Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

Six.

Five.

Zefaris prepared for a sharp turn as they approached the Deep Dweller backline, their force scattered and thinned out from this direction. Meanwhile, Zel stockpiled Fulgur in her Essentia Crucible, a second stomach of sorts. She compressed it until she couldn’t any more, until it was a struggle to keep it from flooding out into the rest of her body, tightly gripping the trigger lever of her arm-cannon in preparation.

Four.

Three.

The Deep Dwellers had long noticed them by now. A boulder flew overhead.

Two.

One.

Zef whipped Sturmgandr into a sharp right turn, its back end smashing right through several mole-men, its back wheel shredding them where they stood. Zel leapt off at the apex of the motion, soaring two-dozen meters over the horde of molemen. Release.

A brilliant, seething power, a sudden flood from her stomach up into her chest and down her arm; a continuous arc of lightning slithered down her left arm, the gaping maw of a monstrous serpent arising around the muzzle of her gun, formed from this immense lightning. In the wake of her skyward rise, the air was filled by chittering electric fireflies, pinhead-sized spheres of lightning that fizzled out in seconds.

Embodying the likeness of a crashing meteor, Zelsys soared down towards the convoy, her final landing spot to be only some twenty meters from the encirclement. She could feel hundreds of eyes on herself, and even heard a few cries from the defenders: “IT’S THE NEWMAN SECT!”

They weren’t as enthusiastic as she would’ve liked. A push down on the trigger lever, her left arm outstretched downward between her legs. Two clicks to pull back the striker; the third would drop it. Mere seconds before landing, she howled an invocation.

“THUNDERCANNON!”

Meters from landing. A final pull of the lever. Blinding light, deafening noise, a hailstorm of bullets, fire and lightning. Three-dozen mole-men and their steeds turned to mush in an instant, a swath cut into their encirclement. It had been a Type-2 shotshell loaded with innumerable iron bullets for conductivity. The recoil of the act would’ve felt like being struck by a runaway tractor to anyone else, but Zel was fine; she had used it to break her own fall, elegantly dropping into the circle of gore-slathered open ground she’d just created.

Still, hundreds of eyes were upon her; molemen all around, all deathly still, staring. Their teeth chattered nervously, but none seemed willing to approach the monstrous thing that now stood before them. To outside observers, Zelsys seemed less a human, and more a psychotic predator, a sharp-toothed grin spanning the width of her face and a baleful, pale-blue glow filling her eyes, blanking out the pupils and as such erasing any humanity left in her face. Silvery conduits beneath her skin shone brightly with the arcane essence coursing through them, mirroring the vascular system which bulged with the tremendous pressure within it. Even as she stood still, her muscles writhed and twitched about in unsettling ways. Before the creatures standing all around could swarm her, she sent a stream of Fulgur down one of her braids, magnetizing its entire length and crudely animating it into wrapping itself around her gun’s bolt lever. A yank upwards and back released the bolt, with the charred, Lichtenberg figure-etched shell popping out as a deluge of opaque Fog sprayed out of the cannon’s side vent, enshrouding her and obscuring her position.

It bought a few seconds of uncertainty. Only now did she take the few moments necessary to pull a fresh shell out of the belt and slot it into her gauntlet’s hungry maw.

The sound of motorbikes fell silent as her compatriots disembarked, and with its quieting, the sound of distant carnage began to grow closer. Molemen exploded into geysers of boiling gore whenever Mata channeled the fire within herself through her fists, and others turned to little more than mulch under the force of Jorfr’s hammer, or to brittle statues under the all-consuming frost of his primal magic. Gunshots accompanied the sound; the crystal-clear ring of Joseph’s rifle along the whizzing of his own magical missiles, pale shining darts precisely piercing the hearts of the horde. The raw, brutish thumping of Hydra shotguns played percussion, a stomping march of tankmen as they ripped and tore into the enemy with a calculated brutality, jets of flame erupting from vents all over their suits whenever they pushed their machines.

The Fog had cleared. A high-strung voice from the encirclement’s inside: “Ozone! I smell ozone! The reinforcements are here!”

He was silenced by a man shouting from the top of a truck: “Yeah, we fucking noticed you mongoloid! Tell the Lieutenant that we need men on the other side, we’ve got it handled over here!”

Several Arkaley Branch men dropped into the open pit alongside Zelsys, their hardened faces filled with more caution towards her than the enemy. A particularly large Deep Dweller mounted atop a giant ant raised its spear, the tip gleaming iron rather than stone. It chattered its teeth and pointed at her, clearly a commander type. Molemen flooded in, and the slaugher resumed.

The commander-mole’s ant sprayed acid, striking one of the men to Zel’s right, steam rising from his burning skin as he growled in pain and hefted the great mass of his weapon.

“Enough waiting,” he said. “We won’t get out of here until these things lay dead.”

Zel looked off to the left, stating: “Just one more moment.”

“What-” the man began, but didn’t get to finish.

Finally came that clarion sound, from some distance away, atop the stopped-dead Sturmgandr.

The Clang.

It was Pentacle firing.

One after the next; spears of flaming metal, cutting swathes through the enemy.

Hardened cold-iron bullets. High-Ignis, Atrine-enriched gunpowder. Enough force to rip through a tank suit with the recoil to match. The heads and flesh of molemen put up only marginally more resistance than the flesh of humans; dozens were cut down before the gunfire first stopped, and even then only to be replaced, for a few seconds, by the pounding of Zef’s shotgun, Tempesta. Bullets gave way to slugs, which again gave way to bullets.

It was the scythe of a reaper for the new era, reaping the unworthy… And among them were many of the beasts surrounding Zelsys.

She glanced to her left and right, taking note of the brave few who had joined her down here. Muscular men and women with blades and auras to match, true blooded killers able and willing to stand against monsters. Zel had half a mind to try poaching the entire Arkaley Branch from the Sanger Family just for these four, but right now, it was time to kill. Numerous spearpoints, claws, and teeth threw themselves at the five of them, and Zelsys couldn’t help but allow a full-hearted laugh ring out. Their strikes numbered many, but their weapons and bodies were fragile and their technique rudimentary, easy to predict.

This was where her defensive techniques came in. She didn’t even bother using the more advanced among them, relying on those which could be powered by Pneuma alone.

“Rebound Pulse…” she invoked in her mind as a spear was about to skewer her stomach, only for a patch of silver conduits to light up in that spot, and for the spear to suddenly bounce back at the exact same speed it was moving previously, just in reverse.

Another moleman’s claws slipped under her arm and were just about to gouge her back. “Graze Pulse…” she invoked this time, causing the same phenomenon with the addition of hair-thin Fog threads emerging from the patch of skin; the moleman’s claws conspicuously slipped off, sparks of lightning crackling in their wake before the technique dissipated.

There were three other such techniques, rooted in the Core of Earthly Iron, but due to its nature as a limited reservoir, Zelsys chose not to use them. Her offense, meanwhile, was utterly unchallenged, to the beast-slayer’s disappointment. “These things are just fat midgets…” a thought crossed her mind.

The Arkaley Branch disciples carved through molemen with relative ease, using their own bodies as counterweights for their giant single-edged blades, or grasping them by handles along the blades’ spines for close-in fighting. One of them just outright spun into the enemy, laughing madly at the fact it worked… Until it didn’t, and when he got bogged down, a boulder cannonball was not far behind. Valiantly though he guarded himself, Zelsys could tell that the impact had left him in a bad way and he would soon get overwhelmed; several large scars on his back had burst open from the strain. The boulder bounced off his sword and smashed into an already-dented truck; it ruptured and piles of black, bulbous stones spilled out, glittering with veins of silvery metal. Molemen flooded right over the wounded disciple, ignoring him in favor of plunder.

Suddenly, it made sense: Why this convoy was so important. Its cargo wasn’t just any high-grade ore.

“Damasite? Explains why Estoras agreed to our terms so easily, the value of one truck alone will make up the cost…” Zel thought before she turned on a heel, bracing against the ground.

“Protect the damaged truck and get your man out of there, I’ll eliminate the Ankylodragon!” she barked, not waiting for a response before rushing headlong into the fray once again. Limbs and heads fell like overripe fruit from branches under the carnage which she unleashed, carving a path towards the surrounded disciple first of all. Once that was done, she slaughtered those trying to make off with the cargo, greatly assisted by the apparent raining-down of divine fury from on high; bullets coming down at impossible angles, a trick wherein Zefaris tossed coins into the air and bounced bullets off of them.

“This’ll be loud…” she said to him as she raised her arm-cannon yet again, swinging her cleaver in wide arcs to keep molemen away while she stockpiled Fulgur in her second stomach. He only grunted in acknowledgment, proceeding to mutter incantations under his breath; his movements became more refined and reactions sped up. A sensory enhancement technique. Exhaling gouts of Fog, he managed to just about keep up with Zelsys on the defense. The remainder of the expeditionary force had nearly carved a path to the convoy by this point, and combined with Zef’s supporting fire, Zelsys was not concerned for the safety of this perimeter. Ankylodragons were the greatest threat in her mind, plus, she simply wanted to kill one with her own hands.

It was ready. A pull of the lever. Brilliant-white heat flooding through her body, a serpent of lightning slithering down her left arm.

Click.

Click.

“THUNDERCANNON!”

A maelstrom of lightning and shot. Flesh turned to mulch, individual pellets magnetized to repel one another for maximum spread and wide-area killing power. The molemen closest to her were turned to little more than greasy stains, while those at the very edges of the technique’s effective cone were riddled with holes and, at bare minimum, severely wounded.

“Good luck,” she said to the no-longer-surrounded disciple as she worked the bolt, using the Fog discharge to obscure her escape, thereafter leaping right onto the truck behind herself. For a few moments, she ran along the encirclement, reloading her gun as she went, before she had reached the nearest point to her target and leapt down into the fray yet again, laughing and wildly swinging her blade wherever her instincts would draw it. A boulder flew right over her head just as she jumped down.

Dozens of Deep Dwellers fell before her blade as she carved a bloody swath towards the Ankylodragon, dodging boulders left and right, indirectly causing the deaths of dozens more as the errant projectiles smashed through the molemen’s ranks. Limbs and heads alike were liberated from their owners en masse, reddish-brown blood spraying all around. The molemen’s own iron claws and teeth served as shrapnel and crow’s feet, inflicting yet further harm upon their own ranks. Another amber-coloured flash from the treeline. This time she was close enough to see.

The Ankylodragon. It barely looked like the illustration; its size was nearly double the estimate, for one, being easily half again as long as one of the trucks. The monstrous, armored thing had a wide-set trunk, short, stubby legs, a club-ended tail, and an arrow-shaped head with one crystalline eye in the center of the forehead, but it didn’t match the book any further. Instead of flat, elephant-like feet it had very clear claws that gripped the stone earth. Its head was split down the middle all the way to the base of the neck, filled with huge teeth and a tongue covered in metallic spines. What caught her off guard the most, though, were the wings. They weren’t vestigial as the book displayed, but they weren’t suited to flying either. Instead, they resembled huge arms with three membranous fingers, scooping soil and rocks from the ground around the creature.

That amber flash had not been what launched the projectiles. It was the Ankylodragon solidifying the mass of compacted dirt and rocks into a solid boulder before it simply threw the mass. Zel could see it coming, and leapt up out of the morass of midget bodies to dodge, soaring above as she watched the rock plow a bloody path.