Chapter One Hundred and Eighty-One - Tactics
Chapter One Hundred and Eighty-One - Tactics
The squad rushed out of the building then came to a slow stop not too far off.
They discovered me, standing half a step behind their C-ranked leader, with a very large gun pressed up to the back of his head.
It was a good position to be in, at least for me. "Don't," I snapped. "I'm in a very bad mood, and while I'm sure you could put a few holes in me, it won't be before I pull the trigger."
"Urgh," Ernest complained.
He had been screaming quite a bit while clutching the bloody side of his face, and... yeah, okay, I felt a little bad for him. Sure, he was an asshole, and sure I was willing to actually kill him, but there was something that made putting someone through a lot of pain somehow worse than just outright killing them.
Dude's eye was gone. What was left was a bloody mess, a lot of which was running down the side of his face and being soaked up by the collar of his uniform.
"He'll be fine," I said to the Seraph soldiers. I made sure not to even twitch. "You guys can stand there for a while."
"Back off!" one of them shouted, and the rest joined in. Seriously, what was it with people in uniform? Give them a gun and an ounce of authority, and they expect people to jump over backwards.
I let them yap for a while, then sighed. A flick of magic had the grass around my feet reach up and grab onto Ernest, clinging to his legs and arms and trailing up his chest. That had the troopers a whole lot more nervous.
That was on purpose. It was a show of force, but one that wasn't immediately dangerous.
Last time, I had fired a shot into the air, which had me Reloading after taking three rounds to the chest. Firing a Shadowbolt wasn't much better. That invited them to riddle me full of holes as well.
The best was this, a not-so-subtle use of Nature magic to make the grass grow and cling onto their nominal leader.
As expected, one of the guys leaned over to another, and I could just about make out what he was saying through his mask. "Grasping Growth. Second level. Nature magic."
That set the stage for them to not shoot me up. I think they had some level of training in de-escalation, it was just that they weren't fast about resorting to it. So, I had to stay here, on the thin strip of dying grass along the edge of the road, with the C-ranker under the barrel of my gun.
The next bit wasn't as tricky as the actual fight, but it wasn't easy, exactly.
First came the reinforcements. Another van, a fast-response vehicle, from Seraph. It parked a ways down the street and unloaded a half-dozen extra troops. A medic came over and pulled that sergeant back, and he was replaced by another ranking officer. Still, just D-rankers.
Heh, just D-rankers. There was enough firepower here to mess up a C-ranked portal with ease.
Then more showed up.
I had put out a call to Luna Corp a few times over the last dozen loops. The only way to get them to respond at all was to sidestep the appropriate channels. That meant calling Eldur, my squad leader, directly. He wasn't happy to be bothered at this kind of hour on a weekend. He was less happy to discover why he was being called over.
There was no love lost between Seraph and Luna Corp, less so when I hinted very heavily that Seraph was trying to kidnap me.
Still, Eldur was just a D-ranker like me. One that had more clout in the company than most, but... well, it wasn't always enough. So I sent out a few texts, some notifications. Basically, I was blowing up the phones of the people that cared to listen over at Luna Corp.
I knew that no one else at the company was kidnapped, but the company didn't know that. A few words to the right, gullible ears, made everyone go on high alert.
Which is why the next pair of vans to show up disgorged half of Squad B and C from Luna Corp. They showed up just as the police arrived.
The cops were just called to make things a little more annoying, and a little more public. When two gangs went at each other on the streets, the common man hid. When the sirens and cops were there, the common man pulled out his smartphone and started to film.
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This whole situation was not one that Seraph wanted filmed.
Sucked to be them. If I had it my way, their failure would go viral, though I doubted I'd be that lucky. The Streisand effect was still a thing, but more often than not, corps could smother things before it got that far, and there wasn't a journo worth their press badge that would poke their nose into this after the fact.
"What the fuck is going on here?" Eldur asked from somewhere behind me.
This many rankers in one place was bad. The police had come with two squad cars so far, which meant all of four officers, and while they seemed like they wouldn't mind poking their snouts into normal problems, this was beyond them.
"She's holding one of ours hostage," the newest Seraph sergeant on the scene said.
"Hey boss," I said without looking behind me. "These chucklefucks kicked in my door. I took one of them out, then left. Found this one waiting out here, and he was very rude, so I... subdued him. Now we're in a good old-fashioned standoff."
"I see," Eldur said.
I risked a quick glance behind me.
There was a world of difference between Seraph and Luna Corp, and having both here made it obvious. Our gear, Luna Corp's gear, was ten years older. The squad that Eldur had put together wasn't fully equipped either.
Compared to Seraph, who all had body armour and nice rifles, Luna Corp looked like chumps.
We were also outnumbered two to one. If this turned into a gunfight, then Luna Corp was going to lose a lot.
I think Seraph felt that uncertainty in the air. So, I poked Ernest on the side of the head and he groaned, loud enough that everyone heard it and was gently reminded that they were down one C-ranker.
Then there was yet another car that came around the corner and stopped just off the sidewalk. A little thing. I think it was a Peugeot? Imported from France, of course. The kind of tiny car that even someone tiny like Jane would have to squeeze into.
The leggy woman that stepped out of it made it look graceful. She was in a cocktail dress, with pale blue tights and a beret, of all things, because of course she was wearing that.
Louise walked over, then glanced around, taking in the situation as though all of the bared arms and the lit sirens were nothing to her. "What is all of this, then?" she asked.
There was a tingle in the air, the kind of thing that only C-rankers and above could manifest. Magic itself was responding to her presence.
Ernest had that too, but he was weak, new to the rank, and rather distracted. Louise, in contrast, made it feel like a cold winter storm just rolling in.
"Hello," I said. I didn't like repeating myself, but... "These idiots broke into my house," I said. "So I defended myself, and they're not happy about it. Eldur was kind enough to show up as backup."
Louise looked at me, then her attention slowly slid over to the Seraph sergeant. "Is this true?" she asked.
"This was a private Seraph operation, ma'am," he said. Which was a very polite way of not answering.
She sniffed. "Call Varrock."
Varrock? That had to be Lyra Varrock. Another C-ranker, and Ernest's direct superior at Seraph as far as I could tell.
The Seraph boys weren't happy about it, but the call was made. Maybe they were also feeling their extremities starting to go numb from the pervasive cold.
Louise was playing it cool, pun intended, but if her magic was this active, then she was ready to throw down. Ernest here was a tough fight, but he was a baby C-ranker. His spells had been good for a D-ranker, but nothing for someone who had as much experience as Louise.
I was pretty sure she could take on ten men at once... in a fight.
The comms guy, with the big techie backpack, made a call, and soon a stocky brick of a phone was passed over to Louise.
She talked on it for a while, explaining her read on the situation, then 'tsked' a bunch. It wasn't long before she tossed the phone back to the techie who fumbled it out of the air.
"Go home, all of you. Take your little C-ranker with you. This time, we will not be fighting." Then her attention shifted onto me. "You... you can come with me. You'll need a place to stay for the night anyway, yes?"
***