Author: "This isn't a new chapter; it's a split of the previous chapter, which was way too long, with 10,000 words.
So, if you remember how this battle ends, move on to the next chapter.
Sorry for the mess"
---
A shot far heavier and harder-hitting rose above the chorus of machine guns still singing from the deck. The high-caliber round cut through the night, glinting faintly with a lethal golden hue, the unmistakable signature of its purity, before it struck and blew the stag's head apart in an explosion of blood and bone.
["When they become susceptible to the Sacred, they're considered lost, or infernal,"] I went on coldly, watching the corpse crumple. ["And the Church orders them killed on sight."]
Even so, they were far from finished with them, to eradicate something that corrupt, killing it isn't enough.
That fleeting thought made me lower my gaze to the sack hanging beneath our branch.
I could hear the Alpha's head thrashing violently at the end of the cable, snapping its broken jaws at the air, reawakened by the scent of blood the breeze carried up from the bay.
And its refusal to die wasn't unique to its kind. Down on the sand, the beheaded stag confirmed it. Its gaunt, headless body kept trying to rise, steadying its wobbling limbs, while small appendages pushed out of the wound at its neck, searching for other fragments to latch onto.
That was why you had to destroy the body, or process it.
For better or worse, in these circumstances, it was the Drexers themselves, still impaled on its black antlers, who began to devour the beast that had run them through, finishing the job.
The rest of the wave ignored the slaughter and kept advancing toward the warship.
They were only a few meters away when the ship's steel groaned.
Right beneath the feet of the angelic figurehead, the armor plating of the bow split open like enormous horizontal jaws, folding back to either side with a deafening screech.
From within, a massive ramp shot out, slamming into the beach with a dull boom that made the sand tremble.
And then, from the metal belly came… cavalry?
My surprise wasn't at the sight of a mounted unit, they still used them on the southern front.
No, it was, and the reason my mind took a second to process it, the enormous eight-legged horses that charged down the ramp.
The old man seemed to know exactly what was going through my head.
["They're called Sleipnir, they're the Brittan Kingdom's exclusive cavalry,"] he said over the comms.
["What are they?"] I whispered, not sure whether I was looking at a Divine animal or a mutated one.
["What do you think?"] he replied, as if he found my confusion amusing.
Without rushing, all of the old man's theoretical lessons made my gaze settle on the riders' complex, almost archaic hydraulic exoskeleton, which hugged every joint and articulation of their plate armor. Right after, I lowered my eyes to their mounts: just as heavily armored, but draped in elegant embroidered caparisons, each bearing a different coat of arms.
Both the helmets and the Sleipnir muzzles integrated gas filters, built to keep fighting even under chemical warfare. And each rider wielded a weapon that, at first glance, struck me as absurd for real combat: a heavy jousting lance…
Until I noticed the abrupt break in its taper, a ring of rotary barrels, fed by an ammunition belt that ran up into the rectangular pack each of them carried on their back.
Meaning the eight legs were miraculously functional, meant to bear and distribute all that weight.
["Even if they don't have any asymmetrical deformities,"] I murmured, studying their stable anatomy, ["I don't think they're beasts touched by divinity."]
["Why do you think that?"]
["Because there are too many of them,"] I said, flatly.
I ran through everything the old man had drilled into me over the years. Divine animals were rare, and their formation still depended on factors that eluded us, especially because, unlike in humans, the concept of "Faith" was ruled out as a criterion.
Besides, those miraculous changes weren't sequenced into their DNA. They weren't inherited. That made every beast touched by divinity a unique, unrepeatable specimen.
Just like with humans in this case, a father's ability to channel Miracles isn't passed down to his children.
You couldn't build an assembly line of miracles.
Mutated ones were another story. Their genetic code did change, and those mutations were passed to their offspring. Drawk was the perfect example.
If the Brittans had hundreds of those identical eight-legged horses, then…
["They're lab-made,"] I concluded, without taking my eyes off my display. ["Some functional mutation, stabilized through genetic editing."]
The old man let a second pass.
["Tch… how boring. You should thank your teacher for teaching you that well."]
["Sure…"] I murmured, letting him take it however he wanted.
["I liked you better when you were little and didn't know anything."]
That made me turn my head, but he dodged it, turning back toward the battle in the bay.
Still, the thunderous roar that followed, from those lances, also dragged my gaze back to them, unwillingly.
In a perfectly synchronized motion, I watched the cavalry level their lances and squeeze the trigger, unleashing an unbroken burst that lit up the night, and blinded my visor's night vision, again.
They made up for the lack of accuracy at full gallop with sheer saturation. The ammo belts ran up and shuddered like metallic vipers from the rectangular packs, getting devoured at an obscene speed.
The wall of fire drowned out the snarls of pain and pinned the Drexers and other creatures in place, keeping them from advancing as the cavalry closed the distance.
With one last violent surge, the traction of eight mutated legs combined with the knights' hydraulic arms. All that massive kinetic energy was funneled into the steel tip of their lances.
The synchronized impact punched through Drexer chests as if their tough gray hide were wet paper. And the ones left impaled were reduced to small chunks of dark viscera and bone with a point-blank burst.
But with the rest, it was different.
I saw one rider slam head-on into a bear riddled with deformities that bulged beneath its bald, sickly skin. The lance went in, but it got stuck in the deep layers of fat and mutated muscle.
Inertia didn't forgive. Unable to push the beast back, all that concentrated force snapped back the way it came, blowing the saddle mounts and literally disconnecting the rider from his mount.
The man was thrown backward, but his Sleipnir kept galloping without him, sparks spraying from the severed umbilical cable that powered his armor.
Another rider met a similar fate, and maybe worse.
He managed to spear the gaunt torso of one of the stags clean through, but the beast's fractal antlers crashed into the armored face of the mount.
And by the forest's sheer malice, one point found the only weak spot: a lens in the Sleipnir's muzzle.
The spike punched through glass, eye, and brain in a fraction of a second. The huge eight-legged mount died instantly, going dead mid-stride and collapsing onto the legs of its rider, who couldn't jump clear under his own weight.
The stag's corpse fell beside him, convulsing as its broken neck tried to set itself and the flesh groped to close around the lance wound that still pinned it.
More of the same made many knights go down, turning into "relatively easy" prey once they were trapped inside their heavy armor.
Through the visor, the horror was mute. I couldn't hear their bones crack, or their pleas.
I could only watch the bears trying to pry their way between the plates with claws and teeth. It made reddish blood start to seep under pressure through the gaps in the armor and the seams of the helmets.
Canned food, I thought watching the Drexers join the feast, licking whatever dripped from the steel cans they couldn't open.
["What are they doing?"] I murmured, watching the rest of the unit push on with the charge. ["They're going to abandon their men?"]
["And what do you expect them to do, kid?"] the old man growled beside me, sounding almost bored. ["Stop dead? That cavalry weighs tons. If they stop, they die. They're only useful as long as they keep moving."]
If that's true, then…
With a quick motion, I unslung my Blitz-Breaker from my back
My fingers flew over the miniature keyboard integrated into the back of my right forearm.
Instantly, the system answered with a line in the corner of my display,
<
From the harness at my belt, small anchoring harpoons shot out with a hiss of compressed air. The cables snapped taut as they bit deep into the bark, forcing me to drive one knee down to lock my position.
["What are you trying to do?"] The old man's voice, rough but calm, slipped inside my helmet. ["Give away our position for an act of mercy?"]
Mercy? No, it wasn't that. Or at least I don't think so. My body simply moved, and "I" only followed its inertia.
"The Alpha's head has its limits…," the old man insisted, raising a finger toward the sky, making me follow it, making me see the tangle of shadows still orbiting above us.
If I fired…
My fingers froze on the trigger, but I didn't let go of the weapon. It drew a sigh from the old man over the comms.
["How many times have I told you? Don't let your imagination run. Don't put yourself in their place. Keep your mind cold. Survive… no matter what."]
I know…
I'd seen enough on the southern front to learn how to switch my senses off.
Though I wasn't sure I'd ever had them "on" in the first place.
That's why I followed the inertia of my body without resisting.
Maybe that's where the part I "ignore" shows itself…
Or maybe it was just a comforting stupidity, something I told myself so I could feel… normal.
I didn't know which was true, and I didn't have time to find out, when a shift in the battle snapped that train of thought in half.
From the ramp, a tide of khaki uniforms tried to save the fallen knights.
Watching their bullets and grenades do nothing but turn them into the next targets made me sigh.
["Don't they have clearing units? Where are the Crystallized Diesel flamethrowers?"]
["Brittania doesn't have an open front on its own soil,"] the old man replied with that encyclopedic calm, as if he'd visited and lived in every Kingdom, the kind that sometimes got under my skin. ["So don't expect NecroDiesel weaponry, kid. Every Kingdom fights with what it has."]
Suddenly, the old man's gaze sharpened. ["Look"] he said, making me lower the weapon.
Between the ranks of riflemen drawn up in formation in front of the ramp, a new unit forced its way through with shoves and shoulders. They looked like heavy infantry, but instead of plates or armor, they wore long black coats, reinforced with sections of insulating rubber as thick as tires.
On their backs they carried generators, wired by cables to their weapons and their helmets. The helmets had a wide, circular, perfectly flat visor, and three coils jutted out from it, wrapped in exposed copper piping that spat small discharges.
["Rubbercoats,"] the old man identified.
There were no powder shots. Only the crack of dozens of voltaic arcs. Electricity leapt from the barrels of their weapons, latching onto the beasts' wet flesh, jumping from one monster to the next in a devastating chain reaction.
The effect was immediate. The bears, which a second ago had seemed invulnerable, convulsed violently as the current cooked their nervous systems.
It did enough damage for the infantry's thousands of rounds, each carrying only faint traces of Sacred Metal, to start taking effect, poisoning them from the inside. It let the destructive power of electricity loose, searing tissue and destroying cells before they could even try to reconnect.
It was the basic strategy of the southern front, executed from a different vector.
One that, from my perch on the branch, I watched the Brittans take a step further, without needing Crystallized Diesel.
Several auxiliary soldiers, sealed head to toe in insulating rubber suits, ran up behind the Rubbercoats. One by one, they threw the generators' heavy levers down, then fled to the rear before the air ionized.
Then the discharges spilling from the coils on their helmets surged wildly, stretching out until they linked with the helmet of the nearest man.
A wall of crackling energy formed, a barrier of electric light that jumped from Rubbercoat to Rubbercoat, sealing the battle line.
["What the hell is that?"] I asked.
["A Tesla Wall,"] the old man said, smiling at my ignorance. ["Watch."]
And then they took one step forward.
While the cavalry charged like a spear, punching deep into the layers of the enemy, the Rubbercoats moved step by step, like a true clearing unit, finishing off the wounded creatures as the infantry behind them riddled everything with holy lead.
The most terrifying part was that as they advanced and took ground, the Rubbercoats spread out. But instead of weakening the formation, that distance only increased its efficiency.
Whenever a creature tried to exploit the gaps to reach the infantry, the "Tesla Wall" snapped alive like a living net.
Electricity hunted the path of least resistance. It ignored the air, leaping ravenously through the enemy's flesh to close the circuit.
Burning it to ash as it became the new focus of the entire infantry, who riddled it with bullets and grenades until there was nothing left to close the circuit through.
Little by little, the tide of rubber and electricity claimed half the beach.
The "Tesla Wall" advanced relentlessly, pushing the darkness back toward the treeline. The beasts, or what was left of them, understood the beach had become a slaughterhouse.
The surviving Drexers screamed, turned, and fled on all fours.
It looked like the assault was over.
But the forest fell silent: the crickets, the wind in the leaves, the creak of wood… everything stopped. And then, the ground shook.
Two roars tore through the air. One to the east of the bay; the other, painfully close, less than two hundred meters to our left.
It wasn't the sharp howl of a Drexer or the bellow of a bear. It was a dense, guttural drone, a physical pressure that crushed my lungs and made my sternum tremble. Beside me, the old man's hunched arrogance evaporated. Down below, even the Alpha's head stopped twitching.
The treetops convulsed violently, carving two direct paths toward the bay. Trunks burst like dry toothpicks under the charge. Anticipating their arrival, the warship fired another flare, restoring the scarlet glow that had begun to fade.
Seconds later, an immense mass leapt from the eastern mountain ridge that cradled the bay. It hit the far end of the beach, cutting off the Sleipnir cavalry mid-rush and forcing them to stop.
Its size matched an Alpha's, but it was her withered humanity that turned my stomach on instinct. She was a walking blasphemy: the anatomy of a woman warped and stretched to the very edge of the unrecognizable. She rose on the sand, grotesquely naked, her pallid skin shining like sick wax beneath the red light.
She looked over the mangled corpses of her young and turned toward the riders and their eight-legged horses. Her withered breasts shuddered against her misshapen chest as she hunched. She spread her claws and didn't weep like a mother; she let out a disjointed screech, a broken sound, soaked in festering rancor that reached even our branch.
There was no time to react…
At the treeline, the darkness spat out the second shadow straight onto the Rubbercoats. Tons of corrupted muscle crushed one of the heavy soldiers at the center of the formation. His insulating coat and helmet gave way with a wet, final crunch.
With the carrier turned to pulp, the circuit broke. Voltaic arcs sputtered, losing stability, and the wall collapsed.
The light infantry and the Rubbercoats, along with the chivalry and their mounts, froze for an instant, because what had just landed in front of them weren't mere Alphas…
And their joined roar that shook the beach proved it.
The Drexers fleeing in blind panic stopped dead, claws digging into the sand. Bowed under a superior will, they twisted back on themselves and charged again, dragging the rest of the corrupted tide with them.
["It can't be…"] I said, costing me to process the image on my screen. ["The Apex are months away from waking."]
The old man, who'd regained his composure the moment it had thundered past, answered on the same beat:
["The Drexers' screams."] His voice held not a trace of the calm from seconds ago. ["They've never lost this many young in a single night."]
Down on the beach, the Rubbercoats finally reacted.
They unloaded their coilguns in unison, trying to re-ignite their wall around the male Apex. The hits seared away chunks of black muscle. In parallel, the light infantry formed a three-tier firing line, trying to slow the corrupted tide bearing down on them.
And to the right, at the far end of the beach, the Sleipnir chivalry split, building momentum as they galloped around the female. The inner ring of knights tucked their lances tight to their flanks, points angled inward, creating a spinning circular saw that forced her to stay still while they fired point-blank.
The illusion of a counterattack lasted three seconds.
Through the smoke of its own charred flesh, the male's arm snapped out, catching a Rubbercoat by the ankle. With a sharp yank, the beast hauled him off the ground and used him like a club against the rest of the squad.
The human-weapon struck a second Rubbercoat so hard it tore his feet off the sand… and catapulted him.
Despite the chaos and the distance, I heard his scream. It was a shrill, high, strangely clean wail, cut off brutally as he smashed into the warship's steel hull, producing a dense, hollow gong.
Inside the chivalry's ring, the female Apex stopped shrinking. She accepted the rain of fire and simply leapt into the formation surrounding her—sending men and beasts alike flying—while letting the lances sink into her sickly skin, just to reach the knight most stained with the blood of her children.
She landed with her back to the forest, back to the branch we were on.
From my angle, all I could see was the rest of the heavy chivalry standing as mute witnesses while the Apex unhinged her jaws and snapped them shut with their companion's head between them.
My screen showed me only the final convulsions of the Knight's headless body, and blood falling to stain the sand.
Before I realized it… the barrel of my Blitz-Breaker was already aimed back toward the bay.
["Not this again"] the old man cut in over the comms, stopping me for the second time.
I knew he was pragmatic, a cold machine built around survival, but even I had to wonder: Wasn't he going to intervene, not even under these circumstances?
The tangle of shadows that had been orbiting above us had already shifted toward the beach, drawing most of the suppressive fire the warship's decks were spitting out.
["If this keeps up, they're going to be wiped out"] I said, defending the impulse.
["Don't rush, kid"] the old man replied in that usual imperturbable tone of his. ["Knowing that ugly bastard, if he truly meant to come ashore in the middle of the night, then he would've come prepared for the dark."]
As if something had confirmed it, he turned his head slightly.
["Look northwest along the coast, near the cliffs."]
I adjusted the zoom, and at first I saw only the blackness of the surf hammering the rock. Then the light amplifier caught it: a black skiff, unlit, gliding in total silence with the tide.
Its occupants, dressed in gear that swallowed almost any reflection, slipped over the side without raising a single drop and covered the last meters underwater.
The first things to break the surface were circular lenses, catching the flares' crimson glare on the heavy respirators beneath them. As they rose out of the swell, I caught the stiff clerical collars beneath the men's masks, and the unmistakable wimples framing the women's heads.
["Priests and nuns?"] I asked in a whisper, glancing at the old man who, as always, seemed to know exactly who they were.
["S.A.S."] the old man answered.
The moment I heard the initials, a vague sting of recognition pricked at me.
["Brittana's Special Apostolic Service."] the old man clarified, his didactic tone laced with both respect and disdain.
While the Male kept venting his rage on the Rubbercoats… with a Rubbercoat.
The dozen priests and nuns of the S.A.S. slid like shadows toward the Female's back, only a few meters from the shoreline they'd surfaced from.
There were no war cries and no covering fire. Only drawn steel: thick curved fighting knives that didn't give back a single glint under the flare.
The immense pale aberration remained absorbed in the knights, still smeared with Drexer blood, and didn't notice them until the nimbler shadows, the ones with feminine silhouettes, climbed up her hindquarters.
Then everything happened at once. The priests went for the tendons in her legs, while the nuns drove straight for her neck and thorax.
Unlike the infantry's standard rounds, her waxen flesh didn't seal instantly after the cut of those blades. The wounds stayed open, weeping as if the curved metal were burning the infection from the inside out.
Driven mad by a pain she wasn't used to, the Apex tried to call for help, but with her vocal cords severed she couldn't. Powerless, she swung her claws at her attackers, but the nuns, with an ecclesiastical elegance, used her as a springboard to peel away in a backward leap.
While the priests let glass vials drop from their harnesses.
The moment they shattered, the contained chemical reaction spilled free, billowing into a dense cloud of opaque smoke that swallowed them all, priests, nuns, and the female alike. It was saturated with tiny metallized particles that threw interference across my display.
Visibility went to zero. I caught only shifting silhouettes and small bursts of sparks, until the Apex suddenly broke out of the smoke screen. Her skin was boiling with a red, blistering irritation. Her chest heaved in erratic spasms with every breath of air laced with metal, most likely Sacro, enough to trigger that reaction.
Then, before she could build momentum, a dozen small harpoons shot out from the fog's thickness and sank deep into her back. With her tendons severed, she couldn't fight the combined pull that dragged her, little by little, back in.
Without warning, a blow to my shoulder snapped me out of the fight.
The old man's voice rasped in my earpiece before I could react.
Without warning, a blow to my shoulder snapped me out of the fight.
The old man's voice scraped my earpiece before I could react.
["What are you doing?"]
"Hm?" I turned, confused.
["Weren't you going to shoot?"]
The old man read my unspoken doubt and opened the same hand he'd used to strike me.
["Deal with him."]
Instinctively, I followed the nod of his helmet toward my new target.
The male… the Apex Predator of the Forest. After finishing off the Rubbercoats trying to contain him, he turned toward those firing on his young, and toward the other creatures charging. With every movement, a soldier died brutally, sliced apart by his claws, half-devoured by his jaws, or with organs ruptured by the inertia of a blow that had barely grazed them. And still, the formation didn't break.
The infantry trembled each time one of their comrades died, but they held the line. They stayed there, fingers rigid on the triggers, because they knew that if they ran, all they'd accomplish was dying like cowardly prey.
Fighting down my body's impulse, I lowered my gaze to the bullet the old man offered me, red as blood. Its tip wasn't a single solid piece. It was made of petals, beautifully engraved, overlapping one another with a delicacy that had no place in war.
["What's wrong, you don't want to?"]
I said nothing. I just kept staring at that closed flower, waiting to bloom, and the question gnawed at me from the inside. What had changed?
The old man answered any doubt with something I could only take as a provocation.
["You don't trust yourself to make the shot. That's it, isn't it?"]
The hit to my pride worked. I took the round, chambered it, and closed the bolt. For the first time since the battle began, I set the stock against my shoulder with deliberate resolve.
Even though I didn't need it, the old man made the branch creak as he knelt beside me, to act as my spotter.
Even though I didn't need it, the old man made the branch creak as he knelt beside me, acting as my spotter.
["Range: two point three. Westerly wind, steady. It'll push you right."]
Still, I clung to his voice over the red trajectories and the ballistic-correction algorithms the display was vomiting in front of my eyes.
["At this range it's not just gravity. It's the planet's rotation, too."]
Through the scope's magnification, I got an image that was clean and grainy at the same time.
["Remember. A sniper doesn't aim at a place. He aims at a moment."]
I emptied my lungs, exhaling hard until the smallest muscular tremor left the rifle's metal. Then there was only the pad of my finger, curling into the trigger's cold curve, increasing pressure gram by gram, waiting for that silence between heartbeats to break the mechanism.
I repeated the old man's words like a mantra, accounted for the projectile's speed, the distance, and aimed for that moment 2.4 seconds in the future.
And yet, when the instant arrived…
["STOP!"]
I didn't have time to ask. A familiar whistle was caught by my helmet's microphones.
A heartbeat later, the bay, the forest, even the branch we were on shuddered. Down on the beach, the artillery shells that a moment before had been cutting through the air detonated right in front of the infantry.
The first blast opened a crater. The second turned it into a slaughterhouse. By the third it wasn't earth anymore. It was limbs.
It dismembered the Drexers and the other creatures about to crash into the line, tearing their momentum apart by the pieces and splattering the sand with fragments that still tried to knit themselves back together.
The male reacted instantly. He didn't roar or wail for the dead young. He sensed danger and prioritized it.
He left the slaughter for later, coiled his legs, and sprang toward the battery of six light tanks modified into artillery. Only now did they become visible from our branch, as they emerged from the warship's "dark zone."
With a single leap he cut the distance in half, and when he landed he didn't lose momentum. The sand exploded under his feet and he kept running, straight at the guns.
The tank crews spotted the threat too and reacted in kind, opening fire on the bizarre mass of corrupted muscle, more than four meters tall, that was coming for them. They only managed to hit the empty space he left behind, the male Apex weaving with an unnatural agility for something his size between their barrages.
The weapons mounted on the decks stopped trying to contain the bat swarm and dipped their barrels to help bring him down. Even the few soldiers assigned to protect the artillery stepped in front of him and opened fire.
None of their rounds worked. They vanished into his flesh like stones into a tar pit…
Even the shots that left a golden glint of pure sacral metal only halted him for a few moments before his body expelled the poisonous fragments.
The impact seemed imminent…
Until the branch we were on flared with a dark scarlet flash, and 2.4 seconds later, after traveling 2,300 meters…
The bullet was absorbed like the rest, but unlike the other, that handcrafted round bloomed savagely a millisecond after it punched through the Apex's blind temple.
Its sharpened petals opened and, driven by the projectile's spin, whirled like saws, ripping and grinding everything in their path until the base deformed, tripping the detonator. The small charge went off, propelling the petals as shrapnel into his skull.
The effect was… mind-opening.
The male collapsed into the sand mid-stride, like the Sleipnir in the first charge.
His head fractured from the inside, splitting in two, held together by a hinge of grayish skin and dark flesh that kept both halves connected. Through that opening, you could make out the scarlet metal petals driven deep into his purple brain.
That kept the two sections from joining, even as the Apex pressed them together with his claws, trying to rebuild his head through the agony, legs thrashing as he let out a pitiful, atrocious cry.
While the infantry soldiers looked around, trying to figure out where the shot had come from, I turned back to the same old man who'd implied I wouldn't be able to do it. I lifted my visor so I could watch him swallow his words.
I couldn't make out his face beyond his ocularium, but I imagined the rest from the sour edge in his voice.
["You still rely too much on technology!"]
I stayed still for a second, not expecting yet another complaint.
["Sure…"] I murmured, then turned back toward the beach. The male Apex was still trying to rise while his body tried, little by little, to expel the scarlet petals. ["What do we do now?"]
["Nothing,"] the old man said. ["We've already gained enough for that bastard to finally show himself."]
I didn't have to ask who he meant.
I didn't have to look.
His presence imposed itself on its own.
A figure over two meters tall, wrapped in armor where light and shadow rippled as if it were alive, not metal but something that resembled taut, varnished muscle fibers, descended the ramp.
The inquisitor finished landinging and ended the battle with a single gesture, a strike of his cane into the sand.
And the beach answered the miracle.
A pillar of fire rose around the Apex out of nowhere, wrapping its body like a sentence climbing into the night sky.