Arcane Exfil

Chapter 71: Familiarization

The rest of the afternoon went to preparation – a self-guided tour around the premises, mission packet review, and an early night. The next morning, Cole ran through his routine, met the others for breakfast, and linked up with Graves and Vale just outside the command center.

They met Langston in the lobby. Beside him stood the potentially half-dwarf NCO Cole recognized from their arrival.

“Sir Cole,” Langston said. “You recall Sergeant Dunmar.”

“Sergeant,” Cole acknowledged.

Dunmar gave a short nod. “Sir. The lieutenant has briefed me on your requirements. I’ve twelve men with air rifles, ready whenever you wish to set them on. They are steady lads, all of them, used to field work, and they will not go easy on you.”

“Appreciate it. We’ll need a few hours. Gotta familiarize ourselves with the terrain first. I’ll send word when we’re ready to drill.”

“Aye. We will be at the eastern barracks. Send a runner when you are ready.”

Langston led them outside as Dunmar headed toward the barracks.

The lieutenant gestured toward the surrounding base with a sweeping arm. “You are at liberty to use the facilities here as you see fit, provided it does not interfere unduly with the work of the garrison. Should you find that anything further is required, you may apply to me. My office is opposite the commander’s.”

“Understood.”

“The cult occupies what was once an administrative quarter of the city,” Langston went on. “You would therefore do well to begin in a part of the base that answers to that character. There are several buildings still standing which we have not yet taken up. They are neglected, but sound enough, should provide a reasonable facsimile of the architecture you are likely to encounter.”

Cole followed his gesture toward the far edge of the compound, where the maintained sections gave way to whatever the Celdornians hadn’t gotten around to fixing yet.

“That’ll work. Thanks, Lieutenant.”

Langston nodded and returned to the command building. With that, Cole led the others toward the section, stopping just outside of the section’s courtyard.

Cole turned to the group. “First things first – we need to familiarize ourselves with the building layouts. Start on the outside, then work your way inside, floor by floor. If the command center and our quarters are any indicator, expect similar geometry. It makes sense once you’re in it, but it’s still a far cry from what we’re used to. Start thinking about how you’ll approach doorways, clear rooms, move through these gigantic open spaces.”

He gave that a moment to land, then continued. “We’ll spend fifteen minutes on the exterior. Note entry points, windows, anything else that catches your eyes. After that, we’ll regroup and compare notes before going inside. We’ve got a few hours before Dunmar’s guys are expecting us, so let’s use them.”

“How are we doing this? In pairs?” Mack asked.

“Yeah. Uhh, how about we do you and Garrett, Walker with Graves. I’ll go with Elina, and Vale can either tag along with one of us or go on his own.” He glanced at Vale. “Any preference?”

“I shall proceed alone,” Vale said.

“Alright. Fifteen minutes, then we’ll regroup back here.”

They split up, and Cole headed toward the nearest structure with Elina falling into step beside him. The abandoned section was about as dilapidated as Langston had described, though the buildings turned out to be in better shape than he’d anticipated – clearly neglected, but not falling apart. The windows were mostly intact and the walls still held true. Whatever the Istraynians had used for construction materials, the stuff was clearly built to last.

That was reassuring for today, though probably misleading for what they’d actually encounter. A demon-infested city certainly wasn’t going to be this clean. They’d be dealing with actual decay: crumbling floors, debris, and untold random shit that they couldn’t even begin to imagine right now.

The first building was administrative – five stories, conventional layout at the base, with the usual Istraynian tendency to get creative above the first floor. The upper stories curved outward like someone had taken the Bean in Chicago and stretched it vertical, all smooth reflective surfaces tapering to a peak.

Climbing that shit would be like trying to scale a glass bottle. To even think of making an attempt, he’d damn near have to be Tom fucking Cruise with a suction-cup rig and a helicopter on standby.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom; the second floor, at the very least, looked manageable. Cole walked up and scanned. There was a ledge where the first floor met the second, maybe eighteen inches wide, running along the facade.

“Looks like the second floor’s doable from outside,” he said, mostly thinking out loud. “That ledge looks solid enough to stand on. We could get up there with a boost, or parkour off the window frames, I guess.”

Elina nodded, studying the same feature. “Earth magic would spare us the acrobatics,” she said. “A small rise, set firm for perhaps a moment or two, would suffice. For something so brief, the expenditure would be negligible.”

Cole liked that idea, but how effective would it be in practice? “Negligible. Hmm… does that also mean undetectable?”

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Elina gave the ledge one last look, then sighed. “No. You are right.” After a moment, she added, “Through the windows, then, I suppose.”

“Alright, so that solves the second floor. Looks like we won’t be getting in any higher than that, unless there’s some spell that lets you climb walls like you’re Spider-Man. Er, a spider.”

They continued around the building, checking each face. The eastern side showed the same geometry – usable ledge at the second floor, increasingly hostile curves above. The northern face had a service entrance and what looked like a former loading dock. The western face was the interesting one: it backed right up against another structure, leaving a tight alley in between.

Both structures had fire escapes running down to ground level – secondary access to the upper floors without having to go through the main interior, which wasn’t a bad option if they needed a more discreet approach. The escapes themselves were pretty much what he’d expect to see in any American city, just metal switchback stairs with landings at each floor.

“Let’s check the second building,” he said.

It had looked relatively normal from the alleyway, but the front put that idea to rest. The front wall undulated in a lateral series of bulges and dips that admittedly looked elegant from an architectural standpoint, but sucked from a tactical one. The rooms behind it would have all kinds of concave sections and blind spots. Anywhere the wall curved inward was somewhere a person could hide from the doorway.

After all the curved bullshit, the third building was almost offensive in its normalcy – just a standard, box-shaped garage. It seemed the Istraynians were fairly pragmatic, at least when it came to storage.

The bay doors were rusted in place, so they wouldn’t be going in that way, but there was a side door that looked operational. Cole did the perimeter walk anyway, though he felt a little stupid doing it – the building was just a box. The walls were flat all the way around, built from the same glassy material as everything else but opaque and without any of the curves or bulges.

The Istraynians had apparently drawn a distinction between buildings meant for people and buildings meant for equipment, reserving their architectural creativity for the former and leaving the latter as simple as possible. That probably said something about their culture, though Cole wasn’t sure what exactly.

“Not much to learn from this one,” he concluded.

“Shall we check the interior?” Elina asked.

Cole checked his watch. It had been about thirteen minutes since they’d split up. “Later. Let’s head back for now, see what the others turned up.”

The others were already back when Cole and Elina returned to the courtyard. Everyone was accounted for, though Vale had positioned himself a few feet apart from the group, leaning against a pillar with his arms crossed.

Cole started with a summary of what he and Elina had found, then opened the floor to the others.

Mack went first. He and Miles had taken the east side – two buildings, both following the same pattern Cole had seen: sensible ground floors, progressively unhinged geometry above. One of them had an enclosed walkway connecting to an adjacent structure on the second floor, which was worth remembering. If the cult’s compound had anything similar, they’d be able to move between structures without exposing themselves on the street.

“Also found what looks like a sub-basement on the north side,” Ethan added. “Rear stairwell, half-hidden behind some equipment. Graves spotted it.”

Cole noted that as well. If Ostreva’s administrative quarter had the same kind of sub-level construction, they might have a whole network of underground routes beyond the subway system.

“The connector and the sub-basement are the big ones,” Cole said. “Does everything else track with what Elina and I saw?”

“Pretty much,” Miles said. “Ain’t a fan of them waterslides past the second floor.”

“Yeah, checks out.” Cole turned to Graves. “Graves. Looks like you’ve got something?”

“I do.” He glanced at the nearest building, where the upper floors caught the morning light. “You have taken those walls for common glass and given them wide berth; yet they are no such thing. The material is not glass, though it bears the seeming of it. It is grown, and holds its strength even under fire – for though lesser shot may strike it, it will neither shatter nor cast fragments.”

Miles leaned forward. “You’re tellin’ me those windows – hell, the whole structure – are bulletproof?”

“In essence.”

“Well, shit.” He looked up at the curved sections he’d just written off. “Aight, then.”

Cole had been writing off the glassy surfaces entirely – transparent and presumably fragile, which barely made them concealment, let alone cover. Tactically, he’d been treating the structures like drywall and timber – stay clear of the windows, don’t trust the walls, assume rounds could punch through anything that wasn’t solid stone.

But if the transparent sections were as sound as the rest, this was closer to operating inside a parking garage or concrete bunker. There was hard cover on every surface, including the ones that looked exposed.

“There is one further trait,” Graves added. “At an angle, the material darkens, that those within may not observe what passes without. Thirty degrees from perpendicular will suffice. The effect is deliberate, and found in all Istraynian work of this fashion.”

Cole hadn’t paid much heed to it, but Graves was right. The curved upper floors – the ones that wrapped and angled away from any single vantage point – were functionally opaque across most of their surface area. Anyone inside a curved room would have a narrow cone of visibility through each section of wall, with blind spots everywhere the geometry angled past the threshold.

“The angle thing – does it work both ways? If I can’t see in, they can’t see out?”

Graves nodded. “It does, for the opacity is a property of the material itself. It favors neither side.”

Cole filed that next to the sub-basement. He’d gotten two significant pieces of intelligence in fifteen minutes, neither of which had come up in the briefing. Of course, that wasn’t a knock on Langston – this was the kind of information they could only find out from operating in these structures. And it was the kind of information that reinforced what Cole already suspected: whatever they’d been told about Ostreva was merely a starting point.

He turned to Vale. “Anything to add?”

Vale pushed off the pillar. “Ah, yes. A word of counsel, if I may be so generous.” He stepped forward, hands clasped behind his back. “Should you find yourself caught in the open – through no fault of your own, I’m sure – do resist the urge to raise cover from the paving. Imbeciles invariably attempt it. They perish, naturally; the stone does not deign to move quickly, and the enemy is rarely so patient. Smoke does not share this obstinacy.”

Make that a third significant piece of intelligence. Cole wouldn’t have tried it himself, but Elina might have. Though she might be a Slayer Elite, she had the least experience out of all of them. Better to learn it now, from Vale, than in Ostreva with spells and bullets flying in the air.

Overall, they’d gotten really good value – not bad for a walk around some old buildings.

“Alright. Let’s head inside. We’ll take an hour inside the main office building; start from the ground and work our way up.”