Firepower
Cass sat on the hard bench with his bound wrists resting in his lap, watching Lucian across the dim compartment. The vehicle’s engine hummed steady beneath them. Outside there was only the sealed metal and the knowledge that they were climbing toward the mountain pass.
“Why are you doing this?” Cass asked. His voice stayed low. “You’re his lover. Everyone knows that.”
Lucian’s green eyes stayed on the floor for a long moment. When he finally looked up, something tired and old sat behind them.
“I still am,” he said. “That’s the problem. I love him and have for years, as much as your pack loves eachother, probably more. But the temple trials… they fed the darkness in him and grew it out of control, that's what it does, and it's already started doing it to your big white wolf didn't it? What’s left now is mostly that darkness. The Nox I knew would hate the thing he’s becoming, but with soo many runs through the temple... Nox isn't even aware how it changed him. I don’t want him to go the rest of the way down this path.” Lucian’s throat worked. His eyes shone a little too bright in the low light. “Maybe in another life he’ll understand I was trying to help. Even if he never forgives me for it.”
He drew a short blade, leaned forward, and cut the cords around Cass’s wrists in two clean motions. The rope fell away. Cass rubbed the fur where it had bitten in. Lucian reached into a side panel and pulled out a heavy handgun, the entire frame cast in dull, cursed silver, leaving a blue after image when in motion. He held it out.
“Bullets are regular. But the gun itself is cursed silver. It’ll still do ugly damage. When the chaos starts, shoot me in the shoulder and the leg. Make it look like you overpowered me.”
Cass took the weapon. The metal felt wrong in his paw, cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. He looked at Lucian flatly.
“Wouldn’t it be more believable if I shot you in the balls?”
Lucian actually laughed, short and surprised. “Do what you think best.”
Cass checked the chamber, then lowered the barrel. “Leg it is. You’re lucky.”
The vehicle began to slow. Lucian’s rounded ears flicked. He closed his eyes for a second, and the heavy shadow cloak that had hidden the entire convoy simply fell away. Moonlight and open mountain air replaced the unnatural dark.
The radio on Lucian’s belt exploded with overlapping voices, panthers and wolves shouting the same question in different levels of rage. Lucian reached down and switched it off without answering.
“I’m putting myself at real risk here,” he said quietly. “Your pack better not fail.”
They didn’t.
Roan’s presence hit the link first, then Zariel’s, then the rest. Heavy firepower opened up from the ridges and the trees in a sudden, overlapping storm of automatic weapons, rifles, and something that sounded like a mounted gun. Screams cut through the night. Return fire cracked back from the convoy. Metal sparked. Someone shouted orders that no one seemed to follow.
Lucian met Cass’s eyes and gave a single nod.
Cass raised the cursed silver pistol and fired twice. The first round took Lucian high in the shoulder. The second punched through the meat of his thigh. Lucian grunted and folded sideways against the wall. Cass moved fast, yanked the panther’s wrists together, and bound them with the same cord that had held him earlier.
More gunfire hammered the mountainside. Through the link Roan’s voice came sharp and close.
“Cass. Status.”
“I’m mobile. Lucian’s down. We’re in the middle vehicle.”
A terrible screech split the night, so loud it vibrated the metal walls. The armored vehicle lurched hard to one side, then lifted. Cass felt the stomach-dropping sensation of weightlessness for a single heartbeat before the whole truck flipped. He slammed into the ceiling, then the wall, then the floor as the world spun. Lucian’s body tumbled with him and went limp, unconscious from the impact.
The feeling of being lifted continued. Through the open link Cass felt the shape of it, massive and wrong, wings blotting out the sky, claws locked around the armored shell. The Void Dragon had the truck.
They were carried out over the drop and then falling.
The vehicle hit water with a bone-jarring crash. Icy mountain river flooded through every seam and cracked plate. Cass shoved himself upright in the rising flood, grabbed Lucian under the arms, and forced the panther’s head above the waterline as best he could. The compartment filled faster than he could fight it. Water reached his chest, his throat, his muzzle.
There was no hatch that would open. No window that would break in time.
The last air pocket vanished. Cold black water closed over both of them.
---
Moments ago, Roan’s voice came through the link clear and close, cutting under the heavy thump of rotors.
“We’re almost at the pass. Hold on, pup.”
Twelve helicopters moved through the mountain dark in a loose, aggressive formation, running lights blacked out, rotors hammering the cold air. Below them a long line of resistance jeeps clawed up the switchbacks in low gear, headlights off, engines growling under the strain. This was no small extraction team. It was a full assault package, the largest the resistance had committed in months.
Roan rode in the lead bird, one boot bracd on the skid, one paw locked on the frame of the open side door. The other rested on the grips of a mounted machine gun. In two other helicopters Kiran and Khepri manned identical weapons, ears flat to their skulls against the wind, eyes already tracking the dark road below. The moment the convoy’s shadow cloak collapsed and the line of armored vehicles snapped into solid, visible shapes on the pass, Roan gave the signal.
Doors slid wider on every bird.
The night exploded with light and noise.
Heavy machine guns opened in overlapping streams of green and red tracers. Roan walked his fire down the length of the convoy with cold precision, deliberately lifting his aim each time it approached the middle vehicle. Kiran and Khepri did the same from their angles. Bullets tore through engine blocks, shredded tires, and punched ragged holes in armor plate. Panthers and wolves spilled out of the trucks in chaos, returning fire with rifles and lighter automatic weapons. Sparks walked up the sides of the helicopters. Two birds took hits hard enough to trail thick smoke and peel away in emergency climbs. One lost its tail rotor and went down hard into the trees in a bright orange fireball that lit the whole ridge.
Then the dragon came.
It rose from the far side of the pass like a piece of the mountain itself tearing free. Black scales covered its bulk, webbed with deep purple lines that pulsed and crawled under the surface like living veins. Its wings blotted out the stars. When its mouth opened the flame that poured out started the color of fresh blood, shifted to a cold electric blue, then went pitch black, a burning shadow that ate light and metal and flesh the same way. Anything the black fire touched simply ceased to exist. Two vehicles and every anthro inside them vanished in that dark blaze without even time to scream.
The dragon’s claws closed around Cass’s armored truck the way a hawk closes on a rabbit. It lifted the heavy vehicle like it weighed nothing and flung it out over the drop in a single contemptuous motion. The truck tumbled end over end toward the black river far below, shrinking fast.
The panic stinging Roan's scalp and spine was intense. But they couldn't go after Cass yet, not with a beast from the Void tearing into them.
The dragon turned its attention to the helicopters. Machine-gun fire sparked and ricocheted off its hide with almost no effect. It came on in a rolling storm of black wings and that terrible shadow-fire, forcing the formation to scatter hard.
Farther back along the ridge another helicopter flared and hovered low. Zariel clipped onto the fast-rope and dropped in a controlled slide, Lir right behind him. They hit the rocky hilltop at a run and went prone. Zariel unstrapped the long, heavy case from his back.
Lir’s voice was tight with leftover adrenaline and honest envy. “You know I’m jealous they gave you that.”
Zariel’s laugh was short and sharp. He unzipped the case and lifted free a massive anti-materiel rifle, the kind of .50 caliber weapon that looked almost absurd even in his big white paws. He loaded a single round. The casing was etched and dull with cursed silver, a projectile worth more than most anthros would see in a lifetime.
He dropped fully prone, settled the bipod against stone, and took his time. The dragon filled the scope, wheeling through tracers and burning wrecks, purple veins glowing under black scales.
Through the link his voice came calm and absolute.
“Get to Cass. Quick.”
The rifle cracked like the sky itself splitting open. The cursed silver round left a thick, luminous purple trail through the air and punched deep into the dragon’s belly. The beast screamed, a sound that shook loose rock from the cliffs and made every helicopter shudder in the air. It flew in a wild, erratic spiral, black blood streaming from the wound in heavy ropes, then turned and drove hard away into the deeper mountains, hurt but still very much alive.
In the lead helicopter Roan’s body changed. Muscle swelled across his shoulders and arms until the fabric of his shirt strained. Veins stood out thick and dark along his neck and forearms as he pulled hard on the gift the temple had left in him. He looked once at the dark water far below where the truck had vanished, then stepped out of the open door without a harness and dropped like a stone.
Inside the flooded armored vehicle Cass and Lucian were still under. The last pocket of air had been gone for too long. Cass’s lungs burned like they were full of acid. Something rolled through him then, sickening and euphoric at the same time, a pressure that started behind his eyes and poured outward in a hot rush. His irises lit an intense, electric purple. He slammed both paws against the iron wall of the compartment.
Purple energy crawled out from his palms in branching, living veins. The metal did not melt or tear. It changed. Iron became wood grain under his touch, complete with old spray-painted logos and a faded stenciled address, as if the truck had always had a wooden panel right there in that exact shape. Cass did not question it. He drove his fists into the transformed section until the wood splintered and gave. The opening that tore open was ragged and unmistakably shaped like a cunt.
He grabbed Lucian’s unconscious body by the vest and shoved them both through the hole into the cold, rushing river.
Roan’s head broke the surface twenty yards away just in time to see them come out of the impossible wooden opening. His eyes went wide. He reached them in three powerful strokes, got an arm around both, and the three of them kicked hard for the near bank together.
The pack and the resistance converged on the rocky shore in a controlled chaos of rotors and shouting and jeep engines. Helicopters circled low while medics and riflemen spilled out. Voices overlapped with casualty counts and extraction orders. Someone pointed at Lucian’s limp form and started to argue for taking the green-eyed panther with them.
Cass, still coughing river water, shook his head hard enough that water flew from his ears.
“Leave him. He’s more valuable with the enemy than he is with us.”
No one liked it. But they listened.
If you enjoyed this story, consider supporting the author on Patreon.
