Divinity Rescue Corps
Interlude- Going All In

Drat did not take to confinement well. He knew that he needed exercise. This he could do: push ups, handstand push ups, and calisthenics of all sorts.

He was used to having sweets whenever he liked. He had a thing for chocolate, cookie and caramel that came side by side with ridiculous, effective marketing campaigns where they tried to sell you only the left bars, or only the right. They were both the same. Drat was not the type of person you’d think would enjoy stupid nonsense like that, but though he scoffed, he secretly enjoyed it thoroughly.

In prison, he was able to buy neither right nor left sides.

He was used to fading into the background whenever he was anywhere. In prison he had harsh, soulless light shining on him at all times, and there was not a shadow in sight.

Helen was supposed to bail him out. He’d locked eyes with her when they’d dragged him in here, where she stood in the hallway outside the portal control room, and he had purposefully given her the most pathetic face he could manage. He might not have the Likability of Cinzy, but he was better than most humans in most of his attributes, and way better when it came to Physicality.

Physicality hadn’t made him into a bodybuilder Adonis like it had with the Guardians, or turned him into a beast like Blake. Instead, it carved out all the fat on his body and left him extremely flexible, fast and agile. That and Durability let him rock Helen’s world when he took her to bed. Likability allowed him to manipulate her outside the bedroom.

Of course, there was no Agility or Muscularity for Drat, the girls, and Trent. They hadn’t been back to the other world to find the system had shifted. Drat hadn’t been disappointed to find himself far less muscular than when he’d gone through the portal. He might never have the chance.

This thing with Helen had to work.

He’d made very sure that she was smitten with him, on his R&R weeks back on earth. It was done as a contingency specifically for this kind of situation. Drat knew he had rivals, or possibly even enemies. He knew he might choose to go against the Agency. He’d lavished her with gifts, flew her to the fucking Seychelles for a week in water you couldn’t get clearer anywhere on earth, and melted her brain with sex the old Drat wouldn’t have been capable of. He’d plied her with gifts, the expensive food, and listened to her inane babble.

So it was unthinkable that she wouldn’t make some attempt to get in and see him.

Instead, he had to put up with conversing with all of Fletcher’s conquests. He had to briefly see Tara through the clear wall when heading out for exercise hour, and how proudly she pushed out and cradled her nonexistent baby bump. He had to see Ivy, glaring at him as though all this was his fault, Cinzy, who he didn’t mind looking at regardless of how deeply she was in with Fletcher, and Isabelle, who seemed oddly chipper despite the fact she’d been in here for weeks. He had to see Trent, who really didn’t deserve this, because he had no fucking clue what was going on.

Isabelle was standing at the door, holding up a hand and flexing one arm.

What? Was she seriously considering—

Isabelle mouthed the word ‘heavy’ very slowly and clearly, or rather… probably ‘Ivy’. Then a word he didn’t know immediately. ‘Tomorrow’ probably.

She pointed at him, flexed one arm again, held up three fingers, and then he was walking past.

Jeez, they were going to try breaking out. The flexing arm clearly meant Physicality Tokens. These were somehow crystallized into nuggets of potential, the only thing on this side of the portal that survived to be accessed. Well, his enhanced attributes and skills were still with him, though he couldn’t access his character sheet.

The slot in the middle of the door was used to deliver food trays to the prisoners. He could easily manifest the Tokens and shoot them through the slot like hockey pucks or tiny frisbees.

The question was, for what? What did they hope to accomplish? Even if Ivy busted her way out, they still had a zillion guards and automatic weapons. They…

Drat stiffened.

All the Tokens worked. Cinzy’s Likability Tokens would make her more charismatic and desirable. She already exuded raw beauty and allure. The guards routinely dawdled in their rounds, pausing to pass her more slowly.

Would Affinity Tokens work? He immediately thought of Trent and his incredible magic. On the other side, his magic was somehow boosted by his crystal Nakamamon bond mate, and Garnet wasn’t here.

The whole thing seemed so incredibly risky, Trent couldn’t imagine it. He didn’t want to think about it, but his mind raced anyway. Having already watched the guards on duty for who they are, where they were stationed, how they were armed, how the place was laid out, he started seriously going through the risks and what would be needed.

Drat got his exercise along with Cinzy. They weren’t allowed to speak with one another, but she grinned and waved. Without any idea of how many Tokens she had and how they were planning to use them, the only thing he could do was smile and wave back, then do a bit of jogging, some pull ups, and a whole lot of permutations. If Alan were here, they could’ve pooled Ingenuity Tokens for him to make the plan.

“Or Fletcher,” he muttered darkly. It was hard to like the guy with the way he snagged all available gorgeous women at all times. Hard to hate him with the work he was doing and his goal of curing his mom’s cancer, but hard to like him regardless.

He was reasonably certain he had a good overview of the way out. They had marched him past the portal room because an imbecile had designed the interior of this place. He knew the route to get there, and he knew the guard configuration for this section of the prison. He resolved to manifest the Physicality Tokens, pretend to trip and fall against the door to Ivy’s cell, and shove them through the slot at waist level.

So, when Helen finally appeared beside the exercise yard exit door, looking grave, he figured nothing could possibly get any worse. How was he going to do this Token thing with Helen inches from him and watching his every move?

“Spence,” she said, and he kept him self from flinching. Good lord, Spencer was the absolute worst name. She fell in step with him, and the guard escort put some pep in his step, in order to give them some space.

“Helen,” he said evenly.

She kept her voice quiet so they wouldn’t be overheard. “I couldn’t get in to see you earlier. You’re in for some serious crimes. Destroying SNORC property, assisting with an otherworldly invasion…”

“I wasn’t in the room,” he said. “I had nothing to do with any of it.”

“Well they told me they’re running a lot of Divination and scrying in the other world.”

A thrill of ice went through Drat’s veins. He wanted to say he doubted that the Agency had that many high level Wizards with that much access to scrying magic, and he didn’t know if they could go weeks and weeks back in time, but he couldn’t say the answer was a definitive no. The fact that they were investigating in the other world was a terrifying prospect.

“I’m innocent,” he said, “and even if I’m guilty, I deserve a trial. We all do. There’s a whole list of human rights we deserve.”

“I know,” she said, her voice subdued.

“I could take you with me,” he said.

“What? You mean… the other world?” Her voice jagged loudly, and she ducked as if the security guys turned to fire at her.

He looked her full in the face. “Tomorrow, Helen.”

She was good looking, a little full in the middle and thighs, which was fine, but she was so slow on the uptake. Still, she had a whole day to process his words and make her decision.

It turned out, when he passed Ivy’s cell and manifested the Physicality Tokens, Helen didn’t bat an eye, because she hadn’t noticed what he was doing.

***

The moment Drat’s rear guard passed in front of Ivy the following day, the operation began. It began with the cell door flying off its hinges, pelting across the hall and knocking his rear guard out cold. The unconscious man slumped to the ground but still slid several feet back anyway. The door came down with a heavy thwok sound.

Ivy launched herself through the door, planted her feet on the opposite wall, and changed trajectory so she could propel herself like a superhero into the gut of Drat’s other guard.

This all happened in fractions of a second.

“All Affinity Tokens to Trent,” she breathed on her way past, then wrenched the cell doors open for Tara, Isabelle, Cinzy and finally Trent.

Drat dutifully manifested all his Affinity Tokens and gave them to a gobsmacked Trent the moment he stepped out.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re going through.”

“They’ll just collapse the portal again,” Trent retorted.

“Not if you stop them,” he called over his shoulder. “Come on!”

Ivy and Isabelle got exactly one kiss in before they all turned.

“Likability Tokens to Cinzy!” Tara called.

“All of them,” Isabelle said. “We’re going all in.”

Drat imagined himself pushing all his huge golden Tokens across the table in a high stakes poker game. His Likability was pitiful, and Cinzy’s grim smile confirmed that as soon as he handed both Tokens over, but her mouth fell open when the bounty came from Trent.

“You scoundrel,” she breathed.

“Let’s get this road on the show,” Trent said. “I still have no idea why I got arrested. I guess the Agency doesn’t like me spending my money to help people.”

“All Ingenuity to Drat,” Tara called, and handed him three Tokens of her own.

“Me?” They hadn’t let him in on the plan, given there was basically no contact between them allowed. Until now. Drat absorbed all the Ingenuity Tokens, 13 in total, then burned all 7 of his own. He then blinked at the strange feeling of expansion that happened in his head, eyes and ears.

Twenty. Fucking. Ingenuity. Tokens. It felt like he’d smoked a specialized kind of weed that hit his brain all over instead of that one spot, and instead of making him feel silly and foggy, he got a pure caffeine productivity brain boost. And instead of the random, ADHD impulses from caffeine, it was pure focus.

“Any Physicality left?” Ivy asked him.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll call out when it’s time to use them,” she said. “I’m wearing off, but I’ve got some left.”

“Which way?” Tara asked.

Which way? His brain was in overdrive, working faster than he’d ever felt it before. The guard shifts he’d been here to witness over the past week, the guards themselves and their personalities, their relationships with one another, the security cameras and what they could see, what they couldn’t see, where they were located, all that information parsed through his mind in an instant.

He started forward, then stopped as he heard the clomp of booted feet. Holding up three fingers, he swept a hand back in a way he hoped they would understand.

All it really took was one jab of the fingers. He knew the moment the first guard entered the room that it was the shorter one, so he got the joint between the leg and the junk precisely at the side of the armored codpiece and jammed that codpiece directly into the man’s balls. A horrified squeak came out of him before he doubled over and the second guard tripped over his butt. Drat darted forward and grabbed onto the weapon of the third, pulling him inside once he started tangling his legs with the legs of the second.

The girls did the rest.

Once they’d knocked out all three and tied them up with their own zip ties, Drat pointed a sidearm out the door and without even looking shot out the security camera.

That was how it went. Physicality Tokens gave you a very short burst because you were engaging the mana in your muscles to do superhero shit, but Ingenuity lingered for you to use it in little sips and gulps.

He maneuvered them through the halls, up the stairs, and had them pause at exactly the right spots so the guards couldn’t get an angle on them, before Ivy leapt up and grabbed the one guy by the strap holding her gun onto her body armor. She went down hard, as did the guy Isabelle took down. Drat liberated their flash bang grenades and pushed on.

Drat paused at the center of one hallway, waiting for the camera to swing to the side and away from where it could see them, so he could leap up and wrench it off its contact point. If he had even a cell phone right now, he could hack the whole system and turn every camera off, then disable the portal’s Ragnarok kill switch.

There were half a million ‘if onlys’ running through his mind right now.

Stepping into the hallway, he simply said, “Cinzy,” and froze. Cinzy stepped forward, bright as the sun to his brain and hormones. If Likability literally brightened her as it did to his sense of empathy, compassion and horniness, he’d have had his face melted. As it was, she hadn’t directed her Likability at him, so he only experienced a vague sadness that it wasn’t turned her way. A sliver of himself remained, telling him she was doing this for a purpose.

They were just outside the control room. The camera he hadn’t bothered to disable; he needed them to be able to see the blonde goddess sauntering down the hall like it was a runway in Milan or Paris.

“Now, Helen,” he said under his breath. If she acted, they could save some of the Physicality Tokens.

With his Ingenuity like this, time froze and he experienced an anxiety coupled with a planning capability that was still unreal. If she didn’t open the door, Isabelle or Tara probably still had enough Physicality to wrench the door open despite the magnetic locks. He might be able to open the panel with one of the multi-tools he’d found on one of the guards, and short out—

The door to the portal control room opened, and he grinned. When Drat got inside, Helen was kneeling at Cinzy’s feet with the dozen other techs.

The room had a huge bay window overlooking the portal room, with its enormous stone ring some thirty feet across, and the machinery all hooked up to it. As for this room, it was a spare, barely carpeted place composed of three different tiers, each with expansive computer consoles covering different aspects of Agency portal operation.

“They’ve opened up the portal room and started it up,” Cinzy said, and ran a comforting hand over Helen’s jaw line, then another of the kneeling, worshipping techs.

“We need to know where the explosives are attached,” Drat said. “That’s Trent.”

“I just… disable explosives?” Trent asked.

“You boost your mana with the Affinity Tokens, you engage your powers, you use the mountain stone to get through the walls, or use the concrete itself, and snap the explosives… there.” He tapped several commands into the nearest console and got a flashing readout of where the explosive devices had been set up for the Ragnarok command. “There, there, there and there.”

They all filed out of the room and into the portal room, leaving he and Cinzy.

“You’ve done well,” Cinzy said in a soothing, smooth tone. It melted Drat’s guts and gave him the warm fuzzies just to hear it, and it wasn’t aimed at him. Now she did turn to him.

“You promised this one… Helen… that she could come through?” Cinzy asked him.

He gritted his teeth. Ingenuity was still going overdrive in his brain. He thought it overrode the near-overwhelming influence of Likability she was emitting, but he couldn’t be sure. His body had reacted of its own accord, breaking him out in a clammy sweat and getting him painfully erect in seconds.

The dispassionate part of him could take or leave Helen, but Cinzy wouldn’t approve, and that would mean a diminishing of their relationship. He might need her assistance in the future… was Helen’s intrusion on his life worth that? He judged that yes, it was. This instance of Cinzy’s incredible Likability showed that she had immense potential power and influence over anyone, anywhere. She might be wrapped around Fletcher’s finger for some reason Drat couldn’t fathom, but she helped out her friends.

“I did,” he said finally. “She let us in.”

Cinzy took Helen’s hand and with a hint of a nudge, coaxed the entranced girl to her feet. “Come. Let’s get you through the portal.”

When he got into the portal room, he found that Trent had indeed used the concrete to reach out and crush the explosive devices, but with surgical precision. The rebar of reinforced concrete poked through in grid form in four different places, and fists of concrete hovered around the portal, complete with disconnected explosive devices within.

“I can’t believe it,” Trent muttered, staring at his hands, “my magic worked.”

Tara was still there, looking back at them. Mental calculations flared to life once again, peering at her stomach.

“Come on you guys!” she called.

This is Christopher’s team doing the improbable.

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