Vol 8, Chapter 17

◆ Commonwealth, Workers of the Steel Tower POV ◆


Revolution. A terrible word for the Commonwealth.

After the Age of Strife, the Lodge feared that word like fire. They feared it and did everything to burn even the thought of uprising out of the world.

But here, inside the locked Steel Tower, that word was being repeated more and more often...

…

At first everything went reasonably well. Metal mages were still valued far above ordinary people; they were an indispensable resource. When news of the epidemic first arrived, the Steel Tower was sealed in an instant.

That was not a big problem, because the Tower was, in essence, a prison for metal mages, and a prison is not unlike a fortress: large stocks of provisions, autonomy, immense thickness of steel walls.

The moment when the Magister unleashed his full power on the academy had been terrifying, but the walls held. They glowed red, they flowed and blistered... but they held.

And if the walls held, then so would they. The magoscope issued a single clear order—absolute isolation. Their only task was to wait for the evacuation team.

The food stores would last a couple of months, so that order wasn't unreasonable.

In the first two weeks they didn't even stop working or cut rations...

By the end of the first month the materials were gone. By the second— the food.

...

Three months had passed.

Mages could endure lack of food longer than ordinary folk. Magic itself sustained their strength, but even they were approaching death. A water mage could save them from thirst. Air mages kept them from suffocating. But other things ran out. Faith ran out. Hope ran out. Patience ran out. Fear ran out.

Even the overseers with the Gift of Fire who had run the place—had lowered their hands.

Three months in total isolation. Three months of unfounded hope.

So when one day they found themselves surrounded by hundreds of metal mages... they no longer had the strength or the will to resist.

The coup in the Steel Tower was bloodless. The new leadership decided it was better to risk the outside, amid the epidemic, than starve to death inside.

The Tower opened.

Even if the steel doors jammed, that didn't stop the metal mages. A plate of steel, blistered and massive, collapsed and struck the glassy surface of the ground; it froze there with a piercing clang.

"Hmm..." an emaciated metal mage exhaled, watching the scorched panorama.

Winds blew away ash, water washed away dust... but that only made the landscape more hellish. Frozen lava streams branched into intricate waves. Houses, libraries, people—everything had fused into one viscous mass. There were no bodies, no graves, nothing. Tens of thousands of souls had been consumed in an infernal blaze of strategic sorcery in a single instant. It was a merciless solution, but a necessary one.

Maybe... the disease had been burned away as well?

So why had no message been relayed to them by magoscope? Why had no mage returned for them to the Tower?

The mage stepped down, his boots meeting the slick "earth" that resembled volcanic glass. His companions followed.

They did not grieve; after three months they had resigned themselves. Still, now and again one or another swept his gaze over the charred surroundings with sorrow, scanning for places known only to them. A heavy sigh ran over the fields of lava.

"We need to find food and..." the gaunt fire mage faltered. The words "...and return to the Tower" were not uttered.

"...and find the seniors in rank, to learn what happened here," he finished awkwardly. Old habits did not die easily—he was no longer an overseer, yet the habit remained.

"We will decide for ourselves what to do now," the metal mage said gently, signaling to the others. After all, the plan wasn't so bad.

The mages split into working groups and began to search the surrounding area. But, alas, for miles around there was only volcanic desert and... a pit.

Chunks of glassy rock had been roughly torn by earth magic, and the collapse stretched down for many hundreds of meters.

"Does anyone remember where we are?" the former overseer asked, lazily nudging one of the fragments back into the abyss. "Merlin take me, there are no landmarks left!"

Mages gathered at the rim.

"Seems... we're near the menagerie," one of them said uncertainly, estimating the distance to the sea by eye.

"And where did this pit come from? Maybe they stored food for chimeras down there or something?"

"You think there's food down there?" the ex-overseer scoffed, and with a flick of his hand sent a ball of fire into the pit.

That was a mistake.

For those who lived below, they themselves were the food.

The flash of flame illuminated a spider torso; reflections flickered across its many eyes. The target had been found.

A sharp lunge, and the overseer, screaming at the top of his lungs, vanished into the pit.

But that was not enough for them. A grinding, the patter of spider legs and the sound of earth crumbling beneath them followed.

The first creature crawled to the surface, sending the artisan mages scattering in terror. And who wouldn't, when faced with a spider the size of a horse? Only this one wasn't alone.

A second beast climbed out. A third... dozens of them.

A flash of a battle staff. Lightning hurled one of the spiders back into the pit... and it likely wouldn't return, as half of its smoking limbs remained behind.

Another artisan frantically searched for the right runes on his wand while mandibles closed in on him. His comrade shoved him aside and raised a magnificent sword, enchanted to the highest grade. A swing!

Of course, when leaving the Tower they had taken artifacts with them. But... knowing how to craft artifacts and knowing how to fight with them were two very different things.

The beast only shifted its legs slightly, and the clumsy swing went nowhere. The hapless fighter stumbled, lost his balance and fell.

Straight into the maw. The mandibles clamped down, muffling his scream.

His companion finally managed to activate the wand. The runes flared with power, the core at the tip heated.

A swing! A blade of air burst from the wand's tip, slicing apart legs, mandibles, shells, people... Tens of meters around were drenched in ichor and red blood, buried beneath a writhing mass of monsters... and human remains.

"I... I didn't mean to!" the mage cried, dropping the wand and fleeing, slipping and nearly falling with each step.

Another beast instantly gave chase. Like a water strider, it glided effortlessly over the glassy surface. Escape was impossible.

A fireball from the last overseer struck it, but... whether from panic or exhaustion, the sphere failed to explode, only cloaking the spider in flame.

Any chimera would have thrashed in panic and tried to retreat, but the arachnid monster didn't care. It was living weaponry, bred only for battle. No brains. No self-preservation. No pain receptors.

The creature tore its attacker apart and tried to continue the pursuit before its tiny brain finally cooked. Only then did it curl its legs under itself and collapse like a smoking pyre.

A flash of lightning. Another. And another.

An exhausted metal mage struck again and again with his battle staff, but the monsters didn't stop. They poured from the pit in such a horde it was as if it were their nest.

The thunder suddenly gave way to crackling. Instead of another bolt, there was only a weak spark. The crystal accumulator crumbled into gray dust, leaving the mage without a weapon.

A spider lunged instantly, snapping its mandibles and nearly severing his arm. He recoiled, shoving the staff into the creature's jaws. It bought him a few seconds, but... without a weapon he stood no chance. He wasn't a warrior, only a craftsman.

And in that moment he felt happier than ever that his daughter was far, far away from here, safe in another country.

The mage was already saying farewell to life when he suddenly felt the presence of metal inside the beast.

Out of sheer desperation, he seized that metal with his Gift and yanked it toward himself.

The chitinous shell burst from within.

A massive chunk of warm, ichor-soaked metal fell into the mage's hands. He didn't know what it was, but the creature... it collapsed dead before his eyes. Whatever this was, they could not live without it!

"There's metal inside them!" the mage shouted at the top of his lungs, above the din of battle. "Rip it out, rip it out!"

They might not have been fighters... but they knew their magic well.

One pulse, and iron tore free from a body, dragging with it primitive spider organs. Whoever had placed it in them had done the mages a favor. Otherwise they would have had no chance.

The spiders dropped one after another. Chunks of iron clattered onto the glassy ground. In minutes the battlefield grew silent. Silence.

Only the vile stench of crushed insects, the heavy reek of blood, and the foul stink of entrails clogged their noses. Around them came the sounds of retching and groans.

The mage looked over the battlefield and felt sick. To distract himself, he examined the iron piece in his hand. To his surprise, he recognized it! It was one of the artifacts they had produced in the Tower. A simple thing, one that only blew air. But how had it ended up inside these monsters?

He looked around. The pit. Chunks of rock as if someone had tried to break in. Everything fell into place.

"There was a laboratory here..." he said.

"What? You mean these creatures escaped? They caused the epidemic? They're contagious, aren't they? Contagious?!" another mage panicked.

"No, unlikely. Look at the pit. It was clearly broken into by earth mages. They were trying to get something out of there."

"Those bastards... They rushed to evacuate the laboratory, but left us to die?!" cried another mage, drenched in blood from head to toe.

"Perhaps they weren't sure the lab was free of disease and simply wanted to enforce quarantine..." the panicker suggested.

But that suggestion was met with grim laughter.

"Kh-kh!" The mage coughed, tossing aside the useless artifact. "We need... to move to the nearest city. Who knows how many of them are down there? It's not safe here. Besides, we still need food, and I don't think these creatures are edible."

The sounds of continued retching in the background confirmed his words.

At that moment they did not know how lucky they actually were. Very lucky.

******

Ash: that was what most of the Commonwealth had turned into; wastelands.

It was expected that the Lodge would burn all the villages and concentration camps around the Academy. Those were reasonable precautions, but the farther they went, the clearer it became that the plague had spread far beyond the Academy.

Towns charred, but almost intact compared to the Academy: the circle of liquidation mages had clearly been conserving power, or in a hurry.

A shattered column of refugees beside hastily erected barricades; corpses torn apart by air fists, impaled on stone spears; wagons drowned, cut apart, burned. Lightning, whips of water, flame: the mages had clearly used everything at their disposal, no longer able to summon purifying fire.

But here, there was food. Taking it from a potentially infected caravan was foolish, yet they risked it.

And judging by the fact that no one was infected, all these people had died in vain, but...

What was happening in the country? Why had paranoia reached the point where the Lodge killed indiscriminately? This was utterly abnormal...

Did any form of governance still remain in the country at all?

Sometimes they encountered people... or rather, bandits.

And it didn't matter who they had been before the epidemic: peasants or craftsmen. The catastrophe had turned them all into savage brigands who knew only the language of force.

But even they could say nothing useful.

Only rumors:

Rumors that the plague had spread across the whole land; rumors that entire cities were infected in a single night; rumors that the Lodge had fallen; rumors that the Magister had gathered his personal disciples and fled the country aboard the Commonwealth's flagship; rumors that the King of the neighboring Kingdom of Steel had seized the opportunity and treacherously struck at all the port cities to capture ships and gold; rumors that his black knights showed no mercy, slaughtering with equal ease both surviving mages and children.

And the claim that he mercilessly killed anyone who begged to be taken into his kingdom, even as a despised slave, was not rumor but fact. At least one bandit swore he had seen it with his own eyes.

This last troubled the metal mage greatly, for his daughter was now in that kingdom. The King had revealed himself to be cruel and merciless; perhaps he had made a mistake letting her go to another land.

And even if the whole world was collapsing into ruin, he intended to correct that mistake.

"I hope you're safe, Ashley..." he whispered.

*******************************************

◆ Reikland, Factory Halls, Ashley POV ◆

"Safe? That damn thing's gonna blow! You Merlin's idiot! By Merlin's name, how could you even come up with this?" she shouted, her voice rising above the roar of the engines.

And that was no easy task, for the engines, lined up in a row on the tracked platform, roared like an army of demons.

"I'm telling you, it's fine! Everything's fine, fine! Ran said they'd work on any fuel... if you preheated the calorizer head first!" Pete insisted, gesticulating wildly as he tried to convince her.

"And what did you pour in there this time?"

"I..." But he didn't have time to finish.

Something clanged, and a glowing fragment of a cylinder flew right over her head. Yet that didn't stop the other engines from running. Only the oil, now spraying rhythmically, began flooding the concrete floor... on which, incidentally, the surface had already begun melting from the shards of fire crystals. One more second and they met; the oil burst into flame, smoke filling the workshop like a kitchen.

"You put fire crystals in the fuel? How could you even think of that?!" Ashley shrieked, dodging a fiery, oily rain.

"Well-ll I thought it would save us from preheating the engine before startup. Listen, I'm not that stupid. I didn't dump them in the tank; I fixed them inside each calorizer head! Six in total, one for each engine! And let me note, five of them..."

Another bang, another fountain of oil gushed from the other side of the platform.

"...Four of them are working perfectly!" the chief inventor declared proudly.

Ashley groaned long and hard... not that anyone heard it in the chaos.

It seemed the idea of sending Pete to tinker with the tank while she refined the armored cars had not been such a good idea. Yes, he hadn't gotten in her way there, but just look at the mess he had made here!

She glanced again at the resulting monstrosity. Yes, it looked nothing like what had been planned...

He had the blueprints, the precise instructions. Why had he even tried to install calorizer engines when the design clearly called for something else entirely? Why had the width of the tracks tripled, and the length of the platform grown several times over? What was this pile of random parts instead of an electric transmission? And that insane idea with fire crystals... Either Pete had no idea how to follow blueprints, or he despised them and ignored them outright. For example, where in the design did it say the test driver should be an elven envoy?

Ashley blinked a few times, hoping she was mistaken. But no. She hadn't noticed right away, but from the driver's seat of the platform there was definitely an elven head sticking out. Its owner was small and probably barely reached the pedals.

"By Merlin, tell me what she's doing in there?"

"Well... she's getting ready to press the clutch lever."

"Isn't she supposed to be trying to make the elves accept our delegation, since she can't make decisions herself?"

"I don't know all that politics. She came here and volunteered to take part... besides, I heard elves are immortal, so there's no problem even if something blows up again." He shrugged.

"Not in that sense of immortal, you idiot! Get her out of there, now!" Ashley gasped in horror.

"So, should I press the lever or not?" shouted the elf girl, carelessly sitting at the controls of the tracked platform. It seemed she had noticed they were talking about her and thought it was time.

"Stop, don't press it!" Pete shouted back.

"I can't hear anything! It's too loud in here!"

"Don't press it!"

"Press it?"

"No!"

"I'm pressing it!"

"Damn..." Pete swore, but it was too late.

The clutch screeched horribly and the multi-ton platform, tracks clattering, surged forward, smashing racks of parts, cabinets, tables, and barreling toward a huge steel support...

"Wheee!" squealed the elf joyfully as she catapulted herself with magic toward the ceiling.

The platform slammed into the support. Steel clashed with steel, the support bent but did not yield. The workshop shook, lamps fell from the ceiling. For several minutes neither side prevailed, but at last the future tank shuddered to a halt. The engines died, and workers rushed in to extinguish the fire.

"Oh, Merlin..." Ashley sighed, desperately needing an island of sanity in this madhouse. "Where's Marvin?"

"Oh, I sent him off to cast the gun turret, so he wouldn't get in our way... I mean my way... I mean our way. Well... you get it!"

Another heavy sigh. The fire was out, and the workers were unsuccessfully trying to haul the tracked platform back onto its stand. Of course, they couldn't budge it—moving such mass by hand was impossible. And even with the original tank design, it wasn't certain they could have managed. After all, nearly forty tons was just the projected weight of the chassis alone...

"Why on earth did you even change the design?" Ashley demanded. "Everything was already calculated in the blueprints!"

"Well, I figured this steel beast would be operating far from supply lines, so it'd be better if we could fuel it with whatever we had. And since one engine from an armored car probably couldn't move it at all—I decided to use six!"

"By Merlin, why six? Didn't it occur to you we could've built six armored vehicles instead of this monstrosity?"

"Hey! If Randall didn't want me to build a tank, he wouldn't have given me the blueprints!"

"Blueprints? Did you even look at them? Look!" she snapped, dragging him to the workbench. "Twin diesel engines. Electric transmission. That's already a damn complicated project—why make it worse?"

"I'm telling you, if the fuel runs out, then..."

"Then grab a crate of thunderstones from the Zeppelin!"

"That's too simple!"

"Ohhh, Merlin..." the mage groaned, then glanced around thoughtfully. "By the way, where did the elf go?"

Pete turned his head and shrugged indifferently.

"Maybe she went to negotiate the delegation?" Ashley suggested... but at that moment her guess was shattered.

"Um, dwarves? Could you help me down?" came a thin voice from somewhere near the ceiling.