by E. M. Hardy
And then there was the fact that the dolls inside the pyramid continually reinforced the damaged sections, spewing quick-hardening ceramic.
It took two whole days of relentless pounding from the andros to open up the first breach. The hieracos that flooded in were greeted by rows of pikes that kept them locked down inside their respective tunnels.
It took two more days for the clay reserves inside the pyramid to run out, all from the intensive repair and rearming. It took another day for the andros to open up enough breaches to force the walkers deeper inside the pyramid—the hieracos slowly capturing more and more corridors.
It all ended on the seventh day when the hieracos managed to lock down the walkers into the crystal chamber. Playing dead did not work this time, for the rogues seemed to sense the awakening of Martin’s constructs.
The absence of any greater threats played a role as well.
When Martin died the last time, the rogues focused their attention on the men and women of the allied army. Now, with no distractions available, they made short work of the surviving walkers, dolls, and cow-boxes—demolishing them ruthlessly and without mercy.
Those seven days, however, weren’t for nothing.
The forty-thousand walkers, two thousand dolls, and one thousand cow-boxes weren’t meant to survive forever. Their attack deep behind the lines made them a priority threat in the eyes of the rogues, which pulled back from the front lines to deal with them. It didn’t matter that the allied army sat just outside their range of control.
No, there was a menace right in their midst and they threw everything they could to extinguish that menace.
This bought enough time for Martin to reconnect with the allied army and plan the next phase of their operations against the rogues: capturing the pyramids that the rogues abandoned in their mad dash to react to the stimulus threatening them from far behind the usual lines.
This, more than anything, supported Martin’s early theory of the bugged, corrupted programming of the rogues. They were simply reacting, not planning, and were driven by simplistic algorithms instead of conscious, proactive designs.
It was a vulnerability that Martin exploited to its fullest.
Chapter 16
“And they’re hundreds of miles away?”
“Yup.”
“And it will take them a couple days or so to return?”
“Yup.”
“And they left all these pyramids completely undefended?”
“A-yup.”
“They are very dumb. They are very, VERY dumb.”
“Don’t let it get to your head,” Martin admonished Hobogetur. “Their swarm is turning around as we speak, rushing back now that your people are attacking.”
The Great Khan of the Grass Peoples shook his head, marveling at the empty sands before him. “But still… to pull back all your forces? I mean, they abandoned what, dozens of pyramids… for just one stupid pyramid? It doesn’t make sense!”
“More like they abandoned hundreds of pyramids, and I keep telling you that they don’t think like you or me.” Martin shrugged with his walker, the one he assigned to escort Hobogetur and keep him updated about the situation.
“How can I put it… they’re like ants. They don’t really think that much, only respond to whatever’s in front of them with what they know. If you present something new to them, they’ll fall back to what they do best.
“And in this case, the default reaction of the rogues is to swarm whatever threat they encounter.”
Hobogetur chuckled at that. “Well, I’m thankful they think that way. I can just imagine what would have happened to us if they had even the slightest tactical sense in their heads.”
“Amen to that.”
“A… what?”
“Never mind. It’s just a saying from my world,” Martin responded, waving away the Khan’s concerns and surveying the field before him.
A walker and Hobogetur stood before a pyramid, one that the dolls were busy converting. A few squads from Hobogetur’s troops scoured the interior, demolishing rogues as they churned out from within the pyramids. Martin’s dolls made their way inside, laying down lines from Martin’s pyramid and into the crystalline core chamber.
This scene repeated itself all across the front line, with smaller squads of the allied armies moving in to clear out individual pyramids. Mounted troops, many of them from Hobogetur’s Great Horde, rode ahead with the express purpose of demolishing the crystalline cores of the pyramids beyond the frontline—the ones too far for Martin to take control of in the limited amount of time they had.
And they moved fast, what with the rogue swarm turning its attention back to the allied army.
When Martin first regained consciousness, he immediately began coordinating with the allied army. He updated himself to what happened over the past year he was knocked out, repairing his core and bringing his network back online.
His suspicions about his death were confirmed by Agent 42 and a rather familiar Agent 97 of the Balancers. The Rats had indeed used their jinni-enhanced shadow walking talents to infiltrate his main pyramid and destroy his core.
He set the matter aside for another time since the rogues were only a couple dozen miles from reaching Al-Taheri. He needed to pull their attention away from the front line, buy time for the allies to gain ground.
The deactivated constructs scattered underneath the sands of the Wastes were positioned perfectly for such a distraction.
The allies held back from their attack for the first week, distancing themselves from the front line as Martin conducted his flanking attack. Seeing no threat from the front, the rogues instead pulled back to swarm the new threat appearing right in their midst.
Martin held on, monitoring the movements of the rogues even as his constructs made their desperate last stand inside the rogue pyramid he still maintained a physical connection with.
The allies moved out on the seventh day, when the pyramid fell to the rogues.
The men and women of the army rushed forward, securing the pyramids at the very front and demolishing the cores of the pyramids further away. They still encountered resistance from the freshly-built rogues built from the pyramids, but their opposition came at them in the hundreds instead of the hundreds of thousands.
The forward troops brought crystal bombs with them, fought their way into the pyramids, and planted their explosive payloads in the crystalline relay centers of the pyramids.
Heavy iron spikes attached to a rope mechanism allowed the teams to detonate the crystals from a distance. The exploding crystals shattered pyramid cores, cutting off the rogue signal and pushing the front line further and further back with each disabled pyramid.
In the meantime, Martin’s dolls were busy digging lines toward the secured pyramids. They laid down physical lines inside them, continuing all the way up to the crystalline relays located within. The dolls would then get to work on the crystal, shaping their hands into hammers and smashing bits away until the pyramid was partially disabled.
Once that was done, they would hook a connection up to the crystal which in turn allowed Martin to begin taking over from within. It was far easier for him to repair crystals damaged by hammers than ones blown apart with crystal bombs—hence the care with which the dolls disabled their targets.
In the end, the allies were able to push the front line fifty miles back before the rogues returned in force. The allies retreated back to the safe zone just outside their control radius, shifting their camps and fortifying their new positions.
More important, however, was the fact that Martin now controlled a grand total of twenty-four additional pyramids while the allied army deactivated seventy-three pyramids before the rogue swarm managed to catch up to them.
Not only that, but Martin’s dolls were already laying down the foundation for three extra pyramids.
One of the pyramid sites was located in the northern reaches of the Qleb Sier
ra, amid snow-capped mountains rich in usable clay. Another site was inside a miasma-choked valley that hid caverns containing crystals used for both bombs and pyramid cores.
His eyeballs also discovered another site of clay in the Grass Seas, one nestled conveniently close to the borders between the Empire and the territories claimed by the Grass Peoples. These resources would be much easier to extract now that he could build pyramids on top of them—pyramids that would serve as mining, storage, and manufacturing hubs.
As for the war effort, he decided to pull back on walker production and focus instead on dolls and cow-boxes. He could form at most six hundred and ninety-two walkers a day from the one hundred and seventy-three production vats spread out in his original facilities.
The primary production facility located in the Leizhu Swamp could manufacture the most walkers—four hundred a day—but it was also the furthest away from the conflict. It would take nearly one and a half weeks for the walkers to run non-stop toward the frontline.
Not only that, but focusing on walkers would slow down production of dolls that could have been building new pyramids and extracting resources instead.
This was why he planned to leave most of the walker production to the pyramids he captured from the rogues, focusing on supplying them with much-needed clay from his reserves up north.
These rogue pyramids were only half the size of the core pyramid in the Qleb Sierra and were downright tiny when compared to the factory pyramid in the Leizhu Swamp. Each of these smaller pyramids could only accommodate ten regular production vats, along with ten large generators that were easily modified to accommodate his pnevmatic wavelengths.
He did, however, possess twenty-four of the smaller pyramids. Their combined industrial output matched that of his existing facilities, and this wasn’t even counting the other ‘dead’ pyramids—the ones with bombed-out relay cores.
Those would take longer to fix up, but he would definitely occupy them once he finished repairing and integrating the twenty-four pyramids already in his possession.
These captured pyramids also unlocked new schematics for his production vats: those of androsphinxes and hieracosphinxes.
If he wanted to, he could begin producing the vicious constructs and deploy them under his command. He chose not to for the moment, since he really didn’t want to confuse his allies by sending copies of their enemies to fight alongside them.
Even if he marked them by, say, painting them over or covering them with mandala patterns, their brawling capabilities did not mesh well with the organized lines of the allied army. They would be more hindrance than help in such situations.
And besides, hieracos would be ill-suited to fight against their brethren. His sphinxes would match the sphinxes of the rogues one-for-one, but the rogues could produce far more hieracos than he could. It would be a losing proposition with his current industrial output.
No, walkers were far more effective against the rogues since they could fight from the safety of the borders with long-shafted weapons. They’d be able to take down far more rogues than sphinxes brawling against their rogue counterparts.
The curious thing was that two of the captured pyramids contained only a single production vat each. These two vats, however, were far larger than the vats contained in other pyramids—even the vats in his original pyramids.
These vats were designed specifically to shape the towering androsphinxes, which could only be formed from within the bowels of the colossal vats before climbing out with their own power.
Using these titanic constructs would be a game-changer in the fight against the rogues. They were big, tough, and powerful creatures that the allied army could definitely use in pushing back the endless tide of rogue constructs.
They could serve as valuable siegebreakers, rampaging through the rogue army and opening breaches for his constructs and the allied army to rush through. They could also go toe-to-toe with their rogue counterparts, screening them while the smaller walkers and humans handled the hieracos.
The sphinxes did, however, require an exceptional amount of time and resources to form.
No, scratch that; the newly-acquired pyramids needed tons of clay that Martin didn’t have quick and easy access to in the desolate Wastes.
Even the rogue pyramids were fed by a constant stream of dolls waddling across the desert, bringing clay in from sources beyond the horizon—probably thousands of miles away from the front lines.
The Wastes were, after all, a rocky, sandy wasteland with few available natural resources.
This resource bottleneck was why he didn’t bother building walkers from the pyramids in the Qleb Sierra and Leizhu Swamp. It would take far too long to amass walkers and send them to the fighting.
It would be much more efficient to build more dolls and cow-boxes to mine clay from the various reserves around the continent, bring them to the captured rogue pyramids near the front line.
He also planned to build more eyeballs to hunt around for usable resources.
Now that he could build pyramids from the ground-up, he would have a much easier time exploiting whatever resources his eyeballs could find.
He didn’t limit his search to just clay and crystals; he also kept a sharp eye out for things that the peoples of the land could use.
Metals, rare earths, rivers, aquifers, potential farmland—he could set up pyramids near these places, either extract the resources himself or provide shelter to those willing to settle these untamed lands.
He also utilized another nearby source of raw materials for his expanded production: the rogues themselves.
The walkers he built to gradually reinforce the allied army not only helped fight the rogues but also used long rakes to pull in the remnants of their fallen enemies. Dolls would then break them down, vacuum the remains, and bring them to the nearest activated pyramids.
Martin would then use these extra resources to fuel his insatiable appetite for clay—bringing even more of his own constructs into play even sooner.
This was how Martin restarted his campaign against the rogues.
***
The rogues managed to push the allied army back twice in the first month, reclaiming and reactivating twenty of their pyramids in the process.
Martin managed to build two thousand extra walkers to help the allies during this time, spending the bulk of his resources and industrial output on dolls and cow-boxes. These constructs immediately began ferrying resources to the frontline, where his newly-acquired pyramids lay waiting for repair and resupply.
He also devoted most of his existing walkers to help secure and patrol the roads connecting the continent together. They hunted down the bandits plaguing them and securing vital trade routes that connected the Empire, the Sovereignty, the Dominion, and the various emirates in the Bashri Basin together.
Not only that, but his walkers helped around with the villages and towns drained of manpower by the war effort. Their aid ranged from handling patrols and mediating disputes to planting crops and tending to the animals—really anything and everything that would help stabilize order within the settlements.
The rogues pushed the allied army back only once in the second month, their progress slowed as Martin firmly established his supply lines and finished repairing all twenty-four pyramids on the front.
He now possessed enough dolls and cow-boxes to provide his newly-captured pyramids with the clay they needed to begin continuous production of walkers and ceramic arms.
This allowed him to begin churning out walkers right on the frontlines, augmenting the tired allies and diverting some pressure off the hardest-hit sections of the line.
The cow-boxes also reopened a steady supply chain from the cities to the frontline, providing the allied army with a regular supply of food, water, weapons, and equipment. They no longer had to scrimp and save on their resources and fought more vigorously as a result.
The cow-box supply lines thus restored th
e allied army’s ability to fight further away from civilization, as they were no longer constrained by the limitations borne by fleshly beasts of burden.
The allied army held its ground for the entirety of the third month—the first time they had done so since the rogues began their march.
Martin now fielded an army of forty-two thousand walkers, with eight towering androsphinxes supporting the allied army. The big cats not only served as excellent cavalry in their own right, sweeping masses of rogue hieracosphinxes away with their mighty paws, but they also served as mobile towers for Taiyo samurai archers and chi-flinging martial artists to more effectively lay down covering fire.
These constructs, along with the aid of the Great Horde, added enough weight for the allied army to successfully resist the endless swarm of the rogues.
Indeed, the rogues still fielded millions of constructs across the land, but Martin’s walkers and the allied army began inflicting enough casualties to successfully hold their own.
The fourth month saw the allies steadily push back the rogues, actually take territory instead of losing it every now and then.
Martin finished building all the dolls and cow-boxes he needed, as well as the new pyramids atop his new clay and crystal mines. This allowed him to switch over to walker production, dedicating all of his existing production facilities to the task.
Not only that, but his dolls also finished repairing fourteen additional rogue pyramids, fully replacing their shattered relay cores and extending his control over them. Thanks to all this, he managed to field eighty thousand walkers and twenty-two androsphinxes at the end of the fourth month.
The fifth month is where things really turned around for the allies.
Martin’s supply lines brought in non-stop shipments of clay and crystal, fueling the production vats of eighty-three captured rogue pyramids. That’s seven hundred fifty production vats churning out three thousand walkers a day, along with eight mega-vats each forming one sphinx per week.