Chương 8: Chapter 7 - The Pack has arrived

The work phone buzzed a little after eleven. Manuel had fallen asleep twenty minutes earlier, phone still in his hand, mid-scroll. I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling, wide awake. That was the problem with training at fifteen percent effort all day. My body finished the evening with a full tank and just enough stimulation to want more. I picked the phone off the nightstand. A message arrived from V:'Haven't you gotten bored of playing soldier, yet? I've got a distribution hub of the thugs you swept last time.

Your intel proved to be sufficient. It needs to be fully swept.' I replied.

'Sure.' The address pin arrived a second later. Camden waterfront, right across the river.

'Car's outside the northern wall.' I slid out of bed and dressed in the dark. One of the cheaper suits. The gauntlets went into the jacket's inner pockets, one on each side, which ruined the cut, but nobody was going to see it long enough to judge. I left the glaive be, because this wasn't the type of event for that. Manuel didn't stir when I eased the door shut. The hallway stood empty, the bathroom at the end dripping somewhere. I walked out of the barracks, across the lot, and then bolted to the northern wall.

I ran up the wall, and vaulted over it. The car indeed awaited there. A black minivan. The shotgun seat door opened. I walked to it and entered. A teenage kid sat behind the wheel, hair wildly overgrown. Five more sat in the back. Three boys and three girls in total, all about the same age, past fifteen and nowhere near twenty. All had an absolute mess of hair, lanky bodies, and wore a wild mixture of black suits and colorful accessories, especially anime pins, all of which I recognized thanks to Kallisto.

The radio blasted an absolute brainrot of a music. I sat in, closed the door, and looked over them.

"Who're you lot?" They all giggled.

"We're the junior agents," one of them said.

"V sent us to watch you work," another added.

"Don't worry," the next one said.

"We will just watch from distance," the last one finished. I rubbed my face with my palm. Were we now recruiting kids outside high schools, or what? I mean, by the hair and lanky body types, these were obvious werewolves, but still. Where the fuck did teenage werewolf sextuplets come from? Well, not weirdest thing I had seen, but close. Werewolves weren't born. They were made my combining a human with an ancient wolf spirit.

Someone must have gotten six appropriate spirits, sextuplets, do six rituals, and it had to succeed. Or, well, there were more siblings and it failed at some.

"Cool. Drive me to the location."

"Bet!" They all shouted, and the one behind the wheel had the minivan bolt forward. Empty streets didn't slow us down. We crossed the Walt Whitman, the river black underneath, one truck driver flashing his high beams at us as we almost drove to his lane. No shock there, because there was no way the kid driving had an actual driving license.

"So," I said, "You're like the pack or what?"

"Yes!" Three of them said at once.

"Did V tell you?" another one asked.

"She said she didn't," a fourth pitched in.

"Just a lucky guess." I smirked.

"I'm Peter."

"We know." Five of them giggled, including the driver, who almost drove off the road, and quickly corrected.

"The only agent left of the original US interventions." Not like there were many of us when they recruited me. With the former boss quitting, most people likely quit as well. The pack stopped by a cold-storage warehouse behind a seafood wholesaler. KEARNEY BROS. SEAFOOD, WHOLESALE ONLY, said the sign out front, honest as a tax return. Not the worst of covers. Refrigerated trucks coming and going at all hours, and nobody asked. And the smell. Fish, brine, diesel, perfectly normal in seafood delivery.

Then again, a crab-type kaiju was like a pile of angry surimi sticks pre-processing. I realized I should tell the kids something. I wasn't all that senior of an agent, but I was more senior than them.

"Now," I said, "I'll go in, and I'll clean it up. Stay outside and observe. When you're doing a sweep, the important thing to remember is that you aren't going in to judge them. That part is already done. You're their death, and you've come to reap what's due. Death doesn't ask questions, doesn't negotiate, doesn't re-investigate, it just reaps. You only investigate after everything's dead." I got out of the car. The kids were staring at me like at the second coming of werewolf Jesus. Great.

Now I had to actually perform. I ran up the fence, and vaulted over. On the ground, I picked up three rocks. By a quick look, they had two sentry outposts, one with two men on a taller tower, and one alone on a smaller one. The lone man turned after the noise. I threw the first rock. It whistled through the air and blasted his skull open. His body fell off the tower.

"Hey?" One man on the tower shouted, turning after him. Two more rocks. Two throws. Two more falling corpses. I bolted across the courtyard. They had a few stacks of containers, and one massive quad-container, that definitely didn't have a kaiju inside. I ran for the office building. The key to doing illegal business was to do it at the standard office hours. So, now at night, it was going to be mostly empty. But if anyone was around, he would be in the offices doing the planning part of the business.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. The office door opened. A burly man with an assault rifle flung over his back walked out, cigarette in hand. He spotted me as I started running up the stairs.

"Shit!" He reached for the rifle. I got to him first, turning the dash up the stairs into an uppercut. I hit him under the ribcage, lifting him off his feet with the force of the blow, pulverizing his insides. With his body still mid-air, I ran past him, bursting into the offices. A man just stood up from behind the desk. He wore a long trench coat, was in mid-fifties with grey hair and a goatee. I grabbed a decorative rock from the shelf by the door, and threw it at him. The rock cleaved the air.

Teal shield shone around him, the rock shattering upon impact. Oh, a mage. I pulled on the system abilities, activating level scanner. A pop-up appeared next to the man.

'Name: 'Vex' Alex Vargas Age: 51 Level: 43' Oh, the kaiju smugglers ran quite an operation to have a guy like this around. By how his eyes shone with green—because blue was so last patch—he just scanned me too. I bolted at him. He raised his hands, gathering flame and lightning around his hands. I stepped low, grabbed the table in front of him, and flipped it into his face. The spells exploded, shattering the table into nothing. I ran into him with my shoulder. The shield shimmered, blocking me.

I pushed him into the wall. The shield kept me off. The second his back hit the wall, I planted my feet, and swayed into a flurry of punches. His shields blocked my fists, shining brighter and brighter. He clapped his hands, and a blast of fire and lightning exploded out of him. The explosion hit me straight. Pain shot through me, but I didn't budge. The counter recoil blasted him through the wall, and onto the yard. I pulled my gauntlets out of my pockets, slipped them on, and bolted after him.

He landed on his feet, and instantly fired a surge of lightning at me. That burned my skin. I blocked the main current with the gauntlets, which were perfectly inert to it, and got to him. I evaded the current, and punched at his gut. His shields flashed, and I rolled with the recoil into a punch at his face. I alternated the angles, switching between punching at his gut and his face in one seamless combo. Shields held the best when the mage could focus them on one location.

A flurry of blows under different angles made it harder. Also, it helped shields a lot for the mage to not attack or cast spells. But he didn't have the liberty of doing that. I kept punching with no breaks, swaying my body to put maximum weight behind each strike. The shields shone brighter and brighter. He readied a lightning spell in one hand, and a fire one in the other. I angled away from the lightning. He threw both at once. The lightning surge missed, and the fire blew straight at my face.

I block with the gauntlets. The spell exploded, searing my shoulders, but causing no major damage. The lightning hit the quad-container, electricity running through. The mage smirked. A roar echoed from inside the massive container, and a kaiju broke out. Ah, the fucker disabled the electronic locks and pissed it off. The kaiju was the size of a decent house, with a thick shell, six pointy legs, and a massive rhino-like horn above a big mouth full of teeth. With a roar, it charged at us. Ha.

How was I going to kill that? I kept punching at the mage, his shields straining. One hit at the gut got a bit through, his body bending over. The smirk froze on his face. He couldn't keep the shields up while running. He tried anyway, jumping sideways. I caught him on the first step with a massive hook. That got partly through, a rib cracking under the bending shields. I grabbed him. Shields still shone around his body, but too close to it. I turned him, putting him up as a shield against the kaiju.

He put both hands on me, and electricity surged from them into me. That burned. I grunted with pain, but held still. The rhino-crab rammed straight into us with the horn. That hit like a freight train. The kaiju pushed us into a container, through its wall, through a mountain of blue powder, and through its other end. The lightning from the mage hit the powder. Fuck. Everything around us exploded into teal flames. Fire scorched me, and the shockwaves tried to tear me apart.

It annihilated the mage, and threw me to the side. I rolled fifty feet before I hit another container. The wall bent under the impact, sending another wave of pain through me. With a grunt, I spat out blood, and fell on one knee. The rhino-crab roared. Its shell now burned with teal flame, but it looked angry more than anything. It charged after me, tearing through the watchtower like it was made of toothpicks, snapping the steel beams that held it up. Oversized piece of shit.

I ran to a container, grabbed it, my gauntlets punching into the metal, and spun. As the rhino-crab was about to hit me, I smashed the container into the side of its head. The impact threw its head aside, shattering the container, blue powder bursting out. It touched the flames, and exploded. The explosion threw me another fifty feet away. But this time, I made contact with the ground, so I stopped it mid-move. It still blinded me with pain for a split second.

My vision started blurring, my ears ringing so loud I couldn't hear a thing. But the kaiju also took the hit, one of its side legs torn, part of the chitin shell blown apart. I bolted to the collapsed watch tower. The kaiju charged after me. I got to the first torn-out steel beam, grabbed it, spun, and threw it like a javelin. It hit the kaiju in the eye, breaking in, but not through the skull. It kept coming. I grabbed another beam, widening my stance. As it got close, I darted to the side. The horn missed.

I smashed the beam into its side, using it like a club. Flesh and chitin flew out, revealing a core underneath. I followed up, not letting it get away, and jabbed the beam into the core. The whole thing shattered. The kaiju went limp, sliding on the ground. I exhaled. Fuck. This hurt. Most of the complex now burned with teal flame. Another container exploded as it got too hot. I ran toward the administrative building. That one wasn't on fire yet. Inside, I looked for some documents.

Nothing on paper, most likely everything on the laptop. I grabbed that, and spotted truck keys hanging on the wall. I did see some trucks parked on the far side. I took three keys, and bolted out. The fire caught the office building. The first key in my hand unlocked the middle truck. I flung open the door, got in, threw the laptop on the seat next to me, and looked at the local navigation. Operations like this didn't have a stable crew.

They hired people to drive without giving them any intel, and in turn, they had stable trucks. So the random hires found the location, the trucks were bound to have the main routes in navigation. Or well, one main route, because the truck had literally two destinations saved in the navigation, and it now parked on the second one. With a smirk, I took a picture of the navigation. I got out, taking the laptop. The fire reached the trucks, one of them catching fire.

I opened the third one, got in, and started it to see the navigation. Same addresses. All right. I left it, and walked back to the van. Something unpleasant touched my shoulder. I couldn't see anything though, so I pulled on my power. Blood magic + Void Gaze. Spending my life force instead of mana, I fed power into my eyes. The world's colors shifted. Mana showed up like stains of paint of a mad artist. Well, not much mana, because the only mana tracks left behind were from the mage I killed earlier.

The fire had no mana, the kaiju corpse had no mana, and I left behind no mana as, well, I had none to speak of. But there were these weird, teetering clouds floating everywhere. Especially in the courtyard and around the administrative building. I tried to touch the closest one, but my hand just passed through it. I waved at it, tried to jolt it with a bit of mana, and blew at it. No reaction. What the fuck was this?

Fire burned through it just fine, it passed through the kaiju corpse and other physical objects, just floating around. Hmph. I turned the ability off and headed back to the minivan. The pack stood by the fence. They had a phone mounted on a tripod, and were trying to do what looked like a K-pop dance in front of the burning complex. Ah, I loved working with professionals. Shame there weren't any around here. I walked to them, tearing the gate's lock in the process.

"I hope I'm not disturbing you."

"Shit!" One of them shouted. Another ran to the camera to stop it.

"Please don't tell V," another added.

"Pretty please!" two more joined in.

"Get in the car. We aren't done yet."