“Still nothing?”

“No, my Lady. No sign of the enemy Dragon Rider anywhere.” The messenger updating me on the overall situation replied. “There has been some discussion that he isn’t actually in the city.”

“No, he’s in there.” I said, glaring at the city walls. “He’s just not going to show himself until he feels he’s ready or we force him out.”

Two days.

Two more days of continuous fighting and we hadn’t made any progress getting through the walls.

I had to give it to whoever created the defenses for this city, Feinster was very well built. No spell anyone tried did more than scuff the surface of the walls and even after getting pounded on continuously for days by a battering ram, the gate doors were barely dented. At this point it looked like Arya’s plan to open the gates from the inside was our best path forward. In fact I already knew Nasuada was preparing a false night raid as a distraction.

What worried me was the fact Samuel probably knew that too.

While I liked to remind him every chance I could that he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was…he wasn’t completely stupid. It wouldn’t take a lot to come to the same conclusion that the only people capable of infiltrating the walls and opening the gates were me and the elves. And once someone knew that it wasn’t exactly a great feat of strategic brilliance to plan an ambush for a group you knew was coming.

And since I really didn’t want my friend walking headfirst into an ambush, I needed to figure out a plan to either convince Samuel to call his ambush off…or trick him into thinking that he caught us by surprise somewhere else.

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair.

That was all for later though. Right now the assault groups were pulling back as the Varden withdrew from the battlefield. A few ragged cheers went up from the walls as the defenders celebrated another victory, but even from out here I could tell they were tired and desperate. Hard to be happy about winning when you knew the enemy hadn’t thrown everything at you and would be coming back in the morning.

I retreated back to the field command tent where I was joined by both Leona and one of the Varden’s magicians.

The next few hours were spent dealing with the normal things after a battle. Were there any urgent matters I needed to deal with? How were the supplies for the medical team? Were there any changes I needed to know about? And a host of other questions like that.

Just like the past couple days though, there wasn’t much of a change across the battlefield.

In part that was a good thing.

Even if we weren’t winning, at least we weren’t losing.

Which all circled around to Arya’s infiltration plan and my shrinking deadline to come up with something to draw out our enemy.

Luckily, I did have a plan.

It just wasn’t a very good one.

“You want to do what?!” Leona practically shrieked in my ear. A rare lapse in decorum from my personal assistant.

I flinched from the volume but calmly repeated myself. “I’m going to give our night assault team a way to get over the walls to draw Samuel out. And I’m going to create a lightshow big and impressive enough to give them time to get there without the defenders focusing too much on them when they won’t have cover.”

It wouldn’t even be that complicated to give the Varden a way over. Just upscale some of the greatswords I had available to the point they were just large metal – dangerous – ramps and drop them on the walls, then distract the enemy magicians so they couldn’t dislodge them. Yes, the lack of handrails and terrible friction would make them treacherous to actually use, but between the threat of the assault teams finally getting over the walls and my own performance I was betting the Varden warriors would have pretty good odds of at least making the defenders feel like they were about to be overrun.

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“Lady Lightbringer, why did you not use this earlier?” The Du Vangr magician asked. “If you could let our warriors scale the walls so easily, Feinster would probably have already fallen!”

I shook my head at him. It was easy to forget hanging around Arya and Angela that most of the Varden’s magicians were rather lackluster, especially after Leona helped reforge all the healers to at least be competent at that. “It’d be too easy for the enemy spellcasters to disrupt for them to be all that useful.”

“How so?”

I shrugged. “Create gusts of wind to knock the attackers off or disrupt their footing, break into the mind of one of the warriors and have him shove others off, make the surface of the ramps too slippery to actually use…there are dozens of fairly simple ways to make this tactic useless if you think about it, especially since I can’t ward the swords against those spells directly. I’m just not going to give the enemy any time to think of them.”

Leona gave me an incredibly suspicious look. “What exactly are you planning on doing as a distraction?”

“Well,” I grinned. “The Empire calls me the Sun Witch and the Varden calls me Lightbringer.”

“So I’m going to light the sky on fire!”

-o-

A few hours later I was standing in the sky watching the darkness below as dozens of torches representing the Varden forces prepared to attack.

From this far up they looked like tiny pinpricks more than anything so I wasn’t worried about anyone on the Empire’s side spotting me. In the daylight I would have stuck out as the only thing in the sky, but right now even with my glowing yellow spell circle rotating beneath me I was just another light in the sky with the stars as my background.

Time to get started.

The first thing I did was focus on the modifications to the projection I needed. Selecting a sword and mentally scaling it up so it was a few feet wide instead of a few inches and then duplicating it several times.

It was a bit of a mana drain but nothing too bad, so as the giant blades hovered around me I focused on aiming where I wanted my improvised ramps to land and adding a little velocity to them.

Most of the massive swords did exactly what I wanted, wedging themselves in the dirt right in front of the walls and tilting so they made nice shiny access points for the Varden warriors. A few did fail to land right, though. And I had to quickly dismiss the projection to avoid them either falling on another ramp or somewhere they would just get in the way.

Once those were in place I focused on part two of my plan.

A massive spell circle bloomed behind me as I tweaked a few things. The base spell was my Nova Blast with the focusing element removed and the ‘Blast’ part slowed to a trickle. What this did was essentially turn the bombardment spell into a massive but harmless flare pointed directly at the walls, blinding the defenders and letting the Varden quickly advance.

Your move Samuel. If you don’t come out to play, Nasuada might actually decide to make this staged night raid an actual assault with a good chance of getting a foothold in the city.

And just to make sure you can’t brush the whole attack off as a distraction…

I took a deep breath to prepare myself for the bloody night ahead of me and let two swords drop into my hands. Not Kanshou and Bakuya, just two random D-ranked longswords that would let me cut through most armor with ease. It might be a bit foolish to not use the most powerful swords currently at my disposal, but I didn’t want to stain two of my favorite blades with the blood of people just defending their home.

With that rather morbid thought in mind, I dropped onto the top of the walls like a meteor.

My first unlucky victim had barely recovered from the sudden surge of light when I cut him across his undefended chest before practically dancing with a twirl to the next soldier and stabbing him through the heart.

The rest of the soldiers were far enough away that they had time to react to my sudden appearance, forming up into a crude shield wall as they tried to focus on me through the glaring light still high in the sky at my back.

“Call out Samuel to face me and surrender,” I called out to them. “Do that and I promise you will be treated well!”

To my disappointment the men just bellowed wordless war cries or variations of ‘Die!’ before charging me.

I leaned out of the way as one of them stabbed at me with a spear, throwing one of my swords I grabbed at the wooden shaft and dragged the unfortunate man close enough to stab him before ripping the spear out of his hands and using it to finish the other unlucky soldier that had been wounded by my thrown blade.

Sparks jumped through the air as I twirled my remaining sword to deflect an overhead chop from another enemy. Hot blood splashed over my hand as I Traced a dagger into my free hand and stabbed the man in the stomach. Two more spearmen attempted to jab at me from a distance and I basically repeated my earlier moves, throwing the bloody dagger at one while deflecting the spear of the second. These two were considerably luckier than their companions as the dagger actually struck a small wooden shield on the one spearman’s arm. The dagger pierced through the shield but was far enough away from anything important that the man was uninjured and simply had a very dangerous attachment on his arm, at least until I dismissed the dagger. The second spearman lost his weapon as my sword easily cut through the wooden haft and left him with nothing but a slightly pointed stick. He wisely fell back, scrambling for the sword on his waist before I lost sight of him as another soldier stepped forward.

The air around me quickly filled with a fine red mist as I danced from soldier to soldier, cutting down the defenders in my reach and either throwing projected blades or stolen weapons at the ones further away.

Pretty soon the Varden warriors joined me on the wall and I had to balance being aggressive without overextending to the point the Empire’s spellcasters could attack the ramps and strand the Varden on the walls with no way out.

“Head towards the gatehouses!” I ordered the warriors forming up around me. “But don’t overextend! We need to-”

Everything I was about to say was lost under the titanic roar right above me.

I felt more than heard a wing flap as the air pressure spiked. Not long after that there was a bone rattling crash as a few tons of giant lizard landed on a nearby building and stared right at me.

“Everyone off the walls!” I screamed and quickly followed my own advice by jumping into the air, not a second too late either as the dragon hosed the entire area in fire from its maw. Luckily for all the people on the walls, Varden and Empire both, the dragon was focused on me and directed its head upwards to follow me.

I darted around for a few seconds until the torrent of flames stopped and turned to look at the new arrival.

Just as expected Samuel was seated on the back of his red dragon, glaring at me. I happily returned the favor.

“Not even a ‘hello’, Sammy Boy? I’m hurt, here I thought we were closer than that. You know, you show up and strut around like a peacock. I viciously mock you. And then we try to kill each other! You’re jumping the script!”

I couldn’t see if he reacted in a particular way since he had a full helmet, but rather than react to my taunt, Samuel seemed to completely ignore me. Simply pointing his sword in my direction and urging his dragon forward.

I guess we weren’t doing banter today.

But fine, if he wanted a serious fight, that’s exactly what I would give him.