Chapter 12
"So you've run your course, Victor Ivanych," I muttered under my breath, looking at the row of machine gunners standing along the entire perimeter of the huge room on two balconies, one above the other. At a rough estimate—about a hundred and fifty barrels.
But Zen take them—twenty minutes of pain, and I'll get to all of them. Maybe even faster, since you still have to manage to hit a fast-moving target, even with a machine gun, and I am a very, very fast target.
Only, behind the row of machine gunners, the arrogant mugs of mages could be seen. I can't stand them, the bastards!
And this dislike goes way back. It stretches all the way from the Tibetan times.
Of course, I liked watching cartoons in my childhood, all sorts of movies, even read some comics in electronic format. Although much later, already during my student years. But I was as far from the proud title of a geek as from walking to China. And I didn't even remotely think that Marvel's mages clustered specifically in Tibet.
And I paid the price for my lack of understanding. It's unpleasant to remember, but they caught me like an exotic animal.
The devil made me enter that village back then, to check out the goods, replenish supplies. And that exact bastard was there. Mage Issei—who participated in the last Battle of Dragons I visited. The very one who carried me out of the arena with his magic. And earned a limp (I tore his knee with my claws before he managed to get going).
Naturally, he recognized me. Broke into a smile, led me to a local tavern, poured me a drink...
I woke up already in a laboratory, where I spent the next six months. A very long and very painful six months. And during this time, I acquired a persistent aversion to any magic and an equally persistent, I would even say, indestructible hatred for mages.
And how can you love those who tested half-baked and untested combat spells with highly unpredictable (and quite painful) effects, various potions, concoctions, and reagents on you, boiled you in acid, tore you to pieces (literally. He tore off my arms and legs, chopped and sawed me not once, not twice, and not even ten times), cut out my eyes, organs... And this is far from a complete list of what these bastards did to me. I forgot to mention—Issei did not do this alone. His mage friends used to drop by, and he would gladly, amidst general merriment and witty comments, repeat "especially amusing" moments and experiments for them "as an encore", like: "what an entertaining roar the test subject produces when lightning hits his tongue... and what if there are many lightnings".
It all ended quite logically and naturally: when all the furniture in his house was upholstered with my skins, this activity, like other research, bored him. It was time for experiments and attempts to improve my body. I am still grateful to my healing factor, which completely refused to accept any third pairs of hands, tails with manticore stingers, spikes and thorns on the back, horns on the head... Thanks to the Universal Intelligent Principle, all this quickly began to be rejected and died off. Losing my human form on the whim of some experimenter would have been extremely unpleasant.
But I must admit—he did succeed in something: claws and bones became stronger (far from adamantium, but already comparable to titanium), regeneration accelerated about three times, reflexes and the transmission of signals through the nervous system improved, and all superhuman senses sharpened.
However, that was all. The successes ended.
And another month later, Issei's interest also ended. I was put out onto the training ground, where experimental combat spells were tested. On the second dozen, one of them tore my head off (including the head, which was simply blown to pieces).
Issei pronounced the specimen dead and ordered the servants to clean the training ground.
They cleaned it. They took the pieces far away from the mage's domain and dumped them in one pile there. A night of rapid regeneration assembled my body from the pile. I'm not sure if the pieces connected correctly there, or if there were enough pieces, but apparently what was needed grew back, and what was unnecessary went into building material. And the fact that the pieces there were not only mine (Issei had plenty of various boring "specimens") allowed me to gain the necessary muscle mass.
But the process was not a pleasant one.
Bald, ragged, dirty, and hungry, I wandered into the right monastery, where "they warmed me up, robbed me... Picked me up, warmed me up".
But that's not what this is about right now.
Right now, I was looking at a familiar face in an SS uniform, and thoughts were flying with terrifying clarity and speed. Apparently, to get them moving, you need exactly this kind of deep shit, where there is a real danger to my conditionally immortal ass. And right now, there is. I would even say: "The cat Vaska is fucked..."©.
* * *
And it all started without foreshadowing such a setup. A camouflaged airfield. Reinforced security. A good target for a "super-partisan". So I took the bait.
Sneaking in turned out to be not difficult. I even managed to mine a couple of planes. And then...
Werewolves. I sensed their approach. And they, apparently, sensed mine even earlier. If there's one thing I am inferior to werewolves in, it's the sense of smell—they are beasts to a much greater extent.
And they, having noticed me even on the approaches, let me sneak in and relax, and now they had surrounded me and were tightening the ring.
I didn't become alarmed even after that. After all, what are werewolves? It's a good fight. Nothing more. They surpass me in strength, that's true. In speed too, but not by much. But their regeneration cannot even be compared to my healing factor. Even in battle form. If you chop off or crush such a creature's head, it won't get up anymore. I won't even mention silver (and I had forged my captured dagger with captured silver in one of the abandoned smithies, adding a strip along both cutting edges, since I had already encountered such an enemy).
A good fight... And at first, that's exactly how it was. I dashingly smashed the heads of the three fastest werewolves like overripe pumpkins with machine-gun bursts, prepared to strike with the butt and grab the dagger, when behind the backs of the wolves I saw the figure of a man in a hood with his arms outstretched towards me. A mage! I sensed the magic being cast, but I didn't have time to jump away or do anything. The next moment, there was a flash and instant disorientation.
I blinked away the blur already in the center of a rectangular concrete room with two rows of balconies around the perimeter, the lower one at a height of about ten meters, the second one about five meters higher. The room was approximately forty by eighty meters in size. Bare concrete floor. No cover. The roof at a height of about thirty or forty meters. Searchlights beating directly at me. Rows of machine gunners. Beneath me on the concrete was a pentagram.
I took a deep breath, sniffing the air. The result was disappointing. On the machine guns, besides humans, there are also vampires and werewolves. And there are many of them. And their reaction and accuracy significantly exceed human ones.
And I also managed to distinguish mages by the characteristic smell of reagents, which eats not only into clothes, but also into the skin itself and hair—six of them in total.
It seems that they decided to shake the pebble out of the boot after all. I can't even imagine how many operations and plans the Wehrmacht had to interrupt and postpone to set up this trap. Because to know that I would go to commit sabotage specifically at this Zen-forsaken airfield, and not at the ammunition convoy in the neighboring village or the location of the tank battalion south of here. Or a dozen other important objects located in this area. The area itself could be calculated.
This means they had to keep at least one mage and five werewolves on each of them. And that is a huge force.
I even felt a little proud—at least the disruption of an offensive for the sake of my humble person. But now I am definitely in deep Zen. I can't handle a sextet of mages in any way. Even without taking all the others into account. And there are so many of the others there that it won't seem like a little.
It's a pity, I had just started to consider myself a cool partisan. And immediately, that same "SS division" came for my soul, just like back then in France for the souls of the resistance fighters...
* * *