The trick wouldn’t work on the dog-sized marguls so easily, because they were stronger, clawed, and both breathed and emanated fire. It required nets of wire or steel chains to do the job, but, hey, there were a LOT of juniors with net-fishing experience, and not putting it to use was a crying shame, or so Princess Kristie had proclaimed.
So, the marguls would slither and squeeze between the legs or floatie-clouds of the shades in front of them, scamper up the sides of the blockading choke-points, run to the top and then pause at the edge, considering whether to leap into the ranks of those below or just start throwing War Magic at them.
Chain-link nets would settle over them, yank them off the ledge into the middle of a circle of waiting hammers, and the lugians in particular would proceed to beat the fuck out of them as they were expertly wrapped up and pinned for attention.
If they made it into the chokepoints, it sucked because they could also worm their way through and between the melee combatants because they were so short, unless the fighters actually went down on one knee to fight them, a rather ridiculous position to fight from. Nobody wanted to grapple with a burning, clawed, scaled, fire-breathing little shit of a malevolent shadow-powered drake.
---
“Ensemble! Get off the damn point and take your relief!” Princess Kristie’s voice had that edge of Don’t-Give-Me-Lip that made your toes want to curl up. I eyed the guy whose stamina was dropping, a paramount who preferred using axes and with an attitude known to be a little battle-crazy.
“I can still fight!” he started to shout back, hewing at his panumbral opponent with zeal, trying to hide his growing exhaustion as lust for battle and karma ignited headstrong idiocy.
Yeah, that wasn’t going to fly with a Warlord there. “Suspend all Healing to the ass who won’t follow orders immediately. In fifteen seconds, if he’s not out of there, drop him from Fellowship, keep him there until he gets blasted to bloodspray, chop off his head, and throw him out into the shades for the marguls to goatfuck.”
There was a perceptible crink in the alignment of the shields around and behind him. Blocking the bashing fists of the panumbris, the paramount looked at the hard eyes staring back at him, and realized he was committing suicide.
With a curse and an oath, he spun back out of position, a younger Sho warrior coming in with a gleaming katana to cut and slice at the legless female shade who tried to follow the older man. Huffing, the axe-using fighter nevertheless hurried to the area designated for recovering Melees, glaring at everyone around him… who glared right back at him and made him flush at the looks in their eyes.
He also had a very distinct feeling that he’d made a bad impression in the eyes of the Warlord, and Warlord Kristie was now going to remember him, and not in a good way. A chill ran down his spine at the thought of her ire, and he suddenly swallowed as he realized that he’d just made himself into a perfect punching bag for her to demonstrate new weapon techniques on… or a lesson on discipline.
She had a standing order that if you wanted to gain the authority to override her orders on the battlefield, all you had to do was beat her in a fight. A dozen paramounts had taken her up on that, and she had beaten them down so brutally and thoroughly that none of them had any desire to repeat the process anymore.
Two of them had been very cocky mages, and their wounds hadn’t healed magically, meaning they were tottering in the back, Healing others in the Reserve and not daring to Fellow up and support the main fighting, where the big Karma was.
The archers were up there drawing back once-dislocated shoulders from behind arrow slits slowly and painfully, and the melees were with the net teams, cracked ribs and bodywide bruises not allowing them to work at the tip of the bottlenecks where they should have been fighting.
“Shit,” he muttered to himself, looking at Brower and Seen-Some-Suns, the two men still having black eyes, swollen faces, and split lips from their pummeling.
Obedience was the price paramounts paid for being allowed to join this fight. Princess Kristie was totally willing to do this without them, and would cut them loose to get slaughtered on their own time in a heartbeat.
Without a supporting Fellowship around them, the paramounts would be slain quickly, and they knew it!
Ensemble looked at the Mick, who hadn’t moved from his position in the bottleneck for hours, and nobody had called him out for it. The Royal Scout Commander’s team slaughtered anything coming through the gap in front of him faster than even a squad of all paramounts could manage, but it was the members helping him, personally trained by him and the Warlord, who rotated in and out as they got tired. His Claymore of Lost Light was only blurs of motion, cutting into and through the Shaded creatures with murderous skill and breathtaking speed, more arcs of radiance than anything solid.
The axeman’s eyes turned to Warlord Kristie, up there on an open parapet. Whirling blades of force, spearing wedges of piercing energy, slamming shockwaves, bolts of fire, blasts of crawling lightning, spheres of devouring acid, swirling blasts of glittering liquefied air and frozen water vapor all converged onto her and the exposed archers about her… and every single blast of War Magic vanished into the air directly in front of her, doing absolutely nothing.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Not a Drain, Harm, or ringing swirl of a Debuff flashed, flared, or played about any of them. The archers rotated in and out as their drawing arms got tired from the terrifically deadly salvo of fire that was smashing into shades and taking them down in only one or two volleys of burning missiles, a better showing than any other squad of archers up top.
Like she could feel his attention on her, the Warlord’s eyes flicked over and met his. He stiffened as they bored right into him like pale violet daggers, making no secret of the fact that she was not only gravely disappointed in him, she was incredibly angry at his arrogant ass defying a direct order, and he was going to pay for it!
Ensemble shriveled up and yanked his eyes away, feeling a sense of shame bite into him that he hadn’t felt in years. Not since he had stood at the top of the world and nobody out there was strong enough to tell him what to do again, ever. Not the High Queen, not her bloody son, not Master Ben Ten or any other ‘noble’ sorts, not even the mages so haughty and proud about the magic that had failed them when so much blew up during the fall.
The Axe he had been forced to use then might not have been the best of them, but it hadn’t failed him like their magic had!
Now, now there was someone there he couldn’t beat with an Axe in hand, and he was absolutely sure she was going to prove it to him!
“Shit,” he muttered again, and concentrated on breathing deeply and getting his stamina back. The stuff was harder to measure now, harder to use, and he had been getting tired and knew it… but he was used to it not affecting him until the very last moment, when exhaustion would collapse on him in a crushing surge, which would itself dissipate as soon as any stamina returned.
Obviously, that was not how things worked now, and he’d forgotten it, or didn’t know how it might work.
There was a pulse and a flash of fractured lights, and he just saw out of the corner of his eye over a dozen wedges of magical force pulsing with a dozen different interwoven energies converge into a point in the air. They turned into a solid bar of pulsing force, and then flashed out into yet another point in the air, whereupon a prism of some kind split the one Ray into two equal versions of it, which speared out over the mass of eager Shaded creatures behind them, seeking out the incoming marguls and softening them up for what was to come, incidentally lighting them up so the archers could focus on them more easily.
The Magos, floating there at the back of the center of the line, watching over everyone, her Healing magic reaching out to everyone to save them from the terrific power of the level eight Incantor War Magicks being tossed here, the Harms and Drains still going off as the shades tried to kill those they couldn’t even see.
She’d already Healed him a half-dozen times, the power of her simple Silver Healing spells infused with colossal amounts of extra Healing energy, as powerful as the most powerful Healing magic he’d ever experienced.
Now she was wielding some of the most powerful combat magic, and certainly the most unique War Magic he’d ever beheld, in between continuously Healing every single primary tank blocking a chokepoint!
She seemed to feel his eyes on her, turning a lovely profile his way, that drifting white silken hair that seemed to have a life of its own contrasting her ebony skin so wonderfully, and her silvered eyes also found his own.
It was very slight, but the shaking of her head cut him to the core as much or more than the curses of Warlord Kristie had. Disappointing a woman like that, one who obviously possessed so much shocking power that she should have utterly dominated this fighting, and who in truth had literally MADE the battlefield they were all standing on! It made him swallow and look away in guilty shame, driving in how deeply he had messed up, desperate to regain his pride and standing and sense of worth all these years after the Fall.
“Keep me out of the rotation until the grievvers start coming in,” he /said into the Fellowship link, concentrating on breathing deep. “I can really, really fight grievvers.”
He’d lost count of how many Bile Grievvers he’d killed in the Quiddity Dungeon, keeping his skills sharp against a powerful and dangerous foe. The Shredders were more dangerous, but not by much, and he could handle them, and handle them fast.
He wanted to learn the tricks the Mick and the Warlord were teaching the new generation, to move a Weapon with that kind of speed and skill and killing power. It, it could have been him, showing them all how it was done, if the woman had first met him instead of some Black Aluvian bastard who slummed for that sad excuse of a king...
---------
Twelve hours of fighting. Waves upon waves of Shaded things coming in, sometimes single types, sometimes mixed companies, drawn by the noise and conflict and lusts for battle they could not fight down, they fought and they died.
The skeptical paramount mages swallowed down their curses and concentrated on their newly-learned Aurora Stances desperately, seeking to get back their mana at every opportunity as the berserk Shaded creatures kept coming. The archers, like the melees, had to retire regularly for magic to ease the strain on their arms and shoulders from shooting so much and so often.
As for the Shaded, they Burned on the slopes of the Choke, as the place came to be called, so much vivus saturating the ground it began to eat at them the instant they set foot on it. It broke down their bodies with incredible speed as they died, adding a constant damage factor to the fighting which, if the living could slow them down enough at the chokes, did much of their work for them if the maddened creatures didn’t retain enough sense to withdraw out of the stuff Burning at their feet.
It wasn’t much damage, less than perhaps standing in a bonfire, a trifle to creatures like them… but it added up over several minutes, even on such obnoxiously tough creatures. Any and all such help in such matters was appreciated, and Summons programming was no exception!