Henry stepped out and headed for the nearest Monolith.
Up close, the green rounds had done exactly what the ballistic data said they would. Every point of entry had a corresponding exit wound on the far side, about the size of his fist. They were ragged, with fracture lines radiating outward through the crystalline plating like stress cracks in tempered glass.
The interior material was darker than the outer shell, with a rough grain that reminded him of broken concrete, except heavier and more tightly packed.
Granted, he wasn’t sure how close Bralnor interiors were to concrete, but the penetration depth and fragmentation pattern were roughly in line with what he’d expected. If anything, the exit wounds were nastier than he’d predicted – which meant the green rounds were probably tumbling after penetration, or the internal structure was more brittle than the outer plating suggested. Either way, it was useful information.
Hayes walked up beside him and crouched next to one of the exit wounds, tilting his head to get a better angle. “Reckon the locals’d have somethin’ to say if they saw this.”
“Indeed we do,” Sera said. She glanced at Hayes, then looked at Henry. “Tell me – might the Ambassador be persuaded to part with such pieces? I cannot think the Guild would prove ungenerous, were terms properly struck.”
Doc answered before Henry could. “Extremely unlikely. The historical precedent isn’t encouraging – any time a significant military capability gap has been bridged through arms transfer, it’s tended to destabilize the recipient as much as the adversary.” He caught himself. “Put simply, handing over weapons like these tends to cause more problems than it solves, even between allies. An all-out war with the Nobians might change things, but even then, the concessions would be steep.”
Henry glanced at Sera. “Hey, look at the bright side. You’re the first and only elf to ever fire a mithril gun.”
Sera considered that for a moment, then tilted her head. “And shall I also be the first elf to use a mithril launcher?”
Henry would never voice it aloud, but her expectations were getting concerning. All he could do now was just hope she’d ask for flowers next time. “I’ll uhh… think about it.”
“You shall think a good while longer, I expect, and arrive at the same answer.”
Henry left that one alone and moved toward the first Megalith – the one they’d brought down with blue rounds.
The damage here told a different story. The front torso was a mess – fracture networks across most of the chest plate, with cratered impact points where individual rounds had chipped away sections of plating over the course of sustained fire. Some of the holes went deep enough that he could see into the interior, where the same dense layered material was visible, cracked and displaced but still largely intact.
It had taken just shy of mag-dumping to do this, and looking at it now, he understood why it had taken that many hits. The plating worked like composite armor – layered, with enough give between layers that the energy from each round got absorbed and spread out instead of punching straight through.
He circled around to the side, then stopped. “Sera, can you flip it?”
Sera extended a hand, and the Megalith rolled onto its back with a grinding sound that scattered loose fragments across the stone.
Henry crouched and scanned the underside. The belly plating was thinner, as expected, but largely intact. He checked along the flanks, under the limbs, around the rear of the torso.
“No exit wounds?” Yen said from behind him.
“Nothing.” Henry stood up. “They don’t look like they did that much damage, actually. Which makes me wonder how we even took it down.”
He looked at the second Megalith, or what was left of it. Fragments of plating had been scattered across a twenty-meter radius, the largest surviving piece maybe half the torso.
“At least with that one,” he said, gesturing toward it, “it’s pretty obvious.”
Hayes rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe we just got lucky and tagged an organ. Or dealt enough internal trauma that somethin’ gave out.” He looked at the body for another second. “Though, hell if I know what internal trauma even counts for in a livin’ rock. Hell if I know if these things even have organs.”
“The Guild has never quite settled the question,” Sera said. “Bralnors put one in mind of golems – in their making, at least – yet they lack the core that gives a construct its life. What, then, sustains them… or how one might strike at it from within, I cannot pretend to know.”
Henry filed that away. It tracked with what he’d read in the Guild surveys – people had cracked Bralnors open before, but all they’d found was more rock. Then again, they also didn’t have electron microscopes.
“Well,” he said, “maybe Dr. Perdue can figure it out once she gets her hands on the samples. Let’s start harvesting – I want material from both Megaliths and at least two of the Monoliths. If anyone’s got questions, ask Sera or Doc.”
Nobody had any questions, so they got straight to work, pulling equipment out of the Holding Cart.
The harvesting took the better part of an hour. Sera handled the heavy repositioning while the rest of them worked plasma cutters along the natural seam lines in the plating, scoring cuts where the panels overlapped or where the crystalline grain suggested a clean separation point.
The intact sections came off in broad slabs. Sera hauled them out, while the rest of them handled the stacking. Each one weighed about as much as a 45-pound plate, though the uneven shape made them a pain to stack.
The back crystals took more patience. They sat in shallow sockets along the dorsal ridge, and cutting them out whole meant running the plasma cutter around the base at a lower setting to avoid cracking them.
Interior cross-sections came last. Sera held each carcass steady while they cut slabs from undamaged areas with the grain still intact. Perdue would need clean layers to work with, and these were about as clean as field extraction was going to get.
They yapped about the rifles the entire time, naturally. Everyone had something to say – recoil, ballistics, enchantment quirks, zero retention – and for once that included Yen, who yammered on and on about enchantment ideas.
Once they’d finished, they separated the Megalith material from the Monolith haul, loaded everything into the Holding Cart, and packed up.
Ron took the lead MRAP on the drive northwest toward the second site. The road – if it still counted as one – followed the base of the valley before curving up along the glacier’s drainage plain. As they gained elevation, the ice shelf started filling more and more of the windshield.
Henry had thought the glacier was impressive from a distance, but up close it was something else entirely. The face of it rose a couple hundred feet above the plain in a sheer wall of pale blue ice, cracked and ridged with pressure lines that looked like the whole thing was still moving. Granted, it technically was by geological standards – just not fast enough to see.
The light hit it differently depending on the angle: white where the surface was rough, deep blue-green where it was smooth, with a luminance underneath that didn’t seem to come from reflection alone. Some kind of ambient mana interaction, maybe, or just the way glacial ice behaved in an atmosphere with higher magical saturation. Henry tried to get a photo, but even after messing with the exposure, the result looked flat compared to what he was seeing through the windshield.
A few miles in, Henry spotted a herd of something along the far tree line to the south – dark-coated quadrupeds, roughly elk-sized, completely unbothered by the MRAPs. Either they were used to noise, or they were big enough not to care.
The second Bralnor site was about four miles further up, where the glacier’s retreat had carved out a wider basin ringed by exposed rock faces and loose boulder fields. Ron slowed the MRAP as they came up on a sparse line of trees that marked the transition from tundra to stone and pulled in under the cover they offered.
He grabbed the optics and glassed the rock faces the same way he had at the first site – slow sweep, letting his eye adjust to the Bralnors’ camouflage before trying to count them.
It took a minute, but he picked them out: five Monoliths spread across the lower rock formations in a loose cluster, and a single Megalith settled against the base of a larger outcrop further back. The Megalith had the same banded plating as the ones from the first site, and from what he could see, it was slightly bigger.
“Five Monoliths, one Megalith,” Henry said over the radio.
There was a pause.
“That’s it?” Hayes said, disappointed.
“That’s it.”
“Shit, that ain’t even a proper rodeo. Y’all left me the kiddie pen.”
Yen’s voice came through, flat as ever. “It isn’t all too bad. Captain’s team didn’t test blue on Monoliths. Could run that here – see how fast they drop with mid-tier.”
Hayes thought about it for half a second. “Well, hell. S’pose that does brighten things up a bit.”
Henry turned in his seat. “Sera, toss up a drone. We’ve got overwatch this time.”
Sera already had the kit in her hands. “Oh, with pleasure.”
Henry held up a hand. “Ah, wait. Might wanna do the trench first.”Sera nodded. She set the drone kit down in her seat, stepped out, and had the trench done by the time Henry finished checking the RWS feed. She climbed back in and picked up the controls. “Done.”
Meanwhile, Hayes had brought his group into position on a ledge about four hundred meters out – similar setup to what they’d used at the first site, with envirosuits on and rifles loaded. Doc and Yen spread out on either side of Hayes at five-meter intervals, settling into prone.
“Overwatch set,” Henry radioed. “Send it when you’re ready.”
“Copy,” Hayes said. “Blue on the Monoliths first. We’ll work left to right.”
The first volley answered the question Henry hadn’t gotten to at the first site: what blue composition did to Tier Seven targets. And the answer, as it turned out, was excessive. Hayes’ round hit the nearest Monolith center mass and the thing just came apart – plating fragmented outward, the torso split along multiple fracture lines, and what was left of the body dropped in pieces.
The other two didn’t fare much better.
“Hot damn!” Hayes called out.
The remaining Monoliths reacted immediately – and not the way Henry’s targets had. Then again, Henry’s initial targets hadn’t literally exploded into pieces. The two survivors lurched into motion almost simultaneously, scattering away from the blast in panic.
It didn’t help them. Hayes, Yen, and Doc dropped the remaining two in short order. The blue rounds simply outclassed Monolith armor; at this tier, there wasn’t much of a fight to speak of.
Thanks to the heightened violence, the Megalith caught on immediately, pissed as fuck. It pulled itself off the outcrop and broke into a full sprint toward the ledge – something Henry genuinely didn’t think Bralnors could do. The ground shook hard enough that he felt it through the MRAP’s chassis.
“Swap to red,” Hayes said, already ahead of it. “On me.”
Three red rounds hit the Megalith in quick succession. The first one took out the forward right leg the same way Henry’s had at the first site – total structural failure below the joint. The second punched through the chest plate and out the back, and the third split what was left of the upper torso into two pieces that tumbled in different directions before grinding to a stop.
The echoes lingered a few seconds, then the basin fell quiet.
“What was that, a hundred meters in five seconds?” Yen said.
Hayes let out a breath. “Felt like less.”
“Scary, low-key,” Henry said. “Imagine if it’d used those boulders for cover and closed the gap while we were swapping mags.”
“Suppose it’s a rather good thing, then, that these rocks are – well – thick as rocks,” Doc said.
Hayes chuckled. “Works for me. Dumb and slow’s a whole lot better’n the alternative.”
Henry tapped Ron and spoke into his mic, “We’re heading down; come join us when you’re done.”
They brought the MRAPs down and started working through the second haul. The blue rounds had made the interior cross-sections easier to get at, since most of the carcasses were already cracked open. The tradeoff, unfortunately, was their wallet – specifically, the crystals. Sera managed to salvage a few intact pieces from the Megalith, but the Monoliths were mostly a loss on that front.
Hayes set down his plasma cutter about halfway through and stretched. “Man. Six targets ain’t exactly a full day’s shootin’.”
Henry finished his cut and set the cutter down. “If you’re really that down bad, there are some boulders over there.” He pointed toward the cluster past the far ridge.
Hayes considered it, though the enthusiasm was limited. “Ain’t so fun shootin’ at somethin’ that just sits there.”
“Yeah, well, it’s either that or we drive around looking for more Bralnors, and I’d rather not push our luck this far out.”
Hayes shrugged. “Well, beats sittin’ around. Might head over there once we’re –” He stopped.
Henry followed his line of sight toward the far ridge, where something shifted.
His first thought was rockslide – it even sounded like one, given the deep grinding rumble that carried across the basin. But rockslides didn’t go upward, and the debris cloud rose instead of settling. What he’d assumed was a natural boulder formation pulled itself apart, stone separating from stone as the whole mass shifted and rearranged into something with legs.
The thing topped out around eight stories, with a footprint close to an apartment building. Its limbs were thick enough that each one probably outweighed an Abrams, and the crystals on its back – the same type he’d been prying out of Monoliths all morning – were each roughly the size of a sedan.
Honestly, it took him an embarrassingly long time to connect the dots, given that he’d spent the entire day dissecting smaller versions of exactly this. It was a Tier Nine Bralnor Gigolith.
“You just had to talk shit, Hayes,” Ron said.
Hayes gave an awkward grin. “Shit, how was I s’posed to know?”
“Everyone back in the MRAPs!” Henry said, already moving. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”