I was probably a little showy, Wings out and everything as I kept up with the combatants, but this was a moving fight, so there was no reason not to do so. Certainly they weren’t looking at me much, even when I marked the next spawn for Tim to head toward, dragging everyone else behind him.

  There was a lot of magic discharging, but Tim was ignoring most of it, and Healing up the rest. In the shadow of the big Monuga, Mowen was mostly ignored, but the damage from any spells hitting him were gone in under a minute with his own terrific Regeneration rate boosted up with Platinum-tier Life Magic.

  -We’ve got motion coming from the Temples!- Princess Kristie /reported coolly, holding down the corner on the north side of the formation with wickedly fast swordwork, mostly Shardings flying in all directions relentlessly. -I guess they decided all the panicked horns going off and two of their shrines being junked finally got a reaction.-

  The massive Spiked Club of Smasher crashed through one of the jade-like support pillars to the third shrine, sending it flying after I snipped the mana-reinforcement conduit below it. With a bellow, Tim charged onto the thing, and the dome-like cap cracked off and went flying, landing on top of one of the groups of guardians there and crushing them flat. He spun with surprising agility, sending the rest of the support pillars flying, then bent down and brought Smasher down on the befouled altar strewn with gore and other offerings, shattering that into multiple pieces, too… all of which went flying as his armored toe swept through them in a powerful kick and launched the fragments into the distance.

  Mowen was swatting moarsmen around like children with his Knuckles when the Tentacles of T’Thuun erupted from the ground and snaked around him.

  Completely unimpressed, the massive tusker promptly backpedaled and howled for assistance, dropping his Knuckles and grabbing two of the massive stalks in his huge paws as he backed up and pulled them taut, instead of being pulled into them.

  “Kill the Reedshark!” Briggs roared back, reminding the tusker of the anchor beast for the powerful Summons here. Mowen blinked, looked down at the big reedshark nipping at his legs, and simply let go of the trunk-thick tendrils.

  He clenched his fists, and the Paws were back on them. He brought them both down squarely on the reedshark, and it only managed to yipe once in pain before it was smashed flat into the ground with a crack and crunch of freezing hide shattering and bones crushing under the impact.

  There was a hiss, and the tendrils all shuddered, shivered, and dried up from the inside. In but a breath they had shriveled up and were falling apart on the ground, and the Tusker Champion was free of them.

  Mowen growled, fixing the fact clearly in his mind, and looking around for more of the deep blood-red reedsharks to pick on.

  “Archer Wagon along the south, be ready for pursuit!” Briggs called out. The landscape ahead of them was starting to come into motion. “Bring it in, flying wedge and line behind Tim! Straight ahead, no stopping. Second Wagon to the rear, blades out, cut as we pass, don’t stop!

  “Tim, trot due west, no stopping!”

  Our Warlord’s voice had instant effect. The lines closed in, almost shoulder to shoulder and setting up a strong pace behind the slowly trotting Tremendous Monuga who was simply scything his Club through everything in his path. Scaled bodies went flying with shattering hides and broken bones, and his feet punted through any press they tried to bring up with tons of mass and muscle behind them.

  The Lugian Vanguards trampled flat anything on the ground as Tim continued on, striking to the sides against anything reeling there and sending them sprawling as the tall and slender snake-men bounced off their Shields alongside the shorter and broader moarsmen.

  Forward spell volleys were increasing, but Tim was tanking them wonderfully. Said volleys were breaking up as he then thundered through the Casters, it being hard to Cast when tons of monuga was stepping on you with a steel-shod boot.

  Mowen was actually moving faster than Tim, darting and charging back and forth through the increasing press of bodies, thinning them out and sending them flying with great glee, opening them up for the warriors behind him.

  I glanced north, where a wall of warriors was running after us, right into the face of repeated volleys of Ice arrows mowing them down with speed and deadly accuracy, rather trumping attempts to catch up to us easily. They also had to get past both Wagons to reach the runners beyond them, and were constantly having to deal with stepping over the bodies of those in front of them.

  Thera and Nippo, the Mick’s attached Support Mages and two of my most enthusiastic students, were spotting the real ones among the Summons. The flash of Imperils going off on targets with a shiny white Aura around them to make them stand out had a bad habit of attracting a lot of focused fire, which led to unfortunate loss of command over a lot of Summons… who then stopped, turned around, and ran back towards their Spawn Points, exactly as their default programming told them to do.

  Which kept mucking up the chase even more, but, hey, they were chasing us with a horde, not an army. Problems to be expected, amiright?

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Briggs was playing the Vanguard like a master, expanding and contracting with force and rhythm and really upsetting any attempts to stop the little folks following Tim the Tremendous Distraction.

  “Coming up on the water!” I Called out for everyone, who were a bit busy to take in all the terrain. I zipped forward, lighting up a bunch of moarsmen and sclavi in the way. Tim thundered through them as they burned, Mowen bashed his way over them, and they were trampled if they didn’t get up in time, Sword and Spear points plunging down to finish them in passing.

  I caught up to Tim as he broke into an open area already stripped of defenders and continued advancing to the shoreline. The Vanguard collapsed into a long line extending behind him, and everyone else rapidly caught up to them and passed them by. The last ones deployed Disks, the armored lugians hopped on them, then turned around and presented a shield wall to the chasing forces as their shields locked together. Magic crackled and roared at them, but bounced impotently off the blue-black metal.

  I zipped ahead, hit the ground, and Shaped up the Circle even as I pumped it full of mana. Dimension-bending magic swirled, and Mowen and Tim whooped and bellowed in excitement as they charged into it.

  Blue-white arcane fires roared up as they set foot inside it, and the two vanished.

  The Wagons hurtled by to either side of the Circle, while the running troops charged right into it and disappeared. The shield wall folded back into a reverse wedge, vanishing into the arcane fires just a few yards ahead of the horde of moarsmen and sclavi chasing after them.

  I chopped down, severing the Circle and its connection with Crown’s Spear, while the entire chasing line of sclavi and moarsmen slowed down to a halt as they lost their targets… except for the real ones in command hanging towards the back and not knowing what was going on.

  A Dimension Door crossed over me from right to left in a black rectangle, and I was out past the Shoreward, just ahead of the Wagons that had just been ushered through the Shoreward by Briggs and Kris pounding it out of the way.

  Gliding backwards, Kris grabbed my elbow and kept going out into the water and away from at least two thousand Summons of dangerous levels of power and skill, some of whom were actually sort of Casting after us as we very swiftly got out of their range and angle of attack, spells splattering against the Shoreward in magical fireworks as it self-sealed.

  “I think that worked out rather well,” Briggs rumbled happily, a big grin across his face. “We’ve got some wounded, but nothing a bunch of Healing magic isn’t fixing right now. They’ll all be ready for tonight.”

  “Wagons together!” I ordered crisply, and the two Forsaken leading them swerved in tight. I wove the Illusionary Wall, and there was a phantasmal burst of blue-white fire behind us, followed by an illusion of empty seas where we’d been.

  I fluttered up fifteen feet and the Wagons came by underneath me, the troops all ducking as I came back down on the back end of Kris’ Wagon, the Mick grabbing Crown and making sure I didn’t overshoot as he dragged me down.

  I didn’t move my eyes from the Wall concealing us from observation as Kris and Briggs leisurely turned south, back around the direction we’d come.

  The seas were empty of anything resembling interference as we motored over them, although everybody was looking for signs of Aquatics.

  ---

  “Thought we’d be seeing more of them by now, lass,” the Mick admitted after a mile of waters went by under the two Wagons.

  “You can’t hear the subsonics. Kris never put Quaver away.”

  He looked at me, then promptly turned around and made his way to the front of the Wagon.

  Kris was indeed power-skating across the waves, Quaver held off and away, trailing a solid swathe of misty vivus droplets from Golden Soulfire. Grasping Bunita’s Kiss more tightly, he could feel more than hear a rising and falling ululation in the magic of his Sword, probably because he’d also offered his Sword to be judged by The Deep.

  He was standing back next to me after another minute, looking out at the waves where nothing was poking its head up, leaping out of the waters to check us out, or doing pretty much goddamn anything.

  “They’re already here, aren’t they?”

  “She’s letting them know WE are here,” I confirmed. “There’s a reason we did this so late in the day.”

  “Will the moarsmen hear it?” he asked reasonably.

  “If they go into the water, they might, but they aren’t going to want to. Hearing that name echoing through the waters like that? They’ll want to get out of the waters as fast as possible. I can also guarantee that there’s no moarsmen NOT subordinate to The Deep outside the Shoreward at this time.”

  He looked over to his left and the island trailing past us a half-mile away. “Take a lot of critters to secure that entire length,” he mused aloud. His Mask came down, and he studied the motion along the shorelines and lands rising up from it, as well as from the pyramid-temples there.

  A tide was reverse-flowing across the island as Summons returned to their Spawn Points, and flashes of light were popping up as destroyed Summons were replaced, Points Sealed in passing forced back open with the magic of Sclavi and the moarsmen’s priests. More numbers were spilling down the temples much further inland, and that dark tide didn’t look to be stopping.

  “It would.”

  “Ye think they could hear it while we were fighting, lass?” the Mick wondered aloud. “Because the reinforcements still be coming.”

  “I think they could.”

  “But ye didn’t make the same impression.”

  “That probably would have called in the ones in the water and exposed them in their eagerness to join the fighting. Not a good idea. They just know that The Deep was involved in what just happened, and they didn’t manage to capture or kill any of us, while we tore through them like a storm.”

  “Well, aye. Tim an’ the big ape were awesome, ye have t’ agree.”

  “They were,” I agreed. “Getting prepped for later right now, too.”

  “Mmm.” He looked at the waves around us. “Do I want to know how many are close to us right now?” he asked under his breath.

  I flicked a finger. Unlike normal, I kept the Holo beneath the edge of the railing, although it was at just the right angle where the Queen Mother on the other Wagon could see it perfectly.

  The Mick eyed the hundreds of yellow, green, and blue streaks layered five and more times underneath us, speeding along below us and keeping pace with the easy strides our two Wagon-mules were using. More were ahead of us, falling in and expanding the wedge slowly and constantly.

  “Aye, that’s a few of them,” he agreed, turning to look at the setting sun, less than an hour from the horizon.

  We had our army.

  ============================

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