Archimedes
“Nooo!” cried the soldiers around Archimedes. Startled, Archimedes and Chedderfield turned quickly to see what was wrong.
“What is it?” Archimedes demanded, scared that the hell-cursed, having been taunted by their rejection of the surrender, had already begun to enact one of their schemes.
“Have those bastards started the attack? Hermano, they aren’t even going to let me finish my fucking food!” Chedderfield complained as he put down the bowl of soup he had brought with him and began to look over the edge with Archimedes.
“No. No, sir, not that,” PFC Loman quickly clarified. “Please don’t switch to being an Automator. We want the buffs from your vassal class.”
“The what now?” Archimedes, who had selected the baron class before starting the construction projects in the base just so he could get a few class levels, took a second to realize what the man was talking about. Then it hit him as he remembered the class’s innate skill:
[Baron] – Increase Vassal Faction Bonus for all faction members by 100%. Decrease the effectiveness of all skills and attacks by 10%.
Novice Baron Challenge III – Generate 100 Baron Points. These points can be generated by giving commands that result in building completions, enemy kills, base expansion, or healing or improving the condition of your vassals.
The 100% increase in Vassal Faction Bonuses hadn’t been a big deal to Archimedes, at least not for battle, at first, because the bonuses were small like 1.5% increased consumable effectiveness, or they were related to things like water-traveling speed or resources needed for mechanical summons, but now that he had incorporated a human faction, it was different. Now, he had the human faction bonuses too, and those were combat related. The bonus had been a 2.6% increase in tool and weapon efficiency originally, but with the sixteen new cores that they had sunk into the base, it was now a 5.2% increase in tool and weapon efficiency for every person in the faction, vassals included.
Since everyone but the gigantic crocodile used weapons or tools in combat, and the baron class doubled it, being a baron guaranteed nearly a 5% increase in damage for the entire base.
After a moment, Chedderfield began to laugh. “You really dug yourself a hole this time, bro,” he mocked as he continued to chuckle to himself.
There were a series of hisses and hoots from the sirrušu, who hadn’t stopped eating their food as everyone else panicked at the declaration of war.
“They say that a good leader is a blessing for his soldiers; a selfish one is a curse,” Chip translated as he held a plate of meats and spikey fruits for the lizardwomen.
“Yeah, the lizard broads are right. Can you just imagine it?” Lucy began, having just come to the walls with Nguyen. “Every time you switch class, some random faction or vassal member is going to be cursing your name again like, ‘Damnit! Did Archimedes get in another fight?! CURSE THAT WARMONGER!’”
“‘Damnit’?” Nguyen looked over at Lucy as if she’d seen a ghost. “Not ‘fuck’?”
“Hey, I’m trying to imagine how they would talk, not how I would,” Lucy replied, justifying herself.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, but this baron will still need to level his other classes a lot. The perk points in other classes alone are too big of a deal to pass up if I want to stay alive,” Archimedes said as he opened up his menu. “Though . . . maybe there will be a skill in one of those trees to help me negate the downsides of class swapping.”
He’d already finished the first two class quests and just had to apply the points to his ability tree. At the first tier, he’d automatically gained something:
Efficient Order – Vassals move 25% faster when following the Baron’s direction.
The second tier of the class offered choices.
[Skill Tree: Economics]
Quick Construction – Increases the speed of local base construction by 10% ( 0 of 5)
[Skill Tree: Military]
The Local Levy – [Perk] Increases the damage and health of vassal troops when inside the vassal's base by 2% (0 of 5)
[Skill Tree: Diplomacy]
Smooth Negotiator – [Perk] Increases Charisma by 5%, with a minimum of 1 charisma if at least 1 point is invested. (0 of 5)
It didn’t seem like a hard decision, considering his build and the situation his group found themselves in. He invested a point into Quick Construction to make sure the portal was completed faster and the other point went into The Local Levy. He’d take anything that would help the soldiers and his people survive longer and deal more damage, and the 2% now stacked well with the 8.4% weapon efficiency they were receiving from the vassal faction bonus, making their weapons 10.5% stronger than before.
“Hey! Stop zoning out!” Lucy demanded.
“Sorry, just taking care of some class stuff before the battle. They aren’t letting me be an Automator,” Archimedes explained.
“Attention!” a loud voice called out over the speaker system. It took Archimedes a moment to recognize the voice of Colonel Hooker. “We have received the terms of surrender from the enemy commander and have soundly rejected them. We stand on the precipice of a monumental decision. Will we stand and fight . . .” The voice broke off. “What do you mean he already gave a speech?” There was silence again. “But this is my thing. I’m the speech guy. Goddamn— Oh, it's still on?” There was a cough. “As you were, soldiers. Defend the base with everything you have. I’m proud to fight beside you.” The high-pitched whine from the speakers told Archimedes the PA system had cut off.
“Well, that was interesting,” Nguyen remarked. “I guess you ruined his moment.”
The two would have continued their banter except a high-pitched whistle sounded from beyond the western walls.
“Incoming!” someone shouted and everyone dropped to the floor.
There was an earth-shaking boom as something struck the ground, and when Archimedes peeked his head over the top of the wall, he saw that something the size of a boulder had landed just past the moat. He wondered if the hell-cursed had even more of those walking skeleton catapults when the boulder moved.
The turrets came to life the moment the object moved, but the boulder didn’t seem to care. It split down the center, revealing a shell that housed four hell-hounds that immediately leapt outside of the container and started rushing the wall. While the turrets weren't able to destroy the boulder-like container, they were able to completely decimate the four dogs, giving the human side their first kills of the conflict.
Archimedes expected more boulders to come out immediately following the first one, but nothing happened as the orange hues of dawn slowly crept across the horizon, bringing a menacing sight with it. Hundreds of thousands of hell-cursed surrounded the base on the west and north in what seemed to be a perfectly structured army. The enemy was arrayed beyond the moat, about two football fields away, into blocks of hundreds, each an unyielding wall of the undead. Dozens of blimp-like jellyfish hung in the sky above them. This was an army far greater than any they had faced before, and the scene stretched out across the entire horizon, sending a chill of dread down Archimides’ spine.
Archimedes heard Nguyen muttering something strange and looked to his right to find her eyes glowing as she waved her arms in an unfamiliar pattern. She ended her murmurings by shouting, “I curse you with the Pox on Death!” A faint glow shone for a fraction of a second in the far off army and then disappeared, but Archimedes knew the curse Nguyen had used would spread, and he hoped it made a difference in the upcoming fight.
There was a silence that was almost palpable as the national guard watched the enemy. The silence was broken by the sound of a horn, a long forlorn note breaking the deep morning quiet. Then the horde began to spread out, two skeletal catapults crawled forward on spider-like legs to the closest line of undead, and within moments, two more bone boulders were launched. Hot Sauce rose from where she sat, raised her staff, and fired a glowing ball of energy that destroyed one of the massive projectiles as it sailed through the air. The other cleared the last impact site but only gained a short distance. It broke apart upon landing, spewing more hellhounds that were quickly dispatched.
“What are you damn kids waiting for?! You fucking bags of rocks!! Get moving!” one of the older soldiers demanded of the younger ones manning the turrets as the boulders started getting a little closer. “Stop acting like you’ve frozen up and start shooting, you fucking bastards!!”
The old soldier kicked one of the gunners out of his seat and sat down to man the turret himself, swiveling it around at the catapults. The man aimed the autoloading machine as low as he could before firing off a round of artillery-style shells.
The result was devastating. After a few seconds, the catapult that had been testing their defenses exploded. “THAT’S RIGHT, YOU FUCKING BASTARDS!” the artilleryman yelled in excitement at the dead on hit.
“What are you waiting for? Get to it!” Archimedes barked as well. “Don’t let them even think about hitting us with one of those hellhound balls!”
A chorus of “Yes, sir!” sounded off. Hot Sauce and Redeye were already firing into the air, shouting sirrušu insults at the enemy. The men at the gate yelled their battle cries, and the manually-fired turrets on the western and northern walls fired. The artillery roared like thunder, blasting hundreds of undead soldiers with every cannonade.
The enemy answered with its own weapons. The hundreds of bone catapults crawling forward began to hurl a barrage of objects into the air even as over a dozen of them exploded under the fire of the manually operated turrets.
Fuck! Archimedes cursed in his head, not wanting to voice how troubling the situation was. He turned to one of the soldiers as he saw hundreds of incoming hellhound balls. “It’s going to take too long for the turrets to take out their artillery. Do you have any anti-air, flak-style rounds you can load in some of the turrets?”
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“Yeah, we were using them last night against the jellyfish,” the soldier responded.
“Good, do it. Switch at least half the turrets over as fast as you can,” Archimedes ordered as he turned back to the front. He knew that, in the long term, he needed to be taking out as many of the catapult creatures as fast as he could, but if they didn’t switch over, they were going to be overrun in the short term. The danger was incredibly self-evident. The undead horde was already firing their second round of hellhounds when over half of the first round still hadn’t been killed off.
This time, however, rather than a thousand dogs landing at their door, the artillery rounds from the turrets exploded the hell boulders midair. Less than half of the projectiles landed within a hundred feet of the coral wall. Nearly two-hundred hellhounds emerged from the smoke and charged forward over their dead comrades, spewing forth a torrent of fire that lapped at the wall before they were put down.
“That’ll do for now,” Archimedes called out, content with the results, “but after the catapults are thinned out more, switch another turret back to anti-ground.”
“Yes, sir,” the soldier replied.
As the cycle of attack and defense continued, the boulders got closer and closer to the base walls and the structures behind them. One crashed into the mess tent, barely clearing the lip of the wall, and unleashed four skull-faced hellhounds that scorched everything they could with their fiery breath before being cut down by determined cooks brandishing glowing kitchen knives. More boulders came every second, but no matter how many laser turrets fired, there were simply too many for them to handle.
“There’s too many catapults for the turrets to handle!” a soldier shouted.
“Give me a chance, coach! Send me in!” Lucy shouted before leaping from the top of the wall down into the base, Emma following closely on her heels.
Archimedes wanted to stop her, but he knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on chastising someone about taking risks and jumping into danger to save people. Instead, he looked at the soldiers around him, noticing more than one of them didn’t have the fancy guns that the rest of them did. “Hey! You two! If you’re still using man-made weapons, stop it. Equip system melee gear and get in there to support her, or are you about to tell me that two girls are going to do a better job defending than combat-trained soldiers?”
“No, sir!” one of them yelled as he quickly switched his machine gun out for a large two-handed bone mace and chased after Lucy.
Soon, the two seemed to gather dozens of soldiers as they charged the hellhounds that emerged from the falling bone capsules. And Lucy led them into a brutal melee slugfest as the group began to tear apart the hellhounds. Lucy glowed red as she wielded her Funny Bone Short Sword in one hand and her white Purifying Sword in the other, stabbing and slicing with each to devastating effect. Emma used her bone spear to keep Lucy from being swarmed, and the soldiers that had followed the two provided cover, using bone spears, swords, and maces to smash and bash the creatures.
The fight was fierce and bloody, with limbs flying off both sides as they clashed together. Soon, some of the hellhounds managed to break past the line of defense and began burning the soldiers alive. Before long, screams echoed throughout the battlefield from those unfortunate enough to be caught in their flames.
The battlefield was quickly turned into a symphony of screams, clangs, and roars. The hellhounds were unrelenting in their onslaught, but the group held their own with Lucy and Emma leading the charge.
“Lucy can handle the ones that get through, but we need to take out those catapults faster!” Chedderfield pointed out.
“Nguyen, Danielle, do you think you can take them out?” Archimedes asked as he turned to the two girls.
“By ourselves? No,” Danielle answered, “but if you give me a half dozen snipers, I think we can damage them enough to make a difference. I’ve got guns they can use already. Made them for trading in case we hit another hub. We just need to find some people who can shoot like marines.”
“Don’t worry about that. I know every eagle eye in the base that’s still breathing,” Loman answered, climbing down the wall and running to the commander's tent. “I’ll be right back!”
Sergeant Maryland came rushing out of the tent a moment later, shouting out names, and within two minutes, there were ten soldiers lined up beside the tent.
“Danielle, get them their guns as soon as possible. Nguyen, get firing already. We don’t have long before those catapults alone overrun us,” Archimedes ordered as he turned back to look at the battle, where the army of zombies was still closing in on them.
“I love it when you boss me around like that,” Nguyen whispered into Archimedes’ ear, throwing Archimedes completely off guard for a moment while she laughed a little and ran along the wall to one of the higher points in the fortification and began firing. Danielle waved her arms for the incoming soldiers to notice her before following Nguyen.
Danielle and Nguyen took charge of the group as they joined them on the wall. Danielle handed out a few of the larger laser rifles she’d crafted, then Archimedes could see her tapping the air in front of her, likely loading up the new skill cards she’d been given. The group of twelve broke up into two groups of six, one group heading to the north wall, the other going to the west.
The snipers fired in unison, and the laser turrets sent concentrated beams of white-hot energy, destroying the hell boulders as they hurdled through the air toward the base. The artillery's booming shots filled the air with smoke and debris, and the number of boulders lessened. Inside the base, desperate defenders unleashed their weapons against the hellhounds that had breached the walls, incinerating them as they ran rampant and burning anything that stood in their path, including innocent civilians.
Despite the odds, a glimmer of hope emerged as more and more of the skeleton catapults were destroyed, giving the defenders a crucial edge. But then the jellyfish began rising off from their low flying altitude just above the ground, taking off into the sky like the slow-moving blimps they were, their tentacles sucking up and grabbing zombies, hell-cursed brutes, more hellhounds, and every other creature they could reach. The ominous cloud of terror then moved through the air toward the base. The dread from the eerie, slowly moving behemoths spread through the defenders, the taste of their destructive capabilities from last night still fresh on the tongues of those who had barely managed to taste victory.
“Snipers continue to fire on catapults! Artillery, switch over! Make sure you take down those jellyfish before they get here!” Archimedes ordered.
The artillery cannons were quickly reloaded with a new ammunition type and strategically aimed at the floating troop carriers. The guns roared as they fired a continuous barrage, sending detonations of flames and smoke high into the sky. The thick armor plating of the jellyfish was a challenge to penetrate, but after several direct hits, the carriers began to plummet and crash outside the base walls. But even that wasn't enough. Six of the massive carriers crashed into the coral walls, while four made it over and began to disgorge their monstrous contents.
The sight was horrific. Hundreds of creatures descended from the sky or crawled out of the fallen jellyfish, causing utter chaos at the base. Defenders were left unsure whether to fire at those outside or inside their walls, both threats being equally dangerous.
“If you’re on the wall, fire at the enemy out there. We’ll handle the ones inside!” Archimedes shouted as he opened up his system menu and quickly dumped a few more recently earned class points into The Local Levy before he leapt off the wall to fight the creatures that had dropped inside their base.
“Right behind you, hermano,” Chedderfield said as he, Hot Sauce, and Redeye landed on the ground next to Archimedes, their weapons appearing in their hands.
The four fighters dashed forward, weapons flashing as they stabbed and slashed every enemy they came across. Zombies were ripped apart by the power of each blow, and the muscle-heavy brutes were decapitated or chopped apart within moments. Only the more advanced crystal brutes made the group pause, but even then, the Sirrušu alien spears blasted chunks of the monsters away with their advanced energy attacks.
Unfortunately, as powerful as the four were, the moment the fight began, he immediately noticed an issue: other than Lucy’s ground brigade of melee troops, the rest of the soldiers were too spread out. Archimedes used Fire Breath to clear out a wave of weaker hell-cursed rushing toward him, burning them alive on the spot, but in the short time it took him to do that, he had already watched a group of three soldiers separated from the rest of the units on the ground get decimated by a crystal brute.
The smaller zombies acted like meat shields, absorbing the fire from the alien rifles as they were blasted into pieces only to reveal the large crystal golem behind the smaller zombies. The more powerful enemy lunged forward and splattered the soldiers like they were tiny eggs being smashed into a concrete sidewalk.
Archimedes followed up his Fire Breath with a thrust of his charged spear at the nearest zombie hulk, destroying it just as fast as the crystal golem had finished off the soldiers, but he knew he needed to get the various groups gathered together to combine their firepower once more.
“Everyone on the ground level, get to me now!” Archimedes called, his order exploding out of him in a blue wave that highlighted everyone on the ground floor at once with a glowing blue light except Lucy, Chedderfield, and the lizardpeople.
A moment later, the soldiers began to rush toward Archimedes, moving at a speed so fast he thought they were, like Chedderfield often did, using Meat Slam or a similar charge skill.
He had hopes they would all make it to him until he saw one bone-tailed brute use its newly grown appendage to clothesline and behead one of the soldiers running toward Archimedes in such a perfect and concise motion that the head ended up popping off like the cap of a soda bottle.
Fortunately, most of the remainder made it to Archimedes without much difficulty thanks to his class ability, Efficient Order, which increased the speed of vassals coming toward him. The second they reached him, they began organizing into a single contingent of well-armed troops without even needing to be told what to do.
“That’s right. We can do it now,” Archimedes said to the gathered troops. “Focus on the enemies coming at us first, but if you get a few seconds between waves, start killing the ones near the wall. Let’s round them up and clean out the center. Chedderfield, you and half the group go right, and I’ll take the other half left. We can then kill them all in the . . .” Archimedes trailed off as he watched the monsters do something similar to what he had directed his forces to do: organize into a large blob.
While this change in enemy position was a good thing at first for the freshly formed-up soldiers because it meant they didn’t even have to aim their guns and could fire directly into the massive blob of flesh that was the hell-cursed army, that relief only lasted a minute. Archimedes realized exactly what was going on: they were protecting a few brutes with their bodies while the brutes were tearing away at the concrete wall closest to the encroaching enemy army.
“Fuck! They’re trying to destroy the fortifications! DON’T LET THEM TAKE DOWN THAT WALL!” Lucy yelled out, voicing Archimedes’ thoughts as she charged straight toward the group with the mace- and sword-wielding soldiers that had followed her to the ground level first.
“You heard the lady, but be careful with your fire. Don’t do their work for them,” Archimedes called out before Leap-Rushing into the fray, Chedderfield charging in behind him.
Despite how quickly the combined firepower of everyone shooting at the same time killed the zombies, just killing them wasn’t enough. They had to blow the bodies apart to clear the flesh out of the way so they could hit the next layer of zombies, and the penetrative power of their concentrated weapon fire didn’t work fast enough. Archimedes joined up with Lucy’s melee units and worked as hard as he could to tear apart the zombies and brutes blocking their way, but no matter what he and the other melee fighters did, it felt like they were piling up dead bodies only to change the living wall to a wall of corpses. Nothing seemed to help the soldiers get clear shots on the brutes destroying the concrete with every punch, and Archimedes couldn’t even push forward to kill more because he couldn’t find his footing on the pile of slain undead.
“Chedderfield, we need to—”
“I know!” Chedderfield must have read Archimedes’ mind because he instantly used his Acid Breath, coating the twelve zombies and a brute almost in a single spray.
“Holy flaming turds! Get away from them!” Lucy warned the soldiers following her, who all backed up just in time to not be caught in the blast as Archimedes activated Fire Breath, igniting the acid and exploding the zombies and brutes. The concussive force was so strong it sent Archimedes tumbling back fifteen feet along with the rest of the corpses.
“We got ‘em now!” Archimedes cried as he sat up. But then he saw the last crystal brute, who was being disintegrated by the concentrated fire of the soldiers, tear one final chunk of the wall apart, revealing the gaping four-foot-wide hole in their fortifications behind it and the slough of dead bodies on the other side, where the catapulted undead had gone to work as well.
“Fuck!” Archimedes yelled in frustration as he stood up, checking behind him to make sure Chedderfield, Lucy, and the others were okay after the explosive combination.
Archimedes then scanned the area to make sure they had killed all the zombies, but his attention was immediately pulled back to the wall by a shout from Nguyen.
“ARCHIMEDES!” She was yelling at the top of her lungs even while still firing. “ARCHIMEDES! GET UP HERE!”
Archimedes didn’t hesitate for a moment, understanding that Nguyen wasn’t the type to ever exaggerate the seriousness of an issue. He used Leap Rush to boost himself back to the top of the walls. There, he looked out to see exactly what Nguyen was shouting about: the downed jellyfish and fallen monsters had collapsed into the moat, completely negating that defense as the clumped-up corpses from the dead zombies, hellhounds and jellyfish formed an easily traversable path.
To make matters worse, during the time it had taken Archimedes and Chedderfield to clear the courtyard, the enemy army had already advanced from being six hundred feet away to being right at their gates. The regenerating wall struggled to grab even one or two as dozens of them began hacking and cutting at the barriers until the sheer number of hell-cursed corpses piled high enough to create a ramp for the others to run over the coral wall straight into the base. The flood of zombies quickly pushed toward the opening in the concrete wall created by the brutes and zombies from the jellyfish attack.