Tala barked a laugh as Terry flickered into being beside the closest beast, ripping off its stubby legs with a series of flickering strikes before retreating back to her shoulder.

The eye-beast that had been delimbed plopped to the ground with an odd, squelching sound, even as all eight eye-stalks oriented on Tala and Terry, even behind the wall’s crenellations. She was watching their enemy through her mirrored perspectives, which were out to the sides for better vantage.

Do our defenses not count as permanent? Can they see straight through them?

Whether that was the case or not, it seemed like at least this enemy was able to see her and Terry.

Maybe they can see anyone who has hurt them?

-It’s a possibility. I’ll notify others of the potential.-

Eight tight lines of magic connected the eyes to their stone in an instant, most did absolutely nothing against Master Girt’s heavily reinforced battlements. Even so, one degraded the rock an inch deep in less than half a second.

The magics had punched through her aura faster than she could oppose them, leaving her utterly unable to deny them from working against her rock. She had never seen magic move quite that quickly.

A blink later, seven attacks cut off, and Tala dove to the side, carrying Terry with her. Even as she dove, however, Terry flickered away.

Behind her the entire wall-top defensive position, within which she had stood, vanished.

Only then did she recognize the magic.

Ending magic?

She laughed, rolling to her feet, lifting her hand and flexing her will.

Her metal rolled back from her hand just as the eye-beam swept sideways to intersect her flesh.

Her aura resonated with her authority as she threw it forward.

She had built up an incredibly potent resonance within herself, and now, with only one opening in her iron layer, the power that had been building within her shell was shunted out in that direction, most of it being the direct counter to ending magics.

Her aura kept the power focused even when it wanted to blast outward in all directions, and together the magic and her aura held back the eye-blast for the moment that she needed.

Beyond the mental flex to pull back the metal, she had altered the target of her amplified gravity on one scale, sending it cracking through the air to drive straight through the main central eye.

The impact was such that the beast entirely burst, coating the surrounding buildings and street in purple blood that immediately began to evaporate, sizzling away the stone as it faded.

A second after she’d sprung to her feet, her metal rolled back over her hand, and she was encased once more.

Master Girt—who was closely monitoring the walls with Alat’s coordination—reformed Tala’s missing defense. While she was grateful for the stone protection’s quick return, she and the entire unit took the previous destruction for the stark reminder that it was; these were powerful creatures.

Based on what they’d learned, with such an obvious counter demonstrated in Tala’s defensive magics, no more beasts would be created, or grow new eye stalks, with that dissolution magic.

That was frustrating as it meant that Tala wouldn’t so easily defeat an attack again.

It was good, however, because she was the only one on her team that would be likely to survive such an insane magical blast of that type.

Tala reached out through Alat to her team. Being the first to take a direct hit, she had information to pass on, “It wasn’t a question of magical weight at all. I haven’t seen anything like it since the arcane elite. The eye-beams lance in so quickly that we should expect to be subjected to direct magical effects. Don’t assume that the attacks will be of the ‘affect, direct, and forget’ types like a fireball, windblade, or hurtled rock.”

A chorus of ‘understood’s came back through Alat.

Alat was really doing an amazing amount of work.

Each of their unit-mates had given Alat explicit access to their Archive connections, and through that, Alat had been able to reach through their soulbonds to those connections to speak into their minds and hear thoughts specifically directed at her.

No part of the system was really intended to work as they were using it, but none of it violated the purposes, or went against the intention, of the magics too much.

-Speak for yourself. I’m holding this together with spit and spider silk… to be clear I mean mundane spider silk, not any of the overwhelming number of magical varieties.-

Yeah, I understood that.

Tala panned her focus across the creatures outside the wall and realized that she couldn’t use a scale for every incoming enemy. She simply didn’t have enough of them.

Her quick count showed more than a hundred of the beasts within easy view.

This has always been my weakness, Alat. Hordes of enemies.

-Ahh, but your weakness was hordes of weak enemies. These are strong.-

How is that better?

-Better? No, no. This is worse. I’m glad we aren’t here alone.-

As if to emphasize the point, seeming clouds of glass rolled across the near sections that she could see. Abrasive particles were thrown to drift across the eye-covered beasts, and immediately had a noticeable effect.

Those that the clouds affected began thrashing and throwing magic around themselves randomly, clearly in pain and unable to comprehend where that pain was coming from.

Master Limmestare would then use the distraction to disguise finishing attacks in many cases, mainly lances or blades of glass that pierced deeply through the main-eyes just as her scale had.

Oh, rust. I’m going to have a rather difficult time if I try to go get that scale. I don’t want to leave any of the white metal, though…

-Yeah, use siege orbs going forward.-

Agreed.

A bit away from the clouds of glass-dust-thistles, Terry was demonstrating his prowess as he did a rather convincing impression of a living hurricane made out of blades.

The beasts weren’t particularly resilient, so their higher advancement wasn’t an issue for the terror bird’s talons and beak.

He had been thoroughly warned not to cut off the tempting, tasty eye-stalks—Terry had worked very hard to convey that that is how he viewed them—and Tala trusted her friend. So, there wasn’t a concern that he’d render their enemy more dangerous with his frenzy of cuts and strikes.

He also somehow had time to find and toss her one white steel scale back up to her.

You are a wonder, Terry.

Tala couldn’t see what the others were doing, but she knew that Alat was helping them coordinate their efforts.

Instead, Tala’s focus was entirely on the opponents before her, as she began picking her shots. Whenever the monsters were even slightly clustered together, she used pairs of orbs, retargeted to each take out the whole bunch.

The initial hit always took out one creature, and then the detonation would obliterate at least one more.

Tala was using up her stock with surprising rapidity, though she had made a lot of siege orbs and had them ready-to-hand, so it shouldn’t be an issue.

She’d even started making a larger variant… no, that wasn’t accurate. The end result was the same size, but she had started with a larger volume of air.

No, this isn’t the place to test a new tool. We’ll use the Pillar-Topplers later.

-I still hate that name.-

As I’ve said many times before: Noted.

The faster-than-thought attacks couldn’t effectively be opposed by aura supremacy, so the unit didn’t waste the effort on establishing such.

Blessedly, that didn’t extend to being able to work deeply within a target Refined. Instead, the magics worked on the surface or just away from their targets, so it wasn’t a contest of magical weight either.

Together, it made the eye-magics an odd form of attack, unlike any that Tala had ever been subjected to.

She and Master Limmestare were the easiest targets, and while Master Limmestare mainly used deflection and absorbing plates of glass-fibers, Tala took the hits almost head on.

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Her iron covering was incredibly effective when she allowed it to work, causing her to pull her white steel covering back entirely, using the material to send supporting anchors through the wall below and behind her instead.

Even so, the iron wasn’t a perfect defense, even when layered and utilized in a type of active protection system and as purposely collapsable plates like she’d practiced with Master Limmestare. Part of that was the fact that the magics tended to enact just away from her, or on the stone beside her, but the greater part was just how much force was in any given strike.

The magics involved were specifically selected to best affect her given her particular defenses, after all.

A concussive blast of some form of shredding magic struck her with the force of a cyclops’ club, immediately flaying her, shoulders to navel, after punching through her elk leathers.

She was pressed back against her supporting rods of magical white steel. She was kept in place by the counter bracing, but the distributed force cracked the wall all over again, and if not for Master Girt, that entire section of the structure would have fallen into a pile of rubble.

Her iron—that had been wrapped around her torso—was splayed out behind her, stressed, stretched, and strained near to breaking as it barely hung on across her back and extending outward to either side.

It made her look like she had horribly maimed, metal wings.

Her flesh and iron were already reknitting, but her scale mail was ruined.

The scales had survived virtually unscathed, but the underlying material hadn’t held up for even an instant as the hostile magics had flowed through every little gap.

Staying coated in the white steel would have been better for that attack.

-And worse for the five before that. We can’t know and effectively switch. Not at our level of proficiency, efficiency, and speed.-

With blood in her teeth—and blood-filled eyes—Tala oriented on the one who had attacked her so effectively. She could not let it hit her again.

It was already falling, bisected cleanly by a wagon-sized Terry, who took an instant to make eye contact with her before flickering away once more.

The message in his actions and gaze was clear, ‘No one messes with my flock.’

Tala took a precious moment to drop Kit to the ground where she expanded enough to let all the scales from Tala’s mail fall inside, before returning to Tala’s waist in the form of a pouch.

The conflict continued at a frenetic pace as the Refined strove to kill as quickly as possible and the beasts drew closer and closer simply by virtue of numbers.

The end result was, after just less than half an hour, Tala had killed hundreds of the beasts by Alat’s count, and Tala had been torn, burned, frozen, slashed, ablated, stabbed, shocked, corroded, smashed, and severed uncounted times.

Master Girt had rebuilt her section of the defense from little more than dust and gravel so many times that her blood was now thoroughly intermixed with the other materials.

If she’d been anyone else, that would have made the rock red, but of course, that wasn’t how her blood worked anymore.

In the last few minutes, every one of her siege orbs had ended at least four opponents apiece.

The effectiveness and efficiency didn’t change the fact that the tide had finally reached the walls.

Tala had already extended her aura over the kill-box, making sure to allow her unit-mates’ magic to act within her authority for when that mattered.

She drew in a deep breath even as she took the last seconds before the first four-legged monster reached them to drive a row of a dozen iron spikes into the lower portion of the walls on either side of the twenty-foot corridor.

She needed as much control and aura finesse as she could get for what was to come.

Then, she exhaled, grabbing her breath-carried magics with her aura and dragging them down into the base of the kill-box.

Her job beyond the walls was complete for now, and even as she continued to breathe out as much of her dissolution breath as possible with every exhale, she moved down to the inside edge of the kill-box.

There, she reestablished her white steel anchors into the stone around and behind her. Then, she was ready.

The first creatures were delayed by a great scything plate of glass, aimed low to keep from severing any eye-stalks.

Master Limmestare was taking out massive sectors of the enemy with his eye-filling, deviously shaped, glass shards, and so he didn’t have much finesse left to spend. The result was an attack worthy of giants.

Unfortunately, the attackers seemed wise to the incoming attack, and they moved themselves in twisting, odd ways, jumping up or flattening themselves lower than seemed possible, so that only the eye-stalks were cut.

Oh, rust.

Less than a second later, they all rose up, twice as many eyes orienting on and firing toward Master Limmestare even as they poured toward and into the gap in the wall, into the kill-box.

That might have been the man’s end, but as the first row of monsters stepped down, their legs didn’t catch them.

Instead, Tala’s carefully held dissolution magics obliterated their flesh, causing them to fall forward into the saturated space to puff entirely to dust.

Master Limmestare took the slight lessening of incoming magic as an opportunity to reposition and focus outward. He wouldn’t be as useful as they’d hoped in the kill-box, but his magics were responsible for nearly eighty percent of the combat ineffective opponents outside their defenses, at least according to Alat.

That was where he was needed.

As for the monsters: Each successive rank of creatures fell to the same fate, barely progressing a few inches further down the path. The dissolution magic was expended even as Tala continued to exhale at the far end, her breath and aura taking the new magic where she wanted it to go.

By the time the first two hundred had died, she was straining.

By five hundred, she was sweating profusely as she fought to keep the magics from breaking apart the very air as they waited to act on the monsters.

When so many had been turned to dust that—paying dozens for each inch gained—they had almost reached her, Tala knew it was time.

“Now, Master Girt!” Alat carried her message to the Refined at the speed of thought.

Master Girt had known the tactic Tala was going to be using, so he’d reinforced the sides of this passage specifically against the incoming result. That would keep the wall well intact.

When she sent him the notification, Master Girt jerked a slab of stone up in front of Tala, carefully crafted to be concave on the enemy’s side, while still being incredibly robust.

Without hesitating, Tala relaxed her hold on her dissolution magics.

The corridor—filled with dust so fine that it filled the space like a mist, hovering almost weightlessly—ignited in a concussive blast that would have staggered Tala even through Master Girt’s stone if she weren’t once again anchored in place.

The explosion incinerated or threw every one of the tightly packed beasts from the kill-box with extreme effectiveness.

Tala might have been concerned about ripping off eye-stalks with the attack, but fire would cauterize the wounds, if anything, and the force of the explosion should kill all the creatures affected, regardless.

A moment later, the shaped slab of stone retracted, revealing an empty, smoking canyon of death.

Let’s do this again. She took a deep breath, filling the air in her lungs with magic before exhaling in a controlled manner.

Control the terrain, control my breath. She readied siege orbs, a smile pulling at her lips despite her burgeoning fatigue. Fire and Ice.

Mistress Deigh and Master Doitean would be proud.

Tala began the cycle again, killing the first groups that came into view with her siege orbs, positioning the ice blasts to help create slowing terrain and give her unit more time to whittle down the never ending tide of nightmare manifestations.

She saw more and more creatures with at least some eyes taken out by Master Limmestare’s glass. Quite a few also had deep cuts in their torso or missing legs that slowed them down, showing Master Clevnis’ contributions for all to see.

From the side that Mistress Cerna was manning, the beasts came variously bent and broken, scorched or fried. It seemed that the Refined was still working out exactly what magics were most effective.

Master Girt was working beneath the surface, quite literally.

He made pitfalls full of stone spikes, broke up footing, and otherwise slowed the horde.

Terry’s contributions weren’t as evident due to the mere fact that all those that he engaged were dead by the end of their brief engagement.

After the fifth cycle of Tala fighting back the waves, filling the kill-box with dissolution magic, then igniting the resulting powdered beastie to clear the near-field, Terry flickered to her shoulder, clearly panting with exhaustion.

More than exhaustion, Terry was injured.

He was cradling one leg up against his chest, and there was blood already dripping down onto her shoulder. His feathers were mussed, quite a few were out of place, and there were several wounds elsewhere on his body.

Tala was so startled that she stared open-mouthed at him for a long second before Alat snapped her back into focus.

-I’ve notified Mistress Vanga. Hopefully, Terry will let her heal him. His exhaustion makes sense, too. He’s removed more from the battle than any save Master Limmestare. It’s hard to compare, however, given that Master Limmestare isn’t killing them.- Alat didn’t mean that derisively at all, and Tala knew it.

It had quickly become clear that without the glass Mage’s clouds of micro glass-thistles they’d likely have been overwhelmed right near the start.

The point was that Terry had been incredibly effective in thinning their incoming opponents.

Now, he was worn out.

Honestly, they all were struggling.

Alat let everyone know that Terry was at least temporarily out of commission.

After the alternate interface had clarified that Terry wasn’t mortally wounded, more exhausted, there was a series of acknowledgments and well-wishes.

Mistress Vanga offered to come and heal the avian as soon as she could, and when Tala conveyed the sentiment, Terry reluctantly accepted.

That dealt with, Tala scratched Terry’s seemingly sleeping head and reoriented on the next cycle, the first eye-beasts coming into view of her position once again.

Two cycles later, the cycles ended.

The eye-beasts weren’t that smart, but they’d finally put together that the wall shouldn’t be there, and it was an impediment to them.

An unholy stillness came over the battlefield as every one of the monsters stopped, orienting on the wall.

Their magics lanced out as one, stressing the wall but not threatening to break it just yet. Then as every creature selected its most effective magics, there was a zeme-shaking thrum.

The magic throughout the entire cell trembled in resonance to the synchronized attack and the wall was utterly obliterated.

Some sections were vaporized, some shattered, some turned to dust… the results were as nuanced and numerous as the attackers. The final state of the wall, however, was not nuanced.

The wall was gone, and they had an entirely different battle scenario to deal with.

There was the briefest hesitation as it seemed like every part of their surroundings took in a collective breath.

In the momentary pause, Tala saw the disposition of her entire unit.

Master Girt collapsed beside Mistress Vanga, clearly having overextended himself trying to resist the attacks.

He’d failed to keep the wall intact, but his interference explained why none of the magics had broken through to create havoc beyond. That alone was incredibly impressive.

Master Limmestare was held aloft by swirling torrents of glass, creating an incomprehensible maelstrom around the Refined.

Master Clevnis was standing up from the crouch he’d landed in, magical blades poised around him like a ready army, awaiting its general’s command.

Finally, Mistress Cerna was encased in what at first appeared to be a cage of precious metal, but on closer inspection was in fact many overlapping and intertwined spellforms, some powered, others awaiting the proper time.

They were as ready as they could be.

Mistress Suile’s voice snapped out into the silence, “Ten minutes. That’s all I need.”

Tala felt herself smile. This would be far from easy, but they could do this.

Their unit’s only response was from Master Clevnis, his voice equally strong in the fraction of a second before the roar of battle resumed. “Understood.”