Dreams In Iron [Pt 5]
Posted: Fri Mar 08, 2024 11:21 pm
Frost 21, 122
Too tired now to curse, Imogen felt herself resting against the trunk of a tree and forced herself back on track.
The primal, she’d discovered, did sleep, briefly. It rested in the daytime, as she’d thought, but it did not require a full eight hours. Instead, it would pause in its hunt for a few hours at a time, at odd intervals, before suddenly resuming its hunt.
Over the course of the last two days, she’d gotten very little rest. Her guesses about when Kegumu was pausing were not always right. Sometimes she managed to nap for only an hour or two before Kitty had to bite her awake, yowling that her pursuer was drawing close.
Sleep deprivation was a bad place for anyone, but it got worse. The constant jogging and napping had left very little opportunity to find food; and without Animus, she had to rely upon herself, her shortsword, and her juvenile cat. They’d managed prey only once, so far, and she’d barely managed to sear the flesh before eating it.
(Thankfully, water had not been a problem. The constant rains gave her ample opportunity to collect drinks, and the blessing of Summer kept the hot jungle from getting any infectious tendrils beneath the skin.)
Imogen had been drilled for a certain extremity of operation from a young age. She’d spent more than one sleepless night standing lookout for her fellow witches, and Master Gerhard especially had a cruel fondness for ‘training exercises’ which lasted thirty-six hours. She was young and fit, whatever Norani’s opinion to the contrary. But as the third day approached, she was keenly aware that it wasn’t all adding up to enough.
The jungle darkened as night came on, marking the end of the period where she could catch an hour or two of rest. The Silent Fisher would stalk her for the entire night, untiring.
The dark jungles and endless miles blurred together as she pressed on; if she encountered any more jungle monsters or relics of the bygone invasion, she could not even recall them. But as night pressed on and light began to play upon the horizon, something new appeared.
Or rather, something not new at all.
As the witch rounded another bole, her panting so regular that it was beginning to feel like normal breathing, she found herself only about a hundred feet from… herself. Imogen stood at the other end of a small clearing, staring at the distant light filtering through the canopy above. As she approached, the other Imogen turned, revealing-
"You?" the witch rasped, recognizing Master Gerhard’s aidolon from the hazy, indistinct static of its eyes. Her voice sounded pretty bad.
"How are you here?" she demanded, momentarily distracted from the real threat at hand, "There’s no mirror."
The spirit gave the haggard original a coy smile, then spoke for the first time in the witch’s recollection, its voice as sweet and lilting as a songbird:
In the time twixt night and day
Many borders fade away
In the midst of sleep and wake
There are paths which I can take.
The words weren’t much of an answer, but they were enough for a witch to follow along. She stood there, breathing heavily, waiting for the spirit to continue. After a moment’s pause, it did.
Run by day and run by night
That’s the way to lose the light
Want to live another day?
You must cast your foe away.
"I know that!" growled the witch, frustrated, ”But what can I do about it? It’s the Silent Fisher and I’ve got no fucking magic left!"
The spirit’s grin grew wider, toothier, and it turned from her.
To Ailos once were weapons sent
Which flesh and light and metal rent
Hidden in this wood facade
Are powers which can wound a god.
Follow swift or fall and fail,
I’ll reveal to you the trail
Everything you seek, you’ll see
You only need to turn the key.
With that, the spirit began to move- though not to walk, not as such. It was simply… further away, then further yet, with no obvious cause of locomotion.
The witch stood there for a time, watching. Was this real? It looked like the spirit she knew, but that entity had no power to manifest even an image in this way. Was she so tired that she could perceive it as an illusion, or was she simply so tired that she was hallucinating, the world and Nod merging until she toddered off the path and collapsed?
Imogen bit back another curse which she was too tired to vary and diverged from her path, following the phantom.
The witch followed the flickering phantom for the better part of an hour, this path seemingly no different from the one she’d been taking.
She still had no real way to know if this was really Master Gerhard’s spirit, but if it was a simple hallucination it was unusually persistent. It did not speak again, ignoring every word when she mustered the strength to call out to it. Something seemed… off, about that.
(And how, exactly, would the spirit know anything about hidden weapons buried in Ailos? It did not seem to tally.)
Given her condition, however, she made it to the spirit’s ultimate goal in good time. There, she found a great glade, moss and vines and trees entangling a rusted metal box the size of a castle. From the exterior, it seemed like a great junkpile, of the sort one could make out from the industrial district back in Zaichaer.
When the spirit stopped, she was no longer moving about in real space, but reflected in a shiny patina of grime upon one side of the metal hulk. The spirit smiled darkly at the Sunsinger, then hooked a thumb at the hull behind itself and disappeared.
"Yeah, yeah." Imogen said softly, to herself, "You want me to go in." But how to do that?
Conscious of the fact that she had only so much time before the primal finally caught up to her, the ork circled the huge wreck, looking carefully for anything which might serve as an entryway. After a few minutes of hacking at vines and brush, she spotted it- a hatchway, almost totally blocked by wood.
The hatch was iron, and must have been sturdy once- with its current condition, the witch had little difficulty lining up her shoulder and bashing it in. A few good strikes from sturdy Orkhan muscle collapsed the whining hinges, and she squeezed into the darkness beyond.
The interior of the wreck reeked, of rot and decay and ancient death never cleansed by the cleaning offices of natural processes. Imogen’s nostrils flared, and she bit back her disgust.
Even in darkness, the interior of the wreck was plainly Imperial in origin. The hallways were too small, for one–she had to duck–and everything was cruel, angular metal. Pipes filled the empty space, and cables of a strange, smooth material she didn’t recognize. The entire machine was quiet, empty. It had lain here dead for a long time.
"Time to wake up, I guess." she muttered. Was that even possible?
She wandered the compact maze of iron for a few moments more before she found a ladder leading deeper into the dark interior. Here, she found a small command deck, a bridge no more than eighty square feet, featuring a dizzying array of alien instruments. There were also three chairs; two of which featured corpses in states of advanced decay.
"What is this thing?" she asked one of the dead men.
-Abnegation- the long-dead man’s skeleton responded -An answer to devilry.-
"Very helpful." she said, voice dry. It wouldn’t matter. Skeletons didn’t get dry humor. "How do you turn it on?"
-Center panel-
The ork nodded, though it probably didn’t matter to the skeleton. She approached the panel, a heavy metallic console featuring cracked glass displays and a dizzying array of buttons, marked with worn symbols she couldn’t read. There was simply no way she was going to puzzle out how to operate this thing.
So she didn’t. Instead, she slid the tip of her sword delicately into the panel’s guts and let her soul touch its memory. As she’d hoped, the console’s memory largely concerned… how it had been touched.
To Imogen’s eye, a barrage of ghostly hands seemed to flicker across the panel, forming patterns and inputting a variety of codes. She watched carefully, taking note of patterns, until at last it seemed clear which one had been clearest in the machine’s mind.
"This one… this one… and… this." The ork punched in the code with a single finger.
CLUNK
Vibrations sounded throughout the machine, and lights flickered to life throughout the bridge. Whirring noises filled the walls.
Most of the glass displays in the room lit, but failed to resolve any images, their delicate instruments ruined by time and erosion. A few, however, loaded, even imperfectly; fuzzy images of the jungle beyond suddenly dominated the room.
And outside, the metal beast began to shift. Autonomous war programs took control in the absence of specific commands, directing metal limbs to spasm and extend. Slowly, the weapon rose from its grave, ripping away from the vines and young trees growing over it.
"Wew-oour." said Imogen, impressed despite herself. Apparently the Imperial engineers were as good as they’d always claimed. She wondered vaguely what event during the invasion had ended with the war-machine disabled and its pilots dead, but failed to destroy the thing.
Now, she just had to figure out how to get it to fight Kegumu Rekaka. It wouldn’t do her any good just st-
The ground lurched as the huge spider-like machine set off the way she’d come, crashing through smaller trees and sidestepping the ancient ones at a surprising clip. The ork grinned.
Maybe sometimes it was just that easy.
The machine encountered the Silent Fisher within ten minutes, and it immediately opened fire.
As soon as the primal’s visage appeared in the bridge’s viewscreen, red symbols began flashing. Automated aetheric-sensors recognized the creature as a threat, and the machine began devising a plan for battle. The ork, inside, relished her new position, seated one the one command chair unoccupied by a dead Imperial.
"Let’s go, spider!" she called out enthusiastically, "Kill that fucking thing!"
Panels opened across the spider's hull, revealing missile bays. Most of the projectiles failed, or misfired, but enough launched. A dozen trails of smoke arced towards the monster, resulting in a half-dozen distinct eruptions of red fire against its invincible hide. Imogen hooted at the screen, pumping her fist even as the figure of the primal broke through the smoke.
Kegumu Rekaka did not hesitate, but rushed the spider. Perhaps it sensed its prey within; perhaps it simply saw the big metal monster as a competitor. Either way, its attack was interrupted as dragonshard arrays woke inside the spider’s belly, summoning a field of repulsive energy around itself. The Silent Fisher’s charge slowed, then stalled to a halt, the primal unable to muster enough strength to burst through the war-machine’s defense.
With its enemy stalled, the spider deployed its weapon. Lines of crystal circuits sparked across the weapon’s hull as it pulled power from its generators, gathering them into a sphere of violet energy- which it unleashed in the form of a beam, lancing towards the primal.
The witch blinked, her mirth suddenly fading. She recognized that discharge. That was voidrillium.
The primal seemed to recognize the power also, blurring as it dived away from beam and field alike. The violet energy tore off into the distance, a dozen ancient trees collapsing as the void magic simply tore away their bases into nothingness.
It should have excited her, perhaps, to see that the machine was armed with such a weapon. Void magic could plausibly kill even a primal, after all- as far as she knew, there was nothing at all it could not destroy. But something about the forbidden light worried her to the core.
"Hey…" she called to one of the skeletons watching with her, "Before it spotted the Silent Fisher… what was this thing programmed to do, exactly?"
-Kill every living thing on the island-
"I see." Imogen said, frowning. Something about that seemed- "Oh. Oh damn it."
Imogen hunted through the bridge, trying to find a way to disable the machine’s shields.
If she could get those turned off, the Silent Fisher could tear the spider apart, or at least make sure it could never move again. Unfortunately, none of the panels seemed willing to cooperate. As she stabbed each one, she could feel them withdrawing, trying to withhold the vital information from her. The machine wasn’t going to cooperate with her attempts to kill it.
Well, she’d have to try something stupider, then.
"What’s making the shield?" she asked the skeletons.
-The array below the hull-
Below, then. If she could get below the spider and break the dragonshard array, the shield should fail. The ork stumbled across the lurching floor, clambering slowly up the too-narrow ladder and back into the dark maintenance tunnel above.
It was less dark, now. Steam hissed through the previously-empty pipes, and various lights adorning various connectors glowed with ominous light. She staggered back towards the hatch from which she’d entered and found herself face to face with-
The static-eyed doppelganger spirit stared out of the ork’s reflection and slowly shook her head. For the first time since Imogen had known the spirit it seemed… angry.
"Well you didn’t fucking tell me it was going to try to kill everyone!" she hissed. The spirit ignored her, disappearing.
She lowered herself out of the hatch, but did not let go. The ground seemed to move rapidly below her as the great mechanical spider skittered across it, reorienting itself to try to catch the Silent Fisher in its sights.
Clinging upside-down to the ladder, the witch surveyed the undercarriage of the war-machine, squinting in the wan light until she spotted-
-there. A series of glowing crystals, abjurinium and otherwise, suspended by a series of delicate-looking wires.
"...just have to time it right." she told herself. Indeed, if she timed it wrong, in addition to not breaking the shield, she was likely to be crushed against the ground by the spider’s metal carapace. The Sunsinger took her blade in hand, staring at the shield array and the moving ground, plotting her next route precisely.
"Three… two…"
The spider finally lurched in the right direction and Imogen threw herself to the ground, rolling, one hand splayed over her face to protect her eyes from jagged rocks and thorny vines. With her right hand, she struck out with her sword. Her entire arm went temporarily numb as it smacked into something metal with a ringing noise.
For a moment, she couldn’t tell whether she’d hit her mark or missed entirely to no useful effect- but blissful ignorance was suddenly replaced with awful knowledge of victory. Kegumu Rekaka made a horrendous noise as it tore into the body of the spider above, metal screeching against metal with all the sonic effect of nails scraping a chalkboard, amplified a thousand times.
The ork squirmed out from below the spider as explosions tore through its inside, and she staggered to her feet. She still could not feel her right arm, which was in awful contrast to just how many scratches and scrapes she could feel on her left. Her entire torso felt bruised.
But she’d made her choice, and now it was time to run from it. The primal continued disassembling the mechanical spider, temporarily distracted by this victory, and the wounded Sunsinger hobbled away as quickly as she could, abandoning costly victory for a cheaper defeat later.
The dream dragged on and on, long past the time it should have ended.
As she fled the implacable, mostly-unseen antagonist, day again turned to night and night again to day. Exhaustion blurred together the endless hours of slow jogging, punctuated by brief encounters with some novel threat or another.
Time and again, she was trapped, certain to finally be delayed unto demise; time and again, she emerged triumphant, capitalizing upon some absurdity or other. A bank of rainbow mists she set ablaze to clear, using a spark of sunfire which had remained on her blade. A carnivorous stream was lured out of its banks by distant noises, and she snuck underneath it while it investigated. A field of jagged crystals which released smokey curse-light into the surrounding air were overcome by throwing rocks from a distance, the woman racing through the gaps as they suddenly vented their poison directionally.
But although the Mountain of Light drew steadily nearer, she grew no closer to any understanding of how to actually vanquish the patient threat behind.
Too tired now to curse, Imogen felt herself resting against the trunk of a tree and forced herself back on track.
The primal, she’d discovered, did sleep, briefly. It rested in the daytime, as she’d thought, but it did not require a full eight hours. Instead, it would pause in its hunt for a few hours at a time, at odd intervals, before suddenly resuming its hunt.
Over the course of the last two days, she’d gotten very little rest. Her guesses about when Kegumu was pausing were not always right. Sometimes she managed to nap for only an hour or two before Kitty had to bite her awake, yowling that her pursuer was drawing close.
Sleep deprivation was a bad place for anyone, but it got worse. The constant jogging and napping had left very little opportunity to find food; and without Animus, she had to rely upon herself, her shortsword, and her juvenile cat. They’d managed prey only once, so far, and she’d barely managed to sear the flesh before eating it.
(Thankfully, water had not been a problem. The constant rains gave her ample opportunity to collect drinks, and the blessing of Summer kept the hot jungle from getting any infectious tendrils beneath the skin.)
Imogen had been drilled for a certain extremity of operation from a young age. She’d spent more than one sleepless night standing lookout for her fellow witches, and Master Gerhard especially had a cruel fondness for ‘training exercises’ which lasted thirty-six hours. She was young and fit, whatever Norani’s opinion to the contrary. But as the third day approached, she was keenly aware that it wasn’t all adding up to enough.
The jungle darkened as night came on, marking the end of the period where she could catch an hour or two of rest. The Silent Fisher would stalk her for the entire night, untiring.
The dark jungles and endless miles blurred together as she pressed on; if she encountered any more jungle monsters or relics of the bygone invasion, she could not even recall them. But as night pressed on and light began to play upon the horizon, something new appeared.
Or rather, something not new at all.
As the witch rounded another bole, her panting so regular that it was beginning to feel like normal breathing, she found herself only about a hundred feet from… herself. Imogen stood at the other end of a small clearing, staring at the distant light filtering through the canopy above. As she approached, the other Imogen turned, revealing-
"You?" the witch rasped, recognizing Master Gerhard’s aidolon from the hazy, indistinct static of its eyes. Her voice sounded pretty bad.
"How are you here?" she demanded, momentarily distracted from the real threat at hand, "There’s no mirror."
The spirit gave the haggard original a coy smile, then spoke for the first time in the witch’s recollection, its voice as sweet and lilting as a songbird:
In the time twixt night and day
Many borders fade away
In the midst of sleep and wake
There are paths which I can take.
The words weren’t much of an answer, but they were enough for a witch to follow along. She stood there, breathing heavily, waiting for the spirit to continue. After a moment’s pause, it did.
Run by day and run by night
That’s the way to lose the light
Want to live another day?
You must cast your foe away.
"I know that!" growled the witch, frustrated, ”But what can I do about it? It’s the Silent Fisher and I’ve got no fucking magic left!"
The spirit’s grin grew wider, toothier, and it turned from her.
To Ailos once were weapons sent
Which flesh and light and metal rent
Hidden in this wood facade
Are powers which can wound a god.
Follow swift or fall and fail,
I’ll reveal to you the trail
Everything you seek, you’ll see
You only need to turn the key.
With that, the spirit began to move- though not to walk, not as such. It was simply… further away, then further yet, with no obvious cause of locomotion.
The witch stood there for a time, watching. Was this real? It looked like the spirit she knew, but that entity had no power to manifest even an image in this way. Was she so tired that she could perceive it as an illusion, or was she simply so tired that she was hallucinating, the world and Nod merging until she toddered off the path and collapsed?
Imogen bit back another curse which she was too tired to vary and diverged from her path, following the phantom.
~~~
A dream within a dream, was it? How unusual.
She followed a phantom through the woods, turning from the path upon a vain hope. She understood the reason. In the dream, such inane risks had often paid off, resulting in strange powers, stranger allies, and convenient solutions to her problems.
But in the waking world, it was rarely profitable to turn off the path and wander blind in the wilderness. More often than not, you got less than you gave up.
The witch followed the flickering phantom for the better part of an hour, this path seemingly no different from the one she’d been taking.
She still had no real way to know if this was really Master Gerhard’s spirit, but if it was a simple hallucination it was unusually persistent. It did not speak again, ignoring every word when she mustered the strength to call out to it. Something seemed… off, about that.
(And how, exactly, would the spirit know anything about hidden weapons buried in Ailos? It did not seem to tally.)
Given her condition, however, she made it to the spirit’s ultimate goal in good time. There, she found a great glade, moss and vines and trees entangling a rusted metal box the size of a castle. From the exterior, it seemed like a great junkpile, of the sort one could make out from the industrial district back in Zaichaer.
When the spirit stopped, she was no longer moving about in real space, but reflected in a shiny patina of grime upon one side of the metal hulk. The spirit smiled darkly at the Sunsinger, then hooked a thumb at the hull behind itself and disappeared.
"Yeah, yeah." Imogen said softly, to herself, "You want me to go in." But how to do that?
Conscious of the fact that she had only so much time before the primal finally caught up to her, the ork circled the huge wreck, looking carefully for anything which might serve as an entryway. After a few minutes of hacking at vines and brush, she spotted it- a hatchway, almost totally blocked by wood.
The hatch was iron, and must have been sturdy once- with its current condition, the witch had little difficulty lining up her shoulder and bashing it in. A few good strikes from sturdy Orkhan muscle collapsed the whining hinges, and she squeezed into the darkness beyond.
The interior of the wreck reeked, of rot and decay and ancient death never cleansed by the cleaning offices of natural processes. Imogen’s nostrils flared, and she bit back her disgust.
Even in darkness, the interior of the wreck was plainly Imperial in origin. The hallways were too small, for one–she had to duck–and everything was cruel, angular metal. Pipes filled the empty space, and cables of a strange, smooth material she didn’t recognize. The entire machine was quiet, empty. It had lain here dead for a long time.
"Time to wake up, I guess." she muttered. Was that even possible?
She wandered the compact maze of iron for a few moments more before she found a ladder leading deeper into the dark interior. Here, she found a small command deck, a bridge no more than eighty square feet, featuring a dizzying array of alien instruments. There were also three chairs; two of which featured corpses in states of advanced decay.
"What is this thing?" she asked one of the dead men.
-Abnegation- the long-dead man’s skeleton responded -An answer to devilry.-
"Very helpful." she said, voice dry. It wouldn’t matter. Skeletons didn’t get dry humor. "How do you turn it on?"
-Center panel-
The ork nodded, though it probably didn’t matter to the skeleton. She approached the panel, a heavy metallic console featuring cracked glass displays and a dizzying array of buttons, marked with worn symbols she couldn’t read. There was simply no way she was going to puzzle out how to operate this thing.
So she didn’t. Instead, she slid the tip of her sword delicately into the panel’s guts and let her soul touch its memory. As she’d hoped, the console’s memory largely concerned… how it had been touched.
To Imogen’s eye, a barrage of ghostly hands seemed to flicker across the panel, forming patterns and inputting a variety of codes. She watched carefully, taking note of patterns, until at last it seemed clear which one had been clearest in the machine’s mind.
"This one… this one… and… this." The ork punched in the code with a single finger.
CLUNK
Vibrations sounded throughout the machine, and lights flickered to life throughout the bridge. Whirring noises filled the walls.
Most of the glass displays in the room lit, but failed to resolve any images, their delicate instruments ruined by time and erosion. A few, however, loaded, even imperfectly; fuzzy images of the jungle beyond suddenly dominated the room.
And outside, the metal beast began to shift. Autonomous war programs took control in the absence of specific commands, directing metal limbs to spasm and extend. Slowly, the weapon rose from its grave, ripping away from the vines and young trees growing over it.
"Wew-oour." said Imogen, impressed despite herself. Apparently the Imperial engineers were as good as they’d always claimed. She wondered vaguely what event during the invasion had ended with the war-machine disabled and its pilots dead, but failed to destroy the thing.
Now, she just had to figure out how to get it to fight Kegumu Rekaka. It wouldn’t do her any good just st-
The ground lurched as the huge spider-like machine set off the way she’d come, crashing through smaller trees and sidestepping the ancient ones at a surprising clip. The ork grinned.
Maybe sometimes it was just that easy.
~~~
The machine encountered the Silent Fisher within ten minutes, and it immediately opened fire.
As soon as the primal’s visage appeared in the bridge’s viewscreen, red symbols began flashing. Automated aetheric-sensors recognized the creature as a threat, and the machine began devising a plan for battle. The ork, inside, relished her new position, seated one the one command chair unoccupied by a dead Imperial.
"Let’s go, spider!" she called out enthusiastically, "Kill that fucking thing!"
Panels opened across the spider's hull, revealing missile bays. Most of the projectiles failed, or misfired, but enough launched. A dozen trails of smoke arced towards the monster, resulting in a half-dozen distinct eruptions of red fire against its invincible hide. Imogen hooted at the screen, pumping her fist even as the figure of the primal broke through the smoke.
Kegumu Rekaka did not hesitate, but rushed the spider. Perhaps it sensed its prey within; perhaps it simply saw the big metal monster as a competitor. Either way, its attack was interrupted as dragonshard arrays woke inside the spider’s belly, summoning a field of repulsive energy around itself. The Silent Fisher’s charge slowed, then stalled to a halt, the primal unable to muster enough strength to burst through the war-machine’s defense.
With its enemy stalled, the spider deployed its weapon. Lines of crystal circuits sparked across the weapon’s hull as it pulled power from its generators, gathering them into a sphere of violet energy- which it unleashed in the form of a beam, lancing towards the primal.
The witch blinked, her mirth suddenly fading. She recognized that discharge. That was voidrillium.
The primal seemed to recognize the power also, blurring as it dived away from beam and field alike. The violet energy tore off into the distance, a dozen ancient trees collapsing as the void magic simply tore away their bases into nothingness.
It should have excited her, perhaps, to see that the machine was armed with such a weapon. Void magic could plausibly kill even a primal, after all- as far as she knew, there was nothing at all it could not destroy. But something about the forbidden light worried her to the core.
"Hey…" she called to one of the skeletons watching with her, "Before it spotted the Silent Fisher… what was this thing programmed to do, exactly?"
-Kill every living thing on the island-
"I see." Imogen said, frowning. Something about that seemed- "Oh. Oh damn it."
A sudden quandary, it seemed. She’d been given a weapon which could defeat the primal, but the price would be the death of the very people she’d been trying to lead it away from.
An irony, yes, but the logical thing was to let it happen. She’d dreamed of the men and women crowded within the center of Ailos, and not one of them had the power it would take to defeat the Silent Fisher. Their sacrifice, though tragic, would buy her life, and she could save man-
Imogen hunted through the bridge, trying to find a way to disable the machine’s shields.
If she could get those turned off, the Silent Fisher could tear the spider apart, or at least make sure it could never move again. Unfortunately, none of the panels seemed willing to cooperate. As she stabbed each one, she could feel them withdrawing, trying to withhold the vital information from her. The machine wasn’t going to cooperate with her attempts to kill it.
Well, she’d have to try something stupider, then.
"What’s making the shield?" she asked the skeletons.
-The array below the hull-
Below, then. If she could get below the spider and break the dragonshard array, the shield should fail. The ork stumbled across the lurching floor, clambering slowly up the too-narrow ladder and back into the dark maintenance tunnel above.
It was less dark, now. Steam hissed through the previously-empty pipes, and various lights adorning various connectors glowed with ominous light. She staggered back towards the hatch from which she’d entered and found herself face to face with-
The static-eyed doppelganger spirit stared out of the ork’s reflection and slowly shook her head. For the first time since Imogen had known the spirit it seemed… angry.
"Well you didn’t fucking tell me it was going to try to kill everyone!" she hissed. The spirit ignored her, disappearing.
She lowered herself out of the hatch, but did not let go. The ground seemed to move rapidly below her as the great mechanical spider skittered across it, reorienting itself to try to catch the Silent Fisher in its sights.
Clinging upside-down to the ladder, the witch surveyed the undercarriage of the war-machine, squinting in the wan light until she spotted-
-there. A series of glowing crystals, abjurinium and otherwise, suspended by a series of delicate-looking wires.
"...just have to time it right." she told herself. Indeed, if she timed it wrong, in addition to not breaking the shield, she was likely to be crushed against the ground by the spider’s metal carapace. The Sunsinger took her blade in hand, staring at the shield array and the moving ground, plotting her next route precisely.
"Three… two…"
The spider finally lurched in the right direction and Imogen threw herself to the ground, rolling, one hand splayed over her face to protect her eyes from jagged rocks and thorny vines. With her right hand, she struck out with her sword. Her entire arm went temporarily numb as it smacked into something metal with a ringing noise.
For a moment, she couldn’t tell whether she’d hit her mark or missed entirely to no useful effect- but blissful ignorance was suddenly replaced with awful knowledge of victory. Kegumu Rekaka made a horrendous noise as it tore into the body of the spider above, metal screeching against metal with all the sonic effect of nails scraping a chalkboard, amplified a thousand times.
The ork squirmed out from below the spider as explosions tore through its inside, and she staggered to her feet. She still could not feel her right arm, which was in awful contrast to just how many scratches and scrapes she could feel on her left. Her entire torso felt bruised.
But she’d made her choice, and now it was time to run from it. The primal continued disassembling the mechanical spider, temporarily distracted by this victory, and the wounded Sunsinger hobbled away as quickly as she could, abandoning costly victory for a cheaper defeat later.
A disappointing choice. Short-sighted. Tactically unsound. She seemed so sure that the primal would only kill her; what if it remained on Ailos and continued its spree?
It was noble, perhaps, for the strong to sacrifice themselves for the weak, but it merely postponed the inevitable. That was all any of them ever seemed to do; buy more time.
But in the back of her mind, a question seemed to blossom.
If you bought enough time… well, wasn’t that the same as winning?