Shards of metal and hardened dirt crunched under Anise's feet as she followed behind the group of soldiers. It was dark enough that it was hard to see, but Anise was starting to get used to moving at night instead of daytime. Ever since the military’s secret weapon started joining battles, every combat operation happened at night. The only time human soldiers fought during the day was when the worldstriders attacked a fort.
said Miria, thoughtfully. She nearly tripped over a small crater in the ground, and Anise saw Miria grimace.
Anise nodded sympathetically, before Miria’s eyes suddenly darted towards the skies. Then, Miria stopped using the communication bracelet entirely.
"I see the enemy!" Miria yelled, as she pointed towards the sky.
Several soldiers, as well as the engineers, grimaced.
"How far away?" asked the leader of this team.
"Not quite in gunfire range, but getting close! They’ll probably start firing on us soon!”
Several other teammates squinted at the sky, trying to pick out what Miria was seeing. Anise did the same, but even after straining her eyes, she still couldn't pick out any worldstriders.
A few moments later, the first worldstriders finally drifted into range. Several of the extradimensional invaders pulled out guns and started firing at the soldiers. Most of the bullets were blocked by the anti-spatial fields, but Anise heard a few men scream as bullets hit them. She wasn’t sure whether they had been injured or killed - but she hoped that they hadn’t died.
The soldiers responded with their own projectiles. For a few seconds, the two sides exchanged a hail of bullets and essence, as the ranged combatants tried to pick each other off. Meanwhile, the fliers in the combat group pulled out their swords and some shields, and then started flying towards the enemy.
But before the fliers could get far off the ground, several worldstriders dropped large metal balls towards the group.
"Bombs!" yelled Miria. At the same time, Anise noticed several of the more well-aimed bombs simply disappeared, only to reappear in the distance. Had Miria done that?
Anise felt a sinking feeling in her gut as she realized that Miria had just used a second ability in front of the soldiers. They might not have noticed, with how chaotic it was - but it spoke to how bad the situation was. How many worldstriders were attacking them for Miria to risk exposure like that?
Anise did her best to shake her thoughts away, and used her own spells to help out. She erected a few {Force Shields} as far above the soldiers as she could, in hopes of getting a few bombs to detonate early. Some of them punched through her barriers like they didn’t exist, but seven more bombs were detonated before they hit the soldiers.
Then, the remaining bombs hit the shield wall. There were several flashes of light, and Anise spent a few seconds blinking away the stars left in her vision. When she could see again, there were several dead soldiers on the field. Several others were screaming in pain, and there were a few ragged gaps in the shieldwall where some of the projectile ability users had been standing. Worse, a few of the fliers had also been caught in the blast. Seven fliers had died before they could even start flying towards the enemy.
Anise nodded, and inched closer to Miria as the other soldiers started to recover. The worldstriders had exhausted many of their bombs in the initial volley, so for a few seconds, the sides kept exchanging gunfire and essence attacks. A few worldstriders tried to pepper the defenders with bombs, when they thought they could get away with it. However, without the critical mass of bombs the first wave had, Anise and Miria had an easy time getting rid of the explosives before they caused problems.
Within twenty seconds of the fight starting, Anise had started to get a handle on the battle again. She started targeting worldstriders that thinned out their bodies too much, and then ripped them apart with {Mage Hand}.
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It was nowhere near enough to retake control of the battlefield. When Anise glanced at the fliers, she realized that a quarter of them were dead or incapacitated. Of the original sixty, only forty-five had reached the worldstriders and started swinging their blades. Worse, the worldstriders were noticing something. They were keeping their bodies compact and controlled, meaning that {Mage Hand}, Anise’s most energy-efficient spell, was doing very little.
After a few more seconds of exchanging abilities and bullets, Anise gritted her teeth.
Anise felt the dimension start to eat away at her body, as if she had stepped into a puddle of acid. Her Market-empowered Vitality fought back against the corrosion, but it hurt.
She spent a few seconds stunned, before she managed to focus again. As a witch, she needed to be able to push through this much pain - even if it was hard. Then, she locked on to a few nearby Worldstriders and started throwing {Magic Missiles} at them.. A few of them ignored her attacks at first, likely thinking that they weren’t threats.
Three worldstrider collapsed under her spells before they realized she was an actual threat. Twenty worldstriders swung towards her and tried to spray her with a swarm of gunshots and essence balls. The bullets all disappeared into thin air long before they could reach Anise - Miria had obviously teleported them away.
Then Miria stepped back from the fight, giving Anise a clear firing line again.
For a few minutes, the two simply worked on taking control of their corner of the battlefield. With Miria’s umbrella and teleportation, it wasn’t hard to stay safe against smaller groups of Worldstriders - however, the better they did, the more the worldstriders noticed them. At first, the two of them were only fighting twenty Worldstriders. Then, the number ballooned to thirty, and then forty, and then hit fifty. The two seriously struggled by the time they were fighting thirty. As more and more worldstriders joined the fight, the two were forced to retreat farther away.
Then, Anise turned towards the rest of the soldiers, hoping that a few of them would be able to lend them a hand somehow. Instead, her heart froze when she saw what the rest of the battle was like.
She and Miria were doing well enough, but the rest of the battle was going catastrophically. Nearly half of the effective combatants were dead, and the other soldiers were slowly being encircled by the worldstriders. It wouldn’t be long before everyone here fell. Even the fliers were struggling to stay alive.
They weren't helping enough.
Anise felt panic start to set in. The two of them could probably escape from here… but what if they failed? Anise didn’t want to let these soldiers die, either. Many of them were soldiers she had gotten used to talking to and laughing with at the fort. She didn’t want to abandon them to their fate.
At the same time, the worldstriders were overwhelming them. The other first weren’t reinforcing them quickly enough for the group to survive.
Just as Anise was starting to panic, she heard something.
It was an eerie, clanking, thrumming sound. It was like machinery, struggling to work with rusted gears and broken components. It was like the whisper of leaves, falling from trees in autumn. It was like the threads of a musical instrument, snapping one after another with the sharp, broken notes of an instrument being cut into pieces with a knife.
It was wrong.
The sound drilled into her ears and made Anise want to tear out her eardrums. She wanted something, anything, to stop the awful sound she was hearing. Dimly, she was aware that there was some sort of essence mixed into the sound - but it hardly mattered when it felt like someone was driving metal spikes into her brain with a sledgehammer. Anise just wanted the sound to go away.
Just as Anise collapsed to her knees, she felt someone touch her shoulder. A moment later, she felt herself shift back to the normal layer of reality. The sound became less horrible. It was still unnatural and sounded awful, but it no longer wriggled through her ear canals and made her want to throw up. Anise shivered, and then looked up. There, she saw the thing making the noise.
It looked like a poorly put together puppet. It was shaped kind of like a woman - but with large, pieced together chunks of flesh constituting large swathes of its body. Its lips were stitched together in a gruesome facsimile of a smile. The sight of it made Anise's skin crawl. Something about the creature was wrong on a fundamental level.
For a brief moment, Anise suspected that the Worldstriders had brought out a secret weapon to finish them all off. A moment later, she heard a thump as something landed right next to her.
She blinked, and looked down. Laying on the grass next to her was a Worldstrider. It looked as if it were unconscious - it wasn’t moving or attacking her at all. Anise still felt like puking, but she managed to rip the Worldstrider apart with {Mage Hand}. A worldstrider that close to her was a guaranteed problem if she didn’t handle it.
Anise sucked in a few breaths of fresh air, trying to quell the nausea and the roiling of her gut, before she managed to get her senses working again. She turned back towards the creature that had helped them, and was met with the sight of the odd creature politely bowing at the two of them. Then, it turned around and leapt away, quickly vanishing from Anise’s sight.
Anise hesitated, as she tried to figure out what had just happened. Part of her was relieved that they had made it out of the fight alive. But a deeper part of her was starting to suspect that Miria was right. After seeing the military’s secret project, many parts of its biology felt like they were stitched together, like Frankenstein’s monster. Even weirder, now that Anise had some time to process the creature’s sound attack, she realized that the puppet-thing had used some insane mixture of Binding, Absorption, and Manifestation essence to launch its attack. It hadn’t felt… natural, though. It felt more like binding essence had been used to force everything to stick together, even as the artificial essence fought itself and tried to unravel.
Anise hoped she was overthinking it, but she felt that something was incredibly unnerving about the essence that creature had used.