I'm used to being outnumbered and outgunned. It's an occupational hazard when you're a practicing private Adept working on your own in hazardous situations, especially when you're facing some gawd-awful creatures from some unfashionable region of the multi-verse. What just makes everything twice as bad is when you discover that the poor misguided folks that have been aiding and abetting your nasty alien visitor
like
things this way, and take a rather unhelpful attitude towards your kindly humanitarian assistance.
Today was a perfect example... and as usual my timing and luck was pretty shitty. We were surrounded now and about to be under attack from three sides at once. Inside the doorway of the consular house, I could sense just with the rising hairs on the back of my neck that a host of rather unpleasant entities was about to come and see what the fuss was about, and probably take an unfortunately dim view to my interruption of their unsavory activities. Behind me to one side, Bel and Janice were already dealing with a car load of a half dozen Clinton Street Gang thugs loaded up to their eye teeth with pistols, rifles and at least one automatic weapon. Now, as if this wasn't quite enough trouble to deal with at one time, a new car load of misguided governmental busybodies in dark suits had just shown up, almost certainly with the preposterous notion that we leave their precious and highly malevolent visitors alone.
Let them all come!
The only real problem was that I really didn't think I could hold off all three sets of assailants at once. Two sets, maybe. Bel and Miranda were doing their best to help, but both were exhausted already and pretty much out of willpower, due to the long trek we'd made tracking the simulacrum of the missing young child. Bel was keeping a shield up in front of us, bouncing (mostly) the hail of bullets from the gangsters, but she was so tired already that she could just barely stand, let alone hold up the protection for more than maybe a few seconds more. Miranda, being a scarcely trained very minor teenaged magician, was already way out of her comfort zone and far past her level of competence and was now in the early stages of a very immense 'freak-out'. I didn't blame her, if I'd been in her shoes and thrown headfirst into this ratfuck, I'd be wanting to run for the hills screaming too!
"Miranda!" I sharply barked while giving the panicking girl a quick rough shake. "You're going to have to help Bel fast, her powers are just about exhausted and if her shield weakens any further things are going to get very ugly and painful fast! Grab the Earth Ley just under your feet and channel it into Bel the best you can. Hold her and hug her if you need to, but help get that force into her somehow! She's too tired now to do anything other than draw on her own internal resources, and knowing her, she'll burn herself out or drain every drop of her entire life-force protecting us, so do it, now!" The teen girl's eyes began to sharpen and focus and then close hard in concentration and I felt her connect to the underground magical energy field, then with tears in her eyes from her own exertions, she clung on to Bel's back and hugged her hard, forcing her own tired and ill-trained will to flow into and join Bel's shield. The result was minimal at first, but as Bel was starting to expend her final internal reserves she sensed and latched on to this flow of new power, much like a drowning person would a life-raft. Her strength stabilized and now with her energies reinforced, the protective shield began to strengthen and slowly even began to increase in size and strength around us, now forming at last a full circular field. It was ragged and a really powerful magician could have overwhelmed it easily, but for now it would do!
"Sean," I muttered, after taking a quick breath for gathering a bit of strength myself, "Bel has the shield firmed up for now, but can you do something fairly overt to slow down the imminent arrival of our visitor friends? I just can't deal with them yet until we get our rear flanking attackers settled with. I think those new government wizards are going to be real trouble!"
I'd rarely spoken truer words! Sean gave me a mental grunt and with an intense and hyper-rapid channeling of massive but untraceable force, a new shimmering shield now barred the doorway in front of us, but this time the protection was to keep them
in
, rather than them keeping us out. This gave me the minute I'd need to deal with the three dark suited government agents, each of whom was now channeling an alarming amount of magic power directed right at us!
They weren't even interested in talking to us, and suddenly with almost no warning three bolts of magical power were now blasted straight towards us, and I just barely had a moment to interpose myself just outside of Bel's shield, so that I could focus my own defenses to parry these energies first. There was no way that Bel's protections could have even slowed these massive energies for even a moment and the Clinton Street thugs were still banging away at us with their guns.
I've been in a magical duel or three over the many years, but I'd nearly always in the past won due to superior cleverness or just sheer dumb luck. My most recent shoot-out outside of the Austin convention center was such an example. Today, facing three extremely powerful wizard-class magicians all at once convinced me once and for all that I was certainly no mundane Adept level magician anymore! I stopped the first three bolts, and then the next three... and then I stopped holding my breath and started to think about making a counter-attack.
Since I wanted to leave Miranda and Bel with unimpeded access to the Earth Ley for their shield, I settled upon my old faithful and usual standby, the Fire Ley, from even deeper into the ground to use for my own. As my flame shield grew in power my confidence began to grow. I was able to restrain their following attacks with relative ease, and now I could also get a better measure of my dark trio of opponents. Their powers were certainly wizard class, perhaps even 'Great Wizard' (or 'Magician 1st Class, Primus', as they call them up here in the USA. Definitely at least 9 Score, each, to the best of my calculation. In theory, I shouldn't have stood a chance against one of them, let alone all three, but I was certainly somehow able to hold my own. Nice... I'd worry about the potential ramifications of this odd magical bounty later!
My first thought was to stick to what I did best, maniacally burn down entire neighborhoods with excessive and unnecessary force... just joking. I did try a few nice sharp fire-bolts, but their shields were up to the task of deflecting them, for the moment. Putting my opponents on the defensive now was also useful for another reason, I wanted to try a focused Spirit jab or two to get some more information about my foes. Now that they were probably drawing near max normal power, I could feel a dark thread or weave to their castings, a similar sort of feel that I had noticed earlier when scanning the protections of this house.
