Rachael could feel the same sensation from around when the lightning bolt zapped past her building up again, and she knew the mage in front of her was prepping a spell. Her natural instinct was to shoot him, and as her pistol came up for her to do so, her HUD indicated movement on the far wall. Automatic optical zoom in a new window revealed a crawler drone with what appeared to be gecko tape tips on the legs. The drone was unidentified, and she could not be certain if it was friend or foe.

Rachael noticed another pair of the crawling drones on other walls and decided that hitting the dirt would be a better option, even with the mage getting mojo happy. Jackson and Mercury followed her lead, and she tried to cover their bodies as much as she could. With magic though, she knew it was rather futile unless the mage was aiming at only one of them. “What kind of mage would pick off targets clumped together one at a time?” she wondered, because she would be perfectly content to toss a grenade at her group if she was in his shoes.

A split second after the trio hit the ground, Jackson’s textual message appeared across her HUD: “Duck!” She would have responded with, “Goose!” but she was afraid he might actually try it. Instead, she watched the hands of the shaman. After a quick pair of gestures, a fire sprang to life in a ball between them, and he pulled back as if he were about to throw it.

She had been burned before. She had the bills to prove that severe burns had been treated at least. She did not really remember it happening, but she was told it had been pretty bad. She could not tell, because the doctors had been very good about removing the scar tissue. She was not real eager to repeat the treatment though, but the shaman looked like he was intent on turning her and her friends into barbecue.

Rachael knew she could not stop the mage in time now, so she closed her eyes and braced for the heat of impact. Four things struck her as odd after doing so. First, Jackson was snickering softly. Second, her HUD indicated that the crawlers were armed, but they were not shooting her and her team. Third, Mathias could not possibly have been taken down that easily without faking it. Fourth, she heard screaming, and none of it was from near the door.

Rachael turned her head to look back at her companions just in time to catch a blast of electronic interference. Her HUD went haywire, gave all sorts of error messages, and became an incredible annoyance in an instant. Blinded by the flickering lights, she disabled the HUD and returned to her almost normal vision right as Mercury’s fist slammed into Mathias’ nose.

The black man staggered backward with a grunt, and the look in his eyes clearly spelled, “What the frag,” without him saying a word. Rachael hated to hurt friends, but Mathias had a temper. She dared not risk it. Her foot kicked out to catch the big man behind the knee and drop him to the ground. She was already thinking of how she could explain to him later that it was for his own good. She even almost convinced herself by the time his head hit the ground with an eerily hollow thud.

Jackson was already on his feet before Mathias landed, and Mercury helped Rachael up despite her complete lack of need. The elemental was gone. She could not see the amulet anywhere. Mathias would not stay down for long. Other people were nearby intent on killing or perhaps capturing them to find the whereabouts of the amulet.

Her two companions obviously arrived at the same conclusion that she did, as both made a break for the door as fast as she did. In her extra clock cycles though, she also remembered something the other two had forgotten apparently. There was someone else in the building. Someone capable of cloaking the members of the other team. Someone capable of throwing lightning. Someone that she could still not see.

Jackson reached the door first and stopped emitting the horrible static that he had unleashed. His hand met resistance before he could grab the door knob. He pounded a fist against an invisible barrier between him and freedom.

Rachael stared in disbelief. For a moment, she considered blasting whatever it was with everything she had available. In the end, she disregarded that course of action. The noise behind her did a lot to convince her not to.

Especially since it was the sound of hoarse, maniacal cackling. She was pretty sure that nothing good could follow maniacal cackling, hoarse or otherwise. She turned her head to view the source: a wild-haired, beady-eyed, squirrelly-looking teenager with a patch work cloak, faded jeans, and ratty t-shirt. Her HUD came back online and promptly provided the threat status of the kid: Rat Shaman, Threat Level Severe.

Rachael pieced together why she was so uneasy about this job right as hell started breaking loose. It was too easy. The space station had been entirely too easy. The trip back was too easy. Handing over the amulet was too easy. She frowned as a thought pulsed through her cybernetic implants. She had the pistol out of its holster just in time to hear a pin hit the floor of the warehouse. She fired two bullets purely on instinct: the first at chest level of a human where the pin dropped, and the second at the same level on the catwalk above that place.

Bullet one hit the wall and ricocheted off somewhere else. Bullet B however disappeared. It vanished completely from sight.

She repeated the word “drek” over and over in her head. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand straight up, and a tingling sensation danced down her arms.

Mercury and Jackson were just still making shocked and surprised faces in slow motion. Mercury was withdrawing the amulet from the elemental, and the boulder stepped away from him just the same.

Something zinged past Rachael’s ear, and she flinched away. Her eyes registered light, and her brain attributed it to electricity. Her head jerked involuntarily toward the bolt’s destination. She was not sure how something made of rock could conduct electricity, but the earth elemental jerked and spasmed in the aftermath of the electrical assault. In the back of her mind, she flirted with the idea that the bolt had not been intended for her.

After a bit of jerking, the elemental roared in pain and rage, but then imploded on itself with an audible rush of air.

With all of the thoughts and events going on around her, she caught motion out of the corner of her eye. She did not need to confirm what it was. She tackled Mercury into Jackson and put her body between them and the frag grenade, back to the forthcoming blast. She spent the clock cycle to wish there was some form of cover between her and the grenade, but as soon as it was over, heat, metal, and pain washed over her. She gritted her teeth, holding back the cry.

The barrage of shrapnel was over as quick as it started, and though pieces rained down from above, they were no longer projectiles. Her ears would have been ringing if not for the sound dampening augmentation in her ear. She felt several cuts from fragments that made it through her armor. Her HUD displayed every wound with a severity read out, and she counted her small blessings that she could still feel and move all of her appendages. No vital areas had been wounded, though a sizable hole had been made in her left forearm.

She glanced over her companions, letting her eyes work their magic and assess their health and well being. Neither seemed to have any major wounds, and she started to get up.

A gun barrel and the accompanying sound of an electronic click inside the firearm came into her view as her head inclined. Drek.

She looked past the gun to the face of the man holding it, and the face of the man had to have matched the bewildered look on her own face. After she blinked, he asked with a degree of familiarity, “Rachael? The hell ya doing ‘ere?”

She stared at the black man holding a gun on her. He was wearing a mask, so facial recognition was significantly more difficult. His hand was not covered, giving her a hint based on skin color, but it was not enough for her in this position. Recognition dawned on her when he said, “Drek! Girlie, ya be needin’ to get gone!” The accent finally rattled home in her head while he lowered the gun, and she hoped she was not going to get another friend killed in this mess.

Mathias scanned the ground around them and said, “Where’s the amulet?”

Her sensors found no threat besides the rock, so she leveled the gun at it. She fought back the mental impulse to fire, due to the proximity to the docks. The military patrols nearby would surely respond to gun fire in a warehouse, and she was not certain her friends had silencers. After 12.582 seconds, she released the breath she did not realize she had been holding and holstered the firearm.

A noise set off alerts on her HUD, and it sounded like, “Thank you.”

Rachael blinked twice, attempting to find the speaker. Her audio sensors indicated that the source was the rock. Her hand went back to the handle.

The monolithic boulder shifted. Rachael’s visual sensors registered a brown glow around the miniature meteor, and then it stood up. Golem seemed an impossibly insulting term for the creature. It stood at a full three meters tall in the center of the warehouse, and she judged it to be more than a meter across at the waist in a mostly humanoid shape. It stretched four arms and with a deep, gravelly voice said, “You have brought me the amulet?”

Alfred pieced together information for her while she stood staring at the quad-armed animated statue. Her computer companion displayed the read out with AR overlay arrows, “Target: 3.012 meters tall, 1.467 meters wide, weight approximately 1,200 kilograms, possible weapons: 12, 4 fists, 2 elbows, 2 feets, 2 knees, 1 head, 1 mouth. Species: 92% chance of earth elemental, 3% chance vessel, 2% chance inanimate object, 3% chance unknown.”

The elemental’s head turned slowly to scan each of the three metahumans in the warehouse then fixed its gaze on Mercury. It extended its lower right hand to the ork. Mercury shiver visibly run up his spine according to Rachael’s AR, and she made a point to give him a little riff about it later. The ork took three steps closer to the spirit while raising the bag with the amulet up for the elemental to take it.

The rocky hand was six centimeters from the bag when the hairs on the back of Rachael’s neck stood on end. Two centimeters later, all hell broke loose.

There is a runner proverb that goes something like, “Watch your back, conserve ammo, and never ever cut a deal with a Dragon.” Rachael considered trying to get it ammended to include “Never take follow-ups.”

Not that this follow-up sounded incredibly difficult, but her stomach kept twisting into knots and untying itself. The sensation did not stop even after they got the details of the next stage of the mission. Nor did it subside once they were back in the van. She watched the sun rising as she was able between the buildings and thought darkly that this could be the last sun rise she would see. She voiced her concern to the others, and they scoffed at her and offered to let her out. She smirked and said, “When we get to the I-told-you-so’s, I’ll bail you out before I gloat.” The laughter lightened the mood a little, but did nothing to alleviate the churning stomach.

The drop point was a warehouse near the docks, not uncommon or conspicuous. Rachael was relieved by that, but after parking and entering the warehouse, her nerves were on edge. In that state, she subconciously activated the hardware in her body that seemed to slow time to a crawl. This effect was wasted when she found the warehouse was empty and void of thermal signatures according to her electronic eyeballs. She frowned and relayed the information to the others in text. While the others were responding, she loaded Alfred and set him to scanning the area.

Alfred found nothing of interest, though apparently this was a high traffic wireless area, so he could not determine what was or was not necessarily something she should be concerned with based on the parameters she had provided. She thought that was computer speak for garbage-in, garbage-out.

Jackson and Mercury apparently sensed her uneasiness, as they put their backs to the nearest wall and watched her for directions. Combat situations always fell to the cybered commando to lead. Some people referred to those commandos as street samurai or sammies. Rachael had always felt the term would never apply to her, because she was not some Japanese fan girl wishing she could wear a kimono every day. She did not even care that Japanese was the language of business.

She moved to the center of the expansive single room and waited.

She turned on the audio systems in her ears, opening the sensors to high and low frequency sounds, amplified the volume, and filtered out the dock and crowd outside. Nothing out of the ordinary triggered alarms. She could hear Jackson and Mercury breathing, possibly a little more heavily than necessary due to adrenaline. She waited, smirking at the soft, accelerated thumps of their hearts.

They waited for the better part of three minutes before a boulder fell out of the ceiling onto the floor at Rachael’s feet. Her reflexes kicked into overdrive, and she leaped away while drawing her pistol. Her stomach began churning in a fashion that she was quite certain said, “I told you so!”