What Lies Beneath (CasualVelociraptor x Zaval)

[CasualVelociraptor]

November 19th, 1893.

Five months, six days since the Raid on Radiant...

(Or the Sack of Radiant, depending on which side of this Final War you were on).

The Caledorian Empire has just suffered a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Orelkortop Valley. The Imperial Army’s relentless reversal of the Ananki Confederation’s gains and advance into its vast, heavily wooded territory was halted, at least in this one place, by an ambush from the ridge above. The Empire fights on, carefully choosing more even ground and increasing air and seaborne bombardments, but still, thousands of broken human bodies and countless wrecked machines poison foreign ground with blood and blackened whale oil, enraging the elves at this desecration.

What the Empire didn’t realize until yesterday was that the 101st Armored Division was spotted by a massive contingent of the Confederate Army on the Western Front at the Vinkanaus River Plain. They have the upper hand in technology and dragons are dwindling faster and take longer to replace than airships and aeroplanes, meaning the humans will soon have total air superiority. But even with air support coming soon, the humans are outnumbered more than 3 to 1 here by furious elves wielding powerful magic and defending their home turf.

The stakes could not be higher. If the Empire loses, then they fear the elves could turn this into a rout once winter slows the invasion further and force them to sue for peace. If the Confederation is broken here, nothing will stop the humans from trampling every village elves have ever known and loved, and churning up all of nature to feed the Imperial war machine’s hunger for their capital of Fort Anankan.

The Caledorians, determined not to repeat their failure, have an ace in the hole, hidden in the back of their line. But humanity might regret what it finds when deploying these new weapons...​

Viktoriyanda “Riya” Thompson could barely hear what Commander Kira Hammond was saying in her stern voice from atop Riya’s perch on the Verdekranger at the back of the line. Some lofty nonsense about the unbreakable strength of the Empire, being the monsters that eat monsters, revenge, never accepting defeat, breaking the arrogance of elves here, blah blah blah.

She was also too busy trying to shield her eyes from the intense noonday light of Emada’s twin suns as it streamed through the trees and lit up her pale skin and shock of white hair with dark goggles and her arms. Scrabbling and surviving in the sewers of Radiant, the city everybody was so eager to die for, against all manner of monster and monstrous men from an early age made her sensitive like that. But she wasn’t one for speeches anyway. She was an engineer, and liked practical results.

Instead, her ears pricked when Quade, a nutty but brilliant old man claiming to be five hundred years old and wearing the plate armor to prove it, spoke softly:

“If I die today, I die a happy man because I am fighting right alongside all of you. Now let’s get to work.”

With the order of battle set and neither side willing to surrender, fifty thousand elves, many riding dragons, charged the Imperial line and pelted it with ancient spells, arrows and bestial fire.

The Battle of Vinkanaus was joined.

As soon as the commander gave the signal, the line of soldiers dug in to their trenches to fire their chainguns and the Goliaths also stood statuesque, resisting white hot dragon fire with ease, whistling from their smokestacks and blaring with an unholy roar. Then they proved why they were the Empire’s most feared weapon by raining cannon fire, even more chainguns, and focused sunlight upon them. And that was before the planned reinforcements from nearly a hundred light airships and aeroplanes stationed at nearby Base Camp Campbell.

The distraction gave Riya’s Verdekranger, one of twenty, the opening it needed to burrow deep into the earth. Riya held her breath, put on her gas mask (for who knew what deadly surprises awaited them) and gripped the railing on the monster she rode like her life depended on it, because it did; if she fell off it would be the end in a single blink. And she knew no proof of any life beyond this one.

Even though the sound of battle was reduced to a dull murmur and a shaking in the ground above, they were not out of danger yet as they pierced the roof of a dwarfish tunnel a hundred feet below the surface. Riya noted that the clockwork-reinforced wooden beams that supported it were at least 12,000 years old, dating to the dwarves’ extinction, already shaken by their landing and probably decaying rapidly. A stray bomb could chew too deep and then obliterate them. If there was a gas pocket from ancient mining activities, a single bullet could spark a mine fire. The enemy probably had teams of tunnelers of their own, perhaps even a few albino dragons; they’d used these tactics before. And a few weeks ago an elder worm ate an entire battlefield’s worth of humans and elves, its emergence cracking the earth for miles and remaining an obstacle until it was bombed back into the Void.

Sometimes Riya was called the downer of the group for thinking of and explaining such things to them, but she was also the only one that had survived (apart from Quade, but she wondered if that man might be charmed) for the entirety of this war. So she kept her headlamp on a swivel, checked the coolant, oil and steam gauges out of the corner of her eye, and hovered one hand each over the “burrower” auto scattergun and her “chattergun” machine pistol that hung on each of her hips.