Chapter 44: Kill or Be Killed
Two rounds punched through the leader’s chest, .45 ACP doing what it did best. The man’s eyes went wide – surprise mixed with disbelief, blitzing through the stages of grief.
The third shot took him in the forehead. Cole sure as shit wasn’t gonna take any chances with wand-wielders. The body folded backward, the wand skittering across the concrete floor and disappearing under shipping crates.
Conway dropped his papers and stumbled away from the corpse, making noises that weren’t quite words. “Merciful heaven! Who are you?!” His heel caught on nothing and he went down hard, scrambling on his back like an overturned beetle.
Convenient, too. It saved Cole the trouble of a civvie standing in the way during a firefight. Four guards spilled out from the side offices, unholstering their weapons.
Cole took aim at the first one out, popping the cultist’s head with two rounds before his arm could even make it halfway up. He folded backward into the doorway.
Cole shifted toward the other doorways, but Elina’s revolver was already booming. The heavy round punched through the first guard’s chest and kept going, catching his buddy who’d been stupid enough to stack up directly behind him. Both men dropped in a heap – one shot, two bodies. Yeah, these hand cannons didn’t mess around. Built to punch through drake scales, they turned bad spacing into a death sentence. Back home, even a .44 Magnum would’ve struggled with that kind of penetration.
Mack meanwhile had taken down his target somewhere in the middle of all this. All that remained was a crumpled cultist with most of his thinking equipment relocated to the wall behind him.
It took barely two seconds to put them all down. In that same timeframe, Conway had somehow managed to wedge himself partway under a steel desk, legs still kicking as he tried to disappear entirely. Like a cockroach.
Still, it was damn impressive. That kind of self-preservation reflex would’ve made him a survivor in any horror movie. If Conway ever gave up the shipping business, he had a future in competitive cowering.
Good thing too, because they were about to need all the cowering he could muster. The gunfire had already stirred up the whole building – Cole could hear boots thundering up from below, cultists converging like wasps to a kicked nest. In about a minute this nice cool warehouse was going to turn into a free-fire zone and the last thing they needed was a panicked civilian catching crossfire or bolting into the middle of a firefight.
Cole moved toward the desk while Mack and Elina shifted to cover the stairwells. Conway had extracted himself just enough to peer around, probably calculating escape routes. He went rigid upon spotting Cole’s approach, tensed like a rabbit but smart enough not to bolt. Either he recognized the uniforms under their cloaks, or he’d figured out that running from three armed professionals was a losing proposition.
The words tumbled out like water from a broken dam. “I’m merely a shipping agent! I arrange legitimate cargo transfers! Whatever contraband might be concealed in those crates, I’ve no knowledge – please, I beg you!”
Cole pulled his cloak open enough to show the OTAC badge. “We’re with OTAC. Stay down and you’ll be fine.”
The distributor looked up through tears, processing the badge and what it meant. Some of the panic left his face, replaced by desperate relief. “Oh blessed providence! Thank the Lord above – I thought certain you were brigands!”
Cole produced a set of cuffs and secured Conway’s wrists to a nearby bracket. “We’ll come back for you.”
Conway nodded frantically, still trying to make himself smaller under the desk.
The footsteps were getting louder. Cole ran the math. Three stairwells fed into this floor – main cargo stairs wide enough for a pallet jack and two mirrored stairwells on opposite ends of the building. Three choke points, three operators. And with the cultists’ level of training and common sense, they probably wouldn’t even need to hold out for Miles and Ethan.
“They’ll try to flank,” Cole verbalized. “Elina, eastern stairwell. Mack, opposite. I’ve got the highway.”
They moved to their positions while the sounds from below got louder. The metal stairs rang under the weight of rushing bodies, and voices overlapped in the chaos of men psyching themselves up to die for their cause.
Cole found his angle where two walls of crates formed natural cover. The main cargo stairs stretched out below him, and more importantly, the overhead climate control unit sat directly above the stairwell. The preservation wards kept everything at meat-locker temperatures, condensation beading on every surface. All that moisture, all that magical cold – it was like having pre-staged ammunition.
The first cultists rounded the corner into view. Three wide in the stairwell, revolvers up, more bodies packed behind them. Maybe fifteen total, pushing up with the confidence of numbers and faith. They moved like men who’d been told they were soldiers but never learned what that meant beyond holding a weapon and following orders.
Cole settled his sights on the lead man. The idiots had committed to a frontal assault up an exposed staircase, armed not even with smoke or suppressing fire but with bodies and conviction. In a stairwell, everyone had to pass through the same vertical channel. Architects never meant to create killing fields, but that’s what they’d built.
Perfect time for a flashbang spell. He held his fire, letting the cultists get closer while he cooked the spell.
The fire wasn’t too hard, even with the preservation wards turning the entire place into a meat locker. Only thing was, cold air was dense air. More molecules per cubic inch meant more mass to compress – like the difference between squeezing a sponge versus squeezing clay. His mana reserves felt it immediately, burning harder just to achieve the same compression.
But physics was a beautiful bitch when properly understood. More mass meant more energy storage. Harder to compress meant more violent expansion. The conservation of energy didn't play favorites – every joule he forced into that dense, cold air would come back out with interest.
He layered the compression, accepting the higher mana cost. The frigid air fought back like it had opinions about being manhandled, all those tightly packed molecules suddenly trying to expand at once. And release he would give it.
Cole flung it right toward center mass, and hot damn was the detonation vicious. It surpassed his usual flashbang spells, clapping deeper than he’d anticipated. The surrounding moisture flash-vaporized – ice crystals to superheated steam in microseconds, adding secondary expansion to an already violent reaction. Dense fog bloomed instantly, hanging in the air like San Francisco on steroids.
The overpressure didn’t just disorient, either. It was powerful enough to send guys flying. The group of four at ground zero suffered the least, airburst probably turning their brains to mush instantly. The cultists just past them went airborne, like ragdolls tossed around by a Nevskor. One of them found the wall face-first, a wet crack audible through the chaos.
Cole couldn’t see shit, but in a chokepoint like this, vision didn’t really matter. With only one way to shoot, he was guaranteed to hit something for each bullet he fired. At this point, his only concern was that of logistics – did he even have enough bullets?
Probably not. But that’s what magic was for.
The preservation wards continued to maintain the cold, fighting entropy. Usually, spellcasting degrades with distance, burning through personal mana reserves like nobody’s business. Basic thermodynamics demanded payment for every joule of transfer – and getting mana from one place to another wasn’t cheap without a conduit. But these wards had already paid that bill, saturating the space with mana. All Cole had to do was redirect what was already there.
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The first icicle formed above the stairway and flew down, parting the fog. A cultist looking up to see where his point man went caught it through the eye socket. He dropped straight down, dead in an instant.
More ice formed as Cole continued to let loose with the remaining ammo in his Glock. His will shaped the ambient energy into foot-long spikes. There’d be a limit when the ward’s energy depleted, but for now he had all the ammunition he could want.
The cultists kept coming, even after losing half their numbers. Was it their unwavering faith in the demons? That if they couldn’t complete their mission of distributing the cargo, their lives would be meaningless? Whatever it was, they showed no semblance of morale to break.
Yet as robotic as they were, they didn’t just throw their lives away. The next wave tried something clever, pushing corpses ahead of them as shields. Would’ve worked against his Glock alone, but Cole wasn’t limited to just that.
It ran dry, slide locking back. In its stead, Cole drew the revolver. He had plenty of cylinders for this beast, and unlike the Glock, it packed a hell of a lot larger punch per shot.
The first round from the revolver exited at mach fuck, pulverizing the first genius to use his dead friend as a body shield. The man’s weapon clattered away along with most of his forearm and stomach. Good luck trying to use that body as a shield.
The radio crackled as Cole opened fire again, this time hitting three birds with one stone. Miles’ voice came up briefly. “Dock’s secure. Movin’ to you.”
“Copy. Got multiple hostiles in stairwells,” Cole responded.
He fired again, and again, and again. The cultists had dropped the body shields and spread out by this point. An admirable attempt at adaptation, but too little, too late.
Between the amped-up flashbang, the icicles, and the bullets, he’d managed to take down 12 cultists. If the survivors had wills to shatter in the first place, it would’ve happened after the first strike. Though logic suggested that there was no hope of getting past Cole, the last three men continued to charge. They’d almost made it up to the top of the stairs, blades in hand.
Talk about bringing knives to a hand cannon fight. The lead knife enthusiast took a revolver round that removed most of his face from the conversation. Cole sent forth a volley of icicles toward the last two.
The second cultist went down with three spikes through his torso, but the third had some moves, Cole had to admit. It looked like he had actually studied bladework. His knife came up in tight arcs, steel meeting ice with sharp cracks. He deflected the first icicle with a textbook parry, shattered the second with his blade’s forte, and rolled aside as the third grazed his shoulder.
Cole popped the empty cylinder and reached for a fresh one, but the cultist was already moving.
He seemed like a duelist, maybe, or someone who’d spent time in the rougher parts of Alexandria where knife fights settled disputes. He kept his profile narrow, swinging tightly. Under different circumstances, Cole might’ve been impressed.
But this wasn’t a duel, and Cole wasn't limited to firing one icicle at a time. The preservation wards still hummed their subsidy, and he pulled hard on their reserves. Ice formed from every angle – above, beside, behind. A dozen frozen spears materialized in the air around the cultist.
The man’s eyes widened as he realized the scope of his problem. Credit where due – he tried anyway, swinging his heart out. He blocked the first two, but decent form meant fuck-all against simple mathematics. Even the best swordsman in the world couldn’t parry omnidirectional attacks.
The third icicle caught him in the thigh. The fourth found his ribs. By the time the rest arrived, he was already falling, his skilled bladework reduced to twitching fingers still trying to grip a knife that no longer mattered. He’d made it maybe six feet from his starting position.
Cole finished seating the fresh cylinder and snapped the revolver closed, but the threat was already bleeding out on the stairs.
He finished the job with a spike to the skull. The impact sent the body tumbling down to join its brothers in the growing pile.
As morbid as the thought might be, the battle was easy – almost insultingly so, especially after the K’hinnum fight. Fighting the Vampire Lord had been like trying to outdraw Death himself while he was already pulling the trigger.
These cultists? They might as well have been training dummies that occasionally shot back. Not even at the same level as the common street thug, perhaps aside from the leader. The one with blade skills might’ve been hot shit in a tavern brawl, but against someone who’d gone toe-to-toe with actual monsters?
It was like comparing a Little League pitch to a major league fastball. Both were propelled by solid application of biomechanics, but only one could put people in the hospital.
The stairwell had gone quiet except for the sound of cracking ice and settling bodies.
“Main cargo clear,” Cole said into the radio. He turned toward the eastern stairwell and called out, “Elina! Clear?”
“Clear!” Her voice echoed back. “I am returning now!”
Mack did the same.
“Copy,” Miles said over the radio. “Comin’ up main cargo, two friendlies.”
Miles and Ethan emerged from the carnage below, picking their way through the human debris with professional care. Meanwhile, Elina emerged from the eastern approach, revolver still in hand but pointed at the ground. No visible injuries, just some blood spatter across her cloak that wasn’t hers. Her first real firefight, and she’d handled it like she’d been doing this for years. Mack appeared from the northwest, doing a quick weapons check as he walked.
“Ship’s secure,” Miles reported, holstering his revolver. “Captain’s breathin’ but his shoulders are dislocated all to hell. Crew’s neutralized – either floatin’ or dryin’ under the sun. First floor was clear when we came in. Y’all got all of ‘em?”
“Affirmative. We’ve also secured the distributor, cozied up under that table,” Cole said, jabbing a thumb behind him. “Wish I could say the same for the cult leader, but at least we aren’t leaving empty-handed. Got civvies locked on the third floor – the hostages. Old timer mentioned a missing kid when we passed earlier. Teenager, worked here.”
Ethan frowned, wiping blood off his watch to check the time. “The skinny one from this morning? Kid who could barely lift the crates?”
“That’s the one – Gerrick. Wasn’t locked up with the others, so I assume he’s hiding around here somewhere.” Cole shrugged. “You and Garrett check upstairs, check on the hostages while you’re at it. I’ll sweep the second floor again with Mack. Elina, you head on down and link up with OTAC when they get here.”
Cole started with the furthest shelf in the corner while everyone dispersed, Mack taking the opposite direction.
The crates in Cole’s section were labeled with the usual lies – grain, preserved fruits, canned foods, rations. Well, half-lies. All of the items were probably laced with enough demonic taint to corrupt half the city if they ever got out of the warehouse, and some of the cans looked like they’d clearly been opened and resealed.
Shelf after shelf, he spotted nothing amiss until he reached the aisle closest to the stairway. There, one crate sat wrong. It wasn’t dramatically askew, just off by maybe ten degrees from its neighbors. But it had been opened.
“Mack,” Cole called. “Over here.”
He materialized from between crate rows.
Cole gestured at the crooked crate. They approached it like a potential IED – because in this business, paranoia was just pattern recognition.
The packaging at one corner was torn open, contents neatly stacked except for a void where a can should’ve been.
“Shit,” Cole muttered, already knowing what they’d find. He keyed his radio. “Garrett, there’s a can missing from the tainted shipment. If the old timer’s right about him being hungry, we might be too late.”
“Copy that.” Miles’ voice came back tight. “Didn’t see anyone leavin’ when we came in. Kid’s gotta still be in the building.” He sighed. “I’ll get these folks to Elina, then we’ll help you sweep.”
“Copy.” As the words left Cole’s mouth, he heard a footstep approach from behind. Whoever it was, it couldn’t have been from his team.
His hand already reached for his revolver, muscle memory taking over. But he was too slow. He knew it even as he turned.
There he stood in the light, about ten feet away – Gerrick. Same skinny frame from the morning, same scared kid face that had been trying so hard to keep up with the adult workers. But the eyes… they seemed empty, hollow.
The revolver in the kid’s hand trembled with a palsy that had nothing to do with nerves. Whatever was driving the body hadn’t quite figured out the fine motor controls. But it understood pointing and pulling well enough.
The finger tightened on the trigger, and then a gunshot cracked through the warehouse.