TIME July 7th, 6:45pm LOCATION The Potters Way slums, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
Three days’ leave, new gear from Rhabbatt, and a location for Eskobar’s den courtesy of a letter nobody wanted to touch. The night shift started with a raid.
WHAT HAPPENED
A body had turned up at the Section House steps overnight – Aiden Flynn, ‘Chuckles’, missing two fingers in a way that made his fellow Hammerskins’ suspicions about a snitch fairly obvious.
Mo, it seemed, hadn’t fared any better once word got round.
Sanchez briefed them on a fresh spate of mutilated, decapitated bodies and one lucky survivor – Martin Luger, son of the Guild-connected Lady Victoria Luger, found gravely injured in the Leith Walk area with one arm badly chewed.
He’d described a monster rather than a man.
His companion, Jake Smith, hadn’t been so lucky, and hadn’t been found at all.
Word going round the House had it that Martin surprised his attackers – the same ‘Children of the Eye’ blamed for the string of transformations across the Section – by cutting back with a ceremonial knife that happened to be silver, which was likely the only reason he still had an arm worth saving at all.
Lady Victoria, by all accounts, was already working her political connections hard over the Section House’s handling of it.
Brin ran through the commissioner’s planned public address at the Plaza the next day – a show of Section House solidarity the city badly needed.
Sanchez rounded up four rookies for the raid on Eskobar’s den and they geared up.
A heavy drizzle had set in by the time they reached Potters Way.
Raven’s recce found no back door, shuttered windows, and four lookouts working the street disguised as beggars.
Sanchez took two rookies to one corner, Krusha and two more to the opposite side, and Raven and Ash held the front – Raven talking one lookout into wandering off, Ash knocking and announcing herself as a negotiator on Zhakarov’s behalf.
Eskobar himself came to the door unconvinced, and even less convinced when Raven pushed forward declaring herself the real negotiator, suggesting the Cutters were scared of two women.
His answer was to order the door opened on a crossbow ambush.
Ash and Raven split for cover on either side of the frame as Ash threw up a mirror image and Raven put a thunderstone through the gap, deafening several Cutters before the door slammed and barred shut again.
The detonation brought Krusha and Sanchez running, scattering the remaining lookouts on the way.
Raven’s crowbar couldn’t get purchase on the door; Ash’s scorching ray charred and cracked it instead, while Sanchez peeled off to try the building next door for another way in. Krusha found the bar holding the door – lighter, mercifully, than the door itself – and shattered it outright with KemerLexi’s power, drawing a satisfying chorus of yelps and curses from inside.
Chanting drifted from within, followed by breaking glass.
A bolt came down from the roof as Krusha peeled off to follow Sanchez into the building next door and Raven swapped places at the door with another rookie, still trying to force it open.
Ash blasted the door to splinters just as the rooftop crossbowman opened up, killing the rookie in the doorway outright.
Raven went through the gap regardless, a blur of motion past four guards to reach the crossbow position itself.
Ash followed through the same gauntlet, losing an illusory double along the way but reaching Raven’s side to drop a Cutter with a volley of magic missiles.
A second rookie went down screaming to another rooftop bolt.
Raven and Ash cut and blasted their way through the rest of the ground floor Cutters – though not before two of them managed to set Ash alight with a thrown alchemist’s bomb and loose a couple of parting bolts before retreating up the stairs.
Krusha and Sanchez’s team, meanwhile, had fought their way up to the roof itself, Sanchez working the cover of the parapet toward the sniper while Krusha circled in from behind through the rain – close enough, within twenty-five feet, that the sniper had already started to turn before deciding against it and looking back over the parapet instead.
Sanchez lined up his kemercannon on the sniper’s unprotected back.
FLOORPLANS
