10. Jagger #3
My skull connects with the bridge of his nose and the calcite-hardened skin splits with a sound like cracking pottery, which is satisfying, but costs me a spike of pain through my forehead that briefly whites out my vision.
The Troll reels back just enough for me to get my arms free.
I hammer my right fist into his exposed throat, driving the war-runes on my knuckles into the softer tissue above his collarbone where the mineral hardening hasn't fully calcified, and the magic discharges on impact with a flash of gold light that sends him staggering sideways off the van.
I roll off the crumpled hood, boots hitting the ground, and my left side screams at me as the cracked rib shifts.
Second hexfire bolt. This one sails past my ear close enough that I feel the heat signature singes the tip of my earlobe, and it detonates against the van behind me, turning the engine compartment into an inferno that throws jagged shadows across the entire parking lot.
I'm backlit now, perfectly visible, and I hear the crossbow racking its third bolt with that same efficient chunk.
I grab the Troll's ankle before he can recover and swing him into the nearest stack of rotting pallets. The wood detonates into splinters. He goes through it, into the chain-link fence behind it, and the fence bows outward under his weight but holds. He'll be up in seconds. Trolls always are.
The Drow comes out of the loading bay door like a ghost, silent and low, her poisoned daggers leading.
She's fast. Drow always are. She closes the distance between us in the time it takes me to pull the collapsible war-hammer from my back holster and extend it to full length, the enchanted steel segments locking into place with a series of sharp clicks that I feel more than hear.
Her first slash opens a line across my left forearm, and the poison enchantment hits my blood like ice water, a numbing cold that races up toward my elbow before my runes catch it and burn it out with a flare of angry heat.
But it costs me. The runes are drawing on my reserves now, running dual duty between combat enhancement and toxin neutralization, and I can feel the war-magic guttering at the edges like a candle flame in a draft.
I catch her second slash on the hammer's shaft, steel ringing against enchanted steel, and shove her backward with a lateral sweep that sends her skidding across the wet asphalt.
She recovers instantly, dropping into a low combat stance, blades crossed in front of her face, white hair plastered to her skull by the rain.
She's young, early twenties maybe, and her movements have the fluid, drilled precision of formal assassin training.
Hollowbridge Shadow Academy, if I had to guess. Expensive. Korvan invested in quality.
The two Goblins emerge from the warehouse flanking wide, one left, one right, and they've ditched the shock-staves in favor of weighted chains that whistle through the air as they spin them up to speed.
The chains are barbed. Enchanted. I can see the faint blue glow of binding hexes woven into the links, designed to constrict on contact and lock the target in place while the poison and the crossbow bolts do the real work.
Four against one. Troll recovering behind me. Sniper on the roof. Drow in front. Goblins flanking. A textbook kill box, and Korvan probably planned it the moment I walked in the front door like an idiot who thought he could resolve a death warrant with a speech about tax fraud and color-coded tabs.
Sabine would be disappointed in me. Not for the violence. For the poor tactical planning.
The Goblins throw their chains simultaneously.
I swing the war-hammer in a wide arc, catching one chain and wrapping it around the hammer's head, then yanking it hard enough to pull the Goblin off his feet and send him tumbling across the asphalt toward me.
I kick him as he arrives, not hard enough to kill, just hard enough to fold him in half and launch him back the way he came.
The second chain wraps around my left ankle.
The binding hex activates instantly, and the links constrict with a mechanical tightness that bites through my boot leather and into the skin beneath.
I feel the hex trying to crawl up my leg, trying to lock my knee, my hip, freeze me in place.
My runes fight it. The golden light along my calf flares and sputters as the hex and the war-magic wrestle each other in my blood, and for three horrible seconds I'm locked in a stalemate, my left leg immobilized, my runes burning through their reserves to counter the hex, my hammer up in a guard position that's the only thing keeping the Drow's daggers out of my throat.
She presses the advantage, a flurry of slashes that ring off the hammer's shaft in rapid succession, each one accompanied by a fresh dose of poison that my faltering runes struggle to neutralize, and I feel the numbness creeping up my left arm again, slower this time but steadier, like a tide that knows it's winning.
The Troll hits me from behind again. He's recovered faster than I expected, and his arms lock around my torso from behind in a bear hug that lifts me off the ground despite the chain on my ankle, which tears free from the Goblin's grip but stays wrapped tight around my boot, the hex still active, still eating at my runes.
The Troll squeezes. My cracked rib grinds against something it shouldn't be touching, and the pain punches through the war-magic's dampening effect with enough force to make me see stars. Bright ones.
I throw my head back for another headbutt, but he's learned.
He tucks his chin, takes the blow on his calcified skull, and it's like hitting a boulder.
My vision strobes. The hammer slips from my numb left hand and clatters to the asphalt.
The Drow sheathes one dagger and picks it up, testing its weight with an appraising look that tells me she's about to use my own weapon to cave in my skull.
The sniper's fourth bolt hits the ground at my feet, close enough to scorch my boots, and he's not missing.
He's herding me. Keeping me pinned between the Troll's grip and the Drow's blades while the second Goblin recovers and picks up his chain.
Professional. Coordinated. This is what Korvan's money buys.
My runes are failing. I can feel them dimming along my arms, the golden light flickering to amber, to a dull rust color that means the magic is almost spent.
The poison from the Drow's blades is winning the war in my left arm, the numbness spreading past my elbow now, turning my fingers into dead weight.
The binding on my ankle has locked my left knee at a bad angle.
The Troll's arms are a vise around my broken rib, and every breath I draw is smaller than the last, shallower, buying less and less time.
I'm losing.
The realization lands with a cold, clinical clarity that cuts through the pain and the magic and the animal fury of the fight.
I'm losing, and I'm going to die in a parking lot behind a rotting warehouse, and Sabine is going to wake up tomorrow in her beige apartment with no one to eat oatmeal with, and the thought of that, the thought of her standing in her kitchen in the quiet morning light with one bowl instead of two, hurts worse than the broken rib.
Worse than the poison. Worse than any of it.