Chương 17: Chapter 16 - No royalties for half kills

The bus arrived at oh-six-hundred, and it had clearly been retired from something else before somebody decided it was good enough for us. Cross didn't come to see us off. She left instructions with the duty officer, one sheet of paper with a bus number and a departure time, and that was the whole ceremony. I understood her. Recruits arrived, trained, deployed, and then stopped existing somewhere out east. A new batch showed up two weeks later and the cycle started over.

Remembering our names would have been a form of self-harm. We stacked the bags by the door and filed out into the grey. Then I went back for the case. It came down the barracks steps with a sound that made Torres turn around before I reached the bottom.

"Hold up." He got a hand on one end of the handle.

"Let me take a side."

"I've got it." He pulled anyway, out of pure habit. His arm locked, his boots slid two inches across the wet asphalt, and the case stayed exactly where it was. He looked at his hand, then at the case, then at me.

"What the hell is in there?"

"Luggage." We both knew I was lying. He gave me the look that confirmed he knew.

"Luggage? Really?"

"Heavy luggage." I pulled away, rushing to the bus. Manuel leaned out of the bus door with a coffee in each hand.

"He said the same thing when I had to share the back seat with it. He also called it a magic wand."

"Which is it?" Kara asked.

"Depends who's asking." I carried it up the steps and set it down in the aisle at the back. The bus settled on its springs, and the driver watched the whole thing in his mirror without saying a word. Francesca tracked the case from her seat, then tracked it again when I sat down. She didn't ask. That was worse than asking. We pulled out through the gate at six-fifteen. Liam stood up in the aisle before we made the highway, one hand on the overhead rail, the other holding the sheet from the duty officer.

"Cross said we pick a squad leader this morning. So we're doing it now, because I'm not doing it in front of whoever meets us at the other end." Everyone found something interesting to look at. Kara studied her coffee. Nadia picked at the strap of her bag. Torres had already drunk half of his cup and looked calmer than anyone had a right to. Manuel pretended to check his phone. Luca and Francesca sat very still, being new, and probably feeling like they hadn't earned an opinion yet.

I'd spent most of the night chatting with Ophelia, discussing her pictures while she showered me with more.

"I can't lead shit, so I'm out of the question," I said.

"And I vote for Liam." Manuel lowered his phone. Even Liam blinked.

"Not saying I'd vote for you," Manuel said, "because I wouldn't. But why?"

"Because I'm a mage." I gestured vaguely at myself.

"My danger evaluation is completely fucked up. I'd walk us into something that doesn't exist as a threat for me and eviscerates everybody else, and I wouldn't notice until it happened. If I'm leading, everyone weaker than me dies badly." Which would be all of them. And that was the polite version, because I wasn't going to explain what the Crown of Empty Soul interacted with my judgment and ability to work in a team. Nothing encouraged trust like having a technique that erased all of one's thoughts and emotions.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. Liam's face moved through about three different reactions before it settled.

"He's right," Francesca said.

"And the same applies to me, which is why I can't take it either. It isn't a personal failing." She looked around the bus.

"It's every mage's problem. It's why mages typically work alone. With the differences in our skill sets, we can rarely work even in a pair." The mood in the vehicle changed. Shoulders came down. Somebody let out a breath they'd been sitting on since the gate. Torres scratched his beard.

"That's honestly a relief. No offense to either of you."

"None taken," Francesca said.

"Mages make for terrible soldiers, and even worse commanders." I grunted. I needed more caffeine. Kara raised a hand a few inches.

"Liam's got the best drill scores and the best coordination numbers. It's not close."

"He's been running us in training anyway," Nadia said. Manuel shrugged.

"Works for me." Luca spread his hands.

"I arrived a week ago. I'll follow whoever you pick, and my read is that it should be him." Torres looked down the aisle.

"Anyone against?" Nobody was. Liam stood there, and I could see him trying to decide whether to be pleased or insulted.

"You're all voting for me because neither mage wants it."

"No," I said.

"It's because you might actually be good at the job. Plus you're the director's golden boy, so maybe you can get us some perks."

"You're such a cunt, O'Connor." He glared at me without any real heat behind it.

"Fine. I'll take it." His shoulders squared up on their own, the role sliding onto him before he'd finished the sentence.

"But everyone follows orders. That includes you, O'Connor." Right. Damn it. I wasn't used to taking orders unless there was a steel whip behind them. And even then.

"I'll try."

"You'll do it."

"We'll see how that goes." That got a few laughs, and the bus loosened up.

"Hold on," Kara said, frowning at nothing.

"Shouldn't we be getting a veteran squad leader? Fresh squads get a sergeant. That's the standard." Torres nodded slowly.

"Yes. That's the standard."

"If there was a senior squad leader available, we'd have one," Luca said.

"The KSF must be running dry. They mentioned staffing struggles during our transfer briefing, but I didn't understand it was this bad."

"Bad enough they let a bunch of rookies vote on a rank promotion," Manuel muttered. So bad they let me in. Old Hellsing knew I was here to spy for Lucielle Legal. He didn't care. He needed to win on the battlefield, and the rest of everything be damned. For as long as I delivered, I could spy all I wanted. I respected that. Nobody had anything to add to that. Forty minutes later, Manuel made a sound like he'd been stabbed.

"Stop the bus." He was halfway across Kara's lap, face against the window.

"Stop the bus, stop the bus, stop the—" The driver did not stop the bus. Two crews on lifts were hanging a billboard over the northbound lanes, and they had most of it up. The image showed a stretch of suburban street at the moment somebody had swung an F-150 at a kaiju. The truck was still intact mid-arc. The figure holding the truck was a grey smear with legs. Under all of it, in letters four feet tall: FORD. MORE THAN JUST A CAR.

"That's Monroe," Nadia said quietly.

"That's from Thursday." At least they had the decency to blur me out. I wasn't getting any royalties, but at least the car's owner was a getting a replacement. Manuel already had the source up on his phone, forty seconds of vertical video shot through a windshield by somebody screaming in Spanish. He held it up so the whole bus could watch a blurred shape drag a pickup truck across an intersection at a speed that turned it into a rumor.

"They're fast," Kara said.

"It happened yesterday morning and there's already a billboard."

"There's an ad agency somewhere that had this cut before the road reopened," Torres said.

"That's the part that gets me." Luca leaned in over Manuel's shoulder.

"In Italy, four squads and a Vatican flight would have been on that in eleven minutes. Where was the response?"

"Ninety minutes out," Kara said.

"It was in the incident feed this morning. By the time anyone arrived, the thing was gone and the mage with it." Liam's jaw had gone tight.

"There's a protocol for exactly this. Unaffiliated mages are supposed to report contact before, during, and after. He engaged a medium class in a populated corridor, dropped it, and walked off. Nobody knows who he is, what he can do, or whose payroll he's on."

"He saved a town," Nadia said.

"This time." Manuel scrolled back and paused the video on the clearest frame.

"Okay, but nobody's talking about the real issue. Look at him. He's got the power to swing a truck, and he's fighting in five-dollar boxer briefs with a torn-up shirt wrapped over his face." I shut the fuck up, acting disinterested. Francesca had not laughed, and she had not looked away from the screen.

"It didn't die," she said. Manuel frowned.

"It looks pretty dead."

"Watch the last three seconds." She reached over and dragged the video back with one finger. On the little screen, the thing came apart into dark particles that drifted upward before they went out.

"Corpses stay in place. This one dissolved." Nobody had an answer for that, and neither did I, though for slightly different reasons. The rest of the ride took another hour, and after the second checkpoint everyone gave up on talking. Three checkpoints total, then a tunnel hidden under so much overgrowth that we were inside before I understood there was a road there at all.