Cataphractoi

  Events unfolded so quickly that Sera could barely even process what was happening. Rinnie’s arrow sank into the nachzehrer officer’s hip and didn’t just destroy the servo but locked it in pce. When the officer tried to move its hip didn’t respond, but it attempted to twist on one leg nonetheless in order to react to Rinnie. But the little dryad was already spinning around the officer in the opposite direction, drawing her new dagger with one hand.

  A bde slid forth from the officer’s wrist and it sshed at where Rinnie had just been, probably unable to cast a spell quickly enough, but the swing encountered only empty air. Rinnie was already completing her maneuver, driving her misericord into the officer’s undamaged leg at the knee in a backhanded spin. Once again she expertly targeted the servo motor there, and the thin armor under it failed to stop the dagger from punching all the way through and out the other side, disabling the knee entirely.

  By now the vanguards were reacting, one bringing its hammer down on a spot Rinnie had already vacated and the other aiming for her current location. They may as well have been swinging at a gnat, though, for all the good it did. Before the second vanguard had even finished raising its weapon Rinnie extracted her dagger from the officer and dove towards her assaint, rolling between its legs to escape.

  The entire affair had happened in a matter of two or three seconds.

  A fsh illuminated the hall from behind the nachzehrer. It wasn’t until Sera heard steel smming against stone that she understood a trap had gone off- then another, and another. With no regard for the traps lining the hall someone charged down its length, unable to be slowed down by such feeble attacks, and there was only one person Sera could think of whom it could be.

  As if in slow motion, the nachzehrer vanguards turned to face this new threat while the officer toppled to the side, catching itself against the wall. Its knee had given out, but its hip, unable to move, had prevented it from simply sinking to the ground. Meanwhile, Sera caught sight of Rinnie as she sped around the legs of the heavily-armored vanguards, delivering blows that weren’t quite as effective but nonetheless left increasing amounts of damage.

  Then Lay arrived and struck the vanguards like a runaway freight train. Visible only through the gap between the two nachzehrer, the warrior braced her feet and twisted her entire body to deliver a mighty blow that sent one vanguard off of its feet entirely. It struck the ground heavily with a ringing crash, activating a trap that failed to damage it but flipped the vanguard over and out of the protective range of its officer.

  Multiple magical traps had triggered on Lay already, leaving her armor scorched in some pces and coated in rime in others, but she had emerged with no actual injuries thanks to her prodigious magical resistance. Sera was forced to avert her eyes as white-hot fmes engulfed the nachzehrer vanguard, and when she looked back, she found it hadn’t weathered the trap nearly so well as Lay. Its armor had begun to visibly sag in pces and was glowing with heat as it struggled to stand, its very survival beggaring belief.

  With its partner barely able to move, Lay was able to focus her attention solely on the remaining vanguard. Towering above even Lay, the nachzehrer took its hammer in both hands and brought it down on the former Amazon’s head, encountering her own weapon, braced at an angle, on the way down. The hammer slid to the side and impacted the ground hard enough to dispce multiple bricks. Sensing danger, the vanguard pulled back its shield-arm and secured its hold on the grip just in time to intercept a return swing from Lay.

  Previously Lay had been armed with a poleaxe, but as her weapon was deflected, Sera saw she’d adapted to their heavily armored foes by repcing it with a Lucerne hammer, its four-pronged head more appropriate to the task of defeating armor than an axe. And in Lay’s hands, the difference was devastating; the brief glimpse Sera caught of the vanguard’s shield showed four neatly-aligned holes punched in its surface.

  A warrior like Lay wasn’t restricted to using the head of her weapon, though; using the momentum from her hammer being deflected, Lay brought the butt around and spped the nachzehrer vanguard’s hammer arm at the elbow before it could pull its weapon back. Then the pronged head swept back around to ring the vanguard’s bell with a blow to the temple, followed by a reverse strike that caught the inner edge of its shield, flinging it back out of the way before it could be brought back into position.

  In spite of the size disparity, the nachzehrer vanguard found itself entirely at Lay’s mercy as the smaller woman pummeled it into submission. When st she’d taken on a nachzehrer in single-combat, it had been a gunner which although outmatched had needed only to align the barrels of its guns with her to strike back. That one difference had made the fight look far more even than it had been. Against an opponent reliant whose stance could be disrupted to disable it, who needed positioning to strike back effectively, Lay’s skill gave her an enormous advantage.

  With utter impunity the warrior rained blows on her foe, sweeping aside its limbs every time it tried to rally and delivering punishing strikes to its head and joints while it reeled. Unseen to her, the officer used its arms to turn itself around, no doubt intending to turn the tide with its magic, but Rinnie was watching and chose that moment to reenter the fray. She stepped out from behind Lay to fire an arrow at the officer, but aware to the threat, it had raised a barrier that repelled the projectile easily.

  Killing the officer wasn’t the priority though; if Rinnie could merely keep it distracted, that was enough. Knowing that, she approached the nachzehrer mage with her dagger drawn and stabbed at its barrier, bearing down on it when the invisible wall of force tried to push her away. The officer turned its attention to her, but all it could do was puts its entire focus on keeping its barrier intact. Even Tiriana had struggled to prepare a second spell while actively defending against a single spell, and by all accounts the alchemists weren’t nearly as adept at combat magic as mages trained in the Armistice Alliance.

  After much effort the burned vanguard returned to its feet, its armaments either firmly in its grasp or welded to its hands. If it felt any pain, it wasn’t evident as it plodded towards Lay and the other vanguard, shield raised and hammer at the ready. Halfway to its target it stopped suddenly, its head craning over to wear Rinnie was pinning its leader down, and it shifted its target to the vulnerable scout.

  That instant of thought determined the course of the fight and was the beginning of the end.

  In the moment that the burned nachzehrer began to raise its arm to strike, Lay reacted with the speed of lightning. Her opponent failed to notice the shift in her attention, too busy trying to brace itself to receive the next strike, so it hardly even reacted when she instead stepped around it and charged, wielding her hammer as a spear. Just as the burned vanguard’s hammer reached the apex of its swing, Lay thrust. The long bde that tipped her polearm nced out and tore through the vanguard’s half-melted gorget, ripping apart the giant’s throat.

  Even as the vanguard fell back, clutching its throat and drowning on its own blood, its battered counterpart tried to take advantage of the situation to strike Lay down from behind. Unfortunately for it, Lay hadn’t left herself as vulnerable as it thought. Anticipating that the nachzehrer would see an opportunity to counterattack, Lay twisted out of the way of the blow when she heard it step forward, withdrawing her polearm as she moved.

  Two hammers descended at once. The nachzehrer vanguard’s weapon struck only air where Lay’s head once was. Hers, however, hooked the legs of her opponent and swept them out from under it. Carried to the ground by its own weight, the vanguard fell heavily onto its back. Lay, both hands firmly on her hammer, brought the weapon around and up, spinning the rge spike opposite the pronged hammerhead around to face forward, then delivered the coup de grace, introducing a spike several inches long directly to one of the two lenses on the vanguard’s face.

  Gss cracked and shattered- as did metal and then bone. Giant though it might have been, the nachzehrer could not survive a spike directly driven into its brain. It never moved again. That left the officer as the only survivor of its contingent, an oversight that would be remedied shortly. Seeing its st escort dead, the officer spoke.

  “We believed two-to-one odds sufficient to eliminate you based upon past experiences. Now we understand that to have been a decision made in error,” the officer said analytically. It didn’t seem particurly concerned about its imminent death. “You do not fight like alchemists. Once we have adjusted our tactics, however, we will return. Your destruction has merely been postponed.”

  “Your threats mean little coming from one who can no longer even stand. They are the words of a vanquished foe too prideful to admit defeat and no more,” Lay growled as she raised her weapon. Without waiting for a reply, she dropped her hammer on the officer’s barrier. It bounced off once, then twice, and even thrice, but the fourth blow proved too much for the nachzehrer’s defenses to withstand. The barrier colpsed with that final blow, and the officer unsheathed a bde built into its wrist, but the gesture was meaningless.

  Swinging her hammer like a baseball bat, Lay crushed the officer’s skull along with its helmet between the hammer’s head and the wall. A sound that combined the squelching of ruptured bone and flesh with the tortured crumpling of metal accompanied a spsh of blood from the giant’s ruined head, marking the end of the battle.

  “Your timing could not have been better,” Sera sighed as she climbed to her feet, stepping out from behind the corner but remaining careful not to step into the hallway. “Thanks for the save.”

  “Oh, I know. It wasn’t an accident,” Rinnie replied smugly.

  “…wait, how long were you there for?” Tiriana asked as she joined Sera.

  “’Why use the other types of trap at all!?’” Rinnie quoted dramatically. Sera felt her eye begin to twitch.

  “Then why’d you wait so long!?” she demanded indignantly. She’d been disturbingly close to trying to end herself before Rinnie showed up.

  “Eh, had to wait for that one to get into position,” Rinnie shifted the bme with a shrug, gesturing at Lay with her thumb. “She’s not really made for stealth so it took her some time to catch up.”

  “Huh, so that’s how you got so close without setting off any traps,” Tiriana noted nonchantly. “You were right behind them from the moment the officer took over disabling the traps.”

  “I presume this was the st of them?” Lay interjected. “Then perhaps you could disable the traps yourself so that we may move.”

  “Oh, right, I guess the officer isn’t exactly doing that anymore…hold on, I’m not sure if I can pull it off, but I’ll try,” Tiriana replied as she stepped forward.

  “It’s fine, we turned the traps off when you killed the officer,” Vivi’s voice interrupted from nowhere. “The engineers got the power back a bit before the end of the fight. There’s some bad new though- we can’t activate the barriers from here.”