Chương 526: BECMI Chapter 525 – Well, They Boldly Came to Somewhere People Had Gone Before…

Thor stepped up on the battlements on the Greater Southern Wall and looked out into the distance, surveying the scene and taking it all in with the skill and ease of a master who'd been doing this for nearly two thousand years, and wasn't limited by mortal boundaries as to his competencies. He didn't need to have his soldiers wasting time reporting to him when it was all visible in the Markspace and on coms, and he could match both to what he was seeing here.

Kostos had done an exemplary job in an atypical situation, switching from rules-oriented logistics management for the long-term and the 'boring' duty of being stationed on the Southern Wall, leaping right into crisis management mindset where you tossed out efficiency for the moment and focused on getting the job done. Not many soldiers could make that sudden shift in priorities and hold to them.

A former Vanguard operator who'd taken something of a retirement, Kostos had been doing an exemplary job of maintaining a dangerous position without the stress of constant expansions that Pyramid border duty entailed, but he hadn't forgotten what it was like to be on those teams. Thor knew it was because he himself was very good at appointing officers and putting the right men in the right places.

The usual butting of heads and styles between gung-ho attacker types and meticulously efficient management types was not something he allowed to take deep root, aided by Allegiance magic that identified such problems and told him where to act to smooth them out. The evacuation of the Delphan colonists was smoothly underway, the hover-carriers requisitioned from neighboring garrisons and Fort Cross itself speeding to the site of the incursion and even now loading up the colonists and their personal belongings.

Following behind were the cargo lifters, who were taking apart everything on the Delphan ships that they could as fast as they could, sometimes helped by Delphans who realized these were their only resources on this new world, and other times watched or even berated or interfered with by desperate Delphans that didn't want to see their prized aerial vessels destroyed.

And they were going to be destroyed, because not a single ship of the ones on the ground had survived the second attack wave, when the neighboring cellulouse jungle vomited up a brown and green tide of mutated plant life.

The wooden and stone hulls of the airships had been corroded to uselessness, infected and animated into crew-eating mutant plant life, or simply doused with bio-acids or explosive fruits, or even constricted by burrowing root-worms that had crushed and mangled them past any hope of immediate recovery… and immediate recovery was the only way that they could have been saved.

Four of the thousand-foot ships were now burning merrily, the flames definitely not from normal wood, and regular shots from the Wall gunmounts were making sure the destruction continued, as such impediments to their sightlines were not allowed.

Scores of acres of ground were stained white, covered with mist, and cellulouse carcasses were stacked up in mounds and Burning with both flame and vivus, feeding the Land proper-like in a display of what was going on further north as the initial push against the hostile ecologies of Swahib was running into a lot of resistance.

Turns out living jungles of mismatched and warring shroom and cellulose lifeforms found common cause when mass Dessication Clouds blew through them, ripped the water out of everything green or gray alike as long as it was organic, and turned miles of fecund and predatory plant and fungi life to collapsing dust with remarkable speed.

It was a fucking slow and laborious process, and the things which dwelt in the hostile ecologies fought back with the mindless enthusiasm of the non-animal organic kingdoms, throwing everything into the fight without holding back. It made reclaiming those areas a true pain. A few square miles a day was exceptionally good progress. The push had started from the eastern coast, and was building in a diagonal to minimize the frontage, every domain forward matched by a similar expansion to the west of the wall.

The relatively narrow area of the landbridge soon widened into the millions of square miles of the continent proper… and the hellhole that had been made of it. Behind the razing and ruin of the land, which had to be fireswept after it was desiccated, with vivus to encourage the Land to attack any seeds, spores, and roots left behind, Nature Elementals were Summoned by the Archpriests of Arbor and Lunia, working together to restore the Land to its proper condition, one mile-radius circle of 3.

14 square miles per Elemental, per day. It was a task of centuries. Most such Priests were on the continent of Erto, hundreds of them praying every day and restoring 3. 14 square miles at a time, keeping the Nature Elementals at work as a wall of life slowly stitched its way across the land, accelerating the natural recovery with lines of pure vitality that helped the ravaged landscapes recover.

Only a few were here on the Wall now, basically setting up a foundation for natural recovery rather than making serious headway against the problem. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. His blue eyes glanced north, to where a larger cargo loader was carrying the first of the seven Delphan ships that had not crashed north across the Stillflight Zone.

The Skyward was unbroken, continuous, and taking it down for even minutes would draw literally thousands of flying creatures from the landscape in a wild attempt to cross, along with spores, seeds, and other contaminants fried constantly by the Wards. The Delphan captains didn't like it, but they didn't want to fly over those jungles or crash their ships even less.

Being carried like a lifeboat by the Atlas-class cargo loaders was a bit humiliating, but it was better than dying to waves of cellulose leafwings or shroomer puffballoon spore bombers, streams of which were still winding their way up to the easy targets.

The flashes of the guns from the hover-carriers establishing a perimeter around the Delphan ships and continually picking off those waves of incoming didn't stop for a moment, the Artificers on duty having to use magic to keep the barrels cool enough after so much continuous fire.

The ground assault was much the same at this point, the initial barrages of mortar and artillery fire held off now as more economical plasma and laser repeaters on portable mounts took over the preliminary defense and worked to thin the enemy attacks before they could reach the downed ships. Shogun Mecha running oversight, grav-sleds with rotary lasers, hovertanks of the sweeper Bright Blade and the rail-gun mounted Black Blade variants were providing long-range and fall-back firepower.

He would have loved to be able to dispatch more drones and warbots onto the field to act as hunter-killers, but Emeril had long relayed that drone warfare and artificial intelligences were trigger terms for a lot of conservative Immortals, who didn't want to see the humanity and life removed from mass combat.

In the interests of stopping a planet-wipe from increasingly irrelevant but still-powerful Immortals, there were no drone fleets, and warbots were confined to Pyramid security, re-boxed and looking like floating crystalline guardians you didn't want to mess with. All this was, of course, in the face of the Carnifex, who were happy to employ whole armies of Constructs if they assembled enough of them to be a threat, and the reason why adamantine bullets were called 'Wrecker-shots' by the infantry.

The Armarines were the closest thing to shock troops and hunter-killer teams the Empire fielded, and highly sought-after by the combat junkies of the army. They weren't considered as elite as the Vanguard Operator teams, and especially the Dispatch Teams, but for the line units, they stood at the apex of required skill to man. The Mecha operators had a friendly rivalry with them, of course, especially since the Shoguns attracted so much more attention than the mek-suits did.

Emperor Thor scanned the deployments, adjusted a few of the emplacements to maximize zones of fire in passing, but largely left them alone. His Warlords knew their business, or they wouldn't be his Warlords. He didn't promote incompetence, however lucky it might be.

"Well done, Colonel," he said, stepping back and down from the battlements. Still standing atop them, the hyn Colonel yet didn't come up to his liege's shoulder. Still, his beaming smile at the praise made him look a full foot taller.

"I understand you are having some problems with some of the colonists?" Thor went on.

"They are mages, they are in a new world, they want adventure and riches, and they are natural rebels against their homeworld. They've come to a new land and a people with all this wonderful stuff, and they want it all for themselves. And," his voice dropped to a sneer, "most of us aren't Casters, and most of them are." Thor just sighed knowingly.

"They've been trying Charm magic and trying to steal technology, haven't they?"

"Well, the use of Charm magic faltered when one woman tried to Suggest to Corporal Lundenhow that he should give her his Grit to examine. He blew her head off instantly." That was the appropriate response to the combination of Charm magic and an attempt to disarm. Thor didn't even blink.

There were combat conditioning treatments available through Federation technology that could completely bollox up attempts to enchant the troops and people in positions of power, which had proven incredibly valuable time and time again against Carnifex infiltrators. Enchantment and Charm magic was rarely used in the Empire for exactly the response it triggered, namely an instant attack against the one attempting to subvert the will.

The Delphan woman had likely thought she was doing a harmless spell on a mere soldier, and a double-tap to the head later, realized too late that was very much the wrong kind of conduct.

"Write him up for a commendation with the Emperor's approval," Thor said flatly.

"I trust the reason for the execution was spread rapidly among the colonists?"

"Very loudly. Very quickly," Colonel Winkerbean confirmed with satisfaction.

"Lethal consequences for the unapproved usage of magic seemed to be foreign to them. They wave about Casting spells in restricted zones like it's no big thing, and are real surprised when they get the shit beat out of them and pounded down to a pulp."

"And no doubt paint us as idiot muscle-heads who don't understand magic, when they are the idiot spellcasters who don't understand the situation they are in. Make it understood by Imperial command that the Caster Protocols are not to be relaxed in the slightest around these idiots. They are going to adjust and keep their magic leashed, or they are going to be shot."

"Yes, sir. That will be passed down and conveyed to them in no uncertain terms," the hyn said, already issuing the orders.

"When do we fill them in on the situation?"

"Once their people are out of the combat zone." Thor paused tellingly.

"How many infiltrations?" he asked directly. The little colonel silently held up three fingers.

"So far," the Colonel added quietly. The Carnifex were watching, and a Wormhole Incursion of this size was not something they would have missed. They had already infiltrated three of their own in among the Delphans, who didn't have a clue. Thor was massively unsurprised at the news.

"Keep them all in one area and see to it that temporary housing is in place for them. Once everyone is out, we can hold a general assembly and enlighten them as the very unforgiving nature of the world they've ended up in." He paused to consider something, then pressed on, "If some of their officer corps feel particularly affronted, feel free to organize their leaders for an impromptu meeting with me. I'm sure I'll be able to convince them of the gravity of their circumstances."