You must keep advancing
With the System’s strange, incoherent spell fresh in my mind, I hauled open the magazine and slammed a round home in each of the recoilless rifles. I looked once more out through the glass of the nose turret, and then scurried up the ladder to the main deck.
“Lura!” I shouted.
She glanced over her shoulder with a grin. “Fret not, little brother. Tis a scout only. We will leave the devil to its devices.”
“We have to kill it!”
The orc huntress laughed. “Worried after the spirits of smokeless flame? Long have the father spirits endured. Long after you and I are dust shall they remain.”
I shook my head. “No! Well, yes, but that’s not it! Try to query the System, will you?”
Lura paused a moment, staring at nothing, then scowled. “The aura of the beast disrupts magic. It is known and is why your artifice have I enlisted.”
“But the System isn’t magic,” I said. I waved my hand. “If anything, it’s the opposite, right? It’s absolute order, not whimsy or chaos. It forces a framework around things that ought be governed by the natural laws of the universe.”
“Ought they?”
“Yes! And before it went crazy, it told me to keep advancing. I think it wants us to kill the null devil.”
Lura was silent for a moment. “A queer notion, for Grandfather to want. Or to speak in such a way. Perhaps in the space between its demesne and that of the beast, its own bonds were loosened.”
Its own bonds. It never occurred to me that the enigmatic System might be under restrictions of its own. I had always sensed it had its own motivations, and certainly things it refused to talk about. But I’d never considered that it was under constraints. Who could constrain such an entity other than itself? And if that was the case, why would such an omnipotent being purposefully curtail its own freedom to act?
“Lo, perhaps I spoke in haste, King Apollo,” said Lura. She leaned forward in her seat. “The City’s defenses seem of less deterrence to the beast than they ought.”
“What?”
Despite her indignant huff, I scrambled over her lap and pressed my face to the glass of the canopy. I had no real baseline for the city’s defenses, but it made a certain amount of sense that the orcs would be intimately familiar with the defenses of every major city. As it was, several jets of what looked like red lightning cracked up from the city at the creature, but they were ineffectual.
“The city is in a state of political upheaval,” I realized. “It must be impacting their ability to mount a defense. We’ve got to help them!”
I felt a hand on my scruff as Lura pulled me out of her cockpit and dropped me to the deck. “Tis the business of Ifrit to protect themselves, as it is all on Kellembog. No coward am I, know you, but three scouts will unfurl not a banner of victory but a funeral shroud. We must plan our attack.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be that simple,” I warned her.
Lura pulled the flight stick to put us in a bank back toward the salt flats. Or, at least, she tried to. The stick stuck fast, and the groan of metal translated through the hull.
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“What jammed contraption is this?” she said. The stick bucked in her hand, and the nose swung back to point at the City of Brass. The throttle slid forward, seemingly of its own accord.
“If I had to venture a guess,” I said, “I don’t think our engineers are keen on leaving their city to a superpredator.”
Pale, pink flames licked out of the control console where the Ifrit slid through the circuitry and spread out along the inside of the cockpit. I couldn’t understand the Ifrit equivalent of speech, but I was starting to pick up on some of their body language. And I know the low, rapid flicker that meant one of the fire spirits was pissed.
“Better radio the rest of the fighters at China Lake,” I said. “We’re going to need backup.”
I looked out the front of the aircraft again at the growing smudge of bad juju on the Lanclovan skyline. “A lot of backup.”
“It seems as we have little choice. Well, tis a proper day for a war in the sky, little brother mine,” said Lura. She laughed in her sing-song way and pulled her headset down. “All hunters of the Dawn’s Light, let sun shine upon spear. By the glow of the cresting sun, shall this greatest totem fall, else see us felled in its stead. I swear to you, glory! Give fleet wind these iron hawks to the City of Brass, lest this feat of legend pass you by,”
Lura grinned back at me. “Let it not be said that I am one to turn away from challenge given, o’ little brother mine. I hope only that your chariots are better for more than cutting circles in the cloud.”
I pointed at the red switches on the forward console. “That one arms your guns. That one arms your rockets. I’ll be on the comm, chief!”
I gave Lura a salute and scurried back toward the tail of the plane to check the tail gunners. On my way, I glanced up at the hull above. System, if you’re listening, I’m doing what I can.
No answer.
My menus still appeared upon impulse, though they flickered in a way that was somewhat disconcerting. But System’s voice was now completely silent, higher-order functions presumably suppressed by the creature the Ifrit called the null devil. I had thought moniker was due to its magic-devouring appetite. I now wondered if that name was due to its effect on the voice that whispered in the ear of every creature on Rava. A voice that came with a subtle presence, a sense of being watched—sometimes with attention so focused it felt as though I was its sole interest, like the first time I flew on a glider. A presence that was now all too conspicuous by its total absence. I was beyond the System’s gaze. Or, rather, shaded from it by a creature that devoured life and magic. A creature that had turned a fertile valley into a desert of dust and bone.
After making sure the scrapper in the tail turret was squared away, I made my way back to Armstrong.
“So much for a scoutin’ mission, eh king?” asked Armstrong.
“You nervous?” I asked.
Armstrong bared his toothy grin. “Naw, I like all that stuff what Lura said. Glory, iron hawks, and all that. Besides, what good’s carryin’ a rocket if you don’t get to point it at a big monster?”
I tugged the shims free from the turret actuators and stowed them under the hobgoblin’s seat. “Armstrong, I like the way you think.”
Armstrong flexed his biceps. “That’s why I’m your number 2! Err, after Chuck, that is.”
“You’re not after anyone. You’re a team, you and he. But hopefully he’ll be along shortly,” I said. I was starting to get a better sense of the scale of that null devil. And if it was really as big as I thought it was, we were going to need every fighter in the fleet. And maybe that even wouldn’t be enough. but I’d learned from the dartwing. I’d learned from the whistler, and I’d learned from the silvermanes and even the elves. We’d iterated, adapted, and improved. If there was any force on Lanclova, or probably even Rava, that could challenge the null devil on its own terms, it was the air wing of Tribe Apollo.
“Ugly brute,” commented Armstrong.
I had to agree. The bestiary Rufus had given me referred to it as a dragon. But it looked more like a cross between a serpent and a black scorpion, sinuous and slithering through the air with two large pincers and a line of dozens of chitinous legs tapping away at nothing down its length. The back end hung down below the beast, dangling a barb that it used to strike the city as it passed, before coming around for an attempt to pry open the brass canopy with its bus-sized claws. Thus far, it hadn’t managed to get in, yet. The dark smudge I’d seen around it was like a visible aura that seemed to warp the air like a mirage shimmer, only it robbed the light passing near it like the event horizon of a black hole.
If the null devil noticed our approach, it gave no indication. Either it didn’t think we were a threat, or didn’t think we were food. In either case, not worth its attention. A red bulb flashed in turret. It meant to secure the magazine, in case any errant sparks found their way into the ball turret.
We were definitely going to be a threat now. Lura had just armed all six missiles.
You may have lost your voice, System. But I hope you’re at least watching. Because this is going to be one hell of a fireworks show.