The Armed State Police continued their attack from above on Polyphemus. More and more men rappelled down into the stadium, while men armed with Stovepipes joined their comrades on the edge of the hole in the roof. Smoke streamed out of the back of the launchers, their rockets making a sharp whoomf sound as they streamed downwards towards the weapon. Cultivators stationed around Polyphemus raised their hands and set up shields of pure Rddhi. When the rockets collided, the cultivators disappeared in a cloud of red and orange, but once the dust settled, they still stood strong. All the while, the Heart continued to groan.
Isaac thought of the best plan he could considering the circumstances. “There’s probably a control panel on the weapon. A shutdown switch or something. And plus, Babs will likely be there.”
Reed nodded. “Let’s move, then. We should try to avoid a fight with the Asps. Things could get messy-”
Salvatore bolted for the door. Isaac swore and launched an electric blast at him, but Salvatore dove out of the way, then leapt over the catwalk down toward the ground floor. Reed just groaned, her bandaged face briefly illuminated by another explosion hitting Polyphemus. The intense combat made lights flicker, sending the facility in and out of partial darkness.
Isaac exited the bunker the same way Salvatore and the administrators did. Outside, the heat and smoke of bullets and cultivation stung his face as he entered the maze of catwalks. Salvatore had disappeared somewhere among the raging battle; hundreds, if not thousands of armed rebels, junior officers, and soldiers duked it out on the walkways, seating areas, and the scattered offices and communication centers around the stadium. Asps in their mottled fatigues made hand signals as they fought towards Polyphemus; someone yelled out in coarse Zhanghai on the weapon itself as the last welder finished his work.
With the junior officers and Asps so focused on each other, neither side noticed the two odd men out - both Isaac and Reed leapt down from one catwalk to the other, eventually arriving amid the seats. A concrete staircase crumbling with age brought them downwards toward the field; by the time any junior officers noticed them, Isaac was already punching them out of the way. An Asp on the catwalk above them, his knowledge of their allegiance ambiguous, fired on both of them. The two leapt over a railing, arriving on a lower level of bleachers amid an electronic array. The gears and machinery whizzed and groaned, picking up in intensity, as a low rumbling drifted out from the ground below Polyphemus.
Isaac kicked a man into the electronic equipment while Reed cleared the rest of them out. Right below them was a nest of Restorationist cultivators shooting fireballs at the advancing Asps, resulting in a couple of Stovepipe rockets coming their way. They weren’t entirely accurate, with the barrage hitting far too close for Isaac’s comfort, so the two had to duck back inside an entrance to an interior hallway.
Wounded men and women littered the passageway, groaning out in pain, asking for water in a mixture of Common and Zhanghai. Overworked medics moved between them, applying what little morphine and medical cultivator pills they still had available. Nobody in there offered any resistance as Isaac and Reed simply stormed past them. They found an entrance back out onto the bleachers a ways away from the Restorationist nest, which was now just a smoking crater.
The Asps now controlled at least half of the stadium. Their numbers continued to increase, threatening to take the entire thing in just a matter of time. The junior officers must’ve known that, since the rumbling below the ground intensified, thousands of pistons and engines clattering and banging away.
Maybe that’s the supporting structure for the Polyphemus gun.
One question bothered Isaac this whole time - how was Babs going to get the weapon out of here? Presumably, she would’ve taken it through the smuggling tunnels since the facility below Four Eagles served as the heart for all of it, but the weapon looked far too big. The Heart was likely transported underground, but the long barrel of Polyphemus would prevent that. He suspected they might’ve built additional tracks in the myriad of tunnels below the city, with the superweapon attached to an armored train. He couldn’t think of anything else.
With the stadium in danger of falling, the actions of the junior officers grew more frantic. Suicide charges erupted in the bleachers, and overhead, through the hole in the roof, sleek Zhanghai fighters and single-engine State Police Copperhead fighter planes dueled in dogfights across the sky. From a nearby tunnel where, long ago, players would’ve emerged, an entourage of powerful junior officer cultivators and riflemen arrived, those in the front throwing up shields so they could advance unharmed.
And there she was. With a grim look of determination on her face, Babs ushered her officers onwards. She traded her Cultivator Marine khakis for gray military fatigues and equally-gray light metal armor, yet she still kept the ankles and sleeves rolled up, and the familiar gum bubble popped as she moved. They headed up a set of stairs and stepped onto the platform of Polyphemus, which was both large enough, and had the Heart propped overhead high enough, that they could move around freely. Technicians got to work on electronic panels while others manned machine guns positioned on the railings of the weapon.
“That’s where we’re heading,” Reed observed, gesturing with her head towards the staircase at the back of platform. She leapt down the last set of bleacher rows, arriving onto the field. Corpses and wounded covered the ground, while those still standing kept firing. However, when a technician flipped a switch on the weapon, the air raid sirens shifted in melody, with the klaxons now blaring in a new pattern. All at once, the junior officers on the field began a fighting withdrawal, either onto the superweapon itself or out through the tunnels. The Asps filled in the vacuum on one side of the field, while Isaac and Reed made a mad dash on the other.
If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
When a machine gun spotted them, they redirected their sprint towards the side of the weapon rather than the back staircase. They slid in next to the platform right as bullets tore through the concrete behind them; at this angle, they would be safe for the time being. Isaac placed a hand against the platform to catch his breath. Energy surged within the metal, swirling and circulating, increasing in intensity.
Loudspeakers crackled around the stadium. Babs’ voice was firm in her convictions.
“My fellow men and women fighting for Kallipolis,” she said. “Our plan to strike at the very heart of the junta is now in motion.”
With that, the most terrible screeching sound Isaac had ever heard thundered through his eardrums. Unseen engines screamed out and there was a commotion at the hole in the roof, which buckled beneath the Asps stationed on it. A few even fell through to their doom, while others backed away from the opening. And then, the hole began to move, sliding over ever so slightly. Sunlight poured through a new crack in the center of the roof, which now separated the roof into two halves. Both sides slowly grinded away from each other.
Reed’s eyes went wide. “The stadium has a retractable roof. That’s how Polyphemus is going to get out of here.” The crack opened wider and wider, revealing an armada of Zhanghai blimps and planes hanging overhead, locked in battle with military fighters.
And then the ground gave way beneath Isaac. Cultivators with earth and metal techniques at the edge of the stadium field had their hands planted on the field, sending out waves of Rddhi. Going from having solid footing beneath him to no footing made Isaac’s stomach lurch as he and Reed tumbled downwards into the darkness. The weapon itself had no handholds, and Isaac went into free-fall.
It only lasted a moment. Partially at least. He soon hit a metal surface sloping downwards, so rather than simply falling, he was now sliding into darkness. Red energy illuminated his face as he tried to punch a handhold into the metal, but his fist bounced right off. As he struggled to come up with a way out of here, he suddenly slid across rope netting, which gave him a place to hold on to. When Reed found a handhold off her own on a rope below him, Isaac sighed in relief. To be perfectly honest - all they could now was hold on as the weapon began to move. And that's when Isaac realized-
Polyphemus isn't just the weapon - it’s the name of an airship!
As engines roared and Rddhi ran down the hull, the entire structure began its ascent. Junior officers that remained in the stadium let out cheers and hollers, while the Asps who survived the chaos fired on the airship to no avail. Bullets and cultivation merely bounced off its metal hull as it rose.
One silver lining about the previous fight on the giant's shoulder was that Isaac knew, at least, that he didn’t have a fear of heights. Otherwise, what was about to happen next would’ve been a whole lot more difficult.
Polyphemus ascended upwards, past the bleachers, out through the retracted roof. Now that it was out in the open, the structure revealed itself entirely - the Heart was placed atop the superweapon, the superweapon was placed atop the envelope (aka the big, gas-filled part of the airship), and down below was the gondola and other cabins. The Polyphemus was massive, dwarfing the size of any of the other Zhanghai blimps in the aerial armada it now joined. Isaac couldn’t see the gondola below the curvature of the envelope, but tiny parasite fighters zoomed out of the hangars that must’ve been adjacent to the gondola. They joined their bigger brethren in blasting the Copperheads out of the sky.
Four Eagles now became visible below them, and Isaac eyed the sight in dismay. The previous web of buildings stacked atop each other now lay in complete ruins and smoking craters, with the narrow streets now widened via explosives and cultivation to allow tanks to rumble through. The siege, which had only lasted for three days, had destroyed an entire district, as the Asps must’ve fought building by building, room by room to clear the combatants out of there, with the civilians caught in the middle.
Some of the Asps caught on the field when it collapsed had the same idea as Isaac; further along the airship, they clung to the netting as well. One men lost his grip and screamed as he fell into open air, the apocalyptic ruins his fellow Asps had created awaiting down below to meet him. Despite all his adrenaline - between the high elevation and chilly weather, Isaac started shivering, and his breath condensed in front of him. Sunlight came down in patches through the layer of clouds; in the distance were the skyscrapers of downtown Narragansett.
Now firmly in the sky, Polyphemus lumbered forward, its fighter planes leading the way, the airships of the armada alongside it. Red energy continued to flash through the metal hull. Considering the odd structure of the entire thing, cultivation must’ve been required to keep the thing aloft.
Reed gritted her teeth. “The netting doesn’t go all the way to the top.”
Isaac cursed, then saw, adjacent to the netting, a series of metal rungs that would get to the weapon platform. He relayed the information to Reed, and then the two caught their breath and began climbing upwards and rightwards, towards the rungs. The wind whipped at Isaac’s face; he could’ve used one of those samurai glider goggles right now. Nearby, a parasite fighter came under attack from a Copperhead. Before its allies drove the Copperhead off, the parasite caught light and then exploded in a storm of shrapnel and orange heat. However, that was the last Copperhead in the immediate vicinity of the armada, with the State Police air squadron now forced into retreat to lick its wounds.
The metal rungs awaited Isaac as he left the netting and held onto them tightly. The city moved beneath him, a sea of squat buildings and factories in western Narragansett. The skyscrapers seemed slightly closer now - downtown Narragansett was the goal. The seat of Supreme Commander Pulaski, the individual and combined headquarters for the State Police, Army, and Navy, the facilities and headquarters for all the departments of the government they ran, the main office of the Bank of Arcadia, and branch offices for both the Reed and Cartwright families were all housed there. It made a tempting target for someone trying to seize control of a country.
One by one, not too fast and not too slow, Isaac climbed the rungs. They seemed to go on forever, but little by little, he made progress. His arms screamed from the exertion, but he circulated Rddhi into his tired muscles, aided by the Bracer of the Westward Wind. Just a little more, just a little more, and then finally - he made it to the top rung.
It would’ve been a damn shame to have made it all this way just to get picked off by a guard right as he climbed over. Fortunately, when Isaac peeked his head over, all the guards had their attention either on maintaining the weapon, the Asps stuck on the nets, or on their downtown goal.
Victory was seemingly close in hand for them, but then Isaac made it atop the airship.