The Celestial Way

Chapter 15.2 - Long Way

He stood in the command room again, the screens above the circular table pouring relentlessly their data over him. He had lost his personal sense of time for a while now. Cloud could always remind him exactly how many hours or days or weeks have passed since any given moment, yet that wasn't the point. The point was that time had passed, and now at last he had accumulated enough mission data to review how this war of his was performing long-term.

Airo rubbed his temple, gazing dourly at the AR screens. He felt strange itches in his mind more and more often, unable to understand why or how they manifested. Medical examinations showed nothing out of the ordinary, and neither did an Æther scan. The phenomenon was a mystery, just like his poorly-controlled timeshift ability. At least contemporary science had helped him understand the latter, if not master it. While the former...

The Revenant soon stopped playing by the same rules they did before, once faced with organized opposition. Like the apparition which had wounded Airo during the first attack on Dragon Retreat, other Revenant began to employ long-range attacks, these no less lethal than their deadly melee assaults.

This forced Airo to change tactics overnight, as now the Radiant Knights lost the advantage of getting in the first strike before the enemy could retaliate. Rules of engagement were shifted to more conventional warfare doctrines, and the resonance fields still gave an important edge, nullifying all intangible powers once they entered their range, making armor technology still viable, even if ranged options were narrowed down to veronite weaponry.

Yet once Airo adapted his strategy, the Revenant changed their approach again. They abandoned horde tactics and began to raid settlements in a more methodical manner, first probing defenses with a small force, then rushing in to slaughter the populace if no resistance was encountered. Airo's nascent network of subverted officers managed to inform him in time about several such occasions, prompting the Knights to evacuate endangered regions with priority, but there was no telling how many lightning raids went unnoticed in territories under the Union's influence.

The Revenant-hunt missions also took a turn for the worse; in two instances the skyship was led into an ambush, after pursuing what was considered an isolated force, only to be attacked by a throng of Revenant hiding nearby. The second incident was particularly harrowing, as three Revenant dragons were present during the battle, and they alone wounded nearly fatally seven of the ten dragons that were part of the skyship's crew. It was as if the Revenant had started stalking the Radiant Knights, and hunter-quarry dynamics were rapidly shifting.

At the same time, there was absolutely no sign of Ferrtau. Airo forced Cloud to review and analyze all intelligence reports in every way possible, yet the result was always the same: the Lightbringer didn't seem to be at the head of his own army. Ferrtau wasn't at the Shard, too; Airo was sure of that. However, nobody had any idea where his archnemesis had gone. According to all signs Ferrtau had simply vanished, and in the meantime the Revenant had proven a deadly foe even without their master.

So far no Radiant Knights had died as the war escalated, yet he knew this was more a fluke rather than a result of sound strategy. He carefully reviewed a technology called cortex crystals, which supposedly made it possible to return people from the dead, querying Yeoman Cloud on all the details. It didn't turn out the master spell he thought it was; cortex crystals couldn't revive someone killed by the Revenant, and the Radiant Knights weren't implanted with them, out of philosophical principle. The latter baffled Airo, and he dug deeper for the true reason with grim suspicion, confirming it was because of the dragons – they weren't able to carry cortex crystals, or bear any other implant or augmentation for that matter.

In contrast, both the Revenant and the two stellar civilizations, the Consortium and the Union, had means to replenish their troops, even if the latter two were able to do so at a dynamically reduced gradient.