Luckless: Chapter 9
"A Serpent, a Mushroom, and some Canines"
Find the Luckless Chapter List here!
Weaving through the estate, with Rosa lagging close behind, was difficult in the mercenary’s armor. Several times, Four ran into pairs of Mohn mercenaries. She gave short commands in the lowest voice she could manage- the panic, helmet, and alarms helped her sound believable. Still, she knew each interaction would hold her back in the mansion- where Vigilants will soon swarm to recover their captured leader. She needed to be out by then.
Four nearly ran into the mountain that was Lucretia as she rounded the corner. The elder Mohn heir was at least six and a half feet tall and almost half as wide in her absurd, black brick of body armor. Her uplifted riot mask showed a paper-white, freckled face with made-up eyes. “Oh! Captain!” Her voice was well enunciated and smooth. “What’s happening? I can’t get in contact with Silvio. And, what has happened to this lady?”
He was a captain? That would explain the deference the uniform had garnered her before now. “No time.” Four hoped her voice would work here. “The bird-woman has betrayed us to the Vigil. Both beasts blew themselves up in the guest room. Go, find the butler.”
Lucretia blinked, her brow furrowing. “‘Butler’?” She repeated. “His name is Van. You should know that.” She stepped back, raising a baton that crackled with electricity. “Who are you? What have you done with the captain?”
Four raised her hands, her mind spinning. “Look, I can explain it all later. But, first, you need to get to Silvio, and-” An explosion shook the mansion, staggering everyone back, along with a loud siren outside. The Vigilants were here.
Four took the opportunity, lunging to the side of Lucretia. With a hefty shove, the already off-balance woman fell backwards, her baton scattering from her hand. The broad shoulders of armor prevented her from doing much other than wiggle on the ground in annoyance.
In any other case, Four would have killed her. But, she needed Thuku’s help- which meant she needed to retrieve the rebreather without killing a Mohn. She ripped the keycard off the woman’s neck and stepped past her.
“W-wait!” Lucretia cried out as Rosa gingerly moved around her. “Get back here! Help! Guards!”
If any guards did hear her, they arrived too late. Only a few doors behind the prone Mohn, the keycard let Four and Rosa into a wide bedroom, with bed, a glass door leading to a balcony on the far end, and a series of mats close to the door where all of Lucretia’s gear was haphazardly scattered. It only took Four a moment to locate the tube-like muzzle of the rebreather. Its tank of oxygen was, thankfully, full, and its CO2 scrubber seemed in mint condition.
Four wrapped the thing around Lane’s head and strapped the tank to her back. She had turned a bit paler since Nekera had poisoned her. Rosa’s spell seemed to be halting the poison, not curing it. The device lit up as Lane began to breathe through it.
“Alright. Next step.” Four nodded to the balcony. “We’re going to jump into the moat from there. The Vigilants will probably see us.” Another explosion, followed by gunfire. The fighting outside the manor was close. “You’re going to take Lane and find the way out while I keep them off of us. Try to do this without incanting. Okay?”
Rosa hesitated. Trying to overstep your magical abilities could cause you to black out- if she did so underwater…
Four leaned in close. “Look, Rosa, I trust you. And I believe in your strength.” She grasped Rosa’s shoulders. “I need you against the Wolf.”
If only to get Four away from her quickly blushing face, Rosa nodded quickly.
Four stepped back. “Alright.” She tried to smile confidently. “On my count. Three… two…”
An exhilarating rush of adrenaline and power pulsed through her arms as she grabbed the mercenary’s chest. The incantations fell easily from red lips, her eyes a prismatic crystal, and her claws- a Root sprouting over her fingernails- held the nearly unconscious man by his chestpiece. Before her spell even finished, he was encased in the deep-blue prison of magical ice. Little needles of frost punched into his blood- the spell would inject him with oxygen and water for as long as she needed to keep him frozen.
Somewhere in the back of Sleet Scythe’s mind, she felt the approval of an evil, slithering thing. The Ice Serpent, patron of all cryomancers, reveled in cruelty and imprisonment, growing fat off of fear and despondence. The dozen mercenaries frozen surrounding Scythe proved a feast for her patron.
The woman retracted the long, black claws of her Root back behind her fingernails, and brushed her hair aside. “East hall’s clear.” She spoke into her earpiece. “Moving onto the main estate.”
“Sub-Vigil Canine needs backup down by south hall. Secure ‘em first.” The saccharine-sweet, Savari-American accent of Sya’n Dlar, Apocrypha’s second-in-command, crackled through. “I’ll keep a perimeter around the estate.”
Dammit. “Respectfully, Dlar, I really think I should be there at the moat.” Only Scythe and Doriax knew about Four- and how important it was to make sure they didn’t capture her. She didn’t have time to waste on sidekicks.
Dlar’s chuckle warbled through. “Oh, bless your heart, sweetie. We’ll be just fine- if you do your job.”
Sleet Scythe bristled. Cryomancers had always been ostracized, considering their patron. But Dlar seemed to have it out for her specifically. Or, maybe she just underestimated her. Still, Scythe took the insult just like all the others- with begrudging grace. “Heard. I’m en-route now.”
The cryomancer passed by the remnants of battles occurring elsewhere throughout the Mohn’s house. The scorch-marks of elemental explosions and bullet casings littered the once pristine maze, and she hid from a couple of patrols of mercenaries rushing past her towards the mansion. The Mohns’ operation was no small thing- the police should never have allowed it to grow so large.
She heard the gunfire as she rounded the corner. The hallway was littered with waist-high shipping containers, with a railing leading to a brackish stream that led out into the ocean. A half-dozen mercenaries fired bulky rifles at the crates, behind which a couple of sub-Vigilants were cowering.
Scythe dove for cover, ending up behind a black-haired man wearing a suit of body armor covered in bones, dried flowers, carved totems, and other arcane fetishes. A monk. “Vigilant Scythe.” She introduced herself as she pressed into the crate alongside him. “Report.”
“We’re pinned. Planning on blocking off this escape route.” The monk explained, then jabbed a calloused thumb at a kneeling, older man a yard to their right. Red blossomed from his chest, beneath the chitinous, hoof-like Root protruding from his palm- a power that was presumably keeping the wound from killing him. “That’s Canticle, our enhancer. I can’t get through their bullets without his boost.”
The monk took her eyes off Sleet Scythe to wildly return fire with his pistol, and didn’t see her rolling eyes. Enhancers of any kind- Rooted or magical- were supposed to be useful, not a crutch. He should have had a backup plan.
“How long until you can move?” Scythe’s eyes shot to the enhancer.
“Ten minutes, at best.” His speech was strained, and his teeth were bloody. He must have pierced a lung.
The mercenaries ahead moved forward, dashing out of cover and getting to another set of crates. They’d be on the sub-Vigil in minutes.
Scythe looked over the other sidekicks. A punk teenager pulled quills from their back, lobbing them with a bow, where they exploded into tiny shards. They would have been deadly if not for the mercenary’s body armor.
Beside them, a purple-furred, worm-like alien stomped its eight legs into the ground, projecting magic that caused the earth around the mercenaries to shake and crack, forcing them to take slow, methodical steps. A novice lithomancer.
She had an idea.
“Monk, I’ll give you a chance to rush them. I assume you can take them down quickly?”
The man nodded, gesturing to a string of wooden beads dangling off his shoulder. “I have enough charms for all of them. Just need to be close before I activate them.”
“Alright. When I say ‘go’, run.” With that, Scythe pushed off. The ground half-froze as she slid past, slipping between the areas of cover.
The teen looked over, yanking another quill from their lower back. “I heard.” They said. “Name’s Frag. What can I do?”
“Can you delay your spikes’ explosions?”
“Only if you can stop them from hitting the ground hard.” They fired another in concert with the lithomancer’s rumbling stomp.
“Make as many as you can spare. I’ll cover you.” Scythe pulled out her pistol, and snapped to create a small mirror of blue ice just beside her cover.
With the mirror, she popped up to fire whenever the mercenaries tried to push forward, keeping them pinned behind their crates. One tried to sneak around behind the railing, but the alien forced the ground to give away, and they tumbled into the stream below.
After a moment, Frag grunted in pain. “Alright.” They nudged about twenty quills toward Scythe. “Any more and my body’ll start eating itself.” Their stomach growled loudly.
“Mage, stop for now. Shake the field when I say.”
The longer strands of fur near the alien’s head rubbed together into a violin-like, pleasant chord- a confirmation, Scythe assumed. It stopped stomping.
Scythe immediately got to work pulling on her magic. The Serpent’s power thrummed through her ears, toes, and fingers- her previous gifts of terror had made it generous. By freezing behind and melting ahead of the quills, inch-tall waves of ice rolled them silently across the ground, layering them between the boxes.
In her mirror, Scythe saw the mercenaries- no longer harried by the lithomancer or other sidekicks- rush to close the distance. They were twenty yards… then ten…
At five yards, Scythe shouted. “Now! Go!”
Both the lithomancer and the monk sprung into action. The alien stomped, rumbling beneath the quills and shattering them. The ice and fragments burst into the air in a chitinous mist, and Scythe quickly turned the frost on the ground to vaporous, freezing fog. The mercs and monk were swallowed by the mist and debris.
The screams of the mercenaries and the rapid fire of their rifles dropped off, one by one, as the mist fell to the ground around them. As the fragments settled and the mist faded, the monk stood with two bloody fists, the wooden charms around his shoulder burning with a smouldering magic. Around him, the blazing symbol of a feather was etched into the shattered rifles and armor of the unconscious gunsmen.
Then, the recoil. As the symbols faded from the monk’s victims, he staggered back. His glowing charms shattered into ash, and a heat-like warping of the air slammed into him as he fell to a knee. Bruises spattered his forearms, but it looked like his bones were intact. More than most amateur monks could handle.
“Good job, Canines.” Scythe stood, helping Frag lift themself to their feet. “Monk, are you okay?”
The man panted, shakily rising to his feet. “I will be.” He said. “I don’t think I can hold this location. Can you stay?”
The cryomancer shook her head. “I’m needed by the manor.” She explained. Not that Dlar would ever actually call for her. She fished around the pockets on her bandolier, finding some bandages and a cloth-wrapped syringe with a dark brown liquid. She tossed the bandages to the monk and the syringe to Frag.
The teen raised an eyebrow. “What is-”
“It’s designed for Roots like yours. A metabolic enhancer that delivers a lot of calories.” It wasn’t a surprise they’d never seen it before- the sub-Vigils got a fraction of the funding true Vigils were allotted. They even had to buy their own equipment, by the looks of it. “It’ll get your Root going in less than a minute. Make sure you drink water within half an hour or you will pass out.”
“Thanks.” It took the teen a while to figure out how to inject the thing. The little instructions weren’t exactly helpful.
As the cryomancer was about to turn to leave, a wet hand slapped onto the bottom of the railing. “Help!” A woman’s cry lowered the Canines’ guards. Scythe and the lithomancer were quickly by her side- Scythe pulling her out, while the stone mage lowered the edge of the hallway to let her roll on. It wasn’t only the damp woman in her torn-up jacket- she was dragging a comatose woman behind her in a scuba apparatus. By the weakness in her strength and visual distortion around where she held her partner, it was clear the conscious woman had been casting magic on her for a long while.
She spat water, shakily put her other hand over the unconscious woman’s chest, and began to incant immediately. The shimmer of magic became stronger, and some color visibly returned to the cheeks of her partner.
“Are you alright? Is anyone else in the water?” The mage nodded ‘yes’ to both. Scythe couldn’t help but feel like they were familiar. “Stay here!”
Leaving her pistol by the shore, the Vigilant dove. The water was frigid. It probably helped save that injured girl’s life.
Broken crates, pale algal blooms, and discarded bits of plastic littered the bottom of the waterway. Chunks of detritus and streaming clouds of blood came from upstream. Someone was thrashed in the river ahead. Something long and clothlike clung to their body, whipping as if fighting them.
Scythe flexed her Root, manifesting sharp, black claws from her gauntlets. She dug them into the side of the canal, forcibly climbing against the current with cat-like stretches. The struggling person noticed as she drifted towards her. She extended an arm.
They were one of the Mohn’s armored mercenaries. Blood streamed from beneath their cracked helmet, and a white, translucent cape around them. Scythe grabbed their arm, and pushed off towards the shore. The monk and lithomancer helped pull the mercenary onto the shore. Scythe quickly took off their helmet as they sputtered water.
The woman’s rabbit-like head, matted with blood and missing an ear, violently lurched and coughed lungfuls of water. From her neck, the thing Scythe had mistaken was a cape grew- a long bundle of pale, twitching lichen, which plumed into the sheets of thin fungus and plants behind and around her. Her open, unconscious eyes were covered in a pale white film.
Four’s mouth opened, and someone else spoke through her voice. “Ah, the infamous Sleet Scythe.” The unconscious assassin said. “Just like you to save her again. My thanks.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Scythe gritted her teeth. She hated how her patron loved the sight of the possessed woman. The sidekicks drew weapons on the possessed rabbit-woman. “Wolf?”
“No, no.” The puppeteer inside Four didn’t so much shake her head as violently jerk it to each side. “I am working against the pack, and I need this host’s memories.”
Scythe looked around at the sidekicks, then to Four’s body. “I’ll ask one more time.” She growled. “Who. Are. You?”
Four’s arm snapped to her face in an attempt to stroke her chin. “I have many forms, and many titles.” It wondered aloud. “I am, first and foremost, a father of a wonderful son. Secondarily, in order to better serve as a father to my son, I have killed more Vigilants and criminals than any other in modern history.” Four’s body jerked forward, the lichen moving like an alien wing, propping her up. Her head lolled and mouth opened, revealing a mesh of mushroom gills molded into lips in the back of her throat. Those lips spoke. “I am many, but you may call me Mr. Mycelium.”
Oooo the mushroom possession is so gnarly, but in a good way!