[TFW] Chapter 373 - Raise The Banners

Note : Chapter 45 of Manaforged Robotics has been written and added to the queue.

Hey guys. I'm really sorry about the radio silence and drought of content, especially for The Fallen World.

Things have been going badly lately. Some of it was due to the construction and the entire mess related to it, but I just...completely failed to regain my footing afterwards, and things have been going sideways ever since.

I'm going to try to get things back on track. But that's all I can promise. That I will try.

In the meantime, I hope you'll at least enjoy the chapter. It always lift my spirit when I see people enjoying and commenting about them.

Chapter 373

Low Alcheryos Orbit

Citadel of the Flames

Somehow, this meeting was even grimmer than the last.

The Adjudicator watched as the Seraphim sat back down. Twenty dead. Eighteen inquisitors, two Seraphim. Over half of the force they'd sent in.

And they'd failed. Miserably.

The makers of Sunrise's slave brands were either dead, or in the hands of the Order now.

It was supposed to be an ambush. Held for when, not if, the Order came for the renegade mages. Instead the Order had turned it around on them, and just vanished into thin air, every pursuit and trail going nowhere or into more ambushes.

"How did this happen?" Said one the Custodians. "We weren't caught unawares. We had teams positioned, weapons loaded. We were prepared, in every way imaginable."

There was a silence in the meeting room, until the Adjudicator cleared her throat, leaning forward on her much too large throne.

Why they insisted on giving her the seat of the sixth Custodian, she still didn't know. And at this point, she was purely and simply too afraid to ask.

"We're stretched too thin." She said, and everyone looked at her. "Our forces are almost to the breaking point. The preparations for the Purge are devouring our manpower, and the Order's sabotage is making the problem worse tenfold. We're on the defensive, they can mass their forces at any one point, we have to defend everywhere."

"That is unless we attack." Said another Custodian.

"That is easier said than done." Jeremiah, commander of the Celestial Watch, sighed. "They're dug in deep, and whenever we find something they just...kill themselves. They're fanatics. Not the figure of speech, I mean true fanaticism. The kind that overrides all self preservation. They're all glad to die for their goal."

"They also know that we will kill them regardless." Said the Adjudicator. "Dead for dead, they might as well avoid interrogation."

One of the Custodians looked at her.

"Are you suggesting our policies are...ill advised?"

"No. Heretics must burn." There was no doubt in her thoughts about that. She wished she could say the same for anything else. "What lies beneath slumbers. It must not wake. And if we let them dig into what the Sagitarius Empire was doing, they will awaken it."

They'd almost realized too late what was happening then. It would not happen again.

"Good."

"Nevertheless." Spoke the Custodian that had saved her. "She brings up a good point. We are unlikely to gain intelligence through prisoners, and it is too late to attempt infiltration. We cannot win if we cannot bring the Order into the light."

"The Purge will take care of that." Said another Custodian.

"Yes, but we need the means to destroy them afterwards." The Custodian may still be weakened, but his gravitas was intact as he leaned forward. "I believe it may be time to petition for Divine Intercession."

The Adjudicator swallowed. An Intercessor? On Alcheryos? That would break every treaty they had ever made. That would be tantamount to Him coming here. Because in a way, He would be. Intercessors were a shard of His consciousness, a dream, a figment of the imagination...but very, very real.

Because when a God dreamt, reality obeyed.

"...The situation is not so dire." Answered the other Custodian, and the Adjudicator shivered.

The fact that they were responding this mildly, and not shutting it down instantly spoke volumes as to how bad things were.

"Perhaps not. The fact remains, however, that we are getting overwhelmed."

"We should focus on one thing at a time." Said Jeremiah. "What does the Order want with the mages?"

"That's easy to answer." The Adjudicator sighed. "It's for the war. Everything they've done on Arkhan so far has been for that. They're going to use them to expand it. If I had to guess, they'll implicate the Sapphire Kingdom's council of Archmages."

"So we watch the council then."

"The council serves as the Kingdom's ministers. Any part of their entire executive branch could lead back to them. We can't keep a tight watch around a whole bureaucracy."

"Do you have a proposition then?" Said the Fourth Custodian, the one who had first spoken after the briefing.

"I do." She grimaced. "I've been expanding the number of inquisitors that will survive the Purge, as ordered. There is an additional well of manpower we may take from." She took a deep breath. "The Temple Guard...and Gorromar."

The Custodians exchanged looks. There seemed to be a whole, silent conversation in that handful of seconds, before they looked back to her.

The Fourth Custodian shifted.

"Are you suggesting that they are loyal enough to be used?"

"Not all of them. But given some time and resources, I can find those we can use. And push comes to shove, I can prepare the...less reliable elements for an emergency."

There was a pause.

What she was suggesting, effectively, was preparing to raise an army in His name.

That was one, short, perilous step from proclaiming a holy war.

"Make it so." Said the First Custodian.

*****

"Hey, sis."

Alexandra blinked, looking away from the command center display.

She tried to spend at least an hour there every day, keeping a hand on the pulse of...well, everything. If she kept herself buried in her workshop and schemes, she'd lose sight of the bigger picture, and that wouldn't end well.

"Yeah?" She answered as Ghost stepped into the room. "What's up?"

"I've got some of the sensor clusters for the observatory set up, and decided to run a few tests."

"Right." That particular project had been to get some real eyes on what was going on in orbit, and especially the citadel. Plus, maybe get some sneaky recon of the lunar facility they thought the Omega level weapons they'd heard of were stored at.

Well 'heard of', more found an Omega level message in the logs of Seraph's communicators headed there when ninety percent of the facility was blown to bits. Which, if nothing else, indicated that the Sagitarius Empire had realized something was happening at the very last second.

"Found something interesting?" Continued the Earth-born.

"And then some. Test I ran was measuring the length of the day."

Alexandra blinked, and laughed.

"That required military grade sensors?"

"No, just math and something more precise than a golem head taped to a pillar."

"Alright, fair enough. What did you find?"

"Twenty-four hours."

"Like Earth then."

"No. Earth's varies. Planetary orbits aren't perfect circles. On average it's very close, but it varies plus or minus twenty seconds, sometimes more."

"And here..."

"Twenty four hours."

"To the second? Always?"

"No, to the fifteenth decimal of a second. It's so precise I had to use Seraph's atomic clock downstairs to verify." Communications across interstellar distances requiring pinpoint accuracy, there was an atomic clock in Seraph's bunker, which they'd found while tearing it apart for the fusion reactors. It had been more of a curiosity than anything -even over several millennia, the inacuracy of 'regular' high tech clocks wasn't exactly big, though it had been useful for reconstructing the trajectory of some messages-, but they'd kept it online because why not? "That's not natural. And. It's. Not. Changing."

Alexandra's eyes went wide.

"The planet's orbit is perfectly circular?"

"Or so close to it that I can't measure the difference."

"That's..."

"Not possible. Not naturally. The likelihood of that happening with a twenty four hour day to boot is so small I can't calculate it."

"So it's artificial. Maybe the Gods changed the planet's orbit?"

"If they did, why didn't we hear about it? And why bother? They uplifted the whole world, but this is stupidity. Plus...moving a planet? Unless you had the entire place under an inertial compensation field, there'd be traces of that throughout the world's geology. And that's if you hadn't ripped the entire thing apart. If either had happened, there would be a trace in the records of the Sagitarius Empire. They might not have much from back then, but they did have records of when the Gods arrived, even if it's, well, vague, since they were basically at medieval tech levels back then. And given how...skeptical they were of them, you'd think they'd have recorded a change to the length of the day, or any trace of a project this big. I mean hell, Seraph did comment on the whole oil problem, with the deposits having been sabotaged, and yet nothing about this?"

"So it happened before the Gods arrived..." Alexandra's eyes went wide. "Or it didn't happen at all."

Why bother moving something huge to an orbit this precise, if you could make it from the ground up at that very orbit? That's what humanity had done for many orbital habitats after all.

Ghost nodded.

"Yeah. That was my thoughts exactly. Especially as I've asked around. Ever tried to compare Alcheryos' mountain ranges to fault lines and all the other geological things that should have formed them?"

"They don't match, do they?"

"Nope. Some of those formations just...don't make sense if you look at them closely enough. And once again, no mentions of the Gods having made them."

"Alcheryos is artificial. The entire fucking planet." Whispered Alexandra.

"I wouldn't necessarily go that far but-"

The dungeon core shook her head as she got up and began pacing back and forth. One good thing about having designed it after a ship's bridge was that there was always some room to pace. On a starship they were effectively maintenance access panels you could remove to easily -and rapidly- get at the most important electronic systems on the ship, here they were...

Well let's say that with her powers maintenance wasn't that big of an issue and her paranoia combined with dungeon expertise meant she had other uses for hidden spaces.

It was probably superfluous on anyone who'd gotten this far, but she wouldn't still be here if she hadn't thoroughly prepared to those kind of scenarios.

"No. No one would go to the trouble of just doing the crust. Especially not if they changed the orbit. Besides, what would be the point? Live on it? Planets are hideously cost inefficient for that, and you know it. Even when we left, orbital habitats were starting to become more cost effective for living on than, say, terraforming Venus or Mars." Which pissed off the Martians of course, but they had a national dream to uphold, for better or for worse. "No, there's another purpose. Why would-" She stopped as something occurred to her. "Hey...do you remember the pillars of power?"

"The what?"

"When Emilia talked to us about the sources of mana. Mana oasis, NLR Cores, dungeons...and pillars of power. I've been coming up on them a bit since one makes Sapphire City habitable." Alexandra looked at her other self. "It was said they went down to the center of the world. To generate mana. Why? The Gods had NLR cores. So many they even gave them away to the Sagitarius Empire of all people! Why would they dig giant shafts into the planet to 'generate' it? Fuck, they probably had dungeon cores too if need be."

"That...are you saying they were some kind of excavation site?"

"Or something else. What did the Empire call them in its documents? 'Mana core taps'? Tapping what, exactly? A planetary core is a big ball of molten metal. And this place didn't have magic before the Gods showed up."

"...Shit. What do we do?"

"We get Glitch to scour every archive and databank we have for those pillars, for starters. Then we start making plans. If we're going to have to hit Tivaro, we're going to get into conflict with the Sapphire Kingdom." Alexandra licked her lips, and sighed. "It might be...worth considering dumping our plans for negotiations with them."

That might cost thousands of lives. Hundreds of thousands.

Ghost looked sick, but she nodded nonetheless.

"Because if we conquer them..."

"We get to take a look at an active pillar ourselves."

"We could just ask."

"In a treaty?" Alexandra laughed out loud. "Ah yes, that would go unnoticed."

"It wouldn't have to be a public provision."

"No, but you can be certain the Church will keep a close eye on such negotiations, and their eventual conclusion. Shit, everyone will. Especially after what we're going to do with this summit." Alexandra shook her head. "No, the only way will be to get the Kingdom under our aegis. And if the council of archmages fought Asaria for a millenia, I doubt they'll bend the knee to Rebirth without considerable force."

Ghost sighed.

"I wish I could say you are wrong."

"Yeah." Alexandra closed her eyes. "I wish so too..." She took a deep breath. "We should get Glitch. Start getting things together. Let's be about it."

"I'll make you a cat golem for your shoulder."

They exchanged smiles. Weak ones, but smiles nonetheless.

"Shut up."