Board & Conquest 124: Pyrrhic Victories

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Goreville was a veteran of many battles, but no foe annoyed him more than the Brood. 

He didn’t fear them exactly—facing the great Titan Whiro and dying at his hands had cured him of that—but they weren’t glorious to fight. Between their caustic blood eating through weapons and armor, their relentless ferocity, and their utter lack of anything resembling empathy or honor, fighting them felt more like a chore than anything else, like exterminating termites that could bite back. 

Nonetheless, Goreville was a dutiful soldier and more than eager to help his god after spending two Titan Incursions and a world war dead. He had thus obediently set traps, dug ditches, and established a defensive layer around Thoon’s ship in preparation for the inevitable tide of vermin coming their way.

Victoire and Jarlack’s group had begun the party in the sky, waging a tense battle against those lobster ships, exploding flies, and strange tentacled machines. They seemed to have that side of the battle well in hand, especially since one of the lunarian vessels somehow switched sides and now exchanged laser volleys with the last remaining one. 

Their turn was just around the corner. Goreville could feel it in the tremors shaking the ground, the smell of burning flesh in the wind, and the blasts rocking the jungle. The Brood were on their way to their location, with a giant at their helm. 

Jasper and the other warriors present—a motley crew of magmorian vanguards, werescale berserkers, and wereling fighters—had raised a shield wall in preparation for the incoming wave, metal pavises and lighter bucklers forming an impenetrable barrier in anticipation of the coming attack. Goreville never thought he would end up fighting side by side with magmorians against Titanspawn in a jungle on the other side of the world two years back, but here they were. One could cut the tension in the air as the earth shook. 

Something big was on its way. Something huge and frightening that inspired fear in the men. Goreville tightened his grip on his new greatsword—carved in an alloy of Brood-resistant bones and blackstone—and waited. 

“Something big’s coming, sir!” one of the magmorians told Jasper.

“Hold your ground and wait for the signal!” Jasper ordered. Renarde, who was in the far back, began to sing a powerful, magical song in order to empower the men with courage… yet even her music couldn’t drown out the growing rumbling. 

The ruckus intensified as trees collapsed ahead of them, and the enemy appeared with a screech.

Having already invaded enemy hives, Goreville had had the displeasure of getting acquainted with their Broodmothers. These powerful and highly intelligent creatures spawned entire armies on their lonesomes. They usually resembled a monstrous fusion between an insect and a massive crocodile, with black chitin covering the body, six clawed limbs—including two sawed mantis-like forearms—and an elongated mouth filled with fangs and mandibles constantly dripping poison. Most reached over twenty feet in length, and the one that emerged from the jungle differed only in one thing from them. 

She was ten times that size. 

I guess Beelzebub juiced her up, Goreville thought. Fear spread among the rank and file as the titanic creature moved their way, crushing trees underfoot and cutting down others on her way to the ship. The beast was so vast that a sweep of her mantis arm would have torn through all the soldiers present in an instant. Oh well, ours is bigger. 

“Wait for it…” Goreville ordered. 

His men would have broken ranks without Renarde’s music bolstering their willpower, and even then, one of his werewolf soldiers began to shake with dread. “But sir–”

“Wait for it!” Goreville insisted, his sensitive ears picking up movement under the earth. Their salvation was just around the corner. “Hold your ground!”

The Broodmother let out a soul-piercing screech, her mandibles splattering acid all over the ground. She lunged towards the soldiers with murderous hunger on her mind… only to freeze halfway through her motion and take a slight step back when she realized the men hadn’t fled.

Sensing something’s wrong, are you? Goreville smiled ear to ear as the earth shifted beneath the giant creature, making it look down. Here’s the cavalry. 

The ground exploded upwards, and a colossal saurian erupted from beneath the Broodmother, biting its throat with a roar. 

The new monster’s emergence and the impact that followed sent waves of dust and debris in all directions, forcing Goreville and his allies to raise their shields to protect themselves. The towering lizard tossed the Broodmother back and threw her across the jungle, causing her to take out quite a handful of flies as she fell upon them during her flight before hitting the ground. The kaiju then rose completely out of its hole to stand on its hind legs, its reddish, spiny spine glowing with power and illuminating its ebon scales. 

The great lizard roared at the Broodmother as the latter recovered, jaws and mandibles snapping; it then charged and tussled with her, claws matching scythe-arms in a clash that sent shockwaves across the land. 

“First time seeing a kaiju battle, am I right?!” Goreville asked Jasper and the other magmorians as they were too awed by the clash to move an inch. “It always does something when you watch these things get at it!”

“Is that creature on our side?!” Jasper sounded torn between relief and rather natural fear. 

“Lady Artemis calls her Champion Mezozo,” Goreville explained with a big, wide grin. “The Mesozoic Emperor.”

Jasper’s eyes burned like twin stars. “There’s an entire empire of those things?”

“Well, uh…” Goreville drew a blank. He had never considered the implications behind the creature’s title. “Maybe?”

“By the gods…” Jasper muttered. “I hope we have a peace treaty with them!”

“Well, we don’t have one with them,” Goreville said as he pointed his sword at a horde of Brood drones crawling out of the woods like a whole pack of panthers. He clutched his torc and called upon its power. “Hold the line!”

Lord Thoon said it would take some time before he could fully awaken the torc’s true power, but Goreville could already feel a change in the way the object reacted to him. The magic flowed through his bones, strengthening his muscles and causing his claws and fangs to leave a trail of ice in their wake. His first act was to smash a drone’s face in with his greatsword and cleave it in two. Jasper and the others soon joined in the melee with a war cry. 

Lady Artemis’ werescale shamans had imbued the defenders with spells shielding them from the Brood’s corrosion, so their caustic blood hardly did more than irritate Goreville’s skin, and their newly crafted weapons could survive more than one hit at their contact. Without this key advantage, the Brood were little more than more-dangerous-than-average monsters. 

At least the small ones were. 

Goreville was busy pounding a drone into the dirt when two more Broodmothers emerged from the trail of destruction their spawn had left. The two were normal-sized compared to the giant one, but still of immense length, and carrying sacks of eggs ready to burst on their backs. 

“Larva!” Goreville shouted a warning to his wereling and werescale allies. “Jasper!”

“We’ll take them!” his magmorian ally replied with a roar, he and his fellows breaking ranks to intercept the Broodmothers. The creature screeched as their egg sacks ruptured and opened to unleash crawling, many-legged larvae hungering for hosts.

Far worse than drones were Brood larvae, since those were frighteningly fast and eager to infect anything with a pulse. Magmorian biology prevented infestation, and constructs had nothing to fear from them, but everyone else was vulnerable. No godly Miracle could cure that infestation short of death and revival, either. 

Goreville and the others werelings quickly repositioned to focus on the drones while the magmorians incinerated the larvae swarm before it could reach them. Jasper leaped on top of a Broodmother and drove his sword into its head even as the beast attempted to throw him off. 

The second one didn’t wage battle with them, however. She rammed through the shieldwall in her way and rushed into the opening, creating a path for a swarm of drones to follow. The group charged straight for Thoon’s ship. A small group of golems came out of it to defend the vessel, but the Broodmother focused on spraying the ship with acidic saliva even as the machines quickly began to grab her legs. 

The battle in the sky was steadily turning to their disadvantage as well. Jarlack’s flyers had retreated, and though Victoire’s dragon and the rebel ship were teaming up to destroy the last enemy lunarian vessel, Brood wasps and tentacled drones were free to descend upon Thoon’s ship unimpeded. They tore through the blackstone armor and created holes for exploding flies to enter through, which they swiftly did. Blasts soon rocked Thoon’s ship and illuminated the night. 

New drones emerged from the jungle in an endless wave, two of them flanking Goreville. He managed to slay one with a strike, but the other managed to bite him in the shoulder with enough force to crack his bones. Goreville tore it apart with his freezing fangs, powering through the pain, but his soldiers struggled against the weight of rising numbers. Their formation was breaking at the seams, with men dragged away and torn apart, smaller groups being slowly encircled, and new enemies stepping up to replace those who had perished. Protections against acid and caustic blood only helped so much against foes capable of tearing through steel with their mere claws. 

The situation was quickly devolving around him. While Jasper and the magmorians had set the Broodmother he was fighting on fire, she had managed to throw him off back and flung him across the battlefield and rushed to rejoin her ally. Only Mezozo was winning his own fight handily, but he was too busy cooking his enemy alive with his fiery breath to help anyone else. 

“We’re getting overrun!” Goreville warned Lord Wepwawet after repelling a drone that had been busy tearing one of his werescale allies limb from limb; and the Champion unfortunately arrived too late to save him. “For real!”

“You’ve held long enough,” his god replied. “Fall back to the rendezvous point. Renarde will send the signal.”

“At your command!”

Renarde swiftly changed her tune, her music changing to a loud and frantic melody that signaled their disengagement. Goreville’s soldiers and allies all perked up as one, Jasper included, and swiftly began an ordered retreat even as the last enemy lunarian spaceship crashed into the jungle nearby. They fled into a ditch-trail specially dug for that purpose, dragging as many of the wounded as they could with them.

Victoire and Soumis broke from the aerial battle to cover the retreat, carpet bombing the brood drones giving chase to the troops. Jasper and the magmorians’ immunity to fire proved useful as they shrugged off the flames that consumed their enemies. Thankfully, few Brood creatures gave chase; the rest of them instead swarmed Thoon’s ship in their hurry to dismantle it. Hundreds, if not thousands, of these creatures continued to pour out of the jungle until they covered the entire vessel beneath their mass.

“We’re through!” Goreville informed his god once Jasper and the others fled into the trench-trail. It only took him a glance to confirm that only drones and corpses remained behind them. “We can’t save anybody else!”

“Then it is time.” Goreville sensed his god’s magic fill his bones and expand outward. “Growth!”

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Victoire watched a forest awaken for the second time. 

She had thought no display of the Growth Miracle could surpass what she had seen in Saguenay, but her god proved her wrong. The Wyld came all alive all around Thoon’s ship, ancient trees doubling in size, roots thicker than bridges surging from the ground, and vines snapping like serpents. The jungle shuddered and then raged. 

Hidden dryads dispatched from Timberan for the operation directed the flood of flowers and its chaotic growth away from their troops and towards the invaders instead. The Broodmother fighting Mezozo was swiftly buried in a tide of plants alongside the swarm that had followed her to battle. She was dragged under the earth and smothered while the Kaiju roared in victory. 

The Wyld’s wrath swallowed Thoon’s ship whole, crushing it and its monstrous occupants. Brood drones screeched as they were smashed into fine paste by roots, their acidic blood unable to melt away the forest before it overgrew back. Soon, little more than a smoking mass of dense foliage remained of Thoon’s ancient vessel. 

“Our losses?” Victoire asked her god through telepathy. 

“Relatively minor, considering the circumstances,” Lord Wepwawet replied grimly. He always mourned his soldiers, even when light losses had been the best possible outcome. “What of the enemy?”

“Heavy, but the ship is down for the count.” Victoire nodded to herself as she pulled Soumis’ reins to retreat, leaving Beelzebub’s flies and wasps to their cruel ‘victory.’ “We’ve won.”

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He had won, but at what cost? 

Beelzebub seethed as he observed the situation through his fly familiars. A trap. Of course it had all been a trap! Lord Apep was right, that scheming wolf god’s Champion would never have spoken about Thoon in public unless she wanted her foes to overhear!

For all Beelzebub knew, the ship had been unsalvageable from the start, its technology ravaged by time and its husk turned into a lure to kill as many Brood spawn as possible! It would take years to replenish today’s losses!

I’ve lost three ships to destroy one, Beelzebub grumbled, still reeling from the insult of having one of his own vessels turned into a hostile construct. That treacherous machine was moving north, no doubt at Wepwawet’s invitation. What a disaster.

On one hand, it now meant his enemies had access to a lunarian ship… but on the other hand, the Overmind had scrubbed its invasion fleet’s records clean to ensure no critical piece of technology would fall into enemy hands should any of the vessels fall. The vessel could also easily be disabled if it tried to approach Lune thanks to intentional structural weaknesses. 

He at least had to confirm whether the mission’s objective had been a success. Beelzebub focused on his flies still inside the husk of Thoon’s ship that gathered into the stasis chamber. A tentacled drone had forced the pods open, finding only bones, dust, and the ancient corpse of a certain lunarian. 

“Thoon’s elimination: confirmed.”

At least there was a silver lining to this whole operation. 

“Grab the corpse for emergency teleportation,” Beelzebub ordered through telepathy. His domination of the Overmind had granted him de facto control over most lunarian constructs, and thus the ability to teleport them back to his Altars. 

The god then turned his attention to the other target of today’s operation: the ship factory in Sekhem. That force had had more success—largely because he sent a dozen vessels rather than three in case Wepwawet had laid a trap—and managed to annihilate the facilities at the cost of half the ships. With the teleportation network firmly under the Overmind’s control, this meant Beelzebub’s enemies had no way to reach Lune for a very long time. 

Time they did not have.

Beelzebub could sense it in the ambient mana long before his Idol saw a great, reddish stain form on Elphion’s surface, like a drop of blood on a cloudy ocean. The rift tore the heavens open over the dark lands of Mortis. What a beautiful hue. 

The Fourth Incursion shall begin in 48:00:00 hours.

Invading Titan: Kronos, Reaper of Time.

“I volunteer,” Beelzebub buzzed with laughter. 

Nothing could stop them now. Nothing.

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