Brock, too, had added another Minion to his tally. He dumped the limp body of his second Minion target beside Kade's.
Up ahead, partially concealed by the flurry of snow that was starting to pick up intensity, Tegan was just releasing the broken, lifeless body of a large Minion guard and stripping him of his weapons. Farther still, toward the pathway that led to the mine's entrance, Kade could just make out the immense form of Hunter as the Gen One male stepped past two freshly dead Minions who lay in slumped heaps at his feet. Kade shot a look around the site for the remaining member of the team and found him up near the cargo containers. Chase had a Minion clutched by the throat, holding the struggling mind slave in a slow and painful death grip, his booted feet several inches off the ground. The Minion flailed and convulsed as he began to strangle.
"End it," Kade muttered in a tight whisper as he watched Chase's expression contort with some kind of wild fury. From beside him, Kade heard Brock growl, a low rumble deep in his throat as he, too, caught sight of the other warrior toying with his prey.
Just then, Chase drew his knife and brought it up, poised to deliver a killing strike. That's when Kade saw a flash of dark movement across the way--another Minion, stepping out onto an exterior staircase of one of the surrounding buildings. The Minion guard had his rifle aimed at Chase, about to squeeze the trigger.
"Goddamn it," Kade snarled, bringing up his own weapon and training it on the sudden threat to Sterling Chase's life. Tegan's warning to hold all fire unless absolutely necessary rang through his head. Fuck it.
He had to do it. If he didn't, in another fraction of a second, the Order was going to lose one of its own.
Kade fired.
The shot cracked like a sudden clap of thunder. Up on the stairwell, an explosion of blood and gore blasted out of the side of the Minion's head as Kade's bullet met its target dead-on. The Minion's corpse toppled over the edge, landing with a hard thump on the ground below. At the same time, an alarm went off inside the buildings. The ringing peal of the sirens echoed all around the exterior of the site, plunging the area into instant chaos.
Before Kade had a chance to regret the move that had spared his brethren's life but possibly put their mission in jeopardy, an army of Minions came pouring out of the place from all directions. Gunfire erupted everywhere. Kade and Brock ped for cover behind the nearest outbuilding, returning fire on the group of Minion guards who moved in on them from across the way.
Through the curtain of thickening snowfall, Kade noticed an additional company of Minions over near the squat brick building that protected the mine's entrance. A dozen of them swept out to fortify the front of the building, while behind them, still more appeared in the narrow windows, which were thrown open and bristling with the long black barrels of high-gauge semiautos.
Bullets volleyed from all directions as Kade and the others tried to mow down the line and clear a path toward the mine's entrance, the obvious nerve center of Dragos's operation there. The warriors took out several targets, but not without a few hits on their side. Although their Breed genetics gave them the speed to anticipate and dodge an incoming shot, in the heat of battle it was easy to lose track--and potentially lose one's head.
Kade took a nasty graze to his shoulder as he fired on the Minions. Beside him, Brock flinched away from one bullet and barely evaded another. The rest of the warriors were under similar attack and, like Kade and Brock, giving back as good as they were getting. Minions dropped from various positions, until all that was left were a few tenacious guards holding the line at the front of the mine's entrance. Then, as if to give the challenge an even finer point, the building's steel door opened and an immense, black-clad shape emerged.
"Assassin," Kade hissed to Brock as the huge Gen One male he'd seen a few days ago with Dragos's lieutenant strode outside to join the fray.
No sooner had he said it than one of the warriors broke out of formation and stalked forward, gun blazing.
Holy hell.
Hunter.
"Cover him!" Tegan shouted, but Kade and the others were already on it, vaulting up from their positions and falling in behind the former assassin to blast at their enemies and storm the mine's entrance in force.
Several yards in front now, Hunter's long, determined strides chewed up the snow-covered ground as he dodged to evade a hail of bullets coming at him from ahead on the right. Another volley answered, and the Gen One took a solid hit to his left thigh. Then another to his right shoulder. Hunter barely flinched as his flesh tore away with the impacts. Head lowered, he threw down his weapon and bulldozed forward in a streak of speed that only Breed eyes could follow. All of his fury--all of his lethal intent--was focused on the other Gen One assassin, the Breed male who had been born and bred the same as he, and trained to be expert in just one thing: dealing death.
At the same moment Hunter shot forward, the assassin released his gun and launched himself into the air in a great leap. The pair of Gen Ones collided in a crash of pummeling bone and muscle. As they went down onto the ground, locked in vicious hand-to-hand combat that would not cease until one or the other was killed, the rest of the warriors moved in quickly to mow down the remaining Minions guarding the mine.
The dual battles were furious, bloody, and seemed to take place in a vacuum of time that was both agonizingly slow motion and spinning out at the speed of light.
Kade and the others converged on the mine's entrance. Blood and bone and bullets sprayed the snowfilled darkness. Minions fell in greater numbers now, their sharp, agonized screams splitting the night as the mine's alarms continued to blare and howl.
And on the ground nearby, Hunter and the Gen One assassin rolled and twisted in an indiscernible blur of movement, hammering each other with their fists. As Kade took out another Minion near the entrance, he saw the flash of the assassin's fangs in the darkness as the Gen One opened his maw and brought his bite down hard on Hunter's shoulder.