Freedom, Humanity, and Other Delusions (Death's Handmaiden Book 3) by Niall Teasdale (best summer reads txt) 📕

‘Do you think you can handle that?’ Nobuyuki asked.

‘We’ll do it somehow,’ Melissa replied.

Nava looked out to the valley’s mouth. There were three guard towers watching over the camp, two at each corner of the mouth and one at the back. ‘I’ll take those watchtowers overlooking the parking area down early. Looks like I might get to try my new spell out.’

‘You have a new spell?’ Rochester asked, suddenly very interested.

‘Something I’ve been working on. I combined Magic Bullet with Magic Burst, essentially. It’s a little greedy, but by combining the two, I’ve got a guided missile with a quintessence warhead. I reconfigured it to penetrate armour better too. I have to work it from the schema every time at the moment, but that shouldn’t be a problem if they can’t see me.’

‘Just what kind of distraction do you have planned, Nava?’ Courtney asked.

‘Oh, the easy one. I’m just going to kill as many of them as I can before we leave. That should be a big enough distraction.’

~~~

‘This is the first time in a while that we’ve held hands.’

Melissa glanced back at Rochester. It was a wasted effort, of course, because he was invisible. That was why they were hand-in-hand and crouched in some bushes a hundred metres or so from the vehicle park. ‘I guess it is. Not terribly romantic under the circumstances.’

‘No.’ Pause. ‘So, you and Naomi, huh?’

‘Me and Naomi. I mean, I’m not sure where it’s going. We call each other and send messages. We’ve had… three dates. He’s busy with the ASF and I’m busy with school…’

‘He treats you well? I mean, he’s always seemed rather…’

‘Intimidating? He’s a lot cuter when he wants to be. Or when he gets flustered. He has something in common with you, actually.’

‘Oh?’

‘He gets a lot less confident and imposing when he has to expose his emotions.’

‘I don’t think I’m confident or imposing at any time.’

Melissa smiled, even if he could not see it. ‘You’ve got better.’ Somewhere behind them, something exploded. ‘It’s starting.’ Melissa looked up, waiting for the next detonation. Maybe two hundred metres away, at the southern side of the valley’s mouth, the top of the watchtower was enveloped in a white sphere of light which expanded, brightened, and collapsed in less than a second. ‘Okay, let’s move.’

~~~

Not waiting for the results of her attack on the generator to become clear, Nava turned, raised her SAH-301, and fired her enhanced Magic Burst at the southern watchtower almost a kilometre away. It took nine seconds for the projectile to hit the tower and she was more or less oblivious to her surroundings the whole time. Still, she was invisible and the people she was now surrounded by had not been expecting an attack. The tower’s platform was enveloped in a sphere of pure quintessential energy. The two soldiers in the tower died instantly as skin, muscle, and even bone was torn apart at the subatomic level by raw magic.

Nava did not pause to reflect on their deaths, but she did now check what her first attack had done. The generator was a sealed unit, a small fusion reactor protected by a water jacket, several centimetres of steel, and a magitech radiation barrier. There had to be magicians here to handle the barrier, but then there had to be magicians here to create the illusion hiding the camp. They might be a problem and they might not. Time would tell. Much of the mundane equipment which controlled the reactor and converted the voltages produced within to what was needed without were outside the barrier and the shielding. So, Nava had not attacked the generator as such, risking containment failure and a possible radiation release. Instead, she had destroyed the external equipment and cut power to the camp that way. And she really had destroyed it; there had been an explosion and smoke was pouring from the trailer the gear was in.

So far, so good. There were people starting to run about, grabbing weapons, emerging from the command-and-control vehicle, shouting ineffectual orders… Nava raised her left-hand pistol and fired a normal Magic Burst at the side of the armoured vehicle. The penetrator went right through the armoured side and light blazed out of the open hatch. Then the screams started. Some would be dead, others would be badly injured, but the important thing was that the regiment’s command structure had probably just taken a big hit.

Turning, Nava started for the tents, firing another burst of lethal magic ahead of her.

~~~

Nobuyuki led the way through the camp toward the tents where Kyle and Kory were being held, Mitsuko and Courtney following with the camouflage system on their armour doing its best to conceal them.

They had made it about halfway to their destination – though they were going to have to cover a lot more ground on the way out – and, so far, no one had tried to stop them. That was probably because Nava was raising merry hell somewhere to their right. If you looked that way, you could occasionally see the top of a white sphere appear and then vanish. Once in a while, it was a bigger ball of flame which Nava had to be making up from scratch; they were very big fireballs and Nava was clearly using all of her newly expanded capacity to launch them.

‘She’s practically field artillery,’ Courtney said under her breath. The radio link she had with the others still picked it up.

‘Those Fire Blasts must be close to what a tank cannon produces,’ Mitsuko agreed.

‘A small one,’ Nobuyuki said. ‘Concentrate, ladies.’

‘We’ve reached the vehicles,’ Melissa announced. ‘We’re starting to look for something we can get into.’

‘Acknowledged,’ Nobuyuki replied. Then he took a rapid step forward, his hand rising, fingers straight. Mitsuko was just wondering why when one of the Befreit soldiers stepped around a tent and spotted the man in the shinobi outfit. There was an instant of shock, and