I'll Pay You Back Tenfold, Part Two
Thanks to the raid on the IS training camp, ammunition was the one thing we had far too much of.
The slaves poured fire in every direction. What swept toward the bandits was a baptism of bullets that made even a fifth-circle attack spell like Multi-Magic Arrow look like a parlor trick.
"Aaaagh!"
"Get down!"
"Aagh!"
"Ghk—!"
Flame spat from inside the tent, and hundreds of rounds stitched the night around it. The bandits charging in dropped flat on reflex, and still they could not dodge them all. What followed was a one-sided slaughter.
"Reload!"
"Reload!"
The slaves passed signals back and forth and kept the rhythm unbroken—load, then fire, then load again.
Watching from the rear, the guild master and his right-hand man ground their teeth.
"What in the world kind of item are those bastards using?"
"I couldn't say, sir. I've never seen the things. I've never even heard tell of anything like them."
Stay where they were and they would lose every bandit they had. They had to shut the enemy's attack down, and not a moment later than they could manage. The surest way was to get inside that tent and tear the place apart.
"Follow me."
"Yes, sir."
A wall of fire thrown up by automatic rifles, rather than machine guns, could only do so much. The instant a gap opened in the barrage while the slaves reloaded, the bandits caught it and came at the tent with the resolve of men already dead.
"Kill them!"
"You bastards!"
They stormed in along the seam where the bullet screen had split.
Ting! Feet caught, and the charging bandits pitched forward onto their faces.
"Urgh!"
"It's a trap! Watch yourselves!"
Slowed by the iron wire laid across the ground, they flung their bodies sideways. Rounds hammered into the dirt where they had been standing, and sand and gravel leapt into the air. Tat-tat-tat-tat—!
While the slaves dealt with the bandits closing in, I stood at the rear and took the shape of the fight. Seizing the initiative with the bombs had paid off, and so far we were holding. Even so, this was not daylight. Hitting men who darted and leapt through the dark with nothing but flares to see by was no easy thing, and knowing that, I had ordered the slaves not to try to drop any one of them clean. Spray the rounds. Stall the approach. Hold them off for as long as they could.
I was sitting at the center with Maximus, waiting, when the Coward's Bell on my wrist rattled violently once more. Jingle-jingle-jingle-jingle.
Hm? When this thing cries like that, danger's close. But nobody's gotten within ten meters.
A cold sweat broke along my spine.
Then my familiar erupted from the shadow pooled at my back, fast as a thunderbolt. Clang! It caught the dagger dropping toward my head—and the slash that followed at once split its body in half. The severed smoke scattered left and right.
Beyond the dispersing haze, a black silhouette set its feet on the ground. There was a dagger in each hand.
"So you're the one running this?"
"You're the master of the Sahara Merchant Group."
His manner was easy, unhurried. Behind me, steel kept crashing without pause. Clang! Clash-clang-clang!
"Hah!"
From the shout, Maximus was fighting someone. No need to worry about him. Unless the other man was an aura user, there was no way he could cut through the armor Maximus wore, let alone the armor vest layered underneath. I put my attention on the enemy in front of me and on no one else.
"You provoked us on purpose, didn't you?"
"That's how you ought to see it. Even I didn't think you'd actually take the bait."
"How were we supposed to stay away? You stuck your neck out and told us to come cut it off."
"Did I? Funny thing. For a man who came to do the cutting, you don't look like you're in a good spot."
"I didn't expect this. Curious items. Seems they shoot something."
I couldn't see it, but I could feel it, faintly—something launching at tremendous speed from the things in the slaves' hands. The trouble was that the power and the speed were past anything he could have imagined. And worse than that—
"They look like ordinary slaves. Put an item in their hands and they perform like this? Remarkable things. Where did you get them?"
"Exclusive to me. Trade secret."
"Doesn't matter. I kill you, and I take them."
"Now that's how you ought to come at me."
"You almost sound like you want me to."
"I do. That way I won't have to feel sorry when I kill you."
The guild master dropped into a crouch, blades ready.
"Don't talk like that. I'm a fearful man, you see."
"What? A coward starts a mess like this?"
"When a coward starts a mess like this, you should have realized just how sure of himself he was."
The taunt landed. In the end, he was the one who moved first.
"I'll kill you!"
His body vanished from my sight. I already had fivefold body acceleration, a strength enhancement, and every physical buff I owned stacked over me. I was a beat late, but I just managed to track him. I felt the man with the daggers circle to my right and come in at my waist.
Firearms were fine for most work. Their flaw was that they were just as happy to kill your own. I had to get clear of here first.
⟨ Blink ⟩
In an instant my body was gone from the air. Pak!
I vanished, and in the moment he lunged through empty space a storm blasted straight up from the ground where I had been standing. KWA-BOOM! The charge I had planted to fire vertically detonated and tore the tent's roof away. I had cut its power sharply, lest I catch my own men in the blast, but at that range it was more than enough to hurt. The guild master, having swung at nothing, found one foot soaked in blood.
"You bastard. Another trap. I won't let you get away!"
He launched himself out of the tent.
I had left the ground by teleportation magic. The spell was built into an item I had bought for a full two hundred and fifty gold, and in a flash it shifted me from the center of the tent onto open ground twenty meters behind it. I wasn't used to the thing yet. My head swam.
As I fought to get my bearings, I saw a bandit ripping through the tent and coming on. That didn't matter anymore. I raised what I held. For a fast one, birdshot was king. The gun was already cocked. I pulled the trigger.
Bang!
This was no ordinary birdshot. They called it Dragon's Breath. Hundreds of tiny steel balls poured out with an incendiary compound and filled the whole space in front of me. The bandit snapped his course aside in an instant, but he could not slip the entire screen the shot had thrown. Fine pellets tore his clothes and bit sharp into his thigh.
Torn muscle was a problem. Pellets hammering bone were a problem. On top of both, the incendiary caught the dark clothes he wore and set them alight. To beat out a fire that had taken in a heartbeat, he slapped at his body with his hands. In that span I finished the pump and fired at him again.
Bang!
He had not even killed the flames before another storm of shot and fire came down on him, and he hurled himself desperately aside. There was no time to scream. I stayed with him as he threw himself sideways and rolled, pulling the trigger again and again.
Chk-bang! Chk-bang! Chk-bang! Chk-bang! Chk-bang!
Dragon's Breath poured flame over him. Caught again and again by fire that leapt from one patch of cloth to the next, his clothes burned halfway off his body.
And then—chk. Click.
Every round I had loaded was spent.
The guild master, who had endured until this exact moment, kicked off the ground. An ordinary magic item was bound to have a limit on how many times it could manifest, and he had judged that this was that moment. I hurled the shotgun in my hands at the man charging in. He dipped his waist with ease and let it pass, then lifted his head again—and found a matching gun in each of my hands, drawn at some point he had not seen.
"No need to play the fool and reload."
On Earth, the first principle of war was volume. You poured it on until the other man fell. That was the whole of it.
The sight of the new shotguns twisted the guild master's face.
Damn it.
He did not even have time to get the curse out before he had to throw his body aside again. A blaze of white fire was rushing in to fill his eyes.
The battle ended in a one-sided slaughter.
The bandits who had come to raid understood that the moment they turned their backs to run, they would be hunted. So they could not even rise. They could only stay belly-down and keep low, and while they did, the slaves—eyes adjusted now to the dark—shot them down one after another. Some died. Others lay on the ground past fighting, dragging out hard breaths.
The guild master's right-hand man lived up to his place as second of the bandit guild. He landed dozens of slashes on Maximus's body, and that was all he managed. In the end he forced a gap in the hard armor and struck at what lay beneath, but he had never imagined there would be yet another item under that. In the instant his final attack came to nothing, Maximus—who had given him the slash on purpose—drove a fist into his face. The punch, sheathed in a steel gauntlet, caved the man's face in, and his mind went out like a snuffed lamp.
Maximus came outside to aid his master and saw at a glance that there was no need. The guild master lay collapsed on the ground, his clothes nearly burned away, burns across his whole body, breathing rough. He had spent the entire fight running and beating the fire off himself, and he no longer had the strength to move a finger. His master, by contrast, having swapped through to a third shotgun, cast a lightning spell down on him with easy composure.
A bolt leapt and seared the guild master's body.
Exhausted, barely holding on, he blacked out where he lay.
With the bandits' leadership in hand, Maximus and his master finished what remained. Stray rounds from the automatic rifles were nothing they had to fear, so they threw themselves after the ones who broke and ran and cut them down.
The tally came to forty-seven taken alive, counting the twenty from the first raid. Five were officers, the head of the bandit guild among them, and forty-two were lower guild members. Another thirty or so bandits were dead.
Most of those captured this time had taken penetrating wounds, burns, and other serious injuries, and they were no good to sell as slaves. The right to dispose of captured bandits belonged to the ones who had taken them. To have the survivors dealt with, they roped them together in a long line, lashed the line to the rear of the Humvee, and hauled them in through the gates of Gerona Castle.