The Portal was buried in the side of a hill, untouched for a few thousand years, and long overgrown by plantlife, dirt, and scree tumbled down.
That didn't stop it from activating, and sending all that matter in the way out into some trackless subdimension as it opened up, and roiling shadows filled the suddenly cleared space in front of the ancient psitech.
The jetbikes came through smoothly, unafraid of what might be there, and indeed, the riders were looking around eagerly for things to engage as they slid out of Gloom into reality.
"Where?"
"South and east, five hundred and twenty miles," one of the riders, an armored Warlock in matte-black armor, replied instantly.
With little more than quiet hums, their stealth fields engaged, and the group of jetbikes turned and headed off. Even the sonic booms as they broke the sound barrier were muffled and distorted into little more than coughs lost in the winds...
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The goblins were coming, the goblins were coming...
The Triple Tide had swarmed over the Kopokral system, the Indrika Protectorate, and the Privali Expanse. Billions of goblins had come out of seemingly nowhere to gather into a massive warhost, and were steamrolling everything in their path as their overwhelming drive to conquer and claim territory spurred them on to endless war among the stars.
Six fully populated human worlds had fallen already, the inhabitants killed and eaten, or drafted into slavery for the goblin war machine. The goblins, their losses being replaced by newcomers drawn to the conflict by parapsychic racial awareness, surged on to the next system, riding a wave of bloodlust and victory.
The Imperial Fleet replied in force, but it still took time to react, gathering forces and transiting the Warp, fighting delaying actions, and leaving worlds to burn as the goblins claimed system after system.
Where there were goblins, there were elvar hunting them from the shadows, picking out their rogue elements, claiming their kills before fading into the void. Massive amounts of manpower and ships were converging on what was being called the Gorgrum Tide, after the now-legendary urgob said to be leading it, a startling piece of news. It was hobgoblin warlords who usually led the goblin Tides.
Gorgrum was now on Capristi II, a once-idyllic world settled for less than a thousand years and still in pretty good shape... until a few hundred million goblin-strong warhost landed and turned the planet upside down.
My contributions in such an environment were more about diversions, distractions, and confusion. There were simply too many goblins, and I certainly couldn't even come close to killing them all myself without a whole lot of time and unfriendly atomics being lobbed in my direction.
What I could do is stamp myself onto their racial collective, butcher their officers, and turn myself into the kind of irritating meme they either had to stamp out or run from, because there wasn't going to be anything else they could do to me.
I could definitely turn any specific battlefield I showed up on completely around. Even if I was limited in how I could take out armor, mecha, or warbeasts, I could chew through infantry like no tomorrow, and the biggest punch of the goblins was all about their infantry.
Rapid-fire lasers from Paten and Host, backed with holy banefire, Enmity, and Soulbound +IV, could scythe through the green tide of the runtiest of the goblin species with heaven-defying speed, literally blowing them apart with uncanny accuracy from a mobile and very agile firing platform called Wave-Skating Steps accentuating a pair of kickass Rantha legs.
Without infantry, armor is always vulnerable. While the little green runts could hide really, really well, anywhere I went emptied out of living goblins really, really fast, and I was no armored vehicle. I was impossibly hard to hit, and what grenades, plasma streams, massed slugthrowers, and crazy assortments of rockets, missiles, and suicide-divers and the like they tried on me got basically no results.
Their units of Shamans trying massed psychic stuff on me just became targets, and they lost a bunch of those pretty damn quick, which didn't help their morale situation. It got worse when I worked through their artillery lines, blowing up stockpiles of ammunition. Goblins always liked high explosives, so those going up were pretty pyrotechnic.
Goblins were a Powered Race, with even the non-psions tossing off psionic energy the psion/shamans of the race could use. It was also harnessed to their psitech, with the result that the wills and beliefs of the goblin race powered a significant portion of their technology. If that made their tech even weirder, well, it wasn't significantly different then the ancestor-powered crap of the elvar, or the necrobiotech of the drow, or the organic tech of the biovore races. Psionics and science tended to mesh into one another even more efficiently then magic did, after all.
In the end, how it worked was nearly as important as the fact it did, and in their way, it was as good as human tech. Given long enough to develop and Level, there was no doubt whatsoever their TL could rise to the levels of even the ancient elvar or Ruk... and equally no doubt that they lost it when their civilizations crashed, as they really didn't have any way of carrying it on other than their racial memories... which also meant they could never truly lose it, merely working back up to it some time, some when...
I seriously doubted the goblins were an evolved race, but the universe was crazy, so who knew? Once you started throwing psionics and magic into an evolutionary mix, anything could happen. As it stood, the goblin had elements of all major Lower Planar influences, meaning they had backers among all the major evil god factions, which was quite impressive on a racial level. Having three sub-races effectively meant none of the evil powers really wanted them gone, so on a racial level, the goblins were playing the profound Alignments off against one another...
That was sheer demented genius. Humans played all the Alignments off by having free will, such as it was, and being able to take Classes so quickly to such extremes. The goblins being able to do the same thing among the Evil powers... that was very unsettling if they had done it deliberately somewhen, and very disturbing if they just evolved into it otherwise...
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The orbital bombardment could tear the heck out of the landscape, but the shielded megacities and kiloplexes were not cracked anywhere as easily. Imperial detachments had landed as well, and were making a right fight of things.
For all their genius, goblins were not defenders. They were aggressive territorialist conquerors, always going for more, more, more. They'd occupy land, but reinforcing and arranging defenses wasn't much in them. The most they'd do is turn their living quarters into a maze of tunnels and chambers that would be pure pain to clean out, so the universal situation was to put down an Earthshaker and just collapse any region with goblin caves, crushing them all.
This meant they didn't really have a deep understanding of a defender mindset, probably why the Ruk had suppressed them for so long. Their sweeps and sorties and charges and infiltrations kept running into prepared defensive emplacements, tactics, and men and women who knew how to make use of them, enabling the humans to hit above their weight.
Now there was the Rantha tearing through the sensitive and critical parts of their formations, cracking them open mercilessly, and making a mess of their grandiose plans, frontal attacks, artillery formations, and rolling armor.
I definitely never lacked for something to do, and the toll I had taken on the goblins was definitely in the seven digits after a couple days. I had been doing a LOT of shooting, and at high value targets, in addition to literal walls of runts, heaping them up high so the tankbusters of the humans could basically operate with impunity.
Eh?
I was doing a fifth-gravity dance, moving around as if weighed less than an urgob's axe, when I saw blurs of motion coming in from the distance. They stood out because they had that sheen of cloaking tech around them that said they should be invisible, which was pretty impressive given the psychic static being thrown up by the mass of goblins raging all about me at the moment.
My Mask zipped out, and I had to smile. Wow, they were really eager to see me again, if they wanted to come into a play like this. Being airborne over a battlefield seething with a bunch of tri-colored goblins with pyromania as a racial trait was just not a smart thing to do.
Still I was easy to see, using my violet autolasers wound about with green Bane against Goblins flames and white vivus, and leaving a white trail behind me that was easy to see from a distance. The jetbikes swooped and turned in my direction, and I had to laugh.
I changed the hue the force bolts from Paten and Host's autobow strings to exactly the bright fiery red that the goblins preferred as I hit the ground, taking me out of the firing lines of all the opportunists trying to fill the air around me with lead and fusion fire and hard light. As the drow jetbikes came streaking in, I started shooting at them.
Oh, I wasn't trying to shoot them down. I could have really made things bad, but I wanted them to have some fun. That was what they wanted out of life, right?
Pierce Magical Concealment worked perfectly well against high-end psitech, you know?
Burning projectiles sped out improbably far, bright and catchy, and impacted against the stealth fields of the incoming jetbikes a couple hundred yards out. There were sparks and flares, and suddenly all the goblins whose eyes followed the flashy shots saw ten or so jetbikes streaking through the skies above them.
Hilarity promptly ensued.
The drow were moving fast, but not that fast, as they had finally found me, and were coming in on approach to have a go at me. They definitely weren't expecting me to snipe them at range and remove their stealth cover.
A good chunk of the battlefield seemed to turn as one, and it almost looked like the ground lifted up in a discharge of tracer, fusion, and laser fire. A few gob-techs reflexively blew off some crazily spinning anti-air rockets, and the drow ran right into it all.
They were all moving fast, so they streaked by overhead as curtains of fire rose up behind, around, and ahead of them. Erratic rockets looped wildly and converged on them as the drow split up desperately, trying to evade all the shit coming at them.
Boom, there went one, as heavy tracers caught the engine and found something delicate. Didn't kill the rider, who went flipping out and spinning towards the ground... but the gobs were watching, and happy to investigate further.
Heavy lasers sheared into another, and sent it into a fatal spin around its long access, and the driver barely let go as it drove into the ground in a fireball at a few hundred mph. Rockets cracked, smacked, and boomed, and tore two more off their bikes with shrapnel, while one unfortunate jigged when he should have juked, and ran right into some concentrated high explosive to the chassis that she didn't take too well.
Even more entertaining was the bladewitches who simply abandoned their bikes and fell from the sky down onto my general position.
They ideally aimed to surround me, but given my reflexes were just as good as theirs, and my foot speed considerably higher, I was out of their encirclement before they could possibly land, and shooting at gobbers non-stop regardless.
Four ladies coming in to 'reinforce' me naturally didn't make the gobs that happy, and the fact they were running after me only made it more plain they were 'my allies', so they inherited a good deal of attention as they tried to catch up to me. Any goblins that got in front of them died before the situation could be explained in detail, unfortunately.
Her voice carried across the roars of cannons, explosions, whine of lasers, chuffing of autoguns, rumbling of engines, and the squeals, bellows, screams, and shouts fairly well, "You owe me a duel!"
I spun backwards, my mass harvesting of goblins not stopping, but less thorough, as I wanted to leave some entertainment for them as they labored to follow me. I was a good cardio instructor, I was.
"Madame Lolith! You are such a long way from home! I am a bit busy at the moment... if you would like to stick around until the planetary assault is over, I'm sure I can fit you into my schedule then!"