His shoulders were getting stiff, aching from where the creature's rock-hard hands had clamped down on him as it had attacked. There had been only a pair of them blocking his escape from the sub-city's underground chamber, but their physical dimensions and elephantine body mass had presented a hostile barrier that even his fierce steed had found to be discouragingly formidable. In a half dozen heartbeats, three more of the creatures had materialized, growing up as though they were vengeful elementals from out the gritty, dry soil. The dual-bladed shatter-sword was only marginally useful against them. The destructive sonic vibratory frequencies it harnessed only served to make their steel-hard body surfaces slightly less dense and invulnerable to harm. They were highly resistant to projected sonic frequency beams emitted by the sword, but, nonetheless, the beams did manage to slow their progress as they'd advanced on him. Astonishingly, the tide of battle was turned by the power of the heavy, spiked bone-mace at the end of the Halodean's segmented tail. When the mighty reptile thrashed, whip-snapped and lashed out with the muscular appendage, the horny dermal plates and bulky bone club splintered and shattered the hard, crystalline exteriors of the golems birthed by the Machineries of Witchery.
They then put that arena of battle behind them as quickly as they could manage.
Motion, sound, fury, sensation and overload, strategize and then re-assess, react, move, react again... he was feared he was losing focus, getting sloppy, his psyche becoming numb and distracted. Too much was happening and he was depending too much on the animal within him to lead him out from one dangerous moment to the next. Measured reason was tasking a back seat to survival. He could not afford that to happen. Events were governing his actions instead of the opposite... His concentration had become divided between fighting in the Here-And-Now and plotting what his next immediate move should be -- and where that move should take him. A soldier, a good soldier, did not win battles through virtue of repetitive, remorseless butchery. Combat for combat's sakes' was useless, and would eventually culminate in failure -- and death. Combat was a tool to be used in pursuit of a goal when all other methods of achieving that goal had been eliminated. An experienced, thinking soldier won battles through identifying and staying true to their ultimate objective until that objective was obtained and secured. One fought in service to a master plan. Swords and firearms were indeed vitally useful on the battle field, but a focused mind was the deadliest weapon of all. When the mind was right, the sword was right.
That mantra was a very, very difficult motto to follow when a soldier found themselves surrounded by enemies. Nonetheless, D'Spayr compelled himself to keep his priorities paramount and at the fore of his mind as he savagely made his way through a horde of converging foes. Luckily, the general chaos dominating the streets and boulevards of The City had begun to work in his favor.
His proximity sense alarm went off, directionally unspecific, the alarm feeling like a soft tingling occurring at his temple... He peered through his helmet's dusty visor into the smoggy air. A shadow, there, to the right, just above eye level... D'Spayr raised his right arm in time to block the oncoming blow from an neuro-javelin wielded by an armored figure abruptly lunging from the dimly-lit interior of a machine shop-utility hangar. The javelin was heavy and the man wielding it was strong, very strong, and he moved with an athleticism to be found only in hardened soldiers and battle-trained mercenaries accustomed to close-quarters combat. The tall metal staff, thick around as a tall man's thigh, bounced a glancing blow from off D'Spayr's gauntleted forearm and traveled downwards to ricochet off the scaled flank of the startled Halodean. The beast sidestepped gingerly, hissing in barely contained fury. The force of the strike rocked the Knight precariously to one side of the wide saddle crossing the lizard-steed's back and the electrical discharge from the javelin spat a shower of orange sparks cascading onto the pavement.
D'Spayr nimbly righted himself in the saddle and launched a flat-footed kick at the chest of the attacker, hitting the man just under the collar bone. The thrust behind the kick was boosted by the mech-musculature of the Knight's cybernetic armor, amplifying it a dozen times its normal force. The soldier's torso caved in on itself, doubling him over, and he flew from off his feet and smashed back-first into the forward facade of the same building from which he'd emerged, shattering the masonry.
The ground shook as the overlapping shockwaves from a pair of nearby explosions raced across the enclosed space between towering buildings. A grenade blast coupled with the percussive flare-up of a liquid fuel generator. A whirlwind of shattered glass and splintered masonry fragments rode the heat of the expanding compression waves and a billowing, hazy curtain of acrid smoke poured out into the quarter kilometer-long thoroughfare as a half-dozen well-armed men wearing the armor of Kolag Y'phree's Magesterial Support Guard stumbled out into the open spaces. The troopers were doing their best to aggressively hunt D'Spayr while simultaneously keeping watch in the skies above for the airborne, elemental jellyfish-predators unleashed by Grimmurmanthe.
A remote-controlled, steam-driven ornithopdroid, a hexagonal, propelered mechanical weapons-drone a little larger than a hunting falcon, whizzed by through the grainy haze. The device unleashed a trio of bright blue electro-plasmic bolts at a random set of man-shaped targets moving on the street. The searing, calescent bolts punched through thick slabs of stone and steel alike with little effort and somewhere just past the troopers, a male voice erupted into an agonized scream as a bolt burned through their torso like cobalt-hued lightning. A handful of angry and exasperated voices suddenly erupted, raised in outrage. A regrettable incident of friendly fire. The ornithopdroid's pilot couldn't afford to waste too much time distinguishing between figures in the firezone. Sight, target-lock, fire, move on and then repeat. The Warlord's Action Ops Command would work out the details later.
A whooshing noise of displaced air that grew louder as something approached at ground level accompanied by the mechanical growl of a gear-driven engine... D'Spayr pulled sharply on the reins of the Halodean's harness and the reptile-steed ran a trio of steps and launched itself into the air, throwing its large body over to the left where it impacted into the wall of a building lining the street. The animal grunted as it and its rider bounced off the now-cracked wall and something large and metallic streaked by them to furiously imbed itself into the front promenade and portico of the structure, noisily collapsing it. An out-of-control freight carriage, its dead driver flopping about in the driver's cabin, slewed over onto its side, ejecting a spinning plume of wreckage out onto the street, as it slid the rest of the way past the building's front façade.
The Magesterial Support Guardsmen caught sight of D'Spayr and his steed. They didn't bother trying to assume firing stances. They whipped the muzzles of their weapons up and collectively snapped off multiple shots of ion light-bursts, relying on instinct as they opened fire...
He'd been hit. Three times: mid-thigh, high-rib cage, and across the top of his shoulder. Damn!
The reactive-input targeting computer in D'Spayr's body armor neuro-enhanced the Knight's reaction time as he drew his own wide-muzzled, shatterbolt defractor pistol and unleashed return fire. The electric field negation effects of the volley from his weapon dissolved the molecular bonds of the matter it struck in a fiery flash. Two men went down, their bodies convulsing as they surrendered to the cascading effects of their body's dissolving atomic matrix. The Knight rapidly fired again, driving the assault team back behind a debris-mound for cover. In the meantime, the Outland Marshal Knight-armor's independent mobile command and analytics processing unit, its "Watcher-Brother" neurotelemetric augmentation unit, activated the liquidic swarm of supramolecular nucleic acid structure nanobytes within it. The self-replicating nano-swarm worked to self-seal, where necessary, and repair damages done to D'Spayr's exoskeletal mech-system. The Watcher-Brother set about 3D-printing and weaving artificial bio-skin to repair the Knight's wounds. D'Spayr, ignoring the pain and responding to the carefully regulated drip of adrenalin-booster administered into his system from the armor, proceeded to guide the Haldoean up the street at a full gallop. They couldn't afford to be out in the open and continue to fall prey to these continued skirmishes.
Emaris Staurqe would be depending on him to reach his target and secure his objective.
The Knight issued a cybernetic command to his armor's analytics processing command center and, in tnadem with his Watcher-Brother, the internal computer supplied an optical live-traffic schematic of his position inside The City relative to Kolag Y'phree's municipal Government Center offices at the edge of the Warlord's palatial home. His current position south-southeast of the center at twenty-seven degrees below directional horizontal and there were a minimum of approximately nineteen enemy troopers between the Knight and the Warlord's portal gates. Object-detection scans with acoustic-wave frequencies and with infrared thermographics revealed there were six flying jellyfish-predators at an altitude of six stories-high running amok across that same sector's aerial spaces, moving between Niyaddour's scattered assemblage of tower edifices.
The Watcher-Brother also let D'Spayr know that his armor was nearing the upper limits of its reservoir of energy. The armor was hyper-fiber conducted, lasergen-powered, combat armor was techno-biologically "genegineered" to be autonomous and a multi-isotope, "hot fusion" plasma containment unit the size of the palm of his hand supplied the armor's power requirements. The hot fusion was produced by the use of a powerful magnetic field to confine plasma energy needed for producing controlled thermonuclear fusion power. The actual temperature of the unit's plasma increased as it was rapidly compressed by the restrictive intensity of the confining magnetic field, producing more power, as the armor's need for more energy grew. Yet despite the design, the small thermonuclear containment unit was limited in its energy production by the need for the physical components housing it to "cool", temporarily reverting back to their constituent atomic base to retain structural integrity.
He needed time. He had to momentarily conserve his energy expenditure and its subsequent depletion. The unit needed time to restabilize. But, simultaneously, he had no choice but to get moving.
This was turning out not to be one of his better days...
The Halodean turned its crested head, its mane fanned by a hot wind rushing down the street. It regarded him with a hard, demanding glare. It roared. D'Spayr recognized the timbre of the sound.
"Yes, dammit, I know. I know!" the Knight muttered crossly. "There's an off-ramp at an intersection half a standard chanck from here. If we can get to it, we can outrace the roving urban defense squads and we can stay away from the Arbiter's flotilla of soaring air-squids. The problem is, there's a mechanized autonomous defense-A.I. between here and there, a relic from Niyaddour's time under the Emperium's control. Kolag Y'phree had the unit re-programmed for his own usage. The damn thing's got a set of four large-bore, smart-targeting particle beam cannons. If it gets us in its sights and fires, the beams will lock onto us and follow us until the charge expends it energy. We can't outrun the beams and there's no way we can put ourselves outside its range. We'll have to physically take down the unit, a three-story tall, five-armed artificial intelligence with a ruthless self-preservation mode. You wouldn't happen to have a quick, easy way we could do that, would you, old friend?"
The lizard-steed snorted and loosed a raspy grumble.
"Not a clue, huh? Well, I thought not," D'Spayr sighed. "My motion telemetry scans have identified that there's a trio of those bloodthirsty, rock-golem automatons rapidly approaching. We should not be here when they arrive. Let's go."
The Knight gave the reins to his steed a snap and the muscular reptile trotted off in the direction where the armored, intelligent death-machine lay waiting...
* * *
Nue'methnin Brydeian Polleg, Company Commander and First Commissioned Corpsmaster of the Warlord's urban defensive forces, felt a trickle of hot blood running down the side of his neck on the inside of the metal collar on his suit of tactical armor. His breathing came hard and in gasping draughts taking in lungfuls of hot air. The arm on which he supported his weight as he leaned against a massive plate of metal, was trembling from effort. To his own surprise, he was still standing after being buffeted by the brutal percussive wave that had gripped him and seven of his best men and tossed them around like dolls. Grimmurmanthe had stormed the fortress-city's expansive gateway to its middle bailey, the strongly fortified enclosure protecting the fortress' heart, taking down a steel-reinforced, convex-curved, interior defensive wall nearly three acres wide and four stories tall. The air was still ringing from the thunder of its collapse.
The demonic Arbiter, towering head, shoulders and chest above even the tallest man in Nue'methnin's squad, augmented though they were by the huge exo-frames of their specialized assault armor, strode onward singlemindedly. He moved arrogantly past a collection of crushed, burning vehicles, crumpled mobile cannons and splintered barricades, giving them barely a glance. The bloodied, broken bodies of fallen soldiers and of slain public militiamen and of urban crisis-responders lay scattered across mounds of debris.
Nue'methnin was a skilled and seasoned campaigner of several great battles that had taken him across the continent of Qundin from the fog-enshrouded, windswept, rain-drenched mountains of the Lav'vurik Heights to the heat-blasted, rolling tundra of the barbaric Mata'frobai Lowlands. Very little was left in the world that could or would surprise or frighten him. But the savage Arbiter and his apparently endless flow of flying, alien jellyfish predators was something he could not quite reconcile as being within the realm of sanity. As physically large and as sprawling a landscape as Niyaddour was, a ruined metropolis, yes, but a metropolis nonetheless, Nue'methnin could now easily imagine Grimmurmanthe razing it down to its foundations, its population massacred, before the rise of the next day's suns.
This could not be allowed to happen. He'd traveled as a nomad and a sellsword, as a criminal enforcer and as an assassin, for far too long before settling in this place. It had taken a long time to become convinced of Kolag Y'phree's mad vision to create a sustainable city-state independent of the cruel edicts of the World-Father's wide-ranging Emperium. But it had worked. It had come to pass. And now, The City was his home.
Grimmurmanthe could not have it.
He spat, cursing, and through sheer force of will, imbued his rubbery legs with strength once more. He readied his weapons and prepared to once more charge into battle...
And then he began to see the very dirt, dust and grime at his feet ripple, bubble and rise from off the pavement and cobblestone, changing at a molecular level, as it became like flowing rubber, arching into waving, wobbling cones with fingerlings stretching towards the sky. As if from a distance, he could hear the moans and mutterings of the remainders of his troops as they saw the protean piles of strangeness take shape, fear and superstition overriding their military discipline. He felt his gorge rise in his throat. This was something contrary to every natural law of which he'd ever known. It happened quickly, eerily, and it was a sinister, chilling thing to behold.
Nearly two dozen man-shaped hulks had formed from the muck and debris of battle right before his eyes. He could sense the rage burning like a flaming star inside the wide chest of each of the brutish golems. Everything about them screamed a nightmare of homicide. He was no fool. He knew these creatures were not here to save him. They were not here to fight for his home. They didn't give a damn about him or anyone else -- not anyone human, anyways. They only obeyed the commands of their dread master. Something else was at work here, a vengeful intelligence. Something dark and terrible...
Something that amazingly, impossibly, hated Grimmurmanthe as much as he did.
He watched speechless and amazed as the creatures turned their backs on him and on his men as they gathered to awkwardly race, shambling like gale-driven hunting hounds, after the Arbiter, butchery governing their primitive minds.
"Stand up, you sick, sad bastards, stand and raise arms!" he bellowed. "The Fat Cannibal Devils of Abominorem have smiled on us today and the Dark Slaughterer has sent us his insane hellspawn! The fight isn't over yet! Stitch shut your wounds and tuck in your guts, you lazy dog-brothers. Snatch up your weapons, boys, we're off to go kill us an alien demigod!"
Nue'methnin, Company Commander and First Commissioned Corpsmaster of the Warlord's urban defensive forces, rallied his weary troops and charged off after the infernal mob of wicked golems in pursuit of Grimmurmanthe.
* * *
"It would appear that despite your desires and schemes, Disorder and Death have usurped primary jurisdiction over the land. The presupposed strength and cohesion of The City, the jewel of your colossal ego, crumbles before the assault of enemies both anticipated and unexpected. Your ragtag army finds itself outmatched by the power of the invading alien demigod. The vindictive forces of the Hegemonic Emperium squat just outside your walls, waiting like hungry jackals. And all for what? What will any of you profit from such madness? Niyaddour will be as it always was: a ruined, deteriorating metropolis of liars, thieves, whores, lost souls and broken machines. And every intrigue and strategem you devised to resuscitate and empower it will have failed. So, my dear rebellious monarch of the searing wastelands, how would you rate your day so far?"
Her voice tore bitterly at him from behind the arabesque-tiled half-wall lining the western portal leading into his consular chambers. He had already sensed her presence before she'd begun to speak, but, out of some strange and lingering appreciation for the bond they'd once shared, he had not reacted as he normally would have to the presence of an enemy. He didn't turn to face her. A large part of him would have despaired, softened, if he'd stared directly into the hurt and accusation in her round face, if he'd locked eyes with her furious glare and the sense of betrayal behind it. He truly did not want to see how far into ruin she'd fallen. Odd, so odd. She had been the one to betray him first, but she had convinced herself that what she had done had been in service of his interests, not her own. Then he remembered staring deeper into the gloom suffusing her private sanctum and seeing the baleful face of Ka'esh-Woganhi'e...
Kolag Y'phree turned slowly to confront Karliandras Dru'ell. He should have been surprised by what he saw, by who he saw, but he wasn't. He'd slowly become numb to the events of the day.
Warlord Arvenall Dampiko, the Crucifixer, and his man, Mikaas Drem, the infantry commander of Dampiko's expeditionary field militia, flanked the beaten, bruised and bleeding Grand Vizier. Both men openly displayed their unholstered particle beam weapon-pistols in anticipation of any violence from Y'phree.
"Ah, yes, I see now. This is the missing piece of the puzzle. It makes much more sense now...," Y'phree said, nodding.
Dampiko offered a wry, humorless smile and executed a short bow as he said, "Always a pleasure. It has been a long, ugly time since last we met face-to-face. Your guardsmen, yes, I would think you'd be wondering about them. Infantry Commander Drem and I put them to rout moments ago without much difficulty. Sorry to say, but I think your lauded extended period of peace here in Niyaddour, your time away from raids against smaller territorial tribes and other prey, made them soft and complacent. The men who serve Warlords should always be on-edge, razor-sharp, should always be hyper-vigilant and made angry by the hunger to spill blood. Your men were not like that. A pity."
"True, Crucifixer, too true," Y'phree grumbled. "My men became soldiers instead of bandits and murderers. Discipline and self-sacrifice overcame their lesser, baser instincts. I suppose, in these anarchic circumstances, that evolution could be seen as a weakness."
"By the gods, man, listen to yourself. You're getting old. The morality implicit to their status as protectors instead of predators is of little interest to me," Dampiko said. "All that matters is that they failed to successfully protect your flank."
"Perhaps it is as you say," Y'phree said with a shrug. "Things are what they are. You're here and they, I presume, are now all dead. So, since it is apparent that you and Grand Vizier Dru'ell are not only acquainted, but are also allies, perhaps you can share precisely what end it is you've been plotting towards. You still pursue the metal, don't you? This all is about the Ikarenium ore..."
"You see, but you do not SEE. You've never been one to fully grasp the expansiveness of this tapestry of events. This is about the Upworlds," Dampiko said harshly.
"And what do you think possessing the Ikarenium will do for you in regards to how Teshiwahur relates to the distant Upworlds?"
"I will bring war to the Upworlds, endless, brutal, bloody war without end," Dampiko snarled.
"And how will that in any way change what happens to our planet, to Teshiwahur, while it exists under the shadow of The Wound? The Long Death will still eat away the stars from our skies, drain all life from our solar system and leave only dead space, and eventually devour our very planet. The Withered Land will die, regardless what you do among the Upworlds."
"I know that," Dampiko said. "I'm not a fool. But this isn't about escaping Fate or enacting some miraculous salvation. This is about vengeance. This is about balancing the scales. THEY have everything: a jewel of a planet imbued with endless beauty capable of sustaining all manner of miraculous Life, their people have a destiny of greatness as they slowly expand their civilization out among the stars, a future --- we've seen it, our Oracles have long spoken of it! But the Upworlders don't know what to do with any of that! THEY are what we SHOULD be! That future should be OUR heritage. Instead, we are left with the Long Death and the suffering it brings. We cannot tolerate that. As we shall suffer, so, too, shall THEY suffer."
Kolag Y'phree sighed wearily. "No, Dampiko, you are no one's fool. In your own strange way, you're actually a visionary. But to think you can impose your will upon the stars, upon the face of Reality Itself, and to think that you have the right to do that, this makes you even worse than The World-Father and the tyranny of his Emperium. You, sir, are a madman."
Arvenall Dampiko raised an eyebrow and clicked his tongue against the inside of his mouth disapprovingly. "You have indeed become a doddering old man. I though you would be more imaginative and far wiser than this. I thought that the vigorous fires of adventure and of conquest still burned within you. But I can see that those flames have long since died out. A shame..."
Dampiko nodded towards Mikaas Drem and the Infantry Commander raised his pistol to sight and fire.
That was when Grimmurmanthe, roaring with deafening, inhuman ferocity, erupted through the walls of the fortress chamber, bursting in upon the tableau with a barbaric blood-fury. A frenzied handful of rock-golems had swarmed over his massive frame, battering the Arbiter with maniacal fury even as Kolag Y'phree's aide-de-camp, Nue'methnin, and his few remaining troopers, brawled valiantly against all the frightful devils.
* * *