Earth: Pando’s village commander POV
Four other elf groups arrive before we begin our attack.
Luckily, the closest flying bus had a large contingent of troops with a few that split off in pursuit. Nearly 80 thousand of our frontline warriors like spear wielders and tanks besides the magic users and support staff all arrive inside the territory the system never allowed Pando to explore. The enemy however only has some 40 thousand, thigh they are constantly getting reinforcements.
As our troops get within visual range I start to get higher resolution pictures revealing their larger runic formations.
Pando’s influence grows, but only in the immediate area that our troops step upon. Before it had been non existant, but now, through mechanisms I don’t understand the system allows new growth. Our Nature wielders, Mages and Druids make use of the opening as Pando gets its first real taste of the territory.
We prepare to crush the enemy’s wooden defenses, but fire sprouts from the hastily constructed walls.
Even from thousands of miles away, I feel my skin sweating as if I were on the front lines. Fire from their druids transforms the wood into something akin to charcoal. All the influence that nature magic should have had on their fortifications is gone.
It’s probably a lot weaker now, but the mana backing it and the strange design give me pause. A hint of the puzzle is revealed to me. They are doing things differently.
Then I notice the fear the system induces on anyone inside seems to affect the enemy less than our own troops, though entering this place with tens of thousands at the back in pursuit of the enemy probably helped our side. Normally the majority would have already fled, but they are in place. Maybe this is a good strategy instead of relying on Nash or a couple of other outliers to explore every single one of these places. It probably won’t be enough to take over all of them, but maybe we could add a couple of mines.
With no delay, our attack starts.
The enemy tries to make use of their meager advantages, their lesser environmental restraint, their ‘fortifications’, and much longer war experience but we have our advantages and the pendulum is leaning to our side.
Still, we don’t have too long to enjoy as twenty thousand enemy reinforcements approaching from both our sides and our rear lines. I order a shift in the formation to better defend in the 3 minutes before our next wave of reinforcements. Just 60 thousand, but enough to maintain a healthy lead. Meanwhile, only a tiny trickle of our troops gathers off after arriving in the slower and smaller flying buses after having temporarily ‘abandoned pursuit’ of smaller contingents. They don’t carry dozens to hundreds of thousands at much higher speeds without the wonders of the faux inner world, but there are a lot more common flying buses.
My mind tries to find the best way to counter the enemy and how many reinforcements should I order to the region. Then all thoughts flee, as streams of red warnings pop up. The shield and all other defenses are in place, but dozens of our soldiers die each moment.
Chaos ensues. Any orders I might have been thinking about, become a really low priority. I shouldn’t interfere lightly, not unless I have information the local commanders lacks.
This is now your fight.
Complete and utter surprise echoes in the leader’s and diplomat’s faces around. Faces who are here because we may have a centralizing agency in the world, but most troops aren’t ‘ours’ and now is the moment they are actually here for. To witness exactly this kind of atrocity, how it happened and pass accurate details to their own ‘governments’. The closest thing to panic since we started this exercise seeps into the room.
Worst yet, this isn’t a loss on an unlucky fight where a dozen people get isolated against ten times as many enemies and they still manage to make a decent showing killing half of the enemy even as they are cut down.
This was supposed to be a relatively normal fight with us holding the upper hand.
In barely 5 seconds we get about 100 casualties. Even the surprise of the others and the chaos they summon is of little concern. The troops on the ground may not realize yet, but this is an order of magnitude worse than we feared.
This isn’t a few clumps of deaths from another type of superattack that a powerful new Archdruid could use. But spread all over the line the enemy starts targeting individual people. Pinpoint attacks limited only by line of sight. The enemy may not have chosen the perfect targets, but as we lose numbers it will expose our weak points.
A dozen images arrive in the corner and I call more team of mages, to decipher the runic formations and develop a counter now that we have actual data on the threat. Whatever those cursed instruments actually did to accomplish this.
I pull up the visual record to try to catch the moment that one of our fighters died then play it back, trying to extract anything.
Four tiny formations in the hands of elves come together to generate small transparent attacks, similar to wind blades. They slice through layers of powerful shields like it’s water. The only reason they don’t target the mages powering our shields are those standing at the front lines. However, as they get used to the attacks and our shields people further back on the third and fourth lines start to fall.
Though why they don’t use height advantage to target the mages at the back directly confuses me. Maybe there is a range limitation.
Three hundred dead in a battle just 12 seconds long. Our lines experience the first signs of collapse, as confusion suffuses the people around the fallen. I override the local commanders and give an order I didn’t want.
It’s the right one and we can always come back after regrouping with a proper plan, but it doesn’t seem likely. I could let the local commander decide, or even order them to hold ground for a lot longer, they would probably obey beyond any chance of victory, but that would serve no purpose.
Retreat is the only option.
In seconds the entire line is moving in a coordinated fashion with the local cammander’s blessing.
The enemy tries to keep us pinned and though their maneuvers are successful in forcing suboptimal retreat lines and for us to split the group in two, our cooms are something we had long worked out, with both visual and audio cues.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Without even matching our number, they fail to do more than leave a thin trail of dead as we retreat. We disengage with a relatively modest number of casualties given the conditions.
Nearly a thousand died against less than 500 enemies. Those losses would have been closer if we hadn’t retreated, which allowed a few more openings to the enemy, but it’s still a defeat.
Our first actual defeat.
“Ohh, that was a shitshow.” Says a rising warlord from Alaska. Luckily his title is only in name, rather than a consequence of raids to acquiring more territory by force. “This is our first actual unmitigated defeat?”
“Anywhere near this scale without our side being caught by a much larger group… yes.”
“We should have pressed the attack. The loss ratio seemed reasonable we need to understand and eliminate this threat as soon as possible.” Another warlord who came in person speaks. Though he is only here for political considerations rather than his upstanding character and our desire to associate with him. And though we don’t have proof, his likely association with an old enemy ensures we will keep him at arm's length.
“No,” interrupts one of the most talented human mages who has returned to Earth. It seems he had been paying attention instead of focusing exclusively on figuring out a magical counter to the enemy’s attacks. Even considering there are stronger mages still in the instance, of the ones already back, only Nash’s surpasses his skill leel. Even the mages who had decades to improve their skills in the inner world after Nash’s early return are only at his rough level.
“What?” a few people ask echoing my thoughts, but I just wait patiently.
“They are slicing through our shield like it’s butter with those spells. The formation they are carrying is doing half the job, but we need a real counter before we go poke our heads in there again. The trade only looks ‘favorable’ for now because we didn’t lose anyone ‘important’ to the defense efforts. They can aim at specific people and as soon as they are in a position to start killing the mages powering the defense our entire effort will collapse.”
“We haven’t learned how to fight on even ground, let alone in these conditions.” The new military commander of Charlie’s village points out to hammer the point home.
Their words silence the room for a good thirty seconds until everyone’s faces are turned to me. Not knowing what to think. I simply say:
“I may not be a mage to talk about the magic, but they are right.” That puts the last nail in the coffin of anyone hoping to come back without more preparation.
My mind turns over the problem as we discuss it for the next few minutes and I get a dozen estimates as to how long developing a counter will take.
In the midst of battle, with the quick interactions, maybe we would be able to accelerate development slightly, but tens of thousands of dead is a price worth paying. Nash would have probably already created a barely functioning design in seconds, but now we are stuck with the most optimistic estimate of an hour, so remaining would be foolish.
Even one hour sounds like a pie in the sky dream. Worse yet, they carry subtly different designs of that cursed formation and that probably means they tuned them to bypass several types of shields.
Then a comm room operator starts speaking.
“Another portal has opened up.” My mind halts trying to grasp the implications of his words. This isn’t something that we had planed for, nor how we should address it, but instantly my mind goes straight I realize what is the most important question even as I hear him on the other side tapping buttons and connecting to other people trying to get more information.
“This portal links where?”
“Giza pyramid and…. the Goblin’s city.”
“And what are they doing?”
“So far nothing, but I don’t think they would have turned it on just to look at the pretty space swirls. They are probably waiting for it to stabilize.”
The strategic implications of this bounce around my head. Although there is still too much in the air, I start to piece things together.
Without plans to attack soon, I split the stream of reinforcements to the region of our first ‘loss’, but still kept in place enough faux inner world fast flying vehicles to evacuate them just in case.
For now, focusing on the smaller Elf groups will be more productive.
Though again as if it had been timed, the enemy spread out enemies also begins to attack with the new shield piercing formations. Even attacks on small groups with overwhelming numerical superiority become dangerous. With those ‘talismans’, just about any confrontation closer than twenty meters results in a couple of deaths on our side.
The hour pass and I compile the data coming in. Melee fighters become nigh useless beyond the little mana they can provide and as sacrificial body shields. A few rare tanks with a relatively high constitution stat can survive the attacks long enough to close the distance and kill the opposition. A few from the fastest scouts also manage to dodge the attacks with decent odds and even a large groups of mages infuse shields with an overwhelming amount of will. But those are the exceptions even against a single quartet of talisman wielders to generate the attacks.
With two groups, getting close is a death sentence.
A tank that can survive a pair of shots attacking would get skewered before even getting past the enemy’s mana shield. There is nobody quite at Nash’s level of… everything at once.
Tough, fast and capable of manipulating mana at will.
Still, even keeping our distance and abusing our mages, the trickle of injured and dead is greater than ever as what had been funny mistakes in the past, become affairs of finality now. But cruel as the thought is, my mind turns to how much faster their sacrifice makes the development of a better shield design.
The flow of the battle is different from anything before and the enemy alters it yet again.
Thousands of windrunners form a line to cross the stabilized portal fed by tremendous mana stores in the Elven city. They wouldn’t be able to send more than a small fraction of their numbers to the other side of the world, but they wouldn’t need too many windrunners to raise the goblin’s effectiveness.
The world grows heavier at the implications.
Spirit controllers and shamans may not be any stronger than the Elven magic users, but I always speculated what synergies combining the classes from the enemy might achieve. We had seen similar results from our own experiments. Different races would probably be even more effective.
Nash isn’t even here to make this transfer more mana expensive.
The world shifts the reality of our fight. We won’t be able to step in battle with certainty of victory. Nor can we promise that only the rare unlucky sod and the stupid will die.
No. Now the world has just been plunged into chaos again and we need to build an island of order.
----------------------
Ajax’s POV
The world crumbles around me as the knowledge I can do something about it burns in my mind. But my room is not the place to do it. I don’t know the specifics yet, but I know the first step.
The pyramids call me.
I hear and see portals transporting thousands of enemy troops back and forth between their cities. Dad tries to hide it, to shield me from the realities, but even if I hadn’t snuck into any meetings or infiltrated the network, I can feel that war is here.
It stinks up the air, and makes me more aleart even when I try to forget it.
The Lifestuff tastes funny.
I wish I could ignore Nash’s words. Pretend I didn’t listen to them, but that isn’t the truth of the world. A hint of his strange Aether suffuses me, as the reality of the moment seems greater. I have an important decision.
Do I step on the bicycle again after a car ran me over?
Do I keep fighting after the dog’s jaws let go of my ankle?
Do I step into the pyramid after just having overcome madness?
Do I step into a pyramid that is still a threat to me? One that will cause the system to invade my mind and rip away every hint of memory. A pyramid that is far away, knowing every step of the way what sits at the end.
YES.
I’m in the best place to learn what the pyramids are all about and even if costs my sanity, I will do it.
“I’m not weak. I’m not weak. I… will… do … it.”
I get ready to step into the night when a cold air current hits me and swings my room’s door open. I catch a shadow in the corner of my eye and I look back but there is nothing in the dark corridor.
My mind is playing tricks again. Nobody is watching me. No life detectors or other mechanisms in range to give myself away as guards laugh at my antics.
Atop the bed is the only important thing that I’m leaving behind.
A tiny letter, with a wax seal leaning against my pillow.
And only three words of it seem of any importance.
Love you Dad.