Mage Tank

Chapter 279: Krimsim Skies

Everyone’s eyes turned towards the cockpit as we all tightened our grips on the handholds. Through the windshield, beyond the translucent blue of Guar’s shields, was a dark mass in the sky. The mass expanded until it was a haze of individual dots, which grew until the shape of wings was visible on each, then they were suddenly close enough that I could just make out the colorful plumage of each individual bird. After that,

BAM!

BAM! BAM! BAM!

The birds practically warped into us, and the cabin shuddered as a series of deafening collisions rattled us around. Guar’s shields were smeared with a thin film of greyish-red gore, streaking out into impact spreads that were halfway to scorch marks. The detritus flash-froze and was stripped off by the wind almost as soon as it appeared, only to be replaced an instant later by the next man-sized bird to lose a game of chicken with us.

Elemental Barrier’s knockback effect came out in pulses, and the birds were traveling towards us at the speed of a high-velocity rifle round. There was scarcely a few hundredths of a second between the time they entered my Barrier’s range and when they struck us, letting the majority of them bypass the skill’s effect.

The avians were pelting us like heavy rainfall, and I did not like how the cabin was starting to buck. Varrin was flying steady, like a supersonic iceberg through a volley of ping pong balls. He wasn’t getting jostled, which meant the frame of our vessel was the part that was moving. Baltae’s fur rose as his Telekinesis worked to keep things together.

Madel had encountered the birds a mile outside of Krimsim proper, meaning that at our speeds it would take us around three seconds to get to the city. I didn’t care to try and calculate how many fucking birds it would take to fill that much sky this densely. Okay, I did, but certainly there wasn’t a full mile-thick perimeter around the city, otherwise it’d have to be millions of mana monsters.

Throughout our approach and breach, I had Soul-Sight cranked up and scanning for the telltale signs of Delvers. There were more than a hundred on the ground, but only a few in the air. All of them were lower than us and bunched up in one area, close to where I imagined the city’s center to be. Varrin had no trouble staying out of their way as we cut through the birds and did our flyby.

While I was actively filtering out the souls of the mana monsters, there was one creature with a soul so potent that I couldn’t ignore it. At my current sensitivity it was a flaring beacon, threatening to blind me to all else. It wasn’t any Delver, nor was it like anything else I’d encountered.

Fortunately for our ship’s structural integrity, I was correct that the entire mile wasn’t one hundred percent bird, and we breached the perimeter after a second and a half of bulldozing through. There were still plenty of flying creatures all around, but much, much more spread out. It was more of a figurative sky full than a literal one. Our first objective was to check on the state of the city, so I took a couple of seconds to give it a once-over. The monstrous soul I’d felt was a half-mile outside of its borders.

Krimsim itself was only about a mile in diameter, although the Littans packed a decent amount into that area. The city was constructed so that ground level was a hundred feet higher than the surrounding terrain, but it wasn’t built on some sort of hill or rise. Rather, the entire city sat on an artificial platform, which had me curious, but I didn’t have time to study it. The city was then fully encompassed by walls that rose for another hundred feet, made of a dark brown material, polished and smooth enough to gleam like metal. However, my recent foray into Wandmaking made me suspect that it was wood, especially given the city’s proximity to the Forest.

Regardless, whatever it was, it was durable. I watched a horse-sized avian with lightning coursing through its body twitch madly and veer down from the sky. It collided with the wall hard enough to explode, and the impact left no damage behind that I could make out from this distance.

The reason for the bird’s suicidal plunge was a large weapon atop the wall itself, with an unusual design that I recognized. It was a long spike of dark, mana-woven metal seated on a gimballed mount. The last time I’d seen such a thing was during our ill-fated encounter with the Littan naval blockade off the coast of Eschendur. At the time, it had seemed like an experimental cannon and had caused a great deal of hand-related damage to the person who’d fired it. It had also caused a lot of collateral damage to everything else.

The one atop Krimsim’s wall didn’t appear to have an operator and was shooting just fine without atomizing its surroundings. I could see threads of mana connecting it to someplace deeper within the city, where I suspected an operator controlled it remotely. It launched a crackling bolt of lightning at another multi-colored bird, which arced to three more nearby. Two were killed instantly, but the others were higher grade and more durable, leaving them smoking and injured, but alive.

Further down the wall were more such weapons, although each varied in its form. I spotted several that looked like a conch shell, launching glistening white orbs into the sky that exploded into razor shards of ice. A few looked closer to a traditional cannon, but scaled up to the size of a tractor-trailer. Those released brief gouts of fire that travelled for hundreds of feet, igniting everything on contact. The most common was a smaller weapon that looked like a spotlight, focusing on one bird at a time and smashing its body into pulp with pulses of concentrated pressure waves.

The walls of Krimsim themselves may not have done much against the birds, given that they could just fly over them, but the weapons atop them were putting up a valiant anti-air defense. Even so, it was a losing battle. I could make out more destroyed weapons than functional ones, and of the big guns that were in one piece, half of those weren’t firing at all for some reason.

More weapons were distributed throughout the city itself, mounted atop stout buildings made of similar dark brown and polished materials. These were packed between practical and sturdy houses and shops constructed from more ordinary materials. ȑ𝐀ΝŏВЕ𝙎

The architecture in the city was focused on resilience, favoring wide, one and two-story buildings built on strong foundations with thick columns and supports. Where one might normally construct a building from planks of wood, these buildings were made from beams or entire logs. I saw several that looked to be the whole trunk of a massive tree, cut and sanded into a rounded top with the living spaces carved out from within. A couple of dwellings were even repurposed house-sized monster skulls, but even these were reinforced and filled in with yet more wood. I really hoped they had their fireproofing down.

There were a handful of buildings that rose higher than the relatively short structures surrounding them, but these were uniformly dome-shaped, with roofs made from the tough, polished wood of the city’s walls. Each of them also had a canon on top.

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Overall, Krimsim kind of looked like a densely populated region of Renaissance-era loggers that had been crammed into a perfectly circular city created by wood-crazed wizards, which was then subsequently outfitted by benevolent space invaders with strong beliefs concerning self-defense. There was a clear stylistic mismatch between the weapons and the rest of the city, which made sense if these were the evolved form of the experimental weaponry I’d encountered a year and a half before.

Compared to other Littan vassals, Nohrrin and its capital Krimsim had been extremely independent prior to the phase transition. With the Forest’s conversion into a mega-Dungeon and the arrival of the Littan military, there was a lot of new construction favoring function over form. If Krimsim had a historical society, they’d probably been weeping over the hasty improvements. They were probably still weeping, just out of fear for their lives rather than outrage, but it would be hard for anyone in the city to deny they were alive because the Empire had shown up and installed exactly all of the guns.

The weapons inside the city were turning the airspace above Krimsim into a meat grinder of long-range elemental attacks and kinetic projectiles. A smattering seemed to manipulate spatial energies or fire off beams of raw mystical force, but those were a small minority compared to the number of Physical attacks going out.

Weaving in and out of the aerial fight were a half-dozen Delvers mounted on hammerheads, making an absolute mess of any birds that came near. This crew had some kind of special sauce on their Delver hot wings, because I watched a Delver-hammerhead pair eviscerate a bird six grades above their Level in about two seconds.

Was this the real potential of the Animal Handling skill? Did Joma and Grotto know the true secrets to unfathomable power? I couldn’t be certain, but those weren’t the real questions I needed to be asking myself. The real question was, did I want to tame a giant bird to ride into battle? Because it was looking pretty fucking cool from where I was flying.

I wasn’t a huge fan of birds, though. Maybe I could tame a giant c’thon instead… One that I could actually ride. Shog was more of a carrier. If anything, Shog rode me the last time we got close to anything resembling a mount-and-rider interaction.

Moving on from the mounted combat, I looked to the action on the ground, where Littan Delvers operated in teams to launch attacks and fend off dive bombs. Two-thirds were military, organized into squads with specialized roles. They worked together on a scale that essentially took the concept of a five-person party and expanded it out to an entire platoon. The military was concentrated near Krimsim’s center, flitting in and out of fortified bunkers surrounding the city’s largest dome-like building.

The other third of the city’s defenders were independent Delvers, half of whom were Littan, but the next largest representation was the bat-like Chovali. Some of these Delvers operated with a traditional five-person configuration, but many others ran in smaller groups or even solo. The Chovali could fly and take the fight directly to the birds, but generally kept their fighting below the elevation level of the cannons. Probably a wise decision on their part.

At a glance, the representation from the military looked to be predominantly Level 11 Silvers, with some supporting crews of Level 3 Coppers. The only Golds I spotted belonged to a party from the independent faction. Even then, they were only Level 12, which wasn’t too much of an advantage over the military’s people.

I knew that Krimsim’s ruler, Count Starion, was a Level 26 Gold. The man’s full party also lived within the city, meaning that Krimsim should have had an elite defense force ready to rumble at the drop of a bird. Despite flaring Soul-Sight to an uncomfortable degree, I couldn’t find anyone near that level of power inside the city itself. The hammerhead riders were the city’s most powerful individual force at the moment, with the cannons doing the majority of work cleaning up the weaker mobs.

Fortunately, there were no civilians outside and no signs of mass slaughter. The birds were fixated on the Delvers themselves, who were doing an excellent job keeping their attention focused where they wanted it. Even so, there were plenty of Delvers lying bloody and motionless, missing vital portions of their anatomy. Decapitations in particular seemed to be very popular with the avians, which struck me as odd, but I didn’t know too terribly much about Forest-dwelling murder birds.

Varrin had arced our path so that we had a little more than four seconds to survey the area before he planned to take us back out through the flying meatwall. As it was, there were so many avian mana monsters in the skies that slowing down would immediately have us overwhelmed. We could always retreat into the Closet, but that wouldn’t help with scouting, and whether we wanted to set down in the city was up for debate. We were taking a gander, then falling back to evaluate.

While four seconds wasn’t much time to take a good peek, I could do a lot of lookin’ in a handful of seconds. I’d spent half my allotted time checking out the city, leaving me only a couple of seconds to try and find whatever was attached to the overwhelming soul, which felt like an obvious choice for being the thing responsible for the swarming monsters. Two seconds turned out to be plenty of time to spot the creature, since it was a walking nightmare the size of a battleship. I felt comfortable assuming that this was our alpha.

The first thing I noted was that it was not a bird. It stood on four thick legs, each ending in a spreading mass of bulky, webbed toes. It had a barrel-shaped torso, with a gut that hung near to the ground. Its body was wrapped in a tangle of vines, foliage, and entire trees, as though it had bulldozed through the forest and brought half of it along for the ride. This misconception was banished when I noticed that man-thick roots sprouted from its slick and wet skin, connecting to the mobile jungle. Along its spine was an unusually straight trunk, running the entire length of the creature and then some, jutting out ahead of it like a battering ram. The whole massive rod glowed with an unsettling amount of power to my mana sight.

A pair of gnarled and twisted trees grew from what looked like an otherwise empty pair of eye sockets on either side of its head, free of any leaves or other greenery. Each was a creaking network of black branches, drooping heavily with round masses dangling from their offshoots. The rest of the head was shrouded by the growth and barely visible. All I could tell was that it was ovoid, with a wide drooping mouth.

The beast was a half-mile from Krimsim, amidst a no-man’s land between the city and the edge of the forest. It was a mass expanse of scorched soil, cut and burned of any cover or obfuscation. The ground was churned up and marred by frequent impact craters, littered with the corpses of avian monsters that had died in droves outside the city walls. The deaths meant little to the swarm, as more birds flocked to Krimsim from the thick expanse of trees to our south.

The birds did not make a beeline for the city, however. They flocked to the titanic quadruped and landed amidst its branches. Their bodies came alight with twisted magicks, and only then did the avians take flight towards their objective. The empowerment wasn’t a mild one, either. I witnessed a flock of Grade 2 mana monsters advance to Grade 12 over the course of a second.

Not all the birds were making quick pit stops on their way to the assault. There were five hiding amidst its canopy, significantly larger and more powerful than the rest. I also noticed that there was a constant trickle of birds returning from the city to the beast, carrying some unidentifiable burden in their talons. All of this was far enough away that even with my enhanced eyesight, some of the details were lost. I didn’t have time to study these divergences, choosing instead to focus on identifying the giant.

Hierophant of the Abductor: Whippomorph, Grade 32

Before I could even begin to wonder what the fuck a Whippomorph was, the notification changed.

Hierophant of the Abductor: Whippomorph, Grade 33

This whole situation was starting to look a bit dangerous.