Chapter 339

  Qualen Woods, Archduchy of Rebirth

  Darthar-Asaria Trade Route

  "My lord." Said the messenger as he entered the command tent and saluted the Marquis, sufficiently nobly born to be able to bypass protocol. "Our advance units reporting encountering minefields, covered with field guns and marksmen guarding the enemy's flanks. They cannot break through to engage."

  "Minefields?" Said the Marquis, as he poured over his map, not even bothering to look at the messenger.

  "Yes my lord. Using the same gas mines that took so many slaves."

  "Interesting..." The Marquis mumbled to himself as he moved tokens on the table and ran through scenarios in his mind.

  "My lord?"

  "Nothing. Order the cavalry to keep probing. Wait for an opening or an opportunity to harass them."

  "My lord?"

  The Marquis smiled as he picked up an exquisitely carved wooden miniature, representing a biological airship.

  "Our dear Crystal is about to have company. We need only keep her head into the bear trap she's so gently put herself in for us. Go."

  "Yes my lord." Said the messenger as his fist slammed against his breastplate, before scurrying out.

  "Finally feeling some optimism?" Said the duchess, having done her best to be unobtrusive.

  "A bit." Answered her nephew. "I hadn't expected the dear dungeon core to be quite so obliging as to attack us. But if everything's going right..."

  "It must be a trap." The duchess smiled as the Marquis looked at her with a surprised look. "An adage that holds true in both political and military matters it seems."

  "One could argue one is a continuation of the other. Regardless, yes. The problem is where the trap would be? It-"

  "MY LORD!" Screamed a messenger as she burst into the tent, changing her trajectory in extremis to avoid barreling into the Marquis and instead colliding with the table, before straightening like if nothing had happened. "My lord! Captain Winters reports that the...the thing is charging her! It's punching straight through her troops! Just...ignoring them my lord!"

  "What?!?" Let out the Marquis, as he turned back to the table. Captain Winters had already been hit by the mechanized abomination once, she had to have been on the lookout for it, but why go through...them....

  He looked at the miniatures representing the rest of the UDC's fleet, and that of the ship holding their dungeon core, safely behind them.

  And behind captain Winters' infantry.

  "Oh fuck." He said aloud, before whirling to face the messenger once more. "Go to colonel Horland! Dispatch our reserves! We must stop that abomination!"

  "Sir yes sir!" Yelled out the messenger, momentarily forgetting his noble honorifics, before rushing out.

  "I assume we've found the trap." Said the Duchess.

  "I hope so, my aunt." He said as he gazed at the maps. He knew exactly what she was doing. And it was all the more horrifying that he couldn't do anything about it. He didn't even have a direct line to his 'allies' to warn them in time.

  That mech had a full complement of null missiles. Unleashed at point blank range, from below the ship...

  He shuddered.

  "I really hope so." He finished. "Because if this isn't it, this 'masterstroke' of ours is going to turn into a bloodbath."

  He didn't need to say 'yet another'. It was all the heavier by the fact that it went unspoken.

  How many more could they take before people starting asking questions? How long would his aunt's presence terrify them into compliance, before they decided that the Brigadier's solution with the Southern Army was the one to take?

  He didn't know. And right now, that was starting to worry him even more than the dungeon core he was fighting against.

  *****

  The Mackie had one key advantage over the spider tanks: it was so massive, so powerful, that nothing short of another armored vehicle could stop it. Not in terms of combat power, but in sheer ability to move.

  The mech ran straight through Sunrise's infantry screen, crushing the unlucky and batting aside the others.

  But it didn't do so without damage, and Alexandra cringed as errors and alerts began to sound in the command center, as shields began to flicker under the onslaught...and fail.

  Suddenly, it was through, with a clearish field ahead, or at least what qualified as a field in the Qualen Woods. She could see cavalry on the other side, rushing to intercept, but she quickly ran the math, and smiled as she knew they wouldn't be there in time.

  She saw the airships above. The UDC's fleet had split into two, as she had predicted, the new light cruiser 'hanging back' to 'protect the transports' and no doubt support the onslaught, while the warships went to keep her own vessels busy and help pin down her army.

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  One squadron suddenly altered course, and so did the others, after a few seconds. She had no doubt as to who was commanding that squadron...and who had suggested bringing in that secondary core for a trap like this.

  Well played Glarvistar, she thought, but not good enough.

  The Mackie ran directly under the ship, as wasp like monsters dropped from the vessels, alongside more common infantry. The UDC threw everything it had at her, the ships even firing their guns, taking out some of their own arriving monsters in their barrage.

  The Mackie's shields failed. Armor plates screamed and bent. One howitzers half melted under a relentless barrage of acid, while a rocket pod was sheared clean off by a bone spike the size of a car.

  But through all this, the Mackie moved to sacrifice its lesser weapons. And finally, it came to halt...and fired its missile launcher.

  She'd known that trying to make a sustainable missile launcher for the Mackie was an exercise in futility. So she hadn't even tried. She'd settled for a simple revolver design, holding six shots of remarkably compact, entire enchanted missiles.

  Half a dozen missiles screamed up, and the enemy's point defence desperately reached out.

  The missiles were too small to have all her new bells and whistles. But they were interceptor missiles. This close and this fast...they didn't need subterfuge to hit. Only one was shot down, more by luck than good judgment, and another hit a wasp marine full on, sending the weapon careening into another vessel.

  The light cruiser holding the dungeon core shivered, and began to fall as the null warheads detonated. Its barrier vanished in a cascade of light...and came back up.

  Alexandra's eyebrow rose. Okay, that ship had rechargeable energy shields. And given how quickly they'd come back up, the magitech kind too.

  It wasn't going to save them.

  Below the ships, the Mackie died. Hammered in by half a dozen escort vessels and a veritable swarm of monsters, it fell. It gave as good as it got, and the ground was painted with the blood and guts of its foes, but the first of her mech died nonetheless. But it didn't fall in vain.

  As three seconds later, the So Much For Subtletly's missile barrage arrived.

  The missiles were fired over the enemy's main battle formation, whose defenses might not be made to intercept enemy ballistics during their coasting phases, but tried their damnedest anyway.

  The missiles dodged and weaved, as one of her sacrificial 'chaff' warheads detonated, covering the rest of the volley as the enemy was about to fully box them in, enabling all but one of the other five to make it.

  Then they came back down.

  The light cruiser and its escorts' point defences were really good. Unfortunately for them, they were this good because they were magical...and two of their vessels, one by accident, had just been hit by null warheads.

  Two one ton warheads collided full force with the ship, and for a fraction of a second the screens didn't show anything but vaporized blood and smoke, as the dungeon core's influence rendered the systems capable of piercing through the haze useless.

  Then, like a paladin emerging from darkness, the ship sped out of the cloud...gleaming in the pale blue of mythril.

  "Holy shit, what the fuck is with this ship?!?" Called out Alexandra. An entire ship clad in Mythril? That was so insane even she hadn't considered it!

  However, her eyes caught something. The ship had a layer of mythril under its meat, yes -how that worked with the living component, she had no idea-, but it was armor plating bolted into a frame. And that frame had clearly not been made to take direct hits from warheads that could gut capital ships.

  The ship began to alter its heading, as its escorts moved to interpose themselves...almost too late for the second volley.

  This time the main fleet's defense went from desperate to methodical. Clearly someone had asserted order, and only three missiles made it through the gauntlet. One was sacrificed to shield the others with its chaff, while the other two were shot down by the relentless point defence fire.

  Three screamed back down towards the light cruiser...and the last surviving one, weaving through the gauntlet of fire, was intercepted at the last second as a frigate physically put itself between it and its target.

  The frigate was almost thrown against its charge as the warhead detonated. It began to regain control, and take back altitude...

  Someone with really good, high tech sensors, might have been able to say what went wrong. All that Alexandra knew was that one second the ship was taking its shielding position once more, and the next it was an expanding ball of mad magical energy as something failed inside of its primary mana storage.

  The ship's armored skeleton exploded outwards like a giant shrapnel bomb, and the light cruiser visibly wobbled as shards of bone and less identifiable substances struck its plating. Some, whose angle were just right, just got stuck in seams or pierced through some of the already weakened mythril plates.

  The escorts were in disarray, trying to change their positioning to cover the gap left by their brethren, while trying to avoid the effects of its fiery death.

  And the third volley arrived.

  Four missiles made it through the gauntlet this time, thanks to Subtlety's artful and on the fly changes to the missiles' evasion pattern. And this time three hit.

  Alexandra watched with impatience for the smoke to clear, already cursing her lack of arcane sensor data.

  Then she swallowed a disbelieving scream as the ship came through the smoke once more.

  The explosions had hammered the spikes of bones into the ships, bent the armor plates and their underlying structure so hard it looked like an entire section of the hull was curving inwards.

  But despite that, despite seeing copious amounts of blood flowing through the cracks, it just refused to die!

  The ship kept its heading for a few more seconds...then turned around.

  And Alexandra breathed in a deep sigh of relief as the rest of the UDC followed suit, falling back at full speed. They weren't quite routing, but-

  "Milady." Finally said Subtlety, and the dungeon core looked at the AI, before going back to the hologram as the construct pointed at it.

  Her eyes went wide as she saw Sunrise's center...falling apart.

  "What-" Then it hit her. The ones running away were those who had been under the advancing UDC ships. Or at least had seen them run like beaten dogs firsthand.

  First it was a formation here and there. But as more and more nobles sought to save themselves, taking their slaves and regulars with them, holes began appearing. And every unit that tried to run took the space for another trying to move in to engage.

  Any pretense of organization vanished, and the entire seething mass began collapsing upon itself as one side ran while the other tried to advance.

  "Shall we advance?" Asked Subtlety, and after what seemed like an eternity, but the clock stubbornly insisted was but a handful of seconds, Alexandra shook her head.

  "No. Their flanks are still probing the minefields, and eventually they'll get through." Especially as whatever bastard was commanding the other side hadn't charged in them wholesale, and was instead trying to clear them with skirmishers, which wasn't quick, but it preserved the flanking forces as more or less intact. "We've completely stopped their advances for the day. They have to fall back or risk overextending themselves. Switch the artillery to target the right flank, make it look like we're about to veer into them, force them to pull back. Then we just disappear. Are the civilians ready to depart?"

  "They are already on the move."

  "Good." Alexandra looked at the battlefield, and tried to estimate the number of dead, before her brain simply refused the numbers she was coming up with. "Let's go then. We've broken that trap. It'll put them off for a while."

  Hopefully for long enough. Because if she was right...

  She'd just massacred a hundred thousand people. More than her entire army put together currently.

  And it wasn't even a tenth of what she was facing.

  Dear Gods, what the hell would the decisive battle she was busy planning look like?

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