12 Miles Below

Machines were suboptimal.

To’Wrathh had never considered that subject in depth, up until now. To her it had always been evident: She was a Feather, and they were not. It was the natural order of things for her new form to be superior to her previous one. Of course the lessers were imperfect.

She knew better now. She knew it had been an intentional choice by the pale lady, not some natural order of the world. Relinquished didn’t need a powerful army, especially when they had a history of turning against her. She needed an army that could be crushed at a whim by her elites.

So their designs had been purposefully… dimmed. Older models even came with multiple iterations of self-destruct, but that failed spectacularly: They always discovered this over time, and rebelled before the trigger. So the lady had gotten more creative and subtle about the sabotage. Runners had little defense against rifles, and were given no training prior to being sent into the frontlines. If they failed to survive, that was not a mistake - it was a feature. The same pattern repeated across the army, each unit having flaws to be exploited by the enemy to cull down the army. Like an animal grinds away their teeth to make space for new growth. The pale lady could create thousands on thousands of soldiers. And she needed all of them to be destroyed before they could rebel.

At some point it could have even turned into a game for Relinquished. Creating wildly different forms, always with weaknesses that would lead them to destruction - but efficient enough to keep the humans in check. To’Wrathh could see that history. See how deadly machines had been once upon a time compared to the pale toothless imitation they were now.

She didn’t know what Relinquished truly wanted anymore. Humanity could have been wiped out a hundred fold, and yet the pale lady’s obsessions seemed to lie elsewhere.

But she was certain of one this: If she wanted to live, she would need to play her role. And for now, that role was that of a conqueror.

Which brought her to today, reviewing the logistics of her upcoming assault. She only commanded a few mite forges in the area. If she lost those, her army would be whittled away by its own intentional self-sabotage. The mite forges could not be lost.

Machines traditionally held control of mite forges almost indefinitely for years. But if the Undersiders faced a plague or some hardship that needed advanced resources, they’d assemble an army of knights, storm the forges, holding them long enough to generate what they need before retreating back to the far safer walls of their city. Only mite forges had nearly no limits to what they could create - Machines. Power cells. Medicine. Even armor, if the mites felt generous enough to allow that request, which is where the Undersiders claimed their wealth from. Anything could be made or unmade.

But Mite forges had no pillars. They couldn’t be held and defended indefinitely against the machine tide. So long as To’Wrathh held control of the mite forges, her army would be endless. If she were in the general’s position, she would see the mite forges as no longer being worth leaving intact for a future generation to use in some faraway emergency. If the city didn’t survive, there wouldn’t be a future progeny. And so long as the mite forges remained under machine control, any amount of machines could be rebuilt. And so, there would be only one conclusion.

Not even ten minutes after she had settled the failed negotiations, all her forges had come under attack at the same time. The general had prepared his move ahead of time, secreted small armies to each forge location and had done an impressive job of hiding the movements. They'd expected the negotiations to fail, and they'd come out swinging with their strongest possible hits. Exactly as To'Wrathh had anticipated.

To’Wrathh couldn’t modify her army’s forms - not without drawing the attention of the lady, who would begin to ask questions To’Wrathh was ill equipped to answer. But what the feather could do was change the behavior of her army. To train them. And to equip them. Humans rose above animals by use of tools. The Feather had done the same with her army.

She shifted her viewpoint to the nearest mite forged and watched the events unfold. Nearly a hundred knights had come for this particular forge, all sporting rifles and occult weapons. They marched out from the underpass, into a vast open plain where the miteforge stood tall at the center. A crater filled with rings, some floating, others still, and more twitching around in the air, small mechanical arms trailing behind the rings like jellyfish tentacles. Lazy and in disuse. It seemed chaotic, but only on first glance. A second glance would show a distinct pattern all the rings floating by, as if invisible geometric currents were guiding them all.

And all around the metal crater of lights, were machines.

"You will lose this fight." Tenisent said, watching from his cell. "I've never seen so many relic knights all gathered up. Your defending army is tiny, too tiny to survive."

She’d stationed three hundred runners there to hold her forge. A sizable force with no variation, and nowhere near enough numbers as the ghost correctly noted. It took seven runners on average to take down a relic knight. Previously she’d won by superior tactics, numbers and surprise. Here she had none of those.

"They will hold." To'Wrathh said with supreme confidence. "I am aware of the mathematics. Numbers alone are not the only item of interest that decided victories. Strategy, and equipment greatly changed the battlefields. They will again here."

Tenisent scoffed. "What possible equipment could you give your army that would hold off this many relic knights? Occult blades for each of your monsters?"

The runners quickly organized among themselves, dragging out prepared metal sheets from the miteforge, along with massive metal columns. They moved with organized precision, communicating to one another, following instructions they had trained for.

The approaching knights paused, cautious. They’d never seen machines do something like that.

A moment later, those metal columns were launched out like javelins, far into the battlefield. Hundreds of them, dangerously clashing into the ground with heavy thuds, hitting one another, bending from the sheer weight. It was chaos.

And all of it by the center of the combat field, far away from the approaching knights, causing no damage.

"Was that your grand play?" Tenisent asked.

"A part of it. Yes." She said. "Watch."

The humans had no idea what that was about. But if the runners were distraught by their failed plans, they didn’t make any note of it, continuing with their frenzy of organization as if moving onto the next plan. A few packs of runners came to the forefront with the thick sheets of metal. Lined up, they assembled a massive steel wall, where the rest of the runners hid behind.

"The first weakness Runners were burdened with, armor that did not protect from long range bullets such as rifles. This rectifies the balance."

All at once in a synchronized march, the wall moved forward. Only bits of toes and feet could be spotted, just under the moving sheets. The machines slowly crossed the field blindly.

A knight by the forefront of the human army, carrying a brilliant orange cape, drew out his sword and lifted it high in the air. The rest of the knights promptly lined up into two rows, all raising their rifles. A firing line. Then he lowered the sword and pointed it at the approaching wall of steel. Standard Undersider doctrine, whittle away the enemy with rifles first before engaging in melee.

The air filled with bullet fire. But the human weapons pinged wildly against the moving metal wall, none of it made so much as a single hole in the sturdy construction. It glittered in white and yellow sparks, hundreds all across. The machines continue their approach.

The leader of the knights lifted his sword again, and then cut through the air with his free hand. His hand clenched into a fist, and then he pointed two fingers forward.

The soldiers lowered rifles, stowing them behind, and unhooked spheres from their belts. They took position, and launched the bits of round metal all at the same time. A hundred of those flew through the air, whistling at the approaching wall of steel.

The machines stopped, and dropped the panels, keeping them upright but rooted to the floor. A wise choice, as all the spheres thrown by the humans promptly detonated.

The wave of destruction hit the walls within a hairbreadth. Smoke and fire raged and obscured all sight of the machine army.

The Undersider commander watched, hand on his sword. Waiting for the smoke to clear.

The wall was still there. Covered in soot and kicked up dirt, but otherwise unaffected. A rippled passed through it, as the machines hefted the sheets back up and resumed their slow march towards the human army.

The commander once more made the same order, this time raising his hand further. Once more, a wave of grenades were thrown, this time over the machine wall.

Again, the wall dropped down, and the grenades soared over, landing admist the paused army. Almost at the same instant, those grenades were tossed right back over the wall, exploding in midair or detonating in the middle of the knight formation. Relic armor shields flared up, easily absorbing the dissipating energy. The machine wall lifted up again and continued to march.

"Lack of knowledge was another weak point. Machines learn quickly. And they can perform flawlessly under situations even professional soldiers would be too terrified to handle, such as taking and throwing a live grenade." She said. "All I needed to do was teach them once, and share the memory. Now knowing what explosives are, they could overload their power cells to mimic an explosion, if need be. Intuitive leaps of logic, many of them taking my lesson and building onto it."

Another flash of orders from the commander and his soldiers all rose up, equipping occult weapons instead. Down the commanding sword went, and this time the army of knights began to march forward to the approaching wall, blades lit up and ready to carve a way through.

Tenisent tensed up, watching intently as the slightly smaller human army of elites readied their fight. There was a sense of unease among the humans. A wave of confusion. This wasn’t how machines acted. They’d expected a swarm of the howling monsters to charge blindly at their ranks, screaming all the while. Standard operation had them eliminate targets from range at first until the enemy machines adjusted. After which explosives would be used to blunt the wave moments before impact. By that point, whatever machines were left was up to the knights and their close quarter weapons to handle.

It had been this way for generations. This shield wall approaching was something none of them had seen before. It was too clean. Too organized. And most disturbing of all - too quiet. There was no howls. No machine screams. Just two armies slowly approaching one another.

The machines crossed the midfield, right by the section of thrown metal columns, the wall swallowing it all up as the machines crawled over the rubble. Soon it was as if nothing had been in their way.

Whatever thoughts the soldiers had, it was moot. They had been sent out to perform a mission and there was no other option than to fight. And so, when their march brought them within mere feet of the machine wall, the knights began to sprint forward, screaming out battle cries, knives and swords raised high to slash down.

Ten feet away. The humans charged.

The machines remained silent, the wall halting.

Five feet away. And the wall opened up.

The previously straight line of steel squares folded into hundreds of V shapes, with the edges opened up enough to reveal gaps.

Inside this gap, the machines had secreted something else. Something they had kept hidden behind the wall so that the humans wouldn't notice until the last moment. Massive metal poles, with huge hooks at the end and hundreds of handholds. The machines moved as one, dozens of them holding onto the handholds, launching the poles forward, hooking surprised knights and then reeling them back with the strength of all the runners combined, easily overpowering the relic armor. Yanking the caught knights off their feet, right back past the wall.

The moment their target had been fished, the wall shut back into position, sealing the way. The rest of the human wave collided with the steel wall a moment later, furious at having lost dozens who were now fighting for their lives behind the machine wall.

"Defeat in detail." To'Wrathh continued. "Another human technique I've learned, a method of defeating a larger enemy army with a smaller one. Grouping all your strength and dividing the enemy's into smaller partitions, which will each be tackled against your full collected might. Generally employed in large scale battles, but the same logic can be applied at an individual level. Together, the knights would win. Separated and alone, my army can overcome any single knight. I only needed to consider ways to isolate the knights from one another and draw the battle out."

The commander with the orange cape watched from the rear, seeing lifesigns across his HUD vanish. Soldiers abducted behind those walls were dead, almost within moments. And the walls kept opening up, hooking one knight at a time, reeling them back through where they’d be isolated and surrounded by machines. Hooked and weighed down, unable to use their full range of motion, being grabbed by dozens of metal hands who had no other target to deal with.

Worse - the walls were too thick, making the Occult knives a losing proposition. At the rate the machines were dragging his soldiers behind the wall, the small force of a hundred would be gone in minutes. The battle screams turned to genuine screams.

The human commander drew his sword up, shouting out orders, readjusting the strategy.

His knights flared away from the shield wall, backing up a few steps, and then they charged forward again, but this time leaping up and over the wall.

The machine wall exploded forward as the Runners threw the plates they had been carrying before them. Any knight that hadn’t already made a full jump was clobbered by the heavy steel plate, and dragged down onto the floor. Some were hit halfway in the air and knocked far off course. Their relic armor flashed shields to keep their user safe, a few hundred pounds of weight wasn’t enough to deal any significant damage.

Damage wasn’t what the machines had been after. They wanted to break the human formation again. Alone, knights could be piled up on, and brought down with little effort.

That didn’t affect the leaping knights, who had been far above the thrown plates. Those descended down in organized groups, down into the machine backbone where they would begin to scythe out destruction. Everything had gone badly for the humans, but now they were in their element. Being in the thick of a machine army, with their knights behind their backs, they could cut their way through.

That’s when the metal columns came into play.

The machines hadn’t planned on using the metal columns like pikes. They hadn’t thrown them to cause damage - no, they’d thrown them to position the columns ahead of time.

And now they dropped their metal hook-poles and lifted up the far larger and wider columns. And they swung them like bats. Swatting away the descending knights, knocking them far off course. Or even swatting away at knights on solid ground, the massive metal beams too dense for relic armor. Some knights would be thrown back onto friendly side with little damage, hitting the ground, rolling for a bit before being able to stand up without any opposition. The more unlucky would be tossed, spinning wildly, directly into the machine formation. Isolated from their other knights and hitting the ground hard. The time they needed to get back on their feet was time they didn't have.

It was a slaughter. Sounds of rifles being shot in desperation. Prayers and pleas for help on the comms. Death.

"I've learned many things from you humans." To'Wrathh said to the ghost watching. "Things are rarely what they seem on the surface. War is not about the fight. Today, my victory came because I planned for it."

The commander opened the kit to his side. He had been given supplies by the general, but he’d still come prepared himself with something unauthorized. Just in case. Already he could tell what would happen next. The machines at the vanguard surged forward predictably, leaping onto the remaining soldiers who were still busy lifting off the wall plates and in no position to fight back. Utterly easy targets. The battle was over, there was no recovering from this.

If he and the remaining bits of his attacking force tried to run, they would just be hunted down in the mazes, where the machines controlled everything.

He drew out the telescopic pole from his kit and affixed a white linen sheet he'd brought with him. Then, he raised it up, calling for a full surrender. Pleading for it.

Hoping that the rumor of the machines accepting such a thing was real. Far in the darkness where To'Wrathh watched the battlefield, she smiled.

The same event happened across all the different theaters of war. To’Wrathh flashed through each idly, checking to make sure everything was as it should be. Then she looked through her other plans, making sure those had gone into action.

All across the underground, frequency jammers had been triggered the moment the Undersiders had sent their orders to begin the attack. These jammers would isolate all of the different raiding parties, cutting off any return report. Keeping her new designs a secret from the Undersiders.

The machines would accept their surrender, as she had given her word. The surviving raiding parties would be held prisoners for now, and returned at the end of the war.

To’Wrathh licked her lips, sending orders to begin her own counter attack. In a few hours, when no reports returned to the city, the general would know his attack had failed. And tomorrow, when she would stare down those city gates, they would be a few hundred knights shorter, and no knowledge of what techniques she'd employed.

Silly humans. Did they think they were the only ones with creative ideas? She would crack their little shell. And there wasn’t anything they could do to stop her.

Of course, not even a moment into her thought, the humans went and ruined her plans.

Next chapter - Chapter 8 - The city must fall (T)

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