Everyone was waving around the wooden Rods I’d given them, the Runes on them glowing and ready with general effectiveness for use.
Given this was an elite team of common soldiers, the most offensive Elements of Fire, Lightning, and Ice were emphasized among them, but naturally everyone had secondary Elements, generally much less developed.
They were really surprised when I showed them the Laser for Light, the Acid Spray for Water, the Ice Darts for Ice, the Rockfangs for Earth, and the Wind Arrows for Air. It took only a casual demonstration by the KIA team for the soldiers to fall all over the fact that they now had offensive magic for every single Element, even if it was only at the Novice Tier.
That was what they were employing now, sitting on Disks and bombarding the incoming Ants with spells basically non-stop, although they were also spending their magic wisely and picking their targets for maximum effect. The Ants were dangerous in numbers but small, and Tier-3 Novice magic could certainly kill one of them, or a bunch of them if there was splash damage.
The Implements in their hands helped that process considerably.
They were only basic Casting Tools, easing a little bit of the strain of handling magic, certainly not capable of Channeling massive amounts of power with the short amount of time I’d had to carve them.
But when the Runes were enhanced to +V with Mass Greater Magic Weapon and Mass Bane Weapon to Vermin, well, even a minor spell became MUCH better at punching into their opponents, rarely missing and crushing their magical resistance in so doing. Even glancing hits allowed the watery yellow Banefire to do its thing, shattering carapaces and crippling the Ants it hit, who were promptly disposed of efficiently by their peers.
From their viewpoint, I had given them a Blessing, making their magic much more effective against the Ants. Banefire was actually a form of Curse Magic, although it didn’t deal with Dark energies. Regardless, I didn’t bother to correct them, and they finally realized why I kept waving a Staff around as I was Casting, like some damn cartoon version of an ancient spellcaster, as soon they were energetically doing the same with their basic Rods.
“It’s like fighting a goddamn river!” the Mick called down to me, flicking out his hand. Dozens of sharp spikes erupted from the ground, each of them impaling a separate writhing Ant. Rockfangs at Tier 5 were actually a pretty decent AoE spell, although without Banefire they probably couldn’t penetrate a Warrior’s carapace at all, and the normal Novice spell was basically just an inconvenience to the scattered Warriors escorting the near-mindless Swarm forward.
There were a lot of soldiers out here on Earth Waves, slowly retreating before the Horde, getting in the attacks they could, sometimes wiping out thousands of Ants in large AoE spells spread out across areas as broad as possible. The Ants just soaked it all up and kept on coming.
The lesser soldiers were organized by Elements, uniting their magic in Formations to form higher-Tier spells under the guidance of half-Mages or Mages, who rained them down on the Ants. It wasn’t overwhelmingly powerful, but it could cover large areas, which was really all that was needed right now.
I Echo/Chain Bursted them, and Fastcast/Chained them.
Being in the Beast Realm in a relatively peaceful situation had given me plenty of time to work on rep counts, and the lack of a Natural Day meant getting the power back to do so was simple. Making the +III Metas Efficient down to +II had been simple once I opened my IV Valences. With the Costs reduced to +I for each Meta by dint of my Arcane Thesis: Shards, I could use three +III Metas with their costs reduced to +I, paying the costs of two of them alternately with Residual Metamagic.
When my V Valences opened, I could finally make the powerful +IV Metas Efficient. Of those, Fastcast was the most important, immediately allowing me to get off a completely separate spell by basically accelerating the Casting to an eyeblink.
So, I had two Castings going off constantly. Both of them were triple Darts; each such Dart was as long as my forearm, doing a base 2-12, +50% to 3-18 for Energized, +5 for Extra Edge, +6 for Greater Soulbound Weapon + Bane Weapon, +2 for Vermin Slayer, +4 for Arcane Mark, all of it doubled by a Swarmbane Clasp. So, around 54 points to the first target, 27 to a Chained target, and 13 to a Burst target.
The Kickers were +5d6 Holy damage, +2d6 Bane, maximized to 42 with Zealous Consecrated Spell. Unlike the main spell and its Boosts, Kickers didn’t vary in damage.
The Kickers were thus doing most of the work, naturally. A basic Ant looked to have about 10 Health, increasing rapidly as they advanced in size and status, so the Kickers were complete overkill, tearing apart and obliterating them in mixed golden soulfire, electrum rainbow Holy fire, unwhite vivus dusting them, and the watery yellow Banefire making sure the magic hit all the weak spots. A Tier 3 Ant was around 40 Health, with a stony carapace that compared nicely to steel.
Warrior Ants were sitting on 100+ Health, and were the same size as the Servant Tarantulas, only much more dangerous. Their jaws were able to chew through stone easily, and they had six-inch stingers on their backsides ready to deal some lethal poison.
I had the Darts skip targets when they Chained, focusing on clusters in my Detect Vermin and making sure the Ants I hit with the main salvo were at least ten feet apart. Each explosion of light, Force, and Firefrost was roughly ten feet across, and there were twenty-six separate blasts of them with each and every Dart, basically forming a trio of ten-foot-wide Lances two hundred and sixty feet long with each shot, like a massive trident explosion of fire and light cutting a swathe through the Horde.
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I estimated each Chain/Bursting Dart was killing up to a hundred and fifty or so Ants, so anywhere from seven to nine hundred of them died every six seconds as the continuous Echoes began to play out on sustained Casting.
The Fastcast volley was more like zipping lines of light in contrast, individual Ants popping as streaks of light wove through the dark mass of countless bodies in Chains, buried almost instantly underneath the incoming tide that didn’t slow down at all.
I used the second volley to pick off the larger Ants if needed, or they could be used to dispense Healing if I was so minded.
“There’s over a hundred million or so of them, judging by the size of the Hivemind.” With Magevoice, I could always be heard, and the passive Sound Magic let me always hear them, even over the constant clacking, chittering, and scuttling of the Horde. “So, you only have to kill ten thousand each to do your share. Anything else is just gravy.”
The soldiers looked at their kills of three to five Ants per spell, on average. The KIA guys were averaging ten to fifteen, with Red’s brilliant barrage of small Fireballs averaging thirty or more. The Mick’s wildly spinning balls of Lightning were dancing through the Ants for at least a hundred feet, popping fifty or more as they tore through the bugs, while the Lightning Runner he was riding as if he’d done so all his life was zipping around and crushing Ants in sparking explosions under his claws with tireless enthusiasm.
They... had a long way to go to do their share...
“I see you are shouldering part of our load, Lady Fae!” one of the corporals, a grinning mixed-blood named Eduardo, piped up.
“Or not!” I sniffed right back. “You have Rods, the others do not. I am forced to take up their burdens!”
Explosions and living lines of death hissed out nonstop, even more tireless than these soldiers tossing Novice-tier spells, many of them rapidly getting in a ton of practice with the totally brand-new spells they’d been given.
Walls and such things were never barriers for more than a few breaths, the Horde crawling right up and over them. If they were made of Ice and the Ants happened to freeze solid, the Ants behind climbed over the dead ones, completely undeterred, and the barriers were still little more than speed bumps. Even a Water Wall was something that was simply overwhelmed by sheer numbers and plunged through within seconds, unable to stop the rush.
The only way to stop the Ants was to kill them!
I realized this with everyone else and was calmly retreating all the while I was throwing out spells, dragging the Disks with me in a line. I was working one side of the line in a ninety-degree arc, the soldiers were in the middle, and the KIA men with their Tier-4 Stars were on the far end, with the Mick anchoring that flank. His Tier-6 Lightning effects were nearly as powerful as a rote Adept attack, especially with the Rod’s Blessing on his spells, and he was reaping a nice toll as a result.
I blew swaths through the middle of our frontage every now and then, making sure the Ants didn’t overwhelm their efforts, and was continually eyeing the next team over, who were only keeping up with us by unleashing Adept spells to slaughter large areas at one time, unable to match the efficiency of the continued low-power barrage we were putting up.
I continually reaped through the Ants between us and in front of them, but had to keep moving our entire line back so the Ants to the sides didn’t sweep in and flank us. We weren’t keeping pace with the Ants, but we were definitely slowing them down more than those to the sides of us.
In the distance I saw a Skyflame Funeral go off with green-tinted flame, and smirked coldly. It was a waste of a spell, but it did cover a huge area and at least grant the mages a few moments of breathing room.
I heard the droning before anyone else, Sound Magic ftw, and immediately called out in full Magevoice, “Incoming fliers! Air Adepts, this is your time to shine!”
The Ants were too close to the ground for the more powerful Air spells to work at all, but Ants did not have any Air Affinity, so the more brutal Wind spells would work perfectly well against their fliers!
Word went up and down the line as a darkness in the distance swept towards us, and the winged drones of the Shale-Shell Ants swept towards us.
They were all half-Warrior grades or better, and so no pushovers. There were also hundreds of thousands of them up and down the line, and they could overwhelm any position nearly instantly simply by landing en masse atop them.
If the teams involved slowed down and tried to turtle up, they’d be overrun by the Ants on the ground, and be lucky to get out alive.
With the warning from my shout, however, everyone had time to prepare. Vortexes were spinning up, and the tornadoes which wouldn’t really affect enough area to be worth spending against the landbound Ants roared into life, Formation Casting linking them all together into a devilish web of solid crosswinds.
The winged Ants went right into that hellstorm of Wind Magic and were basically torn apart. Their buzzing wings couldn’t actually support their weight, and they were incredibly vulnerable to the hundreds-mph winds ripping through them. Helplessly tumbling Ants were hurled all across the sky, even as many thousands of Ants on the ground were sucked into the tornadoes and vented into the air to accompany them.
I made sure we were in no danger by letting off a Chained Twinned array of Shards. 18 x 26 x 4 was 1700 different targets, which blew any Ants trying to get between the Wind Discs unleashed by our people out of the sky instantly.
It also generated a lot of instant Soul Crystals, and the near constant stream of them I was pulling away was almost a river for a minute or two as so many of the things died vivic right in front of us. The soldiers knew they were loot, but not what they did, and I didn’t explain any more, too busy collecting them, Zeben working furiously, to bother with explanations as to why.
There were a LOT of them, however, especially with how many I was generating. Basically, a garden hose of Soul Crystals was being injected into my Pocket continually, and I was closely tracking our course, as I’d have to return this way after the fighting was past to collect the thousand-some per minute being left behind by the KIA team, too!
That was absolutely fine, because we needed a lot of them. It took 1600 basic Ants to make a Soul Gem, after all, and 40 basic Soul Gems to make a single Soul Jewel...
I just whistled to myself, promising myself that when I got to 38 Int I was going to grab two more thoughtstreams instead of going for the double speed option I thought might be necessary in the Human world and had taken at 33. With my Ring handling the constant TK, my other Thoughtstream was furiously melding Cores into Eggs, as we’d long met the number requirements for Cores, and Tier-5 glory in two or three Elements was awaiting everyone...
The Karma per Ant was negligible, the amount actually based on Swarm size and the ongoing Glory Award from the mass combat, just like the Spiders... not that the Commanders weren’t a rich harvest, and one I needed considering all my Classes were approaching end-run full Costs per Level as I neared Ten. I wondered if these mass combats against Beasts happened a lot in the Mortal World, but then, I’d come out of a war against the Shades covering an area bigger than a continent in the Beast Realm, so I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was.
Good for me. The more Soul Crystals, the merrier!