Chapter 37 - Fire At Will

EDIT : I realized I straight up forgot to make mention of the riot bots, so they have been sprinkled in a bit.

Chapter 37

Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley

Old Imperial Road

"Here they come." Said Sapphiria. She was currently prone in the forest, and saw Tramistres shift on her sensors. The huntmarshal was indeed heading the skirmishers Gregor had sent forward, and despite herself, the AI was impressed. If she hadn't possessed such advanced sensor systems, she would have been unable to find them.

"How many?"

"Can't tell yet." She couldn't 'see' them either. She was just getting a mass of sensor echoes and messy returns, that indicated that a metallic concentration was moving towards her. "Are you ready?"

"Absolutely."

"Good." Fifteen junkbots, twelve squishies, and a minefield. And a giant pile of undead against them.

One cruiser against an entire Theocracy battlegroup.

She twitched inside her armor. No. She couldn't afford to lock up now.

She saw Tramistres tense up.

"I see them." She whispered. And a split second later, so could Sapphiria. Flashes, in the forest, around the bend of the road. She swept them with her sensor, and swore.

"The maniple's in front."

"What? Oh. Oh crap."

The AI gritted her teeth as the sensor returns solidified. Yeah, maniple in front...marching with their shields raised, in a giant tetsudo formation.

That's why it had taken them so long. The sun hadn't quite peeked from above the mountains, but sky was becoming brighter by the minute. It was to the point that whatever Kalia had cooked up as a light source wasn't even necessary.

She'd thought the Hand had sent the attack off to go slow, make some noise and be sure to draw them out of the mines. But instead it seemed that the Hand was no one's fool, and adapting to the results of the battle for the mining hub.

"What do we do?" Asked the huntmarshal.

They'd been supposed to use the claymores to sweep out most of the horde, then engage the rest, and fall back to leave the maniple to the second fight.

That wasn't going to happen now.

"We improvise. Wait for my signal."

"Understood." She made a slight bird call, and Sapphiria saw the other skirmishers tense up on her sensors.

Thankfully, their plan wasn't screwed. She wasn't like the squishies of old, where she had to wire a fire plan and stick to it. Clicking twice on some mechanical detonator and praying the signal made it down the wires.

She quickly edited her detonation groups, as the enemy walked into full view.

She heard the suppressed gasps and swears from some of the skirmishers, but they quietened down immediately, and she waited.

And waited.

And waited.

She felt Tramistres shift by her side, as the enemy grew closer and closer. And she waited still.

Then, as the maniple almost exited the fire zone...she pulled the trigger.

Eight claymore mines detonated. Thousands of steel balls screamed into the air, ravaging the seething mass of bones behind the well ordered maniple.

The tetsudo formation dissolved instantly, and the skeletons turned around, putting all of their shields between them and the dangers.

Gotcha.

Large swathes of her battleplan rested on the assumption that the Hand wouldn't join the assault, at least staying back at the pass or leading the way into the mines. Because if the undead weren't lead by someone with a working brain, and worked on...whatever ticked inside their heads, they were predictable. And predictability could be exploited.

Especially when a tetsudo formation was fine in theory, but with the skeletons in the back putting their shields up, it was vulnerable to having the front rank taken out. Hence them turning around and forming a more conventional, layered shield wall.

"OPEN FIRE!" She screamed out as she joined words to action, and pulled the trigger on her plasma gun, while simultaneously detonating the rest of the claymores.

The bolt of energy flew straight into the middle of the enemy formation. Given their shields, she'd opted for medium power only, and two of the tightly packed undead went down.

The rest of the mines were more effective. Walls of steel hammered on the undead from both sides, causing further chaos. Dozens more went down...and a split second later, her troops opened fire, quickly followed by the squishies.

The squishies had actually better accuracy than her junkbots. Unsurprising, since the latter were made to be cheap as all hell. But when you had three damned machineguns you didn't need precision.

Lines of screaming gunfire poured into the mass of undead, her junkbots unloading their weapons on full auto as the maniple turned towards the latest threat.

They finally got their shields up between them and the real threat, but by that point the damage was already done. Half the maniple was down, and the intense fire was already hammering the shields. The horde was trying to surge forward, but to do it they had to go on the sides of the road...and straight into the minefield.

She had a flare of hope that they might be able to do this without risking the second group of squishies, down the road.

Then one of the undead, looking like some madman's imaginings of a centurion, raised something in the air. A...gem? Wha-

Her sensors flooded with exotic radiation, as a cone of energy vomitted out from the undead, washing over her position.

And the entire forest caught fire.

The air filled with screams as Sapphiria was flooded with emergency codes.

Time slowed as she shut down every non essential function, and she unleashed several of her programs, picking up a screaming Tramistress with one arm as she lifted the plasma gun with the other.

The centurion ceased to exist as a maximum power plasma bolt slammed into its head, and she began to run.

Before starting this, she'd written a few protocols. One of them had been labelled 'Grabbed the Squishies and RUN'. It wasn't elegant, but it was descriptive.

Her junkbots executed it flawlessly. The squishies were flailing, trying to stop the flames, but the program had been written under the assumption that some of the squishies would not want to be grabbed, and her positioning had made sure she had a bot near each squishie.

There was, however, one problem.

Her ammunition was made to be simple, reliable and safe. It wasn't actually activated by thermal reactions but instead detonated by an electric pulse in the gun's chamber. It could cook off, but it required a lot of things to go wrong before it happened.

The same couldn't be said for the ammo the squishies used.

She clamped her plasma gun onto her back, before ripping the ammo pouch off of Tramistres and tossing it into the charging skeletons coming up the road, before sprinting through the inferno.

Her bots did similarly, and they raced out of the fires like all the demons of hell were after them.

A few seconds later the flames suddenly died out, not just on the squishies but the forest as well, and she sighed in relief. At least they wouldn't have to deal with a full blown wildfire...not that what they already faced wasn't bad enough.

Her systems were helpfully doing a medical scan of the huntmarshal, and it wasn't good. The fire clearly hadn't been natural, and it had attacked flesh even when it shouldn't have been able to. Humans were mostly water, making one catch fire wasn't easy.

She rushed forward, her bots besides her, and caught sight of a wall of shields, spears and pikes, her riot bots standing head and shoulders above the squishies.

Almost there...

There was a shout from Gregor, who for some forsaken reason had elected to be bearing a shield in the front rank, and she looked at her sensors.

The maniple had pursued them, flanked by the parts of the horde that had survived the minefield. But they were stopping, and preparing to throw their javelins.

She hit her final detonation sequences.

She'd set up some of the claymores to cover their retreat, since she wasn't willing to rely on being able to outrun the undead, not when they might have the same ability as her junkbots to just punch through the undergrowth.

They weren't in a good position, but it was still decent enough. The wave of steel mostly felled parts of the horde, but the maniple still automatically brought their shields up.

She ordered the machinegun turrets to open fire as well, trying to keep them up.

They didn't come to a halt, and kept marching forward, but it bought her enough breathing room to spring past Gregor's men, and dump Tramistres behind the shield wall, as the junkbots followed suit.

"Magical fire." She said to one of the stunned soldiers. "Grab them, get them to the aid station, move!"

The soldier nodded, and some of his comrades grabbed the moaning, crying squishies, and dragged them back towards the camp, as she moved up alongside her junkbots, and joined the turrets.

She could have retargeted them, but she had a feeling that the horde of undead arriving piecemeal was going to be a lot less problematic for Gregor and his men than the maniple's javelins if they were allowed to use them.

Her junkbots began throwing their grenades, and shields went flying as the small spheres of death and destruction detonated under the legs of their wielders.

Yet still they came on.

It was terrifying to behold. Like the Theocracy's xenohorrors, just a tide of an unyielding enemy, uncapable of giving or expecting any mercy, coming to crash on the squishies standing in their way.

The horde started to crash against the shield wall. Piecemeal, at first, but then more and more.

Squishies began to fight.

And began to die.

She had a flash. A memory. Of a cruiser, spinning in the void, as boarding shuttles closed in. Screaming. Errors, everywhere.

She shook herself, and screamed her rage as she poured plasma fire into the seething mass of enemies. Some of the horde broke off from the tightly packed squishies, and charged her gun line.

They didn't even make it five meters.

At last, however, what remained of the maniple crashed against the humans. Shield walls clashed as the armored undead literally bashed their own allies aside to make way for the formation.

The fire from her troops retargeted, as the melee turned so vicious it became impossible to shoot the legionnaires without risking squishies in the process.

The line bent, as the furious undead dove in, even her riot bots being driven back. And Gregor's square began to crack. Bit by bit.

There was a cry, and suddenly Kalia was by her side. The mage-magistrate was screaming out something that just didn't make sense, and then-

Then Sapphiria's sensors went insane.

A wave of force swept the battlefield, and the maniple was thrown back, as if picked up and tossed aside by a giant's hand.

They weren't harmed. At least not much. But they were wide open.

Sapphiria's machineguns ripped them to shreds, as Gregor's men rallied, and reformed their wall. Without the maniple blocking them back, the horde finally collapsed upon them, the tidal wave of dead surrounding the square once more, and throwing itself at her troops.

She fired shot after shot into the mass of skeletons, as her junkbots just began emptying their magazines on full auto.

A skeleton, one of the legionnaires in scale armor, almost made it to her, sword drawn back, before getting obliterated by the concentrated fire of five machineguns and a plasma carbine.

And then nothing.

Just silence. Silence intersped with cries of pain.

The AI lowered her plasma gun, scanning the battlefield.

"Did...did we win?" Said Kalia.

"Yeah." She took a lungful of air as the sensor pinged back. "No enemy contacts." Sapphiria stood her units down. "We've won."

The mage-magistrate sagged, and almost collapsed as Sapphiria caught her.

"We've won..." The mage-magistrate closed her eyes.

"Yes." She put herself under the woman's arm to support her. Damn her android's short height. "We have." She looked worriedly at the square of squishies, now coming apart as the troops slowly drifted out, and some of them outright collapsed. "Let's organize some stretchers back to camp. It looks like some among your people need it."

As expected, the mention of her people got the mage-magistrate out of her sudden torpor. A side effect of her magic, maybe?

Kalia began yelling orders, designating orderlies as people began to run around, checking who was dead and who was still breathing. She was quickly joined by Gregor, who took a group of soldiers to finish off any crippled undead still among the massacre and shield their people from any stragglers.

Sapphiria barely noticed the old legionnaire, as she stared at Kalia. She couldn't help it. She'd always been drawn towards decisive women. Like a moth towards flame...

That brought to mind what she'd just experienced in the forest, and she grimaced. Her junkbots hadn't cared that much. They'd taken damage to be sure, but the actual thermal power of the flames hadn't been that high.

The squishies on the other hand...

"I'll go help with the wounded. Use my medikit."

The mage-magistrate nodded.

"Thank you. But not here. Go to the camp, help Truvan and Malry." Sapphiria blinked. Truvan? Oh. Right, the 'elven' healer, from back when she'd first met the squishies down in the mines. "They'll able to triage the wounded, make sure you're directed to the ones who need you the most."

Sapphiria was about to retort that she had perfectly good medical scanners, but then again...she didn't really have the expertise to use them.

"Alright. I'll have my bo-golems help ferry the wounded. Just point them towards whoever needs them."

The mage-magistrate nodded.

"Understood. Now go!"

The AI took off, towards the camp, as the sun finally rose above the peaks, bathing the valley in golden light.

This was going to be a long day.