Chapter 299

Chapter 299

Agent Atrisa Gloomwood carefully ran a brush down one of the support runes of the backup life support system. It was made out of a single hair, plucked from a Tier 25 antelope friend of hers, and just about the finest rune brush that was possible to make. She was no master rune smith, far from it, but sabotage and spy work didn’t require expertise in the field of runecrafting. She couldn't do that if her life depended on it, but she was a master of manipulating existing runes and injecting viruses into them.

While it was incredibly unlikely that the Federation would be foolish enough to power up the shipyard’s systems without a thorough check on the runes and code running everything, backup systems like this were sometimes overlooked, which made the painstaking effort worth it. If worst came to worst, she was making more work for the Federation which was a win in her books. In the best case scenario, one of the viruses she had implanted into the systems would activate once the shipyard was connected to the Federation main network and infect everything, allowing the Guild operatives a back door until the Federation counter espionage teams identified and purged the infected systems. This being a shipyard, there was even a chance of them infecting ships, which would be a coup of immeasurable magnitude.

She was almost giddy at the thought of Federation ships trying to engage with Guild ships, just to find their weapons refusing to fire or their shields continuously triggering overload prevention protocols. It would be glorious.

Unlikely, but glorious.

Her eyes flicked to the side as a warning went off in her [AI]. Someone was moving in her direction and had been picked up by the station's life support systems. Opening her own [AI] back up to the public channels, she found Aster had messaged her a few times.

With only a little kicking and cursing, she kicked one leg out of the vent she had stuffed herself in and wiggled it around.

“Over here.”

The fox bond skipped over to her spot and shoved her head into the hole. “Whatcha doing?”

Atrisa started to explain, but was ready to cut it short expecting Aster's eyes to glaze over in boredom. Instead, she found the other bond had a decent understanding of runes and enchanting.

“Why not hook into the civilian networks? That seems a lot easier.”

Atrisa sighed. “Against the articles of war. Civilian networks are too easy to abuse, so no one is supposed to use them. That said, pretty much everyone uses them as a backup network. But to catch them, you would need to be in the civilian network to monitor the traffic, which meant you'd be admitting to breaking the war rules yourself. The only real way to prove it is if the military network is taken down before any messages can go out, and the opponents still respond, but that's a rookie mistake no one will fall into.”

“Can’t they just have someone jump to the next system with the teleporters and pass the word along like that? Or at least say they did it that way?”

“They do that too. In fact they—”

Aster nodded along as Atrisa gave her a rundown of the various ways the Great Powers circumvented their own rules.

When she petered out of steam a few minutes later, Aster said, “Well I just wanted to let you know we are expecting the second wave to arrive soon, so you might want to come hunker down at the peak.”

If it had been before the last battle, Atrisa would have scoffed at the suggestion, saying she could take care of herself. That was before. Having seen the destruction they were capable of in the last battle, Atrisa was more than happy to go back and join Aster and Morgan at the top of the best defended part of the ice block that was the former shipyard.

Atrisa had worked damn hard in making herself hard to notice, but when energy got thrown around like it had been in the recent battles, she wasn’t willing to be a sitting duck.

Gathering up her supplies, she checked and made sure she had a few dozen miscellaneous pieces of equipment from the Federation’s last attack. Instead of twiddling her thumbs, she could add some viruses to them and hope one got used by someone before being checked over.

***

Liz stood, perched atop the fortress of ice.

A human body looked on with a severe gaze at the space around them, watching as Drifter popped into and out of realspace to harass any military ships that got too close, and making sure there were no attempted stealthy attacks. The fact that civilian traffic, or at least what could pass as civilian traffic in the Federation, had started avoiding their system indicated they were going to get hit again, and they needed to be ready.

Inside her veins, she flowed with renewed vigor as she channeled and delivered nutrients, mana, and essence as appropriate to her human self. On her shoulder, she ruffled her feathers and looked out with the piercing gaze of a phoenix, a second pair of eyes even better than her human sight.

Outside the fortress, she flapped her wings as she circled the area, keeping another eye out for incursions.

In the lower levels, she moved supplies and settled into the fortifications.

With Matt, she perched on her husband’s shoulder, taking advantage of the mana regeneration he was providing and adding additional gravitas to his already-impressive and handsome stature.

In a hidden backroom, she was working on her alchemy three times over, and reading The Book as well.

Ten bodies was loosely the limit for how far she could push herself, especially doing such disparate things, but it was good practice, and she couldn’t slack now.

They had already lasted a week and a half, which was longer than their minimum needed time, but Liz didn’t want to just pack up and leave any more than the Guild generals did. Even if they said it was fine.

Liz wasn’t ready to be pushed out like that. No, she wanted the Federation to throw themselves against their position until they gave up. That was the ultimate victory, a Great Power deciding it wasn’t worth it to throw more troops into the grinder, divert all their military shipping around this point, change the entire face of the war, all because their team was too damn hard to dislodge.

That was a way to prove to their enemies and allies alike that they were a force to be reckoned with.

Liz temporarily flickered the bulk of her consciousness to her alchemist bodies. They weren’t clones, the Kanakas had been quite clear in their advice that she shouldn’t think of any part of herself as a clone, but it was still a byproduct of [Lesser Blood Clone], or [Sanguine Footsoldier] as Group Chatter had been pushing her to call it. That carried certain inherent attributes, no matter what her Domain and Talent did.

[Lesser Mana Clone], according to normal wisdom, could never support more than four clones without an upgrade, Talent, or Domain saying otherwise. When upgraded once, that could be pushed to six. She’d been able to do eight for decades if she called on her Intent, imbuing each of her clones with a bit of independent life. Her Tier 25 Talent combined with a Tier 26 upgrade orb to push that to ten, and her latest record was fifteen bodies controlled by a single mind, albeit heavily relying on her Intent.

Ten was her current ‘normal’ limit. Ten Lizes, six of which were human, three of which were phoenixes, and one of which was pure blood. If she wanted to be comfortable beyond that, she’d need to cast [Mana Clone]. That particular spell also created a second mind in addition to an extra body, and that second mind could control bodies eleven through twenty.

She could then keep casting [Mana Clone], giving her up to ten minds to work with. Ten minds, each with ten bodies, meant she could control a hundred bodies comfortably, optionally pushing that up to a hundred and fifty depending on how fast she wanted to burn through her willpower and mana. At least the latter wasn’t that big of a limitation, between Matt and her own [Blood Sacrifice]-powered regeneration, but it still left it impractical for continuous use.

Plus, she was still getting used to having multiple hers running around. For most people, it wasn’t a true issue, as clones lacked the Domain and thus were undeniably not the true self. But for her, every body was her true self, and she wasn’t interested in going for either a true gestalt existence or as multiple parallel entities, like the Kanakas did. That each mind could freely change what bodies it focused on only further complicated things, but she didn’t like the feeling of multiple minds trying to use the same body at the same time. She rarely had conflicts, but it was still common enough that she actively avoided it.

As a result, she tended to dismiss all of her extraneous minds when not in combat, an action that was always profoundly disorienting to her, as nearly a dozen distinct sets of experiences recombined into a solitary train of thought. But, the way she did it preserved her ‘primary’ bodies, so that was a plus.

Not that there really was anything different about the ‘primary’ bodies, in all honesty. The closest thing to a distinguishing feature between any of them was the one that had completely exsanguinated itself to make room for a different Liz to inhabit its veins. Otherwise, she’d taken to choosing the bodies with the most intact sets of armor to maintain.

Reading, Liz chuckled at the thought of her armor and she set aside her book, stretched out her hand, and let a drop of blood morph and expand until it became a wickedly sharp feather floating just above her palm. The crafters had really outdone themselves with her armor. With nearly no cooldown or diminishing returns for concurrent use, she could summon an incredibly versatile weapon or armor at the cost of just a bit of blood and mana. Sure, keeping them around permanently took reserved mana, which was in such short supply, but each individual feather was cheap, and she could fluidly move them around wherever she needed them.

Really, the fact that all of her bodies shared a single mana pool… was an issue. Sure, her max mana was already high for a melee warrior of her Tier, something that had only been further increased by some runic tattoos and a small pile of natural treasures. But even she couldn’t keep upwards of a hundred and fifty bodies fully armored. And that was without even getting into all of the buffs that also took reserved mana, or keeping enough surplus that she could actually cast. At least [Conjured Avatar], usually a favorite of summoners, let each of her minds use spells without worrying about the cooldowns of the others. But that only exacerbated the problem further instead of solving it.

It still left her stretched thin, but  Luna had prepared her well for that. Her spear skills and existence-wide buffs were plenty for most enemies she fought; no extra mana required. If anyone needed genuine attention from her, she would use her twice-upgraded [Coven Casting] across multiple bodies, solo-casting what was usually a multi-person ritual enhancement, and not many people survived that.

So far as her advisors knew, she was the first person in the Empire to use a Tier 38 upgrade orb on the skill, and the sheer power that it provided, on top of the incredible flexibility, meant she didn’t regret it for a second. She could replicate the effects of heavy modification or even a straight-up upgrade for her spells practically at will, and-

Liz’s spirit sense whispered danger, and in the blink of an eye, all of her was in one place. For good measure, she cast a [Blood Clone] and two additional [Lesser Blood Clone]s for a total of thirteen bodies- the maximum [Coven Casting] could support- and began casting her spells.

[Scarlet Plague], a far cry from the lowly [Spore] it had started life as, was the primary element of this particular ritual, further enhanced with [Analgesic] to make it all the harder to notice as her spell spread out for miles. But she didn’t activate the spell yet, just kept it… waiting. Her practice with free-casting spells was a tremendous boon for her in situations like this, where she could just leave a spell almost cast, holding the mana structure together with her own power. It wasn’t something Matt could do, this was a matter of pure finesse.

[Bloody Spirit], and its ability to amplify other spells, was the only reason she could truly contain this level of spell, and even then, it was just barely within her abilities to do so. When she’d first practiced this maneuver, Matt had teased her about giving her some lessons in large-scale casting. Intellectually Liz knew how hard her husband worked to wrangle control over his ever growing mana pool, but despite seeing him struggle daily for years, she had still been surprised at how hard it was to control a spell that large.

Her perception cranked to her limit as hundreds of ships started to enter reality.

She didn’t immediately activate her trap, but instead waited and watched.

Agent Gloomwood immediately started parsing the information and sending data about the armies the Federation had sent this time.

Rather than an army slapped together from average recruits on medical leave, the Federation had sent one with some actual teeth. Gloomwood threw their call signs up, but Liz scanned the information until she found their last known locations. Rest and recovery after a successful siege as an army that had been slated to return to the frontline. That meant they were in prime condition and would be a well oiled machine, unlike the last army, which had only been a collection of random units.

The Federation was serious about taking this system back with this attack then.

The troops seemed content to sit in their troop transports, which would have ruined her plans, but they had other options. Between the fire from Drifter and Bolt, they managed to cripple two of their ships, forcing the troops to disgorge and be open to assault from Liz.

The troops advanced in loose ranks, not packed in close together like last time, giving Matt few prime candidates for [Mana Beam]. They even took the time to slowly clear the bodies out of the way and not get too close to any of them. They weren’t stupid, and knew she was a blood mage. Even if the planet below hadn’t seen her go out and interact with the bodies herself, she was unlikely to have such a limitation, so they didn’t want to risk it.

That thought process was exactly why she hadn’t bothered to do exactly that, although the idea of turning the bodies of their fallen enemies into mines had been tempting. Maybe next time.

Despite them clearing large swaths of the blood that was suspended in space from the bodies, they were unable to move quickly enough to ensure that the area was perfectly clear, thanks to Matt  cycling through spells as he battered their shield walls. This army had been prepared for [Mana Beam], and had several frontline troops casting [Diffusion Shield], which weakened [Mana Beam] enough to be nearly useless at this range. That hasty advance left hundreds of the troops unlucky enough to have a droplet or two land on them as they flew through the blood mists.

Liz waited until most of them had crossed into the area her blood mist was enveloping before the thirteen Lizzes behind her activated [Bursting Blood]. Like a wave, she watched as the troops flinched and recoiled.

The explosions from the minuscule drops of blood caused minor damage at best, but a solid fifth of the troops had been lightly misted, and that added up. None of them died outright, but that was why her clones unleashed [Scarlet Plague] immediately after. The skill allowed her to infect the soldiers by the hundreds, and she smiled as their skin reddened and started to weep watery blood.

With the spells cast, she waited.

The first few instants, she wasn’t too worried about the lack of deaths. But as that first moment turned into seconds, she started to worry that not a single trooper would die. If none of them fell, that would ruin her follow up plans.

Just as she was starting to really worry, she felt the first death.

A woman had been wounded in her ear, and the infection had spread into her brain before a healer could get to her.

Liz grinned as she claimed the woman's blood through the spell that was still under her control.

Careful not to move the blood inside too much and rupture the body, Liz spread her control over the blood until she had it all. Then, she cast [Blood Clone].

There was no moment of disorientation as the new mind came into being, just a smooth transition of where most of Liz’s consciousness resided from the fortress to the inside of a half-mechanical Federation soldier. If the woman realized what was happening before it was too late, she never got a chance to say it. Liz shattered her spirit and pulped her body as she returned to human form. A dagger-sized feather materialized in her hand, and she drove it through the back of a healer occupied with cleansing her effect from himself.

She noticed her arm formed a little mangled from forcing her way through skin and bone, but it was only a flesh wound, and she had better things to deal with.

Someone spun around with admirable reaction speed, no doubt sensing the flow of essence from their late comrades, but Liz abandoned her human form and effortlessly flowed around the lightning-coated sword, diving into the bloodstream of her attacker. He was dead within moments, but now she had been noticed.

Not that it mattered.

She ignored the man attacking the newly-made corpse, burst through a suit of spell armor, and grabbed the gleaming forearm of the man next to him. Mana flowed and flared, and while the skin was more metallic than organic, it didn’t stop her. With more attention on her now, it was slower than usual, but [Scarlet Plague] was still active, and the man’s Intent wasn’t enough to dissuade her as she stabbed his hand. She drew blood and opened a gap in his spiritual defenses that he simply wasn’t able to close in time.

With a dramatic gesture, she drew upon all the blood in the area and formed two more bodies to join her. One transformed into a phoenix, and the other began casting [Feather Armory] as quickly as the pseudo-skill allowed. Elsewhere, another Liz cast [Blood Brothers], and she grinned as the power flooded her. While typically useful to families and those who had sworn some sort of blood oath, Liz shared all her blood with all her bodies, and it had become one of her favorite buffs as a result..

Her spare body finished repurposing itself into a full set of [Feather Armory] regalia, and feathers swirled as a storm of them descended onto Liz. By the time it resided, she was clad in full helm, armor, wings, and even had a basic spear. She’d keep expanding it as she went, of course, but this was a good start.

Spinning her spear and sliding to the side, she cut through the head of a woman who was just a little too slow to react. Her blood was fed into [Blood Sacrifice] instead of creating a new body. It was all about pacing.

[Blood Sacrifice] was her most recently upgraded skill, and certainly worth it. Something Matt had run into was the fact that his skills were simply too powerful. Her husband had always favored self-buffs and more direct attacking spells, but the issue with those was that you could only make an enemy so dead. Sure, she ran into that problem sometimes herself- between her potions, [Blood Brothers], [Blood Sacrifice], the enchantments on [Feather Armory], her natural treasures, and more besides- she could frequently run into overkill. But when she funneled things like the skill boost from [Blood Sacrifice] into massive, lingering effects?

A new wave of [Scarlet Plague] swept over the battlefield, and other Liz began popping up elsewhere in the army. Liz had her nearby phoenix body dive beak-first into a nearby soldier, only for the falcon-like bird to utterly annihilate the man’s head. An extra-strong body appeared somewhere else, and Liz kept moving to find more blood for her neverending engine.

With all the power coursing through her, she felt like she could wrestle Matt and win easily… unless he was in his new armor, but that wasn’t a fair comparison.

Liz extended an arm and drove her spear through the first man who had attacked her before ripping her spear out of his chest with a hard twist. Using the shaft of the weapon, she blocked the second soldier's thrust and skidded around his questing blade.

Spells started to fly in despite her being within melee range but she just focused on killing the second trooper. Two exchanges later she shattered the collar bone and used his own blood to drive spikes into his eyes.

As he fell, the first body exploded into another Liz which split off and started killing.

Darting forward Liz took down another dozen troopers in quick succession creating a clone from each. She needed to transfer a mind into a few of them to keep herself from getting overwhelmed, but quickly had a full twenty of herself down and among the Federation troops.

An officer of some kind attacked her from the rear while she was occupied fighting a dozen of his people, but Liz didn’t bother turning to face him. Instead, her wings flared and a dozen feathers shot out and stabbed into exposed skin.

He made the correct choice and ignored them while closing in for the kill, knowing he was already infected, but wasn’t anticipating Liz to bring the blood inside her body to life and exsanguinate herself. Blood coalesced from her back to block his attack, then she went for the kill with a spear.

That clone was unarmored and would have lost the fight in just a few moments, but another two clones came in and joined the fight. In a matter of moments, his blood was used to grow another Liz.

Sadly, the Federation troops weren’t stupid and stopped sending in troops, instead pulling back and accepting their losses instead setting up a shield wall, using range to batter her clones down.

Liz didn’t bother to continue the fight and allowed most of the clones to be quickly destroyed, only putting up resistance when it would be mana-positive.

When there was only one left, she made a show of it and she grinned at the Federation troops who had encircled her.

Blowing them a kiss, she said, “See you soon.”

Letting her body fall apart, she stopped the transformation and pointed above them. “Might want to duck.”

The mind dissipated, returning her experiences to the bodies back at the fortress. Once there, Liz laughed as she watched Matt and Bolt hammer the position with spells, quickly eliminating many of the tightly packed Federation soldiers.

Cracking her neck, Liz readied herself for a long and drawn out battle.

Her little stunt had been a, if she said so herself, brilliant opening move to crush the enemy's morale but the actual casualties were only in the hundreds. The commanders had quickly cut their losses and spread out enough that it was hard for her to get enough blood to do anything large scale.

Still, it had been a good test of her new skills, and that was worth the strain she had been put under while holding the coven spells.

Looking back at her coven, she smiled as they finished casting the final spell. It wasn’t a true spell, but one of the skill-less spells she had been working on with Chess. The spell was a simple resonance spell that used her connection to her [Scarlet Plague] and more importantly its residual effects of thinning one's blood.

Anyone that had been infected would be quickly healed but unless the healers took the time to completely purge the side effects, which was unlikely given the pressure they were under, she would be able to track the once infected attackers.

The only real limitation of that little trick was processing the information. Her [AI] was already split a hundred ways and couldn't handle that much computation without being useless for the rest of them. She could mostly bypass that by sending a data dump to Matt’s [AI] and let him use his excess processing power to track everyone, but even just sending that much information quickly enough could make her spare mana run dangerously low..

Hefting her spear, she went hunting even as Matt threw himself out of the fortress. The enemies would soon be infesting their halls lest they contend with her husband in the open field backed by Morgan’s constructs and deadly crossbow. Staying out there was asking to die which would send the attacking soldiers scuttling inside looking for shelter from the rain of death he would bring them.

A good idea in theory but Liz wouldn’t live with vermin in her house. There might be a lot of attackers but there were a lot of Lizzes as well. Lizzes backed by Mercury, Stick and Stone, Bolt, and most importantly Aster who had turned the entire station into her icey territory.

It was time for a hunt.

***

General Casos finally understood how Jas had felt after the first engagement. She had thought she had seen everything through her time in the army, but she just blinked at the report Agent Gloomwood had sent her.

She still couldn’t believe it.

The Oval Table warned her two weeks ago that the moment the Ascenders had crushed the second wave of attackers, the Federation pulled three more Tier 26 armies from the frontlines of battles the Guild wasn’t trying to relieve for the express purpose of dislodging the Ascenders from their territory.

This mission hadn’t just gone well, but had exceeded expectations beyond her wildest imagination, and she could only wonder at the Federation Generals who had given the orders for even more troops to leave the frontlines. It was a… bold move, to say the least. She would have never given such an order, but she suspected she knew the reason. The Federation and the society they had cultivated had been holding pride and honor as an immutable ethos since their fall so the fact seven people were squatting on their front lawn must have been creating societal unrest.

She had immediately ordered Agent Gloomwood to investigate as much as she could with the access she had. If things were so bad that the populace couldn’t tolerate someone taking over a single system they might be able to use that to their advantage with strategic repeats of this maneuver.

Granted it was all conjecture, but she hadn’t been sure what else would or could drive the Federation to pull back from three Tier 26 battlefields to dislodge them out of a single system. Sure, with Drifter’s exceptional piloting skills and the Ascenders for back up, no military shipping could use this lane, but at worst avoiding this choke point meant a few more weeks of flying and shouldn’t have elicited such a reaction.

That said, there was nothing for them to do but watch.

General Casos had read up on Drifter’s profile, and as the woman had been stationed in an embassy for a time they had a fairly detailed personality matrix built on her. She wasn’t a glory hound and knew her limits. A good thing as General Casos was in her ship and didn’t particularly want to be in a heated fight in what amounted to a light frigate with larger than normal engines and weapons.

No, she preferred to do her fighting in a miles long dreadnought surrounded by dozens of layers of armor.

She rethought that proposition as she considered what Ascender Quill could do to a dreadnought with a cast of [Breach]. His single spell was a little stronger than the cannons usually mounted on such ships, and while their shields were rated to protect against such levels of power they weren’t made to fight single cultivators. They would never be able to hit the man while he flew circles around them and blasted holes in her ship.

Or worse yet, he flew inside and cut his way through the ship with that power armor.

General Casos was just glad they were on her side.

As she saw the mountain of ice slowly turning, she reaffirmed her thoughts. Ascender Scoop had been a bit of a question mark in their information but after witnessing the latest, third battle, she intended to send a strongly worded reprimand to whoever rated her so lowly due to being a bond.

The three newest armies had learned from their predecessors and instead of rushing into a fortress of ice and dying inside its halls they had kept their distance and set up cannons used to siege fortress worlds and started blasting the shipyard.

That elicited a response, as everyone defending the shipyard came out to properly hold their position. Enormous spells clashed across the battlefield, and Casos was stunned to see how these handful of people managed to hold their own against what should by rights be overwhelming odds.

After three days of making no progress they had changed tactics again and sent in probing attacks combined with sappers who used massive breaching charges normally used to blow through fortress worlds’ shields. That had finally caused serious damage but Ascender Quill had simply cast some spell that seemed to create mana crystals and used it like glue to reform the fortress to its original state after he slaughtered those who moved the charges into place.

That had caused a standoff that lasted a full seven hours. The Federation Generals must have been asking for new orders, because just when things looked hopeless they packed up and left. While the Federation were not the Sects, General Casos had never seen them just give up like that and knew no field commander would be able to make such a call.

From Mercury and Agent Gloomwood’s reports, the Ascenders were angry that the Federation didn’t meet their challenge. Angry they didn’t get to face three battle hardened armies at once.

Pure and utter madness. Insanity of the highest order.

There was no other word for it.

But the retreat of the Federation armies left them unsure of how to proceed, and General Casos was waiting for the Oval Table’s decision. From the last reports she received the battles they wanted to relieve had already had their attacking armies routed so there was little strategic reason for them to stay but now that it seemed like the Federation was unwilling to push into this area they might want to reinforce it and create their own staging area deeper inside Federation space similar to what the Federation had done to them.

General Casos would never suggest such an action when they were on the defensive everywhere else, but she wasn’t part of the Oval Table and didn’t know if there was a larger strategic reason to keep this system.

Despite her own objections to such orders she had had Jas preparing loose deployment plans just in case. General Casos hadn’t risen to her rank because she could be caught unprepared. Thankfully their orders weren’t suicidal and they were ordered to return to Guild space so they could send the Ascenders on another mission.

Looking out at the fortress of ice, General Casos decided she would not be volunteering to be their handlers going forward. Her understanding of the realm might not make it through another such deployment.