Chapter 20 - They're In The Trees

Note : Apologies for the late upload, got distracted.

And hey, I updated each of my stories in this streak ! That's unusual. Only lacking The Eternal Seeker Saga now really.

Chapter 20

Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley

Logging Site

Most of Kalia's people weren't 'true' soldiers. As the mage-magistrate she'd had a small unit of gendarmerie under her command, and the odd special cases like Gregor, but the vast majority of those that bore arms now were, in theory, simple civilians.

But months of fighting these horrors had turned them all into hardened veterans.

They reacted instantly, everyone dropping what they were doing and coalescing around their foreman. First rule of fighting undead: create a circle. Or any kind of defensive formation. The Bane were not like the legions of the Empire. They didn't have the guiding hands of their living components, so their soulless simply swarmed, engulfing their foe in sheer numbers. Their advantages were total lack of morale to break, their ability to fight even while wounded, and raw numbers.

Kalia found herself hustled to the middle of the formation, sotto voce cursing herself for not bringing a carbine as she readied her revolver. Granted, other groups and guards probably needed the weapon more than her in the absolute, but right now that was cold comfort.

The sentries came rushing out of the woods, and she saw glimpses of movement behind them, hearing the rustling of undead storming through the undergrowth. Being only bones, they were surprisingly stealthy, but that only went so far. She waited until she was sure of a shot-

The skeletons burst into the freshly cut clearing, and she pulled the trigger.

Two of the undead dropped. One from her bullet, the second with a javelin through it's skull, courtesy of Gregor. The undead were in full rush by this point, and they hit the shield wall like a tidal wave.

The first few were hacked to pieces in short order.

But the first were never the problem.

Fortunately, the skeletons had no sense of organization. Instead of coming out as a single, coherent wave, they rushed out of the woods piecemeal, slowed down by the undergrowth. But they came in faster than they could kill them, and before long they were surrounded, fighting on all sides.

Kalia's gaze darted around. They wouldn't be able to hold like this forever, but so long as nothing happened reinforcements would-

She froze as she saw the glint of armor...and half a dozen legionnaries exited the undergrowth. They came as one, coherent unit. Something she knew was only possible if they had been instructed to do so.

And three of them were wielding longbows. The kind made to punch through shields and armor both.

She reached into her pocket, and hesitated.

The mana crystal within it...Gregor had refused to let her go until she took it with her. It represented almost half of their remaining mana. When she'd protested he'd been...evocative on what had almost happened to her, and that a miraculous Hero wouldn't waltz out of the darkness next time.

The mage-magistrate took a deep breath, and drew the shimmering crystal from her pocket, as she holstered her pistol.

She began to incant, runes burning around her, and the skeletons all stopped to stare at her.

The rituals that had made them were ancient, bound in the history of the Empire, going back all the way to Kalaran, the Greatest of the Necromancers and First Emperor. They understood, on a fundamental level, that in any fight, you killed the mage first.

The skeletons went into a frenzy, as the legionnaries drew their bows-

Kalia finished her incantation, and extended her free hand.

She released the web of power she had drawn around herself. Runes flared, and arcs of energy leapt from her fingers, looking as if lightning had been affected by a mad prism, flaring with every color in existence, both visible and not.

The first legionnaire hit didn't crumple, it simply ceased to exist.

The energy leapt from legionnaire to legionnaire, subdividing into less arcs each time. Entire chunks of the undead vanished, while the others twitched madly as the arcana holding them together went haywire. Finally, the arcs found their way to the mass of undead.

Half fell apart instantly. The rest collapsed, and after an instant of surprise, the soldiers stepped forward, finishing them off and crushing every skull they could reach, just to be sure.

After so long spent fighting, they were familiar with their mage-magistrate's abilities.

Silence descended once more upon the clearing.

"...That wasn't just a random swarm." Finally said Gregor as he gazed at the half vaporized legionnaires. "They were sent out with a purpose."

"To eliminate us?"

The old skeleton shook his head.

"No. If they had they'd have been deployed differently. And brought more troops. This was reconnaissance, I think."

"Recon? They've never bothered before." The Hand had seemed perfectly content with bottling them up once he'd taken the entrance to the valley. "Why now?"

"Something had to have rattled the Hand." The former legionnaire turned towards her, sightless orbits staring at her. "Three guesses as to whom."

"...Sapphiria. Crap. We have to warn her!"

"Agreed. I'll get a messenger ready."

*****

Sapphiria whistled softly as she watched the first batch of ore being dragged all the way up, before falling into the crusher's all devouring maw.

"I don't know why, but I always find conveyor belts so satisfying." The AI chuckled sheepishly as Cia gave her a surprised look. "I think my aunt infected me with her love for automation and industry. Too bad running one all the way to the mine would be too expensive."

"Affirmative."

Sapphiria sighed as she looked at the transport bot, that was finishing dumping its cargo, and preparing to go for another load.

A minecart system would be most effective, preferably self powered as a low cost alternative to dedicated hauler drones, since you could just strip out almost everything but propulsion and the most basic of navigation systems. The only problem was that she didn't want to pause everything for the upfront investment in rails, who didnt take much materials but a lot of fabricator time and-

She slapped her forehead, startling the simulacrum.

And she was a damned idiot. Because she didn't need to. There were a lot of old, but probably still serviceable minecart rails out there. She just had to nab them.

"I just had a realization. Cia, get me a construction drone, preferably the one with the storage buckets on. We have some stuff to grab."

"Yes ma'am. What are we grabbing?"

"We're going to lift some rails."

*****

Sapphiria huffed as she lifted the rail, before dumping it into the construction drone's carrying 'bucket', and simply stared as the automata disassembled a couple more in as many seconds, dumping them in with secondary appendages.

Okay. Her android wasn't helping as much, even with her toolkit. But she needed to be there anyway, to control the drone. She could probably do something more productive though, like working on her designs or-

She blinked as she received an alert. From the turrets? That was odd, because it wasn't a notification that they'd engaged. First thing she'd done after noticing the mess they'd made was drawing a line of cheap relays all the way to the hub to be warned if something happened.

She waited for a more detailed status report to be downloaded, frowning as she looked at the progress bar. Those relays were cheap, yes, but they also sucked ass. She was going to need to upgrade, but she already had so much stuff on the to-do list that-

The status report popped up, and she swore.

Of course the fucking squishies couldn't leave well enough alone and stay up there!

She ordered the drone to return home -it would be able to follow the line of relays down, and if it stopped she would pick it back up when she returned-, and went up.

She had some idiotic squishies to school.

*****

"I thought we had an understanding."

The squishie jumped back like he'd seen a ghost. Which, in some ways, he had, as she shut down her camouflage coating and just materialized out of thin air from his perspective.

"Lady Sapphiria, I-" The messenger was one of the men that had guarded the entrance, and some of the AI's alarm bells rang out. The poor bastard looked scared to hell. And not by her. Actually, he seemed relieved.

She interrupted him by hold up a hand.

"Take a deep breath, center yourself, then say why you're here."

"I...Milady, one of our logging parties was attacked. The mage-magistrate was there and-" He held up his hands. "She's fine! She saved everybody! But there were legionnaries, and the mage-magistrate is afraid there's going to be an attack here as well." He winced, looking to the side at the scattered piles of bones from the various battles. He had been trying to hide from the turrets behind a stack of crates, clearly building up his courage to go up to them, not realizing that they'd logged his presence and generated a firing solution the second he'd 'snuck' into the room. "I see I was too late."

"I'm still here. So you weren't. I thank you for the warning." Sapphiria tilted her head, wandering why he'd stumbled all over himself when he'd started talking about the mage-magistrate, before realizing she had her plasma gun in her hands. She didn't even remember drawing it. "When did this happen?"

"A few hours ago."

Sapphiria frowned. That was...a fair bit of time after she was attacked. So there were more on the way or-

"Fuck."

"Milady?"

Sapphiria looked at the entrance her turrets had chewed up.

"I'm not going to be attacked because of you. You got attacked because of me." She gestured at the tunnel leading to the surface. "Lead the way, I need to speak with the mage-magistrate."

"Yes milady!"

"Oh, and my turrets, uh, these things." She gestured at the machinegun-totting defensive apparatus. "Will not shoot you, but please do not go past this room. They will sense your presence, alert me, and defend you should something happen. Pass the word to anyone who may come down there. And don't come in unless absolutely necessary. I expect you guys to respect your end of the bargain."

"Of course milady, my apologies!"

"Now let's move."

The messenger nodded, and sprinted into the tunnel, as Sapphiria followed.

Cia? She called out mentally.

Ma'am? Answered the simulacrum.

We need to start planning. We can't just...keep reacting to things. We need to gather information, and start predicting.

Affirmative.

Sapphiria mentally sat down as she began pulling in data and assembling charts, her body on autopilot. Technically she could do without but her neural matrix was still based on a human one, and she needed some medium to keep herself anchored. Much like augmented humans having full mind-machine interfaces playing around and typing on datapads when they could just enter the information directly with their thoughts.

There was something she was missing there. Actually, there were a lot of things she was missing, starting with all that had happened to her that got her on this planet that she just didn't have the time to deal with right now.

Problem was, she didn't know enough about the Bane. Or magic in general. Clearly, the other side had some reason to have been leaving Astralis alone. If she had to guess, it wasn't mercy. No, most likely it was a resource limitation. They'd had better targets to spend their troops and resources on. But that had changed after she took over the hub. Why? Did they want access to the tunnels below? That didn't seem likely, or the bulk of the undead wouldn't have been guarding the hub.

No, it was something in the upper tunnels they were after. But as far as she could tell, the upper tunnels were only there for one purpose, and that was to get to the lower ones. They'd ignored everything else, including mineral veins, to get there. She could see some of them just left undisturbed when she came up the minecart line to the hub, so why-

The realization hit her so hard she physically stopped, causing the messenger to stumble as he tried to come to a halt as well.

"Milady?"

"They're here for the mines."