Prologue Pt. 00 - Distress Call

A/N: This won't make it onto the public release as I feel that it wouldn't serve well as the new readers' first experience, so I'm keeping it here.

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An armored convoy circled an encampment, separating the guards and drivers from the night’s encroachment. The gaps between campfires were lit up by crystals, scattered about and glowing milky-white. Sanger Family retainers stalked from roof to roof, gripping break-action shotguns and watching the dark. An amber flash lit up a distant treeline. One man saw it, only for a boulder to smash him from his post before even a sound could escape him. His crumpled body careened down into the central campfire and a geyser of  embers soared into the sky as the stone went on bouncing, ripping through tent after tent and awakening the entirety of the camp. The clacking of metal teeth filled the night, a battlecry swarm before bodies smashed into the trucks all around.

The high-strung communications specialist was among the first to wake.

“Of course something would go fuckin’ wrong, what kind of moron hires an entire sect branch to protect ONE convoy if they don’t expect to get their money’s worth?!” he thought, taking up his sword as he rushed through the camp, trying to reach the edge to better assess the situation. The Arkaley Branch which he was part of was among the smallest of the Sanger Family, even now that the greater branches had been desolated by the war, but they were still cultivators. By his reckoning a single outer disciple equaled half a dozen men, and a bottom-of-the-ladder inner disciple such as himself could fight twenty-to-one if it came down to it.

Bandits, locust-men, mercenaries, the entirety of the Arkaley Branch would’ve been overkill for anything one could reasonably expect to attack a random convoy transporting half-refined ore or whatever the hell someone would want from a backwater like Poltragow.

But not this.

“DWELLERS! FUCKING DEEP-DWELLERS! HUNDREDS OF THEM!” a lookout yelled.

Another howled: “THEY’VE GOT A DAMNED ANKYLODRAGON!”

Such creatures hadn’t been seen in the better part of a century, but sheer heart-scrambling fear overruled any doubt in his mind. Of all things, an Ankylodragon was among the more believable of reasons to see boulders flying like cannonballs. He thought to fight by his sectmates’ side, but after the seventh stumpy, unduly strong beast felled by his sword, he gave up. What glimpses he caught of the encircling force only confirmed his assumptions, an ocean of chattering iron teeth and beady, glowing eyes.

He decided to call for help.

Sprinting right to the middle of camp, leaping over scattered, still-burning logs and nearly slipping on the bloody grease-stain which remained of an unfortunate lookout, he reached the largest tent. His goal within was a brass-framed cabinet from whose back stuck out an iron rod tipped by a glyph-etched brass sphere. The antenna.

At the feverish flipping of switches and turning of dials, the aetherwave transmitter array came alive. Its antenna-sphere was shrouded by a lilac glow and shot upwards through the canvas, connected to the machine only by an artery of white Fog. The machine’s earpiece emitted a dull hiss, and an ephemeral image began to take shape above it, slowly forming into a from-below perspective of a stern, swarthy Grekurian with a cigar in his mouth.

A connection had been made.

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The foreboding ringing of an incoming long-distance call began to sound through a luxurious office - that of the governor of the Free City-state of Willowdale. A tanned hand picked it up, its owner exhaling a long breath of smoke. It had to be something serious; few had the means, let alone the knowledge necessary to call this receiver.

“Crovacus Estoras speaking. You’d better have a good reason…” he said, only to be caught off-guard by laboured breathing. Gunshots. The roar of combat, the battlecries and technique-invocations of men blending with unsettling, alien squealing. Rather than continue berating the caller, Crovacus snapped: “Identify yourself and describe your reason for calling.”

“Adrian Hael, 2nd-Sequence Sanger Family Inner Disciple, with the Saffron Earth Convoy! We’ve been encircled by Deep Dwellers, they have an Ankylodragon, potentially multiple! I… I saw some of them riding giant ants, there are hundreds of them! I don’t know what they want, but there’s too many of them!”

The panicked voice of a Sanger Family cultivator screaming about.

Dread washed over the governor. He could feel bile rise into his throat, the taste of which he stifled by toking from his cigar. Not only was the convoy’s cargo vital to the ongoing industrialization of Willowdale as a state, if their journey had been even slightly on time, they had to be in the Poltragow border region right now. It was chock-full of smaller villages, their gestalt output rivaling that of major resource wells, extracting rare minerals and natural essentia crystals from the open faults and geysers dotting that region. If the convoy were overrun, the Deep Dwellers would likely run rampant and ravage the region before retreating underground to become an even bigger problem later on.

Estoras wanted to beat his past self for not foreseeing this. The area’s value came from its geological instability; it was a miracle that something like this hadn’t happened sooner, considering the instability wrought by the Blue Moon War. The resurrection and subsequent defeat of Ubul, the Beast Reborn in Stone, had redirected rivers, caved in two mines, and split a small mountain down the middle. In his mind, the governor rapidly scrolled through every option he had. From the city militia, to its more militarized forces, even the Tankmen in their mechanized armour or the Kargarian Irregulars.

Crovacus swallowed the bitter lump in his throat. For all his efforts to give Willowdale a proper military, to bolster its defenses and expand its ability to protect that which lay within its borders… He only had one real choice.

“Send a ping. How long can you hold out for?” he said.

“O-of course, yes!” came a response. The clicking of buttons. A small, fluctuating readout popped up at the bottom of the projection, confirming his assumption of where the convoy was. “And uh… I- I don’t know, maybe until dawn before we begin accruing serious casualties? If they’re after the cargo, I’d say two hours at best.”

“Help is on the way,” he said. “You will know she has arrived when you smell ozone. Hold your position until then.”

An exasperated question came from the other end: “NEWMAN?! DON’T-”

The governor hung up, standing up and walking over to the corner of the room, where the actual aetherwave cabinet stood, its antenna rod snaking up and out through the ceiling. A dreadful thought ran through his mind as he dialled the Newman Sect: “She’s going to rake me over the coals for this…”