"Though the Battle of the Rhine was the first recorded instance of supersoldiers fighting in an organized manner (the events of the Eclipsed Liberation being a special case), the Defense of Kheriaha was still the first time the Imperial army went into battle expecting to fight an enemy possessing its own form of Elder Magic.
The forces of the Imperial Southern Expedition (ISE), under the overall command of General von Romel, amounted to two full divisions of the Imperial Army, along with two scores of Werwölfe (made up of twenty Phantom-types, fifteen Mirage-types, five Spectre-types, and Captain Uger, at the time the only instance of the Whisper-type), five Untoten (all of whom had participated in the Battle of the Rhine and had ingested Endlose Nacht to fight the Eikons), two companies of soldiers equipped with M-912s, and a demi-company of six aerial mages trained in the use of the D-24 computation orb, led by Captain Weiss. All Division Y assets were under the command of Colonel von Lergen.
Aerial reconnaissance was limited to aerial mages, the only ones capable of navigating the supernatural sandstorm covering the Heresiarch's advance. Even they struggled to get a clear picture of the enemy force, their estimates ranging from four hundreds to over a thousand. This was due both to the storm obscuring visibility and to the unconventional nature of the enemy, whose lack of formation made the standard techniques for evaluating the numbers of a modern army all but useless.
At the time, there were some among the Division Y contingent who argued that an agreement might be reached with the Heresiarch. As the Director had recruited the Nazzadi to the Empire, they believed the Heresiarch and his troops could be persuaded to join the Empire's ranks, despite the innate hatred the Werwölfe felt for them. However, events soon proved that such would be impossible."
Excerpt from the final Division Y report and tactical analysis of the battle between elements of the Imperial Southern Expedition and the hordes of the Nameless City, added to the records on December 5th, 1925.
October 6th, 1925 – Bardad Desert
Weiss could hear the nomads' screams as he flew, and cursed himself for his powerlessness.
The desert tribe had been small, barely a score of people who had just lived their lives as their ancestors had for generations. When they'd seen the skies darkening, they had gone to ground, erecting their tents and preparing to weather the storm. Despite its unnatural potency, they might have succeeded at that – but nobody could have been prepared for the monsters that marched in its shadow.
Now most of them were dead, and those who yet lived surely wished they weren't. For, living and dead, all had become food for the hungry horrors of the Nameless City. The monsters advanced without anything even vaguely resembling a supply train : as far as Weiss and the other aerial mages had been able to determine, they were sustaining themselves by eating those of their own number that couldn't defend themselves. He had no idea how many had already fallen to these grotesque acts of cannibalism, but clearly it hadn't been enough to sate their monstrous hunger.
Weiss wished he was back there, fighting. But he knew this wasn't a battle he could win. Ten, twenty of these fiends – perhaps he could take those down, so long as he stayed in the air. But there were scores of them. And maybe he could still kill them all – they didn't appear to have ranged attacks after all. But even if he'd done that, he couldn't have saved the nomads. All he could've done was grant them a quicker death than the one they'd gotten at the hands of the fiends.
He would still have done so, if not for the burden he was carrying away from the fight. He and the other two mages of his scout group were each carrying two children in their arms. They'd had to knock them unconscious : they'd been hysterical, and might have fallen off.
When they had found the fight, the nomads had been fighting to keep the monsters away from these children, desperately offering up their lives so that they might have a chance of escape. Acting on impulse and without orders, Weiss had moved to pick them up, his companions following his lead without question.
It was a small thing, but making sure the adults' sacrifice wasn't in vain was the only thing they could do. He'd no idea what they'd do with the kids, but he knew he'd never have forgiven himself if he had left them behind.
This was what the Allied Kingdom had unwittingly unleashed upon Kemet. This was what the Major was afraid of, the reason why she'd put so many restrictions on Division Y's activities, why so many spells, rituals and artefacts remained locked away in the vaults of Castle Schwartzstein because they didn't meet her exacting standards of effectiveness and, far more importantly, reliability. Weiss knew more about the reasons for her rules than most – he'd lost his right arm fighting one of the things that'd manifested in the castle due to someone thinking they knew better than her, after all – but this was still a sobering reminder.
We will stop them, he swore to himself, forcing himself not to tighten his grip on the two unconscious children he carried.
We will kill them all for this.
"I should come to assist you in person."
"No, Major. You know that Operation Enigma requires your presence in the Empire at this time."
"Hundreds of man-eating monsters led by an undead sorcerer marching toward a city of more than a million inhabitants seems to me like a situation that should overrides the needs of Operation Enigma, Colonel !"
"Perhaps. I certainly am glad that you think so. But what if this happens again elsewhere ? You cannot be everywhere at once, Major. We need to make sure that your presence isn't an absolute requirement to victory, or else what even is the point of having an Empire ? Besides, it's unlikely you could make it in time to help, unless you have already managed to get Projekt S working again. Is that the case ?"
"… No. We are still months at best from repairing the gateway or building a new one, and that's if we can secure the necessary materials, which isn't looking likely."
"See ? Even if you push yourself to the limit, and somehow don't draw the attention of every ship in the Inner Sea with a functioning magical detector, you'll still arrive too late. No, we will have to deal with this on our own. Besides, the only way your presence could shift the battlefield would be if you used the Kosmosblut again, and we have other options before we resort to that again so soon. Now, if you have any advice for how to deal with the situation, that would be welcome."
"Of course, sir. First, I suggest that you …"
Excerpt of the long-range communication between Major Tanya Degurechaff and Colonel Eric von Lergen, done through the assistance of Captain Johann-Mattäus Weiss, October 6th, 1925.
"Following the discovery of their cannibalistic appetites, the creatures of the Nameless City were given the name of Fiends, and the decision was made to ensure their complete eradication.
Without hard data on their capabilities, General Romel chose to assume they were the equivalent of the Werwölfe. In hindsight, this would prove to be over-cautious, but the General can hardly be blamed for the decision.
At the time, all that was known of the Fiends was that there existed different types of them, that they had endured being petrified for thousands of years, that they could move through the desert quickly, and that the Werwölfe had an instinctive hatred for them and urge to destroy them. The brief engagement by Captain Weiss had also revealed they shared the weakness of Projekt W to powerful attack spells directed to the skull, but then that is a weakness shared by pretty much every living thing on the planet.
With little time before the Heresiarch reached Kheriaha, General Romel ordered a rapid advance south-east, going straight for the Kemetian capital with his mechanized elements and troop transports, while the aerial mages (both those affiliated with Division Y and not) and the Untoten performed reconnaissance ahead of the main force and continued to keep watch on the Fiends' advance.
This course of action left the ISE exposed to the remaining troops of the Allied Kingdom in Kemet, the bulk of which was stationed at Arigzandria, the Kingdom's main base of operations within Kemet. Prior to the discovery of the Nameless City's threat, the ISE had been preparing for an assault on Arigzandria in order to decapitate the Kingdom's military presence in the region, but this was no longer possible.
To prevent the Allied Kingdom from interfering, General Romel decided to resort to a rather unconventional gambit, one that used the unique assets at his disposal while also serving the purposes of Operation Enigma …"
"To the commander of the Allied Kingdom military base of Arigzandria,
By now, you must have learned of the unnatural sandstorm that formed in the Bardad desert and is moving east toward Kheriaha. Given the presence of the Empire's forces within Kemet, you may even believe us to be responsible for it.
I assure you that such is not the case. No, the situation is far worse than you can imagine.
An entire army of monsters, similar in strength to the Wunderwaffen your nation refers to as the Devils of the Rhine, advances under the cover of this storm, unleashed from their prison by the misguided efforts of your own government's agents. It is led by an ancient Kemetian sorcerer who, thousands of years ago, waged war against the entirety of Ancient Kemet before being defeated through means as yet unknown.
Unlike our Devils, these Fiends have no regards for the laws of war whatsoever. Our scouts have witnessed them devouring unlucky humans caught in the path of their advance. This, along with the flesh of their own weaker members, seems to be their sole method of supplying themselves.
And, as best as we can tell, they are going straight for Kheriaha.
I would like to appeal to your rationality, but I have learned, as have all officers of the Empire, that other nations do not put the same faith in logic and reason as we do. And I am too cynical a soldier to call upon your common decency and humanity. So, instead, I am forced to resort to base threats.
Our forces are currently advancing toward Kheriaha, as fast and as directly as we're able. It is our intent to defend the city and its inhabitants from a fate worse than death, at the cost of our own lives if necessary.
If you try to move your troops to strike at us while we are saving the city you are supposed to protect from the threat your government's agents unleashed, you and your entire command circle will die. You may think you can protect yourself from us, but believe me when I say that you cannot. There is no wall, no guard, no defense that will save you should you incur our wrath.
You may send observers, though I recommend they keep their distances.
Kindly inform your colleagues in Kheriaha itself that we expect not to be stabbed in the back while doing their job for them either.
I hope you will do the right thing,
Colonel Eric von Lergen."
Letter found stabbed with a standard Imperial Army knife to the pillow of the Allied Kingdom field marshal of Arigzandria, October 7th, 1925.
October 7th, 1925 – Outskirts of Kheriaha
From atop his palanquin, the Heresiarch looked at the defenses standing between him and the city he'd come to conquer. The sandstorm his sorcery had created would have blinded a mortal man, but he saw clearly, sensing the life-force of the warriors massed between him and the city's beacon-like radiance.
Once, the Heresiarch had commanded tens of thousands of blessed warriors in the name of his lord. But by the time of the last battle, their enemies, empowered by the hated Adversary, had reduced that number to a fraction, and more still had been lost in the final confrontation. They had made the priests pay in blood, oh yes, but in the end they had still lost. When he'd unmade the petrification spell, barely a thousand of the transfigured warriors had remained, and a fifth had perished on the way there to satiate the hunger of their fellows. What remained was a remnant of a remnant, unworthy of being named the Black Pharaoh's army.
But that would change in time. In fourteen days, the new moon would be upon them, and he would be able to start replenishing his army's numbers from the population of the city. Fourteen days would be plenty of time to subjugate the hundreds of thousands of souls he could sense, break them to his will using his sorcery and the strength of his warriors.
Yes, this city he saw in the distance, far larger than any the Heresiarch had ever seen before, would provide him with everything he needed to begin rebuilding his master's kingdom. But first, he needed to crush the fools who dared to stand in his way.
The memories he had claimed from the souls he'd devoured upon his awakening were fragmented and incomplete : the process had never been perfect, and it had taken him some time to shake off the dust of his epochal slumber. But the Heresiarch still knew that Man had designed new ways to kill his fellow since he had last walked this land, and that the strange, pitiful weapons his first victims had wielded in vain against him were but the least of the new instruments of death that defined this era's warfare.
Added to this strange devices of iron, these 'firearms', mortals had also found new ways to use magic. As his army advanced through the desert, the Heresiarch had sensed human mages in the distance, flying through the air and striking at those who went too far from the rest of the horde. They hadn't dared approach him, and so had evaded their rightful punishment, for now.
That would change soon. He could feel their power within the hastily constructed structures that stood between him and the city. He could easily have ordered his forces to simply go around, but he was loathe to leave a hostile force alive. In the past, he'd allowed survivors of his battles to escape to spread word of the dark majesty of his lord, but some of these survivors had come back, granted weapons by the Adversary, and had contributed to the fall of his master. He would not repeat those mistakes. Those who dared stand in the way of the true master of Kemet's right hand would all perish.
But he would also be cautious. With a mental command, the four one-eyed giants carrying his palanquin lowered it to the ground, with a degree of finesse that would have astonished anyone looking at them.
The Heresiarch stood up, and pointed forward with his staff. The blessed ones were powerful, but he'd found it was best to keep his orders simple when it came to such things.
"Kill," he said simply, his words carried to the mind of every single warrior under his command by the power of the authority bestowed upon him by the Black Pharaoh when he'd shed the life of his mortal body for this new, purer existence. "Kill them all, in the name of our lord !"
"During the march toward Kheriaha, General Romel dispatched his fliers to continue scouting the enemy advance, as well as harass them whenever the opportunity to do so without risking their lives presented itself. The occultists of Division Y assigned to the ISE also requested for corpses of Fiends to study while on the move (their demands for live specimens having been immediately quashed by Colonel Lergen).
It was at that time that Division Y learned that, like the supersoldiers of the Empire, the Fiends are created from human subjects. Upon death, they revert to their human appearance, clothes and accessories emerging from their inhuman flesh as it morphs back to its former aspect – all of them of Ancient Kemetian stock. Most of the recovered bodies were clad in little more than rags, but others were completely naked, leading to the speculation that they had somehow been born that way, since unlike the Werwölfe the Fiends appeared to be able to remain in their inhuman forms indefinitely.
While interesting from a research perspective, this new knowledge had little impact on the strategic side of things – apart from the added complication of the need to ensure nobody outside of the ISE stumbled upon the remains of the battle to come, lest the Empire's image be tainted by the ensuing misunderstanding that the Imperial Army had slaughtered a bunch of unarmed civilians.
Upon reaching their destination, the ISE immediately set to work building up defensive positions. With only a few hours before the arrival of the Heresiarch, there was no time for anything elaborate, though the veterans of the Rhine Front did their best under the circumstances (the terrain being much different from the mud of the Rhine in which they were used to digging trenches). These preparations continued until the last possible moment, when the Heresiarch's storm reached them, and the Defense of Kheriaha began …"
October 7th, 1925 – Outskirts of Kheriaha – Imperial Defensive Positions
Visibility was a myth. Every soldier was wearing some kind of eye protection, but they were still lucky if they could see ten meters in front of them. Even with his passively enhanced senses, Uger could only see clearly twenty or so meters, though fortunately his more mystical senses weren't impaired by the storm, allowing him to know just how far away the horde of Fiends was.
That ability was the reason he had been entrusted with field command of the first line of defense, but he didn't need his enhanced senses to know the men around him were afraid. Even the hardened veterans of the Rhine and the men who had spent months working security within Castle Schwartzstein were worried by the unnatural storm that blackened the sky, and the disturbing howls that emanated from it.
"Do you hear that ?" he said loudly. His words were also being broadcast over the radio, to every soldier squatting in the trenches.
The soldiers around him looked at each other, unsure how to respond.
"I ask, do you hear that ?" He repeated.
This time, there were a handful of hesitating positive replies. Uger nodded.
"That, my friends, is the sound of madness. It is the chorus of damnation, of beasts who come to feast upon human flesh."
Word of what the Fiends had done to the nomads they'd encountered had spread across the troops. The officers hadn't tried to suppress it, reasoning that anger would give the soldiers more motivation to hold their ground – and that they deserved to know what exactly they faced.
It was to their credit that, despite this, not one of them had raised any protest at their orders. They were already brave : Uger just needed to remind them of that.
"All of you have known doubt and horror as you killed your fellow man. None of us who fought on the Rhine Front love war, and that is well."
It was not something soldiers liked to talk about, nor were they supposed to. But Uger had learned long ago that almost nobody in the Imperial Army actually liked killing people, and those who did were often given special assignments to take advantage of that (and, Uger suspected, keep them away from the rest of the troops).
"But rejoice !" He continued, forcing a smile on his face and in his voice. "For today, there is no cause for doubt. Today, there is no need for hesitation, for qualms and pangs of conscience."
After his transformation, despite how deliriously grateful he'd been to be healed from his certain doom, Uger had still harboured doubts. Becoming a Werwolf came with certain mental adjustments, and Uger was self-aware enough to realize he probably would've reacted a lot worse otherwise, but those didn't completely cover the shock of what the Rite of Union had done to him. He'd wondered if he'd become a monster, someone who only had a place and purpose in war.
In the end, he'd gone to the Major for answers. She'd looked at him in silence for a long time, before saying :
'The Rite of Union did not make you into a monster, Captain. Our actions are what decide what we are.' She had smiled then, and Uger was certain there had been a degree of wistfulness in it. 'You and your brethren are sheepdogs, meant to protect the flock from wolves. Remember that.'
Now, facing the Fiends, the sheepdog comparison felt more apt than ever.
"Today, you stand as the only line of defense between man and monster !" He shouted. "For if we fall, the citizens of Kemet will die. They will be devoured by the monsters before us. Men, women and children : none will be spared, for it is true evil we face today."
Kheriaha couldn't be evacuated. There were just too many people living in it, and its government was aligned with the Empire's enemies in Albion (although like every Imperial officer, Uger knew that alignment wasn't exactly voluntary). Uger trusted that General Romel's measures to secure their backs would work. All that mattered was one question :
How many children in Kheriaha right now ?
The answer was simple. Even one would be more than enough. And so …
"You are all soldiers, sworn to protect the Fatherland. To fight, kill, and die, in defense of those you love. That is what we are. Protectors. Guardians. Though our hands may be drenched in blood, we fight not for glory or greed, but to defend those who cannot defend themselves !"
There were cheers from the trenches now, defiant and proud, and Uger continued, feeling the fire of his own spirit rising along with theirs :
"To fight here today may not be the letter of our oaths, for this is not the Reich. But it is in the spirit of what we all swore."
The howls of the Fiends became louder and louder, and he saw that they were almost upon them. Time to wrap this up, then.
"SOLDIERS OF THE EMPIRE !" Captain Uger roared. "FOR THE REICH ! FOR KHERIAHA ! FOR ALL THAT WE CHERISH ! OPEN FIRE !"
And as bullets and bolts of energy from the M-912s tore through the air and slammed into the mass of horrors charging them, Uger leapt out of the trench, his human body already being covered by the supernatural flesh of his Werwolf self. All across the frontline, the rest of the Werwölfe followed his lead, and the scions of Projekt W counter-charged the Fiends of the Nameless City.
The melee was immediate and brutal. The Fiends were drawn to the Werwölfe, driven by the same innate hatred Uger's brethren felt for the cannibal monsters. In his Whisper form, Uger's senses were almost completely unaffected by the sandstorm, giving him an unparalleled grasp of the battle. He buzzed above the melee, firing razor-sharp wings, punching and kicking skulls in where he could, while at the same time maintaining a constant watch.
One of the Phantom-types had stayed behind in the command post. There, he could relay to General Romel what Uger saw thanks to the mental link between Werwölfe, and act as a bodyguard if the enemy attempted a decapitating strike. As he fought, Uger sent him all the intel he could think of. Individual bullets were little more than a nuisance to the Fiends, but the M-912s tore through their flesh, and the heavy guns pierced through their hide and made them bleed. And the Werwölfe were superior to the Fiends – that much was obvious.
The Untoten flew with the storm, fighting in the fullness of their power, Colonel Lergen having authorized the unrestricted use of their precious supply of preserved mage blood for this battle. Though the sandstorm blotted out the sun, it was still day, and so they wore their full uniforms, their faces hidden by their gas masks as they plunged from the darkened skies to tear Fiends apart before vanishing back into the very cover the monsters' master had provided them.
With all the training he'd gone through in military school, Uger could read the flow of battle easily enough. They were winning. It wouldn't be easy : the Fiends kept advancing, heedless of their casualties, and the Werwölfe had to keep moving to avoid being pinned down and stop their enemies from breaking into the trenches and slaughtering the soldiers providing support fire. At one point, he was forced to choose between rescuing a Mirage from having his throat torn out by one of the hulking cyclops and preventing a gaggle of snake-like things from reaching the trenches, and chose the latter.
In other places, the too-thin line of Werwölfe had been breached through completely, leaving Imperial soldiers to fight the Fiends in close quarters, a terrifying prospect they were woefully under-equipped for. The handful of Werwölfe General Romel had kept in reserve did their best to plug these breaches, but they couldn't be everywhere at once, and casualties started to mount as the Fiends vented their malice on the mere mortals who dared stand in their way.
But they were winning. Which meant … there it was. Uger's preternatural senses screamed in warning, and he turned his head toward the source of the threat.
The Heresiarch walked through the chaos of battle, seeming wholly unconcerned by it all. He raised his serpent-headed staff, and a beam of black energy erupted out of the sculpted reptile's mouth, bisecting one of the Phantoms in the blink of an eye. A flick of the wrist, and the beam moved across the battlefield in a straight line. It punched through stone and slaughtered an entire squad of infantry, detonating a pair of M-912s and turning the gore to ash in a single cerulean flash.
Now, Uger sent, and five sinister shapes immediately emerged from the sand around the Heresiarch as the Spectres moved in.
The Specters didn't hesitate. Their orders were simple : using their grave-mist to covering their moves, get close to the target and use their special ability to phase into the Heresiarch and then forcefully rematerialize, hopefully tearing him to shreds from the inside.
It didn't work. Uger saw it in details, his senses more than capable of piercing the Specters' mist. The Heresiarch slammed his staff into the sand, and tendrils of blackness erupted from his feet, wrapping around the Specters' immaterial forms and arresting them in their tracks.
Uger didn't hesitate. Moving on instinct, he unleashed his own ultimate attack, plunging toward the Heresiarch in a tornado of bladed wings. The Heresiarch reacted incredibly fast, but even his hastily-erected shield couldn't protect him completely from Uger's attack, which shredded his robe and tore at the dried meat underneath.
It wasn't much damage – the Heresiarch's body was a lot tougher than Uger had expected – but the attack did manage to distract him long enough for the Specters to break free and vanish back into the sand. Uger flew up, but before he could get away, the Heresiarch fired another black beam straight at him.
The attack burned half of Uger's wings off, and would have taken his head off if he hadn't moved at the last moment. He fell on the sand, agony flaring through his enhanced senses even as he could feel his regeneration start to attend to the damage. Before he could recover his wits, something kicked him in the chest, hard, and he fell back, finding himself pinned down with the Heresiarch glaring down at him.
"I am going to eat your soul," hissed the undead horror. "From it, I will learn the names and faces of all your loved ones, and then I will go after them too."
Uger wished he had a mouth in this form, just so he could spit in the monster's face. He settled for trying to headbutt him instead, but his grip was too strong, despite Uger weighing at least three times the weight of the bag of bones, dessicated organs and overly ornate robes atop him.
Holding Uger down with the butt of his staff, the Heresiarch slowly knelt, bringing his free hand close to Uger's skull. The Captain could feel the vile energies gathering around it, and remembered the hysterical tale of the two Albish explorers they'd rescued describing how the undead monster had ripped the life and soul of one of their guards from his flesh.
As he stared death in the face, Uger's thoughts did not, to his own surprise, turn to his wife and daughter. Instead, all he could think of was a desperate hope, a prayer, that someone would stop the monster atop him – that his death wouldn't mean the defeat of the Imperial Army here, and that the people of Kheriaha would be protected.
Then, suddenly, there was a gust of wind, the sound of a violent impact, and the weight atop him vanished.
"The main unknown the ISE's leadership faced was that nobody knew what the Heresiarch was capable of. The testimonies of the two Albish witnesses was short on details, but the Director made it clear during her conversation with the ISE commanders that his elimination must be considered the top priority of the battle.
During the Defense of Kheriaha, most of the ISE's aerial mages were tasked with observing the battle as best they could despite the storm, and most importantly, immediately report the moment they detected the use of mana (as the sandstorm and the speed at which the ISE had travelled had made the delicate detection equipment unusable for the moment).
The plan to use the Specters to take him out rather than have them join the melee was thought to have a high chance of success (the Director having claimed that she herself could very well be taken out by such a surprise attack under the right circumstances, and the Heresiarch hadn't shown himself capable of flight at that point).
Nevertheless, it wasn't the only plan made to deal with the enemy commander. At the very end of the list was the use of the doses of Endlose Nacht entrusted to Colonel Lergen for safekeeping : much as he had on the Rhine Front, the Colonel had been given the authorization to call the Untoten back and have them use the serum if he judged the situation warranted it.
The next plan after the Spectre-type Werwölfe was to use a combination of the assets from Division Y accompanying the ISE in a way that had never been tested on the battlefield before. As soon as General Romel received confirmation that the Heresiarch had joined the fray, Colonel Lergen gave the order to the occultists under his command to begin the last phase of the Ritual of Correspondence.
More details on the Ritual of Correspondence can be found in file 420-BX-9, but for the sake of this report, we will go over the basics. Cast by a number of magic users at the same time, the Ritual of Correspondence enables what can be best summed up as a sharing of mana pools, granting one specific member of the ritual access to the mana reserves of all the others for the duration of the ritual. During testing, it was found that the ritual link can be reliably maintained for a maximum of five minutes once the recipient leaves the ritual circle, although this requires intense concentration from all the other participants.
Fortunately, the ability to focus under pressure is a skill possessed by all occultists of Division Y …"
October 7th, 1925 – Outskirts of Kheriaha
As he fought with the Heresiarch, some part of Weiss' mind was distantly aware that this couldn't possibly be good for his health.
His D-24 computation orb was embedded within his artificial right arm, right where Professor Gehrman had left an indentation in its surface for that express purpose. Weiss hadn't used that feature in actual combat before – you had to keep your trump cards hidden until you needed them, after all. Mana flowed a lot better through the strange material of Projekt P than it did through his own flesh, letting him manipulate mana with greater precision.
In addition to the Ritual of Correspondence boosting his mana output, the Captain was also using a mental doping spell to maximum strength. Rage, guilt and horror : all were sublimated into a state of perfect clarity. Was this how the Major always saw the world ?
He felt the Heresiarch gather mana, and immediately let go, sending his enemy crashing into the sand with little grace while he brutally reverted his own flight to land a few meters behind him. Around them, the Fiends recoiled, hissing and growling like the beasts they were as the two mages faced one another.
"I am the Heresiarch," hissed the undead monstrosity in accented Albish. "First of the Black Pharaoh's servants. Herald of the glory that is to come !"
"I am the champion of the Lady of Stars," Weiss declared in the same language. He wanted that thing to understand him before he killed him. "And I am your end."
With those words, he activated his mage blade, calling it into existence at the end of his artificial arm. Usually, a mage blade was colorless, being made up of raw mana. This one, however, was a shard of moonlight, shining brightly amidst the shadows cast by the sandstorm overhead.
Seeing this, the Heresiarch snarled, and a blade of black and red magical energy burst from the mouth of his staff's serpent head. For a few more seconds, they stared at one another – then Weiss moved.
His first blow, aimed at the Heresiarch's neck, was parried at the last moment, and then the two of them were locked in a lethal dance. Weiss was not a trained swordsman, and he doubted there was any fencing school in the Empire that taught its students to fight against what he guessed could best be described as a scythe. But he was an Imperial soldier, trained in close quarter combat, with his skills sharpened by long weeks spent enduring what the Major called training and everyone else called hell. With his reflexes pushed far beyond their limits by his mental doping and his body boosted even further, he fought less like a man and more like a demigod of old myth.
The two magic blades clashed again and again, each collision sending out arcs of energy that turned patches of sand to melted glass. Particles of sand lifted by the wind were also turned to crystal, creating strange web-like structures around the two combatants that immediately shattered under the pull of gravity.
Never had Weiss been so close to death; never had he felt more alive.
With a shriek of rage, the Heresiarch brought up his left hand, shrouded in black fire. Weiss disengaged and moved backward, not so much jumping as flying at high speeds with his feet just a few centimeters above the sand. The fiery claw passed right in front of his face, and he immediately reverted his motion before lashing out with his mage blade, hitting the offending appendage at the wrist and severing it in one blow. Something cracked inside him at the brutal motion, but he didn't feel any pain (for now).
For the briefest instant, the Heresiarch froze, gazing at the stump of his wrist with empty eye sockets. Without thinking, Weiss moved in. He grabbed the undead's staff and yanked it aside with his left hand, resulting in the Heresiarch's sudden conversion of his mage blade into another beam attack going wide and turning a long stretch of sand into black glass. Then, in the same motion, he plunged his moonlight blade up through the Heresiarch's dessicated torso with enough strength to lift him up in the air.
Slowly, the Heresiarch raised his skull to stare at Weiss, his jaw moving wordlessly, the stench of his breath nearly enough to break Weiss' focus.
"This is the twentieth century, you bastard," Weiss told him. "There's no place for monsters like you here."
"Master," the Heresiarch whispered. "Why have you forsaken me ?"
Without answering, Weiss cast an explosion formula through his mage blade, activating it right at the base of the Heresiarch's skull. The ancient head disappeared in a shower of fire and bone shrapnel that pinged against Weiss' shield, and the rest of the body almost immediately turned to dust, falling at Weiss' feet and mixing with the sand as time finally caught up with it.
As he dispelled his physical enhancement spell, his right arm crumbled and fell apart, the burned-out, melted remains of his D-24 glittering amidst the debris. Swaying on his feet, Weiss managed to stay up long enough to raise his left arm, the one that hadn't gotten devoured by a nightmarish horror from the darkest reaches of the cosmos, into the air, toward the heavens where he hoped the people he hadn't been able to save watched over this battle. Spots danced in his vision, competing with the darkness that crept in at the edge of his sight.
"You … are … avenged," he muttered, forcing the words out. Then he fell straight down, face first in the sand, exhaustion and pain finally overcoming him.
"Though the destruction of the Heresiarch by Captain Weiss guaranteed the ISE's victory, the battle still raged on for several hours afterwards. Soon, however, the genuine struggle turned into a hunt for surviving Fiends, to ensure that none of them escaped to blight Kemet with their presence. As the sandstorm died down, General Romel was able to use artillery to crush the greatest pockets of Fiends, while the ISE's flyers kept watch for any enemy elements trying to run. Unlike what would have happened in a conventional engagement by that point, the Defense of Kheriaha saw no quarter offered to the foe.
The Defense of Kheriaha was a success, but not one without casualties. Several instances of Projekt W were slain, many more injured beyond their ability to recover swiftly from. Despite the efforts to keep the Fiends at bay, the unaugmented soldiers also paid a heavy toll, with several hundreds dead and many more injured.
As the dust and sand settled, General Romel ordered his exhausted troops to quickly gather the corpses of their slain foes, now returning to their human forms. The people and nominal defenders of Kemet's capital had so far remained within the city itself, but now that the battle was over, it was feared they would come to investigate, and perhaps take advantage of the ISE's perceived weakness. To prevent them from witnessing the human-seeming corpses of the Fiends, they were promptly incinerated with mage fire, hot enough to turn even bones to ash.
Victory had been achieved, but it remained to be seen if the ISE's objectives on the Southern Continent would be accomplished …"
AN : You've got to have some magic fights in a YS story, after all. Also, not going to lie, the site of the duel between Weiss and the Heresiarch is probably going to end up as a tourist trap a few decades in the future.
Just to be clear, every italicized section without a source at the end comes from the first document. I thought using that framing device would allow you to get a clear picture of the battle's progression without needing to use an omniscient third person perspective, since I haven't used one so far in the story. Although I suppose Uger's POV isn't that far from that, given the perception abilities of a Whisper.
For the calculations and reasoning that led to the timeline of events in this chapter (specifically the speed of the two armies) check out page 179 of the SB thread. Initially, there was another scene in this chapter, but I ended up cutting it and moving it to the next chapter - I felt it flowed better that way. As a result, I expect next chapter to be a breeze to write, since it'll be mostly the fallout of this chapter and foreshadowing for what comes next.
As always, I look forward to your comments, thoughts, and suggestions.
Zahariel out.