157 Forward

Oh. This is certainly...something.

To be honest, I'm a bit at a loss for words here. It's been a bit more than a day since I stopped the research on the space-bending shell, and things changed a lot during what was a surprisingly small amount of time. First of all, we found an ongoing battle between the Enforcers and the Empire.

At first, there was no clear victor. The Empire wasn't losing any ground, but it wasn't pushing the attackers back. On the other side, the Enforcers were sending waves after waves of mediocre troops to siege the Imperial outpost.

It didn't end well for them. However, this Coalition seems to have unlimited manpower... or just really stupid generals. Both of those options make sense considering what I know about Enforcers. Either way, the stalemate kept going for what must have been three hours.

Then, there was a change on the battlefield. It didn't come from the Enforcers and their prized elites wielding some grand Strategic Spell; the tide of battle was changed by the Empire. A group of heavily armored soldiers teleported at the edge of the barrier protecting the outpost.

The first thing that I noticed was the sheer amount of armor these Imperials were wearing. The elite troops we fought were already quite well-defended, but this was on another level. Each soldier was about eight foot tall, all covered head to toes in thick metal plates pulsing with powerful runes. Those massive suits of armor were not made of a steel-like material like the other elites, those had reddish reflections on their surfaces. I'm far from being an expert on magical materials, but it must be quite good if the Empire was hiding it until now.

The armored creatures raised their arms towards the lines of spear-wielding Enforcers charging at them. That's when it happened.

I expected everything, from beam weapons to some impossible phenomenon like a lava cannon or something equally as outrageous.

But nothing could have prepared me for what came next.

The soldiers all loaded what looked like a rounded blue Magicite crystal into a slot in the left arm of their armor. Then they closed the chamber, and what looked like dozens of miniature pistons smashed into the crystal. The shockwave caused by the sudden compression sent a few wounded Enforcer troops flying. But that wasn't the impressive part, far from it.

A sudden beam of raw mana, almost identical to what comes out of an MH Shell despite being far weaker, erupted from the long cannon embedded into the forearm of the armor. The beams smashed into the Enforcers and reduced most of them to ashes. I can perfectly recall the groans of the few unlucky survivors; mostly because I Rewound this scene countless times to make sure that my eyes were not deceiving me.

However, after some more Rewinds of the same battle, I had to admit that I was witnessing a shift in how the Stonecrusher Empire envisioned battles. This version of their beam weapon is far from perfect. For one, it lacks the power of the last iteration with the rotating glass rods. It's also not very durable since a good chunk of the armor where the beam passes will crack and fall off after a few shots.

But still, this must be a lot cheaper to make, not to mention a hell of a lot faster. After all, this weapon is nothing more than a glorified hydraulic press welded to a tube. But still, this is unprecedented in the magical community as far as I know. Using cheap, disposable and ammo-using weapons is something only we did; until now that is.

This is very worrying since the Empire has a lot more industrial capabilities than us. Not to mention that they have a lot more resources and a lot more researchers at their disposal. Our only saving grace is that they seem to still be stuck in the same line of thought, that 'magic must do everything.' Until they get rid of their bias, then their weapons will still be more expensive and complicated than our own.

I shudder just thinking about it as yet another instance of that fire volley plays in front of my eyes. If we let them, then the Empire might industrialize and advance to mass production of cheap, but effective, artifacts. If the Order, with their limited means, can achieve something like the Hammer then there's no reason that the Empire cannot come up with their own version of the concept.

Or even worse, something better.

We need to act faster than I first anticipated. We are bound to lose this war if we let the Empire modernize. I need to somehow escalate the conflict between the Enforcers and the Empire to make sure that the Stonecrushers are too busy fighting a massive war on multiple fronts to dedicate any time to research.

This war just got a lot more complicated...

I teleport next to Alan. The middle-aged man is busy looking over some kind of schematic on his desk, but he immediately raises his head once I arrive.

"Hey Alan, any news about the Imperial research lab?" I ask.

Alan tenses up, "Not really. The interrogations only gave us some partial information, and decoding the Imperial cipher is very slow since each Gate is encrypted with a unique code."

I nod, this is exactly what I didn't want to hear. Decrypting a magical cipher must be hard enough on its own, but a dozen of them? It's an almost impossible task for a large team, so it's just a pipe dream for us.

We need to choose a singular Gate and focus all our efforts on it. It's too bad that it's likely to take more than one day. Otherwise, I would have explored each one in different timelines.

"Do we have any leads then?" I say with a sigh. I'm starting to believe that we aren't going to get anything out of the raid on the Imperial lab.

"We do have some, but nothing conclusive," Alan says with a wry smile. "We somehow managed to get some coordinates, but nothing complete. I'm afraid that decrypting the rest of those coordinates is going to take a while."

I raise an eyebrow; having some coordinates is better than nothing. And getting the rest could be easy.

It would just be... time-consuming.