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The chapter turned out to be rather more 'shooty' than I planned at first.

Unan watched the swarm of zombies carefully through her army issued spyglass, ignoring the nervous yipping of the rekis all around her. The tension of the cavalry of the North Expedition army was wound so tight she felt like bursting. Even if the zombies were quiescent, the platoon were sitting only a few hundred meters away from a thousand zombies, outnumbered five to one. The days when that was good odds were over.

Cavalry charges against the zombie light beams were bad, the same against the likes of the new Minmay guns would be disastrous. Proud, and expensive, reki cavalry had been reduced to highly maneuverable infantry. The only reason why these parties had managed to keep their mounts at all was because they had all been recruited by King Ektal. The 'platoon' was roughly two hundred riders, far far beyond the party size limit but no one seemed to care about that nowadays.

Minmay had seemingly given up on cavalry altogether.

Today however, they would be given the chance to redeem the reputation of reki cavalry.

Their signal started with a streak of flame rising from the main army line with a dull wail. Seconds later, a blossom of flame erupted above the main body of the zombies, bursting upon contact with their disruption aura, as if a fireshell had somehow been delivered on top of the zombies. The bright popping sound of the rocket exploding rolled over the cavalry group less than a second later.

The shower of fire was deformed and wavered like a cloud in a breeze, sliding outwards around the now visible edge of the aura. The swarm stirred like a nest of disturbed monsters.

There was no respite however. A chorus of wails preceded a storm that Unan had never seen before.

The cavalry's rekis had been trained to tolerate the sounds of a rocket during the various tests and ranging calibrations at Fort Yang, but this was something altogether too much. Black dots rained down from the sky, bursting above the zombies. The bangs started with a light patter and quickly accumulated into a continuous roll. Individual flames merging into a bright flare of burning fire and a rising cloud of smoke. Rockets that missed the swarm mostly did so to the east, sending columns and cones of fire hammering into the empty ground.

In seconds, it was over and the rekis had yet to really begin panicking.

Unan patted down her reki and brought the telescope up to her eyes again. The cloud of smoke covering the zombie swarm was still lit from below, flickering lights of living fire that she knew would burn for minutes.

This was the result of a mere hundred rockets. Gossip said that Minmay was wanting thousands of rockets once the design was proven. If they were used on human armies... for a moment, Unan imagined a scene of lines of trenches under a sky that rained fire and steel.

Then her musing was cut short. The zombies were charging out of the smoke clouds, right at her platoon! And the swarm was barely diminished!

"Mount up!" Unan shouted, the yelping and nervous rekis starting to settle down at the prospect of finally seeing action. Her mount rose up under her as she surveyed the enemy one more time. There was something about the zombies that was nagging at her.

It took seconds before the platoon commander realized that there were no light beams. The rockets might not have killed many zombies but it had collapsed the aura, hence why the zombies were blindly charging like they always did without the aura.

"The zombie aura is gone! Form up and prepare to counter-charge!" Unan shouted again, the looks of surprise and then understanding rippling through the line of cavalry.

Her saber slid out of its sheath with a steely whisper, catching a flash of sun as she raised it upwards. The zombies were still coming onwards. Let them come. The cavalry would ride to victory this day.

"Now is the time we reclaim our honour! The enemy is in disarray! Onwards, to victory and glory!" Unan cried.

Her saber flashed downwards.

Cato arranged the last few tiles in the command panel, filling the line with blank spacers.

Four hundred and twenty lines of wooden tiles, each with three groups of eight plus two. This was the new control method for magic circles.

Rather reminiscent of moveable type actually. Each of the tiles denoted a number or control character. In sequence, each line thus comprised of three numbers of eight digits each, separated with a divider control character.

Each line was one command, either to use a specific enchantment function, position or variables to follow, skip to a specified line, read or write to the register. There were almost too many commands to list. The compiler in fact had gotten so complex that it had been broken up into smaller more manageable portions.

The last one, the main enchanter portion, had been completed on this expedition while waiting for supplies to catch up to the army.

The whole magic circle version two was rather more of a hackjob than Cato would have liked. Despite their high hopes initially, when it came time to actually build the thing, unforeseen difficulties and mistakes multiplied faster than rabbits. There were some portions in that mess of a compiler that Landar had built by hand and not with a generation one circle!

The first thing they were making with the second generation magic circle was one of Cato's other projects. Something that might get the Iris's approval.

One of the favourite ways of the Iris to use a summoning stone they couldn't reach the power requirements of by themselves was to borrow magic from other sources. Before the advent of mass production and storage of magic, the Iris had obtained contributions from their less powerful members in large 'rituals' in order to power the Ritual Class summoning stones. That was where the name had originated from. Charged staffs had also been another option, though expensive.

When magic crystals and compressed magic had gone on sale, the practice merely became widespread. Every single summoning stone the summoner clans had were deployed now, lesser stones handed to lower power members and the more powerful reserved for the stronger.

The reason for that was due to the nature of summoning stones. Every stone needed a summoner to feed the magic to it, a simple direct feed of the sort that Cato's magic circles and Landar's spell cannons used did not suffice. Even the Ritual Class, while able to accept magic from other casters, required special structures to contribute magic.

And every stone was different. Each one had different optimal rates of power draw, different ways of connecting to them and other tricks that reminded Cato of makeshift computer programs. 'Magic' numbers everywhere. Much of the summoner clan's training, when not for power, was in learning the characteristics of summoning stones and how to control their assigned stone.

Why did this Sword stone require a three to two ratio in the two power transfer spots while the other one was equal? Who knew? The Iris had found out through long experiment what the best way was, and that was it. Cato had collated what data he could by interviewing the summoners on the trip about how their stones and other stones they remembered were controlled.

The survey had yielded some minor information. The methods of controlling the stones could be divided into a few patterns that were often grouped together. The three to two ratio for main power was often paired with a control mechanism that used the magnitude of power fed into the control spots. The one to one was grouped with either a magic signature measurement or a series of different structures that denoted a value that was set until changed later.

Cato was reminded of the computer software and how manufacturers applied their own styles to each series. The subtle differences were probably then due to the different versions or something like that. That effect was most obvious in the ubiquitous Sword stones, since it was possible to find duplicates among them and form a trace of possible version changes, though patchy.

All this wasn't really new to the Iris. Only Cato's familiarity of how software evolved over time gave some sort of possible explanation for why, though completely without proof. A plausible hypothesis.

The stones were not freeform programmable devices like Cato's magic circles. They were single function devices with fixed communication protocols that were reverse engineered and barely understood. When put that way, the parallels to a custom electronic chip was obvious.

Cato... was going to sidestep all of that. While it was tempting to try to build an easier interface for controlling a summoning stone, there were just so many complexities that he didn't want to step into that mess.

Instead Cato was going to make a casting aid. His device would mimic a portion of the usage of summoning stones, or more precisely be controlled by the caster into providing one of the six most common types of magical structures used to provide main power to summoning stones. The caster would be responsible for determining variables like the ratios of power provided or when to change it, as well as all the control. His device would draw extra power from the linked power storage.

The intended effect was to allow the Iris to draw safely from external power. Since they would usually draw that power into their body before shaping it into the structure required by the summoning stone in question, this put them at risk of overcharge. The current upper limit of external power was thus determined by how much the overdraw exceeded the summoner's limit as well as how long the power had to be retained.

This power was obviously much higher than the sustained lethal overcharge limit that was used in Kupo's training method.

Stronger summoners could withstand greater overcharge, and their longer training often meant they could move more magic in a shorter period of time, thus they could charge their stones to a much greater maximum power. Though if they didn't dump that power into the stone quickly, they would also rapidly overheat and die. When Cato learnt of it, and how every time Landar drew on external power for a stone, she risked killing herself, he was determined to fix this.

Cato would rather his prospective wife didn't try to kill herself.

Calling it 'normal practice' did not mean he would accept her risking her life if she got distracted while drawing power. He was willing to bet that the Tsarians didn't risk themselves this way either.

Cato looked at the rows of number tiles again, checking for errors.

The first prototypes always had them.

Today was not a good day.

Enay breathed slowly, trying to get himself to focus. The tiny group of zombies were far far away but it was his task to shoot them down.

Once more, Enay cursed his mouth that seemed to just run itself whenever the backup scout looked at him. Farnee was attractive, her body he could die for and that tail, it was so full and fluffy! She clearly knew the effect she had on him but seemed to ignore it. It only made her more attractive, not just because she was pretty but that Farnee gave him a challenger that was quickly catching up to his tracking and shooting skills.

Talking about the awesome targeting abilities of the Model 2S variant Enay had purchased with his pay had finally got the commander to snap and ask Enay to demonstrate it. They ran into a small group of zombies soon enough, common as they were, and now Enay had to make good on his boast.

It wasn't his fault that the gun was just so cool! And his gun was the coolest of them all! It better be after Enay had sunk three months of pay into customizing it. A ranging spyglass, a set of sights with range bars calibrated specifically for this gun, inertial overcharge mode to reduce gravity drop, the new rust resistant steel barrel, with an extension and a bipod to balance it. This gun was almost as pretty as Farnee herself! Think of all the things that Enay could hunt with it!

But the toys were fragile and did not often get a chance to play in war time.

So here he was, lying on the ground with twenty top of the line flechette rounds, that had cost him a week's pay due to their frankly ridiculous manufacturing tolerances. Twenty shots that could make the range, on a good day, with fifteen targets.

With steady hands, Enay laid the shots out on a cleaned rock next to him. Fifteen in a row. He fingered the next and looked up at the platoon watching him. Farnee was there and looking curiously at him. Her ears twitched enticingly.

Screw it, he only got to live once. Enay put the sixteenth bullet back into the box. It would be embarrassing if his even more ridiculous boast was proven wrong but if he won? Well, wouldn't that be impressive?

It was time to destroy some zombies.

Enay sighted through the spyglass at the figures in the distance. The hardy grasses and lack of trees this far from the river gave an open sight line all the way to the zombies. He observed the range markings in the spyglass bracketing the target's head. Sized for a human, the markings showed the zombies were almost half a kilometer away. Maybe twenty meters closer than five hundred? Three marks then.

The wind ruffled Enay's ears and tail, reminding him of the patchy scarred fur on his tail and ears. At range five hundred, that might be half a mark left. The smell of dry sand was overpowering, but Enay put it out of mind.

Enay fingered the first bullet and clicked it into the gun with practiced movements and sighted down the long range sights he had added to the front of his longer barrel. Welded in place, the sight was an annoying protrusion and its zeroing was delicate. But the sight would prove its worth. Set inertia to double charge, halve all corrections.

Elevation, up a bit, correct. Breathe slowly, steady...

Follow the target...

The first crack seemed to be far away, as if Enay was hearing it from a room away instead of the barrel right next to his head. The observing platoon around him jumped, though Enay didn't notice. A second later, the zombie he was aiming at folded in half as the inertia bullet sailed in, undisturbed with the zombie group lacking aura, to gouge a hole the size of a head in its lower back.

"Hit. " said the spotter. Farnee's lovely voice. Ah, so she was counting the score? Then there was no reason to disappoint her.

In the calibration range, Enay had made shots this far. He could do it. Almost in a daze, Enay fingered the next bullet. Another crack, another hit, another kill. The inertia bullets were so powerful that a hit anywhere on the body was a certain kill.

"Hit. " "Hit. " "Hit. "

With each hit, the woman's calm voice wavered not at all. Even as the platoon descended into a tense silence, all of them silently cheering their squad mate on. As the streak grew hit by hit, Enay's budding legend was growing with it. The zombies had turned to them and were charging, but the gun continued its methodical work. Crack. Crack.

None of that mattered to Enay.

It was all a high of one perfect shot after another. He barely felt his fingers as they loaded the next flechette, fingering the vanes. The gun vibrated as he aimed at the next target, the world shrank into Enay, his gun, the sights and the target. The zombies moved in the open, almost obligingly offering themselves up to the invisible scythe hunting them one by one. Rekis' heads blew apart, humans had their bodies mangled.

Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.

Enay could feel the count rising and the bullets depleting. Fourteen shots, fourteen hits, fourteen kills.

The last bullet went into the rails. Enay sighted the last zombie. A human child body.

Almost before he pressed the trigger, he knew he had misfired. Perhaps it was a gust of wind, or a stray grain of sand in the barrel. The intuitive sense Enay had told him it was a miss before the bullet even struck.

The zombie jerked but did not go down. A puff of sand and shattered rock splashed across the landscape behind it.

Enay grabbed his ranging spyglass. To his surprise, the 'miss' actually hit the hand. The zombie was missing it's left hand entirely. But it wasn't a kill.

The streak was over.

And Enay's boast of only needing fifteen bullets was just a failure.

His unconscious sigh was interrupted by a pat on the shoulder. Enay glanced up from his prone position to find Farnee giving him a gentle smile. A small pang of regret and doubt leaked in, perhaps he had reached too far? He should have taken twenty bullets and now everyone knew he was just some overeager kid-

Farnee nudged him again and Enay finally focused on her hand and what was in her fingers.

A flechette bullet from the box.

Enay hesitated only for a moment before it. In one swift motion he didn't remember, the head flew off the last zombie. The lone zombie fell less than three hundred meters away.

"Well done," Kobel said, lowering his own spyglass. The older human commander gave Enay a thumbs up.

And as the platoon erupted into cheers at the incredible shooting, Farnee patted Enay on the head, mind his disfigured ears. The smile on her face was the most beautiful thing in the world, except for one. Enay smiled back and began to pack up his true love.

Today was a good day after all.

Clan Two's scouts had conveyed the ruins' locations quite clearly throughout the march. However, the sight of the stone walls in the distance was a welcome sight. Less welcome than the shoes that had finally arrived, however.

Of course, the zombies just couldn't let the Ektal army have the city uncontested. They ran into increasingly frequent groups that had to be reduced and wiped out individually. Erin, in her capacity as the overall commander, could say the knights and guards were getting used to fighting the zombies.

On the other hand, the zombies seemed to have run out easy fodder. No large armies of zombies were encountered, the complex structures in the aura only gave minor improvements to the living fire resistance they had already displayed. Zombie nightcryers were also increasingly rare. With the new portable mist shields and every fighter carrying a new model gun or better, the army reached the city with almost no losses.

"All right, now that we're here, we're clearing the ruins of zombies and begin preparations to set up a fort," Erin said to the gathered commanders of the five divisions as well as the leaders of the special groups like the cavalry and summoners.

She gestured at the rough map of the city laid out on the low table. The commanders were seated around the table, making the command tent a little stuff.

"There's more than a thousand buildings still standing in the city. The majority of the collapsed buildings are here, with this quadrant of the city mostly burnt down. The Elkas previously reported seeing movement and damaged zombies in most areas, but no large numbers. We'll have to split up through the city and destroy them all. Unfortunately, because we want to learn as much as we can of the people who lived here, as well as to conserve the fireshells for battles, we can't simply raze the city with spell cannons. "

"Each division will divide into squads of fifteen soldiers and clear their assigned sectors. Every second squad should have one flame auxiliary, I made sure there were enough of them. The squads are to enter each building to retrieve surviving artifacts, records or anything of interest. If there is too much resistance, then have the auxiliary torch the building. I'll rather lose out on a few artifacts than accept losses, understood?"

She looked around and got a series of nods. Good. The flame auxiliaries were high pressure flamethrowers fresh from Minmay. They fired streams of living fire that was also magically charged with disruption. Zombie or humans, stone or metal, nothing withstood them for long. The downside was their short range and limited ammunition. In open battles facing light beams or guns, they were of limited use. But in city or trench fighting, they were perfect. Erin had ordered two hundred units just for this.

"Bicycles will be provided to carry messages and each exploring division is to check in hourly at minimum. Each squad will also carry a flare in case of emergency. The Minmay 2nd Guard division will be exempt from the exploration, to form a fast response unit. Summoners, please stay with the 2nd Guard, if anything nasty pops out, we'll be relying on you to crush them. Spell cannons are to set up on this hill just outside the city. Cavalry form a perimeter around the city and scout for any roaming bands. "

Erin looked at the various division commanders of the army. Each of them had been slowly forging their divisions in the grind of the constant small attacks. There were few people in this camp who had not fired a gun at a zombie in this expedition.

"We have come a long way from our country Ektal. We have fought many monsters and learned how to deal with them. We are no longer inexperienced militia and parties, we're proper soldiers in an army now. This foothold is not just to satisfy our curiousity about these lands beyond the Snow Wall. It is more than just contacting those who live here. If we can hold our ground against the hordes coming our way, we can show that humanity is not just holding the line. We show that we can push back the monsters and reclaim the world!"

The commanders glanced at each other before bowing to her.

"We got monsters to kill. "

Kobel crept forwards, inspecting the half-collapsed house suspiciously. He waved a torch inside the gloom of the late afternoon sun, noting with satisfaction that the fire did not waver unnaturally.

When nothing stirred inside and no magic was felt, he waved back at the previously cleared building. The rest of the squad showed up in a patter of feet.

"You see anything?" the squad leader asked the Enay behind him. The scout was the only person from Kobel's unit, the scouts having been broken up amongst the exploring squads for maximum coverage.

"Not really," Enay replied, squinting into the ruin. "I still have a bad feeling about this place. "

Considering that this area of ruins showed the most zombie movement reported by the Elkas, that was obvious.

"So do the rest of us. Well, same as last time, flamer stays outside, the rest of us will check the place. Remember, we're looking for any surviving paper or items that might identify the people. Go!"

The squad moved carefully into the building, checking the ground and ceiling in case of collapse. Meanwhile Kobel walked up to the collapsed section, two other Ektal men flanking him from behind. There was something about the rubble here that...

He spotted a rotted hand in the fallen stone and almost without thought, his gun snapped up into shooting position. The rest of the squad tensed at his motion, bayonets readied and fingers over their fireshells.

"It's just a hand," he said after a while without anything moving. Kobel moved to set fire to the body part with his torch.

Enay shouted at the same time as the hand twitched. Magic rose around the rubble and the hand, to the Fuka, it seemed as if the hand was spewing clouds of black mist.

Kobel scrambled back as the squad rushed to him. "Guns ready!" he screamed.

A row of metal sticks were raised at the motion.

"Set to inertia! We're blowing this rubble away!" Kobel shouted as the rubble began to shift ominously. He unhooked a fireshell and held his fingers on the safety pin.

"Fire!"

The sound of nearly simultaneous shots was deafening in the semi-enclosed half of the building. The rubble exploded as the inertia bullets tore through the collapsed stone and threw up gouts of shattered rock.

What was revealed nearly made the soldiers threw up. Instead of the expected dead bodies, there was just a mash of bones and rotting flesh. The bullets had broken the surface layer but no further. Hostile magic rose up, thick and cloying.

"Everyone out!" Kobel shouted. Better safe than sorry when facing something new.

The wisdom of that practice became obvious as the bones began to move. As the last one to leave, he pulled the safety pin and threw the fireshell at the horror before turning to run. The flare of heat and light behind his back as he dived out of the doorway was only scant comfort. He knew fire was less effective when the zombie magic was present.

"Kill it! Kill it with fire!" Kobel yelled, "everyone, fire at will!"

A patter of bullet cracks began to fill the air as the squad reloaded and fired as fast as they could. The vague movement beyond the flames was large and threatened to burst through. The motion was interrupted when the woman holding the flamer nozzle opened fire.

The stream of glowing liquid shot into the building like a bar of hot light, enchanted living fire accelerated with magic into a burning spear stabbing into the darkness. Almost like a human answer to the searing light beams. Immediately, the building exploded with flames as the pressurized pyrophoric liquid went everywhere.

The rain of bullets slowed to a halt.

"You think we got it?"

Kobel glanced at Enay beside him. "No. Fireshell launchers!"

The squad began fitting the fireshells to their guns. The new model gun that was now everywhere had been slightly modified to fit a protrusion on the fireshell into the bullet slot. Along with a spike to hold the pin, this allowed the almost every gun in the expedition army to shoot fireshells further than anyone could throw.

Or in this case, as the building's front collapsed under the weight of a flaming horror, blast something at point blank.

The blast of hot liquid joined the blasts of detonating fireshells as the squad fired almost instinctively. Kobel instead unhooked the flare gun from his jacket and shot a shining star into the sky.

"Scatter!" Kobel commanded as the horror disappeared under the conflagration but kept coming on. Enay disappeared down the street with a rush of Em. The rest of the squad broke up into twos and threes as they scurried away. The horror kept rising and getting bigger.

As the surface of the thing sloughed off under the intense heat, Kobel got his first look at the new and latest zombie monster. The thing was an amalgation of bones, dead flesh, stone and the strange zombie crystals. It looked something like a worm, if worms had stubby legs and were three meters in diameter.

Where had all the dead flesh for this thing come from? Kobel wondered as he worked his gun constantly. Safely ensconed in the cleared building beside him was Enay and one other Ektal militia, some woman he didn't remember the name of. Their shots did practically nothing, each bullet shattering a bone or piece of stone on the surface, which fell off only to reveal more below.

Did the thing even have limbs to destroy or a skeleton to shatter? The legs seemed to grow out of the main mass like streams out of a pond. Could it even be disabled like normal zombies or did they have to go through and destroy every piece of the thing? The bony worm whipped around as shots impacted across it from all sides, the scattered squad taking shots wherever they could, no matter how useless their efforts seemed. It faced the woman carrying the tank of living fire, the strongest source of magic in the squad, and paused.

Then the front of the thing opened up to reveal a jagged maw lined with crystals and screamed.

Rather than roar like a threatened animal, the scream was high thin whine accompanied with a low rumble. It dug into Kobel's ears like shards of glass, and resonated in his bones. It sounded both like a desperate dying cry and the chest rumbling growl of a reki on the hunt. A predator out to kill and a promise of a horrible death to all.

Every person in the squad, and most of the neighbour squads rushing to the action, was struck by an impalpable dread. This was what was outside the safe fire light of civilization, this was what awaited them in the wild lands. This was the monster that children feared lurked in the dark.

The bullets died down to a trickle.

But one woman stood up against the horrible scream, her mist shield held in front of her. The flamer yelled back in defiance, her metal hose erupting into a beacon of light that stabbed into the thing's crystalline maw.

A glow that wasn't the white-yellow of living fire shone through the cracks in the thing's rock and bone carapace. Kobel felt his blood drain from his face, loading his gun as fast as he could. "Fire now!" he screamed, aiming for the glow, "maximum overcharge!"

The three shots of bullets accelerated far beyond their design limitations were each as loud as the whole squad firing at once. Head sized chunks of bone and rock blew off the bone worm and sections simply fell off as their supports failed. The glow didn't stop.

The glow discharged in a cone of brilliant light that engulfed the stream of flames and much of the pebbled street. The woman disappeared in a fireball as her flamethrower and all her fireshells detonated at once.