Gatecrash: The Secretist, Part Two by Doug Beyer

they could break his concentration. Jace ran forward into the crowd, crowing like an insane dark mage, following his towering illusion back toward the Rakdos-controlled part of the district. Once the Rakdos horde was dispersed in their own territory, perhaps he could face and defeat Exava one-on-one.
    Ruric Thar and the other Gruul warriors could only nod in confused respect as he ran past.

ROUGH CROWDS
    Jace guided his illusionary demon, and the demon guided the Rakdos horde, back through the quarter of the Rakdos guild. Meanwhile Jace fended off Exava in a personal side combat, her furious bolts of sadistic magic anticipated and deflected. His illusion flickered as the horde marched back toward the Rough Crowd, its credibility wavering.
    As they rounded the corner, Jace gasped.
    A Selesnya-guild army was assaulting a smattering of Rakdos irregulars. The Rough Crowd was gone, a splintered ruin, its oak beams unraveled by the magic of woodshapers and ripped asunder by huge nature elementals. Swarms of imps flooded out of the carcass of the nightclub, bombarding the streets below them with burning pitch, hitting their own Rakdos warriors as much as the Selesnya.
    A contingent of Boros soldiers attacked from the Selesnya flank. A warrior angel screamed commands from the sky, hurling blasts of scorching light. Magic crackled back and forth between guildmages of opposing creeds, searing scars of battle into thecobblestones.
    Jace and Emmara made eye contact, she from atop one of the vine-and-marble elementals, and he from down at street level with the Rakdos. They were both among armies they didn’t command but couldn’t ignore.
    Jace’s illusion dissipated, but it seemed irrelevant now. Exava’s horde of Rakdos warriors merged with and reinforced the cultists from the Rough Crowd, and chaos reigned. Reinvigorated, the Rakdos surged against the Selesnya.
    A pack of hellhounds, skinless and crackling with flames from inside their blackened ribcages, broke free of their Rakdos handlers and sprinted into a squad of Selesnya guildmages. Jace saw Emmara struggling to ply her magic, but the nature elementals didn’t respond to her, and the hellhounds crashed into the Selesnya mages. Jace could hear their screams over the din of battle.
    Finally, whether under Emmara’s control or not, the elemental she rode reached down and smothered two of the mongrels with its fist, and grasped two more hellhounds with a mass of ropy green tendrils. It crushed their bodies into a nearby building façade, to a chorus of hellish howls.
    Barbed grappling hooks seized onto the elemental, and Rakdos ogres and goblins pulled on the lines. The elemental’s center of gravity tipped, and more lines snagged onto its chest and arms. It angled into an agonizingly slow stumble. Emmara scrambled to maintain balance as it fell.
    “Emmara!” Jace yelled, rushing to her through the crowd.
    The elemental toppled, dashing against the street. The Rakdos mob swarmed on top of it with swordsand axes, hacking it apart like mad lumberjacks. Jace lost sight of her, and couldn’t see whether she had landed safely, or was under attack by the Rakdos on the ground. But he stopped short before he got to her.
    In his way stood the blood-witch, wielding two serrated swords and surrounded by a team of Rakdos toughs.
    “It’s time to play, Berrim,” said Exava.

    Emmara slid down the elemental’s back as it tumbled to the ground, and found herself surrounded by heavily-armed Rakdos lunatics. She tried to revive the shattered nature elemental with all the healing magic she could muster, but the cultists were thoroughly dismantling the great beast; it was only stomped foliage and smashed stones now.
    The warriors moved in around her. One masked Rakdos ruffian stabbed at her with a barbed spear, but she grabbed the handle, disarmed him, cracked him on the skull with the blunt end, then spun it around and ran it through the guts of a second warrior. She elbowed the neck of