“G packages three, five seven have detonated, S packages four and two as well. Things are on schedule, sir.”

Jamie strode through Salan Court’s stone arcade, the most recent addition to his territory. The area and everyone inside it were now in his custody, forced at gunpoint into the hotel foyer and guarded by exactly ten rifles, no more than necessary to monitor every movement.

“We’ve got four squad cars, west face of the building, over,” a spotter called out over the radio. The west side faced the largest road of the four. It was likely barricaded, creating ground for the police’s front-line base. Jamie grabbed his cumbersome radio and pressed on the receiver with an obnoxious click.

“Hold fire unless fired upon. We’ve got the advantage if we lure them in. Muzzle flashes are only going to draw attention to your position.”

“Yes, sir.”

An ideal attack would have come at night, however, Salan court only accepted delivery trucks early morning. Every truck had been laundered of their incriminated ID, and only one needed to get past the front gates successfully. The other six came once there was no security left to refuse them.

Then the bombs. In both cities, the same obnoxious click of Jamie’s radio had made the earth shake.

He veered off into the courtyard, the centre of the operation. Six trucks were lined up as workers unloaded the contents as quickly as humanly possible. The Higher Order Armour alone occupied three of the six trucks. Saying the assembly needed a coordinated effort was an understatement.

“Progress report,” Jamie demanded from the head mechanic. Face, physique, none of it mattered right now.

“Sir! All parts are accounted for, building can start in five minutes.”

“How long will assembly take?”

“Half the day sir, with all hands-on deck.”

“See to it that it gets done.”

He kept on walking until he crossed the centre courtyard to the southern wing of the establishment where the hostages were being held. The foyer was only separated by a single doorway. Looking through the cracks, he confirmed that all the blinds were closed. That way no shot from beyond the building’s glass panes was guaranteed to hit its intended target.

Everything was where it was supposed to be when it was supposed to be. That’s how Jamie preferred things. Next on the checklist was enemy response.

Elvera arrived at the court in an armoured vehicle shielded by layers of steel and stress-tolerant magic. Ordered to stay in her car until a proper base of operations was established in the adjacent building.

Eventually, a suited man swiftly approached the driver’s side window and knocked it.

“They’re ready for you inside Lieutenant-General,” he said as he moved to open the back door. Elvera got out and followed the man inside. Past the door, the apartment had become a battle station.

Supplies, ammunition, and weapons were still being loaded in from the back entrance of the building, another room had been turned into a makeshift hospital for the police that had already been caught in crossfires. The building truly felt as though a piece of the battlefield had crawled its bloody self into the city once more. It made her skin crawl.

She climbed the central staircase until the suited man lead her into the front-line control room. Upon entering, she exchanged salutes with police figures she recognised. A mix of humans and Beaks, several superintendents, and the commissioner himself were present beside the swarm of high-ranking military personnel.

Plans were being drawn up, yet Elvera already noticed a thick, background power struggle between the Army and the Police, fighting over which method was swifter and less costly. She represented a much smaller faction of the response team’s forces which lessened the sway of her words, but they’d count when they needed to. Until then, she’d wait.

Before she entered the conversation, she looked through the small rift between the curtain fabric and began to gather the foundations of the situation.

Salan Court was indeed an intelligent choice of venue. A grid-like pattern of windows across three floors forced attackers to approach firefights like whack-a-mole, while the defenders could reposition at their leisure. In the event of an assault, entering the central courtyard itself was a definite death sentence from all sides. Knowing S.H.I.A.’s manpower, every corner was likely to be covered. Sweeping rooms would need a small army.

She swept her eyes over the schematics on the table. The three large sheets of paper for each floor confirmed what anyone could gather looking at the windows of the building. Small hotel rooms at regular intervals on the second and third floors, larger ones only ever being exactly double or triple the length of one unit. She approached a superintendent unengaged in the conversation, his shadowy, raven body almost disappearing into the background.

“What’s Deity division got to say about this?”

“They’ve got two on the case. Hostages in the foyer, roughly sixty bodies. The enemy count is ranging similarly. At least two in any given room. Not to mention the armour.”

Deity division was never wrong, and two was considered overkill.

“The main priority is extracting hostages. I don’t see how there’s any other way around that,” the commissioner said, the mechanical voice coming through his mask was as emotive as the voice box could muster.

“The progress they’re making in reconstructing the H.O.A. is too fast. Even if we did manage a hostage rescue, the forces it would take us to cover the exodus would be sitting ducks in the face of that thing.”

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Like being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Sidos’s military was the only one with an active Higher Order Armour division. Transporting two to Geverde along with their pilots would take a day or two regardless of if they marched or were disassembled.

Tanks were too wide for the surrounding streets and aerial bombardment, or artillery was completely out of the question when hostages were concerned.

“Sir!” a police officer shouted as he rushed into the doorframe, panting. “Communication has been established. Someone by the name of Jamie Welrod on the other end of the line.”

As the commissioner scuttled off to receive the telephone, Elvera sifted her mind through all the available commissioned Spirit units she could think of. Similar to carbon-based life forms, most Spirits could be classified on the same level as animals. Only a few were ever trained for the military and only in specialized units. Spirits above those such as Beaks were commissioned, same as humans.

Spirits of a Higher Order…well that took a lot of convincing to get them on one's side.

“Lieutenant-Colonel Broyidal, are your Airborne Spirit units still active?”

“We’ve thought about that, ma’am. We just can’t see that working without them being shot out of the sky. Argh…it would be best to wait until nightfall.”

“Nightfall may be too late. They’ve got so many hostages, they wouldn’t mind killing one every hour for a day or two if they had to,” a superintended muttered.

The commissioner stormed back into the room with a notepad.

“Their demands are here,” he said as he placed the paper on the table. “Sidos must dissolve their alliance with Geverde, the Sidosian government must release all political prisoners to which afterwards, the current government must be dissolved to make way for an unbiased state election, overseen by a third party. Someone pass this along to the ambassador!”

A lofty set of demands, to which the commissioner added one more thing.

“A hostage every hour until their demands are met beginning at 0543. Retaliation will not result in dead hostages, only dead soldiers. If all hostages are killed, the city will burn instead.”

A H.O.A. unit and an untold number of truck bombs. At best, three hostages were to die before an effective counterforce could be organised.

“Who officially has jurisdiction over the operation?” Elvera demanded.

“Hostage rescue is ordinarily police, but H.O.A. come under Military matters, ma’am,” The Lieutenant-Colonel answered, “Top authority goes to the Chief of Army.”

“He needs my co-operation. Someone get me a line to Lieutenant-General Fredrick!”

Jamie placed the phone handle back down on the receiver as his eyes swept over the mass of hostages. He handed back the phone to a young man, perhaps barely twenty years of age, with a rifle too big for him on his shoulder.

He walked forward into the foyer proper. It was as bright as the interior lighting would allow. Every movement was visible, meaning no one dared to make one. A mix of Beaks and humans in the crowd. After mulling it over, he decided to kill a human after the first hour. Everyone expected S.H.I.A. to be totally anti-spirit. Sure, many in the organisation thought so, but their message would be more effectively delivered on a grey platter, instead of a black-and-white one.

Hostages were hostages, and any opportunity the public took to label the operation a hate crime would devalue the message entirely. No. Even killing of humans and Spirits, alternating every hour. Human first.

He turned his attention away, intent on perusing the open-use facilities in the building, all situated on the bottom floor. If the southern wing was the foyer, the eastern was the dining hall and kitchen, split eighty-twenty respectively, the northern the lounge and the western the bathing and spa hall. The rooms were roughly uniform upstairs, small and easy to defend. Yet if there were going to be any proper firefights, they would be in those four sections.

He strode into the dining hall. Twenty or so men were situated here, working out of the kitchen as their base of operations. Ammunition, food, and enough supplies to last them however many hostages they had to go through. Behind him, in the kitchen itself was a doorway leading out to the only vehicle entrance in the facility. Easily defensible as a checkpoint.

“Boys! Start flipping over tables! Give yourself some cover in case you need it.”

The men did as they were told. A regular rifle round would tear through the tables with ease, yet even just visual concealment was valuable when your opponent was likely not to spray and pray, whether that was out of fear of collateral damage or conserving ammo.

He took a right into the large ballroom, where the majority of his forces were set up. If somewhere was as indefensible as a large, echoing open chamber, he would fill it as much as he could to make up for it. The bulk of their supplies, weapons and communication were all here. Wireless telegram workers had already set up their stations and were beginning to communicate their successes.

The final wing was arguably the most useless. Not hard to defend, yet the only reason one would want to defend the bathing hall was for the sake of not letting their enemy gain a foothold. For Jamie that was reason enough, and the area had gotten twelve troops of its own.

There was no reason to check on each floor’s rooms individually. He had junior officers doing that already. Instead, he went up both levels to the top floor where the lookouts were situated. West face was what he was most interested in.

Upon entering, the two men stood up and saluted him. A sniper and his spotter.

“Sir!” the spotter exclaimed, straightening his back. A soldier on the younger side had just been put in the position if Jamie remembered at all.

“Sir,” the sniper chimed. A veteran of the Aether and Diesel war, leagues different from his partner. Jamie returned their salutes. He walked over to the window they were situated at and crouched. A physical barricade had now been set up between them and the other side of the street, solidifying the divide.

“All scout teams on the top floor, this is Jamie. Confirm if the barrier continues all around the building,” he said, holding the button down on his radio. The three other teams confirmed.

“Talk to me,” Jamie muttered to the spotter.

“The building two blocks down to our left, across the street. We believe that’s where they’ve set up shop. They finished setting barricades only moments ago and there’s a sniper at bearing two seven six, two five four and two seven…eight three.”

“Don’t fire any shots yet. If you need more precision or suppressive power, just ask. If they begin an assault, you’ll be the first targets, so don’t peek unless you’re absolutely sure.” This was common knowledge at this point. They had been briefed over and over, yet for new recruits like him, repetition was reassurance.

“Yes sir,” the spotter said, rife with nervous determination.

“Keep repositioning.”

As Jamie uttered his last words of wisdom, another sound entered his ears. The clutter downstairs barely reached him behind the closed doors of the third-storey room, and it became obvious how the city around him had frozen in time. Nothing but faint sirens.

Yet the sound of several cars. A convoy.

“Here comes the fighting force.”

A row of army green transport vehicles rolled up to the buffer zone. An intense profession. As they all took their places, streams of soldiers exited. Three cars and thirty soldiers, and that was just the west face.

“All units, hold fire. They’re not here to attack just yet,” Jamie confirmed. By estimates, they were outnumbered perhaps two to one, not even counting whatever Spirits the military had in their capacity to deploy. If this was a fairy tale of heroes and Higher Order Spirits, odds like that would barely rouse an audience, but this was the real world; an ironically human battle. Numbers, positioning, and the smallest of advantages all constituted absolute life and death.

“To all units stationed in hotel rooms, one person comes down to the front foyer to collect two hostages and bring them back to your rooms,”

Slower and slower they would make the assault. Spirit magic was powerful, yet rarely as precise as a bullet, and even those often missed their targets. The Deity’s eyes most likely circling their heads right now would do Jamie the favour of letting the think tank across the street know about the latest wrench in their plans.