Chapter 54

  Dalex came down through the atmosphere of Gaia Eta directly on top of a horde of a thousand mutts. Seventh and the detection systems in the {celestial chariot} couldn’t see the mutts as anything other than a pervasive sense of distortion coming from all over the surface, but Dalex noticed the creatures when he was two miles from the ground. They kicked up a massive cloud of dust as they moved, leaving a trampled scar several miles wide in their wake.

  As he descended, Dalex had some time to study them with {farsight}. Most of the pack consisted of the same hound-like creatures that gave the mutts their name, but he spotted many more variants than he was expecting. In addition to the thousand mutts on the ground, there were a couple hundred of the bat variant flying overhead, though some of the flyers took a more avian shape. Giant crows and vultures circled the horde on its meandering journey toward Batulan-bar.

  Dalex shivered as he got closer to the pack. The original mutt hounds were close enough to dogs that they had been somewhat charming, but the more they adapted, the more grotesque they became.

  Dalex did not know if the city was their target or if it was just in the way of something else. It did not matter.

  During the flight from the {voidstalker}, Dalex had familiarized himself with all of the special skills the {celestial chariot} gave him access to. Some of them were familiar, if enhanced versions of what he had already used. Others were the kind to crack the world in two. The latter he had locked away against accidental use after giving all of them ominous names. There were probably situations where he might want to use {light ender}, but not within a trillion miles of Gaia Eta or any other world.

  But just because he wasn’t going to use the really big guns didn’t mean he was going to go easy on the mutts. He knew not to mess around with challenges and achievements when it came to the enemy {far realmers}.

  “I was expecting them to be underground,” Dalex said. “But I guess surface travel is faster.”

  “Indeed,” Seventh said, “though it is likely they could be moving even faster than they are. There may be more burrowed under this group, tunneling parallel to the pack.”

  “I cast one {Newton’s hammer} in the front middle of the pack and one in the back middle,” Dalex said. “And a {hive of hornets} on every flyer the spell can track. I’ll clean up whatever is left with {Heart Throb}.”

  One of the many {scrying tablets} inside the {celestial chariot} displayed an alert that the two {hammers} were inbound. Most of Dalex’s {familiars} were guarding Batulan-bar or scouting the surrounding countryside for signs of the Wolf Brigade. He didn’t have any {attack golems} or {steel wyverns} to call on for this battle. But the {voidstalker} was always on hand, and it knew the right kind of skills for exactly this kind of situation.

  Just before his attack struck, the mutts became aware of Dalex’s presence. The horde shifted, speeding up and changing direction toward him. The bats and avian-like mutts began the climb to meet him. They flew against gravity and atmospheric conditions faster than any true bat or bird could manage.

  The {hive of hornets} triggered. A thousand miniature clouds of {astral mortar} sloughed off the exterior of the {celestial chariot}. They formed into tiny golden projectiles and shot down to meet the oncoming flyers, several missiles zooming toward each mutt. Within seconds, the sky erupted with bright explosions. The blasts weren’t massive; just enough to destroy most of a mutt’s body. A hundred bats and birds were blown to bits, raining down blood and viscera on the grounded mutts below.

  Because of the distortion effect emitted by the mutts, the {hornets} couldn’t accurately track every flyer. Another hundred or so mutts continued on their path to intercept Dalex. He summoned {Heart Throb}, a spear as long as the {celestial chariot} was tall. It appeared next to Dalex in the air, and he grabbed it with the {chariot’s} hands. At the top of the spear was a razor sharp glaive that glowed orange at the edges, almost as hot as the surface of the sun.

  Before he met the mutts in the air, Dalex cast another {hive of hornets} to clear out a little more of the swarm. The noise of the resulting blasts crackled through the metal shell encasing him, reminding Dalex of the firework shows he had watched through his hospital room on the Fourth of July or New Year’s Eve. Everyone had told him about the heart-stopping thud a mortar shell produced in your chest cavity. He had never felt it before, and neither did he feel it now. He wished he could wash in the reverberations, but the armor stopped them.

  Sure enough, the {celestial chariot} was not his style, but he would deal with it to eradicate these mindless beasts.

  But then the {hammers} struck.

  The front half of the ground pack vanished in a flash of light. When the glare subsided, hundreds of mutts were drowning in an eruption of earth that reached a thousand feet into the air. A second hammer fell a moment later, obliterating the back half of the pack. Two massive thuds pounded against Dalex’s chest as the pressure waves passed through him back-to-back, strong enough that the {chariot} didn’t mute them. Rocks the size of elephants were thrown into the air. A few intact mutt hounds flew even higher than their avian and bat counterparts. Two massive craters and a handful of stragglers were all that remained of the pack.

  Dalex met the few remaining flyers in the air. He speared the first straight through its heart with {Heart Throb} and then ripped the creature in half with the edge of the glaive. The rest of its fellows swarmed around Dalex, diving in to take a bite or swipe him out of the air. He activated {preternatural intuition} and {sixth sense} and increased the speed of the {celestial chariot}, zooming around the airspace, bouncing from mutt to mutt and slicing them to pieces. He decapitated heads, mutilated wings, and skewered and chopped until nothing occupied the sky but him and Seventh.

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  For her part, Seventh swept over the stragglers on the ground, gunning down the remaining mutts with a repeating laser weapon. It was the first time Dalex had actually seen her in combat. Whatever rules she had about harming living creatures, they did not apply to mutts. She was cool and efficient, dispatching her “unknown faction” enemies with a single shot each. In such close proximity, the distortion did not prevent her from acquiring and eliminating targets.

  Once all of the obvious mutts were cleared away, Dalex and Seventh hovered over the area, studying the ground. There were probably at least a few more under the soil somewhere. Dalex couldn’t be sure the pack was fully wiped out. Luckily, the {celestial chariot} came paired with a spell he knew could deal with underground enemies.

  The {astral mortar} congealed to form five {tears of God}. They floated next to the {chariot} for a few seconds and then Dalex dropped them at intervals on separate parts of the terrain below him, set to go off at five different depths.

  They plummeted toward the scarred ground and burrowed deep into Gaia Eta’s crust. Three of them detonated somewhat close to the surface, as Seventh did not think the mutts would travel long distances underground at a depth of more than a hundred yards. The deeper the mutts went, the more difficult it would be to tunnel through the bedrock. Still, Dalex made sure the fourth {tear of God} descended to the maximum depth of the pit where he had fought his first pack, and he set the fifth to go off a hundred yards deeper than that.

  The ground bubbled and smoked with five massive detonations. When the final explosive went off, a swath of terrain a mile in every direction collapsed into a massive crater at least a few hundred yards deep. It looked like an asteroid had hit this part of Gaia Eta.

  Dalex let out a contented sigh. “It’s much easier when they move out in the open.”

  Seventh added, “It would have been difficult to accomplish this level of precise destruction without the use of your super heavy benefine armor.”

  “Yes, yes, you were right to give it to me.” He dusted off his hands and so did the {celestial chariot}, smacking its giant robot palms together to mimic him. Dalex chuckled, admitting to himself that the machine was kind of cool.

  He continued, “You had me worried for a second, talking about such a massive horde of mutts, but this was a walk in the park. Let’s get the {scout golems} out looking for any remnants and then call it a day.”

  “This was not the full scope of the mutt congregation,” Seventh said, matter-of-factly. “I am still experiencing the same overwhelming distortion.”

  “Oh,” Dalex said. “We just killed a lot of mutts. Are you saying there’s another pack nearby?”

  “It is difficult to estimate, but I believe the distortion has only been lessened by one percent. There are likely many more groups of this size, and perhaps an even larger mass somewhere towards the center of the distortion.”

  “Oh,” Dalex said again. This time, he didn’t have a follow up question. The {scrying tablets} in the {celestial chariot} told him he and Seventh had eliminated close to two thousand mutts so far. If that was only one percent of their total number, they were looking at close to two hundred thousand more.

  He scanned the horizon to the east, looking for more clouds of dust that might signal the presence of more mutt packs. Indeed, the atmosphere looked hazy in a few places.

  “The good news is,” Seventh said, “I believe this was the western most group, closest to Batulan-bar.”

  “That is good news,” Dalex said. “Though it looks like they’re spread out to the north and south. This is going to take a while.”

  “I suggest a saturation bombing of the western region. A five-hundred-mile radius should be sufficient to reduce the congregation to a more manageable number.”

  “No, no,” Dalex replied. “We won’t be doing that. I already feel bad we tore up as much of the environment as we did.” And they were going to have to wreak more havoc soon. “I’m not going to wipe out that much of Gaia Eta.”

  “There are likely very few humanoids settled in the area,” Seventh pressed.

  “Even one is too many to kill out of hand.”

  “They may already have been eliminated by the mutts.”

  “Or maybe they haven’t. It’ll be our job to save whoever is left.” Dalex wagged a finger at her, and the {celestial chariot} mimicked that too. “We won’t be doing any carpet bombing, Seventh. Not today.”

  He flew forward in the {chariot} toward the closest approaching cloud. Yes, it would take time to eliminate the packs one by one, but he wasn’t in a rush. Batulan-bar was safe for the moment. If the Wolf Brigade showed up, the others would warn him. And besides, even after a good carpet bombing, he would still have to scour the area for whatever mutts the barrage didn’t capture.

  ***

  Dalex and Seventh spent the next eight hours crisscrossing the surface of Gaia Eta, covering hundreds of miles at a time to hunt down as many mutt packs as they could. By the time the sun was starting to go down, they managed to eliminate eight groups of the size of the first. One of the packs had been twice as big and more spread out, taking significantly longer to wipe out all of its mutts.

  When the sun finally slipped over the horizon, Dalex was sweating inside the {celestial chariot}. He needed a bath and a bite to eat. A big bite. The {chariot} itself was in need of replenishment, as well. It carried a lot more of the {astral mortar} than his usual armor, but it still only had a limited amount, and most of its skills expended a fair amount of the {mortar} with each use. A {support golem} had already come down from the {voidstalker} to resupply Dalex and Seventh once, and a second was on its way at that very moment.

  It was while Dalex was in the middle of waiting for this resupply, and scanning for more mutts, that he received a new communication request from the {charm of protection} and Hitasa.

  He almost {teleported} right to her, but he was suddenly self-conscious about his smell. He had cleaned off all of the hydra gunk while on the {voidstalker}, but he probably reeked just as badly now. The next time he saw Hitasa, he wanted to be clean and shaven.

  Instead of {teleporting}, he engaged a {telepathic link} between himself and her via the {charm of protection}.

  “Thanks for calling, Hitasa,” he said out loud. “Is something wrong?”

  “Dalex?” Hitasa’s voice echoed through the interior of the {celestial chariot}. “Is that you? How am I—? Oh, this must be the ‘radio’ function Ring mentioned.”

  “Call it a {telepathic link},” Dalex said.

  “Why?” Hitasa asked. “Ring called it ‘radio.’”

  Seventh interjected so that only Dalex could hear her, “Why indeed?”

  He brushed her off with a wave of the {chariot’s} hand. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. What do you need, Hitasa?”

  “The Wolf Brigade has made its next move,” she explained. “They’ve set up a blockade of the city. No merchants or shipments are coming in, and Batulan-bar only has enough food stores to survive a week.”

  “Castreier,” Dalex muttered. “That weasel.” He drummed his fingers in the air, and the {chariot} drummed the haft of {Heart Throb}. “This is a problem. The mutts are more persistent than I hoped. I’m holding them back, but there are a lot more of them than we expected. If I come try to break the blockade, the mutts might overrun the city.”

  “Actually,” Hitasa said, “I was wondering if you could help another way.”

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