It had only been a week or so in the small town Ironfruit served since the new Dimensional Jammer System was installed, ensuring that there would be no daemons summoned in the town of Brassbell, Regno. The large combat Clockwork and community schoolteacher was currently going over lesson plans in their capacity with the Public Education Admin during the night; most people weren't active at these hours, so it was a perfect opportunity to take care of the paperwork.
Indeed, after the first few months, the Education Admin had asked Ironfruit if he wanted to be relieved from his role as an educator. To this, Ironfruit had answered no, stating that he would like to continue imparting knowledge to those he safeguarded, as he had come to enjoy serving the community in a non-combat capacity. On the other hand, Ironfruit had indicated that he would appreciate no longer being the only teacher available in Brassbell. As a direct result, Clockwork Knight Ironfruit now shared the role of educator with five other teachers and a few additional staff for the school building that had been erected with shocking rapidity for non-Dungeon construction.
It was exactly 11:29 PM when Clockwork Knight Ironfruit heard the screams of panic and fear, immediately jumping up from his seat and teleporting outside. As he arrived, the massive multi-ton machine immediately accelerated to top speed in the direction of the disruption, the dark purple lightning highlighting itself against the night sky.
Within moments, Ironfruit and the rest of Sapphire Springs' Clockwork Knight contingent gained line-of-sight on the disturbance, coming face-to-face with a withered specter displaying features from dozens of people and several species of magical beasts. The thematograph readout for the apparition almost immediately pinged Spirit, Undead, and Evil, but notably, no ping for Daemon. It seemed that this particular hostile entity lacked any connection to the lower plane.
It was only 20 milliseconds later that Ironfruit spotted Emerald's prone, unmoving form underneath the wraith. Not hesitating in the slightest, all Clockwork Knights present drew their swords and shields before charging into combat, but they notably did not light the deadly Protonium edges of their blades. To do that would be to consign Emerald to a sure death from radiation poisoning, and all four clockworks absolutely refused to be responsible for a civilian's death if they could possibly avoid it.
The wraith immediately opened up with its characteristic purple lightning once more, the arc grounding itself on Ironfruit's shield. The bolt dissipated harmlessly; if it were actual electricity, it might have caused some heating damage if nothing else, but trying to down a Clockwork with a necromantic bolt simply wasn't going to work.
Then half a dozen Clockwork Knights slammed into the wraith, the mana-saturated materials making up their bodies and weapons easily allowing them to make contact and shove the abomination around, but noticeably not actually harming it. In response to this, Ironfruit immediately took it upon himself to herd the wraith away from town, bodily grabbing the abomination and sending over the tac-net "The rest of you get Emerald to safety and make sure she's in good health. I'll dispose of this mangled spirit."
Thus, the next twenty seconds saw Ironfruit dashing through Brassbell's streets at high speed, carrying a flailing, desperate wraith in a chokehold the entire way. Soon, they were outside the village's municipal limits, where the radiation from a radsword activation would have a negligible impact on the town's residents. Now and only now did Ironfruit engage properly, their sword lighting up with radioactive fire as Ironfruit intoned "By the light of a steel sun I shall protect the innocent!" and plunged the plasma-wreathed nuclear sword directly into the wraith's neck.
Simultaneously, Ironfruit engaged the Thematic Conversion Unit that had been installed in the latest update, changing 20% of the mana going to the radsword from the default Atomic Clockwork associated with the Titan of Steel's work into Holy-attribute mana. The wraith immediately began evaporating from the inside out, as a holy nuclear flame eroded away at its very being. Within seconds, the vile spirit made from corrupted soul fragments disintegrated, and Ironfruit extinguished his blade. He would have to see about getting a sword that had an option to simply channel holy mana directly, instead of lighting up with nuclear fire every single time he wanted to use it.
After a cursory radiation check to ensure his presence wouldn't endanger any of Brassbell's residents, Ironfruit began making his way back to town at a leisurely pace. Now it was simply a matter of checking up on Emerald in either the hospital or the morgue, before getting back to making a lesson plan. Though perhaps, if Emerald was dead, Ironfruit would be skipping his duties as an educator for some time in order to mourn the passing of his first ever actual friend.
The machine really hoped that he'd gotten to Emerald in time to save her.
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Jartham was furious while also furiously looking through all the documentation for the Mortal Control System. The recent developments from that abomination of a country that the Titan of Steel put together necessitated a much more rapid response than could be mustered by the Daemon Titan program. Jartham didn't quite know how they'd done it, but somehow that accursed Republic had managed to not only block dimensional access for Daemons to the entire country, but they'd also cut the flow of soul fragments from the material plane within their borders. Exacerbating the problem, whatever method it was had been almost immediately shared with the subterranean species, leading them to cut the flow as well.
Without those soul fragments, there would be no way to create new Daemons and their numbers would rapidly begin to decline due to the infighting Daemons were prone to. Thus, Jartham was looking for any possible way to crush this new development in its infancy, before it had a chance to spread to the entire surface world. Jartham had already written off the dwarves and other subterranean peoples; the Control Elements simply didn't fit down there, and they often lived inside a sufficiently paranoid and fortified society to nullify any chance of serious Daemonic incursions even without the new dimensional jammers.
It took several hours of intensive reading before the Inquisitor Daemon reached the part detailing the design of the Control Elements' brains. Though Grand Dragons were designed to deliberately lack the structures Dungeon Minions had to link them to their master, there might be something else that could do the trick. And then, Jartham found it. The brains of the Control Units had a long-forgotten feature; namely, exposure to a precisely calibrated pulse of mana would send the dragon in question into a permanent berserk state targeted against a specific set of co-ordinates. In addition, a berserk Grand Dragon would then proceed to broadcast the berserk signal themselves against the same set of co-ordinates, activating any additional Control Elements they happened to fly near.
Jartham immediately got up from his seat, and dashed though the torment-brick halls of the facility he resided in, bashing several lesser Daemons out of the way as he made his way to the workshops. Immediately, the Inquisitor forced the door open and shouted "Attention! I require a device made to these specific specifications, effective immediately. Hop to it!" while simultaneously flaring the aura of command inherent to an Inquisitor Daemon. Without questioning the order, all the Daemons present almost literally dropped what they were doing, and began assembling the device.
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A mere hour later, the Berserk Activator was complete, and set with the co-ordinates of the Titan of Steel's realm. Now, Jartham Gorebringer IV simply needed to get to a Grand Dragon and fire the device. That necessitated a journey to the Summoning Room. After all, it simply wouldn't do if any random mortal could drag any Daemon to the material plane at any time; that could lead to uppity paladins getting the bright idea to summon as many Daemons as possible one at a time and kill them on their own terms, effectively gutting Hell's ability to get anything done whatsoever.
Musings aside, Jartham quickly reached the summoning room, and bashed his way to the head of the queue for summonings. Various Deceivers, Carillists, and other assorted fiends shouted in alarm and tossed the occasional fireball Jartham's way as he passed by. Those who merely complained were spared, while those who dared to attack an Inquisitor Daemon died messily as Jartham eviscerated them with a mere snap of his talons, not even bothering to slow down or look away.
The instant that Jartham stepped onto the hexagram-engraved platform, he instantly felt links to dozens of nascent summonings the world over. Carefully looking for a particularly stupid bunch of cultists, Jartham stepped through the gash in reality to a poorly-lit room full of dark robed figures. On a table hastily converted to an altar, a young man was bleeding out, doubtless the sacrifice used to anchor the summoning.
One of the cultists raised a hand, noting "Wait, you're not the succubus we wanted?"
Jartham simply replied "Indeed. I am not." before walking forwards, straight through the summoning circle that was supposed to contain him. As the Inquisitor Daemon strode out of the room, both the cultists and their sacrificial victim were nigh-instantly slashed to ribbons by invisible blades, almost as an afterthought.
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I noticed what was happening almost immediately thanks to my satellite network, but piecing together what was going on took several minutes. All of a sudden, a Grand Dragon on the opposite side of the planet started flying, which wasn't too unusual. Then, instead of getting in a fight with their neighbors, said neighbors immediately turned to fly in similar directions as the first dragon, making the occasional diversion to grab more Dragons as they flew.
It wasn't hard to figure out where the massive on-rushing tide of Grand Dragons was aimed, and given the speed at which Grand Dragons flew, and the population density of Grand Dragons, it was clear that there would be an absolutely massive attacking force of Grand Dragons arriving in less than 24 hours. To be more precise, the dragon wave looked set to gather dragons from a tenth of the world's landmass, meaning that almost 13,000 dragons were inbound.
Immediately, I sent out a call to Ruby Sherridan, informing her "This is not a drill, there are 13,000 angry Grand Dragons inbound on our location due to arrive in less than 24 hours. Get everyone underground NOW, and I don't care how it happens as long as everyone's safe from the fallout! In the meantime, I'm sending out the message to as many nuclear-enabled Dungeons as I know of to churn out combat chassis like there's no tomorrow, because there very well might not be if I don't."
I didn't give Ruby any time to respond, instead sending out messages to the dungeons going by the names Deep Machine, Radio Core, Iron Bunker, Gearworks, Palace of Circuits, Machine Temple, and the other 29 Clockwork Dungeons who had taken advantage of the new Protonium Reactor technology I introduced, informing them of the impending storm. Almost universally, I got responses back from all of them stating that they'd be putting everything they had into manufacturing anti-dragon weapons platforms, along with estimates of how many could be constructed prior to the Dragon Swarm arriving.
The Deep Machine had the highest power output aside from myself, still considering themselves a rival of mine for the position of Infrastructure Director. They indicated that they could churn out the equivalent to one of my battleship chassis every 10 minutes to my eight, but would be splitting their firepower between smaller units about 50 meters long. Most of the other producers of combat chassis were operating at around a fifth of that capacity, meaning that in 24 hours the SRA would have a total of 1,302 battleship equivalent units, a mere tenth of the enemy's numbers. After that, we would have to seal our launch bays to prevent them from being blasted with Dragonfire and jeopardizing any civilians taking refuge inside.
Aside from that, there were also the much-upgraded perimeter defenses for the country, which were now effectively a continuous wall of Proton Beam turrets and Protonium missile silos. Still, those were definitely finite assets; I estimated that they might down the first 500 Grand Dragons before being blasted into oblivion, but they really weren't designed for what was about to happen.
It was only a couple of hours into our preparations when one of my Battleship Clockworks, AAV Spitefury sent me a message saying
AAV Spitefury: Hey boss, can't we just kill a shitload of the Grand Dragons between the swarm and us before they get caught up in the Berserk Wave? It'll greatly reduce the levels of destructive force slamming into our defenses if we cull most of the Dragons that would be involved in that while they're still spread out and vulnerable.
Titan of Steel: Affirmative AAV Spitefury. You can take all currently constructed Battleship Clockworks with you for the purposes of clearing out the Dragons the Berserk Wave would otherwise acquire on its way here, but the instant your clearing zone gets close to the main swarm, return to base for the main defense. We're still going to need all the firepower we can possibly get.
And with that, I unleashed relentless mechanized death onto thousands of unsuspecting Grand Dragons. Though they were doomed anyway if they were swept up by the Berserk Wave, I still found it slightly uncomfortable to order the deaths of so many beings. On the other hand, if I did not, then the odds of survival for everyone I'd put so much work into helping dropped drastically. Such is war, I guess.
Anxiously, I watched the satellite feeds as the Berserk Wave crept ever closer, and my mechanical agents of death brutally terminated every Grand Dragon they came across. The most time-consuming part in many cases proved to be luring the Grand Dragons out of their lairs to locations where they could be put down without needlessly endangering civilian lives. Yes, much quicker results could have been obtained by simply nuking every Dragon where they slept, but sacrificing tens of millions to save a few million was a line too far.
The end result of this was that my cleaners met the swarm about half-way along their trajectory, having ensured that the number of Grand Dragons reaching the Socialist Republic of Amali would not much exceed 6,000. The dragons came closer and closer, and as I sealed my launch bay for battleships, the turbolift was simultaneously hoisting my core into the superheavy combat chassis I'd constructed in secret since becoming Infrastructure Director.
Inspired by Schlock Mercenary's battleplates, the design was a largely triangular hull a kilometer on an edge and 150 meters thick, liberally dotted with weapons emplacements. I'd wanted to make the entire thing out of Muonic materials, but there simply wasn't enough time to build the entire chassis to that spec by the time this occurred. Instead, the only Muonic parts were the insides of the super-spec reactors powering the design, the weapons, and the outer 20 cm of the hull. The rest of the structure was 'mere' CNT-enhanced Aerosteel, meaning that the entire construction was lighter than air. Compared to the battleship chassis I'd been using previously, this machine would have utterly pitiful acceleration, but on the other hand I'd equipped it with massively overbuilt blink units. I estimated that I could probably punch over a light hour in one hop if I really wanted to. On a tactical level, it would be effectively unlimited teleport spam, especially since I was cranking more than enough mana to punch through any redirection.
As the first flares of nuclear fire lit up the horizon, my new chassis teleported into place in midair with me aboard. It's time to kill some Grand Dragons. Let's rock and roll.