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I see the play too late to stop it. Darrow baited us with the shadows, and flanked our aerial charge by sending a small group around to hit us as we forsook our position. They cleave through us.
I pivot in the air to witness slaughter behind me.
The world slows as I see him amidst my men. The camouflage withering away to reveal a hurricane in battered crimson pulseArmor, a white razor sparking as it carves through a Praetorian’s starShell to sever half his neck.
I burst toward the Reaper and am smashed sideways as I collide with another body. Kalindora shields me from an armored man’s pulsefire. Rhone mows him down. I try to rally the left wing of my men, but it is a slaughter. And at the center of it swirls a god of death. The fighter’s helmet flashes. Around his body whirls that famous Gold-killing blade.
As violence reaches for him, Darrow does not flinch like a man; he reaches like a covetous river. He pulls violence to him, drinks it into his current, and leaps around the battlefield with a seemingly mindless capriciousness. Which, when inspected, illuminates the genius of his violence. He herds us together, making sure we are tight and compact so that our options constrict and his men’s expand.
It is something you can only understand when you feel dread sinking into you when you realize you’re between the claws of a trap, and they’re about to close. You feel surprised that it was so easy to trick you. Surprised that this is how it happens. All those years of preparing, reviewing battles, correcting others. It doesn’t feel like we fell into a trap. It feels almost accidental, yet still inevitable. I feel small and stupid.
“Kill the Reaper!” I shout as I plunge for him, Kalindora at my right, Rhone and three others at my left. We cut through two Rising knights and then, as if smelling the murder on our minds, Darrow, without even looking, jolts backward toward us at a surprising angle.
A Praetorian’s head splits in half. Rhone is knocked from the sky. Kalindora’s left arm spins from her body. My own razor arcs forward toward Darrow’s turned head and finds only air as he performs some aerial alchemy and bends, floating upward, only to shoot back down.
His razor slashes at me as he flies past. I parry, but the force is incredible. I feel a blazing pain in my arm. I’m struck again as he backhands me like a child with his blade. The razor cuts through my gravBoots and I plummet from the sky.
I slam down onto the hardpan, but do not lose consciousness. I stare up in my broken armor. Metal men dance against the crackling clouds. Bodies fall like dying metal birds, leaking blood and machine fluid. The Reaper is already passing on, leaving the leftovers for his men.
A starShell crashes down atop me, pinning me down. Another slams into the sand. I feel heat on my right cheek and turn just enough to see a downed shell’s broken boot thruster sputtering flame against my helmet. I panic and shove in vain. Heat grows as it melts through the armor from the side. I shout and scramble, but I go nowhere as the heat intensifies and a hole opens in the right side of my helmet. My skin begins to itch. I flail, overcome with dread. The itch becomes agony. My right eyebrow curls as it burns. The epidermis begins to bubble and peel away. Fire reaches down to the dermis, shrinking it and splitting it open as fat leaks out and feeds the flames.
The wolf howls fade in the distance. The flames eat my eye.
Only then do I begin to scream.
WE BRUSH AWAY LIGHT resistance at the downed Storm God. Without bothering to complete the kills, we head for Heliopolis. Behind us, we leave the enemy grounded or dying. Radioactive dust drifts south to dim the sun. Soon another sandstorm swallows the daylight entirely.
Visibility shrinks, masking but not slowing our approach on Heliopolis. When we emerge on Ajax’s rear, will it be to a conquered city? Will we be alone against ten legions? Will our own guns be turned to be used against us? Or will the Morning Star have somehow shepherded my army through the Waste?
I can only hope, just as I hope Alexandar is not drowned beneath the sea.
Forward. Forward. One foot after the other.
Our Drachenjägers have barely an hour of charge left. My starShell is dead in the desert. Half the others managed to save energy by riding the drachen through the storm. All trudge on their own now. We hold on to sanity by a thread. Our water ran out in the night. Our ammunition is low. Stims power our senses and keep us from succumbing to the side effects of either the anti-rads or the radiation itself, but they have hollowed our cores. Twenty-four hours engaged with the enemy. How many days awake does that make it for me now? Six? Seven?
I could not sleep in the passage despite my perch on the Drachenjäger.
The night was hell and howling wind and avalanches so frequent we had to abandon the pass and risk the desert. Blackness was our master. Static and sand and gargling radiometers narrated our endless nightmare. Orion’s storm no longer escalates, but it has run wild without her focusing its wrath.
Two sandstorms swallowed a third of our number. The rest, including myself, face cellular decay from fallout. I puke again into my cockpit. The catch is full. The vomit laced with blood. It leaks down into the cracks to trickle over my armored legs. My head pounds. Eyeballs aching at their roots. My symptoms are minor compared with the Grays, Blues, and our remaining Obsidians. Some have already succumbed to delirium as their DNA unwinds. Only the Reds and Golds hold strong.
I just want rest. I just want water. And to sleep.
Forward. Forward. Forward.
The morning is the color of bronze when we come upon the Graveyard of Tyrants. Harnassus dumped the monoliths the Golds built to honor seven centuries of Sovereigns in the desert. The giant statues lie on their backs as sand swirls around them. A skirmish was fought amidst them. Waves of sand lap at the half-submerged and smoldering carcasses of war machines.
The debris field thickens. Phantoms move through the dust. Lone infantrymen without clothes and covered in blood walk past us. We cannot tell their tribe. Blackened husks sit cross-legged in the sand. A desert hyenadile gnaws at a dead man, looks at us, fans the threat-wings on its neck, and flees as an artillery shell detonates nearby. War machines scream and groan in the distance. Their shadows flit through the gloom, growing more substantial with every step.
It is like emerging from one dream into another.
I draw what remains of my force up on a hill with a view of the storm wall of Heliopolis. Our flanks secured by a sheer mountain façade, I survey the siege with Screwface. My heart sinks.
Heliopolis has fallen.
With the desert Storm God down, the storm has lost its direction. It sweeps eastward. Ajax’s army fights in the sunshine.
Acrid smoke rises from huge gashes in the storm wall. Iron Leopard and Ful
