Rot and Gold 4 – Grand Strategy

John pulled the stopper out of the vial. The contents, bright red like stylized blood, were swiftly poured over the wounds that covered Fianna’s legs. It slowed the bleeding, which was all he had time for.

That the sniper lay on the staircase with massive chunks of her legs missing was one thing. The dead Lorylim matter scattered around her suggested a situation she should not have been able to recover from. Still, there she was, ****, breathing, and a pawn that the Gamer had to leave behind. In the cost-benefit analysis, she was not worth him spending more than the first aid he had given.

He hastened up the rest of the stairs. Purgatory claws tore through a damaged weave of hair-like tendrils. The moment he stood on the roof of his Palace, he whirled around and loosened the Arc Lance he had been charging via his Companion Cube. It tore a hole through the central node of the massive Lorylim.

It had been a wing of Tiamat. Stirwin had ripped it off with too much enthusiasm and then it had taken on life and target of its own. By the time John realized, it had been too late to give a meaningful warning.

Now it was a level 250 abomination on his roof. One that he had to help Hailey tear asunder with carefully aimed attacks. The Statue of Liberty was both a symbolic and strategic place of importance. That laser alone could stabilize entire fronts and the soldiers would lose morale if they saw the heart of the Guild Hall destroyed.

Precision cutting a creature like that off his property was difficult. Difficult tasks were normal to the Gamer though. Between his arcane might and Hailey’s brawn, they ripped the creature to shreds within minutes. Minutes was all John had to spare.

‘We got it from here,’ Delicia contacted him mentally. The creature was not yet neutralized, but it had been damaged enough that its level had dropped to 61. By that point, Hailey could squash it and Delicia could administer health potions to whoever could be saved.

‘Good,’ was all John could respond. Regular and Magus Steps took him back into the Palace. He turned a corner to face a human in the middle of takeover by the Lorylim hivemind. The former woman lunged at him. He caught her by the throat. He ripped her head off, blew the heart out with a Blast Ray, and left the body on the floor.

It was all done within two seconds.

Grim determination was the only emotion he allowed himself. His harsh steps reverberated in the corridor. After just one more time, he found the gate that led into the entrance hall. The dimensional windings of the Palace brought him where he needed to be quicker than any lift could have.

Tactical data was constantly uttered. John had not stopped listening. Only when he was back at his position at the helm of the table did he loosen the Possession on the chair that stood, unused, behind him.

He bowed back over the map, refocusing his mind on what was happening. What had initially been three fronts had turned into an infestation across the entire island. The Lorylim were playing to their strengths. Spores allowed them to launch attacks at practically every area of the Guild Hall at their leisure. Such attacks were relatively easy to control, their punching power limited. The waves that crashed into the Guild Hall were the more pressing concern. Each time it happened, a burst of Lorylim reinforced or opened a new front. Sheer mass and the production of new soldiers from Fusion’s fallen threatened to **** them out.

That was the enemy’s win condition. John had his own tricks in operation.

Lorylim attacks were represented on the map in zones that ranged from red to black, depending on severity. Those scattered dots looked like spots of oil swimming on the surface of the water. John had been giving out his orders very carefully, manipulating who lived, who died, and who arrived where and when to make sure Lorylim clusters did not get to connect.

No one was directly informed that this was his strategy. Although Izha was evidently able to read his mind, he considered that it must have been more difficult than to read any broad strategy. This was one reason why John had swallowed the truth on his grand strategy. The other was that he was sending dozens if not hundreds of people to certain doom.

One front was southwest of the Commercial District. It was a minor engagement, all things considered. A spore cloud had touched down, grown a mound that now spat out abominations, and said abominations charged.

By deployment of Sentinel Golems, he had left open a path of least resistance that led into a civilian encampment. They were all subjected to immense horrors, and why? Because John had estimated that this way would have more people standing in the end. The civilian camp was on the other side of a bridge, which was an excellent chokepoint that the soldiers protecting the civilians could use. Anyone who could throw as much as a magical spark would join in the defensive effort out of desperation alone.

While the civilians acted as the bait, the Sentry Golems could go and take out the mound itself, cutting off the movement of enemies. Had the Sentry Golems operated to defend the encampment instead, there would have been less casualties in that camp but the Sentries also would have been bogged down.

Scenes like this played out over and over again in the strategic view of the Guild Hall. If he had told a soldier to let a pack of galloping mutants pass, how would the soldier react? John hoped it would have been with a spirit of heroism. It was what good people would do. John needed that kind of elan at the frontlines, where it could make a difference. From where he stood, letting those mutants gallop through allowed the unit held back to pincer a second Lorylim formation, which then allowed both units to redeploy elsewhere.

Strategy was always about cascading small advantages into bigger ones. John did not have enough advantages to prioritize what was good over what was effective.

“The Guild Hall will rise another 3 metres,” he told everyone. He set the elevation to occur slowly over the coming minutes, so slowly that no one would really notice. It mattered only that the enormous waves were given a hurdle. The Lorylim inside could climb up and then continue through the streams as before, but they would be robbed of momentum.

One pocket of Lorylim was defeated. Three more had sprung up in that same time. The building shook when Tiamat slammed into the mountain range again. Stirwin and Nathalia had strict orders to keep the imperfect avatar of chaos as far away from the Guild Hall as possible, but Tiamat had her own designs on that.

John was tempted to take the Guild Hall all the way into the air. To do so had two disadvantages. One was that the fighting would stabilize. John did not want it to be stable, he wanted as many Lorylim as possible to come to their defendable positions. Second was that he had every reason to hope the reinforcements from Europe would arrive soon. If they were up all the way, their ships could not find the safety of the Harbour. Thirty metres was the highest he estimated he could go before the descent would put a delay in the arrivals.

‘My current miscalculation is the strength of Tiamat,’ John thought. He had truly believed Stirwin would take care of the avatar over 10 minutes tops. They were now 20 minutes into the battle and the two titans were still engaged in a catastrophic exchange.

Tiamat had notably thinned. Mass was lost, dispersed, and what regrew by the rapid regeneration and relocation of power the hivemind was capable of did not offset the deep gauges left by Stirwin’s claws and teeth. The Celestial Devourer did not fight Tiamat alone either.

Surrounded by the red glow of a Firefly’s buff, Stirwin dragged Tiamat back into the wider Hudson. The serpentine neck of the goddess of chaos twisted, but failed to properly bend. A hurricane whirled around her like a massive collar, originating from the navy blue dragon that hovered in the waters near the Guild Hall.

Tilgun’s arrival had been surprising and pleasant. What his game was in all of this, John could not say for certain. Nathalia’s brother was a follower of chaos, he had admitted to that himself several times. He had also considered Tiamat’s current state to be vile. That he was in defense of the Guild Hall likely had to do with other sentimental reasons. The silver form of Enki’s embodiment always hovered near Tilgun.

The hurricane dragon struggled visibly. His four arms vibrated, pressing against the esoteric resistance of keeping his spell up. His sister brought him relief, a pyroclastic explosion slamming into Tiamat’s side and finally driving her back into the waters.

Stirwin let go, before he was dragged into the depths with her. Even the Celestial Devourer feared to enter the depths with the dragon of chaos. Tiamat burst out again with a scream of mad joy. “TO FIGHT! TO LIVE! TO CORRUPT! TO BE! HOW I’VE MISSED THIS!”

The clash of one dragon against three and a fae continued.

As did every other front, each a constantly shifting set of inputs and outputs, interconnected in a way that no one inside it could comprehend. Even John’s erudite mind could only work out so much.

The Shadow Island was lost at this point. The Unseelie Path was the only true holdout, everything else was infested with Lorylim. A development that had come in large part due to the Metracana that had surfaced on the Silicate Island. Salamander had engaged it, then the second of its ilk had weighed in. Kerelex and Xerxes, Second and Third of Hatred, were too much for Salamander alone. Gnome had been sent to reinforce her. Siena alone was not able to protect her island against the enemies.

The Water Island still stood, because John considered it a higher priority to defend. He had played with the thought of disabling the Building, but ultimately the defences he got from the elementals willing to fight for him was more potent than the potential reinforcements the enemies got from corrupting them.

Where Kerelex and Xerxes were active, Thresta likely was as well. There were some selective strikes against higher ranked Fusion militants that could be explained by the stealthy Third of Darkness. John considered it more likely that the Metracana was the proverbial heart of Tiamat’s avatar. Either way, he did not know. His Possessions gave him a wide range of intel, but in the end he was still affected by the fog of war.

The Lorylim’s strategic strength lay in their rapid deployment and hivemind. Their strategic weakness lay in their predictability. The Lorylim were not a truly united hive. Tiamat and Izha were dominant, but they were the bickering couple at the head of a feuding family. Lorylim strategies boiled down to charges, overwhelming ****, and corrupting the innocent.

A strategy that should have been easy enough to predict and counter. One was true, the other was not.

“Need more pieces, John?”

John felt the first emotion in a while cut through his determination: joy. It was a faint flutter, buried quickly, but a smile showed on his face for a part of a second all the same. He turned to face his reinforcements.

Rave, Ehtra, Nia and Nahoa were back. If they had any injuries, they had healed during their drive. “Yes,” he said bluntly. “Ehtra, to the Silicate Island. Xerxes and Kerelex are there.”

The First of Hatred did not need to hear anything more. She rushed towards the exit and was on her wings before John gave orders to the others.

“Nahoa, to the Shadow Island. Your mission is simply to kill as many of them as possible. Bleed their biomass. Jane, I want you to stay ready in the east. Nia… you will be where you are needed. I trust you.”

The blonde woman’s jaw clenched until the muscles were visible. When she nodded, it was abrupt. She and Nahoa were immediately out. Only Jane lingered for a moment. “Tell me, how is it going?”

“Poorly,” he told her flat-out. The other command staff on the table did not need to be lied to to retain their morale. They were all smart enough to know what they are looking at. “The Lorylim are relentlessly beating us from the west, while keeping the pressure up in the east, enough so that I cannot strategically redeploy the troops there. That’s why I need you there.”

“What’s our victory condition?”

“Keep killing until they let up,” John stated.

Rave smirked. It was a grim kind of smile. “That’s my kinda game.”

With those words, she went out to join the others in the fight.

And John returned to scheming his way out of this.

He knew that the Lorylim had an end. They had one in totality and they had one on this battlefield. If they had been an infinite threat, then none of this would be necessary. The Abyss would have been taken over generations ago, one way or another.

Izha’s involvement had given the Lorylim more options to manifest and he boosted their ability to empower, that much was obvious. Had that been enough to bring all of the might of what the Lorylim had been to bear, an entire dead, global empire’s worth of mass, the battlefield would have looked very different.

The question was, therefore, how much the Lorylim could spill onto Earth in any given moment. If they exceeded that amount for long enough, then, eventually, the fight would swing in their favour. John had no idea when that would happen or how he could bring it about.

It was all a slaughter, one in which all he could do was make his soldiers more effective pieces.