Chapter 296 - Falling Stars (Patreon)

Chapter 296

Falling Stars

Two figures appeared in the air ahead.

They materialized between the falling warships and the ground, hovering effortlessly, golden robes flapping in the wind. Both had staves floating before them and spellbooks hanging open, pages turning.

Alexander recognized Artensah immediately. The old man’s illusory projection had been smug and composed. In person, standing in the path of a warship hurtling toward the earth, he looked exactly the same. The second wizard was unfamiliar. Broader. Younger, maybe, though that meant nothing in a civilization where their ruler had apparently lived for centuries.

Artensah raised one hand and muttered an incantation. Magic gathered at his palm, and a portal began to open directly in the path of Alexander’s warship. The dark circle expanded rapidly, its edges looking razor-sharp against the sky.

The second wizard took a different approach. He gripped his staff in both hands, swung it like a weapon, and struck the empty air.

Reality cracked.

The fracture spread from the point of impact, tearing through the sky in a jagged line that widened as it went. It opened like a wound in the atmosphere, the space inside it dark and depthless, expanding directly in front of the second warship.

Alexander grinned, then drove both ships down harder. Metallokinesis screamed through the hulls, forcing them into steeper descents, trying to push them beneath the spatial attacks before they fully formed.

Below, the fortress roof exploded.

Metal and concrete erupted upward as figures tore through from inside. Caroline came first, rising through the debris without slowing, arms casually tucked behind her back, white suit pristine even after the dust cloud. Julia followed immediately behind, ice trailing from her shoulders, blue mantle snapping in the wind of her ascent. Annie was next, four wings beating hard, MetaMetal gleaming across her entire body.

Then another section of the roof shattered.

Skar’Vathos burst through, the structure breaking apart around the dragon’s massive frame. Maximilian stood on its back, black uniform flapping in the wind, chains already materializing around him. The dragon’s wings spread wide and caught the air with a single, powerful beat, carrying them upward in a surge of red scales and raw power.

Then an inky black portal opened between the two holes in the roof. Augustus stepped through, wand in hand, spellbook floating in front of him, followed by Titanic, ducking to clear the exit.

Alexander registered all of it in fragments. Peripheral awareness. Sensor data feeding through Droney’s bond. He couldn’t afford to focus on any of it because Artensah’s portal was almost fully formed and his warship was moments from flying into it.

He drove the ship down harder, rotating it at the same time until he was standing almost horizontal, held to the ship through nothing but Metallokinesis and stubbornness. The hull groaned under the strain.

The unknown golden-robed wizard shouted a single word, and the crack in front of the second warship expanded vertically, stretching upward and downward until it dwarfed the warship’s entire profile. The ship flew into the tear and vanished, the fracture snapping shut behind it.

Alexander’s warship dropped below Artensah’s portal. Almost. The ship’s port side caught the bottom edge of the opening. The portal’s boundary sliced through the hull, metal screaming as it sheared away, tumbling into the portal.

The remaining two-thirds of the ship continued its descent, now a broken, gutted mass of twisting metal trailing debris and screaming crew members who were being sucked out through the gash running down the ship’s entire length.

The surviving highborn wizards launched off the fragmenting hull, taking flight in every direction.

Alexander passed beneath Artensah, close enough to see the old man’s expression.

Their eyes met.

Then Artensah swung his staff forward. Three balls of orange energy erupted from the tip, spiraling around each other in a tight helix. They raced toward Alexander, closing the distance fast.

Alexander launched himself off the dying warship. Metallokinesis hurled him sideways, and the spiraling orbs curved to follow. They tracked his movement, adjusting their trajectory the instant he changed direction.

Homing. Great. Another advancement, courtesy of him teaching the wizards all their weaknesses.

He juked left. The orbs followed. Juked right. They adjusted. He put on speed, and they matched it, the helix tightening as they closed.

The wizards who’d abandoned the ship fanned out around him and began firing. Bolts of energy and elemental blasts streaked in from multiple directions. Alexander wove between them, spinning the last of his metal plates into the gaps, while the three orange orbs spiraled closer behind him.

The other golden-robed wizard turned from where the second warship had vanished, angling toward Alexander.

Julia hit him first.

She came in fast, a streak of white and blue trailing ice crystals. Her fist drove through the wizard’s torso.

His body evaporated like smoke. The wisps dispersed and reformed three meters to the left. The wizard was already casting, fingers extended, spellbook flipping to a specific page. Three syllables, spoken fast.

Blocks of stone materialized around Julia, closing inward from every direction. Stone compressed around her body, grinding together, trying to crush her inside.

The stones strained. Cracks formed along their surfaces. Then they exploded outward as Julia forced her way free, ice erupting from her body in a shockwave that sent the pieces of rock raining all around her. She launched at the wizard again.

Behind Artensah, Annie was closing fast, four wings driving her forward. She swung her bladed arms, aiming for the Exalted’s back.

Artensah didn’t turn.

A portal opened at his back. Another black-robed wizard stepped through, already swinging. His staff came down in a two-handed overhead strike that collided with Annie’s crossed blade-arms. Metal screeched against enchanted wood. Annie pushed back, holding the block, her wings straining to maintain position against the force.

Light erupted from the wizard’s staff, engulfing Annie’s upper body and blasting her backward. She tumbled through the air, wings crumpling, fighting to stabilize as she fell toward the ground.

Alexander tracked it all in flashes. Julia fighting smoke and stone. Annie tumbling. Artensah hovering untouched while his people fought for him.

Talia’s voice cut across the comms. “Reinforcements arriving, Alex.”

For a moment he thought she meant more people. Then he felt it.

One drone connected to Droney’s command network. Then two. Then five. Ten. Twenty. He stopped counting at fifty. They streamed up through the holes in the fortress roof in a swarm, fanning outward, each one linking with Droney as they climbed. The bond hummed with incoming data as the network expanded.

Talia had kept his production line running the entire time he’d been gone.

Alexander pushed the surge of gratitude aside and focused on the immediate problem. The three orange orbs were still tracking him, spiraling closer. The highborn wizards were firing from multiple positions, but they were careful about crossfire, adjusting their angles to avoid hitting each other.

It gave him something predictable to exploit.

Alexander banked hard toward one of the slower wizards.

The man saw him coming and raised his staff, barriers flaring to life.

He cut past the wizard’s shoulder close enough to feel the buzzing energy of the barrier. Then he turned sharply, racing around the wizard to reverse direction faster than the orbs could adjust.

The wizard’s eyes widened as the orange helix slammed into his barriers. His mouth opened to scream. The barriers held for an instant. Then the orbs punched through and hit him center mass.

The explosion sent pieces of black robe and golden trim scattering across the sky.

Alexander abruptly changed direction, turning back to snatch the wizard’s staff from the air, and sent it into the ring with a thought.

The mountain shook as a massive boom rang out.

Metal shrieked and buckled as the broken warship struck the slope broadside. Thousands of tons of metal folded on impact, burying people and their trenches beneath the collapsing hull.

Hundreds of bioelectrical signatures vanished.

More flickered out inside the ship as corridors collapsed and entire sections compressed into solid masses of twisted metal. The vessel broke across its middle, momentum carrying the wreck onward even as the hull tore itself apart.

A section of the upper deck sheared free and cartwheeled across the slope. It smashed through one panicked formation, bounced, then plowed into another. A storm of armor plating and shattered sections of the ship’s frame scythed through soldiers already running from the main wreck.

The main bulk kept moving.

It carved through the army’s center, crushing trenches and defensive lines beneath it, pushing a wall of earth, rock, and bodies ahead of the hull. Soldiers scattered in every direction. Some took flight. Others threw up desperate barriers that shattered as the wreckage reached them.

The ship finally began to slow several hundred meters down the slope, its remains spread across the mountainside in a trail of burning metal and ruined fortifications.

Time didn’t stand still for the destruction below.

The drone swarm raced across the sky, splitting into multiple streams targeting each of the wizards in the air around Alexander.

Most of the highborn wizards had faltered, their attention pulled toward the mountainside as thousands of Empire soldiers died beneath crushing metal. They hastily turned their focus to the new threats as Droney directed the assault.

Julia and the golden-robed wizard exchanged blows above the fortress, ice and stone colliding in the air between them. Annie was climbing hard, wings beating, trying to close with Artensah’s bodyguard, who circled above her, staff glowing. Maximilian and his dragon swept wide around the fortress, chains erupting across the battlefield and carving through entire squads at once.

Alexander threw out both hands.

His cybernetic hand aimed at Artensah. His flesh hand aimed just above Annie.

Two bolts of lightning erupted simultaneously.

The left-hand bolt streaked toward Artensah. The Exalted didn’t flinch. His hand swept through the air in a smooth arc, and the lightning bent. It curved around him, slowing as it went, pulsing brighter as whatever spatial manipulation he’d applied compressed and redirected the energy.

Alexander recognized the technique. It was the same redirection technique Keda had used in the fortress courtyard. Something Artensah didn’t know Alexander had already faced.

The right-hand bolt crossed the distance to Annie in the same instant.

She grinned. “Assimilate.”

The lightning struck her in the chest. MetaMetal absorbed the current, drinking it in, converting electrical energy into something her power could use. Sparks raced across her body. Her wings flared with crackling light.

Then she vanished.

A thundercrack split the air as Annie became a streak of light, closing the distance to Artensah’s bodyguard faster than the wizard could react. Her blade-arms punched through his shield and into his stomach.

The momentum carried them both higher into the air, the wizard’s body sliding down along the metal blades buried in his torso.

Then she carved the wizard in half, sending blood raining down around her.

Below them, Artensah released the redirected bolt. But it came back brighter. The Exalted had layered his own power into Alexander’s lightning, amplifying it before sending it back.

Alexander twisted in the air. The augmented bolt screamed toward him, crackling with combined energy. He reached out with one hand and caught it with Electrokinesis as it entered his Domain. The current fought him for a fraction of a second, the foreign magic resisting his control.

Then it yielded. Within the Machine God’s Domain, lightning answered.

He guided the bolt past himself, angling it with a flick of his wrist, and fired it at one of the distracted highborn wizards.

The wizard vanished, reappearing ten meters to the left with a short-range teleport. The bolt flew harmlessly into the distance.

Smart. They’d watched two of their own die already because they’d relied on barriers.

Alexander continued racing across the sky, barely having to evade the wand fire now that his drones had joined the fight. Over Artensah’s shoulder, he saw a portal forming in the air. A quick glance down revealed Augustus, waving his wand in a circle, forming the other end of it.

“Flight team,” Talia said. “Prepare to withdraw.”