The first Orukthyri charged towards our lines, like a runaway train bent on bulldozing our military. I looked at the creature, and gritted my teeth, before opting to do… nothing.

Extinguishing a non-spellcaster Orukthyri was a waste. I needed to save my energy for the real problems.

A few moments later, I saw arrows start to whistle towards the creature. Unfortunately, its thick skin and muscles stopped it from getting seriously injured by most of the arrows. However, I saw one arrow sink into its eyeball, causing the creature to wince in pain. Amazingly enough, even a fully powered arrow shot wasn’t enough to pierce through the Orukthyri’s eyeball: however, it had definitely hurt the creature, even if it hadn’t taken out its eye. A moment later, it yanked the arrow out of its eye, and whirled towards the archer in question, glaring at him in hate. The Orukthyri now looked distinctly pissed off as it charged towards the archer.

Moments later, another nine Orukthyri rounded the bend and charged forward. They quickly caught up with the first Orukthyri, and joined together right before they hit the front lines.

The front lines braced themselves for impact as best they could. Soldiers raised their shields and braced their spears, preparing to meet the first charge of the enemy.

The first group of Orukthyri crashed into the front lines like billion-ton wrecking balls, and I saw a few soldiers literally fly through the air like broken kites. They slammed into the walls and ceiling of the cave, dying or breaking bones on impact. However, after crashing into the soldiers, the Orukthyri lost a lot of their momentum. The Soldiers started to swarm the Orukthyri like ants, trying to cut at the sinews, bones, and joints of the creatures in a desperate attempt to bring them down.

I saw one Orukthyri go down a few moments later. However, the soldiers paid dearly for every single Orukthyri they managed to drag down. Every single Orukthyri was several times stronger than a normal orthanoid soldier, and trying to wrestle them to the ground usually cost several soldiers their lives.

I winced as I looked at the dead and dying soldiers, but I couldn’t heal such serious injuries, and I needed to save my essence.

I did wonder why we were positioned so far away from the cave bend. If we were positioned next to it, the Orukthyri would have less room to build up their momentum before hitting our lines. Was this a mistake, or was there some other meaning behind our positioning?

Before I had time to think further, another group of Orukthyri emerged from around the tunnel bend. This time, it was a group of twelve. I grimaced.

The front lines were already devolving into a chaotic melee, with soldiers desperately working to support each other while the Orukthyri tried to reach the back lines and swat down the annoying, if not particularly dangerous, archers. The spellcasters were still well protected, although most of them hadn’t finished casting their first spell yet.

A few moments later, a few faster fourth-circle spellcasters finally completed their first spells, causing a volley of spells to fly through the air. Two of the Orukthyri went down: however, several of the other Orukthyri who had been targeted used the strange ability of the Orukthyri to burst out with unprecedented speed, managing to dodge out of the way of the oncoming spells.

I winced.

Most fourth-circle spellcasters had enough essence for between one and three fourth circle spells per day. We couldn’t afford misses, but the Orukthyri’s ability to practically remove all of their momentum and slide in the opposite direction, coupled with their wave tactic, gave them just enough room to dodge.

Then, I frowned.

The way one of the Orukthyri had dodged struck me as ever so slightly off, although I couldn’t quite tell why.

I decided to follow up the attack, and created a crude fireball, before launching it at the strange Orukthyri, hoping I could get a lucky hit on its eyes. Third circle spells weren’t able to harm these Orukthyri very much, but a direct hit to the eyes might still hurt them a bit. And I couldn’t do much with my manifestation essence this fight anyway, so wasting some wasn’t a big deal if it didn’t work.

The creature managed to dodge my fireball, and this time, I noticed the way its body seemed to be far more acrobatic than the other Orukthyri. Was it another variant of some sort? I scowled.

21 magic symbols wasted.

The ten Orukthyri crashed into the front lines. Our soldiers, which had just started to wrestle away the upper hand from the Orukthyri, were once again sent flying as the Orukthyri literally ripped them apart with their bare hands. I noticed the acrobatic Orukthyri at the back seemed less eager to join the fighting, and wondered what it was doing. I frowned.

My teacher had told me that there was some sort of plan, and that I should just focus on dealing with the spellcasters when they showed up until I ran out of essence. However, I was starting to get nervous. The front lines already looked like they were struggling, and we had only seen around twenty Orukthyri so far. When the rest of the horde arrived, would our front lines simply crumple like tin cans? I could see dozens of soldiers already dying, and we had only dropped a few Orukthyri so far.

I swallowed my impatience and hoped the overseer and military leaders knew what they were doing.

Anise looked at the situation of the soldiers trying to desperately drag down the Orukthyri warriors, and seemed to search for a target. One of the Orukthyri let out a fearsome bellow, and Anise took aim directly at it before firing a beam of red energy at it. It reached out its hand to swat away the third-circle spell, but Anise made the beam of energy swerve around its hand. Then, the spell sank right into its mouth.

The creature’s war cry abruptly cut off into a gargled grunt of pain. At the same time, the smell of cooked meat wafted out of the creature’s mouth. One of its hands clutched at its throat, and it gasped. Then, it rasped out a war cry, grabbed another soldier, and tried to throw him at Anise like a javelin.

Sallia immediately grabbed Anise and rolled away with her, leaving the soldier to crash into the ground and splatter on impact. Anise’s eyes widened in horror, but Sallia simply helped her up and then focused on the battle again. Now wasn’t the time to worry about Anise’s mental state: we needed to keep her alive first.

The Orukthyri that had thrown a soldier had turned into a target. Several soldiers worked together, and managed to hold down the creature’s flailing arms and legs, sinking their weapons into its arms and legs like tiny pocket knives. Many of their attacks simply skidded off of its skin, or barely sank into its flesh before getting stuck, but every so often, a soldier managed to get in a deeper cut.

Then a few soldiers jumped onto its face and began sinking their weapons into its eyes and mouth over and over again. The creature roared in fury and struggled, successfully snapping its jaw forward and biting into one of the soldiers, who started screaming in fear.

It crunched down, and the man stopped screaming.

I felt the urge to extinguish the damn thing that had nearly hurt Anise start to rise up in my chest, even though it would probably die in moments anyway.

I gritted my teeth and created a few madness-inducing water bubbles near its face, distracting it for a moment. The creature seemed fascinated by the bubbles for a few seconds, opening up enough time for someone else to land a third-circle spell on one of its eyes and singe its eyeball as well. The creature shrieked in pain, but its moment of distraction cost it dearly, as a soldier finally got a good hit on one of its eyes. It shrieked in pain, and tried to wriggle free, but even with the absurd strength of the Orukthyri, lifting nearly half a dozen soldiers who were pinning down each limb was impossible for it. Like ants swarming over a piece of discarded food, the Orukthyri slowly drowned in the army, even as its comrades ripped into the nearby soldiers.

Before I could celebrate our minor victories, my heart leapt to my throat as another group of Orukthyri rounded the bend in the cave. This group was comprised of about 20 Orukthyri. I glanced at our front lines, and saw that another few Orukthyri had dropped. However, around 15 Orukthyri were still entangled with our troops. I didn’t think that the front lines would be able to handle another charge right now, but the Orukthyri were coming whether our soldiers were ready or not.

The new group charged our front lines, and I tried to create a few madness bubbles to distract some of them and slow down their charge. For a brief moment, a few slowed down, but several of them seemed oddly unresponsive to the bubbles of madness.

However, the other Orukthyri seemed to have noticed that some of the group were slowed down, and slowed down themselves. It was as if the creatures were intent on keeping a formation while charging. I felt uneasy at the thought that our enemies had at least some understanding of military tactics, however weak their understanding might be.

Luckily, our spellcasters didn’t miss this opportunity, and a volley of spells blitzed through the air and towards the slowed down group of Orukthyri warriors.

Several of them screeched in pain, before collapsing to the ground and dying. A few others contorted their bodies in strange ways, allowing them to dodge the spells by mixing their ridiculously fast bursts of speed and their strangely acrobatic physiques.

I frowned.

The first Orukthyri that had been oddly acrobating had also been a bit strange. I wasn’t quite sure what was wrong, but alarm bells were ringing in my mind, even if I couldn’t quite piece together what was bothering me yet.

The Orukthyri that had been distracted by my madness bubbles recovered, and together with the surviving acrobatic Orukthyri, they rushed towards our front lines.

Moments later, the new group of Orukthyri slammed into the front lines. The front lines, which had already been reeling from the impact of the first two groups of Orukthyri, collapsed completely. The next rank of soldiers quickly advanced to fill in the gaps as the front lines turned into chaotic strings of soldiers trying to surround and pin down the massive creatures.

I felt a little bit more worried when I saw this. The tight, confined space of the tunnel meant that our soldiers were having a hard time surrounding the Orukthyri, and it was completely impossible for the soldiers to create opportunities to kill the massive creatures. I had originally thought that the confined tunnel would benefit our side, but it actually seemed to be the opposite, given the massive stat difference. Confining how many routes of attack each side had simply meant that our troops were locked in a fight where they were fighting the Orukthyri at what the Orukthyri excelled at: frontal assaults and head-on clashes.

I also noticed, with some confusion, that the acrobatic Orukthyri were simply sitting in the back. They looked like they were ready to join the fray at any moment, but they weren’t actually doing much yet.

What was happening?

Something about this felt familiar to me. But before I could finish connecting the dots in my mind, I saw another wave of fourth-circle spells crash into the Orukthyri who were tied up by our soldiers, along with one fifth-circle spell. Four Orukthyri dropped dead as beams of light ripped through their skulls, and the fifth-circle spell made parts of a few Orukthyri arms start to turn into a strange mud-like substance. The Orukthyri stopped fighting for a moment and watched, horrified, as parts of their body simply melted before falling off of their bodies. They howled in rage, and threw themselves into the fight with renewed vigor and fewer limbs. However, with only one arm, their fighting effectiveness was much lower, and our soldiers seemed to be slowly weakening and taking down some of the more tired and injured Orukthyri at the front.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I glanced at our spellcasters, and noticed that several of our spellcasters were starting to look exhausted. We had fired three volleys of spells at the Orukthyri so far, and while not every spellcaster had flung a spell into every volley, we were certainly down quite a few spells already. Did we have enough to make it through the fight?

I glanced at Lauren, a sixth circle spellcaster, and the two sixth-circle spellcasters standing near him, and relaxed a bit.

Surely we had enough essence to make it through the fight. Even though the acrobatic Orukthyri were a problem, as long as there weren’t too many of them, it wouldn’t be a big issue to just whittle them down after the easier targets were taken care of.

Another group of thirty Orukthyri rounded the bend, before charging the front lines. With a meaty thunk, a few of the more well positioned reinforcements impacted our struggling front lines, even as more spells started to tear down some of the attackers. The blood of our soldiers started to paint the walls and floor red as more and more of us fell. The fourth circle spellcasters, who seemed to have been waiting for this moment, immediately started letting loose with their spells, blasting into the midst of the massive army of Orukthyri.

I heard several Orukthyri scream, and then drop to the ground dead. Several of our spellcasters looked to be out of mana, but they had satisfied grins on their faces as they watched the Orukthyri drop. Even if a few more acrobatic Orukthyri were mixed into the group and had managed to dodge, we should have accounted for about half of the horde now, and we still had Lauren, the Overseer, and a few higher-circle Mages ready to take action at any time. They had much bigger essence pools than regular spellcasters, and could probably see the rest of the fight through using a few higher circle spells if it came down to it.

From behind the bend in the tunnels, a new Orukthyri stepped out, flanked by about twenty Orukthyri. Unlike the previous groups, this group didn’t charge directly forward. Instead, the first Orukthyri raised its arms, and I felt manifestation essence start to build up around it.

My first target. I could finally do something. The front lines were already starting to collapse. They wouldn’t survive a spell bombardment right now.

So I removed the threat.

Extinguish.

I pointed a single finger at the spellcaster, and a singular drop of water materialized above its head. A fraction of a second later, the drop of water splashed the head of the spellcaster, and it dropped dead on the spot.

Almost half of my alteration essence disappeared, but I had finally done something useful for the fight. I felt some of the tension in my body start to disappear now that I wasn’t stuck waiting around anymore.

I took a moment to scan the other twenty Orukthyri who had been guarding the spellcaster, and frowned.

Something seemed weird about some of these Orukthyri. Their candles of life were… odd. It was hard to tell exactly what was wrong with them, because my Perception was so terrible, but I was pretty sure something was weird with some of them. A few of the Orukthyri looked quite normal, but…

Before I could focus more on what was bugging me, another group of twenty Orukthyri rounded the bend. Five or six of them were dressed the same way as the spellcasting Orukthyri, although I couldn’t sense manifestation essence in all of them.

What was going on?

Either way, several more spellcasters had joined the fray.

Several of our spellcasters started using their remaining mana to throw spells at the Orukthyri spellcaster group in the back. By now, we should have seen most of the horde. It was time to let loose with the rest of our spells and get rid of the Orukthyri before they managed to get the upper hand in this fight.

However, I frowned as I looked at the ground.

Were there fewer bodies on the tunnel floor than before? And why did so many Orukthyri in this group seem to have strange ‘candles of life?’ I was getting an increasingly bad feeling in my stomach, but I was also out of a big chunk of my Alteration Essence. Killing even one Orukthyri was incredibly expensive, and I didn’t have enough to instantly kill another Orukthyri.

I frowned, and out of curiosity, tried hitting one of the ‘weird’ candles of life with an extinguish.

The Orukthyri stared at me for a moment, as if shocked, and then dropped dead, despite how little alteration essence I had put into my attack. Were these Orukthyri with strange candles of life exceptionally vulnerable to shaping? The uneasy feeling in my stomach was only getting worse, despite how easy it seemed to deal with this new group. Not to mention, it was incredibly weird that it had taken a moment for that Orukthyri to die.

I spent a moment trying to figure out what I was seeing, but the chaos of the battlefield waited for no one.

While I sitting around trying to figure out what was wrong with this whole scenario, new Orukthyri Spellcasters started to use second-circle and third circle spells to clear out our soldiers. Whenever a group of soldiers was nearly about to bring down one of the Orukthyri in the front lines, they would get hit by a fire dart or a fireball and die. I could tell that the Orukthyri spells were… misshapen compared to our own. They lacked a proper understanding of how to optimize the spell, but they were still able to make spells that worked, even if there were some wasted magic symbols and some strange additional sub-symbols. And the Orukthyri casters clearly understood the overall battlefield well enough to contribute effectively to the fight.

Worse, the Orukthyri guarding the spellcasters had brought large tree branches or rocks, and they threw them at our soldiers as well. Combined with the ludicrous arm strength of the Orukthyri, our soldiers began to rapidly die as they fought both ranged and melee enemies. The Orukthyri didn’t need to worry about friendly fire, because their bodies were much sturdier than ours.

I noticed that the number of missiles sent by the group of Orukthyri at the back seemed to be lower than it should have been. Several of the Orukthyri were at the front, miming throwing rocks and tree branches, but a lot of them weren’t actually contributing much to the fight. However, they were incredibly acrobatic: whenever our spellcasters sent a spell their way, there was a good chance that they would dodge it using their incredibly unusual acrobatic talent.

However, the ones that got hit died without exception. As if the rock-hard skin most Orukthyri boasted was just an illusion.

An illusion…

I started to feel sick to my stomach, as I finally realized what was wrong with the ‘acrobatic’ Orukthyri. However, it was too late.

Before I could say anything, I heard that voice resound through the cavern, oddly loud in the overwhelming chaos.

“That should be the overwhelming majority of the horde. As expected, the dumb creatures truly lost almost any semblance of critical thinking when the Ortha warped their bodies centuries ago.” the person who was talking seemed almost amused. “Well, it’s time to end this.”

“They’re illusions! Wait!” I yelled, but unlike the strange voice, my voice didn’t carry in the crowd. It was totally lost in the screams of dying men and the sound of steel and Orukthyri crashing into each other, as well as the occasional wet splat as a soldier was flung into the walls or towards the back lines.

I felt a prickle of manifestation essence surface from behind me. However, unlike previous chunks of manifestation essence, this one was massive. It beggared my imagination, making me feel like I had a giant sun behind my back.

I turned around, and saw that a small, raised platform had been made out of shaping magic at some point. On the raised platform stood a dignified looking older man who wore pure white robes. There was only one person in the city who wore pure white. The Overseer.

He was flanked by nearly twenty soldiers, all of whom also had threads of white sewn onto parts of their armor. Standing next to him were another five people, who I realized were spellcasters of the fifth circle. Lauren and the two Sixth circle spellcasters hadn’t opted to stand on the platform with him, but even fifth circle spellcasters were very rare in the city.

I saw several other soldiers glance at the overseer, and realized he was somehow projecting his voice into the noisy cavern during the fight, wasting magic symbols to evaporate a bunch of nothing.

Desperately, I tried warping the way my voice carried through the air with my alteration essence.

“They’re illusions!” I yelled, but my voice was distorted beyond recognition. Somehow, I had messed up.

Meanwhile, I felt the Overseer building up more and more magic symbols. It was a dizzying amount.

Was he preparing a seventh circle spell?

I saw several other casters start hurling fourth-circle spells at the Orukthyri casters, some of them likely using up the last of their essence to do so. A few of the spells missed, since the targets were so much further away, but one spellcaster was killed, and another seriously injured by the scattered spells. I felt a sudden, crushing certainly in my chest.

It was too late.

I felt the overseer’s spell click into place, like a key sliding into a lock.

I looked back, and realized that the overseer had finished constructing his spell.

A fully built seventh circle spell sprang into existence. From behind the army, a ball of light rose like a fake sun ascending into the sky. It illuminated the walls and ceiling of the cave, and I winced, shielding my eyes.

Many of the soldiers copied me. To the side, I noticed Anise close all four of her eyes and put her hands over them to prevent the fake sun from burning her retinas, a half-baked third-circle spell falling apart mid-cast.

Then, the ball of light started shedding layers of energy. waves of light tore out of the ball, like streams of deadly confetti. Each stream of illumination that tore out of the fake sun zeroed in one one of the Orukthyri, before ripping through them like the judgment of a god falling upon the world. A few of the Orukthyri in the group guarding the spellcasters managed to dodge the spray of energy beams, since they were further away, but most of the nearby Orukthyri were caught in the Overseer’s spell.

In seconds, the group of Orukthyri in the cavern was reduced to three surviving Orukthyri. In the Orukthyri back lines, there was one half-dead spellcaster, one honor guard, and one Orukthyri who, by some miracle, had survived despite being caught in the front lines.

Apart from that, there were forty-two real Orukthyri corpses in the cave.

A moment later, about seventy Orukthyri ‘corpses’ got up and gave us a creepy grin, before they faded into thin air like illusions.

After all, they were illusions.

How had illusions created candles of life? How had the Orukthyri managed to coordinate the illusions so well, to look like they were real Orukthyri? Even if there had clearly been something wrong, even I hadn’t spotted anything the first few times I observed them?

I realized, with crushing certainty, that these questions didn’t matter anymore.

We had been tricked. The Orukthyri had used a few waves of cannon fodder mixed in with illusions to trick our spellcasters into wasting a huge proportion of our essence, and their main troops weren’t even in the cavern at all. Now a lot of our spellcasting essence was gone, and the Overseer had already fired off his big spell.

From around the bend in the cave, another group of eighty Orukthyri appeared.

Unlike the previous clusters of Orukthyri, these ones moved as a group. A careful, well trained, intelligent group of Orukthyri. And some of them were armed with logs, boulders, and other massive missiles, taking full advantage of the ridiculous arm strength of the Orukthyri. Woven into the group of Orukthyri throwers were more spellcasters. I counted eleven of them.

I felt something else in the air. Something I hadn’t noticed the Orukthyri use before now.

Shaping Essence.

The illusions disappeared.

I looked at the overseer, and I saw his face harden as he realized that he had been tricked. He had grown overconfident and complacent, and now we were in a terrible situation. There had been several real Orukthyri mixed into the bait, causing several of our soldiers to get killed by the charging creatures, and blinding the army to the oddity of some of the Orukthyri hanging around in the back. It was hard to track a few Orukthyri acting strange when men were screaming, dying, and fighting to the death, after all, and nobody had noticed how a few of the arrows and spells moved through most of the Orukthyri back lines until it was too late. Just enough Orukthyri had been sprinkled into the illusion to convince us it was real, and once the ‘entire’ Orukthyri army had appeared, we had been more than willing to toss our spells and essence into killing them… only to accomplish nothing.

The real main force of the Orukthyri grinned at us, giving us the same wicked smile as the ‘corpses’ from earlier. And then they charged, while the Orukthyri in the back raised their ridiculously large missiles and began throwing them at our already exhausted spellcasters and archers.

I looked at the overseer, hoping that he was able to unleash another seventh circle spell. He was supposed to be an eighth circle spellcaster, right? That should mean he had at least two or three more seventh circle spells in him.

However, as I watched the blood drain from his face, I realized that he might not have been entirely truthful when he spread rumors through the city that he was an eighth circle spellcaster. In fact, he might not have another spell left in him at all.

The main force of the warband had arrived. And we were completely unprepared for it.