Zachary Rawlins - The Academy

One of the Jeeps caught flame, burning from beneath its undercarriage. There were angry voices yelling in Tagalong, as some of the guards attempted to douse the flames with an extinguisher, while others milled about in confusion. The first explosion was dramatic, a terrific bang that sent chunks of metal flying in all directions as the jeep tore itself apart. The gas tanks on the other vehicles followed shortly, all three detonating in rapid succession, each sending a ball of black smoke and flame skyward. Looking through the filter of a combat protocol, Mitsuru watched the guard’s Etheric signatures snuff out, torn apart by shrapnel, their bodies left to turn to charcoal in the flames.

The jungle around the camp smoldered angrily, and then burst into a conflagration, the lush vegetation withering and charring in the sudden blaze. In an instant, they were surrounded on three sides by a towering wall of flame, bathing the camp in a flickering orange light, the barbwire fence protesting and warping in the heat, sparks carrying the flames gradually across the whole of the camp.

“You’re up, Mitzi,” Alice said softly, watching the flames with a rapt expression. “They have to come this way to get away from the fire. Put on a show for me.”

Mitsuru nodded, shifting her grip on the wrapped handle of her sheathed knife, and then disappeared into the shadows, moving in the direction of the nearest patrol.

Alice smiled to herself as she watched Mitsuru’s Etheric signature flit from building to building, her movements accelerated to a blur by a downloaded alacrity protocol, almost invisible in the flickering firelight.

The closer patrol had stopped to have a panicked conversation — one was talking rapidly in Tagalong into a walkie-talkie, while the other stared at the inferno, open-mouthed. Mitsuru rounded an outhouse, then crossed the open space between them in a half-dozen bounding steps, the only sound her cheap Thai sandals slapping against the soles of her feet. She was behind them before either of the guards had time to react, the knife reflecting the ghastly orange glow of the flame.

She slid the point of the knife into side of one of the guards, aiming for a breach between the Kevlar pads on his vest, the tip sliding smoothly past the ribs. With a flick of her wrist she turned the knife in the shape of a ‘C’, the blade emerging red and glistening from his side, slightly above his hip. The guard fell to his knees and made awful, wet sounds, too stunned to scream, his arms wrapped protectively around his ravaged and leaking torso.

The other guard yelled and spun around, leveling his rifle at Mitsuru and pulling the trigger. The rifle was firing at full auto, but the acceleration of Mitsuru’s protocol was such that she heard each individual shot, and saw the flare of hot gas that punctuated each shell’s ignition. She fell forward, under the arc of the bullets that plodded toward her, and then rolled, her perception so agonizingly acute she could see the wake of distorted air the bullets left behind. She let the momentum of the roll carry her close to the gunman, and before he could lower his rifle and aim, her knife darted out and in, cutting his ankles out from beneath him. He cried out as he fell backward, but that was the last noise that he made, as Mitsuru wrenched his arm aside and drove the point of her blade into his throat. The gunman’s scream cut off, his hands clasping Mitsuru’s blade, his eyes bugging out of his head. Blood trickled from his throat, splashing weakly into the dirt beside him. Then the light went out in his eyes, all at once, and his face went slack.

Mitsuru pulled the knife from his throat and wiped the blade against the dead man’s shirt before sheathing it. Her vision was permeated with information from a combat protocol; translucent text and data boxes informed her of the positions of the six remaining guards. Four of them had abandoned their gear and were moving in inhumanly low crouches, their spines contorted and bent, their skulls elongated and feral. The two in the rear moved to supporting positions, taking cover behind the nearby buildings and scrambling to maintain a clear field of fire.

Weir hated humans, so Mitsuru felt safe in assuming that the two rear guards were Weir maintaining a human appearance. That was unusual, as they preferred to fight in their swifter lupine form, or the monstrous hybrid shape the other four guards had already assumed.

They had Egyptian-manufactured AK-47s, the same as the other guards and common to insurgencies the world over, but even through the smoke and the flimsy Quonset hut walls, Mitsuru could see the yellow glow of the bullets, radiating from the working that a Witch had laid on each of them. There was no alternative source — only Witches were capable of creating such artifacts — though to lavish such power on bullets was unprecedented. The workings Witches created took time. Mitsuru had no idea how long it would take to place one on each bullet in a clip, but it hardly seemed worth the effort.

Mitsuru walked calmly into the open, right in the middle of the burning camp, exposing herself to the six guards that remained. The four in the front came roaring around the corner of the main building, their paws kicking up mud and pebbles, hundreds of pounds of rage and sinew and yellow teeth. They charged immediately, fluid as shadows, smelling of the jungle and death, their fur matted with clumps of dried blood. One howled as it ran, a loathsome, high whining that set her teeth on edge.

The two in human form were more cautious, but only somewhat. They rounded the far corner of the building they were using as cover, rifles at the ready, staying low to avoid fire.

Mitsuru smiled at all of them, and held out her hands.

“I’d hoped that the silver one would be here, but still, I’m grateful to you,” she said, in the face of the charging beasts, calm and unhurried. “I can’t normally do this, you understand.”

There was a slight glow at her fingertips, a silvery aura, and the wind picked up from behind her.

“Compliments of Alistair,” Mitsuru said, her eyes rolling back in her head with effort, the borrowed protocol flooded through her mind in a wave of information and pain, the silvery protocol writ large against the field of black that consumed her vision. “A souvenir, from San Francisco.”

Mitsuru dropped her hands like a conductor, and her whole body was encompassed by the strange silvery light radiating from her chest. The wind tore at her clothing, and a fine spray of water from the river behind drenched her.

“Shining Cloud,” she whispered, but her words were carried away by the sudden gale that whipped past her.

A dense silver fog swirled around, and then burst forth in all directions, the main part of it making a rapid, twisting path toward the charging Weir. It passed through the two in front before they had time to react, and they disappeared into the metallic fog, little more than a few brief howls, and then a rapidly dissipating red mist. The two Weir behind them had time to try and stop, talons scrambling for purchase in the mud, before the fog encompassed them as well.

They had more than enough time to howl and cough wetly, trying in vain to expel the millions of tiny sharp particles they had inhaled. One even tried to transform as he was cut to pieces, spitting his insides onto the mud as he died, not quite human, not wholly wolf.

One of the remaining guards abandoned his position, dropping his rifle and running, struggling to free himself from his bulky bulletproof vest so he could transform. The other was either braver or more foolish, and opened fire at Mitsuru with his rifle, or at least in the last place he’d seen her before she’d been obscured by the mist of nanometer blades.

It didn’t make any difference.