Edwin sat up, trying and failing for what felt like the hundredth time to find a comfortable position to lie in, where his oversized armor didn’t pinch or press anything. The first few times Leodin had made fun of him, but now the young marksman didn’t even open his eyes. Comfort and wearability had been high priorities when designing the boy’s adventurer’s coat, as their wearers would have to walk, fight, and sometimes sleep in their armored clothing for days. Sitting in the defilade next to Edwin, leaning against the soft earth, Leodin seemed no less comfortable than in a chair.
Watching the marksman’s chest rise and fall slowly, Edwin realized that he’d fallen asleep.
We’ve been going without pause for weeks, Edwin thought. I don’t get tired, but the others have to be feeling it by now.
As per the brand-new battle plan, the division had kept going until they reached the north Trenn crossing. There, first battalion had stayed behind to guard the bridge while the other three had split up into several smaller groups. The five cohorts of light infantry had formed three task forces, each supported by a unit of crossbowmen.
The two adventurer cohorts would each operate on their own, as this was, so Bordan had assured General Asher, exactly what they were good at. All five groups had then turned around and marched in the direction they’d come from, keeping to the woods while giving the road a wide berth to avoid detection. Once each group reached their assigned position, at least roughly, as they had no way to tell exactly where they were, they settled in to wait.
That had been more than two hours ago.
Edwin was just about to close his eyes and delve into Walter’s mind, entering the Lich’s mindscape to pass the time, when a new sound reached his ears. At first Edwin thought he had been mistaken, then he heard it again. He sat up, shuffling to the other side of the defilade and sticking his head over the edge. Cupping his ear, he heard it again, clearer this time.
“What is it?” Bordan whispered, crouching next to him.
“Metal on metal,” Edwin replied. “Wagons as well, I think. They’re here.”
“Good,” Bordan sighed, returning to his previous spot. “So they really did follow us. The scouts said so, but there was always the chance that it was a trick.”
“Shouldn’t we get ready?” Edwin asked, surprised at the other man’s relaxed expression.
“If you just started hearing them, what’s passing us should be the vanguard. It’ll be another hour or so until they reach the bridge, and then however long they need to set up and commit to the attack. You can relax, maybe even take Leodin as an example and get some shuteye.”
With a sigh, Edwin sat back down as well. He wasn’t tired in the slightest, so there was no way he’d be able to sleep. Instead, he closed his eyes and focused on the faint sounds. If he concentrated really hard, he could almost see them. Soldiers in red uniforms, their bored expressions dulled by hours of marching, followed by massive wooden carts containing everything from food to shoelaces and from bundles of arrows to chests of mana crystals, carefully packed in straw-filled boxes lest they break.
Tens, then hundreds, then thousands of soldiers marched past, and Edwin listened.
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“What are we waiting for?” one of the other adventurers whispered to Bordan.
“The signal!” the former soldier hissed back. Soldiers spent much of their lives waiting, so they didn’t bat an eye when their superior parked them somewhere for an extended amount of time. While the adventurers were fantastic fighters, they were too used to working on their own, and at times like this it showed.
“Hear anything?” Bordan whispered to Edwin, probably more to pass the time than anything else.
“They haven’t started moving again,” Edwin answered. “From what I could make out, the last unit of soldiers passed by two or three minutes before they stopped, so we should be alongside supply carts.”
Bordan gave him a strange look. “You heard all of that from over here?”
“The animals all cleared out when the van came through, so they’re the only thing making noise.”
“Noise.” Leodin chuckled. “We’re several hundred meters from the road. I can barely hear that they’re there at all.”
“Maybe wash your ears,” Edwin whispered. “Or just wash in general.”
He scratched his neck, and his hand brushed past his ear. It felt hot. It took a few seconds, then Edwin put two and two together.
Did I use mana to improve my hearing without even realizing it? I didn’t even know that I could do that, though it makes sense now that I think about it. I need to be more careful; my mana supply is limited, and if I burn through it all before a fight, I might get in trouble.
“Are you sure we’ll see it from here?” Bordan asked, interrupting his thoughts. “The bridge is pretty far away.”
“I think so,” Edwin reassured him “but even if we don’t see it, we should hear it.”
“You’re sure that the new ritual works?”
“Of course it works! Do you think we’d build a dud?”
“We?” Bordan asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Well, they built it, but I gave them the idea,” Edwin grumbled. “I have pretty good ideas sometimes, you know?”
“Yes, you do,” Bordan said.
“…if that was supposed to be sarcasm, you need to practice more.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Huh,” Edwin said, scratching his head, unsure how to react to that. “Well, thanks I guess.”
Their conversation was interrupted by a flash that lit up the distant sky. Several more flashes followed before the sound of the first explosion arrived. The next few seconds sounded like a violent thunderstorm was raging in the distance, over where first division was holding the crossing. Edwin craned his neck, but there were too many trees in the way to actually make out the fireballs, rising majestically over the battlefield like glowing portents of doom, only to pop ineffectually, their fiery contents burning up high above the soldiers’ heads. The light was visible though, illuminating the darkening sky like infant suns.
He wished he could be there, to see the ritual in action. It was a rush job, true, and cobbling its blueprint together from parts of existing rituals had been very much against Walter’s nature. As he wasn’t able to actually help, however, the ritualism team had done an impressive job.
The targeting matrix was almost the exact one they had come up with for their original idea, only changed ever so slightly to make up for the fact that the shield would’ve appeared at its target without delay, while their new payload didn’t. It was the most complex part of the ritual by several degrees of magnitude, as the rest of it was really just a basic telekinetic catapult.
With speed being their primary concern, even a connoisseur like Walter couldn’t find much beauty in the result. The lines were carved with exacting precision, as they had to be, but the wooden base was roughly cut into shape without care for aesthetics, and the four metal vessels attached to the sides looked like nothing more than cooking pots – likely due to the fact that they were cooking pots, but finding open-topped metal containers of the right size on short notice had been tough. Each pot was filled with an armful of medium-sized rocks, and the ritual was armed with a mana crystal sitting in the center. If it detected a fireball, a telekinetic grasp took hold of the contents of one of the pots and flung it toward the incoming projectile at great speed. It was crude, and being entirely devoid of any safety mechanisms probably made it a considerable health hazard to those tasked with reloading it, but it worked.
Ah, how Edwin wished he could see it. The mighty fireball, symbol of the unparalleled power of mages like no other spell, subject of hundreds of songs, poems, and historical text extolling its destructive force… brought low by a few rocks, found by the wayside.
Face it, spellweavers: You’re yesterday’s news. In a ritualist’s world, your vaunted spells are little more than parlor tricks.