We hear the battle before we see it. That is not unusual. Firearms, conjured or constructed, are loud. We also sense it with our aura senses. What we sense is terrifying.
T: That is, I am afraid a number of category 3 auras.
D: How do you know? Have you ever sensed one?
T: Nothing else would be so strong that we could pick it up at such distances. Our aura senses are not that great.
D: What do we do?
P: Go and fight. If they were only friendly, this battle would already be over. If they were only hostile, this battle would already be over.
We are cresting a hill and getting into view of of the river and the people already present.
We are about to get on TV. Well, maybe they are YouTubers, though that truck has a satellite dish on its roof. By nature I am a bit shy. But that ship has sailed. We need to look good.
In the face of disturbances in the air, animated blobs of mud guarding the shorelines of the river and crocodiles with six legs that have not yet obliterated the partially beached ship only because they cannot make up their minds between tearing a hole into the hull and climbing onto the deck. Possibly the explosive and tear gas grenades the ship’s defenders are tossing onto them does have something to do with that.
U: This is your chance to look like great battle wizards. Anonymity is not going to work for you any longer. Now is your chance to be useful and famous.
Great minds think alike.
And of course it is a chance to be ridiculous. Or to die, but then it won’t matter. However, flying around like that guy in spandex wearing a canary yellow cape with a black fist painted on it is too far into the territory of ridicule to my taste. And I am of two minds. Of course it is stupid of Superman to wear his underpants outside his tights. But then of course it means that he is wearing tights over his legs, be they shaved or not, and not just a very, very tight leotard, which may technically cover things, but only in terms of colour, not of shape.
He is definitely the source of a category 3, or, as my tricorder insists on calling it, silver rank aura. The others … are also wearing spandex and running around the ship, most of them on the water.
But why are they beating up three mermaids with silver rank auras?
Thomas is informing the captain via the intercom, that the mermaids are category 3, the crocodiles a mixture of high end category 1 and the lowest end of category 2, while the rest is low to medium category 1. His aura senses work better.
„Vehicles, stop for dismounting infantry. Use your cannons on the crocodiles, but only if you have a clear field of fire. When in doubt, hold your fire“. We are going in.
In terms of firepower, not actually, obviously. Nobody of us is going to go into melee with a monster like that and do any good. My understanding of my abilities and how abilities are trained has changed my approach. I take out my modified aerial servant. I have modified it a little to carry a moderate payload. Nobody notices as I also retrieve a hand grenade with its splitter jacket removed. In that configuration my servant can carry it and its added hook appendage can pull the pin. I target it at one of the blobs. Probably overkill, but a kill is a kill.
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Then I start shooting, joining the soldiers giving off carefully aimed slow shots at this distance. I want to get [Victim of a sadistic killer] into durable targets. I conjure my assault rifle and make a crocodile eat a burst. It dies. Some of our men actually cheer me on for scoring our first kill. The second crocodile monster does the job. Now I should systematically wound more crocodiles and let the rest of the men inflict more wounds. I begin to understand the names my tricorder gave to these afflictions. The crocodile monsters far away from the ship fall victim to cannon fire. Good but not useful to me personally.
By all experience we have gained so far and the military textbooks I have started reading, our commanding officer is doing everything right.
He has identified our strategic goal – save the ship’s crew
He has identified our strength – we have an advantage in range
He has devised correct tactics – use that fire superiority immediately against an enemy too stupid to react correctly.
It still fails. A mermaid emits a warbling screech. Most of the crocodiles on land throw themselves into the water and start diving under the ship turning it into a shield against us, to attack it from the other side. About a fifth of the disturbances drift towards us. Our commander is not tactically blind either. He directs the men with magical weapons to concentrate fire on the sides of the attackers and then walk it inward, lest we waste ammo on immaterial targets and are harder to surround.
I curse and switch to the weapon Rademacher gave me and I never returned. It builds up a charge within the corkscrew and emits it when I so command. It seems to be made for close combat, lacking any kind of aids for aiming. That does not stop me from using it for long range shooting given my racial ability. It still doesn’t have a high rate of discharge, althoug the entities approaching us don’t take many bolts to rip apart into showers of white dust.
Our men with conventional arms are getting nervous, firing on those things, their bullets being deflected into impossible directions, even killing a particular unlucky shooter with his own bullet, but doing no damage.
Against an enemy that is too stupid to scare but is directed by an external intelligence only overwhelming firepower able to eliminate the enemy would help. We don’t have it. Smoke grenades are thrown and the men with conventional guns ordered to retreat. I curse as the smoke also obscures my aim. My weapon is no good for this situation. I conjure my assault rifle, jump to my feet – why? I don’t know. An instinct to run away, to better see or to get into a close range fight on my feet – and go into continous fire from the hip with my right arm and squeeze a few force bolts off whenever I see something. A magical assault rifle does not overheat. As long as I have the mana, I can do this. Thanks to Thomas and a few afflicted crocodiles catching bullets my mana goes down steeply, but not yet catastrophically.
An armoured car of ours races forward, in a dash a danger to our own men, commiting to a suicide charge.