Notes : Chapters 122, 123 and 124 have been written and added to the queue, completing book 3 !
Wew. Okay, with book 3 complete I might take a break. Or switch over to The Fallen World again. I don't know but my eyes are getting worse and I'm tired and slightly afraid of burning out if I push too hard. But at the same time I just got back into it and don't want to waste my momentum.
I hope you'll enjoy the finale to this book. It expanded a LOT from what I'd originally planned (in length and detail), but I think for the better.
Chapter 121
Starborn Mountains, Aurore Hills
Old Imperial Road
Winter sighed as she poked at the bandage on her side.
She winced slightly as it burned. Ow.
The lieutenant hadn't been happy when she was caught near the pass. She'd escaped, taken out the zombie who had struck her, but he hadn't allowed her to go back and try again.
Clearly the Bane knew somebody was sneaking about. And they were up to something. She knew it!
But the lieutenant didn't want to let her go and see. So now she waited by the old road, watching cut rocks on the ground.
Riveting. Truly.
At least she'd have a warm meal when she came home. A good one, there was leftover deer. Venison? What was the name for deer meat? Was there a word for deer meat? Why did you need a word for different meat anyway?
Meat is meat. Fish is fish. Get off your high horse, oh ye mighty noble of high arse, and eat the damn grilled squirrel.
Her ears perked up. There was...something. Like a muted echo.
Someone on the road?
She double checked her hiding spot, and went completely still.
The only things on the road nowadays didn't breathe no more.
She almost jumped back as a group of skeletal horses erupted out of the bend of the road...with nothing but the barest whispers of sound.
Their riders were equally skeletal, and wore the light leather and bronze armor of old Imperial cavalry.
Except for their leader.
Her armor looked sculpted out of a Vestige, Imperial symbols barely overlaying strange designs and iconography etched into ageless metal.
Her face however, was perfectly visible, her hair trailing gloriously behind her like a battle standard. Her skin pure white and perfect, as if carved out of the softest alabaster.
Power radiated from her in waves, and her eyes burned with energy, like twin suns.
On her chestplate stood an Imperial skull, wreathed in a crown of stars. An emblem Winter had only ever seen in dusty history books when she was put through the Magistracy's schools, back when people thought she still might have an aptitude for the arcane arts, and in some old paintings in Magistrate Astur's mansion, when she delivered him his smuggled cigars.
The emblem of a Dominion.
The horses galloped past, pushed to a speed no normal steed could have sustained, and Winter collapsed as she released a breath she hadn't even realized she'd been holding.
Then she scrambled to her feet.
She could go back to the lieutenant. Warn him of what she'd seen. But what could he do besides worry?
...Or she could follow the general of legend that had just moved past her, and was about to rip their fellow Banes a new one.
She started to run.
*****
Streams of tracer rounds illuminated the pass as the machineguns opened up.
For a second, the shields of the Nineteenth held, leather backed by anomalous wood and arcane power standing up to high caliber armor piercing rounds.
Then the enchantments, never built to handle this kind of punishment, gave out.
Skeletons began to fall.
And the infantry charged.
Sapphiria watched as the army parted in two to flow around the bone tyrant, who was still lumbering forward, brief flashes of energy illuminating its ward as shrapnel and stray rounds were deflected away.
Clearly they'd decided that if their giant monster wasn't going to absorb all the fire, they might as well come forward. Interestingly enough, it was slower than the rushing heavy infantry. Siege didn't imply swiftness, far from it, but she would have thought a critical design parameter would have been for it to be able to keep up with the troops it was supposed to open the way for and shield. It certainly had been the case for Federation combat mechs.
She pulled out her plasma gun, clamping the gauss rifle in its place, and began tweaking the settings. Full power would disperse before it hit the creature, low power would lose too much energy. But medium power was made for this. Of course, one could always optimize. After all, she didn't need armor penetration, she just needed energy to drain the shield.
The Hand muttered something, as Gregor fired a couple of shots, before swearing and lowering his gun.
"Too far. Can't do anything to penetrate their scuta."
Scuta? Oh, right, Cia pinged her that it was the latin name for those roman shields. Interesting how they had a mix of proper latin and standard english for this stuff.
It was a little bit creepy that Cia was so deeply integrated she was reading her thoughts, but battle systems were built that way, so that the simulacrum could serve as an extension of the main control net.
"They'll be in range of the golems soon. Then we can concentrate fire." Technically the carbines would hit this far out, especially on such a massive mass of enemies, but those shields could tank those rounds. A deployed machinegun could put enough bullets with good enough accuracy fast enough into one to take one down, but a carbine wasn't going to. Not at this range, especially with her junkbots' marksmanship. It would just be peppering the mass with no real effect, and the other side had every rank with their shields up.
She could open a hole in the front with an artillery strike, but right now she had better targets to spend shells on than their disposable infantry. If she could take shots at their elites she would.
"I'd rather they stay out of range altogether. These guys are moving fast."
"Perhaps I can help with that." Said the Hand, and then gestured.
Two totems flashed with energy, as crystals vanished between their bony digits.
The ground undulated, and seemed to melt as it turned into quicksand.
The first few skeletons sank to their ankles, and then began to wade through, the ranks behind pushing into the undulating ground.
"If you had spells like that, why not use them to dig?" Asked Sapphiria, as two more geysers appeared, tearing holes in the enemy formation.
"The deeper you go the more taxing it becomes. Plus it's only temporary. Digging with magic is also expensive and dangerous. One wrong spell, a single aberration..." They shrugged.
"I see." She could understand the logic. It was kind of like using nuclear warheads for asteroid mining. Yes you could absolutely do it, but there were limits and the more you pushed up the yield the more expensive and hazardous it became.
The quicksand had slowed the whole army down, to the point that the bone tyrant was catching up.
It crossed an invisible threshold, and she shouldered the plasma gun.
"I'm going to start wearing down that ward. I'm guessing they're not going to like that very much. Be ready!"
Both of her allies nodded, and she pulled the trigger.
A brilliant flash lit up the shadowed pass as the first plasma bolt hit the ward. It wasn't dispersed, like she had seen happen sometimes, but rather the entire bubble of energy scintillated. A different kind of ward perhaps?
She could feel the attention focused upon her as the light died out. The Nineteenth knew this wasn't a spell.
She pulled the trigger again. And again.
With each bolt, the ward glowed a little less. Each hit dimmer than the last.
Cia sent a short analysis, showing that the ward wasn't going to last long under the attack. Plasma weapons were good at penetrating armor not just because of the physical properties of their bolts, but also thanks to the insane amount of energy they threw downrange. That was the greatest advantage of energy armaments compared to purely kinetic projectiles. Overall energy versus concentration. A tiny dart of tungsten at relativistic speeds from a capital ship railgun could penetrate starship armor, but a blast from a capital class plasma cannon could vaporize a whole corvette. Of course, against a battleship it would only score the surface layers of the armor, while the dart could punch through and hit the reactor core.
Perhaps it was something she could use against such wards. Overwhelming energy fire.
Someone obviously agreed with Cia on the ward's longevity, and runes blazed into the skies as two mages began to incant.
Both undead flanking her reacted instantly. One of the chants ended in an ululating scream as an arrow of silver hit the mage, and an aberration of swirling acid devoured them and the squad surrounding them.
Another one hesitated as a handful of rounds landed around them. But they completed their incantation.
Sapphiria dove to cover, and alarms blared as her armor was hit by a wave of pulverized rock.
Good news: her android was still up and running.
Bad news: there was a hole in the crenellations, the illusion shrouding her was gone. even her active camo was glitching to hell as the holographic projectors tried to compensate for the ones that had failed.
Whatever they had expected the happen, the finely armored lady turning into a suit of power armor covered in all the colors of the rainbow wasn't it, and the second mage hesitated long enough for a medium power plasma bolt to vaporize the upper third of their skull.
Sapphiria immediately started firing at the bone tyrant again, but it had already made solid progress. Barely slowed by the quicksand, it was actually starting to pull ahead of the infantry, who was trying to reform ranks on the other side of the hindrance, and form a shield wall to cover the others wading through it.
Then, someone on the other side decided that enough was enough, and sending mages piecemeal wasn't going to work.
That, or they realized what they were looking at with her plasma gun and power armor, and knew that they needed to take her down now.
This time it wasn't two mages, and Sapphiria started to run.
She opened fire. The first mage she hit exploded, their shield dispersing the blast into a low yield plasma bomb.
They were intact...but it cleared the area around them.
She didn't even have to send an order. Gregor immediately opened fire, and a split second later, Cia had the machineguns retargeted.
The ward flashed, and died under the onslaught, alongside its mage.
Three others went down, as Hand unleashed ribbons of light, fluttering down from the skies and devouring everything they touched.
By that time however, the others had finished their first wave of spells.
First, the quicksand solidified, the undead pulling out their feet as it went from viscous to mere gravel.
Then the wall turned into hell.
A fireball landed in front of her, skeletons coming apart under the thermal shock, though the shredderbot on that section simply stayed standing, energy flashing as the enchantments on its armor dispersed the wave of heat.
She dove behind the crenellations, and realized too late that the trick wasn't going to work twice as her armor screamed, and she fell, one of her legs sending a pile of error messages as a beam of particles and exotic radiation punched straight through.
Then her sensors screamed a warning, and she watched in horror as a ball of lava flew towards her.
The world dissolved into exotic radiation and light. And when her sensors could make heads and tails of the universe again, she found herself with the Hand standing over her.
All around them the wall was dripping with superheated rock, melting like wax, even the riotbot overwhelmed. The entire blast dispersed by the barrier of energy.
The Hand's shield flickered and collapsed, as she felt the heat rise all around her.
There was another wave of magic-
But this time it was targeting the skies
WHAM
One of the shells exploded in midair, as lightning leapt out to engage it.
The other one made it through. Straight onto the mage that had thrown the lava ball and almost obliterated her.
WHAM
The geyser wasn't of stone and bones this time.
It was made of liquid fire, as the mage's crystals released their mana and an aberration manifested.
Skeletons vanished, reduced to ash, and the bone tyrant staggered as its ward flashed, the liquid flame splashing against the barrier, being turned back into the mass of undead around it.
The tyrant righted itself, and bellowed, a hundred animal skulls opening their jaws and letting out a single roar.
And at that moment, Sapphiria remembered the previous time she'd seen the enemy's mages in action, a split second before her sensors screamed out their warning.
She brought her plasma gun just in time for the mage to come sailing through the air towards her, spear firmly gripped in both hands, glowing with enchantments and shivering with barely contained energy.
She shot it on full power.
Armor burned off, bones charred.
But it came through.
It spear flashed, and energy spat from it. Sapphiria screamed as her plasma gun vented, energy ripping out of the ionization chamber and onto her gauntlets, the Hand doing likewise as plasma wrapped around their legs.
Had it been on full charge, she would have lost both of her arms and the Hand would have probably been vaporized. As it was, she lost the outer layers of her armor as she dropped the inoperable weapon.
It wasn't slag. The gun was actually built for this, though it was supposed to vent away from the squishies.
The skeleton threw the spear, now looking even worse than the plasma gun, aside and drew daggers, coming down like a meteor.
Straight into the field of fire of all the bots, that didn't have the range to target the army yet.
The skeleton physically stopped in midair as half a dozen shotgun gatlings and fifty carbines opened up. There was so much fire being directed at it her sensors showed bullets hitting each other.
Whatever magic was allowing it fly tried to push through, before failing as the skeleton was physically ripped apart, and pieces scattered onto the ground below.
Sapphiria took Sarcher's proffered hand, thankfully the fleshy one, and winced as she was boosted up. Her armor was locking down around her leg, allowing her to stand, but she wasn't going to be able to sprint anytime soon.
Nor was the Hand, their legs look more coal than flesh, though they still stood strong.
She gazed at the swarm of infantry filling the pass, thundering towards them.
"What now?" Asked Gregor, as he came to a halt next to them. His armor was singed and one of his pauldrons looked like it had been hit by a railgun. Clearly, the mages had taken a shot at him as well.
Given the missing magazines and grenades on his belt, it hadn't ended well for them.
"We hold the line." Said Sapphiria.
The Hand nodded. Then froze.
"What?" Asked the AI.
Please. No more mages. I've had it with these bastards.
"She's here."
"Who-"
The entire pass turned into day as a column of pure light came down from the heavens on the other side.