3

It wasn’t hard to spot them. I had expected nothing, maybe a distant rooftop with a glint of metal on the edge. A man in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie, standing in the bed of a pickup truck was not what I had envisioned. With both hands, he held out an enormous pistol, the silenced barrel making it easily as long as a T-ball bat. Three more shots. The sickening whack of one told me it, too, hit Agent Salazar.

If I were a war wizard, I would’ve blown him up. My fireballs were unfortunately non-existent. I scrambled across the parking lot, taking shelter behind a forest green SUV. This did not deter my assailant as much as I had hoped. His gun didn’t make a sound, but his bullets did as they screamed through the metal of the vehicle. Five shots hit in rapid succession. Two tore all the way through the vehicle, not far from my head. I needed a spell, or a bodyguard, more than ever. A distant cha-chunk suggested he was reloading.

I took a quick inventory: a fat wallet, a chaos pen knife, car keys, and a mace-spray-sized canister. I pulled the last item out, disabled the safety, and mumbled a luck spell over it. I dashed past the front end of the SUV and hurled my pocket flamethrower in the attacker’s general direction. It landed with a clink in the bed of the pickup, but didn’t ignite.

The man was reloading, but he wasn’t alone. The driver and a passenger were crawling out of the cab. I couldn’t see the driver well, but the passenger was pulling out an oversized gun of his own. I dove for cover, but didn’t quite make it. A mini-pothole caught my foot and brought me crashing down to the asphalt. The passenger’s first volley sailed overhead. The gunmen in the truck bed took a step to get a better angle. All the luck spells I’d ever thrown were finally catching up to me; karmic balance due on delivery.

My luck wasn’t out. The gunman’s step brought his foot down on the incendiary and the belch of flame enveloped both him and the passenger. Their screams were unpleasant.

The newly appeared wall of flame cut off the driver from view. I forced myself up off the ground and backpedaled into hiding behind the SUV. I drew my pen, but couldn’t quite decide what I wanted it to look like. The chaos blade responded to my indecision with a cross between a short-sword and a katana with a main-gauche style blade catch near the hilt: I went with it.

The driver miscalculated that I had continued running forward, out of the lot. He moved up to where I had fallen, his back toward me as he scanned that direction, gun raised. I lunged and thrust a brilliant yellow pointy end into his jacket. There was a crackle as the blade pierced his flesh and tiny blue-white electrical arcs raced over the cloth. No blood came out, only a hiss of gray smoke. The man twitched like he had just shoved a fork into a wall outlet.

For a second, I thought I had stabbed a robot assassin. When I pulled out the chaos blade, though, his scream was human enough. Maybe it meant I was a bad person, but what I did next came naturally enough: I stabbed him again. The blade had changed to a murky gray hue. No wound ever appeared; the man’s flesh turned to liquid as my swing advanced. By the time I checked my momentum, nothing was left of the assailant but a bubbling puddle and a few strips of cloth.

V had warned me about the “secondary” effects, but liquefying an enemy on contact seemed pretty damn primary to me.