Cleansing Fire Read online

Gwen shrugged, “We can experiment, but they obviously aren’t human, so we can’t guess at motivations, or how their equipment will react. Maybe they’re just ordered to carry and use that stuff and have no choice at all in it. It certainly makes them formidable enough even if it’s a risk. We’ll have to fight them different ways to learn the truth.”

  “Which means finding their main base on the mainland, so they won’t destroy more villages. We’ll leave at dawn, I like Cassie’s suggestion.”

  We spent the rest of the afternoon together, just relaxing and sharing ideas, though it was all a moot point until we’d actually faced the enemy in a fight. After a light dinner, since we’d had two lunches, we retired for the night and spent private time as couples.

  Gwen was mesmerizing, and it was a very good night.

  We headed almost due west while cloaked, from the moment we left the ground. The continent was a big place, and it was just a hopeful assumption that they’d be near the coast. To hedge our bets, we’d asked around before we left, and got a good heading based on what direction their ships went in. If we were lucky, they’d gone in a direct line to their base. They could have used deception and changed their course, but I didn’t see a reason why they would have. The island was no threat to them.

  Lara and Gwen were swapping back and forth on the cloak when one ran low of mana. We’d decided to do it that way simply because we didn’t know their capabilities. Except, they had ships, and they had weapons and armor that seemed to operate by magic, on the other hand their armor technology seemed to indicate a scientific bent at least in part. We had no idea if they would detect our approach, even from far away.

  Better safe than sorry.

  “North or south?” I asked when the continent came into sight.

  Gwen frowned, “Let’s just go a little further. Let’s not lose this heading until we’re sure they aren’t on it.”

  I nodded, “Good idea.”

  The continent was a few thousand miles across. The ship could cross it relatively quickly, but we had to balance that against going so fast we might miss stuff.

  Lara said, “Large port city about a mile north. I didn’t see any evidence of ships, or destruction. Lots of farmland, beyond that.”

  Huh, the continent probably had a ton of different kingdoms, all with ports around the edges, and even more kingdoms in the center. It was also just one of many continents on this world. It was all a bit intimidating, like deciding to explore every square inch of Earth. Still, we did have fifty thousand years to kill, or thereabouts according to the plan when we agreed to put ourselves in Gaia’s care.

  Steve said, “I didn’t see a thing to the south except empty beeches.”

  We flew over some small mountains, lakes, rivers, forests. Most of it was completely unsettled, but we did see a few villages, and even a large city or two off on the horizon. There were four million human minds in this game. The ratio seemed somewhere around one hundred locals for every one of us, not counting evil races or monsters. That left a lot of empty space, if there were only four hundred million or so people in this entire world. Even taking into account the elves and dwarves, which I don’t think counted toward that ratio.

  As far as adventuring, there were only two hundred thousand or so, five percent out of that four million if the ratios stayed true around the world from our little island. That was a lot of space and things to explore for so relatively few.

  We crossed some more planes, and then hit a larger range of mountains, dead ahead.

  “I see something up ahead, coming fast,” Gwen noted with curiosity.

  I slowed us down as fast as I could, but we barely saw the dark green colored composite armor blur past, not really seeing what it was. I started to circle as I slowed down, and dumped speed as quickly as I could without stressing our bodies.

  We slowly approached, and my eyes roved the encampment that was nestled inside a deep valley between several mountains. There was a lot going on.

  First and foremost, there was a huge ship the size of a small city covered in that green armor. There were maybe ten smaller ships about thirty yards in length docked to the much larger ship that had to be a quarter mile long and hundred yards wide at its thickest point. It was flat on the bottom, but oval shaped from up above, it looked a lot like an egg with a third of it cut off length wise. A big green deadly egg.

  As I circled it, we saw there were several empty ports, where those smaller thirty-yard ships should be, no doubt the ones that took the soldiers to the island and stole the slaves. There was also construction in progress on a few of them. What looked like robots were building new ones, though robot was probably a bad word for it, I was thinking old world. Most likely they were magical automatons, controlled by someone, or perhaps programmed to operate independently.

  Clearly, the new ships were being made with steel, or perhaps a heartier metal composite, the point was it was very clearly metallic. I stopped the ship as we reached a cradle that was almost finished, and had my obvious question answered. The builders were spraying on a green liquid of some kind, which slowly covered the ship. Maybe the composite armor was too precious or hard to make to use it to build the whole ship with, it was obviously just an armored coating, presumably tougher than the metal below.

  No, more than that, it was sealing a crystal layer, it all went back to magic. Obviously, there were a lot more questions than answers so far. Their ships, their personal weapons, and their personal armor and shields all had at least master level spells on them, did they have masters, or did they figure out a way to build magic into the crystal creation process. Lots of questions about these clowns, but despite seeing it very little answers.

  It was as cool as it was terrifying.

  Steve grunted, “What a relief, I thought this would be hard.”

  Dan laughed, so did I.

  Cassie snorted, “I’d say a frontal attack was out.”

  Gwen pointed at some movement by the side of the mountain. A man shaped person in a green suit similar to the armor we’d seen was walking out pushing a floating cart filled with processed iron ore.

  “Look, the slaves are being used to mine metals. They’re in some kind of suit too though. I bet it makes mining fast and easy, they just don’t have people to do it, or they’re too lazy. This is good news actually.”

  I frowned, “I got the slave part, the miners obviously only had two legs, but the rest? How is it good news?”

  Gwen waved a hand and said, “It’s obvious they’re hiding, and they took slaves from a very isolated place, small islands in the middle of the ocean. The cities and villages we passed didn’t look damaged or taken over. It’s likely they’re afraid to reveal themselves to a large population yet, and there’s a lot of kingdoms on this continent. Lost ships implies that they need to rebuild from losses, and then they’ll use those to conquer this continent. I don’t think they’re from here, Jason. I think… this game is even bigger than we thought and not confined to just this planet. This is… an invasion force in hiding, while they build-up their losses from the last world.”

  Cassie tilted her head, “Maybe, it fits, but that’s a lot of guesses and maybes.”

  Gwen shrugged, “Forget the space thing then, maybe they’re from another continent, or the moon. Point is, the part about building up for an invasion is clear, they’re down a bunch of their ships, and they’re in the building phase and avoiding large populations.”

  Lara said, “I agree. Based on how ruthless they treated the islands’ kingdom, along with a healthy dose of just plain ignoring them until they’re a bother shows arrogance, a belief we are less than them, and there for them to exploit. Perhaps when they conquer the continent, they’ll go even further with so much slave labor, and start building more mother ships.”

  “I don’t disagree. We should scout them more. We need to know what’s technology and what’s magic, and how they control the automatons. This is too big for us, unless we find a major weakness. Just taking
on one of their armored soldiers seems like a risk.”

  Gwen asked, “Scout?”

  “Sure, I figure we can cloak, and go stick our heads in the ship. We need to at least figure out where the armor is vulnerable. At least some part of it has to be a large flat crystal that gives the suit its power.”

  Gwen said, “They probably put it on the bottom, between their legs, that’s where I’d put it.”

  “Alright, I’ll land out of sight, Dan can put our ship underground, and then we’ll stroll around their ship. On the way out, we’ll start a fight, and run if necessary. We might need to hit one of the bigger cities, and then recruit another group or two.”

  Gwen tilted her head, “Maybe. There could be a big red self-destruct button.”

  Everyone laughed.

  Cassie said faux wistfully, “If only we were that lucky.”

  Lara giggled, “Before we do that, we should probably find the closest kingdom, so we can bind a new respawn point, we don’t want to die and wind up back with Rachel.”

  “Good point, let’s take a look.”

  I brought us up a good mile, and then started to spiral out from the landing point. It wasn’t long before we saw a decent sized town, or maybe a small city, right on the edge of a mountain lake and valley filled with farms. It was a beautiful place and only about ten miles away from the valley.

  In the interest of time, I just brought the ship down in the city while cloaked, and we all bound ourselves to the city’s respawn area right from the ship. We could explore it later, when we had more to tell, or if we died. It didn’t take us long to return to the quadruped’s valley. I had the bad feeling Gwen was right, but I still resisted the idea of calling them aliens, even just in my head.

  Now that we had the small town’s name, Lakeside, I was able to relate the area to the globe map of the world we’d seen in Gaia’s temple. All the cities had been mapped and included. If necessary, there was a much larger kingdom about fifty miles southwest, on the coast of the Southern Ocean. More like the eastern kingdom, a million people or so, which would mean a lot of undying groups.

  Just in case.

  Chapter Four

  “What if their ships can detect the magic field directly?” Cassie asked.

  I shrugged, “Then we all die,” I said only half-teasingly.

  Gwen slapped my arm, “I think he meant to say, then we kick their asses and fight our way out.”

  I nodded, “Of course, I was only joking,” I totally lied.

  We were totally screwed if cloaking didn’t get us in there and back out.

  Steve snickered.

  I laughed, “The good news is we were awfully close to their ship already, I think if they could detect empty spots in the magic field, that we’d have been busted by now. They’d have either shot at us, or if for some reason their ships weapons were offline, they’d have at least called out an alarm and scrambled some troops.”

  I just hoped their internal sensors weren’t any better.

  Cassie huffed, “You’re not inspiring confidence.”

  I said confidently, “I know we can beat them. It’s just so new we don’t know how yet, we’re going to have to take some initial risks, we might even die. In the end though, I promise we’ll kick their asses, and make sure they never leave this valley alive. Not to mention bring the slaves home.”

  That I could say with confidence. There was just… a lot we didn’t know.

  Steve said, “Very convincing, Jason, just warms my heart.”

  Lara elbowed him, “You’re not helping either.”

  Mainly, we were just joking around to get over the nervous hump like we did before all missions. My heartbeat was already slightly accelerated, those armored monsters scared the hell out of me. In this case though, I think a part of it was the leftover damage to our psyches from that awful war, where so many innocents died. I don’t think any of us were ready or willing to face that again. At least, not anytime soon.

  If anything though, that made me more determined to eradicate these bastards before they were ready to come out of hiding. This planet had enough screwed up threats, it didn’t need to be importing them.

  I nodded at Steve, “That’s because I meant it. These bastards are toast, one way or another we’ll end them before they destroy one more human, elf, dwarf, or marten’s village, town or city. Or any other good races we don’t know about yet.”

  Gwen looked a little turned on by my manly confidence, but it was hardly the time, so she popped the canopy and we all piled out. It only took a second for Dan to sink it into the ground, and then we cloaked before heading back into the valley. That time on foot.

  I knew the odds were bad, when I was hoping to find Cassie’s big red self-destruct button.

  There were no entrances at the ground level, the mothership was hovering, and we couldn’t fly without uncloaking, even temporarily visible might be too long.

  “I think the only way on the ship is going the same way as the ore shipments. Not a bad plan anyway, we can see what they do to process it, and maybe get into one of their labs.”

  Gwen said, “Agreed.”

  No one disagreed, so we walked under the ship to the side near the mountain. The floating ore carts were rising up to a large open airlock about fifty feet up. I considered for a moment, and then waved everyone forward as I jumped on top of the ore on the next ore cart. Everyone else scrambled up, and a moment later we started to lift into the sky.

  Through the open airlock there was a room full of machines, as well as automatons. The room itself was cavernous.

  “Jump off left, against the back wall.”

  We jumped off, and then moved against the wall. By then Lara needed to take over, and as her cloak settled over us Gwen’s disappeared. I smiled when there was no alarm.

  Steve asked, “What are we doing?”

  “Watching, there’s a lot of those automatons, and they move pretty fast. Just want to see their pattern of movements so we don’t accidentally get in their way. Plus, we want to see what they’re doing with the metals.”

  Gwen said, “It looks like a machine shop.”

  Sure enough, the metals went into the disparate machines. Some extruded what looked to be deck plating, others put out framing lengths of metal of various size, while other machines manufactured doors, or external plates. Nothing all that technical, it seemed as if this room was merely to build the frame of the ship. The machines themselves weren’t putting off a magical aura, but the automatons were. The latter looked like robots though, which didn’t exactly make sense given their aura.

  There was a larger door on the other side of the room, it was open and looked to lead into a large corridor going left and right. There was also a smaller door on the left.

  “Let’s check the door on the left.”

  We walked through the room carefully, and mostly stuck to the wall where possible. The automatons moved fast, but they weren’t hard to avoid. They moved in perfect synchronicity on predictable paths, and we’d learned those patterns.

  It was a risk, but we went ahead and opened the small door using the button panel. The door slid to the side, and we looked inside. Steve was covering our backs, and he would give off the alarm if we were noticed. As I’d hoped, the automatons weren’t programmed to notice opening doors.

  The attached room was much smaller, and it looked like a mix between storage and repair. We went inside the room, and examined the shelves, and benches. There were also some more automatons standing silently against the back wall.

  Dan frowned, “Look at this, they are robots.”

  I tilted my head as I looked toward the bench. There were automaton parts scattered over it, and they were taken apart enough that we could see inside them to a certain extent. Definitely made up of wires, moving parts, and electronics of some kind. There was more to learn, but they were definitely using a hybrid magic and technology system of some kind.

  Cassie said, “The ones in the back, they’re
plugged into the ship.”

  I frowned, and stated the obvious, “Do you think they’re technical in nature, but powered by magic energy instead of a battery?”

  Lara waved her hand, and she was holding a fist sized crystal in her hand.

  “Found this on one of the shelves. I bet you’re right. This must power them. I’m not sure why they’d be plugged into the ship, the magic regeneration would keep the crystal charged, maybe to receive order updates? Anyway, this thing has about fifty thousand mana in it.”

  Steve went over and grabbed another.

  “It’s flawless, grandmaster quality. It’s also big enough that it will hold a lot more spells than merely six. Although, I don’t think I’d have the skill to even enchant it with one without getting something wrong. It’s… to say it’s very complicated at this size hardly covers the reality.”

  I shook my head, “I’m getting the idea none of these guys know magic, at least not directly. I’d bet they use magic for power, but technology to shape and direct it somehow. I’d like to find one of those rods that aren’t designated to someone yet, I bet there is a crystal inside it, but also instead of a life spell there’s probably a technological DNA reader for security, and perhaps some kind of laser or plasma technology for the blaster part. Obviously, they can control raw magic easily enough, so that explains why the bolt of energy is saturated in it.”

  “That theory was assuming a lot,” Cassie said.

  I replied, “Maybe, but something’s been bugging me this whole time. You know we couldn’t use expert level enchanted equipment until we reached expert. The reason for that is we weren’t strong enough, or knowledgeable enough to handle all the disparate enchantments. So, how does a level twenty quadruped control armor, shield, and rod all at levels beyond grandmaster? The answer is they don’t, technology does it for them. It’s also a weakness of sorts, our spells and abilities are controlled by our minds, and are a lot more adaptable. They’re stuck with their equipment’s narrowly designed capabilities. Granted, they’re equipment is amazingly powerful, but it’s nothing but a blunt sledgehammer.”