NOVEL NEXT 90 – Mangy Dogs and Stone Soldiers
Turning the sound ward generator off he proceeded to stride over to one of his shelves, grabbing an ornamental saber off its stand, proclaiming, “I might be out of practice, but I’m an out of practice Gold-rank Hunter. Don’t worry about me, just focus on them. Make a show of it. Drag it into the streets if you can. If they’re coming through one of the old escape tunnels, you should be able to trace their path back to the staging point.”
While the governor did this, Zelsys and the Mercenary both pulled out their own weapons - Zel her cleaver, the Mercenary his breech-loading rifle. She didn’t see exactly how he manipulated the gun itself, just that from somewhere on his armor he pulled an asymmetrical octagonal cartridge with a blue gemstone instead of a leaden ball.
They both took up positions at either side of the door, Zelsys procedurally firing up the Breath Engine while the Mercenary began breathing in a strange way that had a continuous ribbon of Fog coming out of his mouth and re-entering his nostrils. Crovacus stood up against the right-side wall, behind Zelsys, veins bulging from his forehead and his right hand gripping the saber with a curious hold. It wasn’t a swordsman’s grip, but it was still natural enough to insinuate extensive practice and experience. The trio waited until the sound of impending combat stopped - for a short while, at least.
In this short while, Zelsys kept pushing the lion’s share of her lung capacity into filling the Essentia Crucible with Fog, focused mostly on coalescing one grand manifestation of Siphoning Pulse through this condensed Aether core. All in all, she managed to gather a little under five times her lung capacity before gunfire barked from the other side. The door shook with each impact, the drumbeat of small arms rendered impotent upon its imperious facade. Then, footsteps. The clack of the door handle.
A man kicked it open and the slaughter began.
Meanwhile, in the midst of the Living Storm...
Two years. For two years he had cultivated the Law of the Stone Soldier in the middle of this bombarded battleground, within this equally bombarded husk of a body. For two years he had toiled in the absolute seclusion of a sarcophagus wrought from his own petrified flesh, feeding on the soil underfoot, which had been made rich and succulent by the uncounted deaths of brave, conviction-filled mortals.
For two years had he toiled to understand the circumstances of his defeat, reshaping himself inside and out so that such a defeat would never occur again. He would be stone, a living golem commanding the earth underfoot with a whim. A missing arm would mean nothing if he could simply form a new one from the stone and earth underfoot.
Artillery would mean nothing if he could wake the earth and create fortifications with a stomp.
He had once been the Finger of the Mountain, the Uprooter of Fortresses, the Bringer-down of Hills, the Earth-shatterer, but no longer. Ubul had spent his seclusion perpetually bereaved by the Living Storm’s tribulations, forced to labor at holding himself together in the brief moments of respite when the storm let up to take its rage out on something or someone else. In his struggle, he grew to understand that he needed to turn himself inside-out.
Just as he had once used his command of earth to shatter, uproot, and bring ruination with sheer force, so now he would build, create, and form from the earth the means to achieve his ends.
First of these ends… An army. He needed an army, for what he was now was but a fraction of what he had once been. One shaped from blood-soaked clay and soil in the image of the burial guardians of the immortality-seeking ruler who had preceded His Divinity in rulership over Pateiria’s blessed lands. Without souls of their own, the Living Storm would not know to strike them down.
Ubul knew well how impossible a feat it was, to give form to the formless and teach it how to walk, how to do battle, and he knew it to be a fool’s errand. He would use the bones of those who had fallen upon this battlefield, for bones remembered what they had been in life, and the bones of soldiers certainly remembered what it was to do battle.
Pateirian bones, Snow Demon bones - it made no difference.
Not to him, not to the other Lieutenants, not to the Generals, not to the Emperor.
All mortals were equal as corpses in the end.
The door gave way as he kicked it open, and for a moment, the soldier wondered, “Had the governor somehow foreseen this and fled?”
His thoughts were cut short when a bullet splattered his brains all over the abstract painting on the hallway wall, and another still ripped past his corpse and sailed right through six of his comrades, glass-like ice erupting from their wounds. All hell broke loose.
Zelsys immediately turned the corner and took off running full-tilt down the hallway, channeling Fulgur into her cleaver to heat its edge and swinging with wild abandon as she went. Pateirians every single one, wearing Pateirian uniforms in wildly varying states of wear, some possessed of minor locust mutations but most outwardly human.
All of them displayed a mixture of abject terror and reflexive killing intent at the sight of her, pointing guns and swinging their blades, be they actual Pateirian shortswords, daggers, plundered Ikesian war-knives, or some other type of blade.
Indeed, gunfire resounded all around her, yet no bullets struck true, for she simply moved too quickly and erratically for her foes to get a bead on her. They may have been a real threat, they might have even shot her, had they possessed the will - and she knew they didn’t. At this very moment, these men were closer to animals than actual locust drones, panicked and purely reactionary, lacking even the instinctive tactics and instrumentality of their hive-born lessers.
Zel felt it in her gut. No weakness to look for, it was harder to find a strength on these sorry excuses for soldiers. These weren’t warriors - once perhaps, but not anymore.
These dogs of war were starved and mangy, unworthy of being considered opponents.
She would put them down.
