The army’s march would continue unabated for days on end as they analyzed and took the quickest routes around existing civilian centers. Their goal was the supervault after all, not wanton carnage,
especially not carnage directed anywhere near or at the temples that had been erected by his crewmates. For they served not only as a place of worship but a means by which the pantheon’s mortal followers could communicate local goings-on, such as the movement of a massive mechanical army, among other things. On the eve of the last day of the week, however, Holcomb’s forces arrived at one of the many “rivers” leading into the Underworld. The reconnaissance drones deployed first according to plan, mapping out the interior and moving to deal with any threats contained therein.
As the reconnaissance drones began their first initial scoutings along the outer shell of the supervault, using the pipeline labeled ‘River Styx’ as guidance, their acute readings were momentarily interrupted by the presence of the biological machine hordes that plighted the underground. They had always been there in previous assaults, raids, or delves into the supervault. No doubt created by Konrad in moments of macabre obsession; however, the sheer size of the hordes on the outer levels of the supervault alone warranted caution. Thus the purgation began with their miniaturized armaments attempting high-speed disassembling of the fleshcrafted golems; however, to Isaac’s surprise, no small amount of effort had been put into outfitting the nightmare warriors of Hades. Wherever the spherical machines cut with precision lasers, the automata apathetically groaned and lunged in retaliation. To the chagrin of the creatures, the spherical drones were built for high-speed aerial maneuvers and evasions. What Isaac hadn’t anticipated is the denizens of the Underworld to be prepared with their many hyperinflated chemical solutions. Fluoroantimonic superacid erupted from the tips of the bidents in jetstreams of fluid, dissolving the hard shells of the drones in retaliation; however, their initial defenses would be for nothing after Isaac’s machines cut through the internal reservoirs of the shades. Diminished but operable, the drones pursued further into the supervault…
Lord Aecaus, the Adjutant of Elysium, felt his skin prickle as he watched over the vast terrarium of the Elysian Fields. The germinating mist from the internal reservoirs was rising through the River Lethe, the sister pipeline of the River Styx, earlier than it had before. The demigod softly smiled knowing exactly what it meant - Elysium’s reservoirs were full and actively overflowing back into the Styx Core. He had long removed his helmet on return from the Temple of Hades, his blonde hair dripping with the moisture produced from the fields. His azure eyes, a byproduct of being Zeus’ son, stared out at the lowest parts of the acropolis. In those smaller parts of the Elysian’s infrastructure, the cleansing servants of Hades stalked around to pollinate nearby greenhouses with fresh fluid. He pondered the words spoken by Hermes several days ago as he stood near the heart of the Fields - the Elysian Core. One of the creatures that are regarded as a ‘champion’ approached him in his stupor.
“Lord. Unreported patrol. Sector El-5. Requesting permission.” The champion spoke through gurgled requests, an emotionless and perturbing voice that would’ve caused discomfort to anyone outside of the Underworld. Luckily for Aecaus, most of the automata on the upper levels of the supervault weren’t nightmarish like those in Tartarus. This one in particular was gigantic, covered in armored plating like a revenant from Old Arith tales with a decorated hoplites helmet. It, like many of the creatures of the abyss, had several extremities that either hung at its sides or gripped the weapons befitting its status. This one held a tempered greatblade of restructured nanocomposite that split into a bident at the tip. None of the champion's flesh was visible beneath the reinforced nanocomposite plating, only the dull glow of red necro-fuel illuminated its form.
“Unreported patrol? In Elysium’s outlying territories? I don’t like the sound of that, especially with Lord Hades gone. Khariton, I will be sending a reinforced unit of shades but begin Elysian Phase One. It might be overzealous of me, but we can’t take any risks.” Aecaus spoke, his voice a touch lighter than Zeus’ own without the egotism. The champion shade, named Khariton, inclined its head wordlessly before departing from the acropolis with an ethereal gait. The adjutant-lord shook his head in surprise, the series of events that had recently happened weighing on his mind. A mind now sheltered by the headgear of the nether plate, forged for him by Lord Hades. A hoplite’s helmet crowned by a wreath and a green-white plume tightly pressed against his skin as the systems kicked online.
The adjutant-lord turned from his view over the rest of the Elysian Fields to approach a spherical entity residing in the midst of the acropolis’ central chamber. The snaking pipes of the River Lethe wormed beneath the foundation, feeding directly into the device sat squarely at the realm’s core - the Elysian Core. Like its parent cortex, the device was protected by several energy barriers biocoded to the set user and sheltered by a nanocomposite exterior. Aecaus waved the defenses away, deactivating the barriers and integrating with the nanite shell to unearth the subsidiary core. He pressed an armored hand against the surface of the spherical device, temporarily integrating with the cortex to will the realm at his touch. He felt as if his senses stretched across distances, viewing down from the heavens above at the domain around him. With a thought and an active knowledge that the River Lethe was going to be partially drained, the areas connecting Elysium to the rest of the Underworld began to close up with thick walls of nanocomposite. The demigod nodded to himself in satisfaction that the first initial plans of possible breach had been conducted. Reactivating the defenses of the cortex with his genecode, the adjutant stepped back out onto the veranda overseeing the Fields. Now, he anxiously awaited for Khariton to return with some news.
Any news.
Isaac’s drones would waste no time as they made their way to the end of the pipe and swarmed out into the subterranean skies of Elysium. Although the walls separating it from the rest of the supervault had already been raised by this point, said development was of little concern to the swarm’s controlling intelligence, for this one region alone was a windfall in regards to strategic and material benefit. Flitting through the air, their optics aglow with a hateful glare, the recon drones began an aerial scan to get a complete image of the local topography and any visible defense installations, before executing an RF capture to get a read on the exact positioning of every shade within line-of-sight; and even those which were not as tracked the that moved in and out of the structures below. They then relayed this information back to the warforms above along with the signal to begin their descent.
Clawing their way over the edge, a majority of the warforms made their way down into Elysium itself while a small contingent–approximately a hundred thousand units or so–stayed behind on the surface, their job to keep watch for any overland attacks and spirit away anything ferried up from the supervault below back to the north. As for the machineforms that had made their way below, they scuttled along the walls and ceiling like a flood. The only sign of their existence was a churning sea of red pinpoints as their eyes pierced the darkness to single out important targets. More than a few dropped down after a while to engage and destroy any defenses that stood in their way as well, while the rest waterfalled their way to the ground via the nanocomposite walls. A horrid sound it was, and thunderous, and one that rose to blanket the entire cavern with its clamorous din.
As the reconnaissance drones liberated themselves from the obsidian tunnels, they found the sight of Elysium
concerning. The monstrous machines of the supervault, fusions of flesh and nanocomposite, assembled in controlled groups around specific structures. Shades with mist-emitters on their backs had shifted in their duties, rolling forward onto all fours and arching their spinal mounts to the skyward ceiling. Several larger creatures - Hades’ champions - lingered in specific positions amongst the horde, wordlessly directing through simple phrases or gesticulations. It was beyond comprehensible prediction the amount of automata that Konrad Vitalis could’ve mustered in nearly four centuries. Their numbers were innumerable in comparison to the size of the Elysian Fields that stretched for miles on end as a misty land of artificial jungle and Hellenic city-state. To Isaac’s remote surprise, due to Aecaus’ eternal vigilance, they were aware of the warforms the moment they had entered the cavernous walls of Elysium. The fight for the Elysian Fields had begun with globs of fluoroantimonic superacid and hypergerminating fluids from the emitter-automata, vaporizing the warforms in droves as they crawled across the ceiling.
Short skirmishes from descending warforms broke into full-fledged warfare between the servants of Hades and the drone-legion of Typhon. Those drones still attached to the ceilings found themselves under cataclysmic assault, butchered into dissolving molecules by the fertilizer-turned-artillery biomechanical servants. Forced to drop below, swathes of acid-enhanced bidents and powerfully bunched synthetic muscle tore apart the ballistic-resistant drones in surprising brutality. The lines were drawn across the length of Elysium with the vast majority of Typhon’s machines forming aggressive beachheads around their initial point of arrival with a variety of overhead flanking maneuvers against Hades’. Minor temples, housing artificially curated flora and small vats of necro-fuel, were lost to the great enemy’s horde; however, the major temples were fortified beyond doubt and actively reinforced by Hades’ most vile creatures. The lines held in an uneasy deadlock, each warform replaced by another and each shade replaced by another in an endless stream of mass infantry assault. Only when one of the alpha automata, the champions, moved from their positions did the lines shift. The battle raged on as Aecaus observed the battle for his domain.
Lord Aecaus bit his lip in frustration that Typhon had truly decided to attempt an assault, he silently swore to scour Hellas for this insult. The demigod rid the thoughts from his head as the servants of Elysium began to pool around the central temple. His azure eyes tracked the warforms of the traitor scaling the walls from a single tunnel. No doubt breaching one of the burial sites on the surface to dig through the Underworld. The Elysian champion, Khariton, had returned less than five minutes then when he had left. The haunting facial plate of the semi-sentient automata regarded Aecaus before disappearing into the Underworld’s horde. The adjutant-lord’s eyebrows furrowed, knowing exactly what he must do to ensure that Elysium would not be overrun. In his time as a mortal king, he had always hid away in fortifications and citadels to outmaneuver his enemies. It would be the same for this onslaught.
“Hades forgive your servant for taking the helm of the Underworld in your absence… Beginning Phase Two of Elysian Protective Protocols.” The chthonic demi-deity cursed as he marched back through the acropolis, the sounds of the hordes clashing outside and on top of the structures within the realm. He silently thanked the Fates that Typhon had assaulted Elysium and not Tartarus, his brother would’ve likely abandoned his realm’s cortex to fight the menace at large. Unlike the rest of the structures in the Elysium Fields, the primary temple held several champions within its illustrious halls. One of them had been Khariton, who actively fought warforms that managed to sprint past the horde towards the cortex. His gaze caught one of the aforementioned creatures further down the temple dealing with several warforms, crushing them under the augmented weight of nanocomposite armor and synthetic muscle. Within such a radius of the Elysian Core, Aecaus willed the nanosoil of the Underworld to swallow and mulch the machines. Unlike Lord Hades, he could do no such thing with the entirety of the supervault and was limited to Elysium.
The adjutant-lord’s armored greaves brought him to the base of the energy barriers surrounding the Elysian Core once more when the citadel-temple began to rumble. Unnerved, he materialized a nanocomposite xiphos from a sphere attached to his side. The blade seeped concentrated fluoroantimonic superacid from the edge as if venom from a vengeful viper. His helmet tracked the nearby disturbance and found only the raging battle outside. Almost dismissing the disturbance, Aecaus was about to deactivate the barriers of the cortex when a portion of the acropolis’ roof crumbled inwardly. Warforms that had evaded the volcanic, acid artillery of the shades descended into the temple of the Elysian Cortex. Aecaus prepared himself, willing a thick nanocomposite wall over the cortex to deal with the intruders.
The warforms would continue their assault with unnerving efficiency, spurred onwards by the intelligence controlling them. While some were inevitably lost, such casualties more than fell within acceptable ranges for Holcomb, and those that remained continued to adjust their strategy. Going from a purely mindless rush to a series of flanks, hit-and-runs, and dodges in response to the chemical weaponry being flung their way - while those that did have the misfortune of getting hit either produced more smart-matter to deal with that they'd lost, or flung the affected parts off entirely before regenerating. For so long as their cores remained intact, so too would the machines themselves. As the battle raged on, however, there was a gradual but noticeable shift in the army's behavior.
Where before they had torn through the area indiscriminately, destroying or otherwise trying to destroy everything in sight, now they moved with a clear purpose. While the frontlines were engaged, those drones and warforms that could be spared broke away from the main fighting to steal whatever they could. Be that tools which had been left in the area or the very bodies of the opposing automata themselves. They then took these things back up the pipe and to the surface when and where possible, lumping them into a pile that the warforms above defended with unflinching zeal. Meanwhile, those that continued to rampage through Elysium though soon made their way towards the cortex, for if it could be claimed then everything the enemy had thrown at them would be for naught. Well… that
had been the plan anyway. Once the wall had gone up Isaac was forced to look for another way to gain access to the thing.
It was then that he opted for a two-pronged attack. While some of the warforms attempted to dig beneath the obstacle, a team of recon drones would focus fire to drill straight through it. Granted, given the material it was made of, he considered this latter option to be quite the long shot. Still, in times like these one needed to press every advantage presented to them. So the warforms dug while the drones drilled, each of them hoping to get at the prize which lay inside.
Namely the cortex and its demigod defender.
The frontlines of Elysium’s battleground wavered under the fervent assault of the warforms, shades dying in droves under concentrated attacks from Typhon. The famous superacids of the Elysian Fields were neigh ineffective against the cold, hard shells of the ever-regenerating machines. Even as the mist-emitter automata painted the grounds with dissolving fluids, the biomechanical automata of the Underworld found themselves under duress. Though they felt no fear in their cold, biofuels shells, they began to buckle under the weight of the infinitely reproducing drones. The outlook of the battle appeared grim until the moment one of the many champions of Elysium stabbed their mutagenic claws into the chest of a warform, filling the shell to the brim with superacid and tearing out their core to be crushed. That single warform did not regenerate in that instance. The semi-sentient nightmare creature bounced signals from their cohort, refocusing the attacks of the shades on the particularly precious central processing units of the drexler-assembled humanoids. Tides turned as the servants of the Underworld refocused their attacks, disallowing their biomechanical bodies from being taken and forcing their enhanced claws deep into the warforms.
The counterattack was efficient, but the damage had been done across the Underworld. Minor temples of nanocomposite, smaller greenhouses, and hosts of biomechanical automata had been claimed by the great enemy. Precious raw material had been funneled away by fleeting warforms while the most important sites of Elysium were protected. Reservoirs of necrofuel, terrariums, and primary greenhouses had been successfully defended and forced their would-be attacks into fleeing routes through a combination of overwhelming assaults and core destruction aided by the
unmentionable experiments germinated by the goddess, Demeter. Both sides of the conflict, warform and shade, were depleted in various instances with the servants of Hades reaching half of their original number and Isaac’s drones desperately leaving the supervault with feedstock in hand or destroyed by biomechanical claw.
Aecaus sweat beneath his helmet despite the environmental protection breathing a cool breeze over his facial features. The warforms were endless, their flying avatars even more so. The adjutant-lord could only guess how much more of the Elysian Field’s reservoirs could be depleted before Typhon’s assault succeeded. One of his nanocomposite augmentations fed the information to him as the thought appeared, answering with a full seventy-five percent capacity of the core’s subsidiary tanks.
It will have to be enough, he thought as the warforms attempted to dig through the internal nanocomposite shell of the Underworld. Fortunately for the adjutant, their armaments were unable to chew through the hyperdense alloy that had been built up over four centuries. The demigod forced back an irritated snarl, willing the ground beneath their chromatic feet to be swallowed by the abyss and crushing their cores in the next moment. Unable to physically assault the reconnaissance drones with his xiphos, Aecaus continued to expend the reservoirs by willing the nanocomposite into ultraspeed spikes that impaled their spherical forms. This had only been the fifth wave after the acropolis’s roof had caved in.
An imposing figure broke through from the right of the core temple’s open side, chromatic humanoids clambering over its armored form like ants swarming over perishable nutrients. Aecaus’ personal champion, Khariton, flung the warforms against the nanocomposite form before impaling their lithe builds with its many nanocomposite claws and weapons. The fully enclosed, helmeted gaze of the biomechanical champion caught sight of the adjutant-lord, processing a semi-sentient thought for only a moment before the next wave was upon them. Smaller shades scurried to the side of the champion, their bulging flesh and nanocomposite shells leaking precious necro-fluid from previous engagements.
“Are they endless!? Do they not know when their cause is lost!? Fates forgive me if I’ve deserved this… Lord Hades, I pray to you! May your wrath be visited upon Typhon!” The adjutant roared as his xiphos stabbed through an onrushing warform, superacid bursting from the inside of its writhing shell and melting the core within. He began to feel desperate as the assaults continued, frequently checking the capacity of the reservoirs as the nanocomposite was willed into offensive strikes around the cortex. None had successfully breached the cortex and none had claimed his life; however, the warforms rampaged in an unending wave to capture the heart of Elysium.
Give me but a moment! A single gap in time to activate the next phase of defense!, he thought to himself. Continuous fighting had worn down on him from slicing through enemies that could instantaneously regenerate, he could feel his breath start to turn ragged.
The battle moved dangerously close to annihilation on both sides of the conflict until the Underworld began to tremble. It started as a small, unremarkable shift in the nanocomposite that could be attributed to Typhon’s grand assault. The shifting then turned into modest shaking, forcing several of the automata and the warforms down into exposed positions from the trembling. What could pass as the grinding of tectonic plates was felt across the Underworld in the following moment, upending structures and cracking nanocomposite shell. The rumbling suddenly halted in a strange, sporadic manner that defied the natural state of the Underworld.
Isaac surveyed the field through the eyes of what reconnaissance drones were left, and noted the earth-shaking movement of Elysium with a metallic grinding of his teeth. He'd managed to do quite a bit of damage in the time he had been here, although now that his forces were starting to suffer losses which fell outside of acceptable parameters, he decided that a retreat was in order. He had gotten what he'd come for in any case. Prolonging this battle any further merely risked additional resources he did not have. Thus it was that he conveyed the order, commanding what warforms and drones that had not been destroyed yet to pull back to the surface, and from there back to the frozen north. This was not to say such would be an easy task, however. Far from it in fact, as the concentrated assaults continued even as the machines fled and even more were felled by Konrad's champions. Still, a rather modest portion had managed to escape from the lightless confines of the Underworld with stolen materials in hand, and were already making a beeline for the planet's northernmost wastes.
Luckily for the warforms, they were not pursued by the withering forces of the Underworld. Those shades that did remain claimed the cores of the closest chromatic servants and regained their posture after the quaking ceased. None dared to follow Typhos’ minions into the overworld, none dared risk the wrath of Hades should their corporeal forms die in the light of Hellas. And so, Isaac reaped a great deal of raw materials, biomechanical subjects, and curated flora from the Elysian Fields. The great reservoirs connected to the Elysian Core had been unmolested, although the temples that protected them were damaged to a modest degree. Greenhouses that hadn’t been claimed by Typhos quietly burned and smoldered due to hit-and-run attacks by the laser-equipped reconnaissance drones.
In the tunnels that had been breached by Isaac, the world began to shift and roil in tumultuous waves as the nanocomposite stretched like a living membrane. Those that managed to escape were considered fortunate as the surface bound pipes were shattered and destroyed under the weight of the constricting abyss. A handful more of the chromatic warriors escaped the carnage while those that were still halfway through the pipeline were crushed and repurposed for the supervaults shell. Through the eyes of a drexler-assembled drone, Isaac could see the clod around their invasion point turn into a whirlpool of obsidian shell until it flattened out once again. Those warforms had been lost to him, but he had further succeeded in cutting an artery from the supervault and claimed a bounty of fresh feedstock.
Lord Aecaus prepared himself for the end as the warforms swarmed innumerably around himself, Khariton, and the cortex. He hadn’t stopped to count the amount of chromatic servants of Typhos he had slain, but the adjutant-lord could feel it with each breath he took. At some point in the fighting, Aecaus felt that he had been wounded in several places. One of the drexler-assembled warriors had been about to cleave head from neck when the tremors began. At that moment, he knew that Hades had been with them and pressed the attack while the world shuddered around them. The metallic warrior, cleaved by the acidic xiphos, stumbled back towards the raging champion in the hall. Khariton, battered and maimed, tossed several of the metallic creatures away in their stupor before stumbling from the shifting Underworld. The world cascaded around them as the temple threatened to further sink in upon itself until the quaking halted. It had been the single moment that Aecaus required as he broke from combat to integrate with the Elysian Core.
Aecaus felt no small amount of victory as the subsidiary cortex was within his reach, however, it wouldn’t be necessary to engage the tertiary phases of defense. The warforms had begun to retreat en masse, jumping from the leviathan form of Khariton and pulling themselves out of the temple proper. The adjutant-lord felt that something had gone wrong, or the enemy had achieved their purpose in the Underworld. Sweat, once again, built on his forehead as he needlessly engaged the second phase of Elysium’s defenses. The reservoirs drained a further twenty-five percent as the environment shifted around him. Obsidian shell actively sought out the invaders like writhing protoforms, sinking chromatic warriors and biomechanical aberrations alike into the abyss to be crushed under fabricated composite. By Aecaus’ will of the subsidiary supervault cortex, the tunnels leading out of Elysium snapped shut and clamped against the pipelines. If Typhos’ had any servants left in the chthonic realm, then it was likely they were swallowed whole or managed to escape with resources in hand. The weight of failure sank him to his knees before the beating heart of Elysium. He had
failed the God of the Dead.
The aftermath of the battle, after the initiation and conclusion of Phase Two, was an unholy mess to witness. Temples, greenhouses, and vast fields of moss had been destroyed in the onslaught. The bodies of the biomechanical servants could fill entire colosseums to the brim, while not even a single warform remained to be captured or dismantled. The mist-emitter automata had begun the long task of misting areas with a mixture of oxygen choking chemicals to douse the fires. The remaining champions directed the surviving shades to scavenge the flesh from their machine brethren, starting the long process of feeding the cadavers through the River Styx. Nothing remained untouched by Typhos. Aecaus walked through the dampened fields of his domain, witnessing the extent of the catastrophe and remarking the damage done. He shook his head in despair at how much had been plied from the grips of Hades.
This damage will take decades to rebuild. Thrice the capacity of the current reservoirs.“Reporting. Reservoirs, untouched. Terrariums, untouched. Germination Vaults, untouched. Primary Pipelines, untouched. Elysian-Grade Alpha Automata, above optimal survival rate. Elysian-Grade Automata, sixty-four percent destroyed. Greenhouses, seventy-five percent destroyed. Tertiary Refueling Vats, ninety percent destroyed. Curation Chambers, fifty-percent destroyed.” The emotionless, machine voice of the semi-sentient champion, Khariton, spoke as Aecaus approached it in the aftermath of the battle. Much of the champion’s obsidian plates were dented, rended, or completely torn off to expose necromantic flesh beneath. The adjutant-lord sadly smiled that there was still hope for Elysium to rise from it’s destruction.
“I will hunt him down, Khariton. I will hunt down Typhos for this destruction, and I will do it all in Hades’ name. Where I had wavered for only a moment because of Lord Hermes, I am resolute now in my duty.” The adjutant-lord spoke to the destruction wrought before him. He engraved it into his memory. It would be a scene that he would visit unto eternity. Vengeance swelled within the breast of Aecaus. He unleashed the anguish that had been held back for the duration of the fighting.
“
Know my name, Typhos! Know the name of Aecaus, Adjutant-Lord of Elysium! I swear upon my own life in oath that your treasonous blood will slake the thirst of my blade!”