NOVEL WEB 48: Hell Raining
I sat in the forward lookout again, relaxing after a long morning of helping Jitters and Kory with an interesting engineering problem. Idly playing with my shadows, I was practicing forming them into different things, when my gaze casually flicked out over the sky-sea. Clouds drifted idly, both above and below us, forming and reforming into infinite shapes and patterns. It was a gorgeous view, but one that had gotten rather repetitive of late.
So much so, in fact, that my mind didn’t immediately register the smudged shape of a mountain on the horizon. Then, in a rush, I sat up straight and lunged for the communicator.
“Bridge!” I said into the strange little wood and brass device. “Bridge, we have land up ahead, a lot of it!”
The mountains steadily resolved themselves into a coastline that stretched out across the horizon. The mountains were awe inspiring to look at, even from this distance. They were almost vertical in many places, and hundreds of meters tall. I was almost hesitant to call them mountains, as they were more like gargantuan stone shards that had been casually thrust into the ground by some vast deity. Across the high places were several massive pockets of greenery, while the lowlands were ravaged by rot and decay. Even if we couldn’t see the conflict between the fae and the monsters, it was visible through that medium.
It was hard to get a sense for just how big the island was, but it had to be at least as massive as Anamoor, possibly even more. Would the gods spare the city when the destruction reached it? Would they carve it out of the world and allow it to remain whole?
“We see it, lookout,” Leon said through the comms, since he was the one at the helm right then.
Bassi’s voice called out next, urgent and excited. “Jitters, Kory, Mist, how did the installation of those rail things go? Are we operational?”
“Possibly?” Jitters replied. “We’re not totally confident they’ll work, we haven’t tested them more than a handful of times, but they’re in place.”
“Good enough,” the leader of the Slate Snakes said with authority. “Get to the right hand side ones… uh, the starboard side. We’ll see what we can do to relieve some pressure on the court.”
“Aye aye, captain,” I called playfully into the communicator, before pushing myself out of the lookout and back into the envelope of the ship.
Rushing along the gantries of the upper decks, I ran over to one that hung above another that led to the weapons emplacements we’d only just installed this morning. Leaping down, I rolled and burst through the door of what had once been a storage room about one third of the way up the side of the ship.
The armament within was an unholy union of magic and Earth tech that would hopefully allow us to lob makeshift shells full of magical explosives at our enemies. Assuming they didn’t just tear themselves apart the first time they were fired.
It was basically a very simple magical railgun, built using the same general principle as the engines that powered our ship. Rather than simply using the mana infused water to drive a mechanical process, however, this one used a series of crystals to capture that energy.
The fuel would be injected into a series of combustion chambers down the length of the two rails that made up the gun’s barrel. Then, in rapid succession, the fuel would be ignited, causing explosions within those chambers. So far, so much combustion. The difference was the crystals, which from their rear, would take the kinetic force of the fuel combustion and focus it, then expel it from its other end. That other end was fixed within the barrel, hence the railgun similarities.
When the trigger was pulled on the cannon, the shell would be inserted into the firing chamber at the same moment that the combustion occurred, sending the shell out the end of the barrel at supersonic speeds. In theory. We had only tested our prototype so far, which was now fixed to the rear of the bridge on a makeshift gun emplacement there.
Bassi took the ship up and then into a hard right hand turn, before abruptly pulling us around at a ninety degree turn that would give the starboard side a clear shot at whatever we were approaching.
The land below us was a frightening combination of high, soaring peaks, beautiful greenery, and rampant, consuming rot. Whatever I had been expecting the Wind Court to look like, it hadn’t been this. There wasn’t any artful blending of nature and city, no, the Wind Court had subjugated the surrounding land like any group of humans might.
Tall stone walls stretched across every available access to the high, almost vertical peaks. All across those rocky crags, buildings of stone and wood were crowded together, but in a way that seemed artful and purposeful rather than squalid. Their architecture was the strangest thing about the whole sight, however. It was flowing, like water or the wind caught in stone, with not a single straight edge in sight. Even the walls undulated and curved like a winding river or a snake lazily pushing through the forest.
Everything beyond those walls was a wrecked wasteland, teeming with monsters of all sorts, grinding and burning up every scrap of organic matter they could find to feed themselves. It was an orgy of ugliness and decay that made my stomach turn.
Then the main gates of the Wind Court came into view, and anger began to burn away the nausea. A tiered city had been built on a slowly ascending slope up to the largest mountain in the range. A city that had been breached, and fairly recently too. The lower tier was a scarred and broken battleground, with hordes of gurg and other less intelligent monsters being directed by too many alabasters to count.
Worse, it appeared that although the wind fae were cutting down monsters by the hundreds, they were losing, slowly but surely. I could see them down there, so many fae, all of them fighting with a style similar to Bassi’s, if perhaps a little more showy and a little less practical.
“Gunners, target the breach,” my lover called through the communicator, pulling me from an observer to a participant in the battle. “Mages, do the same. Light that breach up, but keep an eye out for enemy boarders. Victoria, stand by for corruption purges.”
“All together now,” I said into the communicator, taking charge of myself, Jitters, and Kory. “Three, two, one.”
The guns roared in near-unison, but it wasn’t the sound of a normal gun. Rather, it sounded like the growl of three aggressively powerful motorbikes, or a lion the size of a tank staking its claim over the battlefield. Next came the whip-crack-boom of three metal canisters breaking the sound barrier several times over, and almost instantly, the roar of explosions.
The ground in front of the breach in the city walls was torn up and spread liberally across the battle, along with the body parts of any enemy foolish enough to be in the way. The mages lobbed lightning, fire, ice, and everything in between a moment later, causing widespread destruction across the area.
“Mages, swap to hitting targets within the city,” Bassi ordered. “Cannons… keep firing at the breach. Don’t let anything get through it.”
I did as she said, but I’d heard something in her voice. She was stressed, perhaps a little scared? It was hard to pin down over the poor quality of the communicator audio. I’d have to keep a little part of my brain concentrating on her.
To our surprise, the magic explosives we were using did more than just detonate. They left magical fire in their wake, hot enough to turn the ruined and corrupted dirt into glass after a few rounds.
We rained magical hellfire down on the monsters for almost a minute before they attempted to take us out, but the mages were ready. They threw up wards of hardened arcane power that stopped spell and ballista bolt alike, then threw out targeted attacks of their own, hammering down on the enemy siege engines.
Bat riders began lifting off from further back in the enemy lines, but our mages held them off with ease. They couldn’t do their weird reality warping trickery up here in the sky, and they very quickly realised this.
Down below, the confused wind fae had paused, their distant faces staring up at us. Until, that is, one of them got them fighting again. They surged against the monsters who were now stuck in the city, their backs to the wall, literally.
The fighting was fast, fierce, and terrible, with many on both sides going down. Once the anti-air threats had been dealt with, however, there was nothing to stop our mages from raining down pinpoint accurate fire on the enemy back line. Those of us on the guns had to make do with firing indiscriminately into the fleeing creatures of rot beyond the walls, however.
Even watching carefully for problems down on the ground, I almost didn’t catch the collection of alabasters as they gathered. I could almost feel the magic of their combined spell building, even from this distance.
“Shit!” I swore, and lunged for the communicator even as I cranked the angle on the cannon. “Guns, we have a group of enemy mages preparing to do some magic bullshit. Focus fire, don’t let them finish!”
Opening the breech of the makeshift cannon, I cycled the fuel in the rails and hastily loaded a shell. My gun was more or less on target, and with explosive ammunition, that was good enough, so I pulled the trigger.
Pain, that was my next thought. Pain, and a queasy, urgent feeling in my gut. I blinked, trying to understand what had just happened. My thoughts felt sluggish, and in the worst possible way, and it was the panic that brought the world crashing back in.
I was falling, pieces of the cannon littering the sky around me, along with mage fire and some tattered fabric from the ship’s envelope. Oh no, Bassi! She was on the ship, if it crashed, what had—
Spinning through the air, my gaze was just barely able to make out the outline of our airship above me. Still aloft. Good. That just meant I needed to survive this.
Easy enough.
Sighting the shadow of the hole in the ship that I had so recently vacated, I pulled myself through the shadows and back into the safety of the ship. Already, some of my classmates were working to patch the hole, but I didn’t get up to help. Instead, I collapsed on a gantry and groaned. Goddess, that had been close. Way too close.
