Chapter 18

Checkpoint 37

The Verith-Candis Railroad

“We have an unidentified monster attempting to cross the railroad, Lieutenant.”

Lieutenant Garsmith looked to his scout. “We'll follow protocol. Load a toxin battery into the cannon then we move to intercept.”

The scout nodded, turning to run towards the small gunner team.

It wasn’t uncommon for unidentified monsters to show up. Garsmith’s team had already dealt with several that week. The checkpoint that he had been assigned command of was in charge of defending about a mile of terrain. They didn’t fight every monster they came across, only the ones too dangerous to allow into the province, the ones whose cores could be harvested for military purposes, or unknown monsters in need of study.

Garsmith watched with satisfaction as the gunner team carefully loaded the cannon construct onto the tracks. The construct was the most valuable and effective weapon at their disposal. When loaded with different batteries, the cannon could fire out an empowered technique. One of the most universally effective techniques the cannon had was used in tandem with what they called the toxin battery.

Of course, toxin wasn’t really a type of mana. Instead, the battery was infused with mana from the core of a plaguetoise. Nobody quite knew what that mana was. Garsmith had heard just as many scholars claiming it was a sub-type of water as he had heard argue it was a type of air. Garsmith didn’t care either way. All he cared about was that some clever aether engineer had figured out how to put the mana in a battery. When used in conjunction with the cannon, it could produce a devastating poison gas attack. It wasn’t quite as terrifying or deadly as an actual attack from a plaguetoise would be, but it was enough to kill 90% of the monsters that were hit by it.

As the crew finally got the cannon moving along the tracks, Garsmith followed them towards where his scout had spotted the monster. The terrain around the railroad was the most defensible area he had seen in the province. Most of the voidlands throughout the region were filled with rolling hills that effectively blocked vision. Here though, those hills had been flattened out, the excess dirt moved to build up a large mound on which the railroad tracks sat.

It wasn’t just the terrain that made the tracks defensible. Sure, it was helpful to be able to see any enemy approaching, but that alone would do nothing if resources couldn’t be moved quickly to counteract the threat. Fortunately, the tracks weren’t just limited to use by train. Large constructs like the cannon could be freely moved along the tracks. Beyond that, large numbers of troops could be moved to a point of interest rapidly.

It didn’t take the team long to cover the half mile distance. Garsmith made sure that the soldiers under his command kept themselves in shape and ready for combat. Normally, there was a long wait before they engaged any monsters. Tonight though, this was not the case.

The monster that ran towards them was vaguely humanoid, but its body was completely covered in thick black carapace. Where a human would have hands, this monster had long claws, long enough to outrange your average sword blade. None of this alarmed Garsmith, though he did hear some of the men and women under his command muttering in fear. What really scared Garsmith was the speed at which the thing moved. It was faster than any monster Garsmith had ever seen.

“Prepare armor and aim the cannon!”

Even as Garsmith shouted out orders, he stepped to the front of the group. Unlike his soldiers, Garsmith didn’t need to activate his armor. He always kept it active, moving from his pure mana well through his first connector and into the surface of his skin. The mana would slowly flow around his whole body before returning to the aether space via his first connector. There was virtually no waste in the process, making the technique very useful. While he always kept the armor on, even in his sleep, Garsmith very rarely ever used more than a trickle of mana. He found that keeping the technique largely imperceptible was usually in his best interests, much in the same way that your average soldier wouldn’t walk around in public with a sword in hand. Now though, Garsmith pushed more power through his first connector, enough to make the mana protrude nearly six inches from his body.

The humanoid monster continued at its constant pace. The creature ran without moving its clawed arms. Occasionally it would adjust them to keep balance, but it didn’t swing its arms like a human would. The effect was unnerving to say the least.

Garsmith settled in with his men, calmly reminding them to evoke pure mana in front of their nose and mouth to avoid any lingering toxin from the cannon shot. Covering their nose and mouth with a sufficiently thick covering of pure mana would prevent them from breathing which was why the pattern they pushed through their first connector to create their armor didn’t cover the mouth or nose. That gap along with the minimal eye and ear protection were the biggest weaknesses of the armor. Pure mana, when thick enough, could block your senses, and a soldier who couldn’t see or hear wouldn’t be very effective.

Garsmith calculated distances in his head, waiting for the perfect time to fire in order to put the monster in the middle of a cloud of toxin. His gunners looked to him expectantly as he waited. For most monsters he would have fired already, but this thing was so quick that it might escape the toxin if they fired too soon. He decided to wait three more seconds.

“Three…two…one…fire!”

The cannon blasted out a dense green ball, covered in a thin layer of pure mana. As the ball flew through the air, propelled by the cannon’s built in force technique, the dense toxin rapidly ate away at its covering before it expanded into a green cloud surrounding the monster for 50 feet in any direction.

Garsmith’s gunners gave out resounding cheers as they hit their mark. None of the soldier’s dropped their armor though. The attack would kill 90% of monsters, but there were always some that could resist the toxin, either by merit of incredible physical resilience or by being naturally resistant to toxins.

When this monster charged out of the cloud of gas though, it became clear that it had an entirely different way to survive the blast. Evoked pure mana surrounded it, protecting it from the toxin.

Despite the monster’s unusual ability, Garsmith didn’t hesitate for a moment, roaring out a battlecry and charging forward. He trusted his gunners to reload the cannon with a more effective type of attack. In the meantime, it would be up to Garsmith and the handful of other soldiers present to hold off the monster.

Garsmith was the first to reach the monster by a wide margin. As he did, he released the mana he had been running through his channels via a technique. The mana well that he pulled from was a sub-type of force that was usually referred to as edge mana. When released through his technique, a barely perceptible blade of force tore through the air. The technique was the most effective tool in Garsmith’s arsenal for quickly killing an opponent. In the past, he had used it on monsters and bandits alike. Regardless of opponent, few could withstand its raw force.

The monster flared its pure mana up just as the blade came for it. The blade took a noticeable chunk out of the creature’s mana, but it failed to reach the carapace underneath. Garsmith growled in frustration, already spinning up a different technique. Before he could launch it though, Garsmith found himself facing off against the monster while in range of its great claws.

The creature swung a claw at him with impossible speed. Garsmith barely had enough time to evoke an extra layer of pure mana between himself and the attack. The blow hit with even more force than Garsmith had been able to generate through his earlier technique. It tore though his evoked mana and penetrated far enough through his armor to leave a faint scratch across his arm.

The monster may have been able to finish him with a second blow if not for the other soldiers arriving to surround the beast. They each released a technique of some sort. Most of them launched waves of force. These were absorbed by the beast’s mana, but they helped to distract the beast at least. One of the soldiers, the same scout he had talked to earlier, released a blinding beam of light. That proved to be even less effective than the waves of force. The monster was sensing its surroundings somehow, but it wasn’t using its eyesight. The mana surrounding it was too thick for that.

None of the attacks were nearly as strong as Garsmith’s initial attack, but when combined in masse, the monster was forced to abandon its offence to avoid being knocked off balance. In that split second, Garsmith finished fueling his technique, one that emulated the flames of a vexenaught.

Garsmith let out a torrent of flames from his mouth. Out of all his mana wells, Garsmith had the most fire mana, but even still, he moved the bulk of his remaining pure mana through his main channel and into a converter.

The converter was designed to change the normal texture of the mana into the rapidly moving, wavy texture that defined fire mana. The process wasn’t very efficient. For every 4 units of pure mana Garsmith used, he only produced 1 unit of flame mana. Still though, Garsmith needed every scrap of mana he could get to eat through the monster’s thick barrier of pure mana.

The creature did its best to escape the steady stream of flame as its pure mana was burnt away by the roaring ball of fire, but the other soldiers worked together to slow it down. They launched wave after wave of force to keep it off balance while hastily evoking barriers of pure mana at the edge of the flame, forcing it to take the time to shred through them with its claws.

Garsmith felt pride for his men’s performance even as he put all of his effort into maintaining his assualt. Their training was showing through. The monster was far stronger than any of them, Garsmith included, but they were holding their own, buying time and wearing the creature down. Garsmith calculated that the cannon should be ready to fire, and he motioned for his men to begin disengaging.

That was when everything went wrong. The monster slowly opened one clawed hand, revealing what looked to be a small marble stone. In the next moment, marble spikes phased into existence, rapidly growing out of the monster’s carapace. In an instant, the fight was over. The majority of the soldiers were killed instantly, impaled by one of the massive spikes. The few that were lucky enough to be out of the attack zone were showered with marble chips, bringing them to the ground with heavy wounds.

Garsmith threw himself clear of the blast by evoking flame mana underneath his feet. It probably wasn’t a much better option than taking the attack directly though. Flame mana was highly volatile when evoked in its raw form. The blast that threw him clear of the attack badly burnt his legs and shattered several bones.

By the time he was able to pull himself off the ground far enough to get a glimpse of what was happening, the spikes had phased out of existence and the monster ran on. The gunner team desperately lined up their shot, but it went well wide.

Instead of attacking the gunner crew though, the monster just ran on, crossing the railroad tracks and rapidly disappearing into the distance as if intently focused on some purpose.