The Primal War : First Elements Saga Book 1

Chapter 8: Rescue Mission

“Nooooo!” he groaned in despair. It would take at least ten or fifteen minutes for him to scale the cliff and go back the way he had come. Fifteen minutes that Val didn’t have.

It was as he began swimming to the cliff to begin his climb out, his mind churning, a thought occurred to him. What if he didn’t have to climb out? What if he used the burning flame to jump to Val, using the skip method he had discovered in Prague?

Marcus grimaced. He had used line of sight for that, plotting the points in his mind before snapping through the skip jump. He had no LOS here.

But what he did have was the rather traumatic sight of the burning transport, first glimpsed when he hopped in nearly right on top of it, dead and broken bodies scattered out in front of it. If he could focus enough …

*Blink* and he was flying through the air to crash heavily into the ground close enough to the plane, he could feel the flames through his clothing.

“Shit!” he hissed, rolling away from it. Then, he went up onto his hands and knees to locate Val.

Her one eye looked at him with quiet desperation as he stumbled into view.

“Did you … find … water?” she hoarsely whispered. Marcus nodded vigorously.
“But I need to drop you off a ten foot cliff to get to it,” he added, suddenly uncertain.
“Do it,” she whispered.
“Are you …?”

“Do it!” she repeated with as much force as she could muster.

Again Marcus nodded.

“Okay. I’m going to pick you up so get ready. This is going to hurt!”

Val screamed into her mouth as Marcus picked her up as gently as he could, her mangled legs and arms sticking out in every direction. And she kept screaming as he raggedly ran through the jungle towards the pool. Then they were both flying through the air as he once again ran off the top of the cliff and dropped into the pool.

Almost as soon as her body touched the water, Valentina was gone, dissolving like salt in a boiling pot. As her weight vanished, Marcus let the momentum the two of them had given him drop him all the way to the bottom, another ten feet from the surface. There, his boots hitting muck and plant-covered rock, he kicked out and swam back to the surface.

Where, much to his delight, he found a completely restored Val bobbing there, a look of immense relief on her face.

“Gracias a Dios!” she breathed. “That was entirely too close for comfort!”

“You good, then?” he asked, breathing heavily from the run through the jungle.

“One hundred percent restored,” the latina water primal replied before glancing down. “Can’t say the same about my clothing though. Unfortunately it doesn’t get fixed when I go to water form. Just stays in the same state it was in when I transformed. Some sort of strange stasis.” Marcus glanced down at his own clothing.

“Yeah, mine too,” he said with a frown. “You’d think with all the fire I go through …”

“Right?” Val flashed him a brilliant and relieved smile. “I don’t know if I can truly thank you, Marcus, for what you’ve done for me. You literally saved my life!”

“Meh, what are squadies for, right?” Marcus replied with a nonchalant shrug. “But let’s not do that again any time soon. I won’t always be at the end of a recharge cycle.”

“I will do my best not to get shot out of the sky again,” Val said with an absolute straight face.

“I promise.”