Daybreak:Alpha Chapter
Chapter 13 - Massive Strike
Torsten Asgeirsen closed his eyes as he immersed his thoughts in the icy winds.
Above the cloud cover and the raging blizzard below, Torsten and his drake soared through clear skies at the head of the column. The cold air buffeted his exposed face and would have left ice crystals in his thin beard were it not for the enchanted shirt he wore under heavy armor. Yet to an experienced Drake Outrider, that feeling of rushing through the wintry winds was the epitome of blissful serenity.
No man could become an Outrider without loving the skies. To appreciate the flawless beauty of the open heavens, unveiled without the cloud cover its shyness hid behind -- it was the duty of every man who wished to master the air.
The Weichsel air cavalry simply did not understand it. Despite all their three-dimensional combat training, they had no real feel for aerial maneuvers. To them, the skies were just multiple layers of flat plains at different altitudes.
Torsten almost felt sorry for those poor heathens... almost.
After all, those Wickers -- and the Imps who once backed them -- were the aggressors. They were the ones who settled upon the Hyperboreans' promised land and began over a thousand years of enmity. All the wars that resulted were entirely their fault.
They deserved to die.
...Or so he told himself.
Torsten did not like this mission, if he were to be honest. There was no glory in subjecting a civilian populace to massive overhead bombardment. But the Weichsel army gathering there left him no choice.
As the firstborn son of Admiral Asgeirr Vintersvend and the commander of the Polarlys' air group, it was his duty to led the assault. Against this duty to his culture, his nation, his family and his comrades and his friends, his personal feelings and sense of ethics weighed next to nothing.
With concentration willed back to his Pathfinder guidance spell, Torsten realized that the distance to Nordkreuz had fallen to within a kilopace at last.
As soon as fresh intelligence revealed that the Wickers in the Skagen Peninsula were rushing back, Torsten's father -- Admiral Winter -- pushed his skywhales ahead of the main army. It was a gamble, but the only way to seize Nordkreuz with an inferior force was to destroy the city first. To deliver an overwhelming bombardment, the Admiral needed full air groups, undiminished by any decisive air battles or aerial interdictions.
Therefore the strike on Nordkreuz could not wait. Torsten and his men had sortied as soon as their payloads were ready. Their mission: to rain death upon the city and return before the Weichsel Phantoms could arrive.
Reaching into his pockets, Torsten pulled out four tiny pebbles before throwing them into the air. The runes on them triggered as they left his hand, bursting into flares of red, blue, yellow, and black. They formed an emergency call for aid in Hyperborean maritime communications. But on the precipice of battle, the combination carried yet another special meaning:
The fate of our people lay in your hands.
"Commence attack," Torsten sent to the squadron leaders over the command telepathy channel as he pulled his drake into a left dive. "Group Polarlys with me to the eastern gate and army camp; Group Lyngbakr to southwestern docks and camp; Group Hafgufa the southern gate and camp; and Group Leviathan the central city and main docks. Brothers! Let's send these Wickers to the freezing mists of Hel!"
He didn't really need to repeat their orders. His men were elites and already knew their jobs. But he felt the moment needed a touch more 'oomph!' to precede his last line. Unfortunately, his father hadn't passed down much in the ways of oratory skills.
"Yes Sir!"
The strike groups began splitting up even before their commanders responded. Volcanic drakes swerved away from the aerial armada by the dozens before each unit -- looking less like formations and more like tiny hordes -- dived into the clouds.
The Skagen Outriders didn't practice the neat patterns their Weichsel counterparts fought in. But then, they didn't need to. They much preferred scrambling the battle into one giant mess and letting individual superiority carry the day.
Not that they would face any aerial combat here.
As Torsten rushed out of the freezing clouds in a steep dive, he pulled out another rune and activated it. His eyes began to radiate an icy blue as Snow Sight allowed them to pierce the blizzard. Verifying his target in the distance, he braked his dive and banked right before urging his drake into yet another steep plunge.
He was followed by thirty-one more volcanic drakes. Each of them dived at a slightly different angle, aiming for a separate column of tents and buildings as the gravity accelerated them through over a thousand paces of air.
Until the moment struck...
Seven hundred... six hundred... five hundred!
"DROP DROP DROP!" Torsten shouted over both the howling winds and the telepathy channel.
Releasing his reins for a moment, Torsten first touched two runes in the front of his saddle, disengaging the 'safety' to the payload underneath. He then reached behind him and grabbed two small metal hoops held up by the back of his saddle. Yanking both forward with all his strength, he pulled out the heavy duty cords they were attached to. These cords fed through several pulleys, around the drake's sides, and connected to the lids of two long, metal boxes bound to the drake's bottom.
Tugged back by the cords, the two metal lids slid open, revealing hundreds of fist-sized rocks.
As Torsten took back his reins and urged his drake out of the dive, gravity and the increasing speed difference accelerated those rocks out of their compartment.
Every one of them had one or more runes inscribed, all set to be triggered on hard impact.
The simple ones carried lone spells like Fireball or Shatter, designed to injure with bursts of flame and rock shrapnel.
More complicated stones carried a Dispel to breach wards, a Disintegrate to break past roofs, and then a Firestorm spell to ignite everything in sight.
There were many other varieties as well, but the most dangerous kind came from the Admiral himself. These runic stones surrounded themselves with a Barrier Guard once they entered free fall for a few seconds to protect against Ether Seekers and Dispels. Once they landed, the Animated rocks would roll until they struck earth or stone ground. From there, their high-powered Tectonic spell would bury deep underground before sending violent tremors throughout the city and its outskirts.
The goal was to leave Nordkreuz in a brazing, shattered ruin.
With over a hundred runestones per container, two containers per drake, and four groups totaling one-hundred-twenty-eight drakes, Torsten's strike force unleashed more than twenty-six thousand magical munitions over the city of Nordkreuz.
In the middle of this blizzard brought forth by Admiral Winter, the skies literally rained death.