Gilded Ashes-Chapter 75: Burn Through Drones

Alteea Sage jumped.

She didn’t take the stairs. She vaulted over both the mezzanine’s control desk and the rail after that - white coat fluttering behind her - dropped three meters, and hit the lower floor with both feet, already turning. Two quick steps brought her to DRN number Nine’s station. The operator sat with his VR headset on, hands buried in twin throttle sticks, his mind inside the drone feed fourteen kilometers away.

Alteea didn’t ask. As soon as she arrived, she kicked the base of his chair hard enough to spin him sideways. One hand flipped the manual override toggle. The other took the throttle sticks before the headset finished sliding off the falling operator’s face.

"Nine is mine" she shouted.

The operator blinked, headset half-off, mouth open.

Alteea’s fingers gripped the controls. Thumb on the trim wheel. She wasn’t looking at the main screen. Her eyes were closed. She was flying by the vibration in the controls - the resistance in the sticks, the pitch of the props feeding through the throttle housing.

"Nine feed - up on the screen. Now."

On the main display, the high-right drone feed lurched. A split second after, it dove. The Nyx’s axe-head filled the frame. The props screamed as Alteea rolled the drone through the turbulence above the Nyx’s head, cut throttle for a fraction of a second, and dropped it straight down.

The drone hit the blade-head dead center. A bright flash. Then fire, shrapnel, fragments scattering across the camera. The Nyx reeled - one long arm swinging wide, dragging furrows through empty air.

"Next" Alteea shouted, already out of the chair. The woman at the adjacent station was already standing, headset lifted, seat cleared. Alteea slid in, pulled the band over her eyes, and settled her hands on the twin sticks.

"Ten and Four. Link them."

"B- Both linked." Someone answered a few seconds later.

She flew two drones at once. On the screens, two feeds plunged in from opposite angles - one high, one low. Alteea skimmed Ten’s rotors across the Nyx’s axe-face, blinding it with metal scrap, while Four sideswiped the shoulder joint from behind. Four’s frame shuddered on impact - one rotor blade snapped off, a second hung by wire. Ten quickly lost altitude, propellers grinding. Both drones were damaged, yet Alteea kept flying them. Her fingers adjusted for the drag, compensated for the missing blade, held two broken machines in the air through sheer feel.

On the ground, Hazel moved.

She shouldn’t have been able to. She was laying in dirt, left arm ending at the elbow, right leg ending at the knee, dark red soaking the ground around her in a dark circle. But her right hand was flat on the gravel, and she was pulling herself forward - dragging her body toward the staff that lay closer.

Her hand closed around the shaft. She rolled onto her back, jammed the staff’s tip against her thigh where the leg ended, and pressed. Her breath came in short, ragged pulls. Light gathered at the contact point - not healing, not regrowing what was gone. Sealing. The bleeding slowed. Stopped. She’d bought herself a few more minutes of life, nothing more.

"Gate Two is up" MED shouted. "Evac bird rolling."

"ETA?" Alteea asked, hands still on the sticks, eyes still behind the headset.

"Two minutes."

"Rune." Alteea’s voice carried through every speaker in the Lighthouse. "Ninety seconds. Keep pressure on it. Don’t worry about Hazel."

"What!? Are you insane!? But she-"

Then he paused and exhaled quickly, as if obeying Alteea’s words was the most difficult thing for him. "Ninety?" Rune’s voice came back between hard breaths. "Fine."

On screen, he came in fast from the Nyx’s left flank - wingsuit closed against his body. He slashed at the joint where the Nyx’s arm met its torso, deep enough to make the creature flinch sideways. The thing’s other arms whipped in response – wide, chaotic arcs that tore the air. One swing clipped Ten’s housing. The feed crackled.

"Ten lost a rotor" DRN said.

"Yeah, no kidding. Anything I can’t see?" Alteea shouted as she banked Four into the Nyx’s eye line. The axe-head snapped toward the drone. In that half-second of distraction, she brought Ten in from the blind side, what was left of its rotors grinding against the Nyx’s blade head, throwing sparks and fragments everywhere.

She was using broken drones as bait. Burning them down to nothing, just to buy Rune fractions of seconds.

Raizen watched her fingers on the sticks, and pressing buttons at the same time – two different controls, two different interfaces, only two hands. He watched the micro-adjustments. The way she compensated for drag before the drone hit the turbulence, not after - reading the air through the controls the same way he read an opponent’s weight shift through a blade. Speed. The same trait the column gave him. Except Alteea had been doing this since she was sixteen, and the gap between his 916 and whatever she was doing right now felt like an ocean.

"DRN - give me Twelve. It’s the last one."

"Twelve is yours."

Rune found his opening. The Nyx committed to swatting the drone. Its arm extended, blade-head turned. Rune dropped down - wingsuit folding flat against his body - slid beneath the axe-head, and came up behind the creature’s back. In one motion, he snapped the two short blades he’d been carrying together at the hilts. They locked into a twin-bladed spear, luminite running through the haft, both edges glowing together.

He drove it straight into the Nyx’s spine.

The spear sank deep. The Nyx’s body folded around the steel - not collapsing, but trying to reshape itself around the wound. One arm curled backward, bending at an angle that no joint should allow, and reached for Rune’s head. He twisted - shoulders wrenching one direction, hips the other - and dragged the spear sideways through the creature’s back. The blades caught on something dense.

Alteea flew Twelve in. The last drone hit the Nyx’s knee at full speed - a direct collision that buckled the joint and sent a crack through the feeds loud enough to make the desk operators flinch. The Nyx’s balance broke completely now. Its weight shifted wrong. The arm reaching for Rune went wide.

The creature screamed. It was such a strange, horrible sound, the camera feeds shuddered. Stomachs in the Lighthouse turned.

Rune hauled the spear through. Teeth bared, arms shaking, every muscle in his back visible through the wingsuit fabric. The twin blades found the place where the Nyx held itself together and split it.

The Nyx fell. Slow at first - tilting, the axe-head dragging its weight forward - then fast, three meters of dark mass hitting the ground hard enough to send dirt spraying ten meters in every direction.

Rune staggered back. Dropped to one knee.

"Target down" someone shouted. "Abyssal seven-four. Down!"

"MED" Alteea said immediately. The headset came off. Her hair was damp with sweat at the temples. "Posistion?"

"Right above" the guy piloting the evacuation aircraft answered.

On the feeds, the evac craft descended - a heavy quadcopter with four rotor rings, legs extending as it settled ten meters from Hazel. The side door opened. Two medics in white came out at a run. One took the staff from Hazel’s grip and laid it across her body. The other sealed the wound edges with fresh, ordinary bandages, cut loose fabric away from the limb ends, and secured her. They lifted. Hazel’s jaw unclenched enough for her to turn her head toward Rune. He raised his fist in a small victorious pose.

The quadcopter’s door sealed. The craft rose and banked back toward the city.

"Falcon returning" STRK reported. "Autopilot."

On the runway feed, the F-51 dropped from cloud cover, lined up with lane three, and came in quickly. Landing gear down, flaps extended. It touched the rails and decelerated in a straight line, smooth and mechanical. The runway plates began folding back into the campus ground before the jet had fully stopped.

The Lighthouse’s lights shifted from red back to white. The emergency feeds shrank to smaller windows. Normal readouts filled the screens again.

Alteea stood at the DRN station, headset hanging from one hand. A single line of sweat ran from her temple to her jaw. She wiped it with the back of her wrist. Then she looked up at the room - all of it, every station, every operator who’d worked the last four minutes without a mistake.

COMMS stood first. Quiet. Just upright. Then OPS-N. Then DRN. One by one, all the operators rose from their chairs. Screens did it too - status bars sliding to green, tags switching to CLEAR, audio channels closing with small chimes.

Somewhere in the back, a technician put his palms together. Once. Twice. The sound spread.

The eight Royal scholars – plus Kori - were part of it before they knew they’d started. Hikari’s hands clapped softly, her face carrying something between awe and relief. Keahi’s shoulders dropped - the first full exhale she’d taken since the axe-head flicked. Esen clapped as loud as he could, genuienly impressed by Alteea. Raizen’s palms came together and he could still feel the rail’s cold metal in his fingers, still see the trajectory lines crossing wrong on the monitor.

Behind everyone, Ichiro stood still. He pulled his cloak back, but somehow it didn’t sit like it did before. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Kori didn’t applaud. She stood at the rail, watching Alteea with pride in her eyes.

Alteea raised one hand. The room quieted on its own little by little. She set the headset on the desk.

"Good work everyone" she said, not being able to hide a smile. "We do it again tomorrow if the world asks."

She turned to the eight. She looked at them the way she’d looked at the drone feeds: measuring, already thinking about what came next.

"That" she said, "is what you’re training for. Prefferably without needing me to scrap a few drones in the process. Next time, it’ll probably be harder." She paused. "And next time, it might be you."

At the DRN station behind her, a screen still flickered. One of the broken drones - the last one, Twelve, half-buried in the ground - was still transmitting faintly. The feed was cracked, the angle wrong, but the image was clear enough.

The Nyx’s body was dissolving. The dark surface that swallowed light minutes ago was breaking apart - fracturing outward from the luminite wound, the outer shell crumbling, and underneath it, where the darkness split, something glowed. Faint. Warm. Gold-white, like embers that had been waiting inside, waiting to be freed the whole time.

The fragments drifted upward. Small pieces of the Nyx’s dark shell, now burning at the edges, floating into the gray sky. The drone’s broken lens caught them against the clouds - dozens of bright specks rising slowly, trailing thin lines of light.

Ashes. Glowing. As if they’d been gilded.

The feed held for three more seconds. Then the drone’s last rotor gave out, and the screen went dark.