Ch. 17-454 - Infiltrations (1/2)
-Also, the Shroudlord totally knows about vivus. There’s no need to hold back, so start border operations at night as you wish. However, no mass use of Area of Effect vivic magic, no deep thrusts, no surges. Concentrate on pushing back the edge of the Shroud, but make no attempts to hold the ground inside it. Coordinate with Sama and Briggs and the Chinese who are coming in from the east, and do this across a broad front. You want to wipe the lesser Shroudzones before threatening the big one,- I /told Morningflame.
“I’ll send out the orders today.” And aren’t there a fine number of lads who’d been chaffing at the chance to take out the millions of undead right over there, Flame thought to herself. She hadn’t spent all that damn time in India just to look at the things here and not burn them down!
They’d still have to be damn careful. The Congregants and Ministers commanding the undead were hellaciously powerful, and their negative energy blasts could easily one-shot normal troops, then instantly Animate them as undead. Identifying such creatures was one of the skills that kept you alive on the Russian Border...
But that’s what the Death Ward Amulets were for. She smiled to herself, golden eyes starting to burn as she considered that tonight was going to suddenly be much more exciting than previous nights...
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It was perhaps a bit sudden, but it certainly wasn’t overwhelming, as that night the Eastern Borderzone suddenly lit up across the thousand miles of its length.
There was no hurry, and there was a lot of care. Vivic-imbued Weapons, particularly sniper fire, accentuated with some long-range Rays and Shards and things, reached out and snuffed visible undead by the hundreds. Some artillery fire pre-centered and enhanced with True Seeking came down on the undead cannon and howitzer positions, and bathed them and their crews in vivic fire.
There was some immediate counterfire, of course, shots ringing out over the broken ground between their fortifications, and further Shrouded artillery positions sent literally screaming volleys out to break up any assault, even pounding at some of the forward walls.
True Seeking mortar teams took out their counterparts, and the most advanced artillery in the world did the same with the more distant positions firing at them. The Shrouded Dead didn’t have computer-aided targeting systems, backed up with True Seeking...
The fighting went on until midnight, and then slowly tapered off, save for the occasional sniper round here and there going off. Since the vivic shots drew a straight line back to the shooter, taking those shots was risky, and the sniper was almost instantly the center of a lot of return fire... which exposed more undead for other snipers to shoot at.
Sometimes the undead would send out sweeper squads, up to a hundred undead or more, to seize the landscape and surround those snipers. Alas, said snipers didn’t come alone, and those sweeper teams soon stained the trench-strewn, cratered landscape white as well.
When a wave of incorporeal shadows was sent out to surprise and suck the life out of the living soldiers, they ran into a wall of AoE damage spells that thoroughly obliterated them, as the Casters who’d been mostly quiet totally unloaded on them before pulling back.
When the sun rose the next day, soldiers moved out to do counts, and the estimates came back that across the entire border line nearly a hundred thousand undead had permanently bit it, along with hundreds of artillery pieces.
A couple of those howitzers were brought back for analysis, and indeed it was as Morningflame had related to them. If they weren’t visibly confirmed as firing, the cannons were just look-alikes without the complex casting and design to actually shoot anything, basically tubes on wheels intended to attract fire.
They didn’t even want to know how many fake cannons they’d destroyed over the years, but now it was moot. They hacked down the fakes with Hammer teams and left them strewn around for the undead to pick up, killed some gearbones and cogbeasts and Possessed vehicles, and withdrew before nightfall.
Notably, the edge of the Deadzone seemed to have been pushed back a couple feet...
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The following days were not as productive, as the undead rapidly learned their lessons. They couldn’t get any artillery into position, unless they could withdraw it further than the Hammer teams could penetrate, so they basically stopped trying unless they were willing to lose it all, or could move it very quickly out of range of retaliation.