Cole brought his group to the connector without incident. There, they cleared the ground floor in a loose file, took the stairwell to the second-floor connector, and crossed into the main building.

The second floor turned out to be completely empty, which confirmed that Dunmar had committed everything above them.

Cole radioed the other teams. Miles had reached the second-floor fire escape landing without contact, and Ethan reported the first floor clear across the board: lobby, security room, all of it untouched. Dunmar hadn’t left so much as an early warning post, either.

They consolidated on the second floor just long enough to confirm the plan, then split to their assigned approaches.

Cole held his team below the third-floor landing, gave it a five-count to let the other elements close the distance, then started up.

They sliced the angles as they ascended, using the staircase railing and the edge of the landing to progressively expose the floor above rather than cresting blind. Two of Dunmar’s men had set up behind desks about thirty feet from the staircase, oriented squarely at the top of the stairs.

Cole picked up the first guy as soon as the angle cleared his line of sight, while Mack tagged the second. Neither had time to adjust. They subsequently raised their hands and headed downstairs.

Just then, a third broke from a shelving unit on the right. Cole adjusted and had the shot lined up, but Elina beat him to it: pretty impressive, he had to admit.

From the fire escape, Ethan radioed one contact tagged and cleared. Miles came through the elevator shaft access with the same. Between all three approaches, they’d cleared almost half of Dunmar’s force without taking a hit.

The tagged soldiers passed by them with raised hands. The whole process reminded Cole of organized airsoft back home: minus the sixteen-year-olds arguing about whether a pellet actually made contact. Dunmar’s guys handled it better than half the grown adults at most American fields, which was a low bar, but still.

Cole then brought his team to the fourth floor, which put up more of a fight. Dunmar’s men had heard everything on three and adjusted accordingly, and with the elevator shaft and staircase as the only two approaches, the engagements were tighter and faster.

Cole’s team still won every draw, but not by the margin he would’ve preferred.

That brought Dunmar down to four: himself and three others, all consolidated on the fifth floor.

So far, Cole’s team had swept through the building about as cleanly as the skill gap predicted. Dunmar’s men were disciplined and adapted well after the third floor, and honestly, with the right training pipeline, most of them had the raw material to make solid Rangers. But a force-on-force drill was ultimately a fast-draw contest, and Cole’s team had the faster draw on almost every exchange.

But the fifth floor didn’t care about any of that. No amount of maneuver or tactical thinking was going to overcome four guys camping the only way in.

Not to mention the air rifles, which only compounded the problem. Without full-auto to suppress the room or equipment to toss in, there was no going Rambo through the door. The only option was to slice it from the stairs and hope the angles cooperated.

Cole stacked his team below the final landing: himself and Mack first, then everyone else behind.

They started up slow, working the angle one step at a time. The first thing that came into view was Dunmar, standing on top of a cabinet slightly offset to the side, with his rifle already trained on the stairwell. Cole saw him and adjusted, but Dunmar had the shot lined up before Cole’s rifle caught up to the elevation; he’d been slicing for floor-level targets, and the correction cost him the draw.

The pellet caught him square in the chest.

Cole couldn’t even be mad: that was a great play by Dunmar.

He raised his hand and stepped aside. Mack pushed past him immediately, and the rest of the team followed. With Dunmar exposed and his remaining men now outnumbered and outgunned, the whole thing collapsed in seconds.

Aside from being the only casualty, Cole considered the exercise a good run given the constraints. At least now they had a concrete sense of what it actually looked like against live opposition, which beat theorizing about it over a floor plan.

Cole nodded at his team as they came back down. “Good work, guys. You as well, Sergeant. Great play, honestly.”

Dunmar smiled. “Well fought, Sir Cole. Shall we head back?”

They headed back to the lobby. Dunmar fell into step beside Cole somewhere along the way, quiet for a moment.

“A question, Sir Cole, if you would permit it.”

“Sure.”

“I must ask… And excuse my bluntness, sir, but did you or your party make use of any enhancement: physical or otherwise?”

Cole shook his head. “No magic. Air rifles only, like we agreed.”

Dunmar held his hands up. “No slight intended, sir. Your word stands. I have, on rare occasion, put Slayer Elites through their turns before, and what I saw today was beyond that. I would sooner know how it was done than guess at it.”

Cole couldn’t help but take that as a compliment. From Dunmar’s frame of reference, the speed differential probably looked like enhancement, because in this world, that was usually what accounted for it.

“Well, I think it boils down to magic: or the lack of it,” Cole said. “See, magic doesn’t exist where we come from. So our entire military doctrine evolved around maximizing what the human body and mind can do on their own. Reflexes, decision-making, physical conditioning: all of it gets pushed to the biological ceiling, because there’s nothing beyond that to compensate.”

“Hm,” he said. “I suppose that would explain it.”

They reached the lobby, where the rest of both teams had gathered. Dunmar’s men were already picking apart the drill amongst themselves: who’d been positioned where, how fast Cole’s team had moved through each floor, what they might’ve done differently. One of them had apparently taken a pellet to the balls, which his squadmates found a lot funnier than he did.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Cole figured they could afford a few minutes before getting back to it, if only to let someone apply healing magic to the poor bastard.

Dunmar approached once his men had settled. “What are your orders for us now, sir?”

“We’ll be doing the same drill in a little bit. Same setup, but with magic this time. I’d like you to run the same general defensive strategy: adjust where you see fit, but keep the overall framework. That way we can isolate what magic actually changes instead of redesigning the whole exercise. We’ll put the exercise on a thirty-minute timer, as well.”

Dunmar nodded. “And how are we to conduct it, sir?”

Cole had his answer ready. “Use enhancement and utility, whatever helps. Offensive magic’s fine as long as it’s nonlethal; throw something if you want a hit register, as long as it doesn’t put someone down. Same rules on our side.”

He paused. “Oh, and we should probably ban barriers. Kinda defeats the purpose since we’re using pellets and light spells.”

“Aye, that I can abide. No barriers, and nothing that will lay a man up.” Dunmar glanced back toward his squad. “I will have ten minutes with the lads to settle how it is to be handled.”

“Take your time. We’ll be outside.”

Cole gathered his team and led them back out to the courtyard.

“So, we’re running the same drill, but this time with magic. Already the differences are plain: we’ll all be using enhancement, for one. Probably benefits us more than them, given our capacities, but we’ll see how that plays out.” He looked around the group. “Same teams, same approaches, same convergence on three. What I want us thinking about is what changes between here and there.”

“Ice on the staircase,” Ethan said. “That’s the first thing I’d do if I were defending.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m expecting too. Frozen floors on the stairs and probably the elevator shaft access. It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it makes every vertical approach a nightmare.” Cole glanced at the building. “What else?”

“Think they’ll spam snowballs at us?” Mack asked.

Cole huffed a laugh. The ROE he’d set basically gave Dunmar’s guys unlimited ammo: a small ice projectile cost next to nothing, didn’t need reloading, and registered a hit just as cleanly as a pellet.

“Yeah, but so can we,” Cole said. “And given our mana, we can probably do it better, so don’t be shy about returning fire.” He looked around the group. “Past ice and projectiles, it’s all situational. Handle whatever comes up and adapt on the fly. Just keep it inside the rules: no sending people to the infirmary.”

The capacity advantage he’d mentioned also had a practical implication for team composition. His three heaviest hitters would benefit the most from running enhanced, so he might as well put them up front.

“I’m also reshuffling the entry order,” Cole said. “Mack, you’re breaching for my team on the staircase. Graves, you’ve got point with Walker. Vale, you’re first through the elevator shaft with Garrett.”

Vale accepted that with an uncharacteristic smile, no doubt itching to show off.

“As for the fifth floor,” Elina said, “a veil of smoke before we advance would remedy much of what troubled us last time.”

“Provided Dunmar does not reciprocate,” Vale said.

“Then we push through it anyway,” Cole said. “Blind brawl still favors us.”

Nobody had anything to add after that, so Cole left it. Dunmar’s runner showed up about ten minutes later, and they headed back in.

They swept the first two floors as usual to find them empty, as expected.

From there, he brought his team to the third-floor landing and found Ethan’s prediction manifested. The stairs were sheeted in solid ice: not a glaze, but a proper inch of it, slippery enough that Mack had to catch himself on the railing.

And before anyone could test their footing, a volley of ice projectiles came screaming down the corridor from at least three positions: rapid, sustained, and unrelenting. They might as well have walked into Verdun.

Cole pulled back below the landing. Ethan radioed the same from the fire escape: iced over, two shooters covering the exit.

Well, Dunmar had certainly used his ten minutes.

“Damn,” Cole muttered. “Now I know how our ancestors felt.”

Mack leaned in. “Dude. I think I got an idea.”

Cole looked at him. “Yeah?”

“I think I can scale down an airburst spell to, y’know, nonlethal.”

That didn’t sound convincing, but Cole allowed it. “Test it first. Shoot it downstairs.”

Mack pointed his wand down the stairwell. A core of compressed heat formed at the tip, immediately wrapped in a shell of ice that hissed and spat vapor where the two met. He held it just long enough for the shape to stabilize, then launched it before the shell gave out.

It hit the landing below and cracked open like a flashbang crossed with a snow globe: a burst of heat, then a wave of freezing air that left everything in a five-foot radius coated in slush. It was loud, messy, and definitely disorienting, but still well within the rules. Cole gave him the nod.

Mack moved to the front of the stack and let his spell rip. The spell hissed on its way up before going off with a dull whump that carried through the entire floor.

Cole moved up right behind him. The immediate vicinity was a mess of steam and scattered slush, and through it he could make out two of Dunmar’s men with their hands raised. Both of them were covered in snow; the airburst had tagged them clean.

Mack had thrown himself behind a desk on the left. Cole slid in beside him, Elina right behind.

More snowballs emerged from three spots around the room, firing from behind furniture. Cole pinpointed the direction and returned fire with his wand, and within a few seconds the whole thing had devolved into a snowball fight: crazy as that sounded.

Ethan’s team pushed through the fire escape during the chaos and flanked from the east side. Between the crossfire and the volume advantage, Cole’s team chewed through the defenders in under a minute.

Somewhere in the chaos, though, Miles had gotten tagged. “Don’t even say nothin’,” he said as he passed by, shaking snow off his jacket.

Cole smiled and left it alone.

That put his team down one against nine on Dunmar’s side, which was a ratio he could live with.

He reshuffled for the fourth floor, moving Vale to Ethan and Graves’ element before pushing.

Unlike the third floor, the stairwell to four was completely clear, and Ethan radioed the same from the elevator shaft. That meant Dunmar had either pulled his remaining men to the fifth floor or spread them across the fourth in ambush positions.

So, Cole did what any sensible mage would, barring nuking the place with a fireball. He formed a block of ice about the size of a fist, set it on the corridor floor, and walked it forward in short pulses to simulate footsteps. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

The first two didn’t draw a response, but the third one did. Three ice projectiles came from three separate positions: two behind desks on the left, one from a doorway on the right. Each impact gave Cole a fix.

Graves already had the angle. He put a snowball on each of the two on the left and tagged the one on the right with his air rifle before the guy could pull back into the doorway.

That was twelve down, which meant the only one left was Dunmar himself. Cole’s team swept the rest of the fourth floor to confirm, and they’d gotten about halfway through when Dunmar made his move.

Dunmar got Mack on the landing between four and five. He’d been waiting just around the corner, then tackled Mack clean off his feet and stuffed a snowball in his chest. Cole had his wand up but couldn’t take the shot with Mack tangled in the way, and by the time Dunmar rolled off, he’d already tagged Elina with his rifle.

Cole put a snowball on him before he could line up a third, but the damage was done: two down in what couldn’t have been more than a second.

Dunmar looked down at the impact, then up at Cole. He smiled. “Well placed, sir.”

“You too, Sergeant. That was a hell of a play.”

They headed back down to the lobby, where both teams had already started gathering. Cole gave it a minute for everyone to settle, then addressed the group.

“Good work, all of you. Take a breather for now. We’ll keep running variations through tomorrow, then get ready for the real deal.”