152 152 Null Stone
Once they got to a decent hiding spot three hundred meters from the western side of the procession, Wolfe began making preparations. There really wasn’t much that could be done to improve his odds of success. He just needed to cause confusion.
So, he waited until the convoy was halfway past him and his furry partner, then sprayed an entire magazine on fully automatic, wiping out most of his mana pool and igniting [Fireball] explosions all through their ranks.
The unit became a nightmare of flames as the fuel tanker took a direct hit, along with an ammo truck. Explosions rocked the camp as the munitions burned off, sending everyone searching for nonexistent cover, while Wolfe reloaded and then targeted anything that looked important with single shots.
Disabling the vehicles was easy, but there was one armoured container that he was certain held the most dangerous part of the cargo.
He gave it everything he had, hoping to make the spell work against the null stone, but what he got was a defective [Fireball], at least at first.
The explosion against the side of the container was barely fist-sized, and it seemed that the gravity magic had failed to punch through. But then it collapsed into a dense ball of dark blue fire and began to swirl, pulling anything loose into its radius, growing and crushing everything it touched until everything loose, from weapons to soldiers without anything to hold onto, had been pulled into that tiny sun.
“That’s why the Null Stone is so dangerous. It’s unstable and unpredictable. It could have been much worse if dozens or hundreds of spells had been involved.” The fox demon whispered.
“The other dust clouds are coming this way. Let’s get out of here and find a new target. We will keep these soldiers occupied for a while and disrupt their schedule.
Don’t rush your people, though. The suction power of that vortex is still working. It just ran out of things it could swallow.” Wolfe agreed.
ƥαṇdαηθνε|
“How did they know about the VIP convoy? You don’t think it’s the locals trying to rob us, do you?” Someone was asking.
“They wouldn’t normally attack a convoy unless they were desperate. But they won’t get near null stone either, so if it was them, the cargo will be fine.” Someone added.
The other mundane army convoys continued to make plans to recover the special cargo and continue, and the way they were describing the crate of Null Stone munitions made it clear that not every unit had the same gear.
Obviously, this was a valuable substance, and they could use it to bait the army and set a trap for those who came looking for it. So, once Wolfe and the Kitsune were behind the convoys who had changed course to assist the first group, which still thought that they were under active attack because of the burning ammunition truck, Wolfe picked a spot and attacked again.
This time, they didn’t hide the bikes. They just parked behind a ridge and climbed the last few meters to shoot at the army.
They were all loaded into their vehicles and even hanging off the sides so the infantry didn’t slow them down, which Wolfe used as his target markers. The extra infantry was hanging off other infantry transports, so he only had to look for exposed personnel, and he could eliminate the maximum number of attackers at once.
The first ten bursts went into vehicles with the most infantry on them, with Wolfe doing his best to aim at the engines so that the survivors couldn’t get the vehicles working again.
With their transports stopped, they could either split up to help the first group or stop here. This unit chose to stop and regroup while another unit went to assist their allies.
“Next unit. Let’s make them think we’re everywhere.” Wolfe laughed, aiming high above the heads of the unit with the sniper rifle and taking wild shots at a unit two kilometres away.
They would never hear him over the chaos, and a few lucky hits got the interior of a tank with the top hatch open and another ammunition truck. It was almost like the munitions trucks had a magnetic pull to the enchanted rifle rounds.
They had the worst possible luck, and even firing blindly and trusting his rudimentary knowledge of ballistics to hit their general area, the munitions trucks still took direct hits.
That set off a huge explosion, crippling the convoy, so Wolfe ran back to his bike to retreat out of range and wait for them to sort themselves out.
The army units in the area were stopped, and one important anti-magic cargo container was burned to ashes. Not a bad day for the two of them. Now, all that he had to do was wait for the army to abandon what they couldn’t carry and sweep in to take it for himself.
The army decided the same thing. They called in a logistics group to come to collect the rest and packed only what they could carry, leaving the crippled vehicles behind.
Wolfe had targeted the trucks first, so the commanders had decided that the vehicles were the problem, and they were leaving on foot without any attempt to fix them.
Except for one tank squad that was. They gathered their survivors and rolled out in a separate convoy, leading the way toward Sylvan City on a direct course.
When the army moved out, the mutants moved in, quickly clearing everything they could get their hands on, including vehicle parts and any fuel they could scavenge.
One fuel truck was intact, with only a broken front axle where it had been hit by one of their own shells, and the mutants quickly got it up and running again, cheering as they drove it away, pulling a trailer full of loot.
“I need a high-powered radio. We can contact Sylvan Army forces from the Den, but not well, and I want to be able to send a message directly to the city.” Wolfe explained as he led his furry partner through the rubble.
“There. That vehicle has a good one. It’s the backpack sitting on the deck. They must have left it when they ran.” She pointed out after a few minutes of searching.
“Perfect, I think I’ve got their uniform memorized as well, in case I need to imitate them later.”
The Fox Demon shook her head. “You are what you present yourself to be. It’s against the rules, don’t do it.”
She sounded very serious, so it might be a curse condition within the Wastes. There were a lot of those leftovers. The original spells had been broken and mangled over time, but they could still be incredibly deadly or effective at restraining actions. He wouldn’t want to get entangled with something like that, so Wolfe put the idea aside and began to tune the radio.
One of the available frequencies programmed into his new radio was the Sylvan army’s main channel, and it looked like they even had the current cipher for their encrypted transmissions as well. He would have to warn Priya that the enemy could hear everything she sent, but first, he had a message of his own.
He wrote it in the dirt, then mentally translated it with the Noxus family’s personal code and sent it out.
[A day north of the gas battle, the Wolfe stands in the cold.] The message was sent in Morse code, a series of long and short beeps, so the misspelling would be a direct link to him for those who knew but would appear to be a typo to those who didn’t.
That should be enough for Cassie and maybe the other Noxus elders to find him since they were all nearby during the battle. But at the very least, once someone close to him heard it, they would relay the message to let everyone else know he was alive.