It was a rather novel experience to ascend a set of stairs without moving one’s legs. To be more accurate, it was the stairs that were moving, lifting up into the upper reaches of the factory before, through some sort of magic or machinery, returning to the bottom to continue the unbroken staircase. It wasn’t the first time she had ridden such a contraption but this was the longest.
“I have received a report.”
Agnete turned to her side, looking over Who with a mild frown. The construct, during their relatively brief foray back home, decided that she deserved some attire of her own. Which, at the moment, was one of Agnete’s many spare inquisitor cloaks. Long, black, and with several silver buttons holding straps across the chest. Agnete had more than enough of them to spare, having her entire wardrobe full of them. It wasn’t the best clothing for any engineer and would get in the way of her using tools, but Agnete supposed it didn’t matter much. If she needed to use her tools in a hurry, damaging the cloak wasn’t a big deal.
They weren’t expensive to produce. The silver wasn’t real silver and the fabric was made cheap. As everyone expected them to be burned away the moment Agnete got a little hot, both the inquisitors and Arkk elected for the cheap route.
“Thirty-two transport vehicles, each of which contains sixty-four automatons. Two hundred fifty-six voltcoil wyrms. Sixteen swarms of furnace scarabs. And… eight Ironmongers.” Who paused, her mechanical innards clicking in what Agnete decided was genuine surprise. The clicking stopped and she adjusted her head to face Agnete. “There are an additional two vehicles loaded with service personnel and spare materials.”
“Odd numbers,” Agnete mused.
“No. Quite normal. Low, perhaps. If you had filled out the proper forms well in advance, we could have had two to the sixteenth transport vehicles and equivalent increase of other units. Unfortunately, this was as many as we could allocate within the specified timeframe.”
Agnete looked over Who with a deepened frown, wondering about the creature and whether or not she had made any mistakes in construction. Two to sixteen vehicles sounded like far less than the thirty-two they had, unless she meant in addition to the ones they had. “Spending two weeks filling out an elongated form only to have to wait several months for the form to be processed would take planning so far in advance that it borders on prescience,” she said, tone flat. “We’ll have to settle for what we’ve got.”
It sounded like a fair amount. The automatons were, much like Who, roughly humanoid personnel with black-box cores. Within the Anvil, they were charged with resolving any problem that could not be resolved through the factory’s autonomous means. The voltcoils, the flying lightning serpents, were relics from ages past. Allegedly, their duties involved soaring through the smoggy and stormy skies, charging internal capacitors with natural lightning strikes. Once fully charged, they would relocate to a power station to discharge, powering the factory.
The factory had grown too large to utilize voltcoils effectively, but they were still produced and still carried out their duties.
Furnace scarabs, small beetle-like machines, carried out repair and maintenance in cramped and confined locations within the factory. They carried a plethora of cutting and welding tools and possessed the unique ability to pull material through space from stockpiles. Agnete wasn’t sure if that last feature would work in another plane, but the cutting torches would still function.
And the Ironmongers… They were effectively miniature walking factories. Not nearly as large as Arkk’s walking fortress, but still quite bulky with an array of assembly machines, processing plants, and furnaces to rapidly construct practically anything.
Anything except more black boxes. To the best of Agnete’s knowledge, only the Burning Forge itself, and her by extension, could perform that task.
“I have a question for you,” Agnete said, only to frown again as Who twitched.
“I’m sorry,” the machine said before Agnete could ask. “I’m not sure why we have no gearstriders, titans, or roko basilisks. Torchwings were evaluated as being unhelpful in the current situation and magnetrons are too integrated with the Anvil to leave—”
Agnete held up a hand. If she were being honest, she hadn’t even thought about any of the other creatures roaming the factory. The army granted to her was more than she had dared hope for.
“I was going to ask about the reports you get. Or any other knowledge, for that matter. When I first put you together, you hopped off the table and immediately knew where to go, how to speak, and so on.” It was one of the areas in which Arkk was lacking. He could see afar, but he couldn’t speak afar. Or hear. If they could learn what magic allowed such communication within the Anvil, his effectiveness would drastically increase.
“Ah… This is not my first casing. My original casing was damaged. Thus, a great portion of my knowledge is legacy. However, current information is disseminated—Oh! There. Did you hear it?”
Agnete paused, hand on the railing that moved along with the stairs. The Anvil was noisy. A cacophony of whirring gears, hissing steam, clanging metal, and all manner of other sound. But that was all it was. Noise.
Who had been getting better at reading the expressions on Agnete’s face. “It was like a chittering… a ticking clicking… hmm… I wonder if I could verbalize it at an audible frequency range.”
Gesturing for Who to go ahead, Agnete listened.
It began with a high-pitched whistle, akin to the shrill call of a distant banshee, followed by a series of rhythmic chattering that sounded like a particularly angry group of crickets engaging in a feverish debate. With a tilt of Who’s head, a low rumble started mixed with sharp, intermittent screeches. It ended with a long roar of wind through a narrow tunnel, lasting several seconds, before Who suddenly stopped.
“There,” Who said, straightening the shaft in her spine in pride. “That was the notice that just went out.”
“That was a notice? It sounded like…” Describing that in one word seemed impossible without simply calling it more noise. That seemed to be the theme of the Anvil. Noise upon noise upon noise. For some reason, she doubted Arkk would be able to replicate that noise. Even if he could, she doubted it would be useful.
It certainly hadn’t helped her.
“It was an alert that the combat force has been fully mobilized. They await ahead, ready for the Burning Forge’s hand to command them.”
The escalating stairway reached its peak as Who spoke.
Agnete stepped off onto a balcony, wide and impossibly long. It overlooked a large platform—hastily assembled—with a ramp leading to the portal.
Though she had heard the numbers from Who, seeing it in person was overwhelming. Her breath caught in her throat as she stared out over the smog-filled horizon. The transports rumbled in place, jittering and shaking as plumes of black smoke flowed from tall pipes at their rears. One transport looked to still be loading, its side flipped up into an opened position while a series of automatons shuffled inside, taking seats along the walls. The blue-painted transports were large enough that scraping against the portal would be a hazard once they started moving.
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The voltcoils drifted overhead, lazily maintaining a vague formation that seemed to break apart and reform with every passing moment. Lightning raced across their skeletal forms, jumping from pylon to pylon on their backs. Occasionally, lightning made the longer jump to another voltcoil if two drifted too close together.
Swarms of scarabs looked more like a dust cloud clinging to the rest of the army. However, the dust cloud moved and surged in sixteen smaller groupings. Agnete was too far away to distinguish the small, insect-like machines individually, but as a whole, they gave her a slight sense of unease. Dust shouldn’t move like that.
The Ironmongers stood at the rear. They were… smaller than expected. And far less bipedal. More like flat blocks of machinery and random bits of metal, all crammed together to sit atop long treaded platforms, each standing no higher than the large transports but easily twice as long.
“They wouldn’t fit through the portal if fully deployed,” Who explained, once again demonstrating an increased awareness of Agnete’s expressions. “Rest assured, their efficiency won’t be diminished as mobile construction vehicles. The only problem will be terrain. But if it proves too rough to cross on treads, they can take time to reconfigure themselves into proper walkers.”
“I see. How fast can the army as a whole move?”
“Voltcoils are the fastest, followed by the transports. Mobile construction vehicles are the slowest by far, but they shouldn’t be placed on the front anyway.”
Agnete swept her eyes over the army once again, noting the final transport had finished closing up. The logistics of moving the army was going to be an issue. The vehicles were all far too large for a teleportation ritual. That said, she had seen the speed at which some vehicles moved in this world. The trains in particular could cross vast swaths of land in mere moments.
No sense delaying any longer, she thought as she stepped forward to take command.
Perhaps she should ride atop one of the transports.
----------------------------------------
“How long can we maintain the shield?”
Arkk took his eyes off the crystal ball—only one was in the command center at the moment, the other was being used for targeting spells. Rekk’ar stood at the window, looking upward. Most of it had been bricked over by the lesser servants, reducing the potentially vulnerable points in the tower. All other windows in the fortress had been fully sealed. Although reinforced with the fortress magic, glass was still weaker than stone. All that remained here was a small gap.
He couldn’t see anything. Neither could Arkk without the aid of the crystal ball. The swirling gale that was the defensive shield was like a tornado in a heavy storm, blocking the view of everything. Every so often, small parts of it would brighten. White blotches on the surrounding winds. Zullie had done something to tweak her spell to better block the specific type of magic. It wasn’t her impenetrable god-derived barrier, which wasn’t yet ready—Arkk had been forced to move her onto a different project before she could finish it—but it at least kept the worst of the attacks away from them.
“Until the glowstones run dry,” Arkk said, stepping away from the crystal ball. “We can maintain the shield for about one day without resupply. I have sent the first batch to be recharged in the Underworld, but they take longer to charge than they do to deplete. We’ll run out in a few days.”
Rekk’ar grunted, taking his eyes off the window. “I imagine they will change tactics before then. This clearly isn’t working the way they wanted anymore.”
“I’m not so sure. Evestani’s army is on the move. Although obscured by fog, I can see enough golden light to presume the presence of the avatar. Although the bombardment isn’t going to kill us, they may wish to hold us in place until the avatar arrives.” Arkk, stepping alongside Rekk’ar, peered out the window. A futile action, he knew, but he stared up at the swirling shield with his own eyes anyway. “However, I would prefer if we changed tactics first. I’d rather not give them the initiative.”
“I was about to say the same thing,” Rekk’ar said with a self-satisfied nod of his head. “You have a plan?”
Arkk folded his arms, watching the repeated lights strike the barrier as the airship’s bombardment continued. He didn’t respond right away.
He had a few ideas. He didn’t know that they quite broached the concept of a plan. Attacking the airship directly wasn’t possible with their current repertoire of spells. The boulders for the bombardment spell manifested just below the flying ship, almost like they knew. Which, given that Arkk had used the spell before and that it had originally been an Evestani spell before he stole it, made sense. They would know its capabilities and how to protect themselves from its effects.
If anything, Arkk bet that hovering just a sliver above the boulder manifestation point was a taunt.
Zullie was off the defensive project and on to finding anything that could hit the ship. If Priscilla were up, she could have punched a hole in the side of the ship or coated its underside—and cannons—with ice to weigh it down. Her recent injuries and current unconsciousness were making that solution nonviable. Agnete might have been able to use her increased control over her flames to mimic the golden avatar’s destructive rays. He wasn’t sure if that was possible, but he had seen Agnete use narrow beams of flames since her return. He just wasn’t sure of her range. But she was in the Anvil at the moment, collecting the reinforcements the Burning Forge promised her.
From a quick check-in over the link, it looked like she was succeeding. He was tempted to tug on her link to urge her back sooner, but if it meant bolstering his army, he could wait a short while longer.
Apart from those three, Arkk didn’t see many options. They hadn’t been prepared to fight something that could attack from so far away. Kia and Claire couldn’t fight what they couldn’t reach, the weaponry they had developed to counter a demon was also meant for closer range than this, and while he did have a select few fliers in his company, sending even a quartet of harpies and a pair of syrens against an entire battleship sounded like a good way to lose his fliers without accomplishing anything in turn.
There was only one thing he could think to do. Something only he could do.
“I have something of a plan,” Arkk said with a frown. “You aren’t going to like it.”
Rekk’ar huffed, looking down at a leather-gloved hand. “I can count the things you’ve said that I liked on one finger. Perhaps two. That hasn’t stopped you in the past. And if it gets us out of being pinned down…”
Arkk drew in a breath. “Do you recall the first time we met?”
Looking up from his hand, Rekk’ar raised a brow. “Outside your village?”
“That and before that, actually. Technically, we didn’t meet.”
“You’re talking about the attack on the village,” Rekk’ar said with a sudden nervous shift in his demeanor. It was subtle, mostly coming across in his eyes, but he did take a small step away from Arkk as he repositioned himself to fully face Arkk.
Come to think of it, had Rekk’ar ever once apologized for attacking the village?
Arkk wasn’t sure he had. Though at this point, he wasn’t sure it mattered.
“At the time, you called me something. You requested a meeting with someone particular when you came to the village.”
Rekk’ar winced, turning aside. “In my defense, the others described a monster of lightning and darkness. Dakka, especially. I didn’t see you personally, though I did see some lightning bolts flying around. That was enough evidence for me to just repeat what I was told. I now realize Vezta was the darkness and you…” He looked Arkk up and down. “You are you.”
“I feel I should be offended.”
“Didn’t say anything untrue,” the orc said with a casual shrug. “But I recall one thing in particular from that day. One thing beyond two people managing to fight off a hundred goblins on their own and our chieftain’s rage at everyone’s incompetence. The one thing I did see with my own eyes. A lightning bolt, larger than any I have witnessed in nature, striking the sky itself. The one thing that made me think there truly was some kind of beast of lightning in that little village.”
“My magical power increases with expanded territory and numerous employees. At the time of that, I had a handful of rooms and a few connecting corridors under my control. Now?”
Rekk’ar’s eyes widened ever so slowly. “You think you can take out the airship entirely on your own?”
Arkk shrugged. “No idea. Not like I tried. But I’d say it is worth a shot, wouldn’t you?”
“It certainly is… but I’m not hating this plan yet. Where is the problem?”
The walking fortress shuddered as the bombardment continued. Something got through the shield, but not enough to truly rock the tower. Just enough to make everyone in the command center freeze for a brief instant, bracing themselves, before they resumed their duties.
“I cannot channel such a vast amount of power in an instant. And I need open access to the skies.”
“Out there?” Rekk’ar snapped, making apparent just how much he didn’t like the part Arkk knew he wouldn’t. He curled his lips away from his tusks as he sneered. “Are you mad?”
“I did warn you.”
“Can you not charge up—or whatever it is you are doing—then teleport yourself at the last moment?”
“Tried that in a little experiment earlier. Tore apart the room I vacated with a blast of wild and uncontrolled magic.”
Rekk’ar took on a stormy look at that admission. It only lasted a few moments before he straightened his shoulders and nodded to himself. “I see. The solution is simple then.”
“Oh?”
“We just have to protect you from anything getting through that shield until you’re ready. Then, you fry the bastards.”