Ow.
The thing about being an immortal with regeneration powers is that they don’t actually make you immune to pain, and furthermore, they don’t help you remain functional during the several seconds it takes to regenerate from something like, say, having somewhere between five and eight rifle-caliber bullets pass through your torso. There’s lots of different things that need fixing in that scenario: lungs, abdominal muscles, blood vessels, the bones of the ribcage and spine.
So there I was, lying face-down on the dirt, completely silent and limp with a bunch of holes in me, all the while experiencing a frankly incredible amount of pain. I’d gotten used to that kind of pain, as awful as that sounds, which meant that I was free to spend the next twenty or so seconds thinking about the current situation. The field of battle was divided in half by the massive obstacle of the mine’s entry doors, which were very slowly pulling apart. On one side was a mostly open field containing something like fifty cops, all armed with a combination of bolt-action rifles and pump shotguns. On the other side was a large room which was mostly full of cover in the form of mining equipment, and which also had at least a dozen Cassandran infiltrators, all armed with the fully-automatic clockwork rifles favored by the elite portions of the Cassandran army.
Obviously, the cops had a bit of a problem, which was they were rather outgunned and had very little cover to work with. This was also a problem for me, because for some fucking reason I had ended up on the same side as the cops, at least temporarily. There would be more time to reconsider this decision after I had regenerated, and possibly after I had actually won the—
Someone picked me up. “Ow, ow, ow fuck, no, don’t do that, what the fuck are you doing?”
Someone promptly dropped me, presumably upon realizing that I wasn’t actually dead. I caught myself on my hands, then looked up at my would-be rescuer. It was one of the cops.
“You were shot,” she said.
“Yeah, and now I’m not,” I said, shoving my hand under my shirt to find out how many holes I had in my torso. The answer had gone back down to three, so I put my feet under myself and located my gun and sword, a few feet away. I moved quickly enough as I was retrieving them that I was able to avoid getting shot again, then kept moving until I found cover behind the slowly opening door.
Already there were several officers down, writhing in pain or deathly still on the ground, and once the door was fully open the situation was going to go from bad to worse. I had maybe a minute to do something if we were going to get the foothold in the entry hall that was an essential part of the plan. Normally this was where you would use a grenade, but we didn’t have any of those. So I would have to do the next best thing, which was to draw enemy fire and hope.
I rushed out into the open, this time ready to open fire with my revolver. I had gotten two shots off when the first burst of fire came my way, which I quickly dodged, but it was soon followed by others as the Cassandran agents started to freak out about the fact that I wasn’t dead; one or two of them even mentioned the word “alraune.” As I was making my mad suicide rush, my eyes were on a swivel, hoping that at any moment I would see the Grantval police surging in behind me. No such luck.
What I did see, however, was a wooden crate, its lid partially unsealed, and just barely visible through said lid were several very familiar-looking red cylinders. I stopped in my tracks. Holy fucking shit, we were having a gunfight next to a crate of dynamite, what the hell had they been thinking, one bad shot and—
I got shot again. And this time, the Cassandrans weren’t going to fuck around. One of them advanced out of cover, drawing a short sword from the belt of the miner’s uniform she was wearing. As she held the knife out to her side, glaring down at me as I struggled to stand, the infiltrator muttered to herself in Rochathan.
“The doctor said to remove the head… Let’s see if she was right.”
The only person who she could be referring to was Doctor Tersine. Which meant that Tersine was here. It also meant that Tersine was undoubtedly aware we were coming, but we’d already known that from all of the bullets. Tersine was here. I just had to survive long enough to get to her.
The Cassandran soldier drew a hatchet from her belt as she loomed over me, then took it in both hands. I was still on the ground, still recovering from my last shooting, forcing her to awkwardly drop to a knee in order to get close enough to swing for my neck. I waited until the last possible second, pretending to be stunned, before avoiding the blow with a curl-up. The axe crashed into the stone floor, stunning its holder for a crucial fraction of a second. I rolled, not away, but directly into her, knocking her leg out from under her and sending the Cassandran soldier’s full weight careening over on top of me. From there, I could make use of my smaller size and superior leverage, twisting my legs around her midsection and hurling her to the ground.
We grappled for a moment. She had the upper hand in terms of skill and intactness of torso, whereas I had the superior strength and leverage. In the end, though, it came down to the simple advantage that she was on the ground and I wasn’t. My revolver was still on the floor where I’d dropped it a short distance away. I pinned her throat to the ground with one knee, then in the second before she could force me off I lunged, snatching the gun up off the floor. I still had it in my hand when she flipped me away from her, and used it to put a single bullet through her chest.
Unlike yours truly, most people who take a bullet in the lung stop in place, make a few truly unpleasant gurgling noises, and then keel over to die. She did so. Before any of the other Cassandrans could realize that I was back in play, I rose up to a crouch and aimed my gun squarely at the half-open box of explosives.
“You’ve seen that I can’t die!” I screamed over the sound of gunfire. “Now drop your weapons, or I shoot the crate of dynamite and leave the rest up to chance!”
Slowly but surely, the constant barrage of gunfire slowed, then stopped. One by one, the Cassandran soldiers shoved their hands out of cover, showing their disarmament. I called for the police to advance, and after a minute or two to account for the cowardice latency, they did so. It had come at a cost of entirely too many lives, but as I lowered my revolver, I was struck by a wave of relief that we had finally overcome… the first layer of defense.
Still, even if I’d had a better plan, I couldn’t have stopped the police. That was something I’d learn much, much later: armies are like objects in a vacuum, in that once you give them an impulse they pretty much just keep moving in whatever direction you’ve shoved them. In this case, that meant breaking up into two groups. One set up a defensive position, re-using the same cover that the now-captive Cassandrans had been, but with the added defensive oomf of a machine rifle emplacement. The other group moved forward, arming their shotguns and steeling their wills as they prepared to descend into hell.
Laura and I moved forward into the hell-descending team. There was little prep work necessary for us: Laura had her straight-bladed sword fully sharpened and oiled, so once she had cleaned it of blood she was ready. I reloaded one bullet at a time, then wondered if I should do my self-impalement trick sooner rather than later. Considering the fact that all the police already knew I was immortal, and the conditions of imminent ambush in the tunnels…
I retreated a little from the main group, just far enough that it wouldn’t feel obtrusive, then reversed the saber in my hand and shoved it through the most blood-rich portions of my stomach. It hurt, but it was a pain under my control, a familiar pain, and one that faded quickly once I pulled the blade out. My blood, instead of spattering to the ground, adhered to the blade, suspended in its powerful magnetic field to create a semi-liquid shell of red. I could feel the blade becoming an extension of myself, the blood channeling my vitalic field into the sword, creating an edge whose wounds would never heal. Against an opponent that could heal from normal injuries almost as quickly as I could, it was an invaluable technique.
Once I returned to the group, it was almost time to go. Laura was standing there next to me, surrounded by officers of the law. Suddenly I felt… scared. For Laura, mostly, the fact of her immense vulnerability shoving itself to the forefront of my awareness, but for myself and for everyone else as well. This could be it. This could be the end of the long, painful battle against Tersine, her final defeat… or it could be the end of everything. I had no idea what was waiting for me down in that tunnel, and I didn’t want to find out.
But what was I going to do? Ask Lady Halflance to call it off? Beg Laura to stay behind and let me take Tersine on my own? Even if I did ask, neither of those were requests that were going to be accepted.
The machine rifle team finished setting up behind us, and with confirmation from Lady Halflance, it was time to go down. I took the lead. If whatever ambush was set up in the front, then I would take the first blow, giving the others time to react without actually costing them anything that wouldn’t come back. Behind me were the melee fighters, Laura and a couple of burly cops who had agreed to fight with sword and hatchet if we were charged by wolves. Behind them were the bulk of the force, about twenty police armed with a wide variety of guns. It was going to get loud as hell down there.
But before the loud, came the quiet. The quiet and the dark. The mining tunnels were just as wide as they had been on the map, but it was impossible to reckon with how that translated to real life, the uneasy stillness and warmth of the air. It was all lit with electricity, casting a dull greenish tint over the whole proceedings, but the lamps were spaced out enough to create deep wells of shadow. As far as I was concerned, every single one of those had a wolf hiding inside of it, ready to pounce, so I would always make sure to steer myself into the dark, swinging my sword at the musty air.
You would think that the claustrophobia of the straightaways, with nowhere to go but forward and back, would be the worst, but they weren’t. The branches in the path were absolutely terrifying. Sometimes, a lot of the time, there was an obvious main and side direction, the side usually being some maintenance chamber or the bottom of an air shaft. That still meant stopping ourselves in place and shining a lantern’s narrow beam down into the side room, firing off a few warning shots, making as sure as we could be that there wasn’t a party of ambushers ready to attack our rear as soon as we’d passed The minutes immediately after the all-clear were the worst ones by far.
The proper branches and intersections were more abstractly awful. There was, of course, the fact that they left us open to flanking attacks. But with our numbers as small as they were, the women on the flanks were more than prepared for an attack to show up in front of them. It was more the fear of getting lost, of taking a wrong turn and ending up in a loop of corridors that never ceased. When we were inching our way down a lone passage, it was possible to believe that the old salt mine was a small and constrained structure; when you saw two corridors meet, both of them vanishing off into the distance, that illusion was shattered.
Every time we got to an intersection would mean stopping and sitting there in silence while our navigation team quietly determined which path would take us down to the main chamber. There were three of them working in tandem, and the sound of their whispered mutterings and of pencils on paper was the only thing that stopped me from going insane. It meant a break in the total absence.
And that’s what we found down in the salt mine. Absence. For all that I rambled on before about wells of shadow and searching side chambers, every single search came up negative, and every single tense moment spent waiting for an ambush came to nothing at all. It was like we’d picked the wrong salt mine. No blockades, no ambushing forces of wolves, no appearances by mechanodrones or Falem or any of Tersine’s mechanical contraptions, nothing but endless empty halls and the tapping of shoes against the rock. Tersine was down here; why else would the soldier up above have made reference to her, why else would she have warned them about how to deal with an alraune like myself? She had to be planning something. No matter what, no matter how long we were down there, we absolutely had to make sure that our guards were kept up.
Soon, we were approaching the lowest level of the mine. The passages, which previously had had a steady downward slope to them, began ever so subtly to level out. The lights were flickering more, the charge in their wires struggling to make it to this depth. Intersections became fewer and further between, and the navigators took less time at each one to work out where we were. It was like everything was accelerating down to the conclusion.
And then it finally happened. We’d spent so long preparing ourselves for an ambush, steeling our wills for the sudden explosion of violence and noise, that the subtlety of it came as an even bigger shock to the system. The first sign that anything was wrong came from one of the women in the front rank, armed with a shotgun, who raised her weapon to her shoulder with a sudden gasp and fired it off. I felt the air shift as one of the pellets blew past me, but my eyes were locked forward. Something shifted. There was a puff of blood as at least one pellet struck its target; one of Tersine’s wolves sat crouching just in the crook of a bend in the path. I’d been staring right at it, but it wasn’t until she moved that my memory retroactively added to my understanding of the space the hunched, furry shape.
I dropped to a knee, as did Laura and the others in the melee line, allowing the first rank of shooters to unload something like ten rounds of buckshot. Anything living would have, at the very least, been severely inconvenienced. But there was nothing; the rounds tore chips off the walls, sent overhead lights raining down in showers of glass, filled the air with rock dust. There had been only a single waiting werewolf.
“A scout!” I shouted, rising from my kneeling position in order to race down the corridor.
How stupid of me to not see it sooner; Tersine loved to set out lone wolves as scouts, as had her protege Nemesis. A single wolf had both the speed and the durability to have a decent chance of escaping back to the main base and report. Unless, of course, the invading army had someone even faster than one of the wolves. I sprinted ahead, gun out as I prepared to kneecap the wolf, or tackle her to the ground if that failed, moving so quickly that the pounding of blood in my ears was so loud that I very nearly didn’t hear Laura’s alarmed shouting coming from behind me.
“Emma! Could be a trap!”
I stumbled, then skidded to a stop. She was right, of course, and even more right to warn me. I’d walked into too many traps in my day to believe that I was immune to them, or that Tersine was above setting them. Always move forward, yes, but that didn’t mean I had to get myself surrounded and captured. I wheeled around.
“Then follow me! We can’t let it report back to Tersine!”
It was a simple enough plan. With all of us moving together, any trap would have to contend with a wall of firepower, plus me. With all of the ranged fighters on our side, it was even conceivable that we could have disabled the wolf from a distance, keeping it down for long enough that I could catch up. If the police had taken my shout as an order, surging forward into a mad charge, it could have worked. But I had failed to take into account something that I really should have, given that I’d already observed it in action:
Cops are fucking cowards.
So there was no headlong charge, no following of the plan. Instead there was several seconds of hesitation, followed by a vague forward push once Sir Bernardine ordered them all to move. Not a step forward was taken that could have impeded their ability to obliterate any suddenly-appearing foe in a hail of bullets. I’d fucked it; the wolf was long gone by now, and Tersine definitely knew where we were.
No point in turning back, though. It takes a while to set up a proper defensive perimeter, and if Tersine was relying upon scouts that meant she wasn’t going to start preparing until the scout had arrived. If we could get to the central chamber within a few minutes, we could still catch her off guard. So as we descended deeper and deeper into the mine, sword and pistol both at the ready, I made sure the cops behind me kept up the pace.