Small bits of loose debris pounded up into the air and causing cloud after cloud is Anthony kept at it. As he moved in one direction every so often, the clouds would slowly follow him. It was like a slow-moving fart.

If it had been a fart, Anthony smiled because when he was almost full of mana, he got a notification that his divine spell casting had finally reached level five. He itched to check it, but this wasn’t the time. He was going to need to hit his daily quota today before he disappeared. Then he would have a nice walk back to the company area while his mana recharged.

“Sir, you are needed over there,” Sergeant Ginkgo said. “We’ve got a situation.” Apparently not content to just be fired upon without returning fire, a group of zombies were now trying to ram one of the earthen walls.

That was when he noticed the shaking. He had been focused on firing round after round into the trenches. Now? He should have taken stock of the full fight.

Had he known, Anthony probably would have vomited.

A large group of undead was taking a battering ram into the wall. Several groups next to them were setting up ladders to scale the wall.

Something perplexed Anthony.

The legion had a lot of archers nearby. Why weren’t they doing anything? Aside from a few glancing shots, nothing was happening. Were they not taking this seriously enough?

He needed to know.

“Why aren’t the archers doing anything right now?”

A wave of card skills rolled down from the top of the wall into the zombies. Two large fireballs exploded onto the battering ram. There was no door for them to batter down, so why would they...

“Sergeant, pull the troops out!” He yelled, frantic.

His only hint of what was to come hit him straight in the chest. These zombies worked with a purpose. They never sacrificed themselves.

“What? Retreat! Full retreat!” Her voice was so much louder than his. He had to believe that she had card skill doing the heavy lifting.

The word was yelled down even as he saw it happening. The battering ram was abandoned. All the undead scattered save for one large, bloated one.

It took about two seconds.

He felt the immense pressure to lie down as a whole section of the wall exploded. It hadn’t been a battering ram. It had been a battering bomb. The shock wave caused his ears to pop and go silent and all he could hear was the slight whine of what he assumed was universal background noise.

Bits of dwarves flew as the undead claimed land from the living once again. The horde waiting behind the hole in the wall rushed to the front in the confusion. Anthony held his ground as the fifth squad centered around him. The wall was wide enough to support all of them easily, letting two dwarves fight side by side.

They had work to do.

His ears popped as they healed. The damage from being so close had to have been severe.

Anthony cursed that he had spent so much mana firing death into his enemies. He wanted more to push into any wounded. There would be casualties, but he could stem the bleeding.

It was time to pull out his spear. He could feel his card skills pull him into the right form. He was rusty.

It was time to knock off some of that rust.

The squad formed around him, a phalanx, as they moved to close the hole. He quickly identified five zombies doing most of the work. He activated his water bending card and moved with the flow. Then his goblin commander card came to the fore as he prepared those around himself with an aura spell.

Two things happened at once.

He fired both with his off-hand into the largest zombie, and another closed ranks with them. Sergeant Ginkgo brought her sword to bear, moving as if she was dancing. The zombies that had made it to the top of the wall fell to her attacks.

Every step in her move was like a beat of a drum, and rank Anthony could almost hear it. She was playing a rock and roll song in her mind, based on the tempo alone.

She drove her sword through the zombie’s chest, then hit a second one off to one side with the blunt edge of her sword. Her second dispatched it.

Anthony fired another shot. Then he was in it. The beautiful thing about spears was that you could be close enough to hit your enemy, but they still would need to close a gap.

His spear drove through the chest of first one, then another zombie. He let his water bending card take over the martial aspect of his fighting. The spear cut through the water as it pushed back the tide.

“There’s too many of them!” Sergeant Ginkgo said. “Slow retreat! Don’t let them cut us off!”

Behind them, more living dwarves were running to seal the breach. He could hear the faint call of a horn.

“That’s the general alarm! Hold the line!”

The wall above was looking like a better option the longer they stayed there in the breach. Until and unless a pile of zombie bodies hit the ground there, Anthony was going to keep the high ground. Anthony rolled up his leaves and did what he did best, keeping the doors around him safe and alive. Alive! He fought on for a while that way, losing track of time.

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The only time he stopped was when his mana needed to be topped off. Then he would head back in to get a few jabs. It was when Sergeant Ginkgo finally rested that he felt safe.

They are trail rations right there over the bodies and he realized with a start that someone was going down the line checking in people. It was probably the Brave company commander, as this was his group. He groaned, sitting through the bodies.

Anthony did not envy the man at all. The only good thing was that the man kept moving down the line.

Even if one dwarf had died, what would he do? Write a letter to their family? All the dwarves’ families were dead, so far as he knew. They had talk of a memorial wall or something, but Anthony did not know about the little details. Someone would tell him. When they wanted him to show up. It was almost like they were not going out of the way to include him, but just letting him know that his service was not needed. He appreciated their candor, but he really wanted to be in the center of things.

It wasn’t for another hour until another Chosen shot up to relieve him. This time, it was Brianna. He went down to talk to her about the situation and once she was satisfied with what he said; she let him go. He was going to have to go back to talk to Cedric about this.

---

“What I don’t understand is why we can’t do something like have a cell phone or something like that. I know it’s magic and all, but can’t. We have like a message spell or a send Expo? Something to let us talk to each other from a distance. It’s anathema to travel if we just send messages, but...”

“But on back Earth, that’s what you did. Here, we don’t have every little convenience just laid out for you.”

The goddess again appeared to Sonya as if she was trying to find a way to skip a class in school, without it reflecting on her grades. She also looked like she had read the student handbook back to front several times to avoid many specific situations.

“I’m just saying that if you can make a new spell like that, I would appreciate it.”

“While it is true that. I need a way.. I hate to sound like I am ungrateful... But the next death knight is right there. Come on.”

Sonya shrugged. She didn’t really have much of control over what’s going on in the big picture. She definitely did have a good control over what was happening in the small picture, even though after what she was doing with carrying people around back and forth all day and night. But only so much.

She was tired of the got us trying to tell her what she could and couldn’t do. She had something very attainable that all she needed was a little of sign off on. It’s just the goddess that wants to give her it. He wanted more integration with their cards, which is despite being great. Cards were still new to her, especially the minute changes.

All she really wanted was something to talk to the rest of the Caravan from far distances. If there was a spell, she could learn it. But it seemed like there was no such Stella. So the next best thing was to ask the gods for them to create a spell. If it just created it, they might give it to one of her people.

“I need it. Or something like it.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“I can’t kill the death knight unilaterally. I can’t even get too close. I’m constantly surrounded by people that are trying to protect me. It’s stifling. I presume you don’t have the same problem.”

“No, I’m just a little guy doing little God shit when you’re not here. You know we talk about you guys, right?”

Sonya nodded.

“I assumed so. How else would we get you guys to gossip about the Chosen?”

“Well, you don’t make it easy. They can only watch you have sex so many times before we kind of get bored with it. But you’ll be a place to know that I can get you the other thing that you’ve always wanted.”

“Is it true? You’re going to get me a puppy?”

“If you do what I asked you to do, then yes. And this ties into the other thing. I’m going to be taking over airships as part of overlaying travel, so it’ll be easier for you to cast bills on top of one. This isn’t me trying to not do it anyway, but just think of the possibilities.”

Sonia was already playing through some possibilities in mind. Luckily, she had been all over the wall once it had been created, and she had done her best to make it look really nice. Then they had threatened her boyfriend.

No one got to threaten her boyfriend and live.

She was already planning a revenge tour against that particular death night. She was thinking about how it would look if she had just started causing an earthquake over the large area of the Capitol.

There were several reasons they didn’t just bomb the shit out of it. The first being that they were sentimental about it and the second being that every single dwarf inside of the city had a card. They would miss out a lot.

That didn’t even consider all the potential card shops they could raid. There were also the dwarves that had a full deck inside of their souls. These were things that legion was going to need. If they were calling, to have any staying power.

It was going to be an uphill fight to have them take on the other three nations’ zombies, but it was going to be a necessary evil if they want to survive. They only had a handful of dwarves by comparison, so every little helped.

“I thank you for your kind wisdom, Kara. We will begin attacking the death knight in earnest shortly.”

“I should hope so. It’s what I’m paying for you to do, anyway.”

“If you’re going to pay me to do this, I am demanding a raise. Because this is so hazardous that it might as well be a suicide mission.”

“The best they can offer is to double your pay.”

“You’re not paying me anything. Oh...”

Sonya came out of the ritual trance with the same spirit that she had gone in with. Today was the day that the airships were going to hang out on the outskirts of the city. They had made several large changes to the cannon design, so they get my roof out of it. Andrew, the artificer, was especially proud about design and let them concentrate several cannons in One direction, letting him fire three cannibals at once at the same target.

It felt like overkill to Sonya, but boys and their toys make things strange.

She made her way up to the bedroom to see that Anthony was still napping. The pace at which the airships were being pushed out had shocked him. He wanted the death knight going as much as she did, but they do they had to set the good example. He didn’t just rush into a battle with an enemy that had started fortifying things to a ridiculous degree. Even if you knew exactly where the enemy was, you didn’t just charge right in. You had to give them an assistant round of Ariel bombardment first. Otherwise, things would get kind of difficult.

When he told Sonya about how he had been shooting motor rounds from a pipe into the trench that the undead had dug, she was skeptical. Then he showed her it in action. The pipe that he had been using had been rendered in her and he just taken it to show Andrew how it should work. He had updated the design.

Now every single one of the airships had several of the indirect firing mechanisms attached on both sides so that the Chosen could use those alongside the cannons. Unless they were using fire mana, they could do damage without probably destroying all the infrastructure. Probably did a lot of heavy lifting.

“Are you ready for an airship ride?” She said, waking him up with a kiss.

“If you’re going to start my day like that? Yes, I am ready for whatever you want us to toss at me. Please tell me that includes you.”

She laughed.

“Alright lover boy, let’s have a little drink of something and then we can check if the final preparations are complete. I’m so ready for these promised vacations you told me you were going to take. This is going to be a good one, I can feel it.”

“You have a good feeling about this? That’s a bit much, given our track record.”

It would have been easy for her to smother and there with his own pillow, but he just sat there and took her crushing pillow attack.