13
He pulled the trigger as hard as he could, sending the magnum crags soaring through the air, and embedding themselves in the sealing valves of gas. The crag rounds detonated, shaking loose several joints and supports from the plate armor of the Krav IOS. The Krav stumbled once again, and then as it's head came down, it sent a stream of molten iron arcing after Rhiem.
Rhiem's eyes filled with rage as he merely sidestepped the torrential fire. He raised the Fallen Tigress again, aiming for the vulnerable and weak joints holding the plates of the belly together of the Krav.
With each shot, the armor weakened more and more. Metal alloy started creaking, and wires and steel pistons started to bend and break.
One final shot. And then the thickest part of the armor on the Krav, the belly, fell wide open.
Rhiem's eyes widened in shock, but the rage in his eyes did not abate.
As if he, or she, or it, was crucified, the Archeries Operator hung a hidden compartment behind the area that was once covered by the belly plate. Arms and legs were merged horrendously into the machine itself, making the Archeries one with the machine. The chest was peeled of skin, and then screwed onto a huge spine-like metal support, that shot spikes into the Archeries' back.
Although the thing was naked, the body and the face were so transfigured that the Archeries looked more monster than man.
A Soul gear was affixed directly over the Archeries' heart, pulsing with his heartbeat.
A solid metal mask covered the face from neck to scalp.
Krav IOS: Kravatsky's Integrated Operating System.
Integrated to hell, Rhiem thought.
It screamed.
It hurts.
It burns.
The air, it burns.
Rhiem crouched down a bit, recoiling from the wave of emotions he felt from the Archeries. Torture, pain, death, and rot all bundled into one and shoved itself into Rhiem's mind. He raised his gun.
The Archeries readied another beam.
They fired at the same time; Rhiem had to duck to avoid the stream of fire, and missed his shot. He charged towards the most vulnerable area, the belly, the operator itself. The Archeries screamed a challenge at Rhiem, and then swung a massive steel wing at him. The huge blade of death was merely given passing notice to Rhiem's advancing form.
He vaulted over the slamming appendage as if it were a fence, and then planted himself on the large expanse of the wing. He both crouched down to aim a shot, and dodged an extremely lucky beam of fire that skimmed the walls, and left melted steel all over the place.
He flipped up the fallen piece of the Krav IOS's belly, deflecting the next arcing beam of heat. The shot slammed into the plate steel, and rocketed in a spray behind Rhiem. Pieces of heat ignited small areas of the air, leaving the atmosphere behind Rhiem look like it was partially lit on fire.
***
Riu ducked through a doorway, into a stairwell, and she ran as fast as she could up the spiraling stairway. The light of the doorway shone several flights above her. She took only a second to catch her breath before she started up again.
***
"Say goodbye." He shot the magnum rounds straight into the Archeries' abdomen. The man roared in rage, before his stomach exploded in a spray of metal implants and bone.
Rhiem nimbly leapt off the Krav IOS as it collapsed to the ground. Whining and groaning noises leaked out of the audio block at the mouth, growling softer and quieter as it's pilot died with it.
Rhiem turned back quickly to check on Noa's body.
"Noa..!"
He just turned when the machine behind him started up again. The shadow of the injured Krav IOS loomed over him, an iron megalith- and readied one last shot. This one was stronger than the last. This one would definitely kill him.
***
"Ah!" Riu came out the ramparts of the Fortress wall, finding what she was looking for-- The anti-armor turrets set up at the tops of the walls, unused. She slipped into the harness, glancing at all of the controls.
The inputs would have been foreign, even to the best Rubine gunner. But she--she, she KNEW the controls. They were of a subconscious nature.
Her fingers flew over the keys, striking unmarked buttons, and writing in code she never seen before.
The Archeries symbol, a Raven's feather set in a double-crescent background, lit up, and the Green-Blue HUD shone on the glass screen. Immediately, Riu twisted a lever, turning the turret 180 degrees to face the Krav IOS and Rhiem.
A lock-on symbol and a recognition symbol shone on Rhiem and the Krav, respectively. Riu slammed in some more inputs, and the symbols switched. She readied the first volley, letting the cross symbol over the Krav grow from blue, to crimson red. It was about to fire a huge beam.
He fingers curled over the triggers, and she fired.
90mm barrels thundered in the air, sending two electromagnetic rounds into the Krav IOS in two neat holes. Normally, this would not have done much damage, but Riu did something different. She aimed for the Operator.
***
The Operator turned to face a smoking hole, a half foot to the right of his head, in his precious Wyvoid machine. He turned to face the other hole, which took out his entire left shoulder.
"AGAHHH! HAHH! RAHH!"
THe Archeries started convulsing, slamming his good arm against his inputs and his keys.
In the midst of his random flailing, as a final death threos, the Archeries keyed the self-destruct switch.
Rhiem could hear the distinctive beeps of the self-destruct protocol amid the screams of the Archeries.
"Riu! Move! It's gonna blow!"
Riu leaned back to yank herself out of the turret, and started running.
KAM!
Rhiem got them to go ten paces before the explosion of the Krav IOS knocked them to the ground. The Krav IOS seemed to bend from the inside, and the it broke itself in two as a hidden charge of C4 tore the Wyvoid to pieces. These pieces flew all over the place, striking in the ground, in the walls around the courtyard, and towards Rhiem and Riu.
The injured Rhiem lifted himself up, and ~ow~ putting weight on his left arm. A slightly large piece of shrapnel stuck from his shoulder, sending waves of white-hot pain through his shoulder, and effectively stopping it from moving, but otherwise he was fine. He looked over to the still figure of Riu. She was just stunned.
Limping over, all the way to the ramparts, he pulled her up, letting her warmth comfort his pain. He would need to carry Noa's horrifically burned body as well. He got the point of pulling Riu's arm over his shoulder, before his arm gave out, and he collapsed.
Wouldn't be the first time, he thought.
He passed out.
Riu stood out by the tents. She gazed up to the sky, and let the first flakes of snow brush across her face.
Her squeal of surprise and delight traveled all the way to infirmary where Rhiem laid bandaged across the chest, and set on a small bed with a simple mattress. He pulled himself up on one arm, and smiled.
He brushed the tent flap aside, and made his way across the new snow to where Riu was playing.
He had on a half-smile, half-grimace from the pain in his shoulder as he called out to her.
"Your first winter?"
Riu looked back with the winning smile of living something for the first time. There was something in that smile that made Rhiem feel less tough.
"It's beautiful!" She pulled in the furry hooded jacket she had over her face and laughed. The scenery behind her was a deep, full blue, tinged by the glazing snow, and dimmed in the morning lights. Rhiem had on only his battered jacket, and the bandages around his waist and chest, but he felt fine in the biting cold.
He walked over to Riu and turned her around.
"It's usually snowy. You came in at the few months we have summer. Most of the time, it's freezing."
She looked back at him, surprised.
"Was it always like this? All cold?" She looked out at the freezing environment, and realized that it would remain so for the rest of the year, not until the next spring.
Rhiem wiped the frost from his face, he licked his dry lips, pondering the wisdom of telling Riu why winter dominated the year.
"It was the Archeries that brought the endless snow." Rhiem looked up to the east. "Ten years ago, it wasn't like this--until the Archeries set up base at Mount Et. He pointed out, aimed past the falling snow, past the tops of the tents, and past the high mountains of the Apals.
One huge mount, arced like a cliff, and soaring thousands of feet above the rest of the mountains, was obscured completely in a frigid could of frost. Yet a lone tip of black rock stuck out, in an area where it was so dry, no snow fell on it's faces, but it was still frigid and freezing.
"They sent a special Wyvoid--"
Riu took the time to rip her eyes away from Mount Et.
"The Dao Ku-Long. The Knife of Tears Dragon. It causes these harsh winters every year, claiming tens of thousands of people's lives every year in Rubina." Rhiem closed his eyes, and thought back to his textbooks back at the Military Academy. A fierce steel-black wyvoid--completely automated, and one of the most powerful.
"It was of original Sinoese design. One of the most powerful wyvoids in Archeria's entire armory."
***
It strode on the black, freezing rock of the summit of Mount Et. The Dao Ku-Long sensed yet another waning of the winter storms in the southern districts of Rubina.
It shook it's wings, and a whirring could be heard through the chest of the wyvoid. Immediately, the pressure in the skies over the south districts nearly halved. Snow doubled it's ferocity, and the people below suffered even more from the cold. Winter was an indiscriminate killer. The same effect of a nuclear strike, but lasted longer.
The closely fitted pitch-black-steel armor of the Dao Ku-Long slid over one another perfectly, sending screeches of microbes of steel out to mix with the continual howling of the blizzard around it. The bat-like wings flapped, sending puffs of airs all around it, forming another armor of highly pressurized air. The face, a face of the evil Sinoese dragon-god of the West, was of a that of a proud lord, cruel, yet majestic.
It roared, to no one, and nothing. that it was king of this summit.
And again and again, no one stood to protest.
***
Rhiem stood, thinking of how the Dao Ku-Long fought.
"It uses rapid depressurization to rain a freezing hell over our country. This depressurization freezes anything in it's path, and immediately goes away as the area re-pressurizes. Causing an invisible, instant knife of cold that slashes through anything at close range, and a blanket of winter storms from afar."
Rhiem started shivering.
"We've tried to kill it. Nobody has even gotten to the summit. The Dao just blasts or freezes anyone who even tries to get on. And it just blasts us every year with those winds. Well, we got close once--" Abruptly, the sound of crunching snow cut him off. The Veteran, with his metal limbs, was weaving across the tents and the snow, over to Rhiem and Riu.
"Comrades, are you resting well?"
Riu nodded, while Rhiem unconsciously rubbed his bandages.
"Yeah, we're fine." The Veteran nodded, and stooped down closer.
"Listen, I am holding a conference over at the command tent. You and Riu are invited. Meet us over in four hours."
Rhiem stared right into the Veteran's face. He moved closer, until they were face to face. His voice was a careful whisper.
"You had better not be getting Riu into more trouble." The Veteran was a steady whisper right back.
"Do you want revenge for that Noa or not? His body was never found--do you really want to let the ones responsible get away?"
Rhiem felt all the more icy in his belly. Noa.
"Gah! Fine."
***
ater that day, Rhiem pulled into the large, framed tent, with Riu following close by. Hunters, all of them elite, were gathered on the mats set on the ground, with the Veteran taking up the center. Rhiem silently counted all of them. Over two dozen of the most elite hunters involved in the Apal Fortress invasion.
The Veteran stood in front the gathered hunters.
"Hunters! Fellow Comrades! I have gathered you all here today for a mission. No doubt each one of you have noticed that yet again, the blizzards of the Dao Ku-Long has begun. It'll be the sixty-fifth winter that will have decimated our peoples." The Veteran gripped his prosthetic limbs. "But I have gathered you here today to end the terror. We will destroy the Dao Ku-Long once and for all."
Immediately, murmurs and grumbling came slipping out of the crowd of hunters. One of them, a small black man with a close-cropped cornflower for hair and only one eye, spoke up first.
"The Dao Ku-Long targets Rubina. Since when have we owed Rubina anything, anything at all?"
The Veteran sighed, and stared straight back at the one-eyed man.
"No. We don't owe them a single thing--but use your head, man-- although the Dao Ku-Long targets the heavier areas of Rubina, we're the convenient collateral damage. Every year, more of a percentage of our people die than in Rubina thanks to the indiscriminate actions of Archeria."
The Veteran looked out to all the men and women gathered there.
"We're not doing this for them--we're doing it for our pride and safety of our and their peoples."
The black hunter didn't say another word, and leaned back on his chair, arms crossed.
A young women, with olive skin and two thin ponytails set off on the left back on her head, spoke up next.
"How are we going to get to the top? Everyone who's tried has either been frozen or blasted off. I don't plan on losing half of us here before we even get a chance to fire a shot."
The Veteran grit his teeth.
"For that...I have requested some help."
The ponytailed-hunter raised her eyebrows.
"Who?"
The tent flap burst open. A jet black military boot stepped in, followed by a medium built man with a heroic, yet stoic face. This heroic man was followed by two Rubine Elite bodyguards, dressed in pitch-black body armor, and with wide, face-hiding helmets.
Captain Herus Auder, Rhiem's captain.
"Me."
He turned to focus on Rhiem.
"You've been doing alright, have you-- traitor?"
"Better than being a teenage girl's executioner."
"We can argue this all day. But I have better things to do with my time." The Captain turned to the Veteran. "Well, have you convinced your men to join us in our assault? Our Vertical Take-Off Transports are ready to lift-off."
"What do you mean, 'join'? I was under the assumption that I would commit warriors, and you would provide the transport and air cover."
The Captain smiled.
"I brought along some...help."
The Veteran pushed past the Captain and his bodyguards to look out the tent.
A hundred Rubine storm-troopers greeted him with slience. They were all clothed in white robes, and had snow-combat rifles, even the metal of the gun was sprayed with white digital camo. They gave the storm-troopers the appearance of flickering in and out of vision in the falling snow. Five VJTTs, Vertical Jet-Takeoff Transports, with their engines humming and glowing bright, stood behind them.
The Veteran whirled back to face the Captain.
"This is too many, and completely inappropriate! What made you think you could just bring along a hundred men over here to screw around with us?! My men are enough!"
The Captain faced the Veteran square in the eyes.
"Relax. They are here for insurance. You'll need all the help you can get destroying the Dao Ku-Long." The Captain waved his bodyguards with him, who filed out of the tent first, leaving the Captain alone in the tent for an instant.
"Oh--And Rhiem?" Rhiem's eyes narrowed at the familiar tone. "Take this." The Captain chucked a large blade, straight at Rhiem. Rhiem caught it a split-second before it impaled him in the chest. "You forgot your machete."
Smirking slightly, Captain Herus left the tent, leaving Rhiem alone with his old weapon.
"..."
He turned.
Rhiem struck the tent support with his fist so hard, that the tempered steel actually buckled a half-foot, before coming to a creaky rest.
Riu could only look on with concern as he saw Rhiem's blood flow from out the knuckles in his hand, and watch the blood flow from out his furious, pale face.