Chapter 80

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth.

Dungeon Factory, Command Center.

"What the hell are those?" Asked Alexandra as the clip finished playing on the screen.

She might not be able to see through her dungeon view, but she could jack her golems in physically and have them display what they saw on the screens. And while it wasn't exactly practical it let her get information without having to reveal her avatar or risk CQ, Emilia or the maids.

"Undead. Zombies to be precise." Alexandra had never seen the vampire girl look so disgusted before. "I didn't think they'd stoop this low."

"They're here to grab me, and probably orchestrated the war topside as a distraction." She'd hope that the guild had noticed her doors slamming shut, but honestly in the chaos the message would probably get lost somewhere. "I wouldn't call anything too low for them to attempt."

"Fair enough, it's just that..."

"It's unnatural? Most people would call vampires that as well. Hell, vampires were considered undead in my homeworld's mytho."

Emilia opened her mouth, and closed it with a snap.

"I...Right, point taken."

"So, what are the capabilities of these...zombies?" Said Alexandra as she looked at the unfolding carnage. She had a hard time calling those...things 'zombies'. Zombies were shambling undead in her mind, not whirling furies of death and destruction!

"It depends on what they gave them." Emilia shrugged at Alexandra's questioning glance. "There's nothing to prevent potions, elixirs and even philters from working on them. So it's common practice for those using undead to use every stimulant and such on them before reanimation. There are even specialized concoctions, considered too dangerous to use for the living, made for them."

"Ah. So they're basically just packed full of combat stims. That's...not good."

"At least they're not ghouls. Imagine the same, but with cybernetics and integrated weapons."

Alexandra shivered. She'd rather not dwell upon it.

"Alright. Well, we need a way to counter them. Anything in particular works well against them?"

"Yes, fire. Their flesh tears itself apart as they move -part of how they can be so agile-, and usually they are packed full of regeneration elixirs. But fire slows down the regeneration, and in turn that hampers their movement. Burning through any means work, actually, powerful enough lightning would do the trick as well."

"Well, we don't have that. But we do have some power beams. Alright, let's thin those bastards out!"

*****

Aubriana winced as the zombies threw themselves at the golems. They piled on top of the spider tank, and she could see armor plates flying out as they tore it to pieces with their bare hands.

"All squads, advance!" She yelled out, and her men hesitated, before obeying. Not that she could blame them, even she was feeling fairly worried about getting closer to that blender of a melee.

Suddenly, the melee diminished in sound as the golems flattened themselves on the ground.

"Shield wall!"

Her front ranks instantly raised their shields, and a split second later Aubriana closed her eyes as the hallways was filled with blinding light. When she opened them again, the shield wall was still there, intact, albeit with the wards of protection flickering. But the zombies were writhing on the ground, most of them seriously wounded, trying to drag themselves back up as the golems leapt to finish them off.

"Suppressive fire! Buy the...the undead time!"

The shield wall lowered, and the crossbowmen began firing. Golems went down, but more kept taking their place.

But the moment of reprieve was enough, and the zombies came back up, their wounds disappearing as their flesh knit back together, and they leapt back into the fight. They weren't fully healed, in fact some were only held together by tendons and sinew, as even the most potent of healing philter had its limits, especially against burns, but they fought all the same, and the golems began to be pushed back. Or, more accurately, tore down to pieces ranks by ranks, faster than the next rank could push forward to fill the holes left by their dead comrades.

Aubriana sighed in relief, and gestured her men forward. The shield wall broke up, and her squads began cautiously advancing, wary of damaged golems that might still have a spark of whatever passed for life in them or more traps waiting for them to step on them.

Unfortunately, it never occurred for them to look up…and the claymore mines in the ceiling had never been targeted by the spells that had destroyed their sisters on the wall.

"EVERYONE! GET DOW-"

Aubriana grunted as one of her men tackled her to the ground. She'd never know what the ranger sensed that enabled him to shout out his warning, as the mines detonated before she even hit the floor.

The hallways went from a grim battlefield to a charnel house. Thousands of steel spheres, effectively musket balls, were launched at once like the largest shotgun in existence.

Wards of protection flared…and failed. They'd taken too much damage, stopped too many attacks. Many of the musket balls were turned away regardless.

Most weren't.

The hallway was instantly turned into a charnel house, and Aubriana looked in horror at the remnant of her force as she pushed the ranger's shredded body off of her. Her own ward of protection had failed under the onslaught, but her armor, aided by her subordinate's own armor and even his body, had held.

The mages were still alive, if looking extremely dazed. Their own wards had been more or less untouched by the constant fighting, and they had held, if barely, aided by their personal, if more esotheric protections. A handful of her men still stood, looking as shocked as she was, most heavily wounded. The lieutenant was still up as well, although drenched in blood.

There was a pause, in sheer shock. The zombies at the end of the hallway were still tearing into the golems of course, but for a few seconds no one in her force moved, they just stood there, shock and horror forcing even the most elite of troops to pause.

Aubriana shook her head, and started snapping orders.

"Medic! Get the wounded back and form a defensive line! And someone tear up that ceiling, I don't want the rest of those mines to turn on us later!" She turned towards the mage leader, opening her mouth, before taking a deep breath. "As for you…take the fallen, do…what needs to be done."

The mage, his face white as he looked at the carnage, nodded convulsively, and got to work.

*****

Alexandra swore viciously as the golem reported in. The mines had done damage, but the mages were still up, and given how the zombies were tearing up her forces, it didn't take a genius to realize who was the real threat. In fact, the only thing she'd done was give them more material!

That…wasn't quite fair, she knew, at least the zombies were mindless savages, not reasoned, coordinated soldiers, but that was cold comfort right now, especially as the 'mindless savages' were crushing her frontline!

They were hurting them, she could see they were hurting them, with whatever cocktail the undead had been loaded with regenerating a bit less every time, and the zombies starting to literally fall into pieces, but they were going through her golems faster than they were going through them.

Still, her battle plan wasn't yet lost. It was just clear that withdrawing her troops to form a defensive line, and use CQ's ability to outflank the enemy just wasn't going to work. If the golems fell back they'd just get overrun by the zombies, and she didn't have enough left for a sacrificial rearguard and a force strong enough to hold them off for CQ's royal guard to rise again. Which meant that she needed something else to bolster her forces.

She looked to the side at the vampire maids, who were flanking the entrances to the command center protectively.

Well, it was time to see if her suspicions about Emilia's 'maids' were right.

*****

Aubriana looked over her forces and winced.

Of the forty men she'd set out with, only a dozen remained standing, not including the mages. Virtually all of them were wounded, and their shield wall was nothing but a pitiful excuse now, but it was a testament to their training and discipline -not to mention their sheer quality as soldiers- that they were still holding formation and obeying orders, despite everything happening around them.

The ground shook as a stream of energy leapt from one of the mage's hands, and more musket balls went flying through the air as the last few ceiling mines were detonated, and the accompanying drop axes activated from the shock. Unbeknownst to her, the detonation and energy arcs also warped the tubes housing the kinetic drop hammers, neutralizing them. Golems and zombies alike were shredded by the hail of bullets, and while the undead came back up, the golems did not. Then suddenly there weren't anymore golems, as the zombies finished off the last few standing, and Aubriana frowned. That…didn't make any sense, she had seen the ranks behind them, where the hell had they-

The first zombie leapt into the room the golems had been defending. It's right arm was simply missing, and it no longer had a head, more a mass of mutated, regenerating tissue with a jaw attacked by the thinnest of strands of flesh, with most of its body almost looking like it was boiling as the philters tried to regenerate the incredible damage it had taken.

It came back out in pieces, like it had been through a meat grinder. Zombies could regenerate from much, being cut into a dozen pieces was not one of them.

Aubriana's eyes widened as she saw the two women stepping out into the hallway. They were wearing maid uniforms out of all things, and behind them was a solid wall of golems and even what looked like a manticore pup, watching their backs. The first one was tall, and wielded a bastard sword like it was a toy. Another zombie leapt for her, and the woman vanished in a blurr.

It wasn't so much as the zombie was hacked to pieces as it simply disintegrated.

The undead surged forward, and the second maid, almost leisurely, threw a handful of daggers.

The zombies ignored the weapons buried in their flesh….until they flashed with power. Some of the zombies simply vanished, disintegrated into dust, and more stumbled and fell as the blades flashed with energy, and the magic that held them together, the infernal light in their eyes, were snuffed out like candles.

Aubriana watched in disbelief as the maids stood, and the zombies rushed them, and just…died. They didn't fight, they didn't break, they just got into their reach and died on the spot, some reduced to pieces, others falling victims to an apparently limitless arsenal of enchanted blades. Even as more zombies rose from the newly deceased, they just rushed forward to their doom.

Then the captain met one of the maids' gaze, the taller, bastard sword wielding one, and the maniac smiled, revealing her pointed canines. Canines that could only belong to a single race. One they'd known they would face…and planned accordingly.

Aubriana jerked into motion.

"They're vampires! We need to use the neutralizer, now!" She yelled out at the mage leader, and he nodded, pouncing on the spatial bags his team had brought with them.

Then, as the mage started rummaging through the bag, the air filled with…something. It felt almost like a song, tethering on the edge of her perception. It spoke to her very soul, it spoke of eternity, of loyalty, of a bond deeper than time and space itself. It was a promise, from a ward to their guardians.

And to her horror, the bodies of the golems, strewn on the ground, began to twitch.

She stared as metal began bodies melding back together, much like the undead she herself had ordered unleashed, before turning towards her troops.

"It's the boss….It's the boss! It's resurrecting the golems! Forward! Forward now!"

Her men didn't think, they simply charged forward, accompanied by the leaping zombies.

And the maids advanced to meet them…before stopping.

A light flashed behind Aubriana, and the captain smiled as the vampires dropped their weapons, and started to scream.

Neutralizers were rare. And expensive. In some ways, even more than influence disruptors, at least in terms of the level of craftmanship required. Disruptors, after all, had been standardized and mass produced once upon a time, when nations and dungeons clashed in open warfare, those never were. Created from millenia of trial and errors, not to mention extrapolation from weapons and schematics from the Old World they…short circuited, for the lack of a better terms, the enhancements that made vampires, well, vampires. Their enhancements, which normally should have regenerated their flesh, now melted, their upgraded muscles ripped themselves apart as they twitched helplessly, and their brains filled with arcs of energy and manafire as their implants went insane.

They might have recovered, if given a bit of time. Vampires were resilient, and moreover the Western Marches and its dukes had spent much of their time and treasure finding counter measures. They had failed to stay ahead of the curve -far more people wished the vampires harm than were ready to help them after all-, but that didn't mean they had stayed far behind it either.

Unfortunately for them, the zombies were right there, and the golems and the manticore pup couldn't step forward fast enough, as those screams ended in a gurgle of torn flesh and organs.