The Path of Ascension - Chapter 308

General Declan Raven chewed his lip as he watched the starscape that represented the war front as he listened to General Crawford. “As per the orders from King Rusty himself, we need to slow the advance as much as possible.”

Declan didn’t bother to hide his eye roll. No shit. They all knew the situation but if they wanted to even just slow the war down they needed more. More people. More armor. More weapons. More mana. More time. More healers. More ships. More trainees.

That was the thing. They could use as much as they were given but what they were being asked to do was hard enough with their limited resources let alone with what he was sure was coming next.

“Our request for more resources this next decade was denied. We are only receiving our previously allocated quantities.”

“Fucking bullshit.”

Declan’s curse was echoed by Generals Li and Wilkerson.

General Casey held up a hand. “We expected this, stop bitching. I swear you lot complain as much, if not more, than a fresh trooper. Let us be glad we are getting our full allotment.”

Declan was going to snipe back, but Wilkerson beat him to it. “King Rusty isn’t here for you to kiss up to but you still manage to have shit on your nose. Impressive.”

Declan smirked. He and Wilkerson didn’t often agree, but General Casey might as well hand up her uniform and just become a concubine to King Rusty. It was no secret amongst them that she had only stayed in the military to increase her contact with the royal who didn’t reciprocate her feelings at all.

That made it smart all the more that she was right. Declan had half expected them to take a hit in their supplies this decade. If not this next decade, it was surely going to happen within the next few.

Wars were expensive.

General Li pointed at the far wall and took control of the projection. “With just our normal number of resupplies, the current battlefields are too large. We need to collapse the outermost ring and fall back. I suggest we retreat from sectors three, four, and seven. That will pull us into the tightest formation possible with the least amount of planets lost.”

General Brooks shook his head. “That would be foolish. Sector three is a critical defensive point. We—”

General Crawford interrupted Brooks by taking control over the screen. “We can get back to the strategic planning in a moment. First, we need to decide what to do with the Federation’s new troops.”

Everyone looked to the projection of a skeleton with runes carved on it before turning to him.

Declan just blinked at the rest of the generals asking them what they wanted from him but when the silence dragged on spoke his peace. “This isn’t the first time we have seen runes carved onto the bones of soldiers. Sure, usually it’s just elite soldiers, but this is nothing new. It’s runic tattoos taken to eleven, but the side effects are many. They conflict with the body’s spirit and burn out faster because of it. These troops might be making waves now, but they will have to be cycled out of the frontlines after every major battle. This has got to be costing the Federation a lot to keep this many rune troops like this active.”

“So you are saying they aren’t an issue? They have already won several battles faster than expected. That’s not what I would call not an issue.” General Kjarr leaned forward and steepled his fingers in a way Declan recognized as him getting ready to pick a fight.

Declan met the challenge head on. “I don’t believe I said that. I said this is expensive for them. We use the same strategy we use on any expensive consumable. The same one every army since our ancestors thought sharpened rocks were the height of military armaments. We take engagements and play defensively forcing them to burn their runes for minimal gains of areas we already intended to abandon.” He looked to General Li and let some of his disapproval show for her last proposal. “And that means not giving up valuable systems with no struggle. Seriously, I’m special forces and even I know just abandoning those systems is dumb.”

General Li leaned forward with fire in her eyes. “A controlled retreat would allow us to skuttle those systems leaving nothing for the occupying enemies and preserve lives, giving us more bodies to defend the smaller border. You were special forces and don’t know the futility of throwing bodies away in a system you know you are going to abandon. I do. I’ve been there and despite no longer being on the battlefield I haven’t changed my stance. It’s the height of foolishness to throw bodies away for no reason.”

Declan was going to nod an acknowledgement, but General Hale spoke first. “Those lives buy us valuable time and are not given in vain. The Emperor himself informed us of our directives before the war even started. We are to drag this war out as long as possible. We are on the defensive, and our enemies bleed for every system they take. Sacrificing systems without a struggle is at best a hard sell and at worst disobedience.”

Declan thought the last bit was a little too dramatic but didn’t counter Hale despite disagreeing. General Li wasn’t wrong, losing people in a defensive retreat could be done exceptionally badly and he knew she had been a part of a few of those disastrous battles. What was really ridiculous was Hale’s implied threat that Li could be charged for suggesting an idea.

Since the Sophron dynasty had taken over not a single general had been court-martialed for anything less than full blown treason. Even if Li suggested surrender wholesale to avoid losses the Emperor was unlikely to punish her which made the threat ridiculous. The Sophron dynasty, and their current Emperor most of all, were far less bloodthirsty than their predecessors had been, for better and for worse.

Brooks leaned forward. “We are getting distracted and off-topic. The rune soldiers. We need to counter them. I put forward a slow retreat, putting up just enough resistance to make them struggle for it.” Looking at Declan, she continued. “How do the runes work with different Tiers? Are there advantages or disadvantages for a Tier 15 versus a Tier 35?”

Declan wasn’t an enchanter and that question really relied on the methodology on the runes. Some styles of bone enchanting were more dangerous than others, and he needed to flip through the preliminary report to get his answer. He was mildly surprised at the initial results and said so.

“They seem to be using a more…” He paused as he searched for the word he wanted. “Unstable style of rune. They won’t kill even a Tier 15 but the soldiers are going to be in pain from the runes at all times, more so when they use them. The runes will burn at a respectable rate for a decent power boost but the moment they push the runes, and I mean really push them, they are going to need a new set of bones. Complete regrowth. I’ve seen something similar on a few special forces before, but usually only in exceptional circumstances. Nobody without a Talent or Domain to handle them would accept them.”

Casey tapped her chin before saying. “So if we can stall their latest push, we can really hurt them. What are their reserve projections like? Can we stall them enough to stop their advance long enough to push enough soldiers into a healing cooldown?”

Kjarr shook his head. “They are already rotating their troops. It’s a three verse two, and they are all focusing on us. They are only using half their standing armies on the frontlines at any one time. If we started really slowing them down they would either redouble the assaults with the reserve troops or they would simply slow their advance down to a rate they can sustain. Can we hit the supplies they are using to make these runes? That would put a kink in this plan.”

Declan went through his reports and looked for anything that might be a supply depot for runic supplies but found nothing that stood out. It wasn’t like the Federation would put a large sign on their critical war supplies. Everything was encoded and for all he knew the runic supplies were being called potions or talismans in their intercepted supply reports.

The Empire did the same thing.

Declan even tried to ping his Talent to see if it had any good feelings, but even it was silent.

Crawford tapped the table. “Let us table that idea for Team Zero or Duke Waters if we get reliable intel, but I wouldn’t put it past the enemy to leak that kind of information to lure them into a trap.”

Declan agreed and tapped a finger to signify his agreement. That was exactly what he would do.

With that thought in mind he went through possibilities to see if there was any way they could bait an attack out from their enemies but they were already getting pushed back which made it unlikely for them to jump at such an opportunity.

It did make him look at a system near the border where Li had suggested retreating from.

“Guluja is a Tier 15 nexus and is going to be a hotspot but maybe an opportunity.” He let the others look at the system and the seven connected worlds with their tethers. “Can we make it seem like we are going to defend it to the last but have already retreated? We can then jump sideways to Lafla which is another Tier 15 system crushing the attackers there between two armies before retreating? They are going to expect us to defend Guluja to the last and send a corresponding number of troops there. It’s just a small action but can be integrated into any number of larger plans.”

That got them back to the tactical level and together they spent close to five hours hashing out how they were going to defend the Empire for another decade. It wasn’t going to be pretty, but Declan was confident they could do it.

Once that was taken care of and they had a rough plan put together they tabled it for at least twenty four hours so they could all slowly think it over.

Declan still thought there was a better distribution that minimized Empire worlds that were on the border region but hadn’t been able to find something better than what they had come up with. The current plan was only decent, and they needed something good if not excellent for this war.

The Empire had more troops than any of the other Great Powers but that was as much of a curse as it was a blessing as it meant their resources needed to be spread out even further.

As of his last report, Duke Waters was fairly deep in enemy territory, and that provided an opportunity. They just needed the right way to take advantage of it, and he knew exactly who he wanted.

Balfaz’s Raiders were excellent irregulars, and that could be useful. Instead of having them repeat Team Zero’s actions he intended to have them raid some supply lines that would be disrupted by Duke Waters actions.

Supplies won wars and going that deep inside enemy lines was dangerous but that was what his boys and girls signed up for. They lived for these kinds of missions, knowing the casualty rates just as well as he did.

He found a few more locations that might have disrupted shipping lanes and allocated a few more units before calling for a vote.

No one disagreed with his actions, but he hadn’t expected them to. He was the special forces general after all.

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He was just getting ready to do a deep dive into a report when all of the generals looked up.

It was a report from one of their spies. Not urgent, but high-priority nonetheless. They had managed to get their hands on the schematics for a portion of the Republic’s greatest technological feats, their true portals known as the Veil Parter, Slipstream, or the Shortest Road, among others. The massive portals in question required at least a Tier 40 world to function, but served as truly instantaneous transportation between their capital worlds.

The exact limits were unclear, but it was firmly established that for several hours out of every week, massive portals opened in the space around the Republic’s capital planet, connecting it to one of the regional capitals, large enough to convey millions of people and hundreds of starships to the far reaches of their Great Power. It was a staggering feat of engineering and logistics wholly unique to the Republic, with only the Corporation’s StarShot as anything even remotely comparable, yet it was a pale reflection of the Republic’s system.

What data, exactly, the spy had gotten ahold of was unclear, but any information about the system was welcome. The more they knew, the more they could plan around its weaknesses, the more they might be able to disable it, or improve their own technology based on principles learned from the larger project. The last aspect was suspect, however, given the strong implication that the technology relied on the Between, the Republic taming of chaotic space to allow for shipless interplanetary travel, and the Empire was in no position to replicate that in the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, the spy in question had been nearly killed during the mission, and had been forced to body-hop to a child to escape pursuit. So now, some of the most valuable intel from this war was locked within a mortal deep in Republic space. It would be a couple of decades at least before the spy in question would be able to send more details about how to find them, and in the meantime they needed to figure out how they would retrieve them when the time came.

Declan felt his hairs start to turn gray and the follicles trying to loosen their grip on the roots at the turn of events.

With every impossible mission like this he wondered why he was still doing this but he knew the answer.

He wasn’t any different from the young man who threw himself into battles in the special forces everyone said were impossible.

It was only when the odds were stacked against you and everyone agreed the mission was impossible that truly made one feel alive.

This would be no different.

The news did change things and he went back to revising their plans on how to retreat. On the off chance the spy made contact in the next hundred years, they needed to ensure they had a clear shot into Republic space.

That was why they tabled any formal plans for a full day before sending them out.

Something always came up.

It never failed.

***

Saziel Varan reached up and adjusted his hair as a strand fell into his face even while he was being dressed down.

“Do you even know what attention means? I have—”

Saziel turned General Alfonso out as he pulled his hair out of his pony tail and made sure to capture all of his hair this time.

That just set General Alfonso off on something else, but Saziel was already ignoring the man.

This was all because he had refused the new runes so many soldiers had been getting when it had been offered to him. Saziel had heard the undertones of an order and disregarded them because he could. And he had both good and valid reasons. His body was already a masterwork, the result of millennia spent enhancing and replacing portions of his limbs and torso. His mana channels were a literal fine-tuned machine, and he had no interest in throwing a spanner into the works.

Adding runes to what few bones he had left was asking for a cascading malfunction no matter what the surgeons said. That was the valid reason to decline the runes. The good reason was he didn’t care for the push to use these new runes and didn’t need the power increase to be a monster.

The good General Alfonso had been a proponent of the runes and had been pushing everyone under his command to take the surgery. If anyone declined they found themselves in hot water, but as the equal to any Archwarrior Saziel was wholly immune to such petty tricks.

Maybe it was time to remind the general of that?

As General Alfonso poked him in the chest, Saziel decided that he had had enough and it was time to remind the general of who he was messing with. In a deceptively slow movement he reached up and grabbed the offending finger and bent it backwards until it snapped.

General Alfonso snarled and threw a heavy mana infused punch in a tight jab at Saziel but he just stepped to the side and drove a knife hand into the general’s ribs. Rune powered bones snapped and the now released power did even more damage to the surrounding tissue.

Really, the General should have expected as much. That much power in newly-integrated runes was just asking for trouble. Until and unless the spirit fully accepted the runes, someone who knew what they were doing could far too easily trigger a fairly catastrophic failure. His own implants, of course, were as stable as what little flesh and blood he had left.

The metal ring encircling his eye glowed, and Saziel received a brief premonition of the general withdrawing and attempting to stab him with a short, vibrating knife.

In response, he grabbed ahold of the knife with his magic as it left dimensional storage, and twisted.

Bones snapped and Saziel grabbed the falling knife letting it flick through his fingers.

“General Alfonso, I will not be assaulted by a superior officer. If you take issue with that please feel free to put a note in my official file. It won’t be the first time I have been reprimanded, but ask yourself. Who does the Federation value more?”

Pocketing the dagger Saziel stepped out and nodded to the panicked looking receptionist.

Tapping his rapier, Saziel stepped out of the building and into the rubble of a freshly captured planet.

Despite his bravado, Saziel knew attacking Alfonso had been a bad idea. The man was the highest-level general in this area and would be out for blood the moment he thought he could get away with it. Saziel needed a plan and thought he had it.

Flicking through his past message he found one in particular he had been ignoring.

He’d joined the military alongside one Captain Heart, in the wake of the Federation’s most humiliating loss since the Shattering itself. While the two of them had gone in quite different directions in the tens of thousands of years since, he and the now-General were now undeniably some of the ‘old guard,’ eyewitnesses to the many ways in which the Federation were on the decline.

Not that he would ever admit it, of course. Or think it, if certain inquisitors were around. But the strongly-encouraged rune package was but the latest example of the many ways his time serving had become far less practical as of late. He needed an out, and while joining some trumped-up team to fight Ascenders was hardly better, serving under General Heart in that kind of strike force could be enough for him to, if not fund his advancement to Tier 45 and ascension, at least get him enough clout to opt out of the ever-more absurd demands that high command was foisting on them.

He still loved the Federation, but they could certainly make it hard at times.

Still, fighting Ascenders was less of a death wish than staying here.

Tapping his rapier, he flowed like the wind and crossed half the planet in a moment. Arriving at the landing site, he made up his mind.

The sooner begun, the sooner done.

His implants gleamed with a white light, and with a thrust of his fist [Wind Manipulation] swelled around him, and he rode the jetstream high into the atmosphere, then beyond.

He reached orbit in a moment and looked down to a battlefield where he had just fought so desperately.

It all seemed so pointless.

Pointless and he wanted out.

To get out, he just needed to kill a few more people.

Sending his acceptance of the old orders, Saziel was freed of his obligations to this army and boarded a supply ship that could get him to a hub.

It took two weeks of travel, but he spent the time productively. He had intended to just relax but his work ethic had forced him to work after just three hours of relaxing.

Any improvement of his skills might be what kept him alive if this joint mission was as dangerous as he suspected.

He always carried around his own personal cybernetics workshop for tune-ups and repairs, and while he was no Maker, nobody knew his body and magic the way he did. It had been a little while since he’d given himself a proper upgrade, but if there were ever a time for him to implement all of his newest materials and knowledge, it was now.

While he preferred to use his rapier, his hands, embedded as they were with metal bands, were his next weapon of choice. Swords and all weapons were force multipliers but there were a thousand and one ways one could be disarmed and still in a condition to fight.

Saziel had that lesson beaten into his skull in a thousand-and-one fights as he made his way up the Tiers.

He ran a power-diagnosis on his arm implants, watching as light slowly collected from a focal point in his wrist, flowed up the metal strips in his hands, and sequentially lit up each of the bands in his forearms. Once they were fully activated, he activated his sensory booth, studying the reads as he lightly channeled his various manipulation skills through the enchantments. No major faults, that was good, though a few areas he saw that he could improve.

Next, the mechanical test. With a flick of his wrist, a blade popped out of his fist between his knuckles, right where a band of metal connected the power focus in his palm to the set of rings on the back of his hand. With a flick of the wrist the other way, his blades vanished just to pop out of his elbows with a snick.

He pulled the blades back in but frowned. There had been a small delay in his left arm.

He left the diagnosis booth and went to his implantation station, turning it so that properly accepted his arm. Once the limb was properly locked in place, he activated the station’s enchantments and let the magic peel back flesh and steel, unspooling his muscles and implants to better view where his blade nestled between his metal bones.

He’d faced a bit of ridicule over the years, not storing his arm-blades inside a pocket dimension, but Saziel had never seriously considered the idea. Spatial magic embedded into his body would disrupt his existing implants.

Besides, that was just asking for trouble when someone spatially locked you. Then you were stuck without your backup weapon, and nobody wanted to be in that position. Besides, it wasn’t like the physical storage was that hard to maintain if you knew what you were doing, and this way any enchantments on the blade itself would always be active.

He traced the track the blade ran down looking for bends but noticed nothing which was good. That was paired with the arms main support pillar. If it was bent, he would need to replace the arm itself. He then checked the force applicators, but they were cycling perfectly. He eventually tracked the issue down to a speck of depleted metal dust that had slipped into the arm at some point and was hiding from his spiritual perception while trapped in the actuators.

Cleaning the arm took a few minutes but once that was done he cleared his right for good measure.

Creating a knife hand similar to the one he had driven into General Alfonso, he activated the enchantment he had built into his fingers. The fingers merged slightly as the sides of his hands narrowed into a blade’s edge.

Slashing out he tapped into [Wind Manipulation] and sent out a dozen air blades in sequence, letting them crash into the testing steel he had on the far end of his training room. Fortunately, the room’s sensors confirmed that each blade was identical in size and strength.

Good.

Letting that enchantment drop, his hands returned to normal but he immediately activated his death grip enchantment. He didn’t have anything that could survive that level of stress, but he was able to ensure the enchantment was working properly well enough to satisfy.

With his arm’s implants now in good working order, he returned to his maintenance room to work on his legs. With a thought, he grew another three inches as blades extended from his legs to cover his calves and shins. A kick from him could cut through even the best armor, though that would cause substantial damage to his legs as well. More commonly, he used them to hold himself fast to just about any surface he walked on. Still, they could use a bit of love, and he returned to his implantation station to remove the blades for sharpening, polishing, re-tempering, and just a couple tweaks to the enchantment. Most of that work was done on its own by an automated forge, so while that did its job he turned his attention to his armor.

A couple of contact points, where the armor connected to his body, needed some cleaning, and once those were good, he activated it upon its mannequin, one stage at a time. The first activation expanded it from a breastplate into more of a metal bodysuit, extending to his elbows and knees, as well as protecting his neck. From there, it slotted into covering everything but his hands, feet, face, and the top of his head. One final activation closed those ports as well, letting the armor clunk into place like a guillotine, ready to sever his ponytail if he had been wearing it at the time.

Saziel never cut his hair. It was only cut when he needed to activate his full defenses. When he was younger he had just let his armor cut the hair because he was always activating it and it was easier than stopping the growth of his hair. As he got stronger and needed the full armor less and less his hair started getting longer until it had turned into a bit of a game with himself. The longer it got the stronger he was becoming. That had gone on until he grew to the level where he could contend with even the best of the best. Or the best besides Ascenders.

Most of his commanders didn’t care. Either they understood what he was doing and understood what the hair meant, or they feared his reputation as a pinnacle elite only attached to their armies for a mission or two where they would face some of the worst fighting of their careers.

Either way, most left him alone.

He was almost tempted to let his armor cut the hair off here and now. Do it on his own terms. When facing Ascenders, he would be activating his armor before the fighting even started but he wanted a bit more time with his hair before it was less than a finger’s length again.

His orders must have been transmitted to the hub because the moment his ship arrived in real space, a courier ship hailed the supply ship and ordered him to board. From there, it only took a month to travel to an intersection between the Federation, Republic, and Sects territories.

The moment they entered real space, Saziel used the scanners to investigate the system.

He had seen a lot of things in his time in the Federation army. Four full wars, hundreds of border skirmishes, and dozens of clandestine missions, but he had never seen something like that before.

Perhaps he wouldn’t be dying in this war after all.