The loud boom of explosions strike randomly across the campus, followed by the quieter but more numerous cracks of bullet wands and the previously dark campus lit up by orange flames.
“Sarrah!” Allia shouts and rushes in the direction of her friend’s last known location.
“She’ll be fine. She’s with J. Stay put. Keep safe.”
“She might not be. I need to find her.”
“Follow your training then. Take cover, cast a shield spell, then look for her.”
Allia dives behind a stone wall and chants the standard shield spell. After 20 seconds of casting, the person-shaped invisible bubble flickers into existence around her. She spends another 10 seconds adding a heat attribute to it and another 10 to add a secondary layer to partially diffuse force bullets prior to impact. Then she runs towards J’s lab.
More explosions go off. They seem more fiery than concussive, so are unlikely to collapse any of the school’s structures built to withstand the mishaps of a thousand magically gifted young students. Seeing this, Allia takes a route through a neighbouring building. A group of students rush inside with her, looking for cover, but none of them are Sarrah, so she keeps running.
Several darkly clad figures with cloth face masks suddenly run around the corner of the hallway and stop when they see the students. A brief second passes, then they all raise bullet wands and shoot, green light flashing from the tips.
Allia outstretches her hand and creates a series of barriers, each blocking the entire hallway. The first two shatter from the volley, but the rest give her plenty of time to gesture again. She blasts the whole group sideways against the wall, shattering their shields and knocking them to the ground. Before they can recover, she creates a series of bands which she constricts around them to serve as ropes, then creates smaller ropes to pull away their bullet wands and a domed barrier over the whole group, anchored to the wall.
“Whoa!” One of the students with her shouts. “Did you see that? That was amazing!”
“Is anyone hurt?” Asks Allia, not taking her eyes off the shooters.
“No… No, I think we’re all good.”
“Good,” Allia says as she retrieves a fallen bullet wand, looking perplexed as she does.
It’s not standard Thalassian make. It’s wand-shaped, about the same size and weight, has something recognizable as an accumulator/accelerator chamber bored into one tip and has mostly the same runes, complete with the double safety locks, but there the similarities end. For one, this wand is made out of barely worked wood rather than the grey metal tubes of the standard weapons. It does have a bump where a sight should be, but it doesn’t seem as precise as it should. Second, the A/A chamber isn’t open on the side for the first two inches to allow rapid accumulation. Finally, the handle is at a greater angle. The standard bullet wand is a 1-by-5-inch tube with a second, flatter tube attached at the end at a 100° angle to serve as a handle. But this handle is more like 150°. It doesn’t seem like a very good way to absorb the recoil.
Having examined it to her content, she aims at the wall and presses the shoot rune. A loud bang and a large hole appears in the wall. She keeps the rune pressed and a second bang and hole appears a moment later. It’s noticeably more powerful than the Thalassian model, judging by the hole, but slower too. Maybe 3 shots every 2 seconds compared to the normal 2 per 1.
With a nervous look at the wand, then to her captives, she creates a fine hook construct and pulls down their face masks. A gasp comes from the group of students as pale blue skin and fine angular features are revealed – the characteristics of demons.
“So that’s the who. That just leaves the why and the how,” Allia says, giving the demons a meaningful glance, which they return with a silent glare. She sighs and creates more rope constructs, which she stuffs in their mouths to prevent casting. “Right then, you lot watch them. I’ll send help if I can,” she says to the students, handing the closest one the stolen bullet wand.
“You’re going out there?” One of the students asks.
“I have to find my friend.”
“Can I come?” One of the boys asks. “I can fight.”
Allia gives the group’s dull hair a dubious look. While not every blossoming comes with a colour change, it’s improbable that more than one of them has experienced it. “You’re all first years?”
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“Yes.” One of the girls answers before the hot head can, giving him a ‘what’s wrong with you’ look. “We were in a club, and the older members made us stay to clean up.”
“Then just stay put and keep safe. Let security do their jobs… and make sure you all have shields up.”
One of them blushes and begins chanting the spell as Allia hands the rest of the bullet wands to them, keeping two for herself, then rushes off to find Sarrah. Uncertain of how well her shield will hold up against the demon wands, she gestures three more barriers into being in a rotating triangle around her. It’s not subtle, but it should keep her alive.
She rounds the corner and gains sight of J’s building... and is immediately hit by a volley of shots. Two of her barriers shatter and her shield takes a hit, but she manages to dive back into cover before it becomes dangerous. Her shield is fluctuating where it was hit with a pulsing blue light, but it’ll hold for a few more.
She peeks around the corner and spots a line of maybe 20 demons (presumably) in front of the entrance taking cover behind freshly raised earthen mounds, before a trio of shots hits her cover and forces her back out of sight.
“Allia!”
Her friend’s voice snaps her gaze to a stone bench where Sarrah is crouched behind. The bench is one of four surrounding a large statue. It’s large enough to keep her safe, but the nearest cover is perhaps a hundred feet away – too far for her to try to make it in a mad dash.
It’s 100 feet to the benches, the benches are 20 feet long, and then there’s another 100 feet to the building on the other side of the plaza. Seeing this, Allia gestures for her friend to wait just a moment as she spends a minute erecting more barriers for her plan. Once she has enough, she motions for Sarrah to come with one hand and counts down from three with the other.
Sarrah looks horrified at her friend’s plan, but nods in agreement. Just before zero, she erects a barrier in front of Sarrah, then sends the rest shooting out to form a wall stretching all the way from her building, past the bench and to the building on the far side. At the same moment, Sarrah sprints to Allia.
The demons, assuming that the far barriers are covering movement, spread their shots against them at random. A third of them shatter, but Allia raises them as quickly as they fall as she keeps another barrier set to move with Sarrah as a backup, all while throwing a sporadic spear blindly at them in hopes of keeping them busy. It looks like Sarrah is about to make it.
Then the fireballs hit, taking out half of the barriers and knocking Sarrah off her feet.
Allia immediately coalesces all but one of her barriers around her fallen friend, then half steps out of cover to better see the situation and draw fire. She immediately takes a force bullet, but also spots the fire mage sending another trio of orange orbs their direction.
With a gesture, she sends the free barrier to intercept, causing the balls to detonate well before reaching Sarrah. With another gesture, she sends a half dozen spears at the mage, but layered area shields stop them from reaching.
With a scream, she creates a half dozen more spears and futilely shoots them against the barrier. But no, not futilely. There’s a blue flash with each impact, indicating a weakening. She smiles and creates one more spear nearly the size of a combined volley and shoots it at a far greater speed. The column of light collides with the barrier and partially shatters it, then continues on to bash the demon mage’s chest, dead centre, knocking them to the ground.
Unfortunately, she failed to do this before the enemy sent additional fireballs streaking towards them, and she was too focused on the attack to intercept them. Fire washes over them. The low barrier dome she placed over Sarrah holds, as does her shield spell, but it’s dangerously strained. A second later, a force bullet hits and finishes the job – shattering the bubble in a blue flash and sending searing pain through her side as it rips a hole in her chest.
Allia, now shieldless, is forced to dive back into cover, which means the demons are free to focus their shots on her barrier dome over Sarrah. Meanwhile, Sarrah is forced to crawl, as trying to stand would require Allia to make the dome taller, which would make a larger target.
Several barriers break, and Allia frantically replaces them, ignoring the pain in her side to keep her friend safe, but the rate of collapse is overtaking the rate of creation.
Then, more shots ring out from the windows all around. Allia slams herself against the wall for cover, but sees the shots aren’t for her, but the demons. The bullets focus on the hole she made and pick off several demons, forcing their attention away.
Allia takes the opportunity to raise the height of her barriers to allow her friend to run, and a moment later Sarrah is behind cover next to her.
“It seems campus security is finally doing their jobs,” Allia says bitterly.
Sarrah shakes her head. “They did some fighting at first, but were forced back. Must have been regrouping when they saw you.”
Allia nods begrudgingly. “That’s okay then. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m alright. What about… Allia, you’re bleeding!”
“It’s fine,” Allia says, recoiling from her friend reaching for the bright red liquid. “It looks worse than it is. Most of the bullet dissipated and it didn’t hit anything vital.”
“Don’t be silly. Any bullet hole left alone can kill, especially demon made ones.”
“…Fine,” Allia says, but drags her several paces farther into cover before raising her shirt and presenting the wound.
Allia winces as Sarrah presses her hands against the wound and starts a lengthy chant. After about 20 seconds, Sarrah finishes the chant, but maintains contact as the wound continues to close slowly over the course of minutes. Meanwhile, Allia stockpiles constructs and redoes her shield.
“All right,” Allia says, “Once you’re done, we need to go. We’re still students; it’s not our job to deal with… whatever this is. Campus security seems like they’re holding their own for now, and are probably buying time so they can grab their shield piercers from lockup. Plus, the army shouldn’t be too far away… How did you know they were demons, anyways? They all have masks.”
“Oh, they came into J’s office right before the shooting started.”
Allia gives her friend a perplexed look, then sighs. “I guess you'd better tell me about that. Since we’re stuck here and all.”
