BECMI Chapter 322 – Doom Comes to Darkmoor III

The area ahead of them was Hell.Part of the training of becoming a Shogun pilot was watching videos of what a powerful mech could do. Walking and hoverskating weapons platforms with great agility and firepower, Shoguns could decimate opposing forces who didn’t have armored forces of equal power, tear apart battlefields, and bring down cities and even nations, especially given the right load-out for massive destruction.

What remained of the mountain ahead of them and its environs looked like some of the videos of horrifying destruction from mechanized armies laying waste to everything about them. Chbilla grit her teeth as she surveyed the highly radioactive, superheated, and slag-strewn craters and fields of rubble that had blasted a mountain into many pieces, magic gathering madly to the contaminated ground and seething and spitting as it coalesced into unstable and hostile energies that living creatures wanted nothing to do with.

Radioactive+magic = mutation. That much was an iron rule, repeatedly demonstrated by genetic researchers, with the results of such mutation usually wildly aggressive, unpredictably gifted with magical abilities, and far too prone to attempting to escape and set up a niche for themselves in the ecosystem that nobody wanted to deal with.

This place was going to be birthing mutated creatures for generations, even if they managed to suppress the Vault below that was still sending up mechanized artillery and armor forces after all this time, drilling and blasting through the rubble blocking it from the surface, sometimes creating new tunnels out, sometimes just streaming out the old ones and filling the air with nuclear payloads.

There was no choice but to bombard the fuck out of them, and shoot down anything coming out of there. Given the numbers of war engines they’d confirmed destroyed already, there had been a mechanized division or more of high-tech engines hidden inside the mountain, just waiting to be unleashed and storm across the world.

There’d also been a lot of extremely weird war machines of strange and illogical designs, most of them fairly singular, as if a child was experimenting with new patterns and then abandoning them for something better. Most of those died pretty quickly, tending to have glaring weaknesses in speed, armor, firepower, or mobility, even as they tended to be massively over-weaponized or over-armored in return.

The damn things tended to have hot power-plants, too, which turned them into highly radioactive dirty bombs when they were blasted down.

Uncaring of what that kind of thing did to the environment, the bots and mechs kept coming.

There was a white burst and a sharply spreading cone of blue-white light as an EMP pulse cannon went off, smacking a whole swarm of shrieking drones out of the air with mass sparks and overloading of their simple computer cores and relays. Bounding drone-dogs raced to intercept, spiked legs bouncing over the terrain, all their targets painted and going to be destroyed before they could possibly reboot. That would also put them into position when some of the rolling or crawling infantry bots came zipping up to try yet another flanking attack.

It was no wonder this place had chewed up her father’s team and spit them out. Nothing mortal was going to live long out here, even the most powerful and dangerous of mortals. There was just too much firepower filling the air.

She slid aside and her point defenses cycled as a trio of StS missiles came streaking for her, running into sharp saber-beams that cut them out of the air after cluster cones destroyed their refractory coating and made them vulnerable. Next to her, Ginwur’s plasma cannon flared sun-bright for a second, and charged particles flashed across the miles to punch into the missile-launching hovertank on the other side before it could draw back into cover, slicing off one of the boxes of missiles it was attempting to aim through the haze, smoke, and dust of the battlefield. The tank promptly launched all of its remaining missiles from the other box, which went streaking all over the place as they attempted to find their targets and the electromagnetic soup of the atmosphere interfered with their coordination and targeting something fierce.

Cluster cones detonated here and there, coating the missiles with nanite charges that ate through their refractory coating and made them vulnerable to targeting lasers, pulses of sharp light cutting across the sky and popping dozens of the missiles as they streaked wildly about, trying to find their targets and homing in on the anti-air defenses instead.

Force fields crackled up in domes of translucent blue, and fire and fury detonated on top of them with explosions churning up the landscape as they ate the missile storm coming in hard.

A heat-seeking mortar round bored down from the sky and took out the missile tank before it could reload its magazines, its dirty power engine going up with a flash of gamma rays streaming across her viewer and contaminated soil being blasted into the sky with a small mushroom cloud of irradiated ash that was sparking purple and green lightnings inside it, a clear warning sign.

The Ei didn’t care.

Her viewscreen blinked at her as she strafed the irregular line of spidery infantry bots, ignoring the light cannons that bounced off her hull impotently as she slid left and shot right with a master’s experienced touch.

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She’d been training to be a Shogun pilot since the first time she picked up a video game controller as an infant, after all. Getting into the physical condition to do this in wartime was harder than actually controlling the big mech and its array of firepower.

The blinking meant another fusion bomb was going in…

The missile streaked across the battlefield at multiple Machs, multiple shots trying to track it in as it juked and wove and plunged past them. Several shots clipped it and cost it guidance vanes after shorting out its deflector screens, but that was not enough to stop it from entering the main tunnel entry.

A second later a hot pulse of superheated air blew out of the mountain, as well as a dozen access tunnels from below, shoving a lot of lighter bots and vehicles out in front of it in a tumbling, super-heated mess. Tunnels collapsed, whole sections of the mountain lifted up, and then crashed back less than intact and doubtless discomfiting whatever had just survived a sun igniting below ground there.

Yeah, they had bombs enough to lift that mountain right off the ground, but the fallout from that would reach all the way back to Darkmoor and take years to clear off, with the mutations of the wildlife likely to infest half the continent. They just couldn’t DO that, although the Ei certainly didn’t seem to care about such consequences.

But they could all feel its mounting desperation, just in the quality of the machines coming out now, clearly lesser versions of the fine and dangerous engines of war that had been dispatched first. The infantry was actually using humanoid models occasionally now, among the least efficient models you could use for base ground movement that didn’t involve urban environments, instead of insectile or canine designs that were far more maneuverable and harder targets.

Well, it wasn’t particularly smart or sane, she’d been told, sending a particle round into the corner of a hardpoint and blowing a hole right through it and the three droids behind it. Twin-linked lasers chewed them into molten scrap, and the drone-dogs didn’t even have to hunt them down.

Wait, a great deal of the enemy fire had just faded away. That wasn’t a good sign, it was a danger, it meant-

A section of the mountain away from the blast craters blew hundreds of feet into the air with the telltale superheated vapor of stone being reduced to gas by point-blank plasma feeds… and then something large came up through it on a roaring column of combined magnetic acceleration, anti-grav, and plasma engines lifting it up high and running fast, weaving through the instant array of air defenses attempting to target and pick it off like it was made of smoke and mirrors, bouncing what did not miss it and heading for the sky.

Alarms blared across her mech as the datafeed confirmed unstable energy leakages in the anti-proton bands, the alarm going out across the force, and then across the many miles back to Darkmoor and the Barhund.

There was an antimatter missile launched, and its course was already tracked.

-CODE BLACK,- the coldly calm /voice of Lady Edge echoed through the Markspace. -You have 559 seconds to evacuate or die. Trigger all Runemarks with all speed if you have not now. Fugit Protocol in effect.

-Get out of here, everyone.-

Elias Nergman hit the detonator, and watched in great satisfaction as the great force field generator that was supposed to spread its protective wings over the city of Darkmoor and its technological marvels powered down and faded, the main power junctions melted to slag by magical acid from the Glyphs he’d put in place in the heart of them almost ten years ago.

It would take six hours to disassemble the couplings and get to the matrix to replace them. The city didn’t even have six minutes!

He was aware of the launch of the missile in the far distance. Gulguz had been crowing about his work on it for years, making sure nothing mortal was going to stop it on its course. It was near the top of the world now, however, close to the polar opening to the Hollow World, actually, and wouldn’t be visible for a few minutes.

Strange. Was there a temporal surge just now?

He looked around alertly, ignoring the alarms going off and soldiers and technicians rushing madly about as they tried to discern what was wrong. Instead, he moved to the nearest window, looking north.

He… could see the missile already? He blinked in shock at how fast it was moving, a streak of light across the sky that was going to reach here in seconds only!

He had to get out of here now, then!

He reached out and exerted his Will… and gasped and nearly fell down as the Immortal Power was sucked out of his body by a tremendous power, sending him staggering against the window. He stared in disbelief at the incoming missile, looking like a mere mortal overcome with horror and fear at what was racing at him so very, very quickly...

He was in a temporal acceleration field, and there was a massive siphon of Immortal Power pulling away all his strength!

He heard a gasp, and looked over to see the dark-haired, distinguished beauty of Nifl’s avatar Pamissa leaning against the wall.

“I’ve lost contact!” she murmured, a phrase lost amid the shouting of confused men who’d also lost contact with the outside.

Elias Nergman, Avatar of Thanatos, looked outside, and saw blurs flashing through the streets of the city of Darkmoor not far away, moving dozens of times faster than humans could move, birds like streaks of motion, and even the clouds were running across the sky.

“We’re in a temporal acceleration field!” he croaked back, unable to feel his greater self with the sudden loss of Immortal Power in this vessel. “We don’t have minutes before the warhead arrives, we have seconds!”

The mortals there also heard him, stilling in their frantic motions to look out the window with a sudden, rather chilling sense of inevitability.

Both Avatars felt the change, and the eyes on them. They turned around, to find friends and co-workers they’d lived among for years looking at them with eyes that had suddenly cleared up.

“We’ve been waiting forty years to kill the two of you,” Niles Braderson smiled coolly, his frequent drinking partner aging gracefully with the Federation rejuvenation tech Elias had used as an excuse for his own continued youthfulness. “Even volunteered for the right to do so, knowing we couldn’t stop you from what you were planning. Say goodbye, Elias.”