The Machine God

Chapter 296

Falling Stars

Two figures appeared in the air ahead.

They materialized between the falling warships and the ground, hovering effortlessly, golden robes flapping in the wind. Both had staves and spellbooks floating in the air before them.

Alexander recognized Artensah immediately. The old man’s illusory projection had worn a smug little smile. The real one wore the same look, even standing in the path of a warship hurtling toward the earth. The second wizard was unfamiliar, though. Younger, maybe, though that meant little in a civilization where their ruler had apparently lived for centuries.

Artensah raised a hand and muttered an incantation, gathering magic into his palm. A portal began opening directly in the path of the warship Alexander was riding, the yawning hole expanding rapidly.

The second wizard took a different approach. He grabbed his staff with both hands and swung it wide, striking the empty air.

Reality cracked.

The fracture spread from the point of impact, tearing across the sky in a jagged line that widened as it went. It looked like a wound, and whatever was on the other side of it was dark and depthless.

Alexander grinned, then drove both ships harder. Metallokinesis pulsed repeatedly against their hulls, forcing them to dive faster as he tried to push them beneath the spatial anomalies before they fully formed.

Below, the fortress roof exploded, metal and concrete erupting into the air as figures tore through. Caroline was first, rising through the showering debris without slowing, her arms tucked casually behind her back, white suit pristine even within the dust cloud. Julia followed immediately after, trailing ice, her blue mantle snapping in the wind.

Annie was next. She gleamed as she raced upward, MetaMetal catching the sunlight, now flying with four wings instead of the two he’d last seen.

Then another section of the roof shattered.

Skar’vathos tore through it, the roof breaking around the dragon’s massive bulk. Maximilian stood on its back, chains already materializing all around him. Once through, the dragon’s wings spread wide and caught the air with a single, powerful beat that carried them both into the air.

Then an inky black portal opened between the two holes in the roof. Augustus stepped through, wand in hand, spellbook floating in front of him, followed by Titanic, ducking to clear the exit.

Alexander registered all of it in fragments. Peripheral awareness. Sensor data feeding through Droney’s bond. He couldn’t afford to focus on any of it because Artensah’s portal was almost fully formed and his warship was moments from flying into it.

He drove the ship down harder, rotating it at the same time until he was standing almost horizontal, held to the ship through nothing but Metallokinesis and stubbornness. The hull groaned under the strain.

The unknown golden-robed wizard shouted a single word, and the crack in front of the second warship expanded vertically, stretching upward and downward until it dwarfed the warship’s entire profile. The ship flew into the tear and vanished, the fracture snapping shut behind it.

Alexander’s warship dropped below Artensah’s portal. Mostly. The port side touched the bottom edge of the portal, and metal screeched as it sheared away, the entire section tumbling into the portal.

What remained, now a broken, gutted mass of twisted metal trailing debris and screaming crew members, continued its descent toward the mountainside below.

The surviving highborn wizards launched off the fragmenting hull, taking flight in every direction.

Alexander passed beneath Artensah.

Their eyes met.

Then Artensah swung his staff toward him. Three balls of orange energy erupted from the tip, spiraling around each other in a tight helix. They raced toward Alexander, closing the distance fast.

Alexander launched himself off the dying warship. Metallokinesis hurled him sideways, and the spiraling orbs curved to follow. They tracked his movement, adjusting their trajectory the instant he changed direction.

Homing. Great. Another advancement, courtesy of him teaching the wizards all their weaknesses.

Alexander raced left, then right, but the orbs gave chase. He put on speed, but they matched his acceleration, the helix tightening as the orbs closed.

The other wizards fanned out around him and began casting, sending more bolts of energy and elemental blasts streaking toward him from every direction. Alexander wove between them, shielding himself with the last of the metal plates.

All the while, the homing orbs spiraled closer.

The other golden-robed wizard turned from where the second warship had vanished, angling his staff toward Alexander.

Julia hit him first.

She came in fast, a streak of white and blue trailing ice crystals. Her fist drove through the wizard’s torso.

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His body evaporated like smoke. The wisps dispersed and reformed three meters to the left. The wizard was already casting, fingers extended, spellbook flipping to a specific page. Three syllables, spoken fast.

Blocks of stone materialized around Julia, then slammed into her, trying to crush her between them.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the stones began to shake, cracks forming along their surfaces, before suddenly exploding outward as Julia forced her way free, ice erupting in a shockwave that sent pieces of rock raining in every direction.

She put on a burst of speed, chasing after the wizard.

Behind Artensah, Annie was closing fast, four wings driving her forward. She swung her bladed arms, aiming for the Exalted’s back.

He didn’t even turn. Instead, a portal opened at his back and another black-robed wizard stepped through. His staff came down in a two-handed blow that crashed against Annie’s blade-arms. Metal shrieked against enchanted wood as she caught the blow, wings beating hard.

Then the staff lit up, the light engulfing Annie and blasting her backward. She tumbled through the air, flapping her wings awkwardly, fighting to regain control.

Alexander caught it all in fragments. Julia fighting smoke and stone. Annie falling. Artensah hovering in place while everyone else did all the work.

“Reinforcements arriving, Alex,” Talia said calmly, voice clear over the comms.

For a moment he thought she meant more people. Then he felt it.

One drone connected to Droney’s command network. Then two. Then five. Ten. Twenty. He stopped counting at fifty. They streamed out of the fortress in a swarm before fanning outward, each one linking with Droney as it climbed higher.

He could feel the bond humming with more and more data as the network expanded.

Talia must have kept the fabricators running in his absence, even going so far as to put the drones together in his place.

He’d find a way to repay her later. Preferably somewhere without wizards.

The highborn continued firing after him, adjusting their angles as he went, careful about crossfire. That gave him something predictable to exploit.

Alexander banked hard toward one of the slower wizards, drawing the three spiraling orbs after him.

The wizard raised his staff, and a multi-layered shield flared to life around him.

Alexander cut past the wizard’s shoulder close enough to feel the buzzing energy of the barriers. Then he turned sharply, racing around the wizard to reverse direction faster than the orbs could adjust.

The wizard’s eyes widened, but his reaction was too slow. The orange helix slammed into the first barrier, which held for a heartbeat. Long enough for the wizard to scream. Then the orbs punched through.

The explosion sent pieces of black robe and golden trim trailing blood across the sky.

Alexander turned back around, snatching the wizard’s staff as it tumbled through the air, and sent it into the ring with a thought.

The mountain shook as a massive boom rang out.

Metal shrieked and buckled as the broken warship struck the slope broadside. Thousands of tons of metal folded on impact, burying people and their trenches beneath the collapsing hull.

Hundreds of bioelectrical signatures vanished. More flickered out within the ship as corridors collapsed and sections compressed into nothing but solid masses of twisted metal. The vessel snapped in the middle, momentum carrying the wreck onward even as the hull tore itself apart.

A section of upper deck sheared free and went cartwheeling across the slope, smashing through a distant, panicked formation, before bouncing and plowing through another. More shattered sections and loose armor plating went hurtling, some of it scything through soldiers already fleeing.

The wreckage kept moving. It carved through the center of the army with no respect for the man-sized trenches and defensive barriers. Ahead of the ship, earth and rock and bodies piled up as wizards took flight and others threw up desperate barriers that shattered on impact.

As the ship finally began to slow, several hundred meters down the slope, its remains cracked open, spreading across the mountainside in a trail of burning metal.

Time didn’t stand still for the destruction below.

The drone swarm raced across the sky, splitting into multiple streams targeting each of the wizards in the air around Alexander.

Most of the highborn wizards had faltered, their attention pulled toward the mountainside as thousands of Empire soldiers died beneath crushing metal. They hastily turned their focus to the new threats as Droney directed the assault.

Julia and the golden-robed wizard exchanged blows above the fortress, ice and stone colliding in the air between them. Annie was climbing hard, wings beating, trying to close with Artensah’s bodyguard, who circled above her, staff glowing. Maximilian and his dragon swept wide around the fortress, chains erupting across the battlefield and carving through entire squads at once.

Alexander raised both arms, aiming his cybernetic hand at Artensah and his flesh hand at Annie, then unleashed two bolts of lightning.

One streaked toward Artensah, but the Exalted didn’t even flinch. He swept a hand through the air, and the lightning curved around him, slowing as it went and pulsing brighter as the wizard compressed and redirected the energy.

Alexander recognized the technique. Keda had used it against him, though he was guessing Artensah didn’t know that.

The other bolt raced toward Annie at the same time.

She grinned.

“Assimilate.”

The bolt struck her in the chest, and MetaMetal absorbed the lightning, drinking it in, and converting it into something she could use. Sparks danced across her body and her wings flared with crackling light.

Then a thundercrack split the air as Annie became a streak of light, closing the distance to Artensah’s bodyguard faster than he could react. One blade-arm punched right through the wizard’s shield, into his stomach, and out his back.

The momentum carried them both higher into the air, before Annie ripped the blade free, carving the wizard in half and sending blood raining down around her.

Artensah released the redirected bolt. The augmented bolt screamed through the air.

Alexander reached out with his cybernetic hand and caught it the moment it entered his Domain. The lightning, formed partly of his own energy and partly of Artensah’s, fought him for a fraction of a second.

Then it yielded.

Within the Machine God’s Domain, lightning obeyed.

Alexander winked at Artensah, guided the bolt past himself much as the wizard had done, then sent it racing across the sky toward one of the highborn with a flick of his wrist.

The wizard vanished, reappearing a short distance away with a short-range teleport. The bolt flew harmlessly into the distance.

Smart. They’d watched two of their own die already because they’d relied entirely on barriers.

Alexander dodged another spell, though the ongoing assault had lessened now that his drones had joined the fight.

Behind Artensah, he saw a portal forming in the air. Down below, Augustus waved his wand in a circle, forming the other end of it.

“Flight team,” Talia said. “Prepare to withdraw.”

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