Chapter 1392 — The Dust Has Yet to Settle
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 5
The gentle voices of the elven twins reached Bolken as though from another world, so distant did they seem—this hall lay at the very depths of the whole flesh-construct, where countless neural links ran inward from every part of that vast, misshapen body, streaming seas of data into Bolken's mind. Among that torrent were not only the construct's own perceptions and its surveillance of the entire battlefield, but also the dark priests down in the depths undergoing their fusion. Though all of them had spent the past while adjusting themselves toward mental assimilation, compared with true "becoming one" they still possessed separate minds, and to gather those up and comb them into a single whole was, for Bolken, a task of enormous difficulty.
The attack from the Deep Blue Well arrived—the counterblow of that ancient wraith hiding in its steel fortress. High-intensity energy beams focused on the crown of the construct, as though seeking to destroy the organ that launched the "Calamity Magic Bullet." Several organs meant for raising shields activated their energy barriers in time; though they themselves swiftly burned out from overload, the attack from the Deep Blue Well was successfully held off.
The damaged tissue then began to repair itself, and astonishing quantities of biomass were pumped up from deep underground and converted into layer upon layer of additional carapace. Bolken carried out these operations with mechanical precision—power and ability he could never have imagined as a former human, and now all of it was his to command. In the gaps between half-waking and half-dreaming, he pondered his present existence... He felt as though he were a god.
A burst of psychic communication arrived at the construct from afar, and from it Bolken read the mass death-signals of mutants and bio-synthetic beasts, along with that powerful impact unique to "fire from heaven falling to earth."
It was the Cecilians. They had pushed as far as the scorched plains of the North and were setting up their purification devices there. The Wasteland Legion left behind had only the most basic instinct to kill, and lacking heavy units, they had held out less than a day against the mortal army's assault—an outcome he had expected. They were fodder to begin with; the only regret was that this fodder had accomplished far less than anticipated.
Somewhere in the "brain chamber," a neural node gave off a dim red glow, and Bolken's will became a psychic wave, racing north along the underground root network that crisscrossed the land—there were no dark priests left there capable of command. The ends of the root network connected only to one large neural node possessed of basic intelligence, and that node, buried deep underground, could exercise the most rudimentary control over mutants and bio-synthetic beasts within a certain range—in essence, no more than keeping those basic units from going completely "feral."
This way, at least, the Wasteland Legion deployed in the outlying regions could still serve some purpose in blocking and delaying the mortal army.
Having issued the order to regroup the troops for delaying tactics, Bolken's consciousness returned to the battlefield before him—the Order had abandoned every gain it had won abroad to date, abandoned more than seventy percent of the wasteland's territory, abandoned everything that could be abandoned, all for the sake of this one battle. Yet in truth... this was not the future Bolken had originally envisioned.