“I kind of expected it after seeing the crushed tanks, but it’s hard to believe, even seeing it with my own eyes. How would it even support itself without just falling to pieces…?” Sera wondered as she gazed up at the hundred-meter-tall head. Even dozens of meters ahead it towered above, its crystalline eyes barely visible from her current angle.
“A stunning number of structural reinforcement enchantments would just be the start, I’d guess,” Tiriana answered. “Their magical engineering capabilities must have been incredible.”
“Wasn’t enough for them to win, though,” Sera pointed out, glancing at the battlefield around them. Dozens of tanks had been destroyed by the fortress, but it had fallen in the end.
“I don’t think it was the tanks that took it down, judging by the external damage I’ve seen so far. They might have been a distraction, or maybe a delaying tactic, while the fortress was boarded.”
“It’s strange that they don’t seem to have prepared fixed defenses. The footprints at the first battlefield suggest it came through there, but they were pretty old.”
“And it marched right through those,” Tiriana observed, glancing at Sera. “They might have decided they weren’t effective.”
“Maybe…I wonder why that battlefield was so much older, though. It had to have been a few months before this one. Think they had some kind of truce and fought here when it fell through?” Sera speculated in turn, getting drawn increasingly into the mystery.
“Possible, yes. Then whoever owned the tanks chose a different strategy after the trenches failed to stop it. Or maybe they didn’t set up defenses because it would have been seen as a provocation. Anyway, did you happen to see a way in?” Tiriana asked at last after deciding they wouldn’t find any answer through guesswork.
“Nothing. You?” Sera shook her head and returned the question back to Tiriana.
“No. Now that we know they definitely were using magic, though, a trail isn’t the only possibility. An elevator, or flying ships, or a hidden passage- they might have had any number of ways of getting in,” she said thoughtfully, holding her chin in one hand as she looked up at the fortress. “Unfortunately, the way in could have been blocked when it collapsed, too.”
“Can’t you make some handholds or something?”
“Combat mage, remember? I could do it, but they wouldn’t be very safe to use. I would essentially be blowing small holes into the rock face, rather than carving them,” Tiriana explained with a shrug. They both looked up at the fort for a few moments before coming to the same conclusion.
“”Vivi.””
“Think this would be enough to convince her to come out here?” Sera asked, recalling what Vivi had said about her reasons for staying in camp. She probably had some way of assisting them with one of her miracles, but that wasn’t very helpful if they couldn’t bring her here to begin with.
“It’s something concrete that we do need her for, rather than having her along as a precaution. If that’s not enough, I can probably convince some of the others to join us long enough to take a look around. Jonas, maybe, or Ixtris. Although…” Tiriana trailed off as she looked in the direction the fort had been moving in. “Would you mind if we extended things by a day or so? I’m curious about where they were going.”
“We don’t know it was within a day’s travel from here. Do we even have enough food?”
“You haven’t eaten nearly as much as I packed for, so we should be fine. I kind of forgot to account for you not being a magic user, yet. It’s usually only relevant for children, and they eat less to begin with,” Tiriana assured Sera.
“I think I should be fine if I’m a day or two late for my next treatment from Vivi…and I guess I’m curious what they were protecting, too,” Sera said, staring off into the distance. It would be a waste of time if they couldn’t reach the fortress’s destination in the next day, but it would be nice to sate some of her curiosity.
“Great. Let’s set up camp for tonight and we’ll continue tomorrow, then,” Tiriana said as she dismounted Soswa, shucking her pack to retrieve the tent. Sera hopped down as well and moved to assist her.
Fortunately, it seemed the defenders had really been the very last line of defense, as it took only two more hours- as Sera measured them, not Tiriana- for them to find a base in the mobile fortress’s direction of travel. In spite of the defenders’ supposed victory, the base was entirely abandoned from what they could tell, though it was so pristine Sera would believe the personnel had walked off just that morning.
What they saw wasn’t all that alien for Sera. Chain-link fences, tarmac, a small hangar, and a number of plain concrete buildings sized for beings larger than humans. The motor pool she was only able to identify by guessing; all the vehicles stored there had presumably been deployed against the fortress.
It was eerie how silent the place was. Sera could hear nothing but wind here. No animals, no footsteps, no commanding officers barking orders at subordinates. She and Tiriana walked right in the front entrance unopposed, their flokka mounts neatly hopping over the barriers that were in place. The guard posts were abandoned, but there was no sign of a fight here at all.
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“Where did they all go…? Even if they deployed everyone that was combat-capable, the support staff should still be here.” Tiriana muttered, disturbed by the silence. She seemed to be casting spells of some kind, but by the look on her face, they weren’t giving her any answers.
“There must have been something important here if the fortress was targeting it…although it may have simply been more convenient to destroy it on the way through, so they wouldn’t be attacked from behind later,” Sera whispered back, acutely aware of how loud her words sounded in between passing breezes. “If it was the target, maybe they evacuated?”
“I won’t rule it out, but I’m detecting some aircraft in that hangar. I don’t see why they would just leave them behind.”
“If they didn’t use them to attack the fortress, maybe they had some reason to stick to the ground.”
“I suppose it’s possible the fortress’s air defenses kept them grounded.” As they spoke, Sera and Tiriana continued deeper into the base, briefly examining each building to see which ones were worth investigating. They left the garages, storage buildings, and barracks behind, more interested in finding some kind of administration center. According to Tiriana, if they could bring some records back, Vivi would be able to translate them using a miracle.
The women might have jumped at every sound, given how unsettled they felt, but there simply were no sounds to startle them. Once they passed between the buildings, even the wind faded away, replaced by the sounds of Verinilla and Soswa’s footsteps and the shifting of their packs. Having seen at least half the base now, they must have been close to the admin building, but Sera called for a stop when she sighted something else.
“Hey, hold up for second,” she called out, making Tiriana jump in her sadly. Smirking, Sera pointed at an unassuming building they had just passed. “I think that’s a high security facility.”
“It looks like every other building, to me,” Tiriana replied, looking the building over.
“No windows. Even the storage buildings had windows. And there’s a lot of cameras on the neighboring buildings, all with overlapping views of this one building,” Sera told Tiriana as she gestured at each of the cameras.
“Is that what those are?” Tiriana asked, squinting at the cameras in question. In her defense, the cameras were little more than black half-spheres, and they were each obscured from the angles they weren’t looking in. “I assumed they were lights. Our surveillance devices are typically better camouflaged.”
“That’s pretty much what they look like back home, or at least, some types do. Think you can get the door open? It’s probably heavier than it looks,” Sera asked, looking at what seemed to be another double door, spotting a keycard reader and number pad near the middle. It looked just like every other door around them, but the builders would be fools if it were the same thickness.
Tiriana hopped down instead of replying immediately, walking up to place her hand on the door. After a moment she turned back to Sera.
“You’re right, this is a blast door. It looks like it would swing open the way the others do, but it’s actually on rails.” She cracked her knuckles. “Not enough to stop me, though.”
Tiriana stepped back and focused on the door, her eyes so intense Sera thought they might burn a hole in the door. She placed her hands together, than a few second later she wrenched them apart, and the doors slammed open as if repelling each other.
“Magnetic lock,” Tiriana explained. “I reversed the charge on one of the doors so that they repelled each other with as much force as they were being held together.”
She seemed a bit smug at her solution, and Sera wondered for a moment how that was the solution a self-professed combat mage would come to, but she decided to let it pass and dismounted. Just as Tiriana’s statement had implied, the building had power, and the lights inside were on, revealing another empty room. The entryway had metal detectors installed, and glass windows on both sides that were almost certainly bulletproof.
Neither guard station was manned, a fact which was of no surprise to Sera by now. She hesitated to walk in, though, as she wasn’t sure there was no security, including the automated variety. Tiriana showed no such hesitation. She walked in fearlessly, crushing the metal detectors into scrap without even questioning what they were first. Then she waved a hand vertically, and the inner door’s lock was severed right down the middle, allowing her to push it open with ease.
“Aren’t you worried about automatic security…?” Sera questioned as she tied up the flokkas using a nearby light pole.
“Nope! I’ve already gotten a good look at their tanks, and I’m confident my barriers can stop a shell from one of them, much less anything they’d use indoors,” she stated proudly. Sera refrained from replying to that, certain that any comment she made on the topic would come true if she did.
“Cool. Keep your barriers between me and the shooty things, then,” she said instead, following Tiriana in but remaining behind her. Sera was significantly less confident in her own bullet stopping abilities, so the expert could lead the way. They walked down the hall, glancing into rooms as they passed, but it seemed that the rooms closer to the entrance were break rooms and the like, not offices or labs.
The two women passed an intersection and, seeing that both turns were dead ends, continued towards another security checkpoint ahead. Tiriana held up her hand and stopped, then whirled around and swung her hand to the side. Sera felt the air beside her expand, and then she was flung bodily down a side hall moments before the sound of gunfire erupted around the corner.
As she jumped to her feet, Sera caught the flash of tracers going past for a brief second, but although the gunfire continued to echo off the tight corridors, the bullets weren’t making it down the hall anymore. She hurried back to the corner and peered around cautiously, finding that Tiriana’s confidence hadn’t been unfounded.
A pair of guns had descended from the ceiling and opened fire, but half a meter in front of Tiriana their bullets struck an invisible walls and bounced back, forming a pile in front of an unseen boundary line. Maintaining the barrier might have been slowing Tiriana’s casting, Sera guessed based on previous displays, but it wasn’t long before the guns’ barrels abruptly bent, and at the same moment they misfired, destroying both turrets.
“You okay back there?” Tiriana asked, glancing over her shoulder but still holding one hand out to maintain her barrier. Sera stepped around the corner and nodded.
“Thanks for the save.”
“Sorry about the rough treatment. I can keep my own barrier up indefinitely, but a bigger one like that takes a moment to prepare.”
“Why not just wreck the turrets, if your own barrier was enough?”
“I was worried a ricochet might catch you before I could destroy them. Doesn’t look like anything else is coming, so let’s see what they wanted protected so badly,” Tiriana said as she tore down the security door behind the turrets.