Merry Xmas everyone!!!!

“Holy shit!” the girl said, staring at the piece of metal that thumped down onto the ground at their feet.

“Yeah. This one’s a good deal stronger than the one we took out. Hold on.”

He closed his eyes and felt for the Japs. With the mentalist on their right down, the fire from the Nuzeelanders in the bush behind them had forced the surviving Japs to retreat to the wooded scrub they had advanced out of originally. The strong mentalist had brought up the rear, shielding as many as he could. The other mentalist was definitely dead. Good!

“You got that mentalist. Good job.” He said the sniper.

“What about the other one? I haven’t seen someone carve metal like that.”

“He’s powerful, certainly. But we should be able to take him the same way. Just give me a minute to collect more power.”

He set about drawing power from the sun. The other enemy mentalist was very strong, and he would need every bit of power he could muster. The other two studied him even as a few bullets pinged off the overturned APC.

“You’re glowing!” The girl said.

“What?” Asked the Captain.

“Can’t you see it, sir? He’s literally glowing with power.”

Andrew smiled. “The captain can’t see, but you can, which means you have basic mentalist talent yourself. You’ve never had any formal training?

She shook her head. “No. I went through a period where I could feel this pressure on me mentally that was worse the more people there were around, and then I sort of imagined this mental wall around my head, and it went away, eventually.”

“Right. Well, you need training. In the meantime, we have other matters to take care of. You ready?” he asked, and the girl nodded. “Same as last time.”

He moved down to the other end of the wreck and felt her moving alongside him. He stopped, checked she was ready, and then stepped out from behind the cover to his right. The girl stepped out behind him, and he focused on the mentalist. He cast Control, then Fear, and finally, Fireball. She shot a split second later, and there came the fingernail on a blackboard screech of a powerful mentalist dying. A hail of shots was bouncing off his shield, but with no mentalist to protect them, the rest of the Japs were toast. He moved forward, his shield tinted so it was obvious to the girl, and he used the needle punch to slaughter most of the Japanese troops before they could retreat out of his range, and the girl got the rest.

“The column can advance again, Captain.” He informed the Nuzeeland officer who had followed them, also using Andrew’s shield for cover.

The man nodded and then glanced at the girl. “You ride with the mentalist from now on, Simpson.”

“Sir.” She replied.

The Captain quickly had a couple of squads double time across the bridge and spread out into the woods on the far side of the gully to check on the Japs while a group of troops gathered around the APC and tipped back upright. They then pushed far enough off the road to let their vehicles get past. His driver brought the LAV back down to the main road, and he climbed back aboard with the girl hopping in the rear seat.

He pointed towards the bush where the enemy was and held up both his hands with his fingers splayed, then the left hand with the fingers still fully splayed, and put on his right hand, he held up only three fingers. The man nodded and then disappeared back into the bush, presumably passing that information on while the other soldier crouched in view of Andrew. He moved to the end of the APC and stuck his head around the corner, studying the position. The enemy troops were hidden in the bush, and it was going to be costly to winkle out. Unless he made the decision to earn his pay properly.

He heard the sound of running feet followed by shots and then the clangs of bullets ricocheting off the APC, and two of the Nuzeelanders joined him, hiding behind the wrecked APC. One was definitely the fellow he’d signaled to earlier who had Captain’s tabs on his collar. The other was a female carrying a rifle that was nearly as long as she was tall. Andrew did a doubletake and then realized belatedly that it was a sniper’s rifle. He scratched his head, trying to devise a way to use the girl and her sniper rifle to their advantage. He could tell where the enemy were because he could sense their glow magically, as even the ordinary soldiers had a small glow. The trouble was she couldn’t. Hmmm.

Then he felt another vehicle coming up behind the enemy position. This one had four people in it. However, two of them had to be mentalists as they felt very strong even at a distance. He could sense when the vehicle stopped, and they disembarked somewhere out of sight. All the enemy sort of congregated together in a huddle while they discussed tactics, and then the huddle broke up just like in a football game. The Japs lined up and began to advance. The Nuzeelanders behind them opened fire but with little effect.

“They’re shielded.” He yelled. Then he reached out mentally and felt a strong mentalist to the left front, a much stronger one to the right front, and what felt like an untrained but strong mentalist right next to him. The girl! He’d worry about that later. The girl at least had a natural mental shield, which was why he hadn’t noticed she was a mentalist earlier. He turned to the girl.

“There are two enemy mentalists. A strong one and a weak one. The weak one is on the left. Get behind me and shoot over my shoulder. I am going to distract him with energy and mental spells. He’ll almost certainly drop his physical shield to protect against me. As soon as you see my fireball, shoot him.”

The girl nodded and then pointed at her ear. “Shooting right beside your ear will almost certainly deafen you.”

“I have protection.” She stared at him for a moment and then shrugged as if to say it was his funeral. She hefted her rifle, checked the safety, and nodded. He turned and felt her move right behind him. Then he stepped to the left, which meant they moved out of the cover provided by the vehicle. He knew which man out there was the mentalist and hit him with the Mental Control spell, which slithered off his mental shield, then the much more showy fireball spell, Crack! The rifle fired, and his sound-muffling spell did its job. The rifle sounded like it was a hundred meters away, not a few centimeters! The mentalist went down. He shoved the girl sideways, and the slash from the other mentalist impacted the front edge of the overturned vehicle, cutting off a large chunk of metal.

He hopped out and began moving back down the dirt road that his vehicle had turned up even as the gunner swung his machine gun around, facing where the shots had come from across the far side bridge. He didn’t actually open fire as it wasn’t obvious where the enemy was, which Andrew thought was wise as all it would do would be attract the Jap’s attention. There was no point in attracting attention if he didn’t have a decent target to make it worthwhile. Andrew used his magic to reach out into the distance and sensed only six enemy troops, maybe three hundred meters up the road hiding in the trees. He opened his eyes and compared the scene with his mental image but couldn’t actually see any of the enemy soldiers, so he moved position further along the dirt road, getting much closer to the main road they had been driving along.

The Nuzeelanders were dismounting from their vehicles and deploying into the scrub both on the high side of the road and also on the low side from where they were starting to return fire. Then he felt more enemy troops coming up the road. They were moving closer so fast that they had to be in a vehicle, he decided. Just before they would have come into view, the vehicle pulled over, and he could feel the enemy soldiers disembarking and spreading out. That included the driver, who also jumped out of the vehicle according to Andrew’s magical detection. The vehicle had been packed, and as a result, they added another fourteen soldiers to the enemy force that was blocking their advance.

Andrew put up a shield and raced over to the burning wreck, sheltering behind it. He’d angled the shield a little, so the bullets striking it hadn’t knocked him off balance as he ran across the space. He sliced open the top of the APC as he climbed onto the deck of the vehicle and then looked inside, but no one was still alive. He sucked the heat out of the fires burning inside the cab while absorbing the energy until he had snuffed them, by which time he felt like he was glowing with power. With the fire out, he turned toward the enemy and let loose a fireball using all the power he could. The wooded area wasn’t tinder dry, but it wasn’t damp either, and an area of maybe a hundred meters across went up in flames with a whoosh.

At least one of the enemy soldiers was caught in the fire, and a couple of others had to scramble to get out of the way, so he used a push spell to force the fire to change direction, which caught one of the two before the fire front passed them. He dropped down from the deck of the vehicle and looked back toward the Nuzeelanders. A couple of them were crouched at the edge of the bush, and one of them nodded toward the vehicle behind him, so he shook his head, indicating that there were no survivors. The man grimaced, so Andrew thought he would make the news even worse.

Contact with headquarters informed them all the troops that were available had been pushed forward to a point west of Princetown, where they were digging in until the Nuzeeland troops arrived. Safely on a main road, they raced westward to Port Campbell, where they found the Nuzeeland troops had been getting themselves ashore from their transport vessels and were organizing themselves. A lot of the heavy equipment was still aboard the ships and heading toward Warrnambool to be offloaded, but they had managed to offload a whole range of wheeled AFVs and even a couple of light-tracked ones from a couple of specialized landing ships and maybe two thousand troops. They only had mortars rather than heavy artillery, but the General in charge of the expeditionary force, who had landed with his troops and intended to lead from the front, felt it was better that they bottle the Japs up in the hilly and wooded terrain between Princetown and Appollo Bay rather than letting them get out into the open countryside beyond Princetown.

Despite assurances of his intention to stop the Japanese in the wooded hills, the General let a whole day go by before the first of the Nuzeeland troops headed east along the Great Ocean Road. Andrew was forced to say goodbye to his mad but speedy driver, who headed back north with the vehicle they had come south in, and Andrew swapped into a Nuzeeland LAV. It was quite a nice little four-wheel, lightly armored vehicle designed for reconnaissance, primarily. Its armor would stop small arms fire and slow down the cyborg’s lasers but wouldn’t stand up to heavy weapons, but that was okay, as that was one of the reasons Andrew was along.

The Nuzeeland General and most of the senior officers of the unit were dubious about the value of having a mentalist attached to their force, particularly one that insisted on riding at the front, but enough information had circulated about the effectiveness of the Jap mentalists that they were willing to accept his addition to their force. To give the Nuzeelanders their due, once they got moving, they moved quickly. They didn’t stop until they reached the defensive positions of the small militia group holding the exit of the Great Coast Road from the more rugged terrain it passed through after leaving Apollo Bay.

There was no sign of the Japanese, but that didn’t mean anything as their scouts probably included at least one mentalist who could detect the Nuzeelanders from some considerable distance and not have to expose himself. They broke camp at dawn and resumed their advance along the road toward Lower Gellibrand. There had been no indications or reports that the Japanese had reached this far west, so they were traveling at a fair clip. Andrew’s LAV was in the lead, followed by a wheeled APC, with the rest of the force strung out along the road in a long sinuous column.

Ironically, they had passed a sign that said high-risk area not that far back when shots impacted the light shield he was keeping in front of the vehicle. Fortunately, the driver heard the shots and swung left into a side road stopping behind some bushes up a small rise. The second vehicle, a wheeled APC, wasn’t so lucky and it took an RPG round in the from cabin, rolled, and came to a halt diagonally across the road about ten meters beyond the road junction Andrew’s LAV had turned up. The vehicles behind the APC came to a screeching halt and began backing up the road. Shots continued to fill the air, and the bushes Andrew’s vehicle was hiding behind shook as bullets impacted the leaves and branches.