Kirinyaa serves as Arascus’ model for a society. If it is allowed to stand then it creates competition to the Pantheon. It is not that we are against the success of Kirinyaa simply to keep them down, it is that the success of Kirinyaa threatens the success of the Pantheon.
Currently, the dominance of the Pantheon is secured as much through the subconscious idea that standing against the Pantheon is unthinkable as it is through our own policies. The Epan Coalition and Kirinyaa both threaten to act as dominos which could make everything we have built come crashing down. For the sake Ardan Peace, both of these factions need to be so utterly humiliated that they forever taint the idea of splitting from the Pantheon.
- Excerpt from a document written by Maisara, Allasaria and Fortia.
Damian Sokolowski sprinted across an empty road. Rifle bouncing on his back, suitcase full of plans and papers in his hands. The rest of his command team, Pawel, Mateusz and Wiktor all followed him as they tried to make as much distance between themselves and the slowly tilting building. A tall tower, not quite a skyscraper, but it had served as an excellent vantage point to overlook Nanbasa’s evacuated industrial district and the mix of wood and concrete that made up the sea-wall. A sphere had hit it and the building was starting to collapse.
If it was an artillery shell, or even just a dud, Damian would have not been sprinting so frantically. He fondled his radio, grabbed the button and screamed into it. “This is General Sokolowski, another one landed on me! I repeat, another landed on me!” The radio turned off, it buzzed slightly for a moment, and then turned back on.
“Copy that General.” There was silence for a moment. “RF Seven has been dispatched to your location. Estimated time is three minutes. Over.” Damian did not respond, he merely dropped his radio, it started dancing on its cord again and grabbed onto a sign post to quickly turn. Response-Force Seven, they were positioned north west of him, he should head that way.
“AFTER ME!” Damian shouted as the three men behind him slid on the ground and started sprinting after him. And behind them, further past the cracked black tarmac and underneath the artillery shells and jet planes shrieking through the skies as they bombarded the monsters that clambered out the seawall and tried to knock it down. “RUN!” From that toppling building, the sphere that had caused it to collapsed rolled off, crashed into the asphalt as napalm shells exploded in mid-air and something shrieked from the ocean.
The smooth sphere split mechanically. A hexagonal pattern split it down the middle. It cracked into two halves, like an egg. Damian felt rush of adrenaline hit him like a steam engine as he heard the maddened barking of Uriamel’s dogs. That was the colloquial name, not even Arascus and Helenna knew what these creatures were.
But six of them burst out from that sphere. As large as wolves, but with scales instead of fur. Gills on the side of their bodies, their heads covered by a crown of thorns, their legs ending in long claws. Where they should have had a mouth was a curtain of octopus tentacles underneath a dozen crazed red eyes. Foam poured between those tentacles, Damian knew there was a beak hidden there.
A beak that could crush rocks, forget about bone and skin. “BEHIND US!” If there was one, Damian would have given the order to turn and fire. But there were six, each one took about as much firepower as a bull. “RUN!” And so they ran.
Down one corner, with those monsters catching up to them with every step. Another pair of jets shrieked over and unleashed lead as the cannons positioned on the skyscrapers all fired in unison. Explosions and napalm and shrieks. Then there was a cheer from the wall and a huge splash. The misty sea, tinged sour with the blood of Uriamel’s monsters, enveloped the eastern Nanbasa like rain.
Damian Sokolowski did not turn backwards, he saw RF7 turn around from the corner. Two Lynxes that quickly trundled along the ground and cracked the roads underneath them. Each one with a man crewing the machine gun on top of the turret. “DIVE!” Damian shouted as he jumped to the ground and rolled over.
He turned around to see Wiktor, Pawel and Mateusz drop down and heard the two Lynx tanks open fire with their machine guns. Using the main gun on the roads had been banned for now, but that didn’t matter too much. The machine themselves were of a larger calibre than what men carried and while the heavy scales of Uriamel’s dogs could glance pistol shots, these tore through the monsters.
One. Two. Six dropped as Damian Sokolowski fondled for his radio. “This is Sokolowski, RF7 made it in time.” The radio replied almost instantly.
“RF7 has orders to move past you. I’d advise getting out of there General.”
“Why?”
“The Seawall is about to break.”
Jets and artillery shrieked overhead. More splashing came from the other side of the wall.
Arascus looked out the window as he watched another squadron of fighters dive and open fire on more of those giant creatures marching out of the ocean. Nanbasa needed more men for its defences, but every city had been attacked on the coast. Nothing as large as the capital, some of the attacks had already been repelled even, but it was enough to make sure that Nanbasa stood alone.
More men were needed. The volunteers that were arriving from the nation’s west were simply too small in number. He took a sigh and looked down at the new law. Kassandora was smart, Kassandora was brilliant and, worst of all, Kassandora was right: War did need to be scaled up.
A single signature sentenced two million men in the city to serve.
Damian Sokolowski stuck his fingers in his ears the huge anti-air gun started to pound lead into the monsters coming out of the water. These huge double-barrelled cannons where first built in preparation for anything from the air. Any assault by massed magicians or by Allasaria. Then someone had the idea of simply tilting it down.
Damian watched as he saw that huge black crab’s shell burst open in a line as the AA gun focused on it. A pair of KAF jets dived down, autocannons wailing, the crab’s leg got hit, the creature lost control. It collapsed, the two massive claws smashing into denizens of Uriamel as they poured out from the waves. Napalm artillery came in from artillery batteries in Nanbasa’s central zoo and Sokolowski watched the ocean be set alight.
The soldiers of Uriamel, humanoid but obviously not human with all their limbs too long, started to scream and run from the flames as Nanbasa’s defenders from the wooden seawall, now cracked and revealing the solid slab of concrete interlaced with steel on its inside. And Sokolowski watched more of those giant crabs crawl sideways out of the ocean. At first, he had been awed by their size. Now, he realised the real danger of Uriamel was not the great beasts it possessed but the fact it could use them to wield even greater weaponry.
Each crab had a small platform on it, from which Uriamel’s commanders were shouting down orders at their men. And each crab was helping pull a steel cable out of the water. Sokolowski clicked his radio and talked into it: “This is General Sokolowski speaking, artillery barrage on whatever the fuck just came out of the water.”
“Roger that, batteries two and four are ready, three is out of ammo. One is operating at three-quarters strength after a vehicle malfunction.” The radio said. They would pass on the orders. They passed them on quickly in fact.
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Only a few seconds after Sokolowski clicked the radio off, he heard the thundering drumming of artillery from behind him. Sokolowski had never been a hopeful man, so he kept the optimism contained. Good thing he did, the ocean leapt upwards. The shells that screamed as they fell exploded against that barrier of clear liquid. The water collapsed and Damian saw what the crabs had been dragging out of the water.
A huge cannon, a massive tub of black metal. Damian heard the cannon to his side fire. He saw the shell of a crab start to crack under the fury of its shells. He heard another round of drumming from behind him. Fighter jets screamed from above as they dropped bombs or emptied themselves of autocannon ammunition. The defenders on the seawall fired. All its turrets turned to fired at that tube and at those monster pulling it out of the ground.
But it didn’t matter. In a mere moment, Damian watched as that tube lit up a bright blue. A beam came down on it as the neighbouring crab collapsed. Before the monster managed to even make a splash in the water, the tube had finished. Damian had seen magicians cast spells with their wands, what he just witnessed could only be described as an upscaled version of that.
And Damian realised what had happened. He grabbed his radio, ready to report the situation. This, Arascus and Kassandora had to know about. A massive hole had been carved through several buildings, as if the beam from whatever the crabs had pulled onto the shallow waters had simply incinerated the bricks and mortar. A massive hole through the buildings, and through the seawall.
The ocean spilled through that broken seawall.
And all the monstrous soldiers of Uriamel came in a flood with it.
Arascus had gone off to fight, so Helenna had to manage the logistics. She had only rarely done it in the past, and always it was when it was her own plans. Allasaria and Fortia both had doubted her skill in it. And then Arascus had told her that he trusted she would be able to supply Nanbasa with enough ammunition to shoot everyone in Uriamel ten times over.
Helenna smiled as she leaned back and gave the God of Pride’s seat a spin. Comfortable, lovely, almost as if it was meant for her. It still had his smell too. She poured herself a glass of red wine and turned from the disaster happening through the window. Arascus was in the air, and Iniri’s Seawall had been broken. That was the front, that wasn’t her demesne.
Helenna readjusted her black cap marked with her emblem: the thorned rose of the Goddess of Love.
She looked down at the paper she had just finished drafting: The National Survival Bill, it banned unions in all manufacturing industries, it imposed a minimum two year prison sentence for organisation against labour, it set the death penalty on all wilful sabotage of Kirinyaa’s manufacturing, it instituted fines and imprisonment in labour camps for deliberate avoidance of work, it would expand the ammunition factories three times over, it would make sure that Arascus had enough ammunition to shoot everyone in Uriamel twenty times over. And it was all done in the name of Love, for each other and for the nation.
This was her demesne.
“FIRE! FIRE! FIRE AND HOLD! NOT ONE STEP BACK!” Damian shouted his team gunned down a charging platoon of Uriamel’s soldiers. When the seawall had still been in once piece, it was farcical that they had come without long-ranged rifles. The best they could muster were the harpoon guns and they could only shoot as far as a street was wide.
Now that the fighting took place on the streets, Damian did not find their weapons so laughable. Not with the heavy shields that almost all of them were equipped with. What sort of technology it was, Damian did not know, but every soldier had a thin barrier around him that held back lead and flame and napalm and had to be overwhelmed with nothing but sheer firepower. They cracked eventually, but he had seen a single soldier of Uriamel wade through machinegun fire that would have downed elephants and keep on marching.
Damian another magazine into his gun as the Lynx tank besides him fired. The tread had fallen off, it had caught itself on the pavement and now field engineers were madly working to pull it back on as the turret and Damian’s platoon worked to defend them. The ground shook, another building started to collapse as glass rained from overhead.
A helicopter turned and let emptied its rocket pods onto the street. It started to pick up altitude, fly away. A bolt came out of nowhere. It impaled itself through the helicopter’s hull, the machine started to lose control and fall. It exploded somewhere out of sight, the explosion of its engine lost in the hundreds of other explosions from bombs and artillery and cannon shells.
Damian looked down the iron sights on his rifle and held the trigger. Two of those monstrous scaled dogs with beaks for mouths and tentacles for whiskers ate the entire magazine. One dropped on the spot, the other kept on marching until Pawel aimed his sniper at it. He held his breath, pulled the trigger, and the monster’s head suddenly burst open with a hole in the middle. “HOW LONG?” Damian shouted as he saw the rest of this Uriamel platoon start to charge.
Damian was about to issue an order to forget the tank and retreat when a blade dropped from the sky. It shot downwards like a needle launched from the heavens. Then another. A third. A hundred. In an instant, a monsoon of blades from above came from the sky.
Swords. Swords and spears and axe and all manners of weapons reverbed as they stuck themselves into the ground. Each one shaking as pieces of an Uriamel soldier lay around it. They tore through armour and scale and bone and flesh as if it was all paper. And the street was still, Damian eased his finger off the trigger. How many were dead? A hundred? Two? He couldn’t even count all the bodies.
Damian looked up and he saw Arascus staring down on the street. The God of Pride lived up to his namesake, with a suit and long red cape that flew in the wind, A thousand golden spheres around him, each one ready with a blade, a spear, an axe or a hammer prepared ready to be launched. Arascus said nothing, his face was only deadly serious as he looked at the dead on the ground, scanning them for any sign of movement. One thing twitched, it was immediately pierced by a sword that lodged itself in the ground.
The God of Pride turned as another of Uriamel’s monsters turned the corner. It hissed, a rider armed with a pike on its back. The thing was as large as a tank, its front with two horse legs that cracked the tarmac with each step. Its back a slithering snake that left a trail. Arascus did not even move.
A massive silver blade dropped from the sky and split the monster and its rider in two, as if a giant had just decided to cut it in half. Damian swallowed his own spit as he looked up at Arascus again. The God hovered in the air for a few seconds, then turned and moved onto another street.
Damian was glad Arascus was on his side.
Arascus stood on top of a skyscraper as he picked out another crab marching through the streets. Uriamel’s soldiers around it and a piece of a vehicle in its claws. He took a breath and looked elsewhere down the streets. Killing it was not hard, but there were hundreds of thousands of invaders already in Nanbasa. One ant could be squashed, but even Gods got tired when they had to constantly be crushing ants. Allasaria was not here yet, but he had to conserve enough energy to make sure that the Goddess of Light would be kept at bay. Neneria and Olephia were assisting with the defences of the other cities, they could not be called here.
Arascus pulled his phone out and rang command. They answered immediately, although they always did. “Ground Control speaking your majesty.” The radio operator said.
Arascus gave his order quickly. “I give permission for bombing runs over Nanbasa.”
“All units report they’ve moved out of the industrial district.” Wiktor shouted as he flicked a button on his radio. Damian Sokolowski readjusted his coat as he made his way to top of the cresting hill in Nanbasa’s zoo. From here, all he could see was the skyline of the western part of the ring-city. A 77T plane was flying north-to-south along it, carpet bombing the city from high above. Those bombers were the only things that could touch the forces in that part of the city now.
The concrete jungle was too thick and too dense to allow shelling from an angle. Either bombs would come in straight down, between the buildings, or shells would impact against buildings instead of against the enemies currently in those streets. So the concrete jungle had to be cut down. “Anything new? No change in schedule?” Damian asked. Wiktor played around with the black magic that was the radio controls for a few moments before shaking his head.
“We have information that they’ve brought demolitionists to tear down the seawall as well.” Wiktor said. “And more are coming in, but that’s about it. Nothing new, no undocumented monsters on the horizon.” Damian took a heavy breath. Well, there was nothing to wait for now.
Damian clicked the button and said goodbye. Goodbye to the grand docks of Nanbasa, to the huge cranes to lift heavy containers out of vessels. To the huge factories and warehouses that once tarred the skies with fumes and now lay silent, most already damaged by the battle in the city. Goodbye to the streets, now flooded by the waves of Uriamel’s soldiers and monsters. Goodbye to it all.
The industrial district of Nanbasa was ripped apart by flames. The same inferno that had ravaged Fortia’s Army in Melukal now ravaged Uriamel’s in Nanbasa.
Allasaria returned to the great domed cities of Uriamel underneath the water. Nanbasa would fall eventually. Kassandora’s trickery could only slow Uriamel down, it could not defeat it.
Now though, it was time to send a message. The entire world had to know what kind of power the Pantheon possessed, and what kind of damnation would be wrought upon those who decided to stand against it.