Chương 54: Interlude VII: Toil and Trouble

An entire army of demons was slowly advancing through the ruins, their formations broken up by the occasional crater, the lighter infantry blocked by lines of slagged cars, their sheer numbers enough that they didn't quite fit in the streets and stragglers were overflowing on the sidewalks and alleys. But though it was slow, though it was impeded by the terrain, though it had been contested at every turn, the march of the undead was inexorable.

A vanguard of hundreds of sword-wights and executioners in their grim, black iron plate and serrated swords or two-handed glaives swept the streets clear of any obstacle the magical iron of the sorceries of Maveth could hack apart. They were followed by thousands upon thousands of hulking, red, skinless forms, the type of undead the necromancers would call ghouls for their hunger for human flesh and tendency to raid recently dug tombs to find it when... fresher sources were not available.

With every step the skinless fiends oozed red liquid that shared only a passing resemblance to blood; where it dripped the asphalt sizzled and corroded away, metal pitted and rusted in seconds and plastic or paper caught on fire. The true horror of Mavethan infantry did not lay in their food preferences, their disgustingly monstrous visage or gleeful barbarity but the way they could melt living beings with a touch.

The bulk of the main forces was flanked by several hundred of skeletal archers, petrified skeletons held together by molten metal joints, wielding steel longbows that shot arrows of magical thermite and despite being mere archers having a resilience and strength that surpassed any mundane human even as their every step dripped molten metal and set everything flammable it dripped on on fire.

Those long-range units were in turn reinforced by unchained Least Demons, towering fiends that might as well be mobile artillery pieces, what with their ability to conjure homing fireballs that tracked down targets like the magical offspring of missiles and drones then exploded with building-wrecking force. If that weren't enough, their near-invulnerability could shrug off most infantry weapons and their cursed breaths stole the life of everything they touched.

Above the army smaller imps flew by the thousands, chicken-sized, dog-faced humanoids with bat-like wings and the ability to conjure small fire-blasts equivalent to shotgun shells, weaker illusions that allowed them to turn invisible, stone-like bodies that gave them a degree of hardiness and minor but highly distracting magical pyrotechnics.

Between their swarms much larger shadows flew, tank-sized, chicken-shaped birds of iron that could rain feathers of exploding steel like the Stymphalian Birds of legend and breaths of fire and ruin like miniature dragons. The iron beaks were the equivalent of Mavethan fighter-bombers, slower than jet fighters but far more durable and not limited by ammunition when it came to delivering punishment to the necromancers' enemies.

Unlike earlier sorties by the enemy's summons, this was a proper army built on combined - if magical - arms, backed by the Mavethan sorcery that had finally taken root on Earth.

Fully empowered by that background magical currents, this was no mere raiding horde for a quick smash and grab, or to be sacrificed to pin an opponent down until the weather spells of their master could be brought to bear; their weapons were three times as effective as they had any right to be according to physical law, while their armors were three times as tough, three times as light and flexible, and self-repairing.

They were what a cult of heretical Numerologists had termed as +2 magic items and were only part of the army's deadly upgrades. The undead and fiends themselves were faster, stronger and tougher than they'd previously been, their presence fully integrated into their lord and master's magical hivemind rather than left to their own devices or commanded as small groups. Above all else, they were even cheaper per unit than the initial summonings had been and perfectly replaceable.

Despite their smaller numbers than the armies of tens of thousands previously deployed, they would have been a deadly threat to even the most dug-in modern infantry positions. Their target? The fortress with walls of black iron and towers full of murder holes but no windows or doors that had appeared almost overnight to the North of the ruined city.

xxxx xxxx The squad of lightly armed but very well trained scouts had managed to avoid any wandering corpse, any undead patrol and all hunter demons for over a day in this city of horrors. Largely cut off but still in sporadic contact with their headquarters hundreds of miles away, their mission had been to infiltrate the enemy installations, report on the enemy's troops and capabilities and contact any survivors within this Hell on Earth.

Except for the monstrous enemies, their mission had been plagued with misfortune after misfortune. First had been the loss of their supposedly secure radio to an imp attack, a considerable blow since cell phone reception was still spotty enough in the enemy's area of influence to make it near-useless and military signals of other sort seemed even more susceptible.

Then, a building had toppled just at the wrong time and place, their disappearance enough to temporarily expose them to a Lightning Tower's line-of-sight. Fortunately, nobody had actually died. Unfortunately half of their supplies had been burned to a crisp and the other half they had been forced to leave behind. They had been down to emergency rations for two days, deep in enemy territory and unable to immediately retreat.

Infiltrating any of the enemy's main buildings near where the center of the city had once been had proven a fool's errand; the undead and demons did not use conventional internal corridors or rooms as they did not actually make use of the buildings themselves; there were only minimal access points that led to summoning chambers deeper in, a singular, narrow, bare corridor connecting said chamber with the world, through which monster after monster spawned and walked into the light.

Finding survivors had also been a total failure; if there had been any after the initial invasion the monsters must have long since dragged them out of their homes and either killed them for sport or turned them into more monsters. Signs of countless violent home invasions had been found in pretty much every civilian building the team had checked - those buildings that hadn't been burned, torn down via main force, or blasted to bits through the use of strategic weapons, that was.

The team's not-so-secret actual mission that wouldn't be recorded in any books had met with partial success. After risking their cover and thus their lives over a dozen times, the team had reached the outskirts of where the nuclear detonation had occurred and taken various measurements. Actually getting to ground zero had proven impossible and the enemy's latest mobilization had forced them to pull back again and again, staying ahead of the latest advancing army by the skin of their teeth.

"Yo, Dead Walker, what do you make of this?" a guy in urban camouflage of dark browns and greys asked, pointing at the towering building north of their position.

"Reckon it's an enemy strong point?"

"Possibly," the aforementioned 'Dead Walker' muttered in a barely audible whisper.

"Doubt it, though." Everything about the tall, heavily muscled, heavily-armed marine seemed washed out, toneless and faded, from his too silent voice, to his threadbare suit that remained such no matter how many replacements he'd requisitioned, to his rifle that at first glance seemed like a reed twisting in the wind rather than a very lethal heavy caliber assault weapon it actually was.

Even when he walked in broad daylight or was actually shooting at the enemy, Dead Walker was hard to see as the eye slid around his form, almost refusing to look at him unless the onlooker already knew about him and had a rough idea where he was. It was one reason he'd been tapped for this mission.

"It doesn't share the same architectural style, doesn't seem to be made of the same material, though the enemy uses metal too. And it's not up to its roof in undead."

"I think it's a trap, the third soldier growled, his own muscular frame making the sound a lot deeper yet sharper than normal, almost like a howl.

"We've been there long enough, someone's bound to have noticed us and set it up""Nobody asked you Mad Dog," the guy in the urban camouflage said.

"I say we go for it. Road's leading there anyway and looking into enemy installations was on the mission."

"Screw the mission!" another man in the back butted in. This one was carrying a grenade launcher - what should have been a crew-served weapon - with only a bit of awkwardness.

"We're dead already; we just don't know if it'll be the zeds, thirst, or some mutated zombie virus shit that gets us first." Stolen novel; please report.

"Shut up, Big Load," Urban Camo shot him down.

"This is the military, not fucking democracy; we'll follow our orders. If you didn't want to be here you shouldn't have volunteered."

"Yeah, volunteered," the rather appropriately called Big Load grumbled.

"We all have powers here; if you believe we could have refused this suicide with extra steps I got a bridge to sell you. It's in downtown Destin; two blocks behind the enemy lightning tower line."

"Shut up!" Urban Camo whispered.

"I think I can hear someone approaching." The entire team scrambled to find some cover; they'd learned the hard way they couldn't underestimate even the weakest monster, not even random zombies; the moment a single enemy caught sight of them, the hunter-killer teams would soon follow.

"You boys were arguing so loud I could have shot you in the dark," a silvery-toned, crystal clear voice called out.

"Not that shooting in the dark has been hard since our night vision doubled in quality along with everything else." Before the wary soldiers could respond, a pair of women strolled into their hiding place without getting shot for it. Their being very obviously women and very... womanly at that probably had something to do with it.

The two brunettes were six feet tall if they were an inch, had hourglass figures most models would eagerly commit murder to get, barely decent under shorts and tank tops a couple sizes too small. Their long brown hair fell in gleaming, artfully-arranged hair over their shoulders that shone with health, superb genes and the kind of cosmetics only professional actors could afford with any regularity.

Their heart-shaped faces held identical amber eyes sparkling with mischief, identical French noses and ruby-red lips that were mirror images of each other. They were also perfectly clean with perfectly moisturized, flawless, all but glowing skin despite having come out of a literal warzone. In short they were the most gorgeous women the four men had ever met and identical twins to boot.

That they had managed to walk up to them before the soldiers could retrieve their gaping - and in one case drooling - jaws had been a foregone conclusion. That they'd somehow produced a handgun in each arm and had two soldiers each dead to rights was not that surprising either.

"If you've grown tired of dodging demons in the ruins, we could invite you to our castle," the brunette on the left said.

"We have fresh food, fresh water, charged cellphones to play games on and fairly thick walls between us and any attackers," the brunette on the right said.

"Huh," said Urban Camo, the first of the four soldiers to recover... though it sounded suspiciously like a cough and/or an attempt to speak before thinking of what he wanted to say.

"Is this an invitation or an 'invitation'? Because the second is something we have to talk about first."

"Nope! The guns were just to prove a point," the brunette on the left told them.

"A rather sharp yet elegant point, don't you think?" the brunette on the right asked.

"... are you, like, identical twins?" Mad Dog suddenly blurted and the women laughed prettily. Though it somehow did manage to sound like a cackle. xxxx xxxx The interior of the metal-walled fortress the four soldiers had been brought into was a chaos of activity.

Over thirty kids and young adults moved packages of clothing and food, drums full of water, oil, or even gasoline, set heavy steel tables, desks and chairs against the doors or built impromptu but well-designed barricades out of them and generally did everything the average civilian could do to prepare for a siege. That might have been expected if the scout team hadn't spent a day searching for survivors and not finding a single one, but while surprising it was not ultimately notable.

What was was how calm the civilians were, how well-organized, how their preparations seemed well-rehearsed, even disciplined. No, not civilians, the ex-commando that went by the callsign Tumbleweed corrected himself. Here, he could see a girl fusing metal desks together, arc-welding with her bare hands. There, some boy that had to still be in middle-school was pulling sandbag after sandbag from one of his many belt pockets - and since when did civilian belts have pockets?

Back in the kitchen, a barely adult cook was hovering over a dozen merrily bubbling pots with inhuman speed while handling multiple separate dishes in a way that even the fastest professional chefs couldn't have.

More interesting but also far more alarming was the short, silver-haired man in a doctor's overalls upending bottle after bottle of pills in a honest-to-God cauldron that was glowing purple, and his companion, one of those goth kids, who was tearing pages with glowing letters out of a whole tower of drawing blocks... pages that bent, twisted and transformed into origami animals by themselves that then took flight or scurried away, trailing glowing sparks.

"What the..." Mad Dog sputtered, coming to a complete stop.

"They are Enhanced. Like, all of them!"

"That we are," one of their twin escorts admitted with a pleasant smile.

"It is one of the three reasons we survived."

"Yeah?" Despite the absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, probably supernatural looks of their very armed escorts, the younger guy was slowly regaining his wits - and with them his usual cynicism.

"What are the other two?"

"The second is cooperation," the other twin told them as the walked towards the kitchens, turning her mostly bare, very shapely back to them. It was a bit condescending; she hadn't even disarmed them!

"Everyone pulls their weight here, to the extent they can." Then again, maybe not. It wasn't as if the four of them were going to open hostilities with ten times their number of unknown Enhanced.

"And the third?" Tumbleweed almost demanded before remembering to moderate his tone. These were no longer civilians; not after surviving for two weeks in this Hell on their own. They were resistance fighters, both armed and Enhanced from what he could see.

"That's need to know, sorry," the other woman told him with an easy smile that clearly said she was not sorry at all. Instead of pressing further and alienating an obviously influential figure in this group, he changed track.

"How did you survive?" In his experience, young, belligerent people that had not been broken by violence yet were quick to brag about their accomplishments.

"This fortress is an obvious strong point, something the enemy would immediately target." If only to shatter morale, he did not add.

"And yet you must have stayed here for days." They had to, to have built the extensive metal construction, even with powers.

"Closer to two weeks, actually," the brunettes said in so perfect a unison they sounded like a single person, before sitting behind a note and map covered desk that screamed 'operations' to him.

"This had once been a school. Our school."

"You're a high schooler?" Big Load gaped again.

"But..."

"Magic opens paths to many abilities some would consider... unnatural," the young woman on the left said, leaning back on her chair and stretching her arms overhead. The other just rolled her eyes.

"If you could get better looks, wouldn't you?" she asked instead of her twin's shameless display.

"I'd rather aim for survival," he said with a frown.

"Looks do help with that, trust me," the other twin said with a wink. He would not take her word for it... because she was right. Tumbleweed took a look around the room, noticed how everyone, no matter what they were doing, threw the occasional glance at the brunettes. Great, they were the leaders. Three guesses how they'd gained that position in this group of teenagers and the first two didn't count.

"I wouldn't take that bet if I were you," one of them said. The way they were changing who talked at any moment and with how similar they looked, he was beginning to lose track of who was who. Plus the whole- "No, I did not read your mind," the same young woman interrupted that thought before it even formed, obviously lying.

"It's just superhuman intuition, cold reading, empathy and social skills." OK, she might not be lying, but the alternative wasn't much better. It still amounted to mind-reading, except for being able to truthfully claim it wasn't mind-reading.

"OK, I'll give you that," he offered, "but you need far more than social games to survive here. The undead don't care how pretty you are."

"That is true. This is where the duality comes in," the one on the left said.

"Duality?" If they were talking about their being identical twins he couldn't see how-"Give me your rocket launcher," the brunette on the right demanded and thought it had not been aimed at him, the sheer force of personality in that order made him want to instinctively obey. He immediately revised the brunettes' threat level higher. Then Big Load handed over his weapon without question and one of the women picked it up as if it were no heavier than her handguns. He revised their threat level way, way, way up.

The two young women took a deep breath, braced against the desk, then reality seemed to split and recombine. When the slight blurring cleared, there were two grenade launchers, one for each young woman.

"This looks promising," the one on the right mused, handling the heavy weapon as if she knew what she was doing. Maybe she did. The other brunette handed the original back to Big Load, who received it mutely. There was another split in reality, and the rocket launchers became three.

"Listen up everyone!" both women sounded in unison. Tumbleweed was beginning to suspect they weren't identical twins at all.

"There's an undead army three thousand strong twenty minutes away from our door. By the time they arrive, I want everyone to have finished with their preparations then come by us to receive a grenade launcher, a bag or grenades, or get your destructive tool of preference duplicated. The moment those invaders show their faces, I want two explosives or magical blasts for every one of them!" The crowd exploded in cheers.