Just twenty more seconds and we’d be done. Just twenty more god damn seconds and we would have the packs, jump back through the portal and back to the safe zone on the Kinakai servers on the other side of the net. Julie seemed to be handling the security easily enough, so I focused my attention back on files we were getting, doing a preliminary scan and checking for possible corruption traps that might interfere with the download or mess me up later when I tried to use it. Of course I would do a more thorough inspection back on the coders, but for now it gave me something useful to do.
Eighteen seconds left, and my initial scan complete. I figured I’d take a look at Julie and her watchdog invocation to see if there are in holes in the system. In about five seconds I’d start executing the portal spell to get us out of there. The portal spell was by far the most useful spell I knew, but it took so long to execute and so many resources, especially while doing a major grab like we were, that I needed to start it early just to get out in time.
Julie was spending all of her resources expanding her watchdog invocation and preparing some reactive spells incase the angels we were stealing from noticed we weren’t supposed to be here. I always thought it was funny that Julie coded her watchdogs to look like woodland creatures. Most people just code them to download the global settings and blend in. But then again Julie always had to be different. It made for a funny sight to see a rabbit or a squirrel haplessly bouncing around the inner code vaults of these powerhouses, which for god knows what reason were, without fail, coded to look like the torture chambers of the Spanish Inquisition. Just once I would like to go for a grab somewhere and have the place be unassuming. It doesn’t have to be a friggen park with a blue sky and birds and a curtsey picnic basket or anything, but do the dank smells, poor lighting and concrete walls really help anything? I mean its all in how you code it anyways.
With just fifteen seconds left is when the alarms started going off. Julie’s watchdog invocation executed her defense invocation automatically. Those harmless bunnies and birds transformed from their unassuming nature into the deadliest predators of the forests, and now armed with a nasty paralyzation worm I cooked up after the last incident at the Destona place. It would look like this one might go south as well, but hopefully Julie’s new assault drones are up for the task. She just has to keep the angels off for a good fifteen seconds. Plus, I can lend some aid if I start executing the portal spell now. I might not be able to blast them with my hardest rending spells, but I can at least execute a couple barrier invocations.
I was starting my portal spell when the angels burst through the front door. This of course inevitably led to their death, what with the traps Julie had been setting up for them. The three of them took the full effects of the rending spell Julie was preparing. They didn’t last 2 nans with an effect that powerful. It’s a god damn good thing we did our research this time. The last time Julie tried to use a rending spell, she messed up the base language. It had about as much effect on our attacker as spraying a thug with a water gun. Right now, it looked like the angels only sending initiates through the main entrance, so I quickly threw my barriers on the backdoor entrances I had discovered earlier. They probably knew we where after the files now, so they would send their best agents in to jump us from behind unless I blocked their path.
Ten seconds left and all hell broke loose. The initial angels they sent through the front door turned out to just be the expeditionary force. This time the group was armed with bigger weapons and what appeared to be a corruption virus. It also looked like they didn’t send just some untrained initiates anymore, but some full angels and even an adept along to take us out. We were sucking wind.
Goddamn it Gordon, if you don’t hurry up with that goddamn portal, our asses are fried! Julie screamed through the hardline.
What the hell does it look like I’m doing! Use the paralyzation spell I gave you on them. If it works, they’ll be caught, and none of their friends should be able to get around them with out getting paralyzed too.
She ducked behind one of her drones and cast the spell I had made and given to her. It would take her a full second to execute it while she maintained her defense invocation, a full second she didn’t have. Of course if she didn’t have that invocation, our asses would already be done for.
A quick strike by the angel to Julie’s drone inflicted the corruption virus I was sure I had spied earlier. It was a terrible sight watching the poor thing choke on its own programming, and Julie had to dismiss it before it spread to her other invocations. It would take Julie a good three days to redo all the work she spent on that drone, and the invocation would lose all the data it stored on this run.
Julie finished her spell and cast it on all the angels in the room. Like watching a piece of machinery that’s been pushed too hard, the angels began to grind to a slow halt. Their systems were too overloaded with the spell to be able to do anything else, even move. It looked as thought we may be able to get out of this one after all.
After what seemed like a decade, the portal finally opened. It took straight back to the main server we dive on, which conveniently enough also has out personal systems. We made it back with a few cuts and scrapes, but otherwise, safe and sound, and with the data packets we wanted.