RAVENS OF ETERNITY - Chapter 404

404 Sanguine Massacre, Pt The fighting down below was still incredibly fierce. The Sanguine Fundamentalists had concentrated on sections of a few walls and literally blasted short tunnels through them. Many had even begun to charge through the breaches, but typically met concentrated defensive fire from all of the security forces behind the walls.

Despite the fissures, the majority of the fighting still occurred just outside the high walls. Out there, the streets had been filled with tens of thousands of armed and armored Sanguine Fundamentalists, all of whom screamed bloody murder.

It was all so chaotic and messy and completely out of their capacity to deal with that almost no-one even noticed the explosions far above their heads.

Hell, it was so far away that they couldn’t even detect them – they had their own explosions and gunfire to contend with.

Whatever beleaguered security forces still fighting from inside the high walls fired smoke canisters all over the Sanguine Fundamentalist’s front lines. Each of the canisters erupted with deep black smoke that spread quickly and practically obfuscated everything.

The smoke was so thick that the terrorists without augmented visors could hardly see past their snouts. But even worse, those without helmets or environmental suits couldn’t breathe.

Numerous terrorists began to choke and gag from the smoke that surrounded them. Out of sheer panic, they ran in various directions and caused absolute chaos wherever they went. They accidentally knocked around other Fundamentalists, or broke their formations, or interrupted their aim.

Of course, the security forces didn’t have any such problems. The combat visors installed in their armored helmets allowed them full visibility on the battlefield. Their optics were specially designed to work with the smoke itself, and could see “through” it.

Rather, the countless sensor nanites in the smoke itself pinpointed everything surrounding them, and sent data back to the security forces. That information was transmitted up to their visors, which displayed the outlines of everyone and everything in the clouds.

…..

Not just the fundamentalists themselves, but their barriers, their weapons, their armor. Even their dead.

They could easily see where the terrorists were moving, even if the terrorists themselves were completely dumbfounded by the smoke itself. And more importantly, the security forces could see if they were behind their mobile barriers or not.

Under the chaos of the smoke, many simply lost contact with their squad and strayed from their formation. Without cover or backup, they were as good as dead.

The security forces didn’t hesitate to take advantage of that, and fired down at them with impunity. Their rounds tore through the terrorists, even as they stumbled around blindly. The streets became littered with the bodies of the Sanguine Fundamentalists, to the point where they began to stumble over the corpses.

Despite the losses they faced up front, the hovertanks far in the rear continued their onslaught. But now that they had torn through many of the walls, they focused their attention on the towers themselves. Each of them shifted their barrels and aimed them higher and higher up.

Then, in near unison, they fired their disintegration shells at the towers.

Dozens and dozens of them smashed into the huge towers close to a hundred meters up, and from nearly every direction. The shells battered the exterior coral-like armor plating and broke it apart. The broken shards and clusters rained down on any security forces below.

Orange energies swept out from the point of impact, and caused numerous power circuits inside the towers to wane and ebb. Lights flickered and faded, while terminals and systems powered off and on over and over.

Anyone also struck by the waves of orange energy were also halted in their tracks – their nervous systems simply couldn’t withstand them. Their bodies shook and shivered in place as signals overwhelmed and interrupted their neural pathways.

Everyone on the floors that were directly hit by the shells immediately launched into panic. The sounds of furious thundering echoed all around as the walls were hit on all sides. Many were knocked to the ground by the sheer forces of each successive blow. They simply couldn’t keep themselves on their feet.

The vast majority ran for the closest Emergency Rendezvous Sector, no matter what was happening around them. Their survival instincts had kicked in to the absolute maximum, and they overrode all sense or logic.

Some practically trampled others as they scrambled towards safety – all others be damned.

The Emergency Rendezvous Sectors were simply large sections on every major floor in each of the towers. Simply, the buildings themselves were too large to have physical escape paths – they needed escape pods just like large spacefaring ships.

Running on foot down to the ground floor was an impossibility. Doing so would simply take far too long, and cause far more casualties than not.

Those furious and panicked tower workers ran into the ERS on their floor as fast as they could. There, emergency technicians manned terminals that managed four-person escape pods which jutted out of the walls themselves.

The emergency techs scrambled to finish up final preparations as the first handful of panicked civilians hopped into the first escape pod. It was only a second later that they closed up its small hatch shut, then launched it out to the Lacroseth City skies.

As its meager thrusters propelled it far from the building itself, another pod slid into place from the side. Its hatch had opened for barely a few seconds before the next set of panicked civilians filled it up. The emergency techs sealed the hatch shut even as the civilians strapped themselves into their seats.

They launched the pod as quickly as they could.

But this time, as it sailed away, it was struck by a disintegrator shell and ripped wide open. The pod itself was split open violently, and most of the passengers inside were blasted apart.

The one passenger who survived the shell instead tumbled out of the sky and plummeted towards the ground far below.

Then, another shell came in and smashed right into the open escape bay itself. Orange energies swept across everything, which numbed and froze and caused drogar to seize up. But that was the absolute least of their worries.

The kinetic force of the shell ripped them to shreds at the same time. Their bodies were literally swept aside in the impact, and blasted to pieces as a result. Their parts were literally thrown in every direction, and their blood decorated every surface.

Worse, not only did the entire ERS warp from the impact, but it was pierced right through. The disintegration shell punched deeper into the tower itself and utterly annihilated everything in its path. People and machines and furniture and devices were all swept up and mangled into each other violently.

By the time the shell stopped, it had caused hundreds of deaths and millions in damage in its wake.

And it was far from the only one.

The hovertanks continued to bombard the towers and fired shell after shell all around the 100 meter mark. Round after round shattered the towers’ exterior armor, then punched through the standard structural armor, and dug deep into the towers themselves.

Unlike typical spacefaring ships, land-based structures simply didn’t have the capacity to resist these kinds of weapons and attacks.

And although the shells weren’t large enough to cause the towers to topple, they were more than enough to cause massive internal damage. Over the course of the entire skirmish, tens of thousands of drogar inside the towers were torn apart by the terrorists’ vicious and senseless attack.

The Sanguine Fundamentalists inside the hovertanks were cheering each other on, high from the thrill of killing. Waves of joy flowed through them with every shell they fired into the towers themselves.

Each of them felt the raw authority that the weapons had given them – it was something they had never truly felt before. To them, this fight they were in was the epitome of their lives. They had never felt this much power and freedom, ever.

So they reveled in it, in the sheer destruction of the act itself. Though they didn’t actually see the drogar they killed, they still took massive pleasure in their deaths.

But they didn’t get to enjoy it for long.

While the main security forces fought off the terrorists head-on, the first wave of reinforcements came in from further out in the city. While the center fought, hundreds of power armored Justicars circled around to the largest hovertank formation, and charged at them from behind.

Some dropped to one knee, angled their heavy long-barreled rifles at the tanks, then fired explosive slugs into them. They struck the tanks with so much force that both the Justicar and the tanks were pushed around violently.

More importantly, the slugs themselves punched through the chitin and further into the tanks’ inner cabins. There, they erupted right in the hovertank operators’ faces and blasted them to pieces.

Some of the tanks spun out of control and smashed into nearby hovertanks, while the rest simply sat there and smoldered as their crews bled and died.

Before the tanks could regroup and face their new enemy, numerous other Justicars leapt up on top of them with heavy THUNKS. Many of them grabbed the sealed hatches atop the hovertanks, and simply wrenched them out of their sockets.

One of them tossed the hatch aside then hopped straight down into the cabin inside. There, she swung her long blade at the operators and cut them down where they sat.

While the Justicars and Imperial Security Force dealt with the Sanguine Fundamentalists below, two dozen fighters and two corvettes flew down into Lacroseth City’s open dome. They flew through the air at top speed, straight towards the very top of the central towers.

As they approached, the tri-pronged light fighters veered off to eliminate any drones and turrets around the very top of the tower. They sped down towards them, and with their thin orange beams, cut them apart with ease.

The carcasses of the wasp-like drones tumbled down towards the ground, more than two dozen kilometers beneath them.

While the fighters dealt with the meager defenses, the two corvettes flew right towards the very top – specifically where the Imperial Throne was. Thick, black smoke poured out of the jagged hole that was once a throne room wall, but that didn’t stop the corvettes’ approach.

One of the corvettes sidled right next to that wound as its portside entryway slid open, and hovered in place.

Orsethii emerged from the smoke itself, and leapt from the building into the waiting corvette with relative ease. Her scales had been torn apart and blackened from the explosion, especially around her face.

Blood and pus oozed out of her open wounds – any that hadn’t been scorched shut anyway.

Though she herself was filled with an incredible amount of pain, she seemed stoic. Perhaps even at peace, though it was momentary at best.

Despite her stoic silence, a handful of MedTechs immediately ran to her side and attended to her wounds. They injected her with swarms of nanites and drugs, all of which worked quickly to seal up and repair her bloody body.

“Open a line to the senator,” she said after a moment. “Let him know our mission’s a success.”