamie asked, bewildered. “That’s more than half.”
“Yes, I realise,” he admitted. “But unfortunately, their services are needed elsewhere.”
Jamie had never heard of this before, nothing about any plans to give up any of their hostages. Only one H.O.A. unit had been fully completed, which would barely suffice for his motives. Voicing such was so obvious it was futile.
“C—could I ask why?” Jamie stammered, in disbelief at the betrayal which only earned him an exasperated sigh.
“There’s another activist group on the outskirts of the city-state of Fadaak, the Free Slave Army which I’m sure you’ve heard of before.” Jamie nodded. “And I have offered them a small number of specialised Higher Order Armour engineers to get their own program up and running.”
Small number? It was over half their cohort, something S.H.I.A. could not afford to lose.
“Your engineers are trained enough now to understand the workings of the Higher Order Armour, and there will be financial compensation from the F.S.A. of course.”
“I understand,” Jamie struggled, “but these are our engineers, we still require them—”
“Now Jamie, there’s no need to be so selfish,” the sponsor cooed as though to scold a child. He leaned forward in his chair, letting it creak under the weight of his bony body. “I, as a part of the network, colleagues, and ideology I represent, must think of the bigger picture. I only care about your cause insofar as it benefits the furthering of mine. Now, don’t get me twisted I truly think it’s wonderful. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be helping you.”
The sponsor stood, brushing off the seat of his pants and sighing, looking in Jamie’s direction and chuckling. “I do understand, Jamie. To you, it must seem as though there isn’t an awful lot aside from S.H.I.A., Sidos, and your latest ploy. But to me, there is a whole lot more at play and I must continue to think ahead.”
The sponsor wrapped an arm around Jamie, turning his body stiff and rendering his brain useless. There was an aura around him, an aura Jamie could not sense without being only centimetres away. Something greater than a mere human, something ethereal. Magic?
“I will leave it up to your imagination to guess what will happen if you do not comply. My advice is usually optional, but these are orders,” the sponsor whispered, the ever-present sly grin gone from his face. Jamie felt a pat on his back as the sponsor let go, skipping backwards and regaining his merry demeanour.
“The Federal Police are coming, Jamie. Move them tonight, before it’s too late. Oh, and one more thing,” he said as he strutted towards the door. “The woman you were looking for, the one that caused you problems. What did she look like?”
“Orange hair and a tattoo on her cheek.”
“Do you have a name?”
“No.”
“Get me one. Tell me as soon as you do.”