SWNOVELS Fractured Earth: Chapter 35
After the first brick was thrown, a hail of rocks, chairs, and other hard objects began crashing to the ground around Dan. The soldiers in powered armor simply ignored the projectiles, opting to return fire on the Orakh. A direct hit might stagger them or knock them off balance, but generally the magically reinforced armor could weather the blows.
The rest of the expedition hurried under the mechs, taking cover from the metal and cement slamming into the pavement around them. A spellshield could absorb a blow, maybe two, thrown from height, but the quantity of detritus falling around them would quickly overwhelm any of their defenses.
Dan began gathering mana to cast Railgun. An air conditioning unit crashed to the sidewalk next to him, thrown by a particularly large and enterprising Orakh. Silhouettes began to fall from the sky as the Orakh themselves tried their luck. Some missed the mechs altogether, snapping their bones like kindling against the road. Others were plucked from the air by the weapons mounted on the mechs and powered armor.
The rest landed on the giant war machines. They bounced and jostled as they fought to wedge limbs or weapons into cracks in the metal, attempting to arrest their falls. Their numbers began to accumulate as the Orakh that survived their leaps began to climb up the sloped surface of the mechs.
The spell finished, launching a slug into the top of a nearby building, converting the top couple of floors into a Fireball. The mechs began to fire their main cannons, tearing chunks out of the nearby high rises. Not every shell took out a load-bearing pillar, but each round shook and rattled their targets.
“We need air support!” Abe’s voice crackled over Dan’s radio. “Jennifer, you need to send the drones flying low enough to avoid enemy fire right away. We’re heavily outnumbered here, and we do not have good firing lanes. Anything that isn’t an Orakh has been eaten by an Orakh. We need you to just level these buildings.”
Dan turned, directing the Railgun toward another building full of Orakh. His original target burned behind him, shapes streaming out of it and into the fire of the soldiers huddled beneath the mechs. It might not collapse in the next couple of minutes, but the fire more than denied its use to the Orakh.
“We’ll be within range in a couple of minutes,” Jennifer’s voice replied, scratchy with interference. “Rebecca warped us further than we thought. Once we’re over the staging area, we’ll be able to launch the drones stationed there as well. Our mobile command center should be able to handle about fifteen of them at a time. Not enough for us to level the entire city, but we should be able to pull your buns out of the fire.”
“Do you hear that, Dan?” Abe shouted over the radio as his mech fruitlessly tried to pull its leg from the subway tunnel trapping it. “Jennifer thinks that my buns are hot!”
Dan fired the Railgun a second time, gutting an office building. Flames shot out of its windows, and the structure began to teeter, the force of the strike rocking it to its very foundation. A handful of Orakh fell from the roof, and even more escaped out the front as the fire from the attack spread.
Glancing up, Dan frowned. Orakh on Abe’s mech were pounding at hatches and gun turrets with their weapons. Axes might not be the best tool to damage the massive war machine, but leaving the Orakh to attack the irreplaceable machine unmolested didn’t seem like the best course of action.
Activating Gravitational Easing, as well as his strength runes, Dan jumped, catching on to a joint almost fifteen feet up on the mech. Marshaling his strength, Dan pulled himself upward again, this time landing on the hull of the mech.
The nearest Orakh only noticed Dan when his sword removed its head from its meaty shoulders, leaving only a purple afterimage behind. Its companions spun to face him, pulling their weapons up and to the ready.
Without breaking stride, he launched two Forcebolts, knocking the Orakh nearest to him off-balance. His blade swept low, severing an Orakh’s legs as Dan ducked beneath his enemies’ clumsy blows. Scrambling past the Orakh as they stumbled to regain their footing and turn to face him, Dan launched a Fireball overhead. He aimed low enough that the pressure front would slam the Orakh and knock them from the mech, but hopefully high enough that the fire from the spell wouldn’t damage the war machine.
It worked. The explosion didn’t do much damage to either the Orakh or the mech, but the shockwave swept them clean of the machine’s surface. Dan smirked slightly as they tumbled to the pavement below. For a brief second, they lay still, stunned by their fall, but that was all it took for the soldiers underneath the mech to make short work of them.
Bricks slammed onto the metal around Dan as the Orakh tried to clear him from the chassis of the war machine from their vantage above. The mech reverberated beneath him as Abe fired its main cannon into the nearest building. Dan frowned as his hearing lapsed into the steady ring of tinnitus.
The shell hit something important, and combined with the cumulative abuse the building had taken over the course of the battle, it collapsed. Dan created a force bubble to prevent himself from being thrown off the mech as a wall of dust flowed out onto the street, shaking everything.
Dan shook his head, trying to clear the ringing. Orakh were sprinting down the street toward his army from the direction of Midtown, using the distraction of the ambush to get as close as possible before taking fire.
He frowned slightly, dropping three Fireballs into the front of their charge. The explosions blew back the first wave of the Orakh, killing a handful but tangling the feet of the rest with their companions’ injured bodies. The charge stumbled into a morass of confusion as the Orakh tried to extricate themselves from the situation and regain their momentum.
The unarmored infantry beneath the mechs opened fire on the stalled Orakh forces. One or even two rifle shots wouldn’t kill one of the heavily muscled warriors, but it was far more than a handful of troops shooting. Sleeting waves of fire cut them down, one after another.
Another building fell, multiple cannon rounds from the procession of mechs ripping its foundation apart. Dan stumbled, catching his balance as another pressure wave rolled across the machine he was standing upon.
A rock bounced off his spellshield, forcing a wince from Dan. He’d been trying to rest, to give his mana reserves a couple seconds to recharge after his repeated use of Railgun. He searched the roofs surrounding their team, looking for the offending Orakh.
One leaned over the edge, only to immediately take a fifty-caliber repeater round to the chest. The creature jerked backward in a fountain of blood before disappearing on the roof. More and more suits of powered armor were stalking out into the open in order to give themselves a better vantage point on the attacking Orakh.
Dan smiled. Their ambush might have been successful against a more primitively armed force; bricks from rooftops would do a toll on spellshields after all. But, against the reinforced steel of the mechs and power suits, it wasn’t terribly effective. The magically toughened metal could withstand a bombardment from the simple rocks almost all day.
His smile disappeared as a pulse of electric mana emanated from a building almost two hundred feet away. Instinctively, Dan threw himself off the side of the mech.
The wall of the building exploded, revealing a quartet of Orakh shamans clustered in a circle, a gigantic commander standing next to them with a two-handed sword planted in the building’s floor. Lighting sprayed from the cluster of shamans, striking Abe’s mech.
Dan landed on his back, half-blinded as the streaks of light and energy pulsed up and down the mech. Secondary explosions popped and crackled as the vehicle’s metal skin superheated almost immediately, and ammunition began to cook off.
The lightning stopped, and the mech sagged. Dan held his breath, half-expecting to hear Abe’s voice from the radio. Letting him know that he was ok. Letting him know what to do.
One breath turned into two with no response. Dan’s eyes narrowed. Without conscious thought, the invisible rods of magnetic energy that formed the core of the Railgun spell appeared in front of him.
The shamans and the Orakh commander all looked at him simultaneously, sensing the mana accumulating in Dan’s grasp. They shouted. Whether he could have understood their words or not had he been closer, Dan didn’t really care. The hissing wreck of Abe’s mech next to him pushed him past that.
They erected a crude spellshield before the Railgun slug hit, but it wasn’t enough. The chunk of metal smashed into it, releasing the entirety of its kinetic energy in a Fireball that shattered the walls of the room they’d been hiding in.
Almost immediately, the rush of mana slammed into him. Dan still gained mana from killing ordinary Orakh, but at this point, it was only truly noticeable after slaying high-level variants. He didn’t even bother to check his System to see his gains, satisfied that the influx meant that his enemies were dead.
A quartet of reapers flew overhead, shaking the battlefield. He shook his head. Moments too late.
Missiles rained down from above, blowing the top couple of stories out of building after building around them. Either recognizing the futility of using the buildings as cover, or abandoning their commander’s strategy with its death, the Orakh swarmed out onto the street.
For a handful of minutes, there was an unthinking melee. Dan wove through the Orakh, his sword hacking off limbs and slashing open throats, buying as much room as possible for the powered armor to use their flamethrowers.
The gouts of liquid fire ignited entire clusters of Orakh. Unfortunately, it barely slowed the suicidal creatures. Blinded and dying from the flames, they charged on regardless, desperate to take a handful of Dan’s men to the grave with them.
And they did. His troops died hard, but they did die. The congested streets of New York without the close-up fire support from the mech were far from an ideal place to fight the melee-centric Orakh. Even if they killed fifty of the aliens for each soldier that fell, it was still an exchange that left a bad taste in Dan’s mouth.
Finally, the sounds of battle began to fade. The Orakh didn’t run. Without a commander, the idea of retreat was simply a foreign concept to them. Instead, they killed every last one of them.
Without a word, Dan pumped energy into his thermal resistance rune and jumped onto the back of Abe’s mech. The task was made quite a bit easier by the vehicle’s post-lightning collapse.
The heat from the metal began melting the soles of his boots almost immediately, but Dan didn’t care. He sprinted to the mech’s hatch, ignoring the heat and mana deprivation headache. Squinting, he shot the hinges off the deformed metal before grabbing the handle.
Even with the rune active, Dan could smell the skin on his hand burning off. With a mana-enhanced yank, he pulled the door open with a single jerk. Inside, the air was dark and sweltering. The array of monitors and electronic equipment lay dark and lifeless.
A cough pulled Dan’s attention to the two back chairs. Abe and his copilot Bennett were still breathing. Burned and struggling, but still alive.
Abe’s eyes opened a crack as the daylight from the open hatch hit him. He smiled weakly up at Dan.
“Thrush.” Abe’s voice was raspy, like he’d just smoked a pack of cigarettes and eaten a cigar. “You look like shit.”
“What the hell, man?” Dan replied shakily as he forced his body into the searing mech to start undoing the clasps holding Abe and Bennett inside. “Your entire mech looks like a half-melted candle. How in the fucking hell did you make it through all of that?”
“You’re not getting out of paying my check that easily.” Abe coughed. “Must have been a Faraday Cage. They hit us with all that electricity, but it just went straight through the metal and into the ground. Fucked the mech up pretty badly, but left the soft little squishy bits on the inside largely unscathed.”
“You call this unscathed?” Dan shook his head in disbelief.
“To a certain extent,” Abe replied with a pained chuckle.