Stormblade 4 C29: War Games (1)
29 - War Games (1)
Three days later, I said my goodbyes to Ellen, Jessie, Jeff, and the others, climbed into a black GC SUV, and got out at the GC headquarters building. The rep and I climbed into an elevator, but instead of going up, we dropped down into the ground.
I’d been briefed on what to expect from my new team, but it was still a shock to get off the elevator and step into unfinished concrete walls, flickering fluorescent lights, and the presence of five of the most powerful delvers in the Phoenix area.
“Thanks, Eddie. I’ll take it from here,” Nathan Anders said. He stuck out a massive hand as the elevator door closed behind me, and I shook it. “Kade Noelstra, welcome to your new home for the next week or two. We’re going to get you up to speed for the mission Harriet briefed you on.”
“Thanks for getting in touch,” I said.
“Thank Angelo when you see the bastard.”
We took off down a long, dark tunnel, moving at a healthy jog just a touch faster than four minutes a mile. The air was surprisingly crisp. Not like being outside, but well-filtered at the very least. “Speaking of the Light of Dawn, he’s briefed you on the A-Rank roadblock—or at least his version of it, right?”
“Yes.”
“Great.” Nathan didn’t sound pleased. “Angelo’s a powerhouse and a great ally. I trust him with my life. But he’s got some flawed reasoning. Those ‘choices of determination and responsibility’ are half-truths at best. The real truth is that we’ve got a process here, involving Paragon cores. It’s easy to get from A-Rank to S-Rank. You don’t even need to learn Laws. You just need a resource that’s highly controlled, and the Inner Council controls it. That lets us create conditions for an A-Ranker to reach S-Rank, artificially.”
“And you’re telling me this because you’re going to push me to S-Rank?” I asked.
“We need you as strong as we can get you before Harriet pulls the trigger on this. If that means spending what’s left of our cores on you, so be it.”
“Respectfully, I have to decline,” I said. “I’ve got a different path to power. You, Terrel Young, and Bernard the Wall met the Crone, right? I’m in contact with a similar entity, and he has a vested interest in getting me to S-Rank.” I didn’t mention that Eugene might be interested in pushing me even higher. Phoenix’s S-Rankers were up against what they thought was a ceiling, and if any of them figured out that I might have a way to break it, it’d be a problem.
Nathan stopped jogging. He stared at me, a look of frustration on his face. After a second, he nodded. “You would. Angelo said as much, but I needed to make the offer, because this would be faster. What do we need to do to get you to S-Rank, then?”
“I need portals. Lots of portals. Big ones.”
Nathan laughed. “Now that we can do, Kade. Let’s go meet the team.”
◄▼►
A few minutes later, we stepped through a sliding steel door and into a massive compound far below ground.
The first thing I noticed was the intense power dampening from the portal metal walls and sparring room systems that covered every inch of the wide, padded floor. I’d been in GC center sparring rooms before, but this was different. The sheer amount of damage reduction was almost overwhelming.
The second thing was that there were no sparring rooms—or rather, that the football field-sized space was the sparring room. A few smaller metal doors opened off of its two narrower edges, but it was obvious that the arena was the centerpiece of the facility.
And the third thing was the single unawakened human standing at the center of the room.
“Welcome, Kade Allen Noelstra, to the best-kept secret in Phoenix,” Councilwoman Harriet Myers said. “The bunker will be your new home, and the five S-Rankers here will be your new teammates. You already know Sarah Cullman, the Spark of Life.”
Sarah didn’t wave from where she sat, cross-legged, on the far side of the room. I nodded.
“Terrel Young, the Portal Tyrant, is the team’s fighter. He and Bernard the Wall are the front-liners.” Myers pointed at each of them; they were fully geared and getting ready to, I assumed, fight each other. “They’re constantly killing each other, and Sarah’s constantly putting them back together. And over there, in the corner, is Hugo Martinez, the Falcon’s Eye. He and Nathan Anders, the Phoenix Reborn, are the back-liners. Sarah will be covering healing, and you—once you’re caught up—will be the team’s striker,” she finished.
“Thanks, Harriet,” Nathan said. He shook her hand and nodded back toward the tunnel. “You’ve got a war to start. We’ll take care of this kid.”
“You got it, Nathan. We’ll be in touch.”
And just like that, she was gone, leaving me with my new team. There was just one person missing. “Where’s Angelo?” I asked
Nathan shook his head. “He’s the wrong delver for this job, and he knows it. He’ll be more effective on the surface, so I’m taking his spot. Bernard, Terrel, get out of that gear and get your asses over here. You too, Sarah. We need to plan out the next week’s worth of our time and make sure we’re ready to work together as a team. And Kade needs as many portals as he can get if we want him at S-Rank.”
◄▼►
The team was aggressive.
Without support, and with Sarah Cullman—the best healer in Phoenix, and possibly the best in western North America—we could afford to push the pace. Four damage-dealers was more than I typically ran with, and both the Falcon’s Eye and Portal Tyrant did more sustained punishment to their targets than I could muster. Add to that the Phoenix Reborn, a literal legend in the city, and it was a lot to keep up with.
But it wasn’t just that. We spent a good chunk of the afternoon playing out fights from the S-Rankers’ past with our current team, almost like a Dungeons and Dragons game, but with ourselves as characters. And, with every move, I realized I was in the presence of people every bit as strategically-minded as Dad—especially Sarah. She understood her own capabilities, and those of her allies, better than anyone else in the room. And, despite the huge amount of posturing between Hugo, Terrel, and Bernard, they fought more like the ghosts I’d worked with in the Fallen Delvers portal than like my own team.
Jeff, Ellen, and the others…just weren’t this good. Sure, we knew each other. But we’d learned each other’s capabilities the hard way, and everyone kept growing and changing. These people, though…
Terrel, Bernard, Sarah, and Hugo didn’t even need to talk. Nathan and I were the outsiders, but even so, they knew Nathan’s skills, powers, and choices before he even made them.
And even better, it only took them a few hours to integrate me into their battle plans.
I wasn’t going to fill the same role I had with the Desert Wind Guild, though. With my old team, I’d been capable of doing almost anything. I’d been strong enough to hit like a fighter, fast and precise enough to be a striker, and good enough with magic to moonlight as a mage. That had worked when we fought B-Rank monsters and below—especially because I was stronger than most of the team. But here? With the S-Rankers?
No.
No, I had a specific job to do, and the battle plans Sarah drew up required me to carry it out.
When we took a break after a few hours of wargaming, my brain hurt from the speed the S-Rankers operated at. I went for some water, and Nathan Anders joined me. “Good to be back in the game,” he said.
I sipped from my glass. “Is it? You didn’t enjoy being retired?”
“Not at all. Running the GC’s like fighting, but without the actual fighting. Everyone wants something. It’s all maneuvering and manipulating. That’s Harriet’s gig for now. She can have it.”
“My sister’s our guild leader, and it feels like she’s thriving in that position,” I hedged.
“Yeah, there are some who get it. Robert Traynor’s one of ‘em. He’d be a great city leader, except for the ego.”
“Really?” I asked. “Ego?”
Nathan’s eyebrow went up, and he shook his head. “No, I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s more ego in this room than anywhere else on the planet. Just Hugo’s every bit the equal of someone like Bob. But Hugo’s also, you know, supreme dictator of Tucson, an S-Ranker, one of the six most powerful guild leaders—counting Myers and the GC—in Phoenix, and so on. Bob happened to get lucky right after the Portal Blitz. There’s a big difference between earned ego—even of someone like the Falcon’s Eye—and unearned ego.”
“And everyone here has earned it?” I asked, then finished my cup.
“Yep. Even you. You won the tournament and…I’m not going to say saved the city, but you definitely landed a decisive blow and saved a lot of lives. Between you and me, though—and don’t ever tell Harriet this—your sister’s the one who won the battle.”
He pulled out his phone. I stared at it, surprised it worked this far underground. Then he nodded. “Come with me. We’re done wargaming. It’s time to put it all to the test. A-Rank portal, near Dry Lake Pleasant. We’ll take the whole team, see what we can do as a squad.”
“Sure,” I said. It had been a good few days off—and after the Fallen Delvers portal and breaking the Siege of Phoenix, I’d needed it—but it was time to get back to work.
◄▼►
Dry Lake Pleasant.
The dam had given out when I was four. I remembered the images on the news; a portal had broken inside of it, and the monsters had wasted no time destroying the multi-arched dam and sending the precious water crashing down the sun-rotten concrete walls of the Agua Fria River, right through Phoenix. Dad had taken us to see the raging water, and for a few years, until the Wickenberg Portal opened, food had gotten expensive.
In retrospect, it had been one more thing for Dad to deal with.
As the GC strike team’s helicopter rocketed over the Desert Wind Guild’s building and closed in on the giant, cactus-covered silt flat that had once been Lake Pleasant, I got a good look at it for the first time. It was nothing like the desert around it; where sand blew into dunes or baked into semi-hard chunks of not-rock, there was nothing but grey-tan silt. It was flat. Even a decade and a half after the dam gave way, it was still flat.
“Portal in sight. We’ll be on the ground in three,” the helicopter’s pilot said over the headsets.
“Copy.” To my surprise, it wasn’t Nathan calling the shots. Sarah Cullman’s voice cut through the static and the roar of helicopter blades. “We’re going right in. Bernard, then Kade, then the back line, then Terrel in the back. Unknown portal, so be ready for anything.”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything.
A handful of minutes later, the massive chopper’s rotor kicked up dust in a whirlwind as the six of us sprinted toward a deep, almost royal purple portal. We hit it one after the other, less than two seconds separating Bernard’s tower shield from Terrel’s sabaton’s heel.
And I stood in a familiar world.
Tree branches—massive tree branches the size of skyscrapers—spiraled in around each other in a perfectly flat disk, the gaps between them filled with woven branches, both living and dead. More boughs grew straight up from the gigantic platform, which must have sprawled a quarter of a mile or more in each direction. Some of these smaller ones were hollow, and each was bigger than the tallest trees on Earth.
And, high above, a much smaller woven spiral sat balanced between a dozen of the gigantic treetops. There were no trees reaching up from its surface, and the sun shone on a wooden palace whose walls I could barely make out.
We stood in front of a wooden wall so loosely woven it felt more like a fence, with a massive porcullis of vines and silk blocking our way.
“Arboreal,” I said. “This feels a lot like the C-Rank Arboreal portal Ellen and I first found evidence of the Crone in.”
“Right. Good call. While we’re here, look for any evidence of brass or those steam automatons,” Sarah said. “Stick together. A-Rank portals are dangerous. Battle plan is standard. Terrel, please knock on the front door.”
Terrel Young nodded. He pulled a long-handled, thin-tipped hammer from his back—he was carrying multiple weapons—and slammed it into the gate’s lower side. The shockwave that rippled out knocked me back a step, and vines gave. Two more swings, both into the top, and one kick from Bernard later, the gate thudded inward.
And a hail of arrows rocketed toward us.
Every instinct said to try to Storm Dance away from the rain of arrows, but we’d war-gamed this. Instead, I pushed forward and to the right as Bernard activated his Unique skill. It was a lot like Jeff’s Taunt skill, except instead of redirecting enemies to attack him, it grabbed the arrows and pushed them off-course—right into his massive shield.
It sounded like hail on a tin roof, but it was A-Rank missiles on a portal metal barrier a full inch thick. And not a single one made it past Bernard. “That’s it? You’ll need more than that!” he shouted as he swept his mace across the arrows, breaking them off and littering the ground with fletching.
Then a single arrow snapped off a bowstring behind me. Hugo Martinez, the Falcon’s Eye, only fired once. But his arrow glowed a dull red and black, and as it hit the first A-Rank archer, it curved into another, then another, bending impossibly in the air. When it finally stopped, a half-dozen A-Rank elves were wounded.
“We need a gap!” Sarah yelled.
“On it,” both Terrel Young and Nathan Anders said. The long-hafted hammer slammed down on the shield-wall protecting the archers, snapping spears and cracking wooden barriers. And behind it, a flaming bird of prey rose over the wall. Fire roared down from the bird’s mouth, engulfing the front line.
“Okay, Kade. Let’s see what you’ve got,” Sarah said. “You’re up.”
I nodded. Then I dashed forward, into the shattered shield wall. Nimbus Edge hummed with electricity, and I let the battle trance wash over my mind. A spear stabbed toward my face. I parried. Then another, which I ducked. Arrows hissed overhead, dozens heading through the gate for every shot the Falcon’s Eye took. Bernard’s shield rattled behind me. I ignored it all. I even ignored the spear-bearing elves. They weren’t my job, and Terrel and Nathan were already mopping them up.
They weren’t my target. A single elf was.
Atelier Silkweaver: A-Rank Monster
She stood in the back, wrapped in hundreds of strands of twisted, rope-like silk. A bundle of cloth sat at her feet, open, and from inside of it, a silken golem quickly formed. It wasn’t anything like the automatons we’d fought during the siege, though; this one was almost spider-like, and exquisitely graceful in its eight-legged movements.
“I hate spiders,” I muttered as I ripped Nimbus Edge through an archer’s arm. Blood spewed across the battlefield behind me, but it wasn’t a lethal cut. I switched stances as I ducked under the spider golem’s first set of legs, then leaped over its mandibles.
The spider wasn’t my job either, though. The string mage empowering the golem was.
I got in close. Stabbed into the elf’s chest once, then again. She staggered back, blood covering her silk rope robes. I pressed the attack without giving her a chance to retaliate, and as I did, I used Thunderblade. The attacks hammered in, one after another, and the A-Ranked mage died screaming in a crumpled pile on the wooden platform. Then I switched stances, used a Lightning Charge for Storm Dance, and appeared next to Sarah. “All done.”
“Great. Feel free to pile in, but save your resources. We’ll be using you for more precision stuff throughout this portal.”
“You got it.” Nimbus Edge hummed and crackled in my hand as I threw myself back into the melee. There were plenty of elves to fight, after all—and the sooner we got inside, the sooner we could get this portal cleared.