Book 8 – Chapter 48 – Homecoming

Aurion zoomed in his helmet’s vision, replaying the footage they’d just captured a minute ago. The other scouts behind him remained in cover, waiting for his call. Likely praying to the golden goddess herself that these clan knights passing far under them weren’t walking hand to hand with who’d they thought they’d spotted.

But they couldn’t be certain, not until he confirmed it as the captain of the squad.

The marble white features, the dead-set look of disgust, the inhuman way they walked too casually.

A Feather. He’d been in three engagements that had seen their ilk, and by far he was the luckiest man alive to have survived that many as a mere mortal.

But he’d never seen them run before. They’d never needed to.

Seeing this many of them, sprinting at full speed within gunshot distance, was freaking him out. And he couldn’t let the rest of the scouts here know, the poor squires needed someone who appeared to have it together.

“Captain?” One of the scouts asked, while he returned back to cover, hiding from sight. “Is it confirmed?”

They were trapped here for now until the wind passed. Stepping outside the safezone would be death, it didn’t matter if human, machine or even a Feather.

The team here already knew who it was they’d spotted. The captain couldn’t hide it for long. Not with what came next. He gave them a shallow nod. “They are Feathers. Nine of them.”

There was a collective hold of breath.

And then the idiot in the group asked the obvious. “Are… are they really as bad as everyone says? Maybe we could still take them.”

“Cassius.” Aurion said in the most no-nonsense tone he could muster. This squire really was the thickest one under his command. “A single one regularly kills Deathless teams. Not one Deathless. Teams. This is the reason most Deathless end up back in the fortress to recover, their runs are ended by those things.”

One of those teams was healing up right this moment at Perseverance, resupplying and preparing to return back into the fray. The other one was taking a breather before they’d leave.

At least the idiot didn’t say another word, helmet nodding glumly.

“But the surface knights with them.” Atticus asked from the right. “What are they doing down here? Three entire stratas under the surface? Surface knights don’t travel that deep, there’s no reason to. How did they even get this far down?”

“Did you not notice they’re running with Feathers, soldier?” Aurion snapped back. “Machines can easily allow any of them to travel anywhere they damn well please if the silver traitors are working with the enemy now. They came here for a reason.”

“Surface humans working with the enemy…” Atticus shook his head. “Never thought they’d go that low.”

“They’ll do anything for their clans.” Julia said from the left, frustrated. She turned her head and peeked over the ridge, watching the distant group of enemies take cover from the wind, far under the group. “And who better to hunt down humans than them, really? They’re quite literally trained from infancy to kill other knights. Of course the machines would naturally ally with them. More surprised it hasn’t happened till now.”

“Julia, pilgrims visit them constantly. They’re not that bad.” Cassius said, holding his rifle a little closer for comfort. “At least most of them? Maybe this was a feral clan we don’t have ties to. Like renegades too remote for airspeeder travel.”

“Cut chatter, wind’s ending in thirty seconds.” Aurion said with finality to this discussion. “They might be delusional enough to think the violet goddess isn’t going to stab them in the back the moment they’re no longer needed. Delusional, but they’re all still extremely dangerous. A single surface knight can only be brought down by an Imperator, or three fully trained crusaders of at least the fourth oath. Let alone scout squires like you lot. Not only do the knights among that group outnumber us, the Feathers are in a different league entirely. We report back to Perseverance, and make sure the alert is full on. The rest of the fortress will handle this threat. We do our duty to the golden goddess and the empire itself above all. Julia, good work on following your hunch here, goddess guide us back to safety after this.”

But Aurion also knew the danger. The group racing down right in their own territory represented an insane amount of firepower, all concentrated in a tiny amount of soldiers. This wasn’t an excursion force, it was an invasion force dedicated to breaking down the fortress.

That they’d gotten here without alerting any other scouts or watchtowers further up ahead meant they’d traveled by portal directly, likely one of the dark ones that nobody had yet managed to trigger.

There were hundreds of them scattered across this land of thin metal bridges, turbines and those strings. It was both an advantage and disadvantage.

Larger machines wouldn’t get through. Flying ones would get caught in those strings. But it also caused the entire place to be more of a maze than anything.

And every rocky safezone here had a fifty fifty chance of having a portal under it. The partially floating rock platform they hid within had a staircase drilling downwards, leading to a silent gate already.

It made Perseverance a perfect nexus, an easy expedition point to depart from on the goddess’s missions whenever those portals turned on or off by the Imperial mitespeakers.

But surface knights following with these Feathers was no coincidence. They didn’t stumble on each other in one of the portals within that area. He knew exactly why the Feathers had brought the surface knights for: The pillar heart.

The heart at the fortress was still active and it wouldn’t be scheduled to go down for another three days. So long as that remained online, no machines could breach.

So the Feathers wouldn’t send machines to break the heart. They’d send humans. And the most deadly humans in the world that were equally as likely to work with the enemy were surface knights.

The nine Fathers would remain outside and draw the full force of the fortress out, while the infiltration team of surface knights would break through to the pillar heart and sabotage it. From there, the Feathers would handle the rest.

Nine wasn’t an oddity. It would be enough to break the fortress open. He’d never seen more than a single one at a time. The greatest Deathless fireteams had to deal with two at most working together. Nine meant the violet goddess was not taking failure as an answer.

They might not know how many Deathless teams were currently resting or resupplying at the fortress, hence they sent enough Feathers to handle any amount of Deathless.

As for why now? And why the need for surface knights? There was only one answer: They didn’t have time to wait three days. The machines were mobilizing already. Reports of them all leaving their territory, heading up to the surface en-mass. Giving up even strategic locations such as the mite forges, completely exposing them for imperial access.

The fortress was on high alert as it was, fully abusing the situation already to reach the more powerful unguarded mite forges – but seeing a Feather kill-team bringing humans along was a desperate measure and meant there was a timing issue to all this.

Whatever the machines were doing, it had to happen right now.

“Ten seconds until the wind clears sir.” Cassius said.

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They’d get another two minutes before the wind flooded the region like a rising sea again, strong enough to pick up a knight up and off the bridges if they weren’t holding down onto something more sturdy.

Off the bridges and directly into the arms of those deadly strings this biome was famous for.

“Get to the comm relays,” Aurion ordered. “That’s our only goal now. The earlier Perseverance knows of their approach the better. Stay low, and make sure the enemy don’t spot us.”

Their armor’s comms range was too far from the fortress. The scout signal relays would pass the message along from relay to relay all the way back home. They only needed to make it to the outpost rock.

His HUD counted down a few more seconds, and just as suddenly as it had started, the storm and howling wind instantly died off.

The team bolted into action.

Perseverance fortress actually existed during the days of Urs and Talen. It had been apparently an near insurmountable obstacle that took A57 several months of scheming before he managed to get the machine empire to collapse it.

There’s a reason the fortress still took this much time for him to crack open, and it had nothing to do with the fortress itself and everything to do with the biome here. This maze was basically the most anti-machine environment I could possibly have wished for. Utterly hostile to larger armies by its own nature. Scraps raining from above, even I was worried about taking the wrong step around here. Despite all my gear and training, this place could kill me.

So, it’s basically an excellent place to put the heart of an imperial church. Only issue is it being three stratas deep, which was getting very difficult for regular people to travel to.

Tiny thin bridges of metal didn’t allow large equipment to be passed through, all of it going up, down, left and right in pure chaos. Bringing any kind of supplies or even airspeeders down here was impossible. Everything had to be carried by hand.

The fortress itself was naturally on the far other end of this madness, and Cathida said it had plenty of internal food and water that was being supplied by tapping into a micro-biome within it.

It had been reclaimed and rebuilt from the last time it had been destroyed – and it hadn’t fallen a single time since. That’s five hundred years of history there, with only two hundred missing years between A57 destroying it, and the imperial church stumbling onto it again on the search for lost ancient relics of their past.

They’d been very happy finding the ruins. I could imagine the Deathless team traveling in this biome, struggling to make it, until they found the ruins of a legendary fortress left behind by the empire. No wonder it had been named Perseverance. This thing was still part myth, tunnels and vaults within remained collapsed and sealed off long after, traps left behind by A57 that the imperial church feared setting off.

We’d be seeing it in person real soon, I’ll take plenty of pictures.

The wind streamed through our little refuge, strong enough to have picked me clean off the ground and hurled me outside if I didn’t have my armor to weigh me down. Even then, Journey’s HUD warned me to lower my center of gravity down, and keep a gauntlet locked on some grip.

We were hiding inside a rock ball, connected with bridge strands in a few alternating directions.

All of these outcroppings came in different shapes and sizes, this one just happened to have a pocket of air in the center, and a few dozen holes leading out, like a wiffleball of some kind. It didn’t stop the wind from passing through, but that was fine. The wind wasn’t what was dangerous here. Technically.

It’s what the wind rattled around that could be.

“We are clear to continue.” Father said, at the exact moment the wind died off. Crouching to the exit then sliding down the first bridge ramp back to the main suspended ‘roadway’ – which was just a larger metal bridge that had no railings like everything else in this biome.

The rest of us followed behind in a single file line, all picking up the pace as we raced down the metal ramps, platforms and occasional rock platforms that broke the scenery here.

There were a few larger mountain hills and walls, with tunnels build all within, although those were equally dangerous to traverse within. Outside was oddly the safer choice.

“These rock safe spots rebuild themselves over time if they get broken apart, so if there’s trouble, the fortress will shoot first at every last rock here and then continue to fire potshots at whatever purple bastard is still crawling to get a good angle.” Cathida continued. “Better make sure we get on their good side before they blast away all the cover.”

As for why we were running on these bridges when we had jets… well, they were functionally useless due to thin spider-like strings that draped down under each bridge, all over this region. Thousands of them just within a few hundred feet of myself. Including the far ceiling. All floating around in the air like spiderwebs. And all glowed bright blue.

It was an eerie sight. Almost all the light in this strata came from those millions of thin strands all out here.

Occult edges.

No idea how the mites managed to get them to be this long or thin or made from a material that didn’t seem to be metal at all – but the bridges were mite metal that was immune to the division fractal, so there was no way to cut them down either for study or to clear off the biome. And occult edges wouldn’t be cut by other occult edges. The wires were rather stretchy too.

‘Protein-based fiber’ according to the armor sensors, and the occult sight showed none of them had any properties of the occult. Which made no sense, so I had no idea how the mites made this biome function in the first place.

We tried figuring it out earlier on passing through the gateway here, after stomping through a small army of machines and Feathers sent to stop us.

I may or may not have had the time of my life playing with all the powers of a god. Urs really came through here, channeling the spell while yanking my soul into it. Superior and I got into a groove real fast.

But as for the biome and traveling through it: The rocks were not immune to occult edges. They weren’t made of durable metal like all the bridges, stairs and ramps that connected everything here. If anything, they were rather brittle and easy to accidentally smash apart.

But they were safe from the strings. Because they all floated within the only places that these strings wouldn’t reach when flapping around madly in that wind. Otherwise it was an absolute scrapshow where everything was getting shredded into pieces besides the environment. That couldn’t be destroyed anymore than a blast door could.

Every two minutes the wind would pick up and start the process all over again, blasting through hard enough it would probably make a Screamer get tossed off the bridges if they didn’t flatten themselves close to the ground. I gave the biome a worried look around, as we traveled through it. “So this is where we’ll have to bait Talen to fight in… might be a little tough to take a pause every two minutes and hide. Think we could bait him into the strings directly?”

“He has lost his senses of orientation and recognition of friend or foe, however I can assure you he has not lost any of his battle senses since the last time I attempted to fight him.” Urs said. “This biome will not stop him, only slow him down at best. We will need to be clever in working around this. The fortress should offer enough defenses to wear some of his strength down before he reaches it, after which we will need to fight him at the central courtyard for maximum effect. All you need to do is get near enough within touching range, and I will handle the rest.”

“At least we don’t have to worry about the machines trying anything here.” I said, giving a slight shrug while I followed the single file sprint forward. Above we passed a small line of lightly floating strings, just a jump away from touching our heads. It was like this everywhere, penning us in silently. Waiting for the wind to come back.

It basically prevented any kind of general army from marshalling out here for long, as everyone would need to rush to these rock safezones when the music stopped.

And those only have so much room to go around.

Like I said earlier, I couldn’t have picked a more deadly biome to plop down a fortress in.

“I suspect a fortress is the reason the mites built this biome.” Urs mentioned after I asked what the chances were that we’d get such a biome to be the location of the imperial heart. “By definition of statistics, there must be a few locations in the world that are the greatest defensive locations. This is one such place, as I have never found a better biome for a fortress myself. The fortress was selected to be placed here after the scouts reported the conditions of this area.”

Despite being in confinement for seven hundred years, in complete despair that humanity itself had been killed off and that he’d be trapped here for the rest of time since Relinquished hadn’t figured out how to properly kill him – Urs was oddly in good spirits.

Excellent travel companion, liked to chat engineering in the few minutes we weren’t wiping out an army of machines, ten out of ten; would hang out with again, that’s my verdict.

For an undead shriveled up metal husk with no legs or arms strapped on my back, he was fairly quick to answer back.

“You sure you’re fine hanging out as my backpack? Not exactly the most dignified way to meet your old empire for a first impression, you know? But hey, far from me to judge, I haven’t run an empire yet.”

“I prefer this angle personally.” He said as our group advanced through the maze of bridges, HUD displaying the one minute timer before the storm picked up again. “I do not need to make eye contact with anyone as I am facing backwards.”

“Eye contact scares you?” I asked, moving at the center of the formation. “For a god, I’d have thought you wouldn’t mind that kind of thing at all.”

“It does not scare me. However, it does make me feel uncomfortable in a manner that is difficult to explain.”

Father grunted up ahead, which meant trouble. “We’ve been spotted. An imperial scouting party further ahead. They’re advancing to a relay to warn the fortress about our approach. I can hear their footsteps.”

Decisions. “The imperials are going to spot us coming at some point. Team, capture these scouts. We’ll have a chat and maybe get them to help escort us to the fortress in the best case. Worse case, we let them go after we’ve already prepared a better gameplan, in case they’re stubborn about us.”

The Winterscars all gave a green ping, and the race to catch the first squad of Imperial advanced scouts was on.

In hindsight, I might have forgotten how terrifying this group would look like to the regular folks down here, especially with the entire group here sprinting directly after them.