Alright. continuing on.
Seamus looked out over the city. They had just barely arrived, and were now surveying the metropolis that laid before them. During their travels, they had kept a watch out for any sort of satisfactory crossing point that would be usable by more than just Seamus and Zhanna. The two umbramancers could easily find their way across without any difficulty, but everyone else didn’t have the same opportunity presented to them. Disappointingly for some of them at least, no such crossing point presented itself. The supply lines ran through a very wide open area with very little tree cover.
Having reached the city, they now conducted some simple reconnaissance to figure out if they really could pass through the city. He had briefly wondered if they could skirt around behind the city up into the mountains. However looking now, that thought was dismissed quite quickly. When they said it was set against the mountains, I didn’t think it was literally up against the mountains. Sheer cliffs that had been hacked and blown apart lay behind the mountains and Seamus could see no way around that way. He briefly wondered how much difficulty they had with falling rocks. A good size boulder falling off one of those cliffs would no doubt flatten a house with little difficulty.
Barossastadt was for all intents and purposes a city. It looks much like most modern cities did, with several tall skyscrapers rising out of the ground, reaching for the sky, only to be overshadowed by the massive volcanic mountains behind them. Smaller buildings, such as homes and small businesses spread around them reaching out into the plains beyond them. Looking now, he realized that his map must have been incorrect. The city seemed to stretch from the mountains all the way to the ocean front, several dozen miles. While the metropolis section was focused around the mountain base, homes and their like stretched out for some distance. Pockmarking the surroundings, massive industrial factories belched smoke far into the sky, leaving a massive cloud of haze that hung over the city. Several roads let out of the city, most converging into the supply line that led to the portal. What had once been the main roadway that led out of the city and to the portal, and inevitably back to German to such cities as Berlin and Munich now had been appropriated as a roadway to transport weapons of war.
No matter where they went they would have to cross through the city. If only the topography had been stretched out a little further, and the elevation change from sea level to the mountains had been gradual they might have found an easier way through the city. As it was they were probably going to go right through the heart of the city. Right into the belly of the beast. He watched Adara looking out, simply observing the city, not so much conducting reconnaissance as she was simply awed by its scale. There was something about her, something almost intoxicating that had drawn him to her, since they had first met. He had heard stories about love at first sight, but he had never believed them. Now he was as devout and pious a believer as there could be.
I can’t just come out and say “I love you!” he thought. They hadn’t even met until the day before. One can’t simply fall in love with a person that fast. These things take time, they always do. That’s what he had figured with Zhanna. Things take time. Maybe in a different situation, or a different time, he would have fallen in love with her instead, but that time and place was not now. Perhaps if he kept in contact with Adara over time, and kept his mind focused and straight, rather than getting caught up in a momentary madness, things would work out fine. That sounds right.
He crept over to where Adara sat, observing the city. He looked briefly at her. Her hair glistened in the sun, and her eyes were shaded for her angling her head to keep the sun out of them. It was a very enchanting look, and he briefly forgot what he had come over to even talk about. Focused and straight. Dammit! “What do you think of the city?”
“It’s so large. How many people live there?” she asked.
“Hundreds of thousands. Seems like a lot of London has more,” he said.
“And you’re searching for one man among hundreds of thousands. It sounds incredibly difficult,” she observed.
“We’re not searching here first. You saw him at the portal. If we go there we can probably find some sort of a clue there that can help us figure out where he went from there,” Seamus said.
“But even when you get there, it is not likely that he is still there,” Adara said.
“I don’t think any of us believe that he is there for a second. But it’s a better clue than anything else we have,” Seamus said. He gestured toward the city. “In all likelihood, he’s probably somewhere in the city, but who knows where.”
Examining the city, he tried to pick out several notable locations that he remembered from the map. He was pleased to see that those sections at least hadn’t changed. The massive factory district lay in front of them, where massive smoke stacks left clouds of smoke into the air, like some field of metallic volcanoes. The Charleswelt Reichstag, the seat of government modeled after the very building in Berlin sat off to the side on a hill that overlooked the rest of the city. It seemed like an obvious spot for Crowley to be at, and if their search at the portal turned up nothing that would be the first place they headed to. It was too much of a gamble to simply storm the seat of government without reasonable suspicion, but they were at a loss as to where else they should be looking for the man.
Broussard walked up to them, while they still looked out into the city. “I think we’ve got an entry point to use for getting into the city. We’ll need to mug a few civilians to get in, or some army regulars. We’ll iron out that detail when we actually get inside the place. Let’s get moving.”
Without another word, Seamus and Adara filed in after the rest of them as they proceeded toward the city. As luck would have it, this side of the city was still fairly heavily forested so they had little difficulty in moving through the area without being seen. However as they reached the side of the forest that terminated in a great field that lay between the forest and the city, they all immediately noticed the apparent obstacle.
“Guard post,” Broussard observed.
Dammit. So much for an easy entrance, Seamus thought.
Seamus looked out at the guard post. It was a simple house with several guards sitting out in front of it. Theere wasn’t a large amount of them, but they occupied a position that made any attempt to bypass the area difficult at best, and disastrous at worst. They were going to need to take care of the problem themselves. Seamus gauged the distance between their position and the tree line before deciding that it still a little too far for him to shadow jump to.
“I’ve got this one,” Grigori said.
Broussard paused for a moment, but then nodded his head and Grigori walked forward, boldly moving out into the open, pacing directly toward the guard post. His cloth rippled in the wind and his hair curled about his face as well. The guards noticed him almost immediately, but no shots were fired. They seemed unsure what they wanted to do, and they took no actions.
Grigori waved his hand at them in greeting and called something out to them in German, They holstered their guns and one of the guards walked up to talk with Grigori. Either they didn’t notice that he was Russian, or that he had just walked out of the wilderness, or they didn’t care. The guard that was talking with Grigori casually led him inside. Another of the guards followed suit. Suddenly Seamus noticed an opening, where there was no one watching in their direction. He started to move forward, but Zhanna grabbed his arm and shook her head. He held where he was and looked at her with curiosity. She simply smirked, and pointed toward the guard post.
He paused, watching the guard post for several moments. Suddenly there was a bright flash of light, and several seconds later a guard ran out of the post, screaming as he held his face in his hands. Even more surprisingly, he was also on fire, and his skin was obviously charred and burned. The other guards outside yelled out in surprise and brought their guns out. Two run to the man on fire and knocked him down, trying to pat the flames out. He screamed in pain as they patted him down. As one, they immediately looked toward the entrance to the post, where smoke was starting to billow out from the room.
Grigori casually strode out of the building like some fiery god of war. His hands were wreathed in flames, even as he stepped through the door, his footprints remained imprinted on the ground in glowing red spots. The soldiers backed off, their eyes gaping wide open in horror from Grigori’s display of power. He stretched his hands out, and fire erupted from the palms of his hands, enveloping several soldiers in the huge gouts of flame. Some of them sprayed off shots in some futile effort to hit him, buit Grigori suddenly became a blur, using cover and shelter to avoid shots. As several soldiers fell to the ground, engulfed in flames, Grigori leaped out, and flexed his muscles. Several dozen balls of flames exploded into being behind his head and shrieked across the ground, impacting with the different soldiers. Each one exploded when it impacted on each soldier, knocking them to the ground, blowing limbs off and creating a general mess with.
A small trail of smoke crept from the top of the building as the area fell silent. Some corpses still smoldered slightly giving off the faint fumes of burnt flesh. Grigori immediately went about grabbing the corpses and hauling them into the building. Seamus looked around, checking to see if the coast was clear, and joined Grigori in his grisly work. The rest of the group headed down toward him as well to help out. Seamus noted that Adara stayed farther away with an almost sickened look on her face as he picked up a severed arm and threw it into the building.
Their effort wouldn’t keep their attack hidden, but they would still be able to bypass the area before anyone found out about it. Seamus looked toward the city. They’d need to head in now if they wanted to start making good progress. Broussard thought the same thing evidently, as he gestured for them to hurry up and move out.
