Someone darts through a door to my left and out into the hallway. I know that it isn’t one of ours going to clear the rooms on this side of the building.
Jumping up, I race after them, they’re heading in the direction of where Reed and the others have gone to locate The Owner. I am absolutely not going to risk this fucker sneaking up behind them and causing an issue.
My feet are silent as I rush through the hallways, hot on the heels of the supernatural that came down here. She’s fast, that’s for fucking sure. She suddenly stops, spins around, and shoots magic at me. I manage to duck at the last moment, and the wall right where I was standing a moment ago explodes with the hit of magic, making bricks and debris fly everywhere.
Rolling out of the way of the crumbling wall, I send a stream of water out, wrapping it around her legs and pulling her to the floor.
She counteracts the water with fire, which only seems to piss my magic off, and it doubles down on its attack as I wrap it around her fire, putting it out and suffocating it.
My water is stronger than her fire, and she quickly realizes that, so she changes tactics. She isn’t a supernatural that has fire as part of her magic, like I first thought though, she’s a mage.
That makes things a little trickier and a whole lot more fun.
I can feel it as she starts to build a nasty fucking spell, and I instinctively know that while it may not kill me like she intends for it to do, because I’m stronger than she thinks I am, it is going to put me out for the count, leaving me vulnerable and allowing her the time to escape and help her boss or kill me.
For whatever reason, she holds loyalty to him. Enough to risk her life in order to help him. She must know that we’re going to have a team on her boss, which means that she either thinks that she is strong enough to go up against the whole team, or she doesn’t care whether she survives the encounter.
The Owner was clever in that sense. He’s got people working for him who want to work for him. People who like and even respect him.
People who are willing die for him.
It’s smart because it means that they won’t betray him. In fact, they’ll do everything that they can to help him.
It’s a more intelligent way to do it than most of the criminals we come up against do. Most of them use threats, blackmail, or magical control in order to keep the people working for them in line. All that means is that when those people get the chance to escape or turn their bosses in, then they do.
There is absolutely no loyalty.
Knowing that she’s preparing something nasty for me, I use her distraction to my advantage and command my water to hit her in the face, hard and fast, knocking her out instantly and stopping the spell from building.
Once she’s down, I move toward her quickly, securing her with magic-dampening cuffs and calling it in to the team who are collecting the people that we secure in areas other than the main arena. It would be too dangerous to extract people in there at the moment, since that’s where the majority of the fight seems to be happening.
In theory, Reed’s team should have cleared all of the rooms on this side of the building as they headed to find The Owner’s office and consequently The Owner.
We questioned the location at first, it’s a pretty obvious place to be holed up in a raid, but it’s where Rana said he would be because he has a magical safe room in his office.
Fortunately for us, he really didn’t have any intention of ever letting her go, and so wasn’t as careful around her as he perhaps should have been, especially considering that Rana is incredibly observant. Although he may not have realized that.
She knows the code for his safe room and the spells that lace over the door. Ransom gave Reed the premade spells to break through it.
Still, I want to check that we haven’t missed anyone, and I know that the arena is well taken care of now that the rest of my family is in there.
“Heading your way, Reed,” I say through the comms.
“Good, we could need a bit of backup,” he replies, as he grunts.
I immediately pick up the pace, as I change the plan, I’m not going to bother clearing the rooms, helping the others, and securing The Owner is by far the most important thing that we need to do right now.
To be honest, anyone else could escape, and we would simply hunt them down and bring them in, but The Owner poses a threat to one of our own, Rana, and he needs to be brought in once and for all.
I know where I’m going. I spent hours studying the map that Rana had drawn for us to make sure that everything was covered, that I thought of as many eventualities as I possibly could, and that we were as prepared as we could be for each one.
Also, so that I would be prepared in a situation like this, where one of the teams needed backup.
It would waste time if I had to ask directions and cause them unnecessary distractions.
I cautiously approach the room that I know to be his office, and ready my magic. When I peek around the corner, I see why they need extra help. The office is in complete disarray, and The Owner is standing on the opposite side of the room behind his desk, with some sort of ward or something around him, as things are flying around the room at his command and launching themselves repeatedly at Reed, Doc, and Coen.
Coen can’t shift in here because he’s too big and would collapse the whole building, and it would also make him a bigger target for the various things that The Owner is launching at them all.
