“I want to be part of this,” Jason said.
“You don’t have the strength,” Emir said. “Protecting you would cost us more than having you would help.”
“I know an alchemist with a stockpile of medical supplies and connections with the Healer. We could set up a recovery station outside the astral space while you go in and get them.”
Emir gave Jason an assessing look, then nodded.
“How fast can you get things together?”
“I can lend him some Adventure Society authority to speed things along,” Arella said. “I’ll have your friend Vincent meet you.”
“He still has a job?”
“He does today.”
Chaos reigned as the expedition campsite was attacked. There were very few living people amongst the attackers, all of whom were silver or bronze rank. Their features couldn’t be seen under sandy-coloured robes, not even race. Only their auras gave away their nature as living beings.
The bulk of the enemy force were construct creatures that varied wildly varying in design. There were creatures like wooden puppets, awkward but numerous. Lumbering, stone golems walked amongst them, as large as two or three times the size of a human. There were strange creatures made of complicated, interconnecting parts. Some were the size and shape of people, others were more animal-like, sometimes serving as mounts for the robed people. Behind them all was a towering behemoth of stone and metaclass="underline" a ten-metre tall, spider-shaped, steel behemoth. It apparently had been held back so as not to alert the camp before the surprise attack. As such, it was still making its way forwards from a distance.
Danielle quickly discovered there was no ordering the chaos. All she could do was find key people and try to direct them where they were needed most. In between, she stepped onto the field herself. She wanted to go after the robe-wearers she assumed were controlling the construct army, but too many people needed help against the artificial horde.
She paced herself, knowing her own limits. In a short fight, she was confident against any opponent, but her powerful abilities would exhaust her mana quickly. Aside from conjuring her dimension blade, she relied on skills and silver-rank attributes to mow through weaker enemies. She saved her most exhausting powers for critical moments, when the difference was life and death.
Around the battlefield, the more capable adventurers had reached similar conclusions to Danielle and were doing their best to help the others. Those that knew their abilities well and how to use them picked their targets accordingly. Thalia Mercer ploughed through crowds of constructs like a bowling ball, enemies bouncing away without slowing her down. She focused on the golems, which were big, slow and either bronze or silver rank. The bronze ones barely slowed her down, exploding into stone shrapnel as she literally smashed through them with shoulder charges. For the silvers, three times her height or more, she would rip off a limb and break the rest of the body apart by using it as a club.
Farrah and Gary had recruited Beth Cavendish and her team. Farrah had encased herself in obsidian armour and conjured a huge, obsidian sword. The blade was not a blade at all, but a pillar of jagged segments, like horrible teeth. The segments could break up and whip around on a cord of glowing magma. She swept it around, burning and breaking apart the constructs. Mixing in devastating lava spells, she used her abilities to create space for weaker expedition members to fall back.
Into that space, walls of metal and stone rose out of the ground to form barricades. This was the combined efforts of Gary and Hudson, the human front-liner who was almost as large as Gary. The other members of Beth’s team cleaned up any loose ends while Beth used spell after spell to keep feeding mana to Farrah. Her potent abilities were costly and hard to maintain as the battle dragged on, while Beth desperately replenished her as fast as she could.
Rufus, in the meantime, was flickering through the enemy like a ghost. He appeared and disappeared in rapid succession, moving unhindered. In his hand was a silver sword, under which constructs fell as he passed. These were simple humanoid forms, mostly wood on a metal frame. They were essentially combat dummies without the safety features. These were only incidental targets, however. His primary targets were the less common construct creatures, which were many and varied. They were larger than the humanoid, for the most part, and had been built to mimic various animals and monsters. In addition to being larger and tougher than their wooden, humanoid brethren, they were also faster and smarter. Where the others shuffled along with zombie-like shambling as they sought out living enemies, their forms very much followed function.
Rufus tracked a specific one—a giant tiger made of intricate steel cogs. The bronze-rank clockwork cat was faster than its simpler brethren, wreaking havoc amongst the expedition’s panicking iron-rankers, even claiming some of the bronze.
Rufus stopped his rapid, vanishing run. He dropped the conjured silver sword and a golden one appeared in its place. The cat locked its unliving gaze on him and launched into a high pounce. Its speed, so terrifying to the iron-rankers, was as good as standing still to Rufus.
As Rufus activated his speed of light power, the world seemed to freeze in time around him. The creature was stuck mid-pounce, hovering in the air. The power only afforded Rufus two seconds of accelerated time and he wasted none of it. He ran under the creature, pushing his peak, bronze-rank reflexes to the limit as he lashed out four times with his golden sword. Every movement left a trail of golden light in his wake.
Rufus returned to the normal passage of time and the cat was once again hurtling to the spot Rufus had just disappeared from. The golden trail showed every movement he had made in accelerated time, but it did the cat no good. It landed, vulnerable on the ground, each of its limbs cleanly severed. The severed limbs all glowed with golden heat where Rufus’s sword had passed through.
The creature landed helpless on the ground, limbs scattered around. Rufus plunged his sword into its head, sinking it to the hilt. Then he ran the sword down the length of its body, leaving a trail of hot metal as he sliced it clean in half. He left his sword buried in the clockwork cat, conjuring a new silver one and vanishing.
Danielle kept an eye on the battlefield as a whole. They weren’t turning the fight, but their key people were sending the unintelligent automatons in to an increasing state of disarray. It was enough that she could start organising a withdrawal. In one corner of the battle, some of her people had erected barricades she could use as a launch point for the retreat. The trick would be holding the rest of the line as she wrangled those behind it. She spread out her aura senses, looking for the expedition leaders she would need to make it happen.
109
The Tyranny of Rank
The retreat was going worse than Danielle had hoped, but better than she feared. The iron rankers had been pulled back behind the bronze and silver-rankers holding the line. Luckily, the other side had only a few essence users, their number made up mostly of constructs. The artificial creatures were not the match of an equal-rank essence user, but there were so many that they made up the difference. The enemy essence users were also reluctant to risk themselves by engaging directly, which helped Danielle’s attempts to pull circumstances under her control.
They were not out of danger as the enemy continued to press, but the constructs were paying for their aggression. Pushing mindlessly against the increasingly ordered withdrawal formation, they were being rapidly ground up. They were unrelenting, however, the unliving constructs having no morale to lose. There was not a lot of open space in the rainforest, but a battle line had managed to form in the now-destroyed remains of the expedition camp, which had been cleared of trees using essence abilities. That made for a relatively open field in which the defence was holding, while the rest of the expedition retreated into the trees.