Destru - Vasi - Mehka - Nuli
Destruction Vast Matter Nullification
The Vast Destruction of Matter and Nullification of Magic.
- Originally Created by Mikha Nuli, The Ninety-Sixth Protector or Kragg Mulinama
Originally created as a means of destroying beast hordes by nullifying magic cast within its range, before creating anti-reality orbs randomly within its range in an attempt to swallow the beast horde it was directed at whole.
Proven worthless after the ‘Kragg Mulinama’ incident, where the orbs expanded until they devoured the city and continent whole.
Destru - Vasi - Mehka - Nuli
Banned by The Protector’s Guild by the Guild Master’s decree.
Use is a Degree Four Offense.
The Sentence is Death by onsite execution.
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Jesus this place is huge.
Upon entering the city for the first time he’d come across a few larger buildings, including a mall that had apparently been melted down to the foundation.
The only reason he knew it was a mall was because the sign in front with its name and logo was still standing.
What the fuck kind of name is Walmart anyways? Did they sell walls? Drywall? Whatever, who cares.
Other than the mall the city had seen its rather fair share of destruction at the hands of the Invaders. It was obvious that they had done this, instead of the massive beasts that littered the area. The destruction was old, very old, many of the buildings that had been damaged, caved in, stepped on, had begun to crumble apart even further than before. Nature had reclaimed many of the buildings with plants building into, and over many of the houses and even one of the apartment buildings he’d crossed. Plus, even if the beasts were attacking a city, none of them left massive footprints across roads, highways, and buildings.
No beast had grown big enough to even measure up to a Warmachine until a few years ago, and the serpent that had attacked the Guild city was barely the same size as it, and nowhere near as powerful.
Hopefully that was still the case, and he wasn’t humanities first to contact the new ‘mega-beast’ species or whatever.
Traveling through the city was going to be a hassle however, as most of it was damaged in one way or another. He’d yet to see a part of it that wasn’t burned, melted, shattered, stomped flat, or vandalized in one way or another.
Shit, finding useful stuff in here might be more difficult than I first expected.
He’d walked through roughly three blocks of the city by now, and almost every store or mall had been melted to the ground. It was a rather common tactic of the Invaders: target the shopping centers, hospitals, apartment buildings, whatever the hell has the most people in it first, then work on whatever is left. Like an exterminator getting rid of an infestation, they were fast, brutal, and worst of all efficient.
Damn shame too, this city had some life to it…
He’d barely entered it by now and even with all the war-damage and slag he could still see some of the color the city had, even after decades of time had passed. Buildings with patches of paint sticking out, roads painted in odd rainbow colors, hell even the signs were covered in different decorations.
If my city looked even half as good as this one probably did I doubt we’d have as many fights in the slums. Why ruin your own home if it looks so beautiful? At the very least people might think twice before practicing fire magic on some poor dudes apartment complex.
If only the Warmachines hadn’t fucked everything up.
--
The rate of survival for those caught by surprise by the Warmachines was roughly one out of a hundred thousand, and even that number is heavily debated. Of course there are many other factors that play in, such as whether or not someone is in a vehicle, if they were healthy enough to run into the nearby wilderness or simply book it for miles on end until they were out of the range of the soldiers that followed, if the Warmachine was specialized for area of effect attacks, precision, or heavy damage, and many others.
One of the biggest factors was simple; luck.
The Warmachines specialized in AOE such as the Hellraiser or the Novalight were the most effective at mass murder. The Hellraiser could melt half a city in less than an hour if it was in a rush, and the Novalight was capable of outright annihilating entire townships and small villages without even bothering to look at them. This of course came with drawbacks to both of them, the Hellraiser was rather slow, and as long as someone was quick to react, and lucky enough to be a decent distance away, they could reasonably get away in a vehicle. Of course in a busy city that is practically under siege that point was practically moot unless the driver was in a motorcycle of some kind and didn’t get crashed into, or crash into someone else while trying to get away.
The Novalight was another story entirely, its main weapon was a massive cannon that had been retrofitted onto its arm, and it could only be fired once every few minutes. The effectiveness of the weapon couldn’t be understated however, as there had been many towns, villages, cities, military bases, and evacuation centers that had witnessed the mech arrive, only to be vaporized before they even had the time to think about running away. The blast itself was comparable to a high yield nuclear bomb, except it left magical radiation instead of normal radiation.
It was only in recent years we’d figured out the magical radiation was basically a magical slag - unrelated to the slag left behind by the Hellraiser - created by rendering all matter, including meat and bone, into white hot fire magic. Out of all of the Warmachines, the Novalight was considered one of the most dangerous when it came to widespread destruction, and the only reason it hadn’t claimed even more lives was because it had been one of the bastards taken out early on before they’d realized what a damn nuke was.
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One of the few good things about the individual unique qualities of the Warmachines was that the destruction they left in their wake allowed someone to easily tell which one was where.
If buildings were cut in half, with massive craters surrounding the area, it’s most likely the Ronin.
If everything is a giant, melted slag, it’s most likely the Hellraiser, or the Carthite.
Giant crater covered in magical radiation? Novalight.
Stomped flat as if there was nothing ever there? Dreadnought, or the Bertrand Crawler.
If the cities were covered in poison plants that actively hunted people, you could be certain the Matriarch and her spores had been there.
Other than those however, there were another six that were more ‘mixed’ than the others. Where the Hellraiser or Carthite focused on massive AOE magic that melted everything, you had the Polina and Vastus which were both relatively ‘normal’ infantry mechs designed around supporting their troops from afar with artillery and, if you could even call it that, rifle fire.
Where you had the slow, heavy Dreadnought and Bertrand Crawler Warmachines you had the Herme’s Warmachine, which seemed to be the more ‘reconnaissance’ focused of the batch, faster, relatively smaller, and lighter. More focused on scouting, hit and run, and taking out supply convoys and reinforcements than outright assault. Although, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t fully capable of it.
And finally, to top off the shit cake that was the Invasion you had something that many had viewed worse than the Warmachines outright dedicated to war itself, but the two Warmachines that were built around support.
The Argus and the Maiden, two ‘backline’ mechs that had spent the majority of their time either assaulting smaller nations incapable of defending themselves properly, or assisting the others in their activities.
The Argus had the capability to shield itself, and to top it off it had the capability to shield others. It would frequently shield its allies from bombardment, rifle fire, explosives, everything as its troops marched through cities and took them, brick by brick. The only reason the Argus had been taken out so early was because of its pilot's ignorance about what happens when you fire a sonic blast directly at a dozen nuclear warheads as they attempt to run away from you. Whether or not it knew what they were, and was in the process of destroying them to stop more of its allies from falling to them, or was just trying to get its licks in is unknown, but the massive crater that once made up Rome told the rest of the story.
As for the Maiden, she was small, dainty, and had the weakest armor out of all of them. She was also the one that had been teleporting all of her friends around the planet and was most likely the most dangerous of her group. A Warmachine was usually fast, save for the Hellraiser, Dreadnought, and Bertrand Crawler, but they couldn’t be everywhere. Even if they had been capable of moving as fast as a jet, they still had to move, which left them open to ambushes, and they didn’t go anywhere without their soldiers beside them, and in front of them.
It’s still unknown who killed the Maiden, but her shattered body was found inside a nuke-crater somewhere along Italy’s borders, and if she hadn’t been killed so early in the Invasion, it was unknown whether or not humanity would have survived the war.
Knowing all of this, from the names humanity had given them to the abilities they had, from the destruction he’d seen in different classes and on the internet, from a lifetime of learning about the machines, why did it feel like he was missing something?
--
The buildings around here are slagged to shit, could be the Hellraiser who did this… but it doesn’t seem like enough shit is melted for it to be him.
It wasn’t uncommon for the other mechs to melt anything with people in it, sure they didn’t do it anywhere near as often as the Hellraiser and Carthite, but many of them had the weapons in smaller forms. However even if they had stayed around for a few days for just this city, why was there so much slag? The Hellraiser and Carthite would have slagged almost the entire city, if not to the ground then at least covering most of it with the black magma, but there were only a few buildings per street that had been turned into waste.
If it had been one of the others, at least from what he’d seen from the footage he could find online, their melter’s only really had the ability to fire a dozen times at most, and even then they did far less damage than even a single shot from the ones that specialized in it. To cover so much of the city, from what he’d already seen, they would have needed to spend quite a bit of time just burning buildings.
Maybe one of them got bored? Decided to burn people for the fun of it? Like some fuckin’ kid with an hourglass and an anthill.
Sadism was a decent explanation, albeit a rather flimsy one. There hadn’t really been too much proof of the Warmachines themselves ‘indulging’, besides the Ronin's' last stand which had been what many had viewed as ‘blind rage’ over its allies' deaths.
However, since it had already been proven before that the bastards had pilots who were capable of… outbursts, there was a good chance that one of them was just a bit more cruel than the others.
Either way, the fact of the matter was that he was in a city - and the fact that he hadn’t been attacked by anything yet was giving him the creeps. When he’d thought of finding a city he’d expected a battle royale, him versus thousands of other monsters and beasts vying for control over the area in a show of dominance, but so far he’d seen nothing.
No predators, no prey, not even a rodent.
It was eerie.
If I don’t come across something with a pulse soon I might just leave entirely, this is honestly worse than if something DID try to attack me.
The best bet was that the animals of the area were simply nocturnal, or there was something so damn scary to the surrounding wildlife that they all decided to steer clear, something he had obviously failed to do judging by the fact he was currently in the middle of the city.
He was hoping for the nocturnal theory, as bullshit as it sounded for literally every animal in the city to be nocturnal it was better than the alternative.
The mist makes it difficult to tell where the waterfall is, but I can practically hear it inside my own head. If I wasn’t capable of tuning down my hearing I would have most likely never even gotten this close from fear of death by migraine.
As he was walking he thought he could hear something other than the sound of crashing water, so he stopped. Turning his gaze around to face a small apartment building he gave it a quick glance. It had obviously seen better days like most of the city but it was at least un-slagged and practically in perfect shape, save for a massive hole on the third floor that nearly reached the fourth due to its size. He’d thought he’d heard the sound of something inside the building, but knowing how old and unmaintained the area was it could very well be the building itself creaking.
At least I hope that was just the building creaking, I’d rather not get ambushed… again.
His journey was nearing its end, and he was getting rather reckless even by his standards. He’d strut into the city with his balls out ready to take on anything that tried to get in his way, and while he was confident he could take most things in a fight right now he wasn’t sure how well he’d fare against the king of the jungle - or city in this case.
He’d nearly reached the waterfall when he came across a rather annoying obstacle.
A topped apartment building.
Apparently this one had been blown nearly in half, and as most things do when that happens it fell over.
He could go around, travel a block or two over and hope the road was clear… or he could jump over it.
Crouching down until his knees were almost touching the pavement he leaped forward, rising just over the top of the sides - that had become the ‘top’ - of the building before falling on the other side, clearing the fallen debris in one go.
Goddess, I love being able to ‘leap tall buildings in a single bound’. No wonder old comic books are always gushing about it.
As he rose he was met with the image of a tiled path that led to a railing overlooking a small cliff.
And the waterfall.
Holy shit that thing is fucking massive.
He didn’t really know what he’d been expecting when he’d been tracking the sound of the waterfall, but he’d expected it to be massive based on the mist that permeated the city. He just hadn’t expected it to be so huge.
Are all waterfalls this size? Is this normal?
It wasn’t as big as he’d been expecting, but it was certainly up there.
The massive waterfall seemed to be around two thousand feet long, maybe more, curving almost like a horseshoe from one end to the other.
It definitely wasn’t the largest one in the world, even he knew that much, but it was big enough that he wasn’t surprised by how loud it had seemed before. From up close it looked amazing, colors dancing off the falling water as the mist rose from where it landed below, continuing on further than he could see.
The rushing water below, the sound of water crashing, the colors and scent of the open water…
Damn near made the whole trip worth it, just to see this sight.