Lidija is sitting in a corner and crying. Natalija is earily quiet. We should have aborted the mission as soon as we reached the city. In hindsight. But in foresight to be told that your survival depends on the speed you win at makes a larger difference.

At the end of the day we are beginners. Talented beginners maybe and not absolute beginners for sure, but we suck compared to trained professionals.

L: I could have used my new barrier. I just forgot about it.

P: Listen, people forget things. You are a girl pressed into a warrior’s role, deprived of sleep and deeply traumatized. Mistakes will happen. Now heal her and be ready to protect us against the rest of them.

PN: Of them?

P: Yes. They are going to see the traces. They will check the houses. We need a full distraction.

P: Lidija, I need you to cast [Mantle of Frenzy] on me.

She does just that.

I am watching them through my spy eye. They look like blue or violett stick figures, almost purely skin and bones, just impressively tall, between 2m and 2.2m.

P: We all make mistakes. I am going to lead you through mine, when we are out of this shit. Preferably on a beach in the South Sea. I am also tired. My meditations have started sucking. I’ve had too many narrow escapes. But for now we have people depending on us. I need you to be Xena for a few days more.

L: Your taste in TV is abhorrent.

I go up to the roof. There is a door that opens from the inside. I conjure a wedge under it, just in case. Let’s ride. I spread my wings.

First I do a strafing run. To my disappointment, few of them, in fact only one, go down and stay down. But they are bleeding. And that makes a difference. I have a source of the good stuff now. They are afflicted. A few balls of lightning leaving thin brown trails behind follow me, but extinguishing going to close to the metal building I’ve landed upon.

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Have they seen where I’ve landed? I best make sure. I drop a hand grenade. There are not many of those left, but they are mundane and big threats will become more and more magical. I can just as well use them up.

The purple ones are not the sharpest tools in the shed. They keep wasting mana and ball lightning. But all of them storm the building whose top I am on. Are they really stupid enough to not understand that I have no reason to stay here and can fly? They can’t be that stupid. This has to be a trap. I teleport to a roof on the other side of the street. This is exactly the right place for a sniper.

They are fast in the vertical. There is no honest way of denying that. I am barely set up properly before they burst out of the door. Time to pick of few of them off. It takes a lot of shots to drop them. Bullets just pass through them without doing vital damage. Time to go for headshots.

That works. Unfortunately the blue ones are clever enough to take cover. Well. I am happy to shoot purple ones. Communists in their ancestry for the reddish part of their hue? I don’t care. The blue ones do care. They order them down to chase me. That is an execently opportunity to use an annihilating beam as a parting shot. Hitting them with bullets has filled my reserves to the brim.

I could crawl to the back of the building and drop off it. But then they might go back to searching the houses for me. If I leave by the other sides the blue ones can electrocute me. It is time to use the environment. The roof and the door is metal. [Wrath of the Magister] can heat things. I am looking forward to the first ones to touch that door. That said, the weather seems humid today. I can try it. The floor in front of the door gets the opposite treatment. I am corrupting nature. I think I am understanding why that stone gave me this power.

I hear a sound like a box of cutlery hitting a tiled floor. Do they scream like that? Maybe I can aid by increasing ventilation? I go to full auto and pour gun fire through the door. More of that sound.

The door bursts open. A number of Bluies, let’s call them this, spills through the door, bearing a ramrod made from some kind of furniture. Yes, that was a bed frame, before they abused it. But who makes a bedframe blue with pink triangles? It does not matter. The floor has had time to react. It is icy and slippery. They fall down. I conjure a rod, hold it horizontally and go into hulk form. The impact propels them over the edge of the roof. I do not waste the momentum and teleport to the building I came from. They were not ready for an opponent of that size wielding for what was for them a telephone pole. They do get a few lightning strikes in, but that is not slowing me down. In fact, they get slower compared to me. [Mantle of Frenzy] is kicking in.

They are too few. Where is the rest? Not having an answer to this question frightens me. I retreat from the roof through the door, which they had also blocked. I’ve run, turned back and shot at them so far. What is missing? I enter a fairly empty room and conjure a stately empty cupboard and step into it. I concentrate on tamping down my aura. If I didn’t have an eye out to observe, I probably would not have the nerve to just wait.