The flowbeast making up his costume let out a sound between a mew and a liquidous warble before extruding a pair of pseudopods that slapped down onto the two creatures’ heads, driving them hard into the floor. With them stunned, the pseudopods narrowed into tendrils that wrapped around the gargouilles’ torsos and threw one against the far wall and the other through the window of the office where he’d been holed up in.
While Lishuura retracted into the form of his costume once more, Gideon got to his feet and called out: “Goulemanda. Come. We’re moving to the fortress. Burn everything else. I might have a use of my former business partners, so we can’t have anything pointing back to them.” As he strode toward the window, Lishuura acted on her own initiative, forming a huge pair of wings sprouting from Gideon’s back.
Emerging from her hiding place in one of Gideon’s pocket’s Goulemanda wasted no time conjuring up her war doll. The faerie construct energized its green beam and began to sweep the room with it, burning away scattered furniture and papers, paying particular attention to the palmtops and tablets Gideon confiscated from his ‘partners’ once he’d given them their marching orders and sent them away.
Gideon stood and watched to make sure those were taken care of before directing Lishuura to fly them both out the window toward his newly-created fortress.
Outside, the tide was turning. The Nightmare King’s lapse combined with Tydir announcing the arrival of the Heir of Hyrilius had allowed most of his faerie thralls to shake off his control and rally around him as her so-called herald against the security forces on the ground and the aerial combatants from the fortress.
A group of armed men found their tight formation broken by the tangling vine-like limbs of spriggans in one area while near the airship, the minotaurs who weren’t still incapacitated by Renaissance’s lubricant had ripped down lighting stands or torn off parts of the gantry to use as polearms to strike flying monsters out of the sky.
It looked like whatever his goal had been, the so-called Nightmare King had lost with only his gremlin-generated monsters left to him. All that remained was the capture of the man himself.
“No, we’ve got the perfect weapon right here: ten tons of airship and an age-old strategy called ‘ram it’.
The very same cloud of unagu steeds that was keeping him from being located and sniped was proving to be a hindrance to Gideon as well. There were too many of the monsters to directly control and even if there weren’t, they weren’t faeries: they acted on orders pre-programmed into the fortress’s holographic simulation and those orders could only be issued or rescinded from the fortress’s throne. Worse, Lishuura was a novice and skittish flier at best, spooking and shying away from anything that crossed her path, leaving them hopelessly weaving through a sea of wings, only vaguely making headway to their destination.
He tried to calm her with his power, but there were just too many sources of stimulation for the young flowbeast and as soon as he quelled one freak out, another came along.
Gideon looked up to see the chaos of unagu parting before a golden, wedge-shaped head of an approaching dragon. For a brief moment, he felt a spark of hope—even good luck. Could this have been the ancient and powerful creature he’d sensed in the airship?
A dragon. Even after seeing the impressive abilities of the minotaurs and gargoyles, avarice rose in his chest at having such a mighty (if surprisingly small) creature turned to his side. Almost without consideration, he turned the full force of his power against the beast diving toward him.
It washed over and past the golden dragon like water off a freshly waxed car. The ‘dragon’ was from Earth. And he knew in the moment before impact exactly who said ‘dragon’ was as well.
Facsimile opened her wings just before she slammed into him, creating enough drag at the right time to swing her hind claws into play. All four taloned appendages struck Gideon, raking the mail of his costume. His costume in turn sprouted a pair of stubby, poorly-defined limbs that hammered into her ribs.
Lishuura, realizing the bludgeoning her friend’s foe was getting her nowhere, extended dozens of sharp quills. Facsimile yelped, the shock affecting her more than the pain but all the same leaving her open to a slam from a pseudopod that dislodged her from Gideon.
With that, she beat her wings hard once, hurling herself into Gideon’s blades. The weapons tore into her, but she ignored them to drive herself even closer until she was in range to punch him in the face. Gideon responded by slashing his weapons in opposite directions, a move that would have cut any other person in half, but only served to push Facsimile away with force.
Before she got to two, an almighty cacophony erupted behind her; the twang of steel cables snapping and the deep, deep groan of the huge airship’s superstructure protesting as it suddenly began to rise into the air.
Gideon watched as the airship, it’s instrumentation platform reshaped into and enormous steel ram, began a slow but inexorable ascent toward his fortress. “What? No! No!” He started to shake in fury as he pumps more power than he’d ever used before into a single mental cry of alarm. Goulemanda!
The response was instantaneous. A beam of brilliant green energy ripped through the air, annihilating dozens of unagu and parting their numbers as easily as one slices bread. A causeway between them opened temporarily as the creatures scattered from the killing light.
Still riding the desperate surge of power he’d summoned, he overrode all other thought in Lishuura’s mind and ordered her into the gap at full speed. They shot past Facsimile in a frenzy of wings, arrowing toward the fortress.
“Hey!” Facsimile shouted after him, performing a wingover to pursue. “Get back here!” Before she got very far at all, one of the mounted riders astride an armored unagu struck her from the side with an agony lance, causing her to convulse in pain as the red crackling energy surrounded her.
Marshaling her inner reserves of grit, she extended one of the orihalcite claws she kept on her person from the side of her hand and karate chopped the offending weapon in half. Then she grabbed the broken half of the lance still in the rider’s hands and used it to pull him from the saddle.
By the time she was done with him, she had lost sight of Gideon.
A shuddering boom rolled out from the underside of the fortress, the noise echoing through the quarry. Massive fissures raced out from the point of impact and split the flanks of the stone edifice, throwing debris and dust into the air. The castle above shuddered on its foundation, one of its towers cracking and falling asunder.
Flying rocks smashed unagu steeds out of the air while dust choked them and sent them gagging to the ground.
The whole of the Fortress Allegiant began to slowly rotate, sinking slowly even as the airship crushed itself against it and its fuel reserves exploded.
“Or… it might not matter anymore,” Facsimile mused.
Gideon was watching his plans literally crumble and collapse. The once-might Fortress Allegiant was shaking itself apart under the assault of enemies he’d sorely underestimated.
Still, he refused to to give up hope. He’d chosen his castle with care, analyzing every feature of it.
Tense minutes followed the impact between the ROCIC airship and Fortress Allegiant. The Overwatch, General Barrett’s transport and the Karasu no Yūrei all circled as the shattered remnants of the airship along with gargantuan slabs of stone fell back into the quarry.
Any further discussion was cut off by a high keening sound. The unagu steeds still circling the area began to ignite, trailing flames as they burned out of existence in the same way they did when destroyed by other means. Seconds later, a flare of silver light emerged from every door and window of the structure, increasing in intensity before engulfing the entire fortress.
For an instant, everyone was blinded by what appeared as a new star hanging in the middle of the quarry. Then the sphere of light collapsed in upon itself, leaving naught but empty air and a rain of cinders from the destroyed unagu steeds.
“…Whoa.” Zero was surprisingly the first one to break the silence.
“Device World?” asked General Barrett.
In a flash of silvery light, the Fortress Allegiant appeared in an alien sky, the orange-red glow of a sunset tinting its now-crumbling walls and towers. Chunks of shorn rock sloughed off, crashing hundreds of feet onto a sandy coastline.
Gideon, still swathed in Lashurra, stumbled out onto the balcony of the central tower and stared out. The fortress’s arrival hadn’t gone unnoticed; some of the airships—not dirigibles, but actual flying galleons with sailcloth wings and towering smokestacks—that had been moving about above and around the bay a few miles away were changing course to approach the newly-arrived curiosity.
“Somewhere else.” The voice made him jump. It echoed as if coming from that bottom of one of those smokestacks and rasped like a thousand nail files were being dumped down the same. Gideon whirled to find himself staring into a pair of eyes like furnaces set into a face literally made of brass.
The creature before him had the supper torso of a brass man with sculpted muscles and hair forged into the appearance of five curved spikes jutting from his crown. His bottom half was a swirling pyroclastic cloud that whirled like a tornado beneath him. When he spoke, cinders and flame puffed out from between his serrated teeth.