110: Brute Force

Eilian set me down gently, her hand shifting to my waist to steady me. “You took quite the hit there. Are you hurt?”

“Yes,” I croaked, and shifted my form slightly towards my hafornsu. With my plant body taking the fore, my human one could begin to mend.

She saw my body grow green and nodded. “Better reform your shield. We have a great many more steel ones to kill before the day is out.”

“Destroy,” I muttered, wincing as a field of protective energy flickered back into place around me.

“Hmm?” she asked, tilting her golden-horned head in question.

“Destroy, not kill,” I told her absently, glancing around. She’d teleported us to the top of a ridgeline nearby. “They aren’t alive. Complex machines, nothing more.”

“I see,” she chuckled, and she… she ruffled my hair.

I frowned up at her. Why did she have to be taller than me too? Her smirk was… so much.

“Please don’t do that,” I grumbled. “It’s distracting.”

Her cocky grin grew wider. “I’m sure it is.”

I watched her as her eyes danced with mirth. God, she was gorgeous. Like all mages, I guess, but she was especially gorgeous from my perspective as one who did not ascribe to the neutering mantra of toxic masculinity. Her strength was an aura around her, in the way she carried herself, in the way she wore her suit, and in the way she now drew her sword.

It crackled to life with the signature golden energy of her magic, and she arched one perfect eyebrow at me. “Are you ready? I figure we can discuss my arrival and all it entails after this is done, yes?”

“Agreed,” I nodded, but reached up to grasp her hand below the hilt of her sword. “But give me a moment.”

She looked askance at me, but held her position, waiting for an explanation.

“The missiles, did my strike destroy the nacelles?” I asked, already using my eyes to find the answer. “One of them, okay. We need to get those things out of commission before they can kill more of our people. Can your sword cut them off?”

“I don’t know what any of those words are,” she chuckled, gesturing forward with her sword. “I assume you mean the big explosive arrows that killed a lot of your people already?”

I nodded. “Yes, those.”

“Okay, I’ll get it done,” she said. “Can you take care of as many armourclasts as you can while I do so? Then we’ll coordinate to destroy the kingbane.”

“Good plan,” I said, and summoned my blades back, allowing them to fan out lazily behind me.

“I like those,” she said, reaching out to tap one with her sword. It produced a cascade of sparks and a harsh tearing sound.

I snorted and threw her a look, one which was returned with a thoughtful consideration. She was probably trying to reconcile the differences between the Ryn she had met almost a year ago, and the mage who stood beside her now. I’d changed a lot.

“See you down there,” I grinned, and blinked back into the battle.

My blades swept up over my shoulder and down to strike at the vulnerable joint of an armourclast. One after another, they crashed into it, until it was sundered from the main body in a spray of sparks and screaming metal.

With the metallic monster listing drunkenly to the side, I brought one of my blades back around and slammed it into the stump of the severed limb. Rather than pull it out, I allowed it to dissipate and then crashed more of my blades into the weak point. It was surprisingly effective, using my blades to repeatedly hammer at the same place over and over. Eventually, one of them broke through and smashed something important. The armourclast went limp.

Looking up, I saw one of the missile pods tumbling free from its home, trailing molten metal in its wake. I really needed to ask Eilian how she was doing the whole lightsaber thing. If I could incorporate it into my blades…

A flash of emotional urgency struck me low in the belly, but it wasn’t the fun kind, and it also didn’t feel like mine. I acted on instinct, teleporting blindly out of harm’s way just as a beam of charged particles lanced through the place I’d been standing.

Another shot rang out, loud and angry, then another and another. These were black as night, and they slapped into the offending armourclast in rapid succession. Grace had just unloaded on the metal beast with a magical energy I didn’t recognise.

The metal armour of the enemy began to rapidly oxidize and decay, until the arm cannon that had shot me was hanging useless at its side. Unfortunately, it didn’t go on to consume the rest of the bot, but I was there a moment later with my blades, jackhammering them into a weak point.

I made eye contact with my girlfriend as the huge machine collapsed to the ground. Her alarm for my safety had jumped across the intervening gap, regardless of the lack of physical contact. It spoke to just how much she cared for me. Gosh, I was lucky.

“Ryn!” Eilian’s call brought my thoughts back into the fight, and I looked up to see her standing atop the kingbane. “Time to fell the beast!”

Rather than yell out to her, I just teleported up beside her. “How do we kill it?”

“I have no idea,” she laughed, and stabbed downward into the armour of the big mech. “I figured we’d just start hacking away at it until it stopped moving.”

“I guess that works, but my swords don’t cut as well as yours does,” I said skeptically.

“How about I cut you a hole and you can start slicing up all those soft innards?” she asked, and jammed her sword into the shell. From there, she cut a hole in the armour big enough to fit through, and offered it with a pointed glance.

Eyeing the hole dubiously, I said, “I’d rather not actually go in there.”

That didn’t stop me from summoning a small blob of magenta energy and dropping it in. She watched curiously as it rattled around inside the machine’s innards. Then, it detonated, creating a blast of energy that warped and twisted everything it touched. One of the legs of the great machine twitched and curled inward like that of a dying spider. Okay… so what if more grenades?

Before I could drop another one or five down there, one of its huge gun-encrusted arms shifted to aim at us. Eilian wasn’t having any of that, though, and she slashed her sword with impossible speed, sending out a wave of crackling energy. It gouged a deep rent in the arm’s wrist, causing it to list slightly off to the side as the kingbane disgorged its weapons. The mountainside behind us took a beating.

You know what, fuck the grenades. “Eilian, better get off this thing.”

I didn’t wait for her confirmation, instead launching myself up into the air with an impulse spell. She teleported out of the way just as I reached down with an infinite swarm of telekinetic tentacles. It felt fitting to do it like this, considering how my first fight with a steel one had gone.

As I gripped the internal workings of the massive robotic mech, I allowed myself to feel the deaths of all those scattered across the battlefield below me. My empathy for those lost to gunfire and explosions contracted around my heart. So many thinking, feeling, loving humans, and they were all gone. The empathy turned to rage, and I shoved all that emotion into the furnace of my magic.

With a scream of exertion, I tore the internal mechanisms of the kingbane apart with my mind. The world filled with the sound of tortured metal, so much so that many of the remaining steel ones turned to watch. I hoped they understood on some level what was happening. I hoped they understood the hopelessness of their battle. That they were soon to meet the same fate.

All the pieces of the kingbane gathered around me like debris orbiting a celestial body as I hung almost sixty feet in the air. For some reason, my tentacles were visible as dark magenta light, shifting and moving as they emanated from my head. I was holding myself up in the air with them too, several reaching all the way to the ground to act as legs.

I began to throw chunks of the kingbane at the smaller steel ones, crushing a great many crawlers under heavy heat sinks and other random chunks of advanced computing. It was chaos, with dirt, stone, and steel all crashing about. Below me, the useless husk of the kingbane collapsed with a deafening crash.

Blowing out a puff of exhausted breath, I blinked down to the ground beside my girlfriend and slumped against the rock she was using as cover. “The rest are yours, my love.”

“Damn, Ryn,” she laughed nervously. “Tell me how you really feel…”

“Tired,” I grumbled. “Tired, and sick of being shot with missiles.”

Her smile lost the awe and gained a large dollop of love. “Okay, babe. We can handle what’s left.”

Sliding down to sit with my back against the rock, I gave her a grateful look and watched as she went back to shooting. She was amazing to watch, her elegant hands working the various components of her weapon like they were a musical instrument, as well as one of destruction.

Of course, then my eyes slipped up her arm, because I was mentally exhausted and unable to control where my gaze traveled. Yes, I was on a battlefield, and yes, there were dead people all over the place, but also… Grace was hot. I mean, who could blame my wandering stare? She was such a perfect combination of feminine beauty and physical strength.

I closed my eyes finally when I’d let them drink their fill of her. God, what a fucking mess. If we’d had more time we might have realised that we needed to target those missile pods first. Instead, we’d been forced to rush in blind as a force of advanced robots barrelled towards the town.

Was Avonside a town now? I was still thinking of it internally as a university, but that didn’t really seem right anymore. Maybe we should be considering it a town now, or even a country. How crazy was that?

A sudden silence snapped me out of my daze, and I stumbled to my feet to peer over the rock. “Is it over?”

“Yeah…” Grace said with a long, relieved sigh. “Yeah. We won.”

I couldn’t bring myself to feel good about it, though. It was hard to think of this as anything other than a bad thing that could have been so much worse. Instead of everyone dying, only a moderate number of people had been killed. This had meant to be our damned weekend. Fucking robot bastards.

Ah, but now I had to go and ask what the hell Eilian was doing here. No rest for the wicked, I guess.

QuietValerie

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