Do you wish me to give them my word? It is said that a warrior does not make promises, for everything we speak is a promise. If a warrior says he will do something, then it will be done. If a warrior speaks, it is a vow. I have already said why I am here. We will fulfill the duty of the Dark Ocean. Tell your men the entirety of the Imperium would not stand in the way of fulfilling the final command of Okubo Tokugawa. The Imperium will come to understand the coming danger or they will perish. I will make them understand the truth of this.
—Toru Tokugawa, May 1933
Free City of Shanghai
Ian Wright was incoherent with pain. His leg had been destroyed by the Iron Guard. Everything below his knee was flopping uselessly at an odd angle, a bone was sticking through the skin, and there was blood everywhere. He couldn’t even put his hands on it to stop the bleeding because they were shackled, and those same chains were being used by the others to drag the lot of them back toward the tunnel and the torture chambers beneath the mansion. It wasn’t a safe place, but it sure as hell had to be a safer place than out in the open.
He was in so much agony that he had a hard time wrapping his brain around what was going on. It was like the Iron Guard were throwing a civil war. He’d never imagined Iron Guard slaughtering each other before, but then he realized what was happening.
Some of the Iron Guard weren’t Iron Guard at all. They weren’t even human . . . Everything Sullivan had said was true. Absolutely true. These were soldiers of the Pathfinder, and now they were eating people. He’d been a fool to doubt, and now it was too late.
“They’re consuming magic!” Doctor Wells shouted from the far end of the chain. “Now that they’ve been found out, they will go on the offensive. They must consume as much Power as possible so they can summon their master!” And there were five powerful Actives here chained together, wounded and nearly defenseless. “Summon a demon. Hurry!”
That was a good idea, but they’d been marked with some sort of spell to keep them from using their Powers. Ian reached for his forehead and started scrubbing hard. It had been put on with some sort of thick demon grease, so he’d probably have to rub all his skin off to cancel it out . . .
An Iron Guard was coming their way. His skin had been burned off, and beneath it was a mass of bulging purple muscles. He looked hungry.
Ian started scratching wildly at the mark.
Suddenly the skinless man turned grey like a fade, sank into the ground, flailing, and disappeared. A moment later, another grey figure crawled out of the grass and became solid. Heinrich Koenig gasped for breath as he rushed over. “Hello, my friends. Busy day, no?”
“You’re a master of fucking understatement!”
Heinrich grabbed Ian, and suddenly he felt insubstantial. When he reformed, his shackles were lying on the ground. Heinrich repeated that with the next knight in line. “You must flee while they are paying attention to Sullivan. Carry those who cannot walk. Cross the south wall. Zhao is by the river waiting for you in a patrol boat.”
An Imperium soldier rushed them, long rifle and bayonet aimed at Heinrich’s back, but he was knocked aside at the last instant by Wells. The alienist was still shackled, but he threw the chains over the soldier’s head and twisted until his neck snapped. Wells didn’t have access to his magic, either, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. “Just like a Rockville prison riot,” he explained after Heinrich freed him.
“Herr Doctor, get these men out. Schnell! Hurry!” Once the last of the knights had lost their shackles, Heinrich turned toward the mansion.
“What’re you doing?”
Heinrich bent over, picked up the dropped Arisaka rifle, and kept walking. “Making a difference, I hope.” He worked the bolt action. “Go!”
* * *
The Chairman, or the guy that looked exactly like the Chairman but really wasn’t, tried to escape by Traveling.
Faye didn’t find that very sportsmanlike at all.
The real Chairman could Travel too, but what Faye had learned was that there was Traveling, and then there was really Traveling. Any Active could pick a nice safe spot in clear view and hop on over there, but it took an artistic touch and a whole lot of practice to do better than that. The Chairman could do darned near everything, but he wasn’t a specialist like Faye, and he’d paid for that sloppiness with his hands.
This Chairman wasn’t even nearly as clever as the old one. Sure, he had buckets of Power and a horrible little monster helping him, but he’d never really worked for it, he’d never had to struggle and figure it out on his own. It had been given to him by the invisible octopus riding on his shoulders with its tentacles stuck in his eyes and ears. Faye simply could not abide that.
That critter was the Pathfinder everybody had been talking about, but they couldn’t see what it really was. They had been expecting a giant, indestructible beast because that was what it had grown into last time. This thing was just a tiny little part of a great big whole spread all over the place. There was what was in our world, but the great big dangerous rest of it was still in another world, right next to this one, where it couldn’t help. The little part had to figure out how to open the door to let it in, and it had been letting humans do all the hard work for it, gathering up all the magical folks into one easy bucket to dump into its mouth hole.
Now that its plans were all messed up, all those little bits were on the move. The rest of the folks didn’t realize it yet, but a war had just started. There were going to be battles now in every single part of the world the skinless men were hiding in, but Faye couldn’t worry about that right now. She had to stop this big part of the monster from getting away.
The new Chairman Traveled away just as Toru swung his big club. The club whistled through the air where the Chairman had been and a big lion statue got turned into gravel instead. Even though Faye’s head map was filled with thousands and thousands of moving people she easily picked out the spot where the new Chairman moved to. He thought he was quick, jumping seven times in just over eight seconds, but she was right behind him.
She intercepted him on the roof of the castle.
He saw her the same time she saw him. The invisible monster that was steering him opened its parrot beak and hissed at her. The new Chairman’s mouth opened in surprise. He could see magic as clear as she could, and she knew he’d never seen anything close to her before. “What are you?”
“I’m the Spellbound. The Power picked me. So now your time has come.”
He raised his hands and a sickening wave of destruction came at her.
Even as the energy surged through the air faster than a bullet, Faye was processing the information. It was the same type of magic as the Black Monk’s. She quickly changed her link, folding and refolding it until it connected to a new section of the Power. The destroying magic washed harmlessly past her as the roof began to disintegrate. He changed tactics, and the air around her began shedding energy, trying to freeze her solid and make the water in her body turn to ice to rip her cells apart. Faye merely switched to Whisper’s magic and heated everything back up.
They went back and forth, he’d try to hit her with magic, but she’d change things and hit him right back. He tried to electrocute her, but she thought of George Bolander’s magic and deflected it. Lightning bolts shot into the sky. A current of fire formed between them, which rapidly spun into a tornado, and when they let go of it, the fire crawled down the castle wall and drifted across the panicking crowd. He tried to command her, like a Mouth, but she just laughed at him while their fire tornado crashed into the high-rise next door and the whole thing exploded.
Demons sprang into existence beside her. She slugged one in the face and it exploded, took control of the other one, and ordered it to go eat the Chairman. He blasted it into chunks of black ink, which Faye then gathered up with her mind, hardened the droplets into bullets, and launched them into the Chairman’s flesh. He hardened his body and absorbed the impacts, started to Heal himself, but then Faye appeared before him and drove the stolen sword through his heart. He used Mover magic to knock her away, and he grimaced and yanked the sword free. It hit the roof with a clatter, and she immediately focused on it, made it spring into the air, and impaled it into his leg.
He roared, gathering the energy from the air, focusing it for a mighty destructive release, but Faye snagged it from him and shoved it aside. The Boomer magic was diverted and another of the high-rise building’s lower floors was hit instead. The explosion rocked the entire city. The forty-story building fell, slowly thundering its way down into the escaping masses. Instead of soaking up that freed magic like it was used to, the Pathfinder was shocked as Faye took it all instead.
Faye was fueled by death and Power.
In all of its millions of years chasing the Power, the Enemy had never met anything quite like her.
Hopelessly damaged, the roof collapsed. He tried to Travel away, but she was much faster at that, so she reached the part of space he was trying to smoosh together and smacked his hand away.
“How—”
The roof came apart around them. The Chairman simply turned himself into a Brute to take the fall. Faye went back to what came natural and Traveled off to the side.
They fell inside the mansion. Mr. Sullivan and Toru were there, on the ground floor, completely surrounded by Iron Guard. The two of them were moving from room to room, shooting, bludgeoning, stabbing, kicking, smashing their way through enemy after enemy, leaving a pile of broken bodies behind them.
The Chairman landed with a crash in the middle of a group of Iron Guard, scattering them.
Faye landed perched, on the balcony railing high above on the third floor.
The Chairman got to his feet and spoke to her, only she quickly realized it wasn’t the Chairman speaking at all, but rather the monster which had been hiding inside of the imposter for so very long.
“You may beat me here, but the spores have settled across the entirety of your world. All you have done here today is speed up the inevitable harvest. I am everywhere.”
Faye felt a sudden alarm. Her pulse quickened. Her head map was spinning. It was as if the Power itself was trying to warn Faye of something.
She opened her head map, couldn’t find the problem, then used up more Power, and more, burning the energy of some of the hundreds who had just been killed around her. It was further than she’d ever dared push before, but she fueled it with a battleship worth of dead connections. Her head map expanded outward until it seemed to cover the whole world. The information was too much, it screeched against the wall of her sanity, but Faye could see everything, every connection to the Power, natural and unnatural.
The unnatural was easy to spot. The monster was not lying. It really was everywhere. It had been planning for this moment since long before Faye was born, even before Sivaram had shown the Power how it could defend itself, and now that it had been exposed, it was making its move. There were thousands of infiltrators spread across the world, and all it would take would be one bunch of them consuming enough magic in one place to anchor the big Enemy to this world forever.
There were patches of death in the world as the skinless men began their harvest. Faye watched her head map with horror as the blackness began to spread.
“I am everywhere.”
“Well so am I!” Faye shouted back. She picked a location, threw caution to the wind, and stepped through reality.
UBF Traveler
“We’re going down!” Barns shouted. “We’ve lost half our major systems.”
“Keep us in one piece, Mr. Barns,” Captain Southunder responded.
There was a terrible clatter, a tearing of metal, and another one of the small demons came crawling up out of the instrumentation. “Gremlin!” the teleradar operator shouted.
Captain Southunder calmly drew his .45 auto, centered the front sight on the screeching beast, and blew its head off. The operator was splashed with sizzling ink, but better that than being rent by their razor claws. The creatures were only the size of small dogs, but they had certainly made a mess of his fine new airship.
“Losing altitude fast,” Barns said, having ignored the gunshot. “I’ll do what I can.”
“Very well, Mr. Barns.” Southunder went over to the nearest phone, spun the charger a few times, and picked it up. “Cargo hold. Mr. Schirmer, are you there?”
“Schirmer was attacked by a demon. He cannot come to the phone right now.”
“Ori. Listen, we’re in trouble. I need you to keep us from going up in a ball of fire. We’ll be in range of the entire Imperium navy in a few minutes.”
“Yes, Captain. I will not let us burn.”
Southunder glanced out the front window. They were out of the unnatural night and back in the blue skies he knew so well, and that meant he could fiddle with the weather. “I might be able to get us out of this, but it’s going to get choppy. Have the eggheads aim that device back at Shanghai. Let’s give Mr. Sullivan our full support. I have a sneaky feeling he needs it.”
“Covering,” Sullivan shouted as he fired the BAR through the doorway.
“Moving!” Toru charged forward through a wall, plowing into the soldiers on the other side. The war club rose and fell, and two more died. Toru picked up a submachine gun in the other hand. “Covering.” And he opened fire into the next room.
Sullivan rushed past Toru and took up a position behind a marble pillar. “Reloading.” He dropped the spent mag and pulled another from his chest. His magic was overheated and exhausted. He hadn’t pushed this hard since the Second Somme.
Hundreds of troops had converged on the mansion. It was falling apart around them. Bullets were competing to fill every free bit of air space. Iron Guards were everywhere. Sullivan had been shot so damned many times he couldn’t even keep track. The Spiker armor was being pulverized and picked apart by the sheer volume of impacts. He was bleeding from an unknown number of cuts, punctures, and burns, and his Healing spells were barely keeping up.
Toru wasn’t faring much better. His fancy samurai armor was missing a horn, and one big impact from a recoilless rifle had nearly put him through the foundations. He was limping and leaving a blood trail behind them. “Where is Saito?”
Sullivan pulled the bolt back on the BAR. “Lost him.”
“The coward has fled!” Furious, Toru kicked a couch across the room.
The wall next to Toru exploded and a gleaming metal man appeared. It slammed a fist into Toru’s side and launched him into a marble pillar so hard it cracked. Sullivan shot it, but the bullets bounced off the gakutensuko. It was far sleeker and more humanoid than the American versions. It raised an arm, and bullets ricocheted off Sullivan. The two kept firing into each other, and then stopped when they fell empty at the same time. They charged and collided, and the metal man knocked Sullivan through the ceiling.
He was in a bathroom. “Son of a bitch.” He rolled over, saw the machine man walking beneath him through the hole in the floor, and swore again. His Power was already rebuilding in his chest. Sullivan got up, found the cast-iron bathtub, made it weigh nothing, ripped it out of the floor, took it back to the hole, aimed it, and then quadrupled its weight. The tub fell, smashing the mechanical man in the head. Sparks flew. Then Toru appeared and hit the gakutensuko with the tetsubo so hard that gears flew like confetti.
Sullivan jumped through the hole and landed next to Toru. He lurched when he hit the ground, realizing that at least one of the mechanical man’s bullets had made it through the armor and embedded itself in his stomach. “Reloading,” he said again.
There was a huge crowd of Iron Guard coming up the front entrance. They were moving cautiously now, covering each other with firearms and magic. Sullivan moved to the opposite side of the room to see if there was any potential escape, but as soon as he neared the window he started taking machine gun fire. Something big and silver moved in the yard. The second robot tracked him through the wall, and much like Toru had said earlier, it really was accurate, as more bullets struck his armor.
He moved behind a shelf, and for the first time Sullivan realized they’d been pinned down in a library. He marveled at the stacks, which stretched to the ceiling. It was a rather nice collection.
Well, that was certainly an appropriate place for him to die.
He came around the corner shooting, dropping another two soldiers and injuring a third. A Fade came through the wall, grabbed onto his arm, and tried to sink them both into the floor. Sullivan surged his Power hard, making himself as dense as when he’d fallen from the sky, and the Fade was simply unable to muster enough Power to drag them into the ground. The second he reformed, Toru smote the ninja’s head from his shoulders with the club.
It felt like the entire Iron Guard collectively opened fire. Bullets tore through everything. Books ignited under the intense heat. Lightning arced through the doorways and tracked up the electrical outlets, and the overhead lighting exploded in a shower of sparks. Sullivan was hit at least another dozen times. Another bullet pierced his side, and he winced as breathing filled his lungs with fire. “Son of a bitch.” Another pierced the armor of his leg and ripped through his calf. He crashed into a shelf and fell to the floor.
Toru lurched to the side as a heavy round struck him in the helmet. It was an incendiary, and it was still glowing like a coal. It sizzled as it burned his forehead. Toru wrenched the damaged helmet off and threw it away. “Curse you dogs!” And then he had to rub the fire out of his hair.
The noise tapered off as the Iron Guard reloaded or let their Power recollect.
He didn’t know what was going on around them, but there was a terrible racket outside. Entire buildings were falling down and there was Power humming through the air like he’d never felt before. But he knew hundreds of troops were converging on the mansion.
“We are surrounded,” Toru stated with grim finality.
Sullivan pulled another mag for the BAR. The origami duck fell from the mag pouch and landed on the floor in a puddle of blood. Sullivan studied it for a moment, picked it up, and then went back to reloading his rifle. “I’m not the surrendering type.”
“Agreed. I would rather die looking a fellow warrior in the eye than wait in here and be executed like a fish in a bucket.”
“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. You don’t execute fish.”
“Very well, Sullivan. We will die with honor. I leave this world with only two regrets. First, that we did not manage to kill the traitor, but we can die knowing that his infiltrators have been exposed.”
“I’m sure your father would be proud,” Sullivan said, and he wasn’t mocking Toru in the least when he said that. “What’s the other?”
Toru turned and looked him in the eye. “Now I really am curious to see who would have proven the better warrior between us . . .” He lurched over and offered his bloody hand to Sullivan. “Come, we finish this . . . brother.”
Hell, why not? He’d already had one Iron Guard for a brother. Sullivan took the bloody hand. He winced in pain as Toru helped him stand.
There was a commotion among the Iron Guard. Something was going on at the mansion’s entrance. Sullivan risked a look around the corner.
It was the imposter.
He was torn, battered, burned, bleeding. His uniform hung in tatters, but he was not running. Somehow, Sullivan understood. Saito was no longer in charge. This was the Pathfinder, and it was done running. It had been exposed, and its war had begun. It was coming to kill them, and then it would kill every Iron Guard, and then it would consume the whole city.
Toru had seen it as well. They exchanged a glance. “Fortune smiles upon us.”
“Let’s end this fucker.”
They went through the door. Sullivan put the sights on the Chairman and opened fire. Bullets stitched him through the torso in bright red splashes. Toru was right behind, and he fired his Power, leaping over Sullivan, screaming his battle cry.
“TOKUGAWA!”
There were Iron Guard all around. They reacted immediately and Sullivan was hit with more bullets than he could count and more forms of magic than he knew what to do with. The BAR was torn from his grasp, but without pause Sullivan drew his pistol and kept shooting as he pushed forward.
The Chairman didn’t so much as flinch as the bullets tore through him, he simply turned, his lips curling up in a snarl as he prepared to Travel out of Toru’s way.
Sullivan hit him with every bit of gravity he could muster. Every ounce of magic he could wring from his body, his spells, or drag from the Power itself was thrown into that burst. Any lesser being would have been flattened like a tin can being stamped by a heavy boot. The excess magic which bled off instantly killed three other Iron Guard.
But the Pathfinder had made Saito’s new body incredibly tough. Fifty extra earths’ worth of gravity hit flesh, but Saito didn’t die, even as a circle of cracks spread around his feet and marble was churned to dust. He tried to Travel away, but even somebody with that much magic couldn’t teleport weight equivalent to a fully loaded freight train.
Sullivan bellowed as the magic threatened to rip him apart, but he was not letting that bastard get away. Even with the new spell on his back, there was only so much one body could channel. The new spell began to smoke and his flesh sizzled like bacon hitting a hot pan.
The Chairman raised his hands as if he was pushing back against the gravity. Sullivan felt the magic recoil back against him. He roared.
Toru was struck in mid-air by another Brute, and the two crashed at the Chairman’s feet. Toru rolled over, slamming the other Iron Guard in the face with his fist. Blood flew. A powerful Mover blasted Toru away. He hit a pillar hard enough to shatter it and came right back up. An Iron Guard got in the way of Toru’s tetsubo and died, and then another, blood flew as a ninja appeared and drove his sword through a gaping hole in Toru’s armor.
Dosan Saito’s eyes narrowed as he pushed back against the gravity. They both knew, one second after that pull let up, he would escape, and the harvest would continue.
You ain’t getting away. Sullivan concentrated. He had nothing left to give. He couldn’t push any harder. Keeping this up was taking inhuman focus. An Iron Guard slammed a rifle butt over Sullivan’s head and the wood stock shattered. Another came from behind and hamstrung him with a sword. Sullivan went to his knees in a shower of blood.
Constant as gravity . . . Fuck you, Jake Sullivan don’t quit that easy.
Toru flung off the other Iron Guards and swung right over Sullivan’s head, and the ninja who’d nearly cut Sullivan’s leg off was torn in half.
Something changed. The light seemed to brighten. Beams showed between the floating dust and blood and gunsmoke, cutting as clean as the sword which had just pierced his flesh. It was like the light was coming from heaven, and it brought truth with it as the Traveler aimed Fuller’s ray beam at the city.
There was a horrific thing bonded to the fake Chairman. It could be seen clear as day, hanging there. It screeched as the light scorched through it. That was the real Pathfinder, and it knew that it was done for.
The Iron Guards stopped struggling. They cried out in shocked disbelief as they saw the reality of what they’d been fighting and dying for. There were other monsters there too, pretending to be Iron Guards, and they were revealed for what they really were. They were just sponges, collecting up the magical energy as the real Iron Guards died around them.
Exposed, the monsters fell on the Iron Guards, ripping them apart with terrible savagery. Every inch of the vast marble room was quickly covered in blood.
But the Iron Guards were no longer trying to kill Toru. The unstoppable force came off the floor, the tetsubo was rising. Sullivan saw it coming. Dosan Saito and the Pathfinder didn’t.
“TOKUGAWA!”
Sullivan cut his Power and collapsed.
Toru smashed the club down onto Saito’s shoulder. Half the bones in Saito’s body exploded. He struck again. Defined by the light, the Pathfinder was vulnerable. The Pathfinder shrieked as it was compressed into pulp. Tentacles ripped from Saito’s eyes and ears in bright sprays of red. Toru smashed the legs out from under Saito and he hit the floor, totally pulverized.
The Pathfinder was crawling away, leaving a trail of black ooze. Sullivan dragged himself forward, leaving a trail of red blood. He reached the monster and lifted one steel arm. It screeched in frustration. Sullivan channeled everything he had left into a single pinpoint of terrible gravity and brought his fist down like the finger of God and he smashed it through the Earth.
The center of the Pathfinder collapsed. The outer edges of the creature blew up like a balloon before it burst beneath the terrible pressure.
The Pathfinder was dead.
Sullivan lay there, bleeding. The spell on his back had been burned out, forever extinguished, pushed too far. His body wasn’t far behind. Toru took a few halting steps, and then fell, blood drizzling down his arms from several deep wounds.
Saito was still breathing, barely. Blood was coming out of his mouth with every breath. Toru had utterly destroyed the man, and Sullivan had destroyed the Pathfinder.
The Iron Guard were occupied battling the monsters. It was as if the three dying men were alone.
“That was for my father,” Toru spat. “I reclaim my honor, traitor.”
Saito went first. He rattled out one last gurgling breath, and was gone.
But the Pathfinder had been a spiteful beast, and it had prepared one final spell of revenge. A glowing line appeared in the air over the splattered creature, and it quickly drew itself into an elaborate kanji floating in the air. Sullivan could not read it, but he could feel chaotic energy building.
“Boomer,” Toru said with tired resignation.
Sullivan opened his hand and examined the bloody paper duck.
A few seconds later the mansion exploded.
Art to come
Sullivan & Toru armored
