NABC Chapter 333 – Not Defeated But Dead
Chapter 333 – Not Defeated But Dead
Kassandora grabbed Neneria’s wrist and pulled her sister back. “Wait.” The Goddess of War said as the corners of her eyes noticed the grey-green ethereal glow that always heralded the marking of a ghost. To their right, the trundling Torchbearer tanks came to a stop as Kassandora called upon her blessing.
There were no flashing lights, no great explosion to signal the sound beginning of Kassandora signalling her power to activate, but all who were led by Kassandora heard the violin that signalled the beginning of War’s Orchestra. The entire vanguard stopped to the sound of a single drum that only they heard, soldiers started leaving their APCs silently. No orders needed to be given, the only sound that filled the tunnels was the sudden turning of tracks and the slamming of steel against stone as ramps dropped down. Boots started to echo in the illuminated darkness as the soldiers of the Underground Expeditionary Legion marched to the soundless tune of drums.
Kassandora saw through their eyes and through her own. She saw Kavaa look up and place her hand on the hilt of her sword on the other side of the convoy. The Goddess of Health hadn’t been enlisted into War’s Orchestra, but she must have worked out that Kassandora had taken charge of the situation. There was not a single order given, not a single shout, not even quiet polite requests to move out of the way. All who heard War’s Orchestra played to the tune without needing a word to be said.
“I can just clear them out Kass.” Neneria said quietly.
“They don’t need help.” Kassandora said. This is why she was sending men out, because a thousand sets of eyes were better than just her own. It had been on her mind how the dwarves had withstood Tartarus for a millennia. That shouldn’t have been possible. The only thing that stopped Tartarian portals was their forceful closing. That wasn’t difficult in itself, but dwarves simply lacked whatever it was that humanity had which granted the latter the access to magic.
“Are you sure?” Neneria asked.
“I need to see how they survived this long.” Kassandora said. If worst came to worst, they would help. But not yet. The tune of War’s Orchestra spread like a plague, backwards through the convoy. Vehicles kept on turning, their drivers suddenly aware of the fact the convoy had stopped without a single word or command needing to be relayed down the ranks. Kassandora found Iniri through the eyes of one of her own soldiers. The man approached the Goddess of Nature with a steady step.
Iniri was pulling roots out of the ground that were forcing the treads back on a tank as engineers were underneath it. “Iniri.” The soldier said and the Goddess of Nature turned to look down at the man. She stood in a dark black coat with hints of green, with a thick sweater underneath it and heavy gloves covering her hands. A short Divine, the man only reached up to her chest.
“Iniri?” She said flatly, somewhat amused.
“This is Kassandora.” Kassandora spoke through the man. “We’ve reached the hold. There’s a battle there.” The man leaned to look at the tank. Iniri may not know, but Kassandora had taken it upon herself to study all the faults of her vehicles. This one had dislocated its tread and cooked some of the fluid it looked like. “Fix up here and then get to the front. We are already there.”
The Goddess of Nature looked at the man, somewhat in doubt. “That’s you?”
“Let’s not pretend there’s much of a difference between speaking through soldiers or through flowers Iniri.” Kassandora answered through the man, then the sound of an organ within War’s Orchestra ordered him back. Back at the frontline, men pulled out binoculars, gunners looked through scopes and the cameras from vehicles zoomed in so that Kassandora could watch exactly how it was that a race without power both magical and mechanical could somehow survive for so long.
A hellhound turned a corner, it was as large as a direwolf. Its ragged red fur was smeared with its own dark blood but Kassandora had faced these creatures before. It had a gash running down its shoulder, great and deep and bleeding. A wound like that would behead a man. To the hellhound, it was merely a scratch. The dog’s pause left the ground of smooth grey surface that made up the interior of the dwarven hold steaming. Beasts like that left prints in metal and stone.
A squad of dwarves silently lowered their tall pikes to make a phalanx. It was easier to describe each figure as an animated brick rather than a suit of armour. They had skirts upon skirts, around their legs. Their helms were simple things, with tiny slits for eyes and not much else and there wasn’t a single inch of flesh showing. Even the insides of their palms were armoured. That phalanx took a step forwards.
That was a new style of armour. Kassandora had to give them that, but was that it? The sealing of the World-Core had left them without power. They had no animated statues, they had no self-powering forges. They lacked the great machinations and early tanks that had once safeguarded these highways. It couldn’t be just armour, could it?
The squad of two dozen dwarves in tight formation advanced in unison. The huge hellhound snapped. Its beastmaster rounded the corner supported by what could only be lesser demons. Figures armoured in black plate and skin the colour of bright-red blood. They had burning eyes. The hellhound snapped its ferocious jaws and jumped forwards.
It impaled itself on the tight formation of pikes, Kassandora wasn’t surprised. There was something almost relieving to know that Tartarus still relied on endless waves that of forces. The armour of the demons was new. The fact a few held something akin to rifles was also worrying. They seemed to have exchanged the ancient straight sword for thick cleavers, the sort that butchers would use to separate bone. And axes had been substituted for hammers.
The hellhound slid all the way down the trio of pikes it was impaled on, and it gave one final thrash as the demons screamed and raced forwards. One of its thick legs, as wide as a man’s torso, knocked one of the dwarves into the air and against the wall. It was as if a cannon-ball half the size of a man had just been launched into a cliff, the sound that dwarf made could rival the sound of artillery. Kassandora made a face in confusion. Trading even one for a hundred would mean that the dwarves would have long been extinct. And it was obvious that they had not created some incredible weapon that made them untouchable.
She saw the suit of armour drop its pike and slide down stone wall. And then she saw the suit of armour stand up without even a pause. Kassandora blinked as she watched a dwarf that obviously had just been killed move into action. Even most Divines would need a moment to recover.
Kassandora’s vision from dwarf to dwarf as she looked through the eyes of her men. One of them noticed that the dwarf who had just been launched into the wall left no blood, as most of the other looked to a demon a full head-taller than a man swinging his cleaver to cut the pikes down. A few of the closer dwarves dropped their spears immediately to pull out short-weapons. Axes and swords, one of the half-men stepped forwards to swing and was kicked by another demon.
Another pike pierced that demon’s black armour and ended the creature’s life. One of the largest invaders stepped forwards, a tail whisking behind his back and his chest covered in a thick armour that the pikes simply bounced off. Another team of dwarves appeared looked over one of the bridges that led from one balcony to another. They loaded steel…
Not crossbows but arbalests fashioned out of pure metal, each one had to weigh more than a fully grown man. They readied them and prepared to fire as the largest demon picked a dwarf up by the arm and held him in the air. War’s Orchestra played the tune of a light trumpet and one of Kassandora’s men turned their attention from the dwarf to the demon’s arm. Kassandora saw strands of muscle turn and twist and veins pop as the demon tried to crush the dwarven armour, but then the monster gave up.
Instead, he brought him lower to the ground and Kassandora realised what those rifles were for. They weren’t rifle in the first place, instead being handcannons. A smaller demon, smaller meaning only the size of a human, ran to the dwarf, pressed the end of the barrel against that layer up layer of steel and pulled the trigger. A great burst of fire roared from the end of the cannon. It was a huge wave of flame and iron and steel, as what had been fired was grapeshot. Louder than artillery, this one.
That wasn’t true though, it was simply shards of the dwarves’ great armour that been knocked off as the demon still held it in the air. One of Kassandora’s men watched the demon who just fired run away, another watched a different demon, its handcannon loaded, come close, a third noticed the lack of blood again, a forth looked at the dwarf, a fifth peered into the steaming hole ringed by molten metal, a sixth caught their breath in surprise.
Glowing bone, inscribed to the extreme with runes of power that Kassandora did not realise. The dwarf… or skeleton within the armour did not even notice the damage, instead, it pulled a cleaver to match the demon’s out of its belt and swung at the arm holding it. The sound of wind and bolts releasing, followed by the high pitched twanging of steel came from above as steel bolts penetrated into the demons. Each one was the thickness of a rat or a mouse, and the length of a forearm. No, Kassandora changed her mind. Those weren’t bolts, the dwarves were simply firing sharpened steel ingots that left huge holes the size of small dogs through the demon’s armour.
One of Kassandora’s men noticed that they had gone for those cannoneers, those demons collapsed, their bodies utterly shredded into pieces by the blows from above. The demon roared as the dwarf swung its blade up at it, and then fell onto the ground as flames burst out around it.
A succubus? Incubus? Kassandora looked around, but she couldn’t see what was casting the magic. Either way, it didn’t matter. Tartarian flames did not burn like fire, they burned stronger than the sun. In the Great War, they had been used to melt through fortresses and walled cities. Kassandora still remembered them well. She kept watch as to how the dwarves would react. Panic was out of the question but a charge forwards? Maybe a retreat?
But the steady step-by-step advance, she would not have predicted. The team of dwarves once again rallied, they even put up a shieldwall as those flames turned from roaring orange to a searing purple. And as if they were standing in nothing more than a midday drizzle, the dwarves took another step forwards.
In that moment, as she watched the armoured suits step into searing Tartarian flame that melted stone and even caused that armour to steam, Kassandora realised that within those heavily skirted suits of armour, there wasn’t a single dwarf that was actually alive. All of them were skeletons. All of them marched forwards in unison, utterly ignorant of the heat around them.
Another team of dwarves stepped into view. A ring of dwarves flanked by more of the hulking bricks of skirted grey armour. When Kassandora had seen them before, she had assumed that the skeletons were merely servants or a labour force. She kept silent, but her mind started asking the important question: How did they manage to get past the inherent fragility of bone? A few of the dwarves here were alive. The lack of faceplates covering their helms revealed faces with skin and lips and nose and eyes rather than just the bones of a skull.
Runemasters, Kassandora had seen them in the past, and the lack of weaponry had not changed. One of the dwarves brought out a steel ball the sized of a closed fist from his satchel. He brought it to his lips and whispered? Breathed? Kissed it? He did something to it, that was for sure, because immediately the ball flickered alive with runs.
The dwarf tossed it into the air. The ball came to a momentarily stop, and then it shot forwards. There was no acceleration or charge up. It was simply still, then it became a blur. A crash and shout came from the corner that the ball had disappeared behind. The flames went out. A cloud of grey dust rolled around the wall.
The death of the caster marked the end of the battle. The skeletal dwarves were unstoppable. They advanced without any great speed, but they were an unstoppable bulldozer. Twice, the demons managed to damage their armour again. Another hellhound even managed to tear the arm off a suit of armour with its crushing jaws. It should have killed the half-man within its paws, but instead the half-man calmly ignored that he was missing a limbing, pulled out his axe and swung it straight into the dog’s head.
Kassandora got her question answered. The dwarves had not survived, at least not the majority of them. They had died, but they had managed to separate wrest death out from the claws of defeat and claim it for themselves. Kassandora had tried it for entire ages during the Pre-Great War eras, and the best she had managed to do was force victory into the same bundle as death on occasion. Death was the end, death should have been the end, but somehow, they had managed to make death into a stepping stone.
It was rare that Kassandora got amazed, but she was glad she could still feel the emotion, as rare as it was.
As the battle ended, one runemaster turned, squinted, and waved towards the lights. He gave them a loud, cheerful shout, as if unaware of the fact he was up to his calves in blood. “Humans hello! We have awaited your return!”