The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page B

a threat, but that didn’t mean the world was not without the means to defend itself.
    At the base of the Root Palace, midway between the main gate and the right arm of the growing courtyard wall, great bay doors, one hundred meters high and wide, opened to give exit to the Empire’s giant mobile weapons.
    Gran Mid, the bare skeleton of a snake one hundred meters long and eight meters in diameter, slid out over the ground, its ribs moving subtly like the legs of a centipede to effect movement exactly like that of flesh and blood snake. Upon Gran Mid’s head stood another skeleton, that of a man, with arms folded. In truth, though, this man, Jav Holson, only pretended at being a skeleton. He wore the Kaiser Bones, the Artifact he received from the Emperor forty-seven years ago, which gave him the power to command the dead. Jav could sense bone in the ground, could raise an army from any graveyard, but there was nothing to raise here. The planet was remarkably clean in that respect, but it didn’t matter to Jav. With or without his army, this planet was already the property of the Viscain Empire.
    Behind Jav and Gran Mid was Raus Kapler, riding atop the head of Gran Pham, a great war elephant preceded by its massive curled tusks shod with thick bands of steel to create a dual striking surface. Gran Pham, standing thirty meters at the forward shoulder, lumbered heavily, its prodigious muscles, a sickly gray-green, working visibly beneath pale, translucent skin. Raus’s Artifact, the Resurrection Bolts, gave him a command of the dead similar to Jav’s, but he, too, would be denied an army on this planet.
    Gran Lej, a thirty-five-meter-tall figure of synthetic wood, modeled after his master, Icsain, came next. Close scrutiny revealed that Gran Lej was composed of countless two-meter-tall figures locked together that were smaller representations of the larger whole. This was Icsain’s army, ready to scatter and swarm at Icsain’s order. Icsain was somewhere hidden amongst his thousands of soldiers, likely buried within Gran Lej’s breast.
    The last Gran to emerge from the Palace, occupying almost all of the space opened by the bay doors, was Gran Mal, the great walking machine castle belonging to Gilf Scanlan. Scanlan had designed and built all the Grans, but Mal was his crowning achievement, easily dwarfing its predecessor, Gran Kohm, and out-powering all existing Grans and those that had come before. It moved slowly, and with each step, the ground quaked. Its gross outline was similar to that of a tortoise, but one with cyclopean plates of shining gold making up its shell. Gran Mal followed its fellows as far as the gap between the rising courtyard walls of the Palace. Here, it stopped, dropped until the lip of its shell touched the ground, and settled in to form the gate, the impregnable first line of defense, for the Root Palace.
    Forbis Vays and Brin Karvasti, both of the Titan Squad, stayed behind with Scanlan within Gran Mal. The three of them, with the thousands of machine troops housed inside the Gran, ready for immediate dispatch, would be enough to repel any force. The remaining two members of the Titan Squad, however, continued on with the other 21st Generation Generals.
    Hilene Tanser and Nils Porta could fly under their own power. Hilene was the winner of the last Artifact Competition, but she was also an impressive graduate of the Locsard Psychic Academy. Nils had been the top student at the Academy at that time, however, and had won his Artifact for that honor.
    Nils Porta’s ability was unique. Without the aid of his Artifact, he’d been able, through force of will alone and on demand, to substantially increase his bone mass, the shape of which he could alter and thrust from his skin, and with which he could form a spiked, armored shell—the end result looking not at all human. In this state, he gained a limited form of telekinesis, granting him totally free mobility in any direction, and a kind of radar