The sky above the barrier was already an unending swirl of sand by the time I found myself back at our hotel-like barracks. Glaustro was out front, along with Bronwynn and most of the demons in our unit. This was reassuring, but I didn’t like the look on the commander’s face at all. He seemed genuinely worried.

“Good, you’re here,” the sergeant snapped, tension releasing slightly from his shoulders at the sight of me and Mia. “We need to take up our station at the outskirts. So far, the jinn haven’t had much luck breaking through the barrier, but we don’t know what else they can bring to bear.”

We didn’t wait a second longer to start following that plan, though I briefly felt my brand heat up as Glaustro sent out instructions so any stragglers would know where to find us.

“What happened with the lieutenant general? How did we not catch the jinn approaching earlier?” I rattled off questions midstride, making only a token effort to keep my voice down.

“Things went… well, we are not in any sort of trouble,” Glaustro replied. “In fact, before this whole thing started, he was thrilled. It might push the jinn into a frenzy, but even a partial removal of the World Will’s bindings will benefit us immensely. You don’t feel it as much, and the more experienced members of the legion are used to it, but the binding feels crippling at times.”

Glaustro’s confession made me want to ask a thousand more questions, especially with the feeling of power squirming in my chest since some of the chains vanished. If it was affecting me so much, when I still hadn’t quite risen to the level of proper demonhood, then how did the partial removal of the binding feel for him and the rest of the demons?

“How did we not know about this attack earlier?” Mia repeated my earlier question, her gaze focused and rather murderous as we sprinted down the beautiful streets of the demonic capital on Lagyel.

“Best I can guess, they slipped past our sentries by pulling the same trick we’ve relied on: burrowing. They certainly have the constructs for it.” Glaustro sounded bitter, and I couldn’t blame him. Not only had his favorite strategy been turned on us, but the capital’s defenses had somehow dropped the ball, hard.

Then we reached the city’s outskirts, and I was thoroughly distracted from theory-crafting by the sight ahead of me.

Even through the stirred-up sand, I could see a whole legion of jinn camped out beyond the spatial barrier.

The jinn were almost as individually varied as demons, though I could definitely spot groupings among them. The majority looked like badly charred humanoids, ash and golden, their visible veins flowing with lava-like blood. The second most numerous group looked like they were made of rocks or minerals, with a couple metallic-looking individuals among them.

The rest were a smattering of all sorts of elements. I spotted a few jinn who resembled living trees, and others with bodies made of swirling streams of water. There was one terrifying visage composed solely of shifting shadows.

Above all these jinn hovered four floating chariots, containing what I presumed were the leaders of the gathered army.

One was a living storm contained within a humanoid vessel, whose stomach constantly churned and swelled. I got the sense that the destruction contained within would surge out in a ruinous wave with a single lapse of the figure’s concentration.

The second was a molten mass of lava and metal. The shape was roughly human-ish, though only by the most lenient definition. Bits of the jinn’s body bubbled from the chariot and trickled down to the ground far below, leaving behind hissing puddles of living metal that refused to cool.

The last two looked like they could be twins, though maybe that was my lack of familiarity with jinn speaking. They were more living flame than flesh, the structure of their bodies outlined by red-hot bones. They even had horns of bone jutting out of the foreheads of their skulls, which made them appear oddly demon-like.

All of the jinn, from the least soldier I could spot to the leaders, had runes running all throughout their bodies. For some, the runes were golden flakes that stuck to their skin, accenting their ashen complexion. For others, the runes were woven into their forms, flowing within their internal waters. Yet, one and all, the jinn had them. The leaders, in particular, were densely covered in these ‘tattoos’, glowing like beacons of magical might.

And the anti-magic sand bothered not a single one of them.

The more earth-mana aligned jinn simply let the sand strike them, heedless of its nature. The runes glowed more brightly on the jinn with less cohesive bodies, creating a sphere of influence around them that deflected the weaponized grains.

Anxiety clawed at my chest. These jinn could use the full extent of the sand’s power against us, without suffering a single ill effect themselves.

And if the jinn alone weren’t deadly enough, we also had their constructs to worry about.

All sorts of animal and insect shapes flitted about the approaching army, each glowing with their own set of runic tattoos. The most intimidating were the scores of ‘lesser’ golems leading the way, but just as alarming were the huge, earthworm-like boring machines that dipped into and out of the sands in their squirmy dance.

I couldn’t know for sure, but I guessed these were the constructs that had gotten the jinn so close to our city without notice. Massive plates of glass-like processed sand covered every inch of their bodies, which probably helped their stealth. Such equipment would negate any and all detection magic our sentries relied on, even if the demon mages could get deep enough into the sand-covered surface of Lagyel to catch hint of the constructs, which probably wasn’t the case to begin with.

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“Mages, bombardment duty! Warriors at the front! Be ready if they manage to break through the barrier!” Glaustro hollered.

Part of me wanted to argue that the commander’s orders were delusional. I obeyed them anyway and followed Glaustro to the front lines, which were arrayed all along the shallow moat that encircled the city. Not one demon actually crossed the moat, making me eye it with interest, but it wasn’t like staring at it would let me divine its purpose.

Instead, I focused up and drew my sword, keeping the flame off its blade for now. No reason to burn even a trickle of mana. I would need every drop when the enemy army tried to dice us all to smithereens.

I noticed other units and commanders lining up just like we were, but I had to admit the numbers on our side were far more sparse than I would have liked. The demons were intimidating, sure. As our mages began to form their runic dome matrixes, the world’s mana visibly shuddered around them. Still, I had expected a larger defense force for the demonic headquarters.

Then it hit me: just like my own unit had been recently, it was highly probable that Crewe’s forces were scattered all across Lagyel, hunting down the army-ending golems before they could wake up and wreak havoc. Unfortunately, that meant our central city was left rather unprepared for enemy attack.

And if the jinn had brought this an army this size so deep into our territory, then what was happening to the lesser settlements we had on the outskirts?

The jinn army picked up their assault, the golems all but glowing as their sand barrage intensified even further. I shuddered. Individually, these golems were nowhere near the level of strength that a ‘greater’ golem could wield. Together? Well, they were getting rather close to imitating their more powerful kindred’s capacity for destruction as they attempted to drown our barrier in sand.

Fortunately for us, the city’s barrier was far more robust than the one we had used while marching. No matter how much sand the golems threw at us, they couldn’t destabilize it.

Meanwhile, our own mages finally fired off a salvo, and then it was the jinn’s turn to hastily throw up defenses.

Clearly, the invading army was operating on the assumption that we couldn’t hurt them with our magic. If their panicked scurrying was anything to go off of, they thought the sand would provide them sufficient cover.

But demons were nothing if not inventive when it came to finding ways to hurt others. Now that they had a more thorough understanding of Lagyel, the demonic mages were no longer using spells that could easily be eroded away.

Glaustro was the best example. Instead of throwing around fire or pelting the jinn with an array of smaller rocks, my commander summoned a single, devastating attack. Rock ripped itself out of the ground and continuously coalesced, compacting further and further until a crystal-like spike of massive proportions hovered over Glaustro like the sword of Damocles. The demon pushed one final wave of power into the spike, then sent it rocketing out of the city faster than any ballistic missile.

I could feel with my advanced magic-senses that Glaustro had withdrawn all of his mana from the spike. No longer was this a construct. It was just a bundle of extremely compressed rock, launched with magic and left to sail through the air entirely on its own momentum. The jinn conjured shields and waves of sand, but Glaustro’s attack ripped straight through them all and pulverized several dozen jinn.

The other demons were following a similar course of action. Ice, conjured and solidified before being launched. Molten metal, sprayed over the jinn army without any regard for aiming. Even odd fireballs contained within a shell of mana and rock, which exploded harder than any but the most powerful mortal bombs when the shell popped.

The only exception to this strategy were the rare spatial and soul mages among our ranks. They reaped lives with no regard for our enemy’s supposed resistance, filling me with an odd sense of jealousy.

I didn’t bother trying to contribute my own magic to the fight. Not only was it pitiful in comparison, but it would also get thoroughly ripped apart the second it crossed into the sandstorm.

The jinn were not content to sit there and be pummeled into submission, of course. The four leaders began to weave spells of their own. The spatial barrier absorbed these attacks, though it quaked and shuddered in response.

Then the constructs surged forward. It was surreal, watching them stretch out and then disappear the second they touched the spatial barrier. The barrier shuddered even harder as the constructs attacked it from the space between the layers, but it held.

That was when Crewe finally showed up.

The lieutenant general arrived already fused with his dread wyrms, his lamia-like body slithering in a way that positioned him just as far above our army as the four enemy generals were above their own troops. The demon glared at the jinn leaders, rage flashing across his features. The four hovering charioteers glared right back.

Then, with a grin, Crewe started to conjure a spell of his own.

It took the shape of a black cloud over his head, growing continuously as mana and runes slipped off his body and fed into it. Soon, flashes of thorny tentacles and teeth began to appear inside the cloud, heralding its danger as it began to inch closer and closer to the barrier, threatening to spill outside and onto the awaiting jinn army.

They really didn’t like that.

One of the enemy generals screamed something, and a whole row of jinn stepped forward, looks of intense focus on their faces.

Sand rose from underneath their feet, swirling as it climbed their bodies. I could see their expressions twist in pain and anxiety. Whatever they were doing, it wasn’t without cost. But as the sand finished climbing above their heads and dispersed, I couldn’t help thinking it was worth it.

Each of the jinn now stood in what looked like full-body plate armor. It shone brilliantly with inscribed runes and was obviously made of the anti-magic crystal.

Crewe’s spell advanced. So did the newly armored jinn. They reached the barrier before the spell could spill out, and the result was unlike anything I had ever seen before.

The barrier tried to stretch around their bodies and consume them, trapping them like it had done with the sand and the constructs, but it failed. Instead, space began to wrap visibly around the jinn, twisting in ways that no mortal mind should have been subjected to.

The barrier creaked and shook in response, more intensely than ever, and Crewe’s casual posture suddenly shifted.

Up until that point, the lieutenant general seemed to be enjoying himself. Save for the brief flash of anger I spotted on his face upon arrival, he looked hungry when he began to conjure his spell. The longer he dragged out its formation, and the more the jinn army’s fear grew in response, the hungrier Crewe looked.

Now, the remaining runes and mana required by the the spell snapped out of him in less than a second. The cloud’s speed increased many times over, washing over all jinn in its way. Seconds later, it reached the frontlines of the army that had hung back when the transformed jinn advanced.

Screams of agony broke out among the enemy ranks, but Crewe did not look particularly pleased. Gnashing and scraping could be heard where the transformed jinn once stood, but no sounds of suffering came from them, nor did the barrier recover. If anything, it only began to shake more violently.

I gripped my sword, knowing I would soon have a chance to use it.