[center][h1]Practical applications[/h1][/center] Dawn rose over the south west of the 12th realm where fertile plains met verdant forests, both of which had been repeatedly fertilized by the blood of war. Here human and beast had shed each other's blood over and over, yet while their vitality had bled into the soil, no bones or bodies had left to lie, for instead they had filled bellies and bonfires to fuel the cycle of violence that had sloshed back and forth across the land in waves of crimson and hate. Failure to strike a decisive blow had not been taken well by the humans. General Rebecca’s string of losses and Pyrrhic victories had seen resources that could have been used to reinforce her battered army directed north and east instead to more successful forces, leaving her to struggle in the mud against their first and most hated foe alone. Only now was she seeing a significant investment by the capital (sans the first), which she felt was well past time. For perhaps the dozenth time her army marched forth. At its core were her veterans. Survivors if not winners of many battles, who had empowered by the dead such that they stood head, shoulders and broad chest above both of the rank and file she had scrounged up from wherever she could, and of the new bizarrely clad reinforcements she had been furnished with. It annoyed her a little that the newcomers were not really here because they saw it as their patriotic duty to fight, or because someone had finally seen fit to fulfill her requests for aid on its own merit. No, they were here on a ‘test run’ and acted under the command of one known as Damina, who was riding atop some oversized lizard near the back of the formation from which he would ‘observe the experiment’. She found herself scowling back at him, the man having been quite the pain to work with. He was an oddball that one, and integrating his own people into her army had been both a pain and only moderately successful. Then the hulking blue skinned woman shook her head, dismissing the train of thought and instead ran her hand over one of the things she’d gotten out of the collaboration. It looked like a crossbow, only about three times as long and six times as wide, a size such that only a juggernaut like her could carry one around and use it as a personal weapon. It also didn't have a bow, instead it hosted a series of gemstones lined along the inner edges where the arrow would have. ‘Would have’ being the optimum words, because what went in that much wider groove instead was altogether much more fun than a plain arrow. However she felt about the rest of this operation, Rebecca could not wait to try it out on a live target, and the all too familiar howling coming from the woods they were approaching told her she’d have plenty of those soon enough. [hr] The howls of war rang out, calling the packs to do battle once again, and come they did, to cast out the invaders, and to prevent their home from being turned to ash. These where no scattered clans fighting with tooth, claw and bestial cunning. No, the wolves of the south had both trained and armed themselves for war, first with stolen scraps, and then later from looted corpses. Arrays of wolves stood ready with long-swords, axes and hammers held in their jaws, ready to smash armored foes, while smaller wolves carried bundles of spears for stronger throwers to use one at a time to strike their enemies from afar. A good number of them had squirmed into rusting armor, while the younger ones carried stolen buckets, ready to rush to put out the fires in the forest that inevitably came with a human assault on their homes. They were old hands at this, some quite literally. A whole pack of kings made up the mirror of Rabecca’s own veteran core on the wolfish side, muscled brutes in stolen demon armor who had grown strong and towering from gouging on god touched human flesh. Meanwhile many of the rest of the pack where outsiders, come to heed the howl of war with hopes of doing the same. Today, unfortunately, would not be the effortless feast some of the new arrivals expected. The leaders knew this both from experience and from their scouts, who had detected yet more new and strange contraptions among the human ranks, along with strange ones clad in form obscuring cloths. Still, it was their home on the line. That they had learned from howls that had traveled all the way from the north, where the ill prepared kings had burned in a fire, brought low by their own arrogance and passivity. The king of kings, Skullcruncher, would ensure this fate would not befall his realm, no matter what the cost. The hulking beast, big as a rhinoceros, who had a coat white as death and blood red eyes and who carried a heavy warhammer in its jaws, growled instructions past the handle to his weaponless pack caller, who let loose a howl that began their preemptive strike. Whatever the humans had planned, the wolves would strike them hard and fast to ensure it did not come to pass. [hr] They were getting into position now. Rebbeca was familiar enough with this land that she knew exactly where the requested distance from the tree line was, and she’d even made sure they had a hill to park on. Unfortunately, this hill plan had a downside, which was that the larger wheel mounted equivalents of her own new weapon were proving a pain to drag up there. Worse, the hybrid forces were getting in the way of each other as they tried to set up a battle line, which was exactly the worst time to get ambushed by wolves appearing from the underbrush on their left side. It was also exactly when Rebbeca had expected they would be ambushed, so while the majority of the force scrambled to respond to her commands, the general herself was already aloft with her elites. Instinct had her itching to reach for her twin axes and to dive down into the fray, but she had orders from the council to prioritize weapon testing, and so instead she and her fellow demon juggernauts reached into hip mounted pouches and pulled out one of the set of disks that where held. As practiced/told, she placed the disk at the bottom of the open air channel where the notch of an arrow might have gone if this were a crossbow. Then she raised it and started pulling power from her horn based mana reserves into a set of crystal wires on the handle and fore grip of the weapon, which caused the gemstones lining the flight groove to glow. In response the gemstone ladened stone disk began to hover, held aloft by geokinetic magics, and then started spinning rapidly, charging both the weapon and it’s ammunition with power until a few dozen heartbeats later she pulled the trigger and disk when hurtling towards the incoming wolves. A barrage of a dozen of these scythed forth, hammering into the ground in all but one case where the luckless wolf was bisected by the spinning disk. Then they all exploded. But they didn't just explode. The demons in their haste and lack of real practice with these weapons had chosen a random uncoordinated assortment of disks from the carefully curated set they had been given, resulting in a chaotic cacophony of violence. Some of the disks exploded with chaotic lightning, some in pillars of fire, others tore open fissures into which wolves fell, or caused massive stone spikes to rip out of the ground and impale their hapless foes, while one disk in particular simply liquidated the earth around it into a boiling pool of molten dirt. The utter devastation should have broken the wolves but for a major flaw in execution, and that was that the delay in explosions ment the detonations had mostly gone off at the back of the pack. The front runners barreled on mostly oblivious to anything but the noise, while those close enough or spooked enough to look behind them found their retreat cut off. There was nowhere to go but into the ranks of humans trying to form up ahead of them, and so race on towards them like cornered rats they did. Commoners in tinpot armor scrambled to react, firing off a smattering of crossbow bolts at the incoming enemies while captains shouted for order and beaked engineers demanded they be protected. Rebbeca cursed, slapping another disk into her launcher and ignoring the safety instructions she had been given to charge it as quickly as possible. Her squadmates did the same and, just before the wolves hit, another volley of disks slammed down into the dirt behind them, Rebbeca and over half her squad’s launchers cracking, splitting or in one unlucky case straight up exploding from the misuse. Another maddening eruption of power ripped through the rear of the charging ranks of wolves, far too close for comfort for the humans who those blasts had been intended to aid. When a set of fireproof suit-wearing soldiers pushed into the lines of militia troops and let loose torrents of scolding flame towards the incoming beasts, ignorant or indifferent to who was too close, it all became too much for the freshly mustered troops. The humans broke and fled in response to their physiological damage inflicted by their allies' own weapons, and for a moment Rebbeca was witness to what to her was an absurd sight: human and wolf fleeing together, side by side. Then one of the wolves leapt and slashed down a human who was on its way with a rusted sword, and everything devolved into chaos. Those humans with their wits still with them formed hap-hazard clumps of spears, jabbing at wolves who either tried to flee through the army’s front line or out the back into the open field beyond, and thus right through the soft center, but that was about the limit to the spontaneous coordination. “General! Restore order!” came a shout from Damian, as his armored salamander let loose a torrent of magmaticaly empowered boiling spit into a trio of wolves and his assistants did their best to find shelter behind him, “I cannot work in these conditions!” The demoness grunted with annoyance at his reasoning, but did not disagree in the slightest as that it needed done. “Command team with me! Charge!” she cried out, tossing aside the damaged disk launcher and drawing her twin axes as she plummeted from the sky and into the panicked ranks “Form up! Form up! Stand with me and live to see another day!” She bellowed at the soldiers while bringing her axes down and cleaving a wolf in twain right as one of the flamethrowing masked troopers exploded into a pillar of fire. “Creator’s breath, this is a right bloody mess” [hr] As he thundered across the dead grass towards the fighting Skullcruncher would have had to agree with his opponent's assessment, but for him it was a bloody mess he could at least turn to his advantage. The attempt at a hit and run attack had turned into a chaotic scrambled melee with both sides messed together in an incoherent mass. The wolf wasn't entirely sure why the humans had broken in response to their own attacks, but he wasn't going to sniff a proffered throat, especially one that had prevented the humans from bringing the same weapons they had used on the flankers to bear on his main forces. They did still have other ranged weapons still of course, but these were of the kind the wolf was familiar with and could endure. Light bolts from repeating crossbows rained down, striking down lesser wolves but simply sticking in the thick fur of the kings, or plinking off stolen armor. In retaliation wolves with spears, axes or just heavy branches in their mouths pivoted and then leaped, putting their whole body into overhead tosses of their assorted throwing weapons, which crashed or stabbed down into the shieldless ranks of humans. Heavier crossbow bolts retaliated, these ones held back by more professional troops for just the right range to strike down some of the tougher wolves. Skullcruncher was the target of many, but the wolf had been listening for the telltale human bark to fire and leapt to the side moments before the shots came for him. Then heartbeats later he was upon their ranks, his titanic form and mighty hammer plowing through the pathetic human’s ranks as if they were naught but air. A human with a layer of stone somehow held across their full body suit as armor came at him with a tall axe. They swung it poorly, yet when he moved to block it the stone in its head quadrupled in weight, causing the wolf’s eyes to go wide as the putty human forced him back. But only for a moment. He quickly recovered and swept a paw forwards, batting the human aside, breaking its body with a single swipe and then moved on to continue the reaping. All around him chaos had struck the human front ranks, who were being overwhelmed at the front and harangued from behind by wolves from the opening flanking attack who had regained some of their senses and were trying to regroup with their kin. It was all going down like a clean hunt, the king mused, which was right when he heard a familiar sound. “You! This time you die!” came a shout, drawing Skullcruncher’s gaze to the sky and finding a great muscular blue skinned bronze armored demon swooping towards him. A familiar one. He’d recognize that stupidly long autumnal colored hair trailing dramatically down behind her anywhere. He growled and leapt back as the annoying human came to fight him once again. [hr] “Your reign ends here, White Death!” Rebecca screamed at the top of her lungs, as much out of passionate hatred for her foe as out of a desire to raise morale through her bravado. Then again it was easy to be brave when you were a towering titan of a demon and not a frail human, though against this king of kings, it was practically as if it were a battle of a mundane woman against a plain old wolf. Except her horn and wings, of course, or the fact that the wolf came at her with a massive warhammer held in its jaws. She flapped her wings once to pull herself back out of the way of the blow, trampling a lesser beast as she did, then swung forwards with one of her massive hand axes. The beast blocked it with the steel rod of the hammer as Rebecca cursed whoever had commissioned a hammer like resilient and then gone and died while wielding it, before swinging her other ax, only to get a paw swipe at her leg which knocked her off balance enough for the blow to miss. She cursed and lashed out with a cloven foot in retaliation, forcing the wolf to pounce backwards. Then both of them had to block or dodge as both their allies took that moment to launch shots at their foe, Rebbeca catching a spear with the side of an ax while the wolf shrugged off more obsidian crossbow bolts and charged right in. The demoness brought up her other ax to guard, only for it to be smashed from her grip by the hammer bow. She cursed, and then, already on the back foot, got the other blade knocked out of her hands by a dastardly swipe from the end of the hammer’s handle. “Piz!” she cursed, animal instincts telling her to flee to the skies while her mind knew that if, after her dramatic proclamation, she turned and fled the rest of the army would likely break and rout as well. So instead she dove out of the way of a killing hammer blow and snatched up the first weapon she could find that was her sized: an ax with a spear length handle and a comparatively small head that had a large rock of all things embedded in the core of the ax head. It was weird, but it would do, she thought, not knowing that the blade’s previous owner had fallen trying to slay the very same white wolf that she was up against. She rolled to her feet and faced the wolf king once more, raising the new ax and sweeping it down in one swift motion, feeding power into it as she felt it desired her to do. The wolf raised his hammer to catch the blade on the handle once more, only for them both to be shocked when the super heavy blade, fueled far past its intended limits by Rebbeca’s arch demon levels of mana reserves, smashed right though the handle, utterly ruining itself in the process. Both were stunned at their sudden weaponlessness for a second, but would have gone at it tooth, fist and claw mere heartbeats later had the world had not started exploding. [hr] Skullcruncher snarled, furious that his weapon had been broken by this annoyance. He was going to rip her throat out! Or at least that was the plan before the strange contraptions at the center of the army suddenly started glowing. They were like the ones the annoyance had used to devastate only even larger, having to be wheeled around by teams of humans, which was why it had taken them so long to get into position at the top of the hill. But now they were there and everyone could feel the magical charge in the air as they started charging. Madness, were they going to shoot into the melee? Destroy their own people? The wolf king would not put it past the humans. The truth, however, was far worse. Geomantic magics hurled goat sized disks over the heads of everyone fighting, sending them raining down all across the wolves’ forest home, where they burst into searing pillars of flame that refused to go out no matter how much water was poured onto them. The searing pillars reflected in Skullcruncher’s blood red eyes, the flames beginning to consume his kingdom. To consume his people. The young. The old. The pregnant mothers and their cubs. The battle ground to a halt as anyone not immediately in danger found their eyes inextricably drawn to the building inferno. Close to silence fell across the blood soaked soil. And then the humans started cheering with renewed vicious spirit and the wolves yowling in fear and sadness, their morale shattered by this attack.. And just like that, the battle was over. [hr] Well, it wasn't quite the moment it ended. There were pockets of wolves too trapped to flee to put down, and those that were able to flee back to try and save either the forest, their kin or themselves were not allowed to leave bloodlessly, the beasts being hunted down by the victorious humans as best their forces could muster in their battered state. As was tradition at this point, the victory was swiftly followed by the lighting of bonfires, the victorious general bathing in some of its power while a number of fighters from the ranks who had outdone themselves took the rest of the heat from the burning corpses (or sometimes not quite corpses) of the wolves. As the general stood before the flames, arms outstretched while priests attended to her minor enhancements, Damina approached her: “I can see now why you were having such difficulty, without my inventions, this would have gone quite poorly,” “It is because of your inventions that the left flank collapsed-” Rebbeca began to bite back, but then stopped herself. It was good enough to have someone important recognise the difficulty of what she had been through. So she switched tact and gave a proper analysis “we will need to acclimatize people to them, and make sure they are properly protected in future.” “Agreed. Further refinement both to the new weapons and the military strategy of employing them is needed. The results have been quite spectacular so far, if i do say so myself” the demon said as he gazed to the burning forests, its light reflecting in the volcanic glass of his bodysuit’s goggles “we will simply need to ensure the people are better suited to make use of them” “We’ll have plenty more battles. If this war could be one in one battle I'd have won it long ago” Rebbeca said, as she joined the scientist in admiring the burning woods. Oh how long she had waited to see that, and this, this was only the beginning of the fire they would rise. [hr] Rebecca was wrong. There would be no more battles, or true ones at least. Not here. Not now. Though his winter white coat was peppered with arrows and blackened with scorch marks and soot, Skullcruncher had survived the collapse of his forces on the battlefield. He had survived braving the first fires to pull his people from the ashes. He had survived challenges to his leadership, leaving more wolves dead at his own paws. If he was to survive any longer, if his people were to survive, he and they were going to do the unthinkable. They were going to have to leave the forest behind. Thus as the humans cautiously closed in on the forests, flamethrowers at the ready, they heard howls not of war but of farewell. The southern kingdoms sent dire warnings along the woods to their eastern kin, and then left them as only wolves still stalking the 12th realm. The northerners had burned in one swift execution. The southerners had fought on a brave fight, but they knew a slow death when they saw one. So they gathered their families, packed their stolen gear, and simply left, beginning a mass exodus south into the (to them) unknown lands beyond. Let the humans have their ash heap. They would find a new home in the south. As for the easterners, well, they heard the news on the wind, of tales of gemstones and crystals bristling with power, and thought those sounded quite familiar. The last wolves of the 12th realm (and despite the death in the north and flight in the south, the east held legions far greater still) turned their eyes to the mountains and ships of strange crystals traveling down from them with vengeance in their hearts and hunger in their bellies. And chaos sang out for its misbegotten children in kind [hider=summary] After a long and bloody back and forth slog of a war with the south western wolf kingdoms, Xavior’s forces in the south west of the 12th realm, under the command of a General Rebbeca, have gotten the good stuff, magitek disk launchers (cannons, both wheeled and arch demon carried), flamethrowers and various gimmick weapons and they use them to finally turn the tide of that war in a decisive battle that ends when they bombard the forest home of the wolves with their new artillery, breaking the wolfish moral as that which they were fighting to defend burns anyway. The south west burns and the 12th realm seizes the second flank for its war with the 18th, while the wolves of those soon to be gone woods have packed their things and seek greener pastures to the south, under the leadership of Skullcruncher, known to the humans as the White Death. [/hider] [hider=mp] 5/5, none spent, simply application of last post’s spending spree [/hider]