The Traveler in Red: Warlords of the Withered Land

Part Sixteen

The massive dryfftnaught exploded from under nearly twenty five meters of frost-covered, rocky soil with a sound resembling a thundercrack in a metal bell.  The cyborg craft surged from underground, moving at the rate of a horse’s gallop, knocking aside collapsed buildings, architectural columns and dirt-stained, weather-worn alabaster sculptures with little regard to historical reverence.  Swirling clouds of dust and fragmented debris flew higher than a giraffe’s head as the ship surfaced topside and slowly came to a stop, its engines thrumming percussively.  Waves of intense heat, generated by the friction of prolonged travel through the soil, rolled off the sides of the whale-like burrow-ship, radiating arcs of reflective, mirage-like optical ripples.

Knighted Arch-Inquisitor Purge, inscrutable as ever, greeted the vessel.  He was flanked by a half-dozen of Arvenall Dampiko’s mercenaries.  The ever-present triad of scarlet-armored Pater-guardsmen, each carrying the symbolic segmented lance that signified their authority, retained their posts at his side, awaiting instructions.  The edges of his capacious purple robes fluttered in the stream of hot wind that danced away from the dryfftnaught’s slowly cooling hull.

Purge frowned.  “What’s going on?  Why hasn’t anyone appeared on-deck?  Why isn’t anyone disembarking?”

“This doesn’t feel right, m’lord,” one of Purge’s sentries muttered.

For a moment, the huge vessel sat silent in the valley of the trench it had carved in the ground, until strange, muffled percussive sounds were heard to come from deep in its interior.  The sounds reverberated and grew in volume until the group outside the ship realized it wasn’t just the same noise repeating itself: it was a series of conflicting noises.

 The sound of battle.

 That was when the large, hexagonal external hatch under the front base of the burrow-ship suddenly blew out, tumbling and splintering under the force of the concussion behind it.  A column of blue-black smoke preceded a flash of bright orange sparks and red-tongued flames as a resounding crash accompanied the explosion from that hatch portal.  Purge and his personal guard were knocked to their knees by the blast.  Arvenall Dampiko’s contingent of guards alternately ducked or scattered, looking for cover, as the hatch door disintegrated.

 The Traveler in Red emerged from the maw of the vessel, his arms wrapped around the body of a massive, multiple rotating-barreled, dual-magazined assault rifle.  Ryonne was at his side, kneeling, as she released a volley of superheated, coherent light bursts from a long, pyramidal firearm, targeting different positions in front of and above the Traveler’s field of fire.  Unhesitatingly, he took aim on Purge’s position and let fly a cavalcade of deadly, explosive-tipped metal projectiles…

 

 

“Six units have reported in, but my Perimeter-Psych says he’s getting nothing from units two and five,” the grizzled, one-eyed commander of Arvenall Dampiko’s field operations  monitoring force reported to the Warlord.  “It’s not like they are not answering his mental beacon, and not like there’s some kind of interference blocking their collective mental patterns, but more like they have relocated to someplace beyond his extrasensory reach.  They’re no longer here, on-site.”

 “That’s not possible,” Dampiko responded snappishly.

 “Not at first observation, but it is if someone is using The Discipline,” the commander, a soldier named Re’luth-Ki said.  He referred to the use of Magick, which was the Art and Science effecting physical Change to occur in cosmically-conforming inanimate objects and organic matter though ritualistic focus of Will.  Magick was long-forbidden, even more so than the pursuit of rebel machine Tekk, even after the fall of the Emperium by nearly all warlords, sovereigns and imperators.  Its mercenary practitioners kept their knowledge hidden, only revealing themselves to possible clients when there was no other alternative --- or if the promise of remunerative reward was fabulously large.