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Chapter 1396: Silent Disaster

The demon assault collapsed.

The black pillar was large, but its interior was finite. There was no arrangement of flesh and stone that could carry unlimited numbers of small Spider Demons, and the assault force had brought more than twenty general-purpose machine guns to a mountainside fight. At these distances, the curtain of fire was as close to airtight as it made no practical difference.

Under that suppression, the soldiers gathering at the retreat point surpassed three hundred — close to the operation’s full headcount. The casualties had come during the evacuation, not the fight. Some soldiers, caught on the far side of the stone pillar’s impact point, had been separated from the main body; those further from the mountain trail faced not only Spider Demons but the additional hazard of fire from their own side coming across the rubble. They had gotten low and moved along the flanks, fighting as they ran.

Tracer rounds had made the difference in the machine gun line. Before tracers, gunners could not tell where their rounds were going once they left the barrel; bullets deviated and were lost in the landscape without anyone realizing. With tracer guidance, the gunners could see their work, correct it in the moment, and choose their targets with a precision that had previously required guesswork. The suppression density climbed accordingly.

But the true crux of the battle — what every soldier present understood without needing to say it — was Lightning’s warning. If the crews had still been at their guns when the pillar struck, the casualties would have been of a different order entirely.

When she floated down through the dispersing snow mist, the crowd gave her unanimous applause. Warm, unreserved, the kind that comes from people who have just calculated what would have happened without her.

Lightning’s expression did not change. “Where is the commanding officer?”

“That’s me — Cat’s Claw.” He stepped forward and bowed. “Everyone here survived because of you.”

“You need to regroup and evacuate immediately.” Her words came quickly, the sentence structure of someone thinking in parallel. “The Blackstone pillar that hit the decoy position also contained Spider Demons — they’re all moving this direction now. Also: the floating island still has multiple projectile installations. They can fire again at any moment.”

Cat’s Claw’s heart moved through his chest.

He had assumed they would clear the remaining enemies and then withdraw in proper order — that meant accounting for every soldier, living and dead, before the mountain trail was abandoned. The plan existed for exactly these circumstances. But the picture Lightning was painting was not that plan. It was worse by a significant margin.

The two designated positions shared a connecting route along the mountainside. If the Spider Demons from the decoy site were already moving, time on the mountain became time spent walking toward the meeting point with the next wave. The narrow trails here were nothing like the ground the Witches had smoothed out for other operations — barely wide enough for two rows of soldiers to pass abreast, sloped and snow-packed, completely hostile to any defensive formation worth the name. That left two possibilities: take everyone down immediately, regardless of who was still unaccounted for, and secure the junction before the Spider Demons got there — or call the reserve troops forward to intercept.

But the reserves were over eight hundred strong. If Lightning’s assessment of the remaining projectile installations was accurate, concentrating that force on the mountainside was inviting another strike. A reserve force looked far more like a main force than an assault team did. The reliable option was to tell them to hold, and to extract everyone from the assault force using only what the assault force had.

Logically: straightforward.

Actually: not simple at all.

Twenty-three soldiers were still unaccounted for. Somewhere in the rubble and the snow and the narrowing window, they were injured or pinned or fighting and waiting. Walking away from them meant walking away from them.

And Jop was nowhere Cat’s Claw could see.

His mind drifted for a moment.

“Captain!” Someone close by pulled him back.

He was the person responsible for these troops. That was the fact. Mission completion meant bringing as many First Army soldiers out of the Impassable Mountain Range as could be brought out — not rescuing every individual while sacrificing the rest.

“Contact team — inform the reserves to maintain concealment.” He said it through his teeth. “Everyone else: we evacuate this position right now and converge on the junction at the mountainside.”

He pulled the cowhorn from his belt and blew the retreat signal.

Under his command, the flintlock troops split into covering units, each shielding a portion of the soldiers running down the mountain — those moving, those being helped, the stragglers — until the last person had cleared. Order in the extraction, not the fighting: that was the standard.

“Miss Lightning.” He turned to her when the orders were done, his face showing more than he meant it to. “For the soldiers who can’t make it to us yet — ”

“Don’t explain it.” She already knew. “Leave it to me.”

“I’ll leave it to you.” He bowed again and went to organize the Artillery Squad for the next gathering point.

Is this what you were so proud of?

Silent Disaster did not say a word. He didn’t need to. Nassaupelle felt the shape of the question anyway, emanating from somewhere behind that impassive face — mockery, he was almost certain, though its owner would deny it if pressed.

The humans had resisted more fiercely than anticipated. Even after the range had been closed, even after the Extinguishers had been committed, the resistance had not broken. The humans had absorbed the first wave, formed a defensive perimeter on the mountainside, and were preparing to meet the second.

The Extinguishers — the new Symbiotic Demons Nassaupelle had named for what they were meant to do: extinguish. Meant to prove that his creations could overwhelm human fire-forks, fire-bolts, and fiery rain combined. A name was a declaration, and declarations invited exactly this kind of embarrassment when reality disagreed.

Nassaupelle knew his work was superior to Primal Demons in every category. In attack, defense, endurance — and unlike Primal Demons, they required no Red Mist, feared nothing, felt no pain, and would fight until their magic power ran out. He had privately calculated that if the Extinguishers had been available a few hundred years ago, the Union would never have escaped. Even the island territories south of the Land of Dawn would have fallen. The Extinguishers were, in every honest assessment, perfect weapons of war.

And on their first deployment they had performed barely better than Primal Demons.

He raised the magic core in his fist. “We have plenty more on the Deity of Gods. Let me see how long they last against the next wave.”

Silent Disaster’s hand came down on his arm.

“You want to tell me the magic power supply is limited — ” Nassaupelle’s voice dropped into resentment. He despised this particular form of interference — the kind delivered through strength rather than reason. He had expected it from the Blood Conqueror; he had expected it from Sky Lord. He had not thought Silent Disaster would be the same.

The mechanics, though, were not in dispute: the improved obelisks that granted the spear-Symbiotic Demons the strength to throw pillar-scale weight drew heavily on magic power with each firing. Consecutive shots at short intervals disrupted the Deity of Gods’ flight stability. Worse, the extraordinary consumption degraded the God’s Stone deposits beneath the obelisks, cutting into the floating island’s operational lifespan. ” — but if we let these lowlifes walk away, we hand them a story to tell. Hackzord’s humans are watching this engagement. For the race’s sake, we cannot let the first real deployment of the Extinguishers look like failure.”

“Allow me,” Silent Disaster said.

Mask went still. “You plan to ride one of the spears down yourself? I’ve run tests. The impact force on landing is sufficient to destroy most living specimens even with protective wrapping. The Extinguishers can survive it. You are not an Extinguisher.”

“But you haven’t run that test with me.” Silent Disaster was already walking toward the stele that was accumulating magic power, not looking back.

“Hackzord isn’t here. If something goes wrong, I can’t pull you out.”

A wave of one hand. The warning did not appear to reach him.

Nassaupelle had no further lever. He activated the magic core and commanded the spear-Symbiotic Demon to open its outer shell.

The moment before Silent Disaster stepped inside, Nassaupelle called out.

“Hey. Don’t die.”

Silent Disaster paused and raised an arm. From the cuff of his sleeve, a corner of white cloth emerged — a piece of fine robe, thin and pale as snow, deliberately kept.

Mask frowned at it. Few in the race placed any value on decorative objects. But the cloth’s color and fabric called up something in his memory: the usual dress of Valkries in the Presiding Holy See.

“I will not die,” Silent Disaster said, “until all the humans are.”

He stepped into the stele and disappeared.

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