Dakka stood back, watching with narrowed eyes.
The legs of the walking fortress were equipped with magimechanical defenses, a joint venture by Perr’ok and Morvin. There wasn’t much to them. Metal wheels attached to a magical array that made the wheels spin. The large scythes attached to the wheels turned them into defenses that should have sliced-n-diced any human who dared to walk into it.
It worked. The first of the invaders stopped short, not daring to move forward. A few at the front tried disabling the trap by slamming their swords down in the way of the scythes, only for those dark blades to slice through the metal like it wasn’t even there. All the while, the men and women at Dakka’s back launched their assault on the invaders.
The black-armored soldiers had allegedly shrugged off siege magic. Dakka wasn’t sure what a few dinky lightning bolts or balls of fire were supposed to accomplish. Unlike the gold version of these soldiers, they couldn’t even splash acid into their helmets. They lacked the grated visors, instead having a smooth front with a wide visor of glass letting them see out. Dakka had no idea how they breathed. Her own helmet felt stuffy and it was full of small gaps and holes to try to alleviate that.
That didn’t stop the battlecasters from trying. They threw everything they had at the intruders. Flickering lights in a myriad of colors dazzled around Dakka’s peripheral vision. Green fire, black-and-purple bolts of shadow, an alchemical bomb flung over the spinning blades, an illusory sword jutting out of the ground before shattering into a thousand violet fragments… Someone even whipped out one of the counter-demon spells.
A black void filled with distant stars drifted past the barricades with almost lazy effort. It started small. A faint star in the middle of the air. Halfway across the room, well away from its caster, it erupted into a wide orb of night sky. Crackling tendrils jumped out from it, latching onto the ground, walls, the barricade, and even passing spells. The reinforced elements of the fortress ignored the tendrils, weathering the void. A lance made from ice fell in as it tried to shoot past. A pair of fireballs ended up swirling around and around until one of the tendrils absorbed them. Then they fell in as well.
The surge of spells from behind Dakka slowed. She could feel the collective bated breaths at her back, waiting to see if that void accomplished anything or if the assembled knights trying to figure out a way past the trap would just shrug it off as they had ignored everything else.
The Eternal Empire backed away, but they couldn’t go very far. One man would have had plenty of time to descend the steps and cross over the traps they had already disabled, clearing the path, were it not for one small problem. They were packed in. The stairs in the tower legs were large and wide, spacious enough to facilitate transporting those walkers, but trying to cram a few thousand people up one leg?
It wasn’t that the Eternal Empire were idiots. They weren’t. They had left themselves plenty of space between units to avoid exactly this. It just wasn’t quite enough.
Dakka imagined they were used to fighting in wide open spaces, outdoors, rather than inside the tower’s confines. She and the rest of her men had trained for the opposite since building the tower.
The closest of the knights didn’t back far enough away. He raised his shield, huddling behind it. Made from the same material as the rest of his armor, Dakka half expected him to ignore the orb.
A tendril lanced out, curling around the shield. While the thin void fizzled out after a moment, the effect remained, picking the shield up and dragging it toward the central orb. The knight fought against it, planting his feet as he tried to pull back. The brute force was relentless, a gravitational hunger. The knight slid closer, his boots skidding across the smooth floor of Fortress Al-Lavik with sparks in their wake.
Deciding the shield was a liability, the knight pulled at a strap, letting it free to fly off toward the orb. But it was too late. He got too close. More tendrils snapped out, licking at his boots and gloves. The sparks of his boots disappeared as his feet left the ground.
That cosmic predator pulled him ever closer. His form began to distort in the eerie light. The process was subtle at first, a slight elongation of his limbs as he tried to swim through the air back to his companions. It was as if he were being stretched on a taffy puller’s rack. One of his fellows tried to reach out, grabbing hold of his arms, only for the tendrils to lick him as well.
The distortion grew more pronounced as the screaming began. Both knights weren’t pulled toward the orb so much as they simply fell into it. As they fell, the elongation grew. Their limbs stretched out like molten glass dripping off a punty. The screaming stopped at some point. Dakka wasn’t sure when. Somewhere between knight and thin filament.
They didn’t get a chance to fall into the orb, however. Not like the spells and shield it had eaten. Too early, it splashed against the back wall, dissipating into thin wisps of void before snuffing out completely.
The thin strands of metal and flesh clattered to the floor, still wiggling and twisting as if the two knights were still alive, thrashing against their newfound fate.
Dakka hoped they weren’t, for their sakes.
A brief silence fell over both sides of the battle. She wasn’t sure that anyone had seen something like that before. Not even the spellcaster who used it. Arkk had explicitly warned everyone against using such spells unless they were up against something truly insurmountable. Hardly anyone even knew them, as far as she knew. The few battlecasters trained to use those spells obviously hadn’t used them against anything living.
Two people behind Dakka collapsed. One, Dakka knew, was the caster. Based on the wobble before the fall, she pegged the fall as magical exhaustion—another reason not to use those spells. The other, one of her orcs, wasn’t a spellcaster at all. Brann’on just fainted.
Both vanished, whisked away to elsewhere by Arkk.
That broke whatever stupefying spell everyone had fallen under. The Eternal Empire let out a collective roar of anger before charging forward.
It was only when they started moving that Dakka realized the spell had taken out more than just the two soldiers. The trap that had been keeping them at bay now sat twisted and broken off to one side of the room.
“Ready up,” Dakka barked, fingers gripping tight around her scythe’s haft. “They go no further!”
Dakka swung her scythe, leaving a trail of darkness in its wake.
----------------------------------------
Arkk concentrated, eyes closed, upon his throne in the command room. Leaning forward, he covered his face with his hands and watched through his omniscience of his territory.
A sword slipped through a thin gap in an orc’s armor. It didn’t make it far. Just enough to draw blood. He pulled the orc back, leaving the enemy knight falling forward with the sudden lack of resistance. Two others were on the unstable knight immediately. The shadow scythes didn’t easily slide through the Eternal Empire’s armor, not like they did with just about anything else they touched, but they still cut. A few heavy hacks to the same spot and one of the shadow scythes punctured through, its tip diving deep into the knight’s spine.
In another part of the fortress, the Shieldbreakers engaged with their group of opponents. Enchanted weaponry crashed against enchanted armor, both nullifying the other’s effects. Brute force won out there. Aya and Viola were both a hair away from getting a sword to the face. Arkk moved them a step back, opening a way forward for the taurus Ellen to slam down a massive battle axe.
Richter led a team of soldiers, backed by his battlecasters and several gorgon. Unfortunately for the latter, the helmets of the Empire didn’t let them effectively utilize their caustic venom, nor could they petrify any of their targets through those reflective visors. Their entire group was losing ground. Arkk kept everyone out of danger to the best of his ability, moving anyone too injured straight to the infirmary, but he needed to do something about the situation before the Empire broke through fully. A shuffling of the combatants…
Arkk threw Kia into the mix. She had been warned that she might be teleported abruptly, so she barely flinched before dozens of afterimages drew her two-handed sword. More effective than the shadow scythes, she cut their armor with ease. If something required two swings, there were two afterimages in place. A dervish of death, she spun through the enemy, buying Richter some breathing room while Arkk tried to find a more permanent solution.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
She was, after all, only one person.
Claire was at Arkk’s side, ready for surprises. Arkk wasn’t expecting the demon to pop up and take his head off, but he couldn’t discount anything at the moment.
Dakka’s team was losing ground as well. They had spellcasters but not as many of the Shadow Knights, too few compared to what was needed to fully hold back the onrush. Arkk teleported Dakka directly in front of his seat, her arms already in mid-swing, and cast a haste spell on her. In less time than it took to blink, she was back in the fray. Her super-speed enhanced swing easily lopped the head of one of the knights off. The spell wouldn’t last forever, but it would give her a temporary edge.
Arkk moved his focus to the next—
“Sir! The airship! It’s plummeting out of the sky.”
Arkk threw Vissh into the infirmary as he looked up. For just a moment, he felt a spark of hope. Whatever fire his lightning bolt caused must have damaged some critical component of the airship. Maybe a ritual array that kept it afloat, maybe some structurally important piece of wood. Whatever it was, it crashing to the ground would rid him of at least one problem.
One look at Luthor’s face and that hope snuffed out.
“It’s coming straight for us,” the chameleon beastman said. “And it isn’t a-alone.”
Arkk clicked his tongue as he repositioned Franna out of the way of an enemy sword, leaving her with a clear shot at the soldier’s side. “Not alone?”
Harvey, crouched over the crystal ball with large floppy ears hanging back over his head, looked up as Luthor looked back to the ball. “One of the whale ships is coming down as well. No idea where it came from.”
If it turned invisible before positioning itself overhead, they never would have noticed. Annoying. Arkk reflexively checked on Lexa. The gremlin was on her way back to the tower, mission presumably accomplished. He would have to keep an eye out and make sure to teleport her to the tower the moment she came in range. “But they’re both visible now? And they’re both coming in range of our siege magic?”
“Yes and yes.”
Arkk dropped several colored marbles for Lelith to decipher. At the same time, he dropped Maria into the infirmary and moved two battlecasters out of the way of an enemy spell.
Why come closer when it puts them in range of magic? The airship had been maintaining its bombardment from high up just fine earlier. They could have protective spells of their own. Arkk expected it, even. But a bombardment would wear down the spellcasters eventually and with his reserve of glowstones, he could power offensive magics far longer than he imagined any spellcasters could last. Even a highly capable inquisitor like Sylvara would wear down eventually.
Speaking of, Arkk couldn’t teleport Sylvara around as she hadn’t actually joined Company Al-Mir. She was a powerful spellcaster and adept with a blade, but he was still reconsidering his decision to let her join in the fighting.
Rather than teleport her away from danger, Arkk teleported in an alchemical bomb—one of the smaller ones—directly behind the soldier attacking her. The explosion wouldn’t harm the soldier through his armor but it would knock him around. It wasn’t a trick he could pull too frequently. Mercury was in the lab making more, but they were still limited in quantity.
“Counter a-attacks on the airships underway,” Luthor said as a bright green flash lit up the narrowed windows of the command center.
Arkk nodded his head, refocusing on making sure as many of his men survived this as possible. For as careful as he was being, for as quickly as he maneuvered people out of danger, he had already failed two of his men and the fight was only beginning.
“Bombardment having trouble hitting the ships. T-They’re moving too fast. No sign of them slowing.”
“Do they intend to ram into us?” Arkk asked, teleporting a few dozen lesser servants onto the exterior of the tower. Most of the windows had already been sealed up or reduced in size. The last few gaps were nothing more than a liability at this point.
“It will only be a few moments more if they—”
The protective spell around the tower started up again, swirling the wind around into a mostly opaque barrier. It formed just in time to avoid something… strange.
Arkk cast his gaze over the crystal ball, frowning. The whale ship tried something. It opened up, roughly where he presumed a mouth would be on an actual whale, and spat something out. A large glob of reddish-purple meat hurtled downwards, moving even faster than the ships. The gale of the protective dome sheered it apart, sending a splattering of red mist off into the distant parts of the forest.
“Didn’t get a good look at whatever that was,” Luthor said after a moment. “More are coming down. Doesn’t look like they’re getting through the shield spell.”
“They’re finally slowing down,” Harvey said. The flopkin opened his mouth to say more, only to hesitate as his eyes widened. “Cannons underneath the main airship are deploying. They’re going to bombard us again.”
“The bombardment team will handle it,” Arkk said, hoping he was right. With the army outside the tower, he couldn’t exactly go out there and try to lightning bolt them off his back again. Maybe he could stand atop the tower, but that would just put him closer to their cannons.
“T-The whale ship doesn’t look like it has defenses, but the other ship is keeping close. Some random wind keeps picking up right when a spell is about to hit them.”
“Not random then,” Arkk said. He shuffled around a few groups in active combat, ensuring the ones who had been fighting since the start got at least a brief moment of reprieve. “The other ship has some way of defending the whales.”
He leaned back and closed his eyes again, diverting all his attention elsewhere. He kept the battle in a constant place in the back of his mind, maneuvering people around as needed, but he quickly refocused on the lesser servants trying to destroy the ritual holding the tower in place. Much of the enemy army was still outside the tower. He doubted all of them could make it inside, not before the stairwells ended up filled with bodies. If the tower were free, however, he would be able to crush the army and end the siege all in one move.
With the ritual active, he had to break the circle or force the magic to redirect in order to disrupt it. Or kill whoever was maintaining it. With such a large ritual circle, he had no clue where its operators could be. Thus, he had been working on damaging the circle itself. It was more resilient than he had initially thought. It kept… repairing itself.
Which did make an unfortunate amount of sense. It was designed to capture his tower. If the tower walking across the ritual circle broke it, it wouldn’t have been very effective. It had to have a way to withstand or otherwise regenerate the extreme forces of the tower’s legs coming down on the ground.
While several lesser servants continued to eat away at it—maybe its regeneration component would break under the continued strain—he had even more servants out looking for whatever was powering the circle. He guessed a minimum of eight people were out there, standing in designated spots to fuel it. Maximum of twelve. It was a large ritual but it couldn’t possibly be as strenuous as blowing open a hole in reality to meet with a deity.
Not one of the servants had detected a human out there yet. Nor any glowstones that might be powering the ritual. He had scoured a quarter of it already, which meant he should have found between two and four people, but there was nothing. Either they were all concentrated in one spot… or they were using the Eternal Empire’s cloaking ability to hide away. If the latter was the case, he wasn’t quite sure what the best option was.
“Sir. E-Evestani is marching out of Woodly Rhyme.”
“After all that effort in setting up their defense, they’re going to come out to play?” Arkk scoffed. “Couldn’t stand to be showed up by the Empire, huh?”
He was significantly less concerned with them at the moment. The only thing they had going for them was the avatar. The rest of their soldiers would die to bombardment or conventional weaponry much easier than the Empire’s knights. In fact…
“Where are Mags and his men? They should be in the tunnels behind us, right?”
Harvey and Luthor both leaned over the crystal ball. Normally, that was something he would have looked into himself. Keeping an eye on every little bit of fighting going on was taking too much concentration, so he left them to it while Arkk occupied his time continuing the same thing he had been doing for the past twenty minutes, making sure his enemies died and his friends and allies didn’t.
The flopkin leaned back, nodding his head after a short moment. “Yes, Sir. They’re moving forward. Looks like their pace has slowed because of multiple branching paths and narrowed tunnels, but they’re headed toward us.”
Pausing his focus on the battle for a brief instant, Arkk removed the lesser servants from the tower’s exterior and set several to digging proper tunnels while one other plopped down right in front of Mags. The portly man didn’t flinch. For a moment, Arkk thought Mags was going to attack it, but the servant doing its best to beckon Mags forward made him rethink his actions.
“Check in on the tunnels occasionally. It isn’t a priority. Alert me when they get underneath our rear foot. In the meantime…”
If the golden avatar was on his way, Arkk had a present for him.
Unfortunately, his original plan of having either Priscilla or Agnete deliver it was not an option at the moment. Priscilla was unconscious and Agnete was directing a small army of her own toward the Anvil’s portals. She would be through shortly, but in time?
He wasn’t sure. Maybe. Maybe not.
One other entered his sphere of influence right as the thought crossed his mind. Reaching across space and time, he teleported the short gremlin directly in front of him. With her came a stench. She was covered from head to foot in some kind of tar that smelled of fetid offal. Taken aback by the sudden smell and her appearance, he didn’t even get the first word in.
Lexa tensed, drawing her blades in surprise at the sudden relocation, only to look up at Arkk with a look of surprise. Squelching that surprise, she shuddered. “That thing was horrid. You would not believe—”
“Sorry,” Arkk said. “We’re under attack. No time for a proper debriefing.”
“But—”
“Not under imminent threat of attack. The battle is ongoing. The Eternal Empire has trapped the tower and we’re fighting off their army.”
Lexa’s eyes widened before she clenched her fists around her daggers even tighter. “What do you need of me?”
“Have you ever considered the profession of a diplomat?”
“What?” Lexa cocked her head to the side. “Are you mixing me up with Edvin?”
Arkk shook his head, teleporting a dozen more of his men around during the short action. “No. You see, I have a gift for the leader of the enemy army. I’m sorry I can’t give you time to rest after your successful mission, but I think you might be the only person who can deliver it.”
“A gift… A gift,” she said, slowly grinning. “For the avatar?”
“Just a little something between opposing commanders. Wouldn’t want him to think I never thought about him.”
Lexa’s grin turned especially vicious. “How soon can I go?”
“Soon.”