“Pushback from the Falcons against us coming in too, then, I imagine?” I asked Sama, wondering just what to do in this situation as I swirled glass two of Girly Sweetness Special #4. No, I wasn’t going to try to match drinks with Sama.

“Well, of course! It makes them look bad if another mercenary group has to get called in to help them in their own territory! They’ve tried really hard to imitate the littoral defenses Fuzzy can design, and they watch all the tactics and imitate what they can, even trying to hire experienced Boonie Boys from up in New England who’ve got time in at the Littoral Zone there.” She smirked at their efforts and the strings they were pulling, since a LOT of others were doing the same thing, given the amount of shoreline combat going on.

“But no firearms.” That I was sure of, because every goddamn gun we could make was sold for the next six months to a year, and neither Atlanta’s armory nor the Falcons were on that list!

“Oh, they’ve got SOME... which they bought for ruinous prices and don’t have enough ammunition to even practice with.” Gritworks Munitions had all the money the nation could throw at them, but there was only so fast they could get things moving and people trained. Making magical firearms for mages still required the personal touch, we couldn’t auto-stamp and mass produce them!

The firearms we could auto-stamp were basically for civilians, which just increased the demand for magical ammunition to the moon. Win-win? Our alchemical branches were going gangbusters. People graduating from Coralost Academy and College were guaranteed jobs, and basically preferred to keep working with and for us, their Typeless Magic uniquely suitable for what we were doing... and making good money because we paid them well.

There was a metric arseload of people trying to crack the secret of our ammunition, firearms, propellants, Implements, Healing Potions, and on and on and on, wanting to get in on the bounty to be made. Others were willing to pay exorbitant sums for them, and if they couldn’t get them, were perfectly willing to steal to attain them.

Add on all the Mana Regeneration items that were going for what the market would bear, and yeah, we had a massive broad income stream now, which our divisions in India weren’t hurting in the slightest. Demand was just way too high for all of the stuff!

“Is there any reason Lance Blank shouldn’t be in the ground right now?” I asked her.

“Other than another Archmage is a great thing for a littoral zone?” she asked rhetorically.

“What about JAG?” I had to ask. The legal arm of the Armed Forces was supposed to be the ones who caught this kind of crap.

“We’ve nobody working there, but soft inquiries say the matter will be buried until the five years of the Emperors are up, at which point Lance Blank will be encouraged to retire before certain facts come to light.”

“For the good of the Corps, of course.”

“Of course!” Sama’s smile was very knowing as shot #4 found its way down her throat, then poofed purple flames for a moment before she continued, sounding like she was swallowing glass, “It’s not that he’s untouchable, or we won’t touch him, but the country should get its use out of him before we put him in the ground.”

I thought that over. “Is he on the volunteer list for the Floodbreaker Ritual?”

Sama’s eyes glittered, and she glanced away as shot #5 was poured out, foh greater intestinal damage, sah! “Why, no, would you look at that?”

I closed my eyes to slits. “Why am I not surprised?”

“He would also be quite difficult to get killed off in pitched combat. He won’t go near the front line without his bodyguards and a major enemy showing up to require his presence,” Sama duly informed me.

“So, he’s a coward, too.”

“Well, of course he is!” Sama threw back her drink and glared at it accusingly, then more lavender flames popped out of her nose and mouth in meek surrender. “He’s a rapist, a murderer, a leech, a traitor, and a faithless sot.” Her eyes lit up again. “Gods-dammit, I hate bastards like him. Fuzzy has good stuff. My willingness to wait for this fucker to be useful is dropping with every drink, and fuck his Sage of a patriarch, too!”

She poured herself another one, ignoring the wisps of purple flame leaking out of her tear ducts as she did so.

“Losing a coward who won’t fight won’t hurt anything, and will help morale and overall strategy,” I said thoughtfully. “The trick is to make sure the Aquatics are blamed for it, so his father doesn’t wash his hands of things.”

“Ohhh, so we’d have to be clever. And all without obviously being there.” Sama tapped her chin slowly and repeatedly. “So, is this ‘really clever killed in combat’, which is going to be deuced complex and hard, or ‘how the fuck did the Aquatics kill him but they’ve got his body?’ clever?” she snickered.

“What I want to do is dump him and his cronies in front of the Mick and his team, and enjoy some popcorn while watching what happens,” I admitted.

“Damn, I’d pay money for that. A bunch of cowardly fucks leeching combat zone pay against a platoon of Archmages each with over six thousand hours of active littoral combat duty ranging from Bangkok to Brazil. Yeah, that would be something to see,” Sama purred approvingly. “He’s got a death sentence on him, fine. Is he worth keeping around? No, he’s a waste and inept, getting others killed and not fighting himself. The only reason to keep him around is to motivate his dad to pick up his slack.” She threw back another mouthful bound to start burning and helping her digestion. “Leaving the boys out would be bad form. You let me snag ‘em for a week, and I’ll wash our good general out to sea, and nobody is gonna know we were involved.”

“Clear up their schedules.” The boys didn’t work together quite as often anymore, each of them overseeing teams with specific training niches, who were then mixed and combined for specific jobs. The Redshore Marines were the biggest providers and trainers of inland combat troops coming to fight on the shores in America, given we had so many Littoral Zone veterans who didn’t actually live in those areas. Volunteers from all the surrounding states were pouring into the training areas set up with their States’ National Guards’ funding to learn what they needed to survive.

“Can do.” It also meant they had my blessing to enact some harsh justice, and if they couldn’t crow about getting revenge, well, we could definitely leak all the stuff after the fact about the dead bastard. Sage Blank wouldn’t react much because his son would already be dead, and if he did, well, that was just stupid on his part if he couldn’t find the sources, which he wouldn’t.

The Marines wouldn’t like the very bad press for promoting a rapist, murderer, coward, and traitor to his men to General, but they’d also be relieved he was dead. The people who’d allowed it to happen would find their careers cut off and promotional opportunities leading right to active warzones where they could die with honor for their country, as they had not lived with it.

Given the shame that would fall onto their families if they didn’t, death tours were all they could look forward to. America did not treat those who exploited their military positions well.

------

Three weeks later...

“NO!” General Lance Blank screamed, as the octopoid body and semi-human head, surrounded by dozens of coral-crustacean crabmen, rose from the sea right ahead of him and his personal guards.

A Krakenoid Ruler, a full Queen with her personal guards, was right in front of them!

Her sharktoothed smile of gleaming pleasure was unfeigned as Psychic power smashed into the group of Human mages, and they fought back desperately as the first spells of Sound, Water, and Poison came reaching for them!

It had been a bad day, turned into a terrible one, and it was now a horrifying one!

“Chaos Magic!” spat Hank Venkman as Charlie Fleetwood tried to hold back the mental pressure from the Queen, the air around them full of magic as the five men juked and dodged. “They wove it through the mist with Water Magic! Totally turned us around!”

The littoral attack had started off the same as normal, a press of Aquatic bodies racing for the shores, driving the tide ahead of them, sprays of Water Magic smashing into the fortifications and breakwalls and the Shoreguard positions.

The Falcons were stationed at the far end of the shoreline, where the water was shallow and broken up, not friendly to attackers who preferred the main piers and harbor. They could move to reinforce the middle rapidly if need be, or hold the entire south side down by themselves if the Shoreguards were shifted to reinforce the northern side. It usually meant they saw a lot less pitched combat than the soldiers did, and so suffered far fewer casualties.

Things had seemed to be going all right, and then went all wrong.

Some of the Archmages on the north side had worked together in a measured display of power. First the skies had spun into a vortex, lit up with Lightning, and multiple strokes had plunged down and electrocuted a swathe of the harbor in a dancing wall of thunder, leaving behind hundreds of floating Aquatic corpses.

Ignoring the losses, the Aquatics had pressed in. There had followed a similar rain of fireballs, of such intensity that the whole incoming tide was momentarily pushed back by so much Fire Mana, killing thousands of the creatures as it did so and filling the air with a thick layer of steaming, boiling-hot mist.

Under cover of the mist and riding the wave back in as the Fire Mana dispersed, the Aquatics had pressed in... and then the entire cloud of mist had gathered into floating icy spears and plunged down in a merciless shower of ice that had left the entire surface of the northern harbor frozen solid, with thousands of Aquatics impaled in that ice.

Undeterred yet again, the Aquatics had come in under the ice, now protected from bombardment and ignoring their frozen, burned, and broiled predecessors.

Spikes and razors of stone had come bursting up through the ice, impaling thousands more of the close-packed Aquatics, shattering the ice and spraying the whole area with cold blood that boiled and bubbled in the water.

Still the press of invaders had come in, although more hesitant now, filtering between the razored walls and impaling spikes with the corpses dangling from them with speed and only some dismay.

They didn’t see that the spikes and walls had formed gates and pools, channeling the flows of Aquatics in together. When the Formations of mages on the Shoreguard brought down their magic at the pre-selected points where the Aquatics were the densest, the carnage was horrible!

Multi-elemental bombardments tore through the pockets of Aquatics, filling the air with burning gore and char... and the swelling vivic mists which devoured the dead and left no trace of them, no chance for the dead to be used as food. The crimson smears across and below the ice conveyed the vivus everywhere, and soon the northern end of the harbor was bubbling unwhite mists as Aquatics Burned away.

Finding that bombardment and the arrangement of the landscape a little suspect, the main thrust of the attack finally shifted to the southern end, which was less naturally hospitable, but hadn’t been secured nearly as well.

The forces there, especially the Falcons and Fire-Fisted Sage Schiller’s Braves, hadn’t been ready to face the main force of the wave. They were caught off-guard when the tens of thousands of Aquatics came at them.

General Lance Blank had been forced to come out with his personal company to aid in the sudden pitched combat on the south side. The north was kept occupied by sacrifices of chaff, while the elites of the invaders found the south much easier to deal with. They had started making headway into the shoreline and up the breakwalls, and had even managed to break into the city itself!

Half-Sage Russler’s Atlanta Hawks, deployed as the rearguard, had put up a desperate defense as the Shoreguard broke in the south and fell back, clouds of mist boiling past them and obscuring everything visible.

General Lance Blank had tried to flee with his men, but he’d been turned around in the mist, and somehow was now out in the middle of the harbor, right in the middle of the most powerful members of the invading Aquatic forces!

He felt the pulse of magic sweep past him, and knew his father was in motion, only for a second later an answering pulse of at least equal might to come from out in the sea in open challenge!

General Lance Blank screamed and fought with everything he could as the invaders locked down the sky and space and tore at the few Humans in their midst with the savagery of sharks in a feeding frenzy...