Chapter 181 - Last Hurrah

Note : Chapter 184 has been written and added to the queue !

Chapter 181

Fallen Province of Irakia, Sagitarius Empire.

Hammer of Eternity, Command Center

The core hummed softly as the archon stepped into the room.

It wasn't looking at him per se…but both were clearly staring at each other.

"Why have you come?" Spoke the archon, an abnormally short human. If human could still be applied to an archon of course. "Something sent you here. Or rather someone."

The core stayed silent as it monitored the rest of the battlefield. Total defeat. The enemy was even preparing to detonate the Valiant Winds' central reactor, and-

It caught Alexandra's small monologue.

The speakers crackled to life in the Hammer of Eternity's command center.

"The cause lives on. Ad Astra."

And the core lowered the walker's shields.

The nuclear detonation did the rest.

*****

Allya heard the alarms a tenth of a second before she was thrown against the wall as the landship was knocked around like a toy.

Luckily for her, the Hammer of Eternity absorbed the bulk of the blast, by virtue of the supply ship hiding behind it.

But it didn't absorb all of it, and she had a split second to see the golem she had been fighting fly towards her before darkness took her.

*****

Alexandra walked up to Pyris, having fully jumped back into CQ's body rather than having on a sliver of attention there, 'possessing' her by the slimmest of margins.

The paladin wasn't her first choice of person to go to, but she couldn't seem to find the baroness or her command staff.

"Pyris! Hey!" The adventurer looked over her shoulder, clearly about to shout at her to shut up, before doing a double take.

"Crystal! Thank the gods you're here!"

"Why? What's going on?"

"It's Sonya! She threw the baroness and her people as a boarding party on one of the ships!"

Alexandra blinked. Then her -well, CQ's- face went white.

"She WHAT?!?"

*****

Allya awoke, gasping in pain as she tried to get up.

Whatever the hell had happened, one of her ribs was clearly broken…and she could feel blood trickling from her forehead.

She shook herself, immediately regretting the decision as her vision began to swim.

"Pyn? Anders?" She called out, panic seeping into her voice as she surveyed her surroundings.

Pandemonium was the only apt descriptor for what she saw. The ship was clearly kocked on its side, as she was standing on a wall…and her people's bodies littered the hallway around her. Some worryingly still, and a few others faintly stirring.

She searched through the bodies, her panic rising, before she finally saw Pyn's long, auburn hair, coming from underneath a golem.

The baroness hissed in pain as she pushed the automata off of her girlfriend, her broken ribs flaring up, before dropping to her knees as she moved her hand to her girlfriend's neck.

She sighed in relief as she found a pulse…a split second before a loud clang filled her ears, and a sizeable armored hatch went flying further down the hallway.

Her face went white as some kind of three legged armored automata stepped through, wielding the unmistakable bulk of some kind of gatling, although its second weapon was mercifully dangling off of half ripped out cabling, clearly out of action.

She grabbed the chain on her girlfriend's neck, and tugged the teleport talisman into her hand.

"Sky. Electric. Limelight. Order." She spoke as the machine turned towards her.

There was a flash, a thunderclap of displaced air…and only rushing air in front of her as her girlfriend was teleported to safety.

She reached for her own talisman…and hesitated.

There was no way she could get her bodyguards and advisors to safety, even by triggering the talismans of those who had them. There simply wasn't time…unless she stayed, and fought.

She sighed, and drew her daggers, wincing slightly as she did.

Not the wisest course of action, perhaps. But she had a feeling she was going to need her people once this was over.

And there was no guarantee anyone would get to them in time to bring them back otherwise. Provided the Old World mechanical horror didn't vaporize them to begin with!

The construct brought its weapon to bear, and Allya dodged as laser bolts began flying. She dove for the construct's damaged side, and as expected it swung to try and keep her in its sights.

By the time it did, she was already too close. She jumped…and dived under its legs.

Whatever the automata had expected, this wasn't it. Allya swept at its legs, pressed the buttons on her daggers.

The blades materialized inside the armor, and the golem shuddered as it pitched forward…but not before its last leg kicked out, catching Allya in between the shoulder blades, knocking her breath out and slamming her into the 'floor'.

She gasped as she tried to get back up, her vision swimming even more, and failing that, she rolled onto her back.

To find herself nose to a spinning up gatling. The golem somehow having recovered its balance.

Time seemed to slow as adrenaline flooded her system…which is how she caught the flicker of movement from the door the golem had come from.

A split second later, a spider tank erupted from the passage, and the Old World golem barely had the time to react as the tank crushed it against the bulkhead.

However, the automata was built of sterner stuff, and it lifted its gatling, even pressed into the wall, and began firing into the tank.

But it bought Allya enough time to recover. She leapt on the spider tank and rushed to the pinned construct, plunging her daggers into its core.

She pressed the buttons, and the Old World golem twitched, and went limp.

Allya stepped back, before collapsing ontop of the spider tank, belatedly recognizing it as Alexandra's -Crystal, damn it- gift from Rebirth's crest inlaid onto its armor.

She patted the tank.

"Good boy." She had the time to say, before her injuries caught up to her, and she blacked out once more.

*****

"Report." Said the Custodian, as the adjudicator bowed. The room would have been a strange one, for those not used to working with the Inquisition or its masters. It was something halfway between a conference room, a shrine and an operational command center.

But currently, it was empty of anyone but the Custodian and his subordinate, the consoles, habitually manned by Seraphims, empty, busy as they were on other projects. Even with the God of Fire's gifts and the help of the clergy in recruiting, there was never enough of the faithful that met the arduous requirements to be elevated to their hallowed ranks.

"We have finished parsing through the orbital reconnaissance data for the attack. It is confirmed. Multiple units with advanced levels of technology boarded and destroyed the support vessel, using gravity weapons, railguns and lasers."

"Numbers?"

"Unclear. Their insertion method used previously unknown stealthed vehicles. And not just any stealth, the best of the best, at least for the heretics of the Old World."

"Concerning."

"Yes my lord. Due to this, we were unable to confirm the exact numbers of transports, although we are aware several were seemingly lost in the assault. We do know they originated from within the town or quite close to it, but the level of stealth, combined with the unexpected design and the town's own interference prevented us from locking onto them before they were already out into the desert, and we were unable to backtrack to their origin point."

"Where did they retreat to?"

"The supply ship's core detonation made determining that utterly impossible. The explosion not only blinded our sensors for several crucial seconds, but the resulting radiation and fallout hashed the following scans. With such level of cloaking technology, finding them without short range, effectively atmospheric scans would have been impossible."

The custodian nodded.

"Then it is not your fault. We cannot allow the Order to realize we are onto them. What about the drone?"

"We have checked the logs from the dungeon core. The drone was absorbed but contained little of use. Some materials and computer systems the core was allowed to keep, the control program deleted the rest. The design indicate a modified Nolkor MV8X stealth attack drone, a post Twilight design, but one widespread enough that pinpointing the exact origin of acquiry is impossible."

"Very well." The Custodian looked at the table for a second, before raising his head. "The Order is growing bolder, and far better equipped than we had realized. If they have acquired fabricators from the supply ship, and the schematics to have them self replicate…we cannot give them the chance to rebuild."

The adjudicator nodded. She didn't need to be told what had happened the last time the Order was left to its own devices, and allowed to interfere with a purge.

The empty seat in the Custodians' council chamber was all the reminder she needed.

"Then what are you orders?"

"I will discuss this with the rest of the council. But those fabricators are of little use without advanced processed materials. I will recommend that the purge be moved forward. This will eliminate most of the sources for such materials, and collapse international commerce, allowing us to track them more efficiently. Furthermore, in the chaos we should be able to unravel their conspiracy. We know they have infiltrated the Eris Empire, their corruption clings to this realm still. We must purify it."

"Yes my lord. It shall be done. Glory be His Name."

"And Glory be His Pyre, Adjudicator. Dismissed."

The adjudicator bowed, and exited the room. She took a second to orient herself, and walked towards the communication center.

It was time to purify Alcheryos once more.

*****

"Well, at least we got the baroness back safe, if not sound." Said Emilia as she sat on Alexandra's armrest.

"That's something." Alexandra sighed. She had not expected Allya to ask Sonya to serve as a giant catapult, and much less for the damned sorceress to send the baroness onto one of the ships! "This almost turned into a disaster."

"Almost. Yes." Said the vampire, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "It's not like your little stunt killed at least two hundred adventurers, or seeded the town's outskirts with radioactive fallout."

Alexandra winced. She'd been lucky in that the fusion gun used by the Hammer of Eternity was powered by a helium-3 reaction, meaning it was completely radiation free.

The reactor core for the supply ship…had not. It hadn't affected the town itself too much, but there was no hiding the fact that the entire battlefield was now a radioactive mess. Not to mention the cores of the other ships, who despite not having overloaded had still taken a beating, and some of them had melted down and flooded the interior of their vessel with hard radiation. Most of that could be counteracted with magic, some technological assistance and, push came to shove, a buttload of medical care. There were, unsurprisingly enough, a lot of spells and established procedures to deal with even severe radiation poisoning, which made sense, the entire planet had been a radioactive wasteland when the God of Fire had come by and ended the Great Night, and the inhabitants would have not gotten far in reclaiming the world had they not developed some extensive treatments and countermeasures. Still, there were some spots 'hot' enough to fry circuitry, let alone humans, healing spells or no healing spells. Something, incidentally, that she had found out the hard way after flooding the downed ships with her golems in an effort to find the baroness.

"The adventurers were an unfortunate form of collateral damage." The siege walker had absorbed most of the flash from the nuclear detonation, but it was still a nuke. A great number of adventurers had been simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and simply vaporized by the thermal flash, rendering any resurrection effectively impossible. "But I couldn't afford to have them realize what I had done."

"True, I suppose." Emilia sighed. "But that was reckless."

"Very much so, yes. But there was an opportunity to help keep you safe, and I took it." It was a bit of a stretch, but not that much of one. Protecting her advisor and girlfriend was, after all, one of her primary objectives. "With what we've gathered…our enemies will tremble."

"Right. If you can get it to work properly."

Alexandra winced.

"Fair enough."

One of the slight problems she'd had was that while, yes, she had been able to extract small fabricators and the databanks from the ship…she'd also done so without the codes or authorization.

Depowering everything had prevented them from wiping their own contents, but now all of the files were on security lockdown, encrypted to hell and back under a protocol even Seraph wasn't familiar with.

The fabricators were another matter. She didn't have the codes to make them work normally, but she didn't need to. As expected there were failsafes to be able to manufacture spare parts should the officers be incapacitated, and she'd been able to input some of Seraph's schematics into there. She couldn't order the fabricators to manufacture whole weapons, but that wasn't what she wanted them for. After all, she already had assembly lines and workshops, what she needed was the base components.

She'd only had a bit of time to run some tests, before leaving it into Seraph and Sarah's hands, but even with just a single fabricator, producing only the most expensive parts to replicate with her dungeon powers, they'd reduced the price of manufacturing a railgun by half.

"But I suppose it went as well as could be expected." Emilia sighed, shaking her head.

"Yes, it has. Alright, I need to go, the baroness has woken up and-"

Alexandra stopped mid sentence as Emilia grabbed her arm.

"I think we can give the baroness a night to recover." The Earth-born looked at the vampire, who smiled. "And before you say anything about the to-do list…I'd like to remind you that we've been running around in panic for the entire week." She straddled her girlfriend's lap. "So, I believe both of us earned some R&R, mmmhhh?"

Alexandra meekly nodded. Not that she was all that intimidated at this point, but she knew the vampire liked it.

"Good girl."

The vampire leaned forward, and Alexandra met her halfway, kissing passionately. There was much to do…but they could spare a night. And Emilia was right, the least she could do was give the poor baroness a night to recover. Then Emilia's hands began unfastening her armor, and she had much more pressing things to think about.