Chương 70: Chapter 63 - Peace and the Demon Summoner (part 2)

The gate vanished, and Elsha stood in its place. In a black dress, with decently polished horns, and a different harp. She glanced around, smirked a little, and pink petals swirled around her. They formed a sofa, which she lounged on.

"This looks like it will be fun." I nodded.

"We are going to attack the base up ahead. You are the backup for when things go wrong." The corners of her mouth dropped.

"The backup?" Yeah, I didn't have the mana for her to solo this.

"You always told me that you need to be summoned for proper occasions. That you don't do grunt work. Now, we've got an army here to do the grunt work. So, what I am saying is that your time to showcase your magnificence will come, just that the grunt work needs to be done first. By the grunts, ideally." That earned me a few glares from the golden soldiers. The smirk returned to Elsha's face.

"But what about my upkeep? I'll burn all the mana I've got over time, even if I'm just floating around."

"The same upkeep for which I got you a 99 percent reduction to?" She gasped.

"You weren't supposed to remember that." She floated around, stopping by Gilgamesh from the other side of me.

"Hey, Gil, it's been a while." Gilgamesh inclined his head exactly one inch.

"Dark Alexandra." Ah, so they knew each other.

"I wanted to say you haven't aged a day," Elsha said, bracing her head by the arm.

"But you have. You look kind of old and worn. The beard really doesn't suit you. And don't say it looks kingly. It doesn't. It looks like you've had six divorces. Or was it seven?"

"It is always a pleasure to meet you." I snorted, summoning the rest of the gang. Astarielle. Ashy. Yushi. Siegfried. With their respective spell effects, they all appeared. Well, Siegfried just appeared, as his summoning refused to produce any spectacle. Ashy and Astarielle instantly bowed toward Elsha.

"Wait." In a pink blur, Elsha spun around us, floating to Siegfried, glaring at me. She motioned at Astarielle and Ashy that she acknowledged the bow.

"How did you get a Kallisto demon? I'm pretty sure I put in a filter so you could only summon my girls or worms or an occasional random samurai, so it wasn't too obvious." Gilgamesh used the opportunity, and motioned the army to move forward. The golden horde advanced. Did she? While I nudged my horse forward, I glowered at her. So that was why I was summoning an endless array of C-rank succubi. Siegfried only slightly shrugged.

"I believe that will be a longer story, Goddess." Yushi covered most of her face with a fan, just mischievous eyes glinting above its edge. She hijacked the summon. Trumpets blared, ending our conversation. Mina bolted forward. The base on floor thirty-three had been a fortress. Mina hit the outermost shield membrane at full sprint. On thirty-three, that swing had thrown a gate into orbit. Here, the membrane flexed like a soap bubble deciding not to die, drank the impact, and detonated it back into her.

She skidded forty feet through moon dust, actually knocked off her stride. Then the walls answered. Turret clusters along the battlements swiveled and sprayed arcs of amber sludge across the front ranks. Where it landed, golden soldiers hissed, smoked, and slumped like candle wax. A wedge of Alexander's cavalry rode through a curtain of it and came out the other side as steaming puddles. Gilgamesh flicked his wrist without looking, the same casual gesture that had rebuilt a shredded legionary out of gravel.

The puddles stayed puddles. His eyes narrowed. It was the first time I'd seen him look interested. Further down the wall, lance emplacements unfolded, long bio-mechanical stingers that fired no light at all, just a sound, a flat wrong note that went through my teeth. Every soldier the note touched simply stopped, the gold going inert, whole phalanxes collapsing into heaps of very expensive scrap. And from the hangar mouths, drones came out.

Thousands of them, wet-looking machines the size of bears, on wings, on legs, on things that were arguably both. On thirty-three, Gilgamesh hadn't given a single order. Here, he never stopped.

"Leonidas! Shield roof, hold the center. Caesar, testudo, take the left approach. Hannibal, pull the elephants off that membrane, they're being eaten." His voice rolled over the battle like it had its own artillery support. Gold surged up out of the moon dust around us, forming new figures.

"Vauban." A man in a powdered wig materialized, already unrolling plans that hadn't existed a second ago. Behind him, a hundred golden sappers hit the ground digging. Trenches erupted across the lunar plain in fast-forward, zigzagging toward the walls, swallowing the army out of the sludge-throwers' arcs.

"Napoleon." A short man in a bicorne appeared on a low rise, and behind him, two hundred golden cannons wheeled into a grand battery, muzzle to muzzle to muzzle.

"The wall, if you please." Napoleon's hand dropped. The moon shook. The first membrane layer burst in a sheet of dying light. The second layer took the next volley. The cannons were reloading themselves.

"Zhukov." Golden tanks poured out of the ground, blocky and squat and gorgeous, forming into a wedge aimed at the thinning shields.

"Richthofen, handle the sky." A golden triplane climbed past my head, followed by forty more, and the drone swarm found out what a dogfight was. Mina got back up. She went for the lance emplacements, moving by the wall, ripping a turret cluster out of the wall like a rotten tooth and using it to crush its neighbor. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. Three lances tracked her at once. The note hit her mid-swing.

It didn't switch her off, she wasn't gold, but the follow-up beam from the surviving cluster punched through her flesh and tore a chunk of her left forearm. The flesh instantly refilled, regrew, and covered with fresh fur. Werewolf regeneration apparently worked even in the large sizes. She stepped to the wall and sunk her claws into the lances. Vauban's sappers reached the wall. The mines went off in a rippling line, and a hundred-meter stretch of bio-mechanical rampart heaved up and came down in pieces.

The wall immediately started healing, amber flesh-metal crawling across the gap. Mina got there first. Rebuilt, personally offended, she tore the closing breach wide open with her bare hands and held it like a woman holding elevator doors, and Zhukov's wedge drove through her legs into the fortress with the elephants right behind. We rode in through the gap. As we did, I motioned at Elsha. With a semi-annoyed expression, she floated to me, looking at the battle.

"What? Should I float more in the back to be even more backier backup?"

"No." I smiled.

"Peace is here. When she dies, take her soul. She's not getting revived." She spared me a glance.

"Fine." She floated off to have a better view of the battlefield. My other demons visibly relaxed. They all edged closer to me.

"Yushi, find Peace," I ordered.

"Siegfried, Ashy, when we move for Peace, make the way. Astarielle, the usual, but when I tell you, hit me with the biggest shockwave fireball you have in the back to throw me at Peace." We moved into the base. Inside was worse. Interior sprinklers misted digestive amber over the avenues. Flesh-machine soldiers poured out of the walls, which turned out to be barracks.

The golden army ground forward through all of it, dying and being reformed and dying again, and Gilgamesh conducted the whole thing like an orchestra that frequently exploded. And then the inner ward opened up, and I saw it. The heart of the fortress was a spire. A stepped ziggurat of amber and glass, terraced stairs climbing its face, and above the summit platform, rings of runes orbited slowly in the dark like a crown that hadn't decided on a head yet.

Rivers of stolen sunlight ran up its sides in glass conduits, feeding the top. Above the pyramid, a large ghostly arrow appeared, pointing at the top. Guess Yushi confirmed it. I slid off the horse, glancing at Gilgamesh.

"I'm going after her." He replied with a short nod, creating more tanks for Zhukov in the process. We charged.

Verchiel landed on the station a few seconds before Liu and Henrik. The station's defense lattice met the three of them a mile out. Point-defense webs, laser strands thick as bridge cables, drone screens peeling off the platforms in shoals. Verchiel's slashes of pure force demolished most of them. Henrik's lightning spells finished off the rest.

They landed on the docking spine, a long platform of ribbed amber running toward the control core, sunlight roaring through the conduits beneath their feet like a river under ice. Liberation stood at the far end. The trenchcoat hung off him in a lazy fit, sword low in his right hand, pistol holstered. He looked at the three of them with mild attention. Henrik rolled his shoulders, stepping forward with a staff in front of him.

"You shot me in the head."

"And I will shoot you again." Liu took Henrik's side, settling into his stance, robes stilling around him.

"Your time has come due." Liberation raised his blade a centimeter, drawing the pistol. The tower interface flashed in front of Verchiel's, Liu's, and Henrik's eyes. [CRITICAL ERROR] [EMERGENCY EXTRACTION INITIATED] [EXTRACTION IN: 10] The edges of the vision of all three of them began to shimmer. Henrik swore and stabbed at menus that weren't responding. Liu's golden aura guttered like a candle in the wind. They all knew what it meant. Cassandra just pressed the emergency eject button for all the climbers.

"Paradise appreciates your visit," Liberation said, leveling the pistol at Henrik with unhurried care.

"See you never." [9] The countdown glitched. The red digits shattered, and gold flooded in behind them. Where the numbers had been, a golden symbol of a dune. Golden text overrode the red one. [KING'S OVERRIDE] [EMERGENCY EXTRACTION — CANCELLED] [ADMINISTRATOR ACCESS — REVOKED] The shimmering stopped. The interfaces cleared. Everything was back. Henrik sported a short laugh.

"We have come more prepared than I expected us to." For the first time in three floors of fighting, something moved in Liberation's face. His jaw tightened. He raised his hand and fired. Verchiel slashed with his left-hand sword, swatting the bullet away. He bolted forward, meeting Liberation head-on, as he also charged. Liberation led with a slash. Verchiel crossed his blades and caught it. He slashed with both. The force alone pushed Liberation back, and the blades released two crescents of pure force.

They cut Liberation across the chest. Blood sprayed out. Henrik finished a spell. An orb of flame fired from the tip of his staff. It curved around Verchiel and hit Liberation head-on. He blocked with the sword. The explosion still threw him back, tearing off parts of his clothes and flesh. Before he even stopped flying, Liu arrived in front of him. With a spin, he kicked him in the stomach. A golden blast thundered through the air. Liberation hit the rails by the energy core behind him.

He wrenched over with a sickening crunch, and then collapsed onto one knee, spitting blood. In front of him, reality tore apart into a portal.

We charged up the ziggurat. Siegfried took point. He was even faster than last time, every sword swing a hypersonic boom that released a shockwave that threw even smaller mechs around. Absolutely nothing that hit him caused any damage. Machine gun fire, laser weapons, plasma blasts, it all bounced off him. The extra stats from Inspiring Presence really made a difference. Ashy floated around him. Nine feet of shrieking steel, cutting apart anything and everything that Siegfried missed.

"SQUEE! I'm so sharp! And strong! And fast! This is awesome!" I ran behind them, doing my best to keep up. Astarielle ran next to me, shooting crimson fireballs to the sides to cover us. Every explosion devoured a part of the building and whatever they hit. They had low stat base, I realized. So, the flat stat boost gave them an insane power up. Elsha sealed our formation, flying around with casual boredom. Nothing worthy of her attention has yet appeared. And with a bit of luck, it wasn't going to.

Two pink threads connected her sofa to Ashy and Astarielle. I wasn't sure if those were leashes or buffs. Most likely both. A stray tank shell hit Astarielle. Her shield flashed, blocking it off. If Yushi was somewhere, I didn't see her. We reached the upper part of the stairs. A giant mech landed into our path. Mina flew in from a side, mid-leap. She grabbed the mech with her claws, and tumbled with it down the ziggurat's side. We reached the top platform.

"Stay two steps behind," I shouted at Astarielle, drawing Sarah's sword.

"And prepare the spell." She stayed behind. Elsha floated up and behind as well. I ran onto the platform a bit behind Siegfried. I could finally see her. Sarah lay in an open, crystalline coffin. Her skin glowed with inner light. Energy that snaked up the ziggurat all led into her. Peace stood in front of the coffin. With the usual trench coat, white shirt, and long pants. She looked as serene and insufferably calm as ever. Two massive mechs stood a bit to the sides in front of her.

A flash of bright light came from behind, bathing everything in pure white light for a split second. I didn't look back. Peace formed a faint smile, and the crystal behind her expanded into a ring. Nice try, but I knew this trick.

"Now," I shouted. The negative field expanded from the crystal. Astarielle hit my back with a monster of a fireball. It strained my shields, but not that much thanks to the damage reduction from the cloak of the wanderer. The shockwave rocketed me forward. Siegfried, Ashy, and Astarielle vanished as the field touched them. I lost all feeling of mana. But I slid forward on my shins. The mechs reached after me. Too slow. I slid between them, pushed myself up to my feet, and crashed into Peace, sword first.

The tip pierced her chest. The impact threw her back at the coffin. I caught the sword with both hands, stepped in, and slashed horizontally. The blade cut her throat, sliding off her spine. Blood burst out, and she collapsed on the coffin, motionless, blood flooding out. Mina landed on the platform behind me. Each of her claws pierced the mech. She threw them aside. I exhaled. The negative field vanished. Elsha instantly hit Peace's corpse with a pink string. She yanked out the leaving soul, drawing it to herself.

The crystal collapsed into little shards. They flew into Sarah.