Standing in the face of a rampaging Denarian requires resolve.
Beta'd by Sesparra
Carlos Ramirez hadn't expected tonight to be nearly this crazy.
It had started so normally, too, what with them remaining generally in the area of some local talk show host's studio so Dresden could give an interview about… private investigating, apparently? Something to take a look at later.
Anyways, he got a job from some mysterious jet-setting priest who managed to slip away before Dresden met up with the three Wardens on their way to the workhorse old truck that they'd had the good fortune to be able to borrow (Ramirez couldn't see how Dresden managed to fit himself into the beaten-up bug, let alone anyone else, and even if Yoshimo and the Captain were relatively compact, Ramirez was the better part of six feet and had shoulders broad enough to cause problems even if he was next to Dresden's lankier frame with the separation of the center console, in the front seat).
When they got to the truck, though… well, ex-truck might have been more accurate.
Someone had worked it over but good. The windshield had been smashed in, along with the rest of the windows, and all four of the tires had been slashed. Opening the driver's side door of the machine revealed the ignition of the car dangling halfway to the pedals, almost completely torn free from the main body.
"Looks like someone tried to pull the ignition out and hotwire the car and then presumably gotten frustrated and decided to wreck it," said Yoshimo, after dropping the glass eye that she used as a focus for her psychometric spells back into a pouch inside her coat.
"Damn it," said Dresden from the other side of the truck, and looking over, someone had messed his car up too.
"What do you think, you get on the wrong side of the mob lately?" Ramirez asked, trying for humor and managing to scrape by with strained as he tapped his fingers on the hilt of his sword.
"Not Marcone's style," Dresden replied, and wasn't that all kinds of scary that he'd tangled with the mob enough to be able to say that about them. "Probably either a carjacking gone wrong or that gang of lycanthropes I pissed off a couple years ago. Come on, I'll go call my mechanic and see if he's got a loaner big enough for us all to fit."
Halfway up the alley to the street, past first a young black man in a shabby overcoat and then an old man with a cane, there came a snuffling sound from behind them. Carlos took it to be a stray or something at first, but the way that the Captain turned and hissed out an Italian curse was more than enough to get him to whirl on it, one hand already coming up to release a cloud of green-glowing mist as a shield.
After a single look, though, he abandoned the shield and scrabbled at the sword belted at his side, since there wasn't a whole lot an entropic shield could do against a bear that had been juicing with hellfire and the souls of the damned to get pumped up to twice the size of a regular bear, with both its massive jaws and the pair of spiraling horns pointed squarely at Dresden.
To his credit, the man reacted faster than most Wardens would, curling up into a little ball and wrapping himself in a bubble of blue-white energy from a shield, to the point where he went tumbling away from the bear on a path that would leave him battered and dizzy, but unchewed.
Captain Luccio set flame blazing up the length of her sword as she lunged past it, slashing at one of the bear's six legs, and caused it to rear up on its back four legs, roaring with fury. Beside her, Yoshimo drew her katana, slashing at the same time, and when the bear slammed back down, shaking Carlos inside his boots, it held one of its legs tenderly, two of the claws joining a slowly growing puddle of blood on the grimy alley floor.
Unfortunately, it turned its four hellish eyes on Yoshimo, and while she dove out of the way as it hurled itself sideways at her, she was still clipped by the massive form of the bear, sending her spinning away past the old man. Luccio, once she'd recovered from her own roll, turned her still-burning blade to face the bear, but it moved far faster than anything that size should be able to, wheeling aside and charging directly towards Yoshimo with all the inevitable weight of a freight train barreling through a tunnel and infinitely more malicious.
Desperately, Yoshimo tried to call up a spell, but as she moved her hand to cast, she winced and fell to her back, clutching her injured arm to her chest. Ramirez couldn't hear her over the pounding of his blood in his veins and the sounds of the bear that he was, against all sense, charging towards with just a sword up against what looked like if Mike Tyson was a bear and also into transhumanism, but she was shouting something at the old man, presumably to run while he still could.
The old man did not run.
His cane came apart in his hands, silvery steel revealed within the wood, and as the blade of a straight-edged katana emerged, it blazed to silver-white light with a sound like someone hitting a tuning fork the size of a building, resonating with the sword in Carlos' hands and presumably the other two silver Wardens' blades within earshot. Then, he took a high guard as the bear-thing flinched away from the light, skidding to a halt, and spoke in the voice of a kindergarten teacher telling their class that playtime ended fifteen minutes ago. "You shall not touch her."
"Ah," said the bear, in the kind of voice that Ramirez would have expected out of some of the old guard of the White Council, the ones who lived in England proper and still loudly lamented the fact that the colonies "don't know their place" while smelling of booze. "I thought I scented you upon the wind, Knight. You failed to stand against me three decades ago, what makes you think you have a chance today?"
"Let him go, Ursiel," said the tall black man in a Russian accent, shucking the coat like the hojas off a batch of tamales. His right hand dropped across his body to his left hip, and as he swept the American-style cavalry saber out of its scabbard, it, too, blazed with incandescent light, resonating at a frequency akin to but distinct from the sword wielded by the old man, like two notes in the same chord.
"And the reject," the bear-thing- Ursiel? said, with all the concern of a grandfather tolerantly amused with his grandchildren playing soldier in the yard. "Truly, I don't know how I can win this. Next you're going to tell me that the wizardling with the rapier is the next Merlin, too."
"Surrender," Luccio snapped, flaming scimitar blazing brighter to the point that Carlos could feel the heat radiating off the thing. "Give up the coin and you need not die here!"
"Stupid wizard!" From the bear's maw came a different voice, tortured and strained, touched with madness, but clear in spite of it. "We're all going to die!"
"And you," said the smooth voice, "die first!"
Ursiel whirled on Luccio, lunging forwards with all the weight of a charging bear the size of a truck, and Luccio, falling prone, barely managed enough of a shield to send it backpedaling into thin air a hairsbreadth over her nose like it was in Looney Tunes, the reddish pane of light guttering out instants after the bear's paws left it.
With the bear in the air, unable to dodge meaningfully, the Russian man spun the scabbard of his sword up, like John Wayne with a rifle, and it burst into a mass of spinning components, glowing with a pale shadow of the light of his sword as it clicked and clacked its way into expanding into a short-barreled rifle that seemed familiar, like he'd seen something similar recently. A runic array on the wooden stock glowed with silver-white light, resembling an abstract artist's depiction of a wing, and it pulsed as the weapon barked twice, the light in time with the discharges.
Two streaks of silvery light flashed out from the muzzle of the Russian's rifle, punching into the bear's haunches, and where the blood matted its fur, flames flickered up in that same silvery-white color, and the fur blackened and curled under the supernatural flame.
The bear roared as it stumbled to a halt upon landing, something more than sound in the act, and Luccio's sword winked out like a candle in a monsoon, though the flames slowly spreading from the puncture wound only surged forwards, as if feeding off of something within whatever spell the bear had cast. "Impossible!" it snarled, rolling over to smother the flames before limping forwards, making sure to keep its horns pointed towards the Russian. "How did you, of all people, get an artifact like that, reject?"
"A favor from a friend," replied the Russian, raising the rifle up to blow imaginary smoke away from the muzzle. "Care to try your luck again?"
Evidently it did, and this time a corona of flickering bloodred light swelled into existence around the bear as it charged towards the Russian. He swore, firing again, but this time, the light was drowned out in the corona, and he barely managed to whirl aside in time to avoid being gored or trampled, and the slash he tried to land in mid-spin didn't make it all the way through the corona before it flared out and brushed him away like a leaf on the wind, sending him into a wall and then to the floor as the light of his sword winked out, the blade clattering to the floor off to one side with his rifle going to the other.
This time, instead of screeching to a halt, sending a spray of concrete shards everywhere, the bear turned, charging directly for Carlos, an indistinct blur of teeth and fur behind the bloodred light.
Now, though, Carlos was ready, having already started invoking his own magic by the time the bear made it three ground-shaking strides towards him. Before it had closed half the distance to Carlos, he clapped both hands around the hilt of his sword and jabbed it directly at the bear with a cry of "Fluere, Rio Grande!"
Water exploded forwards from his sword, fountaining against the bloodred corona before starting to flow around it, eroding away first flecks of the Denarian's fell magic and then eroded bits and pieces of the six-legged bear as it slowed the massive creature down from supernaturally fast to roughly the speed of a man wading through chest-high water with a child on his shoulders.
"Hurry!" said Carlos, chest already heaving like a bellows from the effort of pulling such a large evocation out of nowhere. "I can't hold it for long!"
Luccio leapt forwards, sword slashing, but since she couldn't call up the blazing shroud that she had earlier in the face of Carlos' water spout, she was unable to leave more than scratches on the bear's hide. Dresden, on the other hand, took one look at Ramirez and his geyser, then raised his staff and barked out "Ventas servitas!" The air in the alley roared to life, and it started blowing in the same direction as the stream of water, starting to shove the bear back down the length of the alleyway with main force alone.
The old man sheathed his sword for a moment, brow furrowing in concentration, then, just as Carlos' spell guttered out, he moved.
If Carlos hadn't been specifically ready for it, he would have missed seeing the old man's motion carry him past the bear right underneath its slavering jaws, in a streak of actinic light, to where he stood, sword extended behind him.
After a moment, Dresden's spell died out too, and as it did, the bear collapsed, six legs no longer holding it, landing six inches behind the old man as its head rolled sideways, tongue lolling out in death.
"Nice work, everyone," wheezed Dresden, leaning on his staff. "Ten out of ten, no notes."
"What the hell was that?" Carlos asked, staggering two steps sideways and managing to brace himself against a wall before his legs gave out on him after such a grandiose spell.
"Bad news," said Captain Luccio, bowing to the old man. "I am grateful for your assistance, Knight Yoshimo."
He shook his head, and now that Carlos had a moment to look at him, the thick glasses and wispy white hair around the edges of his bald pate seemed at odds with the naked sword and the dead bear-thing, even as he sheathed the sword and moved to check on the downed form of the Russian. "It's a job. Speaking of which, I hear congratulations are in order, Captain?"
The Captain chuckled. "It's a job."
"What do you mean, bad news?" asked Dresden.
"Last reliable intel report we had about Ursiel had him kicking around the Middle East, trying to brute force some sort of war. If Nicodemus is pulling in nominally independent Denarians…" Luccio shook her head. "Whatever he has planned, it's big."
"Big enough that the White Council sent three Wardens of their own volition?" Carlos looked up, and on a fire escape there was a man who looked like he'd just come from a renfaire, complete with a cross on his tabards, on a fire escape, built like a barn and with the kind of unassuming appearance that you'd expect out of the man who built it. He dropped down to street level, striding over to Dresden, and the two of them clasped hands.
"Saying that the Council did it is somewhat disingenuous," said the Captain, sheathing her sword. "We got a tip that the Master of Shadows may be in Chicago, and I… appropriated what forces I could. Not much, in the face of the Red Court, but… It will help."
"Yeah, about the Red Court, a Duke Ortega decided that Larry Fowler's studio's a good place to challenge me to a duel," said Dresden, and Carlos knew his mentor well enough to see the exasperated sigh she was holding back for the sake of her own reputation if nothing else.
To be fair, he couldn't exactly fault her- first the Denarians, then the Red Court, all in a town that already had a major Winter presence, was one hell of a powder keg. What was next, the Archive? A Valkyrie? Maeve?
Hopefully none of them, but given Carlos' luck, he should probably start preparing for all three.
And that's that!
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