Chapter 1038: A Hammer to Shake the World (Patreon)

The bridge between Pallimustus and Earth was not a perpetually open door. Instead, it served to ease the requirements on dimensional travel that was normally resource and skill intensive. So long as travel was between one island in the Storm Kingdom and one abandoned town in the Australian outback, the astral magic involved was relatively cheap, easy and safe.

Arriving, on the other hand, was less safe. The Divine Army of Knowledge had annexed the island at the Pallimustus end of the bridge, and while it was politically contentious, the Storm Kingdom had not made moves to reclaim it. Yet. On the Earth side, humanity had established a dense ring of emplaced defences, although they did not expect them to last. The Knowledge Army did not disappoint, using a magitech nuke to wipe out the base that had once been an abandoned small town.

Even then, arriving through the bridge was a fraught affair. Every soldier Knowledge sent through was pounded by attacks from Earth’s defenders, fighting over ground reduced to glass by nuclear fire. Only wave after wave of gold-rankers was enough to push the Earthlings back. Gold-rankers were notorious hard to kill, yet Knowledge sacrificed them in catastrophic numbers to establish a foothold on Earth.

Earth could not match that level of sacrifice. Each gold-ranker was precious, and the defenders did not have the same stomach for loss as the goddess. The Church of Knowledge, was less shy in spending lives, their faith and zeal washing away fear and doubt in pursuit of glory for their goddess. As a result, the Earthlings were pushed back, their tactical retreats reaping lives but ceding ground.

With the dimensional bridge secured, the Knowledge army was able to act with less reckless abandon. They expanded strategically, eschewing the expected targets of Melbourne, Sydney and the Australian capital, Canberra. Instead, they staged a lightning raid of Darwin, in the far north. Using that as a gateway into Asia, they made punitive attacks against Indonesia and other South-East Asian nations, pushing them onto an unexpected back foot. They claimed no territory, simply causing as much destruction as possible before pulling back.

The result was that Australia’s geographically closest allies acted with caution as the Knowledge Army turned its gaze back to Australia.  What would have been eager support was now cautious, allies wary of further incursions upon their own nations. In Australia, there were only a handful of major population centres, relative to their nation’s size. The invaders swept over them one by one, starting with the more isolated Perth and Adelaide before turning towards Melbourne.

The Battle of Melbourne, a year after the invasion began, was the hardest fought since the arrival of the invaders. The cities of Earth were not built to withstand gold-rank conflicts, and by the end of the first day, Melbourne was devastated. By the fifth, it was a wasteland. The population had been evacuated; the single concession both sides had made was to allow civilians to escape the war zones. Knowledge wanted worshippers once her holy war was over.

Days after the battle, a fleet of flying ships was in the air above Sydney. Aboard the flagship, in the command-and-control centre, Grand Marshal Michael Mills stood in front of a panel of monitors that covered one wall. Each had separate footage of the fighting in Melbourne and the aftermath.

As Grand Marshal of the Earth Defence Joint Initiative, Michael was the inaugural Commander in Chief for the unified military might of planet Earth. Standing behind him, also watching the footage from Melbourne stream in, were civilian representatives of the most powerful groups and nations on Earth. Together, they looked at the rubble that had once been a city of over five million.

“I know you have concerns,” Michael said, not turning his gaze as he addressed the people behind him. “We need to stop thinking of this as a war in any way we understand it. This is a war from myth and legend. Our enemy is a goddess; her objectives are metaphysical. Her only concern is meeting the conditions of the Laws of Intrusion that will allow her to come to our world in person. She doesn’t care about what destruction she wreaks. She’ll raze cities to the ground to show that she can, so long as there are souls to worship her when it’s all done. She’ll rebuild civilisation from scratch if she has to. Winning territory only matters because it shows that she won it. A mark on the board. We won’t worship her, so she has to take what is ours to make it hers. Once she has it all, it won’t matter what we want anymore.”

“All we have been doing is falling back,” the Indonesian representative said. “Because you do not show strength, my nation was attacked. If we do not show this army that we will stand and fight, they will think they can strike us with impunity!”

“Good,” Michael said. “We have two pathways to win this war. The first is to hope that Jason Asano hasn’t had something done to him he can’t come back from, figures out how to stop a god and then comes back to do it. I don’t like that plan because we can’t do anything but buy time in the hope the something we don’t know, somewhere we can’t see, happens at some time between too late and never.”

He broke his fixation on the video feeds and turned to face the group.

“The other path is we win. Not some saviour from another world, but us. The people of Earth.”

“Jason Asano is from Earth,” said Lina Karadeniz, the Asano Clan representative.

“Yes,” Michael agreed. “He is from Earth, but he hasn’t been of Earth for some time. Long before I ever met him, I would say. As he has said himself, on numerous occasions. I am not downplaying what Jason Asano has done for this world, up to and including giving us the ability to fight this war at all. But he gave us that power because he realised it would be up to us to fight it. Don’t get me wrong, Ms Karadeniz, if he wants to show up and end all of this today, I’ll be more than happy to make my next plan be for his enormous parade, but I don’t think he will. Unless the Asano Clan knows something we do not about where he is and what he’s doing?”

Lina shook her head.

“We don’t, although we believe that he’s getting stronger. The aura that permeates clan territory has grown stronger and…”

“And?” Michael prompted.

“There have been oddities that we suspect might be related to the aura, but we can’t be sure.”

“Oddities?”

“Relating to certain rules of physics.”

“Isn’t altering the laws of physics the very nature of magic?”

“Yes, which is why we aren’t sure. Our researchers are also speculating that the concentration of magic in clan territory may be interacting with the physical world on a quantum level. I don’t pretend to understand it.”

Michael nodded.

“I do think that serves to highlight my point. As much as Jason Asano has done for this world, his fate is unknown. Whatever challenges he is facing right now, they are beyond us. Perhaps beyond our comprehension altogether. Relying on his potential intervention to save us is a level of optimism just shy of rubbing lamps in the hope that a genie pops out. That leaves our second path. One that I would hope that your respective military strategists will have filled you in on, as it not a secret.”

His glance at the Indonesian representative was brief.

“The force put together by the goddess of Knowledge is not infinite. We are a planet and they are a church, one of many. Granted, it’s full of very strong individuals, as their world has been teaching people how to be strong for thousands of years. But you know what I didn’t call them? An army. I called them very strong individuals because that’s what they are: individuals. Their world is stunted in terms of developing a military because the power in in the hands of each person. But here on Earth, what we’ve been doing for thousands of years is getting better at war. Armies, navies. Strategy, tactics, the tools of war. Yes, person to person, they are mostly stronger. But we a not one church, or any other singular institution. We are a world in its entirely, unified in purpose. Which is the long way of saying that there are more of us than there are of them. We have the numbers and, more importantly, the understanding how to use them. Give these invaders a thousand people and they have a thousand strong people. Give us a thousand people and we have a hammer to shake the world.”

“How certain are we of an advantage in numbers?” the US representative asked. “We have no intelligence on what they have access to in the other world. They certainly weren’t reticent about letting their people die in the early stages of the war.”

“No, they were not,” Michael agreed. “Taking the dimensional bridge site cost them deeply. As did extending into South-East Asia, I believe more than they expected. Makassar Station gave them a surprise they did not anticipate, which is a win for us. Even without the power of their goddess, they have proven to excel at information gathering. I would like to commend Indonesia’s contribution in this.”

The Indonesian representative looked mollified, although he maintained his disgruntled expression.

“Since the early stages of the conflict,” Michael continued, “the invaders have significantly shifted their approach. After their strikes into Asia cost them more than they anticipated, they became significantly more cautious. They are no longer throwing bodies at problems and instead attempting to maximise their power advantage. They have more, and often rank-for-rank stronger essence users, and they’re trying to use that edge in individual strength. That individuality leads to our commensurate advantage: collective strength. The people of Pallimustus are used to small group tactics, not broadscale conflict. If they fight as people, they win. We make them fight as an army.”

“That tells us how to use numbers,” the French representative said, “It doesn’t tell us what those numbers are.”

“It doesn’t, not alone,” Michael acknowledged. “We do have estimations of their numbers on Pallimustus, but I am not going to disclose what they are or how we got them. I will tell you that what we’re seeing from their strategy correlates with the estimates we have. The church went all out to secure a beachhead, then became more conservative with their strategy because they tried to smash an egg and found it was a rock. They couldn’t keep that up forever. Now they intend to grind us into the dirt until we yield not just our land but our hearts. When humanity collectively accepts that we have lost, we have. At that point the goddess herself can come to our world and take over.”

He panned a hard look over the group.

“Our strategy is to bleed them until they can’t. Efficiency is our watchword. For every scrap of ground they take, we bury a mountain of them under it. We cede ground, not casualties. We keep our people alive and make theirs dead. That’s the goal, and we pay for it in territory when we have to. If they want to crawl across the planet then we’ll lay barbed wire over every inch.”

“What you’re describing sounds like trench warfare,” the Russian representative said.

“Metaphorically, it is,” Michael said. “Except that we make sure that they’re always the ones going over the top. Their people are the ones getting cut down in No Man’s Land. Our people stay careful, stay cautious. Let them make the big pushes and pay the big price.”

“Metaphors are all well and good,” the Canadian representative said, “but what of specific strategies and tactics?”

“Those are the purview of the Military Council, not this Civilian Oversight Committee. You here are privy to the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of this war. The ‘how’ is for someone else.”

“Are you suggesting that we or our staff have been compromised?” The German representative asked.

“I would never suggest that,” Michael told her. “Knowing and not telling would be so much more useful.”

“But we can’t just let ourselves be pushed back,” the US representative said. “If all we do is let them take ground, they’ll adapt. Start pushing into key strategic areas knowing that we’ll just let them. Look at the dimensional bridge site. You want to cost them bodies? You said yourself that they paid more there than anywhere.”

“Indeed I did,” Michael said and made a looping gesture over his head. Suddenly the screens behind him went blank and the walls shimmered with colour, like oil on the surface of water. The representatives started looking around, some tapping at earpieces.

“This room has been sealed against communication of any kind we know of,” Michael told them. “Operational security. In a moment, live feed from an active operation taking place will be sent to the display behind me.”

***

“I don’t like having you this close to the Knowledge Army’s centre of power,” Gabriel Remore told Emi. They, along with Gabriel’s wife, were sneaking across blighted landscape, wiped clean by a magically enhanced nuclear blast. Flat and barren, they were reliant on an invisibility ritual that forced them to move slowly.

“I’m not special,” Emi told him. “If Jason was on Earth that might be different, because then they could use me.”

“They can use you anyway,” Arabelle pointed out. “If you get killed or captured, I suspect the reaction of the Asano Clan will be rather drastic, regardless of your uncle. That being said, it’s not our place to tell you not to protect your world.”

“Did I just do that, though?” Gabriel asked.

“Less talking and more sneaking, husband.”

“Yes, Dear. Sorry, Dear.”

Previous Next