The trios kept their heads on swivels as they exited the redoubt. The first couple blocks were essentially deserted. The national guardsman operating the radio told them that the people nearest the redoubt had either been let inside or fled from the secured area's border. John sympathized, mages fighting could always get out of hand quickly. On top of the risk of stray gunfire, it made sense to flee away from a potential hotzone. They’d been issued helmets and plate carriers and struggled to adjust the straps to find a comfortable configuration.
Despite expectations, the redoubt hadn't come under assault while they'd been there. The cops that spared a moment to catch Case up to speed said that what little Raleigh had by way of organized criminal element were exploiting the opportunity to kill each other off without police intervention. A couple people had tried tagging secluded portions of the barricades, but the roving patrol had scared them off.
The convoy's chief concern was encountering anarchic or outright insurrectionist mages, or someone who'd try to strongarm them into transporting a wounded family member to the hospital for medical care. John was concerned about finding a similar situation at the hospital, but they'd cross that bridge when they came to it. Thankfully, the streets were mostly clear of traffic. The few cars driving around ahead of them turned off into sidestreets when they saw the convoy oncoming.
Case and Jen had started to discuss the results of delving into the magical situations inside their bodies when several mages popped up at the edge of John's senses.
“Y'all feel that?” John pointed towards the auras he'd felt.
Case shook his head, “No, what is it?”
“Mages, couple blocks that direction. I barely felt them, but they were moving parallel to us before they moved out of the range I could feel them.”
Jen manifested a vine that tapped their radioman, “Got something for you to call in.”
They reported the sighting over the radio. John thought about the direction the mages were moving. Assuming they could move as fast as or a little faster than the convoy, they'd intercept the convoy right as they got onto the freeway. The convoy’s leaders decided to keep going, with orders for the mages to be on high alert. John paid close attention to his sense for other mages, waiting for the three suspicious signatures to show again.
John compared his senses’ range against his friends’. They found that John could detect mages about sixty feet further out than Case or Jen could. The convoy moved too fast for it to matter much, but John tucked the information away. John would have to spot for his friends until their own senses improved.
As the ambulances and APCs rumbled down the pavement, the vanguard sensed other mages hiding inside buildings. The gunners and mages tracked their positions, but none of them moved towards them. Several hidden mages moved away from the road as the convoy passed. Each time the convoy passed a mage and nothing happened, some of the tension bled away. John hoped they were OK. He worried that something was wrong with those still mages. What if there were kids disabled by their mana? John could only shake his head. That was a problem for when they secured the rest of the city.
The convoy kept rolling. A few mundane people drew close to the vehicles’ path, but loudspeakers warned them away. John worried that those people needed help, but the convoy didn’t have the space to help them. He thought about jumping down to heal some of them, but nobody was in particularly bad shape. John could only shake his head no and move on. Behind him, Case explained how his shield worked to their gunner, Steve.
Case manifested a tiny hexagon over his palm, “Go ahead and poke it, it won’t hurt you. The problem’s going to be that you won’t be able to shoot through it. It’s not like the forcefields in Star Wars.”
Steve tapped Case’s demonstration and nodded, “Well then you’ll save it for anything the vehicle’s armor can’t handle.”
“What would that look like?”
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“Let’s go with any sort of propelled explosive or magic. The plating’ll stop small arms and most of the bigger stuff that one man can carry.”
Jen spoke up, “I can run point defense against small, slow stuff. The vines are pretty good at batting down thrown projectiles.”
Steve chuffed, “Well, I’d be thrilled if they’re only throwing things, but good to know.”
John patted Jen on the back, “It’s ok, Jen. If they’ve got molotovs or whatever you’ve got us. Y’all, pay attention. We’re coming up on the on-ramp, be ready.”
As the lead elements of the convoy turned onto the ramp, the mages and guardsmen atop the vehicles looked around nervously. None of the mages could feel the group moving in parallel with them, and the buildings obscured their sight lines. John’s hands perspired, and he saw Case nervously tapping his knife against his thigh. John had hoped for a loaner gun to the National Guard’s armory, or even to have another police riot shotgun. The Colonel had disliked giving mages another force multiplier, and there hadn’t been much time either way. John would have to make do with his knife and mana.
The tension mounted as the convoy’s vanguard made it onto the freeway. John kept his head on the swivel, but the trees and concrete fences to limit noise pollution made for even worse visibility than the buildings. Thankfully the freeway was nearly empty. The police escorts peeled ahead to direct traffic to the side of the road. The foremost vehicles made it a quarter mile down the road before a calamitous blast sounded behind them.
Their radio roared, “CONTACT”
John whipped around. A cloud of dust obscured the near end of the on ramp, and a hill blocked the remainder. There were three ambulances, two APCs, and three squad cars behind him. A burning tire bounced out of the dust cloud. Tracking it as it bounced across the road nearly cost John his life.
A keening whistle gave just enough warning for John to duck before a meter long segment of rebar ripped through the air where his head had been, before embedding a third of the way into the concrete median barriers. Some sort of heat-haze bloomed over the mounted .50 caliber’s barrel as it suddenly grew cherry-hot. Several dozen auras bloomed all at once as John traced the angle on the rebar to their assailants.
Case swore, and a gigantic pane of mana bloomed to cover the APC’s flank - just in time to eat a hail of automatic gunfire.
Steve cursed, “The fuck they’d do to the fifty!?”
Jen called back as she lodged vines in the crannies of their ride, “They probably have a heat mage or something. Lobbed a bundle of mana our way and managed to tag it.”
John realized what had happened. The assailants hid just outside the convoy’s mage’s range, then fired off attacks and burst out of the fog of war. He growled.
As their APC slowed down to position itself between the attackers and the ambulances and cop cars, John and Jen jumped down. They were circling the wagons, so to speak.
John looked to Cortez’s position and got smacked with a headache for his trouble. That bizarre sense mage had replicated Case’s shield. Hers was at least four times the width of the ambulance, obscuring their position from anyone who could stand to look at the hideous thing. Debbie’s vehicle had a small berm of disturbed roadway accumulating next to it, clearly compounding her affinity for petroleum products and the stone mage’s ability to move the gravel within the road base.
John called up, “Case, can you do anything like that?”
“No! Nothing crystalline for me. I could maybe rip up a car, but metals take a while!”
“Gotcha”
By now, the National Guardsmen had dismounted and taken cover behind the vehicle. Going by what John could hear, they were under fire from automatic handguns and a handful of larger rifles or submachine guns. A few more rebar projectiles slammed into Case’s sloping shield, but were deflected. If that heat mage was still attacking, John couldn’t tell. Above, Steve splashed water on the mounted gun’s barrel, but John suspected it was still to hot to fire.
John waved Jen to cover behind the APC with everyone else. He felt safe to evaluate the rest of the people trying to kill him. He could tell their auras were there, but there was no way in Hades that John could pick out magic types. A mage with two wicked icicles covering his forearms lobbed flurries of mana at Debbie’s earthworks, while another spewed odd gaseous mana towards the kaleidoscopic barrier. The the ineffable gaseous mana withered the grass and scrub as it passed. John was eager to avoid getting caught in that. Other mages hurled projectiles or gunfire down the length of the convoy. John could make out a party surging over the hill towards the rear half of the convoy. The situation was a mess. The forward element was hemmed in without any way to move their vulnerable patients back. The assailants were all uphill, but drawing closer as APCs or mages provided effective cover. The rear of their convoy was caught on the ramp and stretched back towards the redoubt.
John yelled to address the squad leader from his APC, “So, what’s our plan?”
The squad leader barked a couple things into his radio before answering John, “Do our best to neutralize them, feel free to help, but don’t get in our way.”
