The Fire and The Storm - The Nexus of Kellaran #2
Chapter 160

Part 24

"The true purpose of the exercise was not to complete the objectives, it was to train your fighters to wage war as a cohesive force and to prepare them for the horrors of the warfare we will face. In that respect, we all failed today, both we who organized and operated the exercise, and you who commanded. Almost all of your fighters did no more than supply power and spectate over your Command Link, and the experience was of little value to them as training."

He paused as he glowered about the gathering, seeming to meet every eye, then continued. "The joint Triax-Kellarani training exercise scheduled for two days from now has been postponed. The gods of The Triax and a few of their people have been coming to Kellaran quite often recently, so it sometimes seems that they are nearly here already. Their sixteen world-craft are approaching us at tremendous speed, but the fact remains they are still very far away, and that it would still require almost six more years before they would arrive within the moon system of Kellaran. That is where they feel they need to be for their mortals to truly assist in the defense of Kellaran.

"Soon after we began working together, we of the Pantheon of Kellaran suggested that they might Translocate their entire force here. Their gods say that they had never considered Translocating so much so far. They are capable of it, but such a feat would leave them dangerously drained and vulnerable for days until they recovered. We of Kellaran have proposed to assist them with this, but they are nervous abou such a co-operative effort, particularly their mortals. This is understandable, for if any of their world-craft are rendered unusable, there is not enough room for its complement aboard their other craft, and their nearest survivable habitat is a Triax outpost in a star-system very distant from here. If they lose a mother-ship, they lose almost everyone aboard her. The operation has been repeatedly postponed, until all of them and all of us can be completely certain of its safety.

"Thus, the joint exercise with them has also been postponed for at least a week.

"You can make good use of the time. Bring the other nations of Kellaran up to pace with yours, and be prepared to have them participate in the next exercise.

"Until we have a method of testing you that trains all of your forces at once, instead of merely training most of them to be nothing more than batteries, fighters with combat effectiveness scores greater than five thousand will not fight in exercises with the rest of your forces, nor will power-sharing or remote-combat be allowed.

"Those of you with scores greater than five thousand can participate in the next general exercise as commanders, but not as combatants. Those high-scoring fighters, Strike Wizards, and those who can fight remotely with Simulacrums and other methods, will be tested in separate exercises.

"Those with scores greater than one million will be invited to train with the gods.

"Know that when all further exercises are held, the individual behavior of the simulated demons you will face will be run by the gods of The Triax, and they will co-operate with us in commanding them. In our war with the demons we fought them for more than fifty years, but the Triax have been at it for eons. We have to grant that they know a long stride more than we do about how demons fight, and their knowledge of the subject is some seven million years more up-to-date than ours. Their assessment of our efforts is that our simulated demons show the same offensive capability as real demons, and they've helped us be more accurate in that respect, but they maintain that our simulations don't fight like real demons. In particular, we're not duplicating the unpredictable, vicious, and cunning nature of the demons. "This is understandable. Ours are orderly military minds, and are therefore almost diametrically opposite to the orientation of the demons. Those who will guide your enemies in the joint exercise will give you a far more accurate depiction of true battle with demons, so I warn you to guard against complacency.

"Another difference in the next exercises is that they will have no time limit. They will continue to complete victory, or to complete defeat. You can be sure that all of you and all of your forces will be tested to your utmost.

"After the first joint exercise, we will have another, then another, then another, until it is time to begin the true war. Each exercise will be more difficult than the last.

"Know this; The Triax have been victorious in the majority of their encounters with the demons. But as mighty as they are, there have been times when they were defeated and forced to flee. And there have been times when they faced a force of demons so strong that they dared not even show themselves, and instead were forced to watch and wait until the great horde broke up into smaller hordes, then hunt them down one by one.

"There is a better than even chance that the horde we will face will be weak enough that they will be heavily over-matched by the Kellaran-Triax alliance. But there is a very real chance that we face an enemy that will overmatch us, even if we become ten times as dangerous as we are now before we fight them. The rock that contains these demons is about nine hundred and twenty kilometers long, six hundred kilometers wide, by four hundred and forty-five kilometers deep. It is the largest that The Triax have seen the demons use for such a long journey. I'll leave it up to you to calculate how many demons could be hidden in such a stone.

"The Triax speculate that the demons may have chosen this huge rock because it was already moving at great speed in the direction they wished to travel when they found it, and so using it saved them a grea deal of energy and effort. But we cannot afford to assume that this is so.

"If they were a weak horde who merely jumped aboard an oversized rock because it was going in the right direction, it would stand to reason that they would simply let it continue at full speed until it reached the inner worlds, and then either Translocate off of it and let it impact with the sun, or they might break off the part that contained them and then slow that if they thought they might continue to need it to shelter them from the void, and again, let the rest of it continue to fly into the sun.

"The fact that they are expending the massive energies needed to slow that flying mountain range indicates that they are numerous and intend to keep it for a while. The fact that they can afford the energy to do so indicates that they are powerful.

He paused for a second to see how they reacted to that, then brought his lecture to a conclusion.

"Please inform us when you will be ready for exercises with all of the militaries of Kellaran, and we will schedule them.

"You will be informed when the first joint Triax-Kellarani exercise has been reliably rescheduled.

"Again, I congratulate you. Today's exercise was of little use as training, but it was an astonishing display of the most innovative methods of warfare."

He gave a nod, and vanished.

Somonik took the center of the circle. "Since the end of The War of The Founding of The Just Alliance and the initiation of the time-bubbles, military matters on Kellaran have returned to being national matters. Many of the most senior commanders and other key people who coordinated and commanded the military of The Just Alliance are in the time-bubbles, including Prince Yazadril, Supreme Commander of The Militaries of The Just Alliance.

"It was thought that little would change during the two months for us that they are gone, and perhaps that would have been so, if Prince Mark and his family had not emerged early.

"But they did emerge early, and have since acted in ways that have changed life on Kellaran completely. Most significantly in the immediate term; the institution of the new training systems, the Healing spell that allows them to be practical, and the Work spell that has freed almost everyone to participate.

"Were it not for the need of the non-magical humanoid races to deal with their suddenly becoming magical, almost ninety percent of our world's surface populations would be combat-ready right now.¶¶¶¶¶¶

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