Book 6: Chapter 22
The number of vampyr approaching Avalon increased as time passed and singletons and small packs became less and less common as larger swarms and groups with almost military precision began making their way into Avalon’s territory. No one knew if they were distractions, probing attacks, genuine attempts to take out Avalon, random wanderings, or some other plan made by maddened minds, but they couldn’t be allowed to survive, for multiple reasons. Most importantly was the threat to anyone nearby, but the longer term issue was having the planned incursion against the vampyr being slowed down. The agents and infiltrators doing their best to stall the vampyr building the ritual circles could only slow things down so much and the eventual push into what used to be Nelam couldn’t afford any delays. Smaller groups of vampyr that needed to be crushed would just waste an armies time, so it was up to more mobile fighters to deal with them.
Which is why Cindy ended up taking her trail of heavily armed ducklings out to kill some vampyr. That was what she was calling her personal guard, in her head at least. They were all so cute the way they trailed after her like they were her duck babies and she was the duck mama. It totally wasn’t a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that she had people poking their noses into every second of her life at all times, not at all. Outside the sanctity of her head, her personal ducal troops still didn’t have a formal name, although she was happy to report that ‘Arquebusiers’ had finally gotten shot down with her fervent support.
As much as she rocked between annoyed that she was constantly surrounded by people and aggravated that they wouldn’t leave her be, which weren’t the same thing no matter how much Colen said they were, her miniature army was a very useful group of people. Having minions to aid her in testing her new weapon prototypes saved all kinds of time!
“How’re the grenades looking?” She asked without turning away from the swarm of vampyr that had gotten stuck in a small ravine. At some point the idiotic things had started fighting each other and the loosely collected group of vampyr had gone from a potential threat to the countryside to an internally aimed orgy of violence that wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. A perfect target!
“Troops are saying everything’s fine,” The stout dwarf next to her reported. “Took some getting used to but the weight’s not terrible for any of ‘em, and the special ones are holdin’ together.”
Cindy glanced down at Gundar, the overall commander of her personal troops. At some point the gruff-spoken dwarf had just shown up, ready to go and already armed with some decent firearms. Some quick asking around had told her that the people she’d recruited for the first weapons project to develop guns for Avalon had known of him, he’d been one of the few people from the other side of the continent that liked to experiment with guns and traded letters back in forth with the rest, and he’d gone looking for whoever had gotten the Class Line Progenitor title for guns as soon as he’d found out that Cindy existed. As soon as he’d met her he’d literally bent the knee and sworn fealty to her, and somewhere along the way he’d ended up as her right hand man, with Colen as her left. She couldn’t make fun of Kay anymore for somehow gathering an eclectic cast of characters around him like the protagonist of a shounen anime anymore, not without being a hypocrite. The worst part of it to her was that her tweaks to her precognitive Class had made it so she’d had no idea either of them were coming!
“Right, have whoever’s our best throw to get one of the special ones right in the middle of them, then follow up with a volley of regular ones.” Cindy ordered.
“On it.” Gundar grunted. He stalked off to the waiting line of troops, all standing in a row with their weapons ready and making Cindy constantly nervous about how vulnerable firing lines were to guerrilla attacks. Reassuring herself that her people weren’t forming firing lines and they had sentries in place to keep an eye out for ambushes helped a little bit.
One figure stepped forward holding a red sphere about the size of a baseball, with a metal mechanism sticking out one side. They twisted a tab protruding out of the mechanism until it had completed a full rotation, then chucked it into the seething mass of fighting vampyr. It landed right on one’s head, temporarily confusing it for long enough that one of it’s rivals in the melee managed to get a good bite into it. A second later, the timed fuse that had been lit in the experimental grenade finished burning it’s way into the powder charge. A dull thumping noise that Cindy had long gotten used to at this point accompanied a wave of carnage as a hardened sphere of Kay’s blood shattered and turned into shrapnel, ripping through the vampyr. Those that didn’t die instantly started shrieking and writhing with pain and there were a few that had skin sizzling where the shrapnel had cut through them.