The Dark Edge Chronicles - Clan War

Chapter 38: White Flame in Dark Shadow

Thankfully the closest secondary entrance, a winding pathway through an old medieval sewer, was within minutes of the entrance his team had been protecting. Long empty of anything resembling human waste, it was more like a soggy cave that meandered its way into the depths, dank and barely navigable.

It was also significantly more stealthy of a way in, a fact not lost on the Qos Viran Lord Commander. If he had been in charge of finding a way into the cavern and to the Castle, this would've been the way he would've chosen. Because that way he would've avoided having to cut through the cavern's entire defense to get to their objective.

That was mostly because Qos Viran special ops teams were relatively small. They couldn't afford to get caught in a massive firefight that could kill them all.

The White Flames apparently weren't constrained by numbers, throwing entire regiments into this effort to rescue Demaskieros. They could use cannon fodder as a battering ram to smash their way through the perimeter, pound open the doors, then run roughshod over the remaining security team on their way to the Castle. And that wasn't even accounting for the fact they were using stock human weaponry and vehicles out in the open, such as the A-10s with their heavy guns and missiles.

Pondering that was enough to tighten Lash's expression as he carefully squeezed between two old iron gates covered in rust to enter the ancient sewer's broken down access point. From here he would need to descend three flights of worn and winding stairs, each covered with moss and growth from centuries of neglect, just to get to the sewer itself.

Then, he had to hope that the winter in Warsaw had been relatively dry. Or storm runoff would make navigating the sewer line itself, a winding tunnel braced with stone arches, even more challenging. Especially since he had lost his boots in the explosion.

But navigate it he must. Or there was no hope of reaching the underground fortress before Janner and his nanite-filled flunkies whisked Demaskieros away before the arch traitor faced vampiric justice.

After the Nocturnum fell, Lash immediately knew the modified humans would try to recover their ally, if only to tie up a loose thread. Demaskieros simply knew too much about Janner's operation to be left in vampire hands, where skilled interrogators like Master Vulcrum could leverage information out of him. Combined with what they already knew from the compromised White Flame officer's mind, the hacked VOC database, and what data Magnar had managed to gather before his death, Lash and his allies would have the keys to Janner's White Flame kingdom.

At least, Lash was fairly certain that's how the modified humans were looking at the situation. And the attack on the Castle served as confirmation.

Ironically, thanks to their own intel gathering efforts, the vampires already had a pretty damn good idea of what Janner and his cohorts were doing. All they lacked was a physical map that outlined Janner's bases, strongholds and service hubs that they could attack and hurt the White Flames back with. Oh, and somebody on the inside that could feed them operational intel as it was happening, would be nice. Like this attack on the Castle. It would've been extremely helpful if they had known the White Flames would throw an entire ashing army at them!

Of course that was impossible. No vampire could pull it off. The modified humans had perfected their methods in detecting vampires in almost every situation. Lash would almost wager a good amount of gold that these filthy bastards had been hunting vampires for a very, very long time. Perhaps even since shortly after the vampires appeared as a self-perpetuating species, thanks to a series of fortunate mutations, thousands of years ago. After all, there had been humans hunting them before.

Even now they were being hunted; Inaya spoke of the aggressive hunters in India as one such group, their unrelenting efforts pushing Clan Ganges nearly to extinction.