-Ferro
A dark shadow sails overtop the buildings gathered around a central square. A collection of people stand below, gathered together, a few men and women bearing weapons around the huddled mass. Faces turn up toward me as I stop in the sky above them, the long shadow cast by my wings stretching down the street.
I scan the people below, many names, only two magicians among them, and those rank one. Dovik isn’t here. I press on.
I pour on speed, pulling my soul presence tightly around my body. It is far easier in the air, the information from spreading the presence muted with so much open space. Pushing my awareness through the town itself is still far too great a challenge.
Smoke rises from the buildings toward the eastern end of the town, flames climbing thatched roofs, the volume of gray far exceeding the extent of the blaze. The hiss of steam mixes into the crackling flames by the time I make it over the edge of the town, a woman at ground level straining as she manipulates water from the nearby river to throw over the flames. She is also a first-rank magician. I remember the difficulty Bali had with manipulating just fist-sized globes of water by the time she departed with my brother. I wonder what level she had been then.
The woman looks up when she notices me, brown hair sticking to a pale face dirtied with soot. Our eyes meet for a second. Then, she returns to fighting the fires, while I turn my attention toward the enemy.
The fields on this side of the town are full of dead terror wolves. More, there are other monsters amidst them, random creatures, few worrying. Six people are out amidst the milling horde of monsters. Dovik fights, his form moving like an arrow in and amongst the churn, his feet never still as he flashes around the snapping beasts. A shroud extends away from him for twenty or so feet, and each time a monster turns its attention to him, he vanishes, reappearing somewhere else inside his aura. The feat is impressive, and I find myself watching it for a time, his ability to teleport within his soul presence is incredible. I can’t even begin to guess at the usefulness of such an ability.
A cry of pain pulls me out of my passive watching. Along with Dovik, five others fight the beasts, though their cohesion shows clear teamwork and a reliance on one another that would take a long time to develop. A man and a woman stand at the head of their formation, both wearing heavy armor, both carrying massive shields, all of their attention turned toward pushing back the monsters that try to make their way closer.
The silvery light surrounding the man gives him away as being rank two before I even bother to identify him as such–guardian conflux. My heart skips a beat, thinking for a moment that I see Macille standing there, facing the horde. No, this man is human, all of the magicians on the field are except for the dwarven woman fighting side-by-side with him.
Behind the two shieldbearers are two other women, one obviously an archer given the powerful and exploding arrows she launches into the press, the other a healer of some sort, an aura of green magic surrounding her–rank two that one, Holy Tree conflux. The last among them is a man kneeling on the ground, white robes pulling around him, the flickering light of a spell still lingering on the head of the staff he leans against. Without seeing his abilities, he strikes me as a mage, one suffering from mana exhaustion. All in all, a well-balanced party. If they weren’t facing down more than a hundred enemies with more than a hundred already dead on the field, they would likely be quite successful.
The archer below cries out a warning, making the kneeling man look up to find a terror wolf broken away from the pack and racing straight for him. The healer begins to gather power, the green presence around her glowing brighter for a moment, but whatever ability she has coming is slow. Ten paces away from the man still trying to rise from the ground, the terror wolf is smashed into the ground by a spear of the darkest black falling from above. Vines reach up from the ground, wrapping around the corpse of the monster climbing over the spear as well as it slowly begins to dissolve into grains of black sand.
I do not doubt that Dovik could handle the rest of this combat on his own. In the dozen or so seconds I have watched him, no monster has landed a blow on the man, nor even come close to it. They are simply too slow, too unorganized. The only chance any would have is to snare him with some strange magic, but given the man’s specialty, I doubt they would have any success with that. He is a scythe moving among the wheat. They might bend away from him and scramble to evade his culling blade, but the farmer bears as much fear of his crops as this man does of monsters of this level.
No, were it not for the struggling five below, I don’t think I would interfere. My mana is already fairly exhausted, bringing my magic to bear fully would be dangerous. So, I dispense with the dragonfire, and once more unleash my soul presence to near its maximum extent, encompassing the battlefield but not the town to my back.
The horde of monsters seems to almost buckle at once, a sudden pressure pushing down on each of them as the wave of crimson energy washes over them. Grains of dark sand drift up from the terror wolf I killed just before, forming into a dark lance as I bring it up to my side. The floating sphere above my head splits apart, becoming three additional spears that I turn down toward the monsters below.
If the sand can form a cutting edge, I still have not managed to figure out how to do it. Knowing that I need to conserve the mana I expend, I limit myself to only attacking with the dark lances. They prove far more effective than I would have guessed when dealing with a horde of enemies. Where Dovik is the cutting scythe, my lances of black sand stab down like a rain of nails. Each strike cripples or kills a low-grade monster, the sheer weight behind the dark spears essentially made from gold enough to crush some of their victims.
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Stray blasts of silvery light fire up through the sky toward me, the few rank two terror wolves among the churning mass sensing me. I dodge in the air, splitting my focus between controlling the falling spears and avoiding the blasts of magic. Even with my speed, the task proves too much, and multiple blasts land. The silvery light cuts, my newly made armor absorbing a decent measure of the magic in the attacks. The gray coat I have fashioned for myself shows its true value as the enchantments I have laid upon it move to redirect the striking magic, pushing the force away from my chest and vital areas, sometimes making them miss completely. Still, errant rays of magic slice through the fabric in places, cutting deep gashes in my arms and legs that only begin to bleed for a moment before scabbing over.
My attacks against the terror wolves prove far more lethal. One by one, the monsters able to turn any attention toward the air are snuffed out. I take six of the creatures while Dovik dances through the press and manages to decapitate another four. The final one dies to the archer woman, an arrow cutting into its skull before detonating. With all of the monsters able to offer any resistance to my attack from overhead dispatched, the one-sided battle becomes a true slaughter.
A little over half an hour after arriving, the fields and sparse forest surrounding the town finally fall silent. A headache digs at me, my mana having fallen even lower. Closing my eyes, the air passing over me soothes the ache somewhat, the wind playing with my hair. I breathe deeply, calling back all the black sand and secreting it away once more into the vault. Dovik meets me when my feet touch the earth once more, my soul presence already pulled back and vanishing into my skin.
“You finished first,” he says, the sword in his off-hand disappearing into light. He digs a cloth out of a pocket inside his coat and starts trying to wipe the gore from his blade, finding the monster's blood sticky and difficult to remove.
“It was a good opponent for me,” I say. “Not that it looks like you had much trouble.”
“No,” he agrees. Dovik nudges the body of a dead terror wolf with his boot. “Compared to those magical beasts, these were…”
“Easy,” I finish for him.
“Yeah.”
We both turn as footsteps approach. The healer woman from earlier stops five or so feet away, offering a small bow before looking between us. “My team would like to offer its gratitude for your assistance. Roger told me that you handled another stampede that came at the town from the southwest. We hadn’t known that would happen. I don’t want to imagine what might have happened if you hadn’t been here to assist, either of you.”
I nod, looking at her closely once more.
Amilise Calmwood(Level 53)
Holy Tree Conflux
The woman is hardly below my level. Glancing back at her group, I find them all of similar levels, the big fighter at fifty-five and the other three very near the threshold for the second rank. How could these monsters have possibly posed a serious threat to them?
“Of course,” Dovik says while I am lost in my musings. “We came across this monster stampede by chance on our way to Danfalla. Are you heading that way as well?”
The woman, Amilise, smiles strangely, almost as if she is embarrassed. “No, my lord. The call to muster was only for silver-rank adventurers and higher I am afraid. Our team is high copper, allowing us to stay in the Duchy for the purge of the beast tide, but we have been tasked with keeping safe this township. Until the rise of these monsters is put to an end, we will persist here.”
A man from the group behind her calls for her attention. Amilise turns, nodding back to them as they start hiking back toward the town. “Of course, if my lord and lady should wish to stay the night in Curvedbrook, to take a rest on their way to the capital, room in the inn can be found.”
Something turns over in my stomach at being referred to as a lady. I know the sentiment merely comes from the crown on my head, but still, it feels…wrong.
“What do you say, your ladyship?” Dovik asks, turning to me. “The day is almost over.”
“Where is my ship?” I sneer at him.
Dovik’s eyes glance over toward the river. Squinting, I catch the light of gold reflecting in the afternoon light, the rim of the ship sticking up from a watery ditch that it has been left slightly abandoned inside of. By the time I can look back at Dovik, my temper rising, Amilese has already fled back toward the town at a brisk but desperately trying not to look panicked pace.
“You crashed my ship again,” I say, doing my utmost to not yell the words at the man.
“I didn’t crash it,” he says. “I set it down, maybe a little quick, and then the ground gave out beneath it. I don’t think that I can be blamed for that.”
I groan, rubbing my eyes and trying to message out the building headache. “If any of my furniture is broken, you will have to replace it, again.”
“You didn’t take my advice and bolt it down? Really, Charlene, doing so would be for the best.”
“I didn’t plan on crashing it repeatedly!” I end up yelling. Immediately, the throbbing in my head picks up. The migraine has arrived, a sharp pick digging into the back of my eye. Why don’t we have an alchemist in our group capable of making mana potions so that I never have to deal with this pain? Why hadn’t I bought any when I had been in Grim? The incredible expense of the little potions seems so paltry now that I have to deal with the consequence of their absence.
“Let’s just go,” I say, gesturing toward the ship. “Go ahead and get it in the air.”
“What are you going to do?” Dovik asks, walking ahead, smartly not bothering to object to my ordering him around.
My soul presence expands across the battlefield, the pain in my skull nearly doubling as my senses expand along with it. I can’t imagine the headache the duke must deal with daily if just encompassing a battlefield hurts my head this much. As the wave of red washes out across the field, the bodies of dead monsters begin to fall apart, becoming pink mist that drifts through the air toward me.
“I am not going to let any of this go to waste,” I tell him. “Not a single one.”
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