NOVEL NEXT 274 – Rising Thunder Pt. 3
Artillery crews scrambled to load their mortars and field cannons, tankmen put their machines into first-gear and began spinning up their engines, training their weapons on the treeline. Mortars were fired at the marked target zones, one after the other, spreading out to cover as wide an area of the forest as possible while giving the scouts opportunity to get clear; a brief whistle on the descent, before a thunderous BOOM audible even here. Cultivators and normal people alike kicked back all sorts of liquid courage, be it drink, Liquid Vigor, DDLV, or some other, homemade elixirs. Trees were both heard and seen toppling, the forest rumbling not unlike the clouds of a storm before an impending lightning-strike, swarms of birds flying for dear life. Forest critters, too, were seen running for their lives, a deer and a wolf seen running side by side out of the treeline. Soon after them followed the first of the scouts, the man’s Second-model tank suit was just about sufficient to let him outpace the clay monstrosity in his wake. It was a thing of five legs, three arms, and two heads, one faceless, with two faces occupying its torso instead. One by one, the other scouts emerged from the treeline, the Eagle-man seen somehow propelling himself above the treeline and gliding down, while the old man exited covered in strangely runny clay, grasping a cracked orange gemstone in one hand and the longer of his swords in the other.
One after the other, Clay Soldiers and inhuman clay monstrosities alike emerged in the scouts’ wake. Some Clay Soldiers were shaped in the images of Pateirian soldiery, others were vaguely humanoid, and the horde ran the gamut, but one thing was consistent. Their eyes all shone varying brightnesses of yellow, and although only a small few could see it at this distance - such as Zefaris - their bodies all had areas of hardened, cracked clay, and from these cracks, too, shone that yellow light. Most wielded scavenged war-knives or possessed a single disfigured, weaponized limb, but the largest monstrosities were strong enough to carry entire logs or boulders, and these things numbered perhaps one tenth of the total Clay Soldier forces.
There was a short time of immense tension between when the scouts got clear of the treeline, and when one could hear the order blast across the field.
“FIRE AT WILL!”
An all-consuming thunder resounded and the ground shook underfoot, mortars landing just as the first of many thousand shots were fired. It was the tankmen’s Barrage Guns that made up the body of the gunpowder symphony, their relentless pounding the background noise for the divine thunder of mortars, cannons, anti-cultivator rifles, shotguns, exotic firearms, and all manner of minor magicks. What few Eagle-men and other wind magic users were present, had their tasks cut out for them just clearing the smoke. Despite their presence, the full-sized tanks only made up a tiny portion of the wall of lead, serving as artillery on the sides.
It went on and on, time itself becoming enigma as all those in the battle line solely focused on one thing. Gunfire.
Even Zelsys, though not willing to spend precious ammunition unless necessary, loaded a Type-1 shell and built Fulguric charge in her second stomach just in case, whilst continuously producing and burning inhuman quantities of Fog to unleash Thundersaw
after Thundersaw.One after the other she set them loose, able to just sit still and dedicate all her output to this task, her focus unimpeded as even without sight, she possessed a general awareness of where these screaming hunks of unstable cold-iron were. With five Thundersaws in the air at once, she put the Thundersaw Swarm to task in dismembering what she, in her mind, dubbed the Clay Gestalts; to toppling them and disabling them that their cores might be annihilated. Indeed, she thought of the biggest clay monstrosities, totaling over ten cores within the mass, as Gestalts, whereas all those smaller were simply Two to Nine-core Composites.
Meanwhile, Bherad the Tailor’s needle-sword elegantly darted about the battlefield, tripping, mutilating, entangling, and impaling Clay Soldiers, his skillful eyes sharp enough to discern the locations of their cores with some, albeit limited, consistency, due to the visual obstruction inherent to large-scale use of gunpowder.
Ozmir had pulled from his bag a set of Bombard Salamander Eyeballs, shish-kabobed on a stick of ancient ceremonial wood from a divine tree and pickled in the faux-amniotic fluid of a draconic homunculus. Through the consumption of these he awakened a mutation - globules of highly volatile alchem-organic explosive compound were produced in his stomachs while two of his three sets of lungs were put to task, and with some effort, he spewed forth a veritable rain of explosive ordinance upon the Clay Soldiers’ horde.
Though her understanding of a First-model tank suit’s inner workings wasn’t the most sophisticated, Collier knew more than enough to make her bashed-together walking artillery piece pull its own weight and then some, for one thing she understood: Obscure, bizarre automated reloading mechanisms, and a great many prototypes she had had to choose from in such a short time. Three back-mounted Anti-Cultivator Rifles equipped with Burgess’s pre-programmed autoloader arm, two fully loaded Macroshotguns, and an entire tow truck of Tank-scale Barrage Guns for later, not to mention all the ammunition and firearms she could scrounge up. Profit and compensation came later, she couldn’t make any damn money if this city got leveled.
Collier made her tank suit to engage its proprietary Iron Brotherhood stability anchors - piston-driven spikes on either foot - and set loose firepower only matched by four other tankmen put together, yet aimed with the calibrated precision of one knew every tiny nook and cranny of the guns mounted and how they were most likely to interact with the suit’s mass. She didn’t need to know how to talk to a Fulgur-Igneic engine to know how to turn gunfire into a symphony, and she had both the eyes and experience to hit a copper Gelt in flight at a hundred meters.
