Chapter 154: Battle of the Citadel

Chapter 154: Battle of the Citadel

Izumi tried not to hold her breath as she used a distant Pod to watch her Behemoth advance. All of the Behemoths were advancing, ponderously marching into the no man’s land around the Dark Citadel, but Izumi had insisted on putting herself in one the lead Behemoths. Less out of courage and more out of the fact she stood a far better chance than most of surviving if her Behemoth went down to defensive fire. High-Com hadn’t liked the idea much, or even the idea of her participating at all given her value to the Terran Alliance as a whole. But they hadn’t been able to argue her out of it, given how much they were throwing at this venture and how powerful she was on a personal level.

Just how much they were committing was something she could see from her overhead view.

Their armor battalions alone were enough to clog the approaches to the Citadel. The Zilts hadn’t been stupid when they’d built their fortress. They’d reshaped a large plateau that had only three approaches, planted their city-fortress in a center, and cleared a kill zone all around it. All three of those approaches had roads, thick ones, which served the Fortress. Yet even so, every approach was practically wall-to-wall heavy metal. Eight Behemoths each, followed by 48 Shieldmaiden IIs, twice that number in Operator series mechs, and an entire Armored Battalion each based around the Saber II – Mod Qs to follow up the Shieldmaidens and Operators. All with Doomtreader Power Armor mixed in as support. Which wasn’t even counting the…

*THUMP* *THUMP* *THUMP* *THUMP* *THUMP* *THUMP*

That. The massed artillery pieces that had just opened fire. Given the plateau working against them, most of it was made out of MRLS (Multiple Rocket Launch Systems) that had been provided with staggering amounts of modified ammo for this job. Now, the fire from those rockets began to rain over the Dark Citadel, attempting to batter down its shield. Not that it seemed to be working, something like eighty percent of the rockets were being shot down by was looked like a laser point defense grid. It wasn’t, of course, those ‘lasers’ actually being bolts of the ‘magic’ that the locals used. It was still damn impressive, and showed a far greater level of automation and technical expertise than they’d seen anywhere else so far.

Sadly, even the twenty percent of the fire getting through the defenses wasn’t making an apparent impact. The rockets impacted on a shield far more potent than even those on the Greater Gates. In truth, previous efforts had shown they weren’t likely to be able to batter down that shield. Possibly not even if they’d been willing to bring in nukes.

Which didn’t make the assault pointless.

In addition to making it essentially impossible to deploy air assets to attack the rear elements of the army without them being instantly fragged by the competing fire, every defensive bolt and hit to the shield cost energy. The Zilts obviously had healthy reserves, but they wouldn’t have needed to invade Earth at all if they had limitless amounts of QE to work with. There had to be a limit on just how much energy they could put into their defenses, and forcing them to expend it against the bombardment meant less of it to use in the ground fighting.

Of course, the more important limitation of that shield was the very reason they were marching into that no-man’s land. Just like the shields on the Greater Gates, the Zilts couldn’t seem to deploy a full shield that went down to ground level. Admittedly, Izumi was one of the few that understood the why of that, with some of the metaphysics involved being a stone-cold bitch if you didn’t have access to heavy duty amounts of processing power. Something the Empire’s tech base didn’t provide.

Heck, even with the Operator androids and some YoRHa computer systems back on Earth, they’d only mostly cracked the issue, allowing the Behemoths and other armor to have decent shields despite being near-ground level. Even then, the shields were incomplete, being forward, top, and side arc facing with open rear aspects. Not that it should matter much when they were being forced into a frontal assault like this anyway.

Just as that thought finished running through Izumi’s mind for the hundredth time, the six lead Behemoths, marching 2-by-2, crossed some invisible line in the sand. A dozen far thicker beams of power that the anti-air systems lanced out from the Black Fortress, impacted the Behemoths with enough raw force to make their steps stutter. Yet, to the audible relief of everyone in the compartment with her, the shields barely flickered. Of course, Izumi knew more than they did, having a direct feed to the power systems, and she internally winced as those opening shots drained around 13% of the shield capacity from their ride. Still, the pilots didn’t hesitate, actually pushing their pace harder now that they’d been fired upon.

They also began firing back, targeting where the onboard systems said the defenses had fire from. Their Behemoth shuddered again, this time from the blowback of the twin railguns firing, trying to knock out the defense installations…only to hit more shields. Smaller and tighter than the massive one over the Citadel as a whole, they did their job of deflecting the railgun rounds…though Izumi hissed a ‘yes!’ of success as the follow up plasma shots from the true main gun of the Behemoths fired. Only one of the twelve defensive guns went down, four Behemoths having all had an angle on it and concentrated their fire. Still, when only eleven beams shot out as the defensive arrays cycled, Izumi called it a win!

It meant that it wasn’t pointless to trade shots with the Fortress, and she could practically feel it as the pilots of the mechs began to coordinate, doing their best to make multiple Behemoths hit each installation, as close to simultaneously as possible. Two more defensive guns died…before the assault force seemed to cross another zone and different guns opened up on them. Izumi’s hiss this time was less happy, as she saw the shields beginning to rapidly die under the shorter-ranged but more numerous weapons.

“Buckle up and hold onto your panties everyone, our shields won’t last much longer and we’re only a quarter of the distance to the Citadel.”

Of course, the lead Behemoths also weren’t alone, and those behind them began to fan out a bit. Once their shields went down, the first group would fall back behind the second, letting fresh shields take the hits. Meanwhile, some of the Shieldmaiden-Mod Qs following behind them began to hit their own max ranges for their secondary weapons, launching short-ranged missile systems at targets being painted by the Behemoths.

This proved ineffective at first, the larger defensive emplacements apparently having their own anti-missile systems. Yet, when the Shieldmaidens switched targets to the smaller guns, they started having some effect, silencing a number of the lesser emplacements with their rocket fire. A moment after that, however, the first of the Behemoths had a shield failure. It wasn’t her ride, which still had about 14 percent shield left, but she quickly tapped into the Behemoth with the failure, to see the effects of the next shots as they hit the Black Aetherite armor. Some of her tension bled as she got the results, noting that while the armor had been mildly damaged, it would take repeated hits to punch through it. Repeated hits that the enemy wasn’t going to get just yet as that particular Behemoth dropped back and another surged forward to take its place.

Izumi’s brain was buzzing, hypercognition partially in effect as she tried to work the math. The numbers were complicated by the sheer number of things going on, so even her best estimates were only estimates. Still…she was fairly sure they were going to make it. The Behemoths, sadly, couldn’t recharge shields. Not on Ziltmach at least. The area around the Citadel, even more than most of Ziltmach, was barren of naturally occurring QE, all of it likely sucked up long ago by the Citadel itself. That mean the energy-intensive Behemoths were limited to just what they’d been loaded with, and there was only so much room for the new man-sized and hyper-dense QE batteries. Batteries that had to power the mech itself, the shields, and the plasma main gun. Once the shields were gone, they were gone, until the battle was over. Likewise, once the 32 shots from the main plasma caster were fired, about a third already gone at this point, it would run dry as well.

Still…calculating for the number of emplacements they’d taken down, and the fact some of the smaller guns were focusing on the Shieldmaiden IIs now? Izumi was fairly certain they would make the distance to the walls before being battered apart. Which only left actually getting through those walls as a challenge. For that, though, each assault team had their own breaching-focused Quirk. Izumi’s team, for example, had Thirteen. Normally against violence, Thirteen wouldn’t be taking part in the actual assault once breach was achieved, but there was very little in the universe that could hold up to the power of a black hole. She would breach the wall for them, just as Honenuk Jozu, borrowed from the Guild for this assault, would do the same for Momo’s group. Similar stories, with Quirks uniquely suited for making walls into doors, were the case with every Behemoth team.

Their own Behemoth lost its shields less than two minutes later, falling back…but as it did Izumi pulled the trigger on one of their extra tricks. From all two dozen Behemoths, suicide drones coated in a crude shield and a thin Black Aetherite armor coating flooded out of apertures in their sides. She, 2B, and a half dozen other androids took control of them and guided them through the patterns of anti-air fire they’d now had enough time to analyze. With their guidance, over sixty percent of the drones managed to cross the distance, zeroing in on carefully chosen defensive installations. They didn’t even try to get all of them, instead focusing down hard on four of the largest guns and a dozen smaller ones. Another twenty percent of the drones were knocked off course in the last few seconds…but then the exotic QE bombs they carried, each intended to make a small unstable Rift that would rip through almost anything, hit the installations.

A bare heartbeat later, there were abruptly less guns firing.

More tellingly, for the first time, there was sight of the enemy as someone inside the Citadel abruptly realized they might legitimately be in trouble. The gates that opened seemed small, but only in comparison to the sheer size of the Citadel, which was a good four hundred meters height of sheer black stone at the outer wall. What came out of those gates wasn’t small at all, entire squads of something that looked like Ogres…only significantly larger. As in, nearly the size of an Operator mech, if not quite up to the size and bulk of a Shieldmaiden.

The enemy charged…but it was here that the Empire proved, despite fighting on Earth, they really didn’t have a good grasp of proper tactics against modern weapons. They kept tight, holding up shields and charging in old-school ancient cavalry-like formations. Which was fucking stupid as the Behemoths were fully capable of traversing their railguns and plasma canons down to fire into their massed formations. Those formations turned into bloody chunks, breaking up, with Shieldmaidens that hadn’t yet used all their rockets opening up on those that survived.

Not a single enemy got even halfway to them.

Tellingly, the gates closed tight again, even as the Behemoths neared the halfway point.

Izumi scowled a moment later as the enemy proved not to be out of tricks yet. Hundreds of additional openings in the Citadel exterior opened and a lot of fire from smaller platforms and individual monsters started pouring out at them. At the same time, higher up the walls, enemy fliers poured out in the thousands, below the shield. That much had been accounted for, with anti-air weapons from both the Behemoths and the Shieldmaidens immediately pouring fire into the fliers, with hundreds of additional anti-air missiles rising from handheld box launchers carried by the Doomtreaders that were advancing behind them. The fliers died by the hundreds, only a tiny fraction of them getting through, and those that did were soon dying to supporting fire from the Saber IIs that were mixed in with the Doomtreaders.

Yet…the increased fire from the walls took its toll, a second set of Behemoths losing shields and falling back behind the third set. That left only one remaining set of replacements, though they were now passed the halfway point to the walls. Better yet, the weapons of the Doomtreaders were now finding the range and had targets. Nowhere near powerful enough to damage the defensive guns, they did have potent enough guns to start taking a toll on the individual monsters that were exposing themselves to fire. Izumi didn’t think they were actually killing all that many of the enemy, but they were doing a good job of suppressing the increase in fire they’d offered. The smaller point sources of enemy fire were cut in half as many of those monsters were forced to duck or die.

There were no more tricks now, though.

No, now it was time to grit their teeth and push through.

Another minute passed, two, three. The Behemoths weren’t slow by any means, but the Zilts had made sure there was a multiple kilometer killing field around their fortress. The last exchange of fresh shields happened when they were three quarters of the way to the Fortress walls, the Behemoths all out of plasma rounds by now, but having put paid to something like sixty five percent of the larger guns. Guns that were even now still dying as the more numerous guns of the Shieldmaidens and Saber tanks following the Behemoths got clearer and clearer angles. Of course, the enemy was now focusing some fire on those mechs and tanks, causing painful losses among their numbers.

Yet it was now clear that the Citadel couldn’t stop them.

Ninety percent of the way across the field, the last shields on the Behemoths fell to increasingly frantic fire from the citadel…and Izumi grit her teeth as the Behemoths took the chance to fan out, multiplying the targets as they closed the last of the remaining gap. Armor was taking hits now, and two Behemoths suffered ‘Golden BB’ type shots, one losing a leg joint that slowed it to a crawl, the other suffering a lucky penetrating shot that must have hit a still-full QE battery, as the Behemoth exploded.

Izumi clenched her teeth at seeing that, checking who it had been, and was relived to find it had been one of the Behemoths mostly crewed by YoRHa androids. They had backups that they’d been actively streaming their data to, insuring continuity of consciousness. Things got fuzzy when you were considering the mortality of an AI mind, particularly given that they were certain from 2B’s experience in the Void that androids had something like a soul. Still, 2B had ‘died’ and restored from backups numerous times in the past. So, presumably, continuity of consciousness was all that was required. It was, at least, something more certain than whatever fate awaited the humans and monsters that were dying in this conflict.

Knowing souls existed was something that still fucked with Izumi’s mind, and she genuinely wasn’t sure what she believed. Thoughts that she shunted aside again, along with thoughts of her own mortality, as she faced down fire from enemy guns. Maybe, if she lived through this, she should take the time to find religion? Somehow, she thought she was far from the first solider to consider that in a moment under fire on a battlefield. ‘No such thing as an atheist in a foxhole.’ That was the saying, wasn’t it? Such half-morbid thoughts carried Izumi through the last stretch, hypercognition now a subtle form of torture as she wondered if each shot that tore into their armor would end them.

Then they were there.

The Behemoths barely even slowed as they impacted the walls, having been explicitly design for this maneuver. For all their immense toughness and obscene cost, none of the Behemoths had been intended to survive this engagement. The overlapping panels that made up their blunted front opened partially at the last second, specifically engineered crumple zones coming into effect to absorb the impact. Those panels crunched in just such a way that the front of the mechs peeled back. Contrary to some random thought by a layman looking at the mechs…the pilots of the Behemoth were in the rear of the mech, nothing but armor and this specifically design breeching mechanism at the front. Now, as they shuddered and groaned to a halt…they were faced with the carved black stone of the Citadel, protected by a crumpled tunnel of armor panels.

Izumi had only a moment to realize the Citadel’s outer wall was grotesquely carved into scenes of torture and slavery…before Anan Kurose, better known as the Pro Heroine Thirteen, was expelled from Fat Gum, who had protected her through the rough final moments of impact. All ten finger caps of the Heroine’s suit plus a palm feature that had been added just for this, popped open as she directed Black Hole at the fortress wall. While her Quirk wasn’t quite a true black hole, it was something frighteningly close, and the wall resisted for barely a moment before disintegrating under the assault. It was thick, it ultimately taking Anan over three minutes to chew through nearly thirty additional meters of black stone.

Yet, chew through it she did…along with a first wave of monsters and Zilts that vanished under the effects of her Quirk.

Thirteen shuddered at that, even as she capped her Quirk. Izumi didn’t blame her, the gentle woman hated the idea of killing, even if she’d done so more than once since the Invasion started. Still, right now her courage in getting them this far was all that was needed. Izumi, fully transformed, was the first through the opening Anan had created, Virtuous Contract ruthlessly swiping, blades of energy scything through more of the enemy. She wasn’t holding back, and the fact that these were all Elites didn’t stop them from falling like so much chaff as she pushed forward.

The Battle for the Citadel had begun…