our erstwhile savior to be.

"Why would I have a rabbit up my sleeve? Do you need it for a summoning?" he replied. How long had he been in the other realms? Was he asleep the whole time? What had I gotten myself into?

"Any more tricks? The sight of Gorgie advancing on them is not going to hold back the reserves." I think he got my point. He glanced around, taking stock of the situation. It looked like he considered using the APC, but I think it just confused him. He then inscribed a pentacle around himself, waved his wand, and flames starting dancing at the points of the figure. He started chanting, all the while with bullets dancing about him.

We were running low on ammo. I don't even know what Gorgie was using for ammunition. She never paused to reload and any bullet that hit her quickly formed into a stitch to repair any damage it caused. For the most part, we were staying low, only coming out of cover to shoot where the Mark VII directed our fire. Gorgie was mopping up their forces, but I could feel their mages working on her.

Bit Brain shouted that Tenney was on the way. The traffic level and the fact that the Johnson had radioed his pilots to leave had finally spurred her into action. One pilot was dead and the rest were wearing kill collars. Bit Brain had come up with the idea: couple some explosive gel and a receiver to a collar. If the person with the transmitter either triggered the device or failed to heartbeat an okay signal every five minutes, the collar exploded and severed the head off of the prisoner.

Evidently one of the pilots thought he was indispensable and was going to obey the Johnson. After Tenney shot him and put the kill collars on the others, she revealed to them that she was our rigger. We had to secure a LZ and take out any AA the Paladins had in the area.

I don't know how many times I felt hell broke loose that night, but next to C'gull's arrival, what happened next was the most impressive. He used his reanimation trick to control that damned dragon. At first I thought it was still alive and was going to attack us again. Then I saw the grin on C'gull's face and I knew the Paladins were truly fragged.

The zombie-like dragon better work, because he used up most of that white light to bring it back to life. He started to fling mana bolt after mana bolt at the Paladins. Not only was he trying to spend all of the white light, I got the feeling he truly enjoyed fragging elves. "Garbo, help me expend it. Every abomination on the face of the planet will be drawn here. We need to get rid of it and get as far away from here as possible."

"We've got air transport, ETA is another minute. They'll be coming out of the south, keep the dragon and your bolts away from them. They'll be like the APC you took out earlier, but flying." I told him as I started to expend the mana bolts. Not knowing who else from my old circle was out there, I was casting sleep spells. I also diverted some of it to form some water elementals. We were far from the nearest river, lake, or ocean, but I tapped into the underground springs I could feel. I directed the elementals towards the approaching hellhounds. "When the Sarge pops off some purple smoke, the copters will land. Get aboard the nearest one."

Just when things started to look up, I heard the whine of approaching copters. Problem was that they sounded too heavy to be our tickets out of here. The Kid spotted them first, heavy attack copters. "C'gull, see those ones east of us, those are not ours. Get that dragon over there and keep them busy." I could see the raw willpower flow from