Chapter 144 The Violet Artillery
The heavens over the Iron City tore apart with the thunderous bang of our scavie anti-air guns.
Bright and blindingly white tracer rounds whipped down the rooftops and cut through the snow. The big caliber shells crashed against the rushing Striders. Had these been the old Coalition machine work, the rounds that pierce armor would have torn their hydraulic joints open in a few seconds.
But the Rot had altered the laws of physics.
SKREEECH.
The lead Strider was shot squarely on the right leg. The metal was bent, and the dense, throbbing violet biomass was interspersed throughout the chassis immediately shot up. The fat vines were swelling, the damaged steel was drawn back into place like the tissue of a muscle being stitched up. It did not even slow its pace.
"They're regenerating!" Kaelen screamed in the comms, a second later the crack of his sniper rifle was heard. His high-velocity hollow shot in the glass cockpit of the walker, but there was no pilot there--only a glowing, pulsating mass of nervous tissue. Small arms fire will no halt it! We need to destroy the core!"
"Hold the breach!" Ryker shouted, and his voice pierced the confusion.
The Perforation in our shipping-container wall was twenty feet in our joints. Ferrous, in command of the Iron Guard, was shoulder-to-shoulder in the smouldering cavity lifting heavy scrap-metal shields.
He no longer was a cyborg, but he fought like a god of the forge. He carried a great two-bladed battle-axe which he had obtained in the Foundry. As the hive-mind first wave of infantry struck the line Ferrous flung out the axe in a cutting arc. It pierced through the corrupt Coalition armor and two soldiers were thrown back into the snow.
"Flesh heals!" Ferrous swore, his breath vapouring in the icy wind, his mutilated limbs pitting themselves against the burden of the advancing swarm. "Hold the line!"
But it was not the infantry that was the problem.
There was a low, mechanical sound of humming in the soles of my feet. I was looking beyond the fighting at the breach. Three of the enormous Mammoth tanks were swinging their turrets five hundred yards away. They were chaining on to the barricade.
Those barrels started glowing that violet light of sickness, and that concentrated light.
"Artillery!" With a scream Jaxon threw himself behind a reinforced concrete pillar. "They're firing again! Get down!"
And when they strike the barricade a second time the entire wall collapses! Vane yelled over the radio. Ryker, we can not get another volley!
Ryker looked at me. He had fiercely desperate golden eyes. "Elara! The sky!"
He didn't need to explain. I knew what I had to do.
I scrambled up the icy slope of a turned-over transport truck not much farther back than the front line, and found myself on the wind and before the battle-field. My fingers had gone numb, yet I put my hand on the broken Origin Stone on my left hand.
The magic lay down, plowed in chilled by the snow of the blizzard. I didn't try to coax it gently. I drove my panic and adrenaline into the rock.
Wake up!
The stone jumped and energy, white-hot, shot up my arm.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The three Mammoths opened simultaneously. Three huge violet plasma-rot balls shot through the frozen no-man-land, and snow vapor was left in their paths. With them they were turned right at the middle of our line.
I threw both hands forward. I was helpless to build up a sound magical wall, not in this cold. However, I could manage the pressure.
I picked the screaming snow and squeezed it. I threw a wall of hyper-dense, freezing air directly across the line of the approaching plasma.
It was a disastrous collision.
The superheated violet artillery, striking the absolute zero air, when it struck compressed, did not blow upon it, but bounced off. The path of the plasma spheres was bent by the atmospheric pressure.
One of the shots took a mad flight up into the grey clouds, and burst futilely. The second shot broke through the damaged overpass a hundred yards on our left, drenching the uninhabited street with flowing concrete.
The third was heavier than the rest. It crashed through my wind-shield, its course being slightly changed.
It did not hit in the middle of the barricade, but thirty feet before the break. A tidal wave of boiling snow, broken asphalt and violet fire threw across the line by the explosion.
I was thrown out of the truck by the shockwave. I landed on the ground of ice with a great bang, the breath knocked out of me.
"Elara!" Ryker screamed and ran up to my aid and lifted me up. "Are you hit?"
No, my ears ringing, my hands throbbing with the effort. "But I can't keep doing that. The stone... the cold is battling me...
You gave us time to buy, Ryker said angrily. He swung his gaze to the breach on fire.
The Striders were in touch with the wall.
The twenty-foot walker had one of its feet in the crater, and its heavy and clawed foot squashed a fragment of the melted shipping container. It gazed down on Ferrous and the Iron Guard. Its violet steam that was pouring out of its chassis smelled of rotting meat and ozone burning.
It lifted a huge, bi-pedal arm, which was terminated in a heavy rotary saw blade greasy with biomass.
"Bring it down!" Ryker commanded.
He did not wait till the machine struck. Ryker had charged into the breach together with Ferrous.
It was just a beautiful frightening exhibition of violence. The Alpha and the Warlord.
Just as the Strider swung its rotary saw upon the Iron Guard line, Ferrous came forward. He didn't dodge. He knocked his heavy scrap-shield right on the side of the saw mechanism. The bang of metal on metal was thunderous, the spurts of sparks flying on the snow. The pure brute power of the human strength of Ferrous made the blade stop during the very next moment (one second).
That was all Ryker needed.
Ryker threw himself off the side of a broken container fifteen feet in the atmosphere. His Star-Metal sword flamed on, and the blade flashed blinding, hurtful orange.
He didn't aim for the armor. He aimed for the biology.
Ryker pushed the burning blade all the way up to the deep bunch of violet veins between the knee of the Strider and its upper chassis. Corrupted corpus he hissed, and warned the Star-Metal. The machine gave a digitized scream of pain.
Ryker pulled the blade laterally and cut off the bio-mechanical tendons all the way through.
The Strider's leg buckled. Then the huge mechanism crashed in the snow and the chassis crashed down at the ground with force that shook my teeth. The sniper rifle of Kaelen snapped once more before he could take action to regenerate. One of the armor-piercing rounds had lodged into the uncovered, edible nervous core of the cockpit of the walker like a cork.
The violet light flashed and the Strider was dead, and lay a mass of vaporising scrap iron.
"One down!" Jaxon was cheering on the flanks.
However, the victory did not last long.
The snow cleared behind the slain Strider. The hive-mind infantry was coming across. They did not run; they moved with that same horrible, synchronized pace, straight on top of the rubble of the walker, to come pouring into the gap.
They were hundreds, and they had violet eyes and their rifles were in perfect unison as they were raised.
"There are too many!" Vane yelled over the radio. Oh, they will break the barricade by sheer mass!
Ryker was at the centre of the break, his orange sword was smoking on the cold air, and Ferrous was shoulder to shoulder with him.
The corn-thick of the avalanche of infected men, aligning their weapons against a shield, could not be resisted with a shield wall, and Ryker growled out the words. "They don't feel fear. We must take the head out of the snake.
Ryker gazed over the frozen battlefield bridling his golden eyes on the giant command crawler resting five hundred yards off in the storm. General Vance was there within, plotting the swarm.
"Baron!" Ryker roared.
The huge werewolf leaped to his side, his grey hair lying wet with blood and snow.
Clear me a passage, Ryker said, with cold and absolute voice. "We're going for the General."