"None will survive the coming carnage! NO ONE, we will drag your Gods and your Devils out into the pyres so that you can plainly see how pathetic your attempts to resist enlightenment truly are!"
First Lord of the Heavenly Pantheon. BA: 12-205
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We need to talk about the damage to your soul, Markus
There goes any hope I had of the false diagnosis. Just out the window and into the bin. What am I going to do? I can’t fight without a leg, unless a simple peg leg would work that doesn't require me to bend my knee, but would I even be able to fight with it? Would I be ALLOWED to fight with it in any professional circles? I was already pushing their boundaries with my body, let alone if I rocked up and said “I’m Peg Leg Mark and I’m ready to kick some ass!”, they’d throw me out immediately.
A thousand thoughts were going through my head at once. Could it still be a false positive and we need more tests? No, Giani is too professional for that. She wouldn’t have said it like that if she wasn’t sure. Let alone the scare it’d give any normal patient she doesn’t have a cruelty streak to her like that, just a cold one.
Has she told anyone? What happens if they look inside your medical information and see that you have soul damage, without having ever come into contact with one of the invasion portals in your life? The only other option they’ll think to even check is either powerful magic too dangerous to allow you to walk out of here or a soul weapon. And if they think it's an uncontained soul weapon…
“Mark? Markus!”
Snapping me out of my anxiety attack driven thoughts was Giani was looking at me snapping her fingers in front of my face.
“W-what?” I stuttered out.
“Do you know how you received such a dangerous injury?” She calmly stated while looking me in the eyes, “I- I think I do. I was jumped by someone outside a bar, I woke up a bit later in the alleyway and was in a rather bad state, judging by what my landlord said when I finally got home.”
This lie is shit, but it's the same thing I told Donovan and I can’t give everyone a different story or else if the feds investigate me they’ll catch onto the lie quick.
I couldn’t tell if she entirely believed me, the main issue with people who wore a mask all the time was that they got used to it, and Giani was very good at keeping up a mask.
She seemed to buy it for a second, before she asked me another question that made my balls retreat into my body.
“So you were at a bar, got jumped badly enough by such dangerous magic that it damaged your soul, then walked home, who knows how far away without ever thinking to call an ambulance or the United Lands Provincial Protection Office?” It took me a second to translate ULPPO from what it was to Beater, I’ve been spending so much time around the pits I had practically forgotten basic knowledge that even the children around here know.
“I didn’t really think it was that big an issue, I didn’t see who did it and quite honestly I usually heal from even the worst injuries in a matter of days, if not weeks. I figured I could just sleep off the worst of it and then get back on my feet. But my damn knee just won’t stop hurting, no matter what I do if I bend it even slightly it’s like getting stabbed by an angry Tusked Hog.” I wouldn’t call myself the best liar, generally I try to just tell the truth as much as possible so that I don’t have to bother lying, as getting caught out in one is much worse than simply avoiding the question or downplaying how bad something was. But even then I could tell Giani didn’t entirely believe me, even if I had told her more of the truth that the person who assaulted me had been RSC or even related to them she probably would have called me out of somehow pissing off the cartel by accident at some random bar. And while I wasn’t the smartest person in the world she knew me well enough to know I wasn’t that stupid.
While looking me in the eyes she began speaking to me calmly again. “Mark, you realize that the danger you are in is severe, correct?” Of course I know how severe it is. I'm one misstep away from getting carted off to a prison cell or shallow grave, if they decide to even bury me. “I know how bad soul wounds are, but I was told in the email that there was a small chance it was a false positive! Can’t we do a few more tests, see if it’s just the magic making the machine glitch out or something?”
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The pleading sound of my voice must have done something to her because her face softened for the first time since I’d started my regular hospital visits, even going so far as to look away for a moment before clearing her throat and looking back at me.
“Mark we know for a fact it’s soul damage, we knew the second you walked back into the hospital today”
What?
“Ever since the invasion magic and technology have improved, far beyond what we originally thought was possible. Where once we couldn’t stop our oil production to power our cars and almost all of our transportation in general, we have magic that can move these vehicles completely cleanly, and much more affordably,” She spread her hands towards me, and then towards the rest of the room. “And such we also learned many things, such as scanning technology infused with magic that can detect when one of the invaders' tools, weapons, or unique magical signatures appears so that we will be warned if they ever return.” At this point she was only looking at me, and for the first time I saw a sad look on her face.
“Mark, you can’t use your leg because it’s been infected with soul magic directly from one of their Warmachines’ power cores.”
Warmachine
Generally the word is used as a general term, a tank is a ‘War machine’, a sub is a ‘War Machine’, the general definition is a “Machine designed and built for War”, however when it came to the invaders, Warmachines meant something entirely different.
During the invasion it wasn’t just swathes of fleshy monsters from the pits of hell that came to eat our souls, it was infantry, vehicles, equipment. And this magical equipment that they used practically replaced everything scientific with magic. The lightbulbs had mana, or magic or whatever people like to call it that all magic tools rely on to light up instead of electrical currents, their vehicles had engines specifically built to house large quantities of magic power for long term usages, and recharging them simply required them to swap out small discs or cubes and they were ready for war all over again.
The largest, and most terrifying weapons they used during the invasion was simply called the “Warmachine”. Easily the size of a small apartment building, so durable even tactical nuclear bombs only stalled them, not stop them, and the only time we ever managed to destroy them was through booby trapping them with many, many high powered nukes that when set of nearly decimated everything in a fifty mile radius, and poisoned the land much further than that. The machines looked more like giant knights than mechs, many of them even wielded swords and shields as they trampled over the world's armies. They were faster than most vehicles, durable enough to take as many hits they needed in a frontal assault, and deadly enough that most of the largest cities on the planet were merely walked over in an attempt to squash any attempts at resistance.
There were only ever a dozen of these that entered our world, and each one had a trophy collected. When the Warmachines that had appeared in countries unable to stop finished off whatever meager resistance they gave them they simply changed focus and assisted their allies in another country in an attempt to end the fight faster. It took months and months of research and hail mary’s before the government destroyed their first one, and that was more of an accident that the Warmachine had caused while assaulting a convoy that was transporting a large portion of nuclear devices out of what had become enemy territory. The story goes that while hurriedly rushing the bombs away from the enemy forces while their own soldiers covered them, the mech just teleported within a mile of them and rushed their position, when it got on top of them and the soldiers and commanders realized they weren’t getting any of their nukes to their launch sites, and they couldn't let the enemy have them. they detonated them remotely in an attempt to stall or at the very least keep them out of enemy hands.
The explosion was quite frankly so massive it shattered windows over fifty miles away. Nothing survived, Nothing.
Although thousands died from the detonation, the successful kill of the Warmachine, which was confirmed when drones spotted its annihilated body, made the entire affair a complete success. With the death of one of humanity's extinguishers dead, they just had to do their best to reenact the death of the first one as well as possible. This proved more difficult however when it quickly became apparent that the other eleven were being extremely careful from that point on. At that point humanity had a choice, sacrifice its own people in an attempt to annihilate the Warmachines or face destruction. Three more Warmachines died in this process with minimum casualties, minimum being only a few thousand people in the active blast radius.
The last Warmachines death was the most horrific. After losing most of its comrades and other Warmachine's the Warmachines that had terrorized China for years went into overdrive, instead of simply clearing out obstacles for its infantry to slaughter anything in their way, it became the butcher. It flattened cities, annihilated villages without even looking at them, even trying to slow it down with air-bound nukes simply resulted in it blocking it with its shield or simply tanking it with its armor. City after city fell, even with other nations doing everything they could muster in their weakened states to assist the people of China, boating refugees overcapacity by transport ships, cruise ships, fishing boats, Box cars, military transport trucks, it still wasn’t enough to get even a tenth of the countries sizable population out of the warzone.
After China’s military had formed a last stand in Dali, and only after being pushed out of almost every other base and city they owned, they were being bombarded by the Warmachine in every way. Using its sword and shield to cut down skyscrapers full of hiding people, stomping on homes with people in their basements, obliterating bunkers it found with its scanners before annihilating them wholesale with its built-in magic weaponry, by the time the leaders figured out what they had to do they had already seen half their city get turned into gravel and molten glass.
Realizing they had no choice but to stop the monster where it stood before it simply moved on and destroyed even more cities, or slaughtered millions more of the already dwindling human population, they did the only thing they could do to stop the monster in its tracks.
They detonated nearly a hundred nukes in the center of the city.
The population before the detonation was somewhere in the ballpark of six hundred thousand people. This was nearly doubled by all the refugees, soldiers, and other scared, terrified people who were hiding inside of it hoping for safety from the monsters outside.
Safety Never Came