Enil looked at the mountain rising out of the rolling plains. It wasn't a particularly tall mountain, nor sharp and forbidding. In fact, it was green and round, barely qualifying the name of Greenspring peak. But the twin towns to the east and west of it were proud of their mountain and insisted on calling it so.
"How's the scout groups going?" Enil asked his aide.
"Fine," Feuston tossed her head, "I still have no idea what you are thinking, spending our money like that. "
Well, now was as good a time as any to start teaching her. Enil shrugged, "This army is too big to move quickly and if we can hold the Greenspring towns, they will allow us to rest behind some proper fortifications. Greenspring towns have long sided with Minmay, they're practically right on the doorstep of the Minmay south gate. "
"How does that justify spending money on scouts?" Feuston scoffed.
"Times are changing, my girl," Enil laughed at her naivety. The younger woman scrunched up her face cutely, the same way she did whenever she thought he was looking down on her. Well, this old sack of bones could still learn a new trick. "Humans aren't like monsters, they won't charge at you so you can conveniently kill them. Imagine if we were the monsters and Minmay's Guards were the humans, how would you defend Minmay?"
Feuston looked down and frowned in thought, then she brightened up, "I'd pick us off a bit at a time, raiding and attacking isolated groups. Just like how we attack monsters. "
"Good, we'll make a commander out of you yet!" Enil grinned and stroked his beard, "and if our knight scouts meet their scouts, we will know if they are trying to attack us and we may even win such skirmishes. From our information, the spell cannon isn't very portable after all. "
"I still don't understand why we're going after the Greenspring towns though," she asked again, "shouldn't we just attack Minmay city directly? What do we have to be afraid of with four hundred knights? They're probably just digging in around Minmay and waiting to ambush us. "
Enil shook his head, "And if we go directly there, the Greenspring towns will be right behind us. What if some of Minmay's Guards were there waiting to attack us? We'll be cut off from Duport. "
"Let them! We'll kick down Minmay's front door. "
"We'll be fighting both in front and behind," Enil shook his head again, "the Guards behind us will harass us, the Guards in front defending Minmay. We aren't invincible and I would prefer to force them to give up than turn this battle into a free for all fight in the fields between here and Minmay. That can only end in total massacre and even if we do have the advantage in battle, more knights will still die than necessary. "
He shaded his eyes from the sun. There were four dots approaching the army from the hills. Riders. "A scout group has returned I see, go find out what they saw," Enil nodded at Feuston.
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Kobel held up a clenched fist and the group went silent immediately. The little copse of trees was barely large enough to hide all of them, the large flat fields of Wind eyes made for non-existent cover at this early budding stage.
Slightly down the slope, a group of knights had dismounted from their Rekis and looked like they were taking their bearings. And having a break at the same time, some of them were watering their Rekis. Vague murmurs of laughter and conversation drifted downwind to the guards sitting among the stand of trees watching them.
"Duport's knights," Kobel muttered, "that banner is not one of ours. "
The guards looked at him, soft creaking from their leather armour as they shifted slightly. He counted the knights, weighing their odds in his head. Four knights against his six. Five with the messenger.
"Distribute wands," he murmured.
Ildhin opened her pack and started taking out the bundles of magically active sticks.
"Kinrayi," he got her attention, "go back to Greenspring and report that we are engaging a scout group just west of Milly Creek. "
"She always gets the soft treatment," Sulee grinned, "do you think he likes her?"
Ildhin frantically gestured at her to shut her up. Kobel sighed mentally and turned away, pretending not to have heard.
When Ildhin had finished taking out the wands, Kobel leveled his bowgun and took aim. A rustling of leaves and soft footsteps told him that Kinrayi had disappeared, keeping to the ditch running along the edge of the field to avoid being seen.
He thought, considering blow and counter blow. They might need an edge in this.
"Set firebolt battery for timed fire, one minute, then ten seconds after that," he muttered and Ildhin, the most practiced at using enchanted items among the squad, aimed them and set up the lines. She held the triggering wand over the fuse and nodded to him.
Kobel raised a hand and right as the knight watching the surroundings turned away, swung it down.
A clatter of bowguns lashed outwards at the same time as Ildhin triggered the fuse. Without waiting to see if he hit, Kobel pulled back the string to load another bolt, counting the seconds under his breath.
The lookout died instantly, pincushioned by three bolts. The fourth bolt was nowhere to be seen, missed.
As the knights shouted in alarm, Sulee unslung her wands with practiced coordination. The second salvo of bolts passed the returning fire, that splashed into an invisible disruption wall from Sulee's shielding wands.
As fire blossomed overhead, Sulee dropped her dead wands and drew another set.
Kobel fired a third round, the knights were alert now and their bowgun bolts were glancing off shields and activated armour. It still made the knights hesitant to charge them though, the knights probably thought they had a mage, with the shield above them.
"Out, into the ditch, avoid being seen," Kobel gestured and the squad followed him out, firing their bowguns along the way.
"Wands out, force and fire mix," Kobel growled as they got clear, the knights second salvo of disruption bolts tore away the shield and ripped at empty ground. The first of the timed battery went off, firing a sequence of firebolts down range to splash on a hurried shield.
The knights weren't even trying to take cover, not that there was much there. Kobel shook his head and nodded at his squad
They stood up and leveled their wands at the knights. A hailstorm of force bolts and firebolts, with even a bowgun bolt or two mixed in, smashed down towards the knights.
The knights frantically warded off the attacks, missed force and firebolts throwing up dirt and heat all around them. Then the second timed battery sent another screaming spread of the standard ten firebolts at them.
Ildhin glanced at the firebolts headed their way and jerked her thumb downwards. While the knights were distracted by the firebolt battery, they all dived flat to the muddy ground, watching the firebolts sail over their heads and impact into the soil around the ditch with gouts of flame.
Kobel peeked over the edge and saw the knights swinging up onto their Rekis and turning away, leaving the one dead scout on the ground. He sent another bowgun bolt their way, but only glancing off armour again.
Well, that went decently enough.
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"And how did you manage to lose to a Guard scout group?!" Feuston fumed.
The knights huddled in front of her anger like lost sheep, looking down. The four Rekis behind them snorted and sniffed at Feuston curiously.
"There were two groups!" the leader of the party protested, "the second one must have been nearby and came running when the fighting started, they wouldn't have dared attack otherwise! And there was a spellstorm with them!"
A spellstorm? Enil frowned. The Minmay knights wouldn't have needed all of them to win against Corbin's army but they wouldn't have dared to shave off too much. So the opposing commander had put his knights with the scout units, hm?
"Who would put a spellstorm with scouts!" Feuston exclaimed.
"It's true! They had a rank ten spell storm with them! Two salvos of firebolts!" the knight tried to defend himself.
"Spellstorms can't even defend themselves properly, who would use them to scout?!"
"Enough Feuston," Enil interrupted, "I am inclined to think it's true. There cannot be many knights with the Minmay Guards and even if spellstorms are fragile, they must be tougher than a Guard. "
She backed down at his nod.
"That was useful information," Enil nodded his thanks and tossed a small coin bag to them, "it's not much consolation but-"
"It's all right," the leader caught the bag and looked inside, "we never liked him anyway. His share will be welcomed. "
Enil nodded again. Good that they weren't too attached, the closest knit groups worked better but tended to cause trouble if any casualties arose.
One spellstorm would multiply the firepower of the scout groups, but wouldn't help if his knights managed to close the range. Although if the Guards were scraping the bottom of the barrel for any knight, a spellstorm would be better than nothing he supposed. That probably meant there weren't too many knights over there although if that was the case, then Enil wouldn't have used them for scouting.
That and the fact that scout groups were clashing so near to here meant that there was a high chance the Guards were in the Greenspring towns. Good to know.
"We ride for Greenspring Peak. I want to get there by tomorrow midday," Enil nodded at Feuston and she snapped to attention before running off to organize the necessary orders.
Enil wondered just how the Guards managed to persuade the Minmay knights to break up their parties.
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"The battles are going decently," Curaysm nodded, placing another marker on the map. The large table in Greenspring East's biggest inn had been commandeered as the war room. After the Minmay fire, the idea of a war room had spread and it seemed that just about everyone had a table map with markers. Merchants used the concept to mark their markets and sales by area, the knights and Guards for patrol routes and trouble spots, builders for construction sites and transportation.
Curaysm didn't know how useful it would be to the others but it was sure useful here. Too bad accurate maps outside of city areas were hard to come by, they just had to guess where the reported fighting actually was.
"The fighting seems to indicate the army is around here, perhaps a few hours ride from Milly Creek. "
He looked up to see Polve arranging the red markers for battle spots.
"They'll come here, now that they knew we are in Greenspring," Curaysm nodded.
She nodded back.
"How's the preparations? The spell cannons?"
"It's fine. The Guards have dug out raised shelves for the power box after last night's rain, it won't happen again. "
Curaysm nodded. The things you learnt when you brought new equipment into the field. The rain last night had caused some minor flooding, what was slightly uncomfortable for the Guards had resulted in water getting into the crystal evapouration chambers for the spell cannons. The wet had caused the seals to fail and the power output was miserable. Luckily they recovered function once they were dry again.
"Will the supplies last for another day?" Curaysm asked. Minmay had given strict instructions that the Guards were not to take anything from the towns without paying for it.
"The victory cans-" Polve blushed and corrected herself, "we still have three days worth of canned food. It will be sufficient. "
"Tell the Guards to eat well tonight," he nodded, "we will all need it tomorrow. "
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The knights rode up the hill and halted in sight of the thin line in the rising land ahead. Men moved along the line and arms were waving in the distance. The enemy had spotted them too.
"That would be the Minmay Guards?" Enil asked no one in particular.
The strange line in the soil was two rows of artificial ditches dug into the farmland. Stakes pointing outwards had been driven into the ground in their direction, a clearly makeshift defence. Despite how the scouting battles had gone, humiliating draws most of the time, the knights were still optimistic.
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Enil tried to count the number of Guards rushing around the lines. Certainly more than he had knights but how much more? "How many do you think they are?" he asked Feuston.
She sniffed, "it doesn't matter. When our spellstorms get in range of those lines, we will roll over them!"
"Well then, I guess we should find out if that's true," Enil smiled, "advance!"
The first attacks were launched right at the edge of feasible targeting range. Battlemages hurled disruption blasts and the spellstorms' signature mnemonic chatter heralded a tidal wave of magical bolts that sailed overhead towards the enemy lines.
Then much farther than normally possible, the returning fire entered magical sensing range. Enil heard Feuston gasp in shock, the range at which they could be felt meant those huge blasts were ludicrously powerful. Those must be the spellcannons! And there were four of them!
"Intercept with disruption!" Enil shouted. A number of the knights, those who were in the lines of fire of those monstrous blasts, had already started but more of them turned their attention to countering the incoming magic. The outgoing fire waned as spellstorms began to unleash their power at the oncoming attacks as well.
Without a sound, the clash of raw magical power winked out in unseen violence. The blasts were stopped.
Then a wave of smaller bolts, all of suspiciously identical strength, entered view. They splashed, diverted and faded away on the hastily thrown shields and walls of magic. The entire area of the frontline disappeared in a conflagration of magical flame and great gouts of rock and soil. Spot failures where the party simply wasn't strong enough lead to sudden incineration of entire squads of knights. Wails and cries began to rise. Only a few casualties, certainly not enough to stop the knights.
The hailstorm of the knights' first attack reached the enemy lines. Enil craned his neck, trying to catch a glimpse of what was happening through a gap in the smoke.
Just like their own, the Minmay Guards' position was blanketed in fire and smoke. Enil frowned, the flaming wall of smoke and dust nearly completely covered their lines. An airburst? Their firebolts had ignited in the air! The Guards had shields too! He squinted, the continuous rain of magic on the shields were beginning to define the shape, stray shots still exploding high in the sky.
A dome? Enil could count three massive domes covering all portions of the thin lines.
What kind of mage was powerful enough to cast that huge a shield and sustain it against the kind of continuous bombardment the knights were pouring on it?!
"Charge!" Feuston urged her Reki forwards, her powerful shield shouldering aside a trio of forcebolts from the second wave of the enemy fire.
He had the sinking feeling that this battle wasn't going to be as easy as Feuston hoped. It proved true when another quartet of spellcannon blasts rolled into view, all of them seemingly bearing down on him.
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Kobel ducked into the trench as the shield overhead failed and Duport's knights' blasts began to rain onto their trenches and smaller individual walls.
"Concentrate fire at the center of the line!" the cannon commander shouted and the four spell cannons were manhandled forwards past their shields to point at the charging knights. "Fire!"
The huge magical power in their barrels discharged downslope. They drowned out the smaller bolts in their sheer brilliance, filling his magic sense with nothing but a uniform glare. Then it was gone and the invisible world of magic returned.
He could practically see it through the walls of his section of trench. The dim cloud of the oncoming knights' shields, pinpricks of magical bolts flying their way like rain from an overcast sky. The clearly defined explosions of magic on the Guard's square shields from their wands, a glittering bulwark of multilayered disruption shields protecting the spellcannons. The constant flashing of bowguns firing. Then the beat of their drum came again and everyone popped out to fire a wave of smaller blasts down at the knights, obvious gaps where their own shields prevented wands from being fired.
Screams of burning men and women rang in the air as their shield walls began to fail and lucky shots caught soldiers out when they were shooting.
"Main shield, deploy! Cannons, begin charge!" the cannon commander shouted again.
The spherical device behind their lines discharged its shining load of magic into the sky, blossoming into the carefully spaced spherical shields that once again blocked the knights' attacks. Kobel sighed in relief and popped out of his trench to fire his bowgun in the direction of the knights struggling up at them.
Behind him, Kinrayi and Sulee were at the spherical shield device, hurriedly shoveling more crystals into the charging chamber. Four men were ferrying sacks of the crystals forwards from the waiting ammunition carts behind the lines.
Kobel reloaded his bowgun, only three of the new model Resist bolts were left in his belt, then he had to make do with the original acceleration ones.
He took aim downslope and was shocked at the sight. The center of the knights' formation had completely collapsed. The four spellcannons had punched a hole all the way through the center shields and knights alike, leaving a line of human and Reki bodies on the ground, lifeforce completely destroyed. The rest of the knights continued their reckless charge, seemingly leaderless.
Kobel shook his head at the senseless charge. He took aim at one of the leading knights and fired, the man's Reki crashed to the ground. How many of them would survive to reach the line? At this rate, Kobel wondered if any would.
"Main shield, lower. Cannons space your fire!" the cannon commander shouted.
Kobel dived back into the mud along with everyone else. The shield overhead shuddered under the multiple impacts then winked out.
"Fire wands!" the call for the third salvo came out, right as the bright searing glow of spellcannon fire flew overhead again. They boiled upwards to fire another salvo at the still charging knights, barely thirty meters away now. Flames and showers of dirt and limbs greeted them, fierce and savage close range magical combat taking its toll of life. The great blasts of fire from the spellcannons ripped the holes in the knights' tattered formation even wider. There was no time to intercept this shot.
"Spell cannons, continuous fire! Shield stand down!"
Kobel drew his sword and readied it, the commander would only call that if the knights were going to reach. He leveled a wand at the nearest knight to him and discharged it futilely against a shield as the bugle went out for a counter charge.
Kobel rushed forwards, scrambling out of the trenches along with the rest of his squad, freed from crystal shoveling duty. The knight he shot at had been dismounted and came at him with a cry, swinging a magical blade downwards with savage force. Kobel parried with his own, the Resist enchantment along the blade anchoring it against the attack. Then the knight's sword broke through, smashing his blade in half and slicing downwards along his shoulder.
Kobel screamed and fell backwards, only to see the knight shielding himself desperately from the close range fire of his squad mates. Sulee even had the nerve to grin at him. He gritted his teeth and drew his wands with his good hand and added to the fire, tossing spent wands like so much trash.
The knight's shields failed finally and he went down in flames. The choking smell of burning flesh and the thick metallic scent of blood seemed to blur with the shouts and cries of men and women dying in the chaotic melee. Kobel groaned and tried to get up, but the pain in his shoulder was too much. Ildhin nodded down at him and he waved for her to take command of the squad. Sulee looked apologetic as she scooped up his wands, he wished there was time to reassure her.
Overhead, the spell cannons fired a stream of blasts, stronger than any wand, hammering down shields and men alike. To either side, the Guards, far outnumbering the knights now, were attacking them in a mix of melee and close range wand fighting. Here and there, pockets of knights made their stand, only to be hosed down by spell cannon fire.
A hailstorm of magical bolts flew over Kobel and there was a sudden outpouring of magic at the back line escaping into the sky. One of the spell cannons had been hit, probably. He shifted, trying to crawl back into the trench. His shoulder wouldn't cooperate, there was probably a few bones broken in there.
Then a knight fell down beside him as the woman's Reki died under her. Before she could react, Kobel hurriedly grabbed the remains of his sword with his left hand and stabbed downwards into her face. She twitched and stopped moving.
He flinched from the blood spray and resumed his desperate crawling. With nothing but his knife in his belt, there was nothing more Kobel could contribute.
The screams and explosions was starting get distant. Was there always so much blood on the ground? Kobel sighed and rolled onto his back, too tired to go on any longer.
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"Hey, you're awake?"
Kobel opened his eyes. He sighed and smiled at Sulee sitting beside his bed. "Can't you let a man get some rest?"
"No rest for the wicked," she grinned, "you were already awake since five minutes ago. Count yourself lucky I let you sleep that long. "
Kobel snorted, "so, I see I was treated when I was still sleeping. How bad is it?"
"Your shoulder is broken, but you'll live," Sulee nodded, "you'll be back in two months. "
"The others?" Kobel asked.
Sulee paused, her face falling. "Kinrayi didn't make it. A knight archer shot her," she said finally.
Kobel blinked up at the ceiling and sighed heavily. He supposed it was too much to hope that all of his squad had made it out alive. Then again, when he was surrounded by groans in this white tent, it was clear that the casualty count must not be low.
Sulee looked up and got to her feet, saluting. Kobel raised his head and saw the commander, Curaysm, approaching his bed. He struggled to get up but the man held out a hand. His expressionless face was hard to read.
"It's all right, you don't have to get up," Curaysm said, "how's your shoulder?"
"Sulee tells me that I'll be out of the force for two months," Kobel said.
Curaysm nodded then turned to the woman following him, who scribbles some notes on her clipboard as he talked, "an honorary discharge. Kobel, your service for the city of Minmay has been recognized and we grant you a leave from the Guards to recover your injuries. A sum will be paid to you for your salary during these two months, with a bonus to cover your treatment. Once you have recovered, if you wish to join the Guards again, then we will welcome your application. "
He looked at Kobel, as if waiting for him.
Kobel nodded formally, the best he could do on this bed. He was expecting worse than that, now that he couldn't fight. "Can you tell me what happened? Did we win?"
Curaysm looked at Kobel and nodded, "we did. "
And then the two of them were moving on to the next bed. Sulee sat down beside him and grinned, "he's been going around all week, talking to those who have woken up. "
Kobel smiled, "he might actually be quite nice under that sternness after all. "
"Yeah, I wouldn't have thought him capable of that," Sulee pouted, "not after the marathon we got forced to run for training. I hear the commander was the one who mandated that everyone do it. "
Kobel leaned back against the hard bed. This was going to be a boring two months after that excitement.