Mage Against the Machine

by Shaun Barger

  Red steered the craft down toward the library, violently veering back and forth as he fought to stay on target. Down below, some of the Watchmen turned to point at the wounded craft hurtling toward them.

  “What are you doing?” Jem shouted to Red. “The hospital, not the library. We’re heading straight for those Watchmen! Change course!”

  “I’m trying,” Red said through gritted teeth, and then, as the Watchmen grew close enough that they could clearly make out the faces of those below, the crackling hum of the guardian horn beneath them went still—silent.

  The horn smashed into the scorched lawn with an explosion of dirt and stone—Nikolai and the others barely jumping off in time to avoid being caught in the crash.

  The Watchmen were on them in seconds, surrounding the three of them with golden staves drawn and ready, tips pulsing with blue and red. Nikolai and Jem scrambled to their feet, Focal and revolver drawn as they prepared to fight their way out.

  Red turned to face them sharply, holding up a hand. “Nikolai, Jem, STOP!”

  They hesitated, confused as a steely-haired sorceress with dark brown skin and a long, serious face pushed through to confront them.

  “Captain Bantugan,” Red said, cautiously, hands held up to show they were empty of Focals.

  “Lancer Strauss,” the Captain replied. Her eyes flicked to Nikolai and then Jem.

  “What’s happening here, Captain?”

  “One of those ships crashed into the roof, destroying the library’s cache of emergency crystals,” Captain Bantugan explained, talking fast. “Trapping the students who’d gone there to escape. Orders up top prioritized preventing these . . . monsters . . . from entering the library, from obtaining any of the books that might provide intel on our kind.

  “But by the time we got here with numbers enough to do anything about it, those armored creatures had taken the students hostage. One of the Moonwatch arrived, went right in, ignoring their warnings that they’d begin executing hostages. I just sent two teams of my best in after her, and they’re saying that she’s not doing anything to help the children, she’s letting them die while she just destroys the book collection. We’re trying to save them, trying to get them out while the . . . machines . . . are distracted by the Moonwatch. We have backup on the way, but they’re so powerful, I’ve never seen anything like—”

  “Students? Are they killing students?” Nikolai demanded, stepping forward as his mind was flooded with nightmare visions of Stokes and Astor’s broken bodies. At his movement, the circle of staves rose higher, the pulsing blue and red glowing brighter. “Let me through!”

  “Nikolai,” Red said nervously, “calm down. I’ve got this. I’ve—”

  “They’re killing them!” Nikolai pointed his baton at the flashing lights beyond the broken doors. Toward the screams of terrified, dying magi. “If you just want to stand here and wait for backup, fine. But I’m going in!”

  “Nikolai, no!” Red reached out for him, wide-eyed, but Nikolai strode forward, meeting the confused stares of the Watchmen standing in his way with an unwavering gaze.

  “Hold your fire!” Bantugan ordered.

  Nikolai shoved past the confused magi, black baton trailing rainbow light as he sprinted up the stairs to the destruction within. From behind, he could hear Jem and his uncle scuffling with the Watchmen, shouting after Nikolai to come back.

  He ignored their cries, trusting that if worse came to worse, they’d be able to break free and escape without him. Red was a Lancer after all.

  Ragged sneakers squeaked across soot-stained tile as Nikolai ducked into the chaos, laser fire grazing his shoulder with heat hot enough to burn his flesh, even through the protective enchantments. Though the additional shielding of his glove and crystal helm gave Nikolai an advantage, he knew that a direct strike from one of the Synth rockets or blades could be enough to kill him, no matter how powerful his enchantments might be.

  The library was massive—second only to the town hall in size. Thousands upon thousands of books filled shelves that rose from floor to vaulted ceiling in the great lobby—a grand set of double stairs on the far side leading up to a second level, into another grand hall beyond immense wooden doors that had been scorched to jagged shreds.

  There were three of the Synth troopers engaged in combat with just over a dozen or so Watchmen who blasted through the air featherweighted, each mage dying one after another as they frantically struggled to destroy the machines—billowing flames, invisible tentacles and columns of jellied akro doing very little to accomplish this goal.

  Synth bullets tore through their navy blue uniforms, their lasers and blades slicing magi in half and severing limbs. Their immense mechanical hands struck Watchmen from the air with lazy slaps hard enough to shatter bone, as casually as one might crush an insect.

  Nikolai scrambled into cover, peering over the side of an overturned table to search through the chaos for a way through to the other side. He wasn’t sure he could even take on one of these troopers, let alone three. But he had to try, he had to break through, even if it meant—

  “Thank the Disc!” one straw-haired Watchman cried as she burst away from the melee to land hard beside him. “Are you Edge Guard? We need help, the machines, they’re killing us, we’ve already lost half our numbers, they’ve got three in here, and then three more on the second level, with all the hostages. They’ve taken cover beyond the entrance, we can’t break through, and the Moonwatch, she—”

  A cloud of glittering purple mist poured from the second-floor doors, and the Moonwatch flew out behind it, guiding the mist with a long black sword held by a slender, pale arm.

  Bullets and laser fire burst out from where she came, but it all just curved around her, twisting and correcting to strike the stonework of the wall beyond, forcing Nikolai to dodge to the side as a shard of rock crashed down between him and the straw-haired sorceress.

  The Moonwatch came to a floating stop, high over the center of the room. She was a terrifying figure wrapped in a shredded, voluminous cloak of twisting, living shadow. Atop her head she wore a slick, bone-white helm, face hidden by a plainly featured mask that didn’t even have slits for eyes.

  Her method of flight was a mystery to Nikolai. She flitted to and fro, a cloud of glimmering purple mist sweeping across the books with the direction of her long black sword. As the mist passed through shelf after shelf, tiny glowing runes tore away from the books, smearing and fading like ink in water as the mist stripped away the protective enchantments and set the paper aflame.

  The Synth troopers, realizing their bullets and lasers couldn’t touch this mysterious masked sorceress, changed their tactics. Two of them launched up at her, white-hot jets blasting from their feet as they attacked from either direction. The third trooper fired a volley of high-caliber bullets up at the vaulted ceiling above her, sending out a cover of smoke for their attack.

  “Now’s our chance,” Nikolai hissed. “Now, while they’re distracted, let’s—”

  His stomach turned as he met the Watchman’s empty gaze—a trickle of blood oozing from a smoking, scorched laser wound through her temple. Dead. He shook his head, smothering horror so he could focus. He’d just have to go it alone.

  The Moonwatch flicked a bundle of burning threads toward the trooper on the ground from the palm of a naked hand, the bundle splitting into multitudes as the trooper moved to dodge, reducing it to a cloud of plastic and dust.

  The first of the two others she stopped in one movement, a graceful swipe of her long black blade blurring as it seemed to come down in a thousand places at once. The Synth exploded from a line of light that split the machine from top to bottom.

  The other she stopped with a motion of her hand, immobilizing it midair. She closed her fist, slowly, and with a hideous whine of steel the machine crushed in on itself, raising its arm to fire off one more missile before—

  The Synth exploded, and the missile streaked off, course knocked wild, twisting up, then down
, then—

  Nikolai was launched back out of the library in a cloud of flame, barely managing to cling to his baton as he bounced down the stone-cut stairs in a tumble before his fall came to a halt.

  He lay there, ears ringing, eyes out of focus as he struggled to regain his breath. Slowly, he turned himself over, gripping the stone as he righted himself, as he—

  Nikolai froze as the Moonwatch brushed past him, shadows curling away from her cloak in smoky wisps as she walked briskly down the stairs to the horrified line of Watchmen, who stared at her, unbelieving. The flames still roaring behind her. The agonizingly slow gunshots and screams continuing on the second floor.

  BLAM.

  Ten seconds.

  BLAM!

  Another ten seconds.

  How many hostages dead so far? How many left before they were all . . . gone?

  “Hey—stop!” Nikolai called after the Moonwatch. “Where are you going? Help us!”

  She continued on, ignoring him.

  “I said STOP!” Nikolai boomed, struggling to stand. He tucked his baton into his armpit, plucked the sergeant rank Edge Guard insignia from the breast of his uniform, and flung it at her.

  The slick lacquered pin bounced off of the invisible fields protecting her with a burst of sparks and clattered to the ground. Finally she stopped, though she did not turn to face him.

  “My name is Sergeant Nikolai Strauss! And those Lancers up there—” He raised his baton with a dramatic smear of rainbow light, pointing it at the guardian horns battling distantly overhead “—were sent by that robe-pissing little fuckwad you call a king to capture me. If you save the hostages, I’ll surrender, I won’t put up a fight. Then you can kill me, arrest me—I don’t care! Just please, help them!”

  The Watchmen watched from beyond the blockade at the bottom of the steps in stunned silence. His uncle and Jem staring wide-eyed from amid their ranks.

  Slowly the Moonwatch turned to face Nikolai, looking up at him through the sightless eyes of her mask as a pale hand rose from the twisting shadows and pointed at him.

  “No.”

  A column of curling darkness erupted from the tip of her finger, expanding as it shot toward Nikolai, eating the light, etching away at the very fabric of reality.

  Nikolai stood tall. Defiant. Baton held before him as the curling darkness filled his vision, too fast for him to dodge. Too powerful for him to do anything but stand there and be erased.

  An immense wolf formed before him like a shadow unfolding from within itself as time seemed to slow, toothy maw open to eat the darkness, to devour the spell, to—

  The wolf disappeared, but the curling darkness shrank right as it should have struck him, pulled into the tip of Nikolai’s baton with a deafening roar that made the ground shake, that threatened to fling Nikolai back, to destroy him.

  Crackling electric black coursed up the sleeve of his uniform from the baton to his other arm, and he felt the stump of his wrist become wet, become swollen and cold and the PAIN, oh the pain; he couldn’t move but he could see black threads like wire forming the skeletal outline of a hand, then crimson and yellow and pink as the skeleton turned to bone, then tendons and muscles crept across bone, then fat and finally flesh.

  His hand had grown back. Healthy skin dripping with a crimson sheen of blood.

  The darkness disappeared, and for an instant, all was quiet. Even the Moonwatch was frozen in shock at the impossibility of what had just occurred.

  A pillar of rainbow light shot from the tip of Nikolai’s baton and struck the Moonwatch’s long black sword, which she raised just in time to block the blast from consuming her.

  There came a dull thudding thunderclap, and the ground around her cratered, melting as she was sent exploding back all the way across the campus green, shooting through the side of the distant, flaming healers ward with the speed and force of a cannonball.

  Nikolai stared at his baton, panting.

  The others were staring at him. Some in awe. Others in fear.

  BLAM!

  Another gunshot from within the library.

  No time, no time to contemplate the miracle that had just occurred. They were dying, the others were dying, and without thinking about it he drew his blade Focal with his freshly grown hand, blade in one, baton in the other, complete and whole again.

  Nikolai parted the smoke with a blast of air and charged down the center of the flaming building with a trailing ribbon of defensive Veil as two of the three remaining troopers burst from the doors upstairs, the sporadic gunshots continuing behind them as they moved to impede his path.

  A thread of light shot past Nikolai as he wove back and forth, then six gunshots in quick succession, and Nikolai glanced back to see all of the remaining Watchmen charging after him, crazed, unafraid—Captain Bontugan leading half of them, Red leading the other with Jem by his side, and everything exploded with light and fire as the others closed in on the Synth with an intense, fearless ferocity.

  Amid the chaos Nikolai cut his way through the distracted troopers, flying up to the entrance between them with a blasted arc of jellied air as he jetted through the shattered doors in a roll.

  The desks and tables that had once filled this area had been flung to the side, barricading the windows and creating a defensive funnel at the entrance, slowly catching flame as the smoldering shelves of books along the walls spread to the heavy cracked wood.

  In the massive open space between, dozens of students kneeled, sobbing, hands on their heads as they awaited execution. Dozens more already lay dead on the tile, blood pouring sluggishly through shattered skulls, their Focals dissolved.

  Standing before them was the final trooper, one arm a rifle pointed down at the next hostage, its other hand flipping quickly through a book as it read with the pulsing blue light of its eye.

  He caught a glimpse of Astor’s short yellow hair among the hostages, next to the unmistakable blue of Trudy, Stokes’s girlfriend. And there—Stokes! The three of them, alive!

  BLAM!

  Nikolai’s desperate, gasping relief was cut short as a mousy-haired mage collapsed dead onto the bloodied tile.

  “ARMITAGE!” Nikolai roared. “STOP!”

  The trooper tossed the book aside and reached into a compartment hidden in its chest for another, casually inching the barrel of its gun arm to the next victim as it began to scan through the pages.

  The next hostage was a shivering, willowy sorceress with hair that glowed with soft, pearly light. Gwendolyn. Beside her, next in line, was the red-haired mage whom Nikolai had first attacked in the bar just a handful of days before. Freckles.

  “That masked woman was very thorough,” Armitage said. “This body only managed to hide a few volumes within itself before she destroyed the rest.”

  “No!” Freckles howled, voice cracking with fear. “Don’t hurt her! Don’t you fucking—”

  The red-haired mage yanked Gwendolyn aside, shoving himself in front of her.

  BLAM.

  Freckles died.

  Ras, Nikolai remembered. His name was Ras.

  “We did warn them,” Armitage said, voice tinged with regret. “Don’t think that we enjoy this. But we must follow through with our threats, lest they be taken lightly.”

  Nikolai went featherweight and blasted past the Synth, looping an akro tentacle around the rifle arm and yanking it to send the shot piercing over the magi’s heads.

  He featherweighted Armitage to disorient the Synth and blasted past it, trailing a looping ribbon of protective akro in his wake.

  Armitage riddled Nikolai’s akro ribbon with a volley of bullets, some of which glanced across Nik’s body—agony despite the protective enchantments.

  A direct hit would break bones. Maybe even shatter his invisible crystal helm.

  Nikolai looped a tentacle around the Synth’s throat and jetted up to try and fling the featherweighted Armitage against the ceiling.

  But the trooper wasn’t confused by the sudden change
of gravity’s pull on its immense body, and closed a hand around the tentacle, white-hot jets sending it bursting up with far greater speed than the mage to spin him around with such intense force that Nikolai quite nearly passed out.

  “I’m on to your tricks, wizard.”

  Armitage released the tentacle, and Nikolai struck the floor hard, his crystal helm cracking against tile, the burst of jellied akro from his uniform to cushion his landing the only thing to keep him from shattering his back.

  He lay there, dizzy, as he focused all of his strength on getting back up.

  A blinding laser swept across Nikolai’s chest, and Nikolai screamed, falling back to the floor and writhing as the heat blistered his flesh through the cloth. The protective enchantments were all that kept it from slicing him in half. The Synth smashed down onto the tile beside him, peering at the mage with a demeanor that might have been amusement.

  “It’s been a very long time since I’ve come across something I don’t understand, Nikolai Strauss,” Armitage said. The Synth chuckled, its laughter musical as its arm unfolded into a glassy length of blue-edged blade. “As refreshing a challenge as this has been, I’m afraid our little chase must come to end. I am thoroughly looking forward to learning more about your kind.” It raised the blade of its right arm to bring down on Nikolai’s face. “Farewell.”

  “Akro!” came a defiant voice, and thick wad of jellied air shot through the air to stick in a clump across Armitage’s shoulder.

  Astor stood there, trembling with hatred and terror, the golden finger of her medi-glove Focal pointed at the Synth.

  Armitage raised its gun arm to shoot her but two more jets of hardened air shot out from Stokes’s emerald scissors and Trudy’s cog-knife, sealing up the barrel of the weapon.

  In the instant before the trooper could burst into the crowd to cut them down, Nikolai, still featherweighted, kicked back in a flip and sealed the Synth’s leg to the ground.