Short summary of the last chapter:
Spoiler :
In the last chapter Voice spent a while purifying his mana, planning something called ‘DDay’, and setting up a few things for the city, including: a four part tournament each month, a better guard system, and items for his guards.
Also, let me know if anything is wrong with the chapter! Be sure to comment and rate!
Felix; NPC; Guard; on watchtower duty the night the ‘War of Death’ began.
Felix was a simple man. He only came to this new city because he had overheard it was created by the Chosen of Mar. Something like seeing the dead rise from faraway hills was above the line of what he thought he’d have to do.
He did his duty though. He made sure to alert everyone with his horn.
Felix knew he’d be the first one to die in this fight, but he was no coward. He would fight to protect his family. The king Voice0fReason had promised to protect the families of all of the guards with utmost care during an attack.
The dead crept closer and closer. Felix was shooting as many arrows as possible. He had been trained to make every arrow count, so would only shoot if he knew he’d hit.
His archery skill was only at the novice level, but the targets were so close together he was basically guaranteed a hit. Arrow after arrow flew from his quiver. He was one of the best new trainees, which was why he was on the rotation on tower duty.
When the dead arrived about a hundred feet from the city walls, large circles of light began to shine. The sine blotted out the darkness. Felix’s eyes watered just looking at them. The light seemed as if it could dwarf the sun.
The undead began to break and fall apart. Soon after they broke, they began to turn into dust. Felix could tell the light was some sort of barrier. He was never more grateful for magic in his life.
Felix had heard of the light spell ‘turn undead’, but he didn’t know it could be used at such a large scale.
Another horn began to sound. It was from the north tower. Felix, on the west tower, looked that way by instinct.
More undead! Felix looked toward the south tower, even as the horn from the south tower began to blow. Felix gaped. This wasn’t just going to be a battle against the undead, it was going to be a siege!
The circles of light began to flicker and appear around the entire arc the wall formed. The only part of the city not lit by the holy light was the castle. Felix thought it gave quite the ominous look to it, but that was hardly king Voice’s fault.
Felix turned his attention back to the undead attack. He continuously fired arrows, at least until his quiver was empty. They had been trained to never stop killing the enemy, even if the defenses had a clear victory. That would lead to hubris, which would lead to their families death.
They might have only been training for a short while, but there were a few ideas drilled into their heads on a daily basis.
I watched the approaching undead. I ‘just happened’ to be awake at the right time, and ‘just happened’ to be looking in the right area to see the first wave.
I had all of the doors thrown open in order to allow the citizens to enter. The few guards I had stationed at the castle went to work making preparations for when the people came.
At first the people began to trickle in to the castle, but that quickly became a swarm of people trying to escape whatever it was that got the guards upset.
I had the guards explain the situation, but made sure they kept it mild. Inducing hysteria wouldn’t help anyone out.
Within only a few tens of minutes, everyone was inside the castle. Given that the castle was on a mountain that was quite something. Of course I had created a simple pulley system, with the help of the mages’ guild. The pulley system could easily carry up about twenty people at a time.
Forty men went up first. Women and children went after those 40. Not because the deserved to live more, but because I knew it would have been weird if I didn’t have the women and children go up basically first
The ‘elevator’ was a large wooden raft-like structure, supported by thick rope, and enchanted with some minor enchantments that increased durability. There were a total of ten of these rafts. Each one went up about a tenth of the height up to the castle.
One would pick them up from the bottom, then go up 1/10th of the way. The people on the raft would get off on a small jutting. Another raft-structure would come down to the left of where the other one was, and pick the people up.
Like that the people could be ferried up the entire way by only a few dozen strong people. The pulley system was controlled by about forty strong people, that would wind a large wheel. The wheel would provide the force to lift the rafts.
I made sure one guard was on each raft to make sure nothing bad happened to them, and also provide a sense of security.
Having ten rafts made the work a bit more, but also increased the safety of the elevator as a whole. If one fell that would kill some, but not all of the people on it. If there was just one large raft, they would all die at once.
When everyone was in the castle, I made the announcement. Basically I would talk into one large stone (about the size of my head), and my voice would be echoed by several smaller stones around the audience room of my castle.
The smaller stones, about the size of my fist, only had the power to echo the larger stone. They also had to be within 100 feet, and be fed with mana. They couldn’t actually store mana. So using this ‘PA’ system that I created, I could speak to everyone in my audience room.
Although it did cost me a whopping 250 mana per second. Since I had 8918 mana, I could only keep speaking for 35 seconds, but that is without my mana regen. Over those 35 seconds I would regenerate enough mana to actually increase my time by 7 seconds. During those 7 seconds I would gain enough mana to increase the time by one more second. So a total of 43 seconds.
That wasn’t enough to do an entire speech, but it gave me enough time to at least calm the people.
“PEOPLE! You are here because our great city is under attack! We will overcome this! Our brave defenders are out there, right now, battling to protect you. I have set a magic barrier around the city. The villains that are here will find it impossible to beat us! I go now, to defend our homes!”
I flew into the air, and shot out to the outer wall. One of the guardsmen was shooting at the undead that were attempting to get past the holy circles.
I patted him on the shoulder in a brief moment he wasn’t shooting. He jumped slightly and began to draw his bow to attack me.
“It’s ok, it’s just me. I’ve come to put an end to this non-sense.”
He stared dumbstruck at for me for a moment, before I jumped down from the wall, and began the ‘extermination’ of the undead.
The ‘battle’ was anything but difficult. I used my mana in the most flashy way possible. Normally these flashy moves wouldn’t do a terrible amount of damage, but since they were technically my undead anyway, they dropped when hit by even the simplest of my spells.
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I started off the attacks by floating in mid-air, you know to give it a badass kind of feel. The holy light circles I had placed on the ground didn’t do much damage to the undead, but they sure created a lot of light.
My body began to glow brightly. A thin, but intense, light surrounded my entire body. The excessively white light lit up the blackness of the night. It would have looked to anyone else as if a bright moon had suddenly appeared in the area, surrounded by several large suns.
The light suddenly exploded out. The barrier of light concentrated itself into 20 different arrows made of light magic. Each one shot out and hit an undead in the head with perfect precision. Once hit the undead exploded in a nasty green gas.
Well what really happened was that I made a healing orb and then sent the healing magic out by using ‘long distance heal’.
Now that would deal slight damage to the undead, but it would have been impossible to perfectly guide all twenty of the arrows. The undead actually made themselves get hit by the arrows. It didn’t really look like it was on purpose, so that was ok.
Even if the light could hit them perfectly, the damage would be minimal. They would in no way explode from the damage.
The explosions were actually Kretchof using ‘corpse bomb’. He was the one summoning them after all.
I repeated that effect until my light mana reached 0, and I used 1/8th of my pure mana.
That was 1111 mana. Of course that meant I sent out a huge amount of arrows. Instead of creating a healing barrier each time I just made the same barrier hold up. The arrows began spewing from the area around me.
For all intents and purposes, I was eradicating an entire army of undead by myself. At least that is what the guards looking in my direction saw. I was also in the perfect position for the peasants in the castle to see me.
The arrows constantly spewed from my barrier. I sent out hundreds of the things. The undead attacking this portion of the wall were dealt with in less than a minute.
After causing my healing aura to explode outwards, I flew to the next section of the wall. The west wall’s holy circles were beginning to flicker. The mana I had put in each of them was only about 9 thousand, so they couldn’t last forever.
On the west wall, I used fire. My light mana was depleted, and I wanted to make it look as cool as possible. I made sure the people from the castle could still see what I was doing, but also made it hard to see my figure in particular.
I surrounded myself in phoenix-fire. The cost was kind of large, but it really looked cool. Instead of sending out fire arrows, I decided to make fire spew from the ground.
With Drake’s help, I concentrated on forcing all of the fire and wind mana in the area to concentrate on four places. The heat on those areas was so much that the zombie portion of the army had their rotten flesh melting off.
After about thirty seconds of concentrating mana, I activated my spell.
The wind mana and fire mana exploded out. The wind mana shot straight towards the sky in each of the places. The four circles I concentrated the wind in looked like pillars of wind.
Less than a second after, I activated the fire mana. Contained by the wind mana, the fire had no choice but to become a giant fire pillar.
The flame pillars light up the black night with a red ominous glow. The shadows flickered behind the undead as if they too were going to fight against the slaughter I was about to throw at them.
The fire pillars would only last for a five seconds at most, so I quickly guided them by manipulating the wind mana that formed their shapes.
I flattened out the wind mana, and made it turn into waves of wind. Of course the waves carried the fire mana with them.
The battlefield was scorched by large waves of fire. At much the same time, in the forested area, the dark rainclouds blocking out the moon began to pour down.
Tear was forcing the water to wet the forest so no fire would escape the small area I wanted it contained within. SparrowHawk, was helping by taking away the fire’s air. Since there was very little fire mana in that area, the cold water forced any flames to disappear instantly.
The fires began to hungrily consume everything around them. The zombies and skeletons that met the flames, instantly fell to the ground, dead.
At least Kretchof had taken out all of the mana supplying them. The fire was enough to leave scorch marks, and even melt rotten flesh, but it wasn’t enough to actually kill off an entire army of undead.
I flew over the tops of the houses to quickly get to the last side of the city, the east. The las section of the city was being bombarded by animal undead. The holy lights that had been ‘destroying’ the undead were just shutting off as I got there.
They were fading, becoming darker and darker.
After i reached the area where the animals where, I let myself fall to the ground. When I hit the ground, a small crack formed beneath me. The crack began to widen, spread, and multiply. Soon cracks were all flowing towards the undead that surrounded me, and the ones that were coming towards the city.
The ground began to tremble. Large chunks of the ground began to shift. Sometimes small parts of the ground began to rise and jut above the rest. The ground began to actually sink inwards.
One second the ground fine. The next it began trembling and cracking. Less than a second later, it sank entirely. A huge canyon was formed where before there was no sign of one.
Of course the undead fell into this canyon. Even the ones that seemed to try to climb up the wall, had their mana cut off.
Now this new canyon was partially thanks to Eli making the earth mana unstable. The undead moles, and a few undead dwarves, also helped by digging tunnels to force the upper levels of the earth to sink easier into the ground.
After a few seconds the earth began patching itself back together in the exact way I had showed Eli I wanted it to. First small bridges of earth began to shoot out from both sides of the small canyon. Once they connected they began to spread outward, getting thicker and thicker.
The bridges began to send out small bridges to connect to each other. These began to become thicker as well, and send out small earth bridges as well.
The massive amount of mana that cost was only supplied by sucking out as much earth mana from the falling chunks of debris as possible. Using me as a conduit, Eli patched together the canyon. Within about five minutes, the canyon is filled again.
It was as if nothing had even happened. Except for the undead now buried under the several yards of solid stoned connecting the canyon sides.
I allowed myself to fall to the ground, and debuffed myself enough to force myself to fall asleep. Just as the glows from the circles died out entirely, the guards began to run towards me to take me back to the city.