by E. M. Hardy
He split up the original force of 9,500 walkers making their way toward the ruined pyramids in the Bashri Desert. 4,000 were running like the wind back to the Leizhu Swamp, divided up into groups of four as they had not reached the rallying point before Shen Feng’s attack. The remaining 4,500 walkers had made it to the rallying point, and it would take at least two weeks for them to arrive at the Leizhu Swamp. Weighing the benefits of pushing through with the attack on the ruins against a possibly belated arrival that would be too late to matter, he decided to go on with the attack on the desert ruins.
He was not sure how much resistance he would face inside the ruins, but he figured that his forces would be enough. The scarabs had overpowered his walkers due to their numbers and the fact that his walkers were wielding the wrong weapons for the job. Instead of spears, they now held shields in one hand and maces in the other—perfect for covering a slow but steady advance into tight tunnels. The shields could even provide cover against the lasers that the scarabs blasted them with, preventing them from blinding the walkers.
Numerous scarabs were already out and about patrolling the area by the time Martin’s walkers arrived at the ruined pyramid. As soon as they detected the mass of walkers heading their way, they began swarming out in an attack as a blaring alarm brought forth even more scarabs from within the tunnels.
Martin had been drilling with his walkers assigned to guard the expansion toward Ma’an, practicing advancing and retreating in formation. This, coupled with the fights against the akinji raiders, gave him the experience he needed to coordinate the movements of his walkers.
He set them up in lines fifty walkers long and four walkers deep. As a result, Martin had 20 flexible lines of walkers that marched at the tunnel’s entrance in a half-moon formation. The scarabs did not focus their efforts on one particular line, instead spreading out wide to meet their attackers on the open sand. They skittered on the ground heedless of one another, solely focused on the enemies in front of them. With the shields protecting them and maces ready to crush the scarabs, Martin’s walkers held fast as the first wave crashed into his formations.
With the advantage of superior numbers and arms, Martin’s walkers stood their ground and quickly knocked back the weaker scarabs from their formation. Beams of light blasted out from the crystals mounted on the scarabs’ heads, but they did nothing against Martin’s clay constructs. He simply hid his walkers behind their shields while he had them swing wildly down with their maces. The scarabs kept swiping their claws at the shields, seeing them as the threat and not the walkers hiding behind them. The simplistic way these constructs were programmed made Martin realize how useless they were against the invaders, not counting their weak physical power. It may not have mattered though, since these scarab constructs were obviously designed to rely on their lasers as weapons—not their claws. He was just thankful that the lasers were not intense enough to burn through his walkers, considering the ceramic materials that formed the base of their construction.
Soon enough, Martin found his forces outnumbering the scarabs 4 to 1—a fact which surprised him. He estimated that only about a thousand scarabs rushed out of the tunnel entrance before their numbers started tapering off. Yes, more scarabs were still arriving after he had dealt with the first wave, but the follow-up waves were nowhere near as numerous as he had expected. They numbered just under two dozen each batch, and each batch came out every fifteen minutes or so.
And so Martin advanced with the walkers in the vanguard, adjusting the lines to reinforce wherever the scarabs were pressing the hardest.
He took it slow and steady, not wanting to commit all his forces in a reckless rush should the scarabs hit him with a nasty surprise. After an hour of slogging through the suicidal scarabs, his walkers began surrounding them. The walkers on the edges of his formation folded into the mass of the scarabs, slowly capturing them in a pincer formation. 12 of his 20 lines were engaged with scarabs, with the remaining 8 lines finding themselves pushed out of the semi-circle that had trapped the scarabs. Martin sent these 8 lines toward the entrance, cutting off reinforcements.
After another hour, the battle on the surface was over as the final scarab was struck down with a mace. He had the entrance fully under his control, though more scarabs kept bashing themselves senselessly against the walkers blocking the entrance.
Martin was surprised once more by the fact that he had lost none of his walkers. Their primary weapons may have blinded Martin’s walkers, but he was still able to fight back from behind the safety of his shields. Those same shields also held the claws of the scarabs back, as the individual scarabs did not have enough strength to match Martin’s larger, sturdier walkers. And finally, the scarabs did not come out in large enough numbers to overwhelm the walkers like they had done with the first scouting party. Before they could mass up in front of the shields, numerous maces would flick out of the gaps and smash them to oblivion.
With the majority of the scarabs cleared out, it was time for Martin to investigate the underground basement of these pyramid ruins. With all that was going on up north, in the Leizhu Swamp Pyramid, Martin was sorely tempted to send his entire force of walkers in at once. Rush in, blaze through the tunnels, kick down all the obstacles, and get everything as soon as he could. However, he was a fan of the slow-and-steady approach to things, especially since he ignored what surprises awaited him in the depths of these ruins. He wanted to send his eyeballs ahead of the walkers, but he needed them to keep watch from the skies. The last thing he wanted was to get ambushed by an akinji raiding party while his walkers were trapped deep in the pyramid.
Then he remembered that he could possibly lose those walkers anyway. If the Leizhu Swamp Pyramid fell, that would mean losing the generators that came with it. That was 3 big generators, 11 medium generators, and 5 backup generators—generators that supplied power to half of all the constructs he was currently fielding. If he lost those generators, he would lose control over half his forces and be obliged to destroy them anyway.
Faced with the chance that the Leizhu Swamp Pyramid would fall, he decided to bull ahead. He sent his walkers in, splitting off groups of walkers to scout ahead of the main forces each time he encountered a split in the tunnels. Just because he was in a rush and willing to take casualties did not mean he wanted to lose all of his walkers should he encounter a trap. Besides, scarabs kept pouring in a dozen a time, meaning that something in this facility recognized him as a hostile threat.
The interior of this facility was quite different from what Martin had encountered in the other pyramids. While the pyramids he had found were in bad condition, with corroding generators and broken production vats here and there, everything about this underground facility was in tip-top condition. Martin’s walker met numerous dolls toddling about the place, fixing up everything from cracks in the granite walls to replacing circuit boards on panels near the walls.
It was strange seeing electricity and silicon being used in this world. It made him feel nostalgic, remembering the appliances he used back home. However, the whole thing seemed… archaic, like it was somehow obsolete. This was ironic, since Martin did not even know what kind of power his constructs relied on, what strange source his generators drew their power from. Pnevma or soul magic was just this vague concept he had picked up from the conversations of the builders, but he did not really understand how it worked. It was a gap in knowledge that he hoped to fill one day, and maybe this facility could answer those questions for him.
After a few hours of exploring the labyrinthine twists and turns, Martin noticed something weird about the dolls. They weren’t hostile to him so he just ignored them, but then he saw them go out of the tunnels and collect the broken parts of the scarabs—both the crystals on their head and the clay that made up their bodies. They stored the materials in their bellies, making them look disturbingly pregnant as they waddled back toward the interior. Martin decided to follow them. Oddly enough, his walkers seemed to e
ncounter more and more scarabs as he followed the dolls carrying their cargo deeper into the pyramid.
Soon enough, the dolls led him right to where the scarabs were coming from. It was a production vat that was very similar to his own, and he could see a scarab pulling itself out from within the vat’s “birthing canal.” Martin realized that these vats could be useful if he could somehow manage to gain control over them, so he assigned a few walkers to stand guard and clobber the scarabs as they came out. Now that he had cleared out a path to these vats, he also began sending in dolls of his own to see what they could do here. Perhaps they could tap into the secrets of the production vats, make scarabs of his own. With the crystals on their heads that were capable of emitting intense laser blasts, they might be able to provide covering fire for his walkers—maybe stall Shen Feng’s troops long enough for his reinforcing walkers to arrive.
His other walkers, however, stumbled into something much deadlier.
One of his exploring groups of walkers rounded a corner, and they were immediately blinded with intense light. This laser ray was far brighter and more powerful than what he ran into with the scarabs, with the ceramic material of the walkers capable of absorbing exorbitant amounts of heat with no problem. Unlike with the scarabs though, his walkers’ shields started cracking apart with the intense heat they were receiving. Within moments of the shields going down, Martin’s walkers were blasted down into rubble that cracked apart from the temperatures they were exposed to.
Martin did not have time to plan an alternative, more elaborate solution to the problem of this super-laser. He did, however, have the numbers to follow through with a blind charge. He gathered up a sizeable chunk of walkers around the corner where he had lost his walkers—about a hundred or so—and rushed them in shield-first toward the source of the light. Prepared, Martin dashed into the tunnel, losing the first and second lines of his advancing walkers before they made it across the gap.
His walkers swung wildly at the source of the light despite being blinded by the reflection coming from their crackling shields and bodies. One of the walkers managed a lucky stroke, and slammed its mace solidly into something. That something cracked, and it exploded into a thousand shards as it released the awesome energies stored within itself. That explosion ripped apart the nearby walkers, including the one that had dealt the killing blow.
When Martin’s walkers recovered their sight, they stood before a pedestal of some sort as crystalline shards lay scattered all over the floor at their feet. Some of his walkers had the crystal embedded in their bodies as well. He had lost 44 of the 100 walkers he had diverted to attack this tunnel, including the first 5 walkers he had sent ahead as a scouting force. This thing, by itself, was able to do that much damage in the few minutes it took for his shielded walkers to sprint across the tunnel. After seeing what it had just done, Martin desperately wanted whatever this weapon was.
He sent more scouting walkers down the tunnel, moving more carefully and spacing them further apart now that he knew about the laser weapons hidden down in this area. Soon enough, the lead walker in Martin’s scouting party was exposed to a blast of light. He was prepared though, and quickly retreated as it let its shield absorb most of the heat. That quick peek across the corner was enough to cause its shield to become so brittle that chunks of it started falling out on their own.
Curious about what was at the end of such a heavily-guarded tunnel, Martin prepared another force of 100 walkers. He psyched himself up and repeated his charge. He moved faster and spread his walkers out instead of clumping them too tightly together. The result: losing just 23 walkers before reaching the oversized crystal and knocking it down from its pedestal. As Martin’s walkers progressed down the tunnel, he encountered three more of the weapons guarding their respective turns. The losses were negligible considering he had thousands more to spare, so he continued pushing onwards.
At least until he reached the end of the tunnel.
The shield of his scout walker got hit by another blast of light, and he prepared another hundred walkers to attack and break the crystal. His walkers charged forward, the lead elements cracking and ultimately breaking apart due to the heat. Instead of rushing through a tunnel though, his walkers ended up storming into an open room—one with multiple laser-firing crystals mounted not on an easily-accessible pedestal near the floor, but up high on the walls. Each walker that poured into the room was instantly reduced to piles of super-heated rubble from the focused fire of multiple crystals. It all happened so fast that Martin could not even make out what they were guarding in the first place.
Martin lost all 100 walkers in that push, even the ones that he had retreat. The crystal he was originally aiming for was positioned in such a way that it covered the length of the tunnel leading into the ‘kill room,’ as he so aptly called it. It thus continued disintegrating his walkers as they tried backing up into the tunnel. The worst part was that he came out of the whole experience learning very little about what happened, with all the light being reflected by the ceramic skin of his walkers.
Martin blew out a huff in frustration.
Yes, he had been expecting trouble like this, but it still irked him the way the weapons so handily wiped out his walkers. If he had all the time in the world, he would be only mildly annoyed like back when he had first stumbled upon the scarabs. He would just find some other way to solve the problem; maybe tunnel above or around the kill room, find a power supply he could sabotage somewhere else. However, Shen Feng’s forces were at that very moment knocking down the walls of the Leizhu Swamp Pyramid. The Chi-infused siege weapons had already broken down the gate and were making quick work of the paste that the dolls had used to harden the main entrance. The martial artists, on the other hand, were already halfway through the granite blocks. They would break through in a matter of hours, though Martin hoped that the reinforcing paste would stand up to their attacks better than they were doing against the catapults and ballistae.
Even his own dolls were having no success at connecting with the production vats. Unlike the other pyramids he had encountered so far, this pyramid continued to function after all the years it was left dormant. Once the other ‘dead’ pyramids had come into the range of his obelisks, his dolls had had no problem extending his control over them. However, this ‘living’ pyramid refused to yield its facilities to his rule, as all attempts by his dolls to take over the production vats ended up doing nothing. They had to cut through rooms that were blocked by sealed doors, and those doors were tough. The local dolls also kept trying to shove his own dolls away to repair the damage, and any doll that touched his constructs flew into a rage—forcing him to destroy them with his patrolling walkers.
Worse still, those production vats were the only intact facilities he had seen in the basement of the ruined pyramid. The structure may have been labyrinthine and many sealed doors protected its treasures, but many more of its corridors had collapsed over time. His free dolls were already excavating what they could; still it was taking far too long for them to get the job done.
That was the crux of the problem, for Martin did not have the luxury of time. He needed whatever technology he could get from these ruins, and he needed it now. With only one visible way forward, he gathered his remaining walkers—all 3,598 that were free— and lined them up in the tunnel. Martin steadied himself, his consciousness moving them as one with their shields raised up in front of them, and willed his walkers to stoically rush into oncoming laser fire.
The first dozen walkers broke down in the charge into the room, as he had anticipated. After all, only one crystal was covering the length of the tunnel. The casualties, however, really started to take off when he managed to make a push into the room. In fact, there were so many crystals burning away his walkers that he was losing more walkers than he could pour into the room. Their remains slowly formed small piles of broken ceramic—piles that grew into heaps, then mounds. He kept pouring in walkers, strategically posit
ioning them so that they would form more walls when they broke down. This course of action, however, hurt the walkers as much as it helped them. The ruined ceramic blocked the paths of his own walkers, so he had to slow them down as they climbed over the ever-growing mounds of smoking debris. In the end though, Martin found himself doing nothing more than sending walkers in despite losing hundreds of them each minute.
Just when he was contemplating retreat, when he was starting to think that the defenses were impenetrable, the first crystal popped.
Martin heard rather than saw it happen, and he didn’t even know what he was hearing at first. A loud snap whipped across the room, its report coming out far louder than the comparatively weak crackling and crumbling of Martin’s walkers as they disintegrated under intense laser fire. Soon enough, more shattering sounds followed as Martin’s walkers kept surging into the room. He increased their pace after he noticed that the laser fire grew less concentrated after each shatter, and he didn’t even bother hiding his walkers behind cover any more. In fact, he wanted those lasers to keep firing so that they would overheat faster, regardless of the casualties they inflicted.
Before long, his walkers started to gain more ground as laser fire started tapering off. The crystals continued dying off one by one, and Martin quickly filled the spacious room with his remaining walkers as they continued absorbing as much laser fire as they could. Martin breathed a sigh of relief at his success, despite reeling from the horrible number of casualties he had incurred.