Chapter 356 - Uprising (Patreon)

Note : And this concludes book 9 ! And this streak, most likely.

I might adjust the ending in the future, but I'm completely out of steam. Don't worry, the beginning of book 10 will be dedicated with dealing with the aftermath of what just happened, on a personal and geopolitical level.

I hope you enjoyed this book ! I certainly did.

Chapter 356

Red Sands Desert, Archduchy of Rebirth

City of Darthar

Fortunately for the regulars of Sunrise, the Duchess was extremely paranoid and the Marquis' aide the camp highly aware of their...proclivities.

That meant that not only did they have plenty of guards on duty, but also makeshift fortifications encircling their camping sites. The romans would have cried in despair at how pitiful those were compared to their castra, but they were there.

Furthermore, a strict policy of separating regulars and slaves had been enforced by the Marquis' aide, knowing that were it not put into place, neither group would get much sleep tonight. Half of the duties of the guards posted was to make sure that no one snuck out to grab a slave to warm their bed.

Unfortunately, the Duchess' paranoia also meant that the regulars were surrounded in every direction by the slaves' encampments, meant to provide a layer of ablative armor in case of attack.

The regulars were roused by a chorus of screams, as the soldiers that had managed to sneak through or bribe the guards were slaughtered. All had been on edge, desperately hoping against a dungeon attack, and soldiers boiled out of tents, fastening armor and unsheathing weapons. Throughout the encampments of the elites, squires prepared mounts as knights encased themselves into heavy armor.

Then the slaves boiled out of the night, and all hell broke loose.

The only reason the regulars survived the first rush was that many of the slaves were trying to leave, impeding those attempting to rush them.

It was a bloodbath. Several encampments of regulars, those housing normal cavalry and skirmishers especially, broke, the slaves butchering their way across them.

Those with infantry fared better. Lines were formed, and shield walls held back the tide as arrows and spells were poured into the seething mass.

For the first time, the soldiers of Sunrise felt the full fury of what they had unleashed upon their enemy. Worse, even. With the brands gone, the slaves' morale wasn't unbreakable, but there was nothing to restrain their fury either.

Still. They were poorly equipped, even worse trained, and all of Sunrise's troops had, at some point in their service, had to deal with a slave uprising. The camps consolidated, officers yelled orders, and the infantry closed ranks, forming a dense core of steel, and began to move to extricate themselves from the encirclement, usually by linking up with other nearby encampments. They didn't even bother trying to try and rally around the Duchess' camp, hearing the blood curling screams of dying nobles as well as their guards, and the rising flames above it.

Gryphon knights and pegasus cavalry finally managed to clear a large enough area to take off, moving to take stock of the situation.

Only to immediately crash back down, wreathed in flames.

Everyone froze as the thunder of the artillery rolled upon them.

And in the silence, they heard it.

The rythmic stomping of massive, armored feet. Of giants of metal and death, rushing towards war.

The regulars redoubled their effort, in sheer desperation. They pushed, away from the incoming horrors, trampling over their own dead and wounded. Some formations lost cohesion and broke, as their officers lost control.

Those that did were torn apart in minutes, a veritable tide of slaves rolling over them.

Then suddenly, the Mackies were there. Appearing out of the night, guns blazing, illuminating the slaughter with strobing flashes of light.

Entire formations exploded, as shells, rockets, autocannon rounds and endless streams of machinegun fire poured into them.

Someone yelled out, and the gryphon knights reformed into a spearhead, and charged. Through the slaves, trampling all over them as they sought to engage the Mackies, to pin them down to allow the rest of the army to escape.

The closest Mackie turned to face them.

And knelt, bowing down, almost tipping over.

One of the knights screamed as he saw but a single thing.

A missile launcher, pointed straight at him.

Half a second later the null missile launched.

Fortunately for his comrades, it failed to activate properly, and its warhead didn't detonate.

Unfortunately for him, its 'warhead' was a large, runed slug of mythril, steel and malachite travelling at three times the speed of sound.

It didn't need to trigger.

The first missile punched straight throug half a dozen wards with sheer kinetic energy, killing as many knights. The second properly activated, and the knights' wards went down.

The third was just to be sure, the nullification field doing little but keeping some mages from recovering.

The fourth, fifth and sixth were all high explosive warheads.

The knights were outgunned, outteched and hopelessly outnumbered, but they were made of stern, stern stuff.

Stern enough to power through the attack.

Just not stern enough to do the same when four other Mackies unloaded their entire rocket racks into them at almost point blank range.

Shards of enchanted equipment, steaming pieces of essence infused flesh and scorched feathers were thrown in every direction.

They hadn't even had the time to all hit the ground before the Mackies waded through the field of craters they'd just created.

By the time they had however, the regulars had managed to coalesce together. Spells, arrows and even light siege weapons screamed towards the mechs, and they answered in kind.

But they didn't advance.

There was no need. Lightning bolts and power beams rose futilely into the skies in anticipation, trying to create a wall of energy to stop what was coming.

The Old World missiles ignored the pesky interference, their wards swatting away whatever attack managed to somehow hit them, moving so quickly they might as well have hit instantly, traversing the entire distance in a fraction of a second.

There was a bright series of flashes as the missiles hit the ground with the force of an artillery barrage, then only the roar of primordial fury as the plasma warheads disgorged their payloads.

Wards or no wards, nothing Sunrise had left was going to survive that.

The Mackies rushed in, the slaves parting before them. Even the regulars desperately tried to get out of their ways, though many failed and paid the price.

And suddenly, the regulars no longer had a solid formation, slowly marching out. They had a circle of troops, the center obliterated. Surrounded by slaves...and with the massive warmachines in the center, missiles screaming down from the skies every thirty seconds, annihilating entire companies and causing cracks to appear.

They broke.

And they died.

*****

"Fucking hell." Whispered Alexandra as she looked at the holograms of the slaughter.

Sunrise had taken three hundred thousand regular and elite soldiers down from Asaria. Over time, she'd manage to whittle that number down to about two hundred and fifty thousand, with about a fourth of them resurrected and thus not truly combat effective.

And she'd just seen every single one of them die. Down to the last man and woman, either torn apart by the slaves or by her own weaponry. There were so many corpses she had to use her claws equipped spider golems to scoop containers of bodies for the resurrection orbs. She had to organize golems to sift through the bodies, making sure slaves were processed and not regulars, and she had to hastily convert some of her spider tanks into bulldozers by attaching the spare armor plates meant for the airships to their front, just to be able to clear paths in the sea of corpses for them to be recovered more effectively.

The situation beyond was pure chaos. She was getting contradictory reports from, well, everywhere. Asaria was apparently lifting its siege but the regulars there had been well dug in into redoubts, and it was going to fall to the royal army and Grant's mercenaries to dig them out.

As for the occupied territories...well, Molro was de facto liberated. Kaidan...Kaidan was weird. The city itself was apparently in a kind of standoff, with the Brigadier's troops and the slaves refusing to engage each other, more or less keeping to the division the officer had instituted. Amazingly enough, there were even some report that they were actually trying to talk to each other, even cooperating to some level.

Sunrise and Lorenz...blood. Just blood. It was too early to say how it would shake out but it was almost certain that both duchies' upper class had just been annihilated, or was soon going to be. The members with the main army were dead, and the center of each duchy was in the midst of a full scale revolt. No, not revolt, revolution.

The plans she'd drawn with Allya and got their majesties to agree to were now void and null. She wasn't even sure the slaves who now de factor controlled half the Kingdom would even accept their majesties' sovereignty, let alone the plan to create new noble houses and reorganize the rebels'.

But...well, who could blame them? They'd gone through hell and got their chance to strike back. And now they would most likely want it to never, ever, happen again.

And given the fact that their homeland had failed to defend them, even de facto condoned Sunrise's practice of slavery until the war broke out...

Honestly, the only reason they probably wouldn't just spit in their majesties' faces and tell the kingdom to go screw itself was because they'd want to join Rebirth.

The Republic was a similar mess. The slave troops had immediately deserted, most of them not mistreated to the point of berserker uprisings like in Sunrise, and the civilian population was more or less in open revolt in several provinces as the news broke out. Amazingly however, the Republic's core territories held, with the fortress city of Pavrow still withstanding Amelia's siege, though for how long was an open question. Elkis, the capital, was in a state of utter shock, with the Senate descending into panic. She was receiving messages from all over the world about what Rebirth intended to do next, and if she was responsible for the slave revolt, but senators had begun to reach out to Allya directly, trying to negotiate a deal.

The summit with the New Republic hadn't been announced officially yet, but most of the senators guessed, correctly, that the archduchess was the person with the most power over the good general, and could, if she wished, strongarm her into sparing the senate.

There was no way in hell that was happening, but hey.

Shockwaves were also propagating to the rest of the world, but that was...vaguer. Some of what she was getting didn't really make sense, some corporations that had nothing to do with slavery were apparently flipping out? There-

Alexandra received an alert from her avatar, and stepped into it.

Only to find herself being shaken by Emilia, the vampire's face centimeters from hers.

"Alex! Alex come on!"

"Ah!" The dungeon core tried to fend off the vampire, unsucessful. "I'm here, I'm here!"

"Okay, good." Emilia backed up a bit, still holding the avatar by the shoulders. "You won't fucking believe it, the news I got from home, I...Holy crap!"

"What is it?" Alexandra's eyes narrowed. "It's about the brands, right? It seems we really have underestimated Rook's ambitions. He seems to have just broken every slave brand on the planet."

Emilia laughed, with an edge of hysteria, setting off all of Alexandra's mental alarm bells.

"Slave brands? Broken? Honey, he didn't break them. He made them no longer possible. Period. Don't you understand?!? He. Changed. MAGIC!"

Alexandra opened her mouth, then closed it, reeling from the implications. She knew magic was a construct, knew it could be changed, but...

Something was wrong here. Badly wrong.

Rook and his seven were insanely powerful, and they'd needed industrial quantities of ingredients. From what she knew they might have been accumulating them for millennia and she might have just been a late supplier, used to cut some time. But even then...

If people could change magic, the Order would have. And there had been no mention of it being done, ever. It couldn't be hidden either, as far as she knew, as the sound was heard by everybody.

Besides which, where were the failsafes? The Gods had to have something protecting such a powerful and important system. If they weren't, the 'Citadel of the Flames' would have been shot out of the sky a long time ago.

Questions were still swirling inside her head when Emilia let go of her, and she focused back on the vampire.

"There's also...it didn't just affect slave brands either." Emilia made a sweeping gesture. "It also affected...contracts. Magical ones. And oaths. Anything...anything that allowed someone to control something else."

Oh.

Oh shit.

END OF BOOK 9