12 Miles Below

Humans had trench lines, formations and generally kept some order. Either the Odin had a different view of what order was, or it was simply impossible to keep everything organized with three degrees of freedom.

Because the tower had the single messiest war I’d ever seen. The sounds were deafening. Hundreds of birds flying in all directions, at all angles. A few organized flights could be spotted keeping in a loose formation and they’d dive into the melee and immediately dissolve into the fight.

There were some things I could understand: The enemy side was clearly well prepared to fight. Small nets were used with skill and precision to tangle up Odin mid flight. Some were armed with silver pebbles on their wings and with every wingslap, a bird would come tumbling out of the air. And all of the tower defenders paired those with long metal needles affixed on their beaks. I got to see their real use in combat. They’d stab down mid-air with precision at different wing muscles, equally causing Odin to fall right out of the sky. The entire battle was so dense, just falling down meant the bird would collide against a few others before finally hitting dirt.

The other side outnumbered them by a significant factor, but against a force with nets, needles, weaponized wing slaps and an entire fortified base to retreat behind, there wasn’t that much the deadlanders could do.

It was like watching relic knights fighting off a wave of normal soldiers. Though not quite as invincible.

But in that chaos was some kind of civility to it. They could have stabbed each other in the throats, or gone down and crushed skulls of the hapless birds who couldn’t fly anymore. Instead, once an Odin hit the ground, that seemed to be the end of their soldier career. They’d hobble or crawl back to the direction of their forces, and they weren’t otherwise harassed by any other attack. Helping all sides out on the bottom was some kind of highly decorated group of Odin, with actual jewelry and vivid yellow colors. Some kind of combat medics?

I’d find out more about all this later, but good to know the civil war here was actually civil in some way.

And then there was the fire, which was spreading out fast. It was splitting the focus of the deadland soldiers, with them stuck between trying to take the tower or trying to put out the fire.

A small vehicle carrying a large red tank strapped on its back zipped to my right. The driver passed by without giving me a single look, too focused on correctly piloting the thing, but the other wrapped up passengers holding onto the sides all had their heads swivel slowly as they stared up at me.