18.
The wall was silent. Nobody spoke or moved as the waves grew more violent, smashing the shore in their rage as the wind whipped up a fury. Looking at the strangers all around me, I saw the fear in their eyes as they gazed out into those dark depths. Marching shadows patrolled the beach, golems that we had crafted for this battle. The first battle with the second fort and its subsidiary keeps occupied. There had been whispers and nerves before we all marched up to the wall as the sun finished its nightly fall, but those had faded away.
“Now.” The word broke the silence, a deep command that boomed over the sound of the howling wind and energetic surf. I looked at the commander of the wall. His name was Hayden, a man in his early fifties with a salt and pepper beard. Originally a member of the council, he had stepped up to take command of the wall three nights ago. With his order, the walls of our fort lit with the power of modern searchlights. Banishing the darkness around us, letting us see what the sea had deposited at our feet.
The beach was crawling with monsters. The fishmen were lined shoulder to shoulder, packed as tight as sardines. That made me crack a smile, I had a thought of turning to Miguel next to me and telling him my joke. I banished the thought though as I saw commanders mixed among the foot soldiers. Six of them on the beach, standing there and blinking furiously as the bright light momentarily blinded them. Now wasn’t a time for jokes, I knew the urge was just to help my own rising sense of fear. I was scared, truly scared. The feeling of steel sliding through me, of my flesh parting and blood flowing. There was an icy pit in my stomach at that, my mind was babbling about running, of hiding away to avoid what was to come.
I crushed those thoughts and feelings.
I stood tall and defiant, waiting for Hayden to give his order. To let the scorpions rain down upon the packed masses. I thought he was waiting too long, burning away precious moments that we could have used to begin our assault.
“FIRE!”
Agatha fired the scorpion. The entire construct flexed and bucked as a spear of stone was launched into them. Up and down the wall, the rest of the crews were firing into their designated target areas. Each scorpion crew of four had a zone that they were responsible for. The rest of the fighters, armed with crossbows, had orders to fire into different areas. Hayden had organized all of this, to give each group and set of fighters their own responsibilities and areas.
Watching the spear explode in their tight packed ranks, splinters of stone slicing apart bodies, I felt the urge to be sick. I was moving, grabbing a new bolt for the weapon, as Bobby and Miguel pulled back the arming mechanism. It was the same system we had established that first night. Only now, Agatha’s granddaughter was firing a crossbow only a few feet from us. Agatha kept looking at her with worried eyes after she fired, bolt after bolt scything through the fishmen with catastrophic results.
They didn’t slow. Mournful horns blew and the sea responded, each wave receding to leave a new contingent of fighters racing up the banks. As endless as the ocean itself, their numbers never thinning despite the continuous fire. I felt the kill energy sparking in me, filling me with its blessed heat. Even working like we were, the cold of the North Sea at night was enough to freeze a person. Ice clung to some of the men’s beards, in their mustaches and eyebrows. The internal heat of the kills kept us functioning.
The monotonous actions of the fight made time blur, hours sliding away as my entire life became loading the scorpion. Loading bolt after bolt, the recent increase to my strength helped as I lost myself to the process. Previously it had taken nearly everything I had to lift a single one of the bolts, now it was simply difficult. I heard the notifications of new levels gained, but I pushed that aside too. I’d look after dawn, when they retreated back into the sea.
In the few times I managed a free moment, I looked down to see the golems fighting. They were twelve foot giants, each step enough to crush one of the monsters, each swing of their arms brought death in droves . They were the last line of defense before the walls. Still, no crabs had come out of the surf, no new threats aside from the abundance of commanders who were dying just like the rest.
Hayden had found the best crossbow operators, and made two teams of three. Those six had the freedom to roam the wall and hunt the commanders. Most commanders were being brought down by the scorpions, their nature causing the fishmen to bunch around their leaders. They were easy targets to the scorpion crews, but those that managed to survive found themself falling as they were bombarded with crossbow bolts from the special kill teams. No one wanted one of the commanders to reach the wall and get within sword reach.
For a while it seemed this was all they had, unending waves of attackers. It looked like they were better armored and had a higher quality of weapons, but they failed to get near the wall. Their corpses were piling up, making mounds of rent flesh and broken bodies. They were climbing over their own dead without hesitation, the horns blowing continuously as more and more came forth. It wasn’t enough.
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Then finally, as the equilibrium started to tilt in our favor, as the waves deposited them on the shore, already bolts were falling on them, it changed. Dozens of the crabs surged free of the water, streams of foam falling off of them as they charged the beach. Their horrendous facial tentacles waved wildly in the air, feet speared deep into the ground as they bisected corpses. Agatha kept her discipline, firing into her zone only. Every bolt fired brought death to our foes, her new skill allowing her to be the most efficient killer on the wall.
The crabs clashed with the golems in a battle of titans. Carapace met stone, bladed feet dug and gouged, looking for cracks or other weaknesses to take advantage of. The golems in turn pummeled them, their large stone hands cracking shells like glass. The golem line became fully occupied though, no longer having time to help with the still swarming masses of fishmen. Scorpions were now occupied with killing the larger foes, leaving the masses to run toward the walls, with only crossbows firing down on them.
Then the walls of the fort flared again, heat pouring out as the lights brightened to a greater height. It was like a bright noon day sun had settled planetside just to warm this section of the fight. The fishmen screamed, horrible warbling cries as their skin darkened and cracked from the brutal heat. I winced at the cost. Scores of mana hearts had just been used for the heated walls, we only had enough mana hearts for two more pulses like that. It was enough though, as even the crabs felt the heat, cooking inside their shells. The golems' dark stone bodies were unaffected.
The entire attack stalled, the smell of cooking fish filling the air, carried on the wind. For a moment the beach was clear of living creatures. The baying horns had fallen silent, the screams of the fishmen nothing more than a fading memory. The sea stirred, the wind howled with renewed fury. Mist rose off the heaving sea as storm clouds lowered closer to the surface. New fear gripped me; here it was, the new twist in the tutorial.
A song, haunting and deep bellowed forth. It came from the sea itself, formed of crashing waves and screaming winds, salt brine thick in the air. Tendrils of water spun upward, reaching for the descending iron gray cloud bank. Dozens of waterspouts formed vortexes that sucked the clouds into them. Hundred foot high tunnels of black water, spinning in fury as they moved toward the beach, toward us. My heart was hammering in my chest, the recently suppressed fear waking with a new vigor. We had to flee, to run beneath the surface, for death now came forward from the sea.
Bolts of lighting, bright as daylight, blue-white and jagged, filled the sky. The night turned to day, dimming even our fort’s luminescence in comparison. Six bolts for each of the waterspouts. The lighting raced in the black water, the water grew glassy, acting more like a solid than a liquid. Something was forming inside of the sheets of water, a feeling I couldn’t shake.
“Shoot one Agatha. Shoot it now!” I barked at her. Fear was driving me, filling me with its anxiety. My words trembled in the air, my voice shaking. I hated it. I hated this clutching and gagging fear that was choking me. I had wanted to grow strong here, to be powerful here. To no longer have this fear in my heart, to be not scared of what lay beyond the horizon. To embrace the unknown and be willing to rise to the challenge, to let the chains of civilization that had bound us in our place fall free. Now though, standing before whatever sorcery had created this evil, my hopes were drowned.
Agatha, for all her own fears that controlled her, didn’t hesitate. The scorpion bucked again, sending forth a bolt of obsidian. Streaking through the air, the lashing bolts of lighting, a shadow of death among the heart of the storm. It slashed through the water of the closest waterspout, shattering the glassy quality of it. For a moment we could see the thing inside of it.
There was no flesh. It was humanoid, with a head, torso, and limbs. My mind struggled to understand it in that long moment. Its skeleton was storm clouds, tightly bound and spinning in place. Lighting raced around it, filling the clear heart in the center of its body, racing inside of it, to be redirected out. A heart, a true mana heart. That lighting filled all eight limbs, raced to its head and the water and cloud that made it. Triangular and sharp, it looked like how I imagined a dragon's head would look like.
The bolt hit it, crashing through its body, destroying the tightly woven spinning bones of storm clouds. Lightning surged outward, exploding in a blue-white blast that evaporated the entire waterspout. Hairs on my arms raised up, as even from hundreds of feet away the burst of electricity was enough to be felt. All up and down the line, other scorpions began to fire, piercing through the waterspouts. Without Agatha’s skill though, to see the weak points in them, few were successful.
Agatha was firing with a concentrated look on her face. Scowling hard enough that her face was scrunched, she pressed her lips into razor thin lines as she growled out and kept fighting. The brief glance at Olivia was enough for me to know what drove this fury. These things being made from the storm, bound by water and cloud and lighting, were the most dangerous things we had encountered so far. She had the heart and desire to kill them all before they ever got close to us.
That wouldn’t be enough though.
The fishmen were swarming again, racing across the blood drenched beach in an attempt to make the walls. Crabs came with them, wrapping up the stone golems and keeping them distracted as they reached the wall in record time. The few crossbow bolts weren’t enough to slow them sufficiently. They couldn’t climb the slick stone, not without the crabs helping them, but now they took shelter against the sheer walls. I felt the urge to trigger another burst of heat and fry them all, but I had promised to follow Hayden’s orders on the wall. I looked to the older man, who was busy roaring out orders and directing the defenses.
The ineffective scorpion crews were ordered to return firing at the army marching on us. Leaving Agatha alone as the only one fighting the encroaching things. Elementals, the voice in my head whispered. These things coming at us were storm elementals, fused by the sea people and marching to our destruction. Each one of Agatha’s bolts that parted the waterspouts showed them more and more formed. The waterspouts grew weaker as the elementals drank them dry to form their outer body. As they made landfall, the columns of water fell away in a drenching rain.
The first one that came forward fully formed was disjointed and strange. Seven limbs that swirled and danced about on their own whims, sinking back into the main body just to emerge from a different part. Its head was wide and triangular, eyes formed of lighting drenched storm clouds. The dark murky waters of its body hid the clear mana heart that I knew resided inside of it, along with the bones made of clouds. Its mouth opened and a sea gale erupted forth, a wind so strong that the bolts from the scorpions blew off course, crashing into the ground prematurely. Lighting danced on its limbs as they swayed around, firing in random bursts to land among the golems. Each blast turned patches of sand to glass. Those that did hit the golems ,though, caused explosions of stone shattering away as the golems staggered about. The golems wouldn’t last long against the elementals, which would free the crabs to be used as ladders. Then the fishmen would be among us. That couldn’t be allowed to happen.