The Primal War : First Elements Saga Book 1

Chapter 12: Fire and Earth

"Okay, Jay. If you can pop a flame, I can skip jump to you directly," Marcus then said over the comms. "Then we can figure out how we're going to bust through that barricade outside." "Copy that. One of my guys has a lighter. Is that good enough?" Jay asked.

"Yeah, that'll do it," Marcus said, quickly scanning for a fire nearby to use as an entrance into the fire plane.

There: a fitfully burning piece of paper garbage, probably from the initial assault. It wasn't much, but was more than enough to get him onto the plane.

A quick focus and blink he was there. A second focus on Jay and his head was swinging around of its own accord to find a nearby flicker of orange and red. Then blink, he was through and standing beside an astonished member of Delta Team, who held a lit lighter in his gloved hand.

"Holy shit!" the operator breathed, eyes wide behind his goggles. "He really can jump from flame to flame!"

Jay threw the operator a hard look for the unprofessional outburst as he stepped towards a frowning Marcus, the earth primal's body armor scorched and dented. Then he was giving the younger primal a nod.

"Hey. Thanks for joining the shit show," Jay dryly noted.

"Thanks for the invite," Marcus retorted before looking at where a handful of Marines were clustered behind a column, one of them looking around it into the reception space and towards the entrance.

"So, is the sitch normal or fucked up?" he asked, looking back at Jay. "If we push the Soulless from their makeshift barricade out front, will that allow the evac choppers to get onto the roof?"

"As long as there aren't any more of those bastards floating around out there where we haven't seen them, yeah," the stone primal replied. "So normal? I think? At least, it's straight forward.

We take them out and my team and the Marines should be able to handle the black tags."

"Well, I didn't see any more Soulless wandering around outside when I got here," Marcus said before frowning. "But then again, I wasn't really looking."

Stepping past a frowning Jay, the younger Descendent then stepped out from behind the supporting wall they were using as cover to drop into a tactical crouch. From there he crabbed forward until he had joined the handful of Marines at the column.

"Hey," he said when they all looked at him. "Marcus Gray with RedSky. How's the entrance looking?"

"Pretty fucked, to be honest, sir," one of the Marines that had been looking around the corner indicated with a grimace on his sweaty, soot-stained face. "Our body armor can't handle that fire attack they got, and they keep pelting us with chunks of rock the size of our heads whenever we leave cover. We try to rush the entrance and they'll knock us down and burn us to ash!"

"At least we smoked a bunch of the assholes that were carrying guns," another one of the Marines indicated.

Marcus favored that one with a quick look even as his fire-enhanced brain churned through possible attack scenarios. Including a version of the stealth attack he and Val had used against the Soulless at the Centennial Bridge.

Then Jay bumped into him as the earth primal crouched just behind him.

"See anything good?" he asked when Marcus glanced over his shoulder at him.

"Maybe," the fire primal replied, returning his attention to the Marines. A quick gesture pulled the two peering around the column back then he took their place. He then carefully extended his head around the column to get a glimpse of the entrance.

A quick scan was all he got before enhanced reflexes jerked his head back in time to avoid rocks slung by their earth elementals, as the Marines had reported the Soulless doing. But it was just enough to confirm his stealth attack would work here to thin out the Soulless numbers without a frontal assault.