“Sir, Kyle is Raktor now. Landed just beyond our frontlines.” A Cretin officer reported to Sebastian, making Sebastian grin. All part of the plan.
“All the traps in place?”
“Yes, sir. Mage hunters waiting for your command as well.”
“Julia, you copy?” Sebastian asked over the arctech radio.
[No one fucking said anything about a long-range explosive attack!] A female voice grunted in response on the other side, as the sounds of fire-fighting could be heard in the background.
“He must have gotten his hands on something new.”
[This means we will have to revise the plan. No way I am going to let my men die due to a lack of information! You need to put him through his paces, make him show everything he got. We might need more relics on hand.]
“Not a problem, you’ll have access to the entire stash. You, send the first two battalions in and corner him now. Don’t fully commit, just focus fire on the others around him for now.” Sebastian ordered the Cretin Officer, who saluted in response.
“Yes, sir. What about Ares?”
“We won’t need him for now. Move him to the other end of the battlefield and have him whittle down the Seven Snakes. I’ll make sure Kyle is locked down right here.”
Kyle thrusted the spear forward, killing the last of the shocktroopers before flicking off the blood coating the tip, the splatter painting the rugged ground. “How many squads left here?”
“Just us, sir.” Alex motioned to the squad behind him that was gathering, Ollie and Bola dumbfounded at the sight of Kyle’s new exosuit.
“Shit, I never seen arctech knight armour like that before! That’s amazing!” Ollie exclaimed in obvious excitement, trying to get a better angle of Kyle.
“Spread out back into the buildings, prepare for a fight.” Kyle ordered quickly, causing the squad to quickly split up. Alex grabbed the healed Slavin, entering a broken building while Kyle stood alone on the street, walking around the warped wreck of the warmachine, where the crew within had been impaled by the outburst of metal within, a ghastly way to die.
Something’s wrong – I didn’t get any kill notifications from the Detonation Spear. Kyle could not believe that no one died in the attack, having seen an entire building collapse and burst into flames with his own eyes. The whole incident put him on guard, making him wonder if the Ardent Cretins had countermeasures.
Sebastian wouldn’t be dumb, he would have prepared countermeasures for people like me and Sasha. Mages were a known phenomenon, and with the power Kyle had demonstrated in the Culdao Peaks Town, he was confident that Sebastian had something planned: he just did not know what it was.
Right now, he had Qatu lead the troops from the Culdao Peaks to clash against the alliance of Violet Demons and Ardent Cretins, preventing the Ardent Cretins from reinforcing their homebase in the South Sector. Now, his elite squads were spread out in the city, along with Sasha holding other parts of the frontline.
[Sir, two Cretins battalions pushing towards your location right now! One straight ahead and the other from your left!] The observer in the hovercraft spoke rapidly in Kyle’s helmet radio engraving.
“Get one elite squad and backup squads to my location now!” Kyle urged, picking up an Ardent Cretin rifle and checking the remaining amount of pellets. As strong as his Detonation Spears were, he could not use them infinitely. He only had four remaining, and he had to use them only when necessary.
Kyle quickly took cover behind the wreck, gripping the rifle tightly. As strong as his own armour was, he had not tested the fatigue cycles nor the durability of the exosuit, and he was not planning to test it during combat either. Best to stay out of line of sight as much as possible. It would also reduce his Reactive Armour engraving consumption, allowing his exosuit to run longer.
His exosuit also had a detector installed within, telling him the remaining strength of his Advanced Arcia Crystal. For now, it was still at its highest possible value, but Kyle still kept an eye on it to manage his energy uses.
[Artillery!] The observer suddenly barked into the radio engraving, forcing Kyle to look up only to see a hailstorm of sharp fragments hurtling down towards him, launched from a mortar fragmentation round.
The fragments pierced into the concrete of the buildings and the floor, while Kyle ducked into the warmachine itself, using what remained of the armour as a defensive plate, the force of the impact sending vibrations through his body.
Before Kyle could recover, a cannonball fired from another warmachine from afar slammed right into the wreck, throwing Kyle backwards in a tumble as the warmachine skidded backwards from the head-on collision.
“Move up! Move up!” A Cretin officer yelled as the ground troops moved up, providing covering fire and suppressing Kyle in the warmachine with pellet fire.
Penchant for Violence! Kyle dug his hands into an armour plate of the warmachine, ripping it out before using a single hand to toss it right at a nearby Cretin squad, the plate immediately crushing their bones and guts through the middle of their body.
The firefight broke out in earnest as Alex and his squadmates began to fire down on the Cretins in the streets, shooting over distances of two hundred meters or more. Pellets sung through the air as Kyle escaped the wreck, moving into what remained of a clothing store, the colorful fabrics stained with dust accumulated from the constant shelling.
“He’s in that building!”
“Forget about him, kill the fighters at the top!”
Not a chance. Kyle ran through the clothing store, flanking through the alleyways to attempt to get the drop onto the advancing Cretins. However, there was already three Cretins, each of them wielding tower shields and handguns, immediately firing at Kyle.
The pellets pinged off the armour of Kyle’s exosuit as he leapt up along the walls of the alleyway, firing back with his stolen Cretin rifles. The tower shields proved impenetrable, prompting Kyle to throw away his rifle and brandish his Spear of Defiance again, slamming the tip into the tower shield.
“Hah, your stupid spear can’-“ Before the Cretin could finish his taunt, the inner surface of the tower shield burst apart, cracking it in half and allowing Kyle deliver a follow-up jab right into the chest plate. The subsequent implosion twisted the Cretin’s innards, his face scrunched up in indescribable pain as his body crumpled to the floor. With two more lunges, Kyle made quick work of the remaining Cretins, killing all of them with two blows.
“He’s in here! Move back!” Another Cretin spotted him from the ends of the alleyway, immediately sprinting away.
Move back? Kyle was confused about why they were retreating, but he wasn’t about to let them get away that easily. He snatched one of the dropped handguns before charging right out of the alleyway, only to see a warmachine right around the corner.
Without hesitation, the flamethrower on the warmachine blasted forwards, threatening to engulf Kyle. This is My Turf!
The liquid flames split apart into two waves that lapped the ground up, allowing Kyle to move straight to the warmachine and pierce it with the Spear of Defiance. A single jab ignited the flammable liquid storage, causing it to blow up in a brilliant ball of fire. Kyle quickly activated his impulse engravings, thrusting himself backwards while skidding along the floor, friction throwing sparks.
The sheer destructive power that Kyle showed now raised Alex’s squad morale to unimaginable heights, a far cry from the despair and fear they felt before. “We can win! We can actually fucking win!” Bola screamed out, firing wildly into the Cretins.
To their credit, the Cretins still fought valiantly, and more and more of the Cretins were beginning to pour into the area. “Where’s my elite squad?!” Kyle asked with a hint of urgency as he noticed he was starting to be outnumbered, even as he shot another Cretin in the head with his stolen handgun in the street.
[Almost there! Backup squads are arriving soon!]
“How soon?”
[Two minutes!]
I don’t have two minutes! Kyle grimaced as he grabbed another Detonation Spear on his back, arming it. His eyes darted around the firefight, landing on a tall ten-storey building that overlooked the entire battle.
With a grunt, he flung the Detonation Spear right at the base of that building, the spear lodging itself into the pillar. Before the surrounding Cretins could evacuate, the spear blew up, fracturing the structural integrity of the building from within as one of it’s main pillar was completely shattered apart.
“Shit, it’s collapsing! MOVE MOVE!”
The building toppled with gravitas, crashing into the ground with a thunderous roar as the resulting air shockwave buffeted Kyle even while he hid behind cover. A billowing cloud of dust, smoke and finely grounded rubble blasted outwards, covering the street in a dense fog.
The collapse hardly stopped the firefight, but the chaos was amplified even further as allies could hardly see each other through the fog, with only pellets making their mark as they tore tunnels within the smoke.
[Sir, the residual smoke is blocking my vision, I can’t see anything!]
“Update Keith on Cretin movements elsewhere – I got this!” Kyle charged out from the cover, his engravings glistening as he killed each isolated Cretin squad like a predator hunting in the mist, the prey unsuspecting and blindly firing, making them easy targets.
The slaughter was horrendous, and by the time the dust settled, only a slew of dead Cretin soldiers were lying on the pavement, their blood filling long-clogged sewers, with only Kyle standing alive.
Such carnage was not new to Alex’s squad, but the intensity far surpassed any skirmish they had fought thus far as a logistics squad. “By Yual, what am I looking at?” Alex felt that whatever inkling of strength he thought he personally had had been tossed out of the window by Kyle’s display of power. Like a god amongst men.
The Cretins on the opposing side felt the same too. While Kyle had only killed a fraction of their battalion, the show of force was more than enough to weaken their resolve. As such, when the officer called for a hasty retreat, it was followed immediately, the survivors scrambling to return back. Even the flanking pincer attack by the battalion on the left was called off, both of them retreating as quick as they arrived.
[Sir, backup is approaching now!]
“How’s the rest of the troops doing?”
[The main force is being mobilised now.]
“Good! All squads form up behind me! We’ll form the first wave and establish a breach first!” Kyle led the charge as the Seven Snakes formed up behind him, three hundred men strong. Buoyed by Kyle’s dominant leadership at the front, they rushed in with him, picking off the stragglers in a brutal firefight that spanned the entire street length towards the Ardent Cretins’s territory defense line.
It was a death chase, filled with screams of agony and dying whimpers as the fleeing Cretins attempted to evade their pursuers, but Kyle was not about to let anyone go, not even the deserters who were trying to make it to the Central Sector. To him, it was a statement to the rest of Raktor that the Seven Snakes were far from weak.
However, when the Seven Snakes attacking force saw the first defensive line of the Ardent Cretins, they took a step back instead, finding cover as a slew of machine guns and warmachines fired right down at them, threatening to mow them down with withering fire.
“Where are the other Cretin forces? When is the second wave coming to help us?” Kyle asked the observer.
[Two battalions are attempting to flank you right now! Twenty minutes until the main force reaches you!]
I don’t have twenty minutes. “Prepare to push once I break the blockade!” Kyle roared, earning the nods of the men around him as the order was relayed down by those who could hear of the din of gunfire.
Penchant for Violence! Kyle took cover as well, grabbing yet another Detonation Spear, flinging it towards the blockade and expecting it to blow up just like he had done with the building. The force with which he threw the spear was far too fast even for the Cretin’s point defence systems to react.
But just as the spear was about to reach, a sniper shot from afar suddenly deflected the spear, causing the spear to be knocked off-course, instead blowing up another building instead of the blockade. Before Kyle could react, another sniper shot took the head of a Seven Snakes soldier clean off, tearing through his skull instantly. Snipers!
