“My guess would be a second aircraft, someone on a boat, or both,” Bruce said. “They may have even been tracking our transponder and triggered the explosion remotely.”
“We should hope for a boat,” Shade said. “I don’t have enough bodies to make a boat viable for the open ocean if we hit rough weather. If our antagonists have chosen to supply one, then you will need to pacify them and seize it.”
“I like that plan,” Jason said. “Bruce, you keep an eye on this lot. The parachutes will take care of themselves, so you’ll just need to handle any airborne threats. Is that in your skill set?”
“I have the powers for that,” Bruce said confidently. “Should I be the one to go, though?”
“Can you take on a boat full of magical hostiles alone?”
“Can you?”
“I’ve dealt with sand pirates before,” Jason said. “The water variety should be about the same, right?”
“Sand pirates?”
“Alright,” Jason said. “I’m going to drop down and see if I can’t secure you a landing zone.”
Jason turned off his slow fall and angled his body down.
Jason’s sharp eyes picked out the yacht as soon as he dropped below the cloud layer.
“We’ve got a boat,” he told Bruce through voice chat. “I’ll probably drop out of voice range before I reach it, given the low magic. Seriously, though, who takes a luxury yacht to shoot down an aeroplane?”
“The French?” Bruce suggested. “We can’t be certain that the boat you’re seeing is involved, though.”
“True, but I’d take those odds. I’ll check it out before I do anything drastic.”
He descended further as the ocean below and the boat floating in it became clearer to see. As he dropped down to a low altitude, he spotted a swarm of small objects rising from the yacht. As they rose to meet him, he realised they were drones.
They were not just technological objects but also magical, lighting up to his magic senses. As they drew closer, he spotted the shimmering magical bubbles around them and the glowing sigils carved into their surface.
“Are they little magic attack drones?” he wondered. “That’s kind of cool. Still, can’t be having that. Pop out, if you would please, Gordon.”
Gordon manifested beside Jason, keeping pace with Jason using a continual series of magic dashes. As Jason suspected, the drones moved up and attacked, projecting rapid-fire streams of tiny needles imbued with lightning magic. The drones were, impressively, bronze-rank constructions, but their inundation of attacks proved a poor tactic against Jason. His cloak sheathed itself around him and his descent was not slowed at all as the attacks were expended harmlessly against his cloak.
The drones were steel wrapped in protective bubbles, on which Gordon went to work. His disruptive-force beams cracked the magical shields while his resonating-force beams made short work of the reinforced drones underneath. The four beams swept through the drone swarm in pairs, efficiently wiping out what Jason hoped was an outrageous wealth of magical devices.
As he drew closer to sea level at a rocket pace, more attacks launched from the boat below. These were not light attacks but a trio of shoulder-mounted rockets imbued with silver-rank magic. At first, it looked like they were going to fly right past him, and not even that closely. It seemed like they were quite carelessly aimed. Then they locked on to not Jason but Gordon.
Jason immediately recalled his familiar, not trusting Gordon’s intangibility to endure the silver-rank magic he sensed from the rockets. As soon as Gordon was gone, the rockets stopped adjusting their trajectories and flew straight, making them easy to dodge. He was worried that they would go after the people above, but was out of voice range to warn them.
“Gordon, see if you can’t grab the attention of those rockets and dog fight them down. Their tracking systems can’t be that complicated.”
Gordon reappeared and dashed up after the rockets. Jason pulled out his old non-magical telescope, slowing his descent into a glide for stability. He eyed the yacht below, which he realised was even bigger than he originally thought. It was the class of profoundly expensive super yachts that even all his gold might not be enough to buy.
He picked out a shadow on the sun deck made by an awning, then used his cloak to shadow jump directly onto the yacht. He immediately reconjured his cloak, which blended him into the shadows as he listened to voices coming from the deck below.
“Where did he go?” one voice asked. “Why didn’t the rockets go after him? They have magically enhanced tracking systems.”
“How would I know?” a second voice asked. “You made a big deal about these weapons to the Network man and they don’t do a thing.”
“They’re powerful weapons!” the first man insisted.
“Then maybe you got broken ones because these didn’t do a thing,” a third man said.
“You’re taking his side? You told me just this morning how impressed you were with the drones.”
Jason recognised that the three men were arguing in French. It was the result of his practise at actively listening to people to recognise the languages his power translated for him. It had been a reason to watch some of the foreign films he always told himself he should be watching instead of trashy action films. He had compromised by watching trashy, foreign-language action films.
The three men talking were silver-rankers, but not essence users. Their magic had the same feel as the EOA thugs that Vermillion had once talked him out of fighting. There were others around the yacht, which was no smaller or less well-appointed than his houseboat, at least from a non-magical perspective. The yacht was an ordinary vehicle, unlike the plane that had been taken out.
The bulk of the auras were bronze rank, except for the three silvers continuing to argue on the deck.
“Where did he go?” one of them asked.
“You think I know? Maybe he turned invisible or teleported onto the boat.”
“We need to find him before the boosts wear off. We shouldn’t have taken them so early.”
“We needed to fire the rockets.”
“For all the good they did! I don’t want to come back down in the middle of a fight. They said he was dangerous.”
“We don’t even know it was him.”
“Of course it was him. You think we got lucky and he died in the plane explosion? If that was going to kill him, they wouldn’t have sent us out here to finish him off with all these weapons that don’t do a damn thing. Now we do it our way, so get everyone to start searching.”
The three split up and yelled orders to search the yacht to the other dozen crew Jason could sense. It was all unnecessary as Jason emerged from the shadows and dropped lightly to the lower deck, landing in front of the three men.
48
THE PRICE OF TRANSGRESSION