"Make way!"
This simple order, a mere two words, never had any right to work. But within the extremely specific circumstances, I've found myself in, an impossible happened.
My voice, greatly amplified by the electric tube speaker, shook the air no less than the powerful cry from before.
And the people in front, a mere few meters away, just recently willing to trample each other in their panicked desire to escape...
They all started to move to the sides.
At first, only a few men moved, likely too mentally broken to even think about resisting such a simple and loud order. Whatever discipline the bullying back home instilled in them, now pushed their legs forward, forcing them to squeeze into the already intense crowd within the wetlands.
Following the first few, more and more imperial soldiers started to move, slowly opening a five-meter wide path across the entire wetland, all the way to where the crowd already spilled to the solid ground outside the forest's near-permanent shadow.
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But things weren't going to be as easy.
'Still, there's few enough of them,' I thought once the situation more or less clarified.
Most of the survivors of the human army followed my voice and opened up the path. But there was a total of about twenty to thirty of them who remained rooted at their spots.
Some were too terrified, too shocked to move. Others, quite the opposite. Their stares were full of passion and determination as they stood defiantly in our way.
I sighed and raised the loudspeaker to my mouth for the second time.
"Make way for us to pass," I ordered in a calm, emotionless voice amplified to some great volume by the magic of the electric device in my hand. "Or we shall cut it open ourselves."
I lowered my hand and took a deep breath before blinking my eyes and casting a long look at the state of the path.
Bang!
Within the extreme silence of the crowd, the roar of the explosives accelerating the bullet cut all the deeper into the ears of the terrified soldiers. As they turned their heads, taking their sweet time to process what was going on, the first body struck the ground, with Chris already moving his sights onto the next target.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
One by one, the shots opened up small yet ugly and extremely bloody wounds in the bodies of the stupid few who stood in our way.
A few more shots and a change came. Rather than pressing the advantage, Chris ejected the empty magazine, using the momentum of it falling out to move his left hand, swing it down to his belt, grab a fresh mag, and then spring the hand right back the way it moved, loading a new set of rounds into the gun.
All of that in a single, well-trained motion that the man clearly perfected over the years.
It was a skill that any martial artist would recognize as something that came as a necessary development that came with enough experience in the field.
Just like a warrior could parry the standard attacks without even thinking about it, by the sheer force of reflex in his body, Chris could reload his side gun so smoothly, that just blinking would suffice for one to miss the entire thing.
And as soon as the new magazine clicked with the gun, the execution, for it couldn't be called any other way, continued.
Still, as expected, a few of those who defied my order turned out to be relatively stronger than the rest... Or at the very least, capable of raising a proper barrier.
According to my instruction, Chris didn't waste his ammunition on them, sparing only a single round for each of the targets. And with that, mere two magazine swaps after it all started, only a total of four enemies remained.
'Now, it's time to test out how things changed,' I thought, allowing a small grin to accompany the look of disappointment and exasperation on my face.
And with a single thought, in the exact same way as I did many times before, I infused my aura into the darkness hidden below the defiant soldiers.
'This is going to be ugly,' I thought, conjuring a spike-like shape from the darkness before shooting it up, aiming to pierce the resisting soldiers from the crotch up, using a method Vlad the Impaler would happily approve.
Yet, rather than thin, slick spikes the size of a human fist at their thickest point, the darkness below those few soldiers exploded, ripping their bodies into pieces as spikes as long as the school's bus shot out from the ground, only to vanish the very moment their task was fulfilled.