The sound of the flame lances shrieking through the sky echoed all over the mountains as the entire town buzzed about preparing things, activating defenses, and getting into position for the oncoming siege. There were five or six-man stations for siege weapons situated all around the mountain which were almost immediately filled by young men and women, itching to enter combat in any way they could.
Fen watched several people lower themselves into bunkers constructed out of wrought metal and lined with charging arrays. They looked like they were a tight fit, but Fen was intrigued by the arrays used in the production of the bunkers. Walking over to the bunker closest he began following the array lines with his finger, tracing the patterns as they reached nodes and wrapped around the sigils that were inscribed along the barrel that stuck out of the bunker. Fen reached out and touched the barrel of the weapon as he attempted to trace the primary sigil of the entrenched object. Immediately he pulled his hand back in pain; the barrel was hot beyond belief.
“I wouldn’t do that if I was you,” said a voice from behind him. Fen turned and was faced with a young woman dressed in a ruddy uniform. “The casing gets really hot during pre-charge. Can you not see that would be the outcome from the venting arrays and cooling glyphs on all the joints?”
“I was trying to work out why it was so simple is all”. Fen frowned, following several lines as they traveled throughout the bunker’s outer shell. “If these lines were moved here...” He pointed to a blank spot between two of the glyphs used for restoration and venting energy. “The cannon would fire slightly weaker shots but would overheat thirty or forty times less. The design is bad,” he said, cocking his head to one side in confusion.
“It's not that simple. While you're right, on both counts, if you moved the array line there, you're letting power build up in the lower half of the device. It would lead to a much higher chance of catastrophic failure, which is something I think everyone inside would prefer not to have. If the material choice was better then we wouldn't need the cooling glyphs at all, and that would solve the heating bottleneck entirely”.
A head popped out of the top of the bunker and a young man wearing an odd helmet spoke. “Dreamer, we’re waiting for you! This is a four-man device and... what are you doing talking to a child?” The young man pulled himself out of the entrance hatch and then swore as he placed his hand upon the boiling hot metal casing. “Kid, why aren't you in the homeworld?”
Fen looked at the new soldier blankly for a moment. He was dressed just like the girl, Dreamer, was; red uniform with gold trimmings to offset the dirty colour that served as a form of camouflage against their misty mountains. After a short time pondering the question he turned back to Dreamer. “Huh, I like the idea of changing the materials! What would you use?”
“Are you ignoring me, kid?” the young man said grimly.
“Leave it, Leon. You know as well as I do that the only reason you need me here is because of my large mana reservoir”.
“If you need mana why don't you use one of the spirit stones? Nereid aquamarines would work well and the cold element would help with the overheating issue too”.
“Spirit stones?” Dreamer looked at Fen, as if he had said something she had never heard of before. “Aren't those elemental shards?”
“Spirit stones are what my master calls them. He should be around here somewhere, I think I’m lost though”.
“Do you want to look for your master then? I can help you, and we could keep talking about the ins-and-outs of the bunker cannons”. Fen nodded and took the young woman’s hand, “Just use one of your spare nereid aquamarines and I’ll pay you back”.
The young man frowned before tentatively sliding back into the bunker. As he closed the hatch he shouted out “Piao will hear about this, this is going straight to his father”.
Sighing, Dreamer pulled Fen away from the disgruntled soldier. “Ignore him, Leon can be nice sometimes, but he hates not getting his way. Have you got any idea where your master is?”
“No, he was asked by his brother to make something and he ran off after talking to himself for a few minutes”. Fen frowned as he glanced at the horde of men running towards the mountains in the plains below. Small groups were holding back and building something as the rest relentlessly charged towards injury or death. They were fearless, proud even, as they used their bodies, their very lives to defuse the traps to save their brothers in arms. They all knew that most would not survive, but it was a rite of passage. Those that did would be far tougher than they would have been otherwise, ready to challenge Babel to its completion. They cheered and jeered loud enough for Fen and Dreamer to hear even at the top of the mountain. It was distracting, but their voices as they screamed in pride, rage and anguish made the necessity for defense even more prevalent in their minds.
“Does your master do that a lot?”
“What? Run off?”
“No, talk to himself. My mother often says to me that I shouldn’t trust men who talk to themselves, but I don’t really know if she’s joking. She mostly says it when my father is doing exactly that. They have an odd relationship”.
“Master talks to himself all the time. He also talks to Cleo and me though”.
“Cleo? Who’s she?”
“I’m not entirely sure, but master really likes her. He made pictures of her and sculptures of her and even had her displayed in time crystal in the center of the gallery”.
“Are you serious?” Dreamer looked at Fen, her eyes wide in both shock and fear. She kneeled down and grabbed Fen’s shoulders. Fen winced slightly as her fingers dug into his skin. “That’s horrifying. Why? Why would he do that?”
“I... I don’t know. I know she died and he was sad about it. It was at the end of last cycle”.
“So he kept her corpse trapped in time crystal? Hold on, what in the name of the mother is time crystal?”
“My master made something when he was much younger,” Fen replied as Dreamer’s fingers relaxed. “He once said to me that he broke time in the process and the Tower itself produced this crystal in response. He’s the only person who can touch it in any quantity because without his Web of Time the crystals will seal life”.
“This material must be either super high quality or worthless,” Dreamer replied. The cannons on the side of the hill began firing down upon the Saints below, silencing her for a moment. Their arrays would light up and barrels would rock back as each shot fired out into the field below. Two or three salvos hit the encroaching army and immolated the soldiers below, their screams a piercing counter-chord to the war cries from before. Several Heaven rankers stepped forwards and raised their hands. They gathered power and soon wide shields of mana rippled out to cover the foot-soldiers below, leaving barely any gaps for the cannon-fire to strike through. This did not stop the cannons however. Roaring flames shot out of the giant muzzles that were spread out along the forefront of the mountain but spread out harmlessly against the shields like gravel flung against a window. “I hate all this. We’ve done nothing to any of them, but because we have something that they want, the sects refuse to let us be. WHY WON’T YOU LET US BE?”
Dreamer’s cry was drowned out by another salvo from the entrenched cannons. Her shoulders slumped forwards and she sighed heavily. Everyone knew that the lesser clans and cults would keep attacking until they either won or the Hephaistians had a big enough deterrent to stop them. It was a war of attrition, one that had lasted decades. As she looked out at the soldiers getting increasingly close to her home Dreamer noticed the structures that some of the soldiers were setting up. Long bone spikes jutted out of the ground with runic symbols embossed against them. The bones looked like they had been grown rather than formed and the runic symbols had a natural tyrannical air that made her feel uncomfortable. These spikes made her skin crawl.
“Dragon's teeth,” Fen whispered, his eyes alight with shock and joy.
“What?” Dreamer asked, wiping away the tears of rage that had been forming.
“Teeth harvested from an ancient dragon, they're Immortal ranked materials with their own essences”.
“Immortal materials? How did the sects get something that valuable? Wait, I think I remember these things”.
“You should. They are amazing! They radiate of the power of a dragon and contain strands of learning of the dragon they came from, so each set of teeth is like a snowflake”. Fen salivated at the thought of owning the teeth, as such good quality materials were as hard to come by as dragons teeth.
“So what do these ones do?” Dreamer looked on as the ten or so Saints that surrounded each tooth began the process of using the objects. Waves of purple light began radiating from each tooth, flickering faster and faster until it was no longer waving and instead was blazing like a fire. There was a crackle and an explosion as each tooth produced a bolt of lightning. The lightning rose into the sky, taking on the form of a great dragon and immolating the Saints that surrounded each tooth before coming crashing down upon the defenses of Misty Peaks. Shield after shield shattered as the dragon-lightning cut through the Hephaistian defenses like a hot knife through butter. There was a flash of light as it seemed like the mountain was to be consumed by maw of a great beast before the teeth slammed into the mountainside, tearing apart several bunkers before finally being grounded.
Both Fen and Dreamer were knocked over by the blast, shards of granite peppering them as the dust obscured their vision. Fen's head pulsed and his entire body ached, but he crawled towards the nearest shape on the ground to him. His hands stung and he could see the muddy blood trailing down his arms from where he had been lacerated. He hurt, but he pushed on. The first shape he got to was a pile of uneven stone, but he tried not to lose hope. He knew there was a chance for things to go badly and yet he kept searching. Laurence had never hidden the shadow of death that loomed over everybody from Fen, in fact his work made the concept of hiding it an impossibility. Instead, Laurence had reinforced the idea of mastering death, becoming more than mortal and rising up the Tower like so many had tried to do before him. Because of this, Fen refused to give up and believe Dreamer was gone, and instead kept moving, searching for his new friend.
The smoke finally began clearing itself and Fen kept searching, only to see Dreamer on the other side of the street looking for him; her hair was bedraggled, her uniform even more torn and muddy coloured than before, but she was alive and alert. They rushed over to each other and hugged, before she bent down and smiled at him.
“Are you okay?” she asked. Fen nodded and turned around before pointing at the place that the bunker where she was situated used to be. Shrapnel was spread out around the entire road in chunks, some as small as fingernails and some as large as a head. They had torn through the few people who had been standing in the vicinity, but Fen and Dreamer had been just out of range.
As Dreamer looked upon the damage of the dragon's teeth all the colour drained from her face. She let out a sound similar to that of a bird's call, but in reverse. “Leon!” she cried out before running towards the remnants of the bunker. The inside of the bunker could barely be called the inside anymore, with the arrays and glyphs that formerly lined every single section of the walls and surfaces were shattered beyond repair. The parts of the walls that had managed to stay in the ground and were not blown apart by the proximity of the explosion were warped beyond belief. She clambered through the twisted metal with Fen hot on her tail, her hands frantically brushing away at the surfaces, peeling up stones and looking beneath them. “Come on... Jet, Alex... where did you store it?” The longer she searched the more distressed she became, tears were streaming down her face and her nails were cracked by the ground. Blood seeped out but her pain was momentary in comparison to the pain that loomed over her shoulder. Finally she saw a glassy surface that had been stained by the dust and heat of the attack. Brushing off the dirt revealed a glossy black surface which caused her to dig even more frantically. “Come on you bastards,” she yelled, “If you didn't install the stealstone I swear I'll kill you all myself!”
The stone popped out, and immediately Dreamer wrapped it in her arms before sighing in relief. Inside the gem was a single sigil, perfectly intact and unharmed from the heat and shocks caused by the dragon's teeth. “Why does this have to happen? Why can't they just go home?”
“I could help,” said a child's voice behind her. She turned and nodded at Fen, hoping that anything the child could do was better than her tears. Ruko smiled back, ruffling the young woman’s hair before looking out at the army that was breathing down their necks.
“It's time to see what your puppets can do, Fen”.
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