“Fuck fuck fuck!” I corrected my uncontrolled dive at the last second, landing into a roll - just as well, because I was now at 29 HP and didn’t have any heals. But now, I had AP. I sprung up, roaring as crackling black light ripped around my body and down the length of the spear. “EAT A DIIIICK!”
The Master of Blades split out toward the Wraithlord. It vaporized three of his shadows and blew him onto his back. Before he could get up, I was on him, the flaming Spear of Nine Spheres raised to strike.
“We will take back what you stole!” The Wraithlord hissed. Its voice was like dry wind howling down a stone tunnel. “For Ashur! For Napath!”
There was a pretty good chance he was buying for time, so rather than give it to him, I plunged the Spear down into his face. It exploded into dust, and the remaining shadows vaporized.
[Quest Updated: Objective complete! 3/3 Artillery batteries destroyed!]
[You gain 500 EXP!]
[New objective: Protect the Wall!]
The game didn’t have to elaborate. There was really only one thing to protect the wall from now.
The Brontosaurus reached the useless abatises and charged in against them, shoving them out of the way with its chest. Now that I had a better look at the dino-zombie, it was definitely packed with explosives.
“Okay, Tidbit! Let’s go break up this donkey show!” I called up to her. “You got fire?”
“Yes! But only enough for one more attack!” The dragon soared down to land, heaving for breath. The opalescent color between her scales was glowing. She was burning hot to touch. “Almost... phew... almost out. Stamina potions?”
“Last one.” I pulled it from my inventory and helped her chug it. “Glad I picked up all those herbs in the swamp. Gonna be brewing all night.”
“You should make some beer.” Karalti bent down to let me onto her back, then launched heavily into the air.
“Beer?”
“Yeah! For Vash! We were talking about food before, and he really likes beer. He said he drank a whole keg during an orgy once. I don’t know what an orgy is, but he said everyone was dancing and cheering him on. It sounds like fun!”
I shook my head in disbelief. “This guy is supposed to be a monk.”
“He is! So it was a monk orgy or something, I dunno!”
The bronto was gaining on the No Man’s Land with frightening speed. Nerveless, fearless, it was completely unstoppable. It ploughed through trees, mud, razor wire, barricades and bodies, shedding chunks of flesh on its relentless course toward the wall.
“Let’s do an A-roll past those things and scatter them, then flame the port side,” I said. “We only have one chance at this.”
“I know! Hold onto your butthole!” Karalti’s focus intensified, just before she furled her wings in close to her flanks and dove.
I stared over her shoulder as the bloated corpse got closer and closer... and when we closed in, she pivoted and sprayed a precise line of Ghost Fire along the brontosaurus’s flank. It hit the explosives and caught, white fire blazing.
Pinned by centrifuge, I fought gravity to snap my head around and look back to see the earth-shattering kaboom - but as we soared back up into the air, the Bronto was still moving just as it had been - except that it was now on fire. An acrid, caustic smell filled the air.
“Fuck. What the... oh, shit!” I slapped my own thigh, then held onto the saddle. “Karalti! Turn back! That thing is carrying Greek Fire!”
“What’s that?”
“Those explosives are protected by a layer of quicklime that insulates the payload from fire, but gets really really hot on contact with water.” I looked over the terrain, trying to figure out the Demon’s strategy. There were puddles of water on the ground. There were heaps of dead, soggy zombies and explosive vest-wearing skeletons piled against the walls. “We need water. A lot of water. We need it fast.”
“How, though?”
Just as she said that, a trebuchet behind the wall flung a huge ball of flaming pitch at the approaching bronto. The projectile nailed it in the chest, sending it reeling to the side. It stumbled and fell to its knees in the mud, the vest barely touching the sodden ground. Where it did contact, white steam began to rise.
“Uhh... uhhh...” for a terrified second, I found myself paralyzed. I’m not smart enough for this shit, I thought, staring at the distant trebuchets as another counterweight cocked back. My eyes widened. “Wait! Trebuchet! See that bucket that they’re using to balance the counterweight? Do you think you can carry it?”
“Gonna have to!” Karalti rolled up and pumped her wings, tongue lolling.
“You have Haste, don’t you? Any mana?”
“Just enough!”
The dragon’s hot scales flared with seams of light as she silently cast the Spera-Cil-Kain spell, boosting her speed another twenty percent. The Weaponeers manning the siege engine scattered as she winged over the wall and landed on the trebuchet’s beam. Seesawing back and forth, beating her wings to maintain balance, she hastily pulled the rocks out of the counterweight and threw them to the ground.
“What are you doing?!” The Catapult Supervisor ran for us, pulling at his hair. “Stop!”
“Excuse me sir! We’re just going to borrow this for a second! Trust me!” I shouted back down, catching the saddle grips just as Karalti lurched back into the air with the bucket clasped in her hands.
Fortunately, there was a lot of water around the Prezyemi Line. The bronto was about halfway across No Man’s Land, dragging barbed wire and corpses on its course toward the men. It had lost its guts from a cannon blast, but it just dragged those along, too. Karalti flew down to the surface of a shell crater, scooping up half a huge bucket of water.
“I can’t do it!” She panted as she struggled back into the air. “Too heavy!”
“You can! Pour a bit out, and let’s go!” I checked her weight limit. We were a hundred pounds over. White-knuckled, I went into my inventory to throw out anything heavy. We were carrying a couple of sets of armor and spare weapons. Without a thought, I threw them all to the ground along with a bag of five hundred gold. They all landed in the mud below. Items didn’t despawn in Archemi - and they were as safe out in the battlefield as they were in my Inventory.
The reduction in weight was enough that Karalti could fly. Her stamina was at 5% by the time we reached the brontosaurus, who was barely a body length away from the pile of zombies at the Wall. In synch with her, I felt the burning of her efforts as she lined herself up.
“I’m going to go down and slash open those bags.” Grim and focused, I fixed on our rapidly approaching target. “Pour behind me. At the end, land and I’ll jump on: we can restore a bit of stamina, grab the thing’s tail to stop it walking, and hold on.”
“Roger.” Karalti’s tongue lolled as she lined up, and I jumped. The wind rushed by as I fell, then landed with a soft ‘thump’ on one of the satchels, driving my spear into the thick oiled leather. It split open, puffing out a cloud of stinging white dust. Quicklime was cheap to produce, caustic as hell, and reacts explosively with water, reaching temperatures of 200 degrees within ten seconds. This much quicklime was guaranteed to reach the effective maximum temperature in less than half a minute - around 500 degrees. I knew the stuff well: we’d used it to cook powered armor pilots in their armor in the swamps of Indonesia.
Holding my breath against the toxic dust, I zig-zagged from side to side on the dinosaur’s back, dragged the Spear through each payload, and jumped to the next one, trusting in Karalti behind me. As water slopped onto the exposed powder, it began to hiss and crackle, absorbing every drop of liquid as it hardened and cracked with a sound like huge grinding teeth. I was fucked if the payload under the quicklime was explosive instead of flammable.
The brontosaurus emitted a gurgling moan as the packs on its back swelled, rupturing with steam and the expanding stone inside. I was about halfway along when the first pack ignited with an audible ‘phwoomph’. Heat and a garish, dancing ye
llowish light flooded over me, along with an awful rotten egg odor.
“Sulfur! Fuck fuck fuck!” I stabbed a pack on the way past, but then just focused on running past the skeleton archers and the flying snakes. Above and behind me, Karalti threw the bucket into a pack of zombies charging toward the front line and then landed on top of them. Swiping and stomping, smashing them to pulp with her tail, she struggled to keep pace with me as I wove across the see-sawing Bronto’s back and leaped toward her. I was out of AP and out of enhanced jumps. Even with a run up, I hit her ribs, bounced off, and landed in the mud.
“Watch out!” Karalti lumbered forward, seized me in her jaws, and ran.
The Brontosaurus’s vest ignited, belching steam, then greenish fire that consumed the huge dinosaur and turned it into a hundred-foot long barbecue grill. It collapsed to its knees, then toppled forward with its head barely resting against the base of the corpses piled up at the wall. When the belly of it hit the mud, there were muffled explosions, then a roaring conflagration as the wet ground ignited all the Greek fire beneath it. Flaming oil gushed out onto the oil-soaked corpses, lighting them. The flames streaked toward us across the water.
“Throw sand! Throw sand!” Somewhere on the battlements, a man shouted over and over until his voice broke.
I jostled up and down in my dragon’s mouth. She ran until her stamina ran out, breaking down into a heap of wings and long sagging tail. She dropped me on a pile of smashed skeletons to heave for breath.
“Holy fucking titballs.” I reached up to embrace her around the neck, watching as the fallen bronto’s bones ignited. The entire battlefield blazed white as they cooked, the heat so intense we could feel it at the other end of the battlefield. “Imagine if that had gotten to the Wall. You did it, Tidbit.”
“You helped too.” She pulled her wings back into position, shuddering with the effort to lift them.
I leaned back to look up at her. “Hey, now. Don’t downplay this. You worked your ass off. Take the credit.”
“Okay.” She crooned, tucking her face down shyly. “But you saw the bucket. I don’t notice lots of things while I’m flying.”
“That’s why we’re a team. Speaking of noticing things - those flying eye things have me worried.” I searched the sky. “Did you kill any?”
“A few.” Karalti’s mental voice was strained. “I dunno if we got all of them.”
“I have a feeling those flying snakes we saw are recon units. Nothing we can do about it now, though.” I rubbed her hot neck, monitoring her status. Only once the Fatigue penalty icon blinked out did I climb onto her back.
When she was back at 5%, Karalti awkwardly took off into the air, tilting to one side as her left wing caught the wind a little slower than the stronger right wing. She strained on the way to the wall, where we were greeted by a crowd of cheering, whooping soldiers.
“Good gods, man!” Istvan was at the front ready to receive us, and when I jumped down, he reached out a hand to clap my forearm. “What a performance! Between you and Suri, you nearly wiped out the entire attack force!”
“Karalti and the artillery support are the only reasons I didn’t get my ass kicked.” I wearily clapped the dragon on her knee as she reared back up to sit on her tail and rest. “How’d Suri go?”
“Well, first she grabbed a rifle and took out fifty-two zombies.” Vash’s deep, gravelly voice rasped from behind me, making me and Karalti both jump. “Then she loaded in ten crates of cannonballs by herself while you were bouncing around in the mud, THEN single-handedly took out the four Allosaurs advancing out of the mists behind the Brontosaurus with a rocket launcher-”
“And if you don’t think I’m keeping this baby, you’re out of your mind.” Bathed in sweat and streaked with gunpowder, Suri pushed through the crowd of soldiers with a simple musket-like rocket launcher braced over one shoulder. She carried the four-foot long weapon like it was made of feathers instead of iron and hardwood.
I grinned. “Ditching the bigass sword?”
“Nah. My axes broke, and this is better.” She grinned back. “Turns out I like guns.”
Vash pointed at her. “If you don’t marry her, I will.”
“I thought you weren’t talking to me?” I stepped away from Karalti and embraced Suri one-armed, thumping her on the back and kissing her on the cheek.
The monk scratched his stubbly jaw. “Oh... yes. That’s right. Thank you for reminding me, you filthy lying pile of jackal cum.”
“We all saw you out there, Fly-boy and Fly-girl.” Suri let go of me, eyes dancing. “So, how many’d you get?”
I made a show of thinking for a moment. “It was pretty chaotic out there... I don’t exactly know, but I know it was a skele-ton.”
Istvan’s nose wrinkled. Vash laughed, slapping his thighs as Suri turned away in disgust. I cackled and raised my hands to the sky, bathed in the joy of pun-romantic power right up until my Berserker girlfriend decked me across the face with her free fist and knocked my ass to the ground.
“Oof.” I pushed up on one arm, and reset my jaw back into position with a muffled crunch. “Okay. Guess I deserved to get boned for that.”
Suri’s eyes narrowed to smoldering golden slits. “You did not.”
“You do NOT want to rib me any further, young lady. I can do this forever.” I grinned back at her.
She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Okay. Fine. I surrender. What do you want from me?”
“Well... we could go back to our bedroom at the Fort and...” I paused as the grin went from ‘playful’ to ‘shit-eating’.
Suri glared at me. “Do. Not.”
“... have a mature, consensual adult conversation over a bottle of wine,” I finished.
The woman put her hands on both my shoulders. “Good. Because my consent to anything ends when you start in with the puns. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Istvan cleared his throat softly. “If you two are done... we must urgently debrief now that the crisis has passed.”
“Sure.” Suri stepped around me, looking up at Karalti. The exhausted dragon lowered her muzzle to sniff, huffing hot air over Suri’s skin. Hesitantly, she reached up a hand to stroke her. Karalti tensed, but as the woman massaged her sore muscles, the dragon’s crests went from alert to half-mast. “You fought a hell of a fight today, Special-K. You gonna be able to make it home?”
“Of course, I’ll be able to make it home!” The dragon stiffened, then snorted and brushed Suri’s hand off. “Come on, Hector. We got a debrief to go to. And we’ll be the first ones there!”
Chapter 25
At Soma’s request, the debrief was held in the Officer’s Mess. Compared to the War Room, it was clean, warm and dry, with brass candelabras and rich wooden furniture. There was real food here, miles above what the rank and file had to eat. Roast chicken, bread, vegetables, even fruit. The floors were not covered in reeds, but carpet. Everything about it pissed me off.
"The zombies were digging, you say?" Soma sat at the head of the table, where he sawed into an entire chicken and a platter of baked potatoes. The knife and fork looked like kid’s toys in his giant hands, but he was able to separate meat from bone with the precision of a surgeon. "That is concerning. Did you see any sort of sophisticated earthworks nearby? Any reason for what they were doing?"
"No." Rin looked to Suri and me for encouragement. "It was weird to find them out there, actually. We didn't see any other excavation crews."
"I had a thought about that." Suri sat to my right, her hand resting on my thigh, my hand covering hers. "Could they be trying to tunnel under the fort or the wall? They don't have to breathe, but they have to worry about mud and tunnel collapse... those Dredgers looked like they were trying to drain something."
"Most likely, they are trying to drain the bogs into the Sarviz so that they can minimize the amount of water they pass through on their way here. There is no feasible way for them to maintain the kind of underground infrastructure they'd need to bui
ld a tunnel underground." Soma shook his head. "The ground is far too soft."
"The rock underneath is not," Istvan said sourly. "And there is a city under the swamp."
"The rock is very far down. My father had the swamp surveyed, looking for oil." Soma shook his head. "And no one has found any evidence of a city under the Endlar. No one has seen it. It’s nothing more than a barbarian fairytale."
"Oh, yes. Everything must be seen by you to be real." Vash was rocked back in his chair, smoking what smelled like a mixture of tobacco and weed in a carved wood and bone pipe. "Taltos cannot be seen from here. Is that also a fairytale?"
Soma glowered at him. "Archaeologists with better tools and more brains than you have explored this mud pit looking for a lost city, Dorha. No evidence of civilization was found. Believe me, I am very interested in the prospect of dragon ruins, but time has taken its toll. There are no cities of the Solonkratsu left here."
"There's definitely a city under the swamps in Ilia," I replied.
"And how do you know that?" Soma asked acidly. "Did you hear about it on your nursemaid's knee?"
"I went there," I replied. "The place is called Cham Garai. It’s a closely guarded secret of the Order of St. Grigori. I had to go through ritual trials there to be able to bond with Karalti."
Karalti looked up from her meal, chewing vigorously. Her polymorphed form was still youthful, but she now looked like a Tuun woman in her early twenties instead of a girl in her late teens. Her cheeks were stuffed with chicken. “Wat?”
Vash rolled his eyes so hard that his lashes fluttered. "It's almost like the native people who lived here for thousands of years might know something you don't, Soma."
"I am far more concerned by the proximity of the Ix’tamo," the lord replied acidly. "The one you four retrieved is the first we’ve ever captured from the Demon. Horrible things… Rin has already reported the extent of the damage it did to a small area of our province. At this rate, the land around Karhad will be ruined for generations, perhaps forever. If the undead somehow manage to undermine the Prezyemi Plateau - geologically, I mean - the wall could collapse."
Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset Page 102
