by Gross, Dave
On his left ran the druid, Bronwyn. He could no longer discern her expression. The moment they had readied themselves for the advance, she had raised her hood and covered her face with her black scarf. She dragged the weapon behind her, blade upward. Nemo could hardly imagine her wielding it in the melee, but he had seen the power of her spells.
To either side they were escorted by storm knights. Major Blackburn led the Stormguard on the right, leaving the left to his Stormblade captain and the storm gunners. Mace held high, Chaplain Geary ran with the captain. Behind him came his ensign, holding the Precursor knight’s banner high so all would know where to find the chaplain.
Nemo cast his thoughts wide, running the salvaged Stormclad and the Fireflies up the center, resisting the temptation to let the light warjacks outpace the heavy. He kept the Lancers as far as possible to either side, giving him the widest possible range to channel his spells across the field.
Beyond the Lancers, the stormsmiths drove the Striders just close enough to support the warjacks with their lightning cannons, but far enough to either side that they could make a quick dash to the east or west flank. Against such uneven odds, Nemo needed the ability to shift tactics swiftly.
As they ran across the field, the Convergence soldiers formed ranks to stop them. The foremost bore odd scalloped shields. Nemo saw the purpose behind their design: With a click audible even across the field, each crescent-moon shield locked into the next. The result was a continuous wall of steel held before the soldiers, each of whom also wielded long maces and unusual halberds.
As the halberdiers raised their weapons, Nemo once more experienced an epiphany: The axe-blades of the halberds slipped down, allowing the spearhead to project that much farther.
Beyond the wall of clockwork infantry, Nemo saw the angels take to the sky. He spied Aurora among one of the three groups. While the other two groups spread out toward the flanks, the Numen of Aerogenesis and her guardians flew toward Nemo. She remained out of range, but he knew it was only a matter of time before he must face her, warcaster to warcaster.
And though she knew his reputation, Nemo thought Aurora might be surprised just how far his lightning could reach.
A flash whitened the battlefield from the west. An instant later, another struck from the east. Tendrils of lightning lashed out from the Striders’ storm cannons. Their tips danced among the outermost soldiers in the shield wall. Steel limbs, fragments of brass, and shattered maces and halberds leaped up from the stricken sites.
The rest of the line moved forward until they came into the range of Nemo’s battlegroup.
With the slightest mental nudge, Nemo activated the Fireflies’ storm blasters. Galvanic bolts leaped out to strike the center of the shield wall. The lighting shattered its targets before leaping to the victim’s nearest comrade. Another blast, and they would start punching holes in the shield wall.
As rifles fired from the east and west, Nemo sent the Stormclad straight into the middle of the clockwork defenders. Perceiving his foes through his warjack’s sensors, he felt like a giant wading into battle. Before it closed, the Stormclad raised its generator blade. Lightning curled around the sword and lashed forward, tearing apart a halberd-wielding soldier before leaping past to obliterate another behind it.
More fire barked from the east. A moment later, the western woods echoed the sound, and a rising din of shouts told Nemo the infantry charged in from either side. The soldiers ran past the Convergence battle engines even as blue-white rays screamed down to tear the men to pieces. Brief flashes high above the ground showed where the orbiting servitors intercepted incoming shots before falling, ruined, to the ground.
Nemo paused for an instant, considering the damage to the clockwork soldiers’ front line. They had suffered somewhat more to the east.
Half-closing his eyes, Nemo shifted his focus to the Lancer on his right flank. Drawing on the arcane channels he had developed through years of study, he summoned a circle of blazing runes around his body. By force of will, he poured lightning through the arc node inside the Lancer. The storm lashed out into the clockwork soldiers, leaping from one steel body to another until several more lay scorched and mangled on the ground.
Far behind the clockwork troops, three explosions rang out, one after another. The sounds told Nemo his rangers had begun breaking the prisons in Calbeck. From east and west, the infantry drove inward to join them, capturing the outer streets to control the exodus of captives before the fighting reached the village center. With their attention focused on his swift assault, the Convergence forces would now have to choose between defending their position and recovering the escaping prisoners.
The remnants of the Convergence shield wall parted to allow an assault team through. Heavy clockwork troops bearing shields on both arms rushed forward. As they charged, heavy triangular blades shot out from their shields.
The storm gunners blasted a few of the attackers to the ground before they closed the distance. The others crashed against the knights. The blades of their protean shields punched through the Cygnaran armor, leaving mangled bodies on the ground
The Stormblades struck back, but most of their glaives clashed against the impenetrable shields. Those that slipped past severed steel limbs and left brass viscera scattered in their wakes.
Nemo returned his attention to the Stormclad. With the heavy blade he cut a mace-wielding soldier in half. He reached out with the warjack’s open hand to crush the head of another.
And then the colossal stepped forward.
It roared like an army of engines, the earth trembling beneath the force of the displacement field under each of its titanic legs. Clockwork soldiers scrambled to avoid being trampled. Trios of giant conical drills, each larger than a light warjack, jutted from the ends of its arms. It advanced, shrugging its shoulders like a fist-fighter, drills shrieking as they spun.
From one of the heavy units mounted on its shoulders, a projectile fired with a sharp pneumatic report. A monstrous harpoon shot through the chassis of Nemo’s Stormclad. An instant later, its heavy tow cable jerked the massive warjack forward, dragging it across the battlefield toward the Convergence colossal.
Even as Nemo directed the Stormclad’s open hand to grasp the cable, the warjack slammed into the colossal. Nemo barely had time to raise the generator blade in a futile gesture of defiance before one of the triple drills fell upon it, grinding the blade and the arm beneath it into steel filings. The shriek of sheared metal carried across the battlefield. Friend and foe alike turned to see the warjack struggle as the second drill arm fell upon its back.
As the Stormclad was destroyed, another harpoon shot out toward the west. The tip of the weapon fell short of the crackling orb of the lightning cannon, but where a stormsmith had stood, only a haze of blood remained. As the colossal reeled in its harpoon, the surviving stormsmith pulled back on the driver’s yoke to move the battle engine farther from the lethal foe.
Nemo heard the crack of another loud pneumatic report, this time from the main body of the colossal. A second and third followed in rapid succession. To his left, the bodies of three storm knights flew backward, each impaled by a long steel spike. The colossal coughed again, and four men died on the right.
“Spread out!” Blackburn shouted as he recognized the danger of the clustered projectiles. An instant later, men to either side of him leaped backward, their bodies transfixed to the ground. As Blackburn turned to shout an order, Nemo saw the deputy’s lieutenant impaled through the mouth, his back arched at an impossible angle as the spike bent him backward.
Blackburn choked, reached for the man, and stopped himself. Instead he shouted his order to the next officer down the chain. Then he turned back to the enemy to continue fighting.
Even Sebastian Nemo, veteran of a hundred dire battles, had seldom seen such devastating power unleashed against such vulnerable targets. The destructive power of the Convergence war machine caught his breath, distracting him long enough that he was su
rprised to hear Finch cry, “Look out, sir!”
Instinctively he crouched and raised the tempest accumulator to guard his head. Steel rang against steel as he threw himself to the ground. Tumbling, he looked up to see one of the clockwork angels rising once more, her razor-sharp sword still crackling with the static aura it had caught from his staff.
Cursing his own inattentiveness, Nemo rolled back to his feet, wincing as he felt a sharp pain in his hip. He was not injured, he realized. He was simply growing old.
And he was determined to keep growing old, which meant first staying alive.
His eyes sought the next attacker. She came at him from the west, blade held to the side, ready to sweep through his neck. He braced himself to parry the blow, but a sudden blast of invisible force threw the winged assassin off course. It flipped her over, redirecting her invisible propulsion field to throw her to the ground. Before she could rise, the three nearest Stormguard fell upon her. Their voltaic halberds cut open her steel-and-brass body as the lightning danced among her gears. She lay unmoving on the ground.
Nemo turned to see the druid Bronwyn rise from the crouch from which she had hurled her spell. She turned away without so much as a nod to acknowledge that she had saved his life, axe raised to strike at another clockwork soldier menacing a storm knight with its bladed shields.
Above Bronwyn, a third clockwork angel dove toward Nemo. He raised his staff, ready to trigger a lightning strike, but he withheld the bolt because Bronwyn remained dangerously close. Unlike Finch and the storm knights, the druid wore no storm armor and thus had no protection from his lightning.
Instead of risking striking Bronwyn, Nemo waited for the angel to close with him. He thrust the head of the staff toward her, trying to deflect her course before she could decapitate him. His staff pierced her shimmering power field to strike her steel shoulder, but not hard enough to knock her aside. Nemo ducked his head as her blade penetrated his power field and sang against the galvanic coils on his back.
They crackled and sputtered. The generator whined and surged, but it did not fail.
Not yet.
As the clockwork angel soared back into the sky, Nemo waited until she was high above the fray before flinging the lightning after her. The white arcs burned away her wings and one arm. For an instant, her hovering field continued to operate, carrying her limp body across the field before dropping her among the Cygnar soldiers.
Another wave of clockwork infantry surged forward to support the first. At a glance, Nemo saw that the infiltration of the village had not distracted them from his attack. Ignoring the escaping captives, the Convergence forces focused all their attention on repelling the Cygnaran army out of the village, especially away from the tower.
Nemo had hoped to divide their focus, but protecting the tower was their priority. Somehow he needed to entice Aurora to turn her attention elsewhere. He knew a way, but it would not come without great cost.
“Finch, bring that Storm Strider to bear on the colossal,” he pointed east. He shouted a similar command toward the other Strider in the west, where the officers relayed it, shout to shout. He saw the lone remaining stormsmith on the battle engine’s platform receive the order. The man looked back at Nemo, his goggles giving him a surprised look. The man did not balk. Instead, he nodded emphatically to acknowledge the order.
Nemo recited a silent prayer for the man. He hoped the Striders’ range was great enough to strike the colossal with their lightning cannons while keeping the stormsmith out of range of the harpoon.
The storm knight infantry clashed in melee with the clockwork soldiers. The Stormblades and storm gunners fired into the fray, heedless of their comrades, whose armor shielded them from the lightning.
As the Storm Striders maneuvered into position, Nemo briefly noted the placement of his Lancer warjacks before focusing all his attention on the Fireflies. He moved them just into range of the colossal and unleashed their storm blasters. Lightning leaped in to dance along the colossal’s right arm, scoring the chassis beneath with irregular black lines.
The western Storm Strider fired its cannon, following Nemo’s lead in boring deep wounds along the colossal’s flank. One of the giant machine’s triple drill bits flew away spinning, but the other two continued tearing apart the Stormclad caught in its embrace.
At the colossal’s feet, three light vectors rushed up to reach their probes toward the colossal’s wounds. Armored men—clockwork or human, Nemo couldn’t tell—ran forward to clamber up its massive legs, welding torches and spanners swinging from their belts.
Trying not to think of Mags Jernigan, Nemo lashed out at them. Another volley of electrical energy from the Fireflies threw a mechanik from the machine’s leg. Another melted the limbs off a repair vector.
Rifles continued to bark from the east and west, their previously cascading volleys breaking up into sporadic fire as soldiers picked targets of opportunity. More and more of it moved from the troops on the ground to the tower dominating Calbeck. Nemo saw brief flashes of energy as an invisible shield deflected the gunfire. From what he could see, not a single round penetrated the power field.
Spherical servitors flew from the tower out toward the long gunners. Some sprayed luminescent green fluid over the soldiers, highlighting their positions. Others exploded, throwing shrapnel and limp bodies in all directions.
Aurora appeared again, soaring toward the colossal with her bodyguards on either side. Beneath them, a squad of disparate vectors followed on the ground. No two were alike, but they moved in unison, obeying their warcaster’s silent command.
The Convergence colossal turned toward the western Storm Strider that was continuously raking its body with claws of lightning. It hovered toward its foe, the earth beneath its shadow churning in the powerful displacement field.
The stormsmith pulled back the Strider’s control yoke, desperately trying to maintain the advantage of range while staring up in awe at the looming colossal. What the driver didn’t see was the Convergence battle engine intercepting it from the west.
Nemo called out a warning, even as he realized there was no way his voice could be heard from such a distance. The knights relayed his message across the line, but it was too late.
As the tower-shaped Convergence battle engine drew closer, two of its orbiting servitors swung into position on either side. They flashed with blue-white light, fixing the Storm Strider’s weapon with seemingly harmless beams of light. Then the battle engine’s own cyclopean lens opened and blazed.
A steady beam of blue-white radiance speared down, striking the crackling orb of the Strider’s lightning cannon. The silvery globe shook and blackened, trembling in its rig. Three of its lightning nodules dimmed as another one burst, galvanic energy spilling out to leap across the catwalk.
The Strider shot back, diverting its lightning from the colossal to the battle engine. One of the orbiting servitors zipped into the path of the lightning, bursting in a shower of molten steel but sparing its battle engine the brunt of the bolt.
The Convergence engine stalked the retreating Strider, trying to herd it back into range of the colossal. Nemo could see from the man’s frantic gestures that the driver perceived the danger. But without a co-pilot to aid him, he found the colossal drawing closer and closer.
With another sharp pneumatic report, the gargantuan Convergence machine fired its harpoon. It pierced the lightning cannon and shot straight through the steel armature. An instant later, the tow line drew taut. The Storm Strider tottered and braced its four crab-like legs. Its mass was too great to draw back toward the colossal, but it remained caught.
For a few moments, the stormsmith struggled with the drive yoke. He was looking down at the gauges when the shadows of half a dozen clockwork angels fell upon him.
From the ground, Stormblades tried to draw off the winged assassins with lightning fire, but it was too late. The angels and their blades swept down, one after the other, with barely a pause. They flew past, swifter
than birds of prey, already out of range by the time the lightning converged on where they had been an instant earlier.
Another flare of blue-white light caught his eye, and Nemo turned to see a ring of runelight fading around Aurora. He deduced she had cast a spell to lend her flying assassins their incredible speed.
All that remained of the stormsmith were bloody scraps of cloth, steel, and flesh hanging from the Storm Strider’s catwalk. The unattended vehicle shuddered and tugged against the colossal’s tow-line, useless without a driver.
In that instant, Nemo saw the inevitable outcome of the battle. Not only would he fail to reach the Convergence tower, he would die fighting, as would every soldier who followed him.
Aurora
Aurora concentrated her remaining Galvanizers on repairing the damage to the Prime Axiom. If she had not distracted him, Nemo might have destroyed them all along with the optifex. Fortunately, between the surgical strikes of her angels and the damage she had caused to his nearest Storm Strider, Nemo had failed to eliminate the repair units.
That was a critical mistake. Between the Galvanizers and the optifex directives, Aurora’s most powerful machine would remain in the battle.
She glanced east and west to monitor the attacks from the flanks. At any moment she expected more stormsmiths to emerge from the screen of woods, yet none had appeared. Their absence troubled her, despite the near proximity of her Modulator vector.
Tempted though she was to surprise Nemo with the one vector immune to his favored lightning attacks, she knew it remained vulnerable to the blades of the soldiers around him. She would save it for the right moment, when Nemo felt he had the advantage of the storm, and she could show him how wrong he was.
Behind her in Calbeck, Cygnaran infantry withdrew from their rescue mission, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Aurora had committed only a token force to oppose them. As she had directed, Pollux assigned a few perforators to put up the appearance of firing on the fleeing villagers and their rescuers, although they had instructions to aim not for the unarmed prisoners but only the soldiers. The more pointless goals Aurora presented to the Cygnarans, the less attention they would devote to the one thing that truly mattered: the realignment node.