Chapter 288 – Face to Face Once Again

Finally, Emily’s appropriated fleet closes in on Silvia’s location. She joins her pilots on the ship’s bridge as they approach to see tens of high-energy readings flashing across their displays.

“Looks like we’re walking into the thick of it,” one of them muses, turning back to Emily with a confident grin. “You gonna rip them to shreds too?”

“That won’t be necessary. I’m sure Silvia has it handled,” Emily responds dismissively, her gaze locking onto one of the largest energy spikes on the screens labelled with their vice-captain’s name.

“Maybe. The Vice is strong, but you’re something else. I always knew lightning mages could be terrifying at higher circles, but I’ve never seen one split a fleet in two!”

“The spatial attack was worse,” the other pilot adds with a genuine shiver. “Remind me to never get on your bad side.”

Emily tunes them out as they start discussing the scariest awakened they’ve met, not seeing any value in their exaggerated accounts of star-swallowing monsters after they begin comparing them to her son’s presence. She keeps her eyes on the horizon, watching bursts of light flicker in and out of sight ahead.

Eventually, they reduce their speed and drop into space not far from an active warzone. Blanketing the horizon are thousands of points of shifting motion. Most of them are individual mechanoids built to survive in the vacuum of space as comfortably as most races dwell on planets, but among them are hundreds of spacecraft. They’re nearly all small, unmanned fighters that would offer little threat to an organised fleet, but they’re flanking three metal behemoths closer in size to planets than personnel-carrying ships. Two of the metal monstrosities are covered in weapon hardpoints, with hundreds of sparking plasma cannons and a dizzying number of open projectile launch tubes puking out ceaseless streams of explosives, but the third seems completely unarmed. Instead, it’s wrapped in a thick energy shield Emily can practically feel the weight of from afar, and its centre is split open in a gaping maw of twisted space, pouring out a stream of bodies and ships to reinforce the other erratic defenders swarming around it.

“Shit, they’ve got a warpship here!” one of the ship’s synth pilots cries, their bolstered confidence in Emily nowhere to be seen as they stare at the battlefield with horror written on their face. “No wonder the Vice wasn’t anywhere near any of the planets she was assigned to guard.”

“Does she have The Blade at least?” the other pilot questions, pulling up the crew’s division records to check.

“No,” Emily answers for them. “Yorn claimed Lethia’s support.”

“Damn. Are there any shield-busters here?”

“I think there were.” Emily points towards some of the ships with their backs to the arriving Heavy-blade fleet. They’re dwarfed in number by the opposing mechanoid forces and packed close together despite bearing the marks of the FAF and several pirate crews. Drifting around them are the wrecked corpses of several larger ships, each destroyed vessel varied in form but loaded with the pieces or mounting points of plasma-gathering chambers, recognisable to the trained eye. “But it looks like they were targeted first.”

Emily’s gaze scans the battlefield as her fleet hesitates to approach, and she picks out the faint forms of nine individuals walking through the vacuum without a ship to protect them. Two of the figures are carrying heavy cannons wreathed in machina on their shoulders: one spitting plasma towards the warpship’s shield; and the other defending them both from an onslaught of small fighters with an endless stream of kinetic rounds. Three of them are floating among the defending FAF forces, two wrapping them all in thick barriers of wind and water while the third conjures hulking limbs of rock to clash with the ceaseless barrage of fire from the colossal warships, occasionally slipping a construct through to rend a few hard points from their surfaces before being blown to pieces. Finally, four of them are darting across the battlefield using themselves as weapons, ploughing through the endless stream of unmanned fighters and sending out blades of qi to cut down the mechanoid soldiers that pour out from the warpship’s maw in dizzying numbers.

Emily recognises one of the humanoid weapons by the faint red haze following her every move as she dances through the void, and by the cloud of absolute desolation in her wake. Where the other martial artists punch and cut through tens of mechanoids at once, shattering a ship or two with each targeted blow, Silvia cleaves through ships by the dozen like a goddess of war, with hundreds of individual mechanoids and nearly a quarter of the massive planetary defenders’ weapons focused purely on her.

“Should we…” one of the pilots asks, snapping Emily’s attention back to them.

“Approach and make contact with the rest of our fleet,” Emily orders them, nodding towards the cluster of friendly ships in the distance and noticing several mechanoid soldiers and unmanned fighters starting to break away from their chaotic formation to approach her small fleet. “I’ll keep the ratch off you.”

Emily Blinks outside the ship and draws the Stream from her belt, shouldering the newly rebuilt rifle and squeezing the trigger halfway to prime the crackling rails running the length of its barrel. She flexes her legs and propels herself forward with a burst of wind, meeting the approaching mechanoids halfway with a stream of hissing gunfire. Her bullets tear through her enemies as she targets their joints one by one, easily picking out every kink in their construction with a practised eye.

The weak energy shields wrapping the fighter crafts deflect her shots, so she feeds Harriet a small chunk of her mana and lets the familiar run wild, leaping from her body in a single thick bolt of charge that jumps from ship to ship, frying the outer layer of their defences and leaving them exposed to her assault. She pulls several grenades from her belt, charging them with magnetised machina and lobbing them at the larger spacecraft, watching them stick to their targets for a few seconds before detonating and swallowing them in a cloud of shrapnel.

The contingent of artificial beings that have broken formation to target her fleet turns their full attention to her, recognising the greater threat, and Emily gladly keeps them distracted, reloading magazine after magazine with a small grin curling her lips. She spots a few ships trying to pursue her fleet as they approach the FAF forces on the defensive and raises her left arm, slotting in a projectile launch system and flooding it with machina before letting out a devastating shot that tears through the vacuum after Harriet before punching clean through three ships in one go.

The FAF allied mages notice her ships approaching and, after a moment’s hesitation, extend their barriers to them.

Looks like they’ve made contact.

Emily reaches into her Factory and pulls out a large explosive charge, priming it with a burst of machina before pulling on the spatial marker she left behind on the bridge of her temporary ship, vanishing from the centre of the forming cloud of scrap and struggling mechanoids. She doesn’t see the resulting explosion as she reappears at her pilots’ shoulders, but she sees a large energy spike on their readouts, followed by all the small signals around it vanishing.

“You think you can do something about that warpship?” the pilot primarily in charge of the ship’s weapons systems asks, turning back to face her with their synthetic face once again a mask of grinning confidence.

“We’ll see, Slippy,” Emily replies, ignoring the synthetic humanoid excitedly turning to their fellow pilot with a victorious smile, “but for now, I need you to disperse among Silvia’s fleet while I confirm their loyalties. I’ll discuss our next move and whether I’m to interfere on this battlefield with Silvia when I’m done.”

“I told you she’d know my callsign! You owe me-”

Emily shuts her eyes and tunes the squabbling synths out as she connects with the ship’s communication relay and once again reaches out to the surrounding Heavy-blade ships in a now familiar process. It doesn’t take her long to make her way through Silvia’s fleet, most of them proving loyal to their current commander, but in the end, she has to remove a few more souls than she did from Rotwin’s fleet.

After the Mental Lock has been placed on all of the present crew, leaving only those under Yorn’s command, Emily allows herself a short reprieve to refill some of the mana lost in the process before turning her focus outwards. She locks onto Silvia’s current position from her energy signature alone and tears apart the space between them, appearing at the vampire’s side in an instant.

Silvia doesn’t seem to notice her, taking blows from the weapons of the surrounding mechanoids without putting up any defence and lashing out in turn with bloody claws, dicing several ships into shreds with a battle-crazed grin plastered on her face and her eyes glowing with bloodlust.

Emily notes the woman’s tattered robes and the plethora of burns and cuts only visible from up close. Her burns heal at a visible rate while the cuts widen on their own, seeping a river of blood that responds to her every movement, reaching out in an extension of her will to crush, slice, and bludgeon indiscriminately. Several blades of crimson liquid cut towards Emily, but she barely bats an eye, calling upon her metal and lightning connections at the same time and turning the surface of her skin to glistening steel that the unfocused attacks barely dent.

She raises both arms, channelling charge into her limbs and forcing them into a malleable state between plasma and solid. Her arms lance out, splitting into a branching web, growing larger as she pours more and more mana into them and driving through every mechanoid and ship in their immediate surroundings. The metallic influence hardens the thin spines, allowing them to plunge through reinforced metal skeletons and chassis with equal ease, and the touch of lightning that follows spreads through the connected beings, melting their internals and completely disabling them in the blink of an eye.

Silvia’s forward momentum is cut off as she slams into the wall of metal before her, carving deep furrows into it but not cutting through, and she finally snaps out of her combat trance, turning to face Emily with a look of surprise that quickly morphs into a familiar teasing smile as some of the hungry light fades from her gaze.

“Well, that’s certainly a dramatic way to interrupt,” she muses, watching Emily separate from her conjured metal web and reform her arms at her sides. “I take it this means your foray with Perinith was a success? Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to check in. As you can see, I’m a little predisposed.”

“You look like you’re having fun,” Emily responds flatly, building up a field of magnetic charge around herself that presses against the sphere of metal encasing them. “And yes, it went well. I used a spatial implosion to kill him, and I didn’t even have to eliminate as many of our crewmates as I first believed since many of them turned coat and meant it the moment he was dealt with.”

“Well, it sounds like you had fun too, but I could be having more,” Silvia chuckles, reading Emily’s intent in the charged air and drawing her claws along her thighs, opening more wounds and creating hundreds of crimson blades from the resulting flow, which she surrounds them with and holds at the ready. “None of these constructs could ever bleed as beautifully as you.”

Emily releases her gathered charge in a burst of pressure, and Silvia unleashes her attack in sync. The dome of metal around them is diced into shrapnel before bursting out, tearing clean through every mechanoid nearby and opening a wide gap in the swarm.

“Well, you’ll have to make do without me, since I take it you still want Yorn’s fleet cut down to those willing to turn on him.” Emily draws the Stream and begins gunning down the mechanoid swarm before they can close the gap.

“Truly a shame, but you’re right.” Silvia restarts her rampage, though she retains a hint of clarity to continue their conversation and moves with more grace than savagery. “News of Perinith’s untimely demise has probably reached him already, so I believe we’ll have our chance to strike if you cause a bit of noise while you’re at it and flee before he can retaliate.”

“Understood.”

“Before you go, would you be a darling and open a gap in that warpship’s shield? I believe that should be well within your particular area of expertise.”

“Gladly,” Emily replies, turning her gaze to the hulking ship and releasing Harriet towards it, charged with a bundle of mana. “If you could keep the ratch at bay, that would be appreciated.”

She lets Silvia’s responding, gleeful laughter wash over her and drops her elemental connections, pouring mana into opening a gate to her Factory on the spot. Trusting the vampire to keep anyone from following her, no matter how much noise she makes, Emily slips into her private dimension and takes her position at Elisime’s heart, once again calling upon lightning alone and flooding the ship with energy, preparing a devastating blow.

She takes her time building two crackling marbles of power in the centre of the ship’s railguns, but when she finally unleashes them, she angles the apertures inwards, causing the resulting beams to collide a short distance from the gate out of the dimension. They clash in a maelstrom of force and charge, threatening to burst outwards and shatter Emily’s stored creations, but she pulls upon the energy suffusing the space to press inwards on their point of meeting, forcing them to merge and rocket out in a spiralling beam that cuts through the mechanoid swarm between her and their mothership in the blink of an eye.

The beam slams into the warpship’s shield with a screeching cry that draws all eyes on the battlefield. Ripples spread across the colossal energy construct, but it holds firm despite the overwhelming flow of mana biting into it. However, the twisting beam continues for almost a full second, tearing at the shield the whole time and prying open a small crack barely the size of Emily’s torso.

Harriet leaps at the opening, forcing her way into the fizzling open wound and holding the jagged edges apart.

“Go!” Emily cries, releasing her hold over the attack and letting it peter out before slipping out of her factory in its wake and closing the gate.

Silvia doesn’t need to be told twice and kicks off, shooting straight for the opening and squeezing through before Harriet runs out of energy and lets it slam shut only inches behind her.

“Have fun,” Emily mutters despite knowing the vampire won’t hear it, before turning back to the FAF forces where her squadron is dispersing to capitalise on the mechanoid swarm’s distraction as hundreds of the mechanical foot soldiers chase after Silvia in a futile attempt to stop her coming rampage.