Serenity glanced around the room. He’d checked it out before, but mostly paid attention to the portals instead of the room itself. It had four entrances; other than the one he stood at, there were two pairs of double doors in the far wall and a single interior door on the left wall. There were also two windows on the wall to the right.

The double doors were all glass and led outside, but were grimy enough that unless they actually had a light source inside it would be far easier to see out than in; the same was true of the windows. The door to the left was an interior door; Serenity couldn’t tell where it led.

The important thing was that this was an absolutely terrible room to try to secure against a group. No matter which direction he tried to defend from, enemies could circle around and come at them from the rear; Ita might be able to defend herself, but the two scientists were unlikely to have the skills and even less likely to have the weaponry they’d need.

The other thing they needed was time. Serenity didn’t know how closely the two scientists were being followed, but he expected they’d been seen entering the building. Backtracking would take him to the enemy, but it would still have the rear vulnerability. Forward it was.

“Follow me!” Serenity called out, then hurried towards the interior door. Ita was right behind him, but the other two were slower to catch on.

Serenity wanted an interior room with few entrances. Only one if he could get it. He went through the door and into a corridor; there were doors to the right and left in several places along the hallway. Left would be towards the middle of the building but also towards the entrance they’d come in; the rooms might or might not connect. Right would be towards the exterior of the building; there would be windows but it also meant they’d have a choke point unless the Sterath thought of going through walls. To the right it was.

Serenity checked the first room on the right; it had a door to the outside. No good.

The second room on the right looked like it had once been set up as a children’s room; daycare or Bible study, Serenity wasn’t certain which and didn’t really care. There were cute animals on the walls, including a group of animals on a wooden ship, and faded stained carpet, but everything else had clearly been moved out. Serenity could see marks where shelves had once been, but even they were gone.

It had a window set high on the wall, but only one and no door. It was just what he was looking for: a large room with no obvious entrance other than a single choke point. “In here!”

Once the others filed past him, Serenity turned to the two scientists. He needed to get the most important information first. “I need details. How many and where?”

“Is this really safe?” Rachel stared at the walls. “Do we really want to fight here?” She waved at the mural on the wall.

“Not much choice if they’re close,” Serenity asserted. “Are they?”

Dr. Ridge took a deep breath to steady himself before speaking. “There was one between us and the van when we walked around the building. Then another one came around the corner.”

Rachel interrupted Allen. “That’s when he eeped and ran like a kid.”

“You were right behind me.”

Rachel giggled. “Only because you run faster than I do.”

Maybe Dr. Ridge wasn’t such a bad person. If he didn’t stop attacking Serenity, though, Serenity wasn’t sure it would matter. He had run to Serenity for protection; maybe that was a positive?

“How many were there?” Serenity hoped the number would be small. A standard Sterath Group was eight, but if they’d seen close to that, he needed to plan for more than one Group.

Allen shook his head. “I only saw the two.”

“There were at least four,” Rachel disagreed. “And I think I heard more than that shouting.”

At least one Group, then. Possibly two, but in that case Serenity would have expected the Strike group to have already reached them, and he still hadn’t heard anything from outside. He turned to Ita. “You’re Tier … three, aren’t you? What Tiers are the other Sterath here?”

He’d caught Ita by surprise, and taken advantage of the fact that she was a pretty pure Mage-build; physically, he was far stronger than she was, even though she was likely of higher Tier. Not that being a higher-Tier Mage would help that much on Earth right now; any mage with a large enough mana pool would have the same leakage problem Serenity did. Serenity was more concerned about higher-Tier people with a physical focus; they’d degrade in a low-Tier environment, but it was slower.

Ita nodded once; it was a strong agreement. “Yes. The BattleLord, I believe he is Tier Five. The highest they could send and they could only send one. The troops are mostly Tier One or Two with the commanders at Tier Three. Only mages are Tier Four, and then only two. One was the portal mage whose portal you destroyed. The other.” Ita stopped and wrinkled her entire face. Serenity recognized the expression as severe disgust. “A noble. I think he may be Shameless. He came later.”

The Shameless were the closest the Sterath came to having priests for the Shameful Ones; they were intercessors to the mighty. They did not have a good reputation; given who the Shameful Ones were, that made sense. One of the Shameful Ones was a Lord of thieves, while another had a coterie of assassins; while Serenity wasn’t bothered by Tranquil Conviction’s pursuit of strategy and cleverness over individual honor and bravery, many of the other Shameful Ones didn’t fit Serenity’s morals. Of course, the challenge Tranquil Conviction had issued was still more in line with the Sterath culture than Serenity’s.

Serenity hoped that Ita wouldn’t start to count herself among them simply because she followed him, even though he had no intention of following the Sterath moral code. It couldn’t be good to look down on yourself the way she clearly looked down on the Shameless.

“That’s not as bad as I feared. Still, one Five, one Four, and Tranquil Conviction is plenty, even if our contest keeps him from playing a direct role…” Serenity muttered in Sterath before focusing on the current situation. Serenity didn’t catch the momentary shock in Ita’s expression as she caught his words.

He swapped to English for the next part. “Have you two called for backup yet?”

They glanced at each other, then Rachel answered for both of them. “No, we just ran.”

Serenity nodded. That was what he’d thought. “See if you can. I’m not sure what the situation is here, so maybe one of you call your superiors while the other calls 911? I doubt they’ll get people here in time, but at least they can keep other people away.”

“What are you going to do?”

Serenity turned towards Dr. Ridge. “I’m going to kill some Sterath. If I do this right, they won’t know what happened. The longer we can keep it that way, the better. Get to the back of the room, try to stay out of view of the window.”

Serenity swapped to Sterath. “Ita, do you know any illusion magic?” When she shook her head, he frowned. “Darkness, then? Or fog?”

“I can do those. Dimness and fog. Not true Darkness; I don’t have the Affinity.”

Serenity was puzzled by that. “It’s doable with Space Affinity, and I know you have that … you know, we’ll deal with that later. See if you can make the area in the corners a bit dimmer and less interesting; that’s where you three will hide if anyone comes in.”

Ita nodded.

Serenity noticed that she didn’t ask what he’d be doing; she didn’t expect to be told. He decided that was a habit of hers he was going to break. “I’ll be taking care of the Kaelitha. Hopefully none will make it back here; if they do, try to be unseen. If you are seen, fight or run; do what you need to to live.”

Ita nodded. “I will not be captured.”

“If you are, I will free you. Stay alive.” Serenity didn’t want her to have the usual Sterath opinion about being a captive, that it was better to be dead, even if it meant suicide; unfortunately, he wasn’t certain if he could give her enough hope to prevent it. He’d just have to make sure it didn’t come to that.

Serenity walked to the door and listened. He could hear Sterath speech in the distance. He whispered “Hide” at the humans and waved all of them to the back of the room. He couldn’t safely open the door; it wasn’t possible to tell if any Sterath were looking down the hallway, and he couldn’t afford to give away the hiding place.

Fine.

Serenity shifted to his Sovereign of Potential form and streamed under the door. It didn’t take much substance to be able to sense down the hallway, and the hallway was quite dark to ordinary vision; it was unlikely anyone would see him.

There weren’t any Sterath in the hallway, and the door at the end was still closed. Good enough.

Serenity slid the rest of the way through the cracks between the door, the wall, and the floor, then rose towards the ceiling. The shadows were a little deeper there, but more importantly, few people really paid attention to the ceiling.

As Serenity slid through the door out of the hallway back into the large room, he was reminded of less than an hour earlier when he’d watched the same room the same way. This time, though, there wasn’t a pair of portals and a mage; instead, there was a group of four Sterath. One was holding a wand of some sort over the circles painted on the floor while the other three examined the rest of the room. Serenity suspected they’d only recently arrived, which meant they’d followed the humans very slowly.

“No explosion. No damage, no blood.” One of the Sterath examining the room reported to the one with the wand. “Tracks, many old, some new.”

Serenity tried to get a feel for the power of the various Sterath. It was usually possible, but it usually had more to do with the pressure someone left on the world than their actual danger. Serenity knew he was far more dangerous than his Tier said he should be, because of his skill; trusting simply to how powerful someone felt was a very rough guideline. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get much of a feel for the various Sterath in the room. The one in the center with the wand felt a little stronger than the others, but he could have guessed that by the fact that one of the others was reporting to him.

“Have the doors been opened recently? The outside ones.”

The Sterath tracker shook his head. “No tracks, cannot tell.”

The commander grumbled. “They’d better be doing their duty then. Go check the inside door. The one we didn’t enter through. Everywhere the tracks lead. Find the humans that saw us. Capture if you can, kill if you can’t.”

The Sterath pulled his right fist up to his right shoulder quickly in a simple salute, then turned towards the opening Serenity floated above.

Serenity slipped back into the hallway, past the still-closed door. A silent kill seemed the best option.