Chapter Sixty-Six – Back, Against the Wall

If you want more to read, consider joining my Patreon! Or check out my other original works:

Stray Cat Strut (A cyberpunk system apocalypse!) - Ongoing

Fluff (A superheroic LitRPG about cute girls doing cute things!) - Ongoing

Love Crafted (Interactive story about an eldritch abomination tentacle-ing things!) - Completed!

Dreamer's Ten-Tea-Cle Café (An insane Crossover about cute people and tentacles) - Hiatus

Cinnamon Bun (A wholesome LitRPG!) - Ongoing

The Agartha Loop (A Magical-Girl drama!) - Volume Two Complete!

Lever Action (A fantasy western with mecha!) - Volume One Complete!

Heart of Dorkness (A wholesome progression fantasy) - Completed!

Dead Tired (A comedy about a Lich in a Wuxia world doing Science!) - Ongoing

Sporemageddon (A fantasy story about a mushroom lover exploding the industrial revolution!) - Ongoing

Past the Redline (A girl goes too fast, then she does it again) - Completed!

Magical Girl Crystal Genocide (Magical Girls accidentally the planet, and then try to fix it) - Completed!

Magical Girl Rending Nightmare (A sequel to Crystal Genocide! Cute girls in a soviet dystopia having a picnic on the roadside) - Volume Two Completed!

Noblebright (A shipcore AI works to avenge humanity) - Completed!

The Complicated Love Life of Ivil Antagonist (The Empress of Mars finds love) - Completed!

Pokebun (Broccoli Bunch in the world of Pokemon) - Hiatus

Queen Violence (An Assassin Reborn as a Kitten) - Completed!

No Strings Attached (An Elden Ring/Bloodborne inspired progression fantasy) - Dead

Save Scumming (A time-looping system apocalypse) - Ongoing

Black Apron - Max Level Archmaid (An OP Maid doing Maid things) - Ongoing

Chapter Sixty-Six - Back, Against the Wall

"Hoe long does it take for a city to fall?

The record for how long it took a city to fall (which counts only cities that fall, not those that held out for a long time and eventually were reclaimed) is a tie between Ahvaz, Iran, and Kolkata, India, both taking sixty-two days from the time of their initial breach until the end where they were officially declared as lost."

--Primer on Antithesis Siege Warfare: The Fall of Cities, first ed. 2049

***

Our timing happened to be damned good because as we were rushing towards the wall, shit went sideways.

The first and pretty much only hint was a section of the upper wall blowing the fuck up.

It wasn't a huge explosion. I'd seen bigger and I'd set off better, but it was concerningly coming from the inside of the wall. "Fuck," I said before pushing the BOBCAT to move faster. Gomorrah moved faster as well, though she fell behind a little, so I was the first on the scene.

My IFF immediately started to highlight enemies, mostly dark smudges vaguely visible through the flames wrapping around the upper sections of the wall. They were spilling through, dog-like Model Threes and a few others. Some ran out too quickly and plunged to their deaths, but others were leaping down onto some scaffolding and making it to the ground.

Soldiers were rushing back and away, running for their lives.

I aimed both 90mm guns into the gap and opened up. I set the rate of fire relatively slow with a small tweak. The shots were explosive, and a near miss was enough to wreck anything close. With the gap more or less plugged for the moment, I could take in the situation.

A section of the upper wall to the side of what had to be section 42 had blown up about three quarters of the way up the wall. I wasn't the best at judging explosions, but it looked like it came from the inside. I didn't seem much charring and the way chunks of concrete had spread out looked like that had been pushed away from the interior.

I wasn't sure. The lighting wasn't the best, just whatever a few dozen floodlights and the still-burning fires within could provide as illumination. "Myalis, do we have schematics for the wall?" I asked.

I'm sure I could find something.

"What was in that section there?" I asked with a vague gesture to the hole. The fire within was slowing down, which was the only good thing. A lot of aliens were coming out of the hole and I was only able to kill so many. Fortunately, those that had made it to the ground already arrived a little stunned and slowed, and the soldiers running around gunned them down without trouble.

There's a small storage room in that approximate location.

"An ammunition bunker?"

No.

"Was it being used as an ammunition bunker despite not being one?" I asked.

Yes.

Typical. Some lazy dumbass just stored shit where it was convenient rather than safe. I felt Gomorrah approaching behind me and flicked on the comms to speak with her. "Anything you can do about that fire?" I asked.

"I can add more," she said.

I paused and really thought about that for a couple of long, long seconds. "I'm going to assume," I said slowly while I worked through it. "That you're wanting to use some sort of fire thing that will stop the current fire somehow?"

"That's right. I have some thermobarics and some fuel-air bombs that leave no lingering fire once they've detonated. And I can load special ammo in. I have some fire-suppressants as well, but they're not loaded."

"Right, gotcha," I said. "Uh, go nuts?"

Gomorrah didn't need to be told twice. She aimed one of SERAPHINA's arms upwards and a tiny missile shot out, streaking across the sky and into the hole in the wall.

A moment later a large whump made the ground jump. Fire raced out of the hole and through the inside of the wall a ways, a bright, liquid thing that boiled out from the broken wall. And then it burned itself out. The exterior was blackened to a crisp, but the flames were put out.

If anyone had been in there, they were dead.

There were good odds that they were dead already, regardless. If the Antithesis were pouring out of the wall that meant that they had infested the inside already.

I looked for an opening and found one a section over. "I'm going to head outside of the walls," I said.

"Is that wise?" Gomorrah asked.

"Probably not, but I'm kind of useless on this side. If we cut the flow of aliens hitting the wall, we'll give the soldiers time to clear out the insides and take back control. We just need time, right?"

"Give me two minutes," Gomorrah said. "But head over to the gate. I'll get you some reinforcements."

I didn't know what she was planning, but I trusted her, so I lopped over to the gate, bringing the BOBCAT to a stop just behind the heavily reinforced door. I checked over the mech's status as I did. It was becoming something of a habit to look over things whenever I had a minute to spare. Everything was green, though I'd used a good chunk of my 90mm ammo. Not enough for it to be concerning yet.

I was just started to lose patience when Gomorrah's voice came back over the comms. "We have... several elements of armour available. They can't do anything on this side of the wall. They're volunteers, with no clear chain of command. Can you handle that?"

"Sure," I said.

She transferred an IFF package over and I linked it up with the BOBCAT's systems. It pinged a dozen tanks and armoured vehicles, all of them slowly making their way over.

Pikes and Rattlesnakes. I was happy that I'd spent so much time working with similar vehicles because I had a decent idea of what I was looking at. A couple of days ago the designations wouldn't have meant anything to me. There were also two Beavers, which I didn't know anything about.

I pulled up a web-browser and searched them up real fast. After scrolling past the AI overview bullshit, I eventually found one of those nerdy tank-lover forums talking about it. A Canadian-made heavy MBT. Slow as shit, under-armoured, and under armed, but that was just the opinion of some tank-weebs on the internet.

The two that slowly rumbled over were chunky things. Three generations past the Leopard... according to the nerds. It was all angular and sharp and wasn't covered in nearly as many small arms as I'd expect a modern anti-alien tank to have. Those tanks were not made for fighting hordes of small, relatively squishy enemies.

I didn't have time to have a nice chat with the entire crew, so instead I went on the comms and just issued orders. I tried to be calm and precise about it. If I couldn't get people's blood pumping, then the least I could do was be rational and chill.

I positioned the heavier tanks up front, the lighter ones at the rear. We'd basically form a frame around the more stationary Pikes, since they had awful side-to-side shooting. The big tanks would be on the ends and the Rattlesnakes were to spread out between everything. I'd take the front and serve as the point of the spear.

The doors rumbled open, slowly shifting aside. They were barely more than a metre open when a Model Five flopped its way through. I didn't even have time to reach for my controls before someone filled it full of holes with machinegun fire. That was a bad sign.

The door continued to open, spilling light from the inside of the wall into a broad expanse of darkness, lit only by a few remaining searchlights. Where those lights swept, I could make out a sea of moving chitin and alien flesh.

Some of that swarm was too damned close.

"Alright, stay close," I ordered before stepping forwards.

I was barely ten steps past the end of the wall before I was attacked. I leapt to the side, avoiding a lunge by a particularly large Model Three. I stomped down, catching its neck and slamming its upper torso into the ground with all of the weight of my mech behind it.

The tanks had lights, and they illuminated a growing circle around us, one filled with skittering forms.

"Fire at will!" I called out.

The air filled with whizzing gunfire, with the occasional booming retort of a cannon serving as punctuation. We barely had to aim. This was as target rich an environment as we could ever want.

I wasn't sure if wanting this was clever, but here we were. I shifted the BOBCAT lower, ducking beneath a large spinning mass of spikes and thorns, then I traced that back from where it came from and blasted the area with a railgun round that lit up the night for a moment on impact.

We had the swarm's attention now, for better or worse. I just had to hope that the others had time to stabilize the wall while we held that attention.

***