Chapter 147: 145 – Guerilla Warfare

Hidden within one of Rigport’s many tidal caves, illuminated from above by the light of the moon, and using a small Ignis burner to cook food without fire, Alcerys and Strake hid.

Alcerys now knew why Estoras had been so insistent on her participation in this operation. 

She wasn’t just here to keep a rabid dog in check - she was, as an Inquisitor, as close to a guerilla combat specialist as the Grekurian Statehood’s armed forces got. Quite possibly the best partner for him.

For seven hours, the two of them had rampaged through Rigport’s surrounding lands, at first through forests, then across the seaside. They used the same tried-and-true guerilla tactics, constantly moving and never committing to a single position as to create the illusion of a far larger force.

The most impressive of Sodan’s displays took place three hours into the rampage when they reached an outpost in the middle of its construction, catching a number of geomancers effectively defenseless as they were in the middle of a wall-raising ritual. If they were to just stop, the walls would, at best, collapse - at worst, the reflux of geomantic energies would turn them to stone or make them explode with stone spikes from the inside out. Such risks were the price of what they were doing, drawing on the powers of a leyline to fuel their magnitudinous construction.

Besides them, the fort-in-construction had a respectable number of guards, among which was one Fog-breather. After thoroughly trouncing them all, they took the weapons and bound the arms of those who had survived and gathered them in the middle of the fort, and Strake boasted before them with his armor’s larger-than-life visage to project fear and awe, “All of you wounded - those of you who can - pick yourselves up from the ground. Run. Tell your leaders, you’ll need more men. Pine Tree Riots won’t stand for this besmirchment of our land.”

...And like clockwork, a few of them did indeed stand up and run off. Sodan and Alcerys went on to pretend to be taking over the fort, taking a few minutes to rest before Sodan put on such a convincing show of receiving an emergency aetherwave call that it even made her second-guess the Eye’s judgment of his lie.

In this way they weakened the enemy line and slipped through with ease, creating discord and chaos wherever they went.

Even without actively picking out targets, without a plan beyond reaching their infiltration point into the city on time, they caused untold destruction to occupation forces. What surprised her, though, was the fact that most of them lacked common identifiers to betray a Pateirian affiliation - in fact, they scarcely saw any military Pateirians, but rather mostly merchants and traders.

Strake had somehow repeatedly pushed the armor well past its limitations, even shrugging off firepower that she was certain should’ve penetrated, whereas Alcerys kept up without issue through liberal use of every technique at her disposal. The heat of combat being the catalyst for innovation that it was, she found the lack of a geasic framework for her techniques to be liberating - with the ironclad foundations of what she already knew, it was almost easy to simply iterate on a technique and use it in a new way. Almost. To say it took a few attempts to form a defensive projection was an understatement.

And all the while, Strake’s machine sang. In that single night, he had burned out two of its fuel cells and wreaked permanent damage upon the frame…

...But he had also destroyed fortunes in military equipment and consigned dozens of occupying soldiers to their deaths by putting troop ships to the torch, with Alcerys’s considerable assistance.

At one point they had found themselves in conflict with a captured and repaired Ikesian tank, and Sodan leapt atop the steel beast, trying to pry the engine compartment open. Alcerys had been certain that his suit’s arms would come apart long before he could force it open, knowing herself what a fool’s errand that was - and yet, he managed. Just as she could see the joins of his arms threatening to burst apart, the engine compartment flew open, and he threw stolen grenades right into it.

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...And so, through their efforts behind enemy lines, it came to this. Waiting out the rest of the night in the safety of a tidal cave. Sodan rapidly performed field repairs on his suit as if he knew it better than the back of his hands, then sat it down and leaned on it as he ate.

“What the fuck are you, tankman?” Alcerys eventually asked. 

“Not a cultivator, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he glowered. “Just an old dog that learned a couple new tricks.”

Alcerys had half a mind to question what those pills were, how they allowed him to get such output out of that suit, but… She knew better.  

However, when he pulled out that metal box again to smoke, he saw her glance at its contents - even if only briefly. He brought it up after taking a long pull of a cigarette: “They’re alchemically activated meteoric iron. The pills.”

---

When the tide receded in the early morning, the two snuck out and made their way along the coast, needing only to avoid a few fishermen and patrol parties. Able and willing to simply kill them all without raising the alarm though the two were, they could not afford to raise even the tiniest amount of additional noise.

The city itself had its own walls, even possessing naval blockades intended to halt the advance of ships whose sheer bulk had not been seen in centuries.

All the chaos they had caused would be their shroud, the pattern they had drawn would drag the enemy’s attention away from their true objective - entry into the city through a smuggling tunnel long-abandoned due to its small size and inconvenient placement. 

It was here that they rendezvoused with their contact inside the city, whose sole purpose had been ensuring that the tunnel was not being guarded - in practical terms, he was an aetherwave hobbyist with a dissident streak and few to none other applicable skills beyond being too reclusive to be under suspicion. 

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