Chapter 448 - Wall Breaker (Patreon)

Notes :

Well, not a great start to the week, I'm not going to lie.

My father ended up in the ER after a bicycle accident. No broken bones, just bumps and bruises, and he insists he's fine, but he was saying the same thing after he broke his leg last time. Plus he's also complaining that he's taking way longer to get around the city after the accident (not because of his lack of bike, but because he's physically walking more slowly), so I'm trying to keep an eye on him.

Also I woke up with what seems like a cold today.

So, fun times all around, but I'm still up and running, and my allergy treatment should be arriving soon.

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Chapter 448

Low Alcheryos Orbit

Citadel of the Flames

"That was...inspired." Said the Third Custodian, and the Adjudicator bowed her head.

"You honor me, my lord."

"It is not an honor." The Custodian turned around to face her. "It was a statement of fact. They were destroyed?"

"To a man." The Adjudicator shifted. "It was highly likely that a self destruct would be in place, thus the...risks I took in terms of personnel."

"I am aware." Softly said the Custodian. "As I said...inspired." He gazed at the room. It was empty, save for the both of them. "These inquisitors would have had to be purged anyway. Letting them do a great service to our Lord one last time is a better end than what normally befalls them."

The Adjudicator nodded.

"There is that. Though honestly my thoughts were primarily on managing our own resources and avoiding losses. Plus, of course, sending a response."

"Of course. This should, at least, buy the Purge some time."

The Adjudicator nodded. They needed to respond to attacks by the Order. Slow them down.

They had already extracted what intelligence they could by spying on that small administrative hub. Striking it would make the Order second guess everything and put them on the backfoot. At least for a bit.

How dire the times were, that such tactics became necessary.

"Our preparations are getting back...not on schedule, but we are recovering." Said the Adjudicator. "Integrating more dubious elements from the inquisition and leveraging the resources of the temples has given us considerably more manpower. However it is draining normal operations. Less healers trained, fewer sermons..."

The Custodian sighed.

"It is unfortunate. But once the Purge has run its course, there will be fewer people in need of healing."

The Adjudicator didn't blink. It was cold, but it was true. After the Purge, Alcheryos' population would have collapsed once more.

"My concerns are different. It is being noticed. Not with alarm, not yet, but soon there will be questions."

Questions that might turn into something far more serious once the Purge began.

"That is easy. One of our temples has been obliterated by Old World automata. Incidents against the Church, and involving Old World remnants in general are on the rise. We are simply reassigning resources to the stricken areas, and digging into the root causes."

"Yes, my lord." The Adjudicator smiled. "Which also happens to be true."

In a way, at least. The best lies were those that weren't fully lies.

"Indeed. Though I dearly wish to know how the Order brought itself back up. We had eradicated it. Yet now it has resources, stockpiled for centuries, if not millennia, and organization like we had never seen before."

"Perhaps some of the...Fallen Seraphim?" She had to force the words past her throat. The fact that such a concept existed was still shocking to her.

And she'd seen one die with her own eyes, felt the death throes inside of her mind.

"No." Said the Custodian, and it was definitive. "But it does not matter. The Order is here now. And they need to be held at bay while the Purge is prepared."

"Yes my lord. I shall see it done." She stood up, and bowed. "Glory be his Name."

"And Glory be his Pyre."

She left, trying to ignore the whispers. The insidious doubt that had gnawed relentlessly at her mind.

Doubt that now questioned...why was the Custodian so certain it had not been Fallen Seraphim?

And what else would she not know about this shadow war she was fighting?

*****

"Better." Said Alexandra as she reviewed the damage. "But not good enough."

She'd remodeled her testing field. Before, it was made to test weapons against Sunrise's fortifications, notably against the rebuilt forts to cover the Southern Army's retreat from Darthar. Now it mimicked sections of SouthMarch's fortress. Small ones. That thing was stupidly huge.

It was also extremely tough. The shield alone was a nightmare, but what was beneath wasn't to be underestimated either.

Seraph appeared next to her, followed by Subtlety and Frank.

Frank had sprouted a small, manicured dagger beard. And a mustache. He was starting to look like a dashing rogue, just missing the rapier. There was something deeply ironic about the fact that he was an AI commanding a siege ship.

Seraph simply gazed up at the walls, where you could see the craters from the impacts and detonations from the various prototype ordnance.

"Given our current test data, it seems that our current weapon calibers are simply not enough to meaningfully damage this structure without a long, sustained barrage of fire. Which is not possible under current mission parameters."

Subtlety grimaced.

"I have to agree. My missiles hit hard, but this thing isn't a fortress wall, it's a geological formation. The only thing more massive is the mesa fortress, and even then, the topmost defenses rely more on compartmentalization than sheer mass. There's arrow slits for spell projectors that are over a dozen meters deep here."

Alexandra nodded, as she gazed at the wall. It was...well, it was gigantic.

This wasn't a fortification that was made on the cheap, to repel infantry assault, but to hold back the horrors of the wasteland. Monsters, sure, but also a Sand Kraken. And though it wasn't really discussed in the historical documents, she was sure it had also been made with things like the Hammer of Eternity in mind. It could literally survive being nuked. Nuked. Not via any special enchantments, though it had plenty of those, but through sheer mass.

These walls literally weren't possible without geomancers. They were, for all intents and purposes, an artificial mountain. Sure, she could take them down with high tech weapons. If nothing else, though they certainly could survive an altitude or surface nuclear detonation, she doubted they'd be able to resist a nuclear bunker buster.

The problem was that they'd just tested conventional bunker busters. And they didn't do jack shit.

No, correction. They'd blown massive holes into something so stupidly large it simply wasn't enough to even scratch the weapons buried within.

Subtlety hadn't been exaggerating about the arrow slits. Since certain spells could alter their trajectory, sort of like how one could ping a battlelaser off of special mirrors, they'd buried the artillery deep inside the walls, with various machinery at the end of the slits to allow them to aim.

For all intents and purposes, they were basically a PDC's missile silos.

Frank rubbed his beard, gazing at the parapet, then squinting at the craters pock marking the wall.

He was becoming more human-like by the day, it was a bit creepy. Especially because he wasn't picking up his mannerisms from any of the others or Alexandra herself, whom the AIs usually patterned themselves after.

"The problem is that this thing was made to fight Sand Krakens. Who just vibrate through sand. And are very big. The entire wall is invulnerable to seismic weapons. And made to resist kinetic attacks via a giant monster ramming into it. So..." He seemed to hesitate as everyone looked at him, before Alexandra nodded encouragingly, and he continued. "How about energy weapons?" He shrugged at their confusion. "Worth a try, no?"

"We don't have low tech energy weapons." Said Subtlety.

"Untrue." Retorted Seraph. "We have numerous arcane energy weapons. We do not have low tech, purely or mostly mundane energy weapons."

"I stand corrected. But these weapons are expensive, and used sparingly. This will be a siege that will require overwhelming force."

"No." Said Alexandra, and the AIs quieted down as they looked at her. "We have to think like idiots."

"...What?" Chorused the AIs, and the dungeon core smiled.

"An old web serial Arcadia made me watch. We have to think like idiots. We can't get over it, we can't get under it, and we can't smash through it. So what do we do? We pick the stupid, insane option." Her smile widened. Thank you, Caboose. And Tucker. It was insane, but if it worked... "We melt it."

"...The amount of energy required to melt granite is considerable." Pointed out Seraph. "And though this is not, per se, granite, or any natural rock formation, it is the closest applicable material for approximation, since granite was the raw mass processed into this fortification."

"We have numerous thermal induction spells." Pointed out Frank. "Heat is the easiest energy to create due to entropy. And due to the Church, fire spells are both extremely popular and thermal attacks well researched."

Subtlety squinted at Alexandra, then at the wall. The dungeon core gave her a second. She was smart enough to figure it out. And though Frank had excellent lateral ideas, he wasn't very good with following Alexandra's thinking yet.

"...Thermite." Finally said the AI, and the others stopped talking. "Spells are expensive. Mana is a pain to ship in large quantities. And in a straight magic versus magic battle, we will lose because they have a pillar of power which even our NLR core cannot match. But we can avoid using magic altogether. There are powerful exothermic reactions through conventional physics, even without using nuclear technology."

"Precisely." Said Alexandra, with an encouraging smile. "And thermite is blindingly easy to make, can be scaled up to ridiculous degrees, is so stable it's easier and safer to transport than our bullets, plus it is a low tech solution that no one will bat an eye at us having."

Seraph tilted their head, then nodded.

"Some thermite mixes can go considerably higher than the temperature required to melt through the fortress' rock compound. But melting the entire wall is impractical."

"Nor are we even going to try. What we can do however is melt the various weapon apertures, and neutralize most of the fortress' guns. We'll give a shot with flooding them with napalm first, but given what we did to Sunrise, I'm guessing they'll be ready for that." It was the first option they'd discussed, but the issue was blindingly obvious, and they'd pulled it off a while ago. There was no way the Sapphirian Royal Army hadn't started on countermeasures. Or even already deployed them. "Plus, this will induce considerable thermal shock into the structure itself. Is it a good solution? Probably not. But it's going to surprise the hell out of them and deal a lot more damage than just trying to slam it with regular shells. As for energy weapons...it's worth a shot too."

The AIs nodded, and Alexandra blinked as she received an alert.

"And that is all the time I've got. Come up with some proposals for the new weapons and the tactics to use them, we'll start development based on what you can model. I'll be back later today."

"We won't let you down." Said Frank, somewhat solemnly, and Alexandra smiled.

"I'm sure you won't. Let's get wall cracking."

Then she stepped away, her avatar returning on autopilot to the command center, while she plunged into her simulations.

She had her other self to meet.