It was dark enough that it was impossible to see someone’s face from five meters away, so when the knights emerged out of the alley ahead of them, all Kalender heard was shouting.

“To the front! Twenty meters! It’s them!”

“Hit the dirt!”

At the least, it was disciplined shouting. It was comforting to know that someone knew what was going on, even if it wasn’t himself.

Jyn gripped his arm. “Get down!”

He was already in the middle of ducking down, but he didn’t expect Jyn to yank him down even harder. He broke his fall with his arm before he ended up face-first against the pavement. Things were happening much faster than he could process.

Projectiles whistled overhead and skipped against the ground around them. Flame bullets made fast tracers in the air before splashing against the ground, flaring up and disappearing in less than a second. No matter how small and fleeting those flame bullets seemed to be, he felt their prickling heat on his skin every time they zipped by him.

This was his first real battle against people, he realized, and he was paralyzed.

That’s what leaders were for.

“Kalender! Throw up a barrier!” Jyn shouted right beside him, patting his shoulder several times. At least that much, he could do.

He pointed forwards.

{Designate a rectangular prismatic field, origin point ten meters from my pointer finger tip, primary area vector matching my pointer finger direction, thickness one meter, width of the entire street, height two meters. Apply variable acceleration vector across this field matching the direction of the primary area vector. Guarantee velocity reduction to 0.5 m/s.}

This highly specific spell was the result of many days of trial and error. Just saying {Force field!} resulted in a deadly, ever-expanding field of randomly-pointing force vectors that ripped everything apart inside of it. Thankfully, he’d only used enough MP to victimize a fly.

Even when he’d reworked the instruction to limit its scale and arrange the force vectors in uniform order, incoming objects of different masses would end up slowing down at different rates: a thrown pebble would get slowed, but a thrown brick barely did.

The last annoying thing was the difference between a “force” and “acceleration” field—in other words, the difference between expending the exact same MP for each projectile, slowing them down at different rates, or letting the amount of MP vary so that more was used on heavier projectiles. At Jyn’s insistence, they agreed to prefer the latter.

The result: the enemy’s projectiles slowed in the air like trying to swim through molasses. Even the flame bullets slowed down, fizzling out of existence before they’d even left the field’s influence. Seeing it actually work in a real battle gave Kalender a lot of relief.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Return the favor!” the knights’ leader shouted.

The knights, and even the Clerics from the rear, entered the fight in earnest, launching a volley of stone and flame bullets of their own.

The other side charged, unaware from their perspective that their attacks had been reduced to lazily tossed pebbles.

It was a frightening thing to see a wave of metal charging at you, but also an uplifting thing to see your own side shout right back. The defiance of it was like a drug stirring up strange, unknown emotions in Kalender. He never thought it would feel like this. He never imagined it at all.

Ah, another thing about his “force” field: it decelerated things coming at it from one direction, but accelerated stuff coming out the other way.

The knights and Clerics’ projectiles gained speed. Where stone bullets used to just dent metal, now they lodged themselves in there.

Good thing it was night. Kalender couldn’t see the gore they did.

He felt impatient being left with the job of maintaining the barrier. He had a perfectly serviceable rifle right beside him; why shouldn’t he participate?

Jyn grabbed his shoulder. She always seemed to catch him right before such thoughts spiraled out of control and into recklessness.

“You have your job,” she said.

Kalender nodded. He couldn’t be more thankful for having Jyn beside him—and Jyn couldn’t be more thankful that he actually listened.

Her Leadership allowed her to sense the emotional states of her nearby comrades. It wasn’t some overpowered empathy magic like what Page had; it was just enough to let her know who was about to break, and who was about to do something stupid.

They let the battle take its course, staying well behind. Minimine didn’t interfere, letting the knights and Clerics get EXP out of their fellow mortals. Gellar spent the time looking out for worse threats; none came.

When the battle was over, Kalender took a look at the bodies that littered the road. There were nine; it didn’t sound like a lot, but when you were actually there, they seemed too many all of a sudden.

Their own side had also taken a few losses: two knights. Kalender approached one of them—and so did Minimine.

She didn’t even crouch down this time. She didn’t even snap a finger. The fallen knight’s wounds just knitted together, and she woke up with a gasp.

Kalender was startled a little by the speed of it, but nothing more. There was another gasp behind him, and he saw that the other fallen knight had also been revived.

“How about the other knights?” he asked.

“They’ve been charmed,” Minimine replied. “Even if I revive them now, they’ll remain so.”

Right. There was something like that.

“I can revive them later,” Minimine continued. “You can charm them after that.”

“What?… Right.”

Hang in there, Kalender. Cyrraia’s got a Key and a plan, and you’ll be happy to hear it.

Seeing their comrades revive just like that, though, the lower-ranking knights finally caught on, and they all started to kowtow around Minimine and make a fuss out of it. Kalender felt a little awkward about the fact that he was the only one not kneeling with his forehead on the ground, but eh, it’s just for a little bit.

The knights’ leader got on one knee. “My apologies for my knights’ behavior, goddess,” she said. “Please give me a moment to educate them.”

As someone who had gotten her hands on a Limited Edition copy of the Best Goddess Interaction Manual, she felt inadvisably compelled to do so.

It only took twenty push-ups and some military verbal abuse for the group to be ready in 5 minutes. It was kinda amazing how normally the knights were acting around Minimine now—and how more scared they were of their own sergeant.

***

At the same time—

Arpeggio and Cyrraia jumped the wall from the northeast, making a beeline for the castle. Their two demonic pursuers followed suit, herding them like so.

An injured red-skinned demon came in through the south. At least the Sentinel wouldn’t be rejoining the battle any time soon.

Manager knocked on the western gate with a retinue of Republican troops behind him. The gate swung wide open, and a company of knights welcomed him with an archway of swords.

The cast had all convened in Harmony.