Displaced

Chapter 66

With the click of a mouse, Blake Myers designated another target for his sniper skitter and shifted his view elsewhere, tracking the actions of his units as they spread out through the Eterian capital. A small smile grew on his face as he witnessed his robots doing exactly what he'd designed them to do: slaughter. Fascinated, he watched as three of his creations waded into the large, desperate mess by the city's west gate, where the Eterians were engaged in a valiant but laughably futile effort to hold back the oncoming tide of Ubran soldiers. Neither side was prepared as the four bots swept in from the north and began carving through the Ubran troops while another four converged from the south.

To call the result "gruesome" was putting it lightly. The robots announced their presence with a furious salvo, the tucrenyx slugs tearing through the Ubrans almost as if they were made of cloth. Medieval-quality leather, cloth, and metal armor just weren't made to stand up against bullets moving at supersonic speed. Nor, it quickly became apparent as the skitters charged into the fray, did it hold up against weaponized five-foot-long chainsaws.

It didn't take long for panic to set in on both sides. At about ten feet tall, the Battle Skitter Mk Ones were hard to miss even in the chaos. They towered over the humanoids battling between them, their large, bloodstained chainsaws flashing out to bisect anybody foolish enough to get within range. Even if somehow one were to be unable to see them, the sharp cracks of the bullets breaking the sound barrier would be enough to catch your attention. That and the screams.

Not that Blake could hear those screams himself. He wasn't anywhere near the battle; he sat back in his chambers in Wroetin where it was safe instead, watching from above through a video feed like a sensible person. In his opinion, there was no real reason he needed to put himself within even a hundred miles of possible danger when he could just have robots do it instead. He had the technology, after all. Even at this distance, he could still give orders through the same chain of flitters stretching from Otharia to Crirada that supplied the view he was watching. The delay wasn't even too bad, perhaps ten seconds at its worst—more than fast enough to coordinate his units and let their rudimentary AI handle the details. He only hoped that the Eterians wouldn't be stupid enough to attack the skitters, as the skitters would no doubt return fire without mercy—a behavior that Blake had programmed into them from the start to deal with any Otharians who might decide to start attacking his units in some sort of guerrilla campaign against him.

Quickly Blake switched through an array of video feeds coming through the link, checking the state of the rest of the city. While most of the Ubrans had been entering the city from the west, some had taken advantage of the nearly-unoccupied wall around the rest of the city to enter that way, and they couldn't be left to do as they pleased.

Two of his units scrambled through the large nondescript buildings in the northeast quarter, while another two worked their way through the large empty villas in the southeast quarter. The final three skitters were reserved to guard the gate of the wasteland that had once been the northwest quarter. Outside of pushing back the Ubrans in the west, keeping the north gate closed and the northwest quarter unoccupied was his top priority. After all, it was the reason he'd bothered to throw his hat in the ring.

Blake hadn't cared for the fate of the Eterians until yesterday—if he were to be honest, he still didn't care now—but the phenomenon he'd witnessed that day had turned his thoughts upside down. He'd never before heard of a "Severed" attack, as he'd later learned they were called, but eldritch tentacles emerging from portals meant other dimensions, and that made this highly relevant to his interests.

At first, Blake had thought to recreate the phenomenon in Otharia for better study, but one conversation with Leo had squashed that idea. Apparently, people at risk of becoming Severed didn't just grow on trees, and any that did pop up were usually taken out before they could endanger everybody around them. How the Eterians had acquired such a number of Severed people was a mystery, but that didn't matter in the end. What mattered was that there hadn't been a Severed attack in Otharia in twelve years and finding somebody was just about impossible as well as highly unwise. The news had left Blake momentarily crushed.