Based on the state of the warriors every time they came back from an expedition, Ashen had expected them to be swarmed by Narkals from the start.
But three days had passed now, and the only enemy they'd had to confront was the harsh environment.
"Halt."
The group of a hundred finally came to a stop before a large futuristic city, or what remained of one. A more apt description would be unsalvageable ruins. Ashen moved to the front beside his father to get a better look from the elevated ground.
"Is it deserted?"
"Normally, it would be," Adam answered without taking his eyes off the distant ruins. "Until now, we've used this place as a midpoint to rest and camp, but..."
He gestured to the side, and Ashen saw one of his brothers holding a piece of parchment. When he focused his eyes on it, he was able to read the contents.
There are enemies in the ruins ahead.
The words were probably written by the man himself, but what followed had nothing to do with him: the parchment began wrinkling in on itself, then the skin rotted and eventually crumbled away on its own.
"Divination."
Adam answered his son's unasked question before adding, "Most of our enemies have ways to shield themselves from it, and so do we. But there is one enemy that's vulnerable to it, or rather, one that doesn't even acknowledge its existence..."
"Who?"
Adam's expression turned colder. "Those scraps of metal... the mechanical force."
◉◉◉
KRRRAAAA-BOOOOM!
The ground jumped under Ashen's feet.
For a split second, he thought something had fallen from the sky. Then he saw the pillar of white light lancing out from the heart of the ruins, cutting straight through the spot where three warriors had been standing a moment ago.
The rock it touched melted into glowing slag, and the air screamed as it rushed back to fill the space the beam had left behind.
A destructive beam, fired from somewhere deep inside the ruins.
Ashen didn't remember deciding to move. He was simply behind a slab of broken stone, his back pressed against it and his spear clutched to his chest, while his ears rang so badly that the world sounded like it was underwater.
The three warriors had dodged, but the hill they had been standing on now had a trench carved into it, long enough to bury the entire group.
He peeked over the edge of his cover, and what he saw looked like the end of the world rather than a battlefield.
A second beam came, then a third. After that it was pointless to count. The ruins lit up from dozens of points at once, and the beams didn't travel in straight lines as they should have; they bent.
A beam would shoot toward the sky, strike something glinting atop a collapsed tower, then snap downward at an inconceivable angle toward a warrior who had thought he was safe behind a wall.
And through all of it, the warriors kept running forward.
Only moments ago, when Adam had named their enemy, the cautious and steady approach they had kept for three days was thrown away entirely.
There was no scouting and no careful encirclement. Adam had simply drawn his sword and given a single order.
"Everyone. All in. Now."
His explanation had come hastily, shouted over his shoulder while the warriors were already spreading out.
In short, their eyes were better than theirs. Far better.
From this distance, Adam judged they had already been spotted, and there's no 'maybe' about it.
One would wonder then… why haven't they attacked?
"Because they're preparing to kill all of us at once." Adam's voice had been flat, as if it was a common occurrence for him. "That's how they fight. They don't skirmish. They wait until they calculate their opponents' death to be a certainty. Until then, they build, and then they wipe you out in a single go. The more time you give them, the more lethal they become. So we don't give them any."
Which meant that this… the melting hills, the bending light and the screaming air… was them unprepared.
Ashen swallowed.
The devastation being hurled at them right now was nowhere near the full power of whatever was hiding in those ruins.
◉
He finally saw them when the warriors closed the distance.
Ashen had imagined something like the golems he'd read about in fantasy novel books: big, slow, clumsy things of stone and iron. What came pouring out from between the shattered buildings destroyed that prejudice.
The first kind were tall and thin, nearly three times the height of a man, their bodies made of blackened metal ribs wrapped around a hollow center.
Chains hung from their arms, and at the end of each chain swung a lens, like a censer swinging in a temple. When one of the lenses flared white, a beam came out of it.
But it was the second kind that explained the bending light.
They were smaller things, hunched and many-limbed, perched on every high point of the ruins. Each held a polished mirror of strange dark glass in front of its body like a shield. When a beam struck one, the mirror tilted, and the light went somewhere else.
Sometimes it went to another mirror, then ricocheted to another. A single beam could pass through five of them before it found its target, coming from a direction no one could possibly have predicted.
Censers that fired. Mirrors that aimed. Together, they turned the entire ruins into a single weapon that could hit any angle.
Then came the ones who walked out to meet the warriors head on.
They were shaped like men, but only in outline. Their frames were hollow metal ribs and joints with nothing between them, wrapped in so many chains that they clinked like bells with every step. Where a heart should be, each of them carried something in its chest cavity, held in a little cage of wire.
Ashen squinted, then wished he hadn't.
It was a skull. A human skull… Every single one of them carried a skull in its chest.
"Penitents," a voice said beside him, and Ashen nearly jumped out of his skin.
It was Orin, the brother who had held the divination parchment earlier, crouching beside him with his face pale, though the grin at having frightened his ever-composed little brother was plain to see.
"That's what we call them. Don't look at the skulls too long. It'll only make you angry, and angry spells are sloppy spells."
"Whose are they?"
"Whoever came before us. But don't worry, none of them belong to our family. We make sure to always recover our corpses." Orin answered the unspoken question.
The Penitents met the front line of warriors, and Ashen felt a sense of dissonance as he observed.
They were fast… but not fast like a beast is fast, but in a way that felt wrong.
A warrior swung his axe at one, and the Penitent had already moved before the swing began, as though it had read the man's mind. It stepped exactly far enough to let the axe pass by a finger's width, then lashed out with its chains. The warrior barely managed to throw himself back, his shoulder torn open.
Ashen did not take long to realize where the wrongness was coming from.
First, their movement may look fast, but it was mostly thanks to the unnatural angles the limbs kept making, unlike what the human frame they took suggested they could make.
Like they were calculating the most optimal path regardless of what the joints could produce.
And secondly…
'They weren't reacting. They fought as if they were predicting every move…' Ashen though grimly.'
"Looks like you realized it?" Orin chimed from the side when he saw Ashen's changing expression. "Those metal scraps are using the brain they embedded as a tool to calculate and predict the most optimal path to slaughter us."
Ashen let a hollow laugh. "When I first saw them, I thought they'd surely be using some super technology processors to function, but what's this…? Their processors turned out to be human brains?"
"Well… you can take it as a compliment." Orin shrugged, looking completely unconcerned, "It means our heads are better than anything they could come up with on their own, kekeke…"
Ashen glanced to the side, realizing that this big brother of his is also a little touched in the head. Not that he minded.
Another warrior was not as lucky as the one before him. A Penitent's chain wrapped around his ankle, and before he could cut it, a beam bent through three mirrors and came down on him from directly above.
He survived only because the brother beside him tackled him away, and even then, half of his shield was gone, melted clean through.
Then Adam reached the front line, and the battlefield changed.
He moved through the storm of light like a man walking through rain he could see coming.
A beam would bend toward him, and he'd simply not be there anymore, a single step to the side, a half-turn of his shoulder, a sudden drop to one knee. Ashen realized his father was reading the mirrors, watching which way each one tilted before it caught the light.
A Penitent came at him. It had already predicted the path of Adam's sword, and it shifted its body to slip past the swing.
But the sword that came down was not the sword it had predicted.
Mid-swing, the blade grew. It went from the size of a large greatsword to something as long as a house, the edge stretching outward so fast that the air cracked. The Penitent's movement was meant to dodge a sword, so when it was greeted with a colossal slab of metal, its fate was sealed.
It was cut in half from shoulder to hip, and the chains around it scattered like broken necklaces.
Adam didn't stop. He swung again, and this time the sword shrank back down before it struck, becoming light enough to whip around in a blur, then swelling with weight the instant it made contact. The next Penitent was crushed into the ground as if a hill had been dropped on it.
Their predictions were perfect; Adam already knew. They were perfect at calculating the path of a weapon, so all he had to do was make his weapon not have a fixed path. Its size and weight could change at any moment, mid-motion, on nothing but Adam's whim.
You can't calculate a thing that is decided only by a man's will.
Ashen watched his father turn Penitent after Penitent into scrap metal, and for a moment, he thought maybe this wouldn't be so bad.
Then another flash of white came from the ruins, so large that it dwarfed every beam before it, and a whole section of the battlefield simply ceased to exist. The warriors there had seen it coming, barely, and scattered. One of them didn't get all of himself out in time. Ashen heard the scream, and then the healers were running.
"It's comparable to Catastrophe-class Narkals at least…" Ashen muttered under his breath.
He had wanted to fight on the front line. He'd had that thought for three days straight. But now, watching how fast everything moved, how a single misstep meant being deleted from the world, he understood that if he went up there, someone would die protecting him.
So he did what he could.
He closed his eyes for a breath and built the spell in his mind.
Knowledge first: he knew how wind behaved, how it could be compressed, how pressure built behind a narrow point and released all at once. Imagination wrapped around that knowledge and gave it a shape: a spear made of air, twisting on itself, tight enough to drill through metal.
Then intent. He looked at a Censer swinging its lens toward one of his brothers and let himself want it gone. He poured that wanting into the shape.
Then mana. He drew it up from within himself and threaded it through the shape, carefully, the way he had already done a million times for years. Sloppy weaving bled power, and a refined weave held every bit of it.
Ashen opened his eyes and threw.
The wind spear screamed across the battlefield and struck the Censer square in its hollow chest. The metal ribs buckled inward, the lens chain snapped, and the tall thing toppled over with a noise like a collapsing bell tower.
"Nice!" someone shouted from the backline.
Ashen grinned despite himself, built the spell again and threw it at another Censer.
This time, something strange happened.
Halfway to the target, his spell frayed. The spiral of wind began to come undone at the edges, as though someone had found the loose end of a thread and was pulling on it. By the time it reached the Censer, it was barely half as strong. It dented the metal and nothing more.
Ashen frowned. Had he messed the spell somehow?
He focused harder, built it a third time, more carefully with more mana and more concentration, and threw.
The spell didn't fray this time.
It never reached its target at all, because a spear of wind came screaming back toward the backline from the ruins, aimed straight at him.
Ashen threw himself to the side. The wind spear drilled into the slab of stone he'd been hiding behind and punched straight through it, leaving a hole the size of his head.
He stared at the hole.
That was his spell. The exact same shape with the exact same twist.
And worse, he had felt it as it passed him. The intent woven into it had brushed against his senses as it went by, and it was his. His own desire to see the thing in front of him gone, thrown back at him with a force far stronger.
"Ashen!" Orin grabbed his collar and dragged him behind new cover. "Seems like another troublesome scrap of metal is hiding there; for now, don't use the same spell more than twice!"
"They—that was mine—"
"I know. Look."
Orin pointed toward the ruins, and Ashen finally noticed the third kind.
They hung in the high, broken windows of the ruined towers like spiders. Each one had a dozen thin arms and a cluster of lenses for a face, all of them turned toward the battle, constantly clicking and refocusing. They didn't seem to be doing anything besides just watching.
And whenever someone cast a spell, Ashen could see their arms twitching, as if they were writing something down.
"Copyists," Orin said. "First time they see a spell, they record it. Second time, they understand it well enough to unravel it. Third time…" He gestured at the hole in the stone. "They give it back to you."
'What the fuck…'
Ashen realized at once… Every spell they used was a gift to the enemy.