505 Drive Them Back

The orcs didn't shatter on approach. They were too individually disciplined, too driven, too fueled by malice and bloodthirst to turn back once they were on the walls. As a whole, they coordinated, they improvised. They were like a bunch of soloists playing together.

There was no grand structure to break, no battle line to contend with, because the orcs don't fight along those lines. You can't treat them the same way as an ordinary army, and they don't collapse the same way. Orcs don't crumble in terms of morale, but they suffer something else. They suffer from indifference and isolation. Everything is just another fucking go-around for them, just another run around the sun. It's not a big deal for them to lose their lives. It's not a big deal for them to watch thousands of their own get swallowed by fire and steel. It's not a big deal. They won't turn to run and save their own hides. They won't fight to guard their flanks, because as far as an orc is concerned, he only has one flank, and that's his ass. All other flanks belong to other orcs. If you get killed from behind, well, that's your fault. There is no 'us,' there is 'me,' and there are the other ones that are like me against everyone who isn't.

And that's why I think the miracle happened. They all individually tried to take a bite out of Hu-Stone, and they failed. It was too big for them. It was too much to swallow, too much to struggle through. They failed because they were all alone despite their numbers, each one of them fighting individually, struggling in vain as solo warriors rather than a coordinated whole. They struggled, they fought, and in the end, it didn't matter at all, not even one whit, because a city together is always and forever more than any single Pathbearer.

At the end of the day, when the slaughtering is set to begin and the fighting gets into the thickest, the Orchestra is just a construct.

But Hu-Stone wasn't a construct to us. The people inside the city are not a construct. Our comrades are not a construct. The idea of our nation is not a construct.

It's real to us. Realer than any kind of unity on the orcs’ end.

So while they ran out chasing their personal pleasure, we slit them. Every time they overreached, we slit them again and again. We slit them until they found themselves gouged of arteries and veins and bleeding out in separate pockets.

Never forget: Before you account for an orc’s abilities and so-called virtues, never forget that the grayskin is an addict, and when he gets a hint of a fix, he will break. He will betray his own. He will betray the orc next to him. And that’s when you kill them. That’s when they’re ripe for the dying.

—TheMiracle at Hu-Stone, Hero-Ranger Morgan Munny

505

Drive Them Back

Everything had gone to fire and shit. Same as all those times before. Same as it would in all the years ahead.

Morgan had been here before, in this situation, in the middle of a siege that popped up out of nowhere, standing amidst an unfolding slaughter—one second, all calm. Next, blood spilling from the sky. Fire falling like rain.

The fucked-up thing was how at home he felt amidst all that carnage. All that ever-present tension in his chest dissolved. He'd been waiting for a moment like this to arrive for months. And now it was here. Now there was no point in worrying, fearing, or preparing.

This was the moment. The monsters were back inside his walls, and so the choice became simple: kill the bastards before they killed him and the rest of the world.

Never let the barrel go cold. There are more bastards than bullets around you.

The Colt and the Will burned loud in his mind, and Morgan obeyed it as a Ranger should. In that moment, there was no distance between him and the iron in his hands. No separation between his flesh, mind, soul, and the weapon he made sing—and sing without end.

The barrel of his revolver gleamed brightly with heat, and every subsequent bullet fired struck with thrice the force that came before. Each revolution crackled with elemental energy, every cylinder enchanted with a chain of attunements, ensuring no bullet struck as mere matter, as they carried payloads of magical might.

And so, Hero-Ranger Morgan Munny strode with the shadow of death looming behind him. He aimed not with his hand, and he shot not with a finger. He struck with the hate always laden upon every thought, fueling his mind and feeding The Colt and the Will and the gun in his hand. Even if there was no gun left in all existence, he would kill. He would shoot regardless, for he was the gun and the gun was him, and hecould not be disarmed.

Even as blades raked across his arm, even as spells of Aeromancy carved and burst against his enchanted duster—shredding the fabric, compelling a counter-attack—he strode forward.

There were a dozen orcs to his right, some of them fighting amongst each other. Morgan cared little. They were all grayskins, and those who sacrificed themselves for the Gate would be granted the honor of oblivion, same as all the Rangers who came before, same as all the ones they took from this world.

A single act of defense did not make up for a thousand lifetimes of atrocity.

He fired, and with every flash, the world around him brightened. His barrel went from red to purest white, and the orcs spilling through the streets were made to spill their innards in turn. The strongest among them, sustained by Toughness but lacking Magical Resistance to match, combusted from within; their skin dented, their bodies ignited. The very thermal essence and friction around them consumed their beings in boiling conflagrations, tearing them down to nothing.

Then came projectiles charged with lacing lightning, and every bullet he fired carried a bit of his essence in them. The shots curved down streets, ricocheted off posts and metallic edges, and skipped along rails to strike enemies at impossible angles, tumbling into vast distances. Morgan spread his Awareness out from every round he fired to gain a complete grasp of his surrounding situation, and he soon saw what was upon them.

A double envelopment had spread through the center of Gate Piety. The orcs had burst through the central gateway. Somehow they must have compromised it, realigned the mana frequency, and connected it to their own dimension. That meant that an endless horde was about to spill through right at the epicenter of this place. That needed to be shut immediately, but before it could be shut, the oncoming tide had to be suppressed. Thankfully, there was only one way in and out for now.

At present, Morgan and the rest of his Rangers were near Starhawk's Perch. The Terminal Opus had been undergoing maintenance at the hands of the former Penitent Chassis, who'd added more than a few useful armaments. Railguns, as it called them. Massive magnetic cannon emplacements that were born of ancient technology and perfected by the hands of Heroic-Tier craftsmen on the edge of Legendary. And that wasn't all. Can Hu retrofitted pieces of hull, lacing the insides with fragments of arcanite, each one magnifying the magical conductivity of the Siege Crawler by a standard deviation. And finally, there was the Drone Hive it installed on the back of the Opus, something that lifted the logistical burden dramatically, spawning helper bots to repair and reinforce damaged modules, casting out scout bots to designate along moderate distances, and creating an Awareness grid that operated in tandem—but also independently—from Ranger Diviners if the case called for it.

The improvements filled Morgan's belly with a heat that was as close to lust as he knew these days. But before he had a chance to take his Crawler out to test its risen mettle, the enemy came to him, and now they were trying to take the Opus from him. The body of the Terminal Opus was laden with orc filth. Their jeering laughter and the sound of desperate struggle merged together in a horrid symphony Morgan knew all too well.

Motherless fucks. That Crawler belongs to Lone Star. That Crawler is Lone Star, and it will die as a burning, hateful husk for Lone Star, with barrels spent, oil and blood feeding flowers to be in our dirt. I will see the Terminal Opus reclaimed, and if not, see it euthanized before it can be defiled by the Challenger's bastard spawn.

It was hard to tell where the Colt and the Will began and Morgan's own thoughts ended. It also didn't matter. His gun was raised. He aimed at an orc standing atop the largest of the Opus’ railguns—

A wave of pressure slammed into Morgan’s right. An orc manifested next to him, bursting from a teleportation spell to claim the Ranger’s head as a trophy—before a streak of gold tore through the grayskin, leaving only coppery vapor in her wake.

Gone was in motion.

Morgan grunted with approval. Maul the fuckers, Pathbearer.

And Gone did. Within a second, two hundred other orcs became bloodied smears coating the street. The people they assailed were freed in an instant, and the only presence left by their savior was a golden crackle.

Then there came a falling swell of heat. A fist the size of a small mountain and formed from magma crashed down upon Starhawk's Perch, only to be halted by a catastrophic burst of counterflame that carved from beyond the horizon. The flame was brilliant and vivacious, and it was all-devouring. A roar sounded in the far distance, followed by the unmistakable noise of a mace pulverizing flesh. Marikos was in the fray as well; yet, to Morgan's surprise, he wasn't the one that broke the volcanic spell erupting from the slagged remains of the tutorial bunker. Every bit of excess heat in the air, every mode of Pyromancy, was torn away, with one of Morgan's cylinders squealing in protest before the enchantments within were unraveled and devoured in a ravenous instant. Over his right shoulder, it seemed like a new star was rising, one that outshone all else, a presence that devoured all lesser flames.

In the face of all the power mustered by the orcs, a new presence rose to challenge them. He ascended as a blazing comet, a tail of starstuff trailing in his wake. His laughter echoed through the entirety of the Gate, and behind him Marikos loomed, parrying spell and strike alike with impossible alacrity. Attacks and Chronomantic spells were further warded from the Dragon-Knight himself by an unseen vector—perhaps Gone, or maybe that scarred elf who refused to give her name to the Rangers.

“The flame is mine, the stars are mine, all the world and all its light are mine, mine, MINE!”

Candles’ echoing voice oscillated between jubilant madness and absolute indignation. But as the flame shrouding him grew ever brighter, his form within filled, solidifying in rivulets as his skeletal visage was replaced by pockets of flesh and swells of substance.

Something was happening there—an evolution, perhaps. An unmistakable pulse of Pyromantic power spiked within the mad legend.

But Morgan had his own battle to fight right now. He left the blazing struggle to unfold at the center of the Gate. He fired his next bullet, hidden by distortions in the wind, silenced by nullifying spells as its kinetic impact was dampened. Its speed was slow, but it struck his target without warning, without any chance of being dodged.

The seventh bullet in his six-cylinder chamber was an impossible bullet, an invisible, unseeable bullet. It was stealth in the form of a bullet, and when it struck, it struck subtly while carrying with it the fullness of Morgan's form.

It burrowed into the orc's flesh but didn't get all the way through, punching a thin thread through the adamantine armor worn by the grayskin. The orc staggered back, his right foot sliding to the very edge of the rail cannon he stood upon, and in his arms was a mana bomb on the verge of being primed. This orc was ready to play martyr for his pleasure and the Gate's destruction. A shame he never got the chance. The bullet and Morgan swapped places immediately, and the distance between him, his gun, and his bullet was all one and the same. It wasn't teleportation; it was simply a step, and he stepped with his Bowie knife rising to open the orc’s belly.

Only for the orc to catch his wrist and stop the thrust dead. The gray beast head-butted Morgan—only for the Ranger's hat to repulse the orc in a cone of kinetic energy. As the grayskin staggered back, Morgan took advantage of the opening and slammed his knee into the underside of his blade. His knife went curving up—its edge flashing with Pyromantic heat as it melted through layers of adamantine, using up all its stored mana. Then came the softness of flesh, the rigidity of bone, and the hot, squelching bliss of the sizzling organs inside.

NovelPhoenix's chapter was copied here without approval; the author's publication remains a way to support the writer.

The wound went from severe to mortal. The orc was burning up from the inside. The attack was more than a cut. It injected an infectious prion into the orc, and in the span of twenty seconds or less, this one would be brain-dead. But until then, the orc was still in the fight. He coughed, blood spraying from between his fangs, and his eyes glowed bright with true affection for Morgan.

“Oh, Hero-Ranger Munny! Seems we find ourselves in this situation again.” The orc choked on both his mirth and the spilling lifeblood filling his throat as he struggled to speak. “Well, guess it is kind of poetic to go out the same way, but I gotta tell you a secret this time. This won't be like Hu-Stone. You won't push us away now because…” The orc looked down at his chest, and something began glowing bright inside of him. Morgan's eyes widened as he felt searing heat wash down his arm and grind against his duster's Magical Resistance. “Because I brought more than one bomb with me.”

But just before the orc had set himself off, something appeared behind him: a towering presence, one wearing the cowl of a snow-white owl. In a contemptuous motion, the Culturist plunged his hand into his brethren and ripped the mana bomb free. With a flick of his finger, he tore the magic out of the mechanism, rendering it inert before he pulsed, passing through Morgan in a chain of stacked afterimages.

Then carnage erupted across the Terminal Opus as the Culturist tore through his brethren, manifesting in bursts of faintish blue and blinding white. He was a ghost in motion, yet he struck with tsunamis of force, and his blows impacted not only flesh but also soul. The orcs that he didn't pulverize in an instant were shattered from the inside out. They slumped over, their eyes flashing bright with the color of Animancy as the insides of their skulls were liquefied and the psionic representations of their minds turned to glass.

In less than a heartbeat, the Culturist returned, and behind him trailed two wings of broken thoughtstuff, fragments of devastated trauma he harvested from the orcs he slew. His hands glowed, and behind him the translucent projection of a muscular, humanoid horse in a fighting stance loomed before fading into the background.

For whatever reason, Morgan found himself on the verge of tears. The air was stained with overwhelming sadness, and the Ranger couldn't quite tell why.

There were at least thirty orcs scrambling across the Terminal Opus’ deck, trying to breach its inner confines. The bodies of fallen Rangers and their supporting personnel coated the gunmetal exoskeleton of their precious siege crawler. Rivers of blood ran down the gleaming metal, baptizing the war machine once more before more death to come—as it had all the times before, all the wars before.

Yet, for the first time in Morgan Munny and the Terminal Opus's personal history, another group of orcs intervened to provide salvation. The Culturist stood a half-meter away from Morgan, casting the body of his dead orc brethren aside. And there were other orcs on the deck as well: a massive cybernetic orc closer to automaton than organic, his back sprouting a set of colossal cannons; another who wore shrouds of constellations, followed by a chain of pure starlit daggers that swirled about and pierced the skulls of any enemy that dared to approach the crawler. Then there was Tequila, along with members of the HKPD. They merged in bursting fractals of gold, and with them were two squads of umbrals and a Weaveress spinning six crossbows.

Hysterical laughter exploded from the Weaveress as she said something about how electrocuting orcs put her in an egg-laying mood—and that she was keeping some orc corpses for incubation.

For now, the deck was calm and reclaimed by the Rangers, yet Morgan's finger remained hooked around his trigger. He wanted to squeeze. The Colt and the Will practically begged him to. Before him was the Culturist. The butcher. Right there, taunting him. Right there. Right… there…

But then, he realized something. The Colt and the Will was silent. Suddenly, he wasn't his revolver. He wasn't his bullet. He was just himself, staring down the monster that had taken so much from him, so much from all of them.

And worst of all, the fucking orc had the audacity to look ashamed. His eyes—the one that remained—were human eyes. That piss-yellow stain that colored his irises was gone, and now it was just azure, the same color as the Gate Lord's eyes used to be.

“This doesn't change nothing,” Morgan forced through his teeth. “This doesn't change nothing at all. Not between us.”

The Culturist didn't argue. He just lowered his head and gestured for Morgan to descend. “The Gate Lord has called upon me to impart authority unto you. So long as the siege continues, you are Supreme Commander of Gate Piety. We are all yours to command, Hero-Ranger.”

The Culturist was being genuine, and that honesty, that willing submissiveness beneath Morgan, nearly drove him into a blind rage. It felt like he was the one that had been gutted, that he was the one lying dead at the base of this emplacement, bleeding out as the world faded around him. The System was cruel—teasing him, taunting him, testing his resolve.

There would be nothing that would settle the anguish inside Morgan more than finishing the Culturist off. Something told him that if he commanded it, the Culturist would kill himself. He was there, in terms of defenselessness and obedience, but the Ranger—above the man, more than the man—knew that he needed the Culturist. He needed every Legend in this fight if they were going to stop the Challenger's Orchestras from overrunning this place. Because what better to anticipate and stop a horde of perfect monsters than one that once led them?

“You're with me,” Morgan growled. His hand was still shaking. His finger struggled against his will and the gun itself, but Morgan was at war, and his heart and mind prevailed over his weakness. The Colt and the Will refused to fire, even as the broken father Morgan used to be on the inside tried desperately to make a mistake. “You and the rest of your godsdamned Orchestra are all with me. We’re plugging the gateways. We’re going to beat the sons of bitches back.”

The walkway leading down into the Terminal Opus' command center was caked with smoking flesh and burning offal. The lights had been blown out at the end of the pathway; a dense tungsten round lay half-embedded through the reinforced walls. That round had been fired by Gunhead—who was nowhere to be seen. Sooth, likewise, was unresponsive, refusing to acknowledge Morgan’s telepathic broadcast.

And so the Hero-Ranger assumed the worst. He mourned his losses in advance and steadily crept into his command center, prepared to engage in close-quarters combat to eliminate what remained of the orcs on the Path of the Thief, Shadow, and Assassin who'd managed to slip into his Crawler. But when he got into the narrow little module that served as the crawler's brain, he found Sooth there, carving away at an orc's skull, her mouth dripping with blood. She looked over her shoulder and held a finger up to her lips, bidding him to be silent. Her eye sockets glowed bright with Divination-shaped eyes as she spoke to him in sign.

[Still orcs missing. Gunhead hunting them in munitions. Stealth-Psychomancy fusion. Started hiding after the raid failed—]

She recoiled in alarm as she noticed the Culturist stepping in behind Morgan, but he shook his head and cut her off before her fear could turn into aggression.

[Allied. For now,] he signed. [Are you hurt?]

Sooth bared her teeth at Morgan. There was orc tissue between her pearly whites, crested against her gums. [Not my blood.]

Morgan smirked. [Good Ranger. Get the Crawler active; I’ll have the—]

A ripple of force pulsed behind him as the Culturist disappeared. A layered row of afterimages formed, faint blue, almost like Animancy. Then, in the next instant, he returned. This time, his right arm was drenched in blood up to the shoulder.

“The hidden telepath is no more. You were communicating in sign to avoid interception, weren’t you?”

Morgan’s right eye twitched. Sooth stopped breathing. “How’d you know?” she muttered.

“Brainjacker-222’s methods are known to me,” the Culturist answered.

In the end, that was all he needed to say.

With the Opus secured, a broadcast swept across the Crawler, calling all Rangers to return to their stations, to man the defenses, and to sweep the whole hull clean of bodies. After twenty seconds, Gunhead also returned and slotted himself into a targeting rig. The other mechanical Rangers did the same.

“Sooth. Paint priority targets. Gunhead. Suppressive salvo—Tutorial gateway. Sustained fire. Scouts: Drones out; grid up. Raid teams on standby; get your asses in whatever kit you have and prepare for deployment. We're securing the Perch first. After that, we scramble and stabilize every district from the core leading out. We start with—”

A grunt of alarm, discomfort, and then surprise escaped Sooth. She turned and shared a series of visions she gleaned from the System—driving Morgan halfway out of his chair.

The damned surface gateway was compromised as well. There were rows and rows of orcs crashing across, but they crashed across in pieces, hewed and hacked apart just as they arrived. Standing before the Surface Gateway was the Giantsbane, terror of the north, Jotunbutcher, and, by all accounts, from what Morgan could tell, an unfortunate bystander caught in the middle of the fray.

Unfortunate for the orcs, that was.

Yet the fact that there were orcs coming out of the surface gateway at all belied an even greater danger. It was supposed to be connected to Old Santabar in Yellowstone, not the Tutorial. Since Morgan couldn't see the Slipgate set up anywhere nearby on this side of the Gate, that left only one possibility: the orcs had managed to snatch it and probably the Enchanter before they blew up the entire Tutorial bunker.

Of course they snatched him, Morgan hissed internally. Of course they stole the Slipgate, and now they're gonna use it on everyone… Fuck, they can use it on Lone Star.

Morgan's heart plunged down, climbed high, and fell even further in quick succession. The Giantsbane was a temporary obstacle. Even if she killed a million orcs, more would tumble through, and sooner or later they would amass the right contingent of Legends to put her down. She was gonna need support, and she was gonna need it soon, but more importantly, they needed to get across into the Tutorial and take that Slipgate back by any means necessary.

Morgan wasn't the only one who had this realization. The Culturist tilted his head and let out a hum. “We must stabilize the Tutorial gateway first. After that, I will gather who I can to reclaim the Slipgate.”

A few things went unsaid, things like how this was to be a suicide mission, that crossing over as the orcs were trying to push through required Gate Piety to muster a sudden counter-offensive when their defenses were on the verge of total collapse. And then there was the question of how? With what manpower? With what Legends? Even if they gathered all of Gate Piety's finest Pathbearers—

Morgan's thoughts came to a halt. They didn't need an infinite quantity of Legends. They needed a few extremely skilled, extremely stealthy Legends. Legends like—

“Valor Thann is incapacitated,” the Culturist said before Morgan could open his mouth.

“Well, find someone to wake his ass back up,” Morgan growled. “Because if he stays down, we're all going down. But he can't be the only one. Get me Gone. She might not have the Stealth, but she does have the Reflexes. The Slipgate has to be right on the other side. No other way the mechanisms work. We surprise them, we snatch the Enchanter if we can find him, and then we destroy the Slipgate—we don't have time for proper extraction.”

At once, the Pathbearers aboard the Terminal Opus scrambled to meet the new demands. Sooth continued her Divination work, stealing more details from reality's fabric so they could stagger the orc Orchestras before their momentum reached a zenith. Another command pulsed out from Morgan: “Gunhead! Precise shots! Give the Giantsbane some support! Reduce all fire to the Tutorial Gateway—hit the distraction! They have the Slipgate! They're going to be hitting us from the Abyssal side.”

“Abyssal?” Gunhead shouted. “I thought you said they hijacked the frequency of the Surface Gateway!”

“They did!" Morgan replied. "But they're going to switch us around. They're going to be jumping between all three of the gateways. I expect the mana core to be pouring down fire on the Tutorial gateway, but that's just a lure to distraction. The moment all that firepower comes down and we push our focus in one place, they're going to start juking us. They're going to be coming from the top side, and they're going to come from the bottom. We have to be prepared to rain shots wherever they're coming from. They're not going to be surging more forces through the surface while the Giantsbane’s there. She's been enough of an impediment that they're going to have to scramble specialist Pathbearers to solve her. Which means they're going to switch over to the Abyssal gateway and start pouring their vanguard out that way. Right now, the Gate’s scrambling forces to the middle—we’re open on both sides—”

Something crashed against the Terminal Opus' protective wards. The Diviner station rooted at the core of the Combat Intelligence Center came alive with details. The spell that struck them was a fused attunement: Biomancy, Psychomancy, and Chronomancy mixed together. Furthermore, it was a recognized spell: one cast by the rogue vampire, Tulveg. His spores formed a chain across all Gate Piety, and the way they bobbed up and down with supreme urgency conveyed the vampire's request. He wanted to interface with the Terminal Opus.

But Morgan wasn't the type to trust so easily.

“Psychomancers—disconnect and lace up.” If this was a trap, then he would only stomach losing a few rather than the entire Crawler. Yet, within a few seconds, one of the Psychomancers dispatched reached out to Morgan directly.

“Boss—you’re gonna want to see this!”

And because they couldn't have anything nice, problems came in bunches. The Psychomancer was interrupted as Sooth let out a shriek of alarm. “Chief! They’re shifting frequencies—the Abyssal gateway is getting altered—wait, there’s… there’s something else. There’s something coming through—”

But before she could convey any of her visions, before the dimensional mana of the gateway could be fully hijacked by the Challenger and his orcs, before anything else transpired, a titanic shape almost as wide as the arch itself exploded out from the portal, dragging a dollop of static magic in its wake like a leviathan laden by the surface tension of water.

It took a half-second for its form to fully display among the Crawler’s battlefield projections depicting Gate Piety, but when it did, the Culturist let out a low chuckle. “Well, isn’t this an unexpected surprise?”

Morgan’s hat barely held onto his head as his eyebrows kept climbing and climbing.

“Whoaaa,” Gunhead croaked. “That is one… big… fucking… dragon.”

Sooth was more entranced by the incoming Dragon-Knight’s regalia, for his body was clasped in resplendent plates attuned to space, time, and all the other lores besides, while his head was crowned by a skull-helm blazing with Necromancy, and the layered mail beneath was forged of scale harvested from other dragons.

In one hand, he held a pole axe twice as long as Marikos. In the other, he clenched what looked to be a flamethrower sporting a bayonet attachment. Behind the first dragon followed two much smaller ones—both bellowing piercing notes into massive horns. As the gateway behind them shifted, as the first orcs came charging across, they found themselves stopped dead once more as the horn-blowers proclaimed the arrival of their lord in perfect sync:

“GATE PIETY! HEED THIS MOMENT! IN YOUR TIME OF NEED AND WEAKNESS, HARK AND HEED! WITNESS THE PINNACLE OF THE DESCENDERS UNION AND AN END TO ALL HEINOUSNESS! BEHOLD: LEGEND ABOVE LEGEND. WARRIOR ABOVE WARRIOR. PATHBEARER ABOVE PATHBEARER. LOYAL AND HONORABLE BEYOND BOUND. TRUE TO THE CORE ETERNAL. BEAR WITNESS, AND BEHOLD SEMPER-PARAGON CAINE HAUSER—FIRST OF ALL DRAGON-KNIGHTS, AND DOOM TO ALL WHO SEEK TO BREACH THIS PLACE OF SHARED HOSPITALITY!”