Geron
Geron was tired. It had been a short battle up to this point, but he was barely able to move any muscle without a twinge of pain shooting through his body.
How does anyone do this for hours? he wondered. Of course, he had trained for much longer per session than this battle had gone in its entirety, but that wasn’t with eight hours of quick marching and burning through his mana as if it were thin paper.
That all said he knew how people carried on. Simply because they had no choice, if they stopped they died.
An ax pulled him back into the present and he deflected it with his shield before returning the favor by slicing a shallow gash into the warrior's arm.
The Rangda were becoming desperate. They were headlessly charging them while most of the oathbound had vanished somewhere, probably the line holding Lord Grim and the spear tip back.
Eydis was behind him still raging like a cornered bull. She mainly engaged with one of the few oathbound who was still attacking them. The man continuously yelled something at her that Geron couldn’t understand or even cared to understand.
He didn’t have the time to ponder it either as every moment another weapon reached for him.
Geron was in his element, his movements flowing on pure instinct. His armor was bruised, and blood came from multiple small wounds he didn’t manage to prevent but he still knew that they would survive. The Rangda were in disarray and the sounds of battle drew closer.
A sword skittered across his ribs, impotently trying to bite through his chainmail. Geron had let the strike-through, knowing fully well that it would neither connect perfectly nor have the strength to seriously injure him. He paid the man back by driving his sword into his eye and then ripping it out to the left.
The sounds of battle were closer, even closer now, and nearly with them.
Zeke Tomp was the first to reach them. The veteran knight barreled over two men with one swing of his war hammer and then pressed past them to join Geron and Eydis.
They barely reacted to his presence other than reducing the area they paid attention to.
Sir Godfrey Pyke broke through the thicket of Rangda warriors next. He wasn’t swinging his sword anymore but had a shield strapped to the remains of his lost arm and a mace which he swung to devastating effect.
The line of Rangda began to thin between the surrounded and the approaching spear tip.
Silas completely shattered it, as he swung a large arc and let his mana flow freely into his blade. Some managed to block the attack but many others didn’t and so holes opened up which the knights ruthlessly exploited.
This battle was over. The Rangda just needed a little push.
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Kiran
Kiran’s eyes flickered from side to side. The hostile magical barrage had reduced significantly since the knights had connected with the final enemy line. It wasn’t surprising as throwing big spells into such an intertwined melee would only be done by the most psychopathic of mages or those who didn’t value their allies.
Noticing and blocking small spells meant to hit a single person, were much more difficult. Annoyingly they were the norm after real contact was made between the frontlines.
The knights had experience dealing with those though, so Kiran wasn’t too concerned. Right now, he was watching the fight in total. The enemy was showing signs of breaking.
Hesitancy in their attacks, cries of terror, and less than coordinated efforts to resist.
“Pan, we are abandoning defense. Make ready to throw big spells far behind the enemy line,” Kiran quickly ordered the recently recovered satyr.
Pan nodded; her eyes half closed.
The old mage hated pushing the bright girl so hard right after she was hit by possibly the biggest spell backlash, she had ever experienced but he had no choice.
Kiran himself began to weave symbols into a much more complex pattern than he had been using this whole battle. His goal was to sow fear, damaging the enemy was only secondary.
He drew water from the air humidity and mixed it with his own reserves to create a stronger base. The spell would draw in more water as it worked but he couldn’t allow anyone to disperse the water before it managed to grow enough.
The spell sigil extended row by row until it covered twelve bandwidths in diameter.
“Are you ready?” Kiran asked his compatriot, and the satyr nodded again with a spell sigil glowing in her hand. It was much less complex than Kiran’s but probably a more deadly design than he had built.
Kiran raised his hands high, and the sphere of water followed, it was writhing in his hands as if wanting to grab onto something.
“Cast,” Kiran ordered and activated the spell sigil which made the blob of water fly high and over the heads of the battle.
Next to him Pan did the same and Kiran could feel multiple sources of mana emerge from her sigil.
Pan’s spell made contact first with a loud bang. Kiran couldn’t see the effect, but the amount of dirt, leaves, and other debris suggested some kind of pressure bomb.
The blob of water landed a moment after her devastation and this time Kiran knew exactly what was happening. It would draw in water and then start sending out a fine mist that would give it information about where enemies were. The moment it found someone it would flail out a tentacle of water and try to drag the poor soul into its body to leave him to drown.
It was a horrible spell, and hellishly complex, but in the end, it was one thing over anything else it was horrid to witness. Seeing your comrades being pulled into a featureless blob of water just to see them drown while you could do little to help them or be pulled in as well would leave no one unaffected.
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Eydis
Strike after strike hammered down on Eydis. Sev was completely lost in his rage and hammered her with his axes.
Eydis herself was also lost in the heat of battle returning his barrage in kind. She had noticed the reinforcements had arrived and that something was wreaking havoc behind the line of the Rangda, but that was more peripheral information.
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She had always had an affinity for the battle fury and now she had fallen to it completely. Geron and the rest were covering her back and no warrior dared to approach the whirl of blades that was Sev and Eydis.
It felt like a miniature of the battle contained in their little world, as Sev was striking out like a cornered animal while Eydis pressed in on him with increasing certainty.
Their fight wasn’t anything spectacular, certainly nothing about which stories would be written. Eydis was better than Sev, she also was on the brink of achieving aura level, but she was injured and exhausted.
It dragged out the fight. Openings she could have normally taken were closed before she could reach them, parries that would have normally been an afterthought turned into blocks which made her muscles scream.
If Sev had been cool-headed then he might have been able to leverage that, but he had lost his head the moment the fight had started.
He swung at her wildly, trying to take her apart but Eydis knew that fighting style well.
She ducked under his sword. His ax came up to block her escape and her own prevented it from finding her opening.
“Clan Umbel is retreating!” someone yelled but Eydis paid it no mind, swinging her sword at Sev’s leg.
“Chief Saruo is dead!” someone else added from another direction.
This time Sev got distracted by the shouts. “KEEP FIGHTING!” he yelled back but this moment of distraction was enough.
Eydis lunged at him with her sword pointed at his chest. Sev jumped back but failed to recognize the feign in time. He didn’t manage to pull back his arm before Eydis flicked her blade to the side and cleanly took off his hand.
He tumbled back with a painful scream, but Eydis didn’t press it. She could kill him right now, but his screams had pulled her out of the zone. Sev growled and whimpered as he took another step back, his hate-filled eyes trained on Eydis. His mouth moved but Eydis couldn’t hear him, too focused was she on the stump on his arm.
“They are closing the encirclement! The western approach is still open!” More shouts came from different directions.
The Rangda morale was wavering and Eydis saw the first man to break. It was a young lad, with red hair and wide eyes. Blood was covering half his face, and his mouth was halfway open.
Eydis saw him out of the corner of her eye, he was just standing there, trembling with his whole body. Then his fingers lost their grip on his sword, and it clattered to the ground. That sound was seemingly enough to rip him out of his stupor.
With his eyes widening even further he turned around and began to push his way through the surrounding warriors in a panic.
He was the first stone to fall but he wouldn’t be the last. With the first man running a mass panic took hold of the surrounding warriors and spread like wildfire.
“STAY AND FIGHT YOU COWARDS!” Eydis could hear Sev yell, but it was far too late.
The coherence of the Rangda was broken and there was nothing that could stop hundreds of men and women trying to save their own hides.
Eydis stared at Sev as he stood there, his remaining hand pressed on the stump of his other arm. Eydis could basically feel the hatred in his gaze before he turned around and joined the retreating warriors.
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Freya (Rat)
“How much farther?” Samira asked as they and maybe a dozen others snuck through the dark forest. Rays of light followed them in a haunting manner from what had been the Rangda encampment.
“It’s not far,” Freya assured her. “But we need to be careful, there are probably Telios soldiers in the area.
“We should have stayed and fought. Isn’t that what we were here for anyway?” a young warrior complained.
“Stop complaining,” Samira snapped. “There is no way we could have fought the entire Telios army in an ambush. If you want to die then no one would have stopped you from staying with the other idiots, Frido.”
“I most certainly did,” Frido’s sister, Insa, joined in.
Freya wasn’t paying their petty squabbling any mind though. She had spotted something they hadn’t. Up in one of the trees they were walking toward sat a figure with the mask of a silver fox. Her head was cocked as she watched the strange procession, her gaze ultimately fixing on Freya.
The spy made sure that no one was watching her closely and made a couple of hand signals toward her senior, who disappeared a moment later.
“Well, I trust her word and you should trust me,” Samira snapped at Frido harshly.
Freya turned to them with a placating gesture and said, “We need to be quiet, or they will notice us.”
They continued their covert trek through the forest after that until Samira spoke up again but this time only a whisper.
“You didn’t tell me who betrayed us yet,” she noted.
“I told you it is a long story, which can be told once we are safe,” Freya replied.
“We do have time now. It is not like we are doing much apart from walking. Or is there a reason you are not telling me?”
Freya sighed internally; she couldn’t lose the trust of that woman now. The good thing was that Samira would only have to believe her for a little bit longer and with no way of verifying her words, the lie would be easy.
“You are not gonna believe me,” Freya started to soften her up. It was a good trick to make people more receptive because the human mind instinctually wants to prove negative prejudices wrong about oneself.
“I trusted you this far so why should I stop now,” Samira shrugged in an attempt to seem nonchalant.
Freya acted like she was hesitant at first but then came clean. “It was Elder Druid Ill’irian. He was conspiring with Count Michael Rowan to lure the Rangda army into a trap. Eydis and I were closing in on the truth when he tried to kill me in the forest yesterday.”
“Ill’irian? That is impossible,” Samira exclaimed a little bit too loud.
“Told you. You don’t believe me after all,” Freya shrugged.
“No. It's not ... I have known that man for years and he was always such a great man. Why would he betray us?” the barbarian tried to row back.
“That I do not know. I found out he had a meeting with someone in the woods and had hoped to get clarity, but that didn’t work out. Mind you, I wasn’t certain that he was a traitor at that point.”
“I can’t believe it,” Samira mumbled to herself.
“I couldn’t either, he seemed like such a nice man,” Freya agreed with Samira. “We need to be quiet now though. We can talk more once we have met up with Eydis.”
“I really hope she got out,” Samira said, and Freya nodded.
“Me too.”
It took them over an hour to reach the meeting point. Freya had been careful to stretch out their track to give Silver enough time to set everything up but finally, they reached the clearing surrounded by bushes.
“Let me check out the situation. I will call you once everything is clear,” Freya said to the clan members and then pushed herself through the foliage.
Of course, the clearing was completely safe and even Freya couldn’t spot anything out of the ordinary except for Silver sitting high in a tree again with her feet hanging down playfully.
“Is everything prepared?” Freya signed up to her and the fox mask nodded slowly.
Freya turned around and called out for the Rescar survivors. They slowly emerged from the bushes and joined her in the clearing.
“Where is Eydis?” Samira asked.
“She is not coming,” Freya came clean.
“What? Why?” she seemed completely confused but that confusion quickly faded as a full unit of ten mounted outriders broke through the bushes and trained their bows on the Rescar.
“No! You can’t be,” Samira understood now what was happening.
“You really shouldn’t have trusted me. But alas, throw down your weapons or this will become a bloodbath very quickly.”
Even though the numbers were more or less equal, the Rescar were barely armed and mostly unarmored due to Freya hurrying them along. The outriders on the other hand were of course fully equipped, mounted, and had bows.
“You fucking traitor!” Frido yelled and tried to charge her. He managed two steps before an arrow lodged itself into his shoulder and made him stumble back.
“Don’t try it. I know that none of you have mana to speak of and Eydis would hate me for slaughtering you guys. I will do it if you provoke me, keep that in mind,” Freya warned them, all her happy personality gone now that she finally didn’t need to act anymore.
“Eydis too? No, you are lying!” Samira yelled while shielding Frido from the archers. Her voice was hard, but her eyes were filled with uncertainty.
“Feels bad to have lain with a traitor, doesn’t it? At least I can tell you that she was quite torn about betraying you guys,” Freya replied with a broad smile.
“You bitch! I will rip out your spine,” Samira growled.
“Hey, you ran away to save your people. You don’t really want to murder them all right now, do you? Throw down your weapons or die.”
Freya could see Samira struggle with the decision when a small package landed in between the Rangda. It exploded a moment later into a purple cloud of gas and yells of surprise came from inside.
“They will fall unconscious a few moments after inhaling. Capture those that try to escape the cloud,” Silver ordered the outriders, who put away their bows and dismounted to surround the cloud.
Silver then turned to Freya and regarded her with a measuring glance. “You play too much.”
Rat scoffed and rolled her eyes. “Don’t mimic the grandmaster, Silver. We are equals.”
The other agent looked at her for a moment more while the outriders were struggling with some of the prisoners and then asked flatly, “Where is your target? You weren’t ordered to capture prisoners.”
“She knocked me out and left to try to save her clan,” Freya replied with a shrug.
“I see,” Silver replied, completely ignoring the scuffle going on behind them.