Chương 255

The diviner gasped, recoiling from the scrying basin as if the water had turned to acid.

"They are coming," she breathed, her eyes wide as she looked up at the assembled leadership.

"A fleet of airships rides the northern winds. They have locked onto the beacon." A tense silence fell over the command group. Orion immediately checked the data streaming across his glasses, verifying the atmospheric shifts and the faint, distant vibrations bleeding into the Field, but couldn't find anything yet. That didn't mean she was wrong, only that the wait would be long.

"How long?" Archmage Valentia demanded, unknowingly echoing Orion's own question.

"The Ironwood is vast, Archmage," the diviner replied, steadying her trembling hands.

"They are pushing their engines to the limit of what I've seen them capable of, yet they are carrying an unprecedented load. We have two, perhaps three, hours before they reach the Shattered Basin." Orion let out a slow exhale. It was a welcome buffer. The enemy was rushing, blinded by the overwhelming allure of the faux-Heartwood, but their sheer bulk meant they could not simply appear out of thin air. The Alliance had time to finalize their positions, check their wards, and prepare their artillery lines.

Asteria turned her attention downward, gazing into the canyon where the newborn tree pulsed with emerald light.

"Elder Tasmeos," Asteria called out, amplifying her voice so the man could hear.

"The trap is set. Gather your Circle and ascend the cliffs. You do not need to be caught in the crossfire." Below, the old druid seemed to consider her words. He looked up at them, then back at the glowing anomaly they had birthed from the earth.

"The nature of this tree is false, Priestess, but the soil it stands on is true," Tasmeos rasped.

"The Iron State brings poison to our home. We will not watch from the safety of the high stones as they desecrate the riverbed. We shall remain here and fight to the last." Valentia frowned, stepping forward.

"Elder, this is an artillery ambush. The canyon floor will become a cauldron of fire and shrapnel. To stay is to invite death."

"We all share the same root, Archmage," Tasmeos answered with finality.

"If the earth is to suffer today, we shall suffer with it. We will ensure the metal beasts do not leave this basin, even if we must drag them into the soil ourselves." There was no arguing with the fanatic light in the druid's eyes. They intended to fight, accepting martyrdom if it meant exacting a price from the invaders who had burned their woods. Asteria hummed, displeased but accepting their choice.

"Then may the moon watch over your journey." That's as good as proclaiming them dead men standing. But then again, something tells me Tasmeos was always going to go out this way. Contributing to taking down the enemy is a better end than being hunted through the woods, alone. The ensuing wait was almost agonizing. The mages shifted positions several times as new information arrived about the enemy's approach, drawing dozens of staves, each humming with elemental fury.

The Sanctum battle-witches murmured quiet prayers to the Mother, setting up defensive veils around their position and preparing for the war's largest battle so far. Orion was moved to a secure vantage point near a thick outcropping of rock, giving Pauline control of their surroundings. She seemed determined to make sure nothing would reach him, though he doubted that, once the fighting started in earnest, they would be able to stay out of the way. It's a miracle I managed to convince Mom to let me come along.

Despite our agreement and her recognition of my efforts, it's not easy for a mother to lead her son into war. Eventually, the natural sounds of the forest, the rustling leaves, and the distant calls of those predators whose senses weren't fine enough to notice them ceased. A low, mechanical thrum vibrated through the bedrock, rattling the small stones at Orion's feet. The sky above the northern horizon grew noticeably darker as the sun's light was blotted out by a creeping, unnatural smog.

Then the fleet broke the tree line, and he finally saw what kind of monstrosity he'd have to deal with this time. Floating high above the canopy were dozens of armored zeppelins. They were fortresses of riveted brass and steel, kept aloft by humming engines that vented thick, yellowish-green exhaust. The sheer scale of the armada exceeded their estimates, revealing that more had been kept in reserve than they'd assumed.

"They aren't bringing ground forces, then," Jonatan whispered, somewhat relieved.

"If it's entirely an aerial fleet, we might not even see any fighting once we unleash our artillery." Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Orion frowned, rapidly analyzing the thermal signatures radiating from the airships' underbellies.

"They did. They just changed the delivery method." As if to validate his suspicion, the bay doors underneath the zeppelins ground open, and everyone tensed, waiting to see what would emerge. Thousands of metallic shapes plummeted from the sky. Some fell like unguided missiles, encased in streamlined drop-pods that shrieked as they sliced through the wind. Others were deployed in clusters, spreading mid-air to cover a wider area. The impact was deafening.

The first wave of pods slammed into the northernmost part of the Shattered Basin, cratering the ground and sending plumes of dirt and water high into the air. Before the dust could even settle, the pods burst open. Towering mechanical Centurions, multi-limbed Burrowers, and heavily armored Cyborgs stepped from the craters, already primed, their weapons out. It seemed the Iron State could also weaponize gravity itself, using a vertical envelopment to instantly flood the kill zone.

"Fire!" Archmage Valentia roared, his voice cracking like thunder as the cliffs erupted. Hundreds of spells rained down on the basin floor. Roaring cyclones of flame, lances of kinetic force, and wyrms of ice slammed into the descending machines. Before the barrage could even slow, the artillery weapons were released, belching elemental fury of all kinds and shredding brass armor before the machines could fully orient themselves. Yet the enemy forces kept falling.

The sky was filled with a rain of metal, and there was no sign it would stop anytime soon. On the canyon floor, Tasmeos and his Circle went to work, commanding the terrain itself. Thick roots burst from the rocky soil like striking serpents, wrapping around the mechanical Burrowers on the front line and crushing their chassis under the pressure of growing wood. Vines laced with potent natural toxins whipped through the air, finding the cyborgs' exposed biological components and dissolving them instantly.

It took very little time for the basin to become a nightmarish blender. From his position, Orion could see his mother, Elder Candra, and Archmage Valentia deleting great swaths of machines with their spells, summoning powers so great that the Silence armor the machines wore could do nothing but crumple. For a moment, he allowed himself to hope it would end that way, but then the stream of falling machines tapered off, only for five more pods to be released, larger than any before them.

A thousand feet above the riverbed, violent bursts of alchemical thrust arrested the pods' momentum. The doors sheared off, and the entities within stepped out into the empty air, suspended by howling thrusters built into their armor. Arcane Overlay flashed a frantic series of warnings. Despite looking vaguely like them, these were not standard Praetorians. They were actual warriors encased in mechanized combat suits, somehow surviving the suffocating aura of Silence.

Yto Hausae — Iron State Enders Elite Class: Human-Alchemical Hybrid [A-rank] Level: 177 Mind:??? Attunement:??? Body: 1240 (+400) Traits: Arcane Void [A-rank]; Hive-Mind Integration [A-rank]; Alchemical Mana Circulation [A-rank]; Man-Machine Meld [B-rank];???

[A-rank] It took some effort to even get that much, yet Orion barely allowed himself to groan in annoyance at the pushback before writing the status screen on a piece of paper and passing it to Pauline, who vanished it into her shadows and would bring it to the attention of their strategic commanders. The most noticeable thing, aside from all five of the Enders being tier four, was that he'd managed to get a sense of how their armor affected their Body stat, which was more than he'd done before.

He didn't know whether that meant he'd gotten better or that these specific enemies were less shrouded in the Silence than the Amalgam had been, but now wasn't the time to figure it out, especially since the five Enders rocketed straight toward the highest concentrations of mana on the battlefield. Two of the augmented warriors broke formation to engage Archmage Valentia, forcing him to abort his attack on the crawling mass of machines.

The air around the mage warped as he regarded them coolly and summoned a tempest of razor-sharp wind that clashed violently with the storm of blades wielded by the Iron State elites. Elder Candra met another, unleashing a blur of spells from her silverite cane and easily parrying hammer blows that could have shattered mountains. The shockwaves from their clash cracked the basin, sending both friend and foe stumbling. Asteria took the remaining two.

She danced through the air, using rapid spatial folds to evade corrosive alchemical fire and weaving complex transmutations as she sought an opening in their anti-magic plating, since her initial barrage of moonlight spears had failed to do more than knock them back. While their powerhouses fought a grueling duel against the artificially empowered brutes, Orion forced his gaze away and stared firmly at the sky.

Pauline stood over him, deflecting stray kinetic bolts and shrapnel that came too close to their position.

"Those Enders had never been seen before. To think they kept them in reserve until now," she muttered, looking like she'd very much like to take to the sky and face them herself.

"I can tell their power is mostly artificial, but they sure hit hard."

"They are a distraction," Orion grunted, his gaze locked on the hovering zeppelins. The Arcane Overlay was feeding him a constant stream of atmospheric data, and he could see that the airships were still venting. A fog of Silence was pouring from the zeppelins' exhaust ports, cascading downward to form a dense cloud above the fleet.

Fortunately, it wasn't the corrosive defoliant they used to destroy the forest, but it wasn't much better, as its arrival saw the flow of battle shift away from a slow but inevitable victory to a slog. Witches who could once take on three or four machines had to restrict themselves to two as their hold on the Field weakened. The repeated elemental barrages from the Collegium's backlines began losing their potency, with the magics breaking down halfway through.

It was still their battle to lose, but unlike the machines, they could not fight forever, especially in these conditions.

"They are trying to turn it into a battle of attrition," Orion realized as the Iron State's strategy clicked into place. Strangely, that helped calm his nerves. He'd been waiting for something to go wrong since the start, and now that he knew what it was, he could finally do something about it. He pulled Pauline down behind the rock outcropping, raising his voice to be heard over the deafening explosions.

"The zeppelins are deploying an aerosolized Silence buffer to dampen our artillery and suffocate our spells, since we have developed ways to render their armor useless. As long as those ships are in the air, they can keep pumping out the fog until we run out of mana."

"I imagine this is the part where you suggest a harebrained plan to shoot them down," Pauline muttered.

"We can't," Orion said, ignoring her tone.

"The fog creates drag on any magic, rendering even tier-four spells too weak to truly damage them, and I'm certain those zeppelins are tougher than they look."

"Then what do we do?" she asked. Orion looked at his hands, then up at the hovering fortresses. The solution was clear. Magic couldn't punch through the fog because it was designed to unravel spells, so they needed something to get through it.

"We have to go up there," he decided.