Chapter 228 – Battle of Denyr: A Chain Reaction

Deirdee - Team “Covert Angels” - Day 16 - 105 Days Remain

On second thought, I’d prefer they still ignored us, I thought as Kart and I emerged from hiding after the only to come under gunfire from what looked to be two squads of Jägers advancing down the street. One of them was equipped differently than the other, as a few of the soldiers had barrel attachments on their rifles that I recognised to be the grenade launchers that Persephone and Ren had mentioned on the radio.

‘I wish I had grabbed one of the rifles,’ Kart sighed, as she reloaded her hand crossbow.

I had to agree. She was a good shot with it, but by the gods was the crossbow shit in a stand-up fight.

Of course, shit didn't mean useless, as three Jägers with crossbow bolts in their necks could well prove.

Still, I had my doubts about whether we would survive this one. The house we were using for cover was mostly reduced to rubble by the grenades the soldiers launched at it, so the two of us had to use what was left of the walls for cover.

And there were fewer and fewer of them with every enemy salvo.

We did call for help and Aki and Caei were coming to aid us, but would they be here in time?

I leaned out to fire a few shots at the enemy, but I didn't notice that my carbine was dry. That nearly cost me dearly, as I could feel a bullet graze my temple.

FUCK!

Quickly ducking behind cover again, I reached into a pocket for a new mana crystal, when an idea that could possibly qualify as “pulling a Lilyth” struck me.

I mean… desperate time and all that…

I put a simple [Trigger] enchantment on the crystal and threw it towards the Jägers. A quick finger snap and…

An explosion rocked the street.

‘Cover me!’ I shouted to Kart, cast the [Grace of Water] on myself and leapt out of cover towards the mercenaries, drawing my sword mid-flight.

The mercenaries have still been recovering from the explosion, those who didn't end up as paint on the walls of nearby houses that is, so they must have thought literal wrath of the gods fell upon them when I dropped among them and began my deadly dance with my [Crystal Weapon]-enhanced smallsword. All credit to the Jägers, two of them actually managed to find their footing again, but one of them was too close to me for it to matter, and the other’s attempts at fighting back were ended by a crossbow bolt in the back of his head.

As, that was the last of them, I turned to Kart and gave her a salute with my sword and she returned it by giving me a bow.

‘I may have found you some free rifles to choose from,’ I called out to her.

‘Aww, how sweet of you, Dee,’ she smiled at me. ‘You remembered!’

Persephone - Solo - Day 16 - 105 Days Remain

My ability to fly was a curse sometimes. It wasn't the first time I got to see the full extent of devastation after a battle, some of it caused by my family and me, but there was something… worse about this one.

It felt so… senseless. Pointless. Not that we killing people due to family drama was… better, but there was some higher reason behind it. We were at least trying to stop the Great Game. Or so we thought at least.

You see, the games that the gods play inevitably lead to some great calamity that sweeps the world and basically remakes it. You could even argue that the toys left behind after the previous cycles directly caused the next ones.

Our family drama led to the creation of the Vandarian Empire, and my mom was at least partially involved in its downfall. Which also meant there was a small, but non-zero chance my actions somehow led to Lilyth ending up on Dwynevia, though if I got the dates right, Lendaria let my mom out after the Tower of Trials was turned on.

And now our family features in a THIRD cycle. Good job us!

I wonder if there were others dealing with the Great Game-related guilt.

Was Malika among them?

After my provisional resurrection, Lilyth did tell me what she had learned about Savri's mother’s past, which only added one to my “potential cycle crisis” tally. The first five I was unsure of the order of, or whether they factored into each other and/or other cycles.

• Whatever had happened to the Moon

• Ascension Thrones

• Vaults

• Whatever happened to Demons

• Y-Ramites

The remaining crises were more straightforward:

• Our Rebellion

• The Fall of the Vandarian Empire

• The Current Shitshow

So… there were most likely between five, I refused to believe the moon was related to the other four from the initial list, and eight cataclysmic events that we have the evidence for. And at least four of them happened in the past three thousand years.

And how are the Hellborn related to all that? Are they even related to that? Maybe the Demon stuff? But how? Hellborn are sterile.

Alas, all those mysteries would have to wait until after the battle.

Between the directions from Anika and the spread of the destruction, I had very little issue finding out where the Jägers were attacking from - a large warehouse in the middle of a sizeable complex of those in what looked to be a sparsely populated area. If I still had any doubts that “X marked the spot” those would get quickly be dispelled by a network of trenches in front of the entrance. What looked to be nearly a hundred people were running around, getting ready for the fight.

I immediately identified several points of concern. The first was a group of five people running around in what they intended to be no-man’s land and burying things. The next were people in the trenches carrying large bullets to long skyward-pointing bipod-supported tubes, and the final was my intended target: a battery of eight carriage-mounted honeycomb-shaped clusters of six tubes.

[Gravitational Collapse]

A terrible ending to Company C’s already very bad day

Sometimes to truly appreciate a good trainwreck, you need to take a step back and look at things from a wider perspective.

When Persephone cast the spell, the singularity it produced proved to be more effective than she had hoped for it to be and all the multiple rocket launchers, their crews, AND ammo suddenly found themselves competing to occupy a very small area of space. Now, all the Jägers caught in the spell area quickly stopped being biology and became physics, mostly fluid dynamics. The problem was with the other competitors for the limited space - namely Cloudkiller Multiple Rocket Launchers, most of them fully loaded, and several piles of missiles for them.

It needs to be said that the MR-14 dumbfire rockets were a nice piece of magitek engineering, combining conventional high explosive warheads with Air magic-based propulsion, something certain Kitsune was working on. Usually, the mana crystals lost most of their charge during flight, meaning they had minimal, if any, impact on the actual missile explosion. This was not the case here, and, one should note that those weren't the cheap crystals Lilyth was producing. No. Those were state-of-the-art Large Mana Crystals, as nothing weaker would provide MR-14 with sufficient velocity.

While the artillery crews had now other, bigger problems, namely a REALLY pissed off Goddess of Death, many of the remaining Jägers had a more mundane issue - heat. As you can imagine, neither the warheads nor the mana crystals particularly enjoyed high temperatures, which was a bit awkward because the whole “being crushed by high gravity” thing involved a lot of heat being generated, which, after a few seconds, caused a catastrophic cook-off of all the captured munitions.

That wasn't the end of the problems for the soon-to-be subatomic vapour mercenaries, as the singularities generated by the [Gravitational Collapse] aren’t known for their stability, and a sudden spike in energy, say an ammo explosion, has been known to cause them to release their captured mass as more energy.

It wasn't all doom and gloom, however, as both explosions cancelled each other out a bit. Unfortunately, they were still strong enough to turn most of the warehouse into rubble and the mercenaries standing outside into the past tense. That wasn't the end of the very bad day, however. The fireball didn't quite reach the main munitions depot, the Jägers weren’t stupid enough to keep it anywhere near the launchers, but still managed to set off some of the lets-have-easy-access-to-them MR-14s lying outside of it. One of the warheads, a dud, flew through the open door and hit a rack containing the remaining rockets which caused its already cracked mana crystal to shatter.

The resulting detonation would have been measured at 1.5 kilotonnes if anybody in Denyr had equipment to do so.

Persephone - Solo - Day 16 - 105 Days Remain

Uhhhh… I thought as I looked at the massive mushroom cloud that was rising out of the crater where the warehouse had just stood.

You know… If anybody asks, I was never here.

Savri - Team “Demon Furry” - Day 16 - 105 Days Remain

‘The ammo stockpile?’ Lilyth wondered out loud after the loud explosion.

‘Could be,’ I agreed. ‘I can definitely hear secondaries.’

Then there was an explosion that dwarfed the previous one in magnitude and actually caused the ground to shake.

‘Ah,’ Lilyth said. ‘THAT was the stockpile. Anyway, time to go, I think.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘We’ve won!’

‘Do you want to be the one who has to explain this whole mess to Prince Vikker?’

Ohhhhh.

‘What the fuck are you waiting for then?’ I carefully rose to my feet, fresh vigour entering my body.