Origin Witch - Invaders From 665
“Organized PMC,” Corinne muttered into the wind. “Caldwell’s vanguard.”
Damp wind off the granite ridge smelled like scorched iron and wet copper. She glided through the high pine canopy forty yards above the forest floor, her body hanging weightless in the cool morning air. Her paralyzed legs swung under the dark linen tunic, rocking side to side as she rolled her shoulders to steer south. Inside her Pouch of Preservation, forty glass vials clinked with a soft rhythmic sound, a heavy metallic note that cut through the rustle of pine needles.
Below her, the southern border of Sector 666 was burning. A thick column of black smoke rose from the clearing near the old stone ford, where an independent gatherer’s drying shed had been reduced to glowing orange embers. Three hundred yards south, beyond where the hundred-foot silver fog had sat for a month before dissolving at dawn, the jagged granite cliffs of Sector 665 rose like a wall of broken teeth.
And coming down the rocky slope from those cliffs was an army.
Corinne pulled her black frames up her nose, blue-tinted lenses zooming across the four-mile gap to read the incoming formation. Thirty men in full military order advanced down the dry riverbed in two tight disciplined ranks. Not mismatched leather jackets or wooden clubs like Mickey Callahan’s dead thugs. These wore heavy interlocking steel breastplates that gleamed gray under the morning sun, steel greaves over their shins, high-viz tactical harnesses strapped over gray camouflage fatigues. The front rank carried eight-foot iron-tipped pikes and broad rectangular tower shields of thick riveted sheet iron.
Behind the shield wall walked a squad leader in a clean khaki tunic with brass buttons, holding an iron-reinforced megaphoned horn.
She didn’t stop her flight. She angled her torso downward, dropping ten yards lower into the shadow of a broad oak branch, and watched the clash unfold at the narrow granite choke point near the creek ford.
Garrett Thorne and twelve men from his ridge war-band held the gap between two massive boulders. Garrett sat at the center on a flat granite stone, his broad chest bare, his five-foot storm-blade resting against his shoulder. His men held wooden hunting bows and heavy iron axes, boots planted firm in the gray mud of the ford.
“Hold the line!” Garrett’s booming voice echoed up through the trees. “Don’t break formation. Let them step into the narrow water.”
The vanguard squad leader stepped to the front of the iron shield wall, raising his horn. His voice boomed across the creek, loud, sterile, dripping with military authority. “Attention, armed insurgents of Sector 666. By decree of General Caldwell and the High Command of the Iron-Ridge Coalition, Sector 666 is hereby placed under martial annexation. Lower your weapons and lay your hands flat on your heads. All raw timber, mineral deposits, and alchemical processing facilities within this sector are now property of the Coalition. Resistance will be met with lethal force.”
“Eat shit, sergeant!” one of Garrett’s bowmen yelled back, loosing a heavy iron arrow.
The arrow slammed flat against the center of a rectangular tower shield with a heavy thwack.
“Testudo, move!” the vanguard leader commanded, cold, unbothered by the arrow. “Advance three paces. Lock shields. Clear the ford.”
Iron met iron with a ringing clang.
The front rank of fifteen armored soldiers slammed their broad iron shields together, forming an unbroken wall of steel and riveted iron that spanned the entire fifteen-foot width of the granite gap. Eight-foot iron pikes extended through the narrow slots, a bristling hedge of metal pushing forward through the shallow water with heavy rhythmic steps.
“Fire!” Garrett roared, face flushing dark red as his war-band loosed a volley of eight arrows.
Clang. Clang. A body hit the mud.
Every arrow bounced off the interlocking iron plates like hail on a tin roof. The vanguard didn’t break stride. They moved forward like a thirty-ton steamroller, iron pikes thrusting through the gaps, forcing Garrett’s men back three steps into the gray mud.
“They’re too thick!” a war-band fighter yelled, his axe bouncing off an iron shield boss in a shower of orange sparks. “Their plates are three-eighths mild steel. Our hand axes can’t cut through.”
“Hold the gap!” Garrett shouted, swinging his five-foot storm-blade in a broad desperate arc that struck two pike tips, snapping the wooden shafts with a loud crack. “Don’t let them push into the open timber.”
High above the creek, floating twenty yards over the center of the Iron-Ridge shield wall, Corinne adjusted her wire frames.
“Three-eighths mild steel,” she whispered to the wind. “Riveted iron. Tactical harnesses.”
She reached into her Pouch of Preservation. Her muddy fingers bypassed her health vials, bypassed her mana vials, and closed around three round yellow glass throw-tubes in the padded leather loops. Grade-E Offense Potion: Corrosive Slowness Decoction.
She didn’t shout a warning. Didn’t announce herself. Didn’t call on Garrett Thorne to step back.
Corinne leaned her upper body forward, tilted her head down, and released the first yellow vial.
The glass tube dropped forty feet through the morning air, a tiny amber streak against the pale sky.
The spear took him with a wet, tearing rip.
The vial hit the exact point where two broad iron tower shields locked at the center of the vanguard’s front rank. The round glass shattered. A thick blinding cloud of mustard-yellow acidic sludge erupted outward in a three-meter burst, sticking to the iron plates, the steel greaves, the leather harness straps, the bare skin of the soldiers’ forearms.
A long, spiteful hiss rose from the shield wall—the sound of three hundred copper kettles boiling over at once as dense sulfurous green smoke billowed off and the concentrated acidic flower sap and wolf-bile ate through the iron.
“WHAT THE, MY SHIELD!” a vanguard soldier screamed, dropping his broad iron plate as the acid ate through his leather wrist straps, sizzling into his skin. “ACID. IT’S ACID.”
“STAY IN FORMATION,” the squad leader barked, voice rising in panic. “RAISE SHIELDS OVERHEAD. COVER THE.”
Corinne dropped two more vials.
Two more fell, wet and sudden.
The second and third yellow tubes hit the rear rank of armored infantry. The mustard sludge splashed across their steel breastplates. The high-acidity fluid ate through the rivets holding the shoulder plates, fusing hot metal to the cotton fatigues beneath. The one hundred percent Neural Drag of the slowness decoction hit thirty men at once.
Their Agility dropped three points at once.
Armored soldiers who had advanced with parade-ground precision suddenly froze. Their legs felt encased in wet concrete. A soldier trying to drop his melting shield found his arms moving in slow motion, fingers twitching helplessly against the sizzling leather handles.
“MY LEGS,” a pike-man shrieked, falling forward into the shallow creek as his steel greaves fused to his ankles. “I CAN’T MOVE MY LEGS.”
“AIRBORNE,” a rear scout screamed, pointing a trembling hand up at the high canopy. “TARGET IN THE SKY. WHITE DRESS. THIRTY YARDS UP.”
The vanguard squad leader whipped his iron horn around, eyes on the high branches.
Hovering twenty yards directly above his head was a girl in a dark gray tunic. Her motionless legs hung beneath her like dead weights, black hair blowing in the wind, dark eyes unblinking behind a pair of black frames.
In her right hand she held two more glass vials, these glowing with a bright violent orange light. Grade-E Offense Potion: Flame Potion.
Corinne opened her fingers.
The two orange vials plunged straight down into the center of the trapped, acid-burned vanguard formation.
The charge landed with a hollow, wooden crack.
A five-meter pool of sticky white-hot incendiary fire erupted across the shallow water of the ford. The Fire-Bell sap and raw sulfur dust didn’t just burn. The sticky orange syrup adhered to dissolved iron plates, melting tactical harnesses, oiled fatigues, burning at eight hundred degrees Celsius. The shallow creek water didn’t put the fire out. It boiled instantly, sending plumes of scalding steam into the soldiers’ lungs.
“AAAGH. GET IT OFF. GET IT OFF ME.”
“RETREAT. FALL BACK TO THE CLIFFS.”
“MY ARMOR IS MELTING. JESUS CHRIST MY ARMOR IS MELTING.”
The Iron-Ridge Coalition’s invincible vanguard, thirty men in full military gear who had marched across the border reading a sheepskin annexation decree, shattered into a screaming thrashing mass of burning acid-soaked iron. Soldiers tore at their own breastplates, skin peeling off with the hot metal as they fell into the shallow water, screaming as the slowness decoction kept them from crawling away.
Garrett Thorne sat in the narrow granite gap, his five-foot storm-blade lowered, broad jaw hanging wide as he stared at the roaring pool of orange fire and melting steel twenty feet ahead. His war-band fighters backed up two steps, hunting bows lowered, eyes wide with raw terror as they looked up at the girl floating in the sky above them.
“Mother of God,” Garrett whispered, raspy voice shaking as he wiped cold mud off his cheek. “She didn’t just stop them. She melted them.”
Corinne didn’t drop a sixth vial. She stayed suspended twenty yards in the air, hand resting on the hilt of her Moonstone Carver, watching the twelve surviving vanguard soldiers haul their acid-burned screaming comrades out of the boiling creek and scramble back toward the Sector 665 cliffs like beaten dogs.
The annexation decree lay in the shallow water of the ford, charred, soaked in yellow acid foam, unreadable.
Corinne glided down through the steam, stopping five feet above the wet granite beside Garrett Thorne.
“The border is clear,” she said. Her voice was flat, calm, devoid of emotion, as if she had just checked the temperature on an iron cauldron.
Garrett looked at her, then at the smoking pile of melted iron plates in the creek, and swallowed hard.
“They’ll be back, Corinne,” Garrett rasped, hand tightening around the leather hilt of his storm-blade. “General Caldwell has three hundred men on that plateau. He has mortar stations.”
“Let him bring them,” Corinne said, spectacles reflecting the fading orange embers in the mud. “My cauldrons are still hot.”
She dropped the last two paces to the granite and landed light on her dangling heels beside him, the leaf-mark barely flickering. She crouched at the water’s edge, scooped the charred sheepskin decree out of the foam between two fingers, and let it fall back to float. “Next time he sends paper, tell him I don’t read proclamations. I read casualty counts.” She turned and walked the five paces back to the tree line, Steelwool dropping from a branch to ride her shoulder, leaving Garrett standing in the steam with the smoking ruins of thirty men behind him.
— Origin Witch —