12 Miles Below

To’Sefit was gone. Despite this being the middle of enemy held territory, everything felt silent.

That gave us some time to lick our wounds before we marched forward again, and to tend to our wounded. Windrunner was at Atius’s side, helping the Deathless up. The clan lord hadn’t recovered yet, still having a hard time just breathing. Black blood kept building up in his lungs, hacked out with wet coughs.

Sagrius remained standing where we’d left him, gazing vacantly into the distance. “Captain, are you all right?” I asked, waving a hand in front of him, fearing the worst.

I thought he wouldn’t answer. He proved me wrong. His head turned, snapping to my direction. “Unknown.” He said in a calm voice. “User unresponsive.”

I almost wished he hadn’t spoken. That manner of speech… “Are you his relic armor?”

“Affirmative.” The captain said. It was his voice, the same deep scratchy worldness of it behind each syllable. But the words… it wasn’t him.

“How’s that possible?” I asked, though I’ve already seen the occult do stranger things. For a moment, Father had outright possessed Winterscar. If it could happen one direction, it could go the other.

“Natural language predictive transformer unable to generate acceptable solution to the query. All answers fall below twenty percent confidence threshold.” He spoke, helmet still turned my direction, unflinching.

I’d heard that very same phrase before. Swallowing, I asked the same question I had all these months ago. “What is the highest answer you have?”

“I am unwillingly consuming my user’s soul.” His voice remained monotone, but for some reason I felt almost a twinge of panic.

“Unwillingly? Can you stop?”

“I am unable to stop the process. I do not understand how to stop.”

Kidra approached from behind us, walking over to the captain. She glanced at me, and even behind the faceless helmet, I could tell she was hoping I’d know what to do.

Only one way to know what was going on. I was the occult specialist here, time I started pulling my weight.

I opened myself further into the soul sight, fumbling around for the soul fractal within Sagrius’s helmet. I found the fractal, but nothing within. Empty.

I searched with a tendril, floating it out into the cold harsh world, until I fumbled onto the relic armor’s own soul fractal. Here I found a mess. Sagrius was still there. Or at least, the concept of his soul remained. Diminished, intertwined with the armor. Linked back to his body, comatose. And, almost like osmosis, bits of his soul were flaking off, floating over into the relic armor’s own soul, almost pulled like gravity. They touched on the relic armor’s own depths, and merged within.

The relic armor wasn’t aware of it’s own soul, not like humans were. We could manipulate, move it around, shape it into tendrils. The relic armor seemed more trapped inside its soul fractal.

“Place me next to him.” Father said from his base of operation on Kidra’s necklace, rousing me out of the soul trance. “I’ve learned much about souls and the occult in my time here. I may be able to help.”

Windrunner lifted Atius, cutting loose the greatcloak, locking the clan lord’s armor to his back. Relic armors had hidden hooks for all kinds of gear, and one thing they could do was carry another armor back to back. “Kidra, grab Sagrius. We can’t stay here for long. Time isn’t on our side.” His own armor whined at the strain of lifting a four hundred pound armor, especially with the damage he’d taken earlier, but Windrunner’s armor was up to the task.

Kidra did as asked, grabbing her necklace and draping it over the captain’s own neck. In the soul sight, I saw not just Father, but other knights within the multiple soul fractals in that necklace reach out. It took Father only a few moments to come up with a plan, moving tendrils into walls that held off the captain’s essence from drifting away. The other knights joined in, trying to copy Father’s own movements with far less finesse.

The broken motes of Sagrius’s soul collided against the makeshift walls, but didn’t merge. “As I thought.” Father said. “The concepts and identity that make up my soul is different enough from his that we cannot merge. Winterscar generated an engram of me, and in doing so, it became too similar to myself. That’s how I slipped inside, the resonance was an open door, unguarded. Sagrius has done the same, become too much like the armor, allowing it to connect to him. I suspect that’s how he gained the single minded focus to resist To’Sefit’s attack. The two worked together as one. Only, the separation at the end of their task was impossible.”

“Can you separate them yourself?” Kidra asked.

“Not yet. I can slow down the process, too much of him was tied to the armor. Enough that even his body moves as if it were the armor’s.”

A mental image of where Feather was looking at was sent out to all of us looking in with the soul sight. Tendrils of sagrius’s soul had reached out, connecting to the relic armor’s. Those hadn’t been severed. In effect, I couldn’t tell where the Captain began and where the Armor ended. What I could sense was Father’s intention. He needed to find a way to cut a part of a soul somehow. If he could cut off those tendrils, Sagrius would be separated from the armor, and then his soul could be dragged away back into an empty soul fractal, safe from the world.

Kidra lifted up the comatose captain, hooking his back to her own. He made no move to assist, nor fight back. Windrunner nodded, turned and began on a slower sprint. He didn’t trust his armor could jump with another armor strapped behind him, vaulting over ruins was out of the question. So our group was forced to follow the watertrails. The mite forge was growing closer, our navigation point remained fixed on it.

“The Feathers haven’t attacked us with any lesser machines. Not since our fight with To’Orda.” I said as we make our way through the temple.

Kidra nodded grimly at that. “Even fighting against To’Sefit, none appeared to play interference. I am not well versed in machine tactics, Wrath, is this expected?”

No. Wrath sent back. Machine doctrine is to send all lesser forces against the enemy with little reserve. Only stronger units are more strategically used. As far as I am aware of, I am the only Feather within the last dozen generations to attempt to preserve my forces. At least, until now.

“Perserve forces eh?” Windrunner hummed. “I see a possible reason now. To’Sefit, her weapons aren’t made to hold back against friendly fire. If she threw her forces at us to tie us down, they’d have been blasted just as much as we’d have. Then again, machines aren’t known for holding back anything. If they could have sacrificed a dozen Screamers just to force one of us to stay still for a beam, they should have.”

That is the standard doctrine. Runner models are easy to produce and require very little specialize machinery to create. Wrath said. To’Avalis is not behaving as other Feathers would.

“To’Avalis is limited in resources. He doesn’t have an actual army here at all.” I said, putting the pieces together. “Think about it. The moment we killed To’Orda, he sounded the retreat for them. Whatever forces he has here, he must not have been able to fully restock an army in the short time he had.”

I’m sure feathers could move fast enough to make it here, hence why all three of these Feathers were lurking around. The minions move a lot slower. “His first goal had been to divide us into smaller, more easily managed subgroups. And then try to further whittle us down from a safe distance. Whatever forces he has here, it's the bottom of the storage bin scrap I think. Anything he could work with that was nearby.”

“That winged machine doesn’t seem low quality.” Windrunner said. “Looks mighty expensive to me.”

“Also looked stupidly fast.” I said. “Not surprised it managed to make it here in time. We made a good call heading here right away, any later and he would have had an actual army to throw at us. That said, now that To’Sefit’s run off, we might be able to move on the roof level. Make a direct line to the mite forge.”

Windrunner nodded, “I follow that theory they don’t have much to work with right now. That means time isn’t on our side. More machines are on their way. The longer we take to reach the mite forge the worse it will get for us. We need to get there as fast as we can.”

“No.” Kidra said. “This entire time we’ve been playing into To’Avalis’s plans. He’s set the stage, and we have all been reacting instead of acting. If we make an attempt for the mite forge, we need to do it in a way that he isn’t prepared to handle.”

Windrunner didn’t say anything for a moment, focusing on his run. Then he sighed. “You make a point. But how do we surprise a Feather that’s got us running around his palm like this?”

I would recommend disabling his intelligence first. Wrath said, watching from her sack. He must have found some means of tracking you and your group. To’Sefit’s attacks were too well placed to have been blind fire. And Feathers do not have means of seeing through walls.

“So he’s tracking us somehow already. Lovely, always wanted another machine stalker. Don’t think he’ll end up the same way you did though Wrath. Maybe he has a spotter of some kind?”

“We could use standard doctrine against Othersider long distance weaponry.” Windrunner said, making his way back to the clan lord and the motionless Sagrius. “There’s a list of potential means to track targets. We can start by ferreting out his spotter, and then move on to verifying he isn’t tracking us using software, a mole, or some kind of long range vision.”

“He’d need something that could keep up with full relic armor sprints.” I said, following the group behind at our safe speed. There’s no roofing anywhere here, just large chambers with pillars, walls, and pooled water with leaves growing anywhere dirt might have appeared. If he was tracking us, he’d need some kind of unit that traversed things effortlessly. “That bird could have been above us the whole time, keeping sight. We have to figure out how it hid from sight.”

Windrunner was taking random turns on each chamber, hoping to confuse the enemy on our ultimate endpoint. “If he’s got a more conventional spotter following us, it would have to be a drake. That’s the only model of machines known to surpass relic armor sprinting speed.” Windrunner said. “Problem with that is that Drakes like to bounce when they jump from roof to roof, we should have seen a pipe lizard making the rounds by now.”

It is not a drake model. Wrath said. The terrain is too chaotic for their kind to smoothly move through. As Windrunner demonstrated, we would have seen the ‘bounce’

“You sound like you have an idea.” I said.

I do have a suggestion. The terrain here is varied enough the spotter cannot have visual contact all the time. There must be some amount of blind spots that occur as the machine follows behind. The wrong terrain could force the machine model to take paths that we could use to ambush it unaware.

Windrunner nodded, putting it together. “We find a narrow set of corridors that leads to a larger open room. Then kill our speed and instantly take the corners. Wait a second, flash the strongest short range ping out. If we have any tails, they’ll lose sight of us long enough to stumble close enough. A strong ping from our armors should be able to detect them all if they don’t have any warnings it’s coming.”

“That will have to do.” Kidra said. “Now we’re at the mercy of luck to stumble on the right location.”

“No, not luck.” Windrunner said. “Atius wasn’t running around without a plan. He was surveying the area, following a shallow sweep pattern. The mite forge wasn’t his end goal, I think he was already planning on turning the tides on To’Avalis. He didn’t have a plan yet, but he knew map knowledge would be critical for whatever we came up with. There’s a spot we already passed that would be perfect for this kind of ambush.”

The group doubled down on the sprint, cutting a corner and backtracking a different route. It took only minutes to reconnect with our past exploration. From there, Windrunner took a few obstructing turns, making our end goal less obvious until the very last turn, where we sprinted down a wider corridor at full speed. The moment we reached the turnpoint and vanished from the corridor, Kidra and I dove to the left, while Windrunner took the right.

There were sounds approaching in the silence. Like metal rods clinking against rock, only it felt like hundreds of it. A second later, the sound was nearly on top of us.

Windrunner sent out the ping. The machine scrambled to try and stop, their own sensors detecting the incoming wave, but being too far committed to get out of the way.

We got an answer. “Scan returned. Showing we’re being shadowed by four spiders, two on each side of us. Let’s take them down.” Windrunner said.

Atius coughed then, hand reaching out to make signs. Enemy. Eyes. Redundancies. Threats unseen. Strike all at once.

Wrath was the one who picked the meaning apart, violet eyes staring at the clan lord’s shaking hands. I don’t know when she’d learn the surface hand signs, but she knew enough to cut through even his shaking.

The spiders are the threat we can see. What’s important is the threats we can’t see. To’Avalis must be tracking us with multiple redundancies. If we eliminate the spiders without eliminating the other methods, he can recover. We need to eliminate every means of tracking us all at once, along with mapping another route.

Windrunner nodded, lifting up from his crouch before continuing his sprint forward, Kidra and I following. Somewhere behind us, four spiders skittered away, cautious to not be seen and agile enough to make that a reality.

Kidra, Windrunner and Wrath all started swapping ideas on other means To’Avalis could be tracking our group.

There were still other bits of information we could use. It’s been a quarter hour since we’ve breached the temple and he still hasn’t sent any other machines to attack us. Even with a limited amount of machines, he’d still at least try to probe out our full strength. Wrath’s thoughts was that his forces were already tied up somewhere we’d be forced to go through, and he wasn’t going to divide his soldiers on a possibly failing attack on us. When the machines under his command were played as a card, it would likely be an all-in.

Kidra brought out that the separated knights wouldn’t just sit idle behind the rock wall. They’d go looking for another way into the temple, and by now they’d have found it. So To’Avalis also needed to consider dealing with a larger group of knights running around the temple. He might be using them to bait those knights out of position while he dealt with us.

She was convinced on one point: He’d gone out of his way to separate me from the rest of the expedition. That meant he didn’t think he could win with the forces he had against our relic knights. Which put an upper number to what he actually had to work with. He couldn’t have dozens of spotters running around if he was fortifying a chokepoint.

So how else could he track us?

No. Not thinking about it the right way. I should pick out the earliest he’d started to track us and go from there. The tunnel, To’Orda had been sent there to hold us off. So he must have known by then where we were. And down there, there’s no visibility. The spotters weren’t the main way he was keeping us in sights, they were the backup.

When was the point that he didn’t have visibility on us?

To’Sefit opened fire on us with several walls between, and those had cut through like a heated pole through snow. Her range of fire is likely limitless in tactical terms. If she could shoot blindly so long as she had a spotter. When we first retreated into the forest, she should have been able to shoot through if she had visuals on us.

Instead she remained stationary. No pursuit. So somewhere between that point in the forest and our group going down into the tunnels, he’d found a way to track us. Something we couldn't see as humans, and relic armors wouldn't notice either.

The right kind of signal could be both.

“All relic armors.” I announced, “Cut off any signal you’re sending, then search for anything still being transmitted from armors around you.”

Next chapter - Outfoxing the fox

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