They pushed forward, keeping right up against the buildings on the right-hand side, ducking into doorways and such as they advanced another hundred meters or so without anything happening. Then, a fusillade of shots erupted from diagonally across the road to their front, indicating that some of the Japanese troops had gotten into a position to fire on them. None of the shots had any effect, as he was holding a really hard shield to defend against the shells from the AGC’s cannon. He opened a small hole for Simpson over his right shoulder and put a sound shield over his ear to protect against the sound.

“Can you see that?”

Her response came in the form of the shot she fired, which he assumed hit one of the Japanese. Her accuracy was such that she would hit with four out of five shots she fired in the huge rifle she wielded meant that whatever she fired at stayed down permanently, generally speaking. He stood still and let her take several shots, which resulted in the Japanese fire diminishing rapidly until it stopped altogether, and they proceeded to move further down the road again. He must’ve lent a bit too far out when provided the target because the AGC fired, the shell hitting his shield, which he had angled, fortunately.

Because he had been protecting them from the shots from diagonally across the road, the shield was at about a sixty-degree angle to where the AGC was firing from, and instead of exploding in his face as the shell earlier had, this one deflected off his shield at a shallower angle and impacted a building a good distance back up the road and again, on the other side of the street. He jumped out from the cover they were using, concentrated, and lobbed a tight fireball into the fighting compartment of the AGC, using a bit of telekinesis to pull it down into the open top. He ducked back just as the thing exploded in a massive ball of fire.

He grinned at Simpson, and they began walking down the road, not bothering to hide anymore. The occasional Japanese burst of small arms fire in their direction was invariably met by Simpson sticking her gun passed his shoulder into the hole he created in the shield and her blowing the person firing away. Between attacks by the enemy, he could hear firing both left and right as the Nuzeeland troops moved down the parallel streets, clearing the enemy from them as well. They passed the smoldering wreckage of the AGC and continued their advance in the face of the occasional Japanese fire.

So far that day, they had found no Japanese willing to surrender, although they hadn’t really come across any civilians yet. The troops advancing behind them ducked into buildings as they passed to clear them, but most of them were empty, just the occasional holdout who all seemed to be soldiers that were too wounded to retreat. Strangely, the further they advanced, the less the resistance proved to be. He wasn’t sure whether it was because the Japanese were running out of troops or enthusiasm. Most of the houses they passed seemed to have been ransacked at some point since the invasion started, but they didn’t look like they had been subjected to long-term occupation by civilians, or at least that was how it looked to Andrew. Which he thought odd given the civilians they had found earlier, but he supposed they might have been families of some of the troops and were further forward for that reason.

“What are you doing?” She asked.

“Trying to modify the healing spell that I know so it’ll work on my ACL.”

Simpson shook her head, but the medic perked up.

“You really think you can fix an ACL rupture with one of these spells?”

Andrew shrugged. “Maybe. I’m going to give it a go in a minute if you want to hang around.”

“This I’ve got to see.” The medic said. “Growing up, magic was just something they did in the old days. Uncanny people tended to be ostracised in recent times. Not that I’ve ever met anybody quite like you.”

Andrew nodded. It sounded as if Nuzeeland was worse than here and more like what his father had complained about. He still hadn’t seen much of that sort of discrimination so far himself. The few bits and pieces of discrimination that he’d experienced were mostly verbal quips that he hadn’t paid much attention to. He grinned at the medic and focused on his modifications to the spell. He reasoned that he could use the bit for pulling the skin back together to repair a cut, as it should work just as well for repairing the ligament if he got the spell right. He studied what he had come up with, memorized it, and then cast the spell on his knee.

It hurt briefly, then it ached for a bit, but the swelling started going down, which was another section of the spell, and the rapidly forming bruise from where his knee contacted the ground started fading as well. The medic watched with his mouth hanging open. The ache started to die away, and Andrew flexed his knee. There was no shooting pain, so he reached over for his trousers, which had been deposited to his left. He fed his legs and decided that lying down was too awkward, so he stood up gingerly. He eased up on his good leg when he put weight on his bad knee. It was fine, perhaps a little sore, but nothing to write home about.

“How is it?” The medic asked, unable to keep the amazed tones out of his voice.

“It feels a bit tender, but it’s fine.” To emphasize the point, he walked a couple of paces before returning to pull up his trousers on finally.

“Damn.” The medic said.

Before they could do anything, there was a hissing sound as a shot from the AGC down the street went swooshing past to explode against the building across the road. Looking around, they spotted the APC that had been easing around the corner further up the street and signaled it to back up out of view.

“Time to earn our pay, Simpson.”

She grinned at him and moved over to where she put down her rifle. “Ready whenever you are.”

“Okay. We’ll keep to the right and see what we can achieve.” They grinned at each other, and the medic just shook his head as Andrew eased around the corner with his shields up, angled from right to left, and started down the street. They must’ve been seen at first, but then the AGC fired a shell, which he felt more than he saw. It impacted his shield but didn’t explode due to the angle he was holding it, and the shell rocketed across the street and exploded against a building on the far side of the street, three buildings further up the street. The impact still staggered him, but he was pleased that it didn’t explode on contact with his shield.

“She did a good job, bro.” The medic said. “Any other problems? Heard you got blown off the front of the APC.”

“Yeah. Scared the hell out of me, I can tell you. My left knee’s bad.”

“Right. Will your trousers come off, or do we need to cut them?”

“I think they’ll slide off if I undo them.”

Simpson had stood up and glanced around the corner of the building but mustn’t have spotted anything because now she looked down at him with a grin.

“I could help.”

The medic was getting his left boot off while he tried to undo the righthand one.

Simpson leaned down and took over, undoing his right-hand boot, then helped slide it off his foot. She then moved sideways along his leg to get a little better position and reached for his belt. Her hand stopped short of the buckle, and she looked him in the eye, grinning just a little before going further. He could tell she was enjoying herself, and she smiled at him. He tried to shrug without hurting himself any more than he already was.

“Go for it.” He said and lay down, closing his eyes.

By lying there with his eyes closed and trying to ignore things down in his waist area, he was able to keep himself under control, particularly as he made a conscious effort not to try and differentiate between whether it was Simpson or the medic doing something. He felt his trousers being slipped down and then gentle prodding of his knee. He tried to think of a healing spell that would work, but generally, they didn’t work as well on your body as when used on other people.

“The verdict, Doc?” He said after a few moments when the gentle ministrations stopped.

“It’s a bit hard to tell here in the field, but at a guess, I’d say it’s an ACL when you landed.”

Andrew considered that.

“If you got a pad, you can show me a diagram of the ACL injury, mate?” He asked, sitting himself up on his elbows.

The medic shrugged, looking puzzled, but he pulled a combat pad out of his jacket. It was slightly different in design from the Ostrayan ones but worked the same. He fiddled with it for a little bit and then showed Andrew a picture of the ACL rupture. Actually, the pad had a series of pictures from different angles, and Andrew studied them all for a few moments, swiping backward and forwards on the screen as he lay slightly on one side to free up one of his arms while he rested on the other’s elbow while his free hand held the pad.

He mentally brought up the healing spell that he had memorized the best. It was suited cuts, even bullet holes, rather than a ruptured ACL. He couldn’t remember anything better in his grandmother’s journal, which he didn’t have with him anyway, so we set about modifying the spell on the fly. He must’ve looked a bit odd lying half on his side, staring into space as Simpson finally interrupted him.

The next Princess book is out

The Princess & The Spy

The next book will be Taroniah at Work (changed the title) followed by Kyron the Warlord.

With that, he took himself off, heading for a group of officers who had gathered nearby, clearly waiting for him. Whatever it was, he said to them it was over with pretty quickly as they split up and headed off in various directions. Troops began relaxing and setting up tents, except for the ones on patrol out towards the Japanese lines. For their part, the Japanese seemed content to just sit in their defensive positions and wait rather than do anything aggressive. Andrew could hear a considerable artillery barrage happening off in the distance somewhere to the north, but their part of the front went quiet now that they’d knocked down the Japanese drone.

In the morning, the night-time patrols reported no sign of the Japanese, so they mounted up and resumed the advance up the main road into the built-up area to see if the Japanese had indeed pulled out. They encountered little resistance, just the occasional sniper. Andrew was riding in the front of the lead APC with his shield out as before, and he quickly took care of any snipers after their shots hit his shield. The buildings all looked like they had been ransacked as the Japanese retreated, or perhaps when they’d originally advanced, as it was hard to tell without stopping. The first serious resistance came when they reached a retail area where several roads intersected. Numerous signs referenced Belmont, so he assumed that was the suburb they were in.

They drove up Corio Street and turned right into High Street. The Japs had one of the AGCs hiding off the road with just the edge of the body and the gun sticking around a building, and it fired as they rounded the corner. Andrew wasn’t expecting the blast from a large caliber shell, and he was knocked off the front of the APC and onto the ground, where he landed heavily.

“You all right?” Simpson called.

“Back up, back up quick!” he yelled at her, and she quickly passed the message on to the driver.

He had done something to his left knee, and his arm felt like he’d come off a motorbike at speed. He scrambled over toward the shop on the righthand corner even as the APC growled backward, just in time too, as the next shot from the AGC just missed and hit a tree on the far side of the corner. He couldn’t put any real pressure on his knee, but he could hop and managed to get behind the cover the shop on the corner presented. The door had been smashed open, and the inside looked a mess, although, with no lights on, it was hard to see in the gloom. The Nuzeeland troops were deploying and beginning to advance down the side street. Simpson came running over, cradling her massive gun and carrying a first aid kit.

“Shit! Your arm’s all grazed. Let me get some stuff on it. You’re going to need a new tunic.”

She proceeded to start undoing the buttons on his tunic and then stripped it off him. He was having trouble moving his arm, so he sat and let her tend to the grazed section of his elbow and arm that he couldn’t get a proper look at because it hurt too much to twist his arm around. She was finishing wrapping it up when a proper medic arrived and watched her finish.