Stepping back from the table, Subcommander Jates put his hands behind his back and stretched his lower back with a groan. Between the rush through the tunnels to combine his forces with those from F.O.B.3 and the hurried assault once they’d arrived, the stress was getting to him.

  Over the command channel, he heard, “Jates! Get your troops under control! The push from tunnel 5 is falling behind, you’re going to allow the bastards to regroup if you don’t hold that position!”

  Growling in annoyance, he replied, “Yes, sir. I’m on it.”

  Stomping away from the table, he switched his attention to the command channel for his units and began barking orders.

  While most of his attention remained on the battle currently being fought, he couldn’t help but complain to himself that he had been supposed to be handling a simple clean-and-clear mission from a fortified base camp. It should have been a slow, measured advance through the upper city. Not this.

  Arriving at the last checkpoint before the end of the tunnel, he looked over at the overworked head of his healers and asked, “How are the healers holding up? Can they keep up with the cycles?”

  The healer looked over at him with a grimace but nodded. Jates could feel her choosing her words carefully when she replied slowly, “Yes, for the moment. We haven’t lost anyone yet, but a few resuscitations have been closer than I’d like. The sustained rate of injuries we’re seeing is nearing our limit. Any chance we can slow down on the cycles we’re seeing?”

  Snorting in amusement at her, Jates replied, “Not likely. If anything, I’m thinking it’s only going to get worse.”

  “I don’t understand,” she replied with a sigh. “I thought all we had to do was keep the enemy engaged on this side of the chamber so that House Walker could get through one of the smaller tunnels on the other side. They’re through, so we should be ramping down the assault, right?”

  “You’d think so,” he replied. “But that’s not what’s happening. The commander in charge of the assault wants to make sure the kobalds keep their attention here. Everything hinges on keeping them from following after them. We need the kobalds worried that they’ll be overrun. That means we need to keep pounding their defenses and bleeding their forces. Without reinforcements, they’re losing troops by the dozens with no one to replace them. With our healing, we can win a war of attrition.”

  Turning his attention away from her, Jates observed the 20-man-wide fighting line holding the entrance of the tunnel. He could see the kobald shamans on the top of their effective but poorly built wall holding back the few mages who were working hard to pull it down. As it had been for the last hour, it was a stalemate.

  From the scry reports they’d received, he knew the chamber they were assaulting was large enough to house thousands of the little monsters. The kobalds had built multi-storied stone hovels that had been packed to rafters with fighters. Even at the rate they were killing them, it would take forever to clear them all out. Which was of course the entire point of them being here. The kobalds needed to buy time for their ritual and were perfectly happy to sacrifice their grunts for the opportunity.

  Mumbling to himself, he said, “We’ll just have to keep them focused on the fighting. If House Walker fails, we’ll fall back. Otherwise, they’ll need this chamber cleared to make it out of the upper city’s noble district without being hunted down by furious kobalds unhappy with their plans failing.”

  Thinking back to his interactions with the disturbingly competent Catherine Averett, he sincerely doubted that would happen. While most of the army was just going along with the attack on the off chance House Walker might succeed, Jates had a feeling the kobalds were already dead and just didn’t know it.

  Shivering at the memory of her cold stare, he thought to himself, ‘Yup. Thinking that woman will fail is idiotic.’

  —--

  While Nero would have thought he’d have to push through the lines to be allowed forward, he instead found the soldiers waiting for their turn at the combat line shifting and ducking out of his way as he passed them. Their essence fields, along with their smiling faces, made it clear that they were more than happy to have him join them.

  The tunnel they were fighting in was wide enough for ten or fifteen people to fight without getting in each other’s way, and by now they’d retreated a good distance from the entrance. The kobalds were still coming though, just not in the numbers that he’d expected to see. Near the top of the tunnel, he could see that a few mages were maintaining a small shield to stop the kobalds from launching any arrows, spells, or spears over the top of the fighting. Unlike the shields he was used to seeing, this one butted up against the tunnel ceiling and dropped all the way down to a foot above the height of the combat line, ensuring the fighting remained focused on the melee.

  By the time he got near the front, he could see troops cycling out to either take a break or go get some healing. They didn’t look all that stressed, and the kobalds were barely making them put in the effort of pushing them back. Both sides looked like they were just going through the motions.

  ‘The dumb lizards really do just want to keep us out of their little chamber. Idiots,’ he thought to himself.

  The tension he’d been feeling from being denied a chance to cut loose, along with his ethical concerns of feeling responsible for losing people felt like a weight on his shoulders. He needed to vent, and he was more than happy to kill kobalds to make himself feel better. It would probably be more productive than tracking down some alcohol or figuring out how to post inflammatory posts on the Thought Hub.

  For a moment, he debated whether or not he should bother with a full-on mage shield, but eventually decided that he’d never get better at using one unless he practiced. He needed to get used to maintaining one while in the thick of it, along with his link to the command channels and his spell forms. The more he worked his mind, the more it would grow.

  Reaching out with his senses, he collapsed as much essence as he could along his skin before building up a shell of protection around himself. He could feel the tingling sensation of the enchantment taking form as his attention split. Frowning in determination, he began carving two spell forms above each of his shoulders and attaching them to his collected essence with a spell tether. One was his trusty spell-shell chucker, and the other was his acid ball launcher. The last thing he needed was to fill the tunnel with flames that might end up eating all the oxygen or some other such environmental problem that he couldn’t possibly predict.

  ‘Keep it simple stupid,’ he reminded himself.

  Hopping lightly a few times to loosen up his muscles, he drew his sword along with a small buckler from his personal space. He followed the same procedure he’d seen others do and waited for someone to call for relief from the line. He could practically ‘feel’ the other troops alongside him mentally stepping back and allowing him to take the next opening. No one said a word, but he could just tell.

  All of his concerns about ethics, responsibility, what might happen in the future, the prospect of failing… it all just fell away as his entire being prepared for combat. He had no idea when he’d become a battle junkie, nor did he care. Something about the focus of combat and the flow of uncomplicated battle just called to him. It felt freeing.

  His head whipped to the left as a soldier stumbled back, calling out, “Need a replacement over here!”

  Shooting off at a run, Nero rushed past three troops who’d been waiting for their turn and quickly cut in front of them. Without a single apology, he slipped past the Wacko who was clutching his thigh and trying to keep the kobald spear stuck inside it steady while he retreated.

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  “My turn you scaly bastards! Did you miss me!?!” he shouted as he hopped over a dead kobald while leading with his shield.

  He felt the kobald’s spear scrape against the buckler in his hand as he guided it off to the side. With an evil grin on his face, he lashed out with his sword with a cross-cut, splitting the kobalds snout down the middle. As it scampered back in pain, he took a single step forward and lunged forward to stab it through its chest.

  Smoothly recovering from his lunge, he returned to his position among the line, glancing to his left and right to see how his new teammates were doing. From what he could tell, they seemed more than happy to wait for the kobalds to come to them and were maintaining their lines without moving forward.

  Seeing as he had a moment or two before another kobald decided to brave the line, Nero began funneling essence from his reserves into the spell form he was maintaining on his left shoulder. With barely a flicker of his attention, he charged it with some soul stuff from the ether and began launching an acid barrage at point-blank range into the kobald line in front of him.

  While he’d seen a few troops using abilities that could affect areas, like the guy whose hammer swings trailed plumes of fire, his acid barrage put them all to shame. It was as gruesome as it was effective. The kobald line basically melted as the poor bastards hissed and screamed their death throes.

  One after another, his balls of acid made their way across the kobalds. Each one erupted into a small explosion of utter destruction. While the small kobald shields and armor helped, it wasn’t nearly enough to stop the splatters from affecting them. Kobalds didn’t typically wear too much armor, so there was plenty of exposed skin for the acid to eat.

  The entire kobald line took an involuntary step back, pausing the entire conflict as they began wrapping their confused clone heads around the shift in tone the battle had just gone through. They’d thought the humans were content to just hold them back, but not Nero. Nero was intent on wiping them out.

  Stepping forward, Nero made sure the human line was a step or two behind him when he began charging the spell form above his right shoulder.

  “Witness and despair at the power of sustained artillery fire,” he mumbled in a faux-deep voice to himself as if he was playing the part of a narrator overseeing the battle.

  The moment his spell was ready, the sound of his spell filled the tunnel with an echo. It was similar to the sound a grenade launcher made when it fired but sharper and louder. First one, then another, until the shells began rapid firing every second.

  Nero walked his line of fire across the tunnel, firing directly into the kobald line without bothering to arc his shots. At merely a few paces away, the shells' explosions were enough to make the human line of troops stumble back as the air pressure pummeled them, some of them getting scraped up by shards of kobald that blew past them.

  Nero, however, was perfectly fine inside his mage armor. Aside from a bit of added pressure on his mental reserves, he didn’t even notice the bits of kobald that were failing to find purchase on him. Whenever blood or gore landed on him, his mage amor ensured that it just slid off him like rain off a windshield on the highway.

  It took barely any effort for Nero to maintain his rate of fire. He could feel the soul stuff in the air funneling toward his spell form like a toilet draining. All he had to do was continue to compress more and more essence into his collected reserves to maintain the spell form’s fuel, the soul stuff providing the destructive potential.

  Nero began walking forward as the kobald line fell apart. As stupid as they were, they continued to try and push forward, unable to understand that they were only spreading up their demise. Their efforts weren’t entirely in vain though, as it did force him to slow down. He could only fire so many shells per second and when he focused on one side the other refilled with kobalds pushing forward. They didn’t seem to care at all that they were crawling over their dead to get closer to him.

  Grunting in annoyance, Nero stressed his mind a little to begin adding fire from the acid launcher he’d prepared. While one side of the tunnel was being hit with exploding spell shells, the other was getting buried in acid. Like two alternating sprinklers, he walked the lines of fire back and forth, crossing them for a moment in the middle before they moved on.

  When the rare occasion of an acid ball and a spell shell met the kobald lines at the same time, their effects seemed to be amplified. Even with his ability to observe essence interacting, he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Regardless, it was effective.

  Spell shells plus acid balls equaled eruptions of superheated green lava acid. Nero had no idea why, but he liked it.

  After a minute or two of constant fire, he must have killed dozens of kobalds, slowing their progress and pushing them back toward the entrance of the tunnel. While at first he was too focused on the fighting to pay attention to anything else, eventually he had enough breathing room to use his perception field to look around.

  He could tell that the humans in the line of Wackos behind him were uncertain as to what they should do. There was definitely an undercurrent of fear along with a healthy dose of awe. There was also a great deal of pride for some reason in their essence fields. Nero assumed it was probably due to the fact that their mascot was laying the smackdown like a good little figurehead.

  Setting them mentally aside for the moment, Nero focused on the kobalds and what they were up to. He could see that the entrance to the tunnel was being fortified like the one they’d first seen when they’d arrived at the chamber. Kobald shamans and casters were setting up walls of earth along with small holes for kobald fighters to run through. To Nero, it looked like they were building a very dangerous-looking version of one of those castles for children that someone would find at Chucky Cheese or at a play center.

  While it would probably be effective when they finished it, right now it wasn’t much more than a five-foot-tall wall of mud with holes in it. Scurrying all over it were kobalds shouting and screaming at each other, none of them having the mental capacity to understand what was happening.

  Near the edge of his range, Nero could see a few obviously stressed kobalds trying to corral the stupider clones into formations. Some of them were larger than the others, like the tall ones who’d he come to refer to as the ‘big guys’, but there were also more well-armored and robed little ones who were probably members of the upper caste and not clones. Nero wasn’t sure if there was a better way to tell them apart, but he had no trouble recognizing the intelligence in their eyes as they screamed and hissed at each other.

  Right as he was about to take another few steps forward and unleash hell on their pathetic little attempt at a wall, he felt Harry’s presence focus on him through the command channel.

  “My lord, may I ask what you are doing?” Harry’s voice came through along with the unavoidable feeling of his immense displeasure.

  Nero, while maintaining his fire along the tunnel floor replied, “Um… killing kobalds?”

  Feeling Harry’s presence trembling with repressed rage, Nero wisely waited for the man to use his words before saying anything else.

  “Why? Our goal is not to engage them, but to stop the anchor from being set. We don’t WANT them to think we’re a threat. Remember? We’re supposed to be leaving them here and pretending to run away,” he said while trying and failing to sound patient.

  Nero, suddenly realizing that calling attention to their little assault band might not have been the best idea, replied, “Of course. I was just clearing out the tunnel a little. Nothing more. You know, just freeing up some space so we could have an organized retreat.”

  Immediately cutting off his spells, Nero took a few steps back to rejoin the line. He could feel the entire gaggle of Wackos staring down at him with their various emotions blaring through ether like trumpets letting him know how they were currently feeling. The morass of emotions was suffocating.

  Using the hand that was currently still holding his sword to cover his mouth, he awkwardly coughed a few times before saying out loud, “Well, that should buy us some room to switch out our troops. Anyone who needs a bathroom break… now’s a good time.”

  The kobalds who’d been pushed back to the entrance were now thirty or forty feet away and rebuilding their lines. Even from where he was, Nero could feel their confusion as their orders were being passed along from the wall behind them. He could only hope they weren’t being changed from ‘defend this stupid chamber’ to ‘kill the dangerous humans’.

  Returning his attention to Harry, Nero asked, “You know, if you want, I could just push forward a bit and start really wiping the chamber clear of them. I doubt it would take long. Only an hour or two.”

  Harry, his presence still feeling like a disapproving coach glaring at him from the sidelines, replied, “We don’t have an hour to waste here. We’re moving out.”

  Nero suddenly felt the command channel for the entire division start getting new orders from former Sergeant Blackwood, henceforth known as Terry since Nero decided to consider him a friend. The man’s curt tone dished out orders one after another, quickly getting everyone moving.

  Nero moved along with the rest of the combat line in an organized retreat, taking advantage of the fact that the kobalds had temporarily paused their assault. Like a coordinated wall of troops, they backpedaled further and further into the tunnel, leaving the kobalds and their unfinished wall behind them.

  Due to the distance, Nero quickly lost sight of the non-clone kobalds and he could only hope they didn’t change their minds and decide to pursue them.

  ‘Yeah, that might not have been the best idea I’ve ever had. I really need to work on my impulse control problems… It was fun though,’ he admitted to himself while trying to shrink his presence in the ether so people would stop paying attention to him.