Chapter 33 – The Last Eleven

Thomas turned back to the room.

The pain was gone. Not entirely—the joint still throbbed with a deep, structural ache that told him the ligament was very much destroyed—but the blinding, white-hot agony that had been paralyzing his leg had been replaced by something manageable. Something he could work with. Florence’s intervention had drained the hemorrhage, reduced the swelling enough that the joint could bear partial weight without collapsing. He wasn’t running any sprints, but he could stand. He could aim. He could fight.

And the odds had shifted while he’d been down.

Thomas extended his senses outward, reading the room the way a sailor reads the wind. The ambient mana had changed. During the brief medical intervention, thirty seconds, maybe forty, the oppressive churn of overlapping spell-lattices had thinned. The relay that had been grinding his core down was stuttering. Where four distinct casters had been rotating in disciplined sequence, Thomas now counted three. One of the sources had gone silent. Not dormant—silent. The kind of silence that meant a mage had stopped casting because a mage had stopped breathing.

His tablecloth-wearing friend had not been idle.

Thomas gritted his teeth, planted his good foot, and hauled himself upright. His left ankle protested, a hot, grinding complaint that radiated up his shin, but it held. Florence’s healing had bought him weight-bearing capacity, if not comfort. He’d take it.

He peered over the edge of the overturned oak table.

The dining room of the Lacquered Swan looked like the aftermath of a siege painting. Smoke hung in lazy, drifting curtains. Small fires crackled in the wreckage, fed by splintered furniture and shredded curtain fabric. The chandelier lay in the center of the floor like a fallen crown, its iron arms bent at grotesque angles.

Thomas counted.

Eleven cultists had entered the breach. Two he had dropped in the opening salvo—the first headshot and the priest. One had been killed through the table when the idiot announced Thomas’s affinity to the room. The pot-bellied man with the sawed-off was dead courtesy of his masked ally. One more had been dropped on the right flank by the same shooter. Florence had put the axe-wielder on the floor unconscious. A seventh was folded against the far wall, fresh. Shot mid-flank while Thomas was down. The stranger’s work.

Seven down.

Four remained. Two of them were on the ground, the man with the shattered shoulder and the rifleman he’d shot in the thigh during his aerial stunt. They were writhing in the rubble, their burlap hoods soaked dark with sweat and blood, their hands still moving in the jerky, compulsive patterns of mages who refused to stop casting. The lattices they produced were weak, malformed, sputtering things, barely coherent fire-seeds and trembling earth-shifts that a stiff breeze could have disrupted. But they were still trying. Still feeding the relay with whatever dregs of mana their failing bodies could produce.

Fanatics.

The other two were standing. Both had their backs to Thomas.

That was the detail that mattered. Both surviving cultists, one with a repeating rifle, the other with a revolver in each hand, had repositioned to face the far side of the ruin, where the masked figure in the tablecloth was apparently causing enough problems to demand their full attention. They were crouched behind a mound of collapsed plaster, firing in short, controlled bursts toward the right flank, completely focused on the stranger who had been dismantling their operation from the shadows.

They had forgotten about Thomas.

Mistake.

Thomas settled his revolver on the edge of the overturned table, using the mahogany as a rest to steady his aim. He lined up on the nearer of the two, the one with the rifle, currently racking the bolt for another shot.

He fired.

The report was flat and precise, swallowed almost immediately by the acoustics of the gutted room. The round crossed thirty feet of smoke-filled air and struck the cultist between the shoulder blades.

The man’s reaction was instantaneous—reflexive and, Thomas had to admit, impressive. Even as the impact drove him forward, his hands were already moving, mana surging through shattered concentration. A slab of compacted stone erupted from the rubble in front of him, angling backward to intercept the trajectory.

It was a good instinct. Fast. Well-drilled. The kind of emergency ward that might have saved his life against a conventional shooter.

Thomas flicked his wrist.

The stone slab dissolved. The mana holding it together simply ceased, the compacted earth losing cohesion and cascading to the floor in a shower of gravel and dust. The bullet, which had already passed through the man’s torso before the wall even began to form, continued on its merry way into the far wall.

The cultist dropped.

Thomas shook his head, a grim, involuntary motion. They always tried. Every geomancer, every pyromancer, every caster who had ever faced a Nullifier tried to cast their way out of it. As if the solution to having your magic erased was to produce more magic for erasure. It was like trying to bail out a sinking boat by pouring in more water.

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The last standing cultist saw his partner collapse and something behind that burlap hood broke.

The discipline went first—the drilled coordination, the rehearsed formations, the professional calm that had carried them through the breach. It all shattered in the span of a heartbeat, replaced by something raw, animal, and infinitely more dangerous. The man spun away from his cover, abandoning the engagement with the masked figure entirely. He wasn’t aiming at Thomas. He wasn’t aiming at the stranger.

He was aiming at the civilians.

Both revolvers swung toward the cluster of survivors huddled behind the fallen chandelier, a knot of dust-covered, bleeding people who had been cowering in the wreckage since the first explosion. A woman clutching a child. An elderly man with blood streaming down his temple. The young waiter who had somehow survived the initial barrage, his white shirt soaked crimson, propped against the ironwork with glassy eyes.

“Die!” the cultist screamed, the word tearing through the burlap in a spray of saliva and desperation. “Just die! All of you! Every last—”

BLAM.

The masked figure materialized from the smoke on the right flank. One shot. Clean, economical, punching through the cultist’s side just below the ribs.