Light, heat and sound overwhelmed the bridge of The Intercessor.
As the first of the explosion washed over Lucina’s morphic armour, it automatically reacted, reassembling, and strengthening against the incoming attack.
But despite these adaptations, the armour continued to experience conditions exceeding its protection parameters.
The second layer of defences activated, previously non-existent. It had been added to the smart armour’s protocols only two days ago, by Lucina herself.
The morphic armour changed shape, abandoning its physically defensive restructuring. Instead, a delicate and complex matrix of runes, shapes and symbols blossomed across its surface. Tiny amounts of certain encapsulated substances appeared at key points in the formation.
Magic and technology hand in hand.
Before Lucina could be consumed by the sun created in the heart of the Intercessor, she disappeared.
And in the next instant, the supreme authority of the Incandestine Empire was on the planet below.
Lucina stood in an invisible base, hidden high in the sky some distance from Al Dherjza. Her left ear rung faintly. Part of her vision was blurry and would not clear. Half her face was numbed, burned terribly by radiant heat. Her left eyelid wouldn’t close, burnt to a crisp. Her armour glowed a dull red. Part of it had melted away, vaporised.
What… had happened? Lucina wondered in a daze.
Despite her horrible condition, Lucina calmly limped over to the med bay in the hidden base and lay in a cot. Panels slid away from the wall and ceiling, revealing several hovering drones and robotic arms that got to work performing critical surgery on the Empress. Various chemicals were sprayed and injected into her wounds, as dextrous, many fingered arms pinched, held and stretched her skin as necessary.
Numerous attempts made on Lucina’s long life had conditioned her to survive and react accordingly in near-death situations. The Incandestine’s advanced technology would have her back to normal in less than a minute.
A communication line opened from her right hand, Jamie, who had been stationed in another hidden base outside Al Dherjza.
“Empress! You’re alive!” he exclaimed joyously in disbelief.
“What happened?” Lucina asked of him, her voice carrying a lisp and sounded hoarse.
“The Intercessor… well, you better see for yourself.” Said Jamie.
A confused look passed over Lucina’s face. She rendered the ceiling of the sterile base transparent with a single thought through her neural link.
Her view was filled with the image of the glowing wreckage of the Intercessor, split into four uneven pieces, a hole gaping through its heart. Its carcass gently drifted apart in the vacuum of space.
It took a long moment for the Empress to process what she was seeing. Her right fist unconsciously tightened around the grip of the Bloodfire Blade, which she still possessed in its damaged sheath, leaning against the side of the cot.
How can this be?
“What of Hagley? The Twins?” Lucina asked. Her burnt face had nearly been restored to normal, though the slightest trace of a lisp remained in her speech.
“Unresponsive, likely dead, your highness,” Jamie responded. “Initial reports suggest that the main cannon, bridge, vehicle bay, and main engines were annihilated by what appears to be antimatter. Less than 15% of the crew remains alive. We are attempting rescue but the majority of our ships and escape vessels were destroyed in the attack.
White-hot fury filled Lucina’s entire being, beginning from the top of her head.
How could this happen?
Countless dead, failed under her leadership.
“Was antimatter not on the list of substances forbidden by the Intercessor’s aegis?” She asked in vehement frustration.
“It was, but the attack somehow bypassed it.”
Lucina fell silent for a long while, struggling under the weight of her next decision.
“…Order a full retreat, we are outmatched against this enemy.” The Empress admitted in defeat.
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“Your Eminence?” Jamie asked in shock.
“Do not make me repeat myself, Jamie. Have whoever is available assist with the rescue of what remains of the Intercessor’s crew. You will regroup with them at the popup base on the plateau east of Al Dherjza and request assistance from the galactic fleet.”
Without the Intercessor, it could be months before they were rescued. Working together would be the Incandestines’ best chance of staying alive.
“It will be done, Empress,” Jamie replied without hesitation. “But what of you?”
“I will not give up on what we came here for,” Lucina said simply, as she stepped onto the balcony of the base, surveying the city in the distance below her. “The Aegis – Rolynd… the whole of Apolaphia knows that he has gambled everything on a meeting with this so-called ADAM. A god-like being that grants wishes. If this being can destroy the Intercessor, perhaps it can restore it.”
“Respectfully, your Highness, how will you find Rolynd and ADAM?”
“…Sophia.”
“The Aegis-scorn?”
“Yes. Before he presumably died, I had heard from Asmodeus that he had dealt her a mortal wound. I do not know what kind of healing technology these Apolaphians may have, but I doubt that she would be fully healed in such a short time. She is most likely being kept somewhere safe.”
Lucina reasoned that the demons were aiming to depose the leadership of Al Dherjza. And, they likely had more information than her. Following this chain of thought, wherever the demons were congregating, Lucina would either find Rolynd, Sophia or someone else that could lead her to the King and by extension, to ADAM.
To Lucina, Rolynd was physically invincible. Though she knew a critical weakness existed, one exploited by the fugitive Bloodstones to defeat Asmodeus, Lucina did not know what that weakness was exactly. She did not care to figure it out with the limited time and resources available to her.
Instead, she would exploit a weakness that she knew existed within Rolynd’s heart. In the strategic planning exercises that Rolynd was trained on, there was a statistical bias in the number of times he chose the plan which preserved the safety of Sophia over any other individual. And, whether he liked it or not, Rolynd was unable or unwilling to change that part of who he was. Lucina knew for a fact that he would almost always favour a course of action that preserved Sophia’s safety.
Lucina did not know if it was because of love, guilt, lack, or a simple drive to protect the cheerful, straightforward chimaera, but it was a weakness that The Empress knew existed. And it was a weakness she intended to exploit.
“The wreckage of the Intercessor is on a crash course with the planet’s surface. There are 40 minutes before the largest of the wreckage falls to earth. Before then, please be wary of stray debris. In her memory.” Said Jamie’s voice in Lucina’s ear.
A timer appeared on Lucina’s heads-up display. That was the amount of time she had left before Apolaphia was annihilated by millions of tons of metal crashing into its surface from geostationary orbit.
She could no longer afford to hesitate.
“I shall do whatever it takes to right the wrong of Catherine’s death.” Lucina declared. “If you do not hear from me, Jamie, you will make sure to keep everyone else cared for.”
“Empress! You-!”
“I know you aren’t a foolish enough man to argue with me,” Lucina said, interrupting her most trusted aide.
“…Yes, you are right.”
“We will have justice, one way or another.”
The cold night air blew over Lucina as she leapt from the clouds, Bloodfire Blade burning in hand, licks of flame finding their way up its edge. A single rune-covered wing sprouted from the armour of her back, guiding her rapid descent to Al Dherjza. Despite the impossible physics of Lucina’s wing, her flight was inexplicably controlled; owing to the enchantments all over the wing’s surface. As the Incandestine Empress drew closer to the city, a vampire flying from Necropolis happened to cross her path.
Rex Lucina focused briefly and loosed an attack, pirouetting through the air. Though it looked simple, the manoeuvre took considerable skill to execute with such speed and precision. In an instant, the Bloodfire Blade elongated and trailed about her, becoming a storm of glinting orange metal. Though the vampire attempted to block Lucina’s attack with her sharp claws, the aegis-scorn technology imbued into Lucina’s weapon caused it to pass straight through the vampire’s defences.
The monster’s face contorted and grew out of proportion as its blood vaporised beneath its skin, which inflated and grotesquely tore like a burst balloon. The vampire’s entire body exploded into a wet firework of bloodfire.
Lucina expertly retracted the blade back to its sword form, having resumed her descent without the slightest delay. Though even the most minuscule mistake could cost the Empress her own life, she wielded the weapon with the utmost confidence and competence.
The leader of the Incandestine fell to earth like a meteor, landing heavily on a cobbled street in the western outskirts of Al Dherjza. The ground cracked and trembled beneath her carapaced limbs. Her morphic armour had reshaped itself to withstand the extreme force of her controlled crash landing. A cloud of dust around her cleared away just as a tide of surging, mindless flesh pressed in.
Lucina’s armour returned to its standard form. Like dealing with an insect, the Incandestine Empress took one glance at the countless, rapidly encroaching red eyes and flicked her wrist with disdain, striking at the horde with a whip-like extension of her weapon.
Where the edge of the Bloodfire blade sunk into cold flesh, the pale skin lit up from within, glowing a translucent orange. Bones cast dark shadows from within for just an instant before the body inevitably exploded into a geyser of crimson flame. Shards of burning, bloodfire-drenched bone and clumps of sizzling flesh flew out in all directions. Where bone tore through flesh, new blossoms of gory flame were born, continuing the chain reaction. Even the comparatively harmless burning flesh smouldered through the skin and contacted the dead blood beneath, causing delayed explosions wherever there were gaps. Tens, then hundreds, then thousands of zombies were annihilated in seconds accompanied by the sound of roaring flame. The conflagration of corpses spanned several city blocks.
The Empress stood and watched her enemies be reduced to nothingness.
After the destruction had passed, a haze of pale ashes filtered its way down to the stone below accompanied by the gentle hiss of white smoke, sizzling flesh, and the quiet pitter-patter of falling bone and charred meat.
Lucina’s neurologically-linked armour made a protective mask to cover the Empress’ mouth and nose as she stepped forward to trample over the graves of the those that had just fallen at her feet.