Chapter 178 - A Clash Of Titans

Chapter 178

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth

City of Rebirth, Outskirts

Even after all Alexandra had seen today, if someone had told her Starvak had this much power, she wouldn't have believed them.

Five landships brought their guns to bear on the dwarf, firing all they had in an effort to protect their flagship.

Missiles, point defense lasers, railguns. Not just guns mounted on tanks, but starship grade artillery. Weapons meant to rip apart spaceships, and shred fortresses. They were decayed, true, but no still mightier than anything in Alexandra's arsenal.

He ignored them like so many pesky flies.

He leapt through the air, surrounded by a halo of energy as his wards strained against the onslaught. Then one of the 'cruisers' fired…something, and the guildmaster went flying back. Whatever it was it made the sensors for Alexandra's golems go completely crazy, and cascade with error messages.

The dwarf landed in the sand, and looked around, clearly assessing the situation.

The smart move here would be to join the massive charge towards the land ships. Draw the fire from the heavy hitters by flying around, never getting to close to one of them to actually force them to cease fire and retarget, and letting the main forces do the work. It would take longer, but fatalities would be much lower. It was the safe choice, the politically advisable one.

Or he could be a glory hog, and attack them head on, dooming hundreds, thousands of adventurers to a messy, preventable death, possibly a permanent one. Something like that would break his authority as a guildmaster forever.

The dwarf took to the air again, clearly choosing option one.

Which was why Alexandra sent all her units towards the Hammer of Eternity. Making it look like she was looking to board and attempt take over the walker.

And the guildmaster switched direction, and dove after them.

She smiled. He would do anything, anything at all, to prevent her from getting her hand on such weaponry. And he might even be able to justify it as wanting to stop the main gun from firing again. But anyone with some passing knowledge could see that this wasn't a weapon meant for rapid fire, hell, even Alexandra could see some parts of it were already dangerous close to failing or even outright melting under the strain of that single shot.

But it wouldn't matter. Abandonning his people for this? Justifiable or not, there would always be those to see this as a simple grab for personal glory. His tenure was over.

And as he did so, she moved her special unit forward, cautiously skirting around the battle. Towards the ship at the back, the one glimpses could be seen between the legs of the massive siege walker. The small, forlorn vessel.

The supply ship. The one with the real prize, the fabricators and the databanks.

She could leave Starvak to take care of the main threat for her. If he'd survived this onslaught, he could take them down. Losing so many adventurers would be a blow to her business, and she was loath to have so many innocents die, but this was bigger than them. Besides, Emilia would point out -rightfully- that there were far more adventurers than slots in her dungeon anyway, so this would hardly affect her. And this would enable her to focus her resources on pulling something out of this mess. Resources she was privately sure she'd desperately need after this mess. Because if anything was sure, it was that her and the town's enemies weren't going to nicely wait for them to rebuild their defences before attacking again.

*****

"What the hell do we do?" Asked Allya, panic seeping into her voice as she went up to her knees from the prone position she'd dropped into automatically. She was Knight-Valiant, but damn it she wasn't trained to fight that!

"We stay the course." Said Crystal as her boss simply looked over the parapet. "This gun has to be slow reloading. We need to overwhelm the walker before it reloads and fires." She smiled. "Luckily, it wasted its alpha strike on my mesa. So we have some breathing room."

Allya looked at the dungeon core in disbelief, and Crystal knelt by her side. For a second Allya didn't feel like a baroness talking to a dungeon core, but like a wounded soldier being reassured by a general, as Crystal extended her hand.

"Come now Allya. We have a battle to win. We'll make it through this. I promise you."

Allya looked at the dungeon core for a split second, then took her hand, and the Earth-born helped her up.

She took a deep breath as she steadied herself, and bellowed.

"Sound the charge! Support the adventurers! This is it everyone! For their majesties! For Rebirth!"

Her soldiers roared in response.

She leapt over the parapet, and her troops followed.

*****

Alexandra sent most of her mind into dungeon mode, as she considered the tactical map Seraph was busy keeping up to date for her.

The main issue was the escort ships. The walker was slow, cumbersome, and effectively an armored siege gun. It was a trap, like her Bertha had been. The real threat was the landships.

They seemed…Odd. Two of them had tracks, the so called 'cruisers' the baroness' little captain had reported. Seraph had been pretty clear those were frigates, at best, but they were still very large. So large that there was no way those tracks could physically support them. There probably some amount of trickery going on, with skimmer drives and antigravity systems taking some of the load. But what mattered is that they were relatively slow and ungainly, so the adventurers, with their enhanced mobility -especially thanks to a generous distribution of leap bracelet the day before, through 'dungeon loot', ie packing every treasure chest full of them- should be able to board them. Their weapons, the ones that had made even Starvak hesitate and utterly baffled her and Seraph both, were concerning, but they couldn't sweep their own decks with it.

The smaller three ships were more concerning. Those corvettes were full skimmers, floating in the air, and they had agility and power to spare. She ordered what was left of her artillery to target the corvettes. If the enemy was as stupid as they had proven until now -thanks, it should be said, to the policy of keeping all of their aces in reserve-, they would be boarded as easily as the frigates, but even the simplest of evasion pattern would make them being the reach of all but the most powerful adventurers present. Which only left the airships for boarding, and that meant a distraction or a lot of dead skiers.

She began digging a new entrance to allow her forces to leave the mesa, thankful that her paranoia had brought her to reinforce and bury deeper her forges and warehouses when she had rebuilt her dungeon. The first floor was gone, and so were the steps, but the rest was relatively intact, the blastdoors having done their job, even in the face of nuclear attack.

She still had some spider tanks in reserve. They wouldn't do much, but they could hold the attention of the ships while the adventurers and the airships closed. It wasn't much, but it would help. She also ordered her remaining missile launchers to be deployed. Some had been stationned in the warehouses, intended to be deployed in the town if the fortress was crippled. Hopefully some missile fire -even though she highly doubted any would make it through point defence- would convince whatever was commanding the other side to order its escorts forward.

Alexandra winced as she received an alert. Starvak was engaging the walker…and the escorts were forced to retarget, turning their guns towards the onrushing adventurers.

This was going to be a bloodbath.

But right now, a bloodbath might be exactly what she needed.

As the escorts ignored the small squadron of stealth transports, somewhere between a grav truck and a small shuttle.

She took a deep breath, and focused on them. Home made command interfaces popped up, and for the first time she could control her combat forces without having to jump in personally.

She had given the orders to the rest of her army. Hopefully that would be enough. Because from now on, they were on their own.

*****

The core glitched as it tried to process the situation.

It had been fooled. Lured into an ambush. The enemy was far more capable than it had been lead to believe.

Powerful individuals of all sorts, an archon, even armored automatons and tanks. All hidden until now.

It began to calculate chances of victory, as the enemy archon dove and tore through the innards of the walker, onboard security desperately fighting to stave off the inevitable.

And the odds were not good. The fusion gun's containment fields were damaged, using it for another shot would not work for some time. Using it too soon would not even let the reactor build up to a self sustaining reaction, it would simply fail as an oversized plasma bomb, doing little more than destroy the gun.

The escorts were reaping a rich harvest into the enemy however. If they were sent forward, they could punch through the charge and-

Alerts sprang to life in every ship as the mortals began leaping into the air like jetpack infantry.

And its plan fell apart before it even began.

The comparatively low priority alert from the support ship was ignored in the chaos. After all, the vessel no longer had any strike crafts to support, and it was of little use in a battle. This was a ride or die situation now, not a long term strategic fight.

And compared to an archon tearing his way through the command walker, not even high tech weapons fire was worth the core's attention.

*****

Alexandra swore as the support ship opened fire. Clearly even the stealth coating couldn't defeat high tech scanners at such close range.

Or rather, the enemy clearly knew there was something there, but couldn't get anything approaching a lock, as point defence laser began sweeping the sky at random.

She ordered her transports to skim the ground, and the lumbering prototypes dropped. Clearly the enemy was expecting her to sweep above them, either as a bombing run or to launch drop pods, and the lasers focused on the skies above the ship.

The six aircrafts flew under the guns, before their makeshift engines screamed as they banked up to board the ship.

Either due to the engines or the sheer proximity, the supply ship acquired a hard lock, and turrets pivoted to fire. But they were already too close.

The transports shot over the landing pads dotting the top of the ship, and landed with a clang. Before the maneuver was even complete, sliding doors had already popped open, and the Praetorian guard opened fire.

Point defence lasers were, by design, relatively fragile. There was no way to make an heavily armored turret that could track targets at the ridiculous speeds required to intercept even hypersonic missiles, to say nothing of orbit to surface artillery.

Railguns spoke and the point defence lasers flew apart. Dorsal hatches opened, and Alexandra's golems threw pulse grenades before the automated turrets could even pop out.

But those were security weapons, meant to counter exactly this kind of maneuver, or enemy dropping assault pods onto the ship. Some jammed, or exploded, mecanisms decayed by millenia of neglect failing to stop the gravity vortexes. But others worked, and turrets smoothly popped out.

The golems were waiting. Railguns, laser rifles, grenade launchers…

They almost got them all. Almost.

A trio of plasma turrets opened fire. One fired wide, its shot vanishing into the deset. Another vaporized a praetorian guard and threw the rest of its squad around like toys, even Alexandra's technological and engineering prowess failing in front of a weapon meant to down assault shuttles.

But the last one targeted one of the transports. And the vehicle flew apart.

Shit, thought Alexandra, as she gave orders.

She'll need to set aside some explosives to vaporize the half melted carcass. No one could know she had been there.

But that was a problem for later, as her golems rushed the closing blast doors.

Right now she had a ship to take.