I gently pushed Red’s hands off my head, sighing. “Get moving, Red,” I told him, as Noble began to glimmer with Healing Light. He bounced to his feet and took off running without hesitation.

The Restoration went off, Healing energies to soothe mind, body, and soul and bring everything back into balance washed over me inside and out. The blood on my clothes didn’t go away, but most of the other residues did.

-The longer we take here, the longer the people in Coralost arming up have to wait,- I /reminded everyone as I got to my feet. -I’m moving to the Focus room, I am going to be sending you out in lots of ten, subject to Driver Sam clearing your arrival and chance to move out immediately.

-Coralost teams, coordinate armory draw and resupply for everyone. For the armory here, we’re going to be stripping it. I want the extra supplies assembled and ready to be Tapestried when I arrive.

-Let’s go, people. I want this to be the fastest and most unseen mass insertion of troops that’s ever been seen. The faster we get into position and the fighting starts is the faster we can get reinforcements on the way there.

-I need every Allegiance member working in the Ohio military and guilds on alert for interference in this matter, and those in neighboring states watching like hawks. Anyone trying to prevent reinforcements from being dispatched or attempting to change orders and targets is probably a traitor. You have clearance to use minor Divs to verify the Auras of said people, if you weren’t suspicious of them already.- Naturally enough, Aura-reading and recording of people in places of influence and power was quite the pastime, and we had lists of some damn suspicious people who Sama and Briggs had been slowly prying into the affairs of, for much quiet profit and doleful revelations and reputation-trashing.

I had the feeling we were going to find a whole lot more such people after today. Ambition was one of the greatest tools for the Black Curia, after all. They’d tried to slip a dozen or more agents into Coralost, to absolutely no success. Briggs and Sama knew who those people were, and had been tracking them.

I wondered how many of them I’d see here...

-------

I had a high Caster Level, but Teleport could only take so many people and their gear at one time. Mass limits were simply a thing that had to be dealt with, and if I didn’t like it, too bad, so sad.

That being said, it was a damn good thing I had so much Mana to blow, because a standard Valence Caster never would have been able to do this without opening up a Portal or some similar effect.

The gear on the blankly-woven blanket shrank down and became additional threads woven into the cloth, a picture of the ammo and equipment that had been tightly packed upon it earlier. I rolled it up with a gesture, and folded it up over my arm.

Psychic communication via the Marks was kept tight, as any Psychic Mages among the enemy could track them. Swampy’s use of Sound Magic was proving very crucial right now, as he had to Silence every group coming in so they couldn’t be heard by any Sound mages and give away our positions.

There were no Dark mages among our numbers, and that included Shadow mages, supposedly the premier stealth types among the Caster set. Alas for them, invisibility and working illusions fell among the more interesting applications of Light Magic, and even minor Typeless mages could wield a good selection of them.

Illusions were covering most of the groups as they cut through the fields, making them look like hazy disturbances that might have been visible from above, but there was nobody up there watching, that had been made sure of.

Sunny, Lord Quake, and Hopper were all completely invisible, too, but staying low and moving fast. The Plant mages were even restoring the crops behind everyone, so passing cars or stuff wouldn’t notice anything had cut through the fields.

I stepped off the Seal Focus with the last group of Hunters, who wavered a moment as they got their bearings, looking around as Driver Sam rose to his feet. With some slight effort, he started restoring the ditch to normal, unmaking the Seal Focus, grabbing the squad’s leader Percy and pointing as Swampy gestured and settled Silence over top of them.

A flicker of a glowing hand Holo pointed, and everyone moved out. I noted the shimmer on both sides of the road, allowing everyone to cross without being seen, and then the Earth rippled as Driver Sam brought everyone aboard and began rolling us silently in the direction required. The fields in front of us parted and merged back together like a stone boat cutting through green water.

Tight flickers of Mark communication ran back and forth here and there, along with holo-flashes making words and pointing in specific directions.

Forward scouts had already discovered that a lot of the houses and farms they were passing were curiously empty, and there was nobody out in the fields.

Wasn’t that all kinds of ominous...

Briggs’ and Sama’s operators were trained in non-magical takedowns, almost a lost art among the people of this world, who relied so much on magic and magical senses that personal combat skills were basically ignored by many as archaic holdovers. Being able to use magic in tight quarters, now, that was a very advanced discipline...

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

But when an Air/Light user glided in silently and invisibly and stuck nine inches of steel into your cerebral cortex while you were on watch duty in Shadow form and extremely vulnerable to physical damage, well, it sucked to be you.

Typeless Divination magic, on the job...

Burt was out there with the advance team, his Elements of Light, Air, and Chaos making him really, really good at open-field stealth maneuvers and messing with people’s perceptions. They hadn’t run into anyone more dangerous than Adepts, but all those people had been Shadow-users concealed and on watch for mass movement of forces, checking in at fifteen-minute intervals and keeping their coms handy.

Which meant we had maybe fifteen minutes to cover the ground and get into position before they realized something might be up.

Then again, Audible Glamer could imitate someone’s voice perfectly enough to fool a Sound mage, and it was only a Valence I spell.

Tox and his squad of Plant mages got into a silent battle with a massive trapped area of animated Corpse Willows, their roots ready to spring out and impale or grab intruders, adding their stripped corpses to the gory skeletons they adorned themselves with. Said Willows were not prepared to be Held, and then shredded from the inside out as they sat there paralyzed by Plant Magic.

The waiting clouds of insect Swarms, all replete with lethal poisons, were another barrier to get past. There was almost no way to avoid their notice, and they were virtually impervious to Elemental Magic as basically congealed Mana themselves.

Almost, but not quite. The Purifying power of Light Magic, dispersed through the Fog Cloud spell of Water Magic, was perfectly capable of wiping away Poison Magic like that, turning the tiny but deadly creatures of living venom into spatters of goo. The magical mists billowed through the undergrowth of the woods in front of the teams, clearing the path as they sparkled with soft moonlight and faded away.

The last circle of defense was made up of the Dark Beasts and their handlers.

The Black Curia was infamous for these creatures made from other humans. They were twisted and warped by Dark Magic, especially Curse Magic, into superhumanly powerful and violent rage machines, fully capable of ripping an average human apart.

Under normal circumstances, it would have been good enough to try to capture them and put some Silver Magic to use to try and reverse their conditions, as many such creatures were outright victims of the Black Curia, as well as those who had failed their superiors.

Here’s where the Earth mages shone, as being girt in Rock Armor at Tier IV and higher meant that a mage could stand toe-to-toe with one of these fellows, and anyone who dared was also someone who’d been fighting in the Boonies, and had gone and was still going through Briggs’ courses on martial combat.

Earth Magic was also good at just plain reaching up and grabbing the lesser versions of the creatures. The Mick and Red led the teams who took out the more powerful Cursed Beasts with massed and coordinated Lasers and Lightning Magic, while Swampy and Glenn covered the sound of combat and the flash and glitter of it, respectively.

Point-blank head shots also did wonders for finishing them off quickly. Armor-piercing rounds didn’t much care for how strong the creatures were, and bones only got so tough, while brains were nowhere near as durable as enhanced muscle...

---

I stepped up to the Ward, my fingers glittering with circles of Runes and Glyphs that rendered the subtle warning aspect of the outer Ward into wave-forms and patterns of magic.

I didn’t have the deep exposure to Formations that a true Ward Master of this world would have, simply because I didn’t have access to the information archives necessary for that purpose. Such things were held onto tightly by those who used them and sold their services, with only the more widely-known Formations and Wards available for purchase.

But they used Magery, and I was using Wizardry. The difference in subtlety and complexity between the two was quite stark at the foundational level.

Magery was about harmony, resonance, and power, in the end. A Formation was thus about layering protective effects in synergy with one another and harmony with the local Manafield, the objective being to minimize the amount of power it took to remain standing. The individual components of the Formations generally weren’t very complex, but they could be interwoven in complex ways to form a greater whole that could be VERY tough to crack.

If you were using Magery.

Wizardry could do that, but Wizardry scaled both up and down in terms of complexity. You could make a single Rune that covered acres if you wanted to, sure. You could also make entire Formations on the head of a pin if you were of a mind to, and had the Spellcraft and focus to do so.

Fifteen Ranks in Spellcraft with a whopping modifier of +50ish, only helped by the target being outside and its Ward anchored to natural terrain features, yet unable to exert massive power because of its primary function of concealment and containment, let me work REALLY fast on this thing.

Wheels of Divinatory Sigils and Seals wormed their way into the illusory and sensory Ward before me, finding the areas of dissonance, the flaws in its structure, and the weaknesses in its design and function. It wasn’t much different metaphorically from finding the right key to fit a lock, I just had to find the magical pins and test them. The best way to do so was to either make the lock transparent or at least partially disassemble it for proper viewing, as opposed to just going in blind.

I could have cracked it open a bit, but what I was reading was that such a move would cause a cascading ripple and irregularity that would quickly be spotted by whoever was monitoring this thing. That would be the standard tactic of a normal Formation-breaker, so they’d set up a layer against it. It was equivalent to snipping the lock and opening it, but leaving it hanging there, pretending to be effective.

I bombarded the sensory nodes of the Formation with irrelevant details, kind of like fuzz or dust scattering against it, ignored as immaterial given the pure weakness at the scale I was working with.

“It has a sensitivity to a specific configuration of Curse Magic. Bring one of the Dark Beasts over.”

They’d caught several of the former-humans alive, because I wanted to see if I could break the magic of their condition. A boulder of stone completely encapsulating a Dark Beast from the neck down was brought up on a ripple of moving earth. The former man, teeth all turned to fangs, skin blackened by the Runes scribed upon him and the body-altering Poisons pumped into him, was howling and struggling madly but Silently.

I reached out, clapped my hand on his jerking head, and pumped some Wrath through the magic in him.