Chapter 193: How the Game Resumes

Thacea

Emma had been… sparing with the details of humanity’s darker legacies prior to this point.

Though she had, through a tangent of an allusion, made mention of precisely one conflict prior.

This… ‘first war amidst the heaven’ — singular heaven, at that — had been a subject of much introspective thought, not least on account of its highly peculiar phrasing.

It stands to reason then that a global conflict would precede such grander affairs.

And yet…

“Did you not make mention that this was the War to End All Wars?” I questioned. “I understand that this may have been a rather shortsighted claim to make on account of the later war amidst the heaven, which logically follows a global war. However, given its rather bold moniker, I would have at least assumed that the intervening years between these wars would preclude the emergence of yet another global conflict.” I posited, handing Emma back the floor, and prompting her shoulders to slump in a fit of apprehensiveness I’d become accustomed to in our private deliberations.

“You’re right in assuming that it was kind of short-sighted, but only in retrospect.” Emma began with a nervous lilt coloring her voice. “In fact, the gap between these two great conflicts is one of the shortest out of the nine ‘major’ wars on record. We’re talking about roughly 20 years between the two.”

I narrowed my gaze, whilst Thalmin’s features had once again shifted far drastically into the realm of disbelief.

“Emma… the scale of devastation here would preclude even the most populous of adjacent realms — possessing magic no less — from ever attempting the same disastrous conflict within that brief of a timescale. Not especially given the fact that 20 years is scarcely enough time to wipe the trauma of one war from living memory.”

“It was precisely the lingering aftereffects of the first world war which gave rise to the precipitating factors and subsequent downstream effects that led to the second world war.” Emma explained carefully with a slow, deliberate tactfulness. “These failures in forging a lasting peace would be carefully studied and dissected, to later form the framework for an international forum of interstate arbitration and multilateral relations needed in the modern world. We could simply not afford another conflict on such a scale, as you’ll soon see.”

“And yet you failed thereafter, didn’t you? Despite claiming to have learned from the second of these horrible wars?” Ilunor questioned plainly. “You mentioned nine major wars, did you not?”

“Yes.” Emma nodded, acknowledging the insult with complete earnestness. “Because despite learning from said past, we still had not yet forged a supranational apparatus capable of maintaining both relevancy and upholding international commitments within the rapidly evolving socio-political, technological, and ecological landscape of the contemporary era. That would come later following the reforms resulting from the cascade collapse.” She uttered that latter line more as an aside before moving on seamlessly. “We had improved tremendously, of course. It would be disingenuous of anyone to say that the United Nations was in any way as ineffective as the League of Nations, which came and collapsed before it during the interwar years. The former’s humanitarian missions had specifically led to a radical decline in human suffering. It’d helped to eradicate entire diseases in the realm of healthcare. And it likewise prevented what could have been an even worse ecological collapse in the form of the Montreal Protocol, preserving… heh… a layer of our manaless ‘tapestry,’ so to speak, from being destroyed by the aerosolized byproducts of our industrial runoff. But—”

“But it still wasn’t good enough, now was it?” Ilunor reiterated.

“It was good enough to survive, and act as a precursor to the union Emma now hails from, no?” Thalmin questioned.

To which Emma nodded once in response. “Yes. Furthermore, we… don’t claim to be perfect. If anything, what I’ve shown you, and what I am about to show you, are some of our darkest moments. We didn’t get to where we are right now just by being born different. We weren’t destined for the stars. Heck, we weren’t even destined to rule our planet. Nor were we destined for a path of liberty, égalité, and mutual prosperity. There was no great fate, no grand plan for us to follow, no great path for us to trek. We had to chart this course by our own hands, and unfortunately… a lot of that learning was done through trial and error. It was garnered by lesson after painful lesson, each reinforcing one simple notion — never again. Am I ashamed that it took us this long to get it? A bit. But it’s easy to cast judgement on the past when you’re sitting atop a paradise built upon their sacrifices.”

There was… an uneasy overture present throughout the entirety of Emma’s willingful admissions.

It was unlike anything in either sight-seer that had come before, coming across more as a ballad of equal measures apprehension and guilt, rather than an unabashed symphony of human triumph.

The combination of which cast an uneasy shadow over what was to come.

Though this fact, yet again, seemed to do little to faze the lupinor prince.

If anything, this only seemed to further enrapture his burning curiosity.

“Well then, let’s see it, Emma.” The lupinor prince urged. “Let’s see this war devastating enough to have led to the goodwill of an entire world so clearly teetering on the edge of utter martial madness.”

Emma nodded slowly before turning once more towards those same skies, snapping her fingers with a sense of ominous finality.

We found ourselves once more on the same vast fields of what I assumed to be the previous conflict.

The trenches, whilst now buried under a layer of dirt and overgrowth, were still visible, and so were the pockmarks and craters.

The scars of the previous war had just barely healed, with nary a fresh layer of grass and weeds to cover up what had come before.

Then—

Brr…vrrrrrrrr…..

—came the unmistakable sound of the combustion engine.

However, and in a fashion strikingly reminiscent of the sight-seers on Earthrealm flight, I could sense an audible, palpable change in the underlying potential of these constructs.

The engines sounded… deeper, rumbling with a greater bass, treble, and a certain warble which felt unmistakably more powerful than that which came before.

This effect was compounded by the accompanying chorus of many such vehicles, a fact that was reflected when we witnessed the arrival of not a handful, or even a dozen, of such vehicles.

They were arriving by the hundreds.

Thalmin

The rumble of these engines conjured up a strange tingle down my spine as their foreign, jarringly alien sounds elicited but a single feeling — power.

These were a new breed of tank.

I could hear it in their dulcet hearts.

I could see it in their iterative designs.

These innovations were just oh so… obvious when one understood the fundamentals of their function.

Of course they’d change the placement of the gun. It only made sense for it to be atop the hull rather than its sides!

Of course they’d opt for a larger cannon. The only thing holding them back was, presumably, the weaker engines of the day.

And of course they’d be able to build them in larger numbers, in grander fleets.

This was Earthrealm… and their capacity for simply iterating on what had come before was unparalleled.

Yet I could not shake this uneasy sense of… apprehension as I watched these new and improved machinations skittering across the barely-tamped soil atop the previous war’s scars.

This all just felt… much, much too fast.

We’d watched guns evolving from primitive muzzle-loaders into breechloaders in the span of a millennium.

Yet here we were, watching a vehicle scarcely envisioned two decades ago coming into its own.

Gone was the rather cumbersome handling of last generation’s vehicles, the necessity to turn your entire hull to bring your guns to bear, and the frankly embarrassing speeds achievable despite the large engines set within.

In its stead, on both sides it seems, were machines of war more deserving of their fearsome potential.

Every ‘tank’ present, from the small, rather embarrassingly endowed puny cannons of their smaller variants, to the massive, almost boat-like monstrosities equipped with large yet stubby cannons, all seemed to play their role, filling their niche, acting almost akin to…

…

Oh.

Vrrrrrr!!

Vrooooommmm!

They were…

BOOOOOOM!

…

They had taken the role of cavalry now.

I stared blankly, turning this way and that, trying but ultimately failing to spot any beast of burden alongside the silhouetted figures and their soot-belching constructs.

None were to be found, or at least not on the very front. Only in certain backline positions was I able to observe some number of beasts relegated to hauling wagonfuls of supplies and equipment. Yet even so, much of the equipment was obviously drawn in via these rumbling carriages, relegating the humble beast of burden into obscurity.

I shook my head for a moment, trying to clear my mind as I scanned the ever-evolving battlefield, watching as the battle lines actually moved, as flanking, thrusts, and a great many maneuvers conducted across a wide front were somehow taking place atop the very dirt that had once been host to entrenchments that had held for years. With not a single static defense line forming, as was seen in the previous war.

Then it hit me.

Cavalry had become obsolete in the Great War, as any attempt at a quick decisive movement could be countered by a simple buried explosive, some strings of sharp wire, and a well-placed burst of bullets courtesy of a pair of machine-gun-armed recruits.

Recruits who probably barely spent a few weeks in training.

Recruits whose equipment was just as quick to be replaced.

Both of which could be replaced far faster and much more efficiently than an experienced cavalryman… let alone their horse.

The advent of the car and the tank, ofrealcars and tanks and not those rickety old prototypes, spelled the reemergence of the cavalry.

It meant the death of trenches.

It beckoned the end of the static drudgery that was attrition.

It marked the rebirth of maneuver warfare on a scale never before seen.

A war where warriors of all sorts were held safely behind inches of steel, armed with those very same weapons that had once made such movements unthinkable, and gifted with speeds rivalling those of cavalry.

And what’s worse?

…

They didn’t seem to get tired.

I watched in utter awe as these constructs surged forward in defiance of their manaless dispositions, acting more akin to the berserking rush of gargoyles and the seemingly perpetual stamina afforded to them as a result of their enchantments. They did not halt for food or water as was the case with horses.

In fact, nothing stalled their advance.

They pushed forward tirelessly, ceaselessly, relentlessly engaging and then finally…

Fwoooosshh…

They stopped.

I watched on now, as a liquid was poured into one of its ports, as artificers arrived to open its rear, revealing a dizzying array of strangely shaped metal. Some of which I recognized, others… which were simply beyond me. I watched as the machines of all sides were maintained, repaired, slathered in some dark ichor—

Pitchwine…

Wait…

Ah. Yes. This was already known.

“You… you really relied on pitchwine for everything, didn’t you?”

“For a long while, yeah. It’s also one of the reasons why this war was ultimately one of industrial might and a game of logistics and supply lines more than anything.”

Emma snapped her fingers, pulling us out of the ongoing tank battle as we approached what appeared to be strange metal towers numbering in the hundreds set against a dreary, lifeless series of dirt roads and rail tracks.

“To get pitchwine out of the ground, you need these big, heavy, dirty industries. To refine it, you need even more advanced plants which need to run constantly for you to actually get the combustible fuel you need to run everything in this era.”

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I nodded slowly, coming to a startling string of thought.

“So the deadrealm feeds on the remains of putrified dead matter, to fuel their dead constructs, all to incur more death upon the world.” Ilunor spat out.

I paid little attention to that, however, as I watched both pipes and pumps alike draining the earth of this dark ichor.

“You abandoned horses and cavalry, in favor of artifices actually capable of participating in a war that had far outpaced their use.” I spoke candidly.

“Beasts of burden have no place in a world built for and by the cold and tempered wrath of human hands. Where men command steel by the ton with the tap of a foot.”

“And what of the instances where we do see them?” I pushed back. “In rear units, in supply formations?”

“It wasn’t done out of any want, but only out of desperation and necessity, more a sign of inadequate industrial capacity and resource allocation than that of a purposeful choice made with any pride or confidence.” Emma commented. “Though, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say there were exceptions to what was becoming a steadfast rule.” She continued, raising a single finger as she did so.

We were transported to an entirely foreign landscape in short order, just outside of a small, quaint town which wouldn’t have looked out of place in an adjacency.

There, we watched as a group of mounted cavalrymen charged the fortified positions in town, separating into two distinct groups and engaging gun-bearing foot soldiers dressed in varying shades of grey. In a surprising turn of events, they succeeded. Though not without a trail of bodies to show for it.

“The Battle of Krasnobród comes to mind, where the element of surprise and several clever maneuvers allowed defending Polish forces to recapture a town that had fallen to the enemy. And to be completely fair, these cavalry units performed admirably in spite of the odds stacked against them. They, I feel, embody some of the best final elements of organic cavalry maneuvers in an era rapidly transitioning into full mechanization.” Emma took a deep breath as she spoke. “You’ll see just why this is the case here.”

She snapped her fingers, and we found ourselves in a relatively open plain.

We stood in between the rumblings of engines emanating from all around us, as out from seemingly every direction came first the tips of tens, then dozens, and eventually close to a hundred such cannons. All of which were affixed atop the bodies of vehicles far larger, and seemingly more well armored than even the ones that had started this second world war.

“How long did this war last, Emma?” I questioned. “When did this take place? These tanks, they seem quite a fair bit more refined than what we’d seen earlie—”

“Historians still argue precisely what qualifies as the definitive start to the war, so I’m going to use the most commonly agreed-upon metric — six years. The tanks we saw at the start of this war at the Ardennes during the Invasion of France took place three years prior to this battle. A battle that contains some of the largest tank engagements of the entire war — the Battle of Kursk. More specifically, we’re looking at a specific chapter of that battle, one which contains some of the most intense confrontations of armored elements many would commonly associate with this campaign — the Battle of Prokhorovka.”

I noted the ground, one already littered not just with silhouetted forms but bristling with hidden explosives buried just inches beneath the dirt.

Broken remains of some larger field guns appeared in places, so too did a single tank that had seen a massive hole cleaved straight through its side armor.

But no sooner was I able to observe these remnants of previous skirmish than the next battle began in earnest.

And it was…

BOOOM!

Powerful.

The sharp cracking sounds of gunfire seemed to play second fiddle to the larger, more pronounced chest-thumping BOOMS of the cannons atop these mobile fortresses.

Indeed, they almost seemed to be the kings of the war below.

Wherever a tank moved, droves of soldiers would follow. Wherever they seemed to break through, so too were their successes immediately exploited by their smaller, more vulnerable brethren.

Yet in their seeming command over the battlefield, so too were they vulnerable to the exploits of elements lying in wait. Components of a battlegroup which might not have been anywhere near as impressive in their presence but were impactful enough to bring these beasts to heel.

From explosives beneath the earth which tore the treads of these battlefield monarchs, leaving them crippled and stranded, to field cannons which, despite their comparatively static nature, still held within them enough power to pierce a thicket’s worth of steel. There was no shortage of reminders for these tankmen that their steeds of iron were anything but invincible.

Nowhere was this more apparent as the next phase of battle began, and I witnessed what I could only describe as a clash of the titans.

It started without me even noticing, as these large skittering beasts fired not on static emplacements, positions, or even the unarmored infantry.

No, they were very much aiming, firing—

BOOOOM!

And landing shots—

fwwweeeeee-KA-BOOM!

At one another.

I watched as several tanks fired simultaneously, their cannons—

BOOM!

BOOM!

BOOM!

Generating this thunderous noise preceding either complete misses—

FWWWWWIIISIHHHH

Or glancing shots that bounced—

SKKKRANNNGGGGGGGG

Grazed—

CRACK-CLANG!

Or landed direct shots—

KRA-THOOM!

On their opponent’s own war machines.

Yet no matter how many were felled… there seemed to be more, and more that came to take their fallen brethren's place.

The battle seemed to stretch for hours, even as Emma skipped much of it in favor of focusing on the tank-on-tank engagements that I was so enthralled by.

And I knew exactly what it was about this that enraptured me.

Either out of some flight of fanciful imagination, or my own reaching mind, I found these exchanges as almost akin to the jousts of a bygone era.

It felt almost like a perverse misinterpretation of the sport, as viewed and reimagined by a manaless realm.

And to an extent…

It far surpassed any of the jousts or cavalry engagements I’d ever seen.

At some point, however, either after the first round of engagements or the second set of parrying cannons, something else crept into the back of my consciousness.

I couldn’t help but imagine the sigils and markers of these great vehicles painted in the livery of the Havenbrockian crown.

My mind drifted to the possibility, the very enticing thought, of rebuilding these vehicles within the smithies and forges of Havenbrock’s ironworks.

But more to the point…

I couldn’t help but imagine a Nexian chosen one at the end of one of these barrels’ sights.

Every resonant BOOM and each subsequent CLANG of a successful hit reinforced the growing dream of a Havenbrockian army reforged in the image of Earthrealm’s manaless madness.

Eventually, I dreamed myself within the bowels of this beast, wrestling control over its levers and knobs, corralling a beast of steel with something as rudimentary yet raw as my own two hands.

This fever dream continued, up until Emma emerged with the statistics.

“This single day saw the loss of roughly 80 tanks lost on the attacker’s side, and roughly 340 on the defender’s, out of a total of 300 and 600 respectively that entered the battle. But as for the overall numbers of the entire Battle of Kursk? Roughly 3000 tanks on the part of the attacking force, and 5200 more on the part of the defenders. And that’s just tanks we’re talking about.”

“For a single battle?” I questioned.

“For a single battle, yes.” She nodded.

I didn’t need to see the factories to believe it.

I didn’t even need to see more of the battle to fully grapple with the implications.

Indeed, I internalized that number, trying to fathom the sheer scale.

Because if this was a single campaign, a single battle in a grander war, one lasting six entire years… then just how much was Earthrealm capable of producing?

“I have a request, Emma.” Thacea urged as she pointed at a domain I had overlooked in favor of my new… fixations.

“Yes, Thacea?”

“Take us to the skies.” She urged without saying much else.

Though I knew what the implications were.

Emma snapped her fingers without a second’s hesitation, but instead of taking up high above, we instead found ourselves in one of the many cities we’d momentarily visited in the previous presentation.

London.

“Rewind the clock roughly three years before the Battle of Kursk, and you have one of the most devastating examples of an air raid on civilian targets to date.” Emma spoke solemnly as these wailing, horrible sirens filled the air.

The lights in the city were entirely darkened. Not a streetlamp or window was lit up by the artificial lights synonymous with Earthrealm’s cities.

Indeed, the only lights which were present were pointed up at the skies, a repeat of the search for balloons of their first world war.

But what appeared… was anything but.

It started with a single aerial craft. A far larger, much more sizable construct than the biplanes of the first war.

Then another searchlight found another.

Then another.

And another…

The whole skies erupted in an ugly, droning whirr, as in spite of the loss of the ominous presence of a single airship, there came instead the unmistakable horror of seeing not one target but hundreds.

It didn’t take long for that apprehension to be realized, and for the realization of this newfound weapon of war to be actualized in full.

Thacea

The ‘airships’ were, as Emma had put them, a dead end.

Aircraft, meanwhile… seemed to be the obvious successor to its shambling predecessor.

We had seen how large these craft could be in Emma’s Acela presentations.

Airliners ferrying hundreds and even thousands of passengers, all while achieving incredible, blistering speeds.

It stands to reason then that the very same carrying capacity could be deferred to weapons instead of cargo, and soldiers instead of passengers.

And indeed, I was right.

More to the point, a creeping thought emerged as I stared up at the skies crowded with formations of these foreign constructs. It was a creeping sense of dread, one common amidst the flightless flock when faced with enemies and dangers striking from high above.

That latent fear was only natural, especially for those trapped below. After all, the skies were a domain both inaccessible yet ripe for domination. A dimension of existence which granted one an incredible advantage over those that were stuck below.

I had only personally related to those fears precisely once before, once aethraships and their incredible power were demonstrated to both me and, more specifically, the newly appointed Queen Consort.

I had watched with a heart-wrenching apprehension as they laid waste to defenseless ground forces below in a manner reminiscent of Ilunor's own sight-seer.

But specifically, I saw them engaging towns and cities, in a sight eerily similar to what Emma was currently bringing to our attention.

I blinked slowly as I witnessed the underbelly doors of those craft opening… and the deadly contents whistling down to the surface below.

I watched as the devastating power of the aethraship was brought to life in a manner far removed from its context, as townhouses and buildings shattered into their constituent components; the once bustling city deconstructed before my very eyes.

Fires raged on as fire brigades rushed to stem the spread of the raging infernos erupting in every street corner.

Yet this wasn’t the entire story.

Because unlike the defenselessness wrought on by the asymmetry of Nexian primacy and their adjacent realm dominions, there was a degree of… tit-for-tat parity that the old nations of Earthrealm possessed.

Both sides had the capacity to wage war in the air.

Both sides had the means and wherewithal to engage this otherwise unassailable dominion from the ground.

And this was demonstrated in short order as ground-cannons engaged the skies with the same ferocity as those lumbering beasts had done, their ferocious efficacy revealed to us firsthand in short order…

Another snap of Emma’s fingers took us into the confines of one of these many aerial craft. We witnessed from their perspective the onslaught of the ground’s retaliation to those bold enough to violate the sovereignty of their dominion.

Clouds of black smoke soon filled the air, the result of the shells from below exploding in front of and all around the formations of these craft, as the loud and irritating noises generated by these engines were punctuated and outright obscured by their detonations.

And it was nothing short of terrifying.

The skies were no longer the exclusive zone of impunity that aethraships had enjoyed.

Instead… it was an infernium made manifest.

Each explosion from the shells below echoed throughout the cabin, as the fragments from their self-destruction peppered holes both large and small throughout the thin-steel walls of the craft.

It was… a disturbingly simple concept.

Indeed, I should have anticipated this.

The northern ice-bound flocks — with the aid of hired Nexian advisors — had long since constructed a terrible, comparable weapon designed with a similar goal in mind.

The seeking shrikes.

My whole body shuddered at that mental image, just as I would shudder as the craft we were in suddenly lurched sideways.

I watched in horror as I saw an entire wing shorn off, and from there… well…

A fledgling could tell you what happens after a flyer suffers such catastrophic injuries.

Yet these attempts to assail the air weren’t limited to ground defenses alone.

In fact, we were soon treated to exactly what Emma had spoken of previously.

The importance of speed and maneuverability in the war within the skies.

The skies had been turned back to day, as we now found ourselves away from the cities and positioned towards a beautiful coast. One consisting of sheer white cliffs overlooking an ocean.

This vista, however, was contrasted by over a hundred dark green and grey craft, both large and small, approaching the shore.

Though it’d be the latter that would show its true colors in short order.

Because as quickly as this armada had appeared, so too did a smaller group of aerial craft adorned in waves of dark green and brown with target-like roundels emerge from the horizon.

It took them scarcely any time at all to catch up with the armada, at which point… a familiar song and dance erupted.

Bullets tore through the larger craft with ease, whilst the smaller craft protecting the armada had broken formation to engage the oncoming craft.

What came to manifest was, in fact, reminiscent of an aerial melee.

Though one which was lacking in the… finer maneuverability second nature to a smaller form factor.

Yet the maneuvers they were able to perform were no less impressive.

I watched as this winged parlay evolved into a sort of deadly dance, as each craft from either side attempted to gain a vantage on the other, each desperately trying in a contest of wits and skill to outmaneuver the other for that one deadly blow.

There was… an almost macabre and perverse sense of beauty about it all. A waltz of death, made manifest by the relentless conquest of aethra primus, making possible the dreams of flight to those otherwise condemned to the earth… yet nonetheless shackled to the darkest urges which lay in wait within the hearts of all men.

Bullets were fired, casings fell in a trail of desperation, and eventually, the craft with the roundel livery won out.

Emma was then quick to halt that engagement, taking us back to the familiar map, and gesturing at precisely where the engagement had taken place.

“The Battle of Britain, which includes the bombing of the city of London I started with, lasted just over three months. And in that time, thousands of aircraft crossed from the continent in an attempt to bomb one of the last free and democratic nations still standing in this region into submission. They failed, and that was thanks to the brilliant defensive system, of which you’ve only seen just the teeth.” Emma spoke solemnly. “Because behind the anti-air batteries and fighter aircraft was a system of airfields, refueling and maintenance teams, as well as an entire network of sensors that tirelessly scanned the skies for incoming enemy sorties. This is what it truly takes to maintain aerial dominance. And this…” She turned to Ilunor. “... is what we’ve been building up to since the inception of aviation, Ilunor. We’ve been controlling the skies for a millennium now. And what you see here today was just the first 40 years of its history.”

Ilunor

…

All of this was real.

In fact, the implications of it had already been there in the previous sight-seers.

Or at least, this was the case as it stood with Earthrealm’s… aerial ambitions.

The ‘tanks,’ the ground battles, the grand armies of iron and steel… that was new.

But that… that could easily be dealt with, swiftly in fact, with aethraships and battlemages alike.

It was the finer details of Emma’s defensive aerial demonstrations, however, which started to worry me.

Those ground cannons penetrating deep into the heavens… those were reserved for enchanted ballistae.

And yet here they were, by the thousands, capable of firing what was, in effect, a near-limitless number of shells if Earthrealm’s factories in the first war were an accurate enough indicator.

…

But they were still static emplacements.

Even these ‘fighter’ aerial craft could easily be dealt with, provided a sloop was outfitted with a robust series of countermeasures and a competent crew.

Moreover, there were shields, enchantments, and wards to deal with these bullets.

A sloop would just have to up-armor itself.

It wasn’t difficult.

This was manageable.

And yet…

This was the first 40 years?!

“Controlling the skies?” I questioned pointedly.

“Yes.” The earthrealmer responded.

“You have shown me larger cannons, and now aerial craft capable of greater feats of acrobatics and speed. You have not yet shown me the promised weapons you oh so brazenly displayed at the end of my sight-seer.” I countered.

To which Emma merely paused, placing a fist atop a cocked hip.

“Alright, Ilunor. Let’s show you the darker side of rocketry.”