“How long will they last?” The Icon asked, looking over at the barrier.

Laser fire was being deflected off, explosions were equally blocked. Even the occult strings were barely licking the sides of the barrier.

It moved and reacted like a living thing, allowing weapons to fire outwards, protecting the defenders, and even letting them in and out as if it could tell who was a machine to be warded, and who was a Winterscar knight having stolen a Feather.

“A few hours.” Urs said. “They are strong, and experience clearly guides them. But they are human. Eventually their souls will burn out one after another and the shield will fall. They all know this.”

“Do we have eyes on Talen at all?” I looked over the warmap, but the biome beyond. “Is he going to get his ancient butt over here by then?”

“No sign of him has been confirmed yet.” The Icon said. “However, given Avalis’s more frantic movements, I estimate perhaps one to two hours left. But that will matter less, the walls will be lost before that point against the Feathers.”

Those older Deathless might be manning the wall defenses right now, but that also meant they weren’t fighting alongside the rest.

Which meant the Icon was fending off the second generation Feathers herself with whatever soldiers she could throw in their way.

And I couldn’t get out of this vault to fight. Those same Feathers would charge right over here and rip the terminal appart.

“How long can you hold them off?” Urs asked.

“I estimate forty to fifty minutes.” The Icon said. “Results grow less certain beyond that point.”

“Very well.” Urs hummed, turning his full attention to his final work. “I believe that is enough time. Stand by.”

Kidra scythed through another Feather, watching the body split in half, landing hard on the snow. The war on the surface raged on without end.

The rest of clan Altosk was now separated and divided into so many smaller armies that she wasn’t certain she’d ever see them again.

“Excellent work Miss Winterscar.” The Icon spoke, “The rest of the machine army here is going to be routed by conventional forces, an airspeeder is on its way to pick you up to the next front.”

She’d been fighting with nearly no pause for the past nine hours. All of them had. The entire world was fighting back against Relinquished. By now even the more hesitant had finally come around to following the Icon’s instructions.

“How is my brother?” She asked, as she made her way across the white wastes, leaving behind the corpse of a massive machine. Rifle shots and shouts were coming from all over as the machine army swarmed out of the hole, but she knew she had to trust the process. If the Icon said the rest of the armed forces and retainers here could handle the fight, then they would.

“Mister Winterscar is still currently holding the imperial citadel. The tides there have turned in our favor, the Deathless have triggered an older defense layer that has completely blocked off the walls from damage. We are currently working on whittling down the Feathers that have broken through earlier. They are putting us in a difficult predicament.”

Feathers.

She’d fought more of those in the past three hours than she’d ever expect any reasonable Deathless would have in multiple lifetimes. The first few hours had seen next to none of them. But as the battles grew larger in scale, they finally started appearing just about everywhere.

According to the Icon, Kidra and every knight from Clan Altosk had been her strongest anti-Feather solution. The only real problem was that they all came from the same starting location.

The world was vast, and the white wastes were equally as daunting to cross. Nine hours would not be enough time for even the most reckless airspeeders to ferry Altosk Knights to where they were needed across the globe.

She gave another silent prayer, to anything at all, that her brother and the ones under his care would survive through all this.

An airspeeder banked ahead of her, rapidly turning on itself to land hard on the snowbank. She leaped up, and a relic knight from another clan opened the hangar doors, hand reaching out to grab her own. Pulling her inside.

“Clan Altosk.” She greeted the knight, taking a few heavy steps into the cabin as the airspeeder lifted back up and raced off.

He traced a smile over his face. “Clan Alliman.”

She frowned inside her helmet, now recognizing the sigils on the knight. “That’s nearly seven hundred miles away. How are you this far from home?”

“The war takes us where it needs, we are mere snowflakes in the wind.” He laughed, shrugging. “How many miles away from home are you, knight of Clan Altosk?”

She hadn’t been paying that much attention to her current location, but when she checked Winterscar prime’s map coordinates, she had her answer. “Oh. Three hundred miles off from my clan it appears. Perhaps you are correct in your statement. We truly are lost in the wind.”

“The gods have a plan and we follow.” He gave a traditional salute with his dagger, half a prayer, half acknowledgement. And sat back down on his seat, strapping in.

The other knight was far more chatty however. “Can’t say I’ve ever had this much fun! The blood rushes through with each battle. And we fight with legends no less.” His helmet turned to the other end of the airspeeder, where Kidra could spot three knights silently waiting.

They wore Undersider armors, given the lack of sigils. One was clearly imperial in service, while the other two were far more wild.

Her HUD confirmed what she already suspected. Deathless. Old ones at that. And if they were here in the same airspeeder that she was, then they were heading into the jaws of a machine infestation that would require heavy firepower indeed.

At her own side, she could see seven other relic knights. The one who greeted her and his compatriot were the only two knights wearing the same sigils. The others were from completely different clans given their different trophies and hanging ornaments.

All except for one further off in the rear. Kidra realized who that was from the armor’s paint patterns. “You’re a pirate.”

The pirate laughed, “And you’re only the seventh knight to tell me that. Believe me, I’m real nervous each time. Someone’s bound to attack first before having the courtesy to inform me they’ve noticed my colors.”

His helmet slowly turned to the Deathless further off in the cabin. One turned back his way and gave a slow nod. “We have already given our word. You do not need more.”

The pirate inclined his head back. “As the gracious Lord Deathless speaks, I am free from scrutiny in my past, for now. So long as I fight the machines hand to hand. Which, as you might guess, I certainly have no choice. Not much of a life to any of us if humanity loses this fight, right?”

The knight next to her nodded, “This would be the fourth outlaw I’ve seen thus far, all pirates and no worse. I suspect the Icon, hallowed be her name, knows well I would attack a slaver on sight. Even she cannot forbid this from me.”

“I’m more certain those assholes are getting thrown headfirst into the meatgrinder.” The pirate laughed, “Or if they refuse to follow her orders, they’re probably getting the machines dragged over to them anyhow. The golden lady has, perhaps, a slight distaste for their tendencies and way of life as far as I’ve learned from chattin’ with her.”

“I have a great distaste for their tendencies.” The Icon chirped in their helmets. “And while I cannot in good faith make the attempt to deliberately kill any human, I do not go out of the way to shield them from the machine forces either. Do prepare for the next engagement everyone, conventional ground forces have breached a spearhead into the machine facility, enough so for this airspeeder to weave through with a predicted success chance of eighty three percent, and I consider it enough to warrant the attempt.”

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Kidra could read between the lines. Even if the airspeeder didn’t survive the engagement, the knights here all certainly would. Which would still leave them deep in enemy territory, with their sole mission

She was correct. But the airspeeder pilot narrowly managed to avoid one fated enemy missile with a last second side thruster dodge, and that allowed it to drop the entire crew off in a pass by. It flew off to fight another day. Or rather, another half hour.

And behind, she and the knights got to work.

It was another machine structure like the others. The majority of the machine were on the further side, trading fire with the approaching human army.

The light around her flickered. She was used to that as well. When she turned her head, she caught the tail end of the orbital laser. The fury of the gods themselves, alive again after all these centuries of orbiting the world. Ripping apart any enemy they flew above.

It was like watching the stars fight back. A twinkle moving too fast to stay in her sight for long.

They didn’t lose a single knight in her mission, entering into the half-constructed buildings and budding anti-orbital weapons. The Deathless worked flawlessly together, focused on bogging down and rooting the defending Feathers long enough for the regular knights to take care of them. Kidra focused on handling any Feather that broke through the containment. She acted as the team’s final backup defence.

Generally if she didn’t kill the Feather directly in her fight against it, then she at least held its attention long enough for the rest of the team to collapse inwards onto it.

Soon the last guard collapsed, headless on the snow.

Without Feathers here to fight back, the rest of the lesser machine forces here were culled to pieces where the team went to work setting explosives all across the facility, following a list of objectives.

It was then that she got a message from the Icon. “Miss Winterscar. Disregard all prior instructions, prepare for immediate extraction. Draw blades, and run directly ahead of yourself at maximum speed. Do not stop for anything. Attack the immediate target ahead of you.”

Kidra tossed her unset explosives to the next knight nearby, drew her blade and raced directly ahead of herself. There was nothing but snow, mountains and the last walls of the machine facility. She was now sprinting directly for a dead end.

There was no meaning to the order. No sense. But Kidra followed it without question.

As she picked up to maximum speed a relic armor could take her at, Kidra saw what the Icon had planned.

She, and Clan Altosk, were her strongest counter to Feathers after all.

It was only natural what happened next.

To’Hardial sliced into the wallside, looking to rip through the metal superstructure. The courtyard within the citadel was theirs for now, and his team of five Feathers were going to tunnel through to the gate guardians hiding deeper within.

To’Avalis had discovered the location of the occult shield protecting the citadel. And it was now the greatest priority to reach. Annoyingly the humans were pulling off a spirited defense, cycling around the exact Deathless needed to counter their own team compositions, forcing Avalis to pull them out.

He couldn’t risk losing a single Feather at this stage. There were no more reinforcements to send in.

But cutting through the superstructure would be something the enemy forces might not notice or recognize. Which was worth the gamble.

They were almost through, when he heard something nearby.

A portal opening. Which meant To’Avalis still had some in preparation and was merely holding back this whole time for the right moment. Excellent. Reinforcements then.

His eyes turned and he saw the portal behind him. Ahead, there was a familiar staging ground. Although as his scans went through he realized something was off about it. All the lessers were in pieces. And three dead Feather shells from the third generation were on the ground. Dragged together.

A man was knelt down over them, tinkering with their shells all the while. He lifted his head, then turned their way, noticing the portal for the first time.

To’Hardial’s overclock kicked into full gear instantly as his threat detection software blared out warnings.

The man ahead through the portal was no man. And clearly far faster than any human, as he was already sprinting at full speed directly for them, silently. No war cry, nor charge.

The detection system displayed a name tag over him.

Tenisent Winterscar - Lethal threat. Extreme caution required.

He hardly had time to worry about the rest of his team as the man dove straight through the portal.

Perhaps they retreated correctly.

But as he was the nearest to the portal, he didn't survive long enough to know.

I could see the whole thing through the soul link we shared.

How many iterations it had taken. And how utterly monstrous it was to use.

The breakthrough wasn’t in the fractal itself that he studied. It was hiding in my fourth dimensional cloak and To'Sefit's plates.

With the soul sight, he studied and copied over individual concepts he needed, grafting them on the amalgamation he was currently focused on. With three different occult fractals all dedicated to portals, it was good enough data points for him to make something work.

The second breakthrough wasn’t occult based, but refining the scope of things. The concept of the universe in its entirety was one thing that was throwing a wrench into everything, and it was embedded within Avalis's fractal calculations, requiring an actual universal constant on location, which was difficult since the universe was infinite. Part of the reason he wasn't able to really make this work well, and instead had to use anchors and more sideways thinking to alleviate the mental load.

But the concept of only the world we stood on, and all twelve stratas under? That was a lot less to work with.

With the scope scaled down, and the right additional concepts to put together, Urs got to work weaving a new fractal together.

He didn’t try to simplify the occult research on those portals, nor attempt to make it work himself. Neither of us could ever use this fractal, at least not the version he settled on.

Because it still required extreme processing power to calculate. The kind of processing power nobody could have at the drop of a helmet. And it was individual calculations, each location requiring some creative thinking about how and where to anchor the base from, using the surface geometry as the seed to the rest of the equation. Similar to Avalis's solution of using a physical object to affix the fractal on and then offset the actual portal by a ton.

What we ended with wasn’t elegant, refined, or even halfway stable. It was barely running jank that needed to be looked at just the right way and ran on duct tape and prayer.

But it worked.

If the fractal was drawn anywhere in the digital sea, a portal would equally appear somewhere in the world in answer, following the equations.

If it were just me, I’d probably need years to calculate the equations needed for a single portal. And I wouldn’t have the means to write it out on metal given it was a constantly shifting pattern. It was basically useless to everyone.

But for a golden age AI? The Icon took that fractal and ran with it.

Anywhere there was open air and enough visibility for her to calculate enough of the geometry in the area, regardless if that was on the surface or further underground, she could make a tunnel there.

They would last only for a dozen seconds, and just about any damage could collapse them entirely. But that was enough.

Ironic that Avalis accidentally handed us the strongest possible advantage humanity could ever hope for: Mobility.

Now the game got truly dangerous.

I saw it all over the war map. Portals opening up everywhere. She took all of a half second for each portal to generate, and organized the order of portals from most required to least.

And in under seconds, knights were sprinting straight out of them, into the citadel proper. Some flew through the instant the portal was opened. Others were caught by surprise, likely outside of the Icon’s communication range. But once the portal opened, and they saw what was on the other end, they charged straight through.

Seventy three second generation Feathers were currently bringing down the citadel. And in one swoop, the Icon’s greatest weapon against Feathers charged directly into their faces: Clan Altosk.

All of us.

There were only seventy three second generation Feathers running within the citadel.

Clan Altosk had passed two hundred knights months ago.

The surge of forces was brutal, and utterly unyielding. The first wave was nearly eighty knights.

I even got to see Lord Atius himself step through a portal, dome shield already out to hold off the expected enemy attack while four knights sprinted behind him, fanning out to surround the target Feather. All five pincered down on their singular target.

It was a slaughter.

And then Kidra arrived herself, outright flying through a portal from full speed, slicing and dicing into her already weakened Feather caught fighting off four Deathless. She didn’t pause, already sprinting to the next objective the Icon placed without even stopping to say hello.

“Oh yeah, now we’re talking.” Green dots appeared everywhere over the citadel map before my eyes. And the red ones getting wiped out at equal speed.

“Odds of success have greatly improved, yes.” The Icon noted with a tiny bit of smugness to it. “And with this new addition to my abilities, I believe the odds of success for all humanity has significantly improved in equal measure.”

She could send knights everywhere in the world now. And indeed, I saw a few were already being ordered to march straight through a new portal, out into the snow filled fields, heat and wind sucked straight through, almost as if beckoning the incoming knight.

This had gone beyond just ruining Avalis’s day. Relinquished herself was going to have a hard time fending off the Icon now that she was everywhere.

And we were bringing back everyone we’d sent out to the staging grounds. Including Father.

The last red dot was wiped off the citadel warmap in under two minutes. It took that long because that particular Feather was built for speed and evasion. And the portals the Icon summoned still took a half second to manifest into place, which was enough time for a particularly panicked Feather to dive away from.

“Stand by, with the citadel fully defended, we are moving on the offence.” The Icon spoke, the war map moving upwards, fully centering on the biome beyond.

Already portals were appearing beyond the walls, sending out fireteams deep behind enemy lines, or extracting them right back into the action somewhere else. She didn't waste time, making full use of everything she had.

“I got one question.” I said, looking over the glorious chaos. “Am I able to send an occult mirror through these portals myself?”

As it turns out from immediate testing, I very much could.