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Chapter 1: one usual day in the office ( i think!)

The soldiers finally trudged into the Boss’ office as the clock on the wall struck midnight, after what had been declared, by common vote, the worst working day any of them had ever had. They had traveled over most of Europe in under fourteen hours, on the trail of a hot suspect, with regular breaks to halt the onslaught of mostly unstoppable mass-murdering machines, and hadn’t even had time for a coffee after touchdown before Inspector Davies called them upstairs.

Said Inspector was currently sitting at his desk, on a large pillow to mask his dwarfish height, cigar ash dripping all over the notes he was taking from a fat book that took up most of the table. He looked up as his men filed into the room, saluting one by one, and grinned, chewing his cigar happily.

“Ah gotta ‘nother job fer you boys!” His thick accent, coupled with his bright red hair and short stature, often made newer recruits question his suitability as their leader. Older troops, however, knew that he was as crafty as he was brusque and more than competent as their senior.

“A good ‘un this,” he continued, reducing his cigar butt to shredded paper and tobacco in the process. “Reports comin’ in sayin’ there’s gonna roughly 150 troops few miles west o’ Notredame in a coupla’ hours. Go get ‘em, lads!”

He pretended to brush invisible dust off of his book, shoved all the real ash and pencil shavings onto the floor, and went back to his pen-pushing. A few minutes later he looked up again.

“WELL!? What’re ye still doin’ here?”

The men started and then started what any Force of their reputation would; they started grumbling amongst themselves and complaining about the task that they had taken as a joke.

“Great!” The one whose nametag read “Gabriel(with the ‘riel’ crossed out and an ‘e’ penciled in above)”, and the Lieutenants’ Stripes, had the loudest voice. “Just what I’m gonna need at two in the morning, a bunch of Cys trying to rip me limb from limb. This job doesn’t pay enough.”

20 minutes later they were on a plane to France.

*

Stepping off the private jet, Gabe rushed towards the disaster they had seen from the air, the smoldering remains of a farmhouse and a still-flaming ambulance in the road beyond. He quickly beckoned his second-in-command, a young man named Frank. Crouching behind the ambulance beside Gabe, Frank gathered his power and threw a fireball high into the air, illuminating the whole scene, and revealing odd, shadowy shapes in the windows of the house. A bullet whizzed out of the closest window and shattered the fireball before it had even reached the peak of its arc and Frank yelled in surprise.

“There!” he motioned the others to get down.

“They haven’t advanced to the city yet,” Gabe noted, quickly counting the shadows and coming up with a good 100 before having to duck down again as more bullets darted around his ears.

*

Almost one hour later bullets were still flying, but the number of Cys had diminished greatly and Gabe was quickly regaining control of the situation, although two of his men were dead and several more were wounded. They were wearying, though, even Frank’s onslaught was slackening, and he was one of Gabe’s strongest. They both leant round the side of their ambulance, Gabe letting rip a stream of solid metal spikes from the hole in his right palm, connected directly to the centre of the iron-producing bones in his forearm, hitting his target straight on. He counted quickly and realized that all they were doing now was fending the Cys off until they realized that retreat was their only option with so many wounded.

By the time the last one had slunk off into the darkness, limping far behind it’s co-troops, Gabe was exhausted. He glanced around, pleased to see the rest of his men patting each other’s shoulders and bumping knuckles in congratulations and laughing, even though Gabe knew they were just as tired as he was. The only one missing, and the one Gabe spotted wandering off out of the corner of his eye, was Frank, heading towards the fields with his shoulders twitching. Gabe ran after him, knowing that the ability to create fire, seemingly from thin air, was a talent that suited Frank’s hot-headed personality right down to the ground, and Gabe was sure he got an unnecessary adrenaline-rush from the killing.

“Good work there,” he murmured, putting a hand on Frank’s shoulder slowly. He could feel the heat radiating straight off the jacket under his fingers.

“Yeah.”

Frank’s eyes looked kind of glazed behind his mask, and gleamed unnaturally in the low light. Gabe wondered, not for the first time, what his comrade actually looked like under the plastic-china cover he wore over his eyes and nose. He thought he should at least offer some sort of help, opened his mouth to speak, and then lost his nerve.

“You can send up a flare,” he gave Frank’s shoulder one last squeeze. “When you’re ready.”