Chapter 547: 4th & 10 (2/2)
The children tossed black roses as they moved past, all of them drawing cruel blades that crackled with purple and black and indigo lightning. The children never stopped singing, nor did they feel fear at the sight of such terrible beings.
More than a few cried in relief.
The last two, closest to the building, the monastery, the abbey, two massive green figures stalked out. They were in powered frames, with armor crudely welded to them. Their paint was pink and white and red, smeared on their armor. Their faces were grayish green, their eyes burned with red fire as they drew heavy axes. Upon their heads they wore wigs and scalps torn from the enemy.
In their footsteps flowers grew.
The six joined the robed figure, who pointed at the forest, and at either side of the narrow entrance to the box canyon. The two massive war machines moved to either side of the entrance, while the five figures moved to the middle of the entrance, then twenty steps beyond so they could see the forest below.
From the mist on either side slipped lithe figures, dancing, twisting, moving in and out of the mist and shadow. The crystal armor covering their bodies was deep purple, their weapons appeared to be carved from bone and engraved with strange runes. The six figures took position between the five figures and at either side of the slightly bowed outward line. Their skin was purple, their smiles fierce, their eyes flashing, and their hair a spray of silver in the breeze.
Lightning crawled up the middle figure and the robe turned to ash and blew away, revealing heavy ornate power armor, the plates as thick as a man's hand. The armor was painted pink with white edging, a bloody handprint across the chest over a deep puncture as thick as an adult's palm. Pinkish blood slowly oozed from the puncture as the figure snarled.
On the balcony, at the top of the tower, hands on the railing of the widow's walk, the Mother Superior watched, her ears proud and high, the pink and white powder on the ends glittering in the rising sun.
As one the figures below raised their weapons and bellowed the same thing.
AVE DIGITAL OMNIMESSIAH, MORITURI TE SALUTANT!
The one in the middle added one more line.
”۞_۞”
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The Atrekna felt it. A growling, snarling, muttering cloud of static that seemed to envelope not only the mouth of the canyon ahead but cover the entire canyon. The fear vanished, the echoes of night terrors and the stain of agony vanished beneath a sweet clean calm that made several of the Atrekna wince. Then the murmuring growling snarl covered the box-canyon in a field of static that blinded the Atrekna to the morsels beyond.
The Atrekna knew that they had been seen, detected somehow, and the building had mustered defenders.
They weren't worried.
Still, they urged their creations into further urgency, harrying them and driving them forward even as they brought up their personal phasic shielding and spread out.
The exited the treeline and saw what was before them.
A pathetic group. Barely numbering a dozen. While two of the opponents were the hardy and tough machines that nearly qualified as an army on their own, the Atrekna could see plainly the evidence of battle damage, of rent plates and buckled struts, of cracked weapons and damaged tubes.
Even those who stood before them were damaged. Six of them were garbed in crystals that felt dead and heavy to the Atrekna's psionic abilities, but the others were dressed in damaged plates of riven power armor.
If it wasn't for the burning blades and axes in their hands, the Atrekna would have dismissed them as statuary.
Covering the baker's dozen was field of snarling, snapping, growling phasic static.
It didn't matter to the Atrekna, who gave the order for their creatures, mechanical and biological alike, to attack.
With a roar the great beasts lunged forward. With the shriek of YOU BELONG TO US the mechanical war machines moved to engage.
The figures roared back a single sound. The Atrekna wouldn't call what the creatures bellowed a word, just a sound.
WAAAAAAAAAGH!
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The Mother Superior watched from the widow's walk as the great War Titans opened fire, the Deathnauts raking the front lines of the Atrekna forces with their great cannons, the quad-barrels lancing out a solid bar of light even though the tracers were mixed 5:1. The shells, self-correcting semi-guided density enhanced armor piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot mass reactive phasic enhanced antimatter rounds, tore apart the first ranks even as the War Titans fired rockets and missiles.
The eleven other figures stood silent, unmoving, as the War Titans raked the lines of Atrekna with their cannons, the missiles, rockets, and mortars hammering the rear lines.
But still more creatures and war machines left the forest to charge the thin line of defenders.
Below her, in the chapel, more Sisters knelt and led the children in prayer. Some held the ones that could only rock back and forth. Others cradled the ones that, before, could only scream and now did nothing but endlessly weep even in their sleep. Mute ones pressed their hands together and mouthed the prayers. Blind ones turned their empty eye sockets or blind eyes to the great picture.
”♥╣[-_-]╠♥ Doki doki Omnimessiah kawaii desu ♥╣[-_-]╠♥,” they sang.
The Mother Superior could hear the singing, an ancient song, spoken in the only language almost all of the children seemed able to speak. She watched the Fallen Elves, who had fell in the early days of the War and had been brought to the Abbey to be buried in the soft loam of the forest that came all the way to the cliffs, suddenly moved. They had been buried where sweet water trickled down the cliff face to become creeks and streams, their graves tended by the children who now prayed, and they had honored their Queen's vows.
The Fallen Elves lunged forward, disappearing into silver streaks that zig-zagged around the edges of the mob of Atrekna forces, each corner and twist of the zig-zagged pattern they appeared, streaked and blurred, for a brief moment.
The Fallen Elves vanished into the forest, and the Mother Superior knew that they would fulfill the High Queen's oaths.
The horde of machines and Dwellerspawn were shattered by the massed firepower of the group as the other fire figures began adding firepower from their weapons, but for every one they killed or destroyed a dozen took their place.
Slowly, but surely, the horde advanced, even as the seven defenders poured all of their wrath and hate into the ever growing tide.
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The Atrekna Conclave knew that they were rapidly running through their forces. The two war machines were still outputting heavy fire, even though the Atrekna could see that their weapons were damaged. All seven of them took hits that should have killed them, each impact not even rocking them back, despite the fact that their armor was rent and damaged.
Snarling, three of the Conclave began to bring up reinforcements, reaching into the timestream and finding their forces intact, able to be copied forward.
Bluish phasic energy wrapped around their hands, cored with sickly yellow light as they began shifting the chronotrons.
Each of them stiffened as one, their hands reaching in front of them, to their robed chests. Their eyes opened wide with shock.
Blades of ivory, bone taken from fallen defenders of Hesstla and forged into a solid blade, erupted from their chests, smoking and sizzling as the purple blood was devoured by the black and purple flames surrounding the blades. The runes, inlaid with purple and pink warsteel, glowed and burned in the shadows of the forest.
Each of the three Atrekna felt the lithe bodies of the Fallen Elves press against them.
”I ar rís Alv-ah-naya on- hen Suilad,” they whispered, before withdrawing their blades with a whisper and vanishing back into the shadows.
The rest of the Atrekna looked around, startled by the sudden disappearance of three of the Conclave. They increased their personal shields as they cast around for what could have killed three of their brethren.
One let their concealment drop, just for a moment, to look around better.
The blade flashed as it bisected them from shoulder to opposite hip, and the Fallen Elf vanished back into the forest.
The Atrekna fell in two pieces.
The Fallen Elves waited in the shadows, moving silently through the forest's secret paths, their dead eyes watchful for any trace of the Unclean.
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The Mother Superior watched as the horde reached the seven defenders, who erupted into furious motion. Fists wrapped in Enraged Wrath crushed the life from insects, point blank weapon's fire gutted machinery, and melee weapons wielded with wrath and fury sliced and hewed at the attackers.
Dredgutz fell first, collapsing to the ground even as he kept firing his heavy gyrojet pistol, each round slamming deep into insect and machine armor, moss and vines spreading from the wound even as flowers bloomed.
Zakariwrath fell next, cloven in half. The massive Dreadful Knight pulled himself forward with one hand, firing with the other, until a massive taloned foot ripped away half of his skull and left him dead.
The Mighty Wrathbourne fell next, his chassis screaming as he took a shell that would have gutted a starship directly to his mighty chest. He fell to the side, his chassis burning, even as he washed green fire over his foes that tore them apart screaming in agony, be they living or machine.
The Dying Joan screamed her wrath and redoubled her efforts, her chainsword in one hand and her beloved Ackack in the other. Her cry drove the others to redouble their efforts. The torches on her shoulder burned with pink and white incandescent fury as she leveled her wrath at those who threatened the innocent behind her.
Pericles the Rwandan Ferocious One fell next, his skull caved in, but he took the machine that had killed him with him, his muscles giving one more convulsive effort that ripped the robot in half, spraying hydraulic fluid like blood.
From the forest the sounds of FWOOP! began to rise. Singly, then more, then faster and faster as the Atrekna themselves realized they were under attack and gathered together to defend themselves and one another.
The Mother Superior watched with an unreadable expression on her face, her ears still held high.
The Burning Wrath of Zunil Anvil fell next, but not before his mighty guns had hammered the last of the largest machines to junk. The burning warsteel chassis slumped, smoke billowing up.
The Dying Joan shrieked out in enraged emoji-Engrish as she attacked her foes with more fury, pink and white lighting completely wreathing her, almost blotting her out.
Side by side she stood with Bluddonnur, until a lucky hit from a tentacle smashed the Orkz head in, caving in his face.
The Dying Joan grabbed Bluddonnur's heavy axe, KawaiiByte, in one hand, her chainsword in the other, and kept fighting, screeching and yowling her fury as she was forced back step by step.
The FWOOP in the forest slowed, then ended.
The Dying Joan crushed the skull of the last of the Dwellerspawn with the hammer head backside of KawaiiByte and ripped in half the last of the machines with the pink and white Nekoblade.
Silence slowly descended, broken only by the snap and crackle of flames consuming machine and flesh alike. The Dying Joan dropped KawaiiByte and gripped her Nekoblade with both hands, grounding the tip in the earth as she panted, her tongue hanging out, trying to lower the heat of her armor and her body that was fused to it.
The Mother Superior gripped the railing tightly and leaned forward.
Drifting from the forest came a single Atrekna. Upon its head rested a crown of burning golden alloy set with phasic crystals that shone in the noonday sun.
The Dying Joan lifted her blade to the guard position as she stepped forward in between the two posts of the low stone wall, which was somehow still unbreached.
”╭∩╮（︶︿︶）╭∩╮” was all the Dying Joan said.
FWOOP!
The air rippled as the psychic blast tore through the noonday air, sending smoke spiralling in a whispy translucent funnel around the edges of the blast.
The Dying Joan stepped forward, guarding her one eye with the blade, the pink fire in her single eye that still was burning brightly.
The Atrekna lifted a hand and the ground turned to mud.
The Dying Joan kept advancing, slogging through the mud, pink and white lighting flowing over her Nekoblade, the torches attached to her back blazing, the banner on her back, showing a crudely drawn and smiling Hesstla child's head, snapped briskly in the breeze.
The Atrekna made a fist and the ground turned solid.
The Dying Joan slogged out of the dirt, her power armor hissing and thumping.
The Atrekna began to float backwards, thickening its shields.
It was too late.
Five quick charging steps and the Dying Joan was on the Atrekna. The first chop of her Nekoblade, the teeth of the chain roaring and sending fountain of white and pink sparks showering out, destroyed the thick phasic screen.
Before the Atrekna could do much more than scream the Dying Joan grabbed him by his head, crushing the crown in her armored fist.
And sawed his head off, standing in the wreckage, under the burning fire of the noonday sun.
She stood there a long moment, then opened her hand, dropping the pulped head of the Atrekna. She turned away, moving slowly back to the abbey.
Her lossglass torches fluttered and went out as she approached the door.
The children opened the door and she thudded through.
The Mother Superior stood inside. She reached out and touched the wound driven deep into the armor, that still oozed pink blood.
”Rest. Return to your meditations, Beautiful One,” the Mother Superior said. ”The children will awaken your companions and return them to their resting places.”
”(￣。￣)～ｚｚｚ” the Dying Joan said.
”I know, Glorious One,” the Mother Superior said. She motioned at the chapel at the back of the Great Hall. ”Dwell in the light of the Father, the First Joan, and the Initiate.”
Four children rushed up, two holding chairs. The other two climbed on and draped a thick burlap robe around the mortally wounded Neko-Marine. The adjusted it, then drew the hood over her head, hiding her missing ear, shadowing her ravaged face.
Outside the children moved to each of the fallen defenders, touching them, singing in Engrish-Emoji hymns of faith and duty. Others moved into the forest, knowing where each of the Fallen Elves lay, to bring them to sleepy wakefullness and return them to their rest.
Each of the fallen struggled to their feet, and followed the small children, still singing hymns, back to their tombs.
The Dying Joan knelt in the chapel, the tip of her sword grounded on the stone. She put her gauntlet clad hands on each side of the crossbar of her Nekoblade and looked up.
”Father,” she whispered.
She bowed her head and began to pray again.
The bodies of the Dwellerspawn, the wreckage of the war machines, was covered by moss that grew in minutes. Flowers bloomed on the mounds and humps, vines spread out, and berries appeared.
The High Queen turned her attention away from returning the defenders to their rest, having set into motion magics and spells and rituals to reclaim the land and erase the scars of war.
Beyond the valley, away from the mountains, Operation Billy Mays entered its eighteenth hour.