The Legend of the Meta-Defying Smith Who Saved the Kingdom

For some five hours, the battle proceeded much as it had in the first half of that day.

The Smith ran around, Gale and Lightning hammers in hand, slaying demons.

The demons had taken a terrible loss in their failed attempt to summon the six Great Spirits. That they had even come close to succeeding was a shock to the generals and analysts observing the battle from the top of the Royal Castle. Human Spiritualists, at the height of their power and even with synergistic classes, could only manage to summon and collaborate with lesser spirits. To dominate? Unthinkable.

If the six Great Spirits had been fully summoned and turned to the task of wiping out all humanity, there would have been no fighting back at all. In a matter of some few short years, every single human would be dead.

It had taken somewhat less than one hundred thousand demons to perform six Grand Summoning Rituals.

And in five hours, the Smith had managed to kill less than ten thousand.

His pace was slowing down.

First, there was the drain on his resources.

With four [Fimbulwinter] enchantments to support, he was steadily draining the magic power he had saved up prior to the fight, and what he had collected from his desperate attempt to drain the void.

And he couldn't let the [Fimbulwinter] collapse.

The arc of wintry death was doing a wonderful job of slowing and halting the Demon Army's advance.

Even those demons who appeared to have an affinity for Ice were struggling.

But not as much as the Smith was struggling to catch the demons who danced around him.

They were spreading themselves out, far enough that his chained lightning couldn't leap from one to another.

They were covering for each other, helping each other dodge away from his hammer strikes.

They were attempting to slow him down with all manner of traps and pitfalls, but these he ignored entirely thanks to his armor.

The fight had turned into a contest of endurance.

Would the Smith be worn down first?

Or would every demon be slain?

The sun fell towards the horizon in the west, and the sky turned red where it could be seen through gaps in the clouds over the battlefield. Clouds of toxic gas along the ground, and clouds of winter storms above. Invisible to the eye were the clouds of chaotically mixing essence left over from the summoning rituals which both sides tried to take advantage of; the Smith trying to dash from place to place rich in sylph essence to empower his [Gale-force Tailwind Haste], and the demons launching any attack they could without triggering the divine retribution of the Smith's Greatshield.

A mundane stone accelerated faster than sound would not trigger the shield.

Attempts to envelop the Smith in water and drown him would not trigger the shield.

Gradually raising the heat around him would not trigger the shield.

Attempts to blind him with light did trigger the shield, and the demon who attempted that was struck down with a narrow lance of holy light that impaled him from his crown to his feet where he stood.

Most of this actually was not any risk to the Smith, which was why there was no retaliation from the enchantment.

No, there were two problems.

First, the demons were delaying him. A second here, a few seconds there, it added up.

Second, the demons were learning.

Pitfall traps were abandoned.

Confounding mists and smokescreens proved effective, and were deployed everywhere, mixing with toxic gas.

And when the Smith ascended above the smokescreens and gas, a massive great-arrow would, without fail, smash into his chest and send him reeling, wasting even more of his time as he recovered.

And then the sun sank below the horizon.

Finally the sun sank below the horizon.

The day shifted to night.

Lux essence weakened, and nox essence strengthened.

With a surge, the arc of [Fimbulwinter] swelled, increasing in area and intensity now that it no longer had to fight the heat of the sun.

An evening wind picked up, and the mists and smoke and gas were driven off in seconds, rather than lingering over the battlefield.

The Smith vanished before the demons' eyes.

Not [Invisibility].

Not even [Greater Invisibility].

Such enchantments are not perfect, and require large amounts of magic power.

No, this was an enchantment of the shadow element.

[Perfect Stealth_One with Shadow—Secret Master]

The demons could no longer see him.

The demons could no longer track him by sound above the blizzards' howl.

The Dire Wolves could no longer scent him.

The demons who had, until a moment ago, been toying with the Smith even as their comrades periodically died for misjudging proper distance or timing, paused and took up defensive stances.

As soon as he struck, they would know his location.

But he didn't.

He was gone.

The first demon made it through the blizzard.

Snow was piled high, and the light of day was fading, but before her was the human city, its walls broken, totally undefended.

Behind her lay the bulk of the army, and she trusted her comrades to keep the Irregular tied down.

Her wrath was immense. But her fury was tempered, and she had only a single goal in mind as she raced forward across the plains.

Slaughter every last human.

Dispose of them.

It would be an extermination.

And then a hammer caught her in the temple and she knew no more, and darkness clouded her eyes.

She was dead.

The shadows deepened further as the sun sank lower below the horizon, and the first stars started to appear in the east.

The Smith had finally stored away his Greatshield enchanted with [Perfect Enhanced Divine Retribution].

He simply didn't intend to be struck anymore.

He had three priorities at the moment: avoid detection, enhance his own perception, and minimize magic power consumption. He already had all his [Ice Nullification] accessories on, and the blood from his impromptu ear piercing session had already dried, so there was no point in taking them off now.

The Smith went on the hunt.

For hours as the night passed, he swept through the blizzards, slaying any demons he came across.

And he didn't miss a single one.

He would periodically leave the blizzards and check the edges for anyone trying to go around, but he found the demons had largely halted their advance. Having lost sight of him, and given the chaos, the demons were trying to restore order, calm the monsters, and get some rest during the night.

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Irritatingly, they had spread out wide enough that trying to catch them with [Meteor Strike] would be a waste of magic power and give away his position.

Besides which, the demons still had scouting parties and stealthy assassins trying to make their way into the city.

The Legendary Smith set up another tube, and launched a canister into the air above the demon army. They immediately moved to intercept, but the canister burst anyway, scattering another thousand needle-like stakes into the ground at roughly the army's center of gravity.

[Sapping Field]

[Howling Shriek]

The sap effect was minor, and would hopefully go unnoticed: just enough to ensure that any attempt to rest was thwarted.

[Howling Shriek], on the other hand, was a nasty piece of work.

At random intervals, a terrifying noise would ring out from one of the thousand stakes for a random amount of time between five and fifty seconds.

And the sound was so loud that nobody in the entire Plains of Cordova was able to sleep that night.

Just a little present from the Smith while he was out tracking down scouts and assassins and other stealthy types.

It took the demons all night to track down and destroy all the tiny stakes that were keeping them on edge.

When dawn broke and the blizzards weakened and the Smith dispensed with his own stealth, ten thousand demon scouts and assassins were dead, and Cordova remained untouched.

The demons had, in the end, slain their own monsters, unable to calm them.

Perhaps they simply intended to gather and tame more as they moved on, once they killed the Smith and took the city.

It had been nearly twenty-four hours of non-stop fighting for the Smith, and however long he had been forging and enchanting prior to that.

The demon army was spread out to the maximum extent possible, but clearly positioned to split into two diffuse columns around the edges of the blizzards blocking the bulk of the army's advance.

In the empty space in the middle, the Demon Lord appeared from empty space. With a magically-enhanced voice, he shouted, "Parley!"

Treacherous demon, to attempt a parley after violating the last one.

And yet, the heroic and noble Legendary Smith obliged.

He leapt into the air, shining in the dawn light, his [Perfect Enhanced Divine Retribution] Greatshield once again in hand, but in the other he held his Gale Hammer.

Of course, he kept his [Spell Jamming] active, wary of another spell of [Perfect Magic Seal].

He arrived without a sound, hovering in the air an inch above the ground to avoid triggering any traps that might have been set.

"What?" he spat.

"Give up," the Demon Lord demanded. "Your efforts have been most impressive, but you can't win. Soon, your strength will fail. You will run out of mana. The mages supporting you will be unable to sustain their spells, or one of our assassins will make it into the city and disable their Classes.

"It is a wonder this Kingdom has has many mages as it does. Our advance agents should have kidnapped and sealed the last few generations of human Mages up to the last few years…"

James, the Smith, the former slave grit his teeth. "The shackles… that was you?"

"Oh, yes. By reducing the number of human Mages, the chance of any of you resisting us falls commensurately. Or, it should have."

James felt his jaw clench even tighter.

The slave camp.

The shackles.

The iron mining.

It had never been about the iron.

All along it was a plot to weaken humanity by attacking its mages.

The Demon Lord steepled his fingers in front of his chin. "I am not without mercy, Hero. In recognition of your efforts here, I will grant you a reprieve: take your family and flee, flee to the ends of the earth, and I will let you live out your days until we finish exterminating every other human. Then, and only then, will we arrive to finish the job. As it is, that is likely to take some eighty years now. Perhaps you will live out a full life and die naturally? Perhaps even your children will live out their full lives, and when we arrive, we will find only your bones? What say you?"

The Legendary Smith stood motionless, his expression unknowable behind his helmet.

But he was furious.

And yet, behind him, the [Fimbulwinter] cartridges failed, and the blizzards dissipated in the dawn light, leaving heaping hills of snow behind, dazzling bright with reflected light.

The demon army raised a cheer.

"See? Even now your mages fail in their support." The Demon Lord smiled almost seductively. "Withdraw. Live out your days. Rest easy knowing that we will leave you for last."

The Smith took a deep breath, and let it out.

"I refuse."

The Demon Lord arched a single eyebrow.

"Then I suppose you will die tired, as a true Hero."

"I ain't no Hero," the Smith retorted.

"Oh? I can't imagine what else you could be, to fight so valiantly."

"I'm a Smith."

The Demon Lord stared at him blankly.

"And maybe you don't know about Smiths, given the lack of armor you demons wear." James gestured with his arm at the demon army, clad mainly in cloth and leather if anything at all. "But the thing about forging is, it takes hundreds, thousands of strikes to make a single piece."

The Smith pointed at the Demon Lord with his hammer. "And I don't mind striking a hundred thousand times to finish off you bastards."

The Demon Lord opened his mouth to retort, and the Smith flexed every [Haste] enchantment he had.

He closed the intervening space almost instantaneously and smashed the Demon Lord's head right off his shoulders.

There would be no more negotiations.

An angry shout rose from the demon army, but they made no attempt to attack the Smith magically. Instead, they began to advance on the city, now protected by nothing more than piles of snow.

And then six tubes, pre-placed, fired cartridges into the air with fwumps.

And six [Hellfire Storm] enchantments activated, empowered by the sun's solar essence, and formed two lines of three cartridges each, blocking the head of each column with a diagonal line of fire and heat.

The two lines formed a funnel, with a gap in the middle where piles of snow rapidly melted, forming a muddy bog.

The columns halted, and then broke apart. Maintaining distance from each other, the demons raced to cross the gap.

If even one of them could make it to the city, they believed, the magical storms could be stopped, and the rest of the demons could make it across the Plains.

The Smith swooped down into the gap, standing at the edge of the mud.

The demons stepped right over the bog as though it were solid ground.

The fight became almost entirely a contest of endurance.

How long could the Smith last? How long would the magic empowering the storms last? How long until one demon got lucky and brought down humanity's last champion?

The demons came through roughly one or two at a time, either trying to strike the Smith down or get past him.

Whenever they tried to form into a tighter group, the Smith would wield his [Meteor Strike] Hammer and smash them, sending more earthquakes shuddering through the continent.

All day this continued, until dusk fell and the fire storms faltered. The demons cheered for a moment, until the cheers were choked out as blizzards formed and took their place, spreading wide across the battlelines.

There were thirty thousand demons left as the sun slipped below the horizon, and the Smith disappeared once more into the shadows.

There was a fwump, and a moment later shrieking howls filled the rapidly darkening Plains.

Finally, the demons' spirits broke.

More than four-fifths their number had fallen in battle to take one human capital city.

But they had never needed to amass their forces like this in the first place.

And only one Regular human had ever managed to resist them like this.

No.

They could simply spread out and take the long view.

A single demon could easily slaughter an entire city's worth of humans if this unusual irregular weren't there.

And he couldn't be in thirty-thousand places at once.

And so the demons attempted to retreat, to fight another day.

The Smith had other plans.

There would be no other day for the demons.

He wouldn't let a single one escape. Not after threatening his family, and his country.

Fwump. Fwump. Fwump. Fwump. Fwump. Fwump. Fwump. Fwump.

All throughout the plains the soft sounds rang out underneath the howling shrieks, and incredibly bright flares of alchemical light hung in the sky, illuminating the battlefield even as night fell.

The Smith raced across the plains after the retreating demons. No longer coordinated and focused on delaying him, the speed of his slaughter increased.

And true to his intentions, he slayed every single demon.

Not a single one lived to see the dawn the next morning.

As the sun rose, the blizzards faded once more.

The Smith stood tall, and he finally felt his Classes reconnect to his soul as the last demon perished.

The intrusive thought was overwhelming.

Smith Class has reached level 21.

…

Smith Class has reached level 103.

Enchanter Class has reached level 21.

…

Enchanter Class has reached level 103.

One of the largest battles fought in humanity's history up to that point had been won single-handedly by one man, who lacked a Combat Class.

His Skills regained, he established his [Domain of the Smith] and [Domain of the Enchanter] and dismantled his wards and fields, silencing the howling shrieks that still rang out at random.

He took a deep breath and turned to face the city.

The city that was still on fire.

With the Royal Castle in the center, at the highest point.

The place where his family and his Princess were waiting for him to return.