Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 180: Chubby Adorable Spies

“Why aren’t they showing up?” Perry muttered to himself, scanning the aerial shots of the surrounding land. Since he’d gotten word of an attack force of trolls approaching he’d scanned the surroundings with drones with advanced imaging technology and located several more troll teen shepherds, and even a few nomadic structures, but nothing that would indicate an attack.

Even with infrared, he couldn’t find any humanoid shapes other than the ones he’d already found generally minding their own business, and occasionally eating each other alive.

Problem was the numbers he was seeing didn’t seem to reflect the total number that should exist. The nomadic tent-cities were ghost-towns, with maybe one in three tents actually having occupants, of which were entirely pregnant female trolls, or newborns.

So where’s the army, lead by the ‘Great Karth’? Perry thought, scowling at the pictures of rolling plains dotted with the occasional stands of trees.

No caravans of adult male trolls… no deep-grooved tracks from a marching army…nothin’.

Perry wasn’t naive enough to assume that there wasn’t an army marching straight towards Chicago. They were just being sneaky about it, which seemed highly out of character for trolls.

Do they know I have aerial surveillance and are deliberately countering it, or are they just getting lucky? Perry thought. Base your decisions on what an enemy can do, not what you think they should do.

…drain the blood of one of their own until he has Einstein level IQ, then use him to hack my imaging drones?...unlikely.

An invisibility spell? probably not, but I don’t know what the capabilities of adult trolls are.

That did give Perry an idea, though. If they were aware of his capabilities and countering them somehow, then the solution was boots on the ground, regardless of how they were doing it.

Actual scouts could spot things the aerial photographs couldn’t. Smells, sounds, invisible trolls attempting to rip them limb from limb. Scouts could detect all of those things.

Additionally…Perry had an insane idea rattling around in his head ever since he’d hit the prairie dog’s burrow the other day.

That’ll take a few days to prep, though, first we need to get scouts out there.

Perry left his office and called his captains to meet him in the War Room. The old City hall didn’t have a War Room, but Perry felt like it might be needed.

He told them there was a troll army bearing down on them, and that he needed them to find it.

He then assigned them to scout outside Chicago rather than hunt. More and more private hunters were renting Perry’s equipment, taking the burden off the militia. Now was the time for them to do the job of an actual standing army: Provide defense.

It was a new experience: Getting someone else killed.

***2 days later***

Perry was spraying the surface of his listening dish with a homebrew material designed to boost its sensitivity to sound when the door to his workshop burst open, and a Mk.3 with a green shamrock on the breast tromped through.

“Paradox, we found one, but it’s Killing us!”

Perry didn’t have to ask any clarifying questions. He knew where they’d been scouting, and who was at stake, just from the design painted on the armor.

He broke into a sprint towards the door, rushing past the Green Shamrock squad-member, who flinched as Perry flashed past him at superhuman speed.

Perry’s armor met him in the hallway outside. He jumped into it and shot out a nearby window into the sky.

It only took him a minute to join the fight, but the damage had already been done.

Green Shamrock was fighting a single adult troll, who stood a good four feet taller than the twelve footer that Perry had found guarding the metal filter-feeders.

Its weapon was a cleaver that looked to weigh a half-ton, connected to a chain bristling with barbed hooks designed to anchor themselves in human flesh and reel them in like struggling fish.

I suspect the younglings are expected to make their own weapons, while official warriors have more advanced stuff. Good to know.

The oddest feature was a strange glow to its eyes that matched the light emanating from an orange-glowing symbol carved into the troll’s forehead.

Rather than healing, the wound continued to glow and bleed, dripping down its forehead and splitting to either side of the troll’s muzzle like crimson tears.

With the rattle of chain, Perry saw one of Green Shamrock get reeled in before they were hit with the bladed edge of the cleaver.

The armor did its work and prevented the cleaver from penetrating the chest, but the impact sent the squad member flying backwards, rolling to a halt in the dusty earth.

They didn’t get back up.

Just because the armor was tough enough to take the blow, didn’t mean the person inside could handle the impact.

Damnit! Perry hit the accelerator and dove straight at the mammoth creature, feet first.

It saw him coming and raised the cleaver to deflect, eyes widening when Perry speared through the steel and caught the giant in the chest, cracking the troll’s ribs.

“Gather up anyone who can’t move on their own and get out of here,” Perry said, disengaging as the giant staggered back. He stood about mid-thigh against the giant. Sixteen feet doesn’t sound like a lot until you’re staring up at it.

“Anybody who isn’t doing that, tell me what happened here.” Perry said, avoiding looking at the partially torn apart suits scattered around the plain.

“We caught him out in the open, eating a bear. We approached and he snagged Merrel out of the sky with that chain…The rest just kind of went downhill from there.” Cody Lee, the captain of Shamrock said over the comms.

“Alright, get outta here, I’ll keep him busy until you’re gone.” Perry said.

“Yessir.”

Perry squared up against the giant while Green shamrock picked up their fallen members.

The troll watched this happen with a disconcerting amount of intelligence.

“You must be Paradox.” He said, placing his cleaver under Perry’s chin. “Tell me, are you their greatest warrior?”

Sliding Stats

Attunement 59 -> 65

Perry gently placed his hands on the steel cleaver and ripped off a section like it was a piece of paper.

“That would be Solaris.” Perry said, sharpening the metal shard with his fingertips under the troll’s bemused gaze, heightening the reactivity of the iron while modifying the air around it to become an insulator.

“But you don’t rate.”

Perry threw the ripped off shard of metal at blistering speed, embedding it square in the center of the troll’s chest, where it disappeared into the depths of its torso.

The creature’s eyes went wide, and Perry spotted the symbol burning in its forehead dim slightly as boiling blood and steam began to erupt from the wound.

Basically, Perry had upped the iron’s reactivity to oxygen, allowing it to rust in the blink of an eye, creating a massive amount of heat in the process.

He’d effectively made the iron into white phosporous. In troll fashion, the troll warrior ignored the wound and set on Perry in a mad rage.

Slam, slam slam slam! Perry braced himself with Dragor’s Kinesis, and allowed the mundane cleaver to fold against his armor.

“Hey, look at this,” Perry said, displaying a crystal shard, one of Tomward’s Floating Dazzlers.

Crack.

A burst of light caught the troll in the eyes, and Perry used his moment of confusion to fling him up in the air.

I hope this Karth fellow is enjoying our little show. Perry thought, scanning the surroundings. He couldn’t see anything on his infrared, but Perry found the idea that his men had only located this one warrior to be highly suspicious.

Smelled like a setup.

Not to mention, judging by the speed of the Mk. 3’s, in the amount of time it took to get Perry and come back, the adult troll should’ve killed all of them.

He was playing around to lure out the ‘big guns’.

If it were Perry, he’d be watching the sacrificial pawn’s battle closely to judge the enemy’s capabilities, which would dictate how dangerous a full-scale attack would be.

Already it wasn’t looking good for Team Paradox.

A dozen human foot soldiers were incapable of taking down a single warrior, and the human who could defeat one of their own…well, there was only one of him.

If I were a troll…I would be pleased with this outcome.

It was too late for Perry’s people to demonstrate overwhelming firepower to dissuade them from attacking. anything that Perry killed this warrior with now would simply be worked around, so now Perry had to keep certain spells on the down low.

Like Disintegrate.

A feather pillow alone could stop Disintegrate if deployed early enough to catch the beam on the feathers floating through the air.

He could use the spell now to end this one warrior, but that would inform them of its existence. Since he’d learned about the trolls, he’d gathered up all of his remaining crystals and armed himself for lethal force.

Only about eighteen shots left, though. I should really summon Ex’bergazzat again and buy some of his eyes. Perry didn’t think the situation was bad enough to warrant it yet, as Ex’bergazzat might have a trap planned for just such an occasion. Just because he was able to weasel a deal out of him last time didn’t mean the demon wasn’t sore at him.

Demon?

PPP.EXE

Perry sent the Pernicious Prison up, drained the troll’s life-force, and proceeded to tear off its head with Dragor’s Kinesis.

The struggling body went limp, too drained to regrow a head, and Perry pulled the head up close to study it.

He traced the unhealed symbol carved into the oversized forehead with his finger. Its inner glow had guttered out the moment that Perry drained the troll’s life force.

Handy to have an indicator showing everyone else how much the troll has left in the tank, but I suspect that’s not its primary purpose.

The troll had been fairly deliberate and eloquent until he’d put burning shrapnel in its heart. Perry hadn’t even drained it with the Pernicious Prison yet.

So do older trolls grow out of it, or…

It was obviously a demonic crest, symbolizing some kind of deal between this particular troll and an unknown demon lord. Likely the coming-of-age ceremony the other on had mentioned…

What did he say? ‘Smash crunchy meat, eat raw and offer their magic to Gna’kis’

If Perry had to guess, it was a deal that traded excess life force for some kind of boon from the demon. A win-win, because the troll got two benefits: whatever the boon was, in addition to a higher brain function unclouded by rage, while still being able to recover from devastating wounds, as the symbol would lower its drain when the troll was wounded. They essentially lost nothing and gained everything.

Trolls aren’t normally smart enough to make a deal that good.

Gonna have to do some research, Perry thought, pulling his phone out of his armor and snapping a picture of the symbol.

His phone vibrated in his hand for a moment as the symbol came up on the screen, then it glitched out, the screen showing a demonic face that laughed maliciously as the body grew six razor-sharp mechanical insect legs that tried to jam themselves into his gauntleted palm before the entire thing burst into flames, hopping off his hand and disappearing into the prairie, setting fire to the surroundings.

Perry’s brows climbed his forehead

Static Shock.EXE

The bolt of lightning tracked down and exploded the skittering horror, allowing Perry to stomp out the burgeoning fire before it became a problem.

Well.

That happened. Looks like texting the image to Gramma is a no-go.

Perry went back to the troll and peeled the symbol off its forehead and rolled it up. Perry nearly jammed it into a storage pocket in his armor…then thought better of it, wrapping the symbol in grass and twigs and carrying it back by hand.

When he got back, He set the symbol aside in a low-tech safe, and turned his attention back to his master plan to flush out the approaching plains trolls:

Prairie dogs.

The concept was this: Prairie dogs have their own language, which to the ear sounded like nothing more than squeaks. They also have a wonderful tendency for their sentries to describe anything unusual going on around at full volume to inform other prairie dogs of potential danger.

All Perry needed to do was make a magical giant listening dish attuned to Prairie Dog blood via Nocul rituals, that could listen in on any prairie dogs in a twenty-mile radius and decode what they were saying.

Then it would feed that chatter through a powerful computer which would show visual representations of what the prairie dogs in any given area on the map were talking about, whether it be coyotes, hawks, people, or even…giants sneaking towards Chicago.

Perry knew he didn’t have much time to locate them. Now that the trolls were fully aware of how they stacked up against his foot soldiers, they would push to arrive as soon as possible, most likely attacking tonight.

Prairie dogs, don’t let me down, Perry thought, patting the giant dish before switching it on and going over to the display to see what the animals were talking about.

…it gave him nothing.

Sure, there were plenty of coyotes, hawks, in-group fighting, even some hot gossip about who was stealing from who, or whose burrow smelled bad, but there was nothing at all that he could attribute to the giants.

Until nightfall.

“Sir, you told me to come get you if anything weird pops up.” One of the Rainbow unicorn squad said, pulling Perry out of his Tinker Twitch as he tried to design a mechsuit that could fight trolls on more even ground.

“Eh?” Perry asked groggily, blinking the fugue state out of his eyes.

“Come take a look.” The young man nodded and Perry followed after him, rounding the corner and leaning over the monitor to study the map filled with rodent chatter.

“Trees moving?” Perry muttered, taking a sip of his coffee. Trees moving? TREES MOVING!?

Perry launched a drone out and raised it high above the wilderness above the city, zooming in on the southwest quadrant.

The tree-dotted hills were literally moving, a couple feet at a time. Perry had to mark a location and watch for several minutes, but they were moving.

They made a shell of earth and sod and are travelling under it to hide from aerial surveillance. They’re only moving at night to minimize the chance of us locating them.

They were also right outside Chicago, mere hours away from emerging from the surrounding overgrowth.

“Get all the captains together,” Perry said, “We need to evacuate the southwest side.”

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