ALL NOVEL Far Future Ch. 348 – The Emperor Awaits
The Emperor was fighting on multiple fronts now, as the Warp Forces began to land on the Palace and begin the assault, all the while pummeling it from a distance.
They were still wary about us, and had ships set to screen us from attacking, but Briggs and I just sat out there twiddling our thumbs, mocking what was going on, and the smell of popcorn pervaded the ships as we sat back and watched all the fighting going on everywhere.
About half the Emperor’s Gloom Portals had been seized by the Warp, and they were actively trying to invade the Palace through them. The Emperor had tried to close them, a bunch of Warp Sorcerers said no way, and so He was engaged in massive combat with a lot of energy projectors and shields clashing and flaring in the depths of the Palace.
The other half of the Gloom Portals were constantly sending reinforcements into the Palace, most of whom immediately got thrown into the defense of the other Portals.
The reinforcements of those halves were engaged in monstrous amounts of brawling and fighting across tens of thousands of square miles of Gloom, wiping areas down to basically sprawling, cratered plains with waves of combat sweeping here and there, demons manifesting out of Warp Portals as endless amounts of undead kept sweeping in so that they could get past and help out His Bones.
One by one, we knocked out the Deadworld Portals, generally with megatons of explosive force that might come from either side. The Portals closed, the reinforcements stopped; without reinforcements, the tides of demons won eventually, and then, without an enemy to fight, dematerialized and went away.
The Thunder Companies were also cutting off the Emperor’s new troops, blooding themselves deeper on undead, demons, constructs, and the Warped. The Warped would naturally fight anyone around, so they had to be careful of taunting them, but the main thrust was to make things untenable for the Emperor.
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Up in Reality, a massive grinding battle of machines vs psionics, and the living vs the undead, was going on with explosive enthusiasm.
There was no really stopping the Warped, and even the ancient walls of the Palace were falling when enough force was brought to bear. Shields were breached with ground assaults, generators compromised, and artillery or starship bombardments exploited the gaps. Troops flooded into exposed tunnels, endless passageways, chambers, rooms, courtyards, amphitheaters, walkways, bridges, roads, buildings, and more. Everything was stuffed with waiting undead, wall to wall as they fought, and the Warped brought the fight to them enthusiastically.
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“There.” Briggs pointed it out as I noticed it too, and we slapped hands to hilts.
The bombardment on the underside of the Palace was just as intense as the top. The terrain was jagged, but there was much less cover, and the shielding was more exposed. Bring down the shield generators and the whole underside would be vulnerable to being cracked open; the Palace could be quickly torn apart by focused fire and enough munitions.
An Interdiction rupture had occurred. We could almost hear the eager roars of the Warped as teleportation systems that were primed and ready for something like this to happen roared to life, and a Whole Lotta Warp energy blew open several Portals into the Warp deep in the Palace, and out flooded more demons, well back towards the Throne.
Excitement ensued over the next days and hours, as the gap was first healed, then broken back open by the demons, and more troops began to teleport in as undead assailed them from all sides.
The wall-to-wall undead slowed things, but the demons were limitless in number, and simply soaked up immense amounts of firepower and booby traps meant to deal with the living as they were annihilated, quite undisturbed about it all.
Sections of the Palace were broad and open enough for mecha to operate in freely, while others could barely accommodate multiple men in power armor. There was room for all types of fighting, from stealth to artillery, infantry slugfests to shoot-and-cover, sabotage to sniping. Undead abominations long sequestered by the Emperor, and tough enough to endure a Sunburst Bomb, moved alongside necromechs and did battle with horrors of the Warp without hesitation.
Millennia-old buildings were blown apart in every direction, fires raged, nobody paid attention to them, and the shooting only got more intense as things dragged on... until the ammo was low and it was time to come to fisticuffs again.
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Briggs and I naturally had to be there for the final fight. Getting in wasn’t actually all that hard, but we took different approaches to it.
Briggs whipped up some flowmetal accents for his armor, giving himself some over-sized horns, pauldrons, spikes, and typical things, switching up the Enchantments on Beat to a more Fire/Bane Undead theme. With Beat burning black and red, his Source field retracted down to skin tight, and looking every bit a wandering Champion of the Warp, he simply joined the fighting.
With his Source Charisma and fighting example, his ability to withstand suffocating amounts of firepower and energies, and the power and force he displayed bringing it to the undead, he soon had a whole mass of Warped and even demons following him around, crowing crazily about a Chosen of Klaw leading them on as he laid about him savagely, pounding a path towards the Throne and leading the Warped to their destiny.
I chose the stealthier approach, moving through and above the clusters of undead, charting the entire approach path out for him as his scout. When he started bellowing orders to those following him, and those orders turned out to be incredibly insightful, his impromptu identity as a Warped Warlord only improved. Soon he was among the leaders pushing the attack forwards, and even the Fallen Legionnaires were looking askew at him as he beat everything around him to a pulp, the Runes on Beat seething so hard even they found it hard to look on as Briggs let loose years of aggression with heaving gratitude and a fury even the Warped could appreciate.
I had a few special deeds I had to accomplish, too, and me and my impossible Stealth check flitted around doing them.
I had actually been in the Imperial Palace before, to scout the general layout of the place. I hadn’t gone near the Throne area, as I didn’t want to spook the Emperor, but flitting around and getting the lay of the land over a month of personal wandering hadn’t been too unseemly hard. It had been almost twenty years ago, but there hadn’t been much need to change the layout, as those who knew it were now undead, and wouldn’t adjust well to radical modifications.
Getting this addition to The Map had been interesting for voyeurs, able to see a lot of the grand and overly done architecture and tributes that defined the Tellurian Empire and Cult of Personality of the Empire.
There was a lot of history here. Pretty much all if was going to be blown up, so, hey, video record before it all went poof. After all, it wasn’t like we wanted to capture and hold this place. We wanted to destroy it, too.
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There were miles and miles of undead and necroborgs to fight through, and finally the Fallen Legions began to arrive en masse to contribute some portable heavy firepower and speed things up a bit.
Briggs, playing the role of a Warped combat fanatic to the hilt, basically ignored them except to give orders at key moments every now and then... which, if they ignored them, hurt them badly when hidden artillery opened up, elite necroborg units flanked them, or massed necro-psions were umber-shotting them. If they obeyed, they were actually in position to deal with the threat or eliminate them first.
He just waded forward, only making real efforts to avoid cannon-grade fire, and even the Fallen Legionnaires ended up impressed by just how damn durable he was.
He ignored them and pressed forwards, while the Legionnaires relayed to their Princes that a Chosen of Klaw was making a big impression down here, and it might be wise for them to start making appearances in the fighting...
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The appearance of the Demon Princes definitely helped build momentum, if for nothing else the presence of the Warp became stronger, boosting the Blessings the Warped combatants had and solidifying the presence of the demons helping them out/randomly fighting undead that got in their way.
As all the salient forces began to converge on the Throne, Briggs drew up before the gates, and waited with all those behind him, not bothering to move.
He wasn’t dumb enough to go up the walls of the city-sized complex, as this was something that had to be dealt with by massed artillery, across a five-mile killing ground now being occupied by rows of Imperial mecha of all sizes, rows of tanks happy to start firing at any moment, Walkers, blah blah blah... All the fun over-sized robotic mischief the Mechanists could put up, now set to go up against the Warped Weaponsmiths of the Princes, who were deploying their own armor forces, drawing up lines and lines of artillery to start pounding at the walls.
He didn’t bother to tell anyone he was Invisible to the Undead as he stood there, and an unbelievably loud and violent clash of demon-machines and necro-mechs unfolded before him. The guns on the walls of the Imperial Throne complex roared, and atomic fires raged back and forth as the Warped replied in kind. Cannon placed twenty miles back rained down fire on those looming walls, more direct fire splattered on the shields warding the material of the walls themselves, and down on the kind of apocalyptic castle-sized machine-on-machine fighting that made the impossible savagery of the hand-to-hand combat still going on all over the palace look like ants brawling.
Cannon rounds occasionally detonated around Briggs, but he wasn’t worried about anything except a direct hit, and his Soak would make sure he survived that, while nothing was actually aiming at him, regardless of how long he actually stood there.
But oh, what was I doing?
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The security was good here, but come on, it was not meant to deal with Stealth checks a prepped Twenty could dish out. I looked down at the antimatter core powering the shields around the main gates, and the secondary reactors that were feeding the guns.
Yeah, there was a lot of stuff here, and the area it covered was much too big for me to take out myself, with solid Interdiction to stop bringing in more help and stuff.
But that was the thing. I didn’t have to stop all this power, I just had to stop the Interdiction generator.
Being who I was, identifying that little thing among all the odd contraptions - weird mixes of ancient tech, crude replacements, and odd necrotech enhancements all about – wasn’t actually all that hard, especially since I could feel the reinforced Veil extending out from that elephantine doohickey right there...
I dropped down from the ceiling, landing between two necroborg techs with almost as many limbs, and certainly more attachments, than I had. They turned to look at me, trying to process the demonic female, all horns and batwings and tails, standing between them, before Chalice politely split their cerebral cores, and then I blew three Shardings right into the power couplings of the defensive field around the Interdiction Generator sitting over there.
Once that was done, it was simplicity itself to take a fusion grenade out of my Masspack, and use my Ring to TK it over to the primary reality matrix of the device.
The microatomic explosion did a good job of sending a lot of undead technicians flying like chaff, but didn’t actually affect most of the machines here, as they were all protected by their own fields.
The Interdiction Generator, however, was blown to slag and plasma.
I laughed, dropped a certain highly Agathakalogical crystal on the most technologically-dense piece of machinery within range, something that looked like a power monitor for one of the secondary reactors, and vanished behind incidentals, bending light and other energies as I vanished from their scanners once again.
The Axiomatic pattern swelling in response to the massive Chaos presence, and all this technology, was pretty damn strong, and the undead were currently in no shape to stop it.