Chapter 32
Sloan
The bullets hit Sloan’s shield like a peppering of rocks. Her strength as a vampire kept the shield in place over Kade. Two bullets ricocheted off Sloan’s helmet. It felt like someone punching her in the head, but the steel helmet stood solid.
Sloan looked up at the last second before impact.
She aimed her lance at a pair of soldiers, one kneeling and the other standing behind him.
At the moment of impact, she took the kneeling vampire through his right eye.
Kade’s forward moment pushed the lance completely through his skull, and into and out of the back end of the stomach of the vampire who knelt behind him.
After that, there was no time to plan, no time to process what was happening, only time to react. Kade plowed through the first line of vampire soldiers, finally launching himself into the air and coming to a stop atop a mound of soldiers.
Sloan felt a shudder through her shoulder as her lance snapped in two. She leapt off Kade, hurling her broken lance at a vampire soldier like a spear. It punctured the vampire’s light armor in the area over his chest.
Sloan drew her mage sword with her right hand and flipped the switch.
Her left hand still holding the large square shield, Sloan went to work.
She was a maelstrom of wrath as she cut down her enemies left and right, and adrenaline pumped through Sloan’s veins so quickly, it threatened to overwhelm her senses.
As if her vampire part understood what was going on, her vision reddened and her canines elongated.
Out of the corner of her eye, she tried as much as she could to be aware of what was happening around her.
The white colors the Azra guards used, compared to the black the New Hope soldiers wore helped in cutting down on the confusion of who was fighting whom.
Sloan severed the head of a vampire soldier in front of her, while taking a bullet to the front of her right shoulder from another vampire soldier to her right. The bullet lodged in her scale armor, making the skin underneath sizzle with the heat of the round.
Hurling her shield at the vampire who had fired on her, Sloan severed his body in two with the force of her throw.
All around her, shifters grappled with vampires, and vampires bit into Azra guards in return.
Sloan’s vampire unit was fighting as bravely as she could ask for.
To her right, Pia and Babs were back to back.
Doyle had made his way near Kade and the two were fighting a large group of vampire soldiers who were trying to reload their weapons.
For the moment it seemed like their plan was working, but for how long their much smaller force would manage to keep the New Hope soldiers at bay was anyone’s guess.
A blow struck Sloan from her left, so hard, it made her head ring. Her helmet flew through the air as she struggled to see past the bright stars that exploded across her vision.
Without warning, a white mage sword came down toward her neck, hoping to relieve her from her head. Sloan managed to get her own sword up just in time to block the blow, and sparks erupted with an angry sizzling as the weapons met.
Sloan went down on one knee under the immense pressure applied to her blade. Her eyes searched past the bright light of the two weapons to find Commander Steel on the other side. His black eyes were alive with bloodlust. Not only his canines, but also his entire mouth had filled with jagged teeth.
Sloan rolled out from under his blade, coming up to find her feet. For the moment, those fighting around the two military leaders decided to mind their own business and find others to engage with in battle. A small circle opened up for the two warriors.
“You’ve already lost and you don’t even know it,” mocked Commander Steel, who Sloan also knew as the mercenary The Scar. “It’s over.”
“Nothing’s over!” Sloan yelled back over the raging war.
Horns sounded from the Azra walls, signaling that the gargoyles had swooped in and rescued the slaves working on laying the track.
“You hear that sound?” Sloan bared her teeth at her enemy. “That’s your slaves making it to the safety of the Azra walls.”
Commander Steel lifted his head high and barked laughter into the sky. “You think we didn’t anticipate your sense of morality leading you to this point? We wanted you to open your gates, you idiot.”
A pit of doubt filled Sloan’s stomach. Fear raced down her spine in a way the promise of battle never could. For some reason, Sloan understood Commander Steel wasn’t bluffing; he meant every word he said.
Shouts of panic began to fill the battlefield. Before Sloan could look around to gauge what was happening, Commander Steel came at her again.
He was just as fast and as strong as Sloan.
With previous opponents, Sloan would rely on her years of fighting experience to best them.
This wasn’t the case with her enemy now.
He matched her, stroke for stroke. The combatants circled each other, weaving in and out of one another’s strikes.
When their blades did hit, they sent showers of sparks over the battlefield.
Deep groaning so loud Sloan thought the earth itself was tearing open interrupted the battle and the ground shook with tremors akin to an earthquake.
Sloan wiped the sweat from her face, and her hand came back red with her own blood, blood she hadn’t even felt in the heat of battle from a wound that had opened on the side of her head and had already healed.
The groan came again, like a hundred metal rods being twisted against their will.
The retreat horn sounded somewhere from the Azra gates. Yells from Azra guards warned their brothers and sisters to make it back to the gates with all haste.
Out of the corner of her eye, Sloan witnessed the impossible. The giant mage engine was alive.