The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++The invention of the plasma cannon was far from Vornholt’s greatest contribution, but of course it is among her most famous. Destructive things tend to stick in the memory.++

- Commentary by Maria Voret. 1,938 A.E.

My father arrived the day of the attack.

I was not quite sure how he managed it, because he came on a cloudscraper and disembarked with a dozen men I recognised as the new guardians of our estate. He said nothing at first, just looked around at the refinery with a look of mild stupefaction. I believe he came with dreams of fixing up the defence and whipping us all into shape in a proper soldierly fashion. I almost felt bad about bursting his bubble.

Almost.

“Isabel,” he greeted me at last, once his shock had receded.

“Father,” I said evenly. I was not surprised by his presence, but I was far too tired to deal with it. If he wanted to fight and do nothing else, he would be a useful asset.

But did he want to fight and do nothing else?

“I’m here to help,” he told me. “I…I brought machine guns.” My eyes flicked behind him to the several crates being transported from his cloudscraper.

“How did you acquire this vehicle?” I asked him.

His face burned at the question, and he did not meet my eye. “A debt. I had to take out a substantial loan for it, but…I think this refinery can pay it off, right?”

“Probably,” I said. “Thank you.” I turned from him and got to work on organising the placement of the guns. Truth be told, they were a good contribution. Even I had a hard time acquiring firearms like this, despite my newfound income, some things had more to do with connections than hard currency. And Baron Agrian Vornholt had connections.

He had friction with the rather haphazard command structure of my refinery, especially when he found out an Estalian woman barely older than me was my second in command, but apparently my father’s military background let him ease into things. He seemed at peace once he accepted that it was all a part of some large chain of command.

His men were easily integrated, or at least it was Blakely’s job and not mine, so I was not inconvenienced by the effort of doing so. This was also the latest possible time for it, because not three hours later we caught the first sight of the Vorets’ army upon the horizon.

Their disparate gaggles of mercenaries and magicians had united since my last air raid, and with all of them combined they made for a fearsome sight. Nothing compared to the vast forces Garamon had sent to attack Orapathaqi, but then again we had nothing compared to Orapathaqi’s vast walls either.

It was simply a limit of resources. If I had prepared for combat any better than I did, I would not have been able to keep the refinery afloat and profitable.

Now my decisions would be tested.

***

Baron Agrian Vornholt felt younger by ten years. His body seemed lighter, his old joints looser and springier. He was retired from the army and happy to remain so, his days of soldiering were behind him. He’d always looked forward to a quiet and dignified old age, perhaps showing off the old lion’s strength in the occasional sparring match, hunting or riding or any of the other old events, but never swinging a sword in anger.

And then the Vorets had come for his daughter, which had thrown all that aside.

Now he stood atop Isabel’s wall, propped just far back enough that he was shielded by one of the raised stone sections made thick enough to stave off at least a smaller cannon shot. There were no attacks coming now though, magical or otherwise. The enemy hadn’t brought bigger guns, and however many magicians they had hidden among their numbers—Isabel had claimed a terrifying twenty percent or so—were still out of range.

When they were half a mile away, the wall-mounted weapons began opening fire, and the air turned sharp and hot with flying death.

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Agrian had been ready for the machine guns. Those he’d brought himself, and done so with full knowledge of what they could manage. These new models were even more advanced than the one he’d defended his estate with all those years ago, more reliable and able to fire for longer before their barrels became hot enough to threaten the weapon’s integrity. Each was the equal of two dozen riflemen firing in unison.

They weren’t especially accurate compared to those riflemen, but at this range it hardly mattered. There were ten guns and each one sprayed ten rounds in the enemy’s vague direction each second. Agrian heard the turning barrels as they churned out bullets, sending them hissing through the air.

Their targets were not just squishy men though. Before the guns even started firing, the approaching enemy had thrown up walls of aether to shield themselves. It was an old tactic used nigh on a hundred years now, and Agrian bristled as he saw it.

“Do we cease firing?” he asked Blakely beside him. As much as he chafed to defer, especially to a damned lunatic, Agrian knew that Blakely knew his business. More pressingly, he’d spent the last few weeks preparing this position for attack, and Agrian hadn’t.

“No,” the Cadnichan grunted. “This won’t last long enough for ammo to be a concern, better to keep up the pressure and snatch whatever kills we can.”

It wasn’t very many. On occasion a stray round would find some gap in the enemy’s defences, slipping through. When that happened there were about even odds that some man would fall, and with bullets this big most of the ones who did never got up again. Single corpses every few paces, but they weren’t significant at all in the grand scheme of this conflict. The enemy marched closer and their barriers held strong, barely even chipped by the bullets.

That was the thing with machine guns, they fired rifle rounds. Plenty adequate for killing a man, but not made to punch through heavy magical defences.

That, apparently, was what Isabel’s strange, vibrating cannons were for.

The enemy was a quarter-mile away, far closer than they’d have been for regular artillery to start doing its work, when the first one fired. It shot out a great streak of what felt like pure power, light bright enough to sting even Agrian’s eyes, and a sound that left the air shaking. By the time he registered what had happened, the shot had already hit the enemy.

Agrian saw the mystery substance break and splash over them, like water or steam, then he heard the screams of men whose bodies went up in flames. The wall was stunned for a moment as the light faded to reveal a mass of confused, mangled men falling over each other, some spraying cold water with magic to extinguish flames and sap heat, others just screaming in panic.

Blakely was the first to react, as quick as ever.

“Machine gunners!” he roared. “Now!”

There was a hole in the aether, and Blakely did not intend to waste it. Instantly the guns started whirring again, and this time their bullets sank into unprotected bodies. Dozens of men fell in moments before the quickest-witted of their magicians thought to re-assemble the barricades. By the time they had managed that, many more had died already.

And then the next cannon fired, and it all started again.

Agrian just stared at the destruction playing out ahead of him. Working in unison, a team of magicians could generally stave off fire from a thirteen-pounder piece of artillery essentially forever, repairing their barricade and reinforcing it fast enough that by the time their attackers had readied another shot, it was already back at full strength to turn it aside. Such was the hard spine of modern warfare; magicians to cover the attack at the front, forming an unbreakable breastplate behind which the rank-and-file could hide as they neared the enemy.

But Isabel wasn’t having it. Agrian couldn’t help but laugh. It wasn’t enough for his daughter to use the existing tactics, focusing fire from multiple guns on the same spot of the enemy and hoping to bleed them bit by bit as they approached. She’d only gone and designed a whole new weapon to render the tactic itself untenable.

Oh, the barriers were still providing protection, that much was undeniable, but it was far from absolute. Men died each time one of those magical cannons vented its dragonfire into them, then more men died before the opening could be filled. Before long, more explosions started racking them too, this time emerging from under the attackers’ feet—mines! Magical mines! Agrian had expected the attackers to lose a man every few seconds as they marched towards the wall, now it looked like they’d be losing ten, even twenty times that.

It looked like Isabel had given them a chance for victory after all.

Agrian felt a stabbing in his heart at that, and it took him a moment to realise why. He’d come here resigned to death. Would he live after all?

No. No! There would be fiercer fighting here than he’d ever seen in his own military service, just looking around he could see the mercenaries on Isabel’s side starting to realise the danger they were in, staying now only because they knew those incendiary cannons had burned away any chance for reprieve. The enemy would have no mercy after seeing their comrades torched to death, and the defenders would not surrender in the face of that carnage.

It had in fact been a masterstroke, with one move Isabel had both gained an advantage in the accounting of bodies and blood, and simultaneously ensured her own allies would remain to fight. Agrian was reminded once again what lay behind his little girl’s mask. She was playing nice with this oil business. And those poor Vorets didn’t seem to realise it.

They would keep coming. Oh yes, they would come, and there would be death and destruction for all. And Agrian intended to meet it head on. He could sense it. This was the end. His end. This was where it all led, the old soldier with one last fight left in him.

It had to be.

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