Chapter 338

  Qualen Woods, Archduchy of Rebirth

  Darthar-Asaria Trade Route

  To say that Sunrise's vanguard was terrified would be a considerable understatement.

  They could hear the distant screams and thundering guns as the army's right flank, or left from their enemy's perspective, was attacked by the Mackie and its armored escort.

  So laser focused were they on enemy traps and a possible charge, that they didn't fully realize what the whistling was until it was too late.

  Some of the more alert ones dove for the ground.

  Most didn't.

  The formation came to a crashing halt as the artillery barrage began. The first volley crashed onto the wards in a chorus of thunderclaps. The second caused them to flicker. And the third punched straight through the failing barrier, as its shells began reaping a rich harvest, and any semblance of organization or unit coherence vanished in the chaos as soldiers dove to the ground or tried to run to cover.

  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the shelling stopped.

  Officers bellowed, soldiers rose to their feet as order began to emerge again...just in time for them to see the hand grenades sail through the smoke and dust.

  There wasn't much left to mop up afterwards, as whoever hadn't been taken out tossed down their weapons and ran as fast as they could, as the golems marched through the craters made by their own artillery.

  *****

  "General! Your Grace!" Yelled a messenger as he stumbled into the command tent. "The enemy's artillery has engaged our center and mechanized units have withdrawn on the left."

  Mahikam, Marquis of Caliban, commander of the Northern Army of Liberation and incidentally, the duchess of Sunrise's nephew, nodded.

  "Good, status?"

  "The left flank holds strong thanks to the reinforcements from the UDC, but their original units have been badly mauled. The center...the center is in full retreat milord. We are trying to turn them around."

  "I see." The Marquis nodded. "Interesting..."

  "Ideas, nephew?" Said the duchess, and the Marquis jumped a bit, as if he'd been so deep in his thinking already he'd completely forgotten about her.

  "A few. But nothing concrete." He frowned. "Trying to predict and outfox Crystal has proven...hazardous, for all her previous opponents."

  "I suppose you would know." The duchess sighed. She was a politician, not a soldier, let alone a commander. Getting nobles in line, alliances and trade deals were more up her speed. Maybe it was a blindspot for her...she'd always expected to have military people to handle that side of the affair, but she'd run out of trustworthy commanders frighteningly quickly.

  "I certainly hope I do." He straightened. "Her options are few. But an artillery barrage on our center buys her time. She has shattered the road, making our infantry advance harder. That was expected. The question is what she will do to prevent our flanks collapsing on hers and encircling her force."

  "You believe she will stand and fight?"

  "Whatever you think of her my aunt, Crystal is no one's fool. If the civilians have been as panicked as we hope, she will reform her army around them to get them under control. This will take too much time to even allow a fighting retreat. No, she'll make a stand."

  "Which we will win."

  Her nephew gave her a look that sent shivers down her spine.

  "No. We'll pin her down for the UDC to finish."

  "...You've been talking to the dungeon cores behind my back."

  "Underlings talking to underlings has been the way things have gotten done since the dawn of humanity, my aunt, but yes. The UDC wished to ensure they would strike the final blow, for I assume their own propaganda and 'domestic' purposes. I was more than happy to let them throw their own troops at a cornered dragon."

  The duchess leaned back into her seat.

  "And you think this'll work?"

  "As they think it will?" He shrugged. "Probably not. But this is our best shot right now. So we're taking it."

  "Very well. Good luck, my nephew."

  "Never say good luck to a warrior." Said the Marquis with a smile. "Say good hunting." He nodded towards the messenger, who had done his best to become deaf, mute, and part of the furniture. "Signal colonel Halpsrey and captain Winters. Order the flanks to begin the attack!"

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  "Yes my lord!" Said the messenger as he slammed his fist against his breastplate, and scampered out.

  The Marquis watched him go, and focused back on the map, his mind working overtime.

  The dungeon core was going to have tricks up her sleeves. Anticipating them by reviewing all of her previous fights had walked the UDC straight into a massacre.

  His only hope was adapting. And hoping that his 'allies' would take the brunt of it, when the time came.

  ******

  The first inkling of what was coming was the airships.

  Alexandra's airfleet may be a shattered remnant of what it once was, but it was still a force to be reckoned with. The airships advanced, not far enough to pose an immediate threat to Sunrise's advancing troops, but sufficient to make the UDC's own vessels stand back.

  Without air reconnaissance, and their own vanguard units annihilated in the center, Alexandra's spearhead moved undetected.

  Of course, the retreating regulars could have told their fellows, as they rejoined the main army...and they did. But what little they could say was a confused mess of panicky accounts. Most didn't even bother passing it on, and those who did found their noble officers thoroughly unimpressed by the accounts of cowards desperately trying to justify abandoning their posts.

  Both armies gathered pace. Alexandra's troops came to halt, staying within the range of their artillery and air cover, and set themselves up, preparing their eventual withdrawal.

  Sunrise's central group was the army's hammer. A mix of regulars and slave troops, it was a sight to behold, a seething mass of humanity, whose pockets of disorder were ironically all from the regulars, soldiers not bound by brands making them march in perfect lockstep.

  Their front ranks were all slaves, intended to serve as meatshields for the linebreaker regulars behind them. Unfortunately for them, the UDC's hesitation to challenge Alexandra's airfleet meant that they were at the mercy of her recon drones. Sunrise's mages may be shooting them down after a handful of seconds of coming within sight, but a few seconds was all they needed.

  The howitzers adjusted their targeting...and fired.

  A few seconds later, so did the So Much For Subtlety.

  Regulars and slaves alike tensed up, as their mages went into action. To their credit, they were no one's fool, and focused all of their efforts on the missiles. Their efficiency may have been diminished by dispersing into the army, trying to avoid the easy to target, large mage formations Alexandra had slaughtered at Darthar, but they also had trained for this every step of the way from Asaria.

  The first volley was annihilated long before its null warheads came into range. The second came closer, as the mages were briefly distracted or thrown off balance by the thunder of hundreds of artillery shells hitting the forward formations' wards like sledgehammers.

  Unfortunately for them, the first two waves were sacrificial. Intended to distract the mages from the real threat.

  The frontline screamed as a golems suddenly ran into sight, and a seemingly solid wall of gunfire erupted from their guns. The golems' accuracy was abysmal, firing from the hip as they charged, but they didn't need precision. Even a shot fired wildly was bound to hit something against such a large formation.

  Sunrise's mages suddenly had a choice. Deal with the army bearing down on them, or the bombardment. To their officers' credit, they chose the bombardment.

  Alexandra had been unwilling to bet against that. The next volley of missile came in...and began dodging all over the place. Enchanted warheads were thrown about by new propulsion and evasion systems, as one of the missiles suddenly accelerated ahead of the others, and detonated into a mess of smoke, illusions and arcane noise, Alexandra's best approximation of magical chaff and Electronic Counter Measures.

  Two missiles were intercepted.

  Of the other three, one's warhead failed to detonate.

  The last two were more than enough.

  The null warheads activated, and wards came down throughout the army's backbone, enabling the terrifyingly well calibrated artillery to hammer the formations of regulars into paste as the howitzer shells screamed in after the missiles.

  *****

  "And that's what you get for being cute." Said Alexandra with a wolfish smile as she watched the take from the drones. With Sunrise's mages thoroughly occupied, she now had air reconnaissance for a few dozen seconds at a time, though even she was going to run out of drones before long. "Strike assessment?"

  "Their regular formations are shattering." Subtlety straightened, her hologram flickering briefly as the ship fired another missile volley. "You were correct milady, they did not need to be annihilated. Just damaged enough to fall back."

  Alexandra nodded. The regulars could be broken, and once they were, they would try to fall back and reform...which meant trying to push through unyielding slaves, turning the entire mess into pure chaos. She was effectively using the same tactic they'd intended to use against her...except that she was using their regulars instead of civilians.

  "Alright. We can't allow them to reinforce. Push forward, engage them as closely as possible."

  "Yes milady." The AI froze. "Status change!"

  Alexandra opened her mouth to ask what, but she saw the hologram in the center of the bridge update.

  "Ah. Our dungeon friends are coming out to play. I suppose they finally found what's left of their courage." Her smile got even more wolfish. She'd seen they'd been reinforced, but only by a handful of ships. Two frigates and a light cruiser. Some 'backup'. "Alright, move the fleet to intercept, and-" Alexandra froze as an alert sounded, and the edge of their sensor range began to glitch.

  "Anomaly detected. Possible enemy countermeasures to our sensors." Said Subtlety as the UDC's ships went forward, and Alexandra's blood ran cold as she realized what was peeking out from inside the enemy formation.

  A small, flattened sphere, centered around the new light cruiser, where their arcane sensors who, for the most part, were just divination magic or a variation thereof just...failed.

  "That's not ECM. It's a dungeon core's influence." Said Alexandra.

  "...Problematical. Mobile influence?"

  "Yeah. I haven't used it much." On her primary core, back when she'd first been turned into a dungeon core, fighting through the golems and collapsing the access point to Seraph's bunker with her avatar, and a few tests with her secondary cores while en route to their soon-to-be branch offices. "If it's here without a giant fleet protecting it..." Alexandra closed her eyes and swore. "It's a mobile FOB and manufacturing center. I've never tested if these things have a limited throughput. If they have the mana to burn, they can probably just vomit out troops all day long."

  "Why reveal it?"

  Alexandra blinked. That was...a very good question.

  "...They're not." Alexandra leaned back from the holographic projector. She could feel Ghost coming from the same conclusion, the apparition having taken Seraph with her and trying to help CQ optimize the civilian evacuation and keep setting up surprises with the sappers. "They don't know they're in sensor range. They think our blackbirds and our drones are our long range eyes, they don't realize the carriers have upgraded sensor packages." Ones which actually enabled the Subtlety to fire over the horizon without needing drones or other ships sent forward. Not fire nearly as accurately, perhaps, but nonetheless.

  "Orders?"

  Alexandra's eyes narrowed as she ran quick and dirty numbers through her mind, though it was as much of an educated guess as anything.

  She was doing a 'coup de poing' operation. An uppercut, hit them hard, hit them fast, and get out. Whether the UDC knew or not was immaterial, that secondary core was the perfect counter. They could use it to swamp her with monsters that she couldn't break, creating them at point blank range with no idea of what they'd make next. It'd be expensive as all hell, but they could do it.

  "Play dumb." She gritted her teeth. "They probably expect to surprise us by just summoning an entire formation out of nowhere while the rest of the fleet distracts us. So for now, we play dumb, fat and happy." She relaxed a bit. "While we prepare to slit their throats. Get the mackie back to the main force, I think we have a job for it."

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