Chương 1296: 1326 - Task Force Nikolaos III

A flash of lightning revealed for just a moment the creature hurtling toward the window: a massive serpent, its body easily a hundred feet thick. It appeared at least a thousand feet long and had a skull larger than the room Valeria was standing in, yet moved with the speed and dexterity of a creature a hundred times smaller. Most eye-catching of all was a curving horn made of glistening ivory, its surface covered with flowing runes.

Valeria had no time to inspect much about this creature before she made the only decision she felt appropriate: attack.

"WITH ME!" she shouted as she closed the canopy of her Ulta suit as quickly as she could and threw herself at the window. The Tempest Knights followed closely behind or chose one of the other windows. Glass shattered around her as she crashed through the window and emerged in the misty air surrounding the palace ruins. She let loose with her power without restraint, pushing the mist back just as the serpent reached the palace's outer walls.

It hissed, the sound striking Valeria's ears like needles, and she felt pressure against her mind. But the serpent was tenth-tier as far as she could determine, and with a flex of her origin power, her mind was secured. Accelerating out of the window, she collided with the serpent with an earth-shaking crunch. Her Ulta suit shuddered as the serpent screamed.

Her adjutant giant within the suit reported some minor damage, but since the suit remained functional, she conjured the blue light blades and began tearing into the sea-green hide. A moment later, her Tempest Knights did likewise. With a furious roar and a malignant glare, the serpent reared back, its horn shining like a silvery sliver of moonlight.

The runes etched upon it shimmered, and half of the Tempest Knights fell screaming, including Perella, Cilia, and Nava—all those who bore bloodlines within this company's ranks. Charging forward, Valeria again slammed into the serpent, and her power flowed through the suit until it exploded outward in a torrent of sharp ice. The local temperature plummeted, causing the mist to dissipate and ice to gather around the serpent. A hiss escaped its titanic throat, its yellow-green eyes focusing on Valeria.

Ice shattered as it moved its enormous body, but she conjured a great lance of ice fifty feet long and launched it against the creature, piercing its hide and spilling a river of black blood. It shrieked again, and Valeria followed up with a hundred more lances, striking again and again, not letting up. The serpent retreated, but Valeria didn't let it go. She pursued, ordering the remaining Tempest Knights to see to their fallen comrades.

She didn't have to go far; the serpent was unable to regain the speed it had earlier shown with so many ice lances piercing its hide. For a moment, she paused, her sapphire eyes taking in the creature's enormity.

'Is this the same kind of creature Leon fought?' she wondered. She hadn't joined Leon during the campaign to the Serpentine Isles, but he—and the others who were there—had told the story enough times that she broadly knew what the serpent that Jormun became had looked like. This monster was smaller, despite its gigantic size, but otherwise, it seemed remarkably similar. With killing intent flashing through her aura, Valeria charged again, determined not to let the creature escape.

Ice flashed in the dark, and a hundred more lances fell upon the monster. Agonized shrieks filled the air, its magic pulsing as it turned once again to make a last-ditch attempt to save itself. Its horn shimmered, but before it could do anything, Valeria launched herself against its skull, throwing open the canopy of her Ulta suit as she did, giving control over to the assistant giant as her glaive appeared in her hand. Blue light shone like a beacon from her glaive's blade, and icy mist followed in its wake.

She hit the creature's skull with the force of a comet, ice flashing from the blade and into the creature's body. Its shrieks fell silent as it was nearly cut in half from within. It froze—literally—and fell, hitting the ground so hard that the entire city shook. Her breath misted in front of her mouth, her power having caused the local temperature to plummet. But she watched with relish as the serpent shuddered once, then twice, and then fell still.

A glance told her that the Tempest Knights were waking up as the light in the serpent's horn faded, and she descended to the creature's skull to inspect it more thoroughly. However, just as she landed on the creature's forehead, the city shook again. She heard more hissing from seemingly every ruin, and a hundred terrible auras pulsed in the early night. In a split-second, she resolved herself to do what was necessary.

With a single swing, she severed the horn from the fallen serpent, stuffed it into her soul realm, and then shot back into her Ulta suit. Once she was safely ensconced within, she sensed more serpents rising from pits in the city, some simply smashing through the ruins from tunnels beneath the earth. She was stronger than any individual serpent, but all together…

'Sorry, Cassie,' she thought.

'You'd have liked this place…' She shot back to her knights and ordered them to head back to the fleet. She waited just long enough to make sure that all of her people were accounted for and moving to safety, then ducked back into the palace through the window she'd charged from. It looked ruined, little different from the other desolate halls she'd moved through to reach it. There was no loom, no books, and no Phaya. The shawl she'd been working on was likewise gone.

Valeria registered this quickly and without hesitation, darted back outside, then rocketed upward. With her head pressed against her suit's cloud glass, she turned over movement to her giant and activated the suit's comm lotus.

"Your Majesty," Admiral Ian's smooth tones immediately greeted.

"We're picking up serious disturbances down there."

"Destroy the city," Valeria immediately ordered.

"Every weapon system you have, fire it. Ruin the city. Leave nothing left but a crater." To his credit, Ian didn't hesitate a moment.

"By your order." Moments later, Lancefire poured from the heavens; it looked like the entire sky was falling upon the city as serpents flooded out into the streets. Some of them turned their yellow eyes upward, realizing what happened, and in their eyes, Valeria could sense sapience, intelligence enough to recognize that they had reached their end. She felt little pity as the fire Lance bolts found their targets.

She identified the serpents as the cause of the mist, and if the bronze doors from Phaya's room were any indication, these serpents were avowed enemies of the Thunderbird Clan. Soon, beams of light and a thousand storms-worth of lightning bolts joined the Lance bolts, and the city beneath her vanished in light and smoke. The city became such a center for magical power that she couldn't even use her magic senses to see what was happening down there.

Under such bombardment, Antaas itself seemed to buckle, and earthquakes started snapping and shattering regions far removed from this city. The bombardment ceased after minutes that felt like hours. Valeria watched from just beyond the terminus line as the destructive magic dissipated and the smoke cleared. Not a trace of the serpents remained. The city had been left a smoking crater, and land all around it collapsed—the tunnels that spiraled out from the city had started collapsing.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. With a tired sigh, she returned to Silent Hail, intent on giving the plane a day or two to settle before heading back down there. She was going to confirm the extermination of all of the serpents herself, even if she had to cut each one down with her own hand.

Legion soldiers swarmed over the plane, searching for anything left at all of the city—or rather, for anything left of the detachment that had been struck down around the city. Those arks had largely been outside of the city, having been brought down in the wet jungles of the hinterland. The collapse of the land around the city, however, had caused many of those arks to slip beneath the earth. Their crews were still nowhere to be seen, but Valeria didn't hold much hope for seeing them again.

But the arks themselves, if they were still reasonably intact, should still be salvaged. Where there was some hope for the arks, however, there was none for the city. A few broken bricks, the odd fragment of bronze or iron, little else remained in the enormous crater. Phaya's palace had been almost in the epicenter of the bombardment, and of those ruins, not even the dust remained. But Valeria could see something else down in the crater: tunnels.

The serpents had used them, evidently, to move around the entire plane given how many valleys and sinkholes had been created from the bombardment, even hundreds of miles away. But even though seemingly most of the tunnels had collapsed, there was one almost in the center of the crater that led almost straight down, like a shaft that led to the heart of the plane. And Valeria hovered directly over it, her force of Tempest Knights at her back, and an entire legion behind them, along with all of their support weapons.

The shaft was enormous, as it had to be to accommodate the serpents, so they didn't have to make too many compromises in their airborne formation. The gray stone of the near-vertical tunnel seemed normal until Valeria took a closer look, noticing stabilizing runes, millions of them, carved into the smooth sides of the tunnel. The dark was unable to conceal such things from her, especially not as the MALLs and Ulta suits of the legion following her turned on lights.

The tunnel kept descending, down and down, so far down that Valeria wondered if they were going to hit the bottom edge of the plane. However, soon, the gray stone of the tunnel gave way to black granite heavily streaked with gold, and the runes in the walls grew stronger and more varied. These enchantments weren't anything that she had to be concerned about given what she could sense, but they were notable nonetheless.

'Those serpents likely didn't carve those runes…' They descended mile after mile, the tunnel seemingly endless, until suddenly, the end was upon them. The tunnel opened into a vast chamber made of the same black and gold granite, one that was completely empty, devoid of anything, not even debris from the city above that might've fallen down the shaft. It was eerily empty, in fact, though nothing jumped out at anyone as the legion fanned out behind her as she slowly descended to the chamber floor.

She scanned the chamber, soon noticing several tunnel entrances leading into the chamber from elsewhere. Most of those tunnels were serpent-sized, and they had all collapsed, though not all during the bombardment, if she had to guess. Only one tunnel remained intact, and it was the only one that was even remotely human-sized.

Valeria flew over to it, noting that about fifty feet into the tunnel were gold-hued bronze doors, embossed with images of the Thunderbird Clan striking down horned serpents, identical to the doors leading into Phaya's room before the palace was obliterated. Though the doors were large enough, if only just, to allow her to proceed in her Ulta suit, she instead jumped out and proceeded on foot.

With her own hands, she pushed open the doors, the hinges not even whispering as the great bronze sheets split and revealed what lay beyond. A long throne room emerged from the underground gloom, the gold in the dark granite shining in the light from the legion at her back. Two rows of columns held up the ceiling at the upper corners of the trapezoidal hall. These columns had nest-like bronze bases, while their capitals were shaped like raptor heads—or rather, Thunderbird heads.

The floor rose gently to the throne at the back, several rows of stairs facilitating the rise. On every stair was a mummified human corpse, laid down deliberately if their identical posing was anything to go by. There was an even split among them between men and women, as the tattered remains of their clothes revealed, and about a quarter of the corpses were children. Between the corpses were rows and rows of large eggs, each one about as tall as Valeria's forearm.

Thousands of them filled the throne room, polluting what was now essentially a tomb with their presence. This room was many things, but she wasn't going to let this veritable tomb filled with those either in or affiliated with her husband's Clan be violated by the serpents using it as a nest.

"Get rid of the eggs," she ordered without hesitation or sentiment.

"Any preference as to how?" Perella asked, the look on her face suggesting that she would like to smash every egg by hand and with extreme prejudice. Given how she'd been affected by the first serpent's power, Valeria couldn't blame her.

"No," Valeria replied. Perella grinned and began shouting orders to the Tempest Knights. Meanwhile, Valeria turned her eyes to the throne at the back of the hall. It was a stately thing, tall and majestic, made of the same black and gold granite as the rest of the hall and attached chamber. A great bird of prey had been carved around it, the throne wrapped in its lowered wings. Another mummified body was seated upon the throne, slumped over in a more natural position, unlike the rest of the corpses.

Another corpse was slumped over at the foot of the throne, a perfectly preserved black shawl crumpled around her.

'Phaya and Eurydoros,' Valeria guessed.

'But if that's them, then how did she appear to me above?' As she approached, the Thunderbird statue—for the bird-of-prey could be nothing but Leon's Ancestor—seemingly gave her an answer as runes illuminated within its eyes, and translucent images of Phaya and a handsome man overlayed themselves over the two corpses.

"Thank you," the projection—if that was what it was—of Eurydoros said, smiling at her.

"We are now free," Phaya added, bowing to Valeria.

"You have our eternal gratitude, Valeria, wife of Leon."

"… What is this?" Valeria asked as movement behind her slowed, the projections grabbing the attention of almost everyone in the room.

"Are you… dead?"

"We are," Eurydoros said.

"These last remnants will fade in a moment, so please listen to us carefully." He looked to his wife, who picked up after him.

"We were attacked," Phaya explained.

"Not by the serpents, but a single man who never communicated with us. He destroyed Antaas utterly, hunting down every survivor with a zeal we have never seen before. Never once did he utter a word."

"We never learned who that stranger was," Eurydoros said.

"Even as he took some of us captive and brought us here, not a word passed his lips."

"We were used," Phaya said, her hand brushing against her forehead. Valeria's eyes were drawn to her desiccated corpse, and she noted a familiar rune carved there: the very same one that had graced the head of the Wailing Dirge.

"Most who were used as experiments belonged to the Ancestral Hart Clan." Valeria's eyes sharpened, recalling that the Harts had sensed something amiss with the plane more strongly than she had.

"The serpents, our most dogged foe from the Primal Age, were brought here by the stranger and likewise experimented upon," Eurydoros continued.

"Eventually, we all died, and the stranger left, leaving the serpents behind. By some stroke of luck—or perhaps he didn't care—my wife and I lingered thanks to the enchantments in my throne."

"But now our time is up," Phaya said.

"We go now to our Ancestors. And you, Valeria, and your husband, will have to reckon with the consequences of what happened here."

"We wish you luck," Eurydoros said, his projection dimming.

"I wish we could offer more."

"Go," Valeria said.

"Don't worry about us. We'll be fine. Just be at peace." The two dead monarchs smiled at her, then turned their gazes to each other. They said nothing more, but over the course of several seconds, they faded away, and the lingering magic in the Thunderbird statue likewise faded.

"… Make sure the Ancestral Harts get these corpses," she ordered Perella, who acknowledged her immediately. Then Valeria turned her eyes back to the corpses, and indeed, hidden among the wrinkles and cracks of their papery mummified skin, she could see carved runes in the foreheads of every corpse. Some were of 'Lord' runes, as Phaya and Eurydoros' were, but many were different.

Valeria was no specialist in ancient runes, so she couldn't say what each one was, but she knew for a fact that she'd stumbled upon something of grave importance.

'Leon's going to have to see this,' she thought as she collected the pristine black shawl from where it had fallen around Phaya. The fabric was long, impractically so for actually wearing, and she had no idea how it had gotten there—the stranger must have allowed her to keep it for some reason—but embroidered in it were images showing the serpents being laid low by members of the Thunderbird Clan.

As she inspected the shawl, however, she realized that that wasn't the end of it; the images closer to one end of the shawl grew smaller and more compact, apparently woven to keep some record of the stranger's arrival and single-handed extermination of the ancient Thunderbird colony. The stranger himself was shown as the only figure depicted in anything other than gold.

He, instead, was woven in silver, and wore upon his face a familiar mask, of a kind with others that Valeria had seen associated with the followers of Khosrow…