Trikal was two words away from completing his chant and raining meteors down on the city when the barrier protecting him suddenly shattered like a boulder smashing through a stained-glass window. He panicked and tried to speak the last two words of his spell, but no words came out. Instead, his primal instincts hijacked his mind, causing him to spin around to the attacker and unsheathe his sword with one motion. As a result, the meteors he had summoned dropped to the city behind him. He expected a loud shattering quake in the distance from the rocks crashing through rooftops, but the striking twang of a barrier pierced his ears, indicating that the attack was blocked by magic before hitting the ground. All of that happened in a few seconds. Now, he was standing before the woman in the green cloak, who had materialized out of nowhere.
Yet she wasn’t attacking—she was just watching, staring, analyzing Trikal with her icy blue gaze. Trikal got the impression, looking into her icy blue eyes, that she could’ve killed him at any moment.
“Don’t interfere,” she ordered.
Trikal almost laughed. She was deadly, but he was the general leading the fight against Plem. Telling him not to interfere was asking him to abandon his country. Moreover, she was surrounded by over a hundred soldiers. Powerful or not, it was brazen for her to request anything. He was about to answer her request with a horizontal sword slash, but one of his soldiers did it for him, striking at her throat with a dagger.
What happened next sent goosebumps crawling down Trikal’s spine. The woman dodged at a speed he could barely follow and grabbed his soldier’s throat, ripping it out of his neck like a tube of fresh sausage. Then she kicked the corpse into a mage and turned to Trikal, dropping the throat at his feet. If that was all that happened, he wouldn’t have fallen victim to despair. He had seen far worse. But it wasn’t the blood or savageness of the attack—it was the barrier that got him. The woman had wrapped herself in a thin layer of mana that acted as an invisible shield, preventing anything from touching her body. So, when blood sprayed over her neck and chest, it dripped down in sloshy waves like it was dripping down a glass window, and when the blood dripped far enough, it exposed clean skin and clothing beneath. When she released the barrier, the blood fell to the ground like a waterfall, splashing at her pants—but even then, it never reached her feet. The sight was so shocking that everyone who could see her froze, unwilling to take a step forward, let alone attack her. It was a terror tactic born worthy of the war goddess Delina herself.
2
Andy was thankful that Emily’s team had put up a barrier before the molten rocks in the sky fell apart, sending fire raining down on the city. It was just in the nick of time.
That must’ve been Sara, Andy thought as he finished the amplification circle. Thank God she’s here.
Andy was grateful Sara was there because war was different than he had imagined. He thought he’d arrive and agonize whether he should use his strength to kill people en masse, as if he were a president in a bomb shelter, hovering his thumb above a nuclear trigger. It wasn’t like that at all. From the moment that they arrived, he hadn’t had a single moment to question his decisions. People were screaming, and soldiers filing through the walls were butchering everyone they saw: soldiers, women—children. It was a passion-fueled orgy of anger, adrenaline, and primal instincts. Enemies watched their comrades die and took it out on civilians, defenders watched their women and children get cut down. Both were furious and butchered everyone they saw. It was raw and messy and savage—and it made Andy understand the depths of human ferocity. That was evident the moment he and Darius saw a Lemings’ soldier grab a woman’s arm and yank her away from her children, pulling her to a nearby building. In an environment with mutilated corpses, fire, and wounded screams, the imagination of what would happen to her was so terrible that it made Andy’s vision white out. But before he lost control, Darius yelled, “You mother fucker!” and charged. Darius caught up to the man in an instant and clocked the man in the jaw with his full strength. The impact was so savage and unrestrained that the man’s head nearly exploded, and the body went flying, yanking the woman to the ground. Once it was all over, Darius looked at the blood on his hands with trembling eyes. He was shocked along with the rest of the heroes, but once enemy soldiers saw them, no one could think about it. They instantly swarmed the heroes, and it became a battle of survival. After dodging a spear strike, Andy committed the same mistake, hitting a man in the chest at full power. The impact crumpled the man’s chest armor and sent his body crashing into a wall like a meteorite—and that felt like the signal for the battle to begin. A dozen more soldiers swarmed them in a blood-fueled frenzy, and all the initial guilt and reluctance that the heroes had about fighting magically disappeared in a cloud of fear and promises to think about it later.
Let’s close up the wall! Andy had suggested.
R-Right, Darius replied.
Wiles nodded and rushed away with them.
Once they got to the breach on the wall (a massive hole in the stone that Lemings soldiers crawled through like ants), Darius put his hands on the ground and summoned a rock wall. It was something second nature to them, but when the defending soldiers saw it, their eyes widened with awe. Their help was appreciated—
—but that changed when someone created the massive meteorite spell, and Andy realized that he could only protect the people around him and there was no way to communicate with the heroes. That’s why he frantically created an amplification array, but that was proving a terrible point of conflict with leadership.
“Don’t you dare use that, kid,” the general ordered. “Officers give the orders. If you start giving orders, the soldiers won’t know whether to follow your orders or the orders they were given.”
“Then die, you fucking idiot!” Andy yelled back. His anger boiled over, and he accidentally released magical pressure that made the general and the nearby soldiers stumble backward. “I’m here by authority of Lady Reece, acting monarch of the Escaran Kingdom and head advisor to the true blood Hier, Prince Alecov Escar. I don’t know who your noble backer is, but you have no authority here. So help me or step aside.” Andy loaded the array, and a bright green light blinded them. Then, heated and pulsing with magical energy, Andy added too much mana to the array, and suddenly, the entire battlefield could hear the noises around him. It immediately clicked that Andy was speaking to the entire battlefield—not just the other heroes—and he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t have the authority to make decisions. Yet…. Sara wanted the heroes to take control and make their own decisions, didn’t she? That’s what he interpreted, and he resolved to face the consequences later if necessary. So, he opened his mouth—and improvised.
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“Soldiers of Lemings! Surrender and lay down your arms or… face the consequences!” Andy wanted to strangle himself for coming up with Hollywood nonsense on a real battlefield, but he continued on regardless. “If you do not, we will strike without mercy until you give up!” His heart pounded as he looked out on the field of over 500 soldiers, grouped together like insects, and imagined what would happen if the heroes used their spells on them. Massacre. It would be the My Lai massacre. Soldiers dropping napalm and Agent Orange on Vietnamese—slaughtering people in trenches. One-sided destruction. Mindless killing. That was what would happen if he didn’t think of something to end the battle. So, he racked his brain and looked up to the sky. “Watch what you’re up against! If you don’t want to face this, back the fuck away!” He raised his hand and started silent-casting a fireball spell.
3
The woman in front of Trikal stopped her stare-off with him to look up to the wall with a grin. Trikal glanced behind him and saw a spell the size of his meteor strike develop in the air in real-time, blinding soldiers with the radiance of a small sun. “What the hell is that spell?” he asked.
“A fireball, General,” she said. “Just like that rock wall is a normal rock wall. That’s the difference between our power.” Her eyes narrowed, and she gazed deep into his eyes. “Now yield.”
Suddenly, a tyrannical amount of magical pressure bore down on the mages, dropping them all to their knees. Even he felt his ribs tighten and his lungs seize up. It was like there was a boulder on his chest, and he was fighting for the right to breathe. Other people didn’t understand the true weight and terror of that action. Normal troops were used to their superiors flexing their magical pressure to garner attention. Yet, after 30 years of practicing magecraft, Trikal hadn’t felt crushing pressure like that for a decade. The only person who could make him sweat was General Tronan, and that man was the strongest mage in the Lemings Kingdom. Even then, he couldn’t release pressure even half as powerful as the woman before him. This was bad—really bad. He wouldn’t dream of surrender, but his soldiers needed to make a tactical retreat and inform the main force of this woman’s power. There was no other choice.
“General!” Soldiers started approaching nervously, looking at the woman with apprehension in their eyes. He put up his hand with effort and looked at the woman. “Listen. There’s ten thousand troops on their way here. Why don’t we discuss an armistice? I can put you at the table with—“
“Yield,” she repeated.
Trikal thought that the pressure she had released was crushing, but the second wave brought him to his knees involuntarily. “What… are… you…?” He wheezed, unable to speak—unable to breathe.
“Yield!” she yelled. The pressure grew even stronger. Trikal watched his mages roll on the ground, clutching at their throats, coughing, wheezing, and gasping for air.
Trikal wasn’t in a position to refuse. He was now certain that this group was the summoned humans King Lemings had warned them about, and they were far stronger than anyone imagined. Somehow, he needed to de-escalate the situation to ensure that someone would bring news to General Tronan before it was too late. Trikal could die then, knowing that his people were safe. He had to. There was no choice.
“Oka—“ “General!”
Before Trikal could surrender, his greatest nightmare played out before his eyes. Somewhere to the right, a panicked soldier threw a throwing dagger at the woman. He watched the blade spin in slow motion, praying that it would kill her, praying that she would dodge so that the situation wouldn’t escalate. Yet what actually happened was beyond his comprehension. Not only did she dodge, but a red barrier shot up around her, and the dagger hit it, sending it flying. When the blade hit the grass, it sizzled, and the grass smoked as if the blade had instantly become red hot.
Everything that happened after that was a blur, like a drunken victory after a major battle. Dozens of daggers hit her barrier as mages chanted spells to hit her at blank range. She waved her hand and hit them with a wind spell so strong that it cut half a dozen armored soldiers in half, sending their bodies and organs crashing into other troops in a macabre hurricane. Then she bounded in the air with lowered gravity, rocketing her into the sky.
“Ward!” a mage yelled.
A mage lifted a magical staff with a massive mana crystal on top and thrust it into the ground beside Trikal, and a massive blue barrier developed above them.
“Ready your spells!”
Trikal could only watch in a blur as his soldiers lifted their hands and pointed them at the woman in the sky. Yet he could feel that she wouldn’t throw herself up into the air (where she couldn’t dodge) without a reason. That fear made it impossible for him to move. He could only watch as the worst played out. And that’s when he saw it:
The rocks and foliage outside the barrier shot up to her at surreal speed, creating a meteorite in real time. A second later, there was a boulder-sized sphere of grass and rock in front of her. Then, it spontaneously combusted with blue flames.
“Barriers!” Trikal screamed.
Mages instantly shifted from attack to defense, putting up multiple barriers underneath the ward as the meteor streaked down from the heavens. It was a good move. The second the flaming meteor hit, the fire engulfed the barrier like a skillet in a campfire. Then, the ward exploded, and the meteor shattered three other barriers before stopping on a fourth, sending flames spreading out around them like a forest fire. Mages on the periphery screamed as the blue inferno engulfed them.
“Attack!” soldiers yelled in the distance.
A hail of arrows, magic, and blades shot at the falling woman, blocking out the clouds as they streaked across the sky.
Trikal had lost grip of what was happening.
4
Andy’s fireball bluff had failed spectacularly. He was hoping that a demonstration of might would stop the soldiers, and for a second, it seemed to work. But that was wishful thinking. The real reason that the combatants stopped was because Sara was in the middle of the battlefield, crushing a man in elaborate red and gold armor with magical pressure. Hope welled in Andy’s heart that she would deal with the situation, but it was short-lived. Within only a few seconds, the situation turned from a stalemate to a bloodbath when soldiers began attacking Sara. Sara’s wind spells clashed with the soldiers, acting like blender blades as they moved across the battlefield. Then, when she released a cataclysmic meteor strike on the area—all hell broke loose. Soldiers rushed toward the scene, screaming to “protect the general” as mages, archers, and fiends shot aerial attacks at Sara. Ground charged by the hundreds, pushing and rioting as they fought to kill her.
Andy watched the stampede, and the massive yet ultimately insignificant fireball that he had summoned to stop the fighting began moving with lethal intent. Panic. Pain. Fear. Those were the emotions that swirled within Andy as he pointed the fireball at the dense tidal wave of charging soldiers.