Knowing no one could answer his question for minutes at best, and even then, he wouldn't have the whole story for even longer, Panta made a snap decision as he shouted to his personal messenger the next moment, "Lukaso! Get the legion union up now!"
Not even a second later, Panta felt a tendril pressing on his mind, and he didn't hesitate to accept it. Sinking into the mental network, Panta fed a sliver of his psy into the casting, but it was barely enough for him to remain attached to the network as he mentally stepped back and watched the web of burning minds expand.
It wasn't that he didn't want to shoulder his portion of the union, but the legion had long learned that the most crucial trait of a legatus wasn't the brute force of their psy, and that went doubly so for their tactics. In the past, many legati placed themselves in the center of the mental network while standing at the front of the battle lines, and there was an excellent reason for taking such a risk.
The best way to inspire one's troops was to lead them from the front. That could only do so much, however, as mortals were mortals. While legionaries might know logically that their legatus was in the battle line with them or off on a flank leading a cavalry charge, they couldn't see it through the massed people. Being able to feel their leader in the back of their minds pushing them forward and fighting with them was a big motivator, causing them to fight harder.
It was also the main cause for many legatus being killed in battle, shattering the morale of the legion along with the union they were controlling, which usually resulted in the collapse and subsequent slaughter of the legionaries.
There were also numerous occasions when the legatus didn't go to the front lines but still maintained personal control of the union, and the result wasn't much better. The legatus would exhaust their psy and willpower by personally sending messages and managing the legion network, and they would end up collapsing into a haze as the strain of a long battle built up, leaving them unable to lead their men.
The result of the second circumstance was nearly as drastic as the first. Usually, those second or third in command were able to wrench the situation back under control, but not always, and the cost was far more lives than would have otherwise been lost. After losing entire legions over a dozen times due to the leader being too aggressive and enthusiastic, the senate went about enacting serious reforms.
Mainly, the reforms pushed legati to focus on endurance and control rather than personal strength and glory. The result was that a legatus took several steps back when it came to a battle.
Sure, there were still moments of intense combat where all reserves were deployed, and even the legatus and his personal retinue were needed to hold the line, but the focus had shifted. Legati now spent more time training their minds and studying the records of old battles to guide the course and flow of a battle, which was a stark departure from the past.
So Panta turned and walked around the podium behind him to the stairs and up to the seat they led to. Settling down and getting comfortable — as it would more than likely be his position for the next few hours, if not day — most of Panta's attention was on the exploding web of minds growing around him.
In seconds, the union had grown to contain hundreds of minds and was only growing faster. Already, the Messenger Cohort — though it was more a couple of centuries than a cohort numbers-wise — of the 15th Legion had pushed the network past the confines of the command building in the center of the Southern Fortress and was reaching its walls.
At that point, the expansion of the union stopped, and Panta frowned. Details about the event had already appeared, which was not a good sign. It wasn't that those on the walls directly experienced the event, but they could see a massive dust cloud billowing into the air around the main thoroughfare and First Ring's wall.
As a general rule, the further the impact of an event can be directly felt, the greater its effects will be. That line of thought was only magnified in a battle, where seconds could determine victory or defeat. With a dust cloud going over a hundred yards into the air and still expanding…
Panta jumped into action, mentally connecting to his second in command, "Quinteea, link with Hellious and keep him appraised of the situation. Request that some of his reserve cohorts be positioned as a quick response force to reinforce us. Once we get a grasp of the situation, we may have to call on them to support us."
"On it." His Prefect immediately sent back before sending out her own orders, as she could feel his growing apprehension. Shifting his attention to the union as a whole, Panta felt that all but one section of the network had stopped.
Generally, every man, woman, and camp follower was pulled within the union when a legion was in battle. Every drop of psy was helpful and could prove to be the difference that tilted the scales in their favor, but that was when a legion was defending a fortress or out on deployment in the field.
When defending a city, that rule flew right out the window to shatter on the crafted ground below. First and foremost, no noble wanted to be drained like a well, and forcing them to do so wasn't worth the headache. But that still left the far larger portion of the city ready to be conscripted.
As for why they weren't linked together, it came down to distance and obstructions. Finding people in the mess of buildings and remaining connected to them was a struggle with trained messengers on active duty. Keeping those who never received messenger training and most likely forgot their legion basics in a union with telepathic tendrils winding around and through buildings cost more than it usually benefited.
Rather than keeping everyone inside a union and tapping everyone dry before the battle ever started, pulse messages were used to relay commands over the city. This still required the messengers to be in places like towers or any other obvious high point to spread the orders over the streets, which wasn't as convenient as it sounded.
While towers were always positioned along the walls, they were few and far between inside them, and in many places between buildings, you couldn't see a tower at all. It wasn't ideal, but few things were during war, and the messengers should — if only just — adequately relay orders and messages across the city to keep Panta informed.
There would be some loss as positions were lost and the messengers struggled to cope with the flood of reports, but that was to be expected. Panta would just have to ensure he was never caught flat-footed and unable to respond to the evolving situation.
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However, there were exceptions to the rule. Knights remained linked to the greater union as long and as often as they could to receive orders directly from Panta — or the higher ranks of his tribunes — when at all able, as there was little room for miscommunication with them. In such a vein, Panta felt the connection to his century of knights placed in reserve inside the First Ring.
Focusing on them before they had fully stabilized their connection, Panta ordered, "Knight Centurion Brackus, move to the dust cloud with your knights, clear the dust, and report back. I need to know what is going on there. I will be sending the Eighth Cohort as support."
"We're moving, Legatus. We'll be there in under four minutes." The Molten Man rumbled as he slapped his steel helm onto his head and mentally and physically started shouting for the knights around him to get up and start moving.
Panta watched the knights clank into motion, their bodies moving at superhuman speeds down streets and even leaping onto roofs as they rushed toward the dust cloud in the distance, their bodies enhanced with psy. Within seconds, they had moved more than a hundred yards from the small square they were resting in, reaching the edge of the zone where the nearby messenger could easily support their connection, causing him to let it go.
While the knights blurred off, they were not faster than the psy rippling through the air above them. Panta was not one to rely on a single point of failure. All around the dust cloud, messengers were being ordered to immediately form a union, gather reports of what happened, and send them back. The first reports were less than Panta had hoped for but no more than he expected.
If anything happens suddenly and without warning in front of many people, and you go around asking what happened, you will get a wide array of answers. To find the truth, you had to sort through them all and see the common threads.
Closing his eyes, Panta couldn't stop his lips from twitching in a frown at the flood of answers he was getting. His assumption of the varied contents of the reports was wrong. From those who knew anything, he was getting basically the same response: There was some rumbling from below a few minutes before, and then the First Ring's outer wall had collapsed around its main gate.
Whether people noticed the alarming rumbling under their feet beforehand and if it was there at all was up for debate, but it ultimately didn't matter. The fact was that every single person was confident about what caused the dust cloud — well, except one report where a man was swearing a rock fell from the sky to strike the earth — was saying the wall fell into the ground.
Panta didn't let the deaths of those manning the walls or worries about what would happen around the new breach affect his mind. Instead, he was wholly focused on the drastic adjustments to his battle plan and deployment he would have to make before it was too late.
**********
When Brackus thumped to the cast stone street and started steadily ripping large swaths of dust from the air to pile on the ground around him, he was already confident of what he would see, as he had intercepted many pulse messages on the way here. And he wasn't proven wrong.
The knight's metal-clad feet stood at the lip of a wide slope leading into the earth, or so he assumed from the five-foot section he could see. Not that he would see that far for long, as encroaching on the visible air Brackus had just cleared was all the dust still hanging in the air around him.
While he could extend his psy into the dirt in the air and move it around, he couldn't do it for more than a dozen feet in any direction, and it was psy-intensive. Which meant this wasn't a job for him. "Pekloo," he sent into the knights' network, "Use the wind and blow this away."
The Knight Igna-Ventus paused momentarily and then replied, "I'll be tapped after this. Probably won't be able to snuff out a candle."
"Acknowledged, continue anyway." Not waiting for a second order, a gust of wind whistled over and through Brackus's and the other knights' armor, rapidly pushing the dust away.
Brackus couldn't stop his eyes from widening in shock as the hundreds of feet to where the wall should be were steadily revealed. His heart stopped as dread filled more of his veins with every passing second and foot of ground. What he was seeing wasn't the results of a desperately thrown-together plan in hours but the cumulation of an intricately laid strategy that had been brought to fruition over months, if not years.
The road continued at a gentle angle downward, almost like it had been built that way. To the sides of the road was the occasional outcropping of a ruined building's wall sticking up at an odd angle. Those were the anomalies, though, as most of the collapsed buildings had formed an even slope stretching to the sides for hundreds of feet. An entire cohort of a thousand could march three hundred across and not touch the edges of the trench.
As the fighting field was revealed — as there was nothing else it could be — it dipped lower and lower until it finally reached the battlements of the First Ring Wall. Not a collapsed wall, or a knocked-over wall, or even the scattered stones that were once a hundred-fifty-foot wall, but its top. The walkway with its merlons sticking up five feet to the upward side of the ramp. With more dust being blown away, the full scale of the breach in their defense became clear. And yet, it was all wrong.
There wasn't a single figure rushing across and up the breach to attack the inner city. Pulse messages were nearly constantly relayed all around the dust cloud and the city enveloping it, and there were no large forces being reported inside the walls.
Not that the knight could contemplate the oddities for long. A moment later, Brackus felt a knight at the rear of their formation connect to a messenger, giving them a line back to their legatus. Immediately, the knight centurion started relaying what information he had.
**********
It made absolutely no sense to Panta why this trap would be triggered now… unless the dark elves wanted to offer us terms for surrender while being in the superior position? No, that can't be true. This would be showing too much of their hand, as they haven't even officially talked to us yet, let alone made their presence known. It has to be something else.
Panta observed Brackus's head snap to the side at some movement and saw fighting. While there were bodies of legionnaires around the wall, they were all dead from the fall.
The humans Brackus saw fighting were off to the side, inside an alcove on the bottom left side of the destruction. "Assist them and get a report," Panta ordered Brackus before he moved his attention to the wider battle.
It didn't matter how this happened; the fact was that it did, and that had consequences for good or ill. Panta's game with the Dark Elves was over.
No one was stupid enough to think that a "riot" would be capable of bringing down hundreds of feet of legion wall, and if he started looking around, he was reasonably confident of finding more such traps. If they could do this to one of the inner walls, why not the outer walls? That was only reasonable, as once you breach the outer walls of a city in a siege, it was usually the beginning of the end.
"Lukaso, order all the legionnaires but the messengers and their teams off the walls and three blocks into whatever ring they are stationed in. They are to make barricades to block the streets. They are authorized to destroy any buildings they find necessary. Coordinate with Quineeta and my staff to find key points that need to be held. Let everyone know that our foes are underground and can come from anywhere, so they cannot trust their rears are secure. Quineeta, send messages relaying the situation to Hellious and Shree and tell them that we will have to move the plan up as soon as possible." Looking at the map, Panta continued to rattle off orders to shore up points he thought were weak, but he was mostly waiting for what actions the dark elves would take next.
His forces might not have been in the best positions to kick off the battle, but the situation could have been far worse. All in all, this should be good enough. But there was a doubt tickling the back of his mind; what else didn't he know?
The uncertainty of what would happen next caused a thrill of excitement to run through Panta, causing his lips to curl up. It might be frowned upon, but he did love controlling the flow of a battle, the lives and deaths of thousands in his hands.
And this was looking to be the biggest gamble and battle of his life.