It took no effort to cross the trench. That made Tristan wonder if it would have been an effective barrier to the guard crabs. Luke passed him in a flash of green lightning. Up and down the line nearly a dozen other people were making their way across no man’s land. Tristan wondered what these machines could do that had Commander Blacklake so worried.
It did not matter, Tristan crossed the trench and intervening five hundred feet in less than fifteen seconds. To little time for the startled humans to bring their pole arms to bear, but more than enough time for the elementals to brandish their clubs. Tristan decided to do his pole vaulting trick, though this time he did not have to worry about a low gate, or landing on anyone.
The elementals took a step forward just as the pole dropped into Tristan’s palm. This time he was not wearing his gravity imbued armor, but he still launched himself into the air. The motion did give some insight into what the war machines would do. Unfortunately, the elementals did not stop and gawk like the humans, they immediately pivoted, their lacking mass making it easy to turn.
Tristan landed right next to one of the crews setting up the cannons. He was still unsure why the war machines were a higher priority than the cannons. Tristan had seen their capabilities when used in combination with essence reservoirs over the destroyed city of Alchehall. Not wanting to risk it Tristan grabbed the weapon and picked it up.
He was shocked at just how heavy a five foot tube of steel could be. The idea of using it as a club was tossed aside, instead he spun around and lobbed the weapon at the approaching elementals. All the people within reach dove to the ground to avoid the implement, giving Tristan time to summon Vulcan and shove his flaming tip into the guts of the war machine. He shoved a small amount of fire essence and combustion force out. The result was a lot of smoke and melting gears.
Tristan was unable to remove Vulcan before the elementals arrived. They never dealt with pain or hesitation, it made them persistent. Several had dented armor where the cannon had hit them, but none were injured in the slightest.
The nearest man stabbed his polearm into Tristan’s chest. It still hurt when the leather armor deformed around the point, but the material successfully kept the point out. He resummoned Vulcan, the split second it took to move through realms allowed the elementals to arrive. Standards metal essence wrapped around Tristan, adamance needed to be saved for the Lord of the Underworld. The lack of grand speeches was worrying.
He stabbed forward with the butt of the lamp post, further denting the armor. The air elemental lacked the mass to let Tristan punch through. It caused one problem but opened up another opportunity. Tristan swung Vulcan like a club, he planned to knock them over like bowling pins and then run.
Unfortunately, the elementals were not adverse to getting knocked around. The first one he hit latched onto the pole like a drowning person, and this one was an earth elemental. Tristan staggered at its much greater weight, then the remaining ten tackled him. Scratching and biting at the plate armor. Tristan would have died if any of them had been sapient and armed with anything sharp. He slowly pushed himself up, then the Forest Calderans joined in. They did not have to worry about killing the elementals, at worst they would spend an extra minute or two regenerating.
“For the Champion’s Utopia!” The man shoved the point of his halberd into Tristan’s helmet. He must have been at least tier two because he felt the point of the weapon penetrate his scalp deep enough to draw blood.
Tristan wanted to yell at the man about how stupid his utopia was, but the blow knocked him back down. Some of the elementals started locating joints with the soldier's help and soon enough undead fingers started worming their way into his armor. Screw resource management, Tristan wouldn’t get to fight the Lord of the Underworld if he was slain by a bunch of civilians and skeletons.
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Golden fire started collecting around the tip of the lamppost. This attack had never failed to stop anyone, even Luke a tier five was driven to his knees by it. That was when Tristan discovered a counter to the attack. Four soldiers grabbed Vulcan and yanked the soul tool right out of his hands. It was so simplistic, yet effective that he was surprised he hadn’t thought of it.
He dismissed Vulcan, then tried to bring him back. A second limitation reared its head. He needed unoccupied space to summon Vulcan. Without access to anything other than the ocean of metal and fire essence, Tristan pulled a page from Regis’s book. A sphere of golden fire blasted out of him and did nothing.
Yes, it would have blown the elementals off, but they were latched onto him like leeches. The fire never reached their hearts and they shielded the common soldiers with their bodies. It did lift Tristan a few inches off the ground, and though it was not enough space for him to leverage his strength, it still let him reach his belt.
A blade stabbed into his hip, only being stopped by the mythical beast leather. Tristan had ridiculed the armor for its lack of mass, which was fair, people at high tiers weren’t immune to physics. Now that it was saving his life, he needed to retract his thoughts, it was wonderful under armor.
The mythical beast leather gave Tristan the freedom to focus on what he had removed from his belt. His first weapon, and the only remaining of a set. He shoved the adamance imbued, translucent blade through the steel plate covering an earth elemental’s heart. It froze before crumpling.
He lashed out another two times, slaying another two elementals. He stabbed his way to his knees, then looked up only to see a soldier swinging his polearm like a club. Tristan couldn’t dodge, so he reinforced his face, cut the handle of the halberd, and thanked whatever deities were out there that he had chosen to use a closed helm.
The blade of the weapon disconnected with the shaft still slammed into his face. He staggered backward, barely avoiding a vertical chop from another soldier. Several more elementals arrived, ready to tackle him all over again. Tristan was ready, he summoned Vulcan and coated his mangled armor in a shell of adamance plate.
He knew he could not fight his way out, he had no way to reliably keep the elementals down. His knife worked, but it was too close range to work on the dozen or so closing in. So he curled around Vulcan and let them attack him. Stabs that had gotten through now skittered off the reflective armor.
“Take my friend now,” Tristan laughed.
He restarted the gravity blast and this time no one could get enough of a grip to drag it out of his hands. Combustion made the gold a few shades brighter before darkness filled the orb. Tristan pushed as much of the force of gravity in as his mind could handle. As soon as strain reached its peak, started to release it.
Tristan wondered what would happen what would happen if he released all this power while it was trapped below him. He cursed and tried to retighten his loosening grip. It was naive for him to think that he could catch anything so near his limit when he released the tension. He reinforced his whole body just before the world turned black.
Tristan sighed, he was knocked unconscious way too often. It took him a moment to realize that was a very coherent thought for an unconscious man. He blinked, feeling dirt filling his helmet. Slowly he pried himself off the ground and shook off the six or so inches of dirt that covered him.
He had to pull his helmet off to get the dirt out and see his surroundings. Blinking a few times he could only stare in shock at the crater around him. It was a bowl about twenty feet wide and ten feet deep. It was like a meteor had hit right where he was standing. The ground around his feet was hot, but not to the point of glowing.
It took him a few moments to realize he had been the meteor. The stunt would have likely flattened him if he hadn’t been wearing adamance armor. He was not sure how he had gathered that kind of kinetic power while in contact with the ground, but he was not going to stick around and repeat the experiment.
Tristan sprinted out of the crater at top speed relying on his armor to keep him safe. It was not necessary. Most of the soldiers that had been hitting him were injured, but alive. Joints had been bent backward and they would not be fighting today. Their comrades were dragging them away and hadn’t expected the epicenter of the explosion to be alive.
Seven seconds later he was halfway to the trench when he looked to see how Siren was doing. Siren was fine, Tristan watched him punt Custodian into the front line of the human soldiers. Eve was not, her golden guards were fighting a retreating battle against three times their number of elementals.