The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Ten

Dagnoths, apparently the otherworldly walking war machine was called 'Dagnoths'. At least that was what Wilder assumed as the bulky armored creature thunderously intoned that word again and again while it advanced on him and his comrades, attacking with a ruthless and graceless, unsophisticated fervor.

Maybe it was saying something else. Maybe it was actually telling the Traveler in Red that it was going to kill him.

A flashing stream of unidentified light particles from the thing's weapon punched into the side of an abandoned, half-rusted cargo trailer parked alongside the boulevard and the trailer erupted into a hot, acidic rain of vaporized metal.

Wilder hastily decided it really didn't matter a damn what the thing was saying.

The impact from the scorching beams of Wilder's light beam pistols against the Arbiter's armored body created resonant, low-pitched metal clangs as a radiating cascade of white-hot waves, resembling the effect of an arc light, scattered from off the collision points. Light beam weapons were an offshoot of particle beam weaponry, utilizing nuclear-enhanced laser beam technology. The high energy beams used subatomic particles to damage the target by disrupting its molecular structure. The elaborately etched exoskeleton of the squat, elephantine cybernetic alien rocked from the physical punch from the light beams, but they did little to slow the creature's steady forward momentum.

He was shrugging off the hits as quickly as they happened.

Murshipaz and Oerdyke had each fully extended the telescoping photonic battle-javelins they carried to their full length, each javelin topped by a teardrop-shaped stone inset into the weapon's scythe-shaped, claw-ended crown. Photonic javelins were old Emperium Guard infantry weapons that generated an electrophotonic force pulse capable of blasting a basketball-sized hole through a meter-wide wall of solid granite. The javelins were elegant, but lethal devices, remnants of a time when the Emperium's military forces were more swashbuckling and urbane than as cruel and brutish as they'd later become. It took exceptional skill to wield the devices and those trained in their usage were considered among the upper echelon of fighting men. To their credit, Murshipaz and Oerdyke were elite among those elite soldiers.

Not that it made much of a difference, given the current circumstances. The blasts from the battle-javelins were rocketing into an invisible wall of spinning, free-floating atoms surrounding the attacking Arbiter, this monster called Dagnoth, and dissolving, simply fading away to nothing.

The Traveler in Red's mind raced... The confrontation was swiftly devolving into a debacle for the human defenders; there was little to no chance they possessed anything remotely powerful enough to affect the totemic armored golem. It would advance against the battling trio, breach their meager defenses and it would kill them relatively soon. But the one thing to their advantage was the unanticipated weapon that was Wilder's intellect.

Back on planet Earth, while he had been a normal man, Adam Wilder had been a Doctor of Physics at the Harbeckke Institute for Dream Research in Laurel, Maryland, where he had worked for a dream research project called OUTLAND. Wilder had headed the fledgling "theoretical chaos environments" division where he and his team had developed action-models of alien environments that presented scenarios of physical geographies with characteristics outside the accepted parameters of known science. Dreamscapes. Otherworlds. Alternate Realities. Extradimensionalities. In the course of developing various logical systems that were mathematically sound, Wilder had learned to consider these impossible hypotheses not only possible, but probable.

Wilder's agile mind stumbled upon the fragment of a plan based around an errant concept... It was obvious the relentless humanoid cyber-tank was surrounded by a mobile protective field and yet the creature's feet touched the ground as it walked and it could physically interact with the world around it. That meant the field could be manipulated. Otherwise, how could a creature that could not be touched by assaulting subatomic photonic energy touch anything around itself? Logically, there was no way without the cyborg running the risk of the field rebounding upon itself and repelling its own atomic and molecular structure, thereby destroying the cyborg itself by smothering it or crushing it or condensing it until the heat from its compaction combusted it.