Chapter 129 – A Signal… of Distress.

Diana was several dozen meters away from the building where the vampire had shut herself in to negotiate with the senior officers.

Diana was leaning against a nearby storage structure, still rubbing her wrists with a frown.

The pressure from the magical handcuffs had left her skin red, though the clean cuts that golden spear had made through them hadn't left so much as a scratch on her.

Even so, she was in a terrible mood.

'When did everything get so out of control?' Diana thought, tightening her fingers around her left forearm.

Going over the last few hours only made her headache worse.

First, she'd had to face an unknown vampire outside the perimeter. Then she'd had to carry Alfred, hide that same vampire under her clothes to get through the security checks, fight a fellow mage from her own base, end up handcuffed on the ground like a traitor, and, to top it all off, get hauled up by the neck to serve as a human shield in front of the entire squad.

All on the same damn day.

Diana exhaled heavily through her nose.

Honestly, all she wanted right now was for that meeting to end without causing another disaster. There would be time later to sit before a disciplinary committee and try to explain why the hell she'd brought a vampire right into the heart of the base, if either the vampire or the mage ratted her out.

But one look around was enough to see that no one at the base was at ease.

A few meters away, several soldiers were receiving a steady stream of instructions over the radio while others finished carrying away the guards who'd been injured minutes earlier on stretchers.

Farther ahead, groups of mages remained stationed at a safe distance, never taking their eyes off the area where General Salcedo's meeting was still underway.

There were also platoons of regular troops with rifles held ready against their chests, though most kept their muzzles angled downward because medics and fellow soldiers were still moving back and forth.

"Hey, have they approved moving the armored truck from ramp three yet?" a young soldier asked, approaching another who was standing near Diana with the records open on a tablet. "It's blocking half the direct access to the medical area, and the stretchers have to go all the way around."

The other soldier checked his screen and shook his head, visibly frustrated.

"Not yet," the man with the tablet replied. "I've tried to reach the lieutenant colonel twice to get him to sign off on the perimeter change, but his aide says no one's moving any heavy vehicles until the general comes out of that room."

"But it's slowing us down getting the wounded through," the first soldier insisted.

"Tell them that," the other replied more quietly, jerking his chin toward the command building. "Nobody wants to sign off on the wrong order while that thing's talking to the higher-ups."

Diana listened to the conversation from where she stood and let out a long sigh.

Even something as basic as parking a vehicle somewhere else had become a bureaucratic problem because no one wanted to take responsibility without the general present.

It was at that exact moment that Diana sensed something strange in the air.

She hadn't noticed anything unusual in the preceding minutes; if someone had been secretly gathering magic inside the building, they'd hidden it well enough that she hadn't sensed a trace from outside.

What she suddenly felt was the abrupt change at the exact instant that energy began to be released.

The air around her suddenly grew heavy, and a sharp pressure sent goosebumps up her arms and the back of her neck.

Diana's eyes went wide.

'Something in there is about to blow!' she thought, instantly alarmed.

Turning her head on instinct, she saw Mara Velasco standing a few steps away, reviewing some papers near the exterior walkway, with no cover between her and the building the pressure was coming from.

Diana didn't waste even half a second shouting a warning or asking what she was doing standing there.

She lunged forward, grabbed Mara by the arm, and yanked her behind the corner of the storage structure while thrusting her other hand forward, palm open.

The mana responded instantly, condensing moisture in the air into a thick barrier of highly pressurized water in front of them.

Without stopping, Diana gritted her teeth and formed a second, dense layer right behind the first.

A fraction of a second later, the command building exploded.

BOOOOOOM!

An enormous blue flash, which immediately shifted to a violent red, obliterated the area where the negotiations were taking place and blasted the outer walls apart in every direction.

By sheer luck, Diana and Mara were already a considerable distance from the meeting itself, partly sheltered by the side of the storage building, which absorbed much of the direct hit before it could reach them.

Diana didn't even have to block the attack's full force head-on, only the portion of the blast wave that reached her position.

And even then, it almost wasn't enough.

CRACK!

The first barrier of pressurized water shattered the moment the searing blast struck it.

The second layer immediately buckled as dozens of concrete and metal fragments slammed into its liquid surface, forcing Diana to draw heavily on her reserves to raise a third emergency layer just as the blast lifted them both off the ground.

Thud!

Both women slammed into the pavement several meters farther back.

The impact knocked all the air out of Diana's lungs and sent a sharp pain through her left shoulder as she hit the ground.

For several seconds, Diana couldn't make out any of the sounds around her; all she could hear was a continuous, high-pitched ringing that drowned out the distant screams.

Despite her dazed state and the burning pain in her shoulder, Diana didn't lower her right arm. She kept the last layer of water active above their heads as chunks of masonry, dirt, and twisted pieces of metal kept flying overhead and crashing to the ground.

Clank!

Thud!

Only when she was sure the heaviest debris had stopped falling did she let her magic fade.

Splash!

The water lost its shape and fell onto the dusty ground, soaking the edges of her boots.

Diana lay on her side for a few moments, coughing a little as she tried to get her breathing back to normal.

As soon as the ringing in her ears faded enough, she turned toward Mara with a grimace of pain.

The analyst was lying less than a meter away, her suit covered in gray dust, her hair disheveled, and a couple of small cuts on her cheek and the back of her hand, but her eyes were open and she was breathing on her own.

"Ma'am?" Diana called, her voice still hoarse from the dust. "Can you hear me? Can you move?"

Mara blinked a couple of times, dazed from the fall, and raised a trembling hand to her forehead before looking at Diana and slowly nodding.

"Y-Yes..." Mara answered quietly, planting a palm on the ground to ease herself into a sitting position. "I don't think anything's broken. Thank you."

Diana let out a sharp breath, immensely relieved to see her in one piece.

'At least she's not dead...' Diana thought, letting her shoulders drop a little.

That relief didn't last long, however.

As soon as she looked toward the spot where the meeting room had stood half a minute earlier, she realized that many of the people up ahead hadn't been so lucky.

The entire central section was unrecognizable.

Where armored walls and guard posts had stood, there were now only structures broken in half, thick smoke rising into the sky, and debris scattered across the open ground.

Desperate shouts began rising through the dust as soldiers called for their comrades by their last names; some struggled unsteadily to their feet, while others lay on the ground without moving a muscle.

At the exact spot where General Salcedo had been negotiating, Diana couldn't make out a single thing still standing.

Rapid footsteps approached from the side, and a soldier whose uniform was covered in gray dirt crouched in front of them, his rifle slung across his back.

He, too, seemed to have been heading toward the command building before coming across the two of them on the ground.

"Hey! Are you badly hurt? Can you walk?" the soldier asked urgently, quickly looking them over.

"We can move," Diana replied, clenching her jaw as she held her aching shoulder. "What the hell was that? What happened in there?"

The soldier shook his head, just as bewildered as she was.

"I don't know. It came straight from the sector where the commanders were meeting," he answered, offering them a hand to help them up.

Several voices were talking over one another on the radio clipped to his vest, their words broken up by static.

"We need stretchers in the central block now! Multiple casualties!" an operator shouted over the open frequency.

"The internal repeaters in Sector Two are down! We have no contact with the control room!" another voice reported over the first.

"Does anyone have eyes on General Salcedo?! I repeat, confirm General Salcedo's status!" a third officer demanded, but no one on the channel gave a clear answer.

A few meters away, a sergeant with a bleeding cut on his eyebrow began shouting orders at the regular soldiers who had already gotten to their feet near the truck blocking the way.

"You four, quit staring at the smoke! You're not helping anyone like that!" the sergeant ordered, pointing toward the smoking wreckage. "Get all the wounded who can walk or crawl out of the central area, and get that route to the infirmary cleared! Move!"

None of those men stood around waiting for the mages to come and fix the disaster.

Several soldiers immediately paired up to lift their fallen comrades, others began pushing aside loose beams and chunks of wall to clear a path toward the medical tents, and a couple of noncommissioned officers shouted back and forth, trying to find out who in the chain of command was still alive.

Even so, not everyone managed to react the same way.

Closer to the ruins, Diana saw a young corporal standing completely frozen, his hands empty as he stared at the crater, repeating aloud that the general was still in there. Beside him, another soldier kept smacking the side of his radio, trying to contact a guard post that no longer existed.

Barely five minutes earlier, they'd been inside a secure military base, and now the entire place looked exactly as though it had just been heavily bombed.

Diana winced as she put weight on her leg to stand, feeling another painful tug in her shoulder.

Mara, who had already gotten up with the soldier's help, held her good arm to steady her, and the two stepped back to stay out of the way of a pair of soldiers carrying a man with a bloodied leg.

"Watch the frame. It's loose," warned the soldier who'd helped them, trying to clear a side entrance where the metal door had been bent inward by the blast wave.

Mara didn't stand around doing nothing; she immediately went over to the soldier, pressed both hands against the damaged metal door, and pushed alongside him to keep the passage open while two makeshift stretchers were carried through to the safe corridor.

But every time a wounded person passed and she had a second to spare, Mara's eyes immediately went back to the dust cloud over the devastated area.

Diana was looking that way too, her frown deepening.

No matter how many times she went over it, something about all of this didn't add up.

She was a mage; she knew exactly what a magical discharge felt like. And that brutal pressure that had made her skin prickle just before the explosion was nothing like the cold vampiric energy she'd seen the intruder use earlier, nor did it have anything to do with the intense golden glow coming from that strange spear.

That wasn't enough to tell her who had attacked first in there, but it immediately made her question the first shouts that reached them from the front.

"The vampire broke the deal! She's hostile!" a powerful voice shouted from the other side of the ruins.

"All magical units, surround the central perimeter and contain her right there!" more voices followed, repeating the order.

At that moment, the wind swept away some of the gray dust, and Diana finally made out Matt's figure in the middle of the ruined ground.

He was still holding what remained of the blue-haired mage's body in one hand.

Diana froze where she stood, an unpleasant hollow feeling settling in her stomach.

Less than half an hour earlier, she'd been trading blows and spells with that very woman.

She'd insulted her to her face, wanted to get her off her back by any means necessary, and bitterly resented her for snapping those handcuffs around her wrists.

But seeing her reduced to half a charred corpse dangling from someone's arm was something else entirely.

In the distance, Matt opened his hand and let the remains fall onto the broken ground to free both arms, adjusted his grip on his golden spear, and turned his whole body toward the rank-nine mage.

Even with the distance and the constant noise around her, Diana managed to hear some of what the vampire was furiously shouting at the man.

Matt was shouting something about General Salcedo. Something about how the mage himself had caused the explosion and killed the old man.

But too many people were shouting orders over one another, and almost at that very moment, the rank-nine mage raised his voice, ordering the other mage squads to close ranks and under no circumstances let the vampire leave that sector alive.

Diana pressed her lips together, her ears still hurting from the blast.

She had two completely opposing accounts in the middle of a total disaster, with no way to confirm what had happened inside those four walls before they were blown apart.

"Squad Four, clear all noncombat personnel out of the central courtyard and provide cover for the mages!" a captain ordered as he hurried past them, lowering his radio receiver.

"Captain, what happened to General Salcedo and the command escort?!" asked the soldier beside the bent door.

"No visual confirmation on any of them yet! Just follow the head mage's orders!" the captain answered without stopping.

Diana immediately understood what was happening.

Almost none of the soldiers or mages beginning to tighten the cordon had been close enough to see how the explosion had started; they were simply obeying the highest-ranking person still standing and giving clear orders.

A second later, the fighting began.

BOOM!

CRACK!

From her position farther back, Diana couldn't make out each spell clearly through the fallen walls and swirling dust.

All she could see were glowing panels rising at different angles, Matt's figure moving at high speed through the rubble, and flashes of magical attacks crossing the open ground from several directions at once.

The regular soldiers who had ended up too far forward quickly fell back behind chunks of concrete to stay out of the line of fire.

One of them dropped to one knee and raised his rifle, trying to aim toward the center, but the soldier beside him slapped the barrel down.

"Lower that weapon, idiot! Two of our mages are crossing right in front of you!" the other soldier yelled before running with two more men to drag a wounded man by the shoulders out of a spot dangerously close to the exchange of spells.

At the same time, the radio of the soldier still near Diana crackled with a new report from the inner sector.

"Attention, containment teams! Another rank-eight mage is on her way to the central block to reinforce the cordon! Keep the intruder inside the area!"

Diana gritted her teeth at that.

'Another rank-eight on the way?' she thought in frustration, watching the golden flashes in the distance.

She didn't like the way any of this was going, but even if she wanted to speak up, who the hell could she tell about her suspicions?

She was the idiot who'd smuggled that vampire in under her clothes, who'd been arrested only a short while ago, and who had just been used as a hostage in front of everyone.

No one at that base was going to stop an entire operation on the strength of her gut feeling now.

◇◆◇

A few steps away from Diana, Mara Velasco helped a stretcher-bearer finish settling a wounded corporal behind the side wall, forcing herself to breathe slowly and keep a clear head.

On the outside, she was as composed as ever, but with every passing second, she found it harder to look away from the fight in the ruins.

The negotiations had ended in the worst possible way.

General Salcedo had disappeared in the explosion and was no longer responding on any channel. The military chain of command had broken down, chaos was spreading through the outer sectors, and in the middle of it all, the princess was completely surrounded by human squads beginning to coordinate their efforts to take her down.

Because unlike Diana and the other soldiers at that base, Mara didn't see that white-haired figure as just some unknown vampire who'd come in to try her luck.

She knew exactly who the vampire was.

She knew perfectly well which royal bloodline ran through her veins.

And above all, she knew with absolute certainty that there was someone on the other side who would demand to be informed immediately if that girl's life was in real danger.

Elyra.

Almost unconsciously, Mara's right hand drifted a few centimeters down toward the inner pocket of her jacket, brushing against the fabric over the small metal object she kept only for extreme situations.

But she stopped short of pulling it out.

There were too many soldiers moving around just a few meters away.

Diana was still standing very close, watching the fight. And activating that object right there would mean putting all the undercover work she'd been doing for months within that military operation at risk in a single moment.

"Miss Velasco, this area is no longer safe," one of the soldiers told her, approaching with a tense expression. "I can escort you to the shelters in the rear block right now."

Mara moved her hand away from her jacket as naturally as could be and gently shook her head.

"I can walk on my own, soldier," Mara replied calmly. "Go help the people who can't move on their own first. There are still several near the vehicles."

The soldier hesitated for only a moment, nodded quickly, and ran back toward the rubble, where someone was calling for help with another wounded person.

A few steps to the side, Diana noticed the analyst immediately turn back toward the magical flashes in the center and narrowed her eyes slightly.

"Are you waiting for someone who's still in there?" Diana asked, moving half a step closer.

Mara didn't even blink at the question.

"I'm just trying to understand what really happened," Mara replied without raising her voice.

And it was partly true; even she hadn't expected the head of the mages to blow up the general himself in the middle of a deal that was all but settled.

But just as she said that, Mara caught sight of Matt through the smoke as he tried to change position around a barrier, only for a compressed magical projectile to strike him squarely in the side.

BAM!

The force of the blow made Matt lose his footing and drop to one knee on the broken ground, just as three other mages nearby raised their hands to prepare their next attacks at the same time.

From that distance, Mara had no way of judging how deep the wound was or how much energy Matt really had left to regenerate.

All she understood with cold clarity was that she couldn't afford to keep waiting until she was absolutely sure they were going to kill the princess.

If she waited to confirm it with her own eyes, any help would arrive too late.

Taking advantage of four soldiers passing directly between her and Diana, carrying a wounded officer and blocking the view for a few seconds, Mara silently stepped back several paces.

She moved behind a wide section of wall that was still standing, checked with a quick glance that no one was watching that corner, reached into her jacket, and pulled out a small silver whistle.

Mara brought it to her lips and blew hard.

The whistle made no sound audible to the human ear.

Even so, Mara felt a faint, warm vibration in her fingertips, confirming that the internal mechanism had just activated and sent the emergency signal linked directly to her exact location.

BOOOOM!

Another loud blast from the fight shook the dust on the wall above her head. Mara immediately slipped the whistle back into her inner pocket and straightened the edge of her jacket before stepping out from behind the wall.

The signal had been sent. Now all she could do was hope someone on the other side would respond before it all ended in disaster.