The creature bellowed.
“Go,” Cornelius repeated.
A sniper rifle shot took a man down in the third row. The aegises stretched their magic shields, angling them up.
The floor under my feet shook again. The walls trembled, and the rhino beast hurtled through the gap it had made at full speed. The line of advancing soldiers scattered. Bodies flew, one of them desperately trying to adjust his shield against the impact.
The beast rampaged on the slope, running back and forth, stomping and goring anything in its way. It rammed one of the car wrecks we hadn’t had time to clear and headbutted it like it was a toy.
“Psychological warfare in three, two . . .” Bern said.
Arabella’s voice blared through my earpiece. “You’re going to die. This is your last warning. Leave, and we will not pursue you. Save yourself.”
“Bern?”
“Sorry. Had the speaker on.”
Arabella’s voice vanished.
On the field, one of the soldiers yanked his helmet off. Noise-cancelling helmets were fine and good, but you still had to transmit the orders to your soldiers. Bern had hacked into their communication channel. Right now, their ears were full of my sister’s voice telling them they were about to die.
Loud booms of artillery bombardment came from the south.
“We have visitors,” Runa announced.
On the hill, the attackers reformed into a column, the aegis mages in the lead, and charged the gap. A portal snapped open in front of the beast. It was galloping down the hill as fast as its legs could carry it and it had no time to turn. The creature vanished into the portal and the ragged dark hole collapsed on itself.
“Krause is in range,” I called out.
“Good.” Alessandro straightened in his circle.
The flood of Arkan’s soldiers spilled inside the wall.
A rapid staccato of gunfire tore from Leon’s tower. People dropped like flies.
The last woman through the gap stabbed the man in front of her with surgical precision, spun, sliced another attacker’s throat, blurred into the man she just killed, and sank her knife into the third soldier’s kidneys. Konstantin.
He was cutting them down like they were weeds, jumping from shape to shape as he went.
“Stop it,” Leon growled. “I almost shot you twice!”
“Any sign of them?” Alessandro asked.
“No,” Bern reported.
The real fight hadn’t even started. These were the preliminaries. Neither Arkan nor any of his two remaining Primes and six Significants were on the field.
Arkan would have to provoke Alessandro. It was just a question of who he would use.
Konstantin and Leon were mopping up the intruders. If Arkan was going to push the go button, it would be now.
A woman strode into the opening at the bottom of the hill and jerked her hands up.
“It’s Krause,” I called out to Alessandro, covering my mike. “He’s using her as bait.”
“I wonder what she did to get on his shit list.”
“Do you want to go for it?”
“She’s not going to give us much choice.”
I took my hand off my mike. “Please go to your designated circles.”
A cascade of explosions came from the south.
I grabbed the tablet off the counter and pulled up the feed from the motor pool. The southern end of the property looked like hell on earth. Here and there asphalt burned with crimson magic. An oak crashed to the ground and caught on fire. The motor pool’s roof in front of the camera looked like Swiss cheese.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Across the wall, something exploded sending a geyser of dirt and fire into the air. A person howled in pain. Grandma Frida must have scored a direct hit.
Another mortar answered, splashing crimson fire against the motor pool. The front wall curved outward, bulged, and fell.
Magic cracked above my head.
“Bern?”
“She opened the portal directly above you.”
On the tablet’s screen, a tankette rolled out from behind the motor pool to face the southern wall. It was barely larger than the average full-size SUV. A 40-barrel stacked projectile volley gun rose from the tankette’s roof. Unlike normal guns, stacked projectile batteries had no moving parts. Each of the barrels was stacked with bullets that had no casing and no primer. The bullets were fired electronically when a pulse was sent through the barrel. The rate of fire was insane.
The tankette brayed like a donkey, burping its entire arsenal in a fraction of a second.
This was the closest I had ever come to an actual war zone.
“Linus?” Grandmother Victoria said.