Chapter 399 - Full Force Contact

Notes :

Very happy to see you guys enjoyed the Sand Kraken ! Only two chapters after this one before the end of the novel ! I hope you'll enjoy them as well !

Also got drained of blood today for medical tests, so I got thoroughly vampired.

Chapter 399

Red Sands Desert, Aurorean Empire

Dungeon Factory, Operations Center

Ghost watched as the strikes hit, her eyebrow raising a fraction as, instead of a cascade secondary detonations, one of the caches went up into a plume of plasma.

"Guess we found the missiles." She gazed at the guild hall as she received the alert, and saw the air shimmer, and the next wave of shells exploded in midair, the air flashing with energy. "Shield on the guild hall. CQ?"

"I copy." Said Alexandra's daughter. "I'll crack it."

"Good." Ghost looked over her shoulder as the door to the operations center opened, and Alexandra joined us. "Welcome to the party."

"Status?"

"All three caches got hit. First wave pasted the hall, but the building is still up, and it's raised some kind of shield."

Alexandra looked at the images, and snorted.

"It's the same one they loaned Allya, when she was fighting the Republic's black ops. I wondered what they'd done with that."

Her voice was almost casual, but her eyes were haunted.

"The expedition?" Asked Ghost.

"Dead. Very dead. Piece of advice: do not watch the recordings."

"Got it. The troops are proceeding to their waypoints, aaaand we have weapons fire."

People emerged from the site of the third cache, looking like they'd...well, just survived an artillery barrage, firing gauss rifles as they pushed pass the debris, downing the first rank of golems in short order.

The rest of the automata returned fire, but kept advancing. Their rifles weren't making much of a dent in what had to be high tech body armor, though it was hard to tell under all the soot.

It didn't matter. It distracted the survivors for long enough.

The artillery fired a third volley, this time precisely targeted, and high tech or no, their armor wasn't 'take a hundred and fifty five millimeter shell to the face' good, let alone fifty.

The survivors abruptly turned into deep craters with a fine red mist, and the golems continued their advance.

By that point, the Mackies were charging straight at the guild hall, moving to clear their rocket pods.

The first mech came to a halt, the supersonic blast of a railgun echoing through the air.

Clearly, there had been a cache, and personnel ready to use its contents, within it.

The mech staggered...then it adjusted its pods, and fired.

Six more railguns opened up, pulverizing its internals and ripping apart its power systems, causing cascade failures in the mana crystals. But it was already too late.

Most of the rockets didn't make it. Lasers lapped out of portable point defence kits, blasting out of windows, doors and murder holes. A few even simply got thrown off course as the mech died, going wild.

But enough flew true. And their null warheads had come a long way since Alexandra had gotten her captive archmage and brought Emilia fully into her secrets.

The shield collapsed like a crystal dome hit by a sledgehammer, shards of disintegrating energy falling like a rain on the guild hall.

They hadn't even touched the ground that the other Mackies were already returning fire. Shells, rockets, machinegun and autocannon fire ripped into the hall.

But it was built like a fortress. Murder holes exploded under impacts, windows filled with fire and the smell of sizzling flesh, but the hall stubbornly refused to fall, diligently giving back as good as it got, felling mech after mech with plasma blasts, railguns and even laser cannons.

Then the mesa fortress opened up.

It wasn't a single blast. It was an avalanche. Shell after shell after shell hitting the same, precise location within a second of each other. Blast after blast from armor piercing high explosive shells digging their way through the enchanted geomancer fortifications like a drill punching through an armor plate.

Then the guns fell silent.

Just in time for CQ and her jetpack troops to fall through the newly blasted holes, firing as they came.

"Hostiles attempting to break out of the cordons. Riot control units holding for now." Reported Seraph. "Casualties mounting."

Ghost nodded, gravely.

"The guys caught in the crowd are realizing what's going on and pushing out." She tapped one of the reports appearing in the hologram. "Golems are reporting mounting resistance at the cache site, and there's at least one another we didn't find. People rushing to it and dispersing to engage the infantry afterwards. We need to-"

They both felt it. The hyperspace field.

Then the explosions and roar of gunfire in the upper levels, as the teleport intercept room's defences engaged.

Their gazes met.

"I'll keep a handle on things." Said Ghost.

Alexandra nodded gratefully, and sprinted out of the operations center.

She had already seen what had arrived in the dungeon.

And she needed something...special. She had a feeling it would come in useful.

*****

Starvak grunted as he stepped in, and felt the teleport go wrong.

He didn't think, when he materialized in the wrong place.

He just acted.

He jumped to the side, throwing both of his axes, using the enchantments within to make them tear apart the rows of guns pointed where he'd stood a second ago.

Thankfully, it took a second for the golems to fire. Perhaps it was surprise. Or some kind of security to avoid killing friends. He didn't particularly care.

Concentrated artillery fire ripped the platform he'd been standing on to pieces, but he was already among them, tearing through the gun crews with his bare hands, before his axes flew back, and he used them to slice apart the artillery pieces themselves as well.

It was over in less than a minute, and he took stock of the situation, waist deep in wrecked golems, the last few having tried to rush him with directional mines strapped to their chests.

This room wasn't on any of the maps. Clearly fortified, and made for this purpose. Was that what had affected the teleport? Brought him in? He was no mage, but that wasn't supposed to happen.

He didn't even bother to look up when the ceiling came down, the gigantic pillar metal screaming through the air.

He simply lifted a single hand, and stopped it dead, the ground cracking underneath him as his powers failed to fully dissipate the impact.

His eyebrow rose as the pillar began to heat up, and he calmly walked to the room's entrance, letting the trap fall behind him as he stepped into the corridor.

"Is that the best you can do?" He asked.

The corridor exploded.

*****

The fighting in the guild hall was brutal. The entire structure had to be cleared room by room, corridor by corridor, against an enemy that may be outnumbered, but had an overwhelming technological superiority. Rushing down a machinegun was hard, but a pulse gatling holding down a hallway was almost impossible without power armor.

Thankfully, CQ was able to break a lot of chokepoints, teleporting in and fighting heedless of damage thanks to her abilities. Most of the time she didn't even have to kill them, just distract them long enough for the golems to overwhelm them.

Their armor may be good, but her sword was made by her moms. It was better. Far better. And the golems had been issued shaped charges and plenty of grenade launchers, plus RPGs. Overkill for most targets, and unwieldy as hell in this setting, but antitank weapons were the only reliable low tech way of putting these people down.

She smiled as she felt the rumble of Kara moving through the training fields, her information stream showing her how the manticore pounced on a railgun tank hunter team trying to reposition tearing them apart before they could bring their guns to bear.

She saw a door slam open in front of her and readied her sword to strike. She-

She froze, as Dominique barreled into the hallway, and came to a halt as she recognized who she was facing, her incantation dying on her lips.

"CQ?!? Crystal's boss?" She blurted out. "What-"

The boss saw the guild soldier appear at the end of the hallway, missile launcher on his shoulder.

She perhaps wasn't brilliant in the way most people could consider intelligence, but her instinctual understanding of combat was second to none. She couldn't get the attendant out of the way in time, and her shield wasn't going to hold against something like that, not after taking so many hits.

There was no way to tell if that thing had soul sealing enchantments. And mom would be extremely sad if something happened to Dominique. And angry. Angry beyond reason. She would do something she would regret later.

CQ grabbed the talisman around her neck, and ripped it off, pressing it against the stupefied attendant's collarbone.

Then she crushed it, and the universe screamed as the attendant, alongside her hand, vanished into hyperspace.

Not that her missing limb mattered much, as half a second later the missile vaporized half of the wing, CQ and her assault team along with it.

*****

Starvak walked out of the ruins of the corridor, his wounds vanishing like they'd never existed. Which, in truth, they hadn't.

He was an archon. So long as he had mana to burn, he was immortal.

"Good. Very good." He said as he stepped into the room, only to be immediately pelted by gunfire.

This time it wasn't just artillery. Machinegun teams and autocannon turrets attempted to rip him to shreds.

Instead, his axes sliced them apart, and returned their matter to the universe, as they slowly dissolved into nothing, like that influence disruptor he had 'accidentally' demolished back then.

He hadn't bothered to bring one of his own. If the Duchess' assassins had failed, it was obvious Crystal had the countermeasures. And if she somehow hadn't then, she definitely had them now.

No matter. He could tear his way through her army, and rip her screaming core out of it's defenses himself.

He began jogging into the tunnels beyond, when he felt the unmistakable sensation of a nearby teleport.

He turned around, expecting movement from the room he had come from, but...nothing?

Curious.

A split second later, the ground shook, and a cloud of dust filled the tunnels.

Ah. She was collapsing the direct way deeper. She was afraid then.

It wouldn't help. But he could play that game. Besides, digging through the debris would take too long.

He moved forward, and into the next fight.

*****

"Stun her ass and toss her into the brig, I can't deal with her right now." Said Alexandra over the comms, and Ghost nodded.

"Understood." She gestured, and a split second later the backup teleport intercept chamber filled with the bark of a stun pistol.

Dominique had been too confused to bring her wards up, and she collapsed like a sack of potatoes, golems grabbing her and moving her towards the core fortress.

She had bigger problems to deal with right now as well. Though she deeply appreciated CQ saving the young woman, as the loss would have devastated her other self, there simply wasn't time.

The battle for the guild hall was doing well, if one counted 'losing a dozen soldiers for every enemy down' as 'well', but she had sixty thousand troops to throw at the problem. The Mackie losses were more painful, but now that the tanks had caught up, they were eating the guild's tank hunter teams for breakfast, just pulverizing anything that even looked like it was trying to shoot back, while the golems swept the building, room by room, the jetpack commandos now joined by the regular infantry.

The last cache the guild had however...was more problematical. She couldn't pin down the exact location, and had to simply flatten the entire block, walking an artillery barrage up and down the entire area for a solid minute before she was finally sure they wouldn't be digging any more guns out of there.

Then there was the matter of sweeping up those who had already gotten their weapons.

The guild clearly had found a way to infiltrate personnel into the city with knowledge of these guns. How many was hard to say, but she had three full squads in power armor out there raising hell. There had been some in the guild hall, but at least they were penned in. Here they could use their armors' boosts to its fullest effect, staying ahead of the artillery response and the tanks with the long, almost lunar strides power armor enabled.

Given the number of enemies and the fact that they'd already been in gear, she was guessing they'd put a few squads down in that stockpile to gear up immediately if something went sideways. A wise precaution, given how power armor could take a bit to don if you didn't have the right assistance.

Fortunately, she had come prepared for this kind of mess.

Their armor gave them greater mobility, but she could flood the air with drones, and once she locked onto one of them, she kept on them like a damned bloodhound.

Eventually, they simply ran out of space to maneuver, and the mass of golems just obliterated them. A few made some pretty respectable stands, but power armor wasn't something that worked well without support. Just like a regular tank, no matter how tough the armor or how powerful the guns, if it was stranded alone, it would eventually be overwhelmed. And these guys had no clue how to actually fight a war in these things, just small unit actions.

So one by one, they fell. Not without cost, and not without a wild expenditure of ordnance, but they fell.

She felt the ground shake again.

Alex, what the hell are you doing up there?