The volunteer rebel army stood in rough formation just beyond the reach of the Horuthian encampment. The opposing forces had already organized, boosted by the reinforcements that had survived our last-minute attempt at guerilla warfare with our mountain ambush.
“That’s a lot of soldiers,” I murmured, looking at the strict lines of their much more defined formations.
Both sides were in a bit of a holding pattern. Neither side wanted to draw this conflict out, but both sides could, with the Horuthians having an open supply line to the south and the Velgeins having the entirety of the north to their back. Similarly, neither could attempt to move to encircle the enemy and cut off their lines.
The Horuthians had an overwhelmingly advantageous defensive power, both in terms of numbers and organization. It made no sense for the Velgeins to take the offensive. The Horuthians also had a rather advantageous offensive power, but at least if they took the offense, the Velgeins would have a bit more control of the defensive battle.
However, if the Velgeins failed to close in, the Horuthian forces could spread out as they moved up from the pass, which would further press their offensive advantage. The Velgein forces did not have the numbers to spread their defensive line to keep that from happening. It would make sense for the Horuthians to push, even at the slight cost of their advantage, and the sooner they did the sooner they would be able to reclaim the north and have this war ended, reclaiming their profits from the north’s steel manufacturing.
The only reason they had not immediately invaded was because they had no idea what else they might face beyond our lines and in each city. If the Velgeins could mount sufficient resistance across the entire north, the soldiers would have little option but to raze everything and have to rebuild in full. Drawing the full Velgein forces to this battle would serve their needs more effectively.
The Velgeins did not have the numbers for that, though. Most of the resistance’s forces were already present. While a slow trickle of additional volunteers did make its way to Freigel, the resistance had reached more or less the peak of their power.
Even if the Horuthian forces knew that, they would then also know that slaughtering the Velgein forces here in full would seriously hinder their desired workforce. The Kingdom wanted knowledge and productivity from the north, and that came directly from the Velgein people.
Or maybe I’m entirely misunderstanding the situation, I thought. I don’t know war. I’m just some dumb Earthling who has botched this every step of the way.
I clenched my fists.
I‘m such an idiot. Me and my stupid high horse, to not offensively attack the remaining Horuthian soldiers, has only led to a larger conflict now, where far more from both sides will likely die. I’m no utilitarian, but if I just helped Golchev wipe out the Horuthians properly in the fall, we could have blockaded the north from reinforcements.
I sighed, incredibly frustrated with myself and the situation. I should have just stayed in Roko when Marshan was called to the capital for the war effort. I could have continued training Soa, found my own mercantile path in the trade city, and ventured out in any direction for adventures.
Even as I thought that, I knew it was a fallacious fantasy. I needed to know what was happening in the world, and when I saw something that struck me as wrong, I felt the need to correct it. Whether or not I did it the right way or the wrong way, I could not abide simply living in the Kingdom with the Velgeins being enslaved. I still probably could not free the slaves in the capital, but I could help these people here.
I should have realized that I had needed to be all-in before the winter. I let the misery of the war through the summer affect my mind, and I ran away.
Coward.
I was going to make up for it now. I would probably die, though it was not the first time I had died. I’ll at least make it mean something, this time, and see this through.
Eventually, the Horuthian soldiers began to move up. Since we had no choice but to meet them before they spread out, the rebellion moved in to meet the enemy.
* * *
The lines clashed. I was at the rear, and I scanned over the enemy’s backline, hunting for my target. My eyes fell on the man I expected to see, the wild-haired old mage I met as a child.
A quick appraisal told me that the man was largely unchanged from when I had met him, having only gained a single level in seven years.
My eyes narrowed as I took in his stats a second time.
Vorel Bargolson (Lv 75)
HP: 383/383
MP: 1058/1058
Status: none
EXP: 1297/7500
Skills: 4-Point Magic(+++), 5-Point Magic(+++), 6-Point Magic(++), Cooking, Enchantment(+), Inkmaking(++), Literacy(++), Negotiation(++)
Master Skills: Fire Mastery, Illusion Mastery
I briefly noticed he had further advanced his 6-point magic, despite it being forbidden by the Church, although perhaps he had received special permission from the King to get trained for this war. Though he had only gained a single level, it was worth almost three of my own recent levels, and provided plenty of skill points to push that to double-advancement.
What concerned me was something else. I had long thought of Vorel as a master fire mage, and he was, but he had also mastered an element of 5-point magic, which I had, in truth, somewhat forgotten about.
Burning up potential slaves would impact future steel production. Breaking their minds, so that they could be captured, would not. I realized this at around the same time that Vorel’s MP started to drop and I started hearing the rebellion scream in terror, not from the soldiers but from dark horrors which started springing up on the battlefield.
“They’re just illusions!” I screamed out, but then I watched one slam a claw into a rebel and realized that an illusion master could likely also add solidity to his phantom designs without burning too much magic.
I had prepared some tactics to deal with fire, but the illusory demons had caught me completely by surprise. Shit, I need to distract him somehow, break his concentration…
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Only one thing came to mind. I focused on my 3-point magic circle, and sent my mind to his.
Vorel thought.
Across the battlefield, I saw his eyes find mine. I had not bothered with the normal Velgein illusion, reserving all my magic for the battle. The illusion would not matter if I fell here, and on the off chance we won, I was no longer particularly worried about the secret getting out, since I hoped it would end the conflict in full. I was not even sure any of the soldiers would even notice me in the chaos of the conflict.
The illusory monsters of the battlefield had slowed as Vorel’s attention was split, but they were not gone, and they were interfering with the rebellion’s ability to fend off the real soldiers. I focused my magic into the telepathic connection, a mental attack on the mage.
From the Horuthian backline, I could see the old man wince, and many of the illusions faded. I cursed under my breath. I had not thought to weaponize telepathy—to be honest, the thought of that horrified me—but had I planned this in advance, I could have further advanced my 3-point magic and possibly ended this conflict with ease. As it stood, while Vorel did not have 3-point magic of his own and no mental defenses, he was still a very powerful, very magical opponent, and his own internal magic was enough to fend off the full severity of my mental attack.
That was the same reason it was difficult to simply combust another mage with 4-point magic, or interfere with a mage’s heart with a 5-point magic barrier inside their body. It was something I had encountered fighting in the dungeon. The magic contained in a being was a natural defense from the intrusion of external magic.
Still, it seemed that the mental assault was a distraction, even if I could not damage him.
The man started to laugh, and I saw him cast magic towards something in several wagons around him. Are those… rocks? Black rocks? Vorel would of course be talented with throwing stones magically, but it was not his mastery.
Suddenly, the stones burst into flame, and I understood.
Burning meteors started firing at me from the opposing backline, and I threw up a quick barrier before I realized that he was peppering the entire rebellion with the fiery assault. I could not provide a barrier for our full ranks, not one that would survive a bombardment from the master mage.
I had always wondered how someone could master fire magic. My own use of fire magic had been largely reduced to igniting my own campfires and cookstoves. The cost to ignite an enemy was preposterous, due to the magical defenses of living creatures. Vorel could probably burn up the Velgeins, directly, on account of them having no magical defense and his own mastery of the magic, and that might explain his success in the initial campaign to the north and his subsequent mastery, but it surely had not been how the Kingdom had defeated the south or how fire mages dealt with beasts.
Rather, in the same way that a water mage could reduce the cost of their magic by providing water instead of trying to collect it from the local humidity and moisture in the environment, and in the same way that an earth mage made use of the local stone, a fire mage that provided their own fuel would be empowered to launch a tremendous amount of flaming death on their enemies.
I cursed myself for never figuring that out, but for the moment, I had a bigger problem.
Fire rained down on me and my allies, fueled by the coal or charcoal that the Horuthians had hauled to provide for the mage. Vorel had over three times my MP, and while mine remained high and I had enough potions to recover my MP in full a few times to match, he also had qualitatively better magic than I did.
The only tools in my toolset were my superior knowledge and his mistaken conclusions.
Vorel had come to believe I could not actually control metal, as my magic was not some mysterious force from the north but the same Horuthian magic as his own. That was only partially correct. As he had given up on the illusory magic I would have struggled with and switched to fire, I could actually level a response.
If he had chosen to simply burn up our forces, I was not sure I could do anything about it aside from try to cancel his spell with my own, which I would ultimately fail to do, but he was trying to crush a resistance to make slaves, not wipe us out. He was barely attacking our side’s forces, concentrating mostly on taking me out, and providing a distraction that the Horuthian soldiers could use to beat down the rebellion. He probably even intended to heal the forces he captured after the battle was won.
It was about time that I started to combat his forces in return.
The difficulty of my task was how widespread the Horuthian forces were, and how many targets I had to focus on. One by one, I started rusting away blades, seeing a number of soldiers' shocked faces as their weapons were whisked away and the tide turned on them.
My focus washed over the opposing army, converting iron and steel to ferric oxide, and I started using the rust under my command as a blockade to Vorel’s bombardment.
At the very limit of my perception, I thought I saw a look of confusion and then fury wash over Vorel’s face when he realized his fire was being blocked by the cloud of oxidized metal. I only hoped that he still believed it to be a strong 5-point magic barrier and not what it truly was.
I gathered and gathered and gathered the metal, disarming the Kingdom’s soldiers, and quaffed a MP potion to continue my workings. When they had no more swords, I began to take their armor as well. With no weapons or defenses, the Velgein fighters easily cut down the soldiers.
Vorel’s spell grew tenfold, and the wagons of carbon exploded into massive bonfires. He was about to throw everything he had at us.
I closed my fist, and began to force all the rust to close in on the enemy mage. I saw his eyes widen as rust began scouring at his skin.
The old man began swirling his fire around him in defense as the cloud of metal tightened and began to enclose him. My MP was burning away to nothing, so I downed another potion. My stomach roiled, but with the additional magic, I forced all the metal I had gathered down on the man, a sphere of rust fully surrounding him and his burning fuel.
It was not enough, so I gathered more metal from my own side. I saw looks of confusion on my allies’ faces as the armaments of the rebellion turned into additional material for my metal tomb. I dumped the rust I had kept in my inventory and fed it into my spell as well.
Vorel was fully enclosed in a casing of metal, but within, his fire raged as he attempted to free himself with his mastered element. Slowly but surely, the fire began to heat the ferric oxide, the man acting like a blast furnace with his magic, and the shell of rust began to turn molten.
Eventually, the inner layers of the rust fell from my control as the oxygen from the rust was ripped free by the force of the fire, and the liquid iron began to drip from the shell.
A deep, echoing scream rang out from the glowing ball of superheated metal.
The screaming continued, and one by one, the enemy soldiers turned in horror at the dying cries of a master mage, one of the Kingdom's top resources and powers. His doom was being fueled by his own magic, as a molten rain fell on him within the enclosure.
His status screen showed me that he had switched tactics within the glowing sphere, and his MP plummeted as his HP spiked and fell, then spiked and fell again, desperately trying to heal himself and survive, only succeeding in extending his agony.
I had already released my own magic, unable to oxidize the superheated metal until it cooled. I could no longer even remove the metal from him if I tried. Even if he could have survived the heat and molten metal that had washed over his body, there would be no oxygen left inside once he had burned all that carbon.
As his HP and MP both fell to zero, the screaming stopped, and the orb of metal slowly dimmed as it began to cool in the cold spring air. The battlefield was silent for a moment.
Then came chaos as soldiers began to flee and rebels gave chase. With the weapons and armor gone from both sides, the battle became a brawling melee, one which the powerful Velgeins had a huge advantage in.
I ignored the melee. My eyes were locked on the metal orb as it cooled. The screams had stopped, but I could still hear them in my memory. I fell to the ground and vomited until I passed out.