Immovable Mage

– Era of the Wastes, Cycle 219, Season of the Rising Sun, Day 25 –

“May the Bright Lady be with you,” said Akemi solemnly. The devout followers that were kneeling in front of her nodded. Emboldened by their faith, they straightened themselves and soared into the sky to join up with the mobile combat support and flying battle mages.

Akemi sighed. She much preferred her circle to focus on healing, but against the dead, there was no more potent counter than the holy-infused fire of the Bright Lady. They wanted to help and if they wanted to give it their best, then they had to do more than support the defense with healing. They had to move out.

Akemi had drawn a line at joining the trailbreakers. Thinking of the first among them, she could only sigh again. That obstinate man was the worst patient she had ever had. It was hard to believe that his mana signature was still shining brightly, but so it remained in her mana sight. She wondered how such a man had provoked a bounty by the Circle of the Bright Lady. He did not appear to her like a vile man that would warrant such aggression.

Akemi’s eyes followed her flock fly above the enemy horde and join the airborne mages that were raining cleansing fire and purifying light onto the unholy horde. She frowned anxiously when she saw how resistant the undead hellspawn appeared to be. The support of their goddess was not unlimited and she could only hope that the unholy creatures would fall before their channeling would dwindle.

“Ready?”

Akemi forced her eyes away from the fighting members of her circle to find a human woman in city guard uniform and an elven crafter looking at her while waiting for a reply. “Yes.” She looked to the unaspected workers hurling in ammunition, then at the strange contraption in front. Even the most construct-illiterate person could tell that this siege weapon was physically impossible without magic.

Akemi glanced at the wand in the crafter’s hands. A wand crafted by the worst patient she ever had. One of many that were fueling their indestructible fortifications and stabilizing their physically impossible siege weapons.

Akemi ignited a flame of holy-infused fire to ignite a small sheltered wick attached to the oiled boulder.

“Fire!” shouted the human guard.

An impossible trebuchet swung and hurled the boulder. At its peak, the holy flame licked the oil and the grey boulder was covered by bright golden fire. The projectile reached beyond the water-drenched perimeter and raced towards the rear of the undead horde.

Akemi did not wait to observe the boulder’s trajectory. Adjusting the aim was not her job. Neither was waiting around until the next projectile had been loaded. She had a few more boulders to ignite and then to meet up with the defensive frontline. She still believed it madness that even manaless were allowed at the golden grid, but it was too late to argue the point anymore. She could only try her best to make sure they would remain healed and safe behind the gold of her goddess and the spell of her worst patient.

Akemi ran past all the rows of impossible artillery. Past all the mages burning their mana with long-range spells. Past all the mana-less runners rushing back and forth with supplies, until she reached the golden grid where an elven city guard with greased-back hair was barking orders.

“Thrust!” ordered the city guard.

In imperfect synchronization, the line of defenders thrust forward their long spears. They pierced through the gaps inside the immovable grid of gold and into the bodies of zombies and ghouls that had gathered on their metal net.

Thanks to their drills, they knew to avoid aiming at the undead hellspawn. Those were not enemies they could bring down with just a few spears wielded by regular people. The defenders here were either manaless or mana users not used to combat.

Akemi spotted a few familiar faces from the Flower House where her patient had recuperated. A human woman covered in tattoos that wielded a spear amateurishly, and an elven woman among the group of weaker casters that focused on supporting the grid instead of long-distance attacks.

“Back!” ordered the city guard.

More defenders rushed forth to help grab the spears and pull them back.

Akemi caught the gaze of the guard and nodded. She proceeded to cast Sanctuary while observing the elven guard place one wand at his hip and retrieve another with the same imprint. They knew where they needed the spells. All the important locations were equipped with spares to allow for the automatic recovery of primers after use.

As soon as the sanctuary had been established, mana-users led by Edmund were climbing over the golden grid and eradicating the undead hellspawn before the next wave of runners would arrive.

Akemi moved her eyes over the manaless defenders. When she saw even a pair of manaless elderly women wheezing and out of breath while both clutching the same spear and supporting each other, she could only shake her head.

This city was truly stubborn beyond belief.

***

Terry nimbly darted through the line of runners. He did not have time to waste on the weaker undead. He pulled his disruption rush with him to ward against the mana arrows crashing into him from the enemy skeletal warriors and the crossfire spells from the city’s defenders.

The battlefield was pure chaos with magic attacks and other projectiles flying everywhere. Their boulder bombardment had finished and it wreaked absolute havoc on the enemy’s vanguard of undead hellspawn and runners.

Unfortunately, there were many more undead to come. Terry was not surprised to find that the horde’s rear was mostly built around death aura creatures. That did not differ from the hordes he had encountered in Tiv’s Wasteborder. The skeletal warriors with the mana equipment were probably the weakest undead creatures that were still able to wield ranged attacks.

What truly made Terry grit his teeth, however, was that there still remained undead hellspawn and several death whisperers hidden among the remaining horde. There was even another behemoth, but today that was someone else’s turn to deal with according to their plan.

Terry dodged to the side to evade the gleaming blade of a high-level death executioner. He stomped on the wet ground. He froze the droplets and transfixed immovable ice. He accentuated his power with a burst and elongated his king spear. With the help of an immovable fulcrum, and a furious charge forward, the executioner’s spine was broken in less than a breath’s time.

Terry accelerated to catch up with his disruption rush and not lose his built momentum. He made sure to mark the purple signatures in his mana sight with mana flares of his own. Today, there would be no hiding for the vampires threatening the borders of the city state.

Behind him, Terry could feel the momentous charge of the disciples from the Soaring Mountain Sect. He noted that going by their performance, Xuan had been severely impaired by the limited area in the Thanatos Proving Grounds of Whetstone City.

These avenging disciples were using the same signature move of their sect and it appeared that they increasingly built momentum when charging in a straight line. Their defenses did not appear as exaggerated as Xuan’s, but they still shrugged off all attacks while waltzing forward and crashing into enemies with the raging weight of a mountain.

Terry sensed a shadow-aspected anomaly and before the shade even had a chance to properly manifest, its ghoulish body was already blown apart by a thunderous blast from his king spear.

The ground rumbled when a man in inscribed full-plate armor rose to the height of a small building to face an undead juggernaut. He wielded an equally giant hammer covered in brightfire and wherever it landed, the undead returned to their graves.

Seeing the man fight like that, Terry found it hard to believe that not too long ago, that grizzled hunter had looked up to him of all people. He could also not help but smile slightly at seeing the Castellan combination in action again. It had been so long since he had met Lizzy in Tiv.

Terry’s mana bubble warned him of another incoming wave of projectiles from behind and he transfixed those he could not evade easily. He did not stop on his path to the closest cluster of enemy whisperers.

In another marked location, Terry sensed the mana resonances of a white tiger and golden crows that were challenging the whisperers. More mana resonances were popping up all around the battlefield and Terry was not surprised that most of the trailbreakers jumping into the crossfire were martialists.

Bless these battle-crazy maniacs.

Terry didn’t know if it was because of the martialists’ tendency to devalue life, because they egged each other on, or because they made a habit of overestimating their abilities, but he didn’t care. Today, he was grateful to fight with them at his side. It took a certain bout of madness to face bad odds without backing down. Preparation only took one so far.

Terry darted through a gap of phantoms that fled his disruption discharge with the unnatural fear of undead being controlled by a death whisperer. He knew that those were not allied, because Intira’s phantoms were currently pestering another vampiric whisperer. Terry instantly set up more mana refractors to redirect a part of his disruption rush to eradicate the ethereal creatures.

Terry got a grim satisfaction out of knowing the enemy whisperers had tried and failed to protect the phantoms from him. He knew that he had their attention. The fact that none of them tried to attack him meant they were scared. Their fear was his hope.

Terry charged further into the enemy horde and smashed into the skeletal warriors with divine hammers, blasts of lightning, and an unbreakable spear pole. Even while he decimated the creatures in his path, he never stopped on his path towards the whispering vampires.

Terry pushed into the undead horde like an unstoppable bull. He could have bypassed the horde by stepping into the sky, but his role was different. He had achieved his objective for the first phase of the defense. His objective for the second phase was to demoralize, divide, and distract.

They threw countless spells at Terry, only to have them shredded by his disruption domain before the spells could even reach him.

They cloaked their spell centers, only to have Terry locate and shred them anyway.

They tried to secure safe casting centers underneath the earth, only to find their spells blocked by an indestructible layer of rock.

They used large-area fire spells, only to find Terry emerge from indestructible ice after the flames had died off. They tried darkwater and acid, but everything appeared to yield the same demoralizing result: Freedom’s Guardian dashed away unharmed while their own undead forces had been turned into collateral damage.

They tried to utilize second-degree effects by maintaining inferno or blizzard spells, only to find the dastardly defender creating tunnels of divine barriers or shrugging off the temperature with a deliberate circulation of mana while their runners were being crippled.

They unleashed a coordinated wave of poisoned air but Terry detected it instantly. The hopes they harbored when he was forced to hunker down in an air-tight cube of divine barriers was immediately dashed when a buzzing swarm of golden wisps were manifesting to diffuse the poisoned air until the annoying city defender could dash forward once again.

They learned that if they wanted to deal with Terry, they had to engage in close combat, but so far, Terry alone had killed five of their whisperers already. If they wanted to kill Terry before his reinforcements arrived, they had to sacrifice their whispering and divide their forces by sending at least four vampires at once. In their efforts to avoid that, they kept sending individual vampires to their deaths.

Terry punched while infusing mana into the inscribed bandages at his arm and a divine hammer flew forward to knock a flying death mage into shards of immovable ice. He gritted his teeth and suppressed the urge to step upwards and help in the aerial fight.

Even though he knew that the bulk of the battle was not in the sky, he could not help but worry about what was going on up there. He swallowed his anxiety and reminded himself that the air belonged to a mixed force of Guildheads, guards, and hunters led by Intira. Everyone had to play their part.

Terry took a deep breath and then raged forward with renewed intensity. His punches pulverized the skulls of skeletal warriors while the accompanying divine hammer smashed into a death reaver further behind.

His lightning-infused king spear cleaved into the head of an undead juggernaut while another divine hammer slapped a flying death mage into the ground.

Terry finished off the juggernaut with a blast of lightning while kicking a divine hammer into a group of death knights and vanquishing a death specter outright.

Terry felt his blood pumping furiously and his anger rose. It only took a moment to realize that this was an abnormal state of frenzy and he burst his mana while turning to the intensely blood-aspected mana signature of a blood abomination running wild.

Terry focused on his breathing to help maintain his calm. He cursed inwardly that they still had to wait before moving onto the next phase.

Although it might be better this way.

Terry noted how the blood-corrupted zombie was absorbing the corpses of all other zombies. Even though a blood abomination was annoying to deal with, it managed to cut down the number of enemies as well. A lot of zombies traded for a single blood abomination. Depending on the situation, one might be preferable to the other.

Terry forced himself to ignore the blood abomination and pushed further towards the whisperers. One trait of blood abominations that he could appreciate at this moment was that these mana-corrupted zombie plague victims were slow. He had time to reconsider his options before the blood abomination would become a problem for the city.

As long as the martialists stay outside its range. They're too insane to throw a frenzy effect on top.

Terry involuntarily shivered at the thought, but he continued on his path. He would not second-guess his actions at this time. He had to push forward. He had to force the enemy to play their trump card, so that they could throw it back at them and proceed to the last phase.

Terry continued decimating the undead in his path and dispatched the vampires challenging him until the enemy commander had had enough. With a silent order towards the back of the horde, a gigantic monster of rotten flesh and rotating maws grew into the sky and immediately proceeded to stomp forward towards his position while the rest of the horde carefully avoided the giant feet covered with rotating maws.

As ugly as the last one.

Terry took a deep breath and forced himself to remain calm. None among the Lich Kingdom forces noticed his fleeting switch of spellwork to lift the Immovable Object on the layer of rock below for just a moment.

Just long enough for a certain area to be liquified and carved out of the transfixing spell.

Long tentacles emerged from liquified ground and wrapped tightly around the behemoth’s pillar-like legs. The undead hellspawn pulled with all its might and barely managed to lift the tentacled shape of a mana-corrupted squid into view.

A creature just as undead as the hellspawn. Even though the undead beast did not reach quite the behemoth’s height, it was still large enough to wrestle with the hellspawn. Its tentacles were stretched and the dead flesh tore, but not before it managed to trip the behemoth.

No matter how well-coordinated the undead horde was, there was a limit to how fast the whispers traveled and another limit in how fast the many skeletal warriors could move out of the way. Among the densely-packed rear of the horde, the fall of one gigantic behemoth was a harbinger of eternal rest, only dwarfed in undead destruction by their initial carpet boulder bombardment.

Behind the fallen behemoth, a ship rose up from liquified earth and when the mud dispersed from their arcane protective bubble, the passengers erupted forth at once. Death mages flew into the sky towards the nearest vampires. The whole flank of the ship was filled to the brim with death knights wielding mana bows aimed at the undead horde while the weaker skeletal warriors were crawling around the ship’s hull and lifting it up to move.

Hunters and martialists alike leaped down the ship and roared with eager battle cries. It had taken their all to wait in ambush to break into the enemy’s rear. With their enemies finally in their sights, nothing could hold them back anymore.

At the helm of the ship, Thiago stood with a raised hand and a never-ceasing whisper on his lips. He did not know if he could truly take control of the undead behemoth. After all, there was a reason why hellspawn were long thought an impossible target of necromancy. However, his whispers did not have to be victorious as long as the enemy’s were impaired to impotence.

Thiago raised a second hand and pushed both hands forward while his whispers changed in an eerie echo of voices. He might not be able to wrestle an undead hellspawn from the control of the Lich Kingdoms, but wrestling for the behemoth’s reins did not prevent him from coordinating his own undead and recruiting more from the enemy’s death aura creatures. He might not have grown up in the Lich Kingdoms, but he wanted to see who dared to contest with him in death aura whispers in his own home.

While the vampire commander was cursing and many red eyes were drawn between the fallen behemoth, the assault on their rearguard, and Terry’s rampage through the horde, few among them noticed the martialist elders that appeared from a completely different direction.

A female elder in grey-blue robes instantly cut out the heart of one vampiric whisperer. While her fellow sect masters were similarly dealing with the other vampires at this location, she nodded with satisfaction at the progress of their allied sects.

They might be small sects, but united they would rise. She believed that was the intention of the Venerable Senior. A lesson worth teaching.

They had waited in hiding for the best possible moment to strike, and struck they had. Her juniors had performed admirably and everything had gone well to distract the enemy and provide an opportunity to best utilize their strengths. All as the Venerable Senior had envisioned.

The female elder wiped the blood from her sword and solemnly declared: “Let our sect serve as the sword for the Honorable Elder to enlighten the world once more.” She circulated mana through her dantian and then infused it into her blade. “His will be done!” She darted forth while the furious mana resonance of a white tiger roared forward.

***

“Report,” ordered Edmund wearily.

“How about you cheer up, grumps.” Intira slapped the dwarven city guard on the back. “We won.”

“Hmph,” grumbled Edmund with an unsatisfied expression. “Not without loss.” He looked back at the messenger and repeated: “Report.”

“The Guardian said that a few managed to escape,” said the messenger.

“To be expected given how many vampires they arrived with,” said Intira with a shrug. “Defeating a beast is one thing, but preventing its escape is another.” The joking tone vanished from her voice. “I’m not going to send hunters out to pursue. That’s a recipe for walking into a trap.”

“Of course not,” concurred Edmund and nodded at the elven woman. “Too many for that and we don’t know where their reinforcements might lurk. Get your hunters healed and then get ready to scout properly again.”

“I’ll forgive you for trying to order me around this time.” Intira slapped the dwarf again on the shoulder and then left with a chortle.

“How is the Guardian holding up?” asked Edmund.

“He looks unsatisfied,” replied the messenger.

“I meant his injuries,” clarified Edmund with a frown.

“He looks like shit and was obviously avoiding the leader of the Bright Lady’s circle,” replied the messenger. “I’m not a healer, but he looks, well, ‘better’ would definitely paint the wrong picture. Let’s say less bad than after the last battle. Still looks like shit though.”

“I can imagine Akemi will be cursing because of the wounds beyond a superficial glance,” muttered Edmund. “I caught a few of the Guardian’s fights and those were some powerful bursts.” He shook his head and sighed. “A gem cannot be polished without friction…” He shrugged.

“Pardon, Sir?”

“Nevermind, just an old saying.” Edmund shrugged. “A lot is resting on him. I hope he can take it.” He clicked his tongue. “And I wonder what exactly he experienced to still look unsatisfied after such a performance.”

While muttering Edmund reminded himself to control his own expression. This was not the time to lower morale. They had lost good people. They had played all their cards and the escaped enemies would be certain to inform their leaders. But, nevertheless, they had won. The city would stand another day.

“No idea, Sir.” The messenger’s reply jolted the tired city guard from his thoughts.

“Make sure that the healers get to him,” ordered Edmund. “Get Jasmine or the others to tie him down if he is obstinate. I don’t care how unsatisfied he feels, he should get healed properly and let us deal with the stragglers.” He looked at the horizon. “When the vampires report back to the Lich Kingdom instigators, they’ll be more prepared the next time.” He took a deep breath. “We’ll have to do better.”

***