Janine rarely had the privilege of witnessing Alpha’s battles firsthand. Her own duty always demanded her direct presence in the midst of carnage, delivering Reclaimer justice to any foes. But now, locked inside the APC, surrounded by the weeping cubs and civilians breaking down from a sudden exposure, the fear wave, with Marty and her trying their best not to fall and squash anyone, with the faint breaths of Marco risking to stop, she needed a distraction. Any distraction to quell the emotions pulsing through her and continue the basic routine of helping the field medic.
Plasma dischargers on Alpha’s wrists hurled overheated clots, and Horkhudagh weaved in the air to avoid them. Streaks of flames crackled around him as the skeleton flew under the straight thrust and rose behind the warlord. Blackened claws wreathed in blue formed at his hands. Solid to liquid and back to solid again. The last thing one would expect from a skeleton would be feats of agility.
A quick elbow to the skull sent him back, saving the generator backpack from damage. Alpha whirled, and the multicolored wings of her opponent enveloped her, forming hands that pinned her down. The intense heat disrupted the video feed, but enough of it came through to show Janine how the hands overlapped, forming a superheated layer that exploded in a directional blue beam that melted the ground beneath Alpha’s legs.
Heat. He is trying to suffocate her. Metaphorical cogs in Janine’s brain came to a halt, trying to draw her attention to something obvious. Flame. Why would he skirt around the attack…
“Warlord!” Janine yelled in the com. “Alpha, the bastard’s not completely immune to the heat!”
Her HUD received nothing but the intense blue glow for several seconds, and then the claws parted its front to face the solidified, fiery talons of the hordeman. Horkhudagh grunted as his weapons and hands splintered, and Alpha hooked him by the elbows.
“Sister,” Alpha said, a camera briefly catching her reflection in the vitrified wall. Her suit held on, refusing to lose, but one by one the cameras were getting shut down. “Not my first time.”
She lunged, closing her maw on the flaming man’s face, viciously hollowing it out. Then the plasma dischargers fired, almost catching Horkhudagh in his lunge to the left, and he lost the right side of his body. With a series of cracks, the body spat out fresh body parts, and a whirlwind of blows and cuts chained the fighters together, one shining bright as a star, spewing flames and heat, the other a raging fury adorned in the finest diamondoid alloy.
Fiery blue splashes pierced the remaining apartments, spurting like blood from arteries. Alpha advanced away from where she was knee-deep in molten asphalt, forcing her opponent to the more solid surface. Tongues of flames burst, cracking the surfaces, and claws raked against the black bones and the state’s armor.
“Sword Saint, consign me to termination if you so desire, but I simply have to remark on the stubborn refusal of your noble kin to accept valuable insight,” Albert’s voice came with interference, partially hissing after all the damage.
“Nah, soulless buddy, yer truth,” Martyshkina remarked. Still holding onto the ceiling with one paw, she leaned over and quickly fixed the dislocated shoulder of a young Ice Fang. “Better?”
“Ouch!” The boy blinked away the tears and moved his paw. “Hey, it no longer hurts! That much. Thank you, lady!”
“Just Martyshkina, little one. Albert, don’t apologize when you are right. She totally fired way later than needed, missing her opportunity. But she is too proud to admit a mistake.”
“She is gathering information,” Janine said, understanding. “Warlord Alpha destroyed Horkhudagh’s eyes and then fired. But he dodged. Why do so if he can form his body? And how?”
“He doesn’t need his head to see,” Martyshkina said.
Horkhudagh’s belly erupted, temporarily covering everything in white, and Janine heard the rumbling and working of servomotors as Alpha jumped. When the feed resumed, she saw the claws closing in on the scorched man’s legs, easily tearing through his leather skin. The strongest warlord landed on top of the enemy, thwarting his attempts to gain distance, and his hands morphed. Dozens of thinner and longer arms wound around Alpha’s wrists; needle-like appendages protruded from the open Horkhudagh’s back, quickly stabbing at the warlord, targeting her mouth, neck, joints, and lenses, denting and notching her armor. One bite destroyed a good dozen of them, and the warlord swung her arms, tearing at the bonds.
Tiniest droplets of blood lingered in the air and vanished, evaporating. An ugly cut appeared on Alpha’s lips, and one of the stabs found its way to her skin on the inner part of her elbow. But Horkhudagh suffered for this legendary deed. Janine finally spotted it—not exactly the orb from before, but another, lesser orb floating inside of the hordeman’s body.
Alpha struck this very core, shattering the black bones and cleaving through the arms raised in defense. The core itself was the size of a Normie’s torso, but proved to be of far sturdier material as the tip of Alpha’s claw scratched it, and Horkhudagh grunted, producing the noise of a roaring furnace, no longer mimicking boiling water of burning wood.
It was a roar of sorts, but not one of fear or displeasure. Elation resonated in it.
Horkhudagh rammed his elbows into Alpha, lifting the woman a little, and the needle appendages on his back merged into a single, wide palm of flame. It slammed the warlord to the ground and dragged the Wolfkin across the street, carrying her closer to the ruined academy in a river of melting stone. A web of cuts appeared briefly on the limb, so fast that Albert had to slow the feed a bit for Janine to even recognize it. Alpha broke free of the limb, her billowing hair resembling dancing snakes.
The two charged to face each other again, Horkhudagh growing a fresh set of larger and thicker arms, closing any damage done to his fake body, and Alpha silently passing through several walls of flame that appeared in her path. A headbutt sent Alpha’s head skyward, but her paw was doubtless already aimed at Horkhudagh’s true body, and the hordeman launched a strike of his own.
Neither managed to proceed as the clouds above belched a single piece of the armament, and something about this projectile terrified Janine, and she wrapped her arms around Marco and the closest cubs, shouting warnings for the troops to do the same. It was a weird premonition that touched her even before Alpha’s combat armor signaled a warning.
The threat of a WMD.
There were three great nations in the world, three pillars of civilization and peerless industrial capacity. The despised Oathtakers, eternal rivals of the state, fanatics mistakenly believing in a falsehood concocted by their inane cult leader, and willingly surrendered partial freedom of their free will for the sake of unity, forever hindering their growth as humans. Janine despised them more than anyone in the world, even though her adopted daughter chose to live there. It was simply something she would never accept. The mutilation of the personality, the infringement upon the decision-making for those who had committed no crime, was a bridge too far for her to tolerate.
Next in line was Iterna, the traitorous butchers. They should have shown the same hatred and vitriol to the countless gangs feasting upon the ruins of the Old World near their borders that they had shown to the literal cubs who came to study under their wings. But Iterna was said to have changed, no longer displaying the same rash decisiveness as before. They were uplifting and integrating instead of stopping atrocities. Idiots. The likes of Mad Hatter, Blood Graf, Thunder Emperor, Mincemeat, or Techno-Queen would never change. They had the might but lacked the willpower to act.
The Reclamation Army was the last and largest nation in this union of necessity and perhaps potential friendship. Janine accepted they weren’t perfect, but she firmly believed that the Dynast’s vision and foresight were the only correct path for the world to take, lest it be destroyed in another war. Overthrow the slavers, bring the misguided fools back into the fold, and teach the people how to be better, to spare the younger generations the misery of existence under the unworthy rulers. Take away dangerous tools and use them to build, not destroy. Thousands of races, maybe even species, united under a single banner.
These nations had shaken hands and signed many treaties, ranging from tariffs to tourism to stopping diseases and controlling potential Apocalypse-classes of New Breeds, promising never to use weapons of mass destruction and swearing to abide by the rules of war, treating both civilians and military humanely. The horrors of MAD that had occurred during the Extinction haunted their leaders.
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And the Gilded Horde… These bastards lacked such reservations.
****
The shell fired by the Sky’s Wrath carried a payload of over nine hundred thousand tons of TNT. It exploded half a kilometer above Opul, forming a fireball of approximately one hundred and ten million degrees Celsius, bathing the town in a temperature hotter than the center of the sun and incinerating everything it touched.
Alpha’s armor reacted immediately, entombing the warlord against her will and cutting off contact with the outside world. Her long crimson hair fell and turned to ash, cut by the sharp edges of her helmet. The suit released its emergency supply of nanomachines to form a protective, solidified layer over the warlord’s claws and sealed her mouth. Designed and manufactured to operate in the event of a nuclear attack, its artificial intelligence lacked Albert’s cheerfulness or any personality to speak of and now labored meticulously to preserve the user.
As the blast expanded, it resembled a semi-sphere of hellishly heated air, storming in every direction at millions of kilometers per hour, driving the fighters into the ground with the force of a falling meteor or spaceship.
Hell reigned in the real world for but a second, as the raining destruction quickly cooled to merely the surface temperature of the sun. That second was used to overload a ship’s shields and soften its outer hull before the main guns of another ship or a defensive station used further methods to strip the ship of its fighting crew or teleport boarding parties in.
When used against the surface, unprotected by any shields, it turned Opul into a molten lake. The Knight Academy, a place of local pride and the defensive fortification, dissolved like a moth to an intense flame; parts of its masonry were simply ionized. The survivors, both Horde and locals, died so quickly that no one registered even a hint of pain. Statues, libraries, shops, homes, factories—nothing was left standing. The traveling shockwave wrecked everything around Opul for kilometers, reaching the retreating convoy.
Trees hit the APCs so hard that the transports nearly flipped. Then the world-collapsing cacophony of destruction tossed them, lifting the vehicles as easily as the wind plucked leaves. The cubs, secured in their harnesses, screamed in panic as a special foam appeared from their restraints to cover the passengers in protective cocoons. Unaccustomed to such overloads, they vomited against their will as the black- and white-armored forms around them tried their best to keep them safe. The civilian Normies suffered even worse, their organs bursting under the pressure as the faint shadow of the Horde’s apocalyptic weapon barely grazed the vehicles.
****
A wall cracked, spraying the soldiers with metal shards, killing a Wolfkin and paralyzing an Ice Fang. Janine weathered two more, forcing herself to trust the medic to keep Marco safe. She blocked several more shards from reaching her troops and was surprised to find a blade-sized piece of metal lodged between her radius and ulna bones. Kalaisa’s family and several pack members closed ranks around the unconscious wolf hag.
Their APC continued to spin. Up. Down. Left. Right. Janine caught a medic before the woman could fly into the gaping hole, holding herself steady with her claws. Her son was already safely nestled in a portable harness locked to the floor, and she tossed the woman to a knight, stopping another piece of debris from falling at the cubs. She didn’t even see the piece of stone, moving on instinct, and her eye twitched at a sudden sting of pain. The knuckle and the plate above it were destroyed, and her finger dangled loosely.
“Even pebbles hit harder than you, Marty!” Janine teased in an emotionless voice, earning herself several chuckles. Good. Don’t you dare think about dying.
“Ah, the delusions of youth…” Marty croaked, shielding the cubs with her back from a shower of debris.
“I’m a day younger than you!”
“…are so amusing. It’s not my fault that your bones are so brittle that I have to hold back all the time.”
“Hold back? What a load of cusack shit! I won our last spar, Granny!”
“Because I was holding back, suckling!” teased Martyshkina and Janine could’ve sworn that the mood brightened after their bickering.
“Albert, can you reach Bertruda in the other APC? Is…” the traitor, the scum, the bitch I will slaughter, “… the sword saint fine?” Janine swallowed the insults. Marco and the cubs were more important than her feelings.
“Negative, Sword Saint,” Albert answered.
“It is warlord…” Janine looked out of the hole. “Brace yourselves! Rough landing!”
“We flew?” squeaked Tilden.
“Carried, I’d say…” Martyshkina groaned as a piece of metal flew past Janine and got stuck in her back.
The APC crashed to the ground and rolled several dozen meters. Blinking away the confusion, Janine realized they were a dozen kilometers from Opul. The town was no more, and a mushroom cloud hovered over it, and her tired imagination tricked her into seeing a grinning skull in the swirling shadows. She shook her head and contacted Bertruda.
They lost seven civilians, one cub, a boy whose head was squashed, two drivers, and a male of Martyshkina’s pack during the landing. Janine hated herself for even thinking it, but they got off lucky.
“Albert…” she began, looking numbly at the dead Ice Fang cub. They rescued them, dammit! She placed no blame on anyone and let the hawks of the Investigation Bureau conduct an investigation based on the video feed they could recover from their suits. Deep down, she knew that they had done everything they could.
It wasn’t enough. That’s the bitter truth of a defeat. Sometimes you fail, no matter how hard you try. She cradled Marco in her arms, panicking that he could’ve been in a place of this boy. Spirits, what will his parents feel?
“Any… any radiation in the air?” She regained control over her voice.
“Not a trace, Sword Saint,” Albert hissed, the sadness clear in his voice.
“Understood. What are you lazing around for?” She snapped at a knight and a warrior who sat, resting their legs. “Healthy? Congratulations, find a wounded person and get them moving. Medic, designate those who should not be walking. I will hear no objections!” She kicked a scout who was missing an arm back onto the cloth. “If she tells you not to move, shut up and lie down like a cub. Bertruda, Martyshkina, organize teams to carry the wounded. Anissa, I need ten eyes on the perimeter.”
“Thank you for the confidence, Warlord,” the field medic said tiredly. She didn’t correct her that it was a necessity.
“Yes, Warlord!” Anissa replied, and Janine looked up, silently thanking the Spirits for the deliverance.
They survived.
****
Unbeknownst to the warlord, the world was already experiencing changes. Iterna’s satellites had detected the explosion that wiped out Opul, and an envoy demanded an audience with the Dynast to discover what was going on. The Oathtakers immediately called for the evacuation of their citizens, sending small parties to protect their tourists, infiltrators, workers, and diplomats. Cries of relief rippled through the shocked denizens of the Net as the citizens of the three countries slowly realized that an entire town had just been wiped off the map.
In the far east, a white window touched the clouds. Outsider, the grand commander of the First and the personal champion of the Dynast, vented his anger upon learning of his nation’s grievous loss. Basking in the light of his power, the defenders of the Abandonment glowed on the battlements, fading into nothingness, and their vast bastions soon followed. The slaves rejoiced as the Orais shattered their holding caves, freeing them.
The myth of the dark figure walking in the sky, cloaked in white light, was born that night, culminating when the screaming tyrant vanished as the black gauntlet seized him. The entire castle disintegrated with him, adding to Outsider’s legends, and belief in the Champion continued to spread, revered by the new citizens.
Devourer reared high in the Wastes, arching his back and howling with such hatred that the nearby slavers dropped their weapons and surrendered immediately. Their leader arrived, carrying an entire mountain above his head with his gravity power, a proud New Breed who had never met his match.
A single, casual tail slap ended his existence. Devourer planned to take his time with the scum, but his short lesson had its effect, and the resistance ceased in an instant. Grief and hatred coursed through the commander’s body—hatred for those who dared to harm his precious home and grief for the lives lost. His pride, his magnum opus, was hurting, and he wasn’t there to help.
Mad Hatter smiled blissfully, ignoring the blows of a frail man who had unwittingly won freedom and safety for his village. She inhaled the air, forgetting even the fleeting intention of visiting the local church and ignoring the dead soldiers at her feet. Her smile widened at the knowledge of the distant destruction and the low rumbling beneath the village, but then a worry replaced the joy. The liar and heretic on her shoulders no longer whispered; his psyche seeped into hers, intensifying her thirst for blood and conquest.
She snarled, dismissed his offers of unrivaled power, and left the villagers alone, venturing into the camp. Mad Hatter felt it in her bones ever since she murdered that strange monster. Her own ascension, true divinity, wasn’t complete, but it was near. It required only one more sacrifice. It was high time to march on Houstad to claim her destiny and announce the defeat of the Reclamation Army with the blood of one of its finest champions.
The doors of the Dynast’s fortress opened, and a host marched forth, accompanied by the Nameless, sons and daughters of the conquered rulers, and the Dynast’s personal guard. Enhanced by the most secret bioengineering knowledge available to the Reclamation Army, they prepared to repel any assault. Reality itself cracked and screamed above them as the pocket dimensions opened, releasing vehicles so destructive that the state had banned their use. Emulated minds slumbering in the depths of the palace awoke and took control of the systems not meant for human use. Mechanical horrors of the Old World joined the royal forces, heading for the troops of the Provincial Army from other regions that would relieve Houstad in its day of need.
And in the snowy mountains at the edge of the Inner Lands, sleeping on the disgusting carpet of hundreds of slaughtered wild bioweapons, Ravager stirred, disturbed by a strange dream that broke through the thickness of nightmares about the Room, or the scum who took her family, or Eugenia, who denied her a chance to escape, or even the simple dignity of dying normally.
In this dream, she was conversing with her children, calming their fears and providing them strength to carry on, even talking the twisted girls out of immediate mischief. She decided that she had hallucinated it as she gave birth to no child and her wards rested safely in Houstad and their villages, while the skinwalkers resided beyond the Wall. Besides, a monster could not inspire, could not help.
Covered in a thin layer of rime, Ravager slipped back into the emptiness of her sleep, amused at imagining the silly misunderstandings between her tribe and the locals in Houstad.