When the man paused for a moment, possibly to try a different form of attack, Andrew lashed out with a lightning bolt and then a combination of both stun and sleep. At the same time, he used his left hand a squeeze Simpson’s thigh as she leveled her gun over his shoulder. Boom. The man dropped like a sack of potatoes, and when they reached him, they could see a nice hole in the middle of his forehead.

“Night shot, Simpson.”

She smiled brightly at him. “We make a good team, don’t we? Why don’t you call me Jess, Andrew.”

He smiled back, momentarily forgetting his surroundings. A fusillade of shots that pounded into his shield recalled him to the situation, and he looked around to see where they were coming from. There appeared to be Japanese further down the road in the trees on the left. He threw a series of fireballs, using his feel of their mental position with his eyes closed. When he opened his eyes again, a whole bunch of trees were on fire down the road a bit further.

The shooting stopped, so they began advancing again.

“You’re really a one-man army, aren’t you?” She said.

“No, where a two-person army.”

She made some sort of noise that he couldn’t quite work out whether it was a word or what it was, but he could feel, magically, that she was happy as she walked along behind him. They came under fire again almost immediately from what looked like the stands of a football stadium. Simpson fired on a fellow who then tumbled out of the stands into the road in a classic move dive. There was at least one more, so he felt for him magically and then spotted him and did a narrow push pencil thin. The fellow collapsed, and they continued their move down the street. He heard the sound of vehicles behind him and, looking over his shoulder, could see what looked like the whole Nuzeeland army advancing down the road behind them.

They stepped over to the side of the road and let the army rumble past. The APC they’d been traveling all the way on pulled up in front of them, and they hopped on with Andrew taking up his usual position sitting on the front glacis and Simpson standing in the commander’s hatch. The crew grinned at them briefly before resuming concentrating on driving their vehicle. The column continued to advance, units splitting off into the side streets as they rolled through the center of Gilong. They passed an old movie theatre on their right before the road went over a crest, and from there, they could just make out the bay in the distance. The Nuzeelanders continued to drive forward in the face of very little organized opposition now. The occasional diehard would open fire on the head of the column, with such attacks met by mass return fire before the advance would continue.

With their APC well back in the column, Andrew wasn’t called upon again until they reached the t-junction, where the road ended just to the right of the old pier. As the APC Andrew was riding on approached the T-junction, they passed another APC, which had an officer standing on the top of it who, as he spotted Andrew, yelled out at them.