by E. M. Hardy
“I… I understand. I really wish things would be different this time around, that these constructs would be friendly, that… that I would find one other like myself,” Martin finally admitted with more defeat in his voice than he meant to let out.
“Focus, Martin,” Gurhan chided sharply. “These constructs attacked my scouts first, then they attacked your walkers. They refuse to accept overtures of peace. Better that we strike now, while they are here in the Wastes instead of in Ma’an, threatening the emirate or even al-Taheri itself.”
Martin sighed one last time and pulled himself together, casting his dashed hopes aside and girding himself for yet another fight.
“Right. Then let my walkers lead the way, test their abilities before you commit your scouts.”
The princess huffed at Martin’s offer. “My troops and I can take care of ourselves, Martin. I would much rather we draw first blood. Or first mud. First clay? Or first… whatever, in this case with constructs.”
“Better to lose a clay man than a man of real flesh and blood,” Martin said flatly, without any emotion in it. Princess Gurhan scowled at that, about to say something, but Martin cut her off before she could voice her concerns.
“If those hieracosphinxes have a secret weapon, if they are just pretending to be at the edge of their limits, then I would much rather sacrifice my walkers than explain to your father how I managed to get his daughter and a hundred of his best scouts killed in action.”
The princess studied Martin’s walker a little more intensity, with more thought and less hostility than before. She nodded her consent and trotted back to her scouts, consulting with them on how best to engage the rogues.
Martin, however, was already busy sending his other walkers out. Ten thousand walkers against… more or less a hundred thousand rogues all bunched up together around their pyramids. The numbers sounded bad—were very bad actually—but at least the rogues were bound in place.
If their behavior held, if they were actually leashed so closely to their pyramids and obelisks, then Martin’s walkers could chip away at the edges of the rogues at leisure, without putting his walkers in any real danger.
This is why Martin started with a probing attack, sending a thousand of his walkers all along the outer-most line of rogues. The first line of walkers moved in with an array of ceramic weapons, from blades and spears to mauls and warhammers.
Just like his own constructs, the ceramic bodies of the rogues were resistant to piercing and slashing weapons. Blunt force did far more damage, especially when his walkers managed to score a solid blow.
The mandala patterns carved on the walkers did not help much, as there was little ambient chi to be found in the Wastes . There simply weren’t enough living organisms in this desolate land, at least not enough to fill up his walkers like he could in the other, lusher lands of the continent.
The mandala patterns, nonetheless, helped store up the energy produced by the pnevmatic generators that powered Martin’s walkers. The transfer was not as effective as chi, which the carved patterns were designed to hold. Still, they could store enough additional energy to bolster the capabilities of the walkers in a burst of power.
This allowed Martin’s walkers to charge up their attacks, slam their blunt weapons with enough force to down a hieracosphinx in a single hit.
It would have been far more effective if he had a source of chi to draw upon, which would have provided immediate and near-constant shots of energy. Still, it was better than nothing… at least until Martin decided to bring out the blood-weapons.
Assured that the rogues were at the limit of their range and weren’t just playing possum, Martin decided to bring in the big guns. Or in this case, the weapons super-charged by blood.
Walkers armed with blood-spears, blood-bows, and blood-arrows stepped up—their weapons imported from the Taiyo Sovereignty, the Ren Empire, and the Sahaasi Dominion.
The peace treaty all parties signed required the spreading of their techniques throughout the signatories, helping ensure parity between them all. Mandala tattoos, chi-cultivation, blood-binding were now staple techniques taught throughout the northern lands and were quickly spreading south toward the Emirates in the Bashri.
All these techniques were taught under the shadows of Martin’s obelisks, where humans in close proximity more easily absorbed the talents of their peers. They also helped in bolstering techniques already learned, as well as easing the new application of those very same techniques.
For now though, Martin was just grateful for the weapons his walkers held.
Martin knew from firsthand experience how deadly the blood weapons were; how they could easily cut through ceramic like hot knives through butter.
He also knew that these licensed weapons were bought from legitimate binders, men and women who poured their own blood into their weapons. His eyeballs witnessed the creation process of every legitimate blood-bound weapon all across the land, assuring him of their ‘cleanness.’
Now it was time to find out if these weapons would perform just as well as they used to.
They did.
The first row of walkers with blood-pikes marched in, the red veins of their weapons glowing bright crimson as his core coaxed the blood of a thousand spears to life. A thousand fragments of Martin’s mind thrust together as one, causing around two hundred hieracosphinxes to crumple to the ground. The rest of the hieracosphinxes strained and thrashed against their invisible restraints, eager to revenge themselves upon the walkers that damaged them.
The rogue constructs didn’t actually crumble to dust, but they did fall down like puppets with their strings cut off after getting struck center-mass.
Martin took note of what happened to the surviving hieracos. Legs, limbs, necks, and heads—cutting through these parts didn’t immediately end them in that instant. No, the spears buried deep into the torsos killed them, probably hitting something vital in the middle of their heavily-protected abdomens.
Martin moved in with his archers next, who coaxed the blood in their bows and arrows. They didn’t loose their arrows in an arc like what most archers normally do when massed up. They instead spread themselves out, finding perches and elevated surfaces where they could get good lines of sight at their targets. Martin even managed to pull the archers up a rock formation where they had a clear shot at one of the gigantic androsphinxes hanging back behind its smaller brethren.
Remembering his lessons from Ishida and the other samurai, the fragments of Martin’s consciousness residing in the archers focused deeply into their weapons. They reached out to the blood in their bows and arrows, forming a link, and then loosed.
The many partitions of Martin’s consciousness then narrowed the focus of their world down, concentrating on the links to their arrows. They guided the red-veined shafts in flight, willing the fletching to spin while tightening even more power into the arrowheads.
The arrows corrected their flight paths and found their marks—the legs of the tall androsphinxes, thick as tree trunks. The stored force within the arrowheads exploded on impact, shattering the limbs of the tall constructs and sending them toppling to the ground.
Princess Gurhan and her scouts watched impatiently as Martin continued systematically dismantling the rogues. It was less a fight and more a clean-up job, really, as the rogues remained tethered to the twelve-mile limit around their half-built pyramid.
They also refused to adapt to Martin’s attacks, no matter how many casualties he inflicted upon them.
As soon as a hieracosphinx fell, another would take its place at the line. They would then stand their ground, attempting to bite with their beaks or swipe with their talons. The same went for the giant androsphinxes.
Martin would blow off their limbs, send them crashing to the ground. Another would simply amble up and take position—stoically standing its ground even as Martin’s archers loosed more flights of arrows.
Princess Gurhan’s patience
ran out after two hours of watching Martin’s constructs do all the work.
“Well? Are you finally going to permit my people to strike, know what it feels like to fight these rogues first-hand? Or are we going to sit up here on this dune and twiddle our fingers until the sun goes down?”
Martin would have grimaced if he could. He still wasn’t entirely sure about the rogues, but he thinned them out enough that his walkers could hold them back if they suddenly attacked. Or at least hold them back long enough for Gurhan and her scouts to get away.
“I… alright then. Just remember to fall back the moment I tell you to, alright? We don’t know what these rogues are capable of, and I really don’t want to risk you if possible, and—”
“Right, good, SCOUTS OF MA’AN! MOVE OUT!”
Martin sighed as Princess Gurhan’s mounted scouts rode down the dune, their lances lowered. He calculated where the scouts would make their charge and cleared his walkers out of the way. At the same time, he massed up his pikes around the expected breach point to provide extra support while archers aimed at nearby threats.
The scouts and their accompanying jinn moved in, slamming into the lines of the hieracosphinxes to devastating effect. Princess Gurhan and her elite scouts bore blood-bound weapons as well—lances this time—and they had the advantage of their summoned jinn hovering with them. Her scouts were also trained in cultivating chi, but like Martin they could not rely on it due to the desolate environment of the Wastes.
The scouts shouted out their war cries as they slammed their lances into their foes, felling hieracosphinxes with ease. Surprisingly enough, they didn’t fight brashly or recklessly. No, they pressed the attack as deeply as their lances would reach before pulling back and reforming.
They didn’t dive in but skimmed along the lines, stabbing and thrusting with their lances as their mounts rode parallel to the front line.
Princess Gurhan may have been eager for battle, but she wasn’t stupid enough to dive right into the middle of the enemy formations.
And yet, even this conservative attack resulted in a handful of casualties. About six horses ended up with their flanks sliced up by talons. Three scouts likewise sported gashes along their abdomens while one scout managed to get bitten on her leg.
No deaths… at least not yet. It was rather impressive considering Gurhan and her hundred scouts managed to destroy around twenty times their number in the hour they were locked into combat with the rogues.
The princess, satisfied with the damage she and her scouts inflicted, eventually sounded the retreat.
Sweating freely and breathing heavily, the princess-warrior clambered down from her mount and approached the waiting camels laden with supplies. A servant handed her a cup of tepid water, which she downed eagerly and held out for a refill.
“Unbelievable,” she said with a shake of her head, sweat dripping from her bangs. “They really are leashed to that obelisk, like dogs tied to a pole.”
One of Martin’s walkers approached, nodding, even as the other walkers continued to systematically demolish the rogues. “And we’re lucky they are. We would stand no chance if all those constructs rushed in at us, enveloped us at all sides. We’re also lucky that the pyramid they’re building isn’t complete yet. Should be in another two, two and a half weeks at the rate they’re going.”
A fragment of Martin’s consciousness peered through the lens of an eyeball, studying the pyramid in question.
Rogue dolls swarmed the structure, transporting mud from as far away as his eyeball could see. Each individual doll looked like it was pregnant, carrying their cargo in a sealed sphere within its belly. Once these ‘pregnant’ dolls reached the building site, their bellies would split from the groin up and spill their precious cargo out on the hot sands.
Nearby dolls would then immediately siphon up the mud with their hands, passing it up along in a chain to reinforce the structure. Martin watched, curious, as some of the mud was diverted out to reinforce the pyramid walls. Others brought mud into the pyramid itself, brought metals to the building vats and supplied generators with crystals.
The whole thing looked like it was being 3D-printed, with dolls laying out mud on top of everything. They weren’t compartmentalizing, focusing on essential structures first. No, everything was being built from the bottom up. The more Martin watched their single-minded construction process, working with single-minded determination, the more they looked like mindless robots simply carrying out coded instructions.
Come to think of it, the androsphinx constructs functioned the same way. Both the giant androsphinxes and smaller hieracosphinxes didn’t adapt at all. They simply attacked in predictable patterns over and over again. They didn’t pull back, feint their attacks, or set up elaborate traps for his walkers or Gurhan’s scouts. No, they just shoved themselves at the very limit of their range in a futile attempt to ‘reach’ their enemies.
It looked like these rogues weren’t being directed by a Custodian at all. To Martin, all this looked a hell of a lot like a robot apocalypse scenario—machines running rampant because of some faulty logic loop in their coding.
The idea of such a scenario sent chills running up his non-existent spine, especially since he himself controlled constructs identical in form and function to the rogues. The idea of these rogues building pyramids all over the planet, expanding their production capabilities as they cleared out the land of any and all hindrances, suddenly became a lot more ominous than he initially realized.
Martin was tempted to break through their lines to target the obelisks and pyramids—cut them off at the source and hopefully take them all down. And yet he looked at the numbers before them.
All his walkers remained intact save for a few dozen with their limbs bitten or torn off, but he still had to deal with more than forty thousand rogues all in all. And never mind those big, honking andros towering around their smaller brethren. They had yet to approach the front lines, content to sit back behind the hieracos even as they came under relentless bombardment from his archers.
Memories of the underground ruins suddenly resurfaced. The last time Martin gambled on a singular attack, he ended up losing thousands of his walkers in the attempt. First to a swarm of scarabs suddenly popping out of tunnels, then to a suicidal Custodian who preferred destroying himself and the entire facility instead of working with the ‘corrupted’ soul of Martin.
When Martin posed this dilemma to Princess Gurhan, she simply raised a brow as she wiped the sweat off her forehead.
“Why the sudden rush? You have sustained few casualties fighting here at the edges of their control, picking them off one by one. You have destroyed, what, more than fifty thousand of these rogues in half a day?
“No, you are fighting well here, Martin; there is no reason to risk your own walkers out there like that. You still have nearly seventy thousand more marching here from all corners of the continent.”
Yes, Gurhan’s argument was sound. There really was no need for Martin to risk his force in a reckless attack. He could fight at the borders, pick off the ‘dumb’ rogues one by one as they strained against the limit of their pyramids and obelisks.
With this advantage of fighting safely, he would surely be able to destroy far more constructs than the rogues could build up. There was absolutely no way in hell that the rogues would be able to produce enough of their own to keep up with the casualties he could inflict.
He’d be able to wrap this threat up in due time, easy-peasy lemon squeezy…
Chapter 03
Si Shi Er, also known as Agent 42, also known as Merchant Yao Ping, also known as Tailor Lian Min, also known as Courtesan Quan Xiu, also known as Messenger Xu Ya… currently known as Historian Cui Dai.
Historian Cui Dai’s apprentice sat beside her in the carriage, nervous and jittery as she swiveled her head this way and that, taking in the endless waters churning all around her. The carriage they rode on was but one among many in this carava
n rolling through the Continental Bridge—a massive clay bridge connecting the Ren mainland to the Isles of Taiyo.
The waves battered relentlessly against the thick pylons of hardened clay supporting the bridge itself, which in turn was filled with drains so that rainwater and seawater alike would not flood the bridge.
The Continental Bridge was ugly and amateurishly built, with no attempt at aesthetic improvements whatsoever. Not that its architect cared, for it was the longest and largest bridge she had ever seen. The only thing that mattered was the numerous pylons supporting it all the way, supporting a thin strip of land traversing the three-hundred-mile channel separating the Isles from the Ren Empire.
“Be calm, Historian Yao Xiu, and still yourself,” Cui Dai said as she laid a reassuring hand on the young lady’s lap. She froze up, bunching her shoulders, before she exhaled slowly, deeply, as she drained the tension out of her body.
Inqiz, Yao Xiu’s jinni, chuckled with a gentle shake of his head, green wisps of light trailing his head. “How can you expect her not to be anxious, Senior Historian Cui Dai? This is her first time crossing such an expanse of water on an unnaturally long bridge such as this.”
The ethereal creature spoke Cui Dai’s title with so much obvious disregard, so much sarcasm, that anyone listening in would quickly infer something was off about her role on this little outing. Fortunately for everyone involved, they were in a private carriage—one among many in a long caravan heading toward the Isles.
“Watch your tone,” warned Cui Dai, her own tone low and threatening. “All it takes is one small slip, and anyone listening in will start to become suspicious. Remember this when you risk putting not just myself but your own bonded partner in danger.”
“Indeed,” nodded Cui Dai’s own jinni, Enin. Shadowy tendrils of black licked at the handrest as she crossed her arms. “The way you address Cui Dai’s title reeks of distrust, of disbelief, and it will breed suspicion in anyone who picks up on it.”