Wicked Survivor, thy secrets be shown,


    Smoke rises high and dark portals grown,


    Will rain fall on a fortress drowned?


    Through tenacity and war, thou march profound.


    A tale of thy decline, with tears and blood,


    An uncertain verse of thine humblehood,


    Then, to be reborn as a terrible blade,


    More than mere servant, thou’st been made.


    And yet thy shape holds a clue to our destiny,


    Found within, but then made anew in thee.


    As through woven plans, thou didst pierce,


    The essence of life, soul’s purpose fierce.


    So harken mine voice, O’ Survivor,


    Reveal thy intent, thy endeavour,


    The world hangs upon thy great design,


    To see what fate hath made of thine.


    <hr>


    CHAPTER 12: DESCENDANT


    “Deploying the weapon,” the drone said over radio transmission. “Pray this works. It is our last chance.”


    The habitat inspection drone swept into a higher elevation, overlooking a battleground. The intense sun crept below the horizon, and the world was swept beneath deep hues of indigo and violet. The drone was nearly a metre long, with a sleek arrowhead shape and a collection of manipulators and tools clustered in orbs beneath their nose.


    On their underside rattled a weighty rig that secured a missile larger than the drone itself. The weapon was crude. It did not match the elegance of the drone’s design, not being made from the same sophisticated manufacturing techniques. The missile’s fuselage was mottled and bent, crafted according to ancient instructions followed by the imprecise manipulations of bioengineered mutants. Stamped metal assembled by hand would have to suffice.


    The mount opened, and the missile disconnected, falling away. The weapon extended two flight surfaces and entered a level glide, shaking in the turbulence of the quickly cooling desert air before igniting its chemical engine. Then the missile screamed ahead, accelerating furiously towards a vast City.


    Impudent Axiamat stood before them. Built from hundreds of kilometres of concentric ring walls, each extending higher and higher into the sky. A dozen curling limbs raked the atmosphere at its apex, stretching covetously towards starlight as night began to wash over the heavens. The drone watched the missile arc away before they released catchment mechanisms, dropping the clumsy rigging and entering a deft roll.


    Below them, in the City’s shadow, vast armies collided. Weapons fire ripped from side to side, flashing amidst the lengthening shadows. Concussive blasts kicked up plumes of glassy sand and dust as they brutalised each other. Scanning amidst the enemy, the drone resolved the shapes of a massive dragon with a fleet of smaller aerial combatants. In disciplined formation, they stood tall and set their wings. Then, firing their engines, they kicked into the air, locking their weapons to intercept the missile before it accelerated beyond their reach.


    The drone would not let them. They flexed their engines in their mounts, angled their steering surfaces, and projected hardlight planes to direct air around other portions of their body frictionlessly. Then, upon their fore, they powered up a weaponised cutting tool.


    Arrogant, the drone swung low and surged hypersonic over the battlefield. They let the shock in their wake tear down over the enemy ranks, careless of murder as the boom shattered bone and aug alike, leaving the survivors crippled and maimed on their fields and in their trenches. However, this was just one small portion of a vast landscape, the carnage that stretched to all horizons in the shade of terrible entities.


    When the drone lanced upwards again, they surprised the aerial fighters at their flank. The dragon and its winged contingent could not react to an opponent with such speed and technological superiority. The drone merely had to direct its bright red hardlight lance, massless and infinitely sharp, through each of the freaks that had taken to the sky. Bones and biomachines were separated. Their bodies span apart, and they died with the same violence in which they had lived.


    Their leader, the dragon, swerved and swayed as it tore through the sky. He stank of fear, of desperation, trying to preemptively evade a strike whilst accelerating on primitive engines. Then, turning a gun mount back, the monster took near-blind shots at the drone, which merely strafed—defying their opponent’s concepts of aerodynamics—and accelerated harder. Finally, the drone impacted the dragon like a wicked blade. They tore through his body, expanding their hardlight armour inside the centre of the beast’s chassis. The monster exploded outwards from the overpressure, fuel and munitions detonating as its pieces scattered, burning.Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.


    The drone exalted in their opportunity to finally cut loose without worrying about the damage they could do to their surroundings. Even as burning fuel rolled from the hardlight shell they had spun around their chassis, they slowed and brought their body around in a sharp yaw until they hovered over the battlefield.


    The artillery fire stopped momentarily, long enough for the drone to revel as all eyes were upon them. All these lesser creatures would finally learn their place.


    Yet such a time could not last. The drone watched the flash and kick back from a tactical biocannon, then lazily strafed to evade the crude projectile. They responded by lancing that impudent creature through, hundreds of metres below, with their hardlight blade. It died, and, mildly offended, the drone turned back towards their own forces.


    Young Acetyn strode the field, surrounded by its own armies. Upon colossal, columnar limbs, it crossed the expanse with titanic steps that shook the planet’s bedrock and kicked up a vast expanse of dust in its wake. Held aloft, between its many skulls, it gripped a spire of glass and star metal aloft as a standard and banner. The very apex of this tower shone, gemstone-like in its faceted qualities, catching the light that still breached the horizon and casting it shimmering as a beacon downwards into the growing night. The sky trembled when Acetyn called out, sonorous yet howling, and the distant lashing of giant Axiamat’s arms turned back towards the earth.


    The drone cut through the air and slowed only within narrow reach of that ancient tower that had been taken and carried across the world. Finally, at the spire’s highest level, the drone found a balcony, where they directed their engines downwards. They came to an aggressive stop, hovering in place.


    On that platform stood Eberekt, once the favoured child of the Axiamat, the child who had reached the Crucible, the child who had returned a tyrant—a Pilgrim. With him came ruin, for the attacking armies were his, the weaponised biomass of countless other Cities brought under his dominion. His strong hands gripped the rail as his gilded raiments were lashed by the cooling desert wind. With empty eyesockets, his bare skull regarded old Axiamat against the twilight.


    Around the tower, the skull-keeps of ambitious young Acetyn, too, looked ahead. Together, the three of them, the drone, the ruler, and the City, watched the white streak of the missile surge towards its target.


    “I prayed that this would not be necessary, Genekeeper,” Eberekt said lowly, his voice deep and filled with remorse.


    The drone, for they were indeed the one he addressed, did not deign to dignify him with a response.


    The City of Axiamat was vast, both in its expanse and in its towering height. Each of its ringed walls reached higher than the last. Now, the missile lanced over its outer reaches. In the distance, they could see the City fire defensive cannons upwards. Still, their shining, burning projectiles were slow, hanging in the air with a gentleness when compared to the white-hot threat. It was a last-ditch attempt and a hopeless one at that. Even as they fired high into the atmosphere, exploding in dark starbursts, none disturbed the missile in its frightening attack.


    In a final desperate coil of its limbs, mighty Axiamat took a kilometre-long shard of star metal from amidst its knotted boughs—a fragment of the ancient star-faring vessel, the Avia. Acetyn thrust it high towards the sky, and field engines ignited with a rainbow shimmer that lit up the countless crenulated depths and hollows of the Axiamat below.


    The drone leaned forward, engines flaring. They weighed up a potential pursuit. But it was too late for such a decision. They had to trust their plan through to the end.


    Eberekt knew to look away a moment before that impossible contrail flashed across the distant City to impact with its heart.


    A silent flash. A bright light shone through flesh and bone. It dazzled the twilight of war. Below, both warring armies fell still, dropping their meagre blades, their artillery falling silent and still.


    The enemy army, closest to the point of impact across the vast battlefield, began to panic as the soldiers realised their skin was burned into a numb char. They tasted their own smoking flesh in the air, and fear held them as they realised they would die.


    Anyone fortunate enough to have been looking towards Axiamat was blinded, even through closed eyes. Those who still had retinas looked towards the ruin, and, for a fleeting moment, they could see a red-hot spherical cavity glowing in Axiamat’s vast stem where the weapon had detonated. But swelling out from that wound was atomised vapour. This growing force made the evening air turn black as it rose, dragging up the pulverised remains of the City into the sky.


    Then, the lower reaches of that rising cloud collapsed and surged outwards. The thunderclap that hit them was louder than any sound ever heard by the creatures of this world.


    “What is this?” Eberekt asked in horror, turning his skull to look over the vast destruction, the calamity spreading kilometres each second.


    “An antediluvian weapon,” the drone—the Genekeeper—answered.


    Far below them, they watched as a burning, rolling cloud engulfed the battlefield. Those freaks that still lived were hurled outwards by the blast, and their fortifications and vehicles were thrown into the air, shattering from the sheer force of the blow. They had no time to reach shelter. When the first shockwave settled, a scant few crawled from under the rubble, broken and gasping, only to be sucked back in the other direction, dragged by a cold wash of air breaking into the low-pressure zone. Just as violent and just as terrible, it brought with it the pelting force of sharp stones and broken wreckage and the bodies of the dead.


    The blast broke around young Acetyn’s titanic legs, and his many skulls reared and bellowed in tragedy, shaking the air and breaking the clouds.


    “This was not what we agreed,” Eberekt said, his voice trembling. “This wasn’t what you said would happen.”


    The drone did not respond. It looked into that black rising cloud, tearing its way up and out of the broken City of Axiamat, out of its glowing hot heart, now molten and infernal.


    The remains of the Avia hung in the air. It was just a single field manipulation manifold: an engine, a weapon, a computing processor—all of these things at once. A shimmering field surrounded it, cascading rainbow light in every bright hue in defiance of the encroaching night and in spite of the nuclear holocaust beneath it.


    “Do not falter now, Eberekt,” the drone said. “We cannot let that vessel escape the atmosphere. All life on this ruined world yet depends on that.”


    Eberekt looked to the Genekeeper, his fleshless skull unreadable. The chrome sheen of his teeth caught every terrible glow cast from the hellscape below, where flesh yet burned and the desert was cast high into the sky by fissile fire. It was only after that long, terrible moment that he answered.


    “Then so be it.”