massive iron shields steadily pelted with fire, but giving more in return with the incessant chatter of their chain-guns. They laid down suppressive fire as the mighty Defenders behind them spat successive earth shaking salvos. Caine looked helplessly at the Sentinels. They were too far to summon and he was too far to teleport back to them.
Allister Caine was on his own.
The first wave of the flank assault began. Winter Guard came screaming from the thicket, their silhouettes easy to mark with distinctive greatcoats and wooly ushanka hats.
From a fitted leather holster, Caine withdrew twin shining pistols. Spellstorms, the armory had called them. Two of a kind, made for him and him alone, the exquisitely crafted long-barreled revolvers gleamed with intricate brass lattice and inlaid magic-amplifying runes. He’d named them Beatrice and Darlene, and the runes on each now glowed white hot at his touch, and he took aim.
The first spat fire, a shimmer of rune-halo at her muzzle, and the nearest enemy in the charge fell back straight as a board, the icon on his ushanka rendered a smoking hole. Now the other roared, with an equal measure of rune-halo and death. Another Khadoran shouted, clutching his chest. The pair spat in rapid succession, tasting blood each time, yet still they came.
Caine was going to fail.
It was like shooting at a tidal wave. There was nothing to be done, even as he felled three more Khadorans, six more surged over the fallen. A withering hail of shots came at Caine, and the power-field from his warcaster armor visibly dimmed with the strain. They were too close, too many. Kneeling, he gasped for air. The arcantrik generator on his back was churning black smoke now to keep his power-field from failing. Beatrice was spent, Darlene too, seconds later. There was nowhere to fall back. A screaming Khadoran was but two strides away, the point of his axe aimed right at Caine’s face.
Caine closed his eyes, resigned. With a single exhale, he let it all go. Fear. Anger. Regret. A second became his whole life. With a final breath, he waited for the weapon’s touch.
It didn’t come.
Perplexed, he opened his eyes. The axe was still there, perhaps a stride closer. But there it stayed. Caine looked up. The screaming Khadoran had fallen silent, though his war face remained no less fierce. He was still as a statue. Behind him, some threescore of his comrades were equally still.
Caine saw a world robbed of color around him, only faded gray. The sounds of war, once deafening, had become a dull hiss of white noise. An ethereal glitter drifted languidly in the air, and his Spellstorms faintly hummed. Then it clicked.
That day at the pistol range ...
Caine remembered the moment. His magic, then as now, had brought him here. A place between the seconds, perhaps? Caine laughed at the spectacle, his voice echoing in this strange timescape. Incredible it was to find such power even as all hope left him. How long before it would ebb away? He couldn’t say. It didn’t matter.
He would make the most of it.
He flicked his Spellstorms open, sending spent brass cartridges cascading down. As they fell to earth, their sheen faded into the ubiquitous gray. In a fluid movement, he drew his pistols past speed-loaders set in his belt, and then snapped them shut, loaded. Space buckled around him as he vanished, reappearing some thirty feet over the charge of the Winterguard.
Caine opened fire.
His twin pistols began to stitch radiant death left to right, a maelstrom of lead. Each shot flared like a starburst from his muzzles, leaving a wake of concentric shockwaves as they went. The figures held bizarrely in pause below him answered with their blood. Slowly, it began to spatter into the air, blossoming abstract patterns.
So much blood …
Caine awoke with a start. He sat up and immediately regretted it. He lay back down with a grimace, clutching his head and closing his eyes. With a deep breath, he opened them again, and looked around. He found himself upon a cot in the field hospital. There was a nurse watching him, and he smiled feebly at her. His smile was gone a second later. Next to her stood his commander, warcaster Major Horlis Abernathy, cross-armed and looking more stern than usual in his thick battle-scarred armor.
As Caine met the gaze of his commander, the patrician looking man, some ten years senior only, shook his head.
“I would not believe it, were you not right before me.