Notes : Chapter 125 has been written and added to the queue, kicking off book 4 !
The place below mine is preparing construction. Great.
Also I'm going to work on a few special shoutouts soon, for RR and patreon, so stay tuned for that.
Chapter 123
Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley
Starfire Pass
The lumbering horror began to rush forward, gathering speed as it did.
The infantry down below parted, creating a channel for the abomination to push through, and raising their shields, as the archers opened up again.
"They're trying to suppress us!" Said Sapphiria, as her junkbots retargeted.
There wasn't really a choice right now. The shredders didn't have the range yet, but they did little to the enemy's shields, though a few of the archers found that direct fire also meant exposing themselves, even if briefly.
The tyrant's shield began to glow. At first in bursts, then continuously as the remaining machineguns and carbines poured fire into it.
Sapphiria reached out, and helped the Hand back to their feet.
"Any ideas?"
"Pray?" The undead coughed, and pushed her hand away as she offered some of her mana crystals.. "Pushed myself too far. Can't. Too dangerous. Would be more likely to kill myself and you than them."
Wait, what?
No time to ask. She simply nodded.
"Weak points?"
"None. It will reform. Bones can move alongside the metal armature." Sapphiria blinked, and then as she looked more closely she saw that it was true. You could still see damage where the chains of light had bitten, but some of it was already vanishing, bones flowing to replace destroyed ones. It almost looked like a liquid. "Hit it hard enough and it'll stagger though. Take out enough and it will lose cohesion."
"Can I take out the armature instead?"
The Hand shook their head.
"You can rip bits off, but the joints are energy, it'll reform. The metal parts themselves...Maybe. With the right spell. Or perhaps a Vestige weapon. But this has been made to survive sieges. Brute force will work better than precision. Trust me, I've used enough of them to see the result of some clever mage trying to target the armature. And even if you took it out, you'd only remove it's ability to reform that part. You have to remove chunks. Burn it, melt it, explode it."
She nodded. It perhaps wasn't the most helpful of advice -she wasn't going to offer it flowers- but at least she wouldn't waste time trying to snipe its armature with her gauss rifle.
"Alright." She looked up, only to see that it had already covered a frightening amount of ground. "And the ward?"
WHAM WHAM
The barrier of energy glowed brightly as both shells exploded on top of it, and she swore she saw the creature stumble, as if part of the impact made it through.
"Overwhelm it. Lightning or fire spells if you can." They jerked their head towards the remaining archers and slingers. There were frighteningly few friendly undead remaining, but those that did were grabbing specialized ammunition. "Continuous attacks, not concentrated blasts. Don't waste energy trying to focus a beam."
Ah. Like when she had used the nukes to strip the raiders of their point defense guns and sensor clusters. Shaped nukes, not laser warheads. Damn, that felt like decades ago, but it had only been a few months.
She raised her hand, and racked her databanks. She didn't have a spell for this, so she'd have to make it up on the fly.
Fortunately, she'd been fascinated by magical lightning. Not just because it might allow her to create electrical current anywhere and bypass her current gear limitations, but also because it behaved so anomalously.
She assembled the runes, ran through the possibilities...and triggered the spell.
Lightning leapt from her fingers. Not a blast, or a thundering bolt, but a steady stream, crackling through the air.
Some of the arcs of energy wandered off course. But most of them flew true, slamming into the barrier.
It got dimmer. Faster and faster and faster.
The tyrant rushed past the filled in ditch of the first defensive line. Sapphiria wondered why it hadn't moved at full sprint before. Then realized that it was because of the damage.
Each time it stepped, bones cracked and broke, leaving behind a trail of debris as others flowed to take their place. It could move that quickly, but only by damaging itself.
Two puffs of smoke behind her again.
The shredders retargeted, as the monstrosity crossed into their effective range. It got dimmer of course, but far less than from her spell, despite the immense weight of fire. That shield was amazing at dealing with kinetics. Which...was probably the point, actually. They'd have to have made it to survive siege weapons, and probably tuned it to survive her artillery.
Shells whistled overhead.
One hit the shield head on, and the creature staggered, this time much more noticeably.
The second one missed.
And instead impacted the flattened barricade and pile of debris of the second defensive line.
The debris was thrown up in geyser, and she winced. She couldn't afford wasted shots-
Wait. There were exotic energy signatures in that debris.
"Oh. I'd forgotten I put those there." Said the Hand, almost conversationally.
"What the f-"
Sapphiria didn't have the time to finish as the entire plume of debris exploded into a maelstrom of energy. Some of it was spells, some of it was five different aberrations forming at once, and the rest was the spells going haywire thanks to the aberrations.
The energy expanded...and more talismans buried in the remnants of the defensive line triggered.
The chain reaction caused the entirety of it to explode in a shower of energy.
The damage was more flashy than dangerous. Some of the skeletons from the archers still trying to pour fire onto the wall were obliterated.
But the ward?
The barrier of energy surrounding the bone tyrant imploded under the cascade of energy, turning into a rain of energy shards and a blinding flash of light.
The tyrant reeled...and then roared as the bullets finally found their mark. Bones shattered as bullets slammed into the mass of the abomination.
More flowed to take their place. But the creature began to visibly thin.
But not fast enough.
Sapphiria stopped her continuous lightning spell, and threw a fireball as it finished its rush, emptying her shoulder-mounted gun into the creature on maximum rate of fire.
The combined fire of the guns and the explosion of the fireball managed to destroy one of its arms, causing the heavy bade to fall to the ground, gouging a trench and annihilating half a dozen legionnaires.
The second one slammed down onto the gate.
Runes flared, and Sapphiria watched as reality warped.
The gates, the sections of walls framing them, as well as the undead and bots on them, simply went flying as gravity changed direction.
The infantry had been waiting for that moment. Skeletons poured into the breach, weapons drawn.
And found themselves face to face with the Rolling Fortress.
The autocannons fired, reaping a rich harvest as the remnants of the assault force tried to go in, even the archers dropping their bows to draw swords and try to force their way past the wall.
Bots surged onto the sides of the breach, tossing grenades, emptying carbines at full auto into the seething mass below. They were quickly joined by the Hand's troops, loosing arrows and sling bullets.
Unfortunately, that only made them targets. Whatever spell it had just unleashed, the tyrant either couldn't or wouldn't use again, but it was still wielding a blade heavier than a recon tank. The undead horror swept the massive blade across the parapet, crushing half a dozen bots and twice that many undead. Its arm was already reforming, and Sapphiria saw the fallen blade twitching as it started to drag itself across the battlefield towards the creature.
She raised her hand, and saw the thing turn towards her.
The runes blade shone as it rose.
Well. It seemed she'd been mistaken. The nineteenth didn't want her alive after all.
She could dodge a normal swing. With that gravity attack? No way she could get out of the area of effect with her busted leg.
But she could wreck it before it destroyed her android.
She heard the rumble of an engine, and her head snapped to the side.
Just in time to see the Rolling Fortress leap forward, and through the press of skeletons, already thinned by the autocannons and the grenades..
And ram the bone tyrant.
The creature staggered back, and its swing went wild, the blast of gravity exploding beyond the wall, stone and skeletons bearing the colors of the Nineteenth going flying everywhere.
It tried to right itself, but the miniature tank had already reversed, and veered off, leaping beyond the wreckage of the second defensive line, its autocannons stitching a line of craters into the abomination.
It spun around. And for a second, it just stared at the vehicle.
There was...almost intelligence in its posture.
Then it struck.
Sapphiria launched her fireball. The second arm exploded.
But the first one reformed, scraping its blade off the ground, and she realized she'd been baited.
The swing was awkward, the tip of the blade gouging the ground all the way. It almost missed.
Almost.
Sapphiria screamed as the tank crashed, the whole thing bent like it had been hit by the first of an angry God.
"CIA!" She screamed on every channel, and even, she realized, aloud.
The simulacrum responded as she diverted all their resources. Subsystems shut down. Time slowed.
She could see two shells, slowly descending from the skies.
One impacted the bone tyrant's back, blowing a gash into the central mass.
The other struck a leg, instantly obliterating it, leaving nothing but the strange, glowing metal armature, held in place by eldritch energy.
Sapphiria interfaced with all the crystals around her. Those in her armored compartment, those in her hands, everything.
Then she cast her spell.
She screamed as energy coursed through her. Ah. So magic could enact a physical strain.
But she was no squishie. She screamed, she collected the damage reports...but she didn't lose her concentration.
Her spell wasn't very complicated. It was simply fire. And fire.
And fire.
The sphere of energy leapt from her fingers, and flew straight into the gash in the tyrant's back.
For a second, nothing happened, as the gash vanished, bones flowing to reconstitute the abomination.
Then the sphere lost coherence.
And released the equivalent of a full hundred kilograms of TNT inside the tyrant. Ten times what her artillery shells packed.
Sapphiria flinched as she was showered in flaming bone fragments. But she was already tracking the wreck of the rolling fortress.
Some of the nineteenth's infantry had broken off from the breach, and were rushing it.
"Sarcher, we need to-"
"LOOK OUT!"
The Hand surged forward, and threw his sword, decapitating the skeleton that had been about to throw a javelin into her face. And she suddenly released her hold on her processing resources, allowing everything to come back online.
There were skeletons everywhere. Climbing the stairs, no longer held back by the rolling justice's autocannons, they were stepping onto the wall. The last few of the Hand's undead were falling.
They'd lost.
She automatically went into a fighting stance as she instructed Cia to brace for the enemy going to the outpost. They could still-
She received a ping from her sensors.
There was someone on top of the wreck of the rolling fortress. On a skeletal steed no less.
She wasn't wearing a helmet, and her eyes glowed with pure energy. But her skin...it was as pale as the Hand's. As lacking of life.
Sapphiria watched as the Nineteenth's legionnaires came to a screeching halt. Even the soulless stopped dead in their tracks by the sight.
The figure made a series of complex hand gestures. Sign language?
Then she slammed her hands together.
The ground erupted. Spikes surged, impaling the skeletons.
In an instant, the entire battlefield was nothing but a sea of jagged lances of rocks.
She saw the woman? Other Hand? Raise her arms and-
She felt it. Like a distant echo, filling every comm channel and every frequency.
A single word, with the weight of a planet.
"ENOUGH!"
All around her, the undead, from the Hand's remaining bodyguards to the Nineteenth's legionnaires, dropped their weapons. She raised her hand, and ordered the bots to cease fire.
And absolute silence descended upon the pass.