Hearing the gunshot and the crystal peal, Tomasz curses his aging lungs and keeps moving towards the car.
Pierce continues to chant, putting more power into his shot, inducing a 10ft explosion with an adamanite bullet, attempting to burst through the shield, "I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I shoot with my mind."
Step one, get out of the cone of fire that lies on that line between the machine gun and Pierce. Step two, to be determined at a later date. Sam takes off running to the northwest.
Agent L posts up at the northwest corner behind the wall.
Another shot rings against the barrier, abjurative magic holding fast against the explosive bullet. The soldiers, meanwhile, move with silent, quicke effectiveness: with a soft bang, a flare arcs through the air, illuminating Pierce's area. At the same time, the machine gun opens fire, showering L and Pierce in lead. The spray, however, is wildly off target due to the distance, and both the agents dodge the deadly 8mm bullets.
The attack also has another consequence: it looks like most of the soldiers' attention is focused towards the sniper, leaving the nothern side more lightly defended.
Lungs on fire and legs heavy, Tomasz manages to get to the Jeep. With a jerk and a stutter, the engine roars into action.
Shrike makes the last stretch as quick as he can, making it up to the back one of the trucks, the one he suspected might house more sacrifices. Quietly panting and grimacing at the aches shooting up his bad leg, he tries to peek inside.
Sam moves for the trucks, and as she comes up behind Shrike she says as quietly as she can, "I'm behind you, I've got a scroll for opening locks, uh, somewhere in my pockets."
From this closer position she tries to see what's happening with the ritual.
Pedal to the metal, Tomasz swings wide around the German encampment.
Pierce moves forward out of the area of the flare and takes another shot, though he is unable to achieve the focus to continue his magical chant
L moves stealthily on the other side of the encampment, crouching behind the barricade. The officer's ritual motions are weaving in a complex, undecipherable pattern.
Pierce's shot cracks again against the barrier, as spidery cracks appear on the dome of force, like glass about to break. The german soldiers intensify their volume of fire, and two bullet graze him, one in the shoulder, the other on the hip . The pain is sharp, but neither wound is disabling.
On the opposite side, the Ford GPW appears with Tomasz at the wheel, engine roaring.
"Sacrifices in the truck," Shrike said into his radio, dropping his pretense of stealth. He held out a hand with fingers splayed toward the interior of the camp. Clenching his hand into a fist, his swarm of blades arced up into the sky and down through the soil as though it was naught but mist and leaving no trace of their passing. Unlike his earlier strikes, this clearly cost him, the leather of his glove creaking with the force of his tight grip. The trajectories of his weapons all intersected at a point just outside the rippling dome of force, next to the generator, bursting outwards like a bladed flower.
L, with one swift motion, grabs the soldier and pulls him over the wall into a sleeper hold.
Sam points at the soldier on the machine gun, speaks a word, and she becomes visible as her spell takes hold on the gunner.
Steering one-handed, and thanking God for British jeeps and their reversed driver's seats, Tomasz bears straight towards the Germans and, right before he reaches Mina, chucks a small device in front of the vehicle.
A shimmering slope appears; Tomasz bounces onto it with a sickening lurch and floors it over Mina's head. For a frozen moment as he leaves the ramp the jeep hangs suspended in the air before crashing down onto the Germans' shield.
Many things happen at once.
L grapples the soldier over the barricade, pinning him to the ground. An instant later, the German moves its gun arm in a way it's not supposed to. With a wet crunch of bones snapping, the pistol now aims at L's head.
James unleashes a bladed torrent of destruction at the unaware, mutilated soldiers. As the first sword cleaves into one of them, he's surprised to see that the wounds are lighter than they should be, and that they appear on all of the soldiers. If the attack should have killed a few of them, instead it wounded them all. And they all turn towards him.
Sam's spell opens, for the briefest of moment, a link between herself and whatever horror has been inflicted upon the soldiers. She fights off a wave of nausea as her target raises his rifle towards her position.
The sound as Pierce's rifle strikes the barrier again is no longer crystalline silver, but a screeching akin to nails on a blackboard. The sniper instinctively brings his hands to his ears, but the sound doesn't get any softer- it's ringing in his head.
And then the jeep rises through the air, loudly crashing against the barrier. The dome of force shatters with a deafening bang and a shockwave as the car lands over the generator, smoke coming from the engine. By luck, Tomasz is able to get out of the vehicle a heartbeat before the consequences of shattering the barrier become apparent.
As the barrier, the enchanters' concentration is shattered. The battered generator hiccups, cutting power to the copper lines for a brief moment, but that moment is enough. A backslash of something just wrong washes over you, and only the wards on your mind prevent you from going insane or worse . The Germans and the beggars aren't so lucky. The soldiers slump to the ground like puppets whose strings have been cut, and the vagrants stop breathing all at once, and they are the lucky ones. From the broken pentacle, a pool of darkness coalesces from nothing, dark ooze rising to swallow the officers before they even have the time to say a word.
But uncomplete as it was, the ritual worked to a degree. From the pool of darkness sprout forth four undead black stallions like those the dullahan at the Barracks was riding, but bound in a harness. And behind the harness is a simple coach made of dark wood. And at the coachy's place is another headless knight, holding the reins. Inside the coach you can make out a red-clad, cowled figure.
After a confused moment with the now dead soldier, L quickly spins around to look at the new developments. As he turns, he reaches into his pants and pulls a grenade. Seeing the unnatural horse drawn carriage, L decides that the inside of the coach is a great place for a grenade and lobs it.
Staggering out of the wreck of the jeep with his head aching and his stomach roiling like the North Sea, Tomasz fumbles at his side for a moment before pulling the pin on his own grenade and tossing it at the coach.
Pierce pants as he banishes the foreign presence from his mind and goes to doing his damndest to finish the job and continues his chant I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart.
Shrike spends a moment dazed as the ritual is ruinously interrupted by Tomasz's entrance. Swords and spears ripple into reality around him, slipping in from the space between spaces. A glance into the truck reveals he had failed there but Tomasz was still alive and in the path of something unreal.
Brushing past Sam, he makes for the interior of the encampment before the inhuman intelligences within the carriage can collect themselves. Axes and daggers whisper to attention as he stands between the older man and whatever unholy thing the nazis managed to call up.
Sam moves so she's not quite so exposed, and draws and drinks from a glass vial. She looks around the side of the truck at the summoned creature.
The explosions rock the coach and injure the driver, but the vehicle is sturdier than it appears, or maybe its otherworldly nature is protecting it. The occupant floats through the roof as if it was not there, clad in a long red velvet dress, frayed at the ends. A dark shadow is cast where her face should be, and from the bottom end of the dress you can see pale, cereous legs hanging loosely. The darkness that is her face washes over you, and you feel her voice in your mind, cold as the ocean.
As an eerie laughter punctuates the last words of the message, the dullahan snaps the reins, and the chariot starts heading south, towards the beach.
Towards the bridge.
Towards the mainland.
The words cut into him like a knife. Slicing through his layers of restraint and armor like the layers of an onion. Around him, the blades stared to drift aimlessly and the flow of grey fog from his eyes guttered out for a moment. Yet there was something hard inside of James Shrike that did not care. A core of cold purpose. The creature could see inside of them but not truly understand them.
He drew in a breath of frigid air and exhaled a cloud of the grey fog that twisted about his face unnaturally. "Tomasz, shall we teach her the weight of words? I've a mind to show her what she is tampering with," there was something wrong with Shrike's voice when he spoke as though there were some sort of sound lying just under the sound of his voice. Grey eyes spilling fog turned to look at the nearest of the trucks and he began to walk towards it, his collection of weapons bunching closely around him instead of orbiting freely.
"All points, get ready for pick-up."
Wrócę, pewnego dnia.
Baring his teeth in a snarl, Tomasz pulls a single intricately-carved bullet from a pocket. "One moment. This coach, I am thinking it does not need to swim. Sam, grab the big gun if you can. I will need one of the snipers." He makes a break for the truck.
The weight of the words hit L causing him pause.
"I am a pawn on a chess board and the Black Chamber plays my side," L begins muttering. "I am a scalpel, a precision tool that cuts. Held by Black Chamber, I remove the evil that would threaten the world.......I am a pawn on a chess board and the Black Chamber plays my side.....I am a scalpel, a precision tool that cuts. Held by Black Chamber, I remove the evil that would threaten the world......." Agent L continues this seeming mantra as he hops over the wall and walks toward Tomasz. He draws a sniper rifle from his back and removes the bullet in the chamber, "...I am a pawn on a chess board and the Black Chamber plays my side...." Once he reaches Tomasz he holds out the sniper and grabs a vial from a belt pouch, "...I am a scalpel, a precision tool that cuts. Held by Black Chamber, I remove the evil that would threaten the world..."
Pierce grits his teeth " chose to study the occult. Do you think someone masters five languages on accident? No I studied languages and history and magic because that's how I can change the world. I do not kill with my gun. He who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father; I kill with my heart.
"As if I needed a reminder that it's not my government," Sam says to herself. "First of all! That thing was a banshee, a death omen! It gets to the mainland and there'll be a whole plague of suicides!"
She goes for the nearer truck to see if somebody left the keys in the ignition.
Pierce lets a bullet loose after the monster, ripping through the velvet dress, as the rest of the team converges towards the southernmost truck. By a stroke of luck, you find out that the German officers had left the keys on the driver's seat, and the engine springs to life with a healthy roar. As the coach rides away from you with preternatural speed, the banshee's voice in your mind turns to a laugh, then a shrill wail. It's too far away to harm you, but your ears still feel wet with blood.
Shrike gets up into the corpse strewn bed of the truck and makes himself some firing slits with a casual effort of will.
Taking the bullet from Tomasz, L loads the rifle, takes the passenger seat, and swigs the potion.
Sam climbs in the bed of the truck along with Shrike and positions herself so she can fire out one of the slits.
As soon as Sam pulls out her pistol, she thinks about it again, stows her pistol, and climbs up to the machine gun.
James' parting shot flies wide as the banshee enters the coach again, heading south faster than any natural horses could move.
Pierce hurries to the truck while Sam loads the weapon on the roof, and as soon as they are all ready, Tomasz floors the pedal, chasing the unholy abomination. Fast as nightmares can be, they are no match for modern engines, and it takes less than a minute to get the vehicle back in sight, already on the ice bridge.
Pierce looks for something he can use to to tie himself to the vehicle after making sure that the knife up his sleeve is still readily accessible.
Important point to remember, only mindless targets are immune to Psychic Strike damage
Light Blades: 6/6
One Handed: 6/6
Two-Handed: 6/6
At such a range, his heavy blades were less reliable. Instead, a trio of daggers sped outwards towards the unholy beasts pulling the wagon. Shrike had no idea if they were actually what was propelling the vehicle, but he doubted they would be here if they did not serve a purpose.
Tomasz will put foot to pedal to metal, trying to get as close as possible. Meanwhile, he'll pass L his special bullet.
Taking the bullet, L loads the rifle and takes aim through the windshield, readying an attack for when he sees the banshee.
[dice=Reflex]1d20+39/dice]
As two of James' daggers strike through, cleaving through the nightmarish horses, L fires Tomasz's bullet. A ripple in the air is the only indication that anything changed, but the horses crash violently against the unseen surface, and for a moment it looks like the coach will overturn. But the Death Coach is far from ordinary, and it settles back in order, although still, in the time between a flutter of your eyelids. Tomasz swerves quickly, dodging the unmoving obstacle, but the left wheels bumps violently against the invisible barrier, shaking the vehicle and coming close to catapulting Sam and Pierce into the icy Atlantic waters. The rooftop pair, however, manages to hold tight for the moment.
Behind the truck, the Banshee has once again risen through the top of the coach, and she's apparently drawing breath.
Sam takes her own deep breath and opens fire on the deathly carriage.
On the off chance she is for some reason not immune to crits like all incorporeals
Light Blades: 6/6
One Handed: 6/6
Two-Handed: 5/6
James watched with what almost looked like idle disinterest as the carriage slammed into Tomasz's cunning barrier. A halbred positioned itself for a strike and waited in the air, like a loyal hound.
Tomasz wrestled with the wheel, bringing the truck thudding back onto four wheels with an ugly crunch before he slams on the breaks. "Here," he says, handing L his last two grenades, "the ice underneath the carriage, destroy it!"
L takes the grenades and nods.