Despite mostly passing through the Revenant unimpeded in the physical plane, the passage of Zero's shots still seemed to impact the Revenant, tearing away pieces of its form as they passed. Though the damage was only around a third of what the Nameless Phantom's shot had caused, Zero's suppressing fire still disturbed the construct such that its focus shifted towards the screaming machine for a second with each shot before returning to its real targets. It was, perhaps, made more effective by the fact Strake screamed out a tirade of admonishments against the Revenant and the Order in general. A second, smaller Revenant emerged at the ground level, possessing two giant arms and sprinting forward on six legs, with a skull covered in eyes. Writhing, boiling flesh spilled out of a maw that split its chest down the middle, interlocking rib-teeth stretching down its full length.
Without waiting a moment, Zel sent an aetherwave message:
"If you have any aces left up your sleeve, use them now. Keep it away from us. It will not be long."
This was in the middle of Zero exchanging blows with the Six-legged Revenant whilst also firing on the Sacrificial Revenant.
After just a few clashes with the Six-legged Revenant, Zero's pilebunkers were completely mangled, with fleshy webbing growing up its arms. The machine's heat, however, kept the growths at bay, causing them to shrivel, while the Six-legged Revenant regenerated. Zelsys, knowing the stakes at hand, dug deeper to form a pair of False Fang Spears, flinging them over to Zero by sheer force of will.
The machine didn't pick them up. The militaristic, brass-and-drums music which had been blasting out of its speaker suddenly grew distorted, cutting in and out. In a literal sense, Zero was screaming.
Strake laughed at the suggestion. Aces up his sleeve, she said. He glanced at that sealed-up lever. Pulling his hands out of the control sleeves, he forced his fingers through the seals and grasped the lever. With his free hand, he reached for a pill bottle in the emergency kit, dropping three of them into his canteen, still 1/3 full of Witch's Brew. They were part alchemically activated iron, part stabilized Ignis crystal, part Rubedo dust. He didn't know what to call them, but he knew he really hadn't expected to take them this soon.
"Listen to me, you rabid dog... Just this once, do whatever you need to do."
He didn't know if he was talking to himself or to Zero. Strake kicked back his canteen, downing every bit of Witch's Brew alongside the three pills as he forced the lever forward. It didn't slide smoothly, or click forward; there was a tremendous, immovable resistance, a solid steel pin stopping it from moving. The pin snapped, and with it, the lever locked forward.
STEEL COMMAND: TOTAL LIMITER RELEASE
Maintenance and emergency access panels started bursting open around him, and for a moment, Strake thought Zero was breaking apart. There was the hissing of cable locks coming undone. A hive of black serpents set upon him, over a dozen connectors piercing his back. By some cruel miracle, none punctured his lungs, but his heart wasn't spared; the Main Governor Cable, overgrown with draconic nervous tissue, embedded itself there. Another, the Main Control Cable, pierced the back of his skull.
Zero's entire chassis shifted, vents and thrusters extending, built just as heavily as the unit's primary armour. Jets of flame, like welding torches, blazed out of them, shifting in hue from orange-blue to a furious red. Explosive bolts and physical locks snapped away, a layer of metal purging from the tank in an instant. Two sets of three heat sinks extended from its back, glowing orange, lightning arcing between them. A perfect, circular impression was blasted into the ground right beneath Zero as it floated into the air by only a few centimeters, no higher than the usual height for its kinetic skates. A second circle followed, deeper, but with a smaller diameter, and a last, third one. Boom. Boom. Boom. Three concentric circles in total. At this point, Zero appeared nearly weightless, just hovering there, screaming. In this timespan, the Sacrificial Revenant was able to refocus on attacking Zelsys, and Zefaris was still busy engraving the Dragonfire Shell. Phantom Manus manifested to meet the monstrosity in combat, and soon, so did the Tankman Phantom. The twin phantoms did mighty battle against the combined abomination, the Tankman Phantom's twin cannons thumping out a steady twice-per-second beat while it grappled with the Revenant. Manus, meanwhile, continuously fought against the tendril-arms that the Revenant constantly spawned, each just as powerful as Third's own version of that attack. The only difference was the vastly reduced frequency. The brave phantom's flaming sword scythed through this accursed flesh and struck back with blazing rays of holy light between each swing, but even this wasn't enough. The duo barely sufficed to keep the Revenant at bay, and the strain of fuelling them showed; the final stretch of engraving the Dragonfire Shell, the fourth antediluvian glyph, had taken Zefaris nearly as long as everything leading up to it.
Both Zelsys and Zefaris knew that, if the vortex kept advancing at this rate, the ritual would move ahead before they could intervene. They pushed ahead anyway, as this was the only plan they had that could conceivably work. Nonetheless, Zelsys couldn't help but remember a prayer - one of the many otherwise vestigial memories she had inherited from her progenitors. She had never prayed, but in retrospect, that was itself somewhat illogical. The existence of divinity was undeniable - even more so here and now. She couldn't see the presence of the divine, but she felt a sense of the sublime. Just as there was an inconceivably grief, wrath, and suffering, she felt the opposite of that coming from the few survivors, far off at the edge of the city. It hung in the air, swam in it, passively suppressing the wretchedness of the Order's techniques and strengthening her own. She also felt the vague energy gathering, not to her, but to six places through the city: Five churches, visible even from here, and a sixth, at the other side of the vortex.
Akaso
If you’d like to read ahead, consider heading on over to the Patreon! You get up to 20 advance chapters for both Retribution Engine and Cherno Caster.
I’d also greatly appreciate it if you could rate my story, maybe even leave a review or advanced review!
For a link to the discord, check the synopsis.
Despite mostly passing through the Revenant unimpeded in the physical plane, the passage of Zero's shots still seemed to impact the Revenant, tearing away pieces of its form as they passed. Though the damage was only around a third of what the Nameless Phantom's shot had caused, Zero's suppressing fire still disturbed the construct such that its focus shifted towards the screaming machine for a second with each shot before returning to its real targets. It was, perhaps, made more effective by the fact Strake screamed out a tirade of admonishments against the Revenant and the Order in general. A second, smaller Revenant emerged at the ground level, possessing two giant arms and sprinting forward on six legs, with a skull covered in eyes. Writhing, boiling flesh spilled out of a maw that split its chest down the middle, interlocking rib-teeth stretching down its full length.
Without waiting a moment, Zel sent an aetherwave message:
"If you have any aces left up your sleeve, use them now. Keep it away from us. It will not be long."
This was in the middle of Zero exchanging blows with the Six-legged Revenant whilst also firing on the Sacrificial Revenant.
After just a few clashes with the Six-legged Revenant, Zero's pilebunkers were completely mangled, with fleshy webbing growing up its arms. The machine's heat, however, kept the growths at bay, causing them to shrivel, while the Six-legged Revenant regenerated. Zelsys, knowing the stakes at hand, dug deeper to form a pair of False Fang Spears, flinging them over to Zero by sheer force of will.
The machine didn't pick them up. The militaristic, brass-and-drums music which had been blasting out of its speaker suddenly grew distorted, cutting in and out. In a literal sense, Zero was screaming.
Strake laughed at the suggestion. Aces up his sleeve, she said. He glanced at that sealed-up lever. Pulling his hands out of the control sleeves, he forced his fingers through the seals and grasped the lever. With his free hand, he reached for a pill bottle in the emergency kit, dropping three of them into his canteen, still 1/3 full of Witch's Brew. They were part alchemically activated iron, part stabilized Ignis crystal, part Rubedo dust. He didn't know what to call them, but he knew he really hadn't expected to take them this soon.
"Listen to me, you rabid dog... Just this once, do whatever you need to do."
He didn't know if he was talking to himself or to Zero. Strake kicked back his canteen, downing every bit of Witch's Brew alongside the three pills as he forced the lever forward. It didn't slide smoothly, or click forward; there was a tremendous, immovable resistance, a solid steel pin stopping it from moving. The pin snapped, and with it, the lever locked forward.
STEEL COMMAND: TOTAL LIMITER RELEASE
Maintenance and emergency access panels started bursting open around him, and for a moment, Strake thought Zero was breaking apart. There was the hissing of cable locks coming undone. A hive of black serpents set upon him, over a dozen connectors piercing his back. By some cruel miracle, none punctured his lungs, but his heart wasn't spared; the Main Governor Cable, overgrown with draconic nervous tissue, embedded itself there. Another, the Main Control Cable, pierced the back of his skull.
Zero's entire chassis shifted, vents and thrusters extending, built just as heavily as the unit's primary armour. Jets of flame, like welding torches, blazed out of them, shifting in hue from orange-blue to a furious red. Explosive bolts and physical locks snapped away, a layer of metal purging from the tank in an instant. Two sets of three heat sinks extended from its back, glowing orange, lightning arcing between them. A perfect, circular impression was blasted into the ground right beneath Zero as it floated into the air by only a few centimeters, no higher than the usual height for its kinetic skates. A second circle followed, deeper, but with a smaller diameter, and a last, third one. Boom. Boom. Boom. Three concentric circles in total. At this point, Zero appeared nearly weightless, just hovering there, screaming. In this timespan, the Sacrificial Revenant was able to refocus on attacking Zelsys, and Zefaris was still busy engraving the Dragonfire Shell. Phantom Manus manifested to meet the monstrosity in combat, and soon, so did the Tankman Phantom. The twin phantoms did mighty battle against the combined abomination, the Tankman Phantom's twin cannons thumping out a steady twice-per-second beat while it grappled with the Revenant. Manus, meanwhile, continuously fought against the tendril-arms that the Revenant constantly spawned, each just as powerful as Third's own version of that attack. The only difference was the vastly reduced frequency. The brave phantom's flaming sword scythed through this accursed flesh and struck back with blazing rays of holy light between each swing, but even this wasn't enough. The duo barely sufficed to keep the Revenant at bay, and the strain of fuelling them showed; the final stretch of engraving the Dragonfire Shell, the fourth antediluvian glyph, had taken Zefaris nearly as long as everything leading up to it.
Both Zelsys and Zefaris knew that, if the vortex kept advancing at this rate, the ritual would move ahead before they could intervene. They pushed ahead anyway, as this was the only plan they had that could conceivably work. Nonetheless, Zelsys couldn't help but remember a prayer - one of the many otherwise vestigial memories she had inherited from her progenitors. She had never prayed, but in retrospect, that was itself somewhat illogical. The existence of divinity was undeniable - even more so here and now. She couldn't see the presence of the divine, but she felt a sense of the sublime. Just as there was an inconceivably grief, wrath, and suffering, she felt the opposite of that coming from the few survivors, far off at the edge of the city. It hung in the air, swam in it, passively suppressing the wretchedness of the Order's techniques and strengthening her own. She also felt the vague energy gathering, not to her, but to six places through the city: Five churches, visible even from here, and a sixth, at the other side of the vortex.
Akaso
If you’d like to read ahead, consider heading on over to the Patreon! You get up to 20 advance chapters for both Retribution Engine and Cherno Caster.
I’d also greatly appreciate it if you could rate my story, maybe even leave a review or advanced review!
For a link to the discord, check the synopsis.
