Cataphractoi

  With how fast they both knew the elevator to be, it was little surprise when it soon arrived. On it were five nachzehrer; two gunners, two vanguards, and one smaller model they might have assumed was a leaper if it were not positioned in the center of the others, partially shielded by the vanguards. If Sera had to guess, the ck of leapers in this group could mean one of two things; either the nachzehrer had determined leapers were ineffective against Tiriana and held them back or they had gambled by sending their entire leaper contingent ahead to secure the secondary core.

  Tiriana was already focusing on a spell when the nachzehrer in the center stepped forward and began to speak, confirming its status as an officer.

  “We have witnessed your defeat of our comrades. For an alchemist you are exceptionally powerful. Surrender. We assure you that one of your caliber will be made an officer, retaining the majority of your sense of self,” the armored giant said without preamble.

  “Not very reassuring from someone that can’t even refer to themselves with the word ‘I’,” Sera snarked. From the start, it was obvious this conversation was going nowhere, but Sera wasn’t going to compin if the enemy was willing to waste time talking.

  “Only an alchemist would have the arrogance to refer to themselves as an individual,” the officer replied in a monotone.

  “If you’re an officer, doesn’t that mean you used to be an alchemist?” Sera pointed out, trying to draw this out as long as she could. Tiriana’s silence told Sera she was probably focused on preparing something, so the more time she could buy the better.

  “We have been reformed. We now understand that are merely a part of a greater whole, a member of the great army of Muspelnd. That does not mean we are any less ourself- merely that we understand proper decorum,” the officer insisted with no more inflection that before.

  “What…?” Sera furrowed her brow in confusion. She wasn’t quite sure whether to take that at face value. Was she speaking to a single avatar representing a greater machine intelligence, or merely a brainwashed foot soldier? In the end, of course, it wasn’t that important. Neither was preferable to the other. “Kind of sounds like your personality was altered to me.”

  “We prefer the term…enlightened,” the officer replied.

  “If you’re looking to convince us you’ll have to give us a better expnation that that. What exactly did they do to you?” Sera asked skeptically. There was a moment of silence, the nachzehrer officer tilting its head to the side in thought. Sweat dripped down Sera’s neck.

  “…you are stalling,” the officer determined, wordlessly ordering the gunners forward. “If you wish to know more, we will show you firsthand.”

  “Tuck your head in,” Tiriana ordered abruptly. Before Sera could ask why, she felt an invisible hand grasp her and pull, yanking her at an incredible speed back through the hallway she’d just crossed. Every single magical trap in the hallway triggered as she passed by, but she was moving so quickly that she was well clear before she was in danger. On the other end, a powerful burst of wind impacted her back, slowing her nding from lethal to ‘merely’ rough.

  She only remembered to protect her head the instant before she hit the ground.

  Still in a daze, Sera felt Tiriana drag her from where she nded, finding herself around the corner from the hallway by the time she came to her senses. Miraculously, she found that she’d somehow managed to maintain the invisibility spell on that brick, albeit nearly at the cost of smashing her head open.

  “Why!?” she screamed at Tiriana. “Couldn’t we have just rearmed everything starting from the other side to here and saved ourselves the trouble? What if you hadn’t readied your spell in time?”

  “I had that ready from the start. If they’d brought leapers I would have cast it immediately, but I was hoping we could at least make them waste a few seconds approaching cautiously,” Tiriana expined in a whisper. “I have a pn, but it relies on them being focused on those magical traps.”

  Gncing around the corner from a crouch, Sera saw that the gunners had taken the lead instead of the vanguards. A few steps into the hall, they each turned and fired their weapons into the walls, repeating the process each time advanced, the vanguards lumbering along behind them. One of the gunners stepped on a pressure pte, triggering a spear trap that gnced off its armor harmlessly.

  “I hope that wasn’t your pn, because it doesn’t look like it worked any better than on Lay,” Sera commented, gncing up at Tiriana who was leaning around the corner above her.

  “Well…not quite, but I did think it would have some effect,” the elf admitted with a click of her tongue.

  “Why?” It stood out to Sera that Tiriana had said she thought it would have an effect, not that she’d hoped it would, so either the elf was getting delusional or she knew something Sera didn’t.

  “Desperation.” That boded well.

  “Now what?”

  “I’m hoping that now they’ll assume the physical traps aren’t a threat. They would have assumed this formation once their vanguards trigger the first set of magical traps either way, but if they’d had vanguards, they would have tried to copy me and outrun the traps,” Tiriana revealed, speaking barely loud enough for Sera to hear. If nothing else, it was comforting to know this pn had multiple yers to it.

  Which was fortunate, because there wasn’t much for Sera to do right now except watch and wait. The nachzehrer were slowed by having to disarm the magical traps in order to open the way for the vanguards behind them, but once they cleared this hallway, there was nothing else to hold them back.

  “Didn’t you say if you tried to disarm those entirely they’d trigger?” Sera wondered as she watched the nachzehrer gunners plow through the traps without any issues.

  “It’s probably their bullets. With the power out the traps have finite mana- they don’t need to destroy the spells, just drain them until they can’t activate while they’re within the gunners’ anti-magic fields,” theorized Tiriana, less perturbed than Sera would have expected. Apparently this wasn’t enough to foul up her pns.

  Foot by foot, the nachzehrer drew closer. Occasionally one of the five stepped on a pressure pte, but the spears, arrows, jets of fire, and other contraptions universally failed to damage or penetrate their armor. Their impcable advance left Sera wondering what in the world Tiriana thought was going to be any more effective against them, but she’d find out soon enough.

  Whatever it was, though, it needed to kill all of them, or else they were both dead. Sera wouldn’t be able to conjure another illusion and Tiriana wouldn’t be relying on a trick like this if she had anything left to spare. That was what Sera had signed up for, though. She just hoped it would make a difference.

  Knowing her death was likely approaching, Sera just felt fear, not peace. Would the nachzehrer even kill her? Or would she be doomed to become one of them? That seemed the worse fate. A tiny part of her was considering ways to ensure she was killed and not captured. Whatever she did, she would have to do it before one of them got ahold of her, because dwarfed as she was by the armored giants there was no way she could escape their grasp.

  “So…your pn has another part to it, right?” Sera asked nervously as the nachzehrer got closer to that floating brick, trying to distract herself with conversation. She was answered only with silence and looked up to find Tiriana biting her lip. “…please tell me your pn doesn’t end with ‘step four: die.’”

  “Of course not!” Tiriana denied strenuously.

  “Oh, good,” Sera said with a sigh of relief. It was premature.

  “That’s step five.”

  An inarticute sound of frustration escaped Sera’s lips as she looked around the corner again, deciding to pce her hopes on the mysterious brick. The nachzehrer were close. They stopped one more time to drain a pair of traps, then stepped forward. Without her influence, the brick she’d been keeping hidden popped into view at the same time as it began to fall, nding directly on a pressure pte before any of the nachzehrer could realize what was happening.

  The effect was instantaneous, deafening, and brutal. A stretch of the ceiling dropped with the force of a hydraulic press and the speed of a jackhammer. A horrid crunching sound came from beneath it before it receded into the ceiling as quickly as it had dropped, leaving both gunners fttened. For all the good it had done them, their armor may as well have been made of tin.

  “Why use the other types of trap at all!?” Sera practically screeched in disbelief. That singur trap had done more damage than the rest combined. Although, considering they’d done absolutely nothing, that wasn’t a high bar.

  “If you realized the first dozen traps were harmless, how hard do you think you’d look for the next one?” Tiriana asked pointedly, grinning a bit.

  “You say that like making intruders think there aren’t any wouldn’t be just as effective. Besides, how’d you even know what that one did?” Sera shot back.

  “Look, if you find a sane ‘alchemists’ you can feel free to ask them.” A beat passed before Tiriana replied to Sera’s question. “Also, Rinnie talks to herself while she disarms traps. We’re lucky she’s so diligent.”

  “This changes nothing,” the nachzehrer officer shouted down the hall as it strode forward, unworried. When Sera looked back, she realized it had blocked the pressure pte Tiriana had triggered with ice and the next set of magical traps failed to activate either. “You merely dey the inevitable. Surrender. We do not wish to diminish your future capabilities by damaging your bodies.”

  “Ah,” Tiriana intoned, that single sylble ced with understanding. “The gunners weren’t just blocking the traps. They were blocking the officer’s own magic as well.”

  “That seems like a major design fw.”

  “It must have hurt their enemies more than it hurt them,” the elf replied serenely, as if death wasn’t currently marching towards them. Every instinct in Sera’s body told her to run, but she was too exhausted to make it far even if that nachzehrer officer wasn’t wearing a simir suit to those of leapers. Stepping into the hallway and triggering the closest trap was starting to seem like a good idea.

  Noticing something, Sera looked to Tiriana. “Is that-”

  “Shh!” Tiriana hissed, thumping Sera on the head lightly in admonishment. Chastened, she watched in silence as the officer grew ever closer, its vanguard minions at its back, armed with shields and hammers Sera probably couldn’t even lift. Once they cleared the st of the traps there was no hope of stopping them. None of the adventurers originally assigned to defend the secondary core were in good enough shape to take more than a single blow from those brutes, and even if the power was restored it wasn’t like there was anything left down here that could be used against the nachzehrer.

  At this point, their only hope was for reinforcements to arrive.

  Sera’s heart pounded in her chest as she prayed to gods whose names she didn’t know that help might arrive in time. The approaching nachzehrer now eclipsed her view of the elevator room behind them, so she had know way of knowing if anyone was coming at all.

  “Have you ceased your struggles? Excellent. Remain where you are and do not resist. You will be unharmed,” the officer assured them, taking their silence and ck of movement as a sign of surrender. Sera felt herself starting to shake, but she couldn’t bring herself to take the easy way out. She wasn’t sure it was even an option, depending on how strong of a mage that officer was.

  But then a small figure darted out from behind the nachzehrer vanguards, bow drawn, and loosed an arrow into the officer’s hip servo at point-bnk range.