Chapter 328: Forever War

Will pried himself out of the cliffside, coughing the sting of smoke and dust out of his lungs as he did.

Nothing growing inside my lungs. No tiny hazardous miasmat particles, jut the normal shapeless stuff. Air seems safe.

Through the dust, Will could make out a tightly packed coil of miasmatic structures begin to flood with Charge.

Will didn’t know for sure what it was, but it was pointed at him, so that was reason enough to get the Abyss outta there.

Will dove to the side, and an instant later, the cliffside shattered as a fluctuation of Charge leapt across the distance, exciting the atmospheric miasma and causing a devastating explosion.

To Will’s miasma-tuned senses, the miasma coil filling with Charge made a sound a bit like a steel sheet being flexed, but underwater.

Will wrapped Phantom hand’s armor into a harness and tugged himself forward, putting on speed and shooting out of the cloud of dust in a fraction of a second.

Once he was out of the obscuring dust cloud, Will could assess the opponent visually. The coil of miasmatic structures were contained inside of a shiny platinum cylinder the length of a man. The slab of shiny metal was in turn attached to a crablike shiny metal monster about the size of a peasant hovel.

The monster’s limbs whined as they moved, Charge flowing through its frame to power complex miasmatic structures whose purpose Will needed more time to decipher.

As the metal cylinder swung back towards Will, his fighting experience kicked in and he swept towards the monster at full speed.

He took advantage of the proximity to sidestep the cylinder’s concussive blast of magic and landed on the back of the shiny metal crab.

It was all flat planes and hard angles, looking nothing like a living thing. It’s joints moved with a strange precision that felt nothing like the smoothness of a breathing creature.

If anything, it reminded him of the strange capsules that jutted out from the ceiling on the 8^th Floor.

It’s a machine, isn’t it? Will thought as his foot came down on the back of the creature, finding a spot where the cylinder couldn’t reach.

The instant Will’s foot touched down on the material, he saw a flicker pass through the miasma, travelling down into the bowels of the machine.

Will lifted his foot back up an instant before the flicker came back with a Charge, which passed through the miasma in the machine’s back and became lightning that crackled along it’s frame.

Hmmm. When you don’t know the opponent’s capabilities…the best thing to do is disengage and hide like a bitch. That was also his experience at work.

Will pulled himself away and crouched down behind a rock, his Rogue kit turning him invisible before he swept himself up and away.

He watched the artificial monster explode the rock he hid behind before carefully sweeping the barrel of its weapon this way and that, seemingly searching for him.

I need to warn and protect Mason.

Will had no idea what would happen if that strange bolt of overcharge touched someone’s Class, especially someone like Mason.

They’re due to enter in just a few seconds, so I should find a good spot to wait for them to-

An instant later, Will swerved as a ray of Charge shot past him, crackling the miasma in the air, making Will’s hair stand on end and causing his Class to go fuzzy.

I’m still invisible, right? Will thought, checking himself.

He was, but for some reason, the crab machine’s turret was following him again as soon as he started moving.

Does it see Miasmatic structures? Will thought, frowning. No, rogue kit can hide even miasmatic structures, so-

That was when Will’s gaze landed on the harness made of his Phantom Hand’s armor, that he used to fly.

Typically this was invisible to the naked eye, but it wasn’t necessarily covered by the A/V dampening while hiding clause of his rogue kit.

Will flung himself one direction while releasing his harness and sending Phantom Hand the other direction.

The turret immediately changed direction, following Phantom hand. A hole opened up in the top of the metal crab and another shiny cylinder popped out, this one had a stranger series of more complex miasma coils, seemingly arranged in a way that would interfere with each other.

Why would that-

Will’s question was answered immediately as a cone of minute packets of Charge filled the air, nearly catching Will in the spray.

As fast as the Phantom Hands were, two of the packets of charge impacted against one, and its armor was torn away, leaving a wound in the structure of the hand itself.

…Ow.

Will knew he could feel the hands, but usually nothing actually could hit them, so this was unexpected.

So it is following the miasmatic structures? Will thought as he bounded off the air itself.

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The other turret twitched towards where Will had compressed the air, firing a shot that missed Will by a good ten feet.

It can perceive the terrain-strengthening effect of Aspect as well, Will thought. That near miss gave Will an idea.

Will shaped his next platform into a exaggerated gourd shape, with one side being thick and wide, and the other side – the one he landed on – was small and narrow.

Will landed on the platform and stood still.

The turret turned and unleashed a shot that landed dead in the center of the thickest portion of Will’s platform, missing him by a good fifty feet, but damaging his condensed air platform.

Huh. That gives me another idea.

Will made a doughnut shape out of it, and the next shot passed harmlessly through the center.

It’s aiming at the center of mass, Will thought. It continued incessantly firing down the center of the large doughnut of compressed air without bothering to think of an alternative.

It’s rather stupid, isn’t it? Will thought, sitting down on the platform and opening his map, but not fully taking his attention off the machine. Even an insect would try a different tactic, even if it was just because it lost focus.

There’s Mason and the others.

Will connected to them through the map and threw his voice by vibrating the terrain around his companions.

“There are monsters who target magic. That includes Classes, Normal stealth is iffy. Keep out of sight if you can. If you run into one, they’re not intelligent, so decoys work well. Get Travis out of bed, these things are right up his alley.”

“Roger.” Will heard Mason’s voice through the map, and he watched as the others crouched down and made themselves small.

ZZZZZ!

Will’s attention was drawn back to the machine as a half dozen tiny metal boxes flying in a chevron pattern swept towards it.

The spray-shot cannon took out two of them, but the rest impacted against the side of the crablike machine.

BOOM!

The miasmatic structures buried inside it overcharged and melted a large gap in the pristine metal walls of the machine as the tiny boxes exploded into slag.

A moment later, a beam of charge-infused miasma caught the wounded side of the machine and pierced straight through, evaporating its insides before the rest of it turned into slag.

Will blinked the black line out of his eyes and followed the beam back up to the clifside, where another crab-machine with a slightly different shape had appeared.

Its main weapon was bigger and more centrally located, indicating more of its guts were dedicated to powering the thing, which made sense, given the range and power.

Will carefully tiptoed his way towards the shiny metal crab perched on the cliffside, making sure to stay high, hidden, and continue making doughnut shapes that kept the center of mass of his platforms at least fifty feet away from him.

ZZZ!

A few tiny metal boxes hit his platforms or chased his Phantom Hands, but it never got too close to him.

Will rose higher as he approached the cliffside and wound up overlooking the valley beyond it, his heart dropping in his chest.

In the valley beyond were thousands upon thousands of these machines in various states of destruction. Light glinted off of the flat planes of their shiny platinum exteriors, as well as the ruined lumps of metal from where they had been melted by unidentified magical attacks.

The world itself was sandblasted and barren, without a scrap of green to be seen.

The sun seemed distant and cold, with tiny motes of light travelling through the sky like slow-motion shooting stars.

The Abyss happened here?

In the distance was the ruins of a city, but the only way Will could tell was by the outline. A slight change in the color of the sand around a dried-up basin that might’ve once housed life.

The wind and sand and the constant pummeling of magical explosions had reduced once great buildings to so-much fine sand. The only hint that the buildings had been great at one point was a hint of red in the sands where massive steel beams had weathered away to so much red dust.

Twenty thousand years will do that to you, Will thought.

But on the other hand…How are these machines still able to move? Unlike living things, machines could not reproduce or repair their own bodies, and they couldn’t resist corrosion for this long, so these machines had to be new…at least newer than the ruins surrounding them.

Right?

One of three things was possible.

1: the machine were completely immune to wear and tear and simply immortal. Will wrote that option off because at the rate they were killing each other, only one would remain after twenty thousand years, and it would be heavily damaged.

2: They were repairing themselves somehow. Unlikely, but possible, since Will didn’t understand every part of their miasma structure, and even if they could repair themselves they probably would eventually die out, since damage to whatever did the repairs was always possible.

3: something or someone was making more of them. Slightly more likely. That any production facility could last that long was far-fetched, but more likely than the first two.

As if to confirm Will’s thoughts, a nearby mountain opened up.

The stone façade lifted away and a double line of crabs flanked by doglike machines marched out into the valley.

Now that he was aware of it, Will also noticed the deep groove worn into the mountain trial where these machines had marched through time and again over the millenia.

On the other side of the valley, another mountain split open and another group of metal crabs emerged, slightly more sprightly and guarded by thousands of flying boxes.

Huh.

Will flinched as the sounds of battle erupted from the valley as thousand of bolts of charged miasma were flung back and forth.

Machines were destroyed by the thousands, but among the carnage Will made out smaller metal creatures who used their superior mobility to cut pieces off of large broken machines and sprint back to the opening in the side of the mountain.

I see. They’re using pieces of destroyed machines to make more.

Will sat on the used the Map to guide his people away from the thickest fighting while he sat and watched the machines fight each other, learning everything he could.

They were nearly identically matched. When one side pushed, the other side retreated and then made them pay for it. the casualties were nearly identical every time, and using his map, Will could see some outrageously large turrets buried in the earth beside the entrances to the two bunkers situated on opposing mountains.

Presumably, if one side got the upper hand, the defending one would deploy the giant turrets and rip the attacking army to shreds, restoring the delicate balance.

Will made multiple sketches of the miasma structures inside every different type of machine. With the upgrade to his Map that allowed him to see miasma, taking sketches had become as easy as mentally grabbing a figure on the map and dragging it over to his lagend tab, which produced an instant, perfect recreation, faster and more accurate than when he’d been doing it manually.

The thing that fascinated Will the most was their use of Charge and Miasma in a non-living creature.

Up until this point, Will had assumed without thinking too deeply about it, that only living creatures could harness Charge.

But the moment he sat and thought about it, he immediately disproved it.

For all intents, The Devourer of Knowledge was not alive, in the sense that she didn’t eat, sleep, excrete, breathe, or reproduce. But she moved, and she had thoughts and feelings, and most importantly, she had the ability to refine Charge and use it to change the real world.

Therefore, being made of meat and blood wasn’t the requirement for using magic. It was, and always had been, the miasma structures.

By taking his time and studying the machines as they fought each other, Will was able to slowly accumulate information about each machine’s individual strengths and weaknesses.

Which was going to be important, because the Key Sites seemed to be inside those mountains spewing out innumerable machines.