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.