Mori kicked her feet against the clocksteel hull of the assault skiff, playing with the S. energy mace in her hand, “How much longer?” she asked the Talonec beside her.
“Another few minutes, mistress,” Bluejay replied. He was one of the hundreds of death knights that had ascended during the week of the frantic upgrading of ATHENA’s design and, like the rest of his comrades, he was a normal person. A bit of a pension for slaughter, obviously, but his desire lessened when he became a death knight. He was also one of the few who had taken to altering their armor design as a form of individual expression. His helmet was fitted with an extra mask on top of his normal one. It looked like a hockey mask, oddly enough, which just went to show how much of her memories they inherited.
“In that case…” she trailed off, standing and turning to the undead behind her. She brought with her a large contingent of two hundred Talonecs, along with five Necromechs and ten death knights. Her dragons-- or at least the ones who were partial to fighting-- opted to roam the mountain peaks of the Aekan Range. She took all of her undead, packed onto the largest assault skiff Ajex was willing to part with, and grinned, “Everyone listen up!” she shouted over the whipping wind, “We’re about to reach the Aekan Pass and, as far as I could tell from the raven’s ravings, we’ve got heavy resistance. Big wall, few cannons, no mish-mash of troops, the whole shebang! So, we’ll be seeing a fair bit of combat from here on out!” Mori felt the wave of distant and not-so-distant excitement coming from them, pushing her grin into cartoonish proportions, “So! Even if you’re all more than capable of tearing through legions of Clockworks, you all need to be careful! Use your movement to your advantage, make sure your little buddies aren’t in the line of fire, and don’t let yourself be isolated. If I have to pick up any of your souls while I’m here, I won’t be a happy camper. With that out of the way, get ready for combat!” she finished, turning back to the horizon.
She saw the tips of the mountain range minutes ago, and the peaks had only grown into walls of stone and natural wonder as time went on. A moment later, she saw the top of the wall. There were cannons up there. A trio of them, in fact. They were larger than ATHENA’s by a wide margin, the batteries arrayed against her being four feet in diameter while ATHENA’s were a foot and a half. Both were oddly proportioned, ATHENA’s only made worse by the fact that it was only a half dozen feet in length, but the guns atop the wall looked like what someone would get if they sized a battleship’s main batteries up a few times. She ignored the niggling sense in the back of her mind telling her that both sets of guns should not have been possible and chalked it up to magic nonsense.
A minute passed and they saw more and more of the wall they were facing. Zhanuk had been helpful in planning the assault, as his scouting runs were very useful. He was not omniscient, though, which led to some mishaps. Like the one they were dealing with. The wall was not a big slab of metal placed in the ground. No, it was a castle constructed with the sole purpose of hampering Mori’s assault, with crenelations, gatehouses leading up a massive ramp to another, massive gate in the center of the wall, and multiple bastions protruding out from the wall and making kill zones with multiple gatling guns trained on them.
Mori found the little part of her that was once the [Enhanced Mind] Trait and triggered it. The world slowed to a crawl, and Mori had time to think and to plan. There was no way to sneak up on the enemy, considering the fact that the sun was already almost fully in the sky and the fact that the Clockworks could see in the dark anyway, but they could also not afford a frontal assault. She brought so few troops with her because she needed to conserve fighting power for the main assault on the Hive proper. That left her with a massive, seemingly indestructible fortress, a hundred and change undead, and the goal of needing to turn the former into rubble with nothing but the latter to help. She thought hard for a few moments, then looked at the massive guns they were contending with. Then to the walls between them and a way into the castle-like fortress. She turned to Bluejay, who tilted his head-- for lack of any other way to silently communicate-- in confusion. “Hey… Bluejay… if I were to ask you to draw those big guns’ fire, could you do it without becoming a fine metallic paste?” she asked.
The undead looked up at the cannons, then back to Mori, sighed, and drew his rifle, “I can. What do you need me to do?” Mori spent a minute explaining her plan, to which Bluejay sighed once more, “I can do it… I think.”
“If you get yourself killed, Blue, I’ll come out there and smack you in the soul so hard you’ll be smarting for a week,” Mori replied, “After I revive you, anyway.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, mistress,” he said, his voice flat and droll. He checked his rifle, then checked to make sure that the knife on his belt was still secure, and finally gave Mori a nod before shimmering away. Mori idly wondered where in the world he got a knife from when the cannons atop the wall suddenly swung downwards and let loose a trio of shells at, presumably, where her undead was shimmering about. The shells glowed like shining lights for a long moment, then crashed down upon the ground, kicking up sand into the air. Mori switched to soul sight for a moment to check for any mana in the shells. Unfortunately, there was mana. A lot of it. It circled the blast zone like a coiling serpent, slicing the air into ribbons as it did so.
She switched out of soul sight. She was happy that the Forgeheart did not add such things to its normal soldiers’ bullets. That would have been a nightmare. Granted, she did not know what or even if there were any engineering problems with adding those things to bullets, but she just silently hoped it was impossible.
There was a flicker of light right near one of the walls and the cannons snapped to it, shooting their shots right next to the twenty foot high creation. Mori saw another flicker of light far away from the wall as another thundering explosion shook the ground, kicking up not only sand, but also metal. When the dust settled, Mori was met with a metal wall, blown open like a sheet metal door. She cheered, then turned to her Talonecs, from which the anticipation was palpable, “Alright, all of you go and cause some trouble! Make sure you don’t get killed, though! I don’t want to have to collect your souls in the middle of a battle!”
The few who were death knights shouted out confirmations while the rest nodded. All at once, Talonecs turned to light and beamed towards the walls and fortifications even as the defenders, standard and hybrid Clockworks sallied out to meet them. Mori let the sounds of combat fade, even as her Necromechs opened up with their guns to assist, and she waited for the skiff to reach the breach in the wall.
By the time she reached it, hundreds of Clockworks were left scattered around the fortifications, broken and destroyed. The skiff, captained by a final Talonec, slid to a halt and Mori vaulted over the side of the skiff, only to feel an odd tightness in her body. She looked up, only to see the three cannons aiming their barrels directly at her.
Almost instantly, she wove together a shield to resist the shells, but she had little faith in them. Fortunately, however, she had five undead with extremely capable shields behind her. As she saw the lights descending onto her, five veils of purple arced over her like flying carpets, layering on top of each other and blocking Mori’s view of the shell. There was a boom so loud that Mori thought that she would be the victim of a sinkhole before the shells reached her. Then there was silence. She continued to stare up as the veils retracted, seeing the smoke and mana rage above her and smiling. “Thank you,” she said to her Necromechs. They nodded, following behind her as she marched up to the next gate, “If you can’t do that again, make sure you’re safe. Alright? I’m pretty sure I can take one. If they can fire again before we break down that damn gate-” Just as she spoke, the gate exploded inwards, propelling red hot clocksteel at whoever and whatever was unlucky enough to happen to be standing behind it. “Huh. I guess that’s that,” she said, marching on with her Necromechs behind her.
