Fractured Earth: Chapter 30

Dan frowned into the binoculars, adjusting them slightly to compensate for the lurching mech beneath him. It was hard to tell which of the squat, concrete buildings clustered on the outskirts of the city were built by Peter Best’s forces, and which had already been there. In the end, it didn’t matter. Whatever the numbers, they had to clear Best out and keep going. Use the surprise and momentum of their attack to clear both Best and Drummond from the board entirely.

Half-bored, he called up his status.

Most of his recent battles had been against unawakened humans. Unfortunately, that didn’t lend itself to much gain in spirit, especially at Dan’s current level. His only real improvements were in his affinities and spells, mostly thanks to learning Railgun.

He sighed, tucking the binoculars into their carrying case on his hip. Best, or whoever was commanding Best’s forces, had spotted them. A line of metal and flesh was forming around the buildings they were using as a command post, claiming the spartan cover afforded by the landscape. A couple of the unarmored soldiers were frantically digging trenches or foxholes, but most recognized that they wouldn’t be able to fortify their army’s unprotected flank before Dan’s troops hit them. Instead, they tried to find slopes, rocks, or in a couple of cases, cacti to hide behind.

“Boss.” Abe’s voice was slightly modulated by the speakers in the mech he was piloting. “We’re at the extreme range for our antipersonnel shells. It’d probably be best if you stopped hitching a ride. I’m not sure I’ve read the entirety of the manual on how these things work, and I’d feel pretty bad if I caught you in the backblast.”

Dan squinted at the dull flash of metal marking the enemy forces, almost a mile away. The sun peeked out from behind a cloud. No one spoke. The only sound was the heavy footfalls of the mechs and powered armor worn by the troops around him.

Farther down the line, his more conventional soldiers were equipped with the bracers and supported by modified armored vehicles. Against modern forces, they’d tear through them like a rock through wet paper. Here? Their weapons would struggle against the factory-base armor. The spellshields built into the bracers were rated for anti-infantry weapons. The fifty-caliber repeaters built into the suits would rip his infantry apart.

Instead, their spearhead was Dan, the ten mechs, and the almost three hundred suits of armor they’d managed to build or renovate and enchant. Best’s armor almost certainly outnumbered them, but their heavier weapons and shields would make the difference while the infantry made quick work of Best’s more conventionally equipped flanks. Hopefully.

Dan shouted down to Abe, hoping that the mech’s audio pickups could hear him. “Actually, hold it steady for a second. Let me do the honors and open the battle up with a couple of Railgun shots. It’ll take us a couple minutes to get within close range of the enemy anyway. More than enough time for my mana to recover.”

Abe didn’t respond, but the mech slowed to a stop. Around them, the rest of his forces kept advancing, but Dan ignored them as he began marshaling his mana. Over the course of a second, the spellforms constructed themselves out of raw magical force in front of him. He squinted, holding them in place with his mind as the magnetic forces he’d generated tried to push the two rods of energy apart.

Dan rocked backward as a gout of fire spat from between his outstretched hand, the very air turning to plasma as energy crackled from the superheated lump of steel he flung toward the waiting enemy. A flash of light was followed a moment later by a rumbling explosion as one of the squat buildings transformed into a fireball, throwing armored suits everywhere.

He smiled tightly, glad once again for his thermal rune. Maybe the spell could be fired in the void of space without superheating nearby gas, but on Earth, each and every shot would flashboil the firer without some sort of defense against the heat. He focused on another building and cast the spell a second time.

It erupted into flames. Dan smiled tightly as he made out the forms of armored suits beginning to abandon their cover. Against ordinary weapons, clustering behind a cement wall was probably an effective strategy, but heavy weaponry changed that. His spell more or less only considered the wall a convenient source of shrapnel to pelt the defenders with. Huddling behind cover just made them easier targets.

He jumped down from the mech, his feet sinking into the loose soil. Dan patted down his smoking outfit, trying to ensure that the sudden bursts of heat from casting Railgun twice didn’t ignite his clothes. Satisfied, he turned back to the mech.

“I’m done for now, Abe,” he said cheerfully. “Fire at will and give ‘em hell.”

The mech rumbled into motion, leaving Dan behind as it sprinted at almost fifty miles per hour across the scrubland. As soon as Abe caught up with the rest of the column, he opened fire.

Even knowing that the System would fix his eardrums if they ruptured, Dan clapped his hands to the side of his head as sound from the cannonfire hit him, knocking the breath from his lungs. A second later, the rest of the mechs opened fire, blanketing the enemy lines with airbursts.

Dan stopped entirely as the pressure hammered into him, his smoking clothes shuddering as the waves of sound and air passed over him. Shaking his head against the ringing, Dan surveyed the enemy lines, grinning like an absolute idiot. A second later, the mechs fired another volley, this time in sync.

The main cannons on the mechs fired variable ammunition, with each war machine carrying a combination of armor piercing, flechette, high explosive, and long range anti-personnel shells. On flat terrain, each of them could fire their gyroscope-stabilized main guns almost ten times per minute while traveling at almost seventy miles per hour.

Dan had never been on the receiving end of a barrage, but with a dedicated gunner, the mechs could easily fire volley after volley while charging at a full sprint, hopefully suppressing anti-armor emplacements until the mech was close enough to clear them out with the anti-personnel machine gun turrets mounted on each of its four knees. Frankly, every time he saw the mechs in action, Dan was glad that they managed to steal them before Best figured out a solution to the power distribution problem. Even with magic, he wasn’t sure that his forces would’ve been able to take out a dedicated unit of them.

He began jogging after the rest of his forces. Technically, he could keep up with the power suits as they ran at almost forty miles per hour, but unlike the robotic armor, he’d get tired. No, it was better for him to be fresh when he hit the line of enemy soldiers.

When the mechs were about five hundred feet from the defenders, return fire began sparking off of the mech’s spellshields. Without warning, the mech split into two sets of five, traveling in opposite directions parallel to Best’s lines at full speed while their machine guns began chattering.

Dan smiled to himself. The anti-personnel guns probably wouldn’t bring down a suit of powered armor unless they hit something vital, but the steady stream of thirty-caliber slugs were more than enough to force the armor back behind cover. Cover that was promptly destroyed by the main and shoulder guns on the mechs.

A pair of tanks drove out from the cover of the cement buildings. They each managed to fire a round at a mech. Only one hit, causing the spellshield to sparkle and fail as it robbed the penetrator of its kinetic energy, dropping the crumpled slug to the sand and grass of the battlefield.

Immediately, all five mechs in the cohort near the tanks returned fire. Dan shielded his vision against the explosions. Seconds later, all that remained was the burning chassis of the vehicles, surrounded by a bloom of twisted armor and machinery.

He jerked back as his spellshield took a shot from a .50 repeater. Apparently Best’s forces weren’t sufficiently distracted by the advancing armored infantry and the mechs. He chuckled slightly as he tossed a Fireball back in the general direction he’d been shot from. It likely wouldn’t do all that much to his power-armored opponent–it was hard to flash burn metal after all–but with any luck, it’d help keep them under cover until the rest of Dan’s infantry closed to their effective range.

As if on cue, a ripple of fire erupted from both sides. Despite Dan and the mechs thinning Best’s ranks, they still had almost as many suits of powered armor as Dan. After about ten seconds of firing, the runic reinforcement of his soldier’s armor showed its value. A direct hit from a suit’s gauntlet repeater would punch through the base armor, killing one of Best’s men almost immediately.

For Dan’s soldiers, a hit would crumple a portion of the armor, but unless they were hit in roughly the same spot more than once, even a fifty-caliber round would fail to penetrate their enchantments. Generally, after taking two to three shots, his forces would withdraw. If needed, they could be sent back into combat as a reserve, but Dan wanted them alive to fight the Orakh, humanity’s actual enemy. He wasn’t terribly keen on sacrificing his employees unnecessarily in a battle that it looked like they would win handily, regardless.

Still, a couple of his suits fell to the well-churned soil. There were simply too many soldiers on both sides firing very high-caliber weapons to avoid all casualties. Despite the losses, his forces continued to fight with a ferocity that Best’s men couldn’t match.

Before combat, they’d promised that any casualties would be first priority for the nanites. By now, all of his troops knew the value of the System. Even if they could use a small amount of mana to reinforce their armor right now, it would let them level up and cast spells. So long as they survived their injuries, they would recover fully and join his elites.

Best’s forces, on the other hand, only fought for money. Well, money and the promise of social and political power in his “new order” when Best won. For them, this was a job, and many began to reassess their loyalty to that job as they began to fall in droves.

The power suits began falling back. For a second, Dan was surprised that the unarmored infantry wasn’t joining them, but then he looked closer at the battlefield and grimaced.

The defender’s battle line was strewn with torn bodies and limbs. The artillery barrage and constant machine gun fire that mostly rattled the armored defenders indiscriminately killed the conventional infantry. Those who survived writhed on the ground, incapable of retreating.

Dan drew even with his soldiers and advanced into the mess left behind by the defenders as they began their withdrawal. Grimly, he glanced at the carnage around him. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Humans might have killed each other since the dawn of history, but with an alien threat, it all just seemed so pointless. They had a planet to defend, and every death in a petty conflict like this was one less person to help them defend against the Tellask and the Orakh hordes.

He drew his sword, feeding mana into its runes so it glowed purple, drawing attention from all across the battlefield. If he needed to fight other people, so be it. Better for their civil war to end here in one definitive battle. There would be no withdrawal, followed by later regrouping for Best’s troops today. They would either surrender, or they would die.

All eyes on Dan, he poured mana into his runes and charged the slowly retreating defenders.