Overwhelming Firepower

When the sun rose, Lucen felt blood rising from his lungs and coughed it out. There was not a single part of his body that did not hurt.

There had been several system notifications, but he ignored them as he was focused on the battle.

His mana pool felt like a dry well scraped to the stone. His aura mantle flickered faintly around his skin, unstable, thin. Even lifting a finger felt painful and incredibly hard to do.

The backlash from using RELEASE was not as bad as before because of the power of the ring.

Lucen looked at the battlefield and saw that the final monster had fallen. Yet he did not feel all that relieved. The same as all the other previous waves, this one was just the first one.

He already sent a few scouts buffed with a few spells to enhance speed, to see what was to come. For now, he needed to rest, and so did the others.

Lucen, feeling his entire body falling apart, fell to the ground looking at the sky. ’Damn, I thought I prepared enough, but I guess I underestimated fate too much.’

Lucen lifted his tired arms to look at the ring, which had stopped glowing for the moment. ’If not for this thing, it would have been game over already. I wonder what those voices meant by incomplete... Well, once again, so many questions but no one to answer me.’

Lucen sighed, ”The Styrhord must be starting or has already started. I wonder how Father is faring, should be better than me, right?”

***

At the border of Stellhart, it was as Lucen thought the Styrhord had already started. Marquis Valeire did not waste time with his superior numbers; he quickly initiated an attack.

The Marquis thought that this would be like any other battle he had seen before. Starting with a few back and forth, with mages trying to use large-scale attacks and the enemy mages countering, while the soldiers try to besiege the fortress alongside the aura users.

As they marched towards Duke Vardon’s area, the Marquis felt like this Styrhord would only last a day.

Unfortunately for him, he could not imagine the range of the two Roaring Thunders, which were basically heavy artillery naval guns.

A single point of light appeared beyond the ridge at first. It looked like one of those lighting spells the mages use.

A few men squinted their eyes to look at whatever it was. From the vantage of Valeire’s forward scouts, it looked like a comet, white and tiny.

Then it accelerated. The meteor-like object was heading towards them. Then the sound arrived.

It came as a deep, rolling concussion that pressed against the chest before it reached the ears, as if the sky itself had exhaled in anger. The white streak grew larger, brighter, screaming as it tore through the air.

The commander in the front was about to give a command, but before a single word could come out, the shell struck.

The shell hit one knight, crushing the knight’s body. Immediately after, the ground erupted upward in a violent column of soil, stone, and shattered bodies.

It was brutal, dense, and physical. The impact drove a crater into the earth and hurled everything within its radius into the air as if flung by an invisible titan’s hand.

Men were lifted off their feet before they understood they had died. One soldier saw the sky where the ground had been. Another saw nothing but brown and red.

A third opened his mouth to shout and inhaled dust and blood instead. Horses screamed as shockwaves snapped legs and burst lungs.

War-trained destriers that had endured aura clashes and fire spells crumpled like puppets with severed strings.

Shields splintered. Armor folded inward with a sickening crunch. The front ranks simply disappeared beneath a storm of debris.

Then the sound fully caught up. A thunderclap rolled across the plain, flattening grass in a widening circle. Eardrums ruptured, teeth rattled in skulls.

The shockwave slammed into the following ranks, knocking men backward and tearing banners from their poles.

The people couldn’t understand what was happening when they heard the sound again, this time several times.

They saw it in the sky once again, the falling meteor-like objects. This time, the commanders were able to react.

”Mages! Defensive barrier!”

The mages quickly deployed barrier spells to defend. The strength of the barrier spell depended on the amount of mana used and the complexity of the barrier.

Mana surged outward in layered geometry, hexagonal planes interlocking, refracting light into prismatic edges.

The ones creating the barrier spells right now were mages at the second and third circles.

The shell hit the barrier and did not penetrate, but it exploded, tearing the barrier apart. The barrier did not shatter all at once.

It fractured in stress lines, white cracks spreading outward like spiderwebs across glass. But unlike the first time, the destruction it produced had lessened due to the barrier.

The shattered fragments of the barrier had not even finished dissolving into motes of mana when the third shell came falling from the sky.

The mages tried to strengthen the barrier by overlapping them with one another. This time, it somehow worked.

The barrier flexed inward violently, cracking like frozen lake ice beneath a hammer. The explosion flattened the ground outside the shield.

Several mages dropped to their knees, noses bleeding. Still, despite all that, they were able to block the attack.

Seeing as they now knew how to block the shells, they were ready for the next one.

It was at that moment that figures emerged from the nearby hills. They were heavily armored knights carrying weapons no one on Valeire’s side had seen before.

Without giving them time to think, the knights’ aura mantles flared as the weapon they were holding started rotating.

A spray of bullets came raining down on the people on Valeire’s side. It was a devastating sight to behold.

Before they could do anything like creating a barrier or using their aura mantles to defend, a few mages and knights were decimated.

Once they got hold of what was happening and were about to counter-attack, the knights wearing heavy armor had already fled.

If that wasn’t enough, another round of those falling metal shells came falling down on them. It was hard to keep on marching.

The distance were the attack was coming from was something no spell under the fifth circle could reach.

Of course, there was one or two mages of that caliber in Valeire’s employ, and they did counter-attack, but it did absolutely nothing to the other side.

The defense of the fortress was made by the dwarves using rune-engravings. So weak long-range spells, like what they use, would not even leave a dent.

They would need to use more powerful spells, but those spells could not travel such a long distance.

They haven’t even seen Vardon’s fortress properly, but they have already lost a few hundred men.

When Marquis Valeire heard the report coming from the front line, he gritted his teeth, but he was still not that worried.

The amount of losses was still within the acceptable range. So instead of panicking, he ordered his men to scatter in groups so that the long-distance shells would not kill them in clusters.

He also had his elite knights scout the area to look for those heavily armored knights that were using hit-and-run tactics.

The next artillery shell fell, and another one at the same time. They were able to block the first one, but the second one hit them.

But unlike before, this time, due to them not being in tight formation, but in a rather loose one, the explosion only hit a smaller number of them.

As for the heavily armored knights carrying the unknown weapons, they would show up and fire upon them, but this time, they were prepared.

The mages were able to fire spells at them, but the armor the knights were wearing had negated the spells fired at them.

The rune-engravings on the armor were made to allow for the negation of second-circle spells and below, and resist higher-level spells better than most armors could.

The elite knights who had spotted the heavily armored knights quickly attacked, but they could not get close as the rapid fire of their weapons made it hard. This gave the heavily armored knights enough time to flee.

Valeire’s army advanced, but every hundred meters cost blood. The Roaring Thunders did not fire constantly. That would have allowed prediction. Instead, they fired in irregular rhythm.

They marched under anticipation. Every glint in the sky made hearts seize. Every distant rumble made veterans flinch.

Every artillery strike forced barrier deployment. Every barrier drained mana. The mages rotated efficiently just to preserve as much mana as they could.

Mana potions were being depleted, and Duke Vardon’s side had not even received a single casualty.

They, on the other hand, had already lost hundreds of men. A few of the siege engines had already been destroyed, despite their being heavily defended.

Marquis Valeire did not like how the Styrhord started, as he had already lost a lot of men without being able to do anything about it.

Still, he firmly believed that once he got in the proper attacking range of Duke Vardon’s fortress, he would be able to overwhelm him.

Marquis Valeire and his army finally saw Duke Vardon’s fortress. They finally felt like things were about to go their way. Unaware that this Styrhord won’t go as anyone expected.